Affiliation: Alumni - 1930s
Dorothy Fenner Oral History Interview
Life history interview conducted by Janice Dilg.
March 22, 2014
Dorothy Fenner (b. 1917) attended Oregon State College as an undergraduate from 1935-1939
and as a master's student from 1939-1941, obtaining degrees from the college's Home
Economics program. During World War II, Fenner served her country as a code-breaker,
intercepting and interpreting Japanese signals from a base in northern California.
After the war, she and her husband John engaged the OSU and Corvallis communities
in numerous capacities, including work with the OSU Alumni Association, OSU Foundation
and Music Department. Fenner's interview focuses on her years as an OSC student, her
war service and her connections to the university in the decades that followed.
June McCallister Oral History Interview
Life history interview conducted by Mike Dicianna and Chris Petersen.
July 3, 2014
June (Geil) McCallister (1919-2016) was the matriarch of a five-generation Oregon
State family. A 1940 OSC graduate in Secretarial Science, McCallister married into
a lineage that traced back to William A. Finley, the first president of Corvallis
College, as well as Hugh M. Finley, co-founder and first president of the school's
Alumni Association. She was also mother to three children, all of whom graduated
from OSU, as well as nine grandchildren, many of them Beaver alumni. Her interview
focuses on her memories of undergraduate life at Oregon State College in the 1930s
as well as her family's extraordinary connection to the university, which dates back
to the 1860s.