Daniel Cymbala '87
Primary tabs
- Alenka FigaAlenka: Go ahead.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: My name is Daniel Cymbala. I currently live in Westfield, New Jersey and I’m a member of the Grinnell class of 1987.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: I came to Grinnell because... I didn’t want to go to Hampshire. Actually, I knew I wanted the open curriculum and I knew I would fail or flail at Hampshire even though I was admitted there. But, I visited a whole string of colleges from Ohio – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, out to Iowa, and I just liked the people the most. And Nancy Maly, who was out in New Jersey, she recruited me in some way. It was good. I didn’t deserve to come to Grinnell. I was a total derelict; I didn’t get good grades in high school until, probably my senior year. But, it was a good decision.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: Best memories of Grinnell... Probably studying in Steiner with my good friend Suzanne Castello, and the kind of conversations that we had outside the classroom... philosophical and in the humanities, that kind of thing. What clothes did I…
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: What did my dorm room look like? So I was almost never in a dorm, which is not allowed, but my... I met my girlfriend, who I was with all four years of high school, Chaia Heller, when I was a prospective at a Philosophy department get-together which was in... that was either Mears or the President’s house or something. Jack Worley was there, and the reason that Chaia was there was that she was protesting that Dan Magurshak who was a phenomenology and existentialism professor was not going to be allowed to continue, wasn’t going to be on a tenure track. It had something to do with the Dean of Faculty believing that phenomenology existentialism wasn’t a real discipline, or it wasn’t real philosophy.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: So she was there protesting and Jack Worley was there eating, y’know, shelled nuts, as usual, and she happened to live in Stanford, Connecticut and my family was in New Canaan, Connecticut, so we were like fifteen minutes away, and after that academic year we met and went to different gatherings together and then she was in France for a year and I was in.... Germany because I took an exchange student year before I went back to college after high school, and so we had some connection there and then we got together during New Student Days.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: She was living off-campus on Park, and, yeah I didn’t see a lot of my dorm room. I didn’t have a roommate that I got along with and so I moved to Main and I didn’t spend much time there, either. The next year, a bunch of friends and I, who are- I was very happy, a large portion of them were here for the 25th reunion - and we... in order to be in a college off-campus housing you had to have a program and our program was Juggling House. Which was, half-earnest and half a total scam. It was great and it’s wonderful to have connected with them.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: My junior year, I went to Vermont for an internship and took classes at UVM and some other alternative college, and then I went to Germany on Institute for European Studies for a semester and studied at University of Freiburg. Then, came back and lived off-campus again. So, yeah, there are many Grinnell experiences. Many different ones.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: What book influenced me the most at Grinnell? I think there’s many different books that influenced me in different ways and... So, I was a Philosophy major and Aristotle’s Metaphysics changed my life and got me excited about philosophy. So, it shaped my academic career that way and of course obviously my life. My freshman tutorial with Jeff Adams was “Who’s Afraid of the Steppenwolf?” and we focused on 19th Century European literature, but especially German and Russian. We read Notes from Underground, and that was a great, iconoclastic... classic that informed my sort of radical or anti-authoritarian kind of thinking. So, those are two.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: And then... something no longer available on campus. I don’t know what’s no longer available. But, the annual Co-op was really important ‘cause we lived off-campus and the students who volunteered their time for that were un- I mean, unbelievably generous because we couldn’t have afforded all the food that we needed for a house of 12 people without the Co-op.
- Daniel Cymbala & Alenka FigaDaniel: We had huge bricks of Jarlsberg and other cheeses in the freezer and 5 gallon drums of shelled nuts and all kinds of staples for the year, and- I think I, for the whole year, I think my parents gave me like 800 dollars for food or something, and- y'know, for- this doesn’t include going to the Longhorn for breakfast every once and a while, but I think I spent 300 dollars on food. Certainly the dining hall was more like 800 or something.Alenka: It’s expensive!Daniel: Yeah. So, I don’t know if that still exists but it was a really good, important thing.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: One of my favorite academic experiences at Grinnell.. Actually, something that really informs my life still and that helped shape some of my adult learning interests was taking a class on Linguistics which, because it relates to semantics and semiotics and structuralism, post-structuralism, that kind of stuff, it gave me a scientific basis and ideas that have developed out of some basic concepts of meaning and morphemes and memes.Daniel: And because of the scientific aspect of the building acoustic phonemes, it’s become really easy for me to learn languages and now I’m learning Hungarian.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: I took... Well, I was in Germany. I came here and then I started in 200 level German classes and then I, after my freshman year, I went to the Russkaya Shkola in Vermont, in Northfield, Vermont- Norwich, Vermont, actually- and then I took Russian for a year and following Grinnell, because I knew a non-English Germanic language, German, as well as a Slavic language, I really wanted to learn a sort of non Indo-European language and I went to China and while I was there I learned Chinese and I’m still OK with it. And now I’m learning a... non-sinoid language, so it’s a Finno-Uralic, but that changed my life, being able to do that.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: If I knew then what I know now, what would I have done differently? I think... it doesn’t have anything to do with academics. What I know now that I- so I don’t think I would have necessarily done anything differently.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: I will say that, and I’m very sorry to myself that I can’t remember her name this weekend, but there is a woman in Career Development, Robertson or Robinson maybe, who was fundamental in shaping my ability to investigate- cultivating and informing like, for basic skills, my ability to do research, to investigate a career and life opportunities and have the confidence to call people up who don’t know me from Adam and where I really don’t know much about their field of interest or expertise, or profession, and getting them to talk to me and share their expertise and their time.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: I’ve had great unfortune with keeping jobs, but luckily I learned a lot of skills about finding and getting jobs, so that was hugely important for me. Hugely important for me, and has saved my ass like, many many times, having those skills. So I owe a great debt to her and to the Career Development Office, and thank God it isn’t a placement office but you can’t have that at a liberal arts college anyway. But, that was really profound for me.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: If I met my partner at Grinnell, describe how you met and fell in love. So, she was almost my partner, but, yeah, it was the New Student Days. Actually, I was in Gardner Lounge in Main for a talk led by some folks from the Class of ’68, and just going down there- it’s this shabby little, dark, badly-designed space, but there were the best parties down there.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: Actually Chiah, when I was a prospective, invited me down to the pub and that was ’83 so anyone over 18 could drink. Then she said that she was there with a bunch of friends. They were all going to a GCGC dance and I didn’t know what GCGC was. It was Grinnell College Gate Community. They had- GCGC had absolutely the best dances and they were often there in Gardener and it was a great memory. It felt a little bit like going back to Kindergarten, you know, where it, "Was it really this small?" Y’know? It is really that small, but they had the best dances there.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: And I lived in Band-Aid House, so this is really like, oral history stuff, all the stuff that people wouldn’t know if you weren’t part of the set that... y'know, that lived on Broad there, just north of 6th. And there’s a story about Band-Aid House that the owner found this sickly flesh-colored paint on sale somewhere, really bargain-basement price, and just bought a ton of it, and whenever the house needed painting, you know, she had a decades-supply of this paint. And.. you know, it was unique. It had like, a turret, it was a Victorian with a maid staircase in the back.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: So, I spent a lot of my time living there and then when I came back from my junior year away from campus, friends of mine lived in the first floor, which was only two-bedroom, but we had a food co-op together so I lived alone in an apartment over on High Street. But, we.. you know, we bought our food and ate our meals together which was unusual but really good because living and eating alone is no good for anybody, I don’t think. And that worked really well for me.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: If I were writing a history of Grinnell College what would I include from my years here? I don't- That’s interesting, writing a history. History has so many different aspects, so… I usually would have an answer for that. I don’t really know.
- Daniel CymbalaDaniel: I think, fundamentally, and I don’t know that it’s different at any other college or, you know, cocooned society, but it’s about the people, you know? There were not always harmonious relationships and I may have offended people at different times, but coming together after 25 years, whatever those things were really don’t matter and the core of the attraction, or the- whatever the bond is, that- often based a lot on some similarities, but everyone being unique that, you know, you can pick up, in so many ways, where you left off from friendships and relationships built during that time of life.
- Daniel Cymbala & Alenka FigaDaniel: And some core of people doesn’t really change that much and in many ways, because of the strong culture and foundational experiences and shared social outlook, you’d think in 25 years people might have changed in ways that, when you hear them speak extemporaneously about something that they’re doing in their life now or that they have an interest in, that you might not have any... you might not be comfortable with it or it might be different or alien and it’s absolutely not the case. So maybe we’re all really predictable, but it’s been really good. I’ve enjoyed it.Alenka: Thank you.Daniel: Yeah.
Alumni oral history interview with Daniel Cymbala '87. Recorded June 3, 2012.