A cool briefcase

You may have noticed the well-used leather briefcase Fairhaven College Dean Roger Gilman carries about campus. It might interest you to learn that Dean Gilman first started using the briefcase many years before – when he was a student himself at Fairhaven College.

Making the grade

The Registrar’s Office at Western can be a very busy place. For instance, the office processed more than 50,000 winter quarter grades in just a week’s time, according to David Brunnemer, the WWU registrar.

Lots of bricks

Western’s campus, in its many buildings and walkways, has a lot of bricks. How many? The good folks at Facilities Management have an estimate: about 1.9 million.

More on bricks – the naming of Red Square

Speaking of bricks, Tamara Belts from Western Libraries Special Collections said that according to an oral history they did that the color of the bricks determined the name of Red Square.

In a Feb. 5, 2003 interview, Lou Carlile said: “And so when they built that big square out there it was to be called…, I’ve forgotten what they were going to call it now, but anybody who walked in there, I mean your first impression was that all those red brick, acres of red brick you know-- Red Square. That just fell into place so beautifully. It never got called anything but Red Square after that (laughter).”

Lou Carlile, interviewed before her death, taught briefly at Western, and was the wife of Sene Carlile, a longtime professor in the Speech department. She also was a longtime member of Women of Western.

Belts also noted that Western had just completed the bricking of the square at the time of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The first ever gathering on Red Square (by later accounts) was a memorial type event for King. At the time, a faculty member proposed in the then Faculty News (a predecessor to FAST and the current Western Today) that they should name it King Square in honor or memory of the great Civil Rights leader, but that never transpired.

Vampires in Red Square?

While on the subject of Red Square, Window magazine editor Mary Gallagher recently received an interesting Class Notes submission for the magazine from alumna Laurie (Lundberg) Thompson (Business Administration; 1986), whose pen name is Laurie London. She just released “Tempted by Blood,” the third installment of her paranormal romance series. Her 2011 book, “Embraced by Blood,” opens with a midnight vampire fight in Western’s Red Square.

Club tennis to national tournament

Western is one of 64 universities in the United States to qualify for the 2012 USTA Tennis on Campus National Championship for co-ed intramural and sport club tennis teams. The contest is set for April 12 to 14 in North Carolina.