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Jim Togeas remembers that Senator Hubert Humphrey was scheduled to speak at UMM in October 1962 on what turned out to be the most dramatic day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "President Kennedy had announced that if Russian ships bound for Cuba crossed a line in the Atlantic, they would be intercepted, boarded, and searched. Nuclear war seemed probable to many people." Humphrey's talk was in Edson Auditorium on a sunny afternoon. "I remember no details of his talk; just that he had been in frequent contact with the White House and we weren't bluffing about that imaginary line in the ocean." |
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| Our Registrar, Ruth (Gilbertson) Thielke, remembers eating lunch with her sister, Jeannie, at Louie's Lower Level in her student days when they were approached by Dean Rod Briggs with another of his big ideas. "He wanted to turn the barn into a women's dormitory, completely renovated but reflecting our agricultural roots. We were aghast. Jeannie explained that it was bad enough being teased about attending a cow college without living in a barn." A few weeks later Briggs returned with plans to fill the mall with buildings so students wouldn't have to walk so far outside in the winter; he figured they didn't really appreciate the mall anyway, since they were always cutting across it, creating paths that made it an eyesore. Again the women were horrified. They told Dean Briggs how students gathered on the mall every evening to play and visit. "At that time, the mall was just a flat, square piece of grass," Thielke remembers. Jeannie borrowed the plans and drew an alternate idea on the back... sidewalks through the mall where students habitually walked, mounds of earth to make slight hills, landscaping with trees and flowers. Thielke doesn't know to what extent her sister's drawing was used by developers, but the mall today looks very much like what she drew. |
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Chemists Jim Olson and Jim Togeas were originally officed side by side in the Engineering Building, now known as Community Services. They shared a phone that sat on a shelf in an 18-inch window cut into the wall. Togeas would climb on a step-ladder to adjust the steam heat valve in the lines that ran along the ceiling. In the fall, the fragrance of apples would perfume their offices as the WCES employees stored the harvest along the west wall. Unfortunately, the WCSA shop was also nearby, occasionally filling the air with the sounds and smells of unmuffled combustion engines, highly revved. |  |
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Vivian Heltemes, Director of Alumni Relations and a UMM graduate herself, was thrilled when Amy Cole won the student body president election as a write-in during the mid seventies, becoming UMM's first female student government leader. (Apparently still swimming in powerful circles, Cole can be seen here in the red and black sweater standing immediately to the left of Chancellor Sam Schuman.) |  |
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| Ruth Thielke was a music student at UMM and remembers one performance during the sixties that literally captured its audience and may have saved their lives. "Our final stop during a spring break tour was an evening concert in a large high school auditorium in Mankato. Snow had already begun to fall as the buses climbed the steep hill to the auditorium." The band played beautifully, but when the house lights came up after the audience's ovation, there was a flicker... and then the auditorium was plunged into total darkness. Ice from the storm had broken power lines. "Without missing a beat," Thielke remembers, "one of the members of the band began to play the melody of a children's nursery rhyme. Soon the rest of us jumped in, fleshing out the tune with our rich diversity of instruments. When one children's song ended, someone would strike up another." The band continued this improvised encore for an hour, keeping the audience in their seats, laughing and cheering. When the lights came back on, the superintendent of schools thanked the band for taking in hand a situation that could have led to panic, trampling, or even death. But they weren't trying to be heroes, Thielke admits. "We just thought we should find a way to fill the silence." |
| "I think what makes me proudest of UMM is the response when someone is in trouble," says secretary Bonnie Tipcke. "It's not just the way we pitch in when someone gets sick or suffers damage to a home. Remember the time one of our students had luggage stolen over a break? People were so generous!" Soccer coach Chris DeVries agrees. He enjoyed winning the first college soccer game ever played in Morris. But he appreciated even more the way his team supported him and the program after life-threatening complications set in following his knee surgery. "When I got out of the hospital three weeks later, the whole team threw a surprise party to welcome me back." |  |
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