It's Not About Me

While I owned a blue 1955 Ford, it remained parked in our yard in Bolivar for my first two years of college . The first few trips to UTK was by train…I think I boarded the train in Grand Junction, TN (south of Bolivar in Hardeman County) at 5:30 PM and rode all night to Knoxville, TN until about 8:30 AM the next morning (train went through four states MS, AL, GA and back into TN); one-way fee was about $11. While the train accommodated passengers…they did not go out of their way to do so. I recall one Christmas break going back to Knoxville and we were herded through the one or two passenger coach cars into the baggage car where we road all night. Some of the riders were even sitting on a coffin for part of their journey back to school! When we arrived in Knoxville at the train station, you would then take a cab to the University or “hitch a ride” with another student who had a car for hire. New Melrose Hall was a 9-story dormitory for men that had recently opened on campus. I lived there with a roommate, Glenn Mizer from Tullahoma, TN my first year on campus. I spent the remaining three years next door in Old Melrose Hall in a single room on 1 st floor. My original intent when I arrived on campus was to join a fraternity as my cousin Barry Coates had been President of Sigma Chi at Georgia Tech and that sounded cool! I did participate in the fraternity rush program, but I sort of lost interest in joining a fraternity. Having been very active in 4-H across Tennessee, I joined the Collegiate 4-H Club and was then attracted to the Independent Student’s Association (ISA) which I later joined. This move would become one of my best decisions as I would eventually become President of ISA. I maintained a 3.0 average for most of my college career, but as time progressed, I became more interested in participating in extracurricular activities than I did academics. I made a lot of friends while involved in campus activities. Among them was Dave Long and Katherine Ward. Dave was President of Stadium Hall Dormitory and Katherine was V.P. of Women for ISA when I was the ISA President. I was also President of my dorm, Old Melrose Hall. As part of the Independent Students Association (ISA), here are some of the activities we sponsored at UT-Knoxville: • Women’s Karate Self -Defense Course – while today, this is a normal offering at many colleges and universities; I can assure you that this type of program was a rarity in the early 1960’s especially for women! • Xerox/Test File Service – In the early 1960’s, the first 914 Xerox copiers had just been introduced. The only student accessible copier at UTK was located at the library which was not centrally located. Fortunately, ISA had its office on the 2 nd floor of the Student Center and we leased a 914 copier from Xerox for student use. It was so big, it barely fit through the door. We charged students 2 cents a page for this service! Later, we established a central public test file service at the student center whereby we collected tests from several thousand UTK courses and catalogued them by Subject/Year/Professor; students were charged 10 cents a page for making copies of the test questions. This service proved invaluable to students in that they could more easily learn what type of test questions a professor gave as well as the subject matter that the teacher felt was most important to master in the course. This effort was one of the most successful ventures

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