Due south of the Communication Building was a tiny, architectural wonder called College Memorial Library. With such a generic name came the assumption that it was a generic building. Those beliefs were not far from the truth, as during my time on campus it did little to attract attention. It actually was a very interesting structure, though it did look like a miniature sandstone-colored gumdrop, composed of a rotunda with some wistfully unfinished appendages.
It was famously built in 1899, with “modest additions” hurriedly completed over the next two years. These additions were necessities because the then-president (an odd duck named Caldwell) realized that the century would be over shortly and he wished for another building on his fledgling campus; in short, what would end up as the last building built in the nineteenth century. Why not a separate library, he asked? Why not, was the reply. Plans were scraped together in the tenth hour and a wandering artist – some sort of woodcarver, sculptor, or what have you – was engaged to cobble together Caldwell’s wishes. Old tales were told that this nameless artist (later called “Quistopher” in unofficial texts) used some sort of black magic to complete his project, but these are conjecture and no one believes in magic anyway (let us not be silly). In actuality, Quis only completed the shell of the new library, thus fulfilling Caldwell’s wish to have “another building on his fledgling campus” before the end of the year. It was officially dedicated in 1899, though Caldwell vehemently denied the governing board access inside, claiming it was not “a public facility.”
Following the ceremony, the early months of 1900 were spent figuring out how to construct an interior to match the grandiose exterior. When through, College Library re-opened in 1901 and continued in its designated role until the early 1920s, when the larger replacement library opened on the north end of the quadrangle. Maintaining the name “College Library” on the outer wall of the building, the original college library went through a series of uses that had little to do with Caldwell's intended use: general classroom space, random administrative offices, unwanted equipment storage, unsavory dining hall, improperly-ventilated science laboratory, undersized performance space for the newly created drama department, over-sized gallery space for the uninspired art department, and, by the 1970s, the first broadcast studio space for the campus radio and television stations.
Purportedly the rotunda room of the library had great acoustics to make for studio space. I don’t know: I only visited the library a few times during a history tour, long after the Communication Building had been built and the library building had somehow returned to its original usage, now a "special collections" holding area. It was hard envisioning the building as anything other than a library, much like President Caldwell would have had he lived that long.
One of the undergraduate instructors, a scatterbrained woman named Mrs. Mavis Ganslape, had taught some of the ancestral communication courses in the library, back when the courses were part of some other curriculum (like drama or theater or...). This was odd, since some people said she looked older than the library. I kid, but so went the criticisms of my peers. Back in her heydays, the radio station she supposedly help staff was nothing more than a low-watt studio stuck in mere closet-sized space. Student DJs reportedly sat in bucket seats and played nothing more than scratchy warped pieces of vinyl featuring classical, jazz, and prototypical rock...and it’s anyone’s guess how the audience took to it. Evidently Ganslape thought little of the jazz, rock, and other popular styles back then, based on her annoyed reactions to the current jaw-weary shams in all the different varieties during my time on campus.
Anyway, I first encountered this mysterious blue-haired woman my freshman year and was admittedly somewhat nervous of her omnipresent wrinkly scowl, pointed features, and prickled voice. I didn’t know what she did in the Communication Building, other than appear out of nowhere at the most inopportune times – such as stepping out of her shadowy office at one end of a darkened hall just as I entered from the opposite end. Her saggy eyes, vividly shown through her crystal clear glasses, crossly examined me as our paths briefly crossed. When I asked around, I was told she taught the Media Presentation course, a second-year class that was more known for being outlandishly outdated than anything else.
Outdated and outlandish as the library where she originally taught, no doubt. So that was what I had to look forward to. I couldn’t wait....
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Library Nation
(the evil tambourines/Al Larsen)
The Evil Tambourines
From the album Library Nation
1999
