\n\tBy MARTY LEVINE<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1934, Pitt (and the rest of the U.S.) had just passed through the worst of the Great Depression, but the Oakland campus wasn\u2019t yet feeling the upturn. The world was still a bit \u2026 makeshift.<\/p>\n
\n\tTake the rat problem in the Cathedral, for instance \u2014 a structure still unfinished at the top, but occupied below that. Beginning in 1933, hundreds of workmen brought in by FDR\u2019s New Deal employment program, the Civil Works Administration, had eaten their lunches in the building under construction, and now students, staff and faculty were leaving behind scraps of their lunches too.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cSo from far and near,\u201d reported the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, one of Pittsburgh\u2019s three daily papers, \u201ca small but select tribe of rats has come to make the dim, dark recesses of the unfinished Cathedral their home. \u2026 \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cAbout a month ago,\u201d the article continued, \u201csome of the Cathedral janitors had an idea. In boxes, they brought the biggest, boldest tomcats they could find. Here, they said, these ferocious cats will pounce upon these rats like panthers!\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tUnfortunately, those feral creatures apparently preferred other digs and snuck back outside. And then, the paper said, \u201cPitt officials had a truly brilliant idea. They asked: \u2018If cats can be homesick, why not raise the Cathedral’s cats to be at home in the Cathedral? We will bring them in as small kittens and wait for them to grow big enough to fight the rats with some hope of victory.\u2019 So that is what they have done.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPitt\u2019s kitten wrangler, Tony Pasquarelli, was certain of success this time: \u201cJust wait. These cats, they will snap up these rats. But it is not allowed for the students to feed the cats. A cat to hunt rats good should not be too full.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnother feline who wasn\u2019t too full was the student who acted as the Pitt Panther mascot. He got a new, slim panther costume to squeeze into for the Pitt-West Virginia football game that fall. The poor guy \u2014 Pitt cheerleader David Patrick, a second-year med student \u2014 had a costume \u201cmade of four real panther hides, 10 deer hides, three combined panther tails, real claws, (and) zippers to help the inner man get in.\u201d He debuted it at a freshman orientation event \u2014 complete with an address from football coach John B. \u201cJock\u201d Sutherland and the dean of men, recitations, a boxing match and songs by the University quartet.<\/p>\n
\n\tOn March 22, the noise of Cathedral construction, involving pneumatic drills and hammers, was measured with a new Westinghouse device that place the decibel level at 105, \u201cwhich is louder than a boiler factory,\u201d the Sun-Telegraph said. The top of the structure had also acquired a new design: \u201ca massive steel platform which will support a new top knot. \u2026 Stone and concrete has been chipped away at the four corners of the top of the building to make room for the new design. Now the stone is to be brought higher, shooting the tower’s top 40 feet nearer the clouds. \u2026 New plans by architect Charles Z. Lauder call for a glass enclosed observation deck and lounge room.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBy April, the Post-Gazette announced that the unfinished 42nd floor of the Cathedral had acquired a \u201clighthouse,\u201d with one light beam shining upward and the other aimed horizontally. The lenses, a kind of prism designed at Carnegie Institute of Technology, were \u201cbuilt here for use at the Panama Canal, but since that time lay hidden away in Carnegie Museum. Two lenses, identical in design, are now in use at the Canal Zone, sending rays to ships 17 miles at sea. \u2026 The lighthouse stands,\u201d said Chancellor John Bowman, \u201cas a symbol of Pittsburgh’s aspirations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe year of 1934 had not started auspiciously on campus. On Jan. 4, 1934, two of those Civil Works Administration men had been killed in a fall from the Cathedral. \u201cThe men were working outside the safety ropes when an outrigger supporting a plank on which they were standing broke,\u201d the local press reported. \u201cThe men were nailing up muslin sheets as windbreaks to protect workers setting stone.\u201d For both men the job had represented their families\u2019 first steady income in years.<\/p>\n
\n\tThen on Jan. 7 a small plane, its pilot lost, actually aimed for the Cathedral for a crash landing, because he knew there was open land around it. Happily, he missed the building itself, and lived.<\/p>\n
\n\tConstruction of the Stephen Foster Memorial was announced for spring that year, as well as a room in the Cathedral as a memorial for another locally bred composer, Ethelbert Nevin. But the Nevin room never did materialize. Song manuscripts and unpublished works of the Sewickley-born Nevin are today in the Center for American Music on campus, and several pieces of his furniture are featured in the Early American Nationality Room in the Cathedral. Nevin wrote mainly orchestral pieces, but did have a few popular hits \u2014 and has 921 monthly listeners on Spotify today, even without a memorial.<\/p>\n
\n\tCampus life featured a Spring Festival parade, which included a truck-borne wooden white horse, borrowed from \u201ca local club woman,\u201d said the P-G, who had herself snagged it from \u201cthe display window of a Carson Street harness store\u201d 50 years earlier. \u201cIt was quite a landmark that every old Southsider knew it.\u201d For the parade, it sported \u201ca long haired co-ed Lady Godiva\u201d from \u201cthe Kappa Kappa Gamma girls.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tFraternities were not as popular with a certain segment of the student populace. A group of Pitt non-fraternity members that year circulated a petition to abolish the Student Self Government Association because it was dominated by fraternity men and, therefore, \u201cpetty politics.\u201d The SSGA refused to disband, but, in an apparently wider Pitt student vote, it was eliminated \u201cin favor of a new, more representative organization. The new bylaws approved by the students call for an increase in the number of student representatives to the council, and for faculty representation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPitt’s department of aeronautical engineering (with courses on such things as airplane motors and plane structure) got its first female student, 18-year-old Frances Shapiro from Philadelphia, who was already working toward her private pilot’s license, with six solo hours in the air.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhatever this new student did in 1934, she should not marry a football player. The athletic department told the Sun-Telegraph in December of that year that \u201cfurther marriage by Pitt football players is banned\u201d \u2014 since eight had already rushed down the aisle.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIn the last few days W. Don Harrison, Pitt\u2019s director of athletics, has had heart-to-heart talks with three or four or more of the Pitt footballers who apparently were running around asking experts if it’s true that two can live as cheaply as one,\u201d the paper wrote. \u201cHarrison no doubt pointed out that a healthy young man has enough on his hands with his schoolbooks and football without having to explain to the little woman why he was 15 minutes late for dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tPitt researchers in 1934 continued both to innovate and to state the obvious in a very influential way. A collaboration between two faculty members in the School of Dentistry and the Department of Zoology showed that 3.2-meter radio waves, exposed to teeth roots for 5 to 60 minutes, killed nearly 30 percent of streptococci in infected tooth roots and in 42 percent more of these cases damaged them.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnother Pitt zoology professor developed wire diagrams to help his three blind students \u201csee\u201d diagrams of, for instance, frog parts for dissection, which the students praised.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn October that year, William T. Root, psychology department head, warned a gathering of \u201ccredit men\u201d at the Credit Association that \u201cthe credit applicant who wears a checkered suit and looks like a race track tout may be more honest than the individual of clerical bearing and soft spoken voice,\u201d the P-G said. Root\u2019s research had included \u201cpsychoanalyzing\u201d hundreds of people, including prisoners, with the conclusion that \u201cthe cultured individual with the southern or English accent has victimized as many merchants and bankers as the criminal with the plug-ugly nose.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cDeprecating the popular idea that people with homely and distorted countenances are dishonest, and that \u2018cauliflower ears\u2019 and flat noses are characteristics of the person who is not amiss to turning a dishonest dollar, Dr. Root said the reverse is often true,\u201d the paper noted.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cDon’t let the personality of a person affect you in your credit decisions,\u201d Root concluded. \u201cPersonality means little, if anything. Instead, judge a credit applicant\u2019s character: study his past performance in paying bills. That’s the true test.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn a preview of the next thousand years, apparently, of America history, Chancellor Bowman that year received support for his earlier decision to fire a professor (for being too \u201cliberal\u201d) from a group calling itself \u201cThe Americaneers.\u201d Described by the Associated Press as \u201ca patriotic organization\u201d from Columbus, Ohio, the group opined: \u201cThe absurd statement of the so-called American Civil Liberties Union that the dismissal of Turner from the University of Pittsburgh faculty for his alleged radicalism was a \u2018flagrant violation of academic freedom\u2019 is in itself nothing less than a flagrant violation of freedom of action.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe officials of the University of Pittsburgh, the same as those of any business, corporation, industry or the like, have a perfect right to hire and fire whom they please, and if Turner had not been charged with radicalism the so-called liberties union would not have given the matter even passing notice. It is common knowledge that the so-called liberties union is closely allied with the revolutionary causes of communism, socialism and kindred isms and that it interests itself primarily in the defense of the \u2018red\u2019 movement and \u2018red\u2019 agitators and leaders who run afoul of the law.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tMarty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu<\/a> or 412-758-4859.<\/p>\n \n\t\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHave a story idea or news to share? Share<\/a> it with the University Times.<\/p>\n