Mike Dicianna: Today we are at the fiftieth anniversary celebration for the Hatfield Marine Science Center in the Guin Library. We're here interviewing some of the alumni and special people from the history of the Hatfield Center and we're going to put together some little vignettes of folks. To begin with, who am I speaking with right now?

Anja Robinson: I am Anja Robinson.

MD: And you were here when?

AR: I started here August, was it 21st, in '68.

MD: So just basically a little less than three years after the founding of Hatfield Center.

AR: That's right.

MD: And so I understand you were here before a person named Bob Olson.

AR: Yes, I was a couple weeks before and we argued about that all along. "No, I was here before you." "No, no I remember when you came in." And then finally, finally, years later Bob said, "Yeah, I think you were here before me. I know you were here before me." And I remind him right now when I met him and he was "Yeah, so it was you were here before me." We were only about twenty people here at that time so everybody knew everybody.

MD: Let's hear about some of the early days of the Hatfield Center. What was your research and who did you work with?

AR: My research was on oysters and clams and that sort of things and we were trying to develop a hatchery program because native oyster spawn naturally here and it does very well on its own, but we were introducing an oyster from Japan, and that did not spawn here. Water temperature was too cold and everything was wrong for them to spawn. And so what we did, we conditioned them for spawning in the warm water and then we spawned them and raised the larvae in the hatchery and only the larval stage is critical. After they spawn and they sit, they are fine. You can dump them in the cold water. They, we call spats, oysters are spats. But in cold water they grow a little bit slower than in warmer waters. But that's alright. The oyster industry can live with that but they cannot live without oysters.

MD: What was the early days of the lab and the facilities like at the Hatfield Center?

AR: Well we only had the main building, which is still there. That's that dome where this is under and the public wing. And then we had two wings out of that, the east wing and west wing. And oyster hatchery was actually built on west wing in the garage, part of it. Three temperature controlled rooms. That's all we had. And we had about five hundred liter tanks in there on two layers.

MD: So you were cutting edge to start with?

AR: Exactly. It was very much cutting edge. Professor Breese had been here long time and he was monkey going to the mudflats. There was some little shack up on the bay. Of course, he was the first one to transfer into this facility. And so he was giving me bad time saying "Oh, we all know when oysters are in spawning condition, you don't need to come and tell us anything. They don't need any conditioning. They condition fine out there." And I said "Yeah but they won't spawn early enough to have a industry that will send oysters early overseas like they are right now already sending them, this early."

MD: Now, you, over the years, have worked with graduate students and probably generations of grad students that have come through here or through the Oceanography program.

AR: Yes I have.

MD: Any memories of those folks?

AR: Oh, I have some memories of folks. I got things mixed up so often, so funny, and then they just oops. And I always told them, "Okay look, whatever the mistake is, just let me know. Because if you make one that I have not made yet, we will celebrate."

[0:05:11]

MD: Now, what were your years here? Did you retire from Hatfield?

AR: Yes I did.

MD: When was that?

AR: That was about ten years ago.

MD: So you literally inspired generations of oceanography students. And so you spent all of your time here. What was the connection with the campus itself in Corvallis and the Hatfield center?

AR: Okay, that was interesting. We had a huge, big computer early on and connections, 'cause we had to go to faculty meetings to Corvallis. It was much shorter trip that direction, in the winter especially. Come summer, we did have some faculty meetings over here then, and they were always on Fridays. It was amazing how that just so happened.

MD: Yeah, that worked out that way.

AR: Yeah, that's the way it worked out.

MD: And you have probably been through a number of the administrators that have been in charge of this place. Any special people there?

AR: A number of them. Dr. Weber was longest length of the time, the head of the Marine Science Center here and John Byrne was earlier head of the center and before him was Hedgpeth, Joel Hedgpeth. He was the first one. And so I knew him. And he was a different character again. And then about other characters we had Barry Fisher. Oh, he was my next door neighbor. I had the office next to his. And, oh he had absolutely no patience with anything! He was ranting and raving out there in the hallways.

MD: And now there's a building named after him.

AR: Yes, yes. Because he was one that was a, we called him doryman because he promoted dories. So you can launch them and go fishing.

MD: Now the Lincoln County Extension Service was working closely with Hatfield Center, mostly with the visitor center and things like that. Did you help out some of the programs that the Extension service was sponsoring?

AR: Yeah we had some things, boy I don't think I'd remember what all we did. We visited back and forth and they came to see the oyster program.

MD: Yeah, because they were heavily involved with the industry.

AR: They were. So they came over and they wanted to know what we were doing and how we were doing and all that. And it was so much fun. I knew nothing about oysters. Now, I have a funny story about that. Dr. McNeil interviewed me for the job. And so he said, "Okay Anja, we have working oysters," and then he paused, he just looked at me and I said, "Oh yeah, those little smoked morsels that come in the can of oil." And he looked at me, he had a hard time not to laugh, he actually laughed, he said, "Well I can see I need to take you around that lab because here they don't come quite that way." I said, "Oh well all we could do is a taste test" after that.

MD: Oysters on the half-shell!

AR: Yeah! So anyway, that was my start. I told my late husband that's what I had done in the interview, he just shook his head and said, "Anja, in this country, sell you." I said, "Well what do I know about those, that's all I know. I was honest." And he put a line in, I get the job.

MD: And so you basically spent your entire career with...?

AR: All my time over here, yes.

MD: Are there any thoughts or memories you want to impart to the fiftieth anniversary of the Hatfield Center that we could capture here?

[0:09:50]

AR: Oh gosh. Yeah, I really wish the center all the best and all the luck. This is fantastic place to work. Now it's large. Then it was small. And I understand it is growing and growing. And I hope that it keeps its, kind of the connected to each other. Because then we had EPA was under the same roof, Fish Commission was under the same roof, we were all there, all twenty of us. So that was kind of nice to be connected with various parts of the program. They all had their own niche where they were. Yeah, all the best of the luck to the place.

MD: Well, Anja, we really appreciate you sharing some memories for the fiftieth anniversary of Hatfield Memorial Center. Thank you very much.

AR: Thank you.

[0:10:59; End of Robinson interview]

Mike Dicianna: Okay your name?

John Markham: My name is John Markham. I live where I grew up in Arch Cape, which is on the northern Oregon coast, so I've known people affiliated with this institution since I was in high school.

MD: And I understand you were a graduate student here when this place was first built?

JM: Almost when it was first built. I was a graduate student of oceanography earning my master's degree from 1965 to 1967.

MD: And so, what was your area of study?

JM: Well I was biological oceanography. The research project I did, mostly in the summer of 1966, was a survey of the animals living in the kelp holdfasts on the jetty of Yaquina Bay. I was working under Herbert Frolander, whose specialty was plankton, but I really never quite gravitated to plankton, I was always more interested in the benthos.

MD: Now, when you were here, very early on in the history of the Hatfield Center, not a whole lot of buildings and labs. Were the lab facilities cutting edge or were they just getting put together?

JM: Well they were essentially being assembled. There were two faculty members, Joel Hedgpeth, who was the director, and anybody who's ever met Hedgpeth has Hedgpeth stories. He was one of a kind. And Jefferson Gonor, who was, well I'm not sure exactly what his status was, he was a professor here, and the two seemed to be trying to decide what to do with the place. All that existed at the time was the front building and the halls extended back beyond that. There were some rooms available for students to use. I was put in the, the fourth person in a room which essentially only had three corners, so it took some doing to find a place for me to wiggle into that room to gather my samples. Actually, I did most of the work on the material back in Corvallis. So I was here more for collecting. Every other week, trundled everything back to Corvallis for analysis.

MD: So that was in the early days when there was quite a bit of back and forth between the center and Corvallis, before it became more of a permanent location for laboratories and student work. Now did you ever do any time on some of the research vessels?

JM: Well yes because that's the way the OSU oceanography faculty recruited unpaid labor. Every graduate student in oceanography was required to put ten days a year at sea.

MD: Which one were you on?

JM: Well the first one was the hydrocast vessel. For a while I wanted to see animals but no, we were out there looking at water. As far I'm concerned, all water looks alike. We went out the Newport hydrocast line, I guess that was done once a month, maybe it's still going on, but at any event routine sampling, just taking water samples and squeezing the numbers out of the samples. The first time I went out was just after I finished up my final exams for fall term, in other words it was the middle of December. So I came down here and boarded the Yaquina and headed out. It was quite an adventure because the ship was rolling thirty degrees each way and there was one poor fellow who became carsick on the way to the ship and I don't know why somebody didn't have the sense to tell him, go home. But no, he was on the ship. Took me two or three days to realize that huddled, miserable lump was supposedly somebody sharing a watch with me because he was absolutely functionless out there. I survived quite well. By the second day I was eating just fine. I had to hold on so I wasn't thrown all over the place, but I adapted well to being at sea.

[0:15:31]

MD: Yeah, you got your sea legs.

JM: I didn't know whether I would but I came through on that. But as I say, it was strictly water.

MD: So you finished your graduate work here at Hatfield and then you went off to a career somewhere else?

JM: Well I finished two years, well, earned my master's degree here in two years and then I landed a Fulbright grant for a year in Denmark and that was essentially the same sort of marine life as I knew from here so I simply eased into that with no trouble. And after that I decided I wanted to see something different so I earned my PhD at the University of Miami and that was something completely different. It was east coast, it was tropical, and suddenly I was back learning the names of animals, just as I had started doing at home when I was at high school.

MD: So now, where did you get your undergraduate degree?

JM: Stanford.

MD: Stanford. Now, you said that you've kind of come full circle and you came back. Now you've been on staff here at the center?

JM: Not really. I am on the courtesy faculty in Oceanography at Oregon State. I'm still working at home. The great advantage to being, well I thought I might be able to apply for grants, I needed some bureaucratic backup, and so that was the main reason for applying for that status, but the continuing benefit is that it gives me access to the library. And of course, Oregon State is essentially the scientific library in the state of Oregon.

MD: Now do you have memories of the library here at the Hatfield Center in its early days?

JM: Well yes. At first it was, it's what now is the break room, directly across the hall from the director's office. At that time that was the library. There was no librarian and I don't think there was an actual librarian appointed. Well, library people here know that history much better than I do, but I think the first librarian was appointed when the library moved into the second floor of the main building.

MD: So are there any memories of your time here that kind of stand out when you were a young student, young grad student? I mean any recollections that are the story?

JM: Well of course, there was always Joel Hedgpeth stalking around the halls, muttering "yoiks!" But he, as I said, he was one of a kind. But later I didn't land what I considered, well I didn't really land any paying jobs in biology, and I said maybe I should try my hand as a teacher. Well for teaching I needed teaching credentials. So I went back to Oregon State for a year to take the teaching curriculum and I wanted to do my student teaching in a place where there was biology and I was also looking to become qualified to teach German. And it turned out that Newport High School had a German teacher and of course every school has a biology teacher. Most of the students at Oregon State were doing their student teaching in Corvallis and communities around there so I was considered something of a novelty that I said, "I want to go to Newport." And, "Oh well, okay." So I came out here and I needed to find a place to live. And that was when I first met Lavern Weber, who at the time was director. And he said, "Oh no problem, you're a student at Oregon State, we have a dormitory and nobody's using it this term." That was fall term. So I was the only person living in the dormitory that term. Just happened there wasn't any student demand at the time.

MD: Now what year was that?

JM: That was 1983.

MD: So the dormitories were a going concern by that time. Because they were, very early in the history of the Hatfield Center they didn't have dorms.

JM: Yeah, when I was a graduate student earlier, we, ironically, four of us rented an apartment right across from the high school at the time I had nothing to do with the high school.

[0:20:04]

MD: Well are there any nuggets that you would like to impart for the fiftieth anniversary?

JM: Well when I was here for the student teaching, one day there was a fancy ceremony held out in the front of the building and that was the renaming of this place for Senator Hatfield. And he was there and pulled off the sheet that covered the nameplate and it was dedicated as the Hatfield Marine Science Center as of that date. So I attended that ceremony because I happened to be living here at the time as a student teacher.

MD: It's a wonderful memory and your connection with this institution goes back to its origins. And we really appreciate you spending a couple of minutes and giving us some of your memories of your time here in the early days of the Hatfield Marine Science Center. And we thank you very much.

JM: You're welcome.

[0:21:05; End of Markham interview]

Range Bayer: My name is Range Bayer. My legal name is Richard Bayer, and I came as a graduate student to OSU in 1972. I lived in Corvallis as a graduate student until about March of '74. I commuted back and forth to take classes but I moved over here to Newport in March '74 and as a graduate student here. There was a college work-study program to make an income working in a library. At that time there were two libraries. This is before the old education building was built for the first really formal single library. But it, this would have been about 1974-1975, right about that era.

But there used to be two libraries in the old wing of the Marine Science Center before they built the education wing, before they built NAL and RSF. The one wing, one part of the library was a room, 263, in the west wing, and that library was all devoted towards fisheries and wildlife and that's where, the people down that wing, that's what they were working in, is fisheries and wildlife. They had kind of their own mini-director down there. That was part of the library. The other part was in room 157 in east wing, which was the oceanography part of the building. At that time the two buildings, they separated out the people and there was kind of a little bit of stuff going on between them. As a graduate student working there, what my job was to do was to check books in and check books out and sometimes we'd get some shipments from what was then known as Kerr Library over there to put on.

And my immediate boss was Grace Bowden, who was kind of an administrative assistant at that time. And there wasn't really a director that was on site that was taking care of things so Grace was that person. And she did oversight and then maybe once a month or - I think it was more often, about two or three months - somebody from Kerr Library would come over and they would go through things with Grace and sometimes with me. But there was a series of us graduate students that were working there. I wasn't the last, I think maybe second or third to last. But it was a nice job. I enjoyed it. The rooms are very small and at this time here in April 2015, the rooms themselves have not changed. The uses have changed. But there's a lot of rooms where the size has changed or they split them up or opened them up, but those rooms are still basically the same size as they were then. The shelves were probably about seven feet, the highest one would have been seven feet tall. I'm 6'5" and it was higher than my head. And they were so close together I had to get down on my knees to look at the lower ones because they tried to cram as many shelves in as they possibly could.

[0:24:53]

There were mainly journals and I remember my exposure. I was a zoology graduate student so I didn't have any, really, background with oceanography. But oceanography, I remember looking at these data reports that they did. And they had lots of these data reports, shelves and shelves of data reports. And I was impressed. And it influenced me in my time here as a graduate student. So it was like that, and then they built the old education wing and about that time Marilyn Guin was a graduate student here at the Marine Science Center. And when she graduated, she became the first librarian. And I think her first helper there was a woman named Judy Sprague, who's actually still around somewhere. I've seen her here many times. I was hoping to get her to come here but I haven't seen her in time and I don't have an email address for her.

But Marilyn was very far-sighted. Computers where you could be able to use them were just coming in, and she worked to try to get, well, back up. When they set up the first library, they moved all the shelves and all the books that had been in those two rooms up into the old library, which is basically kind of a loft in the education wing. So she worked with that. But the computers were coming in and they had a very poor internet connection over there but, and I kind of informally helped her as well with trying to set something up with OurBase, which was a database program for being able to do requests from here to campus for books to go back and forth, because that hadn't been worked out yet. But it was really kind of a time in transition. Computers really weren't that far along, they really weren't. But she could see that this was kind of the way of the future. And she was very interested in trying to make it work and work better. And you know, I'm grateful for that time. It was a good experience for working with trying, you know as a volunteer, with Marilyn on it, I could see that. Basically the new library here, well for vision from where computers would go, she tried to design this, to set up the design for it the way it'd become, the new library, so it'd be computer friendly. In 2015 things have changed beyond what she could see, but for her time, this was way, way beyond what the rest of us were seeing for the world of computers in libraries.

Mike Dicianna: So when you were here, as basically a librarian helper, most of those journals and things like that, they used to come in on a regular basis, and so your job was to actually catalog and file and you guys were kind of left on your own to do the librarian part, basically?

RB: Well, it was very simple work. There's librarian assistants now that still work as students and it was very similar to that, except we were graduate students. But we didn't do any of the cataloging or anything like that. It was just checking in, checking out, taking books in and make sure that they matched. So it was a very simple job. It really wasn't, and I can't remember the title of it, but it wasn't really – yes we were working in a library – but I wouldn't call, particularly as a profession, I wasn't a librarian in that sense and I don't want to give the impression that it was. But we were working with checking in and checking out. Grace Bowden was our immediate supervisor and if we had questions we'd go to her, and there was communication by telephone at that time for a lot of the things we took care of.

MD: So you worked in, or dealt with many of the scientists that were here doing cutting edge research and you were finding resources for them and they'd come in and they'd look at studies? Anyone stand out that you dealt with during your period of time here?

RB: We had a card catalog and there were separate card catalogs for each section where you could look. And I believe they had theses that were here that had been done. So people would do that. The staff at that time was a lot less because it was only in one wing. And it was also set up that we didn't work here full-time. The libraries would be actually open but it was kind of like an honor basis. A lot of stuff was honor basis and they could come in on their own and look for stuff. And they just checked it out and put the card there. I can't remember exactly how many hours, but I was only working part-time. Whoever was working there, there was only one person at a time and they were only working part-time. So it wasn't a full-time person, but the libraries were open. And people would go in and fend for themselves. I don't remember a whole lot, because everybody just knew that we weren't really librarians. We were taking care of the mechanics of it. Basically it was mostly theses. There were a lot of theses here, I think there were a lot of journals, some books, but I think the space was kind of limited. They started out with the first library in the education wing; they had much, much more room and that's where they started expanding and could get lots more stuff and Marilyn was very good about trying to get stuff that would fit all the different groups of people that were here.

[0:30:59]

MD: Make everybody happy.

RB: Well, her library experience had been in La Grande, as I recall, and she was the librarian that... she wanted to serve people and people's interests. She was very interested in finding what people were interested in. At that time, I know in particular, we didn't really have any zoology people working with birds. But she knew Bob Olson and I, and there were a few other people that were very interested in birds. So we were kind of over represented over here. She knew there was an interest and she also knew it was marine interest. So we had a lot of stuff on marine birds directly result because she knew everybody and she was trying to... she went beyond the job description of just being a straight librarian. She knew, actually she knew practically everybody here. She knew everybody here and she knew what they were doing. Actually, her graduate research was on hemigrapsus nudus, the shore crab. So she had an on-hands approach, and that wouldn't have been her background, but becoming a marine science librarian. So she had that experience, needing the materials, but also what a scientist would need. She had a master's of science in, I'm not sure which department it was, I think was Oceanography. I'm pretty sure it was. So she had that background where she could go beyond the call of duty.

MD: Now, you graduated with a graduate degree from here, from OSU. Where did you go?

RB: Well, I stayed here in Newport. I'm still here in Newport. I graduated with a master's of science degree in zoology in 1976 and I stayed in town. This is pretty boring so you might cut it off. I went to work for Oregon Aqua Foods, which was a salmon aquaculture place. It's across the street from where the Marine Science Center was for many years and I worked there until 1983. And that was the time when Weyerhaeuser had it and I don't think it lasted many more years than that. It just really wasn't cost effective. I was still staying in town. I wanted to stay here in Newport because I liked working with birds and there wasn't much in the way of job opportunities. Actually I started here... I was always around the Marine Science Center because the Marine Science Center, even in the '70s and '80s, even in the early '90s, was kind of a place where if you're still in the area and you still had an interest, you were still really kind of a part of things. And you were welcome. I was still very welcome to come in. I still continued to use the library because they knew if you were a serious person about science or using the library; that was part of the tradition of Marilyn Guin. You were very welcome to use the library. You bring things in and out and you don't damage stuff. She wanted to see the stuff used. That was her idea of a library. It wasn't supposed to be something that was locked up. So I came back in 1990. I needed a job and I started working here as a part-time custodian. And actually, I retired from the Marine Science Center as a custodian in end of 2009.

[0:34:57]

And actually, there was a time when, 'cause I remember when Janet Webster, she ended up replacing Marilyn. Marilyn never got to see... Marilyn went through all the stuff, designing and pushing for design of this new library. She passed away before she actually got to see it. Which is a shame. But Janet Webster had come on board in the old library and I don't think she had any idea she'd end up becoming the librarian but it just kind of came to be. Janet's full of some of the things that Marilyn had, but Marilyn was also one, people kind of follow your own thing, don't follow somebody else's, so I think Marilyn would have been very happy with the way things are going. And there's one period of my time here where I was custodian at the library and I liked that because I've always liked libraries. It's one thing to use libraries. It's another thing where you're actually involved in checking stuff in and out, you get much more familiarity. I enjoyed that time when I worked here as, I guess a library clerk would be the best title of it, of checking stuff in and out because you get exposed to books that I wouldn't normally do and I'd be physically handling them.

MD: Saying ooh, I've got to look at this one later!

RB: Yeah. I mean, this is interesting. It was the kind of job that, we weren't high pressure stuff so we had a chance to spend some time looking at things and that's a thing I really appreciated because it became kind of a class to me, an informal class. Like I said, it was about the oceanography, the data reports, it influenced the way I did, I started doing data reports on bird stuff. And my template for it was those oceanography data reports. You can't publish this stuff anywhere. There's no place to really publish it. They deserve to be out someplace where people can find it and when they're cataloged through a library, they're in a card catalog and people can find it. And you can find, you know some of those oceanography data reports, I mean, there were hundreds of pages of just raw data. And it needed to have a place and at that time there wasn't computers to do it. So that was a good place to do it. As a library tech, to be able to actually see all this stuff and put stuff back and forth was good. And then here to clean it, that was another education because I'd be cleaning stuff between the shelves and looking at things again. But I've always liked libraries.

MD: Well, it has been an honor to be able get part of your story. Is there any special memories or messages that you'd like to provide to the Hatfield Center for its fiftieth anniversary?

RB: It's been a wonderful... I moved here in '74, I started coming back and forth, I met Pete Rothlesberg in '73 so my time here is registered as '73 through '76. But I was still around here through '80. But the wonderful thing about it was not being in one department. There was all kinds of departments here. All kinds of graduate students. In those early years, we had this small building so we were always communicating and we were exposed to so many different things, all the way from oceanography to zoology to fisheries and wildlife, from the practical to the theoretical. All these different things, and plus we had the, because the education wing was right there and the oceanography classes we got to see how the education part of the thing worked. And that was a very big education part which I think was important that I wasn't getting when I was over on campus. On campus I was on one wing in Cordley Hall, and basically that was it. And everything else was apart. Here you were a part of many different things. And it was much more a broader education, which I thought was wonderful, because we all interacted at that time.

MD: Well Range, we thank you and you're a big part of the history of this organization.

RB: Well, thank you. I'm glad to be able to have this opportunity. This is a wonderful place and I've already talked to some people who were sharing some memories of this thing. There's a lot of things that were special but a lot of us got here, especially people who are traveling from distance; who are traveling from distance because it was important to them. And it was an important place in our careers, thirty, forty years down the road and our lives. So thanks for doing this.

[0:39:49; End of Bayer interview]

Warren Hanson: Warren Hanson. I was here initially with Ivan Pratt in 1966 in the spring, before the east wing was fully completed. We came down to have Ivan show us what the graduate students could look forward to. And then I moved back to Corvallis, stayed in Corvallis to finish up my coursework. I came down here in 1968 in the spring, April, as a research assistant. I stayed down here until 1970 and left after that.

Mike Dicianna: What was your area of research that you specialized in?

WH: Ivan was a parasitologist and I was working with the parasites of redtail surfperch.

MD: Oh okay. So along with Bob Olson, who was –

WH: Bob was my sort of on-site director of my research. He took care of me down here. Ivan took care of me in Corvallis.

MD: So you have walked through the doors of this place when it was still being built. Some of the earliest memories of the Hatfield Center.

WH: It was. As I said, the east wing was still being plumbed. When we walked down here, they were hanging, as I remember, they were hanging cabinets in the lab that we would eventually work in. At that point, when I moved back down here in '68, there maybe were four, maybe five, graduate students and residents on that side.

MD: Now that was back when there was the fisheries side and the oceanography side. And you were attached to?

WH: The Zoology department had offices over there in the east wing. Ivan's lab was first in the sequence and then Austin Pritchard had a lab the next one down.

MD: So these labs were cutting edge in the sciences at that time?

WH: They may well have been but they were mostly, mostly they were just seawater labs, running seawater so you could keep fish, invertebrates, whatever you needed to have alive, in time to be able to put them to use for a research project you were working on. We had to collect redtail surfperch, usually at Seal Rock, and then bring them back and use them in the lab.

MD: So the early fishing, or the early research vessels that the center had, did you ever spend any time out on the ocean with those?

WH: I did. Bob Olson and Ivan were working on a sort of long term study of parasites of fishes in the area so we were going out, Bob and I in particular because Ivan was always, of course, in Corvallis. But Bob and I would go out on the Paiute, initially, and then on the Cayuse somewhat later on and we would sample off the coast with our trawls. We tried to be sort of bimonthly, every two weeks or so. We tried to get some samples, bring those fish back into the lab, keep them alive until they could be processed. And then we would occasionally work on the bay too, but Ivan's particular interest was in the off-shore, close in off-shore, two or three miles.

MD: So in these early days, now when you were a graduate student, you were here basically at the very beginning. The facilities were not set up for residents. And so you what, had to stay in town or drive back and forth?

WH: I rented a small house up on the bluff where the hospital is now. One of the local fisherman had a little second home that he rented out to graduate students. And I lived in that. And when I left, James Burkinson took it over. And he lived in it for a couple of years. I don't know who had it after that.

MD: Now later they were able to develop dorm facilities here.

WH: $234 a month for my stipend and I think we rented the house for $55 a month. It was a very interesting early times. A lot of time hanging out with the other graduate students and their wives. Small, close-knit community.

MD: Now the early days, the research library here was pretty much nonexistent during those first days, but they tried.

WH: There was no library to speak of.

MD: And so most of the research and materials you got came from over on campus.

WH: We had to go back to Corvallis, back and forth.

MD: Now some of the early classes, back in the first days you were here, they would bus people over in the summer for summer school?

[0:44:59]

WH: Yes, I wasn't particularly concerned with the summer school program, but I think there were some bussing programs that went on in the very early days, '66-'67. I don't think there was much bussing that I recall.

MD: The place here was kind of remote, but even during the time you were here, you probably saw some substantial growth in the center.

WH: Actually not much. The center was to be completed and that was mainly what happened when I was here in that period from '68-'69. They were finishing up these dorms and I don't remember that they added much in terms of physical plant here, but they did add to the physical plant on the bay front.

MD: Tell me more about the physical plant on the bay front, that's a story I haven't heard before.

WH: Well just in terms of the dock and the ability to handle the boats. I think they finished the small boat dock over here on the west.

MD: Oh okay. Yeah, because these were the first research vessels, the vessels you were involved in were the first research vessels that the Oceanography department had.

WH: Yeah. I never got out much on the Yaquina, the bigger boat. We used the small boat, the Cayuse, just for close-in work, two or three miles out. The Yaquina, of course, was designed for farther out, high seas kind of stuff.

MD: So when this place was dedicated, you were still a student? Were you here when the dedication happened?

WH: I would have missed the dedication by three or four months. I think it was dedicated in June of '65. I arrived in Corvallis in September of that year.

MD: And so basically your history, with the early days of the Hatfield Center, goes back.

WH: It goes back very near the original.

MD: So you finished up your graduate studies and spent a career in the industry?

WH: No, I went to Whittier College in California and stayed there for forty years.

MD: To teach or?

WH: To teach. Whittier's a small, undergraduate-only institution. So I was teaching and advising and not doing much research. Which was my choice.

MD: Are there any special memories or messages you would like to leave with the Hatfield Center for its fiftieth anniversary?

WH: Oh I don't know how to describe that in words that would be useful, but... Being here changed my life. I came to Corvallis as an undergraduate student, just newly minted with a bachelor's degree. Didn't have any idea really about any graduate programs to speak of. Ivan put me to work, gave me... Ivan got a Sea Grant, a fellowship, one of the first Sea Grant-funded programs, he and Austin Pritchard. And he gave me one of the very, very first Sea Grant research assistant jobs. And sent me down here to spend the time. My Sea Grant came through in April of '68. Anyway, to respond to your original question, this is a remarkable experience and it changed my life. I couldn't have done what I've done without having come down here.

MD: Well Warren, on behalf of the center here and the OSU Libraries, thank you for your memories.

[0:49:06; End of Hanson interview, end of recording]