Category: This is TCU

The words were spoken by a freshly-scrubbed bright-eyed young man of about twenty. As leader of a student-conducted orientation tour, he addressed a small group of prospective students and their parents: “This part of the library is the newest, built in 1982. This is our card catalog where you can get a lot of information for term papers, and stuff…. The library has about a million books, and they’re going to put the catalog on computers soon….” Moving his audience past the catalog cabinets and west into the Current Periodicals Reading Room, he continued, “This is the oldest part of the library. It’s where you can find recent newspapers and magazines and stuff, and lots of students find this a good place to study, and it’s a great place to meet friends, and stuff like that….”

His remarks set me to musing, as is my wont, on the nature of stuff in general and TCU’s Mary Couts Burnett Library stuff in particular.

The more I thought about it, the more apt the word “stuff” became in regard to what this library holds for me, a fifty-year sojourner in this place. The very vagueness of the term allows for the tangibles as well as the intangibles–the books, periodicals, papers, furnishings, fixtures, equipment, the progression of people, the aggregation of matter, memorabilia and, yes, memories–that are captured here.

If you were here in 1924, you will know that the “oldest part” of the present library space was built that year to provide a larger place for the stuff that had accumulated to that time. Those who were here before then will remember another space, another library housed within the walls of Old Main, the first building on the Fort Worth campus, opened in 1912, which is now Dave Reed Hall. The TCU libraries that existed prior to that, first at Thorp Spring and then at Waco, reside now mostly in pictures and written accounts, for 1873 is back beyond living memory, and the years at Waco from 1895 to 1910 recede farther and farther into the past.

If you were here between 1957 and now, you will recall two other library versions–the first being the expansion completed in 1958 that extended the outer walls farther north and westward toward University Drive, altering forever the colonnaded facade of the 1924 building. The second, the 1982 expansion, has spread the library farther east along Lowden Street, and has turned its once-western face to the south. Those who will be here in the two thousandnth century of our time may find the size and the shape and the stuff in yet another form.

As the young man pointed out, the Current Periodicals Reading Room is the oldest part of the library and survives almost sixty-five years in close-to-original form, although its function… and stuff… have changed some. The southern wall of tall arched windows that let in the light of 1924 lets in the light of 1988, and if you stand in just the right place outside, you can see the original brick high up around the arches. The ceiling of the room still reaches up two floors and is still crossed in six places by bands of ornate plaster, between which, some might recall, three great chandeliers hung from filigreed iron plates. The high ceiling gives a feeling of spaciousness that belies the ever closer conditions below, where the original heavy oak tables and chairs are set among stack ranges of current periodicals and are filled most nights now with a new generation of students on their way to Parnassus or points between or beyond. Along the walls, the inset wood shelves replace the built-in catalog drawers of an earlier time.

From an interior half-moon window of a second-story room that used to hold the University’s archives and rare books, one can look across and down into the Reading Room which was, in the beginning, the nerve center of the library. From my vantage point behind the glass in this room, I can get in touch with all sorts of intangibles, all sorts of visions and stories that rise up out of time and dance unrehearsed across the scene.

I have only to look in that direction to see the main desk that once ran out and across from the center of the east wall, behind which the library staff took requests for materials that were shelved in mysterious realms called “closed stacks” and were just as mysteriously retrieved by means of a dumb waiter that can, and sometimes does, still operate in its 1924 shaft. The faces that move into that memory-piece belong to Mary Charlotte Faris, Emily Garnett, Nell Van Zandt, Irene Cox, and the Head Librarian, Mrs. Bertie Mothershead. The light captured is a soft one that reflects a time of pleasance and quiet competence that had to do, no doubt, with the gentle nature of “Mrs. M.” herself. I’ll tell you something else about Mrs. Mothershead, too, that you might not know unless you lived across Rogers Street and up three houses from her. She had a delicious laugh. Like bells sweet-toned and clear, the sound of her laughter lingered long in the air of a still summer evening. Mrs. Mothershead still stands on duty in the Reading Room where a bust of her likeness sits in a south window, hair in long braids around her head and that laugh just behind the smile caught by an artist’s touch.

Like the movement of microfilm across a lighted surface, other framed snippets of time come into view–a wedding on a rainy December day in 1931 that took place before the desk, an assembly of family, TCU folk, God, and Prexy Waits, that was the beginning of a life-long partnership between Elizabeth Harris and Willis Hewatt that was, by chance, my genesis. Another picture in another frame reveals a door that still opens behind and to the right of where the desk stood, and that once led to the back stairway of the library. It was through this door that my father carried Chemistry Professor F. Woodall Hogan to take his place in the receiving line of the President’s reception held in the Reading Room at the beginning of each Fall semester for several years. Crippled by infantile paralysis, Mr. Hogan was unable to negotiate the long flight of marble steps at the library’s front, so the back stairs were used by his friend and colleague to make his entrance less conspicuous.

Beneath and beyond the room that holds those pieces of special time for me, and to the west, north, and south, are spaces that hold more memories and hundreds of volumes that hold the time of our kind in histories, philosophies, and theories of all that we know. Individually, we poke around among all that and, taking readings of height, breadth, and depth, we make of it what we will. Each observer brings his own measure of space and time — and all that stuff.

©1988 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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He was surely one of the most colorful characters to ever roam the campus. There were some, no doubt, who were ornerier, crustier, even crazier, but certainly none more colorful. His trademarks were bowed legs and boots, a white broad-brimmed cowboy hat, a whistle, and a watering hose. Often taunted by the boys and cajoled by the girls, he was given to threatening talk and enforcing the letter of his law.

There were some who thought him a pesky clown, and some who were just plain scared of him, and if you haven’t figured out by now who the grizzled old gnome of this story is, you weren’t around TCU from 1948 to 1959.

“Cowboy” Luois Monroe was already retirement age when he was hired in September of 1948, primarily as a member of the grounds crew, but also as a “policeman” to issue tickets to those illegally parked. Born in 1882 to poor sharecroppers, he had grown up in Texas, chopping cotton in his father’s and other farmers’ fields, working later as a trail hand on short cattle drives and, still later, as a stock buyer for local ranchers. At 66, “short on my bills and still staying behind” (as he put it), he applied for maintenance work at TCU. To the unsuspecting TCU community, he just seemed to appear one day, a book of tickets in one hand and a hose in the other, ready to water down the first trespasser on what he came to call his “range”–the grasslands of the TCU campus.

Thinking back now and having known the campus both before and after his time, Cowboy arrived at a period when the campus was probably at its most ragged point since its initial years on the southwest prairieland of Fort Worth. A major building program, actually proposed in 1929 and twice put on hold for the passing of a severe economic depression and then for a World War, had been reactivated and had already seen the stadium enlarged and the completion, in 1947, of Waits Hall dormitory for girls. University Drive was soon to be widened, the Fine Arts Building was under construction and plans for the Winton-Scott Hall of Science were on the drawing board.

Before Cowboy would retire in 1959, the new Religion Center with its Carr Chapel would be built, as well as the Brown-Lupton Student Center, Pete Wright, Milton Daniel, and Clark dormitories for men, Colby Hall and Sherley dormitories for women, and Dan D. Rogers Hall, which would house the M. J. Neeley School of Business. Jarvis Hall and the Bailey Building would be renovated, the library tripled in size, and the stadium enlarged for a second time. It’s safe to assume, then, that with all this building going on, the landscaping was continually battered.

When my mother first came to the campus in 1921 and lived in Goode Hall with her parents, the gentle “Mr. Fred” Strandburg tended the grounds, nurturing the rows of red cannas and the pink, purple, and white petunia beds planted along the walks and at the edge of a road that curved in from University Drive in front of the five original buildings facing east. Sycamores, elms, and a variety of shrubs reaching toward maturity contributed to a park-like atmosphere.

My own early memories of the campus and its keepers center around patchy green stretches of grass, ground-hugging shrubs, a few large shade trees, and a group of kind and soft-spoken men like Mr. Dees, Mr. Doss, Mr. Redwine, Carl Tyler, and Johnny Greer. Even Carter, a hulking black man known to be one you wouldn’t want to challenge in his own community, was mild-mannered in his role as campus handyman.

Cowboy was of an altogether different cut. A small, spare man, he seemed all sharp angles and quick menacing moves. His sun-washed blue eyes were like the ubiquitous hawk’s; they caught the slightest movement in the fields he patrolled–and he was just as swift to strike. Armed with only that whistle, that hose, and a stick with a sixteen-penny nail in the end of it to stab maverick paper and an occasional dog, he was everywhere at once, keeping the lawns inviolate. Just when you were sure the coast was clear, Cowboy would come seemingly from nowhere to whistle you down. And sometimes, if provoked and the hose was handy, a well-placed squirt punctuated his feelings. There was nothing he could do about mechanical ditch diggers, cement trucks, cranes, and the disrespect of itinerant construction workers for vegetation in their way, but there was, by gosh, something he could do about the resident population’s disregard for the grass.

“Cutting across” was the most heinous offense, and one he simply would not tolerate. He wasn’t about to let outlaw trails get even a toehold on his land, and he once gave chase to a coed in the very act of committing the odious sacrilege, tracking her all the way from the Ad Building to the street curb opposite the drugstore on the “drag,” to deliver his opinion of her erring ways.

Some of the boys liked to wait until they were sure Cowboy was looking, then step off the walk just to hear him holler, “Git off that grass, kid!” With all the bravado of youth, one or two would stand their ground for the follow-up scene in which Cowboy would finally demand, “What’s your name, young feller? I’m gonna turn you in!” To which the perpetrator would obediently reply, “My name is Tom Mix, Sir,” or “Babe Ruth” of “Mickey Rooney,” Cowboy writing each one dutifully down while the group sniggered. I’m not so sure but that Cowboy was laughing too, and responded in the way he did, because the boys got such pleasure from it.

He took his police duties just as seriously as his ground duty, showing, like the Grim Reaper, no privilege in selection. He descended on student and staff without a trace of bias, and once ticketed President Sadler for a parking violation. If Cowboy’s own version of that story is to be believed, Dr. Sadler thought the incident honorable, commended Cowboy for his attention, and sent the paid ticket back to him as a “souvenir.”

Since the days of Cowboy, the number of cars and, thus, the number of parking violations on the campus have multiplied a thousandfold. A single person, albeit the Cowboy, would be unable to ride today’s herd. And since we are forty progressive years from that time, pulsing area sprayers and automatic sprinkling systems have largely replaced the hand-held hose. And with no one to watch, “cutting across” has become commonplace.

The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line. And sometimes in a mindless moving with the mass, I start to step onto the grass and cut across, too. But everytime I do the spectre of that old cowboy with a whistle in his toothless mouth stops me, and mindful of his presence, I find I must return to the laid-out walks, unable to violate his commanding spirit.

©1988 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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How like at a puzzle I work at my Christmas memories, spreading all the pieces out, turning each over and around, testing this one here, that one there, joining the scattered snatches of images until a sure form appears. The frame is easy to assemble, all pieces having common straight sides that lock together. These are much like the pieces of most Christmas memories, having to do with candlelight and carols, mythical gift bringers and family gatherings, lighted trees, tinsel, and all-round peace and good will.

Coming together to form the central picture within my Christmas frame are the unique images of one’s Christmases–those images that make each celebration a private one. There I can reassemble our family’s annual tree selection and decorating ceremony, every old and familiar ornament taken out of their tissue wraps, in turn, and placed just so on just the right branch. There, too, is the patient direction of my mother as my sister and I constructed the hand-made items we would give to aunts and cousins and grandmothers; and there, too, I can see again the serious business of cutting rolled dough into shapes of storybook characters, star, wreath, and tree, cooking them to plumpness and icing them to life with colored coatings enhanced with sparkling sugars and candied morsels, then nibbling away the various parts of the gingerbread man until only the smiling face would be left to pop in the mouth last.

Taking shape out of patches of shade and color are vignettes of the TCU family at Christmas in an age when there was more time to come together and share in observance of the season. For it has only been in the last fifteen years or so that the mid-semester break includes Christmas and New Year. In my day, the Fall term allowed only a short time-out for about a week and resumed a few days after the first of the year. The campus, then, instead of being the relatively quiet place it is now in the days immediately preceding the Christmas week, was alive with holiday spirit. Christmas pageants, programs, and parties filled the December calendar and culminated in a banquet for the students and another for the faculty.

The Faculty Christmas Dinner was held annually from as far back as I can remember to the last one in 1984. For several years in the late thirties and early forties, the party was held in the basement cafeteria of the Administration Building (now Reed Hall), with the President, E. M. “Prexy” Waits, as Master of Ceremonies. The cafeteria was not a very attractive room, at best, but through the efforts of the University’s dietitian, my Grandma Georgie, it became, for this occasion, a festive banquet hall. My mother assures me that I was never actually there during the dinner, but I have a pretty fair reckoning of what they were like because of the previews I was privy to. Before the dinners, I could see the cafeteria in its decorated splendor, the exposed pipes along the ceiling, the stark pillars, and bare walls disappearing behind garlands of ivy and holly, ribbons, glitter, and lights.

If the actual affair was anything like the preparations for it, there was great fun, indeed, at those early Christmas parties. As a part of the program, each faculty member present would receive a gift. A group of faculty wives, headed usually by my mother and Betty Ridings, wife of the esteemed journalism professor, and the President’s daughter, Mary Beth Waits Scott, would haunt the dime stores well in advance of the party, to make the gift selection that, when presented, was bound to bring hearty laughter from the crowd. Hours were spent in composing the most appropriate verse to go along with the gag gift, and which was to be read aloud by the recipient. I can remember the outburst of laughter during composition sessions in my home.

To present the gifts, of course, a Santa Claus was needed. Just exactly how Daddy came to be the impostor is a piece of the puzzle that is missing, but play the role he did for a number of years. It was a source of great merriment for my sister and me to perform the yearly ritual of helping him fit into his red and white Santa Claus costume. Daddy was always of trim build, so that padding was needed to make a convincing round belly. Beth and I would hold pillows in place while Mother positioned the pants and jacket around them, securing all with a wide black belt. Then we would fix big white whiskers over his ears and under his chin and top it all off with the traditional floppy cap. The transformation was complete with Miss Sadie Beckham’s cowbell and, in repeated rehearsals, he would ring the bell to get our attention, hold his pillowed belly with his broad hand, and give out with the “ho, ho, ho” s. He didn’t need to practice getting a twinkle in his eye; he seemed to have been born with that.

Daddy apparently took his role as the evening’s entertainment seriously, and began to stage his entrances, arriving once by donkey and another time by motorcycle. Stories tell that it was no small trick to coax the donkey down the steps from the first floor entrance landing to the hall in front of the cafeteria door. The only alternate route to enter was through the kitchen, and that, said my grandmother, was out of the question.

As the years went by, and the student body and faculty grew, it became impossible to manage a student banquet, and the informal frivolity of the faculty inevitably gave way to a more formal format with programs of more accomplished performance than professors masquerading as jolly old elves.

There is a line from Longfellow– “…let the dead past bury its dead“–which, no doubt, is wise and right. But sometimes, when my mother and I reminisce over an earlier day, and I see her pretty half-smile, and hear the distance in her voice as she remembers, saying, “We had fun. . . . we really did,” I can’t help but wish that for a small piece of time–for just a small piece–we might enter that scene again.

But for now, having finished my puzzle and once more admired its view, I will crumble the pieces apart and let them fall back into their box, to be taken out another time and carefully, lovingly, and joyfully placed together again.

©1987 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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The coming of September on the TCU hill in Fort Worth was, during the years of my youth, a time of anticipation. For those whose lives revolved around the school calendar, as my family’s did, it was a time of returning and renewing, a time of fresh starts, chance, and possibility. I and my sister would be returning to public school, and my father and mother would be returning to the TCU Biology Department after the summer respite, he to teach new students in established courses, and she to serve as the department’s secretary. In those days of the 1940s and early ’50s, the University’s Spring semester was over about the first week in June, and the regular semester of Fall didn’t start until past the middle of September. Among other anticipations, then, was the cooler weather that October would bring to the heat-saturated prairie on which Fort Worth is laid, and following close on that would be a new season of Horned Frog athletic contests.

TCU athletics was an important part of my greening, and long before I met and married Johnny Swaim and became really involved, I had annually accompanied my parents to the football and basketball games that TCU’s teams played in the city. Some of my earliest memories of the campus are centered around the old track and playing field to the east of the Mary Couts Burnett Library, the still-new Amon Carter Stadium on the far western edge of the campus, and the old wooden “Barn” behind the gymnasium on the main campus that served as the basketball fieldhouse. Later, I was part of a regular audience who watched first Hub McQuillan’s teams, then “Buster Brannon’s brats” perform in the Will Rogers Coliseum, where conference basketball games were played from the mid-forties at least through the 1952-53 championship season.

On the Saturday afternoons of home football games, there was almost a crackle in the air, as the streams of cars and pedestrians headed for Stadium Drive and the game in Amon Carter Stadium. Rogers Road, where I lived, was only four and one-half blocks from the stadium and, on those Saturdays, it would be lined with parked cars, and our driveway would be full to capacity with the cars of friends who liked to park and walk with us to the game. Sometimes on our way, we would be just in time to catch up with the TCU band as they marched west, from up near where the quadrangle fountain is now, to the stadium, drumsticks clicking, brass flashing, and shoulders swinging in time. As they neared the east entrance, the leader would whistle a signal, and the band would strike up the “Fight Song” to let anybody who could hear know that it was about time to start the contest–the Frogs had arrived. A true fan would have had to have been dead not to feel excitement in that air and to step a little more smartly.

After the game, our friends would return to Rogers Road to partake of the good food and fellowship provided by the Hewatts. More often than not, Dutch Meyer and his snappy little wife,Maggie, and Abe Martin and his Sally would drop by to bask in approval or to be salved by the sympathy of the group gathered there. “Uncle Abe” would unfold his lanky length on the floor and relax, sure that here, at least, were steady friendship and support, whatever the game’s outcome. Those people I remember wanted Dutch and Abe and Buster to be successful because they were friends and colleagues, and you wanted your friends and colleagues to win. It was a selfless attitude, born of friendship and loyalty that didn’t sour or turn cold at failure.

Many of my parents’ close friends were associated in some way with the sports programs at TCU. Football was represented by the Meyers, the Martins, Walter and Elaine Roach, Bear and Martha Wolf, and Howard and Madelon Grubbs; basketball was there in Hub and Altine McQuillan, and sports publicity was accounted for in Amos Melton and Gracie. TCU’s golf coach, Tom Prouse, and Lois were often in the group as was the team’s physician, Mac Crabb, and Mildred.

Daddy and Dutch were representatives of yet another “sport,” too. Although I have no affidavits, it was well known that Willis Hewatt and Dutch Meyer were a formidable, in fact, bloody, pair to oppose at the bridge table. Dutch was hard and gruff, but underneath that tough exterior, one could catch a glimmer now and then of a bit of a pussycat. He was amicable and quite gentlemanly at the socials in our home, and although there were always heated arguments, especially among Dutch, Daddy, and Howard Grubbs, they always ended in good-natured gibing and obvious mutual respect. When the courageous Maggie finally succumbed to cancer, far too young, the old “fight ’em ’til Hell freezes over, then fight ’em on the ice” Dutch was ready to give up, too. It was the warmth and support of this same group of campus friends, that saw him through his blackest hours.

The TCU world was much smaller then, being contained almost entirely within the rectangle bounded around by University Drive, Cantey, Stadium, and Bowie streets. Only the library and the football stadium were outside these borders. The athletic offices were on the first floor of the “Little Gym,” a building first occupied in 1921 and used as the hub of physical activities until 1973, when the Rickel Health and Physical Education Building was built. The sights, sounds, and smells of that old gym have captured light in my mind that seems not to fade with use and years. The glassed-in tropies in the lobby outside Dutch’s office, the tunneled echoes of splashes, pounding feet, and bouncing balls, the odor of chlorine, sweat, and a musty warm moisture that never went away, furnish my mingled memory of that place; the people who worked and played there give the memory life.

Perhaps because of the proximity of the campus facilities in those years, athletics seemed more of an integral part of university life than they do now. It seems that a vague remoteness has crept in, and there appears to be a small but discernible crevice between the Daniel-Meyer/Amon Carter athletic complex and the campus east of it. There seems to be less comraderie between the coaches and the faculty. The athletes, the “gladiators” as Dutch called them, seem somewhat detached from the rest of the student body; they live apart, eat apart, and play apart. So it seems.

But, it is probably simpler than that. For it may well be that I am the one who is remote, certainly more remote from the athletic program than at any time in my past. It could also be that my girlish anticipation, as often happens, has lost its edge. No matter–for when we climb again to our familiar fifty-fourth row seats in the West stadium stands, from which I can view the panorama of my campus, and as we stand there to sing the Alma Mater, I’ll be glad for the opportunity to pull for the Frogs once more.

©1987 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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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

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Sometimes it is difficult to sort out what in your memory is inviolably yours, and what is someone else’s. Time can blur the sharpness of once sure experience and cast it into a less bright, even hazy light, where other voices and views mix and mingle. It is within this kind of piebald consciousness that I find my grandmother and the early cafeteria at TCU.

This much is fact–that my maternal grandparents, Frank and Georgia Harris, with their young teenaged daughter, Elizabeth, came to TCU in June of 1921, to set up and manage the first cafeteria-style food service. Up until that time, meals had been served family-style.

The Harrises were given campus quarters in Goode Hall dormitory (now Clark Hall), and two years after their arrival, my grandfather died there. A year after his death, the univeristy administration, having tried several alternatives, turned the management of the cafeteria over to the widow, who remained in that position until her retirement in 1942.

TCU’s main cafeteria and adjoining kitchen were, until 1955 when the Brown-Lupton Student Center was built, centrally located in the basement of the Administration Building (now Reed Hall), directly below the old auditorium. Public access to the cafeteria was gained by the same stairs that now descend within the north and south entrances of the building. During the time that my grandmother was in charge, a wide hallway connected the stairways, as the ones on the second, third, and fourth floors do now. Those who were here in the late forties and early fifties will remember this area as the student lounge.

The back entrance to my grandmother’s kitchen faced west across the uncut land toward Stadium Drive and could be approached by both pedestrian and vehicle, as Rogers Road extended into the campus from the north, running behind Jarvis Hall, the Ad Building, and Clark and Goode Halls. It was this route that I took on my visits to the cafeteria–walking south from my home on Rogers, crossing Cantey Street, skipping along behind Jarvis to the back of the Ad Building, waving sometimes to Carl Tyler, Mr. Dees, or Mr. Doss, or the black Johnny Greer, all of whom worked to keep the grounds neat and clean. Johnny would always smile, lean on his hoe, and call an “Afternoon, Miss Joanie.”

I don’t know what occasioned my visits to the cafeteria kitchen–probably bound on an errand from my mother–but I usually came in through the back porch door. The back porch was a large screened-in area that was set up with a training table where the athletes took their meals during the playing season. In inclement weather, canvas awnings let down to keep out the wind and rain. It was here, I’m told, that the legendary Sammy Baugh practiced his throw. I wasn’t there, of course, but L. D. “Little Dutch” Meyer vows it’s so, that the boys would always clamor for more milk than “Mom” Harris had set out, and Sammy would go get the extra small bottles in their wire baskets and “pass” them down the length of the table to his cohorts, while the tolerant “Mom” shook her head and tried not to smile.

To most of the students my Grandma Georgie was “Mom,” the diminutive, red-haired provider of their daily nutritional needs. She loved the students and bore their pleading for extra helpings and “seconds” with good nature, but she could also easily handle the mischievous, rowdy, or surly with clearly expressed thoughts on decorum and demeanor, which left no doubt as to who was in charge.

Grandma Georgie’s staff was made up of what we call “minority” now, but at that time, at my age, in my family, there was no such labelling, and I was taught to treat with equal respect the different colors of adults who moved in and out of our lives. As far back as my own memory goes, Victor Martinez was the Chef, although I am told there was a Jim Montgomery before that. Vic had begun working in the cafeteria as a dishwasher, so young, my mother says, that a box was provided for him to stand on the reach the sink where the piles of dishes awaited him in those unmechanized days of handwashing.

Vic, M. C. Duarte, Will G. Story, and Ethan formed the core of the cooking staff. Vic, M. C., and Will G. did most of the main meal preparation, and Ethan was the pastry cook. Even now, after all these years, I can smell and taste and see Ethan’s delicacies. There has never been, nor will ever be, a chocolate eclair or cream puff that can approach the ones he made.

I don’t recall, and there is noone now to tell me, how I started giving poetry recitations to the kitchen staff. I had been taking “‘spression lessons” from my aunt and had learned to recite several poems “by heart.” Someone, probably my grandmother, somehow coaxed me out of my usual shyness to say a poem which began: “Guiseppe de Barber, he greata for mash / He gotta de bigga de blacka mustache / Good clothesa, good styla, and planty good cash!”

After that time, whenever I visited, I was lifted up from the cement floor by Vic or Ethan or Will G. onto the spotless counter and prevailed upon to relate in my best Italian accent all of the good things that Guiseppe de Barber “gotta.” How they would laugh at the last line when I rolled my eyes and pointed to myself saying, “But notta Carlotta, gotta!”, Ethan’s great white teeth flashing out of his dark face. We must have presented an amusing scene–the brown-skinned men in their white uniforms with starched aprons and tall chef’s hats, listening to a red-headed, freckled-faced child of seven or eight quoting verse from a drainboard perch in a college kitchen.

The public eating area of the cafeteria is less clear to me now than the kitchen, although I know it was every bit as clean. The steam table was set along the west wall adjoining the kitchen, and the line of approach to it was along the south wall, where ground level windows let in an abundance of natural light. A white-painted iron railing defined the waiting and serving lines from the dining area, and one proceeded from south to north, being served by Bessie, or Irma, or one of the other steam table ladies, and ended at the cash register which was attended usually by a student. Wooden tables and chairs, uniform in design, were placed so that groups up to eight could dine together and each had a white tablecloth.

A small anteroom, off the northeast corner of the main dining room and separated from it by French doors, provided the faculty with a more private atmosphere. I ate there sometimes with my parents and listened to the friendly easy banter and laughter of the grownups. Such gatherings, brought back in memory, always seem to include the genial and much-loved “Prexy” Waits, his daughter and son-in-law Mary Beth and Scotty (Gayle) Scott, Miss Sadie Beckham, Mabel Major, Elizabeth Shelburne, and her tiny little mother, Mrs. Cephus Shelburne, the gruff but affable L. A. “Bud” Dunagan, and the Lincolnesque “Mr. Pete” Wright. I was welcomed, warmed, and informed by those good people who gave so generously of their energies and talents to enrich TCU, and whose names now adorn so many of its buildings.

Time alters; with equanimity it obscures, enhances, and all too often, obliterates. Recorded memories can stanch the flow of impersonal time, and whether sharply etched images or fuzzy-edged collages, all are valid, all are mine.

©1987 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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When you live for a long time in the same place, you become sort of proprietary about it, like one does their house and land and mate and child. And when that place is the one you were born to, the feeling of right to ownership is just that much stronger. Your history and its history have been made in parallel time, and a knowledge and kinship result from the sensations of the place, that have become memories in time, that have produced a knowing. I came to know and thus, to possess, the “TCU hill” in this manner–the university buildings, the campus walks, the trees and flowers, the commercial strip, the surrounding neighborhoods, the churches and schools, the people of this place–and I feel rather smug about it. Smug, not in an arrogant, unkind way that smacks of an inflated superiority, but one that comes more from an intimate knowledge and pride and respect and love for what a place was and is.

There is one spot on the campus that is more clearly “mine” than any other: the site of the biology lab as it was until 1952. The Department of Biology-Geology (since split into two separate units) was then in not so lofty a home as it now occupies on the third floor of Winton-Scott Hall of Science. In fact, it was in a dark hole, the basement of old Clark Hall, a men’s dormitory that was one of the buildings constructed on the Fort Worth campus from 1912-1914. That building was razed in 1959 and the new administration building, Sadler Hall, was built on the site. But, no matter what activity is now or will be located in the basement of Sadler Hall, that spot will remain in my memory as the old “bilogy lab,” that was full of wonders and not a few terrors in my youth.

The entrance to the department was centrally located beneath the front portico of the dormitory and was accessed by short flights of steps down on either side. The first step down brought you under the portico, and descending further was like going down into a pharoah’s tomb or an old storm cellar under the ground. You immediately sensed the closeness and smelled the musty-cool odor of the concrete walls, ceiling, and floor that, being perpetually out of the sun, retained the moisture of the years. The floor between the stairways slanted slightly downward toward a small, circular iron-grated drain in the middle that took the run-off of rainwater coming down the steps through the unprotected openings. Years later, when I first saw the Claude Raines’ film version of The Phantom of the Opera, the sights and sounds of the underground sewer scenes momentarily triggered the memory of a frightened pigtailed little girl, not yet nine, cautiously descending out of the reassuring rain into the dripping darkness of only-heaven-knew-what horrors. The only reason I braved the trip at all by myself, was to reach my father’s office at the south end of the basement, where for a time, I came after school to wait for my mother who was helping him in his oyster research.

Once inside the heavy front doors, another darkness prevailed. I recall that, on entering, there was a switch to turn on the overhead light in the entranceway, but I can’t recall it ever being on, or of ever turning it on. Those were post-depression days and the period just prior to and during World War II, when every surplus of anything was sharply curtailed to contribute to the war effort. If no one was using the hall, the light was turned off. Passing through didn’t count as “use” besides, there was only the one switch by the entry which could not be operated from the far side of the hall. The entrance area was made even more dim by the fact that there were no windows for natural lighting. Tall wooden exhibit cases stood as motionless masses in the gloom, their specimens of shells and fossils and skeletons barely visible against their black velvet display beds. “Skinny,” the department’s human skeleton, hung from her stand against one wall in the wide passageway that opened into the hall leading to Daddy’s office. “Skinny” was actually a welcome sight as I traversed the darkness, not only because she was so familiar to me in that place, but also because I knew that now there was only one more obstacle to get past: the rattlesnake in John Forsyth’s office.

Dr. Forsyth was a herpetology specialist on the biology faculty, and his office was the first of the three or four that were located in the south portion of the basement. He kept live specimens in cages in his office and the rattler was positioned on the floor near the door. When the door was open–I think it always was when I came by–the snake could see movement in the hall and react with its customary defense, the coil and the warning rattle. From John Forsyth’s office to my father’s was about thrity feet and I was almost at a dead run by the time I got across that thirty feet. It’s an odd thing, but not extraordinary I think, that I transferred my fear of that snake to its keeper, and it was really after I had been a student in Dr. Forsyth’s histology class, some twenty years later, that I came to wonder at how I could have been so intimidated by such a mild-mannered gentleman. I’m glad I had the chance to change that early impression.

But the lab was much more wonderful than terrible. There were all manner of fascinations, from live lizards, primarily the “horned frog,” to the ancient fossilized ammonites. The largest ammonites–two to three feet in diameter–were displayed on the floor of the entrance area, along with the fossilized track of a dinosaur big enough for me to sit, curled up, inside. My geologist friend tells me only one of the ammonites remains today, on display in the Sid W. Richardson Buildings, and he doesn’t know what happened to the dinosaur track.

In another area, large jars of preservation fluids held human fetuses, so discretely wired to clear glass panes that they appeared suspended, in vitro, so it seemed. These were the premier trophies of the lab to show to friends whose fathers worked in ordinary offices in the workaday world; hours could be spent pointing out the babies’ tiny fingernails, little wrinkled ankles, curled toes, and their overall peaceful, slumbering appearance. They could have been horrible, no doubt, given other circumstances, but under the calm, sure instruction of the teacher-father, those unborn infants were just another aspect of the miracle of life, and to be held more in regard than disdain.

It seemed that the treasures of the lab were boundless: darting fish in bubbling aquaria, sparkling minerals, dried specimens of fish and crustaceans, exotic shells from faraway seas, black boxes of pinned, spread insects, and the world of strange planktonic forms that pulsed and crept and sped in the fluid on a microscope’s slide–tiny creatures with strangely enchanting names that challenged pronunciation, like Biddulphia and Coccinodiscus, trocophores and rotifers, and the villain, Dermocystidium, whose invasion into oyster beds caused great concern in the coastal shellfish industry.

The people of the lab, the professors and students, were extensions of my family. There was the brooding, but kindly, Mr. Winton, so highly respected that no one called him Will, I think not even the gentle, soft-spoken Mrs. Winton, whom he called “Madama.” And the dear, laughing Scotty, Dr. Gayle Scott, closest friend of my father, a brilliant geologist, whose career was cut tragically short by a deadly brain tumor. And the mischievous Frank Lozo, a young geology instructor, who was much more friend to me than distant adult. And there were the graduate students, Dan Jarvis and Lola Lollar (Huff), who would later become TCU faculty members, and those who would make medicine their life work–Bob Cook, Cortell Holsapple, Jr., Bob Magoffin, Spud Taylor, Wiley Alliston–and those who were geology majors, like that incomparable personality, Davey O’Brien. From my perspective now of forty-plus years, those were halcyon times, peopled with kings and princes and fine ladies, with a dragon here and there to make the noble more appreciated.

One by one and piece by piece the loved, familiar faces and objects and places disappear from my current view, and I feel an emptiness, a loss at their going. At the same time, I realize how much emptier I could have been, and how much greater a loss would have been mine, had I never known their presence and influence. I cherish them among my possessions.

©1986 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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My friend says if you stand at night at the bottom of the east steps to Reed Hall and look down the walk, between the Memorial Columns, across University Drive and straight east down Lowden Street, the lights from the Library make beautiful golden slashes on the lawn that stretches between Lowden and the north side of the Library. My friend says he would like to paint that.

Having faith in my friend’s vision, I went in daytime to his spot to conjure his view. I could see the library’s basement windows, from which, he said, the light in his night-picture was sharpest, and I could just see, from my angle of sight, the first-floor window of my library office which looks out on Lowden. I saw his lights–and also the lights of a Lowden Street of another time, and I wondered how many canvasses it would take to bring back those scenes, and who would care if I did.

Reed Hall was there then, too, but, unnamed officially, it was the “Ad Building” and nearly all of the business of the University was carried on there, for it housed not only the President’s Office, the Business Office, and Registrar, but also classrooms, faculty offices, the only auditorium on campus, and, in the basement, the post office and cafeteria.

The Memorial Columns were there too, although the ones of my time were bridged by an arch and were dedicated to only one war’s dead heroes; the original archway was torn down to accommodate a wider University Drive, and by the time the present columns were erected, there had been another war and more dead heroes, so it was dedicated to them both. And the Fallis house is still in its old place at 29– Lowden, though Dr. Fallis and his family long ago left it, and it now serves as the TCU Nursery School. And the house on the northeast corner of the 2900 block is still there in a remodeled version to quarter campus housekeeping services. I can’t recall who lived there, but I do know that the neighbors to the west of that house were the Samuel P. Zieglers. I do know, too, that that land on the north side of the 2900 block across from the Library and all that could be seen from there, was pretty nearly my entire universe until I was six.

Ours was the second house east from University Drive, although we were situated about midway the block. There were always, as I recall, two or three vacant lots at the west end of the street where it connected with University Drive. The first house was a duplex, in one side of which Lorraine Sherley lived for a time. To our east, set far back on the lot, was my grandmother’s house; next to her was Sterling Cottage, a two-story frame house which belonged to TCU and housed female Home Economics students. Then came a little house in which a schoolmate of mine, Eugene Peden, lived, and then came the Fallis home, the Ziegler home, and that house on the corner. Eugene’s and the corner house were the only “non-TCU” ones.

TCU and Lowden Street, then, were the sum and substance of my world. I could watch my father and grandmother walk west in the mornings, up Lowden to their jobs, he to the basement of old Clark Hall (now Sadler Hall) to his Biology Department office, and she to her work as Head Dietitian in the basement of the Ad Building. I suppose that Bruce Fallis and the Ziegler children waved their fathers across University Drive, too, to the Speech and Art Departments in the Ad Building. If anyone watched Miss Sherley off to her English office, it was surely only with hidden glances. Born painfully shy, I was, and I assumed everybody else was, terrified of her and always thought if she caught me looking, she could if she wanted, turn me to stone, so powerful was her presence. The best part of a day was waiting on the front steps in the evening, trying to beat my sister in spotting Daddy on his way home, then racing to the corner to meet him and tell him our day.

Mostly we played in our backyards or skated or rode our tricycles up and down the sidewalk on our side of the street, but sometimes Mother would let us go across to the Library side of our Lowden Street and play on the long front steps, or slide down the long concrete banisters of the Library, or skate on the wide concrete surface that was laid from the base of the steps west to the concrete railing bordering the eastern limit of the Library’s lily pond. We took great delight in clacking over the several marble plaques with all the engraved names that had been placed in the concrete as commemoratives by senior classes at TCU.

On rare occasions, we were allowed to go down the small grassy slope to the red-bricked edge of the pond itself and watch the bright yellow, orange, and white goldfish that swam beneath and among the lily pads. All of this area was visible from our front door, and I’m sure that was the only reason we were allowed that far away. I recall one time when the pond and I became one.

Mother had gotten my sister and me dressed in our “Sunday best” for Sunday School and had consented to us running across to the pond to watch the fish, while she and Daddy were dressing for church. Of course, the warning, “Don’t get dirty, girls,” followed us out the door as we headed for the pond. And I remember that I was wearing a ruffled yellow taffeta dress and black patent Mary Janes, and I think it was that that makes the memory of falling into the pond so sharp all these years. I’ve never really known whether I just fell or was pushed by my sister (I always claimed she pushed me; she was certainly given to meanness where I was concerned), but I know of the horror of that moment when the yellow taffeta hit the water. The pond was so shallow that I doubt if my life was in the balance, but I rose from it with wailing, more for the ruined taffeta than the indignity done me.

The pond and the beautiful facade of the original Mary Couts Burnett Library exist now only in pictures and the memories of those who knew them. The pond eventually became a maintenance problem and was filled in and over with dirt and turf, and the building itself has been so expanded and altered that there is only one outside wall along the south side that retains the grace of the first structure. Even the western main entrance was moved so that it now faces south. Curiously one marble plaque remains, I believe in the same place on the west-running walk, crossed daily now by unknowing feet and ignored by unseeing eyes.

There are other memories, too, of rose trellises and trumpet vines, and sandboxes and puppy dogs, of backyard swings and porch swings, and the smell of boiling water and hot starch in our kitchen on wash-day morning. And the good talk and laughter from the faculty-student gatherings in our backyard coming in on the summer air through our shaded bedroom window, and, sometimes, if the wind was right, the mellow sounds of Mr. Ziegler’s cello floating out his front door and westward toward the campus and beyond. My friend was right. There are golden slashes of light along Lowden Street to the east.

©1986 Joan Hewatt Swaim

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