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Kansas City, Missouri, Alexandria, Virginia, United States
~ About: A 1961-65 Park College Diary ~ As a high school girl and then a college coed in the first half of the 1960s, I wrote nightly entries on the pages of one-year diaries. In January 2010 I began transcribing the entries into a blog and gave each one a title. I grew up on three farms within 30 miles of Iowa City and the University of Iowa with its Iowa Writers' Workshop. As the oldest of four daughters, in my diaries I sometimes referred to my sisters as "the kids" or "the girls." We helped our parents, but we also had good, wholesome fun - a characteristic I took with me to Park. Park is 300 miles southwest of West Chester, Iowa, in Parkville, Missouri, on the Missouri River 10 miles northwest of Kansas City, Missouri, and across the river from Kansas City, Kansas. In 2000 Park College became Park University. Today Park's flagship campus is in Parkville and there are an additional 41 campus centers across the nation. Park was one of the first educational institutions in the United States to offer online learning. My last post was on May 22, 2018. I may be followed on Twitter @BarbaraMcDWhitt.

Interviewed a Herman Melville Descendant - Thursday, July 25, 1963

I love Evelyn. She finally wrote just when I did (as I figured would be the way). We wrote about and asked about practically paragraph for paragraph, the very same things. We are a lot alike. This afternoon I went out to interview Ralph Melville, a glassblower who lives in Washington. He's quite the person - educated at the University of Leibniz in Germany, lectured at Stockholm, taught at the University of Washington, been on the Ed Sullivan Show, and is a descendant of Herman Melville. He gave me a tiny orange vase he had made. Mrs. Hahn came tonight so we girls could order some Avon products. Varners and Lorahs are at Grandma's now.

2 comments:

Hilary said...

I love this. What fun that he'd been on the Ed Sullivan show and was a descendent of Melville.

Barbara McDowell Whitt said...

I enjoyed finding out things about the people I interviewed for feature stories.