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By Ona Fellows - September, 1997 Montpelier Seminary, which it was known as in 1933, (later renamed Vermont Junior College) was really a private preparatory school for college. Some students were there also to finish their high school course, or re-do it, if necessary, for the college course. Anyway, M.S. was my mother's alma mater. I had seen pictures of her in her basketball outfit, and the appeal was there. So after three boring years of high school in Gardner, Massachusetts, we sent the application for entrance to M.S.A. I remember it now, I think the powers that be, who interviewed me, couldn't understand why I would choose M.S. over Gardner High! I never regretted it. There was, of course, a tuition, which meant getting a part time job at M.S. For me, this turned out to be sweeping and cleaning the administration building. One always had to sign in and out of the dormitory, even to go across the street to work. In the building to be cleaned, there was a chapel. In the chapel was an organ, and I mean an organ: a pipe organ! The pipe organ, of necessity, had a door near the back for use to work on the pipes, or whatever. Donald Fellows, who would later become my husband, lived off campus. His mother's house was just across the street! How convenient! He didn't have to sign "in and out” as I did at the “dorm," so when I was at work in the "ad" building, he could just come over. One day when I was sweeping out the chapel, he “just happened" to drop in and so did someone else! We ducked into the organ when we heard footsteps. Evidently one of the music students had come in to practice! How deafening it was! You'd have to try it to really know, but we survived. Somehow the dean found out about our secret trysts, and I got called to his office. I can see him now as though it were yesterday, shaking his head as if in disbelief, and hear his words, 'We just don't do that here! He pronounced it hayah. "We just don't do that hayah!" (English, you know.) Of course Don and I still found ways to meet, even if not in the chapel! When I recently re-visited “the school on the hill" and entered the chapel, there it was, the very same organ. I relived the trysts with Don, inside among the pipes. I'm a widow now, but these memories are very much alive. From the Blackberry Dispatch, the Fellows Family Newsletter, September 1997 |
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