Oral History Program Ralph P. Vander Heide Interviewed by Jamie J. Weeks 3 October 2013 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ralph P. Vander Heide Interviewed by Jamie J. Weeks 3 October 2013 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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, with additional interviews being conducted by members of the Weber State community. In 2013 the campus prepared to celebrate the 125th Anniversary of Weber State University in 2014. In order to document the student experience, interviews were conducted with Weber State College Alumni on an ongoing basis. ____________________________________ 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: Vander Heide, Ralph, an oral history by Jamie J. Weeks, 3 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Ralph Vander Heide October 3, 2013 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Dr. Ralph Vander Heide, conducted on October 3, 2013 in his home in Ogden, Utah, by Jamie J. Weeks. Ralph discusses his memories of Weber State College from 1955 to 1957 and his membership in the Sigma fraternity. Also present is his wife Judith Howell Vander Heide and our video technician Stacie Gallagher. JW: To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your early life? You did start out in Ogden, right? RVH: Yes, I was born in Ogden on April 15, 1937 at the good old Dee Hospital, which was then on 24th and Harrison. My family lived in west Ogden. I come from an immigrant family; Dutch on my father’s side and Danish on my mother’s. We lived there with my grandfather actually. I like to say, we had a compound, you know like the Kennedys, and we had an aunt here and an aunt there. We had about three houses on the street, and that’s where we lived until I was ten years old. I went to the Hopkins school, which is named after a man who was superintendent of schools in Ogden. Mister or Doctor I don’t know, but his name is Hopkins. My dad worked for the railroad and mother started teaching again five years after I was born. I was in grade six when we moved to Cohen Street above Harrison and I went to Lorin Farr School then to Central Junior High and on to Ogden High School, and on to Weber State College. I looked around at other universities and colleges, I wasn’t rejected but I thought well you know, I will spend the money somewhere in California or New York or Salt Lake City or I can put my feet under my dad’s table. I could keep driving my leaded, lowered 1 Chevrolet, it was a fifty-something. Metallic blue and I didn’t want to leave that behind you know, so I stayed in Ogden at Weber College. JW: And did you have any siblings? RVH: Me I’m it. They took one look at me and said that’s enough. JW: So it’s good that you were raised with all your aunts and cousins. RVH: Or they knew they could never do anything better, maybe that’s the other way of looking at it. JW: I found and printed off your pictures in the 1956 and 1957 yearbooks and your pictures from Sigma. (App. 1-4; 1956 Acorn and 1957 Acorn) RVH: Yes. We are still playing with Sigma through to this day. We have regular meetings going again. We meet once a month. We have lunches and twice per year bring our mates. Not too many turn out, but we are working on it. JW: The move of the Weber campus from 25th Street to Harrison took place in 1954 and you attended campus in the fall of 1955, so where did you attend class? RVH: I was on both campuses. JW: Really? RVH: We all were back then. I wasn’t on the lower campus much, you had to take PE down there I guess, so I did take PE classes on 25th Street. I can’t recall anything else on that campus, I guess drama, but I didn’t do anything with that. I was mostly on the upper campus by far. You could go early then and park right in front. I thought why not, so I would take my books and park right in front and crack the book open and that way you got to see the girls go by and your friends and everybody else too. 2 JW: So were there four buildings? RVH: There were those original four yes, and then we had something very famous call the TUB (Temporary Union Building). I did an article on the TUB. JW: Oh did you? RVH: The alumni association asked for some stories and I did one on my experience with the TUB and professor Sheldon Hayes. I took piano lessons from his wife, so I knew the family, I think they were from Brigham City. My mother knew them, and my grades were getting worse and worse in his class because I was stopping in at the TUB for coffee and conversation. It was a big deal to drink coffee there. I was that immature, as were several of us. So Sheldon Hayes took me aside and told me I better quite spending so much time playing “Joe College” and get with the program. I don’t know to this day how he knew. My point of the story is that it shows how good our professors were, they did take care of us and they really did watch over us. JW: That seems to be an ongoing theme I hear from everyone. So what courses did you take your first year in 1955? RVH: Well that’s a little harder. I was filling groups because I hadn’t declared a major yet. I like languages, so I took Spanish and there was never a nicer old gentleman than Victor Hancock who taught Spanish and other languages. He noted my language interest and gave me a couple books and encouraged me along the way. I already knew some Dutch, so I knew what language learning was about, and I took some Spanish in high school and junior high. So Spanish was part of the deal and I took English and that I liked very much because I liked 3 to write. I had Bob Mikkelsen among others and he was very good I thought. He must have been around 38 or early40’s, I don’t know, but a young guy and someone I could relate to. They were all helpful to us. We had a really good program at Ogden High. It was an outstanding high school I think, but still we were just kids and immature. They knew that. I know now they knew that then, but we didn’t know that then. They were really helping us along. You thought you wrote something brilliant and then Mikkelsen says, “Well you know, this isn’t spelled right and that is a dangling participle.” You didn’t know as much as you thought you did. Let me just add, when I went down to the U (University of Utah), they used to say things like, “You will lose credits when you transfer from Weber.” I did not lose one credit, it all transferred. It was good to know that the U had that much respect for us. JW: So back then, were most of the students attending Weber people that you had maybe gone to high school with? RVH: A lot of them were, yes, but I got to know some of the people from other high schools and that was nice too. I notice now when I go out with friends who went straight to BYU (Brigham Young University) or Utah, they don’t know anybody at Weber, and I enjoy those relationships with the guys we knew back then. I know the president or the head of this department or this student or Sigma; it was good for me to be there. JW: What kind of activities did Sigma do while you were there? RVH: Oh we would have kegs. We had a stripper once. I believe our president of Sigma had to go in and explain that situation. We had some guys who had 4 returned from Korea and they weren’t quick to take any flack. They ran Sigma for the most part and they weren’t about to put up with this baby stuff. First of all they said we would have no initiations, like drowning us in reservoirs or waterboarding or anything like that. We were men, so when you got your bid to Sigma you were proud to be a man. We would go see a naughty movie and have a beer. You always had to have a keg that was big stuff. JW: So were you the “wild fraternity” on campus? RVH: Well yes. I read the blurb in here (yearbook) this morning, but I haven’t read it for years. We were known for that and we did a lot of good too, so we were also do-gooders, but sometimes it got a little carried away I guess. We had our annual pajama dance and we all wore ten layers under the pajamas, but some of the guys are saying we didn’t. However, I think I’m right on that, I don’t think those mothers were letting those girls go out of the house… JW: Without several layers on? RVH: Well yes. We had those mothers where you know, you drove up after a date and they flicked the lights off and on when you were sitting in the car. Damn that was annoying, you would always park further down the street. JW: So were those most of your activities? I mean you guys were having fun, but I know you were doing good things because I think that was the point of the fraternity, to contribute back to the school right? RVH: Yes well, I wasn’t in athletics but I was a music major when I started. I was a voice major, so I did some of that choir stuff and singing, and then I dropped that major along the line for different reasons. 5 JW: Who was your choir director while you were there? RVH: Mr. Hanson was there and Roland Parry, it was hard to beat [that level of musicianship] anywhere. Let me get this right, his wife Helen I’m pretty sure was the daughter of James E. Talmage, who was one of the best known authorities of the Mormon Church, ever. He was really an intellectual man and it turned out she was gifted herself, and so she came from that line of people. Parry was from the local Parry family who were here long ago and owned a lot in Ogden. He was a musician and teacher of some note. He wrote “All Faces West,” the story of the Mormons coming here. He knew, because he met him in New York, Igor Gorin the baritone, who was not ever known well enough during his lifetime. That has been recognized since, but I knew Igor Gorin because I sang in a choir as a nobody at the age of 15 or 16. He let me speak to him in his trailer and that was fun because I was so interested in vocal training. I would ask, “What do you drink before you sing in this dry climate?” but we are off the subject I guess. JW: Well, that is interesting to me because we do have some Igor Gorin pictures and a few items about him left over from Roland Parry in the archives. RVH: It’s hard to get a recording though isn’t it? The Parry family does have records, but I don’t know if or how they have released them. JW: As far as the social activities you are involved with, you enjoyed singing, and were you involved in the musical productions the college put on? RVH: Well, I was involved a little bit with music, but, I’ll tell you one guy I sang with was Heber Jentzsch, who is the president of the Church of Scientology International. He had a marvelous voice and I think he went to Las Vegas as a bar singer, it’s 6 hard to get employment, there’s competition out there. He came from a polygamist family actually, and I don’t think he would mind me saying this, that’s just how it was. I was trying to think of where we had our school dances, that was always big stuff, the proms, the dances, kings and queens. JW: We already mentioned the TUB. I wondered if there was more to the TUB socially? RVH: The TUB was fairly big in my life because you’d go up there and you could have a snack or coffee and that was new, you can’t do that in high school. That was kind of fun, I guess that made you feel grown up or like a real college guy. JW: Did they hold other activities there in the TUB? RVH: I don’t think it was big enough. It was one of those government buildings which we had around Ogden from way after the war and it had been moved to the campus. Temporary did mean temporary and it went away. You know some of these things they have called temporary, like down at the U, and they are still there. JW: There isn’t anybody that we’ve ever talk to that didn’t have great things to say about the TUB and so it must have just been such a big deal. RVH: Well you couldn’t study there very well because people were banging dishes and what not, but you went there and talked and had coffee I suppose. JW: So what was the dating scene like back then? RVH: Well you know, not much different I would say. It was the day of going steady right? 7 JPH: Getting pinned. RVH: Right, getting pinned. I guess we did some of that. I never did any pinning so I don’t know. JW: So you kept your Sigma pins to yourself? RVH: Yes, well you had steady girlfriends and that sort of thing and that was big, but it caused too much trouble and concern when you went steady and would date somebody else, then you weren’t steady anymore. There was a time when I thought I was steady, and I wasn’t steady its turns out, but I think you’re sort of stuck with one girl. JW: Was there a lot of group dating or a lot of friends hanging out together? RVH: Well yes, you hung out together, but you went with your girlfriend. Well I don’t know, there were two or three girls that I was sort of steady with no matter what, that means eight dates or something, but I was just a little nerdy kid from Ogden High. I wasn’t one of those cool guys from Korea, boy we thought they were really men you know. JW: Oh the ones that had been to war? RVH: Yes, and they had let us into their fraternity, wow. JW: So who was your favorite professor? RVH: Oh I guess I would have to say Jennings Olson. Jennings Olson knew about as much as any man I’ve ever known. JW: So did you have him your second year? RVH: All I could. JW: Really? 8 RVH: Yes. I would have private talks with him because he said things that I didn’t hear in the church for example. He was so prepared he would write his whole outline of his lecture on the boards just after he walked in and then go through those points. He really introduced me to that stuff big time; philosophers and people that I had never even heard of. If you’re receptive to that, as I was and I’m still very receptive to that, it was just mind boggling. I mean I’m still talking about it and I’m seventy-six. I saw him a few times after my Weber days. I would come home and visit my mother for example and he would be outside exercising and walking. He had polio when he was a boy and he started weight lifting. He did everything in his power to overcome that limp he had. He was as strong as an ox and he would win weight lifting competitions in the state. Besides his intellectual accomplishments, he had built a special room on his house for his weights and equipment. I’ve known people who have lifted with him and they say he was fantastic. He was very helpful to us meatheads. He would make time for you with all the intellectual ability he had. I often wondered why he didn’t go somewhere else, which may be in your mind but I don’t know, I absolutely don’t know. He was not respected in the community because he was very anti-Mormon. He thought it was nonsense and that doesn’t make you too popular at Weber State in 1955 because everybody else is involved with the church, or at least most of them were. Weber is very different that way now in having broadened the backgrounds of the people they hire. So he offended a lot of people just by being. 9 I thought they were all pretty good. People like Robert S. Mikkelsen in English. They had a man named H.E.D. Redford, no relation to Robert, but he was an actor and taught the drama and theater, he was outstanding. Thatcher Allred was a fine professor, a very knowledgeable man. I didn’t take art, but a good friend of mine did, and the art people were as good as any. You go to the U, or you go somewhere else, and you have other professors then you can compare. I’ve been to school in Europe, I’ve been to the University of Zurich, I went to the University of Madrid, the University of Seville and I went to the University of New York at Albany. I never had anybody superior to, not even equal to Jennings Olson. Now he didn’t know languages. I’ve had professors who knew maybe five or six languages, but I never had anyone better as a teacher. Maybe Dr. Paul Wyler at the U. There are some of these famous people around Brewster Ghesilin was one down there, a writing teacher, but we’re talking about Weber. JW: So did you know President Miller? RVH: I did, my family knew President Miller, and he was superintendent in the Weber District before he went to Weber State. I remember when he came to our house, I was probably five, and he asked my mother to come back to teaching. He said, “We have got to have you.” He came to our house! So, I got dragged along sort of at an early age and played behind the piano because I wasn’t supposed to be there I guess. She taught out in west Weber, and that was quite a drive, do you know where that is? JW: Well I guess I’m thinking out past Marriott-Slaterville? 10 RVH: Yes, out there. So yes, President Miller and his wife had four daughters and were highly respected here. I was interested to learn when I taught at Clearfield High, the principal there, Joseph Cook was a good friend of his, and they both went to the Weber Academy, and it was a big deal that you drove all day to get into Ogden I guess. So those two men, well Cook didn’t have a doctorate, but he had a masters, that’s pretty high education back then for the rural communities. A lot of being a good teacher, principal or superintendent is common sense anyway and Miller had that. Miller was a scholar and a gentleman and a very nice man. JW: So how did he interact with the students? I mean you knew him on a personal level, but what about the regular student. RVH: Well yes that’s true, somewhat I did. I thought he interacted well, but not in the way some do. He wasn’t among us every day and walking around or anything. He was receptive and listened to you, helped you, warned you, and put up with things like Sigma. Some professors wanted to drive us off the campus with whips, and with our beer in our cups. JW: What kind of diversity was there on campus? RVH: I don’t think there was any diversity back then, but it began to change rapidly starting about then. Some of the best students I knew at Ogden High came over to Weber. I was sort of surprised, some went off, but it was a money issue. If they could afford to go to Colorado, or California, some of the very best scholars went to places like Columbia. I could name names but I won’t, or Stanford maybe we had one go to Stanford I don’t know. 11 JW: So was there any kind of political activity going on on campus? RVH: Not really back then. I go over there now and I enjoy it cause I see these kids and they are every color and their hair is kinky or straight, and some of them are smoking cigarettes right outside doors as close as they are allowed to stand, and they are just fun. And then inside they have this cause and that cause, and I would go up and read their causes so I can take a piece of candy or whatever they are offering there. There’s always somebody there it seems to me every time I go over there. Then they are grabbing coffee there at Starbucks, that’s a cut up from the TUB. JW: Are you still involved with Weber? RVH: Well yes, I’m on the AHA Committee, the Arts and Humanities Advisory with Dean Madonne Miner, who is one of the people who has come fresh to the college without local baggage. Not that local baggage is all bad but you have to have some variety and she’s part of that. We do a lot with Weber. We go to some of the plays and concerts and some of the things are in people’s homes. We support them quite a bit. JW: And so why did you return back to Ogden? RVH: Well I returned because it was home and I was happy here. My mother was here and she was alone because I am an only child as we mentioned earlier, and she was getting older and it was harder to get around, and I wanted to be closer to her to help her out. It was time to retire somewhere and we could have stayed where we were, Judy liked it more than I did, but it was a very nice place to be. We looked at houses here for a while and we found this house and Judy liked the 12 house a lot, and it was okay with me. Sometimes we say, this is really mean I guess, but we say we live here because it’s closer to Salt Lake. We came back and I felt real good about that because we were here three years before Mother died and I was really glad I was here. JW: Is there anything that we haven’t covered? RVH: Probably. JW: Anything that you would like to talk about, about Weber and your days there? RVH: I’m concerned that Weber can hold onto that now. Weber keeps selling itself this way, as a place that cares for students and so on. I’ve seen a lot of evidence of that. I have taught some classes there in Spanish for example with Tom Mathews and sat in on some other classes. I observe professors if I’m over there in the halls and they are greeting students and so on, some more than others. I think that still does exist even though classes are bigger and you can’t know everybody like you could back then. We probably really did know just about everybody but that is harder and harder and it is a problem as the place gets bigger. We’ve got the other campus now, but I think that special care for certain students who really need it is good. You know we used to call Weber, Harrison High as it was just an extension of high school. Ogden High was much bigger and seemed to be more sophisticated to me than maybe Weber was. Everybody went to school there; the wealthiest kids in town, the poorest kids in town, so Weber was different than that, but I don’t know how you hold onto that. I have gone to school many places, 13 but I never saw more of that than I have here, caring for students. So how do you hold onto that? JW: I don’t know. I earned my bachelors at Weber and I felt the same way and it wasn’t that long ago. I think for the face-to-face courses, the professors are still the same way and just as involved with the students as the students would like them to be. I think the real issue, because I teach online classes, I think that’s where some of that is starting to come in. When you have online classes it’s really hard to build a rapport with someone you have never met face-to-face. There’s no way we cannot move in that direction, we have to, in order to remain competitive, but I do think that is the place where we are starting to lose that close rapport with students. RVH: I have seen students, like with Tom, and he will tell me, “Oh she is married and she’s got three kids, or this guy just came back from here and he works over there,” and he knows and he doesn’t just walk out the door. I’ve had these guys they walk in, look at their clock, start the lecture, then walk out, and I haven’t seen that at Weber. JW: I’ve never experienced that at weber. JPH: Well you know, having gone to Stanford, and I’m two years ahead of him academically, I did know a couple of professors. Actually one was William Scowcroft, who’s from Ogden originally. I was a creative writing major and I knew Wallace Stegner and my freshmen Western Civilization professor, but the rest of them didn’t know you from a hot rock, they didn’t have any interest in knowing you. I mean when I go back to reunions, and I love the people I went to 14 college with, there are 1500 people in my class. Obviously I didn’t know everyone, but it’s so different from the way he is describing this experience where the professors actually knew you. I mean I had classes with 300 people in them. RVH: Maybe Weber doesn’t want to grow that much anyway. I know we’ve talked to the new president about this very thing, and he likes that about Weber. JW: Right, and he comes from the U which has their share of walk-in, walk-out professors. RVH: Yes, he has a prestigious background, but I still think he is down to earth and will mingle. JW: He is new to us, and it’s always hard to move from one president to another one. However, I’ve been impressed with the events that I’ve gone to and having talked to him I think he’s going to do a good job. RVH: Ann Millner has awfully big shoes to step into; I’ve never seen anybody give more than she did to the job. JW: She was nonstop. RVH: She could tell you about an injured football player, how he was recovering, and in the next minute talk about next year’s budget in the drama department. She was just up on stuff like that, all the time, everything that happened. JW: Right, and that’s the thing, it’s hard to fill a previous president’s shoes, but I think that he is going to do okay. He seems to be sliding in pretty easily and he really has shown his face all over campus, which is appreciated. I mean if they’re not walking into your building and they are not paying attention, then people notice. 15 RVH: I tease him about about that. I say, do you know my name? JPH: His mother went to Skidmore. RVH: Yes, his mother went to Skidmore, so he got me back. JPH: Which is where Ralph taught. RVH: He asked, “Did you teach my mother?” and I said, “Thanks, thanks a lot.” JW: Well good, he has a sense of humor then. RVH: Yes, he does, it’s real subtle. JW: Yes, you have to catch it. Well, unless there’s something else you would like to add, I think we’ve covered your time at Weber, and I know you’re still involved. RVH: Yes, and for ten years we worked with school accreditation. Mainly in Utah, but internationally as well, so schools from New York to Bangkok. That was something that Weber can help prepare you for too. You have so many experiences during your life, but they all add up. We got to see some good teaching and some bad teaching in that experience too. One or two were colleges, so again you compare Weber in the mix. JW: Well we appreciate being able to come here and appreciate our time with you. It has been really interesting. I love that every story is different and yet they all come back to this warmth for Weber that most people don’t feel for their alma mater, so it’s nice to hear. RVH: In the last three years I have finished and published a book and an anti-Nazi magazine published in Chile by the Germans who fled their homeland. Judy and I wrote a second one as well. I was pleased that Weber’s Radio Station student 16 personnel were very helpful in giving me interview time (i.e., same old spirit of cooperation). By the way, no married couple should write a book together—the marriage did survive. 17 1 Appendix 2 3 4