SRU ORAL HISTORY
“SLIPPERY ROCK UNIVERSITY IN THE SIXTIES”
INTERVIEWEE: DR. WILLIAM MEISE
INTERVIEWERS: DR. JOSEPH RIGGS AND LEAH M. BROWN
17 SEPTEMBER 1991

R:

We’re going to begin with beginnings, freshman year at Slippery Rock.

M:

My early fond memories of Slippery Rock date back to the fall of 1940 when fresh out of high
school I had the opportunity to look forward to being a student at Slippery Rock. Those days in
my undergraduate program extended from 1940, 41, 42, and during that time I remember the
closeness of the campus. We had approximately 500 students, 350 women and 150 men. We
lived in old South Hall which has been demolished for sometime now. We had a dean of men
that lived on the first floor and I’d venture to say lots happened between the students and the
dean of men over the course of an academic year. There could be a lot of dormitory stories; I
would just narrate one. The dean used to like, keep order and would patrol the halls, and on
this one occasion this one group was sort of rowdy, and so the dean knocked on the exterior
door and demanded to know what was going on in there. One of the boys not knowing who it
was said, throw a lot of water under the door and swim through. So this was the type of life
that the dean lived in those days. The women had a similar situation having a women’s dean
whom they called Gummy because she was deft of foot, very quiet in her movements around
the halls which, of course, caught some of the women in embarrassing situations. Our hours
were rather rigid. Through the week, the women had to be in their dorms by a quarter to eight
so the men might as well go study, and so that was the predication of the hours. On Saturday
night, the women usually had twelve o ’clocks, and so consequently that was social night. Friday
night maybe ten o ’clocks, and the rest of the time it was early socializing or none at all. The
high part of the day, as I recall in those undergraduate years, was right after dinner when in the
Hut, there was always records played and we could go up there and dance from the end of the
dinner until a quarter to eight at which time the women had to be tucked away in North Hall.
There were other stories that could be related since the security was rather tight in the girls’
dormitory. Occasionally the men would tie bedsheets together and try to gain entrance through
windows, first and second story windows. Sometimes we would be successful and sometimes
we would be caught in the process. I would imagine that most colleges across the country were
having things of that nature take place during that time. As I look back on it, the instruction was
strictly a teacher preparation school. Elementary, secondary and health and physical education,
that was it. The program was rigid. Everyone took the same thing in the same major. So if I
were to enroll at that time, I knew that the second semester I was going to have chemistry as a
health and physical education major. As a sophomore, I knew I was going to have anatomy and
so on. There was no choice for electives. Of course, that way they were assured that you were
well prepared and could meet all the emergencies of teaching which we were to experience

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later on. The sports program was fairly extensive and back in those days we dominated because
we were the big health and physical education school. We had probably more athletes than
some of the other state colleges or state teacher colleges as they called them. I remember
going down to California one year. Their big school major was industrial arts. Of course, they
had a lot of good industrial arts potential, but many of them didn’t have too much football
potential. So if they did get their helmets on correctly, we intended to spin them around, and
usually the games were fairly one-sided. Of course, as part of this, Coach N. Kerr Thompson is a
legend in his own right. I was fortunate enough to play for Coach in his last two or three
seasons before World War II, and of course, stories abound for years prior to that, since he was
a long-time mentor of both the football and basketball programs, and baseball programs here at
Slippery Rock. We had a great time. There were no cars. Well there was one car on campus
and it didn’t run. It sat out on the Morrow circle, and it was mainly for the kids who would crawl
in there on cold nights, or it was there as a showplace. If the students went home, they maybe
were picked up by their parents or they hitchhiked or they rode into Pittsburgh with the milk
truck driver, or they sought out some type of transportation of that nature. So consequently,
most of the student body went home at Thanksgiving, at Christmas, maybe in the spring
towards Easter and that was it. The rest of the time they were here. The academic week
extended basically beginning Monday morning running through Saturday at noon. Heavy
classes. Classes were scheduled Monday, Wednesday and Saturday [and] Tuesday, Thursday
and Saturday, regularly. Of course, they took a dim view of anyone missing classes, period. And
on Saturday they were particularly suspicious. That’s about the way it was. So we had short
weekends. I would say of the mores of the time, there were five or seven little older students
and some of them smoked cigarettes on occasion, but that was about it. If a woman smoked,
she was suspect, as far as the teaching profession was concerned. All our meals were quite
formal. White tablecloths. Served. We had hosts and hostesses. We were rotated. Everyone
got to eat with everyone else before the year was out. Manners and a proper cultural eating
experience were emphasized as part of the educational process. After my freshman year, I was
fortunate enough to get a waiter’s job. You say fortunate? Well, we were paid twenty cents a
meal, which was a great help with our college expenses, but the biggest fringe was we didn’t
have to dress as formally as the rest of the students. We had our white waiters’ coats over our
regular classroom garb. Everyone else had to dress for dinner. Women had to wear hose and
suits or dresses. Men had to have ties and coats on. So it was a preparation time. As a result,
some few students used to miss meals on occasion because of the dress code, however, most
everyone attended. During meals sometimes there would be a pause in between courses, and
there would be pep songs. Before a game there would be pep songs and rallies and that sort of
thing, and announcements. Sometimes, some of the academic groups would make their
announcements such as meeting tonight. So it was a time of communication and fellowship.
Then right after dinner of course, everyone would flock to the Hut, which is now called one of
the art buildings, I think. The Hut, which had a very nice floor, was originally constructed by the
Y. M. C. A. and put there for cultural, semi-religious experiences. We had the chapel which you
can hear many experienced Slippery Rock people talk about. It was a beautiful gray stoned, twin
towered building at the top of the circle there at Morrow Drive. In the chapel, architecturally it
was quite distinctive. In the chapel, weekly there was held, and every Sunday

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night, there was held chapel meetings. It was interdenominational, but everyone was to attend.
During the years 1940 to 1943, everyone had an assigned seat and they sort of took roll, and if
your seat was empty too often, why the dean of men or social deans would bring that to your
attention. Now if you were home for the weekend you were expected to get back in time for
chapel, and it was usually an interdenominational church service. I could hardly see it
functioning today in our climate, but in those days it sort of met its needs, and then throughout
the week they would have, sometimes, special speakers and maybe special musical groups
during what would be an assembly period. They would dispense classes at that time, and that
would be part of it. Looking back on the whole procedure, it was a great opportunity for
interpersonal dynamics. I mean your roommate and what he did, and the people across the hall
was a great part of the educational process. And the Faculty members, they lived there, they
ate there. It was an in-house type thing. The faculty members were also about as cloistered as
the students. They lived in the dormitories or lived very close to the campus and they took their
meals right there with the students. And if you wanted to engage over dinner a conversation
about a particular subject, perhaps you were sitting with a subject teacher, and they did assign
the subject teachers throughout the dining hall, maybe one at each table. If you happen to have
the chemistry teacher for two weeks you could talk chemistry with him if you cared to, or with
the English professor you could talk novels or whatever you cared to, to glean a little extra if you
cared to, and some of that took place. I would suspect that by the end of the day the faculty
members were happy to just have dinner and talk about something else. So it was an
interesting time. It was a happy time. Students were all, I would say, that were there, they
were there by choice, and they were going to be teachers, and it was a happy time. Then, of
course, things rapidly changed. War became activated and most of us were reservists of one
kind. We were called up, most of us, and the campus changed dramatically. It got down to the
place where there were only a few men left who had physical problems, and maybe 200 to 250
women. It was shortly after that that the Air Corps got into arrangements. It so happened that
we had Army units stationed here. I think they brought in 400 or 500 or 800 Army units and it
became a military camp, with these 250 women and three or four civilian men still pursuing
their studies. So, I don’t know too much about that myself because I was gone for three years,
and came back in 1946 and finished my senior year. I was taken out after my junior year and
went to the military. I went to OCS [Officer Candidate School] and became an officer in the
Navy. I came back in 1946, and there were some changes. There were a few more electives in
the curriculum. Enrollment was up slightly, maybe 500, 600. I went on and took a semester of
classes, which I enjoyed because I had a little different insight after those three years in the
Pacific. I had a little better understanding of what I was really there for, and so I gained
probably more from my studies. Then, when you went into it at that time, you had to have
student teaching and preprofessional activities, which I enjoyed. I ended up, and teachers were
it very short supply at the time, up there in Coudersport, northern tier, central Pennsylvania.
The coach and physical educational teacher came down with undulant fever from consuming
unpasteurized milk. This was in the middle of the school year so they had sort of an emergency.
They called down at the time to the Laboratory School where I was doing my student teaching,
wanting to know if anyone was available. The deal would be that they could go up there, finish
their student teaching, they would supervise them up there, and also pay

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them substitute’s wages. I was halfway through my student teaching experience here at the Lab
School. Dr. Wagenhorst, the director at the time, came into my class one day where I was
teaching. He observed, and right after class he said, Bill, how would you like to go up to
Coudersport? They have an emergency up there. He told me the deal. I had a car at the time,
and I was on the G. I. Bill, so it sounded like a good deal, good experience. So I jumped in the
car, went up there and was ready for the next Monday’s opening of classes and took over there
basketball team and had a good time up there in the north woods. It was cold, but it was a good
professional experience. So I was fortunate. To reflect back, some of the classwork they sent.
We had one class that we had to take in conjunction with our student teaching, and I met with
the superintendent up there once a week, and he had a written exam for me over the content of
the course. I remember that I had to study that text at the time, take this test every week, and
then he would send it back here. At the end of the semester, they graduated me and gave me
credit for everything and it worked out pretty well. I had good recommendations up there, so it
worked out pretty well. Then I went off and worked in the public schools for seven years which
was great and had the opportunity to come back to Slippery Rock in 1953 as a junior faculty
member connected with the Laboratory School, which I accepted. I came in here in October of
1953 and set about settling in to the niche of a Laboratory School teacher. Back in those days,
the Laboratory School was supposed to be a laboratory school. I mean out on the cutting edge
of new educational methods with lots of glass enclosed anterooms in the back of the class for
observations and that sort of thing. I also had student teachers from the college, roughly about
37 a semester. So I would have two or three student teachers with each public school class.
These were really public school youngsters in the Laboratory School, and I enjoyed that because
it gave me an opportunity to explore, with the college students, what was happening in the field
and it kept us all up to date. It worked out very nicely. After about three years, due to financial
problems, all laboratory schools were dispensed with pretty much starting here, and it pretty
much happened across the state. So now what used to be combined educational effort
including college and local community was distinctly separate, and, in fact, it almost went so far
that never the twain would meet. Unfortunately, that carried over for quite a number of years.
Then as I recall, later as I got into deaning and other academic activities, we strove to increase a
number of laboratory activities that we could get together. So it sort of just ran full cycle. We
almost had a complete separation, which then over a number of years, we were able to get our
students back into some classes in the Slippery Rock school district, and gained some valuable
benefits from that. Of course, in 1953 the enrollment was around 700. As a junior faculty
member, the typical teaching load was 18 to 22 hours. If things were tough, or they had a lot of
students in a particular area, why the chairman would approach you and say, well, gee whiz, we
have all these students. You can handle another class or another five or ten, can’t you? You
really didn’t have much choice but to shake your head and go from there. Here again the school
week was Monday through noon on Saturday. Those of us in health and physical education
coached three sports plus usually carried these 18 to 22 hours, so we were busy. You were
either teaching, coaching, or you were preparing for one of the two. There was little coffee time
or slack time. You had to love to teach. You had to love to work. So consequently, there was a
turnover for I’d say the first ten years I was here. A number of faculty members came, maybe

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lasted two or three years, and then would take off for greener pastures. I found the whole
teaching experience sort of stimulating. You had lots to master. We had a philosophy in the
health and physical education department that if you really wanted to be a well-rounded
teacher, you should teach it all. So consequently, if you had anatomy, kinesiology, and a couple
of activities one year, well, then next year we would give you a couple of other classes and some
different activities. So you would learn to teach them all, you see. That’s what really happened
in the course of the first five years that you taught. I taught about every class offered in the
health and physical education area, and I had files on all of them. I was smart enough that as I
taught each class, I developed a file and resource material. So I had these reams of filing
cabinets full of all of this stuff, which then, depending on the schedule I received, I’d pull out. I’d
review them and oh, yes, here we go, this is what we do in anatomy. So we would refresh
ourselves and get started, but you had to also study along with the kids, so to speak, to keep up
with things. So research opportunities were minimal. You just didn’t have the time or energy
for it unless you got into graduate work, which, well, I had my master’s degree before I came up.
I started after my coaching experience, which I enjoyed very much, which included the first five
years I was here, six years. Four years at football, four years assistant basketball, four years
track and field. So that was 12 years of coaching there in four years. So I thought, physically this
was going to be a tough sustain, particularly later in life, and I was interested in some of the
other aspects. So I got into graduate study and went on and took doctoral work out at Colorado
and enjoyed it very much. Never sorry. But during those days, we had a great camaraderie
among the faculty. John Eiler was very helpful. When we had to change assignments, we would
help each other. I remember John Eiler. There was a woman on the staff, and myself, had to go
to teach swimming the following semester, which was very important because it was certified
by Red Cross, and it was well-being at stake and safety and that sort of thing. John Eiler did a
crackerjack job of teaching the swimming. But when we had to change teaching assignments,
then we got together, the three of us, and he sort of laid out the program, the way to go about
it. How do you handle this swimming? I mean, we could swim. We were all certified and we
were young people, but there’s more to it than that. The techniques of it and the breaking
down and the hand and arm movements, you had to be precise on this, which John Eiler took
the time to go over with us in detail. We met almost weekly. That’s just one example there and
similar things happened when teaching assignments changed so faculty members really had to
have good camaraderie and have a lot of support for each other. Otherwise, it was survive
together or sink alone type of thing. But the faculty members were of the highest caliber, I
would say. That didn’t necessarily help in physical education, which is the area I’m familiar with.
Not many health and physical education faculty had advanced degrees, maybe 1 or 2. Advanced
degrees were more common in the other areas. But then, as time moved on, the health and
physical education faculty also got into the higher education swim and now, I think today,
probably hold the same number of degrees as you’d find in any academic area. [can’t make out
name], another fond memory, as track and cross-country coach was very dedicated to it.
Unfortunately, with about 10 years left, he went out to California to teach in one of the
California state colleges.
[tape skips from about 31:39 – 32:03]
We had, I remember as a student and junior faculty member, on May Day, we still had the May
Pole dances and the May Day activities. So we would dance and frolic out on the lawn. This was

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usually supervised and organized by the dance teacher and the gymnastic teacher. Everyone
spent the day, the afternoon anyway, out on the front lawn in the May Day activities.
Gymnastics was revered as a part, a representation, of the health and physical education
program. I remember the gymnastic teams, men and women at the time, were not competitive
teams. They were exhibition teams. So they would do all their stuff, back and front
somersaults, horizontal bar, parallel bar, and all that was exhibition. And they would take these
big trips to New Castle and down through the city, the city of Pittsburgh. City schools would
love to have them for assembly programs and so on, and around the various public schools,
along with some dancing. They usually had maybe a half a dozen dancers that were part of the
program. It was a set program and this was an exhibition, and afterwards there would be a little
explanation of how we have this program at Slippery Rock and we would hope that you all
would want to get involved in it and so on. It was sort of a public relations thing and the
students all went and put these on. So they would go around to the various schools and they
maybe put on 12 to 15 of these during the course of a winter. That was really the purpose of it.
Then as time went on, Wally Rose, who was a great colleague, came from Springfield and he got
sort of into competitive gymnastics, and after a fairly short period of time the men’s and
women’s gymnastics programs were divided and were strictly competitive teams. They would
go down there and go through the intercollegiate events. The NCAA prescribed events where
they were in competition with Pitt, West Virginia, whoever had a gymnastic team that wanted
to schedule us, just like any other athletic teams. So it went completely full cycle from an
exhibition to competitive, fairly highly competitive, till today where I think both programs have
been disbanded. So there is an example, to follow the history of gymnastics, we would have
seen quite a difference there. It would be interesting to take every sport and maybe every
activity through music, drama, publications, library, whatever, of the current university, and
trace it and see the ebbs and flows and see how it has changed to make it what it is today. As in
the case of gymnastics, it is non-existent, and probably in some other activities the same would
hold true.
Not digressing too much, getting back to the early days as a junior faculty member then, I taught
all the courses and found it a very broadening experience. I got into research in my doctoral
program, where I had the opportunity to use freshmen classes here, for which I was thankful
and did my doctoral research and dissertation and thought it was great. I finished that up and
now, rather than a junior faculty member, I am more of a senior faculty member. Having been
here and having seniority and having known every president since President Miller, gave me
insight as to what happens in these state teachers’ colleges, state college, the university setting.
Thinking back over it, I know I had as a student, President Miller was here the first year and then
Dr. Entz, and I think upon record the succession of presidents, but they all had their strengths
and weaknesses and they all had their trials and tribulations, and it was interesting to know
them all, and see the impact that took place. History sort of indicates that ten years is about the
maximum amount of time that the president can be real functional. However, I’m sure that can
be disproven. Actually, I looked at Dr. Entz as a personal friend. I worked for him as part of my
student employment and used to drive him and so I got to be very fond of him. When we all
went off to service, he bade us good-by, and when we came back I think he had retired. But it’s

the nature of the beast that you have a dynamic interaction taking place. There are lots of
influences exerting pressures, and I’m sure in today’s situation the same holds true.
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An interesting study would be the budget fluctuations that have occurred over the years.
During my active years, I guess I was through maybe a half dozen budget emergencies and
crunches, and they all pretty much ran about the same course. As a junior faculty member, I
remember there were 700 students, and the buildings and facilities at the time and in three
years we over doubled the enrollment to where there was about 1500 or 1600 and we didn’t
add a faculty member or a new building or a thing. Didn’t add a thing. I remember saying to my
colleagues, well, gee whiz, we must be pretty good. It’s either that or we were overstaffed
before, that we can double this operation and still not add anything. Well, that was the first
budget crunch. Well, then things went along and things loosened up a bit on our budgets,
improved a little, and people could see that roofs had to be repaired and that improvements
had to be made and we had to have more facilities. Well, then we got the Field House off the
ground. When we moved from the East/West Gym complex down to the new Field House, I
think it was around 1960 or 1962, we filled it. There were no empty places in the new Field
House. We had accumulated enough students and equipment and everything up in the little
East/West Gym complex, in that little facility, that we could just move it all down into the Field
House and we just filled it nicely. Well, we had some breathing room but not much. Then of
course, since that time, the Field House has been filling. The same thing has taken place, and
now I would suspect, I understand the students have added paddle ball and hand ball courts and
some other facilities, But I would suspect that they are pretty full to the brim again. How soon
the new facility, which was talked about years ago, will come into being is anyone’s guess. Here
again is the ebb and flow of the budget. Right now, we are in another budget crunch. These
budget crunches usually come down from Harrisburg, usually involved in the statewide budget,
usually result in severe cuts, and nonpayment and so on is not new with the recent one. It
occurred a number of times previously. I remember our faculty paychecks were not
forthcoming for a month or so there on occasion. Back in the seventies, we had a budget
crunch. So that was something you sort of got used to and you rolled with the punches.
An exciting and interesting time to me was during our time of rapid expansion and after the
early sixties and through the sixties. We were expanding. We had the budget. We were hiring.
We were booming. This was a lot different than I had experienced previously. I remember
being charged with, and not just myself but a number of faculty members being charged with,
the responsibility of in our travels, also recruiting. We were after faculty members, in any
discipline with advanced degrees, who could really upgrade and contribute to the academic
program. So if on occasions, I had become the department chairman of the health and physical
education and went to a number of national meetings and so on, but in the process of going to
these meetings, I was always asked to go to the University of Illinois, to the placement office,
and they had the applicants lined up. We went there as well as going to the meeting, which was
close by, which I think was in St. Louis. We went to the University of Illinois and was there for a
week or ten days just interviewing applicants from any discipline, might be English, math,
physics, any area. Our main objective then was to interest them in Slippery Rock. Tell them
how nice it was and so on, and then get them to forward over their credentials and apply to, if it

was a physics teacher to the chairman of physics, or their committee or if it was
communications, speech into that area. Of course, in health and physical education, we could
deal directly with them. So that’s what we did. We had, I’d say, about four or five interviews
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every day at the center they had set up for us and we could meet with these faculty members,
and we have faculty members on the campus today that got here from that process. But we
were out, nationally, trying to recruit the best young people. They were mainly people coming
right out of doctoral programs, graduate programs, who were willing to relocate or who were
seeking positions. Yes, I’m sure that we have some on campus today that came out of those
programs. But that was quite exciting. We had to increase our faculty. We were looking for
maybe 40, 50, 60, 80 new faculty members with advanced degrees, at one time, because we
were going to lose some. We knew there was a certain amount of attrition, we were expanding,
new programs, new courses, new opportunities. As we expanded to gain faculty, now back on
campus here, we were going through the rigors of expanding programs. Which programs were
we going to expand, which ones were certainly going to contract. Mainly we were expanding,
we weren’t contracting many. So we’re expanding everything and anything that we thought
there was a need for, at the time, in health and physical education, I remember. But that time it
was a school and I was serving as the dean. Rather than one program, we expanded to separate
programs in recreation and resource management, into pre-physical therapy, into nursing, into
health science as a separate program, as in health and physical education both teaching and
non-teaching. And that was typical of every program on campus. So this was a period of rapid,
exciting expansion which I think would be noticeable in any historic study.
Continuing with that, now we have programs in physical therapy, nursing and accounting and
business and those areas, which 20 years ago would have been overlooked by most. So it’s
amazing how we’ve grown, expanded, and developed as an institution. Always strong and
peppy as a social entity. And I think it’s still reflected by some of the activities, in the fraternities
and down at the College Garden apartments, but we won’t talk about that to any great extent.
Always in athletics and activities. Although today we don’t excel in certain athletic areas quite
as much because parity has been reached and other institutions are also strong in that area.
They are also the recruiting and scholarships, and back in the beginning days, the only
scholarship anyone had was what their family could provide for them or what they could work,
through the summer, to attain. That was the only scholarship available to you. Of course, now
the costs are quite a bit greater. As an undergraduate, we paid $400 a year. Two hundred a
semester, and that included room and board and laundry. They had a laundry on campus, and
so each week we had the soiled laundry in a laundry bag there and they picked it up and did it,
and returned it back to your room, most of the time. Some of the students lost items so they
were a little gun-shy of the laundry. They tell me before my time, they grew everything that
pretty much was consumed in the dining hall, they grew on campus. So their meat, one of the
local cooks also raised cattle and stuff, and that’s where they got their meat. They had gardens
and they grew a lot of stuff that they ate, so it was pretty much a self-contained, pastoral type
setting. I remember, the first 10 to 15 years, there were big herds of sheep right south of
campus that roamed freely there, and it was not until fairly recent times that the property was
sold to the state and the sheep were eliminated. So we had a very pastoral setting in the early

days which led up to the current sort of quasi-cosmopolitan status. Here, we are sitting out in
the country and can commute to the city and the students do commute there. So it’s sort of a
different situation.
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The trustees back in the early days, the trustees were all appointed. Trustees usually changed
with each administration, and trustees were, I would say, more political and involved in local
issues than they are today. The trustees’ function is now changed to more of a longer tenure,
and removed from the political day-to-day activities of the campus, and more as overseers
responsible to the state board, which probably is an improvement.
I would say memorable students, we’ve had our share, and I think we have more probably
outstanding students spread over more professional areas today than could ever be imagined
years ago. I think there have been lawyers and doctors and people of that sort that got there
start here, where in the early days, we had some outstanding educators who of course came
through the narrower program that was committed to education at the time. I’d say there
would be a contrasting description of the faculty. The early faculty was pretty well locked into a
set program as the students were, and didn’t have near the voice that they do today. Now
academic matters, and faculty interaction is a prerogative that the faculty can exercise to a
greater extent. The role of the administration, in the early days the administration was pretty
much, well, I remember as a junior faculty member we sent a slip for each class that we met,
daily, to the academic dean in Old Main, and on there we put any absentee students, and that
was a requirement. If you didn’t turn in your slips for the day, as far as they were concerned,
you weren’t there. So there was a track, a close keeping of the attendance as far as students
were concerned, as well as the faculty. There was no missing of classes. It was unheard of by
either students or faculty. Through the evolution of this whole thing there was sort of a
rebellion against that, and I remember after the first couple of years here some of the faculty
members claimed that this was more like a high school than anything and that we needed to do
away with that. And sure enough, we did away with it. So there were some needed changes
made. Of course, in the early days, public support was total. Probably 90 percent of the budget
was taxpayers’ money and the students paid their $400 a year. Now, I think the public supports
maybe 50 percent, so the financial structure has changed quite a bit. The decision-making is, of
course, much more diverse today. Back in the days of the education-dominated institution, why
there weren’t as many decisions to be made and, if they were, if they needed to be made, they
applied to teacher education pretty much and were made by a relatively few number of people.
Then it was concurred by the faculty. Of course, the objectives have changed totally from a
narrow purpose to the multipurpose institution that Slippery Rock is today. So from that
standpoint, I would say, I’ve just been thankful that I was a part of it, and I’ve been more
thankful that I’ve been able to survive it, and enjoy these retirement years. And I still enjoy,
very much, coming to campus and attending musicals and plays and athletic events and
activities whenever we’re in town. So I consider myself a supporter of the institution and one
that has many fond memories.

B:

You mentioned Coach Thompson. I have a couple of questions about him. Was that a faculty
position? You said he coached football and basketball, and did he teach besides?

M:

Oh, yes.

B:

Everyone did?

(10)
M:

Everyone did. There were no such things as separate coaches. The coaches worked very hard,
and Coach, of course he had the pressure sports. He would be running around maybe with the
basketball team, get home maybe around twelve o’clock or one o’clock in the morning. He
might have an eight o’clock or nine o’clock the next morning. In all likelihood, he probably
would. None of us hardly started after nine. We were all over the East/West Gym over there.
There were a lot of eight o’clock classes and by nine o’clock, sometimes if he was out on a
basketball trip, they would maybe try not to start him before nine, but you had to be over there.
Well, you don’t have to be crazy to do this but it sure helps. In baseball or football, maybe
someone would throw a pass and hit the receiver and the receiver would drop it, he’d say, hit
him in a bad place, right in the hands, and then when he pulled the player out, he would say,
that ball hit you in a bad place, right in the hands! Coach had a peculiar way of speaking. Food
he would call “fud”. He’d yell, boys, you forgot to get your “fud”. We all joked about that. He
had these speech mannerisms that were distinctive. He was a big guy. He had hands like a ham.
Like he was back from the Jim Thorpe days of the Carlisle Indians, where you had to be. He was
big in his prime. When it got to the time that I was playing for him, why he was getting elderly
and he was in his sixties probably, but I could see when he was in his prime, he had hand on
him.

End of Tape I, Side B
M:

They used to always kid him. They’d say, Coach, is it true that you won the game? He’d laugh.
He’d say, oh boys, don’t believe those stories. He says, most of them aren’t true anyway. They
used to kid him about that. Sneaking into a uniform at half-time and playing the second half.
Back in those days they didn’t check on eligibility as close, but I don’t think he did that. I don’t
know. They used to always kid him about that. But he was quite a player in his own right, and
he was big and strong. He coached a lot of years here. As a result, he was revered by a lot of
people. Well, the single biggest scholarship fund that the University has today was given in his
memory. His players, not only his players, but the students, the kids he had in class, many of
them women, so on, just remember old Coach and he was just a big, old, friendly bear, and that
everybody thought a lot of. But he spent a lot of time, well, all the coaches did, spent a lot of
time over there. Time you’d finish up it would be six or seven o’clock at night before they would
get home for dinner every night through the week. His widow is still living over at Orchard
Manor [Grove City, PA], and was called on by his players here, I think, last fall. They gathered up
five thousand dollars in memory of Coach and contributed to the NKT [N. Kerr Thompson] Fund,
which I forget how much we have in that fund now. Bob DiSpirito was probably here a year two,
when Coach passed away. We used to take him out on recruiting. We started when Bob
DiSpirto came. We got into recruiting more. We had to do that. So we would get in a car and
go to various functions, around to schools, to meet with high school seniors and Coach would go
along. He’d say to Bob, let’s talk football, let’s talk football. He was still interested right up to

the time that he passed away. He was quite a guy and no pretenses, no facades. What you see
is what you get, and that’s what everyone liked about him. He’d teach health classes and a
number of classes. The kids would try to get him off the subject, you know, get him to talk
about sports rather than talk about health. What are we going to do this week, Coach? Well,
(11)
M:

you boys forget about that, we’re going to learn our lessons here. Learn about our “fud” and
how important it is. He was quite a guy.

R:

Did you have Bob DiSpirito?

M:

Yes. I think it was around that time we were having basically a football practice. We saw the
need to upgrade the program so we had a lot of applications, maybe 70 or 80. We sifted
through them. Bob was over at Bucknell and so we interviewed him as well as a number of
other people. We thought that he could do the job for us. Got him from Bucknell and then we
said to him, well, we were expanding so we had faculty positions that we could use. We needed
a couple more. We told him that he could bring one assistant. So Rog Oberlin was his choice,
who was also over at Bucknell. So we got those two at the same time. I told him it was going to
be rough going, that he was going to have to work at it for a little while. The first game they
played Waynesburg, and Waynesburg beat us 61 – 7. After the game he says, yes, it’s going to
be rough going. But the main reason, looking back at it, that they beat us 61 – 7 was that they
had this wide receiver who, after graduation, went and played with the New York Giants for six
or eight years. He was so fast and tricky, we didn’t have anybody who could cover him. It got so
that the first part of the game Bob had one guy trying to cover him and then it was two. I said,
why don’t you try three, and he tried three. We just didn’t have anybody fast enough afoot to
stay with him. He was catching passes all over the place. The kids got discouraged and we just
didn’t have the horses. But then the next year we got a little better. I think they won a couple
of games the first year, and the next year we won a few more and the next, a few more, and
then before you knew it, you know he had those three or four state championships and we had
the bowl playoffs and we were running around all over the country playing people. But we had
to work at it a little. We got so that we had recruiting groups in down there every weekend and
we would all go in and give them pep talks about our various programs, and how they ought to
think about coming to Slippery Rock. I remember going down. I was department chairman at
the time or dean, and Bob says, on Saturday morning can you come talk to this group at about
ten or eleven o’clock? He would give me a time. He had everyone scheduled. He even had
some faculty members come in from various programs, if he knew the kids were interested in
various faculty programs. So we might have 50 high school students in there, in their senior
year, ready to come to college and we would literally sell them on the various programs and the
value of coming to Slippery Rock. It took time and it would knock a hole in your Saturday
sometimes, but that’s what he had to do. So over a period of years, we got so that we were
getting, now we were getting 24 or 25 or 50 pretty able-bodied students and some, by golly, had
football ability. When you get that, he was getting some depth and it got so that he gathered
together a pretty good squad there. He had good morale. Bob was a good organizer. He could
rally the campus to support the program. At times, we didn’t always have that. In fact, at a
time or two, it’s pretty easy for the coach to alienate the campus toward the program. But the

trick is to get someone who can win friends and influence people and get everyone working to
support this program and show them that by having a good, let’s say, football team, hey, we’re
going to spin off a certain number of able-bodied students in your area, and your area, and your
area. So we weren’t just recruiting football players, we were recruiting students in various
academic areas. We made an effort to recruit the science student, too. All students, and if they
(12)
M:

happened to be health and physical education students, why we would take them also. To have
a successful program from, I’d say, Bob DiSpirito’s days on up to this time, that’s what you have
to do. You have to have the whole college behind every program really, supporting it, giving and
taking, and you can realize your maximum potential that way. Prior to that, we just had
problems. It didn’t reflect well on the whole college, and that’s why we got into this concerted
effort, and by golly it worked. Well now today, we have a solid program. There are a few of
these opponents that we are playing, we don’t have the manpower, people power, but it’s a
pretty solid program and we do fairly well.

R:

Had I.U.P. [Indiana University of Pennsylvania] gone clear out of our league?

M:

Yes. They are so strong, and Edinboro is awful strong. They gather up a lot of money there.

R:

Alumni?

M:

Yes. I would say those two, I.U.P. particularly, in football. Now basketball, why no problem. But
football, it just comes along with a lot of resources and money, and it makes a difference.

R:

Was Carter a supporter of athletics?

M:

Yes. I would say he supported athletics. He supported, let’s say athletics a little more than
physical education, but I think he wanted a good projection. I think he wanted student athletes.
I don’t think he supported it to the extent that Al Watrel did, for instance. Al Watrel, I think
presidential-wise, was the strongest supporter by far. More happened during his administration
than any of them. He was a former football player himself. I think he enjoyed the action. He
went down there and milled around there with the coaches.

R:

Yes, Bob told me about him. He would read his mail, and he would do the clippings from the
eastern newspapers, and he would underscore the good-looking crop. Some wonderful stories.

M:

Yes. He would give him these newspaper accounts. It was great, but the only thing is, there was
no way of doing it though. We could have channeled him, just smoothed it over. We didn’t
have to go as far as he wanted to go. He and I disagreed.

R:

That’s not the press box thing you are talking about. It’s scholarships and the other problems.

M:

Yes. He told me he wanted a strong program, and I said, well, fine, we do too, but we wanted a
good strong academic oriented program. I’d say, well, we’d need maybe a hundred student
workers, which we had jobs for down there. We could employ them all. He’d say, well, take
200. No, I don’t want two hundred, just want one hundred. That caused all kinds of trouble
because I felt that was sort of a disproportionate number. Not only that, but I had to employ
and keep track of all these students, which was a heck of a job. I had to vouch and certify that

they were all gainfully employed, and that they put in the time. I could do that with a hundred,
but it was tough with 200. He went on the assumption that if this was good, why twice as much
would be better, and that isn’t always the case. I tried to caution him that your academic image
is going to be damaged. You’re going to raise resentfulness here, as the thing up on the hill

(13)
M:

turned out to do. A lot of people just resented that thing being there. Well, that didn’t have to
take place. If he would have just gone easy, softer on it, but he was hard to convince.

R:

Did he ever miss any away games?

M:

Not very many.

R:

Not very many. It had to be a big-time emergency for him to miss.

M:

He wanted to be there. He wanted me to be there and he wanted the athletic director to be
there. Me and Bob Raymond. And we were there. Most of the time we were there.
Occasionally we wouldn’t be able to get there. Yes, if he would have just tempered it a little,
hey, I think we could be floating along today. We really didn’t have to go overboard then. We
were doing very well. And I feel Bob DiSpirito would agree with me. But that was an interesting
experience. Previously, I mean, we didn’t put near the resources into the program. Now we are
putting more in that we ever have, private funds. We have more scholarship monies. The
alumni and various people have given these funds that have now grown to the place where we
have more than we have ever had. But Indiana has twice as much as they have ever had. So if
you want to compete with them, you have to do what you have to do to compete with them. If
you don’t, it’s sort of an injustice to the kids to send them out there, sending boys out there
against these grown men.

R:

Does size of their enrollment impact on all this? They’ve got fourteen, fifteen thousand or so.

M:

It’s well over ten thousand but I think what it attracts, more than anything, is that they’ve got a
bigger source of private funds. I understand that they’ve got an old oil well, and you know
they’ve got some other things. They’re pumping oil and bringing it in all the time. That just
gives them more to do with.

R:

Doesn’t the NCAA place limitations and restrictions on the use of that money or how many
scholarships they can support?

M:

Yes. The NCAA Division II restricts the number of full scholarships that they can have, but we
don’t have enough money to come up to that level. California doesn’t either, or Loch Haven, I’m
sure. Shippensburg, maybe. And if you don’t have enough money, and you’re allowed thirtyfive full rides in football, you don’t have enough money to support that, well, that’s your
problem. So now you’re going to have to function with 15 full rides, or how many you can
afford. I don’t know how many we can afford now. I don’t know how many we have, but I
would guess maybe 20. I think the NCAA, you’re really allowed 50. I think Indiana has fifty
without a problem, and they’re all full rides. It doesn’t cost them a cent. While our students,

they might only have half rides or a third. So now if you’re a student coming out of high school
with some football ability, and Indiana approaches you and say, well, come to Indiana it won’t
cost you anything, and we say come to Slippery Rock, it’s going to cost you a thousand a year, or
we can help you to the extent of a thousand a year. Your parents may say, hey son, you’re going
to go to Indiana. It’s not going to cost me anything. That’s about what it comes down to. Now
that just applies to football and basketball and probably baseball now, and girls’ basketball and
(14)
M:

girls’ softball. But when you get into the other ones, well even the tennis players and the
golfers, there’s two or three of them that get some help, and the soccer players. But those
sports aren’t as recruited as heavily so you can get by. If I’m a coach, I can get by better on a
smaller budget in soccer than I ever could in football because the best football players are
heavily recruited, but the best soccer players are just sort of recruited. I can probably find some
for free, that if I coach them hard, I can bring them up to a level that would be competitive. In
football, I could never coach them up to a level that would be competitive. It’s about as simple
as that. That’s the way it is today.

R:

Did the coaches have academic rank when you came? Had that been installed a long time ago?

M:

Right. We were faculty members first, and coaches incidentally.

R:

And now that’s just changed recently.

M:

Yes. During my time as an administrator down here, we pretty much held it at that. Now, they
can be working someplace else and coach here. It was during my last year or two that it was
changed, that you didn’t have to. What happened, people go tired of coaching and wanted out
of it, and we didn’t have any new faculty positions. What could we do? But now I think that
they pick up quite often, and all these schools do, they pick up their local high school coaches
maybe or go ahead and get the fellow downtown, an enthusiastic rooter. Sign him on as a
coach. Of course, it’s the same with high school. It isn’t as bad in college as it is in high school,
you are working with younger people that are more susceptible to injury. So they’re not
educators. Of course, we might say the same thing about the scientist who was a lab person for
a big chemical company, he’s not an educator either, but we’re putting him to have him teach
chemistry, particularly if he’s a Nobel prize winner or something. We don’t look at his
educational credentials. See that’s the argument, but we always thought it was more sound if
we had educations coaching. But now, let’s see, on the current football staff we’ve got maybe
three that are full-time faculty members and the rest of them, the one’s from Grove City, a
former coach over there. He was a teacher over there. One’s a high school teacher from
Moniteau and you get them from wherever you can get them.

B:

Does that make a difference in their relationship with the rest of the faculty? Or does it not
matter?

M:

I think it makes a difference, like in some of the other sports, like the volleyball coach. She just
comes and coaches volleyball and goes back home. Other than that, she doesn’t know anybody
on campus and they don’t know her. She can’t feel part of the academic program hardly, except

that they are representing an educational institution. So whatever effect that has. Probably on
the college level, these kids are sophisticated enough to perform.
R:

That’s all written into the collective bargaining agreement, isn’t it?

M:

Yes. That’s all part of it. That’s the way it’s been negotiated.

R:

Were able to stay outside, pretty much, of the Carter firing and then Watrel’s firing and all those
kinds of hoorahs that we went through?
(15)

M:

I was able to stay outside of the Watrel firing because, boom, I mean it happened and I was
probably the last to know about it. But the Carter firing, I think I was a dean then and you know,
people brought petitions to me and said, here you go, sign them. I said, no soap. I’m not
signing any petitions. For what? And I’m sure that made some unhappy and others happy.

R:

Well, you were part of the administrative team.

M:

Yes. I was part of the administrative team.

R:

You either support it or you don’t support it.

M:

Carter supported me in a number of instances, which I always appreciated. I can understand
how Carter got into trouble, and what the problems were. But from the health and physical
education administrator’s standpoint, Carter gave me probably as good a support under trying,
difficult circumstances as I had as an administrator. The worst thing in the world, you know, is
trying to administer and have a very soft support base. Worst thing in the world. With Carter, I
had the support base that I didn’t always agree with, but I knew what it was, which is
comforting. That’s my preference. Maybe some other people wouldn’t have chosen this way. I
didn’t always agree with it, and the same with Watrel. I didn’t always agree with him, but I
knew what it was. As I said before, I was always trying to get him to tone down his support of
athletics, and telling him the dangers because I’d seen it before. I’d seen what happened, and I
cited it to him. And he said, oh, it will never happen. If he had just listened and soft toned it a
little bit, he probably would be here today, in my assumption. Because a lot of people liked him.
He was pleasant. He got around campus. He just pushed so hard that some people resented it.
Carter, after he was gone, came back a month or two later and we were talking and he says, Bill,
I was disappointed in you that you didn’t support me any stronger than you did. I said, what do
you mean? They brought me petitions. You didn’t see my name on any of them, did you? He
didn’t say anything else.

R:

Was he terribly upset when you saw him after he left and came back?

M:

No. He was sort of reserved.

R:

Sort of handled it fairly well?

M:

Yes. I don’t think he looked at it as the end of the world or anything.

R:

He had enough ego that he was going to land on his feet.

M:

Oh, yes. He knew he had a niche waiting for him someplace. I think he went up to Ferris State,
Michigan. Over at Dennison, he was very highly regarded. You know Dennison has a high
academic program and he was highly regarded as an academician over there. But he dabbled in
sports, and he used to go out and help officiate track meets, and do some things that small
colleges like to see faculty do. Private colleges. He loved to mill around with the coaches, but
he kept it in better perspective with academics. He knew that the heart of the University was
academics. There were days when I wasn’t quite sure that Al Watrel knew that. He’d get there
and get to rah rahing and it was gung-ho. But we didn’t need that. I told him we were going to
(16)

M:

dominate this thing just with what we got. We don’t need all this stuff. I couldn’t talk him into
it. But like you say, I’d rather know what my backing is than to have a very wishy-washy, weak
backing, not knowing quite where you stand. You can’t function that way. If you know what it
is, then at least you can function. You may not be able to function the way you want to, but you
know the way you have to go. But when it is wishy-washy, why then it’s by gosh and by golly
and the whole program looks that way too. I have a couple favorite expressions here that Bob
Aebersold still quotes. I remember the President, a more recent one, who went to Maryland.

End of Tape II, Side A
M:

We had these management meetings occasionally. So at this one management meeting, Bob
Aebersold’s there and we’re all there and he said, now everyone write up a couple of slogans or
something that were going to have to incorporate in our management style. So we were in a
crunch at the time, and I thought, well, gee whiz, an appropriate one would be, frugality out of
necessity. That’s what I wrote, frugality out of necessity, it’s our watchword. Well, I had a
number of others down there and sent them in. He looked them over. The next day, we’re
meeting again, and he says, I’ve got one here. Now this is really something, frugality out of
necessity. He didn’t like it very well. Everyone sort of laughed. I thought that was very
appropriate, and I stuck up for it. I said to him, I thought that was very appropriate, I think
maybe it says something. He made a joke out of it at the time, and a couple of times joked with
me about it, but Bob Aebersold still uses it today. Frugality out of necessity. Then the other
one. We were up at Old Main once and I think it was during Watrel’s administration, and we got
down to a debate over what programs and how we were going to advise and so on and so forth.
I got sort of impatient and it was late in the afternoon, long meeting, and I said, well, I don’t care
how you decide this but I’m sick and tired of trying to throw a blowout patch on a leaky
program. It was the advertisement thing. So every time I came over, Bob Aebersold says, we
still use that expression, throw a blowout patch on a leaky program. If our students aren’t
advised properly, you end up with them down the line, and now you have to try and patch it up
and that’s really what we are doing. At the last minute, in their last semester, we would go to all
these lengths to advise them or change or make exceptions so they could meet the
qualifications to graduate. I had a hard time buying that. If you have graduation requirements,
well by golly, we have graduation requirements and we had it sequentially planned so that the
student could meet those graduation requirements, not ill-advise them or somehow, they go
astray over in these other areas and come up short, and now, at the last minute, you try to
make maneuvers to make them eligible to graduate. So that was the main point and we had a

little fun out of it, and I guess that’s why we were successful and maintained our sanity. We
used to get some jokes out of it.
B:

Were there some other people that you remember with affection or maybe lack of affection
over the years?

M:

Well, really every president. Dr. Weisenfluh probably annoyed me as much as any of them, but
even the day he left campus, we shook hands and we were on good terms and I wish him well. I
said we didn’t always agree, which we always didn’t for various reasons. He was subject to
pressures and influences from other people and I was sort of idealistic at the time. I was fairly
(17)

M:

young and I thought he ought to just recognize principles like I did and hey, follow them. There
was nothing to it. Well, I found out it wasn’t that simple and of course that’s the way I
approached him and he was being badgered and influenced by other people. The principles
weren’t really important as the pressure he was getting from the other people. As I look back
on it now, if I’d have been a little more mature and smarter, why you know every president
along the line, they’re badgered by a lot of people, and some give a little more or a little less. I
would say one of the most resolute, in their principles and their ideals, was Carter, and we all
know what happened to him. But if you want to say, well, gee, the guy really sticks by his guns.
Hey, that was Carter. I mean he had some ideas and he stuck by them and that’s probably what
got him into trouble. In other words, he could have been a little more flexible.

R:

So Weisenfluh changed them from time to time?

M:

Oh, yes, he’d vacillate quite a bit.

R:

In management matters?

M:

Well, yes, in administrative matters that affected the whole college. What affected athletics and
physical education was the part, because I was sort of acting chairman at the time, but that’s
how I got into administration. He appointed me acting chairman. Back in those days, a
chairman was an appointed position. It was an administrative position. To be a chairperson,
someone, either in the academic dean’s office or the president’s office, had to look on you
favorably and appoint you. That was the only way you could get in there, and Weisenfluh
appointed me acting chairman at the time. When he left he said, Bill, I’d make you permanent
but I think the next president ought to have that prerogative. Well, which is fine, but he was so
soft and fluctuating in his support that I had a hard time figuring out where I was.

R:

In terms of how much budget you had to work with?

M:

Yes. Things would change in a hurry. Someone would go in and beat his ear and he was that
way for a day or two. Someone else would beat his ear, and he’d be that way then. So you’d
wonder who’s going to go in next? By the time you got done with that, that makes it tough to
function.

R:

How did the Michigan Stadium thing evolve when we played those two games? We played
twice at the University of Michigan?

M:

Yes.

R:

In a 104,000-seat stadium.

M:

Yes. I was dean down here and Bob Raymond was the athletic director and he knew the athletic
director up at the University of Michigan and they were talking and what it boiled down to is,
the motivation was, that they wanted to fill their stadium to quite an extent while their team,
the University of Michigan, was playing out on the coast. So they were out on the coast playing
UCLA or one of the California schools and things were pretty quiet there around the University
of Michigan in a 102,000-seat stadium. They said, well, how are we going to fill this thing? Well,
(18)

M:

we could get two smaller schools with a name, and Slippery Rock was one of them, and a
Michigan school, Wayne State. The other one’s kind of a comparable program, Division II,
Wayne State’s a lot bigger institution, but football-wise we’re fairly comparable. So okay, we
get those two teams in there, and they bring their fans, but that isn’t going to fill a 102,000-seat
stadium. That’s only going to bring maybe at the most maybe 10,000 fans between the two
schools because Wayne’s an inner city, they have no following, and they may have brought 50
fans. We had the rest of them. So we’ll make this band day and all the high school bands
around, any outstanding bands, and he gathered up all these bands and got them in there. Well
then, each band brings a lot of band parents and they got them in there, and so when it was all
said and done, we had all these bands which stood and played and made a tremendous musical
sound, we had 65,000 people. That’s the biggest crowd we’ve ever played before. We played
Shippensburg one year and Wayne State the other. Yes, 65,000 people and we got a pretty
good financial return, covered our expenses, and gave us a few thousand dollars to put in the
bank. We were playing someone comparable and there we were in the 102,000-seat stadium
with the AstroTurf and everything and it was a nice sunny afternoon. It wasn’t that far. It
worked out all right.

R:

Great P.R.

M:

Good public relations. I don’t think we played very well either time. I think we lost both games
up there, maybe not.

R:

Shippensburg was a lop-sided score. The other one was fairly close.

M:

That was close.

R:

They won in the last little while.

M:

Yes, the last little while. But 65,000 people, you know, for whatever reason. This guy was a
promoter and I’m sure he made a few bucks out of it. He was trying to make his athletic
program, I think, more visible.

R:

Of course, Michigan has this great reputation as a music school like Indiana.

M:

They have a big music following. I enjoyed the bands. That was something to see, that many
bands all crammed in there.

R:

How did you get to Slippery Rock in 1953? Who made the connection and all that?

M:

Well, C. N. Long was the, I guess you would call him the local superintendent of schools, but he
was also the director of the Laboratory School. Employed half by the local school district, and
half by the college, and I think he asked some of the staff members at the time, Bob Smiley
being one of them. I think I was winning at the time, and I was getting pretty good write-ups in
the Pittsburgh paper for about seven straight years in both football and basketball. We were at
the top so I think C. N. Long asked, well, hey we’ve got this vacancy on the physical education
laboratory staff, who should we ask? I was in football camp up in Laurel Hill State Park, up in the
mountains there, and someone called me long distance and said, hey, we’ve got this position
(19)

M:

and would you be interested? I was right in the middle of trying to shape up this team. It was
going to be a good one. I said, could I call you back? He said, well, we can’t wait too long. You’ll
have to call me. I said, I’ll be home that Saturday. About three or four days. When I got home I
called him then. I had talked it over with my wife and so on. She was a Slippery Rock graduate
so there wasn’t any doubt in her mind. She said, we got to get there. But I hated to pull out. It
was right in the middle. So I had to leave this school district in the lurch, but not until they
found somebody. They did find someone to fill in.

R:

What school was that?

M:

Well, they call it East Allegheny now, but it was East McKeesport then. It was East McKeesport
and so they put them all together. North Versailles, East McKeesport, Wall and Wilmerding they
put together and made East Allegheny out of it. When I had left, I had been there seven years. I
had a woman principal that I communicated really well with and she became superintendent
shortly after I left, and a couple of other administrators they had there, we got along really well.
They tried to keep me from leaving. They said, now if you choose to stay here, we’re going to be
combining and we’ll have principalship and so forth and we’ll make you the principal, and we’re
going to take care of you. So I had been involved in the public school discipline and I knew what
principals did and I said, no, I don’t think that’s my bag, so they wished me well and I was gone.
But I had had seven beautiful years down there, and probably learned as much as I was able to
partake and give to them, I hope. I felt I worked a lot, but they worked my fanny off. That was
back in the days of the smaller high school. Really, so I had all the health and physical
education, football, basketball, and baseball, and all the tough disciplining, study halls, P. O. D.
[Problems of Democracy]. I was certified in social studies. I had senior P. O. D., which I liked to
prepare for. We studied the problem of democracy. Every year we studied statehood for Alaska
and Hawaii, and that was one of the problems. Hey, which came about, and which we went
through. There were a number of problems and we discussed them and researched them and
so on. There was a lot of work involved in it. Then I had every study hall where there were
liable to be kids that would act up. Then you’d like to discipline them, but they kept pressure on
me all the time. So for seven years I had that, and it sort of got tiresome. Got a chance to come
up here. When I went over to the Lab School it was a breeze. I thought it was a breeze.
Because at the high school, I’d drag home seven-thirty, eight o’clock at night and have dinner
and fall asleep in a chair, get up and have to be in the school at nine o’clock the next morning,

had a class, ready to go, and then right after school, coach again. In my spare time, I got my
master’s degree. I’d commute to Pitt.
B:

That’s when you were really young.

M:

I think we all did it at the time. But I remember coaching basketball, and I’d have to quit
practice, knock off practice a little early, five-thirty. I’d run out, jump in the car, eat a sandwich
while I was driving because I had a six-thirty class at Pitt that night. I’d have two classes, sixthirty to eight-thirty, eight-thirty to ten-thirty. Then ten-thirty jump in the car again, drive
home, get home around midnight or so and then I’d have to get up the next morning and be
ready for class at the high school. That’s how I got my master’s. I said to myself, if I have to do
this on a doctoral level, it will never happen.
(20)

B:

Tell us a little about women’s sports at Slippery Rock.

M:

Women’s sports at Slippery Rock, I think pretty much mirrored the trend at the time. We
probably had more for women in athletics than the average university, but I mean we were still
plagued by some of the restrictions of the time. They were debating whether it was good for
women to play full court basketball. They played a game which was, they couldn’t go over a
certain line on the court so they were really only playing like half court basketball. It wasn’t
good for them to maybe swim or sprint at certain times, so they were hashing that out. The big
thing here for years, when I was a student, for women, was women’s field hockey. They went
after that with a lot of enthusiasm, and gymnastics and dance and tennis. I would say that was
the main extent of women’s sports. Well then, as ideas became more liberal, as far as activities
for women, why then we started to add more sports and we went to full court basketball and
softball has come on. In the early days, they didn’t play softball for women. Now they did have
archery, back in the early days, and some schools actually had archery competition because
women excelled. We had an outstanding woman golfer here, Janet Anderson. She could have
played with the men’s team. There was no women’s golf. She’s on tour now.

R:

She won the L. P. G. A.

M:

She’s been scoring. I’ve been watching her making maybe five, six, seven thousand dollars every
week at these events on the women’s tour. She’s a heck of a golfer. So there was a case where
if we’d had a women’s program, maybe she would have stayed and played. She played with the
men, but she only went a couple of years and dropped out, and that might not have been the
reason. But women’s field hockey was big, and it’s gradually grown. Back in those days there
were some high schools without any physical education for women at all. My wife went to a
high school where the only physical activity she had was cheerleading, I think. They had no gym
classes or anything. I guess it wasn’t legal for them to get too exercised. It’s grown. It’s a good
thing. Then back in the early days the facilities just were not shared equitably. I mean the girls
couldn’t get on the boys’ varsity basketball court. They either got undesirable time or
something, but now there is equal sharing of facilities and there’s an equal number of sports
and the same varsity sports. When they cut them, they cut two men’s and two women’s. So
everything is more equitable. But back in the early days, they debated and studied, and

physiologists, and anthropologists claimed that it could even be damaging to women to run
around too much, but they’ve worked through all of that.
R:

They were all out in the fields putting up the hay.

M:

Some medical people even, at the time. They made these studies that women shouldn’t be
sprinting or conditioning at the wrong time. They forgot all about those covered wagons and
stuff. They came across and maybe they’d have a baby and jump into a covered wagon and grab
a musket and hold off an Indian. Now as we look back on it, it didn’t make sense at all, but it
was highly debated. When I was a student here in 1940, 41, 42, the women’s program was very
controlled. Gymnastics, field hockey, some half court basketball and some volleyball and
probably that was about it. I don’t think they had any competitive swimming. Today you got
(21)

M:

these young girls and see these young girls here in New York recently playing tennis there,
goodness.

R:

A fifteen-year-old, seventeen-year-old, world class tennis players.

M:

Yes. Every time she hits the ball she grunted, you know. She hit the ball 109 miles per hour, had
to grunt them a couple of times. So that’s been revolutionized. That’s coming out of the dark
ages.

R:

How’s retirement going?

M:

Good.

R:

We have three retirees here at the table.

M:

Good.

R:

Leah’s been retired a year. I’ve been gone two years. You retired in 1982?

M:

Yes, 1982.

R:

You did 30 years here. Seven years in the high school.

M:

With my military time, I was just a month shy of 40 years of service in the retirement system. I
bought three years military time. I would have been teaching during those times if I hadn’t been
in the military. I was just about a month shy. I figured that was long enough. I’ve enjoyed
myself since. Gives you a little time to do the things you always wanted to do. I go at a slower
pace, and if you have your health, why that’s the most important thing.

R:

Do you have a benediction?

M:

No. We really talked away the time!

R:

Thank you very much.

B:

Thank you.