I took the 6:30 a.m. bus from the Table Mesa Park-n-Ride and got to DIA about two and a half hours before my 10:10 flight. I intended to carry-on all my luggage an had my old Lowe Alpine travel bag, one-third full, and my Colorado Software Summit laptop bag (minus laptop). When flying stand-by there is a risk of not getting on the airplane, but also a chance of landing a seat in first class. To get into first class you have to pass a dress code which depends a lot on the ticket agent, so I was ``dressed up'' in a sort of eclectic way: Dockers slacks, Armani jacket, brown belt from the honeymoon in Italy, Ecco shoes Mom and Dad bought in Denmark, pale green shirt, and my ever-reliable paisley tie--the dark red and tan and gray one. For reading material I had old Time and Newsweek magazines and the currently popular novel, The Da Vinci Code.
I was lucky to get the last seat on the plane (Boeing 737?) in coach, between a woman who worked with mentally disabled people in Arizona and was reading philosophy/morals and the man who owns the Val-Pak coupon franchise in Des Moines. He told me it had been raining for weeks in Iowa.
At the Des Moines airport (DSM) I called Grinnell and they sent a student to fetch me. I was waiting in the baggage area for a guy in a red t-shirt when Molly in a white t-shirt came at about 1:15. Molly was a math major from Bettendorf (Iowa). She had recently been at Grinnell-in-London. We talked about math majors and travel. She asked what one does at the reunion and I wasn't too sure what to say because this was my first. All she had heard were tales about drunken alumni in golf carts (apparently she hadn't seen the four page schedule). She said there was a lot of drinking among the classmates she hung out with. This made me wonder if Grinnell had turned into a sort of Club Med experience (as James Fallows once described Japanese universities) complete with lavish residential suites (as opposed to good old-fashioned dorm rooms) or whether it actually had always been that way and I had been too bookish to notice. I should have known better.
Unfortunately the sole window (curtained in fabric suitable for sacking potatoes) faced north to Loose Hall and its roaring attic fan. Opening the window let in the noise but also a breath of air, warm and humid though it was.
In the end I stayed just barely cool enough to sleep; the Loose attic fan shut itself off late in the evenings, and I wasn't in the room enough to let the aesthetics bother me. On the one hand I was a little let down by the room, but on the other I was pleased that the College was not wasting money on frivolities but perhaps was still focussed on essentials (by which I mean academics). I looked for and found the network socket which didn't exist in 1979. After unpacking I walked south past Burling Library (where I sent an ``I'm here!'' email from an iMac) and across U.S. Highway 6 to High Street. I've lived most of my life near Highway 6. Note for next time: bring hangers.
The old house at 1030 High Street, where I lived from the summer of 1960 to the summer of 1965, was looking grand in fresh white paint. It's a duplex near where the railway crosses U.S. Highway 6; we lived in the better half. It's apparently student housing now. I knocked on the door but it was obviously empty, blinds down, closed for the summer. In August 1997 I came by this house with my new wife and showed it to her, it doesn't seem to have changed much since then, or since 1965 for that matter: it's a large frame house with front and back porches and slanted cellar doors in the back. The elms in front and the walnut tree in back look good. I recall bushes between it and the house to the north when I was there in 1997, but they're gone now. Directly across the street the rail line is still in use (but modern coins don't squash nearly as well as the copper-rich pennies available to a seven-year-old in 1964).
Recently I pointed out to my wife that until last year I had lived longer at 1030 High Street than at any other residence in my life; moreover those were the formative years from three to eight years of age. I've lived for six years on Grinnell Avenue in Boulder where I've been married, mortgaged, and offsprung, but a big chunk of me will always be in Grinnell. I went to first and second grade at Cooper School (a block to the northeast) and Dad worked in the Quad just across the street. This is where I lived when I collected fireflies, built with an Erector Set, learned about dinosaurs, and terrified my little sister Debonney by explaining that a Tyrannosaurus Rex was large enough to reach into our second story bedroom window. It is still true that I've lived longer in Grinnell than in any other place, nine years, bifurcated. I'm strangely proud of that.
In 1997 we found some kids playing by the bushes. They were suitably (not very, but polite) impressed when I told them that I used to live here a long time ago. When my sister and I talk about the house now we always talk about the fireflies, and so I mentioned to these kids that my sister and I used to collect fireflies here. We put them in jars with nail-punched holes by our beds, and even wantonly broke off the glowing tails and pressed them into nooks into our walnut bedsteads. A boy asked immediately, ``Do you want a firefly now?'' He went into the bushes and brought one back to us and put it in my hands. Now, a few months after his kindergarten graduation my five-year-old son Jacob saw a snapshot of himself standing by Mrs. Dodyk and said ``It makes my eyes wet,'' which made it hard to see. The firefly was a little hard for me to see, too. I held it in my hands like a precious thing and then carefully released it, not quite understanding why I should be so happy that there are still kids collecting fireflies on humid August nights in small Midwestern towns. Even wanton kids.
Today there weren't any kids around; on vacation in Colorado, perhaps. I took some pictures, reminisced, and walked on.
A few blocks from High Street, past a looming church (which loomed much larger in memory) I came to Cunningham's Drug Store. It was closed and for sale (a Wal-Mart opened recently), but still there next to the improbable and delightful Louis Sullivan jewel-box bank. I had forgotten they were next-door neighbors.
Hansen's ``Danish Maid'' Bakery across the street was still a going concern, though it looked like its sign hadn't been changed in forty years. Staring in through the window I got a whiff of a forty year old craving for a cookie, but I wasn't holding onto Mom's hand and didn't have to worry about my sister getting something I might not. In college days we made ``bakery runs,'' showing up at the back door at two in the morning for the freshest doughnuts. Later in life I tried to explain why I didn't want to live in Golden, Colorado. ``It's a gigantic brewery with some houses around it. It's not a town,'' I said. My friend asked what I meant. ``Well, for example, it doesn't have a bakery,'' I said, and he understood.
A band playing in the gazebo in the city park could be heard all over downtown. People were gathered in an arc at some distance from the gazebo. I came up behind them and looked around for food to buy. A local grocery had a barbecue stand set up and was selling hamburgers and brats for two dollars, hot dogs for one dollar, and rib eye steak sandwiches for three dollars. A can of pop was an additional dollar. Everything was sold out except pop and rib eye steaks, for which the vendor was very apologetic (running out of food in the Midwest!). He was so regretful that when I ended up with a smallish steak he slapped a second one onto it. I sat in the grass and listened to the band while I ate. Then I took my novel to a picnic table in back of the band and read in the descending light, a light unavailable to those living in the afternoon shadow of the Rockies. In the High Street house I knew the light was shining almost horizontally through the rooms and illuminating lazy dust motes.
An aluminum can lady sat herself down across from and introduced herself as Doris Boyd. She was full of information, some of which I believed. The tale of the local man who was rich from collecting cans (``He has sixty thousand dollars!'') seemed fanciful, but she was clear about Cunningham's and said the fountain was still visible through the windows. I had forgotten that Cunningham's had a soda fountain. She said the train station was now a restaurant and looking over my shoulder I could see it was true.
After I said goodbye to Doris I walked over to the former station. It's built at the intersection of two rail lines and so had the pleasing efficiency of serving both lines at once. I recall riding the train overnight to Colorado, before the interstate highway arrived and made driving cheaper and faster. Since my mother doesn't recall this I rather doubt it's true.
From the train station I crossed Third Avenue and entered the residential part of town. A sagging, rattle-trap Pinto bounced by and an incredibly thick rural accent (was I being put on?) called out, ``Sair, wair is thaird avnoo?''. The wide streets had two kinds of houses: frame houses and bigger frame houses. Some of these were like layered castles: a raised ground floor with high ceilings, a second floor above, and a healthy sized attic on top. The leaded glass windows were apparent from the sidewalk, but having lived in these houses I new the wooden floors, trim, stairways, banisters, solid doors, and mantels inside. In Boulder these houses would cost a gazillion dollars, more or less. But something besides the plasticizing effect of too much money separated this neighborhood from the modern suburbs I have come to know and loathe. What was it?
For one thing, the blocks had alleys to access the garages; the most
prominent feature on most houses built today is the garage and
driveway: once one- or two-car garages, now 
-car garages where
is an arbitrarily large number. The most prominent feature I saw on
these houses was the front porch. I walked down some alleys past the
garages and looked at the backsides: kid's toys and back porches. I
remembered standing on our own back porch on the corner of the block
and looking across the backyards and alleys at a space full of
fireflies. Then the rest of the mystery unraveled: I was looking at
back porches, gardens, and kids toys without fences blocking my view.
The great distinguishing features of modern suburbs are garages in
front and (appropriately named) stockade fences in back, slicing up
the neighborhood like giant upside-down cookie cutters. Here there
was none of that, the lines between neighbors here are not fortified.
Now, I live in a house with fences on three sides of my back yard. I
persuaded Garland, on the east, to build a low one, and I have high
hopes of persuading Lieschen on the west side to take down her fence
entirely this summer. The back fence is tougher because Jim is
inordinately proud of the new fence on his rental. Think globally
(liberal education) act locally (one fence at a time).
Steve McKelvey was the first classmate I met. He recognized me first down the hall, in the dark, which impressed me. I had not stayed in touch with any classmates other than Mike Grefe, and not him since a couple of years after graduation. Steve was cheerful, bearded, and like me, somewhat heavier. We chatted briefly before I went out for dinner. Soon after I went to bed, about 10:40 p.m., a woman called down the third floor hall. I got up in my pyjamas to meet Mary Beth George, a class agent. Mary Beth was one of the many I did not really remember, but it was a pleasure to get to know her. And this was generally the case with everyone I met or met again: even though I didn't remember most people, or them me, I found them gracious and approachable and of course we had something important in common. Mary Beth in particular was responsible for this being a successful reunion.
For me this was a math-major-themed reunion. The Grinnell OnLine Directory for 1979 lists five Mathematics majors (Bruce Albrecht, Steve McKelvey, Mark Hatherly, Carolyn Mow, and Newton White). There were three double majors, too, including Keith Brown (Philosophy), Carl Klapper (Economics), and myself (Physics), and three General Science/Mathematics majors (Michael Grefe, Lee Lovig, and Tony Montoya), All of these attended except for the following slackers: Newton, Keith, Carl, and Tony. That's seven out of eleven mathematics majors of one type or another who attended. I recall that none of the General Science majors took the senior year Topology and Analysis classes. I asked Lee why I couldn't recall him and he explained that he had spent a year in Japan (``I got a wild hair''). Of course I wished I had a spent a year in Japan, and London, etc. Recently Lee has been working as a software consultant in Des Moines.
Steve and I were the only ones who went on to doctorates in mathematics, but Steve is the only one us who followed the traditional academic path to completion: graduation from Grinnell, Ph.D. in math, hired at a college (St. Olaf's in Northfield, Minnesota), and tenured there. Recently, though, Steve has gone to the Dark Side and become a dean.
Bruce is another software geek, like myself. He is managing software builds Blue Cross Blue Shield near Minneapolis. This says something about his reliability, and probably gives him a lot of job security--something I've never really valued, for better or worse.
Likewise, Mark Hatherly is working as an ``IT project manager for 3M''. He has someone gotten an equine lifestyle, by which I mean he and his wife board horses outside of Minneapolis.
Carolyn Mow said she is not involved in mathematics, though once a geek, always a geek, I say. Her story is a little more interesting, and let's say more involved than most, including a lot of human rights work in Central America. I recommend asking her about it if you have the opportunity. And take notes.
Lee, Carolyn, and I have children. Mark, Bruce, and Steve are married, but have no kids--I was surprised by that. The directory reports a spouse and child for Carl. Newton White went to Harvard Law and is reported to be married with kids. Newton appears to have an intellectual property law practice in New England; I should talk to him sometime.
I went to the Noyce Science Center with the intent of going to a lecture, but got distracted by signs pointing to the Mathematics Department (I seem to recall it being in Goodnow in '79). I found Mr. Walker's office and made an appointment to see him in the afternoon. I saw Mr. Jepsen sitting on a bench, but he was in conversation with someone, so I finally went to the lecture. It was an ``Alumni Talk'' titled ``Why aren't all engines double-acting variable-stroke HCCI compound free-piston gas-turbine engines?'' This made more sense than it should have because I was already familiar with the HCCI acronym (``Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition'') from working in the Chemical Engineering Department at Colorado School of Mines. The talk was given by Paul Schweisow, '89, and it turned out that he had been an English major. But ``my father was a physicist!'' he joked, (and I have a Master's degree, in Science! I thought to myself). Somehow he had gotten interested in alternatives to the standard four-stroke combustion engine (via the internet, of course) and was here promoting what he thought was the best idea. He had an interesting reprint from an old Popular Mechanix magazine and a plexiglas model.
I sat next to Steve McKelvey and Bruce Albrecht. We were three geeks in a row. I couldn't understand how the new engine would work, but that wasn't the point, I suppose. The talk was entertaining for a while, but it showed no signs of ending after an hour so I left early.
Michael Grefe was the only male Grinnell friend I spent much time with after graduation. That was in 1980-81 when he and I and Antonia Joy Wilson were all living in different parts of Los Angeles. Like me, he is now thinner above and thicker below, but still recognizably Michael. He is doing art and illustrations now instead of the architecture he had been studying in L.A. He lives in San Francisco and seems to be pretty happy overall.
My reunion packet contained a lunch ticket and so I turned down an invitation to go to town with others in favor of a waitered lunch in the Quad.
I was joined at lunch by Hubert Farbes, '69, one of the few (and only one I talked to) black men at the reunion. He's an attorney in Denver (quite successful, I gathered) for large development projects; he mentioned C-470. On the one hand I was gratified in a well-meaning liberal sort of way to speak to him. I haven't really talked to a black person as an every-day peer since sitting next to Curtis Baynes in band practice at Grant Junior High School in Denver (and that says something for integrating schools right there). I wonder what happened to Curtis after he moved to Oregon. The trajectory of my life through Cherry Creek High School, Grinnell College, Aspen, mountain sports, aerospace engineering, mathematics, and computer science has not resulted in mingling with much of an ethnic or gender mix. It's been white boys all the way except for traveling abroad.
On the other hand, I was a little suspicious that Mr. Farbes was on the wrong side of the issues when it came to real estate ``development'' along Colorado's Front Range. I perhaps read him wrong, but he seemed the slightest bit annoyed by the fact that the C-470 beltway goes only three-quarters of the way around the metro Denver area but does not and probably will never include the quadrant containing Boulder (and Golden, to its credit).
Be that as it may, it is easy to chat with someone as urbane and friendly as Hubert. I asked him about racism in Boulder; my sister said an African-American friend had complained about it. Hubert was unaware of a problem, somewhat to my relief. It came out that after Grinnell he had gone on to Yale Law with Bill and Hillary Clinton. He said that it was pretty easy to get Bill on the phone up until the time he won the New Hampshire primary in '92. It's always fun to hear Bill and Hillary stories since there is always an sense of incipient scandal in every story. My brother-in-law Bruce Basham went to the University of Arkansas where he played second base for the Razorbacks and roomed with Gennifer Flower's high school boyfriend. Bruce's brother Keith has his own gossip about a Christmas party with Hillary and Vince Foster. It is curious how we care about the personal lives of these public people when we are so often incurious about our own families. but it's fun to gossip, anyway.
In one form or another I told the following story often.
``After I graduated I worked for a couple of years on laser death-rays for Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles (remember Reagan's Star Wars project?). Then I went traveling in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent. I spent 1982 and 1984 abroad and the year between house-sitting in Aspen. In 1984 I went right around the world, taking the Trans-Siberian from Beijing to Moscow and on to Berlin; that's the year I didn't spend ten nights in the same bed. When I got back I decided I needed a job so I went to graduate school [this may be a liberal arts tic: when you need a job, go to school]. I intended to study Computer Science but had a math degree from Grinnell and ended up in the math department at Colorado State University. I found an advisor I liked (Rick Miranda) and ended up getting a Ph.D. in Algebraic Geometry. I taught full-time for five years at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where I began teaching more and more Computer Science, and then took a position as a Research Professor doing software in a Chemical Engineering department at Colorado School of Mines. That job ended last week and now I am unemployed. At the end of grad school I met my wife, Michelle, and we have two kids, five and three, and live on Grinnell Avenue (really!) in Boulder.''
Sometimes this was abbreviated to ``I do software at Colorado School of Mines and live in Boulder with my wife and two kids'', but in whatever form people seemed to relate to the ``living in Boulder'' part more than any other. Evidently, living in Boulder is cool.
After lunch I returned to the Noyce Science Center. Mr. Walker was in his large and appropriately cluttered office. I reintroduced myself and asked him for some information about himself as I was going to introduce him at Saturday night's dinner. This put us into an interview mode when really I just wanted to chat, but we did both. He hadn't changed much since he was my undergraduate mathematics advisor, though he was now head of the Computer Science group. Since I had moved into CS (sort of) we talked about that and other changes at Grinnell. It turns out that a laudable lack of change was more to the point as I was very pleased to hear that Grinnell has the same academic departments, no more, no less, than twenty-five years ago. Mr. Walker is a little grayer, now, but still has the same energy, rich speaking voice, and air of formality. I remembered that he had gone to MIT, but had forgotten that he studied algebraic geometry--probably since algebraic geometry really isn't taught to undergraduates. I told him that Mike Artin was my mathematical grandfather (my advisor's advisor), and he told me that Artin's daughter had attended Grinnell. He recalled being taken back in memory to MIT by seeing Artin in the halls here.
On Thursday I tried to get into ARH to look around but it was locked. Friday afternoon I got in to hear a lecture and looked around a bit. ARH has been renovated. The biggest change to me was the carpeting, which altered the acoustics of the hallways. In 1979 I attended a chamber music recital in the hallway--the echoing acoustics were perfect. Someone passed around brownies on a china plate before the performance and halfway through it dropped the plate onto the conglomerate stone floor. Acoustically, it was the most perfectly smashed single dish I ever heard, better in a way than the ball I attended with Antonia in Denver around 1990 where an entire serving table stacked high with columns of side dishes became unbalanced and slowly, endlessly, waterfalled to the floor.
The ARH auditorium was packed and I was lucky to get a seat. Tom Cech ('72, and Grinnell's only Nobel laureate, so far) gave an excellent presentation (even though I almost fell asleep during the technical bits) titled ``From Catalytic RNA to Howard Hughes.'' It was stimulating, funny, and even inspiring. He discussed how his team stumbled across the work which led to the prize (and then spent a year confirming that the behavior of his control was not due to contamination--finally proved by synthesizing the necessary RNA), and his current work at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute--very impressive. The man has five hundred million dollars a year to spend and I think it's in good hands.
At the end of the talk I wanted to ask how I could get involved and was lucky when another geek asked, ``I'm a software guy, what are the opportunities?'' Later I was gratified to learn that this was the class of '79's own Neal Miller, who has a consulting business somewhere in Illinois. Cech answered that bioinformatics was booming and that neurotransmitter modeling, in particular, was very interesting. My feeling was that if it was interesting to him then it would be interesting to me. (And remember, to an academic, ``interesting'' is about the highest praise that can be given to a topic.)
After Tom Cech's talk I wandered south down the ARH hallway until it merged into Goodnow Hall and found myself at Gene Herman's office. Like Mr. Walker, I found him well-preserved (if not, as Daniel Waterhouse says of Enoch Root at the beginning of Neal Stephensons's Quicksilver: ``implausibly well-preserved''). His voice, like Mr. Walker's, seemed unchanged, as did his quietly intelligent demeanor. We chatted about my life (I gave the standard Story). He asked what classes I took from him. I mentioned Linear Algebra and Symbolic Logic and the independent study of Gödel's Theorem with Mark Hatherly. ``Was I able to keep up with you?'' he asked, surprising me.
The independent study class ended in one of those moments I looked back on painfully. ``Pain'' might not be the right word but ``embarrassment'' doesn't seem to fit, either. Mr. Herman gave Mark an ``A'' in the class and me a ``B'' which really rankled. I remember complaining strongly about it to him and he saying that he felt Mark understood the material better. Ah, well. I was somewhat relieved he didn't seem to remember it, not that I asked him--or Mark. This type of memory can be more powerful in the present than warranted, but this kind of memory is certainly part of my Grinnell experience. I asked on the class mailing list about this sort of recollection: whether anyone might hesitate to attend the Reunion for fear of awakening some great embarrassment, but no one responded. Going to the reunion helped me see a lot of things, not all of them embarrassing, in a new context.
Mr. Herman had another visitor for a few minutes and while they talked I examined his bookshelf. He had already found Bradley's A Primer of Linear Algebra which we had used twenty-five years ago, and I may have told him my anecdote about the ever-rising price of the Blue Rudin text, which I bought for fourteen dollars at Grinnell in 1978 and had the chance to buy a again for fifty dollars at Colorado State University in 1988. The book which caught my eye was Proofs from the Book, about fine proofs Erdös considered suitable for God's Book of Proofs. Once a geek...
I love books and they love me. As a child I hoarded the few dinosaur books from the Grinnell Public Library and as a college student I escaped to the same building to read non-mathematical novels in the late-afternoon sun (The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles). When Dad worked at the University of Denver I descended down, down, down into the stacks of the Mary Reed Library to gnaw here and there.
The feeling can depend on the building though; when DU had I. M. Pei build a concrete box library I could no longer find the magic. Nowadays the renovated Mary Reed building has been occupied by administrators who appreciate its grand style and the Pei building is looking more and more like a (stained) concrete box.
When the class of '79 graduated and we had to clean out our dorm rooms I walked through the hallways scavenging for books. I knew I was leaving a special time and place that I feared (rightly) would be gone forever, and I wanted some paperback talismans to carry me on. Now those books are really cluttering up my basement and I'm hoping that attending the reunion will help me get rid of them: about a thousand fewer would do. After all, perhaps the major point of going to Grinnell was to prepare the mind for a continuous stream of new books. I'll never forget Rick Miranda's friend Steve Landsburg at CSU who had ten thousand books and was still gathering more. In his mid-forties he calculated that if he read eight hours a day until he was sixty-five he would get through about a third of them. I know how he felt. This sobering calculation evidently did not, however, slow his book acquisition rate. Having children has slowed mine.
At the All-Reunion Picnic I asked some of the class of '47 and adjacent classes about Stuart and Isabel Mace but no one seemed to remember them. Unfortunately, I was asking the wrong class,
Stuart and Isabel graduated in '41, which should have occurred to me as I knew that Stuart went on to the 10th Mountain Army Division before living in Boulder and then Aspen and becoming famous as the Toklat sled-dog musher and gallery owner. Stuart is gone, now, and Isabel is the oldest alumni I know. Their son Greg was head waiter for my Dad in the Quad and sometimes babysat me and my sister. Greg graduated in '66 and in 1974 hired me and Gordon Mac Alpine '66 to dig a ditch (I mean picks and shovels in rock-rife alpine soil) at the new Pine Creek Cookhouse near Toklat. Gordie had babysat us one night, and I remember sitting at the kitchen table with him at 1030 High St. playing a game where we tried to slam a cup down on mice on strings which the other players would try to jerk away. Gordie's mouse always got away and when I asked him how I first heard the phrase ``It's all in the wrist.''
Greg, Gordie, and Elston Bowers were the trio I knew from the early Sixties classes, and to a little kid and later a teenager they were heroes (though at Grinnell only Elston the football star was an official hero). Greg, an Eagle Scout in Aspen, went to Hotel and Restaurant school in Switzerland (skiing and climbing!) and married a Hungarian woman who had escaped through the Iron Curtain, Elston married a woman from Panama, and Gordie was a traveller. I can now see that Greg and Gordie were a huge influence on my life. That summer in Aspen Gordie taught me some guitar; at the time I was giving up my childhood clarinet for the folksy steel string guitar and was impressed that he knew how to play a twelve-string (``It's kind of like driving a truck,'' he said, comparing it to a six-string). I can still play the Pretty Peggy-O riff he painstakingly laid out for me.
Those guys could tell stories about Grinnell: segregated dorms, pranks, and the Sixties. I remember standing in the ditch with Gordie and asking about the lines of tattoos running up his legs. Tattoos were unusual then, and subtle abstract patterns on the legs were unheard of; Gordie had gotten his from the South Sea tribe he had come to know as a Peace Corps volunteer. Greg and Stuart knew the rich and famous of Aspen. Perhaps its not so strange that I associate the small liberal arts school with the most exciting kind of life imaginable; and I see now that my life has been shaped through this kind of Grinnell experience nearly as much as through the academic experience.
Not all the stories ended happily. The most common scenic photograph that you see of Colorado is two jagged peaks above a lake. These peaks near Aspen are called the Maroon Bells, and occur so often on Colorado calendars that they are a cliché. Greg Mace, Eagle Scout, was the head of Aspen Mountain Rescue when he fell to his death on North Maroon. He was traversing a snowfield in one of the steep gullies visible in the usual calendar shot when he slipped, lost his ice axe, and tumbled down to the rocks below. It's all too sad: they were rescue guys, the radio failed, the helicopter arrived too late. I won't go into it here, it's described in The Falling Season, by Hal Clifford, ISBN 0-06-258565-7. For many people's lives it is not as important that their stories are happy or sad, for if you try for either you will have both, but that they have stories at all.
Now it is more than a little ironic to me when I talk to a high-school students on their way to a ``fun'' college experience who think that going to a little town in Iowa would be boring and lead inevitably to a boring life. For me it was a ticket to intellectual adventures in poetry, mathematics, politics, music, and all the other subjects I could grab onto, not to mention world travel, exotic lovers, hanging out with the glitterati, drug dealers, New Age seekers, eco-warriors, and facing life and death at high altitude, on steep faces, and in narrow rivers.
At the All-Reuinion picnic I did not think about these things. I sat with some '79ers on chairs, enjoying the food and chat and then sat with some others on the grass. The first group talked mostly about whether the Class Clown should be restrained; he was making a scene, perhaps again annoyed by alumni who brought their spouses and children. The second group, well, we ended up talking about children.
Conversations at reunions are often responses to ``What are doing with your life?'' If you mention that you are raising kids then a large part of the question is answered. People who have raised kids understand and you don't need to say anything more about it. People who have not devoted a large part of their lives to raising children will never understand, not in a gazillion years, and don't want to hear about it anyway.
My own views on children have naturally been changed by having them. I now view parenthood in almost heroic terms, probably because I am continually astonished and dismayed by how much effort it takes. I no longer have sympathy for single people who complain about people with families sometimes getting breaks. I believe society has an obligation to help raise my children. Certainly there are many ways to contribute to civilization and raising good kids is only the most direct way, but whatever you do, unless it eventually devolves to children or those who were once children, it is beside the point.
I probably could have expressed myself better to my present companions, all gay men, and one took exception to what I was saying. He ended up walking away, saying ``I don't think the human race is going to die out!'' The others told me not to worry about it, and I didn't worry about the words, but actually I do think about the human race dying out, by which I mean that the veneer of civilization, from the point of view of the parent, is thin and hard to apply.
One alumnus seemed to fulfill the role of class clown. I had breakfast the first day with Steve McKelvey, Nick Malden, and the Clown. Steve had been given a ``Thank You'' sticker for his name tag because, he said, he had donated twenty-five dollars to Grinnell the year before. The Clown complained bitterly about not having one; he said that he had given a ``lot'' of money and mentioned his wife's corporate matching program. He later showed up with a bunch of ``Thank You'' stickers on his name tag. The Clown reappeared on my radar several times during the Reunion, usually in some quasi-scandalous role. He always dressed nicely, in the sense of ``nice'' casual clothes, and he had carefully slicked down hair--sort of a country club Republican look. There was a hint that he had a lot of money; I thought he might be the mailing list's ``leprechaun'' class fund-raiser Bob Meyer was looking to in order to make up any difference to the class fund goal of fifty thousand dollars at the end of the reunion. At the time there was about forty-three thousand dollars accumulated.
I heard that the Clown enjoyed a lot of alcohol while at the Reunion and the mailing list reported that he managed to proposition every female encountered. This triggered a memory of Mike Grefe telling me something similar about him, or someone who was the Clown twenty-five years ago. I was probably moaning to Mike about the difficulty of bedding classmates when he explained that the Clown had this problem solved. The Clown's method was to go to the Forum and (just!) ask women, at random, if they wanted to go to bed with him. Mike said his success rate was one in ten or one in twenty. At the time that seemed not impossible (though that may have been wishful thinking on my part) and it was probably more efficient than anything I would try. While I am no saint, this method was not in my character: I'm more of a slow-food kind of guy; though I may admit to some envy.
In the end my direct contribution to Grinnell this year was a measly seventy-five dollars, given via the auction, though I would liked to have given more (Miss Manners, when asked how much she would like to give as a ``voluntary donation'' to the Metropolitan Museum of Art said ``A wing''). Sometime before the Reunion I was fortunate to see how a more sizable gift than mine might be handled. In early May my Dad and I met his sister Rosie and her daughters Sue and Kim at the University of Denver. Rosie was being given a tour in preparation for pledging a large gift. The tour was competently and pleasantly hosted by Scott Lumpkin (``Associate Vice Chancellor'').
First we visited Alton Barbour, who had succeeded my grandfather Elwood Murray as chair of the Speech (now Human Communications) Department. His office had a display case of Elwood memorabilia, some of which I recognized from the old house at 2391 S. Clayton St. (A former sorority house, purchased by Emma and Elwood for four thousand dollars in 1932.) We talked some about times with Elwood; mostly the people he had brought to DU; Buckminster Fuller, S. I. Hayakawa, etc. Mostly though we talked about Alton's hobby: he's a catcher for trapeze flyers.
Next we visited the site of the Hotel, Restaurant, and Resort School. A couple of guys in ties from the alumni office met us there with sketches. From there we walked to the Chancellor's office in the Mary Reed building (formerly the library).
Chancellor Dan Ritchie, whose name adorns the gilded tower of the new physical education/recreation complex (so prominent when viewed from I-25) had a genial meeting with us. We met in a small, heavily paneled room; Dad, with his superb memory of things Colorado, recalled for us that the furnishings had been taken from the old Phipps mansion. Later, Dad also told me that Ritchie had been the CEO of Westinghouse and had given something like eleven million dollars of his own money to the university (fifteen million according to his website biography). The meeting room was overlooked by a glass cabinet containing a red vest worn by an important turn-of-the-nineteenth-century chancellor.
We chatted about the HRR school and how Ritchie was overseeing and architectural restoration and rejuvenation of the campus. This is being done in a very traditional style, real limestone, copper roofs (``second in durability only to Italian tile''--come to think of it the University of Colorado has red tile roofs). An architectural magazine recently had a survey of new architectural developments at five campuses; but this was not one of them. Ritchie and his team haven't the least interest in avant-garde. They actually talk about building for the centuries.
The chancellor told an amusing anecdote about getting the zoning adjusted for the water-less urinals in the the new law building. The city zoning bureaucracy wouldn't allow it but he learned that state law, if applicable, would overrule city law. Now, the state rules did not allow water-less urinals, either. Finally he called governor Owens, and had a chat. DU got its urinals.
Concerning Rosie's donation, he said that anonymous donations were going to cover more than eight million dollars of the new school's cost, so that the naming of the entire building could be had for three million dollars (he did not use the phrase ``special deal for you!'').
After this meeting Mr. Lumpkin took us to lunch with Jim Griesemer, dean of the Daniels College of Business, named after cable TV magnate Bill Daniels. Apparently Daniels gave DU eight million dollars to improve its M.B.A. program and then after it was improved was persuaded to give another eight million to house it. Some of his words about character are engraved in the building, which is all well and fine, but the fact that cable TV is essentially a tired government-enabled monopoly with dubious social value hurt my ability to feel inspired. What was more inspiring was the west-facing conference room on the top floor where we had lunch, its views were spectacular; I could see the Flatirons. At my questioning, Griesemer mentioned that previously he had been DU's financial officer, appointed by Ritchie to run the school finances on ``business principles''. I don't know how the academics feel about that, but it is certainly true that DU, under Chancellor Ritchie, has risen from a financial miasma and is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Even the hockey team recently won the NCAA championships.
After lunch I said good-bye and thanked Scott for a very pleasant and educational day. Rosie and her daughters went to the alumni relations office with Scott Lumpkin to talk money. It seemed that the 2000 stock market crash would preclude naming the building, though at least the kitchens may become the Richard Meyer Kitchens.
Friday night the Class of '79 tapped a keg on the lawn outside Reed Hall and had a party. John DeBacher and Lance Prager helped set up a sound system (Lance ran it off his laptop). I was in and out of the party and tried to chat with people I didn't know: Lance, Charlie Shepardson, a tall pony-tailed bass player still into hard rock, and others.. At one point Carolyn Mow gave a lighted sparkler and I wrote my family's names in the air. I turned in around midnight, several hours before it ended (if it could be said to have ended). My best conversation was with Charlie, who had gotten a Ph.D. in English and had been an itinerant professor around the east coast. Recently he landed a tenured job at SUNY-Albany, and his slight, bearded, horn-rimmed appearance made him look the part of the English professor.
At 7:30 on this brilliant sunny morning a couple dozen people, including Russell Osgood, president of the college, gathered outside the rec center to run a five kilometer foot race. I got up to run this 5K with hopes of getting a low-altitude boost. On Monday I had run the Bolder Boulder in 56:17 and thought 25:00 was possible in Grinnell. As it turned out the altitude advantage was huge and I finished in 24:40. I felt pretty good until the last half mile, and the second mile was a ``recent memory'' PR of 7:36. The turnout from my class was very good and included Nancy Wagner, Ed Fry and his son (who both beat me) and math geeks Steve McKelvey and Carolyn Mow. My worst defeat was by President Osgood himself, who finished in 24:00.
The course ran east to the edge of town, then north, and then west and south around the country club and back to the rec center. I followed a class of '89 alum the last half and caught him with about half a mile to go, at which point I told him to stretch it out and he finished a hundred yards ahead of me.
Here are my numbers. Using the rule-of-thumb maximum heart rate (220 minus age, rounded to the nearest multiple of five) of 175 my heart rate monitor recorded the following: maximum rate, 179 bpm, average 163. Using the training target zone of 131-149 bpm I was below the zone 0:26, in the zone 2:14, and above it 22:00. I ran the first half-mile in 4:01.6 with heart rate max/avg 155/149, the first mile in 7:58 (158/156), the second mile in 7:36.2 (162/165) and finished in 24:40. The last mile was tough: I went over 100% of the theoretical maximum heart rate for the first time.
I think the only way I could have finished faster in this race was to go out faster sooner, but overall I was pretty thrilled with my time and thought the race was one of the best parts of my reunion. We hung around to cheer in the finishers, and then I got a shower and went over to Cowles for a well-deserved breakfast.
About a month later, in no worse shape, I ran the Fourth of July 5K in Boulder. My fastest mile was 8:10 and I finished in about 26:30.
Next I went to Herrick Chapel and arrived late for the alumni awards. I hadn't made this a priority event but it turned out to be exhilarating and depressing at the same time. I learned that one older alum was one of the giants of the promotion of American synchronized swimming (inventing underwater speakers and organizing clubs, etc.). Another graduated from Michigan with a Master of Fine Arts degree in ``Rhetoric and Public Speech''--an art much overtaken by technology, but as Elwood's grandson, an art I appreciated. The biggest surprise for me was the award to '79's own Charlie Shepardson, whom I'd met at the class party the night before.
The awards gave me the vicarious gratification of honor by association and really did inspire me to keep up what good works I do. They were a little depressing because they were vicarious--I certainly haven't achieved as much as I though possible in 1979. I wondered how I would have reacted to a similar ceremony at Harvard or Stanford where the level of achievements would no doubt have been higher. Grinnell's students are not the very best in the world, but we humans have silver and bronze medals for a reason. How would I rate my own life? The reunion encouraged this sort of self-examination, which is by itself a good reason for attending. I'd give myself a ``B'', I suppose, with arguments for a lower grade. Perhaps my wife would give me a higher grade as a husband, which I'd value as much as my own grade.
I had lunch in Cowles dining hall with Wendy Knox and Mark Scott. Wendy I vaguely remembered, Mark not at all. They were both theater majors. At every school I've attended the thespians have formed their own little society (perhaps like mathematicians) which understands what it is about--and you don't. Probably this is due to my own ignorance; I've found some people's reactions to mathematics equally puzzling.
Mark works as a caster; I'm not sure that is the right phrase, but he casts people in roles, mostly for television pilots. Since most pilots do not continue and since I'm an indifferent viewer of television, I hadn't heard of his shows. Wendy is the Artistic Director at the Frank Theater in Minneapolis, which prompted Mark to admit more than once that he felt like he had sold out on ``real theater''. Of course Wendy pooh-poohed this and Mark was no doubt undergoing some of the self-reflection I had had at the Alumni Awards.
I asked Mark and Wendy about the Denver theater scene and the Denver Center Theater Company in particular. It turns out that they both have connections to one of my favorite DCTC actresses, Annette Helde. They were all in graduate school together at the University of Washington and Mark was actually her agent for seven years (at the auction Saturday night I took a picture of the two them to show to Annette). I talked about my experiences at the theater in Denver. I've been growing somewhat dissatisfied with the DCTC's work the past few years; I suspect that they need new blood, but I rhapsodized about a DCTC production of Travels with My Aunt I had seen several years ago. The parts were played by four male actors in tuxedos, and they magically (no other word) created the characters of the staid banker, the eccentric aunt, the failed revolutionary, and others, passing them around in a suspension of disbelief that would have been impossible on film.
My years at Grinnell were marked by wonderful shows somehow lured to a small rural town by the legendary Georgia Dentel. Her name came up over and over again in reunion conversations, and was usually spoken with something approaching awe. She had prescient taste for talent and an astonishing ability to get it to Grinnell. I have a memory of having heard that Variety magazine rated college entertainment programs and that Grinnell came in second, after UCLA. Whether or not this was true, we were certainly blessed, even if we didn't always appreciate it. I believe it was Lance Prager who said ``We didn't know what we had.'' We recalled Joan Armatrading, Pat Metheny, Asleep at the Wheel, The Police, Julie Harris in ``The Belle of Amherst'', Elly Ameling, the soprano, who sang right through you into the Herrick Chapel pews, and Gil Scott-Heron (``What's the Word in Johannesburg?''). Lance recounted Georgia's most famous coup for our class: on the same week that Bruce Springsteen was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek he played at Grinnell. Lance told how Bruce's people found an illicit tape recorder the student sound techs had set up, but the students dismantled it without too much regret because it was a red herring for the real bootlegging machine which was never discovered. He wasn't too sure about what happened to the tape. Unfortunately for me, the Springsteen concert happened the year before I entered Grinnell in the fall of 1976 (my undergraduate career only lasted three years). On the other hand, Lance missed the awesome George Thorogood concert in Darby Gym--I remember George off the stage and in the crowd, hunched over his guitar and dancing with us.
And Georgia Dentel? I heard rumors that she left the college over some financial scandal. The true story, and a recounting of her career, would be a great story for the alumni magazine.
I've always thought of the sixties, especially the late sixties, as the glory years for being a college student in America. It's the only time I know of that students had the nation's attention and collective student decisions had national significance. Yes, I have some celebrity envy, but in the end those were the glory years, and I was fortunate to be around college students from 1960 through the early seventies. The sixties had something for which the German word ``zeitgeist'' is the right word. Of course every time can be said to have a zeitgeist but the sixties had a zeitgeist on steroids, an actual feel in the air that is impossible for me to convey to those who missed it.
Grinnell has ``cluster'' reunions some years for some classes. At this reunion the classes of '68-'70 were housed together in Loose Hall. I didn't know any of them personally except for Huber Farbes, whom I met at lunch on Friday. However, on Saturday afternoon there was a meeting with history professor Alan Jones in Loose Hall Lounge to reminisce about those years. I got there well after it started and the lounge was packed, so I stood in the back to listen. Alumni told stories about the politics, protests, organizations, and incidents of times: the closing of the college due to war protests, Hubert Farbes organizing black students against some local attacks, the cancellation of the yearbook for political content (though no mention of a recall due to the inclusion of a photograph of a professor emerging with a student from a local motel room, as remembered by my father). These former students shared a memory of a political zeitgeist that our class of '79 did not, though I had a whiff of it when I arrived in the fall of '76, among the seniors living in South Campus. Occasionally one of the alums would get up and go get a drink from their incredibly well-stocked refrigerator, adding to my envy.
Like a lot of my experiences this one was two-pronged. Alan Jones's son Tom was one of my best friends in the first and second grades. We attended Cooper School (principal Mrs. Abis Tone), which, when it existed, was a stately brick building just east of the Quad (now a sadly vacant lot). I vaguely recall our first-grade teacher was red-haired Edna Mae Stewart. My mother told me that she was the teacher who really taught me to read. I remember Mrs. Stewart moving me from one reading group (Red, White, or Blue) to a more advanced one. The move scared me a little, and made me proud, but I was sad that I was leaving the group of my friend Chuckie Dorsett, a truck driver's son. Those were the days I was memorizing Jack Mack, which volume I now hold and read to my children. In November of 1963 someone from the office burst into the classroom to announce that someone had shot President Kennedy and he was dead. Some first-graders started crying. I felt sad, but confused, because I knew I didn't really understand what was going on. Mrs. Stewart, taken aback, said something along the lines of ``Class, this is what happens when someone does a bad thing.''
Our second-grade teacher was the brilliant Mrs. Graham, wife of biology professor Ken Graham. She personified the apogee of my elementary school education (followed by the nadir of Mrs. Roberts in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, the next year). Mrs. Graham's class had bright kids: Kenny Betts, who became a physician (Mrs. Graham's anecdote about meeting Kenny related having him read aloud to test his reading skills; he started on the title page and continued confidently through ``Published by Houghton-Mifflin in...'' before she stopped him; later when Kenny learned that his shortness was genetic he complained to his father for not marrying a taller woman). Tom Jones I remember as being medium-sized, with straight sandy hair and plaid shirts. He was not particularly gregarious but serious and a good draftsman. Mrs. Graham kept a tall stack of 11x17 inch paper which kids who had finished their exercises could take a sheet from to draw on--to this day a stack of paper is like money in the bank to me. We boys drew fanciful schematics of ships, planes, tanks, submarines, and battle scenes with infantry and frogmen. My clearest memory of Tom was going by his desk and seeing an elaborate diagram. ``What's that?'' I asked. ``An internal combustion engine,'' he said, and went on to explain how it worked: the valves, spark plug, combustion, piston, and crankshaft.
Those childhood acquaintances are now long gone from my life, except in memory. I hear of some now and then; my parents told me that Annette Wellborn, a lively blond first-grader who was an excellent jump-roper, is now a mother in Highlands Ranch (Annette, I would have married you then!). But where are Chuckie Dorsett, Kenny Betts, Tom Manderville who lived along 6th on the other corner of our block (father in the Air Force?), Johnny Freeborn (said to be half Indian), the fastest runner, the Talbot clan who lived kitty-corner on our block, and Burdette Sully, a classmate whose family farm I visited after a rain and with whom I spent an afternoon wantonly throwing dirt clods at water skippers? And Tom Jones? Not all stories ended happily. I learned from his father years ago that Tom developed severe schizophrenia and lives in a home elsewhere.
I approached Alan Jones after the meeting. A smoker, he now brings an oxygen tank everywhere; it was by his side. He looked up at me and gently took my hand and said ``I remember you.'' We talked a little about Tom and I said good-bye to him. I took a slow walk down the loggia, looking east to Cooper School, which was hard to see.
An early reunion class had an ``ice cream social'' at the Forum in honor of Asa Turner, the founder of Grinnell College. After a couple of scoops I went back to the Read Lounge and found Mark Hatherly and his wife Janet Keyes staked out in front of the television. As they keep horses (but didn't, as far as I could tell, ride very much) they were keen to see the Belmont Stakes. Naturally, we talked about horses. The favorite, Shorty Jones, had a chance to win the Triple Crown, but in an exciting race lost to ``Rock Hard 10''--a horse whose name Mark Scott, sitting in the back, couldn't help but remark on.
My Reunion packet had a coupon for the Grinnell bookstore so I stopped in to buy something for the kids. I found a book there called Walter the Farting Dog co-authored by a Glenn Murray. Go figure.
In the entrance way by the lockers John Pfitsch, the legendary coach, had a table set up to sell copies of his book (Pfitsch Tales: 50 Years of Grinnell College Athletics). Ed Bauers came in and sat with him. Their names were familiar to me through my Dad, whom they remembered, and we chatted a bit about old times. The Class Clown had complained generally about alumni bringing their spouses and worse, kids, to the reunion, but he probably wouldn't have minded if I brought my father. It would have been superb to hear those old guys shoot the breeze.
We gathered at the Forum for beer and wine before dinner. We were entertained (much to my surprise and pleasure) by an a cappella men's group. This consisted of five lads in Grinnell t-shirts reminding me of the notion of Ivy League glee clubs. They started off with What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor? and sang several more, including an encore. There actually is an Ivy League feel to Grinnell here and there, in the academics, ivy, and traditions (and I say this without ever having attended or even visited in Ivy League school). That traditional college experience, perhaps still very strong in the forties and fifties, cracked apart in the sixties. In 1960 the campus was still segregated by gender, and the meals served by student waiters and the male students were required to wear a coat and tie. My father remembers serving the traditional Boar's Head Dinner. By 1970 all that was gone. Still, today Grinnell is a college with a true respect for learning and nowadays more of an ivory tower than most research universities.
During the social hour Mike Grefe showed me two of his paintings in the alumni art display, and I found Mr. Jepsen and gave him my Life Since Grinnell spiel.
Also instantly recognizable (and well-preserved) at the Social Hour was Charles Jepsen. Perhaps he looked a little more cadaverous than a quarter century ago, but the dry wit was still intact. I meant to tell him my favorite Jepsen anecdote before he left the dinner but his wife was anxious to get back to Des Moines so I didn't get the chance.
In Spring 1977 I was in Jepsen's Differential Equations class (we said
``Diffy Q'') when he introduced us to Euler's formula for
exponentiation of a complex number. He set this up well--we all knew
about negative exponents, but what could be the meaning of a complex exponent? He got no answer from the class, so he finally
turned to the blackboard and wrote
I found out that Mr. Jepsen (as well as Mr. Walker) had a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from MIT. This made me wonder about subliminal messages, if not outright fate, since I had got a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from another MIT grad, and in the autumn after this reunion I got a feeler about a research position there. Perhaps I should have gone straight to MIT--but what am I saying?
My Life Story may have had an apologetic note when talking to my former mathematics teachers, apologetic for not succeeding as an academic mathematician. Mr. Jepsen very kindly said that it seemed that I was living the kind of life well-suited to me.
The Class of '79 was given a dinner at the Forum. Pam Neil Womer had already put together a slide show with ``before and after'' alumni photos. The food was pretty typical, but good, and I complimented the head of the food service afterwards. I sat at a table with Mr. Herman, Mr. Jepsen, Mr. Walker, their wives, and the math majors.
Before we ate, by way of an honor, Steve introduced Mr. Herman, Bruce Albrecht introduced Mr. Jepsen, and I introduced Mr. Walker. Steve told an anecdote about introducing Mr. Herman to three-dimensional tic-tac-toe (Mr. Herman only lost the first time), and Bruce said something about Mr. Jepsen, not the Euler's formula anecdote, though, which would have amused only our table. One of these introducers made a point that these teachers had made winners of us. I ended up giving a little speech which was really more about Grinnell than Mr. Walker.
[Amended Recollection] ''My name is Glenn Murray [pause] and I am a geek. [Scattered laughter growing into general approving applause and cheers] I am here tonight to introduce Mr. Walker. Mr. Walker was my advisor in the Mathematics Department at Grinnell. [In fact, I did not mention my assigned freshman advisor, Mr. Wubbels, who told me that mathematics was `like bowel movements', something you had to do when necessary] Mr. Walker got his Ph.D. in algebraic geometry at MIT. He taught mathematics at Grinnell for many years and is now more involved in computer science education.'' [Pause]
``In my Grinnell mathematics experience I was not a winner. [Expectant silence] In my sophomore year I took Abstract Algebra from Mr. Walker and it did not go well. I got a `C' and was advised not to take the second semester. This was tough because Abstract Algebra is one of the hard pure math courses and part of the foundation for studying algebraic geometry.'' [Audience attention starting to waver]
``What I want to say about this is that at Grinnell we were all exposed to standards, high standards. [Nods of recognition] Whether or not we did well with them was another story, but we all left with a sense of what a high standard, excellence, is. [Nods of approval] These standards have served me well [Actually I said something much less coherent at this point] and I am now the proud holder of a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry. [Loud roar of approval and applause]. I would like to thank Mr. Walker and the entire Grinnell Faculty for giving me this sense of excellence. Thank you!'' [General applause as attention quickly shifted to comestibles]
I had prepared, but did not deliver, a joke that while those gathered for the 25th Reunion did not represent the entire class of '79, those of us present may have outweighed the entire original class. I've read that Americans gain (at least) a pound a year, on average, after they turn thirty, and our class didn't seem to be bucking the trend much (myself included). However, a pre-dinner speech didn't seem the right place to make the joke.
After dinner the class of 1979 proceeded to Read Lounge for the auction. The idea was that alums would contribute something (perhaps of actual value) to a fund-raising auction and that the proceeds would go to the college. Some were no doubt caught unawares by this, six-packs were a pretty common auction item. I donated a poster for a student band which had played a concert during my last semester. I had improbably found it surviving deep in my parents' basement in a box of papers from my California days. The poster still looked good: it was a genuine wood-block print mounted on stiff paper, which is why I confiscated it in the first place (from ARH?). It said ``Grin City Blues''. I never went to the concert and didn't even know the band, but Mark Hatherly bid it up to sixty dollars and took it home. He said he knew someone from the original band who would be glad to have it.
And so it went. The bidding was sort of like a Chinese restaurant at rush hour: hot and noisy. We were packed into Read Lounge, sweating in the heat while a couple of fans tried to pump in air from the loggia. A symphony needs a conductor and an auction needs an auctioneer; we were fortunate to have the appropriately theatrical Wendy Knox armed with a small loudspeaker and the wit to sell Budweiser: ``This is it folks! One hundred and forty-four fluid ounces! People! This is the king of beers!'' Wearable and unwearable items were modeled to cheers and bidding wars erupted over trinkets. A give-away promotional pen with a light (``A pen, for writing in the dark!''), free at tech conventions, went to Mark Bailey for a hundred dollars. The highest bid item was a cheese-head hat which went to Ed Senn for three hundred and seventy-five dollars, followed by Mike Grefe's seascape watercolor for two hundred and twenty-five dollars. A bag of cicadas (``Seventeen years before you see these again!'') went to John DeBacher, who started every round of bidding with a hollered ``Twenty dollars!'' but he got only cicadas. In fact, his thirty dollar cicada bid beat my twenty-five dollar bid (I thought the kids would like them).
I resolved to take home a box of chocolates to Michelle and inadvertently got into a bidding war with a boy (poetic justice would have him be Ed Fry's son, who beat me in the 10K, but I don't know). I won when the boy's mother pinned his arms to his side and I was able to make jokes for weeks about Michelle's seventy-five dollar box of chocolates.
The auction was the funnest class event of the reunion, and raised $3,745 dollars as well. It seemed to be uniquely successful among the many classes having reunions this year, if so, credit was due to Wendy and the organizers. It was fun to donate and fun to bid, and though good accounting practice would not sum it that way, it seemed like I had made two donations: the poster and the cash for the chocolates. All the way home I recalled the intensity and excitement and have already decided what to donate at the next auction. But I'm not saying.
In fact, several alums reported that it was generally acknowledged on campus that the Class of '79 had the best reunion.
Darby Gymnasium, a wonderful building for over a century, was scheduled to be demolished in a couple of days, so a last dance was held there. I remembered its brick sides, but had forgotten its arched roof and elaborately latticed wood ceiling.
This is where I saw George Thorogood and Joan Armatrading and home basketball games and more than I can remember. After the raucous auction the oldies and dancing seemed a little subdued, and I was not feeling nostalgic. People were dancing in couples and groups and chatting on the side, just like in junior high school. I spent a lot of time looking up at the wood lattice roof and thinking of the sounds it had absorbed over the years and whether it had learnt from those sounds like a guitar changes from being played. The building is coming down to make room for a new central dining hall to replace Cowles (which will become dorm rooms) and the Quad (which will be kept for special occasions). Losing the Quad for everyday meals will more than double the loss for those who can remember it.
Bruce Albrecht told me how he was to shy to dance much as a student, but he danced a little now, as did I. We are more bookworms than dance floor athletes, but the Class of '79 showed a lot of energy. Ed Senn romped in his new cheese-head and kilt (``I'm an Ogilvie!'') and Mary Beth George was still slinky after all these years. Sometimes I stood in the outer ring and watched. Jo Looye, standing next to me, gave me a sideways hug and I automatically reached around for her hand to give it a squeeze. Good-bye, Darby!
Sunday we had our last dining hall meal in Cowles. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I don't remember Cowles ever being so cheerful. The alumni were moving freely among the tables giving farewells. I sat with Carolyn Mow for a while and lectured her on the evils of proprietary document formats (when you write something in Microsoft Word format then Microsoft in some sense owns part of that document). It was gratifying to see her look concerned. I said good-bye to all the people I could and then cleaned out my room. I decided not to go by 1030 High Street a last time as I had had enough recollection and was worried about catching a flight. I shared the shuttle with four others to the Des Moines airport for another stand-by adventure. I had taken an early shuttle to try to get on the three o'clock flight, but it was an over-booked little plane from which the agents had to buy a passenger. Mark Bailey was the only other classmate I saw. I tried to start up a conversation with him (he had lived a long time in Boulder where he had done a lot of hiking), but he was deep into cobbling together a reunion web site. This was referred to as the ``Fastest Web Site in the West'' on the mailing list when it went up a few days later.
I was listed for the 5:30 flight which had empty seats, but it was delayed because wind shear instrumentation tests failed. When the paying 7:30 flight passengers started showing up and heard that their flight was also delayed they started taking the empty 5:30 seats, including the first class ones, sigh. I was happy enough reading my book but the anticipation made me nervous. At the last minute one passenger was called twice for the last seat but did not appear. Two more were called but each had a companion they were not willing to leave. The ticket agent looked at me and said ``This is your lucky day'' and as with my flight in I got the last seat in the plane, a middle seat near the rear in coach.
I have spent an inordinate part of my life on Asian buses and well never complain again about an American airline seat--I was glad to have it. The plane soared up over the flat and green. I looked for an ivory tower in the distance. In Denver it was all routine: bus to the Table Mesa Park-n-Ride in Boulder and car home. The kids got out of bed to greet me and were very excited about the markers and Walter the Farting Dog. My wife gave me a kiss. Next time I'm going to bring my Dad.
(Click on the class picture below for a larger image)
