The Girls from Ames Read Online Free PDF Page A

administrative assistant at Iowa State. And several of the girls had Marilyn’s dad as their pediatrician and Sheila’s dad as their dentist. But some of the girls’ fathers held jobs with secret code words and clear expectations about how the girls should talk about them.
    Diana’s dad was a well-known swine nutritionist at Iowa State. City types would assume he was creating weight-loss programs for pigs, but as Diana explained it to everyone, “He wants them bigger, fatter, faster.” Actually, that wasn’t exactly it. Her dad was really researching ways to build muscle weight, as opposed to fat, and to do it rapidly and cost-effectively. He always instructed Diana and her friends to say “swine” rather than “pigs” or “hogs.” To his ears, and in people’s minds, “pig” sounded unclean; “hog” sounded uncouth. And so, when he’d bring piglets into Diana’s grade-school classrooms for show-and-tell, the operative word was “swine.”
    Cathy’s dad, meanwhile, was a soil scientist at Iowa State. Her father considered “dirt” to be a dirty word—a four-letter word. Dirt is what you get under your fingernails when you work in soil. “I study soil, not dirt,” he’d say.
    “Well, soil is also a four-letter word, Dad,” Cathy replied.
    Cathy and her siblings were discouraged from using the word “dirt” in the house, but behind their dad’s back, they jokingly called him “Dr. Dirt.” One day, some of the Ames girls came over to work on their soil-gradation projects for science class. Cathy’s dad helped them, explaining the difference between the D word and the S word, as Cathy rolled her eyes.
    Karla and Sally both had fathers who worked for Iowa’s Department of Transportation, which was based in Ames. Karla’s dad was a civil engineer who designed bridges. Sally’s father was a materials engineer; he handled materials inspection. Both helped build many of the highways now crisscrossing Iowa. They had their own language protocol, too. Whenever the Ames girls were around Sally’s dad, if they were ever referring to a roadway, they had to use the word “concrete,” not “cement.”
    “Cement is a binder. It’s a component of concrete,” Sally’s dad would say. “Highways are made of concrete.”
    Concrete, not cement. Swine, not pigs. Soil, not dirt. The Ames girls took it all under advisement, giggling, but mostly they just focused on their own young lives.
     
     
    I f you’re a kid hanging out with a bunch of other kids in a small town (or even a large city), you don’t ever stop what you’re doing and say, “Hey, wait a second, how did we all get here?” And so, it took years—in some cases, well into adulthood—for the Ames girls to learn the details of how they all ended up being raised within a few square miles of each other.
    Several of the girls’ parents, not surprisingly, first came to Ames to attend or work at Iowa State. Karla’s dad and Diana’s dad both enrolled at the university in 1942. Kelly’s dad, being so much younger, didn’t enroll until 1963.
    A few of the families ended up in Ames by happenstance. Ames sits in the center of Iowa, forty miles north of Des Moines, and people heading due north or south often have little choice but to pass the town on Interstate 35.
    Sally’s parents were born in North Dakota, and in March of 1956, when her dad was ready to graduate from college there, he drove to a job interview in Peoria, Illinois. On the way, he happened to stop in Ames. It had been cold and snowy that day in North Dakota, but Ames was warmer and brighter. He liked what he saw, found a job in Ames as a civil engineer for the Iowa Highway Commission and stayed the rest of his life. In a town with brutal winters and sloppy, slushy springs, Sally’s dad was one of the few residents who actually moved there for the weather.
    Jenny’s family, meanwhile, was in Ames because of an incident that happened on July 4, 1944. Her dad was nine years