announcement of the next general meeting of the club with one of the topics being the annual Dynamic Club Diner-Dance to be held later in the Spring.25

In March 1932 we find that The Minor Executives and the Dynamic Club contribute a large sum of money for a new flagpole fund drive at U. of D. and that plans are progressing for the second annual Dynamic Club Dinner-Dance. 26 Later that month articles appear that show increasing engineering enrollment27 followed on April 6, 1932 by further Dinner-Dance plans.28

A spark is applied to the primordial soup the week of April 17, 1932. Dean Lawrence and twelve other lay (non-clergy) faculty are told their contracts would not be renewed for the next fall. In response, Dean Lawrence tenders his resignation. Rev. Albert Poetker, S. J., president of the university, says the moves were purely economic. Enrollment at the university dropped 800 to 1000 students from the fall of 1929. “It is not practical and almost an economic impossibility to maintain the teaching staff we employed at that (1929) time.” As news breaks around campus, there are student protests, particularly in the Engineering Department where petitions for Dean Lawrence’s return are circulated among students.29 His resignation is effective at the end of the school year.

Left unknown is the background for the decision. Is Poetker (an acting president, substituting for the ailing president of U. of D.) brought in to clean house; is the burden of offering free classes to the Minor Executives, despite being taught by unpaid volunteers, creating too much financial strain on U. of D.; is the character of the university being threatened by the influx of Minor Executives - or worse being a party to self-guided rather than administration-guided curriculum; is it politically untenable for the Engineering department to show steady or increasing enrollment whereas the other programs are losing students, or is it a fatal combination of Dean Lawrence being widely popular with students while exhibiting ever increasing personal and autonomous ties to Detroit industry leaders that help a staid Catholic institution to include his name on those not being offered a contract to return?

Meanwhile the Dynamic Club, approximately two weeks after the resignation is announced, on May 7th holds its second annual Dinner-Dance. The event gives all of Dean Lawrence supporters a way to show their support. Over 600 people attend.30

•Germany and Japan

withdraw from League of

Nations.

•Wiley Post completes the first successful solo around- the-world flight.

•The number of lynchings of blacks in the United States during the Great Depression peaks at twenty-eight.

•Roosevelt inaugurated (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”); launches New Deal.

•Glass-Steagall Act bans banks from dealing in stocks and bonds.

•Michigan governor William Comstock orders all banks in the state to close for eight days.

•Edwin Armstrong introduces frequency modulation (FM) radio transmission.

•US Unemployment rate is 24.9%

1934:

•Dust storms ruin about 100 million acres of cropland in Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and Oklahoma

•Lawmen in Louisiana

ambush and kill Clyde

Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

•John Dillinger is shot outside Chicago movie