Nearby History: Ida Lou’s legacy at WSU

One of the better known buildings on the Washington State University campus in Pullman is the President’s House, sitting on Campus Street, tied to the sorority buildings across the street and looking, albeit through a fence, onto the pathway which runs up the hill from near downtown to Thompson Hall. With the WSU president no longer living there, the campus is renaming the facility after an inspiring and influential Palouse native, a WSU student and later instructor, Ida Lou Anderson.

The President’s House itself had been suggested as far back as 1893 as a place for the university president to both live and to host the social and business events that were important to the role.

The college eventually authorized $15,000 for the building. The governor sent it back, ordering WSU (then WSC) to spend $25,000 and build something more impressive and appropriate.

Construction started in 1912 and the building was occupied in early 1913, quietly and with no fanfare. In the subsequent 110 years it housed nine presidents. It has hosted VIPs and weddings; it has welcomed new faculty, visiting parents and returning alumni. Students would come to serenade incoming presidents or to protest their decisions. The interior was extensively updated in 1967 but it remains fundamentally the same building save the replacement of a back balcony with a patio, landscaping alterations like the addition of a pond in 1950, and the fencing off of the backyard in the late 1960s.

As the building no longer houses the president, it will be renamed for Anderson, who was born in 1900 and grew up in Colfax in a busy house high on South Main Street. In 1909 she contracted polio, and subsequently spent five years unable to walk, having to be carried everywhere.

Through treatments including braces and casts, she would again walk but was forever small (about 4 feet tall), in pain, and had a hump on her back. Despite this, she graduated from Colfax High School in 1920.

That fall, she entered WSC, part of the first cohort to live in McCroskey Hall which, as school started, had only the students’ rooms completed and required them to walk across planks to enter the building and to weave through piles of building materials inside. Their first all-student meeting saw them sitting on sawhorses, nail kegs, and whatever else they could find to hold them.

Though Anderson found ways to be involved, her condition kept her from more physical activities like sports or dance.

She had an excellent speaking voice and a love of poetry and it was speech professor Nathanial E. Reeid who saw past the physical and recognized her talents. He worked with her on voice, and also cast her in many of the campus plays. Here Anderson would shine, and she turned from a lonely and unhappy freshman into a vital part of campus life.

Graduating in 1924, she knew she wanted to teach and was hired at WSC as an instructor, where she quickly became a student favorite. In 1922, commercial radio had swept the nation, and the human voice became how the next generations would connect to the world. WSC had one of the few courses in radio broadcasting, and in 1926 a young man named Egbert (soon changed to Edward) R. Murrow came to Pullman and enrolled. Murrow would cite Anderson as his greatest influence. Her emphasis on speech and public speaking molded the development of Murrow and numerous other significant broadcasters who came out of WSC and who would, in turn, influence future generations of radio and TV broadcasters.

By 1939, Anderson’s medical condition had worsened and she was forced to stop teaching and moved to Oregon to live with a sister; she died in 1941. In her short life, she overcame tremendous handicaps, was a vital part of both her Colfax High school and her Pullman college, was a beloved teacher, and left an influence that affected generations of broadcasters.

This Thursday, at 4:30 p.m., the former President’s House, which as an unhappy first term student Ida Lou Anderson could probably see from her third floor McCroskey window, will be named the Ida Lou Anderson House in her honor in a ceremony free and open to the public.

O’English is the university archivist at WSU’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.