BYU NewsNet - Columns Cover Campus

By Jacob Terry

Jerry’s Jargon. Pratte’s Post Script. Hartt to Heart. These are just three of the many clever column titles The Daily Universe used in the late 50s, a time when the lead article was more likely to be an editorial on the stealing of the “Y” bell than the election of President Eisenhower.

Between 1957 and 1959 alone, The Daily Universe ran more than 15 opinion columns. From “Marking Time with Mark Murphy” to “The Stagline,” The Daily Universe had a column for just about every subject.

“It was more folksy,” said Hartt Wixom, writer of sports column Hartt to Heart and editor-in-chief in 1959. “We would write about dating relationships and we tried to make people think. They had a lot of stuff then on who was getting engaged, big long stories on engagements.”

A column called Diamond Jubilee appeared regularly listing engagements on campus — as well as including a little gossip. For example, the column’s author, Jeri Ann Murphy, reported on one student who previously had avoided dating.

At the time she wrote: “This Wag with an artistic flair, who neither believes in dancing nor in the fact that girls exist, was discerned taking the long dark way to Mutual with his brother’s fiancé.”

Such specific coverage was common in the many lifestyle columns written. Among the events mentioned in two years of coverage were students delivering a mouse in a nicely wrapped box to women in Helaman Halls, a “revolt” of Heritage Halls women walking out after dorm hours and a female student getting a “butch” haircut.

“You have to remember, the school was a helluvalot smaller then,” said Duston Harvey, who wrote the column Picayune Confidential in 1959.

BYU enrollment surpassed 9,000 for the first time in 1957. That’s substantially smaller than BYU’s current enrollment of over 29,000 full-time students. Although the university has grown, many of the column topics of the 50s are with us today: public displays of affection, walking across the grass, closing down campus for assemblies and talking in the library.

“Seems to me that a decision should be reached as to whether the library is a place for collective or for individual study,” wrote Joan Blodgett in her column Kampus Klippings. “There seems to be a question in the minds of some students.”

Although there were many columns on campus social life and sports, more serious topics were also covered. A column titled “From the Tower” often concerned itself with the intricacies of student government and took the administration to task for some of its decisions.

“The Journalism Department offices were right across the hall,” Harvey said. “We got called in and chastised. There were sort of limits on what we could print. We had a little more freedom back then, but you know, it was BYU.”

The choice to write about some of the smaller details of student life was a conscious one, Wixom said. It did not indicate a lack of conviction towards journalism.

“We felt like our role was to cover the campus,” Wixom said. “We took it seriously, maybe even more seriously than they do today. We always felt like we had a great responsibility to even spell someone’s name right.”