The College Years: 1921-1925

by Elizabeth Newell Marvel Marti

(Excerpted from her book, A Celebration of Life, privately printed in 1985 and used with the permission of Jack Marvel)  

 

I shall never forget my arrival at Hastings College, alone, on the train and not knowing a single person. Had I gone home at the end of the first week, I would never have returned. But by the end of the second week all had changed — Hastings College, the “College of the Plains,” in those days was very small, with only 300 students and by today’s standards, its education quite simple, elementary and unsophisticated. But those four years, which seem rather prosaic and uneventful as I try to recall and recount them, probably changed my whole life more than any other such a short time span. Truly, it set the direction, the course, for all the rest of my years and life experience. The faculty members at Hastings College were dedicated and caring, and occasionally inspiring and intellectually stimulating. My affection and respect for Dr. Calvin French, the beloved and saintly President of Hastings College, kept me from breaking any college rules and thus disappointing him, although several of my good friends were expelled after going to a Demolay dance during my freshman year.... I felt much the same about Dean Frank E. Weyer, for he was not only an inspiring teacher but a very wise, dedicated, and understanding Dean.... Miss Janet Carpenter was probably the greatest teacher in all of the history of the College. Her course in Advanced Composition taught me to think independently, to read with discernment, and constantly to want to learn more. It was she who introduced me to the Atlantic Monthly and Harpers, two of the then great magazines of opinion.

     Life at Hastings College was strictly regulated. Church attendance and daily chapel services, as well as a Bible class every year, were required. I lived in Alexander Hall for the first three years, where the rules were very strict. We were required to be in our rooms for study hours every week night from 8-10 p.m.  But on weekends we could sign out of the dormitory, saying just where and with whom we would be until 11:00 p.m., when the front door was locked. After that the only way to get in was to awaken the housemother and receive a demerit, or go in by the fire escape window on the third floor — which I used on a few occasions!

                Automobiles were not permitted, and so we walked every place, even to church and the Hotel Clarke, a mile and a half away, for our formal banquets. What a sight we must have made — dressed in formals, high heels, gloves, and wearing beautiful corsages — as we went tripping off on that long trek! Since dancing was not allowed either, our social life consisted of formal banquets and various kinds of parties, usually given by the societies which were the substitute for sororities and fraternities. I belonged to Theta Psi Beta and helped to organize a new one (Chi Omega Psi) in my senior year, when the increased enrollment made it necessary. In our passion for democracy, the year before we had instituted a requirement that all girls should be invited to join a society in order to overcome the heartache and stigma of rushing followed by the selection of only a chosen few. To be democratic and kind and yet retain some elements of preference and selectivity, we instituted a quite complicated set of procedures which I had finally designed but attributed it to a dream — not wishing to claim it as an original idea! I think it really worked quite well for several years.

                Hastings College gave me the joy of some dear life-long friends and widened my academic knowledge, but there were several other contributions — “hinges” so to speak — which opened doors into new and different life experiences. Someone has said, “that to become educated is to become someone and not just to learn some things.” For me, the process of becoming someone — a person — an identity — has been lifelong, but as I look back in the perspective of many years, I can now recognize some of those turning points when my life was being shaped and I was in the forever on-going process of “becoming.”

                First of all, I learned to study — the hard way! Good grades had come to me in High School without any effort on my part and so the night before my first Chemistry test; I had blithely relaxed and attended a party. To my utter amazement and chagrin my grade on that test was a 60% which I had never seen before! Needless to say, my grade on the next test was 100% which amazed the professor so much that my final grade for the year was also 100% (A+), and I finally graduated cum laude in 1925.

                The second “hinge” for me at H.C. was intangible, but no less real. Because of the religious emphasis at the College in those years, the Bible and our religious heritage became a living and growing experience. The strong commitment on the campus to a life of service permeated all of our planning for the future. It was a faith and commitment which ever deepened into a fundamental part of my life. In later years, this intangible concept was put into words for me — by Oldham, I think, in Life is Commitment — “that we find the good life, not by who we are, not by what we do, nor by what we have. We find the good life by what we give ourselves to.”

               
                Another “hinge” of my college days which opened doors for me was a direct benefit derived from being in a very small college. In spite of my shyness and sense of inferiority, I was given opportunities again and again to attack a task or to fill a role which I would never have had the courage to seek. One remarkable instance involved Dr. Hayes M. Fuhr, the director of the Conservatory of Music, who asked me to be in the Glee Club presentation of the operetta The Fire Prince even though I could not sing a note! He chose me because I was tall and could thus balance the very tall girl on the other end of the chorus line — and then he asked me to speak (either at the High School or the Church) in each town on the two-week tour on “What H.C. means to me as a student,” but because it was a small college, there were also opportunities to do all kinds of tasks — to chair a host of committees, to be Class President — to become a so-called “Leader.” It was through those assorted tasks that I slowly came to see something which I really understood only years later, when out of learning from experiences in the field of Group Dynamics in the ‘60s, I came across this definition and recognized its fundamental truth. “Leadership is not too difficult. It does not require a certain set of qualities or talents or skills. We know now — that every person exerts some leadership, that a leader is a person who sees a need and makes a response to it, one who is willing to become personally involved in a situation.”

 
                But perhaps the most important “turning point” of my college experience ... was that Hastings College brought into my life both of the men whom I later married. The catalyst in this story was a young faculty member, Miles Martin, who had come to H.C. in 1921 to teach Physics and Debate. He and his bride Lucille became dear and life-long friends.... Early in my freshman year I had noticed a striking, handsome young fellow on the campus [Lloyd Marti] and dared to hope for a date with him — but he never really saw me until months later.... That spring, Miles decided to raise money for a debate room by putting on a play using his Debate team for the cast. The play was to be Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw, and he found himself with a cast complete except for the leading lady. When I arrived in Hastings on the train after spring vacation, Miles and Dean Shaffer met me to ask me to play the part and told me that Lloyd Marti was to play the leading man. Of course, I quickly accepted thinking that he would finally have to notice me! The play was given in the old Kerr Opera House downtown and was a great success — although I did not recognize for years that it was a satire on war.... Lloyd and I enjoyed a rather intense romance which was both sweet and short. He went out the next year to teach in the High School at McCook, where he met the girl whom he later married. In the meantime I had met Archie [Marvel], and again Miles Martin was responsible. I had played a part with Miles in a short play Suppressed Desires, which we had given over and over before Hastings groups. At a Hastings Kiwanis Club dinner Miles introduced me to Archie, a handsome widower with two little boys.... By the end of my third year, we were engaged and planning to be married after my graduation. [Archie and Beth Marvel were married for nearly 40 years. After she was widowed, Beth Marvel married widower, Lloyd Marti.]

                Midway through college came one of those again unrecognized turning points.... Toward the end of my second year, Miss [Janet] Carpenter, as faculty adviser, called me into her office to ask me to accept the position of President of the Student YWCA. I was completely amazed, for although I had attended the weekly YWCA meetings, held on Thursdays in lieu of the chapel service, and I had served on the Student Cabinet, to become its President absolutely scared me to death. I felt that I was totally unprepared and very ignorant. That was my first experience in being asked to do a task which was much too large for me. But fortunately for me the confidence and faith and support of many people led me to accept the honor, and to try to respond to the opportunities of the task.

                This was the first time I had ever confronted my own sense of inadequacy with the then very shaky faith that God would never ask nor give me the opportunity to do a task without giving me also the strength and support to try to accomplish it. Such confrontations have persisted throughout my life, for I have never felt completely adequate. Self-assurance is not one of my characteristics, I am convinced. As a consequence of that election, the path of my life was set in a new direction for the next sixty years — one of great and lasting rewards.

 
                That summer (1923) I attended the Student YWCA Conference at the YMCA Conference Center in Estes Park, Colorado, and there began my life-long love affair with that particular place. It was just one year after the Fall River Road up to the [Continental] Divide had been built, and we drove up in sightseeing buses. The hairpin turns were so narrow that the bus was forced to back up at each curve and hang over the cliff in order to get around the turns. We hiked from Bear Lake to Fern Lake (the only time I ever made that hike). We slept in small cottages on the Big Thompson — all a great experience for a girl from the Great Plains of Nebraska.

                The conference was in itself a revelation. Grace Loucks (later Grace Elliott) was the Bible teacher and she introduced me to “Amos” and “Hosea” in far broader terms than I had been taught at Hastings College in the compulsory Old Testament History Course. Hers was the modern approach to the social problems of our day through Biblical teachings. It was my introduction into the Social Gospel (led by Walter Rauschenbush) which was just then coming into prominence, and which taught basically that Christianity could not be separated from concern for the social issues of the day — such as economic injustice, war and peace, class and race discrimination, and justice and freedom for all God’s children. The Social Gospel was to dominate my religious thinking for decades. Grace Loucks Elliott came back into my life in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, as a beloved friend and adviser, during her years as President and then Executive Director of the YWCA of the U.S.A.

 
                Another National YWCA staff member in that conference was a lovely, talented black woman named Juliette Derricott. She was the first black person I had ever known and I was deeply impressed. When she died a few years later in the deep South of neglect following an auto accident because she was not given emergency treatment at a nearby “white” hospital, a window opened for me which has never closed — a window which revealed the injustice and the inhumanity of our system in its treatment of our black people, and proved to be not only a window but a threshold into wider interracial experiences in the YWCA and even into the Civil Rights Movement in the ‘60s. [Beth Marvel Marti served the local and state YWCAs in various capacities, was elected to the National Board in 1951, served as President of the YWCA of the U.S.A. from 1961-1967 and President of the YWCA National Board of Trustees from 1974-1979.  She remained active in the World YWCA throughout her life.]
 
                1921-1925 was the age of the Flapper, Jazz, Prohibition, and the Speak Easy, Scott Fitzgerald and the Scope “Monkey Trial” in the sheltered life at Hastings College, we were not aware of any of those trends nor designations.... The only one I recall was the disturbing resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan for the first time since the aftermath of the Civil War. I was invited to attend and become a member, at a “secret” meeting in the Clarke Hotel ballroom — but the Klan’s blind hatred of Catholics, Jews, and Negroes disgusted and frightened me. Instead I was drawn to the pacifist movement and to speakers and writers such as Sherwood Eddy and Kirby Page. Later I made speeches for several years urging the ratification of the Kellogg Peace Pact Treaty, which would renounce forever the use of war as an instrument of national policy. That treaty was signed in 1929 by sixty-six nations just when the forces in Germany were gathering in the relentless push toward Hitler and the next war....

                As I look back ... one thing has become very clear, my gratitude to, and appreciation of, the Hastings College of 1921-1925. During those years we were given a “ground on which to stand” for life in this rapidly changing world. We were exposed to values and attitudes, to a religious faith and to commitment to service, to a respect for decency and acceptance of all people and to a curiosity for learning, all of which truly changed the course of my life. Thus, I treasure especially two honors: an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters awarded to me by the College in 1962, and my election to the Hastings College Board of Trustees in 1964.