Guilford College - Quaker Yearbook (Greensboro, NC)

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Saturdays away from TV sports and Sundays after church are good times to work on pubhcations at Guilford College. New Garden Hall usually is pretty quiet. Concentration is easier, and if an article turns out really well, in your humble opinion, it ' s worth it to the old ego to know you have perservered when you could have been playing tennis or watching the Dallas Cowboys. So it was on the weekend of November 27-28. 1976. At 4 o ' clock on the afternoon of the 28th tlie account of Mary Men- denhall Hobbs and Mary Hobbs Hall was finished. The cover story ready for the typesetter. A good feeling. Checking it to make sure dates were correct. 1 chuckled again over the way Dorothy Gilbert Lloyd Thorne had described the curling iron fire in Mary Hobbs. Less than 24 hours later-between 10 and 10:30 a.m. on Monday. November 29-the heart stoppmg, stomach-churning call came. Mary Hobbs is on fire! The phone rang again before I could grab a camera. A friend on the newspaper wanted fire details as soon as possible. The weatlier had seemed mild earlier that day but now the wind was from the north and felt off the snowstorms of upstate New York. As 1 ran past Duke Memorial and the Library, I could barely see for all the smoke being blown my way. Circhng around toward the Urban Center, whose right side faces the rear of Mary Hobbs, the view was perfect-if frightening. Gray smoke was pouring from the eaves with obvious force, hke steam escaping from the rim of a pressure cooker with a stuck valve. It blanketed tJie campus toward Friendly Road and spread into the shopping MARY HOBBS IS ON FIRE! by Dave Owens area. Inside the Urban Center 1 used a secretary ' s phone to call the newspaper and inadvertently broke the news about the fire to perhaps the only person on campus or within earshot of a radio who didn ' t know it, and she witliin spitting distance of the com-

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motion. Lots of smoke but so far no blaze visible. I told tlie re- porter, who naturally began asking questions about Mary Hobbs history. For once, I had done my homework on the right subject; important dates flowed out and the reporter made her early dead- line. Returnmg to the scene 1 joined the ring of taces all different but all asking the same silent questions of how and why. all mir- roring the mutual feeling of helplessness. Man were crying, the Mary Hobbs girls. Standing to the north of the smoking building, the crowd shiv- ered in the damp, gray day and watched firemen mount their ladders and climb into danger. Some were chopping holes in the roof. Others kicked the windows out of the dormers and went inside with firehoses. Flames belched into view througli a dormer and 1 remember thinking that I wouldn ' t give a plug nickle for Mary Hobbs ' chances for survival. Save Mary Hobbs! indeed. Oh, for a simple little curtain fire, caught from a curling iron! Fortunately, almost all of the fire was confined to the attic and no one was injured. Unfortunately the blaze had been set. Arson. The following Friday morning, December 3, it was discovered that contents of a waste can in the women ' s rest room of Duke Memorial Hall had been dumped on the floor and set afire. At about 4 o ' clock the next morning, fire was found burning in trash dumped from a receptacle in the second-floor hallway of Shore Hall. Damage was zero in Duke, considered minor in Shore. But in Shore, where students were sleeping . . . Updating brielly: Fire department and college officials believe Mary Hobbs was not a total loss because partitions in the attic were removed last summer. (Tlie attic was converted to hving quarters in the 1940 ' s and taken out of use for residents 12 years ago.) If the partitions had still been there, firemen could not have fouglit from inside the attic. Although several offers of living space were received by the college, rooms were found for all Mary Hobbs residents on cam- pus, some in dormitories and some in empty Frazier Apartments. Campus security was doubled, personnel charged with check- ing all buildings more often and more thoroughly than ever. Residence halls formed Fire Watch brigades for night-time sur- veillance. Tlie roof of Mary Hobbs was repaired. Workmen removed the charred remains from the attic and dried out the plaster which suffered water damage during the fire figliting. Hobbs women moved their belongings back to their rooms just bet ' ore Christmas break and are living in the dormitory during spring semester. Like all i ' lle;jc Inuldings. Mar Hobbs is tuUy covered b ' fire insurance, and always has been. All residents of Mary Hobbs have been interviewed by fire department officials, not as suspects but as possible sources of information which might be helpful in solving the mystery of who set the fire. At press time no suspect had been charged. P.S. The annual Mary Hobbs Christmas Banquet was held as usual, and althougli it was in the walnut dining room of Founders and not at home, the food and fellowship were as fine as ever.