When you do genealogy research, you become very aware of where people lived – where they were born, where they married, where their children were born, where they lived, and where they died. The holy grail for genealogists is an ancestral tombstone. I have made several research trips in search of tombstones, and there is something very satisfying about seeing your ancestor’s name, dates, spouse, and sometimes other information literally etched in stone. But I have become aware that I am often the only visitor to my ancestors’ graves in decades. Family members have died or moved away, and there is no one left to visit these graves. In imitation of John Brown, their bodies are just a-moulderin’.
This is one reason (there are others) why Tim and I have decided to donate our bodies to the Medical College of Virginia when we are finished using them. There’s no point in planting us somewhere that no one will ever visit. What I’ve decided to do instead is to use the campus of William and Mary as my living monument. I plan to create a pamphlet that traces a guided walk around the campus, emphasizing the places that were important to me when I was a student here and that are important to me now. If anyone wants to remember me, they can come to Williamsburg and use the pamphlet as a guidebook to these places. This essay describes Stop 1 on this tour, and I’ll continue to work on it until it’s done.
As Julie Andrews sang in The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning.” That would be at the red box with the number “1” in it on the map above. The tan building beside it (number 588, although it’s a little hard to read) is Jefferson Hall, where I lived my freshman year. My roommate was Janet Ackroyd, a high school classmate of mine from Annandale, Virginia. We had applied to William and Mary together, and when we both got in we decided to room together. We lived in Room 214, the first room off the second-floor lobby, facing Jamestown Road.
The year I spent living in Jefferson was the beginning of everything.
This was the year I learned to live away from my parents. I was ready – don’t get me wrong. But I had to learn to make decisions for myself. When to go to bed, when to get up, when to eat, when to do laundry, when to cut class (I did this very seldom), when to study, and so forth.
This was the year I learned to bounce back from failure. I failed my first economics test, resolved to do better, and ended up majoring in economics.
This was the year I met Tim. I dated several other boys (we called them boys, not men) before I went out with Tim, but he was the one that stuck.
This was the year I joined Kappa Kappa Gamma. I didn’t really know what a sorority was before this year, but I found some very good friends in this sorority. It was a home base for me. Some people have lifelong close friendships with their sorority sisters, but that isn’t the case for me. Since we live in Williamsburg, I see my sorority sisters once in a while when they are in town for an alumni weekend. But some of them actually live in town, and I don’t see them unless I run into them at the grocery store, on a walk, or in an Osher class.
When I think of this year, I think of music as well. Janet and I had a record player in our room, and we played our favorite albums constantly. The ones I remember most are my Beatles albums (“With the Beatles,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “Rubber Soul.”). I also loved Joan Baez, so her albums were part of the rotation. I loved Barbra Streisand’s Second Album, and I played it so often that I still know the sequence of songs. I played the Rolling Stones as well, although I can’t remember which album it was. The Animals third album, “Animal Tracks,” came out in the summer of 1965, and I have a distinct memory of playing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” on repeat while I was packing up to go home for Thanksgiving break. As much as I loved William and Mary, I was ready to go home for a few days. Tim and I rode the bus home (only seniors could have cars on campus) and his sister Sally picked us up at the bus station in downtown DC. I had a bag packed full of books so I could study over the long weekend; I don’t think I did any work while I was home.
Living in the dorm was an experience. The girls on campus (we were girls, not women) had an 11:00 pm curfew, although it slipped to 12:00 on Saturdays. The bells in the Wren Building rang at 10 minutes before curfew and then at curfew itself. If you were late, Mrs. Montgomery (our housemother) stood at the door, counting the minutes you were late. If you accumulated more than 10 tardy demerits, you were punished by being “campused” for some period of time. That meant you couldn’t go anywhere except the dining hall for that period. I was campused one weekend because I had accumulated demerits. We made up lyrics to the turn of the Christmas song Silver Bells. It went like this: “Tardy bells, tardy bells, Monty is giving demerits.” And so forth.
This was a girls’ dorm. All of the girls dorms were along Jamestown Road, on one side of the campus. The boys’ dorms were along Richmond Road, on the other side of the campus. In between were classroom building and the Sunken Garden. Boys were allowed in the lobby but not upstairs. There was a monitored front desk in the lobby; when Tim came to pick me up, he had to go to the desk and ask the girl sitting there to call for me. The call came over an intercom system: “Karen Arnold, you have a caller in the lobby.” If a male had to come upstairs for some reason, they were preceded by a girl shouting “man on the hall.”
Girls were not allowed to wear “pants” outside of the residential floors of their dorms. We were supposed to wear dresses or skirts even to hang out with our boyfriends in the lobby. Some girls who got up late wore raincoats over their pajamas to go to class. Tales abounded of girls who wore their raincoats and nothing else in these situations. These stories may or may not be true. I’m not talking. And speaking of hanging out in the lobby – if you were sitting on a couch with your boyfriend, there had to be three feet on the floor. Monty came through and counted.
There was one telephone on each floor. The etiquette was that if you got a call, you were supposed to answer the phone the next time it rang. Since my room was right off the lobby, I frequently answered the phone in exasperation because people at the end of the hall didn’t walk back when the phone rang. If you answered the phone, your job was to yell down the hall to tell the person she had a phone call. If she wasn’t in, you were supposed to leave a message on the pad by the phone so when the girl returned she would know she had a phone call. Cryptic messages like “Karen: BC, WCBL” awaited you when you were not in your dorm. (This is deciphered as “Boy called, will call back later.” We texted before it was cool.
Meals were in Trinkle Hall (414 on the map above, behind 220 (the Campus Center). This was right across Jamestown Road from Jefferson, so this was very convenient. There was another dining area in the Campus Center itself, but I never ate there because you had to pay. Meals were presented like they were in high school cafeterias; there was one entrée for the day, and you got milk along with that. There was no opportunity to order a sandwich or a pizza or a salad; if it was meatloaf day, you ate meatloaf. There were small kitchens on every floor of the dorm, but they didn’t get used much. This was before the days of microwaves, and we had little interest in making coffee. There were soda and snack machines in the basement, but that was it.
The bookstore was in the building labeled 635 on the map; it was called Talliaferro Hall at the time, and became a dorm when the new bookstore (200 on the map, now identified as the Admissions office) opened in the spring of 1966.
Fun fact: Talliaferro is an old Virginia family that has a white and a black branch. The white branch is descended from Richard Taliaferro, father-in-law of George Wythe and owner of Powhatan Plantation outside of Williamsburg, now the location of the Powhatan Resort. Richard built the Wythe House on Palace Green for his daughter and son-in-law, and it mimics the house at the resort. The white descendants of Richard Taliaferro pronounce the name “Tolliver.”
The black branch is also descended from Richard Taliaferro, but through his slaves; these descendants pronounce the name as it is spelled, “Tally-a-fair-o.” I learned this when I had a black student with the last name Taliaferro when I was teaching at Woodside High School in Newport News. When I was calling the roll on the first day of school, I decided to show her how hip I was by pronouncing her name the “right” way. That’s when I learned that I was pronouncing it the “white” way. Lesson learned.
So. Back to the bookstore. This was not a self-service bookstore. You had to wait outside in a long line to get into a small space with a counter. Several students were behind the counter to wait on you. You handed them your class list and they went back to the storage area to retrieve the books you needed. I don’t recall them having notebooks and pens and such in the area, but they may have. We usually went to the Rose’s Department Store (where The Cheese Shop and Fat Canary are today) to buy school supplies.
This bookstore is significant to me because it played a role in the evolution of my relationship with Tim. One afternoon during the first week of classes, I was standing in line outside the bookstore, class list in hand, waiting for my turn to go in to get my books. It was really hot that day. Tim walked by on his way to football practice and saw that the line was too long for him to wait. But then he noticed me in line (we had met in English class a couple of days earlier) and he asked me if I would buy his books for him. He gave me his class list and enough money to buy his books, and we arranged that we would meet up later that day so I could give him his books. And the rest is history.
I hope you have enjoyed Stop 1 on my campus tour. See you next Friday for Stop 2.
This is so much fun! I love hearing how W&M has changed (and stayed the same). Can’t wait to read the rest!
I didn’t go to W&M and I’m much younger than you (lol…there were coed dorms my freshman year). That’s really all I wanted say…I was younger! You’re a great story teller, Karen!