‘Prepare for anything’: From relationships to careers to lives beautifully built, four alums reflect on their Maryville College love stories, 45 years later
Sept. 8, 2023
You can see it in the eyes of Gary Sloboda ’76 as he reminisces, sitting under the oak trees between Fayerweather and Thaw Halls on a Friday afternoon in mid-summer: the girl he would marry, standing near the Center for Campus Ministry, wearing socks that would change his life.
They weren’t particularly special, that footwear, but they provided the opening he needed to make a formal introduction via a good-natured insult she nevertheless found charming. Decades later, she sits beside him as he remembers, and it’s clear from the affection in her own eyes that Amy Smock Sloboda ’78 is caught up in a similar sense of nostalgia that a return to their alma mater has manifested.
“I just remember it was my last term here, and I didn’t want to meet anybody. I was about to graduate and was heading back to Pittsburgh, so I didn’t want to get involved in anything,” Gary says, staring into the distance where the ghost of his younger self is working up the nerve to approach that of the woman smiling at him in the present. “And then I saw her. She was walking from Lloyd (Hall) to wherever, and I remember telling my good friend, Marc Ward ’76, ‘There. THERE. That’s her! THAT is the mother of my children!’ And he’s looking at me kind of funny and saying, ‘OK …’
“I remember we had a child psychology class together, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her the whole time we were in class. And then I saw her standing there, right outside what used to be the post office, and she was talking with somebody and had on these Birkenstocks with these socks that had multi-colored toes. I mean, each toe was a different color, and I just walked up to her acting brave, because I was really very nervous about the whole thing. And I just said, ‘Those are the ugliest socks I’ve ever seen!’”
Friendships built on Howee
The Slobodas of 2023 chuckle, as do their friends and fellow alumni: Dr. Charley Blair ’76 and his own MC bride, Dana Alspaugh Blair ’78. It’s been almost a decade since the foursome, once inseparable during their undergraduate years at Maryville College, got together, not since the wedding of one of their children. Friendships like theirs, Amy points out, aren’t difficult to reignite, especially in the shadows of such familiar old buildings that contain memories of a lifetime ago.
“It’s one of those things where you step onto campus, take a deep breath and just think, ‘This is wonderful!’” Gary adds.
It made perfect sense, then, for it to be the destination for the Slobodas’ 45th anniversary celebration. The Blairs wed on July 8, 1978, and the Slobodas followed suit a couple of weeks later on July 22. While Gary and Amy have celebrated in ways big and small over the years, they opted instead to spend the weekend at RT Lodge, nestled in the Maryville College Woods, and reached out to invite the Blairs as a way to celebrate both anniversaries together.
“There’s something about East Tennessee that is just like a place that touches my soul every time we’re back here,” Amy says.
They didn’t have to do much to convince the Blairs. The son of Dr. Charles Blair Jr. ’38, Charley actually lived on campus for a while as a boy, while his father briefly taught at MC. And Dana’s connection to the campus was made the first time she stepped foot on Howee, she adds.
“When you grow up in New Orleans or anywhere in Louisiana, really, and you come here, it’s like, this is the most beautiful place on the planet,” she says.
The Blairs also met on the Maryville College campus — Charley’s cousin introduced them “on the left-hand side of Pearsons Hall, and that was it,” he remembers. The pair were Art majors alongside Amy, while Charley and Gary were both suitemates in Pearsons and part of the soccer club together. A boy from Pittsburgh, Gary was recruited by his high school English teacher Dr. John Braymer ’68 and his MC bride, Dr. Meta Robinson Braymer ’68, who brought him down one year for Homecoming. Like the rest of the foursome, he fell in love with the campus and enrolled as a Chemistry major. Roughly three years later, Amy caught his eye, he adds.
“I actually knew her brother before I knew her! (Dr. Richard Smock ’74) was my math tutor and my partner in Religion class, and even though I liked him and thought he was a great guy, he used to kick my butt big time in chess!” Gary says with a laugh.
He asked Charley and Dana to make an introduction, but seeing her standing on the quad in those socks, he decided to make his own move. She was nevertheless charmed, she says.
“I already knew who he was, because he wore his bathrobe and house slippers to breakfast in the dining hall,” she says with a laugh. “I wasn’t mad at what he said; in fact, I’m sure I laughed. That was one of the things that attracted us to each other in the beginning, a big sense of humor.”
MC: ‘A mecca for romance’
Besides, she adds, Maryville College has a way of introducing soulmates to one another: Her brother met his own wife, Angela Petersen Smock ’74, while the two were undergraduates, and they were married in the amphitheater in the MC Woods.
“They just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, so I guess there’s just good karma here!” she says. “Maryville’s just like a mecca for romance!”
Romance, but so much more: It was at Maryville College that the four young people found themselves in ways both small and profound.
“It gave me the freedom to grow up, because I was away from home,” Charley says. “I was, and still am, a recluse. I was not happy with my high school years, because they were not what I wanted them to be. Coming up here, I was almost five hours from home in Athens (Georgia). So I made some mistakes and made some good decisions, and in the end, it turned out well.”
It wasn’t until Dana’s encouragement, he adds with a chuckle, that he buckled down on his studies. Gary, on the other hand, was so smitten that his grades suffered somewhat after he started dating Amy. Of course, the mischief Charley and Gary got into at the time likely served as a distraction, like the time fellow students set out to rearrange the letters spelling out Thaw Hall. Gary’s job was to hide out in the library and open the doors in the midnight hours, except he fell asleep and missed his opportunity. His compatriots pulled it off anyway, and years later, although innocent, he was still blamed for the shenanigans.
The entire quartet erupts in the shared laugh of nostalgia, and the stories continue to flow. The campus dogs, Spot and Beans, are recalled fondly, two wayward hounds who were adopted by Charley and Dana and smuggled into the residence halls at night … the gorilla suits Gary and Charley wore to a football game, where they terrorized the Scottie dog mascot at the time … the weekly menus that included such stomach-churning delicacies as boiled okra and potato pancakes.
“Potato pancakes was pancake batter with lumps of potatoes in it,” Charley says. “I worked in the kitchen, and I remember one night, we did boiled okra, which you can just imagine what that looks like. Nobody would eat it. Fortunately, they always had Mayfield ice cream and cake, and my senior year, that’s all I ate. Before we got married, I had to lose 30 pounds just to look human.”
On a walk around the Maryville College campus, the four old friends are gobsmacked by all of the changes, especially in Pearsons, and the news that some students still complain about the food is met with uproarious laughter. So much has changed, they point out … but so much remains the same as well. Maryville College, even then, prepared them for anything by encouraging them to study so much more than just their individual programs of study.
“The professors were all invested in us and the relationships we had with them, and the encouragement to form your own thoughts made such a difference,” Amy says. “I ended up with a concentration in art therapy, which wasn’t even a major here, but they provided the space for me to study that and combine art and psychology in a way that wasn’t technically an official major. I then went on to graduate school when I was 40, got a master’s degree in Expressive Therapies, and made a career as a hospice therapist. That all started here, with everything I was interested in being supported and nurtured. The path I found at Maryville has given great meaning to my life to this day.”
“The life I have now that I have so enjoyed over the years also got its start here in a very, very, very big way,” Gary adds. “This place taught me how to think. I remember Dr. (W. Gale) Rhodes’s biochemistry tests — they consisted of two questions that you got at 9 a.m. on a Friday, and they were due in 24 hours. You spent the first 12 hours figuring out what the questions mean, and the next 12 hours answering them. And that’s how they taught you to think in so many of my courses.
“Some of those questions were about subjects you didn’t go over in class, and it was the first time seeing them, so you had to use everything in class to be able to answer those questions. In a way, the test was a learning procedure as well. It was all about learning how to think in different ways, to be adaptable and flexible and trainable over and over again, because what did I do with a degree in chemistry? Spent 41 years in advertising!
I came out of there with a degree in chemistry, but I was not just a chemist, and I wasn’t trying to be just a chemist,” he added. “A liberal arts education showed me that learning how to think is so much more valuable than learning one discipline, and coming back to Maryville College and looking at the life Amy and I have been able to create, we realize so much of that is because of how we were taught to think and learn and just be.”
