Kendall Staggs Oral History Interview

Dr. Kendall Staggs is an adjunct instructor of history at Oregon State University. In his interview, Staggs discusses his childhood and high school years in Chicago, his experience on his high school’s track and field team, running track on scholarship at during his undergraduate years at Oklahoma State University, writing his master’s thesis at University of Iowa on the oil policies during the Herbert Hoover administration, and writing his PhD dissertation on 20th century oil import policies. He also talks about his interest in beer; his time after graduate school teaching at a small college in Goodwell, Oklahoma; his experience home brewing; moving to Oregon to become an adjunct instructor at Western Oregon and Oregon State University; the beer culture there in the mid 1990s; and his teaching in beer and brewing history at OSU for the then new Fermentation Sciences program. Staggs talks about his time after leaving OSU, the beer scenes in the various places he worked, beer tourism in Europe, moving back to Corvallis, and consumer culture in the post Prohibition era centered around beer.