 From left, Alumni Association Executive Director Tim Walsh, Senior Associate Director Sheila Dossett, Hazel and Phil McCarty, Associate Director Clay Cavett, and Club Coordinator Port Kaigler pose with items donated to the Association by the McCartys. For more photos, click here for a photo gallery. |
For years, they remained boxed away or forgotten in the attic of Hazel and Phil McCarty’s Clinton home. But the couple’s treasure trove of Ole Miss mementos has found new life at the Triplett Alumni Center.
Along with an antique silver tea set, the McCartys donated freshman beanies, handbooks, dance cards, and other items owned by them and Hazel McCarty’s father, also an Ole Miss graduate.
Hazel (BA 55) and Phil (BPA 55) met at Ole Miss in 1952 at an ATO fraternity dance as sophomores. In 1955, they graduated and married in quick succession. “We graduated one Sunday and married the next Sunday,” Phil explained.
The couple found their way to Quantico, Va., where Phil, a newly minted Marine officer fresh out of the Ole Miss Navy ROTC program, was stationed. A stop in New Orleans followed, where Phil continued his education at Baptist Theological Seminary. The couple eventually moved to Clinton, where Phil taught religion at Mississippi College.
Along for the ride were random mementos of their time at Ole Miss — Phil’s freshman beanie, an M Book, even a student parking permit (expired 8-31-55).
The couple also came into possession of items belonging to Hazel McCarty’s father, Hugh McCain (BA 18) of Memphis. They are the types of things, more often than not, lost to time: her father’s brown leather beanie, a dance card from the 1917 Red and Blue Club Easter Formal, and another dance card and a leather-bound commencement program from 1918.
“We were pack rats, and her dad was, too,” Phil said.
Hazel’s father “saved every newspaper article, and he kept scrapbooks,” he said. “I had all of these things, and I didn’t really look at them.”
The McCartys hadn’t given the items much thought. But when they decided to give an antique silver tea service as a gift to the Alumni Association, they wondered if the Association wouldn’t also want their stash of Ole Miss artifacts.
“I had a little wooden box, you know, the beanie was in there, and I realized I had three graduation announcements, and then the dance cards,” Hazel said. The couple discovered Phil’s own freshman beanie when they were cleaning out their attic.
Monday, the McCartys came to Ole Miss and presented the gleaming silver tea service to Alumni Association Executive Director Tim Walsh.
They also brought the well-worn beanies and the other items, which immediately fascinated Walsh and Association staffers. M Books and commencement programs from that time are rare, but even more rare are items like McCain’s dance cards.
Also among the cache was a completely random item — a simple flatware spoon, with the engraving “Gordon Hall B.C.” on its handle. McCain was likely a resident of the residence hall, and just as likely confiscated the spoon as a souvenir.
Gordon, built in 1909, was the Stockard Hall of its day. A stolen spoon would be the least serious transgression recorded among its residents. “Boys shot firecrackers in the building’s spacious hallways, whooped and hollered half the night, defaced the walls and furnishings, and in general badly abused the university’s newest and largest building,” wrote David Sansing in The University of Mississippi: A Sesquicentennial History.
The building was destroyed in a fire in 1934. Carrier Hall was later built on the site.
The McCartys were pleased that items such as a simple spoon captured the alumni staff’s attention. “I was so pleasantly surprised in how interested everybody seemed to be in all of that,” Phil said.
Looking at his old blue and red beanie, Phil reminisces about the days he donned the dubious headwear as an Ole Miss freshman. All were required to wear one. “But first, you got your hair cut, and it wasn’t a very nice haircut,” he said of the experience, which came at the hands of older students in the Cardinal Club. “They didn’t shave your head — they just used the scissors in such a horrible way that you had to go to a local barber and shave it up,” he said with a chuckle. “That’s where a lot of the crew cuts originated.”
The tradition was one Hazel’s father, a generation earlier, used to recall in the same fashion, she said. “Daddy said, ‘when they shaved my head as a freshman, it never grew back.’ He was bald-headed,'” she laughed and noted the freshman trim certainly didn’t help his receding hairline.
The family’s three generations of Ole Miss alumni include McCain, the McCartys and their son, Phil McCarty Jr. (BA 91), who grew up in Clinton and now lives in New York.
The younger Phil recently ran into Chancellor Dan Jones (MD 75) at an alumni reception in New York. Jones, who received his undergraduate degree from Mississippi College, took elder McCarty’s religion class as a student.
“He told Phil in New York, I was the only teacher he ever made a B with,” McCarty laughed. “They are good people,” McCarty said. “Dan and Lydia are good people. Ole Miss is lucky.”
Walsh said the McCartys’ gifts will be displayed in the Alumni Association’s offices along with historic items donated by other Ole Miss graduates.
“We thank the McCartys for the beautiful silver tea service, and for the beanies and other historic Ole Miss items,” Walsh said. “While some of these smaller items are often discarded or forgotten, we consider them priceless treasures and are blessed to receive them.”