i i i / £ i fBatirui, rsj BV / THE BATTALION Pa' % f Word Thursday, May Si, 1§51 ( . ^Senior' Wife n Appraises Years /At Aggieland By VIVIAN CASTLEBERRY Battalion Women’s Editor There will come a time—though I am sure now I cannot imagine such a thing—when I shall ask myself “What was it really like—those college years?” By then most of us will have forgotten a little of the ingredients that went into the making of a college degree for our husbands. While it is still very much with us, we want to set down something of the good times and the bad that have made up the lives of married college students at Texas A&M College. Ask a married student what his years of getting a degree have been like and you’ll get as many sets of answers as the sets of ques tions. But one thing they’ll all have in common: the student remem bers the long, hard, ceaseless grind, the never-ending routine. Ask the wives and you’ll get another set of answers, for they remember . . . Coming home from work at 5 every day and finding the sink stacked full of breakfast and lunch dishes. . . . the bed still tousled from last night’s few winks'. . . short tempers during finals week . . . the party she’d counted on that her husband’s prof knocked \in the head by as signing an A quiz . .. the time baby’s fever hit 105 degrees when polio was so rampant . . . the honorary her husband made. What were our moments of delight and our moments of despair as married college students? They were, perhaps, little more or little less than living at any place at this time in history. For most of us, looking back over the three or four or five years it has taken us to go through A&M, we remember the laughs and we have already mostly forgotten the tears. Nearly all of us who are graduating now came back to school after we had worked for a few years. We came back because we were tired of not getting the promotion because we didn’t have a college degree ... we came back because we recognized the necessity of aiming toward bigger things ... we came back because we wanted to give our kids a better start in life . . . but one and all, for reasons that are deeply and confidentially our own, we returned to school. We chose A&M for another entirely different set of reasons . . . be cause it offered a good degree, because it was a family school, because it was close to home, because we thought living conditions would be good here. Most of our folks thought we were a bit crazy when we broke the news that we were going back to college. They warned us that we had adult responsibilities. They wanted to know how we would manage when the babies came. A few of them planned right away to “chip in” a monthly check. Some sat back and waited for us to give up the idea. Some sanctioned our move. Others said nothing. But, one and all, they’ll be among the proudest people present at commencement tomorrow night. Most of us started out broke. When we had paid our first month’s rent and the moving expenses we had a couple of dollars left to buy food for a week . . . and to meet any of the incidental expenses connec ted with our new way of life. We know one couple who wired home to borrow money from dad and stayed at the telegraph office until it came back so that they could go have supper! We didn’t have much furniture either. Armed with a few wed ding presents—mostly an assortment of crystal vases, bon-bon dishes, guest towels and cocktail forks—we set out to establish our homes in a new world. And what homes they were! Many of us remember the Annex apartmenls—with little nostalgia. Couples doubled up, lived in garages, attics, bedrooms and shacks. One bride we know lived in a garage. Every time it rained, the sew age and waste water backed up in her shower and had to be siphoned out. She dissolved into tears a few times, but she always went to work with the mops and the disinfectant, pasted on a smile and looked forward to the next day. Another couple made a large closet into ba by’s room, hung their clothes behind improvised curtained closets so that the combination living room-bedroom-dining room-study wouldn’t disturb the sleep of a tiny tot too much. These early experiences will be with us always—and with them we’ll remember how we haunted the College Housing Office for a place to live. We can’t credit A&M too highly on that score: it |has provided us with the neatest, cleanest, most livable apartments of any college we know about, and at a price within our means. Pardon us if we smile a little at the new crop of brides who ask if we really enjoy living so close together with so little privacy. “Hon ey,” we feel like saying, “these apartments are castles!” What will we remember most about Texas A&M College? Per haps above all else we’ll remember the spirit of comradery, the close ness, the feeling of doing things with somebody else who shared our every dream. We’ll remember running into each other’s apartments to borrow everything from a cup of sugar to a bobby pin to a baby thermometer. We’ll remember sharing rides to the grocery store We’ll remember the complete dinner our neighbor brought over when we’d been sick for a week and our husband had just about thrown in the towel from trying to keep up his studies, manage his part-time job, take care of the kids and do the housework and cooking. We’ll remember that spirit of “all for one and one for all.” . . . And we’ll remember the times when there was absolutely no pretense in our lives, when we didn’t have to keep up with the Joneses. Most of us became pretty good cooks. We had to be. Our specialties were Italian spaghetti and casserole dishes. We probably ate more ground meat than any group of people in any one place at any time in history. Near the end of the month we ate lots of beans and bread and rice. We learned things about cooking while we were student wives that will stand us in good stead for the rest of our lives. As College residents we should have been in a position for stinT ulating mental experiences, but those we failed to find at A&M. May be we were too lazy to go in search of them . . . maybe small children kept us too close to hearthside . . . maybe we didn’t have the “push” required to find the mental stimulus we needed, but for one reason or another many of us got in a rut. We missed the opportunities that we needed for stimulating hobbies and avocations. Two other things have distressed us as student wives: we resent the patronizing way we are treated in many business places and we resent the low salaries paid by those same places. We were probably a little spoiled when we came here. Many of us hold college degrees or degrees in specialized training; many of us have experience to back up our training, but we have gone to work for the same wages—and in many instances less—than girls just out of high school with no training and no experience. Merchants mostly think their businesses show no difference be tween the local customer and the student wife. One girl we know be came a resident of College Station on a permanent basis after her husband’s graduation. She knew in a few weeks the difference in her treatment when she was stretching a-hundred-and-twenty-a-month and when she became Mrs. Localite. These things have been our teachers and we have learned 'from them, but we are not likely to harbor any bitterness because of them. We’ll remember college days because of the time our husband made the distinguished student list . . . and we’ll remember the time we were on scholastic probation. . . . we’ll remember football games... and friends in for dinner .... and typing all night before the term reports were due. Many of us will remember birth here . . . the place where our children joined our families. A few of us will remember death here . .. the giving up of a child that we’d looked forward to so eagerly and planned for so much. . • the telegram that told us a loved one had passed on. But most of all we’ll remember the day-in-day-out grind, the nev er-ending, constant-striving for something ahead, the big dream of holding a degree from Texas A&M College. A lot of us will reach it tomorrow night. And, though we told ourselves “never-never” when graduating, friends in former years told us “you’ll hate to go,” we admit arriving at this time with a little ,Wfrow in leaving a place where we have done so much living. ‘Tweedy Pie’ Has Hard Time Making Grade By HAL BOYLE New York—