Heather Riggs::  OK, so we’re on.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  OK, well, my name is Mary Parker and right now I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is where I’m from, generally. I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of 2006.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Great. So, we have some questions.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Go ahead with the questions. That’s fine.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  What were your first memories of Grinnell?
Mary Parker::  Well, I never prospied here, and I never came to see it before I showed up, so I just rolled into town. I remember being really freaked out that Mom and I could not find any exit signs that said anything about Grinnell. No “Grinnell 20 miles” whatever until “Grinnell 6 miles” by the rest area and then we’re thinking, “OK, here we go. We’re actually gonna find it.” So it was, a little strange at first ‘cause I thought, “You’re a college town, surely there’s a sign.” No sign.
Mary Parker::  But, I remember really liking it as we came into town. It's different from where I live, it’s more town-y, less city-y. So, I just thought it was cute. I really liked the redbrick buildings and all the move-in people were super friendly and then Mom didn’t want to leave and she wanted to come here and go to college here, despite the fact that she’s been to college. She’s got a master’s degree and everything.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Great, what were your best memories of your time at Grinnell College?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Wow.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I know, it’s kind of a big one.
Mary Parker::  I don’t know. There’s a lot of really good memories, and a lot of kind silly memories. I remember, one time going to watch the India Pakistan cricket match on the big screen in ARH. It was obviously the middle of the night ‘cause it was played on the other side of the world, so we slept for a long time on the couches in the lounge area and then we got up to watch the rest of the game and it was winter and it was really really icy outside and so it was early in the morning when we finished watching the game.
Mary Parker::  We were walking back across and there was this huge patch of ice by the train tracks and I slipped and I just fell right over and I couldn’t stop laughing about it. Then I got up and I fell over again immediately and I couldn’t stop laughing and everybody else was like, “What are you doing? Just get up.” but I was like, “This is hilarious. Been up too late watchin’ cricket. Now, I can’t stop falling on the ice." It was just one of those really silly moments. It was fun.
Heather Riggs::  Yeah. What kind of, I guess, going back, why did you decide to come to Grinnell?
Mary Parker::  I used to have this really good story about how I was just flipping through my college book and it fell open to the Grinnell page and I thought, “Oh, well, I’ll apply there, sure why not?” And then I told my mother this story, and she was like, “Yeah, I kinda creased the book so it would fall open to that page.” ‘Cause she’d been looking through that book, too, and I guess she really liked the look of Grinnell. It was kind of a choice for me between here and a sort of similar college in Maryland called St. Mary’s and then UNC Chapel Hill. I thought about going there but Grinnell seemed like the best bet. And, they gave really good scholarship money and good support and it seemed like they had a lot of interesting things going on for the middle of Iowa.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah, definitely.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  So here I was. And they called me a lot of times.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Really?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah, yeah, they called me a lot. It was kind of flattering. It was nice.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  How has Grinnell changed since you were a student? I know it wasn’t that long ago, but.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Oh, no, it’s still changed. The JRC, do you call it the Joe?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Usually the JRC.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I know you’re supposed to call it the Joe.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Some people call it the Joe, some people call it the “jerk.”
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Oh, the guy wanted it to be called the Joe.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Oh, really? Most people just say the JRC.
Mary Parker::  I figured. Yeah, that wasn’t there. It was just being built. There was a lot of construction when I was here ‘cause the first year, the East campus dorms weren’t finished so, I know, it’s crazy for you but for me they were just brand new and we were all like, "What is goin-?" It looked like a big ocean liner, ‘cause it was just a frame and then the lights, and they’d keep us up all night. ‘Cause I lived in Younker my first year and my room faced Mac Field so, just lights into the window all night long, but, yeah, we would sneak into the construction site illegally. I was so afraid I was going to get caught and expelled, I only did it once. It was pretty cool, in the middle of the night, walking around the construction site, little thrill of danger. Can’t kick me out now. Yeah, those weren’t there until my second year, I guess, and even then D wasn’t finished, whatever it’s.. Rose?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Rathje.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  What’s it called?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Rathje.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Rathje?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah, they named them-
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I don’t think it had a name.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I don’t think it had a name for a while ‘cause they couldn’t find a donor.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  We just called it Hall D.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah, now it’s Rathje.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Good to know. And, the Science Center wasn’t all fancy. When I started here, instead of this, there was Darby Gym and the little, it was just this little house where the medical office, the nurse’s office thing and Stonewall were, and then they tore those down.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Wow, and where was the house?
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Just next to Darby. Yeah, kind of where that parking lot is now. That parking lot that you can’t actually park in, as I discovered yesterday.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  What, can you describe something that is no longer available on campus, but that was meaningful to you during your time here?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Well, there’s Darby. That was meaningful, just ‘cause, it was old and it was neat and it was unique, pretty much, in the country because of the way it was constructed. Because of WWII, there not being enough steel, I guess, it was built out of wood.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Really?
Mary Parker::  Yeah, the supports and the ceiling were all built out of wood and we all loved it. It was this crazy old place. We didn’t think they'd ever tear it down and then they did, and we were sad about that. In terms of programs, I don’t really know. When I was here, I was in the Buddies Program. I helped run the Buddies Program and Exco, but I think both of those are still going.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Which is great.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  And the Buddies Program was with the elementary school?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  When I was leaving, we integrated it with Big Brothers Big Sisters, so it had some more official cache. Other than that, I don’t know what there was. It seems like they just keep adding programs, not too much taking them away.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  That’s really interesting about Darby, though.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  There was the Forum. We had a pool table in the Forum, in the middle room and on the outsides there were bean bag rooms. It’s not really an essential service, but.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  I’ve heard stories about the Forum, yeah.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  It was a good place. I used to work in the Grill so.. It was attached to the Forum. But I’m glad they didn’t tear it down.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  What was the Grill like?
Mary Parker::  It was cool. When I started, we had Northern express and Southern express, that were these little like convenience stores where you could go in and get a meal equivalency of food or buy some food, and there was obviously one on each thing and we called them Nexpress and Sexpress because we’re silly. And then, eventually they shut them down and moved them into the room that had had the pool stuff in it. Well, they tried to move it into the main part of the Grill, so it looked like a gas station. We were all really angry and the professors were so angry.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Really?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  They were so grumpy.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Because would they often eat there?
Mary Parker::  Yeah, because they’d go and they’d take people to get tea or coffee or a snack or whatever, like interview people. Sometimes we’d have class in there. I remember my second year before they moved all the stuff into the pool room, there were tables in there and we had class in there a few times with one of my seminars. And, ‘cause we got bored. It was in the afternoon and we all needed coffee.
Mary Parker::  Sometimes we’d go there or Saint’s Rest and, yeah, it just looked like a gas station convenience store and they had all these problems with people stealing stuff because they were angry and the professors complained, so eventually, they moved all of that stuff up into the room that’d had the pool table in it and they instituted the grab ‘n gos where Nexpress used to be. I don’t know if it’s still up there.
Heather Riggs::  There is outtakes now.
Mary Parker::  Right, ‘cause you have it all centralized. Well, it was up in Cowles, in the little room off the side of what used to be the dining hall, which, I guess, is now apartments? Yeah, I worked there too. It was fun, baggin' up lunches. I liked it, I liked working in the dining hall. It was good. I had a pretty sweet deal my second year, ‘cause I worked pretty much exclusively breakfast shifts and pretty much exclusively as the card checker so I had to get up early but it was totally worth it. But I started, definitely, in the back on the plate line. Good old Lyle.
Heather Riggs::  We’ve all been there.
Mary Parker::  Yes,, we have. Yes we have, which is a good thing about Grinnell, I think, that a lot of people work in Dining Services so it’s less degrading than it could be. ‘Cause when you work in Dining Services, people have a tendency to pretend you’re invisible, even if they know you pretty well. So, it’s nice that lots of people work there.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Describe your favorite academic experience or class, like what was your major?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I doubled in English and French.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Oh, I’m a French major.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Excellent! Well, I really recommend that you do the program that they will tell you about next year where you spend the year teaching in France.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I’ve heard about that.
Mary Parker::  You should do it. I did it and it was awesome. I can’t really think of too many classes that I didn’t really like. Probably one of my favorite classes though was the seminar on the Romantics with Erik Simpson because he’s so great and the Romantics are just one of my favorite periods in literature ‘cause they’re so dramatic about everything. It just makes me laugh so much. And the writing is good, but it’s fun to read ‘cause it’s so dramatic. Lord Byron. Oh, crazy Lord Byron, but we always had such good discussions in that class. It was really just really cozy.
Mary Parker::  I liked my seminar with Shuchi Kapila on Postcolonialism. ‘Cause I was a sophomore and I felt all special that they let me into this seminar, and that was the one where we would go for coffee in the Forum or Saint’s Rest but it was just nice, ‘cause y’know even though I was a sophomore, I felt like people let me talk and respected my opinion and we had some really good discussions on some really interesting topics that a lot of people don’t think about. It really helped me out later when I did my study abroad ‘cause I went to Southern India.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Wow, how was that?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Wonderful, and I would go back in a heartbeat and I loved it. It was the best. I spent three and a half months there staying with a host family and studying Tamil and Indian religion and literature and politics, and then I spent about 5 or 6 weeks traveling around India.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Oh, that sounds great.
Mary Parker::  Which was awesome. Even when I was sick and miserable, it was still awesome. I got to meet up with some people and just ate the best food ever and I saw all the sights that you could really ever wanna see. Except, I didn’t get to go to Kashmir ‘cause nobody really gets to go to Kashmir lately, especially if you are an American. So, but, I did get to see a whole lot of things that I would not have gotten to see if I had not gone to Grinnell, I think, ‘cause there aren’t too many study abroad programs in India. I was dating an Indian guy at the time so, it was like “Oh, the experience, it’s interesting.” Plus, I’ve always been interested in India.
Heather Riggs::  Definitely. Cool. What was student and campus life like during your time at Grinnell?
Mary Parker::  Pretty laid back. I mean, there was the usual row every now and again about, "Oh, self-governance is dying! It wasn’t like this when we were first years!" So I feel like that’s probably still going on. But, self governance was still alive most of the time. We got that campus bikes added to- South campus bikes. Yeah, that was when they started, and when they started, they were all these ugly old things painted orange, spray-painted orange, and somebody took my bike a couple times claiming they thought it was a campus bike, even though my bike was red, and not obviously spray-painted orange. But, people would throw the campus bikes off the Loggia.
Mary Parker::  And we had a couple of incidents of homophobic stuff, I guess, being written up on places. But, just one or two. I feel like that’s been going on lately from what I hear on Plans, like homophobic and some racist stuff every now and again crops up but, it’s really hard to get away from that.
Heather Riggs::  Yeah. I would say once a year there’s probably a big- pretty big controversy.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Probably the biggest thing that ever happened when I was at Grinnell was, my first year and that was when we had all the suicides at once and it was really, just felt like the end of the world.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  How did that affect the campus atmosphere?
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Everybody just went around looking really quiet and sad and unhappy and the weather was also awful. We had hail the size of softballs.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Was this at the beginning of the year?
Mary Parker::  No, it was Hell Week. Spring semester Hell Week. So, everybody was already stressed out and they canceled a lot of finals eventually, but it was just. And everybody was so mad at the administration because we felt like they weren’t doing what they were supposed to, and they came up with the suicide contracts after that, and we were really mad about that, too.
Heather Riggs::  What were those?
Mary Parker::  If somebody goes to the therapist and expresses a will to kill themselves or to do harm to themselves, they have to sign a contract that says they won’t. Which, if somebody’s gonna kill themselves, they’re not gonna care about this piece of paper. But it was just, so.. I mean it’s a small place. You knew pretty much everybody on campus, or you knew somebody who knew them and one of the people that killed themselves lived in Younker in like, the room above my room. The other one was a friend of mine and he lived on the floor where I practically lived, 'cause I spent all my time there. And, the person who tried to kill herself was also a friend of mine. It was just. It was just terrible. You didn’t know if you were gonna wake up and hear that somebody else had tried to kill themselves or, and we never talked about it after that, really.
Heather Riggs::  Really?
Mary Parker::  Yeah. I mean, after that week, they had this big meeting and it was like, “If you’re grieving for these people, if you have some things to say come to this meeting,” and it felt like nobody was listening. They were like, “But we came up with a suicide contract.” We were like, “How does that help? What does that do?” It was just, really felt like the end of the world. And then... Well, it was just crazy.
Mary Parker::  The only other time that I really remember talking about it was senior year, in one of my seminars. We had this end-of-the-semester graduation party and we were all over at Professor Andrews’ house, and there was like one junior in our class, I felt really sorry for that person ‘cause he was talking about, “Oh, our time at Grinnell, our four years at Grinnell.” And he was my tutorial professor too; a couple of our tutorial professors.
Mary Parker::  So, it was just kind of a retrospective and then we were talking about how strange it had been and how it still affected us and, ‘cause we were still worried a little bit, every Hell Week, to see if anything would happen and fortunately nothing really like that ever did again. I mean, it was the only other time I remember talking about it.
Heather Riggs::  Do you feel like campus recovered from it?
Mary Parker::  Yeah. I mean, by the time I graduated it was only us who remembered, so... And, I feel like we moved on, mostly, or at least we tried to forget about it. But it was still just sort of in the back of everybody’s mind, I think. It’s a big experience to go through your first year of college, on a small campus. We had some other people die but it wasn’t really, wasn’t really the same, fortunately.
Mary Parker::  But it’s a stressful place, and one of the attractions of Grinnell is that it's for all kinds of people who are quirky and really smart. The problem with people who are quirky and really smart is that sometimes they aren’t accepted by other people, other places and they’re not very happy all the time. They come here and, well, it’s in the middle of nowhere, and the weather’s really bad for a good chunk of the year. So, I don’t know. It’s a strange little place, this College. I mean, I love it, but I can see how it can be kind of a hothouse for unfortunate events.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  How do you feel like today’s students compare with students when you were a student? Do you feel like there’s a big difference in the student body?
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  I don’t know you guys.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah, that's true.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  You’re probably more hipsters than we were.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Probably.
Mary Parker::  With your skinny jeans, yeah. All we wore to class were pajamas in my day. We knew how to self-govern ourselves. Just kidding, nah, I don’t really know anybody who’s here right now. You guys seem great. I’m sure you’ll go on to do great things. I imagine you’re pretty much the same as we were, possibly a little more wealthy ‘cause I know the cost of tuition keeps going up, and I've heard some people complain about how Grinnell students are just so rich and entitled these days, but Grinnell students were pretty rich and entitled in my day. Not so much me, but.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  But some people.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Some people. And, you kind of have to be entitled to hear about this place in the first place, because this is an upper-echelon kind of college. It’s not one that everybody goes around talking about. You’re not going to hear about it unless you are in the top percentiles intellectually.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  How do you feel like that influences, I mean, you said that Grinnell is kind of an upper-echelon kind of place, but do feel like that attitude influenced the student body?
Mary Parker::  Are we snobby because go to Grinnell? Probably a little. I’m definitely proud of having gone to Grinnell, and the fact that nobody’s heard of it does give us a certain exclusivity. "Oh, it’s not mainstream. It’s Grinnell," which adds to our hipster vibe, I’m sure. I don’t think that this is necessarily a snobby place but it being out of the mainstream does, does make it seem that way. I don’t necessarily think that people here are snobby, but we sound snobby when we talk about it.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  Yeah, just a little bit.
Heather Riggs & Mary Parker::  "You haven’t heard of it. It’s very special."
Heather Riggs::  If you were writing a history, this is kind of a funny question, if you were writing a history of Grinnell College, what events, or not necessarily events, but just what would you include from your time here?
Mary Parker::  I feel like my time here wasn’t marked by anything that extraordinary, really. I mean, it wasn’t like we had protests and stopped graduation happening. I’d probably put in Darby being torn down. That’s part of it, just ‘cause it was historical, but I don’t know. It's just... for better or worse, a time when not that much extraordinary happened I think.
Heather Riggs::  Yeah, well, I don’t have anymore questions. Do you have anything else you want to add?
Mary Parker::  I don't know. I like Grinnell. I miss Grinnell. Every now and again I’m like, “I wish I could go to class at Grinnell,” ‘cause I just graduated from grad school and the people in my classes were.... not... up to Grinnell standards and that’s really gonna make me sound snobby, but I feel like Grinnell prepared me really well to handle anything else academic that was thrown at me, ever, ‘cause I thought grad school was a cakewalk, compared to the coursework I had here. Even though, in my program we had classes one day a week and we were teaching four days a week so it was basically grad school plus a full time job.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Socially, I don’t know how well Grinnell prepared me. We’re kind of awkward here. I presume that continues.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Of course, definitely.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  But I feel like it also creates really strong bonds between people, and I really appreciate the network of people that I have from Grinnell.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  OK, great.
Mary Parker & Heather Riggs::  Thanks.
