Laissez les bons temps rouler

See our digitized newspapers at
http://archive.org/collection/mountstmaryscollege.

FAT TUESDAY HAS A LONG HISTORY at the College, and back in the day even had a Mardi Gras Queen, who was crowned at a costume gala the Saturday before Lent began.

The Queen in 1950 was none other than Beverly Halpin Carrigan '52, whose social and academic lives at the Mount are well documented in the scrapbooks she donated to the Archives a couple years ago. (She also put herself through school working in food service.)

Queen Bev and her court in 1950.

Incidentally, notice the reference to "Mount Ball Room" in the headline above. As constructed in 1947, the first floor of the Charles Willard Coe Memorial Library was devoted to dances and parties, complete with a small kitchen, dumbwaiter and glossy maplewood floors. As far as we can figure out from the old blueprints, the orchestra pit was directly underneath where the Archives sit now. Let the good times roll!

The Easter Bunny, 1951

WE MAY BE A CATHOLIC COLLEGE, but the Easter Bunny sometimes plays as big a role here as anywhere else.

Mr. Bunny was front and center on March 9, 1951, when a few fraternity pranksters (thought to be from the Mount's brother school, Loyola University) "borrowed" the 10-foot, 300-pound plaster statue from in front of a store on fashionable Wilshire Boulevard and hauled him up to the Chalon Campus in the early hours of the morning.

Students arrived to see a giant rabbit in top hat and tails by the flagpole in the Circle. Police were duly alerted, and the investigating officers posed with the "hot" rabbit and a couple dozen smiling Mounties. The wandering bunny was then returned to his rightful home.

Our occasional pen-pal Beverly Halpin Carrigan '52 remembers this incident well. She reminds us that it was the year after the movie Harvey came out (in which Jimmy Stewart's best friend is a 6'3" invisible rabbit), and theaters featured giant rabbits in their lobbies.

So this Easter Bunny wasn't the only oversized, overdressed rabbit with a starring role that year. A happy, blessed Easter to all!

Postscript: Read about the missing Loyola Lion a few weeks later.

Sink or swim

BEVERLY HALPIN CARRIGAN '52, a regular Archives pen pal, did some reminiscing this week in an email about Freshman Orientation in the late 1940s when she came to the Mount.

There was no Welcome Week, Orientation or much else to get students into the campus groove. Orientation in 1948 consisted of being assigned to a Big Sister who showed you the ropes: answering questions, describing courses and teaching the finer points of Mount etiquette. The word crap was not to be used, Bev discovered. "My response was that my mom used it all the time," Bev remembers. "Needless to say I expunged it from my language."

Freshmen were required to study together in the Coe Library four nights a week "under those dreadful chandeliers," she recalls. (Evidently they cast as little light then as they do today.) The Associated Student Body and club representatives made presentations in the Little Theater (now the Hannon Theater) and you were on your own. "No, we 50 or so first-year students had to sink or swim!" Bev writes.

No problems for Bev Halpin -- from what we can see in her scrapbooks in the Archives (available for viewing), she took to college like like a duck to water. She won a scholarship to graduate school in social work, married a lawyer who is now a retired Colorado Supreme Court judge, and is very generous with her alma mater.

In 2005 Bev and her husband, Jim, created the Beverly Halpin Carrigan '52 Endowed Scholarship to promote study in social work or social science. Bev wanted to help other young women achieve what she did, to get them into the swim, so to speak, at MSMC.

Thanks for the email, Bev, and thanks for all you do for the Mount.