Drake University - Quax Yearbook (Des Moines, IA)

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The fact that fines were owed, too, was only a slight sur- prise. To many students, evading a book fine was an indoor sport second only to TV or bridge. The shocker came when the library, tired of indifference, sought and received higher echelon backing. The university adopted a get-tough policy and students owing fines or books were not to be permitted to re-enroll for the spring semester until the debt was crossed off the ledger. This occasioned a frantic hunt for missing books, climaxed by an exhaustive search of fraternity houses by one of the Greek governing boards. Library oliicials, intoxicated by the heady wine of cru- sade publicity, dispatched further releases to the campus press regarding the practice of library card lending, and in so do- ing, revealed the suspected fact that a third of Drake's en- rollees did not even possess library cards. VVhen time came for spring registration, however, all but a few of the wrong- doers had settled accounts and most of these squared things via a special table in the registration line maimed by the library staff. Scarcely had the library matter died down when on the ldes of Nlarch money again got banner headlines in the Dellmlzic. VVith spring incipient, the student body's thoughts had. turned to outside recreation, after the indoor confine- Chill spring fog, symbolic of many a gradua+e's uncertain fu- ture, enveloped couples as they made the long, leisurely dorm- ward wall: ment imposed by winter. Drake's body of titular student governors, the Student-Faculty Council, sought funds which it thought had been set aside in 1953 for future construction of campus tennis courts. But although the money had been saved in good faith and petitioned to be set aside by the 1953 council, its successors were unaware that the surplus funds had gone where seemingly every department's surplus funds go: the treasure cache of the Student Fees Allocation com- mittee, from whence, like Limbo, there is apparently no return. The newspaper branded the five hundred dollar amount as missing, which from the students' standpoint, it was. But then the Delphic characteristically added, with more candor than tact, that the funds had become enmeshed in university red tape. Administration ofhcials, momentarily confusing student journalism with public relations, rapped the editor's action in printing the story and held that the headline would create an unfavorable impression of the school. In the paper's next issue a letter to the editor appeared with the university business manager's seal aflixed. The letter spelled out the administrati0n's side of the wrangle and attempted to set forth the meaning of the word missing and phrase uni- versity red tape as the school officials dehned it.

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-T. K. BROWVN Like rhe early spring flowers they sluclied, Prof. Leland Johnston's boi'-any class appeared in the woods torious by about 10 points in the forthcoming Drake-Ames game. To indicate just how nice it would be, Dillaglia dis- played several bills of large -denomination. No dice, replied Ben Bumbry. Terrible, The nadir of poor taste. H VVith this episode, a chain of events was started that, frustratingly enough, was to give Drake's name more promi- nence in the next few weeks than portly Robert Stuhr's pub- lic relations department had been able to achieve in months of toil. . The Hrst link in the chain was the immediate notification of Coach Jack lWcCle1land by the conscientious Bumbry concerning the bribe attempt. The coach duly reported same to the gendarmes, who promptly hopped on Diljaglia and had him indicted for attempted bribery, the first instance to which the new state anti-bribe law might be applied. As if striving to make an example of DiPaglia, the court gave him a ten-year sentence. But regardless of the outcome of the trial, DiPaglia might just as well saved himself a lot of time and trouble, for Iowa State won by the exact 10-point margin that he wished, through no fault of Bumbry, who scored 17 points. A fatal- ist might opine that this is DiPaglia's punishment. And as for Bumbry, the question of his reputation being tainted by- DiPaglia's momentary association was merely rhetorical, for shortly afterwards Bumbry was declared scholastically ineligible for sports, had to leave the team, and chose to leave school. He wound up the season playing for the local Clarkson Realty team, a hot-shooting AAU squad. fllthouglz many lll'ylHll87ll.1' during the year ceizierrzl around such fine and vital subjects as football and the draft, a crass, mundane note was recurrent. This was a note im- mortalized by Calypso singers, given foundation by national governments and sought after, in one way or another, by nearly everyone in the world. lVIoney. Despite the fact that universities advertise themselves as non-pront public service institutions concerned only with man's betterment, money managed to make the news at Drake several times during 1954. ii Public Relations, it might be expected, had several things to say about money. They ran up the distress Hag when it was found that nearly thirty thousand dollars were needed to complete financing of the dorm project. They wore a happy smile when they revealed that according to their cal- culations, Drake's average yearly expenses were a com- paratively reasonable Sl080, making it one of the low men on the totem pole of midwest college costs. Money made many departments, including this publica- tion, set up a howl when budgetary appropriations were made, slashing funds available to most university enterprises to below the '53 level. But money news came from unexpected sources, and thereby received more than passing notice. The library, long regarded solely as the place to go when solitude and sleep is wanted, revealed that it was owed nearly 34,500 in both un- paid library fines and unreturned books. The fact that the books were missing didn't surprise many, for instructors have long maintained that petty thievery is the inevitable result of their recommendation of a book for course reference. 27

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