HE-SHE DANCES: See the handsome couple here? That’s Leona Anderson ’27 Edu and Ellen Bullock ’27 Edu. They were classmate and friends. And for at least one winter night back in the 1920s they were each other’s date at the annual he-she dance.The fact that Leona is dressed in the ladylike fashion of the day while Ellen is decked out in gentlemanly attire was the whole point of the he-she dance. It was a lark, a night of amusement among the ladies. Days or weeks before the dance, girls would ask other girls to be their dates. When the big night arrived, the girls who did the asking would dress as men and escort their dates to the dance (usually held in the Armory), where the party would begin. “They were more like the big dances in Rec Hall—like a sock hop or something,” recalls Grace Baer Holderman ’34 Edu. “But the only men there were the guys in the orchestra.” It's hard to say when he-she dances began or ended, but certainly they were in full swing by 1923 and nonexistent by 1940. Holderman, who attended several he-she dances during her college years, stresses that the dances were nothing but innocent fun. “Girls dancing together was just the common, decent, ordinary thing to do,” she says. “It wasn’t strange; it was just a lovely party for coeds.” 

BONFIRE: Back in the early 1900s, a Penn State athletic victory was often celebrated by setting fire to the towering, kerosene-soaked mountain of foraged wood that would sometimes take students a full two days to gather. When the pile was fully ablaze, coaches would deliver rousing speeches, the band would play, and students would celebrate around the crackling inferno.

The first bonfire on record at Penn State dates to 1903. (The one shown here—celebrating a wrestling win over Cornell—is from 1911.) The tradition was temporarily suspended in 1914 when the captain of the football team and several other players were severely burned by a bonfire after the team had played Ivy League powerhouse Harvard to a 13-13 tie. By the 1930s, students were once again creating bonfires on the corner of College and Allen. But by the end of World War II, controlled acts of arson had become passe on campus. “The war put a lot of things into suspended animation,” says former Penn State archivist Lee Stout ’69, ’72 MA Lib. “Some things, like bonfires, stayed suspended.” 

THE SWIM TEST: In 1934, Penn State decided that its freshmen needed to be able to do more than tread water, and Athletic Director Hugo Bezdek ’32, ’33 MA Lib instituted mandatory swim testing for every incoming student. “We should like all students to be able to swim before they leave Penn State,” Bezdek told the Collegian. Only 60% of the first-year students that year believed they were capable of passing, and 12% of those confident folks still failed. All those who failed were immediately enrolled in swimming class, and had to pass the class before they graduated. While enforcement grew more lax as time wore on, it wasn’t until 1981 that the swimming test became voluntary. 

MANDATORY CHAPEL: Compulsory attendance at weekday chapel services dates back to the earliest days of what was then the Farmers’ High School. Students were required to be in the Old Main chapel at 6 a.m. (5  a.m. during the summer) for sermons on morality and God. A second mandatory service was held in the early evening, and Sunday services were also a must. 

Beginning in 1912, students began to formally challenge the idea of mandatory chapel services. “In what was to become a yearly ritual,” Mike Bezilla ’75 MA, ’78 PhD Lib writes in Penn State: An Illustrated History, “students sent petitions to the president and board of trustees asking that the compulsory aspects of these services be eliminated on the grounds that a state institution had no constitutional right to require a person’s presence at a religious function.” Unfortunately for the students, it also became something of a yearly ritual for the administration and trustees to deny their increasingly strident petitions.

Finally, facing opposition from a majority of the student body and the university’s 10th president, Ralph Dorn Hetzel, mandatory attendance at weekday chapel services was discontinued in the fall of 1927. At Hetzel’s further urging, mandatory Sunday chapel was jettisoned in early 1930. 

MAY DAY: When Penn State’s inaugural May Queen pageant was celebrated on May 20, 1914, at sunset, Mildred Ride 1914 H&HD was crowned the first-ever May Queen. About five years later, the celebration was titled May Day and had grown into a festival featuring dancers, stage plays, and Glee Club performances. The crowning of the May Queen remained an important part of the party, and strong feelings were expressed about the candidates. A Collegian article from 1937 opined: “(F)or some pashy bisquit to fall into a spot like that just ’cause she happened to be born beautiful but dumb.... No, indeed girls, this department certainly agrees that, by all means, May Queen should be elected for ‘suitability, interest, and past activities.’” May Day officially ended in 1960, when students instituted Senior Class Day in its place. 

POVERTY DAY: During the national economic boom of the Roaring ’20s, poverty was far from the minds of most Americans. This attitude was evidenced locally during Penn State’s Poverty Day, first held on Oct. 25, 1919. It began as a way to humble incoming freshmen: The newcomers were made to dress in the oldest, most dilapidated garb they could find, which they would sport to Saturday morning classes and then to the afternoon’s football game. After the victims marched around the field at halftime in their torn slacks, cardboard boxes, and burlap sacks, upperclassmen voted on the costumes and awarded prizes. When the Great Depression arrived and poverty became less of a punch line, the event disappeared. 

COMPULSORY MILITARY TRAINING: The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 called for military training of students at land-grant institutions. At the Farmers’ High School, military training for all male students became mandatory in 1865. Compulsory military training was eventually limited to all able-bodied freshman and sophomore males, but the creation of the national Student Army Training Corps during World War I briefly expanded that to male students of all ages. The SATC disbanded shortly after the war, and was replaced by the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and a return to a two-year requirement for underclassmen. After surviving student opposition in the 1930s—and a Supreme Court ruling that ROTC did not need to be compulsory in land-grant schools—mandatory participation in ROTC continued through World War II. Compulsory military education finally ended at Penn State with the freshman class of 1963, when ROTC became volunteer-only. 

GENTLE THURSDAY: It was the 1970s and Gentle Thursday was all about harmony and togetherness. For one afternoon each spring, young and old would gather on the HUB lawn and bask in the crazy, sunlit glow of their own wild existence. Folk and rock musicians peddled their tunes, Frisbees were tossed, dogs frolicked, an occasional student was seen drinking or smoking something illicit, everyone smiled and laughed. The whole experience was cryptically and succinctly summarized in 1976 by one cosmic reveler, who told a Daily Collegian writer: “Molecular gas has made this a truly genuine experience.” 

It began spontaneously in 1971 as “sort of a non-event event,” according to Lee Stout, the former archivist. Within a few years, what had once been spontaneous became institutionalized. “They had planning committees and such,” Stout says. “That was the first major change.”

And then things just got out of hand. Gentle Thursday lost the cool vibe and became nothing but a big, loud party, featuring lots of university students and local high schoolers alike partaking in various illegal substances. When the marijuana usage and underage drinking got too heavy, Gentle Thursday had to go. By 1981, gone it was, another Penn State tradition up in smoke. 

PUSHBALL SCRAPS: Before major sports took over the spotlight, among the most anticipated sporting events at Penn State were “scraps”—contests that pitted the sophomore and freshman classes against each other in physical battles for supremacy. While some scraps—like the “Tie-Up Scrap,” in which two teams of 50 competed to see which side could literally tie up more of their competitors during six five-minute periods—seemed to be short-lived, Pushball Scraps endured as a tradition for over two decades, beginning in 1908. The game was simple: The frosh and sophs battled to push a giant, inflated leather ball, typically 6 feet in diameter, past their opponents’ goal line, and the highest score at the end won the battle. The competition became so popular that local stores began to offer advertisements using its name: “The winner of the Pushball Scrap is doubtful, but the men who buy Bostonians are always winners,” read an ad from the Bostonian men’s shoe shop on South Allen Street. Pushball scraps were eventually phased out in the mid-1930s. 

PHI PSI 500: In 1968, members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity organized a 1.1-mile race through downtown State College. Participants were encouraged to dress in strange costumes and required to down a beer or soda at several bars along the route. As an annual event to raise money for local charities—and an excuse to get stinking drunk on an otherwise uneventful April afternoon—the Phi Psi 500 was a grand success. In 1985, for instance, the raise raised $25,000 for Easter Seals and the Mount Nittany Conservancy. 

Beginning in 1988, strongly encouraged by the State College Borough Council—which was in turn spurred to action by an incensed local citizenry opposed to wanton displays of public drunkenness and idiocy—alcohol was incrementally phased out of the race, a move that caused participation, proceeds, and spectator interest to dwindle. By 1991, the Phi Psi 500 no longer included beer consumption or a race through town, Instead, it was an alcohol-free talent show that featured singing, lip-syncing, and comedy skits. In 1992, after 24 years of existence the Phi Psi 500 was history.