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Fall 2002
Coming Home
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| Harry
Zide ('26-'29) |
Moss
was the only woman enrolled in a parliamentary law class. As a joke,
her male classmates elected her Sergeant-at-Arms. "They would
say to me, 'Sergeant-at-Arms, it's too warm in here, can you open
the window?' " Moss recalls. "Or 'Sergeant-at-Arms, it's
too cold, can you close the window?' I went along, they were only
teasing." Women's suffrage had been in effect less than a decade.
"I started coming to class a little bit late because they were
telling dirty jokes all the time," Moss says. "It's not
that I didn't enjoy them, I just thought I shouldn't be there."
Frosh
men also had to undergo their own rites of passage. Zide, who took
premed classes at UCLA from 1926-'29, says he defiantly refused
to buy a required beanie — "That was the only smart thing
I did," he says with a laugh — to avoid being hazed. But
being found out could have brought down the wrath of upperclassmen.
How did he manage to keep a low profile? As an ROTC cadet, Zide
wore his uniform to school. "Maybe that did it," he says.
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| Holly
Halsted Balthis '29 |
STUDENTS
TODAY can find entertainment a few minutes away from campus
in Westwood Village or the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.
In the mid-'20s, the Cocoanut Grove at the now-closed Los Angeles
Ambassador Hotel was the premier nightspot. Tuesday evening was
celebrity night, and such headliners as Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra
— he was the bandleader who commissioned George Gershwin to
write "Rhapsody in Blue" — Bing Crosby, Harry Barris
and other members of the Rhythm Boys graced the stage with songs
from the Jazz Age like "It Had to Be You."
"Our
toes were tapping, our thumb and middle finger were snapping,"
Balthis says. "And to think that we knew every word to every
song."
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