Here are a few items from the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library and our thoughts about what they are and mean.
Pin for the Win
Pinback buttons like this, adorned with ribbons and football charms, were the cat’s meow in the mid-1900s.
Trowel Power
Mabel Eaton, Class of 1910, donated to Bates this trowel, which helped to prepare the soil for an ivy planting during the dedication of the 1910 ivy stone, which is located on Hedge Hall.
Mabel Eaton, a 1910 graduate, donated the trowel to Bates. She went on to became Bates’ famed librarian, first as an assistant (1921–1941) and as librarian until 1957. Eaton made significant contributions to Bates: She founded the women’s honor society Bates Key in 1936 and served as its president for 22 years.
The Bates Key was so named because the alumnae membership served as “key people” in organizing activities for graduates and to “influence young women of the best type to come to Bates in the future.”
The Lewiston Evening Journal called her “the key woman of the Bates Key” in 1945. The Bates Key and the men’s College Club later merged to create the College Key, whose scholarship is named for her.
Following retirement, she was the technical supervisor of the student nurses’ library at Central Maine General Hospital (now Central Maine Medical Center)
Bib Deal
Through the 1960s, under the guise of helping newbies learn the ropes, first-year students faced what today would be considered hazing, sponsored by the college’s respective men’s and women’s student governments.
Among other rules during the first few weeks of the first semester, women had to wear bibs (and had to sew their names into the bib) and men wore beanies.
This photo was likely taken in fall 1948 in Cheney House. Standing with bibs on are Mary Leckemby Merrill ’52 and Shirley Veale Davenport ’53. Seated before scrapbooks (in which two bibs seems to be placed) are Caroline Jaques ’52 (left) and Dorothy Pierce Morris ’52. The woman at right is unidentified.
Other rules for first-year women, as noted in a 1952 edition of The Bates Student, included “show[ing] respect to the upperclass women in the following ways: By opening doors and permitting upperclass women to precede them on all occasions; by standing when an upperclass woman enters the room; by pouring milk and water in the dining hall.”
The first-year men, meanwhile, had to wear garnet-and-black beanies during the early weeks of the semester. Other “Frosh Rules” for men in 1952 included being required to “know the full name of every upperclassman in his dormitory by the end of the second week of classes” and, with their roommates, being “responsible for making a football placard which they will carry at all rallies and home football games.”
An earlier rule, in effect in the 1940s, required the men to wear green bow ties. The late Keith Wilbur ’45 wore this tie as a first-year student:
Categories Alumni Society and culture
