THE THOMSON FAMILY SCRAPBOOK Compiled From Original Scrapbook Of David McCullough Thomson By David McCullough Thomson, August, 2001

MICHIGAN STATE COLLEGE - 1950 TO 1954

So far as I know I am the first East Lansing High School basketball player to play on Michigan State College's Freshman and Junior Varsity basketball teams. I, along with about 60 other players, tried out for the Freshman Basketball team. I was the only one chosen to join the team.

The Freshman Basketball team consisted do 15 scholorship player. These players were some of the best players in the mid-west, e.g. Indiana. One player, Keith Stackhouse, played on the Indiana team for the annual Indiana vs. Kentucky game to deteremine which State had the best team. Keith was selected as the "Star of the Stars" in the game, i.e. the best player. He and I ended up in the same fraternity, Sigma Nu, and became friends.

I was not a very good student when I attended Michigan State College (MSC) from 1950 to 1954. I normally didn't study as I found I could get through most classes without studying. This is an example of my grades at MSC. Although I failed Basic History and now I am writing my own history! Please click on the photo to see an enlarged version.

I majored in General Institutional Management and was the 1st graduate in this major at MSC as the program began when I was a Junior. The major was to prepare students for work in institutions such as hospitals. I originally was in the Hotel & Restaurant Management, which my brother Tom majored in back in the later 1940s.

I worked for the State Of Michigan after my discharge from the Army but only for a year as I then joined the company that Tom was working for, Buddies Food Service. I managed several Hospital food services and then switched over to industrial food service and ended up in Columbus, Ohio. Since the manager's job in an industrial plant was very easy and boring, I started attending Ohio State University at night taking mathematics courses, Calculus, which I did very well at.

I joined the Sigma Nu Fraternity (ΣΝ) during my Freshman year at MSC. These are my "brothers" in Sigma Nu from the 1952 Wolverine, the MSC year book. I am in the 2nd photo, first row on the right.

Each year the fraternities take part in a "turkey trot", where each fraternity fields as many runner as they wish to compete in an approximately 2 miles run. Each runner receives points base on his finish place, e.g. 1st place = 1 point, 10th place=10 points, etc. Only the top 5 "brothers" in each fraternity points are counted.

In the photo below I am shown, runner on the left, just about at the finish line, where all runners had to first go over a hurdle, shown here, and then under a hurdle to get to the finish line. As you can see, I look just about "done in" but I was able to finish the course and my points did count in the Sigma Nus total. We took second place and won a turkey as the run took place each year around Thanksgiving.

We kept the turkey in the fraternity house, alive, as no one wanted to killed it, especially our cook. I recall that some of the "brothers" fed it beer and it got drunk and pooped all over the room we kept it in the basement near the recreation hall. Needless to say, our house mother insisted we do something with the bird but to this day I can't recall what happened to it.

Fortunately, due to the kindest of Business Professor during summer school I was able to graduate. To this day I can't understand how as I believe my grade point average was a bit below a 2.0.