Return To Edens: Women Recall Early Days At Wwu -- School, Alumni Celebrate 100 Years Of Learning
"Here is the Home of Color and Light . . ."
- Ella Rhoads Higginson, Washington's poet laureate; inscription from the poem, "The Normal," carved above Edens Hall's entry.
BELLINGHAM - Edens Hall is gutted and dusty. But for most of Western Washington University's life, it has been the heart of this campus.
Anything imperfect looks a bit out of place at Western. It's almost a consensus that this is the most beautiful place in the state to get a degree.
Bellingham Bay lies on the west side, with the San Juan Islands sprinkled beyond. The Canadian Cascades with their powdery peaks beckon from the north while Sehome Hill Arboretum and Mount Baker adorn the eastern view.
Students have been studying and learning here for a 100 years, and this week the school celebrates its centennial. Most of the students have been women, and for them Edens was home.
Western was founded in 1893 as State Normal School, a training college for teachers. The campus' two oldest buildings still stand - Old Main, which housed WWU's original administration, and Edens Hall, the women's Greek Revival-style dormitory, where students traditionally pose for photos.
Edens was the original women's quarters. During World War II, Edens was the hub of the campus. Practically all the men had gone to war and nearly all the students on campus were women.
As Western celebrates this week, alumni talk about the history of the campus and its evolution from a small school that pumped out teachers into a comprehensive university, consistently ranked as one of the top in the West by U.S. News and World Report. More than 10,150 students attend Western's seven colleges. As in the past, women students outnumber men, 5,661 to 4,489.
Until the 1940s, women were not expected to be campus leaders. They were expected to be only "ladies." That changed during the war, when they became the campus' movers and shakers. Many called themselves the Fabulous Fortiers.
Western alumna Lucille Currie says her father was ribbed by his friends for allowing her to attend college. She had won a scholarship to Normal School.
"Girls didn't do this," Currie said. "They told him it was a waste of time for me to go to college because I was going to get married and have children anyhow. My father didn't pay attention. He sent me anyway."
The oldest of three children, Currie was the first in her family to attend college. She lived in Edens Hall, where she quickly made friends with other women from throughout the state and country.
In her first week, she found herself writing for Western's weekly student paper, The Collegian. Desperate for writers, the editor spotted her walking past the paper's office and recruited her to write a first-person account of her first year on campus.
"I wouldn't have had the chance before the war," Currie said. "There wasn't a woman editor until a year before I came on board. In the past, it was all fellows. We took advantage of the time."
Currie was hooked and wrote frequently. She became editor in her sophomore year.
Unlike other students on campus, Currie didn't want a teacher's certificate. She wanted a sociology degree.
"I was the misfit; the last thing I wanted to be was a teacher," said Currie, who graduated in 1948 and became a case worker for the King County welfare department.
Other Edens Hall residents, such as 1947 graduate Mary Burke, knew she was going to college. Her brother and sister were enrolled at the University of Washington. She chose Western.
"Women didn't become lawyers back then," Burke said. "Nobody I knew at Edens was going to be an engineer. Now my niece is an engineer. Fifty years ago, nobody thought a woman could do that."
Burke wanted not only to teach but to become an administrator.
"A lot of us thought we could set the world on fire in education," Burke said. "We were stronger in a lot of ways than others in the past. Maybe that's what made Edens feel special."
Edens was also very strict. Men were not allowed beyond the receiving room. Lights were out and doors were locked by 10 every week night and midnight on weekends.
To make sure students were in bed, proctors went door to door. There was only one telephone per floor, so there was precious little time for private conversations.
Wednesday was formal dinner night, when everyone dressed up. All the women hurried to make it to dinner on time, because latecomers had to sit with house mother and Dean of Women Lorraine Powers, who ruled with an iron fist.
Receptions were held in the Blue Room, the dorm's social room where the Fabulous Fortiers danced and decorated the Christmas tree near a roaring fire. There was an annual dramatic reading of "A Christmas Carol."
There was time for rowdiness at Edens. Residents short-sheeted each other, tore down snowy hills on dinner trays and cooked soup in the marble-lined bathrooms when lights went out.
Adventurous ones snuck out at night through the fire escapes. Those whose bedrooms were closest to the fire escapes tied string to their ankles so they could be awakened to let the adventurers in.
Cheryl Bickford was student president at Edens and was also elected to the school's board of control, Normal's governing body.
Bickford recalls how she and other friends celebrated before graduation by sneaking to a night picnic at Lake Whatcom. They missed curfew and had to return via fire escape.
One problem, though - no one was around to open the window.
"We were in pretty serious trouble," Bickford said. "We eventually got caught and they wanted to hold us back from graduation. But we got away."
When her daughter enrolled at Western in 1969, Lucille Currie returned to the campus and pointed out where she had lived in Edens.
For mother and daughter, Edens was worlds apart as far as what a woman can do.
Currie's daughter, Laurel Oates, pursued a degree in psychology, a rare choice in the 1940s for a woman. Oates became an attorney and is now the director of legal writing at the University of Puget Sound.
"My mother's generation was the starting point for women on campus. The first step is always the hardest. Instead of being told what to do, they made career choices," Oates said.
Edens shut down as a dormitory in 1970. The 70-year-old building stands empty, stripped of its wallpaper and fixtures, waiting for remodeling in June.
University officials promise that Edens will be restored. It will reopen next year as a co-ed dorm, where men will be allowed beyond the receiving room and women will be allowed to pursue any degree they want.