Good Times in College From Back in the Day


Yesterday I had the pleasure of going over to my friend Darlene's house to continue our planning of my wedding decor and flowers.  (She is kindly organizing it all for me!  Her artistic talents are boundless, I swear.)  After talking about the necessary things, we went on to other life topics, and we got onto the subject of what her college days were like.  She attended a state university here in town, then called SMS, in the 60s.  (In the picture above, she is the furthest on the left.  She said she loved that sweater but the angora itched a lot.)  A small town girl coming to the big city, she was caught off guard by some of her roommates' antics and the frat boys that lived in the house next door to hers.  Probably my favorite story she told was how she had a roommate that would iron her bullet bras to a sharp point every day.  No one else around them was wearing such bras at that point, so it was a bit appalling to all the other ladies.

Not to mention the guys next door that ran a bar.  After closing the bar, all the student clientele would just walk on over the these guys' house and continue the party.  Darlene said they were constantly being raided by the police in the middle of the night, so that was a new experience for her.

Although times have definitely changed since then and college experiences are very different now, I think we younger generations think of college students of this time as way stuffier than they actually were.  Today I have a fun collection of vintage college antics to share with you, to put it all back in perspective.  (And I'm having major senioritis and DANG-I'm-done-with-school emotions that are strong right now, so enough with school seriousness.) 
First off, my favorite vintage fad I've discovered: Telephone booth cramming.


Obviously this late 1950s game involved cramming as many people into a telephone booth as possible and snapping a picture before the people on the bottom suffocated.  Apparently it got pretty intense and resulted in international rivalries.  And we thought planking was clever.

Or, if phone booths aren't your thing, you could pack a 1965 Volswagen:


And then this guy pulled a great photo prank.  To get all the ins and outs of how it worked, check out this article, but basically while the photographer did a slow pan of this college group to get a long line of students, a guy ran from one side to the other, and because of the slow exposure... shows up twice in the picture.  There he is in both the bottom two picture excerpts.  What a joker.


Then sometimes they just had to cabaret on the lawn:

Good times, good times.

P.S.  It's the last day to enter the Contrapunt Etsy Shop giveaway to win a custom-sized vintage pattern!  Don't miss it!

4 comments

  1. Wonderfully fun post! I think that the youth of most cultures have always hammed it up and had a lot of exuberant fun. Those qualities are part and parcel to our younger years and even if things were, culturally speaking, stuffier at times in the past, that doesn't mean teens and college students didn't still find all kinds of shenanigans to get up.

    ♥ Jessica

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So true! And I cracked up because Darlene told me after reading this post that she and her friends did indeed try packing cars, ha!

      Delete
  2. Oh these images remind me of all the ones I found in my parents' scrapbooks from their college days. Telephone booth cramming, hot bread parties, what they did to boys who got engaged...oh my!

    xoxo
    -Janey

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hot bread party? What's a hot bread party?!

      Delete