admin
Tue, 08/12/2025 - 19:39
Edited Text
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University
Mel Klein Interview
July 31, 2009
Bailey Library, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania
Interviewed by Philip Tramdack
Transcribed by Morgan Bonekovic
Proofread and edited by Rebecca Cunningham and Judy Silva
Reviewed and approved by Mel Klein
PT: This is the Rock Voices Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University. Today is Friday
July 31, 2009 and the time is 1:17 p.m. We‟re at Bailey Library, Slippery Rock University of
Pennsylvania, and this is an oral history interview video with Mr. Mel Klein. The interviewer is
Philip Tramdack, Director of Library Services.
Good afternoon, Mr. Klein. I‟ll be asking you some questions about yourself and your time as a
student at Slippery Rock. But first of all, let‟s start with some biographical information. What‟s
your full name and date of birth?
MK: Do I have to say Melvin [laughs]? Melvin L. Klein.
PT: What did your mother call you [laughs]?
MK: Sonny [laughs]. Mel Klein, Mel. Actually Melvin L. Klein and I paid for that in the „50s
when the Jerry Lewis movies came out. His name was Melvin and my students slyly would say,
“Melvin.”
PT: [Laughs]. And what‟s your date of birth?
MK: March 23, 1927. By the way, that was the year of Lindbergh, the year of Babe Ruth, and the
most important thing was my birth.
PT: The year of Klein. Okay, and where are you from originally?
MK: I was born in Pittsburgh; lived in Battle Creek, Michigan for four years. I started school—I
went to five different schools in the first grade, but in the more recent sixty years, I came to
Slippery Rock, after living in Pennsylvania. I graduated from East Pittsburgh High School in
1944, went to Carnegie Tech for two years, and then to Slippery Rock after World War II. Now
we‟re from New Jersey.
PT: And after you finished at Slippery Rock: graduate education?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 2
MK: Graduate education—in fact we were all education majors in those days; it was Slippery
Rock State Teachers College. I got a job teaching in Erie County: high school. I taught all the
math, all the science, all the boys and girls phys ed and health and I coached four sports. We
were fed by six one room school houses. McKean, where I was, was halfway between Erie, Pa.
and Edinboro.
PT: As a child what did you want to be when you grew up?
MK: Never to grow up. [Pause] I didn‟t know, but in 1944 the war was on and I had a
scholarship to Carnegie Tech, and I played basketball. So I was in engineering and after about
the third semester I hated it. My first contact with Slippery Rock was through Carnegie Tech and
basketball. I played in December of 1944, the first game of the season Slippery Rock went down
to Carnegie Tech and we played—probably the worst college basketball game you could think
of—but we beat Slippery Rock 27-25.
Then in March we played up at Slippery Rock and that was the last game before I went to the
service. Eventually I gave up going to engineering school. I had taken all my math courses and I
had tutored some sailor shipmates of mine, and they responded to me and I said, “I think this is
what I have to be.” Hence, Slippery Rock.
PT: Very good. And you already mentioned about your first job . . . .
MK: Yes. I was there for two years, then went down to Tarentum, Pa., which is in Allegheny
County, as a math teacher and the head basketball and tennis coach.
PT: So your affiliation with Slippery Rock University, you graduated in 19 . . . .
MK: ‟49.
PT: And your degree was?
MK: Bachelor of Science in Education.
PT: Now the school, when you were here, it was called . . . .
MK: Slippery Rock State Teachers College. I don‟t go back to the Normal School days.
PT: Not quite to the Normal School days, right. You yourself did not attend a one room school
did you?
MK: Oh no, oh no.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 3
PT: While you were here, what were some of the campus activities that you engaged in?
MK: I did play basketball; I did write for the school newspaper. I was a sports writer for the
school newspaper, and I once figured out how Slippery Rock‟s football team, by comparative
scores, defeated Notre Dame that year. Nobody bought it, but it was fun.
PT: Any other campus activities that you, in retrospect after sixty years, can divulge?
MK: Not really [pause].The veterans who came back were pretty much all business. Schooling
and that was it.
Oh yes! We played duplicate bridge at Dale Houk‟s house, the president‟s house. There were
about three students and the rest faculty, and Houk used to have bridge about once a month. Had
a good time with it. Sometimes we even beat the professors, but it was much to their chagrin.
PT: While we‟re on the subject, you did talk about going away to the service. Do you want to
talk at all about your experience in the service?
MKL: Sure. As I mentioned, as a result of my tutoring some of my shipmates who wanted to get
a higher rate, it affected me and I said, “This is what I want to do.” The most important
experience was being on an aircraft carrier in 1946. It was just after the war, and I stayed in after
the war. I was involved with the atom bomb testing at Bikini Atoll, July 1st of 1946 and July
31st—oh my heavens! This is an anniversary of the second bomb.
First bomb was dropped from a B-29 and exploded about 10,000 feet above the ocean. Our duty
was to send mother planes and robot planes to the mushroom site and send the robot plane
through, catch it on the other side, and take it to an island about 150 miles away. The second
bomb was floated in, in the middle of a target area where there were dozens and dozens of old
ships. They floated it in and was about, oh maybe twenty or thirty feet underwater, and then it
exploded.
Then shortly after that, we sent in—and we really didn‟t know enough about radiation—we sent
people in with Geiger counters and rubber suits just to look at some of the research and some of
the testing, because they had animals on board. We really didn‟t know anything.
There was a video, a DVD, it‟s called Radio Bikini, and it was out about fifteen years ago. One
of the fellows who was on the research committee was in a wheelchair. In the beginning they
show him here and later on you can see the swollen arms, his legs were cut off and a year after
the DVD he died of radiation poisoning.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 4
[I] played basketball every night on the carrier and I played basketball with the answer to a trivia
question. The fellow who was the high scorer of the very first NCAA championship was a
fellow—my division officer—by the name of John Dick, and his picture‟s in Springfield
Basketball Hall of Fame.
But the most exciting experience and awe-inspiring experience was the bomb—the two bombs
and the devastation they did create. It was the same power bomb that did Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
PT: Now I would like to ask you about some of what you would consider to be your
accomplishments while you were at college.
MK: The education fraternity, Kappa Delta Pi. I did play a little basketball, because when I first
came after playing at Carnegie Tech I had to sit out a year. I played the first semester of my
senior year and then the second semester I was doing student teaching.
I have to tell you this—when I look back at it, I brought all my math credits with me so I didn‟t
really take much math here. But I was able to take courses with folks like Dr. Strain: Principles
of Geography, Harold Weiand, who was U.S. History, and Janet Burns, who was a speech
teacher. These people kind of put the humanities touch to my education.
Dr. Spotts: English literature, American literature. And it was great for me because I liked to
have memorized poetry and he liked the fact that I did. So we got along well. I was just thinking
of four lines of one of the sonnets, especially one that came to me at the time of the atom bomb.
“The world is much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little
we see in Nature that is ours;” and I thought about that [pause] in terms of the atom bomb. And
[pause] still think about it.
PT: Right, it‟s actually a moving bit of poetry when you think about the impact on humanity that
the technology has had in the 20th century.
MK: But, that was Dr. Spotts, Dr. Spotts. That was his doing and his class that got me to it. And
I often use one of Wordsworth‟s other poems, when I deliver speeches, “My heart leaps up when
I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began; so is it now I am a man. So be it
when I shall grow old, and die. The child, the child is the father of man.” I use that in different
speeches in different occasions, and I go back to Spotts on that one.
In 1965 I spent a July at Williams College on a John Hay humanities fellowship. When I got
back to school, and as a principal, I developed a whole routine on the humanities of English and
social studies.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 5
I go back to the Slippery Rock time, with those particular professors, none of whom were my
professors for my major. And I think I, between this 1965 thing at Williams and what I had here
from those professors, that‟s kind of tied it in for me. The kids in my high school, where I was
principal, they were going to be exposed to art, music, literature, and a history teacher and an
English teacher were going to plan together so that the literature and the history fit one another.
So I think it went back to those folks.
PT: So these professors who, I mean what you‟re suggesting is there‟s a good reason why we
have buildings named after these people.
MK: Oh yes. Well Dr. Swope was music history, I think it was Mrs. Gault who was an art
professor. I had music history and art history from those folks. I remembered giving reports in art
history on some paintings and things of that sort. Yeah, and sixteen years later I was able to
orchestrate the whole thing for about seven hundred kids in Glen Ridge High School.
PT: Of the professors you‟ve mentioned that were noteworthy in your experience, is there one in
particular who you identified with, or you attached yourself to, who was a mentor in some way?
MK: They weren‟t necessarily mentors. But I was impressed with the fact that Dr. Strain, who
had Principles of Geography—and we talked about cotton being a one crop society. Then I went
into Weiand‟s history class and one of the lines was, “What caused the Civil War?” And Strain
had given us the answer to that [laughs].
I mentioned Spotts, who, I just really liked his classes in literature. Janet Burns was my speech
professor and I think she, she kind of took to the kind of speeches that I made, which led to
announcing the football games here. Then when WBUT Butler radio station opened up, just
about the time we were in school, they wanted somebody to come down there on a Saturday
morning and run a show for an hour from Slippery Rock, and there I was. So it wasn‟t just one,
they were—I have to put them all in the same group. Again, no math professors, but I brought
most of my math major stuff from Carnegie.
PT: That‟s interesting that your experience here was rich in the humanities.
MK: Well the president—now remember, it was after World War II, before the Korean War and
it pre-dated you „60s folks. We‟d had enough of war, and there was a swing for the humanities.
And it stayed that way until 1954 when the Russians shot up Sputnik and then the gearing all
over the place was for math and science.
PT: How do you think the experience at college was affected or influenced by the returning
veterans? From your perspective?
MK: Oh that‟s on my list. Veterans coming back were no-nonsense people, and I pitied the
seventeen-year-old freshmen coming and sitting in the same class with vets. But I think it had a
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 6
greater effect on professors, because if a professor said bananas grew on some island, there was
somebody in that class that would either say, “Yes” or “No. Because I was there.” So I think the
lectures and the jokes that were on the margins had to change. And I think we had a [pause] good
effect upon presentations that professors made after that point. I think the professors welcomed
some of the challenges that they got from the veterans. They just didn‟t let things slide and take
[things] for granted. It was a challenging time, I think, for professors. Maybe we should have a
little more of that these days.
PT: Possibly. And did you—we talked a moment as you were coming in about the buildings on
campus. The campus at the time that you were here was really confined to what we now call the
“upper campus” and a few of those buildings are still there. Can you recall anything in particular
about the buildings that were here then?
MK: Well we only had 960 students. So it‟s probably one-tenth of what we have today. The
cafeteria, the food services, was on the first floor of North Hall. We had the regular breakfast and
lunches, go [in] one line . . . . [PT yawns] [MK laughs] See what I do to audiences?
But for the evening, we were served family-style. The men and boys had to wear jackets and
there were usually about eight to a table and there were two sittings. The bell would ring and all
of these servers would come out and deposit—there was a piece of meat for every one of the
eight and then there was family-style potatoes and vegetables and things. You met people by
being assigned to different tables, maybe after two or three weeks. And you dished out the food
for everybody. But that was kind of an interesting.
PT: So did the students learn to eat the way you would eat at a mess in Fort Sam Houston or did
the Fort Sam Houston people learn to eat the way you would eat at a college refectory?
MK: I think it was just a way to get the faculty and students to know one another. It was small
enough that they could do that. And I think it tried to imitate home to some degree.
PT: Any high jinks at dinner, like throwing bread fights or anything like that?
MK: Nothing like that. Our high jinks were much more sophisticated.
PT: Well you‟ll get a chance to tell me about that in a little bit. And your classes, where did you
have classes?
MK: There were some in Old Main. I did take a couple science courses in [pause] well I have it
here [laughs], the map here.
PT: You took classes in Old Main?
MK: Yeah, there were classes in Old Main.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 7
PT: Very interesting.
MK: And [pause] in fact, I think several of my classes were in Old Main.
PT: What floor?
MK: Second, third floor—I don‟t know. I‟m not sure now. But, you know I‟m not sure about it
anymore, because I get so out of whack with just visiting here today. The football field was just
about the end of the campus. There was a nature trail that went up the road and a lot of the trees
and bushes were labeled. And, that was pretty much it.
PT: And, let‟s see, you said that the Chapel was . . .
MK: We had graduation at the Chapel.
PT: And the library, where was the library then?
MK: It was called the Maltby Library.
PT: Okay, so the Maltby Library had been built by that time; it was there. The building we‟re in
now is the successor to the Maltby Library. The Maltby Building is still in use. [Pause] So,
where
did
you
live?
MK: First semester on campus, being a transfer student I lived with a family on Keister Road.
Then the second semester, all the boys and men lived in South Hall—dormitory living. The girls
were in North Hall—second, third floors, whatever was there.
PT: And when you were not studying how did you—well let me go back a step. While you were
here, what would you have called home? Where would have been home?
MK: Home would have been East Pittsburgh, Pa., and then my family moved—and they told me
they were moving, so they didn‟t try to get rid of me. [PT laughs] But my father bought a store, a
curtain shop, in Erie, Pa., so the last two years they were in Erie.
PT: So if you were going home from college—I don‟t imagine you went home every weekend
the way students do now.
MK: Didn‟t go home at all. I was in a two-room suite with four other transfers. There were three
of them from Pitt, one from Duquesne and I was from Carnegie Tech. So the one thing we had in
common: we were transfer students, and we never went home.
PT: Did anybody own a car?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 8
MK: One of my roommates had a car the second year there, but we didn‟t go anywhere. Besides
when we used to play golf down the road a piece, we used to hitchhike with our golf clubs. Play
the one hole going up and then pay our fee and play golf. Most of our evenings were studying.
After the dinner we would mull around here in North Hall, and the girls would go to their dorms
and we would go where we were, and that was pretty much it. For entertainment in about 1948
and ‟49 we‟d walk down to the center of town where there was an appliance store and they had a
couple of TVs in the window. We would stand outside and watch a little television then.
PT: So there weren‟t any televisions on campus? In a public room, a common room or something
like that?
MK: No, no.
PT: Well that would‟ve been just at the very beginning of television and out here they might
have had maybe one channel, I don‟t know, two channels.
MK: Well they would‟ve had the Pittsburgh channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS and one channel,
channel 13 or something. We didn‟t miss anything because it was no different from home. There
was a theater, a movie theater. There was an Isaly‟s Ice Cream, there was a movie theater right
on Main Street, and that too was recreation.
PT: So if a . . . say a boy, a man wanted to invite a young woman for a date, what would they do?
MK: Maybe go to a movie if the young lady had enough exempt time to go out. The girls were
allowed one midnight a month.
PT: That means they were allowed out until midnight?
MK: Yeah.
PT: Once a month?
MK: Once a month.
PT: When did they have to get back . . .?
MK: Well anywhere from 8:00-10:00 o‟clock, 10:30 something like that.
PT: So did they have a sign in sheet or something or did they have to sign a book, something like
that?
MK: I think they had to sign out and sign in, yes.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 9
PT: Hmm. That‟s a little different from the way it is today.
MK: Just a little, just a little.
PT: And so they might go into town and go to the movie or go have an ice cream, something like
that?
MK: That was it.
PT: Interesting. I assure you, things are different today.
MK: We had three daughters go through school so, yes [laughs], I know that from another point
of view.
PT: When you first got here, and especially getting here as you did after serving in the armed
forces, can you recall what your first impression of the place was? What your first—what struck
you when you were here?
MK: My first impression other than at the basketball [game], was playing up here on campus and
even as an opposing player: the friendliness of the place. Then when I got here, I thought I was
going to be an outsider since I was a transfer student. And, we got into the hello or howdy
tradition. You didn‟t walk by anybody without saying “howdy” or “hello,” or getting “hello”
back; everyone, the professors, the president, all the student body.
That was one of the things that I had remembered and it was just a plain, friendly place and I
compared it to my experiences at Carnegie Tech. I went through a very bad, emotional time and
depression time because [pause] I knew I hated where I was going with respect to engineering
and I had in the back of my mind this teaching stuff. And Slippery Rock rescued me. I came up
here, Dr. Duncan was the Dean of Students, and he wanted me to start right away, and I told him
that I‟m going to take off for the summer, but I‟ll be back here in September. And September of
‟47, that‟s when I started. But it just was family. All 960 of us plus faculty were family.
PT: It was a small enough student body that you, you could know a lot of the people by name, a
large part of the class by name . . . a large part of the college by name.
MK: That was a possibility. Yes.
PT: Did the [pause] you mentioned a little when you were talking about your professors, did the
professors invite students to their houses, or things like that? Did you have that kind of social
interaction with professors?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 10
MK: The social interaction was that bridge, duplicate bridge at the president‟s house and there
were several faculty members who played there so we got to know them besides some of our
own class professors. But there wasn‟t much [of] invitations to professors homes.
PT: Coming back from the perspective that you have of now sixty years since you graduated,
[pause] what do you think is the most—what strikes you most about the campus today? I mean I
can imagine there are buildings, a tremendous amount of building [pause] but what are some of
the things that impress you about the place or that strike you as surprising?
MK: Well just looking at it as a university status with all the different offerings, because in our
day it was teaching, and now there‟s, I wouldn‟t be surprised if education is one of the smaller
schools, I don‟t know for sure.
PT: It‟s actually a substantial school here. I‟m not sure if it‟s the largest, but if it‟s not the largest
it‟s the second largest, and that‟s because it‟s been, always been a specialty here.
MK: It‟s big compared to what I saw, and I don‟t know . . . in some cases big is very good and
in some cases you lost some of the familiarity and the friendliness.
PT: Well I imagine one of the—one of the things I look back to, in comparison to my college
experience which was forty years ago, is the luxury—I don‟t know if you‟ve been in any of the
new residences?
MK: No.
PT: You should visit, if you have the chance.
MK: We may go on a tour with alumni.
PT: I invite you to compare with your dormitory room. We‟re not even allowed to use to word
“dormitory.”
MK: That‟s what I understand.
PT: It‟s a residence.
MK: A residence.
PT: Not a dormitory.
MK: South Hall was very old, but we made do. There were—a lot of us were veterans and it was
a little more luxurious than the sleeping five stacked high in an aircraft carrier [laughs].
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 11
PT: Right.
MK: There were a lot of things of that sort. I have to mention one thing. In 1948, in September, I
volunteered to sit at a desk and check in the new freshman. And they had the names and their
social security number and they had a letter at the end of a name. “H” was for Hebrew or Jewish,
and being Jewish and not knowing any, I sat down and went through the whole list of young
ladies and found two or three “H‟s” behind the names, and I ended up marrying one of them.
PT: [Laughs] Very interesting, using this intelligence to scout a partner. That‟s intriguing. I
wanted to ask you a question. You mentioned about greeting the freshmen: anything about rituals
or initiations or any of that kind of activity?
MK: Nothing like that. There were no social fraternities. I don‟t know whether there are now or
not. I think this was the effect of veterans. [They] didn‟t want to mess with that nonsense.
Everybody was friendly, but no, it was school work and you could go someplace for a bit. We
got very good at bringing in laundry in boxes, and somehow bottles of beer got in there.
[Laughs] But, no—
PT: They‟re probably any number of those bottles that are still in a wall somewhere, in one of
these buildings, that somehow got back behind a steam pipe [MK laughs] and is probably still
sitting there.
MK: Could still be. The socialization was, I think, as a result of the [pause] veterans having that
in common. And again, I kind of felt sorry for some of the seventeen-year-old kids coming in
who weren‟t part of that.
PT: Did they have regulations about alcohol in the dorms?
MK: Absolutely. I mean this was dry country, between here and Grove City. Oh yes.
PT: So what would‟ve been, in the event that a person who had been a veteran of the war in
Pacific was enjoying a beer in his room and he was apprehended. What would‟ve happened to
him?
MK: I don‟t know of that ever happening but I am guessing that they would say, “You know
what it is, don‟t do it again; be smart about it,” and that would have been the end of it. I just
think it was that way.
PT: When you say this was dry territory, by that you mean that the jurisdiction, the township was
alcohol-free, right?
MK: That‟s correct. There were no bars, none of that.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 12
PT: So, I‟m not suggesting that you would‟ve ever done such a thing, but someone who had
developed a thirst for, say a bottle of beer, what would they do?
MK: It would‟ve been very rare. [The] reason is that these were the rules, we were veterans, we
were all part of rules. And that was it. Again it goes back to: why were we here? And it was, it
was all business in that sense, yet we all fit into the friendliness of the college.
PT: Do you have any reminiscences or memories of the students that were here at the time you
were, and any in particular who were distinguished in some way or who were movers and
shakers or people who, you know people who come to mind?
MK: Well I have one sad story, one tragic story. There was a fellow, Paul Clauson, who had
been a captain during World War II. He was a junior, he was a year behind me, and we played on
the same softball team, things of that sort. And I had just graduated in „49 and in 1950 the
Korean War started, and Paul was called. I remember having—they told me this—he had a
conversation with Marie McKay who was the registrar. Marie said to him, “We‟ll have a place
for you.” Never came back. He was killed dragging one of his platoon to safety. And he was
such a friendly, good guy. He was missed; he was missed. And there may be something in the
school that‟s in memorial for him, but I‟m not sure about that.
PT: The name is familiar, Clauson. I‟ve heard that name; wouldn‟t surprise me if there was a
memorial somewhere.
MK: And we had about four or five men who were elementary [education] majors, that
graduated from Slippery Rock, got a job teaching sixth grade in an elementary school; fifteen
minutes later they became principals, and fifteen minutes after that they were superintendents.
They were probably, in my class, they got to the superintendency a lot faster than the rest of us.
I wanted to be a career math teacher. And I did that for fifteen years, then became a high school
principal and wanted to do that as a career. But things happened and changed and I ended up as a
superintendent of schools. And I relate one thing with respect to that: during the Depression, I
went to five different schools in first grade between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Depression, father
working, looking for work. In 1983, I started, after I so-called “retired” as a superintendent, I
sold insurance very badly for a year, and some district called up and asked if I would be an
interim-sup[erintendent], so I spent the next fifteen years doing nineteen interim-supes, all over
the state of New Jersey. So I go back to the first grade [laughs] and then I relate it to my career—
in fact I hold the record in New Jersey. Although there is somebody that‟s probably going to
break that record. But, they always remember Babe Ruth first, anyhow. [PT laughs]
I think one other thing that‟s a result of—I was kind of a pioneer in cable television. The town
where I worked as a superintendent, Livingston, was the second community to be wired for
cable. And there was very little local programming, so I had a program called “The
Superintendent‟s Forum,” and I had it for four years. It was very local; it wasn‟t what it is today.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 13
And I would tape a show once a month and they played it on our local channel twice a week and
then each month I‟d have a new show. And that was really the beginning of everything, for cable
television.
PT: What, do you recall when that would have been approximately what year?
MK: Yeah, it would‟ve been . . . ‟77 to ‟81. Livingston was wired up in 1977 and then I started
programs right then. The commissioner of education, I had some—one group—I brought back
three students who had just finished their freshman year in college and the idea was, if you had
to do it over again what would you do? Anything differently? Well one of the three was an actor,
and he stayed in acting. And he plays the part of George on Seinfeld. He graduated from
Livingston High School, Jason Alexander, for this example. So yeah we had a good time there.
And again, I‟m amazed when we say there‟s about what, close to ten thousand students?
PT: I think there are about 8,500 students here full time equivalent.
MK: I did spend some time, after I graduated I was up there in Erie and I scouted Gannon
College for a football game for Slippery Rock. So I‟d come down because, I‟d come down to see
my about-to-be-wife who, at that time was a sophomore here. So I came back and forth and do
what I could as far as that was concerned.
In 1948, for homecoming we had “The Rocket Man” and I think there‟s a picture of him in this
yearbook, a fellow by the name of Jim Jewel became “The Rocket Man” and we introduced him
the night before the homecoming football game. I don‟t know whether they kept that tradition or
not.
PT: So was the mascot a rocket?
MK: The Rocket Man.
PT: Now I don‟t know what, I‟m not sure what the mascot is now. [MK laughs] It may be a lion;
I think a lion. And then I‟m wondering if they ever had a rock as a mascot, probably not.
[Editor‟s note: yes, there was Rocky the Rock mascot in the 1970s]
MK: No, well because at least in my time because it was “Rocket Man!” He was a gymnast so he
combined a lot of stuff. And I, this was before my time, it was about 1938, and I think it was the
one item that got Slippery Rock nationwide attention. There was a sports writer by the name of
Cunningham writing for a Boston newspaper, and it was during the football season I think in ‟38
or so, and as a gag—he was supposed to pick twenty teams to win—and as a gag he picked
Slippery Rock to win. Now he‟s waiting all Saturday night, and finally the Slippery Rock score
came in. And Slippery Rock won, and he won the pool. And then on Monday I think he wrote a
poem [pause] “Slippery Rock, that great school; helped me win the football pool.” And it made it
in the Boston papers.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 14
Then one time Slippery Rock did go to the Sun Bowl; that was in the „30s. So between that and
the athletic director at the University of Michigan also put us on the map even more. They used
to have Band Day at the University of Michigan and the high school bands came in and they took
up too many seats. So he decided to have band day on a day when the football team was playing
away. And he invited Slippery Rock and the team that they were to play on that Saturday to
come up to Michigan and play, and they had Band Day. And they played before a crowd that was
probably bigger than any the whole season—any those two schools had. I understand that
Michigan and the state of Texas would flood the bookstore with mail orders of Slippery Rock
paraphernalia.
PT: Those are two interesting anecdotes. I think we‟ll try and track down that poem if we can;
we must have some record of it somewhere. And the other is the, the thing I first found out about
when I got here in 2002—I grew up in Pennsylvania, I always knew of Slippery Rock, it was a
place that people used to go to, to college, from where I grew up outside of Philadelphia. You
came to Slippery Rock either to be a gym teacher or because it was as far as you could get [MK
laughs] from mom and dad, and still be in the state of Pennsylvania; that was the other reason.
But Slippery Rock has always, I found out now, it‟s been a real recognizable brand. People all
over the place have heard of Slippery Rock.
MK: Yes.
PT: I mean it‟s something distinguished that we—I never realized until I got here. [Pause] You
were talking about Rocket Man there; I‟ve never heard of him before. But do you remember
anything else about any other events that took place while you were here: any kind whether it be
political events, campus events, weather events, just plain interesting things.
MK: I have one. I believe it‟s the opening game of the football season; we played Westminster
on our field. The night before, a group of Westminster college folks came over and they were
going to ring the bell. The tradition was every time Slippery Rock won a game the first people
back from the game, if it was home or away, would talk to Charlie who was the security person.
He was the whole security staff, and we would say, “We‟ve won, Charlie. Ring the bell!” The
Westminster guys came over and they were going to ring the bell. We got word of it, we put up
the defenses, and we captured several of them. And on the day of the game we paraded them, we
got some of the young ladies to give us clothes, and we clothed them in women‟s clothes and
paraded them. In fact, there‟s a picture in the yearbook of that particular scene. And that worked
out pretty well [laughs] and it was fun and we treated them nicely and they behaved so—
PT: Did they invite you over to Westminster to return the favor?
MK: I think they were on the alert. [PT laughs] I don‟t know whether anybody afterward from
here decided they were going to try to go one-upmanship on the Westminster crowd. But they
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 15
were our rival, and Grove City. In fact, the same year we played at Grove City; we won, and for
whatever reason we tore their goal post down. I don‟t know why, but we did.
PT: People used to do stuff like that. I can even remember—uh oh. [PT checks recording
equipment] Hang on for a tiny second I‟m just looking at this, this thing is not recording
anymore. [Pause] I just noticed this a second ago. Alright here‟s what happened: the wire wasn‟t
in, the battery went out, but now it‟s on again. So we might have dropped about five minutes or
three minutes of the video. But that‟s okay because I‟ve been keeping my eye on it to see it.
Everything is lined up. So we‟re back with the video now, after a slight interruption.
MK: It was just time out for a commercial break.
PT: Yeah it was time out for a commercial break. The question that we were talking about:
events that happened here. And you were talking about capturing the students from Westminster.
I was wondering if you had any other reminiscences about any particular event that would‟ve
taken place, for instance while you were here would‟ve been the 1948 presidential election, there
were [pause] political events, any kind of—anything you remember about the weather or
anything spectacular that might have happened?
MK: Nothing spectacular in that sense. We did have some guest speakers. I remember there were
a variety of guest speakers that were held in the Chapel. Ely Culbertson‟s wife was a bridge
expert, was a devotee of United Nations and things of that sort. But we were pretty much a fairly
closed community. And we were with ourselves, so we made the events, the local events.
One thing that happened while we were here: the Middle States visitation committee came in.
That was kind of fun because years later I went to nine Middle States high schools and I chaired
three of the nine, and then I also was on Middle States at—well visited two universities. So the
experience from that—
PT: We‟re doing Middle States review right now, this year.
MK: A simple evaluation.
PT: Many of us are involved in that. One thing, a characteristic of western Pennsylvania is the
weather. I don‟t imagine the weather then was much worse than it is now in the winter. A cold
winter now is probably comparable to a cold winter then.
MK: Yes.
PT: But I imagine that the resources for snow removal were not as [pause] available then as they
maybe are now. Did you ever get the feeling that you were kind of getting closed in?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 16
MK: No. I‟ll tell you what it was though. My first teaching position in McKean, up in Erie
County. That would‟ve been 1949, and the day after Thanksgiving in 1950, it snowed thirty-six
inches worth. That‟s the biggest snow storm I‟d felt at that time—probably ever. But I don‟t
recall having any problems at all at Slippery Rock during the two years that I was here. Yes, it
was pretty good.
PT: People were pretty resourceful. Nowadays they come up with the plows, but of course the
principal concern is to get the parking lots clear so people can drive their cars. If people don‟t
have a lot of cars and then you don‟t worry about it.
MK: That is true. Going back to that particular thing, as a superintendent of schools, one of the
toughest jobs was should I call off school, should I have a delayed opening, or should we have
school. I don‟t think even the Harvard School of Education prepares people for those kinds of
decisions.
PT: I‟ll tell you here, it‟s just as difficult a decision because . . . although the university
obviously never closes because we have three thousand people who live here, and we have to
provide services. The library for instance, is open. We‟re always open. We never close because
of the weather. Somebody can get here; somebody who lives in town can get here. But the issue
of when to cancel classes is always a touchy issue.
MK: There was one thing I wanted to ask you, in terms of relationship with the community, like
the library. Do people in the community have access to this library?
PT: Yes. In the last six years—we provide anybody with a 16057 zip code with a library card if
they want one. We also give any school teacher from a Slippery Rock township or a surrounding
township‟s district a free library card and free access to the materials here.
MK: That‟s interesting.
PT: And I was going to ask you about relations with the community and with the town. If you
could talk a little bit about whether you all had a lot of contact with the people in town. I mean
you had the storekeepers and the townsfolk who worked on Main Street in the various shops, but
whether there was, were there other points of contact?
MK: As a matter of fact I had a cousin who owned a store, a department store right on Main
Street, and so I was friendly with them. But I think we acted as citizens of the community and we
spent most of our time here. But I don‟t think there‟s anything that was unusual . . . .
PT: Just wondering if there were, on top of everything that you mentioned here, if there were any
other memories of a personal nature that you‟d like to talk about more at length regarding your
years at Slippery Rock.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 17
MK: Well I might have mentioned [pause] I did start the Saturday morning program at WBUT
Butler. Got down there—I don‟t even remember how I got down there; I think I might‟ve
borrowed the car from my roommate—and did the Saturday morning show. We did recordings,
we did news briefs and at various times I had talented people from the college come down and
perform in the radio studio, and that was a first. I enjoyed that. It started me thinking about that
kind of career.
In fact, after I retired as a superintendent, the first time I did it as a result of going into TV
production, which I did. I think I mentioned that I had a TV show for local programming, but in
addition to that, as a result of all these experiences I had here, I helped produce several videos.
Anything from how to raise money for college tuition, how to pick colleges, and it was for
parents and teachers and faculty. For faculty: how to conduct a parent conference, things of that
sort. So I can go back to Slippery Rock for that kind of background. And when we had our, in
1949, our gala spoof show, I emceed that. And there was stuff written by some talented people. I
kind of orchestrated it, and I‟ve done all of that kind of thing.
PT: Just wondering if you have any other things that you had noted in your preparation for
coming to speak with us today that you wanted to bring up.
MK: Hmm, let me look. I think I did very well [laughs].
PT: I think so!
MK: Oh, I have to tell you one story. Coach Thompson, after whom the field was named—
Coach Thompson was a basketball and football coach at Slippery Rock prior to my time. But he
was a seventh grade math teacher at the lab school. And in student teaching I had a class of
seventh graders, I had a physics class, and I had a high school math class. I remember months
with the seventh graders, I asked one of the kids if, one of those old things: if two pencils cost
ten cents how much would four pencils cost? And a little boy, he floundered around with it. I‟m
not sure that that was the example but it was that kind of thing.
After the class was over Coach Thompson said, “Mel, now little Cooper every morning gets up,
gathers the eggs, goes and sells the eggs to the neighbors.” He said, “The next time you do one
with Cooper, instead of asking him about pencils, ask him about eggs.” [PT laughs] Sometimes a
practical example hits the nerve, but that was one of Coach Thompson‟s gems. Good guy, good
guy.
I started the second day of teaching the twelfth grade math and I made mention of being at Bikini
for the atom bomb test. And my coordinating teacher went and looked up that I had this, then the
next day he asked me to do the homework assignments with the kids. He walked out of class and
he came back about six weeks later [laughs], so I ran the whole thing. I became maybe too
independent because I went right into being a high school basketball coach. I was never
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 18
anybody‟s assistant, and when it came time to deal with somebody—like as a principal and a
superintendent—who had different philosophies from me, we did bang heads a little bit.
PT: It was a learning experience.
MK: Well I consider that a learning experience for that superintendent at that time [laughter].
See, vanity hasn‟t left me.
PT: [Laughs] Any other things you would like to remind our community?
MK: Well I was very happy to do this and it helped me reflect because I‟m hopeful to do
something else, and it‟s something that caught my ear from one of Bill Clinton‟s comments,
“Everybody should write their biography, if for no other reason than for their family.” We have
three daughters, and one of them especially wanted to know more about what I do and what I did
and I think what we‟re going to do is set up something like that [refers to video recorder] and
start right from the beginning for grandchildren and great grandchildren. I‟m a great believer in
collecting and saving the history of family. And I think this helps me get through with it. I hope
maybe if I get a chance I could get a copy of this too.
PT: We‟ll provide you with—first we provide you with the transcript to review, then this is
supposed to be mounted on a website so people can see it, and the audio portion will also be
made available.
If there isn‟t anything else you want to add then I guess we‟ve concluded and I want to thank you
very much.
MK: My pleasure. Thank you, because again, I think it will inspire me more to get going on this
family thing.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Mel Klein Interview
July 31, 2009
Bailey Library, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania
Interviewed by Philip Tramdack
Transcribed by Morgan Bonekovic
Proofread and edited by Rebecca Cunningham and Judy Silva
Reviewed and approved by Mel Klein
PT: This is the Rock Voices Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University. Today is Friday
July 31, 2009 and the time is 1:17 p.m. We‟re at Bailey Library, Slippery Rock University of
Pennsylvania, and this is an oral history interview video with Mr. Mel Klein. The interviewer is
Philip Tramdack, Director of Library Services.
Good afternoon, Mr. Klein. I‟ll be asking you some questions about yourself and your time as a
student at Slippery Rock. But first of all, let‟s start with some biographical information. What‟s
your full name and date of birth?
MK: Do I have to say Melvin [laughs]? Melvin L. Klein.
PT: What did your mother call you [laughs]?
MK: Sonny [laughs]. Mel Klein, Mel. Actually Melvin L. Klein and I paid for that in the „50s
when the Jerry Lewis movies came out. His name was Melvin and my students slyly would say,
“Melvin.”
PT: [Laughs]. And what‟s your date of birth?
MK: March 23, 1927. By the way, that was the year of Lindbergh, the year of Babe Ruth, and the
most important thing was my birth.
PT: The year of Klein. Okay, and where are you from originally?
MK: I was born in Pittsburgh; lived in Battle Creek, Michigan for four years. I started school—I
went to five different schools in the first grade, but in the more recent sixty years, I came to
Slippery Rock, after living in Pennsylvania. I graduated from East Pittsburgh High School in
1944, went to Carnegie Tech for two years, and then to Slippery Rock after World War II. Now
we‟re from New Jersey.
PT: And after you finished at Slippery Rock: graduate education?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 2
MK: Graduate education—in fact we were all education majors in those days; it was Slippery
Rock State Teachers College. I got a job teaching in Erie County: high school. I taught all the
math, all the science, all the boys and girls phys ed and health and I coached four sports. We
were fed by six one room school houses. McKean, where I was, was halfway between Erie, Pa.
and Edinboro.
PT: As a child what did you want to be when you grew up?
MK: Never to grow up. [Pause] I didn‟t know, but in 1944 the war was on and I had a
scholarship to Carnegie Tech, and I played basketball. So I was in engineering and after about
the third semester I hated it. My first contact with Slippery Rock was through Carnegie Tech and
basketball. I played in December of 1944, the first game of the season Slippery Rock went down
to Carnegie Tech and we played—probably the worst college basketball game you could think
of—but we beat Slippery Rock 27-25.
Then in March we played up at Slippery Rock and that was the last game before I went to the
service. Eventually I gave up going to engineering school. I had taken all my math courses and I
had tutored some sailor shipmates of mine, and they responded to me and I said, “I think this is
what I have to be.” Hence, Slippery Rock.
PT: Very good. And you already mentioned about your first job . . . .
MK: Yes. I was there for two years, then went down to Tarentum, Pa., which is in Allegheny
County, as a math teacher and the head basketball and tennis coach.
PT: So your affiliation with Slippery Rock University, you graduated in 19 . . . .
MK: ‟49.
PT: And your degree was?
MK: Bachelor of Science in Education.
PT: Now the school, when you were here, it was called . . . .
MK: Slippery Rock State Teachers College. I don‟t go back to the Normal School days.
PT: Not quite to the Normal School days, right. You yourself did not attend a one room school
did you?
MK: Oh no, oh no.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 3
PT: While you were here, what were some of the campus activities that you engaged in?
MK: I did play basketball; I did write for the school newspaper. I was a sports writer for the
school newspaper, and I once figured out how Slippery Rock‟s football team, by comparative
scores, defeated Notre Dame that year. Nobody bought it, but it was fun.
PT: Any other campus activities that you, in retrospect after sixty years, can divulge?
MK: Not really [pause].The veterans who came back were pretty much all business. Schooling
and that was it.
Oh yes! We played duplicate bridge at Dale Houk‟s house, the president‟s house. There were
about three students and the rest faculty, and Houk used to have bridge about once a month. Had
a good time with it. Sometimes we even beat the professors, but it was much to their chagrin.
PT: While we‟re on the subject, you did talk about going away to the service. Do you want to
talk at all about your experience in the service?
MKL: Sure. As I mentioned, as a result of my tutoring some of my shipmates who wanted to get
a higher rate, it affected me and I said, “This is what I want to do.” The most important
experience was being on an aircraft carrier in 1946. It was just after the war, and I stayed in after
the war. I was involved with the atom bomb testing at Bikini Atoll, July 1st of 1946 and July
31st—oh my heavens! This is an anniversary of the second bomb.
First bomb was dropped from a B-29 and exploded about 10,000 feet above the ocean. Our duty
was to send mother planes and robot planes to the mushroom site and send the robot plane
through, catch it on the other side, and take it to an island about 150 miles away. The second
bomb was floated in, in the middle of a target area where there were dozens and dozens of old
ships. They floated it in and was about, oh maybe twenty or thirty feet underwater, and then it
exploded.
Then shortly after that, we sent in—and we really didn‟t know enough about radiation—we sent
people in with Geiger counters and rubber suits just to look at some of the research and some of
the testing, because they had animals on board. We really didn‟t know anything.
There was a video, a DVD, it‟s called Radio Bikini, and it was out about fifteen years ago. One
of the fellows who was on the research committee was in a wheelchair. In the beginning they
show him here and later on you can see the swollen arms, his legs were cut off and a year after
the DVD he died of radiation poisoning.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 4
[I] played basketball every night on the carrier and I played basketball with the answer to a trivia
question. The fellow who was the high scorer of the very first NCAA championship was a
fellow—my division officer—by the name of John Dick, and his picture‟s in Springfield
Basketball Hall of Fame.
But the most exciting experience and awe-inspiring experience was the bomb—the two bombs
and the devastation they did create. It was the same power bomb that did Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
PT: Now I would like to ask you about some of what you would consider to be your
accomplishments while you were at college.
MK: The education fraternity, Kappa Delta Pi. I did play a little basketball, because when I first
came after playing at Carnegie Tech I had to sit out a year. I played the first semester of my
senior year and then the second semester I was doing student teaching.
I have to tell you this—when I look back at it, I brought all my math credits with me so I didn‟t
really take much math here. But I was able to take courses with folks like Dr. Strain: Principles
of Geography, Harold Weiand, who was U.S. History, and Janet Burns, who was a speech
teacher. These people kind of put the humanities touch to my education.
Dr. Spotts: English literature, American literature. And it was great for me because I liked to
have memorized poetry and he liked the fact that I did. So we got along well. I was just thinking
of four lines of one of the sonnets, especially one that came to me at the time of the atom bomb.
“The world is much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little
we see in Nature that is ours;” and I thought about that [pause] in terms of the atom bomb. And
[pause] still think about it.
PT: Right, it‟s actually a moving bit of poetry when you think about the impact on humanity that
the technology has had in the 20th century.
MK: But, that was Dr. Spotts, Dr. Spotts. That was his doing and his class that got me to it. And
I often use one of Wordsworth‟s other poems, when I deliver speeches, “My heart leaps up when
I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began; so is it now I am a man. So be it
when I shall grow old, and die. The child, the child is the father of man.” I use that in different
speeches in different occasions, and I go back to Spotts on that one.
In 1965 I spent a July at Williams College on a John Hay humanities fellowship. When I got
back to school, and as a principal, I developed a whole routine on the humanities of English and
social studies.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 5
I go back to the Slippery Rock time, with those particular professors, none of whom were my
professors for my major. And I think I, between this 1965 thing at Williams and what I had here
from those professors, that‟s kind of tied it in for me. The kids in my high school, where I was
principal, they were going to be exposed to art, music, literature, and a history teacher and an
English teacher were going to plan together so that the literature and the history fit one another.
So I think it went back to those folks.
PT: So these professors who, I mean what you‟re suggesting is there‟s a good reason why we
have buildings named after these people.
MK: Oh yes. Well Dr. Swope was music history, I think it was Mrs. Gault who was an art
professor. I had music history and art history from those folks. I remembered giving reports in art
history on some paintings and things of that sort. Yeah, and sixteen years later I was able to
orchestrate the whole thing for about seven hundred kids in Glen Ridge High School.
PT: Of the professors you‟ve mentioned that were noteworthy in your experience, is there one in
particular who you identified with, or you attached yourself to, who was a mentor in some way?
MK: They weren‟t necessarily mentors. But I was impressed with the fact that Dr. Strain, who
had Principles of Geography—and we talked about cotton being a one crop society. Then I went
into Weiand‟s history class and one of the lines was, “What caused the Civil War?” And Strain
had given us the answer to that [laughs].
I mentioned Spotts, who, I just really liked his classes in literature. Janet Burns was my speech
professor and I think she, she kind of took to the kind of speeches that I made, which led to
announcing the football games here. Then when WBUT Butler radio station opened up, just
about the time we were in school, they wanted somebody to come down there on a Saturday
morning and run a show for an hour from Slippery Rock, and there I was. So it wasn‟t just one,
they were—I have to put them all in the same group. Again, no math professors, but I brought
most of my math major stuff from Carnegie.
PT: That‟s interesting that your experience here was rich in the humanities.
MK: Well the president—now remember, it was after World War II, before the Korean War and
it pre-dated you „60s folks. We‟d had enough of war, and there was a swing for the humanities.
And it stayed that way until 1954 when the Russians shot up Sputnik and then the gearing all
over the place was for math and science.
PT: How do you think the experience at college was affected or influenced by the returning
veterans? From your perspective?
MK: Oh that‟s on my list. Veterans coming back were no-nonsense people, and I pitied the
seventeen-year-old freshmen coming and sitting in the same class with vets. But I think it had a
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 6
greater effect on professors, because if a professor said bananas grew on some island, there was
somebody in that class that would either say, “Yes” or “No. Because I was there.” So I think the
lectures and the jokes that were on the margins had to change. And I think we had a [pause] good
effect upon presentations that professors made after that point. I think the professors welcomed
some of the challenges that they got from the veterans. They just didn‟t let things slide and take
[things] for granted. It was a challenging time, I think, for professors. Maybe we should have a
little more of that these days.
PT: Possibly. And did you—we talked a moment as you were coming in about the buildings on
campus. The campus at the time that you were here was really confined to what we now call the
“upper campus” and a few of those buildings are still there. Can you recall anything in particular
about the buildings that were here then?
MK: Well we only had 960 students. So it‟s probably one-tenth of what we have today. The
cafeteria, the food services, was on the first floor of North Hall. We had the regular breakfast and
lunches, go [in] one line . . . . [PT yawns] [MK laughs] See what I do to audiences?
But for the evening, we were served family-style. The men and boys had to wear jackets and
there were usually about eight to a table and there were two sittings. The bell would ring and all
of these servers would come out and deposit—there was a piece of meat for every one of the
eight and then there was family-style potatoes and vegetables and things. You met people by
being assigned to different tables, maybe after two or three weeks. And you dished out the food
for everybody. But that was kind of an interesting.
PT: So did the students learn to eat the way you would eat at a mess in Fort Sam Houston or did
the Fort Sam Houston people learn to eat the way you would eat at a college refectory?
MK: I think it was just a way to get the faculty and students to know one another. It was small
enough that they could do that. And I think it tried to imitate home to some degree.
PT: Any high jinks at dinner, like throwing bread fights or anything like that?
MK: Nothing like that. Our high jinks were much more sophisticated.
PT: Well you‟ll get a chance to tell me about that in a little bit. And your classes, where did you
have classes?
MK: There were some in Old Main. I did take a couple science courses in [pause] well I have it
here [laughs], the map here.
PT: You took classes in Old Main?
MK: Yeah, there were classes in Old Main.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 7
PT: Very interesting.
MK: And [pause] in fact, I think several of my classes were in Old Main.
PT: What floor?
MK: Second, third floor—I don‟t know. I‟m not sure now. But, you know I‟m not sure about it
anymore, because I get so out of whack with just visiting here today. The football field was just
about the end of the campus. There was a nature trail that went up the road and a lot of the trees
and bushes were labeled. And, that was pretty much it.
PT: And, let‟s see, you said that the Chapel was . . .
MK: We had graduation at the Chapel.
PT: And the library, where was the library then?
MK: It was called the Maltby Library.
PT: Okay, so the Maltby Library had been built by that time; it was there. The building we‟re in
now is the successor to the Maltby Library. The Maltby Building is still in use. [Pause] So,
where
did
you
live?
MK: First semester on campus, being a transfer student I lived with a family on Keister Road.
Then the second semester, all the boys and men lived in South Hall—dormitory living. The girls
were in North Hall—second, third floors, whatever was there.
PT: And when you were not studying how did you—well let me go back a step. While you were
here, what would you have called home? Where would have been home?
MK: Home would have been East Pittsburgh, Pa., and then my family moved—and they told me
they were moving, so they didn‟t try to get rid of me. [PT laughs] But my father bought a store, a
curtain shop, in Erie, Pa., so the last two years they were in Erie.
PT: So if you were going home from college—I don‟t imagine you went home every weekend
the way students do now.
MK: Didn‟t go home at all. I was in a two-room suite with four other transfers. There were three
of them from Pitt, one from Duquesne and I was from Carnegie Tech. So the one thing we had in
common: we were transfer students, and we never went home.
PT: Did anybody own a car?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 8
MK: One of my roommates had a car the second year there, but we didn‟t go anywhere. Besides
when we used to play golf down the road a piece, we used to hitchhike with our golf clubs. Play
the one hole going up and then pay our fee and play golf. Most of our evenings were studying.
After the dinner we would mull around here in North Hall, and the girls would go to their dorms
and we would go where we were, and that was pretty much it. For entertainment in about 1948
and ‟49 we‟d walk down to the center of town where there was an appliance store and they had a
couple of TVs in the window. We would stand outside and watch a little television then.
PT: So there weren‟t any televisions on campus? In a public room, a common room or something
like that?
MK: No, no.
PT: Well that would‟ve been just at the very beginning of television and out here they might
have had maybe one channel, I don‟t know, two channels.
MK: Well they would‟ve had the Pittsburgh channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS and one channel,
channel 13 or something. We didn‟t miss anything because it was no different from home. There
was a theater, a movie theater. There was an Isaly‟s Ice Cream, there was a movie theater right
on Main Street, and that too was recreation.
PT: So if a . . . say a boy, a man wanted to invite a young woman for a date, what would they do?
MK: Maybe go to a movie if the young lady had enough exempt time to go out. The girls were
allowed one midnight a month.
PT: That means they were allowed out until midnight?
MK: Yeah.
PT: Once a month?
MK: Once a month.
PT: When did they have to get back . . .?
MK: Well anywhere from 8:00-10:00 o‟clock, 10:30 something like that.
PT: So did they have a sign in sheet or something or did they have to sign a book, something like
that?
MK: I think they had to sign out and sign in, yes.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 9
PT: Hmm. That‟s a little different from the way it is today.
MK: Just a little, just a little.
PT: And so they might go into town and go to the movie or go have an ice cream, something like
that?
MK: That was it.
PT: Interesting. I assure you, things are different today.
MK: We had three daughters go through school so, yes [laughs], I know that from another point
of view.
PT: When you first got here, and especially getting here as you did after serving in the armed
forces, can you recall what your first impression of the place was? What your first—what struck
you when you were here?
MK: My first impression other than at the basketball [game], was playing up here on campus and
even as an opposing player: the friendliness of the place. Then when I got here, I thought I was
going to be an outsider since I was a transfer student. And, we got into the hello or howdy
tradition. You didn‟t walk by anybody without saying “howdy” or “hello,” or getting “hello”
back; everyone, the professors, the president, all the student body.
That was one of the things that I had remembered and it was just a plain, friendly place and I
compared it to my experiences at Carnegie Tech. I went through a very bad, emotional time and
depression time because [pause] I knew I hated where I was going with respect to engineering
and I had in the back of my mind this teaching stuff. And Slippery Rock rescued me. I came up
here, Dr. Duncan was the Dean of Students, and he wanted me to start right away, and I told him
that I‟m going to take off for the summer, but I‟ll be back here in September. And September of
‟47, that‟s when I started. But it just was family. All 960 of us plus faculty were family.
PT: It was a small enough student body that you, you could know a lot of the people by name, a
large part of the class by name . . . a large part of the college by name.
MK: That was a possibility. Yes.
PT: Did the [pause] you mentioned a little when you were talking about your professors, did the
professors invite students to their houses, or things like that? Did you have that kind of social
interaction with professors?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 10
MK: The social interaction was that bridge, duplicate bridge at the president‟s house and there
were several faculty members who played there so we got to know them besides some of our
own class professors. But there wasn‟t much [of] invitations to professors homes.
PT: Coming back from the perspective that you have of now sixty years since you graduated,
[pause] what do you think is the most—what strikes you most about the campus today? I mean I
can imagine there are buildings, a tremendous amount of building [pause] but what are some of
the things that impress you about the place or that strike you as surprising?
MK: Well just looking at it as a university status with all the different offerings, because in our
day it was teaching, and now there‟s, I wouldn‟t be surprised if education is one of the smaller
schools, I don‟t know for sure.
PT: It‟s actually a substantial school here. I‟m not sure if it‟s the largest, but if it‟s not the largest
it‟s the second largest, and that‟s because it‟s been, always been a specialty here.
MK: It‟s big compared to what I saw, and I don‟t know . . . in some cases big is very good and
in some cases you lost some of the familiarity and the friendliness.
PT: Well I imagine one of the—one of the things I look back to, in comparison to my college
experience which was forty years ago, is the luxury—I don‟t know if you‟ve been in any of the
new residences?
MK: No.
PT: You should visit, if you have the chance.
MK: We may go on a tour with alumni.
PT: I invite you to compare with your dormitory room. We‟re not even allowed to use to word
“dormitory.”
MK: That‟s what I understand.
PT: It‟s a residence.
MK: A residence.
PT: Not a dormitory.
MK: South Hall was very old, but we made do. There were—a lot of us were veterans and it was
a little more luxurious than the sleeping five stacked high in an aircraft carrier [laughs].
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 11
PT: Right.
MK: There were a lot of things of that sort. I have to mention one thing. In 1948, in September, I
volunteered to sit at a desk and check in the new freshman. And they had the names and their
social security number and they had a letter at the end of a name. “H” was for Hebrew or Jewish,
and being Jewish and not knowing any, I sat down and went through the whole list of young
ladies and found two or three “H‟s” behind the names, and I ended up marrying one of them.
PT: [Laughs] Very interesting, using this intelligence to scout a partner. That‟s intriguing. I
wanted to ask you a question. You mentioned about greeting the freshmen: anything about rituals
or initiations or any of that kind of activity?
MK: Nothing like that. There were no social fraternities. I don‟t know whether there are now or
not. I think this was the effect of veterans. [They] didn‟t want to mess with that nonsense.
Everybody was friendly, but no, it was school work and you could go someplace for a bit. We
got very good at bringing in laundry in boxes, and somehow bottles of beer got in there.
[Laughs] But, no—
PT: They‟re probably any number of those bottles that are still in a wall somewhere, in one of
these buildings, that somehow got back behind a steam pipe [MK laughs] and is probably still
sitting there.
MK: Could still be. The socialization was, I think, as a result of the [pause] veterans having that
in common. And again, I kind of felt sorry for some of the seventeen-year-old kids coming in
who weren‟t part of that.
PT: Did they have regulations about alcohol in the dorms?
MK: Absolutely. I mean this was dry country, between here and Grove City. Oh yes.
PT: So what would‟ve been, in the event that a person who had been a veteran of the war in
Pacific was enjoying a beer in his room and he was apprehended. What would‟ve happened to
him?
MK: I don‟t know of that ever happening but I am guessing that they would say, “You know
what it is, don‟t do it again; be smart about it,” and that would have been the end of it. I just
think it was that way.
PT: When you say this was dry territory, by that you mean that the jurisdiction, the township was
alcohol-free, right?
MK: That‟s correct. There were no bars, none of that.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 12
PT: So, I‟m not suggesting that you would‟ve ever done such a thing, but someone who had
developed a thirst for, say a bottle of beer, what would they do?
MK: It would‟ve been very rare. [The] reason is that these were the rules, we were veterans, we
were all part of rules. And that was it. Again it goes back to: why were we here? And it was, it
was all business in that sense, yet we all fit into the friendliness of the college.
PT: Do you have any reminiscences or memories of the students that were here at the time you
were, and any in particular who were distinguished in some way or who were movers and
shakers or people who, you know people who come to mind?
MK: Well I have one sad story, one tragic story. There was a fellow, Paul Clauson, who had
been a captain during World War II. He was a junior, he was a year behind me, and we played on
the same softball team, things of that sort. And I had just graduated in „49 and in 1950 the
Korean War started, and Paul was called. I remember having—they told me this—he had a
conversation with Marie McKay who was the registrar. Marie said to him, “We‟ll have a place
for you.” Never came back. He was killed dragging one of his platoon to safety. And he was
such a friendly, good guy. He was missed; he was missed. And there may be something in the
school that‟s in memorial for him, but I‟m not sure about that.
PT: The name is familiar, Clauson. I‟ve heard that name; wouldn‟t surprise me if there was a
memorial somewhere.
MK: And we had about four or five men who were elementary [education] majors, that
graduated from Slippery Rock, got a job teaching sixth grade in an elementary school; fifteen
minutes later they became principals, and fifteen minutes after that they were superintendents.
They were probably, in my class, they got to the superintendency a lot faster than the rest of us.
I wanted to be a career math teacher. And I did that for fifteen years, then became a high school
principal and wanted to do that as a career. But things happened and changed and I ended up as a
superintendent of schools. And I relate one thing with respect to that: during the Depression, I
went to five different schools in first grade between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Depression, father
working, looking for work. In 1983, I started, after I so-called “retired” as a superintendent, I
sold insurance very badly for a year, and some district called up and asked if I would be an
interim-sup[erintendent], so I spent the next fifteen years doing nineteen interim-supes, all over
the state of New Jersey. So I go back to the first grade [laughs] and then I relate it to my career—
in fact I hold the record in New Jersey. Although there is somebody that‟s probably going to
break that record. But, they always remember Babe Ruth first, anyhow. [PT laughs]
I think one other thing that‟s a result of—I was kind of a pioneer in cable television. The town
where I worked as a superintendent, Livingston, was the second community to be wired for
cable. And there was very little local programming, so I had a program called “The
Superintendent‟s Forum,” and I had it for four years. It was very local; it wasn‟t what it is today.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 13
And I would tape a show once a month and they played it on our local channel twice a week and
then each month I‟d have a new show. And that was really the beginning of everything, for cable
television.
PT: What, do you recall when that would have been approximately what year?
MK: Yeah, it would‟ve been . . . ‟77 to ‟81. Livingston was wired up in 1977 and then I started
programs right then. The commissioner of education, I had some—one group—I brought back
three students who had just finished their freshman year in college and the idea was, if you had
to do it over again what would you do? Anything differently? Well one of the three was an actor,
and he stayed in acting. And he plays the part of George on Seinfeld. He graduated from
Livingston High School, Jason Alexander, for this example. So yeah we had a good time there.
And again, I‟m amazed when we say there‟s about what, close to ten thousand students?
PT: I think there are about 8,500 students here full time equivalent.
MK: I did spend some time, after I graduated I was up there in Erie and I scouted Gannon
College for a football game for Slippery Rock. So I‟d come down because, I‟d come down to see
my about-to-be-wife who, at that time was a sophomore here. So I came back and forth and do
what I could as far as that was concerned.
In 1948, for homecoming we had “The Rocket Man” and I think there‟s a picture of him in this
yearbook, a fellow by the name of Jim Jewel became “The Rocket Man” and we introduced him
the night before the homecoming football game. I don‟t know whether they kept that tradition or
not.
PT: So was the mascot a rocket?
MK: The Rocket Man.
PT: Now I don‟t know what, I‟m not sure what the mascot is now. [MK laughs] It may be a lion;
I think a lion. And then I‟m wondering if they ever had a rock as a mascot, probably not.
[Editor‟s note: yes, there was Rocky the Rock mascot in the 1970s]
MK: No, well because at least in my time because it was “Rocket Man!” He was a gymnast so he
combined a lot of stuff. And I, this was before my time, it was about 1938, and I think it was the
one item that got Slippery Rock nationwide attention. There was a sports writer by the name of
Cunningham writing for a Boston newspaper, and it was during the football season I think in ‟38
or so, and as a gag—he was supposed to pick twenty teams to win—and as a gag he picked
Slippery Rock to win. Now he‟s waiting all Saturday night, and finally the Slippery Rock score
came in. And Slippery Rock won, and he won the pool. And then on Monday I think he wrote a
poem [pause] “Slippery Rock, that great school; helped me win the football pool.” And it made it
in the Boston papers.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 14
Then one time Slippery Rock did go to the Sun Bowl; that was in the „30s. So between that and
the athletic director at the University of Michigan also put us on the map even more. They used
to have Band Day at the University of Michigan and the high school bands came in and they took
up too many seats. So he decided to have band day on a day when the football team was playing
away. And he invited Slippery Rock and the team that they were to play on that Saturday to
come up to Michigan and play, and they had Band Day. And they played before a crowd that was
probably bigger than any the whole season—any those two schools had. I understand that
Michigan and the state of Texas would flood the bookstore with mail orders of Slippery Rock
paraphernalia.
PT: Those are two interesting anecdotes. I think we‟ll try and track down that poem if we can;
we must have some record of it somewhere. And the other is the, the thing I first found out about
when I got here in 2002—I grew up in Pennsylvania, I always knew of Slippery Rock, it was a
place that people used to go to, to college, from where I grew up outside of Philadelphia. You
came to Slippery Rock either to be a gym teacher or because it was as far as you could get [MK
laughs] from mom and dad, and still be in the state of Pennsylvania; that was the other reason.
But Slippery Rock has always, I found out now, it‟s been a real recognizable brand. People all
over the place have heard of Slippery Rock.
MK: Yes.
PT: I mean it‟s something distinguished that we—I never realized until I got here. [Pause] You
were talking about Rocket Man there; I‟ve never heard of him before. But do you remember
anything else about any other events that took place while you were here: any kind whether it be
political events, campus events, weather events, just plain interesting things.
MK: I have one. I believe it‟s the opening game of the football season; we played Westminster
on our field. The night before, a group of Westminster college folks came over and they were
going to ring the bell. The tradition was every time Slippery Rock won a game the first people
back from the game, if it was home or away, would talk to Charlie who was the security person.
He was the whole security staff, and we would say, “We‟ve won, Charlie. Ring the bell!” The
Westminster guys came over and they were going to ring the bell. We got word of it, we put up
the defenses, and we captured several of them. And on the day of the game we paraded them, we
got some of the young ladies to give us clothes, and we clothed them in women‟s clothes and
paraded them. In fact, there‟s a picture in the yearbook of that particular scene. And that worked
out pretty well [laughs] and it was fun and we treated them nicely and they behaved so—
PT: Did they invite you over to Westminster to return the favor?
MK: I think they were on the alert. [PT laughs] I don‟t know whether anybody afterward from
here decided they were going to try to go one-upmanship on the Westminster crowd. But they
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 15
were our rival, and Grove City. In fact, the same year we played at Grove City; we won, and for
whatever reason we tore their goal post down. I don‟t know why, but we did.
PT: People used to do stuff like that. I can even remember—uh oh. [PT checks recording
equipment] Hang on for a tiny second I‟m just looking at this, this thing is not recording
anymore. [Pause] I just noticed this a second ago. Alright here‟s what happened: the wire wasn‟t
in, the battery went out, but now it‟s on again. So we might have dropped about five minutes or
three minutes of the video. But that‟s okay because I‟ve been keeping my eye on it to see it.
Everything is lined up. So we‟re back with the video now, after a slight interruption.
MK: It was just time out for a commercial break.
PT: Yeah it was time out for a commercial break. The question that we were talking about:
events that happened here. And you were talking about capturing the students from Westminster.
I was wondering if you had any other reminiscences about any particular event that would‟ve
taken place, for instance while you were here would‟ve been the 1948 presidential election, there
were [pause] political events, any kind of—anything you remember about the weather or
anything spectacular that might have happened?
MK: Nothing spectacular in that sense. We did have some guest speakers. I remember there were
a variety of guest speakers that were held in the Chapel. Ely Culbertson‟s wife was a bridge
expert, was a devotee of United Nations and things of that sort. But we were pretty much a fairly
closed community. And we were with ourselves, so we made the events, the local events.
One thing that happened while we were here: the Middle States visitation committee came in.
That was kind of fun because years later I went to nine Middle States high schools and I chaired
three of the nine, and then I also was on Middle States at—well visited two universities. So the
experience from that—
PT: We‟re doing Middle States review right now, this year.
MK: A simple evaluation.
PT: Many of us are involved in that. One thing, a characteristic of western Pennsylvania is the
weather. I don‟t imagine the weather then was much worse than it is now in the winter. A cold
winter now is probably comparable to a cold winter then.
MK: Yes.
PT: But I imagine that the resources for snow removal were not as [pause] available then as they
maybe are now. Did you ever get the feeling that you were kind of getting closed in?
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 16
MK: No. I‟ll tell you what it was though. My first teaching position in McKean, up in Erie
County. That would‟ve been 1949, and the day after Thanksgiving in 1950, it snowed thirty-six
inches worth. That‟s the biggest snow storm I‟d felt at that time—probably ever. But I don‟t
recall having any problems at all at Slippery Rock during the two years that I was here. Yes, it
was pretty good.
PT: People were pretty resourceful. Nowadays they come up with the plows, but of course the
principal concern is to get the parking lots clear so people can drive their cars. If people don‟t
have a lot of cars and then you don‟t worry about it.
MK: That is true. Going back to that particular thing, as a superintendent of schools, one of the
toughest jobs was should I call off school, should I have a delayed opening, or should we have
school. I don‟t think even the Harvard School of Education prepares people for those kinds of
decisions.
PT: I‟ll tell you here, it‟s just as difficult a decision because . . . although the university
obviously never closes because we have three thousand people who live here, and we have to
provide services. The library for instance, is open. We‟re always open. We never close because
of the weather. Somebody can get here; somebody who lives in town can get here. But the issue
of when to cancel classes is always a touchy issue.
MK: There was one thing I wanted to ask you, in terms of relationship with the community, like
the library. Do people in the community have access to this library?
PT: Yes. In the last six years—we provide anybody with a 16057 zip code with a library card if
they want one. We also give any school teacher from a Slippery Rock township or a surrounding
township‟s district a free library card and free access to the materials here.
MK: That‟s interesting.
PT: And I was going to ask you about relations with the community and with the town. If you
could talk a little bit about whether you all had a lot of contact with the people in town. I mean
you had the storekeepers and the townsfolk who worked on Main Street in the various shops, but
whether there was, were there other points of contact?
MK: As a matter of fact I had a cousin who owned a store, a department store right on Main
Street, and so I was friendly with them. But I think we acted as citizens of the community and we
spent most of our time here. But I don‟t think there‟s anything that was unusual . . . .
PT: Just wondering if there were, on top of everything that you mentioned here, if there were any
other memories of a personal nature that you‟d like to talk about more at length regarding your
years at Slippery Rock.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 17
MK: Well I might have mentioned [pause] I did start the Saturday morning program at WBUT
Butler. Got down there—I don‟t even remember how I got down there; I think I might‟ve
borrowed the car from my roommate—and did the Saturday morning show. We did recordings,
we did news briefs and at various times I had talented people from the college come down and
perform in the radio studio, and that was a first. I enjoyed that. It started me thinking about that
kind of career.
In fact, after I retired as a superintendent, the first time I did it as a result of going into TV
production, which I did. I think I mentioned that I had a TV show for local programming, but in
addition to that, as a result of all these experiences I had here, I helped produce several videos.
Anything from how to raise money for college tuition, how to pick colleges, and it was for
parents and teachers and faculty. For faculty: how to conduct a parent conference, things of that
sort. So I can go back to Slippery Rock for that kind of background. And when we had our, in
1949, our gala spoof show, I emceed that. And there was stuff written by some talented people. I
kind of orchestrated it, and I‟ve done all of that kind of thing.
PT: Just wondering if you have any other things that you had noted in your preparation for
coming to speak with us today that you wanted to bring up.
MK: Hmm, let me look. I think I did very well [laughs].
PT: I think so!
MK: Oh, I have to tell you one story. Coach Thompson, after whom the field was named—
Coach Thompson was a basketball and football coach at Slippery Rock prior to my time. But he
was a seventh grade math teacher at the lab school. And in student teaching I had a class of
seventh graders, I had a physics class, and I had a high school math class. I remember months
with the seventh graders, I asked one of the kids if, one of those old things: if two pencils cost
ten cents how much would four pencils cost? And a little boy, he floundered around with it. I‟m
not sure that that was the example but it was that kind of thing.
After the class was over Coach Thompson said, “Mel, now little Cooper every morning gets up,
gathers the eggs, goes and sells the eggs to the neighbors.” He said, “The next time you do one
with Cooper, instead of asking him about pencils, ask him about eggs.” [PT laughs] Sometimes a
practical example hits the nerve, but that was one of Coach Thompson‟s gems. Good guy, good
guy.
I started the second day of teaching the twelfth grade math and I made mention of being at Bikini
for the atom bomb test. And my coordinating teacher went and looked up that I had this, then the
next day he asked me to do the homework assignments with the kids. He walked out of class and
he came back about six weeks later [laughs], so I ran the whole thing. I became maybe too
independent because I went right into being a high school basketball coach. I was never
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Klein, Mel 18
anybody‟s assistant, and when it came time to deal with somebody—like as a principal and a
superintendent—who had different philosophies from me, we did bang heads a little bit.
PT: It was a learning experience.
MK: Well I consider that a learning experience for that superintendent at that time [laughter].
See, vanity hasn‟t left me.
PT: [Laughs] Any other things you would like to remind our community?
MK: Well I was very happy to do this and it helped me reflect because I‟m hopeful to do
something else, and it‟s something that caught my ear from one of Bill Clinton‟s comments,
“Everybody should write their biography, if for no other reason than for their family.” We have
three daughters, and one of them especially wanted to know more about what I do and what I did
and I think what we‟re going to do is set up something like that [refers to video recorder] and
start right from the beginning for grandchildren and great grandchildren. I‟m a great believer in
collecting and saving the history of family. And I think this helps me get through with it. I hope
maybe if I get a chance I could get a copy of this too.
PT: We‟ll provide you with—first we provide you with the transcript to review, then this is
supposed to be mounted on a website so people can see it, and the audio portion will also be
made available.
If there isn‟t anything else you want to add then I guess we‟ve concluded and I want to thank you
very much.
MK: My pleasure. Thank you, because again, I think it will inspire me more to get going on this
family thing.
Rock Voices: The Oral History Project of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania
Media of