Camaraderie
Introduction
Women experienced many close relationships with other students and with faculty members at Millersville. Caused in part by the smaller size of the institution, a greater sense of community was experienced by students and faculty. Students participated in May Day celebrations and gathered in the Rat Race. Curfew restrictions caused dorm students to spend more time together, and the women’s day room created opportunities for building friendships among commuting students.
May Day
"We had May Day every other year and we always chose a May Queen. We had the rest of the student body prepare dances and musicals and things like that. That was quite a big event. The year I went back to teach, the May Queen was one of my students and I knew that she was living with her grandmother (her parents were dead) so I offered to make her May Day gown. We came in to Watt & Shand and selected a white brocade fabric but the fabric didn’t come and didn’t come. Finally, it came a week before May Day and that was a busy week for me. I made that May Day dress from about 10:30 to 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. Then, Anna Mae came in that last day to have a final fitting and she was so excited, she’d lost weight, so we had to take in the dress again. But that was fun."
Jane Gray Smith, Class of 1933, Faculty, Library
“Well, the biggest event for me was May Day. We had a whole day of it by the lake and they picked a beauty queen. I remember the first year her name was Naomi Hess. She was a beautiful girl and she rode across the lake in some kind of a little boat and when they had the dance, a May Day dance, they called it. We’d dance around the May pole and it was a big celebration on the campus. Every year.”
Amanda Gockley Baum, Class of 1941
“They had May Day observances every other year and that was another good experience. I was in one of the May Day programs. They put on a beautiful pageantry outside close to the lake in that natural marina . . . as you walk from what was Old Main over to the science building. I remember the May Queen was a girl from Lititz, Sylvia Longenecker, and we found out a month after school was over that she had married for a year and May Queen wasn’t supposed to be married, but they kept ita secret.”
Mae Slater Wingenroth, 1936 – 1937, 1953 BSE
"And when they brought the queen down that lake then and had a place for her to sit with her court, they had that all decorated beautifully . . . and the queen of course was all dressed and very beautiful and all her attendants were all nicely dressed. And then we had the program. A lot of the activities were on that flat part that led out to the lake where they had the queen’s court. And I know that there were all kinds of things. I remember I was in a Greek dance . . . we danced in our bare feet on the green grass. I’ll never forget that."
Lelia Jackson Stauffer, Class of 1929
Friendship
“I just thought segregation was down South . . . So I didn’t think that there would be a restaurant that wouldn’t serve me. But the ladies that I went around with, they all had gotten together and decided if we ever went out in Lancaster to go to restaurants . . . we used to go for pizza in town . . . that if anyone didn’t serve me, they were going to walk out. Well, I never even had thought about it. But that’s what they had gotten together to do . . . my friends had an apartment and I later found out that their landlord told them if I came to visit them, they would lose their lease. They didn’t tell me, but a friend of theirs did, and so I never went to their apartment.”
Yvonne Lambert Toney, Class of 1962
"Yvonne’s mother was so delighted to meet me because her daughter was coming to Millersville and Yvonne had been fighting to get into Millersville for some time because her teachers at Coatesville refused to give her a recommendation because they said all black teachers should be trained at Cheney State Teachers College and her mother said...no, I want her to go to Millersville. So it took Yvonne quite some time and that’s the first thing she and her mother told me about and I said . . . don’t worry, I’ll look after Yvonne. She was very happy to see I was an older person. So Yvonne and I had a good time together."
Betty Curtis, Class of 1960
Day Students
“Well, I can mainly speak for the day student. We were all chums because there were so few of us, and of course I knew the ones from Lancaster better than I knew the others because of riding the bus to get there . . . but in my classes, I met a lot of new friends who were the boarding students and . . . I always felt comfortable with . . . whatever we were doing, whether it was in class or out, comfortable with all the girls.”
Margaret Stauffer Zander, Class of 1945
“Well, in the day student room we would play bridge or we’d just sit and talk, or we studied.”
Emma Jane Whirt Shenk, Class of 1942
“when I went to college the day students had a room there in Old Main and that’s where we hung out, and at that time we didn’t have a lot to do with the boarding students, we were sort of our own little group …"
Janice Brenneman Duffey, Class of 1952
Hangouts
“I don’t remember watching basketball as much because it was just that one winter. After . . . this was spring of ’42 . . . after that winter, there was no basketball team that played anything but sort of pickup games. And they played in what is Dutcher Hall now. It was the old gym. And that’s where we had a dance every night . . . Every night from 6 to 7. Rat Race we called it.”
Frances Keller Keller, Class of 1945
“Yes. The gym was right down there in the . . . the Rat Race, at that time there was dancing down in the bottom part. There was like a balcony around. . .There would be music in there through the day. We often went in there and ate lunch.”
Marie Shirk Kephart, Class of 1953
"A Rat Race is . . . I don’t know what you’d call it now . . . but they used to go over and dance for a half an hour after we had dinner in the dining room. There would be music from records and people took charge of, you know, playing certain records . . . But they call it the Rat Race."
Mae Slater Wingenroth, 1936 – 1937, 1953 BSE
“The Sugar Bowl…there was a young couple, a young married couple that ran that. And they were very nice. And that’s when I started to drink coffee. A nickel a cup is what it was, 5 cents. Coke went up to 6 or 7 and I drank coffee because I didn’t have the pennies. I just had the nickel, so we did that.”
Lois Kienzy Breitegan, Class of 1949
“There was a tea room there, Hill’s Tea Room, and there you could buy ice cream I think…And then there was down on Frederick Street a little store that sold ice cream, pint boxes, and he would cut them in half for us. But Hills Tea Room was the only place we went . . . we could go and sit down and have something to drink and something to eat."
Frances Keller Keller, Class of 1945
Faculty and Students
“I had a history prof, Dr. Myers . . . I always enjoyed history, but he really made it living history and . . . there were some elementary people who really helped as far as the teaching of social studies, the teaching of math and things of that sort. They were very good.”
Marie Shirk Kephart, Class of 1953
“Well, I found the relationships with the faculty to be more than I expected. They went out of their way to do things for you. The one that stands out most in my mind was the woman that I really looked up to as a mentor my second year . . . June Smith was a teacher in 4th grade in the training school and she was also the faculty advisor at our table . . . All the tables in the dining room had a faculty member there to teach us some manners, to correct our language. I mean there were a number of reasons why they did that and it was a very good experience . . . I was a student at Dr. June’s table . . . [I] was . . . influenced by her manner and her method of teaching. She told us stories that she thought that we would enjoy. She discussed foods and things, but it was the way she did things that I was most impressed with and I decided while I was going there that I was going to try and emulate a lot of her graciousness, her kindness, her interest, her understanding, and all through the time that I was teaching and . . . she retired before I did, but most of the time that I was teaching, she was a psychologist for the schools and I had a relationship with her all through the years up until she finally retired and then later on she moved to Florida. But she is one of the most outstanding people, in my estimation, of the people that I have been associated with.”
Mae Slater Wingenroth, 1936 – 1937, 1953 BSE
“Yvonne said to me: “I have a wonderful teacher, I want you to meet him … William S. Trout. … He always asked what I was reading … [He suggested Anton Chekoff’s short stories] he would always say . . . “How I envy you, reading it the first time.” … I went to see Mr. Trout . . . maybe about once a week and he always asked me what I was reading. And even when I left Millersville, I was in contact with Mr. Trout. He said . . . you can call me at home. I said . . . yes, sir . . . When I was in Korea, I wrote him postcards and he wrote [a] postcard back. And while I was in Philadelphia, I used to come in on a . . . train and it always had to stop in Lancaster a couple minutes, maybe 10 minutes . . . I always asked the conductor how long we were going to be there and I’d go upstairs on the pay phone and called Mr. Trout and say . . . “Hello, Mr. Trout”, and he said . . . “What are you reading?” And he’d always suggest something to complement that. … So he was very, very important. He was a wonderful instructor. And many of the students emulated his walk, his talk, and everything. They just loved him. He was a sensational teacher. He was very, very outstanding.”
Betty J. L. Curtis, Class of 1960