Diane Gutenkauf '80
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- Diane GutenkaufDiane: My name is Diane Gutenkauf. I live in Elmhurst, Illinois and I’m a member of the class of 1980.
- Chelsie SalvateraChelsie: OK, Diane, thank you for coming. First question: Why did you come to Grinnell College and what is your first memory of the campus?
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Oh, I came to Grinnell as a transfer student. I had been going to a small college in Illinois that was having financial problems and I thought it would be better for me to find a school that was a little bit more stable. And, I didn’t apply to very many schools and Grinnell was something my parents suggested. They had heard of it; they knew about its academic reputation and I think they thought the social atmosphere would be a fit for me. So I applied to Grinnell and I got in as a transfer.Chelsie: What year was this?Diane: That was in 19… let’s see, I was a freshman in ’76, ’77, so I transferred in, as a sophomore in the fall of 1977.Chelsie: Okay.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: My first memory of the campus is, one of those classic Grinnell connection events. My parents drove me here, and we drove into the parking lot of the Forum and my dad went inside to figure out if this is where we supposed to be. He walks in the front door and this student walks up to him and says, “Mr. Gutenkauf! What are you doing here?” It was the daughter of friends of my parents, a professional colleague of my father’s. They lived near Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and I did not know she was a student here. We’d been friends back and forth since childhood and our parents were very close friends. I had no idea that she went to school here, so the first person that we ran into was Anne Finkelstein. In the Foum. I thought, “OK, now I know this is gonna work out.”
- Chelsie SalvateraChelsie: Okay, perfect. So during your time at Grinnell was there a professor, staff or student who had a particularly strong influence on your life?
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: Yes, there was. I took an Anthropology class from John Andelson, and it must’ve been sophomore year because I hadn’t declared a major, wasn’t sure what I wanted to study. I thought Chemistry. I’d been a good science student in high school and I was interested in it but Chemistry class just wasn’t really clicking, here, and then I took this Anthropology class from John Andelson and was like, “Wow. I really like this.” And I proceeded to take every class I could that he offered the rest of my career here at Grinnell, and we still keep in touch.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: And I am fascinated by the work that he does and we talk back and forth at some point and, anthropologist but, at some point in my professional career I started working in an arboretum that owned a prairie and I worked on interpreting the prairies and it was just about the same time that John was forming the Center for Prairie Studies so I got to come out here and kind of touch base and do some prairie visits on research I was doing. So for me that has just been fascinating, and it’s always great to come back and see him. We had many long conversationsChelsie: Oh, so he's currently still a professor here?Diane: He’s still a professor here, yup.Chelsie: Wow.Diane: Yeah.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: What are your best memories of your time at Grinnell College?Diane: Oh gosh, best memories. That’s such an interesting question.Chelsie: It’s very broad.Diane: It really is, because, some of them are social activities; some of them are classes.Chelsie: Yeah, talk about them.Diane: And, I think you just, from the… the amount of freedom that we had as students was empowering and a little frightening at the same time. So some of those memories of finding my way in the world- I was very young when I came here and, so growing up I became an adult at Grinnell.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: I think most students become adults during college but I was seventeen when I got here as a sophomore, something I kept secret from most of my classmates. I did not want them to know that I was considerably younger than they were, but I really think I went well on the way to becoming an adult through bad decisions and good decisions. But I made it as a student, so I think a lot of those memories around finding my way in the world. I only lived in the dorm for a year, and then I moved into an apartment with a couple of girlfriends. Then I moved into a house that is no longer a group living situation house anymore. As a matter of fact, the Center for Prairie Studies is in the house I lived in. Then I got another apartment, then I stayed around…
- Chelsie SalvateraChelsie: Do you remember how your dorm room looked like?
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: Oh, my dorm room, I lived in, yeah, I do because it’s not there anymore. I lived in the second floor of Haines, and the layout were quads in the corners and then the loggia side there were single rooms and on the street side there were two two room doubles, and they were two room doubles, so you had a big outer room and then a smaller room off of that. The smaller room had the two closets and the sink, and the bigger room had enough room for the dresser. I think I managed to get my desk and my bed- I had the smaller inner room and my roommate was Liz Pomer had the bigger room. It was a lot bigger and there was room for both dressers and I’m sure we had a popcorn popper, or something to heat hot water and stuff like that in there. So my room was just this crackerbox with a radiator, we had big hot water radiators, and a window and two closets and a sink in the corner.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Wow. That’s pretty good for a sophomore.Diane: It was. I think transfer students got something...Chelsie: Extra?Diane: A little extra.Chelsie: Just for transferring.Diane: Because, yeah. It was like, “Yay! You came here!”
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Alright. Do you remember the kind of clothes-Diane: Clothes.Chelsie: -that you wore everyday as a Grinnell student, and on special occasions?
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: Well, it was the 70s, so clothing choices probably weren’t- or fashion, I should say fashion was not top of mind for most students. Not that we didn’t dress deliberatively, it’s that there was something too bourgeois about worrying about what was being dictated to people with money, and none of us had money.Chelsie: Right.Diane: I think I sat down and calculated out how much I could spend every week, and make my money last the whole semester. It was probably five dollars.Chelsie: Wow.Diane: Well, but you have to think about how long did it take to earn that five dollars and what did it buy, and five dollars was enough that I could treat myself to something, French fries occasionally at the Grill or go into town and have a few beers, I mean really beers were fifty cents so five dollars could go pretty far.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: So, clothing. So it was jeans. It was jeans and t-shirts almost universally. Although, I did own quite a few sort of cotton, flowy skirt things and I remember wearing those when it was hotter out. I had this beautiful blue wool skirt that had been my mother’s that she bought on her honeymoon, so this great vintage skirt with kind of an inverted pleat in the front. It was really classic-lined, knee-length, and I wore it in the winter and I loved it.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: There used to be a women’s clothing store in town, and I remember, I don’t even know why I was in there. I must’ve needed something for a special occasion and I didn’t have anything, and I went in there and I found a jacket that worked with the skirt and I remember thinking at the time how amazing this was. I had this great tweed skirt and here’s this jacket that I bought. It felt like a big splurge. But, dressing up, I don’t ever remember having an occasion to dress up outside of the Waltz.Chelsie: Waltz, right.Diane: That would’ve been the single occasion that I remember that we dressed for, and I know that earlier classes dressed for dinner, had dances, and we just came in jeans and t-shirts to pretty much everything.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Okay. Awesome. Was there a book that influenced you most in college?Diane: Oh, I don’t think so. I mean, not any one book. I think it was really the act of reading voraciously that was the most influential. I’d always been a reader, but reading, guided reading, having directed reading was...Chelsie: Different, right?Diane: Yeah, it really was. High school, it’s all about learning, kind of learning how to read a piece and in college it’s really more focused on y’know, what does this mean and how is it applicable and how to do you think about this and how does it relate to everything else and there was that kind of context for reading.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Okay. So you felt like it was here at Grinnell where you learned how to do that?Diane: Yeah.Chelsie: Have you been using those strategies in your career?Diane: Yes, very, very much so and learning how to, oh gosh. I learned how to do a research paper in eighth grade, y’know the technical skills. You’re gonna take notes, and you’re gonna outline and you’re gonna do this and then write it all up and piece of cake, research paper. At the time I hated it. Grinnell was where I really felt like, “Oh my God,” I am using all that stuff that I learned in eighth grade that I hated at the time. But, I still do that. I mean, a lot of, a big chunk of what I do professionally still involves research.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: So how exactly has Grinnell... took you to, or influenced where you are now like, your career-wise, as since we're talking about...Diane: Well, I think a liberal arts education, and particularly the way it was structured at Grinnell, helped me stay interested in a variety of topics that seem unrelated but then weave back together again, and have throughout my career. I’m a museum director, and I’ve worked in museums of different types with different content, foci. The influence that Grinnell’s had really involves helping me stay interested in a lot of different things, but also pull them together.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: I worked at an arboretum. The difficulty arboreta have is connecting with people that come there. You come in and you see this big sort of forest-y place, that isn’t really a woodland and it’s a deliberately organized collection of trees but it’s not readily apparent unless you’re kind of in the know. And, when you- we wanted to connect with a much broader audience, help people come there and really understand what’s going on, so the trick is, how do you get people to care about trees? What’s the hook? How do you get them to care about what we do with trees, which is so esoteric.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: I mean, who collects trees and organizes them according to their genus and species and where they come from in the world and what can you learn about it? So, coming from a liberal arts background made it so easy to say, OK, here you bring in poetry and you bring in science and you bring in all these things and find out what people already know and connect with them and that’s really what came out of my Grinnell education, was this curiosity and willingness to just make this experience bigger than the one discipline that you think it would be.Chelsie: Wow.Diane: So that was fun for me.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: OK, I’m going to go back to images of Grinnell town?Diane: The town.Chelsie: If you may have any?Diane: Well, it was such a different economic era for farming that the town was still a vibrant place for people, a center for the region and that’s changed so much over the years. It had a drugstore. It had more than one hardware store. There were three or four supermarkets. There were four places where you could get your car repaired. It was a really active, vibrant center of town with people of all ages. Young families, older families. People stayed here. It’s been over thirty years, and a lot has changed in America.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: So my images of Grinnell, and my memories of Grinnell are, “I need to get a something. I’m gonna go into town and look for it. I don’t need to drive to Des Moines or Iowa City to just buy a new pair of socks or sneakers or a wrench." And, I walk through town now and I see a town that is still surviving, but it doesn’t have that same feel any more of a really thriving center. It’s not, the farmer’s market’s great. There was no farmer’s market then, and it was hard to find local fruits or vegetables because that’s not what people grew around here.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: But, my other memory of town, I mean, is sort of the complete flip of that, is that students only lived in slum housing. There was no real oversight of the kind of housing available to students and people who had decent houses didn’t like to rent to students ‘cause frankly, we were really hard on places. We had no sense of other people’s property.Chelsie: Right.Diane: I mean in a really appalling way that, looking back at it now, I think we were so badly behaved toward things that belonged to other people that we had no business, y'know, feeling like we could co-opt. So I don’t blame people for not wanting to rent to students, but at the same time the housing that we lived in was so vile and substandard.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: I don’t know how much it’s changed. I do know one of the houses I used to live in, I walked by it last night. It’s been completely renovated, it looks like it’s been converted back to a single family house. It looks like somebody cares about it and at the time I lived there it was owned by a notorious slum landlord. It was roach infested. It hadn’t had any maintenance in God knows how long, and it was just awful and we were like, “Yay! We got an apartment!” Really? Now looking back I think, “I wouldn’t want my kids to live there.” So, yeah.Chelsie: It’s much better now. Diane: Yeah, that kind of thing I think is a lot better and I suspect the students have more respect for private property, personal possessions of others. I think there’s just been a big shift in how we raised our children, how people now are.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: So how do you think Grinnell College itself has changed since you were a student, since you talked about the town?Diane: Oh gosh. Other than the physicality of campus, I don’t feel like I really know how it’s changed. I talk to students of- and professors that I know. I don’t know that the real core of what made Grinnell Grinnell has changed. I think that’s still there, and that makes me feel connected to the College. The physical structures change and I hear my fellow alums complaining. “Oh, this building I remembered is different.”
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: I'm like, "Well, yeah, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Really, step back and look at that building. How could it function in the way it needs to now? It can’t." It needs to change in order to stay really relevant and stay valuable. So I think academically, Grinnell is the same and that’s what’s important to me. It’s like, the heart of the school, why people come here. I think there’s a stronger, more vocal emphasis on social engagement and community organizing and that’s important to me.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: It was there, but we were- we were the children of the 70s. We were that slight aftermath of the war and the peace movement and, y'know, the civil rights movement. We were just, just after that so the dust hadn’t settled yet. I think now, the dust has settled and these things have coalesced into something even stronger, and a conscious effort on the part of students to say, “I wanna be involved. I wanna volunteer. I think this is important.” I think that’s a change, but-Chelsie: The Science Center.Diane: Yeah, but it’s become, I hate to say it’s become formalized because that’s almost negative. It’s become more ingrained, I think. It's not as… fuzzy as it was when we were students. We just, we didn- we knew it was important. Now we think there’s more of a conscious decision to say, “This is really important in the world and therefore it’s important to me and I want to make a difference.” We didn’t say it as plainly as that.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: So, describe something that is no longer-Diane: Pff!Chelsie: -on campus…Diane: No longer here but meaningful to me? Oh, Darby Gym!Chelsie: I knew you were gonna say that.Diane: Of course I’m gonna say that, everybody said that! Well y’know it was the quintessential, dance in the gym place. It was a beautiful old building in a really awkward place on campus, given the way the campus was growing. I understand why the College did strategic planning and said y’know, there’s this spot, right in the middle of everything! That’s part of what made Darby so great. All the other people talk about the Forum. "Oh, the Forum’s in the middle of everything." I look at it and I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not in the middle anymore. And yes, we all walk by there, but that’s ‘cause the Grill was in there. If the Grill hadn’t been in there, really, we wouldn’t- probably not have used it in the way you think we used it."
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: But Darby Gym, first of all, it was a historic structure. It had beautiful lines.It was a classic, big gym. Y’know, big red brick gym. The wooden floor and locker rooms in the basement and a place where, when you went to a dance, you were doing that sort of movie version of high school dance in the gym. So it was sentimental for very many reasons but it was also a really nice-looking building. I mean architecturally, I think it was a nice connection to the other buildings around it, so I hated to see it go for a whole lot of reasons.Chelsie: There was actually a couple who came in who said they named their cat Darby.Diane: Not surprised.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Did you get to check out our new gym?Diane: Y’know it's on my list to do this morning.Chelsie: You need to do it.Diane: So as soon as we wrap up...Chelsie: State of the arts.Diane: I know.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: And- and you have to have great facilities.Chelsie: Beautiful facility.Diane: And- There’s a dance studio there. I’m thrilled for this.Chelsie: Oh yeah, we use it a lot.Diane: I bet. This weekend there were yoga classes-Chelsie: Zumba.Diane: -and zumba classes in there.Chelsie: Did you get to attend?Diane: I don’t do zumba.Chelsie: I think you'd love it. You'd be surprised.Chelsie: I know, I know. One of my employees, who's quite a bit older than I am, she just started doing zumba and she loves it. She’s like, “Huuuugh,” but she loves it.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: But, and y’know, realistically, things get outmoded. You have to update them. I totally get it. But there’s something sentimental about a building like Darby. It’s like our, our class dinner last night was in the Quad dining hall and just going in that Hogwarts-esque space made me think, “This is such a beautiful space.” You have to capture that somehow, in historic preservation we call it adaptive reuse. There’s gotta be a way to be really creative about how you capture a space and reuse it so that you still respect the structure and create a new use for it that makes it relevant.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: It is - here’s my plug for historic preservation and sustainable living: The greenest building is the one that’s still standing. Tearing it down and building new wastes resources.Chelsie: Yes.Diane: So, the preservational world is not loud enough about this, that preserving an old building is green and sustainable.Chelsie: Yes.Diane: And tearing it down just to build something that’s environmentally efficient misses the point.Chelsie: Exactly. So, I'm taking that that was your favorite place on campus?Diane: By- Yes.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: So, I don’t know how much you know about the students today, but how do you think they compare to your classmates?Diane: Gosh, I so don’t know that much about them. I have a step-son who’s in college, but he’s going to a very different kind of a college. Y’know, I look at his experience and it’s very different from mine. But I- I don’t think I can make a parallel comparison to what Grinnell students are like. The students that I have met are poised and mature and engaged, and I don’t know that we were quite so poised. Or maybe we didn’t feel it. Maybe inside we didn’t feel it but outside we projected it.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: OK. This is a very broad one, describe student and campus life as you experienced it during your time at Grinnell.Diane: I think I touched on it a little bit. It was open. There were so many rich activities. The college was able to provide concerts and lectures and poetry readings and drama performances, and anybody who was sort of swooping through would come and perform here. You probably heard people talk about Gil Scott Heron and that performance because he just died. It was a memorable one for people in my class.Chelsie: Yes.Diane: But there were a lot of others and at some point it all kind of mushes together, but having people actively care about what movies we would should on the weekends and then there were knockdown drag-outs about what movies we were gonna show on the weekends. The College allowing us to take responsibility for so many things, acting as if we were adults, forced us, in many ways, to behave like adults.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: My step-son’s school doesn’t do that. Went to visit him and there’s a kid at a desk at the front. “I need to see your ID before you can come into the dorm.” I’m walking with my step-son to bring his stuff into the dorm room. “I have to see your ID.” Seriously?Chelsie: "Come on."Diane: "I’m his mother, so that doesn’t count?" “No, you show me your ID. I need to log you in. I need to do this and that.” You have a lot, curfews, things.Chelsie: 'You can't drink in the dorm'? Where are you gonna drink?Chelsie: Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Yeah, I mean, as much as I don’t want him to do it, I want him to do it someplace where he’s not driving.Chelsie: Yes, yes, yes.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: Y'know, and the reality is, he’s gonna do those things. I just don’t want him sneaking around. I want him to learn from it and act mature, and forcing him to submit to those kinds of parental rules keeps him in a position of teenage that I don’t think he should, Grinnell should- or, Grinnell. College should be a time of transition from that, parent’s home, teenage rules, to "Crap, I’m out in the world. Now I gotta earn a living. How am I gonna do that?" You need to transition, and I think college is the place where you should learn how to transition. You should learn how to manage your money. You should learn how to rent an apartment. You should learn how to pay your bills. You should learn how to be responsible for actions. I didn’t study. I failed a test. Oooh. Y’know, nobody’s gonna save you. “Oh, there, there Sweetie, you can take it tomorrow.” It’s just not- it shouldn’t happen.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: So I’m curious, would you- how do you feel about sending your own children to Grinnell?Diane: I would love it if my children were interested in Grinnell.Chelsie: Okay, okay.Diane: I think it would be great. They- they have very different personalities and so if Grinnell turns out to be a fit for one of them, I would be so thrilled.Chelsie: Okay.Diane: It's probably not gonna happen.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Last question, if you were writing a history of Grinnell College what would you include from your years here?Diane: Wow, what would I include? I really- it's kind of asking about what pivotal moments do I think - I really- but I think history is about storytelling. It’s not about names and dates, it’s about weaving together a narrative that illustrates or captures an era. So, I think what I would include are... Gosh, I’m just thinking about so many people that I knew... I’m sorry.Chelsie: No, you’re fine, don’t worry about it.... You're okay.... Don't worry about it.
- Chelsie SalvateraChelsie: I would include those stories of the people that aren’t here anymore.... Isn’t that funny? I said goodbye to a friend of mine this morning and he was all choked up, and I thought, “We’re going to see each other again.” Y'know, maybe he just got so emotional, but you kinda think- it’s sort of emotional fallout.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: But, my history of Grinnell would be stories about the people, and that makes me think about the people that just, I don’t get to see anymore.Chelsie: Yeah... I’m sorry. I'm trying to look for a tissue right now.Diane: Thank you, I- Alright, I’m just gonna take a deep breath and I’ll be fine.Chelsie: Yeah, no, take your time. I'm trying to look for a tissue. Where’s the tissue box?Diane: There never is one when you need one!Chelsie: No, never.Diane: OK, just looking for it, now I’m fine.Chelsie: Okay.
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: All right. I- hoooh. Let me see if I can try that one again.Chelsie: Yeah. Please do.Diane: There you go. That’s close enough. All right.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: If I were writing a history of Grinnell, I would try to capture the stories just like you’re doing now, because it’s through storytelling that we connect the past to the present, because it’s that, that personalizing of the history. You can tell me what year Grinnell was built and then renovated and then what was housed in it. But, that isn’t as important to me as somebody saying, “My Psych class met in there and I was just astonished that I got to do experiments on cats.”
- Diane Gutenkauf & Chelsie SalvateraDiane: Y’know, for me, that’s the most meaningful part of the history of Grinnell, is somebody saying, “I got to do that.” So while Darby is the building I think I’m gonna miss the most, what I miss about Darby is standing this far away from The Police and listening to this music and going, “Oh, I really like this. Who are these guys?” Y'know, because, they opened for another band! The other band was the headliner, and I’m like standing in front, this far away from The Police in a gym! And they’re playing a gym in the middle of nowhere Iowa, and that’s what I want to remember about Darby. And I was- "Wow, that was pretty cool. Dance around here on this wooden floor of this cool old building." So...Chelsie: Wow. That’s great. You got to...Diane: Yeah.
- Diane GutenkaufDiane: Yeah, I think that’s a good- capturing the stories about the place because if I read a history of Grinnell, and liste- I’m gonna listen to these stories told by class- other classes and think, "Wow. What if-" How interesting it was that their experience was like that and mine was like this. That’s what’s meaningful to me.
- Chelsie Salvatera & Diane GutenkaufChelsie: Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to add on there? Any additional…?Diane: Ah, gosh.Chelsie: Did you have like, a set thing that you wanted to say?Diane: No.Chelsie: Okay.Diane: No, there wasn’t- I didn’t have a particular thing I like, “I gotta come in and say that, and capture it on tape! Because nobody will ever know this if I don’t say it on tape!” No, I don’t think I have a thing like that.Chelsie: Thank you so much, Diane.Diane: Thank you.
Alumni oral history interview with Diane Gutenkauf '80. Recorded June 5, 2011.