SRU ORAL HISTORY
"MY FORTY-ONE YEARS AT THE ROCK"
INTERVIEWEE:
INTERVIWER:

MR. JOSEPH STAHLMAN
DR. JOSEPH RIGGS AND LEAH BROWN

12 JUNE 1991

R:

You're a chronological man so perhaps we could begin at the
beginning.

S:

Start like that.

Well, you do have some things jotted down

here so like you say it does kind of jog my memory a little
bit.
time.

I started here in June of 1949.

That was an interesting

There were still some G.I.'s, people going here on the

G. I. Bill of Rights from World War II, and they had a trailer
court up where Patterson Hall sits now, with water, electric
and whatever.

Families.

Some of them had one or two children

and had their trailers moved in and located.

The college pro-

vided the site and the water and the utilities but the veterans
themselves had to provide their own trailer.

We had some older

people going as well as the normal college-age student.

I think

at that time we at the carpenter shop and plumbing shop worked
out of a couple of buildings back of North Hall.

One had been

built for a high school shop, vocational shop, and the other one
had been the laundry prior to the college laundry being located
in the basement of the Behaviorial Science building.
moved down there in 1941.

It was

So the plumbing and electric shop was

{2)

S:

in what had been the former laundry.

The grill that's in the

University Union now was sitting beside the present Art
Building I.

That since has been torn down and Art Building I

was the Hut that had the bowling alleys and the pool tables and
so on in the basement.

I started to work in the carpenter shop

which was the old high school shop. I just hired on at no
particular trade, they just called me a journeyman's apprentice or
whatever.

One of the first jobs I did was put new wooden slats in

the back of one of the huge porch swings that were on the porches
of South Hall, the boys' dorm there.
long.

They were huge porch swings.

They were about eight foot
Anyhow, somehow, they got

some slats knocked out of the back of it.
the foreman put me in that job.

I don't know why

I wasn't a carpenter.

made some slats and put them in there.

Anyhow, I

I had to plane them down.

I put them in the swing and then painted them to match the rest of
it.

Most of the time I mowed grass and things like that at the

beginning. As one of the crews would need help, I helped them out.
I remember one of the bigger jobs that I got involved in at that
time was helping the carpenters put asbestos shingles on the
house where the superintendent of buildings and grounds lived,
Howard Harper, at that time.

That was at the corner between West

Hall and McKay Education buildings, on the corner of the street
there, the corner of the alley.

We were putting new asbestos

(3)

S:

shingles on and I was the guy who had to cut them.

They would

holler down the measurements and I would cut them and carry them
up to them.

We worked at that quite a little while.

Then I got

into painting the trim after we got the asbestos shingles on it.
It was kind of you did almost everything.
Before I came here I worked at a strip mine at a buck and a
quarter an hour.

That was pretty good pay at that time, but

if it rained, you couldn't haul coal.
it was very unsteady work.

They didn't need you and

When I worked, I made real good

money, but like I say, the weather had so much to do with it,
whether they got the coal uncovered and all that stuff.

So when

I came and started here at the University or the State Teachers
College at that time, I started at sixty cents an hour. That was
less than half of what I got at the strip mine, but after two
years averaging it out, I made more here at sixty cents an hour
than I did at the strip mine at a dollar and a quarter because
of the unsteady work and the moving from one place to the other.
It may have been, had I been a machine operator at the strip
mine or something like that, I may have worked more steady, but
being one that depended on coal being loaded, why I didn't work
too steady there. I guess I worked here maybe two or three years
and I got a raise to sixty-four cents an hour.

That was a big

boost.
B:

With the sixty-four cents an hour, were there any other
benefits?

(4)

B:

Was there any hospitalization?

S:

Retirement, of course.

At that time, you had a choice of

either state retirement or public school retirement.
retirement was just coming in.

State

The hospitalization could

be taken out of your pay at group rates but there was no state
paid portion out of it.

Retirement was there as a choice, and

I guess if you were younger than a certain age like 50 or
something like that, you had to be in the program. We had a lot
of older people working here as custodians and so on and they had
a choice if they started here at a later age that they didn't have
to take retirement if they didn't want to.
that category.

My father fit into

He came here a year after I did.

They closed

the mine down where he worked, and I can remember he said,
I'm done. I'm finished. Nobody wants me. That type of thing.
I can remember going home occasionally. Of course I'd only
been married probably two years at that point and we would
go home quite often to visit, and I'd see him just going
downhill just getting discouraged.

I said, if you really

feel that way, why don't you go up and talk to them at the
college up there, maybe they could find something for you.
He went up and he got hired on as a custodian in the boys'
dorm and he worked there for another 20 years.
career again.

A whole

That worked out real well for him, real well

(5)

S:

for me and it was a good experience.
I can remember him and his raises.

Of course I don't remember

whether he was getting Social Security at the time or not.
think he was while he was working here.

I

But he got a raise after

he had worked here a little while and he lost money.

It just so

happened that it fitted him into a scale and I don't know if that
was a raise from the institution or general raise.
we got one from the state itself.

Usually in the order of ten

percent from the governor or the legislature.
losing money on that.

Occasionally

I remember him

Then he got another raise somehow and he

lost money again. Then they rumored that the governor was going to
give us a raise, a general raise for all state employees.

He

said, I hope not, I can't stand another one of those. That's about
the way it went then.
The thing I liked working here as compared to some of the other
places I had worked, most of it had been construction, was that
it was steady work.
weeks.

You could depend on that pay coming every two

You could buy something on time and make your payments.

Where working intermittently like I did before, you would make
a payment and then you didn't know whether you were going to be
able to make the next one or not because if you had money, you
spent it.

You didn't think of kind of leveling it out and making

a couple of extra payments while you were flush or something like
that.

That was one of the good things about the University.

I

(6)

S:

think at that time we had two carpenters.

Well, we had a carpen-

ter and a locksmith and a fellow going to school in cabinetmaking
on the G. I. Bill, but working full-time.
night.

He went to school at

He wasn't going to Slippery Rock, he was going to a

cabinetmaking school over in West Pittsburgh that they had.
It was vocational training.

We had about four guys that you

would call roustabouts, like I was, that helped out at anything at all.

A truck driver.

And then of course the plumber

and the electrician worked out of the other shop there.
was about the crew.
buildings.

That

Of course there wasn't near as many

They did have a custodian in each building, however,

and that was considered part of the maintenance crew, also.
Thinking back over the jobs that were here related to maintenance or non-instructional, I think I've done almost
every job except cook in the kitchen.
there.

I've washed dishes in

We used to go in there and scrub the building, what

they called big cleaning during the summer break.
go in and do, for instance, North Hall.
a floor of it.

We would

They would do

Maybe they would only have one floor with

students on in the summertime and we would do the other floor.
Strip it and scrub it and wax it and buff it up and get it all
cleaned up and do the rooms and whatever.
assist those custodians at that time.
Library.

So we would go in and

I can remember Maltby

The windows. We'd get in and they'd set us to

(7)

S:

cleaning the windows and there's all those little squares and it
seemed like you were never going to get done with those windows.
The first new building they built here since I started was the
heating plant that's here that they built in 1949.

They really

didn't get it finished, I guess, until about 1951 and again they
changed the power over.

I worked in the old heating plant that

was there. Wheeled ashes out of the place and learned a little bit
about firing the boilers there.

I don't think I ever fired a

shift completely by myself there but I did help out with the
thing.

They made their own power at that time, their own electric

on campus.
B:

Who was in charge of the crew?

Who in the administration?

S:

The Superintendent of the Buildings and Grounds, Howard Harper,
at that time.

B:

Who was the president?

S:

Okay.

Who did Howard Harper report to?

It would be Dr. Houk, I would suppose.

bursar at that time, Fred Bauer.
sure of the chain of command.

They did have a

Fritz they called him.

I'm not

I know definitely that Mr. Bauer

had control of the purse strings.

I know that the book store

reported to him and the bookstore at that time was located in Old
Main right adjacent to the bursar's office.

I don't even know

what that is anymore, I guess Student Accounts is in that office
where the bookstore was.
about community relations.

I remember back at that time, thinking
I smoked at that time.

University

employees could go to the bookstore and buy cigarettes at cost by

(8)

S:

the carton and it was quite a savings.

But they found out about

that down street and oh, they just raised the devil, you know, and
so from then on we paid same price we did down the street. So
there went that benefit.
Buildings and Grounds.

Howard Harper was Superintendent of
We got a lot of war surplus or army

surplus, military surplus at that time.

For a while they were

buying things that were a nickel a pound, and it didn't matter
what it was.

I can remember getting a truck load of, they

were pry bars really, about five foot long, and they weren't
really digging bars but you could use them for that.

They had a

chisel point on them and we had bundles of those things, and it
was all that one guy could do or two people really to pick up a
bundle and carry it into the storeroom.

Why we needed that many

of those, I'm not sure. But we did get a lot of useful things.
Quarter inch electric drills and things like that and of course
the biggest end of them were used.
raft of parachutes one time.
drop cloths.

I remember getting a whole

They thought they'd use them for

They cut them up and used them for drop cloths, and

the nylon cord that was on them was used for rope or tying things
that you wanted a good stout rope for or whatever.

Some of the

strangest things down there.

Dr. Houk was President and I had this first experience with him.
Well, I had seen him a couple times when we were working outside

(9)

s:

and somebody would say, that's the President, Dr. Houk.

But

anyhow I had occasion to be up working around the President's
residence. It was up in the morning, somewhere around nine
o'clock. We started at seven o'clock then in the morning, and I
was up there somewhere around nine or so, working outside.

And I

don't think I was mowing grass at that time of the morning, but
there was something up there that I was to do.

Anyhow, he called

to me and he said, you're new here? I said, yes, I started
whatever it was, a few weeks before that.
in.

I said, well, I'm in work clothes.

Oh, he said, come on
He said, oh, come in.

So

he took me in and he set me down in the breakfast nook there off
the kitchen and asked my name and so on.

He shook hands and he

said that he was Dr. Houk, and I said, yes, I had seen him on
campus and that it was a pleasure to meet him.

Have a cup of

coffee, he said. So I had a cup of coffee and a roll or whatever
he had there and we chatted for quite a while.
you live?

I felt pretty good when I left.

that nice of the President.

He said, where do

I thought, well, isn't

I had breakfast with him.

R:

Sixty cents an hour and you got breakfast with the President.

S:

Anyhow, we did get to know one another a little bit there.

He

had two children at home there then, and Ruth, of course, I got
to know her by going up there and doing things all the time.
But anyhow, I thought it was pretty nice of him to care enough

(10)
S:

to want to know who I was and whether I was married or not and
any family and those types of things.

Whether he was sincerely

interested or not, didn't really matter to me.

He asked and I

told him and it made for good employee relations.
R:

How did it work?

Were faculty always asking to get things done?

Was there a process there?
S:

There may have been, but we had a general foreman.
have crew foremen at that time.
general foreman, Russ Douglas.
been here.

They didn't

They had one fellow who was
I don't know how long Russ had

Most of the fellows, I think, that worked here came

since the war was over.

Most of them had worked in mills and

whatever during the war time.

There were a few like the plumber,

Monroe Snyder, Blondie they called him, he had worked here since
the Depression, somewhere around 1929 or 1930 when the crash
happened.

He had been a shovel operator in a limestone mine, and

when things went down, why he came here to work and he just
stayed.

So I'd say he probably started here around 1930 or so.

John Wood was in the heating plant.

He had been here for quite

some time prior to the war or during the war.

An awful lot of

them came when the mills slowed down after the war.

So I don't

know what Russ Douglas did, but he was our general foreman and he
was over the carpenters or anybody but the heating plant itself.
R:

He gave the work assignments?

(11)
S:

Yes.

So evidently work came to him through the superintendent.

Requests from faculty or whatever, or else directly to him from
some of the professors.

I'm not sure how that occurred.

remember one experience with him.

I do

Russ Douglas had us assigned

to do something or other, and Howard Harper came along and asked
us to do something and of course he was higher ranking so we
went and did that. And it got into a thing where it was quite a
hassle over what got done first and why the job was interrupted
and some backlash from that type of thing and probably complaints
from whoever it was to be done for.
coming in one morning.

He was all dressed up in his suit which

was not the way he came to work.
as the rest of us.
work and so on, too.

I remember Russ Douglas

He wore work clothes the same

He was a working foreman.

He did carpentry

But he had a very quick temper.

Anyhow, I

remember him saying, I'm quitting. I just can't take this anymore.
Either I'm the guy that's directing the work force or I'm not,
and I get it from both sides.
morning.

I'm not going to be here this

I'm just here to tell you that.

never came to work at seven o'clock.
like nine or so to his office.

And of course Harper

I imagine he probably came

So Russ said, the only thing I

can tell you is just go back to where you were working yesterday
and sooner or later somebody will be around to tell you what to
do.

We had been working down under North Hall in a dirt floored

(12)
S:

store room that used to be back in there.

I really don't remember

what we were doing, maybe moving old furniture or something or
other or surplus, who knows, but anyhow, we had finished what we
were assigned to do in there at quitting time the day before.

But

we went back down to where we had been working and we sat there.
We waited and waited and nobody showed up and we got a little
thirsty.

We still would take a little time even though we didn't

get guaranteed breaks or rest periods or anything at that time.
We usually went to the shop or maybe to the Grill and had a coffee
or a sandwich or something about 9:30 or so.

So it came 9:30 and

we went up to the shop and had our coffee and sandwich or bite to
eat, whatever, and went back down and sat there.

I think it was

after lunch before somebody finally came around.

I don't even

remember who it was now. There wasn't anything said about why we
were sitting there or anything.

They just sent us out to do

something else.
B:

And he did quit?

S:

No. He came back.

I don't remember how many days he was off

there, but they finally got it settled out to how it was to be.
But it didn't completely settle it, they still had problems.
I can remember in later years some arguments going on about who's
supposed to do what.

There wasn't real clear direction there and

there should have been.

At least if some emergency came up and

somebody had to come and pull the fellows off, they ought to let

(13)
S:

the supervisor responsible for that crew say, hey, I took your
guys to do whatever.

Sometimes it got us into problems.

I

remember painting the floor in the bottom of the Hut, the concrete
floor.

Me and another fellow was working at that.

Harper

came over and got us to help the carpet guy that was laying
carpet in the front of North Hall in the front rooms.

We were

over there for several hours, I suppose, again he got the carpet
stretched out and fastened down and so on. Carne back over and
went to finish our painting there and of course we didn't get
it all painted.

It was a job we could have easily done

in a day's time but we only had about a half of it done.
I remember going back to the shop and cleaned up and never
said anything to anybody.

Never thought to.

Russ came around to tell us where to go work.

The next morning
I said we still

have pretty near half of the floor to do up there.
get it finished? No, I said.

Well, you should have, he said,

well, anybody could have, and he really got upset.
just a minute now.

You didn't

Harper came and got us.

So we went up and finished the painting.
going on for quite a period of time.

I said, well,

That was it.

So that was still

Maybe they just didn't

communicate that well because I can remember several incidents
of that.
R:

Where you using student help back then?

(14)
S:

Occasionally. We had two young fellows the second year I
worked here that worked on the grounds crew.
trimming and things like that.
Canada.

Mowing and

One fellow I remember was from

I can remember his accent and so on, but he was

going to school here at the time.
can't think of his name anymore.

We called him Bud but I
Since I started thinking about

this I've tried to recall names and I can't remember his name at
all.

We would have part-time people occasionally.

I remember

the steel mills down in Pittsburgh being on strike and a couple
of guys came up and worked here.

Of course, one of them was

Russ Douglas' boy which I'm sure there was some reason but it gave
him a part-time job.
had.

It was one of the lengthy steel strikes they

Then there was another fellow.

I don't know if he was

related to anyone, but maybe he was somebody who Andy Douglas
knew. They worked here part-time in the summer.
part-time people that they would pay hourly.

So they did have

It seemed as

though after you were here and established as a permanent
employee, usually within a year they would take you from the
hourly wage and put you on salary. At that time we got
paid the fifteenth and thirtieth of the month.

It was twice

a month actually, but it was different than every two weeks
because it worked out that you had 24 pays instead of 26 in
the year's time.

I also remember a budget crunch where I

think we were six weeks behind.

We worked without pay

(15)

s:

because the budget had not been passed.

If there hadn't

been grocery stores around that extended credit at that
time, a lot of guys would have been up against it.

But

at that time, they carried you on the books and so on.

It

wouldn't work in today's economy. Giant Eagle would just
tell you to hit the road.

I think it was about six weeks.

I think we were on our sixth week of work before we finally
got those.

Then we got all the back checks and we could go

ahead and pay our bills but it took some explaining.

The

bank and most of the local institutions understood what
was going on so there wasn't too much hassle over it.

It

put you in a bad position.
B:

So the crew was pretty small back there when the school
was pretty small?

S:

Yes.

Right.

B:

Then gradually it grew?

S:

Let's see.

After they built the new heating plant in 1949

then because of the size of it and the layout of the plant
and so on, for safety there had to be two people on a shift.
Well, there had always been one fireman on a shift previous
to that.

So that increased that. It doubled the force in the

heating plant.

I'm trying to think of when they started to

acquire more land.
there.

When I started, the Field House wasn't

That was a playing field and then at the end of the

(16)
S:

playing field, they had a dump.

That was for the tin cans,

paper, whatever they threw over there.

They would burn the

paper and whatever would burn, and then the rest of it would
get dumped over the side.

You would keep putting dirt and

ashes, whatever, over it.

R:

That's where Spotts is now?

S:

Pretty much.

Well, Spotts is where the old pond used to be.

Anyhow, I'd say it was probably under the parking lot there behind
the Field House.
that place.

I can remember the rats that used gather around

Of course, they would.

shooting rats for something to do.

Corning in with a .22 and
That used to be a pastime

in those days I guess most anywhere, because I remember shooting
them before I moved up here from Kittanning.

I used to go to

a dump outside Kittanning and shoot rats there.

That was good

target practice.
R:

We did that when I was a kid in West Virginia.

S:

After I had been here a year or two they started selling the
paper.

It must have become at least worth hauling or whatever.

So they got a hand baler and occasionally they would send
some of us down.

The old fellow who worked here, he was in

his eighties then I think, Clem Mccaslin. We called him Daddy
Mccaslin because he was older than anybody else around.
He would go around and gather papers up with a stick and so on.
Then he would also sort the paper and cans and put the paper

(17)
S:

in the baling machine and makes bales of it.

When we got a

load of bales, a truck would take it to Butler.

Now I don't

know what monies or whatever was received from that, but
evidently it was enough to make it worthwhile.

It did cut

down on the burning and the throwing away of stuff that could
be recycled even way back then.

I remember working on the

truck occasionally with the truck driver.

Lee Hamilton was

the truck driver at that time, and Lee was pretty interesting.
Lee would take his vacation, I think we got two weeks or maybe
it was three weeks at that time, and he would take his
vacation in the summertime and go to work for the gas company.
He said he could make enough in those three weeks that he worked
two months here.

So somehow he had some sort of arrangement so

he could work part-time for the gas company in the summer.
remember that oddity about him.
the truck quite often.

I

But, anyhow, I helped him on

They got their salt for the water

plant, to regenerate the water plant.

It came in boxcars

out at Forestville on the siding where Hilliards Lumber used
to be out there.

We would go out and haul it in in hundred

pound sacks in the truck, and we could get about 50 sacks at a
time or something like that.

rt took quite a while to empty that

boxcar and all those sacks at the water plant.
I think at that time the President had the prerogative to come
down and eat his meals at the dining hall if he wanted to with

(18)

S:

with the students at meal time.

But also to call down and order

anything they might be baking, pies or rolls or whatever he might
want for his own use at the President's residence.

I remember one

time, and it happened more than once, they called down and the
baker, Marie Koeher was the baker at that time and a really good
baker, she baked the good stuff, but anyhow, she made cinnamon
rolls so they'd ordered a half a dozen of those.

They put

everything in a basket with a cloth over it and so on and we'd set
it on the back of the truck and haul it up to the President's.
This one day we were particularly hungry, I don't know why, the
cinnamon rolls were in there and boy, did they smell good.
Carried them out and put them on the back of the truck.
the front end of it and Lee says, what all's in there?

I got in
I said,

well, there's cinnamon rolls and I don't know, there was a couple
other things there.

So he took off and instead of going up to the

President's house, just a short jaunt from North Hall where the
kitchen was down around to the farm there and we ate the cinnamon
rolls.

We put a couple back for later on in the day and we

delivered the thing up to the house and at that time there were
two maids working in the house, Christine Rider and Mrs. McBurney.
Christine was always the one who more or less did the kitchen and
the cooking and took care of the food and that type of thing.
Anyhow, she checked it over and what they had ordered and so on
and she said, I don't see any rolls here.

Of course, we perfectly

(19)
S:

didn't know anything about i t.

She called down to the kitchen and

Minnie Colosimo was the one that usually filled the order and
everything, and she said, no rolls in there.

And she said, yes,

there's rolss and Christine said, no, I'm looking at it here and
there's no rolls.

Minnie said, I was sure I put those rolls in

there. So they talked back and forth a little bit and we went down
and got some more rolls and took them up.

That would happen every

once in a while and it was quite a thing.

We didn't make a

regular habit of it because we would have been caught. I learned
something there.
R:

So the history of shortages here runs way back?

s:

Way back.

Probably beyond my time.

I remember a story that

Blondie Snyder, later on I got to working with him as a helper
with the plumber, and I remember him telling me a story or
several stories from way back of being down there and of course
pay's short and so on, and he thought he would get a couple of
oranges to eat with his lunch.
evidently.

He couldn't afford to buy them

He had quite a family so I imagine he was rather

hard pressed.

He wouldn't steal things and take them home but

he'd take them up to the shop and lay them back and he'd eat
one a day.
pocket.

Anyhow, he had maybe two or four oranges in his

Evidently, the dietitian, Nell Woods was the dietitian

at that point, had seen him come in there but she didn't just
out and accuse him and he was working around there and kind of

(20)

S:

working his way to go out and she said, do you want some oranges
Blondie?

He said, no, no.

them in your pocket.

She said, yes, help yourself, put

Well, that's where the oranges were.

She

kept insisting and he said I know that she knew I had them in
there. But he got his way out there and got up to the shop and
he said, I was a little more careful about what I did from
then on.

Several incidents about the kitchen like that that

are rather humorous.

Being down there, I know one fellow,

Jesse McConnell, that was previous to me corning here.

I think the

opening that he left when he left here was what I moved into
when I got hired.

He did the same thing.

Mowed grass and helped

the trades people and whatever jobs needed done around the place
and it was good experience because it broke you in at all things.
Jesse was down there one day and hot and really sweaty and so on
and they were getting ice cream and so on.

So the dietitian or

the cook or whoever was there said, well, why don't you get a
dish and get yourself some ice cream.

They had the · container,

the two and a half gallon container or whatever they were in
the little freezer there.

So Jesse got a dish and he got

himself some ice crean and had a dish of ice cream.

While he

was there somebody else came along, one of the workers,
and they of course envied him with the ice cream and he said,
well, get a dish and have some.

Well, it wound up that about

half of that two and a half gallon drum of ice cream got eaten

(21)

S:

up with people.

The word spread and everybody came.

Jesse

McConnell said, you know, she never offered me ice cream again.
She probably thought that fellow really got an appetite because
she wasn't aware that there were other people involved in it.
That was the thing that happened.
R:

Was Weisenfluh the next president after Houk left?

S:

Yes.

It was in Weisenfluh's term as president that we established

the union here.

Of course, at that time it was a lobby group.

really didn't have the right to organize.

We

The 195 hadn't passed

or wasn't even thought of then, I don't think.

There were some

benefits to be gained by lobbying for legislation and concentrated
letter writing and that type of thing because there were union
groups throughout the state in other state institutions and I
became rather active in it.
officers.

I wasn't one of the original

Originally, Dallas Gill, who was an electrician, was

the first president and Walter Cooper, who was a painter here,
at that time, it had to be somewhere around 1956 or 1957 we
started.

We had tried previous to that.

representative from AFSCME.

We met with a union

We met at Montpiers Restaurant that

used to be out by the Dairy Queen on Route 108.
rant that a fellow built there.
there.

It was a restau-

We had meeting with him out

We were afraid to do anything on campus.

I still think

one of the reasons for one fellow leaving was because of that
effort.

There was a resistance.

And, of course, the unknown.

(22)

S:

What is the union going to do always causes fear in administrations and managers and so on.

Then we didn't do much more about

it for probably a year or so.

Then we had another meeting with

the fellow and finally we got enough people to get chartered to
become a local, 819, that is the bargaining unit for the noninstructional now.

After the first year, well, Russ Douglas was

president the first year and I think Mrs. Woodling, Carl Woodling's wife, was the president's secretary and I think she was the
secretary of the union the first year.

We got along pretty good

as a group and we really didn't push things very hard, but we were
able to arrive at a procedure whereby grievances could be handled
locally here.

People had things that disturbed them or employees

thought they weren't being treated fairly or whatever, why we
had that signed and recognized by Weisenfluh.

We were able, on

the local level, to get some thoughts towards seniority when
promotions were made and so on. I remember when Carl Woodling
left and I was president of the union at that time, was
for quite a while, and of course the person with the most
experience down there was Romaine Allison.
since back in the 1940's.

She had been there

She was young woman when she came here

to work but because she was a woman she wasn't the supervisor and
that definitely was the attitude at that time.

I remember going

in and talking to Dr. Weisenfluh about it, and whether I didn't
use the right approach through inexperience, I caused some

(23)

S:

resistance on his part.

He said, the union isn't going to tell

us what to do here and who to promote.

That isn't it at all.

So I kind of back-pedalled a little bit and then I went back and
talked to him later on, probably with a little more finesse.
she was promoted then to be the laundry supervisor.

And

In thinking

that about laundry, when I first came they did student laundry
also. It was a fee type thing, but students could get their
laundry done there and they would come and pick it up at the
window along with their sheets and pillowcases and the linens from
the college itself.

That's one of the first things when they

started phasing it out, they did away with the student laundry.
They didn't do that any longer.

Shortly after that, they started

putting the automatic washers, coin-operated automatic washers,
in the dormitories so that students could wash their clothes
there.
R:

So you paid in union dues?

S:

Yes.

It started out at $2.50 a month was our dues that we

set.

I think all of that or $1.75 went to the state and national

thing and the rest remained in the treasury here at home, the
other seventy-five cents in the local treasury.
R:

Was Jerry Wurf president?

S:

No.

Do you remember him?

I remember him but Arnold Zander was the international

president at that time. A fellow by the name of Daley, I believe,
was the first union representative that came out.

Evidently he

(24)

S:

had some problems of his own with the union hierarchy or whatever,
and the story we heard back here and I never did get the true
story on it was that he had evidently been working with another
union too, other than AFSCME or the AFL-CIO or whatever. But
anyhow he left and the next guy that came out was Tim Olivero.
That union went along pretty good, like I say, locally.

Some of

the things we got by lobbying for it was the forty hour week and
social security.

Now I can't say that that really happened due

to the union but certainly the lobbying for it and the concentrated letter writing to legislators and visits and so on to them
wouldn't harm anything, and in that period of time we did get a
forty hour work week.

Prior to that we worked 48 hours a week and

we did get social security although not complete social security.
You had an offset there where your retirement was down a little
bit because that money was going towards paying the matching
social security for the employer, so there was kind of an offset
there for a while.
that back out again.

Then later on we had an opportunity to buy
But we did get social security.

I can't

remember what some of the other things were, but there were a few
other little things that we gained during that period of time.
Well then they really wanted to make a strong stand in the state
for AFSME, and so they put out a lot of publicity and asked
everybody to have the "blue flu" and be sick for a day or two or
whatever just to show strength.

Well, not much happened. I don't

(25)

S:

know how good a turnout they had, but it fell flat on its face.
Then at the state level of the AFSCME organization the office
closed down. They still had the office there but the staff left
and I don't know where they went, somewhere else in the country
maybe to organize or whatever.

Our little local here kept sending

dues in and going on the same as usual. I'd say throughout the
state there probably was 20 to 30 other locals. South Mountain
Hospital, I can't remember, Polk was one of them.

I can't think

of the other colleges that were into it at that time.

Anyhow we

still continued to pay our dues into the international, I don't
know where the state portion of the dues would go at that time.
It wasn't very long after that that we got together and we had a
mini-convention or whatever you might call it at Harrisburg and
called all the locals and had them send representatives.
formed what we called the organizing committee.

And we

We didn't want

that toehold we had to go completely down. I was treasurer
of the AFSCME organizing committee for a while.
the rubber stamp.

I still have

Anyhow, the checks would come to me in the

mail because I was the treasurer and I would send out whatever
and our little state treasury built.

Well, part of it would go to

the federal, part to the local and the state part we had in our
treasury.

I remember that while I was doing that out at home, I

had a session of people opening my mail. I was being investigated
by somebody and I don't have any idea who or why.

It had to be

(26)

S:

a federal, I would think, to be able to get into the mail and
not cause some problems but I got a lot of stuff taped shut,
whatever, that had been opened.

R:

J. Edgar Hoover.

S:

Somebody was looking into why these checks were coming there.
I have no idea what and I never was approached by anybody, but
I kept straight books and everything and made sure that everything
got paid.

I guess in the course of that time we still managed

to lobby.

We had a fellow i n Harrisburg that was very close to

the legislature and knew what was coming up and who sponsored
what and who controlled this committee. There are always those
down there.

So we got him on our payroll, just a stipend, we

really didn't pay him.

He wasn't working directly for us.

He was

working for the state but we paid him a stipend to provide information and get sponsors and so on for bills, so not only AFSCME
but the nurses' association and all the other groups.
probably.

PSEA

I think they all got behind that notion of wanting to

get bargaining rights and so on and have union elections to be
representative of the union.

So up came Act 195, and I took part

in several demonstrations down there and marches and so on in
Harrisburg and got chased off of a lot of state property because I
was there handing out literature and so on.
though.

I never got arrested

I remember one thing that we did as a state part of it.

It wasn't a closed shop but it was almost totally union, municipal

(27)

S:

employees in Philadelphia.

So we made arrangments for a bunch

of those fellows to come up to take part in the demonstrations
to build our numbers up.

Of course chartered buses or whatever.

I can still remember. I don't know how many bus loads of them
came in there, and along with it we provided their lunch.

That

was a little incentive for them to come along, and of course
they were union oriented anyhow.

We told them that we were going

to have a meeting first and then we would have a break for
lunch and then we're going down to the capitol building.
We'll start there and we'll do our demonstration and our talks
and whatever.

We had an auditorium there someplace in town

and we were going to go there.

But anyhow, these guys come in

in the bus and they all got off and they all sat down on the
capitol steps and ate their box lunches they had.
first thing that they did.

I guess they thought maybe we was

going to take the lunches off of them.
time anyhow.

It threw everything off

There's all these guys sitting out there and

everybody wondering what is going on.
steps.

Big picnic on the capitol

Probably several hundred of them.

our march.

We marched around.

representatives came out.

Anyhow, we did have

We marched from the auditorium

and down around and down to the capitol.

out.

That was the

A couple of the

I don't think the governor ever came

But anyhow, we got down to where Act 195 did pass and I

was down for the signing of it.

I had at one time one of the

(28)

S:

pens that was used to sign Act 195. The governor used about five
or six pens and gave them to different people and I had one.
Brought it back for the local here but I think they've lost it.

R:

No archives?

S:

No archives.

Anyhow that was one of the pens that he actually

used to sign Act 195.

Just about that time, well, previous to

that, I had moved into managememnt supervisory. It wasn't bad when
I was first level foreman there, considered first level foreman,
but when I moved up into being almost an assistant superintendent,
that was a little too much for me to be involved with the union.
I was still putting up literature and posters around on campus for
the vote trying to get AFSCME as the one to be the representative
here.

I don't remember who all was in the running at that time,

but they had three or four different organizations, labor organizations, that they could have chosen.
R:

When you became foreman, the crew had enlarged a lot?

S:

Oh, yes. Considerably at that point in time.
on the union and I go chronologically.

I get talking

I'm trying to think of

how that expansion of the staff grew. I guess with the doubling
of the people in the heating plant and I guess the next building
maybe was Patterson Hall or the addition to the Maltby Library or
Miller Auditorium.

One of those.

hired to for those things.

And additional custodians were

I think the purchase of ground.

think the big purchase of that was the Gerlach farm.
this is probably on part of it.

I

Of course,

Yes, it definitely is.

(29)

S:

What used to be the Gerlach farm.
land there that they had bought.
sheep farm next to it.

Better than 200 acres of farm
I can remember him with the

That was another experience.

One of my

jobs when I was working here was marking the fields, the athletic
fields.

I remember one time there was a game on Saturday and we

had had rain or something and we didn't get it mowed to mark
it on Friday.

So we did work Saturday morning and it wasn't

overtime but I came in and I had to go down and get that marked.
I went down to mark the thing after it had dried off and so on
there were just sheep, I don't remember how many hundreds of
sheep he had, but they were all over that football field.

And

I didn't know what to do with them.

I tried to shoo them off

there but they are just like water.

They kind of run all around

and follow the leader or whatever.

Trying to get them off there

so I can go ahead and mark and I knew if I put, at that time they
used like a whitewash that they mixed up lime and water and so
on to put on it and I knew if I put that on it they have it
tracked all over.

Anyhow, in the process of trying to get them

off there, Clair Gerlach came up himself in his truck and he
had a couple of dogs there and it didn't take long to get them
cleared off the thing.

But we had the remains of the sheep being

there, I didn't do anything with that. I don't know what they
thought.

There's probably some football players still wonder what

that was or thought that something stunk about that game.

(30)

R:

Some cattle men.

S:

Yes.

But I did get it marked.

Just barely got it finished and

dried and so on, my marking lines and stuff gathered up in
time for the game to start. People were starting to come down
for the game them, around twelve o'clock or twelve-thirty.
That was quite an experience to begin with.
they bought the Gerlach farm.

But anyhow,

Well then, they started with the

dormitories, Patterson Hall, and Harner and those ones.

And

with each one there was additional crew hired and so on.

I

think the total number of maintenance reporting directly to
the Maintenance Center there was 145 at one time and when I
retired it was, I think, 111.

So it definitely had been

decreased over a period of time.

Of course along with that,

was the housing department having contracted custodial and I think
some of that happened also when we had for a period of
time a lot of buildings under contract, too, rather than having
University custodial staff.

It increased again when we took

over more buildings and took them off of contract as people got
laid off at Weisenfluh and the food service came in.

They placed

those people in the cleaning service rather than lay them off or
whatever.

It was rather nice.

I think that was something that

the people here thought was a good move on the part of the
administration not to lay off people but to absorb them that way.
I don't know which way they are heading now. Are they heading to

(31)

S:

contract or not.

I think they're still hiring people for the

custodial staff.

Anyhow, I moved into building maintenance

foreman.
here.

First of all I guess I should go with taking promotions

I started out as a journeyman's apprentice.

discouraged with the college.

I got rather

I had two children and was expect-

ing the third and I went to them and asked for a raise or what
ever, and they said, oh, my, they couldn't do that.

Well along

with that I was working at the second job, a service station in
the evening.

They had just finished the heating plant there and

it was going and they wanted me to roll the shift over to kind of
spell the fireman off.

Sometimes that conflicted with my work at

the service station, and the superintendent and I got into a
discussion there and I said, well I have to work at the service
station.

I can't keep my family on what I'm getting paid here and

I can't get a raise.

Well, he said, how much would it take to

have you quit the job at the service station and work only here?
I said, well, this is my chief job and I consider it my place of
employment but I use that to augment it and I can't live without
it.

Well, how much would it take, he said.

tell you.

I said, well, I'll

I make somewhere between a hundred and a hundred twenty

dollars a month working there.

Oh, he said, we couldn't do that.

so I said, well, I'm going to have to look around someplace else.
I'm happy working here and I enjoy working here but I just can't
make it on this.

So I left for a while then.

I got on up at the

(32)

S:

Cooper Bessemer and worked there from April, 1956 to September,
1956.

They had a complete change of administration here at that

time, and of course, back in those days when the politics changed
in Harrisburg, it wasn't long till it followed.

Well, when I

first came it went down as far as the receiving clerk.

The

president, the business manager, the superintendent of buildings
and grounds, the receiving clerk, they were all out. That was a
pretty common thing, and also in the highway department that was
one of the things that I got involved with, too, in AFSCME.

So

anyhow there had been a complete change and Lee Bowler had been
the florist in town here and I guess he had done some plumbing too
in his early days when he first moved up here. He had done a lot
of building and remodeling in town and so he got to be superintendent.

He came out to my place one night and he said, would

you be interested in corning back to the college to work?
I don't know.

I said,

I really enjoyed working there but I'm doing all

right up at the Bessemer. I had gotten several increases there and
I just even in that short period of time had several of the
foremen tell me if you ever get enough seniority here to be
established and you want a department, he said I'll be glad as
soon as I have an opening because evidently I was a good employee
for them. I remember I did a couple of different jobs up there,
and one foreman told me, I have been trying to get the guys here

(33)

S:

to do that for years. Sent them out here and they work at it but
they don't get anything done. Anyhow, I still feel that if they
were still there I probably could go back there and work if I
wanted. Anyhow, Lee said, well, let me talk to them in there and
I'm sure we could do something. He did and he came back out a
couple nights later and he said, well, we could do a lot better
than what you were getting prior. So we talked it over and got to
talking figures then and I came back here for probably a couple
hundred dollars more a year. I don't remember, but anyhow it was
more than I was making at the Cooper-Bessemer. But they were
negotiating a raise at Cooper-Bessemer at that time and I don't
know whether they struck or not but there was talk of striking. So
I considered that and considered the fact that I was kind of
bouncing around up there. The department I was assigned to, you
had to have 14 years in there to have any seniority at all when it
came to layoffs and cutbacks.

They said, if you don't have at

least 14 years seniority you may as well figure whenever we have a
cutback you are laid off for awhile and go on unemployment.
thought that didn't sound too awful good.

I

That coupled with the

fact that they offered me practically the same thing I would get
at the Cooper-Bessemer as a plumber.
While I was gone, or they were in the process when I left
here of establishing classifications.

Prior to that what

(34)

S:

you did mostly is what you were called, and then because the
guy worked on the lights, switches, and put bulbs in and stuff,
he was the electrician, but actually there was no designated
title or official classification.

I don't know how that

came about, but I remember we had a meeting down in
Behavioral Science in the lecture hall there and they gave us
these forms and explained what they wanted us to do to describe
what it is we did and what we did mostly and this type of
thing.

So they came up with a definite classification.

Then they had plumbers and plumber helpers and that type of
thing.

Prior to that time I think just whatever they

sent you out to do, you did, if it was within your abilities.
And if it wasn't, then you went and told somebody you thought
could do it or had them show you how to do it.
I came back as a plumber.

Anyhow,

Did that for a number of years.

I don't remember when I moved up then into what they call
building maintenance foreman which is kind of a foreman over
several trades.

But I imagine that would have been what

Russ Douglas would have been classified back in the early
days had there been such a thing.

Then, of course, the next

step from that was into the assistant superintendent and in that
direction and actually get into the management end of it.
R:

The big building program came in the 1960's?

(35)
S:

Yes, in the 1960's.

R:

1964 through 1967?

S:

Yes.

Pretty much through the 1960's.

Harner Hall was built in 1963 or 1964.

along there.

Patterson Hall 1958.

Somewhere

Then it really got

moving with Bard Hall and Dodds Hall and World Culture
and so on.
R:

When a contract like that was let, there was a major construction
company obviously and all the subcontractors.

So what did

our folks do?
S:

Really we weren't involved in that.

Early on when the heating

plant was built they had the General State Authority (GSA). It
was an authority created because the state couldn't borrow
money.

So the state authority could issue bonds, borrow money,

do whatever they had to do to provide money similar to the
school authority that built the consolidated schools around
the area.

It still goes on in the boroughs and those types

of things.

I don't know whether the state can still go in

debt and spend money it doesn't have or however you would do
that.

But those buildings were funded by bonds that the

General State Authority sold and then the state would eventually
pay those bonds off and they would own the building.

In some

cases, the building and the property around it was actually
deeded over to the General State Authority.
of deeds up there in the office.

We had copies

So that they could claim that

(36)

S:

if something happened.

It was really tied up legally there.

But a certain area around each building is included with the
building's property.

I'm not really sure how that worked up

then, but of course then the General State Authority had their
own bidding process and bidding people and engineers.

They were

the ones that did most of the building. They also had almost
a duplication effort in the Department of Property and Supplies
that had engineers and inspectors and so on, and they would do
maintenance projects and repairs, major repairs to buildings
and so on.

Eventually those two groups came to be doing almost

the same thing.

The building program slowed down and GSA had a

lot of staff there.

The same thing with Property and Supplies.

They had engineers and designers and so on and almost a duplication of function.

You should have seen the scramble to try

to hold your job.

Everybody was necessary but everybody wasn't

necessary.

It was pretty interesting because we worked pretty

closely with some of those engineers and they were really
worried, concerned about what happened. It did wind up that
a number of them were laid off and had to be let go because
they didn't need that much of a staff.
going on and the program and so on.

The building wasn't

General State Authority

had inspector staff on-site here to inspect the buildings as
the contractors were building them, to make sure that things
were being installed according to plan and so on.

Then the

(37)

S:

two combined and they became the Department of General Services
which we have now, DGS.

They still do a lot of the major repairs

although when we became a University we got some autonomy as far
as what we can do locally here but we were limited moneywise.

It

got to the point where we couldn't even do our roof repair jobs
because of the limitation.
locally.

We were allowed to contract out

It was so low that you couldn't even do a complete roof.

We did Patterson Hall in halves in order to get a good job
and it wound up to be a bad job anyhow, harder too, because of the
two different contractors

And we had a leak where they were

joined, and it wasn't my fault, it was his fault.
a good thing.
amount.
times.
not.

So that wasn't

They were way behind the times in boosting that

I guess the last I heard it had increased a couple of
I don't know whether it is up to where it should be yet or

I agree that locally I don't know that we have the expertise

to design major, major repairs, but certainly a roof or things
that routine.

I mean you could copy the specifications of one

that we've done before.

I would think things like that ought to

be under local or be within the local abilities here.
B:

Back from the very beginning you were very active in the union?
Very pro union?

How about the other people?

Was there support

for the union or resistance?
S:

I would kind of put them into two groups.

The fellows who had

worked in the mills and so on during World War II and had

(38)

S:

come here afterwards were very familiar with the union and the
workings of it and what happens when there is a union and so
on.

So they were all for it and going great guns and they were

the ones that initiated it.

I came from a background of working

in a brickyard for a while.

I was in the construction union.

worked for a little while for the United Mine Workers.
had, of course, a very strong union.

I

They

So I had no problem with

that, and I think most of the other fellows felt the same way.
But there were people that had been local here or had been farmers
and came to work at the college and were unfamiliar with unions.
Women really didn't work out that much then and those that did
work out weren't working in mills. Oh, I suppose there were a few
women worked in the mills during the war because of the need
for additional people, but they seemed to be the ones against,
and clerical people.
were afraid of it.
could get fired.

They had a fear of what would happen.
There was just no doubt about it.

things like that.
was.

And it wasn't that they resisted it, they
They

You can't do

So that's where I think most of the reluctance

I don't know whether that's so much a factor anymore.

There's still a lot of people who don't belong to the union even
though they pay the fair share dues.
members contribute.

I don't know.

doesn't do any good or whatever.
the union.

I know even non-union
Some of them feel that it

I've had good experiences with

I feel in looking back and the things that I've seen

(39)

S:

happen and certainly in my growing up.

My dad belonged to the

Mine Workers and I can remember some long strikes in that one.
They came out much better, much safer working conditions.

A

lot of things like that that wouldn't have happened, I'm sure
with the good graces of the company and the profits and that's
just the way things are.

That's about where, I think, the

difference was between those that resisted it.

I think the

administration, I can't say they were completely against it,
maybe part of their problem was not knowing what would happen.
R:

No doubt.

S:

Probably was.

I wonder sometimes if most of the administration

at the University here over the years have come through the
education end of it.

They are not management people, so to speak.

They're former professors or whatever.

Maybe they have a lack

of experience with the union and labor organizations. Somebody
of course that taught that and that was their line of expertise
would be familiar with what happens and so on.

I'm not sure

how they would feel about it, but I think that's the thing that
a little bit can be overcome.

I often felt that too in the

management of the University, because they're mostly from an
educational background.

I think it could probably be managed

a little better if it was a person that was a manager, so to
speak.

Now, of course, I guess a wise president would get good

managers underneath him or vice-presidents or whatever, and go

(40)

S:

that direction, but that's just one of my personal opinions.

R:

Did you meet Carter when he came?

S:

Yes.

I have a picture at home that I recently dug up out there

of us signing the grievance procedure and whatever agreement we
had at that time with Carter when he first came here.
B:

We would like to make a copy of it.

S:

Sure.

We had all the officers in the union and the Superintendent

of Buildings and Grounds and the President.

We all got together

and talked over what it meant, how we had used it in the past and
what it meant to the employees, and he went along with it.

I

remember very well the incident of who was it, Edwards, Dr.
Edwards, was in the president's residence as acting.
R:

Well, did you turn off the electricity?

S:

Oh, yes.

R:

We've been looking for the guy who did that.

s:

Well, I really didn't turn it off.
to shut the thing off up there.

Orders came down that we were

I shut the steam and the water

and so on off, and the electrician shut the electric off. Carter's
orders, I mean after all he was President.
Edwards.

But I liked Dr.

He had his family up there and so on and I remember

getting with him.

I don't remember how it came about.

think I contacted him, I think he contacted me.

I don't

I said, well,

you know, he's the President, Carter's the President, and if I
would not do what I was ordered to do, I'd be down the road.

(41)
S:

Certainly the subject is some sort of problem.

I didn't know.

Carter was kind of an unknown quantity to me then, but I said,
I'll tell you what, Dr. Edwards, let's take a walk over through
Maltby.

And so we went over and walked through Maltby and I said,

now if you wanted to put some steam and heat up in the residence
there's the valve that you'd open very slowly.

And I said, if you

wanted some water up there and I took him around and I said, this
is the valve that would put some water up to there.

I don't know

whether the electrician did the same thing or not, but if he did
they never turned the lights on at night.
refrigeration and so on.
would put me in.

They may have had

But I said, you realize what a spot this

And I said, that's the way the thing works and

that was the end of it.

So he did turn some water on so they

could flush the toilets and things like that but still the publicity was going and eventually he had to leave.
that episode.

But I can remember

I was a little bit fearful of what I was doing, but

at the same time I felt there's kids up there with no bathroom or
anything.

I didn't know too much about the politics of the thing,

except naturally Carter was the fellow that was approved and
appointed by the Trustees to be the President.

I don't know what

kind of a deal they had with Edwards before that he could live
there.

It wouldn't be the first time that things got all messed

up as far as what different people understand about things.

(42)

R:

Well, Edwards had a sizeable support around.

He must have been a

very nice person?
S:

Yes.

I can remember, too, as presidents changed.

I think I've

seen eight presidents and acting presidents over the years and
I remember that we talked about Watrel there previously to us
starting the interview here.

I remember when the uproar started

about that and they had a meeting, I think, with the Trustees
and the Secretary of Education or whatever down in Miller
Auditorium.

And I remember saying I think I'll go to that and see

what's going on.

Just curious.

It really had no effect on me.

I

went down and I sat down in the front end of the auditorium where
I could hear and I don't know who all was there.

I know Dr.

Roberts was there, but anyhow I sat down and a number of the
professors came in and sat around.

Some sat behind me and I

started listening to what I was hearing and I couldn't believe
what I was hearing.

How that could happen and not know previous

to that that there was some sort of an undercurrent or whatever,
but boy, what a division.
other.

You talk about support for one or the

I thought, isn't that interesting.

Here I am working here

every day and not even aware that something like this was going
on.

Now, of course, I was aware that there were things that were

questionable and that type of thing, but not that that feeling was
amongst the faculty.

That was an interesting thing there.

(43)

B:

And which president was this?

S:

That was when Dr. Watrel was leaving and when Dr. Roberts was
appointed acting.

R:

And Secretary Pittenger came to explain to us.

S:

Yes. Pittenger.

I was trying to think of his name.

it was interesting.

Yes, and

Evidently the faculty had, some of them

at least that I could hear there, had sided up and it was
interesting.

I don't know how that got started.

was inevitable which it usually is.

I suppose it

I think the calmest

presidential changeover I have seen has been Aebersold as he
went in.

But that's quite interesting.

I think he retired, I believe.

Of course, Weisenfluh

Didn't he?

Moved up to New

England or someplace?
R:

No.

He was dismissed by telegram by Emma Guffey Miller and

took a job in Elizabethtown, New Jersey.

Apparently the Board

of Trustees had worked out another job for him.

So when they

advised him that he was not going to be president any
more, he was in Florida, they already had him another job.
S:

It's interesting how some of these things work out.

It's like

when Watrel left here and went out to the eastern part of the
state a little while before he moved to North Dakota.
R:

To get vested.

But it got him a job.

s:

Yes.

R:

But you were one of the builders of the Allegheny Club?

It's been an interesting thing.

(44)

S:

Well, I was involved in it somewhat being I guess at that time
building maintenance foreman.

I got involved in a lot of the

purchases, and a lot of the layout work for the crews as work
projects developed or whatever. The first place we talked about
having the Allegheny Club, that was its nickname
beginning.

from the

I mean Three Rivers and they had the Allegheny Club

and I mean that was it.

That was really a catch phrase.

They

were going to put it under the bleachers next to the locker rooms
on this side of the stadium.
it.

I went up and looked around through

They had things pretty well laid out and drawn up to the way

it was supposed to be, and I know I had to order the little
kitchen unit and refrigerator and stove and sink combination.
Ordered the electric lights that go along the side where the
booths were to be.

I don't know if it was booths or tables.

Paneling that we got put in.

We had quite a bit of that stuff

gathered together there. One day we were up there walking around
getting really down to where we were almost ready to have the crew
up there, and I didn't know what was going on. It wasn't a game
but there was something going on that a lot of people went up over
the bleachers and steps, and it just sounded like a drum down
there.

You can't believe the sound that's down under.

sound barrier or anything.

Just plain steel.

There's no

Hearing that, boy,

that was it. I mean you couldn't put up with that during a game.

(45)

S:

You could just imagine what it would be like with people stomping
their feet.

So they thought, well, that's not the place to put

that type of thing.

So that's when we got into a separate build-

ing and decided to build that up there and of course that wasn't
the proper way to go about it.
R:

Spike was the superintendent? [Col. Henry G. Hamby (ret.)]

S:

No. Spike was the director of planning.

R:

Oh, yes.

S:

Yes.

He was up in Old Main.

Of course, anything that he would suggest, I'm sure Dr.

Watrel, if it was for athletics, he'd go along with it.
Well we were limited to, like I say, by regulations to what we
could build and the money amount we could involve in contracts and
things like that. I remember when the Ski Lodge up there was
built.

It first started out to be a storehouse.

Spike was pretty

good at that.
R:

Lovely storehouse.

S:

It was a storehouse and it was just a little oblong building and
very nice.

Then they decided that they ought to have water and

drains in the thing.

He said, well, you don't know.

Maybe they

would want to wash something off or hose something off.

So it

went on from one thing to another and being built that way then
that creates problems because it's not all tied together.
forget what somebody asked me about.
known how this was laid out.

I

I said, well, if you had

We went in there and we were going

(46)

S:

to pour a cement floor and we put drains under it.

Drains weren't

in part of the thing but the college crew did that.
floor pouring was contracted.

I think the

So Spike was there.

I remember

the one time and I said, where does this drain go?
drawing there.

Oh, he said, right there.

I had a little

So we ran the pipe over

there.

Well, as a result you didn't have uniform slope to the

floor.

But that was put in quickly and then the cement was poured

over top of it and it was there.

He knew all along what he was

trying to develop, what he was working towards.
up to be the Ski Lodge.

Finally, wound

When they cleared the area up over the

hill that's the ski slope, that was a fire break.
listed as a fire break on some of the projects.

It's still
No need for a

fire break there, but it sure made a nice ski slope.

He was

really pretty good at that, doing those types of things.
to take away from him.

Not

He had been an Air Force colonel, I guess.

I remember being down in Harrisburg a few times. I was down
there on union business and he was down there on school business.
He knew the right guys to see to get approvals and see things
done. He had worked himself in pretty well.

If he didn't know

himself, he wasn't going to go out on a limb.
to get somebody else in on it.

He knew where to go

So he got a lot of things done.

Part of what, in my opinion, part of the reason we have things
like West Hall and so on is due to Hamby.

The shape it's in.

we

left buildings run down so they would look very poorly, and then

(47)

s:

he would go down and make a presentation why we needed an art
building.

Those types of things.

Well, I guess they're gone

now but there used to be pictures and slides and stuff that
he used at presentations.

When the old Porter house was over

by McKay. I don't know whether you remember it being over back
of McKay?

A big square building and the art department was in

there for a while.

First they had students in there.

there as a dormitory for them.

Every year we had to rebuild

the thing so that wasn't a good idea.

But anyhow they had

the art department in there for a while.
around at that time.

Boys in

I think Bob Crayne was

I was trying to think who all was here.

Anyhow, I had some of those slides.
sitting in the closet.

For instance, he had a girl

Nobody would ever be in there.

But she

had her easel up and she was painting all cramped up in there.
And he would say, that's the type of space we have, that we're
working with.
thing.

We need the money.

He was good at that type of

The same way with West Hall. He would go to the worst

part of it.

Take pictures of it about how bad it was and so on.

That's the type of, well, of course, I suppose that's what you
had to do if you wanted to try to persuade them.
R:

Plead poverty.

S:

Yes. Plead poverty.
script was there.
slides.

Some of those slide presentations and the
He had notes and so on in the folder with the

(48)

R:

The Archives needs those.

S:

Yes.

I think most of those were pitched when Sorg became the

Director of Planning.

He moved in where Hamby had been.

Of

course the need for that type of function was not there anymore.
I mean we weren't building new buildings and expanding like we
were when Hamby was there.

A lot of the files and stuff were

still there in the office and they needed space and they were
expanding here and there. I know they moved a lot of those
over to our building, things that weren't pertinent to records
that we need for how buildings were built and where differnt
things are.

Some of those were Hamby's presentations and they

got pitched because there was no need for them.

It's a shame.

Some of those would be interesting, like you say, for the
Archives.
R:

Show an expert at work.

S:

Yes.

R:

A hustler.

S:

Yes.

He was going to do a management training seminar and I

don't know if those things are still up in the maintenance office.
Probably has a military bent to it since he did it, but some
of those were still up in the maintenance office there.
all laid out.

Management.

He had it

His lecture and everything was taped.

You could have set it up, run the slides, and the tape and everything.

I don't know whether somebody had asked him to do that or

(49)

S:

whether he just did that as a thing he was going to volunteer
sometime. I think it would be good because he certainly understood
the principles of management.

I remember his opening remark.

says, and it went with a slide that came up.

He

Management, he

said. The dictionary defines management as getting things done
through the efforts of other people or something like that. And
he said, I like to go a little further with that and say, it's
getting the things done that you want done through the efforts
of other people.

That was his lead-in statement and then he

would start expanding on it.

That was pretty interesting.

I remember the first time I met him with the wide Panama hat
and I wondered what kind of a character do we have here now.
Turned out he was pretty good, pretty good guy.
R:

So by and large the maintenance folks have steered fairly
clear of the politics of the institution?

s:

Yes.

It had never affected us like it did the Highway

Department.

Back when I first started here, and I had no

previous experience with state work or government work before
I came here, the Highway Department worked out of what had
been the coal tipple here at the college when they had their
own coal mine.

They would take the ashes from the heating plant

and put them in that old coal tipple for when as they needed them,
and it would hold quite a little bit of ashes.

And in the winter

time as they needed to ash the road and so on they had a pickup

(50)

S:

and they'd back up under there and get some and go out and
ash the intersections or whatever.

They didn't have the program

of deicing that they have now, but they did put some ashes on
some of the bad hills.

So they were kind of centered around

the old barn that was here and around the old coal mine and tipple
down there. There's an amusing thing I remember.

They had

a barrel that they used to make heat in the wintertime and as they
were loading up the truck and they all were standing around or
taking a break, they built a fire in that stove.

Well, they came

up to the heating plant to get coal to burn in their barrel to
make their heat.
anything.

I don't think they had a shanty or a building or

I think that thing was sitting outside as I recall, and

that was their heat while they were there.

Otherwise, they were

working on the truck or doing what ever they did, patching roads
in the summertime.

But anyhow, they came up this one cold day, it

was bitter cold and the fellow came in and he had two old five
gallon paint buckets and he sat down there. The guy had brought
him up in the truck on his way someplace and he was going to come
back and pick him up.

He says, I need to get some coal.

And

while he was back there, we filled the buckets up with ashes
almost to the top.

Wet them down real good so they were really

soggy and then we put maybe a couple of inches of coal on top of
each bucket. Well, he came back from the bathroom, he looked and

(51)

S:

he was suspicious.
that going on.

I mean there was always things like

He said, who filled up the bucket?

We said,

well, that was so and so, one of the other guys that worked
on the highway. We knew the crew that was in there quite
often.

He stopped by and he said, the truck will be back to

get you in a little bit.

Well, the truck did come back and

get him and he didn't think any more of it.

Loaded it on the

back of the truck and they went down and they dumped it and
of course it put the fire out.

Oh, my, we never heard the

end of that.

One time I wheeled ashes out of there in a

wheelbarrow.

I wasn't the regular guy there but that was one

of the things that I did in the heating plant.

Well, the

guy that wheeled ashes normally had a bad back, and every once
in a while he would get a session with it that he couldn't
work.

He was down in bed really.

I stopped in to see

him a couple of times when he was off.

But then they would

send me down to take his place and that's how I got into doing
some of the things that I did that wasn't my normal job.

Anyhow,

not too long after that coal episode the underside of the
wheelbarrow handles were greased.
on all the time.

So that type of horseplay went

You didn't get fired.

One thing or another.

I wasn't in on the bucket, but I was there and I guess I got
blamed just the same as everybody else by association.
what they did.

I knew

(52)

R:

You had some real characters over the years?

S:

Oh, yes.

It's hard to just think of any right off the bat.

I mentioned Russ Douglas there and his quick temper.

I guess

he had managed a Butler store, chain grocery store in town here
that was down on the corner where Bill Hulings' station is now.
There was a grocery store there at one time.

Anyhow, I remember

being with Russ one time and went over to South Hall.
metal shower stalls in there.

They had

They had been in there probably

since, well, not since it was built, but since it had bathrooms
in it.

Been a number of years and they had rusted out down at

the corners and when you'd step on there why of course the water
leaked down through the thing and down through the floor and
down into the shower on the next floor through the ceiling.

So

they wanted something done until they decided what they were
going to do with those showers to seal that leak up.

We got some

tar that the Highway Department had in barrels, but of course it
was very stiff.

So we decided that one of the easiest ways to

patch that up, we didn't have anybody around here with a welder
or anything at that time, was to put some of that tar down there.
Heat it up and pour it down in that crack and let it harden up and
seal it off. At least slow the water up a little bit.

So we went

down and got a can of that and I was helping Russ that day. And
he got his blow torch and got it going and the tar in the can and
the torch up against it sitting there on the ceramic tile floor

{53)

S:

and melting the tar down so that it would get soft enough to flow
down the crack. And the shower was dripping, so of course it was
keeping the thing wet and the tar wouldn't stick that way, so Russ
dried it off and he pressed the handle of the mixing valve there,
and still drip, drip, drip.

He said, dang it, I told that plumber

to shut the water off and that we were going to be in there fixing
these cracks.

He didn't do it evidently.

hadn't got to it yet.

I guess the plumber

Not much coordination there but anyhow,

he reached in and tightened a little bit more and still drip,
drip.

Finally, he got in and really gave it a heave and he

turned it the wrong way and the shower head pointed out towards
the curtain to the door opening.

All the way down the front,

just wet him down completely with that shower.
off.

He got it turned

Battled in there and shut it off. He cursed and swore and

and he kicked the tar can and the blow torch and out the door
he went stomping up the hall just swearing.
know what to do at that point.
to fix the thing.

Well, I didn't

It still wasn't dry enough

But I got the tar straightened back up and

cleaned off the floor as best I could and got the blow torch
lit again, and I suppose a half an hour later Russ came back
all calmed down.
on.

I don't remember what happened from there

I just remember his violent outburst at that.

One other

time, he had a pocket watch, a fairly good pocket watch, and
I was traveling with him.

Evidently he had me doing something

(54)

S:

that he went along maybe to show me how to do it.

We looked

to see what time it was and Harry looked at his watch and it
was fairly like I say a good watch.

It wasn't a dollar pocket

watch like most of them that was carried in that day.

It had

stopped so he wound it and he set it and put it back in his
pocket there and we went on again.

Some other thing we were

doing and he went to look at the time again and it had stopped
again.

He shook it.

It was wound up and he got it going.

So

he had gone down between what was the heating plant there.

It

sat between where Behavioral Science is and Weisenfluh.

We

got going down between the heating plant and Behavioral Science
heading around the corner like we were going into where the
laundry was at that time.

So whatever we was going to do

must have been in that area.

He pulled out his watch again

and it had stopped again, and he hauled off and threw that thing
up against the brick wall and it just exploded.
went everywhere.

Pieces of watch

Just that quick he was really upset.

Of course

that kind of made me chuckle, but I didn't let him see me chuckling.
I can remember, too, talking about laundry again.
thing leads to another.

How heavy the laundry baskets were when

you get mangled sheets and pillowcases.
weighed.

One

I don't know what those

It took two of us to pick them up though.

We'd pick

it up and set it on a stand there and then we'd get facing
straight ahead and carry it out and put it up on the truck.

(55)

S:

Boy, those things were heavy.
pretty heavy.

Haul them to the dormitories where they put

them in the linen room.
there.

Even for two grown men they were

Good bunch of ladies worked in laundry

Oh, we've had a number of characters over the years.

Like I say I can't recall all of them.
McDonald ran the water plant.

I remember Pete

Pete, he liked to get into the

bottle occasionally of course, maybe pretty regularly.
He was a single fellow.

He had been married and was separated

from his wife but he had some girl friends around the area here.
Sometimes he would get in pretty bad shape.

Anyhow, Lee Bowler

was the superintendent and it would fall either on me or on
Jim Leone, he's an electrician here, we were the two guys who
knew how the water plant ran up there.

And back in those days

you would take the salt we had in bags here and they had a
big tank there and probably put about a ton of salt in there and
then they add water to it and make a salt brine to recharge the
water softener.

Then of .course the water was softened and went

up into the little tank that sat there.
we had at that time.

That was the only tank

But Pete would work up there and he would

get a notion that he was going to take some time off to get
involved in his hobby.
Lee, would tell us.
knew.

Well, we would get a call, or the boss,

He said, Pete is out today, and we

We went up there and there was the salt tank completely

(56)

S:

empty.

No salt in it.

Just plain water in there.

needed charged right then.
water.

The softener

The tank was probably full of hard

So we'd get up there and the first thing you had to do

was carry 20 to 25 sacks, hundred-pound sacks of salt up.
the sacks and put it in there.

All the sacks that Pete had had

before were there, hadn't been burnt.
and burn them in a barrel.
corner.

Open

We used to take them out

They were all stacked up in the

You'd just work like crazy. And of course in the meantime

all that hard water started down through the lines on campus
and everybody complained, the laundry and the heating plant, that
the water was hard and everything. And it would take us probably,
depending on water use, maybe three, four, five days to get
that thing back in shape again.
tank and it was good now.

To get soft water back in the

Everything was working good and Pete

would come back and go to work.

Evidently, for some reason or

another, he and Lee were real good buddies.

I don't know what

the circumstances were there, but they were always having coffee
together.

Lee would say,

I don't know why it is whenever I send

you guys up there the water is hard in this place but as soon as
Pete comes back that water is soft and nice.

There was no way

we could ever convince him that we were the ones that caused it
to be soft.

He worked that time and time again.

character, too.

He was a

Quite a fellow.

I remember John Boyd, a good-hearted fellow. Do almost anything

(57)

S:

for you.

But John chewed tobacco.

that worked here.

I figured him as a character

He'd do anything for you except lend you money.

He did have some money but he was going to keep it. I remember
approaching him one time.

I was thinking about buying some

property, a house and so on.

I had no credit at the bank because

I hadn't been here that long and I thought, well, maybe some of
the guys I work with.

There were a couple of fellows here that

had a considerable amount money.

Probably had it invested.

I

remember approaching John about money to buy the property one
time, and he said, well, Josie, he always called me Josie, if I
had it I certainly would be willing.
any cash money.

Well, maybe he didn't have

Maybe he had it tied up in certificates or some

sort of investments.

He chewed tobacco and he would sweat and

chew and work, and he was a very hard working fellow.

He was kind

of the head guy at the heating plant and he talked through his
nose with kind of a nasal effect to it.

I think one of the first

times outside of being in the heating plant and so on going to get
a drink or something when I was mowing grass or something like
that and I'd talk to John a little bit and of course like everybody you get acquainted.

Well, I lived in a farmhouse out on

Kiester Road there and didn't have running water in it.

We

carried water up from the spring so I made enough money and I
figured I'd put a pump in.
to running water.

That was enough of that.

I was used

We lived with an old farmer out there.

So I

bought a pump and everything and it started to give trouble and

(58)

S: evidently it was in the valves of the pump and it had a huge nut
on the thing.

Common guy wouldn't have wrench that size.

I

couldn't get in there and I knew that in at the heating plant they
had a board there just with all kinds of wrenches for the steam
engines that made the electric.

I thought, I bet they have a

wrench that would fit that thing in there and if I just run in and
get it and bring it right back when I'm done, probably nobody
would say anything.

So I went in and John happened to be the

fellow that was firing that shift and I said, John, I wonder if it
would be possible for me to borrow a wrench to work on my water
pump.

Oh, sure, he said, come on back.

He went back there and

there was that whole board and I said, well, I measured the nut
that crossed the flat sides of it and I think it was something
like two and half or three inches or something like that.

I

said, I figured you would have a wrench here to fit the thing.
So he started looking around over the board there and he pulled
down this one wrench and he said, now there's a wrench that don't
fit nothing but if you ever find anything that nothing will fit
that's the wrench that will fit it.
that way.

I never heard it quite put

But anyhow, I measured it and that was the wrench I

even used for my well out there.

John would get into a number of

things, and one of the things that I thought was interesting in
him and people would tease him, too, was he seemed unsure of
himself when he did things, and I remember working with him

(59)

S:

putting something back together and I don't even remember what it
was now, but there were bolts and nuts on the thing.

John would

start that nut on there and he'd maybe make three or four revolutions and then he would take it back off again and then he'd put
it on there and he'd try it back and forth and he'd take it back
off again.

That might happen three or four times in a row

before he finally wound it in and tightened it up finger tight
before he put the wrench on it.

I don't know why he did that

but that was one thing he would do.
rod out the boilers.

I remember helping him

We had to fire two boilers.

You

had to run a brush through it and brush all the soot and
so on out of it.
it.

A big long rod to reach a whole length of

So you had a plank laid out there and you walked on the

plank with the rod then pulled it back out again and that
pushed all the dirt in and down into the ashbox.

Anyhow,

John would start that in there and he would get it started
in there and he'd get it started in and sometimes it would
be in there as far as the whole length of the brush and then
he would pull it back out.

It was a thing.

interesting phenomenon for me.
type of thing.

It was an

I never saw anybody do that

I considered him to be quite a character

even up until after he retired. He'd come down and get one
of the guys to go up in the evening after work or something
and fix something of his for him.

He'd pay them.

He didn't

(60)

S:

expect them to do it for nothing.

I remember Jim Leone going

up one time and he came back next day laughing saying, I went
up to John's there.
seen him coming.
machine.

He said, John came down.

Well, we had

He had trouble with his automatic washing

Jim said, well, what kind is it, John?

oh, I don't know, it's a whippoorwill or whatever.
a Whirlpool is what it was.

A whippoorwill.

Talk about his chewing tobacco.
call was in town here.

John says,
It was

He was guy.

It used to be that the fire

It came to the heating plant because

it was staffed 24 hours a day.

When they called the fire

department it rang in at the heating plant and we would go
answer the phone and get the information and make sure it
was a real fire first of all, because people would call for
all kinds of things.
hose to whatever.

Everything from wanting to borrow a

But when we made sure it was a fire, then

there was switch there we flipped to blow the siren down at
the fire house.
Ollie Hilger.

Most of the time through the day, it would be
He had a garage there right about where the little

town square is now with the buffalo wings and the produce place.
Ollie had a garage there and he'd run across and answer the phone
and get the information and write it down on a tablet and stuff
and then the firemen went and he went too, I guess, to fight the
fire wherever it might be, or else he'd hit the whistle again to
get more help.

But that's the way it worked then.

(61)
S:

We worried quite a bit about the old fellow that lived
out there where we lived with him.

I'd just put a coal furnace

in the house there and he wasn't used to having a coal furnace
and he'd get that thing going and putting coal in and flames would
be throwing out the door while he was there and he was quite old
and so he was slow at it.
fire several times.

I thought sure he'd set the house on

And then he would go to sleep and let his

cigar fall out of his mouth down on his shirt and burn a hole in
his shirt.

But anyhow, any time we were away from home I con-

cerned myself with whether our house was on fire or not out there,
or his house.
plant.

One night I stopped up there at the new heating

John was in there and he was downstairs blowing ashes and

of course it's

real noisy down there and the ashes are taken out

with a vacuum and they rattle and it roars and so on.

The fire

whistle had blown just before that and I was down here doing
something and I thought I'd come here and check where the fire
was. John come over with tobacco and sweat and everything and
he kept leaning towards me.
whoever he was talking to.

He had a habit of leaning towards
I kept backing up.

I was sorry I

stopped to ask him where the fire was. All this tobacco juice.
saw him do the same thing to Mrs. Gladys Arnold one day.
to teach music appreciation.

She used

I remember her stopping down there

about something at the heating plant and John started that
same thing and of course she was all dressed up.

I

He had her

(62)

S:

backed the whole way to the door before he finally got done
with the conversation was finished and she still had tobacco
stains on her.

R:

Oh, he was quite a guy.

So the relationship of maintenance to the students and faculty
and administration has never been very rocky?

s:

No. I'd say most of the time you would get a few individuals
just like anywhere.

R:

Just once in awhile?

s:

Maybe a rock thrown in there, but you know I think it's been a
thing that they feel uncomfortable there and they move on because
the ones that don't fit in, so to speak, just kind of drop out.
Because most of the time outside of just little minor things,
minor skirmishes and so on, the maintenance crew got along.

R:

Did the staff center help things some?

People get to know

each other a lot better.

s:

Oh, I think we do.

I don't think we get too many of the

maintenance guys going over there, but there's a few that do
I think.
R:

It seemed to me early a lot of folks did.

s:

I remember the disappointment back in the early days when they
built the Grill out there.

They did that after the war.

That

was a prefab building that I think was up at Camp Transfer or
someplace.

Either gave it to the college maybe.

But they brought

it down on a big truck in pieces and then they bolted it together

{63)

S:

there and made the Grill.

The guys kept looking forward to that

and they thought, that will really be nice.

We could go over

there and buy our lunch once in a while instead of carrying it.
Although they had the prerogative of buying lunches through
the dining hall and they could even have that taken from their
check, their meal. And some guys did do that, but they thought
that would be a great thing there.

Well, when they first opened

it they let the crew know that none of the workmen was to be in
there unless they were working on a job or some kind of thing.
Really created some bitter feelings back then.
even pay any attention to it.

Well I didn't

I'd never heard anybody say that

and I would go in there and get coffee and sit down and talk to
the students or whoever happened to be in there in one of the
booths.

If I was dirty, I wouldn't go in there and track the

place up or whatever if we were digging a ditch or something like
that, and nobody ever said anything about it.

I don't know what

went on to create that feeling amongst the fellows that were there
when they first opened the place.
the Grill I was thinking of.

There was something else about

Hon Stevenson was there when I came

here.

A long, long time.

I don't know how many years Connie was

here.

I never had anybody say anything to me about going in there

having a coffee or coffee and doughnut.

(64)

R:

Corne to think of it, there is a long waiting list of people
who'd like to work in maintenance, kind of like a permanent
waiting list.

s:

There's a number of people that this type of work evidently
appeals to them.

Maybe the steadiness of it.

I think you

get to a point after a while in construction jobs and so on where
the big money for a few months isn't the answer to everything.
some people realize that and some don't, but there usually is
a number of people.

The benefits I think is a big thing.

R:

The tuition thing has been helpful?

S:

Yes. I think so.

I think that definitely.

When I was thinking

about getting the meals, that's something else we were able to
rectify.

The women in particular had their lunch deducted from

their pay check and they ate in the dining hall, most of them.
Some of them didn't.

One lady, Mrs. Mossrush, her husband was

the boss of the laundry when I first came.
charge.

He was the guy in

I don't know what they called him at that time.

He had

14 or 15 women working in there running the presses and mangles
and washing machines and dryers and the sorting room where they
sorted stuff.

But his wife, I think she had worked there for 14

years when the thing came up about the meals, and she had never
even been in the dining hall but she had paid for her lunch out of
her paycheck all that time, and we thought that isn't fair.

so

(65)

s:

that was one of the things we did locally here was to get those
people who didn't eat in the dining hall and not have them pay for
it.

rt made no sense, but that's just the way it was and always

was and I don't know whether anybody had ever thought about it or
had ever tried to get that done away with.

Of course the people

who worked in there had that.
People are funny.

Experiences that happen to you.

women and they both belonged to the union.

I remember two

One lady missed the

union meeting one night and the other one wasn't there.
she was working.

I guess

But they all ate at least one meal at the dining

hall while in the course of their work day here, and we were
talking about this unfairness of people paying for meals and never
eating them there and never having any choice in the matter.
pay for it anyhow.

You

That came up for discussion at the union

meeting, and somebody got up and said, yes, there's one woman
there that eats two meals there and she only pays for one.

And I

said, I don't know about that and really I don't think the union
is interested in somebody that is getting something for nothing.
What we are interested in is the people that are paying for something and getting nothing.

That's more of interest.

But just

that mention that the one lady had mentioned and they got into a
fist fight, the woman who brought this up and the woman that was
getting the two meals down at the kitchen.

Well, it came out

somehow or other that it was at the union meeting and so the

(66)

S:

dietitian called me down and I was president of the union then,
and she said, what in the world are you guys doing?
were actually at blows.

I said, well, nothing.

talk to them to see what they are upset about.

These women

I'd be glad to
I got to talking

to the one lady, she was a neighbor of my mother's down here, and
really she was quite upset.

And she says, they shouldn't be up

there talking about people at the union meeting and naming names.
I said, there wasn't a name mentioned.

I was conducting the

meeting and there wasn't any names mentioned there.
are you referring to?

I said, what

Well, she said, they said that I was

getting two meals a day down here and only paying for one and I
said, I know for a fact that your name was never even mentioned.
I said, the incidence of that was mentioned.
the only one that's doing it.

Well, she said, I'm

Well, if she had kept her mouth

shut, nobody knew. Or maybe the ones working the kitchen did know
but nobody would say anything or a name.

But she said I'm the

only one that's doing it.
B:

She tripped herself.

S:

But you get yourself into all kinds of things.

R:

So in retirement you have real good memories of Slippery Rock?

S:

Oh yes.

R:

41 years?

s:

Yes.

R:

You're a real residenter for us to interview.

(67)

S:

Yes.

I can remember so many things.

Like I say, as I mentioned

there that I'd like to do some character sketches some time.
I have to get in that frame and think of that particular person
for a period of time.

It makes it difficult for me to come up

with instances of characters just on the spur of the moment.
Yes, I looked down over some of the other things here.

Diffi-

culties. I guess I mentioned the difficulties of the two
supervisors.
I should.

And not being able to get promoted like I thought

I think that's happened a few times in the course

of my working here that I felt that I was better qualified or
whatever than the person that got into that.

But those things

happen any place you work and I don't have any bad feelings
about that.

I feel good that I was able to achieve what I

wanted to achieve as far as my goals for retirement.
I would rather have retired probably when I was around
55 or 58, somewhere along there.

I had some things in mind so

I was hoping to get some promotions that I didn't get, and as
a result of that I stayed until I was 62.

I made up in years

what I lost in salary which those promotions would have
provided.

I'm not any further ahead or further behind. Just a

little bit older.
R:

Well, thank you a lot for the interview.

S:

Okay.

There are a number of other things I could talk about.

R:

Sure.

We'll do it again.

(68)

S:

Yes.

Might be.

I'll have to remember what I said here.

R:

Well, it will be in print.