Oral history interview with Carol Bottoms, 1991 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Carol Bottoms
INTERVIEWER: Missy Foy
DATE: May 18, 1991
[Begin Side A]
MF: If you could start with some general information, like where you're from and when you went
to UNCG and what your major was and just that kind of general information first.
CB: Okay. Well, I was born here in Greensboro in the old Wesley Long Hospital.
MF: Oh.
CB: And then my father was with Pet Milk, and we were transferred around a lot so we were out
of state a good number of years and came back to North Carolina in '78 and then finished
growing up in Raleigh. Excuse me. [coughs] And, let's see, I was at UNCG [The University
of North Carolina at Greensboro] from '73 to '77. Excuse me, that was '68 we came back to
North Carolina.
MF: Oh yeah, okay. I—figured that out.
CB: You probably figured that one out, yeah. [laughs] And went there for home economics and
nutrition.
MF: Were they under the same department at that time?
CB: Yes, uh huh, they still are.
MF: Oh, are they? Okay.
CB: They just changed the name of the home ec[onomics] department to—
MF: Human environmental sciences.
CB: Human environmental sciences, yeah.
MF: Yeah, as soon as you said that, all of a sudden it rang a bell.
CB: Mm hm. The old Stone Building, which now no one can get into. [laughs]
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MF: Yeah.
CB: Because they were going to fix it up and haven't done it yet.
MF: As a matter of fact, I found out that that building—there was some way to get into the steam
tunnels through that building at one point. I'd heard rumor of that but I knew that was —
CB: I didn't know it was through that building, but Tim [spouse-Timothy Bottoms, Class of 1976,
1990 MA] had told me some of the guys would go down in the steam tunnels, you know, I
guess from outside, and go through them—[unclear] and not real tall and could walk through
those. We used to always say hell was under UNCG when the steam would come out.
[laughs]
MF: Yeah. [laughs] What was student life like going to a school that had, well, just a decade
before, been a women's school, an all female school?
CB: It was—well, I went there mainly because it was basically the best school for foods and
nutrition and home economics in the state. I'd looked at other schools. Dad even had offered
Meredith [College] and I thought—and it was known to be a good academic school, and so
that's another reason I went. It was different. There were only two men's dorms on campus
my freshman year, and I remember a bunch of us at North Spencer [Residence Hall] had
gone up to Guilford [Residence Hall] and were talking to some guys one night, and our
question was, "What brought you to UNCG?" [laughs] Because it just—you know there
weren't that many on campus. There were a good number of town students.
MF: Yeah.
CB: But one of the guys I was talking to was from out of state, and it was like, you know, "How
in the world did you hear about us?" And I don't remember what he said, but it was
interesting. You didn't see many of them. I remember being, you know, real naive freshman,
and one of the first people that really stood out in my mind my freshman year was this grad
student from New York, I believe he was, and he was there in the art department. And he
was real, real tall. He wore an afro, but he was not black. He wore midriff tops. He wore
stacked shoes and the biggest black shoulder bag you've ever seen and tight jeans—so made
you a little wary of the men on the UNCG campus. [laughs]
MF: Yeah, of course, I mean you know, I guess a lot of people have heard the old thing calling
UNCG "UNC Gay" and stuff like that.
CB: I really didn't hear that much about it, but you would, you know—every once in a while, you
know, some of the—there were some that, you know, seemed to flit around, but overall the
guys seemed real nice.
MF: Yeah.
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CB: And I think it was my second year there the increase in men had just grown tremendously.
They added a second dorm for men. I guess it was the third dorm because they had one other
dorm over there, so I guess it was three dorms for men, and then there was a fourth one my
second year. So that it was just a tremendous increase that second year [sic].
MF: How did that seem to affect things on campus? Well, I guess, some girls were probably
happy.
CB: [laughs]
MF: But did that seem to change, sort of, the atmosphere of campus at all?
CB: I think the main thing it seemed to affect was from what I had heard from people when it was
an all-girl campus was that a lot of people would go—there would be a lot more of different
dorms from—like [North Carolina] State [University] and [University of North Carolina at]
Chapel Hill would come up for dances and things like that and sorority— fraternities would
come up for things like that, and it was a whole lot less of that.
MF: Yeah.
CB: Because a lot of people did pack up and go to other campuses over the weekend and the—I
remember my dad said that when he was in school at State and then later at Chapel Hill, they
would—guys would all get in the car and go up to UNCG for the weekend, or he called it
WC [Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina].
MF: Oh, yeah.
CB: And that was, you know, the thing to do because that's where all the girls were, and now
they're spread out all over the other campuses, so there's no reason to do that.
MF: To migrate to one school, yeah.
CB: [laughs] Right.
MF: There have always been a lot of town students at UNCG, and did they seem sort of
disconnected from the campus at all?
CB: Pretty much so. You know, I really didn't meet many of them. It's funny how I met Tim
because he was a town student, and I didn't—they usually hung out at the student union, and
I didn't. My course load kept me so busy.
MF: Yeah.
CB: So I met him through my roommate and her boyfriend. But yeah, they didn't seem to mix
tremendously just because, you know, I guess they were on and off campus, or they were up
at the student union where a lot of times we were not.
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MF: Yeah. What about student government? It seems that during that time student government
was sort of losing a lot of influence. And I've heard time and time again people who went to
school in the seventies saying they started out participating in student government and then
dropped out of it because it seemed like it wasn't going anywhere.
CB: Oh, gosh, I really don't remember that much about the student government. The—
MF: Yeah. Do you remember elections being a big thing at all or anything like that?
CB: Sometimes they would be, and sometimes they wouldn't and sometimes somebody would
run as a joke and—
MF: Yeah.
CB: —that sort of thing, but I really don't remember that much about student government per se.
MF: Yeah. What about—it was still a pretty new thing to have any sizeable minority population
on campus, and how did race relations seem to go? Do you remember anything?
CB: No, I don't remember any problems at UNCG with race relations. We had a—well the Shaw
House [Shaw Residence Hall] at that time was International House and —
MF: Yeah.
CB: —sometimes they would—like for Spring Fling and everything, we'd have, you know, a big
thing over in the quad—
MF: Yeah.
CB —in the evening or Saturday or something, and that was always really nice, and they would
always open up International House at that time, and that was good. I think the biggest thing,
though, was that the Neo-Black Society did make things a little difficult because they were
the only group that had space in the student union. Everybody else had to find space
elsewhere, had to get support elsewhere, but they were supported by our, you know, student
activity dollars, the Neo-Black Society was. And so I think that was the sore point for some
people.
MF: Yeah. There was some—I can't—I wish I could remember when it was, sometime in the
early seventies when there was a sit-in at the Administration Building about the Neo-Black
Society not letting white members in.
CB: That did not happen while I was there.
MF: Yeah, it might have been '72.
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CB: It might have been.
MF: Or '71. I can't remember when it was.
CB: Things were pretty calm when I was there. I think the streaking was in there my freshman
year.
MF: Oh, yeah.
CB: I remember that 'cause being in North Spencer Dorm[itory] down the main street of campus,
that's where they would streak up and down on motorcycles and everything. [laughs]
MF: Oh, no. [laughs]
CB: But that died out that year. That didn't last long.
MF: I guess campus police put an end to it pretty quick. Yeah, you can't have streakers [sic] on
campus.
CB: They really didn't do much about it. I think they just sort of let it die out.
MF: Yeah. What about Residential College? I know that that was still kind of a new idea with—
the Residential College. What do you remember? Do you remember much about that?
CB: No, I just remember that Mary Foust [Residence Hall] was Residential College, and that
some people had, you know—did stay in the dorm and take a lot of courses over there. I
didn't—there was no room in my major for that, and I really didn't look into it that much but
some of the people really enjoyed it. But I think it was for those mainly going through liberal
arts, and I think some people really enjoyed it and some people said, you know, some of the
courses they took just didn't seem to be in-depth, you know, and some of them were very in-depth,
so—
MF: What did you know about how Residential College worked? Like, for instance, some people
said they would get this little pamphlet in the mail before they went for orientation, sort of
explaining Residential College, the idea behind it.
CB: I remember getting something in the mail, you know, with all the stuff when I applied to
UNCG, and I read through it. And, as I said, I really didn't look into it because of what I
needed for my major. It just didn't—
MF: Yeah.
CB: —going through the home ec department in nutrition, you basically only had three extra
courses you could take as electives to make your major, you know, because everything else
was jam packed with the home ec courses you had to take and your—all your science
courses. I mean we had as many science courses as—I mean, if you could have counted the
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100 level courses, and in some majors you can, but not apparently in that major—they
wouldn't let us do it for a minor—we'd've [sic] had a minor in biology and a minor in
chemistry—so—and the labs were required, and I ended up taking more hours than I needed
to graduate because there were a couple of courses I wanted to take.
MF: Yeah.
CB: So, there was just no room to even look at anything that didn't meet the requirements.
MF: Yeah, wow—I didn't realize it was such a structured program.
CB: Extremely. There was just so much to meet so that you can meet requirements for—to
become, you know, be able—be possible to take the registration exam for dieticians.
MF: Oh, okay, I see. And then—so did you get a BS?
CB: Uh huh. It was a BS in home economics. It was a BSHE. I didn't know what it was until I
actually got my diploma. My ring just says BS on here on the inside because that's just what
I thought it was. I didn't know it was going to be—you know.
MF: Yeah. It was BS. [laughs]
CB: [laughs] In fact, it was funny at graduation because we stood up when they—you know, they
didn't tell us either, and we didn't know until after we got our diplomas, right. So they asked
all those with just a BS to stand up—you know how they graduate you in crowds.
MF: Yeah.
CB: And so they asked those with a Bachelor’s in Science to stand up, so we stood up then. And
then when they said Bachelor’s in Home Economics, we stood up too, so we got to stand up
twice. [laughs] And my class in the nutrition section was really small. There were only five
of us that year. It had been a big class before—the year before—and a big class the year
after, but my class was very tiny. And we were at the tail end, I think, before it went into the
nursing degree, so we were like five of us standing up on the back row.
MF: Yeah, how many were normal for that class instead of five?
CB: I think they usually had, like twenty-five or so.
MF: Oh, yeah. So that was really small.
CB: I'm not really sure but the class ahead of us was a large class. And it looked like the class
behind us, but because there were so many courses you had to take, and it basically went in
somewhat of an order, you didn't really get to meet all those other people. Now I had some
graduate students in some of my home ec classes because a lot of our classes were 500
levels.
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MF: Oh, okay.
CB: Yeah, so I had a lot of people who were, you know, coming back to school in this class and
some of my classes my last two years.
MF: I never realized that it was such a structured and really kind of complex degree.
CB: Oh, yeah, yeah. I just say it prepared you very well if you had just—the only thing I think
you needed to get any more would be just—I think that there could be a little bit more actual
experience gotten, but you couldn't do that in four years. And I felt very prepared coming out
of my undergraduate degree. Master’s degree, where I went somewhere else, was just
mainly—you did have more hands-on experience and that was the main difference, but I
think—knowledge background I felt very good coming out of UNCG.
MF: Yeah, with all the coursework you had to do, I bet. During the time you were at UNCG, Tate
Street was sort of—well the infamous Tate Street, you know. It had this real reputation. I
know that I hear people say that when they were freshmen they had this—their first dorm
meeting that they were warned not to hang out on Tate Street and stuff like that. And so I
wonder what kind of reputation did Tate Street have at the time you were there?
CB: There was no real big problem. You felt real comfortable going down there and The Corner,
the shop called The Corner, had all sort of nice things. They had the best card selection you
could find anywhere. And at that time too—well, I think at least my first year, if not second
year—there was the theater there was open and they played good movie, and so we could go
down there.
MF: Yeah.
CB: I was not one for beer bashes. I don't even like the smell of beer, and so sometimes when my
girlfriends and I—if we were on campus that weekend—would go down to the corner and
see a movie that evening to—you know, if it was in our dorm, and you couldn't think.
MF: Yeah.
CB: So we either planned to be off campus or do something. [laughs]
MF: Yeah, yeah. Sayin' [sic] that brings up another question I was gonna to [sic] ask you about is
that it wasn't until I think '68 or '69, I can't remember which year, that people were even
allowed to have alcohol on campus and what seemed to be sort of—you know, of course,
UNCG wasn't like you see in Animal House [1978 movie] or something—
CB: No.
MF: —but what seemed to be sort of the norm around for student life, as far as alcohol was
concerned?
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CB: I really didn't see much of it, except like at the beer bashes that you would find the whole
place coated in beer afterwards.
MF: Yeah.
CB: I mean you could—as you approached the dorm, like if you'd gone away on the weekend
and come back on Sunday afternoon, you know, it just reeked—
MF: Yeah.
CB: —before the cleaning crews got in there on Monday morning, but I think that was about it.
You didn't see people really sitting down and drinking or anything like that. At that time
when I first came there, there were still the older dorm mothers, and they were wonderful.
And we had—and then my second year we had a dorm mother—I think she was there maybe
two years at Mendenhall [Residence Hall], and then she retired, and then we had a graduate
student, but the dorm mothers that were at the dorms always—they were just wonderful, and
you could go talk to them if you were having a problem. They were just real sweet, and I
think a lot of the girls really respected them because they were helpful. They didn't come
down—you know, they weren't hard or matronly or anything like that. They were just really
wonderful, and we hated when our lady retired. She had to go have a hip operation. But even
the graduate student we had was good and—but they did not put up with the—with drugs or
anything like that. They made it very clear that that would not be tolerated. If they smelled
marijuana or anything like that, we'd have a dorm meeting, and they would say, "You know,
listen, this is illegal, and we don't want to see this or smell it or anything."
MF: Did any of that go on? Did you—did they have to have dorm meetings from time to time?
CB: It would just—it'd be basically like once a year.
MF: Yeah.
CB: Men's dorms seemed to be very different. They didn't seem to say anything over there. If you
walked through one of the men's dorms, a lot of times you'd think that you could—it just
seemed like a wave of marijuana.
MF: Yeah.
CB: I mean, you didn't—I didn't ever actually see any, but you could just smell it walking down
the hall. It was just a whole different atmosphere between the girls' dorms and the guys'
dorms. They were—they didn't seem to care whether girls spent the night over there or what.
MF: Yeah.
CB: You know, it was very free rein over there, and the women's dorms had, you know—they
were supposed to—men were supposed to be out by such and such a time each evening. It
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was longer hours on the weekends, but still they were supposed to be out by such hour, and I
thought that was pretty reasonable.
MF: Yeah.
CB: They really made, I think—made you feel safer, and also you didn't have to worry about, you
know, scooting down the hall to the bathroom so much—what you were going to encounter
in the hall. Every once in a while you would on a weekend, or you'd hear them in the shower
[laughs] next morning.
MF: Or see four feet in the shower, yeah.
CB: Yeah. But it wasn't real frequent.
MF: Yeah.
CB: And so—and overall, I think we had a good dorm of people, and it was—we had a lot of fun.
MF: What were some of the biggest changes you saw during the time you were a student there?
Because in the seventies, I mean it was sort of a time for—I don't like the word
"reorganization," but it was a time of still some change for UNCG—I guess trying to adapt
to becoming a university, co-educational, and integrated and, I mean, there were still some
changes drifting over from the sixties. What were some of the biggest changes you
remember?
CB: Well, as I said, I think the biggest thing was to see the larger increase of men on campus.
MF: Yeah.
CB: The freedoms that we did have—because I had some friends in smaller schools, you know,
they had curfews, and you know, sign in and out—
MF: Oh, yeah.
CB: And things like that we didn't have, and that did not change while I was there. You know,
those rules seemed to stay the same. So at that point in time, I think you had—you know,
going there as a freshman on, you had enough rules to make you feel comfortable and yet not
so that you would go wild. I mean some people did, you know, after I guess being very
structured at home.
MF: Yeah.
CB: My first semester one of the girls ran off to get married, you know, the first couple weeks of
school. And you’re going—[laughs] But things—at least to me—I was so involved with
schoolwork, you know. I was just not aware of a lot of the other things, but things seemed to
be pretty stable at that point in time. I know since then things have changed. They have
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become much more sports-oriented and things like that. And the—when we first went there,
there was only one fraternity, and they were a—
MF: Service fraternity.
CB: — service fraternity. And then, I guess it was either my junior or senior year they—a service
sorority started. And that seemed to change the atmosphere a little bit too. And since then I
know they have, you know, the regular social ones, and we were sort of proud of not having
the, you know, the social fraternities and sororities, because so many people get caught up in
that to the extent that the school is looked at as a party school or things like that—it was
always, "Well, "If you want a party school, you go to Appalachian [State University]. You
go to East Carolina [University]. We're serious here, and we're proud of being serious."
MF: Yeah.
CB: And the—all the things that you hear of the problems with the sororities and fraternities we
didn't have, and that was good. So when we heard about that, I didn't really think of that
being a positive change. [laughs]
MF: Yeah.
CB: And same thing with some of the things going on now about going more and more big-sports
oriented. I mean we have other teams in the state we can root for, and I'm not sure we
need another big football team or another; you know, big basketball team like—
MF: Yeah, I think basketball is what they're looking towards.
CB: Yeah, I think that's what they're looking for, too.
MF: With the Division I athletics. As far as I can tell there are no plans for football.
CB: Yeah. Not being on campus, I don't know.
MF: I don't know.
CB: They just seem to be going more and more that direction which—I mean, I think sports are
very, very good, and the areas we competed in were interesting and unusual. It's not one that
draws maybe tons of students or alumni like big basketball does and things like that, but I
mean we were always wonderful in soccer and a lot of the women's sports, and we had golf
teams and some of the more, I don't even know a good word for it at the moment, but just
more of the unusual-type things.
MF: More obscure.
CB: Yeah, but interesting things. I mean, everybody doesn't have to be a basketball star. [laughs]
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MF: Right. Yeah, that's a—
CB: I don't think you are going to be able to pull enough support away from Chapel Hill and
State and Duke [University] and—
MF: Not unless they're incredibly successful.
CB: —Wake Forest [University]. Yes, I know. They would just have to wow those people—I
mean just run all over them—to gain the support because I think people divided up over
those four schools and—
MF: Yeah, yeah, a fifth one would be kind of—I don't know. Yeah, they would have to be
incredibly successful.
CB: Mm hmm. And when you're talking about those type [sic] of teams, too, you're talking about
a lot of expense.
MF: Yeah, scholarships and stuff like that, too. Yeah. I guess they'll play in the [Greensboro]
Coliseum.
CB: I guess so.
MF: I don't know where else they would play.
CB: [laughs] I haven't been into the new gym facilities, so I don't know.
MF: I've been in there once, but haven't paid attention to the basketball courts. I wasn't thinking
about that at the time, so—. Is there anything you can think of that I might have left out,
something that you think would be real important to mention or—?
CB: No, I guess not really, but I think UNCG has done, overall, very well about changing with
the times and they are—I guess, as a whole, they try to listen. I mean there are times that we
were frustrated. For instance, I know [School of Home Economics] Dean [Naomi] Albanese
was very respected and she's very good, but one of the things that the nutrition department
was upset about was that we had not developed a program to continue toward getting a
registered dietician—become registered. And at that time the American Dietetic Association
was supporting what they called the CUP [?] program, which they do have now at UNCG,
but we had such good facilities to be able to have that program so much earlier, and East
Carolina, I think, was the first one in the state. In fact, my advisor from UNCG was asked by
East Carolina to develop it, and our whole department had become so frustrated that several
professors left the year after I graduated, and the head of the department had stepped down
because he was tired of fighting for it. And so East Carolina had it first, but here we had a
wonderful place to have it because we are so centrally located. We had the hospitals to use. I
mean we had all the hospitals in Winston[-Salem] to use, the hospitals here in Greensboro—
we could have even used the psychiatric facilities in Burlington to get so much experience.
There were nursing homes around here we could use—everything to be able to get
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experience for to have the CUP program.
MF: Yeah.
CB: And unfortunately, that was not her interest. Her interest was her—the girls going through
home ec education.
MF: Yeah.
CB: And that was the big department in the school—home economics, and they were the ones
who got the attention.
MF: Yeah.
CB: And I'm sure that has played a part in a lot of different departments earlier—
MF: Oh, sure, yeah.
CB: —or schools at UNCG.
MF: Yeah, I'm sure that happens everywhere, yeah. It just depends what the—what's important to
whoever the dean is.
CB: Mm hmm. But I know their graduate school, especially in business and in education has
grown a lot, so that people can work and go back to school. It's hard in some degrees. I don't
think you can do it in home economics either now.
MF: Yeah.
CB: I know you couldn't then. But I think they do try to reach out to the community.
MF: Yeah.
CB: Which I think is important to keep support.
MF: Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you.
[End of Interview]