Oral history interview with Ann Oakley, 1991 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWER: Missy Foy
INTERVIEWEE: Ann Young Oakley
DATE: April 16, 1991
MF: If you could start with some general information like where you grew up and when you went to Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] and perhaps what your major was.
AO: All right. I was born here in Greensboro, and I was in the Greensboro Public Schools through half of the fourth grade. At that time, my father was transferred to New Jersey, and I had the great good fortune of going through the public schools in Summit, New Jersey, where the level of education was infinitely superior to Greensboro, such that they wanted to put me back in the third grade, which to me would have been the greatest shame imaginable. So I worked really, really hard to stay in the fourth grade. My freshman year in college, I went to Rockford College, a small liberal arts college in Rockford, Illinois, where I was a town student. My family then had been transferred to Illinois. And then my sophomore year, at the behest of my godmother, who was Dr. May Delaney Bush who was on the English faculty at Woman's College for a number of years, I came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], which in those days was Woman's College. And I graduated with the class of '51.
MF: I'm from Paterson, New Jersey, so when you said that about the New Jersey schools, that's—
AO: I don't know whether that still is true. I think Greensboro has come a long way to catch up, but in those days it was not a very good school system.
MF: I know that some of the people that I've interviewed have said there were a lot of girls from New Jersey and New York, which is still true now in the North Carolina schools—college system. And they said that they always seemed so much better prepared.
AO: I think this is true. I don't think it's true so much with the big city schools like Grimsley [High School, Greensboro, North Carolina], the schools of Charlotte-Mecklenburg [County], Winston-Salem/Forsyth [County]. We have a broad curriculum, and we have some very gifted teachers. So I think a student who really works hard in a setting like this particular school can come out as well prepared as anybody from anywhere. I've had three daughters graduate from here, and all of them have done exceptionally well in their college work, so I don't think that they're at a disadvantage. But if you go to a small, rural school, I can see where you would be at a disadvantage in preparation.
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MF: Yes. And at that particular time, North Carolina was mostly small, rural schools.
AO: Well, we were. I think still, as we probably are today, recovering from Reconstruction [of the South after the Civil War]. And the Depression [severe worldwide economic downturn preceding World War II] had a strong hold on North Carolina, you know. My father always joked and said, "Everything looked rosy," and then I was born in June of '29 and by September the economy of the country had gone to hell. [laughs] I don't think he blamed me seriously, but he always accused me of being the cause of the Depression.
MF: When you got to Woman's College—well, first, before I ask you that. Rockford College in Illinois, was that a coed or—?
AO: No. It was a very small girls’ school. It's—again, a very, very high academically because it was considered as the Midwestern sister of Mount Holyoke [College, South Hadley, Massachusetts].
MF: Oh, okay.
AO: And I had some superb teachers there, some superb professors.
MF: So there was not the difference between going to a coed school and then going to a women's school?
AO: Well, I had originally planned—you see, at that time, you could not go to [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill until you were a junior, a resident student. And my original plan, after I transferred to UNCG, was to stay there one year and then, as a junior go to Chapel Hill, but I liked it so much that I decided to stay four years—or the final three years at Woman's College.
MF: And what was student life like for you when you lived on campus.
AO: I lived in North Spencer, 139 North Spencer. It was a little bitty room in the Annex. I think it's for graduate students now.
MF: No. South Spencer is, but North Spencer—
AO: I think it—
MF: Well, maybe it is now.
AO: I think so. I liked it because it was convenient to the classroom buildings and it was very convenient to the dining hall because you didn't have to go outside to get to the dining hall. You just walked down the hall. And on rainy, cold mornings it was very nice. [both chuckle]
MF: Yes. What was it like living in a dorm in a women's college? 3
AO: It was a lot of fun because you didn't have to worry about men on the hall and that sort of thing. It was, I think, probably a much freer atmosphere, very friendly. We had a dorm organization where we had meetings—I think, weekly. Tuesday nights, as I recall, was dorm meeting night. I may be wrong about that. And we had parties. The funniest thing was, for some reason I was in charge of—I guess, social chairman one year or something and had to arrange a Halloween party. And we were all going to wear costumes and such. And we always bought the refreshments from the dining hall because it was less expensive. So I contacted the lady who was head of the dining facilities and ordered cider and cookies or doughnuts or something. And of course, in those days, it was against the rules of the school to drink. You were—if you were caught having drunk anything alcoholic, you were suspended, no questions asked; that was it, you were gone. So anyway, we picked up the refreshments for the dorm party and the party began, and I took one sip of the cider and realized that it had hardened.
MF: Oh no.
AO: And—but nobody else realized it. Most of the girls had never had anything to drink, you know, coming from a good old southern background, but my father was a Kentuckian, so we had drinks served in my home, and I knew that was hard cider. And that was the happiest dorm party I ever remember. Everybody had a marvelous time and it was hysterical, and nobody could say anything because we had ordered the cider from the dining hall. So that was a good memory. [chuckling] Sort of ironic.
MF: It was probably a popular party.
AO: Oh, yes. [laughs] Some of these very staid little girls who were tentative and withdrawn suddenly became the life of the party. [laughs]
MF: This was like one of the dances or—?
AO: No. It was just for the people in the dorm. No guys included.
MF: Oh, all right.
AO: It was just the girls in the dorm on a Tuesday night.
MF: Okay. Oh, that must have been a hoot.
AO: It was. It was hysterical. I had one friend whose family also didn't disapprove of drinking, and she found it very constraining to be at the college and not be able to have a drink. And she certainly didn't want to get caught with liquor in her room. So she put a little gin in her steam iron reservoir and when things got a little desperate, why she would tap the iron. [chuckling]
MF: That's pretty ingenious. That's something I guess you don't want to put that idea in a kid's head. 4
AO: No. No. We were very creative.
MF: That's pretty creative. [laughs] What else about student life while you were—
AO: Well, the thing that I remember about the dorm that I hated—as you can look at my desk and tell I'm not a terribly neat, organized-type person—and my college room reflected that. And we had periodic inspections by the lady who was in charge of housekeeping, a very austere—I don't remember her name—Miss Powell, I think it was. And she would have surprise inspections and come in and check the cleanliness and the neatness of your room, and you got into trouble if your room was not clean and neat. Well if you really paid attention, you could tell when the girls down toward the office began cleaning furiously, you'd know that Miss Powell was somewhere in the building, and so you'd rush back and straighten up as fast as you can. And one time, I had had papers due and tests and I just—it was a wreck in my room, and I knew Miss Powell was coming because the word was out. So I threw a bunch of stuff in dresser drawers and slammed them shut and made up the bed, and then I gathered all of my friends who smoked—and most of us did smoke in those days. We didn't know that it was so bad for us. And so then we gathered in the room and lit cigarettes, so that by the time Miss Powell arrived, it was so smoky you couldn't see whether there was any dirt or anything. [chuckles] And we passed inspection.
MF: So you were allowed to smoke in your room at that point?
AO: Yes, we were.
MF: Okay.
AO: But we were not allowed—this is really strange. We were not allowed to wear shorts or bathing suits or anything else on campus. If you wanted to play tennis, for example, when you put on your shorts, you had to wear a raincoat over your shorts to walk from your dorm to the tennis courts. And when sunbathing season came, they put canvas around you on all the tennis courts, and we had to put on bathing suits, then raincoats and walk to this enclosed area and sunbathe removed from the view of any passing motorists.
MF: That's pretty protective.
AO: Well, in those days, the school was acting in loco parentis. And, of course, society itself was much more restrictive in those days than it is now. And very shortly before I got to Woman's College, girls could not go downtown without wearing hats and gloves.
MF: Right.
AO: And they had—I think World War II [1939-45 global conflict] had relieved us of that necessity. So we could go downtown.
MF: What about—? 5
AO: We couldn't even wear blue jeans on campus unless we covered them up. We'd have to roll them up under the raincoat so they didn't show below the raincoat. So—and we couldn't go to the dining hall with our hair in curlers or anything like that or in a bathrobe. We had to be dressed and have our hair combed before we could go to breakfast, for example. It was interesting in the dining hall, meals were family style; you were assigned to a table. And you had a waitress, generally someone who was working her way or helping to pay her own way through. And supper time—dinner time—evening meal was always family style, and they would get the girls in there by such and such—well, I forget. Six o'clock [pm] or whatever. And then sound the chimes and everybody would sing the doxology and then the waitress—student waitresses would come and bring you dishes and platters of whatever you were having. And we would serve ourselves just as if we were in a family setting. And we always hated the all-white meals. That's when you'd have pork and mashed potatoes and cauliflower and your plate was white and the tablecloth was white and the milk. [laughs] If you had—that was another thing. I loved milk, and I always hated the fact that you could have milk only twice a day. They would not permit you to have milk more than two meals a day. I guess it was too expensive. And if you wanted milk three meals a day, you had to bring a note from a doctor saying it was necessary. And one summer I went to the University of Wisconsin, the dairy state, and they put these huge pitchers of milk on the table every meal. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
MF: That's interesting. Nobody's ever mentioned that about the milk, except that when milk was rationed along with sugar and—
AO: Well, there was no rationing [unclear]. The war was well over by that time. But I think the economy was one of the major factors. But the food, overall, wasn't too bad. It was kind of—I remember when I went to order the cider that I mentioned before, I walked in the kitchen area and they had—this was just right after lunch and you had sandwiches and things like that. And they had these huge vats of liver cooking for supper that night. And I went down to The Corner to Jerry's to eat dinner that night. I couldn't face the liver.
MF: Oh, I don't blame you. Being a student, living in the dorm, did you have much contact with any of the town students?
AO: Yes, we did. I won't say a lot because so often the town students, you know, really did go home at the end of the day, and they missed a lot of the things like our dorm parties and such. So they were not as much a part of the school as resident students were, but one of the town students was Laura White [Wolfe, Class of 1951], who is still a friend of mine. She lives here in Greensboro, and I see her from time to time. So it depended so much on the person, I think, whether the person was the sort who would make friends easily with the resident students. We were not the commuting school that we are now so much. Big busses would pull up down in front of what was the old Home Ec[onomics] Building on McIver Street every Friday and busloads of girls would head off to Chapel Hill for the weekend. Fraternity weekends, football game weekends, big doings. We lost half the student population. [chuckles]
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MF: Were there still any Saturday classes at that time?
AO: Yes, indeed. Saturday morning classes.
MF: Did you have any?
AO: Yes, I did. I had a—I don't think a year went by that I didn't have Saturday classes. They were very—I majored in French and there were very few French majors, so that the classes scheduled on Saturday were usually my major. And I can remember being in one class with five people, and it was football season and the other girls were frequently absent on Saturday. And the professor, Monsieur [René] Hardré, who was a very lovely and very patient man, got really upset at having people absent a third of his class time. So I came in one Saturday, and I was the only girl there. And he said, "I'm going to give a lecture and you are going to take notes and you must not share these notes with anyone. And if you do, I will know who did it." So he lectured fast and furiously through the whole period and gave a test on it, unannounced, the next week and the girls who had been cutting his class to go to football weekends were really upset.
MF: Oh, and I bet they wondered how come you had not—
AO: And I was sitting there knowing all the answers and feeling sorry for them, but at the same time very thankful that I hadn't cut his class.
MF: Yes. [chuckles] Were you involved in student government at all?
AO: Yes, I was. I was elected to the legislature for one term. And then I helped to form a chapter of the National Students Association on campus. I felt, having come from the North I guess, that there was an awful lot of provincialism, and I still feel this very strongly and I still crusade against it. I think a global outlook is so important, and so I thought that we needed to be involved in some of the mainstream activities. Now there were two aspects of the National Student Association. One, it was—tended to be a little leftist, and that was not my bent at all. I tend much more toward conservatism and even at that age did. So I was very careful to emphasize in the UNCG chapter—W[oman’s] C[ollege] chapter—just the international aspect. We tried to have events for foreign students and panel discussions and things, but we did not get involved in the domestic political scene. It's rather interesting, too; Chapel Hill had a much more active chapter than we as far as national politics is concerned. And one of their—I guess, the president of their chapter—came to Woman's College to see me one afternoon to try and persuade me to become active in some political campaign. And his bent was very definitely liberal. And mine was very definitely conservative. And he was rather horrified at that, and it turned out to be Al Lowenstein, Allard Lowenstein, who, of course, went on to serve in congress [D-New York] and was later killed by some deranged constituent of his. He was very nice, but our political views were very—
MF: That's who came to see you?
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AO: Yes. Poles apart.
MF: Did you know that [Dr. William] Bill Chafe [history professor] from Duke [University, Durham, North Carolina] is writing a biography on Allard Lowenstein?
AO: No, I didn't. That was my only brief encounter of Al Lowenstein. As I said, he was very nice, but we had no common ground in political thought.
MF: He was quite an interesting person.
AO: Yes.
MF: He could go just about anywhere in the US. He didn't drive and could get anywhere because he had a book full of names of everybody because he just knew so many people.
AO: Yes, he was quite an operator. That was apparent. He had the gift of gab. If you could—very eloquent speaker. But, as I say, politically we were poles apart.
MF: That's interesting that he—I think it's quite interesting the work that Dr. Chafe is trying to do. His papers are at Chapel Hill, Lowenstein's papers, and Dr. Chafe is going through them.
AO: Well, that's interesting. I didn't know that.
MF: Yes. It should come out soon. I would say probably in the next year or two.
AO: I’ll have to read it.
MF: I'll be interested to see what he says as well. Chafe is the one who wrote the book on the Greensboro civil rights, Civilities and Civil Rights [Editor’s note: Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom]. [unclear]
AO: Right.
MF: Well, anyway, we'll go on here. Were the societies at Woman's College still active?
AO: They were pretty much dying on the vine when I arrived. They had sort of lost relevance for my generation. I don't know why. Just something that had served its time and was ready to fold. And I think—as a matter of fact, it did end while I was there, if I recall. I'm a little foggy on that, but no one felt any great commitment to them that I recall. I was an Alethian as I remember. I don't recall participating very much in it though.
MF: Were there very many traditions that seemed like had still carried over from the early years?
AO: Well, I don't know whether they still do the Class Day or not. We had the Baccalaureate 8
Sermon; we had the Class Day, the Daisy Chain and so forth. Class Day, my year at least, was held in the park in front of McIver Building. It was in the old McIver Building, which to me was far prettier than the new McIver Building. And Charles Duncan McIver's statue was right in front of McIver Building then, rather than in front of the library. And, as a matter of fact, the library didn't appear until my senior year because it was not there. We had the library in Foust Building. Not the old Foust, but the—golly, it's the building that's immediately across College Avenue from the Alumni House, smallish building. That used to be the library. And Walker Avenue cut through the campus, and there was a bridge about where the new library is now across Walker Avenue. So they had to bring in a wrecking ball and knock down the bridge, close Walker Avenue, and they finished the new library—not the tower, of course, but the brick part—I think in time for my senior year there. But what else were we—where were we? We were talking about campus traditions.
MF: Oh, with traditions.
AO: Class Day, yes, we would have someone—a student—speak about the past, the present, and the future. And have the Daisy Chain; the underclassmen would go out in the country and gather daisies and make a big daisy chain. And the seniors in white dresses would parade between the two parts of the Daisy Chain.
MF: Yes. Do you think some of these traditions like the Daisy Chain, in particular, had more meaning because the school was smaller?
AO: I think so. We were only two thousand in those days, about. And you knew most everybody or knew of most everybody.
MF: Sort of like a big high school?
AO: Yes. It was a very nice medium to be in for four years.
MF: Yes, I guess roughly about the size of Grimsley.
AO: Yes. We're a little under that. We're about fifteen hundred now—
MF: Oh, okay.
AO: —here at Grimsley. But it was a nice tradition and all the families were there, of course, for all of that. And then the Baccalaureate Sermon was in Aycock [Auditorium] on that Sunday, and then graduation itself was a big deal.
MF: When Woman's College changed to university status and also became coeducational, it seems as though—well, when it was Woman's College, it had a very high status and now as UNCG, it's a good school, but many people have never heard of it.
AO: Well, I think when you're competing with coed schools, you—and, of course, we're moving toward that with the [National College Athletic Association] Division I athletics. 9
That's the only way you can really compete. You have to be like them, and I sort of hate to see that because when I was there—and I know one of my daughters also went to WC-UNC or UNCG, and the thing—I had two who went to Chapel Hill and one who went to UNCG, and the thing that I found in the first two years of their college careers, the teaching at UNCG was superior because they had full professors. My daughter, who was a freshman at Woman's College had Dr. [Richard] Bardolph for world history. She had Claude Chauvigné for French, so you got some really super, high-type professors teaching the students the first two years, whereas those who went to Chapel Hill were in classes with hundreds of people in auditoriums and this kind of thing.
MF: With graduate students teaching.
AO: With graduate students. TAs [teaching assistants]. Maybe one lecture per week by somebody with some clout, and then the TAs would do the discussion sections. And you lose a lot that way because I think just having contact with these real teachers is important. I think the universities, overall, have gotten so into this “publish or perish” that the teaching has been shortchanged, and that's one of the things that made Woman's College, to me, as impressive as it was when I was there.
MF: To backtrack just a little bit, what were some of the faculty like when you were there?
AO: Well, I had Dr. Bardolph, as a matter of fact, for world history my first year at Woman's College. He was very, very young and dashing in those days, of course, and that was one of the reasons his classes were so popular. And I think world history was used as kind of a course where you separated the sheep from the goats, you know. There were those who could handle it and those who simply were overwhelmed and maybe were sent home because of that. Or that and other things. But I found it a marvelous course. I had had, as I said, a superb high school preparation. We had to take world history as sophomores in high school and then American history junior year to 1865, senior year to present, which in those days, was the 1940s. So I had a good preparation in history, and I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Bardolph's course. He's a very eloquent and dynamic lecturer as you no doubt know. And it was a thrill to have him. As a matter of fact, I insisted that my daughter who went to Woman's College try to get in a class with him, which she did. And then my oldest daughter, who went to Chapel Hill, sort of had the feeling that, as you mentioned, Woman's College was inferior to Chapel Hill in every way, so when she was going to summer school to pick up some credits one summer, when I saw that he was teaching history that summer and I said, "Well, you must take this course." Well, she came back very impressed and did agree that perhaps we did have some value. So, yes, Dr. Bardolph was one of the highlights. René Hardré, who was the French—he wasn't head of the department, but he was a perfectly wonderful gentleman. He had just incredible knowledge. The breadth of his knowledge was just awe inspiring.
MF: How do you spell his name?
AO: H-A-R-D-R-E. With an accent ague. And René with an accent ague. Pardon my French. But he was such a fine teacher. And as I said, my major classes were so small that we 10
were able to have a very warm and close friendship with teachers, which is, I think, something you miss when you have a big institution. And you gain a lot just from informal conversations with teachers like that.
MF: I think in graduate school you still find it.
AO: Yes. I think when you get to a certain level, it's true. But this was not just necessarily for—I mean, it could be anybody. Any little freshman could walk into any teacher and be assured of attentive, caring attitude.
MF: One of the other things I wanted to ask you about—you had already started to mention—was with the change to Division I athletics and what you see—how you see that affecting the future of the school.
AO: I think you have to do that, really. I have nothing against sports. As a matter of fact, I love the Carolina—North Carolina Tar Heels and during basketball season, I'm just one of their most avid followers and to a lesser degree, football too because I like basketball better. And I think if you're going to be a top flight university, you're going to have to have that to offer to attract top flight students who want a really balanced college life with a good athletic team to cheer for, and the sororities and fraternities, which, of course, now they have and didn’t have when I was there. There are pluses and minuses in all of this. I hate to see athletes recruited who don't have the ability to do college work. I think that there ought to be farm teams to take care of those athletes who are not of the—who haven't the mental capacity to perform adequately on a college level. And I think it's a form of hypocrisy and dishonesty to pretend that they can when they can't. And I think it hurts the whole program. But I think if it's done with a sense of morality and honesty that it can be a competitive school in athletics, and I don't think it will be a bad thing.
MF: Yes. I think they've said that they don't plan on having a football team, just basketball.
AO: Yes. Well, we have certainly the new facility, and if it grows, you can always play in the Greensboro Coliseum so we have the potential here, I think.
MF: Yes. They named a basketball coach. I just saw it in the paper recently.
AO: Yes, a man from Cornell [University, Ithaca, New York] who had coached under Mike Krzyzewski [men’s basketball coach at Duke University] for a while.
MF: Yes. That's right. I just couldn't remember who it was. [Editor’s note: Mike Dement]
AO: He has a rough row to hoe, but I hope he can do it.
MF: I think if he does well at all that people will be impressed. I don't think people are expecting a whole lot at first.
AO: Of course, the soccer has been great, you know. That's been a superb feather in the cap of the university. 11
MF: Yes. And it's still improving. Yes, I think when they go to Division One I believe that's the first year that they're going to offer athletic scholarships.
AO: Yes. The Spartan Club contacted me the other night, as a matter of fact. I'd been a member for a while anyway.
MF: Yes. I suppose I'll get contacted [unclear] too. I guess they'll hit everybody for that one. Another more recent issue that I'd like to ask you about is the controversy that apparently has been resolved now between the Alumni Association and Chancellor [William] Moran.
AO: Yes, they did resolve it. The Alumni Association, of course, is going to change drastically as times change. And we've had a very loving, if you will—if I can use that strange adjective for an association of alums—but because they were primarily women and had been—had felt a sincere devotion to the institution because they had experienced it when it was a women's college, primarily, I think they resented greatly this feeling that they were being taken over and dictated to by the administration. On the other hand, I can certainly see that the administration felt that it needed to keep a check on everything that was going on, particularly something that might be as powerful and perhaps some days divisive as an Alumni Association with a different view might have become. So I can see both sides of the issue. I was not terribly upset about it one way or the other, personally. But I think there were many who were. But then I've not been particularly active in maintaining membership. But I've not been politically involved in it on a personal basis because of the extra load I have here. [laughs] No time for such things.
MF: Okay. Is there anything that you feel that I've skipped?
AO: Oh, I don't know. We've talked about the quality of the teaching. I think that was very nice, you know. And I don't know how advisors work now, but our—we had class advisors in those days, and they were very conscientious about knowing every single member of the class and really giving you good counsel as to what credits you needed and where you needed them. One teacher I really would like to mention because she was so terribly out of my field was Helen Ingraham, who taught biology. And I hated math and science in high school, and I decided I would take as little in college as I possibly could. And Helen Ingraham was a biology teacher, and she was tough. And, of course, I had, as I said, an excellent preparation in the humanities, and I had just sort of breezed through history courses and language courses and English courses, no problem. And I thought I could do the same thing in biology, but found to my dismay that I got an unsatisfactory report mid-semester from Helen Ingraham. And I was really taken aback and she told me—and she was one of these no nonsense ladies and she said, "Miss Young, you have the ability, but you refuse to use it." So I worked like a demon in biology, which I said was not my forte at all, but by the end of the semester I'd pulled it up from an F to a B, so I felt very gratified. And I've always been grateful to her for having called me on this lackluster performance that I had been guilty of. She was a good person.
MF: Yes. It sounds like it. 12
AO: And you see, this is where I think it might have changed. If you have a huge section of biology students and you're a professor, you just flunk a certain number and you don't care and you don't make it a point to call somebody aside and say, "Look here, you're not doing what you're able to do. Get with it."
MF: Yes. Well, they're pretty faceless and nameless.
AO: Yes, that's right. And I think that's a loss.
MF: Okay. I thank you.
AO: Well, it's been fun. I've enjoyed talking about it. I have a tremendous amount of gratitude for the education I got at the university.
[End of Interview]