Built by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 with a knotty pine interior, it was operated as a cooperative house, independent of the university’s housing system. In 1963, fire safety concerns brought an end to its use as a dormitory. WSU purchased it and renovated it into headquarters for an internationally recognized anthropology program, the Center for Northwest Archeology.
The new $3.1 million Phi Kappa Theta fraternity house opened. High-tech in every respect, it reflected the “wired world” commitment of WSU alumnus and fraternity member Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder. He funded the building, and equipped each of the other Greek houses at WSU with fiber-optic connections.
The facility, a five-story brick-and-wood building vilified by President Bryan for its lack of looks and efficiency, burns after a kitchen fire spreads out of control.
In 1900, the new Ferry residence hall opens. A four-story brick structure topped with a four-sided cupola, it houses between 100 and 180 students. Ferry serves as the only men’s residence hall on campus for three decades. The hall also houses the first campus fraternity, which starts as a club before moving off campus.
Despite an effort by alumni, students, and staff to preserve it, Ferry is demolished in the late-1960s—but not before the cupola was saved. In 1975 it’s relocated to the Glenn Terrell Friendship Mall, near Murrow Hall. Construction in the Murrow Yard in 2008 sparks the cupola’s relocation to its present site in the new arboretum near the Lewis Alumni Center.
Weldon B. “Hoot” Gibson graduates with a B.A. in Economics. Gibson attended WSC with the help of his Uncle, Arthur “Buck” Bailey, and was a member of the football team and the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. After graduating from WSC, Gibson studied at the Stanford Graduate School of Business receiving an MBA in 1940 and a Ph.D. in 1950. Gibson was a long-time executive at the Stanford Research Institute from 1947 until 1988. He earned the Legion of Merit in 1946, Commander of the British Empire in 1947, and the Washington State University Distinguished Alumni Award for his role in creating the Washington State University Foundation.
Early on the morning of Sunday, May 3rd, approximately 200 students rioted, clashing with police on Greek Row in the College Hill neighborhood of Pullman. The riot, possibly provoked by a WSU ban on on-campus drinking, injured twenty-three police officers and about twelve party-goers.
Initially, two police officers were called at midnight to investigate a car-pedestrian accident at the intersection of Colorado and A streets. When police arrived at the scene, rioters pelted them with rocks, beer cans, and construction materials. They also overturned portable toilets and lit bonfires on the street. The officers retreated and called for backup, “giving the party a chance to cool down,” according to Pullman Police Chief Tim Weatherly.
Seeing no reduction in the rioting by 2 a.m., a combined force of ninety-three officers and troopers from Pullman and Moscow tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas, smoke, and water. This only diverted the crowd around the police, and rioters continued to attack law enforcement for two more hours. The riot was finally dispersed at 5:30 a.m. with property damage listed at $15,000. In the next year and a half, twenty-two felony charges were filed against the students involved. Many of them were plea-bargained down to misdemeanors, resulting in nineteen convictions.
John Stickney, a troubled youth and ex-boyfriend of WSU student Lisa Clark, detonated a bomb on the fourth floor of Streit-Perham Hall, killing himself and wounding two policemen. Stickney, a high school dropout, was employed by Industrial Rock Products as a powder man. He drove from his home in Mercer Island to attempt a reconciliation with Clark. Stickney twice attempted to talk with Clark at her dorm room and then detonated the bomb after a failed attempt to force entry.
Post-WWII construction at WSC was marked by the importing of many temporary buildings to handle the boom of returning soldier students. Many of these buildings came from the Farragut Naval Training Station near Coeur d’Alene, ID while others came from Vancouver, WA. These buildings were torn down by the mid 1990s.
Timothy Leary, a troubled psychologist and popular counterculture figure of the 1960s, who coined the phrase “think for yourself and question authority” and was once called “the most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon, graduates with a master’s of science in psychology from WSC. Leary only attends WSC for about a year, moving to Pullman in early 1946, gaining admittance in March of that year, and graduating in June of 1947. He and his wife Marianne lived in a house at the corner of C Street and Alpha Road, enjoying what one biographer would later call “the only uneventful period of their life together.”
Construction begins on the Women’s Gym, now known as Smith Gym, and on Davis and Wilmer residence halls.
The first “skyscraper dorms,” Orton Hall and Rogers Hall, are built to accommodate the Baby Boom generation.
The institution awards a bid for the construction of Ferry Hall on February 19, 1892. The college confirms plans to construct a second classroom building, the original College Hall, on May 15. The buildings are ready when school begins that fall.
