Chicora College for Women - Nods and Becks Yearbook (Columbia, SC)

Page 9 text:

At last it did. The puddles shrank and finally seeped entirely into the ground. A weaker fall sun beamed on our faded-tan faces and made us squint. New trees were planted, young trees that needed taut cord supports in order to root and grow. Growth . . . how this year meant growth for Queens. Albright ... a red-orange, growing skeleton across the street . . . plans forming to remove the secure old house near the corner of Selwyn and Wellesley and to erect a mammoth auditorium in its place. We noticed at first the pipes and spaded ground of con- struction, but it was not long before we shut these from our sight. We became so used to seeing the action of growth that we almost ignored it. Page Five

Page 8 text:

Alpha . . . the beginning . . . 1964. It was a dark, un- usually cold September beginning. Hurricane Dora’s pelt- ing rain beat down upon the red clay and made mud that hardened on the soles of our shoes. Her gusts whipped our hair and creased our eyes and defied us to find pro- tection under wavering umbrellas. Blank-faced freshmen or blase upperclassmen, we began a nine-month block of our lives, a block often measured by “How many more days until . . .” Even at this beginning we were hurrying the present past us. We wanted to hurry and cleanse our rooms of foreign feeling: bare mattresses, prison-striped with gray and white; drawers filled with strange hair clips and lint and eraser dust; closets empty except for others' hangers, wooden or dented wire or cleaner-paper covered. We wanted to hurry and meet new people, exciting and romantic people—it would be a good year, we said. But we did not stop right then and look around and take the time to know everyone we saw. We hurried to the Y-store (we still could not call it Jernigan Center) to check our mail or to beat the crowd in line for books. We wished for a long distance call or for Homecoming or often for the summer just passed. But very much we wished the rain would stop its depressing downpour. Page Four

Page 10 text:

But growth permeated too much of college life this year for us to push it completely from our minds. One hundred more freshmen this year . . . the promise of another hundred next year. Upperclassmen felt a long-latent awareness of the small and friendly campus and suddenly wondered just what all the new students and faculty and facilities would mean. Every step toward an impersonal replacement of Old Queens was painfully present in our thoughts: eating in shifts in the dining hall, seeing fewer empty classroom seats, waiting in large groups to withdraw money from the bank. We often talked about this expansion; it worried us. We clutched tightly to our tradition and hoped that our gain would outweigh our loss. Page Six