Email This PageDoing It Again
Although I attended Swarthmore six years after Amy Singer’s mother, perhaps I can shed some light: 1. “A soft Southern drawl” was indeed Dean Cobbs’s natural voice. 2. The rule then was very distinctly no visiting, period, except for occasional, very limited weekend open-house days, when the door had to be open and all parties needed to have at least one foot on the floor. (I was told things were a little looser in the Mary Lyons dorms.) Regarding curfews and sign-in times for women, as I heard it, the student in question asked Susan Cobbs, “Dean Cobbs, why do we have to sign in by midnight? I mean, if we want to do anything, we’ll have done it by then.” To which, according to what I heard, Cobbs drawled, “Honey, we’re not tryin’ to stop you from doin’ it. We’re trying to stop you from doin’ it again.”
Robert Freedman ’58
New York
April 21st, 2009 11:31 am
In a recent e-mail to the Bulletin, Julie Lange Hall '55 wrote:
In a letter to the editor some time ago, Amy Singer '82 quoted Dean Cobbs about visiting hours. In essence, she was accurate, but according to my mother, Barbara Lange Godfrey, who was there when the comment was made, "the students were plugging for four hours on Sunday afternoons, but Susan Cobbs said two was enough. One student said to her, 'Miss Cobbs, what can I do in four hours that I couldn't do in two?' And she said in her Southern drawl, 'You could do it twice.'" At least that's what Mother was quoted as saying in the Bulletin of March, 1999.
Here's a link to the interview: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Admin/publications/bulletin/archive/99/mar99/backpages.html
Jeff Lott, Editor