The Daily O’Collegian

In the 1940s, one young Stillwater couple thought living on the 900 block of North Hester Street meant there would always be a buffer between them and the university.

It was right after World War II and Wayne and Rachel Drumm lived in Stillwater when it was a dot on the map.

Drumm recalled that her now late husband said, “Well, they’ll (OSU) never come this far north, I believe we’ll build here,” she said.

From 1947 until 2006, the white, two-story building at 924 N. Hester St. was home to the Drumm family.

Rachel Drumm, 89, the family matriarch, moved to Stillwater from Perkins in the early 1940s after she got married. The area where the house was built was rural, she said.

“There were only two other houses there,” she said.

Wayne Drumm, who died Sept. 21, 2004, was a carpenter who built the house after he returned from World War II, Rachel Drumm said.

Margie Harrison, 61, was the couple’s first of three children. She was a baby when the family moved in to the completed house.

She recalled how Stillwater was a far cry from the expanding city it is today.

From their house there were “cornfields as far as you could see,” Harrison said.

OSU has bought 100 acres directly north of campus from about 175 property owners for its Athletic Village, so during the past 60 years, the area has grown.

When it came time for the university to let the prospective sellers know it was interested in buying their property, the notice wasn’t always direct.

Drumm said she read the notice in the Stillwater NewsPress in early November 2005.

Harrison said her mother got a registered letter from Cinnabar, the land acquisition company OSU used for about six months, the next week.

“But, that was after the shock,” she said.

At first, Drumm resisted selling the home her husband had died in the previous year, but after she worked with Gary Clark, then of the OSU Foundation, she said she felt better about the sell.

The foundation worked with the property owners for OSU.

Clark told Drumm how 924 N. Hester would be near the new ballpark, she said.

Drumm said, “Well, I don’t think I’ll sell then, I’ll just sit upstairs and watch the ballgames for nothing.”

Behind the lighthearted quips, Drumm said she knew it would be best to move.

“I realized that I was getting too old to take care of it, and I mowed my yard the year before I moved,” she said.

This independence has helped her adjust during the past 1 1/2 years to her new home at Legacy Park Apartments, 498 E. Virginia Ave, she said.

“When I first moved over here, I was kind of shaky, but since I have nice neighbors now, I’ve gotten used to it, she said. “I don’t mind it.”

She was able to bring many sentimental items with her, including about 30 irises from the 250-iris garden she had on Hester Street.

At her apartment, the various species of irises are marked with names, including “Romantic Mood”; her favorite, “Bay Watch”; “Midnight Majesty”; and “Passion for Lace.”

The flowers used to surround the Hester house in beds along the streets and across the backyard, Drumm said.

Before Drumm moved, she had a yard sale, selling as many of her irises, peonies and day lilies as possible. She said she also sold some material possessions to prepare to move in to a two-bedroom apartment.

In addition to flowers, Drumm and Harrison recalled many other memories from Drumm’s almost 60 years in the house.

Drumm showed a picture of her husband, with a mohawk, from World War II, when he was stationed in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Germany and France.

She said at one point her husband met Gen. George Patton.

“[Wayne] had a big to-do about how mean he was,” she said.

Harrison, a reading teacher at Will Rogers Elementary School, said when her father wasn’t working, he liked to paint as a hobby.

“He did a lot of painting, and when they built the house, he stained the front door in kind of an unusual way; some kind of shapes coming down,” she said.

It has been difficult, but the family has been able to cope with selling things and has many memories, she said.

“It’s hard to let things go,” she said. “It’s not that you really have a use for them, you just don’t want them to not be there anymore.”

As the Drumm’s neighborhood grew throughout the ’50s and ’60s, most of the houses were contracted to be built, Drumm said.

The neighborhood took on a family-oriented character because the families would be outside in the summer evenings to avoid the hot indoors, she said.

“At first it was families,” she said. “I know there were several families that had children our children’s age, but then it got so that students started moving in, and it was mostly students.”

Harrison said as the neighborhood changed and the original homeowners started moving out, many college students started renting the houses.

“Maybe [in the] ’70s a few college kids started living in some of the smaller homes where families had moved out, and it was just a little rental property,” she said. “It seemed weird at first to have college kids around.”

Since moving out of the house, Drumm drives by it about every day to see whether it has been demolished, she said.

One day, she said she saw the Stillwater SWAT team training at the house.

“They threw smoke bombs and ran through the house,” she said.

The team’s treatment of the house upset Drumm, she said.

“They had a big gun and stood out in the front yard and blew one of the windows out of the house,” she said.

When she went up to the house, one of the team members asked her what she was doing, she said.

“And I said, ‘Well, you know, my husband built this house, and I lived here 59 years, and I just wondered what was happening,’” she said.

Harrison reminded Drumm it wasn’t her house anymore.

The university allowed the SWAT team to train in the area, said Gary Shutt, OSU communication services director.

“The Stillwater SWAT are constantly looking for places where they can train, so that was an arrangement we had with them, so yes, that’s taken place a couple of different times,” Shutt said.

In Drumm’s apartment, a framed quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that Clark gave her hangs on the wall and reads, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.”

Drumm said she doesn’t have any hard feelings toward the university and holds the same season tickets to wrestling and baseball she and her husband had for many years.

Drumm and Harrison walked around the village site recently and found markers to be able to find where the Hester house stood once the building is complete. They use a middle section of Boone Pickens stadium and Hillcrest Baptist Church, 902 N. Washington St., to triangulate the location of the Hester house.

Harrison said despite the loss, she looks forward to the university’s progress.

“Once they start with the buildings, I think it will be interesting,” she said.