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Going into 2020 all the talk that was going on was that 2020 was going to be the
best year yet. After Kobe Bryant passing away in January, I knew this year was just
going to go downhill. Although I didn’t think 2020 would be as bad as a virus that is
making everyone sick, killing many loved ones of people and the whole country being
on lockdown. COVID-19 was a huge adjustment that everyone in the world has to adjust
to. I was not expecting this all to happen at all, due to the fact that I am not a person
who watches the news often. Coming back from spring break and hearing about the
virus and people talking about how classes are going to switch to be online, everyone
including myself was happy. Of course, everyone was happy, not having to wake up
early and walk to classes. Little did we know how serious this virus was, and now
everyone is complaining that they are bored and can’t wait for this virus to be over with
because everyone is sick of being on this lockdown and everything being shut down. I
lived on campus, so when campus sent out the first message saying that classes are
moving to online, I was in my college algebra class. Since this happened three days
after spring break, I was still all packed up from that week of being home. Right when I
got home from class, I packed up my car and went home right away. The thing is I didn’t
know that I wasn’t going to live there ever again, so I didn’t grab everything, like my TV,
kitchen stuff, entertainment center, etc. A week following moving classes onto online,
the campus decided that we were going to stay online for the rest of the semester, yet
we as the students didn’t know that. Randomly before the stay in order by the
government, I got an email saying that I need to pick a date to move out. What
surprised me is that we weren’t even informed that we were going to continue online
classes for the rest of the semester first, instead I was just informed that I needed to
move out ASAP. Luckily I got to move out all my stuff before the stay at home order
rather some people, their stuff is still up at school and they aren’t allowed to go and get
it until the stay at home order is done with.
Ever since this virus happened it feels like the world is ending. The grocery
stores were completely empty with no toilet paper, cleaning supplies or nothing
essential at all. Finally the companys realized that things needed to be changed so that
everyone had the ability to get what they needed, like changing the closing time so that
they had time to clean and restock everything by the next morning, when they opened.
Practically everyone is laid off work and is receiving unemployment. Sadly I am not, so I
am just relying on my savings, due to the fact that I only work in the summer and not
during school because my schedule is always too busy to allow me to. My parents are
still getting paid by their company that they work for even though they aren’t working,
but recently their last two pay checks were only half of what their salary usually is, which
was something their boss did not tell them, so they weren’t expecting that at all.
Companies are still trying to pay their employees because if they do, then at the end of
all of this, they get a really big tax break. Everyone just seems so stressed out and their
mental health is just deteriorating. I feel so bad for ones who are lower class and that
�were already struggling to feed their families with their normal pay checks and now they
are laid off, relying on unemployment. Also the unemployment offices are so busy, my
boyfriend's mom was on hold for four hours, and it took them ten day just to get back to
her. Everything is just a mess and it's just straight up scary. Seeing everyone with
masks and gloves is something that I never thought I was going to see in my lifetime.
Some people don’t even touch their mail for days, like my dad, due to the fact that my
grandmother lives with him and he doesn’t want any risks at all to give the virus to her. It
is hard to keep a good mental health during all of what is happening around us in the
whole world.
I personally only know one person that has coronavirus and that is my best
friend's grandpa. Yet, we truly don’t even know if he has it because the doctors wouldn’t
test him. He has diabetes and lost one of his legs, so he had a therapist that came in
everyday and moved him around so that he would lose blood flow to his other
extremities. Comes to find out his therapist had COVID-19 and my best friend's grandpa
started feeling super sick, to the point where he kept peeing and pooping on himself
because he couldn’t control his body. His wife, who is also older called the ambulance
to her house to come and test him and she thought they would take him to the hospital
to take care of him, yet that didn’t happen. His wife explained to the paramedics how his
therapist had it and the paramedics refused to test him and just said that he probably
has it and it's best for him to just stay here quarantined. Now not only does this put my
best friend’s grandma at risk, it also puts her in a position to take care of her husband
and clean up after him after he poops and pees on himself, which is very hard for a
person's mental health. It puts a lot of weight on her shoulders, but of course she is
going to do it because that’s the love of her life that needs her. This makes me think
about how many other people did the paramedics turn down the test to the people in the
city of Detroit that probably has it, but were told just to stay quarantined in their own
home while infecting everyone else who is in their household. This all also makes me
think, is this ever going to end? From the looks of the stats that are updated everyday,
on click on detroit, it shows how many cases per day appear positive, how many deaths
per day, etc. The stats show how it will go down for two to three days, but then just
spikes back up like nothing. This whole situation is scary as hell and I hope the best for
everyone and their family. I am grateful that no one in my family, yet, has caught the
virus but I am praying everyday on this. 2020 is a year that I will never forget, sadly it's
not in the way that I was hoping for.
�
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COVID-19 Journals
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This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
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2020
the year no one will ever forget
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives
Johnson Center for Philanthropy
Grand Valley State University
Oral History Interview with Kathryn A. Agard, Ed.D., April 6, 2010
The Council of Michigan Foundations, Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley
State University (GVSU), and GVSU Libraries’ Special Collections & University
Archives Present:
An oral history interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010. Conducted by Dr. James
Smither of the History Department at GVSU. Recorded at the Johnson Center for
Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This
interview is part of a series in the Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
documenting the history of philanthropy in Michigan.
Preferred citation: Researchers wishing to cite this collection should use the following
credit line: Oral history interview with Kathryn A. Agard, April 6, 2010. "Michigan
Philanthropy Oral History Project", Johnson Center Philanthropy Archives of the Special
Collection & University Archives, Grand Valley State University Libraries.
James Smither (JS): Today’s conversation is with Kathy Agard who is Executive
Director of the Dorothy Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at
Grand Valley State University. This oral history interview is being conducted for the
Johnson Center as part of an ongoing series and the interviewer is James Smither of the
History Department at Grand Valley State University.
Alright, Kathy, can you start by giving us just a little bit of background on yourself? To
begin with, where and when were you born?
00:00:25
Kathy Agard (KA): Sure, I was born, do I have to tell the date [laughter], in 1949 in
Muskegon, Michigan. And my parents are there. We have lived there their whole lives.
JS: Alright. And what did your family do for a living?
KA: My dad worked in the shop. He worked at Camel White and Cannon as a tool filer
and fitter. He had been a farm boy and had won a chicken scholarship, judging
scholarship, to Michigan State University but he was from a big family of thirteen and
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
1
�after his freshman year they didn’t have money for him to be able to finish school, so he
came back home, went to work, helped the other kids go through school and then stayed
there the rest of his life.
JS: Alright, and how many kids were in your family?
00:01:07
KA: Well in my family, there’s only two. I have an older brother and myself and then in
his family there were thirteen and in my mother’s family there were seven. So they both
came from big families.
JS: But they downsized a little. And what kind of schooling did you have?
KA: I went to, I was in the third graduating class from Mona Shores High School, which
was a brand-new suburban high school that had just been built and it was the typical
suburban high school I would say. We had a lot of advantages. One of the things that was
fun about being in the third class was that there were lots of opportunities because
everything was brand new. So we were setting the theme song, we were setting all of the
colors, we were setting the mascot, we had all of that fun of setting up a brand new high
school.
JS: And when you were going through high school, was it your expectation that you were
going to go on to college?
00:01:57
KA: Oh absolutely. Because of my dad’s experience, I never was, and I’m sure this story
is very common, was one of those kids who never had the choice whether to go or not. It
was where I was going to go or not. And then I had an unusual high school experience
that probably helped to shape some of my own background, in that Mona Shores had a
very unusual high school debate team. So I started debating when I was in the ninth grade
and there were seventy-five kids on our debate team. And I debated all during high
school ending up on a national championship team as a senior. And because of that, was
able to get a scholarship to go to the college of my choice. My parents were really high
on me going to community college for two years because of the money. So once I could
prove that I could pay to go somewhere else, I was able to do that, which was nice.
JS: And where did you want to go?
00:02:47
KA: I went to Albion College which is a small liberal arts Methodist college just down
the road from Grand Rapids in Albion, Michigan. And I went there because it had
beautiful gas lamps and because they gave me the money to be able to debate and had a
national championship team at the time.
JS: Alright and then what did you study while you were there?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
2
�KA: I started out, I was going to be a high school debate coach because that’s what I
knew. And about halfway through my schooling, about as a junior, I took my first
political science course and I fell in love with political science. My dad had been very
active politically on the local level. Part of the advantage of working at the shop was he
was done at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and then he would start his real life. And so he was
a volunteer fireman and my mother was the person who called the volunteer firemen
before 9-1-1 existed and my brother was a volunteer fireman and my dad had been a
founder of the city of Norton Shores, had been involved in a lot of political campaigns
and so I ended up really falling in love with American political theory, had a great
professor, took every course I possibly could get from him and my original intention was
then to teach political science at, which would be civics at the high school level, and
coach debate. And then when I graduated I found out that the combination in high school
that you have to have as a teacher is English and debate not the civics and debate, so I
never was able to find a high school teaching job.
JS: At that point, was there not yet an expectation; you went through teacher certification
process and extra certification or things like that?
00:04:25
KA: I went through…I was certified to teach at high school but I think I probably got
frankly bad counseling. And because I had such a passion for political science, or I
wasn’t listening, you know, I stayed on that track rather than picking up the English
major.
JS: So you were technically qualified to teach. The catch was that you didn’t have the
right combination of fields to do what they wanted to hire. Now, what year did you finish
college?
KA: It would have been ’71.
JS: Okay, well things are getting kind of interesting in the American political scene by
then too. Antiwar protests going on, and a lot of other things going on at the same time. I
mean did you get caught up in that yourself?
00:05:04
KA: Some. I considered it a very hard time to have been in college partly because I didn’t
want to be involved politically. I wanted to learn. I thought, you know, I was so set to go
to college and I had this vision of it being a place that would be safe and that I could go
deep into a topic. I actually probably had an unusual experience. I suppose everyone in
the sixties had an unusual experience, in that I wanted it to go away because I wanted to
study and I was a serious student. Of course the University of Michigan was just down
the road and a lot of that would fall over onto Albion or we would go back when there
were protests. And there was a lot of protesting on campus. My graduation was very
politicized. We had no senior year book because no one wanted to do it at the time.
Everyone was too involved in things. And I suppose from that point of history the most
memorable time for me was that one of my jobs, I had several on campus, was to be the
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
3
�telephone operator in our dorm which was a co-ed dorm, and the day of the first lottery I
was working the telephone and watching the guys come up from the basement and tear
up, and I actually tear up even thinking about it now, tearing up their all of their
acceptances to medical school and to law school and to graduate school and having their
moms call in tears saying, you know, “I’m really sorry you were born on this day because
you were number one or number two for the draft.” I’ll never forget it. Those experiences
go deep, I guess.
JS: The draft itself is something that is now an unfamiliar experience to anyone not at
least in their 40s, to have much clue of even what that was about.
00:06:44
KA: Yeah, that someone could come and say you have to go and that was the time.
JS: And so of course, college students, in a lot of cases had deferments, or at least that
was the principal. But…
KA: These were the seniors.
JS: So they were graduating. So they were, Uncle Sam could now catch up with them at
that point. So you finished college. How long did you spend trying to find a teaching job?
KA: Really my whole senior year, so just about a year. Then, I actually had fallen in love,
which does, a woman’s job description ought to have a parallel line that says, you know,
“fell in love, got married, husband decided to move, had a kid, had a child, had the next
child, decided to move somewhere else…” because there’s this parallel structure going
on in life. My husband was in the Air Force. He had been called up for the draft, had
gone in for medical deferment, found out that his medical condition could in fact be fixed
which was a big surprise the day before he was on his way to Detroit. So he ran and
signed up right away for the Air Force and was a translator. He spent two years in
Monterey, California in the language school and then a couple of years in Turkey as a
Russian translator in the security service. So the timing was such that when I graduated,
he was on the, just getting done with his tour and so we were planning on getting
married. My first job really was hanging out at Albion as an admissions counselor and
basically, I was hanging out to get married. It was an interesting job. I didn’t know what
else I was going to do. I couldn’t find a teaching job and so this seemed like a fun thing
to do. I went and talked to high school students about going to college.
JS: Alright so you do that for a year and then what?
00:08:31
KA: Well, we decided, he decided to use his G.I. Bill to go back to school. So he went to
Hope College. We were married. We were there for his last two years and again I was
basically just looking for a job and I was hired that summer as a social worker for a
woman who had just had a pregnancy leave. I, of course, knew nothing about social work
but I was hired as a social work replacement for the regional center for people with
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
4
�disabilities, to help to, this is when Michigan was de-institutionalizing a lot of people and
so my job was to make the connection from the institution back to the home community
when mental health agencies were first being set up, and to begin to look at what kind of
supports could be given to populations as they were returning home. So I did that for the
summer and then when my husband went to Hope, as it turned out Ottawa County’s
Mental Health was just getting organized and they hired me because I had a relationship
with the institution that was sending people to their community. So while I was there, I
developed their Life Consultation Center which is meant to be a lifelong support system
for families when there’s a child with disabilities. I worked with the hospitals setting up
those connections. I did a lot of getting volunteers involved in mentoring and support for
families, and working with older families who never expected that their loved one would
be coming home again. If you can imagine at the age of seventy, when you’ve put a child
in an institution at birth to suddenly have that child be coming home to live with you was
really quite traumatic for families and so we were doing a lot of support for them
JS: What kind of instruction or guidance or direction did you get while you were doing
this?
00:10:23
KA: [laughter] None. It’s my favorite kind of a job actually, which is make it up as you
go along. I think I was well served by Albion in terms of having a general education so I
knew how to learn and I knew how to teach myself. And so I would just go talk to people
and I would go read things. I would go to conferences and basically just picked it up as I
went along.
JS: So maybe, even that initial counseling experience, or just going and talking to people
and meeting people you don’t know, sort of ties in with that.
KA: It does. Yeah, I think it does. I would say most of my life, and this is probably, I feel
fairly fearless about those kinds of things. That given some time I can figure it out, and so
it wasn’t scary. It was just a matter of trying to get in there and figure it out and do the
best I could with it.
JS: Do you think that if you were today starting out with that kind of thing, in the world,
society and government and things the way they are, could you do the same thing as
easily? Could you just walk in and create programs?
00:11:26
KA: Well, probably not because the regulatory environment is much - right then was one
of those moments in history where no one knew what should happen, and the surface
reasons for deinstitutionalizing people were about great values: about that it’s better to be
treated closer to home, it’s better to mainstream people with disabilities so that they have
a more normal life circumstance. The reality was that the real reasons were dollars, and
promises were made that money would follow the patients and that never happened. And
so, at that point, it was a bit of a mess in terms of nobody really knew how to make it
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
5
�happen. So there’s an opportunity in that then to create what you think ought to happen. I
had that chance to do that.
JS: Alright. Now, how long did you stay with that work?
00:12:17
KA: I was there two years, the same two years my husband was in school and then we
had our first child, my son, and moved back to Muskegon. And I was then, worked for
Muskegon Community Mental Health, doing the same job now for Muskegon County. So
I worked for mental health there for about two years and then had my daughter, had a
second child. And then we were trying to figure out what to do with our lives, and my
husband said “Well, why don’t I go back, since I have this great Russian language
background, why don’t I go back and get a Ph.D. in Russian language and be a business
translator?” So this sounded like a good plan. So we sold the house, packed up the kids
and went to the University of Michigan, lived in married housing. My son started
kindergarten there and again I was looking for a job. Oh, I missed a step. I missed a step.
I’ll go back.
JS: That’s alright.
00:13:07
KA: When we were in Muskegon, for about three years, I had worked as the, I was home
with the kids a little while, about 2 years, and while I was home, I decided to go back and
get a Master’s degree because I was not happy being home just with the kids. So I went
back at night and got a Master’s degree in Public Administration because it was the
closest thing to what I thought I was interested in which is this community organizing,
world changing, you know, point of view. And so I went back to get the Master’s degree
and while I was home one of my friends called and said well there’s an opening as the
Director of Planned Parenthood in Muskegon so I took a job as a half time director of the
Planned Parenthood affiliate there and then finished up my Master’s degree and then we
decided that we would move. So when we moved to Ann Arbor, they had an opening in
the regional office of Planned Parenthood Federation of America doing multi-state
technical assistance for the nonprofit organizations. So I had a great background in terms
of professional development. They did a good job with things like risk management, and
human resource development, and board development and all of the things it takes to run
a nonprofit. And then I was in a training position at that point, and I think that’s when I
really became fascinated with how nonprofit organizations operate, and became very
interested in the organizational theory underneath them.
JS: Let’s plug in a couple more pieces here. Where did you get your Master’s degree
from?
KA: Oh, Western Michigan University because it was the closest campus available at the
time.
JS: And did you have to commute down to Kalamazoo to take the courses?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
6
�KA: About half and half. I had half here and I had half at Western that I would commute
down. I was one of those people who left work at 5 o’clock got to school at 7 o’clock,
tried to stay awake until 9:30 and then drove home and got home at 11:30.
00:15:04
JS: Alright, and Planned Parenthood, at that point in time, we’re kind of getting at early
to mid 70s here?
KA: Yes.
JS: Was their principal activity largely promoting knowledge and education of birth
control or were they involved in abortion issues at that point?
KA: I was right at the transition. It was primarily related to birth control and my real
interest going in was around zero population growth. I was very concerned about, having
read the books about, you know, what I would say are environmentalists by ilk and we
were very concerned about how many children can this world actually support. And so I
went in it from that point of view and about half way through, I ended up spending about
ten years in Planned Parenthood, about halfway through was when Faye Wattleton came
in as president, and there was much more of an emphasis on abortion rights. But of
course the abortion, the Roe v. Wade happened in ’72 so it was a year after I graduated
from college, and really, it was sort of amid the midstream, that the idea of protecting
abortion rights actually started to take hold. So I was in Planned Parenthood as a Director
in Philadelphia, moving forward a little bit, during the Reagan years and we literally had
a GAO auditor who had an office right next to mine who would sit and watch all of our
books and everything that we did. We got to know him so well we would like hold
birthday parties for his kids [laughter] because he was there all the time. We decided it
would be better to include him than not to include him.
00:16:35
JS: Alright, so let’s kind of follow your itinerary a little bit. You’ve gone out; you’ve
been at the University of Michigan. How long were you in Ann Arbor?
KA: We were in Ann Arbor about a year and a half. My husband, as he went through it,
he was expecting to learn to be a translator, to deepen is knowledge in terms of
translation. The University of Michigan teaches the history of Russian in English and so
it was not the program that he thought he was going to get. And so he said to me “You
know, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Why don’t you go ahead and do what you
want to do and I’ll figure it out.” And so we, I then went as the Associate Director of
Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia which is a multi-county… there were fourteen birth
control clinics for example. It was a big organization. And then he came along and he
stayed home and then took some photography classes, and tried to figure out what he
wanted to do with his life. So he was the stay at home dad and I was the working mom at
a time when that was not, it was new. It was the leading edge I would say of that kind of
lifestyle.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
7
�JS: Alright, then how long did you spend in Philadelphia?
00:17:44
KA: I think it was about four years and I really became tired a) of always being on the
front lines because it was a top-ten media market. Always being on the top, the front lines
on the abortion issue because it’s not my favorite issue to be advocating. And we also
decided that we wanted our children to be raised in the Midwest. There’s a different style
from the East coast than the Midwest, and we wanted our kids to be around their
grandparents and their cousins. And so we actually made one of those choices where we
stood in the kitchen one day and said let’s go home, and sold the house, no jobs, came
back, just shipped the kids and everybody came back home. So I was literally looking for
a job. And a hospital there, a local hospital, had had a number of years where they had
had fairly bad publicity, and because I had had so much PR experience in Philadelphia,
they hired me on as a public relations director. Again, I knew nothing about public
relations. I remember bringing in the, one of our guys who was working on our
brochures. One afternoon I said, “Okay, now I need to know everything you can tell me
about print media and I have about an hour and a half.” [laughter] And, you know, only
later did I realize what an outrageous question that was. But you know I did the job as
public relations and then I was promoted there to be vice president of planning, so I did
their planning and their marketing and handled the volunteers, and was their lobbyist for
about six years at Hackley Hospital in Muskegon. And while I was there, they had this
great benefit that they paid for higher education. So I was going to go back and get a
second Masters in health administration when my advisor at Western said why don’t you
get the Doctorate in public administration that we have. So I started in the D.P.A.
program, and that was held in Lansing and I did that for two years and decided I didn’t
like it because it was mainly about state government. And at this point in my life, I knew
what I wanted to learn, and I didn’t know where I could get it. I wanted a place like the
Johnson Center and it didn’t exist. So I went back and I took six months off and then I
went into the Ed school at Western because it had the most electives of any of the
doctoral programs. And I was able to, I sat through the higher-ed finance courses that you
have to, but then I was able to pick and choose from the university what courses I wanted
to take. I really knew what I wanted to learn so I was able to piece together really my
own doctorate.
00:20:16
JS: So you were kind of in a program geared towards people who were superintendents
and things like that, and to what degree did you sort of fit in or not with the people who
were in your classes?
KA: Not at all. In fact my dissertation took me about ten years. And the reason was that I
was educating my committee all the time because they were not in that discipline, in fact
no one was in that discipline. And I was trying to say to them, you know there is this
whole field called nonprofit, and so I had two educators and a political scientist on my
committee that I’m not sure, I think the only reason that I actually got my dissertation
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
8
�was that my chairman wanted to retire, and he finally one day said to me “We need to
wrap this up.” And I thought this sounds like a good thing. Let’s wrap this up.
JS: What kind of schedule did you have while you were doing that because you’re having
to juggle dissertation, work and everything else?
00:21:04
KA: Yes, It was a lot. I mean not only was I working full time at the hospital but then two
days a week I was driving to Lansing for classes during the early part of this, and then
when I left the hospital, I had finished my coursework at Western, and was ready to start
my dissertation work, and I decided that I was tired of hospital work. And I actually had
an interview here to come in as a faculty member in the Communications school. In the
morning I had that interview and I met with the Dean at noon, and then at 1 o’clock I met
with this woman named Dorothy Johnson. And I asked Dottie, I talked to Dottie. One of
my friends said that before you take the job at Grand Valley you have to talk to Dottie
cause she has a job that should be interesting. So I met Dottie and she said to me, why
don’t, I have this job its doing organizational development work for community
foundations. I didn’t know what a community foundation was, but she said, “And it will
only be three years. You’ll learn about foundations which will be interesting and then you
can go teach at Grand Valley.” So I said okay, I’ll do that. And that was a twenty year
span that I spent at the Council of Michigan Foundations. So while I left the hospital I
went to the Council of Michigan Foundations and then while I was there was when I did
my dissertation work.
JS: Alright. Explain a little bit, what is the Council of Michigan Foundations.
00:22:25
KA: Yes, the Council of Michigan Foundations is a membership association of the
foundations in the state of Michigan that make grants. So you might, for example, have a
school foundation that raises money for a school, they would not be members of the
Council of Michigan Foundations. So it’s Kellogg, Kresge, Mott, all of the community
foundations, corporate grant makers like Steelcase, and what they have in common is
their role as grant makers. And it was founded in ’69 following the ’69 Tax Act. Because,
at that point, Congress had put a lot of restrictions on foundations, and the foundations
came together to act politically to begin to roll back some of those restrictions that had
been placed on them.
JS: What kinds of restrictions had been placed on them?
00:23:09
KA: Well, it was interesting. Partly it goes back further to the 60s, in that the Ford
Foundation had been using its money to register voters in the south, and the Congress did
not like the fact that all of these black folks who hadn’t ever been able to vote, suddenly
were able to vote, knew where to vote, knew that they had the right to vote. And so
Congress got upset with Ford about that. And then they also got upset with Ford because
they had put majority ownership of the company into the foundation so that it couldn’t be
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
9
�touched by anybody else coming in wanting to buy the foundation, I’m sorry, buy the
company. So they called in Ford and the Ford president, at the time, said to them, “Who
are you? You have no right to control us. We were here before you were. The nonprofit
sector existed before government did in this country.” And we both argue over the
Mayflower Compact, whether it was government [laughter], whether it was a nonprofit
association and Congress said, here’s who we are. So they put a whole bunch of
restrictions. One of the restrictions was, for example, they required a payout that if you’re
having a private foundation that gets tax advantage, you have to give some of the money
away. You just can’t sit on it. They put restrictions on the amount of money that can be
spent on your own overhead or on travel, on what they call self-dealing, so you can’t hire
your own children at exorbitant salaries. And there were, in fact, abuses at the time. So
the regulations weren’t unwarranted, and the field, the mature part of the field like the
Council of Michigan Foundations, when they responded, basically said some of this we
like, some of it we think went too far. Let’s roll back what we think went too far. And
some of that was taxation that they thought would erode the value of the asset over time.
And so what they did instead was they rolled back some of the requirement for payout
and then they gave, private foundations gave some of the money to the IRS to help
support regulating the industry. So the Council of Michigan Foundations started out very
small and ended up, and still is the largest association of its kind in the country, and is a
national leader.
JS: Alright, and now what range of things did you do for them?
00:25:30
KA: I had a little project that was going to be three years and it was funded by the
Kellogg Foundation, and it was to encourage the foundations to engage young people
under the age of 21 as grant makers. This was really the beginning of youth
empowerment and the healthy youth, where instead of always looking at young people as
problems or always looking for distress in young people, the Kellogg Foundation’s
philosophy was, you know, young people are very strong, very healthy, very smart. Let’s
use that energy now. Let’s not wait for them as potential leaders. Let’s use it currently.
And so the community foundations, and at the time there were about thirteen of them in
Michigan, got together through the Council of Michigan Foundations and asked the
Kellogg Foundation for a grant to build youth advisory committees, and also to help them
build their assets. At the same time, there was new research coming out of Boston
College, that talked about the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of
mankind which is the fact of course that the United States had the only major industrial
economy in the world post WWII for lots of years. So there’s a generation that had a
tremendous amount of wealth, and still is in the process of transferring that over to their
children who are now in their fifties and sixties. I mean the children are getting up there.
But that, there was a lot of conversation in the field about, Muskegon is a good example,
about how at one point in time, Muskegon had more millionaires than anywhere else in
the country, post the cutting of all the white pine, and that money totally dissipated. And
it would, we think how could we go from being one of the most wealthy places in the
world, to having almost nothing in a couple three generations. So the community
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
10
�foundations were talking how do we capture some portion of this intergenerational
transfer of wealth, and keep it working in our communities forever?
So Kellogg gave this grant. We tested this theory that young people would be good grant
makers, and what we found out was that they were fabulous grant makers, and we went
back to Kellogg and said we think we now have a model. What if we do this in a big
way? And the proposal that we gave to Kellogg was they should invest sixty million
dollars over five years as challenges to Michigan’s communities, and we promised that
we would cover the state of Michigan with community foundation service, and that every
community foundation would have a youth advisory committee that would have real
power over money, not just advisory power, and that they, we would bring each
organization up to a minimum level of organizational viability. So for the next six years
that was my job. I would drive into little towns in Michigan and I would say, have you
ever heard of a community foundation? Let me tell you about it. I have a million dollars
in Kellogg challenge for you if you can raise two million dollars, and one of your
commitments has to be that forever there will be an advisory committee of young people.
And Kellogg’s million dollars would go into that fund that the young people would
advise on the giving, so that young people would be giving away fifty or sixty thousand
dollars a year of interest earnings on that endowment, and then the money that was raised
locally, the two million to match it would be unrestricted or very broadly restricted, so
the community could make decisions about urgent needs.
00:29:02
JS: Now, when you’re saying young people, what age range are we talking about?
KA: Under the age of twenty-one. Most of them were high-schoolers, and most of the
community foundations made the decision to try to build community capital in that
generation by having young people from various schools. And we used to have a phrase
that would say leave your letter jacket at the door because when you come into the room
you need to be looking at the whole community not just your own high school, and would
engage young people then from every high school in the community. And then Kellogg
really encouraged us, and smartly so, to encourage young people and bring them in, draw
in young people who were not the normal kids that you might put on that kind of
committee, particularly if you were concerned about handing them fifty thousand dollars
a year. So we would go after the kids who might be leaders but are leading in the wrong
way...kids smashing mailboxes. You know, they haven’t murdered anybody but they
were headed the wrong direction. And we have fabulous stories of young people that this
experience helped to turn around, because it was the first time adults had ever given them
real authority and real responsibility to make decisions. And what we found was that the
youth committees were incredibly honest outside of the normal politics of the
community. So they didn’t care who you were that was asking for money and then they
would ask hard questions. Can’t you get this copying done somewhere else? Why are you
spending $5.50 on postage when you could hand deliver it cheaper? Really, I have great
stories of one sheriff that, the Grand Haven Community Foundation is right next door to
the Council of Michigan Foundations, so one day we were coming in, all of us, and the
local sheriff was standing in the hallway, shuffling papers and looking nervous and we
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
11
�said well, we know, hi. How are you? What are you doing? I have this proposal to make
to the youth committee and I’m really afraid they’re not going to fund it. They’re going
to ask me hard questions. And they did. I mean, they were really terrific. And that still is
going on. That is a forever commitment on the part of the Community Foundations.
00:31:15
JS: Is that something you find across Michigan in a lot of different communities?
KA: Oh yes. We met our goals. Every community is now covered by a community
foundation. Almost all of them have a youth advisory committee, and almost all of them
are doing well. They have had a professional staff. They’ve begun to grow and they’ve
begun to capture some of this inter-generational transfer of wealth.
JS: And the youth committees themselves. Are they still kind of made up of the same
kind of people or have they gotten more conventional over time?
KA: Well, you know, I don’t know. I haven’t watched them lately. But my guess is that
those who, not every committee ended up doing unconventional kids, but those who did
have stayed that way. One of them, for example, held their meeting at Juvenile Justice
Hall up at Traverse City because the chair of the committee had been picked up for grand
theft auto. [laughter] So a really nice car that he thought he’d like to take for a spin and
ended up having his committee there. But many of them, of the kids have ended up, who
would not have normally gone on to school, or even those who had other career paths,
have changed their career path because of this experience of being able to give away
money.
JS: Alright. So that’s kind of the first thing that you go and develop for the Michigan
Foundations and what does that grow into or lead in to?
00:32:34
KA: Well, it led a lot of, it led into a lot of different things and one of them that it led into
was that, we became–we do a summer camp for the young people because we were,
actually we weren’t, but a lot of the community foundation board members, who as you
can imagine are the bankers and the lawyers and the more conservative people in the
community, were concerned about turning a million dollars over to a group of seventeen
year olds. And so we would have a summer camp every summer for the young people
and begin to talk with them about grantmaking, about evaluating budgets, you know,
what kind of questions to ask. And at this summer camp what we began to realize is that
they didn’t have the background or the depth of background, they didn’t have a language,
they didn’t have a way to think about the nonprofit sector.
And on a parallel course to this project was the development of the IU Center on
Philanthropy at Indiana University which was really the first big academic center that
began to consciously build a field of study. So they had a historian looking at the history
of philanthropy, they have an economist looking at the economics; they have a
geographer looking at the spread. I mean they really took all of the major academic
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
12
�disciplines and said, okay let’s put our focus and really begin to build a field of
knowledge. So that was happening at the same time, and as we were working with the
young people we thought we ought to be teaching them all of this great material that’s
being created, and the Johnson Center started, sort of, in the middle of all of this. And so
we looked at whether we could infuse into the curriculum of the K-12 school, the
teaching of philanthropic principals. That was my next project for the Council of
Michigan Foundations.
I had gotten tired of doing workshops and seminars on Saturdays and evenings which was
when the Community Foundation boards are available, and so really my passion has been
around these ideas, so we created this project called Learning to Give. And it was taking
the content, the graduate level at this point, content on philanthropy and looking at where
the connections were kindergarten through 12th grade, and knowing that the teachers have
way too much to teach K-12 than they possibly have time to do. That we couldn’t add
another course called Philanthropy, and actually we thought that probably wasn’t the
smartest way to do it because philanthropy is woven throughout our culture. So we took a
look at everything that’s taught and said, how can we begin to infuse philanthropic
messages? And so we started with the social studies because they are our most natural
home. So we started with history and geography and civics and began to look at every
place that’s taught. And we would, again I went to teachers and said I don’t know
anything about your lives in the classroom. You’re the experts on that but we have this
content. We think it’s really important because our thesis, at the time, was that having
knowledge about the sector, also would have an impact on student behavior, because
people would begin to think of themselves as philanthropists, students would. We had a
group of thirty-five teachers from various ages and various kinds of schools who helped
to shape the curriculum and we built a whole standards and benchmarks and learning
outcomes for philanthropy K-12. And then off of that we built a set of classroom lessons,
lesson plans, and because of Kellogg’s support they were always, they are currently still
all available for free to teachers on the website and they’ve all been recently coded to
every set of state standards. So a teacher, a third grade teacher, I want to teach about the
Underground Railroad, I can go online and find a lesson plan that talks about the
Underground Railroad because it’s required by my state, and on the M.E.A.P. test, but
this lesson plan talks about the fact that they were all volunteers, and who were the
abolitionists and how did they organize themselves, and why do they think they have a
right to confront government, and who were the Underground Railroad conductors, and
what was this role as volunteers that they held? So we tried to take this theory of
philanthropy in every single thing that was taught. The next big area we picked up was
English, because there’s a lot of philanthropy in the normal books that are taught in all
the way through the K-12 curriculum. And then we did a high school level text book that
has been out there. I don’t know how many copies they’ve sold but it’s available and
available online and that project is still continuing.
00:37:26
JS: Now, a text book in philanthropy or is it an English textbook that has philanthropy in
it?
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
13
�KA: It’s a textbook in philanthropy, but the chapters are in civics. So it’s philanthropy in
history—American history, philanthropy in U.S.—in world history, philanthropy in
government, philanthropy in world government, world governments, politically plural,
philanthropy in geography, and so we went—I think it’s a seven chapter book. It was
about the discipline that is required to be taught in high school, but it’s from the
philanthropic slant.
JS: You’re combining the different disciplines in the one volume?
KA: Yes. It’s one volume.
JS: Is that designed actually for student use or for teachers?
KA: We did both a student volume and then we did a teacher volume. And of course at
high school it’s a little difficult because the teachers are in their own slot; you know they
don’t teach across the disciplines. But it was cheaper to do them as one volume for each,
so there’s a teacher guide and a student textbook.
JS: Was there any way to measure the extent to which anybody is using it?
00:38:33
KA: Only on the sales and I don’t think it has sold very well. Most people are going to
the website and downloading lesson plans, and they were downloadable so that, every
classroom, they always want to make them their own, so you can download the lesson
plan into a word document and then actually manipulate it and add your own content.
JS: Are the lesson plans set up to be geared towards specific topics that are in these
different fields? You mentioned the Underground Railroad for example. You’re trying to
look for material on the Underground Railroad that you can go use in your class. You can
find this and in its design to work for them that it has the philanthropic part of it
emphasized or woven into it.
KA: There’s a search engine and you can search by academic strand or requirement. So
like the Underground Railroad, that’s how you would search, or you can search by
philanthropic topic, or you can search by grade level, or you can search by keyword. So it
has a lot of ways to be able to get at the material.
JS: Have you got then additional programs or initiatives, or kind of what after you’ve
developed this, what then did you kind of get into?
00:39:41
KA: I was there ten years. That was a long haul for me. That was ten years. And we were
ready to take it to, we were beta testing it in Michigan, with the idea that it would be a
national model, and we were looking for ways to make it national. And there are all kinds
of issues, as you can imagine, between being able to do something in depth in one state,
versus trying to go broad in multiple states, especially in K-12 education because it’s
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
14
�state by state. I had a very wonderful group of advisors, Michigan advisors. And I bet we
looked for two years about how to take it national, when a young guy came in who has
done these kinds of projects before, and he was very interested in service learning, which
would be a teaching methodology for all of this content. And he had asked if we couldn’t
partner in it. As we talked more and more with them, we decided that we would merge
Learning to Give with this project called The League. And that we would be the academic
content, and then he would have a sort of jazzy marketing. And it allows, what happens is
there’s a calendar during the year in The League, that starts with a fall cleanup and then
young people earn so many points for doing these kinds of acts of kindness and
philanthropy. And so they would learn about it in their classroom and then they would go
out and do the service learning and get points for it and then they would be set up in
leagues and there would be league play and national reporting on it. And I think maybe
this spring will be the first time in Parade Magazine they’re going to start to talk about
how The League is doing in different parts of the country. So it’s gone to that level. So
we were ready to, we merged with them; we were ready for it to go national. The
organizational role was that I would become the chief operating officer and Bill would be
the CEO and then I decided that I a) didn’t want to be a chief operating officer. That’s not
really my good skills. And that I was at a point in my life where I didn’t want to do a
national launch because it would mean not only working hard but traveling a lot
nationally. And this job was open at the Johnson Center, so every time it has been open I
would lay it face down on my desk and I would look at it and think, ooh, that’s a really
nice job. I really like that job. And this is the first time that it’s happened to be open at a
time when I could leave a project and it’s just a place where I wanted to be so I was
fortunate enough to come here.
JS: And then when was that exactly when you started?
00:42:10
KA: Four years ago in April. So I’ve just been here four years
JS: Alright. Now tell us a little bit just about the Johnson Center itself for people outside
of here. What is it designed to do? What is its function? What kind of function does it
have?
KA: Yes. We’re one of forty-four, what are called academic centers on philanthropy, that
are university-based. We’re probably the second or the third largest depending on what
you count, and we’re maybe the second or the third oldest depending on which programs
you count. Often some of the programs are a faculty member or two, who have had an
interest in philanthropy and have built their own scholarly work in that field. But once
those faculty members retire, probably that program will go away. So the Johnson Center
is different in that we’re institutional. And it really doesn’t matter who’s here. The
institution will continue because the university and the Kellogg Foundation have both
made a commitment to it. So we started when Kellogg looked at the IU Center and said
we really like what’s happening there. We’d like one of these for the state of Michigan.
And the president of the Kellogg Foundation at the time, Russ Mawby, brought together
all of the university presidents from the state of Michigan, had a meeting, and said we
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
15
�would like to fund one of these, but university, we want you to make a commitment of
money, and a real commitment that you will develop a center. And of the fourteen
universities, two put in proposals and Grand Valley’s was the strongest so it ended up at
Grand Valley. There was a $990,000 challenge grant from Kellogg matched by $900,000
from Grand Valley which launched the Center. So in our early years, the first director,
Thom Jeavons, again this was the start of service learning, he really stressed bringing
service learning to the faculty members at Grand Valley, trying to introduce this as
teaching methodology, as a pedagogy, and that they would begin to embrace it. He left
and our second director was Dott Freeman and she came out of the corporate
philanthropy side of the family, and so she was really stressing work with corporations.
And then when she left one of the faculty members from our School of Public
Administration, Donna VanIwaarden, came, and Donna was the third director and really
stressed more of the scholarship and the research. At that same time, Joel Orosz, who had
been the head of the program officer for philanthropy and volunteerism at Kellogg, came
here as our distinguished professor, and really helped to launch the Center as a national
presence. Before that, we were pretty Grand Valley and pretty West Michigan focused.
And Donna, because of her ties in the community, launched one of our main services
which is the Community Research Institute.
So taking them kind of one a time, the Community Research Institute, the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation wanted to do data-based decision-making and they had to make a
choice, do we build this capacity inside our own organization or do we build it at Grand
Valley, so it’s available to everyone? And they made the choice to do it at Grand Valley.
So the Community Research Institute started doing research first for the Grand Rapids
Community Foundation, and now we do it for most of the foundations in West Michigan.
And we’re looking, it makes us a little different from the other centers on philanthropy,
because they’re looking at doing research about the sector, so their research says how
many volunteers are there, how much are people giving, what kinds of organizations are
in the sector. Our research is more research for the sector. So we’re looking at what are
the rates of child abuse, then giving that information to the nonprofit organizations, so
they can use that data to make data-based decision-makings, working with the food
pantries to find out where is hunger. And we do a lot of geo-coding and mapping, so
where does hunger exist in West Michigan? And then we work with the food pantries to
help them look at where they should be delivering services. So that’s the Community
Research Institute.
00:46:24
JS: So you have, sort of, organizations or groups or whatever, who have an idea, they
think they want to help in a particular sector or do something but they’re not sure where
exactly to put the money. This information helps them figure out how to do that.
KA: We’ll do regular program evaluations, so some of them get grants and we do the
program evaluation for them. But the more interesting work is this work, and the food
pantries is a good example. We did research about where do senior citizens live in Kent
County, who are hungry, who need food support. And then on the geo-mapping what we
overlaid were the pockets of concentration of those populations, and then we overlaid
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
16
�what are the public transportation routes, and then we overlaid where are the food
centers, so where can they get food. And immediately, you can look at the map and say,
Oh my gosh. Here’s a group of senior citizens who don’t have access to transportation
and who don’t have access to food support. And then we can take that and work with the
food pantries and they, we would then overlay where are the churches and synagogues
and religious communities, and where are the schools, the elementary and public schools.
So the pantries could begin to say, who could be our natural partner where we could
deliver service and we do that kind of work for foundations and for nonprofits all the
time. And so that’s the Community Research Institute.
When Joel came in, we really became involved in providing support and doing research
and training for foundations, for grantmaking foundations. And that again makes us very
different from our peers because most of the other academic centers don’t touch the grant
maker’s side of the family at all. We launched The Grantmaking School, which is a
national school to help grant makers learn their craft. A problem for grant makers is that
most of them when they’re hired are hired, because they have deep content knowledge.
They may be the premier water quality person in the world, and the Annenberg
Foundation can hire them. They’re hired; they know everything there is to know about
fresh water quality in rivers in the upper Midwest. So they have this deep, deep content
knowledge and suddenly their job is to look at budgets, and make decisions about how
the money ought to be given away, and how do I strategically look at six grants to make
sure that they interact with one another. In some ways, it’s a difficult job in that the
person loves the content, and often they’re making grants to people who have very good
project ideas, and they have to say no to more than, what ninety percent of them. So
they’re saying no to things that they care about to people who know are doing really good
work, and they have to say no just because there’s not enough money to go around. And
they really need help. And what is this transition from being, from having deep content
knowledge to being the person who’s giving the money away, and we do that in The
Grantmaking School. We do that all over the country, we do it in major cities, and that
part’s been going pretty well.
00:49:26
JS: How would you characterize your own job description right now? What is it that you
do here day-to-day?
KA: What do I do here? A little bit of everything. It’s a cook and bottle washer kind of
job. I raise money. I do strategic planning. I have, there are seven program directors. I
have a lot of staff supervision. I handle all of the, or most of the relationships,
relationship building, I would say both within the university and outside in the
community. Because we are not an academic center, in a sense that we don’t give the
degrees. You know, the School for Public Administration is the place that actually gives
the degrees. So I partner, we partner with them. We have a lot of graduate students
working here, and a lot of what I do is trying to keep it all headed the right way, you
know, as things pull you other directions and to be able to raise the money to be able to
support it. We’re mainly supported by outside money to a great extent.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
17
�The other, the third thing we do is, so that we don’t loose that piece, is that we also do
training and support for nonprofit organizations. Grand Rapids had a program called the
Direction Center. It was one of the first in the country that had been designed and funded
by the area foundations to support nonprofits, and it was supposed to become selfsufficient but they never could charge enough to be able to do that. So when it failed, it
came into the Johnson Center, and we still do a lot of training on how to be a nonprofit
board member, how to be a CEO, and mainly we’re doing that for smaller, midsized
nonprofits. Spectrum Health doesn’t need our help. They go and hire whoever they want.
It’s the women’s shelter, it’s the neighborhood association, it’s the Paws for a Cause, it’s
all of the, you know, it’s Latin Americans for Progress, those kind of organizations who
are coming to us for assistance.
00:51:22
JS: Alright, now, to back up a little bit in another section. You talked about the Johnson
Center being created and so forth. When this got set up at Grand Valley who was
instrumental in terms making that happen? Was this one of these ideas that captured
President Lubbers’ imagination?
KA: Yes. It was launched from Russ Mawby, the president of the Kellogg Foundation,
whose, I would say his 30 year tenure at Kellogg would be typified by being a builder of
the infrastructure organizations to support the whole sector. That’s really how he’s
known. And so when he launched it, he made the offer to President Lubbers, who had the
right kind of entrepreneurial spirit and the vision to be able to say, I could see what this
would look like twenty years from now. We’ll be twenty years old two years from now.
So that was a natural, a natural combination, and the university has continued to be
extremely supportive, even as Kellogg’s support has gone up and down. The university
built this new space for us, and built it to our specifications. They want it to a place where
the community comes in and interacts with the university. So we’ve been very fortunate
to have the kind of support that we do.
00:52:35
JS: Okay. What’s the relationship with the Johnson family?
KA: Oh, yes. What happened was that when Dottie Johnson retired from the Council of
Michigan Foundations, they were looking for a way to honor her at that point twenty-five
years of service. And she really had built the Council of Michigan Foundations from
nothing. She was at half time in a closet, basically when she started it. And is a well
known national leader; she started the Foundation Center, she was involved with the
Council on Foundations, was on the Corporation for National Community Service Board.
When Dottie retired, we were trying to, I was at CMF at the time, we were trying to find
a way to honor her. And the thought was that we could talk with the university, because
her family’s been involved and she’s been involved with Grand Valley, about naming the
Center after her. So the CEO at that time of the Council of Michigan Foundations, Rob
Collier, raised the money to be able to bring over all of the library resources of the
Council of Michigan Foundations, and a half a million dollar endowment for the library,
and then the name, the Center was named in her honor. And no one deserves it better. She
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
18
�really has been a great leader both for Grand Valley and for the field. Now, the materials
that came over, some of them were videotapes, original videotapes of people like Mr.
Kresge talking about his philanthropy that are irreplaceable, and those are all out at the
archives. So this tape that we’re doing is a part of a continuing effort to say, let’s capture
this rich Michigan history. Michigan is known nationally as being a very unusual state
because we’re so well, our philanthropic community is so well organized and works so
well together that we’re somewhat the envy of the rest of the country and we want to
capture some of those stories.
00:54:33
JS: Alright. And finally, I would like to ask where do you see this particular center going
after the next decade or so? What are you going to be trying to accomplish from here?
KA: I had three goals when I started. One was our own building, a twenty million
endowment, and a Ph.D. So far I have the building. (laughter) I would like to see us selfsufficient, on our own, so if we were self-sufficient with an endowment, a large
endowment, then we would be able to continue to help these smaller organizations that
have no where else to go, and I, we’re continuing to do that even though that’s the part of
our budget that struggles. And the reason is that I think that it keeps us honest. It’s very
easy to come into a very nice building and a very nice university and be taken care of,
and forget what its like to run the neighborhood association where you can’t get a copy
machine and you don’t know how you’re going to pay people for the next payroll. And so
I want us to stay rooted deeply in the community and to become a place where nonprofit
leaders can always come and always feel supported and that they’re getting the
knowledge that they need. We, in partnership with the School for Public Administration,
are just proposing a new Master’s degree in philanthropy that we’re hoping that we can
launch in the fall. And that would be a first step towards the possibility of a Ph.D. Now,
Grand Valley is not a Ph.D. granting institution, so I’ve been talking with IU about
whether we could do their Ph.D. here by extension. Or there is some conversation on
campus about an Ed.D. and if we did an Ed.D. whether there could be a major in
philanthropy and nonprofits, because where our counter part academic centers are really
focused on producing academic research and academic practitioners and faculty members
for centers on philanthropy, we are much more applied and so the Ed.D. would make
sense for us because we would be preparing, what I call reflective practitioners, people
who want to be out in the field running nonprofits but also want to do it with, within the
scope and scale of a discipline and with deep knowledge about what they’re doing, and I
can see us preparing that kind of a professional here and would like us to be on the
cutting edge of that.
00:56:53
JS: Alright. Now let’s see. Do you think that there is anything significant about what
you’ve done in your career that we’ve managed to leave out at this point?
KA: No. The kids grew up. My husband became a teacher [laughter], a sixth grade
science teacher. So yes, the life went on, but yes, I think that’s a good coverage.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
19
�JS: Alright. Well, thank you very much then.
KA: Thank you, Jim. Good.
Oral History Interview with Kathy Agard, April 6, 2010
20
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/aa10b790082faa25d40504056ef5df6d.mp4
83a33cc988eafb1345a03dcdec8986fc
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Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project Interviews
Subject
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Philanthropy and society--Personal narratives
Family foundations--Michigan
Charities--Michigan
Description
An account of the resource
The Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) was initiated in 2006 as an innovative partnership between the Council of Michigan Foundations, StoryCorps, Michigan Radio and the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University to create an oral history of Michigan philanthropy. Additional video interviews were created by the Johnson Center for Philanthropy to add to the depth and breadth of the collection.
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (MPOHP) (JCPA-08). Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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2017-05-02
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eng
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JCPA-08
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2006-2008
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Johnson Center for Philantrhopy
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StoryCorps (Project)
Oral History
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/516">Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project (JCPA-08)</a>
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Agard, Kathryn A., video interview and transcript
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Agard, Kathryn, A.
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Kathryn A. Agard, Executive Director of the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, 2006-2010. She discusses her early life, education, family, and work in the Mental Health field, at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Hackley Hospital, Council of Michigan Foundations, and the Johnson Center. She discusses developing Youth Advisory Committees in Michigan Community Foundations, Learning to Give and the development of philanthropy curriculum for grades K-12. She shares the history of the Johnson Center, development of its programs and partnerships, efforts to capture Michigan’s philanthropic history and her goals as director.
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Smither, James
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, Michigan Philanthropy Oral History Project
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Philanthropy and society
Personal narratives
Charities
Michigan
Associations, institutions, etc.
Muskegon (Mich.)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership
Women
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JCPA-08_AgardK
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eng
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
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Text
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video/mp4
application/pdf
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Johnson Center for Philanthropy Archives
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2010-04-06
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c3a049d0e33c849ec1c1a34e316ea311.pdf
83c691670db4a70b95058e576585d971
PDF Text
Text
1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collections, RHC-23
C. Bennett Ainsworth
S. P. Bennett Fuel and Ice Company
Interviewed on October 1, 1971
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010 – bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #24 (31:59)
Biographical Information
Calvin Bennett Ainsworth was born 3 December 1890 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Calvin Bennett Ainsworth married Agnes M. Warnick on 20 March 1922. He was
married to Emily L. Hine about 1926. He died 6 October 1974 leaving a widow, Florence
J. He is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Grand Rapids.
C. Bennett was the son of Arthur Sardius Ainsworth and Ella Elizabeth Innes who were
married 18 August 1887 in Grand Rapids. Arthur was born about July 1862 in Rome,
Henry County, Iowa the son of Calvin and Harriet (Fairchild) Ainsworth. He died in
Grand Rapids in January 1950. The mother, Ella Innes was born 18 March 1861 in
Pueblo, Colorado, the daughter of William and Elizabeth (Brennan) Innes. Ella died in
Grand Rapids 11 April 1916. As his second wife, Arthur married Amye Firth on 5
October 1918. Amye died in Grand Rapids in 1940. Interments in Oak Hill Cemetery in
Grand Rapids.
___________
Interviewer: Were you born in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, yes I was. I was born in Grand Rapids. I don‟t remember the house
because I was too young, moved away from there as a small boy or as an infant probably.
It was on Washington and we moved away from there to James Street, two fifty-four
James. And that is where I grew up-my early, early days of my life. In fact I… after I left
college, my family moved to five forty-nine South College, and we lived there and sold
that house to the Park Congregational Church. It‟s kind of unusual because I had another
house on Madison. I sold that to the church-the colored church and Mayor Parks lives
there now. He‟s a minister of this church and also the mayor of the city-a very nice
house. Well, then I moved out here three years ago and been living here ever since. I can
remember many of the old things about the city. I can remember Cherry Street, which I
was kind of close to on James, being paved with blocks-not blocks- they‟re some circle
pieces of wood made from a tree. They‟re about six inches deep and maybe a foot in
diameter or so, depending on the tree that was cut. This was packed in with gravel, as I
remember, and then… and then covered with tar. And that was a street. And Lower
Monroe was a… had the same sort of a pavement and, I don‟t know, maybe other streets
were paved that way but I can remember those. And when it… when they wanted to do
away with the street and put asphalt or cement in, they tore it up and anybody who
�2
wanted any of these blocks of wood would get them free and they made good firewood
because they were certainly well-seasoned and they had some kind of oil or tar in them.
Interviewer: When was, when was that street torn up?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I don‟t know but I would guess, let‟s see I can only guess from
my age, probably I was twelve or thirteen and that would make it nineteen hundred and
two or three-around in there.
Interviewer: What kind of a street did they put down after that?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I‟m not sure. I think it was probably brick or tar some kind of… it
was an improvement on the wood street. Although a street made of wood like that was
awfully nice for the horses, and they had a lot of horses in those days. Milk trucks and
people were going around in, in vehicles hauled by horses and it‟s a lot better for them
than the paved street.
Interviewer: Why, why is that?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, on account of their hoofs. I was always taught that you shouldn‟t
run a horse on a hard paved street if you could avoid it. It‟s hard on the shoes and on
their legs. It‟s so hard whereas the wooden pavement would take up some of the shock
and it‟d be a lot better. I also remember about the lighting system in Grand Rapids in …
I think that would be about the same period. We had steel towers and there were quite…
oh, I would say they were t- at the base anyway, they were probably twelve, fifteen feet
in diameter and they rose to maybe, oh I‟m just guessing but I would say, four to five
hundred feet. And they had several lights up there that were made with carbon- carbon
sticks they looked like. And they‟d have to replace these every once in a while and they
would throw them down to the ground below and we boys would pick them up and use
them in place of crayons-except they made a black mark instead of a white mark. But
they tore that… I don‟t know when they tore those down and replaced them but, at that
time, it was a good lighting system although I don‟t think it ever was quite as good as
they claimed it would be. You would be able to read a newspaper anywhere in the citythe city then being probably one-fifth the size it is now. I remember at one time there
was a flock of geese that came either going north or south I don‟t know which, but there
was a fog and they flew into this…one of these towers and I think it was on the corner of
Paris and Logan. I‟m not sure of that, but anyway, the… it killed several of the geese and
they were dead at the bottom of the tower and they were there for the grabs-anybody that
wanted them could have them. I don‟t know, maybe, that‟s about all I can think of.
Interviewer: These towers… were the towers kind of ringing the city or…
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, they were spaced in logical places so that they would distribute the
light throughout pretty well. But I don‟t think it was nearly as good a system as it is now
and they claimed a lot more than they claim now. But we had a lot of trees and these
lights were way up and the trees would shadow them and make dark places so I‟m sure
�3
they would have left them up until now if they were practical. But they‟re gone and, of
course, they have a different system of… we don‟t have any carbon lights, maybe you
can remember those. They kind of fizz once in a while. They‟d make quite a loud
singing sound. There was a spark going between the carbons is what it was-that made
that noise.
Interviewer: Well, when you were growing up on James Street, was that on the outskirts
of the city?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, but Eastern Avenue was pretty well on the outskirts. I suppose it
was named Eastern because it was the east, more or less, the eastern limits of the city.
And I remember just beyond there on Wealthy, they used to have a big open space there.
That would be from Eastern east of there and well east there-pretty close to Diamond.
Where Diamond is now was all open and they use to have the circus that came to town
would put up tents there. There was plenty of room for them. It was… it was all open
territory.
Interviewer: Would the shows be there?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yeah, the shows-they put the big tent there and the show would be there.
Interviewer: How would, how would people get out to the circus if it was on the outskirts
of town?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, they had streetcars, I suppose. I know… I know they did because
they had streetcars running out to Reeds Lake. As a boy, I use to go out to Reeds Lake in
the summer and my mother would put up a sandwich or two and some milk and then
we‟d go out to Rose‟s swimming beach and take our lunch and we‟d stay in the water all
day long-swim all morning and afternoon. The water was clean and clear. And then in
the winter, we use to do the same thing only we‟d take our skates out and they cleared a
space out there and we were in…I can‟t tell you the name of it, but it was a big open
saloon, that‟s what it was and a couple of stoves in there, these pot-bellied stoves and
we‟d get cold and come in there and we‟d…I think we had our lunch in there. They let
us have our lunch there. I can‟t remember much about it being a bar but I‟m pretty sure
that was what it was. And we‟d put up our… put our feet up against this iron stove with
our skates on, you know, and it would thaw them out and get warm then go back out and
skate. It was quite a trek out there for us, either bicycle or streetcar. So you wouldn‟t go
out there for just a little while, you go out there for the whole day-the entire day. I
remember shooting squirrels right down by Fisk Lake and around in there. It was
beginning to be a little inhabited there and this-right here where I am used to be a track
here. Mr. Bonnell, as I recall, had some horses, and he had a track which he would run
„em around here. Jefferson Avenue was-in the winter- was a place I think they blocked it
off and some of the rich people with horses and sleighs would have races down there.
They raced down Jefferson Avenue.
Interviewer: Did you ever go down to see them?
�4
Mr. Ainsworth: I don‟t think I did. I remember hearing about it, but I wasn‟t particularly
interested. But on Washington Street they used to block that off for us kids and we‟d
start at Madison with bobsleds and slide down there and then walk back up. We use to
do that a lot. I can‟t remember those horse races at all, seeing one. I can remember
hearin‟ „em, talking about them though. I‟m sure they had them.
Interviewer: Did you go to school in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, I graduated from Central High School in nineteen-ten. That was
the last year of the old high school. Then there was the new one which I guess is the one
standing now-was built in, I think the class of eleven [1911] got into that school. I was
the last one there and… I graduated in nineteen-ten and remember hearing I was the last
class in the school.
Interviewer: Did everybody in those days graduate from Central?
Mr. Ainsworth: I think they did. I don‟t think we had another high school.
Interviewer: Another four year school?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, I don‟t believe we did. Of course, you got how many now-three,
four…?
Interviewer: Well, there‟s Creston, Union, Central, Ottawa Hills-I guess they‟ve got
four, plus the Catholic High School.
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I guess there weren‟t a lot of kids never went to high school, you
know, in those days. I don‟t suppose over half of them went. And so, of course, the city
was so much smaller so that you didn‟t need as many.
Interviewer: Who were the kids that went onto high school and who were the ones that
didn‟t?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, some of them had to go to work and they didn‟t. Some of „em just
weren‟t interested. There wasn‟t the importance put on an education in those days as it is
today. So… and the world wasn‟t as sophisticated. I mean you… you have to have an
education to run these machines now and the computers and everything. Most every kind
of work there is takes a good deal of education. In those days, we didn‟t have those and
the work that was open for you didn‟t require it so you just didn‟t spend the time and
money on it. I went over to the University of Michigan and it seemed to me there were
nine thousand there then and they thought that was a big, big school. My granddaughter
is going over here to Central Michigan at Mt. Pleasant, yeah, Mt. Pleasant. And I think
she said there were something like twelve, fourteen thousand, and they, they consider that
a small school now. I never, I really never heard if it until she went there. And yet that‟s
�5
much bigger than the University of Michigan was in those days. And the University of
Michigan was-and is today-well recognized as a big and good college.
Interviewer: What… what kind of business were you in in Grand Rapids?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I was in the coal business-the Bennett Fuel Company. My father
worked there first and got to own the company, and then I took it over when I came back
from college and I ran it until sixteen years ago when I retired. It‟s about that time gas
kept came in and there‟s very little coal sold in the city now, very little. Even the
industries are not buying it because of the smoke that they‟re creating. So, it‟s been hit
very hard but my son is running the company as best he can and he‟s gone into oil…
selling oil along with coal for heating and other purposes. So he‟s struggling along with
it still in the city. It‟s over-it‟s about ninety-eight years old now. It‟s almost a hundred
years old-the company is. And we had an interesting thing about that. We were on the
corner of Fulton and Ottawa. I think we were there for eighty-eight years and the
property was owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. We rented it from them and we rented
it for eighty-eight years and all we had was month-to-month lease. The railroads are a
little different than other people. If you ship over their lines, they won‟t sell to you and
they give you cheap rent. They won‟t sell to you because they want to hold you on
their… they want to have something over your head. It‟s to make you stay there and ship
over their road. And on the other hand, they give you very, very reasonable rent. In fact,
they‟d give it to you for nothing if they could but the Interstate Commerce Commission
won‟t let them do that. They have to charge at least, as I understand it, six percent the
valuation, assessed valuation of the property. But that‟s all they charged. Well, I think
that‟s all they charged us. Now, now that the railroads are having a hard time, maybe,
they‟re… they‟ll get into the more equitable rent.
Interviewer: Well, if people were burning… would that be the predominant fuel in
homes-coal?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, it was up to about nineteen forty, I‟d say. nineteen forty then gas
started coming in, oil, there was, some oil in… there was some gas but not anything like
what it is now. Though I would say an eighty percent or eighty-five percent of the heat
was generated from coal at that time. And there were over a hundred coal dealers in this
city at one time-at least a hundred licenses taken out. Now there is just our own, that‟s
the only one left. And we‟re… we just can‟t, I don‟t know how he can live off what he
gets there. There‟s just nobody‟s burning coal. I don‟t burn it myself …and fewer every
year. But he‟s got little other outlets that, like oil, trying to go into the fertilizing
business, too. Doing a little of that he can, that goes a very little investment necessary if
you have oil trucks, you can just clean „m out, put the water and the chemical in there and
then you got your own pump, your spray and the whole thing so all throughout the
country quite a few coal yards have gone into fertilizing by liquid spraying.
Interviewer: Well, if most of the homes were burning coal, was there… was there much
smog or smoke in the city?
�6
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, there was, there was no complaint about it but there was at times. I
know that in the winter you get a nice clean fall of snow and all, everything would be just
as white and pure and clean as it could be in the morning maybe, and then by the next
morning you‟d see these globs of soot around. And the snow would get real dirty mostly
from… of course, it gets dirty now but it‟s largely from coal. It seems to me as though
the air should be much cleaner now than it used to be due to the fact that there‟s no coal
used but, of course, there weren‟t very many automobiles in those days and they say
they‟re responsible for 60% of the pollution-air pollution. So maybe we got a worse
victim in the car than it was in coal. I don‟t think coal will ever come back as a home
heating.
Interviewer: Well what, what, how would these homes that were heated on coal, what
was the operation involved in keeping your house warm.
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, at first it was really just hand fired. You just didn‟t… you never
had a fire furnace with coal? You didn‟t?
Interviewer: Well, I did at my parents‟ cottage at one time. But…
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, it‟s merely shovel in the coal usually in the morning and set your
drafts and you‟d get over-runs and under-runs and, it was good, good and cold you
couldn‟t keep the house at an even temperature-or it was very difficult to. Then they had
the… they would get an automatic thermostat for the furnace and it was much better than
without one. It would open and close the draft itself. When the temperature went over a
certain degree, it would drop the draft so that the fire would die down and when it got
cold it would be the reverse. And then… then they introduced the stoker and the stoker is
much cleaner burning. It burns fuel much cleaner than the hand fired by means of a
screw it pushes the coal in so that the fire is fed from below and as that fresh coal comes
in from below, it gets hot and it begins to release its volatile matter as smoke. The smoke
has to go through the bed of flames and it gets burned off. So it burned the coal more
efficiently and cleanly-but it isn‟t. I hate to say it as a coal man, but it isn‟t as clean as
the gas or oil. But, of course, you‟re just practically unconscious of the furnace and then
I… just, your house is held at seventy-two degrees with either coal or oil. So you‟re
unconscious of it.
Interviewer: Well in other words, before they developed the thermostat, it was pretty
difficult keeping your house at an even temperature.
Mr. Ainsworth: Yeah. You had a little dial up here that you could operate around and it
had a chain on it and the chain would close or open the drafts down below. So if it gets
cold, well, you walk over to this operator and just turn it one way or the other and it
would adjust the drafts instead of having to go down below to do anything. You boys
missed a lot of hard work.
Interviewer: Well were there, when people were burning coal in their houses, were there
any coal strikes?
�7
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes, I can remember one but they- the contracts were all written so they
expired, I think, on April first. And we did have coal strikes but the season was pretty
well along for one thing and we could load up on another thing and I remember one year
they had a strike and they had this coal… they loaded cars. Of course, the miner was
anxious to get all the money he could so he was trying to put in all the time he could and
some-so most of „em were on a tonnage basis so the more tons you got out the more you
got paid. And he was trying to build up a nest egg to protect him against the strike. So
they were trying to get a lot of coal out in shipping and we‟d load up and they‟d have
sometimes… there‟s every miner had maybe a hundred cars loaded with coal and they
would… all during April they would ship that to you. And I can‟t remember any time
when, oh yes, I did too, was that a strike? There was one time here we were in real bad
shape one winter. We…we had the supply turned over to the city. I think that was… that
must have been a strike. I remember George Welsh was mayor, I believe, at that time or
city commissioner and the city confiscated all the coal there was in the city. I mean they
came to your yards and now, “You cannot deliver any coal except on an order from the
city.” And then the people had to go to the city hall and declare their need of coal and
they‟d get a certificate and they… we‟d come down and deliver them a ton. We did have
quite a serious shortage one year, I can remember.
Interviewer: Do you remember what year that was?
Mr. Ainsworth: No, I can‟t. No, I can‟t. I just have to guess it was the late thirties or in
the forties. We did have quite a serious shortage at that time, but I don‟t think anybody
froze. I remember greenhouses got preference, hospitals got preference and some
institutions that were vital were… got the first chance. There were… there always…
when they have a strike, there‟s always a few miners at work-they‟re not unionized so
there‟s a trickling of coal that comes out always, even in spite of a strike. There‟s a strike
on right now, isn‟t there? I know that their contract expired last night at midnight.
Interviewer: Oh, I don‟t know about this.
Mr. Ainsworth: I, I didn‟t turn it on there… the television this morning… and so I don‟t
know what happened.
Interviewer: Was the Grand River used for anything when you were a kid?
Mr. Ainsworth: I can‟t remember any of those boats going up and down. I… I can
remember seeing pictures of the boats and I think there were some boats there and they
docked right down there by Fulton Street, but I can‟t remember very much about them
but I‟ve seen pictures. I think maybe most of my memory of that is from pictures rather
than from the actual boats although I can remember a very bad flood we had one year. I
was only a kid. Gosh, I don‟t know. It was probably nineteen-I‟m guessing again but
probably in nineteen-let‟s see, probably nineteen hundred and five or six… around in
there. I remember the… in the Pantlind Hotel in the barber shop-in the basement-they,
they had water right up to… almost to the ceiling. And they used to have a mark there
�8
and then years afterwards they‟d come in and say, well, right up there is where the water
was on such and such a date. And the west side was quite badly flooded. There was
some water over there.
Interviewer: What did… what did happen? Why were there such serious floods then and
not now?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, if you don‟t, there was no wall there at that time and it was the
year in which we had a lot of snow and it melted all fast. Maybe even today it comes up
pretty high. We have walls of protection but if you get a lot of snow and then you get a
warm rain with this two or three feet of snow on the ground, it‟s just running off
everywhere, just in rivers. All over the country, every tributary is feeding into Grand
River and it goes way up and it depends on the condition at the time and at that year. We
were not protected as well as we are now and we had a big run-off of snow and water.
Interviewer: You said you mentioned that your family had a home down on South
College, five forty-nine South College?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yes.
Interviewer: Did you grow up or did you spend any time…
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, I spent a few years there, yes. Most of my time was spent on
James Street. Then they moved out to eighteen thirty-nine Lake Drive, but then I was
married and I didn‟t live at eighteen thirty-nine Lake Drive. They kept going east as most
of us do-east or out in the outskirts.
Interviewer: What kind of a neighborhood was James Street, what kind of people lived
there?
Mr. Ainsworth: Well, there were colored people on the south side of Wealthy and they
used to have what we called the Wealthies and the Cherries. I belonged to Cherry Street
and most of the Wealthies were the people on the Wealthy side. South of Wealthy were
colored… were half, about half-colored and half white at that time. And we used to have
snowball fights and so forth. At that time was more or less a pleasant relationship. There
was rivalry and then sometimes it resulted in bloody noses and so forth but that was the
extent of it. But we… we were… we were divided even then in those days between…
and Wealthy Avenue divided us off. And we got our names from the…from the two
streets, Wealthy and Cherry.
Interviewer: Did they go to the same school?
Mr. Ainsworth: Yeah, we went to the same school. It‟s there now, Henry Street School.
It runs from Henry over through to James and just a little bit south of Wealthy. It seems
to me… I know it‟s there yet, isn‟t it?
�9
Interviewer: Henry School? I think so, yeah. Yeah, I‟m sure it‟s there. Did, well… did
the… the Negroes and the whites get along alright together?
Mr. Ainsworth: In school we did. I can‟t remember anything… any difference or having
problems or even giving it a moment‟s thought. We had no serious trouble, we accepted
each other as we were and we didn‟t have a football team or baseball team I don‟t
think…at least I know I didn‟t-wasn‟t in it. But I had some friends. I can remember two
or three of „em down there and later they got to be waiters at the Pantlind Hotel and I
used to get pretty good service over at the Pantlind Hotel. The boys would… quite a few
of them became waiters in various places. Do you have this thing going? Is anybody
going to listen to all this?
Interviewer: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Ainsworth: Are they?
Interviewer: Yeah, I think so.
INDEX
A
I
Ainsworth, Arthur Sardius (Father) · 5
Interstate Commerce Commission · 5
B
M
Bennett Fuel Company · 5
Bonnell, Mr. · 3
Mayor Parks · 1
C
P
Pantlind Hotel · 8, 9
Central High School · 4
Central Michigan · 4
R
F
Reeds Lake · 3
Fisk Lake · 3
U
G
University of Michigan · 4
Grand River · 7, 8
W
H
Henry Street School · 9
Welsh, George · 7
�10
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8c09728a2dc129661aa8a36f3e572527.mp3
a44bf0baae9471a406f703cd9bd0f7eb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Grand Rapids Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Various
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
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application/pdf; audio/mp3
Language
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eng
Type
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Text; Sound
Identifier
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RHC-23
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1971 - 1977
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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RHC-23_24Ainsworth
Title
A name given to the resource
Ainsworth, C. Bennett
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ainsworth, C. Bennett
Description
An account of the resource
C. Bennett Ainsworth was born in Grand Rapids on December 3, 1890. He graduated from Central High School in 1910, and attended the University of Michigan. He was the owner of Bennett Fuel Co. He died October 7, 1974.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
Language
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eng
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Sound
Format
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application/pdf
audio/mp3
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c79da1b392d7f8ef883efe62ab68448a.pdf
5942c52b8bd69e0fca77aba93abc216c
PDF Text
Text
And its Day 16
by windoworks
Some years ago CB and I were in Wellington, NZ with our son ZL and his wife AW and two
friends from Grand Rapids who were traveling with us around NZ. We were driving in our
rental van around the extensive bays of Wellington on a truly miserable wet afternoon with
AW and I relegated to the very back seat with no open windows for fresh air. This was the first
time I experienced ‘car poo’, that is, an unreasoning and overwhelming desire to get out of this
vehicle right this very minute and everyone just get out of my way!
I tell you this because yesterday I experienced a third day of house poo. Did I want to walk
around the block? NO! I wanted to get in the car and drive somewhere where we could safely
walk the dog and look at the trees and anything else but not the view from our house windows.
And I couldn’t because we didn’t get our car out of the garage before our neighbor put his
ladders across our driveway so he can completely repaint the side of his house facing ours. So
CB promised that tomorrow (today) we could make a picnic lunch and drive out to the lake and
eat our lunch (in the car) and then walk in the woods to the beach. How lovely! I smiled as I
fell asleep last night.
And then it rained all night and there was even a thunderstorm and as I write this it
is still raining. Bah, humbug! We will go for a drive after lunch and walk in the rain, but it
won’t be the same.
So how are you doing?
Yesterday evening, for the first time ever, we group FaceTimed with our children. At first it
was disconcerting because every time someone spoke their video feed got bigger. But after a
minute or so we all adapted and we talked for quite a while. We asked each other what was
happening for each person and their job etc and here’s what we found out.
ZB and baby OB will probably be home together beginning next week. The daycare OB goes to
3 days a week has less and less attendees and on Friday the owner began letting casual staff go.
ZB will work from home for 21 hours a week spread over 5 weekdays instead of 3 full days.
This won’t be easy as OB has learnt to crawl and is progressing fast to pulling himself up on the
furniture. Luckily most of her team members that she supervises are in a similar boat with
�children at home. And if Jimmy Fallon can broadcast from home with his children climbing all
over him, we can all do it.
AB is working from home for one more week until all stores and offices are closed and then he
will take 4 weeks annual paid leave to begin with. He says he will spend most of each day
riding his new exercise bicycle.
ZL is still working from home and last week their readership jumped to half of NZ’s population.
He works at Stuff.co.nz. Check it out, its a great news service. His wife AW is now home as her
Early Childhood Learning Center is closed but the NZ government is subsidizing 80% of her
salary.
In Cornwall, England, our niece EB is furloughed beginning next week. Her partner T still has
contract work as a builder but all building supply shops have closed which makes it very
difficult. The government is paying 80% of EB’s salary I think, so she has assured us they will
be okay.
In Perth, Australia, my friend MM and her husband KM are isolated and doing well pursuing
interests etc. Like us they had to cancel extensive overseas travel plans and can only
communicate with their children and grandchildren via online. In Finland my friend AS is
retired and posting photos of delectable looking berry pies and her husband JS is working from
home as they are locked down also. We don’t hear very much about Scandanavia but they are
suffering just as much as we are.
In local news: the USA has topped the world for confirmed COVID-19 cases and they tell us we
haven’t spiked yet. I can’t even think about that coherently. The Orange One wants us back in
churches by Easter and every morning I thank whoever might be listening for our Governor,
our City Mayor, our Kent County Health Department, our City Police Chief and our City
Manager who are doing absolutely everything to keep us out of harm’s way. I am so glad I live
in Michigan and not in places like Oklahoma where their Governor was forced to accept the
virus as a reality on Tuesday this week and ordered regulations in place. Meanwhile people are
dying in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Those poor people. My heart goes out to them.
Okay enough. Today’s flashback. It’s isn’t really a flashback, its a video (if I can get it to work)
and its self explanatory.
I hope this makes you smile. I replay it every time I feel house poo coming on. Okay - stay safe,
stay home. Tomorrow then.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
COVID-19_2020-03-28_BenjaminPamela_PD-Day-17-And-its-Day-16
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Benjamin, Pamela
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-03-28
Title
A name given to the resource
And its Day 16
Description
An account of the resource
Daily journal entry of Pamela Benjamin, spouse of GVSU history professor, Craig Benjamin, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally self-published on WordPress.
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a86a06111ee24156ff5e68f46a967b3a.pdf
27783c1c19deee454ddda4c499992d54
PDF Text
Text
Online Classes and COVID-19
Online classes for GVSU began Monday March 16, although the campus shut down faceto-face lectures starting on March 12. I believe that overall the switch to online courses will
negatively impact the grades of many students attending GVSU. Many people benefit from faceto-face traditional lectures for many reasons including being more attentive, hands-on learning,
and many more unsaid reasons. Although, I do believe the switch to online lectures was the best
decision in this unprecedented situation to maintain the health and safety of students. Personally,
my online classes have been going just fine but there are subjects in which I can tell I am falling
behind and not comprehending the information as deeply as I would normally. It has been the
hardest to switch over my chemistry lecture, lab, and my cadaver lab. Regarding chemistry it is
so much harder to learn the information and make connections between all of the concepts when
learning virtually than in person because you can ask questions and often go in more depth to the
topics. Labs in general have been very hard to switch online because they are hands on, but I
believe the professors have done a great job at attempting to bring as much online as they could.
Next, my professors have been great regarding the messages I have received and the
support they are willing to give. All of my professors have been sending emails out multiple
times a week with updates, announcements, support, and due dates for material, so we don’t miss
any assignments. The professors have offered help regarding the class material and also have
given us extra resources for outside of class for help with mental health and other related issues.
Overall, I believe the staff at GVSU has done a great job at accommodating material and lectures
during this time. I am very grateful for that because without them and their enormous efforts to
put these classes online this semester could have panned out much worse for many students.
In regard to student organizations, I participate in the Pre-PA Club. The closure of
campus and COVID-19 has caused our meetings to be cancelled since Mid-March through the
end of the school year. This included our normal scheduled meetings, extra smaller group meet
ups, and planned tour trips to various PA schools, including GVSU’s PA school. Our executive
board has done a great job reaching out to us, keeping us updated about what is going on, and
even transitioned some aspects of the club online. While this was great for us members of the
club I feel it may have put some extra stress on the leaders of the Pre-PA club.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anonymous
Description
An account of the resource
Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-04-21
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
COVID-19_2020-04-21_Anon_004
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/866a0c63f9a7370f6dde180dee1023c7.pdf
1833174f5e785025d63bf202450f9c7c
PDF Text
Text
3/27/2020, 7:36pm EST
It has only been four days since the Governor’s executive “stay at home” order went out and two
weeks since classes went online, but pre-quarantine life seems like it was an eternity ago. Many
of my friends have already lost their patience for this new form of asocial living. For a week, we
all hid in our houses, sanitized our door knobs, our phones, our hands, and took action to
“flatten the curve”. If you ask my peers, they’ll still tell you that this is the appropriate course of
action, but they won’t follow through.
One of my friends is a nursing student. In the beginning he was actively tracking the numbers,
notifying us all of every new case and enthusiastically showing anyone and everyone “proper
handwashing technique”. Today I spoke to him and he seemed dismissive.
“Well, she only came over because we all know her, like she’s friends with everyone in the
house, and she’s been really lonely.” This was his response to my concerns about their
household continuing to admit visitors. A household of seven, I might add.
One of the members of that household is my girlfriend. Tomorrow she is moving out.
Temporarily - not that we know how long temporarily is right now. When she broke the news to
her closest friends that she was leaving to live with me, so she could isolate herself as
recommended, she was met with an uncomfortable silence. I can tell this has been upsetting
her. Today as she packed her belongings she called to consult me.
“What is the point of me coming to live with you if you are going to keep volunteering at that
food pantry?” She says her roommates - our friends - have been judging her for this choice.
That they don’t see the logic in it.
“You know, you don’t have to come live with me. I know we made this decision rather abruptly
and I would 100% understand if you changed your mind. I know it’s a lot.” And it is a lot. Only
thirteen months into a relationship and we will be trapped in an empty house together - with
nothing to occupy her mind other than her hobbies. I am grateful I still have my employment, my
school, and my volunteering to keep me sane. But I worry about the tension this could create.
We talked for a while about her concerns. I told her I would give up my volunteering if that made
her feel safer, and I would. We both realize that our friends are reacting this way out of guilt guilt because they know they could also be doing more to protect themselves and the people
they care about. But instead they rationalize and make exceptions. I only hope that none of
them are exposed to the virus, because if one of them gets sick it will surely spread through that
household like a wildfire.
3/29/2020, 11:03AM EST
I can hear the wind whistling past my doorway. Kelly has just left for a bike ride, leaving me
alone to my studies. I sit hunched over my desk, wrapped in a blanket, flipping through Panopto
�videos with our biochemistry lecture material. I pause the video mid-sentence, as my attention
jumps from the specifics of glycolysis to my planner. Did I write down our exam for next week? It
would be a shame if I missed it - something I am likely to do with no set schedule. The exam is
to be posted on blackboard Friday morning from 9am-11am, which means I have to start it
before 10am because the exam times out after an hour…. or does that mean I have until 11am
to start it? I note it as being until 10am just in case. My attention flips again. Now I’m checking
the due dates for our MasteringPhysics assignments. I add another to my planner for the month
of April. My attention fips again. I’m frantically scrolling through the announcements page of my
psychopathology course. Dammit, the discussion board on Anorexia closed last night. Did I get
all of my required submissions in? I search among our professor’s many updates to find the one
with our new grading criteria - it's 25 posts down and was only sent a week ago. Shit, we
needed 3 posts and I only posted 2. Minus another three points if any of your posts are from the
same day. Are mine? I check.
Posted 4 days ago.
Posted 3 days ago.
I let out a sigh of relief. Still missed 4 points for that last post, but eh. I search through the
announcements again. Good, there are still extra credit opportunities. I make a note to myself to
watch one of the videos in eReserve today and write a summary.
I turn my attention to our case study analysis. Now that we are online it will surely be even more
difficult to get my partner to carry her weight. Shit that’s due Thursday too. I add it to the list.
The door downstairs cracks open. Kelly is back. I realize I spent almost the whole time she was
gone updating my planner. What was I supposed to be doing...? My ADD-riddled brain is not
having a fun time with these online classes.
3/30/2020; 5:02PM
Today I ventured outside for the first time in what I am now realizing has only been a weekend,
but has felt like several weeks. And by “ventured outside” I guess I really mean “I interacted with
the public today”. Unfortunately, this venturing was for medical care. Nothing serious or
emergent - well, I guess semi-emergent.
I had a suspicious mole biopsied about a month ago. It came back as “severely dysplastic”,
which I guess is an indicator of increased risk of melanoma. It’s also something that can
develop into melanoma. At first when my dermatologist office called and said they wanted to
remove the spot I was annoyed. Mind you the “biopsy” that had previously been done took
several weeks to heal and basically looked like they had removed the entire thing. When this
whole pandemic things started getting serious the office called again and asked if I was okay
with moving my “surgery” back to May. Since I didn’t really want the surgery anyways, I figured
it couldn’t hurt.
But a few days later, the spot started coming back. I called and moved the appointment closer.
Since in the week leading up to my appointment the pigmentation had almost fully returned. It
�was actually rather alarming. I quickly went from being annoyed at the thought of having another
procedure to fearing that I did in fact have melanoma.
So here we are today. As I approached the office I was greeted by numerous large printed stop
signs. They universally proclaimed that only individuals who had appointments and had
experienced no symptoms of illness were to enter the office. When I approached the desk, they
stopped me and took my temperature from a distance.
In spite of this initial eerie demonstration, the rest of my appointment was seemingly normal.
Other than the fact that I left with a giant scar in my abdomen. I may have underestimated the
extensiveness of the surgery.
Afterwards we picked up some Olive Garden to-go - tragically they only gave us 2 breadsticks
(who goes to Olive Garden and only eats TWO breadsticks???). And then, because I only had
ibuprofen at home, we had to stop at a pharmacy for some tylenol. There were two things that
stood out to me about that Walgreens:
1) Blue painters tape marked 6-foot intervals on the floor. I guess to help customers
visualize how far apart they needed to stay?
2) The shelving area that normally holds tylenol and acetaminophen was entirely empty.
I can only assume the later of these two observations is the result of all the media telling people
to have tylenol at hand in the case they get sick. Because apparently ibuprofen either isn’t
helpful or makes things worse? Thankfully, the Tylenol wasn’t actually sold out, it had just been
shifted to a smaller display at the front of the store. I guess they want to make sure people don’t
try to steal it or buy the whole shelf or whatever. After all, these are wild times.
4/1/2020; 5:54PM
Yesterday we took a walk in the evening. I told myself that I would go on a walk every day, but
today I worked on my coursework all morning and afternoon. We just had dinner and now I only
have an hour until my evening shift at work. I am not going to get a chance to leave the house
today and that saddens me a little.
I know I should be thankful I still have a job. Thankful that I still have income and something to
keep me busy, but honestly work has been rather depressing lately. I’ve been picking up more
hours because, well, what else do I have to do? And I don’t have any reason to ask my
coworkers to pick up a shift because it’s not like I have anywhere else to be. At first it was nice
working online and things being slow. I could get paid to sit at my desk and do homework, as
long as I kept a few extra tabs open and maintained one eye on our chat in case there was a
student who needed help. But at this point it just feels isolating. If given the option I would
certainly rather have the “inconvenience” of driving to campus and looking alert and attentive.
Before the library closed I could look forward to chatting with coworkers every week. I was even
starting to make friends with a few of the new hires from the fall. We’d gossip and joke and even
�when we were just sitting and doing homework, it was nice to sit with someone in productive
silence.
I also miss the students. If I’m being completely honest, there are certainly times when I would
hope to go through my shift without having an appointment. I mean, everyone has those days
when they didn’t study enough for their exam and are secretly counting on using that precious
hour on the clock to cram. Or when you did study and now you’re so tired from pulling that allnighter that you don’t have the energy to hold a conversation. But for the most part, I have
always really enjoyed my consultations. I love how energizing it can be to see a concept finally
click for one of my peers. I love hearing about people’s interests and questions and ideas and I
love the challenge of helping a student find information about a topic I have never studied in my
life. Since we went online three weeks ago, I have only had one consultation and it was short
and awkward because well technology doesn’t always cooperate. I miss the previous frequency
of when my work was actually work and it saddens me deeply to know that there are many of
my coworkers whom I will never see or speak to in person again.
4/2/2020 1:01PM
It is so sunny today. It is only 57 degrees out, but it feels much warmer. We took a picnic to
campus and sat in front of Zumberge pond, crunching apples and watching the geese. I tried to
feed the geese (aka I threw apples at them), but they just swam away.
Campus is eerily quiet. We saw one man driving around in a van. He seemed to be using his
phone to do a voice recording? I wonder if they are doing virtual tours of campus because all of
the in-person tours stopped. I wonder how it is right now for students who are trying to decide
what colleges they’ll attend in the fall. Kelly and I agreed that most colleges will probably have a
lower admissions rate in the fall. Who would want to start classes at a time like this, when we
still don’t even know if we’ll be having in-person classes in the fall? Who could afford to start
college at a time like this?
At one point a family came and walked by the pond. Our picnic blanket was nestled in the grass,
between the upper two rows of stone bleachers that encircle the back side of the reservoir. For
whatever reason the mother thought it would be a fine idea to walk along one of the rows
bordering our setup. It seemed extraordinarily unnecessary given that she has the whole entire
campus to walk about. What happened to a six-foot minimum? Retrospectively, I really wish that
I had forced myself into a coughing fit as she passed. Some people clearly just have no respect
for personal space.
After our picnic we walked to the back of the arboretum. There was the occasional jogger or
couple walking by, but for the most part things were fairly quiet. It’s weird to think how bustling
things would have been given the weather - under normal circumstances that is. There was no
fighting for tree real estate today. We stretched out between two leafless trees on the edge of
�the ravines. The sun easily cut through the canopy of bare branches. It was nice to just lay there
in the sun for a good hour. I really should start studying outside more often.
4/3/2020; 9:39PM
Do you ever have a day that is both a good day and a bad day at the same time? Today is one
of those days for me.
It began with an exam. Normally that isn't a good start to a college student’s day but in this case
the exam was in biochemistry - a subject that I have always excelled in - and it was open-book,
meaning it had to be easier than ever right? Well, I don’t have my score back yet so time will
only tell as to whether that’s true. The exam was from 9-11am, so mostly it was a good note in
my day because I was glad to have it over so early.
I was supposed to have a self-reflection meeting with my leadership academy from 1-4pm
today, but truthfully I played hooky. Self-reflection events have always been something I
enjoyed because they’re generally really enlightening, in addition to having free food and an
opportunity to socialize with my fellow candidates. But the thought of engaging in such an
intimate ritual via zoom seemed alien. Also, it’s pretty easy to rationalize skipping class or an
event when “skipping” only means not opening my computer. So instead I called in sick and we
went on a hike.
I was nervous initially about the idea of heading to Rosy Mound. Earlier in the morning, I came
across a Facebook post by Ottawa County Parks’ that requested hikers steer clear of lakeside
parks because they had been notoriously busy in the past few weeks - an environment that isn’t
too congruent with social distancing. We debated visiting other parks instead, but ultimately
conceded that no matter where we went on such a nice day, it was hard to predict the level of
foot-traffic.
The hike ended up being a nice escape. We climbed many stairs, sticking close to the side of
the path, our heads turned, whenever another party passed. Some people reciprocated our
attempts at keeping a distance, while others plowed through the middle of the path, unperturbed
by us clinging to the sides. After reaching the top, we ended up picnicking in the refuge of a
solitary dune off the lake. Thankfully nobody bothered us there.
That was the good of the day. The bad started a few hours after collapsing into bed, exhausted
from our hike. One of my roommates who had moved home returned to pick up some extra
things. No big deal. Except another one had also come back and was now doing her laundry
downstairs. It frustrated me that as hard as we had tried to isolate ourselves for the past week,
sacrificing time with friends we so wished to have, my roommates had now come meandering
back through the house after spending time interacting with only god knows who. I had
specifically asked them, multiple times, to just text me when they were coming back, if only so I
knew who was in the house, but apparently that was too difficult a request.
�Since then various rotten things continued to go wrong with my day - one of my roommates
broke a glass, she took my vacuum when I needed to use it, my girlfriend accidentally spilled a
full drink (with the last of my quarantine vodka) all over the carpet…
Even saying this now it seems silly how upset I’ve been by all that’s happened. I guess when
you’re cooped up all day and all you have is the little things it’s easier for the little things to get
to you when they go wrong.
4/7/2020; 12:05PM
Things are looking more and more ominous in regards to the severity of this public health crisis and with that more chaotic. I have been checking the Kent County public health website daily for
updates on numbers. We are now at around 177 positive tests, which means realistically there
are probably a lOT more positive case than that since 1) some people are asymptomatic 2)
other people have mild cases that may as well be a cold (like any ol’ coronavirus) and 3) they
are only testing people who are severe anyways!
Public health recommendations are also a mess. Within the past couple weeks, the CDC has
gone from telling people to only wear masks if they’re caring for someone who is sick, to saying
that everyone should be wearing masks in public as a precaution. My parents tried to order
masks off Amazon, but what would normally require 2-day shipping isn’t set to arrive until May.
Some people are making their own cloth masks, but I don’t have the fabric, much less a sewing
machine. My aunt, who works as a nurse at Bronson, is supposedly making masks for my
family. My mom says she would send us some if they got extra, but I don’t know how likely that
is at this point. We haven’t been to the grocery store yet and Kelly says she doesn’t want to
wear a mask anyways because last time we went, we thought the few younger people who were
wearing them looked stupid. I think public perception has changed now that the
recommendations have flipped.
In my spare time I’ve been reading and listening to podcasts. One of the podcasts I’ve always
liked is called Sawbones, it’s a comic medical history show and one of the hosts is a family
physician. In the past few episodes they’ve been talking about the COVID19 epidemic. It’s wild
to think about how quickly this went from being overblow to scary. I remember listening to their
first episode on COVID19 on the plane ride down to Florida for spring break. Even physicians
were being optimistic, warning people not to panic and saying that this would likely only have an
impact on countries like China, who are often hit hard by these kinds of outbreaks due to the
overall poor respiratory health of their country. Two weeks later they came out with a follow up
episode talking about how physicians were setting up decontamination stations in their garage
to avoid infecting patients and begging people to stay inside. I can only imagine what people
outside of the US are thinking about this situation. Probably the same way we have always
looked at China through epidemics like SARS, thinking “Wow, it must suck to be in a country
with such poorly established public health measures. I’m glad that could never happen here”. I
think living through this has definitely made me realize the false sense of security that living in a
�wealthy, developed nation can provide. Clearly we aren’t as separated from the world’s
problems as one would like to think. Heck in this case, we, are “the world’s problems”.
4/13/2020 6:30pm
Today I found out my summer internship program has been cancelled due to COVID19. While I
always knew this was a possibility, it was still a huge blow. The research program was
supposed to be my “in” to my top MD/PhD program. They bring you in for a summer, house you
and pay you to do research, while at the same time you get to attend seminars by graduate
students and talk to admissions counselors about applying. It’s essentially a 2-month long
interview for them - or so my advisor told me.
Well after receiving the news via email and briefly going through all 7 stages of grief, I shot out a
desperate email to the PI I was supposed to be working under. I told her about the program
being cancelled.
“I know this may be a stretch, but are you aware of any other sources of funding that would still allow
me to work in your lab over the summer?”
I frantically emailed my supervisor at the library, maybe I can still continue working my current
job?? I also emailed a few other contacts that one of my advisors had sent me, but I wasn’t
holding my breath - it seemed like everyone was too busy doing damage control and nobody
had jobs to offer right now.
Then my email pinged a response - it was from the PI.
“That is too bad. I’m happy to fund you to work in our lab – so, no worries.”
Just like that, things were fixed (I think??). I have a phone meeting with her tomorrow to talk
over details, but I’m still nervous about all the undetermined variables. It’s so hard to plan
anything now because this pandemic is so unpredictable. I’m worried that even if I miraculously
am still able to set up a job in this lab, our state could have its lockdown extended or their state
could implement one or the hospital could shut down that research project. I’m having trouble
coping with the uncertainty of it all.
�4/16/2020 12:51 pm
My partner moved out this morning. She’s going back to live with her roommates. Tomorrow, I
will be heading back to stay with my parents for a couple of weeks - or as long as I can manage.
Things have not been great for either of us, mental health-wise. The weather has been snowy
and cold and windy and I haven’t left the house in probably two weeks. It’s depressing to say
the least. We tried to mix it up. To roast marshmallows over our grill outside and have sushi
picnics in the living room. But it’s hard to be trapped in a small apartment with the same person
day in and day out, with no distinct purpose. Sure, I have school work right now, but even the
courses I normally enjoy seem to drag. I no longer have any motivation to be productive. I only
feel lethargic and empty. So we decided we both needed a change of scenery. Honestly, I
almost wish we had decided to do this sooner. Things were strange and tense in the past few
days. We both knew each of us wanted to be somewhere else. It’s hard to be with a person
you’re supposed to love and only want to be somewhere else. The stress over thinking about
what this could do to our relationship has not helped. I just hope we can both bounce back from
this weird depression. I can feel myself sinking into a place of loneliness and mourning that I
haven’t been in a while and I only hope that I can pull through finals.
Even though my classes are mostly done - two of my finals were switched to take-home exams
and I’m hardly concerned about those, I still feel as though I’m drowning in responsibilities. The
leadership academy I’m in asked us to record 30 second videos of ourselves congratulating
graduating seniors in place of the normal banquet we have. My research professor asked me to
write up methods and results for our experiments from the past fall since I can’t do anything else
in the lab. I don’t feel I have the energy to tackle either of these tasks.
I am nervous about heading home. From what I’ve heard, my parent’s house hasn’t been the
most hospitable of environments as of late. My mother has taken to obsessively reading all of
the doom-and-gloom news and my younger sister - well she’s always been capricious. Normally
she attends a day program for special needs adults, but she’s been home since the public
schools were all closed. I get the sense that she has no real structure to her day anymore and
apparently her fits have only been getting worse. Normally when I visit home we share a room,
so this is moderately concerning. Nothing I haven’t handled before, but still I’m worried that the
environment will only increase my stress load. Then again, my other option is to spend another
few weeks wallowing within the same four walls - now alone. And that is not something I think I
can take for a moment longer.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
COVID-19_2020-04-19_ANON-029
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anonymous
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-04-19
Title
A name given to the resource
Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
Description
An account of the resource
Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/088a002d1bcb0098ee15d8676ac5ed64.pdf
c01a7fc86f3bca37a696375dd33fa129
PDF Text
Text
May 10, 2020
March 11 was a crazy day. I was working in the library in the morning when I heard about
Michigan State being shut down. I thought this was crazy news. Why would it shut down
already? It was clear that the coronavirus was a serious issue around the world, but it hadn’t
quite touched any of our lives yet.
On Wednesday, March 11, the state of Michigan announced its first two cases of the
virus, and immediately, universities began shutting down. This didn’t make much sense at the
time, but sure enough, Grand Valley made the call too. I was eating dinner at Kleiner Dining
Commons when we all received the email. As a Freshman, the only way I can describe this was
weird. Personally, I don’t get too worked up by things like this, especially when I know most
people around me are reacting more strongly. Still, the environment on campus changed almost
instantly. It felt like doomsday as people began leaving. Some were packing up their things and
leaving within a half hour. Others (like me) took a few days to get themselves off of campus.
The communication we received told us that classes for Thursday and Friday were cancelled.
Everyone was feeling a really weird mixture of anxiety about the entire situation, yet freedom
from academic responsibilities. It’s not like anyone could focus on schoolwork anyway. Even for
those of us who were much more calm, the strange energy in Holton-Hooker, where I lived was
too much to do anything productive. I made a lot of Facetime calls to different friends. Video
Chatting with others was a great way for me to use my energy to make the best of the situation,
and laugh with friends in the midst of everything.
I came back to campus the next week with my parents to move out of my dorm
completely. Throughout this first week away from campus, I had a really strange energy.
Normally, I get stressed out by the day-to-day responsibilities, not the longterm things. This
being said, I was really enjoying my time. All of my stress had suddenly vanished. I spent the
first few days with my brother and sister-in-law downtown Grand Rapids. The government had
just begun encouraging social distancing. Businesses were starting to shut down. The governor
called for all nonessential business to first cut down their hours, and then later for them to close.
This was the biggest bummer for me. I love doing homework in coffee shops, and this is where I
hang out with many friends as well. With everything shutting down, I headed home to my
parents.
When I finally returned to my home in Portage, I have to admit, I was not happy. I had
just begun to really feel really comfortable at GVSU, getting involved in various activities and
pursuing my education full-force. My extracurriculars changed greatly when we left campus.
This year was the first year GVSU has had a competitive speech team, and I was the
first member. The COVID-19 outbreak really threw a wrench in the budding plans of the team.
Together with two professors/coaches, I was in the process of preparing for a national
tournament and recruiting new team members. However, with the exodus from campus as well
as cancellations in speech tournaments, all of this came to a halt. My professors have texted
with me, but we decided to start fresh in the fall.
The other organization with which I am heavily involved is Campus Ministry (CM). The
change from in-person meetings to online events has been a difficult transition as well.
Normally, CM meets each Sunday night for a large gathering/church service, called, “The Well.”
However, with all that has happened, The Well has changed to digital meetings. Each Sunday,
�CM staff and student leaders put together a very well-done video for students. They broadcast it
using Facebook Live. They still do music worship, announcements, and a lesson, but it is all put
together using Zoom video calls and other things of that nature. It has been very encouraging to
know the staff is there for us students, continuing to challenge us in our faith and to be available
should we need people to talk to. We also have small group meetings, called Life Groups.
These have moved to virtual video chats as well. All of the accommodations have been great,
but unfortunately, participation has gone down. I don’t think it’s because of lack of interest, it is
just difficult to keep students available at the exact times when it isn’t a live meeting that they
can attend alongside many students who are equally excited.
College students are really missing community right now - that may be the toughest part
of this situation. I am managing to stay positive, but I miss my friends. I have regular meetings
set up with them, but never do we have all of us on one call at the same time, and just when I
could be progressing other new friendships, I can do nothing but FaceTime these new friends
for chats that are good, but awkward nevertheless.
I hope this can end soon. I know I am not the only one experiencing hardship, and there
are many who are struggling to have good mental health and feel valued in this time of isolation.
It is my goal to be better at reaching out and caring more for others during the pandemic.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
COVID-19_2020-05-10_ANON-030
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anonymous
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-05-10
Title
A name given to the resource
Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
Description
An account of the resource
Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/db2f431d7eae8767780b6cc791592fd4.pdf
342433cb44526c939dd9042f08ddbb64
PDF Text
Text
On Wednesday night March 11th 2020, I received an email from Grand Valley State
University (GVSU) that classes were cancelled for the rest of the week and would move online
from March 16th to March 29th. Many emails came to follow this one detailing all of the changes
that were to come-- my shifts at work had been cancelled until further notice and that I was
expected to move out of my on-campus apartment unless there were extenuating
circumstances. It almost did not feel real. I desperately did not want to leave GV and all of my
friends and community, especially because I had a feeling we would be doing class online
longer than stated. I spent many hours trying to figure out a way to stay in Allendale. I thought of
people I could ask to stay with or reasons as to why I had to stay on campus. However, I knew
the best thing for me to do was go home.
I spent the next few days being with friends and starting to pack up. I decided to not
pack up everything in the hope that I would be returning to my apartment to finish classes inperson. I knew I needed to turn to God with my emotions. I journaled my prayers to Him; my
sadness, my anger, my confusion. My prayers for health and safety for everyone. I said
goodbye to my roommates and left that Saturday to go home, which was bittersweet. I love
being with my family, but I couldn’t hide the fact that I would rather be at school.
That following Tuesday, March 17th, I received another email stating that classes would
be online for the remainder of the semester and I should schedule a day to completely move
out. However as of April 11th, that has not happened due to the governor’s “Stay Home, Stay
Safe Order” and most of my stuff is still at school.
Upon hearing the official news that I would not be returning to GV, the wave of emotions
hit me once again. I lamented my lost time with friends, no longer getting to live with my
roommates, and the loss of future plans. I felt negative and a little hopeless. I prayed to God to
ask Him for a heart attitude change and to not find joy in my circumstances, but in Christ alone.
The beginning of all this change was the hardest. Like I said before, I was processing a
lot of emotions and they definitely weighed heavier on me in the beginning. I also am the type of
person who thrives on a schedule, so since my routine was thrown out the window I found it
much more difficult to get done what I needed to get done. Additionally, the first week of doing
class online was exhausting. I was now on my computer for a significantly longer amount of time
than before. There were also a lot more distractions while I was trying to listen to my professors.
I am normally a handwritten notes kind of girl, which means my laptop is away during lectures.
Now, any and all notifications pop up while I’m “in class.” Like many others, my motivation to do
my homework dwindled. My younger sister and brother did not have any work to be doing,
which made it that much harder to concentrate on mine. I also wanted to spend the evenings
�with my family. If I was back at school I would normally do homework in the evenings, but now
that I am home I find it much more difficult to motivate myself to do work after dinner. Even
though I much prefer in-person classes, I have been able to better adjust to online class and all
that comes with it.
April 12, 2020
Easter looked very different this year. Normally, we wake up and get ready for church.
It’s a big celebration service where we praise the Lord for the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead. The church is always filled to the brim with people. However, this year the chairs in
the auditorium of the church sat empty while the band played songs of worship and the pastor
live streamed his sermon. At home, my family decided to get dressed up as we watched the
service on Facebook live. Since the coronavirus, we’ve spent the past few Sundays in our
pajamas while watching the service, but somehow it just didn’t seem right to be in pjs for the
Easter service. Even though Easter looked a little different this year, the heart of it was the
same. We still praised God for all He has done. We still sang songs, they were just from our
living room. We still drank our coffee while taking notes on the message, but we were just on
the couch instead of in the church. That’s the beautiful thing about God, He sees us and hears
us no matter where we are. Yes, Easter looked different this year, but Jesus Christ still rose
from the grave. He still died on the cross for our sin so that we could have a relationship with
Him. That’s what Easter is about. It’s not about the clothes we wear to church. It’s not about the
ham we eat for lunch. It’s not even about the extended family get-togethers. We still had the
opportunity to celebrate Jesus, which remains the same even among the chaos of this
pandemic.
Usually, I would get to see all of my extended family as we spent the remainder of the
day together eating, laughing, and playing card games. This year I did not get to see my little
cousins, or my aunts and uncles, or my grandparents. Although this was disappointing, I am still
thankful that I was able to be with my parents and siblings during this time. My mom made a
wonderful Easter lunch of ham, mashed potatoes, and candied carrots. In addition, she made a
chocolate cake that was extremely delicious. In the evening, we started to watch a free movie
on Amazon Prime, but soon realized that it was a terrible movie. It was so bad that we could not
even finish it. Instead, we watched Sweet Home Alabama, which is what the other movie tried
and failed to be. Despite the unusualness of Easter this year, I still had a wonderful day with
many blessings to be grateful for.
�April 14, 2020
On most days I try to get up earlier so that I’m able to get most of my work done during
the day. I started off the day reading my Bible and praying before breakfast and coffee. On
Tuesdays and Thursdays I have four classes normally, although not all of them meet
synchronously. Doing classes online is strange because I feel like I’m working all the time while
also not getting much done. Today I focused on a couple of projects for some of my classes,
watching a recorded lecture, attending class, and other assignments. I definitely put in several
hours of work, yet I feel that I accomplished little, which is quite frustrating. This week my little
brother and sister started up online school for the first time. During the past month I’ve been
working hard and having somewhat of a routine while they have not had any official
responsibilities and have had more freedom during the quarantine time. My sister is a junior in
high school and felt especially stressed today as she is in the process of adjusting to this new
way of doing school. Since my brother is only in eighth grade, he does not quite have the
workload that she does. Although who knows what he is actually supposed to be doing because
he is a middle school boy.
I’ve honestly started drinking more coffee during this period of staying at home then
when I actually had to get up early and go to class, which is quite strange. I drink coffee almost
every morning and then again almost every afternoon. To be quite honest, sometimes afternoon
coffee time is the only thing I look forward to during the day. The thought of my afternoon iced
coffee motivates me to get work done so I can enjoy a small break while sipping my coffee and
perhaps enjoying a little treat.
We always eat dinner together as a family, which I love and helps establish a feeling of
normalcy during the time of chaos. One thing I’ve come to appreciate since going away to
college is having my mom make dinner for my family each night. She is a wonderful cook and
I’ve found that it is quite exhausting to plan, shop for ingredients, and then make meals for
myself. After a long day of classes and then a night full of extracurriculars, making a healthy
dinner can be such a hassle.
On Tuesday nights I co-lead a small group for Delight, which is a nationwide women’s
ministry and we happen to have a chapter at GVSU. Our club has really expanded this past
year, which we are so thankful to God for. This semester we are going through the book of
John, and I’ve really enjoyed talking about the Bible with all my girls. We took a couple weeks
off of meeting so that everyone could adjust to going back home and doing classes online. At
first, I wondered if there even was a point in trying to meet anymore, but I am so glad that we as
a leadership team decided to keep going. We meet with our small groups over zoom. My co-
�leader and I try to talk a little bit before our small group so that we have a general idea of what
we want to do with our time. We start out by everyone talking about how they are doing and how
their week is going. Then we pray before we dive into that week’s scripture and devotional.
There are discussion questions that we sometimes follow, but lately we’ve just been discussing
which verses stuck out to us. Tonight was John 20, which covers the resurrection of Jesus. It
was so perfect since this past Sunday was Easter! We had a really good conversation tonight
and I am so thankful for the opportunity to continue to meet digitally and to connect over God’s
word. Normally, our club meets for an hour but our zoom calls usually are closer to an hour and
a half because we have such a good time talking with each other. To close, we ask how we can
be praying for each other and then we close in prayer.
April 16, 2020
Today was my last day of classes for the semester! I never would have imagined that
this is what the end of the semester would have looked like for me.
Thursdays are my busiest days. I have four classes and then two meetings in the
evenings, which I’ve pretty much kept up since coming home. My mom looked at me and said
she could not believe the schedule that I kept at school, but I guess that’s college. Today was
not any different. I was working on assignments and attending lectures for all of my classes
today. It was a full and busy day. My first class period is a time where students can go in to ask
my professor questions about our project and final. I attended speech science today because I
had questions for my report, but I don’t always attend because it is optional. Then I worked on
my project for speech science for the remainder of the hour. My next class was a review and
again a time to ask my professor questions for our final. We had made virtual children’s books
based on a concept we learned about the neurology of speech and hearing. My group shared
our book, which was about the brainstem and I really enjoyed listening to other groups share
their books. Then I watched a recorded lecture for aural rehabilitation and took notes. Finally, I
worked on some exercises for french grammar, took a quiz, and then attended my last class.
I did not get any time to rest though because I was working on things up until my first
meeting, which was our last delight leadership meeting. Again, we used zoom for the meeting.
We had a couple of business items to attend to, but mostly we talked about what a wonderful
year we had together. Everyone went around and shared some of their favorite memories from
this past year. The hour was filled with a lot of laughter. Many of us are not doing leadership
again next year, so I felt a little sad that it was all ending and we couldn’t even be in person.
Unfortunately, I had to leave quickly so I could eat dinner and get ready for my next meeting.
�My second meeting on Thursdays is Life Group. I co-lead a small group through
Campus Ministry. Normally, we meet for two hours spending an hour on talking and hanging
out, and the other hour going over the scripture and message from the Well the past Sunday.
That’s changed a little since going virtual. Instead, we mainly talk for an hour to see how
everyone is doing and see how we can be praying for each other. Honestly, my co-leader and I
have not had a lot of girls show up for our virtual meetings, which was a little discouraging at
first. But I had to remind myself to give everyone grace since we are going through an
unprecedented time. We were excited because we had two girls show up tonight and it was
good to talk, catch up, laugh, and pray with them. I finished both meetings with my heart very
full despite the stress I had been feeling from school. Hard to believe my busy Thursdays are
over!
April 17, 2020
Well it’s that time of year again, the end of the semester crunch to finish up papers,
projects, and studying for finals. The rush to get everything done so that we can enjoy a welldeserved break. It’s strange to look back and realize that it’s been over a month since I got sent
home from GVSU. Normally, this is around the time I would be packing up stuff to head home,
but I’ve already been home for five weeks and most of my stuff is still at school.
The past couple days have been full of anxious thoughts and a bit of mental spiraling. I
care a lot about my grades so I hold myself to a high standard and put a lot of pressure on
myself to do things “perfectly.” So as I’ve had to juggle the influx of assignments that comes with
the end of the semester, I’ve found that my stress levels have skyrocketed. Additionally, the fact
that I’m already home makes it difficult to keep up the motivation and attention necessary for
finals. However, I’m doing the best I can given the circumstances and I have to remind myself
that my best is all I can do. And today that looked like sitting in the same spot for five hours to
finish a rough draft due tonight.
Thankfully, I was able to finish that at a reasonable time and could enjoy my evening.
Fridays are always pizza and movie night at my house. This has not changed since the
coronavirus because we are still able to enjoy these things while quarantined. Over the past few
weeks we’ve been rewatching different series. We started with the Hunger Games and then the
Chronicles of Narnia. Tonight we started the James Bond series starring Daniel Craig. It’s nice
to have some stability and sameness in a time where so many things have changed.
April 18, 2020
�I allowed myself to rest today as I have felt that I’ve been working non-stop these past
few days. I slept in a couple hours past the time I would normally get up. Then I read my Bible
while enjoying breakfast and coffee. I’ve felt pretty lethargic after sitting all day doing school and
homework the past couple days. I decided that I needed to move so my mom, sister, and I all
did a workout video. Once we’d finished I noticed that it was a beautiful day outside. The snow
had melted from the day before, and the sun was shining. I threw on a sweatshirt and went for a
walk. I listened to some worship music and spent some time praying. There is something so
restful about a walk outside on a beautiful day. The fresh air is refreshing and it’s one of the few
times that I can be alone during the stay home order.
After that I did have to get some work done. So I worked on a couple assignments and
organized what I needed to get done in the next week. I love organizing my planner and I love
making lists. It makes me feel accomplished and helps clear my head. Yet lists are deceptive, in
the fact that I feel more productive than I actually have been.
After this, my sister and I painted a sign for one of our friend’s birthdays. His parents had
arranged a car parade that many are doing during this time of social distancing. And so cars
were lined up down his street with happy birthday signs and balloons. Then all the cars drove by
his house while honking their horns to wish him a happy birthday, and we circled around his
house twice. I had texted him earlier in the day, and I don’t think he suspected that this was
happening, so I truly believe he was surprised. He texted me after that it made his day and how
much he missed being with everyone. It was nice to still be able to celebrate a friend during this
time even if I couldn’t physically be there to celebrate with him.
�April 20, 2020
Well finals week is finally here. It’s hard to believe that it is the last week of school. I’m
looking forward to having a lot more free time and downtime to do what I would like. On the
other hand, it will be weird to not have a purpose and to be trapped at home. Normally during
the summer I would have a job, but I am not sure that will happen. There is so much that is
uncertain about the future. What’s more is that I can’t be with friends during this time either. No
fun excursions to coffee shops, no picnics, no going to the beach, no road trips, and no going
out to lunch. These are things I normally look forward to with the end of school, but with the stay
home order that's not possible.
I’m still trying to stay on schedule this week by waking up early so that I’m able to finish
everything I need to get done. So this morning I woke up, read my Bible, wrote in my prayer
journal and then ate breakfast. Next I worked on a reflection assignment for my french class,
which took a lot longer than expected. My mom, sister, and I all decided to work out so after my
mom’s meeting, we did an exercise video and it felt good to move. After that I continued to study
until my final conversation for french. Since it’s a conversation class, a written final would not
make any sense so everyone had to schedule a meeting on zoom so she could assess how our
conversational skills have progressed. It was the shortest final I’ve ever had to take. After that it
was more studying and getting ready for other exams. However I did allow myself some
relaxation in the evening as my whole family watched a couple tv shows together. I figured it
was a well deserved break.
April 21, 2020
Today I had my first official final. To be quite honest, since we were allowed to use our
notes, I did not study for this exam. I have some that are not open-note so I’ve been spending
my time preparing for those exams instead. This happened to pay off for me because I got a
good grade and my grade overall is right where I’d like it to be for this class.
The rest of my day was spent studying for my other exams, talking to my professor
about my research project, and talking to people over zoom. My group of life group leaders met
for an hour today to catch up and see how everyone was doing. It was our last official meeting,
however I know that we will continue to keep in touch. We spent some time praying together as
we head towards the end of our semester and into summer break which is filled with
uncertainty. I love these girls a lot and I am so thankful for them.
Tonight was the last delight bible study for the semester. I know it won’t be the last time I
see these girls though because we are going to do a summer study on James together. I can’t
�wait! Like usual we talked about how we are doing--the ups, the downs, and life in general.
Then we dove into John 21, the last chapter in John!! One of the girls pointed out that there is a
reflection page to highlight how you’ve grown and the ways you’ve come to know Jesus better. I
think that it is so cool and I did not realize that it was there. I’m looking forward to filling it out
myself. I am so incredibly thankful for these girls and I love them lots.
April 22, 2020
I once again started my day with reading my Bible and then exercising. I really enjoy
starting the day that way since I get to grow spiritually, and then work physically.
I did not have any exams today, so a few of my friends decided to study for our exam
together. This is the one exam I had to study for because we were using a lockdown browser
while being recorded so that our professor could make sure no one was cheating. We spent
most of the day going over practice exercises and questions. This took a surprisingly long time
to go through and then try to answer each other’s questions. We all knew this was going to be
our hardest final and wanted to prepare as much as we could for it. I thought it was very helpful
and glad we spent time working on them together.
After we finished that, I looked over some of my notes for that same class. I also
prepared for my other final, which was open note, by bookmarking my notes so I could easily
find any information I needed during the test. I was not quite sure what to expect for this exam,
but I did my best to get ready for it.
Since I had worked so hard studying the whole day I let myself rest in the evening. I am
a big proponent of balance in school. I care a lot about my grades and how well I do, but I think
rest and relaxation is vital in performing well academically.
April 23, 2020
Today was my big day! I had three exams to complete. The first one was at 8am and
required that I set up the lockdown browser. So I made sure that I was up early enough to
complete all the steps for set-up while still optimizing my sleep. I woke up with a sore throat so I
made sure to make some tea and have some cough drops ready. I also was a little nervous
while completing the environment check. That was when we had to show our testing area to the
camera before we could take the test. I made sure to show all of the things I had out so that I
would not be suspected of cheating. There were some questions I did not recognize from the
practice questions, but I did the best I could.
�I only had a small break between finishing my first exam and the start of my second one.
So I quickly ate some breakfast and then prepared myself for the next one. I was a little nervous
for this one because even though it was open note, I still had not spent much time preparing for
it. I would have liked to go over my notes as though I couldn’t use my notes, but I just did not
have the time or energy for that. I finished that one and received my grade shortly after, and I
did extremely well! I was very pleased with my score.
My next exam had a “take-home exam” format. My professor had given us the exam a
few days earlier and it just needed to be turned in by midnight. This was my French grammar
exam, which is not an easy subject. I gave myself a little break before working on it. My goal
had been to do it in pieces, but once again I ran out of time to do that. This left me with only a
single page done and about five pages left to go. I knew it would take time, but this test took me
a lot longer than I had anticipated to complete. I got stuck on one part near the beginning, so I
decided to skip it and come back later. Finally, I finished my last exam. Only one paper left to
go.
April 24, 2020
This was the first day I let myself sleep in. I figured I deserved it and I only had one thing
to do today. Again, I spent some time in the Word and in prayer. It was a slow morning and I let
myself relax and enjoy it, before I took the afternoon to work on my paper.
It was so strange that I had work to do today. Every other semester, I’ve been done by
Thursday. Unfortunately, the coronavirus created a shift in due dates and now my final report
was due today. Thankfully, all that needed to be done was a little editing, However, I’m a bit of a
perfectionist so the editing took a few hours. But I finished it before dinner and I call that a win!
With that I turned it in, and officially ended my sophomore year at Grand Valley. It was definitely
not the ending I had imagined for my year.
I couldn’t help but compare it to the end of my freshman year. There was more of a
resolution with finishing finals and then packing up and moving home. In contrast to this year
where I’ve finished my finals, but I’ve been home for about seven weeks. It kind of lacks closure
in a chapter of my life. That's just how life goes. It doesn’t always follow the plan or expectation,
but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good or that there wasn’t any growth. It just looked different and
that isn’t necessarily bad.
It’s Friday, so of course my family celebrated the end of my semester with pizza and a
movie. I could not wait to truly relax and enjoy the quarantine without worrying about school
work.
�April 25, 2020
A few days ago, my sister and I had an idea to have a tea party. I said that it needed to
wait until after my finals and so it was decided that this Saturday, today, would be our tea party.
My dad is gluten-free so we made sure to have snacks that he could enjoy, so I made glutenfree chocolate zucchini muffins that are full of protein. My sister made cucumber sandwiches,
both regular and gluten-free. We cut up some strawberries and added some blueberries and
raspberries to make a small fruit salad. We also put out some chocolate-chip cookies to enjoy. I
love earl gray tea so I decided to make that to drink for our tea party. We used our china plates,
tea cups, and saucers to make it a little fancier and more fun.
This was definitely the highlight of my day, and perhaps the highlight of the whole
quarantine. I had such a wonderful time. It was so relaxing to drink hot tea and eat treats while
the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack played in the background. It sort of made me wish that we
did it every day. My whole family participated, even my fourteen year old brother. He was very
reluctant to join, which was not surprising but we essentially forced him too. Getting him to join
our tea parties was a lot easier when he was little. My mom tried to take some pictures, and he
straight up jumped out of his chair and onto the floor to avoid any pictures and videos. All it did
was make us laugh.
April 27, 2020
Ah my first true day of freedom. I got to sleep in, read my Bible, and work out. It was an
absolutely beautiful day outside. It was warm and sunny so I went for a walk after I worked out
with my mom and sister. Days like these make quarantine seem a little more bearable.
I have a few goals that I want to accomplish with all my free time since classes have
ended and I can’t work anywhere. One of them is to go through my clothes and get rid of some
of them. However, I felt that it would be a waste of a beautiful day to be inside going through
clothes so I did not do that today. So I made a salad, and apples with peanut butter for lunch
and ate it outside. I then read my book outside for most of the day. Another one of my
quarantine goals is to read all of Jane Austen’s novels. I read Sense and Sensibility back in
January. I am now working on Pride and Prejudice, which I am enjoying immensely. With good
weather inevitably comes grilling so we grilled burgers for dinner, which were satisfying.
April 29, 2020
�Today was a rainy day, which sometimes I enjoy almost as much as a sunny day. I slept
in and began my morning routine of reading my Bible and then working out with my mom and
sister. By the end, we were so hot at the end that we stood out in the drizzling rain and it felt
amazing.
I finished my goal and finished Pride and Prejudice! It was absolutely amazing! I am very
much looking forward to reading the others, although I do not think they’ll be as good as Pride
and Prejudice.
I also finally started on my other goal of going through my clothes. Today I just worked
on going through my dresser. As I sorted through all of my clothes, I was finally able to catch up
on some of my podcast episodes. At school, I would listen to them in the bus on my way
downtown. However, since I have not done that for several weeks, I had not found a new time to
listen to them and had gotten behind. There is something so relaxing about and going through
organizing things.
My dad also told me today that our church was putting together a video of children
wishing their mom a Happy Mother’s Day, so my siblings and I spent some time making that. It
had to be done while my mom started making dinner because she would be guaranteed to be
distracted and we could film it without her noticing, hopefully.
May 1, 2020
I finally got to move out today!! It was such a relief to finally be able to get my things,
although there were some rules we had to follow such as wearing masks. My family decided to
make the trip to Grand Rapids as fun as possible, so we got Chick-fil-a for lunch on the way up
to school; it was amazing. I was the last person to move out of my apartment, so we got stuck
with most of the cleaning. My wonderful mom cleaned out the fridge where I had pried a
kombucha bottle that belonged to one of my roommates off the shelf. All in all, it took about two
hours to clean and pack up all my remaining stuff. It was quite strange to be back when the
building was so empty and hardly anyone was there. On the way back we got coffee from
Starbucks, again to make our trip out of the house fun.
Today was one of my best friends’ birthday and she only lived fifteen minutes away from
me. So after we got back and ate dinner, I decided to drive by her house and wish her a happy
birthday. We stood outside on her front lawn, several feet apart and got to talk for about 45
minutes. It was so nice to see her for the first time in what felt like forever. As much as I wish
that I could have celebrated her birthday like normal, I’m glad that I was able to stop by and chat
for a little bit.
�May 2, 2020
Today was my best friend’s bridal shower. Before the coronavirus, the shower was going
to be at the church with a lot of friends and family. That had to change, so everyone sent gifts to
her house and the shower was live-streamed on Facebook. Since I am her maid of honor, she
asked if I could be there. After talking with my family, I decided to go. I made sure to take the
necessary precautions; I wore my mask and kept my distance while washing my hands and
avoiding touching my face. I was so glad that I could support her during this time where so
many of her plans have had to change.
Once I got home, I found out that my cousins were going to stop by so that we could talk
outside while social distancing. That was a pleasant surprise! This past weekend I have seen
more people than I’ve seen for the past seven weeks combined! They stayed and talked for
about an hour and a half and we chatted about how everyone had been doing. To be quite
honest, I’m not sure how much more the general population will listen to social distancing rules.
It is getting to the point where we have done this for about two months without any idea about
when it will end. I know that I miss seeing people, as many others do. Additionally, the weather
is getting nicer which in my eyes only makes it easier to want to break the rules. Well, we’ll see
what happens. None of us can know the future except God.
May 4, 2020
Many of my days look the same now that classes have ended. I sleep in and then do
some combination of reading my Bible, working out, eating breakfast, and drinking coffee. I
thrive off routine and it doesn’t really bother me that most of my days look the same.
Today I had the inspiration to clean out my craft drawers that have been collecting junk
and art supplies since elementary school. It has been a task on my to-do list and when the
motivation to organize strikes, I have to act on it. It felt amazing to get rid of stuff I no longer
needed and that I had not used in years. I was also able to walk down memory lane a bit with
old projects and photos. I found remains of shrinky-dinks from my fifth grade mini society
project. There were still some sheets left, so I decided to keep it to do one day. You never know
what you might want to do during quarantine. Additionally, I found some things I didn't even
know I had such as the combination to a lock that I used for middle school swim and high school
P.E., which was lucky because my whole family had forgotten the combination.
It was a nice day so we ate dinner outside, as we have been doing these past few
weeks. Any chance to get out of the house, even if it’s just to be outside in our backyard, we
�take advantage of it. My dad suggested that we have our first bonfire of the year and we all
agreed. The tricky thing about a spontaneous bonfire is that we might not have all the necessary
items to make s’mores, and unfortunately, we were out of Hershey’s chocolate bars. This forced
us to get creative with Nutella and chocolate chips, which wasn’t bad but I think I’ll stick to
chocolate bars.
May 5, 2020
Again the day started out the same as yesterday: sleep in, read my Bible, work out, eat
breakfast, and drink coffee. I usually end up not actually getting ready until like 1pm due to the
fact that our workout didn’t start until close to noon because my sister likes to get some
homework done before we exercise.
My friend had texted me asking if I had any books she could borrow because the library
was closed and she was spending too much time watching Netflix. She has texted the right
person, as I love to read and have an endless amount of suggestions. I was only limited by the
lack of space in my house, causing many of my books to be digital on my Nook. To begin, I
suggested To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series because they are quick and entertaining
reads. So she stopped by with her finacé to pick up the books. We then kept our distance in my
front yard and got to talk for a little bit. At this point in the quarantine, many of us are longing for
actual face-to-face human interaction and relish any chance to talk while still being safe.
I then proceeded to watch Gilmore Girls as it was not that nice outside and it is a comfort
show for me. I try not to spend all of my time watching tv and being on my phone during this
time because I do not think it is that healthy to have that much screen time, even though that
would be easy to do. So when it’s nice I try to read outside and take walks or ride my bike.
However, sometimes I just want to watch Gilmore Girls and that’s okay.
As it is Cinco de Mayo today we decided to order Mexican food for dinner. We tried to
order from a local business, but they were extremely busy. So in the end we ordered Chipotle
which was delicious, even though it didn’t arrive until 7:30pm which is a late dinner for us.
May 6, 2020
My morning routine continues with the same items to start off my day. Today’s
differentiating items was a visit with my cousins. One my aunts said her boys were missing their
cousins, especially the girls in college, and wanted to see everyone. So the older cousins got
together in one of our backyards and talked while maintaining some distance. Again, it was
wonderful to actually talk and see people face-to-face, even if it wasn’t quite normal yet. This
�afternoon my mom went into work while we were with my cousins, so my dad had the whole
house to himself. This is an extremely rare occurrence during quarantine since it’s been the five
of us at home all the time.
After that, my siblings and I decided to get some iced coffee through the Dunkin’ Donuts
drive through. As I’ve mentioned before, I absolutely love afternoon coffee time and I savored
every sip of that iced coffee.
May 8, 2020
Today was a pretty relaxed day. I had my usual morning routine and the rest of the day
to do as I pleased. So I read as I typically do when I have free time. Before I read my next Jane
Austen novel, I wanted to break it up with some easier reads. Currently I was working on the
second book in a murder msytery series about a lady and her lady’s maid, think Downton
Abbey. And I spent most of the day doing that. Now that I’ve gotten used to being home, I’m
pretty comfortable with having time to relax and not have many responsibilities. I’m a bit of a
homebody, so although I miss being with my friends, I don’t feel like I’m going crazy staying
home.
It’s Friday so that means it’s pizza night. Tonight we started the Netflix series that most
people have started watching during quarantine, Outer Banks. In my mind, it’s THE show
everyone will associate with quarantine and this season of life, or at least people my age will
associate with this time. It’s geared towards teens/young adults so I was surprised when my dad
suggested it for us to watch. It’s a little overly-dramatic, but I was hooked and just enjoyed the
unrealistic adventure.
May 9, 2020
I had a bit of a shortened morning routine and didn’t work out this morning because I got
to work. My mom works at a small business in our town and sometimes her manager has me
come into work when things are busy and I’m home. They’ve been slammed with shipping, so I
got to go to work today. My mom and I were the only people in the store and we worked on
filling orders for curbside pick-up. The store sells olive oils and balsamic vinegars so I spent the
whole time filling bottles to complete people’s orders. It felt nice to be out of the house and busy
for the first time in a while. We made sure to follow the health guidelines and clean everything
we touched before we left. The Starbucks in our town opened back up for pick-ups orders, so
we got coffee to bring home for the whole family.
�Once we got back home, I found out that my nana had dropped some books off at our
house and sadly, we had just missed her. Then I was able to spend the rest of my afternoon
relaxing by drinking my coffee and reading. Overall, it was quite a nice day.
May 10, 2020
Today was Mother’s Day. My mom slept in while I brewed the coffee and then brought
her a cup with the card I had made for her. Then we watched church, which had a special video
where kids wished their mom a Happy Mother’s Day, as well as a baby dedication video that our
church usually does on Mother’s Day. The baby dedication is a declaration that the family is
deciding to raise their child to love and know Jesus, and that the church will come alongside
them in that process. After we watched church, my siblings and I made brunch for our mom. We
made waffles, bacon, and cut up some fruit. We also did the dishes and then proceeded to
make a mess again by making a lemon poppyseed bundt cake from her gluten-free cook book.
We also had a tea party for Mother’s Day. We made cucumber sandwiches again and
served the lemon poppyseed bundt cake. This tea party was a little less elaborate, but it was
still delicious and a fun way to celebrate my mom.
For dinner we ordered take-out from Noodles and Company to eat while we watched
James Bond per the request of my mom. I was glad we were able to celebrate my mom today
even though it looked a little different during this time of staying home.
�May 11, 2020
Today was back to the routine of coffee, Bible, breakfast, and then working out. I still felt
a little restless after so I took a quick walk around my neighborhood.
Once I got back and had showered, my mom reminded me that I still needed to do my
taxes. The due date for taxes had been extended because of everything that has happened with
coronavirus. I got my first “real” job at the library at Grand Valley’s health campus this past fall,
so this was the first time I had to do taxes. Previously, all my other jobs have been babysitting
so there’s never been a need to do taxes. It was supposed to be simple enough because I don’t
make enough money to support myself and therefore could use TurboTax for free. My mom sat
down with me to do them and all was going well until we got to city taxes. She had never had to
fill that out, so it was new territory and it caused a lot of strife. Needless to say, I now
understand why people hate doing their taxes. Although it is necessary, it sure is a pain.
May 12, 2020
My friend was back today to return the books she had borrowed and pick up some new
ones. This time she brought some cookies for me as a little thank you. I was really looking
forward to seeing her and talking again. I had been thinking of everything I wanted to remember
to tell her once we were together in-person. Crazy how you begin to appreciate things you took
for granted, like talking with someone in-person. We set up chairs six feet apart and talked for
about an hour under the sunshine. That’s something else I’ve come to appreciate more:
sunshine and good weather so I can leave my house.
After she left, I drove to Michael’s to pick up some supplies I had ordered. My
roommates and I decided to make each other gifts for when we move in this August. I saw this
really cute idea of making initial key chains out of clay on Pinterest. Then I saw that you could
make cute earrings out of clay, so I’ve decided to start a new hobby. Hence, the order at
Michael’s. I had almost everything I needed, but I had to order a couple things on Amazon
because they weren’t available at Michael’s. I can’t wait to start my new little project.
May 14, 2020
Today was a lazy day. It was raining and thundering outside so I pretty much laid around
and switched between watching Netflix and reading. I still read my Bible, but we didn't exercise
today. That’s fine though because life is all about balance. I started my next Jane Austen novel,
Mansfield Park and I think I will still like Pride and Prejudice the best.
�My brother wanted to make chocolate chip cookies so he did, however they turned out
smaller and puffier than usual. I kept asking him questions to figure what he did wrong because
he had used our usual recipe. Finally he admits that he used pure cane sugar. I was a little
confused so he showed me the bag he used. He put powdered sugar in instead of granulated
sugar. I couldn’t stop laughing because the two look nothing alike. Then I found out this was the
SECOND time he’s made that mistake. As a teenage boy, he just goes too quickly and doesn’t
pay enough attention to the ingredients he adds to the dough. I probably laughed for 15 minutes
about the whole thing.
That evening we finally utilised my recently rediscovered shrinky-dinks. We had decided
to make it a sibling activity so we all drew and colored some designs onto our sheets. Then we
baked them so they curled and then flattened out to our smaller designs. My favorite one that I
did was a little pig in a paper airplane; it's adorable.
May 16, 2020
Today my sister and I decided to go on a bike ride. We have a trail near our house so
that’s where we decided to go. It was a nice and pleasant excursion until we encountered the
goose. There were two geese with their babies near the path. I had stopped to wait for my sister
because she was a little bit behind. I started to move ahead and the goose hissed at me. I knew
geese could be mean so I said that I thought we should turn back. Then a jogger came by giving
the geese space and he was fine. My sister decided to follow suit, however the goose did not
like that at all. It threw its wings back and chased after her while it hissed. My sister was so
scared she threw down her bike and ran back to me. I had been terrified while watching it, but
couldn’t help laughing afterwards. The whole situation was funny and frightening. The geese
crossed the road and we were able to move ahead. It was quite the story to retell later.
After we got back, my mom said she was going to buy some flowers. My sister and I
wanted to join her so we ate a quick lunch and then headed out with our masks to buy some
flowers at an open market stand. The first place we went to had so many cars there that we
knew we wouldn’t be able to park. If there were that many cars, that meant there were probably
too many people for it to be ideal to shop. So we went back up the street to another one. This
one didn’t have the herbs and lavender my mom wanted, but we bought some flowers anyway.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
COVID-19_2020-05-16_ANON_031
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anonymous
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-05-16
Title
A name given to the resource
Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
Description
An account of the resource
Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c818b35502666e439a328d3a28762000.pdf
1a429014b51287b3d0fd6dd242a117e9
PDF Text
Text
Dear March, we were not prepared.
March 18: went to cousins house for dinner despite feeling uncertainty
March 19: spent the day alone, cooked a lot of the food in my kitchen. Florence Pugh inspired
me to cook and dance! Call your dad it's not that bad!
March 21: facetime with annabelle
March 25: still in the honeymoon stages, doing okay
March 26: family zoom
March 28: drinking a lot of coffee, mom working at greenhouse still (essential agriculture) dad
working from home, constantly walking up and down the steps to get more coffee. Distracted by
Dua Lipa's new album.
April 1:
April 2: morning yoga with annabelle and mom
April 3: worked at metron, took a long nap after
April 4: made more mango and tofu, watched ozarks, took food to brothers
April 5: call to friend interrupted by neighbors, panicking over computer complications, finally
finding comfort and inspiration on the couch
April 6: made to do list for the week, overwhelming
April 7: tried to do yoga while listening to class, tried to make breakfast while listening to class
April 8: walk with Emily, so many worms on the track. Bernie announces dropping presidential
bid.
April 11: 3.3 mile walk around gr, nice nice day
April 12: Easter, slow, clay earrings, painted computer case with no plan
Memorial weekend was warm and it seems that everyone forgot about the virus. It doesn't seem
real to many. Conspiracy theories flying through the air with the fireworks.
May 27: it's warm! It's rainy! Breathing outside helps me think about the future that will happen.
A couple weeks ago, around March 10, I remember a professor warning us about the
possibility of online school. She said, “it's not a matter of if, but a matter of when.” She was
spraying tables with Meyers cleaning spray, and saying we weren't going to pass around papers
anymore. I was a little shocked and a little mad that she jumped the gun and scared us,
doubting the possibility in my mind. Two days after, l am sitting in my apartment living room with
my roommate discussing the buzz of all the colleges cancelling classes for the rest of the
semester, just waiting for the email from Grand Valley.
The paranoia came in weird stages the next couple of days. One of my roommates
moved out the morning after we got the email from Grand Valley. My other roommate, Emily
and I spent a lot of weird moments together in the apartment over the weekend. Anxious
anticipation filled the moments we talked about how we would make money over the next
couple of weeks. This semester has been extremely overwhelming and I was barely surviving. It
was reliving in the moment seeing some of my responsibilities, being forcibly dropped. Emily
�who worked for the telephone outreach program no longer had employment there and was
considering going home to work at the deli. However this decision was not easy since she was
also immunocompromised. A few mornings later when I came downstairs, Emily looked a little
frazzled and quickly informed me that she would be going back to her parents’ house near
Detroit because she woke up with a sore throat. (one of the known symptoms of COVID-19). I
remember trying to seem calm and chill and said okay. As she packed up her stuff I sat in my
bed trying to start some of my homework. When I’m nervous, my head feels very hot, often
thinking I have a fever. I began to think what it would look like if I went to get tested. As the day
went on she no longer felt like she had a sore throat and admitted to a bit of paranoia as well,
but she still headed home at the request of her parents.
My parents live ten minutes away so I spent some time there and some time back at my
apartment.
Mornings are either the best or the worst. Waking up is difficult when no class is telling
me to be there. A good morning/ afternoon last week was spent sitting in the kitchen playing
songs for my mom, making coffee, and connecting with my brother who lives far away. In the
beginning I was determined to keep my class routine; watch the lectures at the right times and
work ahead. As the weeks have loomed on I’ve started to feel behind and overwhelmed again.
My self driven schedule fools me into thinking it's summer and I shouldn't have to spend every
night doing homework. My parents want to spend time with me but the nightly news and my
procrastination anxiety catching up pushes me away.
Social media keeps suggesting what I should do with all my extra time but I seem to use
up the hours so quickly. I then spend hours feeling guilty and anxious that I will look back on this
time with so much negatively wasted time, when I could have done a lot in it. I spend about 75%
of my time thinking this way and then I read an article, most fittingly titled, “Why You Should
Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure” and feel slightly better about all the
times I havent started my next great painting, clay earrings or even finished one book, or even
as the bar lowers: LEARNED A TIK TOK DANCE. However, the articles push me to think
positively, however crushing the uncertainty of the next couple of months might be. I have made
a few spotify playlists, my dog and I are closer than ever, and I have started mixing pineapple
and mango with tofu.
April, praying for better
The weird thing about all of this is that everyone is experiencing it at the same time. It's not a
heartbreak that I am going through that my friends and parents can counsel me through. We are
all trying to make up small, useful hopes to hold onto about our current situation. It could be
worse, people tell us. And it could. This isn't awful when I really think about it. It's so much
worse for other people. No one I know has tested positive for COVID-19. The nursing home that
I work at has no residents who have any symptoms.
I think the scariest part about the virus is its ability to hide.
Its ability to take up residence undetected.
�Impacting every host differently
alerting some of their presence only after 14 days have passed
After 14 days, having moved on to so many others.
I called in 3 times before I went to work. I had a cough, which is not unusual for me. I
feel feverish when I am extremely nervous about something, but the thermometer told me I was
okay. After talking on the phone with my boss for half an hour she said I should be okay to come
in.
We all have times when we feel awful, everyone is walking around others not knowing if it's their
sad time or their ok time. Right now we all collectively feel awful and there is inevitable doom
and we want answers but all we have is the hope of “flattening the curve.” But nobody knows
when things will go back to normal and if we will ever shake hands again.
Living in the Ozarks till this is all over
Humans of ny is the best page on ig: it makes everyone’s, sometimes awful stories- seem still
so beautiful and human.
�Looking through my notes app and found a random quote that says, “anytime we are in a desert
we find out what is truly in our hearts” We have to be comfortable with ourselves. This
quarantine is forcing us to spend copious amounts of time with ourselves. (edit May 27): You
don’t have to take your pandemic self as your real self though. You don't have to accept that
how you are dealing in this time is your true self. You are hopefully doing your best.
It feels like the time when Carsen and I got separated at a music festival we were volunteering
at and we all had to evacuate because there was massive flooding and it was going to ruin the
field and there was lightning??? Anyways, Hoizer and Jack Antonoff were somewhere near us,,,
paralleled to this celebrities are not immune to the virus
Can you tell me what's real?
Last night was the pink super moon! I ran outside at around 12:30 am to see and it was
beautiful, the rare, warm breeze made it especially eerie.
This morning when looking at pictures far superior to my own, I learned that it's not called a pink
super moon because the date (April 8) correlates with the starting bloom of a wildflower in parts
of Canada and the United States.
This blue chair reminds me of bernie.
�He dropped out of the presidential race today and it makes
me feel hopeless. What a time to say goodbye to
healthcare for all. A person who has ALWAYS fought for
the under dog and for the general good.
April 12
If you don’t think about it too hard, life is okay. We have adjusted. We find new things to fill our
time. We are adaptable and we are surviving.I wonder how these new found habits will affect us
in the future. I have done some things, made some things, and read some things. It still sucks, I
don’t like being told what to do; being told to stay home and feeling like my breathing is
constricted when I go to the store.
I watched Saturday Night Live this morning. It was a weird mess. But it's cool to see them still
trying to make it happen.
�These pictures are from my walk yesterday (April 11). SO refreshing I need to do this everyday.
I talked to my brother and sister in law today and she said her family friend died from
coronavirus. The closest ties I've had to a death caused by the virus.
The nightly news that my parents watch is filled with sad stories from nurses in Boston and New
York. Stories about moms saying they haven't hugged their children in weeks, or living in hotels
so that they don't expose their family to the germs they are exposed to. I work a few hours a
week at a nursing home with no cases still, wearing the mask is exhausting and hot. You are
breathing in your own air and I find the stress of it all always causes my throat to feel a little sore
after. I can’t imagine how these healthcare workers feel after 8-12 hour shifts.
I can’t imagine the celebrations that will take place when this is all over. My roommate got into
nursing school and celebrated her birthday since I’ve seen her last.
Maybe NYC:
How the city has changed from my window
From crowded streets, to now only sparse beats
Time passing nonetheless
All the happenings, happening inside
no longer under the sun, under street lights
From a city of life and flesh
To dry bone
People and parties and countries divided on what is my freedom, what is her freedom, how
should he protest the best, and will you act in a way that is better for your larger community?
What does that look like?
�Suddenly everyone is forced to take an opinion on how their governor is handling the
shutdowns.
Everyone must care about politics now because it now directly affects them. Whereas before,
many of us could say, “I'm not into politics.” We had the privilege of not caring about the policies
because we knew we wouldn't be the ones under the knee of police brutality.
May 27, 2020
I have been absent from this journaling. But i've thought about it often- the activation energy in
journaling is just too much sometimes. Whenever I get over the, more realistically, small hump
of opening the doc. I have no regrets.
I think I have a hard time processing shocking things in the moment. Even still- this whole thing
doesn't seem real. And yet I am amazed at the resiliency of people. Then again I am seeing a
small representation of people still doing and progressing. The ones struggling with mental
illness are not the ones being highlighted and having their voice being heard.
�About a month ago we found out my mom’s cousin and her husband tested positive for Covid19. They were fine, in their homes with manageable symptoms. Last week we found out that
during this recovery she had a stroke- related to Covid. Her husband was not allowed in the
hospital as she lay in a bed in the ICU for a few days and later on a Covid floor.
It was a sobering reminder that no one is completely immune. They are in their mid 40s, pretty
healthy.
People provide blanket statements of hope- for the most part the young and healthy have not
been too greatly impacted by the virus.
Neighbors have gotten close, even strangers, forgetting about the virus that just a few months
ago had me washing my hands at the top of the hour, (or more).
It is no less dangerous than then. But- now it doesn't seem real.
�Today, especially, the thought of spreading the virus is absent when fires are in the streets of
where we stood a few hours ago. When “I can’t breathe” is not in reference to the rampant virus
but the last plea to a police officer’s knee.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
COVID-19_2020-05-30_ANON_032
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anonymous
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-05-30
Title
A name given to the resource
Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
Description
An account of the resource
Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ce32c46471d74e7cca31e54b0498e5e7.pdf
446391883367ec2568b97138688c1b83
PDF Text
Text
1
Monday, March 30, 2020
We’ve just begun week three of having all of our classes online and my dominant thought
today is, Monday’s are even harder now than they already were! I spent the weekend lazing
around home where I live with my mom, dad, and teenage sister. Because Governor Gretchen
Whitmer passed a stay-at-home order last week, none of us had anywhere to be. We watched the
news, sat around, chatted a bit, watched some movies, watched more of the news. I felt like I was
in an alternate dimension. Waking up this morning and realizing that I needed to catch up on
class work, homework, and due dates made me feel almost confused. How can I do school when
I suddenly have no structure? How can I think about learning French when the entire world is
closed down and the study abroad trip I had planned for this summer is cancelled? How can I
think about practicing clarinet - my major - when my recital is cancelled anyway?
I entered into this stay at home period full of optimism, thinking it would be similar to
when I lived at home in high school. My older brother has moved out of our family home
already, so I set up his old bedroom as my own school/music practice room and prepared to go to
“class” each day. But wow, it has not been that simple. Mainly because of the fact that it feels
like the world is breaking down. None of us alive today have ever seen anything like this
coronavirus epidemic. This means that as a young adult, I do not have the luxury of asking my
elders, what did you do when you went through this? They never did. I can’t really look to the
adults in my life for comfort because I can see through their masks of calm to the anxiety many
of them feel underneath.
My mother is a Registered Nurse, currently working at Blodgett Hospital in Grand
Rapids. She has been a nurse ever since she graduated from college, and I’ve always looked up
to her for her compassion for others, which I can almost describe as fierce. My mother will
protect you, you have no choice in the matter, that’s what it feels like! I’ve watched her come
home from her 14-15 hour long shifts at the hospital, which are technically only supposed to be
12 hours long, exhausted and heart-sore. She is the strongest woman I’ve ever known and she
has never been afraid of anything. But now, when she comes home from work I see not only
exhaustion and stress, but also fear. Back at the beginning of this when many were still
convinced that the whole thing would blow over and we would all be fine, my mom was hearing
the truth from other hospitals who were already facing a battle against coronavirus. She sat my
sister and I down and explained that she didn’t want us visiting with anyone (this was before the
governor mandated the same order). She said, “most importantly, I don’t want either of you two
or Dad getting sick. I also don’t really want to be sick myself, but even more important than that,
I need to be able to help at work. If I get sick I can’t help them fight this at work.” I’m sure those
weren’t her exact words, but that was the gist, and even though I was sad that I would literally
have to cancel the plans I had made for the following day, I decided then that I would stand with
her and support her in any way she needed.
Since then I’ve seen many newscasts honoring healthcare workers and pointing out the
fact that without them, we wouldn’t have a chance against this virus. They’ve equated healthcare
�2
workers to soldiers, saying that they are our first line of defense for this invisible enemy. People
are finally seeing how hard they work, how ridiculously stressful their jobs are. It is easy to take
these things for granted when the world is not in chaos. This virus has pulled many things into
the light for humanity as a whole, and I hope we take the chance to learn from it and grow in a
way we never have before.
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Yesterday I felt like there were a million thoughts racing through my head, about politics,
about my friends, about my schoolwork and my family. Today, I swung in the opposite direction
and had a hard time focusing on anything at all. I told my friends and my boyfriend that I was
taking a break from technology today, because I felt too tired and drained to talk to anyone. I am
an extrovert, so I get my energy from interacting with other people. Ironically, interacting with
people online has the opposite effect. I don’t like holding seven different conversations, one
through text, a few through facebook messenger, and a handful through snapchat. This is what
I’ve been doing since I’ve been stuck at home and the incessant sound of my phone buzzing is
driving me absolutely insane. I want to see my friends and family members with my own eyes,
and hear their voices and be able to hug them! That is where I get my energy from! I’ve
definitely been making good use of the many different video chatting apps such as facetime,
google duo, google hangouts, and zoom, and those are wonderful ways to stay in touch but I am
craving an opportunity to sit down across from my best friend at a coffee shop and just talk about
anything. Or cuddle with my boyfriend on the couch watching a movie. I find myself missing my
grandparents the most because neither of them are tech-savvy enough to use video chat.
In the past, visiting my grandparents has served as a way for me to escape reality. I have
my paternal grandfather, who lives five minutes from me in a tiny house that’s full of stories, and
my maternal grandmother who lives in an old country house which is filled to the brim with her
quirky, artsy personality. I need to call them more! Both of them have a way of making me feel
like life is bigger than me and my problems. Now more than ever before I would love to drive
out to my grandma’s house, away from my town, away from my school and work, and just
breathe in the day with her. But both of my grandparents are in the “high risk” category of
people during this coronavirus disaster. I cannot visit them, in case I’ve picked up the virus at
some point. They also both have health conditions that put them in the very high risk category, so
if they were to catch this virus, they would be in a massive amount of danger. I have a difficult
time considering the fact that before all of this is over, I could be missing members of my family.
As of right now, I do not know a single person who has the virus. I’ve obviously heard about
tons of people getting it, but there is no one I know personally who is sick. I don’t consider
myself to be very religious, but I pray to God that it stays that way.
�3
Thursday, April 2, 2020
We just got the order from the Governor today that the rest of the school year for grades
k-12 if officially cancelled. My younger sister Elise is currently a high school senior, so I feel
like she got a pretty bad deal out of this. This was her final year with the people that she has been
going to school with for her entire life. School was initially cancelled for them with little to no
warning in mid-March so there was never time to say goodbye to anybody. She doesn’t get to
walk for graduation unless they are able to pull something together at the beginning of the fall
semester but it doesn’t seem like that would work very well because most of the students, Elise
included, will be starting college at that time. She also doesn’t get to have a graduation party
which I personally find to be the most unfortunate part. My experience at mine and all my
friends’ graduation parties was that it was a time for everyone to honor the graduate’s hard work
and accomplishments. I felt so special at my party in 2016. My Dad put together a few photo
boards documenting my life, my Grandma decorated a beautiful box for me to put cards in, and
my Mom made sure that I had vases of colorful flowers on the tables, and other music-themed
decorations. Elise is much more introverted than me so I suspect she isn’t as heartbroken about
missing out on this as we might expect her to be, but still, I wish she could have that.
My only other sibling is my older brother, Drew. He lives with his fiancé Shannon and
their two cats, and they have always had to scrape by with an insufficient amount of money.
Because of the coronavirus, both of them have gotten laid off from their jobs. This has happened
to an immense number of Americans which has caused the system they need to use to apply for
unemployment to crash. With absolutely no income and no unemployment benefits as of yet,
they are in an incredibly tight spot. Today my mom put together a box full of food for them to
take back to the house they rent. To prevent spreading any germs back and forth, she put the box
outside for them to pick up and though we went out on the porch to say hello, we kept our
distance from them, like we’re supposed to!
I actually cheated today with the social distancing… I absolutely take it seriously and
have not seen any of my friends in person since this all started. But today I desperately wanted to
see my best friend. Since it was the first sunny day we’ve had in nearly a week, she and I meet
up at some trails to walk together and chat. We truly did stay at least six feet apart the entire time
and we didn’t hug or anything, but it was wonderful to be able to see and talk to someone
standing in front of me! Though it was extremely refreshing, it almost made me feel more lonely
when I got back home. Since my Dad is now working from home at a makeshift desk he set up in
the middle of our home, we find ourselves having to be quiet all day during the week. When my
Mom is off work she keeps busy with chores and tasks around the house, and my extremely
introverted sister likes to stay in her bedroom and read, write, or draw. That leaves me to attempt
to entertain myself so I feel very acutely the lack of socialization.
My boyfriend wanted to drop off a mystery gift to me today, so I baked some chocolate
chip pumpkin bread to trade with him, and I was so excited! But in the middle of the day I got a
voicemail from him saying that he had had a sore throat for the past couple days, and although he
was almost certain it was only seasonal allergies, he didn’t want to risk passing anything on to
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me or my family and therefore wouldn’t be coming. My mom expressed how much she
appreciated his caution, but although I appreciate it too, I was disappointed to not have even that
small bit of connection with him.
The world is becoming a strange new place now. Last week I called my doctor’s office to
try and reschedule an appointment that I had coming up. The nurse who answered the phone
asked me to wait just a moment while she checked the calendar for later in the summer. A few
seconds later I heard her whispering to herself, saying something like “no I didn’t mean to do
that, go back,” speaking to her computer. I found this a little comical but tried to stop myself
from laughing until I was saved the trouble by her own laugh and her apology as she said “things
have been pretty crazy around here lately.” In that moment, though she and I were sharing a
laugh together, I felt bad for her too thinking about how truly hectic it probably was at that
doctor’s office. Another similar instance happened when I called Grand Valley student accounts
to ask a question. A woman picked up and asked how she could help me but as I started to ask
my question, I heard a baby cry loudly in the background. I paused and could tell the woman was
trying to shush the baby and respond to my question at the same time. Unlike the nurse, this
woman didn’t sound ready to laugh. She sounded stressed and tired. She quickly answered my
question and I said thank you and let her go as quickly as I could, then took a moment to feel
impressed that this woman was still able to give me a concise answer while taking care of a baby
at her home.
On a lighter note, it’s fun to watch the news now and notice all the different locations
news anchors are suddenly reporting from. Many that I’ve seen have equipment set up in their
homes and conduct business as usual from a distance. One news anchor was in his “man cave,”
another in her living room with the dog laying on the floor in the background. The entire network
of people who deliver the news to us on TV is scattered, yet they still manage to do their jobs.
They have also made a habit of reporting light and happy stories about how people are stepping
up to help in the effort to overcome the coronavirus, or about the different ways that those stuck
at home have found to entertain themselves, from having puzzle tournaments, to writing funny
songs, to learning how to draw.
I’ve definitely noticed among the people in my own life that creativity is making a
comeback. My grandma is a painter who hadn’t been painting the last several months, yet when I
talked with her on the phone a couple weeks ago, she told me about how she was painting lots of
things and exploring new styles and subjects that she had never done before. My sister pulled out
a massive piece of paper that she had been saving and decided to start meticulously drawing a
horse on it. My mother, who used to write beautiful poetry and still does occasionally, decided to
start writing down some of her thoughts and experiences similarly to how I am doing right now.
Our neighborhood has also come up with a way for kids to still have a fun easter egg hunt this
year despite not being able to gather with a church community or family like they may have done
in the past. We all received notes in our mailboxes detailing a neighborhood easter egg hunt.
Kids will walk up and down the streets with their parents looking for participating houses. The
houses that decide to participate hang strings of colored plastic eggs from their trees, mailboxes,
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or eaves so that they are visible to kids walking along the street. The kids then count the eggs and
try to find as many as possible. It sounds like a wonderful way to get our little community
together without actually being together!
Friday, April 3, 2020
I thought this would be an interesting additive. I was scrolling through Facebook and
discovered a post that people have begun to copy and share so that it will appear in their
memories in the future:
Just so I NEVER forget….. April 2, 2020
●
Gas price a mile from home was $1.40
●
School cancelled - yes cancelled (students left March 12 and wouldn’t
return)
●
Self-distancing measures on the rise
●
Tape on the floors at grocery stores and others to help distance shoppers (6
ft) from each other
●
Limited number of people inside stores, therefore, lineups outside the store
doors
●
Non-essential stores and businesses mandated closed
●
Parks, trails, entire cities locked up
●
Entire sports seasons cancelled
●
Concerts, tours, festivals, entertainment events - cancelled
●
Weddings, family celebrations, holiday gatherings - cancelled
●
No masses, churches are closed
●
No gatherings of 50 or more, then 20 or more, now no gatherings of 5 or
more
●
Don’t socialize with anyone outside of your home
●
Children’s outdoor play parks are closed
●
We are to distance from each other
●
Shortage of masks, gowns, gloves for our front-line workers
●
Shortage of ventilators for the critically ill
●
Panic-buying sets in and we have no toilet paper, no disinfecting supplies,
no paper towel, no laundry soap, no hand sanitizer
●
Shelves are bare
●
Manufacturers, distilleries and other businesses switch their lines to help
make visors, masks, hand sanitizer and PPE
●
Government closes the border to all non-essential travel
●
Fines are established for breaking the rules
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●
Stadiums adn recreation facilities open up for the overflow of Covid-19
patients
●
Press conferences daily from the President
●
Daily updates on new cases, recoveries, and deaths
●
Government incentives to stay home
●
Barely anyone on the roads
●
People wearign masks and gloves outside
●
Essential service workers are terrified to go to work
●
Medical field workers are afraid to go home to their families
This is the Novel Coronavirus (Covid-10)
Pandemic, declared March 11th, 2020
Why, you ask, do I write this status?
One day it will show up in my memory feed, and it will be a yearly reminder that
life is precious and not to take the things we dearly love for granted.
We have so much!
Be thankful. Be grateful.
Be kind to each other - love one another - support everyone.
We are all one! <3
Copy and share.
Whoever first created this is someone who realizes how important it will be to remember
this time in the future when it is finally over. My generation has always heard about the horrors
of 9/11, which happened when we were too young to remember. Yet we still can feel the terror
and grief of those who lived it. Our children will learn about the Covid-19 pandemic, and
hopefully they will be able to draw hope from however we end up overcoming it.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Yesterday our stay at home order was extended by Governor Whitmer to the end of April.
We have already been stuck at home for weeks and looking at several more like this is a bleak
thought. I have been staying busy with school but school becomes extremely tedious and
suffocating when the experience is not shared with friends and other sources of support.
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Unsurprisingly, the weather day to day seems to have the biggest effect on my moods - it’s the
only thing that ever changes. Right now it is cold and cloudy and still outside and days like this
make me feel the most trapped and the least in control of my life. Though I agree with the steps
that have been taken to slow the spread of the virus, I hate having to abide by all the new rules.
We must stay in our homes at all times. The only time it is acceptable to leave is when you must
make necessary trips to buy food or supplies, go to the bank, etc., or when you walk your dog. I
recently read somewhere that the new rule is that you are only allowed to take your dog for one
walk a day, and that counts as your excursion for exercise for the day. Meaning that we are not
even supposed to walk through our own neighborhoods more than once a day. Grocery stores
and any other businesses that are allowed to remain open must now limit the number of people
who are inside the building at the same time to 4 customers for every 1000 sq. feet of floor
space.
I will be interested to see what humanity actually learns from this experience. I read
something somewhere that a person wrote saying, our grandfathers were asked to go fight in
wars and we’re being asked to stay home and watch TV, what’s the big deal? Aside from being
insensitive, this comment is missing an important factor that makes this current “war” different
from any we’ve fought in recent memory. This is that we are not allowed to comfort each other,
or do anything really. Something terrifying has hit and it’s not just our country, it’s every country
around the world. There’s nowhere to go to escape this. Now when we need hugs and hand holds
more than ever, not only are we not allowed to, but doing so would be to risk the safety of those
we love. Now when we need distraction more than ever - and have in fact been used to
distraction for most of our adult lives - we are instead forced to sit home with our thoughts and
brood. There is much good coming out of this as people adapt and grow to be able to help others,
yet this new life also brings the damaged parts of our society into stark relief.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Today I wanted to take a moment to focus on our president, Donald Trump. I’ve been avoiding
talking about him because my writing will become one long rant if I do. But I found an article
that I wanted to add here which describes many of the reasons why I think he is the worst
possible person to be leading our country through this crisis. It is called “This Is Trump’s Fault”
(the main reason it caught my eye), and cites actions that he has taken during his presidency to
lead us straight into this fire.
● Quotes Trump on March 13 saying “I don’t take responsibility at all”
● Previously promised that casualties could be held near zero - has since changed his stance
to the opinion that if we keep the death toll under 200,000 people, then apparently we’ve
done a wonderful job.
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● The federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018, which caused a loss of
stockpiled respirators to breakage
● Failure to store sufficient protective medical gear
● States are competing against each other for access to the limited equipment available to
combat the infection
● Spent nearly 10 weeks after discovering the coronavirus insisting that it was as harmless
as the flu
● Failure to close borders early
● Constant (CONSTANT) lying about the actual facts of the case, which his medical
advisors then have to correct him on
● Many key government jobs were empty or filled by unqualified people
● Trump’s ignorant son-in-law inserted as commander in chief of national medical supply
chain.
The coronavirus began in China in late December, 2019. The Trump administration was
officially notified of the outbreak on January 3rd, 2020. The United State’s first confirmed
diagnosis of coronavirus appeared in mid-January. The first person known to have died from the
disease lost their fight on February 29, 2020. By March 20, New York City (our epicenter) had
confirmed 5,600 cases. Only after this, on March 21, did the government begin marshaling a
national supply chain to combat the threat. Between this date and January 3, Trump and his
government did nothing except insist that the virus was not a threat. Wishful thinking. What
disgusts me the most about Donald Trump is not his incompetence, but rather his compulsive
lying which cause confusion and opposition at a time when the people of the United States
should be working together, and also his lack of empathy or urgency as he decides that 200,000
deaths would be a small price to pay. Horrifying, disappointing, disgusting.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
I have now been home from school for over a month. My Dad has been working from home for
nearly the entire time so that I have to try and be quiet as much as possible during the day so that
he can focus. I don’t have any problem with this that is aimed at him, but I’ve started to feel that
there is so much pent up energy in me that I need to run and scream and jump and dance and go
wild, but there is no outlet for me to do those things because I am never alone. I cannot say I
would rather be alone during this period of self-quarantine (I’m very grateful for my family and
my house!) but I desperately miss feeling free. I miss being able to visit friends and family
spontaneously, and I miss that feeling of elation I would sometimes get when I realized I was the
only one home. I would love to open the windows, blast some music, and sing and dance like a
fool until I’m too tired, but all I can do is sit quietly and work on school. Tomorrow it will be
exactly a month since I’ve been able to hug my boyfriend, and longer than that since I’ve been
able to hug any of my friends. I’ve been staying in touch with all my friends and my wonderful
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grandparents, but there is hardly anything for us to talk about when our days consist of
absolutely nothing! I haven’t wanted to write like this because it sounds so negative and
pessimistic, but today I’m really struggling.
I’ve been reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies and TV shows in my free
time. They offer an escape from real life, and a chance for me to feel things that I wouldn’t
otherwise have any reason to feel. In the past I’ve gravitated more toward light comedies when
choosing movies or TV shows to watch, but lately I’ve gone more for dramas or mysteries things that make me feel and think. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t take so many adventures
through books and movies though, because every time I come back to reality, I feel a little more
caged in.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
All I have been able to think about - despite trying hard not to - is the idiocy of President
Donald Trump. He goes back and forth and contradicts himself daily, causing confusion and at
this point anger and frustration. He won’t stop trying to blame literally anyone else for his
failures, and especially when he tries to go up against state governors like New York’s Anthony
Cuomo, it becomes evident that despite being the president, he somehow doesn’t have a solid
grasp on the US constitution. In the last several weeks, I have heard Donald Trump go from
literally claiming that he has “total control” over the states and whether or not they close to fight
the virus, to telling governors “you are going to call your own shots” (which they had the right to
do in the first place, based on the conduct laid out in the constitution), to then tweeting (how
ludicrous is that in the first place) “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” and
“LIBERATE MINNESOTA.” In one of these tweets he added that citizens should rise up against
their governors to fight for their second amendment rights which are “under siege”. First of all,
the 2nd amendment is the right to bear arms. Does this mean that Trump was implying citizens
should use weapons in their protests?? I cannot even begin to understand how someone who is
the face of our nation can get away with saying things like this, and over social media of all
things. What is more, he has backed states that have decided to reopen AND attempted to take
credit for their reopening by claiming again that he has power over that.
Trump’s actions are so random and nonsensical, that no one can keep track of them. I
read multiple articles on this man every day and each time I learn something brand new. Further,
each new thing I learn contradicts some other thing he did recently. I am now reading an article
discussing Trump’s insane actions having to do with the tweets mentioned above. He recently
announced a set of guidelines that states should follow before beginning to loosen restrictions in
order to prevent any resurgence of the coronavirus. None of the three states that he openly
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addressed in his tweets met the requirements which HE HIMSELF LAID OUT to be ready to
reopen. This event is exemplary of the kind of things Trump does on a daily basis which make
little to no sense, and only serve to turn citizens against each other. An interesting thing to note
about this is that the three states Trump targeted with his tweets are led by Democratic governors
who are apparently politically competitive with Trump. In other words, they stand a chance at
beating him in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
I am sad to say that this past week in Michigan, conservatives protested at the state
capital in Lansing, gathering together in a large group to claim that Governor Gretchen Whitmer
is taking away our rights as citizens of the United States. They complain that she is taking away
our freedom by putting a stay-at-home order in place, and that we must all come together to fight
her and get her out of office. I truly do not understand how it is possible that people can be so
incredibly STUPID. Gretchen Whitmer is doing a fine job in office by taking action to prevent
the spread of the virus. She listens carefully to what the top medical experts of the country say
should be done, she consults with other governors, she consults with specialists at some of the
top universities in the country to make her decisions. To make the claim not only that people’s
rights are being taken away, but that it is the fault of Gretchen Whitmer is utter BULLSHIT.
They gather to fight for the right to continue life as normal at a time when a horrific virus has
rendered the ENTIRE WORLD helpless to stop its spread. Except that according to the smart
people who actually know what they’re talking about, there is one thing we can do to help, and
that is to social distance. These utter imbeciles have failed to grasp this concept. Not only does
their meeting alone potentially increase the spread of coronavirus, but they are protesting for
something that would likely kill them. It is as if they are begging to be poisoned. But somehow
they do not see this. These people follow the direction of President Donald Trump, who
throughout his life and presidency has openly incited violence, mocked minority groups,
disrespected women, and NEVER taken responsibility for any of his idiodic choices. They claim
they like Trump because he is open and honest about his actions but it seems that they’ve failed
to notice the countless times he has blatantly contradicted his own words. By countless, I do
mean countless. It has happened so many times that we all expect it now.
In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Trump’s greatest care right now is not in
fact the prevention of lives being lost to the coronavirus, but rather his own chances of reelection
in 2020. If I were speaking out loud right now I would be screaming from frustration. I am
unable to think clearly because of the frustration I have with Donald Trump. He is truly the worst
thing to happen to our country. He is going to cause more deaths in a variety of ways, for
instance by pushing to reopen too soon and thus causing a resurgence, or by encouraging violent
uprisings with his reference to the 2nd amendment (the right to bear arms!).
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
I haven’t written for quite a while for two reasons. First, there are really no words for what is
happening right now in our country. It is carnage. Second, for the sake of my mental health, I’ve
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been trying to avoid reading more than an article in a day. Some days I’ve avoided any news of
the outside world altogether. Days like that almost feel like a dream. It is difficult to stomach the
state of our country right now. The coronavirus has brought all our dysfunction into the light.
Donald Trump leads the charge for those who want the right to do whatever they want even if it
means hurting others. He gives them enough validation that they feel justified in maiming,
killing, or otherwise harassing those who disagree with them. These people are wildly out of
control and they are so loud. I think that a majority of Americans are good people who want
peace and positive change, but none of those people seem to be doing anything. I imagine that
like me, these people must be too overwhelmed or disheartened to get involved in politics right
now. But therein lies the problem. The unstable, radical people who worship Donald Trump have
decided that they want to be involved in the running of our country. Trump gave them a leg-up
and they have taken their opportunity and no one is stopping them.
On what planet is it acceptable for unstable, aggressive men to be allowed to parade
around and through the capitol building with massive guns? Apparently ours. The bit that really
makes my blood boil is that if these were people of color “protesting” in this way, they would be
shot dead by law enforcement. Here we see racism at play - white supremacy, entitlement, and a
total disregard for the safety of others. These people have always existed, have always held their
poisoned beliefs, but Donald Trump has given them total permission to act in exactly the
destructive, corrupt way they’ve always wanted to act. And the good people do nothing because
they fear for their lives. If we take a moment to reflect on why people stormed the capitol with
guns, we find further corruption, further ignorance and entitlement. These people want haircuts.
These people demand haircuts, despite the risks that would accompany a rapid reopening of the
economy. They either don’t believe that the coronavirus is anything more than a bad strain of flu
(despite the fact that it shut down literally the entire world), or they believe that “saving the
economy” is more important than saving lives.
These people have literally compared our governor (who is doing an incredible job) to
Adolf Hitler. By doing so, they imply that their situations are similar to what Jews faced during
the Holocaust. This is beyond disgusting. Jews were forced from their homes and dragged to
concentration camps where they were imprisoned in total squalor, their humanity stripped away.
These people today are literally being asked to simply stay at home. Holocaust victims were
killed without a thought if they were suspected of rebellion, if they were seen to be disrespectful,
or for any reason a Nazi soldier came up with, and there was no justice for them. These people
today are allowed to angrily march on the state capitol with massive guns, threatening violence if
they can’t have what they want. Law enforcement apparently tolerates it when these people
scream in their faces, despite the prominent risk of them spreading potentially deadly germs.
Their situation is absolutely nothing like the Holocaust and Gretchen Whitmer is nothing like
Adolf Hilter. In fact, ironically, expert historians as well as psychologists have likened Trump to
Hitler a number of times. And just like with Hitler and his Nazis, Trump’s followers are utterly
blind to the chaos and destruction he continues to cause.
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Perhaps at this point it is fair to say though that our country was already in shambles
before Trump came along. We were a forest of dying trees when he came along and dropped a
match. I can’t continue to talk about all these things for very long or I begin to feel absolutely
hopeless. But here is a bit of a list of the biggest problems that I see with our country.
● Absurd wealth gap - A vast majority of Americans are essentially poor while most of the
country’s wealth is held in the hands of just a few people.
● Capitalist culture - People must work until they literally can’t anymore. Sick days are
barely tolerated, mental health days aren’t even a thing. Pregnant moms often must keep
working up until they deliver their child and get only a brief chunk of time for maternity
leave. There is no paternity leave. All employees are expendable.
● Costs of education - Absolutely no one coming out of high school could possibly afford
to attend college without substantial help from parents, scholarships and grants, loans, or
other sources. Most full-time students I know have at least one job (I myself have two),
which they will put directly back into their education come tuition-payment time. How
can we be full-time, successful students while working copious hours at minimum wage
jobs which barely earn us enough to live?
● Blind Racism - This needs no explanation, except the addendum that when slavery
existed in the United States there was blatant, undisguised racism, and now though our
culture still drips with the same toxicity, people have convinced themselves that it is no
longer there.
● Profound Ignorance - I don’t know how else to say this…. People are just extremely
dumb. I mean this very seriously, I am baffled on a daily basis by the alarming levels of
stupidity I see from people. It is as if as a race we are losing the ability to think critically.
People are walking through life blind and deaf to half of it. I can’t understand this and it
is truly the most alarming thing to me because I think it is probably at the heart of many
of our other issues. Because it’s not simply that people disagree on a topic, but rather that
some of them literally cannot seem to see the opposition. The conclusions these people
come to about the world and how it is or should be run are simply bizarre. It’s like
they’ve read only every other chapter of a book and have pieced together a new reality
for themselves. It is entirely baffling.
To return to a positive note, the environment is thriving without humans mucking it up on a daily
basis. I’ve been going outside for fresh air and sunshine nearly every day. I sit in my backyard
and pet my cat, or I walk through this rolling green field that is enclosed by trees near my house.
I play piano every day and for the first time in a while have started learning a new piece,
Debussy’s Clair de Lune. I ordered a bullet journal starter-kit so I could explore this as a new
hobby. It came with 10 fine-tip pens, 20 stencil sheets, 9 rolls of decorative tapes, and a bullet
journal, and I absolutely love it. There is something extremely therapeutic about designing and
creating a page here and there. I’ve also been doing yoga frequently, using the youtube channel
called “yoga with adriene,” which has suddenly become extremely popular as more people stuck
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in quarantine discover her! I’ve been doing her videos for 3 and a half years and I am excited
that so many people are now jumping on board. Adriene Mishler is such a pure and authentic
person, and at the moment she symbolizes to me all that is good about humanity. As a race, we
need Adriene Mishler. I just hope her increasing popularity won’t ruin her life, like it seems to
do with so many celebrities. Somehow though I have utter faith that she will never let it get to
her.
I cleaned out my childhood bedroom over the last couple weeks and rearranged it so that
it better fits the person I am now. It makes me feel like I am being officially recognized as
someone new. I am reading for the second time Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to
Your Life’s Purpose, hoping it can help bring me clarity and peace during this time when so
much feels so wrong. In this book, Tolle discusses the existence of the ego, which left unchecked
can entirely take over a person so that they are ruled completely by compulsive emotion rather
than logical thought… Highly relevant today. I have only been growing closer with my family,
even though I was worried that the opposite would happen after we’d all been stuck together for
so long. In these times, it is a relief and a blessing to know that I can rely on my parents,
grandparents, older brother, and younger sister to become even more supportive, even more
understanding, and even more compassionate towards their loved ones than ever before.
I have been calling both my grandpa and grandma weekly, and also sent them each a
letter with some questions in them. I asked them both what they would buy if they suddenly
became billionaires. Funnily enough, they both wanted their own version of a cottage on a lake
where they could sit and feel peaceful. I asked my grandma what she would ask or say to her
parents if she was able to but have yet to get an answer from her! I asked my grandpa what he is
most proud of in his life and he said without hesitation that he is most proud of having met his
wife (who passed away when I was seven), having two children, six grandchildren, and one great
grandchild. He told me family is the most important thing and I believed him. I am closer to him
than I’ve ever been and am so thankful for him every day.
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Governor Whitmer has gradually begun to reopen Michigan, so that now we are allowed
to have gatherings of ten people or less. The mother of one of my long-time high school friends
set up a surprise party for her last night and invited myself and four other girls from high school.
This family who threw the party (I’ll call them the Smith family!) all had Covid-19 within the
last month. They are over it at this point thankfully, but two of the girls didn’t come to the
surprise party, one because she herself didn’t feel comfortable, and the other because her parents
didn’t feel comfortable with her going. So the three of us who were okay with meeting up at the
Smith’s house made sure to keep our distance from one another, sitting outside and only
touching our own things, not making contact with each other. We knew that most likely none of
us have been exposed to the virus, but all of us decided to err on the side of caution, considering
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how many deaths there have been. [Just counting deaths for a moment, there have been 65
reported in my county alone, 5,158 in the state of Michigan, 97, 414 in the United States, and
over 341,000 worldwide.] But the Smith family have always had their own ideas about things.
Mr. Smith is a loyal Trump supporter, and therefore believes the severity of the Coronavirus is a
sham. He believes that the numbers are only as high as they are because they are being falsely
reported. He believes that things like wearing masks, and social distancing, and wiping things
down with antibacterial wipes is unnecessary, and in this case, stupid. He said so himself to us
last night. We jokingly took a picture of all of us with our arms out, standing apart from each
other to show that we were social distancing, and Mr. Smith laughed and told us that in a few
years we would all look back at that picture and realize how stupid we were being.
We all looked at him with blank expressions and his daughter said, no I don’t think we’ll
think it was stupid, before quickly changing the subject. I’ve known this family for over half my
life and he is a good man. He is very religious and he is kind and generous, yet he firmly
supports Donald Trump, who in my eyes represents everything wrong with our country. The
Smith family are also anti-vaxxers, because they believe in the holistic healing process and
natural medicine. I don’t know exactly what their arguments are against vaccines, but they are
totally convinced that they are right and the rest of the world is wrong. They are so calmly
confident in their convictions that vaccines are terrible and no one should get them. I have not
ever been able to understand this point of view. The daughter, who has been my friend for years,
blindly follows her parents when it comes to this, though she herself is not even remotely
medically trained. At her surprise party last night, we had one of the girls who had stayed home
on the phone. This girl was just getting over being sick, and we teased her for being sick much
more often than the rest of us. She then laughed and mentioned a time when she got sick right
after getting her flu shot. The Smith daughter heard this and immediately shot me a look as if this
one instance was irrevocable proof that vaccines are bad. It could have been simply a facepalm
moment, but instead I was furious. I was so angry at their entire family for having the audacity to
call our caution stupid, to believe things without even understanding the science behind it, to
discount all the evidence collected by scientists all over the world which shows undeniably that
vaccines have helped keep extremely deadly diseases at bay.
I think their reasoning is that we need to give our bodies the chance to build up immunity
to these illnesses. But what about the thousands and thousands of human beings whose bodies
are immunocompromised for one reason or another? What about the huge demographic of
elderly people who are just trying to live out the rest of their lives peacefully? Or the children
who can’t help but run and play and spread germs everywhere they go? Or the pregnant women
who need to be as safe as possible? By the Smith family’s reasoning, we shouldn’t try and
control deadly health threats like the coronavirus because we’ll be weakening people’s immune
systems… But does that mean they’re totally fine with only half the population making it
through? Survival of the fittest? Natural selection?
I cannot understand how people can look and see all the evidence and still refuse to
believe they might be wrong. Despite thousands of people dying prematurely, they still prefer to
�15
believe it’s a hoax. I read a news story that said a covid-positive hair stylist went back to work
and infected upwards of 20 people. Maybe most of those people will have mild symptoms and be
completely fine, but then they will be carrying it and spreading it to all the places they go. Then
anyone they come in contact with could get it and spread it, and it will just keep going, killing
some, and travelling through others. What on Earth is so bad about wanting to be careful? I am
not afraid of this virus. I make runs to the grocery store and the bank. I take walks with friends
outside and have even visited my grandparents a couple of times. But I wear a mask, and I bring
hand sanitizer with me everywhere, and I stand apart from people when I’m speaking to them.
These things are not difficult to do and even though I don’t like wearing a face mask or avoiding
public places, etc., I would rather do all that than risk being responsible for someone’s death.
I still believe our governor has done well making important decisions for our state. She
has been constantly discussing with other governors around the country and with public health
professionals to determine how soon and how quickly we can reopen. I would rather be stuck at
home than go about my normal life knowing that thousands of people are dying all around me
and I’m doing nothing to help stop it, but in fact may be helping cause it. It is alarming how
individualistic our culture has become. How selfish and privileged we are. It makes me sad
because I was raised to believe that the United States was a wonderful place full of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. But it really isn’t that at all.
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
A ton has happened in our world since I last wrote. As far as Corona goes, Governor
Whitmer just lifted the stay-at-home order as well as other restrictions on Monday. More and
more businesses are allowed to reopen and cases have been going down. They are apparently still
worried about a second wave that would be even stronger than the first, but this issue isn’t even
the focus anymore. Covid is the forefront in hardly anyone’s mind. Because on May 25th,
George Floyd died. He was a black man suspected of forging checks, so he was apprehended by
a group of (white) cops. There is video evidence that Floyd was complying with police orders,
not resisting them at all. Yet they still threw him to the ground and pinned him there with their
knees along his body. One of the officers, Derek Chauvin, placed his knee directly on Floyd’s
neck while Floyd lay face down on the pavement. Two other officers were applying their body
weight to Floyd’s back. They stayed this way for nearly 9 minutes, despite Floyd’s crying out
that he couldn’t breathe. Eventually he passed out, and the officers remained with their body
weights on Floyd’s back and neck for three more minutes, until Floyd’s heart stopped and he
died. According to autopsy reports, Floyd did not die from strangulation, but the pressure applied
on his back and neck were the cause of his heart going into cardiac arrest. Perhaps if the officers
had acted to save him, he would have lived, but instead they remained on top of him until he was
dead.
�16
This insane act of cruelty - which is not uncommon in black communities - turned out to
be a catalyst for nationwide and even worldwide outrage. There were riots the next day in
Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, in protest of police brutality. Businesses were broken into
and looted and the city was trashed. Since then, protests and riots have continued in all fifty
states, as well as in other countries as people everywhere have joined the Black Lives Matter
Movement. This movement strives to bring attention to the injustices the black community faces
daily just for the color of their skin. It brings attention to white privilege and educates the world
about black history. It vehemently condemns police brutality and demands justice for those that
have been treated unfairly, and especially those who have died for no reason other than that their
skin was black.
Many white people balk at this idea that racism still exists and that white privilege is so
prevalent, but I believe it. I see it every single day when people of the white community
stubbornly believe that if you just do what the cops tell you, you won’t get hurt. They continually
believe that black people truly are just criminal and unruly. They continue to believe that black
people do this to themselves, that black people are the only ones killing black people, that white
people are innocent. They are ignorant. It is an extremely uncomfortable reality to have to
accept, so many people don’t accept it. This is the point of the protests. Centuries of
unacknowledged injustices without respite have finally given way to a movement fueled by
anger and the condemnation of cops.
I support this movement, though I do worry that, as happens with so many issues, we will
first swing too far the other way. In other words, I am concerned that before we are able to find
any kind of peace, there will be a massive and long-lasting hatred and mistrust of law
enforcement, as well as the government and the media. When I scroll through Facebook I see
countless different accounts and opinions about these issues. We cannot seem to find common
ground on anything. I know I’ve been saying this in nearly all of my entries, but I honestly blame
Donald Trump. He is behind the mobilization of the national guard to quell these protests, whose
cause is righteous and which are most often completely peaceful. He is the one who has
constantly condemned any and all news sources that do not agree with him. He is the one who
has sown more hatred and division than nearly any other president in history. He is the absolute
worst kind of person and seems to be trying to turn our democracy into a dictatorship. As far as I
can tell, most people hate his guts like me. But Trump still has a hardy group of supporters who
truly believe he can do no wrong. I have truly tried to understand these people, but all I can
conclude is that they are just plain stupid.
I plan to attend a silent sit-in today in the city of Grand Rapids, of which nearly 3,000
people have said they will participate. From 4-5 pm we have been directed by organizers to sit
silently lining the sidewalks of Fulton street with signs that say “I’m still here. I’m still pissed.”
We will not be blocking traffic at all, or causing noise pollution, or doing anything even remotely
destructive. At 5 pm we are supposed to take a knee for 9 minutes and chant “I can’t breathe,” to
represent George Floyd’s horrible experience. I was not originally planning on attending this for
two reasons. First, despite the fact that no one is thinking about it, Covid-19 has not magically
�17
disappeared, and I don’t want to contribute to spreading it more. Second, many groups who are
separate from the groups of protesters have been coming to these organized peaceful protests
with the sole purpose of causing trouble and discrediting the movement. I do not want to be at all
involved in violence. I have decided to go because I think that this movement is more important
than my reasons not to.
The Grand Rapids chief of police has been in contact with the organizers of this sit-in and
has actually agreed to participate in our protests against police brutality. I’m excited to go and
see history in the making, and I hope desperately that this movement can bring about real
change, both in America and in the world.
Tuesday
, June 9, 2020
Last Wednesday, nearly a week ago, I attended a protest in downtown Grand Rapids for
the Black Lives Matter movement. I went to this one (and not the previous ones) because this
was labelled as a peaceful sit-in, and was cleared with the Grand Rapids Police Department. The
chief of the GR police also said beforehand that he would join in our protesting and take a knee
for George Floyd and all the black lives that have been needlessly taken. Over three thousand
people had responded that they were interested in attending this event on Facebook, and I would
not be surprised to learn that they had all come. We lined the Fulton street single file (nearly
everyone with a face mask on for Coronavirus) for what must have been miles and sat there - not
blocking car or foot traffic, not being rowdy in any way - from 4-5 pm. Then from 5-5:09 we all
knelt on one knee and chanted “I can’t breathe,” to relive the memory of George Floyd’s last
experience on Earth. Following this we continued to sit peacefully until 5:30, which was when
we were all supposed to go back home and clear the scene. This was a strict rule so that if any
rioters did decide to show up and cause trouble, it would be very clear that they were a separate
group from the peaceful protesters. Right before my friend and I headed back to the car, a chant
erupted of “No Justice, No Peace,” among a large group of people who walked down the road,
past all the protesters. During the hour and a half that we sat there, many cars drove up and down
the street and at least half of them would honk their horns in support as they drove by, or reach a
closed fist out the window, or give us some other kind of sign of encouragement.
I am so glad I was a part of it. It was especially interesting to see what kinds of people
turned out to support Black Lives Matter. I saw mostly people who were very near my own age,
and quite a few more white people than black people. Yet I also noticed among the crowd middle
aged people and even elderly people. It was excellent to know that this movement finds support
among all demographics of people, throughout the country and even throughout the world.
Though I was not near enough to the police station to know what was happening there, I later
saw pictures of the police chief keeping his word and taking a knee with protestors at 5pm to
chant “I can’t breathe.” As we were leaving, my friend and I had to walk a block over to the car
and as we did so we noticed heavily armored police troops guarding the perimeter of the police
station. There were no protesters in that area, and as far as I know, there never ended up being
�18
any more destruction that night. But looking around me I could see all the destruction which had
been done the previous weekend throughout the city. Many restaurant and shop windows had
been smashed, and were boarded up when we walked through. This included the courthouse,
which makes sense, but also many many small businesses that should not have been in the line of
fire. The beautiful thing is that at this point, a small group of (african american) artists have been
going through downtown and painting beautiful pictures of hope and peace on these boards.
They are using art to change the boards from a symbol of past violence into a symbol of hope.
Another major event that happened last week was Donald Trump’s disgusting use of
force to clear the way through protestors for a photo-op. Washington D.C. was crowded with
peaceful protestors calling for change, when Trump decided he wanted to walk to the small
church there and pose in front of it with a bible. In order to reach the church, which was blocked
by protesting citizens, he called in a force of police who reportedly fired tear gas into the crowds
to force them to disperse. This in itself is absolutely disgusting. These were unarmed, peaceful
protesters who happened to be protesting police brutality when our demented president saw fit to
clear them and their very valid concerns away with a violent chemical, just so he could get a
picture taken. This is far more disturbing when we consider that Trump does not even attend that
church, which apparently nearly all American presidents have attended throughout history. He
does not go to that church, nor any other church for Sunday mass. The bishop of the place was
outraged to see that the president of the United States had used her church and a bible that he
never reads simply to garner support for his reelection campaign. In a country that is plagued by
a global pandemic and has given way to uprisings in every single state, the President uses
excessive force to quell their outcries so that he can focus only on his popularity. If this story
sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is the actual stupidest thing that I’ve ever seen, and not only
stupid, but blatantly evil. Trump’s main supporters are people who blindly follow him without
watching the news or educating themselves on any domestic or world issues. They seem to
believe exclusively what Trump tells them to believe, so this disgusting and unnecessary show of
power will probably appear to them as a good thing. His ill-won picture with someone else’s
bible in front of a church that he doesn’t attend will probably make him appear to them as a very
godly man who they should follow to the ends of the Earth. And the rest of the world laughs at
us.
Now there is a growing movement in the United States to defund and/or abolish the
police altogether. This has understandably received mixed opinions. The first time I heard it from
a friend I thought that was crazy. This friend simply told me that there was a movement to get rid
of the police, and in my head I thought of all the true criminals in the world and thought that
abolishing the police would be equivalent to allowing them to run free. There would be no one to
call if someone broke into your home, no one to call if you were being followed down dark city
streets, or if you’d been assaulted. I completely understand why every single person of color in
the country would be all for this. Amazingly (bafflingly!) for a huge amount of black Americans,
police have been one of the biggest threats to their health and safety. So where I (a young middle
class white woman) see the police as a force for good who will protect me against evil, an
�19
overwhelming number of others in the country are forced to see police as people who will harass
them and threaten them for no good reason, and with no repercussions. And it goes without
saying that they also must fear being unjustly murdered by the police on a daily basis. If I were a
person of color, I would prefer anarchy to a police force. Since I am not a person of color, this
most certainly was not my first reaction, and I still do not support the total eradication of any sort
of police force.
I have since learned however, that the idea is not to simply have nothing in place to
protect people, but to have an entirely new system of public safety in which professionals in a
variety of fields are called on to deal with problems that arise in a more individualized way. In
other words, instead of sending strangers with guns to deal with every single problem ever,
reformers want to be able to send out social workers, psychologists, behaviorists, etc. to help
troubled people rather than simply arresting everybody and sending them to jail. The United
States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is because our justice system is
antiquated. Massive amounts of money are funneled into beefing up the police force so that they
can continue to arrest everybody. Our prison systems are not to help rehabilitate convicts, but
simply to put them in long timeouts. It doesn’t make any sense at all. This is why I support the
abolish the police movement. Though I do think we need some semblance of the police to
remain, I very strongly believe that sending a person to prison should not be the first solution. If
a single mother steals from a grocery store because she does not earn enough to feed her
children, she should be led to resources that could help her and her kids, not led to jail. If a high
school student pulls a gun on classmates, he should be put in a rehabilitation center with
professionals who can examine his mental state, not put in jail for the rest of his life to waste
away. Certainly there will always be crime, but there would be far less if we funneled more
money into programs to help people live a happy life. As soon as a person is deprived of their
basic needs of food, water, and shelter, their fight-or-flight response will kick in and they will
likely do something like steal or even kill others. If there was less crippling poverty, less unfair
treatment by police, more attention from government officials, more prosperity and equality,
there would be less crime.
Let’s defund the police and reallocate that money away from weapons that will be used to
hurt already damaged citizens and into programs that will help them heal. Let’s put that money
toward funding public schools, which are struggling so much that they’ve begun to cut programs
like art and gym class (which if you know a child are essential to helping them focus and absorb
information). Let’s put that money toward buying more Personal Protective Equipment for the
doctors and nurses across the country who have been helping to fight Covid-19 and putting
themselves at risk this whole time. They have had to cover their clothes with trash bags and
rewear masks (which renders them essentially pointless) because the government has not funded
them well enough. This is disgraceful. Let’s put money toward getting homeless people off the
streets and on their feet so that they have the option to reenter the workforce. Let’s put money
into the foster care system so that parentless children don’t have to live through neglect and
poverty only to be thrust into the “real world” on their 18th birthdays with no idea how to be a
�20
productive adult. Let’s put money into bringing down the cost of college tuition so that education
is available to all rather than just the middle and upper classes. We would have no need to beef
up our police force if the country’s citizens weren’t treated so badly as to make them want to
revolt. Donald Trump is like a really bad monarch and I can only hope that he will be
overthrown this fall when we elect the next president.
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Finally, after being home for months, I am beginning to feel like I can have a somewhat
normal summer. I recently applied for a job at a ziplining adventure park near my house and
have a virtual interview with them tomorrow. Thus far, I have only been earning minimal money
at my Library job, which had to cut our hours when the pandemic hit. Luckily I haven’t been
going anywhere or spending money on much of anything, so this hasn’t been a huge strain, but it
will be once school starts and I have to start paying rent at my apartment! I am very excited to
finally have the opportunity to begin making more money (in an environment different from my
home!), and I feel ready to battle whatever struggles arise from reentering the service industry
after so many weeks of people being cooped up. In addition to the scattered hours I’ve been able
to work for the Library Virtual Services, I’ve also been teaching piano lessons several times a
month to a couple of beginning students. One or two of them will continue through the summer,
so that will be a tiny trickle of income for me as well. Every single penny counts!
Though I have been stuck at home without much to do, I have tried to stay busy. I wrote
up a list of all the things I have committed to this summer, which is as follows:
● French classes (one the first half of summer, one the second half), twice a week
● Piano lessons (2-3 times per week generally)
● Library virtual services shifts
● Band camp (A two week camp I help teach for my previous high school each summer.
They only just got the official green light this past week to have it!)
● Family vacation (Likewise, we didn’t know if or when we would be able to have any
vacation this summer, but it looks like we will be heading elsewhere at the end of July)
● Senior Project (Which I was unable to finish last semester due to the pandemic, and
which is now due within the first month back to school this fall)
● Graduate schools research
● Clarinet Practice
● Yoga/daily exercise
In addition to all of these things, my hobby is reading books. Despite its becoming more
cheesy to me every time I read it, I reread the entire Twilight series a month or two ago. I love
rereading books because it feels like visiting an old friend, or returning to a place from
childhood! I’ve perused a couple different philosophy books and most recently charged through
Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I am currently in the process of reading for the first time Jane Austen’s
�21
Pride and Prejudice, which is absolutely phenomenal. I believe I mentioned in an earlier entry
that I picked up ‘bullet journaling’ at the beginning of this quarantine, and have created several
new designs that I am very proud of! I have loved being able to embrace all the creative pastimes
that I don’t normally have time for during the school year, or when my week is full of work
shifts. Because of this, part of me is sad to know that with this potential new job, my creative
freedom and energy could come to an end. But I have no choice if I want to be able to pay for
my apartment next year, as well as food, tuition, etc.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
I have always been someone who has used writing as an outlet for overwhelming
emotions or ideas. These last couple months I have felt so many things that I haven’t even felt
capable of writing them down. There is so much anger and hate in the world, as well as anguish
and sorrow. So many incomprehensible horrors, things we have always read about in history
books and never expected to encounter in real life. Even now as I sit here feeling on the edge of
tears, I can’t think where to begin...
I watched two videos recently of elderly men being violently pushed over by law
enforcement, who were, both times, dressed head to toe in defensive armor. The first video I saw
hit me so deep to the core that I felt physically nauseous and began to cry. In the video, a tall and
thin elderly white man who was protesting with the black lives matter movement walked slowly
up to a couple of police and began speaking to them and gesturing with his hands. He did not
look in any way threatening, out of control, or even angry. In fact to me it looked like he may
have been asking a question. Then, without warning, one of the officers shoved the old man
forcefully backwards. He stumbled back several paces, waving his arms as he frantically tried to
regain his footing, but his old legs couldn’t move fast enough and he tipped back. He crashed to
the cement, the back of his head cracking on the ground and a pool of blood visibly forming
around him. The officer who had stood next to the one who pushed the man began to lean down
to check on him, but was immediately pulled away by the one who pushed. They walked past
him and a group of more officers followed behind, all stepping over this elderly, bleeding man.
The video went viral, and most people were equally terrified and appalled. I just recently saw an
update on the man in my facebook news feed. His name is Martin Gugino, he is 75 years old, and
now has a fractured skull and is unable to walk.
This video circulated quickly and caused anguish in most who saw it. Most but not all,
because our own president unfeelingly suggested that Gugino could be an ANTIFA provocateur,
and faking the fall. This disgusting suggestion came after the knowledge that the police station
had reported the incident by claiming that Gugino tripped and fell and that they had nothing to
do with it. If it weren’t for the teenage girl who had been filming, none of us would know any
different because an entire troop of cops were prepared to sell a blatant lie to the public to cover
their own asses, at the devastating expense of their victim.
�22
The second video I saw was fortunately less devastating, but still scarring in its own way.
It showed another elderly white man, who was quite small and defenseless. He was simply
standing on a sidewalk looking out toward the street when a group of cops came up behind him
and started pushing him up the sidewalk. I truly don’t even know why or where they wanted him
to move to. I cannot even describe the feeling of intense anguish for the man and hatred toward
those awful cops that I felt when seeing this take place. The man jumped when he suddenly felt
hands on him and tried to turn to see what was happening, but was not able to because they just
kept pushing him further and further along. Like Gugino, this man quickly lost his balance and
fell to the ground, though thankfully it was face first and he was able to absorb the fall with his
arms instead of his head. These scenes awake some kind of animal instinct in me where I just
want to rip and tear and I can’t imagine the otherworldly chaos I would be feeling had either of
those men been my own grandfather or father.
Here’s a bit of comic relief, which I will credit to the stupidity of our esteemed president.
As I mentioned, he tried to claim that Martin Gugino (an innocent, previously unknown, peaceful
protestor for BLM) was an ANTIFA provocateur. So I’ve had to learn recently what exactly
ANTIFA is, because the way Trump talks about it makes it sound like an evil organization that
exists to dismantle our government and destroy our country. He literally put forward a proposal
to label ANTIFA as a terrorist organization. HOWEVER. IT’S NOT AN ORGANIZATION AT
ALL AND ANTIFA IS SHORT FOR ANTI-FASCIST. So beyond the fact that Trump is putting
forth blatant lies, he is also declaring himself against antifascism. Which, by extension, means
that he has declared himself for fascism. Ha. Ha. He’s not even trying to hide the fact that he
does every immoral thing in his power to be a dictator instead of a president with checks and
balances. Probably because he believes his followers will follow him anywhere, even if it’s off a
cliff. I hope that in the next few decades our democracy is restored and strengthened and history
books will look back at this time as a low point that we must never repeat.
Another point of grief on my mind today is that the Trump administration has apparently
rewritten the Title IX rules, which is now thousands of pages long. Under the Obama
administration, if someone came forward and accused another person of sexual assault, the
accused could be considered guilty not with clear, obvious evidence, but with at least a 50%
chance that it had happened. In other words, the old rules heavily favored the alleged victim in
sexaul assault cases on college campuses, and subjected the accused to punishments such as
being expelled from their university. At face value this may seem radical, but it was an
aggressive measure put in place to help correct what had been a huge problem on college
campuses for so long. Women have always been shamed for BEING RAPED. You don’t watch
an innocent person get punched in the face and blame them for it because their face looked
funny. You don’t hear that a woman was violated and blame her for dressing the wrong way. But
people do. Because misogyny is so ingrained in our collective psyche that people aren’t even
able to wrap their heads around the concept that a man who goes after a “provocatively dressed”
woman actually just doesn’t have self control or respect for that woman. And other men protect
rapists because they understand the feeling of being so tempted and wanting so badly to give in.
�23
But not all men are racists, because some were raised right; some have learned self control and
respect for others and some have integrity.
Anyway, as a young woman who lives on a college campus for most of the year, the sight
of a man walking toward me at night has the power to fill me with anxiety. I want to be able to
know that were anything to happen to me, I could get the emotional support I need, and the man
who assaulted me would face punishment. Trump’s new rules give universities the option to go
back to the system that was used before Obama made changes, where punitive measures will
only take place if there is evidence beyond a doubt that the accused committed the crime. In
other words, Trump has changed the system back to heavily favoring the rapist. In the interest of
creating an informed opinion, I must say that Obama’s rules resulted in a swing so far to the
other side that girls were falsely accusing men that they didn’t like, who then were treated
unfairly without further consideration into the matter. That occurrence is nearly as bad as a true
rapist never facing consequences. So I agree that perhaps there needed to be more measures set
up, but considering the history of this issue and the vulnerability of women, I personally feel that
the rules should favor the victim rather than the accused. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that
this new change came about under the Trump administration, as they have spent most of their
time in office undoing everything that Obama did to help us.
President Barack Obama began his presidency in 2008, when I was ten years old. I was
young enough for most of his presidency that I wasn’t informed of most anything that he did. But
my parents have told me that for them, having Obama in office was a welcome relief from the
struggles that they’ve always faced in life. My family is situated firmly in the middle class,
where we are generally very comfortable, but never waste money on frivolous things, and budget
and save and sacrifice here and there so that we can stay comfortable. Many of Obama’s
programs and laws went a long way toward making life easier for working-class families. As I
said, I’m not familiar with his entire presidency, but I know that his Title-IX regulations made a
big difference, as did Obamacare, and his treatment of immigrants. He did good things for the
working class, and did his best to make the obscenely wealthy citizens of America pay more
taxes for the good of all. (The wealth gap in this country is absurd, but that’s a qualm for another
day.) Donald Trump these past four years has worked his way through undoing change after
change after change made by Obama.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Anonymous
Description
An account of the resource
Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020-06-17
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University University Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.
Identifier
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COVID-19_2020-06-17_ANON-033
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
eng
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8643fc3c8250ed059255f7eadb1bac8b.pdf
5f3a3e527dc77270b04aa9d407df9bfc
PDF Text
Text
3/27/20 - 11:33 am
It’s hard to believe that school shut down 16 days ago. Time feels so relative now, like we should be
measuring it in some other way. What constitutes a day in these uncertain times? Is it still 24 hours, or
should I measure my days in anxious fits, depres
sive episodes, moments of solitude? Most gruesome, should
we start marking time by COVID deaths? That’s what the news is doing. “March- 25,035
27
total deaths.”
On bad days, I used to take comfort in the knowledge that somewhere on the planet, many good
things are
happening. A baby is being born. A couple is getting married. A father and son are taking a trip. These
microcosms of happiness combine to combat whatever obstacle I’m facing at the moment. Now, though, my
front line of defense against the darkness is dwindling. Across the world, weddings are being canceled.
Vacations are turning into nightmares. Babies are being born into oversaturated, infected hospitals. As I race
to find the light, coronavirus is three steps ahead of me, snuffing out each can
dle one by one.
These are dark times indeed.
3/29/20 - 1:34 pm
"As the sign of a deeper truth,
metaphor is close to sacrament. Because the
vastness and richness of reality
cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone."
- Jeffr ey Burton Russell
In times of extreme duress, I retreat. For as long as I can remember, my immediate response to stress has
been to jump on a horse and run away, sometimes quite literally. Now, as I feel stressed and
- most
frustratingly - trapped, I find myself retreating into books to retain my sanity. Books are deep wells where I
can pour my emotions into and drain them all through the sieve of a great story. When they emerge, they are
filtered clean and pure and stable. I drink from this well copiously,greedy in my conquest for release and
solitude. Unfortunately, living with your boyfriend prevents a complete retreat from happening.
The boy with whom I live subsequently became, through a series of strange events, the boy that I date. We
had two other roommates, one who happened to be his ex. She found herself unable to live with us being
together and promptly moved out. That knocks off one. Our fourth roommate was recently laid off and
moved back home to quarantine herself in. That knocks off two. What
’s left is just myself and my roommateturned-boyfriend as we navigate trying to start a new relationship while being quarantined alone together.
It’s been strange trying to find ways to be together and create space for each other in a tiny apartment. We
both struggle with anxiety, and this crisis has flared my OCD to a nearly unmanageable point. There’s so much
that’s overwhelming about our lives and our home that I struggle to find peace.
This is where my books come in. But my boyfriend has never datedbookworm
a
who’s content to hole herself
in her room and read for 12 hours straight. He’s an outdoorsy type; he wants to do yoga, walk outside, and
my
clean up the earth by picking up trash. I absolutely adore him for it, but I have to express that books are
way of responding to the crisis. Sometimes, getting lost in the words of my beloved poets is the only way I
keep my grip.
�3/30/20 - 11:03 am
Woke up today without the usual chest tightness that accompanies my morning anxiety. Perhaps my brain
and nervous system are settling into this new normal.
I picture my little apartment as this bubble that cannot be penetrated, by people, disease or otherwise. Last
night my boyfriend’s friend came over to drop off some more concrete makeshift weights for themto throw
around and he stayed to chat. I’m pretty sure my heart rate was well into the 100’s imagining him as an
intruder breaking through our defenses and shattering my little bubble of defense. Though he stayed well
away from both of us, I was torn betwe
en welcoming the social interaction and wanting to kick him out.
My parents are both old, well within the demographic most at risk from the virus. My father is turning 71 in
May and my mother, who’s been a smoker her whole life, turns 58 in September. Tho
ugh there’s been many
days I’d love nothing more than to give them both a hug, I know that I can’t. Not until I wait out the incubation
period, solo, to see if I have it. Every stranger that walks through my door sets my incubation period back and
makes mylong-awaited hug that much farther away.
I miss the days when I could jump into people’s arms without fear. I’m a hugger, a toucher, an extrovert; I
thrive in social situations and am most content in a crowded, lively room. Now, as my boyfriend and I swim
this sea alone, I know I’ll never take hug
a from my parents for granted again. I pray that they’ll make it
through this and we’ll see many more hugs on the other side of coronavirus.
3/31/20 - 12:48 pm
The air has never felt more still.
The virus became real today. It became a big, swampy monster that’s wreaking havoc on my life and tearing
my loved ones away from me.
Last night, a close friend from high school lost his battle to the virus. He was a mere 24 years old; a baby; a
blink in the universe’s eye. Yet to me, and my tight
-knit circle of friends from younger days, he was
everything. Ben Hirschmann- you stood up for me when nobody else would. You had a twinkle in your eye and
a bellowing laugh that filled our hearts. How this virusswallowed you whole I’ll never understand; your
personality and enthusiasm was larger than life, larger than this world.
Today I am heartbroken. I am emotionally ransacked and vacant; I have nothing left. My fragile sanity has
been teetering on madness o
f r weeks now and I fear this may be the beginning of a very long descent. For
while I’m aching now, I know this won’t compare to how I’ll feel in a couple weeks. The monster is coming and
it is incredibly hungry. Ben will certainly not be the only casualtyI’ll suffer in the monster’s wake.
I can’t reiterate enough how devastatingly real this feels now. God help us.
�4/7/20 - 7:08 pm
Spent the last week grieving, processing, self-destructing, and rebuilding. Wasn’t sure I’d be able to write
tonight but the air felt still and calm and suddenly I was drawn to my journal. It’s incredible to me how one can
find moments of stillness and peace in absolute chaos.
School has felt incredibly optional though I know, internally, that it’s very much not. I’m
having trouble finding
the motivation to get things done when everything around me is slowly evaporating. I lost my study abroad
trip/summer plans and now I’m applying for internships that probably don’t even exist anymore. It’s terrifying
seeing the newsreports display the unemployment figures, and I shudder to think how dangerously close to
that I am. My school job ends in a few weeks, and then what after that?
4/9/20 - 7:51 pm
Today has been overwhelming, but it’s almost asinine to use that word now. We’re literally living in
unprecedented times, of course everything is going to be overwhelming. But school has proven to be
especially trying. Today I finally counted up everythingI had to do to finish the semester. 14 things. It
amounts to roughly 32 pages of writing, at least 6 hours of coding, and then 7 hours of online exams. I am so
frustrated with the amount of work that’s been given I could scream. I know that professors don
’t know how
to handle this either, but they could try by not randomly assigning papers just for something to do. I have to
write roughly 6 pages of justreflection papers. Reflection on what? The online class I’ve had to suffer through
for a month now? Notmuch to reflect on.
I was telling my boyfriend yesterday that I can’t believe we’re two days shy from it being a month into
quarantine. This month has felt like a blur. It was supposed to be my busiest; my grandest month yet. I had
two trips to DC planned, a conference, an event to host, new candidates to welcome. I’m a Lead Fellow in the
Leadership Academy and I was so excited to hug our new cohort in person. Each person I personally
interviewed, took time in crafting. We’ve pulled together an incrediblegroup of future changemakers and
now I don’t know if I’ll even see them for orientation.
I’m tired of wondering when all of this is going to blow over. I’m tired of the fact that the piling deaths are
having less of an effect on me now. My best friend st
lo her grandpa, my dad’s friend lost his father.. The list
goes on and on. I yearn for better, brighter days.
4/14/20 - 4:23 pm
It’s getting harder and harder to journal. It’s depressing only having bad news to report, but that’s all that’s
coming in. The IMF reported today that the global economy could take a 3 point shock, the worst since the
Great Depression. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared to graduate into a depression. My family lost everything
in the ’08 recession, and it’s taken us 12 year
s to crawl back from square one. They say they’re doing okay
now, but I fear the worst for my family in these coming days. I remember the last time we were so poor we
�couldn’t afford groceries; those days felt so hopeless. I’m certainly not prepared for wh
at’s coming, but how
can you be? My mom told me today that life as we know it is over. I pray that it isn’t true, but, I know deep
down she’s right. With the coming depression and the way lives have already been altered, there’s no way we
can go back to normal.
I know, too, that normalcy will be unachievable for the families who have had loved ones ripped away. The
family of my friend Ben who died just a couple weeks ago is not done with their turmoil. Now, the father of
the family has fallen ill as well. All over stories are coming in from households who are losing multiple people
at a time and can’t hold a funeral. After all, the CDC traced the entire Chicago outbreak to just a single person
who attended a funeral in the city. Now, because of that one person, ten thousand people in the city are
infected, and I fear my parents are next. The virus is so infectious that if one person in the house gets it the
others are likely to follow suit. How terribly violent and senseless it is to lose multiple family members in one
sitting. Yet again, I remember this happens daily to people all over the world. In the Gaza strip, bombings
regularly ravage families. In sub-saharan Africa, infant mortality kills 40% of babies before they’re even born.
Are we privileged people finally getting a taste of the chaos we so carelessly create?
I’m still mourning the loss of my summer plans and now my hopes for the fall are fading. If we can’t contain
the virus or find a vaccine, it’s likely that the fall semester will be moved online as well. As difficult of a
decision as it would be, I think I would defer for that semester and hold my hopes out for winter. I refuse to
lose my senior year to this pandemic after I’ve already lost so much. From my apartment I can still hear the
bells of the clock tower rolling over from campus. Those bells, which used to peeve me on my way to class,
now sound like the melancholy remnants of a distant past. What I would give to be annoyed by those bells
just one more time!
I suppose the good news in all of this is that I’m still alive. I’m healthy, I have a roof over my head, food in my
fridge, and a boyfriend who continues to be my rock through all of this. Perhaps all is not lost.
4/16/20 - 3:11 pm
The days are starting to muddle together and th
e moments are losing their luster. I need to feel reinvigorated
but it’s hard with so much stress weighing down on my shoulders. In these tense times, though, I have found
moments of extreme tenderness, and I began recording them. These are some of my favo
rite things from the
last week:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
The mouthwatering smell of fresh garlic and good olive oil sizzling in a pan
The warmth I feel when my boyfriend holds me and I’m enveloped in his smell of tea tree oil and
sandalwood
Waking up to my cat lazily stretched out beside me, the sun rays warming her belly
The comforting, homely smell of fresh coffee brewed in the morning, my hands wrapped around the
steamy mug
Signs of growth from plants I’ve been nurturing all year
The happy look in my cats eye when she watches snowflakes fall through the window
The roaring, resounding laughter of my friends coming through the phone, showering me with love
and happiness
�Yes, things are bad, but they can be relatively good too. Youstjuhave to find the silver linings.
4/18/20 - 3:01 pm
Today my family and I were told that my grandmother’s nursing home has been exploded with cases of
COVID-19. I have dreaded this day ever since I learned about the virus, knowing full well itsplications
im
for
the older demographics. My poor grandmother Rosemary Risk, aka the light of this world, has been battling
dementia for about ten years now. I used to wake up at 5 am before school every day and go give her a bath,
change her diapers and shee
ts, and sit with her while she ate her breakfast. She’s the sweetest little lady,
always humming as she walks around. During bath times, she used to make me sing all of her favorite old
showtunes. These are the lyrics to her favorite one:
Here we are, out of cigarettes
Holding hands and yawning, look how late it gets
Two sleepy people, by dawn's early light
And too much in love to say good night
Here we are in the cozy chair
Pickin' on a wishbone from the Frigidaire
Two sleepy people with nothing to say
And too much in love to break away
Do you remember the nights we used to linger in the hall?
Mm-hmm, your father didn't like me, at all
Do you remember the reason why we married in the fall?
To rent this little nest and get a bit of rest
Well, here we are, just about the same
Foggy little fella, drowsy little dame
Two sleepy people, by dawn's early light
And too much in love to say good night
Here we are, don't we look a mess
Lipstick on your collar, Wrinkles in my dress
Two sleepy people, who know very well
They're too much in love to break the spell
Here we are, crazy in head
Gee you're eyes are gorgeous, even when they're red
Two sleepy people, by dawn's early light
And too much in love to say good night
Do you remember when we went dancing at the Palomar?
When it was over why naturally we cuddled in the car
So you ran out of gas, and I was green as grass
Here we are keeping up the pace
�Letting each tomorrow slap us in the face
Two sleepy people, by dawn's early light
And too much in love to say good night
Grandma, I am too much in love to say goodnight to you. Please don’t leave us yet.
5/5/20 - 12:51 pm
I took a break from journaling after the winter semester ended. I was so terribly burnt out after my grandma
passed away that I needed a break from my own thoughts. Now I’m back to consultant work/journaling and
can affirm that, oddly enough, things are pretty normal as far as quarantines and pandemics go. Life has
definitely slowed down and adapted to the new conditions. I’ve been drawing quite a bit, planting and
preparing my garden, and renovating my apartment. My boyfriend and I have grown quite a few
egetables
v
from seeds and we’re hoping to get them all in the ground by the end of May. Some of the hardier vegetables
like asparagus and kale have already been planted outside and I check on them like a dutiful mother. I’m
pretty sure our neighbors think we’re nuts for having a full garden outside of our dinky college apartment
complex but we take pride in our little oasis. Watching everything grow from seeds into strong young plants
has been such a fun journey for us while we remain isolated in our home.ouring
P
ourselves into our hobbies
has been a great way to stay sane.
In unrelated news, 2020 has decided to play a new joke on us by introducing literal
murder hornetsinto the
narrative. Japanese murder hornets have somehow made their way over to the Nor
theast coast and prove to
be the icing on the cake of the strangest year ever. These giant hornets grow to be-32 inches in size and
prey on precious bumblebees. They use sharp mandibles to decapitate the bees and take their thoraxes to
feed their young. Japanese honeybees have developed certain adaptations that allow them to fight off the
hornets, but our American honeybees have not. Entomologists say if we can’t eradicate all the hornet
colonies within a year, we won’t be able to stop them from rooting he
re permanently and decimating bee
populations. To boot, hornets are so venomous that a few stings can kill a human. How much more fucked up
can this year get?? I was watching a sweet, fat little bumblebee lazily sniff my begonia bush the other day and
thought of it being decapitated by a murder hornet. I sincerely hope they fix the issue before it’s too late.
5/6/20 - 1:01 pm
Found out today that I’m eligible to receive a huge grant from GV through the CARES Act to help support me
financially through this pandemic. I’m really grateful for the extra income because now I can afford to help
cushion my family a little bit through the crisis as well. My dad’s job is based on sports advertising, so the lack
of sports has taken a huge toll on his income. My mo
ther completely lost her job due to the pandemic so the
only thing keeping them afloat right now is her unemployment benefits and my dad’s struggling income. We
don’t complain because we know that we have it far better than many other people.
There’s somuch talk about certain businesses that probably will never recover from this setback. They say
we’re headed for an economic downfall that could rival the Great Depression, and I’m afraid for what the
future holds. My brother is a prominent chef in New Yor
k, but he’s not sure he’ll have a job when all of this is
�said and done. New York relies on the tourism and food industry, and it’s damn near collapsed without it. My
sister owns a little vintage clothing boutique in Brooklyn that may also never open its doors again. I’m trying
to remain optimistic but, quite frankly, there isn’t much hope to hold on to. My family barely survived the last
recession so I’m nervous about these projections. All I can do is hold on to the hope that maybe things aren’t
as bad as they seem and we can find a way to bounce back sooner than we thought. I read an article today,
though, that showed evidence Trump shelved a CDC document meant to help reopen the economy and
provide safety guidelines. Why the document will never see the light of day is beyond me when so many
people have been begging for ways to slowly reopen the economy and get people back to work. The stupidity
of the Trump administration never ceases to amaze me, and I blame the president wholeheartedly for his
impotence and lack of leadership in these times of duress.
5/7/20 - 8:48 am
Today is the day! After months and months of quarantine and only seeing one familiar face, I am finally going
to see another friend! My best friend and soul sister Lisa has been quaran
tined with her boyfriend for the last
couple of months. They both have the privilege (like I do) of working from home so it’s safe to say we will not
be giving each other the virus. She was going to come visit me this past weekend, but she started getting
severe back pains after a morning run. After a virtual doctors appointment and a carefully
-socially-distanced
MRI, we found out she has a bulging disk in her back. The poor thing will be bed bound for the next couple
months and has to undergo physical ther
apy to recover. I decided to surprise her to cheer her up by coming
to visit with my boyfriend. She doesn’t know that I’m coming but her boyfriend does, and he says she’s been
terribly glum. I do hope that our presence will lighten her spirit as being arou
nd her will surely lighten mine. It
has been so long since I was able to see others and hold them. I can’t wait to go!
5/9/20 - 7:31 pm
It’s getting hard to find things to journal about because everyday is like groundhogs day! Seems like I have
the same routine every day, the only difference between them is the amount of anxiety I’m carrying. I
recently started taking pills to help cope with my severe anxiety. The pandemic and its stress have
exacerbated my anxieties, making it nearly impossible to getthrough the week without a panic attack or
emotional breakdown. It’s difficult being transparent about this knowing that someone will read this journal
years after it’s writing and may judge me for my choices, but please understand how excruciating thishole
w
process has been. I’ve never been the type to turn to pills to get myself through; I hardly even take Motrin
when I have a headache. Usually my anxiety is mild enough to be cleared up with a good strain of marijuana.
The anxiety I’m dealing with nowsi a whole other beast; one I haven’t battled in many years. I knew that my
mental health would take a turn with all of these changes but I didn’t expect a reaction like this. Every day
there is a new looping circuit of anxiety in my head, swirling round an
d round like a whirlpool. I can’t fight the
currents alone, so the Xanax helps me swim to shore. I wish it didn’t have to be this way but my boyfriend
reminds me that needing medication doesn’t make you weak; sometimes the strongest thing you can do is
ask for help. I really need help and, for better or for worse, the pills help make these anxious days bearable. I
do hope that I’m able to stand without them soon.
�5/21/20 - 9:01 pm
Today was an extremely hard but rewarding day. Without going into too much detail, my -girlfriend
ex
and I
had a very passionate but tumultuous relationship for two years. We became so enveloped in each other that
we lost our own independent identities. That, coupled with her family’s constant rejection of me and her
sexuality in general, made the relationship a miserable chore. Despite that, I loved and continue to love her
deeply and wish that it had worked out. I think the hardest breakups are the ones wh
ere two people just
aren’t right for each other no matter how real the love is. We broke up mid
-January, and I started dating my
boyfriend a few months later. The quick transition shocked both of us, and I hadn’t expected to move on so
fast and neither did she. I’m a big believer that you can love multiple people at once, and the timing of my new
relationship was incredibly unfortunate. It has made it difficult for my ex and I to stay friends, an endeavor
we deeply wished for. Today, she came over to grabhet last of her things and give mine back. It was an
incredibly emotional encounter filled with lots of tears, hugs, a couple joints, and some Taco Bell. We
smoked in her car and ate tacos like we used to after practice when we played Grand Valley lacrosse
together. It was jarring to be so near her doing familiar things when I’ve seen no one but my boyfriend in my
house for the last few months. I know she’s been quarantining herself properly so I wasn’t worried about
catching the virus, and it was so enriching to hug somebody new. We were able to find real closure and make
progress towards embracing the new roles we have for each other. I’m so grateful to have a wonderful
boyfriend who gives me the space to mourn my past relationship as we grow our new, beaut
iful one. He’s so
tender and genuine and I feel so lucky to have him. It is my dear hope that my ex and I will reconcile and she
can get to know him the way I do.
5/25/20 - 11:43 am
It’s hard trying to remember the last time I had a day without anxiet
y. It eats at my insides, gnawing at what’s
left of my hollow bones.
6/23/20 - 10:21 am
So here it is, my first diary entry in nearly a month. I didn’t realize so much time had gone by, but then again,
time had begun to mean nothing at all.
I debated writing any of this because I didn’t want my dark times memorialized in the University archives, but
in the end I knew vulnerability was the only option. I promised myself I’d not edit or water down any of my
feelings or experiences so that thislittle snapshot in time would be as real as possible.
I had somewhat of a mental breakdown weeks ago. I was going through the motions of daily life, trying to be
as normal as possible, but everything felt hollow. I realized my use of anxiety medication wa
s becoming
addictive, so I did what I knew I had to do
- cut cold turkey. Three days after my decision to quit, my parents
informed me they were going through another separation. They’ve done this thrice before, but never has it
been so explosive, or final.They began filing with attorneys immediately. I found it difficult to get out of bed
every morning, and it took incredible amounts of patience from my boyfriend who gently coaxed me alive
every day. I took to long hours of meditation and silence to cope ith
w my anxiety, and eventually my frayed
�nerves began to settle. Then, on May 25, George Floyd died. And the events that followed have certainly
changed my life, and the lives of many others.
This is a journal about the coronavirus pandemic, certainly, but I would be remiss if I did not memorialize my
experiences during the beginning of what will certainly be a large chapter in the history books. George
Floyd’s death is the spark that will flame an entire revolution, and I’ve seen the front lines of history. If you are
a reader looking at this diary years after I am gone, surely you too will know how George Floyd. You will know
more than I about the repercussions that follow the waves of his death, and I am hopeful that history is
favorable to our revolution. I hope that his death will not be in vain.
George Floyd is only one in thousands of black people that have died at the hands of racist police. We took to
the streets in the days after Floyd’s death, but there were so many others we were marching for.
Breanna Taylor.
Ahmaud Arbery.
J ustin Howell.
Alton Sterling.
Philando Castile.
Oscar Grant.
Sandra Bland.
I could fill pages upon pages of this journal with the names of black lives lost to police brutality. We marched,
protested, chanted, and burned down buildings and police precincts for them. In my city of Grand Rapids, we
took to the streets for a silent march, a peaceful protest. We did not bring weapons or gear, but signs and
our anger. We brought a desire for justice to the march, and the police showed up in riot gear. They cornered
us in the streets with tanks and suped up police trucks. They barricaded off the streets to the police precinct
so that no one could touch it. Before a protestor had so much as raised a fist, the police marched out in
single formation, dressed in military style riot gear with shields, face masks, rubber bullet guns, tear gas
canisters, batons, and even many real guns. Tear gas, which was deemed illegal to use in war after WWI, was
used mercilessly on protestors who knelt on the ground with their hands up, screaming “don’t shoot!” I was
on the front lines, my heart racing as we formed a barricade of white people to protect people of color from
the police. We were weaponizing our privilege to protect those who have been targeted. The hatred from the
police was so visceral; their gazes cut me like knives. I could feel their disgust that we were on the “other
side.” I had never felt the reality of the police state until I was face to face with it, locked in a showdown that I
was hopeless to win. They tear gassed us to much I felt like I was truly dying. I couldn’t see or breathe, and
people were running and screaming in every direction. They shot rockets off and eventually rubber bullets. I
was knees down on the ground, face in my hands as my eyes burned like fire, when a kind stranger lifted back
my hair and poured milk on my face. I choked at first and then relaxed as the milk cooled my burning eyes.
The stranger handed me water and I drank, grateful and unable to speak. I never caught their name as they
ran away to continue helping, but I will never forget that moment of humanity.
I will also never forget the way the police herded us like animals for slaughter, just for asking them to stop
killing black lives. I will never forget how a peaceful protest was transformed into a war zone by cops who
incited an agitated crowd. I will never forget when they brought guns and we brought signs. And reader, I
hope you never forget this too. I hope these words burn into the back of your mind forever:
We are not free in a police state.
We are not free until every systemically racist institution is dismantled.
Equality cannot be achieved without equity first.
Demand reparations.
��
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
COVID-19 Journals
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries
Description
An account of the resource
This collection of journals and personal narratives was solicited from the GVSU community by archivists of the University Libraries during the events of the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis the university closed suddenly, following federal and state guidelines of social distancing to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. The university closed its campuses on March 12, 2020, and quickly moved students out of campus housing. Faculty swiftly transitioned to fully-online teaching for the remainder of the Winter 2020 semester, and all campus events, including commencement, were cancelled.
The purpose of the COVID-19 Journaling Project was to document the individual and personal experiences of GVSU’s students, staff, faculty, and the wider community during this time of international crisis. Some project participants were university student employees who were compensated for their journaling. Other participants were granted stipends or extra credit for submitting entries to the archives. Still others participated without any compensation or credit. The University Archives remains grateful to all who submitted journals, for helping us to understand the impact of this crisis on our community.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2020
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
Subject
The topic of the resource
Epidemics
Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Text
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Anonymous COVID-19 Journal
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Journal of an anonymous GVSU student's experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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2020-06-23
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University Archives. COVID-19 Journaling Project
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">In Copyright</a>
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COVID-19 pandemic, 2019-2020
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Grand Valley State University
College students
Personal narratives
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COVID-19_2020-06-23_ANON-034
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eng
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/0d66a0a1eda90e49fd1f201283228171.pdf
7b93058f6b8cd3500d962902a9b038ca
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1
Grand Valley State University Special Collections
Kent County Oral History collections, RHC-23
Mrs. Noyes [Eileen] Avery
Interviewed on October 4, 1971
Edited and indexed by Don Bryant, 2010 – bryant@wellswooster.com
Tape #28 (2:00:00)
Biographical Information
Mrs. Avery, born Evelyn Leonard on 28 February 1883 in Grand Rapids was the daughter of
Frank E. Leonard and Sarah E. “Sadie” Pierce. Evelyn “Eileen” was married on 5 June 1907 in
Grand Rapids to Noyes L. Avery. Mrs. Avery died on 4 August 1972 in her home on Plymouth
Road in East Grand Rapids. Mr. Avery had preceded her in death on 4 July 1947. They were
both interred at Fulton Street Cemetery in Grand Rapids.
Eileen‟s father, Frank E. Leonard was born on 8 April 1855 in Grand Rapids. He died on 25
April 1925 and was buried in Fulton Street Cemetery. He married Sarah E. “Sadie” Pierce on 12
October 1881 in Grand Rapids. Sarah was born in July 1859 and died at her home in East Grand
Rapids on 7 December 1950.
Noyes L. Avery was born in Grand Rapids on 18 October 1881 and was the son of Noyes
Frederick Avery and Anna Haley Barstow. Noyes F. Avery was born on 15 January 1855 in
Grand Rapids. He died on 19 November 1925. Anna (Barstow) Avery was born on 11 September
1858 in Paris Township (now Kentwood). She died on 1 September 1921 in Grand Rapids. The
Averys are buried in Fulton Street Cemetery.
___________
Interviewer: This interview with Mrs. Noyes Avery was conducted October 4, 1971. OK, we
can start.
Mrs. Avery: I‟m, I‟m a Leonard, and I‟m also an Avery, I‟m probably the only one, that‟s a
good Avery. The Averys came here in I would say eighteen forty. And you see Grand Rapids
was not started until, I mean Louis Campau didn‟t come until eighteen twenty-six. And no that
was only fourteen years when the Averys, and the Barstow family came and that‟s Mrs. Avery‟s,
my mother-in-law‟s name. And her name was Anna Barstow. I don‟t know what to say anything
here until I know what I‟m going to say…. (Voice in background: “you go on”) And, they came
also at that time.
Interviewer: Where did, where did the Averys come from?
Mrs. Avery: The Averys came from Salem, Massachusetts.
Interviewer: Do you know the reason they moved from there to Grand Rapids?
�2
Mrs. Avery: I should but, people came here at that time, came to Michigan at that time and I
suppose that‟s why the Leonard family came at that time, too. (It was) about eighteen forty,
somewhere in there. Well, the Averys and Barstows were very important people here and they
were friends of the Lowes, the Blodgetts. (Voice in background: “Let me think of something”)
Interviewer: Well, you don‟t remember any particular reason why the, Averys and the Leonards
came to Grand Rapids? Were they, what kind of business were they in when they first came?
Mrs. Avery: I think Mr. Avery may have been in the real-estate business.
Interviewer: I interviewed a fellow the other day, John Cary, and he told me that when his, I
believe it was his father or grandfather, first came to Grand Rapids he bought five acres of land
down approximately in the area of the old Union Depot was.
Mrs. Avery: Yes.
Interviewer: And he bought that from the Averys, bought five acres of land from them.
Mrs. Avery: Well, now that probably was why Grandfather Avery came here. I never looked that
up. This is interesting. And father Avery was born in eighteen fifty-five. And, my father who
was Frank Leonard, Frank E. Leonard, was born in eighteen fifty-five. But Heman Leonard, that
was his father, came also in about eighteen forty. So that seemed to be the time that they were
settling Michigan.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Avery: Then there was a time, you know, when they were settling Ohio. And then, there
was a time when they were settling other states. But this is Michigan.
Interviewer: Yes. Where did your family live when you were a child?
Mrs. .Avery: They lived on Prospect Street. Oh, in those days, you didn‟t have a house when you
were married. You boarded with someone. And, Mr. and Mrs. Avery boarded with someone on
Bostwick Street. There was a rooming house up there. They boarded there. My father and mother
when they were married, boarded with the Charles Leonards on the corner of Oakes and
Sheldon, in a house, I think in that, where Ferguson [Hospital] is now. And they lived there quite
a long time. That‟s Mrs. Judd‟s grandfather too, that Leonard. She and I are Leonards.
Interviewer: What relation, how, how are you and Mrs. Judd related, exactly?
Mrs. Avery: Charles Leonard had a son, Harry Leonard, and Harry is the father of Mrs. Judd.
My father was younger and he was Frank, Frank E. and I‟m his daughter.
Interviewer: So then you‟re ….
Mrs. Avery: She and I are cousins.
�3
Interviewer: Well, when your parents moved out of the boardinghouse and bought a home of
their own, where, where did they live?
Mrs. Avery: They lived on Prospect. It‟s the third house from Wealthy, south on Prospect. It‟s
still there. There‟s still a vacant lot by it and the house is still there. And, my mother sold it in
nineteen twenty-six, that‟s quite a long time ago, too. Well….
Interviewer: What was it like growing up in the neighborhood?
Mrs. Avery: Oh, you knew everybody. And everybody would stop for you in the morning to go
to school. School was just one block west. It‟s the Lafayette Street School now. It used to be
Wealthy Street School. And, they‟d all stop. The thing I remember most about all this is our
wonderful games we used to have after dinner. We played hide-n-seek, over the whole block. All
the neighbors, there were forty children in our block. That is four sides of the block. That‟s a lot.
Interviewer: Yes, it sure is.
Mrs. Avery: The Penneys lived there. They were a well known family. The Halls lived there.
They were a well known family. Then on our street, the Stevens‟ lived there. They were a well
known family, across the street from us. Well, we all went to school together. We didn‟t have
any problems at all. Just came home from school and played.
Interviewer: When you got to be a little older was there a lot of entertaining?
Mrs. Avery: Oh sure, you mean when I was in high school? Oh yes, we used to have parties. Of
course they were just kid parties. We‟d go at eight o‟clock; we didn‟t have dinner or anything.
We‟d go at eight o‟clock and come home at ten, and our fathers would come after us. Heavens,
we never went anywhere with a boy, whoever heard of such a thing.
Interviewer: Going out alone with a boy?
Mrs. Avery: Yes, there wasn‟t any reason for it except you just didn‟t do it. Your father went
after you.
Interviewer: Was that before the automobile?
Mrs. Avery: That was before the automobile. When the automobile came in, Mr. Avery, my
father-in-law had a car. I can‟t remember, I could tell you look it up probably and find out,
because I used to be taken out for rides by Noyes Avery. And then he got a White Steamer, later.
And we went way down to Gun Lake and we started at six in the morning, and of course that was
the steam engine and every time we came to a farm he‟d get out with his rubber pail and fill ….
What‟s that you fill?
Interviewer: I am not sure, I‟m….
�4
Mrs. Avery: With steam.
Interviewer: The boiler?
Mrs. Avery: The boiler. And so we didn‟t run out of steam. And then you would run, when you
saw a hill coming you‟d go awfully fast down that hill. Heaven knows how fast, maybe twenty
miles an hour. And then you got enough steam to go up a hill. And then we came home and I
remember my mother-in-law. She said she put a five dollar bill on my picture in Noyes room so
he‟d have enough money for the day. That‟s my mother-in-law.
Interviewer: Well, was your husband, did he live in the same neighborhood as you did?
Mrs. Avery: No, they lived out you know, where the Fanatorium is?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Avery: They have a beautiful house down there. Just a beautiful house, wasn‟t a mansion, it
was just a home. And it had been built by somebody Taylor. And the Grandfather Avery had
bought it and they lived there. And it had a barn for the horses they would have had at that time,
but not in my time. They had this lovely automobile, about this long. Can you think of something
else?
Interviewer: How did you meet your husband?
Mrs. Avery: I just saw him on the street one day walking a girl home, in high school. I can
remember very well, I thought how handsome he was. He was. And that‟s all. Then you just met
him at dancing school probably, Saint Cecilia Dancing School. We all went to dancing school
Saturday afternoons. When we were young, we went to the two o‟clock class, Calla Travis. And
when we got way up to seventeen or so, then we went to the four o‟clock class. We didn‟t have
to get home until after six.
Interviewer: What kind of dancing was taught at that school?
Mrs. Avery: Oh, it was the two-step, the waltz, the square dances.
Interviewer: When did, when would you have use for a square dance?
Mrs. Avery: I don‟t know. I don‟t remember any, doing it outside dancing school. But we knew
how to do it. And, we‟d go to dancing school out of town someplace and we‟d dance. [In] town
when there‟s no way of getting out except by train. Everything is in town. We had a big crowd of
young people.
Interviewer: When you got older and you got married, when did you get married?
Mrs. Avery: Nineteen oh seven
�5
Interviewer: Nineteen oh seven?
Mrs. Avery: Yes.
Interviewer: Well, after you were married in the entertaining among married people? What kind,
how was the entertaining done?
Mrs. Avery: Well, when we got married we‟d have seven o‟clock dinner, if it was a dress-up
one. Otherwise, I think it would be about six thirty and you‟d have four courses, had to have four
courses. You see I lived on Barclay Street, near John Street, you know where that is?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Avery: And there was a house down there, it‟s now a parking lot. That‟s where my husband
and his two brothers were born. Because Father and Mother Avery evidently bought that house
after they got through their boarding house, and lived there. That was forty-seven Barclay. And
then you know all about the Hazeltine family?
Interviewer: No.
Mrs. Avery: No? I think you ought to find out something about these, these, great families. The
O‟Briens?
Interviewer: That‟s why, that‟s why we interview, we‟re doing these interviews, to find out about
them because they‟re people today that are my age for example, you know you hear those names
mentioned occasionally.
Mrs. Avery: Yes
Interviewer: But you don‟t know what they‟re referring to or who they‟re referring to. What
those people are like, what they did in the town and so on. That‟s why, doing these interviews to
find out about that and make a record of it.
Mrs. Avery: Mr. O‟Brien. I‟m talking about John Street. The Hazeltines lived in the middle of
John Street. The house is still there, on the north side of the street. And up on Lafayette, about a
half block away, Mr. and Mrs. O‟Brien lived. And when the Hazeltine girl, who was a great
friend of mine, Fanny Hazeltine, and I graduated from Vassar College, Mr. O‟Brien, was made
the ambassador, appointed to Japan. And they took Fanny along. They were neighbors, within
half a block of each other. And they went and she went with them and stayed a year, in
diplomatic, and that was pretty great in those days, my goodness. So the O‟Brien family you
should know about. The Hazeltine family you should know about.
Interviewer: Who was Mr. Holt?
�6
Mrs. Avery: Well, he lived right up there on the hill, too. Up, up on Lafayette, too. He had
daughters. Well he was of the same generation that Mr. and Mrs. O‟Brien, Mr. and Mrs.
Hazeltine. Mr. Holt and their girls were younger than I, but in the same crowd. We were all in
one big crowd. When we‟d have a party at Saint Cecelia, it would be a big party because we
knew everybody; we all knew everybody.
Interviewer: I understand that Mr. Holt was, the…
Mrs. Avery: Founder of the Kent County Country Club?
Interviewer: I also understand that he was somewhat of a social arbitrator in the city. That he
was the one who decided, who was in and was out. Is this right?
Mrs. Avery: Well, I wouldn‟t know because I was too young to make any difference. I was in as
far as that went. Not because of my family though. Just because of me I guess.
Interviewer: OK.
Mrs. .Avery: I mean my family was just a good family, the Leonards. And of course my father,
now we‟re back to Leonard, my grandfather, his father, Heman Leonard came and I think it was
about the same time, eighteen forty. You see, nothing happened here until eighteen twenty-six
when Louis Campau came and everything grew from there. He started a grocery store; you know
where Houseman‟s is?
Interviewer: OK.
Mrs. Avery: Well in that corner, and he was connected like almost all grocers were with the
A&P coffee, tea and then if you bought that you got a saucer; you know they still do that, or a
plate. And he was so successful with his china that he went into the china business. And my
father had, when he, when he got to the, when his father died, china store Dick Zeyert and Sons.
And that was the important store. You got your silver and glass there on the first floor, china on
the second floor, hardware on the third floor, and toys on the fourth floor. Everybody went there
for all those things. I mean it was generally, I can remember my, one time, my father saying that
he always, when he sent a set of china which was a barrel of china, out I mean you had twelve of
everything, that, if they didn‟t keep it, it might be a dozen plates, if they didn‟t keep it they
brought it back, it was always, they always smelled of it, because if it has soap-suds on it, you
knew that they borrowed it from the store long enough to have a party. Well, that‟s an amusing
little bit isn‟t it?
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Avery: But they had beautiful china, the kind that Rood has now only even better. My
father went to Europe to buy it. He was connected with a great big firm in New York and he
went down there and bought. He spent three or four weeks every spring there, buying toys, china,
�7
glass, silver. So you can see it was a very important store and the toy department they always had
Santa Claus. He was in the window. And then I got old enough finally, to be a cash girl in the toy
department and I‟d run back and forth to the office with money and things and that would be
done up. Goodness that was important, Christmas time, the few days before Christmas. And then
I got so old that I could be clerk. Boy, was that exciting? That is what you want to know.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Avery: Folklore.
Interviewer: Yes.
Mrs. Avery: Then of course, everybody came down there and you know everybody who came in
almost. You knew people. You weren‟t intimate friends with them but you knew people. What‟s
wrong with them in every way. There wasn‟t just parties; it wasn‟t just social, because we
couldn‟t have parties all the time. We had a lot of parties. But you don‟t remember the parties;
you remember the fun you had. You hide and seek after dinner, and then my mother calling
“Eileeeeeen” till I got home. Eight o‟clock. Well, that‟s when you went to bed. And there wasn‟t
any of this restlessness. Goodness we had everything we needed and we had fun and friends. It
was a great life. It really was.
Interviewer: What, what was society based on in those days do you think? If you were, assume
that I‟m asking you to define how the society was set up, how did one become a member of
society?
Mrs. Avery: I don‟t know. You just got to know somebody and were asked in, it‟s asked that‟s
all. There wasn‟t any caste about it.
Interviewer: It wasn‟t based on money then?
Mrs. Avery: No. Not at all, not at all. It was on friendship.
Interviewer: Did people that lived in the Hill area, did they have, well when they had parties, for
example did they invite people over that lived on the west side of town?
Mrs. Avery: No, because they weren‟t their friends. They weren‟t their friends.
Interviewer: In other words there…
Mrs. Avery: There wasn‟t a caste about it but it was just that your friends over here in the
neighborhood, and you had to walk for goodness sakes; you had no way of transportation. No
busing. Streetcars, yes. You went everywhere on the streetcar. Oh, we went to the lake at
Ramona, we only called it the Lake. We went to the shows every week; our beaus would take us
to the shows. Beaus were just boyfriends. There was a very little romance about our high school
days. I can remember. I mean it was all friendship and fun. Sound great?
�8
Interviewer: Well, it‟s kind of hard for me to imagine I mean, high school today so much
different than, just mere friendship. Was at adult parties, was liquor…?
Mrs. Avery: No liquor, absolutely not.
Interviewer: Why was that?
Mrs. Avery: Well, it just wasn‟t done.
Interviewer: When did it, when did liquor be, start becoming part of parties?
Mrs. Avery: Oh, oh I don‟t know. Not while we lived over there. We moved from that house we
built to the corner. And, we came out here in nineteen fifteen. Nobody served liquor at all.
Interviewer: You said we came out here, where‟s here?
Mrs. Avery: I say we built that house.
Interviewer: The one that‟s on Lake Drive?
Mrs. Avery: Yes. That big white house and we moved in nineteen fifteen. No, we never thought
of it. It just wasn‟t done. We didn‟t even have wine. It just wasn‟t thought of. It just wasn‟t done.
Well, it probably was in some circles but not in ours. I mean we went with everybody else but
there may have been some people who like Lowes and Blodgetts who may have served wine. I
wouldn‟t know. But we never did in our household. And mother and father never did. It‟s just
one of those things that wasn‟t done.
Interviewer: OK.
Mrs. Avery: It‟s like kissing a girl before you‟re engaged. It just wasn‟t done. Or hand-holding, it
just wasn‟t done. Nobody held your hand. You wouldn‟t think of walking down the street with
somebody holding your hand. Goodness.
Interviewer: Times have changed.
Mrs. Avery: I, we used to have lovely hayrides. We‟d go way out to Cascade and have supper
and come back. On the hayride, a boy put his arm around me and I didn‟t speak to him for a year.
A whole year. I wasn‟t any different from rest of the girls. It just wasn‟t done. There‟re certain
things that your generation doesn‟t do. I don‟t know whether there is or not.
Interviewer: I can‟t think of anything. I‟m going to turn the tape over; it‟s almost done here…
Yes, when did the talk about prohibition first start? When, can you first remember hearing talk
about prohibition?
Mrs. Avery: Oh, I don‟t because there wasn‟t any point in it. There was never any reason for it,
for us. We‟d never had anything to drink.
�9
Interviewer: How old were you when you took your first drink?
Mrs. Avery: Oh, long time ago, I guess. But we didn‟t have it in our house over there. My
husband died in forty-seven. Oh, I suppose that, I don‟t know „cause we certainly weren‟t having
any whiskey at that time. I mean not how, you know, cocktails, the way we have it now.
Interviewer: OK. Do you drink cocktails now?
Mrs. Avery: Oh sure, just like everybody else.
Interviewer: Well what about the, was this just, you said that you and your husband never had it
in the house for example but what, was there somewhat of a double standard? I mean, was it just
the women that didn‟t drink or was it also the men? I mean for example, were there saloons
downtown where the men could go for lunch and so on?
Mrs. Avery: Yes.
Interviewer: And they‟d drink at lunch?
Mrs. Avery: I don‟t know.
Interviewer: Never asked?
Mrs. Avery: Not my husband.
Interviewer: Ok.
Mrs. Avery: It was one of those things that wasn‟t done. When I say that I mean it, just that way.
Interviewer: When you built that house across the street were there any of these other houses
here?
Mrs. Avery: One. One down the street on this side and one being built on the other side.
Otherwise it was all woods like this over here.
Interviewer: Ok. Now in nineteen fifteen you got back and forth to downtown in an automobile
didn‟t you?
Mrs. Avery: Yes, by then, we had an automobile. We had an old Tin Lizzy and of course no
starter on it. So we left it up on John Street which is a steep hill. Parked it John Street and we‟d
walk over and get it and let it run down the hill to start. When I came out here every day to watch
them building the house, the men would always start it up for me. I never tried to, it was too
hard.
Interviewer: Why did, for example, why did you and your husband move away from downtown
out to here?
�10
Mrs. Avery: Oh, we thought it would be nice to be out here. I lived on Prospect and I used to
walk out by myself often. And I liked that corner. Well, we decided that, that downtown was no
place to bring up children.
Interviewer: Who was Edmond Lowe, or Edward Lowe? Who was he, where did he come from?
Mrs. Avery: Well he came from the east I think, I never knew where he came from, I never was
curious I suppose, and he was a very important person. A very nice gentleman. And Mr. Blodgett
we knew very well. He was, and they built that house out here on Robinson Road, that‟s now
Aquinas College—beautiful house. Now if we were asked there for dinner, which we might
have been, I don‟t remember, they wouldn‟t serve any liquor. You were invited for seven
o‟clock. Got there and you sat down at the table at seven o‟clock. That was what parties were
like then. Then they‟d go home at ten or eleven o‟clock. They didn‟t play cards in the evening.
Now I‟m speaking of the people that I knew. I‟m not speaking of everybody, I don‟t if
everybody… But we didn‟t play cards. My husband never played cards.
Interviewer: What would you do after, after you finished eating?
Mrs. Avery: Oh, you‟d sit around and visit. First of all the men would sit at the table, or maybe
that‟s when they had some wine, I don‟t know. But they‟d sit at the table and then they‟d come
out with the ladies.
Interviewer: What, the ladies would retire to another room?
Mrs. Avery: Yes.
Interviewer: When did that, thinking back, when do you think that that kind of living, that kind
of society began to change?
Mrs. Avery: Well, I don‟t, I was trying to place it over there in that house. Cause we never had
cocktail parties over there. And that was in nineteen fifty when I left there. I mean, when my
husband was living. My daughter had a beau, who stayed with us, he lived in Cleveland. She
married him. And he was an older person. He was twenty-five years older than… And, he had
some whisky and in the bathroom, so he may have had some. But we didn‟t serve it. They were
married in thirty-five, so it must have been since then. And I don‟t think they ever had any
cocktail parties like, like we have now. I‟m sure they didn‟t.
Interviewer: Was there any kind of event, anything what, when did society begin to change,
when did that style of living and the closeness of the neighborhood that you experienced?
Mrs. Avery: Oh. As you got away from it, you didn‟t have neighbors. You see down, down
where I lived and where Averys lived they knew all the people around. Mrs. Warner we‟ve just
been talking to, lived across from the Avery‟s house, exactly across and she married and we
�11
never seemed to know her. We were too far to walk. Nobody had two cars in a family at that
time.
Interviewer: So what, what started bringing that style of living, living to an end was the
dispersal of people?
Mrs. Avery: That‟s right. Because, now in the Hill District, they all knew each other and on
Lafayette and down John Street where the Hazeltines lived. They all knew each other. The Holts
are down there, Campau lived there.
Interviewer: This morning talking to a…….Pardon?
Mrs. Avery: No. Huguenots, that‟s not their name, oh you know who I mean [Hugharts]. Lived
on the corner across from the City Club in that corner brick house. Right across, up Fulton Street.
The people knew each other on Fulton Street. The Gays lived up there and he started Berkey and
Gay. I should think that would be a good place for you to start, too. Berkey and Gay and I
suppose Mrs. Judd told you about the refrigerator company...
Interviewer: Ok.
Mrs. Avery: …Uncle Charlie Leonard started? He, Uncle Charlie Leonard ran the refrigerator
factory and my father ran the store. Do you get a picture of I‟ve, I have given you a picture at
all?
Interviewer: Yes, fine we‟ll finish there then.
INDEX
A
Aquinas College · 10
Avery Family · 1, 2, 5, 11
Avery, Grandfather · 2, 4
Avery, Mr. · 4
Avery, Noyes · 1, 4
B
Barstow , Anna · 1
Barstow Family · 2
Berkey and Gay · 12
Blodgett Family · 2, 9
Blodgett, Mr. · 10
C
Campau, Louis · 1, 7
Cary, John · 2
F
Fanatorium · 4
G
Gun Lake · 4
�12
H
O’Brien, Mrs. · 6
Hall Family · 3
Hazeltine Family · 5, 6, 11
Hazeltine, Fanny · 6
Hazeltine, Mr. and Mrs. · 6
Holt, Mr. · 6
Hughart Family · 11
P
J
Ramona Park · 8
Rood · 7
Penney Family · 3
R
Judd, Mrs. · 3, 12
S
K
Kent County Country Club · 6
Saint Cecelia · 6
Saint Cecilia Dancing School · 4
Salem, Massachusetts · 2
Stevens Family · 3
L
Lafayette Street School · 3
Leonard Family · 2, 3, 6
Leonard, Charles · 3
Leonard, Charlie · 12
Leonard, Frank · 2
Leonard, Frank E. · 1, 2, 3
Leonard, Harry · 3
Leonard, Heman · 2, 6
Lowe Family · 2, 9
Lowe, Edward · 10
O
O’Brien Family · 5
O’Brien, Mr. · 6
T
Travis, Calla · 5
U
Union Depot · 2
W
Warner, Mrs. · 11
Wealthy Street School · 3
White Steamer · 4
Women's City Club · 11
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e3ef78f9df73fc48c40600c03abe2041.mp3
12eda69efa08d5d26b2080217c1ab727
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Grand Rapids Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Local histories
Memoirs
Michigan--History
Oral histories (document genre)
Description
An account of the resource
Taped and transcribed interviews conducted in the early 1970s primarily of the children and grandchildren of many of the founders of Grand Rapids, Michigan; many of whom were residents of the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Interviews were collected to develop a significant collection of oral resources that would supplement other primary and secondary local history materials. Initially funded as a private project, Grand Valley State College (now University) assumed responsibility for continuing the project until 1977.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Various
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/452">Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf; audio/mp3
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text; Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-23
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1971 - 1977
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RHC-23_28Avery
Title
A name given to the resource
Avery, Evelyn
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Avery, Evelyn
Description
An account of the resource
Evelyn Leonard was born in Grand Rapids in 1883 and grew up on Prospect Street. Evelyn (Eileen) was the daughter of the inventor of the refrigerator, Frank E. Leonard. Leonard was a Vassar graduate and married Noyes L. Avery in 1907. She was president of both the Women's City Club and Women's University Club in Grand Rapids. Mrs. Avery died on August 4, 1972.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Subject
The topic of the resource
Michigan--History
Local histories
Memoirs
Oral histories (document genre)
Grand Rapids (Mich.)
Personal narratives
Heritage Hill (Grand Rapids, Mich.)
Grand Valley State University
Women
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
audio/mp3
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Grand Rapids oral history collection (RHC-23)
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971