Wednesday June 27, 2012
continued………
My College Years
Freshman Year
I can remember beginning my classes. I had English, Speech and History on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays and every afternoon I had art classes. Somewhere in there I had a Psychology class also.
I had to take English, History and Speech as a freshman. Fortunately, as an Art major I had no math, foreign language or science requirement. I was very glad because it meant I would have a lot less reading to do.
Most of my classes my freshman year were located in the Old Main building pictured below. I had my English and all my art classes in Old Main.
Freshman English Class
My English class, I soon discovered to my pleasure, was English Literature and we were going to be studying Shakespeare's play Macbeth. My senior year of high school we also studied Macbeth for almost an entire semester. My high school English Literature instructor was Mrs. Farmer, one of my favorite classmate's mother. (note: I spent a lot of time at the Farmer's house visiting and practice dancing with my classmate.) I picked up a lot of the Macbeth information by just having that interest. I even memorized Macbeth's soliloquy that was one of the best things I could have done
Every time our instructor would ask a question, I had my hand up with a response. I had taken good notes in my high school class and was able to actually read them pretty well. Actually I had memorized most of the questions and in a short time I had the instructor that I was an expert in Shakespeare
One day she had to leave the classroom, she turned to me and said "Mr. Logan, will you please come up here and monitor the class for about a half hour?" WOW I was flattered.
Needless to say I got a very good grade in English Literature that semester. The second semester was basically just subjective writing which I had no trouble with because I had no questions to read and answer. I was just expressing things in my own words. My only downfall was my spelling, but fortunately she was more interested in content than spelling...I lucked out again.
American History
History was a different story. The class was held in a very large lecture hall and there must have been 100 students. The instructor stood in from and lectured on the subject assigned the day before. My inability to read caused me to do very poorly. I think I got a "D" fortunately I didn't flunk.
Speech Class
My freshman speech class was very interesting. The instructor was a woman and she informed us we would have class Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But also on Tuesday we would have a television lecture in a large auditorium.
Somewhere I was told that the TV lectures didn't count too much on our grade so I choose not to attend the TV lectures after the first one. I remember we would be assigned a subject and take turns giving the speeches in front of the class according to the number we had drawn at the beginning of the semester. I was number 7.
Based on the kind if subject and the type of speech, we usually only were able to do 5 speeches a day. I remember this one week my subject was "Why we should eat a good breakfast" (I never ate breakfast.) We were to start on Monday with speeches and I figured I would not be called on until Wednesday of that week so I was not prepared at all on Monday.
Interestingly 3 of the first 5 students were absent that Monday so that meant I was going to have to give my speech. As the first 3 students gave their speeches I sat there preparing my speech as best I could. The speeches were supposed to be in oration form meaning I need to follow an outline and script. I got up and did an extemporaneous speech and was given an "A" for the speech. From then on I never prepared a speech the prober way again that semester.
That's not all, remember the Tuesday TV lectures? I had been getting A's and B's on all my classroom speeches and at mid-term the instructor handed out grade to date. I looked at my paper she handed me and it indicated I had a D.
I waited until after class and went up to her and asked why I got a D when all my speeches had been A’s and B’s. She turned to me and said that unlike the other speech instructors; she gave 50% of our grade based on our scores on the Tuesday TV lectures. There was always a quiz at the beginning of the TV lecture based on the previous weeks lecture. Oh my gosh what was I going to do this late in the semester?
I asked her if there was anything I could do to bring up my grade. She looked at me and after a period of silence she said that if I was to enter into the upcoming intercollegiate speech contest and do well it might influence my grade.
I had no choice, I entered the speech contest. The only category left open was the oration speech category. This meant I had to prepare an outline and basically read my speech. I had spent a lot ot time in high school working with Graphology and had done a term paper on the subject. I prepared my simple outline and when I stood up in front of the judges.
I acted as if I were reading the speech but I actually exempted the whole thing. I was awarded a "Superior" rating for my speech on Graphology and ended up getting a B+ in my freshman speech class that semester.
All the rest of my classes that semester were art classes and the head of the art department made the announcement that as long as we handed in all of our assignment at the end of the semester we were not require to attend class if we chose not to attend.
I attended some of the classes but eventually just worked on my other subjects and never thought to much about not attending the art classes. I was able to hand in my assignments at the end of the semester and got all as for them.
I might mention that one of my classmates was a boy named Larry Lumas, who went on to be a very good "Free Lance" Artist in Des Moines, Iowa. I ended up using some of his work through an ad agency in Des Moines.
Extracurricular Activities
my First Semester
Freshman Year
I like to remember the feeling of "Freedom" I had the first weekend after I had attended my first week of classes. I remember waking up in my Julian Hall dorm room and thinking...I can do anything I want to do.
My first activity was to go for a walk to downtown Vermillion then I took a walk around the USD campus. In the late 50s the campus was pretty small. It didn't take too long to cover the whole campus. I remember I ended up at the Student union where I purchased a hamburger and a soft drink. As I left the student union I stopped and read some of the announcements on the billboard outside of the eating area. There was a notice asking that anyone interested in training on the campus radio station to go to the 5th floor and submit an application.
I had done a little radio work in high school on KAYL, the Storm Lake radio station so I figured it might be fun to check it out so up to the 5th floor I trotted.
When I got there I was told that quite frankly they didn’t have enough Radio/TV majors to participate in the night training classes offer to radio/TV majors. So I was told to come back the next evening to start. It took 3 people each evening and my group was scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
We would take turns editing the news from the associated press teletype machine to give on the newscasts, select music to play and run the control board we called simply "the board". We were to follow a preset script format. The first hour was Semi-Classics the next 2 hours was modern classics and the last hour was popular music that was called "Campus Bandstand".
The program was called "Carrier Current" and was a closed circuit program that had enough power to carry over most of the town of Vermillion and maybe some surround areas. I ask my roommate, Denny to record the program so I could hear how I sounded. I would return to our dorm room all excited about what I was doing there on the radio station and would share it with Denny.
After 2 weeks, Denny decided he wanted to also participate. He went up and got put on Tuesdays and Thursdays with two other people in his group. Each night when we came home we would be so excited about what we were doing at the radio station. It didn't take too many more days until we decided to ask the station manager if we could combine our efforts and talents and be together on 3 nights a week,, Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. We drafted up our own schedule and format and presented it to him.
He approved and we were off and running. The station was an educational station and there were no commercials.
We observed that the station would receive new releases of records mostly 45 records and they were the Rock and Roll songs of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holey and recording artists like Fats Domino plus all the currently popular Rock and Roll musicians. The people at the station would automatically throw them into the waste basket.
Denny and I started rescuing them and it didn't take long to build up a good selection of the popular Rock and Roll songs. In our reformatting of the night’s program we changed the format to 1 hour of semi-classics and the rest of the evening till midnight devoted to "Campus Bandstand" . Denny and I decided we wanted a different name so we came up with the "Denny and Dave" Show. Not only did we play music we did impersonations and pattered our show after the "Bob and Ray" show.
I made up posters and hung them up all over campus but our listening audience was not growing much. I was about then that the radio station was changing from the old 78 records to the long play records and 45s.
There were 4 stacks of old 78 records in the office ready to be hauled to the dump. Denny and I took them all to our dorm room which was just across the street. We then decided to come up with a call-in quiz program and give 5 old 78 records away for each right answer.
We promoted this quiz program with the on campus posters and in the school newspaper, Denny talked his girlfriend into coming up and answering the phone for us, which she did.
We started getting so many calls that we could barely keep up. We had a lot of fun and gain a lot of experience at the same time.
Once a year the station would run what was called a power check. They would broadcast at full power which was 1,000 watts at night to check and see how far the signal carried. The "Denny and Dave Show" was selected to run the power check. We eventually got a postcard from someone in southern California that had received the program that night.
The Denny and Dave Show Dance
One of the most interesting things that we did was sponsor the "Denny and Dave Show" dance and had a live broadcast from the dance.
Now keep in mind, this was basically before remote control was used and we figured out our own "remote control". the radio station was on the 5th floor of the memorial union building and there was a large dance floor on the 4th floor. We put our heads and brains together and decided to drop microphones out the window down to the 4th floor and it worked!
There was a group of music majors that were trying to form a musical group and we invited them to play live music at our dance. Before the "Denny and Dave Show" the USD Symposiums didn’t exist at the dace they preformed their first show and we helped them get started.
No comments:
Post a Comment