Day 33- March 27th

Continued working on Box 2.

Day 34-March 28th

Someone showed me a diploma from the Indiana State Normal School, from 1910. (That was IUP's name when it was a teacher's college.) It was interesting to read it, because the diploma listed all of the subjects that the person was able to teach. It was a quite a list as well- everything ranging from politics to geometry. Nowadays, a person needs a master's in education just to teach elementary school, it seems.

I had an interesting talk with a woman who went to IUP back during the 1960's. It was eye-opening to think what college was like during the 1960's, when there were no co-ed dorms, people had to dress up for dinner, and students had curfews. Mind-boggling.

Day 35- March 30th

I continued working through Box 2. I was going through enlistment papers for the Pennsylvania National Guard in the 1920's- people must have been pretty short back then. The average height that I kept coming across was about 5'5"-5'8", which was pretty interesting.

I had a conversation with a woman who is working through her family genealogy. She is having difficulty, because apparently records that she's looking for were destroyed in a fire sometime around 1855. It definitely drove home the point of how important records can be.

Day 36-March 31st

Today I helped a woman who wanted to learn more about what IUP was like during the 1930's, when her mother attended the school. It was nice utilizing the knowledge I had gained from working on the Sutton Hall tour in the first semester of grad school.

As we looked for photos of buildings that would have been around in the 1930's, it was kind of depressing to think about how much IUP tore down, and is planning to tear down. I know there's planned obsolesce and all that, but there's something about being able to go to an older building and feeling a sense of place and historical continuity. IUP doesn't really have a lot of older buildings left, which is in stark contrast to University of Delaware, which(despite some mis-steps) really treasures a lot of the older buildings on campus, especially the Georgian revival ones. Talking to a woman who wanted to find the buildings that were around that her mother probably went, and realizing she won't find much, definitely makes me glad that Blue Hens can check out dorms that people lived in during the 1920's, and recitation halls from the 1890's.

The dorm that I live in, UT, is scheduled to come down in a few years. It really is amazing to think that except for Whit, pretty much all dorms built in the 20th century at IUP are slated to come down at some point. They really don't build to last these days.