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Marshall Memory A few years ago, I went to an alumni gathering to watch a Marshall football game on television. A young alum greeted me and asked what year I graduated. When I replied, "1951," he exclaimed, "Good God," and walked away without another word.
That illustrates what Russell Baker once wrote in his New York Times column: "As we age, the supply of people conversant with our own culture starts to diminish, then runs at a very slow trickle, then dries up almost completely (and) we are left in a world filled with people who do not think of our lives as life but as history."
So that's the trouble with writing about memories of student days at Marshall when those student days were so long ago, a time when temporary wooden classroom buildings on the north side of Old Main were needed because of the influx of veterans going to school on the GI Bill after World War II.
If I said it seems as if those days were only yesterday would your eyes roll?
Old grads have Marshall memories, not of Marshall as it has become but of Marshall College as it was. Old grads remember when:
The Journalism Department was in the basement of the Morrow Library. (It didn't occur to us then how fortunate that was. We were able to tell our children that when we were in school, we spent every day in the library.) There was a journalism faculty of three: Page Pitt, Virginia Lee and Chester Ball.
A women's residence hall (College Hall) was in a part of Old Main.
We remember the non-stop bridge games in the Student Union. (Is bridge still an intramural activity?) And we remember Don Morris, a really nice guy. That old Student Union that was a second home for some of us.
Memories of Marshall wash over us...the dances...saying long goodnights to dates at College Hall and Laidley Hall or the sorority house...
Like last year's grads, old grads have memories of good times and bad at Marshall... happiness and heartbreak (why did Joy drop me like an old shoe?). Crushes and crises. Those were the days.
Sports memories? We have those, too. We looked forward to the basketball season because Cam Henderson's high-scoring, run-and-shoot Big Green (yes, Big Green) teams were always entertaining, even in pre-game warm ups. We can still see Bill Toothman leading that fast-break, those behind-the-back passes, the opponents trying to keep up.
At half-time of a Marshall basketball game in 1966, some of those old guys put on an exhibition and they had the fans on their feet and cheering once again. Old grads remember, too, the basketball heroics of Hal Greer and Leo Byrd.
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George Hanna is now retired and lives in Leesburg, Fla. He can be reached at geralhanna@embarqmail.com.
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