Grinnell College - Cyclone Yearbook (Grinnell, IA)

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sign blinking its bleak welcome of vacancy to young lust and old weariness; a farmer counting out his coins for a six-pack at a supermarket check-out counter. Here is the land. and here are the people. Having placed the college firmly within its proper setting. the book turns to the major task at hand - the portrayal ofone year at Grinnell College by means of what can only be called a series of photographic essays. The story begins with the arrival of a small young woman with a very large suitcase at the graceful. old, Queen Anne style railroad depot, now, unfortunately. a disgraceful, old, disintegrating ruin abandoned by the defunct Rock Island line. Yes, there were still passenger trains as well as elm trees in Grinnell in 1966. In fact, the railroad was a conspicuous part of the campus landscape and life in I966. The story line carries us briskly through the opening days of the college - freshman orientation Classes, registration. flu shots. frantic book buying in the then quite inadequate bookstore. outdoor classes in the bright sunshine of Indian summer. It is when the general movement forward through the calendar year stops for an in-depth look at the particular that the book fully realizes its potential as an artistic recorder of collegiate life. Most of these pictorial vignettes are crisply efficient in their depictions of particular facets of college life. They presentjust enough to convey the message desired without belaboring the obvious. Surely the finest ot'these photographic essays is that of the speech therapy session conducted by Marilyn Drake for a severely handicapped little girl. There can be no more effective a presentation by means of a camera of a meaningful relationship than this. The final shot of Marilyn watching the child on crutches. guided by her mothers hand, hobbling down the barren corridor of Alumni Recitation Hall a so like the many hospital corridors down which the child must have trudged a has the emotional impact ofa Renaissance pieta painting. Curiously enough, we see no faces in this photograph - only the backs ofthe three persons involved a and we realize with a shock how wonderfully communicative the human back can be. We need no facial expressions to convey the mixed message of sorrow. resignation, and bravery that is painfully present in that scene. I might quarrel here with some 0fthe editorsa priorities. The section on the annual Homecoming game. for example, is by far the longest in the book, covering twenty-one pages, nearly one- tenth 0fthe entire book. This particular event was not then, nor was it ever. significant enough in the ongoing life of the college to warrant s0 extended a treatment. But such lapses in editorial judgment are rare. The quality of the photography in this book would alone justify publication twenty years late, but in addition to satisfying the desire of the Classes of 1966 and 1967 to have at long last their own yearbook. is there any other reason to bring out a 1966 annual in 1986? lthink there is. For the social historian this is an invaluable piece of primary source material. History is, of course, a record of movement through time and the interpreta- tion of that record. Whether that movement is cyclical or linear in pattern will always be a matter of dispute among historians. but for those living in any particular period, history generally appears to be the passage oftime along a continuum. Historical periodization can only be done in retrospect. People awakening on New Yearis morning in the year 1500 did not exclaim, ltAha. we are no longer a medieval people. we are now modernlil The year 1500 seemed very much like the year 1499 to those who were living those years. But there is the occasional dramatic break in the history of any group, be it an institution, a community, a nation, or a people, when we can perceive a sudden change in the flow of history. The moment before is quite different from that which comes after. And it is important to the historian to look at that moment before, when the stream is apparently still running quietly even though, if one listens carefully. one can hear the roar of the rapids that lie just ahead. The year 1966 was just such a year for the history of American higher education in general and for Grinnell College in particular. This surely was the last year at Grinnell in which this collection ofpictures could have been taken as being representative of the college. There is, of course, the obvious matter of student dress and appearance which in these pictures now seem far more dated in style than the automobiles that were then parked on the streets of the town. The young women are wearing dresses. skirts. and dress shoes; the young men, some of them actually dressed in suit coats and neckties, are beardless and with haircuts that would pass a military muster. It was the last year in which parietal rules were still believed in, not only by the administra- tors of those rules, but by a majority of the students a the last time one could take a picture of such an official notice as the one posted on the bulletin board outside a womenls dormitory: llThere will be a Bed Check after any Spring tdisturbances, even in the event that House Presidents are lremovedl from campus!w It must have been the last year that a Grinnell College president could with equanimity state publicly that llstudent government exists because it provides an arena of training and a way of communication between faculty and students, not because of any genuine political necessityW It would be the last time for many years that a student editor would be able to declare in self- righteous indignation that Grinnell was unusual for colleges of its stature in its lack of active interest in the Vietnam war situation. A faculty-student group on Vietnam that was formed in November dissolved after only a few weeks. ll Although the stream of history was beginning to flow faster in this year, it did not move with the rapidity that the editors of the yearbook would have liked. We are repeatedly informed

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To protest the banning of Grinnell College- 1966 by President Glenn Leggett, the book's photographers, Henry Wilhelm and John Phillips, and the editor of the college newspaper, Krystyna Neumun, picketed the college commencement exercises May 26, 1967. The entire editorial staff of the college newspaper resigned in protest of the college's handling of the yearbook situation, and the newspaper ceased publication. IsEm- a -- A WAYS mm 355W? -

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both implicitly by the kind of material selected for inclusion and explicitly by the editorial comment that tlthe development of an individual social consciousness was not viewed as a very serious matter by a faculty and administration who generally had little social consciousness of their own? Here we have the hyper- bolic accusations of self-appointed coxswains damning the crew for not pulling with the proper vigor to get on down the stream. But neither the exhortation of the editors for greater speed nor the reluctance of the faculty and administration to push harder in the race for change was to have any great effect on the movement and direction the college was to take in the next few years. The current was accelerating and, willy-nilly, the college was being carried along with it. With the advantage of hind- sight we can discover in these pages a great many indications of the rapids that lay ahead: for example, the amount of space that is devoted to a few students openly defying college social regulations tincluding the section on a tlpot panyii at Grinnell, which was the initial cause of the controversy over the printing of the bookl; the emphasis that is given to such extracurricular activities as the choir, the orchestra, intramural athletics, theatrical productions, and informal jazz and rock sessions in the student union, with the implication that the students learn as much, if not more, by creative participatory performance as by formal instruction; and the stress that is laid upon the need for meaningful student involvement in the governance of the college. These are important precursory pages to provide an understanding of the abrupt internal collegiate changes which were to come. We also find here evidence of the forceful intrusion of the outside world into what had previously been the smug, compla- cent tranquillity of most American campuses, an intrusion which would dramatically affect college life within the next three years: a picture of male students lining up to take the draft deferment test, with the wry student comment, ttYou know what happens if you screw this oneil; the picketing of a CIA recruiter on campus; the posters denouncing the war which in 1966 were beginning to appear here as suddenly and as ominously as the itMene, menell handwriting on the wall at Belshazzaris feast. We were in that year of 1966 becoming a divided country, and, whether by design or by intuition, the creators of this yearbook, like latter-day Daniels, introduce this theme of internal division on the very first page of the book. The title page shows us a photograph of two professors who have just concluded a public dialogue on existentialism and God. Around each professor there is a cluster of students, and each group has turned its back on the other. Here are the two poles in American society, one representing Aristotelian authority, soci- etal order, and the heretofore accepted eternal verities; the other representing Socratic questioning, individual licence to be onels self, and experiential relativism. That single photograph sets the tone for the entire book. And the story of Grinnell C allege - I966 appropriately concludes with a shot of a wonderful bit of graffiti scrawled on the wall by the public telephone in the student union which contains the quotation: Existentialism is absurd. Life And below it another quotation: Life is absurd. Sartre There we have a fitting epitaph forthe book, the college. and the nation in the year 1966. :ktlwk It is not my intention in writing the introduction to this book to go into the details of the controversy between the college administration and the student editors that resulted in the yearbookis not being published under the colleges imprint at the scheduled time. As one of the principals in this case who, along with Professor Charles Cleaver, attempted to negotiate a settlement between Editor Henry Wilhelm and then President Glenn Leggett which would result in the books publication. I sincerely regretted at the time a and still do - that Grinnell College - 1966 did not appear in the spring of 1967. But in reviewing the manuscript in preparation forthe writing of this introduction, I have also come to the conclusion that its publication at this late date makes it a more meaningful volume to its audience today than it could possibly have been had it appeared as scheduled. Two decades later. with the historical perspective we now have, we can see in it a greater significance than we could have possibly appreciated in 1967 - perhaps even a greater significance than the editors themselves realized at the time. In any event, we are indebted to President George Drake, to Tom Lannom of the Class of 1966 who encouraged its resurrec- tion, to the members of the Classes of 1966 and 1967. and to Henry Wilhelm, John Phillips, and John Wolf, who hold the copyright on this manuscript, for making this remarkable institutional record available to the larger audience which it deserves. Joseph F. Wall Professor of History Grinnell College January 1986