Three generations of the Chiodo/Harrison family, members of DMU’s Grand Family Society, were students on the campus at 3200 Grand Ave. in Des Moines, although the institution and experience were very different for each.
Des Moines University’s 3200 Grand Ave. property holds a special place in the hearts and lives of three generations of the Chiodo and Harrison families. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Nancy Chiodo, later Harrison, walked these grounds when they were home to St. Joseph Academy, a Catholic girls’ school founded in Des Moines in 1884.
“Once upon a time, the robed teaching order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with their boxed white wimples, guided their charges through the ups and downs of teenage life and to their future vocations,” Nancy reflected in a recent essay. “In those years, St. Joseph Academy opened its entrance doors to a gleaming oak staircase that led to dormer rooms for young girls who boarded there and to convent cells for the nuns who cared for and taught them.”
That all changed in 1972 when the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery —now DMU — purchased the property and reconfigured it as a graduate medical institution.
“Where once young girls in their navy and gray wool uniforms walked down leafy/snowy Grand Avenue to catch the streetcar, now young men and women in short white jackets hurried to their classrooms,” reminisced Nancy, who graduated from St. Joseph Academy in 1953. “The stained glass chapel windows were covered with acetate curtains. The gym that once held sock hops and girls in blue bloomers playing basketball were replaced with fitness equipment. Classrooms where young girls once held Latin missals, now students held anatomy tomes.”
Those students eventually included Nancy’s son David Harrison, D.O.’92, who enrolled at the medical school — again renamed, then the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences — in the late 1980s. He now is a family medicine physician at MercyOne Ankeny Family Medicine in Ankeny, Iowa.
Three decades after he graduated from DMU, his son Benjamin Harrison, D.O.’24, also passed through the doors at 3200 Grand as a student amid the COVID-19 pandemic. His journey marked another milestone in the property’s history: Benjamin is a member of the first class to graduate from the university located at its new home 14 miles west on Grand in West Des Moines. DMU retains the 3200 Grand property with plans to establish a regional simulation training center there for students of several central Iowa institutions.
“In 2023, Des Moines University opened new doors in West Des Moines, to a modern, perhaps historic, medical school — for students from throughout the world,” Nancy wrote. “The last of three generations have crossed the threshold of what once was St. Joseph Academy.”
Their family ties make the Harrisons members of DMU’s Grand Family Society, which honors alumni whose parents, grandparents, siblings, children, aunts, uncles and cousins are also university graduates or current students. Are you a DMU Grand Family? Let the university know so that it can celebrate and honor you and your loved ones.
