Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University
Norma Laughner Interview
June 26, 2008
Bailey Library, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania
Interviewed by Brady Crytzer
Transcribed by Annamae Mayer
Proofread and edited by Mark O‟Connor and Judy Silva
Reviewed and approved by Norma Laughner
BC: Explain your affiliation with the university.
NL: Well it‟s been a long affiliation. I was born and reared in Slippery Rock. One of those rare
birds. And so I grew up just taking the college for granted. It was just part of the atmosphere and
the environment. And my father always took me to the football games, even when I was a little
kid we‟d come up to the football game. And he never sat down he always stood along the
sidelines. And my mother worked here for many years, she was one of the people in the laundry
actually. So the college was part of our family life. And it was always assumed that I would go to
Slippery Rock. That was just taken for granted that [pause], that would be where I would go to
school for higher education. And I did, in 1944, which was a very low [enrollment] year for
Slippery Rock. The college was very, very tiny, like we had maybe 350 some students on
campus. And our freshman class was just very, very low. We had two boys in our freshman
class. Joe Funfur and “Hose” Barkley I think were their names. Oh dear. But the second semester
I was here it began to grow.
We got seven men, or nine men altogether. So Coach [N. Kerr] Thompson thought he better have
a football, or a baseball, basketball team. He had enough men he was gonna play basketball, so
we had a lot of fun with that. And mostly girls in their bobby socks and their swirl skirts and we
had a good time. But then came the deluge of men from World War II and that was wild. Those
fellows really put us on our merit. We just from there on had a good time for two years and all of
a sudden boom, uh 19 . . . I guess it was „46 it was the big bulge and [pause], you really had to
work for your grades then because those guys were in there to get an education and to get out.
My husband only spent like three years here and he had a full degree because he would just take
extra classes. And I got out a semester early too „cause I read the writing on the wall and had to
speed up, but that was my experience as a student here.
But [pause] when we came back from Pittsburgh where Carl was teaching and I was teaching at
Coraopolis. We came back to Slippery Rock in „55 and Dr. [Carle] Spotts had put in a word for
Carl when they needed good teachers. So we came back to Slippery Rock and for four years I
was a housewife raising children and I decided I better get to work too because I was losing it;
you know you kind of get used to talking baby talk. So I went up and I heard of a job that was
opened because one of the teachers had run her car under a flat bed and was very badly hurt. She
was in the speech field, which I was too. And in those days to be a speech teacher you had to
have experience in the public schools because it was a teachers college back then. So I had had
Coraopolis training in my field. So that stood me in good stead. So I was hired.
Dr. [Norman] Weisenfluh took me on and [pause] I had ten years, ten good years at Slippery
Rock as a speech instructor. And I had a full complement of classes but of course not the pay,
but I got the work and it was great. And I loved the kids, I loved the students. But there came a
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time when things got a little bit hairy for me and my kids were growing up and needed me and
we were going hither and yon for all kinds of things. I decided it was time to wrap it up. Ten
years was enough.
But during that ten years there were a lot of changes in Slippery Rock because it was the „sixties
and one of the things that I remember especially was the morning I had a full schedule on for
demonstration speeches and I had three people show up for class and I said, “What‟s going on
here? Where is the rest of this class?” And here there was a demonstration around Old Main for
women‟s rights and oh, just to lower all the codes they had around the school for various things.
You couldn‟t be out after midnight ya know and the boys couldn‟t be around the girl‟s dorms.
Oh there were just a lot of things that were real stipulations when you came to Slippery Rock and
the kids did not like that anymore, this was freedom days in the „sixties. So they were out there
demonstrating and I said “Oh,” and the next day there was about seven in class and I thought,
“Well the worst of it may be over.” And they had the Pittsburgh Press up here; everybody was
here photographing, building it up like it was a big deal they were demonstrating but they were
demonstrating all over the country, in those days that‟s what you did.
BC: We have listed the three eras of Slippery Rock; do you remember the transitions between
those periods?
NL: Yes, it was a teachers college when I was a student and when I started to teach it was still a
teachers college. But during that ten years it changed to a state college and I think they had to
bring in like the nursing school and maybe the ROTC [or] something. You had to have various
education fields rather than just teaching to become a state college, as I remember. But it was a
great day. I remember they had a little celebration about turning into a state college and they put
up a stone kind of a marker out at Kiester Road there saying this is a state college, Slippery Rock
State College, and we never saw “teachers college” again down on the main streets. We were a
state college and things did change and they were working towards university status and you
could tell things were changing pretty fast. And that‟s one of the other reasons that I retired after
ten years because I would have had to have go back and get my doctorate, and at my age I wasn‟t
willing to do that. And they were trying to upgrade the whole system in order to get to university
status. And all the teachers had to look to their degrees and see what they could do to upgrade
themselves. It was rather interesting.
BC: You mentioned your department—do you remember any changes your department went
through specifically during this period?
NL: We moved around. We went from Old Main into the Headland House and then over into
West Gym. We had offices in West Gym. We had [pause], I think Dr. Irv Kuhr as the last head
of our department that I worked under. And he was very knowledgeable. We had Dr. Ted
Walwik, who was a good man. We had very good teachers. They were all, you know, very good
in the field. But it was changing into more of a communications field rather than just straight
speech. Lecturing type speech for classrooms, it was changing more into, well the modern age
I‟d say with the television and various electronic things coming in, I think that the head changed,
and it did.
BC: Was the department supportive of the change?
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NL: Well I don‟t think I was there when it really changed a lot. I was gone I think by that time.
We just accepted whatever came; it wasn‟t that big of a deal to us.
BC: What buildings did you work in when you worked here?
NL: Well those were the buildings. Old Main, third floor Old Main was the speech area. And
Headland House was just a temporary thing. While they were building the new classrooms and
there were several being built in the „sixties. And then we went over into West Gym and we took
over West Gym first and second floors. We were on the second floors for offices and we had
nice offices up there even though it was small. We worked together very well and then we had
our classrooms downstairs.
BC: So they were adequate for the times?
NL: For the times it wasn‟t bad at all. We didn‟t have huge . . . we had big classes but we didn‟t
have huge classes. Like they did at Penn State and some of the other places we heard about when
the voice came back it was pretty horrendous. But we had adequate space for classrooms I think
for a while. But it was beginning to bulge when they got the new classrooms buildings in Spotts
and down on the lower campus.
BC: What was your first impression from being on the outside to being a student on campus?
Was it different?
NL: Oh yes, yes it was. Because I was a “townie.” We actually were called “townies” and we
had a room underneath Old Main that the townies met in and could socialize and eat their lunch
or whatever they wanted to do. But it was hard to break into the cliques that were established in
the actual college itself. And it took me a while to make friends with some of the ones who lived
in the dorms. And once you did, I mean, once you were accepted by the people in the dorms then
it was the best of both worlds. But for a while there when you were a freshman you thought, “Oh
am I ever gonna get to do what these girls are doing?” Cause it was altogether a different kind of
a life. And yet I had no restrictions and they had all these ten o‟clocks and twelve o‟clocks and
all these restrictions that [were] not placed on me by my family.
BC: So you lived at home? It was not mandatory to live in the dorms?
NL: I lived on Elm Street. Oh no, no, no never. In fact there were houses around who just took
woman students. One right directly across from Old Main, [the] woman took only female
students. A woman who lived across the street from us on Elm Street took only women students.
And some took only men; my aunt on Elm Street took male students in her third floor. It was
rather interesting when there weren‟t enough rooms up here. You had students all over town.
BC: What changes did you see for the better or the worse?
NL: Right. Oh yeah. In fact I worked on a committee with Maggie Meise and Marie McKay.
That was one of the things I did when I was teaching. I worked on the committee to save the
Chapel, because it was such a beautiful building and it had such good memories for everybody in
town. We had our first movie theatre [that] was in the Chapel and we would go up to that when

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we were just kids and we would sneak in; things like that. And all those memories. And we had
vespers, still had vespers when I was a freshman.
That meant you had to come to Sunday night service so many times a month I think it was. And I
sang in the choir, I always was a singer. So I sang in the vesper choir, and it was no chore for me,
and that‟s how I met my husband. He saw me coming out of vesper choir and hailed me one
night and that was a long story. But that, yeah, we had “save the Chapel” and the big alumni
push, we wanted to keep that building so badly. But they found with a state inspection that there
were termites, it was just termite-ridden I guess and it was not safe. That was the story anyhow,
we never quite believed it, but that was the story and they didn‟t want to save the Chapel. And
they came and looked at it many times but no, we sent out mailings and we tried to get people to
rally around but there weren‟t that many alumni who were interested really in that. We sent one
mailing after another to them but couldn‟t get that Chapel saved, so it‟s gone. They used to have
lovely ceremonies with their graduations. They would walk up the Long Walk, all the teachers in
their robes and so forth, walk up the Long Walk into the Chapel. And that was just kind of
something that lingers in your mind.
BC: Any talk or attempt to rebuild it? Did they say it was going to be a parking lot?
NL: They told us all kinds of stories. There was going to be a little chapel built in the middle of
the lower campus that was to be bricks from the old chapel and the stained glass windows were
saved; well they were actually saved and we‟ve used them you know, in the alumni section of the
union. That one room that you go into, it‟s like a reception room, before you went to the
university union. Those stained glass windows are all from the old Chapel and in the alumni
house they have the old windows from the Chapel. So a few things were saved, wasn‟t like
saving the building, but it was something.
Let‟s see, what else? Was there anything else? But that was the one I was most involved with
because I was secretary for the alumni for twenty-three years. Maggie Meise was the treasurer
and Marie McKay was our staunch registrar. Knew every student by name, could tell you what
they had done and knew if you needed a few more credits to graduate, she could tell you
everything. She was a great girl, Marie McKay.
BC: Campus activities you were involved in? Obviously the Chapel . . . .
NL: Yeah, alumni and vesper choir I was always in as a student but even later I sang with them.
Let‟s see. They wanted me to chaperone a sorority when I was teaching but I had too many
things on the docket. I went over and talked to Dr. Weisenfluh and he said, “Oh that‟s alright.
We‟ll find somebody.” He was a great guy.
BC: What do you consider your accomplishments as a student and as a teacher at Slippery Rock?
NL: It gave me a great base because as a . . . even in the elementary and secondary school we
had teachers from the college teaching us. They were affiliated both places so we would have
people who taught history over here come and teach history in high school, English over here
teach English in high school. A lot of them traveled back and forth. My education, I must say,
was an excellent education. I didn‟t always take advantage of it the way I should, but I was in the
upper fifth in the class so I felt like I had done something in high school. Well then in college I
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knew all of those teachers, so that was a nice start too. I could talk with them if I needed
counseling. Matilda Bailey was a great help to me. I was in English and Matilda Bailey was a
great help. Dr. Spotts was a wonderful help. And I think that probably when I went to Pitt [the
University of Pittsburgh] I had no trouble at all at Pitt and I kind of just breezed through courses
there and I just felt it was because my Slippery Rock training was really good.
BC: Specific memories of Matilda Bailey?
NL: Oh yes, they‟re both dead, so I can talk about them. Oh dear. This one boy, who went into
the service, never graduated. Went into the service when he was a junior I think, I don‟t know
how he did that, but he was asleep in class one day and Matilda came in and he was snoring
away and [pause] classes changed and he was still snoring away. And Matilda said, “Shh, just
come in quietly.” We all just tip-toed in ya know, and Howard was sitting there and he woke up
about two-thirds of the way through the class and he did have a fit. And Matilda said, “Now you
see what happens to people who sleep through class.” Oh, she was a real wonderful person.
BC: What did she teach?
NL: She was an English teacher. And she wrote a great textbook too. Yeah, she was a writer and
made a name for herself. And she came back here as a dollar-a-year person for a while just
because she liked Slippery Rock and because they needed somebody. She said I‟ll come back
and took a “buck” a year. She didn‟t need the money, she was a published author by that time.
Wonderful person. We had pulled some good people in during her time too. Vincent Price [the
film actor]; I remember we went to dinner one day with Vincent Price. She and the speech
department had helped to get him on campus so I was invited as a speech teacher. And it was
very interesting. He was quite a man.
BC: Did you go somewhere local to eat?
NL: Oh we were in Weisenfluh.
BC: As a teacher, best or worst moments?
NL: I think I told you the one where I only had three people in class one day. That was one of the
worst things that I think happened to me.
BC: Did you still teach that class?
NL: No! I didn‟t even try. Because when you give a demonstration speech you have to have an
audience you know, and you have to have feedback. And you couldn‟t tell with two other people
in class what kind of speech you were getting or what kind of feedback you had so I said “Just go
home and meet tomorrow.” And then there were seven so we had class with seven. I‟m trying to
think, I think just seeing my students do so well. And I kept in touch with many of them after
they left. I think just knowing they were doing so well made me feel good.
BC: How many presidents were you here for? Who were they, and do you remember anything
about their personalities?

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NL: Dr. [Dale] Houk and his family were here when I was a freshman. [Pause] we had . . . in
those days you had to go down a reception line, when you were a freshman and meet all the
faculty and the president‟s wife; everybody was in long dresses and tuxedos, and we were in
long dresses. It was a very formal affair, formal occasion. And Dr. Houk was very, very nice to
everybody. He was always very receptive to the students. And his family—he had a nice family.
Dr. [John] Entz I remember a little better because I was still in high school but he was traveling
around here with his little dog, cutest little dog, and everybody would stop and talk with Dr.
Entz. And he was really a remarkable man, but he only stayed a few years and was getting older.
They took him because they needed somebody right after the war I guess it was; yeah, must have
been. And they needed somebody that could hold the place together and start building. He did
exactly that; he was a very fine man.
Then we got Dr. Houk, and he started building all the classroom buildings and things like that.
He was a good man. But I don‟t remember, I didn‟t know Dr. [Dale] McMasters who was the
one who committed suicide. And we understood that he had agromeglia, that his brain and his
bones were growing and causing him terrible pain and misery. But I didn‟t really know him.
[Pause] let‟s see, who else? Dr. Weisenfluh who hired me and mentored me actually. When I
graduated there were only thirteen of us [who] graduated in January ‟48. Because we came in
here with that little class, so there were thirteen of us, and I was the first one I think to get a job.
Dr. Weisenfluh pulled me into his office over in the lab school and he said, “I have a job down in
Coraopolis and it‟s for English; do you want an interview?” And I said, “I sure do.” And I toured
down there and interviewed and I had that job. And I‟m sure because of his mentoring and his
advice that helped a lot to get there, of course; I think seven of the other ones got jobs too of that
class of thirteen. So we were off and away.
The one sorrowful thing though was one of our classmates went back, was called back to the
service for Korea, and he was in the underwater, I don‟t know what it‟s called, I can‟t think of
the name of it. But he was in the demolition, the people who went underwater and planted bombs
and picked up bombs. And he was killed with just a couple months; he went in right after his
graduation and it was a bad time for all of us 'cause we all knew him very well.
Let‟s see, Dr. Weisenfluh, I‟m trying to think. There were a lot, I knew all the presidents of
course because I lived here and we always, Carl and I always came up to campus to the events
and activities even after we retired. And so we knew from the Alumni Association and our
contacts that way all of the presidents to some degree.
BC: Was Dr. [Albert] Watrel in the „70s?
NL: Dr. Watrel, yes, he worked really well with the alumni. But what did him [in] as I
understand is that little press lodge [Gail Rose Lodge] at the football field. He just was a great
guy for sports „cause he had been a coach—Watrel had been a coach. He had a lovely wife
Carol. But anyhow, we understood through the alumni that he was putting a little bit more money
into sports than he should. He was giving a few scholarships that weren‟t clicking or something,
but when he built the press box that was the last straw.
BC: Oh, that was him that put that up on the hill?

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NL: Yeah, Harrisburg decided, well that‟s pushing the button a little too far.
BC: Movers and shakers on campus that you gravitated towards.
NL: Oh, well, in our department Jan Burns, she just was the greatest teacher in our department,
when I was a student and [pause] she actually lent us her apartment one summer, the summer we
got married she gave us her apartment cause she was going on vacation for three months and said
you can live in my apartment so we did. But let‟s see, Doc Spotts, I would say, was one of the
really good English teachers on campus. And he wrote a textbook also which Carl and I edited
and had our names in. That was nice, but he moved over to Ohio then and took a better job in
Ohio, but he was a very fine teacher. But we had [pause] a music teacher, Gladys Arnold;
George Miller an art teacher, very good. People, and the teachers in those days knew all the
students, when I was in school, they knew all the students. So they would have family gatherings
for us. Invite you to their homes in the evening, and you would sit around the fireplace and talk,
you know about all kinds of things.
And that, I don‟t know, movers and shakers . . . I don‟t know, I think probably, Carl did a lot for
the Alumni Association and knew everybody. He made a point of knowing everyone. And Cliff
Underwood, who followed him, was good, but he spent a little too much money that he didn‟t
have and we had to get rid of him. But let‟s see, I think Sally Lennox really did an awful lot for
the Alumni Association. She insisted on building a house for the alumni and she knew how to
press the buttons and the right people to call and she didn‟t mind talking money and she was a
really good person for that job at that time. And we got our [alumni] house and we got a lot of
work done for the alumni even though she pushed the wrong buttons also. But you know when
you‟re a mover and a shaker you often make enemies and that‟s just the way it worked. She
made a few enemies because she fought the administration a little bit and she got relieved of her
duties.
BC: Any other influences?
NL: Yeah, sure, yeah, Gladys Arnold actually gave me personal instruction in vocal exercising
and that kind of thing when I was singing and wouldn‟t take a dime for it, I mean she just did it
because she was a teacher here and she knew I liked to sing. And Gladys Sanderson, who wasn‟t
even a faculty member, she was on the staff. She was the college organist when I was here and
growing up. And she was also the organist for our church choir and I sang with the church choir
starting when I was fourteen. And she mentored me the whole way along, just wouldn‟t give up.
She had me singing when I was fifty-something, oh gee, with another girl from New Castle and
she just was a fine woman and somebody you could really look up to and appreciate. Gladys
Sanderson, Jan Burns in the speech department was a big help to me and Doc Spotts, Dr.
Weisenfluh, oh there were just so many. Ya know, they were all very good people and very
helpful.
BC: Major events or activities while you were here, like new buildings?
NL: I don‟t know [pause], I think when the classroom buildings were starting to be built that was
kind of traumatic and being named ya know, for different people, that was nice. Eisenberg and
Spotts, and the one Vincent, A.P. Vincent Science Hall, that was I think one of the nicest
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buildings that they built during that quick building era. And they would have planetarium shows
and invite the community to come to those and that was a big deal because people were invited
onto the campus and before it was kind of a separate thing. And the library helped a lot too
because they invited people to come use the library.
BC: This library [Bailey Library]?
NL: Yes, this library, Maltby was not a community library to any degree that I remember. It was
students and teachers that used Maltby. But this library always welcomed the community and we
didn‟t have a Slippery Rock library then. We do now, not much of a one but it‟s growing, but
because of that I think a lot of people felt good about coming to campus. And then they started
having concerts and Blase Scarnati did a lot of that community building with his concerts and,
let‟s see, I remember the Miller Auditorium when that was built. Emma Guffey Miller came to
Slippery Rock; they had conferences and Emma Guffey was a power in Harrisburg so we got it
named for her, Miller Auditorium. And [pause] it was wonderful to do plays and things in the
speech department. We had a good time with that. There were some shortcomings to it, but so
much better than where we used to do plays which was under the Maltby Library, the theatre. It
was so tiny. But we did some really nice productions under there in spite of the fact it was small.
I don‟t know what they are using it for now really, I think they did do some plays.
BC: Yes, there are still seats and a stage in there.
NL: Yeah? I haven‟t been down there for a long time. But that‟s good they are using it because it
was more of a comfortable setting in the small theatre. You could do things in there that they are
trying to do in Miller [Auditorium] now by sectioning off for those in the round plays. Those are
good, but I mean you don‟t feel like you‟re in a small theatre, you just feel like you‟re in a big
theatre that‟s sectioned off. At least I do. I haven‟t been to many of them, but that‟s how I feel
about them.
BC: What do you miss the most about being here on a daily basis?
NL: Well I think, I would say the communication with the students is the thing I miss the most.
Although, we do in our church adopt students and I‟ve always had adopted students in my life in
our church in Slippery Rock. At one time I had nine students; we had to sit across the whole
front pew. And that was nice, we would take out to, or they would come home to dinner really,
and we would take them out shopping for different things that they needed and it was just a nice
cooperative development when you left the school to keep in touch with kids. Let‟s see, I never
missed the activities because we still lived in Slippery Rock, we retired in Slippery Rock out on
New Castle Street. And we still kept in touch with the college things that were going on and
we‟d always come up to the activities. So I didn‟t really miss a whole lot. We always came to
football games. We never sat in the press box. We always had our seat at the top of the fifty yard
line there.
BC: Other things you would want current or future Rock community members to know, and how
would you like to be remembered?
NL: Well, it‟s a great place, I think, to send your kids. Now they were saying, ya know, they‟re
getting the cream of the crop from high schools now. But I always thought they did, I always
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thought our kids were the cream of the crop. But I would recommend Slippery Rock, and I do, to
parents who have students in high school who are looking. And I think it‟s financially reasonable
compared with other schools, and I think the instructors or professors are really for the most part
better than they ever were and that speaks well for the accreditation committees and those people
who are trying to raise the standards. They are trying to get more doctorates which may or may
not be the idea, but I think it‟s a good school and I think it‟s getting better for the ones who have
graduated because the name is getting known better and it‟s a good name.
And there‟s been nothing really except that stupid thing about it being a party school five years
ago, there has been nothing to degrade it. And I think it‟s a good school, wouldn‟t hesitate to
recommend it; it has a lot of potential. I think this [pause] equestrian center [Storm Harbor
Equestrian Center] is a step in the right direction too because of the number [of] handicapped
children. Seems to be a lot of that around, or maybe you just hear about it now. It‟s a new step, in
the right direction for our society. I think Slippery Rock is trying to stay on top of things. I enjoy
talking about Slippery Rock because it‟s my home and it‟s a great school.

Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania