Dominican College of San Rafael - Firebrand Yearbook (San Rafael, CA)

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De Young children used as a play house. The college girls were too old to use it as a play house, so for a long time it stood empty. Then Theodore Maynard, the poet and novelist, came here to teach and he used the little house as a retreat in which he wrote his poems and stories. When Mr. Maynard left, the house again fell into disuse, but was soon given to the staffs of the Meadowlark and Firebrand, who established within its walls a sacred literary domain. A shingle was hung out and the small building was named I ' e Think Shop, but it was commonly known as The Meadowlark House. For many a day the grove rang out with the merry voices of the girls, and resounded with the talk at literary teas. But there came a day when the staff rooms were moved into Guzman and the Meadowlark House became the Post Office, a scene of daily joy or disappointment. If you should chance to wander that way some day you will still see a little letter box, the only remaining sign of the past, for the playhouse of the De Youngs is no v known simply as The Smoke House . If you walk away from the Grove, down the banks of the stream and across the bridge, you come to a brown rustic building which shelters the chemistry classes. The chemistry building was completed in nineteen hundred and twenty, and in the final cere- 100

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begin our tales with Once upon a time at Dominican College , because these are tales about the times when our school was very young. The first house on the college campus was Meadow- lands. It had been the home of the De Youngs when San Rafael was a fashionable suburb (you can read about that time in Kathleen Norris ' Sa urf rt) ' ' 5 C i (i) . On an August evening, nineteen-eighteen, fifteen young women met there in the Green Room and, seated in the tall, ladder-back chairs, ate their first college dinner at the long green table, now in Benin- casa. The walls above the green panels were calci- mined in a buff tint, very decorotis as beseemed a con- vent college in its infancy, but Sister Thomas, Sister Catherine Marie, and Sister Patrick knew that under- neath was a hidden treasure, so one day twenty years later they decided to investigate. Sister Patrick took a chisel and chipped away part of the plaster: there appeared a bright spot of color. The Sisters immedi- ately ordered all the plaster removed, and there, en- circling the walls of the room, was a fox hunt on a dewy May morning, painted in unfaded colors. Even today you can see that mural in which the ladies and gentlemen always ride and the fox is forever caught. From the balcony right outside the green room you can see the small building in a grove of trees which the 99

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mony everyone in the college laid a brick in the floor of the front porch. From the science building you can walk down Acacia Avenue to the front of Angelico Hall and vieXv the Spanish spruce tree, now grown so large, which was planted by the first graduating class in nineteen hundred and t v ' enty-t vo. It is a long walk from Angelico Hall to Edge Hill, but the Babcocks, who built Edge Hill, used to go up the avenue at a brisk trot in their horse-drawn car- riage. The Babcocks were very fond of dogs and they kept twenty dachshunds at Edge Hill. Legend has it that each dog had his o vn room, and you still can see the brass bar in the front window vhich was built for their leashes. There is even a rumor that you may stumble over the graveyard Avhere each dog has his o vn little tombstone. As you walk down a shady path in the present, re- member the days about a quarter of a centtiry after the time when the only taxi in San Rafael was a one- horse shay, when the ladies all wore bustles and big hats, and when Marin County was the playground of the most fashionable people in the West. College girls still vore their gym bloomers below their knees and Dominican College had only one building and five seniors . . . once upon a time. Barbara Alexander, ' 48 101