35 Allegheny

■ 1949 THE KALDRON 1949 Caldron (kal-drun), n. A large boiler or mixing-pot, used for mixing or combining quantities of ingredients.—Webster. Kaldron (cal-drun), n. The Yearbook of Allegheny College, used for displaying and describing INTR O D U C T I O N a year's accomplishments and endeavors of the student body.—Kaldron Staff. If you are an average College Annual Reader, you have probably already leafed through this, your 1949 Kaldron, to hurriedly find your own photograph and those of your friends and to pass judgment thereon, and are only now getting around to seeing what is contained in the non-pictorial part of the book. This is especially true of the Senior; it is his (or her) book, primarily, and he wants first of all to see how he is being presented to his departing classmates and to Allegheny’s posterity. Having thus scanned and read the book, he will put it into a secure place, along with bags and trunks and tennis racquets and dance-programs, to be taken home and tucked away, where it can be pulled out years from now and used either as a reference or as a nostalgic adventure in recalling something pleasant and long past. In leafing through, you have perhaps noticed that this year's Kaldron follows a definite and deliberate plan, a mode of presentation, calculated to draw the diverse element of our kind of College life into a coherent and concrete form and to present it to you in such a way as to make you think of the ways in which you were a part of it. You have probably also noticed that such a plan has limitations. For it is not an original idea, to be sure; many Yearbooks have followed the same theme, with variations, over and over again. A plan such as this, which lends itself so readily to solving the problems which plague an editor or a photographer or writer, is bound to have been tried before and to be tried again. Nor is it an adequate idea: one of the first criticisms you will level at your Kaldron is that it doesn't include everything that it could or should, or that it does include some things which you think unimportant. Why, then, do we publish a “Yearbook” whose plan of attack is, at the outset, admittedly unoriginal and inadequate? The answer lies with you. There will be as many different answers as there are readers. And if the Kaldron can reach out to every one of its readers and find in each of them a response, whether it be good or bad, considered or ill-considered, it will have served a purpose. It is something which was written by Alleghenians for Alleghenians, to put here only suggestions; it is in how you take these suggestions, in the form of words and pictures and figures, and associate them with what College has meant and is meaning to you that we are interested. If you can do that, the Kaldron will be unoriginal, certainly, but wholly worth-while and therefore desirable. As for adequacy, there are things that have been left out, not only because of space limitations, (a chronicle of all the ingredients which are in our Allegheny Kaldron would fill a hundred books of this size) but because some of the ingredients would inevitably appeal only to a limited audience; above all, this must be a book of unlimited appeal. The day on which one of you saw a complicated but basic chemical reaction resolve itself in a test-tube down in Carnegie, while it is just as precious as anything you may have experienced here, will have to be put aside for a picture of the Bentley Tower, whose influence all of us have felt. That old volume you found in the Library, containing a passage that suddenly gave a new slant to your thinking, must become a part of something much bigger which you may find in these pages. We have a picture of the Singers, but not of a certain chord that sent a thrill through you; there is the football team, but nothing of the wildness with which you greeted the first touchdown, you will find every faculty-member's photograph, but you will not find printed the remark that he made one day that filled you with encouragement and determination and interest. There is a whole section devoted to a peremptory listing of the Seniors, but not one of them can supply the wording to show us how he felt during the hard-sought moment between stepping up to receive his diploma and stepping down with it in his hand. Yes, we have certainly left a lot out of our Kaldron! So you see why we say that this is your book; why it is Allegheny; why it will be, just like your stay in college, as original and adequate as you choose to make it. Look through it again and again—there are only suggestions here ! Supply your own ingredients! Take the view of Bentley Hall and expand it to include the Rustic Bridge, if you like, or the Infirmary, or the Alumni Gardens on a Spring day which you remember. Ask yourself if your college education has given you the solidity of its foundation, the dignity of its pillars, or the aspirations symbolized by its tower which, even though it is an Ivory Tower, nevertheless points only upward, and is a spot of light when everything around it is dark. Make the winter scenes mementoes of a snowball fight, op a reminder of a hundred and one trips downtown through slush and cold to do a hundred and one errands. Make your view of Brooks Hall include 5 A.M. fire-drills, or the Red-and-White, scene of the Wednesday-morning-ten-o’clock-coffee- club meetings, or a very special serenade in the wee hours, or the place in which you enjoyed so many dances and waited for "her" to come downstairs. Look everything over, and decide what kind of ingredient you have been, or will be, and you will have a valuable book indeed. The possibilities are limitless; and if you have chosen your ingredients wisely, and have mixed them in the proper proportion, you will have a resultant product to be taken with you and kept, not in a nook in the attic, but in your retrospections, as a priceless ingredient and guide for your future. D E D I C A T I ON To Miss Laila Skinner, Dean of Women and Associate Professor of Psychology in our College from 1936 to 1949, we are proud and pleased to dedicate our '49 Kaldron. The choice was a happy one in many ways: few people would fit so nicely in.o the scheme of our book, with her contributions to what we so blithely call a “mixture” ; in few personalities do we find a combination of attributes which fitted her so well for a position demanding versatility, determination and, at times, courage. A brief biography is standard form for a dedication, and so it is with ours; but Miss Skinner’s Allegheny biography is all that would be necessary to point out her qualifications as the choice for the Kaldron's eulogy—all during her stay here it was as if Allegheny College was the only place to which she had ever been devoted, and it is hard to think that she is now gone, or was ever anywhere else. The Allegheny College Bulletin presents an extremely impressive list of Miss Skinner’s degrees, positions, and achievements, from her “A.B., MacMurray, 1921” and “B.M , Rochester, 1923” to the time she came to Allegheny College. She was an instructor in piano at the Eastman School of Music from 1923 to 1929, Assistant Director at the Cook County School of Nursing in Chicago from 1932 to 1935, and Assistant Dean of Women at the Illinois State Normal University in 1935-36. In 1936 she became our Dean of Women, and on March 1, 1949 she returned to the Cook County School of Nursing as its director of personnel. Such a record bespeaks versatility and ability, to say the least. It is trite to say that she has been missed since she left Allegheny. Although she was primarily concerned and connected with the female components of the Allegheny Kaldron, her influence was felt surely and constructively, everywhere, serving as a conditioning agent, moulding and helping to form both ingredient and product. The more one knew her, the better one liked her; nothing truer can be said of Miss Skinner; nothing better, indeed, can be said of anyone. PRESIDENT LOUIS T. BENEZET There can be no single aspect of any college melting pot more important than its President, especially when, like M ildred J. L udwig our President, he takes as vital and active a part as possible in ail phases of the college life. It is difficult to classify him in the terminology of our Kaldron—he does more than JABEZ I,. BOSTWICK stir, he does more than add ingredients or decide which ones shall be included or how they will be mixed. He does all this and more, and in a very real sense is himself an ingredient, inextricably bound up with the college and the college life. Dr. Benezet’s life has indeed been centered around the one theme of education. 11 is father was an educator, and for many years he has been interested in all phases of this field.

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