CWU LIVING HISTORY PROJECT

ED KLUCKING

Interviewer: Bob Jones

 Camera Person: Jean Putnam

Jones: Today we are interviewing Dr. Ed Klucking. And the Interviewer is Bob Jones; the camera person is Jean Putnam. And first of all, Dr. Klucking, we’d like to have you give us some idea of your background, your education background, as well as your personal history, for that matter.

Klucking: Like I mentioned before, probably born at the start of the Depression in ‘29. In fact I was born in Minnesota. A small town. Grew up, went through high school; the usual thing. Joined the Navy. I was in the Navy from, I joined the Navy in 1948 and I enlisted for three, those were the years, you know, that you had to get some military service and they usually went into the Army for two, but I opted to the Navy for three because I really don’t like fooling around with guns, you know, except the big ones. Navy ships, and going in from the Navy, then I bounced all around. I became an “Airographer”, which, collect weather data, so I was training in the Lakes, Great Lakes, down to Memphis and Lakehurst, Jersey and off to California, and then I went up to Hawaii for two years, set to come back from Hawaii for discharge and the Korean Conflict broke out. And then I did my Truman year. That is, I was extended for another year. When I came home after getting extended I decided to get married. My wife, she had gone through college when I was in the Service. She went to a small liberal arts school in Minnesota, Gustavus. I enrolled in Adolphus McAllistoer College in St. Paul. And one benefit of the Navy was that I got the G.I. Bill. And I went through and I got a degree in Geology and a minor in Botany. And I got done and went to major professor, and this is something that never changes, I said, “Well, what do I do now’?” And he said, “There are no jobs out there for you. What you have to do is go to graduate school.” And I said, “Where, what graduate school?” And he said go to the best. So he got me in, well, not in. He told me to write to a man at Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley. I wrote him and he was a Paleobotanist. And so I went out there to become a Paleobotanist. Bonnie came out there with me, that’s my wife, and she got a job then. The man out there actually was very helpful in getting her a job teaching in school in Oakland which was the first time she’d ever seen blacks, you know, out there, and she had a mixed classroom. Pretty rough, but she did a good job. And I had a “T.A.’ship” at Berkeley, and went straight through for a Ph.D.. there. That’s the way you did in those days. They really didn’t go for a Masters. And then about in the fall of 1959 George Beck was the Geologist up here at Central, wanted to retire, and get out, and he actually wanted to retire in September, and he called down to Chaney because George was interested in fossil wood and he wanted a Paleobotanist up here. And so he called Chaney, that was my major professor at Berkeley, and Chaney said, “Why don’t you go up there and take that job?” It was really hard in those days with all these resumes and stuff you know. So I came up here for an interview in February. 1 just came up in a sport shirt and everything. I had no idea what kind of weather they had in Washington. See California was pretty nice. They came up here, and I remember Ed Lind met me and took me to the old Antler’s Hotel. And put me up there, and he said, “Don’t you have any clothes?” I said, No, I didn’t think it would be this cold up here,” you know. And so they showed me around town and they had, probably about a half hour meeting with them, and then talked all this stuff over, gave me the job, shook hands with Wes Crum, and I think the President at that time might have been Perry.

Putnam: Interim.

Klucking: Yea, interim. Perry. And so went back and, but they wouldn’t give me the job here because, you see, I’d been going straight through for a Ph.D.. and they wanted a Masters at least, so I had to take November and December and get my Masters degree done at Berkeley so I could come up here and accept this job. And then Bonnie had a commitment too, at least through winter quarter down there, I think, at the school. So I came up here alone and worked on my Ph.D.., my thesis, I had passed the orals, everything but the thesis, and I came up here and started, and George just took off. And I took over in Geology and I was the only Geologist there. And, God, those were the days. I tell you, the Sixties. I never, Berkeley, when I went to Berkeley, you could feel the excitement in the air, you know? It just was to me, a very good school. But we came up here and I think there were about seventy, seventy-five maybe, faculty members. So we got to know everyone pretty quickly.

Putnam: What was the date you came?

Klucking: This was...I started the first part of January, the first of January in 1960.

Putnam: OK.

Klucking: And there were about seventy, seventy-five people, and that’s when we had the Division of Science and Mathematics. A Division of this and that, and so you got all these people, you get to know them, you know. There was some of that “aliveness” that was Berkeley. The thing is Berkeley is, California area is a little fast life, you were in a fast zone down there, and if you could get that excitement without that speed in the fast lane, you know, that express lane, then you panic, and we had, there’s a lot of young people, I always believed the make up, for example, of a faculty should be one-third, one-third, one-third. It’s the way you make a good Margarita, incidentally. One-third lime twist, one-third orange liquor, and one-third tequila. Try it! But any way the faculty should be that way, too. You should have the young faculty come in because they’ve got wild ideas and they don’t have any restraints yet. And I think it’s the middle faculty, that kind of a middle age type, that’re supposed to nail this down, you see, and take the best ideas and incorporate it. And then use the older faculty for wisdom. And that goes along with, but you see when we came in, we got almost all the young people all at once. And they were building so rapidly. And the faculty got, went pretty young and you got a whole lot of young people there, and it was alive, and then when they got James Brooks, as he came in President, brought the Symposium. That’s when, you see, that was really tremendous for the intellectual atmosphere on this campus. One of the best things they’ve ever had at Central was that Symposium. I think it went, what, four years? Four or five years. And then some of the Professors began to complain that students were taking off, you see, and not attending the Symposium. And they began to restrict it, and restrict it, and restrict it. And in this sense, all through, all of this in all society you always have a clash between order and freedom. You see, and this is half the.. .when you’re growing there’s a hell of a lot more freedom than there is order. That’s why I was talking about this book on the Depression, you see, when Roosevelt came in, my God, there was much freedom because he didn’t know what to do. Everyone’s ideas were tried and if they were no good, and they pass ‘em on, pass ‘em on. But then when you start getting that order down and you begin to clamp down on the freedom a little bit. And that first crept in back in the Sixties. I don’t think I’ve had a better period in my life, other than my childhood. I had a very, very happy childhood.

Jones: Well, how long did you stay in Geology Department?

Klucking: In the Geology Department, actually I was teaching Biology and Geology because I, see my degree is in Paleontology, so I can really teach Botany, and I can teach Geology, and when they made, started on a new building Biology, and they separated the two, then I had, they gave me an option, do you want to stay down here in Geology and do you want to go up into Biology. And all my friends were in Biology, so I said I’ll go up in Biology.

Jones: When did that happen?

Kiucking: It’s, I think Dean Hall was completed.. .1 thought 1970 that we moved in, but either ‘70 or 60, the fall of ‘69, 1969, we moved in Dean Hall. And then they had one or twQ people down in Geology at that time. But I had been in Geology, probably Mr. Geology, well, THE geology Department for ten years.

Jones: Oh, really.

Kiucking: Yea, and it, it was so nice because, you know, we’d teach our classes and then we could go on a field trip. We went on a field trip almost all the time when it was nice, and if they had cars available and they could hop in their van and go off and look for fossils. We started a Paleo Club and we had four or five students that were just gung-ho. Two of them got their Ph.D.’s now. One is the director of Peace Corps. She is really sharp. But, what a time.

Jones: At the time that you came into the Biology Department, is that the point in time when the Geology Department was expanded, or...?

Klucking: Oh, I don’t know if it expanded, but what we did put through was, the couple Geology courses, you know, you start out a little rough when you come into a new teaching job because you bring your Alma Mater curriculum with you. I can remember Marshall Mayberry in Botany, dear man, he watched me teach Botany, he’d sit in and he had comments. And one day he said to me, he said, “You don’t have to teach ‘em everything you learned in graduate school.” You know that it’s true. It’s true because in the case of Dr. Hosford, mycologist, we were talking of, we talked a lot about how to handle courses and stuff, and the first one or two or three years here is like walking a plank. You’re just afraid to get off of that plank, you know, because you’d have to digress from the material, you don’t have the knowledge to do that. You’re idea is to go from one test to the other, you see, that type of thing, which after about four or five years you get away from, you get away from and you start to doing a lot of different things with the class and that’s when it becomes exciting, but you see the first four years as exciting because you’re setting up, you’re setting up and it’s very interesting to organize it and then see if it works, if it doesn’t you say, “Oh, that didn’t work. Let’s cancel.” That type of thing, you know.

Jones: What was your beginning rank?

Kiucking: Me? God, I don’t know if they started then.. I think janitor? No. What is the lowest they come in?

Jones: Lecturer, I think.

Putnam: Instructor, or...

Klucking: No, they really didn’t have Lecturer then. It was Instructor, and I think the salary probably between eight and nine thousand, which was a cut in pay because we were coming from graduate school where I had a T.A. and Bonnie taught in grade school. My God, we had to take a cut in pay. And then when we got here, I lived in an apartment house for one month. I think all I had was an Army cot and an electric fry pan. I went down to Sprouse-Reitz and got a sheet to hang, bought a sheet to hang over the window because I didn’t have curtains or anything. The Wibergs took me in. You know that’s something in that era, those Sixties, too, being small you got to know people from every department, and any function, social functions, you went to, you usually see people from every department. Now days, when you get big, you’re... the social functions are usually restricted to, like Biology at the present time is about fourteen professors. Well you get those in there. That’s all they do. (Unknown word) Biologists, (Unknown word) That I think is really a shame, that and the destruction of the environment, that’s another...

Jones: Did you make full professor in the Biology Department or in the Geology Department?

Klucking: Biology.

Jones: What?

Klucking: Biology. I got up to full professor, how do they go? Associate professor in Biology, but I never, in those days we figured it took probably about ten, twelve years to get full. And I remember I was going on sabbatical, I got it the year before I went on sabbatical. No, I got it in 1970. Yea. Seventy, the year I/we moved up there. Which was a shock to me because lot’s of other stuff

Jones: I don’t know why they put this question in here, but it says, “Did you officially retire?”

Klucking: Ha! I think that has to do with the pay. I don’t teach any course.. .I’m not on phase. I do have an office over in Dean Hall, and I’m doing active research at this time. In fact I have a series of books that I’m working on, and I have promised the publisher that I would do nine volumes and I’m just finishing the eighth volume which means I have to do another volume.

Putnam: What is that?

Jones: Leaf Venation Patterns thing?

Klucking: Yea.

Jones: So you have one more volume to go.

Klucking: Uh huh. I spent all morning, I had a glitch over here, I was trying to run it off Photo-ready, and there was a glitch over here in the Wildcat shop between the instructions I gave and the instructions that the computer wanted to take. See, obviously, I had to give in. So I imagine I’ll send that one off to publication next week which...

Jones: This has turned out to be a long term project, hasn’t it?

Klucking: Yes it has, and now see we’re jumping ahead to research, but the way that started out, I came up here as a Paleontologist and with our classes, I would take the class, that was one thing nice, too, about the school, you could teach your classes out in the field, of course, you bad students that wanted to go out in the field, you know, they don’t have the mobility now. Where every week end they go off some place else in their car. So they have to work, you see, it never seemed to be the problem. The Sixties, I don’t know why, but we’d take them out in the field and we collected fossils for about twenty-five years. And ALL this material, you see, the sights are, well they aren’t depleted, but if you go to a road cut and start digging for fossils, pretty soon you get to the point where you can’t dig there any more because they’re going to fall down on you. So we’re at that point, to seeing when they do fall down they cover sights, but the point I’m getting at in terms of this Leaf Venation series, all this stuff, these are plant that are tropical area here at central Washington, and how do you identify them? The only way you can identify fossils is by comparing them to something that is living at the present time. And when you have plants then you identify them by take a leaf, I have to identify it by comparing them with leaves of plants that are living at the present. Well, this is pretty well, if the flora or fossils that you’re dealing with are temperate because, you know, we are trained in temperate, let’s face it, we’re all temperate people, we know nothing about tropical diseases, tropical plants, so we had a hard time identifying these plants. And when you want to identify them you’d have to pack ‘em up in boxes and go down to some place where they had a herbarium. This is a place where they collect plants, living plants, you know, they put them on sheets and identify them so people want to look to see what they look like. They can go in these places and look at them, like Berkeley has one, probably about two million sheets. Mexico, Philippine Islands, so the idea that I had then rather than carry those fossils that...take a leaf from one of those sheets and bring it up here. And then you could, well, what good would... if only I did that? See, why not put those sheets/leaves in a book and let everyone see them? But then you ask, go through this whole process of bleaching and all that, well I did that for about ten years until, I thought, where am I going with this? I was on sabbatical and a guy told me, in Holland that he had a friend in Germany who would publish that stuff. And so I went to see this man in Northern Germany ,Jay Kramer, he publishes manuscripts. See, you can’t get it done in the United States because you’ve got so damn many plates in there. I mean pictures. If I have a hundred and fifty plates, no publishing company would touch that. So these really are academic, or esoteric, what-have-you, for people in the field, and see what I get out of it. You see how rich I am now. Ha! But you know I get ten books free. That’s it. But you see the point is, people now look at these fossils at other places, they’re actually using them in South America now in Venezuela they’re out in the field, they can compare and use it.

Jones: Well it’s the only publication of its kind, isn’t it?

Klucking: Yea, yea, well there was one in eighteen sixty-eight or something- Von Ettinghause. God, he did beautiful work. Yeah, but this is, I know of no other that has this type of thing.

Jones: When did your first volume come out?

Klucking: Nineteen eighty-five, or eighty-six.

Jones: So you’ve been in progress up to this point which will be twelve years, as far as publication was concerned.

Klucking: As far as publication about twelve years, probably the last one should come out in probably ninety-eight, early ninety-nine. I do have much more material. See, what I have to do, that’s what I used the sabbatical for, to collect the leaves from the herbarium to bring them back here to put into these books. See. And it all worked out pretty nice over a period of time.

Jones: How does all this stuff fit in your office?

Klucking: All these racks? All those leaves?

Jones: The leaves and the fossils and...

Klucking: Right now they’re down in a kind of a store-room office, you see. And I have a lot of space, but it’s really messy. The fossils we’ve got all kinds over at the physical plant, they want to get rid of and...

Jones: You used to have some stuff over in one of these old Quonset buildings.

Klucking: Yea, and when they tore that down we had to move that. And they changed the working shop down in the basement, what the.. .maintenance section on the basement of Dean Hall and they put, built shelves so that I could put about one-fourth of the collection in there, the collection that had been worked on, fossils. The rest we had apple boxes from down at Yakima. Hired a couple of kids to label them all and move them to the physical plant, and there they sit.

Jones: I guess you’ve already told us that you taught in another department. Have you taught in any others other than the Geology and Biology?

Klucking: No, no, when I was over in Biology, I went full time in Biology in about the fall of sixty-nine or seventy. And then I think it was in the Eighties when there was a deal where they were going to make some people redundant, what they called reduction in force, and then they asked me if I would teach a Geology course or two to help them out, you see, because number one, Biology was overloaded for the number of students that they had, and to relieve that then if I taught a Geology course this would take the load off this, so I taught a couple Geology courses for six, seven, eight years. Then they got some new Geologists up here, and the Dean, Cummings, asked me if I’d give up the last course I had was Invertebrate Paleontology for Geologist’s, and I said “Yea.” They can, they wanted to take it over there. And I said “Yea, you can take it over. You can have the collections.” Then they dropped it after one year because they didn’t have anyone to teach it. And now they. .(Unknown Word) with the phase. (Unknown word) The only course I’ll teach now is Senior Ventures or.. .1 love to do Senior Ventures when I take them on field trips. (Unknown word) what stuff is like(Unknown word). And now when they take all those field trips away, it, you know it’s funny, at Senior Ventures, I had a clientele, some of those people I had five, six years in a row. Same course.

Jones: Slow learners.

Klucking: Naw! They’re fun people. Fun people.

Jones: What problems, do you recall, would pass as significant for your tenure here?

Klucking: Which colleagues?

Jones: What problems? Do you recall any problems that you really thought were significant?

Klucking: The problems, I always thought were over-blown here. I can remember, for example, it was in the Sixties were a little rebellious, maybe in the Seventies and they were trying to get R.O.T.C. off the campus, remember that? They had an old building, an old wooden building here by the SUB, on the end of the bookstore down there. And the suggestion was to let the students burn the building to make a statement. Also they could pull them down, and never did anything. But those problems I always thought, people always get so excited about more excited, about the problems, than the problem warrants because it really detracts from everything that can be done. So big problems, I don’t know, What do I consider a big problem on campus...? What do you think? I have to wonder.

Jones: Let’s go on to the next one here. Which administrators and faculty come to mind as important leaders?

Klucking: Yea... Well... Despite my differences with him, I thought Jim Brooks was a pretty good President. Burton Williams. I thought he was pretty good in his realm. Other than that I had some dealings with Cummings. Those two I thought were more innovative than others. You get so many caretakers, you know, type. It’s always been my, with my colleagues, I’ve talked to them about this, the idea that a professor should not, well, administrators should not be under fifty. That teachers should teach and then if they wanted to go into administration, at fifty they should go into administration. But you shouldn’t take young, that middle group or the others for administration. I think, in my mind, see that disclaimer I throw in there, that the administrators should have the wisdom that comes with the older one-third of the faculty, because then they have the wisdom to make the decision. I feel that in terms and you talk about leaders, that a lot of times, you see, when that isn’t the problem. You get the younger people in there, say from the middle group, they hinder teaching faculty more than aid it. That covers a wide area, (Unknown word) Physical Education. I mean the support systems, too. They do a lot of hindering. Another group, I think, that really hinders, at least Biology, is the physical plant. I rant and rave about that, but we used to take, have outdoor classes in botany, and we could take ‘em around and identify, now you can’t reach ‘em. All of the Exotics are that we’ve had are either pulled out or cut down or putting in trees that they already have out here, so they all see the same thing, you see, that type. And we’ve argued and argued about this, if we can’t have a big arboretum, let us have pocket arboreta, little areas where we can put trees that are not all over here. And/but the physical plant said no. Too difficult to maintain. Now they got an idea here that no tree that you put on campus can grow over fifty feet tall. And the reason for that... They don’t have the equipment to maintain ‘em. They don’t have the stuff to reach up and prune ‘em. Oh, my goodness! Tell that to a tree! They don’t tell you about learning do they?

Putnam: Related to that, there is still, isn’t there, a project where a different tree is planted each year in the name of a class, and you’re trying to get different species?

Klucking: Ed Harrington started that project, and we went around and asked, we worked hand-in-hand, and set up the trees, and we had a whole list that we were following through. And we used a lot of the trees on campus that were here because like I would tell, I was telling the group that I talked to about a month ago that this campus really has three stages of forests on it, you know. You have the original forest here on it where you have all the willow trees and this type of thing and you can see some of those along the creeks down here yet, and then they came in and put in the street trees and trees that go around, oh, no, next came in the homesteaders, where they had the houses around here, those houses that were behind Dean Hall, for example, they had little apple orchards and they had trees that went (Unknown word) little over behind Hertz. They have an Eastern Red Cedar there. Have you ever seen an Eastern Red Cedar? We used to core.. .this is what they make cedar chests out of The wood’s pink and smells beautiful. It’s the only one on campus. Now you go and look at that thing that’s threatened, like they got roads here and bulldozers and all this, and over in that same place, they had Eastern Cottonwood, and physical plant cut ‘em down. They said they were dangerous. They fall apart. They looked at the stalks, stems, sound, sound. Now we have no Eastern Cottonwood on campus (Unknown word). We lost our Alaskan Yellow Cedar, we’re losing all these (Unknown word) trees, you see, and the Bass, great big leafed Bass, we don’t have on campus, and Wendell Hill and Courtney Jones, boy they knew how we’d fight them, so they wouldn’t let people touch those trees and Wendell, if someone cut a tree, put the same kind in. Now they, see it’s easier to take care of five hundred Honey Locusts than it is to take care of a variety of trees. What kind of a teaching tool is that? And that, in terms of teaching, is one of my biggest disappointments here at Central, but I think it’s probably universal. It’s that Botany, or Biology, and Geology have been brought indoors. Do you see that all of them, Biology is done with the DNA and the microscope now, you go over to Geology and ask the Geologist who wants a microscopic cross-section in order to identify this rock. I said it looks like such and such. Gee, I don’t know he said, we’ll take it over to the lab over there and slice it up and have ‘em look at it. And, gosh, I mean, you can’t do that when you’re out in the field. See, it’s all brought indoors and that.

Jones: Do you have any memories of problems that existed between the teaching faculty and administration?

Klucking: Memories?

Jones: Good or bad.

Klucking: Yea, there’s always a kind of an annoyance that comes on the thing that some of my colleagues and I talked about, you can’t let things like that get in the way. See, I think, when the, essentially the administration institutionalizes the faculty by making them administrators without administrative pay. You see, then your teaching suffers. Because you have too much to do in a lot of this administrative action. And I think that this is one of the big problems, that the faculty is called on to do too much administrative work. Because there’s a requirement, for example. Admittedly they should be on some committees, but not on the number of committees that they’re on, and what has happened, I was reading in the paper the other day and it sounds like as if this tier system comes in where, see, in the administration you get tier levels between the employees and the administration because the administrator becomes, say a Dean and then they have to have a couple of sub-deans, and these sub-deans have to have a couple... because they call in the faculty. They’re going to do that. They’re, why call in the faculty. The only problem that they call in the faculty is the faculty wants it. Why? Because they don’t trust the administration. And why don’t they trust ‘em? Well, you can’t get probably two or three people in this campus together, faculty, that will agree on the same thing together. See, everyone’s got their idea, the way this thing should be run, and this is the part that the faculty has to learn to accept some of this stuff, and try it too. But they don’t like it. Any specific problems that caused beefs between faculty and administration? No, I could probably work some specifics up, but I don’t think faculty likes to get a lot of the stuff that the administration is ramming down their throats, rammed down their throats. But I don’t think the faculty, as a whole, the way they’re going now, is competent enough to be administrators. I feel that.

Jones: Do you recall any difficulty between the faculty and the Board of Trustees?

Klucking: I don’t want to comment on that. We’ve had some Board of Trustees members that have been very good with the faculty, and some that have been very bad.

Jones: Do you recall any difficulties between the students and faculty?

Klucking: Well, I think that every department probably has faculty members that are somewhat inflexible, and they probably make some demands based on principle, and they should be lenient, based on reality. ‘Cause you can talk about principle all you want, but sometimes reality does butt heads with principle. You see and you could, some of these kids get put in bind situations. It’s like the thing now, you see, is to make us over at “U Dub” make, this one Senator, or Representative, make a student that drops a course, pay for it. Do you see the fine it would levee? It would be over $800, or $400. Well, my goodness, now, see, the students, well, I’ve had really good students. I feel we’ve butted heads, but it hasn’t gotten into much. But I’ve seen where some of my colleagues have made unreasonable demands, and the students won’t take that. They might have taken it in the Sixties, early Seventies. They’re not going to take it in the Eighties or the Nineties. There’s just been a change in he loop.

Jones: Would you care to comment on the town and gown relationship?

Klucking: Well, there is a definite town and gown relationship, and we all know it. I remember when I was in Geology, I had the daughter of a big rancher in my class and I was mentioning about town and gown, this was in the Sixties, and she said, she didn’t think there was. And I said, “Oh, yea, you don’t see it?” She said, “Well, we have a big rodeo breakfast up at our house. We’re going to ask you and your wife. You’ll be the only ones there from the college.” Phew! That was rough. And that was rough! And she admitted after that, there was a definite problem there. We were in different worlds. We were in different worlds. See, and we’re still in different worlds. I remember when I went on my first sabbatical, I talked to the manager down at the Co-op. I said, “I’m going on sabbatical.” He looked at me and said (Unknown word), “We don’t get sabbaticals.” They’re pleasant, most of the people I know in town I bowled with for ten years on bowling teams. They’re good friends of mine. But the ones that I didn’t bowl on, when they’re hearing from the college then, I guess it’s university now, a little different.

Jones: How do you feel about “Publish of Perish?”

Klucking: I never did like the idea of perish. I’ve always felt that if a person wants to do research, they’ll do research, and no matter, forcing them to do research is going to make them do a good job of research, and I know in the Sixties these people all claimed, “gees, if we had this equipment, if we had this equipment, and this lab, and this, we could do research.” And they had money because they were growing and they got it. Did they do research? No, they didn’t do research because then, “We have no time.” See, if we had these breaks and had this time and do this.., in those days they didn’t give them a quarter off, see. If they’d started that then you would have seen who did the research. But to use it as a.. .function of merit or promotion, what have you, I don’t believe it at all. I think when one sees a need in terms of research, one steps in and tries to fill that need, otherwise, I think, it’s just make believe. Make believe...

Jones: The research that you did didn’t seem to interfere with your teaching.

Klucking: No.

Jones: It became a part of your teaching.

Klucking: Yea, in fact I had students helping me, and they were interested, but, this is me. I have a little different idea of research, and I don’t need much, you know. What do I need, a water tap and a bottle of bleach and a camera.

Jones: Have you been the recipient of any awards, or honors?

Klucking: Yea, I should have brought that letter. One of the greatest honors I got was a letter from a graduate student... I should have it framed, but then Bonnie wouldn’t be able to lean on me too much after. But those things you get from students are too few and far between. I did get recognition for my research in Distinguished Professor Research, I think in 1992 or ‘93. That’s about all of it.

Jones: You do have your picture in the library.

Klucking: Yea, it’s down now though.

Jones: Oh, is it.

Klucking: You’d be surprised how many people go into the library and then come into my office and say,” I saw your picture in the library.”

Jones: What significant accomplishments or contributions do you feel that you made to the progress of the department or school?

Klucking: Probably none. Probably to keep ‘em loose. I don’t know. People tend to take themselves too seriously. Really, it sounds so trite, everyone says that. But, God, you can see it all the time. See it all the time. And, how do you make a person unbend? Now, it’s very difficult. It’s like in teaching where the students feel that every word you say is the truth. You know? So I’d start throwing in non-sense words and non sense ideas. And they would pick this stuff up.

Jones: Did they reproduce it on tests?

Klucking: Oh, yea.

Jones: Did you serve on any major campus committees?

Klucking: I sewed on committees, I don’t know if they are major. I was in Faculty Senate for awhile, I was on the curriculum committee, and I was on the research committee, and so on. That’s when I was, probably in the Seventies, I was on a panel like little research, all of these instrument grants from NSF. (Unknown word) They lock you in a room, chain you to a bed, and then you have to read these grants until your eyes pop out. All these grants in one day. Can you imagine it? One day! (Unknown word) It was rough. But I don’t know, I think that curriculum, I would have liked that, of course, what gets me when you get on these committees, if we would talk about problems and try to deal with them in a rational way, but there is too much posturing. That’s what really got me in the Senate. I couldn’t stand the posturing. People talk to talk, and you know, because they were a professor or Senator, Jesus I’m just saying this stuff so you won’t use it.

Jones: Did you ever serve on a building committee?

Klucking: No, I haven’t. I’ve served on the destruction of a building committee. The old Paleo lab. I remember, do you remember that? When they were going to tear that down. They named it. Herrington Hall. And the same day they had the dedication to name Herringbton Hall, they said, “They put it up for demolition.’ And of course they couldn’t tear it down because of all the equipment in there. (Unknown word) I got a notification where (Unknown word) or something. I could hire two people to help me move. You see, but I had a whole list of things I was supposed to go through. Well, my son talked to me and he said there was this girl from Costa Rica that, she was looking for work because my son worked there. And so I interviewed her. Very nice girl. Really sharp. And I say, well, I don’t know who does the hiring I said, but when it comes up I’ll put your name in. Well, it turns our that I did it. So I picked her and the next person that came. Well, the next person that came was a fellow from (Unknown word) Orchard in Yakima, and a kind of a red-neck, and she was a liberal. And those two working together, they got along, but, oh, man, there were just sparks all the time.

Jones: Are there programs or activities on the campus that you feel are not justified?

Klucking: Activities or...No, if you’re going to be a University, you should have almost everything. You should be universal.

Jones: Do you have relatives who attended Central?

Klucking: Oh, yea. My daughter just got her Masters degree last summer at Central. She had taken her B.A. here, her teaching degree here. My son got a B.A. in Business here. He works over at Starbucks. My oldest son went here two or three years. My youngest daughter went to McAllister. Followed Daddy. And so they’re all successful and they, of course, told me, see I knew, they could tell me whom I thought were the good professors and who were the bad. And you know that yourself, when you’re teaching, you know there’s never been a bad teacher at this school, and if you don’t believe me ask any professor. Any one you think is bad, ask about him. No one, there has never been a bad professor.

Jones: With the new science building going up, do you feel you have left too soon

Klucking: Do I have less?

Jones: Do you feel like you have left too soon, retired too soon?

Klucking: No, no. Like I found this out when they did, made Dean Hall, when we were down in Lind Hall. When they start planning the building, there’s about a three year planning, or anticipation period where people don’t do anything. Then there’s about a two year, when they’re building it, they don’t do anything. And then when they get in there, there’s about a three year period when there’s a shake-down cruise and they don’t do anything. And they always have an excuse, well this wasn’t hooked up, or that stuff’s in storage, so you lose about, probably eight to ten years, every time you put up a building. Sounds strange. I may be stretching the time a little, but you check it and see what people do when they move into a new building, or when they’re getting ready to.. .1 don’t want to start that now. The new building will be done in ‘99. Well, I can’t start this now because that stuff’s in storage here. We haven’t been able to hook it up yet. And in the new building they quit too soon. They’ve got less research space in that new building than they have in Dean Hall.

Jones: Is that right?

Klucking: Less research area.

Jones: Those are all the questions I have in front of me. Are there some things you’d like to relate that we haven’t covered?

Klucking: Well...

Putnam: We’ve got about ten minutes.

Klucking: Huh? Do you have some one else coming in?

Putnam: No, she just wanted to know the time. We’ve got at least ten. It’s a sixty-five minute tape. So we’ve got...

Jones: You must have some questions.

Putnam: No, Do you have any... are there any things that were like major events, or things that happened on campus that you might have recalled,.., either sit-ins of the students in the Sixties, or any other events that you can remember that might have happened?

Klucking: Well, you know, in the Sixties they were always trying to sensitize the professors, and then for, I think, Jim Brooks started that too, where they take these, remember we’d get professors over at his house, and they’d have what they called brain-storming sessions. And you’d stay at that house all day, and break up in small groups, and talk. And you’d sit up and throw up ideas that were written down. And then, no matter how wild they were, what you thought of, and you know I found that to be a good way to see how tight or how loose some minds are. See, and if you can really groove with that, then you begin to look at, maybe some of those ideas aren’t too bad up there. So he did that, I think, for, gosh, almost all of the faculty. He’d have ‘em in on the week end. I thought was a beautiful idea to get feedback, or faculty to think on. I thought that was one of the better things he did. The symposium, I can’t say enough about the symposium. I thought it was handled nicely. It was just an electrifying time. They got good people in, and this was one of the things, too that did break down the town and gown. Because you got a lot of town people coming to this and a lot of faculty members, and there was a lot of disagreement, you see. And even, that they wouldn’t disagree with.. .Well, like Stokely Carmichael, or Norman Mailer. Some of these characters were pretty rough, you know. But, man, you’ve got to deal with.. .this is what it means, the world is like.. .well, the town people came and they enjoyed those as much as the people on campus that were in tune with that type of thing. And even when it tapered off, they got a lot of good people would come in for a day, or a couple of days. They didn’t have the great big old (Unknown word), you know. You’d go to one meeting and go to the next one. They’d bring in four speakers and you had all these sub-speakers and(Unknown word). It was really something, I think, that was something that really established community on us. Like Hillary Clinton says, you have to have a village. It takes a village. And this takes a community, and I mean a community on campus here. We haven’t got that now, I don’t feel. The community isn’t there. Right now you can go to certain people and you can get a lot of help and you can talk with certain ideas, but the spirit isn’t there. And even in those days the students, you did things with students. I remember the retreats we used to go on at the Hidden Valley Ranch where you’d go with the students up there overnight. And you’d have these kind of talk sessions and problems bothering you. They don’t do that any more. And they even had this ball room over here on the south.. .Remember that? And they used to have Christmas programs up there where you could bring your children up there. See, that type of thing is not done any more. So I think there is a sense of loss of community, and a lot of the building they’re doing now, you see, they’re building in... Savannah, Georgia was one of the prettiest little towns the first time I saw, I was very intrigued because they always had these little courts, or little areas, you know. Houses would be built around a little city, open like a plaza-type thing. And they had these all over town. That’s what they had on campus. Now they’re filling those in. See what they’re doing? Like with Dean Hall here. If you look at some of the.. .1 was looking at the map in the other room, where they have the hoe dug where they’re going to put the science hall and all. That really takes away a lot of the beauty of it. See they’ll take this corridor of green. They’ll break this down. Probably put a building in there, too. And look what they’re doing between Black Hall and the dorms up there. Remember when, it was about four years ago when they piled dirt. It’s just typical. Piled dirt there and four years later remove it. Do you remember where the Paleo building used to be, they had a depression in there where they were going to put a skating pond, and had that down and dug down here and they went and the winter came and they got the hoses in there and they flooded that thing to make a skating pond. They were going to move a warming shack in and have logs, and when they put that in there, the water seeped into the ground. They kept pumping it in there and it kept seeping into the ground. So they decided to put a black tarp under it. And they put a black tarp under it, filled it up with water, and the water froze, and the black tarp.. .And they probably had one day’s skating and the sun came out with that black tarp underneath, it melted water like that. So they couldn’t keep skating. Then they decided, the physical plant here, well you know what we have to do is fill those holes in that ground. They got bags of clay and they spread this clay over.. just... flooded this thing and they spread the clay over top and watered and all the damn clay floated on top of the water. Finally they gave it up, but that cost twenty-five thousand dollars. That fooling around. You see that? When you’re beginning you could do that, but now times when you make a little mistake that’s one thing, all of these mistakes are disassembled. The green house over there. That green house and Dean Hall, when they first proposed them we could have got the best green house, probably in the country, to freight in here and assemble for eighty thousand dollars. They said, “No, that has to be designed by an architect.” (Unknown word)the physical plant here. .. .they got all signed, and it cost a half a million. And then they didn’t... they wanted to put a wall around it because they thought it would be unattractive. (Unknown word) but that stuff goes on all the time. You see there’s just a lack of understanding. I think that a lot of times when a person like in administration gets pressed, they don’t want to sit down and discuss these things. They want to tell you the way it’s going to be. And they make a decision and then the faculty feels, well , they’re jamming it down our throats. Like I remember a tree in front of Barge hail here, one, now they’ve cut one of our fine trees, a silver maple. One of the prettiest trees you ever want to see. They want to cut this other one out, too, the Honey Locust with big thorns. They came that’s dangerous. No one that has.. .as long as I’ve been here since 1960, I can’t remember any one getting hurt on that tree. ‘Cause they look at the thorns, and they stay away. Oh, well. Do we go out with a whimper? Is this it?

Putnam: Well, do you have any more?

Klucking: No, I have nothing more to say. All I can say is that I thought that my stay at Central has been very exciting. Particularly the Sixties. The Seventies were wonderful. Eighties was more bending down to research. The Eighties and the Nineties were research and teaching. I’ve still got the Eighties minutes, but that’s about all I’ve got to say. I don’t want to get into any of the administrative problems and, I do have my own philosophies and (Unknown word).

Jones: Well, thank you very much.