Dick Scanlan Oral History Interview, April 5, 2019

Chris Petersen: Okay, today is April 5, 2019. We're with Dick Scanlan, who is emeritus professor at OSU Food Science and Technology. He also got his Ph.D. at OSU and was Dean of Research as well, and we'll talk about all that. We're here at his home in Corvallis, and we'll begin at the beginning and I'll ask you where were you born?

Dick Scanlan: I was born in Cazenovia, New York. Cazenovia, New York is a relatively small town about 20 miles from Syracuse, New York. My father at that time had a dairy farm there just outside of town and he actually ran his own dairy plant and delivered milk to the community. I was born in 1937 and lived there for several years. Then he sold that place in Cazenovia and bought another 00:01:00farm down near Hudson, New York, which is on the Hudson River up from New York City.. My father grew up in New York City. He hated cities and he always had wanted to live in the country and that's what we did for my growing up years. We moved to this place, a small farm, outside of Hudson, and we had various animals. It did not turn into a big dairy operation. We had a few dairy cows. We had a few other animals and lived there for 2-3 years. The thing I remember 00:02:00about the farm house was the heating or lack of heating. My mother cooked on a wood stove in the kitchen which produced heat and in our living room we had what was known as a pot belly wood stove. That heated the whole house and it was cold. By the way, if you wanted to go to the bathroom you went to the outhouse. These times were very different than what we know now.

My father attended Cornell University and studied Architecture. I bring that up to indicate he had background other than farming. He went to work in 00:03:00Schenectady, New York, which is north of Hudson, at least an hour drive maybe a little bit more. He worked for a company called the American Locomotive Company. It was one of the major manufacturers, heavy industry manufacturers, of locomotives. He used to drive up to Schenectady. He stayed the week up there and then he'd come home on weekends. We lived on the farm outside of Hudson for about 2 or 3 more years, and then we moved up to Albany, New York, which is relatively close to Schenectady. When we got to Albany I started school. By the 00:04:00way I should also mention, I'm one of 6 kids. I'm second from the youngest. I have a younger brother and then it goes up from there. So, we move to Albany and we all went to school. Me and most of my brothers and sisters started school at a school called Vincentian Institute. It was a big school in Albany at that time, a Catholic school. I started kindergarten there. I actually went to Vincentian Institute from that time until I graduated from high school. My oldest brother Mike attended Christian Brother's Academy.

The time I can remember most are the differences in being born and living out in 00:05:00the country and then city life. Kind of things like we had trolleys on the street in front our house and so on. Being just amazed at how different it was to be in a city setting. The thing I also should say here at the outset is for one reason or another I was a mediocre, minus student [laughs]. I don't know why. I liked school and so on and so forth and got along with all my classmates. Actually, I'll get to this part of it just a little bit later. Were you going to 00:06:00chime in, or no?

CP: I can stay out of the way or I can chime in, however you'd like me to. I guess the question I would ask next is maybe a little bit about your mom? Also, was Albany the town that you would associate with having grown up in? A little bit about that as well.

DS: No, no. Did I say where my father was born?

CP: You said he grew up in the city.

DS: He grew up in New York City. Born in New York City, grew up in New York City. My mother was born on Long Island and she grew up in Long Island. Therefore, they were in somewhat close proximity. Exactly how they met I'm not sure I quite remember, but they did and married and so on and so forth.

CP: You were on a dairy farm for most of your childhood, is that correct?

DS: Well, I was on a dairy farm when I was first born in Cazenovia, but the farm 00:07:00down in Hudson, we had a few animals. We had a few animals. It was not at all a full-blown dairy farm. I'll get to that. We did have a dairy farm later on.

CP: Okay.

DS: We lived in Albany for about 2 or 3 years. I started kindergarten and all my brothers and sisters except my oldest brother Mike also enrolled at Vincentian Institute. My oldest brother, Mike, who I'll talk about later, went to CBA (Christian Brothers Academy). It's a kind of military-type Catholic school. My 00:08:00father put him in that. I think because he was always a bit unruly [laughs]. My father thought maybe the discipline from the Christian Brothers could straighten him out. At any rate, he went to a different school. After, I'm going to say another 2-3 years in Albany, my father, again, always had this hankering to get back to out in the country. He located a farm about 10 miles west of Albany, on Route 20. The same Route 20 that runs from here over to the coast. It's U.S. 20, it starts on the east coast and ends up on the west coast. We were about 10 miles west of Albany, New York, and it was quite a big farm, well over 100 00:09:00acres. After a few years there we started getting some cows. Over time it increased to about 40 milking cows. But he also liked to have almost every other kind of animal that existed. We also had pigs, we had chickens, we had turkeys, we had some rabbits, we had horses. All of that made for a lot of fun. It also makes for a whole lot of work. My father was quite lucky in that he had 4 boys, and we were the ones who essentially did the work on the farm.

My father continued to go to Schenectady, to his job at AlCO. I should point out that World War 2 was happening at this time. AlCO products, being what they call a heavy industry, it switched completely from making locomotives to making tanks. It was one of the major companies in the United States that produced tanks for our army during World War 2 and then later on during the Korean War it went back to some manufacture of tanks. My father really didn't work on the farm at all. I lived on the farm from when I was about 6 or 7 years old until I 00:11:00graduated from high school. We continued high school at Vincentian Institute, which is in Albany. We had a 10-mile bus ride on a public bus that we were able to catch, just about a mile from our house and go into Albany. My brothers and sisters and I used to have to catch the bus in the morning, get into Albany in time for school and then after school take the bus out. The bus, though took us to a mile from our house. After we got off the bus we had a mile to walk before we got home [laughs]. We were lucky. In the morning, when my father went to work, he loaded us all in the car and would drive us to the bus stop.

My oldest brother, Mike, he was in some sense almost a father figure to me, my older brother, Walt, and my brother, Jerry, because he actually ran the farm. My father was working in Schenectady. As soon as we moved out there, my oldest brother, Mike, graduated from high school and it was about a year to go yet in World War II. He enlisted in the Marines. He was in the Marines for about 2 00:13:00years. He was gone for about 2 years. He was on the USS Little Rock, which went to the Mediterranean after the Germans left that area. The Mediterranean Sea was filled with mines and they'd cruise, cruise, cruise until they saw a mine, My brother, who was a sharp shooter, would be on the front deck with a couple of other guys. The mines had spikes on them, and they'd spot them out there with their Browning automatic rifles. Shoot it, shoot it, shoot it until it blew up. So, they cruised around the Mediterranean blowing up mines. He had a very interesting time.

When he came back from the Marines, he and my father decided they really would like to have a full-fledged dairy farm. So, we went out and bought a whole bunch 00:14:00of dairy cows and a couple bulls and so on. From roughly I suppose something like 1947/48 we started running a dairy farm. The thing is, how this affected us. It was quite a bit of work for us to do that as well as to go to school. The other thing that we used to do, our biggest pastime, was we loved to hunt and fish. We would hunt deer, hunt woodchucks, pheasants, and quail. I grew up with my brothers hunting and fishing.

That was probably one of our main recreations. What happened then, well, what 00:15:00happened then was that we ran the dairy farm for about I don't know 6 years or so and my brother, Mike was the main boss. He got married, had a kid or two and he made the decision he really didn't want to spend his whole life running a dairy farm. So, the decision was made to have an auction. An auction person came out, and my father organized all that and auctioned off all the animals. That 00:16:00happened the summer between my junior year and my senior year in high school. So that was the end of the farm as it operated as a farm. That was a span of 5-6 years of being on the dairy. When it was a dairy farm we used to have to get up really early, like about 5:00 in the morning, because the thing about dairy farms is they have cows and you have to milk them twice a day. You start milking them at about 5:30 in the morning and then when you have finished with the cows 00:17:00you have a bunch of those calves. We also had pigs. We had chickens. All these things have to be fed and watered and so on and so forth. It was a very busy life for us. I'd say the benefit of it was at young ages all of us knew what work was. I'm sounding like an old fogy. I see some of the younger generation today they kind of don't want to get to know what work is. But that's another whole story.

So, what next? What next was that my older brother, Mike, moved from that location to work for a big dairy outfit in New York State-Dairymen's League it 00:18:00was called. They collected milk. They pasteurized the milk and distributed it. Trucked it down to New York City and all that kind of thing. This was a plant, a Dairy League Plant in a little town outside of Syracuse, New York, and my brother Mike moved up there and he became the plant manager because he knew about dairies. So we did a lot of hunting and fishing. The other sport that I really, really liked was basketball. We always had a basketball hoop on one of our barns. Then after a while we even found a way to to play basketball on a nice floor inside our barn. My school experience was different in that I'd 00:19:00arrive at school at 8 and would go to school until it let out at about 3:00 in the afternoon. I'd go right out of the school, catch the bus for the 10-mile ride home. I did not get to participate then in a lot of the school activities growing up because of where we lived. The next thing that I think comes along was that my older brother, Walt, who was 2 years ahead of me in school, when he graduated he went to Cornell and majored in Dairy Science.

So when I got to my senior year, my father told me to apply to Cornell. So I applied to Cornell. I got a letter back from Cornell, and it said you're not accepted into Cornell. My father came home from work and I said, "Dad, look we got this letter today and it says I'm not accepted into Cornell." My father, who was a very direct person, said, "Okay, Dick, tomorrow morning you get yourself into that car out there." He didn't say yourself, he said get a part of my 00:21:00anatomy into that car out there. "You drive up to Cornell. You go to the School of Agriculture, and you talk with the dean and find out what's wrong and find out what you can do to get into Cornell."

So, the next day I got in the car and drove up to Cornell, located the Agriculture building and went in. I don't know even if I knew enough to make an appointment with the dean. But at any rate, I got in. I went to see the dean, and, "The secretary said he's in there and go ahead and see him." I went in and I said, "You know, I really want to to attend Cornell. My brother's at Cornell and he's doing alright and I really would like to get to Cornell." He said, 00:22:00"Well, we can't accept you at Cornell." I said, "Well, why not?" I have to digress here. New York State had what's called the regent system. I don't know if you know what that is. It applies to high schools. Most high schools in New York State subscribe to this. It means that, for instance, if you take high school chemistry every school in the state in the regent system, and most of them were, they take the same chemistry exam at the same time. it's on June 6th in the morning and so on. He said, "We have a lot of people come here who grew up in New York State, and they did regents. He said, you know, your' high school average is 75." I said, "Yeah." He says, "I'll tell you what." He says, "We keep 00:23:00track." And he says, "Whatever, in general, what students do in high school in their regents when they come to Cornell they're going to do 10 points less." He said, "So if you came to Cornell, you'd get a 65." And he said, "You've got to be 70 to stay in Cornell. And you'd flunk out after the first year." I said, "Okay."

I was familiar with the School of Agriculture at Cornell. It's a four-year but it also has a 2-year program. I said, "Well, is there any way I could get into the 2-year program?" He hemmed and hawed and he said, "Okay, yes, I can agree 00:24:00you can come in to the 2-year program, but you're probably going to flunk out." I said, "Well, okay, once I get into the 2-year program can I switch to the 4-year regular program?" He said, "Yes, after two years, but he said you have to have a 75 average here to do that. You're not going to do that. You're not going to be able to do that." I said, "Well, can you transfer after 1 year?" He said, "Yes, but you have to have an 80, but you're not going to do that." I said, "Okay, can I get accepted into the 2-year school?" "Yes, you can be accepted." So, I went home, and told my father I got accepted. Well, I think that in retrospect that dean was playing psych 101 with me, because he said I couldn't 00:25:00do it.

Well, I came to Cornell and got 84 average the first year, transferred into the 4-year school into Dairy Science and that was my start at Cornell. I must say, I was, when I came to Cornell, and I don't know quite why, but I was just enormously pleased and impressed and had very good treatment and I think the world of Cornell for what it did for me.

The thing I should bring up here is we didn't have a lot of money. You could get 00:26:00jobs in the women's dormitory in working in the kitchens. Working and serving the food behind the steam table. You're called a steam table boy. Then taking care of all the dirty dishes when they came in, putting them through a big dishwasher operation and so on and so forth. I applied for a job in what was called Clara Dickson Hall, one of the several women's dormitories at Cornell. It 00:27:00was great in a number of ways. When I went there essentially if you got a job there you didn't work every meal. You'd work maybe about half the meals in a week or something like that. They'd stagger it around because they had enough workers. There were probably about 30 guys that worked there and about 30 women who worked there. The guys worked bringing the food out from the kitchen when it was prepared, setting up the steam table and so when the girls came through the line, you'd put the food on their plate. At night, they had a different thing. They'd come in and they'd just sit out in the dining room. This was called 00:28:00gracious living. They'd have, I think it was 8 or 9, people at a table, and there was an upper classman. This was a freshman dorm. There was an upper classman there who would instruct the girls in proper manners and so on. So, I worked in Dickson until my junior year. I also worked some in the... Cornell had a dairy plant, an operational dairy plant. By the way, so did OSU years ago. It's where the theater is now. At any rate, I got a job in the dairy plant 00:29:00working part-time too. The thing about the job at Dickson... it was a very nice... there was about 25 guys there. It was almost like a fraternity. Immediately when you came in you're working with these guys and you got to know a lot of people really quickly. A lot of them became my best friends through my undergraduate experience. In particular, the upper classmen were always helpful and it was just a wonderful experience.

The other thing about is that Cornell had intramural sports. Out of the 25 or so 00:30:00guys there were some fairly good, some of them very good, athletes and we formed a Dickson team for football, for basketball, and for softball. It was like an immediate built in "in" to get into that whole thing. It was a great thing for me. A lot of very good friends and so on. A very important thing happened during my sophomore year. Of course a new class comes in, new freshmen come in and a bunch of new waitresses arrive. One's name was Meg Smith, and she grew up in a 00:31:00town, also on a dairy farm, down closer to New York City. Pine Bush... She grew up on a dairy farm. She was one of 3 girls. When she arrived at Cornell she became a waitress at Dickson. The great thing about when you go there and when you work, you arrive there about 45 minutes before you work and that's when we ate our meals. That's when we got our meals, and when we finished our meals, it was time to go feed the students who lived in the dorm. So, you got to know the other workers quite easily and quickly. It was a great big dining room and we 00:32:00got to know each other. Well, Meg and I liked each other and so on and so forth. We started casually dating soon after her arrival.

CP: Did you get married during your undergraduate years?

DS: Yes.

CP: Okay.

DS: Something else I want to touch here about our time at Dickson. If I were to look back on my high school years, I never liked studying very much. I always tried to weasel out of studying. That's kind of why I didn't do too good in 00:33:00school. After the evening meal my freshman year, some of these upper classmen said, "Hey Dick, we're going over to the library. Why don't you grab your stuff and come along with us?" I said, "Library? Why are you going to the library?" "That's where you go to study." And oh, bingo, the light went on [laughs]. Obviously the fact that I worked at Dickson changed the rest of my life, in lots and lots of ways. Now, you had asked a question a minute ago?

CP: About your wedding, or getting married as an undergraduate. DS: Yeah. The 00:34:00other thing I should mention and then we'll get on and I'll skip back to that, is at that time Cornell had ROTC, just like OSU does. But at that time ROTC was required for the first 2 years. Every male had to do ROTC for the first 2 years. Then with ROTC there's... after 2 years you can quit doing ROTC. The other thing is you can apply for advanced ROTC. If you apply and you're accepted then there's 2 more years of ROTC. By the way, you get paid. You get paid something through advanced ROTC.

My older brother, Walt, did advanced ROTC. I suppose I was influenced by that. I 00:35:00didn't mind ROTC, and so I said, well I'll do that. So, I did. But you also have a military obligation when you graduate. When you graduate, you're commissioned as a second lieutenant, but then you have to do active duty for 2 years and then reserves for about 5 or 6 years. They had some other options too. That's the one I took, so I went on active duty for two years. To skip back to Cornell. Meg and I dated each other, and fell in love with each other. We wound up getting 00:36:00married between my junior and senior year. Then, of course, we didn't live in dorms anymore. We rented a little apartment just off campus and got married in the summer between my junior and senior year on September 5th. That same summer, prior to getting married, Meg went over to Spain. Her grandfather came from Spain. She has a lot of relatives in Spain in the Barcelona area. She went over there and her grandfather was a great guy. Meg was one of 3 girls and he wanted each of those girls to go over and get a real taste of Spain. I was in advanced 00:37:00ROTC between my junior and senior year. Meg went to Spain to enjoy the good food and all. I went to Fort Brag, North Carolina, for officer training [laughs]. That's a hot place in the summer. I was down there for two months. In September of that year between my junior and senior year we had our wedding on September 5th and then we went back to Cornell.

During my senior year at Cornell I took a full load, but I also worked 3 different jobs. I worked in the dairy plant at Cornell early in the morning. I worked as a Lab Technician for one of the faculty members, and the third one was 00:38:00at a radio station in downtown Ithaca at about 10:00 at night. After I studied I'd drive down there, and I went through and cleaned the place and vacuumed it and emptied waste cans and stuff like that. It wound up probably working about 30 hours a week or so. It seemed like that was the thing to do and we did it. The point is, Meg was a year behind me. She majored in Industrial and Labor 00:39:00Relations... I was in the Ag school. She was a year behind me. When it came around time for my graduation, she had a year to go still. But I was supposed to graduate. They put lieutenant bars on me. I was supposed to go into the army. It occurred me, wait a minute, maybe I should get a master's degree. This would allow Meg to finish her bachelor's degree. I went to the military people, and said, "I'd like to get a master's degree before I go into the army.

Can I get a two-year delay for my active duty?" They said, "No problem. We're 00:40:00happy to do that." It might seem surprising, but there was no big war happening then, and the more educated you are, maybe the better you're going to be. That's really the driving force. Plus, during my senior year I worked as a lab technician with the two faculty members at Cornell, Frank Shipe who was then my major advisor for my master's program. Then another guy-B.L. Herrington who was just a terrific professor. I liked all the faculty there. They influenced me a lot in getting interested in research science, if you will. That was really my 00:41:00beginning to have have an interest in research during the first few years of my undergraduate I had no real interest in... I'm not going to do a research... I'm going to finish and go in the army and then get a job in the food industry. I stayed on. I got my master's degree. Meg was able to finish her bachelor's degree. We had our first child a little after a year of getting married... By the time I finished my master's degree, two years, what was it 1960--

CP: '62? 1962.

DS: No, I finished my bachelor's in 1960 and my master's then was from 1960 to 00:42:001962. After completing my master's degree we headed off to my 2 years in the military. Maybe we should take a quick break there. Is that alright?

CP: Sure. Can I ask real quick about the master's degree a little bit more?

DS: Yeah.

CP: My sense is that you get to Cornell as an undergraduate and you become a little more serious about your studies.

DS: Like a lot more [laughs].

CP: But you're also studying things that are fairly familiar to you-I'm guessing dairy science. By the time you're heading towards that thinking about becoming a graduate student you're becoming more interested in research. I noticed, too, that you had biochemistry to your track as a master's student.

DS: Well, see, yeah, I saw that on the sheet. When you got a master's degree you have your major, my major was dairy science, but you have to have a minor. I had 00:43:00taken... if there's part of science that I really, really liked it was chemistry and biochemistry. I knew a professor in biochemistry who I had taken my course from, so why not biochemistry? You don't do anything in biochemistry. They're on your committee, though. It's just like committees here. You have about 4 people on your committee, someone from other departments other than the one you major in and so on. Yes, I was very interested in chemistry and got ever more so through my career after that.

CP: The connection to science then sort of begins right around the time of this master's degree? Is that...?

DS: I would say so, yes. I really didn't have. I mean, I had interest in science 00:44:00because there's all kinds of science in the courses, but not in terms of it becoming a career for me, no.

CP: What was the research topic that you pursued as a master's student?

DS: It was, the title of it, was off-flavor development in multivitamin mineral milk. The essence of it was that there was a company in New Jersey that put out multivitamin supplements for foods and so on and they thought, well, they'd make one up and they'd put it in milk, and they did. When they did the milk then when it was processed and pasteurized developed a strong, what's called an oxidized flavor. It's a very bad, off-flavor in milk.

The guy who worked for this company had formally gotten his Ph.D. in dairy 00:45:00science. He came to the department and said, "Hey we got a problem here." And they'd give you a little money can you solve the problem? That's what happens all the time and so on. We worked on this and it turns out one of the things that they were adding was iron as a supplement. Iron is also a catalyst for oxidation and that's what the problem was, is that they had iron. Then the solution is, they had a lot of other vitamins and so on, but you better pull the iron out because you're never going to sell this stuff when it causes an off-flavor. That's the essence of my master's degree.

CP: Did you have any teaching responsibilities during this time?

DS: Yeah. When I was a graduate student getting my master's, I had a graduate 00:46:00teaching assistantship. I assisted in many of the dairy science courses.

CP: Did that come pretty naturally to you?

DS: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was not a huge faculty. I don't know how big the faculty would've been. I would guess 8 or 9. By then I had done my whole bachelor's with them. They know you and you know them... Plus, there's a couple guys that are graduate assistants, not just one. That's fun too, working with someone else. Usually, particularly, my first year they put me with a more senior person who 00:47:00knew a little bit more about it and so forth. I knew right away I liked working with students in the lab. You'd be there in the labs... what you do as a graduate student assistant in the lab is prepare reagents and materials that are used in the lab and so you do all that. During the labs, you're there to answer students' questions working at their benches doing this and that How come this doesn't work? You help them along through the labs, which I found to be a lot of fun.

CP: Okay, you want to take a break?

DS: Yeah, yeah.

CP: Okay, so why don't we start up now with your experience at the U.S. Army Natick Laboratories, is that correct? In Massachusetts?

DS: I have to start that telling how I got to Natick. I have to go back to my graduate school days at Cornell. There were other graduate students there, of course, and there was a guy, his name was Dick Scarpelino and he and I were very good friends. The point is this-when I was commissioned, I was commissioned an artillery officer. Therefore, when I was going to go on active duty, before I said, "Hey I want to get a master's," I was going to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. I'd be an artillery officer. I was talking to Dick Scarpellino when I finished my master's. I said, well, now I go into the army. He says, "Well, where are you 00:49:00going to go?" I said, "Ft. Sill and be in artillery." He said, "What are you doing being an artillery officer?" I said, "Well that's how they commissioned me." He said, "Write them a letter. Tell them you've got a master's degree in dairy science. You have a bachelor's in that too and you know about foods. The Quartermaster core in the army is what does foods. Ask them to switch you from Artillery to Quartermaster." I said, "Oh, alright." I think I probably took a piece of paper like this and wrote a, hand written letter. I think I probably took it down to the ROTC guys at Cornell and maybe they had to send it in and so on. But, lo and behold it came back and yes, now you're a Quartermaster Officer 00:50:00and you don't go to Ft. Sill.

Now you go to Natick, Massachusetts. When I went into the military it was late June I think of '62 when I finished my master's degree. I went down to Ft. Lee, Virginia, which is the home of the Quartermaster course. We were down there about 3 months for basic officers training. I went down and we lived off base at Ft. Lee. Enjoyed the time down there. Then I was assigned to go to U.S. Army Natick Laboratories in Natick, Massachusetts. Natick, Massachusetts is a 00:51:00medium-sized town about 20 miles west of Boston, Massachusetts. That is where the Natick labs were. It's a military place, but it's a huge research facility, just a huge research facility. It has a tremendous number of civilian scientists working there in the laboratories. Then there's the army component there. When I arrived at Natick they told me I would be assigned to work in the radiation lab. I thought, okay, that's fine.

The army had a program to develop a new way of processing food for the troops 00:52:00out in the field. The thing is what they used for years and years was known as a C-ration. It means that you put some corn beef hash in a can and you thermally process it and it is all the food they eat when they're really outside for exercises and war. Mainly C-rations, and that gets really old. They were looking for some way to make food for the troops that would be just a little bit better and more acceptable. It turns out that you take food and you put it in a can and 00:53:00then you expose it to ionizing radiation. They have a radiation laboratory there. In that radiation laboratory, they have a cobalt-60 source that emits gamma rays. This cobalt-60 is down in a, I'd call it a well. You walk into the room where it is and about as big as that rug that you have right there. There's an opening. If you look way down you see a glow. It's about 25 feet of water. That's so you can be there, and that water absorbs all the radiation and people there don't get exposed to radiation. The way you do it-you put the food in a can. You close the can. You load all this onto a rack which is attached to a track on the ceiling. You bring the cans into the radiation part of the 00:54:00laboratory and expose the cans to the cobalt 60 source. You leave them for a certain amount of time. It imparts enough radiation that sterilizes the food, the same as if you thermally process it as our canned foods are in the supermarket now. There's a problem. The problem is it imparts a bad off-flavor.

The work of the lab was to modify the process to prevent the off-flavors. That's 00:55:00the essence of what I worked on for the 2 years. It never worked out very well. There are some things that have come out from lower-dose radiation to pasteurize some foods... But it just never could be tailored enough or come up with anything that would really prevent these bad off-flavors.

It was still a great experience. I met great people working at Natick. I got to know other scientists and they did all different kinds of food research. The 00:56:00area that I became interested in was flavor chemistry. It was a budding field in food science. This guy at Cornell, Dick Scorpolino, did some flavor chemistry type of work. He influenced me and I knew when I got to Natick, there would a flavor chemistry section. It turns out there were I suppose 5 or 6 scientists 00:57:00there who were just enormously friendly and helpful, but one of them in particular a guy named Phil Eisenberg. And Phil Eisenberg had just completed a PhD program in flavor chemistry at MIT. He also went through ROTC at MIT and he was assigned there as an officer as I was. I got to know Phil very well. He was very influential and helpful in helping me develop my career.

Then my Army time was coming to an end. I was going to be discharged and leave 00:58:00the army in 1964. Phil Eisinberg got out of the Army a little bit before I did. He was a faculty member at MIT. He was a few years older than I was. He said, "Dick, come on back and do a Ph.D. here with me at MIT. So, he was very influential in me seeing what flavor chemistry really was. I also knew the epicenter of flavor chemistry. The guy who really brought flavor chemistry into 00:59:00being was a guy named Stewart Patton at Penn State University. I took some time and I said, I think Penn State is the place to go. I I should also say that there were other people at the radiation lab: Ed Josephson who was the head of it and Morris Simon who said, "Dick you know, you really should get a Ph.D." It turns out Meg's mother, who was a phenomenal person, said, "Dick, you should get a Ph.D." She was a woman much before her time. She was a wonderful woman.

My mother was a little more, oh, conservative I would say. About this time... 01:00:00when I said, "Well, I'm going to maybe going to school further and get a Ph.D.," my mother said, "Dick, when are you ever going to get a job?" [laughs]. We laugh about that still, Meg and I do. But at any rate, Meg and I loaded the car. We had a Volkswagen bus. I'm sorry, a Volkswagen Bug, I meant to say. The small one. By the way we had two kids when I was getting my master's and then we had 2 more kids when we were in the Army. They were "free Army" kids we called them, because the Army pays for all your medical stuff when you're in there. Our family was growing rather fast. But at any rate, Meg and I get in the car and I 01:01:00think we got somebody to look after our kids. We might have dropped them off at Meg's parents' house. I'm not sure. We drove down to Penn State to see Stewart Patton. Went in and he talked. He's a wonderful guy. Talked to him. He said, "Dick," he says, "I'll tell you." "I'm rally moving out of the flavor chemistry game and he says there's more stuff about biosynthesis of milk that I'm interested in.." So he said, "Really, you probably shouldn't come here." But where you should go is Oregon State University." He said, "A former graduate student of mine, named Al Day, who got his Ph.D. with me is on the faculty at Oregon State University.

I applied to Oregon State University and said the other thing was at Natick they 01:02:00used to have these meetings. They brought scientists from outside in and the department head at food science was quite a prominent guy, and he came back to Natick for one of these meetings. I got to meet him. So, I could meet him firsthand when I was applying and he talked to the people at Natick about me and they gave me very high recommendations. The short of it is, I wound up applying to Oregon State University, was accepted at Oregon State University and came out 01:03:00here and started my Ph.D. program. I wrote a letter describing my family. I told them I had a wife and four kids. I said anything you can do financially to help would be appreciated. along. Of course I was interested in getting a graduate assistantship. Well, there's a position, it's a research assistant unclassified. It's the lowest rank of the faculty positions. That gave me couple thousand 01:04:00dollars more than a graduate student assistantship. So, we came out and the meeting at Oregon State University was absolutely wonderful. Al Day met us. He was just a wonderful guy and a very good scientist. He had already established a worldwide-known research program in flavor chemistry. There were probably another 5 or 6 graduate students doing flavor chemistry. Every one of them was welcoming and helpful, and your learning curve goes way up.

It was just a wonderful experience getting my Ph.D. I'd ground through it. I did 01:05:00very well in all the courses. But back then to get a Ph.D. you had to pass a test in scientific German and you had to pass a test in a second language. I chose German and French. You would go over to the library and get this book out of the library. It's a chemistry book in German and you get yourself a German dictionary and you would spend some time going through it. You can kind of 01:06:00figure out what it's about, because its science, you know something about the subject. They're using scientific terms. This is in German, but you... and so on, until you feel you can pass this exam. They had this woman, and she was retired from the language department. Mrs. Dawes was her name. She lived right off campus. You went to her house and you translated the German into English. She was just a delightful, friendly old woman.

By the way, you could also go to several faculty members who would quiz you on German. But my graduate student friends all said, no, you go to Mrs. Dawes. You go into Mrs. Dawes's house and you sit down a couch like you're sitting here and she'll say, "Open the book." And you open the page and start... She had these cats. As soon as you sat down they'd interrupt and I would tell her she had 01:07:00beautiful cats. She'd talk about the cats mainly. Then I would read a bit and I'd say, "Do you want more?" "Oh, no, no, that's perfectly alright." I tell that story and laugh about it still. I did that with German and did that with French and got through the bloody exams. That was part of the experience of getting through the PhD program.

At any rate, I got through graduate school. I think I did well in graduate school. I did my Ph.D. research on flavor defects in... it's called UHT-treated 01:08:00milk. If you go to a store in the US you buy pasteurized milk. It's heated to 162 for 16 seconds in a heating tube. It kills all the pathogens, the disease causing bacteria in milk. But it doesn't kill all the spoilage organisms. If you let milk stand too long it will spoil, pasteurized milk. If you've ever been to Europe there is some pasteurized milk over there, but they have something called UHT: ultra-high treatment milk. They use essentially a machine that goes to much higher temperatures for a shorter period of time and it sterilizes the milk. In other words, all organisms are killed. If you go to Europe, a lot of times in a supermarket you'll see containers of milk on the shelf, not in the cooler because it doesn't have to be. It's like all other canned products, anything 01:09:00else canned.

At any rate, there was a flavor defect in UHT milk. The company that makes equipment, the equipment that goes into a dairy plant, gave my major professor a small-scale unit so we could use the unit in our dairy plant at OSU. Essentially my Ph.D. research used flavor chemistry techniques, which were new to me. A lot of chemistry, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry and so on to identify some of the compounds that were responsible for the off flavor.

That's kind of what flavor chemistry is about: to take a food and to analyze it by analytical techniques such as gas chromatography which separates one compound from another into a mass spectrometer which identifies the compounds. Then you can smell the compound coming off the gas chromatography column to determine which compounds caused the off flavor... That's what I did, and that's what my Ph.D. work was about.

CP: What was your memory of the department on a broader sense as a graduate student? It sounds like flavor chemistry was very strong there, but--

DS: It was very strong, yes.

CP: In a broader way the food science and technology department?

DS: The department you mean?

CP: Yeah.

DS: The department was strong and it still is a very strong, a well-recognized food science department. I know this is on your list, so I... you said dairy 01:11:00science, food science. You know?

CP: Right.

DS: Okay, when these departments started way back when Cornell, University of Massachusetts, North Carolina State, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, and so on, they were all dairy. It was dairy science. Later they've all switched to food science, to much more general, broader food science. Maybe ask yourself, why'd it start with dairy? Milk is probably the most perishable food. That is why when they started way back then they zeroed in on milk and dairy products. Now, there are no more dairy science departments in the United States. They've all switched to food science departments. OSU is one of two that 01:12:00started as food science, UC Davis also started as food science. They had some dairy early by the way but it was always known as a food science department. That's really the genesis of how that happened.

CP: How about the OSU in that time period? What do you remember about the culture of OSU? What was it like to be here in the mid to late '60s?

DS: When I showed up, I grew up on the east coast and I don't know how to say... it moves a little faster or something? It struck me as absolutely delightful but kind of small town, sleepy little town. Nothing negative about that, but that was my impression of it. Even Cornell in Ithaca, in New York State. Ithaca was 01:13:00bigger than Corvallis was then. It was just a more happening town and stuff, you know, than this was. I would say I came here in 1964, and Corvallis has changed dramatically since 1964. It used to be a little sleepy town. Driving around you'd see another car over here and you'd see another car over there. Now we have some traffic jams in Corvallis-on Harrison and all the people who flock in from Albany and Lebanon to come to work and coming in in the morning and leaving in the afternoon you know, so it's changed a lot. It's changed a lot. And Hewlett-Packard coming in, of course, had a big influence on changing it.

CP: Sure. So, you finished your Ph.D. and it was time to get a job, and you 01:14:00wound up staying at OSU. How did that happen?

DS: Oh, that's a good story. Alright, so this is 1967 and I'm finishing my Ph.D. and we are from the east coast. There's no question about it, of course we're going to go back to the east coast... So, I said, well, alright, I, will write application letters to companies back there and to some universities. I applied to General Foods Corporation, which is in Tarrytown, New York, huge place. By the way, that's were Dick Scarpellino went to work and he started a flavor chemistry group in their research center in Tarrytown. I applied to International Flavors and Fragrances in Southern New Jersey and it's a big 01:15:00flavor company.

By the way, I didn't get into this... about ¾ of the way through my Ph.D. thesis, Al Day, my major professor, was hired away to become vice president for research at International Flavors and Fragrances. It's the biggest U.S. flavor company. That's why Bob Lindsey took over as my Major Professor the last year of my Ph.D. I went to General Foods, I went to IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances), went to Kellogg's in Michigan. Interviewed, interviewed, interviewed. I went to... I couldn't quite make up my mind. Am I interested in industry or academic? Went to the University of Wisconsin and interviewed and 01:16:00went to University of Minnesota and interviewed.

The thing about this, flavor chemistry had become from nothing to hugely in demand and anybody with a flavor chemistry background was in high demand. I got very good job offers from all five places. The story I should told before was that before the interviews I did not own a suit. So Meg and I went down to Penney's and we got a suit and we got some shoes. After the interviews I was in 01:17:00my lab finishing up a few things. At that time Harold Schultz was the department head. A great guy who was very helpful. He used to come up and walk around the building. He saw me and he walked into the lab. He said, "Well, how's it going Dick?" I said, "Yeah, things are going great." He said, "Well, you went on some interviews." I said, "Yeah." He says, "How did they turn out?" I said, "They really turned out great. I got job offers from all the places I went." I said, "I got to answer one of them and accept one of them right now and get on with it. You get these letters and you can't sit on them forever." He said, "Well, have you ever considered staying here on the faculty at OSU?" I said, "Well I didn't know there was any position open here." He says, "I'll tell you what. 01:18:00Tomorrow morning I've got a meeting with the dean. I'll be back in the afternoon. Come down and see me in the afternoon." I said, "Okay."

So, I go home and by the way my wife was very set on going back east. Our families were back there. The next day I go down and I walk into Schultz's office and and Schultz offers me a job on the faculty. He had talked to the dean. The dean said okay. Now I had 6 offers. Of the offers, it was the lowest paying one by a little bit [laughs]. But I really loved being here and my research was going well. "Okay," I said, "I want to go home and talk to my 01:19:00wife." "Yeah, okay, come in and see me tomorrow." I went home, talked with Meg about it. And she told me, she really was looking forward to going back. And I said, "Gee, you know, I just want to stay here for a couple years. After a couple years we'll go back. There's no question about that. No question about that." She said, "Yeah, okay, I can go with that." I really liked it here. So, I went back and I told Schultz, yeah, and bingo I was hired. The point is this: Schultz didn't talk to anybody. That's the way department heads ran things back then. There was no affirmative action. There was no consulting the rest of the faculty about it or anything else. Schultz just did it.

So, I was hired as a faculty member. I did really fully intend that we'll just 01:20:00stay here for another two or three years. I had some nice research going I want to finish up. The thing is... and I wish in a way Meg were sitting here because she likes to tell this... she was truly disappointed, but she was okay with it. But after 3 years, 2 or 3 years, you couldn't drag her out of Corvallis and me either. So here we are [laughs]. That's the way our life went.

CP: What was that transition like for you going from student to faculty member? You're now a colleague with people who were your teachers.

DS: It's hard. It's a bit of a challenge. It's a step up. A little bit of it is, well, what do I do now? It turns out there was a faculty member who had a grant 01:21:00that dealt with auto-oxidation of foods and he suddenly had a heart attack and died, and the granting agency said, yeah, they could leave it with the department if there is another faculty member who can take over. I took over it and finished up his grant. It gave me something to get into right away. I was really interested in flavor chemistry and did what I call straight flavor chemistry work for another couple of years, but then we get to the nitrosamine 01:22:00part of it. Maybe we should take a break here for just a minute. Is that alright?

CP: Sure, yeah.

CP: Alright, nitrosamine.

DS: Okay, how did I get into nitrosamines? This was in the late 1960s, I'm going to say about 1969 or so. Every year at the beginning of academic years the different schools have a meeting of their faculties. Science goes to this auditorium. Agriculture goes to another auditorium, etc... Well, there is a big auditorium in the food science building, so we all filed in there. All the other faculty from the departments come in and so on. The dean of agriculture and the associate deans get up and give a pep talk at the beginning of the year. Well, I go into this meeting and I see Russ Sinnhuber sitting there. He was a faculty 01:23:00member, a senior faculty member in food science. He's sitting there and I go and sit by him. We'd talk a little bit before before the meeting starts.

The meeting starts and it goes on and on. Pep talk. I look at Russ Sinnhuber and he's got a stack of small booklets. He's not paying any attention to what's going on. He's going through the booklets and making notes in them. What they are, they were called current contents. You have to remember, this is before computers and there were companies that followed the literature and they would send you reprints of research articles upon request. There's a break and he 01:24:00nudges me and he says, "Dick, take a look at this article." It says nitrosamines are formed by the Amadori reaction. It's a reaction where you take reducing sugar and amino acid and heat them and nitrosamines are formed. This is the essence of the article. He says with your flavor chemistry background, can you determine if this is true or not? This doesn't seem to make sense to me. The authors claimed they identified dimethylnitrosamine and diethylnitrosamine from this reaction.

So, I duplicated their experiment. The first thing I did, I went back and I 01:25:00looked and dimethylnitrosamine has a boiling point of 150 and diethylnitrosamine a boiling point of 165. This means you could separate them by gas chromatography and identify them by mass spectrometry. They had done something called thin layer chromatography, which is not very strong evidence at all, but they did it and they published it and this got everybody's attention. We did the reaction, and we put the products into the gas chromatography and mass spectrometer and there's no nitrosamine. I purchased from Eastman Kodak pure dimethylnitrosamine and pure diethylnitrosamine. I put them into the mass spectrometer so I knew exactly what the spectrum looked like. There's no nitrosamines. So, I published 01:26:00a paper. By the way, several other laboratories did the same thing and and about 3 others say no nitrosamines. But a famous scientist, his name is Willie Lijinsky, studied many nitrosamines and found that most of them are highly carcinogenic. They already had been tested in a bunch of different animals and they caused cancer in them. In the end, it dawned on people that it might be 01:27:00possible to get nitrosamines formed in foods and particularly if you understand the chemistry of the formation. If you have what's called a secondary amine, and there's a lot of them in foods and if you put nitrite into the food you produce a nitrosating agent. The secondary amine reacts with the nitrating agent to form a nitrosamine. That's the chemical reaction.

Then it started dawning on people, what a minute, we do have amines in cured meats. You add nitrite as a curing agent when cured meat are manufactured. Tom 01:28:00Fazio at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration looked at fried bacon and found nitrosamines and bingo that started the whole thing. I was set up already to jump in. I wrote a grant to the National Cancer Institute at NIH outlining how we could study the chemistry of formation and develop analytical methods for nitrosamines in foods. The problem is they're formed in relatively small amounts, and you have to have various good analytical techniques, which are the exact same analytical techniques that you use in flavor chemistry. I was all set up analytically. So I put a grant in to the NIH, the National Institute of 01:29:00Health, and they immediately funded it. I got this very nice grant, which I had for the next 25 years or something like that. Why is this such a big deal? The point is, there's no question there's nitrosamine in bacon. Later you find out there's nitrosamine in beer, for a whole different reason. That it was dimethylnitrosamine. Nitrosopyrrolidine in bacon as well as dimethylnitrosamine. This is a big problem, it's a big problem for the regulatory agencies: The Food and Drug Administration and the USDA because there's a law that was passed. It's 01:30:00called the Delaney Clause.

Delaney was a representative to the U.S. Congress back in the, I think the late '30s or '40s, and he put a bill through the U.S. Congress saying that any compound that's known to cause cancer in humans or animals cannot be added to food. Bingo. The hitch on it is you don't add the nitrosamine to food. You add a compound that forms nitrosamine. They had a little bit of slippage, but a lot of pressure then came on the Food and Drug Administration and the USDA. They both, in different ways, regulate meat products. But to ban nitrite could cause problems. Sodium nitrite in combination with salt, which were both added to all 01:31:00cured meat products are enormously effective in preventing the outgrowth and toxin formation from Clostridium botulinum. That's what Botulism is. You pull nitrite out of the meats, you might have a whole bunch of Botulism outbreaks. They were up the creek a bit. Immediately a lot of consumer group pressure came to to ban nitrite. The National Cancer Institute was very good and prompt in providing funds to solve the problem.

I should jump-it was not just a U.S. thing. The Germans were big into it from 01:32:00the beginning. The thing that happened is there's an agency called the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It's under the World Health Organization of the United Nations. The International Agency for Research on Cancer is located in Leon, France, and it has a big international research institute. That organization took this on as a major problem. It was a major world problem. They sponsored meetings around the world. I don't know how many. I'm going to say over the years while it all lasted probably almost 10 meetings, international meetings that I attended and presented my work at. I met scientists from all these different countries. From Germany, from England, from France, and from Japan and so on who used to attend these meetings. It was a 01:33:00wonderful collaboration which worked together to figure out how to solve this problem. And the answers didn't come easily.

But the thing that the Food and Drug Administration, they had for a number of years they had 3 meetings a year back in Washington D.C. that I would have to fly back to. All the nitrosamine researchers in the U.S. and some from Europe would attend these meetings. We shared results from our most recent research and discussed what needed to be done next. Nitrite had been used in cured meats for many years but they didn't know there was any problem with it. They used to put add a lot of nitrite.. They enlisted Swift, which is a big meat company in 01:34:00Chicago which had great analytical laboratories.. Essentially what they did was they determined the lowest level of nitrite needed to take care of any likely level of Clostridium botulinum. The results showed that they were able to use much lower levels of nitrite than had previously been used. This resulted in much much lower levels of nitrosamine in the cured meats. That's effectively how the problem was solved. Now, there's still just a bit of nitrosamines in bacon, 01:35:00but at much lower levels than found previously.

A few years later dimethynitrosamine showed up in beer of all things. Why in beer? It's because of the malt. When they make beer, malt comes into the mix in making beer. Malt is made from barley. They bring barley in and they wet it down in these great big bins. They let it germinate, and when it germinates it produces enzymes that are helpful in making beer. But then the malt has to be dried. These are big operations. They put the wet malt on a big screen. Down below the wet malt they have all these burners that produce hot air goes up through the screen and dries the malt. That's called direct fire drying.

Direct fire means the fire's right underneath the wet malt. The fumes from the flames contain oxides of nitrogen go up through the malt. The oxides of nitrogen form nitrating agents which react with the amines in the malt to form dimethylnitrosamine. This problem also was solved. It was solved by changing the direct fired drying process for malt to indirect fired drying. In indirect fired drying high pressure steam pipes rather than a direct fire is used to heat the 01:37:00drying air. By doing that, virtually every beer, I'm sorry, malt maker, everyone in the United States and Europe converted their dryers from direct fire drying to indirect fire drying and the amount of nitrosamines in beer is about 2-3% of what it was previously. Both problems were not completely eliminated but tremendously reduced. That's the whole essence of my career working in research 01:38:00at Oregon State University. It was enormously... The great thing about it the International Agency for Research on Cancer have these meetings every 3 years at different places throughout the world. In Tokyo; in Estonia; in Leon, France; in Heidelberg. I got to go to all these places and meet international people. It produced an extra great flavor to my career participating in nitrosamine research. Worked very closely with the people at the Great Western Malting Company in Vancouver WA on my malt projects. One might ask. Why'd I get into nitrosamines research? Because I went to this faculty meeting. I walked in and you can sit here or you can sit there and I sit next to Russ Sinnhuber. He hands 01:39:00me this nitrosamine paper and he says, "Dick, I think you can do this kind of stuff." In doing so he handed me my nitrosamine career. I went back to my lab and that's what got me into nitrosamines. You talk about serendipity. Russ Sinnhuber worked with rainbow trout, using rainbow trout as an animal to study carcinogens. He wasn't in the lab and didn't have anything to do with nitrosamines. If he hadn't told me then, he'd probably have forgot about it and I'd be doing flavor chemistry. That's the essence of my research, the long and short of it. I always felt very, very, very fortunate to hit on something that was of so much interest to me and to do something worthwhile for society. I will always be thankful to Russ Sinnhuber for steering me in that direction.

CP: Sure, yeah. Tell me about Brazil. You have a connection to Brazil.

DS: In Brazil, Campinas is one of the big cities. San Paulo is the biggest. In Campinas there's a big university there. The University of Campinas has a very, very, very good food science department. A guy came from there, Felix Reyes is his name. He is a faculty member there. He came up and did a sabbatical leave in food science, and I got to know him. We got to be good friends. He got interested in our toxicology area. Another faculty member, Dan Selivonchick, and 01:41:00I had developed a food toxicology course. Not just on nitrosamines, but on many other things: aflatoxin, heterocyclic amines, different kinds of compounds that are carcinogens in foods and can appear in food. I developed this course with Dan, and Felix Reyes liked our course. Came up and we got to be good friends. He became very interested in the nitrosamine research, and he wrote back to Campinas and said, I'd like to stay up here for a second year. And they let him, and he worked in my lab for a second year. I had grant support. We became very good friends. He's an excellent scientist.

He went back to Brazil to the food science department there. He called me and 01:42:00said, you've got to come down here and teach a course in food toxicology. There were no food toxicology course in their program. So I wound up doing a sabbatical leave. My wife and I went down there for 6 months. Have you ever been to Brazil? It is an incredible country. It was very satisfying. The thing is, this was my beginning of going and teaching courses internationally. You've got to work twice as hard. You've got to teach to a bunch of students whose first language isn't English. I don't speak Portuguese. But the students were pretty 01:43:00good at English. What you do is you take your course and you weed all the junk out of it. Cut it down to the essence of the course and then use really good visual aids. It was all overheads. Overhead projectors-I don't know, you might be too young. Do you know what they are?

CP: Mm-hmm [yes].

DS: It's like a slide projector only it's overhead... You prepare a whole bunch of overheads, and from your overheads I prepared a paper copy, and when I get down there the first thing I do before I do my course, I said, Felix you got to have the copy unit make copies of all my overheads. Everything I teach and show them they get a hard copy of. That's the essence of teaching international courses. It works reasonably well. I made 2 or 3 trips down there. I was also 01:44:00asked to give talks to industrial group. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed our time in Brazil.

CP: Back to Corvallis, I'm interested in knowing about your experience as faculty senate president in 1983.

DS: What I liked about being a faculty member there's opportunity to do different things. I liked to do my research and teach and all that and write grants, which is a lot of work. But I like doing it. No one from our department was very active in the faculty senate, and so I decided to become a member of the faculty senate just to see what it was like.

Just being in the faculty senate gives you a whole broad idea of what the campus 01:45:00is like. I liked it. Then I was elected to the executive committee of the faculty senate. They do a faculty vote yearly to determine who's going to be faculty senate president. I was elected to be faculty senate president. I enjoyed it very much. The faculty senate has 28 different committees. Every new course gets scrutinized by the faculty senate. Then the faculty senate sends 01:46:00their result to the president, and he decides whether to take it to the State Board of Higher Education.

I just thoroughly enjoyed my time being in the faculty senate and being part of the leadership for it. There was a guy, Thursten Doler, he was the secretary of the faculty senate. The point is, you have a new faculty senate president every year. Thursten Doler, he was in the department of speech and communications... He was a wonderful guy and he the secretary of the senate. I think it was 01:47:00probably a half-time position. He transitioned from year to year. He helped a lot when you first started as president. He knew how things were done and so on. He also was the parliamentarian for the faculty senate.

CP: In 1995, you became the head of the department in food science and technology. Is that correct?

DS: Yeah.

CP: Tell me about that experience-how did that happen and your four years in charge?

DS: I have to think just a minute... A guy named Paul Kifer was head of the department before me. He took a year off-this had to be in about '83 maybe '82. No, it was '83. He took a year off. There was something called International 01:48:00Agriculture on campus and he wanted a break from being department head. The dean of agriculture nabbed me and said, "Kifer's going to go over to do a different job for a year, and I want you to be the acting department head." I said, "I can't do that next year." I said, "I got a research program. I got a course I got to teach. That was the year I was president of the faculty senate ." He said, "No, you got to do it." That was how it came up. I was acting department head. Then we went to Brazil for most of the year. Ron Wrolstad stepped in as 01:49:00acting department head when I was down in Brazil for most of the year. When I came back the Dean did a search for a department head and I applied. Ron also applied. So, I applied as I was always interested in a new challenge. I think I knew the department very well, obviously, by then. I applied and I got appointed department head. I was department head, then, from '84 to about '89.

When I was department head. I enjoyed it very much. It helps that you have a very good department and faculty and the staff. The front office staff was very, very good. There were the promotion and tenure duties and many other things. Somebody's going on sabbatical leave and who's going to teach their course... I thoroughly enjoyed my time as department head, but then I suppose we should move on to dean of research.

CP: Yeah, a new challenge. 1989.

DS: '89. Okay. George Keller was, then they called it Vice President for 01:51:00Research and International activities. In the research offices, there's a lot of things to attend to. The person who held this position before me was Rod Frakes. He was head of the search committee and he urged me to apply. He wanted to retire. At first I was not interested. He came over to Food Science and he said, "Dick, I really want you to apply." I said, "Well I'll think about it." I did 01:52:00think about it. But I also went back and forth. I was really very happy with what I was doing. Then the deadline for getting your application in was like a Monday morning. I let it go and I let it go. That weekend my wife and I went up to see the kids in Portland or to a play or something. When we were leaving I'm saying, "Meg, you know, applications have been open for about 2 months. Applications are due Monday." I said, "Meg, I've been thinking about this. Maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring." She says, "All right." We go to the play and we 01:53:00come back down Sunday morning and I called one of the secretaries. "Can you possibly come in to work for a couple hours today? I have something I really need done." I had to update my C.V. a little bit and put together a letter of application. So, she did. Then I called Rod Frakes. We're very good friends. I said, Rod, "I'd like to apply, but you know the deadline is Monday morning." He said, "Well, Dick, we're not going to be that sticky about it. Get your application over here." So, I went over and put it in and bingo, I got the job. That's how it happened. So I went in '89 and was in that position until I 01:54:00retired in '98. I and I really enjoyed working in the research office. It was completely different. Do you want me to talk a little bit about the research office and what it does?

CP: Yes.

DS: The main... there's a lot of different functions it does. One of the main purposes of research office is to aide faculty in their research and particularly with an eye towards helping new faculty get going on their research 01:55:00program. An awful lot of the research done at Oregon State University is done by funding from various agencies: USDA, EPA, National Institute of Health, and so on and so forth. The thing is, a new faculty member can have a great idea and they can write a research proposal and they can send it in, and they don't get funded because those agencies require some data already that substantiates this person's ability to work in this field. We used to arrange for experts to come in and put on proposal writing workshops. Everything you have to know about how to really put together a good grant proposal and so on and so forth. The other 01:56:00thing is they need to get a little bit of research done to begin with but they don't have funding for it. The research office had a couple different ways from the indirect cost from grants that provide a fund that is used to help beginning faculty get going.

Plus, in the faculty senate there is a research council and it works in unison with the research office. The funding comes from the research office. It's a group of faculty that is appointed by the faculty senate. Maybe almost about 8 people. The Research Office put out a notice indicating the research council's going to meet in 3 months. Faculty can then submit research proposals. The research council would review the proposals. The research council would decide which proposals should receive funding. It used to meet every quarter: fall, winter, and spring. It didn't meet in the summer. The research council was very 01:57:00instrumental in helping young faculty get started.

The other thing, and this goes back to the workshops, is to make faculty aware of all the various different funding agencies out there and what kind of research they're interested in funding. The point is you better contact them in some way to find out if they're interested. The faculty member might think I've 01:58:00got a great idea here, and this is really of interested to me. I'm going to put it in to the National Cancer Institute. Well, if they're not funding research on that topic, you probably will not get funded. You've got to do some homework first. Know that you have a chance at least if you send the proposal in. A lot of times faculty need a piece of equipment to start on their research. They can put a proposal in to the research council to fund a piece of equipment. Back when I was starting out I submitted to get a high-pressure liquid chromatography unit that cost, probably $10,000. The Research Council gave it to me. It helped me get started.

Then you have these compliance things. For instance, if some research is being proposed and it involves human subjects. Those proposals must be reviewed by the 01:59:00Human Subjects Committee. Proposals involving animals must be reviewed by the Animal Care and Use Committee. That committee exists to look at the procedures that the animals will be subjected to. The committee has people who use animals in their work and so they can often say, well, the guy's going to do this procedure, but you know there's really a less invasive procedure. They'll give that feedback and make sure it fits. Every research proposal that leaves the university has to go through the research office.

I signed every one of them. We have people in there that look at budgets, people that look at various compliance aspects. The other thing that happens in the research office is to administer technology transfer. The Research Office would monitor the legal and financial aspects. This is when a faculty comes up with something that has industrial application and may be funded by a company. Patents and royalties would be administered by the Research Office. Then there's liaison. There's liaison with funding agencies and with other research agencies. 02:01:00The other is the university has, it's called an academic and scientific misconduct policy. That's dictated by NIH, by the way. If you're going to get any money from NIH or the other federal funding agencies you got to have this policy in place. It means if something comes up, like if there's a complaint of 02:02:00plagiarism or some other kind of scientific misconduct, it comes to the dean of research. I have to form a committee and do an investigation and then make a report of whether there was or wasn't scientific misconduct. It was the first year I was in the research office that this requirement came through. Its various things like that that go on in the research office. It is a variety of things you're doing. I've always liked that.

CP: Well, I know that a big part of your story was the Linus Pauling Institute and being part of that. Can you tell me about that story?

DS: As you know, Linus Pauling graduated from Oregon State University. He went 02:03:00to various institutions and wound up at Stanford and started the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine just outside of Palo Alto. He ran that for some years. The way it supported itself was largely through private donations. Linus Pauling, I don't know if you ever met him, I did a number of times. He's a very compelling and wonderful guy. But he used to give talks all over the country and he was a magnificent speaker talking about human health and so on, and they got a tremendous amount of donations. That's what kept the institute going.

When he got older, he got quite sick, and he had to essentially bow out of work. 02:04:00The person who took over was Linus Pauling, Jr., his son. He ran the place. A guy named Steve Lawson was the chief executive officer down there. He did a wonderful job. They are the people we worked with. The long and short of it is Linus Pauling, Jr., used to be in a lot of contact with John Byrne. The library donations and all of that. Linus Pauling, Jr., contacted him and said, you know, we're going to have to look for a new home and we hope it might be OSU, if you 02:05:00folks are interested.

That was kind of the beginning of it. Things went along a little bit, so John Byrne came to me and said, "You know, Dick, its possible this could happen. Do we really know if it's a good thing or not?" He said, "I want you to get together three top scientists and go down and visit them for a day. You want to talk to them and determine whether it is a good fit or not." So, it was Don Reed from biochemistry. It was Joanne Leong from microbiology and who else here... George Bailey. I should remember him, he was in food science. They're all top scientists. So, we went down for a day. Spent the whole day down there visiting each person. We're driving the car back up to the San Francisco airport and I 02:06:00said okay, folks, we've done this, I got to go see John Byrne in the morning and let him know if we think it's a good idea or not. Don Reed said, "Look, this is a 1-time chance for Oregon State University to have something like this happen. Everybody agreed. So, I went to John Byrne the next day and I told him yeah, we think it'd be a good idea if the opportunity comes up. Not too long after that Linus Pauling, Jr., called John and told him that they were going to have an 02:07:00executive committee meeting. They said they were going to meet for a day down there and they would like John Byrne to come down and meet with them and explore further. And John, the thing I didn't say about, I'm kind of skipping back to the functions of the research office. There are about 14 centers and institutes at Oregon State University. They report to the Dean of Research.

CP: The institute review.

DS: John Byrne and I went down, we made the pitch, and have a very good meeting down there. Then John and I fly back and John said, "I think we're in good shape, but I still wonder whether they're going to..." They had offers to go several other places already. He said, "We'll just have to wait and see." I was 02:09:00more sure they would, and we talked about this. We flew out of Eugene so I was driving him. John Byrne was on crutches at the time. Before going down there he and Shirley were up hiking somewhere in Washington and he had fallen and he had a very, very bad sprained ankle. So, he was on crutches. But he got through the thing alright. We go back, get on the plane, fly back up to Eugene. I come home and about 6:30 the phone rings, and it's John. He said, "Dick, they want to come up here. How about coming to my office tomorrow morning?"

He says, "Okay, Dick. We got it. You make it happen." [laughs]. It was one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done at Oregon State. There was a lot to it. The point was you're going to have them come up here, so you've got to find some space. Well, space at any university is not easy to come by. It so happens that biochemistry moved out of their biochemistry building into the new agricultural and life sciences building. Bingo, the fifth floor is empty. I go immediately to the physical plant guys who do space and I realize one thing. When you go into 02:11:00an office and say, "I'm down here because John Byrne sent me, and this has got to be done. I need space." They said, "Well, we better go up and take a look at the space vacated by biochemistry." Well, I went up there. They had occupied the whole top floor of the building and already oceanography had come in, they were like a tidal wave coming down. I went back to physical planning and I said, "don't let one other person come in here." So, I had space for him. The other thing is I had to come up with what's called a "Memorandum of Understanding." That had to be drafted it with help from Caroline Kerl. Do you remember her?

CP: Mm-hmm [yes].

DS: She was a lawyer. She was very helpful in this whole project. We put that together. Of course, it went back and forth, back and forth. It was a 10-page document that had all the details. The Linus Pauling Institute was also giving us a bunch of money that would help start the position for a head for the Linus Pauling Institute. I worked with those people down there. We didn't have a center head for them, so Don Reed stepped in and was acting head for a couple of 02:13:00years. We did a nationwide search and was able to hire Balz Frei, who turned out to be a very, very, very effective. Now they have a building of their own, a first-class one, it's turned into a very happy ending.

CP: That must be very satisfying for you.

DS: It is. In a way, it's the thing that I'm the most proud of, I guess, of having been able to work well and get things done. I don't know if you've ever met Linus Pauling, Jr. Have you met him?

CP: I have.

DS: He's a wonderful guy. It turns out there was a chemistry meeting about this time in Hawaii. He lives in Hawaii. I've been to his house there, in fact on two 02:14:00different occasions. He was just enormously helpful and there was not a glitch that we had to slug our way through at all.

CP: You mentioned John Byrne. I want to ask you about interactions with OSU presidents, but before that I want to ask you about Roy Arnold. Because I understand you went to school together. Is that correct?

DS: Yeah, well, Roy... when I came out to OSU to start my Ph.D. graduate studies he was in the flavor chemistry group and he and I worked together side by side. We worked together for all through my gradate career. We both finished our Ph.D. at about the same time. You know it was a couple years, we just worked hand in hand. He was from Nebraska. He went back to Nebraska to become the department 02:15:00head. George Keller was Vice Provost for research and international studies. He 02:16:00said he used to spend more than half of his time on international studies. He retired in '97, and they they hadn't done a search yet. Roy Arnold called me and 02:17:00wanted to know if I would serve as interim Vice Provost for Research in George's place. I knew I was going to retire and I said, "Yeah, sure." And I did that. That was a nice way to end my career, too. Is that it?

CP: A couple questions still to go. The connections with the presidents. Did you say MacVicar is the first one that you had contact with?

DS: MacVicar, were you here during his tenure?

CP: No.

DS: MacVicar was... you get different versions of MacVicar from different faculty. He was a different person and so on and he was a very smart guy. What 02:18:00he was, though, he was an old-time style president. Meaning, he ran the university. There was no provost. No nothing. By then almost all other institutions had got to the time where their president essentially meets with the alumni, does fundraising, does the external stuff and the provost runs the mix of the university. MacVicar, he did it all. I was faculty senate president during the time when he was president and he used to, and he said he wanted me to attend Coordinating Council meetings with him.

CP: Coordinating Council, maybe?

DS: You know, they look after all the universities in the state. I think they 02:19:00report to the governor's office.

CP: Yeah, mm-hmm.

DS: They meet and all the presidents of the different institutions attend. But at any rate, he insisted that I, as faculty senate president, should go to all those with him. I got to know him. He was not as gruff and as tough as he liked to portray. He was really a nice guy. There's one more thing I want to talk now and that is international activities... Jack Van de Water was the Dean of 02:20:00International Activities. MacVicar hired him. Before that there was relatively little international outreach. They hired Jack. Jack is retired now. We're good friends with the Van de Waters. Jack essentially put Oregon State on the international map. He came in and he started the study abroad programs for undergraduates and so on. MacVicar, even though he was old time a bit was very 02:21:00cognizant of the need for international things. MacVicar was followed by John Byrne, who was even more supportive of international activities. The university really blossomed in terms of international outreach because of Jack Van de Water. But you can't do it if you don't have the support of the president, and Byrne was very, very supportive of that whole effort. They started the international degree program for students here. Diane Heart worked in international activities. She and Jack were, and others, were involved in putting that international program together. That was a big, big plus for Oregon 02:22:00State University. President MacVicar and then Byrne were very supportive in getting these programs in place.

CP: Byrne is clearly somebody you hold in high esteem.

DS: Pardon?

CP: John Byrne is clearly somebody you hold in high esteem.

DS: Yes. Extremely So. I retired in '98 and we should maybe say something about that. After I retired I continued to work part time for a few years. The University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia wanted to start a food science program. It's the only big University in Cambodia. There's a couple of small business 02:23:00schools. They wanted to start a food science program as an option in their chemistry program. They had quite a well-established chemistry program. They applied to Fulbright to have somebody come over and help them put together the essence of a food science program. I think it was Jack Van de Water who said, "Hey, have you ever looked into doing work on a Fulbright appointment?" Jack used to do a lot with Fulbright. I said, "I don't know." So I applied and lo and behold I got this notice that Fulbright was looking for somebody to go to Cambodia to help set up a food science program. I applied to Fulbright and got 02:24:00it. So my wife and I went over. It was a great time helping them get a food science program set up. The other thing, which I probably should mention at least, is my international teaching, which largely came about when I retired. I knew faculty members at the University of Barcelona, Spain. They have a good food science/nutrition program. They invited me over to teach a food toxicology course, which I had been teaching here for years. It was just after I retired, a year after I retired I think. I went over and spent 3 months over there teaching a food toxicology course.

Before retirement I had a graduate student from Thailand. This would have been 02:25:00in the mid '80s about. He did his Ph.D. with me. He was on the faculty at a university in Thailand called Payap University. It's in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. He was already a faculty member at Payap. They had groomed him to become president but they wanted him to have a Ph.D. So he came over and did a 02:26:00Ph.D. with me and I got to know him very well. He went back over to Thailand and became president. He and I stayed in touch with each other. He said, "Dick, you have to come over to Thailand. I want you to come over and teach a course in food toxicology."

It was in 2002, a year after 9/11. I was going to go over in 2001, but that was right after 9/11, and I was shaky about flying. So we went over in 2002 and we visited the university. We were over there a couple weeks. My wife and I went over. We really liked it. For the next 10 years we went over and I would teach 02:27:00my course. They were just wonderful people and we enjoyed it. I taught the course the same way with overheads and gave the students handouts. They take English right from the first grade, but for most of them their English wasn't 02:28:00great, but it was doable. I loved going to Thailand and so did Meg. Those were the kind of things I did in retirement.

CP: Well, the last question I have for you is any thoughts you have for the future of OSU, as somebody that has been closely associated for such a long time, seen it change so much.

DS: I'm very biased [laughs]. Right now, the scene in higher education is higher costs. The costs just keep going up. The headline in the paper yesterday was about the cuts that OSU has make. It costs twice as much to go to a private school. I think very highly of the job that OSU does, the changes, the things 02:29:00that we've talked about make it very good. As well as U of O, as well as Portland State, as well as the University of Washington. The University of Washington is one of the top universities in the country. And Washington State University is really good. I think, how should I put this? I think what's happened at OSU over the last few years is great. The expansion and the new buildings, the business school for instance, and what's the other, the Learning Center.

CP: The Learning Innovation Center.

DS: Yeah, these kinds of things are really great things to keep OSU modern and 02:30:00going in the right direction. I think Oregon State University and the other schools continue to be good. However, I quarrel with the Oregon legislature about their rather meek funding of higher education. It's always been a problem. Part of the reason Oregon State University is as good as is it is that the research faculty support their research externally. You don't get much from the university. It speaks very highly of the OSU. By the way, they're good teachers too. There's a thing, oh if you're a good researcher, you're not going to be a good teacher. That's baloney. My experience tells me if they're good researchers 02:31:00they're usually good teachers.

CP: Well, Dick, this has been a pleasure. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

DS: Yeah.

CP: Dick, you had one more thing you wanted to say?

DS: Yeah, I'd just like to say in closing I would like to give all my gratitude and cheers to my wonderful wife, Meg. For her help and very strong support through both of our working careers.

CP: Great, thank you.

DS: Yeah, thank you too.