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What Was Your Favorite Place on Campus and Why?

In the fall/winter 2021 issue of Think, we asked alumni: What was your favorite place on campus and why?

We received numerous responses via email and Facebook, including the following:

Sara Althouse (GRS ’68, romance languages; LYS ’73) said a favorite place was Guilford House, then a residence hall where she and other women graduate students lived. The house mother lived on the first floor; Althouse (whose maiden name was Voss) lived on the second. “Some of the girls, myself included, would gather in the lounge to watch Star Trek,” Althouse wrote.

[Left], Althouse, with her father, Durand Voss, on campus in 1966. “Of course, he could not come up to see my room in Guilford House as no men were allowed upstairs,” she recalled.

The favorite place for Arthur Ellis (ADL ’72), was “a cluttered warren of basement rooms with threadbare carpet, beat-up furniture and only occasional visits from cleaning staff.

“It was—and still is—the home of WRUW-FM,” he wrote, “a home to a group of students dedicated to informing and entertaining all within reach of a meager transmitter. My various roles, including station manager, inspired my choice of career and eventually led to my current position as senior vice president and chief marketing officer for public media powerhouse WHYY in Philadelphia.

“I visited the campus a few years ago, he added, “and was pleased to see that the basement of Mather Memorial has not improved much over the years. Why change a good thing?”

Ellis is pictured [below] in 1972, when he was WRUW’s general manager.

Mark Swartz (LAW ’79) said his favorite place was the third floor of Clarke Tower, where he lived for two years and felt like he was in a TV series from his childhood: Think My Three Sons or The Brady Bunch. His reason? Everyone was attractive, happy “and encouraging of each other, and it just seemed like a really perfect ‘neighborhood’ that you weren’t likely to see in
reality.”

Tom Kerr (WRC ’82) loved Eldred Theater. “I worked on over 30 shows there either as an actor or technician. Theater is a collaborative art, and my time at Eldred taught me to work well in teams.” He is pictured above on the right, in a 1981 production of Dream Girl.

Veronica Coleman Glogowski (WRC ’84, DEN ’87) wrote that Mather Dance Center “was an escape from the craziness of a heavy science course load. A chance to move, create and think about something else.”

The photo of her on the right is from a CWRU admissions brochure from the early 1980s.

Todd Flyr (CWR ’96, GRS ’96, computer science): “... there used to be a wooden street back around Hessler… Also, the Elephant Stairs helped me lose 35 pounds one semester and lower my resting heart rate to close to 50 [beats per minutes].”

Michael Boss (CWR ’20) said he has many happy memories of the John D. Rockefeller Physics Building from his undergraduate years through today, “including my favorite wedding photos,” taken after he and his wife were married at Amasa Stone Chapel on campus. He said the building embodies his CWRU experience “and has so many lovable features, from the names of famous scientists, the memorable gargoyles (especially for those who remember the big snowstorm of ’96), the wide staircase leading upstairs, and the classic lecture hall on the third floor. I can’t come to campus and not visit Rockefeller, stopping by to say hello to the faculty who mentored me.”

Image 04550, CWRU Archives