Thomas G. Alexander Perhaps it is a sign of getting old when you want to reminisce on times past. It seems to me, though, that an occasion like this is a time we ought to reminisce. In the years since 1955, each of us has gone separate ways. Old friends lose touch with one another and keep in touch with others. Vance Pace, Ken Hull, Bob Standing, and I see each other occasionally. I have worked with Barbara Roberts Wheeler on a number of occasions. I see Curt Van Alfen and Marilyn Arnold occasionally since we are all on the BYU faculty. I see Arda Swenson Molen occasionally. I also see Audrey Montgomery Godfrey occasionally. You know that you are getting old when the people who went to college with you, like Audrey, have children who attend your classes at the university where you teach. Barbara Roberts Wheeler kept a number of copies of the Signpost, and she let me have them to prepare this talk. I noted that Audrey was the editor of the Signpost in 1954. Vance Pace was a reporter for the paper, and he wrote a column on club news from Phoenix. As you know, Phoenix got the nickname "The Sisters" because the club appeared in a list in the Signpost among girls' clubs whose members had the highest grade-point averages. Well, Vance recalled that Phoenix had an exchange party with Otyokwa, which, as you know, was the sister club of Excelsior. A group of Excels boys crashed the party and tore things up a bit, as Excels boys were wont to do. Vance was, as you might imagine, quite upset with these guys, and he decided to get back at them. Plagiarizing from Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees," Vance wrote in his column in the Signpost, "I think that I shall never see/ A club as dumb as the Big E." We were still down at the old campus then, and a few days later there appeared quite mysteriously on Phoenix's bulletin board at the entrance to the Gym Building the following note: "Cut the ditties in the Signpost, or we'll pull a panty raid," signed Big E. For each of us, Weber College, excuse me Paul, Weber State University - I suppose it will always be Weber College for those of my generation - has different meanings. For Barbara Roberts and Jim Wheeler, it means the place they met. Perhaps I can tell you how that happened. As many of you remember, some of the faculty used to take students on field trips. Many of you remember Walter Buss's field trips to Southern Utah -camping out under the stars. Some of us went on debate trips with Carl Green. Others took the engineering tour with Jack Atkins - he was the one that always looked like a high school student - Elliot Rich, and my dad to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, Barbara and Jim went on a field trip to Willard Peak with Sheldon Hayes's life science class. After they had climbed to the top, they came down, walking and sliding part of the way. About half way down, Barbara slid on a particularly sharp rock and tore the seat of her Levis. Jim did not know her very well at the time, but he saw the pants rip, and enterprising young man that he was, he hurried up to see what he could do. As luck would have it, he followed closely behind her to the bottom of the mountain; then he told her about the ripped pants. Instead of thanking him, Barbara became extremely angry because he had not said anything earlier. Nevertheless, after her anger cooled down, the two of them started going together, and, as they say, the rest is history. Perhaps there is a moral - or lack thereof-in this experience that all of us could benefit from. You have all heard the saying "Love at first sight." For Jim, you understand, as soon as he saw the rip in the seat of Barbara's pants, it was "lust" at first sight. As all of you remember, we moved from the old campus downtown between Adams and Jefferson and 24th and 25th Streets to the new campus - at least it was new to us - where we are now. I remember that we had to race back to the old campus for assemblies, gym classes, and basketball games. When we had assemblies, you will all remember that we used to drive down. Ogden City Police would always set up radar traps to catch the students as they drove down and back. There were so many ways that you could go, and the police had a limited number of radar guns, so they couldn't set up very many. Invariably someone would put up a hand-written poster at the exit from the campus letting us know where the radar was set up on the way down, and someone else would put a paper on the door of the Moench Building saying where it was on the way back. Still, the police always seemed to get someone. You will all remember that when we moved up, the campus consisted of four buildings named one, two, three, and four, and an old World War II surplus barracks just east of Bbuilding Four called the TUB. To dedicate the campus, the administration bought a statue of Louis F. Moench, who was the founder of the Weber Stake Academy, the predecessor of the college. I notice that they have replaced the first statue with a new one. You will understand why they replaced it if you looked at the old one very carefully. A careful examination shows that like many Tom Alexander 124 of the guys at our dances, the statue had two left feet. That is, on his right foot the arch was on the outside and his foot pointed outside as well. The administration was very proud of the statue since it was made of Italian marble. I always suspected that the artist was probably a drunken tombstone carver who forgot that he had already chiseled out the left foot when he started on the right one. Frankly, I think that Farrell Collett could have done better. I will always remember Farrell's art appreciation class. Laurence Burton used to come by the class every day and look in the window. One day Burton burst into the room, stood there and surveyed the students for about two minutes, then turned around and walked out. Farrell was somewhat taken aback, but he recovered and told us that Laurence must have sold some penny uranium stock. He was always hyper, Farrell said, after he had made a killing on the penny stock market. I notice from reading the newspapers that over the past few years Weber State has been having trouble getting a large enough attendance at the ball games. Frankly, I find that hard to understand. We always used to go to the games. It was a cheap date, and most of us were in favor of cheap dates. We generally sat as clubs with our dates and cheered for the team. We liked to see the team win, but even when it didn't, we sort of felt it was our duty to be there and cheer. I notice that in the 1954-55 year, the football team won 2 games and lost 7. The basketball team won 11 out of 22. A number of us were quite interested in politics. Ron Smout, who was a member of the debate team, was a staunch Republican. I, of course, was a confirmed Democrat. One day Ron told me that he must have been twelve years old before he learned that "damned" and "democrat" were not one word. That's OK, I replied; I was probably the same age when I learned that "reactionary" and "republican" were not a single word. Since then I have learned that Republicans can be more fun than Democrats; after all, I married one. Several of us here used to be on the debate team. I remember one debate trip we took to Los Angeles. When Carl Green, the debate coach, wanted to impress us with his experience, he would let us know that he had crossed the Atlantic twice. Therold Todd, who had a 4-point grade average and was a bit smarter than the rest of us, pointed out that if you went to Europe and wanted to get back to the United States you had to cross the Atlantic twice. In addition to debating, we tried to visit some of the sights. One of the things we did was go to a television show. Rose Marie - some of you may remember her from the old Dick Van Dyke Show - had a show in which she did a stand-up comedy routine. That was in the days before canned laughter, so the guys who warmed up the audience in preparation for the show picked six or seven people they called kibitzers to sit on the stage in a group. They were supposed to laugh really loud at Rose Marie's jokes. Well, Jim Wheeler and I sat down near the front, and we laughed at the jokes the warm-up guy told, so he picked us for the kibitzers' panel. He asked where we were from, and we told him that we came from Ogden, Utah. He asked whether we were Mormons, and we said yes. Then he asked how many wives we had. Well, I thought that he was still going for the laughs, so I would play along and top him. I said we weren't married but that if you were really high up in the Church you might have as many as six or seven. At that point someone in the audience realized that the guy was really serious, and he set him straight. After Jim and I sat down with the other kibitzers, the guy next to me poked me in the ribs and said, "Look, I know that you were telling the truth. Those guys who are high up in the Church hide out all those wives in the mountains." Let me finish by honoring and thanking the faculty of Weber College. They were a dedicated group of men and women and devoted a great deal of time to students. I want particularly to single out Dello Dayton. Many of us took Dello's history classes, and he was adviser to Phoenix. Like many in the freshman class, I started out majoring in engineering. So did Vance, Bob, and many others. Bob became a psychologist and is now an official at Chico State University in California. Vance became a political scientist and worked in the foreign service. My dad, who taught engineering here at Weber, wanted me to be an engineer because he thought I would earn a lot of money and always have a job. About the only ones I can remember who continued in engi- Dedication of the first Moench statue 125