Oral History Program Gene Sessions Interviewed by Marina Kenner 12 July 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gene Sessions Interviewed by Marina Kenner 12 July 2021 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Sessions, Gene, an oral history by Marina Kenner, 12 July 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Gene Session on July 12, 2021 in the Stewart Library with Marina Kenner. In this interview Gene recounts his early life. Along with his association with Weber, shedding light on his academic journey and the influential educators he encountered, such as historian Dello Dayton. Throughout the interview, Gene's narratives paint a vivid picture of mid20th century life, societal challenges, and the transformative power of education. Also present is Lorrie Rands. MK: Today is July 12, 2021, we are in the archives conference room in the Stewart Library and we are doing an oral history interview today with Gene Sessions. This is Marina Kenner, and Lorrie Rands is our video technician. So, let's just start with when and where were you born? GS: I was born in the old Dee hospital on Harrison Boulevard and 24th Street in 1946, I'm the same age as Bill Clinton and George Bush and... Sally Field. My dad worked in the livestock business at the union stock yards down across the viaduct on 24th. My mother had immigrated to Ogden from eastern Utah. She was a farm girl. My dad didn't graduate from high school, but valued education. My mother graduated from high school, but because of the depression, could not go to college. So my brothers and I were first generation college students, thanks to Weber State. I grew up a mile from here, right by Ogden high school, my daughter lives in the house I was raised in to this day. So I'm a local yokel. MK: Do you want to talk anymore about your early life? GS: Yeah, we weren't poor by any means. My dad did very well in his business. We lived in a kind of proletarian neighborhood over there. It was a new subdivision, 1 small houses. But now that neighborhood is very tony and lots of people like to live there. Lots of kids, it was baby boom time, everybody had come home from the war, everyone was having kids, so every house had kids in it. So my memories of my childhood are just in fights and running around the mountains and growing up in Ogden. Ogden, as most people who have a hard time understanding now; was the center of the West because of the railroad. People came from all over to shop in Ogden, and believe it or not they came from Salt Lake to Ogden to shop. My dad worked downtown. So, I remember all the old, tough, stories about downtown Ogden, most of which are false. Like the ones about Al Capone and all that was just a bunch of baloney. But my memories of Ogden are generally very pleasant. I don't have any sad stories to tell. Pretty white bred. We did have a lot of ethnic kids in school because of the railroad and in high school there were a lot of African-Americans. And so unlike most places in Utah, it was a very cosmopolitan place, although our neighborhood was pretty white bred. But had a good time by and large. LR: Where did you go to elementary school? GS: Polk. Thank heavens they're saving that old building. It was a beautiful building and it costs so much to keep these old buildings. But I'm glad they're going to do that. Because it was built in the 30s or something, but it's a beautiful old building. Good teachers. I was a polio pioneer in 1954. They experimented on two million kids for the polio vaccine, and I was one of them. It's kind of weird because I hated shots. 2 There were two million kids that they used as guinea pigs, literally. They developed the Salk vaccine and they tried it out on monkeys, it seemed to be working well. Then, they tried it on a group of institutionalized kids. And then Salk tried to put it on his own family and himself. He talked the government into allowing him to test it on two million school kids. I was one of those kids and of course, it was a stunning success. And we took care of Polio. The people had a hard time. I mean, people were scared to death of it. This last thing we went through was nothing compared to polio, because if you got that, there was a good chance you're going to wind up crippled or dead. Let's talk about this, I have helped out with the athletics up here a lot, but I was never a good athlete. I was too clumsy, gawky, skinny, stubbly kid. So I didn't participate in athletics and didn't do really well in school, not because of the teachers necessarily. I was bored, I think. What brought me to Weber because everybody just went to Weber once you got out of school. You didn't have anything else to do. So I came up here and I have to credit Weber for turning on my bulb. There were some great teachers, and I know there's an interest in that part of our history. Dello Dayton was a historian, I took a class from him and he was a brilliant guy. He later was lost to administration and became academic vice president. I recall Don Moorman who figures in my story later. He came here from back east and loved to tell people, "I'm not a Mormon, and if you misspell my name, I will flunk you." It was M-O-O-R-M-A-N. And he said, "Neither are my three boys, Jack, Anti, and Non." 3 So at that point, which would have been 1964, when I came here as a freshman. The same year, the Beatles came to America. Weber was just kind of transitioning from being very local, mostly, local people, and faculty, and staff, and things like that was beginning to reach out and bring in faculty from outside. So, I experienced both types of professors, Dello was a local guy, he was from Cokeville, Wyoming, and gone off to USC or someplace. Moorman was from Chicago or someplace. So Weber was just making that transition. About 5000 students, tuition was $90 a year. There were the buildings… the library in which we now sit, had just opened. Although this wing, I don't think had been completed by any means. The Fine Arts Center, now the Browning Center, had just opened I took classes there... my first classes ever were in that building. We had basically buildings one, two, three and four where Elizabeth Hall and the science building are now marching up the hill. And there was a big parking lot up in the front and that's where everybody kind of tried to get a parking place. There was the tech building, which they just tore down. The stadium, which just had the east stands, which are built right on the Wasatch fault and let's see...what else was here? The union building was here. And it had just been constructed, so the campus was just beginning to start to look a little bit like a college campus. And Weber had moved from downtown about 10 years before. So Weber was largely local kids, they were beginning to try to bring in kids from outside, but virtually all of those were athletes. I can remember a bunch of Hawaiian football players out playing in the snow one night, but still very much a local commuter 4 school, which hasn't changed a whole lot in all these years. I enjoyed the faculty, they were very helpful, the staff very helpful. Weber was just a nice place to go to college. Then I went on a mission for the Mormons and went in the army. Went on to graduate school at Florida State University in Tallahassee, because by then I decided I wanted to be like Dello and like Don Moorman those history professors I met. I did very well at Florida in the sense that they gave me a nice fellowship to go there. So I had very few expenses and managed to graduate very quickly with a Ph.D. And when I graduated in 1974 from Florida State, there were no jobs for college professors. It was just really tight, at least in history. A lot of my classmates were literally dropping out and getting degrees in something else because you just couldn't find a job. My mother was old and my dad had died. So I came back to Ogden, figured I'd just get a job, be a very well-educated truck driver or something, I have a buddy who had a construction company. I went to work for him and then fate stepped in. A friend of mine was looking for a job and she came out from Florida to Utah and called me and wanted to know if I had any idea where she could find a job and I said, "Well there just aren't any jobs around here." But I took her down to the church archives in Salt Lake and I introduced her to Leonard Arrington, whom I had known before and worked for him when I was an intern in Washington, when I was at Weber. And I sat with her in this interview with Arrington and just tried to help her get a job, and a couple of days later he called me and offered me a job. So I went to work at the church historical department. 5 And it was a great job because they had nine PhD historians who were just given free reign down there. They decided to open things up and stop trying to hide a lot of stuff they had hidden all of these years. So while I worked there for two years, I managed to get a whole bunch of research and writing projects underway and eventually published several books from stuff that started when I was there. Which brings me to this part of the story and interrupt me if I'm getting too far off track I'm trying to skip over things that would eat up too much time. One day I was sitting in the archives doing something, down in Salt Lake, and I looked over across the room and there was this guy sitting over there he looked really familiar to me, and I looked at him, I looked again. "Hey, that's Dr. Moorman. What's he doing down here?" You know, he's a nasty anti Mormon guy and he used to scare all of us with his anti-Mormon stuff. And he changed. When I had him here at Weber he looked like a KGB officer. He wore a black suit and his crew cut and was very stern. It was the 70s now. So he had an open shirt, with a big gold chain, and his hair had gotten long. I thought, "Gee, do I dare go say hello to that guy” he just scared me. So I got up my guts and I walked over and I said, "Are you Dr. Moorman?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "Hey, I had your three classes from you at Weber, do you remember?" 6 And then he just beamed and said, "Have a seat." And we sat down, start talking. He said, "Let's go to lunch." So I went to lunch with him. And long story made short, one day we were at lunch. He'd come down every Friday and we'd go to lunch and one day we were at lunch and he said, "We've got a guy in the department who's dying of emphysema, and he signed up for a full load in the spring and he's not going to be able to teach his classes. Would you want to come up and teach his classes?" I said "Yeah, that'd be great." So I went to Arrington and I said, "I've got an opportunity to go up to Weber State in the mornings and teach these classes, could I shift my schedule here?" So I'd come in later in the morning and work until later in the evening. He said, "Yeah, that'd be great." So I came up, start teaching at Weber. I taught... I can't remember. I think I taught a full load for three thousand dollars for one semester and drove back and forth between Salt Lake and Ogden every day. And I did that for a little while and then there’s a lot of detail here, I'll skip over…It became obvious that if I wanted to, I could go full time at Weber for another year and make more money. They'd give me a contract. So I resigned my job at the Church against everybody's advice because this job here was very temporary and I wound up doing that for six years. I'd come back every year. By that time, if I may brag, I developed a following and I was packing my classes and I was teaching some courses that I had developed. I developed the first women's studies course at Weber State, taught women's history. I taught that until 1980, when Dr. MacKay came and turned that over to her. I developed 7 a history of Africa course. I just managed to make myself kind of indispensable, I guess. And ironically, in 1980, Don Moorman got cancer and died in about six months and he was gone and they just gave me his job. So I came in the back door. That would have been about in 1980. Got on the tenure track. The rest, as they say, is history. Been at Weber ever since. It was great because my mother was here in town. All of my brothers live somewhere else. So that worked out really well, personally to be here to help her out. I really love Weber State. I get emotional when I talk about this. I get angry when I hear people badmouth Weber, calling it, "Just Weber" or “Harrison High.” That kind of nonsense, because I can tell you a thousand stories if we had two weeks of the great thing that the institution did for me and others, thousands of students, literally. Came to enjoy my job a lot. I was one of those lucky people who get up in the morning happy to be going to work. Which should be a goal of everybody, I guess, right? And made a lot of good friends, best friends. Enjoyed the leadership generally. Wound up getting into campus politics, was elected to the faculty senate and then immediately, become chair of the Senate back in the late 1980s. Subsequently became chair of the Senate again in the 90s. Worked with two or three presidents very closely so got to know the big shots and the medium shots, but most of my time was with ordinary small shots. Served six years as department chair, I didn't like that it didn't fit my pistol grip. Somebody was always mad at me over something, and I'm not a very thickskinned person. I don't know about you, but I don't like people to be mad at me. It 8 was the kind of job where you had to do things that people didn't like. You know, make decisions that somebody else is going to think we were wrong. So I did that for six years, and at the end of the first three year term, I told him I'll do another three year term, but that's it, I'm done. And so they had three years to find someone else and they found Susan Matt. She has made my six years look like kindergarten, I mean, she was wonderful for nine years. And now it’s Sara Dant who's similarly amazing as history department chair. So I did all of that, did a lot of politics, got involved in helping the athletic department where I could I don't know why I did that other than just I had gotten all the students or student athletes. I Starting going to all the games trying to support the institution that way I went to lunch with the athletic director on Thursday. He wants something from me even though I'm retired I can't get away from him. I don't know, it's a great experience, How has Weber changed? So let me talk about that for a minute or two. As I mentioned earlier when I came here, it was really just a local school. We had a few out-of-state, few students from out of the three or four county area and everybody else was just a local kid. One thing that changed, as I mentioned earlier as well, is that at that point, the leadership was thinking, "We've got to diversify our faculty and our students." So we started hiring on national searches and we started getting some very fine faculty from all over the country. So that's changed dramatically. When I was here as a student and even when I first came as a faculty member, the vast majority of people here were local people. Some of them were holdovers from the junior college days so they didn't have advanced 9 degrees. I think they had bachelor's degrees, in fact we had a few faculty who didn't have bachelor's degrees, who were teaching in fields where it wasn't very necessary, I guess. We began to hire PhD’s from Berkeley and Rutgers and all over the country. I don't know what was happening in places like the library, but I think similar kinds of things were taking place where people from other places recruiting nationally to bring people in. Certainly, the faculty has changed dramatically from when I was a student and when I first came as a faculty member. Now you go to many departments on campus and there's nobody from around here. They're all out-of-state folks that come from somewhere else. So that really changed the character of the faculty and the nature of the kinds of things that happen here. Some for the better, some not so much for the better in my view. A lot of people who came here with an agenda. And I was never really happy about that, I always thought that a college professor was somebody who was supposed to be balanced. Mysterious in a way. I have students ask me all the time, "Are you Republican or Democrat?" Or, "Are you a Mormon?" I was glad they couldn't tell. So I don't care for people who use the classroom as a bully pulpit. I call them captured audience faculty, you walk in their classroom and they want to talk to you about how much they hate somebody. And make it a big political bash, instead of talking about a subject. That's got good and bad sides to it, but that's really changed, that's when things really changed. 10 Of course, the campuses changed dramatically. I'd like to mention Norm Tarbox here. I don't know if Norm will hear this or see this, but he came here as our administrative vice president 20 years ago. Much of what you see, the campus is the most beautiful campus you can find anywhere. It's because of Norm. He's a remarkable administrator and had a great vision for what he wanted the campus to look like. I brought colleagues from all over the country here for meetings and conferences, and they were just dazzled by our campus. We get used to it. You walk around, you know, big deal. But they are just literally dazzled by how beautiful it is. They've taken these 400 acres and really transformed it into something magnificent. So that's changed dramatically, all the old buildings are gone just about now. The Union Building underwent a major renovation, fixed it up from when I was a kid. The Browning Center, new buildings like the arts building. The science building, Elizabeth Hall, the new business building, the new social science Lindquist Hall, et cetera. So that's changed. People would not recognize the old campus even if you look at pictures, it was just a horse pasture up here. A few houses down along Harrison and things like that. Student body has changed, but not that much. I think erroneously that if you look at our students in 2020 during the pandemic. If you went back and looked at our students in1980, during that 40-year period there was a great change in the nature of our student body, and I don't see that the vast majority of our students still come from 30 to 40 miles from here. Well, we've got dormitories now, we’ve got a lot of outreach, a lot of international students in the 1970s. We had international students everywhere from Iran from the Far East, we've had 11 that nature on campus for a long time. One of the big needs, of course, is as our Hispanic population. And that has changed because when I was a young professor here and certainly when I was a student here, there were very few Hispanic students. Because it wasn't in the nature of the way they were acculturated, even though we had a fairly large Hispanic population, even then in Ogden. Not nearly as large as it is now, but whereas I grew up in a kind of culture where when you got out of high school you went to Weber. Hispanic kids didn’t think that way. Now we're reaching out and getting a lot more of those people, and that's really a good change. Because we've got that huge Hispanic population now underserved and whose way out of that situation is education. So that's different. I think one of the things differently, this is kind of hard to talk about is there has been a change in kind of our self-perception in the sense than when I was a student here, when I was a young faculty member here. Weber had not changed much from the days when it belonged to the Mormon Church. That's no longer true. That has changed very dramatically. We've got lots of folks who aren't part of Mormon culture and they've come here from other places or maybe they bailed out of Mormonism or whatever the case. Not to make religion too big of an issue, but I think you see a big difference in how people perceived who the students were. As to what we can see with who they are now. And again, not so much religiously, but in the sense of the culture. People used to euphemistically talk about dealing with the local culture and what they're really talking about was dealing with Mormonism. Now, I think that's much less of an issue because 12 they're such a more diverse faculty and more diverse student body. And then you get in a lot of trouble by propounding the local culture. So that's changed. And I think that's a good thing. But there's one thing that hasn't changed that troubles me a lot. Weber still has a terrible image problem in the community. There are people on my street…and I live two miles from here…there are people on my street who are all Weber State grads who will not consider having their children go here to school. And I was at a block party for four years ago and I was talking to two different couples, both couples, had graduated from Weber. One couple had family who were faculty here and so on, and their kids were going to UVU and Utah State. I said, "What's the deal?" And they said, "Well, you know, it's just Weber." So I think we're losing ground there and I tell it to the administration about that until they are sick of hearing it. But somehow, we've got to turn the corner on that. And when I came to the end of my career here just a month ago, I looked at the situation and really believe that it hasn't changed very much in all the years. In fact, I think when I was a young faculty member or a student here, we had a higher opinion of ourselves than we do now. And yet you look at what Weber State grads accomplish, we make more money than graduates from any other public school in the state. We're just behind BYU, but they're not open enrollment. So they graduate, students who are naturally going to be a little bit higher up on that. But our grads make more than grads at the University of Utah. They make more than grads from Utah State. They make more grads from any 13 other school in the state. We've got the smallest class sizes. We've got, just a whole laundry list. I used to give a speech, they'd have me go up to the presidential scholars thing and make a speech about why should you come to Weber. I had 10 points of data. Well we beat the crap out of everybody else and you go out in the community and they don't even believe you. It's like, "What? nah, it's just Weber. don't go to Weber you can get away with it." And I recognize that a lot of kids don't want to live at home. And so they want to go to UVU, where all the parties are, Utah State, where all the parties are, or Dixie or whatever they call it now, where all the fun is. I understand that motivation, but I just think we got an image problem. We're not doing anything to solve it. I find that troubling. I wish the administration or somebody would come to grips with that. I don't know if they're in denial about it or what's going on, or it just doesn't occur to them. For example, not too long ago, the administration paid a consulting firm, $400,000 dollars to come in here and tell us why we're having recruitment and retention problems. And they took our $400,000 and they said, "You don't give out enough scholarships." So they dumped a whole bunch of money into scholarships and they reshuffle the scholarship program. And I was talking to the administrator who was so sold on this, and I said, "How are you going to tell if it works?" And he said, "Well if our enrollment goes up, we'll know that it worked." I said, "Wait, wait a minute. You can't, you won't be able to prove cause and effect." But I said to him on occasion, we're sitting in his office. I said, "What 14 about the image?" To me, that's nuts, because I think it's easily demonstrable if you go out in the community that we've got an image problem and it's not good and it's not getting better. And yet we send students to Yale for law school, my own son, he graduated from here, he is going to Oxford for grad school. We can set ourselves up against anybody. And they come out better than they are. LR: So going back quite a bit. You talked about an internship that you had in Washington. GS: Yeah, I skipped over that. LR: Will you talk about that? GS: Yeah. When I was a freshman Weber, my uncle who had grown up with a congressman here in Ogden, the name was Lawrence Burton. He's been dead for years. They asked my uncle to come back and be his press secretary, and he called me. He said, "I don't want to move my family back yet because I'm not sure I'm going to keep the job. Would you like to move to Washington with me and help me?" So I jumped in his car and we drove across I-40 all the way to Washington. And I went to work for this congressman. And so it wasn't an official internship like we have now, but it's basically what I was. I was an intern. And right next to his office, they had just finished a new big congressional office building. And all the Democrats who had the majority were moving into the new building, and so the old building was full of all these Republican guys. And there was an office right next door that was empty. And so that was my office. I had a congressman's office. I sat in there for six months and I did internship stuff with 15 this guy. Like an internship, paid me a few bucks. I lived with my uncle then I came back to Weber State for school. That was a great experience and enjoyed that a lot. I took people on tours of the Capitol building, which is very different now, because now it's very tight security stuff. But I could walk in the front steps in the front door and walk them all through the building and show them all of this stuff. Take him down the basement towards Mark's, where you can see the British soldiers had come in 1814, and burned the building and bullet marks in the walls and stuff. You can't go in those places anymore because of security. But I'd run over with a big box full of flags and run them up the flagpole and back down. All the other interns are up on the Capitol building same flags up and down, up and down. So when people came, the congressmen would give them a flag and say this flag flew over the Capitol. That was one of my jobs. Got to know the city really well. It was a half time deal. I was at the capitol in the mornings, in the afternoons, I just walked all over the city and around the capital. It was a great experience. I mean, I guess a secret, if I was addressing this to students, I don't know how many students would be paying attention to something like this, but they're just opportunities all over the place. You just have take them. You've got to have the guts to say, "I'd love to do that." And it was kind of scary. There I was, you know, the 18-year-old kid from Ogden and walking around Washington, and I guess I got to be pretty familiar because people all the time were stopping me, asking me for directions. I kind of got the attention of the locals somehow when I 16 was a kid there, that was a great experience. And I'd recommend that anybody. Get out of town, get back, see the world. I got to know that city really well. And then my missionary experience, I was in Boston and New York City, so I got to spend a lot of time in all three of those big eastern cities. For most of us out here, it's eye opening. And I was in the military and I didn't have to go to Vietnam. My kid brother was there, but I just didn't get shipped over there. So I spent my time stateside. But that was interesting as well. Those were the days when we had the draft, so you went whether you wanted to or not. I look back on how I grew up in a proletarian household. And I really have to give up an awful lot of credit for working on my brain, making me fascinated with the world and then events occurred. It just kept me going that way. And I was very fortunate. I mentioned earlier that I had started some projects when I worked in Salt Lake. That turned into books. And I kept going and I wound up publishing my great books for major university presses, it did very well that way it was a lot of hard work. Back to our image. I've had people say to me, "well, I'm going to Utah State where they have real professors." I published more books than all of the faculty at Utah State combined. Just one guy, you know. We get a bad rap that way, too, because it's a teaching school. Well, it is, but we also require our faculty to be scholars. So I know I look back on it and it sounds frightened and cliché, but you get off your ass, If I may be crude. Too many people just there on the ride. Right? These days, screen time, we can gripe about what causes it, but people are just on a ride instead of driving the bus. Weber got me kicked in the 17 butt and got me rolling and just kept on going. And good luck, you know, nothing beats good luck. I mentioned earlier friendships. They're just some great people here. I'm not by nature an outgoing person. If you ask people who went to high school with me they didn't know the kid was there. But the job required me to get out of that. So I made a lot of friends, a lot of very good friends, I've had to bury a couple of them recently. But people who you could call on the phone, you know, 10:00 at night, say, "Hey, my car broke down, I'm in Brigham City, can you come and get me?" A half hour later, there they are. "I need you to help me move." Here they come. I Still do stuff like that with a couple of my friends. People I met here who are just great people. Some of them, like Ann Millner became friends with her because of Richard Mulbury, who was her mentor and in continuing education. Richard just passed away. And Ann was kind of his protege, in fact, became like a daughter to him and Rose. She's still taking care of Rose, and their house on the hill. Just good people and I was lucky. At the same time, I actively sought friendships with colleagues that went beyond just coming to work and seeing them in the halls and things like that. Relationships have been a really important part of Weber for me and my friends…getting a little bit weepy here. MK: I just have a couple of questions on some dates, when did you finish at Weber as a student? GS: Okay, here's a story I don't like to admit. I mean, I just recently got my first degree at Weber. They gave me an honorary degree and that's my first Weber 18 State degree. When I got back from back east, my uncle was at Utah State and got me a nice scholarship at Utah State. So that's where I got my degree. And it turned out okay because when I went to go to grad school, I think. Frankly, I had a hard time with work because the department was so small. So I don't regret that, but I don't want to admit it often. I just got my first degree from Weber State when they gave me the honorary degree in the spring. I admitted that up on the stand it was my first Weber State degree. But yeah, USU was okay. I just think if I'm a kid now and I'm looking at the two schools, and I know USU pretty well now too. I'd go to Weber. I mean, I could have then just fine, but I talk to kids all the time. "I'm going to Utah State." "Well, why?" "I want to get out of the house." Look at the cost and what you're getting in Logan compared to what you get here. We can argue we're better, but even if we can't argue that, why spend all that extra money to go move to Logan for crying out loud when you can stay here? So, yeah, you caught me. I often skip over that part of my resume because I could have stayed here easily but I had that nice scholarship and that took me up there and I had a good time there. It was fine, but I couldn't sit in front of a camera in Logan and say the nice things about USU that I can say about Weber. I think Weber is different. One of my friends Bruce Henley who just passed away a couple of years ago, in the Business Administration people ask him, "What is it about Weber?" And he said, "Weber has a heart." It's kind of a trite saying, but maybe it explains a lot. it does, it has a heart. I hope we never lose that. I see signs that we are, and I hate to 19 see that. [To Lorrie] I mean, I see you. Right? I've known you for how many years you’ve been here for? LR: I've been working here for seven years. GS: Yeah, but I've known you a lot longer than that. And I just know a lot of people. I walk around campus it's like, "Hey!" And that's the hard part you know, we know each other, we're different, but we know each other and we have affection for one another. [To Marina] I've known you for probably just... when did you come? MK: I was in your class, I think, 2017. GS: A little more recent. When you sent me that email, I thought, "I know Marina." MK: Oh that's good. I was wondering if you remembered me. GS: I remembered you. It's because you've been here. I knew you were here and stuff. MK: You said you were working with the athletics department as a faculty member. Did you do anything with the faculty or with the athletics as a student? GS: No, like I said, I was not an athlete. I was clumsy. Every kid in our culture wants to be… I mean every guy wants to, I guess, more and more women. But when I grew up, every kid wanted to be the athlete because that's the cool guys. I’d do track, I was a freshman here, it wasn't much, and I was on the track team, but I never accomplished anything because track is that one thing that even clumsy guys can do if you don't fall down running around the track. But no, I had nothing to do with athletics. But when I got here I got involved because of my students. Here were, you know, five young women sitting on second row and they're African- 20 Americans and they're all wearing the same basketball team. So, I started going to basketball games because they're my students. There were maybe 30 other people in the stands, all their parents, but I got to know the coaches and I just kind of got to see the soccer team and mostly women's athletics because I was trying to support the female athletes. That's kind of how I got involved because of my students. And then pretty soon the athletic director would call me up and say, "Could you come and help us with this?" I just helped him with the softball tournament. They give me a shirt, maybe it was even this one, I don't know. But that's been my involvement, mostly been on the students side. Because I felt that I needed to support my students, particularly the females, because they get so little support. Hardly anybody shows up for their stuff and we've had some great women's athletic successes here recently. Volleyball won the conference championship, softball won the conference championship. Basketball wasn't so hot last year, but great opportunities for young women in athletics at Weber. I kind of got into it that way, my very best friend now is Craig Oberg in the microbiology department. Craig and I've been friends for forty-five years. Craig's the faculty athletic representative, and so we do a lot together that way. We recently taught a class called the Effects of Disease on History. Which became the most popular gen ed course on campus, we packed it with 150, then the pandemic hit and we had to cut it way back. But that's been a very successful course. That's another thing about Weber that I've really enjoyed, is there's just opportunity to do about what you want. Any faculty member who wants to step 21 out and do extraordinary things, he's got the freedom to do it. I'm not sure that's the case at all institutions. So, Craig and I became very close and his involvement with athletics and he brought me in as well. I don't know what the athletic director wants from me on Thursday, but he's going to pay for lunch. Even retirement didn't get me away from it. But that hasn't been until maybe the last twenty years, a big part of my out of class energy. I did spend a lot of time with the Faculty Senate, probably 20 years on the Faculty Senate. Three terms as chair and three terms as vice chair and I sat on the executive committee. Some kind of political stuff, which has not been too much fun, frankly. Not big on politics, but I just kind of got drawn in. People are saying, "Would you do this?" One of my biggest troubles in my life has been the inability to form up the word, 'no'. They’d ask, "Would you do that?" and I always ends up coming out, "Okay." So what else we got, Marina? MK: Are there any other committees and organizations you've been a member of that you want to discuss? GS: Let me think about that. We need to fix gen-ed, and I sat on that committee, and worked hard on some reforms there because I think our current general education system is antiquated. It's like a cafeteria where you take this intro class and this little intro class. In the end, what general education do you really get? You learn how to do basic microbiology or basic psychology. We need some reform there. I've worked hard there. And I've sat on a myriad of committees I can't remember all the committees I've sat on. Some of them like regular Faculty 22 Senate committees, along with some ad hoc put together for this purpose or that. Oh we haven't mentioned the online stuff. That's kind of interesting perhaps. I taught the very first online course at Weber State because of my involvement with President Millner. She was then vice president of development and I don't know what the other name of her job was. But they were putting together this online education notion. So, at the time I was the director of the Davis campus, I did that for two and a half years…and I've forgotten that too. She came to me and said, "Would you put together an online course?" So I put my History 1700 out there as an online course and that was the very first. They won't let me stop. I'm doing two sections of that again in the fall, even though I'm supposed to be on retirement…but yeah…. we didn't mention online. That's been a big part of the change too, and I was a big part of that. In fact, unfortunately, this is sad. We started some national organizations at Weber State and Penn State as the leading universities in America with online education. We are not anymore. We've let BYU and Utah State get way ahead of us online. I don't know why we've done that, but somehow along the way the bureaucracy that set up our online system didn't allow it to get the kind of growth and outreach that it should have had. But I still get students from all over the world. In fact, I've got a couple of students this semester, this summer. I don't know where they are, but they tell me, "I'm 400 miles from campus. Do I have to come to campus to take my tests?" I don't know where they are. But we have Proctorio and other ways that they can take tests now. But somehow, we let online education get away from us. Although it's still been a big change at Weber. 23 We could have continued to be the leaders in that field, but somehow it slipped away. We do well with online, but not as well as we could. I think I already covered how the history department has changed when I came. About everybody was local except for one or two, and there was no diversity there. Now a couple of them are local people like me. Eric Swedin is from South Weber, Steve Francis from South Ogden. But all the rest of them from somewhere else, and that's gradually becoming the case in most departments. One of the things that I think, if I may be critical of our department and many others is we're kind of locked in, they talk about silos and we're not thinking big enough. Like in our department, we had someone retire who taught Russian history. So we need to hire somebody who teaches Russian history. Well, nobody stopped and thought, "Why do we need somebody to teach Russian history?" I mean, we need a Russian history class, but we want to hire somebody who that is their expertise. Maybe we need somebody who can do more. There’s only thirteen of us. So, we continue to have these specialties. And I think that ought to change, it has changed somewhat. I've won all kinds of awards, if I may brag. There's something here about certifications and so on. I don't know if there's an award at Weber that I haven't gotten. I feel embarrassed to be so braggadocio about that, but I've just been awarded and awarded. I'm so grateful for those recognitions like the Dixon Award and the distinguished presidential professor and the Hinckley Fellowship, I got the first Hinckley Fellowship. The honorary degree I just got in the spring. I was 24 dumbfounded by that. I guess I could argue I deserve them. But it's been kind of exciting to be awarded so much by students. I won the Crystal Crest Award. What career options did I consider once I had my degree? This is all I ever wanted to do. Just my dream came true to come here and be what I've been. I look back and I feel so fortunate because it was so hard to break in. I literally had to come here for six years and beg for another year. I had three full time contracts here. Three years, it was just putting stuff together. I had two paper routes and sold nightcrawlers in the summer to pay my mortgage so I could keep teaching at Weber. So I clung to this dream “maybe someday,” and then I finally got on the faculty full time. So I didn't consider anything else. I didn't want to do anything else. It was okay being a research historian when I worked in Salt Lake, but I didn't want to do that the rest of my life. I didn't want to sit around shuffling papers for the rest of time. Dealing with students has been really great. Despite my protestations, the opposite about being shy, put me in front of 150 people and I'm on fire. Put me in a room with two or three and I'm a little less on fire. Which means I'm a ham. What else, Marina? MK: Going back to the online courses. I'm interested to know how the department and the courses changed because of the pandemic? GS: Yeah, that's a good question. The pandemic as you know, caused everybody to think about “how do we deliver materials in other ways?” And for me, it was a snap. I had my online courses already there. I just walked into my face to face class one day and said, “we're going online because they're closing the university down. Tomorrow is a Thursday.” As you all remember. And they all looked at me 25 funny and I said, "Here's how you log in." And I just went in and changed everything over from face to face instruction to an online course it was a snap. I think for many faculty, that was a very difficult step to take because a lot of faculty really have resisted online delivery and they resisted virtual delivery for good reasons. I've got colleagues I really respect who just said, "Look, I don't want anything to do with it." For years they said that but the pandemic forced us all to do it. And I think, frankly, a lot of what happened at that point was not effective. I think a lot of faculty took a yearlong vacation and did very little. For me, it was a lot of work because the way I teach online courses were a lot of work. I agree a lot of writing. I try to keep in touch with students. So I had a lot of students and there was a lot of work. I sat up a lot of nights doing my work and I didn't get a vacation during the pandemic. But that's a great question. I think it woke everyone up to the notion that we've got to do it and not only for exigencies like the pandemic, but there are just some students that, that's how they learn best or that's the only way they can learn. I've told stories for years about turning off my computer in the afternoon. And here's some woman who submitted her work in the middle of the night at 3:00 in the morning, "I just got off, and I'm sorry. I just put my kid to bed." Really moving kinds of stories like that, and I don't think they were jerking my chain. These were people who really needed another way to get a college education besides sitting in a class half asleep. Instead, they sit at home half asleep. I'm a believer in it. I do believe, though, that I was a better face to face instructor. If I had a choice between a section of History 1700 with 150 students 26 and there's a section of online with 50 students. Online is less work. It really is because you don't have to show up. I'd take the face-to-face any day because I think they are better and more effective. But that's just me. There are a lot of faculty who really loved online once it got going and don't want to come back. They're mandating 75 percent face to face in the fall. But a lot of factors like, "Well, I'd like to be in that 25 percent who don't have to come to campus." I've got mixed feelings about those people because I do think we're face-to-face. But I am believer in online. Pioneered in it, we used to have our own homegrown online system that was really good and we bought a commercial one. It wasn't so good. Bought another commercial one and now we've got this Canvas, which is okay. So we're covering the pandemic question, right? MK: If you still have stuff on it. GS: Nah. GS: I'm just glad it's getting over with. MK: What year did you teach the first online course? GS: That would have been about 1990. We were still in the quarters, so it must have been before that because we went to semesters. That would be about 1990. MK: [To Lorrie] Do you have any questions? LR: I don't know, maybe at the end I'll have a couple, but I don't have any at the moment. GS: Wow, hard to believe that was 30 years ago. Oh, you want to know what topics I've written about? MK: Yes. 27 GS: Yeah, my PhD was in U.S. diplomatic history and so I wrote one book on that subject, which was published by the University of Illinois. Perhaps maybe the best book I've ever done. I don’t think very many people have read it, but it was a good one. But when I got here, I had to kind of find my niche. And I had never been interested in Utah history. Even though I grew up here, it just didn't ring my bells and Western history. But when I got here, I was working in Salt Lake I realized, there was such a rich abundance of materials and so much. So the rest of my books have all been Utah stuff. And it turns out that about the time I was coming here and becoming involved in publishing professionally, that some of the big presses, like the University of Illinois and Oxford University Press, Kansas, Oklahoma, and others, were becoming very interested in publishing the Utah stuff because it sells. A guy from the University of Illinois, the editor at the university press, in fact, told me one time, “Utah history carries our whole history publishing program.” I said, "You're in Illinois. What's the deal?" He says, "Well, people read it." You publish something on the history of Illinois and it goes to the library and gets lost in the somewhere, Utah gets read. There's a lot of interest, a lot of curiosity. So I wound up drifting into Utah history entirely eventually. And taught a lot of it. I taught a lot of Utah History and Western History. And that's kind of where if you read my obituary, they'll say, "Well, he was a Utah historian." I kind of came in the back door for that as well. Never took a Utah history class myself, but I wound up teaching it. 28 It was like women's history. Here I am a guy and I'm teaching women's history. We didn't have a female faculty member at the time. But it was a hot topic, it was the days of the ERA and somebody needed to do it. So I stepped up and did it. And I'd have some students walk in and see that I was a male and walk back out. My argument always was, "Look, I don't know what it's like to be a woman, so I'm unable to help you with that because I'm not female." But I think there are things you learn from me because I'm not a woman. My perspectives on women's history might be worthwhile anyway. Used to have big classes, big, big history sections, one time had 99 students, it was an upper division class. And that's unheard of at Weber to have that many students in an upper division class, very popular class. Then Kathryn MacKay took it over. She's done well with it. I think Susan Matt teaches it too. I'm not sure. But my writing, I never did do any writing about women's history or Africa, which I picked up. But Utah and the west was the topics I drifted to. And one kind of led to another. For example, Moorman had been working on a manuscript on the Utah war back in the 1850s. When he died and his widow came to me and said, "Would you finish it for him?" So I did that, and it took a couple of years, and the University of Utah published that. There are just things like that that came along that kept me doing Utah history. I did one corporate history, I did the Utah Construction Company, which is where all the money comes from, all the Stewart money, and the Wattis money. That was kind of an Ann Millner project to get more money out of them. LR: So when you were writing the UCC [Utah Construction Company] book... 29 Honestly, I don't know what the question is other than.... GS: I'll answer. We don't know what the question is but I'll answer anyway. Sterling Sessions, no relation, was the dean of business. And being the dean of business, he's looking for money. Long story short, he talked the Wattis family, who were the founders of the UCC in 1900, into giving him a half a million dollars to help build a new business building. And while he was negotiating with them for that, they said, "Look, we'd like to have a corporate history done." So long story made very short, he started doing it, got halfway through the first chapter and thought, "Hey, I'm a business dean, I'm not a historian..." So he came to me and I met him a couple of times- we had the same last name, no relation. But he came to me and said, "Would you help me finish this?" So I picked it up and wrote the rest of it, although both our names appear on it, which is fine because he was actively involved in the whole production, but it was largely an effort on our part to continue to brownnose the Wattis family, and the Littlefield’s, and all those people. And because part of that brownnosing came the UCC collections. And that's why you guys have those collections. I just got an e-mail, by the way, from a woman in Toronto, maybe you’ve been hearing from her. She’s interested in how the UCC treated minorities? LR: Yeah, she spent a week here. GS: I sensed that when she emailed me. You know, picking my brain about things. I want to know if I had anything in files and I don't know, I didn't keep it as far as it goes, you guys have everything. And I told her everything I ever had was at Special Collections. 30 So anyway, I'm not surprised that she's been here. I should have sensed that. But she wrote me a big long email with all these questions about how they treated Hispanics. We didn't look at much of that because we were trying to write a book that makes everybody happy at the corporation. I mean, we had Littlefield, the old man had to approve every chapter, every chapter. I'm helping another guy write a corporate history of the WW Clyde Company, which is a big construction company in Utah. Maybe you've seen them on road construction signs. In fact, I got a meeting down there next week in Salt Lake to make this. When you write a corporate history that is sponsored by the corporation. You're a prostitute. You know, you really are. I hate to use that pejorative term and misogynist term. But everything we did had to make him happy. If I had to write it again, I told this researcher from Toronto, I said, "Look, we were not in the business of criticizing the company, and it certainly needed criticism, but we couldn't do it." So I hope and I congratulate you and hope you find stuff to help you. I praised you guys in Special Collections. You did an amazing job with that collection. I didn't know you had somebody working on it. LR: Yeah. GS: Wow. LR: There's 1,200 boxes when it came. GS: Yeah, I bragged you up big time. Let me mention a failure though. Littlefield's son who died of cancer about 10 years ago had taken all his money and had purchased heavy military equipment. He had tiger tanks from World War II. He had like five hundred tanks and halftracks and stuff. Russian tanks, all this going 31 way back and all of it and running condition except one vehicle he was still working on. He had it on this big estate on a peninsula. He has more money than God right? I mean so much money. When he got cancer, I went down there with President Millner and to visit with him and I said, "How about moving that to Ogden?" you know, "We could put it here and we have to get the Ogden people on board, but we could have that at the train station and all that." And he seemed interested, but I don't know what happened to it when he died. But I mean it was amazing, you go down there, it was just stunning to see this stuff. And he would allow movie companies to borrow this equipment to make movies with. So if you go to a World War II movie and you see a German tank, it probably belong to this guy, just found a tiger tank in the bottom of a river in Poland because it was down the bottom of this cold river. It was perfectly preserved and they pulled that up and they had been working on it there on his estate. But I don't know what happened to all this stuff. We did get all the papers, we did get a lot more money out of him though. They tightened up after we had a couple of guys. We had some conferences here, that buttered him up and published the book. Now, all we've got is their papers. Today, you can't name a building for five hundred thousand dollars, it takes five million. They got their name on the Wattis building for half a million. We don't see much more of their money. Spence Eccles (the big First Secruity guy) once said 75 percent of the First Security wealth is from Utah Construction. And yet it's not in Ogden, it's in Salt Lake. We've got some, thanks to Mrs. Stewart, but not enough. And she had so much of that money. We're getting some from it. 32 We got that a little bit from Eccles, but they all bailed out of Ogden and went to Salt Lake with their big pocketbooks. So that was an interesting experience dealing with UCC. Cursed you with it. Let me say one other thing that's interesting, I mean, that along those lines, it's history...maybe of minor interest. But I've talked a little bit about this guy, Don Moorman. He got his PhD in New Mexico and they hired him at Weber, one of the first out-of-state PhD's to come here. He got interested in Camp Floyd, which is the fourth army build outpost west of Utah Lake, and he worked on that for years and years. And I finished the book about it for him. But he was interested in forts in the West and forts all over the west. You guys have Moorman's collection. For years and years, the Mormons had all their papers on Brigham Young all locked up. So scholars came here, and this was probably before your time. They came from all over to look in the Don Moorman papers so they could do research on Brigham Young because he had copied thousands of Brigham Young documents. Neil Bringhurst wrote for his biography for Brown on Brigham Young from the Weber State archives. Pick up his book in the very first pages that Weber State is the place to go to study Brigham Young. Since then, they've opened up down yonder. And you can get in at the church archives. But, that's another example of how papers become interesting, that was my train of thought. What else, Marina? What are we missing here? MK: I am interested in the development of the Lola Session's scholarship. GS: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that. I mentioned earlier, my mother grew up during the Depression on a dirty farm out in the Uintah basin in the middle of an 33 Indian reservation, she had four brothers. When her dad was dividing up the property out there. Which was some chunk of land, I know that because they kept the mineral rights and all my uncles are rich because of oil. But anyway, he said to her, "I'm giving all this to my sons because you'll have a husband." It's kind of painful for a woman to hear that. But anyway, that was the attitude at the time. So she fled the farm like many women were fleeing the farm at that time during the Depression and came to Ogden to work. She worked as a pink collar, ghetto stenographer, things like that, and she was brilliant. I knew my mother was smart when I was growing up. I just knew she was so smart. I won't bore you with detail on that, but I knew she was really smart. After I came back here, she got here and she became a member of the Weber Historical Society, she came to all of our meetings, would ask me all these very interesting questions about my books, would have questions about it, stuff like that. So when she died in 1997, she died at 97, we decided to put a scholarship together for a history major. So we, my wife and I, put that together and we are now in the process of endowing it. So if I kick off, it'll continue because it's been a year to year donation. And we've done three out of five hefty payments to make it an endowment. When I'm gone we’ll still be able to award a Lola Session's scholarship and it's to honor my mother. But it's is to bring up the issue that all these women who are just as smart or smarter than the men were being shoved off into second class citizenship because of their gender. And I think back at what my mother could have 34 accomplished. It really ticks me off. So that's the purpose of that, and why we put that together. So yeah, it is to honor her but it is also to make it possible for some female to go to college. We've had some amazing stories come out of that. The woman who has it right now is an immigrant from Ukraine, and she's told me with just tears running down her face, "I could not continue without it." That's been a great, great thing to do. And frankly, I wish more of our colleagues had it. I was talking about it in the department meeting one day, and one of my colleagues whom I really like him, and I won't mention his name because I really respect and admire him. This guy said, "Well, when they pay me what I'm worth, I'll think about a scholarship." And I didn't say this time, but my mind immediately went on, "Well, that's not the issue here they don’t pay me what I'm worth either. But I mean, when you give money to somebody. It's for them, it's not for you." And again, I really respect and admire this guy but you're missing the boat on that. I'm glad you brought that up. I felt badly about the little blurb they had on the graduation program from the honorary degree, they didn't mention any of this stuff. And it ticked me off. They sent me a draft of it and I said to the president, "This makes me look like the head cheerleader or something at Weber." But what I'd like is to have the scholarship and some of the other things that we've done that are important in here. And I was told, "Oh, yeah, just write it up and we'll put it in there." And then when the program came out, it was the original. You know, like I invented the term “bleeds purple”, which I did not. I did not invent that. I don't know who did, but I didn't do it, and that was in there. 35 LR: You know, if I could just say as a recipient of that scholarship. I can't talk about it, [crying]. GS: I apologize, but I had forgotten that you were on that list. LR: I am one of those. GS: Well we will both water up LR: That was my first scholarship that I've ever received in my life. I was 38 years old GS: Well, you're like this girl from Ukraine. She's like 40 and just trying to raise kids. GS: That's 24 years now. LR: That you've been doing this scholarship? GS: It started in 1997. LR: I received it in 2012. MK: That's also pretty cool because it means it has helped so many people. GS: You know, I've done a lot of this. I didn't mention that. I've done a lot of oral history, had three different people have me help them write their autobiographies. So I do these big, long oral histories with them. And I know what a chore it is. I know Dr. MacKay got to do this. She's so, so good at it in ways I never could be. I remember this one old guy wants me to help them write his autobiography, which I finally did with the help of his daughter. She finally published it just recently, but he couldn't keep track. And when you guys called, I thought, "I'll do the same thing. Now I'm an old fart. I'm going to go out there and wander off." That's kind of what I've done here. I apologize. MK: You've answered like most of the questions. 36 GS: I tried to stay on track. But, when you're old…you guys will figure this out when you're old. There are so many tracks in your life. You look back and there are so many forks. You can take any fork and find stuff that's interesting to you. What have we missed? MK: In regards to the Lola Session's Scholarship Program how have you mentored others in your field? GS: Oh, yeah, honestly, I'm not trying to be falsely humble here, I don't think I've done a great job of that. I always answer inquiries like the one from this woman from Toronto. I always try and I'm going down to help these guys with this WW Clyde corporate history. So I have not been derelict in trying, but I think I've done a great job with that, probably just because a lot of my successors, to me, are frankly mysterious. I can't figure out just dumb luck if that happened to me. Like I signed two book contracts on the same day. I don't think there is another professional historian in the world that signed two book contracts on the very same day. They just happened to come the same day. I was working on two books at once, and here came the contracts. And I signed them, one from the University of Utah and one from the University of Illinois Press. And I just had projects that just kept mushrooming and growing. One of my colleagues, when I was department chair, walked in my office and shut the door and said, "Tell me how you do it. I want to be mentored." I talked to him for ten minutes and I don't think I taught him a thing. So I think I've been fairly unsuccessful at that. Maybe not, but it seems to me. 37 LR: I was interviewing with Sarah Langsdon who we were interviewing Kate Kendall. I don't know if you remember her. GS: Oh I remember Kate very well. LR: She remembers you and talked about you a lot in her interview and the words of wisdom that you gave her and wanting her to stay here. She chose to go to San Francisco. GS: I just love Kate. Yeah, she made such a big splash. LR: Even though she didn't stay here, she still remembers you and the words that you shared with her. We had so much fun. I mean, you know, she was a lesbian and all. And it was just so much fun to pick her brain and where she was coming from. I got to know a lot of her friends, and one woman she was... I think really committed to for a while. Anyway, got to be good friends with her. Yeah, Kate was wonderful. You think about individuals, like, I had to get outside of myself to get to know her and who she was and what she was up to and how she thought. And I just loved her to pieces. I felt that I lost track of her. In fact, one time I was in San Francisco and she was director of national something for lesbians. And I tried to reach out to her, I spent five minutes on the phone and couldn't get through to her. But I haven't seen Kate in forever. I hope she's doing well. LR: She is. She finally retired. GS: Wow. LR: Well, at least she retired from that organization. She was there for 20 years. GS: I just love her to pieces. We got to be such close friends. 38 LR: Anyway, I just thought, I'd share that. GS: I'm glad you did. Well, you know, and I said when I started the answer, Marina. That I thought it sounded falsely humble, but I really don't think I've done as well there as I might have. If I'd been thinking more in the, "I need to be a better mentor. I mean, that's my major press." And it never was, but I think it happened, incidentally. It was people like Kate and maybe many others that I made contact with their brains and vice versa. The thing about Kate for example, not to pick on her, but since you brought her up. But the thing about her was that I was learning as much from her as she ever learned from me. And that's why I was so fascinated to be her friend. It was just so amazing to talk to her about the way she saw the world and her experiences. And then the other thing about Kate is what a sense of humor. I mean, everything was funny. I mean everything. And so she was serious, but she didn't take herself too seriously. And the movement was important to her, but it was still lots of fun and laughs and, you know, people doing stupid things and saying stupid things. And so, it was just so much fun to be with Kate. She was a great, great friend, I think she was going by Catherine then. And she became Kate kind of later. What an amazing person. So I don't know, maybe I did a better job there than I give myself credit for. I was thinking more in terms of the asked question of colleagues than students. I've had a lot of students tell me about... they're high school teachers. "I'm still teaching your teaching methods." But that's kind of incidental. I've never tried to tell students to be like me. I'm not sure I want them to be like me. I might have 39 done better there than I think I did, but I'm not going to brag about it. Although, you made an example of somebody. MK: Going on with students. What advice would you give to students starting in your field? GS: Well, it's tough right now. When I got out of graduate school in 1974, there were no jobs for history faculty. There were a few people finding jobs, and it hasn't changed, so students come to me now and say, "I'd like to be you". You know, "I want to do what you're doing." It's so hard. Graduate schools have not been responsible. They've got all these faculty, you've got all this money for graduate students, they just keep bringing them and bringing them and bringing them cranking out PhD's. And it's not true in all fields that you're going to encounter jobs. Weber, for example, in business school, they might offer a position. We have three positions, but we'll put one position out, we get 90 to 100 applicants. I've sat on all the service committees forever. I think this last year, because they were replacing names the first year, I was not on the search committee. We travel all over the country. We've interviewed hundreds of people. And you sit in these rooms interviewing these people who are just amazing. Got lists of things, they've done it. I never could've been hired now. It's why I say luck had a lot to do with what happened to me. So what I tell students now is, "Look, if you really, really love history and you really think that you could be a happy, productive member of a history faculty on a university or college somewhere, then go for it. Follow your dream. But you need to be aware going in, you might wind up driving a cab." It's 40 just so hard right now. You know, history is so big and there's so many fields and there are some they're more crowded than others and the ones that are the most crowded are obviously the ones that are the most popular. "I want to be a 20th century historian." Well you at about 8000 other people right now. So I'm discouraging when I talk with students, but I always wind up by saying, "Follow your dreams. It's what you want, go for it. And that's what I did. And I was looking at a career working construction." You know, my buddy had a construction company and I poured cement for him for a while. I sold Night Crawlers and did a paper route and went to work in the archives down Salt Lake. I didn't like that very much. Not doing what you guys do. I might have liked that, but I was a gun for hire historian down there and like that. So I'm cautious when I talk to students about my field. MK: You do have a lot of students that are going into like high school, and junior high teaching. Do you have different advice for them or is about the same? GS: Yeah, although I think, we hear about the teacher shortage, it's not in history or English. It's math, it's elementary, special-ed, things like that. We do send a lot of students out. I've got two friends, right now that I think are very, very well qualified to be a secondary history teachers who can't find a job. I've been trying to help this one guy for five years and he's interviewed all over. Can't leave the area because of family considerations, but he's interviewed all over the place and can't land a job. And it's shocking to me that that's the case. But it is. So I'm certainly cautious with secondary. Our field is too crowded. And history is fun, it's stories. Who doesn't like stories? We get in high school, we get 41 these boring wrestling coaches and stuff, teaching history. But if you know the stories, you can't go wrong. I mean, it's like people say, "How come you're a good teacher?" These are stories, they are just fun. How can you lose? You know? So I just tell them, if you love it follow your dream, but you better be sure you're prepared for the rough road because it's tough out there. We do have successes. I did mention earlier that many of our students wind up in law school many of them wind up in other graduate programs and pursuits. And a history degree is always good for a lot of other things besides teaching. The old joke used to be history teachers teach other people to teach history, but we do teach people to do more than that. So I'm just cautious, that's the word, when I counsel students. On top of the second page, there's an interesting question, "What recognition have you received for your accomplishments?" That's an interesting question because we all like everybody, "You're so great, You're so neat." I do something I thought was really neat and occasionally it would just sort of slide by and nobody'd even pay attention. But I got to tell you a great story. This is oral history. So I published my first major book at a major University Press--University of Illinois Press. It came out in 1982 and I got my first copy. And it’s just...like having a baby. You know, here is this big, thick book, I wrote this book, and so I didn't want to brag about it in the department, but I mean, I kind of let everybody know that I got the book and here it is, you know? I'm sitting in my office and one of my colleagues walks in and he shuts the door and he says, "We need to have a talk." I said, "Okay." He sat down and he said, 42 "Young man, you're making the rest of us look bad. Watch yourself." Got up and walked out. So it's an interesting question, you know, everybody likes to be. "Yeah, you are great!" you know, sometimes... isn't that a great story? True story. I'll never forget it. "Young man. You're making the rest of us look bad. You better watch yourself now." He's now dead, so we won't say evil things about him. MK: What did a typical semester look like for you? GS: I love to teach big classes, as I've mentioned already. So I’d get the biggest classroom I could get. They finally moved me into the business building in that great big classroom there. And when they built the new building, I got the big classroom down there. So my typical day would be start off with a couple of great big classes and get everybody laughing and talking, you know, entertained. And then I do an upper division or two, one at night. I liked to teach at night because I thought we owed our night students. And then the afternoon for many, many years, as always, meetings, politics and campus B.S. That was my typical day. I enjoyed it. I mean, there were a lot of things I enjoyed, but I never got up in the morning and said, "Oh, crap, I got to go to work." Which is something to brag about my age, right? Challenges of obtaining my degrees? I was so lucky there. I had scholarships and fellowships all the way through, which I know for a lot of people is really tough and I was never challenged that way, luckily. When I was in the Army, I saved a lot of money. All my extra duty pay I got, I saved. I was able to get my dissertation written very quickly, with the money I saved and I didn't have 43 trouble with money. Exams were not hard for me. The writing was easy for me; the answer to that question is I was just so lucky. MK: Any resistance or battles you faced during your career? GS: Yeah, my colleagues at Weber. There were a few that didn't like me very much. I probably earned a lot of their dislike, but a lot of it came because of the story I just told you about jealousy. My spouse always told me, "It's just jealousy,” and she's not right about that. There are other factors involved. But yeah, there were people who maybe they had good reason, took a dislike to me, and when I was younger, I was brash and say a lot of dumb things and got in some clashes with people who were, in retrospect, stupid. Shouldn't have done that. But those were challenging the opposition from some people and taking positions that often were controversial. One time I got President Thompson so mad at me, his blood vessels were just poking out all over his face and turning red. If he'd had a gun, he would have shot me dead because I called him out on something and I won't get into the issue. But I was right and he was wrong. Those things happen. I'm not the most likable person. I wish I were. I like to be liked, but I know I do things to tick people off a lot. And I look back on times when I made people mad and they were stupid. Let me tell you one story, though. I got into a beef with a person in the Faculty Senate. He was so mad at me and when he would see me come in, he’d turn around and walk the other way. One day I saw him coming and he started to turn the other way and I said, "Hey!" Called his name and said, "Stop, stop." He turned around and it was like a 44 gunfight at the old corral. And we start walking toward each other and I put my hand on him and said, "We don't have to agree. We don't even have to like each other. But let's just be cordial." Shook hands, and we've been friends ever since. We go to lunch. I still don't like him. He doesn't like me, we disagree, but I'm glad I was able to do that. There are a couple of other people on campus who I ticked them off and there's no making up with them. I can name two people right now. It breaks my heart because I don't like that. I like to be liked. I like to think that I'm somebody I can get along with anybody. But there are two people right now I can name their names. They'll be dancing on my grave. There's one person, in the administration I know when I announced I was retiring, they danced. But he had a coming. Anyway, that's been tough, you know, any time you work in organization, you guys know this. So why do you keep everybody happy with you? You say something and somebody takes offense or you take a position that people agree with in opposition to your position. And personal feelings get involved and down the tubes it goes. Yeah, I feel bad about that. I was here for 46 years and there are too many of those memories. There something here about student organizations, I didn't get involved in a lot of student organizations, I did agree every time I was asked to be an adviser. But most of those organizations didn't ever go anywhere like... this is a funny one. A couple of students came to me one day and said, "We're starting a sail boarding club, would you be our adviser?" I said, "Yeah, sure." I think it 45 lasted about two weeks. But I went down as the adviser for the sail boarding club. LR: So you talked a lot about the image problem at Weber. How would you change the image problem if you had the opportunity? GS: Well, one thing...I'm not a marketing person. I really know little about it. But I think our marketing is pathetic. And I may use a word that is going to make somebody mad if they ever see this. But other schools I look at, other schools in the state like Southern Utah has Cedar City paying for all their marketing because it's all Cedar City's got. And people don't know this, but all the bus ads you see for Southern Utah University are paid for by the city of Cedar City. They pay for all that, and it's effective. They get students to go live in Cedar City, for heaven's sakes. And I don't think we do a good job. I mean, I've got lots of anecdotal evidence of that family members, friends who thought about coming here and were just so turned off by how we market the place. So I think number one, our marketing people need some kind of reformation. I don't know who to blame or what best practice is to point to. But that's one thing. The second thing is harder, and that's us, the three of us and people like the three of us. We've got to change how we think about Weber. President Mortensen's got this model, "Louder and Prouder." And what it really means is we've got to start, all of us, saying, "You're going to UVU? What are you doing that for?" And be serious with these people. If they say, "Well, I want to go down party and be close to BYU" and all that, then we lose. But if they got some other stupid reason, like, "Well, they're better school." then we say, "No, they're not." 46 Ready to put it on the table and say we're better than they are. We should tell you why they just built a 1000 seat classroom for History 1700 at UVU. And they take History 1700 in a thousand seat classroom that's what you get at UVU. You know, if that's what you want, you want to go down there with 45,000 of their kids and hang around with all the BYU people on the weekends, then go ahead. But don't give me this crap that they're better than we are because they're not. So our marketing needs to improve. And then all of us who are here need to change our attitudes big time. And I've been blunt about that and irritated people. We've got vast numbers of our colleagues, both faculty and staff who their kids don't come here. My kids all went here, all my best friend's kids all went here. And I look at all these people I know Craig Oberg has got five kids and three of them have doctorates, the other two have masters. They're all making more money than he does. They went to “Just Weber” and they're ophthalmologists and college professors. So we've got to start being the marketers. The three of us and people like us. You don't make excuses. Irritates me, so that's, I think, the answer about it. How about the campus? I mean, look, people come back. It's a gorgeous place. If you want to go party, you go somewhere else I guess. We can party here too. Before you throw me out, let me look real quick, because I went through these questions, there were a couple of things I just want to make sure. Talked about the pandemic, I don't know how much you wanted to know about that. I didn't want to list all the committees and anything, that's boring. 47 MK: Okay, did you have any others? GS: No, I appreciate both of you. I'm flattered that you wanted to hear what I had to say. I do think that I had a very successful career and I won't be humble about that and a lot of it was good luck. This might make me water, but I also care about my students. I really do every step of the way. I care about them. Shed a lot of tears with them. Shed tears over something when I heard that. So I think that Weber has a heart and has heart because we care about our students when we stop them, we're helping everybody else. There are too damn many of us on this campus who are just here to get a paycheck. If you're for your paycheck, you're going to be sad because we don't pay very much. Better be here for something besides your paycheck. That's my advice to people. Thank you, guys. MK: You're welcome. Do you have any other fond memories of Weber State they want to share? GS: It's been my whole life really. I mean, I was gone from here from Ogden for 10 years, from 1965-1975, those 10 years and the rest of my life spent, we were in Ogden, Weber and in Ogden and I was born two miles from here, I'll be buried two miles from here. And I've been lucky because I love the place with all my heart. That's about it. Thanks, guys. MK: Thank you so much. 48