A house mother?
That term might sound very quaint, or even archaic, to students today. The idea that an older woman, older than your mom, would be living in an apartment in your residence hall, would supervise or be a part of dorm life, seems a little strange. In fact, I’m not sure students today would be as comfortable with a motherly or grandmotherly figure down the hall as they, um, studied in their rooms.
But from 1933 to 1954, one such woman was the beloved matron, hostess, or house mother, as the term often varied, of Snyder Hall. Mrs. Inez Brown Helms, known to two generations of Wofford students as “Mom Helms,” had been a high school Latin teacher in the South Carolina Lowcountry when, in 1933, she came to work at Wofford. A Columbia College graduate, Mrs. Helms was the widow of a Wofford alumnus, A. T. Helms, who was a lowcountry school superintendant from the class of 1902.
Recently, my student assistants and I went through a scrapbook maintained by the Rev. Dr. John M. Younginer, Jr, a member of Wofford’s Class of 1953, who was director of alumni and public relations in 1954 when Mrs. Helms retired. Dr. Younginer presented the scrapbook to the archives shortly after Mrs. Helms died in 1968. We listed all of the items in the scrapbook, and the finding aid is now available on our website. You can find it here.
Among the scrapbook items are news clippings, photos, and letters of appreciation from students, administrators, and alumni. One article about her said that she “was the ideal. Never censorius, she nevertheless commanded respect for her standards. Never puritannical, she nevertheless could deal with the occasional immature pranks of college students.” That statement probably does not even begin to cover the various kind of student pranks that someone like Mrs. Helms observed.
The idea of a hostess or house mother is one that has probably gone for good, but in her time, Inez Helms no doubt comforted an awful lot of lonely, homesick freshmen, advised them on how to deal with roommates, classmates, professors, and the dean, encouraged them when they got a poor grade and congratulated them when they got a good one. No wonder that hundreds of Wofford students thought of her as their mom away from home.
