Photographs of downtown Iowa City 1981, Muscatine high school diving 1973, and a general meeting of the River City Housing Co-op sometime around 1981.

I moved into the housing co-op in January 1979.  My wife Janet had taken an assertiveness training course.  It had a final project - go out and be assertive in a particular area of your life.  She talked our landlord out of our lease because he was so lax at clearing snow from the parking lot.  She heard through a friend, Rich Young, from a friend, JoAnne Yount, that the co-op had an opening and we moved in.  She moved out in June and I moved out the following December to join her in living together again.  

By 1981 Janet had left for greener pastures.  I continued to have friends who lived in the co-op.  I continued to go visit.  Ruth Burch and Dan Daly lived there until they didn’t.

The co-op was an amazing assembly of personalities.  There are a few depicted among these pictures.  Peter Miedlinger.  Then a student of Portuguese, now a professor of teaching English as a foreign language.  Tim Grebner, then a student of engineering, and now a professor at a community college outside Minneapolis.  Susan Reese, the film student. She tried to watch at least three movies a day - week after week.  A few years later I ran across her on the streets of Minneapolis.  She was trying to film her own movie, for a class, and finding it difficult.  Two days later we crossed paths in a different part of town.  And then we haven’t seen each other since.  Maybe she went back to Texas?  I don’t know what happened to Mike Moon or Jim Barfus.  They were dating Cathy around this time.  Cathy is here.  I probably came over to see her spontaneously and found this meeting.  I wouldn’t have gone out of my way for a co-op meeting after having done my share.  Jim was a co-founder of the Observation Club with its fictive leader Seymour B. Moore.  He ran and won election to the university student council in the one-man Dinosaur Party.  Marian Pierce is here.  She was studying literature then.  Later she graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and wrote.  She has an excellent book published about an American living in Japan, drawn from her life.  Martin Pierson.  He was a rhetoric graduate student who turned me on to a lot of good books.  He married JoAnne and moved on.  

I met Cathy because I was dating Lois, also depicted here.  They were roommates.  By this time, Lois had dumped me.  Not for someone else, but for my own sake.  We were still friendly, but didn’t keep in touch.  Two years after this photo, I went to a party Lois was giving to her boyfriend Peter before he moved to Brasil.  That’s where and when my friendship with Vicki got serious.

Cathy and I kept in touch.  She married Mike a few years later.  They moved up to Minnesota where he taught math at Gustavus Adolphus College.  David Babcock taught there then too.  Cathy divorced Mike a few years after that and he took up with his female drinking buddy.

I met Ruth and Dan at the co-op.  Through them I met the rest of my 518 family.  I met Vicki and Cathy at the co-op. 

I’m glad that Janet took that assertiveness training course.