When the first issue of the Cornell Alumni News was published in April 1899, it was an eight-page weekly newspaper staffed primarily by students who thought the alumni could benefit from such a conduit to their peers and their alma mater. One hundred years later, Cornell Magazine is a 116-page bimonthly publication with full-color photos, a full-time staff, and contributing writers from around the country. But the look of the magazine has changed only as much as the world around it.

A look back through the words printed in those 100 years between the turn of the century and the turn of the millennium is a journey from frosh caps to love beads, snowball fights to sit-ins, freedom rides to gay studies, D-Day to O.J. It is more than a reflection of the history of the magazine or even the university. It's a trip through a century that has hurtled through change.

During 100 years of chronicling Cornell and its myriad representations on and off campus, the magazine has broadened its scope and extended its reach. But it remains what it always has been--a conduit to your peers and your alma mater, sometimes serious, occasionally unsettling, often whimsical, always a reflection of the times.

APRIL 5, 1899&emdash;ISSUE NUMBER ONE
THE AIM OF THE NEWS
We ask a kind reception for this young adventurer in the ranks of Cornell journalism. The field into which we have entered is a fertile one; and that it needs attention, we are firmly convinced . . . The objects of the Alumni News will be threefold: First, to reflect faithfully and especially for alumni the present life at the University&emdash;both in Ithaca and New York; among both Faculty and students. In this we have been promised the hearty co-operation of the members of the Medical College of New York. Secondly, to keep the alumni accurately informed concerning the attitude of the University body, students and Faculty, toward the various questions of University policy. Athletics will of course receive its due share of attention, and questions of general University economy will not be neglected. Thirdly&emdash;and this is perhaps the most important of all&emdash;to keep the alumni informed as fully and as accurately as possible about the whereabouts and doings of Cornell men and women; and thus not only to foster the interest in classmates and Alma Mater, but also to increase the enthusiasm and loyalty of every Cornellian for the college on the hill.

APRIL 26, 1899
From President Schurman's annual report:
Buildings and grounds.............................$1,796,372.86
Equipment and departments.......................$1,135,308.12
Invested funds......................................$6,446,818.21
Total property.......................................$9,378,409.19
Receipts from tuition...............................$121,205.83
Total income........................................ $583,050.36
Salaries...............................................$286,185.72
From this table it will be seen that at present the property of the University is valued at something over nine millions of dollars exclusive of Western land unsold.

DECEMBER 14, 1899
Mr. Harry N. Pillsbury, of Brooklyn, gave on December 7 a remarkable exhibition, under the auspices of the Cornell Chess Club, of play at chess and checkers. In the afternoon he played nine games of chess and one of checkers "blindfold," and won the ten. In the evening he played altogether forty games of chess and ten of checkers. Thirty of these were "simultaneous." Of the sixty games he played during the day, Mr. Pillsbury failed to win but two.

APRIL 4, 1906
OUR SEVENTH BIRTHDAY
The Cornell Alumni News is seven years old today. It is celebrating the occasion by issuing an enlarged souvenir number, illustrated with photographs of Cornell men and Cornell views. This number will be mailed to hundreds of alumni outside the pale of its subscription list in the hope that they may be induced to come inside. Last year's souvenir number was used in the same way and was the means of gaining a host of new acquaintances, many of whom were so favorably impressed that they invited the News to become a regular visitor at their homes.

JANUARY 19, 1910
This is "Block Week" and there is very little university activity outside of the midyear examinations. It is a period of doubt and distress to more than one undergraduate. Last year about 150 students were "busted" at the end of the first term and probably as many more were put on probation. A student on probation is not allowed to take part in any form of "student activity." The first term will end next Wednesday, and then will come the Junior Ball and its attendant festivities--Sophomore Cotillion, concert by the musical clubs, and comic opera by the Masque.

NOVEMBER 10, 1909
Professor Hiram Corson was eighty-one years old last Saturday. He received calls from a large number of his friends during the day.

JUNE 1, 1910
Nineteen Seven, on your toes! "Back to the Burg" is the cry. The "Water Wagon," the "caravan of sheiks," and other devices may be necessary to get some classes back to the good old town at reunion time, but the good scouts who got out three years ago are coming back by the simple automatic process. They don't need prodding. The Lake is still there. So are the Hills, the Green Grass, and all the other stage properties that made our four-act play, which ended its run three years ago, such a winner.

OCTOBER 7, 1915
Somebody sold a freshman a ticket the other day "good for one admission to the rowing machines in the gymnasium." The ticket was signed "Cornell Crew Association" and the price was $1.25. The freshman gave a check for that amount payable to the "Association" and presented his ticket to E. S. Jamison, the manager of the Navy. Jamison explained things to him and had him stop payment on the check, which had not been presented at the bank. The check is believed to be already pasted in some "stunt book."

OCTOBER 7, 1915
A black bear cub is the mascot of the football team. The cub was bought in Maine with money which the squad raised by subscription. He arrived last week and made his first official public appearance at the Oberlin game, when he was tethered on the field. The football men were trying this week to think of a good name for him.

JANUARY 13, 1916
Write-ups of members of the senior class in the Class Book are to be toned down in the 1916 publication. It has been the custom to print flowery bits of undergraduate biography about each senior to accompany his photograph in the yearbook. The Sun expressed editorially its disapproval of this practice, and several correspondents to the undergraduate daily urged that the write-ups had outgrown their usefulness with the enlargement of the classes. The board of editors announced this week their decision to do away with the custom entirely.

FEBRUARY 17, 1916
The statistician of the Sun reports that the hundred and ninety girls and sixty chaperones who were here for Junior Week represented twenty-four states besides the District of Columbia. The average number of girls and chaperones to a house party was fourteen-point-seven, a slight increase over last year, when the average was fourteen-point-four. The largest number on record was in 1912, when there were seventeen-point-five guests to each house entertaining. The Sun this year counted twelve Helens, twelve Katherines, eight Margarets, and eight Elizabeths, and scored five each for Grace, Louise, Mary, and Eleanor.

MARCH 16, 1916
No sign of spring could be seen, up to this week, on the "bird chart" which is kept in the north entry of McGraw Hall. This chart records the first appearance in Ithaca of the migratory birds. March 6 is the date of the average spring arrival of the robin and the bluebird. Two unhappy robins were seen on February 24, but up to March 11 no observer had reported even a single bluebird.

MARCH 23, 1916
What to wear this spring is a question now agitated in the senior class. Seniors of recent years have worn parti-colored blazers. That custom seems to have lost its favor. The knickerbocker costume has its partisans among the 1916 men, and there are others who, perhaps for personal reasons, would prefer the sailor suit. The Student Council has appointed a committee to select a costume which shall serve as a mark of seniority.

JUNE 1, 1916
The seniors who voted recently to keep blazers as the distinctive spring costume of the class were late in donning their striped coats and an opposition movement was started last week. The thirty men in Sibley College who form the industrial group appeared one morning in white canvas sailor suits with a monogram of their department on the shirts. The law seniors blossomed out the next day, and now a large number of men in every college are wearing them.

JUNE 1, 1916
A mock election for President of the United States was conducted by the Sun last week. Male students and members of the Faculty were eligible to vote in it. There were 1,759 votes cast. Leading candidates received votes as follows: Wilson, 674; Roosevelt, 616; Hughes, 367; Root, 30; Benson, 25; Debs, 9; Ford, 9; Taft, 9; Bryan, 9; scattering, 12.

JUNE 8, 1916
DESIGNED A NEW COIN
Dimes, quarters, and half dollars of new design will be minted after July 1. The designer of the new quarter is Hermon Atkins MacNeil, N.A. Mr. MacNeil was commissioned recently to execute the statue of Ezra Cornell which is to be unveiled by the University in 1918. He is the sculptor of the memorial bust of Robert Henry Thurston in Sibley College. The "buffalo" or "Indian head" nickel, now in general circulation, was designed by Mr. J. E. Fraser, the sculptor of the Schoellkopf memorial tablet in Schoell-kopf Hall.

APRIL 5, 1917
America's entrance into the war was anticipated in the last week of March and the first of April by preparation on the part of the authorities of Cornell University, who put all the University's resources in men and material at the service of the Nation. The Faculty voted to graduate at once all seniors and to give leave of absence to all other students who enter into public service, either military or industrial. Announcement was made of plans to organize here a military training camp to utilize the University's large facilities. Pending a decision by Congress as to the exact manner in which an army should be raised, the University could not complete its plans for co-operation on the purely military side, but it was ready to act in whatever manner it might serve the cause of national defense.

APRIL 12, 1917
575 WHO WOULD ENLIST
The number of students who had registered with the Secretary of the Faculty, when the University closed for the spring vacation on April 4, as enlisted or intending to enlist, was five hundred and seventy-five. Not all of these students, by any means, are expected to leave the University at once. The action of most of them will doubtless await the Government's plans for augmenting the country's military forces.

JANUARY 25, 1923
The latest in collegiate dress includes three new manifestations. Startlingly brilliant neckerchiefs worn by both men and women have exhausted all the impossible combinations of upholstery silks in local stores. Second, sojourners at the Lake Placid Club over the holidays have brought back with them the wearing on each leg of two dangling, little, worsted pompoms that depend from the turned down tops of golf hose. These are worn by the men, and are just too cute! Girls' gooloshes are worn turned down at the top, quite swash-bucklerishly; the excuse is that the buckles would otherwise tear the bottoms of the lengthened skirts.

APRIL 30, 1925
The teeth of the new Sanitary Code were bared to Paul M. Doering '26 of River Forest, Illinois, when, having been exposed to German measles, he forgot to report to the Medical Office for his third examination. As a consequence he received orders from Dr. Dean F. Smiley '16 to report at once to the Infirmary, there to stay for the remainder of the period of incubation. The incident brought forth an editorial in the Sun on "Muzzling Measles."

OCTOBER 6, 1927
These new football rules have few friends. The officials curse them. The players and coaches are generally uncomplimentary. They make more complicated a game already too complicated. They make what was certain, uncertain. Every point about them has been brought out by experts--except one. And this point is the one tremendously important contribution of the new rules. They give you four thousand more seats between the goal posts. For that boon the graduate managers will forgive the Rules Committee anything--will make pilgrimage to their shrines. It's an odd thing about goal posts--and it wouldn't make any difference if they were on the forty-yard line or out by the ticket office. Let an old grad draw a seat one year inside the posts and he's perfectly satisfied--one yard behind and it makes all the difference in the world. He demands a severed head upon a charger--with lots of dish gravy. Any rule that converts four thousand deadly enemies into the same number of devoted admirers is an important contribution to the peace of the world.
-- Romeyn Berry '04, LLB '06

OCTOBER 13, 1927
The freshmen are berated because some hundreds of their number have not yet purchased frosh caps. This would not have occurred in our time. It would appear that even the freshmen regard "collegiate" as a term of abuse. This is sophistication.
-- Morris G. Bishop '13, PhD '26

OCTOBER 13, 1927
BOOTLEGGERS UNDER FIRE
The business of Campus bootlegging, brought to the attention of Cornell by the Sun, has had a national echo in the dictum handed down by Seymour Lowman of Elmira, successor to Lincoln C. Andrews '88 as assistant secretary of the Treasury in charge of prohibition enforcement. Secretary Lowman has taken steps, through enforcement administrators, to curb the "fraternizing on the college campus" of student and the bootlegger of the traveling salesman type.

JANUARY 12, 1928
Smoking has been prohibited anew in the lobbies, corridors, lecturerooms,recitation rooms, laboratories, libraries, and reading rooms of Goldwin Smith Hall, and about time too. The air of the hall of humanities was blue and sour with smoke, and the butts underfoot were thick as leaves on Vallombrosa. The Sun cries discrimination, on the ground that the professorial offices were omitted from the list of prohibited areas. The answer which the Dean has not deigned to make is that the offices are not public places, that the professors commonly have ashtrays for their disjecta, that privilege is a characteristic of this faulty world of ours, and that if the rule were enforced Professor Blank and Dr. X would resign.
-- Bishop

JANUARY 12, 1928
Some mild cases of smallpox have been discovered down on the flats. Every one is being vaccinated. The doctor's office is the place to go if you want to meet all your friends and pass a pleasant social hour. The change in vaccination customs is interesting. My baby scar is about the size of a silver dollar. The one Dr. Beaman put on in 1901 is no bigger than a dime. You can hardly see the Army one. And this latest mark is hardly more than a pin prick. Among the ladies there are the same differences in the matter of dimensions and an even greater change with respect to location. It used to go on the arm, you remember, but that was unsightly. So they moved to the calf of the leg. The result was equally unsatisfactory with certain changes in fashion. Now the accepted spot is on the thigh about six inches north of the knee cap. Marked progress seems to be being made in all departments of science.
-- Berry

OCTOBER 31, 1929
Picnics are the social mode of the moment. The Agassiz Club picnicked at Buttermilk Falls, the Philosophy Club at Beebe Lake, and the Freshman women in Sage Gymnasium.
-- Bishop

OCTOBER 31, 1929
The conclusions of the physicists with regard to the Einstein theory were very interesting. "Scientists Find Few Errors in Einstein Theory. Advance Reports of Sensational Discoveries Refuting Theory Unfounded," said the Sun. "Scientists at Optical Society Convention Take Part in 4-Hour Discussion but Conclude Findings do Not Overturn Those of German," averred the Journal-News. "Einstein's Theories Raked by Americans. Four Scientists at Optical Society Session Turn Guns on Relativity. Criticize 'Verifications,'" proclaimed the New York Times. Score, two to one for Einstein.
-- Bishop

NOVEMBER 7, 1929
Earthquakes are no longer being reported from Cornell. With the departure of Dr. Pearl G. Sheldon '08 from the Department of Geology last June, the seismograph, the object of her care, has been abandoned. This seismograph was unique in that it registered not only earthquakes of Japan but also the delivery of trunks in Ithaca.
-- Bishop

JUNE 5, 1930
Block Week (we might as well get used to calling the week before examinations Block Week; usage is too strong for historical accuracy) Block Week, I say, is not at an end. To the student Block Week means a period of earnest endeavor and good behavior; to the Faculty of the Arts College, wherein most of the classes are suspended, it means rest, golf, or absorption in one's own work; to the journalist it means that the Hill, with its population of high-minded recluses, is singularly unproductive of news.
-- Bishop

SEPTEMBER 24, 1936
Contrary to the first report widely distributed by the papers, this year's football team will not have a bear mascot. Faculty children are sorry about this, but employees of the Athletic Association, who have known bear mascots and to that extent are acquainted with grief, are hysterical with joy. The last bear mascot, Touchdown IV, occurred in 1919. The fetid odor of the disagreeable beast still lingers in the baseball cage where he was kept.
-- Berry

FEBRUARY 4, 1937
We've lately been having a poll (something to do with advertising, no doubt) to determine student preferences in public persons and commodities. The results have just been announced. Some are interesting and some surprising. Camels are the favorite cigarette, with Chesterfields second and Philip Morris third. For preferred magazine the New Yorker led Esquire by a narrow margin. Ballantine's was the chosen ale and Pabst prevailed in the beer field. Remington was the favorite typewriter and Mr. Carl Snavely the best-liked coach. Jack Benny leads among the radio artists and the combination of William Powell and Myrna Loy upon the screen. Oh, well!
-- Berry

JANUARY 20, 1938
One advantage of the new basketball rules, which make the game a lot faster than it used to be, is reported by our predecessor in this space. Traveling to New York after a Drill Hall game recently with an official, R.B. reports a remark by that gentleman that the boys are now so busy keeping up with the game there is no time for airing personal grievances, either among themselves or with the officials. Afterwards in the showers, he says, the players are too tired from the fast pace to argue or care about anything except getting home and to bed.

OCTOBER 12, 1939
War policies preferences were recorded by undergraduates in Campus balloting sponsored by the Cornell Daily Sun last week. Of the 1,750 who voted, 98 percent were against American entry into the European war; but 93 percent said they would fight if the United States were attacked.

FEBRUARY 29, 1940
One industry that is thriving in Ithaca just now is the making of long wooden paddles, for use in fraternity initiations. Each Freshman supplies his own, which is duly used on him in the traditional manner and is then inscribed with the brothers' names and kept as a permanent memento. Paddles are a stock item with several local lumber dealers.

FEBRUARY 29, 1940
We like the way Mrs. Roosevelt keeps her appointments. It doesn't matter where she is or what she's doing, if her routine calls for her to be on a train bound for her next engagement, she grabs a sandwich and hops along, leaving the city fathers and notables still floundering in the soup course. Her fidelity to her Ithaca audience at Farm and Home Week is well known. What we liked was the way she bucked the blizzard to keep her date this year, the same way we've all battled our way to Syracuse and back during that annual Junior Week snowfall to get the Vassar girls off the New York Central. The lady has pluck.
-- Bob Bliss '30

JUNE 13, 1940
The toughest assignment the Reuners have to take this June is getting used to the new name of Barton Hall. It's still going to be "the Drill Hall" to most of us that have stood in line during Freshman registration to get our well-fumigated khaki.

SEPTEMBER 26, 1940
Cornell Daily Sun, Volume 41, Number 1, appeared Monday morning with twenty-eight pages distributed free. New features this year are comic strips "Hap Hopper," "Henry," "Li'l Abner," and "Blondie." Leading editorial announces that the paper will be non-partisan in the Presidential election campaign. Realistically it points out that "The Sun's support has never in the past been known to vitally affect the outcome of a national campaign."

JANUARY 16, 1941
No queen will be crowned at the Junior Prom. A student referendum defeated the idea. The Sun is gratified "that Cornellians have not followed the mad collegiate 'queen' rush." "Besides," Sun editors point out, "everyone already has a 'queen' for a date; just ask them. An 'every girl a queen' ceremony would be highly satisfactory to all concerned, and much more tactful."

SEPTEMBER 25, 1941
According to the sports writers, all teams with ivy in their hair, excepting only Pennsylvania and Cornell, are to be rated several notches higher than last year. Not that that means much. One's faith in the prophecies of sports writers varies inversely with his acquaintance with sports writers.
-- Berry

SEPTEMBER 25, 1941
Automobiles with license plates from forty-one States were counted in six hours on two July Sunday afternoons, passing the corner of Seneca and Aurora Streets, downtown. The count was made by Donald Bennett, a firetruck driver.

DECEMBER 11, 1941
WAR COMES TO CORNELL
Sudden fact of war was quietly received on the Campus. As to most other Americans, it came unexpectedly to students and members of the Faculty in Sunday's first brief radio reports of the Japanese bombing of Hawaii. The Sun published an extra late Sunday, which board members sold on the streets and in the University dormitories. Sunday night, the Ithaca telephone office observed some increase in outgoing long distance calls, but the telegraph offices report that most of their messages were incoming, from parents to their sons here. Most undergraduates listened to President Roosevelt's message and the resulting action by the Congress. Their general attitude on Monday seemed to be one of waiting, of bewilderment and wonder as to the meaning of it all.

DECEMBER 11, 1941
Queen of the Freshman Court of Beauty, honored at the Jack Frost Formal in Barton Hall, December 5, was Elizabeth A. Acheson '45 of Dobbs Ferry. Nine Freshman women to comprise the Court had been chosen from their pictures at an earlier mass meeting of Freshman men, the one receiving the most votes to be announced at the dance. That morning, the Sun published a group picture of the nine, with names and telephone numbers.

DECEMBER 18, 1941
Fashions seem to change in wars just as they do in undergraduate garments. If we must have wars, it's a good thing to have them close enough together so that there'll be people around in War 2 who remember what happened in War 1, who can take steps to see that it doesn't happen again. It's pretty well agreed, I think, that all a university has to do right now is to keep going and do what it's told. The same applies to the people in it. The American universities are at the moment reservoirs of a valuable, specialized personnel. This material, limited in quantity, should be drawn off as fast as it is wanted, and no faster. An athletic boy who knows trigonometry is too valuable this time to be permitted to join up to drive an ambulance or to swab decks on a converted yacht under the momentary influence of flag-flapping oratory. The natural desire to get into a uniform--any uniform--at the earliest possible moment should be curbed this time to prevent all that unnecessary waste of the other time.
-- Berry

FEBRUARY 12, 1942
Newest Campus organization, announced on the Willard Straight Hall bulletin board, is the Society for the Prevention of Disparaging Remarks About Brooklyn. The SPDRAB invites all to join its new Cornell chapter, whether residents of Brooklyn or not. Foster M. Coffin '12, Director of the Hall, denies any official connection with the new organization.

JULY 1945
Senior women paraded the Campus June 12, serenading dormitories and other buildings. They came a cropper in the University Library, however, where the "Senior Dirge" was felt to be out of place. Reporting the rebuff, the Cornell Bulletin described the Librarian as "turning purple with rage" and tearing the jacket of one co-ed who "was running from his grasp." Said the Bulletin in an editorial: "Look, Mr. Librarian, the Senior women aren't going to hurt the Library. The studying students don't object to the short interlude. Why don't you let tradition be?"

AUGUST 1945
GENERAL GETS GERMANS
Head of G-2 (Intelligence) division of U.S. Forces in the European Theatre, Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert '18, USA, directed half a million American troops in the mass raid on 15,000,000 Germans July 21-22, resulting in the arrest of 80,000 persons, including many SS members, hunted as war criminals. Every house in the American occupation zone in Germany was searched, turning up weapons, ammunition, and stolen American uniforms, gasoline, vehicles, and rations. General Sibert, not previously included in our round-up of alumni generals, is the sixteenth Cornellian of general rank on active duty in the U.S. Army.

SEPTEMBER 1945
Japanese surrender news touched off a night of celebration unequaled even in Ithaca, which has seen plenty of high jinks. Led by Cornell servicemen, many of whom wear Pacific campaign ribbons, a crowd materialized almost instantly in front of Willard Straight Hall, where amplifiers blared the momentous news of 7 p.m., August 14. Within an hour, University officials and Army and Navy commands had granted the swelling crowd's chanted demand: "We want liberty!" All classes were suspended for the following day.

SEPTEMBER 1945
HELP DEVELOP BOMB
Contributions of Cornellians to one of the greatest scientific achievements of mankind, the release of atomic energy, cannot as yet be told. Since the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, many accounts of its making have appeared; yet the details of specific research and experimentation are secrets still guarded by the War Department. Several communiques have been telegraphed to Professor R. Clifton Gibbs '06, chairman of the Department of Physics, saying that all news concerned with martial atoms must be cleared by the War Department. This includes even the names of members of the Faculty and alumni who have worked on the project.

MAY 1, 1947
HEP-CATS GATHER
Cornell Rhythm Club, only three months old but a lusty infant, brought Duke Ellington and his jazz orchestra to Bailey Hall, April 19. The house was packed solid; the music more so.

OCTOBER 1, 1947
In Springfield, Mass., a Cornell student dairy cattle judging team won first place in competition with ten other colleges . . . and another won trophies for judging ice cream and milk.

OCTOBER 15, 1951
Spirited controversy in the Sun has followed the appearance, September 22, of a column by Samuel D. Licklider '53, advocating a return to head-shaving and cold showers as reminders to the Freshmen to wear their caps and stay off the Campus grass. Among the letters published in protest of this attitude was one from Emeritus Professor Bristow Adams, who proposed that "Cornell students should not only be men, but gentlemen."
-- Charles D. Graham Jr. '52

NOVEMBER 1, 1951
A surprise quiz given at the first meeting of Government 417 revealed that of ninety-seven students, twenty-nine could not locate Russia, thirty-two could not identify John Foster Dulles, and fifty-four could not place Singapore.
-- Graham

JANUARY 1954
Early in December, startled eyes among the night-owls on Campus took in what appeared to be a squat Washington monument, but proved on closer scrutiny to be only the Libe Tower, fitted out with spotlights on surrounding trees to illuminate the spire. For years the tower has seemed a menacing finger after dusk; almost enough to make you whistle nervously while walking down Central Avenue. It seemed almost an invasion of privacy to display the bells with such reckless abandon in the wee hours, but in a few years it will be progress, and soon after, tradition.
-- Otto P. Elurlein

FEBRUARY 1954
Nothing so subtle as panty raids kept the children off the streets this year. The ejection of lingerie through dormitory windows has evidently breathed its last. To replace same, more than 150 good men and true stormed the walls of Sage and demanded real live Sophomore coeds to pelt with good old-fashioned snowballs.
-- Elurlein

DECEMBER 1, 1957
A new dodge to enable the user to avoid an exam came to light a few days ago. A student unprepared for a prelim hit himself over the head with a Coke bottle, asked a pre-medical student the symptoms for a concussion, and described his injury vividly enough to officials so he was immediately admitted to the Infirmary.
-- David S. Nye '57

MARCH 1, 1958
Snow, ice, and an unfortunate tractor made news and pictures for the Sun for several days. Six inches of copy and two pictures were devoted to efforts to retrieve a tractor-plow that broke through the ice on Beebe Lake while clearing it for skating. As the Sun had it, "the tractor had been testing the ice when it fell through." Police had to quell snowball fights around the men's dormitories after a heavy, wet snow January 25 & 26.
-- Nye

MARCH 15, 1958
ARE STUDENTS DULL?
Students at Cornell were held up to a searching examination as typical of present college students on Dave Garroway's national television program, "Today," right after Christmas. Joseph Michaels of the CBS news staff spent several days at the University and interviewed Faculty members and about ninety undergraduate men and women, recording their observations on film. The "Today" programs, December 26 & 27, showed some of these interviews to indicate "what today's college students are like."

Michaels talked about students with Dean S. C. Hollister, Engineering, and Professors William R. Keast, English, and Clinton L. Rossiter III '39, Government. These Faculty members said that most students are serious minded, interested, and do their work as expected. But they agreed that there is a lacking now "the influential minority who are critical, angry, adventurous, willing to experiment and take sides," that has marked earlier generations. Professor Keast said that students generally are "too content with a solid, competent performance" and Rossiter said he could not find "a real liberal or a real reactionary in my classes."

JULY 1958
LEARN ABOUT PREJUDICE
Students in a Social Psychology class on "Intergroup Relations" last term got first hand information on the effects of prejudice and discrimination from persons directly concerned. Professor John P. Dean, Sociology & Anthropology, arranged an amplified telephone hook-up in his classroom, on which a recent speaker was Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to play baseball in the major leagues.

SEPTEMBER 1961
MORE RIDERS
An alumnus and an undergraduate swelled the list of Cornellians arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for using segregated bus station facilities this summer. Five had been arrested in late May and early June. By late June, charges were also placed against Elizabeth S. Hirshfeld '58 of Ithaca, a lab technician on campus, and Robert E. Filner '63 of Forest Hills.

JUNE 1962
During the current academic year, the university has played host to four students from the Soviet Union, the first Russians to study on this campus in many years. While it is unnecessary to conclude that the meeting has in any sense eased or even squarely confronted the manifold differences which continue to exist between the American ethos and the Communistic system which promises to engulf it, the experience may well have been more than worth the negotiations which made it possible.

DECEMBER 1963
In the past, coeds have been permitted to wear slacks to lunch in the dormitories if the temperature was below freezing. But how to know, upon leaving for an 8 o'clock, just where the thermometer will stand at high noon? Solution: the head dietitian in each women's dining room will post a notice at the preceding day's dinner hour as to "slacks" or "no slacks" for the following day.

DECEMBER 1963
Horrors, girl cheerleaders! Four such lasses have helped turn out crowds for several of the pre-game pep rallies this past fall. None has appeared on the field at a game with the regular male cheerleaders.
-- John Marcham '50

JANUARY 1964
THE CAMPUS PULLS TOGETHER
It is true that when he heard the President had been shot, one gentleman at the Faculty Club asked immediately, "Why would anybody want to shoot President Perkins?" Like others, he couldn't believe it was the President of the U.S. But otherwise the campus community reacted much as did every other. Phone calls began coming to Cornell people in their campus offices shortly before 2 p.m. on November 22. Transistor radios appeared quickly, and soon work was at a near standstill. Blank-faced professors and students gathered at Willard Straight and the Statler to learn just what was happening. Some went to Sage Chapel and Anabel Taylor to pray. Others turned instinctively toward home, whether home was in Cayuga Heights or in California.

Ithaca's fire chief was on the radio within a half hour urging everyone to please stay off the telephone. There was that long hour of confusion, during which conflicting reports came out of Dallas. Was the President really dead? For those who could not be near radios all the time, uncertainty ended at about 2:50 when the Chimes started playing "Taps," which was repeated again shortly before 3. A minute or two after 3, the big bells tolled the National Anthem in a way that managed to honor the fallen president and with the same clapper-strokes give hope for the continuance of the Republic. "Rest, President, rest. All is well."
-- Marcham

SEPTEMBER 1964
WHY THEY WENT SOUTH
No white man can ever know the depth of frustration and despair felt by the Negro in our society. Our dreams have not been systematically shattered for generations. And no summer visitor in Mississippi could possibly match the courage of his Negro host. We do not risk our lives and livelihoods simply by housing guests or registering to vote. Yet there are ways in which the white citizens' presence in Mississippi can help the Negro in the quest for a just society . . . The experiences of nearly 1,000 Americans these past two months have proved their validity to an unheralded extent. No summer volunteers had any illusions about making Mississippi safe for democracy. This clearly is the task of a new native generation, both black and white. As project Director Bob Moses told the volunteers at orientation: "Don't think that you're going to save something for democracy--just that there's a dirty job to be done." The tragic disappearance of Michael Schwerner '61, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney on the opening day of the project drove his point home to the nation with grievous speed.
-- Robert W. Beyers '53

JULY 1967
Beginning next September, second semester freshmen will be allowed the same driving privileges as sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The relaxation in regulations--all freshmen have heretofore been prohibited from owning and operating a car in Tompkins County--will add an estimated 500 cars to the community.

DECEMBER 1967
A SEASON OF UPS AND DOWNS
Change in campus mood was never greater than between Saturday late afternoon, October 28, and Monday early morning, October 30. On Saturday, Yale's footballers demolished ours; a two-week dream of returned glories had ended, emphatically. The chunk of the campus populace that worries about such things slunk around on Sunday. Yet on Monday morning, very early, came word Prof. Hans Bethe had won the Nobel Prize in physics. At times one wonders, for all its protestations, if a university ever really feels higher than when it has a winning football team. Yet everyone knows the one thing better than a victorious football team is a Nobel Prize-winning faculty.
-- Marcham

JULY 1968
A MUTED REUNION
The 1968 Reunion had been planned to have its serious side as well as the usual frivolity. The death of Robert F. Kennedy the day Reunion opened led to a quick decision by the university, in discussion with Reunion officers, to move tent activity indoors the day of the funeral and cancel all university-sponsored events that day. In their place the campus held a memorial tribute to the slain New York State senator, with President Perkins and the president of the 50th-Reunion class, U.S. Circuit Judge Elbert P. Tuttle '18, LLB '23, of Atlanta, speaking. Tuttle presided over the Fifth Federal Circuit in the South when Kennedy was U.S. attorney general.

OCTOBER 1968
Hippies: Seth Goldschlager '68 gave you several reports on this last year. I was on the West Coast last summer and in and out of Collegetown most of this year in search of answers to the common questions: What? and Why? As proof of the digging, our files now have many shots of the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, and of our enclaves in Ithaca . . . Each young person appears to bring his own reason for hippieing; then clannishness contributes a lot to the style. Much of the gloss of hard-core hippie life had worn off by summer 1968, and vestiges (longer hair, flower emblems, more relaxed dress) are now common in the entire population. Everyone is a bit hippier for the great surge of attention, and hippies a bit less so.
-- Marcham

DECEMBER 1968
A middle-aged visitor who entered the lobby of Willard Straight Hall at 8:30 one fall morning might have jumped to the wrong conclusion. There were indeed two leaflet-covered tables there, staffed by half a dozen members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), urging support of the anti-war movement. But the scores of students sitting in a quiet line on the floor, reading newspapers and books, were merely demonstrating their patient determination to be among the first when the Cornell Folk Song Club began to sell tickets to the Ravi Shankar concert scheduled for Bailey Hall the following Saturday night. (Within four hours, all the 2,000 tickets were gone.)
-- Tommie Bryant

FEBRUARY 1969
MONTH OF CONFRONTATION
A nationwide pattern of black student demands being made on universities was felt at Ithaca as well during December, with only traces of the physical confrontation that brought police and fire trucks onto other campuses. In an eerie two weeks before Christmas recess, the community was made aware through newspaper reports that a portion of the 250 Negro undergraduates at Cornell were "demanding" a number of changes in the fledgling Afro-American Studies Program that went into planning in October. The size of the group framing demands was not clear, apparently ranging from as few as nine at times to as many as 50, 100, or 150 . . . Black students, from 50 to 100, took part the same week in a series of what they described as exhibitions of their demands, for an all-black dining room on campus, greater access to library books (a point Perkins said was not clearly put to him), appointment of a black psychiatrist or psychologist, and other help. They danced on tables in the Ivy Room, took books from the library shelves and left them on the floor, demonstrated in Goldwin Smith Hall, Day Hall, at Gannett Clinic, and for a brief time performed during a varsity basketball game.

FEBRUARY 1969
COED LIVING NOT ALL THAT RADICAL
The place is cleaner, the food better, and buttons stay on, but otherwise there are no real changes since the girls moved in, say members of Cornell's three co-educational cooperative living units. Soon to be joined by a fourth co-op currently seeking to recruit female members, these three small living units appear to mark the beginning at Cornell of a new kind of residential environment being cultivated at colleges and universities throughout the country.
-- Robert N. Cowen '69

MAY 1970
SEX, POLITICS, AND THE NEW FEMINISM
The title of this article is borrowed from the title of a speech given at Cornell on a very snowy evening in November 1969. Kate Millett, education chairman of NOW (National Organization for Women), had come to Ithaca to give the first of two presentations (the second was by author Betty Friedan) to test interest on the campus in an Intersession program on women. Her audience was small but it appeared electrified by her call for a Sexual Revolution, not one that would make contraception and free love more readily available, leading women even deeper into Hugh Hefnerland where they are treated as "sex objects," but for a revolution in the relations between the sexes--a liberation of women.
-- Sheila Tobias

OCTOBER 1976
We had been aiming for distinction as the only periodical in the U.S. not to mention the Bicentennial, and might have achieved that uniquity had it not been for our sense of fair play. We attended the event in New York City in April titled a "Cornell Convocation." We were impressed with the keynote address and hurried around to cover talks by sixteen professors and alumni who were looking backward and forward at the United States as a nation. The event was planned as a Bicentennial convocation, but no one ever printed those very words on either the advance mailing or the actual program of the day. So we could have run the main talk, and a summary of the other talks, as we planned to, without once mentioning the nation's birthday, and thus have kept our private promise. But the truth would have gotten out some way, and in the era of post-Watergate morality we knew we couldn't stand the heat.

FEBRUARY 1979
FAR ABOVE CAYUGA'S WATERS
Coupled with a complex system of interstate and international trafficking that meshes with a whole slew of local pharmaceutical whizzes and plentiful laboratory space, this town is an Alice's Restaurant of heinous chemicals. Translation: 16,000 students flooding in from all over the world bring in enough different drugs and manufacturing techniques to give the town a reputation with the State Narcotics Bureau as "a clearinghouse of soft and hard chemicals." One Berkeley-based jazz musician went so far as to say that "Ithaca ranks only behind Frisco, North Vegas, L.A., New Orleans, and maybe New York, as the easiest town to score anything, except girls."
-- Jack Jensen '78

OCTOBER 1982
Bailey Hall audienceinMay laughed in recognition when Carl Sagan, the Duncan professor of astronomy and space sciences, said, "There are some people who think I invented the word 'billion.'" His mel-lifluous use of the phrase "billions and billions" became an easily mimicked trademark for his stardom as narrator of the popular TV series "Cosmos" on Public Broadcasting. "The word 'billion' has suddenly caught on," he said, in discussions of subjects like the national debt and orders of magnitude of planets. "I'm all for that," he added, but warned that the effectiveness of "billion" or even "billions and billions" is destined to diminish in time. "If you want to make a similar impact in twenty years," Sagan advised, "start honing the word 'trillion.'"

JULY 1985
HAIL AND FAREWELL
The Class of '85 was treated to Ithaca's finest send-off--a warm sunny Commencement day and 30,000 cheering well-wishers. On June 2, some 4,300 graduates were awarded Cornell degrees, to swell the total of living alumni to 175,000. Missing from campus that Sunday morning were the jeans, the T-shirts, and other casual trappings that characterize the Cornell student of the mid-'80s. In their place were graduates in suits and ties and summer dresses and high-heeled sandals and black caps and gowns. Parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters were all dressed in Sunday best. The spectators wore cameras. The graduates carried flowers or champagne bottles. And some held black balloons. The seniors with balloons were urging the university to sell its stock in companies doing business in South Africa.
-- Jeanette Knapp

JULY 1985
Some alumni who found seats in the Uris Hall auditorium Friday morning for the Department of Astronomy seminar, "The Return of Halley's Comet," were looking forward, in late November of this year, to a second sighting of the comet. Four members of the Class of '19, back on campus one year after their 65th Reunion, remembered vividly the excitement of Halley's comet sightings in 1910.
-- Elsie McMillan '55

DECEMBER 1985
Thanks to the New York State Legislature, the party is over. On Sunday, December 1, the legal age for alcohol purchase in New York was increased from 19 to 21, rendering nearly three-quarters of the Cornell undergraduate population unable to buy liquor.

DECEMBER 1989
TO CURSE OR NOT TO CURSE
For years Lynah Rink was a daunting road trip for visiting hockey teams, thanks primarily to the powerful lungs of the Lynah Faithful. Yet in recent seasons chants initiated by portions of the crowd have featured liberal doses of obscenity. Last spring university officials said the cheers damaged Cornell's reputation. Opposing coaches reported that because the chants are so overdone, Lynah is no longer as tough a place to play.

Editorials in both the Ithaca Journal and the Cornell Daily Sun asked the crowd to reexamine its vocabulary. This fall Athletic Director Laing E. Kennedy '63 presented the Student Assembly with a plan to eject hockey fans who abuse referees and opposing players with offensive language. The Assembly balked. "The Campus Code of Conduct makes it a right to lawfully protest," said Assembly President Joshua A. Lowenthal '92. Glen F. Edelson '92 called it a freedom-of-speech issue and wondered who would decide which remarks were offensive. Kennedy has said that whole sections of Lynah might be cleared and Cornell, as a last resort, would forfeit games if opposing teams and referees are subjected to clouds of abuse. "Be loud. Be enthusiastic. Be obnoxious even," Kennedy told the Sun, "but not obscene."

JULY/AUGUST 1992
The professor wore a pink triangle, the symbol of gay pride. One of her students, a young man about 20, wore a necklace, earrings, and T-shirt that read "Get used to it." Several of his classmates talked sex: gay sex, lesbian sex, and heterosexual sex between cross-dressers. This was "Lesbian Writing and Theory." It used to be far-afield. But not anymore. Last year, the university approved a graduate minor in lesbian, bisexual, and gay studies, after a group of graduate students lobbied for institutional recognition for work they had been pursuing independently. The move allows graduate students to select gay studies as a minor to complement their major fields of study and places Cornell in the company of Yale, Harvard, Duke, and several other schools that have introduced gay studies since the mid-1980s.

Gay studies, according to some, is the hottest new trend in academia. Others cite it as the worst of what political correctness has wrought. But judgments aside, what students and scholars of gay studies at Cornell aim to do is this: understand sexuality and how it is influenced by society; expose what they take to be its myths; and prove, theoretically, that sexuality is a far more complicated and variable thing than most people tend to think.
-- Lisa Bennett

OCTOBER 1992
THE CORNELL INDEX
Cost to replace a lost Cornell ID card: $15. Number of bagels eaten in Cornell dining halls in 1991-92: 288,000. Number of bicycles stolen on campus in 1990-91: 60. Number of books circulated in 1990-91: 882,805.

NOVEMBER 1993
OLDEST ALUM DIES
Dora Earl Decker '13 died in late August in Herkimer, New York, at the age of 110. She was believed to have been Cornell's oldest living alumnus. Decker entered the university in 1909 as a 26-year-old freshman; after graduating from Ithaca High School, she had worked nine years to save the money for tuition, room, and board. After graduating with a degree in home economics, Decker worked as an instructor at the University of Wisconsin, a Cornell Cooperative Extension Agent, a postal clerk, and an insurance agent. On her 100th birthday in 1983, Decker told a reporter that the key to living so long was to "just be yourself."

OCTOBER 1995
O.J. ARCHIVE PLANNED FOR KROCH LIBRARY
The jury's still out on where O. J. Simpson will be this time next year. But whether or not "The Juice" is behind bars, he'll definitely be on campus. Through a $17,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, two Cornellprofessors--Sheila Jasanoff, who chairs the Department of Science and Technology Studies, and Bruce Lewenstein, science historian and associate professor of communication and science and technology studies--are compiling an archive of what's come to be known as the Trial of the Century. But don't make a run for Kroch Library hoping for morbid photos and the confessions of perennial houseguest Kato Kaelin. The focus of the archive is far more scholarly than titillating: its purpose is to examine the use of DNA evidence in the courtroom.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997
SURF'S UP!
Last winter, Wilson Lab computer guru Dan Riley noticed that an obscure page of the lab's website was getting hundreds of hits a day, mostly from America Online browsers. That was odd because the page--devoted to the synchrotron's "silicon vertex detector," which finds charged particles from the collision of electrons and positrons--usually garnered only a couple of visits daily from hard-core physics types. Riley did a little investigating, and found that the hits had come from a most unlikely source: searches for websites on "Baywatch" babe Pamela Anderson . . . Perhaps, some at Wilson Lab speculated, the "silicon" in the name got mixed up with the actress's fabled silicone breast implants.
-- Beth Saulnier

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1998
OUT OF THEIR GOURDS
It's not just a vegetable, it's a legend. The pumpkin that appeared atop McGraw Tower in October has been featured on the "Today" show, garnered a quarter-page story in the national edition of the New York Times--and set campus minds wondering how it ever got up there. The most likely suspects: rock climbers trained on Cornell's famous indoor climbing wall. But though the Daily Sun set up a day-by-day Pumpkin Watch and wacky theories abound (a giant crane, a mighty lob by six-foot-seven President Hunter Rawlings), nobody's talking.

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.