Nothing says “Happy Holidays” quite like a party! Each of us hold age long traditions and precious memories close this time of year, no matter how we celebrate. The winter season allows us to slow down our regularly scheduled lives and join together in good will. As Catholic institutions, both Loyola University and Mundelein College celebrated, and still celebrate, the tradition of a vespers service as a way to offer prayers of thanksgiving and receive blessings during Advent as a community. This year’s Vespers was held on December 3rd in Coffey Hall, a former Mundelein building, but how did this honored tradition start here in Rogers Park?

Mundelein College affiliated with Loyola University in 1991 and took up the Mundelein tradition too. Although the evening prayer service is centuries old, this was the first year it had taken place in the way we still understand it today within our community. When first started, the event was held entirely in the Skyscraper building as an open house, welcoming Mundelein College alumni, former staff, and friends to join together to celebrate Advent, including our very own Sister Jean!

This jovial turtle named Terry, dressed here as Santa Claus going down a chimney, served as the mascot for the Mundelein College Terrapin Club. Founded in 1931, the Terrapin Club was the competitive swimming club of the all-girls school until the club dissolved in the early 1980s. The activities of the club throughout the years were documented in two scrapbooks recently digitized as part of the Mundelein at 90 project. The calendar year of a Terrapin didn’t start during the holiday season; from fall to spring, these swimmers had a packed calendar, starting with tryouts early in the school year.  

Terrapin tryouts were open to any student at Mundelein College, even if they were not in the swimming class. The group consisted of two skill levels, the Junior and Senior Terrapins. Any student with a successful tryout became a pledge of the club until initiation a week later. The most important part of pledge week was playful humiliation. Through the years, pledges had to engage in peculiar tasks such as collecting signatures on bathing caps, greeting Terrapin members with the phrase “I am a poor fish”, and even walking around the halls of Mundelein wearing a swim cap, swim shoes, and a life preserver around their neck while carrying either a fish or a turtle. Luckily for the new members, the initiation ceremony at the end of the week put a stop to the madness.  

Wildcats, Phoenix, and Dragons aren’t the only valid mascots for universities in Chicago, and while the LU Wolf follows the theme, Mundelein has experimented freely and creatively with mascots over the years. From a spunky turtle named Terry to the façade of Mundelein itself, join me in looking back at some of Mundelein’s most iconic representatives.

And make sure you stick around till the end where I’ll show Mundelein’s most intriguing attempt at a university mascot.

Like many universities, Mundelein has deep roots in sports and competition. Ping pong, tennis, swimming, horseback riding, and even football make up just a portion of the physical activity offered to the young women at Mundelein. Mundelein students don’t appear to need help representing themselves, and plenty of photos exist in the collection that underscore the importance of sport to these college students. Uniforms, Mundelein signs, and posing with sports equipment replace a unified mascot across campus.

Figure 2: Mundelein College Horseback Riding Club raise hands while posing on horses at the Parkway Riding Academy during the MC Riding Club Annual Horse Show, 1940.

This is part two of a two-part post in which graduate students examined how Mundelein College students wrote about World War II in The Skyscraper student newspaper. This post spans the years 1942-1946, covering immediately after the U.S. enters the war and continuing a year after Japan’s unconditional surrender in September 1945, as the world works to rebuild and recover. Read Part One here.

Following the United States’ entry into World War II, Mundelein student’s coverage of events in the student newspaper, The Skyscraper, strongly centered around college women’s civic duties to aid the war effort. For young Catholic women attending school, these daily activities were bolstered along by spiritual practices of prayers as well as being driven through more physically tangible support. Their focus was to educate themselves to be independent, responsible thinkers who were civically active. With the uptick of the war, focus was also placed on personal sacrifice by way of responsible consumption and rationing. Fewer Cokes and candies purchased each week meant a few more dimes sent to the war effort.  

Mundelein students were active in partnering with the Red Cross, whose standard courses certified over 200 faculty and students in first aid. Numerous drives were held from 1941 through the war’s end to generate funds and materials for the war effort. Mundelein students sold war bonds, invested in War Stamps and gathered scrap metal. Many of these drives were for a specific goal of supplying the US Army with Jeeps. By the end of May 1943, students at Mundelein reported raising a total of $17,232.15, which including inflation as of July 2022, equals around $295,149. By December 1945, the Skyscraper reported their total drive efforts to be “well over $100,000” since 1942. With inflation, that total reaches nearly $1.82 million. Both inflation calculations are from US Inflation Calculator based off the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) from the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor in July 2022. 

This is part one of a two-part post in which graduate students examined how Mundelein College students wrote about World War II in The Skyscraper student newspaper. This post spans the years 1937-1941, covering the time leading up to the U.S. entering the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Read part two of the series HERE.

The period in the late thirties leading up to World War II, the United States was marked by the stirrings of conflict abroad. While still reflecting upon a world changed by World War I, students became increasingly aware and concerned about the trouble brewing in Europe and particularly with Japan and China. The January 22 edition of The Skyscraper in 1937 urged students to “re-arm [their] soul[s] for another year in conflict.” Many of the articles written around this time placed much of their emphasis and message on spiritual resilience, and the duties of Catholics to uphold and promote peace. Students participated in peace marches and attended lectures on how peace could be obtained through social reform. 

After several years of voluntary archival work, my first official appointment as a Digitization and Metadata Assistant at the Women and Leadership Archives came at the perfect time. At the tail end of my graduate education in Public History and Library Science, I gained incredibly useful knowledge and experience in a field I wanted so badly to be part of while working with a rich and compelling collection. With only brief and tangential previous archival experience, I felt nervous about my ability to do this kind of work well. Not only did my time at the WLA confirm my ability to do archival work well, but it has also reassured me that my career is absolutely headed in the right direction.  

Digitization

The digitization process for the Mundelein College Photograph Collection required me to tap into my problem-solving skills. I love this aspect of archival work. As I worked out the idiosyncrasies of digitizing this collection, I was asked to make updates to the written scanning instructions used for this project, a small but concrete contribution I would leave behind.

By Anna, with research assistance from Caroline Giannakopoulos 

Mundelein College reunions and homecomings offered alumnae the chance to revisit their college days throughout the political turbulence of the mid-to-late 20^th century. Unlike many contemporary college reunion events & alumnae associations, these events didn’t focus solely on fundraising or seeing fellow alumnae. Instead, the emphasis was on the continuous provision of women’s educational opportunities, even long past students’ formal involvement with the college. 

In order to celebrate the 90 year Anniversary of Mundelein College, the WLA applied for and received the Illinois History Digital Imaging grant. The IHDI grant is aimed at digitizing documents of historical significance and making them accessible at the Illinois Digital Archives. I have been lucky to be part of a team that is digitizing items from Mundelein College held at the WLA. We’re scanning and describing thousands of publications, photographs, and other items related to the history of Mundelein College so that they are more accessible to the public.[1]

Throughout the digitizing process, I’ve been fascinated by the rigor with which students published journals, newspapers, and pamphlets. Mundelein College students maintained a rich tradition of self-published literature of their sixty-year history. They collected articles and essays, cropped and captioned photos, and folded thousands of pages. The resulting, now digital, volumes demonstrate Mundelein College students’ work and the joy with which they performed it.

College campuses are complex organisms. They are made up of students, staff, faculty, halls, arenas, and libraries. The college experience is comprised of classes, organizations, student jobs, and groups of friends. For many students, the bars, clubs, and restaurants play a large part in not only their college experiences, but also of the college environment at large. Socialization is an integral part of college and one of the major factors that perspective students consider when choosing an institution. This was just as true for the students attending Mundelein College as it was for any student at any other university. While conducting interviews for the Share Your Story: Student Life at Mundelein Oral History Project, Mundelein alumnae often reflected on their experiences in these public social spaces as some of the most memorable. Local bars and restaurants like Hamilton’s and The Red Garter, while gone, live on in the memories that were made there. Mundelein yearbooks are filled with joyful pictures of these locales and the events and parties that went on there. From “Ladies” Night” to the “100 Days Party,” Mundelein students understood the importance of balancing academics with social activities. In remembering Mundelein College, we must accept a truth that where college students attend classes, they also attend parties, bars, and clubs.