100 Years of History – By Carol Pelosi
We have had a few diversions in the last few weeks in the chronology of Wake Forest history, but we left off in 1940 with the strict Baptists on the town board renting the new Community House to fraternities for – gasp! – dances.
Dancing was … well, I’m not going to repeat all the jokes about Baptists and dancing. If you don’t know them, find a Baptist and ask. Baptists might have been concerned about, even opposed to, Dr. William Poteat’s teaching of evolution, but they loved Dr. Billy and he explained it to them. The communal Baptist uprising across the state – almost the next thing to a march on the campus – only happened in 1936 when the college trustees toyed with the idea of allowing dancing in one of those hallowed halls.
And it was not only college men and their dates who were dancing, it was the boys and girls of Wake Forest. Louise Williams, known as Miss Lou who grew up in Crenshaw Manor, rented the small room at the Community House to give dance lessons. When she began charging 25 cents a lesson, John Wooten remembers, he had to stop because his family could not afford it. The Depression lingered, and Miss Lou, as she was in many ways, was a harbinger of change.
There were other cultural clashes, some of them because of the town’s Sunday laws that set out what businesses could operate and at what hours on a Sunday.
Those college men and the townspeople too loved their movies. W.L. Glover, who operated the Forest Theatre where Fidelity Bank now stands on South White Street, wanted to show “The Dictator,” Charlie Chaplin’s satire about Adolf Hitler, on Sunday, April 20, 1941. The difficulty was the town banned movies on Sundays.
No problem. The town board rescinded the ban on movies the week before Glover’s showing, then reinstituted the ban a month later. In fact, although the particular movies were not named, the board lifted the ban twice more before they decided in 1942 that movies could be screened on any Sunday.
There were surprisingly few references to World War II in the town board minutes. Grady S. Patterson, the college registrar and a Faculty Avenue resident, urged the board to help with the collection and salvage of waste paper. The board also agreed to truck in sewing machines for Red Cross ladies to use, and the USO was allowed to use the Community House for free during the duration of the war. There you go, dancing again. There were special swimming pool hours for enlisted men, officers and their “wives and lady friends.”
After Pearl Harbor, the campus began emptying as the students enlisted. In a move to keep some enrollment, in January, 1942, the trustees voted to admit women for their junior and senior years “on the same standing as men for the duration of the war.” The phrase about the duration was later struck out.
The college had been edging toward admitting women for years. Women had been allowed to attend law school classes for some time, but it was not until 1927 that women could be admitted to work for professional degrees in medicine and law and a master’s degree.
In 1930 it was agreed women could attend summer school classes to work toward a degree – teachers had been attending a special summer school on campus since 1897 – and also in 1930 professors’ daughters could attend Wake Forest College for their junior and senior college years. In 1940, it was agreed professor’s daughters could work at degrees for all four of their college years.
There was a lot of discrimination in allowing only professors’ daughters. In 1932 the Wake Forest Town Board appealed to the college trustees, begging that girls who were graduating from the town high school be allowed to attend the college since the Depression and bank failures would make college impossible for them otherwise. The trustees refused.
In 1942, the college also became the home of the Army Finance School, which took over Miss Jo’s cafeteria on Wingate Street for the duration and Simmons Hall on North Avenue, built in 1937 to house the college fraternities.
The young women were supposed to be housed at Simmons, but instead found room and board at one of the Powell houses on Faculty Avenue.
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