Where Have All the Mothers Gone?

The Source

Lots of things have changed on the I.C. campus and elsewhere since they booted me out with my diploma in 1971. Freshmen no longer have to wear beanies for their first six weeks, meal cards have been replaced by scannable pieces of plastic, male professors seldom wear ties, and they have boys and girls living in the same dormitories. . . a sure sign that the end of the world is near but we’re gonna love it ‘til it blows up. And gone, alas, is a longtime institution of many colleges, the dorm mother. These were ladies, a bit past their prime but still feisty, who lived in both the male and female dorms and provided an adult presence in the otherwise rowdy world of college. I know that both Mac and I.C. had them and they were very much a presence on the I.C. campus when I escaped. In fact, I was head resident in Gardner Hall during my senior year. It was a good gig, paying room and board in return for being on duty most days, throwing drunks out onto the lawn, cleaning up messes that made my underling dorm counselors queasy, and trying to keep our dorm mother happy. This was a big change for me to be in a position of authority instead of one of the troublemakers. Ellis and Pixley were the women’s dorms back then, and as a freshman and sophomore I spent many hours trying to figure out ways to sneak in the first floor windows. Boys were only allowed in the girls’ dorms during certain hours so we had to come up with alternate plans during the prohibited times. I walk by these dorms now and see young men brazenly walking in at all hours and I envy them, thinking back to the hours I spent trying to crawl in the back way. And it was the dorm mothers who rode herd on us and tried their best to make the system work. They lived on the first floor of each dorm in a small apartment barely bigger than a student’s room. Their doors were always open and they tended to sit in a position where they could see everyone coming in and out. She made the rules, but it was up to us, the head RA’s, to carry out the dirty work. Many nights found me waking to a knock at my door to find Miss Ballard standing there in her housecoat, hairnet, and slippers. “Ken, there’s a noise up on fourth floor.” “Miss Ballad, there’s always a noise up on fourth floor. That’s where we keep the animals.” “I know, but this noise is different. Please go check on it.” So I’d throw on my pants, climb the three flights, knock some heads, and go back to sleep. Illinois College had a knack for hiring dorm mothers with both acute hearing and wild imaginations so I made many trips up to fourth floor Gardner. Life wasn’t easy for these ladies and at the time I.C. had a president not known for fiscal generosity. Add to this the fact that the college-age years are some of the dumbest in our life and you have a job that no one in her right mind would take. Countless pranks were pulled on the various dorm mothers, none of which I can describe here since they were disgusting and involved many of the men who are now the movers and shakers in Jacksonville. Living on the salary of a retired teacher I’ve always kept this knowledge in my back pocket as a source of potential blackmail. If we’d had cell phone cameras back then I’d be rich today. And it’s interesting to note that in every case, these ladies were delicate creatures, generally diminutive in size and always well-dressed, well-spoken, and as pleasant as a senior citizen living in a building full of idiots could be. I often wondered why they took the job. Their same-age friends were no doubt golfing at the Country Club or having tea with their garden buddies while this stalwart band of sisters spent their days sniffing for marijuana and wondering who put all the Bud Lite cans on the lawn. I simply can’t imagine what sort of stuff they were made of but I suspect equal parts titanium and Valium. I have a friend, Erin, who’s a senior at I.C. When she was a freshman I naively asked her about her dorm mother. Erin said, “What’s that?” I told her those were ladies who kept order in the dormitories. She said, “Why?” “Uh. . . you know, to supervise us.” She said, “You’re kidding, right?” Geesh. I felt like putting on my bell-bottoms, Nehru jacket, and walking into the retirement home.