Zag History 101

120 years ago this summer, the first Gonzaga College students arrived on campus.

All three of them.

These “three lonesome lads,” as Gonzaga historian Father George Weibel called them, arrived on a campus that consisted of one brick building and a cow pasture. The boys were in charge of the college’s cows and horses for several hot and dusty weeks until the rest of the students arrived.

All four of them.

So when Gonzaga College officially opened on Sept. 17, 1887, a grand total of seven boys were in attendance, from age 10 to 15. They were outnumbered more than 2-to-1 by the faculty, which consisted of 17 Jesuits.

From this unpromising start, Gonzaga University has grown to about 6,736 students, 342 fulltime faculty and a national reputation – and not just for basketball.

Yet the roots of Gonzaga University go back, in one sense, all the way to a tiny rough-hewn schoolhouse in 1880 on Peone Prairie, about 12 miles northeast of Spokane. Father Joseph Cataldo, who had been working with the Northwest Indians for 15 years, was convinced that if the Jesuits were to continue their Indian mission work, they must build Catholic schools and colleges for the brightest young Indian students, according to Wilfred P. Schoenberg’s 1963 history of the school, “Gonzaga University: Seventy-Five Years, 1887-1962.” So he opened a little day school for the Upper Spokane Indian children at St. Michael’s Mission.

Yet by 1881, he was dreaming of a bigger school. He and the other Jesuit leaders started planning a large Catholic Jesuit college for Indian students, located right in the growing city of Spokane Falls. He chose Spokane because it was central to the Jesuit missions scattered in Washington, Idaho and Montana. A complicated land deal ensued, resulting in the purchase in 1881 of 320 acres of prime riverfront land just east of the city’s growing business district, which remains today the core of the Gonzaga campus. The town’s founders were so enamored with the idea of a college that they promised Cataldo funds to help build his college. The only catch: They expected it to be a college for white students.

Cataldo later wrote the town was “clamoring for a college”; he began to accept the idea that white students might at least make the school more attractive to Indian students. Work on the brick building began, haltingly, in 1884. By 1886, the building still lacked a finished interior yet had acquired an official name: Gonzaga College, named after St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron saint of youth.

“The building is unquestionably the most commanding and imposing one in the Northwest,” wrote Spokane’s Morning Review newspaper on New Year’s Day of 1887. “The probable cost when completed will be considerably over $30,000.”

By summer of 1887, the building was mostly completed. The Jesuit faculty arrived, and so did those first three students.

A few days after the official opening in September, Father Joseph Joset, a Jesuit missionary, arrived with two Indian boys and tried to register them. Father James Rebmann, the first father superior, informed him that the school was for white boys only. Father Cataldo’s original concept had entirely disappeared.

By the end of the school year, enrollment had risen to 18 boys, all white. That number did not include two boys who had already been expelled. Students could be expelled for any public lapse in morality, the most serious of which were theft, disobedience and “impurity.” The boys were not allowed to go anywhere without supervision; a scholastic chaperoned them even on a walk into town.

Student life

The student’s days were strictly regimented during those first years. Students had to rise six days a week at 5:30 a.m. and work or study nearly nonstop until lights out at 8:30 p.m. They attended Mass every day and twice on Sundays. No alcohol or cigarettes were tolerated, although the older boys were allowed one cigar on special occasions, such as the school picnic.

Students had to pass rigorous examinations for advancement; some students became ill at the mere thought of these exams. One Montana student ran away, and others were pulled out by their parents. Two other disgruntled boys left in disgust, although one of the fathers declared that “the dissatisfaction was mutual.” A total of 27 boys made it to the end of the second year out of the 35 enrolled.

The school was divided into the traditional divisions common in Jesuit schools at the time. A preparatory division resembled what we would now call elementary school; an academic section, consisting of Third, Second and First divisions, resembled what we would now call high school; and the Poetry, Rhetoric and Philosophy divisions constituted the equivalent of a modern liberal arts college.

By 1892, the school was finally out of its infancy and beginning to grow. A new hall, dormitory and the Victorian-style wood-framed St. Aloysius Church were completed. Electricity had been installed in all of the buildings. Enrollment was up well over 50. Even better for student morale: Gonzaga had formed a baseball team that regularly beat teams from the town.

Baseball was a mild diversion compared with the sport called “college-down,” i.e., football, which arrived on campus on Thanksgiving Day, 1892. A reporter on hand said that first game was noteworthy for the “absence of slugging.” Football became a Gonzaga passion for the next several years, until it was banned (and not for the last time) as being too dangerous. One of the most common plays in those days was the flying wedge, in which players linked arms and charged down the field, bulldozing any opponents who got in the way.

New Gonzaga

By 1894, two boys had been at the school long enough to receive Gonzaga’s first Bachelor of Arts degrees. Gonzaga’s enrollment was growing so quickly that the campus couldn’t keep up with it. So in 1897 grand plans were announced for a huge new college building, four stories tall and, according to the Review, the largest building in the city.

New Gonzaga, as the building was called to distinguish it from the older college building, was completed in 1899. It remains today the center of Gonzaga life and academics. The rest of the campus was transformed as well by the turn of the century. The school’s original buildings, including the church, were picked up and moved to new locations on the campus, closer to the New Gonzaga and away from the noisy railroad tracks. By 1906, enrollment reached 483 students, taught by 20 Jesuits, eight scholastics and ten lay professors. Gonzaga’s total Jesuit community totaled 76.

In 1906, disaster struck when typhoid fever swept through the school, killing four boys and threatening Gonzaga’s very existence. School was dismissed six weeks early to protect the boys and to track down the source of the outbreak. The source turned out to be a plunge bath (a small swimming pool) popular among the boys. The outbreak resulted in two changes: The water in the plunge bath was renewed continually and a fine pressed-brick infirmary was built.

The school was transformed in three important ways during its 25th jubilee year of 1911-1912. First, a grand new twin-spired brick church was built to replace the school’s original wood-framed church. This new St. Aloysius Church was dedicated in 1911 and still towers over the school’s religious life. Second, Gonzaga College officially became Gonzaga University.

Acquisition of university status cleared the way that same year for the opening of the Gonzaga School of Law, which would grow to become an increasingly important part of the Gonzaga community. It is today the only law school in Eastern Washington and one of only three law schools in the state. It began as a night school to accommodate its students, many of whom worked during the day, as well as its faculty, who practiced law in the city by day. It remained exclusively a night school until 1970.

The sporting life

Football, revived in 1907, became a Gonzaga craze in the 1920s even though the sport and its growing dominance were still viewed with ambivalence by the Jesuit administration. Yet the students, the city and the alumni loved many of those early Gonzaga teams, and they led a cry in 1920 for a new stadium to push Gonzaga football into the big time. The first game in the new stadium – which would eventually seat 12,000 – was played on Oct. 14, 1922. In an omen of things to come, Gonzaga lost to Washington State College (now Washington State University). The stadium – and the football program itself – soon became a losing proposition. Gonzaga closed its football program for good in 1942, and the stadium was torn down in 1949.

Gonzaga’s most famous alumnus, Bing Crosby, graduated from Gonzaga High School (as the prep school was then called) in 1920. He attended Gonzaga University and the School of Law but left in 1924 without graduating. He headed out to Hollywood in a jalopy in 1925 and soon became America’s biggest star and a generous Gonzaga supporter. A statue of Bing – complete with pipe – stands near the Crosby Library, which was dedicated in 1957 and later became the Crosby Student Center.

The 1920s at Gonzaga reflected the energy and enthusiasm of that jazzy age. For instance, the annual Frosh-Soph Fight on St. Patrick’s Day gradually escalated to extreme proportions. Each side perfected the art of “shanghai-ing” (kidnapping) the opposition to keep them out of the “fight,” which was like a modified tug of war. One year, a sophomore was discovered chained to a tree four blocks from campus. In 1928, both classes chartered railroad boxcars, intending to send their shanghaied opponents rumbling off to, respectively, Hope, Idaho, and Pasco, Wash. The dean of men discovered the plan and promptly abolished the Frosh-Soph Fight forever.

The 1930s were considerably more somber, reflecting the tough economic times at Gonzaga and throughout the nation. Tuition fees had to be cut back and in some cases, waived entirely. The school’s debt rose and enrollment suffered; serious talk ensued in 1936 about closing Gonzaga for good. Yet the school squeaked by, even managing to open a School of Engineering in 1934. This symbolized a new direction for the school, which was increasingly emphasizing professional studies along with its traditional classical studies. A School of Education, for training teachers, had already been in operation since 1928.

War comes to campus

By 1940, the school had recovered and boasted an enrollment of 1,213 – although this number also included 289 female nursing students at the affiliated Sacred Heart School of Nursing, and 91 scholastics who had been moved to nearby Mount St. Michael’s.

Everything changed after the invasion of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The school’s students flooded into the military; the School of Engineering alone went from an enrollment of 175 to 31 during the war years. Many Jesuit faculty members headed overseas to serve as military chaplains. In a further blow, a massive fire destroyed the law library and the school’s science labs only three days after Pearl Harbor.

Yet Gonzaga was soon bustling with a new influx: U.S. Naval trainees. Gonzaga was chosen as a site to train hundreds of Navy pilots in the V-5 program and hundreds of officer candidates in the V-12 program, the Navy’s major collegiate program. Over the course of the war, Gonzaga trained over 3,000 people, including 686 naval officers.

Change proceeded rapidly after the war. Enrollment spiked to over 2,000 in 1948, due partly to the GI Bill and partly because of a revolutionary change on campus: the enrollment of women. In 1948, Gonzaga admitted women students for the first time, even though the subject had been bandied about since at least 1935, when an informal poll showed the boys split nearly evenly on the concept.

New arrivals

When 70 women arrived in 1948, some Gonzaga boys resented their presence and “subjected the girls to much scowling and grumbling” according to one contemporary account. Yet the school fathers soon noticed that the women’s presence “improved the manners of the men and the spirit of religious devotion on campus,” according to Schoenberg. A women’s dorm was provided in 1951, and over ensuing decades the percentage of women on campus rose steadily. Today, women constitute a solid majority.

Another cultural change became manifest in the 1950s: the decreasing presence of Jesuit priests in the classrooms. The percentage of Jesuit priests on faculty declined from 45 percent to 31 percent through the 1950s. By 2007, the percentage had dropped to 13 percent.

In 1954, Gonzaga High School was removed from the main campus to a new campus of its own several miles away under the name Gonzaga Preparatory School (the elementary-age students had already been sent off to parochial elementary schools in 1922). Finally, the main Gonzaga campus was strictly for college students and beyond.

Since then, Gonzaga University has experienced steady growth in both enrollment and in national stature.

In addition to Bing Crosby, its notable students – including the law school – have included novelist Sherman Alexie, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, the late civil rights lawyer Carl Maxey, basketball player John Stockton and (briefly) former U.S. Speaker of the House Tom Foley.

Meanwhile, the late Father Cataldo might be pleased to know that, even though his dream of an Indian college was never realized, Gonzaga now encourages a diverse student body, and yes, that includes about 100 American Indian students.