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 …

Professor Virgilius Ferm's Introductory Philosophy class, 1941.

But the biggest change was the addition of the Delmar Archway. Though part of the original plan for the renovation, the arch was almost never built. At the eleventh hour, during commencement weekend in 1962, President Howard Lowry announced that a gift of $30,000 from Charles Delmar would allow construction to go forward after all. The arch was the inspiration of Delmar’s son, Roland ’30, who served as a College Trustee from 1964 to 1982.

That fall Kauke Hall was rededicated during homecoming weekend. Wilson Compton ’11, chairman of the Alumni Building Campaign, placed a book containing the names of all 6,451 donors in a niche in the archway and sealed it in place with a bronze plaque. In all, nine plaques line the walls of the arch, including three salvaged from Old Main.

The editors of the 1963 Index said the Delmar Archway "serves the campus both as a conversation piece and a shortcut between classes and dormitories."

On more than one occasion, the shortcut has proved irresistible to drivers as well as pedestrians.

Jim Toedtman ’63 recalls that not long after it was dedicated, a classmate returning one night from a local watering hole drove his Volkswagen through the arch. The beetle’s twin exhaust pipes took parallel sets of divots out of the steps as it exited the north side of the building. When Toedtman came back to campus for his fortieth reunion last summer, "the first thing I checked was to see if those marks were still there." They were.

The arch became the symbolic portal traversed by first-year students on their way to convocation and seniors on their way to commencement. One winter in the 1960s, it became the birthplace of a new tradition: the frantic, midnight-to-dawn attempt to fill it with snow.

Jaime Bryk ’03 will always remember her attempt as "the night I found my school spirit."

"Standing between two of my closest friends and surrounded by fifty new ones," she wrote in The Voice, "I caught myself cheering with a gusto I haven’t felt since high school. I had forgotten it still lived inside of me. I belonged with these people who worked together to make something bigger than themselves. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t cancel classes in the morning and that our work would be plowed down in the middle of the night…What we created could not be destroyed by snow plows."

The 1962 renovation grouped classrooms together in the central part of the building, with the wings reserved for faculty offices. Hayden Schilling, who joined the history department two years later, liked the fact that faculty "were sort of on top of one another. I enjoyed being able to walk into Bob Walcott’s office any time. It reminded me of graduate school." Everyone’s doors were open, and students and faculty felt comfortable wandering down the hall and poking their heads in to ask a question.

For Joanne Frye (English, women’s studies), that comfortable proximity fostered

interdisciplinary conversations with colleagues. She says Yvonne Williams (black studies, political science, emerita) "was great at keeping me on my toes," particularly regarding the importance of including diverse observations in new women’s studies courses.

Frye is looking forward to the building’s upcoming transformation (see "Back to the Future" right), which she says will give Kauke’s physical presence "the mark of its emotional association – classrooms and offices that are cool in summer, warm in winter, vivid in décor; new spaces for exchange of books and insights over coffee; a building alive to what has always been its core: probing thought and intellectual exchange all year long."

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