"Skins may differ, but affection dwells in white and black the same." - William Cowper

My Two Years as a Tri-Delt

As I ponder 86 years of living I realize that I have had a wide variety of experiences that have my life highly interesting. One of those was the fact that I lived for two years in the Delta Delta Delta sorority house at 901 Richmond in Columbia. In the late summer of 1941, with $250 in the bank and a $250 Sears Roebuck Scholarship, I hitched a ride to Columbia two weeks before school started to find a job to earn living money as a student. I found a rooming house and began to walk the streets asking for work. I wandered into what I came to know as “Greek Town” and the maid at the Tri-Delt Sorority house hired me to mow the lawn and cultivate the shrubs. Apparently I did a good job, for she then had me do som painting and other odd jobs. The housemother came and asked me if I would like to move in as house-boy. I would live in the basement, fire the furnace and water heater, make salads, wash dishes, serve meals, and do whatever needed to be done. That meant free room and board, so I took the job.

The maid, Hattie Miller, and the cook, Beulah Gray, were black persons. I had grown up in an all white area of Southwest Missouri and had seen black persons only at a distance. I will always be grateful to both of them, for they were wonderful persons and treated me with love and respect. It was my privilege to have a close relationship with them and their families for the two years I worked there. This, I think, colored my relationship with persons we now call African American.

Once the girls move in I was told that I was expected to help serve lemonade and pastries at “rush parties.” I had no idea what they were, but I put on my little white monkey coat and followed directions. Another student, Toby, was there to help me. Several parties a day were held and we began to run out of drinking straws. Beulah and Hattie were gone, so Toby and I began to wash the straws between servings. But some had lipstick on them that would not come off, so we took a pair of scissors and cut them off. When they became too short to reach the top of the glass we discarded them. About that time Beulah came back and saw what we were doing. First she rolled with laughter, then cussed us out, and sent Toby off to the drugstore for more straws.

Living with 65 college girls overhead was a very new kind of experience for me. I had one brother and no sisters. I had grown up poor and they were all from affluent homes. But it was not their lifestyle that shocked me so much as the fact that they wasted so much food. They wanted and got the best, but often just nibbled at it and we threw it away. I started taking them the smaller steaks and keeping the big one for myself until Beulah caught me.

Hairpins were in vogue then, and they kept me running in and out of the girls bathrooms. Each of the two dorm floors had one bathroom with a “gang” shower and six laboratories. Hairpins would get into the drains, clog with hair, and Hattie would say, “Melvin, there are two clogged drains on the second floor and three on the third.” After a bit of experience, I had my response down to a routine. I grabbed my bucket and two wrenches, yelled, “Man on second,” and went to work. In a couple of minutes I could remove the catch pipe, dump the hairpins and gunk, and put it all back in order. I did have some interesting times when girls did not hear me call out, “Man on second.”

I had a nice little apartment, the best of food and a four hour a day job at the University

bookstore for spending money, making 35 cents per hour. What more could one want?