A former presidential candidate was speaking, but the young kids in attendance didn’t care. They had better things to do.
While Sen. Edmund Muskie droned about “hard decisions” to the almost 6,000 students, parents and spectators gathered for the University of Evansville’s commencement on June 9, 1974, children ignored the speech and ran for the weird-looking linden tree that sat just beyond the speaker’s platform.
They climbed through low-slung branches that jutted from multiple trunks like octopus arms – and probably had a better time that day than anyone else.
They were just doing what several people did in the decades before and would go on to do in the decades after. The tree that loomed in front of Olmstead Administration Hall became a magnet for generations of students. They studied in its shade, snapped selfies in its branches, and some even came back after graduation have their wedding photos taken next to it.