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Title: Margot Casanova Wells interview--May 14, 2007
Description: Margot Casanova Wells is the niece of Katherine Casanova, Campus School teacher, 1932-1967; and faculty, Dept of Education, 1967/68.
Digital Collection: Special Collections Oral History Program
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Special Collections
Related Collection: Special Collections Oral History Program
Local Identifier: SCOHP_WellsMargot_20070514
Text preview (might not show all results): Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections Oral History Program Margot Casanova Wells ATTENTION: © Copyright Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. "Fair us
Show moreWestern Washington University Libraries Special Collections Oral History Program Margot Casanova Wells ATTENTION: © Copyright Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. "Fair use" criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. The following materials can be used for educational and other noncommercial purposes without the written permission of Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. These materials are not to be used for resale or commercial purposes without written authorization from Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. All materials cited must be attributed to Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. This interview was conducted with Margot Casanova Wells over the telephone on May 14, 2007. The interviewer is Tamara Belts. Mrs. Wells lives in Ferndale, California. TB: My name is Tamara Belts and I’m talking [on the telephone] to Margot Casanova Wells. You have read a copy of the Informed Consent Agreement, right, and you know you’re being recorded? MCW: Yes. TB: Okay, perfect. Katherine Casanova was one of the well-loved teachers at the Campus School, and I just thought it would be kind of fun to maybe fill in some more information about her. My first question is where was she born? (I know she was born November 27th, 1900). MCW: Well, she was born in a community called Grizzly Bluff, California. TB: Is that near Ferndale? MCW: Yes. TB: Did the family then move to Ferndale, or was that just where they went to school? MCW: No, my grandfather was working out in that area at that point. Well, that’s my assumption; he had worked on some ranches quite a ways out from Ferndale, and she was born in Grizzly Bluff. Her father was John Casanova, and her mother was (I’m going to spell it), Mariursula, all one word, Capaul. They were from Switzerland, and they spoke the language called Romantsch, and, in fact, the kids basically knew little or no English when they went to school. TB: Really! Now, was there just the two of them – your father, Leonard, and Katherine? MCW: No, there were six kids. TB: Oh, six! What was the birth order? What number is Katherine? 1 Margot Casanova Wells Edited Transcript – May 14, 2007 Campus School Memories Project ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MCW: She would be the youngest girl. There was a boy, Casper, then Mary, Dora, Katherine, and then my dad, Leonard, and then Johnny. TB: One of the things I wondered about, knowing only the two of them, and that they both went into education, was if education had been a strong thing in their family? MCW: Yes. Both her sisters were teachers, too. TB: Where did they teach? MCW: Well, my aunt Mary solely taught in little schools around this area. Dora taught in Paso Robles and Stockton and then ended up back in Humboldt County, and taught at several one-room school houses, and other schools, including a year up at [Hoopa], which was an Indian reservation here. TB: So all the children went to college then? MCW: Yes. TB: I know that Miss Casanova attended San Jose. MCW: Yes, it was San Jose Normal when she went there. TB: And then she went on to, I think, Columbia Teacher’s College? MCW: Right. She was always a good student. The family was quite poor, so they all had jobs from the time they were pretty young, even five years old, they weeded (carrots, sugar beets, etc.). She also ended up working at the grocery store, up in the office. She was fairly athletic; she played basketball and tennis. She was all-county in tennis and captain of the girl’s basketball team. Then after high school she went to San Jose Normal. She had to go by ship from Eureka to San Francisco and then on down to San Jose. While she would be home from school or college, on vacation, she [sometimes] taught – I know of one instance that she taught in a little one-room school house. You didn’t have to be accredited at that point, and then after graduation she taught in Lodi and in Stockton. When she was in Stockton she and a fellow teacher decided to go back to school for a bachelor’s degree and she applied and was accepted at Columbia, where she completed her bachelor’s and her master’s. I don’t think she’d ever been out of California before. While she was back there, the stock market fell. She was very brave. She’d been hired at New Mexico State Teacher College (I think that’s in Silver City, New Mexico) and she decided to borrow on her life insurance, and go to Europe. She visited Switzerland, and met her cousins, aunts and uncles. [She] toured around. I know she was in France and Britain. 2 Margot Casanova Wells Edited Transcript – May 14, 2007 Campus School Memories Project ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED She spent one year at New Mexico Teacher’s College, and the Depression hit, and she didn’t even receive a final paycheck. Someone told her about the opening at Western Washington, and she applied and was accepted. TB: Did she never desire to go back to California to teach? MCW: No. She’d be here for vacation and she took classes after she got her master’s, at both San Jose State, and at Stanford. Some place we’ve got some report cards [from] there. TB: Oh, very cool. MCW: She traveled. She and, I think it was Synva Nicol, went all over British Columbia. They took mail buses and boats, and toured the B.C. coast, and all these small towns and everything. She also traveled in Japan, Hong Kong, South America, Australia and Greece. And almost part of every summer was spent down in this area. Her sister Dora was married to a dairy man, and the other sister, Mary, was married to a sheep rancher. At one point Dora decided she wanted a log cabin; she purchased some property adjacent to her sister Mary’s place, and my grandfather felled the logs, and the three sisters peeled the logs for the cabin. TB: Oh, wow. MCW: And of course, she was a big football fan. My dad was at Santa Clara, Pitt, and Oregon. She stayed up in Bellingham for a year or two after she retired, I think she taught a class or two, and then after she retired she returned to Ferndale, California. She became very involved with the whole community. She researched the history of all the different buildings throughout the town, and she spent time at the museum. She belonged to Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church, the Village Club, and the Garden Club. She always contributed to my sister’s and my educations. We always had the latest and the best children’s literature, and she took us to the ice follies and things like that. (I was hoping I’d hear from my sister for some more input on what she remembers). Then when I decided to go back to school, to get into nursing, my son went over there everyday after he got out of school, and she took care of him until I got home from school. TB: Nice. MCW: She just was a wonderful, very neat, adventuresome woman. She lost much of her central vision later in her life, but it certainly didn’t stop her. She continued to live alone until, oh, just about five weeks before she died. Since she couldn’t see that well to read, why, she got books on tape from the library, she always was a voracious reader. TB: I know that when she lived in Bellingham, she lived at the Bellingham Hotel. That was interesting to me because a lot of the single women did live in different hotels. MCW: Right. The Bellingham Hotel, and then Mt. Baker Apartments, I don’t know if it was the same building actually. 3 Margot Casanova Wells Edited Transcript – May 14, 2007 Campus School Memories Project ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: They are close, but not the same building. Is there any special reason why football was so special in your family? Is that because your father, Leonard, excelled at it? MCW: Well, he got into coaching after he got out of college. San Francisco didn’t have a professional team at that point, so he played for the Olympic Club. He was also coaching at a small boys’ academy, and then he was hired at a local high school. He was asked to be assistant football coach and head baseball coach at Santa Clara which he was until World War II. He came back after the war, as an assistant football coach and about six weeks before the football season started, the fellow who had been hired as the head football coach decided to move back to Detroit, and my dad fell into the job at Santa Clara, as head coach. He eventually took Santa Clara to the Orange Bowl. (The year at Pitt you really don’t talk about, because they only had one win). We were here on vacation, when he was contacted by the University of Oregon. He went there and coached football for sixteen years, and then he was athletic director, athletic director emeritus, and helped with fundraising. He was at the university for a total of about fifty years. TB: When Miss Casanova was in Bellingham, she would go to all the Western football games. I never heard of her going to basketball, just football. MCW: Right, no, I don’t think she was that interested in basketball, probably primarily because of Dad, she was a football fan. But when it was a tight score she couldn’t stand to stay in the stadium. She’d get up and leave and go up by the concession stands and … TB: And wait until the game was over. MCW: Exactly, or until she heard that Oregon was ahead. TB: So she got down most weekends to the games down there? MCW: Oh, no, she’d come when Oregon would play Washington, at Seattle. She’d go there. Then my husband, Dave, was stationed at Fort Lewis, and so she came down several times and visited just us there. I had some surgery and she came down and took care of the kids. She was still teaching; I don’t know how she – she must’ve gotten a substitute. She helped take care of the kids until I could get back from the hospital. TB: How nice. MCW: Yes, she just that kind of a really giving person. She contributed so much --straight education, but also culturally, to both my sister and myself, and then to my children, and my sister’s children. TB: Very good. From everything I’ve heard, everybody just loved her, and you’ve kind of just added more to that. MCW: She was so fun to be with, you know. She just was always interested in everything. In fact, in our little town of Ferndale, why, our eighth grade kids take a trip each year and go to the bay area, to museums and baseball 4 Margot Casanova Wells Edited Transcript – May 14, 2007 Campus School Memories Project ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED games and things like that. All of the kids in my older daughter’s class decided that they wanted her to go as a chaperone, because they enjoyed her so much. TB: Oh, nice. Now, she did a lot of traveling, did she used to drive? MCW: Well, I think she knew how to drive at one point, but she never owned a car. She was a great person to travel by bus. TB: She never seemed to be sorry that she ended up at Western, up in Bellingham, so far from her family? MCW: No, no. She thoroughly enjoyed her time there, and she was proud of the campus. I can’t remember when the World’s Fair was in Vancouver, sometime in the 1980s. TB: 1986, I think. MCW: Right. She wanted to go up there. So, she said, “I’ll go, if you’ll go with me,” so I went with her. We were coming back from British Columbia, and came through Bellingham, and the bus driver said, “Well, let’s take a detour and go over to the Western Washington University campus.” And she was so thrilled to go back. TB: Oh, nice! MCW: I had never had the opportunity to be there. We took a quick tour and found the education building. She was just really pleased with how the campus still looked, and always had, very, very fond memories of all the time there. TB: Excellent. So you never came up here summers, she always went down to visit you down there? MCW: Well, my dad moved quite a bit between the Navy and coaching. And then my husband was a career army officer, so Ferndale was the place everybody came back to. Then my husband Dave and I ended up moving here in 1971. She only had a studio apartment, so there were not the facilities for her to put up many guests. TB: That makes sense. So she’d usually come down there at Christmas time, too? MCW: Yes. And she got marooned down here, [during the floods] in 1955 and 1964. TB: Anything else? MCW: I know I’ll think of several other things after we get off the telephone, but … TB: Well, I am going to transcribe what we’ve just talked about, and I’ll send it down to you and you’ll get a chance to edit or make any changes, or add to it, at that point. So feel free to add something in. Do you have Word? I could send it to you on a disk, if you’d like. Then you could make any changes, and do it on the document itself. MCW: Oh, well, that’d be nice. Why don’t you send it in the mail, and then I’ll go over it, and I’ll be able to discuss it very easily with my sister. Then I’ll get it back to you as soon as possible. 5 Margot Casanova Wells Edited Transcript – May 14, 2007 Campus School Memories Project ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: Excellent. Well, it was very nice to be able to talk with you on the phone. I wish I would have known Miss Casanova. MCW: She was a great lady. TB: I’m really kind of excited that she got to come back and visit campus, too, although I’m sorry I didn’t know what I was missing when she was here. Anyway, I’ll get this transcribed, I’ll send you a copy and you can talk it over with your sister and make any other comments that you would like. MCW: Alright, very good. TB: Well, thank you very much. MCW: Thank you very much, Tamara. 6 Margot Casanova Wells Edited Transcript – May 14, 2007 Campus School Memories Project ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Title: Barry Gough interview--March 3, 2015
Description: Barry Gough, first came to Western as a graduate student, before transferring to the University of Montana to complete his masters. He returned to Western as a faculty member, serving on the History faculty from 1968-1973. He holds a BEd from the University of British Columbia, an MA from the University of Montana, and a PhD from the University of London.
Digital Collection: Special Collections Oral History Program
Type of resource: text
Object custodian: Special Collections
Related Collection: Special Collections Oral History Program
Local Identifier: SCOHP_GoughBarry_20150305
Text preview (might not show all results): Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections Oral History Program Barry M. Gough ATTENTION: © Copyright Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. "Fair use"
Show moreWestern Washington University Libraries Special Collections Oral History Program Barry M. Gough ATTENTION: © Copyright Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. "Fair use" criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. The following materials can be used for educational and other noncommercial purposes without the written permission of Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. These materials are not to be used for resale or commercial purposes without written authorization from Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. All materials cited must be attributed to Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. This interview was conducted with Barry Gough on Tuesday, March 3, 2015, in Western Libraries Special Collections on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. The interviewer is Tamara Belts. TB: Today is Tuesday, March 3, 2015. My name is Tamara Belts, and I’m here with Barry Gough, and we’re going to do an oral history, mainly about his time at Western. Now, am I correct, did you come here as a graduate student for a period of time? BG: I was a graduate student here. TB: So how did you first come to Western as a graduate student? We’ll start there. BG: Western always had a very fine reputation in education, notably graduate school of education, with the distinguished Paul Woodring and others, right? And I came to take a master’s degree in education. I was a public school teacher, a high school teacher, in Ladner and in Victoria, British Columbia. And just at that period of time, History was opening a master’s program, so the second summer that I was here I transferred into the History Department. So I had the benefit of knowing my historian teachers, who later became my colleagues when I became a professor here several years after that. So that’s in essence the story. TB: But you didn’t complete your degree here. BG: No, I did not. 1 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: You went to the University of Montana – BG: The History Department had decided on developing a special field for thesis work in Civil War history, and I was not interested in Civil War history, as wonderful as it was. They started in earnest collecting in that (journals, memoirs, monographs and histories). So I began to shop around for another university, and Carl Schuler, who was a teacher of mine, and sensed my unease, recommended me to a professor at the University of Montana, Vernon F. Snow, who was a very distinguished English historian, who worked in 17th and 18th centuries, and he said, Barry, I think that’s the place for you. So I went to Montana and completed my master’s degree there “British Mercantile Interests in the Peace of Paris, 1763” (a study in commercial and colonial policy) the following year. So that brings us now to 1966. And so that, [Tamara], that was the trajectory. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have completed a master’s degree here, but it was the question of the interest in the area that I wanted to become a working historian. You know, the thing fair to say was Western —its history program at the graduate level had growing pains in it, and they appeared somewhat uncertain about what they were doing. Montana was far ahead of that in the seniority and in their academic activities. It was the leading university in the state. And I was brilliantly treated at Montana, and Professor Snow was one of those wonderful fellows, who sort of put his arm on my shoulder, and he says, Barry, he said, I want you to go farther, do more. I think with your field of interest in Imperial and Commonwealth history, he says, I think you should go to London University. And he said, As a matter of fact, I’m going to be visiting the professor, the Rhodes professor of Imperial history when I’m over there in London on sabbatical. And I’m going to tell him about you, and I’m then going to write a letter on your behalf to get you admitted to King’s College University of London. So this sounds immodest when I say this, but he says, “We don’t see your kind very often.” And that was a wonderful thing because I’ve always remembered that when I’ve had brilliant students and very promising ones, those who have real promise, I’ve always thought, remembered what these people said, from Carl Schuler on the first hand, and then Vern Snow on the other, and gave them lots of support. So that’s how I happened to finish my degree at the University of Montana. And then I went to London University and completed my residency requirement there in 1968. And it was at that point in time when I started to fire off letters to see where I could be employed. And of course with my solid ratings here at Western with the people that I knew, you have Keith Murray, Harley Hiller, Bernard Boylan, August Radke, and Carl Schuler, and a few others, I was hired and came here in the fall of 1968 to start my university teaching career. So it was a very rapid move for me over those few years, but I had those wonderful times away in Montana first, and then in London, in that great center of the world. So that was my trajectory through it. And so I came back to the History Department that I knew and to all those other wonderful people that I know, and I don’t know whether you wish for me to speak about these people – 2 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: Keep going, yes, I do. That would be great. BG: Let me give you a profile of them. I could mention the larger aspects of Western at that time. Maybe I’ll leave that to another occasion or a later time today, because I want to talk about that too. But Keith Murray, Dr. Keith Murray, was the chair of the department. He had been a longstanding chairman of the department. His secretary, Esther Erickson, looked after him. Double E we called her. And she knew everything that Keith Murray did professionally. She was like a personal assistant. She made everything hum. She knew not only about Keith and his activities in the city, including in Rotary because he was a noted Rotarian. But Esther also knew his important work in church, and she made arrangements with other people that she’d known who were interested in history. So Archie Shiels, who lived in town in those days, was a noted historian. He’d done a book on the San Juan Island crisis, [Ed. Note: San Juan Islands, the Cronstadt of the Pacific]. He was famous for a book on the sourdoughs of Alaska, [Ed. Note: Seward’s icebox: a few notes on the development of Alaska, 1867-1932?]. So she would introduce me to those kinds of people because she was the kind of a secretary who went beyond the normal call of duty and knew people’s interests and made connections for them. Keith Murray was the dominant head of the department. He was chair of the department, but in essence he was the head. Nobody would have moved him from that job. He had a splendid office in the SW corner Humanities Hall. He was, as I soon learned, later, very well known in western United States, and particularly in Washington State. He was the go-to person at Western Washington State College, as it was in those days, with respect to Northwest Coast history. He had recently published a book on the Modoc Wars, which was published by that very fine University of Oklahoma Press. But Dorothy Johansen of Reed College, who’d written a book on the Columbia River, also very well knew him. Remember that wonderful book? TB: Yes, Empire of the Columbia. BG: Yes. And Dorothy was a good friend of his. And at the State Archives, there were two or three persons, names – TB: Jim Moore, was he there then? BG: Jim Moore came on later under Jim Scott, and I’ll refer to him later. But I’m thinking of Mary [Avery], was it? Who worked at the state archives and had written a book on Washington State history and government, which was sort of the required text [Ed. Note: Government of Washington State]. Now in those days, I don’t know whether it’s true now, but all persons intending to be certified as teachers in the State of Washington took Washington State history, or Northwest history, and there was a little Canadian material in there, some Hawaiian, some Alaskan, and so forth. But it was a very demanding thing because a lot of young undergraduates didn’t want to take Washington State history, but they were obliged to by the regulations of the state. 3 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED So anyway, Keith was a dominant force. He was very busy. I wouldn’t say he was always sympathetic to needs. He was running a very big department and looking after the staffing questions. There would always be a lineup of people at his door, students needing this or that. So he was quite hard pressed. If I remember correctly, his wife died, and that was a very difficult thing for him. But anyway, Keith ran the – he’d been here forever, it seemed to me, and he ran the department as if he was here forever. That didn’t last forever. He retired at or about the time I began to look for work elsewhere [Ed. Note: Murray retired in 1977, he last served as chair, 1967/ 68]. Let’s put it that way. So anyway, let’s go down the list. Carl Schuler. I mentioned him before. He did Greek and Roman history, ancient history, but he was also interested in the history of history, and it was the first time I’d ever taken a course in historiography, as we call it. And it was a fascinating subject and study on the ancients and how they wrote their history. And we were each tasked with writing on some great historian, and he suggested a few to me, and I chose the great Herodotus, and it was the first time I had ever read ancient history. For another assignment I wrote on Samuel Pepys, the Admiralty secretary. All my history work in Canada had been all these modern histories. So this was a world to me that was very exciting to be opened up to. Carl Schuler was a wonderful mentor in a way. He was very interested in the students. But he was also rather stiff in his academic demeanor in class. And if one were to ask a question of him, he probably would go back to his notes and re-read them again. All his notes were written out in blue books. He wrote all his lectures in blue books, and they were very well prepared lectures. But the sort of didactic activity that might go on in many a classroom would not necessarily go on in Carl Schuler’s classroom. It was also in those early times when I got to know “Rad” Radke, August Radke. Now he had been educated somewhere in the East [Ed. Note: BA, MA, PhD University of Washington], and he was a wellknown authority in American social and political history, in terms of teaching capacities. And the course was on the American liberal tradition since 1945. And so among the first things that we began to talk about were the bussing questions, the Board of Topeka, Kansas, questions on discrimination, and of course you have got to remember in those days, we were just—Selma, Alabama had happened just yesterday, and the Chicago Eleven were around, and the Black Panthers, and Malcom X. And of course we were just in the aftermath of the Kennedy shootings and the Martin Luther King disaster, and that entire horror story. But anyway, Rad carried on this wonderful discourse about politics, and business, and the ethics of business, and how parties work, and who was president, and how they became president. And one of the books he had was by Goldman, and I still remember this book very well because it was obviously a strong leftist critique of American social practices. But this is the sort of thing that Radke would lecture on. Himself, personally, would be very conservative and very normal in his approaches to things, but politically he was very strongly of the progressive tradition. So I just ate that up. That was to me a real eye opener because I’d not had modern American history. I’d had a lot of 18th and 19th century material, but I never had the modern material. So that was fabulous. That really impressed me as a broad range and approach to history. 4 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED And then the beloved Bernard Boylan, who as students we called The Duke. He was elegant. Like all of these fellows, he wore suits, shirts and ties. And of them, Boylan was the handsomest and had his suits properly cut for him. And his wonderful wife, of course, was the TV director for KVOS-TV. I’ve forgotten her first name. TB: Marian. BG: Marian. She was wonderful. And the two of them lived in this beautiful house on the hill that they’d had designed for them. And that was their shrine. Now he had a strong Irish background, but he was very Anglo—he was Anglo-American in his instincts. And his studies of the First and Second World Wars had led him to a close study of FDR and Winston Churchill, and the leaders in the US Army and the leaders of the British Army. So if you wanted to know anything about the interwar period or the causes of the Second World War, Boylan would just eat that up, and you would get excellent answers because he was very well read. He was not a publishing scholar. Unlike the chairman, Keith Murray, Boylan was not a publishing scholar. But towards the end of his teaching career, he was due to retire about 1972 or – 3, he was granted a sabbatical and he went to the United Kingdom, was working on a project on psychological impact of aerial bombing on the UK, you know, what happened at Coventry and so forth. [Ed. Note: Boylan was one leave Spring Quarter 1971; he was still working when he passed away, March 14, 1985], nothing transpired from that, but it spoke to the kinds of things that he was interested in. And he got a chance to see England and Ireland firsthand. He might have been there—I think he had been in the army. TB: He had been in the army. BG: Had he? Yes. I think he was, but this was a wonderful gift that Western gave to him in his last years. Now, I mentioned his interest in military history. He was very current in the literature of the times, and particularly in memoirs. And one of the things that he required us to do in the graduate course that he taught on the First and Second World Wars, maybe it was called contemporary Europe, was to give people documents to read, and particularly books to read. So he had us read Mein Kampf, you know, which was a controversial book, but we were obliged to read it to know the content, then to be able to speak with authority as commentators about the mind and the writing of the horror story of the modern world. Another book, which I remember very carefully that he required us to read, was the memoirs of Montgomery, Field Marshal Montgomery, [The memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein]. That had just been published and was available in paperback, and it was a very controversial book because it was very critical of Eisenhower and American Army campaigning in Western Europe. You may remember from your own historical studies that it was a tug-of-war between Montgomery, who wanted the right to [take] Berlin quickly –and Eisenhower, who was pulling back with the reins and saying, No, we’re all going to cross the Rhine River at the same time. 5 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED So, Boylan brought me into his office one day and he said, Well, have you read Montgomery? And I said, Yes. And he said, Well, what do you think about this as a memoir? And so we had a wonderful long discussion about that. So he treated me as—there were all sorts of junior students that he would have had to teach over 20 or 30 years at Western, but with his graduate students, like myself, it gave him a new lease on life, and he enjoyed the conversations and treated us with the greatest respect. And we always felt with being in the presence of The Duke, as we called him, that we were in the presence of someone who knew a great deal of history and loved history, and we could see that he was not—had no major ambitions to be a publishing scholar. But that spoke to what Western was like in those days, which, you know, the essence of it was as a state college, in which teaching was the first thing. And you have to remember, we had very demanding teaching requirements or obligations, you know, three or even four courses per term to teach, and three quarters. So [Tamara], it was a constant turnover of classes and new demands, and large classes and growing student numbers. Harley Hiller was the—did double duty. He taught Latin American history. He had been trained as a Latin Americanist, and he’d been trained to do Canadian history. He studied at the University of Minnesota, done a Ph.D. under a very distinguished American by the name of A. L. Burt, [Albert Levi] Burt, who had been born in Canada. And Burt was a very, very good scholar, and he taught Hiller a lot about Canadian history. And so I was in Hiller’s seminar, research seminar on Canada, and his approach to history was very interesting because he would work it always around documents and interpretations. So we would get some very important things to talk about. For instance, the Jesuits in New France, and the Jesuits in the early Colonial United States. What did religion mean? How did it bear on First Nations or Indians? What were the politics of France at the time that that was going on? So these things charged me up, and I was able under Hiller to really expand my own knowledge of Canadian history. Harley Hiller was one of those great people whose finesse on campus was that he was a great teacher. And you’ll recall, you were perhaps a student of his, but his application went through to become full professor in about [1970], and he was—it went up all the way up to Jerry Flora’s desk, and Jerry passed on it, and he was made a full professor. But in terms of publication, I doubt if there was anything that could be said on that score, but he was a very distinguished teacher, and very loyal to the college. And his wonderful wife, whose name escapes me. TB: Joyce. BG: Joyce, -- who had taught at [Bellingham Vocational-Technical Institute], and they were a great pair. And I remember their children very well. David was one of their sons. And they were very kind to my wife and myself in those days. And when I came back to Bellingham in 1968 in the fall, they helped me get settled and helped me get car loans with the WECU, and ease my passage, you know, made it, made it so simple. So I was always very beholden to them in that regard. So those are the four or five that I remember at that time. 6 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Now when I came back as a prof, I was hired as a lecturer because my Ph.D. was not complete. It was completed the following May or June, so I was immediately made an assistant professor, and three years later I became an associate professor and awarded tenure at that time. So that was a rapid, rapid rise. [Afterthought: this was partly owing to my contributions on campus, including various institutes and academic clusters developed, but extensive publication – The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast (1971) and two book under contract, including Canada, a volume in the Modern Nations in Historical Perspective Series]. But in that time, I got to know Larry DeLorme very well, and I also got to know Jim Scott. Jerry Rutan in the political science department I also knew, but not nearly as closely as the other two. I think Larry and I became compadres. We were not necessarily joined at the hip, but we were almost the same age. We were both Westerners, in the sense we were North American Westerners. We had a lot of common interests. Larry was interested in anti-smuggling and anti-piracy and social things. He was up to his neck in the Alaska commercial company, and interested in the history of shipping on this coast. And of course, he and Jim Scott got together and did a, for the University of Oklahoma Press, did the Historical atlas of Washington State. But Larry was a sympathetic fellow. We became neighbors out in the Geneva District. So we became also therefore carpool mates. So he and I were extraordinarily close. Larry was a wonderful companion, and he was ambitious for his own scholarship. By this time, in the 1970s, the expectations of us to raise the stakes of Western Washington State College and to make it into a university required that the faculty had to pull up their socks in the publishing line. Of course Larry had a very ambitious agenda in terms of the things that he was writing on, which was social history and enforcement of laws, and anti-smuggling, and commercial activities, and the history of coast guards, and so forth. And because I was interested in naval and maritime history of this coast, we did some good things together. We never coauthored works together, but we encouraged one another’s work, and we had lots of conversations on this score. Larry also, it’s fair to say, was somewhat disaffected with the nature of the political climate that was going on here. It could have been that he was going through an age change, Is this all there is? Where are we going to go? But I was—I think I was a calming influence and a very good friend to him. And so it wasn’t very long before Keith Murray was replaced by Bill Bultmann, who I could also speak about if you want me to, because he was a very good friend and a wonderful companion and colleague. But Larry became chair of the department, and Larry’s feelings at that time were, Oh my God, not this again! Do we have to deal with this? And so he was a gladiator in the sense that he was prepared to do all these things, but he was also annoyed with all the bureaucracy and the politics. So he was a happy warrior, and yet there was something slightly sad about him, in that regard. It was consuming, a bit of a consuming anxiety. And so when he passed away [five] years ago [2010], I was really very sad. I felt that I’d lost one of my dearest friends. And as you know, Fortune’s A River, which was published in 2007, was -- dedicated to Larry, and it was also dedicated to Jim Scott. I’ll speak about Jim Scott in a minute. There are some other people in the History Department that I want to talk about first before I talk about Jim. 7 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED So there were some wonderful characters. Les Thomas, who was a Colonial America historian. He’d done a Ph.D. in Wisconsin. He was very well educated and really a great authority on certain things of the 1790s in the United States. He was a very good scholar, but he was a very quiet and almost reclusive man. Tom Horn, Renaissance history, was here. He loved San Francisco, and he loved Bellingham. He was a character. He was a fellow well met. Again, an interesting teaching colleague. Very little in the way of ambition for publishing. But he and Bultmann were very, very good friends. And I mentioned Bill Bultmann; he charmed me because he had an interest in evangelical aspects of British imperial history. He and his wife, Phyllis, who you’ll recall, had studied at UCLA. They did Ph.D.s under a chap called Klingberg [Ed. Note: Frank Joseph Klingberg], –who was a very well known scholar, who was interested in the Anglican roots of the anti-slavery tradition. And Klingberg had written a book on the Codrington Plantation, Barbados, which was a story in Episcopalian or Anglican altruism, where in this slave community they were actually educating blacks to sooner or later become emancipated. So both Bill Bultmann and Phyllis went through this tradition of education at UCLA of being extraordinarily enlightened about the Anglican and Episcopal traditions of thought about these things and wrote—they wrote several very important articles about this. Another colleague of that day was LeRoy Dresbeck, the medievalist. He had come to us from the University of Montana. I had not known him in Montana. He’d gone there from UCLA before. Dresbeck was a medievalist. He had studied at UCLA under Lynn White [Ed. Note: Lynn Townsend White, Jr.], the famous historian of technology, and he’d written on winter in the medieval era. He’d written on the history of skiing. He’d written on the history of English chimneys and sort of technological things that we all take for granted now. But he was a very good medievalist, and he had become, he and Sandy, his wife, had decided to come to Western and raise their family here. Sandy was a colonial Americanist. She’d studied colonial American history with—hmm, I’ve forgotten the chap’s name, at UCLA, and had worked on some important presidential papers. But in any event, as you know, when LeRoy died about [1979] (Ed Note: March 7, 1979). Sandy taught for a while here. They were a wonderful family. We got to know them very well. At about 1968, Bill Bultmann went to the American Historical Association meeting back East, and we needed four new faculty members to be hired to fill out the ranks because our numbers as undergraduates, teaching undergraduates, were growing hugely, so four people were hired. He told me that the character of the department would change, and he was right. Lennie Helfgott came at that period of time. The fellow who taught Austrian history, Ritter— TB: Oh, Harry [Ritter]. BG: Harry Ritter. He came at the same period of time. And then there were a couple of others. And just about that time, 1969, 1970, you’ll remember that the famous crash had occurred when the Boeing aircraft corporation had a contract cancellation. The SST or was it SS1? What was the name of that famous aircraft? 8 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: Well the SST was a famous aircraft, I know that. [Ed. Note: It was the SST and it was cancelled in 1971 lacking a clear market and rising costs.] BG: Well one of them was cancelled, and all of a sudden—State legislature says, Okay, we’re calling back 10% of the budget of all state universities and colleges. What they didn’t have in place here as they did elsewhere in the state college system, and maybe at the universities, public universities, was an arrangement by which we had to decide on who would stay and who would not. TB: RIF. BG: That’s it. TB: Reduction in force. BG: RIF. So you know, we had to decide, and I remember that meeting. There must have been by this time 23 or 25 of us in the department, including those who were on the list to be cut. We voted and some of them were dropped, and I can’t remember who were dropped. You might remember, but it was a very tough decision. We all felt it, so sorry, so deeply, because to have to cut out colleagues, I have never had that experience before or since, and I hope never to see it again, but it was tough. So the tensions around RIF, and RIF-ing as we called it, were very, very severe, and very heart rendering, and it divided us. We took positions as to who we would keep, who we would not keep. TB: And wasn’t there a component that in some departments they sort of did some kind of job sharing, and in the History Department they didn’t. BG: Could be. TB: It was a straight, like you just said, cut. The people who stayed didn’t want less of an appointment. BG: It could be, [Tamara]. I don’t know. It could be that that was the case, and I don’t know how it was determined whether or not they would split them or not. But no, they decided, and I can’t remember exactly how many were cut. But in any event, it was young versus old, right? And a lot of the younger members of the department were naturally very sympathetic to those who were cut. And it was about the same time that the teaching assistants got cut too. Guys like Mike Moore and Don Christiansen, and others, who were, you know, they were hired as instructors, really to be super teaching assistants. They were both either completing their Ph.D.s at other universities or already had them. They were cut at the same time. So it was trimming down in down times. 9 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED But there were some wonderful people in the department at that time. And I could probably go around the hallway if I had to, but Harry Jackson is one who comes to mind, generous -- he and his wife were extraordinarily generous, as an example of that. Jim Hitchman. It was an interesting case with Hitchman, and he’s still alive, and I’m still in touch with him generally. But—that was an interesting case. Now he had become registrar. TB: Dean. BG: Dean of Men was it? TB: Dean of Men, yes. BG: And he lost that job or was being moved out of it. And that meant that he was going to be coming back to the History Department, and some people did not want him to come back to the History Department, and eventually it went to a vote. And I must say that I was one of the leaders of the position to get him back in the department, because we couldn’t really deny him. He was, in addition to being Dean, he was also a tenured member of the History Department, so you can’t—you can’t constitutionally exclude one of your own. But the pressures to keep him out were very, very strong. It was a question of style and personality. Hitchman and I were fellow sailors, and I got to know him on the beautiful Bellingham Bay and the yacht club there. Don Ecklund, a historian of aviation and technology. [John] Bullock, who sooner or later left, historian of Italy, an interesting character. Interesting story about Bullock. He got a research scholarship to do something, and then he didn’t complete it, and then he went to see the Dean of Research, and the Dean said, Well, I guess this is a negative report in your research. It just means that you haven’t completed it. We’ll just file that and let’s move on. I thought that was delightful. So yes, I’ve gone through -- yes, Al Rowe, who I—Al Rowe. He was another one of these wonderful people. There were several people who had come out of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, right? And Les Thomas was one of them. Al Rowe was another who was on that list. TB: Well, Bob Monahan, but he wouldn’t have been in the History Department, but I think he went to St. Olaf, didn’t he? He went to something like that. BG: I think so. And when I was in Waterloo, my university was full of these Norwegian Lutherans, so I got to know them. But I’d known these chaps, Al Rowe and his wonderful wife of the day, Joann. Now also on the list is Ed Kaplan. I don’t know whether he’s alive or not. TB: He’s not, he died. [Ed. Note: Ed Kaplan died June 25,2006] 10 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BG: Oh I’m sorry to hear that. I can tell you an anecdote about Ed Kaplan. He was a New Yorker, and he was very left of center (chuckling), a very serious historian of Chinese history. He and another, Henry Schwartz, who we hired after. Here he is, Henry Schwartz, who was a very urbane and wonderful chap. Between the two of them, they really got Sinology going on campus. But anyway, I once went into Kaplan’s office, and he was reading William Buckley’s journal, which was called The New Republic. And I said to Kaplan, I said, That’s a very unusual journal for you to be reading given your political stripes. And he said, Barry, it’s important to know what the opposition is thinking. And you know, Tamara, I’ve recounted that anecdote a hundred times because it’s so important. TB: Well it’s totally ignorant not to know what— BG: Exactly, exactly. So that was delightful. And I spent many a happy hour over a coffee with him. And I learned a lot from him. One of his friends was a playwright in New York, and the playwright in New York had received a terrible review of his play. The play was on Broadway just opened on Broadway, and the review was a stinker, just a corker, just a hateful thing. And Kaplan said to his friend, Well, you must have been devastated by that horrible review that was in Time magazine. And his friend looked at him and said, Well you know, Ed, a full page of a critique of my play in Time magazine’s got to be worth a lot—you can’t put a dollar figure on it. So, that was another insight that I got from Kaplan. So this was wonderful. I mean, one of the interesting things about this department is that people are from all over the United States. They come from different backgrounds and so forth. But Schwartz was a very fine academic, and I didn’t get to know him as well as I’d have liked to. But that’s a pretty good, pretty good list there. Roley I did not know. He was up to his neck in politics. Spent a lot of time politicking, and he was a Colorado boy, if I remember correctly, and was doing all sorts of good things. So there you are. I think that’s it. Now I mentioned—I mentioned Jim, the great Jim Scott, who came under the careful wings of [Howard J.] Critchfield, the head of Geography and Regional Planning, had been extraordinarily well educated in a grammar school in the United Kingdom, and he’d gone to Cambridge University on scholarship. Then he’d gone to the University of Illinois, and he took a Ph.D. there under a chap called [James Wreford] Watson, who had written a regional history of North America book, [North America, its countries and regions], which is about regions and how they all intersect and so forth. Now Jim Scott was an extraordinarily well-educated guy. He lived down in Happy Valley, and his wife had moved on. She later came back, as you know, Barta. And they had one daughter who Jim looked after very, very closely. But he had this very small and simple house down in Happy Valley, and the place was just jammed with books. And if I needed a book or I needed advice, Scott would have it, because he read in my fields, and he was a bibliophile. That was his world. But Jim Scott was interested in the history of archives, as you know, and so if the state archives in Tacoma or Seattle or Olympia needed some advice, we would go down and consult with them. And Jim was anxious to get the Pacific Northwest Center going here, so 11 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED was Larry of course, and so was I because of my regional interests. But we would go travel a lot together if a Washington state or the Northwest history group, Pacific Northwest history group— We would—we might be on the road one weekend to Ellensburg and three weeks later we’d be in Centralia, and perhaps it was Spokane the next year, or Tacoma or Olympia or, you know, Fort Vancouver. We were all over the map just promoting Western’s development. And this coincided with something that Larry did because he got well-connected with the US federal archives, and he brought a gentleman here who had formally been an archivist, Rhodes was his name. And then there was another fellow who came after Mr. Rhodes. [Ed. Note: Randall Jimerson came after Bert Rhoades]. TB: Paul Kohl was here. BG: Paul Kohl. TB: But he was before Rhodes. BG: Was he? TB: I think he was before Rhodes. BG: Alright. TB: He’s the one who dropped dead suddenly with a heart attack. BG: Did he? TB: Paul Kohl did, yes. BG: Sorry to hear that. But anyway, Larry was instrumental in getting Kohl here, and that’s when on the Parkway, the first building was established there. Larry and Scott were very good at getting people to give them space. And it was at that time that the US Archives and then Washington State Archives was starting to divvy up their materials and make them into regional areas, and so was the federal archives, right? So they were happy when Larry and Scott came along and said, We can solve the problem for you. So that was a great thing because all of a sudden we would be able to do regional history and regional collections right here. And Byerly--is that the right, the guy, the photographer? What was that— TB: Oh, Biery, Galen Biery. BG: Galen Biery, you see. He had these fabulous photographs of early Whatcom County. What was going to happen to those? So Biery became one of our partners in this enterprise, and the museums as well. So all of these things were coming together in those days. It was fabulous. And the university was 12 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ambitious for this sort of thing. They had in Scott and DeLorme, perhaps in myself, they had the kind of energy that was being brought to it. And then of course later on, we brought in Jim Moore , Dan Turberille, and others like that, who could do, you know, the heavy lifting and help with the archival management. And we were able to get some part-time money for persons who could catalog, and box and unbox, and put the shelves together and so forth. So that was—those were great days. Those were great days. [Afterthought: we were builders, and energized by what we were doing. The academic climate on campus in its leadership favored our schemes and allowed us to dream.] The Canadian-American Center was coming along at that time. Jerry Rutan was in politics at that time. He had a keen interest in it. And I gave him a hand with that, but it was not--I had an interest in it, but not to the same degree as in the Northwest history side of things. Jerry Flora, he was one of the great guys, period. I knew he had a lot of foes. Presidents have a lot of foes. He had earned his stripes in his work on intertidal waterways and marine biology. Television stuff that he did with Al Swift, you know, it was regionally well known. He was a good professor himself. He always regretted becoming a president. He, you know, if you read his memorial or his statement in that— TB: WWU! As it was. BG: Yes, I’ve got to get a copy of that book, please. You know, he said, Why did I leave teaching? That’s really what I loved. But we see him—I see him differently. I see that he gave a unifying force to the teaching people here at that time. And we saw that in Jerry that he had the sort of elan. He had the spirit, the bravado. He was very courageous, you know. And the happiness for the job -- I remember we had a dinner at the Bellingham Hotel, which was sort of Jerry’s finest hour [Ed note: Inauguration Banquet in 1968]. It was very, very good. He was good at that sort of thing. When new sculptures were opened, all the faculty would have a field day on the grounds of this aesthetically unsuitable, That’s going to spoil Red Square, you know. But yet it was brought about, and it stood the test of time. I mean, the sculpture policy at Western, which had fruits of, rich fruits on the trees ever since, benefits everybody, and has benefitted the university. And I think the state, when they brought in that one percent, it was a very, very good thing. So Jerry Flora was fabulous. He knew I wanted to return to Canada, and was sorry I did not remain at Western.] Dean Ross, the Graduate Studies Dean, was one of my best friends. TB: J. Alan Ross. BG: He was well connected with New Brunswick. I don’t know whether he was born in Canada, but he had an old family house on the coast of New Brunswick. And I would go in to see him and talk politics about the university, mostly program development about the Canada Center. And he would pull out from his drawer, he had a book, and in the book was a photograph of his old home back in New 13 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Brunswick, and we would get talking about New Brunswick and early life there. Ross was a very warmhearted and genial man, very competent in his administration, and moved things very readily and quickly through the processes. And he was, to my idea, one of the great models of the university administration. I’d seen those kinds of people at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, which I knew before I came here. Like them, he brought to the job a steadiness and knowledge of the world, not flamboyant, not outrageously bullheaded, but booster-ish, he didn’t have to do more. You felt when you were with Ross that everything was well looked after and that he was on your side, you know. And that’s what you need in a graduate dean. And he was very, very sad when I left. I think he rather thought I might have replaced him if I’d stayed, because he was getting up in years. Paul Woodring, I didn’t know very well, because he was back East a lot in those days. But I knew him and read his essays and other works. He inspired confidence and reflected wisdom. TB: Okay. BG: But I got to know him personally. I mean, he was always one of the great stars on campus. Herbert Taylor, Jr. He was the fixer. He was the guy who made things happen for Larry and for myself and for Jim Scott. And the politics of how things were done here in terms of research grants. You made sure that you talked to the research, the graduate and research funding authority before you made your application. TB: No surprises, right? BG: You went and talked it over first, then you prepared your dossier, and you made sure that you had things lined up properly. So I’m sort of telling tales out of school because I was the one who invented this term -- Martini Diplomacy. There was a bar across the street from the Bellingham Hotel. I think it was called The Oasis. Let’s call it The Oasis. And Herb Taylor loved martinis, and late on a Friday afternoon he might well be there. So Barry and Larry and Jim would, I think we might get a message to Herb that we would meet him there. Maybe we’d stumbled into him there on one occasion. So that’s what I remember. We went there once and we started talking about our dreams for the Northwest Center and the archives developments and so forth, and it wasn’t as if we were trying to pull strings with him, but it was Herb, because he was a very competent scholar himself, you know, done very important work in ethnography, anthropology and ethnohistory, and he appreciated the fact that we were movers and shakers. The three of us were very serious, Scott less so in terms of monographic work, but keenly interested in doing the Whatcom County atlas and the state atlas of Washington, and those things were truly important, and he was working with Howard Critchfield to develop, you know, regional studies and get all sorts of good things done, and he’d written a lot himself. But Larry and I were the two that were – I 14 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED think that Herb saw in us real promise. In any event, it was out of this that I coined the term “martini diplomacy” because we went and talked things over with Herb, and we’d get him on our side. And not only that, but we’d get his suggestions about what we could do and where we could go for further funding down the line and where it would lead to. So Herb (1934-1991) was—he was maybe 25 years older than myself, and he was our guide, and we always valued those sound opinions. I guess he would be Jerry Flora’s age (1928-2013), maybe about the same as Dean Ross’s (1911-2001), Paul Woodring’s (1907-1994), possibly Keith Murray (1910-2000). He was in that group. They’d been here for a very long period of time. TB: I think he was a little bit younger though because he did die kind of suddenly [Ed. Note: 1991, age 66]. BG: Did he? TB: He did. He died on vacation over in Hawaii. And they’d all retired. BG: Well the ground was shifting under us very quickly there, not only in terms of the fact that we were jumping from a state college into a university with big ambitions to be the best of the state colleges. Evergreen State College had just been announced, and we were going to do as well as we possibly could. I mean, with a strong science department, a brilliant music faculty, right, great education school, good general arts program, the technology things, home economics, excellent English department, we were well situated to move up to the next step. Fairhaven College (where I taught for a term) and Huxley College, then on the horizon, and Ethnic Studies (and journal). And I think a lot of us felt that. I recall also about how things were getting done. The college and university senate was a very important process on this campus. And it was a way for the administration to distance itself from new policy development, because they wanted the policies to come up from the ground. It didn’t mean to say that when it came to the senate it wouldn’t be set aside or pushed aside or put into another committee for evaluation, but they wanted us to go through the proposals for curriculum change. So, if a new History Department course was being proposed, it had to go through a department, and then it would go to the Dean of Arts, and then from the Dean of Arts it would go through as a representation by the History Department to the Faculty Council. And at the same time, there were usually reports that were given by a department to the same body that were filed to say, you know, What are our student numbers, how many FTEs do we have, what’s our average class size, and so forth. So the Faculty Council was a vetting committee, and it was really important to talk these things over in advance, between those people who were on the committee, on the Faculty Council, and those who were making the appeals for changes. So we did our homework. Nothing was left to chance. Now when I went to Waterloo to work, at Wilfrid Laurier University, the style that was there was very, very different. We didn’t have that intermediary body in the senate. We just essentially had a senate committee, things were done in a different way, passages were different. It was tighter, less political. 15 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED But I remember it this way: at Western it was extraordinarily interesting how in order to get change done, we had to make sure that the pathway was greased and the pathway was clear, because there were certain persons who sat on Faculty Council who would raise questions. They were the political faculty on campus. Some people in the faculty made whole careers about being councilors and made careers about being chair of same. Is that the right term? There was a chief [Ed. Note: Chairman]. And those persons who were chair of Faculty Council would get a full year off from their teaching duties, so that was a prize to behold. But anyway, it was a wonderful way of getting things done, and I learned about—learned about how things were done at Western. So that was intriguing. I can’t remember the fellow who was the professor of education who became a part-time vice president here, but— TB: [Ralph Thompson?] BG: I had a high regard for him. He had been acting vice president, and he said, No, I don’t want this. I’m going back to the faculty. He was wonderful. There were several people like that. Dorothy Ramsland I recall. TB: Ramsland, yes. BG: Very, very strong lead—she was a powerful force on campus. Those are some of the people. I remember the fellow who was the professor of English who read while walking on campus—I talked the talk at lunchtime with him a lot. [Many faculty members would eat together in their own room in the Viking Commons, unpretentious but important to the university.] TB: Hicks, Arthur Hicks. BG: Arthur Hicks. I talked with him a lot. He was a wonderful colleague, very well liked. Had given his life to Western. He kept all of his students’ marks. Bob Monahan and I became very, very good friends, and [Marilyn], and I still see them, and he was with Critchfield and with Jim Scott. They were doing good things. Bob Monahan was a Ph.D. from McGill University, so he had a good solid Canadian background, and he was very strong. He and Harley Hiller were good friends as well, so. That was another one. But there were all these other people. Dean [Robert D.] Brown, who was the Dean of Arts, was not a friend, but he was a very strong ally. He (chuckling)—he was a very, very good dean, a very good professor of English as well, a great author of a textbook I recall. But he— TB: A mystery writer. He wrote mysteries too. 16 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BG: Did he? TB: Yes. [Ed. Note: Hazzard, Prime Suspect, and Villa head] BG: I’d love to read some of them. He was a great guy. He ran a very, very good shop, and he had a lot of problems on his plate with all those arts faculty types, very difficult. As to the architecture, of course it was absolutely beautiful. My view from the eyebrow building of the Humanities Building was over Red Square, and my office was almost over the entrance on the western side. And I remember Jerry Flora sent out a memo to faculty, You are not to leave anything of serious importance in your offices. We do have bomb scares here from time to time. Make sure that you don’t leave anything of personal value in the university, in your own offices, because that would be, you know, you will lose it if we have a bomb scare. I wish I had a copy of that memo now, as a keepsake. And then I remember on another occasion, because the student—faculty politics were so hot in those days, Tamara. And there was an occasion where I was at a full faculty meeting, and then a memo subsequently came out, and I’d love to get a copy of this memo. I unfortunately destroyed it. But it was how to deal with a student stand-in in your class. You are to read this statement, and it said, You are— the class is to disperse, you know, and we’ll bring this class to an end, and you’re to read this three times. And if you didn’t get satisfaction at the end of the day, you were to walk out. Legal and nonconfrontational: beautiful and effective policy. But I didn’t keep that memo, but I’ve always thought that was really an interesting document about the kind of world we were living in, as professors at that time. So those were two things, the bomb scare and how to deal with civil disobedience in the classroom. But I can remember in Red Square, smoke bombs being set off and smoke wafting across it. TB: Really? BG: And demonstrations of course. These were very, very difficult times. TB: I’ve definitely heard of the demonstrations. BG: Yes, and it was uncomfortable. You know, we had sit-ins in Old Main, and we had patriots, who were supporting the Chicago group and Malcom X. These were all worthy causes, don’t get me wrong, but the university was—became a theater for all of the angst and anguish of American society and the post-Vietnam War. And when I look back now on television and I see the LBJ years and earlier the death of President Kennedy and the shooting of his brother and the death of Martin Luther King, I say, Yes, I inhabited not that world directly, but we were in the—we were downwind of all of it, weren’t we? And, 17 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED you know, Bellingham and Western Washington was regarded as Berkeley in the North. It’s just a funny little anecdote on that if I might. There was an organization called the Women of Western. Do you remember that? TB: Yes. BG: Do they still exist? TB: No, but they just disbanded in the last like 5-7 years. BG: That’s interesting, because in one of the—they used to produce an annual cookbook. And one of the items was called Berkeley Fudge, and it had marijuana in it. And Marie Hitchman went through the roof, and the thing was taken off the market. Berkeley Fudge! Berkeley Fudge with marijuana in it (laughter). Times have changed. So yes, those were interesting things. But I mean, just something like that would be a moral question, you know. And reading pages of the Western Front, week-by-week, some new saga, and some new complication. They were very, very tense times. I’m sure for many people they were very creative times. A lot of the faculty got on side with it. I think our authority in the classroom was somewhat subverted, not only by student activism but also by our own feelings that we should be with our students, in sympathy with them, you know, which is a natural thing. I mean, faculty and students are always sympathetic to one another. There’s a synchronicity that works there, because we’re trying to convey information back and forth. And a lot of us were very, very sympathetic about that sort of thing. So that came up to such questions as pass/fail course, right? TB: Okay. BG: Pass/fail. Should that be in existence or not? Then it came to the vetting of courses, were they politically inspired? Who’s teaching them? Were they academically as opposed to politically capable of doing these sorts of things? Were they using their classrooms as vehicles of proselytization or propaganda? But I would think right across the board in the History Department, we were pretty cool hands on this. I don’t recall that there was ever any difficulty of that sort, where causes one way or the other, right wing or left wing, communist or anti-communist, this is the Cold War after all. I don’t recall anything like that. One thing must be said, that, you know, we were almost invariably male. TB: Of course. BG: Until Sandy Dresbeck came on as a part-timer. TB: Okay. 18 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BG: I think—I don’t know who the first female all full-time prof was in the History Department, but it must have been very late. TB: I think Amanda Eurich about 1986. BG: Yes, that’s very late, you know. And a reference—reference persons who are not white. Tom Horn, of course, was Asiatic, Chinese if I remember correctly. It’s not worth really pushing this too strongly, because we were not an all-white-male bastion group at all. We were just a sub—we were just a fragment of history. People had come here, taught here, and done their jobs well, liked it, stayed, you know. And that’s the way it was. TB: Bellingham itself though was pretty white in the 1950s, so it had just kind of—was opening up in the 1960s, because you had a lot of new young professors that came in the mid ‘60s, because campus just doubled in size. BG: That’s right. TB: From when you were here as a student till when you came back as a faculty member, wasn’t it really almost doubled in size? [Ed. Note: Student enrollment 1962/63 4154, 1968/69 8596, and 1970/71 10, 672]. BG: Yes. TB: And was it— BG: I recall about 10,000 students. TB: Yes, exactly, when you came back as a faculty member, and there’d only been, you know, like 5,000 when you were here as a student. BG: That’s why we were hiring four or five profs a year. TB: Thaddeus Spratlen I think was the first black professor on campus . . . BG: Yes. TB: . . . in political science. BG: Yes. TB: And he only stayed about four years. And then went to the UW. 19 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BG: Right, right, right. TB: I know he has stayed good friends with a lot of the young faculty members from then, like the Nugents, because they were all, had been, you know, new Ph.D.s, they’re very friendly, and they don’t think anything about somebody of color. BG: Yes, yes, yes. TB: And I kind of heard that it was—it was still a new experience for Bellingham. BG: Yes, yes. I recall the Town-Gown association. Jerry Flora and others worked very strongly on that. And because of the, again, of the Vietnam War and social distress at that time, there was concern that town would become more and more distant from Western, and Western needed to be part of the community. So one of the first things we did in our inaugural years here were to be invited to homes--to homes of important and influential local politicians and business persons. That was a very good thing. I’d never experienced that anywhere else. But that thrived in those days. It was very good. And of course Ray McInnis was in the library at that time, and he and I became very good friends. He was a buddy of Larry DeLorme’s, and well known to Jim Scott too. And Herb Hearsey, who was a [reference] librarian. He had a collection of books on navigation, and he had one of the editions of George Vancouver’s voyage, and he knew I was up to my neck, as I still am, in the history of George Vancouver and navigation on this coast. So Herb Hearsey and I would talk about those sorts of things. So we had good communications with the library here as well. The library was going through its normal changes, you know, expanding very, very quickly, new additions being put on. TB: Sure, right. The building that you’re in, this addition was completed in 1972, so right about when you left. BG: That’s right, that’s right. TB: So did you leave here and go straight to Wilfrid Laurier or? BG: I went to Laurier in 1972, the fall of 1972. TB: So you did leave— BG: 1972, yes. 20 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: Because from here, it only said you were on leave for two years before you disappear from the catalogs. BG: That’s correct. I was given two leaves—two years of leaves of absence. They wanted me to come back. TB: Ahh. BG: Larry was very anxious that I would come back. He held the job for me. So my exit from this university was, I think correctly, in 1975. I couldn’t ask them to hold the job any more. The first year, I wasn’t sure I wanted—whether I wanted to stay in Waterloo, and then I could see that that was going to be the place where I could—I could really be very, very happy and do good things there. And I’ve never regretted that, but I always had the pull of Western. It had been, and continues to be, so very good to me, in terms of support from my own work. Not only for my teaching, but also from my scholarship. And my first book was published at UBC Press when I was a prof here, so that was good, and that was good for Western. But I wanted to go back to Canada, that’s my home and native land, and raise my family there, so that was a factor too. But, you know, just in conclusion, I’m very grateful to Western, not only for giving me a chance to enter graduate school and to prove myself in that, but then to get my feet on the ground as a professor and to do some good things here. And I think we did. I think those very, very, very good times, creative ones, not only in teaching but in publishing, against that very difficult external climate, if you’ll remember and that others have talked about, these were tough times, tough times for Bellingham and tough times for Washington State and for the university. TB: Very good. We’ve done great. And you’ve always, it seems to me, stayed in contact with a lot of people. BG: Yes. Well, I did. I’ve always been very fond of my friends and kept up the association. So, you know, Jim Scott and I were friends till the end. Hitchman and I are still occasionally in contact with one another. I was in touch with Larry till his death. There are a few other people that I know. George Mariz, for instance, we see one another on occasion. There’s a very bright young fellow in the Geography Department at Huxley Colleges who is a British Columbian. TB: Is that David Rossiter? BG: Yes. He’s a friend of mine. TB: Now he’s going to be the head of the Canadian Studies. BG: Is he? 21 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: Yes. BG: Yes. I came down to see him last year. Rossiter’s a very good scholar and I’ve met him in academic circles elsewhere, but I’m glad he’s here. I think he’s a great credit to the profession and a great credit for Western. Yes. TB: Okay. Well, I’ll say thank you very much. BG: It was a pleasure. TB: It’s been awesome! End of Recording 22 Barry M. Gough Edited Transcript – March 3, 2015 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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