Morgan Rooney and McKenna Snow
MSMU Class of 2020 and 2023
(9/2023) Catching up with Emmitsburg’s very own Bill Meredith has been a gift to the Emmitsburg News-Journal and for the whole community. His local roots run deep for the town of Emmitsburg, especially for the Mount students who have been fortunate enough to meet him. Bill taught at the Mount in the science department for over forty years before retiring, and has a plethora of memories that the News-Journal wants to celebrate and share with the community. He also is known as ‘the retired ecologist’ who wrote for the both the Dispatch and News-Journal in the ecology section for 18 years! His articles and writings are all available on Emmitsburg.net under the "authors" section. This article is only part one of many to come that will reminisce with Bill on his time living in Emmitsburg.
Though he has lived here the majority of his life, Bill was originally from West Virginia, near Fairmont. He spent much of his time growing up on his grandfather’s farm, then his father’s farm once he turned ten years old. Fortunately for the family, Bill’s father held a fairly steady job through the Depression in an aluminum factory, which is more than many could say during that time.
Bill recalled, "My dad and I were cleaning out the barn sometime during the spring of 1949 or 50 and he says, ‘You’re going to graduate this spring. What are you going to do then?’"
Due to lack of funds, Bill planned to get a job once he finished high school so he could make some money of his own. However, he wanted to attend college to receive a higher education. At his father’s suggestion, he spent the next four years living at home and working part-time at a small mine company store using the money he earned to pay his way through college. His time spent working at the store was invaluable:
"This was an important thing to me because it taught me to meet a group of people that I have never met before—a completely different society," Bill elaborated. "That was educational to me, to get to know them. They were good people. Many of them had similar values in terms of honesty and how you treat people as the farmers did, but they had a much different social life. Besides what I learned when I was in college, I was learning about society. That was quite a life changing experience."
He was accepted into Fairmont State College and graduated in 1955 with a Bachelor’s in Science Education and soon after married his wife, Betty Jean. He smiled, remembering how they first met: "She invited me to her 14th birthday party. I was a senior and she was a freshman in high school. She invited me to her birthday party, and we started dating, and that was that." Coming out of college, Bill believed that he would become a high school teacher but was encouraged to apply to the University of West Virginia and received a scholarship to attend. Within two years, he had received his Master’s in Zoology.
By then, Bill started looking for a job, as Betty Jean had had their first child. "So I needed a job, I couldn’t stay in college," Bill said. "So I started to look for openings." His Master’s thesis director told him, "I have a friend at a college in Maryland. And he likes it there, but he’s going to resign and go into publishing. You might apply there. And so I came to the Mount, and applied, and that was crazy. We got my dad’s car that morning at four or five o’clock—and there weren’t any double roads. Everything was single roads from here to there, from West Virginia over about two hundred miles then. And you couldn’t go over 45 miles an hour on those roads because they were so crooked and up and down."
Recalling the drive to the Mount for his interview, Bill smiled and thought of his wife, Betty Jean, sitting in the passenger’s side with their baby girl in her lap for the whole drive. Nursing the baby occasionally, Betty Jean got carsick, which delayed their arrival time at the Mount. Bill’s interview for the position was originally supposed to be at nine a.m., but they did not arrive at the Mount until 11 a.m.
His interviewer, a Catholic priest, did not mind in the least. "Down on the porch of the old dormitory where the chapel is, down there is a spring, a fountain. He was sitting on a bench by that fountain, with a couple of students talking to him. He had been there all morning waiting for me, but it didn’t bother him a bit. And he was in his late sixties then, almost blind—he had two pairs of glasses, a regular pair and he wore a pair of sunglasses over that. And I had never met a priest before, and I didn’t know whether to salute, or bow, or what," Bill said, laughing.
But the priest wasn’t bothered at all that Bill, his wife and their baby girl arrived late—he took them down to the office, and the president was there, who was also a Catholic priest. "Priests wore gowns then, and his was grubby, and had buttons all over," Bill described. "And the vice president was there too, and he was neat as a pin. He looked like he was out of a picture or something. The vice president said, ‘how are you? Who’s this little girl here?’ And I said, ‘That’s Melinda,’ and he said, ‘well let’s see her.’ Picked her up, and held her in his arms—and she was about three months old at the time—and she spit up on his jacket. And that didn’t bother him a bit. He reached in his pocket and got a handkerchief and wiped it off and put it back in his pocket." It was a joyful memory that made Bill laugh as he recalled it.
Bill then described how the vice president then said, "‘You’re from West Virginia? Ever been to that big brewery down in Charleston?’ And I said no, I haven’t been down there. So he talked a while, and the dean was there and he talked a while, and they said, we’ll show you around and you can take a look at it, and if you want to sign up today…"
Bill said his response was, "Well I’ve got one other appointment to go to before I make the decision, but it sure looks nice here." After going to his other appointment, an interview with West Virginia State, Bill said, "They liked me very much and I think I could’ve signed on there if I wanted to, but my wife didn’t like it there, so we came to the Mount. And that was it, I started that fall. We moved down a week before school started." That was just the beginning of Bill’s 41-year long career at the Mount, which began when Bill and Betty Jean moved to Emmitsburg in 1957.
When Bill Meredith, his wife Betty-Jean and their child moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland in 1957 for Bill to teach science courses at Mount St. Mary’s University, it wasn’t yet known to them how many stories Bill would have to tell about their time there—and their time spent traveling out west as Bill got his doctorate! Thanks to Bill giving a full interview with the News-Journal staff this summer, all of Emmitsburg has the privilege of hearing the treasury of stories Bill collected during his 41 years at the Mount.
Once Bill accepted the position as a science professor at the Mount, he and his family moved to a faculty house. Bill explained that there used to be six houses for faculty to live close to the Mount, but now there is only one. Bill and his family lived in one of the two-bedroom houses for the first three years of his career. "We could walk across the road to school," Bill said.
At first, getting students to participate in class was a challenge. "I started teaching science, and nobody was interested in it," Bill said, laughing. Bill explained that the previous science professor hadn’t cultivated much enthusiasm for science in the classroom, and didn’t take as much time for the students. When Bill came, he got to know the students. "They would come down to the house sometimes, and visit to see my wife and see the baby," he said.
"They weren’t interested in science, and after the first month of school I was really having trouble keeping them interested—I mean they were polite, but they just obviously weren’t interested," Bill said. But then, something happened that changed everything.
"When the Russian spaceship went up—Sputnik—the first spaceship, the United States panicked," Bill said. Suddenly, "there was a demand for people who knew science, and demand for science teachers, and demand for students who majored in science. And all at once, things changed. From then on, enrollment went up in terms of majors, and the students who wanted to learn something about it who weren’t majors were required to take a science course of something, and that’s what they took." Bill was able to teach science full-time due to the demand—except for one year, when a slight interlude of teaching occurred.
It was the third year into teaching. "I was beginning to see that things were starting to change at the Mount, the new faculty were getting better educated. And I thought, ‘I’d better get a doctorate,’" Bill recalled. "So I got a grant from the National Science Foundation to go to the University of Colorado for six weeks, to study mountain ecology." By that year, Bill and Betty-Jean had had their second baby, a son. The family of four drove off to Colorado. Similar to their journey to the Mount, Bill explained that it was hot, and their car wasn’t air conditioned.
"It was funny, because there weren’t seatbelts then," Bill said. "So, in the front of the back seat, I built two boxes, one for each side… filled that with clothes and books and whatever else we needed for the baby, and we put blankets on top, and the little girl sat back there and looked out the window, and the little boy sat back there and went to sleep. And that’s the way we went to Colorado." With no seat belts, the children would stand up, and look out the windows.
"Once we got there, that was just a different world. It was a nationally-known university, much higher level than West Virginia University where I got my Master’s degree. And I was with a class of 40 people—all college teachers—and some of them were in their fifties, most of them in their forties and thirties, and I was twenty-six," he recalled, laughing. "And we went all over the mountains there. We would have field trips and we would have two special lectures every day each week." Bill explained that he learned so much, got to knew so many people, and then shortly after, the program was over and the family started back home.
"A funny thing happened when we started home," Bill continued. They began driving east early in the morning. "[We] drove till noon, and I looked at the gas tank and it was still full. ‘Something must be broken there,’" he said. "So I stopped at a filling station. And it only took a gallon of gas, and we had come over almost fifty miles. A car in those days got maybe twenty miles to the gallon, if you’re lucky. But what was going on was, we were going downhill. We were coming down the Rocky Mountains," he explained. The downhill-trip home was certainly one to remember.
Once the family returned to the Mount, Bill received another grant to study genetics at the University of North Carolina. "That was the same thing," Bill said. "People of all ages, I was the youngest one there." Many genetics professors were there to study the updated science on genetics, since only four or five years before, DNA was more fully understood.
"So everything was chemistry now, in genetics," Bill said. "So the genetics they had been teaching didn’t fit anymore. That was a great thing for my education, knowing all those people. Friends stayed in touch for a long time after we left there." Upon returning to the Mount, Bill received a third grant, to go to Arizona to study desert biology for six weeks.
"The Cold War was on, and they wanted teachers to know everything," Bill explained. "And that was just great; field trips two or three times a week. We’d be out in the sun, and it was hot—and everybody was used to it." By that time, they had gotten a new car, but Bill said it wasn’t air-conditioned either. When the family got to Arizona, they went into the hotel. Within an hour, the baby’s toys had melted in the car in the parking lot of the hotel!
"And it was like that all the time in Arizona," Bill said. "You got used to it after a week, and it didn’t bother me anyway, because I had grown up working in the hayfield when it was in the 90’s when you’re pitching hay."
Returning to the Mount after this third trip, Bill still needed to complete his doctorate. Upon realizing this, he explained to the Department head that he might not be able to return to the Mount.
"I said, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to leave the Mount, because I’m gonna have to get a job somewhere where I can go to school while I’m working." The department head, a priest, responded, "Let me check on something."
Bill continued, "And he called me back in the next day, and he said, ‘If you will agree to stay at the Mount for five years after you get the degree, we will pay for a year down there.’"
Though the original agreement was five years, Bill’s 41-year career at the Mount means there is clearly more to the story.
Bill Meredith completed his doctorate after a long cross-country journey to multiple schools with his wife and children. The family then returned to Mount St. Mary’s University for Bill to teach science, as he had promised the head of the department. The original agreement with the department was for Bill to teach for the next five years, but an unlikely story that starts with Bill becoming the Department Chairman changed everything.
Upon returning to the Mount, Bill and his wife had their third child. "The three of them have done alright, they all have families," Bill said. "I have three kids, five children and five great-grandchildren."
When Bill returned to teach at the Mount long-term, the Mount only had pre-med courses such as comparative anatomy and microbiology. In the early 1960’s, Bill began to teach a course in genetics. "Two years after that, I started a course in ecology, because that’s what I was studying, and I was learning a lot. It was new then. So I had genetics and ecology, they were my courses. And I taught them ever since."
Bill continued, "we added other courses as time went by… We got some other people teaching after that, too. It became eventually the department it is now," he said.
"The other thing that happened to me was, I got to be Department Chairman, the year after I got my doctorate degree," Bill said. At that time, the Mount got a new president, who Bill called "Father Phillip."
"He had been in charge of the seminary here, and he wanted another priest to be the Dean, and that guy called me up and said, ‘you’ve got your doctorate now, would you like to be Department Chairman?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I hadn’t even thought about it,’" Bill said, laughing. "He said, ‘well, I would like to appoint you for chairman next year, we’re having a lot of changes here, and we want some new chairmen.’"
"‘Well, did you talk to the guy who is chairman now? He’s a physics professor,’" Bill replied, noting he had been chairman a long time. The president responded, No, well, I’m just asking you if you want to be."
"‘Well I wouldn’t take the job if he wanted to keep it,’" Bill replied to the president. So, Bill went to talk to the current chairman about the situation. "He wasn’t too enthusiastic about it," Bill said. "But that was the only question that I made, so that I didn’t make a senior member of the department mad at me." Bill explained that the current chairman, a physics professor, was a good friend to him.
Surprisingly, the physics professor responded to Bill’s question, "Well, what do you think? I don’t know, do you want the job?"
"‘Well I wouldn’t mind having it, but I don’t want to cause you to lose it if you want to keep it,’" Bill replied. The physics professor "thought for a moment, and he said, ‘go ahead and apply for it.’ We remained good friends and I was Department Chair for the next ten years."
Around that time, the Mount hired its first teachers who were women, and began requiring a doctorate for anyone applying to teach at the Mount. Before that, a doctorate was recommended but not required.
"So things were changing at the Mount, and I was involved in that, because there were meetings all the time—interview this person, interview that person, talk to him, and eventually talk to her," Bill said, highlighting how busy his days at the Mount became. "The last year of 1970, I thought it would be good to have one of the other people from the science department, I was getting on more and more committees all the time," so Bill stepped down as Department Chairman.
"But I was teaching happily. In ‘82, I got a call from the dean—he wasn’t a priest anymore, he was actually one of my former students," Bill said. "The first year I taught, I had a lot of veterans from World War II, and this guy was just out of the Marines, and he had a wife and a little girl, and I got to know him because he was in my science class. He graduated, went off to graduate school, and in the mid-seventies, he was hired as a dean." But this changed soon after—the dean was promoted to Vice President.
"So they needed another dean," Bill said. "They got another faculty member, and he just didn’t work out. He signed papers, but he didn’t do anything else."
He explained that situation was becoming critical, as enrollment in the college was declining. In light of the declines, the current dean called Bill, and said, "‘I’d like for you to be assistant dean.’ And I said, ‘What do you need an assistant for?’ He said, ‘Well we’ve got to get control of enrollment of the college, we’ve got to get data on how many students are graduating, how many are having to come an extra semester, how many are graduating in three years… I need an assistant to make a study of the enrollment of the college.’"
Bill replied as he always did, with an open mind and willingness to help: "‘Well I can do that, I guess.’ And so, I was Assistant Dean for a year. In that time, I got sorted out the enrollment of the college and got it on the first computers… The only requirement I made when I became Assistant Dean was that I’d need a computer. So I learned how to use a computer," he said, laughing. "I made out the program for enrollment… I put that into statistics, made plans for it." But after that short year as assistant, Bill was made Department Chairman again! He served in that position the next six years.
Bill explained that his wife was pleased with all the changes he had gone through with the department. His wife had earned a business degree, and worked for five years as a book keeper. Later on, she became a teacher’s air at the local school. "She liked that, and the kids loved her, and she stayed in that role until we retired," Bill said. "So she was happy doing something she liked, and I was happy doing something I liked."
Amidst the busy life as Dean, Assistant Dean, and then Dean again, Bill said they still made time for vacations and going back home to visit their parents. "And again—[none of it was] planned, it just happened, and there we were," Bill said, reflecting gratefully on all the happy twists and turns of his career and his life.
Bill explained that when he and his wife first moved to Emmitsburg, many people owned horses in the area, and Main Street was lined up and down with little stores. He recounted that there was "a little clothing store, a couple of apartment stores where you could get lunch or dinner if you liked, and a couple barber shops," as well as a factory, and a Ford Motor Company. Bill added that there were always at least two doctors who lived in town, who used to charge "three dollars a visit" when Bill needed medical help with his hay fever allergies. "So there’s always been good medical care," he said.
"Gradually," he continued, "the old stores were replaced by more modern ones."
Bill said that he taught a genetics class at St. Joseph’s College, the former women’s college, in the late 60’s and in the first two years of the 70’s. "And [St. Joseph’s] built a new science building that was better than the Mount’s one, and then, of course, the girls left," he said, laughing. "So their long-term planning didn't turn out to be as good. But I enjoyed teaching over there, you know. I could always find babysitters, because there could always be a girl that I knew over there that I could call and get to babysit [when my wife and I] wanted to go out on a weekend afternoon."
"And I stayed in touch with the students as long as I could after they graduated. Of course, a lot of them ended up marrying Mount students," he recalled joyfully. He noted that St. Joseph’s College closed in 1972, the same year the Mount began accepting women into its programs.
Bill also recounted various memories he shared with other Mount faculty members. At the mention of now-retired theology professor Dr. William "Bill" Collinge, Bill said that he "was one of the smartest people we had in the college. He was smart in everything. When he first started, there was a faculty softball team, and we’d play softball in the summer. There was a faculty basketball team, too, and for a year or two, I played on that [team] before I was Department Chair, and after he came in I was still going to it. We got to be good friends."
As Dean, Bill also helped with the hiring processes for faculty at the Mount, and at one point it seemed as though he was "interviewing everybody who applied to every department."
One year in the late eighties, just before the start of a fall semester, Bill said that one of the Mount’s language teachers announced that he had received a job offer from another school and he would not be teaching at the Mount again. The news was quite abrupt, so the Mount began looking everywhere for a replacement.
"We were struggling and looking around," Bill said, "and Bill Collinge came in to see me one day and said ‘you know, my dad taught German.’ And I said, ‘he did?’ His dad was retired."
Shortly after this exchange, Bill asked Bill Collinge’s father to teach the German language course at the Mount. Mr. Collinge responded that he’d be happy to teach.
"I asked him, ‘do you have any particular requirements you would need?’ And he said, ‘I only have one requirement: do I have to wear a necktie every day?’"
"Originally, a necktie was required at the Mount when I came there," Bill explained. But for Mr. Collinge, Bill said he didn’t have to wear one. Mr. Collinge began teaching and the students liked him very much.
"I was walking down the hall one day, and the bell rang and I was on my way down to the genetics lab, which was right next door to where [Mr. Collinge] had his class," Bill said. "I heard [Mr. Collinge] ask the class, ‘well, did you have any questions on the assignments?’ And some kid in the back said, ‘I had trouble with number sixteen.’ Mr. Collinge opened up his book and he said, ‘yes, now that’s an interesting problem. There are two ways you can do that—there’s an easy way that’s quick and will give you the right answer, and there’s another way that’s really interesting because it ties in with some other things we’ve been studying. I’ll teach you both of them.’ Just like that, and I stood out there in the hall and listened to him get started. And everybody was writing as fast as they could. But he was just like that; he liked the students and they loved him."
"That’s just another thing about the Mount, it’s family," Bill said.
Bill recalled another now-retired Mount English professor, Dr. Carol Hinds, who Bill actually helped to hire. Dr. Hinds was hired as Provost in 1995 and began teaching in 2005.
"She was just wonderful to work for," Bill said. "She would ask me if she didn’t know something, and I would tell her if I didn’t know, and we would figure it out… she’s one of my best friends from the college."
Bill retired in 1998, and soon after began writing a monthly column for the Emmitsburg News-Journal called ‘the Retired Ecologist,’ which ran from 2000 to 2018. Bill and his wife Betty Jean celebrated 60 years of marriage in 2015.
Having shared many memories about the beautiful community of the Mount, as well as the unexpected but happy turns of his life as a professor, Bill concluded his reminiscing’s, for now: "It all started when my dad asked me if I wanted to go to college."
To read articles by Bill Meredith, ‘the Retired Ecologist,’ visit Emmitsburg.net/archives. What a treasure it has been to share these reminiscings in this series!
