Established in 1937, Zahm Hall was the freshman home of John Bellairs and Al Myers. In that era the college designated different halls to different classes, and from sophomore year forward students could select their halls and rooms on the basis of grades. As for curfews, Myers notes that freshmen were allowed two late nights a week, which meant 11:30 during the week and 12:30 on Friday and Saturday.
In his first week on campus Bellairs and Myers ran afoul of Zahm's rector, the notorious Father Paul Fryberger, a man of medium height, slender build and steel gray hair, with piercing dark eyes that could cut through steel. "John's and my transgression was to arrive at one of the hall's entrance doors about 15 seconds after 10 p.m., at which time it was locked for the night. Father Fryberger's dour visage was on the other side of the door. He opened the door and gave us a dressing down for being late. We feebly protested that we had arrived right on the spot of ten o'clock and thus should have been able to get in. For this impertinence, he promptly restricted us to campus for two weeks. To have run afoul of immutable authority so soon after leaving home for the first time in our lives was a terrifying experience for us both. In fairness to Fr. Fryberger about four days later he called us in and rescinded our punishment, now that he was satisfied that we had accepted the proper master-to-whelp relationship.
"Fryberger was famous in Notre Dame lore as the rector who would wear one regular shoe and one (silent) tennis shoe so he could race after you and make it sound like he was just walking. This story is nonsense of course. Father Fryberger needed no such props. He could materialize in front of you like the Ghost of Christmas Future, striking fear in the stoutest of hearts if he so chose. Another rumor about him, somewhat more plausible, is that he had been in the military in World War II (I don't know if as soldier or chaplain) and was a survivor of the Bataan death march. Unfortunately, and I now regret our collective timorousness, nobody had the courage to ask him."
At Zahm Hall, Bellairs's roommate was Ronald Cardwell but after this first year he never again had a roommate.
For his sophomore year Bellairs lived in Howard Hall, noted for being the first residence building of the university to use Gothic architecture.
Bellairs then moved to Room 119 of Sorin Hall, strictly a junior hall in 1957, the oldest and most prestigious residence halls on campus. Sorin Hall was Notre Dame's first residence hall, built in 1888 and at a time when high ceilings were in style. Bellairs occupied such a room, a splendid high-ceilinged corner turret room in the southeast corner on the first floor. In his debut Scholastic article, Bellairs identifies the hall as "South Bend's answer to the House of Usher" and notes, quite truthfully confirms Myers, that:
My room is at least 15 feet high, its exact height being a mystery because of the everpresent cloud formations, and is decorated to resemble a cross between a Victorian tenement and a Pompeian attic.
The next year, Bellairs benefited from Sorin's reclassification from a junior to a senior hall as he triumphantly held on to his highly treasured room - "perfect for the bull sessions that are such an indispensable feature of college life," says Myers. Another student, Robert Sedlack, also remembers how that the high-ceilinged room of Bellairs "always seemed busy with people stopping in and out to chat."
Bellairs kept his room pretty cloudy with pipe smoke. "He was especially fond of a big calabash of the kind traditionally associated with Sherlock Holmes," recalls Bowen. "When he went out he carried smaller pipes with him, but in his room he preferred the calabash." Myers notes this habit was abandoned in early adulthood.
"Also, the junk he collected in his room ran to gothic (in the old sense) and grotesque kitsch - pipe racks with little carved faces and figures, beer mugs bearing sentimental verses in German (Trink was klär ist; lieb was rär ist), that sort of thing," adds Bowen. "Miniature cuspidors probably were included in the collection, though I don't remember them in particular."
While Bellairs chose a spacious first floor room, other seniors went underground to the basement, an area not originally scheduled for human habitation. These rooms, added some time after the hall was built, had ceilings of a more normal height. "Why did some of the rest of us choose, or even scheme to get, the basement?" asks Philips Gibson years later. "Did living underground help us feel like an intellectual bohemian type? Or was it because the priest who was the rector lived on the first floor? He was reasonably permissive about things like drinking, but hiding underground gave extra security. It was understood he would never come down to the lower depths and poke around."
Gibson also notes that the verbal description of Prospero's house, and the frontispiece illustration of The Face in the Frost, reminds him of "weird old Sorin Hall, compact and cubical, with its two round pointy towers - definitely our fustiest campus residence."
Besides the rooms, of which the Scholastic reported as "large enough to encourage study, and at the same time small enough to discourage visiting," Sorin features a large front porch built in 1905 with dual swings facing the oldest part of campus. A history of Sorin notes "this porch over the years has been so popular among students that it is recognized campus-wide along with Sorin's majestic turrets as a symbol of the character of the students within." The residence is south of the Sacred Heart Basilica and Main Building.
There were three or four rooms between the front door and the turret room where Bellairs lived; these rooms appears to have been swallowed up to create a student lounge following massive hall renovations during the 1980s.
