Shipley, Jerry James (11/29/39–1/13/96). For the first two and a half years at Grinnell, I knew Jerry Shipley only by reputation: he was a brilliant and a very serious student. His heavy black-rimmed glasses and his intense manner made him a formidable person. His reputation was backed by solid accomplishment: the prize for the best academic record our freshman year, Phi Beta Kappa, in the Fall of our senior year, honors in economics and Alumni Association Senior Award.
Over the balance of our college years, I was able to get underneath the intimidating exterior shell to find a very witty person who was trying just like the rest of us to find his place in the world. We both were involved in student government and the senior men’s honorary society. We also were in a very demanding and rewarding course, the Political Economy Seminar with Professors John Dawson, Harold Fletcher and Joe Wall.
After we graduated, Jerry and I worked the following summer for Professor Dawson in the basement of Burling Library manually cranking calculators to grind out flow-of-funds numbers. Later that summer the three of us drove to Washington, D.C. to discuss these numbers with people at the Federal Reserve Bank headquarters.
It was that summer while living together that I discovered that Jerry was an excellent cook. I also learned we had similar backgrounds. We came from small Iowa towns although Jerry’s (Ames) seemed like a metropolis to me. We were only sons. We were not close to our fathers who had not gone to college and who had low status jobs (Jerry’s was a barber). Our mothers, on the other hand, had some university education, and Jerry’s, as I recall, was a secretary at Iowa State University. We both were diligent, good students who saw educational success as the way out of this background.
Jerry went to graduate school in economics at Stanford and received a M.A. degree in 1963. For reasons I never knew, however, he never received a Ph.D. after three additional years of graduate study at Stanford. From 1966-71 he taught economics at University of Maryland.
The next 11 years, 1971-1982, he was a staff economist at the Office of Management and Budget; one of the OMB Directors for whom he worked was David Stockman. He then worked as an economist for several trade associations until his death in 1996.
Jerry married another Grinnell classmate, Judy Clyde, and they had two sons, Adam and Peter.
By Duane W. Krohnke
