Oral history interview with Henrietta Huffines, 1991 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Henrietta Huffines
INTERVIEWER: Missy Foy
DATE: May 20, 1991
[Begin Tape 1, Side A]
MF: If you could start with some general information like where you're from and when you went
to Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] and what your major was and just
some general stuff like that first.
HH: I grew up in Lexington, North Carolina. I went to Woman's College from 1951 to 1955,
graduated in '55. And I have an AB [bachelor of arts] in biology—well, I guess biology is
what they call it. I don't know what they called it then.
MF: Oh, okay. [laughs]
HH: [laughs] I don't know where—how the degree program's set up right now.
MF: I guess it's probably a BS [bachelor of science] now.
HH: They didn't have a BS program in biology when I was there, I don't think. I wasn't aware of
it.
MF: I've heard that from many people. Yes.
HH: I don't think they did. I had essentially, I guess, a minor in chemistry. Although I'm not
that—I don't think they officially had minors then either. I don't think the university talked
about it back then.
MF: Yes, that's—yes, I think you're right. I remember something about that.
HH: I took lots of history and lots of French also, so I really had a liberal arts education with an
emphasis in the sciences. The idea was I was going to be a laboratory technician, and they
did have a program then where you did practical work at [Moses H.] Cone [Memorial]
Hospital [Greensboro, North Carolina], but I never did that part of it and never got a—I
never was a certified laboratory technician.
MF: Yes, I was going to ask you: Didn't they have a certification program?
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HH: They did. They had a certification program, but I didn't do that. But I did work as a
laboratory technician both at Bowman Gray [Hospital, Winston Salem, North Carolina] and
here in Chapel Hill [North Carolina] until I started having children, and I never went back to
the laboratory.
MF: Well, it makes it kind of hard when you're trying to raise kids.
HH: You're a wife—and another thing—well, I mean, the person I worked for kept saying "Come
back," and I kept having babies and wanted to stay with them. And then when the babies
were teenagers, I was way too far out of any kind of laboratory practice. It would have been
too hard.
MF: Oh, yes.
HH: So eventually I did go back to work when my two smallest children were in high school, and
I became the administrative assistant to the superintendent of schools here in Chapel Hill,
which had nothing to do with laboratory medicine but—
MF: Yes. When was that, just out of curiosity?
HH: Oh just recently—well, I retired from that about a year and a half ago, and for eight years
prior to that I worked for two female superintendents—
MF: Yes.
HH: —which is—that's kind of unusual in North Carolina—female superintendents.
MF: You were working in that office then during the time when Chapel Hill/Carrboro school
system voted the extra bond referendum for their school district, and people in Orange
County got upset about it.
HH: Oh, yes.
MF: Yes. That's why I was asking when you were there because I remember that.
HH: [laughs] Yes.
MF: I think that's still a hot issue.
HH: Well, the difference in funding between the two school systems is an issue, but I'm sure you
don't want to get into all this, but the people in Chapel Hill have voted extra taxation on
themselves for their schools for years—going back over about a sixty-year period; that's got
a long-established history to it; and we probably do it every time we were asked. People
want to pay the taxes, why not let them. [laughs]
MF: You lived in the dorm then at WC [Woman’s College].
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HH: Yes, I lived in—first in Jamison as a freshman—and they had freshman dorms then.
MF: Yes, they still do.
HH: And then I lived in Winfield [Residence Hall] from then on.
MF: Which was, I guess, the newest one at the time.
HH: And it was—it was not the newest one. Ragsdale-Mendenhall [Residence Hall]?
MF: Oh, yes, Ragsdale.
HH: Ragsdale-Mendenhall was new.
MF: Oh, yes.
HH: Although Weil-Winfield was relatively new and was considered a prime place.
MF: Yes, the rooms were bigger, weren't they?
HH: Well, they were adequate size. They were bigger than the ones like over in Spencer—North
and South Spencer [Residence Hall].
MF: Oh, yes.
HH: A lot bigger than those. I don't know—it was a premium place to live. They had a lot of
room. If you got into Weil or Winfield, that was considered good. My mother [Alice Burt
Bruton, Class of 1928] went to WC, and that was one of my reasons for going there. She
went to NCCW [North Carolina College for Women, previous name of Woman’s College]
though. She lived in—I think she lived in Spencer, but she lived in Shaw [Residence Hall].
I'm not sure Shaw even exists anymore. Is it still there?
MF: Yes, but it's the International House now for international students. It's called "I House."
HH: Well, when she was there, Shaw was considered a great place to live. Well, the way she
talked about it, it was. Of course, when I was there, it was not particularly considered that.
MF: Yes, it sort of sits up at the top of the Quad there kind of by itself. What was dorm life like? I
know there were pretty many rules and regulations to live by.
HH: Well, there were lots of rules and regulations and—actually I enjoyed dorm life. It was fun. I
didn't have any trouble with the rules and regulations. I thought some of them were down-right
silly because the—by the time I got to college, I had been given the responsibility for
making my own decisions about what time I came in at night and was accustomed to driving
a car all over the state if I wanted to for athletic events and other kinds of things. And all this
business of signing in and out and having hours and whatever, I thought was remarkably
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silly, but I didn't have any trouble adhering to it, necessarily. One thing I thought was really
silly was—at least during the time—I can't remember if this lasted the whole time while I
was at—there or not, but you weren't allowed to go home but a certain number of
weekends—
MF: Oh, yes.
HH: —a semester, which—since home for me was only about an hour away. It’d probably only
be thirty minutes now with all the new highways, but that seemed kind of stupid.
MF: Yes, that you'd have to stay there.
HH: That you have to stay there. We had Saturday classes, which meant if you were going
anywhere, you had to make adequate plans for that and had all these elaborate rules and
regulations about how many trips you could have and whether you could miss class or not.
MF: Oh, really?
HH: And that, for freshmen, it was practically a non-existent privilege. By the time you go to be a
senior, provided you had perfect grades, you had unlimited. But as a freshman, you were
really hemmed in. You weren't supposed to miss class. I think you were allowed a couple a
semester or something like that. I don't know. I don't remember. And you only could go
home a certain number of weekends. The housemother had to sign that it was okay for you to
go out with whoever your date was and—
MF: So then the housemother would have to meet the date, I guess.
HH: Well, that was kind of the idea, I guess. At least, I'm talking about freshman year now.
MF: Right.
HH: Actually some of this loosened up even before I left, but we were still signing out. We didn't
have to have approval to have a date. But I can remember pretty soon after I first went there
having to get permission for my date—to go in the car with him—to go to ride in the town of
Greensboro. And Miss Cunningham, Lillian Cunningham was the counselor. She had known
my family in the past, and she wanted to meet this young man. Well, I'd already been dating
him for about three years, and I ended up marrying him, and all of that sounded remarkably
silly too, but we did it.
MF: Yes.
HH: First, my freshman year—and I guess maybe this went on for most of the time we were
there—they'd have these teas and other kinds of things, and you got dressed up with hat and
gloves and the whole bit, which seems silly now. [laughs]
MF: [laughs] Like afternoon teas or something?
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HH: Yes, tea at the Alumni House. Different kinds of things I can remember. Even then when
you came to [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill for a football game, you wore a
little hat or something. The difference between 1951 and 1955, though, was really striking.
MF: Oh, really?
HH: By the time I graduated, you weren't—we weren't wearing hats and gloves, and I wouldn't
have been caught dead in Chapel Hill with a little hat on. Even from my freshman year, I
came to Chapel Hill for football games and things like that.
MF: Yes, they used to—didn't they used to bring a whole bunch of people by bus?
HH: Yes, they actually ran buses on down. And sometimes—I mean I came because my
significant other, which wasn't called that then [laughs], was down here, and it was a very
private kind of thing, but girls who weren't—didn't have a date or didn't have somebody that
had invited them or whatever, went by the busloads. And the buses were met by the boys
down here, and people made a lot of friendships that way. A dorm or something would have
an open house, and I never participated in that, but I knew it went on. I never rode the buses.
MF: Oh, you always came down because you had someone you were coming to see.
HH: I can't really tell you too much about that except I know it went on, and lots of people did it.
MF: Yes, and didn't also some of the—some buses on weekends would bring guys from Chapel
Hill for dances?
HH: Oh, yes, same thing. A dorm or a club or something would have a—what did they call them?
Mixer—and invite a dorm or fraternity from down here. The same kind of thing was going
on. My husband tells me that on Friday and Saturday—Saturday—the road out here, which
was [Route] 54, would be lined with people hitchhiking to Greensboro, who either had dates
or were looking for dates. It was a regular thing. The campus would be full of boys from
UNC [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill], and I guess other places too. So it was
not at all unusual for the campus to be filled up with strolling young men on the weekends.
MF: Yes, somebody had told me at one point—they said, "Well, it was a women's school, but it
became coed on the weekends."
HH: That's right. There weren't a whole lot of men's restrooms available. There were one or two.
And you had to know where they were, so your date or whoever it was you were talking with
you could help them find a restroom because there really weren't many. There were some
over in the basement of the dining—Spencer Dining Hall. All of that is different now, of
course.
MF: Yes.
HH: But there were some men's restrooms down in the lower part. You had to know where they
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were—some in the library. There really wasn't, like in the dorm, any place that you could
invite a young man to go wash his cup or anything.
MF: Yes, I hadn't thought about that. [laughs]
HH: There were some private—there was the parlors, the big parlors. And then there were one or
two little private rooms in the kitchen. At least in Winfield there was a little kitchen. You
could cook, have a—prepare a meal for yourself and your date—or sometimes several
people would go in and do that. One time my mother brought—kind of a—what you'd call—
like a tailgate for the entire floor I was on, and we did it out of the little kitchen.
MF: Oh, my.
HH: But there wasn't really a place that I could invite either my date or my father to go to the
restroom. [laughs] You can imagine. [laughs]
MF: I think what happens now is people just go in the bathroom and look around; if nobody's in
there they say, "Okay," and watch the door.
HH: Well, occasionally there were times when, for one reason or another, a brother or father or
somebody had to come on the floor to bring something, carry something heavy or whatever,
and somebody would always go stand at the door and holler, "Man on the floor." And if you
weren't dressed, you ran in the room and shut your door. Otherwise you had perfect freedom
to run up and down the halls in your slip or whatever because you knew there wasn't going to
be anybody. But that used to be a real thing. When I was a freshman living in Jamison,
they—somebody right off the street wan—I lived on the first floor, which is only half a floor
really—and somebody wandered in from the outside, a kind of a peeping tom-type, who had
to be arrested. [laughs] But anyway—
MF: He just came right in?
HH: He just walked in. During the daytime the end doors and everything were open, and they
were locked at a certain time at night, and then everybody had to come in through the front.
MF: Yes.
HH: When I—the whole time that I lived in Winfield, I worked as one of the people who kept the
desk. But I kept the desk—I didn't keep the desk at Winfield. I went to—I believe it was
Kirkland. But it was the dorm that the—they had commercial students. It was only a one- or
two-year program for people who wanted to be secretaries. And they had a dorm to
themselves, and that was the dorm I worked in. And, of course, you were responsible for
closing the dorm. So then I would have to walk from my dorm to Winfield after hours, so to
speak, and that meant you'd be ten or fifteen minutes past the curfew getting there. Of
course, they knew where you were and why you were doing that. And I can remember—also
I worked for The Carolinian [student newspaper]. I was the managing editor back when I
was a senior, and sometimes we stayed over in Elliott Hall till two-thirty or three o'clock in
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the morning doing the newspaper, and we would walk back to the dorm, back to Winfield,
and I don't ever remember feeling afraid or thinking that there was any problem about doing
that—being out at night, late like that by yourself. I don't think I would feel that way now.
You certainly can't do that in Chapel Hill now.
MF: Yes, I read about that in the paper all the time.
HH: Sometimes I think about that and think about how confident we were, but we really had no
reason not to be because there wasn't a problem. But they did have a very elaborate sign-in-hours
program, and you had to be there. Everybody—used to be a real joke because when
you'd go out on a date, everybody would sign out for the Carolina Theater and the Boar and
Castle, which was a hamburger drive-in-type place. And if everybody who signed out for the
Carolina Theater and the Boar and Castle had actually gone there, it would have been
absolutely impossible—the most gigantic traffic jam of the century.
MF: Yes.
HH: The Boar and Castle had a nickname. I'm not sure you want it on the tape. [laughs] It was
called the Whore and Wrastle. You may want to delete that, but it was—
MF: How did it get that? [laughs]
HH: Oh, it was kind of the passion pit. You know, you'd go sit and order a hamburger—
MF: Oh, okay, yes.
HH: —and neck a little bit. We were much too sedate to do the "go all the way" bit in the car.
[laughs] This was a different world, believe me.
MF: Oh, gosh.
HH: But. as a matter of fact, everybody who signed out [unclear]. They went wherever they
wanted to.
MF: Well, yes, I'm not surprised at that. I know also that a lot of people would—well, not a lot—
but I've heard of people sneaking in windows after hours.
HH: Oh, yes. And there was one girl in my dorm, freshman year, which of course, most of us
were so naive, and we were going to obey the rules no matter what. And we—all of us were
quite in awe of this girl who was from Charlotte [North Carolina] and what she—and she
was gone almost every weekend. But the way she managed it was she signed out to go spend
the night in another dorm with a friend. Of course, that really wasn't where she was.
And she pulled it off the entire year. I mean nobody ever knew the difference, and I doubt
she was there a single weekend.
MF: Oh, gosh.
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HH: This is why I say now, and even then, to me all these rules seemed so silly because they were
very easily circumvented if you really wanted to. But maybe it—given the times, maybe it
relieved the university of their responsibility because at that time they were considered in
loco parentis, I guess, which has all changed now. But anyway, I enjoyed dorm life and
really we had a lot of good times, and there was a lot of camaraderie, and most of the people
who lived in Winfield lived there for three years together.
MF: So you really got to know the people?
HH: You really got to know them, and we just really had a good time. I have a lot of good
memories. We did things like playing black jack for pennies all hours of the night, played
just absolutely wild games of charades and a game called botticelli. I don't know if you're
familiar with that, but you—
MF: I don't know it.
HH: It's kind of like twenty questions. You assume the identity of a character, and then people
can ask you questions, and you can only answer yes or no, and they have to try to guess who
you are, that kind of thing, which got very competitive. There was a lot of good times and
camaraderie, which—my own children have lived in the dorms a couple of years, then
moved into apartments.
MF: But yes, that seems like—
HH: And my husband never lived in a dorm at all and somehow or other, I think that they really
missed something.
MF: You had said that you were editor of The Carolinian?
HH: I was the managing editor.
MF: Managing editor, okay. What's—?
HH: Managing editor is responsible for the makeup of the paper, and the business people of the
paper work under the managing editor in the—putting the paper together, deciding what is
going to be your lead story, doing all the paste-up, that was all my responsibility—all the
headlines, all of that—the person, I guess you would say, right under the editor. The editor
makes the editorial decisions and controls the editorial page, and I controlled what made up
the rest of the paper.
MF: So what was sort of the—well, gosh, I'm searching for the right word here—what was sort of
the tone of the paper at that time?
HH: It was liberal—more liberal than the college—and trying to emulate The Daily Tarheel
[University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student newspaper], I'm sure.
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MF: Yes.
HH: At the time I was there, there was a real uproar over what was being—a picture was drawn
put in the Corradi [student literary magazine]—I can't remember how you pronounce it—of
a nude male.
MF: Right. I remember that.
HH: And this created quite a stew, and then we got into academic freedom and freedom of the
press and all the rest of it. And the people who were—the editorial staff of the newspaper
were very much on the side of freedom of everything, which was not exactly the tenor of the
rest of the campus.
MF: [laughs]
HH: And I can remember when we finally went to some kind of judicial hearing or something
about this whole thing, and people who had taken an interest really had to choose sides
almost to which side of the aisle you were going to sit on. And I remember most of the
journalism people and the Corradi staff and the art group and everybody sitting on one side,
and the more conservative group on the other side. I can remember I made an active choice
that I was going to sit on the side with the newspaper staff. But I was a more liberal person
than I am now.
MF: Yes.
HH: But it was a choice. I found out that even some of my very best friends didn't agree with me
on that issue.
MF: I didn't realize it was such a divisive issue.
HH: It was. Surprisingly so, I thought, because it all—not to pretend like we were open and
honest on this campus. It turned out that when the chips were down we really didn't—
MF: They were still rather conservative?
HH: Yes. And something—some of the girls' families were very upset about it, and my parents
laughed.
MF: [laughs]
HH: I have to honestly tell you that when my mother saw it, she laughed and the comment that
she made was she wondered if the person that drew it had ever seen a real nude man.
MF: [laughs]
HH: But that's just the kind of family I grew up in. I didn't have to choose whether I was going to
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oppose my parents or not, just the—
MF: I guess that was probably an issue for some of the girls, whether they were going to oppose
their parents or not.
HH: Yes, it was. I think it must have been. I remember one of the girls on The Carolinian staff
drew a cartoon which I still have—I put it away someplace—which has this kind of stick
figure just going absolutely berserk and saying, "Beware, beware, call the security. There's
some man on the campus with nothing on under his clothes." [laughs] Which I thought was
a real marvelous comment on how silly the whole situation was. And I still have that
upstairs. Her name was [Mary Ann] Baum [Class of 1956], and she—I can't remember what
her first name was—but she was a descendent of the Baum—a relative of the Baum that
wrote The Wizard of Oz. [Editor’s note: Author is L. Frank Baum.]
MF: Oh really?
HH: Yes. And she drew these marvelous cartoons and was a way-out flaming liberal. You know,
one of these people.
MF: Yes.
HH: At that time, when they had concerts and various things at Aycock Auditorium, you got
dressed up in your high heels and your hose and your gloves and your fanciest dress and
went to the concert or whatever. And there was a small group of people, who mostly were in
art, that defied that at every opportunity and they would come with their shirttail hanging
out, in their jeans and their sneakers, whatever, and tramp like that to the front row and make
a real demonstration out of it and everybody else would be horrified. Of course, now
everybody dresses that way, so it would be hard to make—for you to understand how
tongues clicked.
MF: Oh, I can imagine.
HH: So this was—this was in the early fifties and the—I guess that was the generation where we
were all supposed to grow up and get married and be mamas and—
MF: Yes.
HH: I actually thought about going to graduate school in biology, marine biology. I had a friend
in Miami [Florida], and I went to visit her and she had arranged for me to have an interview
at the University of Miami with a person in marine biology. That was one of the—the
University of Miami was one place and there was another one on the west coast that was
noted for marine biology.
MF: UC [University of California] Irvine?
HH: Oh, I don't remember now. It was one of the branches.
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MF: I think it's UC Irvine because my brother is a biologist there.
HH: But I remember the man I talked with telling me that—asking me, saying something to this
effect, "Why do you want to go to graduate school? What you need to do is get married and
have babies."
MF: And have kids, yes.
HH: And I was Phi Beta Kappa [collegiate liberal arts honor society]. I mean, I was serious and it
was a total put down, but apparently I have learned since that that wasn't all that unusual for
women at that particular time. And as a matter of fact, I was engaged and I did want to get
married and have babies and I wasn't determined enough to fight it.
MF: Going to an all-girls school, what I've heard from some people—I seem to hear two things:
there's one group of people who feels that they would have gotten a more well-rounded
education at a coeducational school, and then I hear from another group of people that going
to an all-girls school gave them the chance to develop some kind of leadership qualities and
get leadership experience that they wouldn't have been able to get at a coeducational
institution.
HH: Well, I think I would come down on the side of the second group. I don't regret having gone.
I went to WC with the idea of staying there two years and then coming to Chapel Hill.
My roommate did that, and I decided not to. I had become very much involved and was
enjoying what I was doing and elected to finish and I don't regret it at all. And I do think I
had an opportunity to do a lot of things I probably never would have. I was totally
unprepared for the kind of put down I got when I talked to this fellow at the University of
Miami, for instance, because I had been treated as a full-fledged, intelligent human being
who could accomplish anything that she wanted to by my father as well as by people at the
college. I wasn't prepared for somebody in an academic situation to tell me I should take my
marbles and go raise a family. So, I would—
MF: Do you think—?
HH: I wouldn't—my own daughter went to UNC and never wanted to go anywhere else.
MF: Yes.
HH: I would have been delighted if she had chosen to go to Greensboro, but she wasn't interested.
MF: Do you think that that was a really beneficial experience for you then to go to a women's
school?
HH: I don't—some of my friends, my college friends—I'm not real close to many people that I
was in college with any more, only one or two. But when I go back for reunions and things
like that some of them resent the fact that it's become coeducational. I don't know if you've
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run into that or not.
MF: Yes, I have.
HH: But I don't because I guess I don't really resist change and growth. And things change and
you have to grow along with the situation, and I don't have any problems with it now being
coeducational or with the athletic program or any of those kind of things. I think all of that
just enhances the university. But I enjoyed the camaraderie and the closeness and the
traditions that went along with when I was there too. I didn't miss anything. I'm sure they
don't sing songs to each other in chapel like they used to and all this kind of things, but that
was fine for 1952 and '53. I think in 1991 it's probably silly so— [laughs]
MF: With the move towards a bigger athletics program—you mentioned that. I was going to ask
you about that. Do you think that's a good move for the university?
HH: I think it's a good move as long as it doesn't get out of hand. I don't think athletics [unclear]
should drive the ship. And I'm absolutely—I mean, I'm as involved in the basketball program
here as anybody can possibly be, but still I think it needs to be in its place. And the same
thing at UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. I would like to see there
continue to be a place for women's athletics, and I'm just absolutely delighted that women's
basketball is receiving as much attention as it is.
MF: Yes.
HH: I played basketball in high school, and we had intramurals at WC, which were fiercely
contested. I got chosen for what they call the all-star team when I was a senior, I guess. And
we went—the only game we ever played off campus was we went over to Duke [University,
Durham, North Carolina] and played a similar team from Duke, and that was about—there
just wasn't any intercollegiate women's athletics at the time.
MF: Yes, I think there was a philosophy behind that that they didn't want the girls to have to
compete with other schools. I don't remember exactly. Someone explained the philosophy,
but—
HH: Well, actually there was a group and people at Woman's College led it who really tried to do
away with girls basketball in high school as a real competition—that women shouldn't be in
that kind of competition. It was too strenuous and all the rest of it, which I also think is
ridiculous. But it even got debated in the legislature, if you can believe such things.
MF: Yes, I can.
HH: [laughs] Yes, I suppose I can too.
MF: When you think—
HH: So the leadership, some of the physical education leadership at Woman's College was very
much in the forefront of downplaying women's athletics at the time, but we have some fierce
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and [unclear] competition.
MF: Yes, that's what I heard. I think competition comes naturally, so I think it's human nature and
so it—
HH: And there were people who really—they had no interest in that at all, and if they had to take
physical education, they didn't want to even do that. I mean, that was very unfeminine. I
grew up in a very athletic family. It was just part of life as far as I was concerned. I loved it.
MF: Did they still have a course in the physical education department at that time—I think it was
called body mechanics?
HH: Oh yes. When you had your physical or whatever, they took pictures of every—of you
standing, practically in the nude or half undressed and evaluated your posture and all of this.
And they decided whether you needed this course called body mechanics or not. And if they
determined that you did, you had to take it. It was also available, I think, if—I was a person
they said had to take it, and it had to do with exercises and posture—I don't know what all. I
remember I took that. I also took modern dance, which was so far away from anything that I
had ever—. Modern dance is a real hoot because unless you were really into being an artiste
or whatever, you had to learn all this expressive dance and you had—I had to develop. Each
person or a group, if several of you wanted to get together, had to do a modern—had to
develop, create a modern dance of some kind and people were doing all this whatever
[gestures] and flinging themselves around. And a couple of girls did one that had to do with
the old villain who ties the heroine to the railroad tracks, and Roger Do-right comes up and
rescues her and everything.
MF: Yes.
HH: Actually ended up having a real good time. I remember that kind of with pleasure although I
hated taking the course, and the only reason I took it was because you had to have a certain
number of physical education credits. I was taking all these sciences with all these
laboratories and just had to fit in the physical education that was at the time that you wanted.
So I took modern dance. I took that body mechanics thing because I had to.
MF: [laughs]
HH: For some reason, they thought I didn't stand up straight or whatever. And I took one called
recreational sports, which was ping pong and pool and something else—those kinds of
games. And it was a real hoot back home in my family that I was taking lessons in how to
play pool. You know, this was a hoot. And there must have been another one because you
had to take four semesters, but I don't remember what the other one was—softball or
something.
MF: Yes, I think they had a golf course also.
HH: I never played golf. I never had anything to do with that. There was a golf course though.
14
MF: Yes, also a golf class.
HH: Oh well, I never had that.
MF: I've heard some people say, "Yes, I learned to play golf over there."
HH: They had a swimming pool, an indoor swimming pool. And Rosenthal Gymnasium was
open new—not Rosenthal, the other one. [Editor’s note: The interviewee is referring to
Coleman Gymnasium.] They got a new one now. But maybe it was Rosenthal.
MF: Yes, Rosenthal with the pool?
HH: With the pool, yes.
MF: Yes, that's Rosenthal.
HH: Okay. That building was virtually new when I was there. There was the old building, and
then there was the new one. We used to have registration in the old one, and then there was
the new one.
MF: The other one was Park [Editor’s note: Park Gymnasium was next to the Curry School.] or
something on the corner.
HH: It was on the corner. And then there was the Park.
MF: The Park?
HH: We called the new one, which had a real nice gymnasium for—I think the pool was in there,
and they had lots of really nice showers, tile showers, and things like that and in the older
dorms.
MF: That's where—
HH: The shower facilities and things really weren't that modern, and some of us—I used to go
over sometimes to Rosenthal, and we would take showers in this real nice tiled—it was all
brand new. Now that's been superseded by another physical education building now, I think,
which I've never been in but—
MF: Yes, the physical education complex.
HH: —which is probably even nicer.
MF: It's real nice.
HH: But the gym floor's practically almost new when I played on it. And the swimming—I used
to go swimming some.
15
MF: Yes, that new place is incredible; yes. It's huge.
HH: I haven't been in. I was invited to the dedication, but I didn't go.
MF: Yes, I've been in it twice, but I haven't gone through the whole thing. One other thing that's
much more recent that I wanted to ask you about was: I don't know how active you've stayed
with the Alumni Association, but I wondered if you—or how aware you were of what the
controversy between the Alumni Association and Chancellor [William] Moran?
HH: Well, let me tell you, I worked for a member, Barbara Parrish [Class of 1948, Director of
Alumni Affairs], when she was a counselor. And I've known her all these years and I loved
her dearly, but I really—I guess if I had to choose sides, I was on Chancellor Moran's side of
this controversy. And I think some of the Alumni Association people really went off the
deep end. Maybe it's because I've been here and associated with my husband. He's an
administrator here at UNC. My own experience with administration of school systems and
whatever, but somebody has to be in charge and you have to go by what the law says and, in
terms of handling money and so on, it's got to be the way it's got to be.
MF: Yes.
HH: And I really think some of the alumni people let their emotional self-interests run away with
them. I was not supportive of a number of things, including the letter that I received out of
the blue with no—supposedly when negotiations were supposed to be underway between the
Alumni Association and the chancellor and all of the sudden this very—what I thought was
very "catty" and ugly letter arrived. It was trying to elicit my support for the alumni point of
view. It really had the opposite effect. Now I realize I'm in the minority because I came to—
what is it called—McIver Days, shortly thereafter and everybody was standing around in the
corner whispering and gossiping and talking and carrying on, whatever. And I was definitely
in the minority in being supportive of Chancellor Moran.
MF: Well, there are members I've talked to as well who—
HH: And I even wrote to some of my friends asking them not to make quick judgments based on
some of the mail they were receiving. That particular day he gave a report on the university
and talked about such things as the animal experimentation controversy, which my husband
has been involved in here, and I know—
MF: I know about that because I've worked in the psych[ology] labs.
HH: —how deadly that is and how important it is to the university.
MF: They came in and released all our pigeons one time.
HH: Well, I don't even want to get started on that.
16
MF: [laughs] It was a nightmare.
HH: But I have no patience nor sympathy with that, and it's caused my husband a lot of pain and
grief. He's the chairman of the animal research committee here.
MF: Yes.
HH: He talked about some of the racial problems and interpersonal things that were going on then
and what he was doing to try to address them. He talked about the university's financial
situation, and then he briefly mentioned the controversy between the alumni and the consent
and control of the administration. The people—the whole room full of supposed supporters
of the university—and they didn't pay any attention to those three problems at all which are
much more important to the life of the university. They immediately jumped in on this fourth
one and started to ask—after the chairman had said, "We aren't going to discuss this. There's
not going to be any questions. We have a committee; we are working on it." [phone rings]
They immediately started in with all of these— [phone rings] Excuse me.
[recording paused]
HH: Yes, I guess it's sufficient to say I was really not pleased at all. And I was definitely not
pleased with members of my class, some of whom refused to even show up for a class
reunion because they were so anti-Chancellor Moran that they wouldn't even come to our
class reunion, which strikes me as apples and oranges and really has no connection. People
who said they weren't giving money.
MF: Yes, that's a big one is people—
HH: I may have been—I may have been as bad in the opposite direction because I had let
[Development Director] Wes[ton] Hatfield know that I would much prefer to give my money
directly to him and not directly to the university and not to the Alumni Association, frankly.
So I guess I'm just as bad in a way.
My father was an administrator. My husband was an administrator. I don't see how
the chancellor could function without being in charge.
MF: There are others who very much—
HH: I got very much involved with Barbara Parrish’s personality. I think people love Barbara. I
love Barbara. They thought that she had been insulted. I really don't think that was the intent
of what went on. I do sometimes think people can stay in a position too long and that maybe
it was time. And I don't mean that in any derogatory sense whatever because I think she was
splendid.
MF: Well, what—a couple of people—
17
HH: My class seemed to be so attached to her, and they were. She did a lot for the Class of 1955.
And some of the people—that same day at that McIver Day, representatives of my class met
to plan their class reunions, and some of them were so bitter and so ugly. I just thought this is
all out of proportion to what the question is here, so—.
MF: A couple of people have told me that Barbara Parrish was going to retire anyway and that
they felt that her resignation was sort of planned to make a statement.
HH: I think it probably was. I believe that.
MF: And I mean, again, they were saying they didn't mean that in any ugly way, but that they felt
that she just did it a little bit earlier in order to make a statement—that she was going to retire
anyway.
HH: And I don't know, I kind of wonder because I don't know the people involved, but some of
the people involved on the alumni board—I don't know how anybody gets on the alumni
board. And it seems like to me that for a long time that has been a very closed group of
people and very much into the way things used to be—the old traditional Woman's College
kind of thing, which means to me they haven't grown and that things are different now. It
seems to me like now some younger people and some people with a little more vision may
be becoming involved, and I think it's a dead end to think that everything is going to be like
it was in the forties and the fifties and—that arrangement of circumstances that were good
forty years ago, fifty years ago are going to hold up forever because they aren't. It's just not
realistic. So, I'm glad they've reached an accommodation of sorts. I think there's a lot of work
to be done on it yet because I don't think they've really gotten to anything. But what I really
think probably works the best would be just for the Alumni Association to be totally separate
like it is down here. You join the Alumni Association and pay your dues. The Alumni
Association does their thing, and the university does theirs and that may be where they want
to go.
MF: Yes.
HH: Their only trouble with that is that it seems that the majority of the alumni being women—
it's a little more difficult to raise the amount of money that may be necessary. We don't have
the kind of contributors. It's a different contributor who can contribute in both places, be
active in both places and things like that. So I kind of still feel like I was a minority of one
who was for the chancellor. I'm glad to hear I'm not. [laughs]
MF: No, there are others too. Some of them are a little shy to say too much because they think
that their friends will get angry with them.
HH: Well, I guess I don’t have anybody I fear that they would get angry or not.
MF: Yes.
HH: I have one friend here in Chapel Hill, who's a little bit older than I am—quite a bit older than
I am—who was very adamantly, very upset and very adamantly opposed to the chancellor's
18
point of view and very concerned about the ownership and management and whatever of the
Alumni House. And she and I found that we could not talk about it.
MF: Yes, I've interviewed quite a few others.
HH: So a few ones ran very hard [unclear].
MF: Who?
HH: Rachael Long [Class of 1943].
MF: Yes, I've interviewed her.
HH: I don't know what she may have told you, but she and I got to talking about it on the
telephone one day and found we couldn't talk about it.
MF: Oh yes.
HH: So we don't. We didn't.
MF: Yes, she—
HH: But she and I have—we, I found that I couldn't talk with her about the Persian Gulf War
[1990-91 war waged by coalition forces from thirty-four countries, led by the United States
against Iraq because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait] and about the so-called need for haven for
deserters and draft dodgers and whatever because we had such adamantly opposed views
that we just couldn't discuss it.
MF: Yes.
HH: Demonstrators and so on, so we just don't.
MF: That's what happens with my brother and myself. He's very conservative, and I'm very
liberal.
HH: Well, actually I'm very liberal too, but I didn't find myself all that liberal about that particular
issue.
MF: Yes, well, that was a funny one for me. My husband just got back from Saudi Arabia.
HH: I have a son who is a federal agent with the [United States] Navy, and I have several sons,
and I wouldn't want any of them to be killed, but, nevertheless, I had some feelings about
that. Sometimes when you have to do certain things. But the point I mean in bringing this up
is that this particular friend and I—there are just some things we can't discuss so we just
don't.
19
MF: Sure, sure.
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]
HH: When my son's new father-in-law said to me something about—somehow or other, where
we went to school came up, and I said I went to WC. He said, “That's now UNCG,” and I
said, “Yes,” and he said, “That's a teachers’ college, isn't it?” And I was—you know, it hasn't
been a teachers college for a very, very long time, if it ever was. And I suspect—
MF: More than seventy years.
HH: About the time my mother was there, maybe you could have legitimately called it a teachers’
college, but even when I was there, there were some graduate programs.
MF: I think it was before 1920 that it was no longer The [State] Normal [& Industrial] School.
HH: I guess my mother was there in about 1920. She probably graduated in 1928, somewhere in
there, '27.
MF: Oh, I interviewed Hilda Weil Wallerstein. She was Class of '26.
HH: I don't know her, but she—
MF: Weil-Winfield Dorm, Weil was named after her mother [Hilda Einstein Weil], and Rosenthal
Gym is named after her uncle [Jonathan “Joe” Rosenthal, College board of directors 1910-
27] so—. She was a fiery person. She’s something else.
HH: [laughs]
MF: I know I've gone over quite a few topics and kind of jumped around some. Is there anything
that I've missed that you think is real important and should be included?
HH: I can't think of anything. I enjoyed my experience. The whole time that I was—from the time
I was in high school I was dating the man I eventually married, so I had no particular social
pressure on me to try to meet that someone and all of this kind of thing. He was going to
school and was in medical school and extraordinarily busy, but we had a commitment, so
neither one of us had this pressure of "I've got to have a date for this weekend." So many
weekends went by when I didn't have any dates, but it didn't matter. That may have been a
problem for some people growing up at that time in that age when it was very important that
you have that somebody. Motherhood and marriage and all that was the ultimate goal.
I don't know. I just didn't have that problem. There were some times when I had
loneliness associated with that, but I had lots of friends, female friends and whatever. So I
don't know if that side has come out in your interviews with people as to whether they felt
isolated from normal male/female kind of relationships. I kind of thought it was kind of nice
20
to go to college, go to class, and be able to express yourself and have the kind of freedom to
dress and behave—whatever you wanted to—not always be on display.
MF: That's usually what I hear.
HH: And yet I had the social life that I wanted, which led to the rest of my life so to speak, sort of.
That was no problem for me. I don't know if I can think of that or not, but maybe that's a
factor. Somebody who was really looking to make those kind of relationships might have felt
somewhat deprived or it might have been harder. You had to get out there and work at it.
MF: [laughs] Yes.
HH: I've always been an academic achiever and, as a matter of fact, found it quite easy, maybe
too easy. Looking back on it, I probably—I mean, I was Phi Beta Kappa. But it came
relatively easy. It probably should have come a little bit harder. If it had been harder, I would
have worked harder. So—and I majored in the sciences, so I don't know. I do know—for
instance I had a teacher in high school who taught us high school biology who took the
syllabus from freshman biology at UNCG, WC as it was then. She wrote it on the board, and
we copied it and I memorized it so when I got to freshman biology at WC, I opened the
syllabus, and it was old stuff. That's probably the reason I majored in biology, probably
because I got started on it and—
MF: You felt comfortable with it.
HH: —felt comfortable, and I was interested, but it wasn't half challenging enough. I know that
now. Same thing with at least the elementary chemistry courses which is kind of like
cookbook chemistry. And they weren't particularly challenging, although you had to put in
an awful lot of time.
MF: Oh sure, especially with labs and—
HH: All the labs and all of that. And so I don't remember it coming particularly hard, and I took
part in most every activity there was to—they had tryouts to be on The Carolinian staff and
then published it when I was a freshman. And somebody said, "Why don't you go ahead and
try?" So I did. We went to—we were supposed to go to—Robert Frost [American poet
laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner] came to talk, and we—as our tryout, audition or whatever
you want to say, we were to write an article, a news article, about that occasion.
MF: Yes.
HH: Which is what I did. Must have been satisfactory because I got on the staff. And eventually I
then became the circulation editor and eventually the managing editor. Was elected to
Golden Chain [honorary society]. I was just involved. It was the same kind of thing I'd
always done. I did it in high school. It didn't come particularly hard, and I enjoyed it.
MF: Well, you're lucky. [laughs]
21
HH: [laughs] You know, but I look back on that sometimes, and I think well I really should have
worked harder.
MF: Well, I think that maybe at that age that's normal—
HH: Maybe everybody thinks that, I don't know.
MF: You work as hard as you need to to satisfy yourself, and that's about it.
HH: But if anybody indicates that, "Oh, you must have worked very hard and you were a grind." I
really wasn't. I had a good time. And I really—when it came time to think about coming
down here for junior and senior year, I didn't want to make the change. I really didn't want to
go through all of that getting acquainted and proving yourself and all of that kind of thing
again. I had lots of friends. The end of my junior year, I was tired of college period, and I
probably would have—if the man who's now my husband had said, “Let's get married,” I
probably would have done it and left.
MF: Yes.
HH: But if it hadn't been for my father—and he came over. And my father was not a real
demonstrative man, but he was a very supportive man. And he had all girls, and he supported
fully the idea that girls could achieve anything they wanted to. And he came, he left, took
time off from his business and came over and took me out, and we went to dinner and we
had a long talk and he wrote me the sweetest letter about how important he thought it was to
stay in school and, of course, we couldn't afford to get married anyway. And I stayed in
school, and I finished. There was no reason not to. I mean, making straight As, why not? It
wasn't like I was having any problems.
MF: Yes.
HH: But I got that support when I was just tired of it—in a senior slump or whatever. What's the
use in going on through? And that was the only thing. If I had to come to school down here, I
don't know what would have happened because we would have been too close together
[laughs] because he was in medical school here.
MF: Well, thank you very much.
HH: Sure.
[End of Interview]