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Phillip R. Ager

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This interview was conducted with Phillip R. Ager, Associate
Professor Emeritus of Music, Western Washington University and
former Dean of Fairhaven College. The interview was conducted at his
home in Winthrop, Washington, on September 19 th, 2003. The
interviewer is Tamara Belts.
TB: Today is Friday, September 19th. My name is Tamara Belts, and
I‟m over in Winthrop with Phillip Ager, who‟s both an alumni and was
a faculty member at Western as well as in Fairhaven. And he‟s just
signed the form and consent agreement, and we‟re going to start our
oral history.
So, as a student, why did you choose to attend Western?
PA: You know, I‟m not sure I ever thought about whether to come to Western or not. A very good friend
of mine decided to come, and we sort of came together, and it was just about that simple. I think in those
days it was kind of not a planned affair as much as it is today. It was pretty simple.
TB: OK, I think you came in the fall of 1948?
PA: Right. Graduated in June of ‟52. It was right at the time when that the college, which it was referred
to then, had become Western Washington College of Education. And I‟m not sure what the year was,
whether that happened just as I was arriving, or whether it had happened just a short time before I came in
‟48, but it was a new name, basically. I got a Bachelor of [Arts] in Education and Provisional Certification,
which was also a new program at that time. It was, up until just shortly before I arrived, or maybe even
during my first two years, that they began the Fifth-year Program, which meant that you graduated not with
full certification but with a Provisional Certificate and then were required to come back for a fifth year to
get a Continuing Certificate. It was kind of an interesting time; there were a lot of changes at that time.
Another thing that was really unique about those years, I think, is that veterans returned in huge numbers,
so that the college population at the time was sort of a mix between us young kids -- seventeen, eighteen,
just out of high school -- and people who had been through the Second World War and were pretty mature,
even though, you know, they might have only been three, four, five years older than we were, many of
them had been through a lot. In a way, it was really exciting to have those kinds of people in the classes.
You‟d sit next to a student who was in the mid to late twenties and possibly married with kids. My memory
is that there were a lot of kids on campus. When I was a junior, I believe, I lived in the veterans‟ housing,
even though I wasn‟t a veteran, and there were kids all over the place, and they were not only hanging out
near the vets‟ housing, but they were on campus. A lot of wives who were not enrolled in school were
there. It made the classes, I think, more interesting.
TB: Where did you live most of the time?
PA: I didn‟t live anywhere most of the time (laughter)! When I went there, I lived in the YMCA
downtown, right where it is today, I believe, if it‟s still on the corner of State and Holly. A lot of students
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lived in the Y. There was a great deal of student housing that was run by community people, all the way up
and down Indian Street, High Street, all over the hillside, and they all had to be, I believe, collegeapproved, in those days. When I finally discovered that getting from the YMCA to an 8:00 class on foot
got to be difficult, I moved up to a private residence on Indian Street, and I think that was the third quarter
of my freshman year, and I was there spring quarter and the following fall quarter. Then I moved into the
MRH, the Men‟s Residence Hall, which was now, I think, where the Speech and Audiology folks still are.
TB: Journalism‟s actually there now.
PA: Journalism, OK.
TB: Yes.
PA: And I stayed there for the remainder of that year and the first two quarters of my junior year, and then I
got married during spring vacation of my junior year, and we lived the rest of our time there in the vets‟
housing over where the tennis courts used to be, which was on the way to Fairhaven, which is probably
somewhere in the neighborhood of where Huxley is nowadays. Even when I was at Western as a faculty
member I was never quite sure of the geography (laughter) because it had been bulldozed and changed and
leveled and flattened and that sort of thing. It was a great experience; it was a really maturing experience,
partly because of the various places I lived, and also because of the presence of all of these older people on
campus. It changed the atmosphere from what it probably would have been had we all just been freshly
graduated from high school.
The first two quarters, when I lived in the YMCA, I lived with a friend from Bremerton whose name was
Clem Modisett, and I think Clem was the first black student to ever go to Western. I‟m not sure of that. He
left at the end of winter quarter my freshman year, partly because it was really difficult for him. It was not
a welcoming place, either the school or the community. He was really a good kid. He was a boxer, I
remember, and I‟ve always felt that was a real privilege to be with him at a time when race was not an issue
in society.
It was not difficult at all for me to do that because one of my best friends, when I grew up at Bremerton,
was the only black student in the city of Bremerton, and it was so interesting because nobody considered
him black. Then the Second World War came, and the town became full of all different ethnic
backgrounds, including a lot of black people brought up from the South as labor in the shipyard in
Bremerton. And, actually, I think the shock was as great for Bill Wilson, who was the person I was talking
about, as it was for us. We‟d never really known that there was a difference.
But, I‟ve always looked back on that with a great deal of, not pride, but just a sense that I felt really
fortunate to have had that experience to spend some time at a time when there were no issues around that,
at least in this area. It was a real wake up when Clem just said, “You know, I can‟t stay here anymore.”
TB: Do you know more about why he felt that way? I mean, was it just that people, either they looked at
him or they ignored him, or…?
PA: He wasn‟t welcome, and a lot of it was in the community. And, of course, this is a very personal
observation, but I never felt that Bellingham, as a community, while I was there, was very welcoming.
TB: So even towards you…
PA: No, no no. Toward blacks.
TB: OK.
PA: Even when I was a faculty person there. I don‟t think the university was particularly welcoming. They
did begin to encourage minorities to come, but, it was a long history of never having to deal with other
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ethnic groups. I don‟t remember a single person during my student days there that was of any other ethnic
background than Clem, and he was there and gone very quickly.
TB: Where did he go?
PA: He went to New York City. He became a real estate agent and was extremely successful. At least
that‟s what I was told.
TB: So he did go onto college, he just went somewhere else?
PA: Yes, and I don‟t know if he went onto college or not. I heard about him after I graduated. And I really
had no way of tracking him down. He just left, and that was it.
TB: Now, did you work while you were a student?
PA: I did. I lived on $25 a month when I was a student until I got married. I got a job in the student coffee
shop which was in the basement of the old Music Building, which is in the same place as the new Music
Building, but it was much smaller. Sixty cents an hour, but I could eat there, so it was great. I did that
mostly my freshman and sophomore year, and then I got a job at Columbian Optical. I had met the owner
when I lived at the YMCA because Columbian Optical was right in that little corner store on the ground
floor of the YMCA building. I made eye glasses. He was an avid boater, and he had a boat out at
Fisherman‟s Cove, and so he took me out, and I worked on his boat because I could work on engines and
do carpentry work. The fellow who owned Fisherman‟s Cove then hired me during my senior as a boat
builder, which I did all during my senior year, and I got an apartment in exchange, plus a small salary.
Harold, gosh I can‟t remember -- restaurant and marina. I don‟t know even if it‟s still there, probably is.
It‟s where the Lummi Island ferry docks.
TB: Who were your favorite or most influential teachers during that time?
PA: Well, that‟s interesting. Does Lucy Kangley ring a bell?
TB: Oh, yes, I have heard…
PA: Oh, Lucy was a wonderful, tough, in-your-face lady. I loved her classes. She even used bad words
once in a while, which is unheard of in those years.
TB: I would have thought, yes.
PA: And she was just sort of enfant terrible, the one that everybody sort of picked on as this terrible
person, this immoral lady (laughter), but, gosh, she was a good teacher, and she just really turned a lot of us
on to literature, which is what she basically taught. And Arthur Hicks, too.
I took the required literature courses from Lucy and Arthur Hicks, and I really liked Arthur. He was a
friend when I went back as a faculty member.
And there was a young man in the Science Department named Kermit Bengston, and I was really into
mountain climbing, and so was Kermit, and he was one of the few faculty members -- most of the faculty
members in those years were pretty reserved, and they were nice people, but you never felt you could get
close to them -- but he was a person you could, you know, get close to, you could do things with out of
school, and I did a lot of hiking and climbing with Kermit, and I really enjoyed him.
Ed Arntzen was great, and someone that everybody learned to mimic. He had all these speech things, and I
could still do them if I set my mind to it.

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Annis Hovde was a very close friend of my wife‟s sister and brother-in-law. Annis was a fairly new
teacher, and in terms of English comp, he was the first person that told me I could write, and I really
appreciated that. Other people, all they could do was tell me what I did wrong. He said, “No, you could
write if you just sat down and spent more time with it.”
I‟ve never forgotten that. He was a faculty member at Fairhaven when I went, still very supportive, a really
kind and really solid guy.
Nora B. Cummins. I can remember History 105. We would all sit in this classroom the first day, and this
lady came in, she looked like someone out of a Victorian picture: lace collar, you know, long black skirt
and a white blouse with lots of frills on it, and she was another one like Lucy, but she wasn‟t quite as crazy.
She was really in-your-face, boy, I mean, if you didn‟t know history, you weren‟t getting out of this school,
and you weren‟t worth anything, and, you know, kind of on and on. In addition to that, I think she was an
excellent teacher. She was quite near the end of her career, I‟m sure, and she was right there, she knew, I
mean, she wasn‟t teaching people [stuff] from ten, fifteen years ago. She knew what was [going on].
Bill McDonald was a great guy. He wasn‟t really a teacher; he was the Dean of Men. But he was always
there, not only if you needed him, but he‟d kind of always anticipate it, and I think that would be fair to say
a lot of people would say the same thing who were there during my years, that he sort of watched out for
everybody, and if people were having a hard time, he didn‟t wait till they came to see him. He kind of
figured out a way to shoehorn into your life and kind of lend a helping hand. I really respected him, and we
worked the first several years of my time as a faculty person, I worked very closely with him. We had a
great relationship, I thought.
Harvey Gelder, a really dear man. I baby-sat his kids for a brief time. I lived right across the street from
where he lived, and I‟ve had a friendship with Harvey since [1948]. He was fairly new, I think, to the
faculty that year.
TB: When you came as a student then, he was a faculty person?
PA: Yes.
TB: Wow.
PA: Yep. I‟m sure he just had arrived. He was living in vets‟ housing, too.
I didn‟t know Paul Woodring very well, but I did take a couple of classes, and I think one of my proudest
moments in the whole time I spent at Western was catching him in a mistake. And he said, “Ah, very
good!”
And I thought, All right! That’s made my four years here! Because nobody every caught him.
There was a woman in the campus school named Eileen McMillan. I think of all the people there, she
probably had more influence on me than anybody. I student taught there quite early, maybe the first
quarter, the short student teaching. In those years you did a short one and a long one, a half day and then a
full day. I don‟t know if that‟s still the case or not. I did my short student teaching at the campus school,
and she was the music teacher there, and she was also, I think, a music faculty person. She took me under
her wing; somehow, there was good chemistry between us, and she really was the one that began to forge
my teaching philosophy, I think. She was very adept at somehow figuring out how to get you to figure it
out for yourself, rather than telling you. She went from Western, before I graduated she left and went back
to Columbia to teach, which was where she had done her undergraduate work. She was very, very good
and highly respected, sort of on the national scene.

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Those are pretty much people that I remember as being quite influential on me. The Music faculty was
very standoffish, very formal. They were OK, the classes were fine, I felt I learned well, but I never felt
close to any of them.
TB: Like Don Walter, you worked closely with him, he was band director, right?
PA: Right, and I was actually the student conductor of the College Band, and he was very kind to me, and I
liked him, but I never felt a personal connection with him. He was all very, I don‟t know; it‟s hard to
describe. He was of course in the department when I came back.
TB: Was it different when you came back as a faculty person?
PA: Oh, he was fine, and we got along just fine. Actually, I got along with everybody. I‟m never quite
sure why, but I think the person who preceded me had created so much antagonism amongst and between
various members that anything was a relief. I really tried hard to play fair and to use people in ways that
suited what they could do and what they wanted to do, rather than just sort of arbitrarily assigning people
like kind of by the number. When I came back as a faculty person, I never really felt any real sense of
nervousness about my relationship with them. Bernard was there, Don Walter was there, who else?
Anybody? You know the department was tiny when I was an undergraduate. Really there was only the
three people: Frank D‟Andrea, Don Walter, and Bernard [Regier]. They were the three fulltime faculty.
Everybody else was part-time. Oh, Myra Booth, excuse me. She would have been, they would have had
four faculty. By the time I left the department, including affiliates and full-time faculty, we had over forty
people.
TB: Wow.
PA: That wasn‟t forty FTE, of course, but forty names, bodies, some of whom, you know, may have only
taught four private lessons a week or some of them taught fifteen private lessons. There was a lot of
people to manage, but also a lot of people to bring their expertise, their personality, and their point of view
into the department. But when I was an undergraduate it was basically [four], Myra was about to retire,
and she taught music history, that was about it.
TB: What about Frank D‟Andrea?
PA: He was an enigma for me. I always had the feeling, even as an undergraduate student, Frank wanted to
be somewhere else. And, actually, he ended up going back to Columbia at the end of the first year when I
came back as a faculty person.
TB: Do you have any other memories of like Dr. Haggard or other -- you talked about McDonald -- but any
of the other…?
PA: Dr. Haggard… Two really specific memories. I didn‟t write these down, they just immediately came
out. The first one is that, by the first day of school, he knew everybody‟s name. He walked the halls; he
was always in the halls, like an old-time principal. It was like he was checking to be sure everybody was in
the right place at the right time. He always knew your name. He called me by my name the first time I saw
him.
TB: Wow.
PA: He came up, and just said, “Hello there, Phil! Nice to see you! Glad you could come!” You know,
that sort of stuff. And it wasn‟t long before everybody knew that he knew everybody‟s name, every single
person.
The other thing was that I had come to Western on a Washington Club Scholarship, which I think the club
is now defunct. I don‟t know if they still have it. It was a Bellingham club. So, as part of the requirements
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of that, I had to go to a meeting and be introduced and had to say something nice, so President Haggard,
called me, and said, “Now is the time. Now I want you to understand that you may hear some language
that you‟ve never heard before.”
And I thought, whoa, boy, I don’t know! Is it Czechoslovakian or what?
He said, “Just don‟t pay attention. Here are the things I want you to say.” (Laugher) Sort of command
performance. So he said, “All right, I‟ll meet you at Edens Hall.”
I can‟t remember, I don‟t believe he drove, he had somebody drive us downtown to the Bellingham or the
Leopold or something. We went down and went to the meeting, and it was fine, and came back. I don‟t
think I‟ll ever forget this: We were walking from Edens Hall to Old Main, and we were walking together,
and we were just chatting, and on the sidewalk was a prophylactic. And we walked along, and without
missing a step, he just went with his foot, pushed it off -- and I noticed all this -- pushed it off into the
bushes, never hesitated in his conversation. It was a beautiful move. But I don‟t think that should be part
of the history here. Anyhow, that‟s a memory that has never really left.
And there were a lot. I skied at Mount Baker. I had never been to a place so beautiful in my life. We did
things like ride the mail boat through the San Juans. I don‟t know if that‟s still something you do. There
was a lot of things that we did that I thought were really kind of fun things. Of course there was no TV,
none of the distractions [there are] now, so you sort of had to figure out things to do. I always felt there
was a really nice balance between experiencing life and doing the academic thing. The emphasis was not
so overwhelmingly on doing the academic stuff, and I think it really makes a difference. I think the time to
contemplate is valuable and to think, rather than just keep grinding away at reading and writing. I really
enjoyed my undergraduate days at Western. I enjoyed the people; I enjoyed the student body.
TB: Now what about, for example, band and the music program. You did a lot of trips?
PA: We took a trip every year to high schools, and that began to sort of fall by the wayside after I left,
partly because high schools become a little more unruly, and band music was not something that all student
body groups really liked. They became more and more difficult. When I was there, I took the band on
tours, but we did it a little differently, and so did our choir when Bob Scandrett was there. He went often to
churches and to neutral venues so that, you know, students could come if they want, and we would contact
schools and say, “We‟re going to have a concert here. Maybe you‟d want your band or choir students to
come.”
But almost every year there was a major tour of the band and the choir. When I was chair of the
department, a lot of the smaller groups took sort of mini-tours -- the Collegiums, chamber music groups,
small vocal groups, and the jazz choir -- so a lot of kids were on the road, so to speak, and stage band.
TB: Were those your closest friends then too, when you were a student -- the people that were in band with
you?
PA: That was pretty much the circle that I ran in. Also, when I was there in Edens Hall the women were in
rooms which frequently had four occupants and the three other women who roomed with my first wife and
their husbands, who weren‟t husbands at the time, were sort of a circle that we ran in, too. But, it was
mostly Music, and the other thing is that Music is a pretty social thing. There are rehearsals; you‟re
essentially studying, but you‟re with a group. I think you develop a lot more close relationships with
students in those, as you do on a team or in a drama production; it‟s just a given, I think. I still keep in
touch infrequently with those three other people. Tom Springer is one. He‟s taught in Lynden for years.
He and his wife are still there.
TB: How about construction? A lot of building was going on when you were a student. Did you have that
sense? They were building the Auditorium; they were building an Industrial Technology Building (Art
Building).
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PA: Right. And I think the plans were, they were starting… I don‟t know if they were excavating for
Haggard Hall at the time.
It was a really interesting time when I was there as a faculty member. It was a period of really fast growth,
and it was also a period of feast and famine. It seemed like every two years, I mean, it‟s hard to explain all
of the intricacies of it, but I‟ve thought that a lot of Western‟s problems in those days, including the
problems of Fairhaven, stemmed out of that fast growth, a lot of new programs starting. One year there
would be lots and lots of funding, and so they‟d hire on people, and then they‟d have a big state-wide crisis.
You know, there were a whole bunch of mini-depressions during that period, from ‟60 to ‟75, ‟78, ‟80.
Then they‟d have RIF. You‟d have to reduce. Then people became very protective, and it became a sort of
survival contest. The people became very cannibalistic. Often it turned out to be people that you didn‟t
agree with, people you didn‟t like, and it was just impossible to objectify the need for retaining or getting
rid of staff and faculty.
It‟s just constant turmoil, which seemed to get in everybody‟s way. It was the thing that was on your mind.
You never really knew, the final budgets never came out until the summer, so people would leave in the
spring; they didn‟t even know where they stood. So then the people would be let go, staff would be
shuffled, and the last in-first out -- you know all that stuff -- would all take place. And then, there would be
another surge of enrollment and another economic time that was fairly good, and so, they‟d start pulling on
more faculty and, of course, the late „60‟s and „70‟s really changed the face of the curriculum, and during
that five-year period of time, all of these new programs -- you know, the College of Ethnic Studies, Huxley,
Fairhaven was there, but it was only about four or five faculty -- all of those things were sort of what
students were demanding. Recreation program, all of… And the people in the traditional programs were
feeling really hammered and had all these terrible arguments about, “Well, you know, this is just a passing
thing. And this is the real meat of it.”
This would go on and on, and I think people got really angry. The thing that was easiest to get angry at was
the constant frustration of not knowing where you stood. But the real situation was that we were trying to
do way too much given the kind of resource base we had. And, you know, I don‟t know where the
university is. It was still, when I left in ‟85 or ‟86, whatever it was, they were still in that mode, I felt,
although not nearly so much as during the early 70‟s to late 70‟s. But that whole sort of interactive domino
thing seemed to be controlling the culture of the college.
Then we had all sorts of people came in and said, “You know, we‟ve got the answer.” There was a guy
named Jerry Anderson. He had this plan, but nobody ever found out what it was, and then he finally left.
Jim Albers had a plan, and, you know, everybody had a plan, we’ll fix this, by golly! Most of the plans
failed because of lack of cooperation, as I see it; that may not have been the case, but that‟s how I viewed
it. I think that‟s why Huxley, to some extent, suffered; that‟s why the College of Ethnic Studies died; that‟s
why Fairhaven was always the favorite hit, because, I mean, after all, they’re just doing all this flaky stuff.
Why should we support all this flaky, non-academic stuff? Often, you know, it would get really personal.
Oh god, who was the guy? Ed somebody. He was always railing at Fairhaven. After awhile, it gets
personal when they start screaming at you in meetings about what a bunch of low-lives you are, you know?
So then it becomes personal, and that‟s when it really gets out of hand.
It seemed to be a shame that that had to be how it was. And nobody was able; I never felt anyone was
really able to get a hand on it. I think Jim Talbot came as close as anybody. And I think one of the
reasons, the reasons that, of all -- see, I had very little dealing with any of the college presidents, and very
few of the deans did. We always dealt with whoever was the academic dean or the provost or whatever
they called him, because along the line they renamed it. And I think Jim‟s great strength -- although I was
extremely angry at him when I left -- his great strength was that he could say, “No.” He could say, “You
know, I‟d like to help you, but I can‟t.”

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Whereas people always wanted to sort of keep their base, their personal relationship base, by sort of being
wishy-washy, so you didn‟t really feel like you were accepted or rejected, you know. Jim had the courage
to say “No” or say, “We can do this much and that‟s it. Here‟s your budget. You don‟t get a penny more.”
Now that‟s how, to be perfectly honest, I prefer, as an administrator, to work. It was really important to
know where you stood, so then you could go back, and you could lay things out in sort of the same way:
knowing what your budget was, knowing what your FTE allotment was, knowing what the resources were,
what rooms you had, and that sort of thing, then you can do the best with what you have. If you never
know, you start by putting the faculty off. I can’t tell you that because I can’t get an answer from… I‟m
sure you know what I‟m talking about because I know it happens all the time.
A lot of administrators simply don‟t have that real courage, and I think that was Jim‟s great strength. I
really appreciate him. He was very supportive of Fairhaven, although he was quiet about it. I think that
was also a very smart move because it did not make him appear to be guilty of favoritism. He didn‟t go
around saying what a great thing Fairhaven is, and I’m really going to support it. He just did it, without a
lot of public pronouncement. He was the person all the time I was there that I reported to. I could go
anytime, ask anything, and get a straight answer, 99% of the time. I really did like that about him.
One of the things that wasn‟t a question was, there‟s a second level of administrators, and those are the
people I worked with, and there were some great ones when I was there. I‟ll just mention their names. Bill
O‟Neill, who was also there when I was a student. He was just fresh out of somewhere. I think he taught a
couple of years and then came to Western. Barney Goltz. Barney and I and Henry Klein built the new
music building. Henry was a cellist and that‟s why we picked him.
TB: I did an oral history with him this summer.
PA: With Henry?
TB: Yes.
PA: Oh, Henry is one of my most favorite people in the whole world. I‟ve never kept in touch with him.
He is a fine architect, but most important, he‟s an architect that listens. He listened to everything. We
would have long meetings, just he and I, and we would talk about the most minute details. He‟d go away.
He‟d be back the next week, and it would be all done. I just think that experience was good, one of the best
I had at Western.
Pete Elich was a really good friend, very supportive of Fairhaven. Tom Schlotterback, who was the Art
Department chairman for many years; he‟s one of my closest personal friends. Gene Omey understood that
really good musicians don‟t always have great academic records, and he would help me get students in that
we really wanted to be in. And, with the exception of three or four, they did not disappoint either of us.
They just didn‟t have great high school records. Paul Ford was Provost right at the end, and he was a good
friend; we had a lot of good times together. Sam Kelly was one of my really good friends, Dean of the
Graduate School. I don‟t know if you know Sam.
TB: Name only.
PA: He was actually the one that nominated me to go to Fairhaven and supported my tenure there very
much. And we had a sort of a betting -- what should I say -- a habit? We would bet on things, different
things. We‟d had bets on who‟d retire first and…
END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE
PA: Are we still going?
TB: Oh, yes.
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PA: OK.
TB: Let‟s just back up and see if we finished with your student time. You were also Senior Class
President; you were on the Board of Control, any other last thoughts about your undergraduate time?
PA: Oh, I don‟t think so. I had my own dance band, and we played probably half or more of the college
dances, which were down in the old gym in the basement of Old Main, which has now been converted to
something else; in fact it was when I was there. I remember that was the one time, a lot of the faculty
would come. After I left, I discovered they were assigned (laughter) to be there. But there was always
eight or ten couples, and they seemed to have a good time.
TB: What was the name of your dance band?
PA: I don‟t know.
TB: Oh, OK.
PA: I haven‟t the faintest notion (laughter)!
TB: When you came to Western as a faculty, what were you originally hired to do? I know you were hired
into the Music Department and specialized in the instrumental and band music and were in the Marching
Band, so were you originally assigned to do the Marching Band at Western?
PA: Well, it‟s interesting. Harvey Bunke came from the Midwest, and he just couldn‟t stand it that there
wasn‟t a marching band for football games, so he harassed Jerry Glass, who was the band director, who
was strictly a no-marching guy. I was assistant band director at the University of Washington, and a couple
of odd circumstances took place. The fellow who was the director was a man named Bill Cole, who was
my mentor and surrogate father and just about everything else in my life and probably one of the most
respected people in the state in the music business and education.
He was hired to come to Western in the fall of 1965 from the U of W. He had gone there in ‟57. I started
my DMA program in ‟57, and he came the same year, and we got together, and we created what is now the
University of Washington Marching Band. And, you know, that‟s a whole story which I wrote up for the
university last year. He didn‟t have a doctorate at the U, so they weren‟t going to promote him. He was
probably one of the most popular and respected faculty people at the UW, so they offered him the job at
Western before Harvey Bunke got this thing about a marching band, so he agreed to come. Well, then they
promoted him (laughter) at the UW when he got a job, see. Sound typical? So he, late in the spring of ‟65,
said, “Sorry, guys, but, you know, I just can‟t afford to come now.”
They said, “What are we going to do?”
He said, “Hire Phil Ager. He‟ll do a good job for you.”
I mean, that‟s what Bill said. So they called me and said, “Would you take the job?”
And I said, “I don‟t know.”
They said, “Well, just write an application and a resumé.”
And I said, well, kind of like, “What‟s a resumé?”
And they said, “Just, list the things you‟ve done.”
So I got some friends who knew what a resumé was, and I did my resumé.
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I had been teaching at Edmonds High School, and I had taught instrumental and choral music. We had
probably one of the best high school music programs in the state; it was a real powerhouse. I had kids
graduating and going directly into professional music. I had a kid in my choir who graduated and went a
year to the UW and then went to the original cast of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
TB: Wow.
PA: I mean it wasn‟t because of me; it was just that there was this incredible talent pool at that time, and all
it needed was just to kind of pull it together.
I did all of the formal things. I don‟t know if they interviewed anybody else, to tell you the truth, but I had
this very formal interview.
TB: And who was it with?
PA: [Bernard] Regier, [Frank] D‟Andrea, Don Walter, someone else, maybe someone from the
administration; I don‟t remember. And so they said, “OK.” I got a thing back in about a week, and they
said, “You have the job, if you want it.” I didn‟t even have my MA then.
TB: Oh wow.
PA: They said, “You‟ve got to get your MA.”
And I said, “How am I going to get my MA in thirty minutes?”
I‟d gone on a doctorate program which bypassed the MA. I had all the class work done; I just didn‟t have a
dissertation done.
They said, “Well, I don‟t know, you figure that out. But you‟ve got to have an MA or we can‟t hire you.”
I went to my high school principal, and he said, “What do you need?”
And I said, “Well, I‟m almost done with something that would do for a master‟s thesis.”
And he said, “Well, why don‟t you take a week off and just write the thing?” And he said, “I‟ll give you a
week off.”
And so I did, and I wrote it, and I got it in at five minutes to five on the deadline at the UW, the last day
you could turn it in.
So I had the MA, and then I said, before I finally signed on, I said, “Now, I understand that, you‟re really
anxious that people have a doctorate before you get promoted. Am I going to go up there and find out
when I get there that, I‟m good for two years and then I‟m on the street again?”
[They said], “Oh, no, no, no, no.”
Well, I had found out later that they had already written a letter to the administration -- this was Frank
D‟Andrea -- that they would probably be looking for someone in the future with a Ph.D. I never knew this.
Finally Jerry Glass, who was an interim chairman, briefly, was the one that discovered it, and he sort of got
rid of it, somehow; I don‟t know. He never would tell me what he did.
At the same time, a guy named [Charles] Murray North walked out of the chairmanship -- just packed up
his office and left -- on Friday the 13th of June in I think 1968 or ‟69, at the time I was to come up for
tenure. I was on at that time the Executive Committee of the Department. R.D. Brown, who was the
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academic dean at the time, called the three of us over -- Jerry Glass, Bernard Regier, and me -- and said,
“Dr. North has left. He no longer wants to be chairman, and so one of you needs to be chairman.”
He started with Bernard, and he said, “So, Bernard, you‟re chairman.”
And Bernard said, “No way.”
And he turned to Jerry Glass and he said, “Well, Jerry, than you‟re chairman.”
And Jerry said, “No,” he said, “I‟m tenured and I don‟t have to take it if I don‟t want it.”
He turned to me and said, “You‟re chairman.” And I said, “No, I don‟t want to be chairman.” I said,
“Besides, I need to talk to my wife.”
He said, “Well, you can talk to your wife all you want, but,” he said, “you‟re chairman. You‟re untenured.
You are chairman.” And that‟s how I became chairman of the department which was really kind of weird.
I did it for a year and then I stayed, mostly, I think, because nobody else wanted it.
It was a good time to be a chairman in the Music Department. We grew and grew and grew. It was a
combination of -- I don‟t know -- the one thing that I thought worked is that we were able to put aside the
kind of artistic craziness that usually happens amongst artists. The department was willing to put that aside
to do the right thing and we grew. Like I said, I think we had about twenty, we had twenty-two FTE, and I
think we‟d eighteen full-time faculty, and then the last four FTE were split amongst maybe fifteen, eighteen
affiliate faculty. The enrollment grew, and the reputation grew, and it just worked.
TB: So it must have been that Dr. North was kind of a difficult person?
PA: He somehow managed to alienate the faculty, and I don‟t know if I should be using all these names
(laughter).
TB: You‟ll get a chance to edit it or not.
PA: Then he stayed in the department, and he was just a thorn in everybody‟s side, he just stayed and
stayed, and finally left. He would come in and vent. He would start a sentence and for twenty minutes it
was non-stop, just vent against somebody or something. But, it was kind of cool, because everybody else
just pretended that it didn‟t happen and that it wasn‟t there and that sort of thing, and so it worked out fine.
TB: So how about you getting tenured then when you were chairman of the department, was that difficult
or made it easier, or?
PA: No, Jerry Glass just did it. I don‟t know how he did it. I didn‟t do anything! One day I was untenured
and the next day I was tenured. I didn‟t have to turn in teaching evaluations; I didn‟t have to deal with all
this nonsense that is part of tenure and promotion.
TB: Can you say anything more about Jerry Glass, what he was like as a person?
PA: Jerry was one of those people that you really liked or didn‟t. I really liked him. I had had a lot of
contact with him in the Music Educators‟ National Association prior to my coming to Western. My brother
and several of the students that I had at Olympic College came to Western before I did, and they all liked
Jerry a great deal. He was very opinionated; he hated marching band; he hated PR; he really wanted to
make music in a serious and professional way. And I admire him for that. Unfortunately, when you have a
president who wants a marching band, and you don‟t want it, I mean, there has to be some place… And he
just said, “You know, if you want a marching band, then get somebody else.”
They did.
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But the hilarious thing about it all was that by the time Bunke left, we had only marched for about two or
three games in that three-year period. We got rained out every single game. It was hilarious. But I came
and I said, “Are you sure you want it?” I said, “You have to remember that you have to have at least three
days of rehearsal before a show, which means it can‟t be pouring down rain.” And I said, “It may well rain
at the football, and then, all of that time is gone.” (laughter)
That‟s exactly how it turned out to be. I went over and talked to him (Jerry Flora) when he was first
appointed. I knew him through the Biology Department and the fact that he was an incredible teacher, very
popular, involved in a lot of things on campus. I did some social things with him before. I said, “You
know, Jerry, this isn‟t going to work.” I said, “We can keep wasting the whole fall quarter doing nothing
but preparing and then not doing it, or,” I said, “we can just go back and teach people how to play.” I said,
“What we could do is that we could just play at the games.” I said, “We‟ll even walk out on the field and
stand in a kind of a formation. We‟ll play some good music.”
Which is what we did for another couple three years until I just had to give it up. It was just too much to do
the department and all of that, too, because just doing the football show is a full-time job. It takes hours
and hours: you write music; you write charts; you conceive the show; you rehearse; you do all the logistics
of getting everything from here to there. It just took too much time. Then I finally got Bill Cole from the
UW, and that was great.
TB: So what were some other major changes, or were there major changes, in the Music curriculum while
you were here?
PA: Oh, yes. I think our graduate program settled into a really first-rate MA program. We started a
Classical Guitar Program. We started an excellent Jazz Program, which is still going, I think. And then I
think the curriculum itself, as a whole, was really upgraded into standards that would match large
universities. I don‟t know where that is now, but I‟m assuming that it‟s probably still there, that quality.
There was a time when Western was the place to go, that we had managed to sort of become the
destination, especially for Music Education.
I think one of the things that happened toward the end of my tenure was that music in the public schools
began to die, and it‟s pretty dead now, not much going on. The demand for Music Education people
probably is reduced. I don‟t know how that affects the department now, but I‟m sure that it does, but the
standards during that period gradually increased to where a lot of the kids now are headed into professional
performance, composition. We started a Music Composition Program. We started a very serious Early
Music Program. That all happened during those years. A bit of an Opera Program that kind of fluttered
and had some strong moments, but I don‟t think really ever matured.
TB: Was there any problem with having students who just love music participating in the music program?
PA: Never, no. The one thing that happened is that, from time to time, we had to restrict private
instruction. If there was a student who was a non-major who was really committed, we gave them private
lessons anyhow, as if they were a Music major. But, one-on-one instruction, as you well know, is terribly
expensive, and we simply, in a lot of the fiscal down periods during that twenty-year period I was there, we
simply couldn‟t afford to provide private instruction. But all of the performance groups were open to
people based on their ability, not whether they were a major or not. There were times when we had to close
some of the Music classes because if we had a big influx of students in the fall and we only had so many
sections, and they were filled with Music majors, we had to restrict it. We had a really hard time with
guitar for awhile, because everybody played guitar, you know. They thought that if they could come in and
just hold it, they would qualify. So we began to require on everything, all of the instruments, an audition,
and there would be a minimum level. During the years I was there, that minimum level gradually increased
to the point that kids had to sing or play pretty well to quality for private instruction, but a lot of non-majors
qualified. They were very good.
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TB: I have a question on the timing, you went, did you say you came from Edmonds and you were also at
Olympic College. Were you at Olympic before you went to Edmonds?
PA: Yes. I went from Olympic to UW – then Edmonds in 1960. ‟53 to ‟57 I was at Olympic.
TB: Right after you graduated almost from Western…
PA: I taught at Sequim for two years and then went to Olympic College. Then I went to the UW from ‟57
to ‟60, and I ran out of money, as is often the case. My wife and kids lived in Bremerton; I lived in Seattle.
And I just ran out of money and sort of burned out doing the Marching Band. I was a student advisor. I
was also an instructor; I was a faculty at the UW (a lecturer). I taught brass class; I taught conducting.
God, I taught so many things that it was unbelievable. I taught a full load, did Marching Band and I
worked at night as a cop -- King County police officer.
TB: Wow. And you were also going to school then?
PA: Also going to school.
TB: Yes, I guess you‟d burn out. (laughter)
PA: I got really burned out, and that‟s why I ended up with three full years of full loads as a student and
nothing, no degree at all to show for it.
TB: What about at Western what other campus activities, like Faculty Council, were you involved in?
PA: I was on the Faculty Council once, I think. I was mostly on committees. I preferred that because both
the Music Department and Fairhaven were pretty much under siege all the years I was there. The Music
Department because of the high cost of private instruction and just the curricular cost, so it‟s sort of selfprotection, and I was on a lot of the financial and curriculum committees, that sort of thing, a lot of
evaluation committees. Man, I can‟t believe how many committees, commissions, whatever that were
going all the time. Every time anything came up, they formed a committee. Maybe that still happens, who
knows? And so I think I was on practically every committee that ever existed at Western at one time or
another, and at Fairhaven, the same thing. I just felt I had to be involved in these things if, for no other
reason, to get information, or to sort of know which way the wind was blowing, to have a voice, to be able
to explain what was happening and why it was expensive to run a Music Department and why people
taught the way they taught at Fairhaven.
TB: So how did you get to Fairhaven?
PA: I don‟t know. I was on the Fairhaven Evaluation Committee with Pete and Paul, Pete Elich and Paul
Ford, and we were kind of three musketeers. We sort of had a lot of subcommittee meetings, and we
originally recommended that they ought to be sacked (laughter). And then, you know, we did that, and we
had another subcommittee meeting and we said, “Now, wait a minute now.” And so we sort of reneged on
that, and it ended up that finally they said, “OK, we‟re going to give you a chance, but here‟s twenty-two
conditions,” or twenty-four or something. They‟re in the record. I got rid of all that sort of stuff.
Oh, there you‟ve got it. How many are there?
TB: Well, you‟re right. It‟s a million because you‟ve got these a‟s and b‟s and [word].
PA: (laughter)
TB: At least eight, but, I mean, there‟s all these a‟s and b‟s under all the numbers, I mean you can look at it
in a different way.
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PA: Yes, I think once I counted up…
TB: There‟s all those subsets.
PA: Yes. Well, anyhow those got drafted and then they decided that they needed a Dean. And so they
asked the second layer of administration, I think, to nominate people. Sam Kelly nominated me, and I
think both Paul and Pete supported my nomination, because I can‟t imagine that I would have been
considered unless there had been some strong support, maybe Bill McDonald, too. Because they were all
people that I was really close to during the years I was in the Music Department. I think it ended up there
were maybe four candidates, and I was the only one that you might describe as liberal. The rest of them
were really hard-nosed (laughter), and so the Fairhaven faculty just really embraced my point of view.
I went over not thinking a whole lot of the place. I thought it was pretty messy and pretty arrogant. By the
end of the first year, I just had a real sort of epiphany. It was a kind of education that I had always thought
about but never felt would work: where you give students responsibility; where you don‟t teach but you
create a learning environment; where you encourage students to question and to argue and to fight for what
they believe and try to persuade them to your point of view but encourage them to try to persuade you to
their point of you, sort of thing. I had always believed that that would be an ideal thing. I had read about
it, the curriculum.
I had a son who was dyslexic, and I discovered, in that process, working with medical people and doing a
lot of reading, that there‟s more than one way you learn, and a lecture is not always the best way for
everyone, that people deal with abstractions in different ways, that there‟s a multitude of ways that people
learn well, but that, in most educational settings, it‟s a single mode kind of presentation. And basically it‟s
either a lecture, or it‟s dealing with abstractions in an academic and an intellectual way. I really discovered
over at Fairhaven, in spite of the anarchy and the different teaching styles and the incredible diversity of the
student body, that the kids came and they selected the way, somehow, that they were able to do what they
needed to do. I really, at that point, embraced the whole notion of that kind of an educational structure
that‟s loosely structured. I was able to see the structure without it being a sort of lockstep. You think this,
this, this, and this, and you‟ll get this. It always amazed me that our Music students did this, this, this, this,
and this, and they very seldom got that. There was something that didn‟t work.
I also discovered that almost all of the programs are vocational. The first priority is not to teach them to
think or to be creative, but rather to prepare to enter a particular profession or the workforce as it is now,
not how it might be in the future, but as it exists now. And I think there are some things that you can say
are fairly the same but that there‟s a lot of stuff out there that you can‟t prepare students for specifically as a
vocation or profession. And I really saw that whole other side of what truly was a liberal arts kind of
curriculum could be that came out of the creative side of people or the experiential side of people where
they could go into a situation, analyze it, and make it work in a way that was not in line, sort of
progression. Am I making sense?
TB: Yes.
PA: My wife worked in a bookstore. She probably knows more about children‟s literature than just about
anybody, not because she reads bibliographies or book reviews. She has read almost every single
children‟s book that has ever been published and continues to do so even though she doesn‟t do it now.
She was fascinated with that. She was also fascinated with how to get the word out about children‟s
literature. Some people might call that marketing, I guess. She was also interested in writing children‟s
literature. Now, where on Western‟s campus can you find something that would give you the kind of
background and the skills you would need to do those three things? They seem compatible to me, even
though I don‟t know the area, but they seem to make sense as a group. Well she was a Fairhaven student
and she put that together as her major. It made very good sense, at least to me. I thought it made it sense,
rather than getting an English major and then not knowing what to do with it, or having to do all this on
your own, separate from your education, your so-called formal education. She got a great education.
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She worked with Don McLeod, writing. There‟s nobody better. She took courses in the Education
Department, and she took courses from English faculty. I think she [worked independently with someone
in the library]. I can‟t remember…
TB: Was it [Enid Haag]?
PA: Maybe, yes.
I think she came out with a first-rate degree, and in the process, she was so motivated by her contact with
these people. As I said, she read, cover to cover, everything -- young adult books that took more than half
an hour to get through. She knows the literature better than anybody I know.
I saw that sort of thing happen time after time after time. I also saw a lot of flakes. I saw a lot of people,
who came and used the system, and at some point, I finally made the connection, I think -- there are a lot of
C and D students that probably aren‟t any better than the flakes who used Fairhaven.
My association with David Mason taught me that there‟s two kinds of science -- I always thought there was
just one -- there‟s a science that‟s an integrative science and there‟s a science that‟s narrow and theoretical.
Both of them are important, but Huxley and Fairhaven give students the opportunity to study, for example,
environmental issues, which require a knowledge and an ability to move through biology, zoology,
geography, geology, all of those things that you don‟t get as a Biology major or that you don‟t get as a
Physics major. And I saw kids go through those programs.
One of my friends here in the valley went through Huxley. He was a straight-A student at Western and
Huxley -- very bright. He ended up being a mapper for the Forest Service here and did a lot of really highlevel creative things as a person who just did maps. I think what I‟m trying to say is that I discovered that
there‟s a place for both of these kinds of educations to exist and that both of them can and should be
respected, and that‟s not to say -- I never said in all the years that I was there -- that a Fairhaven education
was a better education than a Western education. If a person wants to go into research biology, do a
Biology major. If you want to do something different but have that as a base or one of the bases of your
understanding, there wasn‟t, when I was there, an opportunity to do that.
What really interests me now as I look back is that, by the time I left Fairhaven, Independent Studies was a
part of almost every department‟s menu. Travel, foreign travel -- that sort of thing was a part. I mean, they
even hired an administrator at Western, finally, to coordinate all that stuff. Integrative classes, team-taught
classes are now part of the standard curriculum. Nobody questions them. In 1978 when I went to
Fairhaven, people thought those were nuts, that they were crazy ways to teach people anything. Well, you
can‟t teach, I mean, if there are three people, how can anybody learn anything specific? Undergraduate
seminars -- they‟re all over campus now. They were unique at Fairhaven, before I went, where students
actually ran the class and discussed. That was unheard of on campus. They weren‟t ready to do that.
We‟ve got to stuff this all full of them.
We had in the Music Department -- before a kid could be a composer -- we had all these prerequisites. You
had to have traditional theory, traditional harmony, all of these things from the past, and then as a junior or
more likely a senior, you‟d say, “OK, compose.”
What do you think the music sounded like? It sounded like the past. We had completely conditioned all of
the sort of creativity and experimental courage out of kids. It wasn‟t a conscious thing on our part; it was
just something that everybody‟s done for years. The whole twentieth century is full of that, and the only
people to escape it -- there are very few people who have escaped it -- most of the people who have escaped
as composers, haven‟t been in a formal education. It‟s because they just write down what they hear before
they‟re influenced by it.
I think that analogy applies in many ways to how other programs work, too. I‟m not sure, but I think so.
That‟s my rant on education. I think it‟s important to recognize, especially at the university level, that
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there‟s a lot of different ways to do things. That people ought not to be shot down because they do it one
way. That if there are certain ways to teach language, then they ought to teach it that way if that‟s the most
effective way.
Fairhaven was crazy, too. I mean, I‟d go home at night and just shake my head. If we had a faculty
meeting, if there wasn‟t anything really exciting on the agenda, nobody would come. I‟d walk the hall and
I‟d say, “Oh, come on! Come on, we just got a few business items. I can‟t do this without your vote.”
“You got my vote, just do whatever you want. Don‟t bother me.”
Or there were the faculty meetings where there was an issue and, God, the kids hanging from the ceiling!
And you sort of bring the meeting to order and chaos would erupt. Everybody saying, “You can‟t do this!
You can‟t do this!”
And I said, “We‟re not doing anything! We‟re talking about it! OK!”
Everybody talks at once. An hour passes. Everybody leaves. Nothing‟s happened. And then we had fairly
ordinary faculty meetings, too.
But, you know, we had all this stuff we had to do which we did in two years. We did every one of those
things that are on the printed sheet. I think except one, and we got excused from that for some reason. I
can‟t even remember what it was. But a lot of those things were designed to systematize and to
homogenize Fairhaven, which at its roots, was not a homogenous group. It was not a group of people who
thought alike. It was not a group of people who agreed that there was a way to track education into a
specific formal curriculum. What I used to say is, “If you‟re at Fairhaven, you have to tolerate ambiguity.”
You do a lot of things on faith, and you fail at things, maybe sometimes more than you want to fail. But
that you learn from all those things. You learn certain things that allow you then to move forward. If you
can tolerate ambiguity, you don‟t get locked into opinionated situations. If you can tolerate a little chaos -I think probably the most chaotic form of life is democracy. Democracy is a terrible mess. Fascism is
much better because it‟s well-organized: you know who‟s in control, and you do what you said, and you be
at the right place at the right time, and all of these things, but I‟m not sure that that‟s the best way to live.
When I first came to Western, I can remember students who‟d come in and say, “Why do I have to take
this?”
And I couldn‟t explain it. I‟d have to say, “Because that‟s a requirement.” Sometimes I would just throw
my hands up and I‟d say, “You know, it doesn‟t make sense to me either, but read in the first part of your
catalogue. It‟s a contract. We contract with you that if you do all these things you‟ll have a degree and you
say, „I can count on having a degree if I do all these things.‟” And I said, “It‟s very well-organized, it‟s a
very straight line from here to there.”
But when you get down to the point sometimes of having to explain to a student why they need to do this, it
gets pretty tough because there‟s a lot of stuff that you take at Western or any other college or university
that‟s there for reasons other than an education. It‟s to support a department who needs student credit
hours, so it becomes a GUR; you know the story, and so does everybody else. It‟s like Willy Wade
Haggard‟s kicking the prophylactic under the underbrush. We just don‟t talk about it because we don‟t
want to talk about it. We don‟t want to hear about it, we don‟t want to have to explain it because we can‟t.
I think the most exciting time for me in all the time I was at Western was when the kids were rebelling, and
I hate to admit that because for some people that was a hellish time.
TB: You mean like ‟69.

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PA: ‟69, ‟70. I can remember I taught Music in Western Civ (non-majors), or I can‟t remember, it had all
different titles, I had anywhere between 100 and 150 kids every quarter. We would get in there, and I‟d
say, “What am I going to do? These people don‟t like classical music.”
But that‟s what I have to teach, so I have to figure out how to make it make sense, and they would fight,
and I‟d say something and they would argue, and it was wonderful. When I went back to the Music
Department, I taught that class because everybody hated teaching it. I liked it. I went back, and I just
worked so hard, and I‟d have a class, at the end of the class, I‟d feel, boy, now I think that was pretty good.
I‟d say, “Any questions? Somebody say something! Tell me it was lousy! Do anything!
And they‟d say, “Is that going to be on the exam? When are we going to have a test? When are we going
to get the last test back?”
I don‟t know if that still is there, but I know where the pressures are for students now, and it wouldn‟t
surprise me. I have a granddaughter that‟s going there. It‟s all she does. She doesn‟t do anything else.
She‟s a very bright girl. I mean, she‟s bright in mathematics…
END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO
PA: …how hard she works and how there‟s nothing else, and it makes me sad because I think we all need
time to relax and to contemplate and to think about things, and when you don‟t have time to think, when
you‟re always reacting, I think it‟s too bad.
I value the time at Western, when I was a student, that it wasn‟t that way, that there were plenty of
demands, but we also had time to do things on the weekend and to do social things. Most of the social
things were kind of college-wide. They had a lot of activities that the [college] sponsored, and I thought
that was kind of neat.
TB: You seem to think the changes over time that you‟ve seen of students, has it been gradual,
evolutionary-like, or is it kind of different, more sudden?
PA: I‟ve tried to think about that, and I don‟t think I remember it. I just would be suddenly aware that
things had really changed. Now, the most dramatic one, of course, was when I left the Music Department
and went to Fairhaven and then came back five years later, or six years later, whatever it was, and I think
that there was a dramatic change in the student body. Now part of that was being involved with Fairhaven
students, who were quite different, and so it may have been more dramatic for me. That‟s one of the places
that I noticed it. Students were quiet; they were obedient; they were like you wanted them to be when you
taught high school. Don’t get in the way. Don’t confuse me. Just do what you’re told. I think a lot of that
is based on national attitudes.
There‟s a wonderful article in the new Harper’s magazine (September 2003) by, what‟s his name, [John
Taylor] Gatto, who writes on education, to some degree very bitter, but he taught for [thirty] years in
Manhattan, some of the best and some of the worst schools. He said education is basically to create an
uneducated middle class. I think the way he presents it, there‟s a lot of truth to consider in that. He talks
about warehousing students, and I think back on lecture classes of 1200 that we had in the auditorium, and
that‟s what they were. Kids played cards in the back. I don‟t know why they even bothered to come.
Machine-graded tests.
You never spoke with…, I mean Herb Taylor, do you remember Herb?
TB: I knew him, yes.
PA: Herb Taylor, man alive. I mean, he was a stand-up comedian, a carnival barker; he was all these
things. A lecture, if you listened, was absolutely stunning. And he taught some of those big classes.
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TB: How did that change? How did they get away from having those large classes?
PA: I‟m not really sure because that happened the first couple years I was at Western.
I think, this is a very personal and maybe even prejudiced point of view, and I don‟t even know if it would
be agreed upon by others who were closer to it: my take on that was that, when it began, some of the best
instructors at the university were involved, and so, a little by little, they sort of burned out, and what
happened was, it became a sort of a place to put people that didn‟t perform well in the departments. I know
of two or three departments where that was very true. People who had no charisma. I mean, you got to
have something when you‟re dealing with 500 to 1200 students. I know the person from our department
was just [not good]. We kept him there because he generated a lot of SCH, which we desperately needed,
and there was no place for him in the department.
I think that sort of happened [across campus]. I know from two other chairmen that were close friends of
mine that‟s how it worked with them. By the time I came to Western, it was right at the end of that. I think
by the end of the second year they had moved in a new direction. It was not working well at all. I think
students at that time were beginning to get restless. It was, after all, ‟65, ‟66, ‟67, and people were feeling
that machine-graded tests and gigantic classes were not good ways for them to learn. That‟s simply an
observation. I have nothing to back it up except just, my own reaction to how our department behaved and
a couple of friends who confirmed that they felt that way. There were still good people in the program at
the time, I just think that there were too many weak links. And it was, I mean it was hard work, preparing a
lecture for that size, just the logistics of getting the stuff there on stage, if you were teaching music, you had
to have all this sound stuff coordinated. It took a lot of time and energy to put that together, and I think
people just got tired.
TB: Going back a little bit to your [time at Fairhaven], one of the things it seems like they were really
trying to do was cut cost and streamline registration and acceptance, I think, even into the college and stuff,
was that really a problem or difficult to do or was it pretty easy to just send that over to the main campus?
PA: No, we did have two years, to pull it together, and it does take time. It takes time to increase
enrollment, it takes time to cut cost, you can‟t just fire people on the spot, you can‟t stop expenditures in
mid-season, and that sort of thing. But, no, it wasn‟t difficult. I think those were the kinds of things that
people were more willing to accept. They were quite willing to accept, you know, well, so if we got to
restrict the Xerox machine, that‟s OK, and, if we have to pay for our own coffee, or whatever, there was no
issue with that. If they had to have classes in an inconvenient spot, that wasn‟t a big deal.
What was a big deal was people telling them how to think, what to teach, and how to teach it. That was an
issue that was really difficult for Fairhaven faculty because the college had been created to do things
differently. I would have to say this about myself: in a lot of ways, I‟m a company person. If I‟m told by
my employer to do a job, I do my best to do that. I accept the situation. I accept that condition or I don‟t
take the job. I don‟t think any of the other Fairhaven deans accepted that reality, that they had any
responsibility to be fiscally responsible. If kids came, OK, if they didn‟t come, OK, if the classes were two
or twenty. I just don‟t think it entered their consciousness to feel any differently because of the sort of
culture of the alternative nature of the place, that they were somehow different and didn‟t need to conform.
My sense was that we need to conform as best we can. If I accepted [something], and then it turned out that
I didn‟t feel that we should be held to that, I would go argue that and either be excused from it or they‟d
say, “Sorry. We expect you to do this.”
Now we modified some of the things on that initial list. I think that list is pretty much the same list that
Paul [Ford], Pete Elich, and I drew up, all three of us being somewhat ignorant of the culture at Fairhaven.
We saw a lot of the good things; we saw a lot of the bad things; but we never saw the total culture. So, this
list never came to me as a surprise, and when I accepted it, I felt that it was possible to do. When I got
there, it turned out to be a whale of a lot bigger job than I thought. But some of the things that I thought
would be real stumbling blocks weren‟t a problem at all with the faculty or the students or the staff. Like
every place, we had great teachers and we had ones that weren‟t so great. We had staff people that really
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worked and we had staff people that drank a lot of coffee. We had students that performed and students
that didn‟t perform. I don‟t think there was anything unusual about that because I think you could go into
any department anywhere on campus or any other campus and find pretty much the same mix.
The real issues came when they said, “You got to teach this way. You got to make a curriculum that you
can put down on a piece of paper and that a student knows.”
That‟s where they balked. They said, “Look, it doesn‟t work that way because every student who comes
here has two options. They can either take a Western major and do their GUR‟s at Fairhaven,” which was
pretty well-organized; they knew what they had to take. “Or you can do an independent self-designed
major at Fairhaven and do your GUR‟s at Fairhaven, in which case every program is individually designed,
so we don‟t really need a printed curriculum for those folks. We have one for the people who want a
Western major but want to do their GUR‟s here.”
Most of the people who were critical of Fairhaven were totally ignorant of how it functioned and how it
worked. It was very well-structured to deal with the unstructured nature of the place, so there wasn‟t a lot
of that to do. What there really was to do was not to change the structure, but to police the structure. That
is to see that the process for designing their major was followed, and that was easy to do. They just had to
send it all to me. I never sent one back because, when the faculty and the students knew that they had to
go, that one step, then they did it. They just did it right. They didn‟t want it back on their desks; that just
meant they had to do it again. It wasn‟t that difficult to follow the process; it was just that it had gotten so
informal and so lackadaisical that they didn‟t attend to the details of a process that was already in place.
But what happened is that, to those of us on the outside, it appeared there was no process at all. Even
though, in the evaluation, these processes were well-known and well-publicized, I don‟t think it really
occurred to us until the very end that they simply weren‟t being followed. It wasn‟t a matter of a lack of
process, but a lack of not following the process, and that was a simple thing.
Now the fiscal things were a little more difficult because Fairhaven was never over-budgeted. They did a
lot of creative budgeting, as you might expect people of that ilk to do, but they never got a lot of money,
budget-wise. In terms of materials and classroom equipment and stuff, they were pretty impoverished. So
some things were hard; some things were difficult. The most difficult thing for me was just getting the
faculty to agree on some things and to do say what was really true. I would have to send these reports in,
and I‟d say, “OK guys, here‟s what we need to do. I need you to just say, „yes,‟ by voting that we are doing
this.”
And someone would say, “We‟ve always done that.”
I‟d say, “I know you‟ve always done that. We‟re doing it better now, OK? Just say, „Yes, we‟re doing it.‟
Vote.” We‟d take a vote. Three yes‟s and fifteen no‟s, and I‟d say, “Why are you voting „no‟?”
“Because this is a bunch of crap! We shouldn‟t have to do this!”
How do you deal with that kind of stuff?
The unfortunate thing about getting the Fairhaven faculty together is it tends to exaggerate the differences
in people‟s approaches, in their philosophy of teaching and of education. If they‟re independent they sort
of attract their cadre of students who do their thing and are completely happy doing what they‟re doing.
When you get them together and you try to make generalizations specific, the arguments and the fights
remind me of a kindergarten playground.
I‟d say, “Are we adults?” (laughter)
It‟s like the “no” vote, not because they‟re opposed to it, but because “we shouldn‟t have to do this in the
first place,” sort of thing.
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You take people like David Mason and Don McLeod and Bob Keller, Katherine Anderson, Connie
Faulkner, they‟re fine teachers, and they expect a lot from their students, always did. But, as a group, you
name those same five people, and, man, they‟re as different as night and day, from each other. So when
you try to regularize, when you try to print a catalogue with that kind of confusion and that kind of
disagreement about what‟s important, it becomes difficult.
We just took a year and a half, and we got through it, and we got through it well enough that apparently it
was OK. It was probably a combination of more than getting through it. We may have been in a fiscally
more-flush period, and we weren‟t such a threat to the traditional orthodox departments. And as I say, Jim
Talbot was always supportive, always communicated, came to faculty meetings -- and I must say that even
when he was there they didn‟t behave.
For me, it was a great experience, one of the greatest educational experiences I ever had, even though it
was hard, and I didn‟t necessarily agree with everybody, it opened up a whole world of different ways to
look at the same thing, some that I could deal with, some that I thought were nuts -- but that others didn‟t
and that worked.
TB: Then you went, I think, back to Music, taught music history, symphonic band and jazz ensemble -- talk
a little bit about your last three years at Western.
PA: I think when anybody comes back to a department from an administrative post; you‟re sort of a man
without a country. I had a lot of friends in the Music Department. Personally I was treated as well as I ever
was in the department. But I came back, all of the things that I had done, someone else had been hired to
do. In a way I was an albatross around their neck; I was an FTE that they could have used more efficiently
doing other things, things I couldn‟t do. I always felt that -- I don‟t know that the department made me feel
that or whether I just knew that, because as an administrator, I was very aware of that. I had been an
administrator for two-thirds of my time at Western, and I knew what it was like when somebody came
back. I knew what it was like when Murray North bummed out of the chairmanship; there was nothing he
could do. There you have a full professor, top salary in the department; and you don‟t know what to do
with the guy.
Now, fortunately, I could pay my way, because I was willing to do the big GUR courses, which generated a
lot of SCH, and nobody else wanted to do them, really. I taught band; it was kind of the second group, and
there were people in and out. It was kind of a come-down after all the years that I had the top performing
groups, but I had made the decision to retire before I left Fairhaven, that I was going to retire in either one
year or two years, and I‟d made that clear to the administration that that‟s what I was going to do. It was a
time to mark time, and it was a time when I was in the process of being re-married, and it seemed like a
good time to leave, kind of left on the uphill climb. I had known for years that wherever I was I didn‟t
want to hang around feeling like I was kind of out of date, out of step, and an albatross around somebody‟s
neck. And so, when the opportunity came, I had an early window and I just took it, and I knew it was
coming.
TB: Oh, so you did take an early retirement time. I mean, it was during a time of early retirement?
PA: Well, actually, you see, it wasn‟t early for me because I was on State Teachers. Incidentally, that‟s
how Sam Kelly and I came became very close because we, early-on, when we both came to Western, we
came out of the public schools, and we were supposed to have been given the option of staying with [State
Teachers Retirement] or going on TIAA-CREF. It turned out that the university didn‟t want anybody on
State Teachers Retirement, so they just plain told us we could not do it. It came to light a few years later
(very few), because the law then changed, then you had to go on TIAA-CREF; you could not continue,
even if you were entitled in the state system. But, they misinformed us, and we were part, Sam and I were
part of a class action suit that was actually brought by Central, I believe, by Central or Eastern -- by several
other people -- that contested the fact.

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Everybody did it, all the state universities did it, they said, “No, you can‟t continue,” when in fact, legally
we could have. It never came to trial. The universities backed down, then did inform us that we could roll
over, back into the state system, which, I think Sam did, and I did, and I‟m glad I did because, with the
stock market the way it is, the folks on TIAA-CREF are not doing really well, but they were doing better
then I did when I first retired.
I mentioned, when we were out on the porch, that I had left Western pretty angry, and that came out of my
retirement. The State Retirement requires that your last two years establish your salary.
TB: Yes.
PA: Well, all of the other deans that retired got a really nice retirement package. I got nothing, and that
was because of the person who was in sitting in charge at the time. I got the same salary: they can‟t reduce
your salary.
TB: When you switched from Fairhaven as a dean to Music, you kept the same salary?
PA: Right, but it was only a nine-month‟s appointment. I was on twelve-months as Dean. I was paid the
least of anybody as a dean. I found that out, also, in the process of applying for retirement. I requested that
they match my yearly salary on a nine-month basis, and I guaranteed that I would retire. Well, it probably
would have worked except somebody in the Language Department, they did the same thing for them, and
then the guy said, “No, I‟m not going to retire.”
So I was denied that, which meant that my State Retirement when I retired was substantially less than it
could have been. And I felt, you know, … As Music Department Chair and as Dean, I worked seven days a
week, often sixteen hours a day, because there was stuff [to do]. I went to work every morning at eight,
everywhere I went, that was the only way I could get the work done. Then at the Music Department, we
had stuff at night and weekends all the time, which I had to be involved with. I was involved in recruiting
both places, I was involved in the Concert Association both places, and on and on. I figured that should be
worth something. I never asked to be promoted because I don‟t do research. As an administrator, you
either do a good job as an administrator or you don‟t be an administrator and you spend the time doing the
research. But, being that, doesn‟t count for promotion, and I just decided that it wasn‟t worth applying and
being denied. I don‟t know if my salary at Fairhaven was based on my faculty rank or not, and it doesn‟t
matter anymore. So what? But, at the time, I was very discouraged and very disappointed and felt that I
was treated very unfairly.
TB: [And would that be by upper administration in general…?]
PA: Yes. It was by one of my greatest supporters, by Jim Talbot. Paul Ford fought for me. Paul went in as
Provost when Talbot went up to Acting President. He had gotten really badly burned with this person in
Languages.
TB: Ford had?
PA: No, Talbot had. Talbot was the one that made the decision. Paul approved it; Talbot denied it.
TB: What were your greatest achievements, any significant failures, thoughts in general?
PA: Achievements, what would I say? Well, building the Music faculty, saving Fairhaven, I think, are
some things that I was able to do and that I‟m very proud of. It sounds kind of arrogant and self-serving to
say that, but I know that if I hadn‟t gone to Fairhaven, it wouldn‟t have worked out as it did. I know that
the Music Department would not have enjoyed the reputation it did. Building the Music Building -- it took
forever. We got it half done, we made a terrible risky decision to leave it unfinished when we ran out of
money. Instead of reducing the size, we built it full-size and didn‟t finish it, and we waited two or three
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years for another appropriation. I thank God for Barney Goltz, who, by that time, was active as a candidate
for [State] Senate.
Another funny thing about the building is that, as it sat vacant as a big huge shell, we had transients living
in there. I don‟t know if anybody has ever said that, but, they had work lights, they couldn‟t leave it totally
dark, and every once in awhile you could smell marijuana wafting out of the bowels of this cement cavern.
They built fires down in there, you know, we‟d go down and find that residue. It was a place for people to
crash, very interesting.
I was selected my last year as a Distinguished Music Alumni. I think they said my picture would hang
forever in the Concert Hall vestibule. I hope they‟ve taken it down.
TB: There‟s something about you in there, I know I‟ve seem a little plaque to you.
PA: Yes, fortunately if it‟s a plaque, that‟s better. I felt really good about that, it felt nice to have that
recognition. I always felt, I enjoyed being chair of the Music Department. I never thought of it as a chore.
It was a challenge, but it was never something that I disliked. I accepted the Fairhaven Deanship because I
felt that I had sort of run out of ideas for the Music Department, that I was kind of housekeeping. I‟m a
good housekeeper. I keep people and budgets and stuff like that on track because I think it‟s important. I
think it‟s safe to say that every person on the Music faculty was a friend -- certainly different levels. I
never felt I had an enemy in the department.
TB: Everybody said you were a very nice guy, I mean everybody that I know that‟s ever mentioned you has
said you were a very nice guy.
PA: Oh, OK.
TB: That‟s why I wanted to come meet you because everybody says you‟re a great guy.
PA: I think that simply came out of being more open than most people I know. I had a strange experience
coming to Western. I taught at Edmonds High School, which was one of the most progressive high schools
in the state when I was there. Our principal, Carl Opgaard, went on the be president of one of the North
Dakota state schools and then came back and was president of Tacoma Community College, a wonderful
guy. The kind of guy that said, you know, he would call me in – I was head of the Music Department at the
high school. We had a Faculty Senate and he would call. He said, “I don‟t know anything about music.
You do what needs to be done. I only ask one thing: let me know what you‟re doing and let me know if
you do something stupid that is going to cause me to get a bunch of phone calls.” And he said, “I‟ll back
you 100%.” And he did.
It was a great experience, and we worked hard and worked together, and there was almost no animosity in
the faculty. It was so open, I mean, it wasn‟t like faculty lounges everywhere else that I‟d been where
people just came in and kind of crashed and moaned and griped about students and stuff like that. I mean,
we really talked about significant stuff and educational things and ideas for improving, and that faculty
room was full of that kind of stuff all the time. I came to Western, and I thought, oh, boy -- you know, it’s
going to be more of the same and even better. I can‟t believe my first year at Western, how much prejudice
and close-mindedness I discovered. It had to do with the way, I think, universities are divided. They‟re
divided into very discreet divisions of people with very highly educated backgrounds in very narrow kinds
of disciplines. They don‟t see often the whole picture. Then, it was sort of -- everything was competition - in order for you to grow, somebody else had to shrink.
That was the case for the most part all the years I was there. I think that was what was the basis for a lot of
the antagonism against Fairhaven. It was the antagonism against new programs, the antagonism against
one department. They finally got rid of Home Economics, not because they didn‟t have students, because
they did, not because they weren‟t doing a good job. It‟s just that Home Economics is irrelevant, which
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can be translated often to really mean, we need to put those faculty in more important areas. And, of
course, my area is the most important so I should get at least one of those four or maybe all of them.
Jerry Flora used to say, “This faculty is like a tribe of cannibals. If you don‟t watch out, they‟ll eat you
right up.” (laughter)
I have to make it clear: I don‟t say that in a highly critical nature. I just think that‟s how it is. Bill Gregory
– do you know Bill or who he was?
TB: I know his name.
PA: He was a Dean. Oh, that‟s another thing that I feel really good about. Bill Gregory and I created the
College of Fine and Performing Arts.
TB: It was ‟76, yes.
PA: To hopefully create some way of saying, hey, look, there are some things about drama, music, theater,
and art that are different from more academic disciplines, and we’re lumped with those same folks, that we
need to be able to sort of create our own life in some way. And we felt that it was better to go on our own
with all those risks than to stay in the College of Arts and Sciences and be demeaned daily by Ed Kaplan.
Do you know, is he still there?
TB: He just retired. A couple years ago.
PA: Oh, God. I‟m not violent, but I had to be restrained one day in a meeting, and I don‟t remember what
the committee was. He started railing against Fairhaven, and I sat there for a long time, and then he looked
directly at me and said something really, really insulting. I got up in my chair, and I went right across the
table. And I‟m sure it was Pete Elich because he was sitting next to [me] he grabbed my belt and pulled me
back before I could grab Ed Kaplan by the throat. And you better delete that out of this! (laughter)
Oh, man, that man was hateful. He hated everybody. I mean, I should have realized that he treated
everybody that way and not just me.
There were a couple of people that were not quite as bad but were constant… And a lot of that personal
stuff was really hard to live with. You could ignore it in public situations, but you‟d go home with it and it
would just eat your guts out, and that really hurt me a lot because I never asked for anything more than I
felt we needed or that we wanted to do what we needed to do. I always felt that resources should be
distributed rather than closing programs and that sort of thing. Those kinds of accusations used to really eat
away, and that was probably the only real sadness that I experienced at Western. I enjoyed every morning
getting up and going to work. I never regretted going there, and when I left, I left it behind, and I don‟t
know if that‟s something that‟s unique to me. I‟m able to do that.
I don‟t do much in music anymore, except I listen. I love to listen. I don‟t regret that I don‟t participate
anymore. All my life I wanted to do things like woodworking and just explore new things. Since I retired,
I‟ve become an EMT and I‟ve gotten involved as a volunteer firefighter.
When I said I really wasn‟t academically inclined, what I really meant was I don‟t enjoy the sedentary parts
of academia, of sitting and researching and that sort of thing. Music is always active. You certainly have
to do a lot of study and research, but then you get up and you do something. You conduct. You have these
incredible demands to create or recreate the music and it‟s a real -- it‟s a passion to do it right and to do it
well. That‟s what you live for: you do the research in order to do the active part well. It‟s not like you do
the research to do the research. I fought for years at Western against the tenure system.
First of all, I think it‟s very unfair for women.
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TB: Why is that?
PA: Two reasons: first of all, they‟re expected to do more than a man to get the same reward, and secondly
they are judged, basically, by men. Now that may not be entirely true now, but it was when I was there.
There might be two or three women faculty in a department like Music; we had three full-time. And when
T&P comes up, who judges their application? The senior faculty, who are all men. A lot of men don‟t like
the research that women faculty do. Look at the research that Katherine Anderson does. There are a lot of
men that think that is a waste. Now she‟s convinced people that it‟s not a waste, but I can remember when
people used to say, “That‟s stupid. That‟s really silly.”
My experience has always been that most of the research that is done for tenure and promotion, with some
exceptions, is third-rate at best, and is promptly forgotten. It would be interesting to go through all of the
research volumes that are published in Wilson Library and find out who reads them, if anybody does.
Jim Talbot and I had our one kind of shouting match, and it was kind of in fun; it was not real serious. And
I said, “Jim, name me three faculty members who, in your estimation, have done significant research.”
“Well,” he said, “there‟s Bill Wilson.”
Do you know him?
TB: Yes.
Who does stuff for NASA, I mean his stuff is really… And then I said, “Come on, come on.”
He could only name one person whose research he considered to be significant.
I had made this proposal for years: instead of the standard T&P – research, public service, and teaching -and we don‟t give public service any weight anyhow, do we? No, we don‟t, really we don‟t – why don‟t
we, just with a group – one year‟s group of people – why don‟t we have a contractual arrangement where
we say, “Look, we‟ve hired you because you‟re a really stunning teacher. We need some really good
teachers, particularly in your area. Now let‟s sit down and set out a program for three years, of what you
will do, and then we will grant you promotion and/or tenure based upon how well you meet these goals.
Maybe all of your criteria will be based on teaching -- maybe a couple of research projects where you
present, make a public presentation or something -- but basically we‟re going to say, hey, you‟re a great
teacher; we need a great teacher. Let‟s give you tenure or promotion or both based upon your teaching, and
whatever set of criteria you want to set up. In three years, we‟re going to sit down and you and I are going
to evaluate this, and then we‟re going to apply for promotion and tenure. We‟re going to get evaluations
from the faculty; we‟re going to say, „Hey, this is the contract. How well do you think this person met this
contract?‟”
Well, I presented that I don‟t know how many times, and people just laughed, and they said, “You know,
that would never fly with the AAUP.” They have a stranglehold on… I mean, tenure and promotion has to
be a national thing, you guys, I mean, everybody knows that.
I said, “Whether it‟s good for the university or not…”
END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE
PA: I said, “You know, you force people to put their teaching aside to do this third-rate research to publish
in a third-rate, unjuried journal or self-publish it in order for them to get promoted or to get tenure, and it
goes away on the shelf, and it‟s nothing; it‟s a waste of everybody‟s time, and you lose them. They‟re
doing this when they could be doing something more valuable to the university.”
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Now when you get into the areas of Fairhaven and into the areas of music, research is not only less
important, but it‟s harder to define. It‟s really hard to define. Some of the best research I do is listening to
other people perform, and I said, “Ah, yes!” It‟s aural. It has nothing to do with writing or setting up
studies or questionnaires or any of that stuff, but that‟s what they want. I think that is something that has
created what Bill Gregory used to describe as the dinosaur, that we now know as a university, hanging on
to those kinds of practices at the expense of the development and growth of the university. I don‟t know,
maybe in the majority of academic areas that‟s important, but the fact that we can‟t identify very much
significant research coming out of that makes me think that maybe there‟s a better way to do that.
Anyhow, retirement‟s been great. I built a house. I built a shop and a studio. I do cabinet work. I turn
bowls, sell them to galleries. I‟m a volunteer firefighter.
I just finished this spring an EMT course and I‟ve run with the ambulance. We have local medical services
here in this area. People who live in urban areas have absolutely no idea of how much life-threatening
situations you face in a place like this. The closest hospital is at least forty minutes away in good weather,
an hour and fifteen minutes away in bad weather, and that‟s from the time you get them in the ambulance to
when you get them to the hospital. That doesn‟t count for the fact that you may have to drive a half an hour
to find them.
So a lot of that kind of stuff is done by volunteers. We have about thirty EMT‟s and about six paramedics
here in the valley, and we have a very highly-organized rescue service that has absolutely state-of-the-art
equipment because people in the valley have floated bonds, done yard sales, made significant contributions.
Everything in an area like this is run by volunteers. All of the things that people in Bellingham would see
sponsored by the university, by a business, by the city, by the county, we basically do as private citizens.
We‟ve set up our own structure, we [utilize] volunteers, we create our own funding. I mean, we do get
funding from outside sources, but it doesn‟t anywhere nearly cover the cost. And then all of the manpower
is fundamentally volunteer. We have two paid people who maintain the records and do the sort of legal
requirements. The same way with the volunteer firefighting.
It‟s the same with the scholarship programs for students. I don‟t give to outside people; I give to students.
If you‟re a high school graduate and, in my view, you need some help, I might send you $100 a month,
anonymously. I don‟t give to Western, because I can‟t afford it. I don‟t give to United Good Neighbors. I
give to people that I know are desperately in need of something. The same way with my neighbors, I take
care of my neighbors who are older than I am because they need somebody.
It‟s a great experience. Everybody should have to have that experience sometime in their life, and I‟m sure
they do, but it‟s a whole different world. I‟m busier than I ever was. I‟m doing more and different things,
and I love it. (I loved my days at Western). Places like this are a hard place to live. We have a lot of
snow. In order to get out, some days I have to plough clear down. That‟s two miles.
TB: So you have your own plough up here?
PA: Yes, and, you know, it takes a month to get ready for winter. You have to get the house ready; you
have to get the vehicles ready; you have to get the yard ready; or, if you don‟t, you get wiped out.
TB: What time of year do you first start having to get ready for winter, I mean – September, October?
PA: Actually, I would have started slowly by now. I have to clean the chimney because we heat entirely by
wood. I have to go out and get the wood, which I do. But, I‟m doing this cabinet job for the clinic now, so
I‟m feeling just a little bit behind, but once the snow comes there are a lot of things you just can‟t do. You
have to take up the irrigation system; you have to weatherize all the outside faucets. It doesn‟t sound like a
lot until you start doing it, and then it just takes hours and hours and hours and hours. It takes about a week
of full-time. You can do it in a week.

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It means everything that‟s outside has to get under shelter. It means that you have to winterize all your
vehicles, check the antifreeze, put snow tires on. It‟s about a day‟s worth to get my snow plough all ready
so that I don‟t go out there after the first snow and find out that it won‟t work and it won‟t start. You have
to anticipate that when it gets down around zero, a lot of things don‟t work that work fine in the summer.
Between the heat and the humidity, you have to buy a set of tires about every two years. It‟s just a lot of
things.
It‟s a challenge. I didn‟t realize this when I came here that it would be a challenge. I have a well. You
never know when it‟s going to go. You don‟t have water. Until the last two or three years, we had major
power failures. A tree would fall over the transmission line up in the mountains and, you know, they can‟t
get in to fix it sometimes because there‟s too much snow, so you‟d be two or three days without power. So
I have a generator, and we have stuff like this all over the house -- candles. I buy candles by the case. You
have to have cold weather clothing, so you have to start sorting out all your summer clothes now and pack
them and put them away and get out the…
It‟s just a lot of little things that add up over time and it really keeps you going and I just, like I say, I‟m
healthier than I ever was when I was at Western, and part of that is just sort of the stress; there‟s a lot of
stress at the university -- I‟m sure I‟m not telling you anything that you don‟t already know -- which kind
of comes and goes through your life, and it can be as a result of the institutional problems or problems with
students or problems with faculty. One of the things that I did for thirty-five years is that I worked with
huge numbers of people. I added up the other day, I figured that in the thirty-four years I taught, a
minimum of 25,000 students came through my classes. I had huge classes at Western. I had huge classes
when I taught high school.
TB: Wow.
PA: I tried to figure out, just for the fun of it, a few weeks ago, how many there might have been. And
what I had to do was sort of figure out, the ones that I saw two years in a row or something like that, and
that was a pretty conservative estimate, I think. That doesn‟t count all the students. I used to do guest
conducting in Alaska, Montana, Washington, Oregon, California when I was actively in music, where
you‟d go out and do choirs or bands, a lot of people, a lot of kids. The logistics of all that can really
accumulate over the years. I just felt so good just kind of not having to deal with that anymore, and that‟s
one of the reasons that I didn‟t really want to get involved directing choral groups and instrumental groups
here in the valley when I came. I‟d had thirty-five years of that, and it just felt nice not to have to get up
every morning and think, God, how am I going to move these seventy-five people from here to there
tomorrow or today and to get all the equipment and print the programs and… It was really nice to get
away from that. I‟ve enjoyed doing more personal and individualized things.
I love to go out and get lost in the shop for hours and just come back and feel really good. I just accepted a
lot of that as how it was. And then when it disappeared from my life I thought, Wow, you know, it’s gone!
Why didn’t I find this out a long time ago?”
TB: Would you have liked maybe a career of woodworking instead of…?
PA: No, no. I met so many fine people, adults and students and students who are now adults and that I still
keep in touch with. I really had a passion for teaching and for music, probably more of a passion for music
than teaching, at first. There was nothing else I wanted to really do, and I discovered that I didn‟t want the
life of a musician, the kind of travel that was involved and the hours and the fact that I knew a lot of people
who were in it who, you know, were not were not very healthy.
I really loved the outdoors. One of the things when I went to Bellingham, two other fellows and I created
the Bellingham Mountain Rescue Council because we were mountain climbers, which is now, I think,
Whatcom County Rescue Council.
TB: I think its Whatcom County Search and Rescue, isn‟t it?
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PA: I don‟t know what it‟s called now.
TB: I think it‟s the Whatcom County Search and Rescue Council.
PA: I was active in that all the time I was there. As it turned out, it was the only time I had a chance to get
out in the mountains. When I could get up and say, “Sorry I can‟t be here; I got to be there.”
It was good. It was just great people, from the first year I taught, I still remember every kid from the first
year I taught. Along the way, you remember the special students and the colleagues that are really special.
I would have not have wanted to miss that, I think.
Harley Hiller and I started at Olympic College. We were good friends then, socially, and he left and we
both graduated the same year, we said, from Olympic. But I went to the U, and he went to Western. We
remodeled his house in Bellingham up in what we used to call the Edgemore Slums. What is that?
TB: [Edgecrust]?
PA: Yes, somewhere up in there, yes. I lived on Clark Road for quite awhile until I went to the farm.
Another thing that I really felt good about while I was in Bellingham, I was involved in the beginnings of
the organic farming movement, both philosophically, and I had a farm, and farmed. A lot of students lived
there or came out and worked, and that was a great experience.
I tell people I never had a career; I never planned anything. It all just happened. And when something
interesting came along, I either took it or didn‟t. I‟ve never applied for a job, except once. I applied for my
first teaching job in Sequim. All of the rest of the jobs I‟ve had, as I described my thing with Western, all
of the rest of the jobs I had just somebody said, “Are you interested?”
And I said, “Yes, I think so.”
We sort of went through an application process, but I never initiated an application anywhere. And that
was kind of neat, because you just kind of coast along and suddenly something happens.
My dad had a lot of opportunities, I remember, and he never took them. He always stayed in one spot. I
always thought, boy that was not very smart. [He] had opportunities to do things that [he] really loved and
get paid for them. But he always used to say, “Oh, no, I have a government retirement that I can really
count on.”
The terrible thing was that he died two days after he retired.
TB: Did he have a heart attack?
PA: Had a stroke. And when that happened, I thought, I’m never going to do that. He was a wonderful
guy. Just really, a tutor and a friend, but that was what I now think of as a real blind spot. He could have, I
don‟t mean been more, because that sounds like that‟s sort of a hierarchical thing. He could have done
things that would have been more creative and challenging and interesting for him if he could have gotten
past that sense and that notion that he had to stay where he was so that he had a guaranteed retirement.
TB: He probably lived through the Depression, right?
PA: He sure did.
TB: Job security and a good pension made good sense…
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PA: That was it, that was it.
And he was loyal to a fault. I have a lot of that. I‟m loyal when I‟m there, but if I leave, then I‟m loyal to
wherever – I think I am, anyhow, I hope I am. Because I think that‟s an important virtue and something
that seems to be missing in the world of work nowadays. Corporations aren‟t loyal to their employees and
employees aren‟t loyal to the corporations, which makes good sense because if there‟s no sense of loyalty
on one side, then there‟s simply not going to be on the other.
Are you getting bored?
TB: No, no, it was great stuff, and I was actually just thinking you obviously have invested a lot in the
community, which is great; you are being loyal to your community here.
PA: Oh, I really believe that. One of the reasons we came was because we wanted to be in a small
community where we could contribute directly rather than out of your checkbook. Where you could put a
sweat equity into it. I‟ve come sort of 180 degrees from being on boards and stuff like that, partly because
they mostly talk; they don‟t do a lot. I‟ve come to the realization that if I control my contribution, if I take
care of two or three of my neighbors, as Pam and I both do, I really get something out of it. I get their
friendship, I‟m connected with them. They help me, I help them.
If I can help a student that is desperately in need of financial support, and I know that, and I have a lot of
regard for what that kid has done and is doing, I feel much better about that than dropping money into what
could be a bottomless pit. So many charities, I think, are really problematical. That‟s the kindest thing I
can say. I don‟t know about universities because I really had made this decision before the push started.
I mean, gosh, you can‟t imagine how much stuff I used to get from Western. I finally called and said,
“Look, here‟s what I do. I really believe in the institution. I believe in all of this. I have a very limited
amount that I can spend, and here‟s where I put it. And, all this stuff that you send me costs you a lot of
money and you‟re not getting anything back and you‟re not going to get anything probably, so I don‟t need
it, and if you want to keep sending it, that‟s OK.”
Well, the woman at the other end -- I can‟t remember who it was -- said, “You know, I wish I lot of people
would say that, because our printing bill is astronomical, and maybe we don‟t need to print half of this
stuff.”
TB: Right.
PA: And the same with the UW. I‟m an alumni there, and I keep getting all this stuff, [like] travel to
Europe with your UW friends. I said, “I don‟t have any UW friends anymore, and I‟m not a „dawg‟ with a
„w.‟” (laughter)
Even though I was employed by the athletic department, I could care less about football scores now.
TB: Oh, the band at the UW is paid for out of athletics?
PA: Oh, yes.
TB: It makes sense, but I hadn‟t thought about that.
PA: Yes, and the cost is astronomical.
Cheerleaders are paid. Yes, when I went to the UW, I couldn‟t believe it. I was hired. I mean, Bill just
said, “Hey, you‟re assistant director; this is what you‟re going to get.”
And the first check I got: UW Athletic Department. And I thought, whoa, what am I getting this money for.
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Then I was an undergraduate advisor for the Music Department, and the first check I got from that was:
ASUW, Associated Students University of Washington. I thought, whoa, what’s this? I didn‟t realize how
those things worked and how, advising students is important to the ASUW, and, boy, did they have bucks.
They had bucks to burn when I was there (laughter), and so did the Athletic Department.
Sending the band, for example, to a Rose Bowl game: 120 kids, plus adults. We actually had to have one
airplane just for uniforms and instruments and all that kind of stuff and equipment.
TB: Wow.
PA: When we chartered an airplane, the planes weren‟t that big in those years that I was there -- three
airplanes.
TB: Wow, so one for the equipment and…
PA: Right, and, you have to be there a week because you have to rehearse. It‟s during school vacation, so
they have to pay for housing and meals and they have to rent a rehearsal space, which is a football field,
from somebody, and buses to take you everywhere, including the game. And, you know, all that stuff, the
insurance, health coverage… It‟s a lot.
In comparison to the athletes, we traveled third-class. We always got the propeller-driven airplanes and
they got the jets. But it was still great stuff. It was a great experience at that time in my life. A lot of
things came of that, and it started out, as a volunteer.
I keep thinking of how both Pam and I have… Almost everything we‟ve started that has become a
fulfilling and a paying kind of job always started as a volunteer. She came here and she went down the first
day and introduced herself to the librarian and said, “You need some help? I‟ll volunteer however you
want.”
She volunteered for a year. The librarian and her husband are some of our closest friends, and pretty soon,
she was paid.
I volunteered to do the band, and before the season was out, I was employed. I was employed by the
student body also because somebody, I don‟t know who, said, “You know, he‟s got a wife and three kids
and he‟s trying to go to school here.”
Stanley Chapel at the UW, he was director of the music school, put me on the faculty, probably at the
lowest possible end of the salary schedule, but I got a little money there, a little money from the student
body, a little money from the Athletic Department, and I made it through school fine, and all those things I
was doing before I was hired.
[Pam] volunteered at the clinic and now she has a really satisfying job that she loves. It doesn‟t pay a lot,
but it‟s fine.
TB: That‟s good.
PA: A lot of people don‟t see things that way, I think.
Well, now you‟re bored.
TB: No, is there anything else that I haven‟t asked you that you want said?
PA: No, I‟ve talked way too much.
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TB: No, it‟s been great; it‟s been great, well, thank you very much.

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