Oral history interview with Kathleen Hawkins, 1976 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG ALUMNI ASSOCIATION ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Kathleen Hawkins
INTERVIEWER: Eleanor Kennedy
DATE: January 22, 1976
[Begin Side A]
EK: Mrs. Hawkins, I understand that when you first came to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro] you enrolled in a one-year commercial course. Was this a real popular program in Greensboro at that time?
KH: Yes, it was. I had never had any idea of doing anything different but taking the commercial course at what was known as the North Carolina College for Women [now UNCG at that time. And the college had just gone through the change of the State Normal [and Industrial College] to the North Carolina College for Women, and all through high school I expected to come to the college for the one-year commercial course.
EK: Mary Taylor Moore [Class of 1903] was the registrar then wasn't she?
KH: Yes.
EK: I've understood that Miss Moore was really very progressive in her field. Do you remember much about her?
KH: For a short time I worked for Miss Moore in 1938-39. Her secretary took a leave of absence, and Ms. Poet [?] had been on sick leave from 1937-1930 [?] and so the people in her office had been moved up to the Registrar's Office. I worked a year to a year and a half for Miss Moore as her secretary, and I had carried the loan funds and the work I had been doing for Miss [Laura Hill] Coit [Class of 1896, faculty, college secretary, and general assistant to the president] into her office. After about one and a half years, Miss Moore had to have a full-time secretary, and I didn't have the time to devote to the loan fund business which I had carried with me through Miss Coit's days.
EK: I want to hear more about your work in the student aid program. But now, you were born in Salisbury [North Carolina]—
KH: But I came to school here in Greensboro about 1904. I went to the city schools and Greensboro High School when it was on Spring Street and here for my commercial course. 2
EK: Now, you were a town student. What was your transportation?
KH: I rode on a trolley. It would jump the track once in a while; it rode along up Tate Street.
EK: Was there actually a streetcar with overhead wires then?
KH: It was a streetcar with a trolley. And I walked from my house on North Elm Street to the Square, which we called the Jefferson Square.
EK: That was about a mile?
KH: It wasn't too far, but from the Square to out here it was a good mile. And 1'd walk to the classes. I believe they started about ten after eight [a.m.], and we'd have two hours shorthand and two hours typing or sometime reverse it. And up on third floor of the Administration Building, Mr. [E.J.] Forney [head of Commercial Department and college treasurer] would come up there and see if we were on the job.
EK: Now he was administrator of that program, but did not actually teach it?
KH: Oh yes, he taught. He was an excellent teacher.
EK: Was he already treasurer of the college?
KH: He was the treasurer—bursar they called it. He was a bursar of the college, and he taught the commercial work.
EK: I'm not sure we've told what year we're talking about.
KH: Year 1920. Miss Clara [Booth] Byrd [Class of 1913, alumnae secretary, and received an honorary degree 1980] was his assistant in the treasurer's office, and she helped him with the shorthand classes. We always preferred Mr. Forney's dictation to Miss Byrd because he had a keen sense of humor. And although he got after us an awful lot sometime, we enjoyed his wit.
EK: Do you remember any of his particular little traits?
KH Oh, he'd always—well, he reminded me of Ichabod Crane [fictional character in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow]. He was tall and angular, and he'd walk with sort of a swish to his body. There was a stage in the room that had been the auditorium years ago—the chapel.
EK: This was in what we know as the Administration Building [now the Foust Building]?
KH: That's right. We had our seats on the long tables there below, and he would walk the platforms and put his thumbs under his arms and strut back and forth against there and call on us to go to the board if a visitor would come. He would pick out the ones he thought would show off, and he'd never call us by first names. It was always Carter or 3
Petit, and then put the "Miss" on and we'd call him E.J.; he preferred that. Oh, he told me lots of times that the hair on my head looked like the trees in the springtime and that if I was the last woman on earth, I wouldn't work for E.J. But he would dig at people like that to condition them to meet the business world. He thought it wasn't a bed of roses—a hostile world.
I know there was one girl in the class who didn't have a dry eye from the time she came in the fall until she went home for Christmas. Students didn't go home much between holiday times then because of the transportation and the roads. People just didn't have cars to run home every weekend. One girl in our class was real bright—I guess the best in the class—and he always put Carter up to the board; she was a Greensboro girl and show her off. One time he told her, "You don't have enough brains in your head to fill a teacup. And she turned around and said, "Mr. Forney, you go to hell." She didn't care. So he walked across the stage and said, "Come shake the hand of E. J. Forney. Anybody that can talk to a man like that will get by in the business world." Well, Lucy Carter went to work for a lawyer in town, Mr. O. Saft [?] that had a reputation for saying a few swear words once in a while. And Lucy walked the floor behind him as he would dictate and go right along with him. She later went to Charlotte, where I believe she was in the legal department of Duke Power Company, and she married in Charlotte. I talked to her a few years ago; we were trying to get a class reunion of our Commercial Class—she was all for it. But it never did materialize; we couldn't get enough people and by that time we were all too old to get around, I guess.
EK: The commercial course continued from the very beginning of this college or university until 1967, and it grew and was really very popular. What do you think made it stand out so from any other business training?
KH: It was very thorough. Mr. Forney would not put up with shoddy work. You had to do well. We tried for a certificate at the end of the year, and the big chemical company and the big insurance companies would come here and take the cream of the crop every year. They didn't have problems finding jobs if they were any good, and, of course, some went on to Washington [DC] working government jobs. I know one girl in my class was from Statesville, and she went to work in Washington for the US Postal Department and worked there until she retired. I hear from her every Christmas; she's married. I've seen her once since she's been over here. We had lunch together in Washington. They had all kinds of good jobs in New York.
EK: But how did we move from that to a four-year business course?
KH: I think that, maybe, they had business courses in the public schools, and they had to have teachers so they had to have a four-year [program] where there would be more educated people along the business line as in economics and that sort of thing to put teachers in these schools. Then they finally phased out the commercial course in what I believe 1967.
EK: Now, Mr. Forney and Miss Byrd—they were not the only teachers for the commercial course, where they?
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KH: I don't know how many we had in this class. I know that it was a roomful or more. I couldn't say exactly how many, but we had a big class. It had to be divided into two sections. But Mr. Forney saw that he was going to give it up, and then Mr. [George M.] Joyce [director of commercial education, college treasurer, professor of business education] came to work under Mr. Forney for a while, and then Mr. Joyce took over. They changed the system of shorthand from Isaac Pittman to Gregg shorthand. It was being taught in the schools—they were still taking shorthand in the schools. I doubt if there is any shorthand taught in the regular high school now. I'm not sure. They teach typing. But anyway, then they had Miss Patty [Louise] Spruill [assistant professor of secretarial science]—she was an alumnae [Class of 1912], and she came here to teach shorthand. I was already working; this was after I finished my course. But when I was here, the only two teachers we had were Mr. Forney and Miss Byrd.
EK: And were the only two subjects typing and shorthand?
KH: That's right. And we had to take PE [physical education].
EK: Where were the PE classes taught?
KH: Down in the basement of South Spencer [Residence Hall]. We had two big rooms—it was just a regular gymnasium. We had some outdoor games, volleyball and hockey, across the street behind old Curry [Building], which burned down later.
EK: Curry was on what's now is Walker Avenue. It isn't even Walker Avenue now; it's been closed.
KH: And even after it burned, there were still two columns. The ruins were still there, and the hockey field was there. Then they built the science building and the home economics building.
EK: Was Miss [Mary Channing] Coleman [head of physical education for twenty-seven
years] teaching?
KH: No, Fay Davenport [head of physical education 1907-1921] was the teacher. But at the beginning of the school year I didn't go to PE. I really got into a bit of hot water about that. Four or five—this same Lucy Carter and I—we walked from way downtown and figured we'd already had enough exercise without knocking a few Indian clubs around and get on a trapeze. That's about what we did in PE. Day students had a little dressing room. We had a little cubbyhole up under the eastern end of the building. It's all in a basement, and there was a clay ground floor. It was cold; there's no heat. So we didn't want to dress and undress for gym classes down there. We just didn't go, and we got notices in the town girls' boxes about attending PE.
Miss Mary Taylor Moore put a little notice in our box about, "Please come to my office at your first vacancy." We knew what she wanted, so we just didn't pick up the cards, which was really something—maybe kind of bad. But finally, Mr. [Julius I.] Foust [second president of the school] sent Mrs. [Clora McNeil] Foust [Class of 1909], who 5
was Miss McNeil, his secretary at the time, up to our room in the shorthand class and called about five of us up to his office and asked how many times each of us had been to PE class. I told him that I guessed I could count them on one hand, and each one had a different story. We just really hadn't been. He said we could either go to PE or we'd have to drop out of school. Of course, I was all for going to PE, and as we walked out this same Lucy shrugged her shoulders as if she didn't care one way or the other. Dr. Foust called us all back, and I was so humiliated I didn't know what to do because I was going to accept it and get right on over there the next time. But he lectured to us about it and then said, "You go your way." He lectured about her indifference. But we did get to gym the rest of the year.
EK: And your absence didn't keep you from getting the certificate?
KH: I didn't get the certificate. On in the spring, I did some work up the street for the Presbyterian One Million Campaign for Christian Education. I went after school hours up there so I had a little work experience, and in May Mr. Forney didn't ask me to come back and take the exam. I did stay over here and take the two-year concentrated bookkeeping course—two, I mean. We didn't do any bookkeeping until the spring, so we'd stay over here until six or seven at night. We had a set of books we had to do. We worked all day and into the night until we completed them—double entry bookkeeping. When I came to work here for Miss Coit, she had never had a secretary.
EK: You had your first job at school after you'd worked part time at the Presbyterian Church?
KH: I worked there in the summer up until Dr. Foust sent word that he needed a secretary for Miss Coit and if I was interested to come talk to him about it, which I did.
EK: Tell me a little about the pay scale then.
KH: I was making seventy-five dollars a month, which I thought was a good salary and Dr. Foust offered me one hundred dollars a month, so of course I took the job. The One Million Campaign people understood that I should do that.
EK: Was one hundred dollars about what industry in Greensboro was paying?
KH: I think that without any experience they would come to Mr. Forney and take his best in the Commercial Department for about seventy-five dollars; that was top pay for Jefferson Standard and Pilot [Life] Insurance Companies. That went a long way—it was good money in those days. I went to work for Miss Coit as secretary, and I also worked two days a week for Mr. Wade R. Brown—Dr. Brown [dean of the School of Music].
EK: The music school?
KH: Yes. He had no secretary, and I would go in there one day a week and take his dictation. And then in the spring—the music contest had started a year before I came here, about 1918 or 1919, just a piano contest. I remember coming to the contest in the old Students' 6
Building. One of our friends won the contest that year, Helen Bell Rankin [Class of 1938]. She was just a high school student. Then during the contest times, I would spend more time with him because of all this material we were getting out down there. Then when the contest came, I would spend the whole three or four days helping down there because we had to take notes from the judges and we had to go in the three different buildings and line up the secretaries to write down the judges' comments. They all had to be typed up and mailed out to the different schools after the contest was over. I enjoyed my work with Dr. Brown—he was a great person. I stayed with him until he left here in 1937.
EK: You continued dividing your time between him and Miss Coit?
KH: Yes, of course in the summer he wasn't here, so it was during the school year.
EK: But did you work in Miss Coit's office all year round?
KH: Oh yes. A twelve-month job; at that time we had a month paid vacation. Our office was always busy in the summer because all admissions came through Miss Coit's office and she sent the final instructions, and we sent long remarks to every student along with the room assignments. They were made in the dean of women's office. We sent out in the material directions of about coming to school in the fall—when to get here, what to do and the baggage labels were sent out late in the summer and along in September prior to the time they should be here. It was a busy time on the campus as the students were coming in. You could always tell which were the freshmen and which had been here because the freshmen wore their new fall outfits and it was always hotter than love in August when they'd come in September. But they'd be up here in the ballroom dresses and their best clothes. The other girls would come out here in their less formal clothes; they didn't wear blue jeans at that time. But they were in their less formal clothes, and you could tell they'd been here before.
EK: When you worked for Miss Coit did you have a private office?
KH: No, I had no private office the first day I came. They found me a typewriter, and I had to sit on a dictionary. The table was so high I had to type until the bell rang; and the room would then again fill up with students for French class; and then I found another place at the end of that hour; the bell rang, and I had to move again. Finally Miss Clora McNeil helped me find a room and a chair and table where I could be more permanent until finally we did get a place fixed up in Miss Coit's office. The first day with Miss Coit she was dictating letters to students who couldn't get on the campus—the dormitories were filled up. They had some rooms nearby the campus being rented to students, and they could take their meals on campus. I remember when I handed her the batch of letters she began to sign them, and I saw her make two or three little marks on each letter as she laid it aside for me to fold. I went over to see what she was doing. I had spelled dormitory
"D-O-R-Y-D-I-N-I-N-G."
EK: Did you have a dictionary by your desk? 7
KH: I did after that. That was some of Mr. Forney's teaching too. He was a great person for spelling. But I was nervous that day, I guess, and I didn't take out the time to look up the spelling of anything.
EK: Miss Coit must have been quite different from Mr. Forney then.
KH: Oh, she was [the] most gentle person. I never heard her speak evil to anybody. She couldn't believe that anyone was evil or anything dishonest. She trusted everybody. She had a nervous breakdown in 1937 and went off a while to rest. Then she came back in the fall of—I guess it was 1939. She stayed about six weeks and just couldn't cope with it. I remember that one of the first days she was back a student who was a senior that year and had been helped from the loan funds—the girl came to Miss Coit and asked for a loan. She said that they just didn't have enough money—this was at the opening of school. Miss Coit looked her straight in the eye and said, "How do I know you're going to pay this back?" The girl was so shocked because that just wasn't like Miss Coit. She would always work out some way—there was never any question of whether you are going to pay it back or not. She knew the girl would pay it back. She had already loaned her during the previous years, so the girl just but her head down and began to cry. I went down to Dr. [Walter Clinton] Jackson's [dean of administration, chancellor] office and told him what had happened. He said to send the girl down to him. He assured her that we would help her and not to worry about it. A little later then, Miss Coit—as I said, she just got the feeling that people were dishonest or something and had a bad breakdown. She didn't come back anymore. I believe Miss Coit died in the early forties. I've forgotten what year. At that time we reorganized. Her work moved to Miss Moore's, the Registrar's Office.
EK: Miss Coit was actually director?
KH: She was secretary of the college. Her title was Secretary of the College.
EK: Things weren't as specialized then. She did a lot of different things.
KH: No. And at that time then Miss Moore had a director of admissions—Mildred Newton had been away for a year. She had been Miss Moore's secretary. She had been in England on leave. She became the director of admissions. She worked in an office in Miss Moore's big office, and Mildred worked over in her office. Then Miss Moore did the evaluating of the units and credits and so forth and approved by the director of admissions. They moved that from one place to another—it kept getting bigger and bigger.
EK: When Miss Coit resigned or retired, what happened to you then? Were you still her secretary at that time?
KH: Yes, I was. And we had been under Miss Moore's direction, but in another office, getting out and collecting all these applications, getting them in shape and then turning them over 8
to Miss Moore's office. She would evaluate and then we would send out the instructions and all that stuff from our office.
EK: And Miss Coit did handle the loan and scholarships?
KH: Yes, Miss Coit had always handed the loans. Sometime along in the early thirties, the auditors came every year to audit the college books and audit her loan fund book. He set up a new systems bookkeeping—it had been just a ledger. But they set up for each fund a different kind of a fund. So the auditor showed me how it should be done. From then on, Miss Coit let me do the banking, and she would write the collection letters and they were always very brief. She would make her letters very concise and very brief, but she'd get to the point. So after Miss Coit left, I still handled the loan fund business and wrote the collection letters. We had a pretty good collection record. The auditors told us that our collections were better percentage wise than they were at [the University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill. The boys just somehow thought that the university owed them that, and they were sort of hard to collect from sometime. He thought our records were pretty good.
After I got into writing the letters myself, if I'd see any little personal item in the paper about the person, like a new baby, I'd write a little letter to congratulate them and never mention that they had a loan that they hadn't been responding to for a long time. Lot of times that would bring results. They would feel like you were thinking about them as a personal interest, as a death in the family. A lot of times we would get addresses by reading the obituary columns and see who the survivors were. Or personal items—maybe you'd lose [her address]. I remember one time this girl had been paying very well and then she just quit paying. I couldn't get an answer from her—I lost her address. She had a brother here in town, and I couldn't find out from him the address. She still owed us some money. She was one of our real good loaners. She had a sister here. So a friend of mine in Charlotte who had worked for Miss Coit's office, but she'd married and moved to Charlotte, asked me about my doctor. I was pregnant at the time and Dr. Dunn [?] was my doctor. She said that he was a good gynecologist, and she needed to have an operation and maybe I could ask him whether she could come to Greensboro and see him. So I did, and he said he didn't know why she wanted to come to Greensboro since one of the best gynecologists in the state was in Charlotte and he told me his name. I knew it was the husband of this girl I'd been trying to find. So I came back to the office the next day and wrote her a letter and told her I'd learned that her husband was one of the best gynecologists in the state and was so glad to find out they were having such success and so forth. I didn't mention the loan. In a few days I got a letter from her with two dollars in it, and she said "I want you to know that your letter did exactly what I thought you wanted it to do. It reminded me of my obligation. I'm going to send you two dollars every week until I get that balance paid." And she did. I saw in the paper not three months ago that the girl died. She would be in her sixties, I guess, now.
EK: At that time, when Miss Coit retired and you had already begun to handle the student aid— did you handle the entire student aid office in the thirties?
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KH: Well, as far as the loan funds. In the meantime Miss Moore was needing a full-time secretary. They needed a treasurer for the credit union. So I moved over to the little front office in the administration building. I handled the loan funds and the credit union office hours which was like once a week, the people would apply. And I kept the books for the credit union. Then we had to have absences. All the teachers, every Friday, turned in absences, and I had the awful job of keeping up with absences and sending the notices to the students when they'd over cut. They had to go to Dean [Harriet] Elliott [history and political science faculty, dean of women]. Miss Elliott was dean of students. But this was the legwork, I suppose. The work to get them in there was done in my office. I had no help, no secretary. I did all my own letter writing, bookkeeping and this other. Then Dr. [Edward Kidder] Graham [Jr., chancellor] came. He combined the student work program with the student loan fund. He said if they were going to get loans, then work, it all ought to dovetail in one office.
EK: That does make sense because I remember when I was here Mr. Charlie Phillips [director of public relations] handled the student work.
KH: Mr. Phillips had work, the extension work, and two or three other things in his office. So he put the working program down in my office, and I also did the loans and the scholarship funds. We didn't have so many scholarship funds at the very beginning; we had a few endowment funds. The endowment money was in the Wachovia Bank, due to the rules from the state university [Consolidated University of North Carolina System]. All the Consolidated University funds were in trust at the Wachovia Bank. But when the checks came in, we appropriated to the different scholarship funds. Of course, the groundwork—we had scholarship committee. I'd get the material together for the committee, and we'd call a meeting and have the decisions made at the meeting. Then I would send the notices out for these things.
At that time, I guess, I became the first full-time director of student aid, the whole program. All the work checks we mailed out from my office. We had recorded the checks that came in for these students—several hundred checks every month. They used to put them in the post office and got to losing them, so they delivered them to the dormitories. Every one that went to Mary Foust or Guilford Halls was done up in a bundle and sent to the dormitory and put in boxes down there. So that had to be done. When the [National] Defense Loan Program came in, it had to be done in the treasurer's office, and Mr. Joyce at that time was then the treasurer. Mr. Forney had retired, and it had to be done in his office. Well after a while Mr. Joyce didn't have the help in his office, and he didn't want to fool with it down there. But under his supervision, the granting of all those went through the committee. All the applications that would come in you'd have to weed out and see who was eligible, then get the note signed and all that had to go on before they could be awarded the Defense Loan. When you are working with the government, you have all these government reports to make and red tape and this, that and the other. So, Mary Jane Venable [Class of 1947], she was I think then (She's Mary Jane Knight now.), worked for Mr. Phillips so they let me have one-half day's work for Mary Jane to help with some of that work. A little later after this program got to moving along until it was really growing, they allowed me to have a full-time secretary. I had a full-time secretary then until I left, with some student help. They didn't allot me much, but it was some. 10
EK: The Defense Funds that you referred to, was this during WWII [World War II]?
KH: Well, it came after WWII. In the fifties I think [National Defense Education Act, 1958].
EK: The reason I asked is that when I was here in the forties during WWII, I was employed in the news bureau; I was a student. I was thinking that the money I was paid, which was twenty-five cents an hour, came from the federal government. It might have been National Youth Administration [New Deal agency in the United States that focused on providing work and education for Americans between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four]. I didn't know if it came from the college or the government, but I did know that some student help came through the government.
KH: Well, we did have some matching government funds for some student aid help. It could have been. But I don't [think] the National Defense Loans came in until the end of the fifties.
EK I think this might be interesting. In the forties we were paid twenty-five cents an hour. What had student help been paid earlier than that?
KH: In the thirties, during the Depression years and the bank closing, we had NYA work—National Youth Administration. I believe that was only fifteen cents an hour.
EK: Do you remember what students were making when you retired in 1967?
KH: No, because the government had told us that we had to pay the minimum wage which was like $1.65 or something like that. And that was ten years ago, no eight or nine. I retired on July 1, 1967.
EK: Back in the thirties in the [Great] Depression were there lots of students needing help?
KH: Yes, and at that time the banks closed. Miss Coit had a brown envelope with each fund in it in her big bold handwriting. the Cotten Fund, the Alumni Fund, the this fund, that McIver fund. If the student had to have a loan of one hundred dollars, sometimes she'd have to make a note to three different funds to get thirty dollars here, twenty-five dollars there, and ten dollars in this one to make up the total loan. And as I said, they had to close out the checking account and the money for a long time during the bank-closing period. They didn't lose any money in the bank—they had their money down in the Greensboro Bank and Trust company. As I said, Miss Coit trusted everybody. I remember one incident that happened when I first came to work here. There was a girl who roomed over at Mrs. McIver's [Lula Martin McIver was the widow of the first college president Charles Duncan McIver]. Mrs. McIver lived over in this corner house—
EK: Where the bell hangs?
KH: Yes, where the bell hangs, that's right. This girl was older than most of our students, and her mother had been a student here in Miss Coit's day. Miss Coit knew her very, very 11
well. This girl came in the office one day, and she had a check. She said that she was going downtown to buy a pair of shoes. She said that they wouldn't accept her check unless she had somebody that knew her to recommend her. So Miss Coit wrote her name on the back of the check, Laura H. Coit, and she had the check made out to the girl—so she endorsed it and had put her bold "Laura H. Coit" on it. It was from a Columbia, South Carolina, bank. I don't believe that the girl had filled out the check. I know she hadn't because she didn't know how much the shoes were going to be. She said her uncle had sent her this check. About time for the check to get back to the bank and get back to Greensboro, the bank called Miss Coit one day and told her this check had been returned—no such account. It was made for six or seven hundred dollars—it was way up in the hundreds of dollars. Miss Coit nearly died. She not—footed it over to Mrs. McIver's, and the girl was in her room over there. She confronted the girl with this. She got the girl, and Zeke [Ezekiel Robinson, prominent African-American staff member] was the one who drove the car over there; so Miss Coit, the girl and Zeke went to the bank. The girl just acted like she didn't know what that was about and it was all right. There was a signature on the check. I just think the girl went temporarily berserk or something. Well she had all the money but a few dollars in her room—maybe she bought a pair of shoes. She gave it back to Miss Coit, and she didn't lose any money but it gave her a scare. Then this girl had borrowed from the college, and as long and I was over here I was still writing to that girl. She had moved up to Hendersonville or Brevard [North Carolina towns] or somewhere up there. I don't think she ever paid it.
EK: What do they finally do—just close them out or do they continue in an unfinished file?
KH: Well, they never did just actually cut them off. By years the time would run out on these notes, but I would make it a moral obligation. You were benefited from this loan when you were here and you're depriving some other student from this help and do the best you can to pay it. And at one time, when they were twenty-five years old, we would write that we would not charge interest if they would just replace the fund. We got a lot of it that way.
EK: Was there ever a time in the so-called "affluent sixties," about the time of your retirement, that loan funds weren't used?
KH: Never, never. And I don't know of a time when we didn't have a big balance on hand for any of those funds. At one time we did have a surplus. I don't know how it came about, but we took the money, a certain percentage. The Alumni Fund was one of the largest funds, and say we'd take eight or nine or ten thousand dollars out of the Alumni Fund and transfer it to the trust fund at the bank to draw interest. We'd give that dividend and add it to the fund to take the place of somebody who didn't pay that you'd finally have to cancel it. Any time you needed that, maybe there'd be a fund for a certain area, a certain county, or for a certain course, and you ran a little short on that, you could just call on that money and they'd send the check right on over. After the National Defense Funds came up, many people preferred that because you could cancel some of it by teaching. Those statements had to be certified by the principal of the school or somebody in the school system. They 12
would send them in and you'd check your records to cancel ten percent of the total loan and the interest up to that point.
EK: For a student who only had two weeks of intensive bookkeeping you had to do a lot of bookkeeping.
KH: Miss Coit's was just a simple bookkeeping and ours was too, for that matter. I couldn't go into a place now and do this complicated cost accounting and all that. I can add and I can subtract. She taught me an easy way to figure interest.
EK: A lot of yours was on the job training.
KH: On the job training. I guess that's the best after all.
EK: You came as a student in 1919, came as an employee in 1920, retired in 1967. That was quite a span of years.
KH: Forty-seven years. It doesn't seem that long.
EK: Of course not, but so many of the really original college people were still here or in their latter years. Now, of course not Dr. [Charles Duncan] McIver [first president of the school] or Miss [Sue May] Kirkland [lady principal] or any of those; but Dr. Foust, Mr. Forney and so many of the names that buildings are named for now are here. I'd love to hear you reminisce about some of these people. Dr. Foust—now what kind of person was he?
KH: Dr. Foust was a great person in my estimation; some people thought he was rather autocratic, but he got things done. He could go to Raleigh and confront the legislature. I remember a few times that he and Miss Byrd and I—and I think there was another person—we went to Charlotte to work with the alumnae. The letters were supposed to go out under the president of the alumni association in Charlotte—that area, you know the Mecklenburg [County] area. We had the letters addressographed. We had the letters here, and we printed them here. They were postmarked. We stayed at the Selwyn Hotel; we stayed down there two or three days. They had a big alumnae dinner meeting, and we got all of this material out.
EK: Was this to get the alumnae support?
KH: Mrs. C. W. Tillett. Her sister, Gladys Avery Tillett [Class of 1915, honorary degree 1962], was head of the thing then. It wasn't Gladys A. Tillett; I can't remember her name. She was the president of the chapter down there at that time. Dr. Foust was a great tease—he loved to tease. Once, he and Miss Byrd went to New York to have a dinner meeting with the New York alumnae. They were at the Park Terrace Hotel. Dr. Foust, in his droll sort of way when the waiter came that night and handed them a menu (They had met with the president and some of the alumnae up there for a dinner meeting, to talk things over.), Dr. Foust looked it over and at the bottom it said cover charge two dollars a 13
person. He read it out loud and said, "Waiter! Come here! I don't eat off a tablecloth at home, and I'm not going to pay two dollars to eat off a tablecloth up here." Of course, he knew better, and he was pulling the waiter's leg. Miss Byrd, she could have gone under the table, embarrassed to death. He had his fun with that.
I remember one time Dr. Foust and Mrs. Foust and my husband and I went to Pinehurst [North Carolina]. We fixed us a picnic lunch and took a drive down there. Dr. Foust was driving that day. Just as we got down the road a little ways, he stopped at a little country filling station. It was on a Sunday. They had the little grocery store with it. He loved his cigars, and he went inside to get him a cigar. There was a woman working in there that day, and he said, "What's this county we're in here?" And she said, "This is Randolph County." So he said, "Well, what's that county up here that we've just come through?" And she said, "That's Guilford County." And he said, "Well now there's a county right down there next to that," and she said, "That's Montgomery County." He asked all around, and after a minute she said, "You know, I don't believe you got any learning." He liked to do things like that.
EK: Some of the other people that were here that buildings were named for now—we've talked about Mr. Forney, but Dr. [Anna] Gove [campus physician, professor of hygiene, and director of public health], she was active.
KH: Yes, I remember Dr. Gove very well, a real kind person. I've been in her home. I have a little umbrella that came from China. During WWI [World War I] she was with the Red Cross [emergency response organization]. When she died, she had her things willed to five people, I believe it was. This little umbrella was in Anne Shamburger's things, and Anne gave me the little Chinese umbrella. On television last night—no, it was this morning on the TODAY show. It was raining in New York and they had the camera on the street, and I saw one person with a little umbrella just like that. And I thought that I ought to get mine out today if it rained. But she was in the house up on Highland Avenue. And Miss [Gertrude Whittier] Mendenhall [charter member of mathematics faculty], I remember her, too. She was always real stern looking, but she really was kind.
Miss [Cornelia] Strong in the math department—I went to Miss Strong one time to get some paper or something from her, and I had to fill my fountain pen. You know back then they had a bottle of ink on the table and you pulled the lever on our fountain pen to fill it back up; they didn't have the ballpoint pens. I started to fill my pen from a bottle of ink on hers, and she said, "Don't use that, use this. That belongs to the college. This is my personal bottle of ink." She was very conscientious, very conscientious.
We had Miss [Mary] Petty [science faculty]. She was the head of the social committee. I went with Miss Petty on occasion down to the Jugtown [pottery shop near Seagrove, North Carolina]. We had a nice visit with the Busbees [owners, Jacques and Juliana] to get some jars for the auditorium and different occasions. These big urn type decorative jar type things—we got them at Cole's Pottery. They were cheaper than Mrs. Busbee. I did the driving—no, I fixed us a picnic lunch, and she and I went down there. She did the driving because I know that she nearly scared me half to death the way she took the curves. But we did let Mrs. Busbee know that we had already bought the jars. She just wanted to go down and visit with them, and I always enjoyed my visit. I went with Virginia [Terrell] Lathrop [Class of 1923, honorary degree 1966, trustee of the 14
Consolidated University of North Carolina] on occasion to Mrs. Busbee's. Mrs. Busbee had grown up with Virginia's mother in Raleigh, and they were very good friends. Unless you were a friend of somebody who went to see Mrs. Busbee, you didn't get in the little log house. I always enjoyed the times when I had some excuse to get there with others.
I remember Mrs. Coolidge, the dietician. And Mrs. Swanson came after Mrs. Coolidge. Then Mrs. Bessie Doub was here. I remember her very well. Mrs. Bessie Doub's ancestor, [Reverend] Peter Doub, was founder, I believe, or first president of Greensboro College. He really started West Market United Methodist Church [Greensboro, North Carolina].
EK: In those early days it seems as though there was a high proportion of women on the faculty and staff. Is that true? Do I get the right impression?
KH: Yes, that's right.
EK: When did that begin to change, do you remember?
KH: Well, I really don't remember. But it's just been in the last ten years that the department heads have been phased out, and heads of departments are men now. Chemistry was Miss Petty, and then it was Miss [Florence] Schaeffer; Mrs. [Dr. Anna] Reardon in physics. Of course, the math department [head] was [Dr.] Helen Barton—Miss Mendenhall and then Helen Barton.
[End of Interview]