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170 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K T R E I C H L E R dent. But Doug McGregor (president 1948–54) preferred to live in town so my parents became caretakers of the Birch House for $90 a month. Vice president Boyd Alexander and his wife, Ellen, lived in the apart- ment on the second floor. This imposing brick mansion had tulip wood paneling, a refectory- like table in the dining room sur- rounded by olive green leather arm- chairs, a butler’s pantry, a widow’s walk, Mr. Birch’s oil portrait in the living room, and seven bathrooms! During sleepovers on the widow’s walk, my mother told us terrifying ghost stories. Surrounded by fields, farms, and the Glen itself, the Birch House was paradise for children.We played and played, inside and outside, in every available space. Add in my wonder- ful grandmother, my horse Bianca, my Irish setter Queenie, and our two cats Lelo andTattoo, and you can see how this set a high bar for the way of life I came to expect. Then,as now,Yellow Springs and Antioch were home to lively com- munity activities and spirited public debates over race, politics, civil lib- erties, socialism,Communism, the la- bor movement, alcohol, the Spanish CivilWar,WorldWar II,McCarthy, and much else.Our house was always full of interesting and passionate—and fun-loving—people: sometimes for strategy meetings about racial equal- ity or “red scare” victims, sometimes for music at the piano with Andy (Walter Anderson, hired in 1946 to head the Music Department), some- times for carnival-like theater and faculty parties with singing, danc- ing, and booze from the state store in Xenia, sometimes for evenings of games like Murder, Charades, and Grab-bag Dramatics, and sometimes for my grandmother’s bread (she baked on Thursdays). And every so often, a rock would crash through the window with some illiterate threat attached. Notable people came throughAntioch in those years and my parents spent time with most of them: Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Norman Thomas, Leontyne Price,GilbertWilson (who worked on the murals in the gym), and Eleanor Roosevelt. In the 1930s and ’40s, theAntioch community un- dertook serious efforts to integrate the campus and for many years, my mother teamed with Justine Smadbeck, at this time the executive secretary of the Jessie Smith Noyes Scholarship Foundation in NewYork (she then became a columnist on the Amsterdam News under the name Gertrude Wilson). To bring promis- ing black students to Antioch, the two women toured the midwest and the south, talking to black preach- ers, teachers, and school principals to identify bright and ambitious high school students who might be right for Antioch (and vice versa). Their successes are legendary and include civil rights activists Edythe Scott (Bagley) and Coretta Scott (King), A. Leon Higgenbotham Jr., Lonnie McDonald and many more. My mother was their faculty advisor and mentor and stayed in touch with them until her death in 1972. She, Justine, and Coretta had become life- long friends. Immediately after Rev. King’s 1968 assassination, Justine and my mother went to Atlanta to pay their respects, show their friend- ship, and help out with the innumer- able tasks that follow from a national tragedy of this magnitude.Telegrams were pouring in from all over the world (50,000 at the house alone), trucks were coming and going with letters and flowers, and the kitchen was staffed around the clock by vol- unteer ladies from the Ebenezer Baptist Church cooking, organizing the food as it constantly arrived, and making gallons of coffee for family, friends, guests, and volunteers. Later my mother returned under calmer conditions to help Coretta set up an office, organize files, draft press re- leases and speeches, and set up ways to handle constant pressure and in- numerable demands. (Her account of “Two Weeks in Atlanta” was pub- lished as an issue of Antioch Notes .) My parents stayed at Antioch un- til they retired in 1970. They were fêted with a weekend-long gala or- Paul and Jessie Treichler in San Francisco, 1930s. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z