Let's Make History

Helping the University Archives preserve Holy Family's traditions

By April White

ON A CLEAR, SUNNY day in the fall of 1960, each sophomore at Holy Family College was presented with a prized symbol of the school: a white blazer trimmed in baby blue with the college’s seal embroidered on the pocket. More than 60 years later, Catherine Hoffman McGrath ’63 returned hers to the Philadelphia campus where she once wore it. In donating the garment to the Holy Family University Archives, Hoffman McGrath has ensured that Blazer Day, a rite of passage that ran from at least 1955 to 1969, will be remembered by future generations of graduates.

Holy Family’s first 72 years are rich with such traditions, and the University Archives is collecting the physical objects that have shaped students’ experiences—from a telephone switchboard that once sat in Holy Family Hall to the shovels used to break ground for the building’s current expansion. Alumni with mementos of the University can contact the Archives to explore the possibility of donation.

1. Through most of Holy Family’s first two decades, first-year students were welcomed to campus with “dinks” or “dinkie hats”—like this one donated by the late Linda DiSandro ’72—and some friendly ribbing from their “big sisters.”

2. In 1979–80, students faced each other in the Battle of the Classes, took to the rink for a roller-skating party, and competed in something called the “Jelly Bean Contest,” according to a planner in the Archives

3. Hoffman McGrath donated a lapel pin from Logos, Holy Family’s philosophy club. Logos— the “‘thinking’ man’s and woman’s club,” one yearbook says—was active at least through the ’60s and ’70s.

Photo by Theresa Regan/Melissa Kelly Photography.