Growing up on a College Campus

Growing up on a College Campus

Ahhh, you’re thinking, this is a coming of age story. But it’s not.

Welcome to my world, you say, meaning you understand how I feel. But I wonder…

Do you really understand? There were only a few of us who grew up this way.

Did you play hide and seek under the administration building on a college campus? Were the fountains and walkways, benches and shrubbery your playground?

Did you ever walk into the Dean’s office or the President’s office, sure of your welcome, and say, “Hi Daddy”?

Did you sell Girl Scout cookies in the boys’ dorm? Man, those guys bought lots of cookies!

Did you take baton lessons from the college majorettes or ballet with college students?

Did you wear a frilly white dress with a crinoline and a wreath of flowers in your hair on May Day as you watched the Queen crowned?

Were sophomore, dormitory, and commencement common words in your vocabulary?

Did you spend hours upon hours in the college library with no papers to write, just for the sheer pleasure of getting to know Louisa May Alcott?

Did you get married in the college chapel at age 5?

Did you learn to swim in an indoor pool under the gym?

Were Founder’s Day, Parents’ Weekend, and May Day regular celebrations in your life?

Was your father ever burned in effigy by angry students?

Did you have students from faraway lands spend Christmas and Thanksgiving in your home because it was too far for them to go home?

Did you learn to butter one bite of a biscuit and which fork to use in the faculty dining room?

Did you get to rummage through the dorm rooms after the students had left for the summer, finding treasures of old makeup, cheap jewelry, and countless issues of Bride’s magazines?

If you grew up in a neighborhood where fathers went to work at different jobs, if you lived in the same house all the years that you were growing up, went to the same schools, and had the same friends, I envied you at times. Every time we moved to a different college, many things in my life changed. The constants were my family, our faith, and the fact that we were “faculty” – the college, whichever college it was at the time, was not just where my dad worked. It was central to our lives. “The college” was always home to me.