Marshall Memory: “Mom,” Tau Kappa Epsilon housemother Elizabeth Haden

 

By the late John M. Wilson, Class of 1972

 

This memory was submitted by John Wilson’s life partner, Richard Poirier, of Las Vegas. He found the story among Wilson’s personal papers after his death at age 57. Wilson, a member of the School of Journalism Hall of Fame, was the science editor for The New York Times. Poirier established a scholarship in Wilson’s name after his death.

 

Mom

By John Wilson

  

Nothing could beat the smell of those Saturday mornings: Henrietta cooking the bacon and eggs over the grill; crisp autumn air wafting through the crack in the window, and the floors reeking of the same polish that pledges had spread across the old hardwoods for decades. Leaves on them maple trees that lined Fifth Avenue blazed forth in a collage of colors, and Dave sang "Sons of Marshall" off-key in the shower.

 

Unmistakably, it was a football morning, and the old rambling fraternity house was coming to life.

 

Everybody loved a football Saturday, but Mom most of all. It was her day, and she reigned over it in regal splendor. Out of bed long before the rest of the house stirred, she tidied up the dining room, straightened the long row of composite photos lining the stairwell, started the coffee in that ancient tin percolator, laid out the food for Henrietta and sat down to preside over her court.

"G'morning, darling," she'd say, giving me a kiss on the cheek, as her snow-white hair gleamed just like the autumn sun reflecting off the big white pillars that encircled the porch of the old converted mansion on one of Huntington, West Virginia's most elegant streets.

 

Being Saturday, the usual mealtime formalities were cast aside. Mom even allowed T-shirts and bare feet at her breakfast table. The banter was more informal, too, as this was a day to linger over coffee and the sports section, and play around a bit with the "old lady."

 

"Mom, Stan has a hangover," Wayne would say in his best tattle-tale voice. "He drank too much grain alcohol last night, Mom, and he puked all over the bathroom."

 

"Don't you tell stories on my Stan," Mom would say, knowing full well that poor Stan could barely get up the stairs the night before.

 

"Mom, Don had a girl in his room last night. All night," someone else would say.

 

“Not my Donnie,” Mom would respond. “Donnie, tell me you didn’t have a girl in your room last night.”

 

"Mom, I didn't have a girl in my room last night," Don would dutifully declare.

 

And Mom would smile her all-knowing smile, for she had just seen her little Donnie sneaking that blonde DZ down the fire escape not 20 minutes before.

 

Oh, Mom loved to act shocked. But after 10 years as housemother at Marshall University's Tau Kappa Epsilon house, nothing much could shock ol’ Elizabeth Haden, dean of the housemothers.

Besides, nothing was going to ruin a football Saturday for Mom. After breakfast, there would be the hairdresser, for she liked to look her best on these special days when the old boys would come back with wives and children to pay her a special visit before or after the game. She looked forward to it almost as much as seeing her own children and grandchildren.

 

Mom, long a widow, never went to the games. She preferred sitting in her parlor, like the Alabama belle she was, waiting to receive her gentlemen callers.

 

"You look prettier than ever," they'd tell her, and sometimes they'd bring her flowers or candy.

She'd hug them and kiss them and kiss the wife and the kids and tell them all how cute they were and how they should come over to see her more often.

 

Occasionally, one would ask her if she was ever going to retire. She would frown. "The boys now, and oh, they're much wilder than you were, keep me too young to retire," she'd always say, and then lie again about her age, frozen at 70 for nearly a decade.

 

And if Mom's age wasn't going to change, neither was anything else. Not if she could help it.

She liked to know the first party of the year would be Stone Age Stumble, for that was tradition. She'd don her well-worn leopard-skin cavewoman costume and make her appearance at the party to show the rushes just how "with it" the old lady really was.

 

She liked to ring the bell for dinner every night and retire to her parlor, waiting for the president to escort her between the two lines of boys waiting outside the dining room. That, too, was tradition.

 

She liked homecomings and chrysanthemum corsages, and Christmas trees and her boys caroling while she banged out the melody on the old upright.

 

She liked girls in evening gowns and her boys smartly dressed in suits or tuxes, wearing their fraternity pins just so, with the right side of the triangle parallel to the sternum.

 

Though she loved things traditional, she wasn't inflexible. In those days, she couldn't be. The Seventies were dawning and whether we liked it or not, things were changing. Like a sudden summer thunderstorms, the days of hard-driving Dean Buskirk and en loco parentis ended. The university no longer cared what fraternities or sororities did in their own private houses. Girls were no longer girls. They were women – and they could stay out as late as they wanted to, without anyone keeping track of “late minutes."

 

The dean no longer cared.

 

We could have a party whenever we wanted and serve whatever we wanted to whomever we wanted. We could do it every night, and we didn't even have to file a petition two weeks in advance complete with signatures of president, social chairman, housemother, and two faculty members who agreed to chaperone.

 

We didn't even need chaperones. The housemother didn't have to be there. For that matter, we didn't even have to have a housemother.

 

Like other fraternity and sorority presidents, I was stunned when the dean handed us the news.

We hadn't asked for it, and we barely knew what to do with our new freedoms. But I dutifully told Mom, and she frowned.

 

"Who is this new dean?" she asked.

 

“Jeff.”

 

“Dean Jeff?”

 

"No, just Jeff. That's what he says to call him.

"

"And he's the new dean of boys?"

 

"No, Mom, we don't have a dean of boys anymore. Or a dean of girls. Just a dean of student affairs.”

 

"Oh, I knew things would go downhill when that lovely Dean Buskirk retired."

 

Just as Dean Buskirk, forever the dean of girls, had no first name, Jeff had no last name. Everything was all turned around.

 

"Well, we'll just keep things as they are now, won't we?" she said affirmatively, and I nodded that I reckoned we would. Of course, we no longer filed petitions for parties. And, we agreed that women would be allowed in our rooms on weekends and that nobody would get too upset if somebody brought a little beer into the house.

 

Those things had gone on forever anyway. In the old days, we just had to be more careful. And Mom now and then turned her back. Boys will be boys, she always figured, and she liked it that way. She just liked them to be discreet boys.

 

Once, after a house party, a few of us gathered with our dates in Mom's parlor to chat. "Well, Mom," Don said, looking at his date, "we're going upstairs now. Good night."

 

Mom smiled, but when they left, she shook her head. "You know, I liked it better when they had to sneak them up the fire escape."

 

For Mom, there had always been campus rules and house rules and her rules. The others might change, but hers didn't. And every boy in the house knew better than to disturb her during one of the rare moments she had her door closed to watch a favorite TV program.

 

Stan and I did anyway one quiet night during midterms. Stan banged on her door, and over and over we chanted, “We want iced tea.”

 

She jerked the door open and came out swinging with her rolled up Herald Dispatch. Stan ran behind the living room couch and she followed, like a cat-and-mouse chase straight out of a cartoon. From one side to the other they went, back and forth and back and forth. Tiring of standoff, Mom placed her right hand on the back of the couch and swung her two legs, her 150 pounds, and her 80 years over to the other side like a 19-year-old gymnast, swatting Stan all the time.

 

I fell to the floor, laughing like I had never laughed before. And when she finally stopped swatting, she announced, "That'll teach you to bother me when I'm watching my programs."

But she unlocked the kitchen and made the iced tea anyway, as we knew she would all along.

Looking back, I think she set a tone for the whole fraternity. By most measureable standards, we weren't the best on the campus. But we had something special; we had Mom and we had each other, and somehow we always knew it.

 

I suppose time is the enduring test. I know those four years in the TKE house were among the very best I'll see. And, if today, 10 years since graduation, I had to pick my 10 best friends, half of them would have been made right there under Mom's nose.

 

She set a real tone of love that was contagious. She sewed our socks and she ironed our pants; she fixed us iced tea and served us coffee and cookies at midnight during finals week; she comforted us when we broke up with our girlfriends, and she acted proud of us, even after we had made such fools of ourselves singing off-key during Mother's Day Sing.

 

I don't suppose the place has been the same since she retired in 1975. But she is. A couple years ago, she came to visit me in Fort Lauderdale. She looked as spry as ever. Last Christmas, I got the annual card with a long note attached. As far as I know, Mom is still kicking up her heels right over couches, missing the smell of bacon on those special Saturday mornings and thinking fondly of her boys.

 

Regardless, Mom will live forever. At least for us boys who were lucky enough to call her Mom.