Pat Tremaine, 72, remembers seeing her first Auburn football game in 1957, the year the Tigers finished as undefeated national champions. She remembers seeing the very first game at Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum in 1969, when LSU’s baggy-socked “Pistol” Pete Maravich dropped 46 points in a 90-71 loss to Auburn. She remembers walking with her friends to the Tiger Theatre downtown to ogle at the “local celebrities” — the Auburn student athletes.
But most of all, Pat remembers her time spent in Auburn’s historic Wittel Dorm, built by her grandfather Samuel Wittel in the 1940s as a residence for professional women in town. Because of increased enrollment after World War II, it soon became the first private women’s dorm in Auburn. Along with female college students, over the years it housed three generations of the Wittel family, including Pat.
Pat lived in the dorm’s three-story private residence along with her parents and grandparents, even throughout most of her years in college.
“I had to have the same rules that Auburn [students] had,” she said. “I couldn’t be a minute late ... girls had to be in at 8:30 during the week. You could not wear any pants at all [during the week].”
Samuel, his wife Estelle Wittel and the rest of the family would often invite the young women living in the dorm over for dinner or tea. In her youth at Wittel Dorm, she says she always felt like she was in college.
“I was right there with the dorm and all the people,” she said. “I knew who everybody was. It was just a great place to grow up.”
While in high school, she would sell flowers to students to pin to their suits before football games. Afterward, she would walk to the stadium to get a ticket for a dollar. She never missed a game.
Pat says there are a lot of differences between Auburn in her collegiate days and today. Classes at Auburn were $75 per quarter and textbooks cost $30 a piece. If you went down East Thach Avenue far enough, you’d run into farmland. Stores closed early on Wednesday afternoons.
Though the town has changed since her youth, Pat said she is still a fan of the downtown area and how the city has kept it.
“Everything was so convenient [then], you didn’t have everything spread out. Everything was downtown,” Pat said. “Downtown [today] looks really great. The downtown hasn’t really expanded much.”
Since its construction in the early 1940s, the dorm has changed hands a couple times but has remained a women’s dorm. Soon, the building that has served as a home for generations of collegiate women will be converted into a 40-bed boutique hotel.
In January, the Auburn Planning Commission approved the requests of the new owners of the dorm, who plan on converting it into a boutique hotel. The new owners, according to plans, intend to keep the structure of the building mostly the same, adding only a wraparound porch on one end and building a brick driveway for valet service.
Today, Pat lives in Alaska with her husband Les Tremaine. The couple moved there in 1969 after Les graduated from Auburn’s veterinary school. Pat said she’d love to live in Auburn again but is moving to North Carolina soon to be closer to her children.
Regardless of the building’s purpose, it is clear the impact Wittel Dorm has had on both Auburn and Pat.
“It’s a wonderful project,” said Ex Officio Planning Commissioner Dan Bennett about the hotel plan in January. “It’s really important not only to the history of this community, but to our future as well.”
In 1999, it earned recognition from the Auburn Heritage Association as “one of Auburn’s most significant examples of classic nineteenth-century design.”
Pat said she hasn’t been inside of the building in almost 15 years but is eager to see how the new owners will handle renovations for the new hotel.
“My grandfather always sat by the window in the sitting room,” Pat told The Plainsman in January. “I still look at that window when I go by and can almost see him still there.”
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