Terie Frank Jusseaume - Class of 1974
Some of my best Walsh memories are splattered with mud. Not in a figurative way, but literally.
I attended Walsh from 1970 to 1974. There were many Walsh rites of passage during that time but the one that sticks out in my mind was the Mud Tug. It was part of the freshmen first week festivities on campus.
The whole Mug Tug concept was pretty simple - members of the freshmen class had to dig a giant pit in the center of campus, behind the dorms. The local fire department came and filled the hole with water. A rope was dangled from one side of hole to the other - freshmen on one side, upperclassmen on the other.
Usually, there were more freshmen because we were still a pretty young school at that point. So the upperclassmen had their end of the rope hooked to a tractor or truck, so they always won. The poor freshmen would be pulling with all their might, trying to prove that they were stronger, and they would just go right into the mud. They had no idea that the other end of the rope was attached to a car or tractor until they were in the pit.
It was one of the many events on campus that brought us together as a family. It was one of the events that started out the year and carried us into the also fondly remembered, ongoing, nearly perpetual euchre games. These games only paused for classes, and then someone not in class took the place of the unfortunate student who had to actually go to class and miss the real college experience of euchre in the Campus Center.