Greg Thielmann '72
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- Greg ThielmannGreg: My name is Greg Thielmann and I currently live in Arlington, Virginia. I’m a member of the Grinnell College Class of 1972. I’m going to ramble a bit with a few thoughts of my Grinnell years.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: I’m actually one of the Iowans who attended Grinnell. There used to be more than there are now. In my case, I traveled only 18 miles to go to Grinnell College. I grew up in Newton, Iowa. This was a real cultural awakening for me. Even though it was a school very close to my hometown, in many ways it was a world apart. A lot of the students at Grinnell came from large metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, DC. I felt in many ways that I was at least a year or two behind in terms of my maturation, not to mention my exposure to courses like Calculus. So, that was a real adventure for me.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: I also came out of- this was in the middle of the sixties- so I came out of a fairly conservative political milieu. The smart people in my hometown were Republicans, and I was a Republican at Grinnell. When I came, in fact, was, I think Treasurer of the Grinnell Young Republicans.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: That lasted about a year or two and I realized that at that time in the late sixties, I was much more comfortable with the Democratic Party crowd. There was a lot of hostility in the Republicans against youth at the time. Even short-haired youth were somewhat suspect. I think partly because of the influence at Grinnell, I decided that there was no role for a liberal Republican at the time. About one month before John Lindsey, the Mayor of New York, switched parties, I switched parties and went to the precinct caucus in Jasper County for McGovern in early 1972. So politically, it was different.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: I started out at Grinnell in the Air Force ROTC, attracted partly by military service, which attracted me at the time, but also to the fact that the Air Force offered a full ride scholarship which at Grinnell was a very substantial thing. But, that only lasted for one semester because in applying for the scholarship then, I found out that the fact that I had had asthma after age 12 made me ineligible.
- Sophie Haas & Greg ThielmannSophie: Oh.Greg: So I found myself in the funny position of then, when they had the draft, which is a very big part of being a Grinnell male student in the late sixties, I had a draft number of 354 or something like that, which meant that there was virtually no chance of getting drafted. But I had already been turned down from the Air Force-Sophie: Yeah.Greg: -for physical reasons, so a lot of my colleagues thought that was completely unfair, that I would have two excuses not to go to Vietnam.Sophie: Yeah.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: And over time, I changed my- I would say my political ideology evolved, and it was partly absorbing the impact of things like the Pentagon Papers, which convinced me and a whole lot of other people that some of the paranoid fantasies of the Students for Democratic Society about what was going on were actually true.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: So I ended up... my years at Grinnell, being against the war in Vietnam, thinking it was a war sort of unjustly fought from the beginning. And, I ended up on a course toward government service which, in my era, was sort of beyond the pale. In fact, private sector was completely beyond the pale but even government service was a little suspect when I was going to Grinnell, but I did end up at the office management budget and then entering the Foreign Service.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: But going back to Grinnell, I would say that there were certainly a number of classes here which were very meaningful to me, and I think shaped a lot of my subsequent life. I guess, foremost in the Political Science area, was a Professor named Jim McGee who taught the international affairs courses. And I think if there was a single faculty mentor, he was probably the one who gave me such valuable insights as, an appreciation for irony, that if you start to recognize irony, you’re beginning to understand historical developments.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: There were also, right off the bat, professors like Mr. Foster who taught the Humanities course at the time. He was in the English department. He was famous for a number of reasons. One was that virtually everyone in his class got a 2.5. He was very stingy with As or Bs. That was, of course, a shocker for many of us at Grinnell who came with stellar grades from our high schools.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: That was an uncomfortable feeling, but I was due to rotate into another Humanities professor after the first semester. I guess that was just the usual routine; you wouldn’t stay in the same one. But, I thought so highly of his teaching, I thought that it was worth taking another class and... even at the price of a lower grade. So, he was clearly someone that I valued very much as a teacher.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: He helped improve my writing, which is one of the intentions of having Humanities at the time. He, among other things, taught me that the active tense is preferable to, or transitive, to intransitive because you don’t know who the agent is. And it was funny because I had apparently learned in high school that it sounded more erudite if something was done rather than so and so did.Sophie: Uh-huh.Greg: That was just one of the little things that stuck in my mind about something I learned at Grinnell about writing. So, it was things like that that I think had an important role in my development.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: Another interesting class for me was one taught by a Marxist professor who I don’t think stayed very long at Grinnell, but the class was very challenging. He encouraged arguments, and we had a lot of arguments. That was curiously a class that was taught with a bias that I did not share, but which ended up, I think, being a very important part of my educational process.
- Greg ThielmannGreg: I was also very lucky to have had a chance to take classes, although only one from each, from some of the famous Grinnell icons. Joe Wall, I took Constitutional History class from him. Grant Gale was still teaching at the time and I took a Science for Dummies class from him. So I feel really happy to have been able to bridge that era between the modern era and the one where they were beloved and sort of famous in the Grinnell community.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: There are a number of places on campus that still have a powerful hold on me. Just- even though the friends that filled them out at the time are mostly not here- although, a few are here on this reunion weekend. Some of them are of course gone. Marching, in my first semester, in the Air Force ROTC drill unit, in the Women’s Gymnasium of course, is only a dim memory now.Sophie: Yeah.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: But, the Forum still stands, I don’t know how much longer, and that was very much the center of activity the way the Rosenfield Center is now. The Forum may be an Americans for Disability nightmare-Sophie: Yes.Greg: -but it’s a wonderful architectural building for exploration and for finding nooks that are cozy and stimulating. I had some favorite seats on the east side, in one of the bay windows there, and a lot of memories of kind of sitting there and looking out in the winter time.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: In fact, there are a lot of winter memories watching the snow fall. It was a long winter at Grinnell. It was cold and Burling Library had big windows and sort of, cozy places to sit and much to meditate on, you know, in that kind of, snowy atmosphere.Sophie: Yeah.Greg: So that certainly sticks in the mind. And of course, the uniqueness of having a train track going through the campus has memories as well and adds a certain exotic touch to the Grinnell campus, I think. It makes it somewhat unique.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: I guess I should mention also that Grinnell had another effect on me in that it changed the pronunciation of my name.Sophie: Oh?Greg: I happened to grow up as the son of a American born or Southern-Iowa born woman who pronounced my last name, “Theelman,” ‘cause it’s a “t” “h,” but my father was born in Germany and pronounced it in the German way, “Teelman.” And having grown up with the more Americanized “Theelman”, I came to Grinnell as a freshman, walked into the introductory German class, and Herr Roecker referred to me as “Herr Teelmahn.” And I thought that that was kind of fun, but I also thought that all of a sudden when people heard that there was no misunderstanding.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: Everyone heard the “t” sound at the beginning of my name and when I said “Theelman” sometimes people would hear an “f” sound and I thought, well, since that was the way that the Germans pronounced it and my dad was German before he immigrated to America, and because it’s easier to understand, I’ll call myself “Teelman.” And I have ever since, so Grinnell changed me in that way as well.Sophie: Yeah.
- Greg Thielmann & Sophie HaasGreg: So it’s a very important part of who I am, and I thought later as I, in a couple of ways in my latter career, gained some brief hours of fame as someone who publicly criticized the president shortly after I retired and said that he was distorting intelligence information that I knew he was distorting because I had the clearances as my last job and the assignment to master the subject, I sometimes think that some of the experience that I had at Grinnell which encouraged sort of independent thought and going against the grain contributed to my ability to do that later in my life.Sophie: Yeah.Greg: So, those are some of my reflections off the top of my head.Sophie: Great. Thank you so much!
Alumni oral history interview with Greg Thielmann '72. Recorded June 1, 2012.