Jerry Reed '55 - Jerry Reed '55 (2 of 2)
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- Jerry ReedJerry: This is a story that I submitted to the Grinnell magazine which is the alumni magazine and it got- Wait. I'm going to stop and get some water. I- After graduating from Lincoln High School in Osage, I got a job working for a some plasterers
- Jerry ReedJerry: for the summer, and they harassed me all summer about my going to college. They had a friend who had a huge vocabulary and was a loser. So from that they postulated that going to college was a waste of time. Anyway, I was getting paid the lordly sum of a dollar an hour and I had to mix the mud, put it in the two five gallon buckets,
- Jerry ReedJerry: run up a ramp to the second-story window, run down the steps to the hallway, and dump the mud, and rush back, and just as I got back, they would shout, “More mud!” So anyway, my last day of work, they took me out for a beer (this was in Minnesota, where they didn’t check IDs) and they were laughing all the time because they said, “We usually have to hire two high school students to do the work!”
- Jerry ReedJerry: Anyway, I went to Grinnell and was given... We were the first students to move into Younker, and I had a single room in the basement of South Younker. Our first meal, our first college meal, was an outdoor picnic in front of Main Hall. And I had been over visiting an old friend in the stables, he looked like Mr. Ed, so when I came to the picnic,
- Jerry ReedJerry: I came to the third table first. Two-thirds of the students got their -and faculty- got their food from the first table. Each table featured a huge Iowa ham. My dorm room at South Younker was right across from the nurses. Oh, let me set the scene a bit! All the parents, of course, drove their 18-year-old
- Jerry ReedJerry: to Grinnell, and, of course, carried their daughters’ boxes up and got to meet the roommate and all that. And then went back home, mostly the suburbs of Chicago. And for a lot of the girls, except for Girl Scout camp, this was their first time away from home. So anyway, about 8 o’clock at night, the nurses’ phones started to ring, and
- Jerry ReedJerry: people were getting sick all over campus. So she enrolled about ten of us to search the rooms, and we found some students sprawled in a pool of vomit. They took about twenty people to the hospital. And so I could just envision the next morning, her parents get up for breakfast, and while the wife fixes breakfast, the husband goes out into the wet lawn and gets the Chicago Tribune, or the Des Moines Register, out of the bakery bag- out of the bread bag. And
- Jerry ReedJerry: opens it up, and there in giant headlines, “Massive Food Poisoning Hits Grinnell!” And that was our introduction to food at Grinnell, which was managed by a nutritionist who served hospital-type food. Anyhow, about
- Jerry ReedJerry: 200 students were affected, and they found out that at the first table, there was one bad ham. I wrote a story about this for the alumni magazine, Grinnell, and I got it back so quickly it had skid marks on it! So this is my very first time to tell the story. I hope it’s not edited out! But I think I am going to rewrite the story and see if Grinnell magazine will accept it. I have one more story.
- InterviewerInterviewer: Great.
- Jerry ReedJerry: This story also starts in New Student Week. There was a lovely girl (I’ll call her Julie) who was from a Chicago suburb and she had beautiful freckles. And the very first day she met a young man from Chicago, named Buddy. Buddy was one of these friendly, outgoing guys, who was sort of Hollywood-handsome. He was only about 5’9” or 5’10”, but very good-looking and a great
- Jerry ReedJerry: personality. He talked to her. He was always winking and that type of thing. Anyway, they met the very first day of New Student Week and they fell in instant lust. And they were skipping classes, they were walking around holding hands in a daze, and they were humping in the bushes, and spending their evenings at the Grinnell golf course, which was really reserved for upper-class students who were engaged to be engaged. Anyway, about one
- Jerry ReedJerry: week into school, the girls were locked up at 10:15 at night and if a girl wanted to get in after 10:15, she had to ring the bell and a janitor let her in and wrote down her name for discipline the next day. And Julie turned up at the door at 11:30, drunk. And he thought this is a job for Dean Gardner, who had an apartment right above the Main Hall door.
- Jerry ReedJerry: And she had been defending the virtue of Grinnell co-eds for four years, and she opens the door for Julie and Julie says, “Get out of my way! I am drunk. I have to pee, and I have to douche!” And she pushed Dean Gardner to one side and staggered off to bed. Needless to say, her expulsion from Grinnell was on her coffee table the next day when she got up at noon.
- Jerry ReedJerry: It was forbidden to have students to have cars on campus, but she had a huge old Chrysler station wagon that her dad had given her. Like a lot of students, she parked a couple blocks off campus. They spent the afternoon packing their possessions into the station wagon, and drove off into the sunset, and a couple days later we got a telegram from Salt Lake City, that the only word was, “Married” and that’s the last we ever heard of them.
- Jerry ReedJerry: Yeah, I think that’s it!
Alumni oral history interview with Jerry Reed '55 (2 of 2). Recorded June 4, 2010.