Pam Feinstein '87
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- Pam FeinsteinPam: My name is Pamela Hope Feinstein. I currently live in Lewis, Delaware and I am a member of the Grinnell College class of 1987. I guess I will start by saying my first memory of campus. When I was going through prospective- actually when I was applying to colleges I went and I visited UNC and UBA, I grew up in Nashville, and my mom got the- we got the PSAT pamphlet things in the mail and I thought Grinnell was a religious school and I tossed it. I tossed all of those religion, all-female- I wasn’t doing it. And she had been reading Yale Insider’s Guide and it said that Grinnell was a liberal oasis in the cornfields of Iowa. And so she pulled it out and she said that we’re gonna go take a ride.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And so we drove up and the first thing that I saw was David Kopelman, who just died a few weeks ago, with half his head shaved and riding a skateboard. And I turned to my mother and I said, “I could be anybody I want to be here.” And that was it. I was a Grinnellian from that moment on because, I mean- Nashville, you had to play a game, you know? I was told by one of my high school classmates that, “Gee Pam, you’d have a lot more dates if you weren’t so smart.” I was like, “Get me the fuck out of here!” But that’s- y'know, I was just talking to them out there.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: So- I’m be-bopping around. The sophomore year I lived in Farm House. People habitating all together regardless of morals, and we just went and visited and I feel like that’s, sophomore year, I was born. I was born on this campus. I had my very own thought. It was mine. It wasn’t my mother’s. It wasn’t my teacher’s. It wasn't TV’s, the media’s; it was mine. And it was like, the light bulb went off and it felt so good. And I feel like that was the beginning of me.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And so when I die, I want a portion of my ashes buried here on campus because... And my soft place to land are the people that I lived with that year. That was... Mondale Ferraro. That was the election year against Reagan and I think we went to see Ferraro and I distinctly remember election night, crying, and crying. So when the last election Hilary was running against Obama I so wanted, so wanted a woman, and- But then I saw the Iowa election and I saw the passion and the excitement and I thought, “I can’t not be a part of that. So I’ll wait for Hilary, and I’ll go for-," but I thought, “She’s a ball-buster. Bet she could get this country back in order.”
- Pam FeinsteinPam: But, let’s see. What else? What kind of clothes did I wear everyday as a Grinnell student? Jeans, and I also had this thing- I had a whole month’s supply of underwear so that I didn’t have to do laundry more than once a month. And I figured, I had this philosophy that if the dirty clothes were in the hamper for longer than three weeks, they were automatically clean again. I mean, and everybody has their one Grinnell sweatshirt that has the hood that when you have early morning class and you partied too late the night before, that’s how you went to class. You must do that still.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: Boy, what else? Well, the pub was around when I was here and my junior year I went to London and when I came back I got a loggia- a Cleveland loggia room, so it was right above the Pub. You know, where and why the Pub was? It’s like, they couldn’t serve- sell alcohol on campus, so they built the Pub under campus. And so, 10:30 at night my friend was just down the hallway and we’d yell out, “Pub time!” and we’d go down and we’d be at the - but you had to hurry and get all the work done.
- Tamara Grbusic & Pam FeinsteinTamara: This is Bob’s right?Pam: Bob’s now, yeah. That was- yeah. Yeah, we just brought back- people brought back tapes of all the Pub songs on the juke box and it’s so funny 'cause I’ll be going through life or being in the car and a Pub song will come on and I’ll go, “Pub song!” And I start to dance in my seat. Yeah, I mean- OK next, let’s see what else we’ve got.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: What did my dorm-? You know, the size of the dorm rooms never bothered me. It was always like a cocoon. It felt- it was a safe pla- My dad sent me, in the mail, God, a black and white TV, and I put my black and white TV out in the hallway. Oh, wow, I put my black-white… Especially so that everybody could see it, so that we could see the news together, and I came back, I worked Food Service and I came back from working one day and everybody was outside in front of the TV and the shuttle had just blown, and we spent the next, y’know, 3, 4 hours sitting there and watching it play and replay and replay, but...
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And when I went- I did my student teaching. I got certified to teach English to high school students and I was teaching creative writing, and one of the assignments was, “What was the most pivotal events in your life?” And I can’t tell you how many of those students talked about the shuttle exploding. Now it would be 9/11, y’know? And- what was it? I mean, My first memory of TV was seeing men walk on the moon. I remember my mom waking me up.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: What is next? My favorite academic- It has to be Grinnell-in-London. See, there are things that I look back on and I say, "I couldn’t ever recreate that." And I- my life is so much more rich because of that. And... you know, London, the four years- I think that college, I mean I assume for everybody but definitely for me here at Grinnell, that it was four years of freedom to see everything in black and white. Stark. And you knew what you believed.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: You got a new- you figured out what your core was, and then you'd go out into the real world and there were grays. No, don't- you can’t just do away with the military. You can’t take all the money away from it, because for every place that they shut, every camp that they shut down, people lose their jobs and then you’ve got unemployment. It just- it’s more complicated. As Jesse Jackson said in my day, y'know, “It’s more profound than that.”
- Pam FeinsteinPam: But for those four years, it was black and white. You could do it, and you’ll know for the rest of your life what you believe at your core because of that time, you know? And yes, I learned in the classroom. I learned a lot in the classroom. Mostly I learned how to learn in the classroom. But, there was never a time outside the classroom that I wasn’t learning, too. And I partied hard. I did. You know, for as hard as I studied, I partied. But it was like, I know how to learn and there’s now the thing that I- I’ve never walked into a job where I thought, I had it, everything that I need to know the day that I walked in. But what I knew was that you teach me, I can learn it. And I knew that because of Grinnell.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And I have my bliss, which is not what I thought when I was- I thought I was going to be a teacher. I thought I was gonna mold young minds. And, I didn’t like it. They didn’t like learning and I loved learning and they depressed the hell out of me, and I was like, on my parents’ kitchen floor going, “I don’t have to be a teacher if I don’t wanna!” And my mom said, “No Darling, but what are you going to do?” and I said, “Well you know, what is grading papers if not editing?” So I took myself up to DC and got an editorial assistant job.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And then I got, after, I don’t know, five years I got tired of living in the city, and... I had worked with the Speaker’s Bureau representing people who talked around the country. Sarah Weddington, McGovern, people like that, and I wrote their bio material, and I was doing freelance for some of the speakers after I left to make money and one guy said, “I’m writing a book. Will you edit it?” And I said, “Well, I’ve never done anything like that, but if you’re willing to take a chance on me, I’m willing to try.” And he did, and I loved it.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And I came to my… ten year reunion? And my friends were saying, “Well, if you could do anything, what would you do?” And I said, “I would edit romance novels.” And they were like, “uuuh….” because of the romance but also because they said, “Pam, you could do that.” And I said, “No, I think I’d have to live in New York and I’m living on the Delaware seashore.” I was living at the ocean and I liked it, and- 'cause another thing Grinnell taught me is I love small towns. I love being able to walk into a place and know the people that are- you know, that are walking around town.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: But anyways, so, I said- but I said, "I don't-" On the drive home I was like, “I don’t know that that’s true. I don’t know that I have to live in New York.” And so I sent out marketing letters and I took tests and now I work out of my house and I freelance copyedit for the New York publishing houses. And it’s blissful. It’s what I think I was born to do.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And I know comma rules because I worked in the writing lab. I remember this one guy coming in and he had a five page paper, and it was all one paragraph. And I was like, “OK, talk to me. Tell me what you’re trying to say here.” And he did, and he said it and it sounded really good, made sense, and I said, “Why don’t you write that?” And when you work in the book industry, you find that the more successful writers are the ones who write like they’re talking to somebody. You can hear them in the rhythm. I mean, there’s- every writer has their own rhythm, and you... But that’s what you have to teach people when you’re in the writing lab, and that’s what you have to learn when you’re writing. I mean, I couldn’t write worth shit when I came here, but I knew, thanks to Mrs. Moffett, I knew my comma rules when I left, so..
- Pam FeinsteinPam: Describe my favorite place on campus. It was the Pub. I loved the Pub. It was a- and we used to go down for like, happy hour on Fridays and then we’d go up into Quad, which I loved too, what a beautiful place, and- for like, bacon cheeseburgers. And I can distinctly remember saying to them, “OK, tonight, one hour, just one hour, just for these cheeseburgers, let’s not talk anything philosophical. Let’s talk… Love Boat!” Which came on at 2 o’clock in the morning when we were here. But, “It just, my brain is tired, please, can we just?”
- Pam FeinsteinPam: ‘Cause there was never a conversation that wasn't- that didn’t tweak your mind, you know? It’s like, I’d be talking to somebody who was a Physics major, and I was an English major, and there would be a poem that would connect with what they were learning in Physics, and it was so unbelievably educational not in the classroom. I didn’t have that professor. I didn’t and wouldn’t take a Physics class. But, I was learning, and I was learning through him, and he would explain it to me and it's like- so I learned.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And my senior year, while coming out of the shower and the bathroom one time and there was this guy who lived at the other end of the hall, and I wasn’t really good friends with him but I knew him and he said to- he posed some question, some philosophical question to me, and I remember standing there, in my, you know, whatever, carrying my basket of stuff, and saying, “You know, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that," and I will think about that. But here’s what I do know. I want to be asked questions like that for the rest of my life. I want to always be thinking.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And sometimes you get caught up. And I mean, hello, I’m the first one to admit, yes I do watch, y’know, Survivor. I have to. I have to. I work with books. I can’t read after working all day. So, you need to do brain-dead stuff, but- like that night, that dinner. Just let my brain rest, please?
- Pam FeinsteinPam: Okay, so the other thing that I wanna talk about that was really powerful- two things. One was, one of the first things that I felt that I learned at Grinnell. I don’t know; I’m hoping that you guys still learn that, is: Never attack the person. Attack the argument, and you go out into the real world- so fighting isn’t- and I’m willing to discuss anything with anybody because I know that I’m not attacking the human being, they’re not attacking me. But I don’t deal with bullshit anymore. I don't- you know, they’re not gonna change my mind. I’m not gonna change theirs. It’s a useless conversation.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: But, I’ll talk about anything because... but, the real world doesn’t necessarily understand that. They’ll go for the jugular. And I remember like, feeling like I was slapped in the face the first time it happened after college. It was like, it was such a shock to me that people did that. You know, you don’t have to attack the human being, and Grinnell taught me that.
- Pam Feinstein & Tamara GrbusicPam: And the other thing that I think you people are crazy not to have anymore is the All-Campus Scream. We would have it during finals week at a certain time, like usually, I don't know, 10:30, 11 o’clock at night, and you’d go out and just primal scream. Still- sometimes when I get upset, I mean I don’t do it, what I say is, “I need an All-Campus Scream. I need to let it out,” because it’s just everything you just needed to release. I can’t believe that they don’t do it anymore. What a waste.Tamara: I didn’t even know it existed.Pam: Really? See, that’s sad. It is very very sad. It works!
- Pam Feinstein & Tamara GrbusicPam: I mean, how do you guys- and we had Relays, so how do you guys release during finals?Tamara: What we get is… I don’t know. Harris Pancake Study Break. Therapy dogs, massage chairs.Pam: Ooooooh. Yeah, I mean that helps, but sometimes it’s a very private experience. Nobody- nobody knows. I think it should be brought back. You tell them to bring it back, you know? May be we had- And Relays was- I still tell Relays stories, y’know, to people that I'm-Tamara: They're fun.Pam: They’re wonderful and it was another, like London, incredible experience.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: My boyfriend calls Grinnell a cult. And maybe it is, I mean, my friends that sophomore year, when I lived in Farmhouse, they’re my soft place to land. I was diagnosed with MS ten years ago, and... but before- one of the side-effects of MS is depression, and I didn’t know I had MS. I just knew I was deeply depressed and I was losing weight like it was going out of style. I mean, I weigh like, 135, 140 now, and I was down to 95 pounds. And I had my suicide all planned out, down to the point that I scared myself.
- Pam FeinsteinPam: And I called my health insurance and I said, “I need help.” And they got me in immediately to a psychiatrist, but this is where having best friends who were all Psych majors is detriment. He went in and he said, “Do you have high-highs and low-lows?” and I said, “No, I’m not bi-polar.” Y'know, “Are you hearing voices?” “No, I’m not schizophrenic.” And he'd go on questions like that, and he did that two times in a row and I said, “This is bullshit,” and I went home and I called my four best friends, three of them working psychologists. And I said, “I need help.”
- Pam Feinstein & Tamara GrbusicPam: And one took the morning, one took the noon, and one took the evening. And for three weeks they each called me once a day, and saved my life. And those are the kinds of friends I made here. And I hope that everybody makes friends like that here. It’s just- it's an intense place, and it allows for intense emotions. So, yeah. I don’t have anything else.Tamara: Okay. No, that was very good.Pam: Okay.
Alumni oral history interview with Pam Feinstein '87. Recorded June 2, 2012.