As huge scoops of rock, mortar, wood and glass were loaded into waiting dump trucks yesterday, I waved goodbye.

It’s gone. Mortimer Hall, my home away from home for about 25 years — its parts being hauled off to a landfill somewhere — has been razed, with surprising speed, to make room for the new student center.

The Eighth-and-National location is perfect, but it was a mistake ever to move the old Student Union Building away from its long-time spot, across from Ilfeld Auditorium. And it was a bigger mistake to locate it in Siberia, a.k.a. Baca Avenue, across from the football field.

Because people don’t walk much anymore, the new location, Eighth and National, will be about as central as a building on campus can be. Mortimer Hall was erected in the early ‘50s and named after a local physician and Highlands regent, H.M. Mortimer. It began as a men’s dorm, then became a classroom and faculty office building.

Its definition was confused and confusing. “Mortified Hall,” as some of us affectionately dubbed it, variously housed a small copying center, the teacher placement office, a recording booth, a foreign language lab, a photo darkroom, and much more. When I moved there in 1973, there were few occupied offices upstairs, the rooms being used mainly as a typing lab for journalism students and a layout room for the Highlands yearbook, the Southwest Wind.

Downstairs were offices for Modern Foreign Languages, History-Poli-Sci. and Philosophy. In addition, anything ethnic: Black Studies, Chicano Studies, Indian Studies, had offices there.

When Ford Hall, a cracker-box arrangement that started as a women’s dorm and later became offices for some of the humanities, became overcrowded around 1980, English joined us.

Before the invasion, I practically had the run of the plush, modern, air-conditioned, commodious second floor, with a sauna and room for a pony. But soon, there went the neighborhood; we needed to turn down the volume. The place soon resembled a convent-monastery.

Because it started as a men’s dorm, Mortified Hall naturally contained men’s facilities on both floors. When it became a classroom building, the downstairs restroom was for women, upstairs for men. Several sheets of plywood soon covered the urinals in the now-ladies room. The showers got boarded up. The building lacked an elevator and other amenities for the handicapped.

Graphic Design and Mass Communications soon arrived, cramping the quarters further and causing some rearrangement of offices. During the growth, I moved my office several times — sometimes merely next door — and realized how a move across campus would not have involved more turmoil.

Well, a move can be therapeutic; it gives one a chance to clean house, to pitch what hasn’t been used recently. But the one possession that caused the most grief was my office door, a popular meeting-and-greeting place on campus.

You see, for years I’d collected unusual headlines from a trade publication, the Columbia Journalism Review. It contained readers’ submissions of unusual, ambiguous headlines that appeared in newspapers across the country.

One that I submitted, which got published in the Review, came from Dear Abby: “Never withhold herpes from a loved one.” It had taken years to amass such a collection, and even with an Exacto knife, the transfer job still would have been as daunting.

Drake Bingham, the department head, who commiserated over the forced move, promised to look the other way while I decided, “Why not? Why not just move the whole bloomin’ door to the adjacent office?”

Aside from a few stares from rubbernecking colleagues — arms akimbo — the transfer was smooth. For a while. But I’d forgotten a law of mathematics: Thou shalt consider that the door might not be exactly the same size as that of the next opening. And, since the door opened in, the escape became difficult. Fortunately, I’d had a small pry bar that I squeezed into the door jamb, allowing me to open the door. A bit of sanding and a lot of sneezing later, the door opened.

So why were the headlines so precious that I needed to preserve them? The silly headlines, often a topic of discussing during the headline-writing unit of my class, were amusing, yet educational.

I recall some of them:

• A photo of a boy passing a basketball to another read, “Boy donates kidney to brother.”
• Another, about a meter reader: “5-foot 1,200 pounds: Too heavy for her job?” Did you notice how just one little space in “1,200” would have made a difference?
• Another read: “Crowds rushing to see Pope trample four to death.”
• “Panda mating fails; Veterinarian takes over.”
• “Iraqi head seeks arms.”
• Prostitutes appeal to pope”

It was for those reasons that the door needed to be preserved. Yet, it was time to deep-six Mortified.

• • •

The original SUB on University Avenue was a warm, friendly place where thousands of students and faculty enjoyed a milkshake and a burger. In the ‘80s it moved north, to the old Stu Clark Gym and became the Student Center. Several of us with the campus newspaper worried that the name of the venerable former coach would vanish as the gym became the hub of student government, with an anemic cantina, a computer room, post office, ballroom and book store. At least a small bit of antiquity (or uncle-tiquity?) was preserved in that “Stu” and “Stu-dent” begin the same way.

Clearly, the Baca Avenue building would have seen even less traffic if students hadn’t been required to stop there for mail or to buy their books. I agree with the plans to locate the new Student Union Building on the Mortimer Hall site.

Now watch it become an instant hit.