Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Oral History Wednesday

Salisbury House received a most interesting visit yesterday from Dr. Gerladine T. Hess. She is the Vice President of the Adventist Heritage Ministry and a Marriage and Family Therapist. She lives in Florida.

Her father, was Frank E. Thompson. And he was the person responsible for building the structure that we now live in. He built it in 1927.

In some ways the structure remain the same. The beautiful high ceilings and extremely thick brick walls (go have a look how thick the wall is at the entrance to the bathrooms!) The wooden floors etc. But in the early years the dormitory did not have 58 rooms as it has today. It had several large sleeping halls.

Dr. Hess told an interesting story about Ps. C.C Marais, who was the first dormitory dean to ever work in the dormitory (1928, 1931, 1933-38, and 1940-45). He had a very big nose (In fact, there is a rock outside Maluti Hospital that has earned itself the name: Henry's Nose).

Ps. Marais was very strict about the kind of music that students listened to and he was able to exert full control. He would watch the students as they listened to music. If they were tapping their feet to the beat of the music he would tell them to switch it off. The students quickly learned that they could listen to almost any music as long as they did not tap their feet.

I was an honor to be visited by Dr. Hess. It would be nice to get some more of these anecdotes from the past.


Dr. Geraldine Hess and her son (who works as Business Manager at Maluti Hospital in Lesotho)

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