When the Men Came Back

For women who entered Stanford in ’43, the dating situation was bleak.  Few men escaped the call to arms, and those who did were quickly spoken for.  We invited service personnel from local bases to our parties, and the A.S.T.P. filled in the gaps, but, in general, we women spent most of our leisure together.

     At the end of the war in 1945 things began to pick up, and by 1946 droves of men flooded the campus.  Our social lives were back on track.

     After graduation in 1947, I stayed on for graduate work and was invited to teach a couple of sections of Spanish in the Romanic Language Department.  It was quite thrilling to see my name in the Time Schedule along with those of my eminent professors.  One of them actually addressed me as “colleague”.  What I didn’t realize was that most of my students would be returning veterans, some of them older than my twenty-one years and also quite handsome. 

     The first time I stood on the podium in the room where I had long sat as a student myself, was probably the longest hour of my life.  It seemed that the hands of the clock were stuck.  I could hardly look up from my book.  I certainly did not make eye contact with anyone.

As the quarter progressed, my students and I learned to work together and became friends.  One freshman, the grandson of a president, enlivened our translations by bringing in books on Spanish California that had belonged to his grandfather.

Later, on several occasions, ten or twelve students came up to Russell House where I lived, for extra pre-exam tutoring.  My fellow residents were noticeably impressed as I closeted myself with that large gathering of attractive guys. 

One class member, a senior from Norway, dated a friend of mine and shocked us both by his espousal of the concept of “Free Love.”  The romance did not last.

Although I dated students from time to time, I can honestly say it did not influence my grading.  My only questionable action was to fill in a few accent marks on test papers for all my students.  It would have been ½ point off for each one forgotten, and I thought it was the least I could do for the men who had fought for our country.  I also decided that the Honor Code did not apply to teachers.