On Feb. 1, 1986:
Ed Sweet '87 and Joanne Lembert '88 staged a 12-hour sit-in at the Sharpe Refectory, for no other reason than to accomplish their goal of spending a whole day in the Ratty.
They began their Saturday at 7:30 a.m. and stayed until the evening at the same table, playing Monopoly and watching wrestling and episodes of Scooby-Doo on their portable television.
"We did it just for fun," Sweet said. "We don't have a protest, a cause or anything."
Following the experience, Sweet told The Herald that he understood why students do not spend the entire day at the Ratty. He said her 12 hours there gave him a chance to observe students' habits.
"People change their clothes, and people take showers between meals," he said.
But students dining near Sweet and Lembert had mixed reactions to the sit-in.
"Who's doing the spectating — us or them?" said Pam Peters '88.
On Feb. 1, 1985:
Geologist Kathryn Sullivan spoke to students about her experiences in space with NASA and the 132 orbit trips she had taken around the globe.
Sullivan spent eight days in space in October 1984 on a space shuttle mission and came to Providence to work alongside the University's geology department in analyzing data collected during her trips.
During the talk, Sullivan showed Hasselblad photographs of the earth — from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean Sea — taken from an orbit height of 218 miles. A photo from space of New England in the fall elicited a murmur of surprise from the crowd. According to Sullivan, New England appeared brown not green from space in the fall due to autumn foliage.
"I sometimes think we learn more about ourselves in orbit than we do about the earth," she said.
On Feb. 1, 1963:
During a talk in Manning Hall, Josef Smolik, associate professor of practical theology at the Comenius Faculty in Prague, called for a revival of Christian values in order to withstand the increasing influence of the industrial age on Christians. Smolik said the European church consisted of congregations that went through the rituals of participation but did not genuinely understand what it meant to be a Christian. Marxists believed the church would decline and eventually disappear, but with a return to focusing on the gospel, the Church would be able to provide answers to issues of the era, he said.
On Feb. 1, 1900:
The University bowling team lost to Edgewood by only two pins in its last home game of the season. Despite a large group of fans present, Brown was unable to clinch the victory and scored 2,368 pins to Edgewood's 2,370. Edgewood had also triumphed in its last meeting with Brown, by a slight margin of seven pins. The Brown team had two matchups left for the season, though according to Herald coverage, it was no longer likely that the team would be able to end the season ranked second in the Inter-Club League following this loss to Edgewood.
