The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Alma Mater
I WAS ten when I held in my hand two round dollars, the first money that I had ever earned by my own toil. It seemed an immeasurable sum as I gazed at it, wondering how I could best spend it.
My father laid his hand upon my head saying, "Well, lad, I wouldn't spend it all on myself if I were you. Buy something for your mother." Then he gave me a little talk about mother and what her love and sacrifice and teaching had meant to me. The next time we went to the little country town where we traded he took me along, and I bought mother a new dress with part of the money I had earned by dropping seed corn in the long furrow as our neighbor turned the prairie sod. The dress was calico,—a light brown with pale blue flowers, and there were ten yards at ten cents a yard. I got keen pleasure in seeing her wear it, and I learned for the first time the joy and satisfaction of sacrifice.
The child who has every wish granted, every want provided for, daily sacrifices made for him, and who makes none himself grows selfish and unappreciative. So, too, does the college student. In a State University especially, where the student gets everything for practically nothing, where he expects credit or payment for whatever he does, he is likely to grow abnormally selfish and arrogant.
I heard an ill-bred undergraduate say once in referring to his father that it was his policy to get as much out of the "old man" as he could. So, often, the undergraduate feels with reference to his Alma Mater. Two dollars to the memorial fund seems like throwing good money away. That much money would take one to ten Orpheum shows or buy twenty chocolate bostons, or innumerable cigarettes. It is a sacrifice not to be thought of. If Alma Mater wants bells let her pay for them herself.
And yet I have known self-supporting students in institutions where the tuition was ten times what it is at Illinois who gave fifty dollars gladly to a class memorial and who earned it by hard toil.
We can spend ten dollars for a dance or twenty dollars on a house party, or any amount on tobacco or lunches or self-indulgence, but two dollars for Alma Mater—well, what do you take us for?
May