Paul Gault remembers 56 years of Park history
Originally published in the Park University Stylus, Nov. 2012.
By Andi Enns
Editor
When Paul Gault arrived in Parkville as a freshman science major, he didn’t imagine he’d end up spending the next 56 years here.
“I got on a Greyhound bus and never looked back,” he says.
During his decades at Park University, Gault has gone from student to an endowment adviser for the board of trustees. He was recently honored for 50 years of service to the university. The Stylus sat down with Gault to learn about his experience with Park as it went from a small, residential Christian college to a 43 campus center independent university with mainly commuter students.
He was born in Philadelphia, the youngest of three siblings in a Presbyterian family. His older brother and sister both went to east coast colleges straight out of high school, but Gault didn’t apply early enough to follow in their footsteps. Instead, he went to Park College on a recommendation from his brother’s seminary school roommate, who had recently graduated from Park.
In Aug. 1956, Gault arrived at the Pickwick Hotel at 9th and Mcgee in Kansas City, Mo., at 3 a.m., waiting for the bus to rural Parkville, Mo.
“There was a shooting in the bus terminal the night I arrived,” Gault says with a smile. “I thought I had arrived in the wild, wild west.”
After waiting for what seemed like forever, the shuttle picked up Gault and his classmates, and took them to old Woodward Hall, the residence hall for freshman males. Woodward was located behind Chesnut Hall, along Parkville’s modern-day 12th Street.
“We measured the distance in valleys back then,” Gault says. “Chesnut was the first valley, and Woodward was the second valley.”
All of Park’s 300 students lived on campus in one of six residence halls. Freshman men lived in Woodward and freshman women lived in Copley Hall. Nickel Hall was located next to Copley, where the Quad stands today, and it was like a frat house for male upperclassmen. Herr House was a women’s dorm, and Hawley Hall opened in 1957. Upperclassmen could choose to live in the quonset huts on Morden Rd., which were steele barracks left over from World War II. Stephens Hall was an honors dorm for women.
The female students had curfews, Gault says. They had to be in their residence halls by 8 p.m. on school nights and midnight on weekends, except for the Stephens women. The Stephens residents could make their own rules, but they were self-controlled and modest, Gault says. The men didn’t have curfews.
He said walking to his residence hall was like exploring the jungle - he walked on trails through the woods to get to Woodward.
“You’d leave the hall to go to class,” Gault says, “and you wouldn’t go back all day. It was just too far.”
Every student did have to make the trip at least twice a day, though. After class and work-study, the students would return to their halls to change clothes for dinner in the cafeteria.
“We had to dress up for dinner,” he says. “Every day, men had to wear suit coats. Wednesdays and Sundays required ties. The ladies had to wear nice dresses every day.”
They had to dress especially nice on Wednesdays and Sundays because of the mandatory religious services. Gault says each student was required to attend two services and one Bible study each week, and missing five in a semester meant the loss of credit hours.
“If you weren’t Presbyterian, you had to get a note from the clergy every single time,” he says. “So Catholics and Episcopalians, for example, had to turn in three notes a week from their churches.”
Monday nights were educational lectures in the chapel, which were also mandatory.
Every student also had a work-study job, he said. They worked between 12 and 25 hours a week, depending on their financial need. The program continued until federal work-study was introduced in 1966.
“First, I was the projectionist in the movie theater,” Gault says. “It was a plum job.”
Many work-study jobs were in a department called “student industries.” This housed projects like the movie theater, a four-lane bowling alley, the campus bookstore, laundry services, the Jolly Roger snack bar, the swimming center, and vending machines. Over his years as a student, Gault also worked as the movie theater manager and assistant manager of student industries.
The campus looked different back then, Gault says. Highway 9 didn’t curve around campus yet, so the area from the Missouri River shore to the McCoy Meetin’ House was heavily wooded. The main entrance was the sidewalk to the side of the Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel.
The Alumni House, then called the Park House, was originally built where the median of Highway 9 is now.
“The highway changed the whole look of the campus,” Gault says. “When I got here, you couldn’t see anything from the bluffs except the chapel. It moved the whole campus back from the river.”
One of Gault’s favorite memories, he says, is of the social clubs on campus, who held parties in the now-cleared woods. These clubs were like co-ed fraternities, and dominated the social life on campus.
“The freshmen would have to rush to get into the clubs,” he says. “And we’d treat them great for the whole rush week.”
The clubs had names like Lancelots & Elaines or Orians & Auroras, and every student was required to be in one.
“The next week, though,” Gault says, licking his lips, “the next week was Hell Week.”
The upperclassmen would wear beanies and dark clothes, and carry paddles with them. They were called the Goons and the Goonesses and they created an intense hazing for their freshmen. They had rules for their social clubs, and enacted punishments such as being paddled, pushing pennies across the floor by their noses, janitorial work, and haircuts.
“It was all in good fun,” Gault says. “We had tug of war and things. Everyone was stuck on campus, so we needed stuff like this.”
Hell Week remained in practice until 1967, despite the student council banning hazing activities in 1956.
The men in the social clubs would also visit the women’s dorms and serenade them with songs about the college, including songs fantasizing about escalators and other ways to move about campus.
Another favorite place for the students to visit was Alfalfa Point, a wooded area near the modern day Comfort Field.
“It was a great necking point,” he says, grinning. “It wasn’t overgrown yet.”
Besides social clubs, class, faith and work, the students loved sports, Gault says. They played soccer against schools from central Kansas to St. Louis. Gault says the biggest rivalries were against William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., and Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo.
The modern day practice soccer field used to be the stables where equestrian science students would train their horses.
“When I worked in financial aid, we actually gave scholarships to horses,” he says. “There were about 20 on campus, and without the scholarship, students wouldn’t be able to bring their horse.”
In addition to studying and training horses, Gault says some students bred and sold horses from the Park stables. The students held competitions in an arena which has since been overgrown with trees and bush. Their main competitors came from William Woods University from Fulton, Mo., and Stephens Female College from Columbia, Mo.
College life wasn’t all fun, though.
“Then my dad died in 1959,” Gault says. “I took some time off of school to go home, and got drafted to the Berlin crisis.”
The Berlin crisis was the last stand of the Cold War. Gault was one of nearly a million men drafted by President John F. Kennedy as a show of force and strength in eastern Europe.
“I didn’t graduate until 1965,” he says. “But I consider 1960 to be my class, since that’s when I should have graduated.”
Gault stayed in Germany for two years, and then returned to Park as a student and the business office cashier. It was the same year Gault says Park underwent the largest change he can remember: Park College opened a campus in Leavenworth, Kan.
It was the first of many campus centers aimed to recruit members of the military as students. The new campus was the launch of the “bootstrap program,” which allowed officers to complete college degrees on their base. Park currently has 43 campus centers.
The next biggest change, Gault says, was when Park changed religious affiliations.
“Park almost closed that year,” he says. “We didn’t have enough money, but this new church offered us enough.”
Having been a Presbyterian school for 100 years, Park changed alliances in 1975 to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, or RLDS. The church is now known as Community of Christ.
“Their headquarters are in Independence, Mo.,” Gault says, “so they were hoping to expand their base by having Graceland and Park.”
Things changed again in 1993, when Park pushed for commuter students on the home campus.
“I think we were closer as a campus before that,” Gault says. “We were close to each other and to the faculty. As a commuter, I don’t think you have as many friends on campus. And your classmates don’t feel like family.”
In a strange way, he says, Park actually seemed bigger before commuters were the majority.
“You knew everyone, so you knew a lot of people,” he says. “If you don’t know anyone, it’s a different experience.”
The same year, Parkville experienced one of the worst floods in town history. Ten feet of water destroyed shops and buildings downtown. One such building was the Park College Power Plant, now occupied by River’s Bend restaurant. At the time, the power plant was owned by Park. The administration decided to sell it instead of repair it.
“Col. Park actually mandated that the power plant be given to his heirs before it was sold,” Gault says. “He didn’t have any kids, so we had to track down his sister’s kids and grandkids.”
The documents said if Col. Park had no heirs, the building would be donated to the state of Missouri.
Gault’s wife Sylvia, who is a Park alumna and then an employee of the business office, was put in charge of finding these hiers. She found over 250 of them. The college determined 45 of them had a direct interest, and asked each to sign a waiver to their rights over the building.
“It took over five years to track them all down and get the forms signed,” Gault says. “And she still gets letters from hiers.”
While on a trip to Illinois, Gault and his wife toured a cemetery in search of Col. Park’s relatives.
“A lady who was the secretary of the cemetery found us and showed us records dating back to the 1880s,” Gault says. “She happened to have newspaper microfilms and a microfilm reader right in her house. We found one of the five sisters that way.”
In 2000, Donald Breckon, then president of the college, decided to cut ties with the RLDS church.
“Becoming independent is a lot more common than changing affiliations,” says Gault.
Besides Park, Gault has only had two other civilian jobs: working at a summer resort while still in high school, and working seasonally at the post office while in college. He says he never wanted to work anywhere else after experiencing Park.
“If you stay around long enough, this place just grows on you,” Gault says. “Plus, I made sure to learn all of the filing systems, so they’d have to keep me around!”
That ploy worked. Gault held many jobs as a Park employee, from cashier to student life manager to vice president of finance. He officially retired in 2001, but Park has retained him as a part time consultant since then.
When Copley Quad was under construction, the university brought Gault’s hours to 20 per week to be the principal contact for the contractors, but Gault says those were just the paid ones -- at times, he worked 60 hours per week. He says the building was originally going to be 40 feet farther west, and seven stories high. The bottom two floors would be partially underground, but when the university found out it would cost $2 million in retaining walls alone, the structure was redesigned and Gault was working overtime like crazy.
The original plans also called for an elevator to take students from the bottom floor of the Quad to the first floor of Science Hall. That plan was nixed for a covered bridge from the Quad to Science. For cost reasons, the bridge plan was also canceled.
“If you go to the fourth floor of the Quad, there’s a door to nowhere,” he says. “We put it in, just in case we ever get the funding to build the bridge.”
The bridge, he said, was in answer to a complaint even Gault had as a student: the long trek up the Copley stairs.
“Those are a lot of stairs,” he says. “Some things never change.”
By Andi Enns
Editor
When Paul Gault arrived in Parkville as a freshman science major, he didn’t imagine he’d end up spending the next 56 years here.
“I got on a Greyhound bus and never looked back,” he says.
During his decades at Park University, Gault has gone from student to an endowment adviser for the board of trustees. He was recently honored for 50 years of service to the university. The Stylus sat down with Gault to learn about his experience with Park as it went from a small, residential Christian college to a 43 campus center independent university with mainly commuter students.
He was born in Philadelphia, the youngest of three siblings in a Presbyterian family. His older brother and sister both went to east coast colleges straight out of high school, but Gault didn’t apply early enough to follow in their footsteps. Instead, he went to Park College on a recommendation from his brother’s seminary school roommate, who had recently graduated from Park.
In Aug. 1956, Gault arrived at the Pickwick Hotel at 9th and Mcgee in Kansas City, Mo., at 3 a.m., waiting for the bus to rural Parkville, Mo.
“There was a shooting in the bus terminal the night I arrived,” Gault says with a smile. “I thought I had arrived in the wild, wild west.”
After waiting for what seemed like forever, the shuttle picked up Gault and his classmates, and took them to old Woodward Hall, the residence hall for freshman males. Woodward was located behind Chesnut Hall, along Parkville’s modern-day 12th Street.
“We measured the distance in valleys back then,” Gault says. “Chesnut was the first valley, and Woodward was the second valley.”
All of Park’s 300 students lived on campus in one of six residence halls. Freshman men lived in Woodward and freshman women lived in Copley Hall. Nickel Hall was located next to Copley, where the Quad stands today, and it was like a frat house for male upperclassmen. Herr House was a women’s dorm, and Hawley Hall opened in 1957. Upperclassmen could choose to live in the quonset huts on Morden Rd., which were steele barracks left over from World War II. Stephens Hall was an honors dorm for women.
The female students had curfews, Gault says. They had to be in their residence halls by 8 p.m. on school nights and midnight on weekends, except for the Stephens women. The Stephens residents could make their own rules, but they were self-controlled and modest, Gault says. The men didn’t have curfews.
He said walking to his residence hall was like exploring the jungle - he walked on trails through the woods to get to Woodward.
“You’d leave the hall to go to class,” Gault says, “and you wouldn’t go back all day. It was just too far.”
Every student did have to make the trip at least twice a day, though. After class and work-study, the students would return to their halls to change clothes for dinner in the cafeteria.
“We had to dress up for dinner,” he says. “Every day, men had to wear suit coats. Wednesdays and Sundays required ties. The ladies had to wear nice dresses every day.”
They had to dress especially nice on Wednesdays and Sundays because of the mandatory religious services. Gault says each student was required to attend two services and one Bible study each week, and missing five in a semester meant the loss of credit hours.
“If you weren’t Presbyterian, you had to get a note from the clergy every single time,” he says. “So Catholics and Episcopalians, for example, had to turn in three notes a week from their churches.”
Monday nights were educational lectures in the chapel, which were also mandatory.
Every student also had a work-study job, he said. They worked between 12 and 25 hours a week, depending on their financial need. The program continued until federal work-study was introduced in 1966.
“First, I was the projectionist in the movie theater,” Gault says. “It was a plum job.”
Many work-study jobs were in a department called “student industries.” This housed projects like the movie theater, a four-lane bowling alley, the campus bookstore, laundry services, the Jolly Roger snack bar, the swimming center, and vending machines. Over his years as a student, Gault also worked as the movie theater manager and assistant manager of student industries.
The campus looked different back then, Gault says. Highway 9 didn’t curve around campus yet, so the area from the Missouri River shore to the McCoy Meetin’ House was heavily wooded. The main entrance was the sidewalk to the side of the Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel.
The Alumni House, then called the Park House, was originally built where the median of Highway 9 is now.
“The highway changed the whole look of the campus,” Gault says. “When I got here, you couldn’t see anything from the bluffs except the chapel. It moved the whole campus back from the river.”
One of Gault’s favorite memories, he says, is of the social clubs on campus, who held parties in the now-cleared woods. These clubs were like co-ed fraternities, and dominated the social life on campus.
“The freshmen would have to rush to get into the clubs,” he says. “And we’d treat them great for the whole rush week.”
The clubs had names like Lancelots & Elaines or Orians & Auroras, and every student was required to be in one.
“The next week, though,” Gault says, licking his lips, “the next week was Hell Week.”
The upperclassmen would wear beanies and dark clothes, and carry paddles with them. They were called the Goons and the Goonesses and they created an intense hazing for their freshmen. They had rules for their social clubs, and enacted punishments such as being paddled, pushing pennies across the floor by their noses, janitorial work, and haircuts.
“It was all in good fun,” Gault says. “We had tug of war and things. Everyone was stuck on campus, so we needed stuff like this.”
Hell Week remained in practice until 1967, despite the student council banning hazing activities in 1956.
The men in the social clubs would also visit the women’s dorms and serenade them with songs about the college, including songs fantasizing about escalators and other ways to move about campus.
Another favorite place for the students to visit was Alfalfa Point, a wooded area near the modern day Comfort Field.
“It was a great necking point,” he says, grinning. “It wasn’t overgrown yet.”
Besides social clubs, class, faith and work, the students loved sports, Gault says. They played soccer against schools from central Kansas to St. Louis. Gault says the biggest rivalries were against William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., and Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo.
The modern day practice soccer field used to be the stables where equestrian science students would train their horses.
“When I worked in financial aid, we actually gave scholarships to horses,” he says. “There were about 20 on campus, and without the scholarship, students wouldn’t be able to bring their horse.”
In addition to studying and training horses, Gault says some students bred and sold horses from the Park stables. The students held competitions in an arena which has since been overgrown with trees and bush. Their main competitors came from William Woods University from Fulton, Mo., and Stephens Female College from Columbia, Mo.
College life wasn’t all fun, though.
“Then my dad died in 1959,” Gault says. “I took some time off of school to go home, and got drafted to the Berlin crisis.”
The Berlin crisis was the last stand of the Cold War. Gault was one of nearly a million men drafted by President John F. Kennedy as a show of force and strength in eastern Europe.
“I didn’t graduate until 1965,” he says. “But I consider 1960 to be my class, since that’s when I should have graduated.”
Gault stayed in Germany for two years, and then returned to Park as a student and the business office cashier. It was the same year Gault says Park underwent the largest change he can remember: Park College opened a campus in Leavenworth, Kan.
It was the first of many campus centers aimed to recruit members of the military as students. The new campus was the launch of the “bootstrap program,” which allowed officers to complete college degrees on their base. Park currently has 43 campus centers.
The next biggest change, Gault says, was when Park changed religious affiliations.
“Park almost closed that year,” he says. “We didn’t have enough money, but this new church offered us enough.”
Having been a Presbyterian school for 100 years, Park changed alliances in 1975 to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, or RLDS. The church is now known as Community of Christ.
“Their headquarters are in Independence, Mo.,” Gault says, “so they were hoping to expand their base by having Graceland and Park.”
Things changed again in 1993, when Park pushed for commuter students on the home campus.
“I think we were closer as a campus before that,” Gault says. “We were close to each other and to the faculty. As a commuter, I don’t think you have as many friends on campus. And your classmates don’t feel like family.”
In a strange way, he says, Park actually seemed bigger before commuters were the majority.
“You knew everyone, so you knew a lot of people,” he says. “If you don’t know anyone, it’s a different experience.”
The same year, Parkville experienced one of the worst floods in town history. Ten feet of water destroyed shops and buildings downtown. One such building was the Park College Power Plant, now occupied by River’s Bend restaurant. At the time, the power plant was owned by Park. The administration decided to sell it instead of repair it.
“Col. Park actually mandated that the power plant be given to his heirs before it was sold,” Gault says. “He didn’t have any kids, so we had to track down his sister’s kids and grandkids.”
The documents said if Col. Park had no heirs, the building would be donated to the state of Missouri.
Gault’s wife Sylvia, who is a Park alumna and then an employee of the business office, was put in charge of finding these hiers. She found over 250 of them. The college determined 45 of them had a direct interest, and asked each to sign a waiver to their rights over the building.
“It took over five years to track them all down and get the forms signed,” Gault says. “And she still gets letters from hiers.”
While on a trip to Illinois, Gault and his wife toured a cemetery in search of Col. Park’s relatives.
“A lady who was the secretary of the cemetery found us and showed us records dating back to the 1880s,” Gault says. “She happened to have newspaper microfilms and a microfilm reader right in her house. We found one of the five sisters that way.”
In 2000, Donald Breckon, then president of the college, decided to cut ties with the RLDS church.
“Becoming independent is a lot more common than changing affiliations,” says Gault.
Besides Park, Gault has only had two other civilian jobs: working at a summer resort while still in high school, and working seasonally at the post office while in college. He says he never wanted to work anywhere else after experiencing Park.
“If you stay around long enough, this place just grows on you,” Gault says. “Plus, I made sure to learn all of the filing systems, so they’d have to keep me around!”
That ploy worked. Gault held many jobs as a Park employee, from cashier to student life manager to vice president of finance. He officially retired in 2001, but Park has retained him as a part time consultant since then.
When Copley Quad was under construction, the university brought Gault’s hours to 20 per week to be the principal contact for the contractors, but Gault says those were just the paid ones -- at times, he worked 60 hours per week. He says the building was originally going to be 40 feet farther west, and seven stories high. The bottom two floors would be partially underground, but when the university found out it would cost $2 million in retaining walls alone, the structure was redesigned and Gault was working overtime like crazy.
The original plans also called for an elevator to take students from the bottom floor of the Quad to the first floor of Science Hall. That plan was nixed for a covered bridge from the Quad to Science. For cost reasons, the bridge plan was also canceled.
“If you go to the fourth floor of the Quad, there’s a door to nowhere,” he says. “We put it in, just in case we ever get the funding to build the bridge.”
The bridge, he said, was in answer to a complaint even Gault had as a student: the long trek up the Copley stairs.
“Those are a lot of stairs,” he says. “Some things never change.”