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In Your Words

Another time, another world

By Pat Holweger Glynn '60

I wonder if today's students and faculty even look twice at the old red-brick building at College and High streets. The brick is faded and the wood trim needs a coat of paint. Sort of like me.

But 53 years ago, both of us were beautiful—I was a Miami freshman in the blush of youth and that building was my dorm. It was known then as Oxford College. Today it's the Oxford Community Arts Center. At one time it housed a separate school for women, but by my time, it was a Miami dormitory for freshman women. And it was gorgeous.

On the ground level were our foyer, living room, several sitting rooms for receiving visitors, living quarters for our housemother and student adviser, and, best of all, a ballroom. Yes, a ballroom. Floor-to-ceiling windows, parquet floors, chandeliers—a room out of the 19th century, a room for romantic waltzes and satin ball gowns and orchestras playing Strauss. A room used by my fellow freshmen and me for dorm meetings and freshman mixers.

Second floor was the living floor where things were decidedly 1956. We're talking radios and hi-fi here, folks. Two ladies per room, two beds, two desks, two single closets, and 12-foot ceilings.

Memories? You haven't lived until you've studied in your own recessed alcove at the corner of the living room. (It was your own, providing you got there first.)

Or assembled with the entire dorm for evening vespers at 9, everyone in pjs and robes and slippers with curlers in our hair so we'd look perfect the next morning. Vespers consisted of readings and songs or hymns, sometimes poetic, often biblical in nature. These all-but-forgotten affairs were led by our counselors, and most of us found ourselves part of the program at least once. These monthly gatherings were, in retrospect, food for the freshman soul.

Another sharp memory is of sharing every meal with my friends and enemies seated at a linen-covered table for eight, waiting to be served breakfast, lunch, or dinner. This was where we were instructed in the "finer things" that many of us did not know and did not even know we were supposed to know. Pass from left to right, please. Salad fork, dinner fork. Soupspoon, teaspoon. Napkin on the left, in your lap as soon as grace was said. Grace—sung by all as we stood at our chairs before sitting—was the doxology. Can you hear it? Praise God from whom all blessings flow....

We walked to class, leaving earlier than anyone else on campus because we were the farthest away.

And we walked to town for a movie, leaving later than anyone else on campus because we were so close.

We "received" visitors in one of the front parlors because they were male and were not permitted anywhere else in the dorm.

And ambled downstairs on a lonely afternoon when it seemed everyone was at class and the dorm was empty, to find yourself on the lower level at the old upright piano, playing softly the tunes you could remember, and hoping you were the only one listening.

It occurs to me that although I hate to admit it, I am no longer young—perhaps pushing the outer limits of what is euphemistically referred to these days as "middle-aged." It also occurs to me that I have a story to tell—a story of a lifestyle during another time in another world.

Pat Holweger Glynn roomed at Oxford College during her freshman year at Miami 1956–57. The retired teacher and librarian now lives in Middletown, Ohio.