SHARE YOUR MEMORIES OF AYRES HALL!
Do you remember your college days when you climbed the monumental “Hill” to get to a class in Ayres Hall? Once you made it to the top and paused for a deep breath, you could look out over all of campus. At that moment, everything in the world seemed possible.
Ayres Hall has become a campus icon, a building that holds lots of memories for all UT students and alumni.
As we anticipate the re-opening of Ayres Hall, we invite you to reminisce with us. Please share your memories below and read the comments of your classmates, friends and teachers.
Freshman year (’69) I was living in Massey and had a third-floor math class in Ayers Hall. One day I actually counted the number of steps (stairs) from my dorm room to class. A total of 211!!! How can I remember that after all these years?
One of my best memories of Ayers Hall was literally a “stop and smell the roses” event. At the top of the stairs that lead from the West side of campus there were rose bushes (in 1981 anyway) that bloomed in the late spring. I was completing my 6th (and last!) quarter of calculus and was running to my final. That morning was one of those rare low humidity “blue bird” cloudless ones we all love and it just occurred to me to take the time to stop and put my nose to the beautiful roses and soak in their smell. That moment of tranquility prior to taking that last math test in Ayers Hall is something I’ll always treasure.
I was in the first group to live in the South Stadium Hall in the fall of 1948. As I recall there were exactly 100 steps, counting the curb step, to the top of the hill. All my English classes and others were in Ayers Hall. It is still the “Hallowed Hill” to me after all these years.
Yes, I took my six quarters of calculus in Ayers Hall. But in the mid 70s, many of the psychology graduate students had offices in the tower area. You could sign up for and participate in their studies – sometimes they even paid you. As weird as that sounds (especially for an engineering major), I learned a lot about myself from participating in those studies.
I remember having English and Calculus classes in Ayers Hall, but my first memory is from the Summer of 1962 when a busload of students rode down Cumberland Ave at about 6am on the way to camp in North Carolina. When I saw that ivy-covered hill and Ayers Hall sitting at the top, I became a Tennessee Volunteer – decided on the spot to attend UT. The other memory I have is of my advisor in the Engineering College (Bill Lyday) telling me about his memory of frat boys leading a cow to the top. I’m not familiar with cows, but he said a cow wouldn’t go downstairs so they had trouble getting it out. Whether this was true or a tall tale, I never knew.