I took a purposeful walk around the TCU campus one recent day. The proximate reason for my walk was to relocate, to refix places I remembered. I was looking for scenes I had known in my early awareness of TCU; places and objects I had lived among and taken as a daily granted. A few I would find unaltered; a few I would find intact but encased in new surroundings; a few I would find altered beyond ready recognition; and too many I would not find at all, gone altogether now, so that my memory of their proper places became blurred and questionable.
I started from the south side of the library building, which area during the time of this remembrance, was a large field that lay from University Drive to Lubbock Street, bounded on the south by Bowie Street. I recalled seeing my father hitting golf balls across its expanse. Turning at the Library’s southwest corner to angle northwest along the walk that leads to University Drive across from the Memorial Columns that frame Reed Hall farther to the west, I thought of the original building’s lily pond that still lies not far beneath the ground that filled it over, and I wondered if it would be exhumed by some future generation and what ancient relic might be found if one excavated even deeper.
Having crossed University Drive, I stopped and tried to position the missing Bryson Memorial and old bandstand. They had flanked the central walk that led from the street to the early administration building, the since redesigned and renamed Reed Hall. I couldn’t pinpoint the date in time that I had last seen the bandstand, but I recall that the concrete light standards which had graced its four corners were cracked and broken, exposing steel reinforcements. Shrubs and vines had taken possession of its base and steps, and it looked in dangerous condition to mount. A band did play on it once long ago, but not within my memory. The bands of my time had outgrown the small square provided by the bandstand, and I can only remember it being used as a stage for cheerleaders and speakers at pep rallies, with members of the band on the grass around its base, and the students and on-lookers spilling over onto the walks.
The Bryson Memorial was a huge concrete urn with a concrete bench all around, and I still think of it with pink, purple, and white petunias peeking from its top. There is a small marble placque embedded in the south central walk to Reed that declares, “Gift of Class of 1921 / Dedicated to Prof. Walter E. Bryson.” It seems unconnected with anything else in the proximity, and I believe that this may be all that remains of the memorial dedicated to that much-loved Professor of English, who died in 1922.
I don’t know when the bandstand and the memorial disappeared, but I hope that the reasons for their removal were practical ones–something to do, perhaps, with time and the elements, disuse and misuse, maybe even “progress.” The Bryson Memorial was closer to the street than the bandstand, and it may have been sacrificed, as was the original Memorial Arch, to a wider University Drive. I choose to think it was necessity and not disregard that brought them down.
Looking farther west to the space between Reed Hall on the south and Jarvis Hall on the north, I remembered the honeysuckle arbor that covered the walk between the two buildings and to the east of which, for many springs, graduation services were held. With the arbor as backdrop, a stage was set up, and wooden folding chairs completed the outdoor theatre for the exercises. Bees and wasps loved the arbor too, and made for quicker steps when passing through during flowering season.
Jarvis Hall is a girls’ dormitory now, as it was when I first knew it, although once in the early forties and again in the early fifties, it housed men. Of all the original buildings, it is the least changed in its exterior aspect. Second and third floor wooden porches that were suspended between the massive columns and the east wall of the building are long since gone, but that has not diminished it graceful grandeur.
Exiting through the north door of Jarvis, I continued toward Cantey Street, the northernmost boundary of the campus and the beginning of Rogers Road, where halfway down the block, I lived from the time I was six until I married. Mother and Daddy sold the house and land in 1964, and the northwest corner of the University Christian Church stands now on that spot.
The neighborhood I knew is almost unrecognizable now, only a few houses on either side of the street remaining among a few old sycamores, and a few familiar sidewalk cracks that made for good skate-jumping. And something else–the fireplug. Fireplugs are unlikely objects for human nostalgia, but the sight of the one on the corner of Cantey and Rogers, still sticking crazily high out of the ground, brought back happy/sad yesterdays. Bill Tillotson’s filling station was on that corner with a well-stocked metal ice chest that sat outside the office door. On a hot Texas day, neighborhood kids and campus people, especially the grounds crew, frequently searched its icy depths for a favorite flavor of bottled drink. Due, no doubt, to a miscalculation, the fireplug rose more than a foot higher than normal, and was the perfect height for climbing up on, perching atop, sipping a Grapette, and gazing out across TCU–and miles and miles beyond.
There was a clear view then, from my corner across to the west. None of the buildings north and west of Jarvis had been built, and the new stadium’s east stand was the first structure that broke out of the land that stretched flat, then dipped and rose to a bluff upon which Alton Road North now runs. The improvements required of a modern neighborhood long ago replaced the dirt paths along Cantey that I followed to Alice E. Carlson grade school, and the important needs of a growing university slowly overtook the magic field on the southeast corner of Stadium Drive and Cantey that became wondrously alive in spring and summer with wildflowers of every variety and their attendant insect life.
From the wildflower field looking south to where Stadium Drive and Bellaire Drive North cross, there were no buildings. The tennis courts behind the old wooden fieldhouse–the Barn–were the western limit of concrete, the bare land beyond being used for impromptu events ranging from touch football to snowball fights. Cater-cornered across Bellaire, the hills and valleys that are spotted now with sorority and fraternity “houses,” still formed a municipal golfcourse, Worth Hills–locally and more flavorfully dubbed Goat Hills.
The Barn burned in 1953, taking with it a myriad memories of basketball games, pep rallies, sock hops, Howdy Weeks, Ranch Weeks, and Kitty Wingo-called square dances. The “Little” Gym that stood to its east is now the Ballet Building, the old walls listening now to the sound of more musical sophistication than the echoes of splashes, bounces, and shouts of that earlier time. And, slightly south and east of the Little Gym, its front facing north, is a building first used in 1914. Stripped of its original columns, renovated, and renewed, the sign affixed high up on its facade proclaims it THE BAILEY BUILDING, known to house the School of Education. Under the sign, engraved into the stone, I shouldn’t besurprised to find BRITE COLLEGE OF THE BIBLE.
The proximate reason for my walk was to relocate and refix, for me, places I had known; the ultimate reason is to locate and fix for others who might wander this way, and wonder.
©1987 Joan Hewatt Swaim