Joseph Piersen '62 - Joseph Piersen '62 (1 of 2)
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- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Joe Piersen. I’m from the class of 1962, and this is our fiftieth class reunion, and right now my wife and I are living in Deerfield, Illinois. And my wife also went to Grinnell. My brother went to Grinnell, and my younger daughter went to Grinnell.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: I’m just gonna talk about a couple things that I did not do last time, because I was here about ten years ago, or something like that. I’ll tell you a little bit about my brother Bill, because he went through Grinnell. He graduated; he went to University of Indiana for graduate study, and he did very well. He was going to go into Literature and he had a change of heart.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: He became really interested in African American History and he changed his graduate studies, and eventually he got a PhD in History, specializing in African American History. And over the years he wrote a number of books. He was probably one of the most published people in African American History studies.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So he went to get a job. At that particular time the climate had changed. There were no openings for white guys teaching African American History, and he was not angry about that because he understood that... Well, the white peoples had taken their turn. It was time to give someone else a chance. So, he was not angry about that, but he applied to a number of different universities. He’d go to Harvard University, for instance, for an interview, and he’d walk in the door; he could tell that very instant he’d lost the job.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So, ironically he went and applied to Fisk University in Nashville, which is an all-black University, and they hired him immediately because he had such a strong academic record and he published so many publications. And he... There’s only one course he could not teach. That was Black Studies or African American History. But he taught American History and a variety of courses, and he was well-liked on the campus.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Unfortunately, he and his family were killed in a car crash and he... his will left all of the money to Grinnell College. My sister and I were certainly not gonna challenge that because we believed that that was the right thing to do. But... so he became a big donor to Grinnell, and made his contribution in that way also.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: I’m gonna back up to my own history at Grinnell. I entered and went through... went to South Younkers my freshman year, and it turned out it was the very opposite of what I had believed. I went to Grinnell because I did not want a fraternity system, and it was a fraternity system. Although they didn’t call it that that’s really what it was. They had hazing and prepping, and...
- Tamara Grbusic & Joseph PiersenTamara: Could you explain a little of that?Joseph: The.. For instance, all the freshman would be mildly tortured in some way to gain admission, so to speak, to the hall. They couldn’t kick you out of the hall because it was not exactly a fraternity. The College placed you in the hall and then that’s where you were, but the hall could sort of decide itself whether they liked you or not. And they had hazing.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Downstairs in my basement I have this huge board that’s shaped like a paddle or a sword, and it was a paddle for which they symbolically spanked the freshman. Now, it’s true they didn’t usually spank you so hard that it was extremely painful but they did it anyway. And you could take this paddle and take it home as your souvenir, and sometimes it was engraved with your big brother’s name on it. So I still have that.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: At any rate. That was a big disappointment for me because I just didn’t like the way the halls were set up, and they had- I didn’t mind the athletic competition between the halls, but the rest of it was kind of nasty. So the next year- I changed roommates too but that’s another story.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: The next year, two of my friends asked to, or volunteered, to go to a place called Barracks 9B. Just west of the gymnasium were these so-called barracks which were really housing for married couples which were built after WWII because, contrary to everything Grinnell believed in, after WWII all they could get was a lot of married couples. They couldn’t get many singles.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: They weren’t happy about that, but they built these barracks to house them. And eventually they switched back to singles. There were a few married students when I was there. They had to live off-campus, of course. They couldn’t live on campus and they were kind of ostracized by the administration, but...
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: At any rate, we lived in Barracks 9B and we were completely unsupervised. We had a great time. Not that we did anything terrible; it was just that we didn’t have to follow any rules. It wasn’t that we were uncooperative. South Younkers had a lady who was the house mother. They didn’t all have house mothers, but there were at least two of them, and this house lady’s name was Ma Featherhoffer. And we liked her. We would often eat dinner with her up at the Cowles dining hall. She’s a nice lady.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So, it wasn’t that we were in rebellion against that. We just wanted our independence and out of this dorm system. So, we were there for one year and then they tore those down and we moved to a brand new residence hall called West Norris. And I was the first- my friends and I were the first people to be in that residence hall. And.. that worked out well. It was fun. It had no traditions,and so it didn’t have all this bad stuff. It was a new hall, with new traditions. My brother came along a couple years later and he became president of East Norris, and he also didn’t enforce any traditions.
- Tamara Grbusic & Joseph PiersenTamara: So when was this system abolished?Joseph: It was kind of abolished soon after we left. Right now, there are all these displays in the buildings about the revolution of the sixties, and the hippie counter-culture. They had no desire at all to have that sort of thing, and it was overturned at that time. But it actually started when I was at Grinnell.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: The older brother of one of my best friends, his name was Tom Hart. He was a very big and imposing person. He later became a lawyer, and he exposed all the absurdities and the juvenile behavior that the system entailed. And I really admired him. He was a good guy. I think he’s long since passed away, but he did his job.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Because of the system there was a lot of bullying. Kids who were different were picked on, and this was kind of an established way of doing things. Nowadays, you read in the newspapers about bullying all the time and how terrible it is. In those days, nobody cared at all if people were bullied, no matter how badly they were mistreated.
- Tamara Grbusic & Joseph PiersenTamara: So what were they doing when there was a whole house to student victim?Joseph: Oh, it depended- varied. I’m going to give you a couple of examples. It varied considerably. Sometimes they were just mean to them and wouldn’t talk to them and made fun of them, or...Tamara: Was that like, a collective thing? Like, the whole.. choose who to hate?Joseph: Yes, it’s like any social situation. There are some kids who tend to be more outsiders and some are more insiders.Tamara: Mhm.Joseph: And it wasn’t a vote, it’s just the way things work out. And the administration had no awareness. They just didn’t care. They thought, “Well, that’s the way things go.” Because in some ways, in the business world, that’s the way it was, too. People bullied each other. I’m going to give you a couple of examples.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: There was one fellow named Larry McBurney who was tall and he was fairly good-looking. He had a girlfriend. But he came from a family that didn’t have any money and they decided they’re gonna pick on him. And so this was in South Younkers, and so they pennied his door, which is a term nobody’s ever heard of. Which means that one night, when he was asleep, they put lots of pennies under his door and squeezed them in as hard as they could, lots and lots of pennies, and in effect that locked the door.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: In those days, the rooms often were not locked and Larry... Larry was a smart and was a big guy, and he opened up his window, he tied his laundry sheet onto the radiator, and slid down the wall as far as he could and then he jumped from the second floor down to the ground. He was not hurt, but he was furious. And I can remember him right now yelling, “You blankey-blank rich boys! I just hate you!” And he didn’t talk to anyone again, except for his girlfriend, of course, who was nice to him. I felt really badly about that.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: The other one was actually a former roommate of mine. I didn’t participate in this, but I was guilty in the sense that I kinda knew about it, and didn’t do anything. So, this is kind of an admission of partial guilt. So my roommate at that time was a fellow named Sammy Tefft, who was really different. He probably should not have been admitted to Grinnell, and he had some really strange behaviors. But, they decided they’re gonna pick on him.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Now, Sammy Tefft bought all of his suits- his parents bought all of his suits at Brooks Brothers, which was the most expensive, upscale store where you could possibly buy suits and sports jackets. In those days we wore sports jackets a lot. And all the sports jackets had Brooks Brothers buttons on them. So they came into his room one day when he was at class, they took all of this suits and his jackets and they cut off all the buttons and they threw them away, which is really mean.
- Joseph Piersen & Tamara GrbusicJoseph: And poor Sammy was devastated but he decided he was going to show them a lesson, so he wrote Brooks Brothers a letter telling them what had been done and how devastated he was. And he asked for more buttons and they sent him a whole package full of buttons, which he had sewed back on and he got his revenge, so to speak.Tamara: Nice.Joseph: Sammy, I don’t think graduated from Grinnell, but.. He was OK. He was just a little different, that's all.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: There was one incident in another hall, and I’m not remembering this exactly, where they ordered blocks of ice from the ice company. In those days you could order ice. This was a different way- this was a time, a transition time where they were transitioning. They took all these huge ice blocks which weighed a large number of pounds and they piled them up in front of somebody’s door, and he couldn’t get in and out of this door because the ice sort of froze together as a barricade and the... I don’t remember the rest of that story. I wasn’t there. I didn’t witness that, but that’s the sort of thing that went on pretty frequently in the old residence halls.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Alright, now I’m switching topics. I was in the Air Force ROTC, which at this time that was the only ROTC on campus, and I thought that was great because I loved the ROTC. I loved the Air Force, I should say. And this is before the Vietnam War, when I felt so anti-war, but I loved Air Force history and so I joined the Air Force ROTC, and... Eventually they even took me to Arizona to fly around in planes for a little bit. It was not that exciting, but it was different.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So... Finally, they gave me a physical exam and I failed because my eyes were so bad, and that was devastating to me. Not long after that, the Vietnam War came along and I switched my views completely. I was strongly anti-war, but I was exempt because the laws were such that if you got married you were not draft-able, so I got married and that was it. So, I’ll back up and tell you that story, too.
- Joseph Piersen & Tamara GrbusicJoseph: When I was a sophomore, I took Physics, and in my Physics class there was a young lady who sat right in front of me. And noticed her and I thought, “Boy, this is the sorta girl that I’d like to marry.” And so I asked her out, and she was happy to go out with me. She had no idea I was in my class. She had never noticed me, that’s for sure.Tamara: Aww.Joseph: But... So eventually we went out and she was a year behind and she graduated a year after I did. So, there’s another story that relates to this.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: I graduated in 1962, and as I said this is my fiftieth anniversary. And we had planned to get married eventually, and she wanted to go to my graduation, which was important to her. And at that time, South Campus, the girl’s campus, was extremely restrictive. People who didn’t live in it in those days have no idea how restrictive it was. So, she went to Dean Gardner, who was an old maid who hated guys and she said to.. My wife asked if she could stay on campus. And Dean Gardner, “Of course not! You can’t be here unsupervised.”
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Well, my wife had set up a job working for Helen Shipley in the Library, who wa- Helen was a really nice lady, so she was earning some money while she was waiting for my graduation day. And so my wife said, my girlfriend said, “But Helen Shipley has given me permission to stay at her house. I can stay there if I want to.” Dean Gardner said, “No you can’t. You’re not allowed to be in Grinnell. Your time is up. You should’ve gone home.”
- Joseph Piersen & Tamara GrbusicJoseph: My wife says, “I don’t know what the problem is. He’s my boyfriend. I’m gonna marry him some day.” Dean Gardner says, “You can’t stay here.” My wife says, “You know what? I am going to stay here and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” And she did.Tamara: Very Grinnellian.Joseph: Yeah, that’s the way life was in those days, and probably a thousand other people have told you stories similar to that, but that story’s kind of unique.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Just a couple more topics. My hobby, back then and now is railroads and railroad history, and I took a lot of photographs of the Grinnell and the Rock Island- the (inaudible) and the Rock Island at Grinnell. And those photographs are now in the archives at Grinnell. They’re in the Depot restaurant downtown, and.. So I made a contribution to history that way, too. I didn’t make a big name for myself like my brother did, but right now I’m writing a book on architects who built railroad stations, so.. Y’know, I actually- I’ve written more books than almost anyone in my class but they’re not big, hot sellers. But they’ve all been published! So, at any rate... And they’re all railroad books. Only railroad fanatics would like them.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: But this last book on architects is gonna have a much wider audience because it’s beyond the railroads. It’s about an architectural firm called Frost and Granger, and they were one of the biggest firms in Chicago in 1900, 1910, and today nobody’s heard of them. So, that’s a book that needed to be written.
- Joseph Piersen & Tamara GrbusicJoseph: So I think those are my main stories for today.Tamara: Thank you very much.
Alumni oral history interview with of Joseph Piersen '62 (1 of 2). Recorded June 2, 2012.