University of Kansas - Jayhawker Yearbook (Lawrence, KS)

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THE JAYHAWKER PHOTO BY PALMER Sparkling, youthful, a twin, Virginia Joseph, a fresh- man in the College, and a Kappa Alpha Theta pledge.

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FALL I S S U 1945 i nmnin uinn: ... BY R. J. ATKINSON, SENIOR A FRESHMAN woman ' s heart, like the moon, is always changing, and, if you look sharp, you can find a man in both of them. This is especially true during the eager period when the lads and lassies are participating in the blind-date-walkout-hour-danceopen-house-mid- week varsity routine. Until the first few months of college have worn away, it is easy for the frosh lovelies and even the not-so-lovelies to be dated weeks in advance and find a new poten- tial BMOC twice weekly. The new coed ' s popularity really never gets the acid test until the Christmas parties have arrived on the scene. The winter formals are usually the party-of-the-year in the men ' s houses and the women that rate these are the ones with pfff-t. The freshmen flash was introduced to college by a swirl of dates and men will either read her name in the Those who attended col- umns of the Kansan socials or she can safely assume that she crashed the Sophomore Slump group one semester early. Except for occasional dates here she will stay until the junior-senior steady. Though most of the young-uns will find fairly steady pursuers even after Christmas vaca- tion, some may soon begin to notice that their fun sessions become more and more all-feminine as they sit home weekends swapping stories on The Saga of The Hunt. The Hunt is (but natch fella, natch ) the man hunt. If the conversation is not mapping a series of strategies to hook some freshman Joes with whom they are entangled (or hope to be), the evening ' s session will be devoted to the cute high school football stars of whom no one has ever heard. This falls into the various face-saving devices devised by the University ' s fairer sex. For the past several years when men were as scarce as seals in the Robinson pool, it was easy to explain weekends because My man is in the service. As things return to normal and the num- ber of skirts and slacks draw dose to being equal ( of course slacks do not always have a man in them, but from the latest Gallup poll there were men in at least nine of every ten pairs of slacks appearing on the street), there will be many girls who will have to learn to pull wool to save their face on the dateless week-ends. This they can do by developing their own methods or by copying the following from their feminine upper classmen, who use: The week-end with the folks and perhaps either ficticious or non-ficticious suitors or steadies from the home town; the splitting headache routine which is made more effective by a bushel basket full of aspirin tablets in plain view for all to see ( with women who know their aspirin best, its the Little Handy Headache Breakers, nine to six. ); the quiz week or term paper jag which amounts to a week-end of day-dreaming over volumes of books with a TRUE LOVE magazine, which is scrupulously hidden among the debris and can be easily covered or uncov- ered as intruders approach or rescind; and the career woman act where the principal character can not seem to put up with the stupid, boring college males and their juvenile chatter and fun. There are other devices constantly being developed by the more clever ones but they are only good over a certain period of time. Of course there is no real need for face-saving tech- niques if her other techniques are better and she is able to keep both her stories and stocking seams straight at the same time. Mr. Anthony, who features himself as some kind of chronicle on love and what matters, once told a young woman that she was shooting too high for her males and if she would tame her ambitions, she could keep a steady escort. I mention that only in passing since I happened (Continued on Page 66)

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FALL ISSUE 1945 TO LOVE BY ART HOFFMAN, FRESHMAN TO a new man on the campus, freshmen women are rather hard to believe I mean in num- ber, beauty, personality and so forth. As to the general comment on freshmen women, one couldn ' t exactly say you were scraping the bottom of the barrel, nor could one say there was a barrel, but one could say freshmen women aren ' t too much trouble if they ' re kept locked up. Volumes have been written on the garb of the new college coed so I will desist from any such comment, but to those interested may I suggest Darwin ' s book, Man and Microbes. What I am about to comment on, is their strange per sonali ties, and their effects on man. As an example, take the difficulties that the freshmen women are having getting acclimated to so many different boys after going steady in high school for five years. On one date, I distinctly remember I had a difficult time carrying on a conversation. It seems as though she had been going with the same boy for eight years. They had gone together but never had bothered about talking to each other. It had a stifling effect on her personality. However, we got along fine after I consulted my trusty Pocket Guide (Page 10, Article 5), and found a complete table of sign languages. My best friend is going with a girl who has built her life around the song, Take Me Back To Tulsa. No matter where she is, she is liable to burst into a chorus of the song. When she was a little girl she used to live in Tulsa on a farm, and one day she was watching her father load cattle into a railroad car, to be shipped to Kansas City. Somehow she got mixed up with the herd and was loaded into the car with them. The car was sidetracked at the wrong station and lost. Her parents frantically advertised and offered a huge reward but they never found the cattle car. I guess that was the reason for her song. It really wasn ' t a bad number, but it was the dance routine she had worked up to go with the song that made her different. Then there was the time that I took my date to the show and her boy friend came with us. He held her hand all through the feature, which gave me a strange sensation of not being wanted. It wouldn ' t have been so bad if I hadn ' t been sitting between them. Occasionally I would get my hand mixed up with theirs and he would end up holding mine. His facial expressions were so amusing when he found out that I did it two or three times more, but I quit when he bit me. Just the other night while waiting for my freshman date to put in an appearance, I recalled a little incident which happened to me in those trying and bitter days of the early thirties. I ' m relating this story to you because I feel that freshmen women have gone too far when it comes to making a date wait. A campaign should be started to wipe out this worst torture that the K.U. man (or any man) is forced to endure. Returning home from school one afternoon when I was only a senior in high school, I saw a slight movement under the porch. Being a brave and courageous soul, I summoned mother, father, and my six older brothers, and we set out to find what it was. After removing the floor boards and a few of the white columns (we were renting the house) we came upon our goal. There, huddled far back in a dark corner, was a man. He wore a tattered burlap bag, hadn ' t shaved since college nor eaten in months. Although we found no ration books upon his person, we fed him. It seems that one night he called for his date and she wasn ' t ready. He sat down to wait for her and before he knew it fifteen minutes had passed. The minutes turned to hours, the hours turned to days and the days to weeks. For fifteen weeks he waited. Finally the strain was too great he could wait no longer. This story is hard to believe, but when you think of all the huundreds of men in the world who have gone through the same ordeal, it is still hard to believe. In conclusion, I would like to say that aside from all their faults, the freshmen women are, generally speaking and without consulting the statistics, about the youngest women on the campus.