This web page contains two parts. The first is a class picture at our 40th. Part II (scroll down) contains my thoughts on the reunion.
   Part I

Front Row  Left to right: Kathleen (Kathy) Baker Bogie, K. A. (Ann) Wright-Parsons, Sue Roberts Stuhlmann, Linda Miller Staubitz, Susan Fernald Smith, Gretchen Osterhof Thomson, Elisabeth (Betsy) Scherrer Brooke, Gretchen Hayes, Jane Egan Lloyd, Jill Dennington Wettersten, Nancy Game Schuman, Mary Alyce Luschen Krohnke
Second Row  Left to right: Gregory D. Erwin, Charlotte Johnson Hardy, Corinne Anderson Whitlatch, Susan Fox Mc Knight, Roberta Eustis Little, Barbara Kelley Risser, Linda Hayes, Leigh M. Tracy, Kay Rook Norman, Sharon Hasekamp Torno,
Paul S. Torno, Martha (Marcy) Mullican Loats, Judith L. Darrh-Engbretson
Third Row Left to right: William P. Mc Knight, Stephen C. Hoops, Joseph F. Piersen, Thomas R. Hutchison, Robert (Bob) B. Myers, Ann Mc Gregor Junker, Nancy Burgeson Anderson, Elizabeth (Betsie) C. Hosick, Caroline Tollefson Owens,
Ann McMurray Balderson, Ann Hamilton Campbell, J. Godfrey (Gof) Thomson, Dorothy Smardack Palmer, Kenneth M. Kleinman, James (Jim) A. Ahrens, John Ruvalds
Fourth Row  Left to right: William (Bill) H. Parsons, Dan W. Figgins Jr., Paul D. Samuel, John A. Stopple, Judith (Judy) Goddard Kaster, Hedda Haymond Smithson, Miriam (Mimi) Welty Trangsrud, Richard (Dick) A. Bisgrove, Mary (Mickey) Bryden Feldsien, Julia Harmelink Hummel, Stephen (Steve) H. Umemoto, Thomas Bowen, David L. Palmer, Timothy H. Little, William (Bill) J. Wallace, John R. Lowther

Part II    Robert Myers, 6/02

0. This is for Mike Leahman, also '62, who is alive and well, but who missed the reunion because of a death in his family. Mike and I were "East Coasters," he from NYC and me from DC, who started at Grinnell in September of 1958, wondering what in the hell we'd gotten ourselves into. We spent four years together in Langan Hall and both majored in economics. We stayed close during graduate school, he at Cornell in Ithaca and me at Syracuse, 50 miles to the north in upstate New York and then reestablished frequent email contact about ten years ago, he from San Francisco this time and me from DC.

1. Mike has added a Midwest patina to his New York City spontaneity that makes him a lot of fun to be around. We missed him at the reunion. About 10 years ago Mike wrote and widely circulated a missive chastising '62 grads for writing only happy blathering about their lives after Grinnell. By way of correction he chronicled a series of sad events that had affected him. When Linda Miller spoke at our dinner Saturday evening she mentioned that Mike had called and essentially recanted, saying that despite it all, he's now quite happy. My impression is that "happiness despite it all" was the major theme of our 40^th reunion. Below I unabashedly set out eight pages of what I call "happy horse shit."

2. Mary and I drove our 1993 BMW (purchased from our daughter Thea before she moved to New Zealand last year) the 1000 miles to Des Moines, Iowa, in two days. In a BMW it's easy and fun. Mary wanted to stay in Des Moines with a good friend from her college days, Pat Westphal, while I teamed up with a delightful buddy, Tom Hutchison, to go to our 40^th college reunion in Grinnell, Iowa, fifty miles east. When someone who is not from the Midwest attends Grinnell College they get two experiences. One is the (probably usual) experience of attending an academically inclined, small co-educational college. The other is the experience of living in a quintessential, small Midwest town. Both are very positive experiences.

3. My initial trip to Grinnell in September 1958, was by train from Washington, DC, to Chicago and then by road to Grinnell with my sister and her then boyfriend, someone I liked a lot. I have four memories of the initial road trip. Iowa had no upper speed limit: instead the signs read "reasonable and proper." Iowa highways were two lane cement roads with little curbs that differentiated road from shoulder. These curbs, added at great expense, caused innumerable serious accidents and were removed, again at great cost, during the 1960s.

4. Then there was the jet-black soil. For someone growing up with the red clay of Virginia plowed Iowa soil looked like fields that had been burned off. It was a couple of weeks before I was able to walk out into a plowed field and verify that the soil is indeed jet-black loam. And finally, I remember stopping for gas in a small town before entering Grinnell and being given an obviously Xeroxed $10 bill (with a blank white back) as partial change for a $20 bill. I protested and the guy smiled and compliantly went in and got a real $10 bill. I had the impression that he was trying to "rube" me.

5. Mary and I easily made it from South Bend, Indiana, to Pat's house, west of the center of Des Moines, by 4 PM. This included a half-hour stop at Grinnell College so Mary could see it. Since 1958 the town's population has risen from about 3,500 to about 11,000. The campus has become prettier and more elegant and "busier," with several new buildings and additions to old ones. We went into Langan Hall where I'd lived for four years. It looks the same from the outside and the lounge is exactly the same. But the rest of the inside is much more posh, with carpets in the halls, dramatically improved bathrooms, and phones in each room rather than one per floor in the hallway. How can current Grinnell students listen in on each other's business?

6. We had time to relax and chat with Pat before driving the eight blocks (blocks are long in much of Des Moines) to Tom's condo on the ninth floor of one of the relatively few high-rises. Tom has a spectacular view, mainly of treetops. Des Moines has more trees than God made little green apples. Driving under them among the houses is a visual pleasure. We went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. I ordered gnocchi and after a considerable delay ("Sorry, we're serving a large party upstairs") I was given four large potato patties covered with mozzarella cheese and a delicately seasoned tomato sauce. Hardly gnocchi, which is dollops of potato pasta, but very tasty. The problem was with the nomenclature but not with the food. Nor with the evening, which was perfect for a drive and walk before we split up (Mary with Pat and Bob with Tom) for the Des Moines duration.

7. Tom and I had planned to drive to Grinnell and register at about 1 PM on Friday so we could attend Ron Galt's lecture on South Africa at 2:30 PM, then do the '62 cocktail party and, following that, the all-campus picnic. This left the morning in Des Moines to chat and, to my surprise, to weed the garden that Tom calls his mother's and she calls his. After weeding it and seeing him interact with other gardeners, it's clear that it's Tom's garden. Just before leaving for Grinnell we stopped by to visit with Tom's mother, who is 97 years old and in a senior's home next door. It is said that the Iowa population has one of the highest average ages in the US. If others are as attractive, mentally sharp and physically vigorous as Tom's mother, this is a good thing. She's a complete joy: a fountain of stories of the past and opinions about the future. She was the first of several Iowans to tell me that while they like the recognition that the huge farm subsidy bill gives them, they'd much rather see the money spent on conservation and the environment.

8. Registration is easy and fun because it’s interrupted continually by greetings from '62 classmates. The reunion schedule of events and activities seems intimidating because it is so full. However, the discerning eye can cut through the chaff (e.g., "The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Reception," etc.), and design a schedule with a pace appropriate for our age. It turns out that Ron Galt has "disappointed" as the West Africans say, and Steve Umemoto will give a talk on 30 years of UN development work in Asia. It's a great talk, with verbal paintings of Asian scenes mixed with substance on developmental successes and failures. There are several others in the audience, including Dan Figgins and myself from '62, with lots of development experience, so the questions are penetrating. Steve handles them adroitly, which is wise since several questions staked out positions that could ignite arguments, if not bottle throwing, among an informed but opinionated audience.

9. Following the talk I am surprised at how easy it is to find a phone and make a phone call off campus to town to a former economics professor, Jack Dawson, with whom I've kept in touch. The operator patiently explains how easy it is, no doubt thinking in her head, "Come on, old man, this is the 21^st century!" But I remember that 40 years ago one had to first find and then use an ancient Western Telephone pay phone on which you dialed the number and, when connected, deposited the coins into a phone with no coin return. Instead, there'd be definitive "klunks" as the coins hit the bottom of the box. It was sufficiently cumbersome that most people walked off campus and visited rather than calling. Jack Dawson is not home, but I leave a message that I'm hovering.

10. Tom and I go to the '62 cocktail party, which is in a large, barren, ugly basement room in one of the eating halls. The shabby setting is irrelevant; we're all interacting easily in small groups. Right away it is clear that older Grinnell grads are mostly smart, successful, and secure people of consequence. There's a lot of smarts and experience among the '62 grads and it shows. With a few exceptions, talking with classmates, whether I remembered them or not, is enjoyable and intellectually rewarding. I find out later that a little under half of the still living and accounted-for from our class are at the reunion.

11. Extremely nearsighted people like me learn to recognize people by their mannerisms as well as by physical appearance. I see someone from behind, standing familiarly in a quiescent and askew fashion, listening to a '62 classmate. I know he's John Stopple. He's now a physician (St. Louis, I think) and still a nice, outgoing, very smart person. His accurate comment at the photo session for the class of '97 is "they look like our children." John is well known in our household for a story I tell about "When John Stopple lost control of the mouthers at the Fetzer sing competition." Our senior year John was conducting Langan's mandatory contingent of 25, with only 18 singers but 7 mouthers (lip sync specialists), when the mouthers began to sing. We finished poorly, but the expression on John's face when we started to sing was precious. The "we" gives me away as one of the miscreant mouthers.

12. The all campus picnic is on what we used to call the men's quad, adjacent to Coles dining room. It was a "quad" in the past because it was enclosed on the far side by a building, the football stadium I think, now torn down. Two winter snow scenes come back to me from over 40 years ago. Someone from Washington, DC, or the South can't properly imagine the bitter cold and wind of Iowa in January/February. I was incredulous that the temperature could rise 60 degrees Fahrenheit and still not get above freezing. Once the snow settled in that quad, it stayed. We'd clear out a patch of snow, ring it with shoveled snow, and then flood it with water so we could ice skate, which we sometimes did at night when the moon was bright. The other memory was of how much taller everything looked after the snow melted. It was quite jolting to return from spring vacation and see everything without high-piled snow for the first time in four months.

13. At the picnic Tom and I chose to eat with returnees from the classes of '72 and '97. It was a rewarding experience. A friend of mine who returns to Grinnell regularly has been a bit disparaging, saying words to the effect, "The academics at Grinnell have softened and everyone is encouraged to protest everything." These alumnae acted like attractive, fairly consequential people who seemed to me to have their heads screwed on right. The logicians among you may reason that this is not necessarily attributable to their Grinnell education. They could well have acquired their character and substance from their parents and the Midwest setting, in which case Grinnell could only claim success in having selected them.

14 My impression from earlier discussions with some in the Economics Department at Grinnell is that it is somewhat "anti-system," implying that those bent on learning hard-nosed economics would have to do so in graduate school. That wasn't the case in my day. The economics I learned at Grinnell was tough, mainstream theory. It carried me through the first year of graduate school with ease. In addition, I am under the impression that a larger percentage of majors went on to grad school in economics in my day than now.

15. We returned to Tom's place in Des Moines Friday evening, after checking out the room in Haynes dorm where I was to spend the next night. Haynes was a women-only dorm in my day, but men could sometimes sneak in and spend the night if they could hide in a closet, with appropriate connivance, until after bed check. My room-to-be is sparse but clean and airy and with a phone that I can use to make credit card calls. Hoo boy!

16. Aging happily and gracefully seems to be largely about establishing and carrying out rituals. I get up each morning at 5-5:30 AM, have coffee and cookies and read and then take a walk at 7 AM. I've done this for several years in DC, France, Africa, Egypt, Russia and now in Des Moines. My Saturday morning walk along and around West Grand Ave. was perfect. And I was not alone: Many others have discovered this early morning walk routine. In the Midwest they greet you warmly and strike up conversations if going your way. In France, from where I'd just returned before going to Des Moines, it is forbidden to smile or acknowledge others while walking. To do so marks you as a child or an American tourist. Not fearing that, I walked around Paris and Aix-en-Provence with a huge smile (an SEG for those of you who know what this is). I was having a glorious time!

17. Tom and I picked up his mother for the roundabout drive to Grinnell via the Neal Smith National (Prairie) Wildlife Refuge and the town of Pella, near Knoxville where my father was born in 1900. Neil Smith was a US Congressman who'd lost a bid for reelection and was given as a parting gift a substantial amount of money for the refuge by the US Congress. The wildlife Refuge, populated with buffalo, elk, etc., will be allowed to return to a natural state, or to become as it was before settlement. There are a lot of Iowans who feel that this sort of gift, even if basely motivated, is a much better use of profligate largesse than the respectable sounding but tawdry farm subsidies.

18. The drive from the wildlife refuge through Pella to Grinnell is nostalgic for me because little has changed in the farmland over the last 40 years. This part of Iowa is rolling fields of pure, simple beauty and very clearly good farming country. One difference (farm subsidy providers please note) is that most farm families now live in Grinnell-sized towns, not on their farms or in the very small towns, which are dying. In fact, the "rural population" in most of the U.S. consists of those who dwell in Grinnell-sized towns rather than on farms or in very small towns.

19. Tom and I make it to Grinnell at 2:15 PM Saturday, exactly when we are supposed to gather for our '62 reunion picture. Things are running late and the large class of '97 is just assembling on the bleachers on the stage. They and '98 after them magically self-organize so that they quickly have their pictures taken several times, including a last time while holding big numbers in front of their faces so they can be identified. Then it's our turn. There are not as many of us as the '97s, but we're numerous just the same. We stumble onto the stage and bleachers in disarray. I see the photographer looking distressed. He comes down and organizes us for the pictures. We're all joking and happy, but I'm left wondering why the class of '97 so naturally self-organizes for the photo while we need more direction and rearranging. I chalk it up to the fact that we are the Kodak Brownie generation while they grew up on video and digital cameras. We might be a bit obstreperous too, in our older age.

20. Tom and his mom depart and I go off for coffee with my former economics professor "Black Jack" Dawson, now emeritus, at his home. It's good to see him healthy and relatively happy. When he is about to issue forth humor, Jack smiles and moves his head in a very endearing manner. He professes to be ill at ease with retirement. I attribute this to the fact that he's not reading economics. A committed economist who doesn’t read the literature is giving up the ghost. I chide him and he seems to agree to reenter the fray.

21. Actually, I know Jack from outside the classroom because I've worked with him twice since Grinnell when he was a consultant for the World Bank. Jack and I know John Garang (Grinnell, '69), the leader of the SPLA, an army of southern Sudanese that has fought repressive governments in Khartoum since the 1970s. The purpose of Jack’s main area of economic expertise, flow of funds analysis, is to chart money flows that demonstrate economic behavior. In Sudan, where everything is controlled by the government, Jack's data show that the Khartoum government is lying to the IMF and World Bank in order get more loans, which it has no intention of repaying. This leads to a prolonged rupture of the relationship and Sudan's non-payment of debt service. The IMF and World Bank must expend a fair amount of creativeness to be able to maintain their claim that they've never experienced default.

22. From Jack's house I have a pleasant walk back to the '62 pre-dinner cocktail party, this time held in a much more splendid setting in the Buchsbaum-(Linda Miller) Staubitz Rehearsal Room in the Fine Arts Center. I get to meet the still attractive, still fascinating Jane Egan, who I fell in love with just before graduation in 1962. The first thing we discuss is why we haven't brought our spouses. They're encumbering, we agree: they'd slow our flitting and reminiscing. I show her pictures of my family. I don’t tell her how Mary dismissed attendance at the reunion with the statement, "I can't stand any more rubber chicken and I don't want to tag along as wife-of." After 30 years of a good marriage, my wife is still both lovely and very sensible.

23. I ask Jane Egan to sit with me at dinner but am shot down. She has other plans. I settle for a table with unfamiliar people and learn how interesting spouses can be. As I'm sitting I see that I've missed a chance to sit with another former girlfriend, Judy Darrh, two tables over. She looks incredibly attractive and self-possessed. Later I learn that she's remarried after an acrimonious divorce and is now happy. Her new husband and I chat and I conclude that he, too, is good goods. The dinner is indeed rubber chicken, with green beans and a pretty good potato concoction. I eat sparingly, not because I don't like the food but because I've learned the hard way that that's what people our age are supposed to do. Then comes dessert, a 4"x 4" x 2" block of tiramisú, a very tasty but dense chocolate/coffee Italian "gooey." It's a real load of a dessert but I blow it big time by eating it all, thus bloating myself and transgressing back to my twenties.

24. The speeches begin and are generally good, mainly because they're short. An elegant-looking Dave Palmer is the MC, and a good one. He introduces Grinnell’s president, George Drake, who gives a light, humorous speech. Dave then heaps well-deserved praise on Linda Miller, who has been a trouper in holding us together for 40 years. She is a very major reason why there is a good '62 turnout for this fun weekend. A youthful-looking Bill McKnight gets a push in the butt from his wife, the still-attractive Sue Fox, so he'll get up and deliver a plea for more money for the College. I'm skeptical about Bill's message that the college needs more money. My impression from friends closely associated with Grinnell is that rather than money, the priority should be how to spend what the college already has more substantively. I'm told that the trustees won't approve any non-routine, innovative expenditure unless new money to finance it is also raised. So what are they going to do with the income from all that endowment?

25. Following dinner we head back over to the garage-like dining hall basement room for another cocktail party. Sue Fox has collected an extra $7.00 from many of us to finance higher-than-expected expenses for drinks. Her dunning plea is, "It's not just for booze: We had no idea that people would drink so many of those little bottles of spring water. They're expensive!" There seem to be a lot of us who sensibly no longer drink alcohol. There are still some smokers, however.

26. It's almost 9:30 PM Saturday night and my eye is on the clock. I usually go to bed at 10 to10:30 PM and I'm tired, having missed my nap. I'm holding forth about how ineffective aid and the World Bank in particular is to a small circle of '62 grads and spouses, with Goff Thomson acting as my straight man. The group that's listening is none too shabby from a substantive and intellectual viewpoint. However, they seem amazed by my stories of waste and mismanagement. Disgust shows openly on some faces.

27. I suspect they're thinking, "Boy, are things screwed up in Washington, DC; it must be a foul place to live." Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "These people seem so naïve." Their incredulity is probably more accurate than my assessment. Prolonged living in DC and exposure to all the media and political skullduggery here dulls the senses and inures those of us living here to the gargantuan amount of waste, mismanagement, duplicity, corruption and ineffectiveness in the federal government. Nowadays any and all of our presidents are bound to fail: We expect way too much from them. If George W. wanted to insure reelection, he should have stayed in Texas and appointed Al Gore as his DC emissary.

28. I leave the ugly basement room and the frivolity of the '62 grads a little after 10 PM through an outside door. The night is utterly delightful: perfect temperature and no bugs or mosquitoes. Gretchen Osterhof and a few others with good sense are sitting outside on the women's quad and chatting. I join them for a very pleasant half-hour. Gretchen is in a wheelchair, not because of her MS, but because she's had a hip operation. She was married for many years to Goff Thomson and I'm mystified, but don't ask, why they've divorced. I liked them both before and I like them both now.

29. Furthermore, both seem very happy. Goff has married an attractive, smart and accomplished woman who is handling this potentially awkward reunion with incredible aplomb. Gretchen is married to Phil Procter, a guy with a background in theater, who I fell in love with. He's a warm, secure person with more interesting ideas than Carter had little liver pills. Phil and I are chatting away delightedly when a lone, apparently plastered '75 grad who is in the dot.com business sits down and monopolizes Phil, making me extraneous. I seize the opportunity to depart so I can get to bed by 11 PM.

30. I go to breakfast at 7 AM the next morning, prior to going out to highway 6 on the edge of campus to wait for Mary, who’s driving from Des Moines, to pick me up. We're heading east to De Kalb, near Chicago, to spend the night with Frank and Mary Beth Van Buer, friends through our Ford Foundation development work in Nigeria. My former heartthrob Jane Egan is at breakfast. We sit together and have a short meaningful chat. I am of the impression that Jane is from Sioux City, Iowa, just across the river from Omaha, Nebraska. Without verifying this, I launch into the following story.

31. From 1958-62 I regularly hitchhiked to Grinnell and DC. This spilled over to the summer of 1961, when Steve Stovall, a school-friend from DC, and I hitched around the U.S. We stayed with Grinnell classmates all over, e.g., Suzy Fernald in Downers Grove outside Chicago and Tom Hutchison in Palo Alto, California, etc. (Suzy and I were close at Grinnell and have been in contact over the years. Her husband Ron and I have been in each other's peripheries for years. We finally meet at this reunion and he seems a neat guy.) Steve and I stopped at Grinnell on our way to California shortly after my twenty-first birthday to collect free beer at the Rex. (The owner was taken aback: I'd been drinking there for three years as "Doug Queen," who was 26 years old by the time I turned 21.) We then hitchhiked west to Nebraska through Sioux City, passing a huge billboard (here's the point of this story) that read, "IOWANS TURN BACK. THERE IS NO GOLD IN CALIFORNIA."

32. My story lands like a thud on the breakfast table. No one else can recall the billboard. Some admit that a lot of Iowans did indeed migrate to California in the 1940s and 1950s, but it's clear that if I want corroboration regarding the billboard I'll have to get it elsewhere. I go back to my room, pack, and head out to meet Mary on the highway. This works like clockwork and we're on pace to arrive in De Kalb about 2 PM, way too early. In Illinois we decide to take Interstate 80 to 88, which goes to De Kalb, but then to get off at Rock Falls and travel on US route 30, which was the main two-lane east/west route that I used to hitchhike back and forth between Chicago and Grinnell. This route allows us to avoid Dixon, IL, the birthplace of Ronald Reagan.

33. We stop for lunch at a classic 1950s mom and pop diner in Rock Falls, where for $4.00 each, we have an enormous feed. I get soup, salad, a pork tenderloin sandwich, fries and a desert. The pork tenderloin is not what we used to get at the White Spot in Grinnell. It's a large, less-greasy, ground pork patty rather than tenderloin. But it's good all the same. Leaving Rock Falls, we take Rt. 30 east and Rt. 52 south to the small town of Amboy, which wins praise in a local guide book mainly because it has a park with 19 tree stump carvings, including ones of some Presidents from Illinois, including Lincoln, Reagan, and Grant. Carving tree stumps is a clever, tourist-oriented idea, but there are limitations to the artistry of the carvings. For instance, the pioneer woman looks a lot like Napoleon leaning into the wind onboard a ship. Sarcasm aside, Amboy, about a forth the size of Grinnell, looks like a pretty nice place to live. So does De Kalb, which we reach at 4 PM, as promised, using the old Lincoln highway rather than Interstate 88.

34. Frank, whose middle name, "Delano," comes from parents who were Roosevelt Democrats, and Mary Beth are genuinely good people. Frank and I do a lot of home construction. He's been to our house and seen my additions, but I've never seen his. His work is amazing—out of my league. They have two sons and a daughter, all grown with families. We have a fun, nostalgic dinner with the budding family of Derek, a son living in De Kalb, who has been in our home in DC. We leave the next day, which is too soon, but not before Frank drives us around De Kalb, actually a ploy to show us his garden to which he, like Tom Hutchison, is devoted. What's this with Midwest seniors and their gardens? I don't have one and I'd guess Mike Lehman doesn't either. Frank and Mary Beth's family is very close and doing well. Even though the kids were dragged hither and yon overseas, they're still well grounded with Midwest values and humor. Like my classmates, Frank and Mary Beth have made it, and are happy.

35. We have an easy return to DC and are glad to be home. I feel rejuvenated by the trip and the reunion. We live a comfortable life in a nice house in an established neighborhood full of caring people. Our daughters, Moyo and Thea, are attractive, well schooled, happy, grown and on their own. We've also made it. I reflect on all the insecurities and tribulations I experienced at Grinnell. How did I get to here from there? I'll give some credit to Grinnell College, but reserve even more kudos for the fact that it is located in a fairly small town in the Midwest. I very much like where and what I am today, but I'm grateful that the post-parent journey essentially started from a base built in a small town in Iowa.