Carolyn Ashbaugh::  My name is Carolyn Ashbaugh, and I live in Sac City Iowa, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College Class of 1973.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, why did I come to Grinnell? Well, I had a very good financial aid package and it’s an excellent school. There’s definitely some family history with this school; my mother taught here in 1948-1949, two of my dad’s sisters were here in the early years of the depression. My aunt Vera Ashbaugh-Katz, who later became a doctor, lived next door to Grant and Harriet Gale. She was taking care of an elderly woman, I believe, at the time, in the academic year 1932-1933. So, there were family connections actually going back to the 1880s. My mother’s aunt was a student here. She was 25 years older than my mother’s father. She was a student here in the 1880s and graduated: Ada Stevens, from Montour, Iowa.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  A professor. Well, that would be Phillip Kintner, and very sadly Phil is gone. We had a very nice memorial gathering for him this morning, over in Mears at ten. And it was just amazing to listen to the number of people. Some of them were friends of mine from the classes of ’72 and ’73, and there were a number of people from the class of ’66, maybe ’67 who talked about Phillip Kintner’s Historiography class. That was a class that just made an incredible difference for many of us, including me. Looking at history differently, looking at how history is made, who writes history, and we of course read the book by E.H. Carr, "What is History?" So, Phil Kintner would be top of my list of who had a very strong influence in my life.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Don Smith would be up there, and he was my faculty advisor, who at one point accused me of majoring in revolution since I had a strong interest in left-wing politics and the history of revolutions.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Best memories of my time at Grinnell; I was very actively involved in the Student Recreation Association. So, many of these experiences weren’t actually on campus but the group that went out with Jean King, usually, who was our advisor, canoeing, spelunking, rock climbing. So, rock climbing trips to Palisades-Kepler, and Mississippi Palisades Park, spelunking in caves in Eastern Iowa with Dr. Ken Christiansen.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  And then there was the walk from- to Grinnell to Des Moines, the spring of 1970, I believe April 1970, to protest the visit of then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. We also wanted to make a point about the environment. We picked up cans along the way, we filled the back of a pick-up truck with cans, and I was really pleased to run into John Elmore last night, out at the Observatory. He was one of the, I think it was sixteen people on that walk, and we had a future Nobel Laureate on that walk, too. I remembered it as a, tall skinny kid from Iowa City whose dad was a professor, and it was only in the last couple years that I realized that that was Tom Czech. I knew I’d known him slightly, but I hadn’t made the connection that he was also part of that walk to Des Moines earlier in the spring of 1970, before I guess you’ll say all hell broke loose on campuses across the United States after the slayings at Kent State University at Ohio.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, I was involved in campus activism. I enjoyed being part of the Library Committee and the History Educational Policies Committee, which is where I got to know all of the history professors quite well and I was a history major, a double major in history and Russian with a strong interest in science as well.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  What did my dorm room look like? Probably a mess most of the time. I recall a pair of clay-infiltrated jeans that stood up on their own, that I had crawled through about eighteen-inch high tunnels in a cave in Eastern Iowa through the muck and the clay. Well, I didn’t want to put these pants in a washing machine. They were really, pretty bad. Finally, the spring semester, my then-boyfriend Jim Clark came in. He had a similar pair of pants in his room and he was going to wash them, and he offered to wash my stand-alone, mucky spelunking pants, which he did. So, they were... yeah. We got pretty mucky.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  We also did some exercises with Jean King out at Rock Creek State Park. Experience the environment, be part of the environment where we actually got up to our necks in muck, and I was actually kind of feverish and sick the next day. I think that was maybe not the best idea we ever had. I later worked for Jean King at a Girl Scout Camp in Michigan where she went after she left Grinnell, and we did similar things with campers there.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Dorm room, I didn’t put a lot of attention into being inside because I pretty much studied at the library. I spent a lot of time at the library, and if I wasn’t at the library studying I was sleeping. That was about what I used my dorm room for. Or, I was outside, because I really am an outdoor person and why be indoors if you can be outdoors? So, I can remember running around with Shri Venkatesan in the howling wind on a really nasty day, somewhere north of campus. I guess that’s been more developed now, but going out and playing in bad weather was a good thing to do that we did, Shri and me in particular.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Book that influenced me most in college. It might have been Frantz Fanon, "The Wretched of the Earth", I read in college and found it stunning, to say the least. Another book that is memorable was a book about the old believers and the world of antichrist by Robert O’Crummey about the old believers in Russia, religion in Russia. And, a book that we read in, I believe- yeah, in Phillip Kintner’s seminar, "The Pursuit of the Millennium".
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Memories and images of the town of Grinnell? I spent most of my time on campus, or if I got away from campus it was to go out on rivers or into caves or climbing up rocks. Didn’t go downtown a lot, but when I did I worked two summers in Grinnell, 1970 and 1971, and I was doing Fortran programming, trying to work out numerical taxonomy under the direction of Dr. Verne Durkee in Biology.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, I would ride my bike downtown, barefoot usually, to the Grinnell College office building and in the basement of the office building there was a terminal, a computer terminal that accepted the punch cards that I believe I had punched in the science building. Then, we ran them through the machine and they went to the computer, the mainframe at University of Iowa in Iowa City, and then, depending on, hopefully I didn’t have an infinite loop of some sort, a bunch of pages came spitting back out on the floor; perforated at the edge with, kind of alternate green and white or blue and white paper, lined paper. So, going down to the computer terminal downtown was probably the most often that I went to the town of Grinnell. The Russian group, Russian students, we had a, I remember a picnic in Merrill Park.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Well, Grinnell has changed since I was a student. The coffeehouses downtown are very nice, new library; the town is obviously pretty prosperous compared to other small, medium-sized towns in Iowa. Grinnell College has changed. I mean there’re many many, many more buildings on campus and incredible amounts of- well, I mean, I was a senior when the PEC was opened the fall of 1972, although I was in Chicago at the Newberry Library that semester.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  That was a wonderful pool. That was, maybe it was opened a little earlier than that ‘cause I took my first life-saving class in the PEC pool from Jean King, so I have to figure out when that was, but, yeah. So, the pool was great and it was actually what I missed most, sorry to say, when I was in Chicago, the swimming at the pools on campus had been pretty important to me; I swam pretty much every day.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Something that’s no longer available on campus that was meaningful to you. I would have to think about that a little bit. A lot of people went to the Forum. I didn’t go to the Forum a lot. There were programs in South Lounge; I know that things now take place in other venues. The women’s gym, that would probably be the building I would miss the most because it was, I thought, architecturally unique, that sort of oval shape. It’s where I think I went the first week as a freshman to be weighed in and measured and told what I had to do to meet the PE requirements at the time, which were not any problem for me to do. I took the swimming test right away and Jean King said, “Yeah you passed the test but you could improve your stroke. Wanna take a swimming class?” and I said “Sure.” So, I did some improvement of my swimming at Grinnell.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  My favorite academic experience or class. I’ve already talked about Historiography so that’s been covered. Favorite place on campus? Oh, it was probably, you know, outside some place, walking around in the snow. I mean, I’m really a winter person who likes being out in cold weather, so...
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  If I knew what would have done differently? I probably would have come back for my final semester my senior year. I had the credits to graduate, I did the Newberry Program fall of senior year and then I spent the spring semester doing some traveling, actually working on what became a book on Lucy Parsons that I started at the Newberry Library. But, I’m thinking that it might’ve been a more complete education if I’d come back to campus and had some more direct contact. I came and visited a couple of times, as far as future plans, whether or not to go to graduate school, which I didn’t, right away. So, I might’ve come back for my final semester of my senior year and done it on campus instead of just coming back for graduation at the end.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Well, I didn’t meet my spouse or partner at Grinnell, so we’ll skip that question. The guy I dated was Jim Clark, much of the time, and he was a serious rock-climber. Bouldering on Cowles Hall was kind of a fun thing. I know he climbed, I think Goodnow Hall, probably the spring of- I think it was during the B&G strike, which made people pretty nervous, which I think was in 1970. But, he wanted rocks and mountains and wanted to climb, and in the end we went different directions after college.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  And I don’t know a lot of students of today. I teach part time at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Occasionally there’s a student that strikes me as a Grinnell student; usually somebody who’s a environmental activist and interested in global issues, interested in making the world a better place. That would be the kind of friends that I had at Grinnell, people who liked to go spelunking and climbing, and I’ve had several students at BV like that.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, my comparison is with Buena Vista University where the students, on average, are definitely not as academically gifted or well-read as students that are admitted to Grinnell. Every so often I get a student who I think, “This young man or young woman really should be at Grinnell instead of at BV.”
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  Oh man, if I were writing a history of Grinnell College, what would I include from..? Well, I was here on campus fall of 1969 through Spring semester of 1972. Obviously it would be the Vietnam War protest, it would be the walk to Des Moines to protest Spiro Agnew and watching him go in with his, I think six secret service guys on either side of him, and thinking of pictures of the Gestapo and Nazi Germany, those were the kinds of impressions I had of Agnew and of course I think he went to jail later, so.. He was not a good guy, and a lot of things came out about that period in college history.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, tumultuous time. I know there were people who smoked quite a bit of dope and did things like that. I was not interested in that sort of part of college, but I knew it was around. I would include the Russian House experience. I lived in Russian House my junior year which sometimes, I think, is called Brown House. I think it was Conney Kimbo, who was then Dean of Students, later told me, wasn’t sure how that mix of students were going to work out in a house together but one of the things they tracked, it turns out, was our combined grade point average, and it went up. So, from the administration’s viewpoint that experiment was successful because the cumulative or whatever, combined grade point average of the students improved in the year that we lived at Russian House.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  I then when to Chicago the following fall, but a number of the students lived in Russian House another year. Other students moved into Russian House but it was lots of fun. Dennis Whelan and Randy Magee, who were the Russian professors at the time, were lots of fun, spent lots of time at the house. We spoke Russian much of the time.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  I think the Black Cultural Center was established during that period of time in the early 1970s. The women’s movement, I would say, had not really taken hold at Grinnell until after I was here and the gay and lesbian LGBT movement was a bit later getting established at Grinnell. I’m glad to see the Stonewall Center for students as a resource and glad to see an open and inclusive atmosphere at Grinnell College.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, I think the Vietnam War years certainly had an impact on the college. I remember being in the South Lounge the night of the lottery, when they were drawing, and we took up a collection and there were- there was a basket that went around and the money went to the guy who had the lowest draft number for a bus ticket to Canada. And I don’t know whether he took the bus to Canada, but we took up a collection for the person with the lowest draft number to head to Canada and avoid the draft.
Carolyn Ashbaugh::  So, while Nixon was saying that they weren’t fighting in Cambodia and they were and then the crackdown on students, the killings at Kent State, the four students there and the two students at Jackson State, certainly was thinking about those sorts of things as a college student and led to being active in a number of things after college. I think that's- that probably, probably is enough to record. I’m not sure, anyway.
Tamara Grbusic::  Thank you very much.
