Big Dance for Departure of Servicemen

Dorothy F. Nagle (Class of 1946) describes the night before the servicemen left and the subsequent changes at Dickinson in an interview. In 1943, Dickinson hosted a large dance the night before "the fellows were going to be leaving" from the Carlisle Railroad Station. Students were permitted to remain out an hour later than normal curfew (twelve o' clock instead of eleven o' clock) and to rise early the next morning to see the men off. Nagle, who had been seeing a young man at Dickinson who left for the war, remarks that it "was a very sentimental time...." When the men left, the once male-dominated campus became female-dominated: instead of "three-quarters male and one-quarter female," Dickinson had a male-female ratio of 1:3.