Memories of Oberlin College in the 1940s
James K. Sunshine, OC 1949
Whenever I go back to Oberlin, which is every few years, I am astounded at the changes I see on every side. The new science center is the latest and probably the grandest evidence that I am not where I once was. The streets are the same, an occasional building looks as it always did, and the downtown seems, if anything, more down at the heels. Of course the Apollo is still there, but on the whole, the College seems vastly different from what it was 60 years ago in manners, morals, and physical appearance.
October 3, 1942, the beginning of Freshman Week, was an unusually bright fall day in Oberlin. In Elmwood, an old yellow house on Elm Street, it was lunchtime. Twenty young women who were to live there in what was then a typical Oberlin dormitory, and as many young men, gathered in a comfortable, somewhat shabby living room waiting to be called in to lunch. Since they were meeting each other for the first time they were self-consciously doing their best to seem bright and unconcerned. On most days, lunch was served at exactly 12:30 p.m., 10 minutes after the end of the 20-minute noon chapel, which before World War II every student would have attended because “regular attendance” was required and seats were assigned.
But this was a Saturday and the first day freshmen were on campus. They trooped into the dining room, taking seats at round tables for eight covered in white linen with a napkin and silverware beside each place. A small birdlike woman in her sixties presided over the room. Young men in white jackets, a year or so older than the freshmen and working for their part of their board bill, carried trays laden with family-style bowls of chicken, mashed potato, and green beans through the room and placed them on the tables. The birdlike woman, whose name was Mrs. Hayward, and who, as housemother, was in total charge of the manners, habits, and morals of the young women in her house, unmistakably in loco parentis,explained that when she touched her fork, it was a signal that we could begin eating, but that, of course, someone would say grace first. Someone did, and we ate.
As the meal progressed, Mrs. Hayward instructed us on acceptable manners, ignoring the possibility that we might have first been so instructed by our parents. Coming into the dining room to our assigned tables, we were to pull out the chair for the young woman on our right. We were not to eat until Mrs. Hayward signaled. We could pick up chicken and rolls with our fingers, but nothing else, and so on.
Such was my first day and my first meal on the Oberlin campus. Today, Elmwood is gone, as are my other dining halls, Grey Gables and Pyle Inn, where I ate after the war. Housemothers are gone, even the terrifying Mrs. Locke at May Cottage who used to patrol her parlors to catch snuggling couples. But a number of the people I met at Elmwood, and the young men who lived with me in the Third East section of the Men’s Building, dubbed the “MB” and now called by its donor’s name, Wilder, have been my closest friends for the past 62 years.
It is not unheard of for Oberlin graduates to persist in friendship for a long time although perhaps 62 years is something of a record. To recall something of the lives of those I knew and the College as we knew it may be of interest to more recent generations, or it should be, because the College as we knew it is long gone. And to trace even briefly the trajectory of these lives may be reassuring to those generations who fear there may not be life after Oberlin. To still others of a historical bent, it will be interesting to read of what it was like to live in a simpler college in a simpler time.
You have to remember that my class bridged World War II. We came in 1942, when the war was young, the men going off to the service a semester or a year later, not to return until 1946. But most of us who had started together did return. Those who did not are now remembered in bronze in the little garden beside Finney Chapel. Occasionally, when I return to the campus, I see students sitting there studying in the sun, and I wonder what they think of the names on the wall. I wonder if they even see them.
A group of us came together that spring of 1946 to eat at a corner table at Grey Gables on West College Street, another old residence converted into a women’s dormitory. There were several men back from three years in the service (I was one) and a number of women we had known as freshmen in 1942, who were now seniors a semester short of graduation. With me at that table were Caroline Morris, Jean Garcide, Frances Skinner, Midge Garrett, Bob Avery, and Dave Fowler. One other was Jean Reitsman, but she sat at the head table by virtue of her position as dining hall chaplain. It was her task to pray for us before we ate.
By 1949, however, as graduations and marriages in Fairchild Chapel occurred, we had separated, frequently calling on each other in different parts of the country where first jobs took us, but not to come together again as a group until 1982. From then on we have gathered every summer at someone’s home or summer cottage, although each year now it seems we lose someone.
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