How Well Do You Know Arcadia? Find Out with Weekly Trivia
Philadelphia has developed a lively pub culture, which helped popularize Quizzo, a pub quiz game, in the United States. Drawing on this same spirit of cheer and trivia, Archives & Artifacts has started a weekly online trivia series focusing on details (varying in obscurity) from Arcadia’s history. It should be noted that organizers are just as likely to award prizes for good stories as they are for correct answers.
The first question was posted to Facebook on Saturday, Feb. 26. (Follow www.facebook.com/arcadia.archives to receive questions.) It asks, “Which Cold War-era buildings would have served as fallout shelters had a nuclear attack occurred in the area?”
To which Michelle White ’08 replied:
“I’m going to go ahead and say Boyer Hall of Science, because honestly I would feel pretty safe and tucked away in the ‘dungeons’ of the basement (I did often enough when I studied psychology down there late into the night. Also Taylor Hall – I know there was a fallout shelter in Taylor because one day in my first year at Arcadia in my Honors English class, some adjunct English professor (no longer at the school) came running in and decided to give us all a taste of the fallout shelter emergency rations. They were tins of these random crackers that tasted like they were made out of corrugated cardboard and tacky glue. No idea how this professor got in to retrieve those… but my class was happy to know that we would have been kept safe in a time of need! Pretty funny memorable moment … Class of 2008, go Knights!
Lili Vélez ’86 chimed in:
“Boyer was built after the Fallout Shelter era, although I guess you might have been able to hide in the basement levels in an emergency. But I remember that we used old Civil Defense biscuit and water barrels as garbage bins in the old Mail Room in the basement of Heinz Hall. You’d cull all the flyers and junk mail out of your box and toss them into the CD barrels! There also used to be a Fallout Shelter sign on Kistler Hall…”
Answer by noon on Thursday to be eligible for a prize. Don’t know the answer? Then share a related memory.
Find the official answer, photos and an interesting story by first-year student Jordyn Austin, who toured one of the spaces with Registrar Bill Elnick, in Friday’s Bulletin.
