2 At Teachers College

On a crisp, clear September Sunday morning, I put a suitcase, a few boxes, and some clothes on hangers into the trunk of my brother’s 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible. Don drove because his car had the most room. Mother sat in front with him. Father and I occupied the back seat. Americans eventually accumulated so much stuff they could no longer take children to college in a car. Pickups, vans, or trailers were required. When we stopped at noon for dinner in Cedar Falls, it was the first time that the four of us sat down together for a restaurant meal. Dining out was less common for most farm families then.

Would I have been spared the crowded quarters of Stadium Hall if the college had not initially assigned “Carroll” to Bartlett, a women’s dormitory? The correction-caused delay may have doomed me to Room #6, where I lived with four others in a 15′ x 20′ space furnished with a single and two bunk beds, two clothes racks, five dressers, a table and five chairs, and a bookcase. Two storm windows added in winter offered the unexpected luxury of refrigerated food storage. Physical education majors liked having athletic facilities close at hand. O. R. Latham Stadium, completed in 1940, had been named for a recently deceased sports-loving president. The brick and concrete structure seated six thousand; enclosed locker rooms, rest rooms, batting cages, and an indoor dirt track from which dust rose and permeated our clothes, giving us all (we imagined) an earthy aroma. It overlooked a football field encircled by another track covered with crushed cinders from the campus coal-fired power plant. To accommodate its burgeoning post-World War II enrollment, ISTC added twenty-four rooms for 160 freshmen and eight head residents to a mezzanine beneath the stands. Stadium Hall still housed one hundred first year men in 1959. It had a main office and mailboxes, two hallway telephones, two lounges (one with a television set), a study room, a recreation area, and a kitchen for hot plates and corn poppers because appliances used elsewhere blew fuses. Two head residents and their assistants shared rooms. The hall director lived alone. Game days precluded our showering in the locker rooms, but we could still share the toilets with fans.

Overcrowding was a fact of college life. ISTC tripled in size, growing from 3200 in 1956 to more than 9700 in 1970. Average annual increase topped 10 percent in all but one year during that span. Numbers decreased in 1959 with ending the two-year elementary teacher program. Yet half the dormitory rooms had extra occupants making many doubles triples and singles doubles. Stadium Hall’s last resident left on November 28, 1961 for a recently opened residence hall. Congestion persisted despite building four dormitories and denying Cedar Falls – Waterloo students on-campus rooms. Long cafeteria and registration lines exasperated everyone. The Commons fed more than twice the number it had been designed to serve. Filled classrooms closed sections, frustrating those trying to complete schedules.

At a time when American undergraduates nationally were 95 percent White, it should not surprise that eighteen to twenty-two-year-old White Iowans comprised the homogenous ISTC student body. African Americans made up less than 1 percent of the state’s population and seldom numbered more than fifty at the college even though nearby Waterloo had many Black families living on its east side. Some were football and basketball stars. Between 1959 and 1963, Old Gold annuals picture about seventy Asian members of the Hawaiian Club and a handful of international students. Eight sororities totaled 944 Caucasians, eighteen Asians, and no African Americans. Four fraternities had 518 Whites, seven Blacks, and six Asians. Graduation photos show only twenty Asians and nine Blacks. Yet seven African Americans pictured in the Class of 1963 suggest a rise in minority student enrollment. Administrators welcomed diversity and discouraged prejudice expressed by Whites previously unacquainted with minorities. Football QB Jerry Morgan from Gary, Indiana, assisted in teaching physical education. He is the first African American with whom I ever had a conversation.

Apart from urban sophisticates from Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and other cities, most hailed from small towns or farms as did my roommates: Ed Burrell (Center Point), Bill Munchoff (Lansing), Dennis Henrickson (Northwood), and Ken Harris (Spencer). The latter’s brash personality prompted Father to warn me: “You better watch out for that guy.” Ken and I lasted the year living together without becoming friends. I regret being less cordial to him than he was to me. When Dennis had an allergic reaction to dust, an older sister arranged his transfer to Seerley-Baker Hall after just three weeks. Lucky him! Before departing he nicknamed me “Angel” for Engelhardt. I liked the moniker. Alas it did not catch on widely. Over the next four years, Dennis and I followed parallel paths as orientation guides and head residents. We also earned several of the same honors. Bill dropped out after midterm, reducing Room #6 to just three occupants. Friendships formed from sharing a stair landing with Room #5 persuaded Mike Gibbs, a farm kid from near Burlington, to move in with us.

After unloading my ‘stuff” and before my parents departed for home to do the milking, we walked to the Commons for the new student reception. We passed through a receiving line, shaking hands with President J. W. and Mrs. Maucker, Dean of the College William Lang, and Dean of Women Mavis Holmes; had cookies with a cup of fruit punch (it was a warm day after all); and met my adviser, Assistant Professor of History Harold Wohl. A New York City Jewish shopkeeper’s son, Wohl like other easterners had enrolled at the University of Iowa because the East had few higher education opportunities. During our awkward first encounter, we did not foresee how he would further my own graduate training at Iowa just five years later.

The Commons had opened in 1933 for the purpose of socially educating collegians to live with others. It had been designed in the same Georgian architectural style as the Bartlett and Lawther residence halls for women to which it connected. The second level had checkrooms, restrooms, offices, small lounges, and a fountain room. A long, wide promenade separated a ballroom and stage from an equally spacious, attractively decorated Georgian Lounge with a fireplace at each end topped by mirrors and access to an open terrace on the building’s south side. A mezzanine, overlooking the ballroom, provided space for playing games. The food service kitchen and dining rooms occupied the ground floor. Once classes began, two parallel lines of women and men snaked down the hallways from the women’s dormitories to the bottom of each stairway where checkers admitted us to the cafeteria for every weekday noon and evening meal. Fewer students ate breakfast or showed up on Saturday, which shortened lines. Sunday dinner drew a crowd because no evening meal was served. Checker Ruth Sargent, a widow, befriended me; we exchanged Christmas cards for many years until her death. She never failed to rant about evil Republicans in her annual Yuletide greeting.

New student orientation passed in a blur of days touring, test taking, form filling, line standing, and book buying. The ordeal began with the annual freshmen picnic on the lawn west of the Campanile, a campus landmark commemorating the school’s fiftieth anniversary. Beans, chips, hotdogs, and ice cream were familiar and filling. Perfect weather, lovely corn-fed coeds, and pervasive friendliness made for a pleasant evening. Afterward, I set out to meet a United Student Fellowship (USF) representative at the Crossroads. When no one appeared at the appointed time, I looked elsewhere. Might the Crossroads be intersecting sidewalks at the center of the grass-covered traffic circle in front of Sabin Hall? How about the Horseshoe on the street side the Commons? Failing to find other lost souls, I trudged back to Stadium Hall. I thus missed an opportunity to meet Hawaiian members of the Congregational Sigma Eta Chi Sorority and to attend USF sponsored retreats, speakers, and discussions. In subsequent years, Off Campus Religious Centers held “church night” in the auditorium with signs hoisted to keep lambs like me from going astray. While this missed appointment facilitated my drifting away from church at college, I still retained an interest in religion.

The student counseling committee annually selected sixty or so orientation guides. These upper-class men and women delivered gender-segregated groups of newcomers to pre-arranged meetings. They pointed out academic buildings and helpfully told everyone to locate the right rooms before classes began. On Monday morning, we trooped to the Men’s Gymnasium, found an empty folding chair at long tables set up on the basketball court, and completed the second part of the Iowa College Scholarship and Placement Test. The results measured our knowledge of physical science, biological science, speech, and music. Old Gold editors invariably put a photograph in the annual as an iconic image of orientation “processing.” ISTC built the Gym in 1925 as a centerpiece for intercollegiate athletics and training male physical education teachers and coaches. The college soon added a football field, outdoor track, stadium, and baseball diamond to the forty-acre parcel of land it had purchased west of the original campus.

Stadium Hall residents trekked daily from the western edge of the “West Forty” to nine academic buildings clustered on the “East Forty.” All had been built between the American Civil War’s end and the First World War’s start. My classes occurred mostly in Sabin Hall (56 percent) and the Auditorium Building (28 percent). After the first semester revealed studying was required for academic health, I visited the library frequently. The four oldest structures had three- or four-stories, well-worn stairways, warped floors, and noisy radiators. The music department filled Central Hall (1869) and overflowed into offices and practice rooms on the second and third floors of Gilchrist Hall (1882) and Administration Building (1894). Music faculty and students held the recitals required for Exploring Music, which I attended in Gilchrist Chapel. A two-story corridor that conveyed heavy class-bound student traffic joined Gilchrist to Administration, an unattractive Victorian architectural muddle of Classical, Renaissance, and Gothic styles. The Crossroads, built for linking Administration and Central to the Auditorium Building (1900), served as a popular gathering place for students who sought rides posted on bulletin boards, bought play tickets, voted in elections, and picked up the College Eye, a weekly campus newspaper. The Auditorium had fifty classrooms for the Language, Speech, Literature, Education, and Psychology departments and a theatre seating two thousand people.

Science (1903), Women’s Gymnasium (1905), Sabin Hall (1912) and Wright Hall (1915) comprised the other major classroom structures. Sabin, when originally built as the teacher training school, had been called an “educational palace” for accommodating three hundred fifty pupils, twenty-five instructors, and five hundred student teachers. It had been remodeled for business and social science classrooms in 1956 after the new Malcolm Price Laboratory School opened three blocks north of the Commons. Wright, constructed as the Vocational Building for teaching agriculture, manual training, domestic science, and art, had been refurbished in 1950 for the biology, mathematics, and domestic science departments and renamed for original faculty member D. Sands Wright. It retained notable scriptural inscriptions longtime President Homer Seerley had selected to be carved over the northeast and southeast neo-classical doorways: “Do not do what is already done” and “For the People had a mind to work.”

In 1947, President Price called the three oldest buildings firetraps that should be replaced. When his recommendation was ignored, faulty wiring torched Central Hall in 1965 and Gilchrist Hall in 1972. Happily, the musicians already had decamped to their new building. After students rejected a proposed $10 activity fee for restoration, Administration was razed in 1984. The structurally sound and beautiful Auditorium was restored and renamed Lang Hall in 1999.

Neo-classical architecture made the Library (1908) the most impressive structure. It had marble floors and a spacious reading room decorated with large murals painted by New York artist William de Leftwich Dodge in 1920 and 1921: “Education,” “Memoriam,” “Agriculture,” “The Council of Indians,” and “Commonwealth.” The artists’ vision of advancing Euro-American civilization is criticized as politically incorrect today, but did not trouble anyone on campus sixty years ago. Librarians taught every orientation group how to check out books even though their male listeners were more interested in checking out girls. Nevertheless, they showed us the first-floor periodicals, newspaper lounge, and micro-text room with typing facilities and readers for microfilmed copies of the New York Times and the Des Moines Register as well as the second-floor card files, reference section, documents room, reading room, and reserve reading and circulation desks. “The stacks are open,” we were told. Most of us had never known stacks could be closed. Turnstiles and a checkout recently added at the east entrance and exit aimed to curtail the theft of books. The change confused a professor suffering a nervous breakdown at the end of the academic year. He was hospitalized after trying to break into the newly closed north library entrance.

At an assembly of all orientation groups in the auditorium we were told: “Look to your left and to your right. Two of you will not be present at graduation.” We all laughed nervously. College officials then did not worry about attrition. Drop out rates stayed high even as ISTC worked to improve the academic quality of its entering classes. Dean Dr. Paul Bender and Associate Dean Dr. Mavis Holmes headed the Student Personnel Office. Dr. Paul Kelso served as Coordinator of Student Counseling. College support services did not offer much by way of tutoring, career planning, or other guidance. Residence hall staff primarily enforced in loco parentis rules. Alcohol should not be consumed nor property destroyed. Women had restrictions men did not: curfews, lockouts, and public dress codes. Pregnant girls usually dropped out. Many females pursued the “M.R.S. degree,” which by the Sixties had become compatible with public school teaching careers. Expanding enrollments eventually drove an extraordinary expansion of student personnel services after my graduation beginning with the addition of a financial aid officer in 1965 for distributing National Defense Student Loan money.

A Stadium Hall Head Resident told us ISTC ranked third nationally behind first-place Teachers College Columbia University and another institution I do not recall. He did not relate the prevailing view that ranked teachers’ colleges last in the American higher education hierarchy beneath public universities and liberal arts schools. ISTC sought improved quality in the early Fifties by what Dean of Instruction William Lang called “an act of academic statesmanship.” The faculty rejected an elective-based “life adjustment approach” and substituted an integrated general education program aiming to teach every student culture with a capital “C”—the best that had been thought and expressed in Western Civilization. Professors believed strongly in the value of general education and taught the new requirements as effectively as their specialized fields. Collegians responded favorably; 75 percent ranked general education classes very good or superior. Graduates called the first-year humanities sequence “the best course” they had taken at college. President Maucker’s educational testing background and commitment to excellence led him to stress program evaluation. By the Sixties, testing of sophomores and seniors and the General Professional Examination of Teachers showed ISTC significantly above national norms in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences areas. Yet Maucker also proved “we still had quite a way to go” when results were compared to those from Carleton, Swarthmore, Reed, and some Big Ten Universities.

Historian Daryl Pendergraft chaired the Committee of Nine that designed the program. As he told us in class: “ISTC believes liberal arts are the best preparation for teaching.” Hence, students took more general education credits (43) than professional education credits (24). General Education gave them a common body of knowledge about basic academic disciplines and Western culture. Two courses in English and one in Speech instilled communication skills. Natural Science and Mathematics offered Physical Science, Biology, World Resources (social geography with an emphasis on conservation and population trends), and General Mathematics. Humanities, an integrated two-course first year sequence (history, art, music, literature, religion, and philosophy), rejected a superficial survey and instead used a” block and gap” approach to study the most important historical periods from ancient times to the present. Additional humanities courses included Man and Materials (art), Exploring Music, and Heritage of the Bible or Introduction to Philosophy. Social Science taught Man and Society, an integrated two-course second year sequence that addressed economic, political, and social theories and problems. World Resources had been switched from natural to social science when I took the course. Physical Education developed undergraduate bodies via various sports and physical activities. Most students competed core requirements during their first two years.

The professional education sequence mandated The Teacher and the Child, Psychology of Learning, and Social Foundations of Education for every prospective elementary and high school teacher. Each course integrated multiple class observations at the nearby Malcolm Price Laboratory School. Specialized teaching methods and student teaching requirements varied. Hence I took credits in Teaching of Social Studies (2) and High School Teaching (8).

A Rocky Freshman Start

A registration nightmare of long lines and closed sections ended orientation. It took nearly four hours of milling about the crowded Women’s Gymnasium before I accumulated seventeen credits. Conversations with roommates shaped my choices limited by the many required courses. “Adviser” Dr. Wohl signed what I proposed without comment. Sections fortunately reopened to enroll a few more throughout the long afternoon. My hard-won victory unraveled the next day when informed that I had tested out of the mathematics and physical science general education requirements. What to do? Should I stay in these courses for which I had competence and possibly ace them? I did not consider seeking advice from my head resident or Wohl. A graduate had told me social science teaching, my chosen major, was overcrowded and a minor would be necessary to get a job. Why not math? It was in demand. The Iowa Educational Achievement Test had indicated my high quantitative ability. Without further reflection about why it was a bad idea, I dropped the two core courses and foolishly added Elementary Analysis.

Red flags included a 64^th percentile placement test score for General Mathematics. How could a score so low exclude me from taking a core course? Being compared only with ISTC freshmen apparently raised my rating. An 80^th percentile score for reading suggested deficiencies in comprehension that plagued me throughout college and graduate school. Although I ranked in the 95^th percentile for scholastic aptitude compared to all Iowa seniors, this score was considered least important for predicting probable college success. Except for Geometry, my high school General Mathematics and Algebra grades had been mediocre, and I had completed only six weeks of Advanced Algebra. Public school had not required much effort from me, I did not have good study habits. I soon learned college demanded more effort than I was prepared to give. Elementary Analysis, a five- credit course, met everyday. The professor assigned problems that I neither understood nor completed. Since he did not collect or grade our homework, I was not compelled to seek help from him or classmates. Meanwhile, most of my reserved library readings for Speech went unfinished. Plato and other assigned Humanities texts put me to sleep. I did not adequately prepare my English compositions. The day of reckoning came with a midterm grade report comprised of D letters in English and Elementary Analysis (a gift). Mother voiced her disappointment: “You are supposed to be so good.” I had expected my college grades would be lower, but had not anticipated such a disastrous outcome.

Rather than withdraw from school like my roommate Bill or seek tutorial help, I dropped Elementary Analysis as hopeless. I did this without knowing that my tuition scholarship required completing twelve (not eleven) credits successfully. An essay about how Father’s purchase of a milking machine ended my chore of milking by hand helped boost my English grade to a B. “It left me with an empty feeling,” I unwittingly wrote. Amused, Professor Loren Taylor shared my paper with the class. It represented my earliest reflections about rural boyhood, which a half century later I transformed into a book, The Farm at Holstein Dip. While home on semester break, the self-addressed post card I had given Humanities Professor George Poage arrived with news about the course final: “A+ The highest score ever recorded on this exam.” The miracle gave me a 3.0 grade point average for the term, saved my scholarship, and kept me in college. While the $735 stipend I received during eight semesters seems small, it paid nearly 20 percent of my educational fees. Despite academic struggles and nearly being done in by newfound freedom, I loved college from the start. It liberated me from farm chores and parental supervision, and offered indoor plumbing.

Involving first year students in college life is currently regarded as the key to keeping them enrolled. ISTC did not promote engagement to the degree institutions do now. Indeed, head residents warned too many extracurriculars might harm our academic health. After meeting with the basketball and debate coaches, I decided lack of time and talent precluded my doing either. Most regrettably, I did not attend an address Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered to the packed auditorium. More surprising, Old Gold executive editor Helen Knickman, a senior English major, did not report this speech by America’s foremost civil rights leader in the 1960 college annual. Instead of listening to King, I preferred going to football, basketball, and baseball games; Dimensions in Jazz #11, emceed by Playboy Assistant Jazz Editor Don Gold; and Inherit the Wind, a college play staged in the spring. Gear House (one of the two units into which Stadium Hall was subdivided) sponsored intramural flag football, basketball, and softball teams that I joined. For a time, I reverted to my winter habit of practicing basketball at the gym for a couple hours each afternoon. Unlike the Seerley-Baker houses those in Stadium Hall did not host mixers and other social events likely because no female floor wanted to stoop so low. This did not keep me from occasionally dancing with the fair sex at the Commons Ballroom or going on “coke dates” at one of two restaurants on “the Hill.”

Isolated by distance from the heart of campus and segregated from respectable society by dusty bouquet and greenish hue, many Stadium Hall residents devoted themselves to playing cards. Neither before nor since have I engaged in so many different card games so frequently for so long. Others turned to binge watching television or drink, relying on a fake ID at the Hideaway and Circle, two popular downtown watering holes for the college crowd. I limited television viewing to “Maverick” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on a few Sunday nights in the spring and overindulged only once at school that year; back home was another matter. A Stadium Hall Head Resident surprisingly bought several of us a case of beer on the condition that we drink off campus. We parked on one of the near-by country roads and ended up running and screaming in a freshly seeded field. Fortunately, it was a dark night and we escaped detection. Pranks like short sheeting beds or penciling people into rooms were common. Friends filled my car with waste paper after I brought the family sedan to Cedar Falls. Leaving the keys on my dresser made it easy for Wally to execute the idea, which came from a book he had read on his library shift. So many distractions lowered our grades. Stadium Hall typically had the poorest composite semester grade point average among all on-campus housing units.

Starting college suspended me between a familiar high school world and a puzzling new scene. Corresponding with a girl friend at Luther College and returning home every three weeks eased my transition. Sharon came for the ISTC Homecoming. I bought her the traditional mum and took her to the dance as well as the dress up Sunday dinner at the Commons. It turned out to be our last date. I broke up with her soon after by letter, a cowardly way of doing a hard thing. She encountered me by chance in an Oelwein store as a senior and flashed her engagement ring in my face. Her act underscored how marriage remaining an important goal even for college women. One of her high school classmates told me she had expressed embarrassment by what she had done at their 25^th Anniversary Class Reunion. She need not have felt regret on my account because I had done her wrong. Still, the break-up moved me forward from a past I had outgrown. Besides, she married a man from her hometown who took over her father’s business of delivering gasoline and fuel oil to farms and homes. They shared a lifetime together in her parents’ home. It is not a life I would have chosen and not the one I lived as a college professor.

On my first visit home, Father wanted to know: “Do they feed you enough?” It was a natural question for a hard-working farmer who relied upon three ample daily meals. I assured him the food was plentiful and edible even though a kitchen feeding 2000 when it was designed for only 500 surely hurt quality. For breakfast, we had eggs variously prepared, toast, hot and cold cereal, and sometimes pancakes and French toast. Bacon and caramel rolls were served on weekends, ensuring my presence. Lunch and dinner offered meat and potatoes (we were in Iowa after all), a vegetable, salad, bread, and dessert. Coffee, tea, and milk accompanied every meal. “Mystery meat” (probably breaded veal) was widely disliked and invariably thrown away in large quantities. Repetitious menus became familiar over time and bred contempt. Still, I ate heartily enough to gain thirty pounds during four years.

With the free time afforded by dropping to just eleven credits, I started work at the Commons as a busboy on the breakfast shift. A library job would have been a better fit for my bookish nature, but it did not enter my mind to apply. Campus jobs started at just $.55 an hour (one-half the Iowa minimum wage at that time) and garnered a $.05 hourly wage increase for each semester worked. Coeds clad in yellow dresses served food on the line or cleared dining room tables. Boys attired in white jackets and caps carried food to the line or bussed pans of dirty dishes to one of two dumbwaiters. I rose before six o’clock and scurried across the frozen campus watched by stars twinkling in the dark winter sky. Light would be breaking when my shift ended. I killed time before class by playing “Shenandoah” and other popular recordings on the Seeburg Jukebox to ease my melancholy as I stood in the darkened Commons Ball Room overlooking the Horseshoe, watching the campus come alive. The next semester I shifted to bussing the noon meal and additionally toiled on the Saturday cleaning crew, which mopped, stripped, and waxed floors in the three dinning rooms between breakfast and dinner. I labored three more terms as busboy, rising to a princely $.95 hourly wage. My earnings for five semesters worked totaled over $800, paying 20 percent of my college fees by graduation day.

Second semester registration proved equally tedious and time-consuming. Required courses precluded electives and limited choices to professors and sections. I had wanted eighteen credits to recover ground lost in my disastrous first term. I settled for seventeen, which included typing and swimming that fulfilled proficiencies stipulated for teacher certification. At sex-segregated pools, women swam in tank suits while men wore our birthday best. I had been put in the shallow end, perhaps because my self-taught swimming techniques lacked polish. When races put me at the top of the class, the instructor promoted me to the deep end. Jim Hamilton, a farm boy from Independence whose aunt had been my kindergarten teacher, partnered with me for life saving drills. Since neither of us drowned, we passed. We renewed our friendship in 1964 as history graduate students at the University of Iowa. We shared a house for two years (1966-1968), and stayed in touch until he passed away in 2021.

Our faculty speaker at orientation advised studying two hours weekly for each credit hour carried. Belatedly awakening to the need for working harder to achieve better second semester grades, I adopted the professor’s advice. Although never achieving the standard he set, I usually studied thirty hours weekly thereafter. Few peers ever considered studying that hard. Equally helpful, I rented a locker in the Auditorium Building. These had been set-aside for off-campus students. Surely Stadium Hall residents qualified, I reasoned. Storing textbooks in the locker facilitated going to the library from the cafeteria and classes. Not returning to Stadium Hall saved me from cards and other time-wasting temptations. My new habits led roommates to complain: “You study all the time. You are too uptight. It will make you sick.” They concerns were confirmed when I was treated for a stomach ulcer at age twenty-nine. Grades mattered more in the second semester, and I worked harder in most courses to earn higher grades. Lack of digital dexterity doomed me to a C in Typing and I did not care that cutting one swimming class lowered my grade to B. Had a I considered Exploring Music as a history course, rather than a requirement taught dully on television, I might have earned an A rather than a C. My pursuit of higher grades escalated in subsequent semesters. For the most part, I succeeded, earning A’s in all history credits, almost all Social Science courses, and most Education classes.

Dr. Daryl Pendergraft’s American History to 1877 gave me the best history preparation I received at ISTC. He required reading reports weekly from an extensive bibliography, and asked us to write periodically on what we claimed to have read assisted by any notes we had taken. I totaled 4000 pages and (along with an elementary education major) easily topped the class in “reading points” earned by reading such professional journals as the American Historical Review, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and Journal of Economic History; Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison; and books like Avery Craven’s The Growth of Southern Nationalism and Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox. Pendergraft later nominated me for a fellowship at Columbia University so that I might “sit at the feet of Alan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, and other “greats.” Sadly, I spoiled his high percentage for picking winners. Even though Columbia admitted me, I could not attend without the fellowship. It is just as well. The History Department’s reputation for cutthroat competition would have eaten me alive.

My second most memorable college intellectual experience came from taking the first year two-semester Humanities sequence, which focused on instilling culture with a capital “C.” We were often urged to attend on-campus speakers and performances that would deepen our cultural appreciation and knowledge. Listening to Dr. Poage lecture on the ancient world inspired me “to do what he is doing.” It was an audacious thought for an eighteen-year-old having academic difficulty. Yet teaching college history became my goal during subsequent semesters while completing social science teacher certification in case I did not qualify for doctoral study. Unable to enroll in Poage’s Humanities II, Seventeenth Century to the Present, I settled for Dr. Howard Thompson instead. He became my favorite teacher. His emphasis on ideas in history and his mixing lecture with class discussion of assigned texts shaped my career as a professional historian. Humanities introduced me to the study of intellectual history without comprehending what that entailed. Despite philosophical wags calling intellectual historians an oxymoron, I presented fields in American and Modern European Intellectual History (among three others) for my comprehensive doctoral examinations and as a professor taught courses in both. For European Thought and Culture, two Humanities courses, and Principia (a required freshman course) I assigned many of the texts first encountered in Humanities I and II at ISTC. These books truly changed my life forever!

Because several texts were on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, Professor Poage announced the Newman Center priest would grant Catholics permission to read them at their request. Job, a Biblical book articulating skeptical wisdom, addressed the problem of evil. The virtuous Job demands an explanation from God for his undeserved suffering. God’s belated answer did not speak directly to Job’s question, and instead set his problem in the context of the Lord’s cosmic creation. Plato’s Republic, a book too difficult for first year students, set forth philosophical idealism, and described how a philosopher king might rule a utopian society. The dialogues Euthyphro or Apology would have been better tools for teaching the Socratic method. The more interesting Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex described how the King of Thebes unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. Appalled, he blinds himself. Hubris, excessive pride in thinking he could defy the gods’ will, was his fatal flaw. Augustine’s Confessions was as dull as Plato. Yet his story about him and his friends stealing unripe pears resonated with my own misdeeds committed for the excitement of sin. Dante’s Inferno vividly detailed Hell as a series of concentric circles where sinners suffered punishments that fit their crimes. He pictured the depths of hell, not as an inferno, but as a frozen wasteland in which ice fed by the Devil’s tears traps him perpetually. Lack of God’s love accounts for the frigid cold. Machiavelli’s The Prince described how rulers maintain their positions and achieve goals through the amoral means of power politics. Poage did not devote much class time to discussing texts. At semester’s end, he barely mentioned Shakespeare’s “revenge tragedy,” Hamlet.

I enjoyed hearing Professor Thompson and collegians less timid than me debate books in the second term. John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government attacked divine right absolute monarchy and argued for liberal representative government with its powers limited by natural human rights. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty made utilitarian arguments defending free speech. All ideas should be heard because they may be true; or if false, proving them wrong in debate strengthened old truths or uncovered new ones. Voltaire’s Candide made me a Deist. It rejected Pangloss’ “best of all possible worlds” and Martin’s “worst of all possible worlds” doctrines as deterministic philosophies, making humans passive when they should by building a better world. An anonymous letter claiming five English professors advocated atheistic communism sent during the McCarthy era persuaded staff to stop requiring student purchase of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto. President Maucker had responded to the outcry, declaring, “I have no reason to question any ISTC teacher’s loyalty.” Backed by the president, instructors distributed free mimeographed copies to their classes. The book explained how economic forces doomed modern capitalism to collapse and ensured the triumph of a more just socialist society. Such ideas made Marxism one of the modern world’s most important theories.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment enthralled me while reading it in the library during an entire lovely spring afternoon. The novel is set in St. Petersburg, a city Dostoevsky considered corrupted by Western rationalism. It critiqued Nietzsche’s idea that superior individuals would elevate cultural achievements if not constrained by Christian morality. To test Nietzsche’s Ṻbermensch concept, Raskolnikov, an alienated, mentally disturbed former student, commits a random murder without remorse in the city’s slums. He encounters Sonja, a meek Christian woman, prostituting herself on behalf of her family, and comes to see her as representative of all suffering. His kissing her feet is reminiscent of Christ and puts him on the road to redemption. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon explains why innocent Bolsheviks confessed to crimes they did not commit during Stalin’s purge trials. For some, like Rubashov, the act marked their last service to the Party to which they had dedicated their lives. One of the best political novels ever written, it marked the author’s rejection of communism.

Earning just twenty-eight credits kept me classified as a freshman at year’s end. Yet better study habits raised my second term grade point average to 3.24. Eight credits of A in history suggested college teaching might be a possibility. I had drawn a first-floor room with a sink in Seerley-Baker Hall. It had nearby showers and toilets, and was much closer to cafeteria, classrooms, and library. Five of us cut a deck of cards to decide roommates as befitted Stadium Hall residents. Marshall Christenson (Lake Park), Mike, and I ended up in a double. Ed and Wally had a third-floor single. I returned to my parents’ farm for the summer, helped with the harvest on weekends, toiled weekdays for the Costigan Construction Company patching pavement in Clayton and Dubuque counties. Some days we drove more than seventy miles to work eleven hours and then returned home in the evening. Getting paid federal minimum hourly wage ($1.25) with time and a half for overtime boosted my total wages to. $854. This was $140 more than I earned doing three jobs the previous summer and $300 more than I would receive for making cheese the next. The summer passed quickly. A romance with the foreman’s niece probably saved my position when I got sick and missed one week. Karen lived in Farmersburg, a small hamlet about twelve miles from Elkader. I had fun going with her to Lakeside Ballroom at Guttenberg on Saturday nights and fishing with friends on the Mississippi River every Sunday.

Sophomore Stability

The second year at ISTC stimulated me less intellectually than the first. I most enjoyed Dr. Donald Howard’s American History since 1877 for which I read and reviewed three additional books. Some complained he included too much social history and neglected more important political topics, yet his approach anticipated the direction history took in the Sixties. Howard modeled the “professing” teacher that I preferred. He wasted no time on discussion, delivering excellent lectures intoned in a magnificent voice and pausing only to answer questions. He chaired the social science department. His weekly newspaper columns and “Behind the Headlines” radio broadcasts made him well known throughout Northeast Iowa. I liked him as an adviser because he simply signed the card I presented without question or comment. Man and Society, the required two-semester social science sequence, did not excite me like Humanities had. Sociologist Louis Bultena did not lecture effectively and I did not care for the discussion-centered approach taken by Political Scientist Erma Plaehn, a warm and engaging woman. She was one of only three female professors that I had in college and graduate school. The rise of New Feminism in the Sixties eventually raised my consciousness about this unjust anomaly.

Foreign Language study in Iowa high schools and colleges had declined in the Fifties, a trend Russia’s launch of Sputnik reversed in 1960 when ISTC reinstated French, German, and Spanish majors. History doctoral programs required French and German language proficiency. and even if I did not qualify for graduate study, a French teaching minor might make me more employable. Although fortunate to have Dr. Norman Stageberg, renown for authoring An Introductory English Grammar, my ignorance of grammar and conversational ineptitude doomed me to average grades despite hard study and faithfully attending the new language laboratory. Stageberg’s superior teaching enabled me to test into courses at the next level, where the futility of studying a subject I would never be able to teach finally dawned on me. While I easily passed the doctoral French competency exam, fifteen credits of C in French likely ruined my chances for financial aid as a first year graduate student at major universities.

The collegiate grape vine ranked Dr. Oscar Thompson as the best instructor for The Teacher and the Child, the initial professional education requirement. Devoted to discussion-based pedagogy, he had groups spend the term preparing presentations. The project I chaired addressed the problem of Catholic and Protestant mixed marriages. A class member dating an Iranian student at the time faulted us for neglecting Islam. Thompson’s group-based approach was ahead of its time. It is now widely practiced at many American colleges and universities. He preached the gospel of teaching as a profession, and the next year took a job with the National Education Association (NEA) in Washington, D.C. He surely grieved when teachers unionized.

Second-year college life engaged me more fully. I returned early as an orientation guide prepared to impart wisdom gleaned from rookie mistakes. As the elected Hemstead House Social Chairman, I planned mixers and other entertainments. When senior Bob Dickey suggested doing standup comedy for the Associated Men’s Residence Halls (AMRH) talent show, I led a house meeting dressed in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. I repeated the act at Homecoming shows as a junior and senior. Meager chin growth garnered me no prizes for the annual Men’s Union beard contest.

Reared in a GOP home like many other Iowa farm kids I joined the Young Republicans and argued Richard Nixon should be elected president in an English essay assigned by Dr. Edwin Maurer, a Young Democrat co-adviser with Erma Plaehn. I defected to the Democrats and their New Deal policies before graduation after reading Arthur Schlesinger’s three-volume Age of Roosevelt. Most of us did not read newspapers or magazines, and were too ill informed to discuss politics. ISTC attempted to address this problem by requiring a contemporary affairs course for which (as one professor quipped) successful instructors needed “the combined talents of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Drew Person.” Although knowledge of current events increased, the class was dropped when students claimed the requirement was “too historical.” It lasted as a non-credit elective for another year or two, but I ignored the opportunity.

Attending the All College Conference on International Affairs (ACCIA) taught me more about “neutralism” than I wanted to know. Speakers from numerous countries shared their national perspectives in convocation addresses, visited classes, dined with students, and met with dormitory groups. I accompanied the Russian delegate on his visit to the farm of well-known poet James Hearst and embarrassed myself by being unable to answer another speaker’s question about why the campanile had been built. Historian George Poage developed the first conference in 1957 at President Maucker’s request. Declining attendance ended the ACCIA in 1962 after a one-day conference on Latin America. Maucker then named Poage to plan a High School Model United Nations first held at the Men’s Gymnasium in 1966.

Hemstead House Head Resident Jim Ferguson mentored my activities and other steps to become a head resident. I had applied previously without success. Descended from a long line of nervous stomachs on both sides of the family tree, I did not interview well. The new dormitory director, Lowe S. MacLean, hired me anyway. I worked the next two years in a paid position on the lowest rung of the student personnel staff ladder. Jim also introduced me to the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Though much mocked by intellectuals like highbrow critic Dwight Macdonald during the Fifties, BOMC discounted prices drew me to such entertaining historical works as Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt, Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and The Story of Civilization, and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. These volumes purchased for $78 during the next three years and others saved from the textbooks bought for $308 helped me heed the ISTC Catalog injunction to acquire a small personal library. After all, how could one teach without books? I dropped my BOMC membership when I discovered well-stocked Iowa City bookstores offered an abundance of less expensive history paperbacks. My professional library eventually grew to more than 2000 volumes during my professional career.

I continued attending football and basketball games as well as wrestling matches when it became apparent they were winners too. I regret not going to The Brothers Four, The Chad Mitchell Trio, or Bob Newhart despite being a folkie and lover of stand-up comedy. I bypassed lecture concert series events except for well-known poet, Robert Frost. For two hours (frankly, it seemed longer), Frost recited poetry to a full house and attributed his works to farming and teaching interests. Playboy jazz editor Don Gold returned to emcee Dimensions in Jazz # 12, and I came back again to listen. I also enjoyed the ISTC Theatre production of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic poem, John Brown’s Body.

Insufficient credits rendered me ineligible for Greek life until I achieved sophomore status. Group pictures of the four fraternities and eight sororities in the Old Gold indicate that male members ranged between 143 (1960) and 196 (1961); females varied from 165 (1960) to 295 (1962). Together Greeks comprised between 9.3 and 11.8 percent of the student body. They constituted an important part of campus life, but lack of houses limited their influence. All four fraternities invited me to their “smoker,” and I attended those hosted by Alpha Chi Epsilon, Phi Sigma Epsilon, and Sigma Tau Gamma. I declined their invitations to join, and remained a God-Damned Independent (GDI). I had been hazed in high school and did not care for enduring it again. Someone snarkily said a snob like me should have joined Tau Kappa Epsilon, which had not invited me after I had not attended their smoker held in Waverly after a basketball game with Wartburg College. It would not have mattered if they had asked. I do not regret my decision, which neither imposed any social stigma nor foreclosed any opportunities.

My life changed most when I began dating Joan Hartman in January 1961. We had met the previous spring semester in biology. Unable to focus her microscope properly or draw well, she often visited my side of the laboratory table where she peered through my microscope and copied my drawings. Being of use on these occasions did not alter her dismissal of me as a clod for wearing ugly, black-died chukka boots while working in the cafeteria. I had been equally unimpressed by her on a car trip home for a weekend with one of her Adel classmates. She had regarded him as her stand-in high school boy friend, and loudly flirted with him the entire trip. Still, her beauty impressed me when I returned to ISTC in the fall. Deeply tanned from a summer as lifeguard with shoulder length sun-bleached honey-blond hair and million-dollar smile, she looked stunning while putting meat on plates in the cafeteria serving line. Yet having a girlfriend kept me from acting on my libidinal urges. Meanwhile she started dating the college mascot, “Peppy the Panther,” a better catch in her opinion. After my romance ended and Peppy dropped her for being “a dumb farm girl,” we went out on the rebound. Since I liked to “crack wise” and she laughed easily at the right times, we seemed well matched. Her name, Joan, (pronounced Jo Ann) was quickly shortened to Jo.

Our dates included studying at the library as well as college sporting events, dances, and plays. We played games or danced to the Seeburg Juke Box at the Commons. My 1952 Chevrolet Bel Aire (formerly the family sedan), carried us to movies in Waterloo, downtown Cedar Falls, or the nearby drive-in theatre; picnics at George Wyth Memorial State Park, Island Park, or other spots located on the Cedar River; and nocturnal adventures along back-country roads. By the time classes ended, we had exchanged class rings as tokens of commitment, a practice more sophisticated collegians dismissed. We did not mind. As a GDI, I did not have a fraternity pin. Nor did I have cash for an engagement ring. We each returned home to summer jobs. She taught swimming lessons and guarded lives at the Adel Pool while I toiled as a poorly paid cheese maker at the Elkader Milk Plant.

It had been a good year. I attained junior status by carrying eighteen-credits each semester and benefited educationally from extracurricular activities. Notwithstanding French my cumulative grade average held steady at 3.17. Appointment as head resident gave me a better on-campus job and the additional perk of living alone in a single room. Roommates Mike and Marshall teasingly said I had “gone bad.” Mike stayed in school and graduated with Jo and me. Marshall dropped out after our junior year, married a graduating senior who I now think resembled movie star Julia Roberts, and enlisted in the Air Force. He served twenty years as a B-52 navigator and is a Vietnam War veteran. I lost touch with both him and Mike, and only reconnected with them in Texas via e-mail sixty years later.

When ISTC expanded its mission to award non-teaching degrees, its name changed to State College of Iowa (SCI). Faculty had discussed these changes since 1957. All but four teacher’s colleges had become multi-purpose institutions while many liberal arts schools had developed teacher-training programs. Sociologist Louis Bultena presented additional reasons for broadening the curriculum. ISTC already served as a regional college for northeast Iowa. When 56 percent of its 1950 graduates and 33 percent of its 1956 graduates did not teach, it represented a waste of ISTC time and money. Adding programs would attract more talented faculty and strengthen the institution academically. The Board of Regents authorized awarding non-teaching degrees and planning educational specialist and doctoral programs for school personnel at its November meeting in 1960. Expectations that expanded purpose would further elevate academic quality soon drove talk of making ISTC a university. SCI became UNI (University Northern Iowa) in 1967, leaving my generation in an unusual position. We matriculated at ISTC, commenced at SCI, and are alumni of UNI, a school we did not attend.

Junior Challenges

An academically disappointing first semester launched my junior year. French Professor Henri Chabert fixed me with his steely blue eyes and asked, “Have you been to the language lab?” Sadly, practice left me less than perfect. A temporary assistant professor taught us little about Psychology of Learning, and awarding “blanket B’s” confirmed her incompetence. During mandated classroom visits to the Price Laboratory School, social studies teacher Donald Scovel, known statewide for his teaching, complained I did not ask enough questions and concluded I did not care about becoming a good teacher. An ardent Republican and a difficult man on his best days, Scovel often complained about “liberal professors at the college.” Leland Hott, another Price instructor, taught the required social studies methods course. He dismissed my carefully prepared lesson plan as “too long because it would take three weeks rather than one to teach.” His cerebral pedagogy also doomed me to an average grade. Yet the next year while student teaching at the Laboratory School, Hott offered to name me one of his teaching assistants after he had been appointed instructor of sociology at the University of Iowa. He may have been blowing smoke. Our last conversation occurred while waiting at an Iowa City traffic light. He had not yet passed statistics, which a sociology doctorate required. He later left Iowa without his degree for a teaching job at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.

Fortunately, my second semester soared academically. High grades in Modern Europe to 1815, Anglo American Geography, and four sociology courses put me on the Dean’s List for the second time. I remained there until graduation. Sociologist Robert Claus had high expectations in teaching Minority Group Relations. I raced to keep pace with his jargon filled, rapid-fire lecturing style, but enjoyed reading and discussing Arnold Rose’s condensed paperback version of the Gunnar Myrdal classic, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Claus’s course as well as Professor Louis Bultena’s General Anthropology and American Class Structure equipped me for understanding the ethnicity, race, class, and gender mantra that transformed the American historical profession during the Sixties.

Being head resident was hard. Stone House had a daunting reputation as a “rowdy” place. I replaced a former marine who had struggled to keep order. It was hoped “a velvet glove” might be more effective. It was not. Still, a new men’s dormitory eased overcrowding and dropped the decibel level. Enforcing rules pained me. When cooking aromas betrayed one resident, I confiscated his electric frying pan. I busted another for alcohol possession. If he had not left water running to cool his beer, another resident would not have called me to check the room. As the infraction had been witnessed, I felt compelled to report it. The miscreant did not mind; he wanted to move off campus anyway. I looked the other way on two other occasions. For a joke, Father brought a pint of whiskey to my room while accompanied by the state senator from our district. I was not amused. When I dropped in on Mike entertaining his dad and others in our former room at Homecoming, he made me feel unwelcome so I left immediately without noticing their paper cups or the pungent alcohol aroma. Mike and Wally concluded erroneously that I had given them a break for friendship’s sake. I had not, yet my unwittingly quick departure gave us all the best possible resolution of an awkward situation.

I made good friends during my Stone House “daze.” House president Larry Ingraham had ambitious plans during his tenure. He did not blame me when most of these went unrealized. Bill Baker, an older student, shared our interests in books, religion, and other ideas. We spent a lot of time in conversation and all obtained post-graduate degrees in our areas of interest: law (Bill), psychology (Larry), and history (me). We socialized frequently while still in school, but had less contact once we entered the working world. HR David Smith lived in the room below me. I often knocked on his door for late-night talks about our jobs, social science courses, and papers. Filled with ideas and gregarious, David made a stimulating companion. He studied anthropology at Iowa and taught at University of Minnesota Duluth. Regrettably we lost touch during our early days in Iowa City.

My extra-curriculars included serving on the AMRH Social Committee and as the Men’s Union Orientation Chairman. For the latter, I helped plan fall orientation by following dittoed pages in a notebook I had been given. Comedy made me an Old Gold Popularity winner and a nominee for Favorite Man on Campus. Collegians then obsessively picked favorites, evidenced by so many annual elections for royalty: Miss Old Gold, Miss AMRH, Homecoming Queen, SCI Relays Queen, and the Greek Week King, Queen, Prince, and Princess. Such awards signified nothing except a modicum of fleeting fame and a yearbook photo.

Jo and I continued dating despite emerging relationship difficulties over conflicting personalities as our mutual infatuation dissipated. Her energy and gregarious nature often grated on my cautious reserve, which frustrated her in turn. She also disliked the irritability that I had inherited (or learned) from my father and grandfather. It seems Engelhardt men for generations have often remarked cruelly on “foolishness” and “chatter.” We broke up over a weekend and made up when I felt compelled to eat and could not bear facing her in the cafeteria serving line. She soon returned to the Adel Pool for the summer while I started a new job with the Clayton County Road Maintenance Department. I spent several weeks pondering the problems of living with her even as I seemingly could not live without her. Finally, on one of my weekend visits to Adel, I proposed marriage. She accepted. Like most engaged couples, we each foolishly believed the other’s imperfections could be easily corrected. They cannot, of course.

Senior Honors, Plans, and Unfulfilled Hopes

Stone House had not been a happy experience, and I had not liked living alone. At my request, I was reassigned and invited Cecil Shaw, an African American from Aurora, Illinois, to room with me in Newbold House, located on the third and fourth floors of Baker Hall’s newest wing. Cecil had just completed a year as senior head resident, a position for which I applied. Some were surprised when I was not appointed. Hall Director Sandy MacLean explained: “I think you are too busy to do an adequate job.” Then why did you ask me to apply in the first place, I thought but did not say. Sandy instead named Dennis, my short-term allergic Stadium Hall roommate. He was probably right in his assessment. Dennis did a good job, and went on to have a student personnel career at UNI. Meanwhile, my senior activities included serving as men’s fall orientation chairman and president of both the Kappa Delta Pi (education) and Pi Gamma Mu (social science) honorary societies. Activities elevated me (and Dennis) among thirty-one seniors to Purple Key, the highest award the college bestowed on only one percent of the student body. Since 1952, Purple Key had replaced “Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities.” It also substituted poorly for the far more prestigious Phi Beta Kappa, a society too good to be chartered at undistinguished institutions like SCI. I would not have qualified for membership in any case. Still, I am proud daughter Kristen received her Phi Beta Kappa key at St. Olaf College thirty years later.

I finally engaged high culture in ways the college’s liberal arts curriculum intended. The lecture concert series featured the Roger Wagner Chorale singing medieval, renaissance, and contemporary songs. Renowned actors Helen Hayes and Maurice Evans performed scenes from Shakespeare. Pulitzer-prize winning Carl Sandberg recited poetry and sang ballads to a packed auditorium. Pianist Ronald Turani, a Vladimir Horowitz student, won several standing ovations during his performance. And yes, we sat where Jo could watch his hands while playing. Neither of us cared for the avante garde ballet, Metamorphosis of the Owls. Talented actor Ray Mikesh impressed us in the college theatrical productions. He played Jourdain, a shopkeeper seeking to be a cultured aristocrat in Moliere’s comedy of manners, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. He appeared as a provincial mayor in Nicolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, which satirized the flaws of Tsarist Russian bureaucracy and bureaucrats. As the tramp in Harold Pinter’s complex character study, The Caretaker, Mikesh tried to turn two brothers against each other. Sadly, I did not give art or music the same attention that I did drama. The required courses, Exploring Music and Man and Materials, had not yet stimulated the appreciation for them that I later developed. Taking the former as a mass lecture television course sapped my motivation. Yet I always went to the annual Dimensions in Jazz concert and Cecil invited me to hear the Varsity Men’s Glee Club perform at the recently completed Russell Music Hall. Peter, Paul, and Mary required no invitation when they appeared at the Men’s Gymnasium in April.

The first semester was academically rich with subjects that most interested me. I enrolled Howard Thompson’s Modern Europe from 1815, Dr. Lyman Harris’ Russia, and Dr. Donald Whitnah’s American Foreign Relations. Professor Thompson assigned Gordon Craig’s textbook, possibly the best European survey ever written. Studying nineteenth-century liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism as well as twentieth-century Communism, Fascism, and Nazism taught me how ideas shaped history and inspired me to write a term paper about “The German Universities and National Socialism.” Thompson called it “Excellent,” praising my organization, bibliographical comments, and use of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to set the stage. Gifted lecturer Harris competently taught a well-structured course for which I reviewed three additional books. The affable Whitnah, a gifted storyteller, delivered detailed lectures to a large class of more than fifty students. He assigned Thomas A. Bailey’s well-written standard textbook and no additional reading or writing. He is one of only two of my SCI history teachers who published books. He wrote about the United States Weather Bureau, air traffic safety, and the American occupation of Austria, and edited an award winning volume on government agencies. Robert Ross, a gifted political scientist, had just arrived from government service. Public Administration turned out to be my most demanding course. The low grades he assigned on our first essay examination shocked everyone and made some sick. He assigned two detailed book reviews that were dittoed and distributed for class presentation and discussion.

An international crisis caused by Russian missiles in Cuba briefly punctured the SCI campus bubble in October 1962. During a heated discussion over lunch in the Commons Cafeteria, Dick from Dike supported United States military commanders who wanted to bomb and/or invade the island. Dick feared fighting communists on the main street of his small hometown located about fifteen miles east of Cedar Falls. Others at the table disagreed. They hoped President Jack Kennedy’s naval blockade might compel the Russians to back down without incinerating the world. Happily, a solution emerged soon after we finished the more important business of Dad’s Day and Homecoming weekends. The missiles were removed. War was averted. Democrats scored a rare midterm election victory during a president’s first term. And Kennedy—persuaded he could negotiate with the Soviets—completed the Test Ban Treaty. The crisis showed the limits of United States power; America could not bully truculent small nations, a lesson President Lyndon Johnson soon ignored when escalating the Vietnam War.

During the crisis, the SCI Dad of the Day committee honored my father. As part of the festivities, my family shared a meal with President and Mrs. J. W. Maucker in the small Commons Dining Room. Afterward Father delivered an excellent brief halftime address at the football game. “He did a better job than the President,” Hall Director Sandy MacLean opined. My parents appreciated the Maucker’s hospitality. It was the only time I socialized with “Bill,” although earlier he had sent me a congratulatory note as one of two Furniss and Mary W. Lambert Award recipients for “having shown the greatest all-around development during their college life.” It paid $25. Maucker had been named ISTC president in 1950 at the relatively young age of thirty-eight. Looking more youthful than his years, campus visitors often mistook him for a collegian. Having never attended annual Matriculation Convocations, I cannot say whether he indeed was a forceful and at times inspirational speaker. The president’s condemnation of a panty raid as “a nocturnal adventure” had amused several of us in Stadium Hall. His prosaic annual greetings to students in the Old Gold mentioned efforts to improve the faculty and raise educational quality in the face of steadily rising student numbers. He welcomed the new Music Education Building, Health Service, and Regents Hall and worked to make ISTC/SCI/UNI less provincial. He considered it a bad trade when a state imposed out-of-state tuition fee stopped numerous Hawaiians from enrolling.

I put off student teaching until the fourth block because I wanted as much academic preparation as possible before stepping into the classroom. During the third block, I took Social Foundations of Education, Introduction to Philosophy, and Problems in American Civilization. I now regret not electing Heritage of the Bible instead of two social science credits. Although reading Voltaire’s Candide converted me to Deism and interrupted my churchgoing, I enjoyed talking about religion and would have benefited from studying Scripture. When an evangelical student inquired about the state of my soul, I shared my skepticism with him. He shook his head sadly and said he would pray for me. A Catholic and fellow head resident was harsher in his response: “I lost all respect for you when informed about your lack of faith.” I don’t recall my reply. A few weeks later he told the Hall Director that Newbold House residents no longer respected me. He may have projected his own feelings on them. When Sandy asked me about the incident involving a flooded fourth floor bathroom, I replied: “I didn’t notice any disrespect until the other HR showed up. I asked the residents to clean up the mess. When I checked back, they had.” Sandy accepted my explanation and said no more.

Ferdinand (Ferd) Riechmann assisted by Don Scovel supervised my student teaching at the Price Laboratory School. During the eight week period I spent about three weeks in front of four classes: two sections of Riechmann’s World History, one section of Scovel’s United States History, and one section of Riechmann’s Reading, a course he had developed for a group of low-achievers who had been assigned to study hall while their more talented classmates took foreign language. Ferd wisely decided these pupils would benefit more from reading instruction. It became my favorite class. Riechmann related well with students, presented well-organized lessons, and skillfully led class discussions. He taught me to take an interest in student’s lives and made precise suggestions for improving my teaching. We became friends and kept in touch until he died of cancer several years later. It was a stressful time for me. I put in long hours. Nerves kept me from eating much until evening. Even though Cecil and I sometimes ordered pizza while preparing our next day’s lessons, I still lost twenty pounds in eight weeks. Yet my A/B grade satisfied me; it would have been lower had it been Scovel’s decision alone.

June 6, 1963 was my last day at the lab school. At 6:30, President James William Maucker, Ph.D., presided over the Eighty-Sixth Annual Spring Commencement at O. R. Latham Stadium where I had started college just four years earlier on an equally beautiful day. Karl Holvik conducted the Concert Band in a Prelude Concert featuring “March from Egmont” by Beethoven, “Solemn March” by Handel, and “King Duncan’s March from Macbeth” by Verdi. With the opening notes of Alfred Reed’s “The Crowning Glory,” the audience stood for the Academic Procession of the degree candidates (six Master of Arts in Education, 437 Bachelor of Arts with Teaching Certificate, and twenty-seven Bachelor of Arts), the President’s Party, the Administrative Council, and (last and least) the faculty. After “The Star-Spangled Banner” ended, David Bluhm, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Religion, gave the invocation. He had introduced me to philosophy earlier in the semester. Everyone sat down. The band played “A Festival Prelude” by Alfred Reed. Someone awarded honors and prizes. President Maucker conferred degrees. Milo Lawton inducted Alumni. As “America the Beautiful” ended, Bluhm gave the Benediction. Best of all, no one delivered a commencement address and no recessional took place. Instead, graduates gathered with their families and friends on the football field. After Jo’s anti-alcohol Methodist family departed for Adel, my parents, brother, and I celebrated with glasses of beer at the Hideaway Bar in downtown Cedar Falls.

Being awarded buxom Mary Elizabeth Ingvoldstad’s diploma as I crossed the stage afforded comic relief. Graduates rectified the mistake by passing diplomas down the row until our own arrived. The presentation of thirteen Purple and Old Gold Awards for Meritorious Scholarship and four for Conspicuous Achievement in Particular Areas surprised me as a winner for Social Science and Extra-Curriculum Activities. Onetime roommate Dennis got one for Art. “You were lucky,” Father commented later, warding off the onset of swell-headedness by me. Dennis and I also numbered among the seventeen who graduated with honors (3.25 gpa). Ten others attained high honors (3.50 gpa). Three achieved highest honors (3.75 gpa). A marking policy of imposing the bell-shaped curve on all professors achieved its purpose. Grade inflation did not yet afflict SCI. It was indeed an honor to be among the 6.5 percent of 1963 graduates who earned academic distinction. On the other hand, the ability of those attending what was still primarily a Teachers College may not have been as high as collegians at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, or many small liberal arts colleges dotting the Iowa landscape.

The next day, I packed my car and drove home to Elkader. I settled accounts with Father, signing a $1300 note at 4 percent interest. His annual loans made possible my education, and his demand for repayment gave me valuable life lessons. It pushed me to earn more and spend less, limiting my debt. Paying my own way made me a more responsible student. College fees totaled just $3668 of the $6418 spent during four years. The additional costs included entertainment, clothes, and automobile. Father allowed me to use the family sedan at school. My earnings totaled $5056 from a scholarship ($735), summer jobs ($2880), and college jobs ($1441). It made Father proud. “It cost me a lot less than I thought it would,” he bragged. In fact, it cost him nothing; Jo and I repaid his loan with interest in two installments in 1964 and 1969.

A strong sense of inferiority as a Teachers College alumnus burdened me throughout my academic career until recently when I developed greater appreciation for my schooling. Applied learning is now the gold standard for measuring higher education quality. Yet I benefited from practical experiences fifty years earlier as a student teacher and dormitory head resident. We were charged with keeping our floor quiet and enforcing social regulations. We staffed the front desk evenings and weekends and locked up TV lounges at night. “Leading from behind” was how we worked with elected house officers in planning exchange parties with the women’s dormitories, fireside chats, and service projects. At annual workshops, we trained as counselors and disciplinarians through role-playing, and met regularly thereafter to discuss difficulties. The eight-week student teaching term employed similar techniques. We formally studied pedagogy and psychology and observed many classes before actually instructing pupils. Lengthy conversations with supervisors about their critiques followed. I now have a deeper sense of satisfaction for how much ISTC/SCI fostered my personal and academic growth.

The number of faculty with doctorates is a standard measure of institutional quality. The percentage at ISTC had climbed from 28 (1950-1951) to 47 (1959-1960) and then dropped to just 34 (1969-1970). This downturn had little affect on me. I enrolled in twenty social science courses totaling sixty-six credits taught by twelve professors with earned doctorates. Many were outstanding teachers. Individuals without doctorates taught just 14 percent of my total credits; lack of the highest academic credential did not matter in these instances.

Yet large classes diminished educational quality by limiting the frequency of class discussions, written assignments, and comments on individual papers. Required core courses usually enrolled fifty or more. Upper division social science classes often had at least thirty. English Composition II taught me how to make note and bibliography cards as well as to annotate sources. I honed these skills in only seven research papers normally ranging between ten and fifteen pages on such topics as “Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations,” “The Ku Klux Klan: Past and Present,” “The Legend of Quetzalcoatl As a Psychological Factor in the Conquest of Mexico,” “The European Economic Community and Great Britain,” “The German Universities and National Socialism,” “Significance of the National Recovery Administration,” and “The Gifted Student and Secondary School Social Studies.” The last for Social Foundation of Education totaled twenty-one pages on which Dr. Walter DeKock commented in more detail than any other professor. I presented my written work to Cultural Anthropology, American Foreign Trade Problems, and Public Administration classes. I did eight book reviews ranging between five and ten pages for professors Howard, Harris, and Ross. My grades on these varied writing assignments ranged between B+ and A. Still, my small portfolio left me ill prepared for the writing rigors of graduate study.

Near the end of my junior year, I requested graduate school catalogs from all over the United States and pored over them during the summer. Guided by some of my professors, I decided to study intellectual history, started the application process early, and limited my choices to Columbia, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and SCI (my safety net). Rejections for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Columbia University fellowship (Iowa college graduates), and the Merchant Scholarship (ISTC/SCI graduates) did not surprise me because I knew competition would be stiff. Yet better to be eliminated by others rather than myself. Each school admitted me without being willing to pay for the pleasure of my company. Iowa showed interest, but being on a waiting list did not pay cash. My relatively low overall grade point average (3.25) and lack of stellar writing samples hindered my candidacy despite superior grades in history (4.0) and social science (3.85). Without aid, I could not attend.

While waiting for decisions on my applications, I prepared placement papers and even interviewed for a high school teaching position at Cedar Rapids, one of the best school systems in Iowa. Although the job prospect appeared promising, my unwillingness to commit until hearing from graduate schools precluded contract offers for Jo or me. At a reception for graduates at President and Mrs. Maucker’s home, I explained my thinking to Professor Thomas Ryan: “I hope teaching high school and getting a Master’s degree during summers will better my chances for financial aid to pay for doctoral study.” Ryan, who recently had finished all requirements but dissertation, bluntly disagreed. When SCI belatedly offered me a graduate assistantship, Professor Thompson advised against accepting: “You would be better off starting a doctoral program at a university.” Despite his wise counsel, I accepted the SCI assistantship because an award in hand was worth more to me than unfunded future prospects.

Graduate School

Jo and I returned to our hometown summer jobs and earned more than the $300 required to pay for our wedding ceremony and reception at the Adel Methodist Church on Sunday August 18. An unusually cool, gloomy day turned sunny and warm by the time we marched down the aisle. Such mixed auguries foretold the fair and stormy weather of our wedded lives. Cecil took part as a groomsman and provoked bigoted remarks from an Elkader resident and one of Jo’s uncles. The local motel normally did not rent rooms to Negroes, yet made an exception for a wedding party member. A friend, who hid our car in her family farm granary to save it from being decorated, double-crossed us and did the deed herself. We had a brief two-day honeymoon in Des Moines before moving to Cedar Falls and Jo reporting for teacher workshops at La Porte City. Coincidently, Dennis Baker, a fellow Stadium Hall resident, checked us into the Holiday Day Inn. We learned that he and Kent Leinbach, who also had lived “under the stands,” would be our upstairs neighbors for the coming year.

We paid $56.50 monthly rent for a furnished three-room second floor apartment and a shared bathroom in a three-story former rooming house at the foot of College Hill. Conveniently located within walking distance of campus and a Laundromat, it dated from the days when ISTC did not have dormitories. Each room had a door that opened onto the hallway. We only used the kitchen entrance. Doorless openings internally connected rooms furnished in Early Garage Sale style. Our landlady (a Waterloo patrolman’s wife) left a broken bedroom window unrepaired during our yearlong residence. We put a towel over the opening and endured drafts on the coldest days. Jo had the harder part, commuting twenty-six miles one-way to work through rush hour traffic with a Waterloo teacher.

As one of three Social Science Department graduate assistants, my duties were limited mostly to proctoring exams and less frequently grading them or doing research. I enrolled for a maximum twelve credits each semester in the expectation of earning a master’s degree in education (the only one offered). The initial Educational Research class meeting changed my mind. I could not bear the prospect of expending so much energy earning seven education credits when I wanted to study history. What could be done? A history M.A. had been proposed, but not yet approved. Dr. Wohl (my former freshman adviser) suggested: “Fulfill the requirements now and get the degree later. I will inform the University of Iowa history department in writing when you finish the work.” Iowa Chair Charles Gibson agreed to this plan. Wohl’s kind assistance made my year at SCI much happier than it might have been.

I had begun work identifying a thesis topic during the summer by reading Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind as well as Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought, Age of Reform, and The American Political Tradition. I could not help but reflect upon how exciting it would have been to study with Hofstadter at Columbia University. A lengthy conversation with Wohl ensued when I returned to school. He agreed that studying Catholic reactions to Protestant prejudice in Iowa during the 1920s would be suitable subject. I signed up for three credits of Independent Research in American History and examined the Davenport Catholic Messenger, Christian News (Disciples of Christ), and Congregational Iowa. Secondary sources included Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice, John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, Bernard Berelson’s introduction to content analysis, and several histories of Catholicism, and Protestantism. After several weeks scouring indexes in the library, I decided the topic was too ambitious. I had neither the skill nor interest to employ content analysis for analyzing “group imagery” and “prejudice.” Meanwhile, writing papers for Wohl’s lecture course introduced me to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. When I proposed him as a thesis subject, Wohl agreed.

Two three-credit intellectual history courses gave me an excellent introduction to the field and confirmed my interest in it. Auditing English History at the same time offered useful historical context for understanding the origin and transmission of many American ideas. For American Intellectual History, Wohl assigned Ralph Henry Gabriel’s The Course of American Democratic Thought, a classic textbook surveying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; The Puritans, a collection of documents edited by Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson; and Daniel Boorstin’s The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. In addition, I critiqued two D. C. Heath Problems in American Civilization anthologies: Evolution and Religion and Pragmatism and American Culture. For European Intellectual History, Howard Thompson assigned Crane Brinton’s The Shaping of Modern Thought, a paperback edition of his longer textbook: Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought, as well as four anthologies: The Age of Ideology, The Age of Analysis, Marx and the Marxists, and Psychoanalysis and History. We examined the rise of rationalism and the attacks on the new Enlightenment cosmology from both the right and the left. I wrote a twenty-page paper on “Aspects of Bertrand Russell’s Political Theory,” which Thompson characterized as “a sound piece of work.” It is the only paper that I ever wrote in a one-night stand because the words kept flowing until I finished at dawn. Thompson also gave me opportunities to develop skills helpful for doctoral study. I presented my Russell paper to the class and my Niebuhr research to an informal seminar at his home. I audited his Historians and History class because, as he said, “you should know about the philosophy of history.”

For Individual Readings in American History (three credits), I met four times with Dr. Whitnah, to report on sixteen books about the Civil War and Reconstruction. These tutorials with him were more valuable for me than the “truly independent” credits I later earned at Iowa where the professors gave me no time at all. He characterized the twenty-three-page outline of notes and personal reactions as “a most useful record for your future use.” My favorite book, W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South surveyed the development and psychological adjustments of southern society since the Ante Bellum period. Richard Current’s The Lincoln Nobody Knows is memorable because I first learned of Jack Kennedy’s assassination while reading it.

During the second semester, I took Individual Readings in American History with Wohl and began plowing through Niebuhr’s many publications. By May, I had a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a prospectus for “Reinhold Niebuhr: A Christian View of History.” I proposed first contrasting his religious interpretation of history with two secular views that he considered erroneous; second, showing how Niebuhr used his Christian framework for interpreting American history; and third, analyzing critical responses to his interpretation. I compiled a representative cross section of his published work and critiques of it by consulting The Book Index to locate reviews by known scholars that had appeared in popular magazines; the Essay and General Literature Index, 1900-1963, to find articles by and about Niebuhr; and the Index of Doctoral Dissertations Accepted By American Universities, 1932-1963 for three doctoral dissertations ordered through interlibrary loan.

Three lecture courses comprised the rest of my second term studies. I read eight books for Wohl’s American Colonial History, including four from The New American Nation Series about the English people on the eve of colonization, American colonial culture, the coming of the revolution, and the revolution itself as well as challenging revisionist interpretations by Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas, Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, Leonard Levy, Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History: Legacy of Suppression, and Forrest McDonald, We the People: Economic Origins of the Constitution. For American Economic History, Professor Ryan assigned Edward C. Kirkland’s standard textbook and three additional paperbacks. John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power and his subsequent books later helped me understand United States economic and public policy failures. Kirkland became a reference for my later book about the birth of Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota. George Poage, whose example inspired me to become a college history teacher, assigned graduate students in Modern Germany a twenty-page term report with an annotated bibliography. Reading political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism thrilled me in researching and writing “Nineteenth Century Roots of National Socialism: A Synthesis of Interpretations.” Her argument that anti-Semitism, race theory, and the new imperialism laid the foundation for totalitarian regimes bent on global rule, mass organization, and terror as an end in itself remains relevant today.

I signed up for summer session graduate research seminars in American and European History. For Wohl, I wrote my Niebuhr thesis and read John Higham, The Reconstruction of American History and Bernard Berelson, The Behavioral Sciences Today showing respectively how historical interpretations had changed and how the social sciences might be used in writing history. I defended my paper at the Hideaway Bar, which I thought most civilized. My critics wanted to know more about how Niebuhr’s life and experiences had influenced his ideas. While the criticism was spot-on, it took me a long time to learn that abstract ideas are best understood in social context. Wohl went through the thesis line-by-line and exposed the insidious “passive voice” disease from which I still suffer. Dr. Leland Sage taught the European History Seminar. He had directed many theses on Iowa history, his research specialty. Several of his students earned doctorates and had productive scholarly careers. Due to my interest in intellectual history, I had not chosen him as an adviser. For his seminar, I prepared a paper on “John Stuart Mill: A Study of Liberal Political Theory.” It weighed in at forty-nine pages with an annotated bibliography, which I had adopted as “the right thing to do.” Sage corrected several typos and grammatical errors and simply labeled it “excellent as to content.” He surely could have taken me to task for not setting Mill’s ideas in historical context.

As the second semester ended, student body President David Nagle and Sociology Professor Robert Claus coordinated a letter-writing campaign calling on the Iowa Congressional delegation to support passage of the Civil Rights bill. Many professors discussed the proposal with students and most collegiate organizations backed the march. The silent procession of an estimated 800 people walked four abreast from SCI to the Cedar Falls Post Office. I am proud to have joined Bill and Helga Maucker as well as other students, professors, and administrators in support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. My participation evidenced a marked growth in civic awareness since my first college year. Despite prominent local citizens condemning SCI’s support for the march, President Maucker defended it as appropriate. He continued protecting civil liberties as UNI protests exploded between 1968 and his 1970 retirement. Maucker’s detractors charged him with being soft in handling Black student demands, disciplining controversial professors, and permitting crackpot campus speakers. His highly successful presidency had been remarkably free of criticism until the late Sixties. He nonetheless proved himself a worthy recipient of the Tenth American Association of University Professors Alexander Meiklejohn Award for outstanding contribution to academic freedom.

An enjoyable social life characterized our first year of marriage in Cedar Falls. We attended college events and socialized a lot with other couples. Fellow graduate assistant Tom Bruce became my best friend. We spent a lot of time pub-crawling, “seeking our essence” as he mischievously said. Tom taught me about life, books, films, and politics, and often teased me about “The Junior Philosophy Society”—friends who gathered at my apartment to discuss religion. Upon earning his master’s degree, Tom returned to the Mason City High School for a year and had taken a job at the Price Laboratory School when his wife was sent to Denver, Colorado, for a kidney transplant. He taught at Arapaho Junior College and started doctoral studies in sociology at the University of Colorado until dropping out for a job at Sacramento City College in the early Seventies. He eventually became an international authority on thanatopsis. Jo and I also frolicked with Robert Waller, his wife, Georgia, Scott Cawelti, and his future wife, Loydene in the Cedar River at Finchford during the golden summer of 1964. We listened to Bob and Scott sing folk songs at the Cedar Falls Hotel lounge. Waller had been a basketball star before turning to music. He earned a doctorate at Indiana and rose to Dean of the UNI Business School. He abandoned academe for a Texas ranch after publishing the best-selling Bridges of Madison County and earning $12 million on the movie rights. Scott got an Iowa doctorate and returned to teach English at UNI and write a Waterloo Courier column for several decades.

SCI graduate study turned out well. I earned thirty credits, received high grades, and expanded my historical knowledge. Presentations for Whitnah, Wohl, and Thompson honed my oral skills. Four term reports, two seminar papers, and a master’s essay gave me valuable practice collecting and synthesizing information. I additionally committed to becoming a professional historian by joining the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, memberships that have lasted sixty years. Learning how to use the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History systematically took some time, but both publications benefited my graduate studies. Because budding United States historians also should be well informed about present day American culture, I subscribed to Newsweek, the Nation, and the New Republic. The University of Iowa History Department awarded me a teaching assistantship in February and the Merchant Scholarship Committee named me an alternate, the closest I came to winning that award in three attempts. The Iowa City Public Schools hired Jo to teach elementary physical education. Unlike the previous spring’s uncertainties, we knew where we were going, what we would be doing, and who would be paying. It was a good feeling!

I had applied only to Iowa because it offered my best chance for financial aid and an opportunity to study American Intellectual History with Wohl’s mentor, Professor Stow Persons, a foremost authority in the field. In addition, cultural historian Professor Christopher Lasch and the recent relocation of eminent church historian Professor Sidney Mead from the University of Chicago afforded me further exciting study possibilities. Still, these demanding professors soon exposed my inability to analyze, argue a thesis, and write clearly. My schooling became much harder and less pleasant at the University of Iowa.