Virginia Military Institute - Bomb Yearbook (Lexington, VA)

Page 14 text:

m ' E cannot live only for ourselves. A thou- sand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threatls, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as efi ects. IMelville 5 Corps;

Page 16 text:

HISTORY OF THE CLASS OF 1963 It was real, remarked a girl to her date at the couchision of a weekend the ])air had spent together. The remark coiiuoled several things: first, tlie experience was worthwhile; second, the exjjerience was marred with unpleasantnesses as well as hapj)y moments; third, her recollection would refuse, later, to remember only the good or to forget the bad moments. The value of a remembered experience dei ends largely on the strength and breadth of the remembrance. The Class of 1963 does not carry away from the Institute the happiest of memories of its days at the ' MI. In the fullness of time, it will come to realize that which has been learned here has been of inestimable value; but, again, that which has been learned has not, of necessity, been pleasant. The cadet ' s life is not totally a happy one. If he is not mature, he will fail to look beneath the surface of the petty altercations, the rugged moments, and recog- nize only the interminable pressure that they have, with unrelenting monotony, put on him. The Class of 1963 occupies a unicjue niche in VMI history, for it has seen two radically different systems of training and education at work. It has lived under two systems: one, relatively lenient, willing, perhaps, to give a break or to recognize exceptions to set situations, the other tirelessly adhering to the citizen soldier function of the Institute. Under such a dichotomy of educational ])hilosophies, only fifty per cent of the late adolescents who stood sweating in Jackson Arch in September of 1959 have survived to be graduated as Brother Rats.