Cynthia McKeen::  My name is Cynthia Peterson McKeen. I currently live in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of 1968. I had an unusual experience as a prospective student coming to Grinnell, because I was on the Rock Island Line coming from Western Iowa, on the day that John F. Kennedy was shot.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Whoa.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  And people had transistor radios on the train, and we’re hearing it. And we were hearing these, sort of explosive sounds all around. And, everybody, of course, was weeping and distressed and not really having news like we get now. You know, it just- you’re limited ‘til the train stopped.
Cynthia McKeen::  So, we stopped in Des Moines and I had an Uncle who was a special family member who had heard the news and knew I was on the train and came down and sat in the station. We sat there for a couple of hours because they were trying to decide, I suppose everything about transportation, and what was really going on in the country. And, thank goodness, he was there because I was by myself and I was used to being by myself, but it was a pretty crushing piece of news. And we didn’t know at first, if he was dead.
Cynthia McKeen::  So when I arrived on the Grinnell campus, I was met by some volunteer who took me to Grinnell House and who said, “Wel,l the last person who slept in the bed you’re going to sleep in tonight was Harry Truman.” My mother had been very active politically and knew Harry, ‘cause we’re Midwesterners together, and it seemed like such an odd confluence of Presidential things in my life.
Cynthia McKeen::  An upperclassman named Barb Plager was the person to take me around for the weekend, and, of course, the whole campus just shut down. Everybody was in shock. Films were canceled, you know. The meetings I was going to have were pretty much canceled. So, I ended up talking to students for the time that I was there and I certainly turned around and went home much sooner than I normally would have. But it was an odd way to come here. I had visited the campus when my brother went to school here ten years before, so I was somewhat familiar with things and really wanted to go to school here, I suppose because of my brother liking it so well. It was a strange introduction, to come that way.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  I don’t know what the configuration of dorms was then, but Barb and her roommates had like, a little sitting room and several separate bedrooms off of them.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Oh, so a co-op or an apartment. Yeah.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  So that was kind of a nice living arrangement. That isn’t how it played out when I came to Grinnell. I was in Cleveland Hall, and we had, my roommate and I, had kind of a large room on the third floor, and neither of us had sisters so it was a nice experience to see what it would be like to live with a sister and we were very compatible. We had met through a 4-H connection. We had both won a prize to go to Chicago to see the Marina Towers, which had just been built, and we stayed in the old Palmer House Hotel with some other 4-H girls who all wanted to do things in interiors, at the time. When I heard she was going to apply to school here too, we decided to be roommates, so, that was a special connection.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Oh, that’s nice.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Yeah.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Did you like Cleveland?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  I liked it fine. We had House Mothers then. Mom Wepps was our House Mother.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Really? How did that work?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Well, she was not very involved with us, in terms of any rule-keeping. It was more that she was there. We could go down have a cup of something hot at night if it was winter and we had a problem. We had to sign out if we went off-campus. It was unusual, you know.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Were the dorms still segregated at that time?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  They were segregated at that time, totally.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Yeah?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  We went to Cleveland yesterday and walked through and looked for anything familiar and there isn’t much. It’s changed a lot. Tamara|Yeah.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Mom Wepps had spent time in Indonesia and there was a friend of ours, became a friend of ours, Weejee, came from Indonesia and was a freshman the same year we were. I think it was very special for her to have someone who understood the world that she had come from.
Cynthia McKeen::  Every time I would go someplace on the train- ‘cause we came to college on the train then. The trains were still running. It was quite a sign-out procedure so they’d know where we were and when we were coming back. And when we’d come back, we had to sign in again; very different from now. I think we were right on the cusp of that changing. You know, it was ridiculous at that point and it changed pretty rapidly.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  How did that feel like, having segregated dorms and having guys on one side, girls on the other? Did you guys break rules?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  I think because it had been that way, we didn’t even think about it. Y'know, it was just, 'that’s the way it is'. The second year, I had a different roommate and we lived in the same position in Cleveland only in the basement level. The window to that room was right across from the back door of the food service. We were startled, one of the first nights, ‘cause guys came and went through that window. And we got so we’d sleep through it. I mean we just- it just was something that happened. We were a little surprised, and then, y’know, we were studying Saturdays as well. We had classes six days, and so we were tired.
Cynthia McKeen::  I was working two jobs to be able to afford it, and it was a strain for me when I came because although I had done fine in school and I’d done a lot of writing and thought that I had really studied hard, I came from a small school in Iowa. I tested out of all the Trigonometry, Math, Physics, everything because so few of us in a small school would be going on to college. So, the teachers almost custom taught us in those subjects that no one else was taking.
Cynthia McKeen::  So, I was able to handle all that fine, and I thought I would be OK. But, my first French class, I was the only one who had had no French. Everyone else in my French class had had four years in high school. So, I was studying extremely hard and was very tired, I think, because of it. It was nerve-racking. And, the way that I wrote wasn’t the style that I needed for paper-writing here, so it took me a while to learn that. I think the stresses were kind of great, and my roommate and I were talking about that last night and she felt the same thing, coming from a smaller school. So, we were very focused. It was like boot camp, for people like us. My social life, I dated some but not a lot because I was really occupied just keeping up with everything.
Cynthia McKeen::  I loved the films on campus, and because I loved to paint and draw they had me do the posters announcing what the films were going to be. So, the one thing I allowed myself every week was to go watch the TV in the basement in one of the dorms. I can't remember which one it was. But, I would make posters and listen to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. That really dates... really dates us.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  I noticed in the photos from the 1966 yearbook that the only picture there that really relates to the people I knew very well in Cleveland or in the jobs that I was doing at the library, the picture from Cleveland Hall is that there are big paper flowers that are on wire stems pushed into the ground in front of the Loggia. I made about 80 of those and so did others in Cleveland, and that was our project.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Nice.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Otherwise, the photos were great. We knew the people of course, but it’s interesting that there was such a flap about that yearbook. I don’t understand what the flap was, and I don’t think we understood then, either. I’m glad they finally published it.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Yeah.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  And the photos are great so that’s been kinda fun. It’s reminded me of many things.
Cynthia McKeen::  Clothes, what kind of clothes did we wear every day? We wore nylon stockings and dresses, and I was a tomboy growing up. My dad was a physician, a small town physician and an organic person way before most people were interested. I loved the garden. I loved climbing trees. I was very active and I was totally offended by having to be dressed in high school and college in a way that I found just, I didn’t have the patience for it. So, we were still wearing dresses and skirts and sweaters and matched sweater sets and all those things.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Was there, like, a dress code in Grinnell?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  There was. We really were not to wear slacks to class. When I left Grinnell, I left early because of a family situation, and because I changed my major. I came in, totally enthused about being a Political Science major and wanting to learn… I spoke quite a lot of Danish from my childhood. I wanted to learn French. I wanted to be able to be a translator and do something in international, political work. I actually loved Political Science courses here. I had Ed Gilmour as a professor. I had Bradley who came from India, seven years in India as a professor. They were wonderful, and the subject has remained a very strong interest in my life. But after I took an Art class at Grinnell, it was so clear that that’s what I would be doing.
Cynthia McKeen::  So, we had a family crisis where there was... we were really going to be strapped for money and I transferred to Drake University and went into the Art department and just took hours and hours and hours to catch up to make a really solid Art major. I would come back and forth to Grinnell quite a bit on weekends because I had friends and a boyfriend here. I missed things about Grinnell, but it certainly set me up to be able to work quite soon and actually earn money in art which was not an easy thing to do in those days. It wasn’t what most women did.
Cynthia McKeen::  So, that was a big shift. What I loved about transferring is that art students get to wear whatever they want because you’re doing so much messy work all the time. It felt like going home, on that level. It’s interesting that a few years later I came back to visit and everybody was dressing like I was back then. So, it- Again, it was a little bit of a cusp when we were here. It was change time.
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  You guys started it, yeah?
Tamara Grbusic & Cynthia McKeen::  Well, I suppose so. Kind of a difficult bunch in a way, but... I think one of the things that I missed the most about Grinnell when I left was, not that the lectures that I had in Art History courses weren’t absolutely riveting at Drake, but I missed the state of mind, of constant intellectual activity. And as pressured as I felt to catch up when I came here, I felt like I really fit in on that level. It was the way I wanted to live. Although I had great courses and ended up having a couple professors who were probably the best I ever had in the Art school, I did miss that sort of milieu that is- that goes with living on a campus in a small town.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  It’s very special and coming back has felt wonderful because it’s like stepping right back into it.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  I guess in that regard then, Grinnell didn’t change?
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  I think, in the important ways, the truly important ways which are the life of the mind and critical thinking, it’s absolutely up and running and I love it.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Yeah?
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  It’s great.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  It's one of the things I love most about Grinnell, so..
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Good. Yeah.
Cynthia McKeen::  I think that I was discouraged by several professors here which surprised me. I grew up in a totally Danish community where people are very direct, but they’re also not really... I did not grow up with a lot of manipulative people or people who would challenge you in what felt like a mean way. I don’t think I was particularly self-pitying. I had a couple professors who I think were... felt that I probably was light-duty to be here. That was a very useful experience because I talked to upperclassmen to say, “What do you do when this happens?” and they gave me clues, and it worked.
Cynthia McKeen::  And as I went into art and had to deal with really tough clients, was I ever prepared. Now, that was a kind of education I had not expected to find at Grinnell. That competitive and really tough kind of “Do you really think you belong here?” attitude inspired in me a determination to say, “Well, who are you to say that to me?” So, that was a very useful piece of my education, and probably one of the most valuable pieces, in a lot of ways.
Cynthia McKeen::  I loved the Art department here and had we had more money I would’ve liked to do that and go on to grad school. Because I went to Drake and lived with an elderly aunt who was very ill and who I adored, I learned a lot of things I needed to know for later in life about taking care of my many senior relatives, because I was the youngest in a big immigrant family of people who were way older than I was. She was a darling and she was a writer and it was a useful experience.
Cynthia McKeen::  But, because it saved a lot of money, I, then, after graduating, was able to go to Denmark, which I wanted to do. I had visited there once before. It was the height of... the real mecca of Danish design and I went with the understanding that I would be mentored by a woman who was famous in weaving. But when I got to the place where I was to be living in and learning from her, she had run off with an Italian, and she didn’t come back.
Cynthia McKeen::  So I ended up going to the Art Institute in Copenhagen, the Kunst Academy. A friend of the family introduced me to the idea and said, “I’ve set up an appointment for you.” I walked into the office of the head of the school, and being 22 and outspoken Dane and truly excited, I recognized this man. I said, “My God, you’re Ole Wanscher,” in Danish. I had no idea I was going to meet- that this was his name.
Cynthia McKeen::  Ole Wanscher was a furniture designer. His father had been a famous art historian of furniture. He did all the best books about the history of furniture from Egyptian times on. And for my graduation from college present my mother had given me his new book, Ole Wanscher’s new book, which was the history of all these chairs. And I was fascinated by the design of chairs because the leverage and the weight and the balance and the beautiful materials. So, I knew who he was because his picture was on the paper cover of the book. I think he was as startled that a young American knew who he was, as I was startled that I was in the, you know, presence of a hero.
Cynthia McKeen::  So, they custom designed a course of study for me and I ended up working in the two big design stores of Copenhagen for the time that I was there, because he said, “This way you will meet all the designers, and you will work with all the materials and you will learn everything that you could ever want to learn about the display and exhibition of this kind of work."
Cynthia McKeen::  He said, “Because you’ve come in late in the year with the fiasco of your mentor, then you can start taking courses at the next semester but this will really pull you into the middle of it and I think you will have a good time,” which I did. It was remarkable. So I ended up meeting all of the well-known furniture designers that I had studied, and it was a very heady experience. I had to do some work to earn some money, and my first job was cleaning eel which was a totally unpleasant job. But, I soon found that I could do extra hours at the stores and earn money and so that worked. So I had a very odd kind of personalized experience that has stayed with me. Then, I was there for about half a year and I got the news that my father had had a very bad stroke and I would need to come home.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  So, my life changed from that point because then I became a caregiver for about 16 years in addition to working. It was a wonderful thing that I had this intensely fine education here and in the group where I was at Drake and in Denmark, because I didn’t have time to experience that kind of living again for quite a long time. I think that’s also sharpened my feelings of appreciation for Grinnell. You take a major and you never know what you’re going to end up doing.
Cynthia McKeen & Tamara Grbusic::  Yeah, that’s very true.
