Barbara Gray Nicholson, a 1950 graduate of the New Jersey College for Women, with Kayo Denda at Douglass Library.
On June 6, during the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College reunion, multiple alumnae visited Douglass Library. As an indication of the meaning Douglass Library holds for Douglass alumnae, the library is consistently an option on the reunion’s list of activities.
The highlight of this year’s visit was Barbara Gray Nicholson, a 1950 graduate of the New Jersey College for Women (NJC), which later became Douglass College. While at NJC, she met her husband, a Rutgers College of Agriculture student, also from the class of 1950. They married after graduation, settling in North Carolina, where she lived from 1956 to 2019, studied library science, and worked in a small public library. For the last five years, she has lived in Nebraska, close to her son.
Nicholson talked about visiting the library, then located in the basement of Recitation Hall (now Ruth Adams Hall, having been renamed in honor of a former Douglass College dean), and about the professors she admired. They include renowned English constitutional law historian Margaret Judson and seeds specialist Jessie Gladys Fiske, who later became chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. She had fond memories of the dances on campus, through which she met her husband, and the old Packing Box gym next to Voorhees Chapel with an open floor furnace. The students in the mandatory modern dance class had to dance gingerly, navigating around the metal fence surrounding the opening, to avoid getting burns.
