Scrapbooks offer snapshot of campus life

By Sarah Permutt ’08

The scrapbook above features mementos collected by Patricia Robinson Neill ’46 during her years spent on what was then an all-female Prince Street Campus, the original site of the University when it formed in 1850.

The pages are filled with odd mementos and personal photos, and they tell the individual stories of alumni and the collective story of all Rochester students. The scrapbooks as well as a few other saved items are on display in Rush Rhees Library in the exhibition Holding Fast My College Days: Scrapbooks of UR Students that offers a surprisingly intimate look at campus life, including everything from love to sports to grades to Greek life.

A scrapbook put together by Patricia Robinson Neill ’46 (below, right) chronicles her days as a student on the all-female Prince Street Campus. A pair of risqué pink panties peeks out from the corner of the thin pages that also display her midsemester report card, a Valentine’s Day note from a long-distance boyfriend, photos of friends, a comic strip, and a playbill from a student-run musical comedy.

Curator Nancy Martin, library archivist, says she tried to select items that would offer a well-rounded view of college life, including a balance between tragedy and humor.

This scrapbook includes materials collected separately by Charles Coit and Robert Pattison, both from the Class of 1899. Among the items is an image of a skeletal hand taken using an early form of x-ray. The men combined their collections into a single scrapbook, which they donated to the library in 1947, with the following caveat: “Make due allowance for that enthusiasm which places a fraternity far ahead of a college examination, and temporary interests superior to permanent values!”

“College takes up four years of your life,” says Martin. “Good and bad happens, so I want to show both.”

Part of the scrapbook compiled by Edward Ely, Class of 1871, serves as a memorial to his fraternity brother, Thomas King McLean, a nephew of Susan B. Anthony who died of typhoid fever in his senior year at Rochester. In addition to serving as a tribute, the pages reveal Ely’s love of traveling through the inclusion of a bird’s-eye view map of Boston.

Mabel Truesdell ’15 designates many pages of her scrapbook to the fun times with her sorority sisters in Theta Eta, a chapter that no long exists on campus. One striking element is the condition of her scrapbook. A white note card from a sorority sister remains un-yellowed as does a luminescent pink sorority ribbon.

Many of the scrapbooks and the other collected items on display are in remarkable condition. An unmarred and legible fragment of a 1959 goalpost detailing the undefeated football team’s record, which was donated by Jay Bigenwald ’59, is also on view. Interestingly, Neill’s scrapbook is the most fragile due in part to the inferiority of paper available during the World War II years.

Since each scrapbook is so abundant with history, Martin says she had a difficult time selecting which pages to display. “Every time I’d get a display set in the case, I’d have a second thought about which page I should show. It did take a long time to make the final selections,” she says.

Although there are many artifacts on display, the library has few contemporary scrapbooks or museum objects in the archives. “If anybody out there has scrapbooks or mementos of college life, send them because we have very little post-1960 material,” says Martin.

The hours for the exhibition, which continues through August on the second floor of Rush Rhees Library, are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday; noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call x5-4477.