5p, one sided pages, mimeograph on matte off white paper. Students- Work Camper: Irene Lott, Eugene O'Brien, Helen Wright (1942-43 student, just returned after several weeks vacation in New England). Visitors- Devora Denenholz, Miss Radiana Pazmore, Mr Vitello. Staple in top left corner, three horizontal folds.
BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE COMMUNITY BULLETIN
College Year 10 Summer bulletin 9
Monday, August 9, 1943
CALENDAR
The American Seminar will have its “Commencement” this evening at 8:30 o’clock in the Lobby of the North Lodge.
There will be a meeting of the Faculty and the Student Officers on Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 o’clock in the Kocher Room.
The American Seminar will have its last sessions on Wednesday.
Miss Radiana Pamore, contralto, will give a concert of American songs on Wednesday evening, August 11, in the College Dining Hall.
The Board of fellows will meet at 5:00 o’clock on Thursday afternoon in Study 10.
The Lions Club of Black Mountain will have its Ladies Night Dinner on Thursday evening, August 12, at Lake Eden. Ex-Governor Clyde B. Hoey will be the chief speaker of the evening. More than a hundred and fifty people are expected for the occasion. The College people will have a picnic supper somewhere on the grounds on Thursday evening.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Josef Albers began on Tuesday his Summer Quarter course in Fundamental Design. The class will meet on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 10:15 until 12:25 each week in the Art Room in the Studies Building.
Oliver Freud, as Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Physics on the Army Specialized Training Program, will begin his new duties at the William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia on August 30.
Kenneth Kurtz has been elected by the Faculty to the Board of Fellows, to complete the unexpired term of Larry Kocher. The Board of Fellows has elected Kenneth to the Secretaryship of the Board and the Faculty.
Alice McNeill has been named to third Student Officer for the Summer Quarter.
WITH FORMER STUDENTS
O/C D Page, 34125979
Allen Hotel, 8q 14
Miami Beach, Florida
Leslie Paul
61 Garden Street (Edmonds House)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sybil Yamins
123 West Thirteenth Street
New York City
Nan Oldenburg
Beechwood Farm
Brattleboro, Vermont
T/Sgt George M Randall
Headquarters
Provisional Training Group
Engineer Amphibian Command
Camp Edwards
Bela Martin writes from “somewhere in the Pacific”: “The war and being away from everything seem to make the few dreams and hopes that one has even more meaningful and vital. It also seems to produce a certain maturing quality to people who can still maintain a good sense of proportions. One is offered a swell change for an objective outlook after the smoke ring and there comes a moment for reflection and gathering together certain faculties momentarily lost in the host of the flight….. Now and then I pick up an old magazine giving a battle account - those who live tell it glamorously. ‘Flight to Arras’ is still the best account that I’ve read so far. It’s a grim job for which there are now set hours or a set routine of work. Things happen suddenly and quickly at any time of day or night and one scurries into motion like a fireman in a four alarm blaze in the middle of the night. Yet we always find something to laugh about too. The squadron has become almost like the college- a fraternity by pulling together for a cause.
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN - Summer Bulletin #9 - page 2
Yesterday I prowled the beach in shorts and poked around for the curious animals that one can find out here and in no other place. I found a few rare shells known only to this area. They have a smooth satinlike finish with a small opening and can only be closed out by putting the shell on an ant hill and letting the ants eat it out. I had my forty-five automatic along and fired at things floating in the water- how’s that for a pantman’s holiday. The sound of that gun was more terrifying than those on the piano, like an engine or control surface…. There was a movie last night with Ann Haring playing….. Two newsletters arrived a few days ago and gave a great deal of pleasurable reading way out here. I usually pass them on to a couple of other follows who seem to enjoy them almost as much as I do…. Molly Gregory’s report on the work accomplishments of the past year was very interesting, especially the way she wrote it….”
Nan Oldenburg writes from Cermont: “I am working on a farm that is owned by a Harvard professor….. I like it here a lot- the people and the place and the work. The country is lovely, with a softly rolling green hills. I like it best in the mornings when the mist lies in the valleys and the green hilltops just stick above it. At night it is quiet and I have much time to read…”
Leslie Paul writes from Cambridge, Massachusetts: “Another term at Radcliffe has begun…. I am taking four very interesting courses impressively entitled ‘Intellectual History of Europe in the Seventeenth Century’! It is by far the best I have ever had at Radcliffe and should be of great value….. There is little dramatic activity at the college this summer. I have done nothing since the Spanish play last Spring except direct a oneact play in three rehearsals for the Dramatic Club’s opening tea. I am at present, secretary of the Club, which means nothing except I have a vote in the choice of plays….. I am living in a ‘cooperative house with fifteen other girls where we do all the cooking and managing. It is a good deal od work when your turn comes around, but on the whole there is little inconvenience. I prefer the atmosphere of a place like this to that of the dormitories….”
George Randall writes from Camp Edwards: “One thing (in the Bulletins) that is most impressive is the reports of the program of the farm and the community. Somehow I can’t help but remember the days of a struggle with the moving of the pigs from Blue Ridge to Eden. How it appears that things definitely are preparing ad for that my heartiest congratulations. That the College is proving one of its oldest theories (and on that up to now had remained unproven) is something for which you all should be proud. We always thought it could and should be done but when I am writing that you are eating your own vegetables, drinking your own milk, making your own butter, I say a strong ‘Good Work’... Pete Hill is still working with us here at the Training Group. He’s been moved into the S-2 section (Internal Intelligence, to you civilians).... I got a promotion last month, so now I am a Technical Sgt. My job, originally the Sgt Major of a small separate training unit has now greatly expanded…. We are training recruits for overseas replacements and it is not only interesting wor, but very intensive as we have only a limited time in which to prepare them for shipment. However, our Commanding Officer just came back from Africa where he was in charge of one of the landings last November, and he really knows what a man to be trained to do in order to be properly equipped for amphibian landings….”
WITH FORMER STAFF MEMBERS
Dorothy Trayer writes from Concord, New Hampshire that Ray is being transferred to an agricultural experiment station at Storrs, Connecticut. She will join him in October but has to be train in her successor in the laboratory. Her work here has been bacteriology in the State Laboratory- trying to isolate typhoid and other infesting organisms meaning to public health.
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN- Summer Bulletin #9 - page 3
The T.B. work involves “inoculating guinea pigs, with autopsy six weeks later.”
WITH THE 1942-43 STUDENTS
New Addresses:
Private Henry Adams
ERC, ASRP
SCU, 3421
North Carolina State College
Raleigh, North Carolina
Private Otis Levy, 31342705
66th Cav Ren
APO 454
Camp Joseph T Robinson, Arkansas
EXCERPTS FROM RECENT LETTERS
Henry Adams writes from Raleigh, North Carolina: “My trip down to Raleigh was more or less uneventful. The train left Asheville with some six cars. By the time we reached Raleigh, we found that we had gotten that number up to fifteen. At almost every stop, we had added a new coach, just as a college student accumulates credits…. The heat in Raleigh was stifling, especially after being in the cool of the mountains. The 120 other boys here, mostly from the Deep South, only laughed. ‘You should go to Alabama,” they said….. The ASTP unit at State College is on ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ in every sense of the expression. A much-used railroad runs right through the campus, nearly dividing the college into two halves. The civilian students are on one of the tracks; we are on the other. We are segregated from the rest of the college and are theoretically forbidden to cross the tracks. We are marched to all our meals and are fed in a cafeteria reserved for us. When our classes begin next Monday, we will no doubt be sent to them in carefully-drilled platoons. Nobody worried about the regimentation; this is the Army, and the Army’s educational technics are not ‘progressive’. There are compensations though. An amusement park and swimming pool are on the grounds, and a movie house is only a block away. They are much visite, at least until Monday….. Our present status is a curious mixture of army and civilian life. As we will not receive your regular Army Basic training for three months, we get no army priveledges such as free mail, uniforms, laundry service, or pay. We have only the discipline, the schedule (up at 5:45 AM, bed at 10:30), and the foods (more and better than what civilians get) to remind us that we are no longer civilians but reservists.”
Aurora Cassotta writes from New York City: “Puss-a-foot is fine, and enjoying her new found freedom in a four room apartment. Unfortunately, the other day she cut her paw on a flower pot she broke, We were very worried because he paw was swollen to twice it’s normal size….. The next day she was….. As frisky as ever…..”
Betty Kelley writes from the Plymouth Beach Theatre in Massachusetts: “I don;t look much like an amazon, so I have only a very small part of four or five entrances and five or six lines in “The Warrior’s Husband’. The play will be performed here next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, then will be taken on tour…. I’m not on stage much in this play, but i had to stick sound for about four hours this afternoon. I’m afraid that I don’t quite appreciate the type of directing that I saw0 nothing, absolutely nothing, was left up to the actor; practically every line had to be said a certain way, the way demanded by the director. Moreover, every nerve had been worked out for the actor by the director before the rehearsals. So the actor really has no chance to act; he becomes at best, a good puppet….. The classes, however, promise to be wonderful, classes in diction, radio, fundamentals of the theatre acting technique, and make-up. I am quite excited about the opportunities here. But the promise of ‘opportunity to act’ is not going to be fulfilled…… Guess I’m too idealistic.”
Gisela Kronenberg writes from Cincinnati: “I have started studying such dull items as psychological tests….. Hurray for the great God Statistics. To make a bad pun, I shall be able to swing a mean mean before long…. I hope for the interruption of the insufferable climate. Temperature and humidity insist on having the same numerical value, you know, the 86F, 87 humidity type. Aside from that inconvenience we have a daily thunderstorm with added attractions like ball lightening, the kind that floats through a room. Never a dull moment…..”
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN- Summer Bulletin 9- page 4
A/S Herbert Oppenheimer recently talked to a summer school class in Education at the University of Tennessee on “Black Mountain College”. Oppy writes from Knoxville: “We have spare time to read and write but more often those hours just slip unproductively away…. Actually the average soldier today doesn’t know why he is fighting, what he is fighting, and where he must drive after the Armistice. This ignorance of our people is being expressed in Congress today….. The secret of Black Mountain- it quickly becomes one’s community, your home. It’s not only community living, the work program, a new system of education. Black Mountain offers soil its people can dig down to and get hold of, a few years life that may easily dominate a life time, for th community does so easily become one’s home.I wonder about a home like that, around each factory, each office, each farm group. Possibly there is part of the answer to man’s fight for strength and security. But it means much more than colleges and education. It means a new attitude towards life, certainly a new economic system, and some people who can fight for dreams. It’s so damn easy to be lethargic….”
Claude Stoller writes from Fort Worden in the state of Washington: “I’m still a private and will continue to be one for the duration of my stay here. Because while I’m the only piccolo player here, I’m nowhere good enough at it to be indispensable. It’s very frustrating to be engaged in a job you can only do half justice to, and I’m dying to get a whack at something I’m really capable of doing…. I have loads of free time in which to read and study, and access to a fine library. I manage to keep from being bored- perhaps that’s as much as I can say for my existence here. Engineering school seems a bright dream. For months now I have been constantly assured that I’d soon be sent to a STAR unit, but after all, I’m only second class material (limited service). I suppose I’ll be sent out any year now….”
WORK SUMMARY- WEEK OF AUGUST 2nd to 6th
The most satisfactory development this week, from the point of view of planning the work, is that hoeing corn is no longer considered the most gruesome task. One hundred stakes have been cut, split, and hauled for the hog fence. There is a general feeling that this is the hottest and hardest work. Unfortunately the vogue for corn hoeing will not last, as the hole digging, and the placing of stakes in holes become almost easy.
For a brief period last week it looked as though the demands for work would exceed the number of works; and it would have, if people hadn’t risen to the occasion and been willing to help out. Faculty wives and members of the Seminar saved the day by helping in the kitchen in a time of crisis. This they are continuing to do; and until the middle of the next week students will help with the dishwashing.
Members of the community are now carrying the mail. This freed the office staff and the student workers for their regular work and eliminates an old thorn in the sides of both.
A jam in the office was also helped out by students volunteering one evening and getting out what looked like thousands of letters.
Repairing the faculty apartment in Mountain Stream was continued. The plan is to have this finished and the Stone Cottage well on toward completion this week.
Mundy has replaced leaks on the roof ofRoadside, North Lodge and Black Dwarf,
Harold Yenage made two racks for paper storage in the Bookbinding Department.
On the farm, coen hoeing has gone on as only corn hoeing can go, damply, slowly endlessly, Perhaps knowing that this hoeing gives us enough corn to fill both silos and feed thirty beef animals and the dairy cows, silage also and most of the grain for the horses, hogs, chickens, and beef to be fattened, coupled with the knowledge that not hoeing would produce a comparable crop of
BMC COMMUNITY BULLETIN- Summer Bulletin 9- page 5
Rag weed; and that dorn is going to be virtually impossible to buy this winter, makes this endlessness seem important. Rag weed equals hay-fever.
Our tomatoes and sweet corn are now being sent to the kitchen, a second planting of turnips has taken the place of five rows of carrots which have been pulled up for canning and storing.
GUEST LIST:
Devora Denonholz, a secretary for the New Republic magazine from New York City.
Miss Radiana Paznore, singer, from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Mr Vitello, a member of the staff of the Museum of Modern Art.
ARRIVALS
Work Camper:
Irene Lott from East Orange, New Jersey
Eugene O’Brien from Newark, New Jersey
Helen Wright, 1942-43 student, who has returned after several weeks vacation in New England.
IN TODAY’S MAIL
New Addresses:
Pfc Richard D Brown, 14101337
809 Tech Sch Sqd
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
NEWS
Marian Sands is now Mrs Israel Sweet. She was married in Columbus, Georgia and is now living at 1011 Carroll Place, Bronx 56, New York City.
