Manners: Oteliaquette at Chapel Hill

Good manners are not nearly so good as they used to be. In a freewheeling society with no hard-and-fast code of etiquette, this is perhaps inevitable. But there are individuals—ask any lady who has had to stand up on a bus—who insist that what is needed is not a new set of rules, but a new ruler. The old-fashioned wrist-tapping kind. Especially for these young people.

Students Smart. At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, many a campus carpus has felt the sting dealt out by 69-year-old Otelia Connor. An inveterate Letters-to-the-Editor writer and widow of an American Tobacco Co. executive, Otelia came over from Durham for her son's graduation in 1957, was so upset by all the shoving and slurping that she decided to settle right down there in Chapel Hill and do something about it. Taking up residence near the university, she began to eat her meals in the student dining hall, soon became an unofficial campus institution. "The students want to learn," she declares, "but few are taught good manners at home. They don't open doors for women. They slouch. They prop their feet up on tables. They say 'huh?' and 'uh-huh.' In the dining hall, they just pull a chair away from your table without asking, and they won't carry your tray."

Otelia favors a return to the gracious Old South tradition in which she was raised. But the Connor catch-up course is often elementary. If she doesn't have her umbrella handy for a quick thwack, Otelia is apt to snap a finger against an undergraduate's skull, then tell all to the nearest Letters column. "I sat with two law students," goes a typical mid-term report. "One was lying almost prone across the table. The other had his knees doubled up under his chin—I slapped him on the legs and told him to put his feet down."

Field Study. "She is an anthropological treasure," says Dean of Students Charles Henderson, "a throwback to those lost days when manners counted for something, and when elderly ladies thought it their duty to preserve them." Most students agree. They dig Otelia. The school's Current Affairs Committee invited her to lecture at Graham Memorial Hall—though some soreheads around Chapel Hill have been known to describe her as "a circus," "a hell-raiser," and "an apparition—a little toothpick of a woman with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth."

That kind of talk doesn't bother Otelia, who calls her chain smoking only "a silly nervous habit. I just puff it in and puff it out." As self-appointed Gadfly of Chapel Hill, she thrives on controversy. This summer, with many of her naughty U.N.C. "children" off on holiday—presumab!y littering up the beaches or just thoughtlessly kicking sand around—she took a trip to nearby Duke University. "I went there to observe the students in the Union Cafeteria," she reported ruefully, "and their manners are even worse than ours."