Much of the Encyclopedia of Union History, to
be published this fall, deals with weighty issues such as the curriculum or a history of the History Department or academic freedom and civil liberties. But there also are hundreds of “I didn't know that” items, and here are a few examples:
- The most widely known of Union's many campus dogs was Throckmorton, mascot of the Navy V-12 unit during World War II.
- The latter part of the nineteenth century saw a host of facetious student societies, such as “The Mystic Order of the Green Table,” “Knights of the Dark Lantern,” “Agnostic Choir,” and “Society for the Advancement of Social Feeling.”
- The earliest known musical organization at Union was a ten-man Glee Club, which existed by 1854. The earliest student society to be formed in an academic field was the Chemical Society, which adopted its constitution in 1861. The first attempt to disseminate a systematic appraisal of courses was in 1927, when the
Concordiensis published “Comment on Electives Made By Students Taking Courses.” - The first student magazine titled The Idol (1910) called itself “a quarterly of scintillating sarcasm strongly soliciting the ceasing of swiftly circulating student sobriety.”
- The first commencement ceremony, in 1797, saw three graduates. Although early statistics are crude, it appears that the College's enrollment reached 100 about 1808, 200 in 1818, 300 in 1938-and then dropped to a low of 80 in 1872.
- The first student automobile was a Pierce Arrow brought to campus in 1903. The first recorded accident was in 1920, when a member of the engineering faculty ran into a concrete post. And the first auto theft (a Ford parked in front of Kappa Alpha) occurred in 1929.
- Modern digital computing began in the early 1960s with the use of an IBM 403 accounting machine in the business office. Academic
computing was born in 1962 with the installation of an IBM 1630; it had paper tape input
and output, a console typewriter, and 20,000 decimal digits of memory.