- Curry Hicks, photo courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library.
I’ve been swimming in the three indoor pools on campus several times a week since the early 80s. And while counting off the laps, I often wondered about the people whose names grace these buildings. A trip to the library archives revealed the legends behind the names.
Curry Starr Hicks—Curry to everyone—was the first Director of Athletics and Student Health, from 1911 until his retirement in 1949. His philosophy of physical education was broad and inclusive: “It is concerned with the physical, mental, and moral growth of the students.”
Alumni Field, about where the Whitmore Administration Building stands now, was his first accomplishment, completed in 1915. Because the land was a soggy, wet fen, few believed it a suitable field location. Hicks not only solved the drainage problem—volunteer students were among those who helped—he raised half the money for its construction.
Curry Hicks gym, on Hicks’s drawing board for 20 years and completed in 1938, had a similar genesis. Again, he raised half the funds for its construction. His wife, Adeline, head of Physical Education for women, was an athletic dynamo in her own right.
Ruth Jane Totman, seventh of 10 children, was a Conway native who began teaching at the age of 16. Like Adeline, she was a pioneer for women’s physical education and became the first head of the department and professor of physical education. She retired in 1964. Totman gym, completed in 1957, originally bore the lackluster name North Physical Education or NOPE.
Totman knew of another nickname. “You know what they call that building, don’t you? They call it ‘Wopee,’ the letters that stand for Women’s Physical Education.”
Like Curry Hicks, she helped plan this facility. At the time, buildings were only named posthumously, so Totman had to wait until 1984—just five years before her death and only after a special exception was made—for the name to be changed to the one it bears today. Given her academic interest, it’s fitting that the oldest Physical Exercise Department in the country, now the Department of Kinesiology, is in the building named for her.
Frank Learoyd Boyden, a 1902 Amherst College graduate, signed on for a one-year appointment at Deerfield Academy, thinking it would be a stepping-stone to a law career. Some 66 years later, he was still there, retiring in 1968. Deerfield back then had 14 students, boys and girls, and wasn’t expected to survive. With the help of his wife, Helen, a science teacher, Deerfield became one of the preeminent schools in the country. An incubator for educators, it produced 12 college presidents and 50 prep school headmasters in their time.
Sports were a big part of his educational plan. “I believe in boys. I believe in keeping them busy.” There were so few students at the beginning, however, that he played quarterback for the football team, first base on the baseball nine. He coached both sports, including basketball, for many years, and in his seventies, in street clothes, would hit fungoes before baseball games.
At the university, Boyden served on the Board of Trustees for 22 years,
often as Acting Chair or Chair,
decades in which Massachusetts Agricultural College became the University of Massachusetts. The new gymnasium, completed in 1964, was, properly so, named for him.
