Swarthmore College - Halcyon Yearbook (Swarthmore, PA)

Page 9 text:

Front campus in Pre-Sharplesian Days (Spring 1963) SWARTHMORE, PENNSYLVANIA- 1964

Page 11 text:

nmiPATinM ' ' s out ° v °9 ue to dedicate yearbooks. Yet, a centennial year seems an ULUIUflllUll appropriate time to turn toward the traditional. Over the past century Swarthmore has changed drastically. While her aims have always been high their translation into the spirit of the college has varied. Swarthmore has been trans- muted from a small parochial school, through the gung-ho years of athletic professionalism, into some-sort-of intellectual Shangri-la. This metamorphosis has been one of changing people and changing ideas. What then has remained eternally Swarthmore? The Quaker belief in following one ' s own inner light?— Perhaps. But a school is more than ideals. It is people and memories of those people. One memory that must be universal to those who have participated in men ' s athletics over the past sixty years is expressed succinctly, in Swarthmore Remembered, by James Kelly ' 34: A gentle, kindly, knowing man named Ruff Herndon plied his trade in Hall Gym- nasium and appears in retrospect, as he did at the time, to be one of the best appliers of sensible psychology to young men under stress and strain anybody could hope to meet. This memory reflects on something as distinctively Swarthmorian as inner light or strivings for academic excellence,— and equally noble. Its personification has been around much long- er than exemplifications of excellence. We dedicate the 1964 Halcyon to that kind, sensible, knowing spirit and its personification, Ruff Herndon.