Newspapers / Salem College Student Newspaper / Jan. 14, 1949, edition 1 / Page 2
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Page Two THE SALEMITE uox, t January 14, 1949 ^ Gleai^ Slate Although the New Year is now fourteeh' ' d^S old, this is our first' chance to wish the ' kudhhf Tiody and faculty a happy and pros perous New Year. It’s also a good chance for us all to turn over a new leaf. Although we think of a new year at Salem as beginning in September, we have a good chance now to begin a new-half year, for many of us the last half-year at Salem. Eemember back in September in the first issue of the Salemite there appeared an editorial ask ing us to make 1948-49 “The very best year in Salem’s history”. Our chance at ’48 is over and only a few months of 1949 remain in this CjOllege year. ■ 'Let!s look over our accomplishments of the past four months—there have been many. In the opinion of most, this year has been one of the best. If there are some things that are not listed under accomplishments, we have a chance now at a clean slate. Let’s determine to do our best in this year of 1949 in every thing at Salem. We have much to improve but we’re on the way up. Let’s keep it that way. To each of you from all of us of the Salemite, the very' best of everything in 1949. sii 2>ea/i SdUen,: A number of students have been heard to say recently that if Salem offered typing, a great deal of trouble and worry would be lifted from many of the students. Typing was once offered here, the last ■year was 1944-45. In the opinion of many it ■wms a mistake to take this subject away as a great many students did not have the oppor- ' ttinity to take typing in high school and have ■ been at a disadvantage because of this. It helps the student in every subject to be able ‘‘to type and those of us who use the self-taught system and those who hire other students to ' do our typing for us, would like to put in a ■strong appeal for the return of this subject. ‘We don’t ask for the complete secretarial course as it used to be . . . all we want is typing. How this would be done as to credits and hours, we don’t care. Many of us would be willing to take it even if there was no credit offered. We sincerely ask for some attention to be brought to this matter so that future stu- ' dents will not have to be subjected to a de cided lack of, in the general sense, subject matter. T. P. If I could have a cherubim to follow me about And plug my ears with cotton to keep temptation out, To take from me my thirteen cards when I sit down to play And drive me^til I put my inks and drawing pads away; To stomp upon my radio til all the wires are free To empty out my coffee pot and hide my bags of tea; To guide me from the drug store, the concerts and the show And lead me to the library, the place I oughta go; If I could have a cherubim to do these things for me. Then maybe—there’s a slight chance—I might make a C! P. H. Folderol Has It Bad Eight Exams; Ain’t It Sad Salemite Korth Carotiiu G>Dei^iir I Published every Friday of the College year by the Student body of Salem College be Powntown Office—304-306 South Main Street Printed by the Sun Ptinting Company OFFICES Lower floor Main Hall Subscription Price—$2.75 a year ' • EDITOEAL DEPAETMENT Editor-in-Chief Carolyn Taylor Associate Editor Laurel Green Associate Editor Mary Porter Evans Assistant Editor Peirano Aiken ’Assistant Editor Dale Smith Make-up Editors: Helen Brown, Betty Biles Copy Editors: Joan Carter Bead, Clara Belle Le Grande Music Editor Margaret McCall Editorial Staff: lone Bradsher, Tootsie Gillespie, Ruth Lenkoski. Typists: Janet Zimmer and Ann McConnell. Pictorial Editors: Martha Hershberger and Jane Kugler. Business Manager Assistant Business Manager Advertising Manager Asst. Advertising Manager Circulation Manager ——. Joyce Privette Betsy Schaum -— Betty McBrayer Mary Faith Carson Janie Fowlkes by Tootsie Gillespie Folderol bit off her tongue and spat out the bloody pieces. She skinned the cat over the shower bar, screamed a chant out the window and fell in utter exhaustion on the floor, for it was the time of exami nations. No more the happy-go- lucky child of nature, free to pick daisies on the hockey field, free to climb trees and look for robin’s eggs, no longer was, she in tune with nature, for benzedrine was taking it’s toll. One eye askew, Folderol picked herself up off the floor, went through her history dates from Agememnon to Wallace (one eye turned red) and threw cold wmter in her cadaverous face. Out side her room door, six loosely hung students were blubbering in the water fountain making fish noises One had, a gun,' in her hand and was making ugly threats. An ambulance drove up and three more students were carried put horizontally. Armed with blue jeans, four cans of instant coffee, a carton of Ram ses, two blankets, No-Doz, twelve text books and six pads of Blue Horse fine quality crimp-edged, lined paper, Folderol pushed her way thro ugh the bodies strewn about and made for the Inner Sanctum in the catacombs of appropriately named, Pain Hall. Once safely inside, she found a fellow-sufferer lying on the window ledge panting and breath ing with difficulty. “All I wanted to do was pass!” screamed the figure, sticking her fin ger in the electric light socket. The shadow from a deformed tree out side cast an erry F on the opposite wall. The hours dragged by on little elephant feet and finally, spent and weak, Folderol dragged herself along the base-boarding until she came to her second exam room. She was babbling and there were ugly bru ises about her head and shoulders. The exam was in Comparative Kit chen Utensils of Early Bankok and the professor had distinctly said, mused Folderol, that we would have no questions on background history, definition of terms or names to re member. Running true to form, the first question was “Write for two and a, half hours on the background of Bankok.” Following that, there to define along with, a matching list was a list of three hundred terms of names. At the bottom of the ' page was an attractive skull and cross bones. Everything went black and Folderol woke up with delirium tremens. Springing from her seat. Young Intellect grabbed the teacher by the throat, made jiblets out of her eyeballs and ran wildly out the door, spitting perpendicularly. But that was a good beginning. Folderol boozed up on her benzedine that night, jabbed Keepstream in the ribs every fifteen minutes to keep her awake and began the long hard road to review. Her next exam was a pushover—Nostradamus and Why. She learned from her notes that Nostradamus was in reality a thwarted nasturium grower who had been jilted by a faker’s daugh ter for one of the King’s men. He wasn’t keen in the least about the whole thing and told her in a, fury of white-hot anger “Pox on ve! May ye meet' with the most prof fortunes!” And sure enough, a giant ogre met her one day in the woods, took her home with him and moulded her in clay and lacquer to replace the missing queen in his chess set. This built up Nostrada mus ego so that he went into the business and became so famous that a whole stock of parchments were written about him and he sold the story of his life to Metro-Goldyn- Mayer and Pete Smith. During the days that passed, Fol- derol got thinner and thinner and finally one professor wanted the use of her leg as a straight-edge (his Schick went bad on him). She strug gled through one exam after another and in final desperatiefn, set up an altar in her room, burnt candles at both ends and threw another log on the fire, with a prayer that the en tire faculty would drop dead at dawn. Her final exam. Religion, came on Sunday morning (just to keep in the spirit of things, ha, ha, ha! the teacher had said, trying to be funny). A mere shadow of a thing, Folderol slithered into the exam room, neglected to look at the questions and wrote three blue books on why Nostradamus, a tax collector in Bankok, was no good in the kitchen. ^ With blurred eyes, a withered right hand and the sense God gave a billy-goat, Folderol went to a pawn shop, bought a second hand musket, shot each of the faculty in turn, and sent bereavement cards to the administration and trustees. by Peirano Aiken A great many high-flung phrases have been used to describe what college means to people. The intellectual and social advantages, especially, are endlessly painted in rosy plati tudes. It’s true, to be sure, that even the most air-tight mind is cracked ajar by Broadening Curriculum, and Group Experiences come neatly packaged for every ill known to Freud. Yet there is a different type of experience -which everyone undergoes, and we seldom hear a word about it. The Scotch Would call it the benmost life, benmost meaning what is secret or innermost to the individual—not because it is very profound or personal, but because it is comprised of moments of wonder, sympathy or vivid sensation. Subtle and often unmention ed, they rise to the conscious mind long after classes are forgotten. They fall under the al most lost art of being impressed. I have succumbed to that, when, going down South Main Street, on a December night, I’ve seen fog -pick the colors from red and green vases and brass jardinieres in the win dows of Arden-Salem Store and reflect them in moist, shimmering ribbons on the pavement. Too, I have looked with half-closed eyes from Main Hall toward the May Dell and seen those silly stone urns and the fountain that doesn’t run turn into marble grandeur, and the whole became my private corner of Versailles . . . Not all scenes are as pleasant as these. Stumbling through a Clewell hall at two o’clock in the morning with no light except a glimmer com ing through the transom of the john door re calls a child’s association of the dark with loneliness. Palm to the wall like a blind man: plaster wall, wooden door, plaster wall—to the fifth door where I lived. Then there was the unspeakable tiredness of the next morning, when I was all beating heart and aching eyes set in a giddy balloon. This is the familiar feel of no sleep. (Though now in my senior year I’ve taken to going to bed at eleven-thirty, and find the feel of rest more comfortable, if less poetic.) The benmost times that are innermost of all, however, deal with things not physical. The following are a few of mine, but for each you will have one of your own equally vivid. Once I attempted to save a young bird that fell from a nest in the ivy and choked ij, in stead, on canned milk. It, squawked; the white stuff bubbled from its mouth and nostrils; it jerked convulsively and lay still. I watched, appalled alike at ihy stupidity and the abrupt ness with which life can end. To have killed IS a terrible knowledge.—Then there is the im pact of people. What can surpass the delici ous first appeal of sophistication to an adoles cent sophomore sitting on the edge of a world of juniors? Admiration for their yellow satin- striped pajamas, original cartoons of the Bible, art prints on the wall, Thomas Mann in German and Proust in French, illicit beer (It tasted awful, but didn’t I have to be in with the In-Group?). Laughable now, though splen did in its heyday, was Salem a la Boheme. Once, after I had spent a Thursday evening m this world, I returned home to find my room mate holding Y-Watch in the room . . . ker plunk. Yet I couldn’t resist her orthodoxy eithei. She had a river-like quality that sug gested peace and a confidence that, come what maj, everything could be borne. It was then that I realized that whatever theology I adopt ed or constructed for myself would have to be tolerant to both of these worlds, for I could reject neither of them totally. Of course this sort of benmost living goes on throughout life. However, I suspect that it has a special meaning for college-age people because we are, so to speak, fledgling indivi- ■ duals. Free from the thought patterns of the old home and not yet in a new one, each of us forms his own. He discovers his benmost spirit, as well as his mind, and lets it go free, teelmg and sensing whatever it will. Perhaps such emotionalism preceds reasoning, and the this sort to which we are suscept- 1 e form the real foundations for our philoso phies and religious ideas. At least they are very important, if, as Santayana says, religion IS poetry intervening in life.
Salem College Student Newspaper
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Jan. 14, 1949, edition 1
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