Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2007 > November-December 2007	Print View

When writer Tim Brady called to tell me he had a story for me, about a University of Minnesota professor who had shot a student on the debate team for stealing the gates to the president’s house, I knew I had to run it in Minnesota. It wasn’t exactly breaking news; the crimes had already been covered thoroughly in the New York Times and other local and national newspapers. But it was a much more savory story for having aged over 115 years.

We ran his article about the prank in those early days of the U, when, as Tim recounted, William Watts Folwell “served as president, secretary, librarian, and chief janitor” while trying to educate a “mix of would-be Victorian gentlemen and –women and young frontier yahoos” in the May–June 1999 issue.

Tim is a sleuth for historical stories, stirring the slumbering bits of our past so that we might learn from them anew. Next came a story about a University geology professor who accompanied General Custer on an expedition to the Black Hills in 1874 to conduct a geological survey. To the weathered soldiers in the caravan, Professor Newton H. Winchell was nothing but a greenhorn “bug catcher” more interested in gypsum and limestone than the gold that surely lay hidden in the hills.

Then came an article about Ancel Keys, a world-renowned medical scientist at the U. Keys had developed K rations for armed services personnel during World War II and conducted starvation experiments on volunteer subjects, conscientious objectors during the war. The food deprivation study, Tim explained, “filled in a large blank in the scientific literature by describing the most effective way to rehabilitate a semi-starved population.”

Later Tim wrote about Company Q, the women’s military drill team formed at the U in the late 1880s after the campus women petitioned for a physical education program. University student Gratia Countryman, who would later become the guiding force behind the Minneapolis Public Library system, served as the squad’s first lieutenant, deflecting calls that the “girls” stop the practice and “instead of guns, take brooms.”

Then came stories about the experiences of African American students on campus from the 1880s through the 1960s; the great flu epidemic of 1918 and the founding of the U’s student health service; the kerfuffle that arose in the 1890s when a psychology professor dared give a lecture on sexual instincts; the fight for academic freedom on campus in the 1920s, when a bill introduced at the state legislature would have prohibited the teaching of evolution at the U; and the University alumnus behind the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s.

These and many more of Tim’s historical stories that first appeared in Minnesota have been collected in Gopher Gold, a new book from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Tim continues to investigate the people, discoveries, and episodes of the University’s past for Minnesota, and his stories appear in nearly every issue. His latest—on the history of smoking on campus and the role U researchers played in detecting the danger it poses to human health—begins on page 26.

Sometimes, as the smoking story illustrates, we look back to learn how we got here, how far we’ve come, and what, from this vantage, the turning points were. Often what we discover is that we’re retracing our steps and still haven’t learned enough.

Other times we look back to own up to what has transpired. We inherit a place’s history, the injustices and the ugly incidents along with the glorious moments. Going back over those times won’t undo them, but it might take us beyond them.

Shelly Fling may be reached at fling003@umn.edu.