Hentrietta Hay's Column

Here is the trivia question for the day. What does this little old lady in sneakers have in common with Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White and Mesa State's football coach, Bob Cortese? This may be hard to believe, but the answer is membership in the University of Colorado "C" club.

Once upon a time, when C. U. was much smaller and much more fun than it is now, I lettered in tennis. Sometimes I have wondered whether in fact I really did or whether it was one of those fantasies we all weave when we think about our misspent youths. But recently in the mail I received the Alumni "C" Club directory and there it is. It is true. I cannot imagine how or why those records were kept all these years. Maybe they are chiseled on one of the Flatirons or written with charcoal on a shovel. But kept they were. And also, much to my surprise, I feel a sort of warm pride that my name is in that book. Maybe it is because it is visible proof that once I had enough energy and skill to excel in a sport. And maybe it is because there probably aren't more than 25 women in the whole list and part of those are honorary. But that's another story.

In any case, so far as sports are concerned I am now strictly a couch potato. But not then. Those were the days when, every year on Thanksgiving Day, C. U. played D. U. (affectionately known as the Street Car College) in football at the old Merchant's Park on South Broadway in Denver. Our other athletic enemy was located in Ft. Collins. Then it was the Colorado Agricultural College (the Udder University), and C. U. usually won. I understand this is no longer always true.

But the whole thing did bring back a lot of memories about what it was like to be in college during the Depression. A friend recently asked me what motivated my parents to send me to college in the those terribly difficult times. In the early '30's it was a major financial commitment for any family, even though costs were a bit different than they are now. My scholarship paid the $22.00 per quarter tuition. And a check for $35.00 each month paid board and room and whatever else I needed.

I think some of the reasons for going to college were different then. Now college tends to be a way station on the road to some place else. Certainly it is, for many people, simply a necessary step to a career, to the ability to earn a good living.

But for most of us then it was a sort of bright, shining oasis to be enjoyed before we hit the real world of financial depression. We were a bunch of Romantics in a bleak world, but we could afford to be. The major problems facing us on graduation were financial, not the possible destruction of the planet.

It was a whole different world. Nobody had any money, but we didn't know we should have and we certainly didn't miss it. I knew one person with a car, a Model A no less, and she was extremely popular! There was no booze except bootleg and those few who drank did it behind locked doors. The only drug problem that I ever heard of was whether dumping aspirin in coke and drinking the gruesome stuff would keep you awake all night during finals week, The result, of course, was that we had to rely on ourselves. We were forced to use our brains and our natural enthusiasms to create our own college atmosphere and for most of us it was far more interesting than the life we had come from or the one that we expected to be pushed into.

Fortunately, most young people are idealists. We certainly were that. We even believed that the world was "savable" and we were just the ones to do it. Unfortunately, as it turned out, we didn't have the answers, but we thought we did.

Anyway, I have not become a Justice or a football coach, but I sure had fun becoming a member of the "C" Club.