051
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051
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Transcription
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rope and oozed away. In the meantime the orchestra faithfully continued to grind out "Many Are the Friends Who Are Waiting Tonight" until it was discovered that the stage was empty. Happy days, happy days! They didn't catch the actors that night and in a day or two it was safe to reappear on the campus.
It is interesting to recall what the boys looked forward to after leaving the University in the early eighties—professional life, mainly, it seems to me. School teaching was still considered a worthy and attractive profession. The very pinnacle of success was a college professorship. Law invited many of the more vigorous, and a few of the boys were thinking of medicine, business, newspapering, or the new occupation of writing insurance. The ministry called a few. Nobody wanted to go back to the farm. Farm products were almost given away at this time, and land was so cheap and abundant that even eastern Nebraska it sold at from five to ten dollars an acre. So the beginnings of the agricultural college were held in contempt. We could not see that Nebraska was to become a great horn of plenty, smothering the next generation with wealth. A few of the boys had begun to pioneer in the sciences, but we had no hint of the great prizes that were to come to men like Bion J. Arnold, who was then breaking into engineering, or J. G. White, who soon went from an instructorship in the University to an electrical business encircling the globe. What we were getting then seemed the most beautiful and the most desirable things in the world. The habits of industry we formed, the affections we nourished, the visions we enjoyed, and the memories we cherish, make the pioneers of the early eighties refuse to be pitied by students who enjoy the splendid facilities of the University at the close of the first half century of its history.
WILL OWEN JONES.
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