Kansas State University - Royal Purple Yearbook (Manhattan, KS)

Page 8 text:

REWORD Lines, crowds, surging masses of youth . . . eager, vital and striving. Abnormal conditions of wartime replaced by new conditions ... a new impetus, a new feeling and a new hope. Temporary barracks dotting the campus, a stadium honey- combed with quarters, a new dormitory for women . . . standing room only, an auditorium more than filled, sitting on rafters to see every other basketball game . . . Hurry, get there early, wait . . . teachers younger than their students . . . New courses to meet the changing needs . . . Organiza- tions galore. A year of change, this 1947 ... A year of awakening and transforming ... A year of beginnings ... A year for history.

Page 10 text:

mm An ill ... i Well, I ' m back in school now, and brother, how things have changed. Oh, the old buildings are the same. They ' ll probably always be the same. The ivy has grown a little thicker on some of the walls until you can ' t be sure whether the walls are holding the ivy or vice versa. I guess it ' s changed some since the original build- ings were built in a corn field — but that ' s another story. But, Moe, the rest of the picture is something like a DeMille mob scene. No one had any idea what the enrollment would be last fall. The prexy estimated a large enrollment — maybe 5000. When the books were closed behind the last en- rollee there were 6500. The school was shaken to the core. There just weren ' t enough rooms to go around either for classes or for living. It looked for awhile as if the seams would let go. Somehow the school ' s pilots, who had been work- ing on plans for almost a year, dug up enough extra cpiarters for all the stu- dents. They started teach- ing classes at all ungodly hours, beginning at 7 in the morning and lasting until late at night. For some stu- dents they even scheduled them through the noon hour, utterly disregarding the custom of eating. That old crowded sensation we used to feel in an overloaded Quonset was common to everyone. Every available room in town was taken and in some cases students had to live so far from school that they wandered around for weeks like visiting firemen. The school searched frantically for ways to stretch their existing housing facilities. They added more rooms for men in the stadium until it was honey- combed with quarters. They converted the Waltheim apartment building into a dorm, since Van Zile Hall had long since housed only a fraction of the women students. Army barracks were moved in from Cof- feyville and were thrown together on the southeast corner of the campus. That was that lovely plot of grass where we learned our hup-ta-three ' s, re- member? The buildings are not good to look at, but they hold nearly 400 veterans. UtiiiiiVinriiwTu;r,wi iiv ii; ii(k i CAFETERIA