Fun Facts about CBU
#16 When the first two buildings — Kenrick Hall (or the “High School Building”) and Battersby Hall (“The Fort” or “The Boiler House”) — were constructed on the East Parkway campus in 1939-40, giant steam pipes were laid in an underground tunnel connecting them. The Brothers also used the tunnel to traverse the campus. It also became a tradition (albeit a forbidden one) for students to surreptitiously gain access to the tunnel and travel it late at night.
#44The School of Sciences has the most female students of the four academic schools — 44% of female CBU students are Science majors.
#3 The location of the original CBU campus on Adams Street is now the site of Shelby County Juvenile Court.
#21The Rock had several locations over the years. It was originally located in front of Kenrick Hall, but the sounds from freshman/sophomore “rioting” over the painting of the Rock disturbed classes in the Evening program (and neighbors whose homes abutted the campus).
#5CBU opened it’s doors in 1871 to 26 students and four Brothers. By the end of the academic year, a total of 87 students had registered.
#6 The original tuition in 1871 was $165 for a five-month session (which also included “board, washing, and doctor’s fee”).
#7 The four original Christian Brothers in Memphis were Brother Maurelian Sheel, Brother Anthony Walsh, Brother Luperius, and Brother Clement. Brother Maurelian, the founding president of CBC, came to Memphis from Pass Christian College on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi after it closed due to a Yellow Fever outbreak. The other three came from Chicago, where their school had been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire only a month previous.
#11CBU was the first private college in Memphis to integrate, when Ernest Donohue transferred from LeMoyne-Owen College in 1960. He went on to join the Christian Brothers and took the religious name of Brother Ernest Capristan.
#9 When De La Salle Gymnasium (now Canale Arena and De La Salle Hall) was constructed in 1950, it was the largest basketball arena in Memphis. It remained the city’s largest arena until the MidSouth Coliseum was completed across the street in 1964.
#10 CBU purchased its first computer in 1960 — only the second computer in the city of Memphis. It was an IBM 1620 with a memory capacity of 20,000 decimal digits (the equivalent of roughly 20k, the size of an average email).
#8CBU awarded the first post-secondary degrees in Memphis in 1875 — two Bachelor of Arts degrees awarded to Richard A. Odium and Raphael E. Semmes (father of the founder of Semmes Murphey Clinic).
#1 CBU’s first home in Memphis was at what would now be 612 Adams Street (at the time, the address was No. 282) in buildings built in 1854 that had been planned to house the Memphis Female College (but those plans had fallen through).
#66 Dedicated in 1985, the Brother Miguel Faculty Courtyard is behind Barry Hall and named after Brother Miguel Cordero (1854-1910) who was a member of the De La Salle order, a teacher, scholar, and saint.
#27 The statues of St. John Baptist de La Salle and a student that are installed in De La Salle Plaza in front of Barry Hall were sculpted and cast in bronze by Andrea Lugar of Lugar Foundry — who also created the statues of Elvis Presley on Beale Street, Johnny Cash in Cooper-Young, the Memphis Belle in Overton Park, and Ida B. Wells on Beale Street.
#15 The original East Parkway campus was traversed by the Union Railroad, which cut across the property at an angle from the southwest corner of campus at East Parkway and Central Avenue to the current location of Hollywood Street, where it curved north and intersected with the current CSX-Union Pacific rail line. In 1951, CBC acquired the right-of-way, allowing the removal of the railroad tracks.
#25The Collier House was demolished to make way for the construction of Ave Maria Hall (a three-story academic building which itself was demolished in 1990 and its foundation repurposed for the north wing of Buckman Hall).
#17 The first dorms at Christian Brothers College were known as “the barracks.” These temporary structures were military surplus from World War II, and they were used to house students attending the Junior College on the GI Bill.
#56CBC presented an honorary doctor of humanities degree to Danny Thomas, the TV star and founder of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in 1968.
#19The Rock was uncovered at the CBHS construction site and moved to the College’s campus during the 1961-62 school year as a curiosity.
#20In the late 1960s, the Rock was the focal point for social-issue demonstrations. It became a tradition for students to paint the Rock, and rules were established for the process of doing so.
#14 Linda Shanks was the first woman to graduate from CBC, in 1971. She was also the first female scholarship recipient. In addition to gender diversity, she also brought ecumenical diversity, being a Baptist.
#22After spending some time north of Rozier Hall in the 1990s, the Rock was eventually moved to its present location near the Thomas Center when construction of the Living Learning Center began in 2010.
#23The East Parkway campus, acquired in 1939 for the relocation of Christian Brothers College, was part of a 168-acre property known as the Collier Tracts, which the city of Memphis had taken possession of in a tax settlement.
#24The Collier House, a two-story farmhouse which came to be called “The White House,” was included in the Parkway campus acquisition and served as a Brothers’ residence and faculty housing until 1953,
#2 The original CBC property on Adams Street was purchased for the Brothers at a cost of $35,000. (Which would be $783,205.33 in today’s dollars.)
#26 In the early 1960s, Elvis Presley would drop by Christian Brothers College to take part in the occasional touch football game on campus. According to Brother Louis Althaus, he came to campus frequently at the time. Elvis posed with CBC students at one of the games in 1962.
#29As a young faculty member starting in 1976, Dr. Johnny Holmes (Physics & Natural Science) played on the CBC Soccer Club, which later became a regular intercollegiate sport at CBU in 1985.
#28CBC’s first two graduates completed this course of study: Rhetoric and composition, English, literature, logic, metaphysics (Tongiorgi), political economy, astronomy, navigation, surveying, chemistry, calculus, analytical geometry, natural philosophy, plane and spherical trigonometry, algebra, geometry, Viri Romae, Cicero, Sallust, Virgil, Livy, Juvenal, Tacitus, Anabasis, Homer, and Demosthenes.
#51The college division of Christian Brothers College was closed from 1915 to 1940 and from 1943 to 1946.
#67The Brother Miguel Faculty Courtyard features a wall sculpture by Brother William Woeger depicting the saint and his quote, “I must engage in all the works I undertake in a spirit of love.” The courtyard was designed by Brother Vincent Malham, at the time an English and music professor at CBU (and later President of CBU from 2005 to 2008), and constructed in 1985.
#43The Biology Department, which has the most majors (12.7%) of any academic department at CBU, was founded in 1961 under the leadership of Brother Robert Staub, who taught at CBU from 1950 to 1995.
#32 In 2007 and 2008, a major renovation was done on the Science Building which was renamed Assisi Hall. Also as part of this project, the Cooper-Wilson Center for the Life Sciences was constructed.
#18Prior to becoming coeducational in 1970, Christian Brothers College drew its cheerleaders from the Catholic schools for women in Memphis at the time, Siena College and the St. Joseph School for Nursing. The Homecoming Queen and alternates for the annual Homecoming Court were also Siena College students. Siena College was as established by Dominican nuns in 1922 and was located at the site of the current Oak Court Mall on Poplar Avenue. It closed in 1972, just as CBC became coeducational, and many of CBC’s first female students transferred from Siena.
#53CBU was awarded the NCAA Academic Excellence Award in 2014 in recognition of its 90% Academic Success Rate among student-athletes.
#35CBU won its only NCAA National Championship in 2002, when the women’s soccer team defeated the University of Nebraska-Omaha for the DII Championship.
#31Br. Dominick Dunn was the prime mover in getting CBC to prepare students for medical school in the 1960s and 1970s.
#37 The original Engineering faculty offices were above the boilers in Battersby Hall.
#38Brother Phillip Morgan was the first faculty member in Engineering at CBU. He was originally a high school chemistry teacher but earned his Electrical Engineering degree by 1954 and returned to establish the first Engineering degree program in West Tennessee.
#39 Dr. Pu-Ning Sun, professor of Mechanical Engineering, was the first faculty member married in the CBU Chapel.
#40From 1871 until 1922, CBC also included an elementary school.
#41Dr. Rose “Rosa” Deal became the first female faculty member at CBC in 1961, when she was hired as registrar and Latin teacher. She went on to teach French, Italian, and and European history until her final retirement in 1994. She was named an affiliated member of the Christian Brothers and gained the title of “Brother Rose” in 2002, and the Rosa Deal School of Arts was posthumously named for her in 2015.
#42 In 1948, Memphis Mayor Watkins Overton publicly saluted Christian Brothers College as a “Temple of Tolerance” because it was a Catholic school that welcomed Jewish and Protestant students as well as Catholics. Today, Catholics make up 21 percent of the undergraduate student body.
#12 The high school section of Christian Brothers College (now CBHS) became the first integrated high school in Memphis in 1963, when Jesse Turner Jr. was admitted by Brother Terence McLaughlin.
#36 CBU Softball holds the NCAA record for most triples in a game (7).
#45The Gadomski School of Engineering has the most male students of the four academic schools — 35% of male CBU students are Engineering majors.
#46A magnolia tree in Chickasaw Gardens is named in honor of Brother Leander Patrick, who served at CBC from 1898 until his death in 1936, for his work with the Memphis Beautiful Commission and his efforts to plant trees throughout the city.
#47The section of Central Avenue between East Parkway and Hollywood Street is named in memory of Brother Vincent Malham, an alumnus from the Class of 1955 who served as a faculty member from 1973 to 1987, and as president of CBU from 2005 to 2008.
#48CBU is one of six Lasallian colleges and universities in the United States, and one of 60 worldwide.
#49The Christian Brothers in Memphis have formally honored 44 lay colleagues since 1928 as Affiliated Members of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools for having served Lasallian ideals in some extraordinary way. Affiliated members of the Institute may use the initials ‘AFSC’ after his or her name.
#50CBU Athletics joined the NCAA Division II Gulf South Conference in 1996. Prior to that, CBU competed in NAIA Division I in the Volunteer State Athletic Conference and the Tennessee Collegiate Athletic Conference.
#34 Donna Crone (’83) is the only Lady Buc to become Director of Athletics at CBU. She played two seasons of basketball and two seasons of tennis, earning the team MVP award in tennis as a senior.
#52The Physician Assistant Studies program at CBU was the first in Memphis, established in 2012 and granted its first degrees in 2014.
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#4 Christian Brother College opened its doors on November 20, 1871.
#55The rabat, or winged collar, is part of the traditional religious habit of the Christian Brothers and is considered to be the ancestor of the present-day necktie. An architectural ornament, derived from the rabat and designed by Memphis architect Bill Ferguson, appears on the Bell Tower, campus fenceposts, and on several buildings on the CBU campus.
#57Maria von Trapp, of The Sound of Music fame, appeared at CBC in 1961 during a lecture tour, “Around the World with the Trapp Family Singers,” which was in relation to the Broadway success of the musical based on her memoirs — and predated the film with Julie Andrews by four years.
#54Engineering students built a replica of the Eiffel Tower on the CBU campus in 1990, in conjunction with Memphis in May’s 1990 tribute to France. At 60 feet (18 m) tall, the tower is a nearly perfect 1:20 scale replica of the original. in 1992, it was dismantled and moved to Memorial Park in Paris, TN (where it still stands today).
#58Quote: “I’ve heard it said that if all the unauthorized master keys for the school were confiscated, there would be enough brass for a life-sized statue of St. De La Salle.” — From the student underground newspaper, SWEET THURSDAY for March 1969
#59CBC played Loyola on January 7, 1957 to raise money for the then-named St. Jude Hospital for Underprivileged Children. Danny Thomas had not yet settled on what exactly that St. Jude would be.
#60Yes, CBC had sisters. The Lasallian Oblates of Guadalupe had a convent on campus and managed CBC’s domestic services for the academic year 1960-61.
#61Brother Jerome Wegener introduced computerized registration at CBC in 1963; then in 1980, his dissertation was the basis on interactive online registration.
#62The Banner online enterprise resource planning system arrived on campus in 1997 and went live in 1998.
#65Brother Lambert Thomas designed the first bell tower in 1958 and dedicated it to “all the deceased mothers of Christian Brothers’ students.
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