IU commencement 1959
Post-war economy booming, Bishop Sheen spoke at baccalaureate, Jessamyn West received an honorary degree…and a Manhattan apartment rented for $125 a month
Ruth Padget Albright and Peggy Graham Cliadakis collected their Indiana University diplomas in the spring of 1959 and hopped on a bus to New York City, in a rush to start careers.
Photo by Barney Cowherd, courtesy of IU Archives
Two 1959 graduates sit in the grass by the library building now known as Franklin Hall. Behind them is the clock tower of the Student Building.
"We stayed at my cousin's apartment," Albright recalled. "Within two weeks we had an apartment and we both had jobs."
The world was a different place back then. The Cold War was at its peak. The post-war economy was booming. IU was about to enter a growth spurt that would produce new athletics facilities, dorms and classroom buildings.
Commencement took place June 8, 1959, at the old Memorial Stadium, now the site of the Arboretum. IU President Herman B Wells, Gov. Harold Handley and other dignitaries spoke from a temporary stage on the grass field. Students sat in folding chairs while families and friends watched from the stands. Author Jessamyn West and Wabash College President Byron Trippet received honorary degrees.
"More than 4,000 set for sheepskins," read the headline announcing commencement in the Indiana Daily Student (which Albright edited). The bulk of the graduates were divided among the School of Education, the School of Business and the many majors in the College of Arts and Sciences.
There was a big-name speaker for the 1959 baccalaureate: Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, at the height of his fame as America's best-known theologian and religious broadcasting star.
As for commencement, Cliadakis remembers only that the day was hot and there was a blur of activity, with friends saying good-bye and asking each other about job prospects and summer plans.
Albright said, "I remember the dress I wore under my graduation robe. I don't remember anything else." She wore a brown, sleeveless dress with polka-dots.
In New York, the friends got jobs with the McGraw-Hill publishing house and rented an apartment in midtown Manhattan for $125 a month. Cliadakis left within a year to get married and move to Texas. Albright stayed and worked for 20 years at Scholastic magazine.
In 1981, she married David Albright, a fellow Indiana Daily Student journalist who graduated a year before her. They lived in the Washington, D.C., area and in Montgomery, Ala., where she worked for the Alabama Journal. When "people started trying to sell us cemetery plots," Albright said, she and her Hoosier native husband decided it was time to move back north.
They returned Bloomington in 1994, this time in no hurry to leave. "It's great," she said. "It has all the big-city advantages combined with the small-city advantages."
