Waterloo legends, nostalgia and trivia

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 an edited version.

That sinking feeling

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.

Peacock patrol and other legends

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.

A 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.

A river runs through it?

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…

Cheers!

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 Waterloo 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.

Sit-ins, take overs, and the liberation of a village

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.

The Campus Centre takeover

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.

The model liberation of Village 2

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.

The arts sit-in of 1975

The 1975 sit-in at the Dean of Arts office over the Renison College affair 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 Age of WAT

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.