A Tiny Surprise, 1952

Stuff flows into the Woodson steadily, week by week, like small river. Some of it is big important stuff and some of it isn’t, but it’s never boring. This afternoon a colleague showed me a recent acquisition that left me boggled:

Parking stickers are the very definition of “ephemera.” Buy one, put in on the window, then scrape it off or cover it over with a new one next year. That this survived for 66 years (and counting) seems like a miracle. It made my day.

People were already complaining about parking shortages in 1952, by the way. The stadium lot was considered too remote to be of much use.

Bonus: Campus Photographer Tommy Lavergne plays Stump the Band.

“Scare Owls. Do you know where?”

I have to confess that I don’t.

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11 Responses to A Tiny Surprise, 1952

  1. grungy1973 says:

    Tennis courts?
    It’s mind-boggling how disjointed the Google street view is, as you drive it around campus.
    I turn a corner in the stadium lot and the tennis facility turns back into a parking lot, and two different clicks have a half-finished EZF or none at all.

  2. Owlcop says:

    Scare owls at rec center.

  3. Hannes Hofer says:

    My guess is at the Gibbs Recreation Center. The structure looks familiar.

    I am surprised that they had parking stickers in the fifties. I don’t recall having to register my car when I started here in ’81. Parking was wide open and free until they installed the gates at some point during the nineties

  4. Galloway Hudson '60 says:

    I remember parking on the asphalt in front of Lovett Hall as a freshman, but that all changed the next year. As sophomore representative to the first Wiess College cabinet, I got a sticker that allowed me to park in the lot across from the old Wiess. Otherwise, I would have had to park in the stadium lot with the hoi polloi.

  5. Bill Cox says:

    We had parking stickers in the 1970’s–at least for the close-in college lots. It was much easier to get a sticker for Jones College than for Hanszen College; thus Debbie,my fiancée (and now wife of 42+ years) had custody of the car.

  6. loki_the_bubba says:

    As an off-campus freshman in ’78 I had a sticker for the stadium lot.

  7. loki_the_bubba says:

    Does that owl have a chest cannon?

  8. Tommy LaVergne says:

    In the breezeway near the entrance to the Rec Center. It does look like a “Chest Cannon”, but my guess is that it’s an attachment to fit on a pole.

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