Campus Changes
Clyda Weeks Lutz talks about the many changes in education and to the NC State campus since she was student in the early 1960s.
Interview on 2012-09-26 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Like I say, the handheld calculator, which you can buy at any drugstore or anything for a dollar,
was about a hundred dollars then. It had no functions but addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.
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That was what it was, but that was so big. I mean people were so excited about that
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because we were used to using a slide rule, and all of a sudden we had something that-.
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But a hundred dollars in the '60s was a huge amount of money. Well you know how technology is;
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it starts out high and as it's been here awhile the prices go down, down, down. So that's the first thing I see.
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Of course seeing girls on campus, I mean to walk out and see all these girls walking across campus is like,
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this is not the same place that I went to school. [Laughs] And then all the one-way streets on this campus too.
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It was like, good grief. It was like going through a maze to get here today because I was coming from east on Hillsborough St.
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and for me to finally figure out how to get to come back and head towards east, it was like, okay.
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Even though I'm very familiar with the area I just have not kept up with the one-way streets.
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So you see things like that, and all the barriers that you can't drive anywhere you want to on campus without passes.
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And of course all the athletic events were held on campus. I think what was our football stadium is now a parking lot.
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My classes were in the field house of old Riddick Stadium and we sat right there on the railroad tracks,
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and so as the trains would come through the professors would just have to stop.
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I mean the building moved with the trains going through. And of course the basketball games were played at Reynolds Coliseum.
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So everything was confined right here on campus. The married student housing area, that was new while we were here.
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I can remember far back when I was a child when from here west, between here and the textile building,
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was prefabricated houses that were built after the Second World War, so those were finally replaced with the married student housing.
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We tried to get into that but we couldn't get in or we would have stayed out there,
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but it was new and we didn't get our application in, in time. I don't think there was anything
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to do with the campus across Western Blvd. at that time. Now the dairy farm, out where the veterinary school is,
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that was there, I remember that, and there were some farm extensions, one in Clayton and different places,
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but as far as classes being held, I don't think there was anything across Western Blvd. at the time.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.