Miami Hurricane, August 25, 1950

              The Miami w Hurricane
Volume XXV	University of Miami, Coral Carles, Fla., August 25, 1950	No. 9
New Ross Novel Published
Photo by Baiar
MALCOLM ROSS, AUTHOR OF “THE MAN WHO LIVED BACKWARD.
Grad Applications Reach 254 Mark
Applications for graduation at the end of the second summer session total 254. according to figures released this week by the Registrar’s office.
The school of Business Administration remains in top position with 105 degrees, including five master’s degrees, to be conferred. The College of Liberal Arts runs a close second with a total of 82.
The School of Engineering expects to award 37 degrees, the School of Education plans to give 26, and the School of Music, four.
Nine Master of Science degrees and six Master of Arts are to be awarded and the remaining 68 degrees are divided between 48 Bachelor of Arts and 19 Bachelor of Science degrees.
The School of Engineering will confer their 37 Bachelor of Science degrees in five categories: Engineering Science, 5; Civil Engineering. 9; Mechanical Engineering, 15; Industrial Engineering, 5; Electric Engineering, 3.
The 26 Education degrees are made up of two Master’s and 24 Bachelor degrees.
The School of Music will confer four Bachelor of Music degrees.
There are no candidates for law degrees this session.
Dance Rescheduled
The dance originally scheduled for last week will be held tonight on the Student club patio from 9 to midnight.
Buddy Wilson and his band will play for this eighth in a series of student activities-sponsored summer
socials.
There is no admission charge and
everyone is invited.
The Student Activities office also announced that the University cabin cruiser “Bctiska” will not be available until further notice due to the j lack of interest demonstrated by the student body during the summer r months.
Grad Wins Golf Title
A former University of Miami, coed, Pat Devany, recently won the j Michigan state women’s amateur j golf championship.
Miss Devany is a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.
Stunts Planned By U-M Club
Members of the University Pep club are at work planning card stunts for the football games, according to Ted Cook, president.
The newly-organized card section, which ranked third among the southeastern states last year, is working out stunts employing colors and mascots of the visiting teams.
The organization is also planning to obtain letter emblems for all members
Ken Lightfoot, a former University of Florida student who has transfered to the U-M, was appointed director of football activities. Ken was also one of the organizers of the University of Florida’s card section.
Eleanor Starkstein was chosen to head publicity for the club.
All members and alternates are asked to contact Ted Cook at Doctor Thurston Adam’s office as soon as possible.
Orchestra Chooses Beach Auditorium
The symphony orchestra of the University of Miami will present its Sunday series of concerts at the new Miami Beach municipal auditorium this season, according to Mrs. Marie Volpe, business director of University concert programs.
In the past, the orchestra has performed at Miami senior high school auditorium Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings. Under the new arrangement Sunday performances will be in the evening at the Beach auditorium. The Monday evening series will remain at Miami senior high school.
Mrs. Volpe pointed out that the new auditorium is much larger and that it is air conditioned. She added that subscribers to either series of concerts have until Sept. 10 to change their seat locations.
The first concert will feature Rise Stevens, Metropolitan Opera star, Sunday, Oct. 29, at 8:30 p.m. Tickets for the concerts will go on sale beginning Sept. 1.
The move to the new Beach auditorium is a project of the Miami Beach Exchange Club. The committee in charge consists of George J. Bertman, chairman, Harry O. Nelson, and Edoward I. Mandell.
Review Lauds Malcolm Ross For New Work
By FRED SHAW
Associate Profeasor of English
Malcolm Ross was a novelist long before he tried his hand at factual and interpretive writing. His reputation, however, rests on three books of non-fiction which prove his*
Colorful Career Leads Ross To Campus Job
By JIM W1IYTK
Hurricane Editor
Malcolm Ross, author of “The Man Who Lived Backward,” which was published this week, has been university editor at the University of Miami since 1947.
Ross came to the U-M after a varied career as a newspaperman, laborer, author and government executive. Immediately before taking up his duties here, he was the chairman of the 1	--------------“♦'Fair Employment Practices Corn-
gifts as a reporter, a writer of social history, and an interpreter of America in times of crisis: “Machine Age In The Hills,” “Death Of A Yale Man,” and “All Manner Of Men.” Now, in his first novel since 1931, Mr. Ross has written a book that deserves to stand with the best of his non-fiction. And that is very high praise indeed.
Born 1940, Died 1865 Mark Selby, “The Man Who Lived Backward,” was born in 1940 and died in 1865. The book is composed largely of excerpts from his diary, from 1901 to 1865, and the diary makes fascinating reading. Consider the ingenious time plan. Mark always moved backward in time. His ■♦first experience in World War I was marching as a captain in a victory parade; h i s last was doing pushups on his first day of basic training.
Mark constantly walked a tight rope. A woman’s scornful glance, a stranger’s friendly slap on the back, a friend’s allusion to the past, even the kindness of a beautiful woman when he was a child—any action could mean anything; he would simply have to wait and see. He would understand when he had lived further into his future, and their past.
A sensitive and intelligent man, Mark long pondered the curse that time had laid on him. He thought that he saw a symbolic “link between the turning away from life, which war signifies, and that reluctance to face the future which I am forced to believe my life must represent.”
Selby Similar To Ross
What Mark Selby learned in his long backward journey through time is not so different from what Malcolm Ross learned after his graduation from Yale. They were both easy, sophisticated men who enjoyed good food, good clothes, good company. Mark Selby had no knowledge of social classes; but if he had thought about it at all, he would have concluded that America existed for the men like himself who neither toiled nor spun but managed to array themselves rather neatly with their profits from the stock exchange. And when he left Yale in 1919, Malcolm Ross would have felt the same way.
A key year in Malrolm Ross’s life was 1932, when he served with the American Friends’ Service Committee in Harlan County, Kentucky. The bloody coal wars helped make him a bigger writer, a bigger man. Later, when he came to write “Death Of A Yale Man,” Mr. Ross said in his preface:
“I would like to see America try democracy at whatever the cost to comfortable people. And because I know the strength of the opponents of authentic democracy, I have decreed the death of what I was.”
For Mark Selby, the year was 1892, the place Pittsburgh during the Homestead steel riots. He could have used some of his creator’s experiences as a reporter, oil field rousta- j
SIIAW
• • •
bout, and copper mine mucker. It was Mark’s first brush with common men—the strike meeting his “first experience of a human assembly which moved by its own dynamics.”
Sickened By Brutality
The brutality of the union’s supporters sickened him. But he stood with the strikers against the Pinkerton men. And he probed the meaning of what he saw: “Does this ugly cocoon of Homestead conceal a valuable life which today is bursting into the open, and by necessity in violence?”
Mark Selby came late to democracy. But under his tutors— his wife Helen, John Burroughs, Walt Whitman, a newspaper reporter, and a preacher—he moved backward toward the Civil War, holding his experiences up for analysis.
And finally he could say, “The hope to which I cling is the spirit that moved Abraham Lincoln.” And again: “The heart must lie humble to make a true man. Manners and money and power are accidents. The touchstone is the heart that lies under a man’s ribs.” “The Man Who Lived Backward" is a rewarding book. The time pattern gives Mr. Ross a chance to interpret the years following the Civil War in the light of the present, to roam through some of thb places that he knows best, reconstructing life in the way of the novelist of manners. And Mr. Ross is perfectly at home in the nineteenth century. The book moves slowly, thoughtfully, as if it were the work of a (Continued on page 2)
Campus
Calendar
Friday, Aug. 25, 7:30 p.m—B.S.U.’s annual Rush Party and panorama. Honoring new students from Miami area . . . Baptist Student Center Main campus. 9 to 12 mid., Orchestra dance for all students. Studen Club Patio. Music by Buddy Wilson.
Saturday, Aug. 26—Entries due for Handball tournament.
Monday, Aug. 28—Coral Gables Skish Club—Student Club Lake.
mission.
Ross was born on April 1, 1895, in Newark, N.J., the son of Gertrude and William Ross. He was graduated from the Hotchkiss school in 1915 and in 1919 he received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University.
Ross married Miss Camille Miller in April of 1936. Mr. and Mrs. Ross and their three sons, Alexander Clinton. Malcolm, Jr., and David, live in Miami.
Served In World War I During World War I, from 1917— 1918, Ross served as a 1st Lt. with the air service of the U.S. army. He was stationed at an air base near Detroit as a pilot of the “Flying Jenny" type aircraft.
For a short while after leaving Yale, Ross worked as a bond salesman. He then served as a reporter on the “Dallas News,” the “Louisville Courier-Journal” and the "New York Morning World.” Following that he journeyed to Oklahoma where he worked as a roustabout in the oil fields.
From Oklahoma Ross pushed on to Arizona to work as a mucker in the copper mines there. He then joined the American Friends Service Committee, in 1932, to work as field observer. It was his duty with that organization to report on the living conditions and economic conditions of the workers in the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia.
Worked For NLRB From the coal mining area Ross went to Washington, D.C., to take up the position as Director of Information for the National Labor Relations Board. It was while he was serving in this capacity that he met and married Mias Miller.
In 1942, shortly after the beginning of World War II, Roas began working as a writer for the Office of War Information. Following that, in 1943, he was appointed by President Roosevelt as the chairman of the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practices. Roas held that position until 1946.
It was while working on the FEPC that Ross became acquainted with Dr. Bowman F. Ashe. At that time. Dr. Ashe was the chairman in the Southeast for the War Manpower Commission, which worked very closely with the FEPC’
Then, in 1947, Ross was appointed as the University editor here. Since assuming that role he has established the University Press, for the publication of educational and technical works, and has taken charge of the University’s public relations work.
Ross’ career as an author paralleled his multitude of other jobs. In 1926 tiis l>ook, “Deep Enough,” was published. This was followed in 1931 by “Hymn to the Sun.”
Ross published a technical volumne on aerial navigation in 1932. It was entitled “Sailing the Skies."
Wrote Sociological Novels In 1933 Ross wrote the first of his sociological novels, “Machine Age in the Hills." The book dealt entirely with the problems brought on by the coal mining industry in Kentucky and West Virginia. It showed the boom and bust change from an agricultural to industrial society in less than a decade and the accompanying sociological problems.