Late Night Gym
Judge Ronald E. Spivey describes his successful campaign to extend the hours of the Carmichael Gymnasium past 9 p.m.
Interview on 2014-12-15 00:00:00 -0500
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I think the gym closed at maybe 9:00 those days, and I always wondered why it didn't stay open later
00:00:06.129
because if you were studying and you were in the library or wherever it was nice to have a release to go play some ball for a few minutes maybe about 10:00, and if it closed at 9:00 you didn't have that opportunity.
00:00:15.812
So I'm like, well why couldn't it stay open till 11:00 or midnight, so that if you had been studying you could go out and do that.
00:00:23.683
Again we worked with the administration, and they of course had to look at staffing costs, again something that as a student I was not very concerned about.
00:00:33.458
I'm like, well, why can't you just leave it open? I'm not thinking about, okay, it has to be staffed, there has to be somebody there to make sure everything's taken care of.
00:00:41.353
But they looked at the issue and they decided: You know what? We can keep it open for a few more hours.
00:00:46.577
They were kind enough to do that for us and I think it was very valuable because it gave the students another outlet if they were studying,
00:00:54.634
or if they were not ones to go do other activities athletics was always there, and I certainly took advantage of that.
00:01:04.595
I was often in the gym when it closed down at closing hour, in there playing basketball. I loved that about the student experience.
00:01:12.629
Then when the gym closed I would go out back of Carmichael and play at the outdoor courts until 1:00 in the morning. But I thought that was, again, a quality-of-life issue for our students.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
