TIME CAPSULE

Heels and Stockings Required

THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS, at Roble Hall, the freshman women’s dorm, were difficult for many of us. A homesick friend took one shower after another, finding it the only place where she could cry without being heard. I suffered, too, walking to the Outer Quad stairs to gaze longingly toward Palo Alto, where trains could carry me home to San Francisco. By the end of the quarter, however, most of us were enjoying our new life.

At Roble, we were treated not as girls but as young ladies and were expected to act as such. We all had private rooms, which many of us decorated with coordinated bedspread and drapery sets. I had one friend whose mother engaged an interior decorator to do her room.

Breakfast was open seating, usually buffet. I remember consuming many plates of wartime powdered eggs made bearable by delicious honey-topped biscuits. For lunch and dinner, six or eight of us sat at round tables in either of Roble’s two dining rooms while hashers served us. Seating schedules changed weekly, so that by the end of the year, we all had met one another. Roble dining etiquette required that anyone arriving late stop at the head table to apologize to the director before going to her assigned place.

Wednesday dinner meant faculty guests: we could reserve a table for a special professor. It was a dress-up night, with heels and stockings required.

Wearing slacks to any meal would not have occurred to us, and, of course, we never wore them to class. Men’s sweaters, however, were popular with everyone. My brother, Herman Wagner, ’49, announced receipt of his draft notice by pulling off a favorite sweater and handing it to me for the duration.

Each night after dinner, we dashed upstairs to check our buzzers for the dangling pin that indicated a call had been made to us. Placing or receiving a call meant running all over Roble to find an empty phone booth, no small task with only one or two to a floor.

On weeknights, we had to be in by 10:30. We lived under an elaborate regimen of sign-ins and sign-outs, and the worst sin of all was a lockout. Mrs. Mort locked the great front door promptly at closing time and greeted any offender with an expression of horror for being even one minute late. Repeat offenders received notice of a command appearance before Women’s Council. A friend who served on that august body remembers a chronic latecomer who defended herself with a question of her own: “Weren’t you ever in love?”

— Marie Wagner Krenz, ’47, MA ’48