Terri Tower Oral History Interview, February 27, 2012

Loni McKlevie: Today is February 27th, 2012. This is a life history interview with Terri Tower, part one. The interviewers are Cally Whitman, Loni McKlevie, and Laura Tanner. We are in the University Housing and Dining Services, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. So, Terri, can you tell us about where your family lived when you were born?

Terri Tower: Yes. Both of my parents met in the Salem area. And my mother had come out with her family in the 1930s during the depression. They were farmers, or trying to be farmers, during the dust bowl period back in the Dakotas. And, of course, could not make it. And so they were part of the large population that shifted to the west coast. When they came out in the 1930s, my mother was a real go-getter. She was just a senior in high school, and she immediately started to work in the canneries to try and earn any money she could to do a couple of 00:01:00things: primarily to learn to fly. And, so it turns out, she learned fly. She got her pilots license before she actually got her drivers license in the 1930s. And I always found something, you know, really remarkable; I grew up knowing that I had a mother who could fly an airplane. My dad was also a pilot. And so they met at the Salem Airport, when he was a flight instructor and she was taking lessons.

Salem, Oregon was kind of base where they met, and where I was born, and my next oldest brother was born. And we were both boomers, you know, the boomer kids after the war. And, so I was born in '47, my one brother was born in '46, and another one was born in '43. So, you know there were three of us in the family; we all lined up. So we grew up around general aviation, you know, flying 00:02:00airplanes, following my dad around wherever he might have temporary employment-difficult to be employed even during the post-war years.

My dad eventually got a job with the forest service in fire control and air operations. He got first, a temporary job in the summer time flying at a smoke jumper base up in north central Washington, up in the cascades. You all know what smoke jumpers are? The idiots, you know, that jump out of the airplanes to go into a fire and fight a fire. Great, you know, which is what I'd always want to do. My dad was the pilot for the smoke jumper airplane. And, for a couple of summers, we camped out. We kind of followed him there and we camped out in tents, and lived in tents. And then, the other summers that he was still employed like that, we lived in a trailer on the smoke jumper base. And then 00:03:00when he was hired full time, we moved up to that area from Salem. Us kids when to grade school in the Okanogan area, which was just kind of a hop across a small little mountain range in a different valley up there in north central Washington. And then in the late fifties, my dad had an opportunity to become the regional air officer, and the headquarters were out of Portland. So we made the move as a family back to Oregon and lived in the Portland area. And that's where I graduated from high school, was out of one of the Portland area high schools.

Cally Whitman: Sorry to jump in, but I just had a question about your dad's pilot license, did he get that during Word War II?

TT: No, he actually had it before the war broke out. And, so he was a flight instructor... for a... there was a certain program... Once the war broke out, well even before the war broke out, they were preparing pilots. My dad was an instructor in that program-and I should remember what it's called. But there was 00:04:00a program that was established to train pilots to go to the war; and he was one of the instructors for that. When Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, the operations for that were at Swan Island in Portland. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the decision was made to move all of those training operations across the mountains over to Prineville and Madras, because they were afraid the Japanese were going to bomb the coast line. But, I guess, figured they'd be safe if they were on the other side of the mountains; so they moved all these operations over. My mom and dad were actually going to be married at Christmas time in 1941, but when Pearl Harbor was bombed they had to postpone their wedding and the marriage to make this move; to get all these airplanes and stuff 00:05:00ferried across the mountains and get people reestablished over in that area. So they ended up getting married a few months later after my dad was already in central Oregon, and then my mom moved over there to be with him too.

LM: Can you describe your earliest memory?

TT: You know it's really hard to go back. I was just with one of my cousins up in Washington this last week-that's the reason I wasn't here. She is a couple years younger than I am, and she can remember things that I don't have a clue... I mean, she remembers back when she was three or four. She has all these vivid recollections, and everything was just kind of a smudge for me.

Some of my earliest memories though, go back to that Salem house. I still remember the orchard, there was a filbert orchard-we called them filberts then, not hazelnuts. I kind of remember what the front step of the house looked like. 00:06:00I remember the hallway in this little house. And I remember playing with my brothers. My mom was a great classical music fan. The William Tell Overture was one of our favorites because then we could... you know it was the Hopalong Cassidy (She sings: "du dut dut du dut dut du dut dut"). And we would get on rugs, little rugs on the floor and slide around with these rugs, like they were horses or something like that. So those were some of the earlier memories. Once I was about five, six, seven; that's when memories start to really take hold, I think.

I always remember being around airplanes. And, that would be normal, because when I was still a baby, my mom was still flying. She would, you know, in these one-seaters... evidently she would throw me in the back in these little cubby 00:07:00hole things, throw me in the back of the plane and go up and fly for a while. I don't know what she did with my brothers in the mean time, maybe they were out walking on the wings. Who knows. But I remember even when we lived at the smoke jumper base, and were camping out in the tents for the couple of summer that we camped out in tents; I would have to go with her when she would fly over to our other place to do the laundry. I would have to sit in the back bunker with all the dirty clothes. And, even at that time, I was really afraid of heights. I am still nervous around heights, so obviously, I never became a pilot myself. I just still remember sitting in the back of that little plane that just barely had enough power to get over this little tiny lump of mountains. And I swear we weren't this far away from the tree tops (holding her hands vertically, about two feet apart). I could sit there with the dirty laundry looking down going, "Oh, God, I am going to die with the laundry!"

I have very vivid memories of the campout when we were camping in these tents. When I look back on this, it was just the normal thing to do. My dad had a temporary job and we followed him, you know. And, yes, we still had a rental house there in Salem that mom could have stayed with the kids, and just, you know, stayed there, and the guy could have gone off to do something else, but she loved to camp. She loved to be outdoors. She was a real go-getter, so we camped. One summer we just lived in one little tent and had a big sort of a table that was a flat piece of ply wood. And, she cooked on a Coleman stove. The running water we had was a little ditch-flume from an irrigation ditch. We took our baths-sort of-in the main irrigation ditch. And, we kept milk and a few other things cold-it was very cold water-in a little thing in the flume of the 00:09:00water. And, we had an old airplane seat under a little bush that was the only tree or shade that we had. It was the corner of a potato field, that somebody said we could use. And, dad got an out house from some place and dug a hole. That's where we lived for the summer. We thought, us kids, we thought it was great. What an adventure! But, when I look at what my mom did, cooking for three little kids and a husband and all of this other stuff. I think, "What was she thinking?" I would never do that! But there we were, camped out.

LM: So, you said the house you lived at in Salem was near a filbert orchard, was this in a rural part of town or was it in town and then when you moved around were you...

TT: It was in town. It was right on the edge where I-5 was being built. Now, 00:10:00this is also an earlier memory of living there. If you're familiar with Salem at all, Hawthorne Street is one of the exits. And, when we lived on Hawthorne Street, it was when the freeway was actually being built. And, so we could go down this little side gravel road and look over and see the Caterpillars, because I-5 didn't exist, and it was being built. That was a dead end at that time, Hawthorne was a dead end. And, so we lived right on this residential street where there were a lot of other houses. Yeah. it was a little rental house that had a side lot, and so the side lot-I have no concept of what the size is; it doesn't exist now; I think another house was built there. But that's where the filbert trees were.

LM: So, when you moved around, were you moving to town except for when during the summers when you were in the potato field?

TT: Yeah.

LM: Was it mostly in town?

TT: Yeah, it was mostly in small towns. When we lived in Okanogan where we went to school it was on the edge of town. I would say we mostly lived on edges, either out or edges. You know, when I was little it mostly related to where mom and dad were able to find rentals. And, then be able... I think they eventually bought that little house; that financially they became stable enough to buy that. When I look back at those years in Washington, I would say we were more rural and small town, yeah.

LM: Did you live in communities and neighborhoods where people helped, where people were close, and you had ties with your neighbors and people helped each other?

TT: I don't remember the adult families. I remember the kids. You know it was the kind of town, where I went to grade school, where we had tremendous freedom. we would leave on weekends or vacation times when school was out; we would tell 00:12:00mom we were going some place, and we could be gone for the day and no one would check, and we would just go wander off or ride our bikes or climb the hills. There were all these bare dry hills, and there was a river, and an island. So all of these things that I would... if I had children I would never let my kids go there, you know? "You're gonna go there? No. Not with out me, you're not." we just had this enormous amount of freedom.

That was also true where we were in the summer. We always went back to the smoke jumper base in the summer time. And, that was where I fell in love with riding horses. There was a ranch close by, where I could go over and hang out with the neighbor girl and horses and we might have lunch there or whatever. When I look back as an adult, the neighbors must have been supportive and always watching, 00:13:00for all the children to be able to roam around like that. I used to get on a horse and ride up over these bare dry hills for miles, and miles, and miles, and might be gone three or four hours by myself. nobody would come looking for me, but they would check at night to make sure the horse was back; that I got back. My brothers would go fishing in the river, and we would just roam. We had that tremendous... that was one of my general senses of growing up, was to have that tremendous sense of freedom: to be a kid, and go out and do other stuff with other kids.

LM: How did you feel about moving as often as it sounds like you did?

TT: The move that was devastating to me was the move we made to Portland. That was the... I was about ready to get a horse. My parents said I was old enough, and they felt we could manage to stable a horse some place. I would have been 00:14:00going into seventh grade, and puberty and all that that's a hard change no matter where you are. And, so our family moved that summer. We spent the summer up in the Methow, in this valley where we lived in the summer, and then moved to a new suburb in a city. And, I just... that was a hard adjustment. I didn't like that at all. When dad and mom said we were moving, I cried. I went into the bathroom and cried, "Mom, I won't get my horse!" My two brothers, you know, I don't know... I wasn't as aware of what their feelings were at the time.

It took that year of adjustment, and being in seventh grade to eighth grade it's one of those transition times anyway. And, after making a few friends, and 00:15:00getting in school, and getting in activities and things like that, eventually it was fine. I recognize now, that had we not made that move, and if I had gone to high school or whatever in that small town, the chances of my going to college or really having the opportunities that we did, in terms of education. it would have been minimal. It's just one of those things you never know. Well, what would that path have been different? It would have turned out differently.

LM: Did you have any other pets?

TT: Oh, yeah. We always had either a cat or a dog. I loved animals. I grew up with animals. Dote was the name of this little dog that we had. Actually, the smoke jumpers gave her to us. Somebody got her as a puppy one summer-and, then of course, smoke jumpers are usually college students with the seasonal work, and they're going to go back to whatever they were doing after the season was over. And, so they came driving across and talked to my mom and dad and said, 00:16:00"Wouldn't you like a little dog? Wouldn't your kids love to have a dog?" And, of course, we did. So we ended up with dogs. We mostly had dogs from there on out.

LM: Were you raised going to church, or in any particular religious tradition?

TT: My parents wanted us to have some basic religious instruction, I would guess. They attended a Presbyterian in Salem and that was where... that was mostly where I would have gone to Sunday school, I think. So, basically a fairly liberal Protestant up-bringing. Nothing particularly strict or adamant, where anybody said you had to believe this. It was more, we think you should know something about this and blah, blah, blah. And, so I always felt, again pretty 00:17:00much an openness about what we were able to do.

When we moved to Washington my mom had some kind of falling out... She also sang in the choir. She loved to sing. She sang in the choir there at the Presbyterian Church in Okanogan. And, evidently had some sort of falling out with the minister or somebody, or with the choir director. We never really knew what. And, very abruptly stopped going to that church and then we didn't go at all. We just did our own thing.

We are very close to nature, in a way we always had a sense from both of our parents that their spirituality was tied into the natural world; with the care of plants and animals and the outdoors, and just this awesome thing that we live in. so, that was very clear. And, sort of the religious component was sort of there but, you know, we weren't a family that said grace. We weren't a family 00:18:00that really had any strict tenets about religious faith.

LM: Did you have a best friend as a child growing up and do you have memories with that?

TT: No, not really. I had numbers of friends. I, of course, when you are little you always think you might have a best friend, but in retrospect it feels more like there were a group of people you liked to be with. And, a lot of it was more occasional. You were sort of best friends with who you lived closest to, or who was easiest to get to on a bicycle, or ride home with. I was always more in groups of friends then with one specific...

LM: When you were in elementary school did you have a favorite teacher or subject?

TT: Didn't have a favorite teacher. I liked all my subjects. I probably liked reading best; reading and words. I always liked to get perfect scores on spelling tests. And, you know, there is something very visual about that. We had these little strips-I don't think they ever do this anymore. We had these little spelling tablets you used for your spelling tests. And, I always loved those little strips of paper where you got to spell your words out.

LM: So, where did you attend middle school? Seventh grade and eighth grade were at two different schools?

TT: Seventh and eighth were at one school in a suburban area of Portland. And, it was fairly small. It must have been a grade school that was grades one through eight, and then the seventh and eighth graders had their own little curriculum. We might have one main teacher, but we might have had another 00:20:00subject from a different teacher. So, it wasn't a full middle school, nor a junior high. But, it was a little bit separate, in terms of the academic structure for that. And, then I went to a high school that was grades nine through twelve.

LM: Were you a popular student in your school?

TT: I was among the popular group, yeah. Again, it was that group of friends. We were involved in student government, activities, cheer leaders, pep squads and the guys in the group were in the athletics and the other groups. And, so yeah, I was very active and involved and was seen as one of the "popular kids" in classes. Though, I always pretty much liked everybody and it was always easier 00:21:00for me to get along, and adjust, and identify.

There was one class in high school that had, to spite the quirks of the scheduling; it was history class or something like that. That it was kind of the harder... the harder kids of the school, you know, off with their motor cycles. And, I was the only one of the "popular group" or the higher achieving academic groups, and stuff like that. it was in this class, so the teacher nick named me "Rocky," because here I was among all these harder kids. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

LM: Do you remember having any difficulties in middle school?

TT: Well, other than the adjustment, that seventh grade adjustment and feeling sort of lost. I was new, didn't have friends, and was in a split class because this was part of a population growth for this school district. So it was in a 00:22:00combined seventh and eighth grade class. See I'd always been a good student. But going into a new school the teachers don't know how the new students were going to be. So, all the new students were kind of clumped together as if they weren't going to be very good students. And, then by eighth grade, after showing yourself, you know, then I was kind of put with the higher achieving students. so that I felt more like, ok this is more, you know, more who I wanted to be with. So, those more of the challenges like that.

LM: Where did you attend high school?

TT: It was Reynolds High School out in the suburban... outside close to Gresham in the Portland area. And, Reynolds was a fairly new school, there were only 200 students in my graduating class; so, it wasn't too big, not too small.

LM: Did you have a favorite subject in high school or a favorite teacher you remember?

TT: I remember our English teacher fairly well her name was ms stewart and she was pretty strict but I really liked her because she was such a sticler on grammar on our essays she really taught to be better writers then we were when we started so she was somebody I remember I remember quite a few of the teachers because they were very personal and encouraging

LM: What kind of social experiences did you have outside of high school? I mean, when you were in high school while you were with your friends?

TT: Well, there were always some kind of activities going on that were related to school. I did almost entirely school based activities. It wasn't a time 00:24:00period when there were a lot of private clubs or things that you did outside of the school. What you see know, well you might belong to this soccer club, or you might do this, or you might do that that was not the norm at the time. It might have been for wealthier children, I don't know, but we were very, very middle class and so most of my activities and social contacts were within the school: the student government, student government activities, dances, especially dances at school, cheer leaders.

In grade school I did get to play sports (seventh and eighth grade). That was fun because then I did volleyball, basketball, softball, so I had a sport every season that was an extracurricular activity. this was before Title IX and so the 00:25:00opportunities for girls to play sports in high school... it was really odd, in middle school it went from you could do practically anything you wanted to high school to nothing except swimming. And, I wasn't a swimmer. And, so the physical activities that were in sports activities that were available for girls in high school were just negligible. You got to play somethings in P.E. class but that was about it. There wasn't any extra curricular except for the swimming, the competitive swimming. And, then I was a cheer leader one year and followed teams for the junior varsity, so we were always following teams around. I did a lot of, you know, where you rode the bus, the cheer bus off to, you know, an away game and those kinds of things. My brothers were both involved in sports and so I often went to their games and watched their games and things.

CW: What was it like being a cheer leader? What would you do as a cheer leader?

TT: That was a time when, you know, we would organize our routines. There was five of us, I think, on this junior varsity squad and we'd organize our routines and it was kind of a lot fluff. You know with pom-poms, and moving things around? And, then we put together our routines with these different cheers. We would be in front of the audience leading the cheers during the breaks; and then also during the regular play we'd be waving our pom-poms around and trying to get people to cheer for the team and all that; and not the acrobatics that exist today, certainly.

CW: Were there any men on the cheer leading-

TT: Absolutely no, all girls on the squad.

LM: What other clubs and organizations were you involved with in high school? Were you involved in student government?

TT: Yeah, I was a student body officer, class officer... shoot... I stayed a lot 00:27:00with student government. And, of course, that affected what I chose to do then when I came to Oregon State that I immediately went into the student government end of things. So, I was seen as one of the high school leaders, you know, one of the student leaders.

LM: Did you have a best friend in high school that you did lots of stuff with?

TT: I had, again it was a group of closer friends, there were maybe ten or twelve of us we all of the girls. And, then I did have some good friends who were also boys. And, of course there's the dating and some of the usually social encounters and stuff like that. And, you always think you're madly in love with this guy one week, and then a month later it's somebody else. But, there were a 00:28:00couple of boyfriends along the way but nothing that lasted. In terms of lasting friendships with the guys that were in my class, there were a couple that I was fairly close to. And, then still today there's four of us women who still get together every two years and have our own little mini-reunion and do fun stuff.

LM: Did you have any difficulties during high school? Any challenges?

TT: Not really, no

[Break in recording]

Laura Tanner: Today is February 27th, 2012. This is a life history interview with Terri Tower, part one. We are in the University Housing and Dining Services, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. The interviewers are Cally 00:29:00Whitman, Loni McKlevie, and Laura Tanner. So, Terri, I'm going to go back a little bit and ask you more about your family. You already talked about your siblings, but did you have any extended family around? Grandmothers? Grandfathers?

TT: Both of my parents had maintained relationships with their siblings and their parents. So I grew up doing lots of things with cousins and lots of things with aunts and uncles, and there was a lot of sharing and back-and-forthing between, you know, those extended families. And, so there were twenty-some cousins, most of whom I knew and saw at least once a year. And, even though they may live in different states, it was just the common thing with those families that they would get together.

My mother was very much recluse. She did not make friends, but she maintained contact with family, so her social context was primarily with family members. Whether it was her family, or whether it was my dad's family. So that was more of her social orientation all the way through her life, you know? She may have had one or two good friends. One of them died early before I was even born, or maybe, no, it was after I was born. But I never knew her, but she was the only one I ever heard of mom talking about as her best friend. It was somebody she knew back in South Dakota who also moved to Oregon. And my dad was never one to make a whole lot of friends either, but like wise, kept in touch with his brothers and sisters and that extended family like that. Grandparents: I knew my 00:31:00dad's father fairly well and he had lived with us on and off, you know, he'd come and stay a couple of weeks here and there. My dad's birth mother died when he was very young and so I never knew her. And, his step mother was hospitalized by the time I was really aware of her. I don't remember her very well at all. But my grandparents on my mom's side, I both knew. We'd come and go from their house and play in their house when we were little. Those were some of my memories actually, from that early childhood period, was not in my own house but was in grandma and grandpa's house.

LT: Did they live in Salem?

TT: Yeah, they lived in Salem. My grandmother-my mom's mom-she would live with us. She'd had hip surgery or something like that and she'd come live with us in Portland, so I was around her quite a bit.

LT: Can you describe your relationship with your father? And the kind of things 00:32:00you would do together?

TT: Well, he was often gone; he would always go out of his way to spend time with us kids when he was home. He would take us places. that we'd go camping, you know, they'd always make an effort to take us camping, to go do things and we always thought... well, I guess we should personalize, I'm talking for my brothers too. But it was always neat for me that he would pay special attention. He was the guy, while I was little, that I would ask to throw me up in the air. I always thought that was really neat, and then he ended up doing it with his grandkids when they were littlest as well.

And, he was just one of the nicest people I've ever known; and there were a lot 00:33:00of other people who would say that about him too. He was just one of those real genial people. And, he wasn't necessarily passive, but he could certainly ignore my mom when he wanted to. That she was sort of like the Energizer Bunny and you'd just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And, when he came home form work or from out flying, or he'd have, you know, long twelve hour day or something like that he'd just want to nap or read the paper or something like that. So he was really kind of a laid back... I always felt kind of... I guess I almost felt a little protective of him in later years because he never learned to hold his own against mom. And this became really evident when they were aging. When they were 00:34:00in there seventies and eighties, you know, it was like all of those years of not learning to speak to each other directly. Then they developed these mechanisms where they'd talk to my brothers and I on the phone or through letters or whatever: Well, your mother's doing this, well, I can't get her to, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And, you know, it was sort of like, will you please intervene with your mother to get her to do this and that. So, I always felt like that intermediary as they aged. When I was little, you feel that, of course, your parents are your parents.

One of the things I like about my dad was his sense of humor. He would always be trying to do little subtle tricks where he'd switch a glass of milk with a glass of buttermilk because he knew I hated buttermilk. And, so he'd try, before I would sit down at the table, he'd switch the two glasses and see if he could trick me into drinking it as buttermilk. And, I'd take that first taste (She 00:35:00makes a sour face.) And, when he was out flying-this is especially true when we were living in the tents, where we were camped out in the summer times, is that we're in a narrow mountain valley, and so the sounds of the airplane, it was just this... noisy, old, single engine thing out of Canada that made this huge noise that they used for smoke jumper plane-and he would be coming off a jump run or something like that and he'd be coming back toward the airport-and we were kind of in route-and, so he would always come by and buzz our tents. he would come down and he would get as low as he could and do the loud thing or whatever it was he did to make us just (mimicking the loud sound of an airplane) "grrrrrrrrrrr." we would always run out and wave, and he would wave his wings, you know, as he went buzzing by? (Holding her arms straight out to her sides waving them as if like an airplane.) So, that was always a fun little thing... and you just remember stuff like that.

LT: Now was he in the military during the war?

TT: No he wasn't. He was in that flight training service and then he was also a test pilot for a short period of time just before the war ended. He had a job with Douglas Aircraft down in Long Beach and he, mom, and my eldest brother moved down there for a half a year to a year, I think it was. Where he was a test pilot with the planes that were then being shipped off. And, he actually remembers being up-he was up flying on one of these runs as a test pilot when he and the other guy could look down on the streets and see everybody running out onto the streets and waving their arms and stuff-and it was when the armistice, when the war was over, you know, that moment when it was announced: It's done! The Japanese have surrendered! And stuff like that. Because it was still... the 00:37:00European front ended first and then the Asian front. And, so he still remembers being up, you know, when that moment came.

LT: Will you tell me about your mother?

TT: Yeah. Well, I've already talked quite a bit about her. She was a very independent spirit: learning to fly when she was quite young. Loved music. Loved animals. Loved nature. loved the outdoors. And, even up into the aging she would putter around outdoors, you know, fiddling around with plants, fiddling around with the cats, fiddling around with this or that.

Those early years were very influential for me, knowing that here was a person who could fly an airplane, who could shoot a gun, who could ride a horse, you know, she could practically do- in my mind-she could do most anything she set out to do. Very adventurous and taught that to her kids. Instead of becoming, 00:38:00you know... she wasn't able to fly much... She still flew a little bit as long as we lived up in Washington because that was more open skies. When we moved to the Portland area she pretty much stopped and she let her license lapse at that point. Because it was too expensive, it wasn't accessible, and she was nervous about all the radio stuff. You know, having to stay in contact and learn how to fly in a busy air zone. So she didn't continue to fly. She still loved to go a long when they were able to rent a plane and fly. Her idea of their retirement was that she and dad would buy a small airplane and go fly all over the country and visit relatives and go see this and go see that. my dads vision of his retirement was very different because he said, "I've been flying all my life." 00:39:00he said, "the last thing in the world that I want to do right now is buy an airplane and go fly more!" and, so boing! (Knocking her fists into one another) there they go again... their communication...

LT: did you feel like had the same playful relationship with her that you had with your dad or was it different?

TT: Yeah. I would say it was probably less playful because mom was more of the person who was always around. She was a stay at home; she was in charge of the household; she was in charge of us kids. And, so her's was more of a let's get on with the business at hand, you know. Here's how we're going to do our day. More of that role, it wasn't that we had a serious relationship. She also had a good sense of humor. She was more, you know: Let's get down to brass tacks here and organize this, and organize that; get these lunches made and what are we going to have for dinner. And, taught me how to bake cookies, and doing more of 00:40:00those things. In her older age though, especially after my dad died, it was probably more playful because by then I was the person in charge and I was the one that was trying to make it easier for her and help organize her and do all of that around her schedule. And, she suffered from dementia probably the last, I would guess, at least the last ten years. Although, we didn't recognize it for quite a while. And, so she fortunately had one of those real positive dementia-experiences if you can even call it that-in that she didn't feel angry or bitter. She didn't lash out at people except when she was really irritated. And, she was mostly relaxed and loved just puttering around. And, she just 00:41:00couldn't remember much.

LT: So going forward a little bit did, you ever have a steady partner or did you ever get married?

TT: I got married. It was kind of a transition from the college experience which, we haven't really touched on yet. The years at OSU were very influential because it was during this 1960s period when there was all of this external turmoil as well as the usual turmoil you go through, and kind of that growing up period. And, I got married a couple of years... I'd gone though my undergraduate I was doing a two year Master's program in anthropology at Portland State. And, it was during that time, where I had decided either I was going to join the Peace Corps or something else. And, it turned out that I got reacquainted with a fellow that lived back in that wonderful mountain valley where I'd grown up in 00:42:00the summer time-that I still dearly love. I married him, I'll say now on a whim, we thought we both knew what we were doing; I was so clueless. And, got married. I was married about four years living up in that same valley where he was still a smoke jumper and trying to farm. We started a cow-calf-operation and I was learning how to become a farm wife, which was not necessarily something that I was suitable for and was constantly reminded of it, and for various reasons that did not last. I found that the whole experience, even though I love the location and I liked being there, it was kind of suffocating. It was more like: if I stay here I'm gonna be here my whole life and I won't get to do the things that I wanted to do. You know, never gonna see the world, I'm never gonna do this, I'm never gonna do that. And, then that was out there as part of it. Then the 00:43:00personal relationship of the marriage was also, I found, not satisfactory for me. I then initially was the one who then initiated a separation and divorce. That's what prompted me to go to Indonesia. It was sort of one of those things, like: I have got to get out of here. My brother and his wife were living in Jakarta were he was working for an international gas and oil company, and they invited me to come over. And, I said, "I'm on my way! I'm going to wait for dad to retire; I'll go to his party; and then just before Christmas in 1975, I was on a plane for my first international experience. And went and joined them in Indonesia.

And, when I was in Indonesia then-that was were I had taken my teaching credential stuff with me-and got a job at the international school while I was 00:44:00there. But the reason I went in the first place, was partly to get a way from this unhappy-and it did not end, this marriage did not end well, in that my husband was very unhappy and very resistant and all sorts of things started to happen. I just sort of wanted to escape and start a new life. And, had this opportunity to go and those things came together that my brother and his wife said, "come and stay with us." of course, they haven't invited me back since because I stayed two and half years instead of a few months. but never the less, I did move out eventually to live with another teacher.

I don't know if it was based on that experience of four years of what I would consider a not very productive or satisfactory relationship in marriage, and of 00:45:00course, it's always two ways. I didn't know what I was doing; I had no business getting married; i didn't know what I wanted out of life. I thought we were going to join the Peace Corps together and go to Africa together and he thought we were going to have kids. And, that's about how much communication we had a couple of months into the marriage. I go, "Okay, should I go ahead and send in our Peace Corps stuff?" and, he said, "what are you talking about?" "well, I thought we were going to join the Peace Corps." he said, "no." he said, "that was just an idea; I didn't want to do it." he says, "I thought we were going to start a family." I said, "I don't want kids right now."

And, as it turned out... it wasn't because I intentionally chose not to have a permanent relationship after that, other things, other opportunities, other things come along. I always thought I would probably remarry; and, I thought I would have kids and I did not. It was just one of those things that didn't happen along the way. And, at a certain time creating your life you go, "Oh! 00:46:00Well I guess that's not going to happen now." so it's neither sad nor happy; it's just there. And, I've found that I'm quite happy being on my own. Not being... necessarily being a loner, but certainly having my own privacy. I live by myself with two big dogs and three cats; and starting tomorrow, I'm going to have three big dogs because I am taking on my nephew's dog from Fort Worth, Texas because he doesn't have a home for a few weeks. And, so it just is one of those things. It could be-I feel older and wiser now-and I feel like I could probably have a positive relationship with a man now, but I'm not necessarily very interested in that. Just, you know, things change.

LT: So, let's back up and talk about those years you were at OSU as a student 00:47:00for the first time, what caused to come to OSU in the first place?

TT: Well, my brothers were here. Oregon State was the place that our family went. I had an uncle who graduated from here, and an aunt who graduated from here. And, I had at that time; actually I had one cousin... one cousin who was here, both my brothers, and one cousin who had graduated from here. So it was, again a family thing. It was just the place I wanted to be, because it was probably the place I was familiar with.

At that time too, in high school I had a high school counselor who told me I wasn't college material. and at that time-I still remember that because I, fortunately, did not listen to him-but he said because of my scores on my tests, 00:48:00and stuff like, that he thought that maybe I was a little bit of an over achiever; and, I really didn't have the capacity, the intellectual capacity really to compete at a college level; that I had done well in high school because I really worked at it. I just kind of took it in stride, and thought, "I don't know I'm gonna do it anyway."

TT: It was also a time when your high school counselors weren't necessarily looking outward at other opportunities for private schools, for scholarships, for out of state, for those kinds of things. I had a neighbor who encouraged me to look into a small women's liberal arts two-year school connected with PEO called Cottey College that was back in, I believe, Missouri, but I was never really interested in going out of state. So it was more family and close by, close enough that I could get home and it was also something that my parents 00:49:00could afford.

LT: Did you start right after high school?

TT: Yes

LT: And did you live on campus?

TT: I moved into Hawley hall right over there on second floor was my first [room], I lived in Hawley for three years because I became involved in the student government structure beginning with my freshman year. I was on the hall council, then I became hall president and from there I went to what was then called the women's residence hall council at the time I started, and one of the big changes that you see during that time period is the separation of the gender. Women had their activities, residence halls involvements, men had theirs. And so there was both the women's residence hall council and a men's residence hall council. And so WRHC was the group that I was involved with and then I became a senator. I stayed on campus so that I could continue on and 00:50:00became a student senator, the ASOSU Senate then had different kinds of representation, and so I became an ASOSU senator representing the women's residence halls.

TT: And I was involved, again there was another organization called AWS that was the Associated Women Students, I became an officer of that, I was involved with, oh shoot. when I was a freshman there was this group called Rook Rousers (and I've got a thing of that in my scrapbook), there was Rook Rousers - you went to the different athletic events and you had your pompoms and you had your outfit and you sat, it wasn't like being a cheerleader but you were part of the cheering for it, there was an organized group that sat together and did the fight song. Still today when I hear the OSU fight song, you know, OSU, I want to do my little routine with my pompoms [singing] OSU, our hats off...[Laughing].

TT: My hands want to go back into that mode, and so, Rook Rousers. Then my 00:51:00sophomore year there was this service group called Talons that you were were chosen for as far as student leaders, and then I went on to, oh I was part of the homecoming organization (that was a big deal at those times), and I was part of the ASOSU government on different committees, and I was on a bunch of student faculty committees, and my senior year I was on, what was then only for women, Mortar Board - that was the senior women's honorary. And I was, my junior year I think I figured it out, I had more hours in meetings than I did in class. And it was just like I was really in this, into the student government thing.

LT: Did you join a sorority?

TT: You know, I did not. My freshman year I wasn't quite ready, my brother was in a fraternity, and he had encouraged me to go through rush but I just wasn't 00:52:00quite ready for it, and then when I arrived on campus and saw it (it was when Panhellenic and IFC did their rush before other students arrived) and I noticed immediately that there was a sense of if you were really the belonging, the really popular people you joined a sorority or fraternity, if you weren't, you were in the res halls (or I called them dorms then), that you were doing something else and I just didn't feel that it was fair to my parents.

TT: They at that time they had three kids in college and I knew it was a little bit more expensive and I didn't really have a good sense of what that was and so I just opted not to. And then my sophomore year I went through formal rush. At the beginning of my sophomore year I thought "well I'll try this", but there were, by then, there were only one or two sororities that I wanted to join, and they were mostly full. They couldn't take sophomores, they were very limited on who they could take for freshman, who they could take for sophomores, and I 00:53:00actually, I stopped out, I went almost all the way through but I didn't pledge. I just, because the one in particular that I really wanted didn't choose me, I just said no, I'm outta here.

TT: And so then I continued with the residence hall involvement and the student government and all of those other things.

LT: So, how did you choose your major?

TT: Well when I first started I was gonna be an accountant, I was gonna be a CPA, and I took my first business course fall term of my freshman year and that was so boring! I changed my major the next term and went into, I think I went and did education, then after taking a couple of those courses, I thought, I don't want to be a teacher, I want to do something else. I changed into regular english because I love literature and all that, so I spent the rest of my degree 00:54:00program in what was then called humanities and social sciences, and got my degree in HSS with a major in english which was primarily literature.

TT: It was like the, the standing joke about being an english major and then what are you going to do with your life [laughter], you know and so I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. But that was, it was at that point in my life that I wasn't making intentional choices, and it was also in a time period when, I don't know if men were counseled differently than women, but there wasn't the focus on career, there wasn't a focus on matching up a college education with what you were gonna do with your life.

TT: There was a focus on college education, get yourself educated, but no so 00:55:00much as the next step on as what you're gonna do with it. So I don't remember career fairs, I remember there was a career services but I never really took advantage of it. I was too busy going to meetings. And so there was one person, I still remember this, Jo Anne Trow, who was the vice president of student affairs for many years here before Larry Roper came in, was the assistant dean of students, assistant dean of women, when I started as freshman.

TT: She came the same year I did, I think. And she was very influential because she was involved as an advisor to all of these student leadership groups. And it was her, at a dinner one time for something like the associated women students, that she looked at me and she said "what's your goal, what are you going to do?" And that must have been about my senior year because I know my answer was related to this fellow that I was writing to in Vietnam and my answer was "well 00:56:00I'm waiting for my boyfriend to come back from Vietnam and then we're gonna see if anything happens.

TT: But I really didn't know, and she was the first person who ever asked me that question that I remember. "What are you going to do with your life? What's your goal?" I didn't know. You know there wasn't a plan, and so what led me to choose these majors is simply what I was interested in, I liked literature and I thought well ok I'll go ahead and study literature, but it wasn't with any intention toward a working career with it.

LT: Were there any professors that were particularly influential to you?

TT: No, but there was Jo Anne Trow, I would say the professors not as much as those people that I was involved with in these student, in the student government groups, the student advisors, and more of people like that, and Jo Anne Johnson (now Trow), was one of those people definitely. Because it was her 00:57:00influence that made me aware of this student services administration as a whole element of education in an administrative format on a college level, that made me aware there was a profession that actually studied that to become student affairs administrators at a college level.

TT: And it was her influence when I was an undergraduate that I remembered that, when later on, when I'd been through anthropology but not finished the degree because I got married and then I, you know, fiddled around with this and that. While I was married by the way, that was when I went back to school at Eastern Washington University to finish a teaching credential. Because in this little town where we lived up in north central Washington, there really wasn't much to 00:58:00do in terms of employment, and I was really bored and I wanted something to do. So my husband and I agreed that I would go back [and] get my teaching credential so I would be able to teach. And so that was when I started teaching at the high school level.

TT: But teaching, that was more of a default, sort of like, I need something to do to keep myself busy and this is about the only thing that I could be hired as. So I taught for a year and a half at the end of my marriage, and I would have stayed and taught longer, just for some financial security, had it not been for the some of the dynamics that occurred during the separation and the divorce. So I thought it was best just to leave and get away, and that actually allowed me then to look for work when I was in Indonesia at an international school there, and was hired as a full-time, first a part-time teacher and then 00:59:00for two full years after that.

TT: Then that teaching gave me the financial stability that I could then say ok, this isn't really what I want to do, the classroom experience. It was 8th grade girls that did me in, let's face it, I had a group of 8th grade girls that were just, I don't know, they were from texas but I swear they were from hell and gone. Oh my gosh, they drove me nuts, and uh, foul mouthed, divisive, fighting, oh, and I thought, this is not what I want to do, and so that was when I remembered Jo Anne Johnson Trow, and this program in student services administration that would still.

TT: I loved education, and what I loved about teaching was the activities, I was the year book advisor, I was the newspaper advisor, I was involved in all sorts 01:00:00of stuff out of the classroom and got to know some of these kids really well and I still have friends who were my students to this day from the Jakarta experience. I really loved that personal more informal educational process than I did the classroom one.

TT: So I thought maybe this is a better match for me. I wrote back to Oregon State asking about this program and would they please send me the application materials. And so how I reconnected with Oregon State was because I had remembered that there was this program that Joann had helped start (because that was the kind of program, it was the degree program she graduated from back in Indiana). So that was a very influential person. You know I remember a few of my college professors, but not well.

LT: You mentioned that you had some boyfriends through college, can you describe 01:01:00to us what it was like to date back in the 60's and what kinds of things you would do?

TT: Yeah, it was very singular both in high school and in college, at least in the beginning. Singular to say, you didn't go out and do things unless you had a date. So there were some formal dances, and some other kinds of things that you really needed a date in order to go with, you didn't go with a group of friends. There were open dances, there were certainly some open dances where you could go with a few other friends and dance and have a good time, but often the different functions were more one and one oriented.

TT: And the fraternity/sorority scene plays into this because some of the main social occasions were the house functions, and so you'd need to be invited by somebody from there but then you had a date from that one place so you really couldn't talk, well you'd talk to other people but it was like you were attached 01:02:00to this one.

TT: So there was a lot of jostling for position and for guys and so it was a little bit, some women really preferred linking up with one person because it just made it a lot easier. And others of us just sort of floated from person to person and enjoyed good company but didn't really want to have serious relationships, or the serious relationships we might have wanted to have, the guys didn't want to have it with you. And my first, who I would say was my first boyfriend was my freshman year I met in canoeing class, it was a coed class, it was a coed canoeing class. And then we dated most of spring term and through that summer and then started into our sophomore year when I got a crush on somebody else.

TT: Foolish, foolish person, again you know, I really didn't have an idea of 01:03:00what I wanted, I think, from life. And so then, that was sort of more of the norm, you know popping along like that. Until I hit my senior year when a good friend of mine from high school named Mike had, instead of waiting to be drafted (this was also the period of the draft for the vietnam war. And so some of those dynamics start to play in here. Some of the guys who were staying in college were in college to try and avoid being drafted because you still had an educational deferment then, but that became so it wasn't true anymore), so my good friend Mike, who was going to Portland State, decided he would go ahead and join up thinking that if he joined up he might have a better choice at an assignment.

TT: During his basic training up at Ft. Lewis, up in the Tacoma/Seattle area, he 01:04:00met this guy from California named Rich. And because Mike and I had stayed in close touch through those college years, it was during the summer time when Mike gave me a call and said "Hey, I need a date for this, my friend Rich, are you available?" and it was at that time that I had sort of said goodbye to another guy I'd been dating at Oregon State because I thought he was interested in someone else, and then he went off to Spain for the summer and I thought, pfft to him, you know [laughter].

TT: And so that was when I started, I linked up with Rich who I just, he was just one of these handsome, tall guys, I went ahhh look at this guy. And then my senior year, my senior year when both Rich and Mike were in Vietnam, I spent most of my senior year writing daily letters to Rich. So I spent quite a bit of my senior year in college, writing letters to people that I knew in Vietnam. 01:05:00Mike was killed and, ahhhh that's hard to say, [crying] then Rich and I, excuse me, could you turn it off. [tape off]

[Break in recording]

Really an interesting one, but you know, to go back to the relationship, when Rich came back, it was, you know I had met up with him down in southern California which was where he was from and it just sort of fizzled, it was like we really didn't know each other very well. We wrote to each other all of that year, and of course this was before the days of email and text or anything like that, cause what you had then was letters, and that was pretty much it. When he was on R & R in Australia, we did have one telephone call, and even that was a little strained, because it turns out we didn't know each other very well.

TT: I got down there into southern California and he was celebrating with all of his family and friends and there was, he was raised in a large corporate, kinda 01:06:00big farms, big farming community and they drank a lot and of course with him being home, coming back from Vietnam and, there were all sorts of parties and I just remember at one point, we had stayed up late because we were off doing something, and then the first thing we went to get up early the next morning because somebody was giving him a brunch and the first thing somebody gave me to drink for breakfast was a bloody mary and I just, it's kinda like I just collapsed, I just, I can't live this way, I can't live with all this alcohol, I can't live with these parties, I can't, you know I don't know these people.

TT: Some of that settled down a little bit, but even then it was sort of like at the end of that summer (and then he had to finish his service commitment for another few months) and we just kind of drifted apart. I was sitting up there and I remember still living at my parents, I'd gone back to live in Portland to live with my parents and I'm sitting there going, now what am I going to do. Ok, 01:07:00so Rich came home, and now it seems like nothing's going to happen and so what's next? And so I did the one thing that I knew how to do, and that was how to go to school [laughter]. So I went down to Portland State and signed up. I thought well let's see, what should I study this time, you know (again without intention, without any kind of direction as to what I would do with it), I thought well I really loved anthropology when I took it at Oregon State, I really loved anthro, so let me see, I'll do this program.

TT: And so I got through, for anthropology, I got through the coursework. It was a two-year program that required both comprehensive exams and a thesis. They were trying to build their reputation. I mean and I wasn't even examining [comparing programs], if I had done the same program at University of Oregon, I would have had a degree, because they said you could either do your comps OR a thesis, but Portland State was trying to build, so it was both.

TT: So I got through my comps, I got through my language requirement, and then I 01:08:00was supposed to know how to do a thesis, and I never did land on a thesis topic. So that was two years of post-graduate work that just sort of, ppthht, that just sort of went on the transcript, and that was it. And then it was after that though, that I had gone back to get the teaching credential. So relationships along the way, were kind of weird and it was during that anthropology, as I said earlier, that I met up with this friend of the family who was the smokejumper, and we had gotten married on a whim. After knowing each other, being back in touch with each other, for a few months, umm [we] decided we'd get married because I had to make a decision.

TT: I was actually signed up to go for an interview on the Peace Corps to be assigned to Uganda, I already had a tentative assignment to go to Uganda, and I had to decide. And so here I was, deciding, and my decision point was: do I get 01:09:00married, or do I go to Uganda. I mean talk about extremes! And so I chose the getting married thinking that that was part of the negotiated, let's go into the Peace Corps together.

LT: So I'm going to return it over to Cally now and she's going to ask you more questions about the Vietnam time period during college, and also civil rights and the women's movement.

CW: But before we get that far, would you like to take a break? Happy to pause right now.

TT: If you guys want to.

CW: Yeah

TT: Let's take a break [tape off]

[Break in recording]

CW: All right, today is February 27th, 2012 this is a life history interview with Terri Tower, part three. Interviewers are Cally Whitman, Loni McKlevie, Laura Tanner, and we're at the University Housing and Dining Services, Oregon State University, Corvallis Oregon. Now you were starting to talk about your 01:10:00brother and his experiences.

TT: Yeah, my brother, because it ties into your water quality, you know that conversation on water quality [we were just having off-tape], anyway so I have one brother who's is working, who is owner of a company in southern california that is doing the shale fracking. You know where they're dispersing chemicals, under high pressure, into shale to extract gas and oil. Which is according to some, affecting underground water quality in some areas. So there's this controversial [work], and here's Bryan, his son who is an environmental and safety officer for this consulting company out there working with oil and gas companies, making sure they are not causing and harm to their employees or whatever, so anyway another kind of little side.

CW: Well that's something that we haven't really talked about is, what are your 01:11:00brothers like, what's your relationship with them like?

TT: The brother that I was just speaking of is just a year older than I am and he was at Oregon State through the whole time that I was here at Oregon State because he stayed on another year to work on his masters in geology. He got married when I was a, he was a senior, I was a junior, and his wife was a sophomore, we were all at Oregon State together. And that was the couple that I lived with in Indonesia and so I've always been, through the years I've been closer to him than to the older brother who worked in business and moved to California, got divorced, moved to California, [and] back in the midwest and somewhat, so he popped around a little bit more. So my brother Denny is the one I'm probably closer to, although as the years progress, and as you take care of aging parents and all of that, both of my brothers and I are fairly close.

They both live in central Oregon. One brother, the oldest brother, he and his wife built a place. They retired out of California, moved to Broken Top out of bend, and that's where my brother still lives. His wife died of pancreatic cancer, and things related to that, just over a year ago, but he's still there. And my other brother has his permanent residence at Black Butte Ranch out of Sisters, so they're both in central Oregon and I'm in the valley.

CW: Are either of them pilots?

TT: My oldest brother Randy was the only one who wanted to learn to fly and he got as far as soloing. He didn't finish up to get his private pilot's license. Partly because it cost a lot of money (when he was doing it after he retired), and partly because he realized, and he said [laughing] "this is really hard, this is harder than I thought. My dad made it look so easy to land, and now here I am kind of bouncing all over." Ah, but he was also the smoke jumper, he was 01:13:00also the one who wanted to become a smoke jumper and so he jumped for a couple of years.

But yes we stayed close, and I don't have children but both of my brothers had children, and so it's their kids (and now they're having kids) that are kinda like my grandkids. So my nieces and nephews were sort of my surrogates that I kept in touch with so I still have that generation and now they're having children so I have that other generation just like a grandparent would, so I like to stay involved with, with those. Yeah.

CW: So now we're gonna kinda circle back to Oregon State University, and how do you think being a woman affected your college experiences in the 60s?

TT: Well I may wander off the woman aspect of it to bring it back to the, what I had mentioned earlier, in that there were fairly gender specific opportunities 01:14:00at the time period that I started at Oregon State. And that was where the women had their own residence hall council, there were no coeducational residence halls, there was the separation of the genders, and fairly strict rules in place that regulated what women could do compared to what the guys could do.

For example, freshman year, coming to Oregon State as a woman (we still called ourselves girls of course), you could only, you had to be in, I think it was ten o'clock. We had closing hours, and whenever we went out after seven at night, we had to sign out. So there was this card file, there at the office, there at the desk, that when you were gonna go study at the library or go do anything, you 01:15:00had to pull your card and you wrote down where you were going to go and when you expected to be back. And you'd put your card in the out file, that you were out of the building, and then when you came back in you pulled your card and you signed yourself in, with the time, and put yourself back in the in.

Well if you forgot to sign back in, then after closing, your room had, I don't think these buzzers, at one point I think we took the buzzers out, at least the little things that would be beside the doors. There were no telephones obviously, there were no telephones in your rooms, there were no telephone lines in your room, the only telephone was one per wing, and so if you were expecting a phone call or anything like that, we had phone duty that we had people during study hours that would sit in the telephone booth or across from it, that would be responsible for answering the phone. Obviously no cell phones, no text, no nothing like that. But if you forgot to sign in as a woman, then the house 01:16:00resident would buzz you, you would get buzzed, and then you would have to go back down and explain why you forgot to sign in and blah, blah, blah.

Or if you weren't in, even bigger trouble, and you know I don't know what happened cause I always followed the rules because I just thought that's what you were supposed to do. Hardly anybody, this is another thing about that (I started in the fall of 1965), is that given the student freedoms and civil rights, and all these other movements that were afoot in the United States, the starting here as a freshman, things still felt pretty traditional in that if it was a rule, it was a rule and you just did it.

No pants on campus for women, we were expected to wear skirts and dresses. And we, even on cold, snowy, wintry days, if we chose to wear pants we were always 01:17:00afraid somebody was gonna haul us in. We were kind of nervous that somebody was gonna haul us in but we figured out, I mean this was [gesturing], we figured out that if a bunch of us did it, then it wouldn't be as big of a deal. And at this, and the guys of course had none of these restrictions. The guys could come and go as they pleased but the theory was that if all the women were locked up after a certain time period then the guys would go home and go to bed.

So those rules were in place, there were, like I said the opportunities were, it's kind of odd because we had separate governing organizations, we had separate opportunities. Women really had a lot of things they could do because they could really excel. It's like the women's college, you know, you're not competing against a guy, and so the women were able to develop more on their own 01:18:00and likewise guys had their opportunities. Student government, of course there was the crossover, that was mixed, And so you pretty much had equal representation in there because the women were building their own abilities and the men were building theirs and you came together in some of those OSU events, and MUPC, and things of that sort is that you had fairly equal representation, it wasn't just the guys in charge it was fairly balanced and a give and take on that.

But the student freedoms, I remember one of the things that we were doing in the women's residence hall council, we started with the closing hours, oh and then weekend closing hours were later, I think it was we had to be in by, it was either twelve or one on the weekends. And the only place that you could have male visitors was in the main lounge and that area of Hawley over there was the 01:19:00main lounge [pointing out the window] and Buxton's was, well they were pretty much where they are now. Those were the main lounges.

And you could have guy friends in the foyer when they came to pick you up, because then you'd be buzzed (that was again the buzzer), and you could also talk to them in the main lounge but only until closing and then they had to leave. There were always bunches of couples kissing on the front porches, right around closing time, so the women could come in. And then during the years that I was involved with the women's residence hall council, and I think this must have been at the suggestion of some of our advisors, not necessarily coming from us, because we were pretty, like I said, you know the rules were followed, even though this external conflict was starting to come closer in, like the challenging of all of these rules, even to the most personal.

And so some of our advisors and things were saying "well what about different 01:20:00kinds of closing hours?" and so we started to work on, we got approval for sophomores, I think it was during my sophomore year we got approval for juniors and seniors who were living in the women's halls to have card keys. And that allowed us to have our own freedom that we could come in and leave when we wanted to. And at some point and another I think that we stopped doing the check in and check out, but I'm not sure of that. I can't believe that I didn't save one of my cards, one of those checkout cards where you signed in for the library or going on a date, you know whatever. And we got the approval through the residence hall council and the deans office and so on, that we were able to initiate different closing hours for the upper class women.

CW: Were those kind of restrictions still around when you were attending 01:21:00graduate school here?

TT: Completely gone.

CW: Completely gone?

TT: Yeah, well almost completely gone. The other thing I remember us getting permission for was to have male visitors up in our rooms. And the first step in that way was (and this was a big deal, this was considered a big deal that we could invite guys up) Sunday afternoon, there were like four hours on a Sunday afternoon, I think it was 1-5 or something like that, that we had open visiting. But the rule was four on the floor and an open door, or open door four on the floor. Four on the floor meant you had to have four feet on the floor, like you had to have your feet on the floor and the guys had to have four on the floor. And the door had to be left open so that when the RA or house person would come by, and the RAs had to check on this, you know it was the RAs that would come by and make sure you were being okay with your visitor and all that. And then at 01:22:00five o:clock was closing, you know out they go.

And that wasn't until my junior year that we got that going, so gradually, and at some point in time the pants on campus, you know I remember asking Jo Anne Trow one time, what would you have done with somebody who was hauled in for pants on campus? She said, "that was the most ridiculous rule I've heard," and she says "I would have laughed and sent them on their way," she's like "I can't believe you guys believed that for so long."

So nobody was enforcing it and hardly anyone cared, it's just when you came here, you assumed that was what you were supposed to do because that's what you were told you were supposed to do and it was in your student handbook. It was just that time where there were certain kinds, and there were traditions like the green ribbon tradition, and that if you were a freshman for the first two weeks of school or something if you were a girl you wore this green ribbon and if you were a boy you had a green beanie that you were supposed to wear, and you 01:23:00know whatever.

And it was just one of these, some of these little traditions, but gradually as this, and so those were some of the things that were going on internally around your student freedoms and your campus life and they started to change very quickly toward my junior and senior year because there were so many other things going on. As the civil rights, there was the civil rights movement and activities started to feel closer. There was the Vietnam war protests that were closer, there was the silent vigil. It must have been for at least two years when I was a student here, the silent vigil was a Vietnam protest that was in the middle of the MU quad, people who wanted to, just stood silently around the middle and then you'd be walking through, and I remember, oh you know it was kind of a very quiet protest but it was very real, there was a very real 01:24:00presence there.

And so for Oregon State the institution, we had the black student union, and we had students for democratic society, and the civil rights movement, and all of these things going on. And if you think about external/internal, and all the time you're still fussing around with relationships, with dating, with this is a serious thing, you know what am I gonna study for this test, oh I've got to get to the student senate meeting, you know it's all your own personal things going on at a time when you're growing and changing and changing majors and trying to figure out who you're gonna be.

And all these external influences really, really started to come together toward my junior and senior year. So it was, you could almost distance yourself at first, but during the time I was here (and I see this more in retrospect than I did when it was happening), but it started to become closer and closer and 01:25:00closer. So that these traditional things of dances and courts and homecoming and traditions, and rules, and all of those started to seem really irrelevant and superficial compared to people dying in the south trying to get the right to vote and people dying in Vietnam, and just the crushing reality and this crashing almost upon you of the assassinations. You know, my generation was the one when we were in high school in '63 we had the Kennedy assassination. And then that was kind of like shoomp [gesturing like something hitting you in the face], and there was the Cuban missile crisis where we thought we were gonna be blown to smithereens with a nuclear war, and then that sort of passes.

So you kind of get this, this period of innocence starts to feel like, oh you know, this is the way it's supposed to be, and these are just anomalies. And 01:26:00then all of a sudden the anomalies seem to be more of the norm and you start to realize that the traditional way isn't going to last. When you thought this was the way the world was going to be, it turns out that the anomalies are the way the world is going to be and they're going to have a real effect on that. And so if you think about [it], you're standing on a railroad track and looking down it, you know where you see the convergence, you go from parallel into a point.

It was kind of like that in that at first, for me anyway, it was like I was clearly here, this is the traditional I was here, and here was all this other stuff. And then as those college years progress, especially towards the junior and senior year, as you go on, you think that those lines are going to stay separate, but in fact you're aware they're coming closer and closer together. And there was a point in my senior year where both personally, and as I see the 01:27:00institution, they crashed together instead of staying apart. They crashed together when some of these different influences, or some of these different things happened.

And for me, well for Oregon State it was, like I said, there was the SDS the were the civil rights, the black student union, and there was this, and then there were assassinations, the assassination of Martin Luther Kind in 1968 was just, you know it was a real blow, whether you'd followed and been a part of the civil rights movement at all, it was like this can't happen in America, this is not our country. And the becoming more and more aware of what was really happening to African Americans in the south, in the north, in this real subtle kinds of discrimination, and the Jim Crowe laws, and all of those other kinds of things, those start to become much more known and real to you, and then King is assassinated and just a couple of months later, Robert Kennedy is assassinated.

So you've got April to June, you have these two assassinations and you're studying for finals, you know, and you're trying to figure out, my gosh you know, all this is happening and you're just reeling. Then your friends, and for my case, in my senior year which was 1969, that was when my two friends Mike and Rich were in Vietnam and so I was really aware of what was going on more than, for the Vietnam conflict and having a very personal attachment to what was happening there. And writing and trying to figure out graduation, and all these things you do here as a senior, and coming to this point in the spring where there was this, for the University, what came to a head and what was really this 01:29:00crashing of the past, present and future, was around of all things a beard.

I don't know if you've ever heard of the Fred Milton beard controversy, I'm sure you haven't. There was a black football player who, it was off-season, it was the end of February early March, it was a black football player who wanted to grow a goatee, because that was part of his identity as black men were trying to express themselves and stuff, and the coach Dee Andros, said no you can't have that beard because it's the rule that everyone has to be clean-shaven, I guess even in the off-season.

Well that became, it actually hit national news as well as state news and everything else, and there were these different, not protests, but these different gatherings on campus. You know the BSU, the black student union of 01:30:00course, pulled in people from around the state in support of their views because they were saying that it was discrimination against blacks and it was a cultural identity thing, and part of the football team and other players and other athletes and students sided with the athletic department saying they have the ability to set the rules and we have to follow the rules, Just like I did when I was a freshman, you know, you've got to follow the rules they're there, we know what they are.

And there was this huge crash that came together in these class boycotts, the black student union boycotted classes, asked the rest of the campus to do it. The ASOSU president resigned in the context of that and eventually, right at the end of winter term in that early March period, all of the black students or almost every single black student on campus walked out and left the university in protest. Because the university, and it's response, kind of left it with the athlete dept. But what happened is that almost all of the black students left 01:31:00Oregon State, and that has never healed.

You know what's so strange about the University is that there has never been a public, as far as I know, never been a public apology to the way that, well and I think it was because the administration at the time didn't feel they had done anything wrong, But that insensitivity and just this whole back and forthing, was just, it came to that head, you know just before I was leaving as a senior and it took years and years and years. And still Oregon State has a reputation, especially in the Portland area (because a lot of these students who were attending Oregon State at the time were here from the Portland area), and so in that Portland area, around the Fred Milton beard controversy, there are still parents and grandparents who had been here who said you're not going to Oregon 01:32:00State because of what they did in 1969.

And the university has never really gone back to that and said let's reevaluate our history, what did we do here, and invite people back. I always found that kind of curious. Anyway, at the same time, in that same month, in that March of 1969, after finals, spring break, came back it was that last week in March that my friend Mike died. And so all of a sudden my world Pshhhh [mimicking an explosion] just went like that.

And for me that was the clashing of, you know this is real, this is the civil rights, and as a student leader I supposedly had an opinion about the Fred Milton thing, and there was the student leadership conference that followed it because the university was trying to work with its student leaders to try to figure out a direction and a path to take because of all this social change, and 01:33:00all these activities that were everywhere around us.

And I was so muddled by the whole thing. It was like, well I sort of think this, and I sort of think this. And so I became very silent about the whole thing, except for a letter I wrote to the editor about that beard thing, and got myself in a telephone conversations with this really crazy man, um anti black, anti college, he was just, he was a nutso case and I didn't recognize it, um who really played on my sympathies about the death of my friend and the Vietnam thing, and he was a Vietnam vet.

LT: What kind of telephone conversation was this?

TT: He read the letter to the editor that I sent to a Portland newspaper and then called back in a very hostile threatening way to my phone number in 01:34:00Corvallis. And fortunately one of my roommates fielded it for the first several times, but I did end up talking to him on several occasions and met him and that was the only person I ever knew that my parents, I think, were truly worried about my safety, you know that it was just this whole play on my emotions and sympathy and he was just, yeah anyway. But that was you know my letter to the editor kind of spawned that.

LT: What did your letter say?

TT: My letter, well it's in there [gestures to scrapbook], my letter pretty much was a reaction to how the newspaper had written up the article about this group that was listening to the athletic department people. And that because the way they portrayed it was that we were in support [of the athletic department], and I said no, no, no, there were a lot of us out there who were just trying to figure out what was going on. And we think what the players are saying is pretty 01:35:00stupid, and what's the big deal on the beard?

You know, I mean look at the pro football players today, and imagine and college football players today and their hairstyles and their tattoos and stuff, we're talking about a little goatee. Anyway, this whole thing had come together and for me, my own personal world then, had come clashing together in that awareness that there's real death, there's real concern, there's real this and that. And so that spring term of my senior year was pretty much, well you know you're finishing your senior year, you're tired of studying, I was trying to take an economics class, and it was beyond me and I finally dropped it I think and it was just, everything was in turmoil but everything was on hold at the same time because I was waiting for this other guy Rich to come back from Vietnam to 01:36:00determine what I was gonna do next kind of thing, so it was really a strange time.

CW: What did you take with you from that time into the rest of your life? How did it affect you?

TT: At the time, you think it going to be the norm. You recognize that it is a crazy time but you think things are always going to be this way.

As I went to Portland State to study anthropology, it was even more anti-War, pro-Civil rights. This was before women were really getting their foot in the door in terms of women's rights because women's rights began to percolate. Part of the reason that woman began to feel dissed was that guys were starting to 01:37:00take over social issues. The Black Panthers were speaking out and black women were having a hard time being heard. White women were having a hard time being heard amidst all those other controversies. What I took away from that was the world view that said it was always going to be unsettled. It's always going to feel mushy, even though that didn't turn out to be the case. When I left what I carried with me was the feeling that change was always going to be there of some kind. There was not ever going to be one set way. That was one thing I took from it.

Another thing that came out of studying cultural anthropology was a relativistic 01:38:00worldview. How you think about a certain thing is relative to your language, religion, geography, natural environment and culture. That coupled with the sense of constant change or flux and all of a sudden, life became much more fluid. It becomes this amorphous thing that you can let happen or help shape. There was no one way the world had to be.

I took that fluidity into my marriage and it just didn't work. I married someone who was more dualistic and he saw things as one way or the other. When I started to intellectualize and think thing through in a different way than what he was thinking...I became wrong. There was no give and take. I had to either be quiet and uncomfortable or be in constant battle. I've always been sensitive about conflict and avoided conflict if I can. So, I would avoid conflict by 01:40:00shutting-up and being within myself and I always felt like I was walking on eggshells. That's just a person to person communication thing and that is why I say when I got married I was pretty clueless. I think young people today are much more aware of the kinds of things that can help make a marriage work and I didn't at that point in time. I'm not so sure I do now.

At the time, being a woman meant working separately on a lot of activities and our separate ways of being involved allowed me to feel creditable. Student affairs and government was mixed gender and I always felt that in student affairs I was credible as a woman. When I got into the anthropology stuff, I didn't feel quite so creditable. That was more academic and I felt people were judging me and thinking she is just here as a space holder. Part of that turned 01:41:00out to be true, I was kind of a space holder. Then when I got married it became even more apparent to me.

In the early 1970s, the women's movement became more vocal and began to percolate out of these other dissentions. It started earlier than that, but that is when I became aware of it. That had a much greater effect on my decision not to stay married than if the women's rights movement had not been out there. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were beginning to wane and the women's rights movement was beginning to percolate. That did effect my decision to leave 01:42:00my marriage rather than stick it out with what I had.

I went on to Indonesia and that was a very freeing and opening experience because you see the world in a completely different context, even thought I was teaching in an English language school. It was much more freeing because the gender thing was not so much of a big deal. I lived in a Muslim country and saw that women had much more freedom than in, say, Saudi Arabia.

When I came back to OSU in the late 1970s the women's study program was starting, the ERA was going on. The dorms were co-ed, all that had been blended together. Everything was coming together with less differentiation between the men's and women's experiences. It was fun to come back and see that and to be a part of that. I did my minor in Political Science with a Women's Studies focus, 01:44:00so was able to take law classes and women's study classes and got to see how the whole women's' movement was starting to come together. Of course, there was Title 9 and one of my favorite areas of study was to interview people about the effect of Title 9 on the public institution. Exploring how administrator were dealing with something like this. Those were areas of interest to me at that time.

CW: We are going to ask you one more question. What do you think is your biggest accomplishment?

TT: As in career, or in my personal life?

CW: Both.

TT: In my work, when I came into student housing and student affairs I would say 01:45:00that my biggest accomplishment, that I felt was the most personally satisfying was the research and naming of Carrie Halsell Hall. Laurie Bridges and I were the two main researches and cheerleaders that brought that forward from an idea that students had of naming the new residence hall after a student. We wanted to come up with a special name that wasn't some old white guy. We took charge of that. Our starting point was an article a student wrote in the Barometer for Black History Month. The Archives found this picture (in response to requests to find out when the first African American graduated from OSU) in the yearbook 01:46:00that found its way into the Barometer article. One of our students was on a task force to figure out a good name for the new hall and happened to be roommates with the author of the Barometer article. The student mentioned the article and we started from there. We did hours and hour of research trying to figure out who was she, where did she go, what happened to her. We found her trail and that was my most personally satisfying accomplishment.

If you asked my coworkers about what my biggest contribution was, they probably 01:47:00would say the clearing of the land over where the new INTO (International Living Learning Center) building is. I was in charge of family housing at some point along the way and we had all these little houses all over. They were rental houses for our student families over in that area of 17th street. I worked with our property management and facilities services to get almost all of those houses recycled. Most of them are on a street in Philomath. We recycled the houses, got the land cleared and bought a property. Tom Scheuermann (our Director) jokingly said I should be a real estate agent because I was buying and selling property at the same time trying to consolidate the space that we had so our department would be able to expand and grow. When I drive on Western and see 01:48:00the ILC, I am glad we got rid of all those buildings and we got rid of them in a good way.

My personal contribution to work is just a way of being. We all bring a piece of ourselves to an organization and if we are successful, we leave behind an attitude, a sense of camaraderie. I think I left some of that. Personally, my 01:49:00greatest accomplishment is not a particular success, but instead a way of living. I set up three qualities, which I measure my choices against. I define success as the extent to which I meet those qualities. I chose Wisdom, Integrity and Grace. The extent to which you put knowledge into wisdom and live by that wisdom is your integrity, which affects your relationships with others. That which you can't completely ever know or understand is the grace to accept what is. To constantly try to tie those three things together defines success.

I like leaving marks. Naming Halsell Hall was a way to contribute to someone else's mark. There was another mark I physically left on a gravestone that belonged to a Great-Great Aunt in Western New York while I was working at Cornell. The person who had give my Grandmother the old piano that my Mother inherited and that I now have in my living room had no children and no one had ever finished marking her grave. I discovered this while doing some genealogy research in Western New York. Aunt Minnie needed a proper headstone. I set out to do this project before I moved back here. Leaving another mark there for a woman who had an effect on our lives and family even though I never knew her.

I have another one I really want to do. Hopefully this is coming up in the next few years. I'm not sure what kind of mark to leave, but there is this wonderful women architect who did a lot of the buildings in the Grand Canyon. Have you been to the Grand Canyon?

CW: No.

LT: A long time ago.

TT: On the south rim of the Grand Canyon, there are these really interesting structures (they are not really houses) that a person named Mary Colter did as part of the opening up of the Grand Canyon to tourism. She worked as an architect and interior designer from 1902 to 1940s, and she died in the 1950s. I have set up a quest to see all of Mary Colter's buildings and I would love to be able to write some kind of story about her. There are a lot of books and articles written about her, but nothing that you can just pick up as somebody 01:52:00that might be a tourist with limited luggage. Those other books are pretty big. I want it to be something to grab with photos of her work and with somebody's personal perspective. I'm envisioning a train ride from Los Angeles down through the Southwest because she really tied into the Southwest Indians and the Spanish Pueblo styles and built from native stones. She was one of the most influential people in setting up the style called National Park Rustic, which influenced the lodge at Yellow Stone, Timberline; you know, these big timber-framed things. Her style was one of the first to look at that. So I have a quest for Mary Colter.

CW: We are mostly out of time, but do you have other projects that you want to 01:53:00do now that you are retired?

TT: Oh, there are always projects.

CW: Travelling?

TT: I love to travel. One thing about retirement is that you may have time, but you don't always have money. Money is, and will continue to be...I'm not a wealthy woman, I own a house, I have animals and you know what vet bills cost, so I'm always balancing the time money, dogs, travel, what can I do here, what do I owe there and all of that. I want to do that Southwest trip. I like to do an international trip at least every other year, when I can afford it. My last one was Australia. I went to Australia for a good friends of mine, that I met in graduate school, wedding.

I have my Bucket List. I don't know if you guys have made your Bucket list. You know, the list of things to do before you die. I think when you retire that 01:54:00becomes even more essential. A lot of retires have their list, and it is an actual paper list and they take it out, look at it and think about what they can do that year while balancing their other commitments. One thing about retirement is that you should never underestimate how much of your personal time you may give to take care of other people. The first two years of my retirement, I was half time taking care of my Mom. When she died, it was another year and a half taking care of Mom and Dad's property, getting the house ready for sale. It was during the down time of the housing market and doing all the upgrades and repairs and getting that property ready to sell, and the estate and settlement (because I was the executer). Getting all that business taken care of was about 01:55:00four years worth of my retirement that was really focused on other people, on my Mom and Dad.

Just this past year and the year before that I thought, okay, this is my time. Then I started to focus on the repairs and upgrades I needed to do on my house. I had a little bit of money from my parent's estate that I could use to repair my living room floor, get the house painted, and get the fence repaired. I could do these things. Those priorities are always in flux, it does not matter whether you are retired or not. When you are working, you have to balance in your work as well. What is wonderful about retirement is that there is this great gift of time. You get to set your own schedule. You don't have to be here at a specific time unless you have chosen to be there. That wonderful freedom to be able to 01:56:00get up in the morning and stay in your pajamas if you want to and work on your computer, or read the paper, or just sit and drink coffee, or whatever. It's just a beauty.

I live outside of town and am becoming more of a recluse (while laughing), just like my Mother was. I love the outdoors, just watching the birds, feeding the birds and play with the dogs. Do this and that and watch things grow. I've become a gardener, landscaper. I set up travel as a project. I really want to see most of the National Parks in the West. I've started on my National Parks list. Next international trip, I still have not been to mainland Europe. I been 01:57:00to Great Britain because the brother that I lived in Indonesia with also lived in London for about nine years. I got to make quit a few trips to Great Britain, but I've never been to France, Germany, Italy...any of those lands. That's up there. I'd like to go back to Scotland. I collect antiques, collectables. I'm never lacking things to do.

CW: Okay, we have gone a bit over time, and I know that you have an appointment...

TT: Oh, you know, I changed it so I didn't have to leave dogs in the car. I decided there was just too much. That's what you get to do when you retire. You think - well I can space this out, so it's fine. I don't have to be anywhere.

CW: Well then, we would love to look at your scrapbook.

TT: Oh! Okay. Terrific. I did this scrapbook the summer after I graduated. I just had envelopes of stuff that I was going to save so it's not in any particular order. One thing I want you to notice is this was when I started at OSU in the Fall of 1965, $125 was my tuition. I don't remember what my room and board was at that time, but I think the highest is ever went was $145. I had a State scholarship for $100 dollars per term, so tuition was, you know. So for 01:59:00college my parents mostly paid for room and board and then I worked a little bit.

CW: As a percentage of income, how much is compared to what we pay today?

TT: You know, I don't have any idea.

LT: Did it feel like a lot of money back then?

TT: No, it did not. It felt like what was expected. Your tuition covered a lot; you know, that included student fees. That seemed to be what was anticipated.

Another thing about this time, when you asked about dating is that there were a lot of dances. They still did the dance cards. I don't know why I never wrote down who was my date for any of these things. I kept the dance programs, but 02:00:00didn't add in who were my dates.

Because the costs were lower back in those days, there were all sorts of entertainers that came onto campus. Bill Cosby, Henry Mancini, Harry Bellefonte - these were all concerts that I went to during the years I was here. Another thing about student government. Well, not so much student government and more other organizations you were with, everything had an outfit. You had to wear them on a certain day of the week. TALONS was a Tuesday, or something like that. So, every Tuesday you were supposed to wear your TALONs uniform.

This was my Women's Residence Hall Council, where I think the biggest decision we would make during the year was what our uniforms were going to be. Then during the summer, you were supposed to have those uniforms made to a certain pattern. Which was hard, because my Mother never was a seamstress so I bought 02:01:00the material and had to have somebody else make them. Look at all the programs. That one must have been a TALONs initiation, or something like that. I kept little things that I had up on my door and bulletin board. I was always a great Snoopy and Peanuts fan so a lot of the cards and pictures have that on them. I kept some of my class schedules. By my Junior year tuition was $148, then it dropped down to $130.

CW: Wow.

TT: The black bag was a guy who was in a speech and communications class that 02:02:00for one whole term attended class as an anonymous person. This is an article about all the media that would come, and all the students that would walk out of class because it was so disruptive. Some of these things I have no clue about why I saved them. Here we have Harry Bellefonte back again, Nancy Wilson, Al Hurt, Bob Hope, Simon and Garfunkel, Ramsey Lewis. There were these wonderful, wonderful concerts.

CW: Which concert was your favorite?

TT: I don't know.

LT: This was your student ID from 1969?

TT: That must have been a senior class card.

CW: It says "Resistance", why does it say that?

TT: I think it must have been about social change, but still within a certain cultural norm. I'm not sure.

This was a campaign thing. This was one of the guys that was in my brother's fraternity, who lived with us the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. I was part of his campaign group when he ran for student body President. Bobby Kennedy was here on campus. I think that is one of the reasons why the assassination was really hard on a lot of people. I remember going out to the airport to greet him. That was a TALONs thing, to be part of the greeting. He came onto campus and spoke in the Coliseum and he was just a dynamo. He was 02:04:00wonderful. Then he was killed during while running for President.

These articles are for different elected offices. I was on the Home Coming Committee as the assistant coordinator. You know, it's just these different things. The ASOSU Senate...Student government. Like I said, the Mortar Board was a student organization. Two of the women I stayed in touch with from college were both members of Mortar Board, who were not members of sororities. So, 02:05:00sorority members kept in touch with each other. But for those of us that never pledged and were not part of that, we independently formed our own little niche.

That was a student body card.

Registering for classes was very different than it is now. To register for classes all these different stations were set up around the edges of the Coliseum and you had a certain time you were allowed to enter. You had to go stand in line for each class that you wanted and it could be closed out by the time you got to the front of the line. You would stand in line for Speech and then you would go to Biology and you would go get all these things. It was really bizarre.

CW: It would take all day to get your classes registered, wouldn't it?

TT: Sometimes it took three of four hours. Another nice thing about being in 02:06:00some of these student organizations was that you got early registration. TALONs got early registration, for some reason we were considered special, because we did a lot of volunteering for the University, so we got to go first.

Another thing that was in transition was the dropping of traditions. Mortar Board did this big event: the Mortar Board Ball and Mortar Board King. There were always Kings and Queens of these different Courts. This was the year that we canceled the Ball because of lack of interest. We kept up with the King. I think it was maybe a year later that we dropped the King as well. Now of course Mortar Board is known more for the Mortar Board planner. That was a great idea for a...do they still do the planner? Oh no, probably not anymore because 02:07:00everybody used their computers.

CW: Oh no, you can still buy them.

TT: Yeah, that was a fundraiser that started... A lot of these are just honors and awards that I just stuck in the scrapbook. I wanted to show you... [Sounds of flipping though pages]

Oh, in the Dinning Centers, during that time you could only eat in the hall near your dorm. For the three years I lived in Hawley I could only eat in West. If you had a class across campus, you either came back for lunch or you went to the MU to eat something. You couldn't go to another dinning center and you had your own little meal card for that particular dining center. Hawley, Cauthorn and 02:08:00West ate in West. Sackett had its own dining for at least two years, all of those lounges and study areas they have used to be dining areas in Sackett. Poling, Buxton and Weatherford ate in Weatherford dining, which was situated were the little amphitheater is situated not behind Weatherford. That was all a big flat topped dinning center. Finley, Arnold and Bloss were under construction. Snell, McNary and Wilson all ate in McNary. You couldn't go back and forth.

CW: How was the food?

TT: It was cafeteria style, you went through a line and there were one or two entrees and potatoes or something like that.

LM: Do you know when the change happened, when if you lived in Hawley you could cross campus and eat at McNary?

TT: I think it was in the 1970s some time, when that change happened. I recall 02:09:00coming back for grad school I was in one of the Co-ops then. I was an advisor in Azalea House for my assistantship with CSSA. We had our meals there, but by then on campus residences could eat any place. Some of these things (in the scrapbook) I have no idea what they meant or who they came from. These were the military patches from my friend Rich. I was here for the big giant killer's game that was in November 1967 when OSU beat USC, which was a huge deal.

Here we go, here is Fred Milton. This is the little goatee (referring to newspaper clippings). I did not clip the article were the black students actually walked off campus. I can't even remember how many there were, but it was between one hundred and two hundred students who walked off. They walked off before finals, they lost that whole term of work, of class credits, because they had the courage to leave before that.

LM: Did they leave completely? Did they come back the next term?

TT: They never came back; they didn't let their children come back. That is something that the University has missed. OSU's reputation goes back to that. That Oregon State wasn't a place that took care of it's black students. 02:11:00Obviously, not everyone is aware of that but there are still some families that that is important.

I happened to run into Fred Milton while doing the summer conference program. I had to do all the assignments of what group went where, and arranging for the student and staff that did all the checking in and the head residents that would be there to monitor the conference residents. I was checking in on a football camp and I was talking to one of the counselors and he was this big black guy. We introduced ourselves and he turned out to be Fred Milton. I went "the Fred Milton?!" and he said yes. He was the Fred Milton with the beard! I laughed and 02:12:00said that I never got to tell him how proud I was of you, that you stuck to your beliefs. Fred told me how he made amends with the coach, and that they were cool at the end of it all. But we still have a campus that has that reputation, some people have not forgotten. I think it is a real educational opportunity for the University.

This was my letter to the editor (another newspaper clipping) in one of the Portland newspapers. It talked about what I thought about the controversy around Fred Milton. I was more of the stance that it was not that big of a deal.

Talking about lasting influences and who you remember. The year I was in Mortar 02:13:00Board one of our advisors was Brenda Hood, this is a picture of her right there. Brenda was a collector of English ceramics, flow blue china, odds and ends of artifacts and we got to use her house for our Mortar Board events. The two people I've stayed in touch with, Linda and Jean, who were also in Mortar Board, stayed in touch with my old advisor. When I moved back to Corvallis, in 1989 Linda was working for Boeing in Seattle and Jean was in Hawaii. We got together because they had stayed in touch with Brenda, who still lived in Corvallis. We all got together at my house. This picture was taken on my back deck. When 02:14:00visiting Brenda again, it was her stuff that got me hooked on collecting these English ceramics. All of a sudden, I became interested. She is one of the influences of all the junk that is in my house.

CW: Is there anything else you want to tell us?

TT: Gosh, I cannot think of too many more things. There is always something I will think about later. What about you guys. Is there something that feels like there is a gap that wasn't filled in?

LM: I was wondering if you couldn't just give us a basic time line of when you graduated, where you went to college, and then gloss over your resume. You 02:15:00mentioned you worked at Cornell, but we didn't get to talk about your time there.

TT: First five years in Salem. Born and raised in Salem. I went through first grade there. Then when I was five or six years old we moved, in 1953, to Washington State. We were there until 1959 when my Dad was transferred down to the regional office in Portland. Through 1959 until I started college was in Portland. That was where Mom and Dad stayed, that was home base. So when I went home on holidays, or vacations I went back to Portland. I also worked some summers in the Portland area. I graduated from OSU in 1969 and spent that summer 02:16:00waiting with a friend of mine in San Diego. I worked some temporary jobs down there waiting for my friend Rich to come back from Vietnam. I then spent some time with him, and then came back to Mom and Dad's house in the fall of 1971. I did two years of graduate study at Portland State in Anthropology.

Then in 1971, I got married and moved back up to North Central Washington. I was there until 1975, during that time I went back to school to get my teaching credential over in the Spokane area. Then, I taught High School for about a year 02:17:00and a half in 1974-75. I was divorced in the middle of 1975, and I hung around Portland until my Dad's retirement party in December of 1975.

Then I left for Indonesia. From 1975 thru June of 1978, I was in and around Jakarta, Indonesia. I would fly home each summer and I tried to do as much travelling as I could, but it is like working anyplace else, you only have limited time that you can go places. Then I went to Oregon State, with two little miniature Dachshunds and the communication was so difficult, you only had 02:18:00letters, there was a two-week gap, so I never got the message that I couldn't have the dogs. I said I would like a housing assistantship, but I was overseas and they could not interview me. That was when Hall Directors were all on assistantships, they were not full time professional staff. The Co-ops had their housing assistants. So when I finally got to the US in July, the first thing I had to do was come down to Corvallis for my interviews. It wasn't until I got back to the US that I was able to talk directly to the person in charge, and asked him if I could keep the dogs. He said, "of course, you can't keep them". I 02:19:00wasn't told by anyone I couldn't have them and did not know what to do with them. He tells me that I am going to have to work it out. Well, my wonderful parent, who lived in Portland at the time, took them. My parents have also taken guinea pigs from a lab here at OSU, ducks, several dogs from me, anyway, my parents ended up with the dogs so I could do my assistantship here in Azalea House. After I did my two years of graduate study from 1978 to 1980, I interviewed for a full time position at OSU in housing for a job that was a combination of Hall Director and Area Coordinator that was when I had three years in West with a live-in position.

I worked in West International House as the hall director because of my 02:20:00experience in Indonesia, which was my night job. My day job was being advisor to RHA, helping with the organization of all the Halls, helping with staff training and development, the RA class, all of those kinds of things. I was older than average person by then, and I felt like I had done enough live in by them. By 1983 I started to look for other jobs in Housing.

I ended up at Cornell as a live-out area coordinator. I had an apartment off campus. I was at Cornell form 1983 to 1989. I really loved Cornell, loved the 02:21:00area, except for shoveling the snow. It was getting a little too old for snowdrifts. The main reason I came back to OSU, I had a real commitment to being back closer to my parents while they were aging. Both of my brothers had families and were scattered. One brother stayed international until he semi-retired. I knew he would not be able to help out. I knew the other brother had problems of his own. I was single and the most mobile, so I thought that I had to get closer. It just happened that one of the first jobs that came open that I was qualified for was back here at OSU, as the Assistant Director for Res. Life. That was the person in charge of supervising, hiring and training all 02:22:00of the Hall Directors and RAs as well as writing all the handbooks. I interviewed for that and moved back in July of 1989.

Then my parents helped me buy my house, which is the house I still live in. I was on the two-year, four-year routine as a student and I thought I might stay at OSU for six years. I never thought I would be back a third time. Never thought I would be back the second time. I like variety, I am not success 02:23:00driven, but I really like different stuff. I'm curious about different things. So, I really liked being able to move within Housing and Dining, to do family housing, conferences, assignments...all those kinds of things. By the time I finished I'd done everything except Dining Services, I didn't have any interest in doing food service. So that was okay. I retired in 2006. I would laugh from time to time because my final office (after a LOT of different moves) was on the 02:24:00inside of Buxton and I could look out my window and see my room that I had as a freshman at Oregon State in 1965-66. I could look up at my room in Hawley and think - I didn't get very far.

LM: You moved across the Quad.

TT: It's not coming back to the same place. Each time I'm different, Oregon State is different, but there is a certain context and you feel some familiarity. I remembered was it had been like, but I never came back expecting it to be like it was before because I was different, it was different. Even the 02:25:00trees have grown, there is more shade. We used to lay out here in the middle of the Quad in our bathing suits, we called it the beach. That is where we used to lay out on warm days. You used to watch the windows in the boy's halls and wonder if they are looking at us and pretend of course that we were only interested in Western Civilization.