Jim Krueger Oral History Interview, May 30, 2019

CHRIS PETERSEN: All right, today is May 30th, 2019. And we're with Jim Krueger, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at OSU, in his home here in Corvallis. And we will talk to him about his OSU experience and his path through academia. We'll begin with his childhood-I'll ask you-where were you born?

JIM KRUEGER: I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And when I was six or seven years old, we moved to a small farming community at Durand, Wisconsin. My dad was working for that International Harvester company. And then he became a partner in an International Harvester dealership. So I grew up in a dairy farming community. They're a very small town. You know, we have a really interesting culture there-it was ethnic, a lot of German and Dutch people there. 00:01:00Being a small town, there was a lot of togetherness among people and I knew everybody in my high school graduating class-there were actually just nine of us. I was not only in the top 10% of the class-I actually was the top 10% of my class. [laughs] We get back to Wisconsin and visit every other year or so. And I still have three of my classmates left. And we always get together when my wife, Bonnie, and I get back to Wisconsin. It was a great place to live and start an early life.

CP: Were there particular pieces of community life in a small town that stand out to you as being particularly note-worthy or important?

JK: Well, I think for me, interest in sports as a high school student, I kind of defined my relationships with-as least the guys in my class would play on the 00:02:00baseball team together, the softball team, didn't play football. But that always occupied a lot of time. I enjoy reading a lot so I spent quite a good time reading as well. And we did a lot of things, the usual high school classmates getting together. It was very, very close knit group. An interesting thing about the Wisconsin culture, the dairy culture here that probably a lot of people don't realize, the key thing there was a dairy farm which was a family farm. The farm was fifty to two or three hundred acres. First of all, it was something that was preserved from generation to generation so-not all the kids stayed on the farm but-this idea of continuity within the family and the community was a 00:03:00very important thing. That's almost completely eliminated now. Most of the agriculture there now is the corporation raising corns, soybeans. The dairies are only pig dairies. Well, the family farms are just smaller-of course they'd be out of business and people would move to the big cities. But it was really a way of life that I experienced. I didn't live on a farm, but this way of life-of taking good care of the lamb, or tending the crops, having the animals, having good relationships with all of your neighbors, investing in the community-that's kind of thing that's got a bit lost and it's a big cultural change. Things always change but that's something that-I think, a tradition that-should be honored and people know about that.

CP: Was science something that was important to you during this time?

JK: Well, not while I was really young. But when I got into high school here, we didn't have a chemistry course, as you'll be talking about, with me, later when chemistry became my profession. There was no chemistry course. So I wasn't turned on by a chemistry course. But there was a "chemistry closet", it was called. And there were a few chemicals there. And the principal of the school turned me loose along with another fellow, Clark Parker [phonetic], and we could go in and experiment, and do anything we wanted to with what was in that one closet. It contained chemicals like hydrochloric acid and zinc metal. And I think that that was probably the first experiment we tried-is putting zinc metal into the hydrochloric acid solution. And, of course, there was a reaction to the appearance of the zinc dissolved and went into solution, and hydrogen gas was 00:05:00formed. This was a pretty mysterious thing-you know, what happened to the metal, where did it go, what form was it in? And I'm sure that's the kind of thing that sparked my curiosity and led me to being interested in chemistry when I went to university.

CP: Was college something that you always anticipated being in your future?

JK: Yeah, pretty much, even though I'm the first one in my class to-in my family, I should say first of all, but also in my class too-actually go to university. The thing that really made this happen was that my parents were both big football fans. My dad was a Green Bay Packer fan, go Packers. So he was a very big University of Wisconsin Badger football fan. And they went up to Madison for games and when I was old enough, I went along with them. So I knew 00:06:00the Madison campus well, And I think it just became, sort of, understood that when the time came, if the money were there, I would get to go to the University of Wisconsin and become a Badger.

CP: So you were in the region for at least the early run from Vince Lombardi, is that correct?

JK: Yeah, Lombardi, he was the Green Bay Packer great. I once went to visit my cousin in Stevens Point, mid-state Wisconsin, and the Packers were doing their early fall practice. There, I remember, sitting on the sidelines, watching some of those guys. And the thing that impressed me so much was how big they were and how beat up they looked. I mean, they just pounded at each other-it kinda looked that way when you saw them without their big uniforms on. But that was a neat experience.

CP: So you, I gather, were a good student and you had plans to go to school.

JK: Yeah, I enjoyed reading and doing well in classwork was, I think, a real point of worth for me. But as I mentioned before, we did a lot of sports things so it was fun to be out of class and doing other things as well.

CP: And the connection to Madison is obvious.

JK: Yeah.

CP: But you go from a class of nine to a very much larger environment. Tell me about that transition.

JK: Yeah that was quite a transition to be sure. First of all, Wisconsin was-University of Wisconsin-top ten land grant public institution so was slam dunk obvious that that was a great place to go. And I thoroughly enjoyed all aspects of that. It was about 17,000 students when I first came, which was not 00:08:00large for universities then. But it was plenty large to be a really outstanding academic institution. You know, when I first got there, I was loading in the dorms. And I remember in the first week that I had some other fellow dorm students a few doors away. They were both from Ghana, Africa. And one of them, his name was Abe. And I remember I thought, "Ok, I'm gonna get to know these guys" because there hadn't been African Americans in my hometown and they were freshmen too. And I thought, I could help these two get acclimated to Wisconsin, to Madison. And the first I got to learn was that they not only were at least as well acclimated to Madison as I was, but that they were very worldly-they had 00:09:00the BBC on the radio all the time, they knew far more about what was happening in the world than I did. So that was one of the first big lessons that I had in the bigger university going to Wisconsin. Overall, really good experience at UW-Madison.

CP: So how did you arrive at your academic progression at Wisconsin? I gather you majored in Chemistry?

JK: I did major in Chemistry. So I was kind of taking a chance that that would be the major for me. And I enrolled in the chemistry major's general chem course which was a specialty course of about maybe 150 students who were pretty much dedicated to going into professional chemistry. I didn't know whether I was so dedicated but the people that I met in that course, not only the students but the professor Harvey Sorum, was a very well-known educator. And he was a 00:10:00marvelous lecturer and really turned everybody on all the time. And there were two teaching assistants, Earl Siegelman [phonetic] and Don Gordis [phonetic]. They were just consummate professionals at being a teaching assistant. I think those three people really inspired me to want to do chemistry. They made it really interesting and their dedication to not only chemistry but to teaching really got me started on chemistry as a career and thinking about teaching as an option, even at that early state.

CP: So the initial interest is sparked in the chemical closet back at your high school. But then you get to Wisconsin, you decide to give it a shot, and these important figures cement it for you?

JK: Absolutely.

CP: How about extracurricular activities in this time period?

JK: Let's see, what other things-you know, I spent the first two years in the dorm and then I joined Alpha Chi Sigma fraternity which is a chemistry and chemical engineering professional fraternity. But we had a fraternity house right front in Madison. It was just as social as all of the other fraternities except almost everybody there was a really good student. So we had a lot of 3.5 and up GPAs and a lot of good fun beer drinking and card-playing and other things maybe with the women from the sororities. And that probably defined some of my early dating opportunities so that would be part of the extracurricular too. I worked in Madison for two summers. I worked at the forest products 00:12:00research laboratory. And this was much like the OSU forestry program here. I worked with a really neat fellow, Harold Tarkov [phonetic], who is in physical science of wood. And that was probably one of my first really solid research experiences outside of the kind of coursework that we were doing. So it was a good start. But the Madison campus is just gorgeous. Here it's located on the hillside, south shore Lake Mendota-a lake about five miles across. It's over this gorgeous field out to the lake in one direction, and then to the east, the view of the Wisconsin Capitol about a mile away, down Bascom Hill and up State Street. So there were lots of water sports, ice-skating in the winter time, or 00:13:00mountain-skating all around that area. And sailing and canoeing, my dorm buddy, Chuck John [phonetic], and I inherited a canoe and we took the canoe sailing round on the lake. One of my first dates with wife-to-be, Bonnie Jackwoods [phonetic], we went out for canoe ride on Lake Mendota, a very, very neat place.

CP: So you met as undergraduates?

JK: We did, yeah. We were both members of the Memorial Union House Committee, so called. And the responsibility of that committee was to create a program for incoming freshman students to welcome them to the Memorial Union and get to know the MU. And Bonnie and I worked together on that and that's where we first met. Bonnie was a chemistry major too, a year behind me in terms of academic years. 00:14:00But we didn't meet in the chem lab, we met there in the House MU Committee. So we kind of hit it off right away and Bonnie's been my life partner ever since and best friend.

Just thinking back to that time, one of the interesting little stories there was that my senior course, one of them was microbiology, and we had to take that as a chem major. So when it was time to go into the first lecture, there wasn't a very big lecture hall-it was maybe 50 or 75 seating and it was all of these chem majors there. And when I went into the room, I was kind of on the late side, and most of the other fellow chem people were there. And Bonnie was there as well-she was taking it a year early and she was seated the right-hand edge of 00:15:00the room, and all of the chem guys being-well they weren't all nerdy but then you know there was a little bit of that and so single woman in the class kinda freaked them out, I think. So they were seated all around the other part of the room, leaving this huge gap between Bonnie and a group of them. So when I walked in, knowing Bonnie of course, I went over and plunked myself down beside her. And we started talking and guys asked me later on, "hey, how come you were so fearless and walked right up and talked to this young woman?" I explained that it wasn't just my magnetic charm but it was also that Bonnie and I had known each other for about a year up till that point.

CP: By any chance, did you use or encounter Linus Pauling's General Chemistry textbook during this time period?

JK: I think I was only generally familiar with that. So Pauling at that time was a well-known name to me but I think that exposure to Pauling really came when I 00:16:00came to Oregon State. One of the people that influenced me the most in chemistry there was the chairman of the department, Farrington Daniels. And Farrington, he was a really big name in chemistry, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, co-author of the best-known, the most widely used physical chemistry textbook in the US. And he was a very, very outgoing, friendly type of guy and invited Bonnie and me, and some other students, to his home one time. He was a big influence here and he was the one that started me on my research as a junior, although it wasn't chemical research. But Farrington was interested in solar research, now we're talking about 1956-57, during that time. And he wanted to 00:17:00explore ideas for utilizing solar energy to Latin American countries. And he said, "What I wanna do is find a way for people to be able to make parabolic reflectors so that they could use it to heat water and cook food when there wasn't adequate fuel.

And so he and I undertook the design, a way of making these reflectors very inexpensively. And our work was carried out in a big gen chem lab in the main chemistry building there. And there were a lot of other chem researchers there-mostly Farrington's graduate students. He didn't get in there very often because being department chair, he had limited time. But when he would come and I was in the lab, he would come over to where I was working and start talking 00:18:00about how is this project going? And then only when the other students, the grad students-were doing serious physical chemistry research-said "Oh, I have this question, can you come over here, Dr. Daniels?" [laughs]. And they would always tell me "How come you rate to get Daniels over everybody". It was an experience that Daniels was so interested in. It was maybe a bit of eccentricity on his part but it was a real interesting experience. When I was thinking back on that, it occurred to me that the laboratory that we worked in, that was in the rear of the chem building. And across the narrow alleyway was the Sterling Hall, physics building. And it was that wing of the physics building that was bombed by one of the anti-war protesters at the time. So the lab that I worked in there was destroyed by this bomb-this happened after I left Wisconsin and I always kind of 00:19:00regret it, knowing that that was the fate of this lab that I worked in. And then after that junior year with Farrington, in the senior year I worked with Dan Cornwell, doing research in nuclear quadrupole resonance spectroscopy, something that I don't think is done too much these days. But Dan was a meticulous worker and a very good mentor for what I was doing. The chem faculty there was super and as a member of Alpha Chi Sigma, a number of the chem faculty-were professional members of the fraternity. So when we were going to have a party or some kind of special event, we invited chemistry faculty to come. And I was often the person that held the chance to go and talk to the various chem faculty and ask them "would you like to come over and join us at the party?" And so that 00:20:00got me entrée into quite a few offices of really, very well-known people.

And one of them, by the way, was a biochemist named Karl Paul Link-he wasn't technically a member of the chemistry department. But Karl Paul Link was the inventor of warfarin which is so much used now as a blood thinner. And warfarin generated, for Wisconsin, a huge amount of money and led to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and always a huge support for research there. And when I went to see K. P. Link to interview him running this office, he was laying in a sofa in his office there and we kinda chatted for a while about things in general. And he was an awful well sort of guy but he agreed to come to our party and had a good time there. But that was an interesting meeting with a very 00:21:00well-known person there, and kind of an inspiration too to know how much he had done for the university.

CP: It was a very rich experience, it sounds like.

JK: It was, yeah. Madison was really, very good, very inspirational. And one of things that was important to me there was not to just get a chemistry degree and just take chem courses but to have as broad an education as I could. And looking back over my coursework, I think I'm honest in saying the course that I enjoy the most and maybe that broadened my horizons most was a history course that I took my junior year. And it was taught by a Brit who was a visiting history prof. And it was the history of American thought and culture, kind of from a 00:22:00British perspective. And it was just amazing, the interactions from that class, the things that we read, something that I really enjoyed. It played a role during the time when it came to be looking for graduate schools because Chairman Farrington asked all of the outgoing chem majors for suggestions on how to improve the chemistry major. And I said, "it's way too restrictive in terms of the amount of chemistry that you have to take. You really need to have more liberal arts in it." And I mentioned this history course. And he told us how that would be desirable but a lot of credits in chemistry were required by the American Chemical Society and so be it-but maybe they did expand things out after I left. But that kind of impression has been part of my thinking since 00:23:00that time.

CP: Were these research opportunities that you had at that time typical for a chemistry major at Wisconsin, or was that unusual?

JK: I think a lot of the chem majors did seek out opportunities but I can't remember many people doing a number of research things so maybe in that sense, it was. I kinda was winging it toward meeting the faculty and I think that probably gave me entrée into doing that.

CP: So by the time that you were finishing up at Wisconsin, you were thinking about graduate school. Were you gravitating toward a particular area within the discipline?

JK: You mean academic area?

CP: Yeah.

JK: I think physical chemistry was probably what I was going to go into. And 00:24:00that would probably be Cornwell and Farrington's influence, although inorganic chemistry-here taught by John Margrave-that was a really good course too. So I was kind of borderline between inorganic and physical. And either one would have been really interesting. So when it came time to select the graduate school, I put together a list of schools that I was going to go to-applied to, rather. And one of the schools on the list was University of Illinois, big rival, big time, sort of like Wisconsin - Illinois, and OSU - UO kind of thing. So I took this list in to Farrington Daniels and said "what do you think?" And he said, "well, there's some good schools on here." He said "Which one is your top?" And I said, "Well I think maybe Illinois." And he said, "You're not going to Illinois." And 00:25:00now that I look back on it, I think it was partly the big time rivalry thing. But he had, I think, some bigger things in mind.

So I ended up applying to Harvard University and to CalTech, and to Cal Berkeley. And I was fortunate enough to be accepted at each of those places. When it came time for the hard choice, it was really up to me. And I didn't want to rely on anybody else. I knew they were all first-rate chemistry research institutions and I could see Harvard and its splendid tradition and all of that-it's rigorous-and so on. And I could see the palm trees and the ocean in the West Coast school. So I narrowed it down to CalTech or Berkeley. And the choice there Berkeley because Berkeley was a very comprehensive university, very 00:26:00strong in all aspects of education. And CalTech, you know, superb as it is an engineering, and science school probably wasn't quite as interesting. In allure of going to the Bay Area and the Golden Gate Bridge and all of that, it was really kind of a slam dunk choice when I came down to it. I've never regretted my choice to come west to school and that was how I got started going to Berkeley.

CP: Were you married at this point?

JK: No. Bonnie and I were engaged. She was a year behind me so after I finished my first year in Berkeley, I came back. We were married there in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, which was her hometown. And then we made our way across the country, kinda was on a honeymoon, and also setting up camp in Berkeley. We had a 00:27:00marvelous apartment, quite close to campus there and that was on Spruce St. And the thing that was so neat about it was we were on the third floor and, looking out from a window, we were directly to the east of Golden Gate Bridge. So when we looked out our living room window, we could see the big Golden Gate Bridge there, the comings and goings of ships, and the movement of the sun as it moved from north to south and kept setting progressively farther north as you went through the summer time. That was just one of the many, many charms of living in the Bay Area, lots of trips to the surrounding parks there, over to the coast, going to San Francisco of course. I guess San Diego's pretty close by-over all a really neat geographical place to live.

CP: Tell me about the transition academically into graduate school.

JK: I guess it was pretty smooth, having done a fair amount of research there in Wisconsin. The Berkeley tradition was to get started in research in the first term, so they wanted you to choose a major prof. during your first term. I actually started out in physical chemistry because they did not have inorganic as a divisional major at that time. My major prof. was Richard Powell, Dick Powell. And he was one of the most live wire guys that I have ever met in my life-he was a gen chem teacher, marvelous lecturer and demonstrator, and very enthusiastic researcher. So I felt I was in very good hands working with Dick Powell. Dick was famous for his teaching and I think that probably experiencing 00:29:00that further submitted my idea of wanting to ultimately go into teaching. Dick always did some slam-bang type of demonstration and one of the ones that he did was a mixture of powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen, which would give quite the flash and bang when you set it off. And one of the times that he did so, there was an explosion that was too much of a good thing added that ended up destroying part of the lecture bench and some of the media behind it. So when that older building was torn down, it turned out that one of the grad students then had taken a photo of the damage that this explosion had occurred. And then he put up a big picture of that on the bulletin board in the department, and a 00:30:00little caption under that said "Is the lecture over now, Professor Powell?" [Laughs] It was really funny.

He was a great person to work for. When meeting in the hallway, for example, he would always have something to say, like have you read the latest paper on so and so. That, among other things, made me be certain to always try and keep up in the literature of the iterator that we were working into. So at least once in a while I can "one up" him, instead of being "one up" by him.

CP: Did you seek him out specifically? Or was this more of a chance circumstance?

JK: You know, we had the chance to talk to a lot of the chem faculty there and yeah, I think I was attracted to his personality and also to the research that he was doing, which was the mechanisms of reactions both in the gas phase and 00:31:00the solution phase. Did work with Henry Larring [phonetic] at the University of Utah who's a very well known gas phase kineticist. So this really got me intrigued in terms of what kind of chemistry I wanted to do. And maybe not everybody looking at this video tape will have an appreciation for what this is. But kinetics, first of all, is the physical chemistry of measuring the rates of chemical reactions or physical reaction processes. And from measuring those rates, you can learn not only a lot of useful things for designing practical reactions as the chem engineers would do, but also for elucidating the set-by-set rearrangement of atoms and molecules as it went from the reactant 00:32:00stage to the product stage. So kinetics became a useful tool and that was the number one thing that I did. So it was kind of a blend of physical chemistry and inorganic chemistry. And Dick Powell was the premier person who was doing that at Berkeley. And we had a research lab on the second floor of the chem building there and there was a couple of notable things about that-it was right next to the department office because Dick was also the chairman of the Department at that time. And this was in 1960, a big election there between Nixon and Kennedy, and the first year that I was really invested in politics. Bonnie and I had both heard JFK talk in Madison while we're still undergraduates and we became big JFK 00:33:00supporters. So we would put up election hearing signs for JFK on the bulletin board outside the main office and outside the research lab. And it happened pretty frequently that someone would come and carry them down, or replace it with a Nixon matter. So we would, of course, replace it with another JFK thing. So eventually, I guess, we ran out of material there but that was a fun thing.

And another aspect of working in that lab was I had a really neat lab partner there. His name was Gábor Somorjai. He was a Hungarian immigrant. He was interested in solid state of behavior, that is, the chemistry and physics of solids and what happens chemically, not just the structure, but how you make them into research catalysts and that sort of thing. And there wasn't any established program to do that at all-nobody in physics was into doing that and 00:34:00there wasn't anybody in chemistry so much either. But Dick Powell, being the Renaissance man that he was, decided to take on Gábor. So we worked side by side there and Gábor eventually became a prof at Berkeley and is a world-famous, now researcher in the chemistry and physics of the solid state. I know a lot of people who know his name and appreciate his work.

CP: Connections with a lot of talented people.

JK: Yeah, they were all over the place there, lots of Nobel Prize winners at Berkeley, and had the chance to get to know most of them-Bill Giauque who's the one that discovered O-17 and O-18, he did a lot of work in isotopes. He was an interesting person who worked with Ken Pitzer. I took physical chemistry, 00:35:00quantum mechanics from Ken Pitzer. He was really with a very well-known guy. Took quantum mechanics from Bill Giauque also. And he was a really interesting, wonderful personality, very warm personality. Not all p-chemists are warm and fuzzy with the grad students but Bill certainly was. He had a unique style of lecturing which really challenged us as grad students because the lecture room-it was a small room, not a big hall-had three boards, and he would start with his talk about the structure and the bonding in molecule by writing something down and say it, then another board, put some there. And the next thing, he would write somewhere else on another board and gradually, he'd have 00:36:00all three boards with these equations. But you never knew, from looking up from your notes to where he was writing, where the last thing was that he had written. So you'd have pay really, really close attention to what was going on.

But it was a really good experience and one of the strong points of Berkeley was the physical chemistry that they had. I think maybe the most influential person, other than Dick Powell, for my research there was an organic chemist, Don Noyce. And Don was an organic reaction mechanism person. And organic reactions were much the rage in those days and were becoming very well understood, the step-by-step transformation of reactants and the products. And Don was a super lecturer and he had laid out details with such care and showed how what we know 00:37:00wasn't a matter of opinion-it was a matter of how you use the research tools that you had in hand, especially in kinetics to elucidate his mechanisms. And from that course, I think I really got my love of really working mechanistically, but in my case, inorganic, rather than organic chemistry. So he was an important influence there.

And people like Glenn Seaborg were around in the department occasionally. And got a chance to listen to a lecture by him and George Pimentel-a marvelous educator and well-known physical chemistry lecturer. And he was in charge of the seminars the first time I gave a graduate student seminar. And I decided to do it on a Russian paper which had to do with the influence of solvent on the 00:38:00electrolytes that were dissolved in it. So after I finished my talk, Pimentel was the first one to speak up. And he said, "I don't think I believe any of that." [Laughs] Ok, that was a little tough on a graduate student but the ethical set at Berkeley was that research seminars were all important. So that's the way a lot of teaching happened. And that was his way of getting the discussion started so there was a lot of lively discussion about that. And indeed, we saw shortcomings in the paper but there were also interesting things that, I think, became part of my research a little later in my development there.

CP: So beyond the research seminar, what kind of teaching were you doing at this point?

JK: Well, I was a TA in the first two terms, that is, first two semesters, there. It was a fun experience. It wasn't defining-it was a big gen chem course. 00:39:00I think it was more the idea of constructing courses and being able to lecture and work with students. So it was only those first two terms, I think, that I was a TA. And then I was doing research more after. But it really, you know, made me aware of teaching as a possible idea-it was part of the development all along. And Berkeley itself, amazing atmosphere. I expressed before-the fact that it was a really comprehensive university. And just across the road and behind a little stream that came through campus, there was the music building. And I went over to the music building frequently for noon music programs. They were all free and you could just walk in there. That probably played a significant role 00:40:00to my interest in music.

For example, Pablo Casals' hymn resonances was a very well known cellist, he would never perform in public because it was a protest against politics in the US. But he attracted, at that time, a large number of cellists from different parts of the country, and Canada too, I think, who came there to study with him. And these cellists were performing free-of-charge at that music center so you could go over and hear good music, and take a little break from chemistry-one of the many things I appreciate about Berkeley.

CP: Had music been part of your background up until that point? I know it is now.

JK: Well, somewhat. My mother was a homemaker but she was very interested in 00:41:00piano music and she studied at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee for a number of years, and was really very accomplished pianist. So I grew up in a home with a lot of good piano music being played. And I played a little bit then. But once I got started in college, and then went to graduate school, there wasn't really a time or good opportunity for music. So my continuing interest in that, sort of, was left for later years. But I think music is one of the important things to me through my lifetime, and certainly is very much so now.

CP: You finished up at Berkeley, and you wind up at Oregon State. How does this happen?

JK: I did, yeah. Good question. When it was time to be thinking about where I wanted to go, I pretty much had ruled out the possibility of going into chemical 00:42:00research in an industrial setting, not because it wouldn't be challenging or interesting but I was pretty much into the university, seeing the idea of teaching. And I really valued the connection with people that the teaching experience gave you. So I focused on such opportunities and I applied to Arizona State for a position. And I wanted to post-doc for a time, it was Arizona State, to Cornell. Franklin Long had a very good program there in solution kinetics and research from the physical chemistry point of view. And I was thinking about that. And then, I learned that there was an opening at Oregon State University for a chemistry teaching position. So that kind of was in my mind as well. And 00:43:00about that time, I was really having to decide. I first eliminated Arizona State-was thinking that I would take a Cornell position. But then Long got in touch and said the funding for the post-doc position that he had had been delayed for about six months, and he would love to have me come but there wouldn't be any funding for that period of time. So I decided "Ok, I'm going to go for the teaching position at Oregon State." And having fallen in love with the West Coast, with the ocean, with the mountains, and the forest-if you've been around the Bay Area, you know there's some redwood forest there, it was just really a wonderful environment-I could see continuing this if I went up to Corvallis, but probably not so much in Arizona, or not Cornell. So that was a 00:44:00fairly easy choice for me, even though I really didn't know much about Oregon State. And they said "You don't need to have a post-doc here. We need someone to start teaching right away."

So Bonnie and I packed up our belongings in the summer of 1961 and moved north with our six-month-old daughter, Melanie, to the state of Oregon and to Corvallis.

CP: What do you remember about the brand-new Oregon State University. It just became a university that year.

JK: It only recently had become a university, as opposed to Oregon State College. There were a lot of transformations going on at that time. And I think that's one of the things that's attractive to me too. Oregon State, it was a relatively larger school-had a lot of good research going on. They had a strong 00:45:00chemistry department. But then it seemed like it was the time when the university was poised to sort of break out of the rather conservative mode that it had been operating in, and kind of embracing a lot of new funding that was becoming available in chemistry. So it seemed like a place where one could go and kind of make your mark in the department. If you become a faculty member, at a lot of well-established schools, they would have been like "oh, we hope you could be as good as the people already here rather than developing something more on your own." So it was an appealing thing from that point of view.

CP: How about Corvallis in 1961?

JK: In what?

CP: Corvallis in 1961.

JK: '61, yeah, pretty small town. We are living here now in the home that we moved into in 1964. So this is near Cloverland Park, and just to the north of us 00:46:00then was Circle Blvd, so called, except it was a gravel road during that time. So from that, everything to the north of us was undeveloped. And Corvallis has expanded a lot, the university has grown tremendously since then, obviously. But it was a good place to start out with new ventures and new colleagues. You know, I think one of the things that is important about my getting started here was that the last hire, as I recall, that the Chem Department had made was 1956 or '57 with Ken Hedberg. And then there hadn't been any hires for about four years prior to my coming. And I think the reason that I got the invitation to come up 00:47:00here without a post-doc and accept a position I wasn't instructed to begin with, and then they said "well, we don't have enough funding generated yet for the system professor position but you'll get that after one year," which I did-and that was just fine with me-Tom Norris was a very important colleague, again, in chemistry. Tom, at Princeton University and then University of California at Berkeley, I think was one of the movers here in the Chem Department-had pretty conservative leadership, and Tom, among others, said "you know, we need to get new faculty-you haven't brought anyone here-and the time to do it is now. We can somebody from Berkeley and that's the person that we want to get." So I kind of had a little in there thanks to Tom's Berkeley connection. And I was joined in 1961 by an analytical chemist, Dick, Richard Peekema, who came from IBM 00:48:00laboratories in Poughkeepsie, New York. And he undertook a program in analytical chemistry. So the two of us were newbies there, and kind of learning the ropes together. Dick only stayed about four to five year before he was lured back to IBM again.

A little bit of Corvallis history here-Dick and his wife, Barbara, lived in a house near 30th and Grant, to which we were frequently invited. It was an older house and it had, in the basement, a sawdust burning furnace. I don't think there are any of them left in Corvallis. But every time you went into their house during the winter time, there was this wonderful aroma throughout the house, of sort of a Douglas fir scented smell that came from burning the sawdust 00:49:00in their furnace. And that was a really, pretty neat thing and another initiation into the lore of the Midwest. The house is still standing today and Dale Weber lives there now and his wife.

CP: A relic of a different era in Oregon history.

JK: Yeah, right.

CP: Who else was important early on for you in the department?

JK: Well, Tom and Faith Norris were the number one. They took up under their wing right away. Tom was a very good researcher, exploiting radioactive tracers in sulfur and fluorine chemistry. And his wife, Faith, was an instructor in the English department, well known person and marvelous teacher of Shakespeare. And she was one of a kind person, started the Poets for Prisoners program at Oregon 00:50:00State, took people into the Oregon State prison and taught them poetry, and got that started. So Faith was just that innovative kind of person. And one of the first things that introduced us to them was Bernard Malamud. The author had recently left Corvallis after a period of time. And they said "do you know his story, "A New Life"? It's all based on Corvallis. And a lot of us are in the book except we don't get identified. So you can find out everything you want to know about Corvallis by reading this book." And everybody was speculating about whether they were in the book or not, and whether a certain reference to some wacky thing or some very conservative, or whatever thing was going on, was a reference to them or what they were doing. So that was a great start to Corvallis.

Who else, let's see, in the chemistry-Ken Hedberg, I think, himself was a person that I got to know right away. Ken and Lise were very welcoming people. And Ken came along in my first term and said, "What do you need for research? Maybe I've got some things in my lab that you could use." And indeed, he did have a few items that were helpful in my research startup. But in those days-this was 1961-the startup funding for research was almost non-existent and had to come from mostly internal sources-especially at a not front-line university, as Oregon State, you know, was not up in the top-tier institution in those days. So money was hard to come by and this generous offer from Ken really set the tone. And Ken has been a great support and a good friend for all of the years here. 00:52:00And Lise was a good friend too. Lise was a marvelous researcher in her own right. And one of the neat things about Ken, being invited to their home there, was Ken introduced Bonnie and me and the other guests present too that fine art of Skåling as done with the Norwegian style when you drink. And when you have a glass of wine, you make a toast and you drink a little bit every time somebody makes a toast. And it was always the job of the host, Ken in this case, has to explain to make sure that all of his guests had an opportunity to drink enough wine so that he would address one or more of us. And so "Skål, Jim," and then we would be obliged to take a drink of wine. So there was a lot of wine 00:53:00consumed. Ken was always a very good connoisseur of not only fine red wine but also very special martinis. And I think until almost this latest year, Ken always had martini made in just exactly the right way with so much of gin and what kind of ingredients have to go into this, just like a good chemist would want to prepare a solution-his martinis were always that important. Ken was a great guy indeed.

And there were a lot of interesting colleagues that really were important. To get started, I would say one of them that helped me in a lot of my research was John Kice. John was an organic reaction mechanisms person and this was the kind 00:54:00of thing I was talking about for Don Noyce before. He had a big research group and kind of supported my research in kinetics and mechanisms here. I'd turn to John on many occasions for good advice. And he and his wife, Ellen, were very good friends. And John passed away not too long ago but we still keep in touch with his wife Ellen, who lives in California now.

I taught chemistry and chemical kinetics during that time. And the only course before that had been kind of sporadically offered. But I decided that that would be one of the courses I'd like to jump into. And chemical kinetics became a course of 30 or 40 students, offered in spring term. And a lot of the organics students took it, the chem engineers took it, biochemists took it, and my inorganic research group people took it. So it was very popular at that time. 00:55:00Over the years, the need for kinetics sort of waned so the department doesn't teach kinetics any longer. But it was a really stimulating thing to do in those days, a really great entrée into physical chemistry teaching for me.

CP: You have this interest in teaching that was brewing for several years, it sounds like, but not a lot of experience by the time you got this job. Was it something that came pretty naturally to you?

JK: I think so, yeah. It's a really good point there about that I came out of the Cal Berkeley experience with enough teaching knowledge. And the answer, I think, honestly would be "no, not enough." I had the inspiration and the personal example of a lot of really good lecturers in watching them in action. 00:56:00But there's so much more to teaching about organizing courses and deciding what the character of the course is going to be, how you work with students, dealing with students in many aspects of teaching. And that was something that I had to really work on right from the start. And that kind of leads into the teacher mentor program which I think will be talking about later. But it was something that I learned from Max Williams-I'm just thinking a lot of people were very influential. Max Williams was just the best of teachers here. And I was associated with him in not the chem majors but the engineering majors, chemistry course. And I learned a lot from Max about course design and working with 00:57:00students and keeping reluctant students happy and on task. He and Don Reser [phonetic] was also legendary as an advisor and teacher-were certainly big influences at the time. In those early years, there were some of the really, really good chemistry faculty that were at Oregon State and played some role in my development.

People like Jack Decius in physical chemistry-was just a superb researcher. He worked with Bright Wilson at Harvard, author of several very, very well-known texts in spectroscopy. And Jack was the most thoughtful of researchers and lecturers, both. He was a big inspiration overall. Harry Freund in analytical 00:58:00chemistry, the ultimate and careful researcher as far as analytical chemistry. He was a skier and-I never took up downhill skiing but-he kind of instilled in me the love of the Cascade Mountains and the snow. I do some cross-country skiing now but that was kind of later on in my career. But Harry was a really great inspiration.

And Elliot Marvell, boss Marvel, another organic chemistry researcher, was a natural products person. And he was an early influence too, very high degree of adherence to the highest standards in the quality of your research and the careful presentation of materials in teaching and lecture. He and Jean were good 00:59:00friends-got together socially with them on numerous occasions. They're both gone now, unfortunately, but very, very good colleagues. So many more, kind of run the risk here, not mentioning everybody. And I'm not gonna try to be an encyclopedia-but Al Scott was a guy who did so much of everything-it was just absolutely unbelievable. He was climbing peaks in Nepal-mountain peaks in Nepal-even years after he was retired. And always brought a huge degree of enthusiasm to all of the research and teaching that he did. He was a big influence for everybody.

CP: How about Wendell Slabaugh?

JK: Wendell Slabaugh, yeah. Couple of things I remember about Wendell-he was very much into chemical education and the American Chemical Society. And he was 01:00:00head of the Chemical Education section of the ACS, the American Chemical Society, for a while. So he really introduced me to the bigger picture of chemical education beyond Oregon State. And he himself was a good chemical innovator and he did surface chemistry and he liked to do time-lapse photography of corrosion of a metal surface. This is sort of like watching paint dry, you might say. He would take a photograph of a metal plate that was covered with some kind of coating, like a chrome and he would scratch it to start a little locus for corrosion. And then he would take a photograph of that spot about once 01:01:00every 15 mins or something, for a period of weeks and months, and then put these together as fast-forwarded type of filming. And you could see corrosion growing-it was a specific type called filler form corrosion. It was a marvelous thing to watch this happen. It became a really neat teaching tool to be able to show how corrosion naturally occurred then go over the chemistry and what was happening there. Wendell was also a pioneer in developing early visual media-the little four-minute eight mm films that he made on all sorts of topics, like the mercury beating heart, which was an electrochemistry experiment, demonstrations for the metallic molecular kinetic theory. And he had an entire catalog that was 01:02:00very well-known and important around the country. A lot of people sent in to get these little film clips from Wendell. And I still have some of them in my office. You know, they've been surpassed now by various multimedia things but he was a real chemical innovator and a very enthusiastic guy. My memory of the last time I saw Wendell, I was walking to Gilbert Hall around 6:30 at night and Wendell came, bounding into the front wall and up the stairs, and said "Hi" and waved, said "I'm busy, I've gotta go to do something." And that night, he passed away from a premature heart attack. That was just the perfect way, I guess, for Wendell to go because he was always so energetic and enthusiastic about everything that he did.

And I think he was one of the few people that accepted, or sought out industrial research. That was kind of frowned upon, for some reason, at that time. And Wendell used to joke about that-he said "Well, people say I take tainted money when I do this", he said, "but the reason I don't like it because the money, it ain't their's, it's tainted money." [Laughs]. So he was quite the guy. And I enjoyed going to National Chemical Society meetings with him and meeting a lot of people that were higher-ups in chem ed that I wouldn't have met later on.

CP: Let's talk a bit more about your research. I've went through your vita and tried to boil down your publications into groups. And one of those groups, I think was successful, is reaction kinetics. It sounds like that emerged pretty directly from your graduate work.

JK: Yeah it did, from my graduate work. I think it really was from that very 01:04:00first chemistry experiment, the beginning I mentioned back in high school with the chemistry closet. The idea of "How do these things work? You can't see what's happening-something is going on underneath at the molecular level. What is it? And how do you actually find out or probe what it is that's going on?" So I had started that in my work with Dick Powell at Cal. And we were trying to look at new ways of aromatic substation with some phosphorus compounds and turned out it didn't work very well as we might have anticipated. But it really, kind of, sparked in me a lot of looking at reaction mechanisms and kinetics. So I really dove into that here at Oregon State when we got started doing that, having a strong background associated with organic reaction mechanisms which 01:05:00were far ahead of inorganic mechanisms.

Nucleophilic substitution was one of the big things. This is basically a simple reaction where you have one reactant which has a pair of electrons and electron density that will react with a carbon-centered molecule, which has some-we call it a "leaving group"-perhaps a chloride or iodide ion, which could be displaced or removed by the incoming nucleophilic group. And there was a lot of research on exactly what the parameters were for how this happened. Was it like incoming group hitting the carbon and knocking out the other group-that would be the so-called "SN2", the bimolecular or second-order kinetics process? Or was it a unimolecular thing where the leaving group would depart on its own being energized by some solid fluctuations or something and create a carbonium ion or 01:06:00cation intermedia to which the negative incoming group in nucleophile attached itself. And you can answer that questions pretty simply by kinetics. And then there were a myriad of questions that went around us, like, "what about the surrounding groups around that central carbon? What influence did they have on the electro-connections there? The bonding of the molecule and also the so-called steric influence, their positional attitudes, how did that influence the reaction, how did the solvent influence the reaction". So I decided that it would be a really neat thing to do to try to extend this to inorganic systems. For example, neighbors or carbon in the periodic table would be nitrogen and sulfur. And the halogens like chlorine and bromine. And all of these were 01:07:00thought to undergo some kind of reaction. It seemed to be very much akin to the nucleophilic substitution in the carbon compounds. So we set out to look at the kinetics of more of those reactions.

And it turns out that solvent in reactions played a major role there. Because the inorganic reactions are primary in either water as a solvent, or maybe water and alcohol. And water and alcohol are really, so much dominated by the polar influence-plus on one end, negative on the other end-of a molecule and the hydrogen bonding characteristics. And it turns out that solvent influence, which kind of goes back to that Berkeley seminar that I was talking about before, how important that solvent influence is. Nucleophilicity in inorganics wasn't thought to be especially exciting or important because it couldn't be studied 01:08:00very well in water. So one of the things we did was to use dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO as it was called. This was a highlight polar solvent but completely non-hydrogen-bonding. Its composition was one sulfur, one polar terminal oxygen, and two methyl groups, CH3 groups, attached to the sulfur. And it made a very, very good solvent for almost everything inorganic. But it allowed you to look at what happens if you don't have any hydrogen bonding. So for reactions at carbon centers, chloride was never regarded as much of a nucleophile at all. It was not even thought to be very reactive. But in DMSO as a solvent, the chloride became a very prominent nucleophile. And we found that to be the case also in inorganic 01:09:00reaction mechanisms. So we started out with looking at DMSO water solvents and showing how chloride, bromide and iodide were able to catalyze a lot of reactions, and to look at nitrogen and sulfur as the analogs of carbon as a central atom where incoming nucleophile would react at nitrogen or sulfur off chlorine and then expel some leaving group. A lot of the same things that were for carbon seem to be true of these centers. Like, there would be the solvent effect-that would be the steric effect, the electron donating or withdrawing properties of the substituting groups. So that became our first major research operation. I had a lot of wonderful students who worked in that area.

Interestingly, one of the earliest there was an undergraduate student who helped 01:10:00me get started. That was Tom Webb. Tom finished his degree and then went on to post-doc with Al Cotton, and eventually became a chem prof. at Auburn University. And Tom was recently retired and comes back to visit the department frequently. And he's been a big friend and supporter of research here at Oregon State. And it's always great to have him come back and visit, to show the long term interest in research, which really got started in our work with nucleophilic substitution here as an undergraduate.

CP: Yeah, nucleophilic displacement and substitution is another area I had written down here. And the third is oxidation-is that a separate program? Or is that a piece of what you just described?

JK: Oxidation is related. A number of these reactions at nitrogen, sulfur, and 01:11:00chlorine were chemically oxidation reactions, as well as displacement reactions. So they can be both things at once because the mechanism for the oxidation, we learned, in many cases was nucleophilic displacement reaction. So a lot of our teaching, research that was involved are showing that that was the case. But oxidation was important. And then this kind of segue into having cobalt coordination chemistry associated with this whirl. In cobalt(III) coordination chemistry, you can think of the cobalt +3 ion with six adjacent sites for other chemical atoms to bond-two top, bottom, two front and back. The typical thing with cobalt(III) that one would do is anchor down five of those positions with usually nitrogen-type molecule that would set those informal framework which 01:12:00didn't change so that then you could focus on the sixth position, then you could put a particular reactant molecule into that sixth position, called a ligand. So we did a lot of work with the amino acid cysteine which is the amino acid part of the carboxyl group, hydrogen atom and NH2 group, and then the CH2 to a S- group.

Cysteine is very important in plant and animal physiology and it's one of the essential amino acids in our body. And it undergoes oxidation when its usefulness in the body has been completed, then it is excreted in the fully oxidized form of cysteine sulfonic acid. And the question is, then, "how does it get oxidized? What is the mechanism for doing that?" And it turns out that an 01:13:00iron-containing enzyme is responsible for that reaction. And we wanted to try to mimic that iron-type enzyme by using cobalt. You couldn't use it in the enzyme directly with iron because iron is notorious for exchanging all of its ligand partners, those surrounding partners, very quickly, so you can't see "well, here's my structure, and here's the reacting ligand right there." Cobalt, on the other hand, hangs on tightly for a matter of hours, weeks, or even months. So we got our studies with cobalt chemistry. And we looked at the oxidation of coordinated cysteine or the sulfur atom-was held in one position with a nitrogen, and then wrapped around to the sulfur bond in the other position. And that was oxidized by, typically, hydrogen peroxide, indirectly by molecular 01:14:00oxygen but that wasn't easily started. So we started with hydrogen peroxides-so that was HOOH. The sulfur itself was a nucleophile so there was a connection now between the nucleophilic chemistry we're studying and this new coordination chemistry. And the coordinated sulfur, as a nucleophile, would attack hydrogen peroxide. It would knock off the OH- group as the leaving group, sort of like chloride in the organic reactions. And that would leave you with a sulfur bonded to O and H. Then if you could pull that molecule right on the complex, it would be like an organic molecule, sulfur, OH. And that molecule has only fleeting existence in organic chemistry. You can only trap it in a frozen nitrogen matrix or something like that because it just isn't stable-it was on to further 01:15:00oxidation really rapidly.

In the cobalt compound, however, it would exist indefinitely if you limited the amount of hydrogen peroxide. So our lab was one of the first to study these coordinated cysteine-type compounds, and their further oxidation and their reaction kinetics. Some other people in the early work were Ed Deutsch at Cincinnati and Alan Sargeson at Canberra National University in Australia. And they had done some developmental work-all is just about the same time here. So we were competitors and they were both really good researchers.

I kind of came at it from the mechanisms and the kinetics point of view and had a lot of students who were really interested in doing that kind of research. So it proved to be a very profitable thing. And then later on we tried to segue into using highly coordinated iron(III) and molecular oxygen directly. Indeed, 01:16:00you could get some evidence that you could get cysteine oxidized but it turned out that that was never really nearly as successful as the compounds with cobalt because iron, again, exchanged everything out. It made a big mixture and you could infer what was happening indirectly. So Mother Nature really did reveal all of our secrets there-she could do the oxygen oxidation of cysteine quite handedly and that became more of a matter of biochemistry-but we thought that we did shed some light on how it occurred in the coordination chemistry with cobalt. And I think that was an interesting and valuable contribution too. I had a number of students that worked on that over the years, and a lot of good context. And was fortunate to be invited to the well-known Gordon Research 01:17:00Conferences in New Hampshire and present some of that work on nucleophilicity and coordination oxidation reactions. All in all, it was a good research run and a very exciting one. And I spent a lot of time in the lab myself-I always wanted to spend as much time as I could in the lab running some reactions. And I always had my own project going as well as the other people. Quite a number of good students that have gone to other occupations here. So yeah, it was a good teaching experience of all.

CP: Speaking of teaching, so you're hired as an instructor. A year later, you're moved to the tenure track. You have a very heavy course load that you were teaching from what I could gather.

JK: Starting out, yeah, there were a lot of-when I first came, Bert Christensen was the chairman. Bert and Emily Christensen, we were wonderful friends too. 01:18:00Bert was very much of the old-school there and I guess kind of a penny-pincher, maybe, that's how I got the Chem Department through. He said, "When you're gonna come here, you're gonna teach a bunch of chem recitations, as well as doing some lecturing." So that actually proved to be a very useful experience because I knew better than any of my other colleagues at Oregon State then-what the dynamics were in recitation sessions and how to reach those students, what worked and didn't work.

And Berk also asked me to teach the history of chemistry and that course had been taught only a couple of times before, I think, in our department. And when I told my major prof at Cal that I was gonna teach the history of chemistry as one of the courses, he said "there isn't any such course. What are you talking about?" But I knew better because at Wisconsin, we had a marvelous history of 01:19:00chemistry program there with Aaron Ihde who was really world-famous for his history of chemistry programs. I had already learnt quite a bit about what that was all about. So I was happy to go ahead and start teaching that and I had a small and dedicated group of students. And we went way back to the first alchemist and all the way through a number of different kinds of important chemistry people. I taught that, I think, for two or three years. And then it turned out, well, "I guess we aren't gonna teach that anymore-we need you to do other things." And nobody else was willing, or really informed enough, I guess. But it was an interesting run.

So general chemistry lecturing with Max Williams, Vic Logan, Dar Reese. Also part of that on the chemical majors are-Tom Parsons was a very good lecturer in 01:20:00general chemistry, was at one point the Associate Dean of the College of Science. And Tom was a great colleague, boron researcher, and another good and supportive friend through the year, Tom and Velma Parsons. Quite a few people taught gen chem too but those were some of the most important ones at that time. So yeah, it was a heavy teaching load to begin with. And, you know, this is kind of a segue into a different aspect of what I was doing at Oregon State here. Sigma Xi was one of the things that I joined. Sigma Xi was the research society here and it played an important role on campus at that time. The purpose was to enhance the visibility of chemical research. So a lot of people got Sigma Xi 01:21:00awards and they had opportunities to present their research. But we also had national meetings and I was president of that, I think, at about mid-60s maybe. And I went back to a meeting-that year was down near San Diego, in Palm Springs. And one of the things that came out of these Sigma Xi meetings, and our meetings with other colleagues, was that for research accomplishment, you need to have a good course background, but you need to start research early and get into that very early. So that really meshed with my Berkeley experience. But it was very much counter to the then-prominent OSU way of doing things which was very, very 01:22:00heavy in coursework to begin with, with research starting in the third year, and maybe the fourth year in many cases.

So we kind of used the leverage of Sigma Xi to-I'm gonna use the word- "force" the graduate school to change graduate programs and to allow many fewer research credits. And I remember being the graduate representative on research committees, thesis committees for grad students in other departments, most notably oceanography but sometimes forestry, for example, other professional departments. I really loved doing it for oceanography because the talks were all really interesting and the research programs and all-everything that was happening in physical oceanography, June Pattullo, for example, and people like that. But sometimes, I felt my most important role, as a grad representative 01:23:00from chemistry and being in a committee in another department, was to save the graduate students from having too many courses-had to be careful about that because there were traditions in those departments too and I had to be kind of politic about that. But I think that was a big and early thing that had to do with Sigma Xi in that regard.

CP: What was your approach to teaching large classes? There are hundreds of people in these general, or intro to general chemistry classes.

JK: Yeah, that's a really good question. Large classes can be intimidating. So I had to decide right off that there were strategies for overcoming the characteristics of the bigger scenario. You had to reach out to people, 01:24:00especially the students closer on, and engage them in some of the conversation about what you were doing and getting them to assist with some of the lecture experiments; also, I think, trying to get to know as many of them as I could using the chem lab and recitation opportunities. And that's why time spent in the laboratory was always really valuable. Because that was a way where you could see the students more than just a quick interaction. You could look over their shoulders and you know, "what are you doing in lab today?" and getting to know them. So that would partly back into the lecture experience where I could say "Ok, Carl" you know, or "Caroline House, what do you think the answer to this might be?", or "How would this be important in the subject that we're talking about now?" And I think having students have that experience with talking more directly with the lecturer during lecture time was a big part of 01:25:00that. I think a lot of people tried to do that-I was by no means the first to do that. But I decided that would become an important part of what the lecture was. And that really carried over into the Honors gen chem experience which was probably the best teaching experience overall of my career.

CP: Let's talk about that. What was the difference between regular gen chem and Honors gen chem?

JK: The Honors gen chem, they started in 1995 here with the so-called University Honors College program. But number one, the student body of that group was composed of people who have been accepted into the Honors College. So the students there were by and large from across campus and they were not chem majors-one or two chem majors, two or three chemical engineers perhaps-and then all over the university too. So they were not necessarily highly informed in 01:26:00chemistry but they were all highly motivated-so the student body being very receptive to begin with. And then secondly was the size of the course.

We started out with 48 students, two lecture and-rather-two recitation and lab sessions. And I made it a point to be the recitation instructor, so-called, participated in the lab at the same time. We would have a TA there to help me but there would be two of us that are working in the lab. So we had a high degree of interaction between the students and the faculty.

When we started out, the very first lecture would have it on Monday typically and kind of introductory. But then the first recitations were on Tuesday, Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, one each time. And we played a name game 01:27:00right from the very start. We would start with having all 24 students outside in the hall. And they would come in one at a time. I'd welcome them into the room and I would say "Hi, my name is Jim. What is your name?" And it would be like, "Catherine." "Ok. Hi Catherine, glad to have you here." And Catherine would stand here and then the next person would be John-I don't know, maybe this is well known to a lot of people, but-John would come and I would say "Hi, my name is Jim and your name is?" And he would say "John". I'd say "Glad to meet you, John. And glad to introduce you to Catherine. And Catherine, this is John." And so then John moves next to Catherine. And say we would build up this line and, of course, the challenge was when the tenth student came, you'd have to remember what the name was of the first nine students that were there. [Laughs] But I got pretty good at that pretty fast because I focused on that and I knew that it was 01:28:00gonna be important. So then the students would be in order. Then I would have Catherine, John, Carl, Susan, William, and so on. But the students got a hang of this really fast because they suspected, number one, that they were gonna have to do some of this themselves after they were finished up, and, number two, they wanted to screw things up for me so that even though they didn't even know me beyond that point, I can see them kind of, behind my back, they were "ok, you stand here and you stand there. I'm gonna switch places and see if Krueger can figure that out." I got tripped up a couple of times but mostly, I knew that John and Catherine had changed places here. So it was a good challenge.

So then after that, all 24 were in there and they had to do some introducing too. And the result of that was from that day on, starting in that lab and 01:29:00everyday in lecture, and everyday in all of the class through the whole year, everybody knew everybody's name. And they knew that they could talk to each other, get help from each other, where to contact each other. And they put us and the faculty on a first name basis right away. Understandably, even though I was trying to be informal, a lot of people didn't want to say "Well, Jim" so I became known as Dr. Jim. And I kind of breached the gap between the formality. So that contact was really, really important.

We tried an interesting experiment after two years. There was a lot of pressure to have more students-we couldn't take everybody that wanted to get into the course. So we agreed to try 48 to 72, three sections. And we did that. But the problem that came up in the lecture right away was there was some kind of magic, 01:30:00unseen boundary, between 48 and 72, so that when I was trying to talk with the students and get them engaged, not only to answer a few question but to have a lot of teaching come back toward me from questions, the people I could depend on before, to ask questions or to make suggestions, they were climbing up. And with 72 people, it was too many. There was some kind of barrier there. So the next year, we went back to 48, back to the old ways. Everything was fine again. And-I don't know-maybe other people could do this with a hundred or two hundred. But you can see that if you're a student sitting there and you know you're one of a hundred or two hundred people, your interaction times could be pretty limited. But with 48, it was pure magic.

So we had some great students like Jackie Wirz, she was a real spark, kind of 01:31:00off-the-wall student. I remember, I think, the second day in class and this was in Gilbert 124-we had closed lecture doors at the rear. And I always insisted everybody sit down toward the front of the class so we could talk there-you couldn't sit at the back of the room, that was a no-no. So I noticed right away that Jackie wasn't in the room. We were about ten minutes into the lecture and all of a sudden, the two doors at the back of the room burst open and in came Jackie Wirz with two huge boxes of donuts. And she brought them right down to the front of the lecture and plunked them onto the counter in the front. And she said, "Is it ok if we have donuts?" [Laughs] And this was after we were talking 01:32:00some chemistry for about ten minutes. So of course, that broke everybody and everything up. But it was so important in establishing that camaraderie in that section. So it was a neat experience. And she was one of so many students that were just tremendous, stand-out students.

Chief among those was Chris Rosenberg as an undergraduate student in that course. I guess you're interested in hearing more about some of the teaching style and laboratory, and that part of it. So Chris Rosenberg was very helpful in the lab because we started out in the lab, in that very first year, with what we called computer-assisted laboratory teaching. It was something that was already done in the advanced analytical chem lab courses. The simplest case was 01:33:00a pH meter and apparatus. And you would hook up the pH meter to the computer and so you could control what the pH meter did in terms of collecting data and also the output of the data back into the computer so that you could do a chemical titration not just by putting in a phenolphthalein indicator there but you could have this little machine add the sodium hydroxide into the-let's say-acetic acid mixture drop by drop, and keep track of what was added, but to have all that controlled by the computer. And then the data were in the computer. And then you could analyze and have it print out a titration curve, so-called, and analyze for inflection points, and first derivative, and second derivative points in the 01:34:00curve. All of this was very new. It was kind of simple chemistry, but it was new. And we were using this program that was originated in Montana State, a very innovative program. And Steve Mayer and I were the two teachers in the lab. And Steve was the TA and I was the faculty person there in the lab.

So Chris Rosenberg was in the lab there as well. I'm gonna start off by saying that Chris had a physical compromise of having very, very limited vision. So we set it up right in the lab that Chris would have a lab partner that whenever there would be a vision problem, the lab partner would assist Chris and the two of them would work together. And we understood this. So we went into this 01:35:00thinking if this is how we could help Chris Rosenberg. But it turned out, unbeknownst us, that Chris was a computer wizard and genius. He already had created two companies of his own on developing computer technology. So he was really enthusiastic about this computer assistant thing that we were doing and it wasn't long before it was Chris that was teaching us how to make all of these happen. And I solely valued having Chris not only as a real stalwart in making this lab go at it-it wouldn't have been nearly as good without Chris there-but secondly, Chris was so knowledgeable that when the computer assistant stuff broke down and it would be the software that was the problem, we would phone back to Bozeman, Montana, where the Montana State programs were initiated. And 01:36:00they would try to make fixes for us-they would phone in some fix or send it in. And Chris would put it together-he actually worked outside the lab for us. And he'd put it back together again and, sure enough, it would work.

But sometimes it didn't work, So they would say, "Well, we could fix it but it's gonna take several weeks." We didn't have several weeks to wait. So Chris would tell them, "I could fix it for you if you gave me the computer code for how to fix this." They, at first, were very reluctant to do that. But later on they realized, if they let Chris help them, that he could put them back to business right away. So they gave access to this freshman person at another university to help them make their programs go, which were big news across the country at that time. So Chris was just an absolute genius and wonder. Not only did he do that, 01:37:00but he was also, as I learnt shortly, a special employee of the State Department and the Department of Navy. And when they had some special projects for Chris, they would actually fly a helicopter down from Portland to pick him up. I saw him in his Navy guard and he would get in this helicopter and go up to Portland and they would fly him back to Washington D.C. where he would do secret work for the government, work for the Navy. It was totally cool to have a student like this. He wasn't the only student that had many, many gifts to bring, but Chris was a really notable student. Wherever Chris is now, I wish him well and I know that he's doing great things.

CP: We mentioned the Honors College. My understanding is that you helped to get 01:38:00it started. Is that correct?

JK: Yes. Honors at Oregon State. When I first came in 1961, there was an honors program. And that existed up until about 1991 or '92. And we had an honors course in gen chem in the Chem Department. That was taught by Wendell Slabaugh. And it was a very, very neat program. I was never part of that but I always admired, what was going on there. And then because of budgetary limitations in about, I'm gonna say, the late 80s, the honors gen chem course was no longer being taught. Actually it probably pretty much died away around the time that Wendell Slabaugh passed away in the early 80s. And since we kind of missed that 01:39:00experience there, I decided to have an honors recitation that would go along with our chem majors' course. And we recruited a group of about 20 students to be so-called "Honors General Chemistry students". And they did this purely on a volunteer basis. They were good students, they were highly motivated, and they agreed to come to an extra recitation session per week. And we started out doing all of these things which later became that the really hand-on, neat type of gen chem honors things.

But for budgetary reasons, the honors program was disbanded. I'm speaking glowing terms of this honors program because there were a number of people, [name] in history and Gary-I think Cheno [phonetic] was his name-was a very good 01:40:00director. They had a lot of really nice courses they were offering. But then it kind of went by the wayside. But I guess it had been part of a plan by the administration, John Byrne, at that time to take a little breath, gather funding together, and start something that was a real honors college. And so people who had an interest in that were called together and there were a number of people. And Ken Krane was chief among those. Colton from the College of Liberal Arts and Sandy Potter was very interested in that, and there were several others. And we formed a committee together to start making recommendations for an honors 01:41:00college. So we got the administrator go ahead to do this-a dean-search committee was formed and I was asked to be the chair of that search committee. And we had people from across campus on that. That was a really neat experience and we had a number of very good candidates.

It turned out that our best-qualified candidate that we recommended to the Dean and the Vice President was Joe Hendricks who was the chair of Sociology. And the criteria that we thought were really important would be number one, first and foremost, that the person be someone who had outstanding research credentials in his or her own right. And Joe had those because he was the national chairman of 01:42:00one of the big sociology committees. He had done a lot of social research and he was the chair of the department. And research was very important to him. We knew this would be important for the stature and standing of the Honors College. We knew it would be important to track the best faculty there, and we wanted to make it an honors college in which the Dean would have an equal footing with the other Deans-all of them were academic and [inaudible] research programs: College of Science, College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Engineering-that the Honors College would not be regarded as like "well, that's a teaching college. They don't need support, they don't do research." So that was one of the primary 01:43:00reasons that Joe was selected.

But another feature, just as important, was the kind of personality who would be highly engaging with students and faculty. And Joe was that in spades. He could charm the socks off of anybody and everybody. And Joe was just so wonderful in attracting family, faculty. And he became a family-that word wasn't a mistake-really creating the honors family which consisted of the faculty, the support staff, and the students, everybody working together in pretty much a family type setting to make this honors enterprise really grow. So he was a marvelous choice for that. And it started out with Joe Hendricks and one secretary in a little suite of rooms. And I think it was Marilyn Anderson who was the secretary, and then Ken Krane, and Lee [phonetic], and Sandy Potter, and 01:44:00a few other people that were gonna start teaching and getting the incoming students. Everything just very vastly expanded from there. I said, "Let's make a honors gen chem course. Full-year course, lectures, recitation, lab all the way through. And it was the first full-year multi-section course that we had. And biology was in there too very early on-became a really important player. It was a really great opportunity to develop a lot of new ideas and new teaching things, and have association with all the other people in honors gen chem, associated with these others. A lot of really great early teachers there. Carol 01:45:00taught English and being an advisor there. Bill Bogley was in on it very early, and from that matter was a really great asset too-he was one of the real leaders. Ken Krane helped a lot, I think, would be the number one guy, the root-had made this all going-that was acting behind the scenes to begin with, to make all of this a reality.

CP: And a bit later on, Mary Jo Nye. So you collaborated with her on the colloquium class. Tell me about that.

JK: Right, Mary Jo Nye. So everybody who knows something about Honors College knows that a very important part of it was having not just the courses there but in an associated set of learning experiences-the honors colloquia. And right from the start, a number of these were offered. These were small, up to 10 to 12 groups of students and one or more faculty people teaching-could be any subject 01:46:00that the faculty person wanted. Mike Burgett, for example, taught a very popular course on bees-not only about bees but what influence they had and a lot of things that people do as humans, and a lot of very humorous kinds of things.

So Mary Jo Nye and I decided that we would like to put together a course on Linus Pauling to take advantage of the Pauling collection which had just newly arrived at Oregon State and was starting to be set up there. So that became a very neat, new teaching experience. The idea of the class was to exploit the new collection Linus and Ava Helen had donated to the university. And a lot of these 01:47:00marvelous research papers and all of their life things were there in the library. So let's take advantage of this-Mary Jo and I thought we could do this. It was a great pleasure working with her because she is a superb historian of science, so knowledgeable. I think we formed a really good collaboration right from the start. We went over to the collection with this group of students that we recruited, about 12 students. And had an opportunity to start looking through some of the collection. And I've gotta say, to start with, none of these would have been possible here without the immediate assistance and urging of two important people, one of whom is Cliff Mead who played such a big role in making 01:48:00this all happen and getting us started. And he just encouraged me and Mary Jo to get this going. And then Chris Petersen who worked with Cliff and helped develop so much of this and continues on with all of this research.

So, you know, here was our opportunity to look at something from Pauling's background. The thing was when we met in the library, there was no big Pauling room available. It was all like in a storage area. So we had to work with Cliff. And he said "Well, what do you wanna have?" So we brought up various things we wanted to see, like early research notebooks and some letters to notable people that Linus had written, and some of his undergraduate things. So when we brought the students into the class-this was over in the lobby-the very first thing they did was went into the little mock-up room that showed Linus' offices that had 01:49:00existed there back at the CalTech. But anyways, the first thing the students did was to see this. And then they got to hold Linus Pauling's two medals which was always a huge thing, passing around the Nobel Peace Prize and the prize in chemistry. And I could just imagine the impact with these students going back and telling their parents when they got back home, "Guess what I did at Oregon State? I got to hold Linus Pauling's medals." What better advertising for OSU could it be than something like that? So that was always a great feature of everything.

And then, we had the students looking at the research notebooks, or the student notebooks, and the letter. And we made a discovery or two ourselves here and what was in there. I'll just mention one thing. One of the students were looking through and reading one of the research notebooks that Linus-let me get this 01:50:00right, Linus was in his second year of research at CalTech, I think, and he was doing X-ray crystallographer and-on this particular day's notes, put at the very little top was the three words, "I love you". And that was a little thing to Ava Helen, who was his research help mate at some times. And I'm pretty darn sure that this was the first time that anybody had actually seen that at Oregon State. Cliff and me got kind of excited when he saw that. And that's kind of a lore now about that little thing. But that was a student undergraduate research discovery, if you will, they did that.

So we learned a lot about Linus Pauling here in this book. The main emphasis of this colloquium was each student would go into the collection and they would 01:51:00pick out some area that they wanted to focus on. Like, for example, it would be-that takes something maybe less would know-Linus suffered from severe life-threatening kidney ailment. One of the bright young women in the room, she picked up on this and she said, "I want to find out everything I can about that time and how Ava Helen handled this, and how this worked out." So she went back through and looked into the collection of letters and things that Ava Helen had written to friends. She would write something like "I had to help out Linus today and keep him on course with his special diet that he needs." What the students were able to do then, was to formulate some kind of research hypothesis, and go in, and find actual evidence in this collection. And then 01:52:00toward the end of the term, each person would talk about what they were finding there. So there was a lot of sharing of what we were finding, as well as Mary Jo and I filling in some highlights of Pauling's life and some other things-how what he was doing related to other work that was being done at different schools and in Europe as well. That was where Mary Jo was in, just a superb colleague because she knew a lot of these and I was pretty uninitiated with a lot of that.

And then we wanted a work product to come out of this so each student wrote, kind of like a mini thesis almost, a paper. It was a fair bit of work and they had to really put it out there-what they had found. And then we said "we're gonna all of these things into a little bound notebook and, at the end of the term, it's gonna become part of the collection-not of the Pauling collection but part of the Pauling Room collection."

And we did that, I think, for three or four years. One of the highlights for me 01:53:00was a time when I came into the Pauling reception, Pauling's Son, Linus Jr., was there and he was looking through things. And I think Chris was in the room there and we were looking at things. And I asked Chris if he could bring out those little notebooks that our students have done. So those were produced forthwith. And we showed Linus Jr. the students had been studying the research that his father had done and his parents-Ava Helen was part of that as well. So I think he was really impressed with that-the students today were still living and learning the experience of his family and the legacy, which they left, to not only Oregon State but really all of humanity.

CP: Skipping around a bit, I know you were involved with the chemistry teaching 01:54:00mentor program. That was initiated in the mid-90s in the chemistry department, is that correct?

JK: This is the chem mentor program?

CP: Yeah, the chemistry teaching mentor program.

JK: The teaching mentor program, right. In about '95 we started a special program to assist chemistry graduate students who knew that they wanted to go into college level teaching with a more advanced experience. The idea wasn't unique to me or to our department. Ken Krane was wanting something like that in physics so he suggested something like I might be interested in doing something like that. And indeed, I was. So we started a program.

I'm not taking too long to describe this but the essence was to take one of our grad students interested in teaching, four or five at a time would be in a group, and we would have a little seminar that would support this effort but the 01:55:00main thing was to pair each student up with a faculty person and they would help design a course. A typical thing was a gen chem section. And they would identify before the term got started, ideally, and they would work with one of the people, like Rick Nafshun or Carroll DeKock, and Kelvin Gable was teaching some. A number of the people were involved there. And they were trying to have some input into how to formulate the track. Of course, they went mainly the way the faculty person was gonna do it. But, you know, our students would ask questions, "Why do you have this in the list of contents, and not that?", "Why do we have three chem midterms instead of two if there's so much work?", or "If the most 01:56:00teaching is happening in prep for the midterms, why don't you have three or four instead of just one or two?"

So these were all interactions that were set up there. We've had probably three dozen or more students that have gone through this program over the years. They're almost all out teaching now somewhere. This little seminar that we had is the thing that I have continued to be involved with to this day-I still meet with the program. And Rick Nafshun now is the head of that program. It's a lot of fun to do that. But Rick Nafshun himself, an instructor in chemistry for quite a number of years, is just a marvelous personality. He is one of the biggest forces in gen chem at Oregon State. He makes so many things go. And he has the energy to make this teaching mentor program go and recruit people into 01:57:00the program. So in this teaching mentor program, people are involved in learning how to construct a course, how to decide which topics to leave out, how to do testing, how to interact with students, how to interact with administration, how to get funding, how to interview for a job-all the these things that make a really first-rate teaching experience for students in which create a person who's really ready to come out of the box and start teaching right away.

So when you're looking for a job professionally in teaching, it's not nearly enough to say that I had a teaching TA experience. Because almost everybody has had that. But when they could talk about this kind of teaching mentor experience, with helping teach and design courses, they could say that I 01:58:00co-lectured with Nafshun. One of the criteria is that the faculty person be present at almost all of the lectures so that there could be immediate feedback as to what was working well and what didn't go right. And this is really strongly in contrast with what we hear when we're trying to recruit new faculty and we read teaching resumes and they say "I did three lectures for Professor X when she was away in a national meeting." And then the prof. would write a letter, they would say "Well, when I was gone, when I came back I heard that the student did a really good job here." Well, that's not nearly as good as the hands-on experience of saying "I was watching Catherine teach full sections. I watched to see what her interactions worked with the students and whether there 01:59:00were better ideas we worked on to make them better." So these people, mostly, all of them are teaching, from being a department chair to the University of Portland, to teaching at the Evergreen State College and the various at the community colleges around the Oregon and Northwest area. In fact, since we have a number of them fairly local, we've been getting together with our current students, meeting in Portland with one of the breweries up there or something. And we have an all-day section-our students meeting the faculty that have gone through the program. So it's been a really good family-type experience there.

So, a lot of fun. It continues for me and it continues to be a strong tradition. We have three really highly-motivated students doing it right now, helping plan some new courses for the department, one specific for chem majors. And we've had 02:00:00already two years' experience of planning. And a couple of students were teaching in the first go round of that. So it's been a really interesting thing. And the department's utilized their talents as lecturers for a term, even though they're still graduate students. But they were highly experienced coming into it so it worked out well. So, a great program, not very common in other departments. In fact, I'm not sure that I know of another chemistry department that does something like this. So it's a real plus for Oregon State.

CP: Yeah, definitely. You've authored a couple of lab manuals. Tell me about that experience.

JK: Yeah, those lab manuals for gen chem. Right from the start and through the years, here we have tended to use in-house lab manuals. They're often closely 02:01:00associated with or based on the same kind of experiments that commercial lab manuals would have. We've always wanted to do them in house. And that's been a major upper for me because we write experiments here and parts of them that are not working, we get rid of them. In fact, at the end of each term, one of the things we've traditionally done is ask students to evaluate the lab experiments and say "We're going to leave out one of them next year. Which one should we get rid of?", "We're gonna have a new type of lab experiment and here are some choices. Which one of these do you think would be the best in your experience?" So that the students have direct input. And I think we have learned a lot from our students in what works well and what doesn't work as well. But we always have this feeling, to kind of a fresh approach in the lab and keeping it as 02:02:00relevant as we can. And we don't have to wait for a new edition to come out from whatever national publisher.

And the only commercially published thing that I have had was the cation and anion chemistry with Wadsworth publishing. And that focused on the chemistry which I first learned at University of Wisconsin in my first year. It was inorganic chemistry of ions in solution. And that introduces students to a lot of the chemistry, fairly common and important, elements like cobalt, iron, nickel, zinc, potassium, calcium, a lot of different things. And it's a highly motivational lab because it involves unknowns here. And students learn how this chemistry works and then they're given a series of unknowns where they have to identify by a series of experiments-what's actually present in the unknowns. The 02:03:00students usually like that a lot because they like the challenge of the unknowns. We gave that up some years ago because now the importance of that kind of chemistry was not as great as it used to be. So we decided that "ok, there are other kinds of things we'll do." We had a higher turn at one point and then it took five weeks, and then we wrote it down a little more until there wasn't quite enough left of it too. But that was the kind of work that really motivated students. So that was a good lab manual, I think, to create a really good teaching development experience.

CP: Your daughter got a Ph.D. in Chemistry from OSU in 1998. What was that like for you?

JK: Right, my daughter Carolyn Krueger was a graduate student. Undergrad at U of O, then she came up here. She was interested in environmental chemistry. And she 02:04:00worked with Jennifer Field who is an associate in the environmental chemistry side. So it was really neat having Carolyn as a graduate student in the department. Carolyn has always been big on the outdoors and the environment, still is.

So she undertook this work which brought her to work for three summers, I think, on Cape Cod where they had some really good applied environmental research based on Otis Air Force Base which had, unfortunately, developed a real environmental problem with the waters, underground aquifers, which were flowing from the base out to nearby communities. So Carolyn worked on that. Bonnie and I went to visit her for a couple of summers and had interesting first-time experiences on Cape 02:05:00Cod. So it was very neat having Carolyn as a graduate student, very proud of her and her work.

I have two other daughters, Melonie Krueger who owns an upgrade store on auto body business on Orcas island, and also Diane Krueger who is an M.D. anesthesiologist in Corvallis. And Diane also came back as a student. She was a music major, went to the U of O. And after a little bit of professional experience with music, decided that she was interested in medicine. So she came back to Oregon State to initiate as a post-bacc in a medical training program. And she was a student of my big gen chem honers-not the honors but the science major class. So of course, there was this interesting thing of here was my 02:06:00daughter in the students and I was gonna give her anywhere from an A to a D, depending on what you earned, and this was going to influence her entrance into medical school. So Diane was an excellent student, always has been, and she was one of the top students in the class too-so I needn't have worried. But Diane was invaluable in giving me feedback information. And it was instrumental and more than one improvement to recitations, and one guise or another. So have valued very much having both Carolyn and Diane here in Corvallis where she still practices medicine at-was head of anesthesiology at the hospital for a number of years and now works as an independent anesthesiologist in Corvallis.

CP: I want to shift gears a bit and collect a little bit of institutional 02:07:00memory. And the first thing I want to ask you about is Gilbert Addition. So this came about, you've been at OSU for 20 years at this point, and you were the building dedication chairman when the building was dedicated. I'm interested in knowing about the story of Gilbert Addition and the impact that it made.

JK: Yeah, Gilbert Hall, a venerable old building, has seen a lot of students come and go and it's never quite been adequate to the task. So when we had a big new development initiatives sponsored by the NSF-and David Shoemaker was really important in making a lot of these happen-we secured funding for a new building. The trick is to get funding and to be high enough up on the priority list, and if everything come together so the teaching lab seemed to have enough appeal 02:08:00that we got this new lab, just adjacent to Gilbert Hall, fourth-floor laboratory, state-of-the-art teaching facilities, very nice indeed. It's the place in which we did this new chem teaching that we're talking about. And we did have a dedication ceremony for that and a lot of notable people were there. I guess I played some role in that-I don't remember that too well. But it was a very important addition to science and to science teaching at Oregon State. And obviously enjoyed support from some very important people from outside the university. In fact, that's been a real characteristic of chemistry and science. Here we've had and enjoyed very, very good support from a number of individuals outside the university. And of course, it was important for the new Linus Pauling Science building that provided space for the Linus Pauling Science 02:09:00Institute and for part of the Chemistry Department. So all of us are very grateful to all of those donors out there who made all this possible over the years.

I mentioned in my talk earlier about Wendell Slabaugh and his time-lapse photography. His laboratory was just outside where the new teaching lab is to be set up. And he set up his camera in the window, looking at the ground up progress from the basement to the top floor of the new teaching lab-time lapse. So when you look at one of his videos-these are still in existence-you can see all of the workers scurrying around, creating, you can see the building going up level by level.

One of the amusing things about this, to see the workers scouring around, is the idea of taking cigarette breaks every once in a while. And you can see people 02:10:00going over to the side and lighting up cigarette, and huffing on the cigarette. And then they would scour back to work. This would be a perfect work study situation-how much time is lost by people smoking cigarettes on the job. [Laughs] It was perfect. Well, in all, it's been a marvelous teaching laboratory but-it hasn't been enough, we really very much needed the new space that is part of the new Linus Pauling Center.

CP: You mentioned David Shoemaker. I want to ask about him and his wife Clara, important people in the history of this department.

JK: Yeah. They came from MIT, David and Clara both. Brought along tremendous expertise in x-ray crystallography. And Dave came in as our new Chairman then, and he served very ably in that capacity for a number of years. One of the first 02:11:00challenges that he met was getting the coordination for support for this new building, the teaching lab, but also for corralling a lot of different research interest among faculty and running the whole show. Dave was a very energetic colleague with a lot of connections on outside world, and really helped move the department forward in many respects. We've enjoyed having some really good chairs over the years here. And Dave was very instrumental, I think, in getting very high level chairman position here. And Darrah Thomas continued, and Caroll DeKock, John Westall, and Rich, serving most recently here, have all been wonderful contributors to that. But Dave and Clara were a real research team. And I know-I think it's been recorded in other archives-that Clara ran into the 02:12:00anti-nepotism roles here where she could not really be appointed in the statue to which she deserved. But John Byrne, with the help of Ken Hedberg, figured out what to do about that. And Clara was, right from the start, a very important research colleague. And she helped me, for example, in X-ray crystallography, something I knew nothing about, got me through the crystal structure. And that was back in the days when you had to input data by taking over IBM punch cards to the computer center. And young people take note-the way to do that economically was to take the punch cards over there between one and three in the morning. So I did that for quite a number of sessions. We got some good results on it, very thankful to Clara. Very good friend and a very helpful person.

And I want to cycle back to Lise Hedberg at this point because Lise was in the 02:13:00same situation that she was a very valued faculty colleague in terms of research support. And at first, she could not be appointed to that position because she was Ken's wife. But MacVicar-I think I misspoke before-it was MacVicar at the time that helped all of this happen here and got positions for both of them, again with Hedberg's help. So here we had these two women in the department, both really outstanding researchers in their own right. Lisa, doing all of the electron diffraction, support for Ken Hedberg, and Clara supported not only Dave's X-ray crystallographer but her own research. And Clara's background was out of the Netherlands. She went to England during the German occupation. So she 02:14:00did work with Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in X-ray crystallography. I think it was at Oxford, one of those two. Clara did work on the early structural elucidation of coenzyme B12, a very important nutrient which remarkably contains cobalt, the same cobalt that I was talking about earlier, at its central core, which is absolutely essential in mediating the action of cobalt-12. So it's Clara that was one of the co-discoverers of the fact that cobalt is an essential and key element in the function of coenzyme B12.

So when I was doing general chem lecturing and all of the different courses that I was teaching, I could talk about the work of Lisa Hedberg when I was talking 02:15:00bout electron diffraction, then I could talk about the work of Clara Shoemaker in coenzyme B12 when we're talking about structural inorganic chemistry. And together with talking about Ken's work with electron diffraction, I could tell the students, you know, not only is this world-important research but you could actually go downstairs in the basement, the same building we're in, and these people were working down there and they would love to talk to you if you would to go down and see first-hand what the research is like, and meet a renowned researcher as they were. I don't know how many students took advantage of that-some of them did but I think it showed the importance to them of first line research and in Oregon State, it was that kind of department. So, wonderful colleagues, David and Clara Shoemaker, Ken and Lise Hedberg.

CP: And connected by a common individual, Linus Pauling.

JK: Right. Ken, of course, is legendary here for his knowledge and interaction with Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling. And so much of that has been documented so well and so carefully by the Special Collections at Oregon State library. I know that they have been front runners in the research to make collections like that accessible and anyone in the world could go and find out about the collection and all of the information of Linus and Ava Helen that they might want to know by getting online at going to Oregon State's Special Collections and Library here.

CP: What interactions did you have with Pauling? I know he visited campus several times.

JK: Yeah, for many years, he didn't come back. But then toward the end of his career, he seemed to, first, be wanting to come back, and then really delighted 02:17:00to do so. So I had the opportunity to speak with him over dinner a couple of times, such an engaging person, so connected with so many things going on in the world, really, very interesting person to talk with. A lot of interesting Linus stories. One of them was that he would come back and talk in the chem department and would be about, ostensibly, a chemical subject. But the talks would always segue at some point to vitamin C research. This had upsides and downsides too. And often people would tell Linus ahead of time that we want to hear about your nuclear chemistry research or whatever, and the vitamin C work will be important 02:18:00and we'll talk about that in another setting. But Linus always segued into vitamin C research. An appropriate result, you know, who knew more about it's importance at that time than Linus Pauling.

I remember times when he came to chem department picnics over in Avery Park. We'd have a bunch of undergrads there as well as grad students. And Linus would go and perch on top at one of the picnic tables and a number of students would gather around him. And they would ask him questions. He was very generous with his time, smiling and joking. What a great opportunity for these students to not only know about his importance and relevance to developments in science and humanity in general with his peace work, but to get to see him, interact with him. And of course, Ava Helen deserved so much of the credit for peace 02:19:00lectureship and her work with peace. She and Linus really worked together. And she was the instigator of a lot of a lot of Linus' interest and work in the peace area.

And one of ways in which this is manifested is the Ava Helen Pauling Annual Peace Lectureship. And I decided it would be really interesting to work in greater detail with that. So I volunteered for the committee and kind of worked with some of the people that came to speak there, Arun Gandhi, and Mairead Corrigan from Ireland. And Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, came, a real peace maker in his own right, also getting a chance to interact casually behind the scenes with these people. That was really a neat experience.

CP: Noam Chomsky as well, correct?

JK: Pardon?

CP: Noam Chomsky?

JK: Yes, Noam Chomsky, definitely, yeah. Forgot about him. Bringing these people to Oregon State was not only enhanced OSU but really were such an honor to the memory of Ava Helen and Linus, two truly unique individuals in the world in the areas that they excelled in. And the Pauling family-I mentioned Linus Jr.-Linda Kamb, their daughter, came back for these peace lectures and I had the great pleasure working with Linda. And she was such a warm person and really was very, very grateful that Oregon State was helping to promote, keeping the memories alive for her parents and all of the contributions that they made. I'm just 02:21:00gonna throw this in here, another little Pauling thing. When Pauling came back to visit, he was always very much in demand. And one time, there was a big gathering for him and Ava Helen over in the MU. And everybody wanted a chance to talk to Pauling. And one of our students were over there too. And one of them was a young woman, a graduate student from Colombia, the country of Colombia. And she was interested in meeting Pauling but it was pretty hard to get any audience with Pauling so I said "Botonia [phonetic]''-that was her name, Botonia Diborcheno [phonetic] - "stick close to me and when Pauling turns this way, we're gonna go at him." So the time came, I grabbed Pauling, I said "I'd like to introduce you to a graduate student of mine, Botonia Diborcheno." And I said, 02:22:00"She is a graduate student from the country of Colombia." And Pauling said, "Oh, really? Colombia? You should know"-and he was talking about the time- "that that's one of the countries where cavies, or, genuine pigs live and thrive." He said, "You have a lot of them down there." And he said "I want to talk to you about that and about Vitamin C." So he said, "Please come on, sit with me in the sofa." At the time he went over and did that, much to the dismay of many notables who were looking for their turn to speak with Linus. I'm sure they got him back soon enough but that showed his interest not only in students but in this vitamin C thing that was so much a part of who he was, what he cared about.

CP: A couple of concluding questions and the first is about the department, the Chemistry Department. You've been affiliated with it for nearly 50 years 02:23:00now-it's evolved and matured. Interested to get your sense of where it's at now and how it's gotten to that point.

JK: Yeah, that's a good question. I have been retired from the department for a number of years now. But I kind of keep track of what's going on and they have some very accomplished young faculty. I'm really encouraged to see that and some really promising researching things going on. Still, one of the major departments in bringing in outside research funding and continues to be very strong now-a good program of bringing outside speakers, continuing support for the Linus Pauling annual medal and lectureship that is given. You know, I'm very 02:24:00optimistic for the future here. But I think it's necessary to say, too, that the real potential of the department and other departments has always been weathering somewhat by the funding restrictions. And that's part of university life. It's not a criticism of any one administrator or anything but, certainly, more has always been possible here. And when we get outside support from donors for research, and from funding institutions, it's always highly important, so very important to the department. So I'm optimistic and I hope that a lot of the people that care about chemistry and science at Oregon State will consider 02:25:00continuing their support and amplifying that, and realizing that it's going to a very important cause, both academically here to serve students but also to serve the greater gates of the science and the Oregon community. I'm enthusiastic about that.

I can still see things happening because I'm working with the teaching mentor program, And that's part of having all of these going in some way. I think the future is very bright. But it's always a work in progress and work needs to be done. And I think the same thing for OSU. We've gone through with several marvelous presidents here. John Byrne really brought us into the modern era administratively-did so much for the university over all, and created the Honors College. But the whole idea of having deans effective in certain areas and not 02:26:00having the president trying to be responsible for so much. I mean, John brings in Oceanography, lit with one of the world centers now, not only a few world centers to begin with-one of the world centers. And that's all the early people, like Byrne getting started here-Wayne Burt was, obviously, the first person, but-John Byrne made so much of this go. John is surely a wonderful colleague, friends of Oregon State.

And Paul Risser, Paul and Les Risser. Paul, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago. Les is such a great friend of Oregon State and I think next month will be dedicating a memorial to Paul at the OSU Cascades campus. I wish I could be there-I know I'm gonna be out of town during that time. But very important 02:27:00friends. And then Ed-and Beth Ray-I think has been a tremendous president. Beth had been a marvelous first lady, so invested in students and faculty here, a very big player here for the OSUAA, return of the association. Les Risser helped start that, by the way. And Beth Ray was a very good friend. She and Ed always invited the OSUAA board over to their house for dinners. And that's one of the ways we got to know them better or certainly engender their support for the return of the association too. I think the university has been in very good hands, about parking and the effects on community, all of that, sure. Every university has problems like that. And the growth of the university, the tremendous 1.14-billion-dollar enterprise that's Ed's, maybe in his doing, to 02:28:00get that all started. But so many people contributed to that in making it happen at OSU. And so many wonderful contributors are there that are responsible for a lot of big things that we have. For Linus Pauling building, itself have been enjoying a lot of support from that particular initiative here. Athletic as well, and so many other things at OSU.

So the future of OSU, I think, is very bright. It's focused on collaboration in key areas that are very important to people in oceanography and agriculture, and forestry, outreach, all of these things, and science-all of the roles that science can play in the environment and all of those associated things, highly important. OSU and go Beavs, as this really, absolutely a marvelous institution, 02:29:00a great place to send your sons and daughters, and to invest your money if you want to support higher education.

CP: I agree. [Laughs]

JK: And it's been a great place for me, professionally, to work. I've never actually thought about leaving Oregon State. It's always creative for me, the opportunities to do so many of the things that I wanted to do. It's been about people. And for me, it's always been about creating things for people and creating things with people. So many marvelous opportunities to do just that. And a lot of people continued the tradition of doing just that. The Honors College now, under the leadership of-it started with Joe Hendricks of course, we talked about that-Dan Arp, coming in and doing a great job of amplifying 02:30:00everything that was being done there. And then Toni Doolen, current dean, now making engineering such a big part of that. And Toni's a marvelous administrator, making so many good things happen there.

We have 1000 students plus now in the Honors College. These are the best and brightest from not only Oregon but a lot of places. That's taken the work and the dedication only of those deans, but the support of the faculty teaching in it and the support of the president and the provost all being behind this operation. So we have easily, I think, the best honors college on the West Coast, of really vibrant and growing type of organization. And that's all about people and making things happen. You know, my opportunity to be a part of that has been just a wonderful thing for me. So I'm very grateful for having that 02:31:00opportunity. My choice to come to Oregon State was never second-guessed. It's been the very place to grow academically. So much has been accomplished. And the environment here is just as good as when I decided to come here. The beach is marvelous, it's over there. The mountains, the skiing, everything is really the place to be if you want that kind of environment. It's been really, very good indeed. And this whole program of archiving the thoughts of faculty here I think is a great idea too. And a way of preserving some institutional memory. So people have some perspective in, you know, what things were like before they came and how to build on that for the future. Remembering the past and implementing the best parts of the past, that's always a great way to go forward, I think. Again, heads off to the archives, and to the University 02:32:00Special Collections for making that happen.

CP: Thank you so much, Jim.