Spirit (and hijinks) of holidays past

Front page of the campus paper, The View, December 17, 1946.

AS THE CHALON CAMPUS closes for the holidays, I thought we'd wish everyone a Merry Christmas and farewell to 2011 with a look back at The View, the campus newspaper that published its first edition in April, 1945.

First, some verse from the first Christmas edition, the winner of the 1945 Christmas Poem Contest (Vol. I, No. 8, December 13, 1945, p. 3):

Soliliquy [sic] of the Ox

The king of beasts strides in the tall brown grass,

And sees the stealthy, slithering cobra pass;

The sheepdog on the hillside in the night

Watches the browsing flocks all fleecy white.

Many creatures of the Lord, I know,

Have features finer than I can show,

But with no other would I change my place

For I have seen the Christ-Child, face to face.

--Marjorie O'Hanlon '49

The picture above is the front page of second Christmas edition of The View, Vol. II, No. 9, December 17, 1946. Even then the Mount was proud of its diversity, publishing a roundup of short articles by its international students about Christmas traditions in their home countries -- Mexico, Japan, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador. The illustration is by student Barbara Lichtenberg '47.

And lest we think The View was all piety and poetry, there's an article in the 1945 Christmas edition about four Mount reporters chasing down the local movie stars. "View Attempts to Visit Van" describes their mad rush to follow Van Johnson in his blue sports car to the home of fellow star Keenan Wynn on nearby Saltair Avenue, where the two actors were rehearsing a Christmas program for the U.S. Navy. They tried and failed to talk their way past Wynn's maid, but, nothing daunted, they decided instead to stalk handsome Peter Lawford the following weekend.

Hijinks at the holidays! A blessed Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody -- see you here in 2012.