If one wanted an indication of the sort of place the University was in 1895, only three short years after its opening, this fact might provide a clue: President David Ross Boyd, looking for a director of the Music Department, hired a woman named Grace King.  Five months earlier, she had turned eighteen.

She had earned a degree from Emporia State Teachers College in 1893, and had done some teaching as an undergraduate there. She also possessed a remarkable singing voice. Boyd heard about her from a Kansas friend and invited her to give a concert on the campus. Her angelic renditions of “When the Heart is Young” and “Goodbye Sweet Day” knocked the audience off its feet, and Boyd and the OU Regents immediately offered her the position. She got her widowed mother’s consent and the two of them moved to Norman.

For the next six years, no event at the University was complete without a few numbers from “Miss Grace, the Oklahoma Nightingale.” She sang at football games and whenever an important visitor came to town. She never said no to an invitation to sing. She started a glee club and traveled the state with it, winning goodwill for the University wherever she went. The students loved her because of her youthfulness, her kindness,  because she provided noontime music, and—defying the scandalized frowns of some of the town’s evangelicals—permitted them to dance with each other. She was a devout Catholic, and about her own moral views there could be no doubt. She wrote articles for the student newspaper filled with advice that will seem to modern readers as saccharine and platitudinous. “It is sweeter to sing than to weep,” she told students, most of whom were older than herself. “We will go through life with a bright song on our lips and melody in our hearts and the resulting harmony will be the glorious music of a noble life.”

Four decades later, a colleague from those pioneering days wrote about her to President William Bennett Bizzell. “[S]he, more than anyone else brought the school to favorable notice of the citizens.” She “had a splendid voice, remarkable energy and ambition and she gave every ounce of it to her duties.”

In 1901, at twenty-three, Grace King won the heart of the chair of the University’s Board of Regents, James Maguire, an Irish immigrant, started a hardware store in Norman and became a prominent and influential businessman and civic leader. He was twenty-three years older than his bride. After a brief move to Lawton, the couple returned to Norman in 1903, living first on Gray Street and then in a home on Elm Avenue north of the campus. While never losing interest in the University, she thereafter devoted herself to raising her family of two sons and two daughters. She also volunteered to start a Norman public library and to play the organ at her church. She probably believed that her formal connection to the University had ended.

It was the Great Depression of the 1930s that brought Grace King Maguire back. Her husband, now in his eighties, was suffering both severe financial losses and declining health, caused in part by an automobile accident. There was some likelihood that the Maguires would lose their home. Starting in 1932, she began desperately pursuing a salaried job at the University. But the school was itself in severe financial difficulty, and it was not until 1935 that she got a place in the library.  

She had two duties: managing the newspaper collection and assisting the school’s correspondence students in obtaining needed library resources. The director of Correspondence Studies wrote that she handled her duties “in such an efficient and prompt manner that we receive, almost daily, letters of appreciation from students.” The head of the library, Jesse Rader, said she was “unusually popular with the students.” President Bizzell spoke of “the fine service” she rendered and of her “unfailing loyalty to the University and devotion” to her duties. President Joseph A. Brandt called her “a wonderful person,” and President George Lynn Cross wrote that “her loyalty and energy were inspirations to all those with whom she came in contact.  She was kindness personified.” 

Grace King Maguire died on February 3, 1951, at 73. Her body lay in state in Holmberg Hall and classes were cancelled. Librarian Rader, in announcing her death, wrote that “her passing marks the end of a career of conscientious devotion to duty all too rare in this day. Thousands of friends will mourn her loss.” 

David W. Levy is Professor Emeritus of the OU History Department and has written two books on OU history.   

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