Glenn Miller, demonstrations...
once upon a time, not long ago
By Ellyn Hess
They wore saddle shoes, baggy pants, argyle socks
and sweater sets. Some of them fought in a war
overseas.
They were enthusiastic football fans and they
played registration roulette almost every semester.
It's been 30 years since NU coeds jitterbugged to
Glen Miller or snacked on 10-cent brownies a la mode
in the Union, but much of the way they were is alive
in students' fashions and suitudes of the 70s.
UNL students toda don't usually wear ties to
clas or plaster their hair with Dixie Peach Pomade or
fluff it pompadour -,tyie. Slacks have replaced skirts
for '.vomer. nd "'Jit-fitting sweaters are worn instead
of thp b'llkv ca- digans of the past.
Like his modern counterpart, the typical male NU
student in the '40s pulled on sweater vests with
corduroy sport jackets and trousers. Parents often
frowned at his hair length.
Women students wore high platform shoes
comparable to those which designers would have
fashion-conscious women buy today. They painted
their lips ruby red and frizzed long hair out at the
ends.
Almost every coed's wardrobe included a fur coat,
preferably muskrat. They wore jeans then, but with a
difference. Women's pants zipped up the side.
Proms, military balls and the Coed Follies variety
show were must-do's, and on most weekends, two or
three couples would pile into cars and head for the
dance at a ballroom outside Lincoln.
Liquor wasn't sold by the drink then, but that
didn't stop anyone from drinking, according to Mrs.
Ruth Moll) Boehmer, a student at NU from 1945 to
1943.
"We'd go dancing at places like East Hills Country
Club, where the boys usually would have some liquor
with them, to spike whatever was served,h saidyw
Neale Copple, director of the UNL School of
Journalism, said he thinks that there was more
drinking at NU in the '40s than there is now, but that
it was done more quietly. i
Copple, a NU student during the '40s, said World
War II changed the atmosphere of the campus in that
decade.
"During the first year of the forties," he said,
"students didn't worry much about war." Things
changed after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on
Dec. 7, 1941, he said.
"From that point on," he said, "the boys were
very much aware that they were going into the
service." Copple said professors were very
sympathetic, often allowing students to register for
more than 21 credit hours. '
Boehmer recalled that there "were hardly any
fellows" 6n campus when she started school in
September, 1945. .
There weren't. In 1945, the male to fetnal ratio
was 1-13 to 1, compared with a 3-12 to 1 ratio in
1947. Total enrollment dropped from 6,000 in 1940
to 2,750 in 1944.
After 1945, the figure peaked at 9,730 in 1947.
The increase occurred mainly because many students
used the Gl Bill to pay education costs, Copple said.
"We had the same trouble students have today
when it came to registration and crowded classes," he
said, adding that after World War II buildings similar
to Quanset huts sat where the Love Library addition
is today.
The scarcity of men during the war wasn't much
fiin for some of the older women students.
"I was lucky when I started college. Many of the
boys my age hadn't been drafted," Boehmer said. But
I often it was hard for the older women to find dates,
she added.
"I guess we spent a lot of weekends playing cards
or going to the movies."
Once the men came back, though, social life
picked up, she said. Every weekend there was
dancing, and on some weekends, picnics or swimming
at the Capitol Beach swimming pool.
Marcia (Tepperman) Kushner recalls that the men
"looked terribly old and mature" when she attended
NU from 1946 to 1950. She said that women, though
generally younger than the men on campus, were
often ahead of them academically.
"We knew the men were very serious students,"
Kushner said, "and that we would have to work very
hard to get good grades against them."
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former servicemen returned to campus.
"Their lives had been in jeopardy", she said, "and
they weren't going to submit to that
monkeybusiness."
There was a demonstration in 1948 over guess
what-parking. It started at 12th and R streets and
ended up at the Statehouse, according to Jim Tische,
who was graduated in 1 950.
At the time, Tische said, 12th Street ran in front
of where the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery is now.
The University didn't provide formal parking for
students' cars on campus, he added.
One morning, Ticche said, the Lincoln police tried
to two away students' cars which had been parked on
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1 2th Street for more than an hour. A crowd gathered
around the tow truck and let the air out of its tires."
"Somebody panicked and tailed the police, and
before we knew it there were fire trucks there," he
said, adding that students then let the air out of the
fire truck's tires.
Police then threw tear gas into the crowd of
several thousand students, Tische said. Soon after
that the dean of the University asked police to leave
the campus.
But students weren't satisfied, according to Tische,
so 500 of them marched on O Street, blocking traffic,
and then went to the police station.
When police told them that they couldn't solve the
parking problem, they went to the Statehouse to
demand more parking on campus, Tische said. They
got it.
Kushner said she remembers that some eastern
ci tn&YW?3Pj;S said the demonstration was
liaVcommunist-inspired." That was a . joke around the
campus, she said.
Tische said he thinks that while he was at college
"students turned inward to campus life because they
didn't think much about world problems."
Boehmer said she didn't know the names of
national leaders in the 1940's, except for Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
"I don't even think ! read the newspapers in those
days," she said.
Kushner, the first Jewish woman elected Mortar
Board , womens' honorary society president (in 1949),
said that it was a step forward for NU women of her
faith.
"Our house (Sigma Delta Tau) was kind of isolated
from the other Greeks," she said, "and we didn't feel
that we were in a position of power with them.
"When I was tapped Mortar Board president, it
was a sign that we were really getting there, that we
were being accepted and that we were making a
contribution," Kushner said.
Kushner said she thought it odd that the Temple
Building was ctill standing when she returned to UNL
in 1969 to earn her masters' degree in audiology.
"I thought to myself, here I am sitting in the same
building that was condemned 20 years ago," she said.
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thursday, february 7, 1974
daily nebraskan
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