Oral history interview with Emilie W. Mills, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Emilie W. Mills
INTERVIEWER: William Link
DATE: January 30, 1990
WL: I’d like to ask you—begin by asking you when you first—when and how you first arrived at this institution—some early impressions you might have had when you first got here.
EM: Well, I came down here as a freshman in 1958. I was an aspiring art major. It was my first visit to the South, and I did experience a certain amount of culture shock. My sister drove me down here, and—
WL: Where were you from, originally?
EM: From Long Island [New York], and one of the first things I remember is when we got into Maryland, seeing bathroom signs at gas stations for whites only, and I just—I didn’t know anything like that in the world existed. And I began to wonder where I was really going. But when I got to campus, it was a very warm and friendly place. And I had been very impressed on my interview when I’d come down here the previous November with my mother. And the people were just so nice. I think that was the main reason why I wanted to come to school here, because of the friendly atmosphere. And when I got back here to enter as a freshman, I felt the same way again. There was a lot of camaraderie, and people remembered me from when I’d come down to look the campus over.
WL: Students or faculty?
EM: Both. Well, administrator types—really, students. I had come during the Thanksgiving vacation for the interviews. There really were no students here, but, there were a couple of people who worked in the dorms that were still around for the holiday and so forth, and they remembered me, and I thought that was really nice.
WL: Did you come here for the art? Was that the main thing?
EM: Yes, it had a good reputation. The art department was headed up by Gregory Ivy [founded art department] in those years, and, unfortunately for me, the year I came here was his last year here as department head, and so the department was in a period of transition during most of my undergraduate years. We had an acting head of the department. I believe it was Helen Thrush who was acting head until [Gilbert] Bert Carpenter came. And most of the professors that had been here had been here for some time—[Associate Professor] Susan Barksdale and Norma Hardin—they were the fixtures of the department, and had very good reputations. And we got in some new people too. I 2
remember John Sedgewick came from New York to teach in art history and expanded that program tremendously. Formerly, most of the art history courses had been taught by Dr. Elizabeth Jastrow and she was nearing retirement age, and they needed to expand the program. And so he came in and started including more courses in art history, which I took plenty of. I really found I liked art history a whole lot. Of course, you couldn’t major in it. That was not a major in the program in those days. So—
WL: So the program, was it a BFA [bachelor of fine arts]? Is that what you—?
EM: Yes. And I did some switching around of majors during my undergraduate years, so I had to go to summer school a couple of times back on Long Island to get my semester-hours caught up because I kept losing things as I went through these changing processes, but I did graduate at the end of four years, and—
WL: Was there much—? I’ve heard there was a good bit of crossover between, say, art and other departments, the arts, for example, music—
EM: Yes—
WL: —creative writing. Was that the case?
EM: Yes, there was. And the people who were in those programs pretty much gravitated towards one another socially as well as academically. The artists and the writers sort of hung out together. And they were sort of looked upon as the Bohemians [socially unconventional person, especially one involved in the arts] on the campus. We were sort of a cultural group in a way. And I think, in some cases, we were looked at as the interesting people, but then on the other hand I think there were other students who thought we were kind of weird. [chuckles] And so there was a definite feeling there between academics and arts in a way. It wasn’t a bad rift or anything like that; it was just that there was a noticeable difference of feeling between the groups. And certain professors were the favorites of the arty types—that sort of thing. It was kind of cliquish.
WL: Which professors?
EM: Well, of course, there was Randall Jarrell [American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate]. He was here at that time. Bob Watson [English professor, poet] was also in the writing program. It was a little bit before Fred Chappell’s [English professor, poet laureate of North Carolina] years here. At that time in the English Department there was also a fellow named James Applewhite [poet, professor emeritus at Duke University], who I believe is now at Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina]—mostly writers in the creative writing program.
The art department was an older generation of people, with the exception of people like John Kehoe and John Sedgewick and [Joseph] Joe Strother, who came in in the sixties. And so it wasn’t that sort of bubbling, youthful, energetic group that the English Department had. And so it seemed like the English Department was really the 3
catalyst for all the arts in a way. That was where I met—at parties and things, that was where I would meet musicians and dancers and writers and artists, and they were all of a group centering around English.
WL: Creative writing—?
EM: Yes. And it was a very social bunch. There wasn’t much to do in Greensboro in those days besides go to other people’s houses and have parties and—
WL: Is there much to do now?
EM: [laughs] Yes, there’s a lot more to do now.
WL: Compared to—
EM: Yes, oh yes. There’s always something, I think, fun to do in Greensboro or interesting to do. Culturally, it’s a much easier place to live now than it was thirty years ago.
WL: Yes. Was—a great deal of activity also in terms of events and visiting artists and—that would come in as a result of the arts program.
EM: Yes, the arts program was the real focus for us during those years—the Spring Arts Festival and the Arts Forum issue of the Coraddi [student literary magazine]. The people that came in were just incredible. When I look back now through material in the [University] Archives, and see the—at the time virtual unknowns—who now have become big names. And I remember one year a group of people who had been connected with Black Mountain [College] came down. [Joseph] Joel Oppenheimer [American poet] was here, and, I think—I’m trying to remember some of the others, but that whole group of writers and artists that were associated with the late years of Black Mountain came here at least once or twice. I remember Franz Kline [American artist] was here, I believe, in ’56, and the painter Jack Tworkov [Polish American painter]. And, you know, these were giants in the abstract expressionist movement. It’s very—at the time I wasn’t quite as impressed because a lot of the people I didn’t know, or I didn’t know how important their contributions were. But now when I look back and see, I think, “Golly, it’s really amazing we got these big names here, and we were just a little women’s college in a fairly small city in North Carolina, but we attracted them.”
WL: What was it like attending a women’s college in the 1950s? What was the—what would you say the advantages were, the disadvantages were?
EM: Well, for me the advantages were the opportunity to study during the week, and we had to do a lot of that here. At least, I had to do a lot of it.
WL: Very demanding curriculum?4
EM: I felt it was, yes, and I felt I’d also had good preparation. I’d gone to a good public high school on Long Island. I’d also gone to private school and had a good background, I think, to go to a liberal arts program in a four-year college. But I really had to work for what I got. I liked the pressure of not having men on campus. It was really nice to be able to just sort of be yourself and relax and not have a lot of competition along those social lines. On the weekends a lot of girls went off to date boyfriends at Wake Forest [University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina] and [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill [North Carolina] and Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina] and so forth, and the campus didn’t empty out like it does now because there were still a lot of people living here on campus. Most of the population stayed here, and there were plenty of things to do here. And if you didn’t want to do them and had to get caught up for classes, you could do that too. It wasn’t a party school in any sense of the word.
WL: Did that make the weekends intense or—?
EM: No, sometimes they were downright boring—
WL: Here on campus—
EM: —and long [chuckles], yes. But I also—I’ve also been an outdoor person most of my life. I’ve sailed and ridden. I’ve been a birdwatcher since I was about ten years old. There were a lot of things I liked doing outside that kept me occupied, and one of the things I did a lot of—I’d go out to Sedgefield Stables and go riding quite a bit, if I could get a ride with someone because we weren’t allowed to have cars on campus in those days. And that was nice. [chuckles] The campus looks a lot prettier when there are no cars around. If you were a senior, you could have a car. But that was it. And I think they allowed that mostly because a lot of seniors were out practice teaching at—for their senior year as part of their curriculum and had to be able to transport themselves in some cases.
WL: What sorts of—? Obviously, there were a lot of regulations and rules that governed hours and dress?
EM: Oh, yes.
WL: Dress code?
EM: Yes. It was very different then. We were supposed to be fully clothed in skirts and blouses and things like that to even go to the dining hall. Lots of times girls would roll up their pajama bottoms and put raincoats on and go over to the dining hall to get breakfast, and sometimes they’d get caught. And they’d be made to leave and go and get dressed. As art majors, we didn’t like the dress regulations because we always wanted to wear sloppy clothes in case clay or paint or anything got on us, but we had to wear smocks. But, yes, you had to dress properly. No blue jeans were allowed. Slacks were not allowed. You weren’t even supposed to go across campus in your gym suit if you had to go from playing volleyball to going to a Latin class; you had to change clothes. And there were also regulations for freshmen. Nighttime you had to be in, I think it was by ten 5
o’clock [pm], and you had to be studying if you were in your dorm. You couldn’t be goofing off and running up and down the halls. They enforced quiet for freshmen, so they could study. And there was a lights-out policy for freshmen. I think we had to have the lights off by eleven o’clock [pm]. And some girls would put black paper over the windows and stuff something under the door so the light wouldn’t leak out and stay up and study late. Of course, we broke all the rules because they were so silly. But—
WL: That’s what I was going to ask. How much of that was—what would happen if you got caught?
EM: At first we took it pretty seriously, but until we—you know—but then we’d test it to see how much we could get away with. The only thing I ever remember getting caught for was walking barefoot when my house counselor, who was a physical education teacher, knew I had a touch of fungus on one of my feet, and she was afraid I was going to spread it all over the dorm and infect everyone, and I got reprimanded for walking barefoot. I didn’t ever get caught for staying out too late at night. We always managed to sneak back in somehow. We usually had somebody helping us out on the inside.
WL: Come through a window or something?
EM: Oh, yes, or fix a door—do a little “Watergate” [1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate Apartments/Business complex and covered up by President Richard Nixon administration] job on a door or something like that. We had a—we had dorm leaders. I can’t remember—they had funny names—I can’t remember what they called them, but every wing, every floor of the dorm would have somebody in charge, and I was one of those people my freshman year, which I thought was hysterical because I was among the worst [laughs] as far as not observing all the regulations.
WL: Were you expected to account for everybody? Was that the idea?
EM: Yes, we were supposed to make sure everyone was in or, if they were out, that they were signed out properly. You had to have these little pieces of paper filed at the front desk if you went out somewhere and it was kind of like being in a prison, but it was a little more friendly. [laughs] That didn’t really bother me. I didn’t mind the rules and regulations so much because it was so much fun to try to see what you could break. And then by our sophomore years we were treated more like grown people, and things were a little more civil. You know, you could stay in the library until it closed and not have to sign out to go there and things like that, but there was a very parental role played by the university in those days.
WL: Was—what was the nature of the eating arrangement—the dining hall? And did you have tables that you went to—set tables you went to?
EM: I don’t think they were set in those days. You could sit anywhere you wanted. But the old dining halls, which are part of the recent renovation over there, were the dining halls that we went to. They were fixed so that you stood on line on one side of the dining hall, and 6
you walked through the center to get your food. They did not have the array of choices that they have now. I remember that—I never had salads in my family. Where I grew up it just wasn’t something that was fixed in my home, and I really went wild over lettuce and tomatoes and things like that. [laughs] And there were—of course, there were a lot of foods prepared in a southern style that I had never seen before. I’d never seen hominy before I came here, and I was absolutely intrigued by it, and I didn’t eat it. But it looked different from anything I’d ever seen. Grits was something I’d never encountered before. I had trouble getting used to the food. It was done in what I would now call family-style cooking, and I thought the vegetables were all overcooked and the meat tasted funny. It wasn’t really terribly good. I stayed very lean during my undergraduate years.
WL: Yes. Did faculty eat there occasionally or was—?
EM: I don’t recall that they did. I think they could, if they wanted to. In those days they still had the cafeteria over in the Home Economics School, and a lot of faculty would go over and eat there. That was a nice place to eat. I’m sorry it closed.
WL: Yes. What about off-campus opportunities? If you were a student here in the late fifties and you wanted to do things off campus, what—? Of course, you had The Corner.
EM: Yes. That was a—very, very much the center of activity. There was a movie theatre in those days where Addams’ Bookstore is now. In my undergraduate years they used to have a foreign film festival at that theatre every spring. And I got my first exposure to movies by Ingmar Bergman [Swedish director, producer and writer for film, stage and television] and people like that. It was really fun. We went to every single one we could possibly go to, and I think they cost a dollar for the foreign films, and then I think just the regular movies were less. But that was a big treat every spring, the foreign films. The Corner store was a place we’d hang out a lot and buy supplies. They used to have a lot of supplies there. In later years a couple of—sort of, well, there was a sort of a beer joint across the street called the Red Door, and of course that was off limits. We weren’t supposed to go into any places that served alcoholic beverages. And—
WL: You weren’t supposed to drink at all? Period.
EM: No. And further down Walker Avenue there was the Pickwick, and we weren’t supposed to go in there either. That’s where I used to study when I was in graduate school. In those days the Pickwick had very good hamburgers too. Feed myself and study and come back, go to classes, but—during undergraduate years you weren’t supposed to go to places like that.
WL: I was told by someone who attended school here long before you did that they used to make deliveries from The Corner. Were they doing that in the fifties?
EM: I don’t think so.
WL: In other words, they would order something to eat, and they would deliver it to the dorm.7
EM: Yes, I don’t think so.
WL: I think that had died out pretty much by then?
EM: Yes, yes. I don’t—I really don’t remember getting food delivered from anyplace, but whenever we—we’d always try to make friends with a senior who had a car. And Ham’s was a drive-in then. And—
WL: Same place?
EM: Yes, at the same location—what’s now called the Cellar Anton’s used to be called the IPD for Irving Park Delicatessen. That also used to be curb service, and we used to go there a lot. That was—oh, and the Boar and Castle—that was another place and—
WL: Boar and Castle is down—?
EM: Out Walker Avenue, right near the dairy. And we used to go—those were the three most frequented places.
WL: Did students go downtown very much?
EM: Yes, we’d take the buses downtown. In those days all the department stores were down there—Ellis Stone, which I think became Thalhimer’s, and Belk was down there, Meyer’s department store. And Meyer’s had a place where you could eat, and it was—there was a lot going on downtown in those days, the theaters. And, of course, I remember the [Greensboro] Sit-ins. That was a big deal right in the middle of my undergraduate years. But there were lots of things happening down there. Movie theaters—there were a couple of movie theaters down there—of course, the Carolina, and then there were a couple on Elm Street, as I recall.
WL: Much more alive, vibrant sort of place than it is now?
EM: Oh, yes. And that was something fun to do on Saturdays. And sometimes, if the weather was nice, we would even walk down.
WL: You weren’t expected to wear white gloves, I suppose.
EM: No, [laughs], no. But we were supposed to dress and be a good reflection on the school. That was always ingrained in us.
WL: Let me ask you about black students here. How many were there?
EM: When I came there were literally a handful. And, interestingly, I was assigned to Shaw Dormitory, and that was where all the freshman black students were also assigned. And there were also quite a few girls from up North in that dorm, and I think all of that was probably by design.8
WL: They assumed you would be more willing to—
EM: I guess more, feeling more acclimatized to that sort of a situation. You know, I never even thought about differences between black people and white people. I had gone to school and had black friends and—
WL: You went to an integrated high school?
EM: Oh yes. It was public high school on Long Island. If you lived in the district, you went to school there. It didn’t matter if you were Greek or black or Irish or whatever. The black girls were required to live in one section of the dorm, which I thought was atrocious and so did some other white students. One white student petitioned to get permission to live with one of the black students and was denied. And it caused a real furor. This was my freshman year.
WL: 1958-59?
EM: Yes. And the progress that was supposed to be taking place was very, very slow. I just had no idea how black people felt about being black. I’d never had to think about it before because I’d always thought they were just like me. But it was very eye opening.
WL: Was—they must have been very isolated, as what you described. They lived in segregated dorms, essentially. They had separate entrances and—
EM: No, they were allowed to come in and out the same way we did. They just had to go to their rooms down there, and we went to our rooms everywhere else.
WL: Did they have separate bathrooms?
EM: No.
WL: But they had a separate, sort of, area—
EM: They were either—they either lived alone; they were assigned rooms individually, or they would room together. I only remember one black girl really well from my freshman year, and I think that was because she continued to stay in the Greensboro area for some time, and so she kind of sticks in my mind. And she was a really interesting, lovely, wonderful person, and I learned a lot of really neat things from her. She was interested in writing and art.
WL: Who was that?
EM: Her name’s LilyWiley [Class of 1962], and I’m trying to remember if she even graduated. She may have left; I’m not sure. But that was a friendship I think I’ll remember for all my life. They did not—they didn’t segregate themselves into groups or anything; they mixed with the white students. They had their white friends, and it wasn’t 9
like I get the feeling some of it is now—where you’ve really got more of a feeling of separateness than there was then. I think there was a real effort on the part of many of the girls to socially integrate the few black students we had.
WL: There were no men, of course, here?
EM: No.
WL: So that there were no male—wouldn’t have been a question of having male black students.
EM: Right. Right. There was not that situation here when I was a student.
WL: You were here during the Sit-ins?
EM: Yes.
WL: Why don’t you tell me more about that, how that—
EM: Well, we were told not to get involved. The Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina] students were told this—“You stay away from this.”
WL: Told by whom?
EM: The chancellor, who was at the time, Gordon Blackwell, and we—the administration generally was very strong in their opinion about the fact that we should not get involved. However, one of my friends did, and she did not go to school here after her sophomore year, and I believe it was for that reason.
WL: Who was that?
EM: Her name was [Eugenia] Genie Seaman [now Marks, did not graduate] And she and I were friends from when we first came freshman year. She was from Florida, and—
WL: So she was a Southerner?
EM: She—I guess so. She didn’t talk like one, but she was from—she lived in Florida. And I believe it was over that incident in 1960 that caused her—
WL: After—
EM: —to decide not to come back here to school.
WL: After being involved in a sit-in, then essentially reprimanded, and told not to do it anymore.10
EM: Yes, yes. There was some correspondence back and forth, apparently, with her family, and, of course her parents supported her position. And they—this was the way she was raised. And—I’m trying to remember a couple of the other girls—I knew several of them who were involved, and I just can’t think of their names offhand. I remember Genie just because we were friends before all that happened. So she sticks out in my mind on that.
WL: So there was some—at least among some students— some bad feelings about the administration’s position?
EM: Oh yes, oh yes. I just did not understand it. It was just something culturally that I never got accustomed to. I could not understand the—either the fear or the mistrust of what black people were trying to achieve for themselves. And I guess it—it was even, for me, more elemental than that because it never occurred to me that black people were going to have to do this. They didn’t have to do it where I lived, where I had come from, where I had grown up. And these situations didn’t exist. It wasn’t an issue in our family when I was growing up.
WL: Tell me a little bit more about the faculty at Woman’s College. You said something already, but—as a freshman and sophomore you had to take, I suppose, a general curriculum and were exposed to people outside the art department and outside the arts generally. How would you compare the faculty of thirty years ago compared to what it is now?
EM: Well, not having taken many courses here myself recently, it would be hard to say that from a first-hand experience, but I was—I was terrified of most of my professors, except the people in the art department, because they were in areas that I was not as familiar with, and I had really nice people for most of my courses. Franklin Parker was my history teacher my freshman year. Jean Buchert was my English teacher my freshman year, and I really trembled in my boots when I went to my required courses. The person who taught biology is no longer here. She was only here a few years and—of course a lot of the other people have either died or retired. I did—I also had John Beeler for history, and I absolutely adored him. He brought ancient medieval history to life like nothing I’ve ever known.
I also took a Russian history course under a man named Jordan Kurland, who left after some few years, and that was probably the best history course I’ve ever taken in my whole life. It just—we’d come out of there so grown emotionally. I remember a lot about Russian history because of him, and I haven’t kept up with it either. He was just remarkable. I think the thing that impressed me the most after I had got used to these giants of professors that they really loved their subjects and they were very dedicated teachers. I was not aware of the pressures that faculty now have with committee work and research and all these other outside things that are pulling them in all sorts of directions.
I think it’s unfortunate for the students, in a way, that this situation exists now. The classroom was the most important place when I was in school here, and students were the most important thing, and I don’t sense that quite as much now from the students. I’ve been amazed to have students working for me here in the library who talk about a professor in a course they’re talking, and I say, “Who’s your professor?” They 11
say, “Oh, I don’t know his name.” I just can’t imagine that. It’s—I don’t know, sort of like the automat, you know. You go and push buttons and get what you need and get out. It just doesn’t seem right.
WL: There was more of a coherent community in those days, of course, too.
EM: Yes.
WL: You didn’t have all those commuter students—
EM: Right.
WL: Was there more contact between—sort of general contact—between students and faculty?
EM: Yes. Yes. It was not unusual to sit around the Soda Shop, which is now the Faculty Center—in fact, some faculty would come in and sit and talk to students. There was more informal kind of structure to all the classes. I remember Randall Jarrell taking classes out sitting—“It’s a pretty day today. Let’s go sit outside,” and they’d go sit outside and do the class outside. There was a lot of that kind of thing. As I got up towards my senior year, there was more social stuff. Faculty would say, “Well, I’ll have the seniors over for lunch,” or something like that. And we’d go to their homes in small groups or large groups, depending on what the occasion was. But there was a lot of interaction in that way. Of course, we attended things together too, students and faculty—performances, the art films, and that always got students and faculty very involved with each other. When they did the Arts Forum issue of Coraddi, there was always a faculty member who was an advisor to the Coraddi staff who would help with the Arts Forum issue, and when I was here; and later Randall Jarrell was the advisor. And one of my good friends, who was in the English department, Arthur Dixon, had lots of students who were good friends. They would go in huge groups out to Arthur’s place in the country and help him weed and do things like that. And yes—it was a family.
WL: With students who lived on campus too. I mean, that must make a difference having—
EM: It did.
WL: —residential students?
EM: It did. And part of the social life was going around to see each other in the dorms and maybe getting together and cooking something and eating, just—pretty simple and straightforward. And running off during the week to parts unknown was not something we could do. We didn’t have the money; we didn’t have the transportation; we just didn’t have the mobility then that the students have now. And that has changed it an awful lot, I think. In a way it’s another way of life. I guess it’s going the way of the dodo [extinct flightless bird]. 12
WL: Describe to me what the physical layout of the campus was when you were a student here. How similar and different it is, compared to the way it was?
EM: Well, let’s see. As far as across the street on Spring Garden [Street] side, the only thing that was really over there was Curry School, and Curry School was still operating in those days. It was still the practice school. You had the main drag through campus with the library and the buildings that exist now—Home Economics School, Science Building, the Spencer dorms, and the two dorms down at the end of the street. There were no dorms down beyond that dead end there. The farthest dorms away from the center of campus were Ragsdale/Mendenhall and Weil/Winfield. And then there was the freshman quad and Rosenthal Gym and Coleman Gym, and that was about it.
The art department did not have a physical facility. The professors were scattered all over. They just put them in spaces wherever they could fit. Art department offices were everywhere on campus. And the art labs—we didn’t have any studios—the old Rosenthal Gym served as two studio spaces. The basement of Aycock Auditorium was studio space, and they just kind of made room for the art department. And so when the McIver Building was built, that was considered a real prize because all of a sudden all the art faculty were all in one place, and that was really very nice.
WL: Yes. Was that being built when you were a student?
EM: Yes. The McIver Building had been razed just before I came here. And, as a matter of fact, a lot of the rubble was still lying around the site when I came my freshman year because I remember picking some things up to take to art class to use—pieces of wood and some bricks and stuff. And my first art lab was for one of the introductory studio courses required of all freshmen, and Norma Hardin was my professor. She was a weaver, and she had her loom and there were other looms down in the basement of Aycock. And I remember having to go down to see her about my schedule and walking past the old McIver site and going into a side door of Aycock, which would now face the Taylor Theatre, to get to where Miss Hardin was. And I walked in, into this gloomy basement with a dirt floor on one side and some storage materials, and Miss Hardin was over there working at her loom, and all I could hear was the loom squeaking in the basement. It was very kind of spooky. [laughs] And—but the campus was a lot smaller. It was—easy to walk from one point to another. The hardest thing was to go from Coleman Gym over to the Aycock Auditorium, after you had gym class and had to change clothes and get to class on time.
WL: That was a long way.
EM: It was a long walk, yes.
WL: Was—there was no Elliott Center in those days?
EM: There was part of it. The old part that faces College Avenue was there, that runs the cross-axis towards Forrest Avenue, between College and Forrest. The wing was built later, the one that comes toward the library. But that was another center of social activity 13
on weekends. They had listening rooms. We could go over and get records. They had a record rental place there. You could go sit and listen to your favorite music. That was kind of nice. You could study, and I think you could only have the rooms for a certain number of hours and then you had to give it up if someone else wanted it.
WL: One person, or a group, or—?
EM: Didn’t matter. Either. If you wanted to go alone, you could. But it was a nice place to go and get off by yourself because that wasn’t always possible in the dorms because people were in the dorms all the time.
WL: So, let’s see. You graduated in 1962?
EM: Sixty-two.
WL: Sixty-two. What happened after that? Did you—?
EM: I went to Europe that summer, and I visited a lot of art museums. I was really getting into my painting at the time I graduated, and there was a professor here, Robert Partin, who had been a great inspiration to me in finding my way in my medium. And I felt like I needed more time to work with him in my painting. So I decided to come back as a graduate student. The irony of that was he took a year’s leave to go out and teach at the University of New Mexico [Albuquerque, New Mexico], so I was here in graduate school without him. But I think that may have ended up to be a good thing. Right around that time they started bringing in visiting artists for part of a semester or a whole semester, so I got some painting time with Tony Beavers, who was here in the early sixties, and then Giorgio Cavallon [American pioneer abstract expressionist] came later on. He was an important New York painter—just died recently. He was about eight-five years old, I think. And both Tony and Giorgio were a real help to me, and I think in a way it was probably a good thing I didn’t study more with the professor I had come back to study with because I think it would have gotten me into maybe a rut of style that I didn’t need to do. But working with these other two people kind of freed me up and taught me some new things.
WL: So you—were you in school the one—? Did you—was it just one year or two years?
EM: Two years—took two years to get my MFA [master of fine arts] in those days. It may still.
WL: Still does, I suppose.
EM: Yes. And again, I took a lot of art history along with my painting courses. And by that time Gilbert Carpenter was here as head of the department, and I took some art history courses with him, which were, again, unforgettable experiences. He’s probably one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had. I also had an independent study seminar with him, and that opened my eyes to a lot of things I was doing that I didn’t realize I was doing. He 14
was a very capable teacher and could point out your weaknesses without making you feel bad about them—very, very constructive kind of approach to teaching that I really liked. He’s a brilliant man.
WL: Did—how did you go from the world of art to the world of books and libraries?
EM: Well, you have to be a really terrific artist to be able to make a living painting. And I think I was good, but I’m not sure I had the dedication at the time to want to really throw myself into it completely to try to do that. In the early sixties, New York was still the best place to be to be a painter. I did not want to live in New York. I had been born there and I had spent a lot of time there, and I did not want to live there. I didn’t want to go back to Long Island because it had grown and changed so much that it didn’t appeal to me anymore. Again, the country girl was still coming out in me. I like the rural kind of life. And I also met and married a man from Greensboro, and that was another reason to stay here. So—that didn’t work out, and I had to support myself and two children. And I decided to try to get a job on campus because I liked being around the old Woman’s College, and I came—I heard there was going to be vacancy in the library, so I came over and was interviewed by Marjorie Hood, who in those days was head of the circulation department, and I think has become a legend in later years. And she hired me, I think somewhat reluctantly, because she knew I had been an art major. [laughs] And she told me later on she asked around about me, and she was a little concerned about the way I dressed. I was a little more advanced than what you normally saw on campus—really big into miniskirts and leotards and all that sort of thing.
WL: When was this?
EM: 1967. And she hired me, and it worked out. I told her I might be here for eight months. I can’t even remember what it was I had in the back of my mind that I might do, but I’ll be—I guarantee you I’ll give you eight months. And so she hired me, and I ended up staying four and a half years. I worked at the circulation desk, and one of my big jobs was to look for books that other people couldn’t find. If you came in and you couldn’t find something up in the history section, I would just work like crazy to try to find it. I was usually pretty good at that. I also did the interlibrary loans, and that was one person, part-time, back then. Now they’ve got a whole staff. Then I decided that working in the circulation department for the rest of my life didn’t have much of a future. Are we running out of tape?
WL: No, I think—
EM: Okay. And the assistant librarian here at the time, Stan Hicks, encouraged me to think about going to library school. And so, I thought, “Well, okay, that might not be a bad idea,” and I applied to Chapel Hill, and I was promptly turned down.
So I went back to Stan, and I said, “Oh, what should I do? Chapel Hill doesn’t want me. They don’t think I have enough undergraduate credits in English and history.” I’d already had my MFA in painting, but that didn’t get me in. So he said, “Well, why don’t you apply to [University of] Illinois [Champaign-Urbana, Illinois]?” He said15
“That’s where I went, and that’s where [James H.] Jim Thompson went.” And at the time, Jim Thompson was director [of Jackson Library]. He said, “I’ll write to so-and-so up there. I bet you can get there.”
Well, not only did I get in, but I got an assistantship, and I worked twenty hours a week in the library and put myself through school—took my kids and my dog and my mother, got in the station wagon and drove to Urbana. Stayed up there for fourteen months, got my degree, and came back and started up Special Collections. Things had been here, but there had been nobody really in charge, and Jim Thompson was feeling a desperate need to get the Archives organized and to get the rare book collection going with some kind of a purpose. It had been a little bit slipshod and so forth over the years.
WL: Was there—was there a university archives?
EM: Well, not formally. We had had a record schedule written by the State Archives for us in the early sixties, but nobody paid any attention to it. And—
WL: Nobody—
EM: Nobody sent anything to the library unless—
WL: Did you have chancellors’ records or anything like that?
EM: Yes, the [Dr. Charles Duncan] McIver [first president and founder of the State Normal and Industrial School] papers, and the [Dr. Julius I.] Foust [second president of the institution] papers were here. And, some of—oh, I’m trying to think of who the third chancellor was now—my mind is going—
WL: [Walter Clinton] Jackson?
EM: Yes, thank you—for whom the library is named, I should never forget that one. [both chuckle] Dr. Jackson’s papers were boxed up and stored somewhere, and that was it. And they had let Mrs. [Clora McNeill] Foust [Class of 1909, second wife] come in and go through her husband’s papers, and she took out a lot of things she felt were sensitive and did away with them. But we still have tons of Foust papers, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just that I have this awful feeling they’re a lot less interesting than they would have been if she had not been allowed to go in there and do whatever she did to them. The McIver papers are virtually the only ones completely intact. He saved everything, and so did we because he was the first and the founder, and we felt like every scrap of paper that said anything at all ought to be kept, and so it has. But there was no organization. They had been boxed.
WL: They were in a state of disarray?
EM: Oh, God. I mean anybody trying to do research, it just would have been hopeless. We also have Randall Jarrell’s manuscripts, which were very poorly described and even in a worse state of organization. I mean, you could imagine—we—at that time when I came 16
also had the [Luigi] Silva Cello Music Collection. Again, it had been briefly annotated by graduate students in music who did not have all the information they needed at their disposal, and that was something that also had to be redone. There was a lot of having to go back and do things over again and get them in better shape. That took a whole lot of time, and, in a way, the rare book and special collections have almost taken a back seat to a lot of the work that’s been done here because the Archives stuff was just—. There was so much of it, and so much had to be done to it to get it right. And there were people who were trying to do research using these collections. The McIver Papers are very important in the history of the state and in the history of education in the South. And we felt that was a priority to get those going. And [William E.] Bill King at Duke [university archivist] was one of the people who was using those early on. I don’t know how he ever found anything or if he ever did. [laughs] I know he never came back, and he intended to. But—
WL: He sort of gave up when he saw—
EM: I think so. I just think his job probably caught up with him too. I mean, I’ve found that’s true. I don’t have time to do research. And by the time I get home at night I’m pretty well worked out for the day. We don’t get research leave like teaching faculty do. It’s a different life.
WL: Did—so you were—when you became head—were you the first head of Special Collections?
EM: First full-time person. They had had somebody in another department ordering books for the Southern Renaissance Collection, which is no longer the—a unit in the library. And then, I think Jim Thompson was ordering some things for the rare book collection, but again, more reflecting his interests in English history, and—than really looking and focusing on the collection and saying, “What are our programs? What do we need? How can we reflect the programs? How can we help students with materials that are special that maybe they wouldn’t have a chance to see under normal circumstances?” And that was the way I wanted to approach it. I wanted it to be a collection that would not be a mausoleum. I wanted it to be alive and useful. And I wanted it to enrich the student experience, especially for undergraduate students who so seldom get a chance to see a rare book. And I wanted to bring that out in it. And I also wanted to build other research collections and get them in shape so they could be used by serious scholars. One example is the History of Physical Education Collection, which, as far as I know, is the only one of its kind in the United States with books dating back to the1500s. And we virtually try to get everything we can historical on the subject of physical movement and body improvement, health—having to do with exercise and that sort of thing. Dance is part of that. And people come from all over the United States to use that material. We just had somebody here a couple of weeks ago from the University of Massachusetts [Amherst, Massachusetts]. She said, “You have saved me trips to three other schools because the materials you have here are so rich.”17
WL: So you decided fairly early on to focus on—to make that into a focus. Or did you have a core—?
EM: Well, the collection was here. It was not catalogued—
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
EM: —physical education, that we got this—you know, “Oh, the Woman’s College got that collection here.”—that sort of prestige thing. And—but anyway, it’s here; it’s cataloged; everybody in the world knows about it who needs to know about it. And it’s important. I mean, there are copies of books in that collection that just aren’t anywhere else.
WL: Big—I mean when you said earlier the big schools that were—you mean schools in the state?
EM: Bigger, bigger universities in other states.
WL: Other states?
EM: Yes.
WL: Who have—?
EM: Who have major physical education programs.
WL: There seemed to have been a strong connection between Wellesley [College, Wellesley, Massachusetts] and—at least the physical education people coming back—
EM: Yes. Well, historically—let me get my names, and they escape me here, Bill. I can’t remember them now. There was Mary Channing Coleman [director of physical education], for whom the gym is named, who had some connection there. My archive names just aren’t coming up to me like they should be today.
WL: There were a number of people who came from Wellesley or Smith [College, Northampton, Massachusetts]—
EM: Yes, there were people who had been at Wellesley or went to Wellesley and got their education there in their program and then came here to teach. And that has been going on for years. There’s been that sort of cross-fertilization, and that had a lot to do with why we got the collection, because of those professional connections. And that really worked in our favor. It’s attracted other collections too. It’s brought papers in from the National Association of Physical Education and several other areas.
WL: Do you have those papers—the—?18
EM: Yes.
WL: Yes. What about the physical—the facilities that existed when you came here. Did you have to do much expansion in that respect?
EM: Yes. As far as the library is concerned—of course, the tower wasn’t here when I started this job. There was a hole in the ground when I left for graduate school in 1971. When I came back, the beginnings of the tower were being constructed. I moved into this area from the third floor. There’s a little area up there that’s caged off from the stacks where the music and art books are, and that was where we were. And it was an area about the size of this room. And we were really stuffed to the gullet. We were shelving books on book trucks because we’d run out of shelving space. And so we kind of just oozed into here in 1974, and we had this huge stack area. It was just wonderful. And we couldn’t begin to think about filling it up. Little did I know that in 1990 I was going to be shopping around for more space. [laughs] But that’s mostly due to growth in the Archives. But having this area for meetings and for students to come in with classes and see things, it’s really been very, very nice. I couldn’t do any of that prior to the time we moved down here—I mean, to have a class in to show them things. There just was no space to do it. Everything up there was work space. And so this opened up not only possibilities for the collections, but for the students as well because then they could come see exhibits and talk about books and things.
WL: Was this room created as part of the Special Collections or did it exist in another form?
EM: Yes. Well, this originally was part of the Reserve Reading Room before the renovation. And the—what’s all Government Documents area, and this area was all reserve reading. The room where the reserve books are now was what used to be called the general reading room, and that was novels, and they were arranged alphabetically by author, and you could go there and get For Whom the Bell Tolls. You couldn’t go to the stacks and get it; fiction was all over there.
WL: You could check out from there or read there?
EM: Yes. And the desk for the second floor was about where those French doors are now, and there were two ladies who worked up here and took care of the reserve books, the general reading room. The room now where the microfilm is stored, that little long skinny, dark room down there near the administrative offices, used to be where all the art history courses were taught. That was the only room on campus [laughs]—this was, again, before the art department had a building. And that’s—this was where we used to have to come for art history.
WL: There used to be lots of classes in the library, didn’t there?
EM: Yes, the Jarrell Lecture Hall. I used to have my biology lecture in the Jarrell Lecture Hall. And that’s kind of a sad story. I don’t know why that’s being neglected, but it’s closed now. It’s in very bad need of renovation. It’s—the chairs are literally falling apart at the 19
seams, and the stuffing has come out. And that is—that facility is not the library’s. That is the university’s and—
WL: Under their control?
EM: Yes. And when it was still open and in such bad condition, Jim Thompson, who was then director of the library, just felt so embarrassed by the condition of it because it was associated with the library being in the building, that he finally got the university to close it. And they locked the door and walked away. And nothing has been done to it. And it’s a shame. I think Randall Jarrell deserves a little better than that.
WL: It’s a lot of space. Yes. How has the archives program changed over time? Did you—I mean, in the eighties there’s been a lot of—
EM: Oh boy.
WL: —change.
EM: Well, for one thing we have records management now that’s really working as well as records management can work on any university campus. We had our old schedule that was done in the early sixties, Betty Carter rewrote it in 1985. She’s my archives assistant. And she’s a professional archivist; she worked at the State Archives for many years. She re-did it and went and visited every office on campus that she could get an interview with a person for and sat down and wrote a schedule. A lot of—
WL: By office, meaning the administrative offices?
EM: Yes, all the offices. She—well, she didn’t go to faculty offices.
WL: Didn’t go to department heads.
EM: Or academic departments because all that is controlled through the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. So that’s the point at which we want to get material, nothing lower than that, unless a faculty member wants to give his papers or something like that. Then you’ve got a different situation; then you’re getting into manuscripts collecting. But as far as Archives is concerned, we now have a situation where the records management is really under the vice chancellor for planning over in [Dr. Richard] Skip Moore’s office. And they are trying to run that program, keep the schedules updated, write new schedules as they are needed for new offices or for reorganized offices.
WL: Do they have a records manager?
EM: Well, not really. Emily Herman, who works in Skip Moore’s office, has been handed yet that as another job, and I think she’s probably covered up with more than she can handle. And it would be nice if they could get somebody full time or release her time enough so she could do a little more with it. I know it must be frustrating for her. But she’s done a 20
wonderful job of keeping up with things. We now go to meetings. There’s a Society of North Carolina Archivists now, which didn’t exist before 1980, I think, is when we organized that. And we’ve been to meetings of ARMA [Association of Records Managers and Administrators], which is the national association of records managers, so we’re keeping up with things. Of course, we keep up with our reading on it too.
And there’s been a lot of noise about automation and computerized records and all that sort of thing, and we’re just kind of sitting back and watching to see what happens. And, as it turns out now, a lot of the major archivists in this country are taking that sort of wait and see attitude too, that maybe we jumped on the boat a little too fast. And that maybe automating or getting ready—getting our records ready for automating is maybe not the way to go—that maybe we ought to be looking at who we are serving and not trying to get this great database, but maybe look at our local audience first, and address their problems and needs and so forth. And I know as far as doing things like subject cards here, we make our own subjects because this is a unique collection. And if people come in here and want to know about the Sit-ins, why do we need to wade through a whole bunch of cards on civil rights? Why can’t we just go to sit-ins? It’s just a very easy example, but we’re trying to tailor it for our collections and—
WL: —rather than having standard classifications?
EM: Yes. It gets very cumbersome, and you try to take a big system and make it fit to a small archive, which this really is, relatively speaking. I mean, there are less than three million items here. I think that we really need to examine why we’re here, and then let everything follow based on the answer we come up with.
WL: Yes. How do you think the library has changed? The library’s gone through a period of significant expansion in the last twenty years—
EM: Tremendous.
WL: —in terms of staff and in terms of facilities and holdings—almost any—
EM: Oh, it’s amazing how big it is now. When I was in school here, there were under a hundred thousand volumes in the library. Everything we had fit into this one, now little, building. I think that really we’re no different from any other university that’s grown the way universities did grow in the sixties. We have more services; we have bibliographic instruction now like we never have had before. We have database searching; we have a much more sophisticated interlibrary loan system. There’s much more outreach and networking with other libraries. We’ve got the online catalog. All these things are bringing resources to us quicker. It doesn’t mean we get the answers any faster, but at least the resources are more accessible. Along the lines of staff, I think it’s—because we’ve gotten bigger, we’ve gotten more separated and specialized, and we know less about what the other guy is doing. I think when I worked here in the sixties, I had a much better feeling for the work of the serials librarian and the reference librarian and the acquisitions librarian. Now our jobs have each individually gotten so big and cover so many more things that none of us really has a very clear idea of what the other one is 21
doing anymore—I mean, we know where to go to get answers. But as far as sitting down and coping with the details of what other people do to make this whole thing work, it’s not quite as clear a picture; it’s not quite as cozy, as intimate, as it used to be. There’s not the opportunity to get involved in other areas of the library as much as there used to be.
WL: Staff used to crossover more?
EM: Yes.
WL: From function to function?
EM: Yes. And I think we spent more time in other departments too. I love to have something come up where I have to go down to the Reference Department and use reference books. It gets me out of here and somewhere else in the library, a chance to interact with other people. I really don’t see too much of the other librarians or department heads especially, unless we have a meeting. And I think that’s unfortunate. Some of us go to lunch on and off together once in a while and that sort of helps, but everything is pretty much geared toward shoptalk, and we just don’t have time for anything else.
WL: I guess that’s a function of size.
EM: Yes. I think so.
WL: Having to manage this much larger major library, really.
EM: Yes, and I think nationally we’re behind. I don’t know how many librarians in the national average for a library this size, so everybody’s feeling a little overworked, that sort of thing.
WL: That’s just, yes—the question I was going to ask is that relative—the staff here has remained relatively small, the resources have gone into other than staff?
EM: Yes.
WL: Categories, haven’t they?
EM: Yes.
WL: And you’re suggesting that that has put more pressure on staff?
EM: I think so. Yes. And not only are we having to deal with more material, but different kinds of material, plus having to learn new techniques, new search methods, all that sort of thing. Whether we like computers or not, we’re forced to love them; it’s part of our existence now.
WL: We can’t survive without computers.22
EM: No.
WL: Or at least be literate.
EM: That’s correct.
WL: What kind of director was Jim Thompson, do you think? All this growth is—most of it was really occurring when he was—
EM: It’s happened mostly during his tenure here. Of course, he was here for almost twenty years—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years. I loved working for Jim. He was a very, kind of democratic library director. He didn’t run around with an iron fist and a baseball bat or anything like that. He always was wanting to consult with his staff and his colleagues about what was the best direction to go when a major decision was involved. Of course, my working with him was a little bit different because I wasn’t dependent on state funds for adding things to Special Collections. We had Friends of the Library [support group] money and other trust funds that allow me to buy things. It’s interesting that there really is no state appropriation for rare books. You know, that’s something the taxpayers need to know. We’re not spending your tax dollars on five thousand dollar books. We’re spending it on fifty dollar books that are needed for undergraduate needs, mostly, and faculty needs. He was very receptive and open to my ideas about how I thought special collections ought to grow. And it took years of—I shouldn’t say convincing and negotiating because that sounds like he resisted, but I think he was just being careful and wanted to make sure that what I saw needed to be done was the best thing to do. And once he was convinced that that was right, he gave me all the support in the world that I needed. And I don’t think there’s a librarian in this place who wouldn’t say that about him—very fair, very open, very supportive, but he could also be very firm when he had to be.
WL: So he was generally a very popular director with staff?
EM: Yes, I think so, yes. And he was easy to get along with. He had a good sense of humor, and that always helps.
WL: How did you think—what do you think are the most significant changes that have occurred, say, in the last thirty years? A lot have occurred, say, from the time you graduated in ’62 to here now in 1990.
EM: In the university as a whole?
WL: Yes, the whole, not just the library.
EM: Well, from my point of view I think education has become more of a business, and I don’t see students as dedicated to the process of learning for the sake of, the interest of, something. They seem to just want to get through and get their degrees and get jobs and make money. And they’re missing so much. I’m amazed when classes come up here. I’ve 23
had this happen both ways. Not long ago I had a group from the art department, and I mentioned—oh, it’s a poet who’s contemporary with [W.B.]Yeats [Irish poet]. I can’t remember who it is, and I thought, “Surely they’re not going to know who I’m talking about,” but three kids [clicks fingers] picked up on it right away, and they started telling me things about the poet that were very useful to me and that I can use in another class later on. And I was really heartened by that. At other times it works the other way too, where things you think they ought to know they’ve never heard of. It’s just—what they’re being taught is different; what they feel they need to know is different; it’s just changing times, I guess. I don’t think they’re any more or less intelligent than we were; it’s just that they’re being taught a different set of things.
WL: Yes. Different expectations out of education?
EM: I think so, yes. And, I hear my own children, who are now out of college, wanting to maybe go back to—well, I’ve still got one in college; he keeps going in and out—[chuckles] but my daughter is out and she’s teaching now. And she’s thinking about maybe going back and getting a master’s degree, not because she wants to make more money, but because if she stays in education she wants to get into public school administration. That seems to be her goal right now. That may change; it’s okay. My other child obviously isn’t interested in going out and making tons of money because he’s twenty-five years old and he’s still going to undergraduate school. So, you know, they’re not typical, but a lot of their friends just want to instantaneously go out and start making forty, fifty thousand dollars a year, which seems very unrealistic to me. And I’m afraid they are going to be disappointed when they find out, even if they do start making salaries like that, that maybe that’s all they’ve got, that there’s something missing there that they didn’t think about. And I just hope it isn’t too late for them.
WL: You think education should accomplish that? Should—?
EM: I think it should—
WL: Key them in to the fact that there is something else?
EM: Yes, I think it should try to foster something. Yes. I think we have a moral obligation to teach young people that things have happened in that past that are worth knowing about now because they might make—have in impact on your future. If—I’ve often thought at times if I was ever in prison or in some kind of a structured situation where I had absolutely no freedom, that the things I’ve learned might get me through, might keep my sanity and that I could maybe think about a soliloquy from [William] Shakespeare [English poet and playwright] or recite a poem from—my favorite [W.H.] Auden [Anglo-American poet] poem or something like that, that it might make a difference in my own psychological wellbeing, if you will. Or being able to listen to a [Ludwig von] Beethoven [German composer and pianist] symphony while you’re washing the dishes—makes washing the dishes a lot more fun. [laughs] So I think trying to expose young people to that kind of experience is important.24
WL: Yes.
[End of interview]