Biography|John Morgridge — The Bascom Hall Degree Finished in 1955

The later resume compresses Wisconsin into one line.

The first campus year had a hill and a waist.

In autumn 1951, Tashia Frankfurth was walking toward Bascom Hall on the first day of classes when an arm she already knew closed around her waist.

John Morgridge had left Wauwatosa, dropped a plan to stay in Milwaukee, found a room and a waiting-tables job, and enrolled at Madison to be near her.

The university's Alumni Park later put that meeting on a plaque as the start of a sixty-year partnership.

He took a bachelor's degree in business administration in marketing and finance from the University of Wisconsin in 1955.

The Wisconsin School of Business lists the same year.

The present Grainger Hall on University Avenue is not the building that granted the degree.

Grainger opened decades later.

Bascom Hall, at 500 Lincoln Drive on the crest of Bascom Hill, was already the university's signature pile when he arrived, and it is still the pile a visitor can stand in front of.

He joined Delta Upsilon while he was here.

On 13 August 1955 he married Tashia Frankfurth, the Wauwatosa classmate who took an education degree the same season.

The next stop was Stanford.

The money that later came back to this hill — the Education Building gift, the Discovery Building, Morgridge Hall — starts with a 1955 diploma and a first-day walk that almost did not happen.

A visitor climbs the same grade.

The Lincoln statue still faces the lower campus.

The business school now sits a few blocks east.

Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons