Aug. 26, 1978 Gusto feature story: UB in 1928

 

The University at Buffalo was in a period of major physical transition in the 1970s, but it wasn’t the first time.

Aug. 26, 1978

THE UNIVERSITY THEN

        Welcome to the dirt and clatter of construction. Welcome to classrooms and offices scattered all over the map. Welcome to chaotic registration. Welcome to a crisis in school spirit. Welcome to the fine art of slipping outside with your fellow students to smoke Old Golds and tip a hip flask in somebody’s car. Welcome to the University of Buffalo. The fall semester starts Sept. 19, 1928. Tuition is $350, payable in advance.

        1928-29 is going to be a great year. At last the majority of UB’s operations are on the new Main Street campus, which displaced the old Erie County Poorhouse. Yes, the poorhouse. From the completion of the first new building – Foster Hall in 1922 – until the takeover of pre-existing Hayes Hall in 1926, students shared the grounds with the county’s aged and indigent.

        The first things you’ll need to know are summed up in the 1928 Student Handbook. If you don’t have a place to live, the dean has a list of approved rentals in his office downtown in Townsend Hall on Niagara Street. Your classes – well, that depends.

        The School of Dentistry is on Goodrich Street, right behind the School of Medicine at 24 High St. The School of Pharmacy is on the new campus in Foster Hall. Classes in the College of Arts and Sciences are in three remodeled old county buildings on the new campus – Science Hall, East Hall and Hayes Hall. Evening classes are downtown in Townsend Hall. And the School of Law is downtown at 77 W. Eagle St. It never will move to the Main Street campus.

        Open your Student Handbook and meet Chancellor Samuel P. Capen, who offers a sternly enlightened suggestion that the most valuable learning is gained from association with your fellow scholars. Read the history of UB. Until the College of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1920, it was a loosely federated collection of professional schools, hardly a real university. Since 1920, it has shaped itself into a proper institution of higher learning. Enrollment has climbed from 1,300 to 3,300, including night and summer schools. Arts and Sciences students number nearly 1,000.

        One thing it lacks, however, is traditions. To be sure, there is an Alma Mater (“Where once the Indian trod the silent wood …”), which will defy memorization and vocalization for generations to come. There are also Junior Day and the Junior Prom and Moving Up Day and the annual Football Dance. These are the high points of the student year. And then there are certain other traditions, traditions that apply to freshmen:

        “To male members of the Class of 1932, the Student Union does hereby bequeath the following rules, which must be followed as in the past. If, by chance, any disloyal freshman endeavors to form rules of his own, he shall be dealt with by the Student Union jury, which shall publish a list of punishments in the near future.

1.   All Freshmen are to wear the prescribed caps, from the first day of classes in the fall semester until Moving Up Day (the first Saturday in May), every day except Sunday, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and at University games.

2.   Freshmen shall not smoke on the University campus, but shall carry matches for upperclassmen.

3.   Freshmen shall not wear any preparatory or high school pins or insignia of any kind.

4.   Every Freshman must know the Freshman Rules, the three Stanzas of the Alma Mater, the yells and University songs.

5.   At all football games, the Freshmen are required to sit in the section reserved for them. This stand has its own cheerleader and in past years has been noted for its cheering.

6.   All Freshmen must turn out for mass meetings and parades.

7.   Freshmen shall show due respect to upperclassmen, such as wearing no mustaches and not occupying a seat in a trolley car when by so doing an upperclassman may have to stand. (It is well that the Freshman observe this rule without the necessity of being spoken to.)

8.   Freshmen shall restrict their companionship on the campus to members of their own sex, and shall use only the walks. (It is of course incumbent upon the Freshmen to observe a gentleman’s rule of conduct and leave the walks to allow women to pass.)

9.   Freshmen may not use the front entrances to the school buildings. A meek face and a moderate voice are appropriate for Freshmen.

10.       Freshmen shall respond heartily to student activities calls and to promote the development of the University of Buffalo insofar as they are able.

        Freshmen women operate within a different tradition – the Junior Sister System. Each is assigned to a member of the Junior Class, who serves as a guide around the campus, introducing instructors and other students. All have a chance to get acquainted at a party during the freshman preliminary course.

        Otherwise, the preliminary course is mainly for students who didn’t make the upper echelons of their high school class. It teaches them how to study. This is an innovative course which soon will be copied by many other colleges. Another innovation, new in 1928, is psychological testing for incoming freshmen. Later in the fall they will have to meet with a counselor to talk over the results.

        Once freshmen have purchased their official green beanies at Watson’s, 9 W. Tupper St.; once they’ve poured out their psyches and struggled through registration, they get to witness the first college convocation on the new campus. Here’s Chancellor Capen, accepting the gift of the Westminster Chimes and bell tower on Hayes Hall from Mrs. Edward H. Butler, wife of the publisher of The Buffalo Evening News. Within a week, professors will notice that students have stopped the annoying habit of watching the classroom clock. Instead, they have taken up the annoying habit of listening for the chimes. It’s suggested that freshmen bow and meditate when the bells ring.

        The Class of ’32 proves to be a problem throughout the year. The weekly student newspaper – the Bee – reports that they are loutish and disrespectful. In early October, word comes down that freshmen women now have to wear green berets on campus. Freshman class elections are totally snafued – they have to vote three times. Before winter’s over, a freshman has the audacity to date an upperclass woman. By mid-March, the Bee is calling for a revival of freshman subjugation. A student jury is hastily summoned and hands out punishments to 25.

        Football is all the craze in the ‘20s, but for the UB team, winless for two seasons, it’s not exactly a banner autumn. The Bulls suffer five more defeats before they finally skunk Long Island University, 12-0. Jubilant students tear down the goalposts and snake dance and celebrate loudly throughout the weekend. After the two final games are lost, the alumni newsletter says football must go. The Bee says football must stay and the coach must go. The alumni see the light. Come April, Coach Carrick is out and Coach “Biffy” Lee, ex of Notre Dame, is bringing Western-style football to spring workouts. There’s talk of establishing football scholarships.

        The captain of the football team, a big-jawed bruiser of a law student named Stan Drumsta, is the most celebrated brother of Beta Pi Rho fraternity. In this, the first year that UB’s 22 frats have been able to agree on rules for recruiting new members, the coach and Drumsta are highlights of one of the October “smokers’ in the chapter house at 601 Linwood Ave. Beta Pi Rho also sponsors the big track and field meet on Moving Up Day. Unfortunately, Beta Pi Rho parties must encourage bad habits in Drumsta. Within about 15 years, he’ll be dead from too much booze.

        Though Prohibition is in force, there’s no shortage of alcohol. Flask parties are prevalent and flasks are found everywhere, especially in the pockets of young men bound for the Junior Prom. Coeds sometimes are seen ending a pleasant date with a glass of beer, but the issue among women isn’t drinking. The burning question is whether or not to smoke cigarettes. Before the year is out, women get a smoking lounge of their own.

        “How did you happen to take up smoking?,” one woman asks another in a cartoon in the UB humor magazine, the Bison.

        “Nobody believed me,” the second one replies, “when I said I was a college woman.”

        It’s a Presidential election year and the Bee editorializes for an end to Prohibition, but the issue doesn’t apparently stir the students in favor of New York Gov. Al Smith, the candidate who wants to repeal the 18th Amendment. A straw vote after a mock debate at an October convocation goes 341 for Herbert Hoover, 90 for Smith and 20 for Socialist Norman Thomas.

        The only spirit the students seem to have enough of is the party spirit. They stage the biggest, most tumultuous Moving Up Day parade ever, but not enough will turn out to revive the UB band for football games. Their heroes are sports figures, radio personalities and stars of the new talking movies, all of whom seem to be recruited for Old Gold cigarettes’ blindfold test.

        Attendance at convocations is down until academic lectures and talks about foreign travel are shelved in favor of student-run programs of light musical entertainment, which attract big crowds. The new Open Forum column in the Bee draws only an occasional letter. Pranksters wear tuxedos to class and fraternities are criticized for being too social. If there’s any common rallying cry, it’s about the weather at the new campus. Students complain that it’s a bad location. The rain, the snow, the wind and the cold are worse than they were downtown, they claim.

        Meanwhile, the guiding forces at UB are gearing up to complete the dream they envisioned in 1920, when city residents anted up $5 million to build a proud new university. In November, Chancellor Capen announces a second $5 million appeal and College Council president Walter P. Cooke, the fundraising whiz who headed the first endowment drive, is chosen to lead this one. He kicks it off with $100,000 of his own. As yet, there is no graduate school, no separate library building, no suitable facilities for athletics. “Support is not charity,” Chancellor Capen observes. “It is a civic obligation.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Hayes Hall in 1927 with construction scaffolding still on the cupola.

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FOOTNOTE: The second $5 million drive was as successful as the first, but Walter P. Cooke did not get to see all the fruits of his philanthropy. Chairman of the board of Marine Trust Co., later Marine Midland Bank, and internationally known in banking circles, with interests in timber and railroads in the South and a hand in what became the RKO film production company, he passed away unexpectedly Aug. 4, 1931, at the age of 62 in his home at 155 Summer St.

The success of Cooke's first endowment campaign in 1920 helped attract Samuel P. Capen, a former director of the American Council on Education. Capen arrived at UB in 1922 as its first full-time chancellor and served until his death in 1956. Capen also was one of the three founders of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in 1934.