Engineering students tinkering with turbines in the basement, the U.S. Weather Bureau checking temperatures at its weather station on the roof and Walter Cronkite, Liz Smith and Liz Carpenter hammering out stories on classic typewriters.

The Dorothy L. Gebauer Building, the oldest academic building at The University of Texas at Austin, holds all these memories and more.

Built in 1904, the building - just northeast of the Tower - has been occupied at various times by engineering, journalism, geography, speech and the Dean of Students' Office. The building narrowly escaped the wrecking ball in the 1990s, and a decision finally was made to renovate it. The building now houses the College of Liberal Arts.

Liz Carpenter, who received her bachelor of journalism from the university in 1942 and went on to become press secretary for Lady Bird Johnson, remembers Gebauer as "The old J-Building. It was a marvelous place if you were energetic and wanted to be a journalist," she said. The building, Carpenter said, housed the Daily Texan, the Ranger magazine and the Cactus.

"We'd spend our evenings around the horseshoe-shaped table of the Texan hoping to catch an assignment from an evening editor," she said. "I look on it as some of the happiest days of my life, and also a place where my husband-to-be (Les Carpenter, also a Texan reporter) and I were soulmates."

"This was where we really graduated," said Cronkite, who worked on the Texan staff from 1933-35, "where we knew we had left behind forever those days of putting out the semi-occasional high school newspaper, where we got the first sniff of printer's ink and knew the deadline excitement of getting out a daily newspaper."

Nationally syndicated columnist Smith, who received her bachelor of journalism degree in 1950, remembers the J-Building as "antediluvian, dated and in poor shape. I worked in that building for four years writing for the Daily Texan and the Ranger. We never thought anything about (its condition). We all knew journalism was a decrepit, downbeat, but important occupation and everything should be right out of the movie 'The Front Page.' Therefore, the building's condition seemed normal to us."

The Gebauer Building was designed by the San Antonio firm of Coughlin & Ayres and constructed at a cost of nearly $85,000. Atlee B. Ayres was the grandfather of Professor James Ayres, who was director of the university's Shakespeare at Winedale program for 30 years. When Gebauer first opened in 1904, it provided accommodations for the university's newly established Civil, Mining and Electrical Engineering departments.

The flat roof was used for many years by the weather bureau for local observations, and the ground floor at one time housed the U.S. Geological Museum.

It served as the Journalism Building from 1932-52 and, subsequently, other areas such as the centers for Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Mexican-American Studies. Structural problems were discovered in 1991 when workers began installing an elevator in the building. A consulting firm recommended that the building be vacated because concrete slabs between each floor, as well as over the top floor, were beginning to sag.

Eight years earlier, the building had been renamed for Dorothy L. Gebauer, former dean of women and a driving force in campus life for several decades.