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. This March – April 1992 Classic reminisces about a Baylor librarian, a campus lily pond, and the fateful spring evening in 1918 that brought them both to ruin.
When students returned to Baylor for the fall semester of 1914, they discovered an almost-completed new addition to Burleson Quadrangle. The Lariat reported on October 8, “Through the influence of Dr. Pace, a lily pond is being placed on the campus.” Excavation had already begun, and the pond was intended “not only for the beautifying of the campus, but it is to be used as the place for the growing of the numerous species of water plants, which will be used in the study of Botany.” Coed Nellie Lee Hill Cole ’16 would later recall, less verbosely, that Professor of Botany Dr. Lula Pace “wanted to raise algae and things.”
Centered in the patch of lawn formed by the angle of Burleson Hall and Carroll Library, the lily pond was finished later in the month and Waco florist Tom Wolfe announced that he would furnish it with “many varieties of goldfish and various species of water lilies.” Relatively shallow, the pond boasted a handsomely finished concrete edge and was a widely admired addition to the campus.
But the lily pond was not the only new arrival that awaited students on their return to the 1914 campus: a new librarian had been employed during the summer and was already hard at work in nearby Carroll Library.
In retrospect, it is hard not to conclude that these two — the lily pond on the one hand, the librarian on the other — must have been paired by Fate so that their destinies would parallel one another. Like characters in some classical farce of reciprocal nemesis, each proved to be the instrument that ultimately would bring about the other’s downfall.
Willard Potter Lewis was by far the best-prepared librarian Baylor had ever had. Possessed of a degree in library science, he arrived full of energy and eager to put into practice the principles he had learned. In addition to a full range of reforms and improvements in library policy and practice, he also obtained permission to teach three courses in library science. Through his efforts Baylor was able to offer what were arguably the first courses in librarianship ever taught for credit in Texas, and because of them Lewis also became a member of the faculty.
While he clearly wished to provide good library service to the student body, Lewis’s methods may have been somewhat misguided. Whereas a previous librarian had earned the students’ righteous wrath by giving demerits for talking, segregating the sexes within the reading rooms, and breaking up groups of friends who wished to study together, Lewis seems to have inclined too far in the other direction. Though he issued library regulations, he also took his assistants severely to task for enforcing them. As a result, the library became more of a social center than a place for serious study. A small flurry of anti-Lewis sentiment ruffled the pages of the Lariat on that issue in the spring of 1915.
Although that particular controversy soon quieted, other frustrations may have continued to fester during the next few years. Or perhaps it was just the rising sap of spring and youthful high spirits that brought about the climactic encounter of the librarian and the lily pond. Whatever the explanation, on an evening in late May 1918 the temptation evidently could no longer be resisted, and a dozen male students hustled Lewis out of the library and tossed him into the pond.
Since its earliest days the lily pond had done double duty as a dunking- pool for freshmen at the hands of upperclassmen. Although faculty members and administrators issued prohibitions against dunking, the upperclassmen enjoyed it, the freshmen expected it, and the wanting served as deterrents only until the next freshman happened along. However, the involuntary immersion of one of their own was quite a different matter, and the faculty moved swiftly to mete out punishment to the culprits. Despite the confession and apologies of the guilty students, the faculty decided at a meeting on May 27 that each of them should be “suspended for the remainder of the current quarter and lose his work for this quarter, that each be on probation for four quarters of resident study here and that each be not allowed to hold any office or to represent the university in any way during this probation.”
Lewis presumably returned to work a chastened man, recognizing that he would never be able fully to expunge the faint residual odor of pond water from his reputation among either the students or his fellow faculty members. He remained at Baylor for two more years and then departed for other pastures in the spring of 1920.
The pool itself enjoyed no such respite. When students returned for the fall term three months later, the lily pond had completely disappeared. Investigation revealed the disposition of its component parts: the plants had been removed to the biology laboratory; a local monument company had hauled away the concrete for use in making bases for tombstones; and the goldfish had been released “to make their way to the mighty ocean, via the turbulent waters of Waco Creek.”
And so ended, in a denouement of mutual disgrace and dissolution, the fate-driven episode of the librarian and the lily pond.
