1922-1942

Grand Convention, 1922

"The opportunity for service seemed to be the underlying thought of our every discussion, and our own group of women, almost five hundred strong in conference, were eager to grasp and investigate every possibility for unselfish interest that was proposed. Cannot this wonderful spirit be infused into each chapter and give them a new viewpoint of their responsibility to the college community?" Jessie Baldridge Lebrecht, Kappa/Kansas

Grand Convention, 1924

"Soon it was dinner time and we went to the dining room and I wish you could have seen that group of women. About five hundred in number laughing and chattering. Most of them were young but scattered among the bobbed, marcelled heads of the younger generation were the snow white heads of women who before us worked and strove to make Kappa Alpha Theta what it is today."

Grand Convention, 1926

Grand Convention, 1928

Grand Convention, 1930

The Kite Flys over the Border: Being the record of the San Francisco delegate to Toronto, Carol Green Wilson:

“With simple well chosen words such as these Mrs. Clark lifts us above pettiness and brings the convention membership to a state of mind to accept the challenge of the Grand President’s message that we shall justify the investment made by the fraternity in us as delegates, who shall return to accept this responsibility of raising to higher standards our campus and community lives.”

Grand Convention, 1932

Grand Convention, 1934

"Instead of dinner Saturday there was a picnic on one of the Inn’s well-groomed laws. A very civilized picnic, however, with droves of waiters, a piano, and no mosquitoes (the altitude discourages them). We sat on a slope carpeted with long pine needles and learned Theta songs in the dusk."

Grand Convention, 1936

Report from the Grand Convention train: "Sunday, June 28: Breakfast, and the North Dakota strawberries. The friendly and well-informed guides who drove the invaders around Grand Forks. Descent upon and exploration of the Theta house, including the top-story room where several Theta tourists happened in on a Council meeting ... the prairies going on, on, and on. Calls being made from car to car; songs being exchanged; bridge, knitting; registration for those who boarded the special at Minneapolis and Grand Forks. People being baffled by the business of setting their watches back -- or forward. The prairies continuing to go on."

Grand Convention, 1938

"How to tell a Theta who went to the 1938 convention: she will be wearing a blue and white bandanna, sun goggles with white rims, and a Hawaiian lei; she will be delightfully perfumed and will carry a small make-up bag of black moiré and a white crested ash-tray; she will also be carrying several books, quantities of pamphlets, cigarettes, crackers, gum, toothpaste, power, shells, and postcards, and will have dropped them and picked them all the way from New Jersey to New Mexico, and points north, south, east, and west. She will wear a beaming smile and will have learned at least fourteen songs of Theta, as well as college songs and songs of long ago, with a full cargo of modern swing mixed in. Her hair will be out of curl, her clothes will be full of sand and she won’t care a bit."

Grand Convention, 1940

"I was amazed at the AGELESSNESS of Theta. I witnessed an assembly of nearly four hundred women of varied ages and interests – college actives, business and professional women, mothers, grandmothers – all gathered to give of themselves in developing and promoting the fraternity idea, in renewing old friendships and making new ones, in working and playing together without individual pettiness or selfish aims. The fraternity is truly a great American institution and a blessing in a world so harassed by war and the resultant change in the social and economic structure."

Grand Convention, 1942

Elaine Ax, Beta/Indiana:

"From the time we first took those hard chairs with which we were to become so familiar to the last 'Goodbye Beta, see you in two years,' Convention seemed more than measured up to all our expectations. It was amazing the number of girls we learned to know in those ten-minute coke intervals. .. And remember those names we wrote in our pledge books? – Mrs. Sinclair, Mrs. Boyce, Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Higbie and Miss Green? They aren’t names any more; they’re the realest and the swellest Thetas you could ever hope to meet – just as we’d always pictured our Grand council officers."