Caroline Dieterle

(current) Iowa City resident

(Nov. 1, 1991) Daily Iowan Librarian, Advising Center liaison for UI Physics Department

Nov. 1 had already been a rather fateful day in my life for several reasons. So on Nov. 1, 1991, I was being careful and conservative, as I tried to be on Nov. 1 annually. I was working at both the Undergrad Advising Center and The Daily Iowan, and I went to work at the Advising Center as usual that day, despite its being also my birthday.

Tensions on campus had been running high for a couple of weeks. Not only was it midterms time, but the administration had made some very unpopular decisions. I can’t remember what they were — you’d have to look at issues of the DI for the preceding weeks to find out. So advisers were a bit on edge, and “violence” (e.g., maybe sit-ins? protests? Which ironically were considered “violent” back then) would not have been unexpected. So when we got the call to lock down and admit no one to the Advising Center and stay there ourselves because there was a gunman shooting people in [Jessup], it was just much worse than what we had expected might happen.

RELATED: Covering a tragedy: the UI’s 1991 shooting

Everyone was shocked. I wondered whether I could leave to go to the DI newsroom to file that day’s paper. We then heard about the fatalities in Van Allen and that the gunman had shot himself in the end, and most of the advisers left the Center. I learned that Dwight Nicholson was among those lost, and I grieved; I was the Advising Center liaison to the Physics Department, and he was my contact there. He was such a nice guy — always available, genuinely interested in students, easy and pleasant to work with. It was so tragic to lose him.

I went by the newsroom and was proud to see how the staff had leapt into action to cover the story and was getting out a special edition. When I filed the Friday paper, the place was usually deserted, but on that day it was certainly not. Since there was nothing I could do to help, I decided to get out of the way and go home to use the phone. I wanted to call a close friend who had just left teaching at UI to accept a position in the history department at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and who knew my history with Nov. 1.

When I got there, there was a voice message to call him ASAP — he hadn’t heard about what happened in Iowa City but wanted to tell me about a shocking shooting that had occurred in Clarksville that day, too.