Here’s a nice moment from the CMC archives: This photo dates to 1948 (anyone who can identify the student, caught in midreach, let the magazine’s editors know) and may puzzle some of our younger alumni. That doesn’t look like Collins Dining Hall, they’ll say, and they’re right. It isn’t. Long before we had Collins, we had Story House, which really was the CMC campus in many respects. Story House served as a combination of administration building, dormitory, classroom, and dining hall. It was cozy and intimate — and, from what older alums tell me, far more amenable to a good food fight than Collins.
But the loss of Story House to a fire in the late 1960s and the growth of the student body caused the administration to build Collins Dining Hall. That’s the facility I knew as a student. I had a chance to visit there recently, and I could see how much the place has changed since I was a hungry young undergraduate.
Gone were the long rows of benches for seating; so was the old buffet line with a couple of hot items, a cold item, veggies and mashed potatoes, which was the standard fare circa 1970 (and earlier).
Today’s CMCer finds something for just about every appetite at Collins. Now there’s a stir-fry station, a grill, a salad bar that’s a meal unto itself, farm-to-fork for the organic- and vegan-minded, organic cookies (D-Lish!), seafood … Move over, mashed potatoes! Make way for the hummus! Students have plenty of variety to fuel their efforts in the classroom. Noting a number of Pomona, Scripps, Mudd and Pitzer t-shirts, it seems that Collins has also become the dining destination of choice for the 5Cs.
Now that’s something else you didn’t see in my day: people actually wanting to get IN!
– Al Dauber ‘70