Romantic Folklore of OKWU is Revived… and Destroyed
by Micah Jenner
OKWUeagle.com Staff Writer
Oklahoma Wesleyan University students have seen it play out.
Two people start dating and then, they are spotted.
Not once. Not twice. But three times… walking hand in hand around the pond.
They smile, give a giddy laugh, their love-struck eyes are glued on one another, and each of them silently (but most earnestly) hopes that the folklore proves true for them – that by walking around the pond three times they will eventually get married.
“The tradition is if you walk around the pond three times with someone, they will be your destined soulmate,” Kinzi Roth, freshman said.
“When I came to OWU freshman year, Tyler told me about the tradition and we walked around the pond three times so we could get married,” said Lauren Esponda, junior, fiancée of senior Tyler Manzella.
“[Walking around the pond] is a definite necessity to have a strong foundation for marriage,” Manzella said.
Though this tradition has been in play at OKWU for a number of years, it faced brutal opposition this past year due to the construction of the Charles and Janice Drake Library.
During construction the sidewalk that created a circle around the pond was destroyed, as well as the bridge that many considered quite romantic.
Students faced the challenge of trying to devise an alternate route instead of the regular loop around the pond.
Thankfully, some were able to conquer the pond-circling hiatus and get engaged anyway.
“I was sad because I couldn’t fulfill the OWU legacy before I proposed,” said Manzella. However, he and Esponda are making plans for their wedding anyway.
Other graduates of OKWU have managed to find marriage without the endorsement of the three-time circling of the pond.
Vay Facione, associate registrar, who was a Bartlesville Wesleyan College student from 1989-1993, is one graduate who has defeated the folklore.
“I never walked around the pond more than once with a boy. That’s probably why I didn’t meet my husband here,” Facione said.
She also remembers that some of her classmates would try to reverse the “pond effect” by walking around [the pond] three times in the opposite way.
The completion of construction of the library has re-instated the pond tradition but a change of policy has removed another romantic OKWU tradition.
Until this year, students would enter the cafeteria, cautiously approaching the shelf holding the plastic food trays.
“If you got a blue tray, you had to kiss the person across from you,” Emily Davis, junior, said. “I thought [the tradition] was funny because I liked to mess with people, even though I didn’t do anything about it.”
This OKWU tradition has ended because of recent changes in the cafeteria system.
The trays from the cafeteria have been eliminated “to help control with the waste, to cut down the workload in the dish room, and to save time and be more efficient,” according to Bobby Conner, chef for Pioneer Foods.
With the trays no longer in existence, the tradition of the blue trays has been made obsolete as well, leaving the door wide open for new traditions to emerge.
