Throwback Thursday: Unusual Columbus news from leap days past

We searched the archives for interesting Feb. 29 news stories from years past and found three dealing with OSU:

💃 1920: Stop your shimmying!

Evelyn Scatterday, the Columbus municipal dance inspector, attended several student dances and was horrified by what she saw.

• The "shimmy" … the "Camel Walk" … even students dancing "cheek to cheek." She urged them to follow local law and knock it off.

The other side: Men blamed the women and women blamed the men, yet all agreed the university shouldn't be punished by the actions of a few rogue dancers.

• They also argued the law, which concerned public dance halls, shouldn't apply to their private events.

💊 1960: It was all for science

Five OSU students ate "semi-synthetic foods" for 30 days as a test by the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station to see how humans would react if the world ran out of a natural food supply.

Zoom in: They each ate "tasteless wafers," multivitamin pills and liquid mixtures of amino acids and minerals for three meals a day.

• The students, paid $30 apiece for the trial, said the meals were filling, but boring.

✏️ 1972: The original ChatGPT

OSU considered taking legal action against Ohio companies that sold completed term papers to students.

• The companies, which advertised in The Lantern, sold papers for $2.50-6 per page.

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