Oral history interview with Mary Elizabeth Keister, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Mary Elizabeth Keister
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: September 24, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: Dr. Keister, can you tell me when you came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at
Greensboro], and in what capacity?
MK: Well, let’s see, I came to the North Carolina College for Women, [laughs] when my—
LD: Back when it was WC [Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina]?
MK: Even before WC.
LD: Oh, really?
MK: It was the North Carolina College for Women when my father [Dr. Albert S. Keister] came
here to be a professor [of economics].
LD: Oh, really?
MK: And that was in 1924.
LD: How interesting.
MK: I was just eleven years old then.
LD: Well, you can talk about that too. That’s all right. What was the college like?
MK: So you can see how far back I go.
LD: Right. Right. What department was your father in?
MK: He came here to teach economics. In fact, it wasn’t a department then at all. He taught
courses in other departments until he had enough students in economics. They didn’t think
economics was a proper subject for women to study. [laughs] He often complained that
women weren’t very interested in the principles of economics. But he came here from the
University of Chicago [Illinois], where he had been a teaching assistant and brought his
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family here in ’24. So that's was when I came to UNCG, and later it became Woman's
College. And then—
LD: What were your first memories of the college?
MK: We lived in a house up on Spring Garden Street. Spring Garden was just a beautiful street
then. It was lined with elm trees that met overhead. It wasn’t as wide as it is now. And it was
not far from the college. It was within walking distance. I guess, as I look back, I think what
a small campus it was at that time. But we were impressed with it. There were really very
few buildings on the campus. I think the first one that was built after we came here was the
[Brown] Music Building. I think that was about 1924 or ’25. We went to—I had at that time
four younger sisters. We all went to Curry [School, laboratory school on campus]. But it was
the old Curry, which was a building that is more or less where the [Petty] Science Building is
now. And it burned, I think, the second year that we were there. I was in the seventh grade
there. And then they began the present Curry Building.
LD: And did you graduate from there?
MK: Yes. I went to Curry all through from the sixth grade on through high school. The year that it
burned I was in the building at the time. But it was after school, and there weren't any
children, any students, in the building, but we had stayed afterwards to practice a play in the
little auditorium we had and heard people shouting, “Fire! Fire!” and went down the fire
escape on the outside of the building.
LD: Do you remember what caused the fire?
MK: I think they thought it was bad wiring. A lot of those building were just wood on the inside
that had a wide staircase. But burned very quickly. So it was good they had the fire escape.
And they finished out the year by moving all the school, really, over to the then Students’
Building. There is a marker on campus now showing where it was. Roughly it's where
Jackson Library is now. That seemed to be the place where they put everything after there
was a fire because there was a fire in the library too. That was while I was in college. And
they moved all the library over to that Students’ Building, and ran it from there until the
building could be rebuilt.
LD: Were you also a student at WC?
MK: Yes. I went to college there. Of course, it was during the [Great] Depression [severe
economic worldwide depression in the decade preceding World War II; people were lucky to
get a college education. They didn’t go away to college very much. We thought the students
that came from out-of-state must be very wealthy. [laughs]
LD: What years would that be?
MK: I graduated in 1934. I went there for a couple of years.
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LD: The early Depression—the hardest part.
MK: Yes. It was. I remember—I worked in the library all the time that I was in college. And I
tried to help with my expenses. But I remember being in the library the morning that the
banks failed during the Depression. It was right after [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was
inaugurated [as 32nd President of the United States].
LD: How did the news spread?
MK: It must have been in the papers. Of course, there was radio then too. But I don’t know that
there was so many newscasts.
LD: Was it completely unexpected?
MK: Well, of course, the Depression was already deepening. And there was lots of unemployment
and bread lines. And I think—yes, I think it was unexpected because I remember that a lot of
the faculty people had just deposited their salary checks, and all of that was lost. And people
wondered how they were even going to live for another month. Of course, the college people
were very lucky. They were pretty much protected because they did keep on getting their
salaries. I guess the State [of North Carolina] continued to pay. They weren’t big salaries, but
they—something to live on. I think later the university—the college had to retrench and cut
back. And some of my father's friends were out of jobs. But mostly the faculty did all right.
LD: Was your father still teaching at that time?
MK: Yes. Yes. He didn’t retire until 1957.
LD: Oh. A long career.
MK: He made his whole lifetime career here.
LD: That's impressive. Was the college doing anything of a charitable nature to help people out
during the Depression?
MK: Let me think. I don't know. Of course, there were lots of people that came to the back door
asking for food. I think families helped them out. I’m not sure about that—whether the
college did anything.
LD: I was thinking in terms of students who might not be able to come up with the tuition money.
[unclear] Enrollment must have dropped quite a bit in the ’30s.
MK: Yes. I think so. I don't know. I think they asked that students pay their tuition in advance. But
I don’t know that it dropped a lot. At the time that I graduated, the college had two thousand
students. That was the second largest women’s college in the country.
LD: I wonder what the first one was.
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MK: I think it was Connecticut College for Women [New London]. And I don't know that it was
very much larger, but it was somewhat larger. I’m sure that the college at that time did not
have much student aid. They had some. I recently finished writing a piece about Kathleen
Hawkins [Commercial Class of 1923], who was the first student aid officer. In fact, almost
the only one until the present one we have. And she sort of scrounged for things for the
students wherever she could get them—her Sunday School class, her garden club, women
that she knew in the community, to get money for books, and gym suits and things of that
sort. I think, in that way, the college tried to help. At least they had a person who was
concerned with student help.
LD: Do you remember who was dean of students was when you came?
MK: Let me see. I think when we came I don’t know if I was very much aware of that. But it was
Miss [Minnie Lou] Jamison [domestic science faculty] was one of the deans of students, I
think, when I was in college. And there was a Miss [Sue May] Kirkland [lady principal],
who had been dean of students before that. And at that time there was a dormitory named for
her, but since been torn down.
LD: What was campus life like as an undergraduate during that period?
MK: Well, in some ways I think it was more lively than it is now. I mean in a sense that the
campus was the center of everything for students then. Everybody lived on campus, for one
thing. The one thing they kept building were the dormitories because they needed more and
more space for students. They were no married students that I know of. And there weren't
any graduate students. They were all undergraduates until, I guess, pretty long after I
graduated.
There were a lot of traditions that we always looked forward to, like the May Queen.
We had a May Day Festival on the front campus. There was a May Queen and a court. And I
thought that was just very wonderful. Students didn’t, of course, leave the campus much
either. They didn't go away on weekends or anything—no way to go. In fact, I can remember
one spring vacation during the Depression that they cancelled the vacation. I think it was that
year the banks failed. They cancelled the holiday because nobody had any money for bus
fare to go home. They used to—the busses used to line up there on Walker Avenue, and all
of the students that were going in whatever direction would board the right bus and leave
from there to go home at the end of the year.
LD: Would home be mostly parts of North Carolina?
MK: I think so. Small towns across the state. We had out-of-state students, and many of them
were student leaders too. They encouraged that as much as they could. Let me think. Well,
there were more—you asked about student life and what it was like on the campus. There
were more festivities around Commencement time, I think, than now. They had Class Day,
and they had Baccalaureate Sermon on Sunday before Commencement on Monday and so
on.
LD: Where was Commencement held?
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MK: I was trying to remember that—where it was held before they built Aycock Auditorium.
When we moved here, Aycock—that whole corner was just a great big forest with a spring
in it, which I think—for which I think Spring Garden Street was named.
LD: Oh, really?
MK: But I think before that it was in the Students’ Building. There was a small theater, sort of; on
the second floor there with a stage. And I can remember going there sometimes to see puppet
shows and stage plays that the students did. It was a big thing when Aycock was built. We
thought it was a magnificent building.
LD: Do you remember what year that was?
MK: Well, my Commencement was held there. So was the one, two or three years before that. It
must have been built around 1930. ’28 or ’30. One of the early buildings after we came here.
LD: Did they use it for frequent concerts?
MK: Yes. All of the concerts and theater productions were at Aycock. They had the Playlikers
then. It was almost all women; even the girls took men's parts, though sometimes some
faculty men took parts.
LD: Someone mentioned that to me, someone I’ve interviewed. But, can you remember any of
the plays in which women played the male role?
MK: Not very well. I remember one because one of my student teachers had the lead in it. It was
the play called Chanticleer, and the lead role is a rooster. So I guess that was a male part,
really, and a student took the part. No. I don't remember.
But there used to be a real impressive academic procession for Commencement that
went outside, down the street from the old McIver Building into Aycock. And we used to
think it was terribly exciting. Some of the professors, especially the ones that had PhDs, had
gorgeous robes. There was a Dr. [Malcolm] Hooke [professor of romance languages], who
taught French and had his degree from the Sorbonne [college of the University of Paris,
France], we thought looked like an exotic bird or something in a bright red gown with
ermine on it. [laughs]
LD: That must have been exciting. Do you remember any of the other professors that you—was
your major home economics?
MK: I majored in business administration, not what is now business administration. It was called
secretarial science. Again, because the Depression was on and that seemed to be the place
where people could get jobs. So I never did use my training in that way. [laughs]
LD: I asked about the professors that you remembered.
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MK: Yes. I was going to say, in talking about the PhDs that we admired so much in the academic
profession. There were few PhD professors on the campus. Most of our teachers were
women who had master’s degrees. But I think they were some of the best teachers that ever,
ever were. I think we got a wonderful education there because the women were well-prepared
in their fields. And they were just devoted to teaching and devoted to their students.
I think they were marvelous role models for young women in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Do
you want me to name some names?
LD: Yes. If you can remember them, sure.
MK: Well, I think one of the best teachers that ever was at the college, was Florence Shaeffer,
who taught chemistry. She was just a born teacher. She gave the clearest, most precise
lectures and demonstrations. You couldn’t help but learn chemistry, even though science
was not my field at all. And I was pretty nervous about it. I think she was one of the best
teachers on the campus. One of my younger sisters majored in chemistry later and agreed
with me that she was just an outstanding teacher. But she didn’t have a PhD either, but she
was very well trained and dedicated. Vera Largent was another one. She taught history.
LD: Now I've heard her name mentioned before.
MK: I think any student that had her admired her very much. I had two courses with Miss
[Harriet] Elliott [dean of women, professor of political science], for whom Elliott Hall is
named. And I admired her very much. She was the first real feminist that I ever knew, maybe
even before the term feminist was invented. She just thought that women deserved the best
and ought to be well educated—certainly ought to be educated in political science and
politics. She came to class every day with the morning paper and taught us how to read it—
what the things in—what things in it were important for us to know. Her sermon every day
was, “The right to vote is the greatest right that you have. You must always exercise it.” Any
time I miss a voting day, I feel guilty toward Miss Elliott. [laughs]
LD: Well, good for her.
MK: Has she been the subject of very much of the oral histories so far?
LD: Yes.
MK: There are always interesting stories about her. I don’t know if anyone told the one about
during the war she went to Washington [DC] and had some kind of a position as a consumer
protection commissioner or something like that [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 United States delegate to the United Nations Conference on
Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in London in 1945]I don’t
know what her title was exactly. But there is a wonderful story about the day that President
[Franklin] Roosevelt telephoned to offer her the job. Did you ever hear that one?
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LD: No. I haven't heard this one.
MK: I had heard this from my father. I had already left the college then. On that day there was a
switchboard. It was in the old McIver Building. But nobody had telephones in their own
offices. So if a call came in for someone, the switchboard operator had to go and find them
and have them come to the phone. Well, I'll save that for later. We didn’t have phones in our
offices until I came back after 1964. But, of course, she was excited. Washington was
calling. She said it was the president’s office, and she was running all over McIver Building
to find Miss Elliott, whose office was there. I guess she found her, and she came to the
phone, and she apparently protested, and said, “Oh, Mr. Roosevelt, I don’t know if I can do
that job.” He said, “Now Miss Elliott, you must let us be the judge of that.” [laughs] Isn’t
that neat?
LD: Yes.
MK: That is a nice story. And I think it just capped her career. She did come back here to the
college and became dean of women after that. I'm not sure if she taught any longer. But she
surely deserved having that beautiful building named for her. I'm not sure if it was built
while she was still living or not.
LD: So you left as you graduated in 1934 as a business administration major and worked—didn't
you say you—? [interviewee interrupts]
MK: Well, then I had a chance to do the thing I had always wanted to do. I wanted to work with
children. I had taken what courses I could get here in child development, child psychology,
and did a semester at the nursery school, which has just recently been established there at
[School of] Home Economics. And I had an offer of an assistantship at the University of
Iowa [Iowa City, Iowa] in the preschool laboratories, with a chance to get my master’s
degree in nursery school education. So I went there and was there two years. In fact, I didn’t
come back here to the university until 1964. So I was gone for thirty years from the time I
graduated. Just came back to Greensboro to visit my family at the holiday times. So that was
my career.
LD: In child development?
MK: Yes.
LD: Now, when you came back in 1964, what kind of child development program did you
eventually have?
MK: Well, when I came back to what I've always said was the most interesting job I ever did. And
I have had very interesting jobs my whole professional life, I think. I’ve just been lucky. I
came back because the child development department in home economics had a small grant
from the State Department of—was Welfare at that time; it's Social Services now—to begin
some kind of a program for the care of infants and children because more and more
women—back in the early ’60s—were going to work. And they were not waiting for their
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children were in school, but were going when their children were quite young, some under a
year of age. There was already some concern about proper care for such young children, as
their mothers went to work. So we did—that first year, with that grant from the State
Department—did a survey of the care of children younger than three that was going on in
Guilford County. And I directed that. And, of course, that survey showed that there were
many more women with very young children working than anybody suspected. About
twenty-five percent of women we interviewed had children younger than three and were
back at work trying to make good arrangements for the children. So we proposed a
demonstration day care center that would look into what some of the factors were that were
needed for good care for infants and toddlers. And that really was the most interesting job I
ever did. We had support from the Children's Bureau in Washington [DC], the Department
of—at that time was called Health, Education and Welfare. We had support through 1971
from them from 1966—five years. And it was just a lot of fun to do it. We had a lot of
publications that came out of that. And people came from—not just from all over this
country, but from all over the world to see it. We had visitors from places like Israel and
Latin America, who wanted to see how it was done. [laughs]
LD: And then everyone in Greensboro was trying to get his or her child in there?
MK: Yes, I guess so.
LD: I know. We had some on the waiting list for about a year.
MK: Did you?
LD: We ultimately made other decisions.
MK: Did you get in?
LD: At the time he might have gotten in he was already in an established school. But I’ve often
thought that the—compared to other places that I’ve lived and friends to whom I've spoken
in other places, Greensboro had, when I came in 1976, quite a variety of child care options.
And I decided that it was probably due to the program at UNCG and the number of
graduates being generated
MK: Yes. That might be because there were a lot of well-trained people.
LD: So you certainly had quite a big effect on child care in Greensboro.
MK: Well, I hope so. It bothers me sometimes when I think that people think that we “proved”
through our research and demonstration that it was okay for babies to be in day care. Well,
we really didn’t say that. We said, “It's all right if certain conditions apply.” It was fun trying
to define them. And we worked with the State Department to set up standards and all, but
they’re still wrangling over standards at the national and the state level. So I don’t know. But
it was great. We had wonderful morale in the group. We were showing that you could use a
para-professionals to give very good care if you had the kind of a set up and the kind of
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training that was needed.
LD: Were you training students to be teachers in a—caregivers or be administrators or both?
MK: They would have—the college graduate would have been administrators or would have been
directors of day care centers. See, the thing that makes day care so expensive is the personnel
and the budget. And you've got to find ways to use people with less training, with less
education, let’s say formal education, but good possibilities.
LD: Did you also have any educational programs for those who were not pursuing a degree? Did
you offer seminars to—training sessions?
MK: Yes, a one point. And I don’t know if that is still going on. There was a program to train
what were called child care associates. It was not a program at our university. It was a
national program that was sponsored by the National Association for the Education of
Young Children. And one of our staff members undertook that training. It took about two
years. And it wasn’t at the university level, really. A lot of it was apprentice work, but it was
also some study, examinations and all. She is now the director of that Project Uplift here in
the city, a black woman who is very capable. She had both of her children in our nursery at
the time. She had a lot of promise. She is sort of the star of a little film that we made called
Happy Talk. It shows her with the five children that she had in her little group to take care of.
LD: You know, a couple of years ago didn’t they close one of the programs?
MK: Oh yes. I think—I'm not sure that what we were doing is going on at all in the way that we
did it. Yes. They had to close several of them, partly because all-day cares is the only thing
that is in demand today for working mothers. The part-day nursery school and the little
toddler program that they had three afternoons a week or something, where the mothers
came too. Those just aren’t very feasible or very much in demand anymore.
LD: Almost every church in Greensboro has one of those programs, and they are very popular.
MK: Yes, indeed. I saw that the West Market Street Methodist has expanded it to infants and
toddlers. If the program doesn't offer all-day care, it’s not very much subscribed.
LD: Did the coeducational changes that came about in the mid-60s affect your program in any
way? Did you have any men in the child care program?
MK: Yes, we did. Let’s see, I guess they weren't any of them undergraduates. But there were a lot
of graduate students, men, in child development. And many of them—they were more
involved with the research part of the program, the interviews with—the regular interviews
we had with the parents of the children at home and in the nursery. Let’s see, I don't think we
had any men in the training part though they certainly were interested in the program. And I
think some of them got ideas for their research from things they observed with the children
and all.
Of course, you know that child development was the first department in the
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university to offer the PhD, so they had to—men graduate students before anybody else did.
Of course, it was not just the interest in children, but the family relations and family therapy
and so on that some of them came to study.
LD: What was your relationship with the School of Education? Did you—?
MK: Well, mine was perfect. It was really good because I had a joint appointment in education
and in home economics. I taught two courses in each of the schools. I think the School of
Education did become very interested in our program because we moved over to the Curry
Building eventually. We started the program in a local church that was just a couple of
blocks from campus at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. And we were there about
four years. And then when the kindergarten—you know the whole Curry Lab School was
discontinued—they gave us the space that the kindergarten had had. It was very nice space,
including the kitchen and what had been the cafeteria, the children’s cafeteria, and gave us
some money to remodel it. Chancellor [James S.] Ferguson was very supportive of our
program, very interested in it. So, I think at that time Bob O’Kane was dean of education. He
was interested in it too and made us very welcome there. We had offices in the—down in the
lower ground level of Curry, that had once had been the industrial arts.
LD: Someone told me that Bob O’Kane had been trying to keep Curry open, at least the
elementary school, for research purposes after— as the pressure began to build to close it.
MK: Yes.
LD: So he must have been interested in elementary research?
MK: Yes, in young children. I think they especially regretted giving up the kindergarten because
at that time—it was just at the time that public schools were getting into kindergarten—
where they really needed that facility for kindergarten teaching.
LD: Were you involved at all in the opposition to closing Curry? Did you get involved?
MK: No. I was here at the time it happened. Yes, there was a lot of opposition within and without
the university. But I could see the rationale for it. I think that laboratory schools
everywhere—they’re probably too rarefied for really good teacher training. But having been
a student at Curry and all the others in my family being students there, I think we got
unusually good teaching because of the teacher training that went on and the high caliber of
people they had training the teacher.
LD: In the child development program, did you have students observing through either in the
classroom or through two-way mirrors? How would you train your students? Or did they
actually take over the classes for periods of time?
MK: Well, I didn’t do that. I didn't really have responsibility for that kind of training. We didn’t
have very many university students that were coming. Our visitors and our trainees were
people from outside, who were getting ready to set up those programs. We did have a kind of
one-way mirror, not like in the nursery school—you know how that is down there in the
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university nursery school. It has one-way glass, and the sound is piped in and all. We didn't
have that, but we had high-up, large windows that looked into each of the group rooms. And
they were covered with mylar [film], so that you could look in, but the children didn’t see
anything but a mirror. Is that what you were talking about?
LD: Yes. I was just wondering if that was what the nature of the program was.
MK: We did a lot of sort of on-site, short-term training of people. But they came from other
nurseries from all over the country, for one- and two-week training time. We used some of
the facilities, classroom facilities, that they had for the Head Start [program of the United
States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive
education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and
their families] training in Curry. And then they could go downstairs and see the children in
the groups.
LD: So the program was mainly a research-oriented program?
MK: No, it started out to be a demonstration project to find out what do you need to make
something really good for babies and toddlers and what you have to keep in mind. The
research was really part of the evaluation of the demonstration. What we did was to match
the babies in the nursery with babies who were being cared for by their own mothers. We
recruited two groups of children. And they were matched for age and education of the
parents and socioeconomic level and such.
LD: And what did you discover when you compared?
MK: We found that there weren’t any differences. That the babies in the nursery did as well as the
children at home. We didn’t find an advantage either way. They developed very much along
the same lines. But the whole philosophy of the nursery had been—we would make it as
much like home as we could so that there would be a small number of children being taken
care of by one person within as much limits as you can do that, when you hire people for an
eight-hour day.
LD: What other things happened while you were here? The campus was integrated while you
were here, was it not?
MK: Yes, it must have been. Let’s see—I retired in 1978.
LD: And you came in 1964, right?
MK: Yes, I came that year it became integrated as far as gender was concerned. That took quite a
while, I think. The first students were mostly in the arts was my impression, music and fine
arts, most of the male students. Then, of course, when the business school grew, was
established really, it became more attractive to more men students.
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LD: Do you think that they promoted the business school in order to attract men?
MK: I don’t know. Maybe so. That could very well be why they put important resources into it
and hired a very outstanding faculty for it. They did. It was never anything like that when my
father taught economics. He often complained that women weren't very interested in
economics. But, I think—
LD: They are now.
MK: Yes. They certainly are now and doing outstanding work. He would never have believed
they would build a four million dollar building for economics and business.
LD: I'm sorry that we can’t interview him. I’m sure that would have been interesting.
MK: Yes. By the way, recently I wrote a kind of biographical sketch of my father because
Marlene Ingle [director of financial aid] was so interested in it for the students who won the
Keister Scholarship [for economics majors] and wanted to tell them more about who these
scholarships were named for. So you might be interested to have a copy of that. I don’t
know. I had a very nice response from people in the School of Economics and Business
saying they wouldn’t have known some of that history if I hadn't written it down. I really
started out to try to do biographies of a lot of the people that I had known in my father’s
generation here at the college that I thought maybe nobody else living even knew about. But
I did a sketch of Dr. [Ruth] Collings [college physician and head of health department].
There's a scholarship named for her. It was given by the Class of 1931. I did a sketch of
Kathleen Hawkins. I mentioned her earlier—who had been the student aid officer almost
from the time the college started. Then I did one on Ethel [Stephens] Arnett [author,
historian, poet, biographer], who—she was not on the faculty, but she was given an honorary
degree [Editor’s note: not verified] and was a very outstanding person in Greensboro, a
historian of Greensboro. So I could put those together and give them to you, but that's not
oral history—
LD: Well, I think—
MK: —if somebody reads it.
LD: I still might like to see them. I would certainly appreciate that. Did you have anything else
that you wanted to add to—any memories, or [unclear]?
MK: Well, no. What I had to started to say—you asked, “What was my impression of the campus
in the early years?” I had jotted down some notes about how few buildings there were. We
mentioned not even Aycock was built then. There was, let’s see, there were lots of
dormitories, of course. The quadrangle dorms were all finished when we came in 1924. And
the college was barely thirty years old then. I mean ’24.
LD: No, you said ’24. Was that the first group of dormitories on campus?
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MK: I think—Spencer was first, and that’s still there and gets nicer all the time with the
remodeling. And then there were two dorms where that new plaza is. They were called
Woman's and Kirkland. I think Kirkland is named for one of the deans of women [Editor’s
note: Sue May Kirkland was the lady principal]. And those were—and the dining hall was
there.
LD: In the same place?
MK: Pretty much like it is today, except not as up-to-date.
LD: How was the food?
MK: Well, I guess it was the kind of food that girls put on weight with as college students do. It
was very nicely served. And that was one of the jobs that there was for students who needed
to earn their way, or had to be to have be hired because it was served at tables, six or eight of
them. I didn’t live in the dorm, so I don’t know. I suppose even in those days students
complained about the food. But there was—the old McIver Building was there, and that and
the Foust Building were the classroom buildings. And when I studied chemistry, the
chemistry lab and department was on the top floor of the McIver Building, the big old
wooden stairs going all the way up. Curry Building wasn’t there. And, of course, nothing
like Foust and Graham buildings. Those were—there was an infirmary that was where Elliott
Hall is now. For recreation there was one building for physical education. That is now called
Rosenthal [gymnasium]. But for recreation, they had something called the Y Hut.
LD: Where was the Y Hut located?
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
MK: Down at the end of College Avenue, where those two high-rise dorms are now. And that was
used for recreation, both for Curry kids and for college students, for faculty. It was about all
there was.
LD: What kind of a structure was it?
MK: It was a log cabin.
LD: A log cabin?
MK: Yes, a kind of a hut. It had big fireplaces at each end and a little kitchen; you could have
refreshments and things like that. Some friends of mine who went to the college earlier and
were later on the faculty said that down in that woods there was a kind of Greek
amphitheater, where they often had outdoor play productions for some of the students, say
the students that were there before 1920.
14
LD: When was the Home Economics Building built?
MK: I think the old part—the original part of the Home Economics Building was there when we
came in 1924 and that Home Management House behind it there on McIver Street was there.
LD: What was that used for?
MK: For home management training.
LD: Girls lived there?
MK: Yes. Lived a semester in the house. I guess they rotated duties that were involved in
homemaking and were graded on it. The rest of that block on down where the Nursing
School and the Nursery School is now were faculty houses. That was where I got my interest
in children and babies. My first jobs were babysitting. And these were all faculty families
that had children much younger than I was. And I would sit with them. And there was
faculty houses there along West Market Street too. I sat with the babies in those houses. One
of the history—you're going to interview, I guess, Elisabeth Bowles [Class of 1950, English
faculty], aren’t you?
LD: Yes.
MK: Or have you all ready?
LD: No. I haven't yet. But I am going to do that. I've taken courses from her.
MK: She did an interesting history of the college up to about whenever it was she wrote it [A
Good Beginning, A History of the First Four Decades of the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro]. And she tells in there, I think it was in there, that all that faculty housing— that
was six or seven houses that were put up in the 1920s—cost a total of twenty thousand
dollars. I think they were prefabricated houses. I think they came from Sears [Editor’s note:
the houses came from the Aladdin Company]. No, there were four on that street because
where the Nursing School is now is where Miss Elliott lived. And they all had names like the
Spokane, and things like that. Miss Elliott, whenever she heard the fire engine go out, she
was afraid Spokane was on fire. And she would run out of her office to check.
LD: To check?
MK: She could see it from the steps.
LD: You also said that the individual faculty offices didn't get telephones until after you came?
MK: Yes. It was in the 1960s, I'm sure.
LD: That is—I’m shocked.
15
MK: It's hard to believe, isn’t it?
LD: Hard to believe.
MK: How you could even function without a telephone?
LD: Although probably it was a lot quieter?
MK: Yes, and probably saved a tremendous amount of money. I can’t imagine what the phone bill
is for the university today.
LD: That's true. It must be phenomenal.
MK: Yes.
LD: Well, would you like to look over your notes and see if there is anything else that you would
like to add?
MK: Well, let’s see. Oh, I don’t know. I was thinking about what was built after I left in 1934.
The thing that changed the campus the most, I think, was the building of Alumni House. It is
so beautiful. There where it stands now was Mrs. [Charles Duncan] McIver's [first president
of the institution] house, an old frame house. And then something called Old Guilford that
was a framed dormitory. And then another building, kind of a house, down there where that
Faculty Center is now. That was the—I don’t know what was there. Something like student
aid or something. And they were all sort of shabby and tumbled down. And when I came
back, and here was that beautiful Alumni House. That made a lot of difference. About the
same time, the new dorms were built too—the new dorms down at the end of College
Avenue—Mary Foust and New Guilford. Those seemed very elegant to me when I came
back. And then those dorms beyond the quadrangle. I forget what they’re called now.
LD: Close to West Market Street, if you go down that hill?
MK: Well, those were much later. That was after we needed men's dorms. So those were built
after I came back in ’64. Yes, the ones right by Market Street. And, of course, the infirmary
was built between the time that I left college and came back. The new infirmary—the old
one was torn down to build Elliott Hall. But it stood vacant for a long time. There were
rumors that during the [World] War [I], that it was being used by spies. [laughs]
LD: When was the library built? The new library?
MK: Oh, that was after—no, the tower was built after I came back in ’64 because we had our
offices for our demonstration nursery. The office was there on Walker Avenue where that
curb is now, and that house has been torn down. There were several houses there that made
good offices. The library—well, it was built before Mr. [Charles] Adams [Jackson Library
director] retired, so it must have been—I expect it was in the 1960s. No, it was before that
because when I came back in ’64, Forney Building, what's now Forney Building, was the old
library. That was the one that burned inside, and then they redid it. So that was already
16
Economics and Business, I believe, when I came back in the ’60s. So the Jackson Library
must have been built in the ’50s. Of course, nothing was built during the [World] War [II].
There were no materials for building, so there was a big spate of building after—as soon as
the war was over.
LD: Well, is there anything else that you want to add before I thank you? This has been very
interesting.
MK: Well, it was nice that you were interested because you knew about the nursery, and you had
young children.
LD: In fact, I now remember—well, let me say thank you for the interview, and I'll give you my
thoughts. It’s not supposed to be an interview of me. This is supposed to be an interview of
you.
MK: Good.
LD: Thank you again, Dr. Keister.
[End of Interview]