Covers Contents - Past Issues - Wake Forest University

the College subdivided a large tractsouth of campus and sold the lots tofaculty and staff. The first five housesbuilt by developer Jack Kesler (whosedaughter married longtime physicsprofessor Howard Shields) were soldto Jasper Memory, O.C. Bradbury, registrarGrady Patterson, H. BroadusJones, and Henry Stroupe of history.Stroupe, who taught his first course atWake Forest as a senior in 1935 underthe auspices of a New Deal programand joined the faculty full time in1946, taught Southern history andserved as founding dean of theDivision of Graduate Studies from1961 until his retirement in 1984.“After the front yard was graded, wehad a mess of red dirt,” recalls Stroupe,now ninety-one. “You couldn’t comeinto the house without tracking redmud everywhere. The day we movedin, the welcoming committee, whichwas chaired by the president of SalemCollege, served us lunch. You mightsay it rolled out the red carpet for us,literally as well as figuratively.”To further stabilize and sustain thecommunity, the College brought alongWake Forest Baptist Church and itspopular pastor (and college chaplain),J. Glenn Blackburn. “The move wasone of the saddest events of my life,but it was nice to know we wouldhave our same neighbors,” says BeulahRaynor. “And it helped that we broughtour church with us.” The same departmentalconviviality that characterizedthe Old Campus continued on the new.For a good while after he arrived atWake Forest in 1961, history professorJ. Edwin Hendricks, along with hisfellow newcomers, would be taken tothe “Pit” for coffee and conversationevery morning at ten by Forrest W.Clonts, who had been a member ofthe department since the twenties.But across the years, as turnover andSEPTEMBER 2006 27