"Swallow it son, it's good for you!"

The summer is winding down and this will be the last of the new and exciting Ursinusiana discoveries for awhile...and this sure is an exciting one! This editorial cartoon was published in the Weekly at the end of the 1963-63 academic year and I don't think it needs much more of an introduction than that.


(Ursinus Weekly, Vol LXIII, No 23, May 11, 1964, page 2)

It's interesting to me that this was published when it was because it was at the very end of the first semester during which the school began to trim the chapel schedule. The student who drew it (and I wish I knew who the student was - I haven't been able to decipher the name well enough to locate the artist in any directories) must have had some sort of personal issue with the tradition as s/he would only have been required to attend chapel twice a week. The only possibility that I can fathom is that a student (or group of students) were beginning a campaign of sorts in order to sway the Board of Directors and the faculty committee appointed to review the tradition because the announcement about the beginning of the end of compulsory chapel did include a bit about how "The faculty committee on Chapel is still meeting so further changes may be forthcoming”(Chapel Changes Announced, page 1, Ursinus Weekly, Vol. LXIII, No. 11, January 13, 1964).

The identity of the cartoonist and what their angle was shall remain a mystery for now as I conclude this last of the summer posts with the same sort of wishful thinking I have for the past 8 weeks...

Perhaps I'll figure it out and have more perspective as I get further into my research.