Stanhope's Libraries

Most of DC's teen heroes showed some signs of aging, although obviously at nothing like the calendar's pace. In Action #270, (November 1960), Supergirl celebrated her 16th birthday. Four years later, in Action #318 (November 1964), Supergirl graduates high school and begins to attend Stanhope College, so she's aging at about half the normal rate.

Stanhope would be her home for the next seven years. It was a nice, small college, with apparently quite a substantial building budget. In Action #318 Linda Danvers (Supergirl's secret identity) pledges to Alpha Lambda sorority. But she has to pass several initiation tests, one of which involves the new library:



She has to find some way to transport the books from the old library to the new one. Linda implores students to each withdraw ten books from the old building and return them to the new one. A neat little solution, although some might be a little concerned at a library which only has ten books for each student.

But given that, what are we to make of this panel from Action #349 (April 1967), only two and a half years later:



Okay, so Stanhope had three libraries during Linda's undergraduate years. And it was lucky that was all; in Action #366-368 a pair of futuristic fiends named Alpha and Beta threatened to blow up the entire campus with a bomb.

And I'd suspect some substantial repairs to the third building were required after this incident in Action #371 (January 1969):