In March 1993, a discussion of "urban legends" on the Waterloo campus started on the electronic newsgroup uw.general. It touched on two of the biggest traditions in particular:

• the idea that the Dana Porter Library is sinking because of the weight of the books in it, which supposedly had been ignored by the architects
• the belief that there is a secret tunnel network connecting campus buildings, now closed and abandoned because of a series of hideous crimes many years ago [this belief is probably based on the existence of service tunnels which do indeed link the buildings; they are regularly used by plant operations personnel, but not open to the public for safety reasons]

Over a two-day period, I posted several hundred lines of comment, thought and nostalgia, of which the following is a lightly edited version. A postscript appears at the end.

Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs
7 April 1993

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A few more thoughts about campus oddities, if not actually "urban legends" . . .

The sinking library story isn't unique to Waterloo; several US campuses have the same story. This one is widely believed, and every few years it surfaces when some newspaper reporter somewhere phones up the university to enquire about it. (Did ANYBODY notice, or care, when we published a photo of Dana Porter, listing to portside, in the Gazette last April 1?)

The original director of buildings and grounds, Mike Brookes, really did acquire several peacocks which he hoped would wander the campus as they do at one of the colleges in his beloved Oxford. They didn't last long, although it was never clear what predator did them in.

One previous April Fool's, we invented a few campus myths and published them in the Gazette -- including an Indian maiden who drowned herself for love in Laurel Lake (the one below Conrad Grebel), and a ghost in the Dana Porter elevators, which do seem to have a non-human intelligence. Some of the night custodians were so frightened by the latter story that I had to write a memo, for posting in their staff room, explaining that it was a joke.

What could be more of a campus myth than the Pink Tie (the original of which is in the possession of Tom Brzustowski, I believe)?

A previous poster is quite right that the Brubacher House, now a museum, had a fire in the 1960's. I'm too lazy to look up the date.

Who remembers Isafarm, the north-campus home of the Integrated Studies programme? (Now the Clemmer day care centre, if I have my farmhouses straight.) Who remembers Camp Columbia, run by radical do-gooder students
in the summer of 1972, for underprivileged kids? Who remembers the Radical Student Movement, in whose office in the Campus Centre I once slept overnight on a visit to campus in about 1968? Who remembers the general belief that
the ceiling of the CC was full of little stashes of dope?

Who knows the story of the "portable" buildings brought up to this campus from their previous home at Waterloo College, now WLU? Mike Brookes hired some Texas-cowboy type who literally cut them in half with a chainsaw and
rolled them up Dearborn Street (now University Avenue).

I once had a chat with someone who was born in the Schweitzer farmhouse, now the Graduate House.

Does anybody remember the Aryan Affairs Commission, a sort of anarchist-groucho-marxist organization based in the CC that went around"approving" every piece of paper it could find with a giant rubber stamp that said "Rubber Stamp"?

Rumour has it that in the 1960's the head of security was an eccentric chap named Cookie whose idea of vigilance was to crouch in the bushes with binoculars to keep an eye on staff members. It may have been around the same time that two chaps known to history as "the bandits" proved to have been scooping up most of the cash proceeds from the graphic services department.

A couple of the streams that used to run into Laurel Creek (the path of which has been considerably altered by artificial means, by the way) have disappeared from surface view. One -- which ran where the MC building is now -- can still be seen as a storm sewer emptying into the creek near the CC. Another, shown on at least one map from the 1950's, seems to have run across what's now the arts quadrangle.

In about 1968 there was the famous "dog burning" in the arts quad; does that tale need re-telling?

Hugh MacKinnon of the history department ("Father Hugh") may have been the last faculty member here who regularly wore his black academic gown to class. He was one of two faculty members from arts who died in unusual circumstances while on visits to Mexico in the same year (about 1980, if I recall right).

J Minas served UW variously as dean of arts, vice-president (academic), university computing officer, and chair of the departments of statistics, human relations and counselling studies, and psychology -- oh, and director of operations analysis. He kept a fridge in his office full of American beer, in the days when American beer only came from America.

Surely there is a legend behind the "Moose Room" at Renison College, though I don't know what it is. Among the least-known non-secrets of the campus is the stuffed passenger pigeon in the biology museum.

If you want custom-made legend and ritual, Gary Embro of the math faculty computing facility would be the fellow to ask; didn't he do an exorcism when Watbun (the Honeywell computer) was finally decommissioned a couple of years ago?

Many of the buildings previously had other names, even less imaginative than those they now bear. Needles Hall was the "Student Services Building", Matthews Hall was "Administrative Services", Carl Pollock Hall was "Engineering 4" (actually I seem to still call it that most of the time). Humanities, which is officially the J. G. Hagey Hall of the Humanities, was originally Arts III! (Modern Languages was Arts I.)

Most unusual of all the names, I think, is the one now known as Environmental Studies I, formerly Social Sciences. It's officially the Isaiah Bowman Building, named after a 19th century American geographer who was born in Waterloo County.

Needles Hall (built in 1972, when energy was so cheap that they used single glazing, and light-switches weren't added to the building until 1977) was erected on the site of the former parking lot D, which was fetchingly surrounded with split-rail fencing. When I came to UW for the first time in the summer of 1970, I saw a picture on the front page of the Gazette of a secretary with a bouffant hairdo and a microskirt, perching fetchingly on that fence. We'd never run such a photo today, I fear.

Organizations and people come and go. FASS itself, with which I believe this thread started, was founded by the service club Circle K, an offshoot of Kiwanis. I personally think FASS has never been the same since its relationship with the Theatre of the Arts was severed.

Before Federation Hall, people had to drink in the Bombshelter. Before the Bombshelter, people had to drink at "pubs" organized, maybe once a week, in the Festival Room of South Campus Hall. Before those pubs, there was the Circus Room, in the old Waterloo House at the corner of King and Erb. Much of the history of UW was written on Friday afternoons in the Circus Room. Next to the Festival Room in SCH, by the way, was the Carnival Room dining room -- reborn latterly as the Laurel Room. One of the all-time great SCH pubs was a miniskirt event: admission $1, but ten cents off for every inch your skirt was above your knee. The Gazette ran a photo of that one, too. Times change.

The university used to have direct phone lines to Toronto that were, in effect, free. When the switchboard closed at night, some of the phones in the CC (e.g. in the Chevron and Fed offices) were plugged into those lines, and students would drop in to make free late-night phone calls to their sweethearts in the big city. (The Chevron? If you don't know that story,
ask, but it's too long to tell here. Before the Chevron was the Coryphaeus, founded by one Sid Black, who went on to be president of Canadian University Press.)

And UW did have a yearbook, Compendium, until some time around 1970. There are copies in the University Archives, which would be a good hunting-ground for anybody interested in Waterloo lore.

According to Ken McLaughlin, who's writing the history of the place, there were ugly squabbles between UW and Waterloo College over who had the right to post a "this way to campus" sign on the corner of Albert Street and what's now University Avenue.

Within the past three or four years I spotted a young lady on campus with a Waterloo University College jacket. WUC was the undergraduate unit of Waterloo College just after the great schism that created UW and WLU. She said it had been her father's and now it was hers.

The university's phone switchboard used to be in the lobby of the Physics building. At one time the cafeteria and library were both in what's now called Engineering I. Most of the administrative offices, up to 1972, were in the Dana Porter Library. The co-op department, "coordination" as it then was, made its home in Math and Computer. Until the CC was opened in 1969, the Federation occupied half of an ugly portable building on the banks of Laurel Creek.

In the late 1970's we ran a comic strip, "Apartment 3" by Mary Pineau, in the Gazette. It presented three roommates who were Waterloo students: a duck, a squirrel and a human. I've always wished those characters had somehow become part of campus tradition. But apparently we can't even decide what the mascot is around here: the athletics department's Warrior or the alumni office's Pounce de Lion, who comes from the coat of arms. ("Concordia cum veritate": officially "in harmony with truth", alternatively "a compromise with reality"?)

Great tragic moments in our history: the death of Mike Moser, star of the basketball Warriors, in (I think) 1975. Great comic moments: prime minister Lester Pearson visits campus and tries on a Warrior helmet. Great moment
of pride, to a degree now almost inexplicable: David Suzuki comes to campus as the (first?) Hagey Lecturer, circa 1970.

When it was rumoured, then announced, that the Gazette was to be transformed from a newsletter into a campus-wide newspaper, in 1970, the ingenious folks at the Chevron blanketed the campus with "Admininews" and fooled most readers
into thinking it was the real thing. It hit the target so accurately that at least one department phoned the information office in fury: how dare an official publication reveal such-and-such a secret?

Everybody knows the story of the engineers who wrote BEER on the recently demolished Waterloo water tower in 1958, and got Canada-wide publicity for a brand new university. Twenty years later, unidentified persons made the same
climb and painted VODKA in Cyrillic script on the same water-tower.

The school of optometry came to campus from Toronto in 1970, and for its first few years was housed downtown in the old Waterloo post office, now the award-winning home of Mortice-Kern.

There's no funnier picture than the official convocation procession making its way -- robes, mace and all -- across the muddy arts quadrangle for the official opening ceremonies of the Dana Porter Library in 1965. I suspect Dana Porter, then chief justice of Ontario, was on hand himself for the occasion. No doubt he was a fine public servant in many ways, but the one thing I know about his judicial career is that he refused to hear an appeal filed on behalf of Steven Truscott.

"Of Mud and Dreams" is the title of the only published history of UW (by James Scott, 1967). It's long on praise for the Founding Fathers, and hints at the tough conditions under which they worked. Watchword of the day, circa 1959: "It's Friday -- think I'll go and cash my paycheque before it bounces."

There certainly was Mud, even when I first came to Waterloo in 1970 (Chem 2 was under construction that summer and it was a swamp). Many people don't know that practically the whole campus was re-landscaped when UW began building; the hill between Dana Porter and South Campus Hall is every bit as artificial as the berms around the parking lots. As I was mentioning, Laurel Creek was also re-directed; left to its own devices it would flow west across Westmount Road at the corner of University.

Important historical events: (1) the great bookstore sit-in (the store staff, under legendary manager Elsie Fischer, kept right on working, stepping over bodies lying in the aisles, even bringing coffee at one point, and eventually protesters more or less got their way as the store adopted a discount policy on textbooks).

(2) the night students rose up and demanded control of the Campus Centre, emphasizing their point by clearing all the furniture out of the office where Paul Gerster sat as CC manager, and reassembling it in the great hall. That must have been 1969.

(3) the time persons not very unknown (was Bob Verdun among them?) liberated a model of the planned Village 2 from a storeroom on the first floor of the Library and put it on public display, much to the embarrassment of the authorities who weren't exactly ready to reveal what the building was going to look like. Students didn't have much of a role in university
governance in those days.

(4) the 1975 sit-in at the dean of arts office over the Renison College affair (details too long for narration at less than epic length). It was so badly planned that the sitters-in hadn't made any arrangement for toilet facilities until they were, ah, ready to sit. Maybe they assumed that the dean of arts had a private washroom.

The most famous piece of art on campus (as distinguished from the most attractive piece of art, which is certainly not "Joy" near South Campus Hall) was "Convolution", a red-orange plastic Thing that stood on a mound between Physics and Dana Porter for a few years until, one day, somebody planted a bomb under it. The artist was called in but decided that it was damaged beyond repair. Few tears were shed.

Unfortunately classed as fiction, rather than believed as legend, is Jim Gardner's short story "The Phantom of the Operator", about supernatural doings on the 'bun (MFCF's Honeywell computer). We published it in the Courier, as the alumni magazine was then called, in 1985.

We have to remember that although UW dates from 1957 -- that summer when a few dozen engineering students stripped to their underwear for lectures because it was so hot under the tin roofs of their portable buildings -- there were forerunners. St. Jerome's College is 125 years old. As you drive out Erb Street, look for a cairn on your right just before you enter the village of St. Agatha; that's the site where Father Funcken first established his little college. For a status of Father Funcken, visit downtown Kitchener -- he stands outside the now-closed St. Jerome's High School.

Not many people realize that the latticework structure across the ring road from Needles Hall is a water-pumping station; most of the water we use on campus, and in the surrounding neighbourhoods, is pulled from the ground there. ("Not many people realize" could be the title of a never-ending series in the Gazette. I keep discovering new things, especially in the plant operations area. We have a full-time staff member whose job is water testing -- not so much for personal taste as to prevent scale build-up in the boilers and consequent disaster. We also have a gas station on campus.)

The really good stories about the olden days are told by Joan Molloy (formerly O'Connell), secretary to three UW presidents -- four, when Jim Downey takes over next month, except that she's going to retire in the summer. She and colleagues who have grown older in UW's service remember the days when they were close to the students in age and in social tastes. "There was one party," she told me, "when we caught [name of noted campus figure] necking in the shower with one of the students. . . ."

Let's not forget The Razor's Edge, a pickup band of staff and faculty, circa 1970, loud if not melodic on jugs and washboards. It was reunited last summer for the Community Campaign picnic -- minus Gerry Hagey, UW's founding president, one of its original members, who died three (?) years ago.

And on a more serious note, let's not forget Gerry Hagey -- not just his vision (stubbornness, some would say) in getting this university going, but his personal courage as well. His presidency was cut short by throat cancer, and when it became clear that he would never recover the voice he had used to persuade so many meetings of so many things, he turned over the reins to others. But he taught himself to speak by forcing air through an opening in his throat -- a slow, wheezing process that took much getting used to, and that he mastered by hours of painful practice as he walked up and down a beach, croaking over the roar of the waves. With that voice he served UW nearly twenty years as President Emeritus.

The definitive history of the place, as far as I'm concerned, is the brief essay I wrote last year for IMAGES OF WATERLOO (picture book for sale by the alumni affairs office). The text can also be found in UWinfo under "About the University". I started it with one of my favourite anecdotes: Tom Brzustowski, then vice-president (academic) of UW, was at some conference in Europe and found a stranger peering in puzzlement at his name badge. "Excuse me," said the stranger in a French accent, "but can you tell me, why would anyone name a university after a great defeat?"

When we had an open house in 1982 for UW's 25th anniversary, its slogan, as I recall, was "Meet Your Waterloo".

Doug Wright likes to say that UW's distinction is, this is the ONLY post-war university in the world (founded in the past 50 years) to have achieved an international reputation. Our uniqueness is based on a lot of things, of which the most obvious are co-op (first in Canada, and now largest in the world) and correspondence (degree programs by audiotape, introduced in the days when that meant reel-to-reel). Other things we do differently: a "faculty" of mathematics, a department of "systems design engineering", a faculty of environmental studies, an independent (formerly "integrated") studies program.

But we get too serious. . . . One of the odd features on campus is the artwork in the arts pedestrian tunnel. "Where on campus," the Imprint asked in a frosh quiz a few years ago, "can you walk through a giant helix?" The arts pedestrian tunnel, of course. I think that design and the one in the nearby tunnel from AL to ML were winners in a student contest; so was the frieze around the great hall in the CC.

The early boards of governors, and many another earnest committee, met around a round wooden table that used to reside somewhere in the engineering buildings. By the time I came here it had taken up residence in a third-floor meeting room in Needles Hall. When NH was remodelled a decade ago, the table went into storage. I have been told that it's now in the applied health sciences conference room, but haven't actually gone there to look. Around the same age are three oval wooden desks, originally used by some of the top executives. One of them remains in the university secretariat in NH -- I'm not sure where the other two are now.

Little-known features of campus, continued: the mint garden on the north campus (west of Lake Columbia, which is artificial, by the way); the convocation mace, made of solid silver, formerly kept on display in Porter Library, but now locked away in a safe between public ceremonies. (Also on display in Porter: portraits of some of our founders. One of them was
stolen a decade or so ago, and eventually returned to the Gazette office in a green garbage bag. Never figured out why.)

Great photographs from our past: the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops of the area, shaking hands with one another in the middle of a sea of mud, on the day they dedicated the new sites of Renison and St. Jerome's Colleges (respectively). That was in the days when Roman Catholic and non-RC Christians didn't officially have much truck with one another; it
made the newspapers.

Remember Alfie Kunz, long-time director of music?

Remember when everything, including all the computer names on campus (what few there were), started with WAT? To make a watjoke nowadays would mark you as an out-of-touch old-timer. For a while, the Chevron tried to call the place UniWat. My old boss, Jack Adams, invented UW as an alternative to "U of W" (which could also be Windsor, Winnipeg, Washington), and it stuck, mostly.

It's a pretty good place to be, really.

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Postscript, April 1993:

This text doesn't mention the Ridgid Tool, beloved if controversial mascot of the Engineering Society, which has recently been renamed The Tool to avoid offensive implications (and to eliminate mention of its manufacturer, the Ridge Tool Co.). The costume of its bearers was also changed a couple of years ago; they no longer wear black robes and hoods. I wonder whether the Tool still bears the scars of its captivity at the University of Toronto for a period in the late 1970's.

There are probably many other things it omits. I would be prepared to maintain an archive of such tales and trivia, if they are e-mailed to me at credmond@watserv1.

Of course yarns of this kind are no substitute for serious history. The university's historian is Dr. Ken McLaughlin of St. Jerome's College, who would no doubt be pleased to hear from anyone with tales of the past, particularly if they are based on first-hand knowledge.

CAR