HomeMy WebLinkAboutFaculty and Staff Panel 1L- Group 1
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Interviewer: Ann Erdman
Interviewees: Jim Cashion
Pattie Caddes
Knox Walker
Harvey Caddes
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K.W. Before I respond to your question, let me talk about the dimensions
of campus housing and some of the general aspects of the place. I'll start with my
parents: James Knox Walker and Alice Reba Dick, both A &M employees and
who married in 1926, lived briefly in Bryan and then in 1926, rented a house on
the campus on Lubbock Street (now Joe Routt). At that time and for years later,
the campus was considered that section of A &M land east of what is now
Wellborn (Highway 6 then). Though there were, perhaps, twenty College
residences west of Wellborn on A &M land, these were not included in the
campus. In any event, this somewhat arbitrarily designated campus enjoyed 103
residences in 1926; three were duplexes, two were two story two unit apartments;
and there was a four unit apartment, the rest single family houses. Essentially, by
1926, the building of new houses on the campus for employees was over (two
more were added in the 1930s). In fact, the last construction during the major
building era probably took place about World War I time. There were two basic
constructions used for the homes on the campus: large late nineteenth century
Queen Anne types, squarish and airy and stolid houses. sometimes with two
stories and always conveying a demeanor of authority and more money; and
homes that clearly did not belong to the nineteenth century — bungalows, modern
twentieth century structures that were smaller, that did not convey authority and
money. The older and larger homes were the dominion of Texas A &M
administrative personnel: Deans, administrative heads and sometimes department
heads. An assistant professor in 1926, for example, need not apply for a Queen
Anne. But neither should every administrative person at the school who sought
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campus housing. There simply were not enough Queen Annes to go around, and
department heads and others often were relegated to the bungalows. Both types
were wood frame, white painted houses, both equipped with brick flues and
fireplaces for heating and cooking. There was no natural gas on the campus when
these were built.
But there were two other homes on the campus, both distinctly different
from the wood frame structures. Located on Throckmorton, these two story
homes stood back off the street among cedars and oaks, their exteriors finished in
a smooth concrete process, not sculpted as stucco is worked. I'm sure that in their
first year, whatever year that was, these were attractive homes, daringly new
perhaps in their innovation and construction, promising a new direction for
architecture. Perhaps — but by the 1930s the exteriors of both had collected stains
and mildew and patches of moss; and as they stood now off Throckmorton,
darkly, gloomily, they seemed more appropriate for the 1932 back lot of
Universal Studios in Hollywood, a movie company that, at the time, was turning
out horror movie after horror movie. Neither of the homes, however, was
occupied by the Addams family. Rather typical A &M professorial people lived
here, the O.M. Balls and the C.H. Winklers, Dr. Ball the Head of the Biology
Department, Dr. Winkler the Director of the special Summer Session programs.
(Oddly two more of these homes were built on College Road, about two - thirds the
distance from the College to Bryan. From a distance they stood as gloomy and
foreboding as those on the campus. A dead end, I think, had been reached here
for this line of American architecture.)
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Practical consideration and some snobbery seem to have dictated where
one lived on the campus. Employees responsible for the physical maintenance of
the College — electricians, plumbers, plant workers and others — lived primarily on
four streets near the power plant and the Buildings and Grounds office. Academic
types — professors, department. heads, administrative heads — lived elsewhere, on
other streets somewhat west and south of the power plant, Houston and
Throckmorton, the eastern boundary, old Highway 6, the western. Many of the
streets on the campus remained unpaved and uncurbed until 1931 -32. Until then
streets were topped with black cinders from the spent fuel of the power plant, not
gravel.
Campus housing not only provided convenient and cheap housing for
employees, it also was the means by which a little extra money could be brought
in. Residents commonly rented out that front bedroom to some other employee of
the school, who had no house. So you had primary and secondary renters. And
you had yet something else. A number of the homes enjoyed servant's quarters in
the backyard, and these were commonly used for that purpose. Nobody was
getting rich in 1926 and 1932 and 1937 working for A &M, but somehow folks
scraped enough aside to hire servants.
Jane and Ed Williams who lived on Lubbock Street across from the
Walkers discovered a novel and extreme way of renting. During the summer
short course season, when husbands and wives would flock to the campus for the
special courses, Ed and Jane and two kids would move out of their house, and
sleep on cots in the yard, renting the house to several attendees — retaining, of
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course, kitchen and bathroom privilege. All of this, of course, was in addition to
the permanent roomer who occupied the Williams' front bedroom. And there is
more: in late 1936, Jane Williams took notice of the possibilities of the unused
and rather cramped attic of her New England bungalow on Lubbock and, in her
usual way, directed her husband to make such arrangements with Texas A &M
that would allow the Williamses to civilize this skimpy attic with flooring, walls,
electricity, plumbing, and a stairway — that it might be rented out to students.
E.L. Williams, Department Head of Industrial Education, himself a skilled cabinet
maker and carpenter, secured these rights and proceeded then to renovate the
small attic of the bungalow. A lot of effort and trouble — and Williams'
money — and it came to nothing: by 1938, the residents of the campus had got the
word — the era of cheap and convenient housing at the school was nearing an end,
and residents were advised to make other arrangements for housing, as soon as
possible.
Not to single out Ed and Jane Williams I would ask you to look about the
neighborhood, across Lubbock from the Williamses where newly married Knox
and Reba Walker kept the front bedroom of their one bath, small bungalow rented
from 1926 to 1931 to ladies in the employ of the Texas Agricultural Extension
Service. And on the departure of the last of those women, the Walkers boarded a
nephew during his freshman year at A &M. As the nephew left for dormitory life
during his sophomore year, a younger sister of Reba Walker moved in, yet
another boarder, and she attended high school until 1934 at A&M Consolidated,
the public school located on the campus. (My mother's sister, my aunt, had been
struck with severe asthma at her home in Galveston, and her physician, hard
pressed for a treatment, suggested that she leave Galveston and move to another
town. Often, he said, that worked in asthma patients. It did.)
Cut now from the Walker's house to that large Queen Anne at the corner
of Lubbock and Throckmorton where Dean of the College F.C. Bolton and his
family live, a man whose salary, obviously, is sharply above that of Ed Williams
or Knox Walker. Yet for years the second story of the Bolton house has been
rented by biology professor C.C. Doak and his wife. And across Throckmorton
from the Boltons, to the south about one house, there is another Dean who rents.
Dean and bachelor Charles Puryear, his residence taken care of by a housekeeper,
rents out the second story.
Well not everybody rented on the campus. And those that didn't cared not
a whit that some did: that Ed and Jane Williams struggled to find yet another way
to realize extra income from their A &M home, that the well paid Dean of the
College enjoyed even more income from the second story of his Queen Anne. If
these folks wanted to squeeze out a few more dollars out of the works, non -
renting residents considered, well let them go and do it! In the process of
urbanization of the Texas A &M campus, a body politic had evolved among the
residents, and it constructed unannounced but understood standards, rather prim
ones, of behavior and propriety. But renting a front bedroom or a Dean's second -
story was never considered.
The Walkers paid $13 a month for their bungalow during the 1930s,
probably a representative figure for similar homes about the campus. Mary
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Bolton Echols, daughter of Dean F.C. Bolton, remembers that the family paid
about $35 a month for their Queen Anne. But there may have been other rental
arrangements for a select few on the campus.
Early in her tenure at A &M, the early 1920s, my mother learned from an
administrative secretary that certain older members of the faculty, those who had
been around at the turn of the century, were grandfathered by administrative fiat
into free campus housing as long as they worked for the school. Mama, who
wrote out that $13 check each month and who in a kind of private way believed
that equity and fairness stood right up there with the other components of
morality, found all of this repugnant. It mattered not at all to her that by 1930,
there were probably fewer than three such families benefiting from this largesse.
When she was an old lady she still grumbled about the matter. Anecdotal as this
is, I wouldn't at all be surprised that such an arrangement had been struck. Too,
there may have been other arrangements between A &M and renters, arrangements
of paternalism. I remember, as a small boy in the middle 1930s, when a group of
A &M Consolidated children called on the elderly faculty members of A &M,
honoring them with baskets of May wildflowers. Among those visited was Dean
Charles Puryear, long a venerable presence at the College, now a pathetically
infirm old man, crippled, I suppose, by a stroke. Even as children I'm sure we
wondered about this? — How could this man perform the duties of his title? I'm
sure now that he didn't and that he hadn't for sometime. But he was allowed to
live in that house on Throckmorton, a measure of kindness and decency I think.
The accumulation of these several aspects of residential housing on the A &M
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campus persuades me to believe that the school was granted — or took — a rather
free hand in the administration of the homes. I'm glad they did — it's a delight to
remember that once there had been in the same academic setting we see today,
such a different world.
Servant's quarters were mini - houses, equipped with electricity and
plumbing and cooking facilities — each painted to match the house that stood in
front of them, on Houston or Throckmorton or some other A &M street. Not
every home on the campus was equipped with a servant house, their presence
more common in the backyards of older homes. Servants on the campus were
never referred to as servants, too highfalutin I suppose. "Maids" was the
acceptable designation, although it was just as common to refer to a maid as a
"girl ". Though she might be thirty or forty-five or sixty, she was a girl.
Commonly they were black women or women of eastern European origin: Polish
or Czech. Largely faceless people who came and went, they sometimes lived for
years in their tiny houses, rather identified in the community with the family for
whom they worked (and quite probably, it was only those families who knew their
last names).
Stella Roan, her mother born a slave, worked for my parents on the
campus from 1932 to 1940; and after we left the campus in 1940, took a home in
Bryan, Stella continued on until 1959 with the Walkers. Her daily wage in the
1930s was less than a dollar, and out of that she paid nearly a quarter for
transporation to and from the Walker house (there was no servant's house behind
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our campus home). She lived in an old dilapidated home in the country west of
Bryan. Often she worked a seven -day week.
Stella ate the same meals as we and she ate them standing in the Walker
kitchen, by the sink, her eating utensils: her glass, her coffee cup, her plate, her
knife and fork, always returned to and held on the back porch. When she needed
to use the bathroom, she left our campus house, visiting the facilities of a friend
who lived in a servant's house across the street. All of us recognized that Stella
understood the margin and lines that described her world — but of the nouns and
adjectives that came to her mind when she privately examined the substance of
that world, we knew nothing. No one asked of course — that wasn't done. And
too, curiosity in such matters then was as scant as a Hope diamond.
She was a woman of thrift and probity. In the late 1930s, my father either
lent her money or signed a note for her that she might build a house in Bryan.
The house was built, and Stella took care of her obligations. My father died in the
late summer of 1980, Stella a few days later.
Servants in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s cleaned houses and tended
children and often cooked — across a thousand Sundays in campus backyards,
wringing the necks of twenty -five thousand chickens, the first step in that most
conventional of Sunday meals: fried chicken. On Mondays they addressed the
week's collection of dirty white shirts, table cloths, diapers, sheets and BVD's,
kindling fires beneath large and black cast iron pots of blue water, the initial
operation in the laundering process. Though commercial laundries were an
option, many residents clung to the older way.
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Memory is an odd thing — with the right nudge suddenly projecting frames
of images of objects and people long forgotten. In considering this subject, I
suddenly remembered someone, saw a face so long unremembered. She was
Czech, probably no more than nineteen and she began working for the Williamses
on Lubbock about 1931, when I was four. Her name Josie, her hair raven, she
always wore a smile on her pretty face, a delightful smile. No matter the
circumstance, Josie would find a smile. The neighborhood children loved her,
this gentle girl who distinctly cared for them. She was there in the Williams'
servant house for several years, and then one day she was gone, replaced by
another girl. I never knew her last name — probably never asked — never knew
what became of her, why she left.
Several of the older homes were equipped with cisterns, large containers
for rainfall that ran from the roofs. As much as anything, that water was
important to the occupants for drinking. And for good reason. A new visitor
approaching Texas A &M in 1926 in a Model T would likely have been struck by
the prominence of two clapboard towers, one near the power plant, one off
University (Sulphur Springs Road then). Gothic, forbidding looking things,
probably seventy feet tall, sort of shaped like obelisks, these structures protected
the pumps that lifted the school's water from the ground. And it was well water
laden with hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide smells like rotten eggs, but most
on the campus apparently got used to the stuff. But if you had a cistern to trap
rain water, you'd drink rain water. (A visitor making his second trip to the
campus often brought along his own water.)
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In 1926, and on into the thirties, there were sights within the residential
district of the school that evoked things that had passed: Hay barns, barns with
double doors in the second story, repositories for horse nutrition when horses had
been used for wagons and transportation on the campus. And if you had, in 1926,
visited that unusual looking several acres of land just east of Kyle Field, between
Throckmorton and Houston, where the land forms in gentle valleys and
acclivities, an elder employee might have explained that here the clay was mined
and formed into bricks and baked to be used in the construction of the first wood -
masonry buildings on the campus. (You can today still see the imprint of that
brick - making operation east of Kyle Field.) And near the mining site, you would
have noted too the eroded remnant of a dam that once caught water for a small
lake on the campus.
There was no natural gas on the campus in 1926. Not until three years
later did residents get rid of coal grates and kerosene stoves in the kitchen and the
several devices that heated water for dishes and baths. Natural gas had arrived.
Prior to 1929, the school powered electrical generation with coal, bringing the
fuel to the power plant by rail. A spur left the rail line that paralleled Wellborn,
cutting across the northern edge of the campus and then on to the power plant.
An additional spur ran from the plant to Sibisa Hall for some ( ?) reason. A &M
had its own locomotive and kept it in a kind of garage near the power plant, a
trove of opportunities for small boys who would climb up to the cab, imagining
all sorts of daring things. Though gas had come to the College for power
generation, coal continued to be hauled in during the 1930s, perhaps a backup
should gas pressure fail (which, I remember, it did, on occasion).
My parents weren't representative of the people who resided on the
campus — but they weren't all that unrepresentative either. My father's parents,
children during the Civil War, came to Texas with the multitude of Scotch -Irish
who spilled out of Tennessee after the war. They settled near Azle, Texas,
married and raised six sons. A sober, agricultural people, their faith was a kind of
Calvinism — Presbyterianism, a persuasion that seems to have suggested that life's
possibilities were largely cheerless and unsmiling. My father entered Texas
A &M in the middle -teen years, studying civil engineering. Drafted in 1917
before he could finish, he entered and was commissioned in the fledgling Army
Air Corps (in 1917 it was called the Air Service Organization, not Air Corps).
After this he returned to A &M, graduated, and in 1920 was hired for a position in
a two -man organization, the Branch College Department of Texas A &M (the
other person was an accountant). Until 1946, they, the two of them, had the
engineering and accounting responsibilities for the branch schools of Texas
A &M: Prairie View, John Tarleton at Stephenville and North Texas at Denton.
Mother's parents, again Scotch -Irish people (with a French insinuation),
settled in Galveston County at Virginia Point, a tiny village on the mainland near
the foot of the Galveston Island causeway that would be built some years later.
Grandfather Jefferson Davis Dick ranched there and raised nine children on that
salt marsh prairie; Mama, the third, was born in May, 1900, just in time for the
hurricane of September 8 of that year. Hurricane forecasting in 1900 a primitive
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science, the Dick family and many others in the community were slow to react
and leave Virginia Point; and when they did it was hours too late: salt water had
already risen dangerously. Belatedly my grandparents loaded a wagon late in the
day with kids and neighbors and provisions, hitched up a team and struck out for
La Marque, a small town to the north on higher ground. The water continuing to
rise, floundering, half - drowning horses cut loose, the family floated all night. But
they reached high ground; all survived. Nothing was left at Virginia Point, not a
fence post. But the family went back; another home was built at Virginia Point.
In 1900 Texans still did that, still went back and rebuilt — just as they had done on
other Texas frontiers, sixty or fifty years before. The family of Jefferson Davis
Dick may have been Scotch -Irish but it saw life's possibilities as something more
than cheerless and unsmiling. The whole of them found a great deal to enjoy in
this life. I think now that the nearness to the city of Galveston had much to do
with that outlook.
Galveston, Texas in the first two decades of this century stood apart from
the agricultural heartland of the State and from all of urban Texas. It was not the
Barbary Coast: it was a vigorously stimulating, almost cosmopolitan town, a
seaport, an exporter of cotton; a town that attracted tourists to bathe (not swim)
who wore bathing suits (not swimming suits) and who dined in elegance in
restaurants that specialized in oyster dishes (shrimp were slow to be discovered).
And it was in extravagance and subtlety, a venue for culture and entertainment.
There was nothing unsmiling and cheerless about the city of Galveston, and the
younger set of the agricultural sector of Galveston County knew it. Mama grew
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up quite aware of the town. It was that awareness, I think, that focused her
attention on the contradiction of the bright times of Galveston with the stark lot of
women, like her mother, who were managed by some older obligation to produce
and raise a house full of children, often in places remote from a civilized hand, a
medical hand. After the Dick family went back to Virginia Point, another child
had been born, her name Grace. And when the little girl was a few years old, she
became desperately ill and word was sent to a doctor at Texas City, a small town
on Galveston Bay six miles north of Virginia Point. The doctor, a day and a half
later, was able to respond j arriving in his Ford at the Dick house in Virginia Point,
but it was too late. Somewhere in the Virginia Point community, Jeff Dick found
a photographer and a picture was taken of Grace as she lay there, a Mother Goose
book at her side — she seems asleep. Grandmother Laura Dick had had enough,
and the family moved to more civilized Texas City. Young Alice Rebra Dick
took all of this into account.
One of the independent, new modern women of the writers of the time,
Alice Reba Dick chose not to finish high school, selecting instead a job at the
well known department store Robert I. Cohen's in Galveston. She sold children's
clothes there. A pretty woman, she was courted by several young men; and on
warm Saturday evenings Reba Dick and a beaux would glide and posture to the
music at the Tokyo Dance Hall, a large screened pavilion a few hundred yards
from the Galveston beach — and a thousand miles from Virginia Point. The
exterior of this place wore a brilliant green, its interior a marquis for a collection,
row on row, of Japanese lanterns. Rotating in the center of the dance floor was a
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device of illusion and mirrors, and in its process it cast lights of several colors on
the turning dancers, on the Japanese lanterns. In 1917 and 1918, she was caught
up in the dedication and conviction of those years, feeling emotions she had never
known. Twenty -five years later, reminded by a new dedication and conviction
and a song on the radio, she could remember how they would gather at the rail
terminal in Galveston in 1917, when the soldiers — doughboys then — loaded on
the train, and sing the neat little songs of the day, bidding the men goodbye.
One day in 1918, a friend came into Cohen's and handed Mama a copy of
the Galveston Tribune, drawing attention to an event that was going to be
organized by the paper. "Reba," she said, "you got to enter this thing." Mama
read the piece and she did. She entered. The Tribune, one of the two Galveston
papers, had proposed a daring idea for a contest: a bunch of young women in
bathing suits would compete, based on their obvious credentials, for the title of
Miss Galveston. The Tribune declared proudly that this is the first time in this
country's history that such a contest has been held. Reba Dick entered, won, and
was honored with a diamond ring, and went back to selling kids' clothes at Robert
I Cohen's. No Hollywood contract, that was it.
Then in the summer of 1921, a slender man, about forty, prematurely gray,
dressed in a white linen suit, polished in his speech, walked briskly into the
children's department at Robert I Cohen's and asked Reba Dick for help. He and
his family were visiting Galveston, he explained, and he needed bathing suits for
his year and a half old twins. Reba addressed his request. This person always
appreciated a good looking woman and when such a woman could skillfully
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present merchandise, like children's bathing suits, as Mama had done, he was
overwhelmed. After all, he knew a thing or two about clerks and sales. He
bought two suits and laid out his business card before her:
R.K. Chatham
Mgr. Exchange Store
Main Building
Texas A &M College
College Station, Texas
If she ever wanted to leave Cohen's, he declared, she had a job at College Station,
at the Exchange Store, in the Main Building of the College at Texas A &M, and he
left. Mama took a hard look at this travelling stranger, rather chary of the entire
matter, but she checked him out. There really was, she found, an Exchange Store
at Texas A &M and the manager was a respected man of the community, R.K.
Chatham.
In 1922 during the summer she wrote Chatham: she wanted a change, did
that job offer still hold? It did. And in August 1922, Alice Reba Dick with
luggage, hatboxes and a steamer trunk arrived in Bryan, taking a room at Batts'
Apartments, the new clerk at the Exchange Store on the campus at the College ...
the new clerk soon to learn with shock and melancholy that the Chatham twins for
whom she had selected bathing suits the year before had died after Christmas
1921. Vomiting, dehydration and specialists were brought in from Houston ...
1921 and 1921 medicine, no drugs, no sulfas, no penicillins. The children died.
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A few weeks after her arrival in Bryan, one Saturday afternoon, her
determination ratcheted up, Mama went into one of the downtown barbershops in
Bryan. She sat down with three men ahead of her. Finally there was the
appropriate "next" and Reba Dick approached the tentative, already guilt -laden
barber, already aware of what she wanted, who would ask anyway what services
he might provide? She told him and he proceeded. She left the shop, her hair
now bobbed, the liberated woman, the new woman, who had just arrived in
Bryan. Mama had never seen anything like the social structure of Bryan, Texas.
Here was a small town with several good old families who lived in houses of
some elegance and who, in a widely understood way, were regarded as arbiters of
community standard and convention and culture; and who enjoyed the benefits of
old money, and sometimes new money. And even when there was no more old
money, she observed, when it was all gone. the creak and murmur of the right
older attic counted for much in the Bryan society. In 1920 Sinclair Lewis
published MAIN STREET, a critical analysis of the social structure and behavior
in small mid - western towns. Mama never read this book but had she, she would
have concluded that Lewis had written about Bryan, Texas.
Reba Dick knew very well that she wasn't in Kansas, not even in
Galveston, or Virginia Point. And this business about the Galveston Tribune
bathing suit contest ... well, all of that would be inappropriate for the sensibilities
of Brazos County. So she kept it quiet, nobly bearing the scarlet letter of her 1918
success in Galveston in confidence. About 1937, one of her younger sisters
visiting us on the campus, blurted out the story of the 1918 bathing suit contest in
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Galveston. Amazed at her celebrity , I went around the campus, announcing
Mama's achievement. Sadly, by 1937 nobody gave a damn. Times had changed;
beauty contests now were old hat. And after all, there were more important things
to consider. We still were in a depression.
An so in 1926, after a two year courtship, my parents married; two people,
both Scotch - Irish; both employees of the Texas A &M, each seeing the life before
them in a slightly different focus, and they married, always to agree on the more
important things. And those more important things, I believe, characterized the
outlook that prevailed among the colony that lived on the campus of Texas A &M.
Thrift, forebearance and a tight rein on self - indulgence, as trite as that may seem
today, were a ticket to success and survival in the era that I remember so well: the
1930s.
Campus people were a conservative lot, having little time for untested
ideas; abstractions were seen askance; the things that worked were the things
you'd practiced all your life and to some extent things that you didn't already
know were things that might not be worth knowing. Nearly everyone, was and in
an unfortunate way, an Anglophile; even the folks of German extraction, who
arrived in Texas on the heels of Anglos, were Anglophiles. It was perfectly and
socially acceptable in conversation to discount the worth of citizens who had
originated from the other parts Europe. In various ways, blatantly or subtly, there
was a lot of ethnic discounting. What I didn't understand then, the 1930s, was
that the nation in general thought and acted the same way as these people who
lived in an academic setting at Texas A &M.
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Those are some of the things that strike my memory about the campus.
I'm sure I've spoken with bias. It's hard not to do that. Anyway I'll get on with
some of the other things that have stayed with me.
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4. I'm glad you asked. Sometime in 1929 my dad raised ten wild mallard
ducks on the campus for no other reason than he liked ducks: liked to look at
them, liked to hunt them (actually a chicken hen had hatched the ducklings). He
raised them to adulthood, to that age that permitted flight. And fly they did. All
over the campus. He had buried a galvanized live -stock watering trough in the
backyard and that source of swimmable water seems to have always attracted
them back to our backyard in the evening. But during the day they began to get
into trouble: they would find flowerbeds and the like around the campus that were
being watered. There were those good ladies on the campus who saw no rural
persuasion, nothing moving or pastoral in a bunch of ducks in a flowerbed. And
there were others who muttered that the Texas A &M campus, in the first place,
was no habitat for wild or any other kind of duck. The ducks had to go. My
father was sad about the matter a long while. Years later he would recall how
beautiful the ducks were when they flew over Guion Hall.
Later, he raised bantam chickens in our backyard but by then had become
more politically astute, promptly presenting a gift of several of the bantams to
Dean F.C. Bolton's grandson who was spending the summer with the Boltons.
Those small chickens in the Dean of the College's yard, my father well knew,
would make the entire campus safe for chickens.
There were of course livestock belonging to the Animal Husbandry
Department on the eastern side of the campus, east of Throckmorton Street, some
distance from the residential area on the campus. But there were also livestock
west of Throckmorton, in a pasture behind the S.W. Bilsing house on that street: a
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few dairy cattle. Entomology Department Head Dr. Sherman Bilsing was in the
milk business, delivering it himself. The Walkers were a customer in the late
twenties. Only on the campus of Texas A &M!
I remember another animal on the campus and it deserves remark. In the
early thirties, Col. A.R. Emery, Head of Military Instruction for ROTC, moved on
the campus on Throckmorton, a location perhaps two hundred yards from the
Walker house on Lubbock. Among his possessions was a parrot, a bird that
would learn to speak only a single word: one word, and that was the whole of the
parrot's repertoire; and that word he learned from my mother.
Mama was always calling me home, hollering out Knox, normally spoken in a
single syllable. But she made two syllables out of Knox, the first ascending, the
second modulated. A distinctive sound, the parrot liked it — and learned it well,
never bothering to learn anything else. From ten in the morning till four in the
afternoon, there was this litany of squawks and caws and my name from this
parrot on the Emery's screened porch. It became a source of vast entertainment
for the younger set on the campus, and I was constantly victimized by leers and
smart remarks. The Colonel must have been reassigned about 1936, and he left
the campus with the parrot and other possessions.
Parrots are remarkably long -lived birds. Sometimes I darkly imagine that
somewhere there is another generation of Emerys, and they've got the same bird
on a back porch and it still knows but a single word.
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3. K.W. When I was a kid, I would listen to the visiting professors who
would come by our house, and if there was a common subject, it was that of the
physical hazing that went on in the Corps of Cadets, and what wasn't being done
by the College Administration to correct the situation. The Corps at A &M in
those days was an administrative body unto itself and defied being reined in.
They had, and enjoyed, their own agenda. As vocal as visiting professors were in
the privacy of a home, I doubt that they publicly spoke out. Many a gifted high
school kid was routed to other Texas schools because of A &M's hazing. The
school was a public institution, tax supported, yet extreme hazing was allowed to
go on. All rather foolish now.
Things began to change in the fall semester of 1946 when entering ROTC
freshmen were isolated and schooled at the World War II Air Force installation
west of Bryan, Bryan Field. A positive step, a little late, had been taken by the
school. An individual who would later become the first A &M Chancellor, Gibb
Gilchrist seems to have been responsible for this positive move. In a few years,
freshmen were returned to the main campus, but the old days of the Corps were
behind them. The physical hazing had been corralled, maybe not eliminated.
Anyway, it wasn't the 1930s.
•
•
2. A &M Consolidated was created in the early twenties; several one -room schools
were closed and the students off campus were bussed in. School was a mixture of
kids from varying backgrounds.
c
I hereby give and grant to the HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE, City of College
Station, Texas, for whatever purposes may be determined, the tape recordings, transcriptions, and
contents of this oral history interview. Also, permission is hereby given for any duplications of
original photos, documents, maps, etc. useful to the history project to be returned unharmed.
Interviewee releases, relinquishes and discharges CITY, its officers, agents and employees, from all
claims, demands, and causes of action of every kind and character, including the cost of defense
thereof, for any injury to, including the cost of defense thereof for any injury to, including death of,
any person, whether that person be a third person, Interviewee, or an employee of either of the
parties hereto, and any loss of or damage to property, whether the same be that either of the parties
hereto or of third parties, caused by or alleged to be caused by, arising out of, or in connection with
Interviewee provision of historical information, whether or not said claims, demands and causes of
action in whole or in part are covered by insurance.
1r L 4 n F S 3
Interviewee (Please print)
Signature of Interviewee
•
Interviewer (Please Print)
61 ,F .
Signature of Interviewe
Place o
HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE
City of College Station, Texas 77840
ORAL HISTORY DATA SHEET
terview
List of photos. documents. mans. etc.
Name
70 7 Sn o
Address,
yA
Telephone
Date of Birth
Place of Birth
INTERVIEW STATUS: Completed
i.• JuL1 ► cfR
Da
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Initial
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' '7 '7 03
9- il-783
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In progress
Interviewee agrees to and shall indemnify and hold harmless CITY, its officers, agents and
employees, from and against any and all claims, losses, damages, causes of action, suits and liability
of every kind, attorney's fees, for injury to or death of any person, or for damage to any property,
arising out of or in connection with the use of the items and information referenced aboved by
CITY, its agents, representatives, assigns, invitees, and participants under this grant. Such
indemnity shall apply where the claims, losses damages, causes of action, suits or liability arise in
whole or in part from the negligence of city.
C
•
I hereby give and grant to the HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE, City of College
Station, Texas, for whatever purposes may be determined, the tape recordings, transcriptions, and
contents of this oral history interview. Also, permission is hereby given for any duplications of
original photos, documents, maps, etc. useful to the history project to be returned unharmed.
Interviewee releases, relinquishes and discharges CITY, its officers, agents and employees, from all
claims, demands, and causes of action of every kind and character, including the cost of defense
thereof, for any injury to, including the cost of defense thereof for any injury to, including death of,
any person, whether that person be a third person, Interviewee, or an employee of either of the
parties hereto, and any loss of or damage to property, whether the same be that either of the parties
hereto or of third parties, caused by or alleged to be caused by, arising out of, or in connection with
Interviewee provision of historical information, whether or not said claims, demands and causes of
action in whole or in part are covered by insurance.
x J. l ar'ie't Caddess
Interview (Plea se print)
Sig ture of Interviewee
.-e
In rviewer Print)
Signature of Interviewer
Place of erview
List of photos. documents. mans. etc.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE
City of College Station, Texas 77840
ORAL HISTORY DATA SHEET
Name
Address
/07 5. ttaAwei( Dr- 7780
Date
Initial
Telephone
Date of Birth 4-l4/ 1'10 c
Place of Birth_wiLin a n R ZVL.S
INTERVIEW STATUS: Completed
In progress
Interviewee agrees to and shall indemnify and hold harmless CITY, its officers, agents and
employees, from and against any and all claims, losses, damages, causes of action, suits and liability
of every kind, attorney's fees, for injury to or death of any person, or for damage to any property,
arising out of or in connection with the use of the items and information referenced aboved by
CITY, its agents, representatives, assigns, invitees, and participants under this grant. Such
indemnity shall apply where the claims, losses damages, causes of action, suits or liability arise in
whole or in part from the negligence of city.
•
c
•
I hereby give and grant to the HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE, City of College
Station, Texas, for whatever purposes may be determined, the tape recordings, transcriptions, and
contents of this oral history interview. Also, permission is hereby given for any duplications of
original photos, documents, maps, etc. useful to the history project to be returned unharmed.
Interviewee releases, relinquishes and discharges CITY, its officers, agents and employees, from all
claims, demands, and causes of action of every kind and character, including the cost of defense
thereof, for any injury to, including the cost of defense thereof for any injury to, including death of,
any person, whether that person be a third person, Interviewee, or an employee of either of the
parties hereto, and any loss of or damage to property, whether the same be that either of the parties
hereto or of third parties, caused by or alleged to be caused by, arising out of, or in connection with
Interviewee provision of historical information, whether or not said claims, demands and causes of
action in whole or in part are covered by insurance.
� (.W1 l .
terviewee(P print)
Q A AAA
ture of Interviewee
n v
p rviewer (Please Print)
Signature of Interviewer
US
Place of I}riterview
List of photos. documents, mans. etc.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION COMMITTEE
City of College Station, Texas 77840
ORAL HISTORY DATA SHEET
Name
l'70(P roaLvi60 Fry ,7`)(
Addr s
d i d 7 - (4-
Tele hone
Date of Birth /6 //f/k6
Place of Birth o' ar.,,T)c
INTERVIEW STATUS: Completed
Interviewee agrees to and shall indemnify and hold harmless CITY, its officers, agents and
employees, from and against any and all claims, losses, damages, causes of action, suits and liability
of every kind, attorney's fees, for injury to or death of any person, or for damage to any property,
arising out of or in connection with the use of the items and information referenced aboved by
CITY, its agents, representatives, assigns, invitees, and participants under this grant. Such
indemnity shall apply where the claims, losses damages, causes of action, suits or liability arise in
whole or in part from the negligence of city.
Date
Initial
In progress
• The City of College Station, Texas
Memory Lanes Oral History Project
•
The purpose of The Historic Preservation Committee is to gather and
preserve historical documents by means of the tape- recorded interview. Tape
recordings and transcripts resulting from such interviews become part of the
archives of The City of College Station Historic Preservation Committee and
Conference Center Advisory Committee to be used for whatever purposes may
be determined.
with :
1. t(C■
2. 3 . a/ ( cd.i
4. ['fl
5.
6.
INTERVIEW AGREEMENT
I have read the above and voluntarily offer my portion of the interviews
(Name of Interviewee)
14 IV 1
C 5
Date
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
In view of the scholarly value of this research material, I hereby assign rights,
title, and interest pertaining to it to The City of College Station Historic
Preservation Committee and Conferenc Center Advisory C mmittee.
Interviewer (signature)
Interviewer (Please Print)