The picture I was going to use was one from the batch that loyal reader Karl Benson ’63 gave to the Woodson last December. But as I looked closer at some of the other images I was startled to find the answer to a tiny question that has nagged me for quite a while and that felt especially acute after the last post about commencement—when precisely did the parking lot in front of Lovett become a lawn?
If you go back and look that last post you can see that the area seems to be a well established lawn by the time of Pitzer’s inauguration in 1962 and it was still a parking lot in the spring of 1959. That’s not a huge gap, I guess, but I’ve always hoped to get closer than that.
So this is the image I found today, precisely dated, showing a newly planted lawn and reconfigured parking just before Thanksgiving, 1959. If you zoom in you can see guys still working near the building:
I am happy.
Bonus: This is what I started with. The combination of the caption and the look on her face made me smile.
Extra Bonus: O-Week shenanigans, sent in by a loyal reader. I’m not sure how they got it up there.
Who is the gentleman in the orange dunce hat?
It’s Edgar Odell Lovett. It was done for the Centennial in 2012.
Back to the commencement post, where you said that it was held in the gym in 1951, but not after that, and I said that itt was, in 1960 or 1961 at one of my graduations, because of rain. My classmates have assured me that it was in the gym in 1960. This post reminds me that we were set to hold the ceremony on the new lawn in 1960 but were foiled by the rain. We did graduate on the lawn in 1961.