Researching Brockport: the Stylus & Normalia Index

An excellent resource for researching Brockport's past is the online index for two student publications, the Normalia and the Stylus.  The Stylus is the student newspaper many have known over the years; the Normalia the predecessor to the Stylus.  The index covers these two publications from 1900-2008, offering access to over 100 years of the college's history! (Please note that this is indeed an "index:" that is you enter your search, then you get results showing what dates and pages have articles on the topic at hand. To get the actual Stylus article go to our microfilm collection on the ground floor; the Normalia was never microfilmed  and is available in the college archives.)

Pre 1928 Stylus online, plus much more!

There is a regional cooperative venture that hosts digitized collections from a number of area archives and museums online called the FLAG Heritage Site. Among the institutions taking part are the archives here at SUNY Brockport. There's lots of great material added already by archivist Mary Jo Gigliotti, including scans of some student publications from the early 20th century, the Normalia and its successor, the Stylus, covering 1900-1928. There are also photos of the campus in various periods and much more. Have a look sometime!

Freshman Hazing

Nowadays hazing is something people associate with fraternities and sororities, but for many years hazing of freshman by the upperclassmen was an accepted part of academic life at most colleges, including Brockport. It was felt to be a fun way to introduce students to the life of the school, help break the ice and so forth. Accounts of it at Brockport go back as early as the 1920s, and it continued into the 1960s.

The photo here is from the freshman hazing of 1962, outside Lathrop, which was the student union then.  According to the Stylus article this photo accompanied, "Freshman Hazing" was also known as "Student Disorientation Week!" The week included various events and rituals, for example a Kangaroo Court, and special hats for the freshman, the "beanies."

As the Stylus related it, "Answering to the gleeful calls of 'Button Frosh,' and 'Ellsworth Frosh,' this year's crop of smiling freshman got down on their knees, bowed towards the town's telephone tower, pushed pencils along the sidewalk, sang frosh-praising songs..."

There were dances too, including a "Get Acquainted Dance" at which a freshman girl won the Limbo dance contest!

Glass plate negatives revived!

Mary Jo Gigliotti, librarian and college archivist, has done a sterling job of working with a significant collection of photographic materials that depict the college and village in the early years of the 20th century. The collection is made up of glass plate negatives, the majority of them taken by Brockport resident George Guelph,  photographer for the local paper, amateur naturalist and member of the Brockport Yacht Club.

You can view and download scans of the collection that Mary Jo has posted on a regional historical site, just click here. If you have any information on persons or places depicted in the photos please share with us at archives@brockport.edu. Pictured here is one of the photo scans, the girl's basketball team at Brockport in 1906.

Daisy Chain & Class Day

For many years the end of the spring semester featured "Senior Week," which finished with commencement. A popular event during the week was the "Daisy Chain" processional. A typical such event started with the seniors having a class lunch, held for many years in the First Baptist Church on Main Street, and in latter years in the Roxbury Inn, also on Main Street. Following the lunch the seniors, in their caps and gowns, would parade from Main Street to the campus, led by a group of 12 sophmore women elected to the honor, wearing gowns and carrying the daisy chains. This procession sprang from the concept of a "moving up" day, as the freshman became sophmores and so forth.

The daisy chain processional seems to have started at Brockport in the late 1920s, and ran up into the early 1960s, at which time a growing class size and changing attitudes saw the tradition end. The photo here is from the late 1950s, from slides in the Peg Hare Browne collection. Peg was a Brockport grad ('44) and then a campus school teacher for many years.

While the daisy chain died out here, it is still done at some colleges - perhaps something to revive at Brockport? :-)

The "teachers college" library

Time moves on, and the library did as well as the college. In 1942 after a long campaign Brockport became a Teachers College, meaning that it began awarding the Bachelor's degree. (As a "Normal School," our graduates received certificates to teach in the public schools; many of their credits could transfer to further schooling if they wished.)

The library had occupied a set of rooms in the old Normal School building, and had a similar position in the new building erected in the late 1930s, occupying a set of rooms on the second floor, in the middle of what we now call Hartwell Hall. (Pictured here is a scene of students studying there in 1946.)

Like today's library, there was a reference collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries, books on diverse topics that could be checked out, a children's literature collection and so forth. Starting in 1924 we had our first librarian with professional training, Elizabeth Sherley, who had gone to the New York State Library School in Albany. Librarian Mary Lee McCrory succeeded Sherley in 1938 and a second librarian, Rosemond Cook, was added in 1941.

After WWII, as the school experienced tremendous growth in student numbers, expansion of the curriculum and so on the need for a separate building for the library became increasingly obvious. One staff member, senior cataloger Joyce Ogden who retired in the early 1990s, recalled that when she started in 1958 the library was still in Hartwell Hall, and the staff desk seating was so limited that staff had to share desks in rotation; there just wasn't room for them all to be present and working at any one time!

Finally in 1961 the first building on campus designed expressly as a library building was erected, but that is for the next posting :-)

The library in the 1890s

Last time we looked at the early library of the Collegiate Institute era, 1835-1866. In 1867 Brockport became one of the new state "Normal" or teacher training schools, and this led to increased demands on the library. As a teacher training school the state supplied the textbooks, and these were housed in a special part of the library. The library also held a smaller collection of "miscellaneous and reference" books, as well as continuing to house the "philosophical apparatus," the lab equipment of the day.

As time went on in the Normal era expectations for research by students and faculty increased, leading to greater demand for library resources. For some time funds were limited, and the need was met by two of the Greek letter societies of the day, Gamma Sigma for men and Arethusa for women. They maintained a small library of several hundred books each, housed in the rooms given to the use of the societies in the building at that time.

For much of the 19th century the library was maintained by one of the faculty as part of their duties, William Lennon and then Herman Burlingame doing this until the early 1890s. During the time Burlingame was overseeing the library it acquired a set of rooms of it' own, rather than simply being a set of shelves in one of the rooms.

Then in1894 Jeanette Reynolds '73, who had been a secretary at the school, became the first person to be full time as a librarian. Early in her tenure as librarian she arranged and cataloged the books according to the then new Dewey Decimal system, secured the recognition of Brockport as a Federal government depository, a status still held today, and in general established a modern library.

(The photos are from the first yearbook, a one time effort in 1899. Some years later the early Stylus ran an annual yearbook issue ca1916-1928. After that the student yearbook was the Saga, which ceased being published in the 1990s.)