Class of ’56 Memories

In the days before computers

There were no iPods, no picture phones, no desktop computers on campus in 1956. Indeed, there was practically no television because reception from Philadelphia was poor and nearby Iron Hill made even radio broadcasts difficult
to receive.

But, there was a nonstop bridge game in the Scrounge, which was a coffee shop in the basement of Memorial Hall, then called Memorial Library.

According to Ray DeVries, a history major and member of the Class of 1956, “Every day the Scrounge was open, there was at least one nonstop bridge game in progress. If you were playing and had a class, someone would take your place and it went on and on and on. No score keeping, just cards, cigarettes and coffee,” he says.

DeVries, who served as editor of The Review during his senior year on campus, noted that cigarette advertising was the main source of revenue for the student paper and the majority of students smoked. “Cigarette companies flooded the campus with samples, a package of four cigarettes,” he says.

Hailing from the Drexel Hill area in suburban Philadelphia, DeVries lived in Brown Hall as a freshman and moved into the Kappa Alpha house as a sophomore. “It was a very different fraternity then,” he says. “We had sleeping decks and study rooms. Everyone slept in rooms filled with bunk beds. There were two or three brothers to each ‘study’ room where we kept our clothes and books. We ate in the University dining halls and our fraternity ate in the women’s dining hall, which we considered a major advantage. There were no sororities at that time.”

After spending the remainder of 1956 and early 1957 working at the Wilmington Journal Every Evening, DeVries fulfilled his requirement with the U.S. Army and was posted to Germany as an artillery officer. Within nine months, he was assigned to be editor of the Fourth Armored Division newspaper, the Rolling Review. Fully expecting to return in 1959 to the Wilmington Journal, a postal mixup left DeVries with no apparent job, so, with the help of a UD placement counselor, he interviewed for and took a job with IBM.

“It was a very different world then at UD. When I was on campus, there was a single computer found in the school of engineering—a Bendix G15 that was about the size of a large refrigerator. In 1961, I sold the University its second computer—an IBM 1620 that was placed in the new computer center in DuPont Hall,” DeVries says.

“Today, almost every student has a computer in his room that is probably a thousand times more powerful than those early campus computers and much, much smaller. And, gift card shops now sell singing greeting cards with chips that provide more memory and computing capacity than UD’s original Bendix.”

Ultimately, the journalist-turned-IBM salesman combined his two interests to become director of information systems for what is today the Main Line Health Corp. He stayed with that company until he retired in 1994. He and his wife, Marie, have been married 44 years and have five children and 16 grandchildren.

Proper attire

Although the Women’s College of Delaware was integrated with Delaware College in 1945—using Memorial Library as the dividing line—certain restrictions for UD coeds remained throughout the 1950s.

Forget the casual flip-flops and flannel pajama bottoms worn today by late-rising students. The University had a strict dress code then that even prohibited women from wearing pants in the library, except during final exams, and “dorm mothers” who monitored the coming and going of women in the University’s same-sex dormitories.

Nancy Lange Draper of Newark, Del., Class of 1956, remembers having to “dress up” to go into town. Doris Dukes Klaver of Lumberton, N.J., a psychology major who also graduated in 1956, says she does not recall the dress code being enforced, although it remained in effect until the 1960s.

“We just didn’t wear jeans as much then,” Klaver says. “We would wear slacks, and sweater sets were popular. Generally, we wore tweed skirts and blouses with blazers.”
Properly attired men wore khaki pants and white or tan shoes known as “bucks.”

Klaver first lived on “King’s Row,” near Academy Street, three military barracks brought in after World War II to house returning GIs. These dormitories were named Windsor, Hanover and Eaton.

“These were incredibly flimsy buildings with no amenities and small rooms,” she says. “My brother helped me by hanging a bookcase over my bed, and we created doors on closets by hanging curtains on the front of the open frame.

The whole building would shake when someone slammed a door.”

Her second year was spent in another “temporary” dormitory on the south campus. Built in the 1920s but used for 30 years, Topsy, Turvey and Boletus, all-female dorms, shared a house mother who made sure that the women signed in and out in the evenings. “We had to be back in the dorms by 10 p.m.,” Klaver says.

“I was very happy in my junior year to move to Smyth, which had just been built.”

“The great growth of the University is the biggest change since I graduated,” Klaver says. When her mother completed a two-year teaching program at the Women’s College in 1921, the combined enrollment on both campuses was less than 1,000, she recalls, and by the 1950s the total student population was about 1,700. Today, the University of Delaware has about 20,000 students—graduate and undergraduate—in its seven colleges.

Most classes in the 1950s were small, she adds, but because Delaware history was a required course, this larger class met in the auditorium of Wolf Hall. The instructor was John A. Munroe, H. Rodney Sharp Professor Emeritus of History, himself a 1936 graduate of the University and author of the 1986 official history of the University of Delaware.

Klaver also remembers that UD’s home football games had moved from Frazer Field to the Wilmington ballpark her freshman year, but by 1953, football came back to campus. According to Munroe’s book, temporary steel bleachers were put on the University farm, near where the current stadium stands.

Klaver says she found her degree in psychology useful when she worked as an employment counselor in New Jersey and Delaware and later as a counselor in the Camden, N.J., county jail.