Beloit's Century

"Party-party" is the current word for it at Wisconsin's Beloit College. It applies to homecomings, and to "hell weeks" (during which freshman coeds have to do such tricks as painting class numerals on their cheeks and dancing the conga backwards). Last week Beloit had an official party, with Novelist Lin Yutang as an honored guest, to celebrate its 100th birthday.

The college does not show its years. Beloit was once called the "Yale of the West" because two of its founders, Stephen Peet and Aaron Chapin, and its first two faculty members were all Yale men. Today it calls itself the oldest college in the Northwest,* and boasts of a top drawer anthropology department, with a $200,000 museum of its own (Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews is a Beloit graduate). One of Beloit's attractions for its students is its ability to hang on to some of the freshwater college atmosphere so dear to the scenarists who wrote Jack Oakie campus movies in the early '30s.

Beloit's students dress with meticulous conformity, coed/sin blue jeans and bobby sox, boys in loud shirts and windbreakers well smeared with mud and lipstick. They dismiss nonconformists as "study-bugs" or "groubies" ("much worse than a meatball"). Beloit's boys & girls mix business and pleasure: between Cokes and ice cream at the Union last week they boned furiously for midyears.

Dates often include an evening of study in the library as well as a lingering moment in the shadows by the arches of Eaton Chapel (unless the lady is a "pot" --"a girl you might just as well neck with a lamppost as try").

Natty, popular President Carey Croneis (rhymes with grow nice) hopes to make Beloit "the best small liberal-arts college in the country." Its collegiate good living, as well as its scholastic offerings, are what make Beloit graduates send their children to Beloit as automatically as a Saltonstall goes to Harvard.

* Waukesha's Carroll College, 60 miles away, got its charter first, but, says Beloit, took eleven years to graduate its first class.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.