Captivated by the details of steel, drywall and bricks, as we often are, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls is not actually the most important activity involving these buildings.

What really matters, of course, is what people do in a building during those long intervals between construction projects.

We were reminded of this truth by Ken ’45 and Muriel Baldwin of Cornwall, Pa. The Baldwins, donors to the Roger Williams project, may have a genuinely unique perspective on the Bill. Ken lived there as a freshman in 1941-42, and Muriel took a job there as secretary to bursar Norm Ross ’22 in 1946, when Ken resumed his studies after World War II military service. Read the Baldwins’ story.

Art of Glass

As glassy as Hedge and Roger Williams halls are these days, there is still plenty of pane to come.

At Hedge, the big siliceous excitement is on the Alumni Walk side, as workers are installing the glass walls — aka “storefront” — on the four-story stair tower. Particularly at night, this feature will bring welcome light and liveliness to what has been a dark stretch of the walk.

Similarly, the Bill will have a much larger glass box connecting its old and new sections, and installation of that storefront will likely begin by March.

Also at Hedge, the missing windows in the distinctive old turret will soon be set in, now that brick has been ground down to adjust their fit.

Masonry affected a window installation at Roger Bill, too. If you thought you saw a big bay window in place one day but sitting on the ground the next, you weren’t traveling backward through time: the unit was removed so the granite sill could be ground down for a better fit.

Abandoning glass but remaining in the realm of substances you don’t want to chew, Farnsworth reports that the bathroom tiles — nice big subway tiles, white on the walls and dark on the floors — are installed in the ground floor at Hedge, and the tilers are moving upstairs.

As we segue neatly from bathroom tiles to water (sometimes the writing just flows like Jack Kerouac doing On the Road), Farnsworth notes that workers have begun installing solar panels on Hedge’s roof that will supplement the hot water supply for the building. Similar panels will be mounted on the Bill’s roof, too, at a time still undetermined. The panels are among the features that will contribute to the buildings’ high energy efficiency, a centerpiece of Bates’ facilities management.

Let’s end the Hedge news with a nicely symbolic development: the installation of projection screens in the building’s three classrooms. The heavy screens, which live in the ceiling and open downward at the push of a button, needed to be hung before the ceiling grid can go up.

What makes it a milestone is that the screens are the first features directly tied to teaching that have been installed since the buildings’ conversion from residential to academic space began.

Back at the Bill, Farnsworth reports that the main stairs — climbing the dramatic four-story well that Ken Baldwin’s nemeses once used for water bombs — are complete and in use, offering welcome relief to ladder-weary workers.

And expect to see scaffolding rise around the new addition in the coming days, followed by plastic sheeting that will hold in heat and allow masons to do their work. In fact, they’ve already started, laying a course of granite around the base of the addition. Once the staging is in place, it will be granite and bricks all the way.

All bricked up, too, will be the faux chimneys overlooking the Library Quad that now look rather naked and defenseless in their Blueskin underwear.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail Doug Hubley, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

What really matters, of course, is what people do in a building during those long intervals between construction projects.

We were reminded of this truth by Ken ’45 and Muriel Baldwin of Cornwall, Pa. The Baldwins, donors to the Roger Williams project, may have a genuinely unique perspective on the Bill. Ken lived there as a freshman in 1941-42, and Muriel took a job there as secretary to bursar Norm Ross ’22 in 1946, when Ken resumed his studies after World War II military service.

Back then, the first floor and basement were given over to administrative offices and the upper stories housed first-year students. “We were a wild crew,” Ken told Campus Construction Update.

Succeeding generations of inhabitants found their own, increasingly creative ways to ornament the Bill’s reputation, but in Ken’s day wildness involved, among other transgressions, pillow fights and water bombs.

Upperclassmen, Ken explained, would lurk at the top of the Bill’s four-story open stairwell and bombard first-years with bags of water as they entered the building. The ambushees, in turn, would counterattack with pillows. Pity the poor custodians.

“Norm Ross had a desk full of feathers from the pillows,” gathered as evidence, Muriel told us. And Ross did tamp down the high spirits of Ken and his housemates — as did World War II, in a much more profound way. When Ken and other veterans returned to Bates after the war, “it was business, not monkey business,” said Ken.

The Baldwins met in Baltimore during Ken’s Coast Guard service, and he brought her back to Bates 65 years ago this month. While Muriel worked for Ross, Ken pursued an economics degree, and for a time they lived in Sampsonville — the village of prefab barracks erected near Russell Street for returning veterans and their families. (The nickname was for Charles Sampson, an engineering prof who also administered the vets’ housing and was beloved for the consideration he brought to that role).

“Norm Ross said I could write the check to buy the barracks for Sampsonville,” Muriel revealed. ” ‘Since you are going to live there, I am going to let you write the check.’ He said this is probably the largest check you will ever write in your life.”

The deans of men and women, the registrar and President Charles Franklin Phillips shared the Bill’s first floor with Ross and Muriel. Downstairs was accountant Gertrude Cox Campbell — “a very ‘fixy’ woman,” in Muriel’s description — who maintained an attractive flower-filled office.

There was scant contact with the Bill’s upper-story inhabitants or any other students. “They only came when they had to pay their bills,” Muriel said. And the veterans, now out on their own and many with families to support, often had to pay their bills in installments.

“Norm Ross would always call me when a veteran would come in to pay his bill. He would ask, ‘How’s this guy? Can I give him an extension?’

“And I had to tell him whether I thought that person could pay his bill by the end of semester or not.” Her information was generally on the mark. “We were a tight group, really, the veterans and their wives.”

She worked for Ross for three years — “a wonderful, wonderful man whose whole heart and soul was Bates.” But Ross expressed a detailed and fact-driven kind of dedication. Muriel recalled a time when Ross called in the maintenance department’s Albert Johnson and asked him to count the squares in two rolls of toilet paper: one the college’s usual brand, and the other a salesman’s sample reputed to have more sheets, but for the same price.

“Al came out and looked at me, and raised his eyes to the ceiling,” Muriel recounted, “and I knew what he had in his head.” But he counted the sheets and corroborated the salesman — the old brand had 10 fewer sheets — and the vendor won a big new customer.

Ross, she said, “was all business and all for Bates — whatever he could do to save money for Bates. And it was just amazing for me.”