About the diary writer
- Barbara McDowell Whitt
- 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.
Capsized in the Missouri River - Sunday, September 22, 1963
Flo, Gabriel and I took a bath in the Missouri this afternoon on the last leg of our canoe trip. We're not sure how it happened, but suddenly over we went. I was sitting in the middle, so was "under" the crossbar and went down, had to come out from under and surface, whereas Flo and Gabe fell free. I'm glad it's always drilled into people's heads, "If your boat ever capsizes, stay with the boat, " as we instinctively did just that. We managed to pull the canoe and swim one-handed and were almost to shore when Nancy, Chris and Bev caught up to us in their canoe. Then Chris and Mr. Layman helped us bail out water, and we completed the trip, having come in sight of the campus by the time we drifted to shore. That is the gist of the story I'll always remember as one of the more interesting of my life. The rest of the canoe trip was fun.
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4 comments:
Oh dear! Glad you all stayed calm and it turned out okay!
I remember being underwater and thinking, "You could be drowning but you could also save yourself."
Mr. Layman was my high school physics teacher at North Kansas City. Small world when years later I discovered that the guy that worked across the aisle at Bell Laboratories in Naperville, Illinois, was his student the year before when he taught at East High School!
Diana Welch Norton, it is always special when I have tapped into someone's memory bank.
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