Category: TCU Magazine

My friend, C. Ivan Alexander, who remembers the TCU campus as far back as I do, said on a rare visit back a couple of years ago, that he doesn’t recognize it anymore. He doesn’t “know” it anymore; can’t find the past that he knew here; can’t find much that relates to his youth or his student days here. In short, there is no “there” here any more.

Ivan’s family association with the university actually goes back farther than mine. His grandfather, the first C. I. Alexander, was a graduate of old Add-Ran University and a professor of mathematics at TCU from 1908-1919. His mother, Ann (Brooks), and father, the second C. I. Alexander, were graduates of TCU, as were my mother and father. Ivan was, in a word, “steeped” in purple.

Perhaps if Ivan had hung around the campus for as long as I have, he wouldn’t have such a sense of disorientation. I guess for him it’s something like seeing a person you knew as a child, years later after time has worked its changes. For me, I watched as the child grew, so there is more of a feeling of gradual rather than sea-change.

I heard Emeritus Chancellor Tucker say once that if a university is to be viable, it must change, or it becomes a dinosaur — useless, nonfunctional, dead. He was speaking, to be sure, of other than physical change, but it follows that a campus’ anatomy must also change to keep pace with its varying programs, technology, and times

The beginnings of the present structural campus seem so modest. In January 1911, less than one year after the removal of the college from Waco to Fort Worth, the school newspaper published a preliminary sketch of the “new” Texas Christian University campus as envisioned by Fort Worth architects, Waller & Field. An accompanying article by Endowment Secretary Chalmers McPherson explained:

“The Skiff gives to its readers this week a picture of the ‘Lay-out’ of the new T.C.U. This picture is, in part, a dream. The dream is one, however, which will come to pass in the future…. The reason for adopting the ground plans for so many buildings at present is that there may be perfect harmony in the arrangement. The grounds should be properly laid out and every building which is expected to be erected in the future should have its proper place assigned to it.”

The sketch includes nine buildings, five of which were actually built by 1914 and placed according to plan. These five included the original Administration Building (now Reed Hall), Jarvis Hall, Clark Hall and Goode Hall (both razed), and Brite College of the Bible (now the Bailey Building).

Today, almost ninety years later, there are some forty-five major buildings and more under construction, not to mention renovations, temporary quarters, recreational and athletic fields, and parking facilities. Visions in 1911 could reach just so far.

Until 1942, only three major structures were added to the original five — the Little Gym (1921) since become the Ballet Building; the Mary Couts Burnett Library (1925) since undergoing two major additions (1958, 1982) which completely mask its original aspects; and the Stadium (1930) since enlarged three times (1948, 1953, 1956) and named the Amon Carter Stadium. In 1942, when I was in the second grade at Alice E. Carlson Elementary School across Cantey St. from the campus, the first building erected within my memory was begun. Foster Hall, a dormitory for women, was within sight of my home on Rogers Rd. and a half-block bike-ride away. I find some irony in the fact that I roamed its incomplete shell with my biking friends ten years before I lived there as a TCU freshman.

Foster was followed by Waits, another dormitory for women, and Tom Brown, a dormitory for men, and the Fine Arts Building, since renamed Landreth Hall. Then, in 1952, the Winton-Scott Hall of Science was raised at the corner of Bowie St. and University Drive, only the second building to be built on the east campus. The Science Building was a pet project of my father, who was then Chair of the Biology/Geology Department. He was dogged in the matter of naming the building after his respected colleagues, Will M. Winton and Gayle Scott. It remains the only academic building on the campus that honors the professors whose careers were spent teaching in the programs the facility houses.

Since then, the intervening forty-eight years have seen thirty-five more new buildings, the demolition of four older structures (Clark, Goode, Tom Brown, Pete Wright), several major renovations, and multiple improvements to and expansion of athletic facilities. All of this has contributed to the obscurity of Ivan’s “there.”

Although it is hard to get “there” when “here” gets in the way, as I walk on the present campus under the tall spreading live-oaks, pieces of the past poke out and remind me of the way it used to be. I recall those now large trees being planted as very young saplings all along University and Stadium Drives. I can hear my grandmother saying that it would be years before they grew to any height and provided any shade. And, so it was, Grandma Georgie, so it was. My mind’s eye unsheaths the Reed Building’s facade and replaces the six Ionic columns of the “Ad” Building of my and Ivan’s time; it resurrects “The Barn,” an old wooden field house once on the west campus, and a lily pond that mirrored the columned entrance to the library. Yes, it is hard to get back there from here unless you know the territory.

Were the founding Clark brothers, Dr. McPherson, and C. I. Alexander the First to come back today, they would be as unbelieving as C. I. Alexander the Third to see what has become of the little “prairie school.” And were we to come back in one hundred years, what would we find? How far can any of us see? What can we envision? Will TCU stand, expand, shrink in the face of “virtual” universities of the future?

What will happen to Jarvis, Reed, and the Gym (Ballet Building) in the next century? Will they fall to the needs of future generations as did Tom Brown and Pete Wright? Will they become vacant hulls ready for the wrecking ball because students no longer come to the physical campus but visit it in cyberspace? Will they become quaint relics of another time with guided tours of how universities used to function and how students used to live and learn? What will their “here” become?

Time alone can tell, of course, but in the meantime, we are constantly creating a new there from the here and the now.

©2000 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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In my youth, the streets of my TCU neighborhood were paths to destinations, bicycle byways and, sometimes, a ball court for summer evening games of kick-the-can. Their names meant little beyond identifying where I and my friends lived. Dorothy Johnson’s house was on Shirley Ave., Jean Barrett’s on Cockrell, and Kitty Townsend lived on Rogers as I did. I walked up Rogers, down Cantey, and crossed Greene and Cockrell and Waits on my way to McLean Jr. High School (located where Paschal High is now). But the street names didn’t mean much to me, then; I wasn’t even conscious that I knew them. Kids don’t spend much time chewing on such things.

Studying, now, those same streets in search of times gone by, I realize how closely associated the TCU neighborhoods have been with the university at their, and my, core.

Cockrell, Greene, and Rogers were paved and, perhaps, named during the early 1920s. Up to that time, the TCU neighborhood — the “hill” — had been outside the city limits of Fort Worth, connected to the city by a route that led from Forest Park Blvd. to Eighth Ave. to the streets of downtown. In fact, what is now the major boulevard that bisects the present campus, our familiar University Drive, was still a westwardly extension of Forest Park Blvd. and was so designated. This piece of TCU history happened thus:

TCU history professor, E. R. Cockrell, had been elected Mayor of Fort Worth in 1921, and during his brief tenure, the TCU hill was incorporated into the city, and the university and the town had agreed to share the costs of paving streets adjacent to the campus, and widening and renaming that part of Forest Park Boulevard that ran in front of the school. According to Dean Colby Hall’s history of TCU, the college had experienced financial difficulties in the years following World War I, and this new obligation added significantly to that burden.

Help came from two gentlemen who owned considerable property on the hill, and were interested in the development of the university. R. L. Rogers, a real estate man, and Dr. R. M. Greene, whose family owned and lived on extensive property just east of the campus, proposed to the TCU Board of Trustees that they use the proceeds from the sale of vacant lots which they owned to help pay the college’s part of the paving. The school approved of the plan and Greene and Rogers took responsibility for carrying out the proposal, which resulted in over two-thirds of the debt being covered by these two men.

Dr. Greene’s support of the university would continue, willing to TCU much of his estate which included acreage south and east of University Drive to Lubbock Street, as well as the large brick home he had built on the corner of Princeton and University Drive which was used by the TCU Speech and Hearing Department until about 1975. Greene had earlier sold the land on which the library now stands at a bargain price of $15,000.

Dr. Egbert R. Cockrell, after whom Cockrell Ave. is named, and his wife, Dura Brokaw Cockrell, joined the TCU faculty in 1899 when the school was still in Waco, he as Professor of History, Political & Social Science, and she as Head of the Art Department. They would serve in these capacities until 1922, when he became the President of William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri. The Cockrells’ two lots and their two-story home on the corner of Cantey and University was sold to the University Christian Church in 1925. The home, moved diagonally across University Drive to the southeast corner of Cantey and University, was used by TCU as a girls’ dormitory for a number of years.

Shirley Ave., a short two-and-a-half blocks long, and dead-ending on the south at Alice Carlson School and on the north at Avondale, was almost certainly named for T. E. Shirley, an early and tireless supporter of the university. T. E. was on the university Board from 1893-1917, serving as Chairman from 1899-1909. In his first year as Chair, a motion was made to discontinue the school because of indebtedness. Shirley refused to put the motion, which therefore could not come to a vote, and thereupon dedicated himself full time to raising money for the college and started the campaign with $1000 out of his own pocket. Spelling the name variously as “Sherley” and “Shirley,” the men and women of this early northeast Texas family have long been identified with TCU. T.E.’s nephew, Andrew Sherley, was a Board member from 1920-45, as was Andrew’s son, W. M. “Bill” Sherley from 1949 to 1965. And what student from 1927 through 1971 can forget Miss Lorraine Sherley, the feared and revered grande dame of the English Department? These members of the family are honored in the naming of TCU’s Sherley Residential Hall.

McPherson Street, one block north of the campus, was named after Chalmers McPherson, a Waxahachie minister, who was a member of TCU’s Board of Trustees from 1883 to 1903, Endowment Secretary of the university from 1908-1911, and taught in Brite College of the Bible from 1915 until his death in 1927. Dean Hall recalls that “Brother Mac devoted his life in love and zeal to his ‘boys and girls,’ giving them spirit as well as lessons.” On his death the Chapel in the old Brite Building (now the Bailey Building) was named the “McPherson Memorial Lecture Room” in his honor. In addition, his extensive theological library was bequeathed to Brite College, becoming the core of what is now one of the most important collections of theological literature in America.

Edward McShane Waits, after whom Waits Ave. is named, was President of TCU from 1916 to 1941. At the time of his appointment, he was pastor of the Magnolia Christian Church in Fort Worth and had been secretary of the TCU Board of Trustees for five years. He led the school through the Depression years between 1929 and the mid-’30s, personally knocking on the doors of Fort Worth’s business community to solicit desperately needed funds to keep the college going and to meet its faculty payroll. It was during his time, too, that the school’s enrollment rose from 367 students to over 2,000, and faculty increased from 20 to over 100.

Described by all who knew him as a wise, kind, and gentle man, “Prexy,” in the words of his colleague Colby Hall, “was known for the beauty of his phraseology and the prolificity of his poetical quotation, but not for rushing to the termination of a speech.” Students of his day will recall his slow eloquence and distinctive southern Kentucky pronunciation as he conducted mandatory three-times-a-week chapel in the old Ad Building’s auditorium. Memorable, too, is his discussion of TCU’s name. After extolling the greatness of Texas and the high purpose of a university, he explained that the middle word “Christian” gave dignity and meaning to the other two.

If you lived in one place for any length of time in your youth, you remember the streets that led you in and out, and to and from your home. Knowing their names, and the stories behind them, can help you repossess a piece of the past; they are proof, in part, of your identity. It pleases me to know that my paths brushed up against the paths of these fine gentlemen and those of the university they so selflessly served.

©2000 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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I knew Davey O’Brien before he was DAVEY O’BRIEN, but I didn’t know it. I was four years old when Davey won the Heisman Trophy in 1938, bringing the national recognition for himself and for TCU that lingers in national athletic annals still, after these 61 years.

If memory serves, Davey was a geology major and, as a student of science, he was also a student of my father, Willis Hewatt, who taught biology. The Hewatt family lived on land owned by TCU on Lowden Street, across from the library, and Daddy’s students would drop by occasionally. My parents would also have students stay with my sister and me sometimes, and apparently Davey was one of those. I don’t recall that, but Davey did, and got a laugh from it, years later after I was married to Johnny Swaim.

Davey was the master of ceremonies for most of the TCU athletic gatherings in the ’60s and early ’70s, when Johnny was on the TCU basketball coaching staff. The night that Johnny was inducted into the TCU Letterman’s Hall of Fame, Davey was at the podium, and I, our children, and my mother and father were in the audience. When he introduced Johnny, he told the audience of his own history with the Hewatt/Swaim families, boasting that he had held me on his knee long before Johnny Swaim did.

Davey was also one of Mom Harris’ “boys.” “Mom” was the name that the students gave my maternal grandmother, Georgia Harris, who was the university dietitian from 1921 until her retirement in 1942. The cafeteria was in the basement of what was then the “Ad Building” (now Dave Reed Hall), and the athlete’s dining room — if you can call it that — was at the rear of the kitchen on what was basically a screened-in back porch, where a single long “training table” was set up. In inclement weather, canvas awnings let down to keep out the wind and rain. It was here, I was told, that Slingin’ Sammy Baugh and Little Davey practiced their throws. When the players clamored for more milk than “Mom” had set out, she would have the wire basket of pint bottles put down beside Davey or Sam, and they would “pass” them down the length of the table to their “receivers,” while the tolerant “Mom” shook her head and tried not to smile. My grandmother loved her boys, and they, I hear tell, loved her. I don’t have personal recollection of those times, either, but it was one of my grandmother’s stories, and L. D. “Little Dutch” Meyer vowed to me that it was true.

What I do personally recall is that Davey was a one-of-a-kind, a personable guy with a quick wit and ready laugh, and a modest man who seemed to be everybody’s friend. He may have been small in stature, but he was in so many ways a giant among men — and a true Frog Prince.

©2000 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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It’s a smell I can’t forget, the smell of the sea. On a breezy night, sitting on my dock at Lake Granbury, it comes wafting in on these inland waters bringing salty memories.

Daddy, aka Dr. Willis G. Hewatt of TCU’s Biology Dept. from 1934-1975, taught, among other subjects, courses in Invertebrate Zoology and General Science. For many years, beginning in 1936, as part of the spring semester curriculum, students in these two classes accompanied the professor, his wife, and two daughters on an Easter holiday field trip to Galveston and, later, to Rockport on the Texas gulf coast. The trip was short (Friday through Monday was all the “spring break” the university allotted then), but stuffed with sea-searching — on the beach, the jetties, the boat, in the marshes and mud flats, and in the after-catch makeshift lab set up in one of the apartments we rented for our stay.

What a great time we had! Of course, the teacher made it great. He loved the sea, and his enthusiasm was catching. “Oh, yes!” he would say, “why that’s the ghost crab, Oxypode albicans; “Oh, yes! that’s the little sand crab, Upogebia.” “This beautiful purple clam is Murex,” and on and on. The excitement of discovery was always fresh. A student would pick up some beastie from the beach or the water and bring it wonderingly to Dr. Hewatt to identify. He would not only identify it but always made it seem that he had seen it for the first time and that the catch was really quite remarkable, and go on to tell, Kipling-fashion, how the beast got to be just so.

I recall that, years later, after I had wandered far away from that time, I visited the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where I gravitated to a marine habitat exhibit in which my experienced eye caught a crystalline shrimp, rock barnacles, a sand camouflaged sea star, anemones that, furled, blended into the rocky terrain, and a lobster barely visible in a small cave in the rocks. A young boy and his parents came up beside me, searched the scene for a few minutes, shrugged their shoulders, and ambled on to the next tank. I so wanted to pull them back and show them the wonders the sea water held, to make their eyes light up with knowing as had the eyes of so many TCU students (and my own!), but I was reticent to insert myself into their family outing, and let the moment pass.

The last trip I made to the gulf as the professor’s daughter was in the spring of 1953. Although I was enrolled in TCU that year, I was not officially a student in one of the good doctor’s classes, but, as usual, I was allowed to tag along. We left the parking lot behind the Winton-Scott science building at noon on Thursday in a caravan of eight cars, Daddy’s and seven volunteered by the students. Mother and Daddy were in the No. 1 car with their passengers, and each subsequent car was tagged with a number that showed boldly through the rear windshield. Control of speed and organization came from the No. 8 car, because each one in the caravan was to keep the car in back in view at all times. It worked well, until that lead car hit the metropolis of Houston, which at that time had no freeways, throughways, or loops to avoid the city streets. The way Willis Hewatt drove through that city, or any city, made it hard to keep any attemp at organization intact, and he was usually found impatiently awaiting his charges on the southern outskirts of Houston.

Another of his schemes for control involved me, and I didn’t really know it until years later when he admitted that he had intentionally placed me in the car driven by one Don Perry, whose other passengers were Hubert Parrott, Jack Temple, and Tom Evans. If you had known, then or since, those carefree football players, you, too, would have surmised that if any rowdy behavior was to surface on this road trip, it would come from this group. What better way to keep that in check than to have the professor’s daughter, sweet Joan, in amongst them?

In Rockport, I remember we stayed at the Oak Shore Apartments at Fulton Beach, to which the students were assigned not only their sleep accommodations, but also their housekeeping duties. All were expected to share in the cleaning and preparation of meals. I wish I could recall some of the delicacies served under those circumstances!

Although precious in memory, the trip to the gulf at Easter would not have been enough to have set that briny smell in my olfactory system these many years since. Every summer of my youth, through my freshman year in college, was spent on the Louisiana coast or in tidewater Virginia, and one year, when I was eleven, in Puerto Rico. Daddy would be offered a summer teaching position at the LSU marine installation on Grande Isle, or at the Virginia Fisheries Laboratory at Gloucester Point, or that one year’s leave of absence from TCU to direct the invertebrate zoology program at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. He never left the family behind (except for one boring summer, in the days prior to discovery of cause, when there was a polio scare sweeping the nation, and it was deemed safer for “the girls” to keep them close to home). With that exception, Mother, Beth, and I went to every location and on virtually every field trip from that location with Daddy and the students.

My clearest visions of those days are of the teacher-father standing on the beach or reef or marsh in his old beat-up tennis shoes and swim trunks, holding a sea creature in his broad flat palm, with a group of rapt students gathered round, listening in on his expertise; and of my mother’s quiet, gentle, reassuring presence managing the troops.

The specific places and people have become fuzzy with time, but sitting on my dock, I can feel the fine sand between my toes, hear the rhythm of waves, and savor the sweet feeling of clean after showering away the sticky salt. The flavor of it all is lodged in my nose and my mind. I can sense the sea on Lake Granbury.

©1999 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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The three major holidays at year’s end always put me in thoughful contemplation of present, past, and future. Thanksgiving bids me pause amidst the noise and the haste and give thanks for whatever blessings and grace are mine. Christmas prompts me to gather in children and grandchild more closely, and warms me with sincere good will toward my fellow man.

The beginning of a New Year, however, beckons me to look both forward and backward, like the double-faced Janus, Roman god of the sun and the year, for whom the month of January was named. “Auld Lang Syne” resounds as radio, television, the print media, and we all look back at the “year that was,” and if the year ending also closes a lump of time — a decade or, as soon to be, a century — a longer remembrance follows. Then, as a fresh year is heralded in, the “old long since” is bid goodbye, the used slate is wiped clean, and new ways are solemnly resolved.

As I look back over the past year, I realize that, once again, pieces of me are missing. Great chunks, in fact– father, mother, husband, friends. Sometimes I have to shake my head hard to dislodge the disbelief that they no longer come and go in my daily life, aren’t there when I want them, aren’t there when I need them to be.

My campus family, which I have always considered to be an extension of my biological one, was particularly hard-hit in 1998. Among those who left too soon were three giants of my youth, college days, and these later years. Mary Charlotte Faris, Karl Snyder, and Jim Corder all joined William Cullen Bryant’s “caravan that moves to that mysterious realm where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death.” I think I have spoken of them before in some of my remembrances of TCU, but I would like to claim this essay as a special salute to them, albeit brief.

I think I must have always known Mary Charlotte, for I can’t remember not remembering her in my life. You may recall that she worked in her student days for Mrs. Mothershead, in the university library, and later as a librarian there, herself. My mother and father knew her before me and admired her pleasant, efficient ways, those same ways I came to admire first as a student, then as colleague and friend. Mary Charlotte could find anything in the vast resources of the library, and my father was sure she had the entire library holdings stored in her mind — a sort of early day computerized catalog. She could also dredge up facts and figures about TCU that were seemingly obscured by the past, and sometimes pulled them together in presentations that were full of passion as well as great good humor. She was the most purple of TCUans, and when she retired, she found no service so satisfying as that which involved TCU.

Karl Snyder, Professor Emeritus of the English Department at his death, and his wife, Marion, were my parents’ friends and colleagues when I was in junior high school. Dr. Snyder (it seems blasphemy to call this former professor by his given name, Karl) became one of my mentors when I was in college as an English major. He was devoted to English language literature and to that of the Bard, in particular. He was equally devoted to the proper use of English grammar and once chided me, in no uncertain terms, about an egregious (to him!) error in one of my published essays and was appalled that one of his students could commit such a sin. It goes without saying that I double-check my grammar since then! Both his wit and criticism were rapier-sharp, but I came to know that beneath that sometimes forbidding facade, he had a heart big enough to encompass you and break for you, if need be.

Jim Corder was, for long, TCU’s master rhetorician and seemingly effortless wordsmith, whose mind’s eye searched into every nook and cranny in and beyond the world that most of us see. He believed that the unexamined life was not worth living, so he looked at things from every angle — on the surface, from beneath, and around all sides — and inspired his students to do the same. It was he who gently urged me to write, he who approved of my writing when I did, he who helped me find my voice. He, as did Mary Charlotte and Karl Snyder, came early to TCU and stayed late; collectively, they gave TCU 108 years of their professional lives.

All formal note of all passings are inadequate — obituaries fall far short; eulogies make good effort, but fail; attempts at retrospective characterization, such as the present ones, are usually woeful.

But perhaps it is enough to hush and remember and be buoyed by the sure knowing that, even though they take some part of us with them to wherever they have gone, they leave a good part of themselves, too. They live in me and in, perhaps, some of you, and will, I am certain, be recalled to future generations for what they did here.

As my own lang syne counts more years than in my future, I look back down the years, long since and recent, and rejoice in those into whose lives I happened to wander and recall how my life was magically touched by them for a time.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Certainly not. In the words of the poet Burns, I’ll “tak a right guid-willie waught, For auld lang syne!”

©1998 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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In every Horned Frog annual from at least the mid-1940s to 1971, in the back where local companies indicated their support for the university by buying ads, there is a full or half-page spread from the Fort Worth Transit Company. The page usually shows TCU students boarding a bus at the corner of University and Cantey, where stands the University Christian Church, or the corner of Bowie and University, where stood the old TCU Drugstore.

Back in those days, few students had a car, and the bus was our means of getting around to places removed from the immediate campus. Called the “T” now, the Transit Company ran the city buses then.

Having no malls or any close theatres, TCU students regularly took the bus to the main shopping district in downtown Fort Worth and to the movie theatres on 7th Street — the Hollywood and Worth — and farther east, to the –Palace– and –Majestic.

The TCU Theatre, built in 1946, was the first movie house in the southwest sector of Fort Worth,but it didn’t get the first-run shows that the downtown places did. It was considered a pretty special date if your boyfriend took you to town via bus, treated you to dinner at Anders Cafe, then walked the block-and-a-half to the –Hollywood– to see the latest film starring Dana Andrews, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, or Cornel Wilde, along with the beauteous stars, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, or Deborah Kerr.

I was certainly no stranger to the TCU bus route, even before I entered the freshman class of 1952. Growing up on the TCU hill in a faculty family that had known the Depression, the deprivations of World War II, and financial crises at the university, we had the extravagance of one Chevy that was used sparingly. The Hewatt girls walked to Alice Carlson Elementary School and McLean Junior High School (where Paschal is now), and rode the bus to and from Paschal High School (where Trimble Tech is now). The Hewatt girls rode the bus to their “lessons” — ballet at Frances Burgess’ Dance Studio downtown, to their Aunt Tare’s “expression lessons” on South Lake Street near what is now the hospital district, and to piano lessons on Mistletoe Ave., about a mile or so south of the TCU hill in Mistletoe Heights. The Hewatt girls regularly rode the bus with their mother on shopping trips to Leonard Bros., Stripling’s, Monnig’s, Penney’s, and to Meacham’s and Wally Williams’ in the heart of downtown.

Being given to visiting the scenes of my childhood and youth with fond recollection, I had thought recently to take a nostalgic trip on a city bus from TCU to town and back, and one day last June I found my opportunity.

I boarded at the stop in front of the TCU library with a mix of emotions — anticipation and trepidation among them. I hadn’t ridden a Fort Worth bus in years, perhaps thirty-five or more, and didn’t know the fare, or the procedure to pay, or the general decorum of bus riding anymore.

I also had a certain confidence, for I had known the old bus route as well as the backyard of my home on Rogers Road. It ran north on University from the Bluebonnet Circle turnaround to Park Hill Drive, where it made a turn toward the east and on to Forest Park Blvd. From thence, north all the way to Mistletoe Blvd., where I disembarked for the 2-block walk to my piano lesson on Mistletoe Drive. (Lest you become confused, or think I am, there are three Mistletoes, the third one a Street. Each connects with the other.) East again then on Mistletoe Blvd. to Eighth Ave.; north on Eighth to Pennsylvania; a short jog east on Pennsylvania to the Scott Mansion (now Thistle Hill), then north on Summit past the good smells of Mrs. Baird’s Bakery (removed several years ago to the far south of Fort Worth), then east on Texas Street to Henderson. North on Henderson to W. Seventh, where we turned onto the downtown streets. I guess I didn’t pay much attention once we entered that area; the sure and certain memory gets fuzzy here.

To add credence to my memory route, I tried finding archival evidence, to no avail. But surely, I reasoned, the neighborhoods we used to go through as we wound toward town were much the same, so today’s way would not have been altered too much. Guessing the fare was less than $1.00 (was it 10 cents in the long ago?), I handed my dollar bill to the driver. He indicated that I was to deposit it in the elevated “box” to his right. That much was familiar. However, there was obviously not to be any change. There was no move on the driver’s part, nor was there the old metal change dispenser hanging on the box, as of yore. I assumed, then, the fare to be $1.00, and found out only later that it is 80 cents, and one should have correct change.

Taking a seat in the first forward-facing twosome, I subtly looked around. There were two other passengers, both looking like they knew what they were doing and where they were going. A sign by the door told me that “L. Tribble” was my driver. I looked up to see the advertising that had always been in slots above the windows. No advertising. Air conditioning ducts had taken their place. That modern miracle (as I write, it is the 20th day of over 100-degree temperatures) we did without, in the ago. On days such as this, we lowered the window to let in at least a hot wind. Now, with conditioned air, windows that open are obsolete. Straps to hold on to if you have to stand up while riding may be obsolete, too; there were none on this bus. Mr. L. Tribble pulled our bus away from the curb, and off we headed north on University past Cantey toward Park Hill, just as I knew we would. But, he didn’t turn at Park Hill, as I thought he must. Instead, we continued on University toward the zoo and the Trinity River in Forest Park. Well, he must be going to turn at the zoo and get to Forest Park Blvd. that way. But no, we just kept right on going up University past I-30 and Trinity Park, straight on to Bailey, then White Settlement, and so to town. Perhaps I was on the wrong bus?

Moving up to the side-facing front seat across from the driver, I confirmed with him that I was, indeed, on the TCU bus to town and yes, if I stayed on it, he would deposit me where he had picked me up. Answering another query, he said that there was no bus now, that followed the old route down Forest Park Blvd. to Mistletoe. So again, as often goes with memory dredging, “you can’t get there from here, anymore.” I can’t get to my piano lesson by bus anymore, nor take the winding way through old neighborhoods with stately homes, anymore. But then, the –Hollywood and –Worth and Anders Cafe aren’t there anymore, either. All of that would have to forever remain in the corners of the mind where forgotten things are kept until you go looking for them.

I would venture to guess that a very small percentage of the current student body at TCU has –ever ridden a city bus. Affluence has put a car at nearly everyone’s disposal, with the independence and supposed prestige that goes along with that. If we had had our own cars in my student days, we probably would not have ridden either. But I remember the old bus trips fondly, and although it didn’t go –my way this time, I enjoyed the attempt to once again ride around in the past.

©1998 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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Sometimes when I witness or read about university life today, or hear ruminations on the university life of tomorrow, I feel light years away from 1952 when I was a freshman at TCU. It is hard to believe that just three years shy of fifty have passed; yet when I consider the changes in nearly every aspect of the academic scene — what has happened, is happening, and is going to happen — it seems impossible to have come about so much change in just fifty years.

Reading about the new Tom Brown/Pete Wright Residential Complex in the last issue of The TCU Magazine, I think that we must have lived in an oversimplified, primitive world in 1952. The article, which focuses on the apartment-style suites, complete with kitchen, that now stand in the place of old Tom Brown and Pete Wright mens’ dormitories, says that today “students arrive in their own cars with elaborate computers and entertainment centers. They live high-tech, high-expectation lives in high gear…in, for the most part, decades-old housing.”

I thought we lived high expectation lives in high gear, too, but I do admit that our trappings were a little bit different. I arrived at the back door of Foster Hall in 1952 in my family’s car with a few clothes, a cotton Bates bedspread, some sheets and towels, and essentials such as a toothbrush, comb, and hair rollers. Others brought luxury items — a throw-rug, an entertainment “center” that consisted of a radio and/or “long-play” (33 1/3 or 45 rpm) record player. Some might have even had a manual typewriter, although I can’t recall a single person who had one. Television, which was in its infancy, could be watched in black and white, but only from the one set in the dorm’s second-floor lounge. A fan was among some of my dorm-mates’ possessions. The only building on the campus with central air then was the Fine Arts Building, which was built in 1949.

And we lived in decades-old housing, too — Jarvis (built in 1912); Clark (the old and now gone one built in 1912); Goode (built in 1911, razed in 1958). Our newest living quarters were Foster, Tom Brown, and Waits, built in 1942, 1947, and 1948, respectively.

“Nowadays,” continues the magazine article, students expect “a place where privacy and a social life coexist, complete with all the amenities….” I suppose “amenities” means private baths, private phones, private tvs, plus private cook-in facilities. Well, we did have kitchen privileges, albeit not in our own private kitchen. We were allowed to piddle around in the dorm kitchen, across the hall from Dean of Women Elizabeth Shelburne’s suite of rooms (!!), but most of us did what I suspect most students still do — grab a sandwich or bag of chips and a coke from the local and handiest eatery, down it on the run, or carry it back to our rooms.

Most of the dormitories’ facilities also provided many more “community baths” than private ones. I doubt many of us were psychologically damaged by that. I had a small pinch of pain when I read that Foster is shortly to be gutted and a new floor plan constructed, with “more rooms [as] suites and if community baths remain, fewer will share them.” Community baths can certainly provide a venue for a coexisting private and social life!

Terminology has changed, too. The simple telephone is giving way to remote and cell phones, voice mail and message machines. In our time, we had few of the former, and none of the latter. The telephones we had were not in our rooms, or in our purses, or anywhere in our personal space. There were two instruments on each floor of Foster Hall (and all the other dorms — boys’ and girls’), one that served all of the occupants on each end of the floor, and it was actually an extension phone. Its “ring” was centered at a sort of switchboard in the main office of the dorm, where either the dorm mother or student assistant would answer the in-coming call and buzz the room of the requested party, who would then go to the hall phone to answer. Obviously we didn’t have many “private” conversations, but then most of us had grown up in homes with one central phone (and that with a “party line”), and said what we needed to within earshot of the whole family.

As for “E-mail and snail mail,” ours was exclusively of the “snail” variety, computers still being on the far horizon. The post office was in the basement of the Ad Building at the bottom of the south steps and left. Since our time there, that building has been renovated, reorganized, and renamed Dave Reed Hall. Edens Greens, a cafe, now occupies that space. The post office and what served as a student lounge, just a few feet farther down the hall, were the student gathering places then. In today’s vernacular, we “hung out” there.

As a matter of fact, had it not been for that old post office, my life story might have gone down a different path, for it was there that Johnny Swaim and I hooked up. I had rented a post box, although I hardly needed one — my home was a half-block away. Johnny’s box was close to mine, and one day we happened to be checking our mail at the same time. He said, “I never get any letters; why don’t you write me?” I said, “Maybe I will.” And I did. And he wrote me back. Then he called me on that one hall phone. And the rest, as they say, is history. Ours were handwritten messages, too. Something that couldn’t be accidentally erased or hacked on.

In retrospect, then, ours was a simple world indeed, where we lacked so many things without which today one seems unable to function. We didn’t even have credit cards! If you didn’t have cash, you didn’t go, didn’t get.

Dr. David L. Warren, President of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, speaking at TCU’s new Chancellor Michael Ferrari’s inauguration, talked about “riding the tiger of change” into the 21st century. He said the university as we know it is even now becoming a “virtual university,” not bound by real walls and halls and limited communication, but one that soars past geographical, ethnological, and philosophical barriers on the fast-moving magical carpet of technological change.

I’m glad for the students of today with their machines, Internet, virtuality, and charging tigers of change, and sometimes, my muse leads me to wonder what it might have been like to have had a “virtual” meeting in cyberspace with J. R. Swaim, instead of the “real” one in that old post office hangout.

But I am equally glad for my day in the campus sun with its soft-padded pussycats of change. I guess we — most of us — harken back and hang onto what we knew and considered good and the way we thought it was supposed to be.

Everything, it seems, changes but the memories.

©1998 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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On Friday, March 27 of this year, TCU dedicated its $12 million Mary D. and F. Howard Walsh Center for the Performing Arts, an elegant appendage to the 49-year-old Ed Landreth Building for Fine Arts. Conjoined to the south of Landreth, the Walsh Center is placed in juxtaposition with one of the two oldest buildings on the campus, Jarvis Hall, a residence hall for women when new in 1911, a residence hall for women now.

Jarvis Hall was surely among my earliest memory imprints of TCU. From age six through my teen years, I lived with my family on Rogers Road, just one-half block from the northern boundary of the TCU campus. Until Landreth was built in 1949, Jarvis was the first building one saw when looking campusward from the corner of Rogers and Cantey Street, a corner I passed daily on my way to Alice E. Carlson Elementary School farther west down Cantey. I also often walked behind, through, or in front of Jarvis to get to my Grandma Georgia’s workplace in the basement cafeteria of what is now Reed Hall (the other 1911 structure), and to get to my father’s biology office in the basement of old Clark Hall. The latter was razed in 1959 to make way for the new Sadler Hall.

In those early days when I first knew it, the attractive and comfortable parlor of Jarvis was the primary site of university social gatherings, including receptions for visiting dignitaries, TCU Faculty Woman’s Club teas, senior women’s teas, and other students’ events. Since my mother, as a faculty wife, and my grandmother, as university dietitian, were involved in many of these “socials,” I was often allowed to observe, from the periphery, the splendor of the decorated table with its silver trays of dainty sandwiches and pastries, and to watch the ladies and gentlemen in their fine clothes and listen to their polite, pleasant talk. I didn’t know then, nor for a long time after, that this very parlor was the scene of a more somber occasion, my maternal grandfather’s funeral service in 1923. Frank L. Harris had been the first steward of the cafeteria-style dining room at TCU; after his death, his wife, my Grandma Georgia, would take over that office and stay for twenty-one years. There was no church on the TCU hill at the time of his death, much less a funeral chapel, so Jarvis’ parlor served.

Sometimes, too, if I was with my grandmother on her way to our house from work, we would go through Jarvis to visit Dean of Women, Miss Elizabeth Shelburne, and her tiny little mother, Mrs. Cephus Shelburne, who had rooms on the first floor. And, as a Camp Fire girl, I used to sell donuts in Jarvis Hall. To this little girl, all of the TCU buildings then were cavernous halls where important and interesting grownup activities took place. Jarvis was my first view of campus dormitory life. Jarvis girls were grownups living together and having a good time; everyone was pleasant and smiling and laughing — and buying my donuts. Every now and again, I could hear someone say “That’s Dr. Hewatt’s daughter” in a tone that made me proud.

Jarvis is not only old in years, but its name also is venerable. Called simply the “Girls’ Home” when built, it was soon named by vote of the Board of Trustees in honor of Major and Mrs. J.J. Jarvis, devoted and lifelong supporters of the university. Major Jarvis was a Fort Worth lawyer, businessman, and entrepreneur. When the infant forerunner of TCU had been relocated from Fort Worth to Thorp Spring, Major and Mrs. Jarvis gave generously of their money and time to secure its mission. When Add- Ran College was chartered in 1889 as Add-Ran University (today spelled AddRan), Major Jarvis was elected the first president of the Board.

Major Jarvis’ wife, Ida Van Zandt Jarvis, was herself not only active but indeed influential in the affairs of TCU. An account written by Add-Ran alumna, Frankie Miller Mason, represents her as sympathetic to students, and one delightful story has her with white-flagged “truce” umbrella in hand confronting the president of the college, Addison Clark himself, on behalf of a large portion of the student body whose expulsion seemed imminent, all because of what she considered to be a slight infraction of the rules. The controversy was sparked by the discovery that a young male student had walked a young lady from the Thorp Spring campus to her home in the little town one evening, a strictly forbidden practice in 1882. In his defense, a large number of classmates owned up that they, too, had at one time or another violated that rule as well as others, whereupon Dr. Clark informed them all that they could consider themselves dismissed from the school. Mrs. Jarvis, viewing the punishment as too severe for the crime, made such a case that the president soon saw the absurdity in his rigid discipline, reportedly broke into laughter, and ended in not only pardoning the offenders, but also awarding them special privileges for a brief time.

By her own statement in an interview with Frankie Mason in 1935, it was Ida who authored the 1889 charter making Add-Ran College a university. In an 1895 catalogue, she was listed as supervisor of the Girls’ Home at Thorp Spring. In 1915, she was successful in having established the university’s School of Home Economics, believing that every young woman should be taught how to sew and to cook. In 1931, she was the first woman elected to the Board of Trustees and served in that capacity until her death in 1937. Interestingly and appropriately, her place was filled by another woman, Sadie Beckham, who had since 1919 been the Jarvis Hall matron, supervisor of women, and later, dean of women. It was Mrs. Sadie who, as legend has it, each evening at seven, stood on the front steps of Jarvis ringing her cowbell to summon her charges into the fold for the night. In her time, young ladies living on the campus were not permitted out “after hours,” nor to “date,” nor to dawdle, and certainly not to dance!

Seems I have always known some member of the Jarvis family. Until rather recently some one of the Jarvis clan was on the campus in some capacity. Van Zandt Jarvis, Ida and J.J.’s oldest son, was a board member for thirty-nine years, eleven of those as Chair. Many who read this will also remember geology student and later professor, Dan Jarvis, and his sister, Ann Day Jarvis McDermott, who was special collections librarian in the Mary Couts Burnett Library. Dan and Ann Day were children of Van Zandt’s brother, Daniel. Van Zandt’s son-in-law, B.C. “Blackie” Williams, and his son, Van, were students and football stars at TCU. You might recall Van in his later fame as television’s Green Hornet.

Eighty-seven years separate Jarvis and the Walsh Center, but somehow the side-by-side works and seems okay. In fact, the modern lines and materials of the Walsh seem to throw into greater relief the simple charm of the neo-classical Jarvis. And while Jarvis is full of ghosts and memories for me and many others, Walsh is essentially a blank book to be filled in by future storytellers.

©1998 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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Every four years since 1962 and the First Quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, appreciation of my musical heritage is heightened. Attending the 10th competition this past May reminded me of how much a part of my life music has been, and sitting in the Landreth auditorium with its all-but-perfect acoustics, I think of another time in another place where music was taught and played – the old Administration Building at TCU, now Dave Reed Hall. The Ad Building early, and until 1949 when the Landreth Fine Arts Building was built, housed nearly all the curriculum taught at TCU, including the arts. The only auditorium on the campus, and thus the only “performance hall,” was also in the Ad Building. Its small stage was graced by no less musical presence than Ignace Paderewski, among others. And it was in the old Ad Building that I first learned to play the piano.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the little red-headed, pig-tailed child I was, climbing the central steps in the Ad Building to the second floor where heavy doors absorbed most of the sound coming from the interior. I recall that Miss Katharine Bailey was beyond one door instructing in piano, Miss Jeanette Tillett behind another, and my teacher, the young Eleanor Morse was beyond yet another. Small and shy as I was, that building with all its grown-up activity was not in the least foreign or forbidding, for being a member of the TCU family from birth, I included it in my home base.

I cannot remember when music was not a part of my life. My parents were determined that their two girls would be “exposed” to all things “cultural,” and the piano was the first vehicle chosen for our personal progress in this regard. They bought the six-foot Steinway grand when I was four. My sister, Beth, started lessons at five and I, a year later, also at five. Beth soon dropped out, finding the discipline too much for her livelier spirit, I think. I – a different cut from the same piece of cloth – stayed it out for eleven years, probably, at first, from a meek sense of knowing my mother wanted me to, but soon from a pleasure in learning and playing new pieces – for myself.

Recitals scared the beejeezus out of me to the point that I refused to memorize, thinking I could, somehow, get out of playing in public. I wasn’t allowed off that hook so easily, however, my teacher let me play with the scores in front of me. Although I have almost entirely blotted out the memory of recitals, I do recall one quite well. I had nervously played, as one of my “numbers,” the J.S. Bach Sheep May Safely Graze (with the music, of course!). At the reception following the performance, a man approached me and said, “I so much enjoyed your playing.” I responded, diffidently, that I had hit so many wrong notes. “Perhaps,” said he, “but the ones you hit right were very beautiful.”

As I listened to the very beautiful notes of the young contestants in this year’s competition in the Ed Landreth Auditorium, I was conscious, too, of all of the ghosts that linger in and around that performance arena – those who were artists, speakers, presiders, and those who stood in the wings – Loren Eiseley, Robert Penn Warren, Charles Laughton, Jorge Bolet, and closer to home, TCU ballet master David Preston, TCU President M. E. Sadler, TCU Artist-in-Residence Madame Lili Kraus.

Among all those luminaries, however, there is one other whose memory is always evoked when I enter that hall – that of TCU master pianist/teacher, Keith Mixson. I can see and feel him standing unobstrusively near the rear of the auditorium, his long, spare frame leaning against the north wall, his head tilted slightly, the graying hair swept back like a lion’s mane, his leonine features serene, listening. It is the memory of that same pose, although seated, that always comes when I think of Keith. Keith was my teacher for only one year, walking the half-block to my house on Rogers Road from his office in Landreth. He sat in a chair, not next to me, but behind and to my right, his legs crossed, his head with that slight tilt, his features giving no hint of displeasure, although surely he was inwardly wincing. He was probably wise enough to know that I didn’t have serious talent nor serious intent, and that enjoyment was the order of the day. He and I probably exchanged less than a page of dialogue our entire lives, yet it was he who influenced my appreciation of classical music the most. I can’t say why exactly; perhaps it was the withholding of extreme disapproval, or maybe it was the confidence he place in me when he gave me Debussy’s Claire de Lune to learn. I believe it was the first real “classic” that I had been entrusted with; I still have the score, residing on that old Steinway, marked with Keith’s notations.

The day we buried my daddy, Keith, a longtime friend of the family, and his wife, Linda, caught us at the funeral car and, introducing Linda to me he said, “She was one of my best students.” Maybe he was just being nice, but maybe, just maybe, he had heard some sweet sounds among the sour. I never told him how I felt, and now, of course, I can’t. He died the last day of 1992.

The influences of my mother, Eleanor Morse Hall, the recital man, and Keith Mixson are like milestones ticking off my maturing toward an appreciation of not only music, but also life. The recital man’s words I translated into a lifetime motto; my mother’s, Eleanor’s and Keith’s gifts I carry with me to concerts, museums, exhibits, and yes, recitals.

©1997 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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Every four years since 1962 and the First Quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, appreciation of my musical heritage is heightened. Attending the 10th competition this past May reminded me of how much a part of my life music has been, and sitting in the Landreth auditorium with its all-but-perfect acoustics, I think of another time in another place where music was taught and played – the old Administration Building at TCU, now Dave Reed Hall. The Ad Building early, and until 1949 when the Landreth Fine Arts Building was built, housed nearly all the curriculum taught at TCU, including the arts. The only auditorium on the campus, and thus the only “performance hall,” was also in the Ad Building. Its small stage was graced by no less musical presence than Ignace Paderewski, among others. And it was in the old Ad Building that I first learned to play the piano.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the little red-headed, pig-tailed child I was, climbing the central steps in the Ad Building to the second floor where heavy doors absorbed most of the sound coming from the interior. I recall that Miss Katharine Bailey was beyond one door instructing in piano, Miss Jeanette Tillett behind another, and my teacher, the young Eleanor Morse was beyond yet another. Small and shy as I was, that building with all its grown-up activity was not in the least foreign or forbidding, for being a member of the TCU family from birth, I included it in my home base.

I cannot remember when music was not a part of my life. My parents were determined that their two girls would be “exposed” to all things “cultural,” and the piano was the first vehicle chosen for our personal progress in this regard. They bought the six-foot Steinway grand when I was four. My sister, Beth, started lessons at five and I, a year later, also at five. Beth soon dropped out, finding the discipline too much for her livelier spirit, I think. I – a different cut from the same piece of cloth – stayed it out for eleven years, probably, at first, from a meek sense of knowing my mother wanted me to, but soon from a pleasure in learning and playing new pieces – for myself.

Recitals scared the beejeezus out of me to the point that I refused to memorize, thinking I could, somehow, get out of playing in public. I wasn’t allowed off that hook so easily, however, my teacher let me play with the scores in front of me. Although I have almost entirely blotted out the memory of recitals, I do recall one quite well. I had nervously played, as one of my “numbers,” the J.S. Bach Sheep May Safely Graze (with the music, of course!). At the reception following the performance, a man approached me and said, “I so much enjoyed your playing.” I responded, diffidently, that I had hit so many wrong notes. “Perhaps,” said he, “but the ones you hit right were very beautiful.”

As I listened to the very beautiful notes of the young contestants in this year’s competition in the Ed Landreth Auditorium, I was conscious, too, of all of the ghosts that linger in and around that performance arena – those who were artists, speakers, presiders, and those who stood in the wings – Loren Eiseley, Robert Penn Warren, Charles Laughton, Jorge Bolet, and closer to home, TCU ballet master David Preston, TCU President M. E. Sadler, TCU Artist-in-Residence Madame Lili Kraus.

Among all those luminaries, however, there is one other whose memory is always evoked when I enter that hall – that of TCU master pianist/teacher, Keith Mixson. I can see and feel him standing unobstrusively near the rear of the auditorium, his long, spare frame leaning against the north wall, his head tilted slightly, the graying hair swept back like a lion’s mane, his leonine features serene, listening. It is the memory of that same pose, although seated, that always comes when I think of Keith. Keith was my teacher for only one year, walking the half-block to my house on Rogers Road from his office in Landreth. He sat in a chair, not next to me, but behind and to my right, his legs crossed, his head with that slight tilt, his features giving no hint of displeasure, although surely he was inwardly wincing. He was probably wise enough to know that I didn’t have serious talent nor serious intent, and that enjoyment was the order of the day. He and I probably exchanged less than a page of dialogue our entire lives, yet it was he who influenced my appreciation of classical music the most. I can’t say why exactly; perhaps it was the withholding of extreme disapproval, or maybe it was the confidence he place in me when he gave me Debussy’s Claire de Lune to learn. I believe it was the first real “classic” that I had been entrusted with; I still have the score, residing on that old Steinway, marked with Keith’s notations.

The day we buried my daddy, Keith, a longtime friend of the family, and his wife, Linda, caught us at the funeral car and, introducing Linda to me he said, “She was one of my best students.” Maybe he was just being nice, but maybe, just maybe, he had heard some sweet sounds among the sour. I never told him how I felt, and now, of course, I can’t. He died the last day of 1992.

The influences of my mother, Eleanor Morse Hall, the recital man, and Keith Mixson are like milestones ticking off my maturing toward an appreciation of not only music, but also life. The recital man’s words I translated into a lifetime motto; my mother’s, Eleanor’s and Keith’s gifts I carry with me to concerts, museums, exhibits, and yes, recitals.

©1997 Joan Hewatt Swaim

Comments closed