A Cornell without a prominent men's ice hockey team or Slope Day may seem far-fetched to recent alumni, but the Class of 1952 had neither. Yet they had football games where attendance was in the tens of thousands and parties where everyone sang.

So said '52 alumni June 9 during Cornell Reunion when members of the Classes of 1952 and 2002 shared memories on academics, student life and student pranks in the panel discussion "The Cornell Experience 50 Years Apart" in Robert Purcell Community Center.

The subject of spectator sport attendance led the group to voice opinions on the changing level and character of school spirit over the years. Alumni of the Class of 1952 said they showed their spirit by singing different Cornell songs.

"When we went to parties, we sang," said Sue Youker Schlaepfer '52. In fact, she said, students were required to learn the first two verses of the alma mater, the freshman verse of the Song of the Classes and the Evening Song. Older alumni in the audience expressed concern that a majority of recent alumni and students today know no Cornell songs.

A lack of singing, however, does not imply a lack of spirit, said Allison Murphy '02: "We don't sing the songs, but we do have our own traditions. It's not shown in the same way, but the attachment is still there."

The alumni also discussed women in academics and life in co-ed dorms. In 1952, women were scarcely represented in engineering, business or other traditionally male-dominated fields.

"It was a man's world, except for home economics," said William Hodges '52. In contrast, women of the Class of 2002 said that women in their year were well represented in those previously underrepresented fields. In fact, several alumnae in attendance were engineers.

Alumni from '52 asked the women of 2002 how they had survived co-ed dorms, for as one '52 alumna said, "men were an exotic breed" when she attended Cornell. The women of '02, however, said that by the time they attended Cornell this was a moot issue. One '02 alumna commented that women of younger generations had grown up immersed in co-gender culture and thus didn't blink an eye when living in such close proximity to men.

On the topic of pranks, Bob Chabon '52, the host of the event, told of how several members of his class commandeered WVBR, Cornell's independent radio station, and transmitted fake war broadcasts. Others recalled a Ford Model T being disassembled and reassembled in a student's dorm room, a horse wandering on the fourth floor of Goldwin Smith Hall and a cow being led across the Arts Quad. The Class of 2002 countered by describing the infamous day when a pumpkin mysteriously appeared on the top of the clock tower, only to be mimicked with a disco ball sometime later.

Julia Langer '08 is a writer intern with the Cornell Chronicle.