Dowdy finals

Dowdy-world final exams at the University of California at Berkeley:

In those days, before ballpoint pens, we filled our fountain pens, emptied them, and refilled them just to make sure. We self-addressed postcards to enclose in our blue books so readers could send us our grades before official grades came out. Then, as was the Cal custom the first day of finals, the Campanile tolled “An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the morn’.”

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

As a college student in the 1970s, I routinely turned in postcards with my finals. Students were still doing so when I started on the tenure track in 1985.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[“Readers”: graduate students.]