"Memories of Oberlin College," continued ...
Compared to the facilities on campus today, the classrooms and labs provided for us were for the most part laughable. Peters Hall was a wonderful but decaying nineteenth-century structure and looked the part. It was the main classroom building. The psych department kept its rats in the attic. Geology classrooms and lab were in an old house near the new physics laboratory. On the corner of West College and South Professor streets, where the Conservatory stands today, were Sturges Hall and Wright Laboratory, where zoology was taught. Sturges was a former church. Many classes were held in Westervelt Hall, an old red-brick schoolhouse downtown that is now an art gallery. Carnegie Library served both town and college. There were immense elm trees all over Tappan Square, and behind the boulders near the southwest corner there was a huge fire pit for the pep rallies held before football games.
Everything began to change after the war, slowly at first, then with greater speed. Six decades of building have remade what was once a modest, almost improvised, campus.
With the GI Bill bringing returned veterans to campus, the little “avowedly Christian college” began to grow in numbers and diversity. Many of the veterans had been places and done things not particularly Christian, and they were increasingly outspoken. African Americans, relatively rare before the war (in 1942 there were 11 in the entire College, 24 in the Conservatory, and 11 in the Graduate School of Theology), began to appear in somewhat greater numbers. So did Jews and nonbelievers of all sorts. Slowly, Oberlin was losing its earnest piety, which had won for it a reputation for advanced thought in the nineteenth century, and gaining in its place the beginnings of the more outspoken social and political liberalism evident today.
The many inefficient dining halls serving 50 or at most 100 students were expensive to run and endeavored to make ends meet by offering what students often regarded as barely edible food. Lunch could be canned tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches, although served by student waiters on white tablecloths with cloth napkins. On Monday, January 10, 1949, for example, the posted menu for lunch was “corn chowder, crackers, lettuce, bread, donuts, tea and milk.” Supper that night was “bacon, eggs, lima beans, potatoes, bread, peaches, cookies and coffee.”
After a year or so of this, many returning veterans began to rebel. As a consequence the Review launched an investigation, comparing Oberlin menus, operations, and costs with those of other colleges, mainly to Oberlin’s disfavor. Oberlin’s semester board bill at the time was $210, while Harvard and Princeton were at $200. Yale’s was only $160, and many colleges cited charged even less. A front-page editorial stated, “We, the students, are paying more and eating less than almost any other college student we have been able to contact.” Largely because of the numerous small dining halls, two-thirds of the board bill was going into overhead and only a third into food, the Review said.
The result was the beginning of College efforts to switch away from the small, and as it found out much later, beloved dining halls to a variety of mass feeding alternatives carried on by outside contractors, the first being the infamous Saga. It is worth stating here, I think, that the food provided today at Dascomb and Stevenson is so far above what students were fed in the 1940s that it is inconceivable that students can find fault with it. No doubt it is true that students are impossible to please, but as I said, today’s students wouldn’t last five minutes in the Oberlin of the 1940s.
The many small housing units, most of them made-over private dwellings, were also inefficient and perhaps dangerous. Accordingly, newly-appointed President William E. Stevenson, a Wall Street lawyer who had headed the Red Cross in Europe during the war, began to work for change. Federal money was available to finance college facilities to accommodate millions of returning veterans. The money was not enough to pay for more than minimal facilities and there were restrictions on design and cost, but the college made do. Many of those buildings are standing today, among them new Dascomb, Fairchild, South, and Burton, all distinguished by a 1950s look and the most basic interiors. Still, they were far better than the converted houses they replaced.
Such are the memories that remain after 62 years.
Bill Warren, my roommate at the MB, returned from the Navy and married Caroline Morris, known as Kerrin, who lived at Elmwood that first year and later at Grey Gables. Bill became vice president of Antioch College and later an Oberlin trustee. At Gables in the spring of ’46, Kerrin roomed with Frances Skinner, who later married Jim Dittes, who edited the Review. Jim went on to become a noted professor of religion at Yale. The Gables chaplain that spring, Jean Reitsman, had edited the Review during the war. She married Bob France, who became an economist and vice president at the University of Rochester, and she taught architectural history there. Bob Avery married Mineko Sasahara, a Japanese American who had been released from a wartime concentration camp in the West to attend Oberlin. Bob became a much-admired professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, and Minnie went on to become a pianist and a lawyer. Dave Fowler became a professor of history at Carnegie Mellon. In the fall of 1946, Bob Avery and I moved from Gables across the street to Pyle Inn, where we washed pots and pans for our board. There I met Anne Fassett, and after suitable sparring, married her two years later. And I became a newspaper editor. By the 1970s most of these couples had contributed a child or so to Oberlin.
I don’t want to make too much of the changes I see in the College, but I don’t want to forget them either. Underneath the twenty-first-century skin there are without doubt the bones of the little institution founded in the dismal swampland of northeast Ohio by people who were very advanced for their time and place. One has only to walk across Tappan Square or past the Con to see students who, despite the clothes and the nose studs, seem much the same as those of decades past—earnest, awkward, hard-working, and determined to somehow improve the world. It is not just another small college, it is Oberlin, “peculiar in that which is good,” and known for it by almost every educated person in the land. I have been glad all my life that I went there.