Jerry Reed '55
Primary tabs
- Jerry ReedJerry: Hi, I’m Jerry Reed. I went through Grinnell College with my full name Jerry Reed Barbour. I dropped the Barbour later. Should I just go on to my story or...?
- Zoe ZebeZoe: Yeah, anything you like.
- Jerry ReedJerry: I would like to explain why I did not graduate from Grinnell, and I’m still very bitter about it. I was raised in Osage, Iowa, which was sort of the David of Iowa wrestling. We had three or four state champions every year. Jerry Siebert was also in the- 19- in the 155 weight
- Jerry ReedJerry: and I wrestled in that weight for three years and so he practiced against me. We didn’t have a 165 and the heavy weight could toss me around like a rag doll. I tried to go down to 145 and I just became too weak. So anyway, when I came to Grinnell, wrestling season came up and so I joined the varsity team and our coach was Coach Brown. And for some reason,
- Jerry ReedJerry: he didn’t like me. There was another student by the name of Frank who was also in the 165 range and we would practice together and we were almost equal in skills. But Coach Brown wanted Frank to be on first team. So when he inquired about my grades, I said, “Well, I’m not doing all that well.” So, he claimed that I couldn’t wrestle while I was under academic probation, which I was not
- Jerry ReedJerry: at that point, but I did not realize it. My second year I decided not to go onto the wrestling team so I wrestled for my hall in the intramurals, South Younker, and my opponent for the championship was again Frank. He had decided not to take wrestling the second year also, and I beat him. So my claim to fame in wrestling was “College Champion in the-
- Jerry ReedJerry: 19... 65, in the 165 weight class in the year of ’54.” After my sophomore-- oh, we all had to join the Air Force ROTC which started the same year that I started college. And we had to take a course in Political Science. One of my few skills as a college student was I had a very high comprehension rate
- Jerry ReedJerry: and they were multiple choice tests which I could cream. So I was getting... My grade every semester was 94 or 96. So at the end of the first semester of my sophomore year, they called me in and they said, “We are only accepting about 25% of the students for the advanced classes and you’re not on the list.” Which is fine with me, I did not want to become an officer in the Air Force.
- Jerry ReedJerry: They said you could choose to either take the classes the second semester or not. And since I was getting the highest grade of all my classes, I chose to take it. When the end of the semester came, I became a steeple jack for Wisconsin Power and Light, which was a high-paying job and very dangerous. I hitch-hiked up to Baraboo, Wisconsin to take a two-day safety course and then was assigned to a crew of all college students. There were eight of us in the class.
- Jerry ReedJerry: And then we were assigned to jobs. I started out living in Waunakee, just 12 miles north of Madison, and then we were assigned to Green Bay, Wisconsin. We were painting towers, going through a swamp. There were eight men on the team, four to a tower. What they didn’t tell us was that we were painting three towers a day
- Jerry ReedJerry: and the permanent crews were painting two towers a day. So anyway, I had gone to a dance on a Saturday night, and met a delightful girl from Chicago, and she was up there with two friends, and I introduced them to my friends, so they started taking the train up about every second weekend to spend the weekend with us. They were due in on the 5:30
- Jerry ReedJerry: train from Chicago. And as you know, the wire comes into the insulator, loops down, and goes out, the power goes out on the outgoing wire. Chuck, for some weird reason, stood right straight up and backed into the loop and he got hit by 66,000 volts. We heard a “pow” and we looked and Chuck stood there for a second and then fell 64 feet into the swamp. If it had been dry ground, he wouldn’t have lived.
- Jerry ReedJerry: Anyway, we rushed him to the hospital... We had a guy in a power boat that towed us to the parking lot and back, and he came roaring up and hooked up to the skiff and towed us back to the parking lot. We had one kid who wasn’t a college student who’d only been working for the company for two weeks, and he leaped off that boat, jumped into his car, roared into town, picked up his girlfriend, tossed all of his stuff in the back seat, and they took off out of town at 70 miles an hour.
- Jerry ReedJerry: We never heard from him again, he didn’t even pick up his last paycheck. I held Chuck’s head all the way to the hospital, and I was looking at a hole about that big around, and about an inch deep. We didn’t see it, but when they took off his work boots, apparently there was a large hole in one foot, where the electricity went back out. The next day, the fellows from the Wisconsin Department of Safety, my boss asked me to take them up to the tower,
- Jerry ReedJerry: and we climbed up on the tower, and where Chuck’s footprints were we would see little rivets of melted steel where them nails in his heels were. Anyway, he was in the hospital... Oh, and then I had to deal with three hysterical girls at 5:30 and then his mother arrived on the DC-3 at midnight, and I had to pick her up from the airport. Chuck spent six months in the hospital, and got out, and was not any dumber. He wasn’t any dumber than when he went in.
- Jerry ReedJerry: And he went back to a calm college in North Carolina. So anyway, I got my grades from Grinnell, and we had to have a deferment to stay in college, and passing grade was 72. And mysteriously, my Air Force ROTC grade dropped from the high nineties to the low sixties, which gave me a grade point average of 71.9.
- Jerry ReedJerry: So I got a draft notice from the service and was asked to report to take my physical in Racine, Wisconsin the following Monday. So I had to get the girls back to Chicago and then catch a train up to Racine. And I got up there, and if you checked anything on a certain page,
- Jerry ReedJerry: like you ever heard voices, have you ever been in a mental hospital, da-da da-da, do you stutter, and of course I checked that. And of course if you checked anything on that page you had to go talk to the psychologist. Well I’d been to the Grinnell Speech Clinic for six weeks so I could speak the jargon, and he was convinced that I was a genuine stutterer. And he said, “Well son, do you want to be drafted?” And I said, “Oh no, sir!” He took a huge rubber stamp and went “kabam!” in huge red letters, “Psychologically unacceptable for the armed forces.” I said, “Thanks, doc.” And he said, “You can go out the back door, you don’t have to take the rest of the test.” So I found out a couple
- Jerry ReedJerry: of months later from my brother who lives in Fort Dodge that Dean Brown had called up my mother and said, “We don’t want Jerry back at Grinnell.” So I moved to Chicago and spent seven wonderful years around the University of Chicago in an area called Hyde Park where our current President has a home. And then Hyde Park
- Jerry ReedJerry: had the first upper-middle class redevelopment in the United States, before they had bulldozed ghettos and built high-rise ghettos. Hyde Park had a lot of beautiful homes, plus the University, so they were bulldozing the neighborhood we knew and loved--the Chinese restaurants, all that. The only survivor of the wrecking ball was a very famous student bar called “Jimmy’s,” which was the only building not to be torn down.
- Jerry ReedJerry: Chicago is very ghettoized. Hyde Park was liberal, and we had Orientals and blacks, but they were college-educated blacks. And there were two trains coming from New Orleans everyday and a lot of blacks were fleeing the Jim Crow-ism of the South, and a lot would get off in St. Louis, and then the train would stop at 63rd Street before they went on down to LaSalle Street Station. And every day about a 100
- Jerry ReedJerry: people with their possessions in two cardboard boxes would get off the train, so the black ghetto was growing very fast. And it brought a lot of young men who were riff-raff. And they had heard that at Jimmy’s you could pick up white girls, which turned out not to be true. But we had to put an electric door to the back room, and if you were a local, you could get buzzed in. If you were riff-raff from the ghetto, you couldn’t get in. Anyway, but they were wrecking...
- Jerry ReedJerry: I had started a travel agency at the new Hyde Park shopping center, Marco Polo Travel Service. And I started -and this is the beatnik era- and I started realizing that all my friends were moving to San Francisco. And so I had... Kirk Kerkorian had a bunch of four engine Connie’s and he had daily gambling trips from Los Angeles and San Francisco.
- Jerry ReedJerry: He started a weekly trip to Chicago. And the first flight he invited 87 travel agents to take the whole $165 package for $25. The flight was free; he couldn’t charge for the flight, but it was the usual package of a dinner show and flight bags and all that. And I had just hired a wonderful gal of a name Carol Brisky, who had been working for Northwest, six weeks before.
- Jerry ReedJerry: And I got the invitation to go to Las Vegas for $25 for the week, and I said, “Gee, that’s too bad I can’t go.” And she said, “Jerry, either you’re going or I’m going.” So I had sold a Chrysler-300 for a friend of mine who had passed away and this kid had an Oldsmobile that had been prepped for paint but it wasn’t painted. And he says, “Well, I’ll buy the car as soon as I can get rid of my Oldsmobile.” And I said, “Well, how much do you want for it?” And he said,
- Jerry ReedJerry: “75 dollars.” And I said, “I’ll give you $75 trade.” So I got it painted for $19 at Earl Scheib and put it a “For Sale” sign in front of my travel agency. And a week later, somebody came by and bought it for $250. So now I had the money to go to Las Vegas. And I went and had a wonderful time. And then a year later, I really... they were bulldozing Hyde Park, and the call was to go to San Francisco.
- Jerry ReedJerry: So I was their top travel agent. I was the top travel agent for Hacienda in Chicago, so they- and he also had a flight a day from San Francisco to Honolulu in one of his ten pink Connies. So they said, “We’ll give you a free ticket to Hawaii but you have to take the gambling flight to Las Vegas, and then the gambling flight up to San Francisco, and then the flight to Hawaii.” Well I arranged to spend five days in San Francisco,
- Jerry ReedJerry: and I saw all of my ex-Hyde Park friends, and I lived the San Francisco myth for five days, cracked crab at Fisherman’s Wharf, drinks at the Top of the Mark. Anyway, I flew out to Hawaii, and my travel agency had been the south side agency for Budget Rent-A-Car of Chicago, and I was a good friend of Irv Dickson, who sold Budget Rent-A-Car Chicago and moved to Hawaii, and within six months had the largest Rent-A-Car agency in Hawaii.
- Jerry ReedJerry: He was the first “El Cheapo.” Anyway, I really realized I did not want to live in Hawaii. I enjoyed skin-diving, and that was about it. And I found out that people lived there for a couple years, got island fever. So I went back to Chicago, sold my travel agency, and six months later, drove out to San Francisco in a dealer’s Rent-A-Car. And I was born in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and I had a lot of cousins there.
- Jerry ReedJerry: And I looked up an elderly cousin and she took me back to the family ranch and my dad had lost the ranch during the Depression. And they’d discovered Beryllium on the ranch and some guy was paying the hardware store owner, who had bought the $600 note to get the whole ranch. They were paying $40 a truckload to dig up the ranch and drive it to an extraction plant 10 miles away.
- Jerry ReedJerry: And he was getting $40 a truckload with 6 trucks going 9 hours a day! Anyway, I moved to San Francisco and worked for a travel agency for the first couple of years. And well, I think the rest of the story would take too long. The thing is, I never got to
- Jerry ReedJerry: graduate from Grinnell. And I resented that and I’ve come back about every ten years for the last 50 years. And I’m trying to find out where Coach/Dean Brown is buried because I want to piss on his grave. So, that’s it. Goodbye.
Alumni oral history interview with Jerry Reed '55 (1 of 2). Recorded June 4, 2010.