I am in the Sallyport with a group of freshman girls, our hair in 30 pigtails each, our faces covered in cold cream, standing astride a broomstick which we must “ride” to class. Freshmen boys wear paper suit covers from the cleaners (plastic had not yet been invented); they joke and clown around, but cautiously, lest their coverings tear.
It is September, 1926, Friday, the first day of Freshmen initiation at Rice Institute. I usually go on the streetcar, but Daddy brought me today. I couldn’t have taken the streetcar looking like I did.
We girls look crazy; it’s easy to laugh, but I don’t feel like laughing. I’m glad to be here on the campus starting four years of college. I appreciate William Marsh Rice letting Houston boys and girls go free. We would never have been able to otherwise.
It’s really hot as it usually is this time of year in Houston, hot enough to make the cold cream melt, down my face. A bell rings. We move toward the stairs. We go to class. I feel low. I sit in class staring at the professor. He ignores us. I hope I’m not called upon to stand up and recite looking the way I do.
I’m determined to do everything I’m supposed to. The lessons are pretty hard, but I’ll manage. I’m so proud to be in such a prestigious college. Another bell rings, and we leave. It’s hard to ride a broomstick with a skirt on. We have to go across campus between the oaks and the cape jasmine bushes to the Biology lab. Here the most terrible thing happens.
A lab assistant comes around to each person and stands there with a frog sitting in a container.
The professor announces, “Each person has to pick up the frog. Girls, it’s necessary to become acquainted with the frog as we have to dissect it later.” When the lab assistant comes to me, I dig down deep, deep inside of my consciousness and pull out my determination to do everything I have to do. I look at the frog with sheer loathing. I grab the frog. His legs go out in all directions. When I quickly drop it, I am shaking all over.
The smell of formaldehyde haunts me when we later begin to dissect the frog. But then comes spring and the cape jasmine’s heavenly perfume covers the campus. The curriculum is hard. For ten years after I graduate, I dream about sleeping through final exams or not getting through Math 100. But the best part is that Carl Illig’s name is right after my name, Lillian Horlock, on all lists, so we go to classes together, attendparties, dances and stroll the oak shaded lanes together and marry when he finishes law school and live a happy life of 62 years together.