Reunion Park

Reunion Park. . In many ways a university must be built and rebuilt by each succeeding generation. The university will not continue to live on as a vital institution in our society unless each succeeding generation gives to it new energy, creativity, intellectual integrity, and the material resources needed to sustain it. An understanding of the importance of stewardship led the classes of 1948 and 1949 to renew a tradition of class gifts to the University at their fiftieth class reunions. This park was established in 1999 by the joint efforts of these two reunion classes. , The postwar years of 1948 and 1949 were years of remarkable growth and change for the university. Under the leadership of President George Lynn Cross, the enrollment quadrupled after the end of World War II, reaching 12,000 by 1949. The new head football coach, Bud Wilkinson, was just beginning his OU career and would become one of the most popular figures in the state and known by football enthusiasts all over the nation. Also making headlines was the fight of a young African American woman, Ada Lois Sipuel, to gain admission to OU's law school and break the color bar in public higher education in the south. Her struggle would take three years and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court. She waged her fight with such dignity and with such an absence of bitterness that she won the strong support of Dr. Cross and countless numbers of OU students, faculty, staff, and the admiration of people throughout Oklahoma and the nation. , The graduates of the class[es] of 1948 and 1949 experienced tragedy during their student days when a temporary wooden barracks used as a dormitory for 346 male students was destroyed by fire. Many students were injured and three were killed. , The campus was intellectually active in all areas. British opera star Eva Turner arrived as a visiting professor and stayed ten years. Mildred Andrews was teaching organ. Fourteen of her students were to go on to receive Fulbright Scholarships, making her the most successful professor of organ in U.S. history. , Professors Laurence Snyder, the geneticist; Rudd Nielsen, the physicist; and George Sutton, the ornithologist were becoming world famous. In 1949, alumnus Everette Lee DeGolyer gave the university one of the greatest collections in the world of rare books relating to the history of science. , New OU graduates were already making names for themselves like Harold Powell, class of 1948 who opened his first store in Norman the year he graduated. It was the beginning of the Harold's, a clothing chain that had grown to 52 stores in 22 states by 2000. , Many of the remarkable alumni of the classes of 1948 and 1949 have remained active in the continued growth and development of the university through the University of Oklahoma Association. , The park was designed by Randall Lace well, director of Landscape and Ground, 1971 to 1999.