Freshman Year at Cornell College

You will recall, fellow Googlers, that in my first attempt to invade your very own electronic waves, I brought the tour of my life up to graduation from high school.

It was a foregone conclusion in the King household that I would be attending Cornell college, a small liberal arts Methodist college in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Why was it a foregone conclusion? He who has the money, can dictate the rules and my two aunts, Gercie and Nell, were furnishing the necessary college costs and they had the say-so. In September 1937, I made the huge transition from farm boy to freshman in college. I took the usual freshman college courses, including freshman math. However, I found that freshman math was more than my farm intellect could whack to stand. So I dropped the math and took another course. Later on in this blog, you will find that dropping the math was actually a poor decision since there were some positions in the Navy that were open only to those who had taken college math.

I have previously related the accomodations we were assigned to Merner Hall, the newest of the dormitories on the campus. My roommate, Harold Parker from Ida Grove, Iowa, was likewise a farmboy, although a bit more sophisticated than I. As far as knowing the ways of the college world, Harold and I were strictly amateurs, particularly when compared with our utterly sophisticated roommates.

The freshman class had about the same proportion of male to female students, as would be expected and I felt that I would be doing the freshman girls a great favor if I dated them. I didn't have much money, but while the favorite activities 0n a date was to walk down to the railroad overpass and watch the "streamliners" pull through on their nightly run. I might also add that it was very dark on this bridge which was conducive for a farm boy seeking to make the big time.

I was sadly lacking in social graces, not knowing how to dance, nor carry on polite, but meaningless conversation, however, I was not alone in my absence of such graces. Since a large proportion of the freshman class were from Iowa farms or small towns, with this in mind, the college had opened the third floor of a classroom building to what they termed "social halls" open all week long with emphasis being on learning a few dance steps accompanied by victrola music of the period. With this schooling I was quick to learn the various intricacies of the "light fantastic" besides, it was free.

I also recall that during the fall of this year a group of us students hiked westerly on US 30 to the small creek known Abbey Creek. US 30 spanned the creek but the bridge was so constructed that it was dangerous in its engineering and had been a scene of many fatal accidents.

Sure enough when we reached the Abbey Creek Bridge it was horribly mangled and there were pieces of what we took for human flesh hanging from the severed railings. We later found that it had been a scene of a particularly gruesome accident and the passenger had been impaled on these railings.