Harry MacCormack Oral History Interview, December 28, 2017

CHRIS PETERSEN: Okay, today is December 28th, 2017, and we are in the Valley Library with Harry MacCormack, and this is an interview for the Oregon Tilth Oral History Project. Today's interview will focus primarily on Harry's upbringing and his path through academia and his association with Oregon State University. So, I'll begin at the beginning, and I'll ask you, where were you born?

HARRY MACCORMACK: I was born in Binghamton, New York, and I grew up in Chenango Bridge, New York. I'm born in '42, so it was World War II years, and one important thing from that time is that there was food rationing, fuel rationing, and almost everybody was growing their gardens and hunting and fishing to get food. So, that's how my first ten years, that's what I knew.

CP: Interesting. Tell me more about that.

HM: And then Chenango Bridge right at the Korean War time, like a lot of other places, went through a huge change. Now, a lot of that was the result of General Eisenhower when he became president, putting in the freeway system and the first 00:01:00box store, we would call it now, but they were called supermarkets in those days. It was an East Coast store and it came in in Nimmonsburg, and that was about oh, five, six miles down the road, down where we all had freezer lockers to put all of our fish and stuff that we wanted because nobody had freezers at home yet much. And as soon as that store came in and World War II stopped, it was the Korean War still, but the whole consciousness changed, and I saw that change. I lived in that change, and it changed to "we don't have to do this; we can get it all at the store," and that stuck with me. That's part of why I've done all that stuff in agriculture.

CP: Can you tell me a bit about your family background?

HM: So, on my mom's side of the family was the Yagers, and they lived up by Oneonta. Grandpa Yager was known as a truck farmer, and this is another one of 00:02:00my lessons. So, as a young man, he was in his probably late seventies, early eighties-I don't know, he was pretty old and pretty frail-but he had been known in that area as a horse farmer and a truck farmer, and what I learned by listening to him was that what kept everybody fed in the household was that he also worked as a railroad mechanic. And I also knew that in Chenango Bridge, most of the people that were farming and making milk, making meat-that was most of what was going on there-most of those people had some kind of off-farm income. And this is back, you know, in the forties and fifties when we still had the old style agriculture going on.

So, this thing that goes on now where-I just asked somebody last week when I was over here-we're up to about 83% of farms in the United States have an off-farm income, and the rest of them have subsidies, so basically all the farms are 00:03:00subsidized one way or another, either through double work or through the government. So, that was a lesson I learned from Grandpa. And his farm was set up to do some vegetables, but it was mostly an old European style farm, which was mostly what I grew up with, which was animals, focused on cows and dairy, but they also had usually some sheep wandering around and some meat animals, you know, sometimes pigs, not always. Chickens, always.

So, that style of farming is what I grew up around and what I knew, and then my dad and mom had a huge vegetable garden during the war, and they kept that up until we moved to California. So, we had a pantry and we had a storage area in the basement where we stored beaucoup, lots of potatoes. She canned everything. We were pretty much able to weather any storm, just by what we had right there 00:04:00in the local community. And that, that style of living in a community where people can count on their food being grown and their food being there, even if they're not farming, is what I use as a model really when doing all this local food work.

CP: But your parents were not farmers, per se?

HM: My dad grew up farming and my mom grew up on a farm. My mom actually had an 18-year career in Binghamton before she condescended to marry him, so they were a little older when they got married. He grew up on a farm and went to school-college-in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the farm was north of there, the Dilts Farm, which his mother died and his mother's brother took him over. And so, he was in the Dilts family there, and I'm named after Harry Dilts actually.

And even that farm, which was probably 200 or 300 acres, Harry Dilts, my dad's 00:05:00uncle, always was off-farm. He ran the postal service for the area. Well, he actually was a postman. He'd take all day doing the postal route because he liked to talk to people. My dad said he could do it in two hours. Anyway, he was the postal guy, and he also was big in the Masonic lodge. He was a 33rd degree Mason, and he was also a Knights Templar. So he-and he stated some time that I remember "I don't like farming," and my dad told me that "Harry doesn't like farming.

So, his wife ran the farm and they had all these hired hands. They had a huge table where they fed everybody. And we lived down there actually at one point for almost a year after I was born. I was probably about three, three or four, something like that. And that was, again, one of these kinds of traditional family, passed-on farms that was, we call them farms in the middle now, if they're even left. Not very many of them survived the change in the eighties.

CP: What was the type-what was Chenango Bridge as a community? Why did you live there?

HM: Chenango Bridge was north of Binghamton, and my dad was one of the first IBMers. So, there's Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott, and if you went over the hill from Chenango Bridge, you'd come down into Endicott. So, he-and there was a guy up the road that worked at Ansco, which was down there too, a film company that was German, actually, and suffered a lot during the war, and there were a couple other guys that I think must have worked at IBM, but they had a carpool they would use in the winter to go over the hill down because it was snowing. They had these-a button on the dashboard that would drop sand in front of the snow tires, and it was all this stuff they had worked out.

So, it was both he and my mom wanted to have their own place, and I suppose they were able to buy that little half-acre for not very much and build a house. It was a small house. And it was at the end of what was already called I think 00:07:00Wisconsin Drive, but there wasn't anything-there wasn't much before our house, and there wasn't anything after our house when we were first there and I was a kid, and then from the time I was probably four or five, they started building the houses around it, and now it's a blanket of houses, and all the farms that are there are gone.

So, that's that transition period that happened so fast. And then my dad got the word to go down and put together the Poughkeepsie plant, and he just flew back and forth on that one, but then they sent him to California and he put the San Jose plant in. I didn't know he sited it until after he died. They had some guys at his funeral that told me that. But he gave us a call in 1957 just ahead of Christmas and told us to pack everything, that we were moving to California.

CP: And what type of plants were these?

HM: IBM, manufacturing. He was a development engineer, so his-

CP: Electronics?

HM: Yeah. His patent is-one of his famous patents is the gold disk pack in the mainframe computer. So, he had about 39 patents to his name and was a Cornell grad. He actually wanted to be a doctor and couldn't get the money together during the Depression, so he just went and did a generalist master's is kind of what we would call it now, but it was biology and chemistry at Cornell, and then got all involved in the alumni association. We used to go to football games up there when I was a little kid because of that. He was on some kind of alumni board, I think.

CP: So, I gather you were involved with this large garden.

HM: In what?

CP: You were involved with the large garden then?

HM: Yes, although I was a stubborn kid. I think most kids are stubborn, but I was real stubborn. So, I wanted my own plot, which I got, and I had to help with all the other stuff, but I had my own plot. And at five years old I had a red 00:09:00cart and I would pick stuff off my plot and go up the gravel road and go to people's doors and try to sell it, and the first door I went to [laughs] was a woman who opened the door and I said "you want some tomatoes?" and she went "toe-MA-toes, young man," and slammed the door in my face. So, I went home crying, and my dad said "well, go try somebody else.

So, I had this little route in the area. So, there were houses up there on River Road already, and a few people would buy stuff from me, and that was all I had. And then I turned that into-into those days you had Boys' Life Magazine when you were part of Boy Scouts, and on the back, they had an EMPIRE card thing that you could sell Christmas cards and sachets and stuff, so I sent that in and I became a salesman. By the time I was about 11 years old, I was doing close to 1,000 a year selling stuff off that EMPIRE card thing, sachets and cards and crap 00:10:00[laughs], going door to door. So, I'm kind of naturally a marketer, I guess, and when I had to do that with the farm, it was no problem [laughs].

CP: Where do you think this came from, this impulse?

HM: My dad was a natural marketer too, and I don't know where he got it, and his father he never knew, but the farmers he grew up around, you know, that he marketed for them. When he was going back and forth to Cornell, he'd take stuff from Dalton, Pennsylvania and put it in his Model A and go to all the little mom and pop stores on the way up the road to Cornell. So, I guess it comes from him because my mom's not a salesperson. That's where I got the writing probably, is from her, although both of them wrote some, but she was like me; she wrote every day pretty much. Not this kind of stuff, but maybe that's where I-

CP: Tell me more about that, this development of the love of the written word as a boy, I assume.

HM: Well, as a young kid, one of the first pieces of writing we did was my sister and I decided that we would develop-my dad had a mimeograph machine for 00:11:00the Chenango Bridge Civic Association, it's sitting there on a table. So, we decided we'd develop a paper, and it was called The Weekly Snooper, and we had phone lines with a phone lady. So, you could pick up the line and listen to seven other people's conversations, and that's how we found out a lot of stuff, and then sometimes we'd just ask the phone lady what's going on because she knew everything. And so, then we had this-we'd write, and we had this little mimeographed one-page sheet we'd have out every week that was kind of like the gossip of what's going on. And I don't-I don't know how many people we gave them to, but that was the beginning.

And then, across the road kind of up from us, the Andersons [phonetic] built a house, and they had two kids our age. Kenny Anderson [phonetic] and I were buddies. There was enough kids, rural kids there, and we were all doing stuff together all the time, playing football or whatever; going out making huts or whatever; we decided we were going to put on a play for our parents. So, I wrote a play, and I think I probably was about eight years old when we did that. And 00:12:00we charged our parents a dime to come to it. We did it in Kenny's basement and we charged them a dime, and then we charged them for popcorn, and I think they paid for the popcorn that we popped, you know, but... So, we had people come to a little play we did. I don't remember what it was about, but that was one of the [unintelligible under laughter] back then.

And then, probably around that time, we went to church not in Chenango-there was a church in Chenango Bridge, a little tiny Methodist church with a bell tower, but we went to church down in Binghamton seven miles away, partially because my dad had a beautiful voice and he was a paid soloist in the choir. And then Bonnie and I sang in the youth choir and my mom taught Sunday school, so that was, you know, a focus for us.

And they had church down there in conjunction somehow with the Masonic order. There was a huge Masonic lodge at Binghamton, and they put on a play, and I 00:13:00remember it had Roman soldiers and I got-I was the one that got run over by the chariots. So, my time on stage was in-this guy's holding me, and I supposed to be playing dead, or mostly dead. That's how I started my theatre [laughs] in front of people.

CP: So, this period of time in New York, upstate New York, it sounds very much like a formative period for you.

HM: Yeah, and the other part of it, of course, was Boy Scouts, which were really, really important to everybody in that area. We didn't have anything else going on. So, I went through the ranks really quick, and when I was 11 years old, I got a job at Camp Tuscarora, which is on the Pennsylvania/New York border, had 300 kids every week during the summer. Eight weeks in the summer. I got a job playing the bugle, which doesn't sound like much until you realize they didn't use clocks. They used the bugle for every event, so I got up and 00:14:00played KP in the morning, then Reveille, and then the flag raising and then breakfast stuff, and then all the classes all day, and then the reverse in the evening; retreat and back through. And so, I was the last one to bed and the first one up every day for eight weeks. And because of that, I was able to work on a lot of badges really fast, so I ended up being the fifth-youngest Eagle Scout ever in the country.

CP: Wow.

HM: General Eisenhower signed my thing, President then. And went on to become an Explorer, because I got to be 13 and I became an Explorer Scout right when we were getting ready to move. We had a plan; we'd been given a whole bunch of old canoes and we were going to go down the Chenango River and all the way down the Susquehanna, all the way to Baltimore Bay. And one of those canoes was in my parents' basement. Old cellar hatchway doors is how we got it down there, but it was broken when we took it in, and we had to remodel it all. We had to get it 00:15:00out of there when we moved, to give it to somebody. We barely got it out. And I didn't get to go down the river. We went to California instead.

CP: Was there a hunting or fishing element to your upbringing?

HM: Yes. Dad hunted and fished a lot, and I don't know what age I started going with him. I remember being in snow up to my knees a few times. And we just went out the back door and up in the hills most of the time. One time he took me on a trip to Lisle, New York where he knew some people, and we went up a back wall, and probably a logging road, or some kind of back road anyway, in the snow. That was a formative experience, because he raised a gun to shoot a grouse, and I was walking along behind him and I fell down over a log right at the time the gun went off, and he got nervous about that, to say the least, and he said "you sit over there by that oak tree." Well, it was getting dark and I didn't know where I was. Where we lived I knew everything, but I didn't know where I was. So, we sat down by the tree and he went off chasing the bird, and I had the experience 00:16:00of squirrels coming down out of the tree and dancing around me while he was gone. When he came back, they went up. So, that was an interesting little experience that when I got the Indian reservation, I told them about it, my-and that was a whole lesson in that, that was given to me by the squirrels.

CP: Hmm. So, you were 13 when you moved to California, is that corrected?

HM: 1957 we came to San Jose, California, which at that time was known as the fruit basket of the world, and we were one of 3,000 or 4,000 families they were estimating a month, moving in there at the time, and that was how Silicon Valley just, it just mushroomed really quick. And I watched, because I was there for three years going to high school, I watched what happened as a result of that to all the orchards and farmland and stuff. Yeah, within five years it was the 00:17:00cement jungle, is the way I think of it, as it is today. You know, there's a lot of small gardens and stuff going on there all the time, but the commercial agriculture that had been there, what kept going of it moved over to the San Joaquin Valley, and in some places that happen in the valley now, too, over there.

The displacement of farm land's been going on for quite a long while. That experience is why I got involved when I first came back to Oregon early seventies. I got involved with OS Canadia [?] and helped put in the-argue for the land standards here where we have exclusive farm use land that's set aside and we have all these strict laws about how land could be used. And, you know, 45, 50 years later, some of those laws are a little too strict, and I'd like to see an adjustment, but I don't know if we're going to get it.

CP: What was school like for you growing up?

HM: I didn't like school. I liked skiing and skating and snowboarding and-or not snowboarding-but tobogganing and doing all that stuff. In school I was oftentimes spaced out, and I remember getting called on and I'd be focused on snowflakes outside and I had no idea what was going on. I got along okay, but I really didn't like it. And in San Jose, kind of the same thing in a way. I mean, I was a little bit older, but I kind of just did it because I had to do it. And I learned stuff, but that wasn't what I was most focused on.

In San Jose, one of the things that happened was I came out of that East Coast experience where back there you're known as a family unit and your family name is known, and so you're kind of hemmed in by that; come to San Jose and nobody knows who you are. I could do anything. I became first chair trumpet right away, and that wasn't possible back east because of other stuff. And I've gotten to 00:19:00play football in San Jose, because they had varsity, junior varsity Bs and Cs, and I was at a weight and a height and an age that I could play Bs. I got hurt, so I didn't play more than a half a season, but I got to run B track. Probably wouldn't have happened back east.

The kids in the church group ended up setting me up, actually. I didn't even apply for this, but they ended up making me moderator of the San Jose Youth Presbyterian meeting over in Santa Cruz that I wasn't even at. And I got this phone call because I was working at a paint shop on the weekends, I got a phone call and went over there, and so for the senior year, I was in charge of the Youth Presbyterian all the way from San Francisco to Fresno. And I had a car, so I was driving all over the place, and I had a secretary. They gave me a secretary, so we'd go around and visit all the different places.

And I got to go back to a national Youth Presbyterian meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the summer, and on that trip I met some kind of, I guess they were probably middle thirties by that time-yeah, might have been in their early thirties-but people in the ministry who were really radically active like our minister was in San Jose, and they were at that time all civil rights activists. So, I talked a lot with them while we were on the train and coming back, and we talked about schools I should go to and there were schools hooked with religions at that point still. So, like Lewis & Clark College was a Presbyterian school. Willamette was a Methodist school, like that. So, I got accepted at Occidental but I went down there for a meeting and my eyes were watering the whole time I was there and I went "I don't want to be there." So, I went to Lewis & Clark.

CP: Because of the smog?

HM: Oh, the smog was just horrendous. And I'd been in it in San Jose; I'd been working out in it doing paint shop and stuff, but it was way more than I'd ever experienced. And I didn't like the vibe in southern California. So, I came up to Lewis & Clark and it felt good, so I went there. I got accepted a couple of other places too. And the tuition, room and board-this will, for anybody listening to this ever in the future [laughs]-the tuition, room and board at Lewis & Clark in 1960 was $1,200 a year, and by the time I graduated in '64 it went up to $2,400 and I had to borrow $1,000 to get done. So, I could work my summer job, which was at a paint shop and it made a buck and a half to $2.50 an hour over the four years I worked there-it changed-I could do that and pretty much make my way as long as I did something up there. So, I was what they call 00:22:00now a floor reps in the dormitory. I got a free room for doing that. And then I was a substitute hashing food for my roommate in the cafeteria, so I got some of my food costs cut too. But it was a way to get through college and not have much money.

CP: So, it sounds like you were something of an indifferent student growing up.

HM: Yep.

CP: Was there always an expectation of going to college? Or how did you wind up deciding to do that?

HM: I think there probably was because of my dad. My mom didn't go to college but she worked as a high school counselor for 18 years and she knew the value of it, so education was always pushed. But I'm a doer, I like doing stuff, so I was always more into what I could do, you know; build stuff, this kind of thing. You know, people say how can you sit and write a whole winter? Well, it's something to do, you know. I'm not going to sit around and do nothing. If you can be 00:23:00creative and do stuff, that's what I've always been. The education kind of got more important while I was at Lewis & Clark. I got old enough to appreciate it, and I was a philosophy major and a double major in English.

So, I had really good teachers there who pushed me to the wall, and it was a small enough situation. So, Dr. Rena Ratte in the philosophy department came from the East Coast. She came the year I came, and she was a brilliant, brilliant woman. Also, had been studied at, I think it was North Carolina where she got her Ph.D.; she had been a subject for parapsychological work. So, she was one of the first ones I was able to relate to with some of that stuff. And it started around a discussion about René Descartes one day in which she said 00:24:00René Descartes was sitting in his office and he left his body and went over and sat on the shelf. Well, somebody came in and they thought he was dead and they had to get him back into his body to bring him back to life. Anyway, she would talk like that, and I'd never been around anybody that did that that openly, so she and I had some interesting discussions, and that led to some of the stuff that's in the writings.

CP: Interesting discussions because you had a similar sentiment you wanted to talk about?

HM: Yeah. She-one day she was going to have a party at her house with the students and I was in her office and she said, "well come on, I got to go to the store and get something." So, we get down to Terwilliger, and at that time there was a Shell station with one of those things that went around like that [draws orbital motion in the air]. She said, "while I'm in the store buying stuff, I want you to stand there and stare at that long enough so it starts going around the other way," which I got it to do. She was into that kind of stuff that was...it was a lead-in to what else was going to happen.

The other big thing that happened at Lewis & Clark, other than the training in Philosophy and English and learning how to write, running into Bill Stafford, who I never would have written poetry but for him, but the other big thing that happened was a relationship that there's, in the collected poetry here [holds up a copy of Traces on Tracks: Early Collected Poems of Harry MacCormack] that just came out the last two weeks ago-this is a collected early poetry, so it goes from 1962 to 2004, which is my whole time at Oregon State, too-but there's a book that I have actually forgotten that I wrote until I got into doing this collection last winter and I found it up in the attic, and it's called Theresian Sonnets for Sandy of the Makah.

So, Sandy of the Makah was a student at Lewis & Clark that I met backstage in the theatre. She had to do a quick change and I was the assistant director and I was the only one available of anybody to help her with that quick change. And she and I became buddies. We were pretty much inseparable for over two years, 00:26:00and because I had a car and she was-her grandfather was the last tribal chief of the Makah people when they still had that system going, so she was considered tribal royalty even though she's half white technically. Her dad grew up on the reservation but he was born on a whaleboat and they dumped him there as a baby. So anyway, Sandy would have to go up to usually funerals. There was a bunch-they were fishermen and loggers and there were people getting killed all the time for one reason or another. So, three or four times we went up extended stays, three or four days, and I got to hang with her and some other people on the reservation, but mostly her aunts, her two aunts. Her mother had died from a mysterious thing. And I got to experience, because of the funeral situation-and sometimes I couldn't go to parts of it-but they always had these, I would call them wakes from my culture, but anyway they were big community celebrations 00:27:00after the death, so I got to experience the dancing and all the infighting going on, on the reservation. There's five different tribes that were shoved there.

And it ended up, that and being with Sandy, ended up completely changing the way I saw the world, although I probably already saw it this way from growing up out in the country, but I began-I'd come back to Lewis & Clark and there you have western civilization and humanities and all this required stuff that we all get when we're educated the western way, and I'm coming off a 10,000-year-old tribal village, and it just started going like this [makes clashing movements with hands]. So, I talked to Vernon Rutsala about it and he said, "well, why don't you write sonnets around that? Because that's what sonnets were made for, to deal with inner conflict," which nobody else ever said to me.

So, I did. I wrote 50-some sonnets dealing with that whole thing, which went on 00:28:00actually-the experience with her didn't end until we both ended up graduating from Lewis & Clark and she took a job with the American Friends Service Committee in Washington D.C. and I went to Harvard. So, we got together after that year, pretty much. I mean, she came up at Thanksgiving and that ended up being a whole scene in Gloucester, Massachusetts with a brown person. And we decided that we would go back to Portland after the school year together. I went down to Washington D.C. and picked her up. And pretty much the last time that we had any real or normal interchange was the end of that trip because she went north and I stayed in Portland that summer, and then I went to Iowa after that.

That was-being with a 10,000-year-old actual culture still practicing, still being pushed down upon radically by the government and most people, you know, it 00:29:00was a mind-changing experience, and when I was-same time I was doing that, I was working over in the ghetto in Albina District as part of a student nonviolent coordinating committee project that was meeting in the Highland United Church every week. And Ralph Moore, who was the young minister there, and I got to be very friendly, and [laughs] there came a point where it was senior year, I'd already gotten the Rockefeller grant, I already had acceptance at Harvard and I was graduating and Ralph had me over dinner, which started with homebrew. And he said, "well, I want you to consider taking my church for six weeks this summer while I go back east to work with my roommate," who happened to-his roommate from Union Theological Seminary, and who that roommate was, was Jesse Jackson. So, he was going back there to work with Jesse and his wife was going to see her 00:30:00family and stuff.

And I went "okay, I guess." So, he went over-he said he'd already talked to all the professors and everybody at Lewis & Clark and they thought I ought to do it, so I said "okay." And it was interesting because I'd flirted with maybe going into the ministry. Here I was with a social gospel church that-next door to the big Catholic church where the guy's a big deal in the ghetto there, and we had all kinds of stuff going on at our church and we were being threatened by Nazis. I had to raise $2,000 a week for the COFO project in Mississippi. Yeah, it was 18 hours a day, is what I learned. If you were even going to begin to do what needed to be done, it was going to be 18 hours a day, seven days a week. That's the real lesson I learned that summer, and a lot of that's written about in the-I wrote things like introductions to a lot of the poetry in here, [holds up Traces on Tracks] so some of it's written in that. Some of it's in the poetry from that period.

And I left after it was over and drove back east to University of Iowa for the writers' workshop, had no money. They hadn't given me a grant yet. And-

CP: Can I back up real quick and ask you a few more questions about Lewis & Clark time?

HM: Yep.

CP: Can you tell me a little bit more just broadly about Portland in the early 1960s? The Portland you knew?

HM: Well, what was going on, one of the major things that was going on and one of the reasons the ghetto was so interesting to work in, is they were putting in I-5. So, all this displacement of the black population, which wasn't huge-and once I got in that church I realized it wasn't just the black population, there's a huge German-speaking population there that were building ships; they didn't speak English, and another Russian population and all those were getting pushed out of the way for the highway to come through. So, it was an interesting place that way. And it was a city, you know, a city bigger than I was used to 00:32:00being around. But it was totally manageable. I mean it was really easy-it still is-it's really easy to get around in and the neighborhoods are distinct enough so you kind of know where you are, but that center down there where the freeway goes now and over where the rose garden and all that is now, that was all homes and stuff and that was-and it's happening again. There's gentrification going on through all those neighborhoods now. And it's already happened in Seattle for the last five years and it's just changing the nature of the city. So, you get these people coming in that are a different kind of people than used to live there. Portland's got a character still that I like, but it is different.

CP: So, Lewis & Clark is outside of Portland?

HM: Yeah, it's southwest on the hills, and it was a mansion owned by the people that own...I'm going to forget the name of the store. It's that big store 00:33:00downtown. Anyway, it was a man and estate. So, when I first started doing poetry it was because of a poetry reading I went to that was given by William Stafford right when he won the Shelley Award, and I'd never been to a poetry reading before. So, I went in there and sat down and the two front rows were full of nuns from the convent up on the hill [laughs]. They knew who he was, you know. And it was probably another 20, 30, 40 people in there, I don't remember.

But it was in the fireside room in the mansion, so there was this fire going behind him, and what really got to me was-I had him as a teacher too-but what got to me was he was reading, he talked about a poem he'd written for his mother and he started reading it and he started focusing and I could see his eyes focusing on one nun in the front row, and then he started crying, right in front 00:34:00of everybody. I went, wow. And that shook me in some kind of way and I went back to my room and I wrote the first poem that's in this book, "One by the Sea" and just left it on my desk. And my roommate, who was a pre-med student, read it and he went "wow, this is good," and he took it to Stafford and Stafford called me in. That was what started the whole thing. Then it was like unleashing the floodgates.

CP: And did that relationship develop from there?

HM: Yeah, we-he actually had me do a reading with him my senior year downtown in front of a bunch of [laughs] whitehaired old ladies. I think it must have been at Portland State because I remember looking out the window and we were looking into a brick wall. There's a picture in the Oregonian actually of the two of us before that reading in front of the Tudor mansion at Lewis & Clark. I had a copy of that, but I can't find it anymore.

And then when I was at Iowa, Bill came to town. It wasn't Traveling through the Dark, because he had already done that. It must have been another book. He was 00:35:00on tour for a book. Oh, it was when he won the-he became something with Library of Congress. Anyway, he and I communicated all the time and I said, "why don't you come out to the house and we'll put together a big dinner," you know. So, that was a lesson I-he's a pacifist, which I tend to be, and I learned a lot from him that way. So, the lesson that night was we had this big table with a lot of people around it, including Dipak Majumdar, who's a poet from India that Allen Ginsberg knew really well when I brought Allen to town.

Anyway, in those days I was still eating meat and we had a big Iowa ham and he said, you got a carving set there. I asked him if he would carve and he said, "is the knife sharp?" and I said "I don't know" and he went, "no, it's not sharp. Let me show you how to sharpen a knife." So, in front of everybody, he showed me how to sharpen a knife [laughs], which I found ironic because of his pacifism. I didn't even think of him with sharpening knives, you know. But yeah, 00:36:00that Lewis & Clark experience was formative in all kinds of ways. There's another whole part of it that we probably shouldn't talk about here. It would take too long, but it's tangential to Lewis & Clark but it involves a relationship that continued for a year, and there's just a whole book about it in here.

CP: Was theatre a piece of your Lewis & Clark experience, it sounds like?

HM: Yeah. So, Lewis & Clark, I was involved with the theatre there which, in those days, was an old-I think it had been the surrey house for the mansion. So, it was a pretty ramshackle-it's kind of like what they did to us here. It was-had no fly space. It was a building with a curtain and a room that sat I think 75 people. It's kind of like a black box, although it had a stage, sort of like an old stage you'd find in a cafeteria or something, you know. And that's 00:37:00what we had to do plays in, and there was a guy named Leon Pike who was the director and set designer and he was a one-man show and I worked with him, so that was my introduction to both directing and taking a piece of writing and tearing it apart for production and going through the production process. I didn't act. My roommate was an actor, but I was always in the production end of it doing stuff. And I didn't do that all the time. I just did it for certain plays.

CP: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a consequential group certainly in the south; I know less about it in Portland. Can you tell me about your interactions with them and...?

HM: So, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, those guys were-they were black guys out of the South who were super activists, let's call them that. They were much more active than SCLC, which was Martin Luther King's group. So, I was 00:38:00kind of involved with both because of my thing with the church, and at Harvard, I ended up in Divinity School [unintelligible] at Harvard, and I was involved with both there as a go-between because they were fighting each other right before Selma.

Anyway, they periodically would send an organizer to Lewis & Clark and I always enjoyed them, and then one time when he was there, one of those organizers was there, we started a chapter. They had these SNCC chapters all over the country and they started a chapter in the church over there in the Albina district, had some black kids in it, the college kids from Reed, Lewis & Clark, probably some from Portland State, a few people from the church, and we met every Sunday night. And some of the time we'd actually look at books and stuff, you know, sit and talk about stuff.

We were the support group for a group that left and went down for the voter registration drive in Mississippi that summer, which ended up in three people 00:39:00getting killed. People were getting beaten and our Portland crew all got hit with fire hoses and a bunch of other stuff. What I'd do to raise money is I'd call down there every week and find out what terrible thing had happened. "What did they come at you with this week?" Then I had an editor. If they were going in, I'd call the editor and give him the whole thing and put the fundraising thing at the end of it. It was pretty routine. We could get about 2,000 bucks a week [laughs]. Yeah, they were interesting.

Then the, at Harvard, one of the SNCC guys came to do a talk and after the talk, I was talking with him and he came to class with me the next day, but his talk really blew my socks off. What he did was there was a room full of people that had been doing civil rights work and what he did was he stood there and thanked everybody, because we were a bunch of white people-it was all guys-but thanked everybody for helping the black community, and he said-and I will never 00:40:00forget-"now it's time for you guys to go organize in the suburban ghetto," which is what turned me... Right after that meeting, I found out about the Amherst meeting where Tom Hayden was going to be and SDS was going to be, and I went on to Amherst. And we put together, in that meeting, the first big march on Washington against the war in Vietnam. And that was the day Malcolm X was killed, too.

CP: How did you decide to go to graduate school, and especially to Harvard?

HM: Well, Dr. Ratte told me I should apply for a Rockefeller, and Dr. Harrington I think did too. So, I applied for a Rockefeller and I thought I didn't get it, but Rockefellers ended up with extra money or something that year, so they actually had two from Oregon. There was one from Reed College, and me. So, then I had the opportunity to go to different places-

CP: Can you explain what a Rockefeller is?

HM: The Rockefeller Fellowship in those days was somebody that's going to work 00:41:00on some aspect of religion. What I was interested in was religious language. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in religious language. [Laughs] How's that? I was a Wittgensteinian [laughs]. So, part of my work was going to be in the Philosophy Department, so I get to Harvard and I go to the Philosophy Department and the first person I run into is Quine [Willard Van Orman Quine], and Quine says "so, are you a logician?" and I said, "I hate logic." And he said, "well, what are you into?" and I said, "ordinary language" and he said, "go down the road-down the hall-and talk to Cavell."

So, I went down the hall and talked to Stanley Cavell, who was new there from Berkeley and was a Wittgensteinian and ordinary language-you can look him up and you'll see all his stuff-and one of my great experiences that year [laughs], ever actually; Cavell came in the classroom and he was doing a class with a bunch of brilliant people on a Wittgensteinian interpretation of Immanuel Kant's work. So, he's standing up there at the podium lecturing away, and the second 00:42:00day that we came for class, he was in the middle of a lecture and he closed up his notes and walked out of the room. And we came back the next day, they came in and said: "Mr. Cavell will be back next week."

So, we came back the next week, he wasn't there. It was the third week when he came back and he looked like crap. He had grown a beard and he looked like he'd been out on a bender. His clothes were all disheveled. And he stood up there, and you have to get a picture of these brilliant philosophical students from all over the country sitting there in the front of the room, and he looked at all these people, me being back a few rows, and he said "everything I told you in the first two lectures is wrong. Rip it up and throw it away." And then he just stood there. And anyway, some hotshot asked him a question and that got him to talking and they kept asking him questions and he kept talking, and after that, he went off in this whole new direction, which ended up being ordinary language philosophy [laughs]. That was the only honest intellectual I've ever been around 00:43:00[laughs]. He got to the point where he saw he was totally wrong and he wouldn't keep going [laughs].

CP: So, was it safe to say it was a mixed bag for you at Harvard? You were only there for a year.

HM: Yes. I decided pretty much when I first got there that I was...in an environment that I didn't belong in, and a lot of that was coming from the Indian reservation. I totally respected it, and did pretty well actually academically, but-

CP: The experience with the Makah tribe, is that what you're referring to?

HM: Yeah. And you know, I grew up on old Tuscarora Indian ground in New York. I live on Kalapuya ground out here now, and that infuses who I am, you know. Across the road from us in New York was an old burial ground where we did all kinds of snow activity all the time. But so I've-that clash is what led to this 00:44:00[holds up copy of book], so I started writing this while I was at Harvard, A Catechism for the Children of De-Light, and the statement in it that really hit home wasn't until sometime in the seventies when I wrote a book when I was at Iowa and we published it while I was here at OSU called Call of the Mountains, and it was a kind of a...experientially it came from the Makah experience and being up in the Olympic Peninsula and stuff. It's a spiritual journey hike and it's all done in a syllabic form that we were working on at Iowa, and it was the first book that I actually published, and the second one being The Revolving Door, and it was my thesis at Iowa. And where was I going with that?

CP: The environment at Harvard basically is how we started here.

HM: Oh this, yeah. So, what happened as a result of Call of the Mountains is that I was-after my first year of teaching here at OSU, I was going up to meet with a guy I'd known in Iowa named Robert Sayre, and Robert Sayre's claim to fame other than the fact that he had a Ph.D. from Yale is that he wrote a book on how Thoreau...it's a 1,500-page book-how Thoreau got almost all of his stuff from being around Native Americans, and it turned out Whitman did too. So, he had this whole American lit thing that he was doing that was resonating with me big time and we talked for hours.

Anyway, he took a sabbatical and went to Vancouver, British Columbia, and I was driving my old Volkswagen bus, my wife, and baby daughter up to see him, and the motor broke on the hill outside of Salem. I had to come back and replace the motor, so we were a week late getting up there. And when we got to the house where we were going, which was the Ridington house-and Ridington was in the 00:46:00Anthropology Department at UBC and he and Robert had been friends at Yale, actually I think his wife had been a friend too-so, we get there and who's in the house? None of those people are there. Who's there is Hyemeyohsts Storm, Chuck Storm. So, Hyemeyohsts told me that they had left to go to an island; that we were going to have to take a boat over to see them, and the boat wasn't available for I don't know, something like four hours.

So, we sat with Chuck, and he was a Cheyenne Crow, and he was busy sitting there half-blind, writing a book which he was going to call Seven Arrows, which I helped him write, and if you-there's copies of it here in there library, I think, but if you look in the front, you'll see my name and my wife's name and some other friends of mine that we all helped him get that together, because he wasn't a writer. He was a guy he'd done college and work, but he was-some people thought he was a medicine man; he wasn't. He called himself actually a 00:47:00knowledgeable fool.

But he grew up in the tradition and his duty, this life on the earth, was to bring some of the secrets of that tradition, specifically the medicine part of it, to the white culture because what the older people were seeing was the white culture was at a tipping point that they'd heard about in the prophecies. So, that this information, it was time for it to come forth. So, I worked with him on that for a while and I wrote another book called Sacred Teachings of the Animal People that Harper & Row bought while I was in my second year here at OSU. And Harper & Row got threatened by the AIM, the American Indian Movement. They threatened to bomb them if they published that book, and they already had a contract out on Chuck. He had to go hide in Canada for two years. So, there was 00:48:00all this kind of crap going on. It was a violent period on all kinds of levels. So, Harper & Row didn't publish. It took me five years to get the book back from their legal department, and it's one of the ones that I'm going to rewrite before I die, I hope. It's a 650-page typed manuscript, so it's probably like a 350 or 400-page book, sitting upstairs where all this stuff was. Once I got farming, I didn't have time to write very much for all the long years, you know, but fortunately, that was written back in the seventies and it's just sitting there. I'll rewrite it probably in the next year or year and a half.

CP: Can you tell me more about the connection with SDS and the march on Washington?

HM: So, the Students for a Democratic Society was started in Ann Arbor, Michigan as a kind of-you have to think about our generation as growing up in the church and we're all moralist. You know, Tom Hayden was Catholic and so was Jerry 00:49:00Brown. These are people that are all part of that same-we all come into the world as moralists, and what we got confronted with after World War II was an immoral society. I mean, it was-now it looks totally more than immoral. I mean, it's evil almost, but it was bad. It was the antithesis of everything we learned as Christians was not happening. So, our particular bunch came into the world with an astrological charge on us to do something about it.

And SDS started out, if you read the Port Huron Statement-I don't know if there's a copy here or not, there could be, but the Port Huron Statement is around, I'm sure; maybe even get it online-[laughs] "we are the children of the Kennedy years." It starts off so innocent, and it's our moral view of how we should help out people that live in poverty, basically. Michael Harrington's The Other America was one of the key books that-he helped us form SDS, actually. So, 00:50:00that was kind of where we started, working the ghettos, work on poverty projects, do stuff for other people, kind of the do good Christian way of doing stuff.

And then we get a war thrown in our face that's killing everybody, it's going to kill us. I was drafted. I refused, so I was [scoffs] I ended up with a deferment, not because I wanted it but because somebody else gave it to me, but I refused to sign up. And that war changed our whole-that's why that meeting in Amherst was so important. That was the transition from being a kind of a civil rights, even poor white area, organizer bunch that was doing good to we're warriors fighting a war.

But the first part of the antiwar stuff was all coming off from the Quakers. We had the Quaker book there as kind of a handbook, and the march on Washington, that first big march on Washington, which I think the computer says it was 00:51:0025,000 but I think they announced that day that it was 35,000. It was a lot of people anyway, and yeah, one of my great experiences was at one point another guy and I had the Harvard banner; we kept switching it around and two of us had it and a whole bunch of guys said, "Let's go over the fence!" We went over the fence into the White House lawn, ran around in there and got chased out. But you know, you couldn't do that these days, but we did then.

But it was pretty swift, within a year we went from an attitude of being do-gooders to being warriors, which was why I wrote what's one of my major books that's in here, [holds up Traces on Tracks], "The Displaced Warrior," and that was written-first parts of it were written at Iowa, a lot of it was written here. And there's part of it that Oregon State plays a huge role in because I started hearing the poetry go off the page. And when I was sitting in my study 00:52:00out in Beavercreek when I had a farm out there-I couldn't do it over here; the English department here was in Quonset huts [laughs]. I had the office they said was Bernie Malamud's office, and he said he had the same problem. He went and rented a hotel room to write in, you know.

So, when I was sitting in my office out at home, I was hearing words be able to move, and I thought how can I do that? You know, because we just sit here and project. And I happened to have a student at that time named Jerry Ewing [phonetic], and he was an engineering student and he had affiliations with CMC on campus and we got old Sony tape recorders, patched them together with a ticker tape [laughs], and we took the microphones, because we didn't have a mixer, and made a big circular thing out of plywood and put the microphones on, and we began moving language.

So, there's a whole bunch of this, about 20 pages or 30 pages when it got 00:53:00published, which I never thought anybody would publish. Not a big poetry publisher did it. Anyway, the poems basically look like maps, because that's what they are [holds up Traces on Tracks, open to pages of "The Displaced Warrior]. And we did it the first time, there used to be a children's library downstairs in the old public library here at Corvallis and we put it together down there with no lights, turned the lights out, and just let people experience language going through them, which was pretty interesting.

And then we got an opportunity to do it at a play up in Seattle at the Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Festival, which had a tech section. And 35,000 people attend that festival every day (back in those days; I don't know what it is now), and I put together a parabolic walkthrough experience and OSU provided four projectors and these tape recorders and all that kind of stuff. And we did that up there for three days and had thousands of people go through the 00:54:00experience. And it was interesting. There was one Episcopal priest that stood in there for over an hour. He was having a religious experience, he said, as a result of it. You know, it was kind of...well, it's where you want poetry to go. You want poetry to go inside a person without them being able to defend themselves. If you're a really good poet, you could blast through with an image and a person can't defend against it. So, that way with sound too.

And I had been around Allen Ginsberg just enough to appreciate the chanted poem, so we had a reading that I brought him into Iowa City. He had never been allowed in there, and I was a-I roped Ferlinghetti in first with my roommate and I brought him in, and then we brought Allen in, and both of them were antiwar readings right up front. We had 3,000 people at Allen's reading. And yeah, out in the street [laughs].

CP: How were you able to make this happen?

HM: We just called-my roommate was Everett Frost. He ended up being a professor 00:55:00at Fresno for years and years and years and a Blake [William Blake] scholar. But Everett called Allen's agent. He said, "Yeah, I think we can do that." So, then after we set it up, about a few days before it happened, I got called into the president's office at the University of Iowa, and he says "if Allen takes his clothes off here like he did at Indiana last week, your ass is grass," you know. So, I told him he had to keep his clothes on [laughs].

CP: Well, backing up just a touch, you make a decision that Harvard's not for you, but you do wind up at a place that is extremely well regarded, which is the writer's workshop at University of Iowa, and tell me about that. Tell me about how that happens.

HM: So, I think the reason I actually got into Iowa might have been my poetry, but I think the reason I got in is because Bill Stafford and Vernon Rutsala were both graduates of there and they both gave me incredible recommendations. So yeah, and that's really-while I was at Harvard I kept writing poetry, you know, and one day I went into my counselor at Harvard and he said, "So, you going to 00:56:00stay next year?" and I went, "I don't think so." He said, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I've been accepted at Iowa, the writer's workshop." You know, we went on with that kind of a discussion, and at one point he asked me why I would stay at Harvard if I was going to stay and I said, "well, I think the only thing that really attracts me now is the crimson robes in an academic line" [laughs]. He went, "that's crazy, you don't need to be here for that." So, yeah.

So, I get to Iowa and start hanging out with poets. I mean, it was an incredible-it still is, but not as much so as it was back then. Iowa City is like having the art community of New York and the art community of San Francisco gathered together in the middle of a cornfield. That's basically how you can describe that town, and there was stuff going on all day, every day, and every night: readings, new films, all kinds of stuff. So, it was super stimulating.

And I came in as an SDS organizer. There was another guy in town that I ran into 00:57:00who wasn't a member of the workshop and the two of us started doing, we called it open mic on Wednesday in the MU, and it was an antiwar mic basically, and the FBI became friends of ours. They were there every week. And Steve Smith burned the first draft card four feet from me. There's a poem about that. Part of the reason that I was interested in this stuff is because I guess I'm the only one left from that bunch that's alive. Anyway, it was extremely stimulating at all levels, and I got to work with Marvin Bell, who himself personally had been a military man, and he was antiwar, and George Starbuck, who had personally been a military policeman, and he was antiwar. And then there was my other person on my committee on the workshop was Straeter [phonetic]. I don't know where he was at on stuff. And he's the one that I had to do my academic stuff for.

CP: I wouldn't associate Iowa with being a hub of student activism.

HM: Well, it always has been to a certain extent. Wisconsin's a little bit more known for it, but I was actually in Iowa City, I had to be there on Tuesdays for the workshop, but I was up in Wisconsin, over in western Iowa, down in Nebraska. We were organizing SDS chapters, partially because when the draft card got burned, Goldson-Goldson I think was his name-anyway, the two of us that were SDS organizers went, "We don't have any policy on this." And then, while we were walking out, another guy came up to us and said he wanted to burn his draft card. He was a husband with a wife and a kid.

So, we jumped in the car and drove to Chicago to the National SDS office, had a meeting all night in a guy's apartment and came up with a national policy on draft card burning. Also had to deal with-we had a packet, a manila envelope 00:59:00packet ready to go out across the country at that point to show people how to get out of the draft. There were a lot of different ways you could do it, and we were just going to do a mass mailing. So, after our meeting in Chicago, one of the guys at the meetings, a diplomat's son, he went and got on a plane, flew to Washington D.C. and had a meeting with Katzenbach and Johnson because they knew him. And he said, "We're going to send this packet out across the U.S.," and they said, "Don't do it."

"What will you do?"

"We know who all you guys are. There's about 3,000 of you across the country and we'll round you all up in a couple hours, so if you're going to send it out, you're going to have to take it out. Don't send it through the mails, because we can nail you for that."

So, that's what we did [laughs]. We went campus to campus. The national office had nobody in it most of the time. And Iowa City was where the printing press got moved in our garage [laughs], so we were both a poetry press and a printing 01:00:00press for SDS for about a year and a half.

CP: When you finished with the writer's workshop, did you go directly to Corvallis at that point?

HM: Yes. I was offered a lot of jobs in the Midwest but I didn't want to stay in the Midwest. I wanted to be back out in Oregon. So, this was the only job in Oregon. It was-in the English Department here they used to have required writing courses. I don't know if that's true anymore, but a lot of kids were coming out of high school with no writing skills. So, I taught required writing courses as an instructor and taught-Roger Weaver was teaching the writing workshop here but he went on sabbatical. I taught that while he was gone. And then my third year I ironically got a faculty development grant, and in the same mailbox, little mailbox over in the English Department, I got my notice that I wasn't going to be rehired because I hadn't gotten tenure.

CP: After two years?

HM: Yep. So, in the same mailbox, which of course as a writer is ironic so you can't let it go, so I wrote a little thing about that, sent it over the Barometer, and they published it, and of course, that raised hell [inaudible]. But I took a job at McMurry College in Abilene, Texas, and the guy who was head of the English Department there was a full-blood Native American. He had read Seven Arrows, he'd read my other books, and he wanted me there and he was going to pay me three times what they were paying me here and I only had to teach two courses, one of them being a world lit course that was going to use Native American oral literature as a basis for understanding oral literatures and written literatures around the world. I was totally into that, man. It was going to be wild fun.

So, we sold what little we had, we got ready to go, and we had an entourage living with us out at the farm, the Beavercreek farm, mostly because of Seven Arrows. There was usually four or five, six other people around, and some of them wanted to go to Texas with us. So, it gets to be about two weeks ahead of 01:02:00finals here on campus and I get a phone call at home from the head of the department. He said, "The whole thing's off." I said, "What happened?" He said, "Well, the board of directors had a meeting and what they told us is they didn't like your books," which he said, of course, is a violation of intellectual whatever, and he said, "You remember the AAUP." So, I contact them, and he told me he already had, and he said "I would also get hold of a lawyer, and I would also talk to the ACLU," which I did.

And my brother-in-law at the time was a lawyer in Ohio, so he did some nosing around, figured out that these guys on this board were all oil men. And what we figured out a few years later was what had actually happened is they never read my books; they got a thing from the FBI about my stuff. So, that was what was going on with young people in the academic world at that time if you were 01:03:00politically active at all. And it happened on this campus. You were pushed out. It happened with people here in Computer Science and people in Mathematics. It wasn't just the English Department.

So, at that point, I stayed here. I settled out of court for half a year's salary, started a thing called River Run Live and Learn Community. It was a free school for kids that were-they had to be out of diapers, all the way to high school. And we ran out of the United, Unitarian Church, and then we established a farm down on Garden Avenue, an old church campground, and we had the kids down there in the daytime. So, they did a lot of gardening. We had a two-acre garden and we taught classes in weaving and all kinds of stuff. Had teepees, had ceremonies, had all kinds of stuff going on.

That went on for two years and then I got an offer from the Theatre Department to come in, and it was a part-time job and we'd already started the soy dairy by 01:04:00that point, so I went, "Okay, I'll take it" and came in and built stage sets and started teaching playwriting, and then eventually we ended up adding screenwriting to that, and that's what I did for 28 years.

CP: So, can you tell me a bit more about Corvallis, the first Corvallis you knew in 1967?

HM: It was really-and still is-really one of the, if you think about quintessential college towns, it's that. You know, especially downtown here close into the campus, but it really had that feel of being a Midwest college town kind of like Grinnell or any of those places where there's small colleges. And I like that. I appreciated that. It was a city but not really a city. I mean, when we came into town with Iowa plates on, there used to be an appliance store on 2nd Street; the two men looked at the Iowa plates and they said, "Where are you from in Iowa?" And so, I told them, and I said "So, can I put this stuff 01:05:00on time? I don't make much at OSU," and he said, "Oh, just pay us when you get ready, you know, take them." They came out and installed it. It was that way. Everybody opened their arms because you're a young couple with a baby and Iowa plates and it's-it's got that kind of openness to it.

And Iowa City was that way. You know, it was a city but it was small, like this one, so it was a perfect place to...for me to be able to flourish. As long as I could live out and not in town, that was even better. I don't know, our first place out there at Beavercreek, we ran two horses, one of them ours, one of them my high school friend Dr. Morrie Craig, who you know about. And then we ran some white face [?] and some chickens, and we grew a garden that the deer ate most of for three years in a row because we didn't have deer fencing.

But we were doing a lot of canning. My ex-wife, first wife from that period, and I were talking about that. She said, "Man, we canned everything, you know. We 01:06:00were just into it." We were making wine, we were doing all that stuff. It was homesteading. And we were both burnt out from doing the antiwar work and civil rights work and we just decided, you know, let's live in the country. Wasn't anything going on yet; no farmers markets, which I started the Saturday market down here and was instrumental in the other one. But we just, when we bought the farm after the free school thing, we-when I got that settlement, we got a chance to get that farm that we have now and bought that whole place, 15 acres, a barn and the house, for $35,000 on a land sales contract.

And we-well, Linda decided she wanted to have a milk goat, so we traded a saddle-which she didn't want to ride anymore, she'd done her horse thing-so we traded a saddle with a girl up the road who had a 4-H project, a blue ribbon 01:07:00class Nubian milk goat and we got her. She was a two-gallon a day milker, and then when she had kids, pretty soon we had 13 milk goats. It didn't take long. And pretty soon Linda left, so I'm left with her 13 milk goats by myself on a farm.

I was already selling vegetables out on the road. I started looking for people to sell goat milk to and found, across from the south co-op where that trailer court is, there were a bunch of people from Oklahoma living in there that liked goat milk. So, they bought-they had me growing turnips for them and all this food that I didn't even know about. But you know, we didn't have any place to sell anything. We didn't have any co-op. I sold to Gerding's Market on Western and he bought all my berries. They were-that's where we sold our first tofu when we had the soy dairy on the farm. And the Gerdings kept Corvallis going during the depression. A lot of people don't know that, but there were a lot of people who had no money and no food and they just gave them food, because they were a 01:08:00big Catholic family that believed in people living right.

CP: Can you tell me more about the English Department that you knew?

HM: The English Department here when I came here was kind of ingrown. If you want to know about it, the best thing to do is read Bernie Malamud's book A New Life.

CP: I've heard that before.

HM: That was the English Department, and the one woman and the drunk in the thing was across the hall from-her office was across the hall from me. There were no women. I mean, there were [sic] a secretary and we had a couple of teachers, but mostly it was all guys and everybody had these weird degrees. You know, like one guy, Jeffress [Dean Paget Jeffress], he'd been there forever; he had a BA from Berkeley in journalism and he was teaching in the English Department at OSU. It was all this weird stuff. Not like the professional department that it became. And they were, because they were part of a land grant university, part of their charge was to make sure that everybody that went through the university could write.

The only reason there's a theatre at OSU is because it's a land grant university, and right in the land grant charter it says you have to have a theatre and you have to have an art department and you have to have an English department. Otherwise, they probably wouldn't even be here [laughs], you know. So yeah, it was pretty funky.

CP: It was early on in OSU having a College of Liberal Arts, or maybe it was a School of Liberal Arts, I take it.

HM: Yeah, we had a College of Liberal Arts and a good dean, and...

CP: Did it feel like you were looked down upon by the rest of the campus?

HM: Well we, you know, once we got out of the Quonset huts-I wasn't involved in the move-but once they moved out of the Quonset huts, they moved into the old whatever that is in the back of the MU, I forget what that building was, but same thing with the Art Department. They found them their own wooden building and theatre across the street here for-in the old gymnastics building. So, we got kicked out of here and that was interesting. There was a fire up in one of the dorms by the MU and the new fire marshal, who's a woman-I forget her name at that time-she went okay, I'm going to do an investigation in every building on campus.

She walked in the theatre, and they didn't even put sheetrock on the walls in 01:10:00there when they built it. They built the whole theatre in there for $12,000 bucks and it was built with that kind of-well, kind of like this stuff-soundboard. You can stick your fist through it. And we had 450 people in there routinely for shows, and we were always doing pyrotechnics and all this stuff. I mean, it was a facility. It had a fly loft, it was a fantastic theatre. We built-people came out from New York to see our sets. Alex Wallace and Richard George, the sets they designed were absolutely amazing and sometimes it took everything that all of us could do to get them built, but they were amazing, amazing.

They showed the acting-we had kids go out on this program to New York, my playwriting program, they ended up in New York, so it was a-but it was all funky. And then they closed that building down and shoved us over-the only reason we got a spot at all was because that old dairy was there. We were sitting upstairs in the sixth floor and the campus planner came in, he said, "I just had an idea while I was shaving. Let's go look at that old dairy building." 01:11:00Well yeah, we can slam a theatre in here. Because we were supposed to be-we were scheduled in 1990 to have a 17 million dollar facility right where the baseball field is. It was supposed to be theatre and music, and...I think it was just theatre and music in that one. The new one that they're talking about now I think has art in it too maybe. Yeah, it's always been shoved to the back.

CP: My understanding is that you were involved with the Black Student Union walkout?

HM: Yes.

CP: This is a very important moment in the history of the university. Can you tell me your memories of that time?

HM: Yes. So, the only black people on campus in those days-and we're talking 1968, '69-were going to be athletes, and I, of course, had them as students because they had to learn to write. So, when they decided that they would do the black student boycott, they came to me. And they'd been listening to me go off, you know, like I do, and they said, "Harry, you got to give a speech over in the MU tomorrow, noon," you know. So, I said, "okay." And I came over, and there's a 01:12:00picture actually, and the picture's right here [laughs]. A picture that was in The Barometer. They actually, after I got a little ways into the speech, they put me up on a table so everybody could hear.

And I talked about the fact that the university couldn't keep running the way it was running; that there was going to be a new play here and we were going to have to have it done with equality, and that these kids over in the Athletic Department were not happy with their situation. And it got real specific in the faculty meeting a day after-I don't know, a day or two after that-but...it was an interesting situation. I saw The Black Bag but I never could find out who it was. I think it was somebody from the Speech Department but I never knew, but that's why CBS news was here for a week because The Black Bag would go talk every day.

And when we had our faculty meeting, our general faculty meeting in Milam Auditorium [laughs], one of the trainers got up that the kids had been 01:13:00complaining about and he started off saying "Slats Gill never had any blacks on his team and he won all those [mumbles." Everybody hung their head. It was just, it was this old guard that had been around here and they still weren't gone. They were-most of them were not around, but you know, people wanted-so, we were actually the first school at that time in the PAC-8-I think it was still a PAC-8-we were the first school to make safe spots for gay and lesbian people, we had signs that we put in our offices and stuff and let it be known that we were open to talk with the black kids and help them through whatever they were, you know...Yeah, it was an interesting time.

CP: Can you talk more about The Black Bag?

HM: Well, it was a person that dressed up as a black bag, and it was a hell of a symbol. I mean, if you want to make things happen in this world you have to draw attention, and in order to draw attention you've got to have some kind of image, 01:14:00and that was a great image. And what we were able to do with it academically was we got people to think about the other America, and I was using So Long Ice [phonetic] in my classes. I think I even used "Wretch of the Earth" in one of my classes, but you have a symbol like that of what's happening with this thing, this black thing, you know, and that spoke and was fairly articulate. I don't know who it was, but...

CP: So, The Black Bag would speak every day, you said? I didn't know that.

HM: Yep.

CP: And in the MU, or?

HM: Around. I think mostly to people that asked questions, but that's my memory of it, was that it was always interacting. I don't think there was ever a speech given. But it was a great symbol. We're trying to do that now at another level because people your age and younger, if we're going to get to them with any of 01:15:00this food stuff that we're doing, we've got to be able to do an image that they catch and get attracted to in a fraction of a second on their iPhones, so we're actually working with people that are on campus now to help us do that [laughs].

CP: So, is it fair to draw a connection between your activism and the termination of your appointment?

HM: There were only two of us that were brought up for tenure out of the class of 15 of us that they brought in at the time to do their junk jobs, which you know, was okay. I loved doing the job, but it was something that eventually ended up being graduate student work. So, Frank Harper and I were both brought up for consideration under tenure, and my vote was five to four, is my understanding. And the person that actually voted against me wasn't who I thought it was going to be. So, that's just academia, and what I learned from that was not-I'm too much of a lone wolf. I can't trust academia. I can't trust 01:16:00being voted on.

So, when I came back in Theatre, I joined the union. And part of the reason I joined the union is because there was a young man in charge of the union, and actually I had-me and a guy from Economics here on campus, McFarland, we actually tried to organize professors into a union on campus at one point, because you really don't have any voice. You know, you're just a factory worker. So, I came back and joined the union and that helped me out a couple of times in the whole I was here. I was doing this crazy thing of being an instructor but I was in the union and I didn't have a formal academic appointment, but I was doing academic stuff. I even-I even had a graduate school appointment. I was on graduate committees. Me and one other guy in the state had that kind of job. A guy at Monmouth that had a job like that. But that allowed me to be not-I didn't 01:17:00have to worry about what my peers thought of me, so I could be myself more.

CP: How would you characterize the culture of activism at OSU during the Vietnam era?

HM: It was-we were pretty active, a lot of it out of the English Department. But there were people in almost all departments, especially Mathematics and Computer science and stuff, that were very outspoken. And we did some demonstrations and...yeah. It was-sometimes go to bigger demonstrations in Portland. It was probably 10% of the people here who were participating in stuff like that, and maybe a bigger percent didn't like the war. But that war was-it scarred everybody. I mean, it's still scarring everybody.

CP: It didn't seem to make as-the... One doesn't associate OSU with antiwar activism, though. They associate the U of O with antiwar activism. Is that a 01:18:00fair assessment?

HM: Yeah. It was a different a kind of thing at U of O in a way, but the people here...a lot of them that I knew that were antiwar weren't quite so expressive as they might have been if they'd been at U of O, but academia, in general, was at least some high percentage of people in academia. It wasn't like Iowa. Iowa was way more active. There was one guy there that was in Anthropology and he got up and gave a speech ahead of class enrollment time and said, "I'm going to teach a class on"-he was a famous anthropologist and he was going to teach a class on something that was like Marxist yaddy-yaddy-yadda stuff-and he said, "I want everybody that takes this class to know right up front you're all getting Fs. I will not deal with student deferment. I think it's illegal and it shouldn't"-so, he had-it was supposed to be class, and said he had 200-some 01:19:00people sign up. That kind of stuff was going on, you know [laughs].

It was a radical time and you never really knew what was going to come next. But it's kind of like now. That's one of the reasons I did this book now, is because I sat reading this stuff last winter and I went it's no different than it is today with this whole Trump going on, you know?

CP: You mentioned that when you came back to Oregon you got involved with land use, land use planning? Or land use policy?

HM: Yeah. Yeah, so the person that's the hero in this is Lois Kenagy. The Kenagy farm is still around and her son and grandkids actually do some stuff with Ten Rivers Web. But Lois and her husband I believe were Mennonites. I'm not quite sure of that, but they wanted to preserve farmland in Oregon and not have it overrun. So, we did this whole-I don't remember whether it was two years, a year 01:20:00and a half, two years-but we did this whole thing where we eventually ended up with the legislature coming on with land use planning that was the most radical in the United States, and still is, and the biggest part of it is exclusive farm use land, which there's so many rules that have to be gone through in order to take over any land that's in exclusive farm use that it pretty much protects it. It does it as well as any other kind of program we can come up with. The one thing it can't do is protect against eminent domain, and we're concerned about that with Ten Rivers.

The part of the problem that we didn't realize at that point, we were working-the Kenagys are big farmers and we were working with farmers that were, you know, basically the grass seed industry of Oregon, and big farmers here in Oregon are generally going to be wheatgrass seed and stuff like that. There are 01:21:00some cattle operations and some dairies, but mostly it's going to be that, here in the valley, anyway.

So, we get this thing instituted and here we are 40 years later and we're dealing with a situation where we have these young farmers that can't afford to buy farmland now, and if they can get it, they can't build anything on it unless they do 80,000 a year, which was a figure that somebody came up with during that campaign. And it makes sense for certain crops, mono-crops and big chemical, industrial agriculture, but it doesn't make sense for small farms, and small farms and the whole small farm movement is what I've been pushing my whole life. And we're still doing that with Ten Rivers.

So, we've instituted a community food land trust, it's called. We have all the legal work down. We're actually working with a farm right now that might come 01:22:00into it that's been-a farm that's been around for 14 years, and we'll see how it all plays out. But farmland has gone like everything else has gone: up like this [lifts arm, thumb pointing up, straight up in the air], and meanwhile, food prices stay down here [waves hand horizontally near table] and we're the cheapest in the world. So, it's a complete kind of shakeup that needs to happen.

My own farm, Sunbow Farm that I've been on for 46 years now, I'm 75 and I got to a point three, four years ago where I went, you know, I need to pass this on. And it was already set up in a trust with my kids, but my kids are business people. My daughter started Umpqua Bank and has built that whole thing. My son's a businessman who lived five years in China and now he's living in Qatar. So, they want to see the farm go on, but they're not going to do it. So, we went through a whole transition that took us a bunch of legal time and money to end up with a young couple coming in, and they have their own business within an 01:23:00LLC, which the trust is one part of the LLC, and that works out well. We can stay there while we're alive and they have to do all the passing on. It's an inch-thick legal document.

But that's the kind of situation. You got people who want to grow food that don't have any money partially because they got big college debts. And that wasn't the case when I graduated. I had a $2,000 debt, half of which got knocked out for teaching. Now people pretty typically graduate with 150, $200,000 worth of debt. That puts a crimp on anything you want to do. So, the community is going to have to support its food system, is what it comes down to. And we've known that with this whole thing of community supported agriculture, but now we're at the point where the community's going to have to support the land. And we've got that trust scenario set up and there's other scenarios for doing that. The one I did is not...the not the community food land trust.

And the community food land trust, people that come in and do the farm get to purchase the infrastructure. The community holds the land. It's a federal program that was put together for housing. It's never been used for ag before, so we're the first ones to do that. But it's a 20-year-old federal program that separates the land and the community holds it and then you sell the infrastructure, and then if somebody wants to sell they do it within that process. So, it basically takes it off the market. And it's combinations of that that we're going to have to do to...keep a locally-based regional food system going.

CP: We've touched on your writing throughout this interview. I wonder if you can talk a bit about your creative process and sort of maybe your work habits as well.

HM: Okay. For over 40 years I am awake at around five in the morning. Sometimes 01:25:00it was four for a long time. I require very little sleep, apparently, and I can get by pretty well on four to five hours. So, if I get four hours of sleep, I get up and I go into a deep meditation. I take some green tea, which most monks do, and I go into an hour of meditation. And I keep a notebook there so when I come out of meditation, my next process is to write in a notebook. Part of that came from-there's a poem in here of a couple days we had with Robert Frost visiting us. I think it was at Lewis & Clark, but I really, I just remember him in a room, and I think it was at Lewis & Clark, but what I wrote down that day was something that he said to us: "You're young, you don't have anything to say, but write every day anyway and it will all happen as you get older," which he was totally right.

So, I have all these notebooks which will probably become part of the archive here with the writing, and there's times where I don't have time to do finished 01:26:00writing. I just write what's going on in the notebooks and then years later, like this piece [holds up A Catechism For The Children Of De-Light], I chunked out time from six o'clock in the morning until usually nine to 9:30, ten at the office over when we had the theatre in Withycombe. I'd just come in early and open up the building and I'd go in there and write. And I had notebooks. I had stuff from Harvard and I had stuff I'd thought about, all kinds of stuff there.

So that, this thing [holds up A Catechism For The Children Of De-Light] actually got written over there in that Withycombe office [laughs]. I remember the day I finished it. And it got published right after I retired. And that's kind of been my process, to grab periods of time where I can have total focus. One of the things I learned in the theatre experience was how focused you have to be 01:27:00because we literally had four to six weeks to build a very complicated stage set to support very complicated scripts. So, that energy had to be totally focused every day and we had-my job was to keep everybody focused, including the designers, you know, because oftentimes they'd come to me and ask what was needed for the next part of the process.

And it's that way with a farm. I found out very early that nobody has energy to put into an active, physically active project, more than four hours a day. If you go more than four hours on any one thing, you're going to end up wasting a lot of energy. So, you should switch and do something else. So, that kinda-I tend to work in three to four-hour blocks and tend to get time shaken free where I can do that.

And now that I'm retired from farming even, last winter [laughs], when it rained all winter, I started out working on a book called Grandma's Song of Healing, 01:28:00which I had written most of as a manuscript back in the eighties when she was still alive. So, that was the seventies and the eighties. And I knew there was a-I used to use these black spring binder things to hold my manuscripts. There was one of those laying around that had that in it and I sat down to read through and I had all these tapes from her and stuff and I'm reading through it and I get to page 297 and the sentence doesn't even end. It obviously went somewhere else. So, I go up to the attic, start looking for it, and I ran into all this old poetry that I didn't even know I had. I hadn't published a lot of it before. But there was three manuscripts up there that I thought were totally gone that had William Stafford scratchings on and Vernon Rutsala scratchings on, Don Justice of the writers' workshop scratching. The paper itself was disintegrating. It had been up there over 50 years [laughs], and in an attic.

Anyway, I found the rest of Grandma's manuscript and sat down and rewrote that 01:29:00whole thing. That took me a couple of months, 397-page book. So, that will be out from Mud City Press in Eugene sometime early this next year. And then it kept raining and I went well, I can't go out and do any tractor work for them, I guess I'll mess around with these poems. So, I got this together [taps on book off camera] and sent it up to my guy that's done all my editing for me in Portland over the years. He happened to be free. So, it was really a chore to pull together the stuff that had been published before that was all on his computer because it was four iterations of computers ago. So, he has a supercomputer where you could do all that, but it was not easy, especially those sound poems that went around the room. That's what he used as the basis to hold it all. So, that-print and hold. So, we got that one done and it still was raining so I went okay, I've got five shorter plays, two of which, like the early stuff here, had never been written up on a computer. So, I went through those, rewrote them. One of them is a verse play called "Ezek and Evangeline" 01:30:00[phonetic]. Got that done, so that'll get published sometime in the next year, whenever our-one of my editors is going to have to have time to work with me on that, but the plays are done, ready to go as a collection.

And then about five years ago, six years ago, well, 2012, I had these notes for this novel, Sweet Sam, sitting around upstairs in various notebooks and it came off an experience back in the seventies, both at the farm and on Marys Peak, is where it started. So this novel, if you ever want to know about vision quest, this novel has within it the essence of three of my vision quests collapsed into one, and the characters in it are a young guy who has a relationship with an older man here in Oregon that went through all the stuff in the seventies and 01:31:00helped build the alternative culture, and this guy's in Hollywood and he comes up here and they kind of do a walkthrough. They go on-it starts over across the valley and ends up on Marys Peak and then-so, it's a whole quest for him too but in a different kind of way.

So, what goes on in this novel is I've subtitled it A Story Rooted in Oregon's Alternative Culture 1970-2012, and if you read that novel, you get a feel for everything that was going on in the whole area out here that we know as Summit and west Philomath and, you know, where all of the alternative culture was developed over the years. And that's how-where that story got.

And then when I got done with that one, there's a screenplay I wrote called Kokopelli for President. It got tossed around in L.A. but nobody ever bought it, so I went okay, I'm going to make that into a novel. So, that exists online as a novel. I haven't ever printed it yet but you can get it as an encrypted PDF, and 01:32:00it's a wild tale. It takes place down in the southwest. And then I'm working on another one now which was also a screenplay called Mid Wave [phonetic]. That was written while I was in the English Department, and nobody ever bought that one but it's a wild story, most of which takes place in Coos Bay.

And there's another collection of poetry coming. I've been looking at those this week, three books that are sitting around that I'll probably collect as either mid or old stuff. I don't know which yet, but I'll call it something. And then there's that massive 600-page manuscript that Harper & Row bought. And then, astrologically it will be 2019 and I get to step into new stuff. My astrologer told me about four or five years ago that I was in a period where it was really good energy-wise to rewrite stuff, redo old stuff, so that's what I've been doing. And she said energy's not right to do new stuff, but you can definitely 01:33:00do all the old stuff.

So, there's another couple of books here that are available actually for free on Ten Rivers website, tenriversfoodweb.com [tenriversfoodweb.org], and this nutrition book here is Assessing Plant-Based Foods for Humans and Animals, and this one is Assessing Animal-Based Foods for Humans. And I worked on this one last winter along with all this stuff, and this one the winter before. So, it's just pulling together loose-that stuff was all written. I got new pictures from farmers but a lot of the stuff had been written years ago when we had the soy dairy and we were involved in some other food stuff, back in the early days of farmers markets.

CP: Can you tell me more about the alternative culture of the mid-Willamette Valley?

HM: So, what this culture was-and it was different in Eugene than it was in 01:34:00Corvallis, and I'm not the only one that feels this. I have a strange feeling every time I got in Eugene, and part of it comes-we did a lot of Oregon Tilth work there and I always felt like when I'm in Eugene, nothing is permanent. Everything's always going up and done really fast in a cultural way, so the fads come through there really quickly. Here, something like the energy to build the First Alternative Co-op started in a workshop that I was helping to run over here called Man and His Environment. It was on Tuesday nights and we had usually 20 guys involved. Weren't many women on campus [inaudible]; 20 guys, a lot of them in uniform because it was ROTC day, and what we did in that, it was kind of a seminar-type class. It was me and Scott Overton from-he was a systems ecologist here, and Chuck Cormack from Anthropology. We were the ones that 01:35:00started it and then we brought in two guys from Biology later.

But our whole thing was to... Somebody had to present a paper every week-this was kind of formal-but the paper was supposed to take on something that needed to be done. So, these young guys, through some of the papers that were represented, we came up with this notion that there ought to be someplace where you can buy bulk grains and bulk stuff. And it had happened between my wife and Janusz Kozikowski's wife had been talking about the same things as moms; where can we get this stuff that we can afford, that's fresh, da da, da da.

And then some of those same guys started talking to Tom Denison's dad in Biology because they were in biology stuff. And so, this group started to form in Corvallis, and what came out of it was this thing called First Alternative which we located in a house, and we bought the hamburger stand, and now it's two. But 01:36:00that kind of energy, that sustained community energy that involves people from the bottom isn't very fast, but it's not going to go away, and that's how I built the farmers market, the Saturday market. Somebody came to me at the Wednesday market and said, "We would like to have a Saturday market," and I said, "Well, would you do it?" and I said, "Well, I don't know if I have time. Somewhere right in that period, Ron Spisso showed up at my stand, and Ron came in from running a deli in Atlantic City, New Jersey. We joke about this all the time, that he might be out here as a mafia throwaway. Anyway, Ron ended up getting on a-he was here to get a master in business and a whatever you call it, and he said he had time and he wanted to get involved in the community. So, I said, "how about you help me start a Saturday farmers market?"

So, we got-I knew there was money sitting up in Salem because I was Executive Director of Oregon Tilth at that time and I was up there all the time and nobody 01:37:00knew that there was money sitting there for this but I was in with them, so I went "Okay, let's write a $10,000 grant. We'll fund you to be the first market manager and we'll get this thing set up." And I got Tom Denison, John Eveland, Jamie Kitzrow and another farmer that was a corn grower and he taught at Linn-Benton and somebody else. We were five of us and we set this thing up. I wrote the grant, got the money, we got-we set up and there were five of us on the street, on Monroe Street down there the first time we opened the market. And the second year, I forget if Ron did it for two years or one year, but anyway, somewhere in there he said he didn't want to do it anymore and we should hire somebody else. So, we put the word out to the community and we got a fantastic résumé from somebody called Rebecca Landis [laughs], your boss's-I guess he's your boss-anyway, Larry's wife. And in the interview, she blew us away. She had been doing government work in Texas and they had just moved here because Larry had just taken on the job of being the librarian. So anyway, Rebecca took over 01:38:00and it got built from there.

CP: Well, the last topic I want to talk about today is the Theatre Department, and can you give me the sense of what the culture of that department was like?

HM: It was incredible. I really enjoyed my work in theatre more than I did in English because it was a community experience and we had to rely on each other. And it wasn't that we really liked each other in some cases, but we had to rely on each other, and that sense of community where you have a target that has to get done and all of you have to cooperate to do it is pretty interesting to work in. And it's a lot easier to make a compromise and do real stuff when you're in that kind of driven community. And it isn't at all like most of academia. So, I 01:39:00don't know anyplace else on campus that works that way. Now, maybe a little bit in Agriculture, maybe with some of the Experiment Station stuff, I don't know, but definitely there.

That timeline of you've got six weeks to get this up, get it lit and put it on stage, you've got two to three weeks of performance and then you tear it down and you start over again, it gives a sense of temper that's different from anything else and a sense of timing and rhythm. So, I started running my life that way. I'd run the farm that way. And you get so much done when you set up that way, you know. You become open to other people, so our whole work with Ten Rivers, we don't even have a staff. We have an office but we don't have any staff. We just work together. And almost everybody on the board right now is farmers. It has-at times it's been almost all OSU people, you know, but that, 01:40:00that experience.

And then the other part of it that helped me with my writing is that I'm spending eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year in a fantasy world, which it's a world built on image, and to be constructing those images makes that even more clear. The language goes into actual [knocks on table] building a table or building whatever we build, you know. And we built some fantastic stuff. We used to rent stuff to Portland Opera and to Ashland because she made us clear it out of this building over here [gestures towards Gladys Valley Gymnastics Center/the old Mitchell Playhouse]. Supposedly some of that stuff's sitting around to go in the Horner Museum. I don't know, I'll find out when it opens.

But that, the people there, I'm still in touch with the costumer that's just a fantastic, brilliant woman who, she'd been in Iowa when I was there, actually. I 01:41:00didn't know her there. And Richard I saw the other day. He bought one of these. He was a designer that had a kind of brilliance that came out of who knows where. Alex was much more down to earth kind of designer, but both of them just incredible artists to work with, and being in that artistic environment for nine months a year I think's probably the only reason I was able to keep going here because I-I don't think I would have made it in the English Department. I can teach with my eyes closed, I still do. I got to do a thing in Newport in a couple weeks, and there'll be a PowerPoint up there, but I could stand there with my eyes closed and talk to them about all this stuff, you know. It's...

CP: The building you keep pointing to is the Mitchell Playhouse. It's a very-

HM: Yep, the old Mitchell Playhouse across the street.

CP: Yeah, it's a very old building. It's been a lot of different things over the years.

HM: 1897 it was built [laughs].

CP: What was it like to work there?

HM: Well...

CP: Is this where the sets were built?

HM: The sets were built upstairs in the shop behind the stage, so you had to go up those back-I don't know if you've ever been there-but you go up those back stairs into-they've probably built the floor back out but what they did for the theatre was they dumped it and made it into a continental style theatre and then they put the stage in, and the stage was at the level of the old floor, and then the backstage when into the shop where the windows are that look out over Administration, basically. And the sidewalk.

So, just getting the materials up there was a trip. There's a trapdoor that might still be in the floor over there and we'd bring stuff in and we had to hand it up like this [raises both arms straight up] and then we went up-there's a little thing up that was for reviewing the troops. That had been a military building. There's a troop reviewing stand up there; that's where we stored all the lumber, was up on that. So, we'd pass it all up again and then, yeah.

It was just a...it was a point where Alex and I got fed up with them, they had 01:43:00this kind of funky, I don't even know what color green to call it but it was a green wall as they had-they had it in the Quonset huts over there when we had the English Department. It was some old green paint they used to use during World War II or something and we just went-finally, Alex went over to the administration and he said, "Look, I've got people in here all the time and that color actually makes you depressed. Can you guys at least paint that for us?" So, they came in over Christmas and they painted that white.

And then the last two years that we were in that building I think the trees-there used to be a bunch of trees there and they blew over on the building and put a hole in it. So, you'd think the university would fix the damn roof. Nope; they came in and put plastic on it for two years [laughs]. We've 01:44:00got-there's somewhere there's pictures of us in raincoats backstage with-we've got lights of water we're pouring out and it was totally dangerous and they wouldn't fix it.

CP: So, you were building the stage and you were also helping to produce the plays backstage, is that correct?

HM: I didn't do much with production except in-my end of it was playwriting. So, the playwriting class, the way I set it up was the first term the students would come up with what they wanted to write for a play and learn about how to write a play. Second term they'd write the play in one act, write the play-and one-acts are harder to write than full length plays-and the third term, together we had to come up with performers, directors-they couldn't direct their own stuff-and do the production. We were the only [laughs], only playwriting program in the PAC-10 at that time, including UCLA, USC. They didn't have programs that were doing that. Nobody was carrying through and doing the production, and that's where the rewriting went on.

So, the third time they had to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite with the actors to go 01:45:00through that whole experience. And I was involved in those productions, minimal productions in the black box that used to be in the Education Hall, and now when we moved over they built a black box behind the old dairy building, which was a nice facility to work in, yeah.

CP: And this is Withycombe Hall, correct?

HM: Yeah.

CP: Can you tell me about that transition?

HM: Well, when we got the note, we came in the 15th of September and there was this note: "You guys have two weeks to clear this place out and you can't have more than," I think it was 40 people in the building or something like that. We were basically out of business. So, we started going up to the sixth floor for meetings every week in the administration building and the guy who was the campus building planner was getting ready to retire, but he came to a lot of productions so he was really into getting something. And they were looking all over campus for something because they didn't have any money.

And when they found the thing at Withycombe, then we found that there was a pot of money sitting in some government reserve fund or something and they put together some, I don't even remember how much it was-it wasn't much-to have the construction crew build that theatre on those slanted floors in there in Withycombe. And we didn't have any fly loft. We lost all that. We stayed in business, but that year while we were out of business we tried to do one down in across the street from the stadium there...

CP: Oh, in LaSells Stewart?

HM: Yeah, LaSells Stewart Center. We did one production in there and when you're onstage in LaSells Stewart, it's up for music. You can't hear anybody else onstage. It's a terrible place to do theatre. And we did one at The Majestic. We might have done two at The Majestic. It was a fairly new facility at that point. 1990, we're talking. Yeah, it was a big shock for us. Then when we got over to 01:47:00the new facility, Richard was the only designer at that point. Alex had taken off for Texas and Richard had to come up with designs that we could do these complex plays we wanted to do without any fly loft, and that was challenging. There was another guy who came in that did a couple of designs too, but mostly it was Richard, yeah.

I went to a theatre, I traveled in Germany and went to a theatre in Dresden that had that same problem, they didn't have a fly loft, and they solved the situation in a lot of the same ways Richard did; used a lot of wagons and quick moves other ways.

CP: Can you describe what a fly loft is?

HM: Fly loft, in the old rope lofts, ropes come down and you can-people stand over on the side and pull stuff up. Actually, we had a fly loft upstairs with pins and you'd pull stuff up, lower stuff down. So, we had 30 ropes I think, 01:48:00something like that. It was a major-one of the few major rope theatres left. The old Majestic downtown used to have one of those. It doesn't anymore, but yeah... Old vaudeville stages have them a lot of times. I have one of the pins from the old one here. When they said they were going to rip it out I just took one of the pins, so when the museum opens I'll give it to them. I want to make sure something's going to make it.

CP: Have you maintained a connection to the theatre on campus or in the community since you've retired?

HM: I pretty much haven't gotten to the theatre since I retired. I came back and taught for a year and it was the worst teaching experience I ever had because I wasn't around. And I didn't-never realized it before, but part of it was just being available. Yeah. And I wasn't into it anymore. That last year I was here, 01:49:00it was time to go. And you feel that, you know. You kind of know when you're supposed to do something else. Kind of like getting a divorce or whatever, you know. So, I haven't been back to the theatre a lot. My daughter has had me go to some shows in Portland that Umpqua has tickets for and stuff, but no, I had changed-that was kind of a life that I lived and I changed out of it.

Going back to the play scripts last spring was an interesting experience because some of that was written at Iowa. The verse script was written as a result of the Harvard, Iowa experience and somewhat the Indian reservation experience, and the script before that, The Devil's Cage, was written at Iowa and it was the antiwar experience and the evil empire all set in terms of an inquisitor with a cage in which, throw everybody in a cage because they don't measure up to what 01:50:00we want. And then I wrote one called Old MacDonald's. It was a play that's been put on here a few times actually. It got put on around the farming circuit.

So, it was a play in which I was dealing with the whole thing of succession of farms to a grandson: grandfather owns an old farm out here on the coast range, grandson is sent there to take care of it, and grandpa's living in a house with a pig and a bunch of chickens, and these kids come in with computers and they're going to make a business. So, on it goes. It's a pretty funny play.

And then the last one that's in that booklet is a play that's based on an old Kalapuya Indian story that takes place-a lot of it-is on Marys Peak and over into the other side of the coast range. And that play was produced for the Benton County Museum three times. It was produced in Salem a few times with 01:51:00Chemawa Indian School. It's got masks that are made by Portland Opera. One of them is a flip mask. They're animal masks. It's an animal-people play. And they are in the Benton County Museum in Philomath.

CP: Well Harry, we'll call it a day for today and we'll come back another time and we'll talk about agriculture.

HM: All right. Yeah, okay.