Spotlight

Unveiled ESU

Hidden behind everyday Emporia State there’s a cacophony of treats for the five senses. All of it is beautiful and intriguing and even sad, from the myths and rumors to the ymmetry of architecture, to people and places. Look up, look down, be vexed, crane your necks. Hold your head high with pride, because the usual suspects of ESU tradition are just the first layer.

For the full effect, see the story in the electronic magazine, page 16.

The Richard H. Schmidt Museum of Natural History

Tilting an extinct passenger pigeon for the camera, Bill Jensen (MS 1999), director of the Richard H. Schmidt Museum of Natural History and an instructor at ESU, could not bring
himself to smile for the camera.

Richard H. Schmidt, a naturalist and taxidermy instructor at ESU from 1956 to 1974, would also be sad. The museum in Schmidt’s name, with its 600 taxidermy mounts on display, is a testament to his eye for animals as they were in nature. Bobcats, rodents and winged creatures of all shapes and sizes will put your head on a swivel. And where else can you stand next to a bald eagle accompanied by a sign saying it’s possessed with permission
from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? In the back room is a research collection of 1,600 bird specimens and 1,200 mammal specimens. “Richard Schmidt was without a doubt the most talented taxidermist in the state,” Jensen said.

Learn more about Schmidt’s work and the museum online at www.emporia.
edu/smnh. If you’re in the area, another hidden treasure to check out is the Johnston Geology Museum. The diverse collection ranges from a western Kansas Cretaceous mosasaur, a giant ground sloth, a mastodon tusk and world-famous fossils from the nearby Hamilton Quarry.

 

The veins and arteries of ESU

Stop for a second and ask yourself if you see power lines on the ESU campus. Or snow on
certain sidewalks in the dead of winter. There’s a door in the basement of each campus building that will tell you why. Behind the one in Butcher Hall, it’s as hot as a sauna.

Welcome to the tunnels. These are the veins and arteries of ESU, carrying steam, electricity, water, sewer, telephone lines, data processing and Ethernet cables. About 11 city blocks in length and from four to seven feet tall, they wind to the mechanical rooms of every building on campus except the HPERA building and student recreation center. Down here is where students start rumors about rats as big as cats, ghosts, and other nonsense.

Bill Hartman (BSB 1972, MS 1973), director of building services, utilities and systems
maintenance, gets several calls a year from students wanting a tour for an alleged “research project.” Always animated and opinionated, Hartman himself belongs in this feature. In the same breath, he discounts the tunnels’ mystique then builds it right back up by saying they’re “dangerous.” “These are concrete troughs with sidewalks on
top. When we call them tunnels, we give them this mystical connotation,” Hartman said, and yet, “They’re dangerous. They house high-pressure steam in there that will cut you in half, 4160 (volt) electricity that’ll fry you like an egg.”

The tunnels resulted from the powerhouse; both were built in the 1920s to service the campus. Wooster Bridge, in fact, isn’t as romantic as we’d like to believe. It was built to carry steam across the water and into the lone building on the lake’s west side, Abigail Morse Hall. At a junction under Butcher Hall, where a tunnel heads east toward Silent Joe and another shoots south toward Cremer Hall and the library, calcium chloride deposits from moisture seeping through the concrete above have formed tiny stalactites
among the graffiti.

There Hartman credits the ingenuity of long-time employees, like 80-year-old Bruce Meyer, who oversees the production of steam at the power plant, and Dave Anderson, who oversees the distribution of steam. One former employee, Max Krause, took the initiative to encase every inch of the tunnels’ steam pipes in aluminum plates from the offset printing press when he realized the pipes were wrapped in asbestos.

In the end, the tunnels aren’t as meaningful as the people who built them. This university runs on the shoulders of hundreds who aren’t afforded the acclaim of a professor or administrator. They, more than the tunnels, are the support system
underneath ESU.

 

The walls are listening

If the acoustically engineered walls of Beach Music Hall could talk, they’d have a lot to say – because they’re definitely listening. Extensive renovations completed in 1998 were designed to absorb sound and reduce sound transference throughout the building, particularly in the two rehearsal rooms.

An acoustical engineer designed the instrumental room on the east side to match the sounds it would receive, while the vocal room on the west side is structured differently. The wall tiles and ceiling shells increase the room’s surface area, and the angles of the wall’s blocks deflect sound waves. Large draperies covering the windows absorb more sound. Even the drone of the lights is minimized with special ballasts.

It makes a huge difference, says Marie Miller, chair of the music department. She visits other universities as part of an accreditation team, and said that a music building without sound treatment allows “sound bleed,” like trying to listen to five radio stations at once. From an instructional perspective, a teacher has to be able to discern a student’s precise sound without the interruption of other musicians. Think of the impossible task of trying to pull a favorite tune from your memory bank while the radio is playing. The hall’s small practice rooms are also insulated from sound bleed. The duct work in each room vents air into the hallway instead of into neighboring rooms. Each door is sealed with rubber gaskets, and when closed moves downward ever so slightly to seal the bottom.

 

In honor of children's literature

The aging, yellow drawings that became Robert McCloskey’s “Make Way for Ducklings,” the Henry Reed series and other famous children’s books have a new home at Emporia State University. ESU has displayed the May Massee Collection since 1972 to honor Massee, one of the first publishers to specialize in children’s literature. But now the collection has an expanded home on the William Allen White Library’s third floor, a level
newly devoted to children’s literature.

Massee founded children’s divisions at two of the three major publishers of her time, Viking Press and Doubleday, editing and publishing 900 titles. Her collection of original
artwork and manuscripts was brought to ESU after her death by a committee of friends, many of whom were involved with the William Allen White Children’s Book Awards at ESU. Even her desk and original Viking Press office made the trip. Around the top is the Latin inscription of Massee’s motto, “Ne quid nimium, etiam moderatio,” or, “Nothing in excess, not even moderation.” The ceiling bears a large carving of Taurus, her astrological symbol.

 

Catch of the day

Chef Harold Jensen is the “catch of the day” if there ever was one. ESU lured him here from Las Vegas and our taste buds are grateful. He and his staff, including Virginia Dold, catering director, fill the appetites at countless ESU functions. Their long hours in the kitchens and dining rooms of campus make this a special place. At the Homecoming post-game reception, Jensen served salmon as fresh as it gets in the Midwest, flying it in from the coast.

 

Brewing mysteries

Students like to joke about digging up the kegs of beer hidden under Wilson Park at the north end of campus, remnants of a long-lost brewery. But that brewery was covered up long ago, and they’re not likely to find anything now.

An old article by Bob Ecklund for the Emporia Gazette tells all. The city of Emporia proclaimed itself dry when it incorporated in 1857, but in 1868, then-state Sen. Preston Plumb encouraged Frederick Machey to establish a brewery on the outskirts of town. Machey dug a cave into the hill, 100 feet long and 15 feet wide. “The popularity of his beer encouraged Machey to expand to accommodate his local customers,” Ecklund wrote. “To accomplish this he added a beer garden and a dance pavilion to his operation.” The garden became notorious for its crimes, including rumors of a murder or two. Prohibition forced the brewery to close in 1880, and Machey died in 1890.

The property changed hands several times. Dr. Clyde Wilson bought it in 1926 to build a home, but his wife died before the home was constructed. The property remained empty until the Wilson family donated the land to Kansas State Teachers College on April 10, 1937, to be used for recreational purposes. The cave served as storage for trucks,
front-loaders and other large equipment until sometime in the 1960s or early ‘70s, when it was filled in. It seems young men and women were sneaking into the cave at night for mischief, said ESU’s Bill Hartman.

 

How cold?

Kansas winters may be cold, but there’s only one place on campus that reaches 70 degrees below zero Celsius. It’s the ultra-cold freezer in the Science Hall, seen here with first-year graduate students Shikha Sharma (left), of India, and Ying Cao, of China.

While a household freezer reaches 20 degrees below zero Celsius, or 4 below Fahrenheit,
the ultra-cold reaches 94 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and causes the cessation of cellular activity. Bacterial cultures can be stored for decades. It’s a necessity for microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology research. “At minus 20 the cultures would survive but they wouldn’t live as long. Minus 70 is more of a permanent storage,”
said Dr. Scott Crupper, associate professor in the department of biological sciences. “If we collect an organism today and we want to study it, it gives us the long-term storage. You spend all the effort collecting the samples and you don’t want to lose all that work. It’s critical for us.”

There’s also a second freezer on hand, just in case. ESU’s Bill Hartman found both units through a seller of federal surplus property, Paul Schwartz (MS 1973). The two have teamed up to save ESU tens of thousands of dollars over the years – Hartman bought the brand-new freezers in 1997 for $3,500 each when the list price was $23,000 a piece. Now students gain the experience with bacterial cultures that they’ll need at the next level. “It’s a normal part of working in the laboratory,” Crupper said. “They’re getting real-life experiences here. It’s not watered-down.” Or frozen solid, as the case may be.

 

Immutable truths
It’s easy to walk by the two slender sculptures on the outside wall of Brighton Lecture Hall, adjacent the southwest corner of Morse Hall. But to do so is to miss immutable truths. The man holds a sphere, pyramid and cube and represents the search for wisdom. The woman holds a dove of peace with her head toward the future, representing peace and charity. The sculptures were created by Kansas artist Bernard
“Poco” Frazier and added in January 1965, at the behest of Dr. Howard A. Bellows,
assistant to the president and associate professor at KSTC from 1960 to 1964. Thanks to staff at the ESU Archives for putting an end to a circuitous search for how these statues got there.

Martha and other ghosts

Martha is her name, the ghost in the Memorial Union. Rumor has it she was a female
teacher who committed suicide on the third floor back when single female teachers lived there. The union, erected in 1925 as a memorial to Kansas State Normal School student-veterans who died in the Spanish Civil War and World War I, is one of several places on campus which many swear is haunted.

Student managers closing the building at night will shut off the third floor’s lights and leave, only to look up and see the lights on. Now, your Spotlight editor happened to be a building manager as a student. He never saw Martha, but after dark those rooms have an eerie, unnatural presence that makes him shiver even now.

The catacombs beneath the Albert Taylor Hall stage will do the same thing. Edgar Allen Poe would’ve loved that place – if spirits move about down there, surely they hear our telltale hearts thumping in fright. Theater students are known to refuse going in alone.

The Bulletin student newspaper ran a two-part series in October documenting ESU’s ghost stories. The scene shop manager said students have seen a hooded figure in Albert Taylor Hall. “This student left his backpack (there) and went back for it after everyone had left,” Kyle Land told the Bulletin.“When he walked into the theatre, he saw a hooded figure at the very back of the stage. The student walked forward two or three rows and picked up his backpack and then looked up towards the stage. Only a couple seconds had passed, but the figure was now at the very front of the stage – unmoving.
The student turned to leave, afraid, and glanced back a second later to see that the figure was now off the stage in the front of the house. This figure had somehow silently jumped over the 10-foot deep orchestra pit from a standstill – an impossible jump.”

The Bruder Theatre stage has its own rumors, the result of a student who made a game out of hiding in the tunnels. On the King Hall floors above him, the student laid down nylon trip wires connected to cans, warning him of someone’s presence and naturally scaring the snot out of that someone. ESU’s Bill Hartman was the housing coordinator
then, and fielded calls about people seeing spooks and shadows. Eventually the student had to perform community service work as punishment. “’Yeah, that was my alarm system,’” the student said of the wires, according to Hartman. “He was very honest about the whole thing.”

 

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Last Updated April 17, 2008