Grinnell in 1959 was one of the
top-ranked small liberal arts colleges in the country, and my high-school
guidance counselor told me not to apply, as I’d never get in with my erratic
grades. I applied anyway, and to my
surprise, they treated me like a prime prospect. A wealthy alumnus invited me for an interview
in his office at Time Inc. A few days
later I got a note from him, saying I was definitely “admissible.”
I had my
doubts about the place, based on the cover of the catalog, which showed a
clean-cut fellow in a letter sweater sitting under a tree. But my first choice was Oberlin, and they put
me on the waiting list, so I decided to take the invitation from Iowa . A few months later I crossed the Mississippi
River on the Rock Island Railroad, with a carload of easterners
bound for Grinnell.
We didn’t
know it but we were pioneers, the vanguard of a latter-day migration engineered
by the ambitious president of Grinnell, Howard Bowen. Without announcing it, he had set out to
transform Grinnell from a prestigious regional school – the “Harvard of the Midwest ,”
they liked to call it – to one with a national reputation.
