Antioch College - Towers Yearbook (Yellow Springs, OH)

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I seventy-five per cent of the waking hours of the last period in the spring. The actual swimming is somewhat hampered the fact that the Little Miami river resembles nothing so m as vegetable soup. It is warm, it is muddy, and an assortment of weeds continually float in it. These swimming parties pass by the name of mayhem, battery and assault in ordinary society. It is the Antioch equivalent to being taken for a ride, albeit it passes for fun. To go swimming one collects all of what one believes to be one's friends, piles them into a car and zooms down to Grin- nell's. After one or at most two persons paying the necessary dimes for the party fit is an unwritten law that the majority completely forget their moneyj, the car is driven down to the dam. Then comes the Hrst fun. This consists of gathering up the blankets, pillows, books, bathrobes, towels, cigarettes, and victrola which accompany every such outing and crossing the slimy narrow dam to the green pastures beyond where most of the action takes place. After everything has been arranged, one goes in the water. This consists of making a lot of noise, then diving deeply and getting covered with mud. After swimming a few hundred feet one immediately loses all in- hibitions and starts to act as he feels toward everyone. Every party contains a fellow who has never been there before, and whose idea of good clean fun is to push someone over the dam, a process which quickly and not too neatly removes the skin from all knees and elbows, the seat from the bathing suit, and in some cases the rocks below the dam give one nice bruises g also a girl who thinks it is too screaming to pour 173 fl?

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her bathing cap filled with Water upon someone who is asleep. Other denizens of the place are people who push one off of rafts, people who smoke all of your cigarettes, people who throw handfuls of mud, people who go away leaving you to turn off the victrola, and people who are bent on murder. The advantages of the place are a cheap way to acquire a coat of tan for the envy of one's friends 5 a semblance of cool- ness from the sweltering days of early summer 5 a very inex- pensive Way to entertain a date, and a very fine place to sleep undisturbed by the boop-boop-a-doop of the dormitory life. The sporting life is commented on in other sections. The academic al fresco life consists of women hauling blankets under available trees. They then bring all of the books in their library out so that passing professors may be impressed. The glare of the sun is usually so bright that they cannot read and they consequently go to sleep, giving the campus a remarkable resemblance to Lincoln Park. In a family publication such as this We cannot go into other forms of outdoor life which occupy a large share of the time. 175