Steve Sylwester Remembers

My [Steve's] early Faculty Lane memories include:

Racing popsicle sticks in the street gutter during summer downpours. As I recall, the races would start in front of the brick houses and end at the bottom of the small hill at the end of Faculty Lane across from CTC gym.

Playing team Monopoly under the big tree in the backyard behind Hackmanns during the summer. Remember, the tree had a treehouse platform up in it. We played team Monopoly because more people could play that way. Eddie Hackmann always let me be his teammate until one game when I landed on a fully hoteled Boardwalk and bankrupted us. I cannot ever remember being his teammate after that (I recall Eddie shunned me for awhile after that, or at least it seemed that we to me at the time).

The CTC Homecoming celebrations. The CTC students would park a junker car in the gravel parking lot across the street from our house and sell sledge hammer whacks to raise money. The car would be painted with Homecoming slogans against the visiting team. The various dorms made Homecoming floats on the campus lawn and then included the floats in the Homecoming parade. I once was asked to carry a sandwich board through the Seward downtown area to advertise the coming Homecoming events. I remember the CTC beanies that the freshmen had to wear as an initiation. I loved Homecoming at CTC — the whole event from the run-up through the afternoon football game.

The CHS football game played at night in a blizzard. The announcer finally called out for the visiting fans to all come over to the CHS grandstands because they might be better able to stay warm if they bundled up with the home fans. The blizzard was so bad that you could not even see the visiting fans across the field when the announcer made his invitation.

Summer scavenger hunts for the Faculty Lane kids. I am not sure who organized the scavenger hunts, but I thought they were great fun.

Neighborhood plays in the Schwich's garage. I recall Danny being an enthusiastic actor.

The big apple tree behind the Mueller/Stelmachowicz brick house. I used to climb up in that tree and eat apples until I was sick. There were pear trees in the Becks' backyard, and there were rows of grapevines with grapes separating the backyards of a few houses. I think the Schwichs backyard had an apple tree, too (homebase of the backyard baseball diamond might have been under it). The Sylwesters backyard had a big garden in it, but I do not recall that any other backyards had gardens.

Bicycle hide-and-seek on the CTC campus, with the front steps of Weller being home.

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I once threw up in the main room of Link Library. I had gone over to the library myself to look at books in the children's books room when I suddenly felt sick. I ran out of the room to go home and got only as far as the big room with the mural on the wall before I projectile vomited in the middle of the floor. It was a moment of supreme embarrassment.

CTC occasionally had movies in the Weller Hall chapel auditorium that we were allowed to go to. I once went to a Weller Hall movie with my brothers (and perhaps others) and we sat in the balcony. I fell asleep during the movie, and my brothers decided to not wake me when the movie was over. They just walked home to Faculty Lane. When I finally woke up, it was very late at night and I was seated alone in the balcony, and the whole chapel auditorium and all of Weller Hall was completely empty and totally dark. It was very freaky and very startling, and I was upset as I rushed home alone. Of course, my brothers thought the whole thing was very funny.

Geography

Faculty Lane ran along the north side of the core campus of Concordia College in Seward. The core campus occupied a square area that measured about 200 yards on each side. The front of the campus is Weller Hall, which faces Columbia Avenue.

There is a good map of the campus at this webpage, but I have not been able to embed it into this blog. In the meantime, we will make do with this aerial photograph:

Columbia Avenue is the street running vertically along the left edge of the image. The large building to the right of that street is Weller Hall, and it is the front of the campus. The sides of the campus are described as follows:

* Behind the campus, on the east side, lay a football field. (About two football fields could have fit along that side.) At the north-east corner stood an athletic building that had been built only a couple years before our arrival, perhaps in about 1958.

* Along the north side of the campus stretched Faculty Lane, a row of eight large houses. In the image, the prominent street running horizontally along the top of the image is East Hillcrest Drive. Faculty Lane is a crooked street a little lower, on the left side of the image. In the image, that crooked street runs into a large building, which is the college's Music Building. The area of that Music Building previously was occupied by four houses, which were removed in 1964.

* Along the west side stretched Columbia Avenue. At the intersection of Faculty Lane and Columbia Avenue, on the Columbia Avenue side of the street, stood St. John Elementary School. If you walked south from this school along Columbia Avenue there was a row of large houses, similar to the row of houses on Faculty Lane.

* Along the south side stretched College Avenue. Across that avenue stood a row of dormitories. I imagine that those dormitories had replaced a row of houses similar to those that still (in my time) stood along Faculty Lane and Columbia Avenue.

In 1960, Concordia College was at the northeast edge of Seward. Beyond the football field lay only farm fields. Beyond the athletic field there were three or four short streets with homes, but further was open country.

In this aerial photograph, the prominent street running horizontally all the way across and just a little below the image's center is Hillcrest Drive. (You can see the football field a little below Hillcrest Drive on the image's right side.) The image shows a large residential area in the top, right part of the image, above Hillcrest Drive. In 1960, most of that area was open countryside.

If you stood at the west end of Faculty Lane, across the street from St. John’s Elementary School and then walked north, you walked into a rural area after only one block. When we arrived in 1960, the Schlueter family lived there, a block away from the school, and they raised ponies on their property. They had a large barn and a corral for the ponies.

Place Campus Weller Hall

Here is a summary of the history of Weller Hall from a website about Historic Campus Architecture:

Weller Hall was originally constructed in 1925. The building is named for Concordia's first President, Rev. George Weller. The auditorium/chapel addition was constructed in 1952. This room is used for daily chapel services, concerts, convocations, drama productions, movies and other events. The building also accomodates administrative offices and classrooms.

Weller Hall is constructed of concrete masonry units for bearing, foundation, and partition walls. The floor systems are concrete slabs on steel deck on steel joints. The roof system is steel deck on steel joists. The chapel addition roof structure is steel joist girders and steel deck. The building has been renovated numerous times to accomodate changing functions.

My father, Robert Sylwester, had his office in this building's basement. Also in the basement was the Art Department and the office of Reinhold Marxhausen.