047
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Title
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047
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Transcription
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y advertised as gilded youths because they boarded at the Clifton House down town and must have paid as much as five or even six dollars.
After a student had provided for his basic living, had scraped together a few books, and had turned over his matriculation fee of five dollars, which had to be paid only once, he did not feel uncomfortable if he had nothing left. Life in the University was so simple and poverty was so common that it seemed a perfectly normal condition. Social distractions in the early part of my experience were found mostly in the Friday meetings of the literary societies; in an occasional play at the old Centennial Opera House and in a perfect orgy of church attendance on Sunday. I can name student after student who went to two preaching services, two Sunday schools, a Y. M. C. A. session, and the Red Ribbon club every Sunday, from September till June. The young people of the little city were bubbling over with social gaiety all the time, but aside from the small "town set", the students had no time for frivolity. We indeed were a serious bunch of youngsters. We studied mathematics, the classics, history, and a little science, and then read solid magazine articles for relaxation. I remember that I cut my first debating teeth over an article by a British writer who undertook to show that morality has no scientific basis. At Mrs. Swisher's and later at Mrs. Park's on Q street, we curried civilization up one side and down another at the dinner table every day, and then gave it a few extra wipes on Sunday. Society was so simple that George McLane, who received fifty dollars a month for janitoring the University building, was treated as equal by the professors and as a little more than the rest of us and wore better clothes, and the fact that he was making himself round shouldered carrying hods of coal to fill the base burners that stood in each recitation room did not interfere at all with his social eligibility.
Athletics had not appeared on the campus in the early eighties. The only all-university interest was the college paper, The Hesperian Student, which was the center of
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Rights
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