Oral History Program Walter Buss Interviewed by Richard Sadler 29 July 1981 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Walter Buss Interviewed by Richard Sadler 29 July 1981 Copyright © 1981 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii 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 College Oral History Program was created in the early 1970s to “record and document, through personal reminiscences, the history, growth and development of Weber State College.” Through interviews with administrators, faculty and students, the program’s goal was to expand the documentary holdings on Weber State College and its predecessor entities. From 1970 to 1976, the program conducted some fifteen interviews, under the direction of, and generally conducted by Harold C. Bateman, an emeritus professor of history. In 1979, under the direction of archivist John Sillito, the program was reestablished and six interviews were conducted between 1979 and 1983. Additional interviews were conducted by members of the Weber State community. ____________________________________ 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: Buss, Walter, an oral history by Richard Sadler, 29 July 1981 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Walter R. Buss 1905-2000 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Dr. Walter Richard Buss. It was conducted on July 29, 1981 at the Social Science Building of Weber State College and concerns his early life and his Weber State geology trip experiences. The interviewer is Dr. Richard Sadler. RS: This is an interview conducted on July 29th, 1981 in the Social Science Building, Weber Stake College of Doctor Walter Richard Buss by Richard Sadler. Walt let me ask you to tell us a bit about your early life. Your mother and father, when you were born somethings like that WB: I was born in Provo on the first of November 1905. The house still stands where I was born even though mother says it has been turned around in its foundation. My dad was a teacher at Brigham Young High School at the time and later on became a professor at Brigham Young University on the college factory there. Dad was born in New York State in Chautauqua County. Mother was born in Minnesota, but raised in Chautauqua County, raised in West Field. Her mother died when she was about three. Her father died when she was about 12 so she was raised by her grandparents. Even though her father had married and had another wife that lived until about 40 years ago. Something of that sort. Mother had an older sister who died when she was about 20, so mother was the only child of that family who has had children and grandchildren. Dad was the second of six children. He had two sisters one of them who had died young and one other sister who was the youngest of the group and three brothers. I should back 2 track and say that mother had a half-sister and a half-bother also, but they really didn’t ever live together very much. We lived in Provo until I was about two or three years old then moved into a small farm about three miles out of Provo. And most of that farm was in fruit but we had a couple of cows and always chickens and a couple of horses. Driving horses. Dad being a professor of geology always went on summer field trips and we very early learned to camp out because we did not have motels or other things. We learned to pick raspberries and weed the garden and pick cherries and apricots and peaches and apples and make cider and milk cows and haul water out of the frozen-over canal on the sleds, go sleigh riding. We were never very successful with dogs. The dogs we had never got cross. They were either no good or someone shot them. We had two or three dogs that were shot. I have two brothers, I’m the oldest I have two brothers. Younger one lives in San Carlos or Winslow, Arizona. The other one lives in Palo Alto, California. I have two sisters younger than that. One lives in Portola Valley, California and the other one lives in an island in the San Joaquin River out near Antioch. In 1921, dad went to Stanford to do graduate work. He had his bachelors that he had received in BYU in 1913. He went down there for about 6 months and then again in 1923. We went back for him to finish his bachelors, I mean his master’s, work in Stanford and he finished that in 1924. And hopefully he was going to be able to work on a doctorate, but the family took more money and more time then he had anticipated so he went to teaching at San Jose State. Continued to teach there until he passed away in 1943. Mother continued to live 3 in the same house until 1976 when she passed away at almost 96. Dad wasn’t quite 65 when he passed away. Grandmother Buss, dad’s mother, and Grandfather Buss, dad’s father and mother, lived in Lawndale, California and dad’s sister still lives in the house that they built when they moved there along about 1907 or ‘08 something of that sort that they went to California. In the two year period between 1921 and 1923, I met my wife Edna. She was a student of dads and how I came to know her is a rather interesting little thing. The first year she was down there, she is from Ogden, Farr West down here, first year she was down there she got pneumonia and was out of school and had a take an incomplete in dad’s class. Next year she came back to finish it up and something had been said around the dinner table while she was sick about an Edna Taylor and when she came into the labs and finished it up to finish up the work I knew who she was without ever being introduced. In fact, we had been married 10 years before we were properly been introduced. And in 1923, I went to work for an electrical, really commercial radio company in the machine shop in California. Worked there for a year and a half then graduated from Paulo Alto High School 1925. Went down to San Jose State College as it was then 1925 to 28. The years of ‘25 to ’28. The summer of 1927 I had a job. I was able to get a job as a bus driver in the southern Utah area for Utah Parks Company, a subsidiary of Union Pacific and I came back again in 1928 and then decided that I would go to BYU. Edna was down there with her two sisters going to BYU and we were married in November of 1928. We both went on to school, both graduated 4 together with her two sisters and a future brother-in-law all graduated in the same graduation from BYU in 1930. RS: Let me stop you here for just a minute. I want to go back and ask you one question and that is one day you were telling me about a very interesting trip that you took to California with your father. Tell me about that when that was and some of the circumstances involved in that WB: This trip did that Dr. Sadler has referred to was our trip to California in 1921. We were, dad had received the spring water as a sabbatical from BYU. We were going down that his mother and the children were going to stay with grandmother and grandpa Buss in Lawndale and dad was going to go on up to Stanford by himself. We made plans to build a camping trailer much like the little camp pull down trailers that are available today and dad didn’t have time to build the trailer so he bought one from either Mount Grimly Ward or Sears Robuck. He ordered it with pneumatic tires, but when it had arrived it had hard rubber tires about an inch and a half in diameter. We had made arrangements to rent the house and the farm while we were gone. At about two or three weeks before we were to leave my youngest brother Robert came down with the measles. We thought the two girls, who were still younger, might be able to avoid it, but they proceeded to catch it. One of them broke out after we had left the house. We drove past the doctor and the doctor said, “Well if you keep her warm she’ll be alright.” So we drove on down to Nephi, near Nephi and there was an old abandoned school house there. We got inside set up the pot belly stove and put canvas over the windows and set up the tent inside so that Mabel could be kept warm. We stayed 5 there for about 48 hours and then drove on to Fillmore. On the way to Fillmore, the trailer hitch which had been made of a ¾ inch piece of soft iron with a loop on the end of it broke. And we fixed it up with a toe chain tent pole went on to Fillmore. In the meantime my younger sister, who was not quite a year old came down with measles and she was very sick. We couldn’t go into hotels with measles, so the town marshal or the sheriff let us in to a heated room in the old court house in Fillmore and we stayed there for four days. Dad got a new trailer hitch, meantime it snowed about four inches because this was in the middle of March and as we’d go on down towards the highway, the road was high crown for drainage, the trailer would slip into a ditch and pull the car in. We’d get the car pull out on with its chains on and then we’d hook the chain on to the trailer and take it back on the road and go on repeat the process. I think we went from about Fillmore to a little beyond Beaver one day. It may have been a little farther than that I don’t remember. Somewhere in that neighborhood. And then we went on and stopped St. George and the sheriff asked dad where his new license plate were. In those days plates had to be obtained through a dealer. The dealer would make applications and plates were sent. Dad had wanted California plates since we were going to be there for 6 months, but they refused him. By the time the answer came it was too late to get ours so we had so we had our sent to Las Vegas. He did have a letter however saying that he had applied for them and the man knew that they were on their way. As we left St. George, the distributor points in the car stuck. We didn’t know what it was but we towed the car and behind Indians and every other way 6 we could get it we cranked and cranked and cranked and it still wouldn’t start and finally a fetal man from the automobile club of Southern California came along and recognized the problem and fixed it in a minute and we were on our way. We went on down on through the Shivwits Indian Reservation. Started down the so called Beaver Dam slope on a road that was just really two tracks out through the mesquite in the gristle bush. Here were four or five cows lying down the road. Dad drove up close and they most of them got up and ambled of off the brush but one old boss liked that warm soft sand on the road so he didn’t want to get up. Dad came up closer and honked. She raised her hind leg and kicked the headlight lens out. A little bit earlier we had broken the car key. Dad was a great one to coast, so every time he got a chance to coast the car, he would turn the ignition off and coast. When he went to put it back on he broke the key. We did have another key that was the same slots, even though it didn’t have the same filing, but we filed ourselves another key went on. Well when we got to Mesquite, Nevada the road made an abrupt right angle turn along the side of a wash and the cattle had crossed the wash and it looked like it was a pretty good road, so dad without realizing the turn drove off into the wash. We unhooked the trailer and rolled it back and backed the car out and went on our merry way. We had to be towed across the Virgin River because they were just building the bridge. Going on into St. Thomas that night, now under the waters of Lake Mead, and the road had been a bunch of up and downs over three little washes that were coming down to the Virgin River and cracked the trailer pole. And as we went down the Main 7 Street of St. Thomas the trailer started dog down a side street by itself. So we put a new, they were remodeling the store, so dad borrowed enough tools to put a new tongue in the trailer. We went on and got our plates and went on through the Valley of Fire and got our plates in Las Vegas. And then went on south to Searchlight, and somewhere along the way we lost the crank and we also lost one of those hard rubber tires. We tried to put one of the other and old abandoned tire wired on but we couldn’t get it over the wheel and get it to stay. So went on with a steal tire and when we were coming in on in the Amboy Country, the axle crystalized and the wheel came off. We tried to put a skid under it but by the time we got to Amboy, he had worn the axle so much so we abandoned the trailer and the man said he was going to send it but he never did. Loaded part of the stuff on the freight, on the train and send it on in and we drove on over towards Newberry Springs. And as we got over there, on the way over there was sort of a dust storm and we had to take the cloth off the broken headlight to be able to see the road. We got on over there and we finally got to grandmother’s place about a week or 10 days after we were supposed to. RS: How long did this trip take? WB: I don’t remember the exact time, I think it was about two weeks. I could probably count it up, but it was roughly two weeks that it took to go from here to Los Angeles. RS: As a young man what kinds of things were you interested in doing? In school and otherwise? What do you recall some of your interests were? 8 WB: Well I was almost eight when I started school. Mother had taught me to read in such books as The Overall Boys. And mother and dad both had pretty good libraries of their own. And they always gave us free privilege to read those books. I had been spanked or scolded many times for reading books when I should have been weeding the garden, or something of that sort. We used to go swimming in the canal and ride horseback. One interesting little episode was, it must have been along April or early May, and I wanted to go swimming and mother said it was too cold. Well I said, “Can I go riding on the horse?” She said, “Yes.” Well I went down in the orchard where the horse had been tied ever since morning and tried to ride her out the barn to put a saddle on but I didn’t bother to take the bridle. I just ride her by the halter. She got up to the little ditch that had the water in that ran and supplied that port of orchard and she was thirsty. I didn’t want her to take a drink till she got the barn a couple hundred yards away but she had more power than I did so she pulled me right over her head and I landed flat on my back in the water. So I got to swim and the horse ride both. I was interested quite a little bit as a youngster in electrical ideas. In fact at one time I thought I’d be an electrical engineer. As it turned out, I’m the geologist following dad. My next younger brother is a forest man and my youngest brother is the electrical engineer. But we used to… I used to try to make telegraphs and every time I was given an electromagnet, I would try to make me a little telegraph. We had no power in the house, we used angle lamps or kerosene lights for illumination and once in about every eight or ten month the telephone people come out and change the batteries that powered the telephone. Well, that 9 was my sole source of electric power because I just did not have money to buy number six dry cells very often. So, I learned to make wet cells of one sort or the other. The sulfuric acid dichromate batteries. Others I would have a little bit occasionally would put one of those flash light bulbs was powered by one of my batteries on the top of the Christmas tree, or top of a cotton wood tree. Mother didn’t even want a Christmas tree very much in those days and so I used to have a Meccano set which was the forerunner of the Erector Sets. The metallic strips. It was an English affair, but in many ways I liked it better than I did ever the Erector Sets. I used to build that, we had excellent blocks. Mother taught us… mother and dad taught us to not be afraid of the dark by playing hide and seek in the dark out around the house. Pitch black, the only thing was that no one could attempt to scare the person who was it in hide and seek. We’d do it in the house, we’d do it outside. Mother and dad did not like cats around the place because they wanted the birds. In fact, we had a pair of blue birds that nested in a little opening over the porch floor. I don’t know whether it was the same pair but at least a pair of blue birds nested in that hole, must have done it for fifteen years or more. So whenever the cats would come around, the stray cats, we lived on the side road and it was a good dumping place for cats, why we would try to get rid of them. And sometimes we were able to catch them and give them away or put them away some way. We had one persistent one that did not want to leave under any conditions and I had been given an old Model T Ford coil. I fixed up a little box with a switch in it so I could use the telephone batteries to operate the Ford coil 10 and this particular day was a moist spring thawing day. The cat was around so I put some glass and half inch pile of papers and some more glass out on the yard and ran a wire from the Ford coil out to it and grounded the other terminal and went inside the house where I looked through the window to watch that cat. This may sound like a very anti-humane situation, but I waited l like cat had its nose in the milk, pressed the button, that cat jumped 6 feet in the air and left running and that was the last we saw of that cat. It may sound a little not very humane, but the birds were more important to use because we had the orchards that needed the insects taken care of, we enjoyed their singing. Mother always had lots of flowers around in fact I cannot remember when I could not identify flowers with a botanical key. In the year I was in the fourth grade, that would be about 1913 something of that… no, not 1913… 1916, the spring probably of 1916. Dad was also, even though he was a geologist, he was an astronomer and he enjoyed botany very much. We went up into the mountains of South of Vivian Park in Provo Canyon and to see the Dog Tooth Violent. Mother and dad had always called it by its botanical name Erythronium. When I got back the teacher asked for me to write a little report on where I had been because I had missed a day of school or two. So I started to write about these Dog Tooth Violets calling them Erythronium. I asked the teacher how she spelled it she said, “I don’t know.” So I spelled it the best I could phonetically and she didn’t mark me wrong. We had many a good laugh about that ever since. This teacher was,she lived to be quite an old age. It was Elizabeth Lindsey in the fourth grade at BYU training school. I went through the eighth grade at BYU 11 training school and eight quarters in the BYU secondary training school. My first grade teacher was Hermais Peterson, my second grade teacher was Effy Kelsey, but I was only in her room for about a month and they gave me a special into the third grade which was Maime Hewish. Fourth grade was Elizabeth Lindsey, the fifth grade was Pearl Snow, and the sixth grade was Fanny McClain. Seventh grade was Agnus Crandle and eighth grade was Wilford Pulsen and I had, of course, the faculty at BYU was relatively small because we lived a ways out in the country particularly during the wintertime we wouldn’t we youngsters would not go home until dad was ready to go home until four or five o clock in the afternoon. We learned to use a lot of the BYU library. We learned the fact there was a lot more visiting done at that time than there is at the present time. We knew the children of most of the faculty members. My dad would hire some of them to come out and help us in the peach harvest and or they would buy blackberries or raspberries or grapes or cider from us and so we knew the children and the faculty members of the those early years before we first went to California in 1921. RS: I’m interested in any knowledge you may have about the controversy in the early ‘20s of Brigham Young and the Peterson brothers and William Chamberlin in terms of controversy Evolution vs Age of the Earth Church situation. Do you recall that yourself? WB: I don’t remember any of that at all because that ’20, ‘21 I was in the elementary training school. I faintly recollect that there was an argument on some of those situations. I knew Chamberlin. I knew some of those other people very well. I’ve 12 heard my dad say that he was an evolutionist, but not necessarily an organic evolutionist, but an evolutionist in the sense of progress of one sort and another. They have said that we used to go on trips. We used to go down to the concerts that they had at school. We tried to go to very good movies. Living out in the country the folks didn’t feel like in fact they didn’t have the money so that we could drive downtown too often but we tried to go to some of the better productions each summer for quite a few summers in there. There were the travelling Chautauqua that used to come and they would try to take us to that. We got to see one or two circuses we used to go to the parades, but that was all the circus we ever went to. During the summer we’d very frequently get in the horse and wagon and take our supper and drive over to Saratoga which was about 20 miles away. It was a good two or three hour drive over there. Dad put the youngsters to bed and then they’d drive home. Or if they were going off to a party and there was within that little ward or independent branch of Grandview, they would have very frequently have parties. So dad had a white top we’d make a bed in the back of the white top and we youngsters would sleep in the back of the white top while they went to the party. There was one year in particular that I recall they started having parties, pretty much surprise parties. They would tell one member of the family and she or he or she would try to get things ready and then when they’d come they’d even take the heating stoves out of the front room they’d bring a man with them paying accordion and they would dance until midnight and set up the stove and then go home to bed. We had some very close friends in there, in fact, there were comparably few homes in the Grandview 13 branch area that we did not exchange dinner dates on Sunday afternoon. We tried to.. Oh, once in a while I’d go swimming Sunday afternoon with the rest of the kids and I’d get scolded for it and a few things of that sort. Dad was not a fisherman. We tried fishing once or twice but we didn’t ever never do it and he wasn’t much of a hunter, so we didn’t go hunting. We would occasionally go and buy catfish or carp out of Utah Lake as they say in the mount but we never developed very much of a fishing situation. We liked fruit. We’d had the eggs. We used to frequently make homemade ice-cream with rich Jersey milk from our cows. Mother and dad, in terms this might sound a little disjointed, but mother and dad enjoyed iris and at I remember one day we counted more than a thousand blooms of iris out at once. RS: Tell me about Saratoga. What was it like when you’d go? WB: Saratoga in those days was basically just swimming pools. They had as I recall they had an indoor pool and outdoor pool and they probably had swings and things of that sort, but they didn’t try to make it a Disneyland or anything approaching a Disneyland as it is today. We also used to occasionally drive to the hot pots at Midway. There were two good plunges up there at that time, Luke’s and Snider’s. We’d drive up there for an afternoon swim in the hot water. We would go down to the shore of Utah Lake and go swimming in it. I remember on time the ward had an outing down what they call the Provo Resort at the mouth of Provo River on Utah Lake and one of the activities was, that they’d hired the launch and we went across the lake. As we came back it was a full 14 moon and the launch ran straight down the moon lite trail across back to thing and you’ll see a moonlight trail coming right across there. My childhood was a happy childhood because dad and mother tried to make it. They’d play games with us. This where I learned to count using flinch. They thought us how to play flinch, how to play dominoes, spelka, many other types of games. This where everyone of us learned to count. They always read. In fact, one of the things that happened during winter night was that we’d gather around the one room that was heated around the front room heater and dad would read from books like the Shackleton story of his exploration of Antarctica and similar types of things. We always had the National Geographic, we had the Youth’s Companion, we had other good books. Sometime along about 1915 I guess it was, we bought a phonograph, an Edison phonograph. It had very excellent tone in those days. The records were a quarter of an inch thick. Mother and dad would buy only good records, they didn’t buy popular records, they said we could hear those often enough elsewhere. One of our neighbors, friends, use to have a player piano and it was fun to go down and have them use the player piano and enjoy that. This particular family always had an enormous Christmas tree lighted by real live candles and it was nice to go visit them at Christmas time and have them light the candles for us for a few moments. RS: Tell me now when you graduated from college with your bachelor’s degree was your major in geology? 15 WB: Let me backtrack again. Edna and I were married as I said in 1928 and went on to school for two years and graduated in 1930 and then I had gone back to Cedar City to work that summer. I worked for four summers down there in Cedar City and then the depression began to hit and the travel dropped off so I came back to Ogden and stayed with Edna’s folks that summer for a while, and worked at a cannery until along in the early fall and found a job that I thought was going to last all winter as a night man in an all-night garage and then a man lost that so I didn’t get very much to it. The next spring, I heard of a high school teaching job that would be open if I had my certificates. So, I went back to school early in the winter quarter of ‘30-‘31 and picked up a high school teaching certificate. That job fell through and along in February our first baby was born and lived only a few minutes. His heart was on the wrong side. And then the next year, no I take it back, it was the next year that I was going to stay out and work and had that. So, Edna’s folks were kind enough to let us stay there and help on the farm and so on for our board. In the summer of ‘32 I went to work at a cannery, of course I worked in the cannery every summer there where I could, and then went down to school to get my masters and then worked again in the cannery in ‘33 until I began to teaching at Weber in the fall of ‘33 and continued to teach there the rest of my teaching career. RS: Who hired you to teach at Weber? Do you remember who made the contact? WB: Well Dr. Lind. John G. Lind, who had taught there for many years, had broken his hip along I guess the winter of 1931. I had applied to take his job, but they didn’t want to do it and finally when the state took over in 1933, they didn’t want 16 him to teach in his present health condition. So I was hired to teach for just a quarter time fresh out of my masters, no teaching experience except my high school practice teaching and I don’t remember who actually hired me whether it was, I suspect it was President Tracy, Aaron Tracy, that actually filled the contract. I’m not even sure I signed a contract. I was just told I could teach a quarter of the time until Dr. Lind was getting a little better. In the spring quarter he came back and dropped me down to one class. That particular year the salary I drew was the magnificent salary of 100 dollars a month and but again those early years where ones that the faculty knew all the other faculty children and the faculty children knew the other faculty children. Then in 1934, the fall of ‘34 Russell Croft who had been teaching the botany classes resigned to go to work full time for the forest service for the intermountain experiment station. Since I had a minor and only lacked one or two hours of having had a major in botany, they allowed me to teach the botany classes, as well as one class in geology and Dr. Lind teach the other classes in geology. Then in the summer of ‘35 I went to California to find some ideas on classes because it looked like I was going to have to teach solidly in botany with maybe one class in geology geography. But when I got back that fall they decided I was going to teach full time in geology geography. They’d hired another man in botany. But then I went on in ’37, I received a fellowship at Stanford to go and do graduate work which was renewed for another year. I completed all my requirements except the dissertation by the fall of 1939, I went back in ‘41 with a two sabbatical expecting to finish up down there and get a dissertation written and finish up and ran into the press of 17 students trying to get some schooling before they were called into service. In fact, I was out in a field trip with a group of students with on the day of Pearl Harbor and so I was impressed to take some additional laboratory sections that I hadn’t anticipated. It wasn’t until the spring quarter that I was able to get time enough to start working on my dissertation a little bit. My fetal work on the dissertation, which was going to be not a usual regional study, but a study of the phenomenon of soil creep. When I came back to Weber in the spring of ’42, of course, everything was upset. Everyone was working double jobs because there was so many people going into the service and the student load didn’t decrease too much of course the boys were not there, the girls were. But it didn’t reduce the teaching load very much and you couldn’t get gasoline to go do field work. So, it wasn’t till 1945 that we could do anything on the field work and then the professor on whom I started the problem retired, and they gave me some new professors and they were so swamped that when I sent material down they’d keep it for 6 weeks. I’d say, “How do you find that?” “Oh we, haven’t read it yet.” Another six weeks, “Yes, it’s alright go ahead.” Then they hired another person that another man in the field who was more familiar with this finally about by 1957 I finished it up, no 1952 or ‘53 finished up that dissertation and sent it down for him to read. He wrote back and said, “It’s too big start over again.” So I started over again and did something kind of a laboratory study. I was interested in seeing what mass movements were doing. See if I could photograph them in slow motion. So I got a hold of a movie camera and went through about 30,000 feet of movie film. 100 feet of movie film 18 would last me 62 seconds and I would make small lens slides in a glass sided box. True to scale situation, scale models situation remains that it is not fully representative of natural features, but there was a lot of material that came out of that that I think is very very good. I don’t know how many people read it because I’ve never published more than the abstract on it. This is some of the things we’ve done through the years. Of course, I helped on the establishment of the four year program. I helped in the initial establishment of rank in the faculty. I served as president of the faculty association at one time. Chairman of the department for many years. I have taught about 50% of the classes that are probably offered in the department at one time or another. We initiated the geography minor in the fall of ’62, so that we could graduate the upper division work went in. We initiated the upper division work in ’62, so we were able to teach a lot of geography teaching in there for the minor and then a couple years later we were given the major for both geology and geography. RS: Now you worked closely with President Tracy? WB: I worked with President Tracy and President Creer, with President Dixon. In fact, during the time Henry Aldous Dixon was president, I was director of the night school for a year in half and it began to take off. This was right during the war years that we began to take the night school off and I was also director of the Weber Regional Science Fair for about three years and of course I worked with President Miller and President Bishop. I have worked with one, two, three, four, five presidents in the 41 years. 19 RS: What do you recall about President Tracy? What kind of a president was he? WB: President Tracy was a very skilled man in many ways he was skilled when it comes to his knowledge of the Book of Mormon and Bible and so on he was a skilled literature man. As administrator, he was not as strong as President Miller was or as President Brady is. President Dixon was and yet he had a faculty that stood pretty well behind him. He was here for just the two years and then they decided that they need another president, so they brought it Leland Creer and he stayed for just two years and then went down to teach history at the University of Utah that was when President Dixon came in. RS: What kind of a president was President Creer? WB: He was a good president. He was a firm president. He was not as friendly of a president in many ways as President Dixon was. I think he would have grown into a more powerful president had he stayed a little longer. But the two years were really not enough for the faculty and yet I don’t know of anybody that had anything bad to say about him. RS: What about President Dixon? Now he was here for a longer period of time? WB: He was here for a very long period of time. He was a very good president. The students knew hm. He participated in the student activities. He was able to bring to pass many things, like the convincing of people we should move up in the lower campus. He was one of the ring leaders in the original 4 year bill which was vetoed by Governor Lee. He pretty well had the community behind him. He was a 20 very very fine President. President Miller was a very very fine president. He too knew the students. He knew the community. He was a quiet man, but he got things done. President Bishop, some of us were a little disappointed in him because he was a little inclined to move ahead more rapidly and pretty much on his own in some ways, but he too had a lot of good ideas, but I don’t think he was a powerful a president as Dixon and Miller and Brady. RS: You’ve had a lot of dealings with students on campus. If you were to give some advice to a person starting out teaching, dealing with students, what two or three or four kinds of teaching principles and relationship with student principles have kind of guided your teaching career? WB: That’s a hard question to answer just off the top of your head. I would say that the most important aspect of it, is enthusiasm for the subject. Student after student have come to me and later years and said, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that class. But you made it so interesting because your own enthusiasm for the subject.” Certainly understanding is necessary. You have to be able to do it. Wide experience is very great help. This is why I have appreciated the opportunities that I’ve had for 20 odd years of working for the Forest Service all over the intermountain region, during the summer months. Because it got me into places that sometime the next year or two years the student can come up and say, “What is this up in where?” Or, “Where is this?” “Oh yes I know what it is,” and be able to explain the phenomenon to them. This is from the standing point of a geologist with a wide experience. This is one of the reasons that I wanted the students that we initiated 1946, what was called the College on 21 Wheels. We picked up a group of about 28 students that year… 27 or 28 students, and we are going to teach them the principles of physical and historical geology from the windows of the bus by actually seeing the things in the field. We were gone on that trip for 40 days. We went from here to Bryce over to Zion National Park, down to Lake Mead and out on the lake at Lake Mead and down through the Dam of Lake Mead, down into the desert country. We camped at the beach at Newbury Beach south of Los Angeles. We went across to Catalina and out on the glass bottom boats so they could see marine life actually as it existing in the glass bottom boats. We went up the coast into places like the Big Basin, the Redwood Groves, the museums at Stanford and museums of Golden Gate Park. We went into Yosemite for them to see glaciation. We went on up Mount Lassen for volcanism. Most of them climbed Mount Lassen and were able to actually see the effects of the eruption of some 30-40 years earlier. We went out past Mount Shasta. RS: You were telling me about this College on Wheels and you were at Mount Shasta I think? WB: I went up past Mount Shasta into Crater Lake. We rode around Crater Lake for volcanic activities, went to Crater Lake for volcanic activities but the road around the lake was still blocked with snow. So, we went out and spent a night out in the Newbury Craters where the volcanic glass or obsidian flows or are so great. Before we got to Crater Lake, we went to Shasta dam in California. From Crater Lake we went down the Willamette River, and then went out to the coast and were able to see some of the coastal features of that area. Came back into 22 Portland and up and over to Mount Rainier. The students had the opportunity to put on tin pants, so to speak, heavily reinforced canvas reinforced pants and slide down part of Paradise Glacier and to see the moraines and the glacial milk and the valley train and white washed plains and all the other features of it. We went over to Grand Coulee, stayed on night by the vicinity of the Grand Coulee Falls and then into Grand Coulee Dam, on across to Spokane and to Kellogg, Idaho and north into Glacier National Park. Over the pass by going to the Sun Mountain and then we decided to go north to Cardston. We stayed one night at Cardston, then went out to Waterton Lakes and back down to Chief Mountain, on down to Browning, Montana and the Indian exhibits there. Went on down to Yellowstone and spent two or three nights in Yellowstone with the glacial activities and then on down to Grand Tetons and on home. The students have never forgotten that trip because they actually saw the features as we went along. They saw everything except continental glaciation and coral reefs. We had stream activity, we had glacial activity, we had wet dessert activity, windblown activity. We had mountain glaciers, we had igneous rocks, we had volcanlodisim and other igneous rocks, we had examples of metamorphic rocks going into Yosemite, we had the difference between glaciation and river cut and seeing some of the canyons in the Sierras. We saw the extensive lava flows of the Columbia Plateau. We saw the effects of the glacial damming on the Columbia River that created the Grand Coulee, as well as all of the other features that can exist-- great faulting, the great trust faults and so on that exist in that area. That was so successful in the summer of 1946 and 23 the summer of 1947. Victor Hancock the language Professor was officing with me and so we decided that we would go to Mexico because Parícutin Volcano was active at that time. So, we took 45 to 35 students in bus, and truck, and car. We were gone 6 weeks to Mexico. We went to Bryce and out to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, over to Sunset Crater, over to Meteor Crater, down through the Petrified Forest, down the River Grand River to white sands into Carlsbad Caverns and across to Loreto. Went down to Morelos and then cut out to Guadalajara came back into Uruapan and out to Parícutin, into Mexico City and spent a couple days in Mexico City and came on back north up the other highway, meeting the other one at Victoria and they taught them Spanish and geology and biology. Ross Hardey was the biologist with us and he came up though Santa Fe and across and into Mesa Verda and then on home that way. Two years later, we repeated that trip except that we also went down a little south of Mexico City and also were able to go out on the floating gardens in Xochimilco that year. RS: What was the typical day like? Number one: did you camp out most of the time? WB: These were camping trips, all of them. We had initiated the camping field trips, I think it was the summer of 1936. The spring of ‘36. We started the first geography of Utah class in 1936. I had about 45 people in that class and started talking about the southern part of the state and everybody looked blank. I discovered that of the students in that class, about 60-70% of them had never been south of Provo or any place like that. Well, 1936 wages were two bits an hour and people had a hard time to make it up. So, we just chartered a bus and 24 decided we’d camp out, let the students help with the cooking to save on the expense that first trip to Zion, Grand Canyon, and Bryce. Bryce, Grand Canyon, and back of way of Zion cost some $7.15 cents for food and transportation for four days. That was so successful the next year we took two bus loads of people down, but people weren’t able to get into the Grand Canyon because of snow problems on the Cabot Plateau. I think we probably cost them about $10 that year and we continued to take those trips up till about 1971 or ’72, shortly after we started the four year program. And when we began to increase faculty, then there wasn’t the push apparently for people to go even though we continued to take the trips, they were smaller trips and there were more of them so we didn’t have as big a group. I have taken as many as 105 on the Zion, Bryce trip in there. Camping out, sometimes we get rained on. A couple years we managed to get the Utah Parks Company to let us sleep in the lodge hall there in Zion. Another time we were down there in the early ‘50s or middle ‘50s, and it started raining about 2:00 in the morning, everyone got so thoroughly wet we called it a day and came on home. We only had one day out. We ended up charging about $30.00 dollars for that four-day trip, but of course by that time the wages had risen to a dollar an hour or something of that sort too. RS: On a typical day, did you have a class room situation or a lecture part of the day? WB: In part, yes. For instance, on the way down to Zion I would discuss the various areas. We eventually reached the point where we had a partially written log to take them on those trips, that they could read. But, I would point out the various features as we’d go down. Then when we would get to Zion, we eventually ended 25 up going to Zion first and then coming home by way of Bryce. We found that it was a little easier that way. In first place Bryce is about 30-40 miles nearer Ogden and instead of having to climb to get there you are going downhill because Bryce is higher than Ogden, so much of it was easier in the busses for them to come this way. When we’d get to Zion we would spend the morning going to the narrows trail up to Weeping Rock. Tried to look at the museum and we would go back to the campground, because we were camped in the upper camp ground at the grotto and then in the afternoon those who felt like it would climb Angels Landing or Lady Mountain. I’ve been up both of them. Occasionally some of the students would go up the eastern trail and so on, but the next day we’d get out by 8:30-9:00 in the morning and go up through the tunnels. Top walk out to the Great Arch, go on and have lunch and probably in Orderville, or someplace like that. Go on over and spend the night at Bryce. Try to take the either the canyon trip or the trip out as far as we could get towards Rainbow Point that afternoon and then the next morning we would take off and either take the trip there, or the rim trip and then be with them and discuss the various things we came to so that they had a learning situation, maybe not a formal classroom type thing, but they had a learning situation on this. The same type of thing in the Mexican trips. We’d teach occasionally. We’d set up and say here’s a few things we want you to discuss and, of course, we did other trips besides that. We’d take trips to Dinosaur, or trips to out to the City of Rocks or trips to Craters of the Moon. In later years after the war was over we’d go down to Arches… ‘50-‘51 somewhere in there we started going to down 26 to Arches and over Natural Bridges and into Camp Mesa Verda and again it was pretty much a trip in which they were able to see and we would discuss the features as we go along. We didn’t stop just at geology because with my botany background I tried to help them out with the times I had with a ranger naturalist in the Parks Service. Back in the late ‘40s, I was a ranger naturalist in the Parks Service and of course I had driven a few years early than that. Had to be pretty much a source of information about the plants and so on and so I was able to keep some plants, show them plant relationships, animal relationships, able to answer questions about that all through on all these trips. RS: Why don’t we stop there.