The 1950s were the last of five decades in Conn history built on perpetuated traditions. The girls had no locks on their doors; they used the common rooms to drink tea, play cards and smoke cigarettes. Dating meant girls took busses, trains or carpools to neighboring men’s colleges like Yale, Wesleyan and Dartmouth for parties and mixers. Men would also come to Connecticut College for various dances, like the Sophomore Hop (Soph Hop), the Knowlton Prom and the annual Pig Push, a dance with the Coast Guard. Men would choose their dates randomly by drawing from a collection of women’s jewelry.
Rosemary Park was the College’s president from 1948 to 1962. “We loved her,” said Betsy Carter Bannerman ’62, Managing Editor of then-Conn Census. “We thought she was great. She was little, and very friendly – she made contact with students. She wasn’t hiding away in her office.” Beloved Dean of the College Alice Johnson was hired by Rosemary Park to be Dean of Freshmen. “She had been a shy, retiring young professor before being elevated to the Deanery and subsequently to the presidency,” Johnson wrote in an unpublished manuscript. “This retiring, modest, tiny woman had, over the years, become a most superior public speaker.”
In 1960, Park addressed the freshmen. “By 1970, which would be six years after you have graduated from Connecticut, two out of every five women in this country will be in the labor force of the country,” she told them.“They will not be sitting on any satin cushions.”
Park made four additions to our campus in the fifties: Hale Laboratory in 1954, Larrabee and Crozier-Williams student center in 1957, and North Complex in 1958. Cro was originally built to include a gymnasium, with a bowling alley in the bookstore and a pool in the 1962 room.
Connecticut College, Competitive Sing in Palmer Auditorium. April 23, 1952. Dresses are students' own. Photo by Robert L. Perry, New London, Connecticut.
Dance in Knowlton Salon. Left to right: A. Bechen, '53, K. Webster, '54, Eva Blumm, '53, Myra Tombuch, '51.
Dance at Knowlton Salon, April 1951. Photo by Robert L. Perry.
Students return to New London, early 1950s. Center: Helen Fricke '52.
Students shopping in the College's first bookstore in Blackstone, c. 1955
The women of Harkness House. April 7, 1952.
“Most of you will probably live to be a hundred. If you want to keep from being a stuffy old bore for forty years, that is, between sixty and a hundred, then you’ve got to learn to be something now. In other words, you can’t rely on preserving either your youthful charm or your feminine allure through a hundred. To be young and feminine at sixteen is no achievement. To be a respected person at sixty is.” – Rosemary Park, 1960 Address to the Freshmen
