If These Walls Could Talk,

they’d speak of early morning classes in the tower, friendships forged among faculty members, and winter nights spent filling the arch with snow.

continued …

The first classes were held in Kauke Hall on February 2, 1903. From the beginning, it was a busy place. Kauke housed not only classrooms and faculty offices but also the College’s four literary societies, fraternity rooms, offices for the president and the treasurer, the trustees’ room, and, on the ground floor, a kitchen and banquet hall capable of accommodating 350 people. (For which, the Wayne County Herald noted, "four of the leading potteries of East Liverpool have generously donated a complete supply of china and other dishes of beautiful design.")

A postcard of Kauke circa 1905.

Alberta Colclaser ’33 wrote for The Voice and recalls trooping up the stairs to drop her copy in a locked box outside the office of baseball coach Art Murray, who also served as the paper’s advisor. But her chief memories of Kauke center around the professors she encountered there.

"Howard Lowry was my freshman English teacher and also my faculty adviser," Colclaser says. "I remember the very first day of classes. I must have gone to two or three before his class, and in each one we spent about five minutes, got our assignments, and left. When we went into Howard Lowry’s class he just started to talk, and nobody moved until the bell rang. He was just fascinating."

Vergilius Ferm (philosophy, 1927-64) once gave Colclaser’s class an exam of elegant simplicity. "He came in and said, ‘Undoubtedly you’ve been thinking about what questions I might ask on this exam. Write down three and answer them.’"

For Paul Kendall ’64, Kauke will always be associated with Aileen Dunham’s history classes, which were filled not just with bare historical facts, "but with literature and paintings and little personal anecdotes about the main characters of whatever drama she was presenting to us. And it was presented as a drama, as living history."

For others the indelible image is Floyd Watts sitting cross-legged on his desk to teach history, Ray McCall’s 7:45 a.m. Shakespeare class in the tower room, or Mary Z. Johnson (political science) teaching with her dog lying under her desk. With a dozen academic departments housed within its crenellated walls, sooner or later every student’s path led to Kauke. And on at least one occasion, for a group known as the Night Climbers, it led up the walls themselves.

They were inspired by a visiting professor’s stories about a group of Cambridge University students who would periodically "borrow" a punt from the nearby river and string it between the twin towers of one of the main campus buildings.

"So we got Jim Gwynne ’57, an art major, to paint us a cardboard punt, about fourteen feet long," says Willem Lange ’57. "We climbed up the back of Kauke Hall one night and slung it between the flagpoles. Painted on the side were the words ‘Greetings from the Night Climbers.’"

"It took them until noon the next day to get the thing down," Dave Dungan ’57 recalls with a satisfaction the years cannot diminish.

By the late 1950s, all that wear was beginning to take its toll. The alumni voted to make the renovation of Kauke their special project within the College’s centennial fund-raising campaign. The Alumni Building Campaign raised $1 million. In June 1961 the renovation began with the western half of the building. Faculty decamped to temporary offices in small houses on the periphery of campus, while classes were relocated everywhere from the recreation rooms in Andrews and Babcock to the basement of the TUB (Temporary Union Building). "Some professors have resorted to blackboard piracy in order to furnish adequately the temporary classrooms," The Daily Record reported.

By the beginning of the 1962-63 academic year, the work was complete.

"To alumni who remember Kauke over the past few decades," the Alumni Bulletin declared, "the change will seem miraculous." The Daily Record extolled the refurbished building’s pale green and beige interior, acoustical tile dropped ceilings, and interior doors of "plastic woodgrain material."

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