Memories of Cornell College: 1957-1962

By Dave Adkins

I wrote two previous books about my home town of Grinnell, Iowa, a nostalgic-historical approach. I have done something similar here with "Memories of Cornell College, 1957-1962", it is also nostalgic-historic and I reflect on my time at Cornell, some memories pleasant enough, others not so pleasant. In one of the final scenes of "Cambridge Spies", a non-fiction BBC presentation of the story of a small group of privileged Englishmen who betrayed their country and the Allies and spied for the Soviet Union from the 1930's - 1950's, Anthony Blunt, one of the men in question and Professor of Art History at the University of London at the time, was walking down a busy London street. Someone who recognized him said, "Mr. Blunt, I believe. Yes, you were at Cambridge with Philby, Burgess and McClain. How are they? Went on to bigger and better things, I imagine?" Blunt hesitated, then smiled and replied, "Yes, bigger and better things." At the time Burgess and McClain had just escaped to the Soviet Union, Philby was in the process of catching a midnight steamer from Beirut to Odessa and Blunt was to be revealed, then stripped of his Knighthood and ridiculed publicly. The men I focus on in this book were not spies; in fact one, Captain Ron Zinn lost his life in a firefight in Viet Nam in 1965 and another, Colonel Jerry Huml served in the RVN twice and had a distinguished U.S. Marine Corps career, but, yes they all did without question go on to bigger and better things - things which make Cornell look very good. Dorr, Zinn, Robison, Beamer, Weeden, Sunderlage, Hilmer, Taylor, Huml, Altenberg and others- yes, bigger and better things! This book is about life on the Hill Top over 50 years ago, as I saw it, and its impact on me later.

Dave Adkins

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483659510

Dave Adkins

I have written these articles and essays which are mainly historical-nostalgic and also on the topic of aging. They were published on the Grinnell, Iowa website ourgrinnell.com under the heading of Readers Share Thoughts. I was born in Grinnell, graduated from Grinnell High School in 1957 and Cornell College in 1962. I have a Master's Degree from Iowa State University and the University of Leon and a Doctorate from Middle Tennessee State University. I have lived and worked on Okinawa, in Mozambique and in Australia

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Contents

1.   About the Writer

2.   Introduction

3.   Cornell College: Freshman Year 1957-1958

4.   Sophomore Year: 1958-1959

5.   Out of School for a Year: 1959-1960

6.   Junior Year at Cornell College: 1960-1961

7.   Senior Year at Cornell College: 1961-1962

8.   Post Cornell Summary: After Graduation in 1962

9.   Life and Career Timeline

10.   Short Form Curriculum Vitae

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D1

Appendix D2

Appendix E

Appendix F1

Appendix F2

Photo Appendix with Credit Line

Photo Appendices

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS AND DEDICATION

I dedicate these memories of Cornell College to Paul Maaske, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, and Ron Altenberg, a world class athlete from Marion, Iowa who chose to bring his sensational athletic ability to Cornell to play basketball and run track. Ron was a roommate, a friend, an inspiration, a winner and a valued team mate.

"All my life I have felt as if I were preparing for a great test or responsibility arriving in my later years, as if every course I took, every degree I earned, every spiritual practice I learned, and every wound I healed, readied me for this great challenge . . ." John Robinson, ordained interfaith minister, clinical psychologist, from his book The Three Secrets of Aging.

1.   About the Writer

The purpose of this section of the book is to introduce readers to the writer—my background, achievements, shortcomings, etc. and to mention that I set out to limit the scope of this book mainly to my own experiences and memories of the years of 1957-1962 at Cornell College. Yet to stay within the confines of that five year period was difficult as living our lives is not that tidy and clear cut. I believe that the give and take of my years at Cornell were a factor in propelling me to some major, positive changes in my priorities. When one reflects, he brings his whole life experience into the process, not just a portion of it. This whole life experience is a link to the past, the present and even a glimpse at the future. Obviously, everyone’s college days were of a personal nature and thus may differ from the author’s perceptions. Remember that I am giving my impressions of what Cornell was like over 50 years ago, a black and white snapshot with a Kodak Baby Brownie Special camera, not a high definition color, phone camera pic of what it is today with its one course at a time, new buildings, landscaped campus, different faculty and more students, etc. The book is not intended to be all things to all people. This is a presentation of one student’s memories, my experiences, my small circle of college friends and the faculty which I considered significant in my Cornell education.

Dennis Weeden, class of ’61 and valued friend and basketball team mate, lives with his wife, Nancy, only 30 minutes from us here in Corpus Christi and is aware that I am doing this book. He was a rock jock, a Geology major, and carved out a successful career in the U.S. and abroad in the oil business. He asked me if I were going to include Herb Hendriks, one of his favorite professors in his field, in the book. I said that I wasn’t because I had never taken a class from him and didn’t really know him.

Some of this material is repeated in a different context, even more than once in some cases, during the course of the book. I did intend to stay within the confines of the five year period and use only material—people, places, events and things—directly related to that period, which I designated as the time I spent at Cornell, but at times I strayed from that intention. For one thing, I was distracted during my college years. My total focus was not on campus life. I was still back-and-forth with my commitment, holding on to the (imagined) security of life in my home town of Grinnell. I learned from my mother and father, who never left Grinnell that your home town was that forever and I was not able to commit then to anywhere else. They were married during the depression and used all their time and effort providing for themselves and their family. They did not ever consider leaving Grinnell, Iowa, it had all they wanted or needed, and I was raised in that value system, thus my leaving Grinnell and traveling the 90 miles to Mount Vernon for college was a major move for me, as the only child, and my family, a dilemma which I did not resolve for many years.

I recall a woman originally from Des Moines who spent her life, raised her family in California, but as a widowed septuagenarian was drawn to return home to spend her remaining years. She loved flowers and took regular walks from her high rise condo in the heart of Des Moines across the bridge and along the river path to the Botanical Center. I used to see her Sunday mornings when I was jogging the same path. One morning there was evidence that apparently a homeless person (they used to sleep in that area in warm weather) had used the sidewalk as his personal toilet and left irrefutable evidence. The lady in question happened to be using that sidewalk and was horrified at what she saw. In talking with her about the incident, I could see that she was nearly in tears and that her dream of returning to the green, green prairie had been dashed by one indiscrete and vulgar act by an unknown perpetrator. The dream of going home does lie in a delicate balance and seldom matches the reality of it.

A Cornell professor once told me that I was going in a circle of personal stagnation and to get out of that small world; somehow I believed him and eventually began to make decisions that encouraged change and growth, rather than more stagnation. I recall material in a doctoral graduate class, Theories of Personality, of the power of the laborative choice, which includes the hundreds of small decisions we make in our life which eventually determine who we are, where we are and how our life unfolds. This theory also helps explain why with the passage of time that change is so difficult in that it means a disruption in the established pattern of previous choices—as in breaking the pattern of an addiction—drinking, drugs, smoking, or losing weight; beginning an exercise program, ending a destructive relationship, etc.

I have a good memory with many indelible images of the past, including those at Cornell, and called upon this gift for most of the information in this book, although I did confirm some details with a college archivist, Mary Iber, such as the exact dates of the horrific auto accident which took the lives of young Cornell students during Thanksgiving Vacation in 1960. Jack Sunderlage, 1961, provided valuable feedback on a pre-publication read through. I made a concerted and honest effort to give full credit to the sources of the photographs and quotes used in the book.

I have written other books and learned that readers who find a familiar person or event discussed correct me if I have missed a detail. One Grinnell College grad turned physicist informed me in one of my books that the correct expression was Canada Goose not Canadian Goose, and an irate spouse insisted, replete with exclamation marks, that her husband, who had been a high school friend of mine, had not played two years on the PGA tour, but only one! One of the joys of putting one’s thoughts out there to the public is the unpredictable feedback from people I know, or knew, and from others, even strangers, with some connection to the material.

Generally speaking, comments on my other books, Home Town Memories of Grinnell, Iowa, its sequel More Home Town Memories of Grinnell, Iowa and Journey in Overseas Basketball were well received and provided a welcome link to old friends, book ends. The most unique response was to Journey in Overseas Basketball from Ralph Gifford, Grinnell College grad and a career Foreign Service Officer, in Peking. I knew Ralph from his student bar tending days at JD’s, Bob Globus’s restaurant in Grinnell. He wrote that he had tracked down a copy of the book, read it and discussed the possibility of making it into a movie with Will Smith, Hollywood actor who was in China on a motion picture assignment. I appreciated Ralph’s effort, but have, as yet, not heard from Hollywood. Also, I write regularly for ourgrinnell.com, cutting edge website for Grinnell, several surrounding counties and Grinnellians across the country. The web site is owned and operated by Jack Mathews, and my writing appears under heading Readers Share Thoughts. Check it out.

My home town was/is Grinnell (we can come from only one place and that doesn’t change) and my parents and grandparents (excluding my paternal grandfather, Charles Adkins, who was born in Somerset, Kentucky) were all born, raised and are passing eternity there, thus there is frequent mention of that town and college throughout the book, as both town and gown in both Grinnell and Mount Vernon have played an important part as a setting for my entire life. Uncles, aunts and cousins on the Adkins side of the family attended and/or graduated from Grinnell College. Don’t take offense, Cornellians. Cornell College is my alma mater and with the passage of time I have come to realize that I carried away from those years some valuable habits, knowledge, curiosity and lessons, some in spite of myself, and also that many capable people were educated then by the Cornell faculty on The Hill Top. The stereotype of the old grad, misty-eyed and fondly remembering the school which he loves unconditionally, would not apply in my case—but I do realize and discuss in this thin volume some past academic and athletic experiences of value and ones which I do recall with a certain fondness and respect, and at times with a sense of humor, on a four year trek that took five years. I left campus with a diploma and only the vaguest idea what I might do with it. As it turned out, the document was lost in the mail in a move from Des Moines to Corpus Christi and when Cornell informed me that it would be $50.00 to replace it, I decided to refer to it as an inanimate object and not worry about not having framed it.

I graduated from Grinnell High School in 1957, where my two most notable achievements were finishing among the top 10 students academically in a class of 105 and making the first all-state basketball team selected by the Des Moines Register and also was a first team selection by the Iowa Daily Press Association. I graduated from Cornell College in 1962 where I captained the basketball team, was first team all Midwest Conference in 1960-61 and was named to the All NCAA Regional Tournament team (See Appendix G5) at the regional played at South Dakota State University. (See Appendix) After graduation from Cornell, I was hired at West Liberty, Iowa as head boys basketball coach and social studies teacher.

During my senior year at Cornell College, the education department arranged interviews for graduating seniors. They set me up with one in Wellman, Iowa at Mid-Prairie Community Schools for the head boys’ basketball-social studies teaching position. My mother’s neighbor in Grinnell at the time, Delmar De Boer, lived across the street in an apartment with his wife, Ramona, and their children. I told Del about the interview and he said that it would be a good idea to check around Wellman for the presence of outdoor baskets and also to ask locals about returning players to check the strength of the team and of interest in basketball in general.

It sounded like good advice and I did just as Del had suggested—arriving an hour before the 4 p.m. interview, I drove around looking for the outdoor hoops, which there were few, and the interview with the principal seemed to go o.k., but the next morning I got a call from the office of Otis Young, Cornell’s Education Department head, instructing me to see Dr. Young that morning. Doc Young was a gray-haired, usually affable, cigar smoker in his sixties. He was hot about my scouting mission and told me that I should never do that again. I replied that I thought it made sense to find out what I would be getting into and the only way to get that information was to look around and ask questions. He was not in agreement with my ingenuity. I didn’t hear back from Mid-Prairie or Dr. Young and went to another interview at West Liberty arranged by Paul Maaske.

I got the job. However, I was later fired, relieved of my duties expressed euphemistically, first job out of college, in the spring of 1963 by the Superintendent of Schools for my reputation as a heavy drinker, which I was, not appropriate for a teacher, which I fully agreed. The Superintendent was an ex-Marine who, the story goes, was so meticulous about his appearance that he would go home at noon and have his wife press the pants he was wearing that day.

I crossed paths with that same guy 20 years later in Des Moines. He was working as a handyman on a maintenance crew at 421 Grand Avenue where we had just purchased a condominium. He didn’t recognize me, but I introduced myself and we had some pleasant chats after that initial meeting. He had had a few setbacks at the hands of John Barleycorn also and, I hear, never really recovered. I felt bad about my experience at West Liberty, as felt that I had disappointed a bunch of people including my college coach, my mom and dad and the West Liberty Schools. I did a pretty good job coaching the boys’ basketball team, but truth is that I lacked the maturity, even at age 23, to handle the responsibilities of that job. (A sidebar to the coaching job at West Liberty. I had some good players, the two top scorers were a point guard named Dennis Harmon and a forward, David Hawley, who had at the time a talented sister studying at the University of Iowa. Anne Hawley is now the Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and was in that position twenty years ago when thieves pulled off a 200 million dollar, 81 minute heist of rare art collections. There was/is a five million dollar reward for the case and it has not been solved, but pieces of news appear in the media now and then.)

Another note on the West Liberty job interview process: Bob Hilmer, who has become the winningest boys’ basketball coach in Iowa High School Athletic Association history, rode with me from the Cornell campus in Mount Vernon and was interviewed also the same evening in the spring of 1962. Hilmer was a good athlete at Cornell and played football, basketball, baseball and participated in track. He could do it all—good at all sports, great at none. And Bob was also a standup guy—non-drinker, non-smoker, good teammate. Why did they take me over Bob? I suppose I came across a little better than Hilmer to a group of strangers and I probably received a little stronger support from Paul Maaske, whose buddy Ed Kelley, a sporting goods salesman, was from West Liberty. I had scored a lot more for Paul’s teams than had Bob. Also, I was from a larger town than Bob, whose home town was Monona, Iowa, a little more personable and probably more convincing to the small town school board. In retrospect, they made a very costly error for their immediate purposes. He might still have been at West Liberty winning game after game. Bob Hilmer is still coaching (and chalking up w’s) with an Iowa High School team at Waco of Olds and I am writing this book in Corpus Christi, Texas. We have both had our moments and found our way by different paths. If wins mean anything in high school basketball, and I hear that they do, Bob Hilmer would have to be called the greatest coach in Iowa high school basketball history.

I headed to Southern California in June of 1963 to attempt to put the West Liberty debacle behind me. Stopping in Las Vegas for a few days en route, I ran into Dean Keefe, a guy known as Keefer