University Club’s 90th: If These Walls Could Talk

The 90-year-old University Club has all the architectural appeal of a Tudor castle - complete with ghosts of inhabitants past.

Something is loose in the University Club, something that would make your skin crawl and knees knock if you ever saw it, something that works in the wee hours to twist the next day askew, something that seems more mischievous than malevolent … so far.

Mythical perhaps, but too tingly to ignore, especially in the ghastly, ghostly, ghoulish wake of Halloween. Lore has it that this wraith was born – released may be the better word – during the club’s early years, when medical students roomed upstairs. One night, as a practical joke, a few of them went to Science Hall and brought back something they put in the bed of an oh-so-unfortunate fellow student: a cadaver.

They succeeded in scaring the ever-loving wits out of the student. But something else – not anticipated and more than a little creepy – happened: The cadaver disappeared. And it was never seen alive, uh, dead again.

But over the years it has made itself felt. Staff members have repeatedly encountered the same eerie scene when they unlock the club in the morning. In the kitchen, always the kitchen, every door is found open – doors to the refrigerator, the freezer, the oven, the cupboards. If it’s got a hinge, it’s open, though nothing is ever missing. The freezer food is still frozen, so it happens shortly before the staff arrives. And it’s happened a dozen times or so in the past 10 years.

The first-floor Audubon dining room features original Audubon prints.

So who knows who’ll show up for the University Club’s 90th birthday party on Thursday, Nov. 20, from 4:30-7 p.m. Hors d’oeuvres and a big birthday cake will be served, and faculty and staff are welcome to attend without charge. Period attire from the century’s first decade will be displayed, on loan from the State Historical Society, with live ragtime piano. And by party time, birthday banners in the club’s colors of forest green and burgundy will be hung along State Street.

Turning nonagenarian lacks the panache of a centennial. But for the University Club, its first 90 years have been a bountiful garden.

“I love this place,” says Juli Johnson, the club’s manager since 1987. “There’s something about the building’s architecture and sense of history.”

Architecture and history intertwine in the club, like the ivy vines that curve across the colonnaded, gargoyled portico of the Tudor Revival building. Enter the main doors and to your right is the Wayside Dining Room, so named (from a Shakespeare poem) by Professor Helen C. White, who in 1941 became the first woman to head the club. The Wayside is where Johnson once … let’s hold that story until the tour’s end.

To your left is the Reading Room, replete with stained glass, massive fireplace (one of five in the club), stuccoed walls and terrazzo marble floors inlaid with strips of brass. Frequently used for receptions, it has such a polished-wood elegance that it could pass for the reading room of a club on London’s Fleet Street.

Joining the Club University Club membership is open to university alumni, faculty, staff and graduate students. It offers weekday lunch service, rooms for breakfast and lunch meetings, and banquet facilities. Scheduled throughout the year are Tuesday and Wednesday luncheon lecture series, Friday afternoon parties and other special events. Annual fees are $90 for regular members, $45 for retired faculty and staff, $30 for graduate students and $150 for a department or program. For more information, call Juli Johnson at 262-5023.

Straight ahead is a lobby desk with the mailboxes formerly used by male faculty and students who lived upstairs. And females? Women were banned from club membership until 1933, the year the university took title to the building. Before that, women could not enter the Reading Room nor could they eat in the Wayside unless escorted by a member. That’s precisely why – here’s history and architecture in a symbiotic embrace again – the women’s lounge is so nicely appointed.

“Women were allowed to slip in the Murray Street side door and enter the women’s lounge just inside,” says Johnson. The outer room has a full-length mirror and fireplace, and the inner room has a vanity. The lounge is still used today, often by brides before wedding ceremonies in nearby churches.

You also can check out the six other dining rooms. They include the first-floor Audubon Room, graced with original Audubon prints donated last year by Richard Anderson, professor emeritus of psychiatry and pediatrics, and the Fireside Room downstairs, with the same menu as the Wayside plus a pub. The rooms upstairs are now offices for Student Financial Services and the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education.

The formation of the club as a faculty meeting place was urged by President Charles Van Hise in 1906. The first clubhouse was a home at Murray and State streets purchased from university Vice President John Parkinson. A few years later, two brick wings were added and the original house razed, and in the 1920s a third wing was completed.

Today the building is owned by the university, which rescued the debt-ridden and Depression-scarred club in 1933 by accepting the building from the club as a gift. Membership ebbed again in the riotous ’60s, when anyone intrepid enough to eat lunch on the porch could experience the olfactory delights of tear gas.

But today the club’s membership stands at an all-time high of 920, more than quintuple the 162 members of 1987. That means the club is poised, with a solid membership base, to reach out in new ways.

“We want to become more integrated into the arts complex of our campus neighborhood, especially the Elvehjem,” says Daniel Bromley, professor of agricultural and applied economics and president of the club’s board of directors. “The world’s great museums combine the arts, fine food and classic ambiance, and that recipe seems as fitting for UW–Madison as it does for New York or Milan.”

Outreach also will come through a new breakfast series, started last month and funded by the late Ronald Mattox, a UW–Madison graduate and Madison accountant. The series, which reflects the spirit of Chancellor Ward’s community initiatives, brings together town and gown for what Bromley calls “conversations about our mutual futures.”

Well, the tour’s over and we’re back at the Wayside, but first, a final spooky story. A few years ago, Johnson was cleaning up alone after a wedding in the Wayside. She had laid her keys on one of the tables, then heard her office phone ringing. As she was running to catch the phone, she heard the wide-open heavy wooden door to the dining room slam shut, her keys locked inside. No windows were open, so no breeze could have blown the door shut. And the door has no hydraulic arm that could have released and closed it.

So be careful: If you attend the club’s 90th birthday bash on Nov. 20, keep your eyes peeled and your keys close by.