Fun Facts Take Flight
If you need a random fun fact in your life, look no further than the field of aviation. Literal field, in fact – did you know the very first runways were fields, and Amelia Earhart landed in an Irish cow pasture after crossing the Atlantic solo? Presto! You’ve been Fun Fact’ed! Here are twelve more fun facts about runways, airports, and other aviation stuff to add a bit of quirk to your day.
Large airports make a schedule of hotly contested landing slots, and airlines must snatch them to earn the right to land at that airport. It’s a system akin to an Owl Fight crossed with SOLAR Dibs Day. Airlines trade/fight over their valuable slots as though they’re players in the NFL draft. Millions of dollars change hands (wings?) over them.
Like the Blue Bridge, airport taxiways are lined with blue lights at night. I assume if bouncy taxiways were to ever be invented, they would have orange lights to match the Bouncy Bridge.
Paris, Manila, and San Francisco each have four major airports, all of which are outside the city limits, but within 56 miles of the city. That’s slightly closer than Mount Hood is to Portland.
The longest non-military paved runway in the world is Runway 17-35 at Upington Airport in South Africa. It is over 16,076 feet long, which is about 64 times the distance between Naito and Trillium.
In January 2009, in the skies above LaGuardia Airport in New York City, the geese finally banded together to strike a blow against humanity once and for all. A flock of them flew a kamikaze mission into an Airbus A320’s engines, shutting both of them down shortly after takeoff at a dangerously low altitude. The murderous geese thought they had won the day, but fortunately, Captain Sully (and First Officer Jeff Skiles) made an emergency water landing, aka a “ditching”, in the Hudson River, saving all on board. Unfortunately, the freshman dorm “Sully” (Sullivan) is not named after him. Sully’s real name is Chesley Sullenberger. I can’t decide which of those two previous sentences is the greater tragedy.
You might see white stripes painted on the end of runways. Those are there to indicate how wide the runway is. The wider the runway, the more stripes there are. They are colloquially referred to as “piano keys” by pilots. If you see blue stripes painted on a runway, on the other hand, that means it has been participating in picting and copting at Renn Fayre.
Black boxes are not actually black. They are orange. Or sometimes yellow. Since the Quest prints in black and white, just imagine a glorious photo of one in your head.
PDX was closed for construction during nearly the same period that Reed’s Sports Center was. Coincidence?
Reed’s Great Lawn is just large enough for me to potentially land a Cessna 152 (tiny two-person airplane) on it. I have landed on grass before and it feels like wading through knee-deep water, though I have not landed in a field of goose poop before. While the Cessna 152 manual does not include a subsection on landing in a goose poop-covered field in the “Soft-Field Landing” section, I anticipate the goose poop would contribute to helping the plane come to a stop in a shorter distance, making the landing both safer and yuckier. We should test this during Renn Fayre. Airplane jousting, anyone?
The TSA allows passengers to bring Harry Potter wands on board the plane, as well as lightsabers. The official TSA website states, “Sadly, the technology doesn't currently exist to create a real lightsaber. However, you can pack a toy lightsaber in your carry-on or checked bag. May the force be with you.” You are also allowed to bring handcuffs, “laser hair remover”, sand, antlers, forks, artificial skeleton bones, bocce balls, and football helmets. Tents, darts, spear guns, throwing stars, hummus (in large amounts), gravy (in large amounts), LARP swords, and pool cues are checked bags only. If you would like to bring cymbals, ice, hoverboards, or solar panels, you are encouraged to check with the airline. No word yet on whether giant concrete owls are allowed.
The Airbus Beluga XL, a derivative of the Airbus A330 modified for cargo, is one of the largest planes in the world. In terms of weight, three of them could carry the entire Reed student body.
According to the Federal Aviation Regulation 14 CFR §91.213(d)(3), all nonessential but broken instruments must nevertheless be marked “inoperative” with a sticky note over the face of the instrument before the plane is legal to fly. The FAA is real persnickety about this one and once fined an airline over $5,000 for not complying with this rule. We pilots are warned to carry a stack of Post-Its with us whenever we fly just in case. Wonder if the FAA would get me in trouble if I wrote “It is will reopen” on the Post-It in question?
Written by sophomore Charlotte Applebaum, a student pilot and aviation enthusiast who has a habit of looking at fields and thinking, “Is this large enough to land a plane on?”
Fun Facts Crash and Burn
Returning from the previous installment of aviation fun facts, here are ten more aerial factoids to uplift you with.
Registration numbers for aircraft in the United States all start with the prefix N. Three to five digits plus zero to two letters come after the N to make the full registration number. Each country has its own prefix, such as B for China, F for France, D for Germany, JA for Japan, and VT for India. (The United States does not have sub-prefixes that specify whether the aircraft is a plane, glider, or something else, but many other countries do.) The FAA allows you to, for a fee of $10, reserve a particular “vanity” registration number for their plane. (https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certification/aircraft_registry/special_nnumbers) The registration numbers N1908R and N1908, the year of Reed’s founding, are currently taken by a blimp, and on reserve after being used by Boeing 727, respectively. N3203, Reed’s address, is currently taken by a helicopter, and N97202, Reed’s zip code, is currently free after formerly being used by a Stinson 108, a cute little four-person plane. (Source: https://registry.faa.gov/AircraftInquiry/Search/NNumberInquiry)
The ginormous stick of chalk created by Reed students for Paideia 2019 is so big that a Cessna 172 Skyhawk four-person airplane could not lift it. Weighting 1,000 pounds and being 6 feet long, it would only fit in the plane going the long way from front to back, and when placed in that direction too much of its weight is too far back in the plane. Preliminary research and calculations would suggest that it would not fit in a slightly larger Cessna 182 Skylane either, nor even the six-person Beechcraft Bonanza. It could, however, fit the long way in a Cessna 206 Skywagon/Stationair, a vehicle that Cessna describes as “the sport utility vehicle of the air”.
A paper airplane meets the FAA’s definition of a light sport airplane, since it lacks an internal combustion engine, carries fewer than three passengers, weighs less than 1,320 pounds, and has a top speed less than 138 mph. Meaning you need a recreational pilot certificate to fly one. Meaning that you have committed a federal crime if you have ever flown a paper airplane without a recreational pilot certificate. Meaning you get to put “has been a federal fugitive since a single-digit age” on your resume, should you so desire.
Speaking of planes made from former tree material, the fourteenth-largest plane in history was also constructed therefrom. The Hughes H-4 Hercules was a 1947 prototype wooden seaplane with the registration NX37602 (NX being an old prefix for “experimental”), more famously known by its nickname the Spruce Goose, or the Flying Lumberyard. Its body was the length of Eliot and its wingspan was wider than the PAB. It was housed in a 315,000-square-foot hangar that later became a soundstage for the movie Titanic and then office space for Google. It flew exactly once, at a speed of 135 miles per hour. The Spruce Goose was made out of birch wood, not spruce wood. So why does history remember it as the Spruce Goose? Its birch-related nickname was the Birch Bitch. I think that would be a great name for an environmentalist superhero alter ego. If you defeat me in a lightsaber duel/joust/dogfight for the name I’ll let you have it.
If you were to fly a griffin to Reed College, you would not need to install a transponder on your griffin, as one is technically not required near PDX. But you might need to bring a radio to ask permission to enter PDX’s airspace, since it goes down to 1,700 feet above Reed’s general area, and the FAA states that all aerial vehicles, presumably griffins included, must maintain “an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle” when flying “[o]ver any congested area of a city, town, or settlement” (14 CFR §91.119(b)). You would also need to make sure your griffin has an airworthiness certificate and registration, and a valid registration number prominently displayed somewhere on it. Reedies flying griffins to Reed are encouraged, but not required, to register their griffin with Reed Community Safety at https://www.reed.edu/community_safety/forms/vehicle_reg.php.
Harry Houdini was the first person to fly an airplane in Australia, on March 18, 1910. 114 years later, Reed’s Great Lawn remains unconquered. Renn Fayre project, anyone?
If you harbor wishes of being a secret agent but in reality spend most of your time curling up with a good book for hours at a time, why not become an air marshal? An air marshal is a government employee trained similarly to a police officer who secretly travels on airline flights, posing as a passenger in plain sight, there to help should any incidents arise. In practice, the government basically pays you to fly to random places around the world while treating you as a top-secret agent who officially doesn’t exist. According to the New York Times, air marshals do not have to have prior experience in police or military jobs, and get to undergo cool James Bond-esque training from firearms to martial arts. The catch? Air marshals are not allowed to accrue airline miles from flights they traveled on for work. Phooey. Unfortunately, air marshals operate in a highly classified line of work, and therefore you will not be able to apply for the job on Handshake.
Many aircraft engines with propellers are in fact internal combustion engines with cylinders and spark plugs and whatnot, more like a car engine than a jet engine. Accordingly, they take aviation gasoline, which unfortunately still has lead in it, fifty years after leaded gasoline has been banned in the U.S. for cars. Fortunately, unleaded and more environmentally friendly alternatives are currently in development. Aviation gasoline comes in fun color-coded grades: red is the lowest, followed by green, followed by blue, the highest. The blue grade has 2.12 grams of lead per gallon; the green one had twice that level. And now you will never ever drink blue or green Gatorade again. You’re welcome.
Some of the spray bottles of cleaning supplies found scattered around classrooms at Reed contain the molecule propylene glycol methyl ether, or PGME for short. PGME is one carbon and three hydrogen atoms more than EGME, ethylene glycol monomethyl ether (aka 2-methoxyethanol), which is used to deice aircraft and formerly used an antifreeze additive in aircraft fuel. (PGME is also used as an antifreeze additive in diesel engines.)
Starting in 1926, Portland, OR was served by airmail. Meaning we only have two years to go before Reedies can celebrate 100 years of mail delivered by airplane!
Written by sophomore student pilot Charlotte Applebaum, who has been a federal fugitive since the age of 7 for flying paper airplanes without a pilot certificate, and is happy to assist any Reedies in registering their griffins with the FAA.
Fun Facts Below 3.4 Ounces: TSA Edition
Aren’t you dying to know whether or not you could bring the fish tank from the Student Center onto a plane? No? Well, now you are, and you might be surprised to know that the answer is yes! Building onto the previous list of the TSA’s yeas and nays, here are twelve more random tidbits from the TSA on what you’re allowed and not allowed to bring, for the edification of Reedies with air travel and shenanigans in their future.
The TSA states that oxygen is not generally allowed by airlines on the plane itself, but it IS allowed through security to be used at the gate. Perhaps any chem majors among our hypothetical travel group can help brainstorm a way to react any legally brought oxygen into another form before it makes its way onto the plane.
Thinking of bringing something radioactive from the Reed reactor onto a plane? The TSA does not specify whether or not most radioactive items are permitted, but it does mention that “[m]edical devices containing radioactive material, implanted, ingested, injected, or fitted externally as a result of a medical treatment” are carry-on only.
Tragic news for WMD members: All forms of flammable fuel are prohibited. However, if a fire-spinning implement does not resemble a known weapon, it will almost certainly be permitted in checked baggage.
Some more weird and esoteric things the TSA explicitly permits in both checked and carry-on luggage: disassembled computer parts, miscellaneous car parts (so long as they are drained of fuel; airlines may have more specific requirements that they be brand new and unused), magnetic swipe cards such as your Reed ID, electric blankets, “[b]iological specimens, non-infectious, in preservative solutions” less than 30 mL, flowers, Geiger counters, hookahs, laser pointers, night vision goggles, live plants, seashells, Play-Doh, shock collars, chopsticks, holiday lights, and sex toys.
Checked bags only: axes and hatchets, glow sticks (very small amounts may be allowed in carry-on bags -- it’s just about the liquid), snow globes (ditto), brass instruments, slingshots, cap guns, syringes (both used and unused, provided the former is packaged properly and the latter is accompanied by its medication), cattle prods, and nerf guns.
Carry-on only: Live coral, live fish, and matches.
Never allowed: Fertilizer, realistic replicas of explosives, liquid bleach, chlorine, tear gas, and vehicle airbags. One can only surmise that the TSA is concerned someone out there is trying to build a working car from scratch mid-flight.
Check with your airline: dry ice (must be properly packaged and <5.5 lb per FAA requirements), cremated remains, emergency radio beacons, metal detectors, and pepper spray.
As for mercury thermometers, the TSA states, “The individual must advise the airline of the presence of the mercury barometer or thermometer in the carry-on baggage. The thermometer must be transported in strong outer packaging having a sealed inner liner or bag constructed of strong, leak-proof and puncture-resistant material that is impervious to mercury and will prevent the escape of mercury from the package in any position.”
Interestingly, the TSA says, “Out of respect for the deceased, TSA officers will not open a container [of cremated remains], even if requested by the passenger.” Time to steal some Cremated Remains stickers from the mailroom and stick them on my suitcases so the TSA can’t open them.
The TSA prohibits formaldehyde solutions above 10%…and helpfully includes math hints for people wishing to dilute existing solutions down to a permitted level.
Before you ask: marijuana is illegal at the federal level and therefore frowned upon on a plane. This is an FAA rule rather than a TSA rule: “Marijuana and certain cannabis infused products, including some Cannabidiol (CBD) oil, remain illegal under federal law except for products that contain no more than 0.3 percent THC on a dry weight basis or that are approved by FDA”. The TSA takes a slightly less draconian stance: “TSA’s screening procedures are focused on security and are designed to detect potential threats to aviation and passengers. Accordingly, TSA security officers do not search for marijuana or other illegal drugs, but if any illegal substance is discovered during security screening, TSA will refer the matter to a law enforcement officer.” Literal weed(s), in terms of live plants, are allowed. Perhaps you could circumvent this rule by bringing a live marijuana plant on board? (Though the airline might not permit whatever pot you use, in both senses of the word pot.)
Written by aviation enthusiast and loophole lover Charlotte Applebaum, who has been pulled over by the TSA for attempted illicit carriage of pens, toothpaste, magnets, bean bags, squeezy applesauce, playing cards, doughnuts, cake, and nail clippers, despite the latter being explicitly allowed per the TSA website.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered: USPS Fun Facts
The Postal Service ordered more than 447 million rubber bands in 2023. That’s 310,632.4 rubber bands for each one of the 1,439 Reed students.
The USPS sells an officially licensed mail carrier costume for dogs. It’s pretty cute, but it’s got nothing on those Data Lab posters.
It is legal to send a brick through the USPS. Only one brick at a time, though. That loophole was closed after ingenious residents of Vernal, Utah sent 37 tons of bricks and other construction materials through the mail in 1916 and built an entire bank with them, because it was cheapest to send the bricks that way. The USPS lost about $800,000 in today’s money in the process and realized after that incident that they needed to be more specific with their wording requiring approval of “large and unusual shipment[s]”. Whoopsies. A brief history: Until 1913, you could only ship a package weighing up to 4 pounds; on January 1, 1913, it was changed to 11 pounds. In August 1913 it went up to 20, in 1914 it went up to 50, and finally in 1983 it went up to 70 pounds. But the loophole allowing cheap shipment of bulk building materials got closed in November 1916 after the Vernal, Utah incident, with the USPS from that day forward officially calling shenanigans on 200 pounds of non-perishable items being shipped from one sender to one addressee in the same day. So it is unfortunately frowned upon to ship a future structure through the mail. …Unless each and every Reedie maxed out their 200-pound allotment! We could all theoretically ship 143.9 tons of building materials! Another Renn Fayre project, anyone?
And before you ask, no, you may not ship yourself to and from Reed. As stated in the USPS’ website’s list of fun facts, “Do not try to ship your kids!! In the early days of Parcel Post [the January 1913 rule allowing packages weighing up to 11 pounds], a few parents managed to mail their children to relatives. In 1913, an 8-month-old baby in Ohio was mailed by his parents to his grandmother, who lived a few miles away. The baby was safely delivered! Regulations were quickly established to prevent any additional mailing of children through the U.S. Mail.” (Full story: “Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived a few miles away near Batavia, Ohio. Baby Beagle was just under the initial 11-pound limit for parcels. Rural Carrier Vernon Lytle picked up the baby from his parents’ house and carried him in his mail wagon to his grandmother’s house. The postage was fifteen cents [$4.82 in today’s money], and the “parcel” was insured for $50 [$1,606.10 in today’s money]. Although it was against postal regulations, several children traveled via U.S. Mail in the early years of Parcel Post. Initially the only animals that were allowed in the mail were bees and bugs. In 1918, day-old chicks were allowed in the mail. In 1919, some additional “harmless live animals” were permitted, but children did not fall into this category.”) While it is not legal to ship living Homo sapiens through the mail, it is legal to ship living chickens through the mail, specifically baby chicks. “The Postal Service has been working with hatcheries for more than 100 years to safely transport mail-order chicks during the spring and summer months,” the USPS website proudly declares. “Thousands of chicks are transported through the U.S. Mail seamlessly every year. This is a legacy operation we take very seriously as lives are literally at stake.”
“The Postal Service moves mail by planes, hovercraft, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways, bicycles, mules and feet.” Not on the admittedly impressive list is pigeon, owl, tricycle, hot-air balloon, pony, horse (the Pony Express was, according to the USPS, not in fact part of the USPS for most of its brief existence), spaceship, hang glider, bulldozer, ambulance, taxi, Segway, snowmobile, TARDIS, golf cart, skateboard, and scooter. If you ever work as a mail carrier, maybe you can try adding to this list! Reed had better give you off-campus PE credit should you do so.
276 million square feet of bubble wrap were used by the USPS to ship COVID supplies. That’s enough to cover the Reed campus 43.125 times over.
Texarkana, AR and Texarkana, TX share a post office that straddles the state line. (Imagine if the mailroom was half on Reed’s campus and half on the campus of Lewis & Clark. The mailroom mannequin would have to swag with school colors split halfway down the middle!)
Imagine the 188 faculty and and 1,439 Reed students quadrupled. That’s about how many mail carriers in the country do their routes entirely on foot. The USPS refers to them as the “Fleet of Feet”.
There are 139,409 big blue public mailboxes around the country. That’s about 100 per Reedie. According to the USPS website, “[t]hey weren’t always blue. Before 1970, they were green, then red, then white, then green again, and finally — beginning in 1955 — red, white and blue.”
The USPS instituted ZIP codes in 1963. What was Reed like in 1963?
The Real Olde Reed: Highlights from Reed’s 1963 Catalog
https://rdc.reed.edu/c/reedhisttxt/s/r?_pp=20&s=63fa4e74e11a0d9c5a350dac6eee35f2b26dbfbd&p=17&pp=1&part=1
There were 34 members of the Board of Trustees, 6 of them women, all of them married. There were 22 main members of administration listed, 9 of them women, seven of those married and two unmarried (the librarian and the dean of students). All the married women in the administration were listed under their own names, but the married women on the board of trustees were listed as “Mrs. Husband’s full name”. In both lists, the women were either “Mrs.” or “Miss”, but the men were not “Mr.”.
The application also had similar questions, except with the glaring absence of the famous Paideia question, and “[t]here [was] no plan for ‘early decision’ on applications”.
Amount charged in 1963
What that amount is worth in today’s money
Amount charged today for comparison
Application fee
10
102.87
0
Enrollment deposit
100
1,028.75
400
Tuition
1,500
15,431.18
69,040
Room
275
2,829.05
9,050
Board
354 (there was only one board plan; lunch was not included)
3,641.76
8,610 (board plan A)
Health insurance fee, per semester
10
102.87
1,919
Student body fee, per semester
11 (the
Quest
was mentioned as something the money would go towards!)
113.16
155
Total amount charged each year, fees included
2,171
22,334.06
87,010
Estimated cost of travel and books on top of that
350-600
3,600.61-6,172.47
2,200-3,950
You also had to pay $10 for the junior qual, $10 upon successful graduation, and $1 for each schedule change made after the add/drop deadline. Only one board plan option existed, and lunch was not included in it. The College Catalog also made it clear that “[t]here is also a small charge for the use of college [music] practice rooms.” (This charge was not specified; it was implied that it had not yet been determined by the time the catalog was published.)
The Reed College Catalog lists many of the same PE options we currently have, such as squash, folk dancing, swimming, and archery, as well as horseback riding, rifle, lifesaving, judo, “body dynamics”, “trampoline”, “tumbling”, and “social dance”.
The course catalog’s classes were far more basic and less numerous, with the options on offer paltry compared to the vast array of Reed classes today. Still, there were are few particularly interesting ones:
Music 344 - Opera (was listed as not being offered that year and therefore did not have a description)
History 341 - History of the Pacific Northwest. “This course attempts to relate the development of the region to that of the nation, from the pioneer to the contemporary period, and is a helpful introduction to research projects dealing with Western and local problems.”
History 390 - History of Russia. “An institutional and cultural survey of Russian history from earliest times to the present day. First semester: Kievan period to collapse of Tzarism, 1917. Second semester: Revolution and Soviet Regime.” The Soviet Union was still around at the time and did not collapse until 1991.
Economics 410 - International Trade and Economic Development. “International trade theory is examined from mercantilist and simple classical statements of the causes and nature of trade to various modern refinements. The object is to determine why goods, income, and capital move internationally, what benefits are derived and how they are distributed, what the money and exchange counterparts of these real flows are, and what effects result from various national interferences with the international economic order. The later part of the course is concerned with economic development of low-income countries, especially the influence of international economic relations. Emphasis rests upon mastery of analytical techniques but substantial attention is given to historical and present problems and to criticism of public policy. Prerequisite: Economics 210.”
Economics 430 - Financial Institutions and Policy. “Since the great depression of the 1930's[,] increasing attention has been focused upon the flow of national income and expenditures, the level of employment, and the closely related functioning (or malfunctioning) of our monetary system. The enlarged share of government in our national economy since the war years of the 1940's has given the study of public finance added significance. The control of inflation and the preservation of a satisfactory international balance of payments challenge economic policy makers today. These and other related features of the United States economy in the mid-twentieth century are the central subject matter of this course, with emphasis upon the development of analytical techniques and attention to historical background.Course objectives include an understanding of the operation and control of our monetary and banking system; principles of taxation, debt management; and public spending; international financial relations in theory and practice; forces affecting the size, growth, and fluctuations in national income; the determinants of the price level; and the techniques and objectives of monetary and fiscal policy. Prerequisite: Economics 210.”
Political Science 331 - Public Administration. “A study of the capacity for effective and responsible administration in the United States. Primary attention is given to the qualities of organization as the vehicle of public policy; the impact of individual and group behavior is examined, as are theoretical notions of the relationship of the bureaucracy to the democratic state. The Presidency receives considerable emphasis. Course materials are books and case studies in about equal measure.”
Political Science 340 - Comparative Politics of Non-Western Countries. “The course will examine the political systems of the following countries: China, Japan, India, Pakistan and Egypt.”
Sociology 361 - Kinship Organization. “The range and variety of kinship and family structures, the place of kinship and family in social structure, problems in the analysis of kinship and stability, and changes in kinship and family. Given in 1962-63 and alternate years.”
Chemistry 311 - Chemical Instrumentation. “This is a continuation of Chemistry 212 and emphasizes instrumental methods of analysis. The classwork covers the theoretical bases for electroanalytical, photoanalytical and chromatographic techniques. The laboratory work introduces five basic components used in chemical instrumentation today: the potentiometer, the vacuum tube, the servomechanism, the monochromator and the photocell. Three lectures and three laboratories weekly. Prerequisite: Chemistry 212, Physics 110, or General Physics and Chemistry 120, or the consent of the instructor.”
Chemistry 372 - Radiochemistry. “Introduction to properties of radioactive substances and the methods of handling radioisotopes in the laboratory. Laboratory work includes 8-10 experiments illustrating the principles discussed in the course. Prerequisites: Mathematics 110, Physics 110, Chemistry 212 [Introduction to Quantitative Analysis].”
Physics 322 - Electronic Circuits. “This course treats the basic physical ideas involved in vacuum tubes and semi-conductor devices, and their application to electronic circuits. The topics covered are; the characteristics of vacuum tube and semi-conductor devices and their use as circuit elements, basic circuits and circuit analysis. The laboratory experiments are designed to acquaint the student with basic circuits and with the use of various types of electronic equipment. Two lectures and a three-hour laboratory per week.” For comparison, Reed’s CS department today has 21 classes, including thesis and independent study.
Physics 432 - Optics. “This course is a more thorough and more mathematical treatment of both geometrical and physical optics than is possible in the general courses. Topics discussed are: mirrors, prisms and thin lenses; thick lenses and lens combinations; ray tracing; aberrations; apertures and stops; interference and interferometers; Fraunhofer and Fresnel diffraction; absorption, dispersion and scattering; polarization and double refraction; and an introduction to the electromagnetic theory of light. Prerequisite: Physics 210. Three lecture hours per week.”
Philosophy 332 - Aesthetics. “A systematic consideration of the typical historical and contemporary concepts of criticism; a survey of the characteristic attempts to discover and define the philosophical grounds of criticism and criteria of taste.”
Education 451 - Supervised Teaching. “A semester course which should be taken in the fall of the senior year. Student teaching and observation in the schools of Portland or nearby communities. The student should arrange his course program so as to be free to devote approximately a half day for the semester at the assigned school. Prerequisite: Education 311-12 [Foundations of Public Teaching] or equivalent and consent of instructor.” Yep, Reed had an education department!
There was also a Health, Physical Education, and Recreation department, with classes such as Playground Leadership and Camp Counselorship.
Hum 110 existed, though with a less diverse selection of texts: “The initial step in the humanities program is a general freshman course (Humanities 110) exploring the background of western civilization through the study of the institutions, thought, and literary and other artistic expression of the ancient world and early modern Europe.” It was unclear whether or not all freshmen were required to take it, though transfer students were encouraged but not required to take it during their first year.
The Forestry-Environmental Sciences dual degree 5-year program with Duke was extremely similar! From 1963: “Under an arrangement with the Duke University School of Forestry, qualified students may obtain the Bachelor of Arts degree from Reed and the Master of Forestry degree from Duke after five years' work, three at Reed, and two at Duke.” Students would qual in Reed’s biology department, after taking an economics class in their junior year (today, economics is recommended for the sophomore year) as well as an intro sociology and anthropology class (not mentioned in the 2024 description). The premed program was also extremely similar to how it is today.
For the record, O Chem involved “[f]our lectures, one conference and two laboratory periods weekly”. (The length of time was not listed.) Today O Chem involves one lecture, three conferences, and one lab each week, totalling approximately eight hours per week.
And as for dorms, the catalog said, “Students must provide their own sheets, pillows and pillowcases, towels and blankets. A linen rental service is available to those who may not wish to bring towels and bed linen[s] from home. Each student should bring a study lamp. Rugs, pictures and other fixtures may be brought to add to the attractiveness of the rooms. With regard to pictures, it should be noted that the college owns a large collection of fine prints which may be rented by students for small fees. Since the number and size of windows in the rooms varies from suite to suite, the possibility of a last minute change in room assignments makes it impractical to bring curtains already made up.” (Incidentally, Oberlin College also has an art rental program for students, where “each semester students can rent up to two pieces of art from the Allen [Memorial Art Museum] for $5/painting”. This tradition has existed at Oberlin since 1940.)
