Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. In preparing this April 1983 Classic article to be republished, my curiosity led me to find the Dunn House at 1615 S. Fifth St., which had most recently become a low-cost housing solution for international students, was demolished in 2008. Nevertheless, Mrs. Lucy Dunn’s motherly care for her dozens of “kids” lives on in spirit as we remember her this Mother’s Day.
What began as a woman’s plan to be near her son in his college days resulted in her getting more sons than she could count and creating a Baylor landmark.
When Lucy Dunn moved to Waco in 1951 to open a boarding house for Baylor students, the streets around the campus were lined with rooming houses. The Dunn House was just one more large, two-story, frame house along South Fifth Street.
For years rooming houses and back rooms of private homes had been supplementing Kokernot and Brooks Halls, the only two men’s dormitories. Greer House, “L” House, Henderson House, and Aberhof were the Penland and Martin Halls of other eras. But today, in place of these old haunts, stand the law school, the business school, a video arcade, an automatic teller machine, and apartment complexes with sundecks and swimming pools. Yet among these newer structures the seventy-eight-year-old Dunn House stubbornly holds its ground. In the back room of the old house lives Lucy Dunn, now white-haired and crippled by arthritis, but still providing rooms for young men at Baylor.
To walk into Mrs. Dunn’s room in the back of the house is to walk into a scrapbook of the many young men who have lived there. One wall is lined with photographs of young men with slicked-back or crew cut hair, with some of the men wearing service uniforms. Almost every picture has a small photograph of a young woman tucked in the corner of its frame. When asked about a particular picture, not only will Mrs. Dunn recall a story about the fellow, but she is likely to mention that he called her just last week or brought his family to see her last month. “I don’t like to leave town on holidays or in the summer because so many of the boys stop by the house,” she says.
On the wall above the chair where she spends most of her day is a piece of notebook paper with a message written in a child’s hand: “I love you Miss Dunn. Have a Happy Summer.” A few feet away hangs a picture with one of her favorite scriptures written on it: “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Mrs. Dunn still finds much to be glad about, although she is now limited by failing eyesight and back trouble. She is quick to laugh at herself and always has a story to tell about one of her “boys,” as she refers to her tenants. “They may come back with hair as white as mine, but they’re still my boys,” she insists.
Sitting in her large easy chair in a homemade cotton dress, she could be anybody’s grandmother. However, the green satin tennis visor that she often wears to shade her eyes hints that this is no ordinary eighty-two-year-old woman. Her brown eyes sparkle as she recalls the time a young man who once lived in her house drove from Washington, D.C., to see her on Mother’s Day and took her back with him for a vacation, or the time she grew tired of one of the boys pestering her in the kitchen and put a handful of meringue in his face, or the boy who had a phone installed in his room just so he could call downstairs to see what she was serving for breakfast.
“When people ask me how many children I have, I say I don’t know. I also have a lot of wonderful Baylor daughters-in-law and grandchildren. I’m as bad off as that old lady who lived in the shoe,” she chuckled.
Living in a house full of young people was nothing new for Mrs. Dunn; she had plenty of experience by the time she came to Baylor. She grew up in Mansfield, Arkansas, as the eighth of nine children. After her husband died in 1944, she and her twelve-year-old son A.B. moved in with one of her two daughters.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she recalled. “Then one day my son ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. When she heard about us, she came home with A.B.” The friend, who worked as a housemother at the Buckner Orphans’ home in Dallas, urged Mrs. Dunn to join her there. Without waiting for a reply, the friend walked into the office of the president of Buckner asking, “Are you interested in hiring a good woman?” “I’m always interested in hiring a good woman,” he replied. Lucy Dunn had herself a job.
Mrs. Dunn and her son spent the next six years making their home at Buckner. “A.B. liked having all those boys around. He thought he was in heaven,” she laughed. She let her room be home for the children. “I never locked a door the whole time I was there and never lost a thing,” she recalled. “What those children needed to know was that somebody loved them and had confidence in them. My main joy was when the children came to me with their little troubles–it made me forget my big ones.”
Not only did she give them encouragement and love, but the boys insisted that she brought them good luck as well. “They thought I had to go to every football game or they wouldn’t win. I’ve sat out in the rain many a time.”
With this beginning it’s not surprising that her son and the other boys wanted her to be in Waco with them. A.B.’s friend Don Johnson had the idea and told her, “Other women are doing it and so can you.” They thought she would never leave Buckner; however, in the summer of 1951 Mrs. Dunn found the house in Waco and got a three-year lease, intending to stay only as long as her son was in school. After eight months she decided to buy the place.
She started in Waco with only the $300 she had brought with her and some money a few of the boys loaned her. “Some of the Buckner boys who were in the service sent me half their paychecks to help me. I paid them back in the first year,” she said.
Although built as a rooming house for students, with part of it converted into tiny apartments, the house was no longer occupied by students when she found it. “It was a mess,” Mrs. Dunn said. “We worked for two months to get it clean and ready for the Baylor students to move in. I never could have done it without the help of the bots. There wasn’t even a yard; they planted all the grass and built all the walks and flower beds.”
When school started that autumn, the Dunn House was in business with ten rooms rented to nineteen boys. Fifty dollars bought room and board for a month. Her home cooking became known all over campus, and students from other houses boarded at the Dunn House. One year Mrs. Dunn rented an additional house and had as many as fifty people at mealtime. She maintained a family atmosphere by serving the meals at two long tables in a single dining room and having some of the boys help out in the kitchen to earn their board. She had to quit boarding in 1961 because her arthritis made cooking difficult.
The rules of the house have not changed since she took in the first boarder. “No drinking, no pets, no cooking, no gambling, no girls.” But at the top of the list is Mrs. Dunn’s chief request: “Please make this your home away from home.” Most of the tenants do not need to be told that rule. She has never imposed a curfew on them. She explains, “I figure if they’re old enough to go to Baylor, they’re old enough to know when to come home.”
During times when housing around campus was especially scarce, some freshmen lived in the house even though it was against stated university policy for them to live off campus. In excusing one student, the dean said, “It’s all right if he’s going to live with Lucy Dunn.”
“All in all, they’ve been a good bunch,” she brags. “I’ve had to bail only two of them out of jail. One was a book salesman who didn’t know he needed a permit.” She doesn’t remember the other, only that both paid her back.
The students loved to tease the housemother and were always playing tricks on her. One of Mrs. Dunn’s favorite stories is about the time one of the boys took her corset off the clothesline and hung it from an upstairs window above the front door. “The next morning when the bus stopped to let the maid out, the driver told everyone to look out the window. The maid came in laughing and told me about it.”
However, almost as often the joke was on them. One Christmas she planned a dinner party and told the boys not to ask their girlfriends because she already had dates for them. “They figured I was going to ask girls from Mary Hardin-Baylor,” she said, “but I had asked half of them to dress up like girls. They were some of the cutest things you ever saw!”
The house proved to be more than a way to be near her son and the young men from Buckner; it enabled her to care for her invalid mother. “I wanted to take care of my mother, and I prayed night and day for a way to do it. Then this worked out.” The older woman was quite a hit with the boys. Buddy Clendennen, one of the first tenants, remembers, “She used to stay in that back room and dip snuff and tell us stories. She was a big part of life in the house.”
When Mrs. Dunn speaks about her house and the chain of events that led her to Waco, she speaks of how God’s hand has been in it at every step. “I couldn’t have done any of this without His help,” she confesses. In 1957 she was afraid she was going to have to give up her house because she was having trouble insuring it. “The boys were so upset that they considered getting money together to buy a lot to move the house to. I prayed for three days and then called one of the boys who used to live here.” Once again her prayer was answered, and through the same Don Johnson who had urged her to take the house originally. He worked out an agreement with Seventh and James Baptist Church, which sits literally at the back door of the Dunn House, whereby the church would buy the house and remodel the living quarters, allowing her to live there as long as she is able.
The already close tie that she had with the church as one of its members has been strengthened by this new relationship. Many of the church member visit her weekly; when the house needed painting, the deacons themselves painted it. In turn, guests of the church–often people from other countries–sometimes stay in her extra bedroom. “I’ve had people from all over the world living here,” Mrs. Dunn said. “Sometimes the house looks like the U.N.”
Mrs. Dunn is the first to admit that it is because of the help her friends and tenants offer that she is able to keep the house open. Some of the men who graduated years ago and still live in Waco drop by to do odd jobs. “They don’t ask what needs doing, they just do it.” Many of them are trying to repay her for the help she has offered them throughout the years.
Presently Buddy Clendennen is organizing a scholarship in her name that will continue to help students for many more years. Mrs. Dunn has never been in a classroom since she left the one-room school in the hills of western Arkansas, yet she has helped many young men finish college, with some going on to earn graduate degrees. They are now doctors, ministers, lawyers, accountants, artists–you name it and one of her former tenants probably does it.
Nowadays Mrs. Dunn talks less about her boys and more about her kids. “I have as many girls that come around now as I have boys. They can be even more useful than those ol’ boys because they can help me set my hair,” she laughed. “The kids today aren’t as good at fixing things, but they’re good shoppes. One of them keeps my books and others read my mail to me.”
“People have been so good to me,” she continued. “Sometimes when I lie in bed at night and try to remember all the blessings of that day, there’s so many I can’t count them.”
No one questions the fact that the old rooming houses are relics of other days. The modest rooms in the Dunn House cannot compete with apartments that have sprung up around it, offering Jacuzzi baths, swimming pools, and microwaves. The house looks as if it should be located on an acre of land on a hillside rather than surrounded by asphalt parking lots and streets. It’s as conspicuous as a wrinkled face in a youthful crowd. But inside, a white-haired woman still looks out for her boys.
Postscript
In February [1983] Mrs. Dunn was hospitalized and confined to bed by the pain of spinal arthritis. Arrangements were being made in late March for her transfer to Buckner’s Ryburn Nursing Center at 4810 Samuel Blvd., Dallas, Tex. 75228. Dr. Dan Bagby, pastor of Seventh and James Baptist Church, told the Line that he hopes the Dunn House may continue to be available to Baylor students for several more years; rental income will offset Mrs. Dunn’s expenses in Dallas.
