PORT ANGELES — Fifty years ago, on Sept. 15, 1961, 195 full-time students walked into a temporary Peninsula College building on the Port Angeles High School campus.

Two years later, 36 of them graduated from the new college with their associate degree.

On Monday, a record number of students started classes, with 1,660 full-time students and 277 Running Start dual-enrollment high school students.

On Thursday, about 50 of those 21st-century students attended a presentation about student life during those earliest years, as told by eight members of the Peninsula College Class of 1963.

Bill Ellis, one of the first students to walk through the Peninsula College doors in 1961, remembers the coll­ege as a long, featureless building set off to one side of Port Angeles High School.

The entire college consisted of a few classrooms and a student lounge, and tuition was $35 per quarter, Ellis said.

Memorable teachers

There were few teachers, but they were memorable and changed the lives of those who attended their classes, he said.

Marge Avalon was one of the first English teachers at the college and introduced her students to the works of William Shakespeare.

“We said, ‘Who?’” Ellis said regarding The Bard.

“She said, ‘What kind of school did you come from?’”

Avalon gave each student personal attention, Ellis recalled, setting them up for success when many of her students moved on to larger university classes.

With few students and almost no student activities under way, early college journalists were challenged to find stories.

“We struggled to find sports,” said Jack Hussey, an early sportswriter for the college newspaper.

There were few other community colleges, so the basketball team played in a local industrial league and had two scheduled games against colleges from Canada.

The college only offered basketball, so during the off-season, when a student bowled a 300, it became a major story.

A different era

A 1960s college experience was different than what students see today, Ellis said.

Men were expected to wear slacks and button-down shirts, while slacks were forbidden for women.

“Slacks are too informal,” student adviser Janice Cramp told students when a group of female students petitioned to wear them.

It would be another 10 years before women, including teachers, were allowed to wear slacks to school, said 1963 graduate Darlene Owen Jones, who became a teacher at Port Angeles High School.

Women also ran into other challenges.

When two women signed up for architecture classes, they were called into the counseling office and told that there was “no room for women in the world of architecture.”

One transferred to another major; the other stuck to her guns, Ellis said.

Photos of the time showed women in skirts taking an archery class and serving food at the formal “Mothers’ Tea.”

A picture of the Circle K Club — the college Kiwanis group — showed all men.

“They probably let girls in by now,” Ellis joked.

(Kiwanis International began admiting women as members in 1987.)

In addition to Ellis, a retired teacher, founding students participating in Thursday’s Studium Generale session were Jack Hussey, a retired businessman living in Bremerton; Ted Simpson, businessman and Clallam County Public Utility District commissioner from Port Angeles; and Larry Dempsey, a retired teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer now living in the Joyce area.

Protest march

When state funding for the college was threatened, 75 Peninsula College students did something that was almost unheard of in 1962:

They held a student protest march in Olympia.

“We carried a fake coffin and staged a mock funeral,” Ellis said.

“‘Don’t bury us,’ we told them,” he said.

The student protest was so unusual that state legislators and Gov. Albert Rosellini emerged from state buildings to meet with the students.

A few years later came the Vietnam era, and such protests were commonplace, Ellis recalled.

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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.