Hitting the Heights By Candace Page Free Press Staff Writer Once upon a time, when the baby boom was young, dozens of Burlington families started life in a new "garden" apartment complex at the crest of Main Street. Most kitchens were tiny. The casement windows leaked, water pipes froze and the noise of other people's children seeped through the thin walls. No matter. In a hundred family photo albums, University Heights in the early 1950s is a place of happy beginnings, where sweethearts married, children took their first steps and young mothers cinched lifelong friendships over laundry and long days of child care. "We all thought University Heights was the nuts," Betty Little-Royer, 77, said Monday, laughing as she recalled her midnight trips to the tiny communal laundry room in hopes of finding a free machine. "It was a wonderful community of young couples struggling toward home ownership," she said. "The people I met there have remained my lifelong friends." Soon, only their photo albums and fading memories will be left. The University of Vermont will begin dismantling the 54-year-old apartment complex this week. Nine buildings will come down immediately. The remaining 16 will be leveled as soon as UVM can relocate the offices now housed there. By 2005-2006, an 850-bed dormitory will open on the site. $78 a month In 1949, the UVM campus marked the limits of city living. Farm fields stretched south from Main Street where campus dorms now stand. Spear Street was a dirt road and Interstate 89 hadn't been conceived. Only one little building, radio station WJOY, stood at the crest where Main pitched down towards South Burlington. Burlington apartments were scarce and still governed by post-war rent control. To help ease the crunch, UVM leased 12 acres to builders Hamilton Shields and John Doherty to build 23 low, wood-frame buildings housing 92 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments. Shields and Doherty built the apartments in two little horseshoes, each with a circle of grass in the middle. The first families moved in just before Christmas 1949. Renters paid $59 for a studio, $78 for a two-bedroom. Betty and Jack Little -- he a biochemistry professor, she the mother of infant Ernie -- settled into 22A. "We chose the one apartment with a tree outside," she recalled. Medical student Cornelius Granai and his wife, Lorraine, arrived soon after, first to a small apartment, later to the roomier 36B. "You could throw a stone from the back stoop and hit a cow," Lorraine Granai, now of Barre, recalled. Dozens more families followed, some older couples, but mostly young doctors, lawyers, university professors, firemen, schoolteachers, salesmen. Some came as couples -- Burlington insuranceman Duncan Brown and his wife, Georgie; future federal judge Albert Coffrin and his wife, Ann; UVM agronomist Win Way, and his wife, Jane; pediatrician Jim McKay and his wife Liz. Others married into University Heights, like Mae Johnson, who married businessman Joe Corbett in November 1952 and had her wedding picture taken in the front yard of his Heights apartment. Twenty-year-old UVM student Mary Tuthill came to baby-sit for widower Art Tuthill's two little boys and married their father. "Nobody had any money and everybody had a wonderful time," she said. The baby boom These families formed a community of shared experiences: Young fathers worked long hours, young mothers, many of whom held college degrees, stayed home to bear and care for children. Nearly everyone remembers the revolutionary radiant heat in the floors, so that mothers getting up to walk babies in the night stepped on warm floors. (They also remember the heat dried out any rug left down too long, softened the linoleum in the kitchen and caused potatoes stored under the sink to rot.) But in most memories -- as in most of the photographs -- buildings are in the background. Children dominate the foreground. Mary Tuthill, now of Williston, remembers preschoolers darting in and out among the rows of diapers hung out to dry; Georgie Brown, the clothesline full of wet snowsuits. The little development was a cul-de-sac, with sandboxes, a sliding board and a homemade baseball diamond out in the cow pasture. "Nobody had any quantity of possessions. The children had to make up their own games," Georgie Brown recalled. Mothers walked downtown to buy groceries ("Hamburg, 59 cents a pound") at the First National on Pearl Street and housedresses ("$8.95 on sale") at Abernathy's department store. All they had to do was cross the street to UVM to buy eggs from the chicken coops on East Avenue or ice cream from the school dairy on the campus green. "Life those days was getting your housework done so you could get outside with the kids," Jane Way recalled. The Loeb romance Long on children, short on privacy -- that was life at University Heights. The apartment complex buzzed over the romance of Nackey Scripps Gallowhur, occupant of 37B. She was a scion of the Scripps newspaper family and in the process of divorce -- an event worth a newspaper headline in November 1949. That was enough to make her stand out at the Heights, even without her relationship with newspaper publisher William Loeb. Loeb already was making a name for himself with his ultra-conservative editorials in the Burlington Daily News. "He'd come calling on Nackey on weekends, you'd see him in his big camel-hair coat," Joe Corbett of Burlington recalled. Some of the young mothers sniffed a bit. They wondered aloud who was taking care of Gallowhur's young daughter when she went out for an evening. Gallowhur and Loeb married and moved on, but there was plenty else to talk about. When one seven-year-old fed her friends a bottle of aspirin (a trip to the hospital resulted) everybody soon knew. If a couple argued too loudly about children or money, their neighbors on the other side of the wall could follow along. Mothers debated endlessly: Should children be tethered to keep them from toddling off toward Main Street? What was the suitable punishment for the children who picked the prize tulips growing in one yard? (At 50 years distance, four mothers separately recalled the tulip-picking fiasco). The lack of privacy was balanced by the plethora of help. Lorraine Granai found that out when her three-year-old, Skipper, was put in a half-body cast to immobilize his too-soft hip bones. "We managed with a lot of love and help from the neighbors," she recalled. Skipper's little wheeled cart became a fixture on the sidewalk, and so did the arguments among his friends over the privilege of pushing him around. A new generation For Duncan Brown, the little post-war community captured more than the beginning of the baby boom. "University Heights was symbolic of the change that came over Burlington in the 1950s," he said. It was the educated, optimistic, enthusiastic young men and women in places like University Heights who helped organize the Vermont Forum, a group that sponsored lively debates on public issues; who stocked the League of Women Voters and other civic groups with volunteers; who helped organize an industrial development group to seek new businesses like IBM. "It was a group of truly dynamic people thrown together. We shared a feeling in that post-war ferment that we had to make a better world," Duncan Brown said of Burlington at that time. For most of these couples, University Heights was a brief stop on the road to somewhere else. A few, including music teachers Ippocrates and Jean Pappoutsakis, would stay on, in Mrs. Pappoutsakis' case, for 45 years. Most saved their money, had more children and built houses in the new North End, like the Corbetts and the Littles, or in South Burlington, like the Browns. The friendships remained, through business success, moves away from Burlington, the death of a husband or wife. University Heights, once alone on its hilltop, faded from view among the high-rise dormitories of UVM. Generations of families passed through until, in 1994, UVM converted 16 of the buildings into offices. As the first buildings are torn down and recycled this summer, two university students will compile an oral history of the place. Mary Lou Adsit of South Burlington lived in 22B for three or four years in the early 1950s, when her sons John and Brown were little. Her memories sum up to a simple conclusion. "It was a very pleasant time in our lives, a very happy time," she said. Candace Page lived at 36B and 28B University Heights from 1949 to 1952. Contact her at 660-1865 or 229-9141 or cpage@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com