Wolthuis. I have good news for Bart, and it applies to Dale Browning, too. The University of Utah Medical School just made a sensational announcement: Hair is a disease. Dale, I am glad to see that you are nearly cured. We had great success in our athletics that year. We swept football with Jack Thomas as captain. Basketball was led by Norris Nelson. All types of social activities were underway, and the sounds of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey could be heard from the lobby of the Weber Gym every Friday night. Swallowing gold fish was the "in" thing for the now generation in 1939, and Weber got national recognition when Glen Stamos swallowed a live mouse over at the College Inn. It happened - I was there. Needless to say, Dr. Dixon frowned on this, especially on the picture that appeared the next day in the Ogden Standard-Examiner with the mouse going down and the tail still evident and on the x-ray taken at the old Dee Hospital. Glen survived the mouse, but lost his life a few years later in a B-24 plane over Germany. Enrollment in 1939 set new records with nearly 900 students. Someday we would reach the magic 1,000 again and, more importantly, acceptability. A vocational building was constructed on Adams Avenue, and rumors abounded that someday the entire campus would be moved. It is hard to imagine anything so preposterous unless you are a Henry Aldous Dixon. Class of 1943 Reunion Wayne Carver Helen Home Fair called me from Ogden and said there was to be a reunion. She was sure I couldn't come. I said, "Well, Helen, I could send a tape." "That would be all right," she said, after a pause that I still think was longer than it needed to be. I couldn't think of a reunion of the Class of 1943 without my having at least a few words in it. In order to keep something under control, I have written out in a very rough form some things I wanted to say, and I will just read it on the tape. I may be as surprised at what I say as you. In Vreden, Holland, in the late winter of 1944-45, I was taking a shower in one of those 30 seconds per man portable Army shower units, 15 seconds to wet and suds, 15 seconds to rinse. I was in the rinse cycle when from the other end of the shower tent, I heard through the spray and steam, "O, I'll be true to thee, O Purple and White, and I will stand by thee in any fight. For truth and right will always be close by thee, O flag!" I left a bubble or two of suds hanging to my clavicles and rushed to the place the song had come from. There, all pink and sudsy and singing at the top of his abysmal voice - he did everything at the top of his abysmal voice - was Claude Courval of Detroit. He had never been to Weber, nor even to Utah, but he was in my unit, and we had been separated for a month after we got into some trouble after we left England. We had been together since Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where we trained as combat engineers. We told each other about how we lived before the Army began to tell us how to live. He told me of the Perkins Drug Store and of the '34 and '35 Tigers with Cochrane and Bridges and Gehringer and Greenberg. I told him of onion farming and of Farm Bureau Baseball in Plain City. And I told him of Weber College. I taught him "Purple and White" as well as I could transmit the tune and remember the words - and there were the words and some of the tune there in a muddy turnip patch in Holland in a GI shower. It was a touching moment, and standard operating procedure at the shower head allowed me 15 seconds to cry as I got dressed. I am not dispassionate about Weber College. I think of our Class of 1943 as the true war class of Weber College. For the Class of 1942, the war had just begun. For the Class of 1944, the war was winding down. For the Class of 1943, the war was at its peak. 1943 was the war class, and April 8, 1943, was the date the U.S. war machine finally got serious and began to tool up to win and called up the men at Weber who were in the Army Reserve. Some of us in the other reserves - Marines and Navy -stayed around and graduated. I was a Marine until July or August, or up to whenever it was that the Marine examiners took a good look at my body, and still laughing, sent me back to Ogden and the draft board. But though we stayed in school for a couple of more months (some of us), the year really ended and the war really began that April 8th when we all went down to the Union Station and singing "Purple and White" through our brimming eyes and aching, choked throats sent the Army Reservists off in a bunch. Wayne Carver 110 I do not remember much else of that spring of'43; but I will never forget that night, for now the war was real. My brother had been in the Army since early 1941, and we had all heard of Jack Larsen and other Wildcats who were in the Pacific already or in Africa. We saw pictures passed around or in the newspapers. We gave token recognition to the war with blackout dances, scrap drives, and daylight saving time. Jobs opened up at the bases, and a lot of students worked nights and studied days. Naval cadets appeared on campus in the old County Courthouse dormitory. Women studied welding and airplane mechanics in the Vocational Building. The war was everywhere we looked, in the air we breathed, the taste of the food we ate. But after April 8th, the war was not a trembling of the senses: It was there and it was real. I remember going to Salt Lake City on the Bamberger to record at the KDYL studios an essay Mr. Monson wanted me to enter in a national Phi Rho Pi Contest about the way civilians could help the war effort by collecting tires and old pots and pans and papers and rags and rusting farm implements. Fearlessly, I came out foursquare, unequivocally, for scrap iron and victory. The winners of the national contest were to get rich in War Bonds. Several months after I had sent in my record, I met Mr. Monson on the sidewalk between the gym and the Moench Building. "Wayne," he said, in that voice that always sounded as if it conveyed doctrine, "You have taken second place in the national contest and have become famous overnight." I looked around thinking he had mistaken me for Lord George Gordon Byron the morning after the publication of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Actually I am not related in any way to Byron. "And you will win a substantial sum in war bonds," Mr. Monson said. He left me alone to deal as best I could with my fame. A few weeks later I received in the mail $8.20 worth of war savings stamps. That's the last I heard of the contest. I have, by now, through improper financial planning, squandered the money. So we had the war, sort of - as part of the world we lived in, before it became all of the world we lived in. The world broke up on April 8, 1943. It has never been put back together. That night at the depot, we became a class. And though the requirements of my trade have found me going to several other schools since then, my college class is Weber College, 1943. I imagine a lot of us feel that way. Those who stayed until June, of course, had opportunities denied those who left, denied to everyone else ever after. To give you an example, I sang in an assembly, a sacrifice of beauty to duty that only the war could wring from me. With John Vernieu gone, Leo Loll gone, Roy Gibson gone, the Student Body Board of Control was Marvel Murphy, Beth Rhees, and me. We met regularly that spring in the student body office on the west side of the Moench to eat malted milk donuts and ice cream. "Operating expenses" provided the funds, and we were ready to control anything that needed controlling, but there was nothing left to control. It was a year of administrative smoothness, unlike any the school had ever seen. We abolished the yearbook, truncated the athletic program, threw out the honor society. A major play was abandoned when the cast was called up. I was all for closing the library, eliminating classes, abandoning textbooks, but the faculty members on the Board resisted. I remember sitting on the grass, flexing what I called my muscles, but the Marines three months later would not. We planned assemblies. I sang in an assembly with a mop representing Leo, and a broom representing Vernieu, with Beth Rhees, the real Beth, and Murph, the real Marvel Murphy. I sang - real me - unreal voice. All together, we sang: "We three, we're all that's left. The Army got the rest you see." Then Beth: "Carver's echo." Then Murph: "Carver's shadow." Then "And me." That last voice was my own, always good for a laugh. The quintet refused further engagements, and I lived out the school year trying to get a date, now that a congenial sexual ratio, about ten to one, had been established. I advertised myself as Wayne "Swingshift" Carver, God's gift to the girls whose boyfriends worked nights. So the girls got jobs at Hill Field, too. We were the war class, and Pearl Harbor, when we were freshmen, and April 8, 1943, when we were sophomores, bind us together with stronger bands of strapping steel than the usual standard grade bands that hold together other classes of that old school on Jefferson. The big purple W on top of the Moench Building is the emblem of Weber that stays forever in my mind. The new college on the Moench Building W 111