Oral history interview with Eleanor D. Lloyd, 1991 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Eleanor D. Lloyd
INTERVIEWER: Missy Foy
DATE: April 9, 1991
[Begin Side A]
MF: To start, I guess if you could give just a little bit of maybe background information like where you grew up and when you were at Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] and some information like that.
EL: My father taught at Woman's College, it was called then. And he had been teaching Greek and Latin in Missouri and Nebraska. And one of his friends from there—he had taught at the same school my father taught at in Missouri—moved here and like it a lot, and he encouraged—he said, "They need professors here," and they encouraged him to move here. Well, it was when I was in first grade. Well, I hadn't started first grade until we got here. And so he moved here, and he became an English professor rather than Latin and Greek, though he loved all languages. And he taught creative writing and journalism.
MF: What was his name?
EL: J. Arthur Dunn. And he had been a graduate of the University of Missouri [Columbia, Missouri]. My mother was also a Missourian and she was a teacher, but she had quit teaching when we were—when my sister and I were born. My sister [Robbie Dunn Siske, Class of 1935] was two years older than I and—or three years. She was in fourth grade when we moved here. And so we went to Curry [laboratory school on campus, which was part of Greensboro public school system], which was part of UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] at that time. That was the little school that we went to and then we just—she just went straight through Curry and into UNCG. I changed to Greensboro [Senior] High for two years and went back to UNCG. Our father was still teaching there by the time we went to college. She was a history major [Editor’s note: she was an English major], and I was math and art.
MF: Oh, okay.
EL: At that time, Walker Avenue cut right through UNCG. There was—and the old auditorium was on the street that now has the Alumni House and that sort of thing. And they had boxes like—with velvet curtains on the sides of that old auditorium, and we used to have—. There were lots of costumes up there, and after school, we'd frequently go up there and put on the costumes and play. It was a lot of fun. [laughs] But at that time, too, they didn't have 2
regular sororities like the ones we have now. I think you have the regular—
MF: There's the Greek system now.
EL: Yes. But at that time, there were just four sororities.
MF: Yes. Societies.
EL: And one of them—yes, societies—and one of them was the Dikean. I cannot remember the names of all of them.
MF: Let's see if I can remember them now. There was Corinthian [Editor's note: the correct name was Cornelian], Adelphian, Alethian and Dikean.
EL: Those were the four. My sister was a Dikean, but by the time I got to college they had built the new auditorium and had destroyed all that stuff. They used to have beautiful statues in there too. It was a beautiful building where the auditorium was and where we had these societies. And they had frescoes all around the—carvings all around the rooms and they were huge, and they had a statue of Athena and a statue of Diana [both Greek goddesses] in the entrance hall. It really was much prettier than the one they have now.
MF: Yes. The Aycock [Auditorium] over there now.
EL: Yes, it lost a lot of glamour. And the old library was across the street from it too.
MF: Oh, yes. I had just found out today—I didn't realize this—that in '32, I guess, the library had burned down—well, not burned all the way down, but had had a fire.
EL: Well, the old Curry [Building] did. I didn't know the library had burned.
MF: Yes, somebody said that the—
EL: The Curry School burned [Editor’s note: Old Curry School building burned in 1926].
MF: Oh, okay. No, I didn't realize that either.
EL: It was down on the—it was on the same side of the street with the old library, but down in a valley. And, luckily, it burnt after the kids got out of school. My father noticed it. He was coming out of McIver Building.
MF: When was this?
EL: It was about 1932.
MF: Okay.
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EL: Well, it may have been sooner. Let's see. I just can't remember. '32. It would have been more like '28, I guess. I don't remember the library. They didn't close the library.
MF: No, they just had to move some of the books.
EL: They had to close Curry. I mean, that was the end of it. That's when they built the one on Spring Garden [Street].
MF: That's on Spring Garden. Okay. I didn't realize that there had been another Curry. Okay. See all these things I learn.
EL: Yes, it was an old, red brick building. And, of course, McIver Building was where we all had all of our classes, and it's no longer there.
MF: Right.
EL: McIver is gone. But all the classes, science, English, history, all of them, were in that building.
MF: Yes. Now they've got the new McIver Building. Yes. The one that everybody goes, "That doesn't fit on campus." [laughs]
EL: No, it has nothing around it that looks like it.
MF: They say they're going to renovate that sometime in the next couple of years, so I don't know.
EL: And Harriet Elliott [history and political science faculty, dean of women] was very much in charge by the time I got to college. In 1935 was when I started.
MF: What did you think of Miss Elliott?
EL: Well, I thought she was a bright person, but she wasn't what I would call a very likeable person. Wasn't one of my favorites.
MF: Yes, I've had somebody else—see, I've had a lot of people rant and rave about her, but I had somebody else say, "Well, you know, she played favorites," and stuff like that, and so I—that's—you're only the second person who's—although I've had people give me a funny look or something, but nobody who would say anything.
EL: Well, she was—I think she did a lot for the college. No doubt about that. So she was—and Dr. Foust was president of the school at that time. And his initials were J.I. His first name was Julius. Somebody once asked him what the "I" stood for, and he said, "Iscariot." [laughs]
MF: I think it was Irving [Editor's note: Dr. Foust's middle name Isaac]. 4
EL: Yes. But imagine he being Julius Iscariot. [laughs] He was a very funny fellow. He just got into all sorts of funny things like that. Just pure sense of humor.
MF: And then Dr. [Walter Clinton] Jackson came shortly after [Editor’s note: He was chancellor from 1934-50].
EL: Yes. And he was the father of one of my best friends. She was in my class at Curry. Lil, who is now Lillian [Lillian Jackson Hunt, Class of 1938]—what is her last name? Can't even think of who she married. And I know her perfectly. [laughs] Well, anyway, he had three children, two girls and a boy. Lil was the baby.
MF: What was Dr. Jackson like? I hear some people say that he was real visible on campus.
EL: He was a very small man, straight little back and real cute-looking little man. He was sweet.
MF: Somebody had told me this morning that after Dr. Jackson and Miss Elliott sort of took over directing the college that a lot of the rules lightened up and that the atmosphere sort of changed some. How did it change? Did you notice that? Did it change?
EL: Well, I really—you see, I didn't go to college when Dr. Foust was president. See, I was just in Curry, and I just remembered him as a person, not as the president of the college, so I really didn't know much about it before Dr. Jackson became president.
MF: Oh, okay. What was Curry School like? What was it like to go to school at Curry?
EL: It was a lot of fun. It really was. We had the student teachers, and they were—they really were very good. And it was nice to have several teachers. See, the student teachers would take over certain classes, and our basic teacher, of course, was always at the back seeing that they did it properly. But it was nice to have young girls teaching us, and they were attractive, and I know I loved to watch their clothes. [laughs] [unclear]
MF: Oh, yes. I think I would, "Oh, look. " [laughs]
EL: And I remember one of them was a real pretty girl, but she had real pathetic clothes and we used to call her Miss Montgomery Ward [laughs] because her clothes were so pitiful. But she was an excellent teacher, and we liked her a lot. And, of course, we had physical ed[ucation] constantly.
MF: Oh, really?
EL: Yes. We had phys ed every day, I think. [laughs]
MF: Oh, really? I didn't realize that. Okay. Do you know why they had so much phys ed?
EL: Well, you know, the physical education department was the biggest department over there at that time. And so they had so many students, I guess they were trying to get them all 5
teaching—to teach them how to teach.
MF: That's right. Yes.
EL: So we had it every day. It wasn't my favorite subject, but—
MF: What kind of education do you think you got at Curry?
EL: Well—
MF: Because I know you said you went to Greensboro High School then.
EL: I changed to Greensboro High School, not because I thought the school was better, but because all my friends were changing.
MF: Oh, yes.
EL: And I didn't want to be the only one in my group that didn't change, so I—but we had to take entrance exams at UNCG as a result of having graduated from Greensboro High.
MF: Oh.
EL: Whereas Curry students did not have to. They had much better—there was no question that Curry was a much better school. Intellectually, there was no comparison. In fact, I had studied very hard at Curry, always from first grade right through sophomore year in high school, but when I got to Greensboro High, I never took books home. I could just get it done during study hall. [laughs] Never had to study after I got there.
MF: I was that kind of student. I know how that goes.
EL: It made all the difference.
MF: Where you could just remember what happened in class and not have to study. Yes.
EL: That's right. That's right. That's all you needed, but, boy, at Curry that wasn't all you needed.
MF: I know most of the students at Curry were probably children of faculty.
EL: Yes. That's how we happened to go there. And that helped too.
MF: Yes, but I think there were a few students who—
EL: —lived in the neighborhood.
MF: Yes. That weren't faculty children, and I think—somebody told me one time that there were some students who lived down by the railroad tracks that went there and that they really 6
didn't seem to fit in at all.
EL: No, they didn't, but it was a good—good for us to know all that—the different types.
MF: Yes. Did those students usually seem to get lost in the shuffle?
EL: Some of them did. Some of them never got beyond Curry. You know, they never went to college. But some of them got scholarships that had—picked up and did pretty well. I know there was a family of Leonards that was a big family, and some of them were very good in school.
MF: Oh, okay. I'm so disorganized today. I'm sorry. There were quite a few New Deal programs [economic programs enacted in the United States from 1933-36 in response to the Great Depression] on campus during the time, I guess, that you were going to school. Do you remember any of them and what kind of impact they had on campus?
EL: Well, I know that Miss [Louise] Alexander [Greensboro’s first female lawyer], who had been connected with the courts here in Greensboro was in the history department. She came over there in the history department and taught a lot of government and politics. And she was such a strong Democrat that she just pushed the Democratic Party all the time and made little slurs about the Republican Party. Both of my parents were Democrats, having been Southern people. One of my grandfathers was a lawyer, and the other one was a—my mother's father was a lawyer and my father's father was a teacher and a preacher. And they were very—in Missouri—and they were very Democrat, old school Democrats. And so both my parents were too. But Miss Alexander was so strong at pushing the Democrat Party that I became a staunch Republican. [laughs] I always tried to see the other point of view when somebody's trying to push some cloth over on me, so I've been a Republican ever since. My parents couldn't get over that, but—
MF: Well, it seems that the Republican that you were then is not much different from a Democrat now.
EL: Well, that's true.
MF: Yes. They just seem to—well, I don't know. I guess this past election, there seem to be more differences between the two parties than any other election I've seen recently, so I don't know. It comes and goes.
EL: Well, I think the Republican Party has become a little bit more—a little bit less drastic. I mean, it was—it never was as opinionated as the Democratic Party.
MF: I think the Democrats have all these intellectual liberals now that sort of—
EL: And they have either the top of society or the bottom. There's no middle class in the Democratic Party. It's either the kind of goofy, way-out pinkos [person sympathetic to communism] and the blacks. 7
MF: Yes.
EL: But, of course, at the period when I changed, it was—it was not that— it wasn't as marked as it is now. But we do have more—I think we have more middle class in the Republican Party than anything else.
MF: Yes.
EL: If there are rich people, they're people who got that way from work, usually, rather than inheriting fortunes. You get the Kennedy type [prominent American political family; John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States] is much more apt to have been rich from the beginning.
MF: Yes. I see what you're saying. I never thought about it. I'll have to sit down and think about that.
EL: And the Roosevelts were a very wealthy family. I remember when [Franklin D.] Roosevelt became [32nd] president [of the United States], his mother said, "Goodness," she said, "I would never have voted for him because he could never add." [laughs] You know, they were people who had never worked in their lives.
MF: How did the Depression [worldwide economic downturn preceding World War II] seem to affect the atmosphere on campus?
EL: Well, we had a lot more variety of people. The very wealthy people here in Greensboro who would have gone to Wellesley [College, Wellesley, Massachusetts] or Mary Baldwin [College, Staunton, Virginia] and the girls’ schools all went to UNCG. The very wealthy ones and the old homes there in Irving Park that were—where people were—they would sell some of their— [pause] I'm sorry.
MF: Oh, that's okay. They normally would have gone to Brown [University, Providence, Rhode Island] or something.
EL: That's right. And they were very bright girls.
MF: Yes. That's interesting because I hadn't thought about that. A lot of the people that I've interviewed that live in Irving Park and so forth right now, I guess they probably—they may not have gone to WC [Woman's College] had it not been for the Depression.
EL: That's right.
MF: And I think that maybe that must be a big boost for the developmental office. [laughs] But I don't know.
EL: That's right. That's right. I know the Lathams. Latham Park and all that crowd went—Edith Latham [Settam, Class of 1911] was one of my best friends, and she was from a very 8
wealthy family.
MF: Yes. That’s interesting. I hadn't thought about that. There were some men who went to school— [Editor's note: approximately 80 undergraduate men attended Woman's College in the 1932/33 school year as day students]
EL: Well, there weren't the year that I went. I believe a couple went when my sister—just a few, a small group, when she was there. She was there earlier than I, and then there weren't any and now, of course, they've come back.
MF: Oh, sure. A lot of people have mixed feelings about the school now being coeducational. How do you feel about that?
EL: Well, it was the biggest women's college in the world before they made it coeducational [Editor’s note: Woman’s College was one of the largest residential colleges for women in the United States]. And therefore, it had a wonderful reputation as a women's college, and it was very academically pure. But I think once they started making it coeducational, it's still a lot more women and the boys—the first ones, at least—were kind of pitiful. [laughs] You know, they didn't have any sports and any masculine boy wouldn't want to go there. But now, I think it's—I think they've got hockey and different things there now, and I think it's much better than it was.
MF: Before when it was Woman's College, it really stood out as one of the top female institutions in the country.
EL: That's right. And now it's not.
MF: Now as UNCG there are a lot of people who have never heard of UNCG, and so—
EL: It lost a lot of glamour. I don't think there's any question about that.
MF: What do you think happened? I mean, why the difference in reputation so quickly?
EL: Well, I think it was because they just didn't get as good a caliber of young men at first, and then, of course, all of the girls that wanted to meet attractive boys went to [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill. They didn't go here. Or they'd go to Raleigh [North Carolina State University]. So that got a little bit different class of girl here too.
MF: Okay.
EL: But now I think that's all—I think that's kind of worked its way out into normalcy now.
MF: Yes, perhaps. Yes. It's still not the same level, though, that WC was. Although, I don't know. [National Collegiate Athletic Administration] Division I athletics. We'll have to see what happens with that.
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EL: That's right.
MF: How do you feel about that with moving into a big athletic program?
EL: Well, maybe we needed that. I don't know.
MF: Yes, it seems that—
EL: I've been away from it so long. It's kind of hard to—
MF: Some people seem to think that it's a good move, and others seem to think that—
EL: Yes. I think a lot of things that are supposed to bring progress are bad, but you can't always feel that way. That's just an old outlook. [laughs] I can't make myself—I mustn’t allow myself to feel that way.
MF: Yes. What about student government? I know student government was real important at Woman's College.
EL: Well, it did the governing unquestionably, and now I think you've got a lot stronger administration.
MF: Yes. That's probably true.
EL: And I don't know but what it's necessary. Again, I have no opinion about it because I'm not over there.
MF: Do you think that going to an all-female school was really beneficial for some women? I've heard some women say that it gave them a chance to do things they never would have done.
EL: I think it's good, and my daughter did not want to go a coeducational school when she came along. She just said, "I do not want to be thinking about trying to be attractive when I'm trying to go to school." She said, "I want to put all effort on learning. And I don't want to try to look nice during classroom or appeal to some boy, which I would if I—" So she wanted to go to an all-girls’ school as a result of that. And she was Phi Beta Kappa as a result. She just buckled down and learned.
MF: So am I.
EL: You too.
MF: Yes.
EL: Well, good for you. Do you feel that way about it too?
MF: I'm not sure. I went to UNCG, and it's something I had never thought about until I started 10
doing this oral history project. And I've heard some people make a really good case for—particularly during the '30s and '40s, they were saying that it gave them a chance to take leadership roles without having to compete with men.
EL: Yes. And girls are sort of taught that you're not going to be popular if you come out too strongly in class, and it's true. You're not. And girls think that they should be popular with the boys. You know, that's part of life too. So I can see the point of that. Now my mother went to an all-girls’ school, which was the thing back when she went; a lot of people did. But she said she liked that too. Just to go to an all-girls school because she had been through high school where you had them.
MF: Sometimes I wonder, perhaps, if people like Miss [Harriet] Elliott [history and political science faculty, dean of women] didn't stand out as much as she did because of the fact that it was an all-girls’ school. But at a coeducational school, perhaps, she would not have had the same influence.
EL: That's right. Probably true.
MF: What about your classes? What were your classes and the faculty like?
EL: Well, I think we had a really an exceptionally good English department and an exceptionally good history department. The math department was very small because not many girls took math. And so I would usually just be in—maybe six or seven in the class.
MF: Oh, that is small.
EL: So that was kind of nice. But I didn't ever take much science. At that time you didn't have to take biology. If you wanted to, you could take psychiatry or psychology and that kind of thing instead. So that's what I did.
MF: I was a psychology major. Not the counseling part.
EL: I enjoyed that course very much.
MF: No, I was in physiological psychology and sensory processes.
EL: That would be interesting.
MF: Counseling is too abstract for me.
EL: What are you going to do when you finish? Are you going to write history or what are your plans when you finish?
MF: First, just find some kind of job for a year before I decide whether or not I'm going to go on for a PhD.
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EL: Are you going to teach or what?
MF: Excuse me, here. This cold is—probably teach eventually. What was student life like during that era?
EL: Well, I was a day student, so I can't tell you too much about campus life. It was the Depression, and if you lived at home you could save a lot of money. So that's what I did.
MF: A couple hundred dollars, I guess you saved.
EL: Which was a great deal at that time.
MF: Well, it's a good deal now, for me.
EL: I went to class one day, and I seldom went to class meetings after school and all because I didn't want to walk home at night alone. So they were always at night, so I didn't get to go to them in spite of the fact that I was interested in all the girls. So anyway, one day I went into school, and one of the girls said, "Congratulations," and I said, "What on?" And she says, "Well, you're the new president of our class." I didn't even know I was running. Nobody had told me and couldn't get to the thing. But I thought that was right funny. So I did get to know the girls. I enjoyed them.
MF: So even though you were a day student, you were pretty—
EL: President of the class.
MF: Yes, and you were pretty active on campus during the day. They had like a town student lounge and all, didn't they?
EL: Yes.
MF: Did you go to any of the dances and all?
EL: Oh, yes.
MF: What were they like?
EL: They were lots of fun. We used to be in Jamison Dormitory. I remember that. And we led the figure if you were into the—if you were president or vice president of the class. We had led the figures and, of course, I would have to ask some boy that was going to [the University of North] Carolina [at Chapel Hill] or State or Davidson [College, Davidson, North Carolina] to come for it because Greensboro just didn't have any boys left at all in the colleges. [laughs] Didn't date until weekends when they got home because we had—after all, we had three women's colleges here in Greensboro: Bennett and Greensboro College and Woman's College. And there enrolled all the girls, and the boys were all away at college. 12
MF: That's right. I hadn't thought about that.
EL: So you didn't date.
MF: Or not much, anyway. I know a lot of people would make weekend trips down to Chapel Hill. Did you do some of that?
EL: Yes, I did some of that for society parties. Did more at Davidson. Mom and Dad didn't want me to go to Chapel Hill. It had a bad reputation. So I went to Davidson more than any of the others.
MF: When you were in school at Woman's College, the atmosphere really was one where you had more than just an academic experience then, I guess.
EL: Yes. We became very close friends with our teachers. And the teachers had parties for us at their homes if you were a major. Like an art major, the art teacher would have parties at her house. I was art and math, a double major. At that time, you could do that.
MF: Oh, yes.
EL: wanted—I figured if I taught, I'd want to teach math, but I wanted to take art.
MF: But you liked art.
EL: I didn't think it was a teachable subject. Still don't. I think you either got it or you don't.
MF: I feel so disorganized today—I'm sorry—because of this cold. I don't know how familiar you are with all the recent controversy that's gone on with Chancellor [William E.] Moran and Alumni Association and all.
EL: I have read that there's been a conflict, but I didn't know how much or what it was all about, really.
MF: Yes. I think that's where most people seem to stand. Something happened, and it's over with now, but I don't quite know what happened.
EL: That's right.
MF: Yes. That's where most people seem to be. I don't want to have left anything out here. I probably have. Is there anything that you could think of that I seem to have skipped over, something that stands out?
EL: I don't know of anything—I think it's a shame that they don't still have grammar grades right there anymore. I think that's one of the biggest shames.
MF: A what? 13
EL: You know, still don't have a school for grammar students—I mean grammar grades at UNCG. I think it's a shame that they don't have Curry anymore.
MF: Yes.
EL: Not only for the sake of the children who went, but also for the sake of the students who taught.
MF: Yes. Do you remember when they stopped the—?
EL: Stopped having that? Well, it was after my children were—my son graduated at Curry. And Rowena changed schools, but it was still on when she was going there. And Ro is now forty, and they still had it. Let's see, that would have been when she was in high school. Let's see, if she were eighteen when she graduated—I think she was seventeen, but they had it a couple of years after she—so let's see, she was born in 1951, and eighteen would be—
MF: '69?
EL: '69.
MF: God, I can't believe I added that up.
EL: Well, you did. 1969. So it ended about 1970, we'll say.
MF: About the time school desegregation came to Greensboro. It took that long here. [laughs]
EL: That's right. So it's been about twenty-one years since it—that's just a general estimate since I—
MF: I wonder it had anything to do with desegregation?
EL: I think they had a lot of turmoil in the school. There was some fellow who was in charge of the education department messed up. Again, it was kind of like the—
MF: And then maybe, possibly—I don't know, but possibly, maybe the controversies with desegregation were one too many problems.
EL: Yes. And they just decided not to get into that.
MF: That's interesting. I think I'll look into that.
EL: Because I know they never had any blacks over there.
MF: Yes. I know they didn't.
EL: So it could be connected. I never have thought about it. But the desegregation came in in the 14
'50s, didn't it?
MF: In Greensboro, it didn't really happen until '69 or '70. Yes, Greensboro managed to put it off 0for a long time.
EL: For a long time.
MF: A long time, yes. [laughs] And then, well, in Durham the federal courts mandated it in '63. So—but Greensboro managed to put off any major court decisions for a while too. So I can't remember exactly—I mean, token desegregation started in '56 or '57, but it never went beyond that until, I think, '70.
EL: I know both of my children were through school by the time it got anywhere.
MF: All right. Well, probably tonight I'll think of something that I forgot.
EL: Well, if you want to call me—
MF: Okay. I forgot to ask you. I really appreciate it though. Thank you so much.
EL: You're sure welcome. I wish you the best of luck on your grade.
[End of Interview]