By Ken Tokuno ’69, M.S. ’73

I was a kiwi for a year. Lost to time, this bird was the unofficial mascot of Bixby Hall’s third floor back in the days when Bixby was entirely a men’s dormitory. Now it is a residence hall and, I am sure, co-ed. No kiwis. The whole residence life experience changed during my undergraduate years at UC Davis from 1967 to 1969.

Bixby’s unofficial third-floor mascot was actually the plastic kiwi from a Kiwi Shoe Polish display.

I moved in as a transfer student, surrounded mostly by freshmen. In those days, each dorm had a head resident, who was most typically an elderly female. In Bixby, it was Caroline Macey. I never knew how old she was, but she looked like she could have been anyone’s mother. In fact we called her “mom.” Mom Macey. I never found out if she had any children of her own. Looking at some of the other head residents, who more properly should have been called house mothers, we assumed they were all widows or spinsters. In those days, their role was to act as mothers to the large, unruly children who inhabited their houses. We had to be in our dorm by curfew or we were locked out. No women were allowed in the dorm after 10 o’clock. Each head resident had a set of deputies (resident advisers or RAs) on each floor making sure that there were no drugs, loud parties or drinking in their bailiwicks.

It became pretty clear to us that Mom Macey was less interested in policing the dorm than in making sure that all of the boys were embraced within this huge family. Of course, that meant that some minimal order was kept and that no one did anything to endanger his safety. In 1968, Bixby became the focal point of what little campus activism occurred regarding the war in Vietnam. Several members of the “Bixby Liberation Front” actually went down to Berkeley and got themselves arrested. Some of these guys used to play bridge with me in Mom Macey’s apartment under her tolerant but watchful eyes.

The following year, the wall of tradition was breached as Bixby went co-ed. Bixby’s kiwi and third-floor traditions disappeared with this move. We also got the sense that the RAs were now not so much patrolling the hallways as trying to facilitate something mysterious called “resident life.” I had moved down to the second floor and, encouraged by Mom Macey, spent the week before classes as a “student orientation counselor” in Bixby, which meant I mostly helped the new co-eds move into their rooms. One could get cynical about my motivations, but I was really interested in helping the new freshmen, both male and female.

The experience made me interested in applying to be an RA myself, and I wound up in the middle of a major transition in what the dorms were all about at Davis that year. As part of both the selection and training process for RAs, we were placed into encounter groups to help us get in touch with ourselves. With advice and support from Mom Macey, I was selected and learned that our role was now to act as counselors and facilitators to help engage the students in developing a sense of community.

It was true, and probably still is, that much of what any student learned in college came from late-night bull sessions with friends in their living situation. What the UC Davis administration was trying to do was to organize that learning process under well-trained upperclassmen, themselves guided by professionals in the areas of psychology and counseling. The house mothers were quietly turned out, all except Mrs. Macey, who managed to stay on, albeit now at the new off-campus dorms called Castilian. I saw her once in a while in my job as an RA, a position I still suspect that she had a larger role in obtaining for me than she ever let on. Good moms know how to let their charges feel responsible for their successes. At the same time, they are there as buffers. Once when I was berating myself for not being a better RA, she looked at me and said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

I regret that I lost touch with her as I moved forward with my life. She was one of those many people who help us become a success, many such people I met at UC Davis.