SENTIMENT AL JOURNEY 50 years of memories In The Beginning Frieda Dietz, '16 Secret organizations forbidden to women. T.A.S. secret society revealed after flourishing on aid campus. (Talliaferro Admiration Society.) Members watched Boyd in athletic practice. Baseball knocked him unconscious; one girl swooned; others wept hysterically. ( 51 years before the Beatles.) Football heroes entertained with hot chocolate and eclairs served atop Egyptian mummy. . . . Parties ran short of lemonade; citric acid swiped from lab ... Jack Johnson coached pleated-bloomered basketbaill teams by men's rules; Smither, Tanner and Dietz put out of every game for roughness but had to stay in- no substitutes-. . . Lee Liggon had 21st birthday party; a rich guest had an open car, men and girls piled in, 3-deep on laps, raced whooping and singing all over Church Hill. (Half-century before "hot-rndders .") ... WESTHAMPTON: "Who's afraid of" May L. Ke1ler? Huh I Dean Dr. Keller was scared of us. Witness foHowing: Halloween masquerade, 1914. Astonished faculty chaperones saw masqueraders disappear up dark srtairs of unfinished tower. Romantic? Each girl had two men. Sounds not for chaperones. Returning via kitchen, blaze of light revealed a Soph's man wildly embracing a Senior. Group had to pu!l hair-puhlers apart. Soph never spoke to Senior again. Someone played piano. All danced. (Dancing strictly forbidden.) One couple tangoed, man threw girl dramatically in air. Faculty turned to stone. Greek prof flunked girl: "Brains in her feet!" (Long before Ann Landers.) . . . Celeste Anderson (O'Flaherty), president of Student Gov't. couldn 't suggest her own bright idea, put Frieda Dietz up to it. April 1, 1915: Professors gasped at empty classrooms. Dorm girls had rendezvoused with city girls at Cary St. Road, the latter ladened with picnic lunches enjoyed at river bank. Return at 4:30 p.m., met by photographer from Times-Dispatch. Men furious that we outsmarted them . .. . April, 1916: 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death . Whole city invaded campus. London Bridge houses built on both sides of lake bridge. Every collegian active in costume. Emily Gardner, an unforgettable "Puck" in a superb outdoor "Midsummer Night's Dream." ... "Black Moriah," drawn by mule team, met us at streetcar to pull us "frails" up hill. Car ran off track daily; mules mired in mud ... "Twelfth Night," Senior class of 1915, magnificent in red Elizabethan costumes, banqueting. One, Louise Reams (Hundley) first M.A . Dubbed "Sup" because of supervisory
pos1t10n. Name still clings, denoting "Superior." . . . In 1916, Junior Oass of '15 held first May Day, enacting self-written drama, "Ceres and Persephone." Ka,thleen Bland (Cottle) with glorious long hair was Persephone. Men heard girl ask in library for picture of Mercury's costume. Twenty men sneaked view of play. . . . First proposal at Westhampton: Ministerial s,tudent asked, "Will you?" "Yes." Kiss applauded from bakony over Blue Room ... Norma Woodward (Throckmorton) , first Muse of Poetry . . . Mary Porter (Rankin) and Mary Clay (Camp) beautiful in "As You First Tower class rings Like It" ... Fanny Crenshaw, slender young coach Dr. Lough "winning friends" ... Remembering: Five-foot-one and under, Dr. Metcalf, Napoleon, Dean Keller-all born to greatness. Dean Keller going to battle with Dr. Boatwright and trustees for "us girls," put to heavy trial but coming out with our admiration and life-long devotion . Dr. Metcalf's secret smile (he had spirit-contact with the literary dead) , his twirling "nose-pinchers," his different, elegant suit daily . Unless you had a class under our most famous "Metty" or "Bobby" (Dr. Stewart) you lost social status. Dr. Stewart proved that French and German were made for jokes, his classes hilarious. Dr. Loving knowing everybody's name, their love affairs, and shouting them through the street car. Dr. Gaines' wonderful understanding that women didn't need higher math, and through they went, even the hopeless . These stand among the PILLARS of our past. What did we get out of wllege? Precious, priceless friendships that have endured beyond naming the wives of Henry VIII, and a high sense of loyalties to Westhampton and to one another.
The Twenties Mildred Anderson Williams, '28 Last of the innocents , these blessed demoiselles, damp little moths just emerging from cocoons, not quite brave enough to fly. Outside the fabulous twenties roared by: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alexander Woolcott, John Held, Jr., Dorothy Parker, College Humour and Katherine Brush. Inside, the Collegian, the Messenger, the Web, a Writers' club so prolific we filled pages with stories and poems by nom-de-plumes when we tired of our own by-lines. Golden Nineties . . . Platinum Twenties, we called ourselves . . . There was the faculty: Miss Keller, straight as a hat pin with tongue just as sharp ... Miss Harris, chalking in mysterious math [ 5}
formulae on blackboards . . . Miss Beggs, like the prow of a Viking Ship, sailing down Roselawn Road to be towed uphill in an old Franklin named Eloise that carry seven and Miss Beggs . . Miss Brown who pronounced every word as if it had two syllables, who taught us to say, over and over, "I am a Prin-cess" until we almost believed it ourselves .... The classes: Latin I where we sat alphabetically but daily listened to a roll call-a rush through three Andersons and into pash1re with Butterfield, Churn and Cudd while we tittered like silly milkmaids ... 19th Century Poetry in Miss Landrum's study with its thick, blue rug and casement windows, or under a tree when Spring vied with Wordsworth in a poem of her own ... Writing Composition in the Tower where we sat on a window seat facing Miss Lutz and a Victorian desk with Ming yellow insides ... Archeology, a must for Latin majors, where we memorized the pictures of sculpture of the ancient world that lined the walls and knew them shll by heart years later when we saw them in the Louvre and the British Museum. . . . Those cold May Days when we danced in Dogwood Dell, risking pneumonia in rainbow chiffon . . . Original one-act plays, the first ever, on the stage of the Red Cross Building, our relic from World War I that served as Chapel , Playhouse and Gym . .. Ah, Gym. . . . when we donned our blue bloomers and long , black stockings, our middy blouses and our ratty ties and swung from the parallel bars or climbed the moth eaten leather steed that Fanny G. called The Horse . . . The pyrotechnic display of the Science Hall burning, its chemicals exploding and flinging out golden blobs that stained the sky with fireworks . That empty crater beside the Power House where the pathetic Botany professor whose Ph.D . thesis had gone up in smoke, was found poking around the ruins to find a lost paragraph. Science thereafter on the balcony of the gray building overlooking the lake , a building that had belonged to the era when the campus was an Amusement Park at the end of the new street car line . ... Ten minute dates on week nights . . . Dances in fraternity houses just off campus, with curfew at midnight for Westhampton girls who were rushed up the Hill in one batch, together with chaperone ... The Twenties when we loved Westhampton's traditions, her songs and made up those of our own. The Twenties that ended with a bang of the stock market crash that startled all demoiselles from their golden bars of heaven.
