By MARTY LEVINE
Defunct traditions, odd requirements, opportunities no student today would likely want, successful pranks and unexplainable practices: Pitt circa a century ago was full of them.
1910: When Pitt freshmen showed up for their class banquet at the newly opened Fort Pitt Hotel downtown that February, they found nothing but empty tables. “The affair had been cancelled by envious sophomores who posed as members of the banquet committee,” the Pittsburgh Post reported, and “consternation was writ large on the faces” of the arriving students. But those first-year men — for they were only men — proved resilient. The president of the freshman class “gave orders for a meal of any old kind,” and food eventually appeared. “Freshmen all day had been hiding from the ‘sophs,’ fearing a kidnapping plot,” the paper added without further explanation.
1910: That same month, Pitt Chancellor Samuel B. McCormick opened a campaign for a “Noiseless Fourth” of July, with the hope of substituting “a colossal pageant, including a civic drama designed to educate the people to a closer idea of the nation’s greatest holiday,” the Post said. Why? “Owing to the heavy death toll caused by general use of explosives.” It was sound reasoning, but apparently not very popular. The very next year the paper found “record-breaking attendance” at fireworks displays “in all the leading parks … the (proposed) safe and sane Fourth started off with two Allegheny youngsters placing their hands over the mouth of a cannon when it went off, and the day was punctuated at frequent intervals by cries from injured and singed youngsters. The saddest accident was the shooting of a young man in Verona, by another, who was practicing with the revolver and missed the target.”
1914: In the “well, the joke had to start somewhere” category, Pitt’s School of Education announced “a new course in basket making and weaving …”
1916: Incoming female students who did not conform to sophomore women’s idea of proper attire were given a literal redressing by their Pitt upperclassmates: “Curls have been banned by girl sophomores in the University of Pittsburgh,” one paper reported, “and when a group of girl ‘freshies’ appeared on the campus yesterday they were taken in hand and forced to submit to a redressing of their tresses. The ‘sophs’ tucked the hair under hats and pinned it in position with hairpins. Rulings of the upperclassmen do not affect hairdressing alone. The new students are not permitted to wear colored stockings and must wear green buttons to show their rank. They were not allowed to talk to men students in the halls or on the campus and must give their seats to upperclassmen in classes and assemblies.”
1917: The Hotel Schenley — now the William Pitt Union — lost its liquor license when a local judge ruled that it served underage Pitt and Carnegie Mellon (then Carnegie Tech) students and had become “a rendezvous for dissipation.”
1921: Speaking of Carnegie Tech students, a group of them once tore down the large electric “Pitt” sign atop campus as a prank. One of the pranksters was future Pitt dean Herbert L. Spencer, who confessed the crime only in 1936.
1923: Camp Hamilton, near Johnstown, was the training camp for Pitt’s football team. But for two and a half months before the athletes showed up that year, Pitt engineering students lived in the grass and dirt to conduct field work in surveying, among other vital engineering disciplines.
1931: Speaking of living outdoors while attending Pitt, first-year male students this year started a tradition — lasting at least through 1950 — of opening each fall at Camp Kon-O-Kwee near Zelienople. The dean of men at the University came along for the sleeping-bag fest, along with several department heads and the presidents of all the student organizations, “to help the freshmen with school curriculum and activities,” the press enthused.
1934: Meanwhile, the Women’s Athletic Association on campus was sponsoring the Co-ed Prom, in which “upper class women, dressed in white flannels and dark coats will escort freshman girls to … the Twentieth Century Club. A ‘Druid’ smoker and a YMCA membership dinner will be held the same night.” Pitt had in place a senior mentor system for women student transferees to Pitt this year as well. Each of 33 senior mentors met with their own group of incoming women to give “informal chats” on topics that included “The Urban University,” “How To Study,” “Discussion Of Fraternities” and “The Folkways of Pitt Women.”
1936: Apparently the Cathedral of Learning, when it first opened, featured “a loud electric bell” marking the ends of class periods, the Press said, but this year, “Pitt students no longer have to fear a harsh awakening at the end of class periods …” Instead they will hear “half of the sweet-toned Westminster chimes, eight notes sounding, ‘Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,’ at the end of each 50-minute period … for evening as well as day classes.” Yes, the classic sounds of London’s Big Ben clock tower once ushered Pitt students through the halls. After a while, it must have been as annoying as the former bell. But at least it was indoors.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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