Joseph Piersen '62 - Joseph Piersen '62 (2 of 2)
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- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Okay. I’m Joe Piersen, Class of 1962 and this is my 50th reunion. I’ve done the oral interviews before but I’m covering a couple things that may or may not have... said, because as I get older I forget what I’ve actually said, so... at any rate.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: One of the questions on the list is, “How did you meet your wife at Grinnell?” My wife Marge, her name at that time was Marge, Margery Hendrick, and she was one year behind me. So I took a Physics class and there’s this young lady who sat in front of me and I thought to myself, “Now there’s the kinda girl I’d like to marry.” And so I asked her out and sure enough, eventually, a number of years later we were married.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Before that however, back at Grinnell, we were pinned and that’s a ceremony nobody today knows about, but that’s where you’d go to the women’s dorms at nighttime, in the evening, and the women’s dorms, of course, were very restricted back then but they did accept pinning ceremonies. So, we’d go there and then we’d sing a couple songs, and then you’d give her the pin, which you could pin on her and wear on campus.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: The songs were really corny, like they were from the 1910 era, like “Honey, honey that I love so well. Honey, honey bless your heart,” and so on. It’s very strange how traditions from the 1910s and the 1920s carried right through the 50s when we were in school, and within 20 more years they’d all been mostly forgotten, so.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: At any rate, we were married a few years out of Grinnell. We had two daughters, Colleen and Gail. Gail went to Grinnell.
- Sophie Haas & Joseph PiersenSophie: Oh.Joseph: Gail graduated from Grinnell also. At that time they were very... times had changed so much that she lived off of campus in a house that the College provided and they lived without any rules and it was boys and girls mixed in. It was a completely different way of life.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: At the end her grades slipped a little bit but she got out and she graduated and she went… Oh, by the way. She had late assignments and my wife and I couldn’t understand how anyone could turn in an assignment late. But, she did graduate and she went to Minneapolis and did blood transfusions. And then she got more organized. She went back to University of Iowa, became a Physician’s Assistant, which was a very good job, actually.Sophie: Oh, wow.Joseph: And she has had that job up in southern Wisconsin and now Madison for many years. At the age of 42, recently, she married for the first time and so she has a family that came with it, so that’s been working out well.Sophie: Good.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: Our older daughter was accepted at MIT and Carleton and she did not want to go to Grinnell. She wanted no part of Grinnell. That’s sort of a rebellion on her part, and so she chose Carleton, which is like Grinnell without being in Grinnell.Sophie: Mhm.Joseph: And she was happy enough there, not as happy as we were. But, it worked out well and we have three grandchildren by our first daughter and... I don’t think they’ll be going to Grinnell. I just can tell you that right now. Actually, they’re... the two boys are top-notch students. They could get into almost any place, but who knows.Sophie: You just don’t think they’re gonna wanna come here?Joseph: Their mother is not gonna want them to come here, probably.Sophie: Mhm.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So I’m gonna switch the topics to- another area of interest of mine is railroads, railroads in Grinnell. And I recently donated a good number of photographs from 1959-60 to the College archives about railroads, so I’m going to talk about that for a second.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: When Marge and I first came to Grinnell, we took the train here and back from the Chicago area, and that was the Rock Island line. And they had the Rocky Mountain Rocket and the Corn Belt Rocket, and those trains were fairly high class for their day, when of course the students always rode coach because that was inexpensive, the least expensive and that was the way to go.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: And... The students almost never ate in the dining car. They always brought their lunches with them. So, those trains would get into Grinnell at- in the late afternoon or early evening and we’d have to walk with our luggage, all of our luggage, from the station all the way to the dorms. Nobody helped us or picked us up and we didn’t have tons of luggage either, in those days. So... it was kind of an adventure.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: The worst train trip we had, and I don’t complain ‘cause I’m liking trains, when we came back to Grinnell after Christmas vacation, it was below zero outside. And the Rock Island trains were filled up so they gave us these commuter cars, which had center sliding doors. And a number of miles out of Chicago, the steam lines froze up and so there was no heat in any of the commuter cars, and then the doors, which were sliding doors, sort of slid partly open. It was freezing cold on that train.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Now, the lounge car, which is up ahead, there was steam in there and so it became absolutely packed with students. And since they served alcohol, at least in Illinois- not Iowa, Iowa was different. They served alcohol in Illinois and one of the students got drunk and smashed through the window. He didn’t go through but he smashed the window out, so that car was freezing too.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: And then, out in the middle of the Iowa cornfields in the pitch dark, the train came to a stop and waited and waited and waited.Sophie: Oh, no.Joseph: Must’ve been there for an hour and a half before the dispatcher let us go on to Grinnell. Oh, people were so furious. But what could you do, that’s the way it was.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: The other railroad in Grinnell was the M and St. L which cross the Rock Island downtown. M and St. L was also the one that went through campus. And... when I was out visiting as a freshman- I mean as a senior in high school, I looked out the window and saw a flashing light and I could tell that – because I knew about railroads – I could tell it was the only passenger car on the M and St. L. It was a motor car. It was not a heavy train. It was like a single car, and it went past in the night, so I never got a good look at it and shortly thereafter it was discontinued so there was no more passenger service North and South on M and St. L.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: did have a M and St. L spur that went into the powerhouse which is right down here on 8th street, across from... the Union, or whatever it’s called. And... they dropped off coal or fuel oil there later on to heat the campus. The... which is a second, another topic. The campus in those days got heavy snowfall in the winter because that was before global warming. It was always- almost always cold and full of snow, and there were winter sports.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: But, one positive thing was that the heating pipes went from the powerhouse to all the buildings and they generally went under the sidewalks. So, if you walked on the sidewalks that had the heating pipes underneath, you could walk on a snow-free sidewalk. Some of the kids did that. There are even rumors, which I think are true, that some of the students were able to finagle their way into the underground tunnels with the heating pipes and get from one class to the next. I don't- I’ve heard that’s true and I think it is actually.Sophie: Wow.Joseph: It sounds... sounds like Grinnellians, yes.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So, at any rate, we... I’m checking my notes. The only other thing I remember about the Rock Island is, on my way home once, I sat next to a farm boy who was about my age, and he and his dad had shipped a huge load of cattle off to the Chicago stockyards. Now the Chicago stockyards are long gone but this is, I’m telling you about the old days, and he had been sent by his family to go and negotiate the price of the cattle in the stockyards and I was thinking, “Here’s a boy my age, who’s negotiating probably thousands of dollars worth of material and he hasn’t gone to Grinnell.” I said, “Goes to show you can do well in life without actually going to college,” which was not my philosophy but that- there was a lesson in that.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: I’m gonna back up and... let me see if there’s anything else on that topic... I’m gonna back up and tell you about my brother Bill.Sophie: Okay.Joseph: My brother Bill was two years younger than I, and he graduated in the class of 1964. He was president of East Norris Hall. East and West Norris were brand new dorms at that time, and I moved into West Norris the very first year it was built, and Bill moved into East Norris, and he did very well at Grinnell.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: He... he later went to graduate school at the University of Indiana and got a Master’s degree in Folklore. He found out that nobody wanted to hire anybody in Folklore, so he became interested in African American History. He became an expert in it. He wrote articles and books on African American History, even though he was not African American. So, just about as he was to get his PhD, it became socially unacceptable for any white person to teach African American history. And my brother was not mad about this. He actually considered it kind of ironic or strange or funny, but it made getting a job more difficult.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So, he was hired by Fisk University, which is an all-black university. He became a History professor there and Chairman of the History Department, and he continued to write books. He was very well-known at the time, and he... he could teach any class he wanted with one exception: he could not teach Black history, because that was unacceptable. But, he was well-liked, and he did very well there.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: He and his family, tragically, were killed in a car accident.Sophie: Oh, that's terrible.Joseph: And their will left, in the event of the death of all three of them, he left all of his money to Grinnell College. And someone said to us, “Well, you should challenge that will and get the money for yourself.” I said to him, I said, “No. That’s what he wanted. We like Grinnell,” and so that’s where the money went, and his name is on one of the art studios in the Bucksbaum building.Sophie: Oh, nice.Joseph: Because of his nice donation.Sophie: Wow.Joseph: And that included the price of his house and so on.Sophie: Mhm.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So, anyway, I think there was something else I forgot to tell you about the trains. What was it? Well, maybe I’ll back up and remember that. So anyway, later on in my junior and senior year we could have cars… Oh, this is the story I forgot to tell you. Now I’m backing up. So, at that time in 1959 I lived in South Younker Hall.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: Students today don’t understand this, but there was only one way to get a phone call. There were these little telephone booths on every floor, and the parent would call the telephone booths and hope that someone would maybe answer, maybe, and hope that you were in your room, because there were no cell phones or anything like that.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: And so it happened that day, I walked into the phone booth, I reached for the phone and all of a sudden it rang and I picked- my mother pick- was on the other line. She said, “Your father has died. You have to come home right away.”Sophie: Oh, my gosh.Joseph: Yeah, that was tragic, and I packed up my things as quickly as I could and I took the night train out of Grinnell, which left like around ten at night and got into Chicago around four or five in the morning. And it’s the only time I rode that train, but that was a sad trip, yes.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: So here’s another off-shoot from that trip. When I got back, there was a test in my Economics class, a big exam... I don’t think it was the final exam. And I had no time to study for it. I thought I had to take it anyway, so I did and I got like a D or a D – or something of that sort. I went and I talked to the professor and I said, “Listen, my father has died. I couldn’t study for it,” and I didn’t beg him to change the grade. He said, “Well, I feel very sorry for you, but that’s your grade, now. Very sorry.” But I thought to myself, “There’s something wrong here, about Grinnell. There’s supposed to be," y'know, "understanding.”
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: So, in later years I became a junior high teacher and one of my students had a tragedy. I knew how to handle it with some sensibility. So, that’s a negative thing about Grinnell. I’ve never forgotten that.Sophie: Yeah.Joseph: I think that the professors nowadays are probably more humane. I knew he felt badly about it, but feeling badly is not the same as doing something about it.Sophie: Yeah.Joseph: So, I was a little bit angry at that.
- Joseph PiersenJoseph: All right, now I’m going to skip ahead a little bit. When I was a junior and senior, senior- juniors and seniors could have cars and my mother bought a really expensive Buick convertible. She thought that if she let me use it, it would turn me into a cool guy, which did not work. That failed completely. But, I got to bring the convertible out to Grinnell, which is fine.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: But because it was an expensive car, I went and rented a garage which was a couple blocks east of the campus and I kept it in the garage where it was safe. Then I realized that the garage had a secondary use. It could be a place to take your girlfriend, which was very handy sometimes, but in the- Grinnell is so cold most of the year-Sophie: Yeah.Joseph: -that it had its disadvantages. At any rate, the car did not turn me cool, but it was used to carry the homecoming queen around the track during the homecoming.Sophie: Oh, wow.Joseph: Yes, so that was a positive.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: OK, let me see. When I came here to Grinnell, there was an old library on Park Street. It was probably something like the Carnegie Library or something. It was really obsolete and old-fashioned. And that year they built the Burling Library, so I was in the first class of students to use it. It was an incredible improvement.Sophie: Yeah.Joseph: There were large amounts of open space in that library-Sophie: Mhm.Joseph: -which don’t exist today. They’ve crowded it up completely.Sophie: Yeah.Joseph: But, you could sit up in the top and look out the windows and watch the traffic going on Highway Six. It was wonderful, yeah.
- Joseph Piersen & Sophie HaasJoseph: The last thing I’m going to say is that I took some photographs when I was at Grinnell. Film was expensive for kids, in those days.Sophie: Mhm.Joseph: And I had another hobby, which was coin collecting, which is even more expensive but... So, I spent half of my expendable money on coins and half on film. If I had to do it again I’d spend it all on film, because that’s kind of a historic record of the way things were.Sophie: Yeah.Joseph: And all my photographs of trains and buildings and things are now in the Grinnell archives, and I’m very pleased about that.Sophie: That's great, yeah.Joseph: So, that’s all I have to say today.Sophie: Alright, thank you.Joseph: Mhm.
Alumni oral history interview with of Joseph Piersen '62 (2 of 2). Recorded June 2, 2012.