Oral History Pam Parvin, now a counselor in Bar Harbor, was the heart and soul of Take-ABreak for twenty years. She is often thought of as COA’s first cook, but actually she was the third, coming on when six weeks into the second year, cook #2 quit. Pam was twenty-three at the time, a single mother with a young child. And while at first she worked with fellow cook Jerry Smith, covering breakfast, lunch and dinner between them (and sharing child care as well), when he moved on after three years, she was on her own. Eventually, she began taking classes at COA, graduating after thirteen years. A portion of our talk follows. Donna Gold: So, COA was vegetarian at the time, was that what you were asked to do? Pam Parvin: I was a vegetarian and so it was Frances Moore Lappé and Diet for a Small Planet and all that. Everybody was pretty interested in being low on the food chain. I’m pretty sure it was an All College Meeting decision. I can’t imagine getting away with making any kind of a unilateral decision at COA. DG: Did you try to be organic? PP: That was not so big a deal then. We did have a kitchen garden at the college, way, way before there was a Beech Hill Farm. I remember starting to hire work-study students and figuring out what to plant. The gardens at school were organic, but you couldn’t buy all-organic food. DG: Where did you have to go to get your food? PP: We did a lot of sourcing ourselves. We would go buy frozen blueberries from somebody. We would go buy honey from somebody. Then we started the food co-op. For a time, Jerry and I—and this got traded off—would drive to Boston and go to Chelsea market and buy food. We were young and we thought that was a fun thing to do—driving through downtown Boston in a twenty-foot truck. DG: And was the food always homemade? PP: It was my style. My mother was a fabulous cook. I learned to cook when I was a little, tiny kid. And I was into whole wheat and honey and whatever. We made our own yogurt and our own bread and we made pancakes and there would be muffins and stuff all day. You could have as much as you wanted. Dinner was family style. DG: Early students remember that so fondly. Bringing the big pots to the table and everybody just digging in. Did you sit with them? PP: Yes, usually. And kids would come in and say, “Can I make myself hot chocolate?” or “Can I have tea?” or “Can I sit in here?” There were a lot of people feeling like they 16 | COA
were free to come into the kitchen to talk or get something: “I wasn’t here at lunchtime, can I make myself a sandwich?” I provided a pretty warm and friendly atmosphere, so people were in and out all the time. DG: Did you talk to the students about their classes? PP: Yes. I ended up doing a lot of informal advising before there was an advising system. I think I’m a good nurturer and people would come in and be unsure about things and need somebody to talk to, just the way they would talk to other people at school. COA was very open to talking about these things because it wasn’t cemented: people were really searching. You were supposed to be self-directed and when you have to be self-directed you flounder a little. That’s a good thing because you learn a lot. So, people did a lot of talking to each other and other people, trying to get some bearings. …I think we all felt responsible for each other. And people got to know each other pretty well, because All College Meeting could take all day—or half a day, anyway. Were we going to have recycled toilet paper or not? Those things went on for years. And they had to be reinvented because they were a part of the education. There could be a new crop of students who felt that something had to be different, and we would talk about it all over again. That was part of people’s growing up, to have a voice and an opinion. DG: You were on personnel committee, right? PP: I was. I co-chaired it for a while. I loved being on it—it was the hardest thing I think I ever did in my whole life— having to gather everybody’s opinion and having to talk to people about their shortcomings. And lots of decisions that were made in personnel were tough. DG: Do you think the committee system is worth the energy it takes? PP: I do. I really do. I was on admission committee; I was on the compensation committee. I didn’t have a BA yet, but that didn’t matter to people. COA was more or less egalitarian. If you were good at something people recog-
Photo by Donna Gold.
Pam Parvin ’93