Even when the students were lounging, they looked neat. They also looked both old beyond their years -- in the 50s, "teenager" was a nascent phenomenon -- and young in a way that kids don't seem young any more. Less self-conscious, less sophisticated, less worried.
UMass in the fifties: to piece together our scrapbook, we started with a perusal of 10 years' worth of Indexes. The old maroon volumes contain plenty of the timeless, conventional imagery of the yearbook genre: couples lingering on the chapel steps, students bent over their desks taking exams or lounging in their dorm rooms. But as we went from year to year we also found quintessential elements. The formality of the students' dress, for instance: the men nearly always in sportcoats, hair short and often pomaded, faces clean-shaven. The women in skirts, fitted blouses, and hairdos.
What else said "fifties"? Cars with lots of curves and chrome. The solid look of machines -- cash registers, adding machines, lab equipment, a Coca Cola dispenser. The dorm furnishings: gooseneck lamps, bunk beds, oversized foliage-print curtains, and by 1955, Danish Modern.
Reminiscences of several alumni rounded out the picture for us. Virginia Bennett Roaf `50 remembers her time at UMass vividly and with enthusiasm. Classes, the social life, both great. She remembers, too, the presence of World War II veterans, most of them older than the other undergraduates, many of them married, some with families. "The guys coming back were serious, ready to settle down, get on with the business of life."
Mat Brown '58 remembers veterans when he was here too. By then, they were Korean War vets. They seemed older because they were older, but even upperclassmen seemed surprisingly grown-up, people to look up to. "The seniors were men, they were adults. They told us how to behave, and we listened to them."
There were examples to imitate, and rules to follow: curfews, dress codes. (We found no nose rings, for instance, among the student portraits.) What wasn't officially mandated was often compelled by peer pressure. Mat Brown again: "you didn't have to have a lot of clothes, but you had to have the right ones."
Yet the alums we interviewed also recalled a sense of freedom to enjoy their college years -- to be young -- without worrying too much about the larger world. Alan Lupo '59 describes the feeling: "Being in the fifties, we came in between the significant events, the Great Depression and World War II on the one side and baby boomers on the other. We were the last of the 'Joe College' generation. Our lives revolved around Winter Carnival, the Military Ball, the float parades, not around civil rights, the cold war. We didn't go to bed worrying about nuclear conflagration."
According to Judith (Wolk) Feldman '56, "All you worried about was who you were going to date on Friday night" She recalls a campus with a "back-to-the-womb feeling."
Others also found UMass -- then a leafy, low-rise campus of only about 3,000 -- a friendly place. "I was a very shy guy," Lupo claims, but says he lost his shyness "within 24 hours of hitting the campus." Mat Brown recalled: "Everybody knew everybody, or pretended to know everybody."
Many students were the first in the family to go to college. Wolk was one such student. Lupo was another. "Here was a bunch of guys," he says, "the first generation, the first of our ethnic groups, from Winthrop, Chelsea, Revere, Dorchester, Lynn, to go to college. This was a foreign land, it was an extraordinary experience just to be there."
For many, it was culture shock at first. Kids from small towns or closeknit city neighborhoods met people who were "different" -- of different ethnic backgrounds, races, religions -- and found they weren't so different after all. And, it was in the country! When Lupo arrived, he says, "I kept smelling something, I kept checking my shoe. It was a land-grant college, and those were real cows out there."
Financing a college education was somewhat easier; Feldman remembered tuition was "fifty dollars a semester" when she was a student. Brown got a job as a dishwasher for a sorority and made five dollars a week: "It was fabulous. On that, you could date and buy some clothes, you could fly on five dollars a week."
In the fifties dating had not yet been deregulated. It was a key extracurricular activity, but hardly the only means of socializing. Greek societies were popular, and by all accounts, more inclusive than exclusive in nature. There were dozens of clubs -- the Olericulture Club, the Poultry Club, the Pomology Club, the Varsity "M" Club, the Rod and Gun Club -- and organizations. Perusing the yearbooks, we noticed how most students have inches of activities beneath their names. UMass back then was a "user-friendly" place.
Oh, and what about academics? Alums we talked to remembered outstanding professors and administrators, such as Dean Curtis and Dean Hopkins; classes that prepared them for life; the excitement of being introduced to big ideas, new ways of thinking. But their memories suggested that academics were just one element, albeit an important one, of a broader experience that readied them for the larger world.
Of course, campus life has changed. Events which once drew thousands to the campus -- the Bay State Dairy Classic, the Horticulture Show -- are no more. Freshmen wear baseball caps, not beanies. Laptops have replaced Royals and Remingtons, shaded brass lamps in the library have given way to overhead fluorescent strips. Women don't dress up in wrist corsages and formals wider than a doorframe. Where guys once lined up at and hallway phones to call coeds in Crabtree and the Abbey, email messages circulate.
Still, as the yearbooks reveal, certain constants remain: studying in the library, buying books, waiting in line. And every fall at UMass, the leaves still turn a thousand shades of gold, red, and orange, freshmen discover the beauty of western Massachusetts, and we hope, some significant portion of hearts thrills to the words of Shakespeare.
-Faye S. Wolfe
