The ’50s at Long Beach State College ended in an explosion of anger, unrest, charges and counter charges, as the weekly Forty-Niner threaded its way through a verbal minefield as rhetorical cannons thundered from the left and the right.
Faculty members battled each other, as well as the administration, in a two-year fight that led to the retirement-under-fire of LBSC President Victor Peterson, the first president of the school.
The battle often made Page One: In April 1958, faculty members protested the non-reappointment of two professors and the lack of faculty input into the decision. By December, LBSC administrators and faculty were testifying in Los Angeles before a California legislative subcommittee about the explosive campus atmosphere.
The Faculty Council voted to request Peterson’s resignation, and in early 1959 The Forty-Niner reported that 60 percent of the campus faculty had voted in favor of Peterson’s resignation. The Forty-Niner ran a front-page editorial from the student body president: “A Plea for Progress.”
Charges of “immature faculty” who didn’t understand the “purpose and function of a state college,” “ministry of fear,” “cesspool,” “hard-care dissidents,” “irresponsible” “leftist” were among many faculty allegations printed in The Forty-Niner that semester. Some charges came from members of the business faculty; counter-charges came from the liberal arts faculty.
In February 1959, The Forty-Niner reprinted a congratulatory editorial from the Long Beach Independent, Press-Telegram that praised the campus paper “for the outstanding job that it has done” in reporting the battle.
“Dr. Peterson Announces June Retirement” was the banner headline in the March 4 edition of The Forty-Niner, and the fight effectively ended. The State Board of Education named Dr. Carl McIntosh the second president of LBSC; The Forty-Niner printed verbatim McIntosh’s fall commencement address of 750-plus words.
But the real story of the decade was growth and, closely related, construction on the new 320-acre campus. What had begun in 1949 with fewer than 200 students became 10,000 by spring 1959.
That fall, course registration collapsed under the crush of students and lasted almost to midnight. The first residence halls opened on campus. Students were charged $13 a semester to park on campus for the first time. Early talks on a million-dollar student union began. The State Board of Education also voted to continue the 1800s-era ban on liquor sales on college campuses.
The campus was predominantly male during that decade, and The Forty-Niner often published photos of attractive “coeds” in pre-bikini swimming suits for the sake of publishing them; there were no female editors in the 1950s. It published the “vital statistics” of the reigning 1956 Miss Universe in the contest held annually in Long Beach (36-23-36).
G.I. Bill veterans of the Korean conflict made up much of the student body. The evening Forty-Niter was created for the 56 percent of LBSC students — many of them veterans — who attended 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. classes.
The campus also had day and night voting for student offices such as Associated Women Students and Associated Men Students.
Fraternities and sororities dominated campus social life. It was an era of “49er Days” held in Pete’s Gulch near what is now Brotman Hall. We had the Hi-Jinx Ball and elections for Black Bart and Lotta Crabtree.
It also was an era of the Homecoming Queen, the Interfraternity Ball, the Diamond Jim Ball, the Blue Book Ball, the Spring Fling and even the Perspiration Ball in the campus gym, noting that students would be allowed to wear shoes in the gym; it wouldn’t be a “sock hop” anymore.
The Forty-Niner frequently covered academics in the 1950s. It had front-page stories on the library’s switch to the Library of Congress system from the Dewey Decimal System, and in 1958 it headlined that LBSC now would be able to grant master’s degrees that weren’t tied to teacher education.
It also headlined “Fraternity Row Collides With Scholarship Question,” a story based on a national study. It carried a full-page photo spread in 1958 on the new marching band that would perform at half-time at football games. LBSC didn’t win many games, though.
-Lee Brown, editor in chief, 1959-1960
