Tales Out of School from West Baden's College Days

These were the sort of conversations you’d hear at just about any college reunion.

We smuggled that cat into our room that one time.

I’ll never forget my snakebite and my broken jaw.

Do you remember the streakers?! You’d hear someone say “streaker!” And you’d just see bare skin go flying by.

The stories about the ol’ college days are typical. The setting for their college experience was anything but.

Alumni of Northwood Institute recently gathered for a reunion at West Baden Springs Hotel, the same building that housed Northwood’s dormitory and classrooms when it operated as a university more than 35 years ago. In the spirit of college, we’ll try to learn a few things about Northwood Institute before we get to more of the fun stuff.

A few facts on Northwood:

1.) It operated as private university from 1968 through ’83, following a stint when the building was used as a Jesuit seminary from 1934 through ’64. (West Baden Springs Hotel closed to guests in 1932 after the Depression before reopening in 2007.)

2.) Student dorms were on the second and third floors, and they were converted in the style of a typical dorm with community bathrooms. On the first floor, there was a bookstore, pizzeria, game room with pool and pinball, and even a barbershop and a student radio station. Many of the classrooms were in the area where the spa is now located.

3.) The enrollment was about 300 when it opened, and grew as high as 600. The student population skewed decisively male: One alum estimated that of the 350 students there during his era, the breakdown was about 300 men and 50 women.

The atrium (top) was a popular hangout for Northwood students, and the dining hall (lower left) was located where Sinclair's Restaurant is now. 

4.) The school offered two-year and four-year degrees in business, performing arts and vocational studies. Northwood was renowned for some of its specialty programs like automotive marketing, fashion merchandising, and hotel and restaurant management. 

We’ll turn it over to the Northwood alumni to hear more about the college experience firsthand:

Bill Lowry: This is the guy who has stories for days.

Taking rafts out to swim on the nearby golf course when it flooded. Tapping into the phone wires in the ducts, Mission: Impossible style, and making prank calls. The infamous frigid showers in the morning, before the building’s boilers got fully fired up. (“I didn’t take a shower for like a week one time, because the water was too cold.”)

Bill points the way to where his old dorm room was conveniently
located, with a window leading right out to a ledge.

But it wasn’t so bad, considering he had the best room in the house:

“My room was the one way back at the end of the hall. It was the only room that you could climb through the window and onto the ledge and get into the girls’ dorm.”

“You charged a toll, too,” someone recalled.

“We tried to. I told all the guys, ‘If you’re going to come to our room every night and open the window and freeze us to death, we want a quarter.’ So we put out a box next to the window, and it was supposed to be the honor system. I’d hear people coming and going all night and waking me up. I could hear the quarter dropping, and if I didn’t hear the quarter, I’d go, ‘Whoa, wait a minute.’ After about a week, the guys caught on and we started getting buttons and slugs instead of quarters. I said, ‘OK that’s it, I’m shutting it off.’”

“One year, we turned the third floor into a haunted house for Halloween. We had gone out and gotten a real coffin, and it was like an old Dracula-type coffin that had felt on the outside and red, shiny material inside. My roommate Aaron dressed up as a vampire and laid in it. Even some people from town would come, and we charged just a little bit to come through it. They’d come down the hall and walk through the rooms; every room was a different theme. Everybody was dressed up like zombies and blood all over the walls; it was pretty cool. It was quite an effort.”

Melody (Gerrard) Robertson: She met her husband at Northwood, and they were an appropriate pair for one of the school’s biggest events of the year.

“The car show they’d have here? Amazing. It was a huge car show,” Melody recalls of the dozens and dozens of cars that would be displayed in the West Baden atrium. Melody studied fashion merchandising; her now-husband studied automotive marketing and was in charge of the Chrysler team alongside the Fords and GMs and other models on display.

“And then the fashion students, we’d put on a style show in the middle (of the atrium) between all the cars. And then we’ve have the cars were on the turntables, then some of the models would talk about the car and the new features. It was one of the largest car shows in the Midwest for a while. It was a big draw from all over.”

Then, there was a discovery she made one day, likely from West Baden Springs Hotel’s heyday from decades earlier.

“One time I went looking for props for a fashion show, and I went down into what I call the dungeon. I came across a room that had a huge, thick wooden door that had bars on it. I thought, ‘what is in this room?’ I looked in, and covered in cobwebs was a huge — I mean, this thing was huge — brass chandelier. It was just beautiful. I don’t know if at one time it hung from there or not.”

Steve Stewart: There were all sorts of nooks and crannies to discover, especially in the parts of the building where students weren’t supposed to venture. “We had a lot of fun exploring. We only had the first three floors. The fourth, fifth and sixth floor, we’d kind of pioneer. We’d go up there and wander around. Just old, beat-up furniture up there. Nothing much.”

There was that one lingering mystery up in the dormitory area, though.

“For about the first six months or year, every night about midnight we had what I call the Midnight Screamer. Somebody in one of the rooms would scream at the top of their lungs at midnight. Every night. And they kept trying to catch this guy. Never did catch him. We always had our thoughts who it was, but nobody was telling.”

"The many faces of Northwood," courtesy of a school yearbook.

These type of stories go on and on and on, considering the uniqueness of the Northwood experience. They were a college community self-contained living and going to class under the same roof (well, dome, actually).

And some of the fondest memories? They happened right in the middle of the atrium, which was a favorite spot for students just to play guitar and hang out.

“At night, we’d have 10 or 12 of us sitting out here in the middle of the atrium) just talking and shooting the breeze – and there was no one else around,” Bill Lowry reminisced as he looked around the bustling hotel atrium during the reunion. “I mean, can you imagine this whole building we had to ourselves?”