Fine snow sculptures.
Danny Chilton
Class of 1965
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I remember very clearly, it was in 1959, when I had to take a summer course, Mining Survey, and I drove my old '52 Buick around Rolla, and I was astonished, the town was practically deserted. In that year, Rolla had only 11,500 inhabitants, including the 3250 students from Rolla School of Mines. At that time, Rolla looked as a ghost town ...
Gilberto Urdaneta Finucci
Class of 1960
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I remember living in what was called Dorm A with a great bunch of guys.
Arthur Koelling
Class of 1957
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I remember being at the University for a year or so and thinking I wanted to be a ChE. Upon visiting my counselor, I realized that they wanted me to take 18-21 credit hours on top of working 30-40 hours a week. There was no way I could do that. I walked out and met one of my best friends, Eric Triplett, who was in the same situation. We walked around campus figuring out what we wanted to be. We ended up at McNutt Hall and speaking with Jeff Cawfield and a few others. They were friendly, discussed options with us, and what the GE Program was about. It was an instant no-brainer. We then enrolled and became Geological Engineers. Funny how your path is decided by life situations.
Aaron Steigerwalt
Class of 1998
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There were a half dozen seniors in the Aerospace Engineering that took many of the same classes and often studied together. One of our assignments was to find a generalized solution for transposing a 5x5 matrix. We had taken over one of the upstairs rooms in the library. When the lights in the library started flashing, indicating closing time, we ignored the warning. When the whole libary went dark, except our study room, we kept working. An hour later we stumbled through the libaray, guided by the dim glow of the exit signs, to the front desk. Someone called campus security on a phone behind the counter (no such thing as a mobile device) and explained we were locked in. When a guard arrived to unlock the doors, we claimed, with straight faces, that we did not realize the library had closed. We were studiously working away and had not noticed the time.
Michael Sallwasswe
Class of 1976
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I met and married my husband, Kelvin, and had my first child while in Rolla. My husband was working on his MS EE when our daughter, Esther, was born. We put Esther on a pad in a cardboard box and took her to the basement of Norwood Hall so I could help my husband with his research at Cloud Physics.
Fran Erickson
Class of 1978
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In 1974
or 75 we built a snow wall across the quad.
Ed Hohlt, Sr.
Class of 1994 |
Thirty years ago women on campus where a minority, but we where speaking up and making a difference. Our actions encouraged other to step-up and make a difference, and it still is happening today at MS&T.
Here is a rare shot of a moment that changed Rolla for the BEST ever! 
Thank you GDI for your support we could not have done it without you... and ...HERE'S TO THE ST. PAT'S BOARD for making the change with me. You guys made it a great memory in school history, or that none of us involved will ever forget. Thanks to all the student and UMR staff of the '80's, that were there for the ride of a life time.
Mindy Brand
Class of 1984 |
I'll never forget being woken at 3am in Holtman Hall with someone shouting that I should be working on my thesis. I got the fright of my life.
It was at the time of the greatest manhunt ever in Missouri’s history and we had the police helicopter scan our building every few hours to check all was okay. There was a shadow through my thin curtains. In my stupor I immediately thought it was John Brown, the killer. Then I came to my senses, how could it be, I live on the 3rd floor.
Throwing back the curtains, what do I see in front of me only the head of Chewbacca, the 7ft ape from Starwars with lights in his eyes and mouth. He was connected to a speaker hidden under a trench coat obviously connected to a microphone on the 4th. Someone was getting their kicks out of shouting at me to work on my thesis. I laughed and thought what a great prank.
When they asked me at breakfast the next morning if I'd slept well, naturally I wasn’t going to admit being scared senseless in the first few seconds and I replied saying 'like a log'. However, they all laughed at my nonchalance and told me that they had seen me turn on my light. They told me that they had woken the entire dorm shouting out about Irish people in the US, all sorts of things and the only thing that woke me out of my deep sleep was when they told me I should be working on my thesis.
We played some great pranks that year in Holtman. Next time, remind me to tell you about the ‘shocking’ experience on the toilet seat!
Andrew Ryan
Class of 1987
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Yo-YO Davidson's flights over Rolla in the Navy's F4F (Corsair) especially at football games @ Jackling Field c.a.'48-'50
Donald Spencer
Class of 1952
Fond memory: two trips to/into Frisco
Pond. First for a birthday. Second for mouthing off after receiving an
unusually good Calculus or DiffeQ grade. Several took me straight from
the classroom to the "pond".
Ray Purvis
Class of 1974 |
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I was accepted out of high school on a Cooperative Engineering Scholarship with the McDonnell Aircraft Company (now Boeing). This was a real Godsend as my family with five of us kids wasn't in a position to fund my college education. The coop program that I was on required me to attend the 1963-64 school year plus the following summer before alternating semesters with work as an engineering student at the company. I took a summer job with McDonnell before the fall semester, which, with some savings, saw me through the expenses for the school year, but I had no funds left for summer school. My EE advisor, Prof Grimm, was instrumental in encouraging me to stay with the program and helped me identify a loan that I could qualify for that would see me through the summer. Since I had worked with the registrars office trying to find a loan on my own prior to this, I’m not sure to this day whether or not he had personally made funds available. On subsequent visits with him, he was always encouraging, usually with a story about his involvement in activities during WWII. Now, having spent my entire career in the Flight Test and Evaluation division, I have retired from Boeing after 44 years with the company which in the mean time has evolved from McDonnell Aircraft to McDonnell Douglas to The Boeing Company. Reflecting back on those days at MSM/UMR, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Prof Grimm for his wise counsel and caring attitude toward a naïve underclassman. I believe he saw potential where all I saw was an uncertain future. I repeat what I said when I last saw him on campus, “I can’t thank you enough sir!”
Steve Thorn BSEE
Class of 1969
1. A flight to remember: When I was a student at MSM, I was active in the Baptist Student Union. The group decided to advertise the event that was up coming and I was chosen to fly in an airplane with Dr. Aaron Miles, then Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department, to drop leaflets from his airplane advertising the event. As this was my first flight in an airplane, I was naturally nervous. Dr. Miles assisted me to get into his small two-seater plane, with him in front and me in back. Everything went well on takeoff and we rose to what I remember to be about a thousand feet. When I went to put my hand out of the open cockpit I remember the force on my hand seemed terrific, even though our airspeed was under a 100 mph. I started throwing out leaflets above the MSM campus and suddenly the engine stalled. Dr. Miles looked worried. He said that this hadn’t happened before. Fortunately, he was able to get the engine started again and I was able to get the leaflets dispersed to the students on campus. With my heart pounding we landed without incident and this was an unusual episode in my educational experience.
2. Professor Kerr’s way of keeping students in line: After leaving MSM I got a PhD from the University of Illinois and became a Professor at Purdue University. Over time things changed for Professors and student evaluations became a big thing on this and other campuses. I sometimes looked wistfully back on the days when professors had authority and did not have to handle students in such politically correct ways. I remember an incident that occurred in a math class that I took under Professor Kerr that brought back a smile and a recollection about Kerr’s math class. While dutifully taking notes, Professor Kerr paused for a moment and suddenly he sent an eraser flying across the room hitting a student sleeping in class--teaching him that sleeping in class was something that was not allowed. I never saw that student sleeping again in class. Today a professor would have to do it very differently. Today a professor would have the choice of doing nothing or possibly asking the student to see him after class. This last course would be fraught with peril, as the student might make an appeal that the professor had interrupted his sleep and embarrassed him in front of the other students in the class. Perhaps the present way is an improvement for students, but I seriously doubt it. Once I tried gently spraying a sleeping student with a water gun and learned not to try that again. I personally applaud Professor Kerr; he taught us that we were not to sleep in his class and gave all of the students a teachable moment—we were there to learn and not catch up on sleep.
3. Starting at MSM: When I came to MSM from high school, I began with little cash and a Curators Scholarship. After enrolling for classes, a meeting was scheduled at an auditorium in Parker Hall for all of the incoming freshmen. After the dean put some fear in the freshmen by suggesting that he expected only about one in three of us would be at MSM for the graduation four years down the road. Following this wakeup warning, the Dean called the roster of the students by departments, as they had designated at enrollment. About half way through this process, the Dean paused and said, “And here is one brave soul who says he is planning to major in physics.” This sounded rather ominous, but it resulted in my getting a private tour of the campus by the Head of the Physics Department, Dr. Harold Q. Fuller. Happily, I managed to get through the arduous physics program and at the graduation services in 1955 there were several other students who had switched to physics so I was no longer alone as the only physics major in the class of 55. Despite the scary beginning at MSM, I was able to graduate debt free and admitted to the renowned Physics Department at the University of Illinois. I look wistfully back on the incredibly low cost of living in Rolla during my student years—eating at the Tech Club and living in private housing, my room and board came to under $45 per month.
4. Dr. Sam’s economics course: At the time that I audited Dr. Sam’s economics class (he was chairman of the Humanities Dept. as I remember) I recall one of his lectures nearly 6 decades after the lecture was given. I remember copying furiously the notes that he was putting on the blackboard. He began writing R.A.B.P. and proceeded to copy a large list of numbers in columns and rows. The other students and I were frantically copying this array of numbers, while wondering where Dr. Sam was going with this. Finally, he told us what R.A.B.P. stood for. It was the Retire at Birth Plan. The idea was that if the government put aside a small monthly amount for every person at birth, then by age 21 they could retire. The numbers looked good, but as Dr. Sam said, “There would be bit of a problem growing crops with everyone retired at age 21.” Today some would say that this was a frivolous waste of valuable class time, but I disagree. This lecture taught me the importance of compound interest and the importance of making a lecture fun and exciting.
James G. Mullen
Class of 55 |
I remember being at the University for a year or so and thinking I wanted to be a ChE. Upon visiting my counselor, I realized that they wanted me to take 18-21 credit hours on top of working 30-40 hours a week. There was no way I could do that. I walked out and met one of my best friends, Eric Triplett, who was in the same situation. We walked around campus figuring out what we wanted to be. We ended up at McNutt Hall and speaking with Jeff Cawfield and a few others. They were friendly, discussed options with us, and what the GE Program was about. It was an instant no-brainer. We then enrolled and became Geological Engineers. Funny how your path is decided by life situations.
Aaron Steigerwalt
Class of 98
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