{"id":80,"featured":0,"modified":"2024-01-31 17:14:12","latitude":30.63464321049192307100383914075791835784912109375,"longitude":-97.666697284885913177276961505413055419921875,"title":"The Mood Hall Boys","subtitle":"Remembering the legacy of Mood Hall as a (mostly) male dorm","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/f922e227ef7ccbcd57697dce4147b74c.jpg","address":"","all_locations":[],"zoom":17,"creator":["Teddy Hoffman '24"],"description":"The infrastructure of Mood Hall was built to house community–specifically, the community of male (and for two brief moments in the 1920s and 1940s, female) Southwestern students. Before Ruter Hall was built in the 1950s, almost every male Southwestern student lived there for at least part of their educational career, creating a distinctive place-bound identity between them and the building. As is apparent in other Placing Memory entries about East Campus, this worked differently than the female social spaces on the other side of campus.<br /><br />Until relatively recently, both the male and female gendered spaces on campus had distinctive place-bound identities. In a 1919 holiday edition of The Megaphone, the male and female spaces were personified, referenced as “Mrs. Ann Ex,” and “Mr. Mood Hall.” Specifically, the paper stated that these two dorm/community place-bound “characters” were “spending a few days at home next week” for the holidays. So, it is evident that the buildings themselves took on a sense of gendered community for those who resided in them.<br /><br />But, there was a different culture between the male and female residential spaces of the early to mid-1900s. While the women’s domain was surveilled and certain expectations were strictly set (see <a href=\"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/items/show/19\">https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/items/show/19</a>), the community in Mood Hall was more relaxed. In The Megaphone, the language coming from institutional sources about the Mood Hall residents makes them out to be top-tier gentlemen. In this context, they’re often referred to as well-mannered, polite, and virtuous men of tomorrow.<br /><br />However, The Megaphone also provides a rich insight into the culture of the past, as it documented the students’ voices as well as the University’s institutional voice. The student opinions, tones, and experiences regarding Mood Hall strongly deviate from the institutional representation of the community.<br /><br />Among students, the residents were often referred to as “The Mood Hall Boys,” both by male students included in the community and by other student voices who were not part of the community. This recognizable naming of the shared, place-based identity is fraternal in nature.<br /><br />This shared name was also used outside of the community as well. In a 1920s edition of The Megaphone, an advertisement was included for TroySteam Laundry that addressed the “Mood Hall Boys” directly. Thus, this residential community was outwardly known and recognized as being a collective.<br /><br />It seems as though the residents of Mood Hall may have had a few good reasons for bonding with one another. In multiple editions of The Megaphone, across multiple years, there were many cheeky comments made about its meager dining options and the quality of the food. In one entry, a resident stated: “I favor making corn-flakes a meatless dish by eliminating the bugs.” In another, they said that the chef’s worst punishment would be to eat his own cooking. Whether the food was truly bad, or the residents were overly negative, this seems to be one of the aspects that brought them together.<br /><br />After World War 1, the culture within Mood Hall seemed to become less restrictive, with the boys becoming less polite and more rambunctious -- very much like a fraternity unto itself. The boys were perceived to be “careless and unthoughtful” by the external student body, being told that they would “continue to lower the morale of the school and the status of our social life.”<br />Although it is evident that some Mood students had a “reckless disregard for propriety,” others regarded them as less evil and more unhygienic. The boys fell short of hygiene by continuing “to use the same sheets they had on their beds last term,” as stated in The Megaphone. Either way, this negative external dialogue about the community is very similar to how modern-day fraternities are perceived by external voices.<br /><br />Even after Mood Hall fell out of use as a dorm in the late 1960s and was transformed to house professor’s offices and classrooms in the 1970s, the personification of and community within Mood Hall was kept alive and well for almost a decade later. From 1972 to 1977, The Megaphone included a column called “Mood Man.” Begun by Hawk Louis in 1972, Mood Man persisted to embody the Mood Hall community after it ceased to exist in real space and time. This “Mood Man” was joined by the character “Frank the Wonder Cat,” a pseudo-superhero who haunted the halls of Mood. Together the two characters engaged in various antics across campus and the greater Georgetown area. This column in the student paper was so creative that it even won first place in the general column competition at the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association’s national convention.<br /><br />The community, rambunctiousness, and brotherhood of “The Mood Hall Boys” continued to be personified within the paper through these characters. I assume that after the collective memory on campus of the Mood Boys phased out, this column within The Megaphone did, too.<br /><br />Today, there is no residential space on campus that quite matches the level of brotherhood and community felt within Mood Hall. Ruter Hall, being the only stand-alone all-male dormitory today, likely holds a similar place-based identity (in the form of “Ruter Rats”), but is one that may have even more negative dialogue surrounding it both internally and externally than Mood ever did.","sponsor":null,"accessinfo":"","lede":"Although most people know that Mood-Bridwell originally served the campus as a dormitory, the decidedly “fraternal” culture of the lived-in space is less remembered by students today.","website":"","related_resources":[],"factoids":[],"files":{"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/f922e227ef7ccbcd57697dce4147b74c.jpg":{"id":318,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"The Mood Hall Boys","description":"SU Special Collections &amp; Archives | circa 1910s | unknown","thumbnail":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/square_thumbnails/f922e227ef7ccbcd57697dce4147b74c.jpg"}}}