“BACK IN MY DAY…
I was living in Betsy Barbour dorm on State Street in 1952 when the West Quad boys decided to ‘attack’ our dorm, stormed the front door, and ran through the building grabbing souvenirs from the girls’ rooms: the first college panty raid. It was recorded by a Life magazine stringer in Ann Arbor and the story appeared in print. Like any good trend, it was replicated and publicized, eventually becoming a national trend.” — Janet Netzer Neary, ’54
TODAY…
The “panty raids” of 1950s campus memories have long disappeared from the University of Michigan. Nowadays, the first nice day of spring beckons countless hammocks to the Diag. But in 1952, students seemed to be infected with what the then-dean of students would call “spring madness.”
On March 20, 1952, a commotion — started by one student playing his trumpet after dinner — drew an estimated 600 male students from West and South Quads into the street.
As they amassed, a call was heard: “To the women’s dorms!”
With residence halls still segregated by gender, the all-female dorms on the Hill, at Observer and Ann, were the first destination, and “To the Hill!” would become a rallying cry that was heard in future raids.
But women students were not passive participants that first night as the men broke in through the windows, seeking their “miscellaneous female unmentionables,” as the Ann Arbor News tactfully put it. Residents of Alice Lloyd poured water from their windows on the men below, and 500 women quickly assembled to counterraid the men’s spaces, starting with the Union.
That singular night in Ann Arbor was the catalyst for a national phenomenon. The publicity — fueled in part by Life magazine’s national coverage — turned the bedlam into a blueprint, sparking an “epidemic” of raids on campuses across the country.
The fervor, while intense, did not last. As the political and social movements of the 1960s took center stage on campus, the performative theater of the panty raid lost its cultural currency. It did not end with a single, sudden prohibition, but tapered off as undergraduate energy was redirected into calls for substantive societal change and dormitories became coed. — Matthew Benz, ’98
“Also, I was a freshman in 1950, home for Thanksgiving, in the year of the improbable ‘Roses in the Snow’ blizzard victory over Ohio State. Now those were the days.” — Janet Netzer Neary, ’54
In the fall of 1950, the long-awaited Ohio State rivalry game took place in Columbus with the Big Ten championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl at stake. A fierce blizzard overtook the stadium with reports of 10 degree temperatures, 28 mph winds, and snow falling at a rate of two inches per hour — obscuring yard lines, goalposts, and fans’ view of the field. Neither team mounted much of an offense: the Wolverines never made a first down and the teams punted a combined 45 times. But U-M blocked two punts, leading to a safety and a touchdown, and secured an improbable 9–3 victory over Ohio State. The game became known as the “Snow Bowl” or, equally fitting, “Roses in the Snow.” — Katherine Fiorillo
Matthew Benz, ’98, is a freelance writer based in Michigan. Katherine Fiorillo is the senior editor of Michigan Alum.
