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Winter 2016
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TOWER
15
YESTERDAY
Imagine your high school cafeteria,
only it’s 150 years ago. In between
classes, hungry people are bustling around, waiting in line for their chance
to eat. Besides dated cuisine and attire, lunch at Keystone State Normal
School (1866 – 1928) wasn’t much different from your own experience,
with one major exception.Draconian regulations were placed on interactions
between male and female students, who were forbidden to associate with
one another. Ladies sat on one side of the cafeteria, and gentlemen on the
other, with faculty members at the head of each table to serve as chaperones.
This system was supposed to preserve feminine sensibilities, which would
be offended by the slovenly habits of male students, who would pick at
their teeth with forks, throw food and shovel food haphazardly into their
uncivilized mouths. If you wanted to speak with a member of the opposite
sex, it had to be done furtively, if at all, and certainly not while eating.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dr. Amos C. Rothermel
[principal of the normal school and then president of the college, from
1899 – 1934] eased some of the restrictions to allow mixed company at
the dining table, with one provision: female students were expected to
provide etiquette lessons in table manners to the men they were sitting
with. Sometimes, even strategic planning wasn’t enough. In 1915,William
Henry Seip’s ’15 classmates mocked the member of the Keystone Literary
Society for overenthusiasm while eating.
“William wants to specialize in wireless telegraphy,” they wrote. “No
one can say that he does not use gestures because at dinner time in the
lunch room it is not wise to stand too near while he is making a speech.”
Breakfast was served promptly at 7 a.m., and if students were late, they
had to wait until lunch, grumbling stomachs notwithstanding. However,
even if there were fewer diners than anticipated, food wasn’t wasted: until
the 1920s a team of pigs on campus ensured that every scrap was ac-
counted for. In 1928, the school was granted the right to confer bachelor’s
degrees, and marched ahead into modernity, becoming Kutztown State
Teacher’s College.The chaperone system to oversee ‘association between
the sexes’ was largely abandoned…as was the system of using pigs for
waste disposal.
Top to Bottom:
An artist’s rendering
of the new Cub Café
set to open in the
spring semester
in the McFarland
Student Union.
A commencement
banquet held in
Risley Hall in the
early 1900s.
Students enjoy a
break in Chez Nous,
a former dining facility
in Rothermel Hall.
Students in South
Dining Hall after its
opening in 1966.