by Larry Wood

Helen Anderson Waring-Tovey, ’40, still remembers jitterbugging the night away in the old Longstreet gymnasium. And when she thinks of the Wade Hampton dormitory, she still hears “In the Mood” and “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” drifting into the hall from the tiny radios all the girls kept in their rooms.

Before World War II, life at Carolina was carefree; big bands ruled; and campus social life swirled around the rhythms of its dance clubs, one of the many traditions that have shaped USC’s unique student life during the past 200 years.

In 1939, Waring-Tovey belonged to the Junior Damas Club for freshman and sophomore women. The Senior Damas included juniors and seniors.

Everyone loved to dance in those days, Waring-Tovey said, and there was never a shortage of partners. Sometimes women would dance only a few steps before being tapped on the shoulder for a “break-in.”

“You’d swing out on a jitterbug into another partner’s arms,” said Waring-Tovey, who lives in Summerville.

While women had Damas, men had the German Club, which had nothing to do with learning the language and everything to do with formal, elegant dancing.

In 1883, USC waltzed into the record books as the first university in America to boast a collegiate dance club. Named after a popular dance of the day, the German Club lasted more than 70 years, even spawning a rival group in 1958, the Westphalia Club, which danced into the sunset after just one season.

Waring-Tovey participated in another tradition during her days at USC, May Day. Before the tradition ended in 1969, the campus selected a May Queen each spring. “I remember our dresses were three shades of peach and we walked in under arches of wisteria,” said Waring-Tovey, who was a maid in the court of 1940.

Usually dressed in white tie and tails, the University president crowned the queen, who, in many old yearbook photos, sat on her throne flanked by a court of maidens that stretched from one side of the Horseshoe to the other.

Literary societies, the University’s longest-running tradition, dominated the campus in the early days of South Carolina College, which later became USC, and provided the only extracurricular activity for students before the Civil War. The Clariosophic and Euphradian literary societies, both established in 1806, offered young men a chance to hone their public speaking and debating skills.

Members debated everything from slavery and the education of women to federal tariffs. “They debated almost everything under the sun,” said Elizabeth West, ’89, MLS ’95, USC’s assistant archivist.

After the introduction of the first Greek fraternities in the late 1880s, the literary societies began to fade, but handfuls of students kept up the traditions of the Clariosophics and the Euphradians until the 1970s.

Enforced wearing of beanies, commonly called “Rat Hats” or “Rat Caps,” topped the list of freshman hazing traditions for many years. Sam Cartledge, ’37, of Columbia remembers his rat cap was red with a black “C” on it.

“It was a way to identify new freshmen, pure and simple, and we were proud of them,” Cartledge said. “Actually in those days, we did a lot of thumbing, and if a person had a Carolina rat cap on, he could get picked up a lot quicker. It worked, too.”

Living next to the football tenement on campus, Cartledge said, he got picked “nearly every time for a ‘Rat Session.’”

“It was just a little hazing session. It wasn’t too bad. One of the most destructive things the upperclassmen asked us to do

was roll up a magazine. Then they blindfolded all the freshmen, stood them back to back, and at a certain count told them to start hitting each other over the head.

“It was right much fun unless you got hit with the butt end of the magazine. But everybody enjoyed it. I didn’t mind it, and I don’t think any of the other freshmen did.”

Although freshmen wore rat caps until the early 1960s, extreme forms of class hazing began to die out in the late 1930s after the fateful “Barefoot Day” incident, West said. On Barefoot Day, freshmen walked around campus without shoes or socks and did whatever seniors told them.

“One year, someone had the not-so-bright idea of telling the male freshmen to hug and kiss all coeds they saw,” she said. “This was the 1930s in South Carolina, and you just didn’t do that.

“The incident caused a lot of bad publicity for the University and the expulsion of some class members. Parents wrote in saying they were afraid to send their daughters to USC. That marked the decline of class hazing.”

As the University grew in the 1960s and ’70s, many of Carolina’s traditions began to decline. Some traditions, such as Derby Day, just weren’t politically correct anymore, said Harry Lesesne, MA ’95, Ph.D. ’98, associate director and historian of the USC Bicentennial Office.

Introduced by the Sigma Chi fraternity in 1947, Derby Day featured sorority sisters competing in the Miss Venus pageant, wearing high heels, short-shorts, tight blouses, and paper bags over their heads.

The University president, his wife, and the dean of women usually served as judges, Lesesne said. Derby Day ended in the 1970s.

Carolina traditions that have survived usually revolve around activities that bring students together, such as athletics, Homecoming, and commencement.

Students and alumni still raise a toast to Carolina during the singing of the Alma Mater and cheer the Gamecocks on at Cockfest. The faithful still burn a tiger (a tradition that grew from a fracas between Carolina and Clemson students in 1902 over a picture of a gamecock crowing over a dejected tiger) before the Carolina-Clemson game, until 1959 known as Big Thursday and always played during the State Fair in Columbia.

Palmer McArthur, ’48, learned the importance of the traditional Tiger burn when he was student body president after World War II. “Being in the war was a sobering situation, and I thought we had a lot more to do than just play around. So I said, ‘Let’s cut out burning the tiger,’” McArthur said. “We had a Student Body meeting on it, and I thought they were going to throw me out of office.

“I asked Sam Boylston, who roomed above me, to make the tiger, and we burned it. They were right, of course, and I was wrong. Tradition is tradition.”

Except for the annual law school ceremony, commencement on the Horseshoe ended in 1969 with the opening of the Coliseum, but some graduation traditions remain. Students still march in behind the University Mace, and President Palms shakes each graduate’s hand.

During the opening ceremony of USC’s bicentennial celebration January 10, the University reenacted a commencement tradition that faded many years go. Faculty, members of the state legislature, and justices from the S.C. Supreme Court marched in an impressive grand processional up the Horseshoe.

“In the old days, the governor, the legislature, and the judiciary would process from the old State House, not the current one, into Rutledge Chapel where commencements were held,” Lesesne said. “The commencements were very tradition bound with the valedictorian and salutatorian each giving an address in Latin. It’s uncertain how many people actually understood these addresses,” he said and laughed, “but that was the tradition.”