Louisiana State University - Gumbo Yearbook (Baton Rouge, LA)

Page 11 text:

OF There is a place where once the rttstling sugar cane nodded all the sleeping day in the field, con- tent and snug in its cradle of rich black earth: and this was the cradle of the school; where once the sil- ent, shaded, moss-hung bayous curled through the thick and dripping heat: and these found their way to the school; and where once the lonely trapper picked his solitary way among the pointing cypress knees, hearing only the plash of a grumbly ' gator or the piercing cry of a soaring Great Blue Heron; and he was the father of the school. From these came the students that made Louisiana State University, and the things that made it great. This place, these things, are quickly disappearing; for this place was South Louisiana, and these were the things that were found there. But the passing of the heron, the cane, the trapper, has not tolled the death knell for this proud, rich, fertile land. For now there cling on the banks of the muddy Mississippi burgeoning industries, their smoking stacks set against the sky; and cotton, and rice, and corn nod boll and tassle beside the sugar-dripping cane; and too, there nestles, studded with oaks, bays, bursting magnolias, set in the heart of this industrial, agricul- tural, aristocratic land, an institution which fosters the ideas, maintains the traditions, and furthers the development of the area which it serves and belong to, the off- spring of the trapper, the bayou, and the heron: Louisiana State University. It is to you the student of the university that this book is af- fectionately dedicat- ed. It is to you who came out of the bay- ous and the cities, from the oil fields and the cane fields, that we give this book. This is your story, then; the story of your land, the story of your school. The story of what you have done, and what you have seen; of what you have been, and what you are to become. Let ' s begin your story in one of the places you known best: start the LSI story in

Page 10 text:

I. L! S i i i i i i r i ft i .

Page 12 text:

- , . . . The sounds of the night, the scenes of the night: a school and a city, side by side. In the city are the lights: the bright lights, flashing red-and-green-and-yellow neon lights, blinking blue lights, garish lights; and through the campus, there too are the lights: shining steady lights, pin- point lights, late-burning, concealed re- flected lights . . .