Coker College - Milestone Yearbook (Hartsville, SC)

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The William Chambers Coker Science Building There were book reports! But we had fun too. For the i tales of the Sissons’ Commonplace Book were interesting and entertaining. In sophomore English you reviewed the lives and works of some of the greats in English and American literature. Here you met Dr. Haynes and tried to help her sing the early English and American ballads) Remember how crushed you were to find that Shakespeare wrote most of those beautiful love sonnets to a boy? You may have taken Nineteenth Century Prose and .Poetry in Dr. Haynes room in North where you could take off your shoes and sit on the floor, or Journalism of Creative Writing under Dr. Sisson. Whatever you studied in the English department you learned the basic essentials and technicalities involved in reading, writing, and understanding the real value of the English language. Across; Suzanne examines a slide. Below: Faye works out a problem for Sonoco Products. SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS Were you blinded or merely cross-eyed—you wondered as you looked into that odd instrument called a microscope. It took a while to decide. As the days passed in the General Biology Lab. and your eyes became adjusted to the microscope, you got up enough courage to look through the lab manual. If it looked menacing from the outside in its drab gray coat, that was nothing compared to the way it looked on the inside dressed in pages and pages of phyla—animal phyla, plant phyla. You discovered what phyla meant in no uncertain terms. After hours of looking at the list of unpronouncable names, you were told to wear your dungarees to class next session because the class was to go on a field trip to the college club. “How nice,’ you thought, “We're going to have some fun.” And fun it was—in spite of all the unexpected meetings with unfriendly spiders and the half-hidden sticks that looked like snakes. Yes, you managed to get a jar full of odds and ends in the forms of bugs, worms, mold, mush- room, and wild flowers. As you crawled over the fence to leave, you were thinking that it wasn’t so bad after all. ee r 4 . But the party was over next class session when you found out you had to classify each and every dangerous creature you had captured. . Soon enough you were to meet some other new friends who were to help you along the road to scientific knowledge: a grasshopper, a crawfish, an earthworm, and (horrors!) a frog. “Are we really going to—to cut it open?” You were! The formaldehyde burned your eyes and nose. Your lab partner got woozy after the first slash of that awful skin and had to leave; but, soon she came back and together you faced the bitter truth: a frog is one of the things every young college girl should know. But wait, this can’t be all, you thought. So you decided to try your hand at Bacteriology, and cultured some growths fearful and wonderful to behold. You stood beside the questionable poet as he ad libbed: “Still I stared and still the wonder grew That one small germ could carry all that flu.” You once carried six tiny bottles around all day because the darlings inside couldn’t live without fresh water every hour on the hour. In Genetics you set about to discover what had caused the strange combination called ‘you’. One look at the greenhouse and you knew you must take Botony too; so you planted and transplanted, crossed and uncrossed, and even grew something uncommon—to say the least—in this territory, a marvelous pineapple.

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The song Civ. Test expressed your sentiments exactly, un- til you realized just what Civ. was meaning to you. Oh, I am crying, unhappy day, No mote wisecracks—no laughter gay; Ever since they said those words to me, eCiv. Test!” The Java ape man—his home a cave; He should hear those freshmen rave; Ever since they said those words to them, perv. Test!” Austrian succession—it bothers me; I don’t care if Napoleon was a he, Ever since they said those words to me, Aa3 . ” Civ. Test! Ah, Tchaiskovsky—he had a friend, But as for me? This is the end! Ever since they said those words to me, m@iva lesti HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE “History is that social science whose special province it is to trace social development, showing by concrete examples of successive societies in action what society has been, how society has worked, what the causes and consequences of social action have been, and how society as it is, grew out of society as it was.” quote, Dr. Farhner. You, as a history and social science student, were constantly trying to unravel the meaning of this statement. Whether you were studying the Civil War or dis- cussing the problem of juvenile delinquincy, you learned that you must view events and problems objectively. When you first entered Dr. Farhner’s classes, you pondered a rumor you'd heard that if you drop your pencil in lecture, you'd lose a hundred years of history! Somehow you managed to keep up with him; but your hands were thankful when he would tell a story about one of his three favorite topics: William “Extra Billy” Smith, the Navy, or Hawaii. Several people who passed by Dr. Davidson’s Sociology class observed that along with studying the relationships between man and his human environment, you were learning to balance coffee cups and take notes at the same time. After investigating rivers, mountains, and soil with Mrs. Reynolds in Geography, after having gathered much useful information about the history of our state and nation, and after objectively viewing social behavior, you left the Depart- ments of History and Social Science with a fuller understanding of Dr. Farhner’s definition. ENGLISH AND LITERATURE As you, a frosh registered at Coker you were told you would take freshman English and were registered for one of Dr. or Mrs. Sisson’s classes. It wasn’t long before you learned that the main object of the whole course was to teach you how to assimilate the King’s English into a readable composition. Some of your first attempts at composition were so bad you had to te-write them to throw them in the waste basket; but after the Sissons had filled the margin of your papers many times with comments and suggestions, you decided that you might learn to write after all. Left: Jane, Frankie and Frances look at Civ. slides. Right: Betty works on an English theme. or mlaies SS

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You dug up the campus several times and thereby became a permanent member of the “College Garden Club.” But surprisingly, the campus stayed beautiful. And you were sur- prised when you discovered that through it all you had actually absorbed a part of what you had studied and had benefited by it. Having already stepped into the unknown, you decided you couldn’t lose anything by investigating the possibilities of the Math Department. So you entered the realm of figures and diagrams through Algebra, Geometry, and Trig. It was interesting and frustrating at times! For instance, there were the hours spent trying to solve a problem, almost getting the answer but not quite. Even more frustrating was to be work- ing a difficult problem, get half through it and clearly see the answer but not the last few steps needed to arrive at it. Then there were those nights after long hours of studying when you would go to bed and see meaningless figures and contorted geometrical shapes scampering across the ceiling. By and by fate may have exposed another department to you called Physical Sciences. General Chemistry seemed to be first on the list so you checked it off and registered for the course. One of the first problems you came across was: how to light a burner. When you did get the proper size fire going, you set about to do an experiment in glass bending. At least it started out to be glass bending, but it ended up as finger burning with Dr. Vail and his first aid kit nearby. The first time you broke something you became familiar with Dr. Vail’s classic statement, “It doesn’t bounce, does it?” No, sir, it surely didn’t! You discovered there was a shower in the lab in case someone caught on fire. “Does it really work?” It did, and you had to clean up the mess. Then you decided to take a look into the Organic Chemistry lab and came out smelling like rubber aprons or fertilizer or both. You found out that when the book said, “Simply add the acid to the water” you'd better not ‘simply add the water to the acid’. You did once, and when the smoke cleared—. And there was always some jokester who would ask to be invited to cocktail hour in organic lab. By the looks of the equipment, they vowed you were distilling something besides ketones. You had to point out their error to them and by way of conso- lation invite them to have a cup of coffee specially brewed for lab students, in a vial. Hours upon hours were spent try- ing to analyze a half ounce of fluid. Odors continued to change and increase in intensity. Breakage bills continued to mount up, and you always seemed to break something with three or four hours work in it. Sometimes you didn’t exactly get what you started out to produce; once you had to use soap to wash off the soap you had made. All this made you thankful! for the various things you had experienced along the way, and you felt like you’d accomplished something. And you truly had. Mr. Reynolds and Biology students investigate plant and animal life around the College Club. Left to Right: Fisher, Booker, Maxwell, Land, Mr. Reynolds, Holmes, Myers, Duke. PRIVATE PROPERTY