Oral history interview with May Lattimore Adams and Mary Elizabeth "Marilib" Barwick Sink, 1995 [text/print transcript]

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THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT GREENSBORO
INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEES: May Lattimore Adams (MA) and
Mary Elizabeth "Marilib" Barwick Sink (MS)
INTERVIEWER: Robert Prout (RP)
DATE: March 29, 1995
The interview was conducted in the Alumni House on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro for an Arts and Science Camp history course. Also present were historian Daniel Fountain (DF) and videographer Sherry Mullins (SM).
[Begin CD 1]
MA: I looked out, [unclear]. When I drove up there was not one, and then I saw somebody's rear lights come on, and so I just waited.
DF: Good. I'm glad [unclear]. Good luck on our side today.
MA: Good.
DF: Yes, go ahead. Come on across. You want to set that over here.
SM: Just to warn you: there's going to be a glare from the glasses. There's not much that can be done about that.
DF: Okay. Well, we want everybody to be able to see.
SM: Yes.
MA: I've decided that this is a trend all of a sudden. This "way-back" thing. A cousin called—a cousin who grew up in my house; of course we had mutual grandparents—called me long distance and said that her younger son had called her that his second grade was assigned telling about the background of the family: where they came from. She said two days later her granddaughter who is in college called and said that she needed a much more extensive one and had a little bit more time to do it. But she—the cousin was calling to say "What can you tell me that I don't know," and I said, "Not a whole lot." [laughter]
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DF: But that's great though, that the historian—that's important for us to do that and transmit that to future generations.
MA: Well, then—And I live in Friend's Home [retirement community], and this morning I went by the office for something, and she asked me—she said, "We have some students coming next week or week after and want to hear about World War II. Do you mind coming in and sharing that with them?"I said, "No, whatever I've experienced, I'll be glad to."
DF: That's great. I'm glad that in [research?] you're willing to share. It's important. I appreciate that. Again, I was thinking that the format—
MA: Yes, it was Woman's College [Woman's College of the University of North Carolina]. I took the one year Commercial [program] in 1934-35, and then I started working here in June of 1935.
DF: Oh, really.
MA: And worked for forty-five years.
DF: You did.
MA: And I retired in 1980.
RP: Okay, so you've got some experience with the old UN—the former—
MA: It was WC [Woman's College]. It was WCUNC [Woman's College of the University of North Carolina] when I came. It just had become that in '32, because the merchants [in] downtown still called it NCCW, North Carolina College of Women.
RP: Okay.
MA: You see, Max Gardner, O. Max Gardner, when he was governor, and he loved to be called the father of consolidation. He had attended NC State [University] and [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill Law School, and he was the one who thought the women should be included, and the first—Those three units were the first consolidation. And so this place had just become WCUNC when I came here. And of course we just say WC.
RP: Yes, and many people still do, too.
MA: I'm sure they do, especially people who were here in the school then.
RP: We have—
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MA: I probably would have but I hadn't been on campus all that time.
RP: You were here in all the good stuff. You've seen the campus really change over forty years, or fifty years.
MA: Oh, yes. Because, you see, when I came, it was [Great] Depression.
RP: Right.
MA: Very deep Depression, and some of the resident's halls that existed were closed. They didn't have students in them.
RP: They didn't have students—
MA: And then any number have been built since then. The campus stopped on the west side with what's now Jamison and Coit [Residence Halls], and they were at that time called East and West. And those two, in the end, were closed, weren't occupied from the year I came. And then Weil-Winfield, Ragsdale, Mendenhall, Moore-Strong, Reynolds, Grogan, Hawkins, and Phillips [Residence Halls]. All those were built later.
RP: Danny [Fountain] said that Walker Avenue came through the back here and was still open.
MA: Yes. There was a lot of controversy when it was closed. Yes, we walked across a bridge from this part of the campus to the residence halls all the time, and the ruins of old Curry School were still over there and that's where everybody made snapshots because there were steps, you know, and that kind of thing. And so that's where everybody had—made their pictures.
RP: This is going to be fun. I'll wait until the other lady gets here, and then we'll kind of run through—I think Danny has talked to you a lot about what we're planning on doing with this.
MA He gave me a few questions, yes.
RP: And you understand that we are going to be doing this—Hopefully, the children that contribute oral history with my generation—my parents were both alive during the Depression and my mother—Actually my mother was born in 1912, I think, so she remembers very little about World War I, but she does remember [unclear, both talking]
MA: I know, because see, I was born in 1914. I was born during World War I, and your mother wasn't very old, so she certainly wouldn't remember anything either.
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RP: But she does remember, obviously, the Depression and what it was like. She grew up on a farm in Albany, New York, where she remembers the World War II especially because she worked in a packing plant at that time. One of her favorite stories was trying to prepare hams to be shipped to Russia. I guess they were—obviously they were key in—
MA: Yes, they were allies.
RP: Yes.
MA: Well, see, those—I was on the top echelon of that because I was Harriet Elliott's assistant when she was named by [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt to the Defense Council, and she was also on the committee that formed the WAVES, the women's branch of the Navy. Made all the plans. She went to the first meeting of UNESCO in London. All this while I was working for her. [Editor' note: Harriet Elliott was a history and political science professor, dean of women, public servant, and political figure.]
RP: Did you get to go on any of these junkets, too?
MA: Not any of those, but I did—I used to drive her all over the United States almost to make speeches. And one of my good stories though is that she had been in Washington and was coming—She was always called part-time Lee—was to be here for opening week of school, and the day she got here, they called her that her mother was dying in southern Illinois in a little town. At that time Miss Elliott was going all over the country making—working for the Treasury Department—making speeches to sell war bonds. And she would get laryngitis, and she and the college physician, Dr. Ruth Collings, were very close friends, and Dr. Collings came in and she said, "Elliott, if you get on an air conditioned train, you're going to have pneumonia before you get there."
And there were no plane connections to that small place that were good, so everybody got together and decided I'd drive her. And so we started out at noon, pouring rain, and all—We went the long way across. We had mountainous driving, I remember, across Virginia, and Virginia had an absolute law: thirty-five miles an hour speed limit, all over the state to conserve tires and gas. Well, it was raining when we went. And, in fact, we didn't get any further that night than Abingdon, Virginia, and we stopped and spent the night. And we were going to try to make it to Carbondale [Illinois] the next day. Well, we got into Louisville, Kentucky. It was already dinner time, and she said, "Let's stop and eat, and I'll call and see what the situation is."
Her mother was in a coma at home, in her home. So we stopped and ate dinner, and they told her [that] her mother was in a coma, and there would not be any difference if she didn't come until the next morning. And when we came out the moon was out. It had just cleared up, and it was bright as it could be, and she said, "Can we drive further?" 5
And I said, "Oh, yes." So we drove on and spent the night in Lafayette, Indiana. There were army bases. We almost never found a room. We got on into her home about 10:30 in the morning. Well, her sister lived there with her mother, and the sister's son and his wife, all in this big old house. And she turned to her nephew and she said, "Take May downtown to lunch." And she said, "And I've reserved a room at the hotel for her to spend the night before she starts back."
Well, I—We got in the car and Allen was so [unclear] that he says, "You know, this is a little town, and everybody is going to wonder who this is." I'd say I was about twenty-two years old. "Who is this I'm taking to lunch. After all I've got a wife." Well, see, we thought nothing about it. We ate over here in the Home Economics Cafeteria, and everybody who worked, ate over there. Miss Elliott was way ahead of her time anyway, so she thought nothing about asking Allen to take me down there to lunch so as we went.
I said, "Allen, it's just me. If we can get this car serviced—" Because she was going to fly back to Washington for an appointment— "while we are eating, I'm going to head back. I can make it to Louisville before dark tonight and she is going to worry about me as long as I am here."
So with a look of relief, he [unclear] said, "Well, that ought to work." So we went in and, sure enough, as soon as we walked in that hotel dining room, everybody turned around and stared, you know. But anyway we had lunch and we picked up the car and I went back to the house, and in the meantime his wife had made us brownies. And when I said I was going to start back, she said, "Take these and nibble on them on the way." And I started out.
When I hit the border to Virginia, it was very hard for me to stay at thirty-five miles an hour. I spent the night in Louisville and then got on into Virginia. It was still a long drive, but I tried. I was going down the highway, and all of a sudden there was a siren behind me. And I pulled over, and the patrolman said, "I was helping fix a flat." See back in those days, you have a lot of those, too and especially with tire rationing. He said, "I don't know how fast you went past me, but—" He said, "Did you know the speed limit is thirty-five miles an hour."
And I said, "Yes, I'll tell you though, this is the third day I've been driving, and I was trying to get to Abingdon before dark."He said, "Do you see that light over the hill?" It was just about dusk. And I said, "Yes."He said, "That's Abingdon" [unclear].
[Mary Elizabeth Barwick "Marilib" Sink enters the room]
MS: Hello, May.
MA: Oh, hi. How are you?
MS: How are you?
DF: This is Marilib Sink. 6
RP: Hello, Mrs. Sink.
MS: Hello. Hello, May. How are you?
RP: This is [unclear]. Nice to see you.
MS: Thank you.
MA: I don't know why I didn't get you straight from your name. I was sitting here trying to place you, Marilib. I know you as well as I know myself.
MS: You know, I was looking back over the questions and things yesterday, and thought about the Golf Hut, and the years that you were up there.
MA: Well, you know, they moved it. I was the only person left who knew the origin of that Hut.
MS: I still don't know the origin.
MA: It was built with WPA [Works Progress Administration] labor.
MS: Was it, really?
MA: About [1935].
MS: Was the golf course built the same way?
RP: Yes, [unclear]
MA: No, the golf course was later, but now, I don't know whether it had been developed there. The golf course was already there, and it was built for a club house.
MS: Yes.
MA: But it was never really used that way because they had to keep their equipment there at the gym, and so it was just—and then it was boarded up so that when we moved in it, you know, it was all boarded up.
MS: Well, now—
DF: Sherry.
SM: Yes.
DF: [unclear] basically, when I'll be taking notes and stuff. 7
MS: When—When did you all move in? You know, I—
SM: But I don't need to walk so I am going to be casting a shadow. Just so long as you
don't [unclear]. In other words, [unclear] take a seat, like on there or here or
somewhere that doesn't cast a shadow then—
MS: I'm from Greensboro, and know [unclear, all talking]
DF: Okay, I can do that.
MA: And so the day golf house was finished in, then they asked Dr. [James?] [unclear, several people talking] very hurt.
MS: Oh, dear. I can imagine. [laughter] So I—
MA: You know, I had Pine Needles [yearbook] from 1939 to '60, '38 to '60, and I gave them to Brenda when I moved.
MS: Did you really? Well, I still have mine. Well, let's see. I was here from '40 to '44, and then when I came back to teach, I got one every year. And my—We had duplicates from '49 on until—Let's see, I guess we moved away in '54 and so we had two sets of them, but she took hers up to Washington State with her.
MA: Well, I was advisor to—one of the advisors, to the Student Finance Board.
MS: Yes.
MA: And so I always was given one. Some of them had my [unclear]
MS: Yes.
MA: And so I had all of them from—
MS: I think when I was a student, you had to pay extra if you wanted to get your name embossed on it. [laughter]
MA: Well, you did.
MS: And in those days I don't believe I ever paid extra. [laughter]
MA: I'm sure I didn't.
RP: [unclear] I don't think today anybody would go for that either.
MA: I got on the elevator to come out here. Laura Lawrence [Class of 1938], Laura Bateman Lawrence was on the elevator. 8
MS: I wouldn't have known Laura Lawrence, but Laura Bateman I know.
MA: Well, she—Her sister lives at Friend's Home and had a stroke several months ago, and she's got [Laura] up there moving her back into her home. And Laura [unclear]
MS: For heaven's sake.
MA: [unclear] And I said, "Laura, are you headed where I am?" And she said, "Where are you headed?" [laughter] And she said, "No." She said, "I have my hands full trying to get India[?] settled."
MS: Oh, dear.
MA: But she lives at the Baptist Home [retirement community]—she and her husband—in Winston.
MS: Oh, does she?
MA: Yes.
RP: I'm having a hard time finding any way to cut this off. I put up the thermostat up as high as it would go, and it's still running.
SM: Well, okay. Well, they should still be able to hear over—It's just going to create a—
RP: A background—
SM: A background noise. [unclear] non-pleasing hiss. [laughter]
DF: We were going to get some Pine Needles if you all wanted to take a peek through some of those. If you don't, that's fine. We just—we already have them here.
MS: I didn't think about that. I could have done that but I didn't.
MA: Well, I used to do it. In fact, I miss mine since I gave them to Brenda because anytime I was coming to a certain reunion or something—because I knew so many students over the years, I come very often to reunions—and I'd get it out and look through it which was helpful.
MS: Yes.
DF: We have several years here, if you want to, okay.
RP: Let's go ahead and—Let's see if we can get—Mrs. Sink, you were here when? 9
MS: [Nineteen hundred] forty to '44.
RP: Okay.
MS: But I grew up in Greensboro, and I was a day student so my perspective may be a little bit different on it from May. And I did [unclear]
RP: Good perspective. What we will do—Of course Dan [Fountain] explained the principle of why we're doing this in the first place. And this is something we're going to take and hopefully get some of your comments. And we'll edit down, the raw footage, to about a fifteen or twenty-minute package that the children are going to be able to look at and appreciate, hopefully, oral history. And the ultimate goal of what we're trying to do with the kids here is to show them that there are different ways to approach history. Rather than going to the library and looking in an Encyclopedia Britannica, we will be using some other sources in this course: newspapers; we'll be looking at the Pine Needles; and you will be sort of the centerpiece of this course. The children will able to actually hear what somebody who was on campus during this time—
MS: Back in ancient history.
RP: Ancient history. Well, for kids—
MS: My kids think so for sure. [laughter]
RP: That's funny. We were talking about the references that children have to history and Sherry and I were having a discussion about how important—I think dates are important because it helps you to reference things; to know if this is happening at this time, what else is happening at about this time. And it's easy for me as a reference—as an historian, which is also my background. But the process of history is also important, so when we talk about what life was like during the '30s and the early '40s here, when the Depression is going on: what sort of influences does that make on people's lives. You know if people are out of work; if there isn't a lot of money available—Mrs. Adams was just saying how during the '30s when she was here, they closed the dorms because people weren't able to come to the university and Woman's College at that time. So how—The approach basically—By the way, nobody's introduced Sherry. This is Sherry Mullins. She is—
MS: Hi, Sherry.
SM: Hi.
RP: The official camp videographer. She's done a lot of projects [unclear]
MA: I have already issued orders to minimize my double chin. [laughter] However it takes. Let me turn my head or whatever. 10
MS: Both of us wear glasses, and that's awful, I think, to try to get rid of the glare.
MA: With the lights, I know it.
RP: Well, the glare is something we'll have to put up with because we don't have the special equipment.
MS: If we start looking as if we only have, you know, only bright lights, it's going to lift our chin or something.
RP: We can do this in increments. Sherry is just going to do some recording, and if, for some reason, you want to stop, we can stop. We have some refreshments here. We can either do it before, during, or after, or if you want to take a break after about half an hour's worth of filming, we can just have some tea. I think we have some supplied by [unclear].
MS: I'd rather not have something to worry with, like a cup or something like that while we were talking if it's all right with you.
RP: That's fine.
MS: It might look more, you know, as if we were having tea [unclear].
RP: You've got a list of some of our questions. What I basically want to hear from you folks is—In fact, you can do it either one—Mrs. Adams can speak first, and Mrs. Sink, if you want to follow in or want to complement something that she's said. What was life like when you first came here: the kind of aspirations you may have had, and the sort of view of the world you had. What was life like doing simple things. Things like kids want to know, like, going to the movies. What was playing at the time. We've got some movie listings that we're looking at.
DF: Who were the stars, and how got from here?
MS: Well, Anthony Adverse came out when I was in high school, I think, and then Gone with the Wind, I suppose, about the time we were in college.
MA: It may have. I don't remember specifically the—
MS: Mostly war stories, you know. During the '40s, those were—I mean the '40 to '44 stretch, that was the war, and that certainly may have affected our time.
RP: Mrs. Adams, when you were here in '32, the election was about to happen.
MA: I came in '34.
RP: You came in '34. 11
MA: The fall of '34. Roosevelt had been elected in '32; had taken office and been inaugurated in 1933. So I worked as a student under a federal program, the NYA, National Youth Administration.
RP: I remember he had his own problems during that time. [chuckle] I don't know if—You probably remember some of what it was like during that particular election. Did any of the candidates come through Greensboro during that election?
MA: Well, see, I wasn't here during the election.
RP: You were here then. You were just a tiny girl then.
MS: Well, no. In '32: let's see, I guess I was nine years old. No, I think the first vivid celebrity memory I have was as, I guess about a five- or six-year old, when [Charles] Lindbergh was making the grand tour of the United States after his flight, after his return, and I remember that he spoke in the—What is the War Memorial? I guess it's just a stadium over on Bagley Street or somewhere near there. And he spoke there and then appeared at the Fairground later on that afternoon. And even as a young child, a preschooler, that was the most exciting thing, you know, that was going on in these parts right around then.
RP: Oh, yes, nationwide.
MS: Well, I suppose so, and it was a very big thing for Greensboro in 1927, '8, '9, whenever it was. I don't remember the exact year.
RP: We may reference a little bit, Mrs. Adams. I'll ask you about this. During the '30s—in fact, '33 is when Hitler is elected as the chancellor of Germany, and I don't know what kind of news that was during this time, whether we were even concerned about the Nazi party arising in Germany, or if that was—
MA: I don't remember that we were; I don't think.
RP: We may not have—
MA: May not have been aware.
RP: We use that as background stuff.
MA: I don't remember much about the election of Roosevelt. I grew up in a family that was interested in politics; always participated in elections and campaigns to a degree. I grew up in Shelby, which is a small town—
RP: I know it well.
MS: It's a political town. 12
MA: [unclear] Charlotte and a very political town. I don't know whether you remember or not that they had what they called the Cleveland County dynasty. O. Max Gardner, Clyde Hood, and Judge [unclear], and they were very active. And I can remember when women got the vote that my grandfather came back and took them all to vote. He may have told them how, [laughter] but they—that was their duty from the beginning that they were going to vote.
RP: One of the other topics we may want to talk about is race relations a little bit during that time: what it was like, what role did black people play in your lives here. I don't know whether there—I'm assuming there were people on staff that you had contact with. Let me just get—My own interest that you were a day student. You stayed on campus correct. How would be—We will get to that. Let's make it a [timeline?]. I will ask you or you can refer to what it was like to live in a dormitory and how different it is maybe from today. The house rules that you had to have, who took care of laundry or were there servants? Did you have servants at that time?
MA: Yes, we had maids in the residence halls.
RP: And they came in. Did they make your bed, or did you still have to do all that?
MA: No, they kept the public areas: the living rooms and the bathrooms and the halls and all of that. And when I was a student, we didn't have student kitchens or anything like that. I remember having—a family—One summer my friends from down east, their family would send fish. We'd cook it in the basement. [laughter]
RP: If we can go ahead and get started, what I want: first, we'll have Mrs. Adams, if you will just introduce yourself and tell the camera, tell Sherry here basically what we've already talked about. You were here in 1934-35 and you came from Shelby, North Carolina, and you were a resident student. And then, of course, I think it's also important to say that you were here from '49—
MA: I was here from '35 until—
RP: Thirty-five until whenever. So you saw a lot of changes. And then, Mrs. Sink, if you can tell us about yourself, when you first came to campus and—
MS: Are you interested in details? Like, I recall very vividly, as a day student, that my tuition was $121.00 a year.
MA: Yes, I remember exactly what my total cost was.
MS: And you can tell what it was from the total expense.
RP: And as a day student, I think we'd be interested in how you got here.
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MS: I walked. I lived out in Sunset Hills, and it was within walking distance. There was the Walker Avenue bus, but, I mean, I had two good legs, and we were still in the—coming out of the Depression, and if you could walk, you walked.
MA: Yes, we walked to town and back.
RP: Oh, did you?
MA: We rarely rode the trolley. There was a trolley.
RP: That was when the trolley ran out front here. It did.
MA: But we rarely rode the trolley. We walked. We walked—
DF: Let's go ahead and get started then. This will—
MS: I had to go over some hills.
RP: —will be pretty free-form and—
MA: [unclear]
MS: Yes.
RP: We'll put the hard part on Sherry here who will edit it all together. So whenever
you're ready, just—
SM: It's recording.
RP: We're recording.
MA: And anytime you want to interrupt for additional information, maybe about anything that we're saying—
DF: Just a general comment, as detailed as you can be, but if you can't remember something—
RP: And even though I've done most of the talking, this is Danny's [Fountain] project, and I'll sort of let him kind of carry through for that because he's also designed the rest of the course.
MA: And ask anything that you want to know that we don't cover.
RP: All right, well go ahead then. Let's get started.
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MA: I am May Lattimore Adams and I attended what was then Woman's College of the University of North Carolina as a one-year commercial student in 1934-1935. I had finished high school in 1931, but my family couldn't decide on where in the world to get the money together for me to come here to school. I wrote and asked and was told the only student aid was loans, and I didn't know where I'd pay a loan back, so I went back to high school and took typing and shorthand, but I could not get a job working at anything but in a store. I was working in a department store for $9.00 a week when three years later my family decided they could manage to get together the total of $350.00 which included room, board, tuition—everything but books and supplies and laundry—to come to WC [Woman's College]. So I came at the last minute. You could get in because there were residence halls closed because of the Depression, and I didn't even apply, I don't think, until the first of August, and back then you came sometime in September.
I arrived on the train and I think I was met by somebody from the college
and brought to the dormitory. Much to my surprise, when I registered in the dormitory, the counselor was a woman I had known all my life. She was from my hometown of Shelby, North Carolina where I grew up, and she had just—This was her first year back on the campus. Her husband had died about two years before that, and she was the counselor and living with her was her six-year-old daughter who lived in the dorm as long as her mother did, ate in the dining room with us and was a part of our life. We even, quote, baby-sat sometimes if that was appropriate.
MS: Was that Mrs. Funderburk?
MA: Yes, this was Mrs. Annie B. Funderburk [Class of 1916] who was also a graduate of this institution, and who had taught French here before she was married. So she came back first as a counselor because that was the position that was open for her, and later she taught French part-time; and when she got a full-time position teaching French, she moved out of the dormitory into town.
But in recent years, when Mrs. Funderburk's grandson was married and her daughter was living in New Jersey, and she called and asked that I help make arrangements for a rehearsal dinner in Greensboro. We both decided that this campus had been her home—the daughter's home—all her life and this is where the rehearsal dinner would be, right in the Alumnae House. And we made the plans, and everybody was very happy with them, because that daughter also attended Curry School.
Life in the residence halls was very different then. There were closing hours. If I remember, 11:00 was the very latest you stayed out on weekends, and it may have been 10:30. We had closed study on weeknights, and we had lights out. If you needed to study after hours, you got a flashlight and sat on the floor in the closet, [laughter] because they checked to see if your lights were out. The house president did that and her roommate. The house president's roommate was always like an assistant house president. I remember a lot about life in the dormitories, but since I was a student only one year. 15
In June when I finished the Commercial course, I began working immediately in June of 1935 in the office of Miss Laura [Hill] Coit [Class of 1896, faculty, college secretary, and general assistant to the college president], who was at that time called the secretary of the college. She was a wonderful and unusual woman, and I worked on the campus for forty-five years, retiring July first, 1980. So my student days and my staff days are very much meshed. How long do you want me to go on? Don't you want her to say something?
RP: Sure. Mrs. Sink, if you want to go ahead and pick up here, we're—
MS: Well, my experience was quite a bit different from Mrs. Adam's. I still—
So, it would be good to say May or Miss Lattimore, because when I entered in the fall of 1940, I think you were Miss Lattimore at that point, and she was Dean Harriet Elliott's secretary at that point, I believe, were you not? And so I knew her a long time as Miss Lattimore and Mrs. Adams, I think, before I ever came to the point that I could call her May.
I grew—I was born in Richmond, Virginia. My family moved to Greensboro when I was three years old, and I lived here from 1926 until I moved away for the first time after I was married in 1954, so my experience here has covered a lot of years, but not in the official capacity that May's did. I was here as a student, and I came back later as a member of the English department before my marriage. And I have two daughters who attended UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. I have to stop and get my names straight because I know when my father's cousin was here, it was NCCW, the North Carolina College for Women. When I came in 1940, it was the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, and the University of North Carolina at that point was three institutions rather than six institutions because it was the Woman's College here, THE University at Chapel Hill, and then North Carolina State College at Raleigh, and we were three quite separate, quite distinct entities, but all a part of the university. And I think at that time as the Woman's College, we were one of the outstanding women's colleges in the Southeast. I mean this, I think, was generally agreed at that time.
I grew up and went to public school here in Greensboro. When I graduated, it was from Greensboro Senior High School, which now is Grimsley High School. And it was an interesting story. I was already married and had moved away by the time they had made the change in name, but I understand that when they wanted to change the name from just Greensboro Senior High School, that they wanted to keep the same initials. It was going to make a lot of problems if they had to change the school's initials because that school dates back to 1923. It and I are about the same age. And—So they, as I understand it, scanned the school records—the public school—the Greensboro public school records until they found a distant superintendent whose name was Grimsley and so that was how Grimsley High School got its name.
But to come back to what was Woman's College for us: Since I came as a day student, my experience was quite a bit different. I lived on Kensington Road, which is within easy walking distance of the campus. My usual path from the 16
campus [to] home was up across the corner of the golf course at Aycock [Street] and I think usually I cut down Wright Avenue until I got to Kensington, and it was really quite a tolerable walk. And as we were commenting before, during those post-Depression days when I was here, walking was still the thing. The years that I was here, from 1940 to 1944, covered the bulk of World War II. And during that time everything was rationed, and those of us who were living post-Depression, pennies and nickels were scarce and tight, and so we did walk a great deal. And there was the Walker Avenue bus.
When Walker Avenue—Back in the days when it ran right straight the campus from where it stops now up at the [Jackson] Library—ran right straight through the campus, right straight through what is now the Library, right straight through what is now the main part of the [Stone] Home Economics Building, and picked up over just a block before you got down to the Tate Street corner. And there was much hue and cry in Greensboro when there was the closing of Walker Avenue. The townspeople in the western part of town who used that as their artery back and forth to town, really raised Cain and I think there was quite a bit of not very comfortable feeling between town and gown at that particular point, though I think that's about the main instance that I do know where there was much disagreement. By and large the town has always been—the city has always been very, very proud of the university and its presence here.
When I was here as a day student, tuition was $121.00. This was tuition and most of your fees. It covered your Concert/Lecture Series. We had—Civic Music was the cultural musical series that operated all over the country and, of course, in Greensboro it had all of its performances—whether it was individual soloist or the New York Philharmonic or—Well, I remember seeing Lawrence Tibbett [American opera singer] there. I mean a lot of, the major musical figures and organizations of the country came as a part of Civic Music, and Civic Music was included with the Lecture Series as a part of our tuition. And I think there is probably some similar situation now. Isn't there a concert entertainment series that's probably a part of—?
RP: The university [unclear]
MS: Yes. But at that time there were not individual artists who were brought in, but the musical part of it was the Civic Music Series, and that was, as I said, all over the country.
There was a Town Student's Association; there was a fairly large contingent of town students at that time. Of course all of us were girls, and the majority of us lived or had relatives here in Greensboro if we came as day students because there was not the tremendous number of commuting students that we have had now. Particularly, I would say, in the last twenty, twenty-five years. That has been a very growing segment of the campus. But there were many of us who were from Greensboro, so really when I came over here to college, it was just almost stepping right from the senior year in high school right into a continuation because lots and lots and lots of my fellow graduates from high school were right here with me. And, as I say, the education was a tremendous 17
bargain, and many parents who lived in the local area could see no reason for sending their girls off anywhere else when we had such a good education right here in town.
I don't know that there now exists the very close intermingling of the day population or the day students and the campus students as there was in the time when I was in school. We felt very much an integral part of the campus and all its activities. It was a pleasant time for me. There were some girls from Greensboro; however, who particularly wanted the dormitory life—the campus experience—who moved in on campus. I personally could not ever understand why they wanted to do that because for me, I had the best of all worlds. I lived at home. My mother kept my room clean, kept my clothes clean. I didn't have to have room inspection but—Who was it, what was the name of the lady who used to make the—?
MA: Miss [Estelle] Boyd [supervisor of dormitories].
MS: Well, who was it—There was another somebody after Miss Boyd. Do you remember? The girls were in fear of—
MA: Miss [Helen] Moxley.
MS: Miss Moxley. Oh, yes.
MA: I saw her recently.
MS: Did you really?
MS: Well, as a day student, I was aware of who she was even though I had no contact with her whatsoever because everyone feared room inspection. And—Well, I don't guess you want to pass this on to the children. I remember there was one girl from my class who was sent home because they found—not a can of beer, I don't think they had cans of beer then—but a bottle of beer in her room, and she was shipped home. I mean, that was a shipping, you know, offense right—I mean you were out. There was no question about it.
We had a very active Student Government Association, a very active Judicial Board, and the Town Students' Association had its own Town Students' Judicial Board, which operated in case of any infraction of campus rules—campus-wide rules that day students might have been involved in. If you skipped Chapel, for example. And we had weekly required Chapel, Tuesday every single week.
There was a strange situation in that if you actually kept a record throughout the whole academic year, it rained more Tuesdays than it was dry. Now, this—I mean, we really—We would—We almost kept book on this sort of thing because there was nothing worse than having to trudge with all your books from wherever you had been the period before, down to the [Aycock] Auditorium—all of your books, we didn't have knapsacks then. I guess we—I had 18
book bags when I was down in the grades but we had all this load of books, and the umbrella and the raincoat and you get 2,400 girls inside Aycock Auditorium in the wintertime with the heat on, and you could almost see the steam rise. But it was—I don't know the point at which required Chapel ended. I think by the time that my daughters were here in the early '70s, they laughed at the idea. There was no such animal.
We also had mass meetings, when you had to get the whole student body together. Oh, for example, when the campus political campaign was running or other situations that were not covered in a normal Chapel day, there would be a mass meeting, which usually was in the evening. For Chapel we had an assigned seat, and we had checkers who checked to make sure that we were there, and this was day students included, I mean as well as the campus students. And if you were not there, I think you were tolerated maybe an unexcused absence or two, but after that you went before the Judicial Board. This was really a major offense to miss Chapel.
I've run out of something that they might be interested in.
RP: Let me see if we can focus on a couple of things that—Mrs. Adams, you might be first, and then Mrs. Sink can follow up. Tell me about what sort of things that you may have worn during that time, what your standard dress was during that time. What would a typical day be like? When you got up in the morning, what kind of people you encountered in that time and in classes and in Tuesday Chapel; your perspective on that.
MA: Well, my day was not—One-year Commercial had a different day than the other students. And by the way, during the Depression they did not limit the number of one-year Commercial students at all because we saved the campus, literally. A lot of people came for that course, and it was outstanding. All over the state people did their best to get the people who had completed that course to work for them. And I went to class all morning, every morning. I think eight to twelve, and then staff had been cut on the campus drastically because of the Depression. And because I had had typing and shorthand, I was assigned as my work assignment to go the School of Music every afternoon, Monday through Friday, for two hours, and I did the secretarial work for Dean [Wade] Brown who was the dean of the School of Music, and occasionally for some of the other professors in the department. This was done—That meant I worked ten hours a week, forty hours for the month, regularly.
The one-year Commercial head was Mr. E. J. Forney who did not still actively teach, but had a reputation as being head of that department. He was also treasurer of the college, and had an office in what is now the Foust Administration Building. It was the Administration Building at that time.
And he had this concentration idea. When you came to bookkeeping, you took bookkeeping and nothing else for ten days because wherever you worked, you were going to have to learn their system. So what you did was, you learned the basics, and you were expected to come Saturday and Sunday, or whatever it took to turn that assignment in on the specified day. I remember distinctly that I 19
got a ride home for the weekend at Easter. He came walking in Monday morning and says, "You ran out on me over the weekend." I said, "When is this due?" He said, "Friday of this week." I said, "I'll bring it to you Thursday." He really liked for you to talk back to him, so he and I got along quite well.
By the end of the year, every afternoon—I mean, every morning—I was taken out of class and went to the treasurer's office and typed reports about this big [jesters with her hands] to go to Raleigh, all figures. And one day, when we weren't finished—I wasn't the only one doing that—he said, "You'll have to come back this afternoon."
And I said, "Mr. Forney, I'm due at Dr. Brown's office at two o'clock." Well, they were contemporaries. They had been here about the same length of time. So he got on the phone, and he said, "Wade, I can't let Miss Lattimore do this." And Wade was just as adamant that I was assigned there he expected me, so he turned around and grinned, and said, "Go on."
But then he took pride in coming up one morning and strolling around, and he'd put his hands on his hips and stroll in front of the class, and he'd stroll around, and he's say, "While the rest of you were chasing butterflies, guess what she was doing. Look what she typed. [holding up her hands] Can you do that?"
MS: That must have endeared you to your fellow students. [laughter]
MA: I know. It wasn't to his credit or mine that I could do that. It was the fact that I had had a very good shorthand and typing teacher in Shelby. And I had not used it for three years when I came down here, but it came back very rapidly. And so I had the basics and I could go ahead. And we had a teacher in my class who was just as determined that before the year was over in shorthand, we would be doing medicine and law and several other things. We had quite an expansive knowledge of shorthand. They had always taught Pittman Shorthand here, and Mr. Forney thought that it was the only shorthand that existed. The four-year secretarial course at this place was begun the year I was a student, so the head of the department came over and said, "If there are any of you who have had Gregg Shorthand in high school, you may take it now, and not have to switch it."
Well, I had assumed I had to learn the other and so immediately I signed up for that class. He came—Mr. Forney came in and said, "You'll have to write your parents and get permission before you change."
Well, anyway, this was just one of his requirements, but that's also why our teacher was determined that we were going to go far in shorthand, and we did. And as I said, the Commercial students were in demand in the larger companies that existed all over the state and various places. And the reason that I got a position here as soon as I finished was that Dr. Brown found that there was a vacancy in Miss Laura Coit's office, and that was my first place of work on the campus.
Miss Laura Coit was called the secretary of the college, and she did many, many things. So I was to go to work the first of June so our teacher went to Mr. Forney and said, "She needs to be excused from exams, and have at least a week off." He says, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I have a job in Miss Coit's 20
office." He says, "You're tearing up my playhouse." They were teaching the first steno typing in that course, too. And a young woman who had finished here was working in Miss Coit's office, and she was a steno typist, and she was his fair-haired example to push steno typing, and she was leaving to get married. So the fact that I was going in there when I was not a steno typist tore down one of his dreams, but he just smiled and said, "Go ahead." So I did.
As a student—because I continued working here so straight along, some of the times are jumbled—but as a student at that time there were gates locked at the entrances to the campus every night, and I remember on a Sunday afternoon when there was an emergency that we had to get—quickly get the campus policeman and everybody else to get a gate open for the ambulance. These were locked all weekend. Our visitors were not allowed to drive on the campus at that time. And none of us, of course, had cars. I don't know whether we would have been prevented; we didn't have them. If we went to town, we put on our hats and gloves and dressed, and we walked or we rode the trolley, which ran right down Tate [Street] and West Market Street. We all usually walked. We rarely went any other way.
Then my years of experience were varied. There were seven chancellors in the time that I worked here, and in some cases I've even worked short terms for some of them. I went in a few years into the office of Dean Harriet Elliott as her secretary and later, assistant. And she was such a versatile woman and way ahead of her time. She became dean in 1935, 1936. She had taught political science before that. And Dr. W.C. [Walter Clinton] Jackson, who was then the chancellor, had to persuade her that she would be dean of women. She put some restrictions on what she would and wouldn't do, and took the position. And she's the one who didn't like to say "dormitory" anymore. It was residence halls. Nobody was a college girl; they were young college women. And she worked hard at getting counselors instead of house mothers.
This is an interesting thing: Back in those days, North and South Spencer [Residence Hall] were one great big building. Because it was old, it was a fire hazard, and they were not allowed to lock the outside doors at night. Well, I knew as a student that if anybody wanted to stay out late or something, they would stay with a friend in Spencer and slip in. [laughter] I might not ought to tell that either, but it's true. Well, Miss Elliott worried over that and the fact that there was one counselor over the whole building. So in another year—this was before I went into her office. Well, I was still in Miss Coit's office—I moved into the dormitory as an assistant counselor in addition to my daytime secretarial duties, and I received room, board, and laundry for that.
Well, my eighty-five dollar a month salary, free and clear, seemed like a fortune back then. And so I moved into North Spencer as the assistant to the counselor who was over the whole building. I helped her with house meetings; I helped her with varied duties at night. Then when they renovated North Spencer and could then lock the doors, and by that time they had established a position for another counselor, I stayed on campus as a fill-in counselor. If they went away for overnight or a weekend, I stayed in their place, and I still had the same financial 21
arrangement. When the person in Miss Elliott's office left to work on her master's degree, I went in her office for a year supposedly. [laughter]
Miss Coit had become ill in the meantime and what they had done was divide up her duties into several offices, so her office wasn't going to exist anymore, so they had a specific place that I was to work when that year was over. Well, Miss Elliott and I liked working together. We really did enjoy it a great deal, and she was making a lot of changes and working on many things, so we worked hard on getting things in the office like she wanted them, and setting up various things, and when the year was over—She was always a very candid, very frank person—she called me in and she said, "Katharine isn't going to return. She has gotten a job as dean of women." She said, "If you would like to stay with me in this office, I would like it. You did know that you were going to do something else, and if you would rather do that, I understand." And I said, "I didn't have any thought of going there." And she said, "Oh, you don't like her," the person I would work with. I said, "Yes, I do, but I do not like some of the things in that office, so I welcome the opportunity to stay."
At that time, she was making many innovative changes. World War II came along. There was controversy over whether soldiers—There was ORD, Overseas Replacement Depot established at what was then the outskirts of Greensboro. There was controversy over whether soldiers could even come on the campus. She and I worked together on setting up elaborate plans for dances to which soldiers and servicemen were invited to come, with just certain rules and regulations that had to be observed. And my—I probably shouldn't mention a neighboring college. The dean from over there came over one afternoon. She called and made an appointment and came to talk to Miss Elliott because the then-president of Greensboro College was saying servicemen were forbidden to set foot on campus there. She had a son in service, that woman did, and she could not understand that at all, and she talked at great length, and I think she finally got things changed on that campus.
But one of my duties as assistant counselor while I was still living in the dormitory was chaperoning the busses to Chapel Hill for football games, and dances and dancing, and we occasionally went to—We went a few times to NC State [North Carolina State College in Raleigh].
Max—Mr. O. Max Gardner was really proud of the fact that he was called the father of consolidation, which Marilib has already mentioned. He had been a student at NC State and he graduated there, and then he went to Chapel Hill Law School, so when he was governor of the state, he was the first person that thought women should be included in things, I think. So that was the first consolidation. Those three units were the Consolidated University of North Carolina, and that's when we became WC, and he really liked the fact that he was credited with that, which he should have been. It was one of his pet achievements. He—His sons—he had two sons who followed that same path. They went to North Carolina State and to Chapel Hill Law School, and I think his grandsons went to Chapel Hill. I'm not really sure of that, but he was—At the time of his death, he had been named ambassador to the Court of Saint James, was going to England as ambassador and had a heart attack and died in New York before the boat sailed. 22
But anyway after I went into Miss Elliott's office, we decided that I worked so closely with the seventeen counselors, that I should not live on campus anymore. That was not a good working relationship, so I moved out in town and was just then her secretary and finally, assistant. And I enjoyed working for her and during those years—I was in her office about ten years—she was named by President Roosevelt as the only woman member of the National Defense Council, and she was the consumer representative. When that was no longer necessary—I think the council finally was disintegrated. I have a copy of the letter that President Roosevelt wrote to her, accepting her resignation. A very interesting letter. She was not back on campus full-time very long until Secretary [Henry] Morgenthau [Jr.], Secretary of the Treasury, drafted her again to travel—She was an excellent speaker—to travel all over the United States selling war bonds. She came back and forth to the campus for crucial meetings and that kind of thing. We did have an acting dean of women for a little while who ended up being Miss Annie B. Funderburk who had been my counselor when I first came. And Miss Elliott was always available for consultation and was here as much as she could be. But she—
RP: Excuse me. Let me interrupt you a little bit and see if we can focus a little bit on what it was like having a social life here. We're sort of—For the children who are going to be watching this, who understand some of the things that you did when, say, going to downtown or especially you talked about these football games at Chapel Hill.
MS: That was during the war years.
MA: Yes, because that was during that those things—Well, when I was a student, there were four societies, and you were assigned to one of them. I was assigned to what was called the [unclear] Society. They sponsored dances that were held in the gym, and they were a part of our social life. One of the first things that Dean Harriet Elliott did was to try to build up the social life on the campus so the men would come here for the weekends instead of everybody else going away. And it would turn out to be such a fun—
[End CD 1—Begin CD 2]
MA: —filled weekend that it grew. We had dances every Saturday night. I helped chaperone them after I was a staff member. Because I was just in my twenties, you know, I could almost be a part of it. The students who went off the campus for specific things sometimes had to have a chaperone, and I did that. I had made friends on the campus as a student, and they were still students. They were four-year students, and one of them had a connection that we could use a cabin in Greensboro out on a lake and go out just for picnics and that kind of things, and I would have a date and chaperone. We would go out and cook Sunday dinner out 23
there over the fire, that kind of thing. And we were chaperoned if we went in groups, but you could, by that time, go downtown and back on whatever means of transportation. You did always sign out of the dormitory. When you left there, you signed out. And that grew and certainly during the war we had the service dances—the dances for servicemen. The activities on the campus grew and were—And this was a very active place on weekends.
The parlors in the residence halls had been at that time very plain and stark. They were—Everybody said if you'd fix them up, somebody will damage them. Miss Elliott said if you fix them up, they will learn to live that way, and she had, one at a time, every parlor renovated and refurnished. And I think they were probably much more attractive than they are right now. I don't know; I haven't been in one lately. The only damage that was ever done to our knowledge, except maybe an ashtray walking away occasionally: a young man waiting for a date did a beautiful job of carving "Merry Christmas" in a coffee table. [laughter] We did have—we did have a social life of its kind. If we had a date, we could go out on a date, but we did sign out with the counselor.
RP: Let Mrs. Sink take up some of her memories of the social life, and if you've ever gone to any of these football games.
MS: Well, I was here in that generation when—My social life wasn't touched too much inasmuch as I lived at home. I did not have the restrictions imposed upon me that were imposed on students who lived on campus. If they were going to leave the campus for an overnight or for a weekend, [or] if they were invited to dances in Chapel Hill or State or someplace like that, for example, they had to have written permission from home, which they—which would be addressed to the counselor. I think this was correct. I was not a day student so I wasn't involved in this; however, it was nice that when these busses came to take several busloads, a convoy of girls down to Chapel Hill to dances—you know, like for Fall Germans or Spring Germans.
People just didn't have cars. You didn't have gas; gas was rationed and so you just couldn't go trotting back and forth from campus to campus, as—as they do now, or even back home so frequently. If you went, it probably had to be on the bus, which was the best way to get there if you lived here in North Carolina, rather than to try to go somewhere by train. I can remember that my contemporaries, if they were going downtown to shop for an afternoon, as normal wearing, we wore loafers and saddle shoes, period. I mean that was it, with socks. In my day and time, you never saw college girls during the day with stockings on. Of course now with the jeans on, you don't know whether they have socks or stockings or anything. But the general attire was skirts and blouses and sweaters, or skirts and blouses and a jacket, depending upon the weather. Relatively few dresses, you know. Dresses were primarily for dress-up: for dates, or for going to church, or social functions because we didn't have a uniform, but we might as well have in that just about everybody wore the same sort of thing.
And, oh, I guess the typical ornament of that time, if anything, was a string of pearls, maybe, around the neck. That was it. College students did not wear 24
earrings. Nobody's ears were pierces; in fact, the ear-piercing deal started about the time that my daughters started in the '70s, and back at that time, it was not done when you were a little girl or way down in the grades or even in high school. This was a—In my day, one of the first acts of rebellion, I think, against the family was to go to the bookstore or to someplace down at The Corner and buy a pack of cigarettes because nice girls just simply did not smoke in high school; they absolutely did not. And—But this was kind of a sign of being grown-up in those days. I mean this was one of the things that the girls did when they first came away because smoking was permitted in the dormitories. That always surprised me. It surprised my mother when she found out that smoking was permitted in the dormitories. But I guess we've come full circle now. I don't know if they have said "no more smoking" in the dormitories or not, but I know that's not really quite the thing that it used to be.
Social life was plentiful. My—Mostly you just didn't date on weekday nights. This was a weekend activity, and, as I said, those who lived in the dormitory, their behavior was quite circumscribed. The—If they were going downtown just to shop at the local department stores or the dime store or whatever they were going down there for, when they left the campus, I think in the '30s—although I think this had pretty much stopped by the time I came in the '40s because there did—if you look back over a period of time, there was some relaxation of certain demands placed on students. I think in the late '30s, when you left—Now you will know for sure about this and you can correct me: were hats and hose and heels and gloves expected? I mean, you represented the Woman's College to the community, and so you didn't just run down in your saddle shoes and your loafers and that sort of thing, but you dressed to go into town, even if it were simply a matter of going down there to shop.
You mentioned the movies. Movies during the early '40s: we were fed an awful lot of propaganda even though we didn't realize it. I mean we were—we—The movies, Hollywood got on the bandwagon, and they were putting an awful lot of war stories, and I guess it's reasonable that they would have. This is what was going on in our world. When you went to the movies you always had a newsreel at the beginning, and for my generation, it was what was happening on the various fronts of the war, and—
RP: Yes, where did you go to the movies in Greensboro?
MS: The Carolina, and then there was another one on Elm Street called the National or the State. I had forgotten about the State.
MA: The National, there were two on Elm Street; the Carolina was the place.
MS: The Carolina was the first-run theater. The National was about as good, but the State was way down on the totem pole. It ran the movies that your mother didn't want you to go to see. [laughter] And when I think now of what were the ones that they didn't want you to see—Well, it'll blow your mind because, of course, this was long before anything much except G-rated, you know—What was it? The 25
Hayes Office [the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America was an organization that promulgated a moral code for films] was absolutely in control. The movies were censored. You couldn't even show cleavage. And I thought of that the other night when I watched the Academy Awards. [laughter]
But it was impressed upon you if you were a day student or a campus student, that when you were away from the campus, you represented the school; that you wanted to put your very best foot forward, and you didn't want to behave in any manner that would be a reflection on the school. And we were very conscious of that, even those of us who came as day students.
The entertain—There was very little live entertainment at the movies. We didn't have coffee houses; we didn't have places where you had small group entertainment very much. I was very much a child of the swing period. You know, the "Big Apple" and the "Little Apple" and jitterbugging and all of that. I mean those were the dances of the war years, and everybody danced. And everybody danced with somebody; I mean you didn't go off and do your own thing, you know, and just come back and touch hands occasionally but this—As someone says, it was hugging to music. [laughter] And it was very much approved by everybody. But dancing was quite different then, and big formal dances were still the rule of the day during the war.
May mentioned the four societies that we had when it was still the Woman's College. We had always adopted, during the time that I was in school—I don't know if this was official or not, but certainly we all felt that we were very much anti-sorority. I mean, fraternities didn't figure into it in those days, but the philosophy was that if we had four societies around which some of our social life resolved—revolved—that you were assigned to a society. There was none of this rushing business, you know. It wasn't a matter of some people being left out, and others being favored, maybe because they were more attractive or had more money or something like that. But it was believed that if you automatically belonged to one of these social groups on the campus, that that gave you an avenue for social activities and a cohesiveness and a group to get things done and that sort of thing. We had—Each society contributed the same number of girls to be student marshals. Now I think we still have marshals, don't we? And I don't know how they are selected, but in those—in the time that I was in school, these were selected, I think, by vote from—I guess it was a kind of a popularity contest—but they were selected by vote from the various societies, and they did sort of hostess duty and ushering duty and handing out programs and being beautiful and standing around and all that sort of thing at lectures and concerts and any events. If there was a processional—like a faculty processional for a meeting or something of that sort, it was always headed off by the chief student marshal.
And when I was in school, we still had May Queens and the service—I mean the celebration—of May Day was a very important activity. I can remember in my own class, I think the girl who was our—
MS: Hi, Dot. [speaking to someone who comes by the room] 26
MS: —the girl who was our May Queen had a gorgeous, gorgeous dress, which just a few months later, maybe just a month later, she used as her wedding dress. Girls, when we were in school, were—If you were married, you could not live on campus. During the war years, a number of girls did get married, and some of them, as soon as they got married, were told that they had to move off-campus. I guess they were a bad influence. [laughter] I don't know—
MA: It depended on where their husband was.
MS: Oh, was it, really? If he were overseas, could they stay? I didn't know that.
MA: Elise Rouse [Class of 1943] was the first student to stay on campus after she was married because the young man had gone overseas immediately.
MS: Well, I didn't know, but I—Did you know that? But it was, of course, it was a different day and time, and the mores—the social mores were quite different in those days.
RP: Why don't we go ahead and take a break now. I'm sure [unclear]
MS: We'll yack about it [unclear]; we'll talk about it.
RP: You have lots of good stories, don't you? Why don't you go ahead and start. The person that Dottie was talking about. Was that Zeke? [Editor’s note: Ezekiel Robinson was an African American staff member who served the institution from 1892 until his retirement in 1944.]
MS: Zeke, oh yes.
MA: Oh, yes.
MS: Zeke was a campus fixture.
RP: Why don't you start with a story on that.
MA: Well, Zeke was a very small, wiry black man who had worked on the campus since its beginning days. He was Dr. [Charles Duncan] McIver's fetcher and drove for him. First he drove a horse and buggy. Then he drove a car, and when I came to school, I'm almost sure that Zeke met me at the railroad station in an A-model Ford and brought me out to the campus, and when I was in Miss Laura Coit's office, and we had visitors to the campus, we were the only PR [public relations] available. She did admissions—She didn't do the admissions. We did all of the legwork and got it ready and took it to the Registrar's office, and the Registrar admitted the students, but when I working in her office, we did all the assembly, all the correspondence with students. So if they came to look over the campus, they came to Miss Coit's office. Well, I was the youngest and most agile person in 27
her office, so I guided campus tours. And it depended on who was on the tour—whether they were parents and grandparents, or who—I might just walk with them all over campus or Miss Coit might say, "We'll get Zeke, and Zeke will come and take you around."
So he would take us in that A-model Ford. And he worked until he got much too old to work and lived not far from the campus where he had a porch on his house, and he would sit out on that porch all day long. But he was a real fixture and a real character.
When I lived in the residence hall, both as student and as a counselor, we had maids; we had black people, then called colored people, as a maid in each dormitory, and we had more than one shift. They did all of the housekeeping in the public areas. They also acted as hostess at the front desk. They greeted people all day long. At night we had students who earned money to be a hostess. But the maids were there in the daytime, and as they finished their housekeeping chores and they greeted people, they adopted every student; helped look after them. It really was a great relationship between student and counselor and maids in the dorms. They did very good work, under the circumstances.
We took the meals in the dining hall, three meals a day. Breakfast and lunch were cafeteria style, but at dinner we were assigned tables and sat at a specific place for our dinner meal. And I think—Yes, I'm sure we did it all year long. And when I became an assistant counselor on campus, I was the head of a table. The counselor had a table, and some of the housekeeping director had a table, and, you know, as an assistant, I had a table. And I know I have mentioned Mrs. Funderburk's small daughter. They were at the first table as you entered the dining room, and I started pass, going to my table one night, and Nancy being the little girl, said to her mother, "Mother, did you know today is May's birthday."
And she says, "No, I didn't." [Mrs. Funderburk’s daughter says,] "Well, it is." And this was in front of all the students. "She's twenty-three years old." And you became really good friends with people assigned to your tables. I am greeted on the street by some of them now if I happen to see them. There are a few of them living in Greensboro, or if they're back for Commencement weekend. Why, I—You know, they know me, and I know them, and I'm always interested in what they're doing, and to see them.
Marilib, why don't you take over for a little bit. I'm kind of at a standstill for a moment.
MS: Any particular thing that you would like for me to—
RP: Well, I tell you what. Let's do it like—
MS: —address.
RP: Do you have any good stories about Mrs. Adams that you remember that you could tell us?
MS: No, I really don't. [laughter] She behaved herself when I knew her. 28
RP: Did you know anybody here on campus—Now you mentioned the one—Did you know anyone who didn't behave themselves? Somebody who would kind of be considered a rascal character here on campus.
MS: Who's now on campus?
RP: Somebody who was here when you were here; maybe another girl or somebody that we can focus on who had kind of an interesting story or anecdote [unclear].
MA: The ones I know of are confidential. [laughter] I couldn't tell one that happened in the dorm when I was there but she was sent home for something that probably goes on all the time, but I can't tell you who.
MS: Well, I think I told you my only one. And this was not anything that I knew firsthand. It was simply someone whom I knew. You remember the girl who had the beer bottle and was sent home because behavior in the dormitories was—
Well, May mentioned the fact that in the evenings we had closed study. Freshman year, this was strictly enforced in the freshmen halls. I was not subject to it, but I knew about it from all my friends. After dinner, from something like 7:30 maybe until about ten o'clock, there was absolute quiet in the dorms. You didn't visit between rooms; you—If you were not studying in your room, that was your privilege, but you usually had plenty enough then you should have been. And you were expected to be quiet, and you actually got a call-down—and I don't know what the dormitory punishment for that was—if you broke closed study. And the—I think that it probably stopped about ten o'clock so that people had a chance to take baths and wash hair and do all that stuff, you know, before you go to bed. But that was very definitely a requirement, and when my two daughters were here in school, we had just become coeducational and I think that the young men particularly—I probably ought not to lay it exclusively to them because I think the women were probably just as bad—but when you would drive through the campus, it's almost as if they were trying to see who could out-blast everybody else with the noise coming from their stereos.
And I know my son's a Naval Academy graduate, and he said that when you are in school with—Oh, well, in his entering class there were only ninety girls out of an entering class of 1,200 students so it was predominantly males. He said if they all cut their hair alike, they all look alike, they all dress alike, there are only two things that can distinguish you as an individual: the quality of your stereo and whether or not you have a steady date. But we didn't have that on campus here, but I was really surprised at the fact that they were allowed—after having had all these restrictions placed on us—that they were allowed to manufacture that much noise.
RP: Speaking of noise: did you all listen—Obviously you got your news from somewhere. Did you have radios in the halls or each—?
MS: Oh, yes. 29
MA: I had one. Not everybody had one when I was a student, but I did have one. And TV was not in existence, of course, and WBIG [radio station] in Greensboro signed on every morning and off every night with "When the White Azaleas Start Blooming." I could hum it for you. [laughter] And—
MS: Radio was a very important part of our lives. I mean, it and the newspaper and the newsreels at the movies. I mean that was the source of—that was the more or less instant source of our news and so—
MA: And they had soap operas on radio. That never was one of my entertainments, but we did have them.
MS: Again, something that amazed me when our girls were in school over here: the fact that the students used to congregate in some of the lounges over at Elliott [University Center] and watch soap operas. You know the "Young and the Restless" and stuff like that, you know. And I—
RP: It's still a big deal.
MA: Do they still?
SM: Yes, considering that nowadays the kids who are going to be watching this have access to, say, twenty-some plus channels, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it might be interesting to note that the radio that you were getting entertainment from had to sign off and on at a specific period. So you might want to say what that was.
MA: Well, I think radio came on in the mornings maybe eight o'clock. And I'm sure—
MS: There were farm programs, though, on early.
MA: I guess they were; very early, maybe 5:30 or six o'clock.
MS: They were farm programs. They were programs that were aimed really at the farm population.
MA: They were giving information, agricultural information and helpful things.
MS: They had ads, too, but nothing was [unclear]
MA: I think they signed off at eleven. And you couldn't get many stations on a radio. WBIG didn't go out of existence until recent years, and it was the main radio station in Greensboro.
I know in later years after my son was born, I had a woman—a maid—who came in, in the afternoons when he first got out of school when he was in nursery school and kindergarten, and by the time I could get him home, she was 30
listening to a soap opera on the radio. Every day at noon she would come in and have the story on by the time I got home with him. And when he was born, in those days I took a six-month leave of absence and then came back to work in six months.
MS: I took a semester off when Frances [Sink] was born.
MA: Yes, and the young woman in the chancellor's office at that time was also expecting a baby, and they moved her to another office, even before she stopped work.
MS: Oh, really.
MA: Yes. Now Miss Elliott told me that I could stay for as long as I wanted to, [laughter] and she meant it. But in the chancellor's office, which was the front office of the institution, when—after a month or two she was moved to another place until she took her leave.
RP: We talked a little bit about behavior in the dormitories. What was classroom behavior like? When you were—
MS: Wonderful. I have taught both in college and in public school, and there is absolutely no comparison. After I finished here, I went to Chapel Hill for my graduate work, directly the fall after I graduated here. And—Then after I finished there, I came back here to teach in the English department. Now that was an unusual situation. I mean, for me it was an unusual situation because all of a sudden, here I was back in the very department that I had graduated from just a couple of years before, and all the people whom I had known as Dr. so-and-so or Mr. and Mrs. so-and-so or Miss so-and-so.
Leonard Hurley was the head of the English department when I was hired, and when he said, "Now, Mary Elizabeth."
Now my name is Mary Elizabeth and Leonard Hurley is one of the few people who ever called me both names. He was a not very distant neighbor of ours, and I used to babysit for his kids, and so I think he picked that up from my mother. But he said, "Now Mary Elizabeth, you're part of the family now. You must call me Leonard."
I could no more have called that man Leonard than fly. I absolutely could not. Now the same year that I joined the English faculty, Randall Jarrell [American author, essayist, literary critic, novelist, poet, and professor] and Peter Taylor [American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and professor] also joined. I was in very distinguished company. They distinguished themselves, and I was in their company. But the people who came as I came and came afterwards, I could call them by their first name with no difficulty at all, but these men and women, most of whom were my parents' generation actually when I was here in school in the '40s, I knew them. I could call—like Miss Nettie Sue Tillett [English professor]—I could call her Miss Nettie Sue or Miss [Jane] Summerell [Class of 31
1910, English professor], I could call Miss Jane, but I could no more have addressed those women by their first name, I think, than I would have called my mother's contemporaries by their first name. You just—I didn't grow up that way, and so you just didn't do it. But it was a very, very friendly faculty, and—However, there was within our department—I don't know that your kids will be too much interested in this—but there was within our department, so sharp [a] division among the members about certain things that were going on on the campus at that time.
And one of the things that I fell heir to, as the youngest and newest member on the faculty, was that Dr. Hurley asked me if I would be the secretary to the English department staff meetings. And I told him—Well, I wouldn't dare to say "no," you know. I told him I would, and so I did this for, I guess, two or three years in a row. Randall and Peter were never called upon to do it. We had had other women who had come in on—in the years right after, and here I was, still taking those faculty notes. And I was getting kind of sick and tired of it because it was a kind of a picky department in that they would come to me before I had actually had the minutes printed up and want sometimes to see the minutes to make sure, I think, that they were quoted as they expected to be quoted, and I hadn't misquoted them. And so finally I guess after I had been in the department maybe five years, I went to see Dr. Hurley and asked him if I could please be excused from taking the minutes; that there were a number of younger staff at the meetings, and I'd like for them to have a chance at it.
And he hesitated for a moment, and then he said, "Well, Mary Elizabeth, actually I'd like for you to continue. I think you're the only member of the staff who speaks to every other member of the staff." [laughter] Now, I don't know if your young people would be interested in that, but you, as college historians, may be interested in it. But there—I mean there was really, in some departments during the '70s, some heated division in them, because there were some things going on on campus that individuals took different sides of questions and feeling ran pretty strong.
But to come back to the student life, I think that our academic day—whether you were a day student or a town student—was essentially the same. Academic classes, when I came in 1940 and even when I discontinued even into the first year or two or three in the '50s, we had class six days a week. If you were taking a non-lab class, you probably had met the class, if it were a foreign language, I think you met it five days a week. If it were a regular lecture class, you met it Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. The normal load was fifteen hours, and, with permission, you could take eighteen. Fifteen hours meant five three-hour, three-times-a-week classes. If you were taking a laboratory class, you had either two lectures and one three-hour lab a week or one lecture and two three-hour labs a week. And these worked out very well. I know that even as a student, I preferred classes—I tried my best to get my classes out of the way by one o'clock in the day. To do that, it meant that I took eight o'clocks. My normal schedule was eight o'clock every day. It also meant that you would have some Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes from twelve to one, which were not choice classes, and that you would have some Tuesday, Thursday, 32
Saturday classes that met right until twelve o'clock, and nobody wanted those on Saturday.
Even if you were a dean's list student, you were limited in the number of classes. I mean, an honor roll or dean's list, you were limited in the number of class cuts that you could have. I think when my daughters were here in school, that it had gotten to the point that class attendance seemed to me to be almost optional. I don't know whether that still prevails or not. There are many—I am convinced that there are many eighteen to twenty-two years old who can't handle that still, but it was pretty restricted when you did not have—as a first semester freshman, you had absolutely no cuts. If you were on the honor roll at the end of the first semester, then I think you were granted some—maybe three cuts a semester, you know, from then on. Then by the time I was a senior, if you were dean's list then you were eligible for almost unlimited cuts because for those usually were the students who didn't use it at all. It was a situation where I think I was tempted to come to school even when I honest to goodness didn't feel like it, because you missed so much and got so far behind, when you missed lectures. And our courses were very demanding, and, of course, I look back on it and am thrilled to death that they were for what they provided for us.
RP: Did you have recreation classes? How did you, as women—What sort of things did you do when you were—What sort of recreation facilities did you have, and sports facilities?
MA: Well, there was swimming and the activities in the gym, and we were required to take physical education—
MS: Two years.
MA: And health. We were required to take both, even the one year Commercials. And I took swimming, I remember, one semester. I think I had to take general physical education another time, and it was open for activities if that's what you wanted to do.
We walked downtown to movies, and, as I remember, movies cost twenty-five cents. Now I know when I was in high school and younger that in my hometown on Saturdays, they had a special. You went to the movies for ten cents.
MS: Oh, and until you were twelve years old, you went to Carolina Theater for ten cents.
MA: I think it was twenty-five or thirty-five when I was here as a student, at the Carolina. And our drink of that day—I don't know how they ever overcame that. We called Coca Colas "dope."
MS: And [unclear] because they claimed that the original ones had cocaine in them.
33
MA: And yes. That that's where Coca Cola name came from. And they had a hard time and spent millions of dollars overcoming that name, because it was called a dope. You can get a dope with lemon in it if you wanted to.
MS: Or a splash of cherry.
MA: Yes. And that was either five or ten cents. And then our—When we really splurged, we had a flapper dope. Now that's today called a Coke float. That was with ice cream.
MS: Oh, I never heard that.
MA: Well, we called it a flapper dope. And this happened before I came, but you may think it's an interesting story. In the English department, when you were talking about it—What was the Dr. Smith's name that was here then?
MS: W.C. [William Cunningham Smith]
MA: Dr. W.C. Smith was head of the English department, and teaching in it were two young professors—a man and a woman—and so when the woman came in to see him and told him that she was going to marry the young man, he said, "Well, we certainly hate to lose you." And she thought, "Well, I would keep on teaching." He says, "No, you can't serve God and Mammon." [laughter] That was May Thompson Evans—
MS: Was it really?
MA: Who later became head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Party, and she married W. Ney Evans, who also was very active in politics. But she had to stop teaching.
MS: Well, this was true in the public schools in the '30s during the Depression. If both the husband and wife taught, one was automatically fired because they said that they couldn't see two salaries going to a single family when jobs were so scarce—
MA: Were so scarce.
MS: And one might be held by another breadwinner.
MA: And as I said, when we were off-camera, anybody who studied political science here, especially under Harriet Elliott or Miss Louise Alexander [political science professor], they are active to this day if they are living in this country [unclear, both talking]. They are active in politics and whatever comes up, because they were taught as part of their curriculum that you'd help in this life. And I remember one of Mr. Charlie Phillips' quotes that I still use on the proper occasion sometimes: "Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy in our journey 34
through life on this earth." I liked that, and, as a said, at the proper place, I've used it since. It wasn't a direct quote from Mr. Phillips [head of public relations]. I don't know where it came from. I usually say "quote" but I don't know from whom.
They were both wonderful and the students who were privileged on election night to go to Miss Elliott's house and listen to returns with her and Miss Alexander were really on top of the world. And in the Pine Needles of those days, you'll find pictures of that: a whole of group of students sitting around watching the returns or listening to the returns on radio and TV.
MS: Yes. Not watching. Not until the '50s [unclear].
MA: Of course I wasn't ever privileged to have their classes. When Miss Elliott became dean of women, she and Miss Alexander were very, very good friends. They had both been delegates to the National Democratic Convention and all that kind of thing. And so she was instrumental in getting Miss Alexander to give up a job with the city, I think she was—and teach here, and somebody said, "Are you willing to let her follow you. She's such a wonderful teacher." In other words, they might like her better. She said that was perfectly all right if they did. [laughter]
RP: So you would turn out a bunch of young activists.
MS: Absolutely.
MA: Yes.
RP: Let me just put it back to Mrs. Adams. What life—Now Shelby was a small town. I guess Greensboro was a somewhat larger town.
MA: Yes, Greensboro was much larger.
RP: What kind of culture difference [was there] when you were just—as a girl coming onto this campus?
MA: There was some of course. Actually in Cleveland County, in Shelby, my family was active socially and politically and people are all friends, and, as I said, my parents—I have in my apartment right now the vases that Mr. O. Max Gardner gave my parents as a wedding present.
And they had large teas. If you had a bride in your family; if your son married, then you had a big, big tea and invited everybody to meet them. And you visited, dressed in your hat and gloves, and took a calling card so if they were not at home. It was not the trend then to call before you go as it is now, which I think is a good habit. You just went, and if they weren't at home, you left a calling card, an engraved calling card.
35
MS: They weren't receiving that afternoon.
MA: Yes, a calling card. And I have still in my possession a small silver tray about that big [jesters with her hands] that was left out for calling cards. And when I came here, as I said—Now the year I was a student, a woman named Geneva Drinkwater was dean. She was only here one year. And it was the year after that that Miss Elliott came, but the fact that I had started working—I was, well, you know, active in a lot of things, especially since I worked on campus part of the time.
And they had teas in the dormitory to teach the students. Some of them were not used to it. And they had social equipment in each dorm: dishes, pretty things. In fact that was one of my jobs in the summer. The counselors turned in to me a list of the social equipment that they needed, and I had a certain amount of money that I bought with as far as it would go. Punch bowls, ladles, cups, and then china serving dishes. And I loved to shop, especially when I could spend somebody else's money. So that was one of the pleasant parts of my job. And then when students and counselors returned to the campus, those supplies were put out in carts where they could pick them up and start using them.
And then the School of Home Economics at that time, in the Practice House down on McIver Street, they had teas, and they were on—home economics majors spent a certain length of time living in that house, and handling everything—and when they had teas, they invited staff and faculty and they were on a very strict budget. That was my first exposure to spinach sandwiches. [laughter] And I found out I liked them. I don't like cooked spinach but I like it raw. I love spinach salad now. And those were the first spinach sandwiches I had ever had in my life, and they used a good tasting dressing and had them just about this big [jesters with her hands]. And they used whatever they had in the kitchen.
MS: I guess that was cheaper than watercress. [laughter]
MA: It probably was. And this was part of their training.
MS: I think the university felt—or I don't know whether it came from the dean's office or where it emanated—but I think that the university felt the need to prepare these young women for the lives that they were going to be leading afterwards, because really, I think my college generation—from '40 to '44, during the war years—was probably the first one from which the graduates felt that they had a career beyond being a wife and mother or maybe a teacher or maybe a nurse or maybe a secretary because the war years kind of opened things up for my generation; when Rosie the Riveter went off to work in the factory, that sort of thing. So many more jobs were available. But prior to that time, it had been a time of the finishing schools. Now we weren't the finishing school, but I think that the college felt an obligation that its graduates be able handle themselves in social situations.
And not everybody took home economics, and so we had the dormitory teas. The clubs had teas and receptions. We had the formal dances. We tried to provide the girls with the social situations, and I can remember when they were 36
debating—and I don't remember exactly when this occurred. I think it was probably a financial move when they went from the seated served dinners to all three meals being cafeteria style, and I can remember that some of the arguments against it was that these young girls, in having the seated meals and the served meals, they learned how the table was properly set, how the meal was properly served, what side you served from, which side you took away from. I mean things of—just little social things of this sort. And I think that that's—Now I see on television that they are offering very expensive courses for middle management and younger executives in how to conduct themselves in social situations. And which is the correct fork to pick up for what and that sort of thing. So we've kind of come full-circle on this, I believe. But I do think these were things that were done then, and I don't think we ever stopped and thought about maybe why we were doing it, but I think it was a very valuable background for the young women.
DF: That was very interesting about the spinach sandwiches as well. Nowadays we have fast food and you can go out and get a quick taco in a second. What types of foods were you getting here on campus in the '30s and as a child in the '30s?
MA: Anytime you're eating institutional food anywhere, you're going to have people who complain, but I thought the food was good. I really did. It was well-balanced, and one of the favorite places when I showed people around the campus was the kitchen. At that time, see, even then we had a kitchen in the middle and four dining halls like spokes, and you could—We could walk in there in the late afternoon and there would be a bowl this big [jesters with her hands] on legs and wheels that they were rolling into the refrigerator with eggs already broken for breakfast the next morning. [laughter] And this was impressive to the parents and the students, too. That they could serve that many eggs the next morning to that many students.
And I think somebody said something about what—Now I had never been east of Greensboro when came here to school. I had been all up in the western part of the state, but I had never been east of Greensboro. But one time I came down here to the music contest in a choral group when I was in high school, and it was singular that most of my close friends grew up in the eastern part of the state. They were used to barbecues to which the whole family went. The young people—In dances, the parents and the children and everybody went. Now I didn't grow up with that. When I got to high school, we had high school dances, and we had chaperones but the parents weren't there.
I couldn't help but laugh—in October my grandson was in a Shakespearean play—He's twelve—in New Jersey, and, for my birthday weekend, I was flown up there to see him in the play and do some other things, and he said, there's a cast party after the play. So his daddy said, "Well, we'll pick you up later." He said, "No, you can come to the party." Well, his parents are divorced, and his mother married again, and he lives with them, actually, so his daddy said, "Aren't your mother and Peter coming?" He says, "No, parents aren't invited, but you and Grandmother are." [laughter] 37
We didn't go. We picked him up later. But anyway, when we talk about the background of education: my grandmother and her double first cousin went away to a female college when they were thirteen. They were the first people—the first women—in Cleveland County to go away to school, and I'm sure that it was nothing but a glorified high school and finishing school. When they came home at Christmastime, which was the only time during the year that they came, everybody craned to see them come in church, because they were almost an oddity. And because they were put on the train and sent down there—and my grandmother's memories at thirteen were very vivid of that, and her mother would send her a package and they would throw it out of the train windows as it went by. It didn't even stop. So when I decided to come down here, and they said I was coming on the train with a trunk, my grandmother said, "Somebody has time to take her." Somebody has time to take her but nobody did. I came on the train, but she really was upset about that.
Also, my father did attend North Carolina State, and so we had—My mother went to school. When she went to school, it didn't go any further than the eighth grade. My mother had a real good mind. After I started to school, she took a business course, and she worked before that was really done. She was a secretary and worked as a secretary to the Cleveland County Fair. During World War II, they set up canneries for the people to bring in the produce out of their gardens and canned it—it was tin-canned. All of this equipment was put in one building and my mother managed it. And so she did varied things, but that was very unusual in her day.
And most of the members of my immediate family did not pick cotton. [unclear] I had my mother's—My father's brother was a doctor. He was the best educated person in his family. I think my father may have been the only one of them to attend college. But he was a doctor and he was all of our favorite in the family. And—But as I said, I had been to Asheville, to West Jefferson where my grandfather had three brothers and where we forded a creek to get there in the car. I had traveled in the western part of the state rather extensively for that day, but I had never been east of Greensboro and only one time. So when I started visiting in the eastern part of the state it was a phenomenon to me. My grandfather asked me one time when I went home after that, what I thought about the people and the life down there, and I said, "Well, they travel in slow gear. I said, "They are paced slower, and even the dogs doesn’t get out of the road, [laughter] otherwise it's all right." It's true; you had to sit there and blow to get the dog to move so you could drive on. [laughter]
RP: I guess that means that you didn't see the ocean until you were at least [unclear]
MA: I was already working here when I went to Nags Head and Manteo and saw The Lost Colony. That was my first time to see the ocean, and my brother was working in Burlington, and he took three of us down for the weekend.
RP: What was that like, the first time you ever laid eyes on the ocean?
38
MA: Well, I was awed, and because I was with him, I went right out into the swells and had a good time, because he was like a rock of Gibraltar. I don't know that I've ever been since.
RP: Sherry, do you want to take a quick break and change the film out of there? I think we can use your roll over here since I borrowed that.
SM: All right. Let's let it roll for a few seconds.
RP: Okay. I just wanted to just a little bit—
[End of CD 2—Begin CD 3]
[duplicate conversation of the beginning of the interview redacted]
RP: Maybe by, either by name or any—
MS: Also slews of local kids, faculty kids.
RP: And what it was like, the circumstances you just mentioned, that you would be here on campus as a child of either a professor or a teacher, or maybe even a student. What was their life like, if you recall?
MA: Well, they lived in the dorms.
MS: Well, see, the faculty lived all out in town. They didn't live on campus like, you know, in a small community [unclear]
MA: They lived close by, a lot of them [unclear, both talking]
MS: And, I mean, up the street from me, there—Dr. Alex Arnett [history professor] lived in the next block from me. Up on Tremont Drive, Mr. Charlie Phillips lived, and Dr. Collings, who was the university—who ran the university physician, and headed the infirmary, and until—I don't know what year they closed Curry as a demonstration school.
MA: About '70 or early '70s, but—No, wait a minute, before that. My son graduated there in 1964—
MS: Okay, well.
MA: And it did not exist long after that.
39
MS: Well—
MA: We had a dean of the School of Education who made that his goal.
MS: Yes, to close it.
MA: Yes.
MS: Well, I know that when my younger daughter was here, she did her practice teaching, for example, out in the community and not there.
MA: Well, see they still had to because they had—See, after I went in the physical plant, I scheduled the busses then to schools all over town, but by then Curry was closed part of the time. But anyway they couldn't all do it at Curry.
MS: Well, I know that the majority of the faculty children, no matter where they lived in town, went to the Curry Demonstration School. It was one through twelve. Well, kindergarten really.
MA: Yes, and they started—
MS: Because then they started kindergarten down at the home ec[onomics] [unclear, both talking].
MA: Well, the home ec department was a nursery school, and they started down there when they were three, because Bill did.
MS: And—But even though these kids lived all over town, they formed small classes, which the girls who were planning to be teachers practiced on. I mean, that was its practical reason for being, but at the same time some of their courses were taught by faculty members.
MA: Lots of them had exposure to good things.
MS: Yes. Really, it was—I mean, it was a very good education that they got, but—For example, Dorothy Arnett [Class of 1945] was just a year behind me in school, but we were never in school together even though we only lived a block apart because she came with her daddy every day over to Curry, and I went through the Greensboro City Schools. The same thing was true of Jean Johnson [Class of 1945] whose father was head of the Sociology department for a long time. Mary Elizabeth Keister [Class of 1934], who is the woman who got the first PhD that when this university began to [unclear, both talking]. [Editor’s note: Josie Nance "Nancy" White (Class of 1946) was the first and only student to receive a PhD from Woman’s College in 1963 just before the college became a university in 1963.]
40
MA: All liked Dr. White.
MS: That's right. She was. Nancy got [unclear, both talking]. And Nancy has just recently [unclear, both talking].
MA: Mary Elizabeth Keister
MS: And Mary Elizabeth Keister, yes] And Jean Johnson—Let's see, I think I mentioned Jean Johnson. I mean these were my contemporaries and were good friends of mine even though we didn't go to the same school, but—because, well, in the '40s I think Greensboro had about seventy-five thousand people, probably no more than that, and it was a situation when you walked down the street, down Elm Street, and of course everybody walked down Elm Street then because there were no shopping centers, and you knew by sight almost everybody whom you met. It was almost like walking across campus now. You nodded, you smiled, you say "hello" even if you don't know who it is by name, and it was—it was not a small town, but it had a lot of the small town characteristics.
There were no fast-food places as such, but there were a lot of drive-ins, and, you know, drive-ins—The old notion of the drive-in where you drive in, and you have somebody who hops curb for you and brings you your food to your car, is coming back, apparently. But you didn't go to a fast-food place and go in and eat, but one of the favorite places for people on the campus, where Walker Avenue goes all the way out and merges with West Market, there was the Boar and Castle, which was the place to go after anything to get something to eat. I mean, that's where the college students mostly went. And then, of course, even when I was a child, we came out here if we were just out riding in the afternoon. On Sunday afternoon, one of the favorite things to do was just to go riding, and my father would bring my sister and me out to the Yum-Yum. That corner was where the [Mossman] Administration Building is now, and it's the same old ice-cream. The Aydelettes, I guess, are still running it.
MA: There's still one of them.
MS: Well, really, [unclear, both talking]
MA: They still have the best for a hotdog in town.
MS: Well, that's what I was getting ready to say, and they then and now, I think, have the best hotdogs anywhere because they steam the dog, and they steam the bun, and I think—and their—And they had chili.
MA: The chili recipe was Mrs. Aydelette's. She would not give it out, but her family still has it. They would sell you a pint of chili.
MS: Yes. And so, I mean, those were very important places. I was a day student, and one place that was important to me because it was between my house on 41
Kensington Road and [Greensboro] Senior High School was Ham's. Is Ham's still there?
MA: It's still there. It's at the same place.
MS: Well, and the father of the guy who ran Ham's was a contemporary of my father, and they knew each other quite well. And so that was the place you had to stop. You usually didn't stop in the morning. I don't guess they were even open in the morning. But coming home from school, that's where you would stop. And they made the best grilled cheese sandwiches in town. And there were places like that. We just—The day of McDonald's and all the rest of that had not yet [unclear, both talking]
MA: All the drugstores served delicious sandwiches.
MS: Oh, yes.
MA: All the drugstores had a fountain.
MS: They always had a soda fountain.
MA: And they served delicious sandwiches.
MS: And Woolworth's downtown, you know, where—the famous Woolworth's. When I was a kid, going to—
MA: It was a good place to eat.
MS: —school. On Saturday morning, I would come with my father as he went to the office, because he always went to his office on Saturday morning so nobody else was there, and I would ride downtown with him, and I would go to my Girl Scout meeting, and then I would go to the public library, which was down right where the Education Building—where West Market Methodist Church is now—was the public library at that time—and load up on my reading for, my recreational reading, for the coming week, and then have lunch at Woolworth's where you could have a chicken pot pie. As I remember, they made wonderful little chicken pot pies that only cost a quarter, and I think a drink, probably. A Coke probably cost a nickel, and you could get a hot fudge sundae. You could have the whole business for less than fifty cents, and then you could go to the movies through age twelve for a dime at the Carolina Theater. And those of us who were local, I mean this was just—That was just—That was the Saturday morning routine. But—and a lot of this continued even when I got into college. And these were all places that the girls knew. Franklin's down on the corner. Is Franklins still on the corner?
MA: The place to go every night after dinner. 42
MS: Yes, after—It's diagonally across that corner from the Music Building, and there was a Franklin's drugstore there, and they had a wonderful soda fountain. And in fact, when I came as a day student, you could get a permit to eat in the Dining Hall for lunch, and I ate lunch in the Dining Hall maybe four or five days a week for a quarter, but this was the same time in the war years. The student payer or the paid-for student work was twenty-five cents an hour. When my daughters were here, it was minimum wage, and I don't know if they—Do they use student help in the Dining Halls still at all?
RP: No, I don't think they do. I think it's ARA [food service]. ARA hires people to do that.
MS: They were all—
MA: Yes, they do.
MS: But that used to be one of the best jobs. I mean it paid the best. Even at twenty-five cents an hour, it paid the most toward tuition, room—I mean toward room and board. It paid more than anything else on campus. Always did.
MA: Well, talking about eating places: across the street from Greensboro College on West Market Street was a drugstore called McNeely's, run by the McNeely family. Mrs. McNeely baked her own hams, squeezed her own juice, made all the spreads for sandwiches, and had perfectly wonderful food. I lived—one time—lived on South Mendenhall Street and rented a room, and two of her relatives lived in the same house, and we ate down there Sunday night. Her food was wonderful, and they were there for years and years until, I think, they just got too old to run it anymore. And—because I know she ran it on a long time after her husband died.
MS: Do you remember on Greene Street the diner that they used to have next to the Lotus restaurant?
MA: Surely, and do you remember the Waffle House?
MS: It was just like a—Yes, yes. The diner was just like the diner—I mean, it was a car, like a railway car, that was set up like a diner, and on one side of the wall, they had a serving bar, and on the other side of the wall, they had tables and chairs just like you'd have in a diner. Marvelous food.
MA: Wonderful food, and the Toddle House was on West Market Street, a little bit closer to the campus than that, and made the best pie in town.
MS: Yes.
43
MA: And we'd walk down there just to get a piece of pie and walk back. And it was delicious. I'll have to tell you one story about me—against me. I am telling on myself. At some point along the way, I had a date one night in the winter, and we really hadn't planned anything to do, and we went by to get something to eat somewhere, and the fellow I was dating, a friend of his came in, and he was—had a date with a girl who was just visiting in town. And, you know, this was a social courtesy, and they hadn't planned anything. So a lot of people back then owned a cabin out on a lake somewhere, and this family—the people we met up with—their family owned a cabin out off Pinecroft Road on a lake, so we went out there and built a fire and just sat around and talked and had fun, but everybody who ever went out there put their initials on the fireplace on the mantel. His younger brother dated students on the campus all the time. He just had the best time telling that a young woman in the dean's office had been out to their cabin in the woods. And her name was on the mantel. [laughter]
MS: What was the name of the coach up at Curry, who had a place out at Pinecroft? What was his name? I don't remember. He was here for years and years and years.
MA: Oh, they named the gym for him, [Herbert W.] Park.
MS: Yes, yes, Coach Park.
MA: The gym at Curry was named for him. Coach Park.
MS: I wondered if maybe that were where you had been.
MA: No, no. This was—
RP: Well, speaking—
MA: No, no. I'm not going to name names, because somebody might know him. He's a prominent lawyer in town.
RP: Where were—Where did people go, or where didn't good girls go in Greensboro. Is there anything, places that you were familiar with that are places—
MS: That were off limits.
RP: That the good girls didn't go to, but the wild ones did go.
MS: I honestly don't know, really.
MA: Well, actually after Katherine Taylor [Class of 1928, French professor, dean of women, and dean of student services] was made dean of students, the supper clubs had come into being, and we—Some were approved, and some were not. The Plantation Club was always approved. Fred Koury was very circumspect 44
about the behavior and the decor and everything out there, so that the Plantation Club was always approved. Further out on High Point Road, I'm trying to—
MS: There were what they called "Road Houses."
MA: Yes.
MS: Yes, they weren't supper clubs; they were road houses, and they—
MA: They served meals though.
MS: Oh, did they?
MA: Yes, and actually Fred Koury at the Plantation Club on Sunday night had family night. You took your whole family, and the little boys danced with their mothers, and that kind of thing. And I'm trying to think of the name; it was a white building and the name of it, but I don't—That escapes me. Further out High Point Road was one that was blacklisted. So Katherine Taylor decided, well, if the man that ran it came in and talked to her about it, that he had just as nice a place as the Plantation, and he didn't know why he wasn't approved, and he wished she'd come and visit sometime. So she decided that that's what we would do; that my husband and I would take her. And so we went to the Plantation Club; we went to that other one—it had a foreign name, and I can't think what it was. Anyway we went to Plantation Club. We'd no more than walked in until I saw Fred Koury go around and say, "If you've got any bottles out, put them under the table." [laughter]
MS: Brown-bagging days. [Editor's note: the practice of bringing one's own liquor to a restaurant or club that cannot sell alcoholic beverages.]
MA: So it was brown-bagging days, but that was all that was allowed, and you didn't see anybody overdo the drinking. Well, the other man didn't know us, but he did get taken off the black list; after we went out there, it was all right. But it had had a bad reputation under a former manager, and he did deserve a chance.
But when you were talking about children on the campus, they lived in the dormitory with their mothers when the mothers came to summer school, and those children ate in the dining room, and people around the campus were real good about helping with them. They usually were, most of the time, very well-behaved. And they did go either to classes at Curry or to Piney Lake [recreation area] after it came into being, and they had things to occupy their day.
MS: You know, the teachers were required to go back to school periodically to renew their certificates. The summertime was the only time that they could go, and for many of these women, the only way that they could go to school would be to take the child with them in the summer.
45
MA: That's right, and then we had other people—I had duties about assigning summer school. That was one of my responsibilities, and we would have—I know we had two women who came every summer. This was their cheap vacation, and they took courses; they didn't just stay on the campus, and they honestly enjoyed it. And they reserved their room at the end of the summer for next summer. All you had to do to reserve a room was pay a ten-dollar room reservation fee. And they would come in the office and pay that fee and reserve that same room, every summer.
MS: That one that they liked.
MA: That's right. It was their second home. Later both of those women taught in Greensboro, but at that time they were not teaching in Greensboro.
RP: Back in those days, there wasn't any air conditioning.
MA: Oh, heavens, no. Nobody ever heard of air—There weren't even window units. Well, after all, I didn't grow up with air conditioning.
MS: And I [unclear, both talking]
MA: I can remember the first air-conditioned car I owned.
MS: Oh, I can, too.
RP: What did you do to beat the heat during the—
MA: Roll the windows down.
MS: You wore as little as you could get by with and stay decent. And you wore light materials and light colors, and you fanned, and you had electric fans.
MA: And where I grew up, we had a porch on three sides of the house.
MS: Yes.
MA: And our supper every night, everybody sat out there. It was really quite comfortable at night.
MS: Yes.
MA: My grandfather was getting deaf, and his son, who lived there too, worked with him, and the neighbors said every night they heard all the transactions that had been made all day because they had talked so loud to each other, that they all knew it. [laughter] But we—I had an upstairs bedroom. I don't remember it being that bad. You were used to it. 46
MS: I guess that was a lot of it.
RP: You didn't sleep out on the porch or anything in a screened porch like I hear some people talking about.
MA: No, we didn't.
MS: Oh yes. A lot of houses had sleeping porches.
MA: Oh, yes. They had sleeping porches. [unclear, both talking]
MS: And in fact, when my husband and I were married, and when we moved to Asheville, our house there—I mean, it was a built part of the house. There was one corner—fairly large corner room, the two sides of it were casement windows that you could—you know, anytime of the year, you could roll them open, and it was just like being outside because the whole room was literally air conditioned. And I think that they were very popular in that area because back in the early days, the Asheville area was a very important center for TB treatment, and part of the tuberculosis treatment was sleeping and spending as much of your time as possible in the open air, out of closed and crowded rooms and so forth. But I had never lived in a house before that had a sleeping porch, and that was something that—
MA: I just said the Chancellor's House on campus has a room that's closed up now on the second floor that was a sleeping porch. And my son recently lived in Toronto for three years in Canada, and he lived in a beautiful, old, well-renovated house, and the room he used in his house as his home office was what had been a sleeping porch.
MS: Yes.
MA: It was closed but it had windows on three sides and that—It was one of the nicest rooms in his house.
MS: But I knew that weather—that the heat in the Piedmont was not as bad as it could be because I had a lot of relatives down east—my father's family—and in the eastern part of the state it is so dreadfully humid in the summertime that the heat's not any hotter, but the humidity makes it absolutely unbearable.
MA: It closes in on you. It's no wonder they move slowly, and they still do. [laughter] I really think they do.
RP: Was the Asheboro Street area—was that still pretty much of a high-classed area when you were here?
MA: Back then, when I was here, yes. 47
MS: Mayor [Jim] Melvin grew up—his mother was a good friend of my mother's—and he grew up on—His father ran the filling station down on Asheboro Street, and it was a very nice neighborhood. I would say, middle class, very solid middle-class neighborhood.
MA: See, some of those are historic homes now, too, in that area. They are trying to preserve some. It was and it still was when [unclear, all three talking].
MS: That was the area that the first Greensboro tornado touched down in. Were you here in school then?
MA: It was—I was not in school. That was my first year working, and it was spring vacation, and I was down in the eastern part of the state [unclear], and the father of the person I was visiting greeted me that morning as I came down [and he said,] "I just turned on the radio. There's a big tornado that has hit Greensboro." And see, it was devastating.
MS: It really was.
MA: Where it went, it just leveled buildings and did a lot of damage. And it came out Asheboro Street and Lee Street.
MS: Yes. I was in junior high school at the time, and one of the strangest coincidences, I was in junior high, and we were studying in general science: tornadoes, earthquakes, water spouts, hurricanes; you know, all these aberrations of nature, and we lost our power. Even out here beyond the college, we lost our power. And so here I was studying about all these things by candlelight.
After dinner, my father had gone back to his office, which was up about, I think, the seventh or eighth floor of the Jefferson Building and on the West Market Street side of the building, and he said that he heard what must have been the typical roar that sounds like a train, and he got up from his desk and looked out that window toward south Greensboro, and he said it was just like a fireball that—He says it's kind of like one of these "follow the bouncing ball" things; that it was just touching down and jumping and going all through there, and he said he knew something was wrong. He didn't know it was a tornado. He didn't know what it was, but he said he knew that that was something wrong going on. And so he went down—didn't call home or anything—took off. I don't know if he could have reached us—took off for south Greensboro. And he said that the first thing that greeted him when he got down there was a bathtub that was sitting right straight across the middle of Lee Street. A bath—just sitting out there, nothing around it. It was strange. But that was our introduction to that kind of devastation. As I said, we had lived here since 1926, and that was in the '30s that I know of. We have had a couple in Winston-Salem right then—
MA: Yes, I know you had. You've had some bad storms over there.
48
MS: Just fairly recently.
DF: I think we're about to run out of time, it's almost four o'clock.
MS: I have a feeling that we probably haven't touched on a lot of things that you—We've wandered so.
MA: We probably said a lot you don't actually—
RP: Well, actually wandering is good. I was trying to get a flavor of what it was like back during the time you were here. I think we probably, if we had a few more days, could sit around and hear some more reminiscences of you folk that you obviously remember very well, those things that happened.
MS: Well, if you have a chance, if you could talk to people like Nancy White, and is Marilyn McKeester[?] still living?
MA: Oh, yes. [unclear]
MS: And even [Dorothy] "Dove" Darnell [Class of 1944] too. I mean she's lived through all the same things that we have.
MA: She'd be a good [unclear, both talking].
MS: Dove would be a good one. And I think that these people who have had a long-time association with the campus, because I used to come—For example, when I was a kid, I used to come to May Day.
MA: I have a friend who grew up on Georgia Street right up here. Her birthday is May the first, and she said she was grown before she knew that May Day wasn't for her birthday. [laughter] Her mother brought her every year on May Day, and she thought that was a party for her birthday.
MS: We kind of—We had a sort of an amphitheater like, down about where the playing fields are, back behind the gyms, and it was a lovely setting for May Day.
MA: They had it there, and then they moved it to front campus.
MS: That's right. I had forgotten about it.
MA: Yes. And so—But it was beautiful down there, too.
MS: Yes. They had so much more space there.
MA: Yes.
49
MS: The physical education department, they did—Oh, they did all kinds of dances, you know, and tumbling, and all the things that they could do. There was a lot of entertainment other than just seeing—
MA: The maypole.
MS: Yes, doing the maypole, and—Oh, you were asking about physical education. You might be interested in this. We were required to have two years of it. What kind of gym suit were you wearing when you were in school? Was it that old blue one?
MA: Yes.
MS: Well, we had graduated to something that looked like a tennis dress by the time I had [unclear, both talking].
MA: Mine had elastic [unclear]
MS: That's right. That's—And they were navy blue, and we even talked about them when I was in school, that we were so glad we didn't have to wear those, but ours, really—You know, we had little pull-up pants underneath, and then it really looked like a tennis dress with the little pleats in the front here and so forth. It was not too bad, but you had to have four semesters of physical education in order to graduate, and if you didn't know how to swim, one of those was supposed to be swimming.
MA: [unclear]
MS: I remember one of my favorites. I think I would have taken folk dancing for four semesters if they would have let me. Our physical education department, even back in the '40s, was probably one of the very best known for women in the country.
MA: Oh, it was.
MS: I mean, and it stayed that way. I think it's probably that way right on down to the present time. But when it was for women only, and they were doing the things down there that they were doing, it was really outstanding. I mean it was acclaimed that our women were getting all kinds of awards: students and faculty.
MA: We gave one the first master's in physical education.
MS: That's right.
50
MA: Because when I first started working, I typed master's theses for extra money, and the ones that came from the physical education majors were really in good order. They were, you know—They almost could have turned them in—
MS: Mary Channing Coleman [head of the Department of Physical Education].
MA: Without having them typed.
RP: Was that in the Rosenthal Gymnasium?
MA: Yes.
MS: And that's all it was at that time. Rosenthal was it. That was the physical education building for twenty-four hours a day.
MA: And you took swimming, you wore a gray-topped tank suit that you picked up down there.
MS: A clean one every time. And they didn't do a thing for you. They really didn't.
RP: They did your laundry for you here while you were here?
MA: Oh, yes, and it was a good service. The laundry service here was an excellent—I used it as a staff member for [unclear] until the students got so smart, they couldn't put up with it anymore. As I said—I think—Well, it was included in that one fee that told you about. And we put our laundry in canvas baskets down in the basement. The baskets had our room numbers on them, and then that was brought back in two or three days ironed and just as crisp and cleaned as it could be.
MS: They even starched underwear.
MA: Oh, they starched everything. It looked wonderful. And I tell you, when I was working and working in the physical plant, the laundry was under us, so when I took my laundry over—and I had a husband and son—I took the laundry on Monday morning. When I came out of the office on Monday afternoon, it was in the back seat of my car, washed, ironed—the men's shirts looked great wrapped up in brown paper—and put on the back seat of my car. And I believe at that time the students weren't paying but $125.00 a year, and they rose up and said a lot of them didn't use it. A lot of them didn't use it. They were paying $125.00 a year for something they didn't use, so they closed the laundry and put washing machines in the dorms. [laughter]
RP: A service I'd hate to get rid of, I tell you. [laughter]
MA: Same way about the food service. See, it was good. They thought it wasn't, so then they got [unclear]. 51
MS: My girls were over here even after they had the current food service, you know, and they—I would—We would bring them back. If they came home, we would bring them back on Sunday night. Sunday night supper was supposed to be the worst meal that they had. I thought it was wonderful: that variety of the salad bar, all the choices that they had. Nothing like what we had when we were in school. And they were so sick and tired of it, and they complained about it all the time.
MA: Well, I was going to say, and the people—Well, people where I lived, [unclear] the food is horrible. I said, but there are a few people who don't like it.
MS: Well, in anything—I mean, even home cooking—if you eat the same Jell-O and stuff every day.
RP: That's right.
MA: That's right. [unclear, both talking]
RP: You don't know what you've got, until you eat somewhere else. [laughter]
MS: That's right.
RP: Well, this should be—We ate at Winthrop University when we took the camp down there last year, and the food was good there, but this up here is so much better—the choices—and the kids loved to eat in the cafeteria.
MS: These kids, if they've had that experience, you know, in summer things, they're going to be disappointed at what they get in a lot of places when go off to school.
RP: It's such a big deal.
MA I had two younger cousins at Furman [University], and when I was at home on a vacation, we took them back on Sunday, and I ate at their dining room. It didn't touch this one; it didn't begin to. It's smaller and more expensive and everything else, but it was—Well, there was no—There was not much service. There was a cafeteria, and they almost served themselves, and it was, you know, paper plates, things like that, the I just thought was—
RP: Was there any intercollegiate athletics while you were here? Did Woman's College [unclear, both talking]?
MS: Yes, they had some interaction with other women's colleges. That was about the extent of it.
RP: Because Greensboro College was a woman's college in those days.
MA: Yes. 52
RP: Was there any interaction between those? Or was that private and this was a state—
MS: I don't have any idea. I don't know, but I would guess that with their both being right here and Guilford College being so close, High Point College being so close, that among their women that there probably was some—
MA: I think some private—I don't [unclear].
RP: Did the women from Woman's College look down on people from Greensboro College? Who was considered the more elite an institution?
MS: They were more social; we had better academics. That is the local feeling.
MA: They are a denominational college, you see.
MS: Marvelous music department though, even when I was—
MA: Yes, they were wonderful. They had an outstanding music department. That's one thing they had. They had some good things, but one time—I'll never forget—Miss Elliott was on a train coming back here, and there were some Greensboro College students on there, and somebody in the—She just overheard this conversation. They asked a Greensboro College student what it meant—She said, "You don't go to WC."
[The Greensboro College Student said], "No, that's a state school. We're not a state school." And then she said, "They do our laundry." Well, it made Miss Elliott so mad, that she came back and we were—
MS: Cancelled the contract.
MA: They were doing our laundry over at the laundry, but think of the impression it made. It sounds like—She told Mr. Deese[?] that he couldn't do it anymore. They quit doing Greensboro College's laundry. [laughter]
MS: That's wonderful. I'd never heard that.
MA: Imagine that happening. But this is a later story, and Marilib's heard it many a time. We had a faculty wife in Greensboro. The family never owned a car, and she was a very dressy person, and she dressed up and went down town every day. And she loved to go to funerals, and she went to every funeral. If she saw a church, and they were having a funeral, she went in.
MS: Sounds like my former next-door neighbor here. [laughter]
5