Don’t Tell My Maby Tamara Fynaardt

Eulalia Reed, left, and Edith Kraai were responsible for managing the mischief in Colenbrander and Heemstra halls while serving as housemothers in the 1970s.

Wearing jeans and flip flops, a latte in one hand and Blackberry in the other, Northwestern’s 20-something resident directors are barely distinguishable from the students they’re responsible for. Forty years ago, though, grandmas had their jobs.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Northwestern dorm life was supervised by widowed women who’d raised families and then postponed quiet retirements to spend a year or sometimes more serving as housemothers in Colenbrander, Fern Smith, Heemstra and Hospers halls. Saints in sensible shoes.

Cornie Wassink ’73 was one of Eulalia Reed’s Colenbrander Hall charges. He explains that although dorms had no open hours during those years, male students still had to watch for Ma Reed making rounds. “A few tried to shock her,” he remembers.

Wassink says he could tell plenty of stories about Ma Reed and the pranks Coly residents pulled right under her nose. But he’d rather share the shenanigans of football teammates who lived in Heemstra under the seemingly oblivious eye of Edith Kraai ’27.

Wassink claims Heemstra friends were once discovered by Ma Kraai imbibing a contraband beverage in the hall basement. According to Wassink’s story, the guys convinced Ma the barrel-like container was, in fact, a bomb. Just a little one—not very dangerous, says Wassink, chuckling. “They told her, ‘We’ll take care of it. We’ll get rid of it for you,’ and she believed them.”

Wayne Van Heuvelen ’74 lived in Heemstra Hall and remembers Ma Kraai as “wonderful,” with a “ready smile and kind word for all.” But, he adds, “she went to bed early and was a deep sleeper.”

Van Heuvelen wasn’t involved in the “bomb scare” but admits Ma Kraai’s early bedtime might have been handy if he and Heemstra pals had ever wanted to misbehave.

Like what? Van Heuvelen muses about statutes of limitations before describing what he claims is a hypothetical: If some athletes had wanted to stash the chapel chairs in Heemstra’s unused fallout shelter, they could easily have hauled them across campus, through the dorm, down the stairs and noisily stacked them in a heap—all while Ma Kraai was asleep.

Hypothetically.

Former biology professor Virg Muilenburg ’62 was director of Northwestern’s student center in the basement of Hospers Hall in the early 1970s. He says, “It’s true students sometimes thought the ‘Mas’ were naïve.” But Muilenburg doubts that was the case. He suspects the seasoned women knew more than students realized but—at least in the case of Colenbrander and Heemstra halls—let boys be boys.

“They probably thought, ‘As long as I don’t see blood or smell smoke, I’m not going to investigate.’”