But if Ed called a full meeting, we would all be there. I felt like a real part of the institution right from the very beginning. I don’t expect people today to understand what it felt like back then; there was total commitment. I can remember Ed saying, “Here’s the problem: We don’t have enough cash flow—I’m out there, trying to get it right now.” And everybody’s going, “Ooh, yes!”“No paychecks? The paycheck’s going to be two weeks late? Yeah! All right!” Nobody said, “Oh, my god, I hate this place.” And everybody was together. It wasn’t a faculty meeting and a staff meeting; we were always all together in the same room when announcements like that were made. I remember Ann Peach’s little money jar upstairs. It felt like a scene out of It’s a Wonderful Life. “Ann, I gotta have some money. I gotta buy some food; I have a kid.” “Well, how much do you need?” “Sixty.” “Could you get by with forty?” It was wild!
DG: Tell me about the fire. How did you hear about it?
MD: I got a call from Paul Dubois at 5:10 am on July 25th, 1983. His exact words were, “Kaelber Hall’s on fire. Don’t worry, it’s under control.” I threw on my clothes. I lived one mile away. I opened my porch, which faced east, and the sky was black. I knew immediately it wasn’t under control. It was devastating.
windows were all black, and so you’d walk in and it was this really deadened sound. I remember how devastated Walter Litten and Craig Greene were to lose all of their work. I did everything I could possibly do. I remember crawling in under a place I probably shouldn’t have been and I can remember the sun filtering down, the sort of ash falling off the charred structural beams that were above me in the crawl space, trying to find Craig’s index of the herbarium.
DG: Would you say the college was always environmentally concerned?
MD: No! There’s been a big shift at this institution. We have shifted from saving the whales to saving human beings and the earth. Nobody cared about anything but saving the whales—that’s what it felt like. I’ve always said that felt wrong, at first. But it only feels wrong now because of what we’ve all learned. Other people were trying to save other things; it just wasn’t as obvious as saving the whales. We know that saving the whales is important. Now we know that cutting asbestos board with a Skilsaw is not good. We’ve sort of evolved from saving the whales to saving the earth.
DG: You received an honorary degree at some point, didn’t you?
MD: I did. In 1994. I’m very proud of it.
DG: So you drove up and the fire department
DG: So now, what do you see as your biggest
was there—
challenge?
MD: They tried to hold me back on Eden Street
MD: It would be the campus plan, getting stu-
because they were blocking traffic. I just said, “If I have to run over you, I’m going to run over you, but I’m going.” It was a Monday morning. I went home on Thursday. It was a blur; then the reality set in. Jim Perkins (’76) and I, we went down and bought a couple of beers at nine o’clock at night, and we just sat out on the stone wall outside the admissions office, completely black. Just covered. I ruined a pair of shoes trying to save some stuff of Don and Betty Meiklejohn’s out of the basement. It just melted my soles. I’ve never seen a flashlight so restricted by blackness. It wouldn’t expand. It was completely black—everything. The
dent housing built. This student residence village is going to really show what we’re about. If we do a good job at explaining how these buildings work, then it will be phenomenal as far as the impact they will have on the earth. It’s almost unbelievable how little energy they use. And the materials are being carefully chosen to make sure that not only the people that live in the buildings are healthy, but the people building the buildings are healthy, and the people that are providing materials are healthy. So that’s it! That’s the big challenge. COA | 29