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1 UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION INTERVIEWEE: Jane Linville Joyner INTERVIEWER: Missy Foy DATE: February 19, 1990 [Begin Side A] MF: If you could start by telling me a little bit about your education and what you've been doing since you were at UNC Greensboro [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. JJ: Well I went from Kernersville, which is only eighteen miles away from Greensboro, to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], but, of course, it was Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina], and I'm very proud of that, and never thought I'd go anywhere else. The only place I ever applied to because my mother [Lola Jessup Linville did not graduate.] had been there and graduated with a high school class that I think only had twenty-one people in it. So you can see the educational background was not tremendous. But my husband-to-be, William, went to Davidson [College, Davidson, North Carolina], and one of our friends went to RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institution, Troy, New York], and so you see, we went to good places and had had a good educational background, but it was perhaps not what my friends from Charlotte and Winston-Salem [both North Carolina cities] had quite had. And went to Greensboro for the four years, and then I went on to Columbia [University, New York, New York] and got a master’s [degree] there because I had gotten the Weil Fellowship when I graduated from Greensboro. I had really planned to go to Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina] to graduate school because Dr. [Leonard] Hurley, who was head of the English department, had gotten a scholarship for me down there. But then when I got the Weil Scholarship, that meant I could go to New York. And someone said to me—well in fact a friend who's the head of the English department here, said to me over the weekend, "Why did you go to Columbia?" And I said, "Well, I had had two cousins who had gone there, and so I knew I could go." And so that was why. And I stayed there only a year and got a master’s in English. MF: When was that? JJ: At Columbia University in New York. MF: When? 3 JJ: The very next year—'47. I graduated from UNCG in '46 and went to Columbia, got the master's there. And then the next year I went to Queens College in Charlotte and taught because by that time William, my husband-to-be, was back from the war [World War II, 1939-45 global war], and he was back at Davidson, so I wanted to go close to where he was. And I went over there. And I only stayed there one year because we decided that we would go ahead and get married. We came over to [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill then, and I taught in Durham High School while he was in med[ical] school here, but that was the year, the days of the two-year med school, so then we had to go somewhere else, and he went to Harvard [University, Cambridge, Massachusetts]. And we lived for two years in Boston, and I taught in the Brookline public schools, very good public schools. And I taught junior high English then, and that was a wonderful experience. Then when we came back from Boston, I did not teach anymore, but by that time I started having three children. So that was the teaching and educational pattern anyway. And since then I have been into lots of different things here in Chapel Hill, the years—. [laughs] Do you want to know what I've done? MF: Sure. JJ: I've played the organ. I've studied the organ and piano in addition to English. I majored in English in Greensboro. But I studied organ with Mr. Thompson (That was quite an experience.) in Greensboro. And so I was a church organist for years and years, about twenty-seven years to be exact, and that was quite a career. Right now my chief interest is in the public library. I'm chairman of the [Chapel Hill] Library Board of Trustees, and we're trying to build a new library. So we've been into that for several years because our bond issue we had in 1986 was not enough, and we're trying very hard now to get ready to have another bond issue so we can build the kind of library—. But it's a very long, drawn-out process. But that's the chief thing that I'm working on right now besides looking after my family and my husband and enjoying them. So we have—do you want me to tell you about my family? [laughs] MF: That's fine. JJ: Well we have three children. The oldest one is a journalist and works for the New York Times in New York City, and his wife (He got a degree from Columbia also after graduating from Brown [University, Providence, Rhode Island] and his wife is about to get a PhD from Columbia, and they have a little boy who's almost three and live in New York City on the west side, close to where I went to school when I went to Columbia.) So that's really been fun to be able to go back up there. Then our middle child is Janie [Joyner Alexander, Class of 1978], who is a nutritionist in public health. She has two little girls, and she has a husband who is in public health and is an epidemiologist/pediatrician. They are at CDC [Center for Disease Control] in Atlanta [Georgia]. And then our younger son is a lawyer graduated from Dartmouth [College, Hanover, New Hampshire] and [University of] Penn[sylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. And he is a young lawyer, not married, living over in Charlotte. So we're very proud of our family, of course. And they mean a lot. We spend a lot of energy with them too. 4 MF: I'm sure. JJ: So I guess—is that about it that you want from my background? MF: Okay, sure. Why don't you tell me what student life was like while you were an undergraduate at UNCG. JJ: Well as I look back on it, I do think that everything's colored by the fact that it was wartime. And I don't mean to make that sound as if it were oppressive because it was really not oppressive, even though all our boyfriends were—we were just very tied to going to the post office to try to find out what the news was from the boyfriend and where he was. But the fall of '42 when I went to Greensboro, it had not been a year since Pearl Harbor [December 7, 1941 surprise Japanese military strike on US Navy Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii], so we were fresh into the war at that time, and William had gone to Davidson. So he had one year at Davidson while I had my freshman year at Woman's College. So that year was a little more normal in that a lot of us who were in that freshman class, we did get to go to dances and things at other schools because our boyfriends, who were then just—see most of us were seventeen and eighteen, and they had not quite been drafted. So we got to go do things that year. But after that year when we got to be nineteen and they got to be nineteen, our sophomore year, they were all gone. Or if you had been dating someone who was older than you, they had gone that first year. And, of course, it made a great difference in campus life not to have the boyfriends coming in for weekend dates. Of course, that's so different from the way it is now with men on the campus because, of course, it was the women's college, and that was great. We enjoyed it being that way. And so everything really was colored by the fact that it was wartime. And I was trying to think of what did we do differently because of the war, and I think that one of the things that I remember most strongly was working in the dining room. We had to take turns working in the dining room. So—now I guess it is a job, and back then it was a job, and self-help students did work in the dining room to help pay their way. But during the war we all worked in the dining room, and that was an ordeal. [phone rings, recording paused] The dining facilities were four dining rooms, North and South and Spencer and I can't remember the name of the other one. North and South and Spencer. Well anyway there were four. And one of the things I can remember about war, it being wartime was that we had only a half pint of milk a day. So your little carton of milk, if you wanted it for breakfast, okay; if you wanted it, you could have it whenever you wanted to, but there was just one a day. That was rationed. And I remember sugar was rationed, so if you had your sugar for your coffee, then you didn't have it for your cereal. Anyway, there was a little bit of rationing there. But there was no hardship of any kind doing that, but I do remember that we enjoyed that little bit of impressed labor of fellowship of waiting on tables by dormitories because it was wartime and they needed that. 5 But you asked about student life, and the thing that I remember most was how proud we were of student government. It played a really—you talk about class organization, I don't think that the class played that great a part in our thinking. We were proud of class officers and there was a big deal about electing the president and all the campaigns that went on, but I think student government was the thing that we really were the proudest of. And if you participated in that, which everybody really did, and there was a great emphasis placed on electing those student government officers as there probably still is. But I was a junior house president, which was probably one of the most powerful positions on campus. And I suppose they still have a house president for each house and dormitory. But you were the boss; you were the person who really helped that group of people in that dormitory and looked after them along with the counselor who lived there, and that was a very wonderful experience, to do that. And I was house president of Hinshaw [Residence Hall], which looks over toward the gymnasium and the facilities there. It at that time housed two floors of what we called commercial students. They were there for the one year commercial course, and they were treated as freshmen, but they were studying a special course, and that course they don't have any more now. But then a third floor was just for regular freshmen. But that was a fun experience. And then my senior year I was vice president of student government, which meant I was chairman of the legislature, and that was just a very heady experience. [laughs] That was fun, you know. And we had the Horseshoe Room in the Alumni House. Are you familiar with what that is? MF: No. JJ: Down on the ground floor there was a wonderful room that belonged to student government, which, I think since, the administration has taken over for other things, and that's one of the bones of contention between alumni and the administration. But that room belonged to student government. It was for student government. And there was a beautiful horseshoe table that—where the judicial board was held and the legislature was held, and then student government had offices down there too, so that basement of the Alumni House was the headquarters for the student government and for publications, student publications too. So we were very early introduced to the Alumni House on the ground floor. [both laugh.] But the other building that I remember so well that is not there anymore that we really loved was the rattletrap old Students' Building, which was on the site of— it's hard to tell you exactly where it was—but adjoining that area where the Alumni House is now. And the old Students' Building had in its basement a bookstore and the post office. And, of course, the post office was so important to us all, and we all walked in to it from Walker Avenue, which, of course, was closed up, so the whole landscape there looks so different now. But the old Students' Building was something out of the very early, early days when my mother was there in the early days of Woman's College, and it had these marvelous, sort of mysterious, staged auditoriums upstairs that were really so antiquated, even in the forties when I was there, that they were really not used very much except by the societies. They would still hold their meetings there, but by the end the societies were not very important and, even though everybody was assigned to be a member of a society, there was not much importance attached to it, except that you knew that they 6 would put on the dance that year that you would go to. And it meant that people got elected to be officers, but there was not very much importance attached, even at that time, to societies—nothing like had been at earlier times. MF: How was it determined which society you got into? JJ: It was just purely by lot. They divided the whole freshman class up, and you were either an Adelphian or a Dikean or an Alethian or—I can't remember the other one. Anyway there were four. And I'm sure that—I don't know how they got dropped. Had you ever heard of them? MF: No. Only through interviewing former students. [both talking] JJ: I don't know what time, probably when they got interested in having sororities and fraternities. I don't know, but they were not important. They were not functioning societies, except that they put on one big dance a year [laughs] in Rosenthal Gymnasium, and it was not all that important. But they did furnish the marshals for—and marshals meant ushers—for all the events down in Aycock Auditorium. And they did elect those, so there would be about eight of the most beautiful girls from the Adelphian Society who would be marshals and from the others. So all those girls—oh we envied them greatly because they were always the prettiest ones, and they dressed up in their white gowns and put their stoles on, and they would come to supper dressed like that because they were going straight to Aycock to be the ushers for whatever big event was going on. And so that was one little bit of fluff, prestige, that we had then. I don't know when that was dropped. So let me see—what else I could tell you about student life. MF: What about—? JJ: We were serious about school. We studied and we worked, and we spent a good deal of time at it because, as I say, there were no men around, and that was what you had to do. And so it was not hard to concentrate on your work and to do well. And a lot of us had a long way to come, so we did. MF: Yes. What were classes like? JJ: Fairly formal lecture-type. I was an English major and took a lot of history and French. I did take the required science courses, but went through without ever taking a math course. You could take either math or science, and so I took biology and chemistry and never took a math course because I felt I was very ill-prepared for that, and I'm sure I was. I probably could have done it, but I didn't want to worry with it. And the English courses were all fairly formal lecture courses. The history courses were too. And not too much in the way of student participation until you got into a small group seminar, which 7 you didn't get in to until you were probably a senior. So it was—that probably has changed a good bit. MF: Yes. About what were the class sizes usually? JJ: Probably twenty-five or thirty. The basic courses probably had more than that, but the normal class, I would say twenty-five or thirty as I recollect it. I wouldn't swear to it. MF: Yes. What about choices of courses? [unclear] JJ: Well it never—it seemed to me it was very standard and that the choice I had was there in whatever my interests were could be satisfied. And I don't ever remember wanting to take a course that I couldn't take. It was not that you were shut out of a course—too many people had already registered. MF: Yes. How did the registration process work? Can you compare it to the present? JJ: I have no real recollection of registration being difficult. We went to the gymnasium with our cards to sign up. But I don't remember thinking that it was difficult. I remember sometimes you had to rearrange things, but it was no big hassle. And I watched the lines of students here, the way they're registered here now [coughs], and it seems to me that these kids here go through a tremendous amount of hassle to get into their courses. And I don't know whether it's like that in Greensboro now or not. But you know they line up for hours ahead and they make it sound as if it's an ordeal, but I don't remember that it was for us. MF: Do you remember if students generally worked their schedules around the courses they wanted to take or around the times courses were offered? JJ: Oh, I'm sure there was a lot of that. [laughs] I wouldn't take that course. MF: I mean did that seem to be the trend? JJ: I think that pretty much you had a required amount of courses to take. And if you were majoring in English, you had to have so many hours, so you'd pretty well have to take that course in Seventeenth Century [English], and it didn't matter when it was given. It certainly was not the kind of freedom that my son had at Brown [University], where he took whatever he wanted. He was in that last twenty-year experimental group at Brown where they took whatever they wanted, and they didn't have to take any grade at all either if they didn't want to. So it was not that kind of thing at all. [laughs] You had to maintain a certain amount, but I don't remember that people put on a great fuss about having to go to an eight o'clock [am] class, which we all did sooner or later. I know somebody's told you about the Tuesday chapel, required chapel? MF: No. 8 JJ: I don't know when chapel was dropped either, but every Tuesday at noontime the whole campus came to a halt and everybody went to chapel. And it was required, and there were checkers, so—I don't know what office, through what office this worked—but there was a person with a list checking every three or four rows, so if a seat was empty you knew what seat it was, and then it was turned, and you were called on the carpet if you had overextended your cuts. You had two or three cuts. But it was a required chapel program that was not very long, maybe thirty or forty minutes. And sometimes it was of a religious nature, and sometimes—but most times it was a speaker from probably part of the greater university. I remember that Billy Carmichael, who was the comptroller of the University [of North Carolina System], was always one who came every year, and his was always a fairly humorous talk. Sometimes it was the governor. But they were important people who had something to say, and they were programs that [unclear]. It was a wonderful lecture and concert series that we all had tickets to. And that was a night concert or a night lecture, but when you registered as a student, you had a concert ticket and you had a lecture series ticket. And people out in town had tickets too that they had paid for. Of course, ours had been paid for through student fees. And we got to see just wonderful concerts and hear great lectures. I never will forget, maybe about my sophomore year, my room—the symphony was coming, and I don't remember which symphony it was, but it was a good one. It would have been the Philadelphia. I mean, they were really good concerts. And I was trying to get my roommate to go with me to the symphony. She said she didn't think she'd go, she went last year. She had been. [laughs] She didn't need to go again. But I roomed with the same girl all four years, which is fairly unusual I think. MF: Well, what was dorm life like? JJ: Well, it didn't seem anything very unusual. [laughs] We had—as I said, the house president was a very important person, and when I went into Cotten Dorm, I lived on the second floor, and the house president and her roommate lived down at the end of the hall, so that was great. We enjoyed knowing that girl who was a junior. Her roommate was a junior. But some of those friends you made in your freshman dorm were your best friends, and they were your best friends always, and there are two or three that I still see. So it was fun. We enjoyed the people there. But at ten o'clock [pm] you had to be in the dorm. You had to be back from studying on the campus, and if you were going to be gone during that study period, you had to sign out to say that you were going to the library or you were going somewhere in particular. There was no freedom about your movement off of campus. You had to say where you were going. You could go downtown, but you had to sign out and sign back in. If you didn't do it, that was a sin. [laughs] MF: What would happen? JJ: You were called on the carpet about it before the house judicial board or—and if it were something more serious, then you were called before the real campus judicial board. But we did not have the freedom of movement that girls have and the boys have now. And at ten o'clock [pm] you had to come back in, and at eleven o'clock [pm] lights were out supposedly. [laughs] Supposedly. 9 But I did want to tell you about when [Franklin D.] Roosevelt [32nd president of the United States] died. Let's see, I would have been a junior, so I guess that—I don't really remember that, connecting it with living in Hinshaw [Residence Hall] and being house president that year, but I guess that was the year. But the campus was very, very much affected by Roosevelt's death, as everybody was. And my husband at that time was in France. That was the winter he had spent in a dugout. He was in the infantry. He was a young private and then a sergeant in the infantry. And he had—was there, and he was talking the other night about how affected the soldiers were by Roosevelt's death because this was within two or three weeks of the war being over in Europe. But Roosevelt was the one who had negotiated with [Sir Winston] Churchill [prime minister of the United Kingdom] and [Joseph] Stalin [premier of the Soviet Union], and everybody put a good deal of stock in the fact that this was the leader, and we were in war. And when he died at Warm Springs [Georgia]—the funeral cortege, the train, came up very slowly through Georgia and through South Carolina, and it came through Greensboro. It was going to be in the middle of the night. And so it didn't dawn on me that I could go down to the train station. But the next morning I woke up and heard a whole lot of my friends, and it may have been because I was separated from them because my roommate and I were living in a freshman dormitory. They had all been to the train station to see the funeral train come through. And I was just furious that I had missed this, and I had missed out on a world-shaking event, and I can remember how disappointed I was that I had not known that you could do that. And I guess I just hadn't been with them to know. But I remember that as being one of the great disappointments in my career that I didn't go to see the funeral train. And I was reminded of that when we visited Warm Springs just this last fall down in Georgia, a very interesting place to visit. And to hear about Roosevelt and his being there with his lady friend, whom they hushed and got away before the—everybody found out that he had died. If you ever go to Warm Springs, it is an interesting place to visit, particularly for a historian. [laughs] MF: Yes. How was the campus affected by his death? JJ: That's all I remember. I really don't remember anything else, but we were so proud of Miss Elliott, Harriet Elliott [history and political science faculty, dean of women]. Has anyone else told you about Harriet Elliott who was the dean? We were just really proud of her. She was such an outstanding woman, and she really inspired all the girls, the women, on campus to really try to be something, and she was really quite popular. And we were so proud of the fact that she had left the campus and had gone to Washington [DC] to work during the war [Consumer Commissioner on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense (1940-1941), Chairman of the Woman's Division of the War Finance Committee (1942-1946), Deputy Director of the Office of Price Administration, and US delegate to the UN Conference on Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in London in 1945]. And so she was not there part of the time, but I don't remember her being gone all of the time because I knew her well. I remember the year I was junior house president, she invited me and my roommate to come down, and she would—we would have pancakes or waffles or whatever on Sunday night. So she was the kind of person who would do that. But I remember being particularly impressed that she had given a great speech on the steps of the New York 10 Public library on behalf—she went to Washington I think to head up the women's division of selling victory bonds. I think that was what it was. I don't remember the title. Has any else told you what her title was? She worked selling victory bonds was what she was doing, and it was heading some sort of women's division. But I remember being so impressed and particularly when I went to New York as a graduate student after my senior year, the next year, and did work there in the New York Public Library and walked up those steps between the lions. Have you ever seen the New York Public Library with the lions on either side? MF: Yes. JJ: And to think that Miss Elliott had given a speech there. And we really were inspired by the leaders. She was wonderful. And Dr. [Walter Clinton] Jackson [chancellor] was such a warm person and was so approachable. Of course, that was my feeling. Maybe people who weren't active in student government didn't feel that they could talk to him, but he seemed to me to be that kind of person. And, of course, Dr. [Frank Porter] Graham was president of UNC, of the greater university, and he was such an outstanding person. But we really did—were inspired by the leaders, and I think felt a great kinship with them that maybe students now don't feel with their chancellors and presidents. Maybe they do. [laughs] I don't know. MF: You were starting to talk a little bit about student and faculty relationships. How would you characterize student/faculty relationships say within—well, you were in the English department? JJ: Well, I think that basically I would have to say that they were fairly formal. I do remember going to homes of faculty maybe—Dr. Hurley, I remember, had all the English majors to his house. He was a very formal person, but nevertheless he did have us to his house. I can remember one time, but he was not a person that I could say was a very warm kind of person, though he was a great teacher. I remember going to Miss [Nettie Sue] Tillet's apartment once because she taught what we called a coordinating course. All the English majors had to take this course that sort of drew together, a bit of a survey their senior year, drawing together all their courses I guess in preparation for—. I can't really remember what kind of a coordinating exam we had, but there was something— and I remember she entertained us maybe once. I remember that the painter who was just a great fellow—he was a very snazzy little fellow with a mustache, and he had been our advisor at the legislature, so I knew him fairly well. I remember his entertaining student groups, but I was never in these homes, maybe one time, you know. It's a fairly formal kind of relationship. Never calling them by their first names, and usually I'm sure they would call us Miss Linville or so and so. It was a fairly formal kind of relationship. And as I hear things reported now, I think things on that scale have changed a good bit. MF: Yes, I would have to say [unclear]. JJ: I remember when we were at Dartmouth [College] for Matt's, our younger son's, graduation, the fellow who had supervised his honors paper or course, whatever, was a 11 fairly young fellow. And he was on a first name basis with all these kids when we had a dinner at Matt's house, and I thought, "Good gracious. That wasn't like Miss Tillet," [laughs] my senior coordinating person. It's very different. MF: Some of the traditions that they had at the Woman’s College—do you remember any of the traditions? JJ: Let me see what I can think about. We always had a class banner. We had a class song. We had a class banner and we had a class song, and the class song always was written by the two or three really good music majors in your class. Did you have a class song? It was pretty tacky. I mean, it was not the highest class of music, but the girls did real well. And I think the colors—our class was a certain color. Do they hand the colors down still? MF: No. JJ: Well we were the— MF: I think it's more in the alumni paper than anything else. JJ: Well, we were a green and white class. The class next to us above us was a red class, red and white. And so our class jackets were all green. The class above us had jackets that were red with a seal on the pocket. Do they have class jackets? MF: No, not that I know of. I think that stopped in the early seventies. [phone rings] JJ: Let's see, what other traditions? You mentioned the Daisy Chain. And I did not work on the Daisy Chain, but the sister class, which would mean sophomores, did the Daisy Chain for their seniors. And they stayed over after exams for the commencement period, and they went out and they got daisies. And at that time it was daisy time because commencement—I remember my commencement was June 3rd. Now commencement is earlier than that, and I'm not sure daisies would be in full bloom. But they would go out in the country to fields and they would get daisies, and they made a daisy chain by bunching daisies and roping them together on a big rope and then using them for the procession for the seniors to march through. It was a very nice custom. But I can remember at my commencement the Daisy Chain, having been held by the sophomores, and we marched through and we went into Aycock Auditorium. And after we had gone through, they put forty-six made out of the daisy chain out on the lawn in front of Aycock Auditorium. I just had that picture in my mind of that forty-six being made by the daisy chain. Then by that time it had been in service probably two days, two or three days, and it was limp as it could be [laughs]. And it was used also for the class day program. We had a class day program on the front lawn, front campus, in front of—we called it the Administration Building, but now you call it— MF: Mossman? JJ: —that's the new building. 12 MF: Right. JJ: No, I'm talking about the old building over in front of the Alumni House. MF: Foust? JJ: Foust. That was the administration building, and it has since received the name—but in that front lawn with that swag, that's where the class day exercises were held, and because it was sort of a natural amphitheater. And I don't remember too much about class day exercises, except that we had elected a speaker to speak and then the class officers did some things. I don't remember much about what went on. Must not have been that important. [laughs] MF: Let me see what else I can— JJ: Well, we all looked alike. We all had long hair. We all wore skirts and sweaters and a lot of pearls—pearls and a sweater and a skirt and saddle shoes. In looking at the pictures, that's pretty much it. And we all had hairdos that looked alike. And we all looked alike, you know [laughs]. So if you looked a little bit different, you really did stand out. And most of the girls were from North Carolina. Obviously there were girls from out of state. New Jersey was one of the states that has always sent several out-of-state girls, but there was a quota, and there were just so many out of state students. Not too many, but most everyone was from North Carolina. And at that time women did not come to the university at Chapel Hill [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] here as freshmen, so this meant that the Greensboro campus had really the cream of the crop of the women in North Carolina. And it was the place to go to school, somewhat because of the idea of public education, but also I think because it was a bargain. And unless your family were great devotees of private schools and private education, then this is where you would go. Several of the girls did transfer down here but, by and large, they came and they stayed. And there's hardly—at that time, there was hardly a little town in North Carolina where I could go that I wouldn't know somebody. MF: Right. JJ: So it was a very broadening experience. MF: I know they—in the sixties they did away with a lot of the so called parietal rules. Do you know much about those? The regulations on campus? JJ: Well I think the signing in and out, and, was [unclear] the fact that you had to say where you were, and— MF: What about as far as weekends? 13 JJ: Yes. You had to have permission from home to say that you were going home for a weekend. So there was never the possibility that they could say, "Well she went off somewhere, and we didn't know about it. "So I'm pretty sure that we had to have a note from home in order to go for a weekend. There was permission that had to come to the counselor. And counselors were interesting characters too. And several counselors also served as faculty, but several of them were just counselors, and they were very nice, interesting women. MF: How so? JJ: Well Mrs. [Annie Fulton] Carter [Class of 1921] was the counselor in Cotten Dormitory. She was someone everybody knew, and she was a lady from the old school who was from Walnut Cove, North Carolina. Annie Fulton Carter, she had been widowed early and she was an alumna of the university, and she had come back there to work. And she was just a really nice, demanding lady, who demanded that her girls behave themselves. And I remember that when I got ready to go to graduate school the next year to Columbia, she was also going to Teacher's College at Columbia to do a master's degree, very belatedly. I have the feeling that maybe some grandfather rules had come and said that all the counselors had to have at least a master’s in counseling or something like that. So as an older woman, she was going to teacher's college, and I remember we rode the train together, leaving Greensboro very late at night on an overnight train because it would be companionship for us both. But we were both going to Columbia that year. And she was in residence at Teacher's College while I was in Johnson Hall. But that was nice to have her there. She was a very nice person. And Maxine Garner [Smith, Commercial Class of 1946] was a very outstanding counselor, and also she was director of religious activities on the campus. And she was a counselor in Shaw Dormitory on the front of the campus where I lived as a sophomore. And I had a letter from her not terribly long ago which was real interesting. I hadn't heard anything about her, but she's back at home somewhere. I believe it's Liberty, North Carolina. But she had seen my name put to a letter in the book review section of the New York Times. I had written a letter to the editor telling they didn't say something right. And she saw my name there and wrote a letter to me and said—she was just interested to see my name there. And I hadn't heard from Miss Garner in years and years. But she was an outstanding person. And of course Katherine Taylor [Class of 1928, dean of women, dean of students, dean of student services, director of Elliott Hall] was a counselor also who acted as dean while Miss Elliott was gone. And she was a French professor. She lives in Greensboro now. Have you heard her name mentioned? MF: Yes, but I didn't realize she was a French professor. JJ: Yes. She taught French. So some of them taught, and some were just counselors. Let me see. I'm trying to think of anything else I need to tell you. MF: Were there any dorms that were more desirable to get into? JJ: Oh yes. A dorm would get a reputation that it had all the great girls, and it really was a 14 hot number, and you tried to get into that dorm. And you had to draw for a space in a dorm if there were more people wanting to get into the dorm than not. But it was all your point of view. Maybe some thought—but definitely in my crowd Weil and Winfield [Residence Halls] were the places to live as upperclassmen after you'd gotten out of the freshman quadrangle. We were all in that freshman quadrangle, which I'm sure is not a freshman quadrangle any more. But Grey, Cotten, Coit, Hinshaw [Residence Halls] and then, what was the other one? MF: Jamison [Residence Hall]? JJ: Jamison, yes MF: Yes. Jamison is still freshmen. JJ: It is? MF: I think. JJ: Well, are freshmen segregated now still? MF: There are still a couple of dorms that they specify only freshmen, but they don't have to stay there. JJ: Well there was the freshman quadrangle of those six dorms there, and I felt very lucky to get into Cotten because Cotten was supposed to be very desirable. And then—when you came to be a junior house president, it was great if you could be a house president in Cotten. That would have been— [End of Interview]
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Title | Oral history interview with Jane Linville Joyner, 1990 [text/print transcript] |
Date | 1990-02-19 |
Creator | Joyner, Jane Linville |
Contributors | Foy, Missy |
Subject headings | University of North Carolina at Greensboro |
Topics |
Teachers UNCG Troops World War II |
Place | Greensboro (N.C.) |
Description | Jane Linville Joyner (1925-2002) received a Bachelor of Arts in English Phi Beta Kappa from the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1946. She received the Weil Fellowship for graduate study. Joyner recalls the prestige of attending Woman's College, the quality of her education and attending Columbia University. She describes campus life during World War II, the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, serving in student government and being a junior house president. She talks about campus traditions, such as Daisy Chain and Tuesday Chapel, the students' pride in Dean Harriet Elliott, faculty relationships, dormitory counselors and life on the freshman quad. |
Type | Text |
Original format | Interviews |
Original publisher | Greensboro, N.C. : The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. University Libraries |
Contributing institution | Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries |
Source collection | OH003 UNCG Centennial Oral History Project |
Rights statement | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/ |
Additional rights information | NO COPYRIGHT - UNITED STATES. This item has been determined to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The user is responsible for determining actual copyright status for any reuse of the material. |
Object ID | OH003.087 |
Digital publisher | The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University Libraries, PO Box 26170, Greensboro NC 27402-6170, 336.334.5304 |
Full Text | 1 UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION INTERVIEWEE: Jane Linville Joyner INTERVIEWER: Missy Foy DATE: February 19, 1990 [Begin Side A] MF: If you could start by telling me a little bit about your education and what you've been doing since you were at UNC Greensboro [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. JJ: Well I went from Kernersville, which is only eighteen miles away from Greensboro, to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], but, of course, it was Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina], and I'm very proud of that, and never thought I'd go anywhere else. The only place I ever applied to because my mother [Lola Jessup Linville did not graduate.] had been there and graduated with a high school class that I think only had twenty-one people in it. So you can see the educational background was not tremendous. But my husband-to-be, William, went to Davidson [College, Davidson, North Carolina], and one of our friends went to RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institution, Troy, New York], and so you see, we went to good places and had had a good educational background, but it was perhaps not what my friends from Charlotte and Winston-Salem [both North Carolina cities] had quite had. And went to Greensboro for the four years, and then I went on to Columbia [University, New York, New York] and got a master’s [degree] there because I had gotten the Weil Fellowship when I graduated from Greensboro. I had really planned to go to Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina] to graduate school because Dr. [Leonard] Hurley, who was head of the English department, had gotten a scholarship for me down there. But then when I got the Weil Scholarship, that meant I could go to New York. And someone said to me—well in fact a friend who's the head of the English department here, said to me over the weekend, "Why did you go to Columbia?" And I said, "Well, I had had two cousins who had gone there, and so I knew I could go." And so that was why. And I stayed there only a year and got a master’s in English. MF: When was that? JJ: At Columbia University in New York. MF: When? 3 JJ: The very next year—'47. I graduated from UNCG in '46 and went to Columbia, got the master's there. And then the next year I went to Queens College in Charlotte and taught because by that time William, my husband-to-be, was back from the war [World War II, 1939-45 global war], and he was back at Davidson, so I wanted to go close to where he was. And I went over there. And I only stayed there one year because we decided that we would go ahead and get married. We came over to [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill then, and I taught in Durham High School while he was in med[ical] school here, but that was the year, the days of the two-year med school, so then we had to go somewhere else, and he went to Harvard [University, Cambridge, Massachusetts]. And we lived for two years in Boston, and I taught in the Brookline public schools, very good public schools. And I taught junior high English then, and that was a wonderful experience. Then when we came back from Boston, I did not teach anymore, but by that time I started having three children. So that was the teaching and educational pattern anyway. And since then I have been into lots of different things here in Chapel Hill, the years—. [laughs] Do you want to know what I've done? MF: Sure. JJ: I've played the organ. I've studied the organ and piano in addition to English. I majored in English in Greensboro. But I studied organ with Mr. Thompson (That was quite an experience.) in Greensboro. And so I was a church organist for years and years, about twenty-seven years to be exact, and that was quite a career. Right now my chief interest is in the public library. I'm chairman of the [Chapel Hill] Library Board of Trustees, and we're trying to build a new library. So we've been into that for several years because our bond issue we had in 1986 was not enough, and we're trying very hard now to get ready to have another bond issue so we can build the kind of library—. But it's a very long, drawn-out process. But that's the chief thing that I'm working on right now besides looking after my family and my husband and enjoying them. So we have—do you want me to tell you about my family? [laughs] MF: That's fine. JJ: Well we have three children. The oldest one is a journalist and works for the New York Times in New York City, and his wife (He got a degree from Columbia also after graduating from Brown [University, Providence, Rhode Island] and his wife is about to get a PhD from Columbia, and they have a little boy who's almost three and live in New York City on the west side, close to where I went to school when I went to Columbia.) So that's really been fun to be able to go back up there. Then our middle child is Janie [Joyner Alexander, Class of 1978], who is a nutritionist in public health. She has two little girls, and she has a husband who is in public health and is an epidemiologist/pediatrician. They are at CDC [Center for Disease Control] in Atlanta [Georgia]. And then our younger son is a lawyer graduated from Dartmouth [College, Hanover, New Hampshire] and [University of] Penn[sylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. And he is a young lawyer, not married, living over in Charlotte. So we're very proud of our family, of course. And they mean a lot. We spend a lot of energy with them too. 4 MF: I'm sure. JJ: So I guess—is that about it that you want from my background? MF: Okay, sure. Why don't you tell me what student life was like while you were an undergraduate at UNCG. JJ: Well as I look back on it, I do think that everything's colored by the fact that it was wartime. And I don't mean to make that sound as if it were oppressive because it was really not oppressive, even though all our boyfriends were—we were just very tied to going to the post office to try to find out what the news was from the boyfriend and where he was. But the fall of '42 when I went to Greensboro, it had not been a year since Pearl Harbor [December 7, 1941 surprise Japanese military strike on US Navy Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii], so we were fresh into the war at that time, and William had gone to Davidson. So he had one year at Davidson while I had my freshman year at Woman's College. So that year was a little more normal in that a lot of us who were in that freshman class, we did get to go to dances and things at other schools because our boyfriends, who were then just—see most of us were seventeen and eighteen, and they had not quite been drafted. So we got to go do things that year. But after that year when we got to be nineteen and they got to be nineteen, our sophomore year, they were all gone. Or if you had been dating someone who was older than you, they had gone that first year. And, of course, it made a great difference in campus life not to have the boyfriends coming in for weekend dates. Of course, that's so different from the way it is now with men on the campus because, of course, it was the women's college, and that was great. We enjoyed it being that way. And so everything really was colored by the fact that it was wartime. And I was trying to think of what did we do differently because of the war, and I think that one of the things that I remember most strongly was working in the dining room. We had to take turns working in the dining room. So—now I guess it is a job, and back then it was a job, and self-help students did work in the dining room to help pay their way. But during the war we all worked in the dining room, and that was an ordeal. [phone rings, recording paused] The dining facilities were four dining rooms, North and South and Spencer and I can't remember the name of the other one. North and South and Spencer. Well anyway there were four. And one of the things I can remember about war, it being wartime was that we had only a half pint of milk a day. So your little carton of milk, if you wanted it for breakfast, okay; if you wanted it, you could have it whenever you wanted to, but there was just one a day. That was rationed. And I remember sugar was rationed, so if you had your sugar for your coffee, then you didn't have it for your cereal. Anyway, there was a little bit of rationing there. But there was no hardship of any kind doing that, but I do remember that we enjoyed that little bit of impressed labor of fellowship of waiting on tables by dormitories because it was wartime and they needed that. 5 But you asked about student life, and the thing that I remember most was how proud we were of student government. It played a really—you talk about class organization, I don't think that the class played that great a part in our thinking. We were proud of class officers and there was a big deal about electing the president and all the campaigns that went on, but I think student government was the thing that we really were the proudest of. And if you participated in that, which everybody really did, and there was a great emphasis placed on electing those student government officers as there probably still is. But I was a junior house president, which was probably one of the most powerful positions on campus. And I suppose they still have a house president for each house and dormitory. But you were the boss; you were the person who really helped that group of people in that dormitory and looked after them along with the counselor who lived there, and that was a very wonderful experience, to do that. And I was house president of Hinshaw [Residence Hall], which looks over toward the gymnasium and the facilities there. It at that time housed two floors of what we called commercial students. They were there for the one year commercial course, and they were treated as freshmen, but they were studying a special course, and that course they don't have any more now. But then a third floor was just for regular freshmen. But that was a fun experience. And then my senior year I was vice president of student government, which meant I was chairman of the legislature, and that was just a very heady experience. [laughs] That was fun, you know. And we had the Horseshoe Room in the Alumni House. Are you familiar with what that is? MF: No. JJ: Down on the ground floor there was a wonderful room that belonged to student government, which, I think since, the administration has taken over for other things, and that's one of the bones of contention between alumni and the administration. But that room belonged to student government. It was for student government. And there was a beautiful horseshoe table that—where the judicial board was held and the legislature was held, and then student government had offices down there too, so that basement of the Alumni House was the headquarters for the student government and for publications, student publications too. So we were very early introduced to the Alumni House on the ground floor. [both laugh.] But the other building that I remember so well that is not there anymore that we really loved was the rattletrap old Students' Building, which was on the site of— it's hard to tell you exactly where it was—but adjoining that area where the Alumni House is now. And the old Students' Building had in its basement a bookstore and the post office. And, of course, the post office was so important to us all, and we all walked in to it from Walker Avenue, which, of course, was closed up, so the whole landscape there looks so different now. But the old Students' Building was something out of the very early, early days when my mother was there in the early days of Woman's College, and it had these marvelous, sort of mysterious, staged auditoriums upstairs that were really so antiquated, even in the forties when I was there, that they were really not used very much except by the societies. They would still hold their meetings there, but by the end the societies were not very important and, even though everybody was assigned to be a member of a society, there was not much importance attached to it, except that you knew that they 6 would put on the dance that year that you would go to. And it meant that people got elected to be officers, but there was not very much importance attached, even at that time, to societies—nothing like had been at earlier times. MF: How was it determined which society you got into? JJ: It was just purely by lot. They divided the whole freshman class up, and you were either an Adelphian or a Dikean or an Alethian or—I can't remember the other one. Anyway there were four. And I'm sure that—I don't know how they got dropped. Had you ever heard of them? MF: No. Only through interviewing former students. [both talking] JJ: I don't know what time, probably when they got interested in having sororities and fraternities. I don't know, but they were not important. They were not functioning societies, except that they put on one big dance a year [laughs] in Rosenthal Gymnasium, and it was not all that important. But they did furnish the marshals for—and marshals meant ushers—for all the events down in Aycock Auditorium. And they did elect those, so there would be about eight of the most beautiful girls from the Adelphian Society who would be marshals and from the others. So all those girls—oh we envied them greatly because they were always the prettiest ones, and they dressed up in their white gowns and put their stoles on, and they would come to supper dressed like that because they were going straight to Aycock to be the ushers for whatever big event was going on. And so that was one little bit of fluff, prestige, that we had then. I don't know when that was dropped. So let me see—what else I could tell you about student life. MF: What about—? JJ: We were serious about school. We studied and we worked, and we spent a good deal of time at it because, as I say, there were no men around, and that was what you had to do. And so it was not hard to concentrate on your work and to do well. And a lot of us had a long way to come, so we did. MF: Yes. What were classes like? JJ: Fairly formal lecture-type. I was an English major and took a lot of history and French. I did take the required science courses, but went through without ever taking a math course. You could take either math or science, and so I took biology and chemistry and never took a math course because I felt I was very ill-prepared for that, and I'm sure I was. I probably could have done it, but I didn't want to worry with it. And the English courses were all fairly formal lecture courses. The history courses were too. And not too much in the way of student participation until you got into a small group seminar, which 7 you didn't get in to until you were probably a senior. So it was—that probably has changed a good bit. MF: Yes. About what were the class sizes usually? JJ: Probably twenty-five or thirty. The basic courses probably had more than that, but the normal class, I would say twenty-five or thirty as I recollect it. I wouldn't swear to it. MF: Yes. What about choices of courses? [unclear] JJ: Well it never—it seemed to me it was very standard and that the choice I had was there in whatever my interests were could be satisfied. And I don't ever remember wanting to take a course that I couldn't take. It was not that you were shut out of a course—too many people had already registered. MF: Yes. How did the registration process work? Can you compare it to the present? JJ: I have no real recollection of registration being difficult. We went to the gymnasium with our cards to sign up. But I don't remember thinking that it was difficult. I remember sometimes you had to rearrange things, but it was no big hassle. And I watched the lines of students here, the way they're registered here now [coughs], and it seems to me that these kids here go through a tremendous amount of hassle to get into their courses. And I don't know whether it's like that in Greensboro now or not. But you know they line up for hours ahead and they make it sound as if it's an ordeal, but I don't remember that it was for us. MF: Do you remember if students generally worked their schedules around the courses they wanted to take or around the times courses were offered? JJ: Oh, I'm sure there was a lot of that. [laughs] I wouldn't take that course. MF: I mean did that seem to be the trend? JJ: I think that pretty much you had a required amount of courses to take. And if you were majoring in English, you had to have so many hours, so you'd pretty well have to take that course in Seventeenth Century [English], and it didn't matter when it was given. It certainly was not the kind of freedom that my son had at Brown [University], where he took whatever he wanted. He was in that last twenty-year experimental group at Brown where they took whatever they wanted, and they didn't have to take any grade at all either if they didn't want to. So it was not that kind of thing at all. [laughs] You had to maintain a certain amount, but I don't remember that people put on a great fuss about having to go to an eight o'clock [am] class, which we all did sooner or later. I know somebody's told you about the Tuesday chapel, required chapel? MF: No. 8 JJ: I don't know when chapel was dropped either, but every Tuesday at noontime the whole campus came to a halt and everybody went to chapel. And it was required, and there were checkers, so—I don't know what office, through what office this worked—but there was a person with a list checking every three or four rows, so if a seat was empty you knew what seat it was, and then it was turned, and you were called on the carpet if you had overextended your cuts. You had two or three cuts. But it was a required chapel program that was not very long, maybe thirty or forty minutes. And sometimes it was of a religious nature, and sometimes—but most times it was a speaker from probably part of the greater university. I remember that Billy Carmichael, who was the comptroller of the University [of North Carolina System], was always one who came every year, and his was always a fairly humorous talk. Sometimes it was the governor. But they were important people who had something to say, and they were programs that [unclear]. It was a wonderful lecture and concert series that we all had tickets to. And that was a night concert or a night lecture, but when you registered as a student, you had a concert ticket and you had a lecture series ticket. And people out in town had tickets too that they had paid for. Of course, ours had been paid for through student fees. And we got to see just wonderful concerts and hear great lectures. I never will forget, maybe about my sophomore year, my room—the symphony was coming, and I don't remember which symphony it was, but it was a good one. It would have been the Philadelphia. I mean, they were really good concerts. And I was trying to get my roommate to go with me to the symphony. She said she didn't think she'd go, she went last year. She had been. [laughs] She didn't need to go again. But I roomed with the same girl all four years, which is fairly unusual I think. MF: Well, what was dorm life like? JJ: Well, it didn't seem anything very unusual. [laughs] We had—as I said, the house president was a very important person, and when I went into Cotten Dorm, I lived on the second floor, and the house president and her roommate lived down at the end of the hall, so that was great. We enjoyed knowing that girl who was a junior. Her roommate was a junior. But some of those friends you made in your freshman dorm were your best friends, and they were your best friends always, and there are two or three that I still see. So it was fun. We enjoyed the people there. But at ten o'clock [pm] you had to be in the dorm. You had to be back from studying on the campus, and if you were going to be gone during that study period, you had to sign out to say that you were going to the library or you were going somewhere in particular. There was no freedom about your movement off of campus. You had to say where you were going. You could go downtown, but you had to sign out and sign back in. If you didn't do it, that was a sin. [laughs] MF: What would happen? JJ: You were called on the carpet about it before the house judicial board or—and if it were something more serious, then you were called before the real campus judicial board. But we did not have the freedom of movement that girls have and the boys have now. And at ten o'clock [pm] you had to come back in, and at eleven o'clock [pm] lights were out supposedly. [laughs] Supposedly. 9 But I did want to tell you about when [Franklin D.] Roosevelt [32nd president of the United States] died. Let's see, I would have been a junior, so I guess that—I don't really remember that, connecting it with living in Hinshaw [Residence Hall] and being house president that year, but I guess that was the year. But the campus was very, very much affected by Roosevelt's death, as everybody was. And my husband at that time was in France. That was the winter he had spent in a dugout. He was in the infantry. He was a young private and then a sergeant in the infantry. And he had—was there, and he was talking the other night about how affected the soldiers were by Roosevelt's death because this was within two or three weeks of the war being over in Europe. But Roosevelt was the one who had negotiated with [Sir Winston] Churchill [prime minister of the United Kingdom] and [Joseph] Stalin [premier of the Soviet Union], and everybody put a good deal of stock in the fact that this was the leader, and we were in war. And when he died at Warm Springs [Georgia]—the funeral cortege, the train, came up very slowly through Georgia and through South Carolina, and it came through Greensboro. It was going to be in the middle of the night. And so it didn't dawn on me that I could go down to the train station. But the next morning I woke up and heard a whole lot of my friends, and it may have been because I was separated from them because my roommate and I were living in a freshman dormitory. They had all been to the train station to see the funeral train come through. And I was just furious that I had missed this, and I had missed out on a world-shaking event, and I can remember how disappointed I was that I had not known that you could do that. And I guess I just hadn't been with them to know. But I remember that as being one of the great disappointments in my career that I didn't go to see the funeral train. And I was reminded of that when we visited Warm Springs just this last fall down in Georgia, a very interesting place to visit. And to hear about Roosevelt and his being there with his lady friend, whom they hushed and got away before the—everybody found out that he had died. If you ever go to Warm Springs, it is an interesting place to visit, particularly for a historian. [laughs] MF: Yes. How was the campus affected by his death? JJ: That's all I remember. I really don't remember anything else, but we were so proud of Miss Elliott, Harriet Elliott [history and political science faculty, dean of women]. Has anyone else told you about Harriet Elliott who was the dean? We were just really proud of her. She was such an outstanding woman, and she really inspired all the girls, the women, on campus to really try to be something, and she was really quite popular. And we were so proud of the fact that she had left the campus and had gone to Washington [DC] to work during the war [Consumer Commissioner on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense (1940-1941), Chairman of the Woman's Division of the War Finance Committee (1942-1946), Deputy Director of the Office of Price Administration, and US delegate to the UN Conference on Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in London in 1945]. And so she was not there part of the time, but I don't remember her being gone all of the time because I knew her well. I remember the year I was junior house president, she invited me and my roommate to come down, and she would—we would have pancakes or waffles or whatever on Sunday night. So she was the kind of person who would do that. But I remember being particularly impressed that she had given a great speech on the steps of the New York 10 Public library on behalf—she went to Washington I think to head up the women's division of selling victory bonds. I think that was what it was. I don't remember the title. Has any else told you what her title was? She worked selling victory bonds was what she was doing, and it was heading some sort of women's division. But I remember being so impressed and particularly when I went to New York as a graduate student after my senior year, the next year, and did work there in the New York Public Library and walked up those steps between the lions. Have you ever seen the New York Public Library with the lions on either side? MF: Yes. JJ: And to think that Miss Elliott had given a speech there. And we really were inspired by the leaders. She was wonderful. And Dr. [Walter Clinton] Jackson [chancellor] was such a warm person and was so approachable. Of course, that was my feeling. Maybe people who weren't active in student government didn't feel that they could talk to him, but he seemed to me to be that kind of person. And, of course, Dr. [Frank Porter] Graham was president of UNC, of the greater university, and he was such an outstanding person. But we really did—were inspired by the leaders, and I think felt a great kinship with them that maybe students now don't feel with their chancellors and presidents. Maybe they do. [laughs] I don't know. MF: You were starting to talk a little bit about student and faculty relationships. How would you characterize student/faculty relationships say within—well, you were in the English department? JJ: Well, I think that basically I would have to say that they were fairly formal. I do remember going to homes of faculty maybe—Dr. Hurley, I remember, had all the English majors to his house. He was a very formal person, but nevertheless he did have us to his house. I can remember one time, but he was not a person that I could say was a very warm kind of person, though he was a great teacher. I remember going to Miss [Nettie Sue] Tillet's apartment once because she taught what we called a coordinating course. All the English majors had to take this course that sort of drew together, a bit of a survey their senior year, drawing together all their courses I guess in preparation for—. I can't really remember what kind of a coordinating exam we had, but there was something— and I remember she entertained us maybe once. I remember that the painter who was just a great fellow—he was a very snazzy little fellow with a mustache, and he had been our advisor at the legislature, so I knew him fairly well. I remember his entertaining student groups, but I was never in these homes, maybe one time, you know. It's a fairly formal kind of relationship. Never calling them by their first names, and usually I'm sure they would call us Miss Linville or so and so. It was a fairly formal kind of relationship. And as I hear things reported now, I think things on that scale have changed a good bit. MF: Yes, I would have to say [unclear]. JJ: I remember when we were at Dartmouth [College] for Matt's, our younger son's, graduation, the fellow who had supervised his honors paper or course, whatever, was a 11 fairly young fellow. And he was on a first name basis with all these kids when we had a dinner at Matt's house, and I thought, "Good gracious. That wasn't like Miss Tillet," [laughs] my senior coordinating person. It's very different. MF: Some of the traditions that they had at the Woman’s College—do you remember any of the traditions? JJ: Let me see what I can think about. We always had a class banner. We had a class song. We had a class banner and we had a class song, and the class song always was written by the two or three really good music majors in your class. Did you have a class song? It was pretty tacky. I mean, it was not the highest class of music, but the girls did real well. And I think the colors—our class was a certain color. Do they hand the colors down still? MF: No. JJ: Well we were the— MF: I think it's more in the alumni paper than anything else. JJ: Well, we were a green and white class. The class next to us above us was a red class, red and white. And so our class jackets were all green. The class above us had jackets that were red with a seal on the pocket. Do they have class jackets? MF: No, not that I know of. I think that stopped in the early seventies. [phone rings] JJ: Let's see, what other traditions? You mentioned the Daisy Chain. And I did not work on the Daisy Chain, but the sister class, which would mean sophomores, did the Daisy Chain for their seniors. And they stayed over after exams for the commencement period, and they went out and they got daisies. And at that time it was daisy time because commencement—I remember my commencement was June 3rd. Now commencement is earlier than that, and I'm not sure daisies would be in full bloom. But they would go out in the country to fields and they would get daisies, and they made a daisy chain by bunching daisies and roping them together on a big rope and then using them for the procession for the seniors to march through. It was a very nice custom. But I can remember at my commencement the Daisy Chain, having been held by the sophomores, and we marched through and we went into Aycock Auditorium. And after we had gone through, they put forty-six made out of the daisy chain out on the lawn in front of Aycock Auditorium. I just had that picture in my mind of that forty-six being made by the daisy chain. Then by that time it had been in service probably two days, two or three days, and it was limp as it could be [laughs]. And it was used also for the class day program. We had a class day program on the front lawn, front campus, in front of—we called it the Administration Building, but now you call it— MF: Mossman? JJ: —that's the new building. 12 MF: Right. JJ: No, I'm talking about the old building over in front of the Alumni House. MF: Foust? JJ: Foust. That was the administration building, and it has since received the name—but in that front lawn with that swag, that's where the class day exercises were held, and because it was sort of a natural amphitheater. And I don't remember too much about class day exercises, except that we had elected a speaker to speak and then the class officers did some things. I don't remember much about what went on. Must not have been that important. [laughs] MF: Let me see what else I can— JJ: Well, we all looked alike. We all had long hair. We all wore skirts and sweaters and a lot of pearls—pearls and a sweater and a skirt and saddle shoes. In looking at the pictures, that's pretty much it. And we all had hairdos that looked alike. And we all looked alike, you know [laughs]. So if you looked a little bit different, you really did stand out. And most of the girls were from North Carolina. Obviously there were girls from out of state. New Jersey was one of the states that has always sent several out-of-state girls, but there was a quota, and there were just so many out of state students. Not too many, but most everyone was from North Carolina. And at that time women did not come to the university at Chapel Hill [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] here as freshmen, so this meant that the Greensboro campus had really the cream of the crop of the women in North Carolina. And it was the place to go to school, somewhat because of the idea of public education, but also I think because it was a bargain. And unless your family were great devotees of private schools and private education, then this is where you would go. Several of the girls did transfer down here but, by and large, they came and they stayed. And there's hardly—at that time, there was hardly a little town in North Carolina where I could go that I wouldn't know somebody. MF: Right. JJ: So it was a very broadening experience. MF: I know they—in the sixties they did away with a lot of the so called parietal rules. Do you know much about those? The regulations on campus? JJ: Well I think the signing in and out, and, was [unclear] the fact that you had to say where you were, and— MF: What about as far as weekends? 13 JJ: Yes. You had to have permission from home to say that you were going home for a weekend. So there was never the possibility that they could say, "Well she went off somewhere, and we didn't know about it. "So I'm pretty sure that we had to have a note from home in order to go for a weekend. There was permission that had to come to the counselor. And counselors were interesting characters too. And several counselors also served as faculty, but several of them were just counselors, and they were very nice, interesting women. MF: How so? JJ: Well Mrs. [Annie Fulton] Carter [Class of 1921] was the counselor in Cotten Dormitory. She was someone everybody knew, and she was a lady from the old school who was from Walnut Cove, North Carolina. Annie Fulton Carter, she had been widowed early and she was an alumna of the university, and she had come back there to work. And she was just a really nice, demanding lady, who demanded that her girls behave themselves. And I remember that when I got ready to go to graduate school the next year to Columbia, she was also going to Teacher's College at Columbia to do a master's degree, very belatedly. I have the feeling that maybe some grandfather rules had come and said that all the counselors had to have at least a master’s in counseling or something like that. So as an older woman, she was going to teacher's college, and I remember we rode the train together, leaving Greensboro very late at night on an overnight train because it would be companionship for us both. But we were both going to Columbia that year. And she was in residence at Teacher's College while I was in Johnson Hall. But that was nice to have her there. She was a very nice person. And Maxine Garner [Smith, Commercial Class of 1946] was a very outstanding counselor, and also she was director of religious activities on the campus. And she was a counselor in Shaw Dormitory on the front of the campus where I lived as a sophomore. And I had a letter from her not terribly long ago which was real interesting. I hadn't heard anything about her, but she's back at home somewhere. I believe it's Liberty, North Carolina. But she had seen my name put to a letter in the book review section of the New York Times. I had written a letter to the editor telling they didn't say something right. And she saw my name there and wrote a letter to me and said—she was just interested to see my name there. And I hadn't heard from Miss Garner in years and years. But she was an outstanding person. And of course Katherine Taylor [Class of 1928, dean of women, dean of students, dean of student services, director of Elliott Hall] was a counselor also who acted as dean while Miss Elliott was gone. And she was a French professor. She lives in Greensboro now. Have you heard her name mentioned? MF: Yes, but I didn't realize she was a French professor. JJ: Yes. She taught French. So some of them taught, and some were just counselors. Let me see. I'm trying to think of anything else I need to tell you. MF: Were there any dorms that were more desirable to get into? JJ: Oh yes. A dorm would get a reputation that it had all the great girls, and it really was a 14 hot number, and you tried to get into that dorm. And you had to draw for a space in a dorm if there were more people wanting to get into the dorm than not. But it was all your point of view. Maybe some thought—but definitely in my crowd Weil and Winfield [Residence Halls] were the places to live as upperclassmen after you'd gotten out of the freshman quadrangle. We were all in that freshman quadrangle, which I'm sure is not a freshman quadrangle any more. But Grey, Cotten, Coit, Hinshaw [Residence Halls] and then, what was the other one? MF: Jamison [Residence Hall]? JJ: Jamison, yes MF: Yes. Jamison is still freshmen. JJ: It is? MF: I think. JJ: Well, are freshmen segregated now still? MF: There are still a couple of dorms that they specify only freshmen, but they don't have to stay there. JJ: Well there was the freshman quadrangle of those six dorms there, and I felt very lucky to get into Cotten because Cotten was supposed to be very desirable. And then—when you came to be a junior house president, it was great if you could be a house president in Cotten. That would have been— [End of Interview] |
OCLC number | 867541038 |
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