Repository: UIHistories Project: Illio - 1896 [PAGE 65]

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3n t6c ©ape of '81.

graduates—always waiving the point that m e s u p e r i o r young people oi today were too busy cutting teeth in those times to be s u p r e m e l y critical of the s h o r t c o m i n g of others. For it is quite t r u e t h a t we lacked much t h a t goes to make up a wellrounded career in college. W e were devoid of bounce, if you will, and stood somewhat doubtfully amid the puz/ling beginnings of things. If we attempted anything so ambitious as a college yell, it was with t h e vocal diffidence of the cockerel, and altogether we were in the pinfeather stage. I was never a believer in the awful wisdom of the Faculty of any Faculty though I must confess that when I have faced it on certain trying occasions when its m e m b e r s exhibited a reprehensible curiosity to know things not specially set going for their diversion, 1 have wavered in my heterodox judgment of their mental attainments. However, to my mind, the theory and practice of the a r t of the college student is to live, to himself and for himself, a larger life than that of the schoolboy; to plan and to do, to take the impact of rough-and-tumble existence as it strikes; to be a leader among quick young minds, or to fall in cheerfully in t h e ranks of the led. All this prosing brings me Finally to the point: I detect a larger horizon surrounding t h e graduate of today than s u r r o u n d e d him who clutched his sheepskin and ambled forth under a J u n e skv in t h e earlv 'NO'S. You have mixed more genuine striving into your dish of knowledge. You have taken sunburn on the cinder path. You have kicked goals, and have done o t h e r notable things that make life worth living. In the bad old days we did few of these things, though we hungered for them, and reached out after t h e m . One afternoon of foot ball whirls in my memory like scenes on a battlefield; t h e r e I figured on numerous lists of killed, wounded and missing. As we were all raw and ignorant of the first principles of getting into condition, we merely h a m m e r e d each o t h e r into pulp, and then, in the early stages of convalescence, proclaimed a perpetual peace. We tried base ball many times, playing it brazenly at its worst in t h e faces of the shrieking gods. Yet there were brilliant players, even t h e n . Never shall I forget the triumph we felt when we went to Galesburg with our sacrificial orator and our University base ball club, and while t h e other orators buried our orator under mountains of rhetoric, our ball players toyed with K n o x ' chosen gladiators, and carried oft the honors of the field. That was t h e one victory of my time. Since then the University boys have done magnificent work in athletics, and have broadened and strengthened the life at t h e College. This was t h e touchstone that we needed and lacked to discover the stout heart and the steady eye. It was the opportunity for courage and generalship that did not come. I rejoice that it exists for the young men of the present. C. H. DENNIS, '81.

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