Making Way for Men
By Edie Gross
The way Allan Jenkins ’75 remembers it, water was cascading down the staircase of Trench Hill when Dean of Students Mildred Droste walked in unannounced, surveyed the flood, then turned around and walked out without saying a word.
That’s pretty much how Richard Hasty ’76 remembers it, too.
And Alan Schwalbe ’77.
As for Mildred Droste, well, she’s done her best to try to forget what some of Mary Washington’s first male residents put her through.
Beginning in 1970, men were allowed to enroll as full-time students at the school for the first time since the GI Bill permitted it at the end of World War II. But only a handful ever lived on campus – and when they did, it was in apartments here and there, rather than in a dorm.
That changed when about a dozen young men moved into Trench Hill, a stately old home across the street from the Brompton mansion. Their fun-loving pranks would stir up the social scene during their stay at Mary Washington. But the men, who together would become known as the “Trench Hill gang,” would forever alter the dynamics of campus life.
“You would not believe some of the things those boys would think to do,” said Droste, now retired and living in Orange County. “There were times I could’ve killed them.”
The water battles – weapons ranged from water balloons and garden hoses to fire extinguishers and trash cans filled to the brim – were legendary. So were the streaking incidents. And the occasional bag of flaming poo.
“They didn’t quite know what to make of us,” said David Kitterman ’76. “Pranks were prominent.”
“We caused a fair bit of havoc,” said Schwalbe, now an attorney in New Jersey.
He was an 18-year-old freshman in the fall of 1972, when Mary Washington College designated Trench Hill as its first male dorm.
Schwalbe, who grew up in New Jersey, had picked Mary Washington at random from a book of colleges. He had no idea the school had only recently gone coed until a mass of women showed up outside the house to serenade the newcomers on the first day of classes.
“I turned to our ‘dorm mother,’ who was a guy named Marty [Manch ’75], and said, ‘What’s going on?’ ” Schwalbe recalled. “He sat me down and said, ‘You don’t know?’”
Their reception was a mixed one, the men recalled. Before they got there, Trench Hill had been an elite dorm reserved for the school’s best students, and some women resented giving it up.
This small batch of men had a housekeeper to go along with the house. They got seconds in the dining hall when others couldn’t. They received new athletic equipment because the older items were made for women.
Plus, they were an oddity. Only about 50 of the 2,250 students who attended Mary Washington that fall were men.
Hasty, a Spotsylvania resident who works at Mary Washington Hospital, remembers his first trip to Seacobeck for lunch with his dorm-mates.
“You could’ve heard a pin drop,” he said. “All these girls’ heads turned, and they just stared at us and didn’t say a word. It was really intimidating.”
Added Schwalbe: “It was almost like a fishbowl. You knew you were being looked at – and not always with admiration.”
As a result, the guys learned to rely on one another. Members of the Trench Hill gang bonded like fraternity brothers, Hasty said.
“Unlike, say, a fraternity where the girls are dying to see you, it was a fraternity where they don’t want you there,” he chuckled. “It’s not like we were Kappa Sig coming from U.Va.”
The men spent a good deal of time with one another, much of it testing the bonds of friendship.
It wasn’t uncommon for one of them to walk out of his room in the morning, only to be drenched by a bucket of water that had been propped over the door. Or to be sprayed by a bag of shaving cream shoved under the door.
And woe to the Trench Hill resident who fell asleep first. There’s a good chance one of his pals would be lying in wait beneath his bed to grab him just as he drifted off.
“It was all good-natured,” said Schwalbe, who was once hung over a staircase railing by his ankles.
The group eventually made friends with quite a few of the women on campus, inviting them to Trench Hill for parties where Hasty performed his popular Alice Cooper routine. He’d scoot the girls out the back door after curfew so they wouldn’t be spotted by security patrol.
“I can’t remember what the [visitation] policy was,” said Jenkins, now a hydrogeologist in Tennessee. “The effective policy was ‘none.’”
In winter, the guys would ski down the grassy hill outside their home to Sunken Road. And in summer, they’d coast down it in a buddy’s convertible – top down, lights off.
“It was like a roller coaster,” Jenkins said.
The group’s high jinks continued outside of Trench Hill as well. Jenkins recalled several of the guys piling into the bed of the pickup truck of student Emmett Snead ’76, then mooning students as they drove through campus.
When they had a good-sized audience, they pulled out the fire extinguishers.
“We sucked everybody in – and then we let ’em have it with those extinguishers,” Jenkins said. “It was a hoot.”
Streaking was popular on college campuses then – in 1974, the University of Georgia set a record for most participants with more than 1,500 people running nude through campus.
The Mary Washington men knew they probably couldn’t achieve that kind of turnout. But they considered trying to set a record for longest run, Schwalbe said. However, word of their aspirations leaked. On the day of the run, about a half dozen of them sprinted nude from William Street to Ball Circle – only to be confronted by hundreds of giggling women.
“We all wore ski masks but it didn’t really help,” Schwalbe said. “Suddenly there were lights going on and flashes going off, and they started chasing us. We took off.”
What they lacked in numbers, they more than made up for in speed, he said.
After two years at Trench Hill, the men moved into dorms, including Madison and Westmoreland, on the main campus. Fitting in those first few years was tough, but each man said he thoroughly enjoyed his experience at Mary Washington – the small classes, warm professors, and dynamic student body.
Even Droste, an instructor at the school for 30 years and dean of students from 1969 to 1975, said she grew to regard several members of the Trench Hill gang as friends.
“Once they realized I was serious – yet I had a sense of humor and kidded them about things – we got along just fine,” she said. “We finally got to the point where we understood each other.”
Many of the original Trench Hill residents still spend time together, though the pranks have dropped off considerably.
“We’re older now,” Schwalbe said. “I have a son. I’m thinking, ‘I hope you have as much fun as I did – but I hope you don’t do all the things I did.’”
Edie Gross is an adjunct instructor of journalism at UMW.