Born and raised in a Minnesota town of 700, Loriene Roy had never experienced anything quite like the UI campus before moving here for grad school in January 1983 from Yuma, Ariz.
"The U of I seemed serious to me, full of intelligent people, all working and learning in the middle of corn fields," she says. "And people came there from all over the world — the speakers, the teachers, the students, the performing artists."
The past president of the American Library Association and a longtime faculty member at the University of Texas, Roy came here for her Ph.D. after earning her master's from the University of Arizona.
"I arrived as a new doctoral student but it felt like my first real college experience was at UIUC," she says. "There was a real Quad and brick buildings. And a great library.
"I remember getting stuck in the tunnel with what seemed to be hundreds of undergraduates during a tornado warning. I remember when Farm Aid was on campus. I studied in the library, working on the literature review of my dissertation, but I could hear the crowd."
Other memories:
— “Hearing a young girl play the fiddle at the Sweetcorn Festival. Didn’t hear her sing. She was Alison Krauss.”
— “Halloween on Green Street. I remember a group dressed as foosball players, complete with long tubes they used to connect their arms.”
— “I had had lots of lunches in a cafeteria on campus — one run by the home ec students. Really good prices and great food, including the pear pie.”
— “Flowers blooming after a long winter: dogwood trees, tulip trees, bulbs.”
— “I could smell the cheese from the Kraft factory."
