a group of men play tug of war at the soup bowl, the third event in a three part mixer series Calvin females participate in Physical education

We usually remember the 50s as the movies present it, America’s golden decade, a time when Elvis was king, baseball was America’s pastime, and everyone had a white picket fence and 2.4 children.

But as it has always been, college at that time was a place for questioning the status quo, and Calvin’s students were struggling to engage their culture in a Reformed Christian way. Facing the legacy of the Korean War and the newly fallen shadow of the Iron Curtain, the question about “the best way for Christians to be involved in this world” was very complicated, said Gordon VanHorn, who graduated with a B.A. in biology in ‘57. “It terms of how people thought, there was a rich diversity. Just war was a significant topic,” he said, as were the possibility of a Christian labor association and a Christian political party.

No matter how much they disagreed, however, most Calvin students felt like they couldn’t be anywhere else, nor did they want to. The Dutch Reformed community was more concentrated and close-knit in those days and “it was almost universal that if you went to college, you went to Calvin,” said VanHorn, who felt an “ethnic-religious loyalty” to the school.

“It was our college,” agreed Betty (Langeland) Kingma, who received her teaching certificate in ‘56. “There was never any thought I would go anyplace else.”

Despite the ethnic and denominational homogeneity among students, the “difference in social class was probably greater than it is now,” said Brinks. Many families sending students to Calvin were working-class, but since the CRC subsidized a large portion of tuition, “you could, in fact, earn your entire tuition and probably a good part of your board during the summertime,” he said.

Since the Franklin campus had few dorms, most of that board money went to landlords and families in the surrounding neighborhood who rented rooms to students. “The men’s dormitory couldn’t hold all the men,” said Brinks. “We had rooms from a widow lady. It took two rooms for four people.”

Women students, on the other hand, “were pretty sternly supervised,” said Brinks. Some lived just off campus in co-op housing, or “coops,” where they were watched by a house mother, locked in at curfew, and expected to help with the maintenance of the house.

Others, like Kingma, lived on campus in dorms called Guildhouses, which held 10-12 students and 2 RDs. But despite the 10:00 p.m. weekday curfew, the dining hall meals, and the no boys allowed rule, Kingma loved it. “I enjoyed the friendship of being with young people” she said. Nights when they didn’t want to start their homework, “we would hang around after dinner at Commons and someone would play the piano and people would sing,” she said.

Although they might seem strange to students today, simple activities like group sing-a-longs were typical entertainment at Calvin, an intimate school with only slightly over 1,000 students.

“We made our own fun,” said VanHorn. “You’d get together with a group of friends and go skating,” or spend the evening in someone’s living room eating, talking, and playing parlor games, he said.

“Not everybody had a car,” said Kingma, who remembers walking 1/2 mile back to campus after basketball games at the Civic Auditorium (now DeVos Hall). “Basketball was very big then too,” she remembered.

But aside from sports games and the occasional musical or theatrical production, “they didn’t feel obligated to entertain us much,” said Brinks. When they weren’t taking country drives, having coffee at someone’s house or studying, students would “go to the Commons, hang out, have coffee. They had a ping-pong table set up there.”

At that conservative time, the school’s small size also leant itself to a rather rigid standard for social behavior. “There was no written dress codes, but there were unwritten community standards that most people supported,” said VanHorn.

Besides the norms that put women in skirts and forbid shorts and jeans in classes or dining halls, other standards directed how Calvin students could participate in the broader culture. “It was understood that we behave as the church prescribed,” including Senate prohibitions against card playing, dancing, and movies, said Brink. But although not every one followed the rules and “people who wanted to go to movies did,” professors didn’t stand outside movie theaters to catch students disobeying the unwritten rules.

Despite its prohibitions and limited entertainment opportunities, Calvin’s students loved the school’s intimate community. The “college was small enough then that all students would have classes with certain professors, and individual faculty members had a tremendous impact on the community,” said VanHorn. And as America grew and changed, Calvin remained a place of “excellent faculty, intellectual challenge, theological-religious challenge, and good friends,” said Van Horn.