By Jenny Dalsted

When Eloise Johnson Noble attended Concordia, Cobbers wore beanies and class rings and complained about the price of textbooks. But the handful of buildings that were Concordia’s campus were surrounded by little more than fields. It was the “Dirty Thirties” when Noble graduated from Concordia in 1933 with a degree in English.

Eloise and her younger sister Vivian, a Concordia alumna from the class of 1939, were raised in Edmore, N.D. Their father was a newspaper man, and Eloise grew up working the printing press for her dad while Vivian helped their mother. Spending her free time with her father is Eloise’s excuse for not learning how to cook.

Eloise’s father had high expectations for his daughters, and was determined to see them attend Concordia regardless of the difficult economy of the 1930s.

“My dad knew I was going to go to college before I was born; there was never any doubt,” Noble recalls. “That wasn’t too ordinary in that day. In our area, with luck you’d finish high school. A lot of kids, especially farm kids, had to drop out because they were needed on the farm and sometimes that was more important to a family.”

During the depression a college education was not a priority for many.

“It was a matter of are you going to eat and have a place to sleep,” Noble explains. “Now a priority is a new car every other year...I think I grew up in the school of hard knocks!”

She married James Noble, a University of Minnesota graduate, in March of 1939.

“I told him I couldn’t get married because I couldn’t cook,” Noble recalls. “But he said that was okay because he couldn’t do office work, and I have always been organized with money.”

Concordia: 1929-1933

Dining on campus was a different experience than the cafeteria style used at Dining Services now. Three times a day, students met in the dining room and were seated at their assigned table. While some students met the seating requirement with complaint, most took the opportunity to meet new students. After a period of two weeks, the seating chart would change in order to allow students to mingle with those with whom they may not otherwise socialize, according to Noble.

“You weren’t supposed to trade seats to sit by a buddy you had been sitting with last month or the month before,” Noble said.

Rules set forth in the college catalog in the early 1900s make intervisitation rules today and of the recent past seem anything but strict. For example, dancing, card playing, visiting saloons, drinking and tobacco use were strictly forbidden.

“There was one woman on my floor who smoked, and we all knew she smoked,” Noble said. “But she would go to the basement supply room to smoke, and we didn’t really fuss about it.” Rumors of rule breaking in the men’s dormitory were more common, Noble recalls, with sons of ministers being the most frequent troublemakers.

Just as students currently boast of “breaking intervis,” students of the ‘30s spoke of “breaking curfew.” Curfew was firmly observed as 7 p.m. on school nights and 9 p.m. on weekends. Eloise’s younger sister Vivian lived in a ground level room in Fjelstad Hall during her senior year, and girls would crawl into her window after curfew.

“A lot of people learned to run pretty fast, because you would have to ring the bell if you were late to be let inside,” Noble said. “I don’t remember being late, but I must have been sometimes.”

Noble remembers getting special permission once a month to stay out until ten on weekends. Late permission privileges were saved for special dates to the movie theater in Fargo. Noble and her friends would walk to the theater in Fargo and ride the streetcar back to campus for about seven cents.

Although there was never a dance on campus, societies for men and women filled the social lives of many students. Noble was a member of Alpha Zeta Phi and remembers the annual banquet in which all the girls would “scrub up a date someplace, even if it was her brother.”

This past October, Noble returned to Concordia for Homecoming to celebrate her memories of her college years and the seventy years that have passed since she graduated. Homecoming in the thirties was “one of the highlights of the year, just as it is now,” Noble said. She remembers looking forward to her freshman year homecoming, because she was “going with a fellow on the football team.”

Listening to Noble talk about her life at Concordia, one thing becomes increasingly clear. There may have been a time when Fjelstad, Brown, Aasgaard and Boe were people, not buildings, and leaving home did not mean freedom from curfews, but traditions remain, and Cobbers of the past are not all that different from students today. Let us hope our own memories of what so many refer to as “the best four years of our lives” are as clear at ninety as Eloise’s.