IN A (SOMEWHAT) SIMILAR TIME

TO COME

INTERVIEW WITH SALLY CHILDS HELTON

IN A (SOMEWHAT) SIMILAR TIME

In a time much the same as this, the 1918–1919 academic year was fraught with concern. A world war continued to rage in Europe, and an influenza pandemic, which had been thought to be limited to military camps, quickly began spreading to Indianapolis civilians, causing the temporary closure of all schools, including Butler College. Writings found in Butler publications during that year, however, tend to focus more on the impact of the war than on the health crisis affecting the city, the country, and the world during this same time. The April 1919 edition of the Butler Alumnal Quarterly includes the content of that year’s Founder’s Day celebration dinner, held on the evening of February 7, 1919. At that dinner, an address from then-President Thomas Carr Howe detailed how the College, then located at its Irvington Campus, came up with one solution to offset the number of male students who had left to join in the war effort. “Last summer we were all in great doubt about what was going to happen to us in the colleges. College men were grasping at all kinds of straws of information and hope, not knowing which way to turn. It looked as if we should have no men in the colleges at all, and of course the institutions that had only men were worse off than those that were coeducational. Then came along the idea that the colleges should be turned into training camps and taken over by the Government, and an interesting development took place that is an old story to most of you. Along in the late summer, about two weeks before college began, we realized that we would have to have buildings—barracks, mess hall and the like if we were to take care of the men who might come to us as members of our unit of the Students’ Army Training Corps (S.A.T.C.). We had conducted an active campaign, as every college had done and as had been done jointly by the institutions of the State, for the purpose of bringing young men into the college. In our doubt as to just what we should do our minds turned to one of our own men who had been successful in his experience as a builder, and when the Government gave us permission to build the structures we needed we called upon this man and laid upon him the task of providing us with the proper equipment. In a short time, a very short time, we began to have results, and I hope most of you have seen the very handsome and attractive plant that was erected at the College for the housing of the young men who came there. The result was that when the enrollment of the first term came we had about 650 students. I say “about” advisedly, for everything connected with the S.A.T.C. was “about” in some ways. There were 264 finally enrolled, after various vicissitudes, in this unit, and the housing of these students was the work of one of our own men (Mr. Lee Burns ex- ’94).”