As classes start up for another year one might wonder what the very first students thought when they started their classes at UKC. Their campus consisted of only three buildings: a maintenance shop, a greenhouse, and the W.S. Dickey mansion (now Scofield Hall), and their entire student body, faculty, and Board of Trustees could fit in one photograph….

As the countdown to the start of a new semester keeps ticking down it is interesting to look back on all the difficulties students of the past had just registering for their classes…

Here we see Swinney gymnasium filled with lines of students trying to get all of their classes booked in the days when everything had to be filled in and checked by hand.

And here we see a group of students sitting outside the Student Center (now the Atterbury Student Success Center) filling in punch cards which were used with one of the university’s first computerized registration systems.

Anyone who has seen a move-in day on campus can never forget it. Students, parents, friends, and family members carrying in boxes, pieces of furniture, and clothes for the students’ new ‘home away from home’ at UMKC.

So this seems the perfect time to reflect on the first residence hall built on campus in 1955 – Cherry Hall. When it was first opened, however, Cherry Hall was known as the “Men’s’ Residence Hall” since the dorm was only to house men. Women did not even have a residence hall on campus at all!

And to give some idea of what amenities were like for residents in Cherry Hall in the 1950’s take a look: