Display
(1 - 1 of 1)
- Title
- Philip Campbell interview--September 16, 2005
- Description
- Philip Campbell attended WWU from 1933-1935 before transferring to the University of Washington to pursue journalism. He later returned to work in Bellingham and his children attended the Campus School.
- 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_CampbellPhilip_20050916
- Text preview (might not show all results)
-
Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections Oral History Program Philip Campbell ATTENTION: © Copyright Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections. "Fair use"
Show moreWestern Washington University Libraries Special Collections Oral History Program Philip Campbell 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 Philip Campbell at his home in Edmonds, Washington, on September 16th, 2005, his wife Joan (“Jan”) Hoppe Campbell is present and also makes some comments. The interviewer is Tamara Belts. TB: OK, today is Friday, September 16th and I am here with Philip Campbell, who is the husband of Jan Campbell. He also attended Western. He did sign the Informed Consent Agreement. So now I’m going to ask him some questions. How did you happen to come to Western? PC: When I graduated from high school in 1932 the economic picture in this country was not in too good a shape. I had no money afforded me by my parents to go on to college so I took a year off and worked different jobs. It enabled me to put together a little fund that allowed me to go to college, which I had aspired to. I felt that while I grew up on a farm I was not inclined to become a farmer, as a profession. First of all, it wasn’t very profitable in those days; secondly, it wasn’t something I enjoyed particularly. I won’t go into the details of why I didn’t like it. So, that’s where I got the money, I had to work for a year. I started college in 1933 and had a desire to become a writer. I was interested in sports. I was in sports in high school; I was a basketball player for four years. That’s about all our school had, Meridian High School. It only had one or two sports in those days for men due to limitations of budgets. To use the term, we were just too poor. So, I started college at Western and even though I had been out of school a year, I was able to adjust to higher education without too much problem. I took the usual subject matter that was required for entry students, among which was a class called nutrition or something like that, under the tutelage of a lady whose name I won’t reveal, even though she’s passed away years ago. JC: Linda Countryman. TB: Oh, oh, someone else is telling it! PC: I got a D in the course; D as in dog. That’s the only D I ever received in any college course until I got farther along. Then also I got involved in news writing with Ruth Burnet, who was a teacher at that time. I worked on the Northwest Viking during my first year in college, taking other courses, of course, along with it, and had an interest as I said before, in sports. I followed the college football team. They called them Vikings. Chuck Lappenbusch was in his first year there when I came to college, I think it was 1932, he came, or maybe it was 1933. Chuck Lappenbusch later became quite well known as a faculty member and for his years coaching football. We had some pretty respectable teams. I got a chance to tour with the team. In other words, go around to various colleges where they played, not too many colleges, obviously, Central and I think Eastern, maybe a couple others, because the travel budget in those days was very, very limited. 1 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I found out quickly that the school was dominated by young ladies, women. The total enrollment in the year I came, 1933, was something in the area of 600 students. Now that’s a ballpark figure, among which there were about 500 women and 100 men, almost that percentage, which was rather attractive to me. It gave me a quick opportunity to learn about a lot of young ladies that previously I hadn’t. I hadn’t been too interested in my former high school, because most of the girls in high school never went on beyond high school; they got married to some farmer and became a farm wife. So I learned a little bit about the social structure. Well, let’s say I wasn’t a hick exactly, but the other side of the social calendar. I was way down at the bottom. I quickly had to adjust my social aspects to become more sociably acceptable. In that regard, I tried to bring myself into looking like somebody who cared about the other side of the sexes. So, I got this yellow sweater and pair of jeans, not jeans, but a pair of, what were they wearing in those days? JC: They were saddle shoes. PC: Saddle shoes. I noticed I had some attention fairly soon after reaching college, not with my present wife who came along a year later, but with others. I won’t mention their names. (I remember all the names). You ask a question and now I’ve answered it in about fifteen minutes. Do you have more? TB: You’re doing fine, you’re doing fine. PC: Is the interview over? TB: No, no. You were doing just fine. So, what degrees did you get from Western? PC: I didn’t get a degree. In those days you had to go three years, was it, before you get a degree? I only went two years. I decided if I’m going to go ahead in a writing career, sports writing or any other type of writing, I would have to go on to school. I was accepted at the University of Washington, school of journalism, which it was called at that time. Now it’s called the school of communication. Communication in those days was limited to newspapers, magazines and radio, and that’s about it. Radio was not even too great a deal at that time. It was just getting under way; it was just a start of what it became. Most of it was small newspapers. A lot of the graduates of the school of journalism went to smaller newspapers in communities. Some started at major newspapers, but they started at a very low level. Well, I’m getting ahead of my game. I went to the university for three years. Journalism at that time was concentrated in one year, the junior year. So, they placed a limitation on grading. You had to have a B average throughout that whole year in the training for journalists. Unfortunately, they made it kind of tough. We had a good school. The teachers were all retired or had worked on major publications. I can name them by name. We always called them by their first name. Never called them Sir or Mrs., all by their first name, except one, that was Dr. McKenzie, Vernon McKenzie, who was a well known writer at that time. We had a very intimate group of about 65 students. They crowded everything into that period of time, nine months. Unfortunately, for some, they didn’t make it. We had a week of tests, solid tests, writing. You sat there and had to write, write, write. You were not flunked out, but you were dropped from journalism. So, the 65 turned out to be about 28. I was lucky enough to be among the 28. I don’t know why, but they thought I was good enough to pass. I stayed another year, beyond the junior year, which you had to to get a degree. I had to drop out a quarter in order to get some more financing along the way. So, I went five years with a couple of quarters missing. I acquired the necessary credits to graduate; we needed 180 I think, at that time. I had about 210 I think I had acquired over a five year period. Unfortunately, I did not have twenty hours of foreign language. I had what they said was only 18 hours. So, when I came up to my day for graduation they said, “I’m sorry, you can’t graduate. You need two more hours of French grammar;” (I was taking French at that time). I had taken a course previously twice, flunked it twice, the only course I ever flunked in my life -- so, no degree. 2 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED OK, now, let me jump forward about 65 years, if I may, just quickly. A friend of mine, who was a college dean who retired as head of the college of chemistry at the University of Washington, [he and I] became well acquainted. He asked about my background. I told him I hadn’t graduated, but I had plenty of credits. We went through the whole scenario. He said, “I’m going to dig into that for you and see what happened.” Well, I’m going to make a very long story short. It seems that two hours of my French background language had not been transferred from Bellingham State Normal back in 1938 down to the U to pick up on my necessary foreign language. He did a lot of digging and they finally found out about it in 2003, wasn’t it, 2003 (referring to his wife Jan)? In 2003 he got the college to rescind the fact that I wasn’t able to graduate by having those two hours get put back in my records. He arranged for a special presentation of the degree to me in January of 2003 with the university president pro-tem at that time. This was at a luncheon at the faculty club. We had four department deans there, the pro-tem president of the university there, our minister there and a few others, including my wife and couple of other friends. They were all there; it was top flight, a big deal. Sixty-eight years after I was supposed to have graduated I got my degree. JC: My degree tells when he should have graduated in 1938. PC: Anyway, so there’s my diploma, I’m a graduate, I have a degree and no longer am I at a disadvantage with my wife, who had a degree all these years and who used to lord it over me. TB: All right. PC: Now let’s get back to the… JC: You forgot to tell about the fact that when you were in the service stationed in Saipan you wrote a letter. PC: Well, in the interim after college, I had several jobs in journalism, but it didn’t take with me. The pressures involved in writing in a daily newspaper are very severe and I didn’t have that type of discipline to do that kind of writing within the time frame you’re allowed to do it. Now, that may sound like a silly reason but, I could write, but I had to have a little more time to put my thoughts together. You don’t have that. That was then. Now, today it’s all together different. I mean, you’re doing everything mechanically. It’s a different story as you well know, because they have a great school of communication at Western right now. So I dropped out, I didn’t drop out, I just didn’t further my journalist talents, if you want to put it that way. Instead I took some other jobs and finally the war caught up with me in 1942. I was still single. I enlisted and spent four years in the military. The last one and a half years or eighteen months I spent on Saipan. JC: We were married in June 1942. PC: So I wrote a letter to the University of Washington, I said, “Look, here I am over here fighting the battle and saving this country and all this jazz.” I wrote a pretty tear shaking letter. I had little drops of blood around the corner of the letter, just to show them things were tough. They wrote back and said, “Well, I’m sorry we can’t do anything about that two hours of French grammar, but if you want, we’ll send you the paper work and you can do it by correspondence.” Here I was sitting in a tent and the Japanese are dropping bombs on us and all that stuff and I was supposed to be studying French grammar! I used some language then that’s only suitable for military use. I didn’t further it. That brings me up to date. Well, then after the war, well, you ask the questions, I’m giving you… TB: Oh, go ahead; go ahead, after the war… PC: I’m out of breath. No, I’m not out of breath; I could talk for hours. I decided to become a salesman. Well, I did that after I came back to Bellingham. In the meantime, we got married. I married Joan R. Hoppe, R for Ruth, in 1942. We scheduled our wedding day on June 10, 1942. Well, on June 10, 1942, the 3 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Japanese found out about it and they decided to bomb, not Pearl Harbor that was long since, but one of the Alaskan peninsula areas, Dutch Harbor. So, I was frozen in my position. I was over in Yakima at that time doing some training work and I got frozen, if you know what I mean. I got stuck. So, we had to cancel the wedding and move it up ten days or… JC: Two weeks, to the day. PC: Two weeks. So, I finally got three days off and we got married, a long honeymoon, one night over in Vancouver, then back to camp again. Now that’s just trivia. After that I got a job with Pacific American Fisheries in Bellingham, it was a well known large processor of Alaska seafood. I didn’t want to move out of Bellingham because I kind of liked the area and so I found a job there and eventually worked myself into sales. In 1965, the company was sold out, dismantled, put out of business and there I was without a job. Well, fortunately I had made myself a little reputation in the industry as being a fairly decent sales person, so I got a job in Seattle with another company that had bought part of our assets. I worked for them for almost twenty years and became vice president of sales. I had an opportunity to travel around the world practically, to sell products, because we had distribution internationally and nationally. I’m almost bringing you up to date here. So I did that for almost forty years, thirty-five, thirty-seven years. In the meantime my wife was able to travel with me a few times, Europe a number of times and Japan, Australia and New Zealand (well, that was partly on business, partly on pleasure). So, we had a pretty good travel background that afforded me a broadening of my experience in meeting people and working with other people besides American business people. I was calling on mostly grocery trade, supermarkets, wholesale grocers, and selling products that we produced in Alaska and other plants. We were one of the major packers in the business. I retired in 1981 at the age of 67. I don’t mind telling you my age. I am now a little older than that as you make this recording. That pretty much brings you up to date. In the meantime we raised some family. We have four children, two girls and two boys. They all turned out very well. But now I’m putting words in your mouth so now you ask me some questions, if there’s anything left. TB: That’s OK, that’s great. I’m going to go back and ask you questions about Western, then. PC: Way back, OK. TB: Where did you live when you attended Western? PC: I lived at home. We lived out north of Bellingham in a little rural area called Laurel. My father homesteaded there in 1892. That’s where his farm was and that’s where I was born. That’s why I drove back and forth to college. TB: Did you have a car? You must have had a car. PC: No, I had the family car. My father didn’t need the car during the day time because he was always working out in the fields somewhere. TB: Who were your favorite or most influential teachers and why? PC: Well, I would say Ruth Burnet was the one that I was most closely associated with because of her teaching newspaper writing. Incidentally, my family knew her first husband. When Ruth came to Western she had lost her husband during the flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Her original name was Hussey. She had a son Bill Hussey who I knew very well later on. I played with him as a child when I was three, four years old because they lived out on a farm near where we did. I got acquainted a little bit with her when I was 4 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED four years old, but she didn’t remember that. Anyway, we knew the family quite well. My mother knew her parents, Axtell, Dr. Axtell. Anyway, Ruth Burnet was a good friend of mine. I liked pretty much all of them. Even Tom Hunt, Tom Hunt was a history teacher up there as I recall. I liked, well, I even liked, who’s the French teacher, what was her name? JC: Anna Ullin. PC: Anna Ullin, yes, she was OK. Anna was all right. I took a course from Dr. Hicks, as I said earlier; I think the second year he was there. I wasn’t used to his type of teaching. I was pretty green in the area of literature and English. I probably didn’t do all that well, I guess I got a B or something in his course. But I realized he was an outstanding teacher at that time, even though he was in his second year on his college career, which later was about forty years up here or something like that. He was pretty green, to use that expression of that time. His talent as a teacher was probably less than it obviously was later. He was exposing his knowledge rather than trying to teach us, I think at that time. But he was good, I liked him. Who else did I have? TB: Kibbe? Did you have Dr. Kibbe? PC: I missed Dr. Kibbe. I missed him. He was a character; I would have liked to take something from him. I knew all the teachers. TB: Miller? PC: No, oh no, I didn’t care for him. He was a little bit too severe. TB: Did you have Dr. Bond? PC: No, he was a mathematician (really, I don’t remember). I knew all the teachers; I knew them by name and some of them more than that. Oh, Sam Carver for example. Sam was a teacher; I think I took a course in something Sam had. I remember most of them I took courses under. TB: So what classes did you like the best or learn the most from? PC: I suppose Ruth Burnet’s class furthered my interest in writing in a more intimate way, because I was kind of directed that way in the first place. I kind of wanted to be a writer, mostly in sports. I guess a lot of boys like sports and they always think, well, I can write. I was trying to copy Ring Lardner. Ring Lardner was one of the famous syndicated sports writers of the day back in the Thirties, I don’t think you’d remember him, probably, but his stuff was well known nationally and internationally. I thought, well, I could do as well as he does. You know, you have to have somebody to look too. Well, it isn’t that easy. What was the question again? TB: What classes did you like best or learn the most from? PC: Well, it wasn’t French grammar, that’s for sure! JC: Journalism. Journalism is what you were talking about. PC: Well, journalism, yes, but I had to take a lot of other courses. I don’t think I took anything musically. I wish I had my paperwork here, I could tell you. This is back about, what is it, seventy years ago? My memory is pretty good, as you can see by what I’m saying, but it isn’t quite totally refined to the point I can tell you specifically what classes I liked back in those days. TB: That’s fine. 5 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PC: I apologize for my lack of remembrance. Anyway, I didn’t take any classes from her father. I’m sorry I didn’t. I didn’t feel too much drawn towards dramatics, acting. I was pretty much… JC: He was a very quiet man when I married him. You wouldn’t believe it. PC: She turned me around completely. JC: He came out of his shell and now I can’t get him back in. PC: I was a boring, quiet kind of introvert-ish person. I really wasn’t, I had this talent all the time, but she pulled it out of me. TB: OK. What extra curricular activities did you enjoy the most? PC: Extra curricular. Well, I tell you, I kind of looked forward to the dancing. We had the intramural dancing. JC: Rec hour. PC: Rec hour, famous rec hours, we had. Was it every Friday? JC: Yes, something like that, well, maybe not every Friday. PC: In the gym, in the old gym. You wouldn’t believe that gym was so small, it’s hardly called a gym, but that’s what it was. We had music of some kind. What was it, recorded music or? JC: Oh, obviously recorded music. PC: So, we had these dances. It was a good way to meet people. In this case, it was a question of meeting girls, because we knew the boys, there were only a few of us. Also sports, I was into all the basketball and football. JC: When you had to crown the queen… the homecoming queen. PC: Oh, that was after the war. That was after the war, yes. JC: I thought that was when you were still in college. PC: No, no. JC: That’s when you were in college. PC: No, no. I don’t remember that. JC: Well, I do. PC: She’s talking about when I crowned the homecoming queen. No, I did that after I got out of the service. I wore a uniform with my captain or major’s hat on or all the other stuff I had at that time, all the ribbons I’d won in combat. They asked me to come up to the college and crown some kind of a queen, I can’t remember what the occasion was, but the war fervor was still intact. We were still glowing in the results of the war, glowing in the results of all these guys coming back from the war. So, they selected me as being a handy guy to have around to crown queens. And I said I’d do it for nothing. I gave them a good deal on it. The queen I crowned, what was her comment that I thought was beautiful? 6 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED JC: She said, “I don’t know why I was crowned queen, all the girls are just as beautiful as I am.” There was a dead silence when we actually heard what she said. PC: She was quite well addicted with her own beauty, if you want to use the term addicted. Anyway, that’s just an aside. That was after the war. TB: Well, you mentioned homecoming. What about the bon fire? There used to be a homecoming bonfire. PC: Yes. I’ve attended some of them. I didn’t start them. I was an expert at starting fires, because I used to clear land when I was a kid. That was quite an occasion. It’s not practiced anymore, I don’t think, by any college since that disaster down in Texas two years ago, that was ridiculous. That’s a tradition that went on for a long time, but I don’t know why it dropped off. They dropped it before the war, I think, actually. TB: Do you have any other special memories of your college days? PC: Oh, goodness. I have so many. Western, you’re talking about Western now? TB: Yes. PC: I went to two colleges, so I have to be interviewed by the people from University of Washington too. It was my first entry into the social life I should have been more involved in in high school. I’m not talking about college being a bunch of social butterflies, but my reaction toward other people was more fulfilled in college than it was in high school. In high school, we kind of went through there as something we had to do, you know. Your experience in college was something that you wanted to do. You didn’t have to go. In my day a lot of them dropped out in the eighth-grade. I’m going back quite a while in this, but that was true in the country. They went back to the farm. They needed farm help, so they went through the eighthgrade. You had to go through the eighth-grade and you dropped out, some of them did. It was a fulfillment and start of my social career, ability to relate to people, you understand. Not only women, but men, because I was a little more mature, obviously. That period of maturation, or whatever you call it, would not have happened if I had stayed on the farm. I would still have been related to the soil and the cows. This gave me an opportunity to get into the human aspect of social life. I was a friend of a lot of animals, but they don’t count much. These are different kind of animals I met in college. It took a while to adjust to it. She was one of the factors in my adjustment. I think I could see that she wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, but at least she was sophisticated to a point, having grown up among the social group in Bellingham that I had heard of before but know now and became a part of in a lot of respects. That’s about it, I guess. TB: You mentioned earlier that you knew Ruth Burnet’s grandparents, the Axtell’s; do you remember anything about them? PC: Yes, Dr. Axtell and his wife; Dr. Axtell of course, was a prominent physician in Bellingham when I was very young. I really don’t have a lot to go on other than hearsay from my mother, who seemed to have known him, either by the fact that she was a patient or something. She was a housekeeper; my mother was, for one of the legislators from the northwest who was a congressman in Washington, D.C. My mother came from Denmark, she was Danish, came over when she was sixteen years old and found some jobs around after she got here and one of them was a housekeeper for this congressman. She knew the Axtell’s through this congressman, I guess, and that’s how I happened to know the name, but there was no connection, I never knew them. I knew Bill Hussey very well after we went to college together for a couple of years. He went to Fairhaven High School too, didn’t he? 7 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED JC: I don’t think so. I don’t think he went to Fairhaven. PC: Well, I don’t know where he went, but… TB: I think he did. Was that the Aurora? PC: Yes, yes. TB: He went wherever the Aurora was, the Aurora newsletter. PC: We get that. I knew a lot of the people from Fairhaven because in those days because of the economic factors of life during what we call the Great Depression of what you fortunately didn’t come through. There were a lot of people that had to go to local schools, they couldn’t have gone on beyond very far because the money wasn’t there. Some could have, but they chose to start in Bellingham. There was quite a large percentage of graduates from both Whatcom and Fairhaven that went to Bellingham State Normal, for a year or two before they went on to somewhere else. That’s where I got to know a lot of these people and still correspond with some. Well, I’ve known them for years. We still know Jack Carver, a good friend of ours; I think he’s still alive. TB: Oh, yes. He goes to my church. PC: He’s not young. And Margaret Miller, of course, she’s younger; Margaret’s, Dr. Haggard’s daughter. They were neighbors, right next door to us when we lived in Bellingham; we got to know the Millers very well. TB: After you were married? PC: Bob Miller, yes. TB: I just saw them last night. JC: How is she? TB: Good, they’re both doing good. Last night was Viking Night, which is a fundraiser for athletics and they were there. Their granddaughter’s going to be an assistant-basketball coach. She’s a graduate student. PC: That’s Gragg’s daughter. JC: Oh, Gragg’s daughter. TB: Yes, it’s Gragg’s daughter. PC: We remember Gragg when he was born. They didn’t have any children when they moved next door to us, but we knew them very well when their kids were coming up. Sam Carver lived right down the street from us. We know a lot of the people. PC: I mentioned Herb Hearsey. They lived just down the street from us. We knew them very well. JC: They were on Forest Street. PC: They had their twins. They got off to a slow start. Financially they were pretty well strapped for a while. I remember they had a money tree for them one time. JC: When she was expecting the twins. 8 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PC: A money tree so we could help them. Is that their first children? JC: No, no. PC: They had one other. Then later on, I guess Herb did pretty well. He left an endowment, a pretty good endowment. TB: Yes, he got it from somewhere. PC: I don’t know where he got it, frankly. JC: They were really sort of living from hand to mouth. PC: Oh, yes. What was her name? JC: Beth. TB: Laura Beth. PC: Beth, Beth, yes, they went to our church. Didn’t they? TB: They went to your church? PC: St. James. I don’t know if they did or not. No, I guess not. Anyway, we knew them well enough because the kids were around the neighborhood and our kids. We have lots of roots up there -- lots of roots -- a lot of them are gone, of course. TB: Well, you know the Hiller’s. I know you know the Hillers because I told them I was coming down here. PC: Hillers? Oh, yes. JC: Harley and Joyce, I even remember their names. PC: Well, you name somebody like that, that age group. TB: Well, I went to St. James but I didn’t go there until 1974. So, you guys were probably gone. PC: Yes, we were gone 1965, 1966 we left. TB: Did you know Dr. Palmer, then? Harold Palmer, he was a typing teacher. PC: We knew Palmer. Our kids were good friends with their kids. JC: Oh, Grace Palmer, yes. TB: He’s down in Eugene. I interviewed him last week. PC: He retired from Western. TB: He retired from Western and then they lived down in Arizona or New Mexico for about 27 years and then I think probably when his wife passed away, he moved to Eugene to be by his daughter. He was living in the Eugene Hotel, I guess. PC: That’s Beth. 9 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TB: No, it’s Pat. JC: Beth is the daughter. TB: She’s in Forks. One daughter’s in Forks and one daughter’s in Eugene. JC: That was Ginna’s friend. TB: Pat’s in Eugene. PC: We knew them; they lived up on Highland Drive. Good friends of theirs. TB: I think they did live on Highland, yes. Anyway, I enjoyed meeting him. He was a nice man. PC: Yes. TB: He doesn’t see very well either, in fact, he’s legally blind. JC: Does he have macular degeneration? TB: I don’t know. I just know he said he’s legally blind. JC: Well, I’m legally blind, too, actually. TB: Certainly a delightful man, a nice man. Well, anything else that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to share? PC: Am I still on this thing? TB: You’re still on. Anything else? PC: Not right now, that I can think of, until you leave here. TB: OK. JC: It took us seven years to get together, though. It was a long courtship, only there was no courtship. TB: How’s that? JC: We ignored each other for seven years. TB: Oh, really? PC: Yes, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure she was right for me. I was kind of playing the field, you know how men do. Dogs. I had a feeling that somewhere along the line that that she was the right person. JC: You never mentioned it. PC: I didn’t have enough, well, I’m trying to find the right word, but whatever I’m going to pick is not going to be right, so… She didn’t show any aggressiveness towards me, you know, in terms of hunting me down and writing me a letter and saying “How’re you doing?” JC: A girl didn’t do that in my day. 10 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PC: No, I know, in those generations. JC: You had to be the aggressor. TB: So, how did you get together? JC: Just by accident. PC: I think I found out where she was and I probably wrote a letter. I was working over in Eastern Washington at the time. I was at an electrical engineering firm; I was doing some work for them. That’s a good question and I’m going to try to write a book on that some time. JC: We can’t remember. Maybe it was just an accident. PC: The longest courtship… JC: Only it wasn’t. PC: We believed in long courtships in those days. This sounds like back in the 1800s, doesn’t it? No two week marriage and all that. Kids get together now and in six months they’re married, you know. TB: Or less. PC: It’s terrible. JC: And six months later their unmarried. Or six weeks in some cases. PC: We don’t know why we’re married sixty-three years either. If you asked us a question, why are you still married after sixty-three years? Well, I’ll tell you one thing, we’re different, we’re different personalities. I’m a very pacifistic person. She’s not quite exactly like that. JC: I’m like my father. PC: She’s like her father, her father was very …, I use the word temperamental, but that’s pretty close. She’s not totally temperamental, but she has a little bit of it. At times more than a little and I’m usually defending myself. Just something I tell young people, don’t marry another person just like you -- it’s dull, first of all, it’s dull. Ours is exciting because there’s always something going on. I should be a counselor. I am a counselor to some extent with my grandchildren. We have some eligible grandchildren. We have one particular grandchild, she’s a teacher, 28 years old, and she can’t find the right person. She has a list of things she wants, you know, things to measure up to. She’ll probably be teaching school another twenty five years. So, I counseled her, and I counseled one of our youngest grandchildren, boy, he’s over there at WSU, getting a doctorate, but he’s found his wife. He’s found her (with the help of his grandfather). I gave him a few pointers. I said, “Don’t sit back. Be more aggressive.” Do you see why I want to write a book? TB: Yes, you’ve got to write that book. Well, is there anything you want to say now before I shut the tape off? PC: No. TB: Well, I’ll say thank you very much. 11 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 12 Philip Campbell Edited Transcript – September 16, 2005 Campus History Collection ©Western Washington University Libraries Special Collections ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Show less