CWU LIVING HISTORY PROJECT

Frank Carlson

(Transcription of Tape 1, Side 1)

JP:        [Tape begins mid-sentence] Year 2003, and today we have Frank Carlson as our interviewee, who came to Central in 1967, and went on a phased plan in 1999.  I’m Jean Putnam, the interviewer, and Bob Jones is on the camera.  So to start with, Fred, I’d like to ask you if you would please go back in your youth to your beginnings, and give us a brief history of how you came, eventually, to Central.

FC:      Well I was born in Iowa; I’m an Iowan – old Swede background.  When I was a kid they still spoke Swedish every other Sunday at Church.  Grew up typical kid, farm boy, grease monkey, enlisted in the Army, went to Korea, and I came back and taught school after I graduated for a year in Iowa.

JP:        Where did you graduate from?

FC:      Used to be an Iowa State Teacher’s College, now it’s the University of Northern Iowa.  In December of ’57 snow was up to my waist and I thought, “I’ve lived in Iowa long enough.”  So I came West and I taught school in Sunnyside, and then I took a year and taught school in Salem, Oregon, then I came back to Sunnyside, and I was interested in getting – I finished my Master’s degree back at Iowa State, and I was interested in getting Principal’s papers and maybe starting on a PhD.  I remember April Fool’s day of 1963, a friend of mine and I went to the University of Washington, and I started talking with the Dean of the college, and went down through the Department of [inaudible] Supervision, or whatever it was, and finally the bottom floor, and I almost couldn’t get the forms from the University of Washington secretary so I could start the program – because you know, it was an April Fool’s joke – how could you be a schoolteacher? 

We came back to Ellensburg on our way back to Sunnyside, and I thought, “Why don’t I go in and see what Central’s got?”  And I walked into Black Hall, and Roy Ruebel was there – he was the director of Summer Session and Graduate Dean.  In 1939 he had been a Principal at the high school that I graduated from, and I graduated with five people.  We took the Senior pictures, we just decided whose car was going to be used to take us off to the photographer’s.  So I wound up getting Principal’s papers from Central, and then in ’65 I’d left.  Now I should start this PhD.  I asked to go to Washington State University for a summer assistantship – got a telegram saying “Come for the year,” so I went for the year. 

End of the first year, I applied for a job at Central.  I didn’t realize there were two departments:  one Education, one Student Teaching.  I applied for a job, I believe in Student Teaching, to the Education Department.  They were across the hall – Black Hall – they were 50 feet apart.  My stuff never made it from one department to the other.  I found it later.  So I stayed at WSU for another year.  The next year, here’s an applica—here’s a job.  I applied for a job in the Education Department, but I’d wised up – I sent it to the Student Teaching Department.  So again I was being lost, and finally the Director of the Placement Office, Olson, told me “Just go over there.”  So I called up and drove over.  I talked to the Department for about five minutes, I talked to Wes Brown for about half an hour about airplanes.  [Inaudible] crawling around on the floor.  Um – said “I need to know by Saturday, or I’ll go back to Sunnyside and teach 6^th grade.”  So Saturday morning he called me up, and I had a job at Central.  That’s how we got jobs in the 60’s, as opposed to now.  And so I ended up at Central.  I came for a year.  I had my dissertation yet to do, so I spent the year on that, and I really always intended to go, but I never did.  That was in 1967.

JP:        Good.  Well now how – what was your first responsibility?  What was your rank, and [inaudible]?

FC:      I was an Assistant Prof, and I taught what is now AVCS 311 – then it was Ed 314, the Basic Methods and Materials class, and Social Studies.  And I guess Social Studies was what I was really hired to teach.  And after a couple of years I went off to supervise student teachers, and I did that off and on.  The second year I was here, I was the resident faculty in what was called the Freshman Village – probably the most successful program we’ve ever had.  We got 60 boys, 60 girls, put them in the Freshman co-op dorms.  I believe 95% of them graduated, most of them in three years – four years.  A few in five years.  And if I had ever met any other bunch of kids who were so successful – they graduated in ’72, most of them, so they’re retiring a long time ago.  And then after that, the next year, Con Potter asked if I would experiment with a large class, so in ’69-70 I had two full Profs helping me, two grad assistants and I got a bunch of kids, and we taught 301 Intro to Ed in Michaelson – Michaelson – in O’Connell – McConnell.  So we had about 380 kids per quarter in my class, and what I did was break them into small groups so we had everybody in a group of about 15, and a couple of days a week we met in these small groups all over campus, all over Black Hall, over in the [inaudible] house, and so on.  So it was both big and small, and over the year I probably had about 1200 students in my class.  It was a fun class because Potter had me teach two others besides – just normal, regular classes.  That’s when we had a lot of students.  That was just before the Viet Nam War ended and the numbers went down.

JP:        Now was Con the Department Chair?

FC:      Yeah, he was when I came.

JP:        Okay.

FC:      He was again a few years later – not too many years ago.  Actually, for a long time I didn’t do the same thing two years in a row, and right about – oh, 1969 I began to teach on campus.  For 25 years after I had a class off-campus every quarter.  Some quarters I had four classes off campus.  That was my whole load.  So I’ve been in most of the little dinky towns we’ve been in for all our Extended Degree Centers.  In ’89 I was the Coordinator at South Seattle Community College, where we had a Center – there for a couple of years, and that was a summer session.  Director for a year, till President Nelson came to town.  One of the first things President Nelson told somebody was, “Well I don’t need a Summer Session Director,” so all my friends are calling me up saying, “Carlson, you’re fired!  You’re fired!  You’re gone!”  But I just went back to my Department.  And then, for a couple of years – ’95-97 I was the Director of Certification here in the Dean’s office, and then the last year I went up to Wenatchee – helped run a combination Certification and Masters teaching program, and then I went on phased retirement in ’99.

JP:        Hmm.  Well you were very busy.

FC:      It seemed that way, yeah.

JP:        Well, I wanted to ask you if you – just sort of as an aside here – can remember any humorous events that may have occurred while you were at Central.

FC:      In the summer of 1968 I finished my dissertation in July.  Two weeks before summer session ended I came back to Ellensburg to finish summer school, and I asked Con Potter if I could take the Secretaries out for lunch the last day of summer school, and he said, “Sure, take a couple hours.”  I took four of them down to the Thunderbird, and we thought, “Well let’s go in and have a drink before we have lunch.”  We went into the bar.  Some traveling salesman was there with his company’s credit card, and he was so impressed – I was walking in with these four good-looking women – he bought us a drink, and we said “Thanks,” and we drank it.  He bought us another one.  He bought us five rounds.  We never had lunch!  I took those women back to Black Hall.  I think they’re all gone now, and nobody’s going to see this till we really are all gone, so it’s okay.  I took one of them home.  One of them just sat behind her desk, and a couple of them were kind of struggling along, and I remember the last day of summer school there was Con Potter and Roy Rule checking the grades instead of the secretaries, and I thought I was fired.  I went off to a meeting. 

I went to a professional association meeting, and – oh, for 30 years I had a connection with WEA and NEA, and for a long time I was one of the people involved with boards and commissions and so on in WEA – I think partly because I was from higher Ed, and partly because I had started out teaching in K-12.  So I went up to their constitutional convention, I remember, in 1970, and I was on commissions like Certification, Accreditation, Professional Ethics, and a few others like that.  So for more than 30 years I was in the WEA Directory every year doing something – Board of Directors, once the President of their Higher Education Association, and it was probably – aside from teaching off campus that was probably my other big activity.  I spent a lot of hours with teachers.

JP:        Well you – in terms of – speaking of honors and responsibilities, didn’t you have an honor from WSU?

FC:      Yeah, in 1999, I think, I was the College of Education’s Outstanding Alumna. 

JP:        Oh, that’s wonderful.

FC:      I don’t know exactly what the title of it is, but I got a nice hammer and shield in my office.

JP:        Well great.  Were there any individuals – the could be students, staff, faculty, administrators – that you remember that influenced you in any way while you were here at Central?

FC:      I don’t know about influenced.  The people I remember – of course, Roy Ruebel.

JP:        And was he the Department Chair or Dean?

FC:      No, he was – actually, when I was here, he was a faculty member, I believe, and –

JP:        But what do you remember about him? 

FC:      Just general knowledge.

JP:        Was he effective?

FC:      Oh yeah, yeah.  And of course, Con Potter – he was kind of an organizer.  When I came there was this little Education Department, there was the Department of Student Teaching, and there was Hebeler School, and Con put them all together into one department.  He didn’t put them together – he convinced them they should all be one department.  And for a little while we were very large.  We had, in the early 70’s, 72 FTEs in the Ed Department – 72.  And we had about 84 people filling those FTEs, and we were really the big department on campus, which probably offended a lot of people.  We’ve gone through losing faculty allocations as enrollments changed, and when we got the new building, in, I guess, ’99, we split up into two departments.  And I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but that’s probably just the way it’s going to stay now, for a long time.  People have talked about combining them, but the people who talked about that are all retiring!

JP:        Now what are those two departments, now?

FC:      Teacher Education Programs – and that’s mostly Elementary Ed, AECE, and Special Ed, and the School Administrators are in there for some reason, and then Curriculum and Supervision, which is my department, although I used to teach courses that are in both of them.  But that’s – that’s – because I’m kind of a generalist, and somewhere in the 70s we began to hire specialists that will teach this course, or that course, and so I got kind of left out of that.  I’m just a – what’s there to do.  You know.

JP:        Well speaking of the large department that you had at one point, which was 72 FTE – how did you compare like the Eastern, Western – were we still kind of the leaders in Teacher Education?

FC:      Yeah, we were the largest, I believe, in the State.  Maybe still are.  And I always understood that we had a reputation in the Northwest as the outstanding school.  Nobody from anywhere else ever told me that, but that’s my understanding from here.

JP:        Yeah, right.  Right.

FC:      Let’s see, anybody else?  Oh, two of the best bosses I ever had were Carol Barnes, when she was Director of Extended Programs, and Lin Douglas, when she was Dean, and the Associate Dean, and I was reporting to her.

JP:        Does that speak well for women?

FC:      Yeah, yeah – I thought they were the best bosses I ever had.

JP:        Good.

FC:      George Grossman and I were buddies for almost 30 years, and there are guys like Sam Rust, the Varsity, and Glen Madson.  Bob Carlton was a good boss – good Department Chair.  And then about ’89, when I left to go to South Seattle, I was involved in hiring Osman Alawiye, and Ossy and I good friends, and he’s a good boss.  Then at South Seattle there was David Schroeder running the ECD program.  Now he’s running the TDP Department, so there are some people like that.  And every year there would be two or three students, but you know, there’s thirty plus years of that, you know.

JP:        Right.  Um, what about the organizational changes that have taken place?  I know you’ve seen a lot of it, and I know you have a paper here that you were going to –

FC:      We went from the –

JP:        Do you need this, or –

FC:      . . .small department to the big, mega-department, and I guess just before I came there was a division of some sort.  Wes Crum was the Dean of half the college.  You and I were in his half of the college.  Somebody else was in charge of the other half – I guess you’d call it the academic half – and that’s now been divided into several colleges.  But we had some hope, when we got the new building, we’d get a number of departments out of our allocations – partly so we’d have more influence on campus, and in the thing called the Faculty Senate.  Now we still have, I guess, three or four votes in the Faculty Senate, but we’re always a minority.  And of course, from Teacher Ed – we always thought we were the people supporting the institution – especially those off-campus Extended Degree Centers.  [Inaudible] my department helped create those things, because we had the students there, and really still do, and the departments going out there.  But that’s not to be. 

Now I think we’re going to have some kind of collective bargaining – we’re talking here in 2003 – so the Faculty Senate’s probably going to be – maybe less important politically on campus, and probably deal mostly with the academic side of things, and I don’t know that I see faculty much concerned right now with political power on the campus, because this is a time when the State has no money to spend on us anyway, so what can you get?  Don Garrity did say one – one smart thing.  He said the meanest thing about academic politics is its stakes are so damned small.  Yeah, exactly right.  I believe that.

JP:        Right.  That’s good.  Well – well – well those changes that you’ve seen – do you think those changes were for the best in the Department, or do you think they weren’t?

FC:      Oh for the Department they were good, you know.  I don’t know – dividing the campus up into so many colleges – I’m not really sure that was the best thing.  One big change that happened – when we had the enrollment down there, where we went from – I don’t know – six, seven thousand students down to five, or something like that.

JP:        Was that in the early Seventies, you mean?

FC:      Yeah, early – the Viet Nam War ended.  The institution got strapped for cash.  One result of that is I remember in the fall of ’74 we had a retreat up at Camp Fields in Leavenworth.  President Brooks, Vice President Harrington, and Dave Dillard was the Extended – well, the Continuing Ed guy came out, and we were encouraged to teach some classes off campus as part of our load.  And like I mentioned to [inaudible] Dateburn, we stayed at [saved?] about 80 jobs, according to Ed Harrington, the Vice President.  He told me that when I was the Senate Chair, and I believe we probably did that. 

I remember going to Bremerton to teach a Social Studies class for Continuing Ed, and I started in one room, and I finally went to the lunch room of the Administration Building because they had 56 students there, and they were all a part of my load.  They were a fourth of my load, so that one class, that probably generated one job for somebody.  And we did a lot of that for about five or six years, and then all at once, about ’78, I went over to Normandy Park, and we hired Dusty Brady.  Dusty Brady is a good organizer.  She’s [inaudible].

JP:        And isn’t she still there?

FC:      Yeah.  And she says I’m the best boss she’s ever had.  She’s had a bunch of them.  But anyway.  I will tell the story that she was running this thing called a Center, and actually began to run me!  Anyhow, I went back and forth with her for a lot of years, because I taught classes over at Normandy Park or South Seattle for Highline College just about every year – sometimes every quarter.  But something else happened – the, well, when Garrity came, I guess, all at once the Provost – we didn’t have one before – we just had a Vice President for Academic Affairs – took over just about all the money out of campus.  So most of the time that I’ve been at Central the Deans and Department Chairs haven’t had a whole lot to do with the finances of this institution.  And it’s kind of hard to break the mold, I think.  It took them a few years to do that.  But gradually the Deans have become more independent, and more responsible.  But for a long time – fifteen years, or something – they had nothing to do with where money went.  They just accepted what came.  That was probably necessary, but it probably got done too much.

JP:        Any other changes at Central during your association?  Traditions?  Buildings?  Programs?  Anything else that kind of comes to mind that you recall?

FC:      Almost all the buildings.  You know, when I came, the wildcat shop, which is where the computers are now – that was the bookstore.  The SUB was only half the size.  Black Hall was kind of the North end of the campus as far as structural buildings was concerned.  There was no new library, there was no instructional building, there was no Randall Hall, or Michaelson, or Hogue – they were all just empty fields.  Some task works [?] and some old – I’d say Quonsets, because Quonsets only had a round roof – were north of the railroad tracks.  We had a railroad overpass east of Black Hall.  I remember being up in the corner room at Black Hall watching these trains go by down to Hanford, and now I’ve kind of learned what might have been on them.  They were only about, oh, 100 feet away, and of course, the new SUB is going to go out there now – whatever they call the Student Union Building.  Bouillon was the library, and we were kind of on the North end.  I remember we still had a pond around that little Grupe Conference Center, and I don’t know if anybody remembers, but that little pond was meant to air condition Black Hall.  Did you know that?

JP:        No.

FC:      It was supposed to be – that creek that runs under Lind?  That was going to be run through that pond.  They were going to use like a swamp cooler approach to cool Black Hall.

JP:        Really?

FC:      And of course, now they’ve filled that in and they’ve got a plant.  It used to have fish in it, and junk, and [inaudible] water, and I remember that.  I remember once when Senator Warnekie’s wife was in a class of mine.  I remember sliding a table through one of the glass windows in Black Hall, I looked up and told Bob [inaudible] “I broke a window downstairs.”  He called the building people and they put up a sheet of plywood, ad then they came through – they got a little [inaudible] glass to put in these half-windows, and that was the remodel that we tore out, of course.  I was probably lucky that I didn’t get billed for damaging a window.  Um, let’s see.  No, I think that’s probably about it for the buildings. 

JP:        Well were there any traditions that we might have had back then that we no longer have?

FC:      We had CWSC days.  Just barely.  I never participated.  But once we changed the name of the place, I think we kind of lost that. 

JP:        Mm-hmm.

FC:      One thing I think has changed over time is student’s access to faculty.  The faculty’s here, and the faculty teaches the classes, but for a long time when I was here you could just walk up to a kid and ask how things were going, and they would tell you, and you could figure out some way to solve their problem.  And I think now – um – so much of what the kids life it is is on the computer, and they’re not too aware of what they’re doing – what’s on that.  The faculty has a hard time getting it, and the kids have a hard time getting advice from faculty.  And maybe the faculty now is not the best place to get advice, because maybe we don’t know that much about things.  But I remember just sitting in the second floor of Black Hall late in the afternoon, and kids came in, and “What’s your problem?”  And now it’s kind of hard to do.

JP:        Yeah, right.  Hmm.  Well I think we’re – we are a little less aware as technology takes over our lives.  We just don’t – we don’t seem to have that personal touch.

FC:      That’s what I’m – I don’t know if it’s supposed to be personal or not, but I’m supposed to build something of a – oh – system to keep track of kids as they go through the sequence now.  I mean I think that’s probably [inaudible].  [Inaudible] as an intake, and then getting it back, and keeping it is – I guess keeping it is what we’re going to do.

JP:        Did you – what are your feelings toward that NCATE decision?  Do you think it was the NCATE review?  Do you think that Central changed over the years, and deserved that, or?

FC:      Well we deserved it only in that we had, at the time, a President Nelson who didn’t think NCATE was important.  And of course, when it was all settled and done we had lost a President, and a Provost, and then most of the Deans, and the Department Chair, in my case.  When I was a Summer Session Director, on the one half of me was an acting Department Chair, acting Dean, acting Undergraduate Vice President, acting President, and on the other side of me was acting Undergraduate Dean, acting Provost, acting President.  There was nobody at the top who didn’t have interim or acting in their [inaudible].

JP:        Are you speaking of post-Nelson?

FC:      Yeah.  Yeah.  No, he – he did not take it seriously.  Now I’m from Iowa.  Colleges in Iowa – University of Iowa – he was ignoring that one.  Iowa State, Drake, had all dropped it.  Partly because I think they think it cost too much to satisfy.  I’ve heard it cost us half a million – well, I’ve heard it cost us $250,000 just to get ready for NCATE, and that’s a chunk of money.  It’s probably more now.  So I don’t know if that label is worth that much to us.  If we’re really competitive with other institutions it probably is, but –

JP:        What was the relationship, then, between NCATE and the President?  Does the President report, or influence in some way?

FC:      He just didn’t allow Jimmy Applegate to spend the money to get ready for it.

JP:        Oh, okay.

FC:      And he didn’t think it was important enough to do.  He learned otherwise.  So now we spend a lot of effort on it.  Somebody that really helped us a lot in ’93 when we got it back was Dan Unruh.  Dan Unruh is down in Oregon now, retired, but he is a – he was probably about as plodding a guy as I’ve ever met in the Education Department.

JP:        Well as we come to a close here, are there any other things that you’d like to share that we haven’t really talked about at this point?

FC:      No, not really.  I’ve been here for what, now, thirty-six years?  And I’ve got four more years to go in phased retirement, so in a lot of ways Central is my life, really.

JP:        What are your – do you want to ramp up kind of your feelings of your stint here at Central?  How do you feel about your –

FC:      Well I think we probably made a difference in schools because of the way w treated kids – the way we treated students.  I think we certainly put more effort into turning out good products – good teachers, and I suppose there probably are twelve, fifteen thousand teachers in the State of Washington that’s been in one of my classes.  Still – every once in a while they come and say, “You did a good job,” and that makes it worth it.

JP:        Right.  Well what – how do you feel about Central itself, as you’ve served it over the years?

FC:      I wish it were a little less bureaucratic – a little more open-ended, I suppose.  I wish we had created something like a faculty club, because I see names of people on email that I don’t recognize – never seen them.  And of course, when I came this place was just starting to grow.  I came in the year when they hired about 70 or 80 people, and the next year 70 or 80, and the next year 70 or 80, and I know we had 13 new people in Teacher Education the year I came – just in that department – thirteen – most of them [inaudible] supervisors.  Well, we knew each other.  We were all down close to [inaudible], and somehow in the Seventies we just got split apart.  Now we have – I suppose it’s good – we have departments that have their own buildings, and they have their own students, and pretty soon they’re going to put up wire around them so nobody can get at them, and they can’t get anybody else, and I think that’s kind of unfortunate, because we used to be kind of a – oh, an open place. 

In 1970 when I had that big class – well, one way to make the small groups work, I remember, was to have college students help me, and I had Barb Rougel take three, and Don Murphy took three, and I took about six or seven, and I had some other senior students – I went to talk to the kids back from student teaching, and some of them said, “Here, I’ll come and do that.”  Twice a week they’d meet with 12-13 kids.  What I did was give them some credits of individual study, and for a little while in the fall quarter Tom Bonner was [inaudible] teacher, or [inaudible].  And then he began to say, “Oh, we shouldn’t do this.  But I knew the custodians.

JP:        [Interrupting]  Good thing to know.

FC:      [Inaudible]  The custodian would let me in at night, and I’d use Con Potter’s stamp and stamp these blasted forms so I had enough help.  He never knew that.  I remember one other – well, he probably – maybe you have higher standards than I do, but this is what we used to be able to do, and I was supervising student teachers in Yakima in the spring of ’72 – the end of winter quarter – and [inaudible] brought  me a guy who had taken a job in West Valley School District as a Principal, but he had no Master’s degree, and he needed one to get the job.  So we talked down at Adams Elementary School, on the hood of my car.  He had done 45 credits – he had his fifth year done.  And at the time, you could count 15 credits, you know, to going to the Master’s program. 

“So okay – let’s count these, these, these towards it.  Now you go register for 15 credits this spring.” 

“How can I do that?” 

“You register for this and that – you register for six credits of thesis this Spring.”  The guy took his GREs in the Spring, and we did his program.  Came to Summer, “Well you take this, this, this, this, this, okay?”  Now it took a while for the paperwork to move, like it always does, and so this guy’s paperwork made it to the Education Department, and when I got done he’d scheduled his oral with Roy Ruebel and Joe [inaudible] and me down in about room 208, Black Hall, second floor.  And I hung around the office, and Flossie Simpson, the secretary, let me know when Con Potter signed the form and admitted the guy on probation.  And I went down the hall and completed his oral, and I told him, “You cannot turn these papers in until the end of next week, because you got to be admitted before you get finished.”  And I can’t imagine that happening now.  For anybody [inaudible] enough to do that now.

JP:        No.  I’m sure he must have been very appreciative of your efforts to get him through the program.

FC:      Oh yeah.  Yeah, he was, and Joe was.  Joe’s got a daughter who’s now a student teacher this fall.  He’s trying to beat up on Aussie so I’ll be her supervisor for student teaching.  Some stuff lasts a long time.

JP:        Well Frank, this has been very interesting.  Do you have any questions, Bob?

BJ:       I know you were pretty deep in all the collective bargaining at various times.  Would you care to comment on that?

FC:      Well, I went around and tried to get people to sign those cards, and I guess once I did – um, we always thought that we would have collective bargaining here at the colleges, and we really wanted it – the WEA really wanted it.  So I used to go on [inaudible] for the WEA, and once I wouldn’t have had a job except I was making $17,500 working for Central, and the WH [inaudible] only paid $17,000.  So my friends didn’t let me take it.  “We can’t have you take a salary to earn less.”  And I almost shot them!  It was over at Puget Sound, and down in Olympia, and it would have been a fun thing to do.  Of course at the time, that was a pretty good salary. 

When Garrity came, I remember I was the Senate Chair the year he came.  [Inaudible], in the Spring of ’78, and I were on a grievance committee, and he thought, “You know, we should elect somebody like you to be Senate Chair.”  And I thought, “Why should he do that?”  “Well, because you’re going to get promoted to full Prof, and it’ll take that away from you.  You’ve been her a while.  You can’t be hurt.”  So I went from being not in the Faculty Senate to being the Senate Chair, and I remember Don Garrity complaining to me that he was only making $50,000 a year, which was $2000 more than Jim Brooks did in his last year as President.  Some salaries, you know, went up pretty fast.  I was making about half of that, I suppose, at the time.  But what the WEA tried to do was get collective bargaining for Higher Ed, and – no, really, most people in Higher Ed know much about it, or care much about it. 

When I came, everybody in the Department belonged to the WEA.  When I retired, I’m the only person that did, because they just gradually dropped out of what they thought was a union, as opposed to a professional association.  We came close, I believe, in the middle Seventies – maybe ’76.  I remember “73-74 I was the President of the Association of Higher Education in WEA, and it was probably after that we got a bill in the Legislature – Community Colleges, four-year Colleges collective bargaining – and the [inaudible – sounds like “W obvious”] came to me – Bob Fisher – and said, “Frank, we can get one.  We can’t get two.”  I remember saying, “Take the one you can get.”  We got Community Colleges.  I thought we’d come back and get us the next year.  Well, it took 20 years to come back and get us, but all the time I was – you know – trying to get our faculty here involved in WEA commissions and committees.  I did, off and on, and I was always involved in them.  Now [inaudible] collective bargaining [inaudible].  I don’t know – now, the way the budgets are coming from the State I don’t – if we ever get to the place where this place could set its own tuition, that way you could bargain for money to get it from the tuition.

JP:        Yeah, yeah you could.

BJ:       What were your experiences in the Senate?  Were they – was that a good experience?

FC:      Yeah, it was.  We were in Edison Hall where they have that fancy horse now, over by Mitchell, and Esther Peterson and I – Esther was the secretary – we managed to convince Garrity, and I suppose faculty, too, that we ought to have a Salary Schedule.  I came from K-12, and still, I was from K-12, and I couldn’t understand having a salary scale where you could put here, or there, or there, you know, and had nothing to do with any kind of regularity.  So what I did was print up copies of the Salary Schedules of Tukwila, and Seattle, and a few other places K-12, and I just distributed them on campus.  And must have jarred some folks, you know?  Kindergarten teacher in Yakima is making more than I am as a full Prof – you know?  And they were, depending on how much experience they had.

The Senate Budget Committee had people like Claire [inaudible] on it, and I can’t remember who else.  Peter from Philosophy was my Vice President.  Corwin King was in there somewhere.  Um – we got the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Executive Committee to agree that a Salary Schedule would be a good thing, and we had it – we had it for a couple of years.  We went from 48 half steps to 40 steps, and you could get to 36 just with the passage of time and keeping your nose clean.  The last four were going to be for merit.  And after two or three years the Faculty Senate killed it, I guess.  It was probably while I was out supervising student teachers or something that they decided to end it because it was rewarding people who weren’t doing so well.  Now I was told by Ham Howard that originally, after 1947 there was a Salary Schedule that had all those half steps in it.  The first thing that happened was the institution told the faculty, “Well, we don’t have enough money for everybody.”  So the full Professors gave up their step on the salary schedule.

(Transcription of Tape 1, Side 2)

FC:      The next year – “We don’t have enough money for everybody!”  So the Specialty Profs gave up theirs, and the next year nobody asked the Assistant Profs – there were no steps then automatic in the Salary Schedule.  He told me that’s what happened.

JP:        Oh really.

FC:      Somewhere in the Fifties, I guess.  So, was it a good experience?  That was the year we had Garrity’s inauguration – had Hiyakawa here.  It was, I guess, a good year.  I learned some things.  Whether in the Freshman Village, or teaching that big class, or being Senate Chair, I always found out somebody on campus who could do something for me – somebody in Administration, or somebody in Mitchell Hall, or Barge that I could call up and ask, “Can you do this?”  “Yeah, I can do that.”  I’ve never asked for anything impossible.  So I think it usually worked.

JP:        Well good.

BJ:       What about your community involvement?  I know you’ve been involved in a hospital, and what not.

FC:      Well for a long time I didn’t have any real interaction with the community.  Then in, oh, I guess ’93 – well my wife was involved in the community, and all that.  I’ve got two kids right now in the National Guard.  One of them’s getting ready to go to Kuwait, probably, or not, and the other one is – he’s a Captain up at Fairchild, and my third one is my musician in Germany.  He had some talent from one side or the other of our family, and I remember he wanted to be a dancer – he saw a movie with Baryshnikov in.  And the first year we couldn’t find any dancing shoes for him here in town, and the next year we could, so he was with Christine Patterson.  He began winning awards right away because he was really a good dancer.  That’s when he was about 12 or 13.  When he was 15 he got a scholarship to Cornish – full ride, four years, room and board, tuition, high school – worth $50-60,000.  But he was 15, so we got him a GDD and he became a college freshman at 15.  We found a place for him to live half a block from Cornish, up on Pill Hill.  Well – Capitol Hill.  And we stayed with him for a couple of weeks.  He had to cross one street to get to Cornish – just one street – half a block away, and I turned up the hill towards the Safeway store on Capitol Hill and I saw him at the corner waving at us – My God!  Next week he’s going to be picked up on the street, and the truant officer is going to ask him, “Why aren’t you in school?” 

“I am in school!” 

“What school?” 

“I’m in College.”

“You’re too young to be in college!”  (He’s fifteen).  And I could see the paper – the Daily Record – saying “College Prof abandons child in Seattle.”  But he graduated at the age of nineteen, from college, and he went to Germany – began – after about three weeks he decided there was no future in dancing.  He was classically trained.  Whatever her name is Russell with Pacific Northwest Ballet actually wanted him to come and stay  with her, and become a part of Pacific Northwest Ballet – he was that good.  Maybe better than that.  But after three weeks he decided all they wanted in Germany, or Europe, are guys to lift women.  That’s all they do – stand around and lift the women.  So he went back to music, and he started playing music in a puppet theater, and now he’s got a little orchestra, a little band, and he writes music for the Schwerin Opera House, and he goes mostly in Germany, but around here, I think.  And you know, I’m not really sure how I got there except that that was our connection with the community.

Then in ’93 I was riding my bike around the condominium and Bill Kern stopped me and asked how I was, what was going on, and said, “You know, there’s a vacancy on the hospital board and you should apply for it.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Well, you’d just be a good person to have on the hospital board.”

So I did, and I got the job.  I won one election to finish two years, and I won another one to finish six, and I suppose I’ll do another one now.  And of course, the hospital’s kind of interesting because it has changed quite a lot just in the time I’ve been on the board.  I keep telling them I represent the condominium, and they keep telling me no, you represent the community.

One of the things that I was going to say about the old days, when we were a more collegial place – I told you I got these kids to help me with my big class, and at noon I would simply say, “Let’s go have lunch.”  And okay, and I’d toss a faculty member and two or three kids in my car and we’d go down to what was called the Baron, I think – later became Goofy’s, and burned down, you know, where the Phoenix thing is – the main thing.  And a lot of faculty had connections with kids and groups of kids.  Now we’d practically be afraid of harassment charges, I suppose.  I just ended that.  But I used to go to meetings with college kids and never think a thing about it.  Not any more, I guess, but we used to be a much friendlier place.  So I wish we could go back to that.  And that’s about it.

JP:        Okay, thank you very much, Frank, for spending your time with us today.