By MARTY LEVINE
In 1934, Pitt (and the rest of the U.S.) had just passed through the worst of the Great Depression, but the Oakland campus wasn’t yet feeling the upturn. The world was still a bit … makeshift.
Take the rat problem in the Cathedral, for instance — a structure still unfinished at the top, but occupied below that. Beginning in 1933, hundreds of workmen brought in by FDR’s 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.
“So from far and near,” reported the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, one of Pittsburgh’s three daily papers, “a small but select tribe of rats has come to make the dim, dark recesses of the unfinished Cathedral their home. …
“About a month ago,” the article continued, “some 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!”
Unfortunately, those feral creatures apparently preferred other digs and snuck back outside. And then, the paper said, “Pitt officials had a truly brilliant idea. They asked: ‘If 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.’ So that is what they have done.”
Pitt’s kitten wrangler, Tony Pasquarelli, was certain of success this time: “Just 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.”
Another feline who wasn’t 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 — Pitt cheerleader David Patrick, a second-year med student — had a costume “made of four real panther hides, 10 deer hides, three combined panther tails, real claws, (and) zippers to help the inner man get in.” He debuted it at a freshman orientation event — complete with an address from football coach John B. “Jock” Sutherland and the dean of men, recitations, a boxing match and songs by the University quartet.
On 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, “which is louder than a boiler factory,” the Sun-Telegraph said. The top of the structure had also acquired a new design: “a massive steel platform which will support a new top knot. … 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. … New plans by architect Charles Z. Lauder call for a glass enclosed observation deck and lounge room.”
By April, the Post-Gazette announced that the unfinished 42nd floor of the Cathedral had acquired a “lighthouse,” with one light beam shining upward and the other aimed horizontally. The lenses, a kind of prism designed at Carnegie Institute of Technology, were “built 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. … The lighthouse stands,” said Chancellor John Bowman, “as a symbol of Pittsburgh's aspirations.”
The 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. “The men were working outside the safety ropes when an outrigger supporting a plank on which they were standing broke,” the local press reported. “The men were nailing up muslin sheets as windbreaks to protect workers setting stone.” For both men the job had represented their families’ first steady income in years.
Then 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.
Construction 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 — and has 921 monthly listeners on Spotify today, even without a memorial.
Campus life featured a Spring Festival parade, which included a truck-borne wooden white horse, borrowed from “a local club woman,” said the P-G, who had herself snagged it from “the display window of a Carson Street harness store” 50 years earlier. “It was quite a landmark that every old Southsider knew it.” For the parade, it sported “a long haired co-ed Lady Godiva” from “the Kappa Kappa Gamma girls.”
Fraternities 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, “petty politics.” The SSGA refused to disband, but, in an apparently wider Pitt student vote, it was eliminated “in 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.”
Pitt'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.
Whatever 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 “further marriage by Pitt football players is banned” — since eight had already rushed down the aisle.
“In the last few days W. Don Harrison, Pitt’s 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,” the paper wrote. “Harrison 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.”
Pitt 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.
Another Pitt zoology professor developed wire diagrams to help his three blind students “see” diagrams of, for instance, frog parts for dissection, which the students praised.
In October that year, William T. Root, psychology department head, warned a gathering of “credit men” at the Credit Association that “the 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,” the P-G said. Root’s research had included “psychoanalyzing” hundreds of people, including prisoners, with the conclusion that “the cultured individual with the southern or English accent has victimized as many merchants and bankers as the criminal with the plug-ugly nose.
“Deprecating the popular idea that people with homely and distorted countenances are dishonest, and that ‘cauliflower ears’ 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,” the paper noted.
“Don't let the personality of a person affect you in your credit decisions,” Root concluded. “Personality means little, if anything. Instead, judge a credit applicant’s character: study his past performance in paying bills. That's the true test.”
In 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 “liberal”) from a group calling itself “The Americaneers.” Described by the Associated Press as “a patriotic organization” from Columbus, Ohio, the group opined: “The 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 ‘flagrant violation of academic freedom’ is in itself nothing less than a flagrant violation of freedom of action.
“The 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 ‘red’ movement and ‘red’ agitators and leaders who run afoul of the law.’”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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