James Carns::  My name is James Lowell Carns. I currently live in Anchorage, Alaska, and I am a member of the Grinnell Class of 1972. And.. I have a list of possible questions here. I hardly know where to begin.
James Carns::  I came to Grinnell College because I wanted to get the hell out of the small town that I’d grown up in, Longview, Washington. And- Who knew I was coming to an even smaller town? But Grinnell was an easy choice because I was a chip. Both my parents graduated in 1938. My mother’s parents both attended Grinnell and graduated before 1910, I don’t know the exact dates. That was Carl and Hazel Wright. My parents were Catharine Carns and Charles L. Carns. He hated the name Charles, you had to refer to him as “Bill.” He told me when my wife was pregnant with his first grandchild that if it was a boy and I named him Charles, he’d write me out of the will.
James Carns::  So I came to Grinnell, 1968, and I kinda liked it. Small place and a small town. Everybody was very friendly, and I got in on a lot of fairly dramatic social changes at Grinnell. When I got here North Campus was still all male, South Campus was all female, and by the time I left in ’72 the, there were integrated dorms by room.
James Carns::  And a common ploy was for a couple, boyfriend, girlfriend, to get a room with another couple. They’d get two rooms and then they would switch partners and so they could have, y'know, the boyfriend and girlfriend sharing a room. And, on an integrated floor it didn’t make a whole lot of difference, and I’m sure there was a lot of... I never lived in an integrated dorm. I started out in Clark Hall, and ended up in Dibble.
Tamara Grbusic & James Carns::  So with those spots, nobody controlled, like, what the students were doing? You could do whatever you wanted?
Tamara Grbusic & James Carns::  Pretty much. Yeah. It was very loose. My senior year, just to give an example, my senior year I got a three-room double with Jack Couch, who was a sophomore that year. And they decided that we should have a third person in there. And so, people kept coming around but the fact that I had a pet raccoon discouraged any of them from moving in, and so we managed to keep the two-room double, or the three-room double.
James Carns::  The pet raccoon was interesting because I bought it at a garage sale the day some friends and I left to drive to the Midwest. They were going to attend a wedding in Chicago and I was on my way back to school, and I bought a raccoon at a garage sale for I believe five dollars and it was a pet for that semester. It ultimately ended up living in the woods around Mount St. Helen’s, and God knows what happened to it after that.
James Carns::  I also had a pet squirrel at one time, and that was my junior year. Some friends that lived off-campus found a baby squirrel attached to a tree. Its mother had been killed by a cat or a dog, and they knew I was a Biology major and they said, “Well, why don’t you bring it up.” So, I got some advice from I believe Carl DeLong, who was a Biology professor, and I went down to the local drugstore and they had a box of sample nursing bottles that were about one quarter the size of a regular nursing bottle, and the druggist says, “I’m not gonna use these. I was just supposed to pass ‘em out to encourage people to buy Similac. So you can have them.” And I bottle-fed this baby squirrel and raised it and kept it for a couple months till it was full-grown, and then released it on some wilderness reserve that belonged to Grinnell. So, those are my strange pet experiences, but not exclusively.
James Carns::  My sophomore year I lived in Younkers with Mike Daley, and Mike Daley had picked up a pet anaconda when he was in New Orleans, and he.. we kept that as a pet in the dorm. And we were both on the swim team and Mike would bring the snake with him on the- to the meets and at one meet- and Ray Obermiller was telling me about this, I can’t remember, I think it was Coe College? Not certain. But, Mike went over to one side of the pool and released the snake into the pool and it swam- Being an anaconda, it was a good swimmer, like all the Grinnellians are. And it swam across the pool and it was very upsetting to the Coe coach who was beet red, and as Ray Obermiller says, kind of sweating profusely and demanded that the snake be kept out of the pool from thereon.
Tamara Grbusic & James Carns::  Was it dangerous?
Tamara Grbusic & James Carns::  No, no. It wasn’t a dangerous snake. It was probably three feet long which is, you know, not very big around. When Mike first got it, it was about two feet long and to keep it alive we had to force-feed it, which wasn’t terribly difficult. Y'know, two people would hold it straight and somebody would push the meat down its throat. But, it took a while to get used to living with us, and then it would feed off of mice that we got from the psych lab.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  I apologize if this upsetting.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  It’s OK.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  I think that’s... that covers all the pets. But, Mike was a very good swimmer. He’s one of the All-Americans from my sophomore year. There were four of us. I was one as well, barely made it, but it counts. And at the time, we were swimming in the old swimming pool, which was apparently built as a temporary structure in about 1923.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  An interesting personal story about the swimming pool was that my father had started out going to college at Doane College in Nebraska, and they didn’t have the courses that he wanted, so his- a high school friend of his who was attending Grinnell talked him into coming here. So, he transferred and spent his last two years at Grinnell. And the first time my mother ever saw him was when he was diving at the old swimming pool for an intramural swim meet. They got married about a year after graduation, which was 1938. Interestingly, my mother said he never actually proposed to her. There was just sort of an assumption that came up that they were gonna get married and in fact, they did.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Smooth.
James Carns::  Let me know if I’m drifting too far off base, here. So when I came here we were still swimming in that same old pool, which was just beat to hell. Apparently, during World War II they had put a floor over the pool and turned it into an extra classroom for, possibly, ROTC classes or something like that. And then after the war they ripped up the floor and I don’t think they bothered to put a lot of effort into restoring it.
James Carns::  The structure was so bad, that in the winter the steam heat from the radiators would leak out of the radiators and float to the top of the ceiling.. well, top of the ceiling- float up to the ceiling inside, and there were big gaps between the ceiling and the wall in certain places, one of them being directly over the south...west corner. And so, the steam would go up and freeze and icicles would form inside the building in the old swimming pool.
James Carns::  It was a tremendous home pool advantage to compete in that pool. It was 20 yards long, and four lanes. The diving, the ceiling was so low that they had put a, essentially a cupola over the diving area so that it would be high enough for people to be able to execute their dives. And you could- somebody- the divers would disappear half into the cupola as they were doing their dives, and I never quite figured out how the judges were always able to judge how well they’d performed the dives.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  And then, my senior- by my senior year they had completed the new swimming pool, which was a fabulous pool. One of its great features was that it had an underwater speaker and sound system. And we were working out once- I think it might have been early workouts that we used to do prior to second semester starting. We’d come back a couple weeks and work out, and one of the students put on the record, “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” And so, we were all swimming and suddenly you heard these whale calls coming out of the water. Many of us didn’t know at that point that there was an underwater speaker system. It definitely got our attention. And so, I was kinda disappointed to find out that they tore that pool down but I did make a point of going to the pool yesterday morning and putting in 400 yards so I could say I’ve swum in every pool that Grinnell’s ever had.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Haha.
James Carns::  What else did I want to talk about? I was here for the nude demonstration against Playboy Magazine. That was an interesting story. I was on my way back from class and Jim Sebern, who was the President of Clark Hall at that point, was heading south, just leaving the dorms on South Campus, and he says- And I can’t remember which dorm it was. I wanna say Gates, but I’m not sure. He says, “You gotta go into Gates Hall,” or whatever it was, and I said, “Why, what’s up?” He says, “Just go.” So I walk in and there had been a speaker from the Playboy Foundation who was giving a little talk and- well-dressed gentlemen, I remember him wearing a blue blazer, nice tie, casual slacks-
Tamara Grbusic & James Carns::  Could you also give some background on that? Why did the guy come to Grinnell??
Tamara Grbusic & James Carns::  I have no idea why the guy came to Grinnell. It was- the Playboy Foundation was kind of the non-profit foundation started by Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Corporation. Their big thing was, you know, freedom of speech, freedom to publish erotic material, as it turns out. But, they were kind of into first amendment rights sorts of things. I don’t know much about it beyond that and apparently this guy was someone who just went around to different college campuses and talked about the Playboy Foundation.
James Carns::  And I didn’t hear his talk, and apparently what had happened was, in the middle of his speech, presentation, several Grinnell students, I remember it was four or five, had taken all their clothes off as a protest against Playboy’s exploitation of women. There’s some nice photos out there somewhere of one of the women posing with her arm around the Playboy representative and his arm around her waist, and posing for the camera and having their picture taken together. So apparently he wasn’t particularly upset about it.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  By the time I got there the lecture was over and there wasn’t much going on, but they were still sitting around naked and I hung around for a while. The place was packed and then, I got bored ‘cause nothing was going on and so I left. Consequently, the history’s probably better known than I can relate it, but they did get arrested for indecent exposure and were convicted.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  The students?
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  The students were.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Oh wow.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  They were convicted and the case was appealed, got to the Supreme Court but it was denied review by the Supreme Court and I think they ended up, after several years, having to serve some small prison time. I don’t think it was a huge deal but it was awkward.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  A couple interesting aspects of that: One, was that in order to pay for their court costs, they appealed- I don’t know if they appealed or not but they got a nice check from the Playboy Foundation to help defend them. And, the other aspect was Jim Sebern, who was the one who told me to go there and had taken photos. He was a fairly good photographer. His photos were published in the underground newspaper, the Pterodactyl, which was what initiated the Attorney General’s....
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Oh.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  ...indecent exposure.
James Carns::  That was another interesting legal aspect of the case, because there was a printer who had printed up the Pterodactyl, and the state marshals I believe, came in and confiscated all the copies before they were distributed. And that went to court fairly quickly and it was argued that that was prior censorship, they couldn’t do that, and the courts agreed. So then, they were able to distribute the Pterodactyl to everybody on campus, I think, within a week after the confiscation.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  I’m looking at the list.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Okay.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  What did my dorm room look like? Uh, don’t wanna go there. Yeah... It was- what can I say? If you knew what you know now, what would you have done differently during your time at Grinnell College? I wouldn’t have done any drinking and I wouldn’t have taken nearly so many drugs.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Oh.
James Carns::  There was an incredible... there wasn’t much drugs my freshman year, but by my sophomore year you could walk down, at least in the men’s dorms, it seemed like you could walk down any hall and there’d be a party in somebody’s room and they’d all be smoking dope. A lot of dope, little bit of LSD, not too much... Very little of the other drugs that I was aware of, which would primarily be probably cocaine. I did try something that somebody claimed to be speed once to help me study for a class and it was a total disaster. So, I never did that again. And by the time I graduated I’d stopped taking drugs altogether but I wish I had stopped much much earlier. I hadn’t had any before I came here.
James Carns::  One funny aspect was that when we were freshman the Chief of Police gave a talk to the incoming class. Basically he said, what goes on on campus, stays on campus, he wasn’t gonna worry about it very much. But if he found out that we were, y'know, providing drugs for any of the high school kids, he would not look favorably on that and there would be big trouble. But the interesting thing was the high school kids were often the best source for the college students to get their drugs from, ‘cause they had a lot more contacts in Iowa and Chicago to get the drugs. So, it was- My guess is, it was actually working more the other way than Grinnell kids providing things for the high school kids.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Back to my list of questions... How would you compare students of today? I have no idea. I suspect students of today are a little more connected to reality than we were.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  In what sense?
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  It- college life in the sixties was kind of idealized. I maybe had a distorted perspective because so many of my relatives have been to college, and Grinnell College at that. So there was this idea that you got out of high school and you went to college, and you spent four years at college and then you had a career. Early in your career or by the time you were out of college you had a wife, or spouse, and you had kids and you stayed married and you stayed in your career until retirement, and then you enjoyed your retirement.
James Carns::  And the world was not like that, as it turned out. It may have been, in the fifties. It was for a lot of people and I suspect students today have much more of a sense that... life, the world at large and the culture that we live in is considerably more fluid and unpredictable than what we thought it was in the 1960s.
James Carns::  There were some anti-war protests going on when I was here. Grinnell was kind of an early part of that. We actually had a... I don’t know if I can call it committee. There was a group on campus that were experts on draft law. They provided assistance to kids that wanted to get out of the draft. The first draft lottery occurred when I was a student. I drew number 150 which meant I probably wasn’t gonna get drafted, but it was hard to say. There was actually a lottery on campus, or a pool that a lot of the male students kicked in a couple bucks each and whoever drew number 1 won the pool, but lost the lottery, as it turned out. And I don’t remember who that was. I do remember he was pretty drunk by the end of the evening.
James Carns::  So, I didn’t get drafted. I did march in a couple demonstrations that went through town. I think it was my freshman year, there was a busload of us that dressed up very nicely: sports coat, ties, nice shirts, and we went and we marched in a demonstration against Spiro Agnew, in Des Moines. And, I never saw him, and it was very cold. It was winter, and I like to think that it was his “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism” speech just ‘cause I like saying that, but I’m not sure that that’s the case.
James Carns::  There was one student from Grinnell who presented himself to the Security people as the President of the Grinnell Young Republicans. There was not only not a Young Republicans group on campus, there were damn few Republicans, although I did know one or two. Anyway, they let him in. And he got in there and he took off his coat and his shirt and he had a t-shirt on underneath, and it said something like, “Impeach Nixon.” And, God, I wish I could remember who that was. I wanna say Greg Gaines but I don’t think that that’s correct. Anyway, he was escorted from the vicinity of the room where Agnew was going to give his talk.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  The thing that struck me when I was marching was that the manager of the hotel came out and said that, apparently, the Secret Service wouldn’t allow us to come in to warm up. But, that it was OK if two or three of us came in at a time to warm ourselves in the lobby and it just struck me as very Iowan hospitality. And it was much appreciated because it was very cold, very cold, and I- growing up in the Northwest I wasn’t used to the kind of cold that you could have here in Iowa. Living in Alaska, I’ve gotten more used to it. So... that’s it.
James Carns & Tamara Grbusic::  Okay. Thank you very much.
