This week’s trip through the archives reveals the “Blanket Blitz” of 2001, cafeteria cutbacks in 1976, a poorly attended prayer meeting in 1951, and the autumnal splendor of campus in 1926.
This shout-out in The Weather Vane references a monthlong blanket drive during the fall of 2001 in which EMU collected 1,360 handmade and store-bought blankets for “refugees fleeing the fighting in Afghanistan and facing a cold winter” (Crossroads, 2001).
This article about overexpenditures reports a $33,000 deficit in cafeteria operations. “There have been some changes made in favor of the cafeteria’s income,” the article notes, including cutting back on ice cream.
This op-ed about a sparsely attended Mission Prayer Meeting references a couple identified as “Mr. and Mrs. Kim,” who spoke on campus during the Korean War and “attributed the rapid growth and increasing strength of the Christian Churches in Korea to the vitality of their prayer meetings.”
“If one half of the students who were in the dining hall for breakfast last Sunday morning would have attended Mission Prayer Meeting, we would have had an unusually large crowd,” the writer observed.
In the century since these words were written, EMU has grown and transformed, and generations of students have called this place home. Yet the changing colors of the leaves on campus remain just as glorious as they were in 1926.
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