Clay Williams '73

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  • Sophie Haas
    Sophie: -record then.
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: My name is Clay Williams, and I currently live in New York City, New York, New York, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of 1973. I guess I would probably want to talk about the importance of Gerry Lalonde, who was my... He was actually one of those beneficiaries of Kent State. He’s one of the few people that had it work out well ‘cause John Crossett was another Classics professor at Grinnell at the time and Lalonde was in a one year contract filling in for Bill McKibben, who was on sabbatical. When McKibben came back, Lalonde, of course, didn’t have a job. But then Crossett was so pissed off about Kent State that he moved down the road to Cornell College and it opened up a job for Lalonde.
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: And so Lalonde, I must have taken half a dozen classes from him. In fact, that’s what I’m donating money to now, is his fund because I was unable to go overseas ‘cause I was a professor’s kid from Idaho. Which is, Idaho’s very third world as far as salaries, and so there was no way that I could afford to go overseas, even- In fact, I got accepted and even took a- it was an underwater archeology program over in Greece and got accepted, etcetera, and then they go, “It’s gonna cost you like, two or three thousand,” which was of course, might as well have been a million. So Lalonde has started this fund for students to do overseas studying so that’s really worthwhile, I think, so I’m donating. But I had a lot of fun!
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: There was one mentioned here, a question about the most important- or is it- “What book influenced you?” I guess, Homer, but, that’s two books: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Just the fact that we were able to study something in such depth, ‘cause I must have taken… We read it in our Humanities class. We read both works the first semester. But then I took a course- we read- I had a class that was in the Iliad and then I had a class that was in the Odyssey in Greek, of course, so I was a Classics major.
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: As far as these other questions, another question that I’d like to mention was, I’m really impressed now there’s a lot more advice. There were no advisors then. There was the swimming coach, who was a nice guy. He was the boy’s, the men’s counselor, that was it. Then there was some student advisors and RAs, who were, you know, 24-year-olds or something, but there were no- there was no advice as far as professional, what to do.
  • Clay Williams & Sophie Haas
    Clay: And also I would’ve gone, because I’ve become a college librarian at Hunter College in New York. There was, and I didn’t even know about it until later, there’s a program where you can go to the... what’s the American History Library in... the Newberry.Sophie: Oh.Clay: There’s a semester in the Newberry, which I didn’t even know about and I would’ve done that differently. I would have gone to that, which probably would have been pretty easy. Chicago would have been much easier to go to than Athens or Rome. There weren’t any programs then, though. That was... within Grinnell. I mean, there was the- do they still have the Florence- the London/Florence program?Sophie: Mhm.Clay: That was about it, unless you did it on your own. I mean, there were the ones in the sciences for- at Costa Rica.
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: But, coming back to the bit about the opportunities, I think it’s really wonderful that the students that they have so many more opportunities in that sense. But, at the same time, we didn’t know we didn’t have necessary opportunities. Those were all retrospect so it wasn’t… And it was a weird time to be here. So, nobody... You know, I didn’t take the GREs because I had a really low draft number, so I assumed that I was gonna be drafted, in Spring of ’73.
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: Well, that was- the Spring of ’73 the draft ended, so I hadn’t taken the GREs in the fall of ’72, because I figured with a low draft number, and my health was perfect, I would’ve gone into the military. I probably should’ve just joined the Army and gone to the foreign language school or something like that, and become a- and picked up another language that wasn’t a dead language. You know? That probably would’ve been a wise thing to do. But, joining the Army then wasn’t considered a very shrewd thing.
  • Clay Williams
    Clay: But, I should mention, as I mentioned before, that I met- I’ve been married twice, happily married this time and happily friends with the first wife, if you will. They’re both Grinnell women. My current wife got a- she ended up with a PhD in American Lit. from the University of Texas and now she’s a banker in New York. And- she didn’t wanna wander through America; she had to go back to New York to take care of her mother.
  • Clay Williams & Sophie Haas
    Clay: And the other woman is a... became a neurosurgeon but is an emergency room doctor now in Colorado, Boulder Colorado. So I had not only the good fortune of meeting those two women but it also demonstrates how Grinnell teaches you how good it is to really hang around with really smart women. But I think that’s all I have to say.Sophie: Great. Thanks so much.Clay: You bet.
Alumni oral history interview with Clay Williams '73. Recorded June 2, 2012.