“This is the first year I’ve had no first name,” said Dieter Dieter ’03, the only student in the Grinnell directory with the same first and last name. Eliminating his first name, getting arrested for locking himself to other students, and having a two-pronged goatee have been some of the highlights of Dieter Dieter’s ’03 Grinnell experiences.
When it became an option last year for students to edit their directory information, Dieter wanted to eliminate the field for his first name completely, but the online system would only let him edit it. As such, he changed the listing of his legal first name, Justin, to his high school nickname, Dieter, which he has gone by almost exclusively at Grinnell. Dieter’s friends in high school started calling him by Dieter, a common German first name, because there were four other Justins in his class. Family and close friends are the only people who still call him by Justin, “except for profs and people here that just don’t get it,” he said.
For his first three years at Grinnell, Dieter was distinguishable from far distances by his lengthy, double-pronged goatee. At his high school graduation, his friends wanted to see him clean-shaven, so he shaved for them. “Afterwards, I decided to just grow it out,” he said. This past summer hot weather was enough persuasion for him to shave it off, although he still has a full beard.
Some of Dieter’s fondest moments at Grinnell have been with FTP, which he has been involved in since his first year. During his first year, Dieter was arrested with a group of students from Grinnell and Drake who were pressuring Menards to improve their environmental standards. As a protest to Menards practices, five or six students, including Dieter, locked themselves around a light poll with U-locks around their necks. By a fluke, the police found the person who was holding all of the keys, unlocked them, and put them into jail for 17 hours. The arrest did not deter Dieter, who said, “since then, no arrests, but I have to locked myself to a lot of other people.”
As a crowning moment to his FTP career, Dieter helped throw the banner over a store sign at the most recent FTP protest, two weeks ago, the group’s first successful attempt.
Although he has not been arrested in the past three years, he has been banned from many office supply stores, including all of the Office Max and Menards stores in Des Moines and the entire BSB building, the tallest building in Des Moines. “I guess there are quite a few forbidden places for me,” he said, with a grin on his face. Dieter will graduate next week with degrees in Biology and Philosophy.
—Brian Clites