Memories of bad coffee, good talk, ’60s era rekindled

A 1962 aerial shot of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, which, at the time, was called Nevada Southern, shows all five of the university’s original buildings. Maude Frazier Hall (front left), Archie C. Grant Hall (front right) and the Lily Fong Geo Science building (back right) all exist in their original form. The Dickinson Library (center) was renovated and turned into the William S. Boyd School of Law and the Marjorie Barrick Museum (back left) was renamed the Harry Reid Center of Environmental studies. The campus is now made up of nearly 90 buildings.

By Mary Manning (contact)

Saturday, July 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In September 1965, I was a freshman at Nevada Southern University, a small, nondescript campus in a sea of sand.

It consisted of a handful of buildings, most unfinished, and you could see the end of the pavement on Maryland Parkway beyond Tropicana Avenue.

Maude Frazier Hall was the center of our student universe. It was the only place on campus to get a cup of coffee or a snack.

It was also every student’s starting point because the registrar’s office was there.

Between classes at Grant Hall or Wright Hall, we returned to Frazier because it had the only coffee vending machine on campus. (Plus it offered the options of hot chocolate and salty, tangy chicken soup.) I can still remember how that coffee tasted with a double dose of creamer and sugar — that was the only way to make it drinkable.

Frazier was our hangout, even though it always seemed to smell of musty wool and mold. A long wooden table with some wooden chairs along with nondescript gunmetal gray folding chairs gave us a gathering place to study, stew and socialize.

That table always seemed so crowded that we often spilled outside to study or smoke.

Between Grant and Frazier, a green lawn beckoned us outside when weather permitted. There were elm trees and a weeping willow or two that offered shade while we hit the books or daydreamed as a young man nearby played folk songs on an acoustic guitar. (Yes, like “Animal House” but without the boozing, believe it or not.)

The James R. Dickinson Library, a round building that was built in 1963, did not attract many of us in those days. At most it had a few thousand books, the first 1,800 volumes sent south from the University of Nevada, Reno. More of the shelves would have been bare except for some clever librarian’s stowing a collection of Las Vegas phone directories there.

Frazier was the place to study.

On hot, dry, windy days we walked from there through sandstorm clouds to go to class.

When it rained, walking to Wright Hall, or to a sparse gymnasium with ruptured pipes in the showers, or to the new library could be nearly impossible. We tried to stick to the sidewalks leading from Frazier to navigate an ocean of mud.

The perceived threat of communism combined with having the Nevada Test Site just up the road prompted most of my classmates to carry patriotism like they carried books between classes. But biology professor Leonard Storm, a Quaker, held forth after classes from a chair in a corner of the Frazier break room, expounding on his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Later in its life, Frazier continued to serve as the introduction to what had become UNLV.

“I thought Frazier was wonderful for a community outreach office,” said Carol Steedman, who worked in the building in UNLV’s continuing education program from 1981 through 2002.

People interested in enrolling at the university or curious about classes for their children could pull up to the front of Frazier and find catalogs, brochures and a friendly face just inside the front doors, Steedman said.

The last time I walked through Frazier Hall, it was to escape a brief summer rain shower on the way to another place on campus. The registrar’s office still was front and center, but the lunchroom, of course, was long gone. So was the moldy odor, for the most part. Or maybe time and nostalgia had tamed it for me.