By Logan Emonds Freelancer
All universities have their annual traditions that welcome new students onto campus.
For Western Oregon University, their tradition involves cement, nails and a name.
The “Freshman Walk” as it is known, has been a tradition at the university since 1958 when freshman first began etching their names into wet cement during the construction of new sections of sidewalk that surrounded the football stadium.
This is how the new students kick off their college education at WOU.
The tradition has been a long withstanding one; over the years students have scraped their names into the sidewalks of Jackson, Stadium and Church streets – even scraping down nicknames or different aliases.
The oldest signed sections of the sidewalk begin on the south end of campus by the Health and Wellness Center on Jackson.
Even though the sidewalks surrounding the campus have been finished for many years the tradition is still carried out.
When it is time for a new class of freshman and transfer students to sign their names into the cement sidewalks, an old section is ripped up to allow for a new section and more names.
In a 1997 letter to Tom Hanson, Lotte Larsen of the University Archives said that many of the students not only leave behind their names but they also leave their “nicknames and symbols they like: peace symbols, flowers, smiley faces, soccer balls, etc.”
These symbols and nicknames are in a similar fashion to the names themselves: a record of the past.
Taking a walk down the sidewalks surrounding McArthur Field – Western Oregon’s football stadium – allows one to envision what the new freshmen of years past viewed as important.
On a more personal level, students such as Ashleigh Hawkins enjoy seeing the signatures on the sidewalks of family members that have attended WOU in the past.
Her uncle Brent Chapman attended WOU in the late 1980s to the early 1990s and “seeing his signature on the sidewalk would be really cool.”
The problem is finding the specific signature of an individual, as there are “so many signatures on any given spot that it is difficult to find your own even though you know where you put it,” Hawkins said.
In today’s continuation of the tradition, students now paint their names on the sidewalks instead of etching them into cement.
