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The inaugural year of the Block Plan (1970-1), a group of us second year German students convinced the powers that be to offer a German class in Germany I was determined to learn German after meeting relatives as a thirteen-year-old, and what better way to learn German than in Germany! Instead of living at the München YMCA/CVJM with my classmates, I was lucky to find a young family to live with. When class was over at 12:00 on weekdays, Priscilla Walker Engeln ‘73 and I explored München. On Fridays at 12:00 we took off for weekend adventures, usually returning late Sunday night. I was not prepared in class, and never seemed to have time for homework or to master grammar exercises. Reading Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” auf deutsch was particularly uninspiring. Invariably Herr Oppenheimer would call on me and I mumbled some kind of answer to get me through. Bless him for passing me! On our final day of class I realized that my German was just starting to improve and asked my German family if they thought I might be able to get a job and an apartment somewhere for several months. On the spot I was offered - and accepted - an “au pair” position until Christmas. During the summer I went off backpacking around Europe with my future husband (Bob Langin, ‘71) and then returned to München for the fall. What a way to learn German!

Those two Blocks in 1971 made a huge difference in my life. The experience provided the means for me to be immersed in the German language and culture, but also to make life-long friends with the family who opened their home and hearts to me. Thanks to CC and the Block Plan, I was able to accomplish the goal that I set for myself in 1964 as a thirteen-year-old, to be able to speak German with my relatives. I am reminded of this gift every time I go to Germany or have the opportunity to practice German with friends and relatives.

CC changed my life in another key way. I am thankful to have met my life partner, Bob Langin ‘71, at CC. Thanks, CC, for offering Bob a hockey scholarship!

Susan Lang Langin ‘73

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It seemed unlikely that it had been hung there, but a rope swing was suspended in the early fall of 1970 from a ponderosa pine that still stands near the entrance to Shove chapel, and despite the stature and maturity that my new friend Larry Straus and I clearly evidenced in our status as freshman college students, I happened to be running beneath the swing and was pushing Larry, seated in its seat, high over my head as a Catalyst photographer happened by and snapped her shutter. And it really was a fine photograph—two boyish faces smiling widely, utterly free from burden or worry, as though this were some neighborhood playground and we were still six or seven, our hair requisitely long in the emblem of that era, flowing behind our heads like flags of freedom and possibility. Larry promptly sent the front page of the student newspaper home to his parents in New Jersey with a captioning note explaining that here he was hard at work out West; Larry’s mother—in the way that mothers are—was wise enough to save it, and more than two decades later the photograph remains a very valued memento of a time when Larry and I and our many new friends and classmates came of age, came alive, and began the sometimes awkward, often jubilant transition between adolescence and adulthood, between youthful dependency and dawning responsibility, and in the process, Colorado College became what it remains—a specifically frozen place and time, both of which are so entirely characterized by heartache and nascent love, maddening confusion and the delight of discovery, plain failure and the first promises of accomplishment that the totality of our experience here is nearly impossible to describe successfully.

From faulty memory, however, I can tell you that the autumn of 1970 smelled a lot like patchouli oil and a little like pizza; its dress code was heavy leather hiking boots worn beneath both Levis and billowing skirts; 1970 sounded like James Taylor and George Harrison, The Band, and the Grateful Dead; it was a time when the left-wing of the political spectrum rather than the right hated the government—go figure—and despite momentous problems in our country, the future then seemed open and welcoming and bright. My friendship with Larry Straus blossomed in the fall of 1970 because we shared so much in common—a passion for rock-climbing and a ready willingness to spend afternoons on the vertical walls of the Garden of the Gods instead of inside the far-less precipitous library; an interest in investigating whether meaningful religious experience could exist outside the constraints of conventional practice; we loved skiing of every kind, and we were enthralled by the sort of young women who were extraordinary on the one hand, yet unusual enough to hang out with the likes of us on the other. And as we discovered on that very first day, Larry and I both had been selected—for reasons we didn’t know—to participate in the experimental Advisor Plan.

The Advisor Plan, set in place, in part, by the liberating momentum of the decade that just had ended, was designed to let its participants select the courses they would take at the college based almost entirely on their own parochial interests. As long as you could convince your faculty advisor to issue consent, you simply could take whatever courses you wanted to take without the need to be mindful of divisional requirements or the future demands of a major. Indeed, you didn’t ever have to declare a major, if you didn’t want to, and I can vouch for the fact that if you chose never even to enter the science center that then was Olin Hall, you didn’t have to. It was cool; and Larry and I were sure we were very lucky.

In that liberal liberal-arts autumn as well, the only grades you could receive at Colorado College were honors, pass, or fail, but for more than a few of us students, those three grades seemed one too many: the notion of an honors grade somehow offended our egalitarian sensibilities. The collegiate experience, from the student perspective at least, ought to be an open book in every conceivable sense, and this institution’s willingness to explore novel means of matriculation and of measuring and marking our academic efforts were lures to Colorado Springs as large and lustrous as the spectacular eastern face of Pikes Peak. And yes, one more experimental program of substance also was initiated in the fall of 1970, this one called the Block Plan, I believe, and some of you may remember it as well.

The Block Plan, the instructional innovation that immediately lent the college enormous renown and made it unique among similar institutions, has survived the ensuing quarter-century of course, its periodic modifications reflecting both lessons learned from its implementation and the evolving attitudes of the years. But although a pass-fail option remains available to students even today, the college, in practice, had re-employed the initial letters of the alphabet well before the transitional 1970s were finished. I can’t tell you precisely when the poor Advisor Plan expired. My class may have been the last one on whom it was tested, and I’ve shouldered the burden for more than two decades that I was to blame for its failure, in fact.

Confident of my own wise counsel in the early 1970s, I determinedly fled from courses in the natural sciences, foolishly presuming that little of the steaming stew of life could be encountered in chemistry labs or anatomy courses. Although I loved the euphoria and the fear that I felt as I clung to a thrusting slab of stone, somehow I never managed even a single geology course—the Front Range, the Tarryalls, the Wet Mountains, and Sangre de Cristos comprising the splendid classrooms. Politics were inherently fascinating to me, but somehow political science was not. History and anthropology seemed unacceptably ... old, and the classics were similarly suspect. Music correctly couldn’t be academic, could it? And business and economics, of course, were out of the question.

As I confess to you that earlier idiocy and my poorly advised participation in the Advisor Plan, in my meager defense I’ll mention that I was a regular student in the religion department; I philosophized as best my modest mind would allow me; and I spent nearly three years out of four in the English Department, reading the really good stuff. It was my great good fortune to learn the marvelous malleability of language from writers named Shakespeare and Cervantes, to discover rhythm and euphonious lilt of alliteration from Yeats and Thomas and Scott Momaday, who entranced us in the flesh one long-ago evening in Bemis Lounge.

It was in the province of the English Department where simple storytelling became something called literature in the process of being examined, marveled at, and sometimes immensely enjoyed. And it was in the English Department as well where Ruth Barton, foremost among many others, encouraged me to try to tell stories of my own. The creative writing, such as it was, that I produced back in those student days was fiction almost entirely: naive stories in which landscape was painted far too preciously, peopled by characters, it seems in retrospect, cut out of little more than cardboard. In substantial contrast, the stories I’ve continued to tell since graduation have been reported rather than imagined, for the most part, and in order to try to bring them to a kind of lucid and lyrical life they have required me to study—on my own and very much belatedly—rocks and the rivers that wash them away, the wondrous terrain of the human brain, orbital mechanics and the larger splendor of the universe—studies I could have commenced at college had I had any sense at all.

—   Russell Martin, 1974 [adapted from the speech I gave at Convocation 1995 when the college awarded me an honorary doctorate]

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It wasn't a single memory, more my time after classes. I am a physics major, class of '88, only I really should have been class of '87, but loved my college experience so much that I deliberately didn't take a pre-requisite course till '88.

Anywho, physics classes got tougher and tougher, and a group of us students would return to Olin Hall in the evenings, where we would discuss that day's class, each of us contributing, working through the chapter, so that we all got a different set of eyes and viewpoints on that day's chapter, particularly when we ran into issues with comprehension ("I don't get it."). Physics can be hard in that not only are we learning new physics concepts, but often the mathematics behind it too.

I remember one time, we went to a restaurant, and on receiving the bill, we couldn’t figure out how to get the tip, as we were learning such advanced mathematics that we forgot simple math. A simple algorithm of move decimal point over one number, then divide by 2, then add to get 15% was beyond us (back before the standard tip increased to 20%)! Advanced math can be weird!

It wasn’t just physics and math though. We talked, joked, teased, ate pizza, hacky-sacked, and yeah, complained and whined too! Great times!

This style of work has been most useful to my career. I no longer do physics, but small teams working collaboratively for a short time is what I do in my software development career. I dig deep in some new tech quickly, play, test, play some more using what I've learned, implement/document, then move on to a different project (or employer!) and repeat!

- Marc Towersap '88

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Loved writing papers in Palmer Hall. There wasn't a single clock in that building. So, every couple weeks, after dinner, I'd grab about five or seven reference books, go pick an empty classroom, spread them in a semicircle, and then write the paper. Beauty part was, the time didn't matter. You left when the paper was good, and done, and then found out the time later, which later carried over into my career. Thanks Palmer Hall!

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Actually, 'after' the last official block of 1973, I attended the Environmental Science Institute. In addition to a few days in the classroom, we all boarded a bus, accompanied by a variety of science professors and traveled all over Colorado, each conducting experiments. We visited glaciers (saw pika), the Climax Molybdenum Mine (to look at re-forestation, the headwaters of the Arkansas River, and a number of other places. Each of us had one or more experiments. (I measured nitrates in water and also tree rings, which I correlated to rainfall records and to sunspots. I also built a computer database on the school's minicomputer (an HP2000C) that allowed us to tie everyone's experiment measurements, to latitude, longitude, altitude, and time/date so we could see trends and correlations. It was a transformational experience of a lifetime! Thank you, C.C.!

- John C Roberts '74

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My best "last block" was in the spring of 1971 when I was a student in Professor Dennis Showalter's "War and Society since the Renaissance." By then I was committed to a major in History and this course (Blocks 8 & 9), as well as Professor Harvey L. Carter's "History of the Trans-Mississippi West," taken the previous year when I was a sophomore, convinced me I had a future as a professional historian. Showalter was the best lecturer and motivator I have known (including all my graduate-school mentors) and I patterned my teaching style on his method during my forty-three years at the college level. No better way to end a year at CC than to start a summer after a course with Showalter! The following year (1972) I took a summer course with Showalter on "The History of Modern Germany." The History Department at CC was stellar during the early 1970s, and I remain grateful to the entire College, but especially to Showalter and Carter.

- Bill Swagerty '73

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I had a shift in Sacred Grounds beneath Shove. As the tea-goers and occasional late-night homeworker left the warm confines of the basement, I went upstairs into the chapel. The lights would go out at 11pm and Campus Safety completed their rounds shortly after that, so it was a reverent place to play the nine-foot grand after hours. My grandpa’s funeral was the next day – a craftsman by trade and character who built and sold looms in his retirement. I was stuck on what to play at his service. For my other grandparents’ funerals, I had riffed on "Lush Life" and an original for "Mimi," both of which came naturally. Caught while trying to stitch together loose threads, a concentrated beam of light entered the front of the chapel and travelled buoyantly to the right exit. I paused, considered the darkness, whether to wade in. It happened again. I stayed long enough to close the lid quietly, then rushed out the right transept in the same direction as the light.

- Andy Post '16