When Flora Roy accepted a teaching position at Waterloo College in 1948, she imagined it would be a temporary posting until she finished her dissertation and returned to Toronto or another large Canadian university. Little did she know that, as head of the English department, she would stay on and find herself involved in local controversies. This memoir recalls Roy’s early days at Waterloo College (when its standards were still supervised by the University of Western Ontario) and traces the gradual pressures to merge with the new University of Waterloo. As history shows, Waterloo College resisted what was seen then as corporate pressure and became instead an independent and much-loved institution called Waterloo Lutheran University (which later became Wilfrid Laurier University). The story of the transformation of Waterloo College into Waterloo Lutheran University is told through anecdotes and shows that, despite its size, the small campus was very connected to the larger world.