The interior of Mom and Pop Robinson’s boardinghouse on University Hill is pictured, with Mom, Pop, Killer the cook and boarders, circa 1946. (Elaine Clow Larson – (Courtesy Photo)
Back in the 1940s, university students didn’t require fancy housing. They made do with what was around them. Some lived in dormitories or Greek houses, and many students rented a room in a family home on University Hill, furnished with just a bed, dresser, desk and a good reading lamp.
Quite a few students lived in boardinghouses.
Longtime Boulder resident Elaine Clow Larson, now 98, arrived in 1945 to attend CU Boulder, she remembered in a recent interview. She moved from Rochester, New York, after discovering Boulder on a trip west to visit a friend. Larson was a transfer student studying sociology, having completed a year at the University of Rochester, so she was on her own to find off-campus housing. “CU has never had enough student housing,” she commented.
Luckily, she found the recently opened Robinson’s Student House. Though she didn’t know anyone there, she was welcomed with open arms by housemother and father Ruby and Ralph Robinson. “They were so nice to everyone. They were like Mom and Pop, which is what we called them,” Larson said.
Mom and Pop Robinson moved to Boulder in the mid-1940s as empty nesters and set up their boardinghouse at 1121 13th St. in the heart of University Hill.
They hired a fabulous cook named Naoma, whom everyone called “Killer.” Killer provided a hearty and delicious breakfast and dinner each day for the coeds. The students were often on campus for lunch. Killer baked fresh doughnuts and sweet rolls, Larson remembered. “The food was so good.” They even had snacks like fresh popcorn and homemade candy for house meetings.
Robinson Student House had rooms on three floors with men bunking in the basement, the Robinsons on the main floor and the women living upstairs. Larson settled in and made friends from all over the country including Wyoming, North Dakota and Kansas. Pop was known to challenge the students to a snowball fight after a storm.
Student life in the mid-1940s was much like today. Coeds studied at the library, attended sporting events and played softball, volleyball and tennis. Hiking in the mountains was a favorite activity, and the fraternities held parties that they all attended.
Young women followed the latest fashions. “We loved saddle shoes, and we all had cardigan sweaters. There wasn’t much wearing pants, but once in a while we wore corduroy pants,” Larson recalled.
The men liked to go from Robinson’s to The Anchorage a couple of doors down. (Later the site became Tulagi.) “The Anch,” as they called it, served 3.2% alcohol beer, which was the only strength that was legal in Boulder at the time. The students at CU’s U.S. Navy Japanese Language School, which operated from 1942 to 1946, hung out at The Anch, as well. Robinson’s boarders joked about building a tunnel from the house directly to The Anch for convenience. (If students wanted anything stronger, like a cocktail, during those years, they had to drive to Louisville or Lafayette.)
Larson moved on the following year to live at the Kappa Delta sorority house at 12th and College. But Robinson’s remains a special memory.
The Robinson Student House is long gone — today it’s the site of The Fitter. Mom Robinson died of an illness in 1959. Former boarders got word that after Mom died, Pop married Killer. Apparently, they heard right. Mom, Pop and Naoma “Killer” Robinson are buried in the same plot at Green Mountain Cemetery.
Carol Taylor and Silvia Pettem alternate the In Retrospect column. Pettem can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com.
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