This newspaper has published a wide variety of articles in its almost 84 years of history. For those who don’t know, every issue of The Weather Vane that has ever been published since its inception in 1939 is available online in the Library’s database. To scroll through these archives is to get about as thorough a look as you can get at Eastern Mennonite University’s history. While there are certainly many articles that one would expect to find in the archives of a small Mennonite school’s paper- analysis of chapels, professor profiles, discussions of the ethics of the draft during the Vietnam era- there are also many surprises hidden within the depths of the dossiers, surprises that can perhaps challenge preconceived notions of what old EMU was like.

For starters, in the May 27, 1966 issue, reporter Glenn Lehman profiles the first known EMC student to take Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Ken Lind volunteered to “help a psychiatrist test LSD” at a hospital in Philadelphia but even though he was being monitored, he still was able to experience the full effects of the drug. Lind described the experience as “crazy” and “unforgettable” in his testimony. “I was just sitting there in the chair, kind of dazed, enjoying it all and not giving a hang about anything,” said Lind. “On the opposite wall I saw two big wasps. I told the doctor who was interviewing me to look out for them. Doc said to get a closer look at them. So I walked over and saw they were picture hooks. But when I got back to the chair, by jiminy, they were wasps again.” In the article Lind also cautions people against stereotyping neither the experience of taking LSD, nor the people who take it.

Throughout the mid-60s, EMC was home to a UFO Investigators Club, started by Professor Earnest Gehman in 1964 and occasionally profiled by The Weather Vane. The club met monthly to hear speeches from visiting scientists and experts on the phenomena as well as work on “running down reports and getting facts on present and past UFO sightings.” Dr. Gehman described himself as a “self described enthusiast of [UFOs]” since a UFO was sighted by a couple in nearby Broadway in 1956 who he knew personally. The club seems to have disbanded around 1966 as there are no mentions of it, even offhand, past that year.  Other miscellaneous finds within the folds include a brief controversy over a Coca Cola Video Juicebox being installed in the Caf in 1993 before being removed the following year. There is also a significantly larger but logical focus on foreign affairs during the Cold War era as compared to recent years (EMC’s United Nations club also dominated headlines around then, and multiple large advertisements for Goshen College of all places throughout at least a few issues in 2012. In the April 26, 1968 issue, the first of many donkey basketball games that would be played by the school’s faculty is mentioned briefly at the bottom of page three. Professors playing Donkey Basketball seemingly was not worthy of a full article back then. There are more stories, incidents, opinions, and oddities than can be listed in this article that altogether easily contrast any sort of generalization about EMU’s past. Scroll through any issue and you’ll quickly find something to pique your interest or cause significant curiosity. The EMU Weathervane Database can be accessed at https://emu.contentdm.oclc.org/