Oral History Transcript - Mary Sue Haynes - October 2, 1986
Interview with Mary Sue Haynes
Interviewer: Amy M. Leethy
Transcriber: Amy M. Leethy
Date of Interview: October 2, 1986
Location: San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Mary Sue Haynes: You wanted to know something about the family—my father was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, November 26, 1874. He was the fifth child of Colonel Charles Louis Haynes and mother Margaret Ziegler Haynes. Four sisters preceded him. Later there were others, making it eight in the family, eight children. Their father had been through the Civil War, and when he came home, he brought the man with him who had laundered his clothes, you know, and taken care of him. And he wasn’t a black. Most of them, you know, chose a black man, but he chose a white man, and he called him Fizz, and when the war was over, he [Fizz] wanted to come home with his master, he said. So he stayed with them at their home until he passed away. He would tell them stories, you know, the young ones in the family, things that happened during the Civil War. And of course they enjoyed having him there, and in those days people were far more hospitable than they are now. They shared whatever they had. So, of course, his mother and father were very happy to have him in their home.
Colonel Charles Louis Haynes was not only a farmer; he was also a lawyer and a surveyor. He was away from home quite a lot. Since he had been through the war four long years, his health wasn’t too good. So he died, and that left his wife with these eight children. Her [Aunt Susan] father, Captain William Henry Haynes of Clifton Forge, Virginia, suggested that their aunt, Susan Haynes Ziegler, and her husband, Joseph Ziegler, adopt the eight orphan children because later on, you know, the mother did pass away. The Zieglers, the Joe Zieglers, took these orphan children to Fayetteville, West Virginia. They were there until 1887 when they decided that they would come to Pelican, Louisiana. Because Will Ziegler, the son of Joseph Ziegler, had come to Pelican, Louisiana, and was a Presbyterian minister. He kept begging them to come to Pelican, Louisiana, and join him. So, much against Aunt Susan’s will, the family left nearly everything there in Fayetteville.
They decided they would come by paddleboat down the Mississippi River. When they got to Cincinnati, you know, they tie up for a couple of days, so Uncle Joe saw that they were going to have an opera that night, so he asked the girls, Would they like to go? They said, Of course. When they got to the theatre, the opera house, he said he would like to have a box for the family. It just so happened that a very wealthy family was out of town, so they were lucky and got this box. But Daddy said, “Mary, I can’t tell you what the opera was!” Because all those other very wealthy people in the other boxes kept putting their little organettes up (puts her fingers, forming a circle, to her eye to signify an opera glass) and gazing at them. So he said, “It got us all tickled, and we were spending all of our time looking at them!” But anyway, they enjoyed it.
Then coming down the Mississippi, Daddy would ask the man to let him hold the wheel some, and of course he did, and that just thrilled him [Daddy] to death to think that he was really carrying the paddleboat down the Mississippi River. They went as far as Vicksburg, and I think they spent a few days in Vicksburg. Then they came onto New Orleans, and from there they decided they would take the train to Shreveport because that was just sixty-five miles from Pelican, Louisiana, their destination point. So what’s what they did.
When they reached Pelican, the son [Will Ziegler, the minister] was just living in a small little house, so they thought, Well, we’ll just get a great big tent. They bought the land, and then they got this enormous tent, and they stayed there until the big house was finished. Then they moved in. It was a big house. I remember seeing the house. It was painted a kind of a tan color with a dark trim. Then Aunt Susan had the negroes to help her put moss roses and rosebushes from the porch steps down to the big gate. It was a lovely picture, so Mother said. Then they set out an enormous apple orchard on one side of the house and a peach orchard on the other side, and then at the back they had their own icehouse and their washhouse—they called it a washhouse, where the negroes washed, and they had a big barn back there and other buildings, you know. Then closer to the house was a house where old Uncle Henry and his wife lived. He took care of the yard work, and she was in the kitchen helping the aunt prepare the meals.
Let’s see, I think they stayed in Pelican—I’m going to say about six years, and then most of the family moved to Pleasant Hill. Uncle Joe was chosen to be postmaster up there, so they all went except Aunt Susie, and she would not leave the big house.
Amy Leethy: That was Pleasant Hill, Louisiana?
Haynes: Yes, it was still in Louisiana. Later on, of course, Aunt Susie did join them up there, and the big house was just rented. They never did sell it; it was rented to various people until after we came out to Texas, a Mr. Fincher bought the house. But he didn’t take any care of it at all. He was a wealthy man, he didn’t need it, but he just bought it because they wanted it sold. So he didn’t take care of it. It finally just went to nothing, you know. Through the years of course, different schoolteachers would stay there because they could just stay there for nothing if they wanted to, just so they had a room and could go back and forth to school.
Then Daddy decided that he wanted to go over and visit his cousin Will Ziegler, who lived beyond the peach orchard, because he heard that his [Will] wife’s sister, Willie Mae Farmer, had finished her school at Clinton, Louisiana; she attended Sillman Institute at Clinton. So he wanted to go over and see what she looked like, of course. So when he went over there, the first thing that Willie Mae did was to rush up to him and kiss him. That tickled him so that I said, “Well, did you go back the next day?” and he said, “I certainly did.” I said, “What for?”— [he said] “Well to get another kiss!”
Madge, Aunt Madge and Mother, of course, were sisters, and Uncle Will and Daddy were first cousins. So, you see, there was a double kinship there, and all through the years they were reminded of that. They were always talking about how close they were to each other. So, of course, that little love affair ripened between Mother and Dad. Dad went to Odem, Texas, because he was a builder, a house builder. He wrote and asked her if she would marry him, and she of course wrote back that she certainly would. So his brother-in-law took Mother on the train to Grand Cane, Louisiana. That’s where Daddy met her. It was just pouring down rain that night. This brother-in-law wrote me a letter later on in life when I began trying to fit the story together. He said that they went into the hotel and registered. Then Daddy said, “Well, I guess we better just get married tonight because I’ve got to get back to Odem.” So they went over and woke up the Methodist minister, and Daddy said you could tell his wife and daughter were very angry about it because they just put a robe over their night clothes and came on in the parlor where Daddy and Mama stood. He [the minister] was just provoked. He said, “I don’t see why you got out in this kind of weather, why didn’t you just wait until morning?” When he said, “You may put the ring on the bride’s finger,” he [Daddy] said he had forgotten to get one. (Laughing) He didn’t even have it. Well, anyway, they got married and went on back to the hotel. Later on in life when I wrote Dad’s brother-in-law, I asked him, “Did you see them the next morning when you got up to go back to Pelican?” He said, “Why no, I didn’t want to bother them. I just passed their door and came on down the hall and left.”
After they lived in Odem, they were just there a short time, they moved to Longview, Texas. They stayed there until three children were born: Louis, the oldest one, and I came next, Mary Sue, and then Sally. Then they decided to go back to Pelican because Uncle Joe and Aunt Susie were getting up in years and they were lonesome for Daddy and Mama, they wanted them to come. So they went back, and while they were in Pelican, they lived in the big house where the Zieglers were still living. Mama gave birth to Bernice and Sam. Then, I don’t know whether you know too much about Pelican, Louisiana, but it’s very swampy there in places and it rains a great deal. Mother developed a bad cough, and Dr. Armstrong suggested that Daddy move the family somewhere in Texas where it would be higher and drier for her. So we came to Texas. That was in 1906, a long time ago. Of course, the first thing that Daddy wanted us to do was to get in Sunday school, so he went to town and, I don’t know why he was drawn to this place, but he went in a hardware store. It belonged to Mr. Hutchins who was Superintendent of the Presbyterian Church. He said, “Why Mr. Haynes, you bring all of your children to the Presbyterian Church. We’d be glad to get them. We have very few children in the church.” So that’s how we got started in the Presbyterian Church because in Pelican we were all Methodist. We didn’t join, but we attended the Methodist Church with the rest of them. So from then on out, we were Presbyterians there.
When we first got there, we didn’t have a home of course, so we went down to what they called the Wooten Inn. It was where, in the old days, the stagecoaches would stop and take them on to Austin, San Antonio, or wherever they wanted to go. Sam was just a tiny little thing, but he could stand in the window. The old woman who ran the inn would boil her an egg, and she’d boil him one. Then she’d step outside her door and call because she knew that one of us would come to the window. She would throw the little egg up, and Bernice usually caught it, and Sam had an egg every morning while we stayed there.
Then Dad finally found a place up close to the college on Navarro Street. We moved there, and Joe was born on Navarro Street. Today, that whole street, on each side, is filled with dormitories and parking lots, you know for the college. From Navarro Street, Dad built another home in West End, and we moved out there. From West End, he didn’t tell Mama anything about this, but from West End he went back on the Hill, very close to the college, and built the big house I told you about, you know, yesterday when we were talking. In that home William was born. We hadn’t been there very many years when a retired Methodist preacher whose health had broken down came to San Marcos with his family, and he kept worrying Daddy about buying that two-story house because he said, “Mr. Haynes, it’s close to the college, and since I’m not able to preach anymore.” It seemed that he had retired because he had suffered a nervous breakdown. He said, “I think maybe my wife could take some girl boarders, and we could take some girl boarders, and we could get along alright.” So, of course, Mama didn’t want him to sell it, and we didn’t either, but he did, and while he was building another house for us right across the alley from the big house , we lived in a rented house over there close to that cave near where the present-day college president lives, the university president lives. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in that cave, but there’s a cave there. Of course, Mama worried the whole time we stayed there because we were in that little old cave. We’d always go down in there, and she just knew a rattle snake or something would get us. Then when the little house was ready, we moved in it. Then from that house, Daddy built the house on the next street behind us, the big house from where I moved recently to this place, on Elm Street. At that time they hadn’t even named the street, but shortly after that it was Elm. Because we were the only ones behind North Guadalupe, our big house was the only one back there.
Leethy: So you were the first house on that street?
Haynes: Uh-huh, very close to school so we could go over to the training school or wherever we wanted to go. At first, we were in the public school until we moved into that big house, and then we gradually went into the training school connected with the old Normal School because Daddy said since we were close to it why not take advantage of it. There were just a few students there, but they had some excellent teachers. Mr. Lynton Garrett was head of the training school. I remember Ms. O’Banion, and I remember Annie May Blanks from Georgia, and there were several others, but not too many teachers. So, most of us in the eighth grade went up on the old Normal Hill. By that time, Tige Harris, who had been, I guess we’d call him the president, he had left, and Evans, Mr. Evans came to be head of the Normal School. I don’t suppose it would be ugly for me to say, but we all called him “Pussy Foot” for some reason, everybody on the campus did. Under him, the old Normal School made progress because he was one man who could go to the Texas Legislature and he would stay over there day after day after day, pleading for money. He never did get much, but he would get enough where he could buy several small houses in San Marcos and have them taken to vacant land near the college. He would have those houses joined together, and that’s where most of the girl students stayed. They had a few like that for the boys. Some of those places were close to our property, just across from Matthews Street. Lot of times they would come to our house because we had such a great big garden behind the house. Most of them did light housekeeping over there so they would come get Kentucky Pole Beans from Mama, squash or anything else they wanted.
Under Mr. Evans, let’s see, I remember Birdwell, who was my history teacher, because as I told you yesterday, very few of the Normal students at that time were attending, so they took us from the training school, those in eighth and ninth grade. We could go up there and study under them. So, we took history under Birdwell, and later on he became President of Stephen F. Austin College over in Nacogdoches. Then I selected German, and Helen Hornsby, who taught German in the college, was my teacher. Of course, I had to have history, so Miss White was our history teacher, along with Birdwell. Of course, we had other teachers too, but we all went up there on the Hill. Spurgeon Smith, who later on became Dr. Smith and was head man in our big science building up there, taught us physiology.
Leethy: These were all aspiring teachers in the Normal School?
Haynes: Yes, they were. Then from the Normal School after Evans was there, oh a long, long time, he retired, and Dr. Flowers came to take his place. Dr. Flowers and his wife, and I think there were two children in his family. To me, they were the most intellectual people we had ever had on the college campus, both of them. They were Methodist. They worked a great deal in the Methodist Church. Mrs. Flowers would go down to the South Side Community Center because that was under the auspices of the Methodist Church, and she would help with the sale for clothing, and she would help when they were giving parties to some of the people on the south side. She worked until her health broke down because she had cancer. Dr. Flowers insisted that she rest more. But she didn’t, she just kept on. Every time the faculty had a party or something, she would call my brother Bill, who was the buyer for the cafeteria, she would call him, and this would be at night, “to please come and bring the punch,” and she says, “And Bill, if they have any cookies left over there in the freezer, would you mind bringing some more over here, because more people came tonight than I expected.” So she was very fond of my brother, and I think it kind of made my brother’s wife jealous because he was always talking about Mrs. Flowers. But she was sweet and nice to him, and Bill was trying to help her, after all that was his job. So he and Mrs. Flowers were very fond of each other. Then Dr. Flowers and my brother, who died in 1982, at that time he was the post master—
Leethy: That was Louis?
Haynes: Uh-huh, and Dr. Flowers and Louis became very close because they were on practically every civic program they had in San Marcos. They were always working for something. And one of their greatest projects, they were working to get a big hotel. They had drawn up the plans for it. I saw the stationary in the basement after Brother died. They had listed all the different ones who would head the committees and everything, you know. Then Dr. Flowers died of a heart attack, so it just left Brother, you see, to head all of that. With his postmaster work and everything, he just couldn’t carry it. That was his greatest disappointment because both of them were so set on having this lovely hotel because San Marcos really needed one.
Well, it wasn’t just a few years after her death that he died suddenly of a heart attack. So that left the college without anyone because they hadn’t even thought about him dying, he hadn’t been there too long. So Cates, who was down in the, we call it the J.C. Kellam Building—he was my brother Bill’s boss because Bill had left the cafeteria and was working down there with all the invoices in the office—so they asked him [Cates] if he would come and be the interim president until they could find someone. Let’s see, this is when Dr. Jones came. He and his tiny little wife. He was a great, big, good-looking man, and she was just as tiny as she could be and just as cute as a bug, and everybody just loved them. We thought, Well, now we have someone who will really stay on the campus. Do you know, he wasn’t there any time? A university over in Tennessee just kept wiring and writing him and begging him and some of the [inaudible] would come over and ask him, When are you coming over? So he left us. He hadn’t been there long enough for us to even get acquainted with him. So they left.
Then we had McCrocklin. He had been President of A&I in Kingsville. So he came with his wife and two sons—I think that was all in their family. That was all I ever knew.
Leethy: Didn’t LBJ have anything to do with getting McCrocklin appointed as President?
Haynes: Not McCrocklin, at least I haven’t heard it. Maybe he did, but I didn’t know anything about it, not in my reading material I didn’t find it. But anyway, he came, and he made a lot of changes on the campus, and some of the faculty members were just a little bit—unhappy. He was quite different from anyone we ever had on the campus. They liked his wife. She was very active in the DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution] here in town and a good church worker.
Leethy: Why didn’t they like the changes he made?
Haynes: Well, he wanted nearly every one of the faculty members to always come to him for everything, and they had been working more or less on their own. After all, most of them had their doctor’s degrees. They felt like they knew their subject. They didn’t have to come to him to ask for advice, to ask, What shall I teach this semester? or something. So they didn’t cater to him at all, and he certainly didn’t like it.
When he came up here, he brought with him his vice president—and I think he [the vice president] was still in California on a visit when he was asked to come, and he and his wife had an automobile wreck on the way from California and had to stay in a hospital somewhere, I think it was in Colorado, for a long time before they ever got here. So that still left him [McCrocklin] more or less on his own. Then he had also brought up here an English teacher with him and another man who worked down in the Kellam Building where Brother was working. So, he had quite a few of his own people up here.
Well, at that time, my brother, whose hobby was volunteer fireman, was asked to go with the firemen down to Harlingen or Brownsville—somewhere down in the lower Valley, they were having a convention. So, he went down there, and on this particular day they were having a banquet or something up at A&I, that’s in Kingsville. So, Brother said they were all up there, and later on they went over to a coffee shop, and they were all sitting over there drinking coffee, and they all had their little badges on. After a while, a man got up and came over and said, “You are Haynes, aren’t you?” And he [Louis] said, “I am.” He [the man] said, “Do you know a man up there in the college by the name of McCrocklin?” And Louis said, “I do.” And he [the man] said, “Well, what do you all think of something like that?” Louis said, “Well, I don’t know too much about him. I haven’t had time to even, you know, get acquainted with him.” And he [the man] said, “Well, he was our president down here, at A&I. But,” he said, “He left us and went up there.” And he said, “And you know, he tried to take half of the faculty with him.” So, they didn’t like him for that reason down there because they felt like he had just left them to go elsewhere, you know. So then right out of the clear sky, this man said, “Have you heard anything about what I’m going to tell you?” So he started to tell Louis about—well, I don’t know whether I should be putting this on tape or not, perhaps not.
Leethy: Well, if you have any questions about not wanting the information to go public—
Haynes: —You can delete it.
Leethy: Not delete it, but—
Haynes: But, do you want me to tell you what he [this man] said? He just said, “The man [McCrocklin] isn’t what he’s supposed to be.” He said, “He got his doctor’s degree, but it wasn’t on the up and up.”
Leethy: Yes, I’ve heard about that.
Haynes: Perhaps that’s all I shall say right now, but it could be deleted. So, of course, when the faculty members here learned all of that, they just asked him to—leave. So they [McCrocklin and family] did. They had built them a little home up at Wimberley, so they just went up there. But as I told you yesterday, every time he came to San Marcos, he would come to the Kellam Building where my brother Bill was. They just got along beautifully together. He would sit in there and talk to Bill and tell him everything. He wasn’t ashamed at all.
Leethy: Did Louis have anything to do with letting this go public, you know, that his doctor’s degree wasn’t on the “up and up?”
Haynes: (shakes her head)
Leethy: No? That was found out on its own?
Haynes: He just wouldn’t tell it. That’s one thing Louis wouldn’t do was to talk about other people. He just kept it under his bonnet, so to speak, but he told us when he came up because he always had lunch at our home. He and his little daughter Caroline because his wife was a teacher—she taught here in San Marcos in the public school for forty-five years before she died—so she was never home at the noon hour and we always had Louis and little Caroline Sue with us at the noon hour. For that we were very grateful because she just grew up, you know, in our home, and of course, we learned more about Louis throughout the years too when he was there. One time at the table, this happened: Little Sue said, “Do you know what? Our old cat is pregnant.” I said, “Why, how do you know that?” [And Caroline said] “Well, she’s pale around the gills.” I thought Daddy and her daddy would just die. They laughed. They just laughed and laughed, and she couldn’t imagine why they were laughing. But she was always saying something cute like that. I was so happy that Louis got to know her when she was growing up like that because he was rarely ever at home. He was always at some old club meeting or going out of town for something. She really gave him more joy at our house, in our kitchen, than in their own home.
Then after McCrocklin was out, let’s see—who was it that took his place? I’ve already mentioned Jones haven’t I?
Leethy: Uh-huh, Jones was before McCrocklin.
Haynes: Yes, let’s see—then after McCrocklin—(trying to remember) Oh, that must have been when we had Robert Hardesty. Is that right now?
Leethy: Wasn’t there a man named Smith, Mr. Lee Smith, or something like that before President Hardesty?
Haynes: Who was that? (Inquiring as if she didn’t hear me correctly)
Leethy: Mr. Lee Smith or something like that, I don’t remember his name for sure. There was a man for a short time before President Hardesty.
Haynes: Maybe I’ve left one of them out, but right now I was thinking he [Hardesty] came after that. I don’t know, maybe so. But McCrocklin—no, I know who it was, it was Smith. Yes, Smith, that’s right because he and his family were members of our church. Now, he was the one that did not get along with the faculty. Because when he came here, he insisted on all of them, like all the English teachers, he wanted them all to get together so they could be teaching more or less on the same level, you know. Well, a lot of the older English teachers and the new teachers didn’t see eye to eye at all there because they had different methods of teaching, they had different ideas about how they wanted to teach. So he just had the whole faculty in a stew the whole time he was here.
Then, he also wanted them to take time out from their duties as a teacher. He wanted them to write, each one of them. He said, “I’d like for each one of you all to write a book.” I guess he wanted a copy left there in our college library. He just said that that would be a high point for teachers, you know, to express themselves by writing a book on some particular subject, of course, that had to do with the subject they were teaching. Well, you know a lot of people can teach, but they can’t write. So, that imposed quite a hardship on a lot of them because they didn’t know how to write. Others spent more time writing than they actually did teaching. They just let some students hold their classes a lot of times while they were trying to get their book ready. So he [Smith] wasn’t here very long either, a very short time. He got—I think it was a job in Dallas, Texas, and we heard that he was going to head a bookstore up there, but I don’t know whether that’s what he did or not. And then like I told you yesterday, they had family trouble too, you know, with the children, with the daughter. But you can delete that too because I could tell a lot of things about that, but I don’t think it’s necessary. So just leave it out.
Leethy: Okay, well we just won’t talk about that. So then President Hardesty came?
Haynes: Yes, and then Hardesty came. He was the first one that we had on the Hill who was not a doctor. My brother Bill said, “And he’ll be the best one they have, too. I think a mister is just as good as a doctor.” My brother never had much liking for them or something. He just thought an ordinary man was just as smart as they were, but, you know, they always said they had to have a doctor to be head of the institution. But when he came, he proved to be the man for the job. I think maybe he’s the one that you think maybe LBJ helped because when LBJ was in office in Washington, this man Hardesty was up there too. He was in the office with him, you know. I don’t know exactly what position he held, but he was right there. He was his [LBJ’s] right-hand man and helped a whole lot.
So, he got a lot of experience right there because LBJ had been an outstanding student here, you know. He wasn’t an athlete. He didn’t care a thing in the world about athletics at all. He was a good debater and a wonderful leader of young people on the campus. All of them liked him because he was just as poor as he could be, but he would take any kind of job that was on the Hill. He came at the time, you know, when Evans was in the old Normal School, and he didn’t have a place to stay, and so Evans said, “There is my garage there, and there’s a room there, and if you would just like to stay in that room, you can just stay there for nothing.” That’s where LBJ stayed for a long, long time. He would come and sweep out Evans’s office, you know, on the Hill. A lot of students teased him about the broom, you know, but he didn’t seem to care. He also sold socks to people in San Marcos. He did all kinds of things in order to make money because he had told his mother he didn’t want to come to school. So, before he really did come, he did make a little trip out to California with some other boys, thinking, “If we get out there, we’ll find us a job,” but there wasn’t anything out there for him. When he came back, he told his mother, “I think maybe I’ll go.” He walked, they said, from Johnson City to San Marcos. He stayed on the Hill there until he got ready to go out and teach. His first teaching job was the little Mexican school down close to Cotulla, Texas, down in the ranch country, you know. When he was President, he would always tell about the days he taught in that little school, and when he would come back to Texas, he’d go down to visit that little school and talk to them. Now, of course, they’re all grown to grandfathers and grandmothers. But he always spent time and a lot of love on that little tiny school.
Then in the thirties, I think it was he began talking about—shall I leave the college and go into him a little bit?
Leethy: Well, sure, just a little bit.
Haynes: Well, not all of it, but he went into politics then. He started going around town trying to find out the people who he wanted to work for him, and my brother Louis was one of them because Louis’s hobby was the fire department, the volunteer fire department. He went to all the district meetings, and he was chosen to go to the national meeting up in Washington, D.C. So, it shows you what a politician he [LBJ] was. He knew that Louis could pull the votes, I mean get votes for him, not only at the post office level and the city level, but he also knew that Louis would get votes through all these firemen and all over the state he’d get him—for him. When he was President, he would still write to Louis because I have the letters, and I gave some to the library, and in these letters he said “Lou,” that’s what he called him, “Lou, you haven’t sent me the names of the seniors for this year. Now you get busy and send them, you remember—you promised!” That would be in the letter, so Louis would get busy and have them all typed up and the names sent up there to him. You see, Lyndon wanted everyone—he sent letters to all of these seniors—for future voters! He was a smart politician, so was his old daddy. But we better go back to the college now.
I’m going back now to my family to show you why Dad selected that particular place in San Marcos to live.
Leethy: That’s on Elm Street?
Haynes: Yes, right there because we were really the footstool at the bottom of College Hill, we really were. When we went up there—when we finished, out of our family and two of my sister-in-laws, we had seven bachelor degrees, and we had six master’s. Now, one of the master’s was my sister Sally. She did three-fourths of her work to get her MA here in our college, and then she decided she would go over to the University of Texas and finish out that there. So she came back over here, and they got her grades ready and matched them with the ones over there. So, when she got her degree, it was from Texas University, but I still count it here because, after all, she had spent most of her time here. But from one family that was good, and Evans used to say, “If it wasn’t for the Haynes family and the Biggs family, I don’t know how we could run the Normal School.” Because, really, there were so many of us and so many of the Biggs and so few of the students up there, and we were regular because we didn’t go away, we stayed until most of us got through, except for some of the older ones like I did—I went out and taught and then would come back. The rest of them just stayed. From the time they entered kindergarten until they went through college, they were there. I haven’t even counted Helen and some of my other nieces who got theirs. So, we really did get a lot up there.
Leethy: So you were the subjects for the Normal School students to get their experience and then you went to the Normal School.
Haynes: Yes, we did. I grew up in the midst of faculty members. In fact, all of my friends were faculty members. Today, I have about two left out of the whole group. Here were some of the ones that I knew and some who taught me: Helen Hornsby, who was my German teacher, and she became Mrs. Crawford; Mr. Birdwell who taught me history and moved away—you don’t have to copy them all down, hon—and Miss White, who was my history teacher, and Miss Sayers. I’ll have to tell you about her. Her brother at that time, she was teaching math up there, and her brother at that time was Governor of Texas, Governor Joseph Sayers. She had to talk about him all the time she was teaching you math. So finally, some of the boys in the class learned that she was deadly afraid of mice. They found some and put them up there in the room, you know, and shut the door. When she came in one day after we all got there, she looked and saw one of these things coming toward her, and she jumped—she just pulled her dress up as high she could pull it up, got up in the chair, got up on top of the desk and started screaming. (Laughing)
End of Side A. Side B Begins, Mrs. Haynes is talking about other faculty members she has known, beginning with Mr. Goodman.
This Mr. Goodman, I don’t know whether there are any of them left here in town or not, he was my geography teacher, and I had an ed [education] class under him. He wasn’t much to look at, but he was a good man, and if you didn’t look at him it made him angry, and so he would say, “All eyes on me.” So everybody had to raise their eyes and look at him. That was down in the campus school where we had our class. Then they moved him up on the quadrangle, next to the science building; well, it was a room in the science building. He taught up there a while, and then one day he just fell dead at his desk. They said that some of the students had talked so ugly to him, he got so upset, that that’s what caused his death. It was his daughter, Elizabeth, who played the violin in our home when my sister Sally married. Mrs. Goodman was my good friend as long as she lived in San Marcos. She finally moved to Illinois, I believe it was, to live with her young son and his wife. She was one hundred years old when she died. The son was taking his wife over to the Catholic Church, and so they said, “Well, would you like to go with us over there this morning?” She said, “No, I’m not feeling very well.” So, when they came home, she was dead. But she had lived—she was a hundred years old.
Then, of course, Spurgeon Smith, his family used to live in our neighborhood. In fact, they lived next to us in the big house. But he wasn’t a teacher at that time; he was going to our college and so was the sister going to our college. Later on, he became head of our science department up here. He was my biology teacher and also a teacher of—well, I guess I’m going to call science and religion. They put this course in; it was called “The Relation of Science to Religion.” At that time, I was a senior, and I needed an elective, so I took it when I found out that Dr. Smith was going to teach it. One day, I was crossing the quadrangle, and he was standing in the doorway of the old library—I think they’ve torn it down now, it was the first building next to Old Main, on your left as you go up the hill—he was standing in the doorway there, and I was crossing the quadrangle, and he said, “Mary, come here, I want to say something to you.” When I walked to the doorway he said, “Mary, I couldn’t have taught the course if it hadn’t been for you.” I said, “The idea of such a thing. Why?” He said, “You were my inspiration.” I know why because there were a lot of freshman and sophomore children in there, and they had grown up in Baptist homes and very strict religious homes. Of course, in that course, there were a lot of things that we just accept now, but they didn’t in those days.
Leethy: But it didn’t go along with their religion.
Haynes: So, as we would go out the door after the bell sounded, you know. They would be telling me, they’d just be red in the face and just a-fussin’ and everything and talking about him. “He just has no business talking like that, and I’m going to tell Mama what he said, and I’m going to tell Daddy that I’m going to drop the course.” I was always protecting him, you know, and saying, “Well, maybe someday you’ll understand what he meant by that.” You’ll just—
Leethy: Well, was that class offered around the time of that turmoil, you know, between the Scopes trial?
Haynes: Yes, just about the same time that all that came up. But they just couldn’t have it. But I defended him on every corner because I just adored it.
And then this H.A. Nelson, do you know the Meeks?—no, maybe you don’t. H.A. Nelson was the Ag [agriculture] teacher up there, and he married one of his students, and she was my best friend too, she was one of the faculty members, and we were always together. In fact, we used to go over to see Mrs. Evans, you know, after Dr. Evans—because he did get an honorary degree later [referring to his title]. After his death, well, she just suffered a nervous breakdown, and she was an invalid and stayed in bed all the time. Some of the faculty members—and I always was invited to join them—we’d go to her house, but we never went in the room where she was. They had a housekeeper. The housekeeper would call us and say, “Come for watermelon.” We’d be sitting in the long room, like this eating watermelon (making an imaginary sketch with her finger on tabletop), and her room would be right here, just the wall between us, but none of us ever opened the door. Because one time, this Mrs. H.A. Nelson had a little bouquet of these little miniature mums—chrysanthemums. They were real bright. When she entered and she was holding that, Mrs. Evans started screaming. She thought it was a fire, and she just screamed and screamed and yelled, “Fire, fire!” So Mrs. Nelson would never go in the room anymore, and, of course, she told us not to. We never did.
Leethy: But you came over for watermelon?
Haynes: Uh-huh. She was one of the most gracious first ladies that we ever had up there. She just entertained the faculty all the time. Every year, the seniors were invited to the big house. You see, at that time when Evans was up there, the home was right behind Old Main. It was an enormous white colonial place, lovely inside and outside, and that’s where she did all of her entertaining. Then she would have special ones on the campus that her daughter Bernice liked, you know, just a lovely woman. To think that she had to spend her last years like she did, it was the saddest, saddest thing, because at that time, you see, her daughter was married. She married one of our football boys, and they had a big ranch in West Texas, so she was never here to be with her mother, so we always went. I’m quite sure that this housekeeper would say to her, “So-and-so came today. They came to see you, but they just didn’t want to bother you.”
Leethy: Or maybe she could hear you all in the next room.
Haynes: Yes, I guess so, but she never said anything through the wall. It was always sad for us.
Then Miss Pearsall, I wish you had known her. She was real tall and thin, and she was up there when Evans first came. You see, old Tige Harris was the first man up there. So, Miss Pearsall was the art teacher. I was taking art at that time, and this particular day she said, “I want every one of you in the class to draw a sunflower.” Of course, some of them hadn’t even seen a sunflower. They didn’t know what it was. So when she passed one desk, an old tall boy sitting there, and she looked down and she started shaking her head and shaking her head and she said, “Young man, what is that on that paper?” Why, he said, “Miss Pearsall, it’s a sunflower.” She said, “A sunflower! It looks more like a windmill in West Texas to me.” He just laughed. That’s probably what he thought it was too, but he didn’t dare say it. She was the funniest thing. She was a member of our church, the Presbyterian Church, and she would sit on the second pew right in the middle aisle and just sleep the entire time she was there. Everyone said, you know, that she took some kind of medication. I don’t know what it was that made her that way.
Daddy built her big two-story house. He also built the big two-story house right next to that for another woman that I don’t think I even included (looking down at her notes) here. Yes, I did. He built this house for Miss Lula Hines, a big two-story house right next to Miss Pearsall’s house. Today that house still stands, the Lula Hines house still stands, because that’s where Helen Hornsby Crawford lived for a long time. Today, it’s the only one on Vista Street that’s left. You’ll see it standing there. Last year a fraternity had it. When we passed there the other day, all the curtains were drawn, and Brother says that means they’re getting ready now. They’re either going to move that house away or something, or tear it down, but I had been in that home many times.
Pat Norwood, I wish you had known him, too. He’s still living and [the] sweetest man. He lives over there on LBJ Drive with his wife who collects Madonnas and pewter and seashells—she has got more blue ribbons for her seashells. We met her one time down at Padre Island when we were down there. She was collecting them that day. Her Madonnas, she takes them all over San Marcos and shows them, and she gives the history of the artist, you know, who painted the Madonna. Some of them are in porcelain, some, you know, are just the pictures and things. She’s a very interesting woman. They’re members of the Christian Church. Pat was my ed [education] teacher. The first time he came to class, they had just gotten married. He married the daughter of the president of the college at Commerce, Texas. Her father gave them the ticket to go to the Holy Land. So, the first day we met him for class, that’s all he talked about was their honeymoon and their trip to the Holy Land. But that was alright because none of us had books anyway and he hadn’t assigned us anything, but that’s what I remember about him—his honeymoon. Now when I see him, it’s just like the honeymoon all over again. We’re very fond of each other.
This Lloyd Rogers now is still living too. He was also my ed teacher, and dear Dr. Retta Murphy. She was the best history teacher I ever had on the Hill. She died just about two years ago while I was down in the Valley. She was a marvelous teacher. This Dr. Merry Kone Fitzpatrick, who is still on the Hill, she is a second Retta Murphy. She studied under Retta. The tone of her voice, the way she expresses herself and everything, I just love it. It just shows the continuity of her teaching, how it went on.
Leethy: She teaches honors classes at the university.
Haynes: Yes, and now this other, A.C. Burkholder was my neighbor. He lived just around the corner from us, the family. He came from Virginia, and when he came, he told Daddy that he knew a lot of our kin people up there. He was from Harrisburg. He married one of these little teachers in the training school, Miss Eunice Blanks [after the interview, Ms. Haynes said this teacher’s name was actually Annie May Blanks, to whom she referred earlier in the interview], and the reason he met her was due to another teacher down here I have listed (looking at her notes), Elizabeth Falls. Elizabeth Falls knew her [Miss Blanks] over in Georgia, and she got her a job here in the old Normal School. When Mr. Burkholder came, he was a bachelor, an old bachelor, so she [Falls] figured, “Well, I’m going to write Annie May Blanks, down in Georgia, and see if I can’t get her interested.” Sure enough, she [Blanks] wrote a letter, applied for school here, and when she came, Miss Elizabeth introduced her to A.C. Burkholder, and in 1915, they got married. Mr. Burkholder told my mama bout the wedding. He said, “Mrs. Haynes, they lived out in the country from Macon, Georgia, and there was a little tiny room at the back of the house like most of those old farmhouses. It was in the month of August,” and he said, “You know, I sweated down three collars,”—you know, the kind you attach to a shirt—“before I ever went in the living room to get married.” He said, “It was the hottest place I ever spent any time at all in.” Anyway, then when they came back, they moved in this house, and Daddy had built this house too that they moved in, and they were there over fifty years in that house. They had a son and a daughter. Their daughter, during her time on the College Hill, she made the highest grades of any students who had ever been on College Hill. Then now they’re all gone. Mr. Burkholder and his wife are dead, and the daughter lives down in Florida. She’s a widow. Her husband died last year. Clifford, the son, came by to see me not long ago, with his wife. He has retired from Dow Chemical and is living now in Tyler, Texas.
Then Deacon Wright, everybody on the Hill remembers Deacon Wright, and everybody in San Marcos remembers him?
Leethy: What did he do?
Haynes: He was an English teacher in the college. So, I chose him one time because my youngest sister just adored him, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to see why she likes him so much.” I was a senior that year when I selected him. Do you know I never heard a word the man said?
Leethy: Why was that?
Haynes: He just mumbled. He just sat there and just kind of mumbled. The only time he ever raised his voice was when Gates Thomas, another English teacher, had to come through the door to pass down this side of the room to open his office door. That was the only time he ever raised his voice. So after about the second week, I decided the thing for me to do is to do my studying in the library, read everything I could read over there, and we were studying all about—who was it that wrote Huckleberry Finn, you know who I’m talking about?—Mark Twain, all of those—and I just loved those kind of people. So, that’s the way I spent my time. That’s how I learned that course.
Leethy: So you didn’t like that teacher?
Haynes: You couldn’t hear a thing he said. Then another distraction was John Tom Dailey, who finally became Dr. Dailey. He would come in every day to that class thirty minutes late, right behind us, and he would shove the seat back. Deacon Wright never said a word to him as he came in, never said a word to him when he left, and do you know where he was? Behind my mama’s house shooting squirrels. He was always late to come to class, and Mama’d go to the back window and call, “John Tom?” She knew he was supposed to be up there in class because we had known the family for so many years. Finally, he worked himself into a wonderful position up in Washington, D.C. He’s the one I told you the other day about, the other teacher who said, “You better put that wad of tobacco over there. [Referring to a conversation that took place the day before the interview about an incident at LBJ’s inauguration] This boy was the one who made all of the tests for the young men coming into the Army, in math, you know? He made every one of those tests, Dr. John Tom Dailey.
Well, I have a whole list of them, maybe thirty-four of them, but, these are the ones that taught me that I’m naming right now.
Leethy: Well, maybe we should go on—
Haynes: Go somewhere else you mean?
Leethy: Well, touch on how the discipline was back in those days and how it’s different now.
Haynes: Well, now the discipline—In the old Normal School—we called her Mother Shaver. She was the mother of Dr. Shaver, you know, who delivered my sister Bernice’s only child. She [Mother Shaver] was our Dean of Women, a sweet little old woman, but oh, so prim and she wouldn’t let you do—you couldn’t do a thing, if you ever so much as reached out and touched your finger with a boy’s finger or something, you know, that was just uncalled for. So the office was always just filled with girls. She would get the housemothers—you see, in those days they didn’t have dorms. Everything around the College Hill was just great big old two-story frame houses, and that’s where all the girls stayed, and that’s where all the boys stayed.
Leethy: Didn’t they board with families?
Haynes: No, they were just young girls and young boys here in school. A few married ones, I’m sure, came, but they had to get places out in town somewhere. These were places under the supervision of her [Shaver]. Every housemother had to come up there and let her look at them, and if she didn’t think they were the right kind of women to be running a rooming house, she let them know right now. If a girl got out of line—they made a list of the young men in town who were not to be courted (laughing), and “you must not go with so-and-so.” I could name them, but I’d get in trouble if I called their names, but they had a list of them and they called it “the Black List,” and you must never have a date with them. My sister-in-law would get so angry when my brother Bill, you know, was going with her because he thought that was just foolish, you know, that she couldn’t go with him anytime she wanted to.
Leethy: Was he on the Black List?
Haynes: No, he wasn’t on the Black List, but just certain times a week, you couldn’t go out every night—but don’t tell me they didn’t because over at the big Murchison house over there, not too far from where we were, there was a back stair thing, and they came down there at all hours of the night, and they couldn’t keep up with them. Mrs. Murchison didn’t even try to keep up with them. They were very strict in those days. Then, you see, we also had a place called “The Hangout.” Anyway, that wasn’t really the name. It was a place, right there next to the big Murchison boarding house, where John Cores ran a place where you could go and get soft drinks and sandwiches and things like that. It was always just filled, you know. Well, she [Shaver] didn’t like for the girls to go in there because there were too many rough-talking boys in there. You could go down the street, next to the big Ward boarding house, to the Galbreath place where they sold homemade candy, and they served the best waffles that you ever ate in all your life, and he made his own syrup, you know, to go on the waffles. Laura had begged him through the years to give her the recipe, and he said, “No, Laura, I can’t do that, because that’s our best thing—that’s the way we made our money.”
Leethy: That was Laura who?
Haynes: After Mr. Galbreath went blind and couldn’t run that place anymore, and his wife wasn’t able to run it, she [Laura] asked the daughter, Mrs. Dudley Dobie, to give her the recipe, and she gave it to Laura.
Leethy: Laura who?
Haynes: My sister Laura. Then, like going places—you couldn’t go down to the river with a boy. The housemother would usually take—she’d say, “Now, tonight we’re just going to take a few sandwiches, and we’re all going down to the river, and we’ll have our supper down there, and you all can swim while I’m there.” In those days, of course, we wore the long stockings, and those old long skirt things on there, you know, Mrs. Burkholder did too, and, of course, that’d made more people look at her than anything else if she’d had bare legs because she had beautiful legs. But no, she covered them up, and so did all these old girls have to cover theirs up too. No one was allowed to do anything like that. You couldn’t go to the show unless you had someone with you. It wasn’t like, you know, like today. You’re so free today, but not then. You had so many hours that you had to study, and you had to be in your room at a certain time, and you couldn’t leave without permission from the housemother, and if you did anything wrong, you were sent right up there to the office to see her.
Then after Mother Shaver left up there, the next one was a woman by the name of Brogdon, Miss Brogdon. She was an enormous woman, very strict, very strict. So one day, they had been having so much trouble with boys and girls going over in the woods behind our place, you know, all back in there. So she came to the house—she lived in the neighborhood, not too far from where we were, in a big brown house—and she came to the house, and she asked Daddy, she says, “Mr. Haynes, would you do something for me?” Mama wasn’t in the room, and I wasn’t in there, and we didn’t know what she said to him, but Daddy told me later. She said, “Mr. Haynes, would you do something for me? Would you like to be a little detective?” And he said, “A detective, Miss Brogdon?” She said, “Yes. You just kind of disguise yourself, put on a false beard or something, or just make yourself look different.” And she said, “In the late evenings, you just walk across”—we had an old Dobie bridge that led over to where Dr. Ira Bowles lives today—and she said, “You just kind of walk around, and if you come up on anyone, you just pretend that you’ve been scouting around looking, maybe it’s time for the deer to appear, or something. Anyway, just make up some kind of story, you know.” But she said, “I want you to see how many of the college boys and girls you find over there.” She said, “I hear they take their blanket, and they go over in the woods, and that’s where they stay for I don’t know how long.” And she says, “That’s just got to stop, Mr. Haynes.” And sure enough, do you know Daddy did it? Until we found it out, and it was my sister Laura, I think, who gave him the lecture. She said, “You’re not going to do that anymore. It’s none of your business what they do over there, and you’re just not going to get involved.” Miss Brogdon didn’t like it at all when Daddy quit.
Leethy: Well, I heard stories about her dressing up herself to do it.
Haynes: Yes. She did, she did. Listen, she was a sight. But she liked all of us, and I didn’t mind her, because she was a very happy person when you were talking to her, just one of these gushy types, you know. People like that, you don’t know whether they’re really sincere or not, because she was just too gushy. After she retired, well, she was asked to leave, because they found out—oh well, she’s gone now, I’m sure she won’t know what I’m saying, but they found out that she wasn’t always on the up and up before she came here to take this position, so they asked her to retire. She went back to her home in Georgia.
Leethy: That didn’t have anything to do with the students—I heard that they had some kind of uprising against her, I thought. Was that part of her retirement?
Haynes: Sure they did, they didn’t like her at all—what else was I talking about? Oh, we’re still talking about discipline. After that, it seemed to me after Miss Brogdon left, they didn’t call the other woman who came here “Dean.” She was supposed to be—I think they called her a “Student Counselor.” Lunelle Anderson, she couldn’t be up there now could she, although I saw her somewhere not long ago. My brother Bill spoke to her, but evidently she’s retired. But they liked her because she was very easy on them; they could do anything they wanted to under her.
Leethy: So she was the next superintendent over the girls.
Haynes: Now, I don’t know who they have up there now, whether they even have one or not.
Leethy: I wouldn’t know about that, either.
Haynes: You haven’t seen her name anywhere as a counselor or anything like that?
Leethy: No, I sure haven’t.
Haynes: Maybe they don’t have one anymore. Anyway, the ones they had, of course, tried very hard, but they didn’t always succeed. Well, of course, now the discipline is very, very lax, I think. The reason we know, since we were close [to the university] and all those parking lots were right there by us, and then I owned two lots below the home place, you know. We just let all that grow up with the trees and the shrubs and everything down there. At night, you could look down on my corner lot, and on one limb of that big tree you could see these lights just kept flaring on and on and on. So one night, my brother, Bill, who lived across the street from me, said, “Myrtle, I’m going to take my flashlight, and I’m going down there and see what all those lights are.” He had an idea what they were. So when he walked down there, some of them had started coming down the tree, the main trunk of the tree, you know. They were smoking these old—the marijuana, but they had rolled them, you know, and you know how the flare, when you light them they’ll flare like this, and every time one of them flared, well, that was the light that he and his wife were seeing. He got after them, and he reported it to the college cops up there and told them to keep their eye on it, so once in a while they would cruise by to look. Then one day, I don’t know, it was some plant that grew real high. My brother from Kerrville was visiting, and he said, “Mary, I’m going to walk down on your lot down there and see if I can find those little bags of marijuana.” You see, the ones who sold it used to come by in a car, and they would throw it or put it behind a certain bush or they’d go up by that big tree of mine and put it down by the tree. Then when they got back to the dorm, they would tell the one they sold it to, “You go down there, and that’s where it is.” So Brother said, “I’m going down, and I’m going to see if I can locate some of it.” He wore these little jumpsuits sometimes when he was at home because he was always working in the yard or something. This time he had on a blood-red one. Well, after he came home—he was in the Air Corps during the war—and after he came home from the war, his hair was—it got just white.
Leethy: So he was easy to spot?
Haynes: So, he was down there behind these tall bushes right at the edge of my lot, and he found some of the bags. But while he was there, he saw this little red car come by, and it was coming rather slow as it came around the corner, so he thought, “That car is going to stop.” Sure enough, it pulled in right by the curb of my lot there. He was behind these bushes, and this one boy said to the other boy in the car, “Leave the engine running,” he said, “I won’t be but a minute.” As he stepped through these tall weeds, you know, Brother just rose up, he was squatting down, and he [the boy] said, “Ooooh, my God!” and he ran out to the car, and he says, “Let’s get the hell away from here.” And you’ll have to delete that! (Laughing) When Joe came to the house and told that, we just had the biggest laugh. But that’s what they did. Then in the parking lot right now below Brother’s house, they would put it under cars. They would put it just everywhere, even down in the tires. They [her brother and his wife] would watch them at night when they did that because they could look right down on the parking lot and the big light shone on everything. So Brother told the college cops just exactly which car had it, you know, and they’d come up there and find it. We knew that some of those old boys over in Arnold Hall and Spurgeon Smith Hall and Jackson High Rise, they were probably some of them whose cars were parked on that lot, and I’m quite sure they knew someone was turning them in. It worried my sister-in-law to death because she said, “Bill, sooner or later they’re going to do something to you because they’re going to put two and two together, too many of these bags are disappearing.” But, that’s the way they did. The discipline was bad.
Leethy: Well do you think—when was this? Was this just recently?
Haynes: Oh, yes. Sure, when we were still up there. Then you remember—or, you were not here when this girl over at Spurgeon Hall, right there by us, was raped. The boy just came through the window. Then, not too long before we moved over here, another car came up there one time, and I think it was more or less the girl’s fault. She had been out with him, and she didn’t even know who he was. When she said she had to get back to the dorm to do some studying or something, you see he let her out, and then of course he knew where she was. Well, they [the girls in the dorms] were supposed to close the doors, and they were supposed to pull the window down and put the latch thing on, and she failed to do it, and he just came in and raped her. Now, whether they ever sent him home, I don’t know. Then one night, two other college girls were walking down in that park that they created down there by the river, and both of them were raped. They were some boys from the Job Corps out there. So, they don’t have much discipline because, you see, they can come and go when they want to. They have none at all.
Leethy: Do you think the townspeople—that sort of bothers them that the college kids are so undisciplined?
Haynes: Well, it does bother some of them, but some of them they don’t care. They don’t care at all because some of them don’t have such high morals either, from what I hear and still hear, because my little niece’s husband took a course up there one time, and you’re going to have to delete what I’m going to tell you now. He was taking a class in history one summer up there. He was a teacher in Seguin High School, so he wanted to take more history because at that time he was teaching math and he wanted to get in the history department. So, he came up to our college to take more here, he had already gotten his degree and everything, but he came up there to take this course. This particular teacher would come in, half the time he was late, and then when he did come he would never even talk about the lesson. One morning he says, “Oh, let’s just talk about love.” There were several older women in the class. The oldest one in there was a teacher from New Braunfels. They were trying their best to pass these things because they were working for their degrees because, you know, they had to have them. Well, he’d say, “Now, let’s just talk about love.” He’d look at the boys—“Suppose you were just walking along and all of sudden you had an urge, and you saw this old girl approaching you, coming up the street. All you have to do,” he said, “You just grab her, take her behind the bushes and get it over with.” That’s what he was talking about in a history class. When Tommy would come home and tell us that, he’d say, “Helen, what am I going to that class for? What am I getting out of it?” Because he said that’s the way that man conducted the class. One time, he had another class under a girl who came over from the university. She would get there maybe thirty minutes before the class was over with or she would dismiss the class thirty minutes before she was supposed to, and she’d say to them, “My boyfriend is trying to quit smoking, and I’ve got to get back over there to help him, so he won’t smoke again.”
Leethy: So, you’re saying that some of the teachers now—
Haynes: They’re not like they used to be. All these teachers that I mentioned, do you think they would have let us out? Do you think any of them would have said anything—No!
Leethy: Also, when you saying about that one teacher that always insisted that everyone look at him—the kids today fall asleep in class.
Haynes: Oh, yes, they wouldn’t have wanted to do that for nothing. Well, and of course, I don’t approve of all that. I think if you’re going to be a teacher, you have to act like a teacher. You can’t talk like that in a classroom. Well, when I was teaching school, even in the little ones, you think I would talk like that?
Leethy: No.
Haynes: Now they know more, well, even in the first grade, they know more now than I knew when I was fifty years old.
Leethy: No, I don’t think so.
Haynes: Oh, yes, they do. These little old children? Yes, they do too. Because my sister-in-law had first grade on South Side, and, of course, they were all Mexican children, and they all sleep in the same room, most of them do, the way they’re crowded, you know. They knew everything, everything in the world. Oh, mercy, she used to just switch them all the time. I said, “Don, it doesn’t do you any good to switch the little things. They don’t know that that’s ugly.” You see, they’ve seen and heard it all their lives, so they don’t know. Maybe some of the Anglos are the same way. But that’s the way they are.
Now, recreation on the Hill, I thought they had wonderful things that they could do. You know, we used to go on opossum hunts even when we were freshman. We had all kinds of things we could go to. Our PE took up a lot of our time. I think I played tennis every semester until finally they said, “Why don’t you take something else?” We had indoor baseball and all like that. Miss Lula Hines taught that, and in those days she made us all wear old knickers or big old bloomers to play indoor baseball. But it was fun. We had a lot of fun.
Leethy: So, you think the school doesn’t have enough—
Haynes: Then we had cross-country hikes we had to take. There were a lot of things that you could go to. Then we had a lot of clubs on the Hill. I was a member of the Schiller Verein, that’s the German Club. I was a member of the YWCA at that time. I was a pledge for the Pierian Society, also the Philosophian Society, of course, they all have those Greek names now. But we just had a lot of fun. There were a lot of things. You didn’t have to get out and act like a little nitwit or something. Of course, the boys had debates they could be practicing on. They had all kinds of things that they went to. My brothers were always either playing baseball or football or basketball or something. There was always something you could go to. I know they had the Spanish Club you could be a member of. I didn’t take Spanish. My sister Laura belonged to the French Club because she took that too. She was also in the drama department. She had to arrange all of the props for plays and things like that, so she was busy all the time. She didn’t have time to have fun. Sometimes they would go on a tear [spree], like they had been out painting props late at night down in the drama building. They’d go downtown to Papa’s Café. It’d be along towards morning. When they’d come home, they always got a lecture from Daddy.
Leethy: Well, is there anything else you want to tell me about? We have a little bit of time left.
Haynes: Well, another thing, of course, the college always had, even back in the days of the “Old Normal,” we had the Allies Arts Program that came all the time. We had beautiful numbers. We had the best soloists I supposed you could find anywhere in America. Piano players, we had symphonies from San Antonio, we had the symphony from Houston. Along toward the end, down in that campus building that they’ve redone the whole thing now, we had plays down there that we attended. They had that big pipe organ that a couple over in San Antonio gave them. We would have organ recitals that we went to there. Dr. Nolle, who was in the registrar’s office up there, he and his wife were such music lovers. They would always come and sit behind us, you know. If any of us said anything that would disturb them, they’d let you know it. I usually went with about five faculty members. We all sat together, you know, but every once in a while, particularly Miss H.A. Nelson, she’d be telling me something, and we had to laugh—it was something funny. But the Nolles would let you know that you’re not supposed to do that. But I love Mrs. Nolle. After the college took her home because you see they took their home before they took ours because this thing has been going on over a period of time. [Referring to the university’s takeover of residential area near the university] Her [Mrs. Nolle’s] mind became very bad after that. She worried about it so much, you know. So, Dr. Nolle would say, “Mrs. Burkholder, I had to take her back to the Memorial Hospital.” And Mrs. Burkholder said, “Is she sick?” He said, “No, Mrs. Burkholder, she isn’t sick. She’s just worried.” So, some days Mrs. Burkholder would call me and say, “Mary, would you like to go out with me? I’m going out to see Mrs. Nolle.” We would go out, and every time I stood by her bed she’d look up at me, and she’d say, “Mary, you’re so pretty.” She was the cutest little old thing you ever saw.
Leethy: Well, do you want to tell real quick about how the university has taken over your house?
Haynes: Oh, yes. They had been taking property for years. You know, when Urban Renewal came to San Marcos, they were the first ones to try to get houses up on the Hill. That house I told you that Dad built after we left the big house and he went across the alley and built that house? They’ve got that house. At that time, Mr. Ball and his sister were living in there. They didn’t want to give up this house because they had just gotten new fixtures for the bathroom. They did all kind of things, you know. But they just kept after them until they let Urban Renewal have it. Well, do you know, after Urban Renewal got it, they were not supposed to touch a thing in the house. Some of the members came up there, and they stripped that bathroom and took all those new fixtures. Some of them took them to their own home. We know that’s what happened to them. Then the college got the house. That was a long time ago. They had it bulldozed to the earth. They just came up there and just crushed it, just like it was an accordion.
Leethy: So, the house that you just vacated on Elm Street—where you spent most of your life—what do you think they’re going to do with that property?
Haynes: Well, they’re going to destroy it. (Spoken as if they obviously wouldn’t think of doing anything else) Because, when Mr. Odom first came up to see me, of course, he had phoned me a lot of times, but I told him I wasn’t interested in selling my home at all, and he says, “Well, I’ve been talking to your brother, and I think maybe they will.” But, you see, his [Mary’s brother] wife has Parkinson’s disease, and she didn’t want to leave the house, so she never would give her consent. So, over—I’m going to say a period of maybe five, six, seven years or more, they were after us up there to sell. So, when they finally got Bill to agree to do that, I guess he just told Myrtle she had to go along with him because sooner or later they’d have to. Then Bill said, “Well, when I leave, I certainly don’t want to leave my sister across the street in the big home because she’ll be by herself.” But he says, “Before you go to see her—”
End of recording. In conclusion, both Mary and her brother vacated their homes. Mary now lives in a house on Prospect Street that is very nice, but without the family heritage that her previous home had.
End of interview