Oral History Program Reed K. Swenson Interviewed by Richard W. Sadler 1 December 1981 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Reed K. Swenson Interviewed by Richard W. Sadler Dean of the School of Social Sciences 1 December 1981 Copyright © 2012 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: Swenson, Reed K., an oral history by Richard W. Sadler, 1 December 1981, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Reed K. Swenson 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Reed K. Swenson (born 1903). Dr. Swenson served as Weber College Athletic Director from 1933 to 1971. The interview was conducted on December 1, 1981 by Richard W. Sadler in order to gather Dr. Swenson’s recollections and experiences with Weber College. RWS: This is an interview of Dr. Reed K. Swenson, conducted at his home on the afternoon of December the 1st, 1981, by Richard Sadler for the Weber State College Oral History Project. Reed, I’m interested in how you became involved at Weber College. How were you hired here, and when did you make the decision to come? RKS: I had been at Murray, and Weber had been turned over to the State. I had known about Weber through Jim, and Rick Dahl, and so on. So I applied, and got the job. So I came in 1933. I had also been, before that, at the Southern Cal school working on my master’s. While there, my bank in Provo went broke. They didn’t cash any checks except my paycheck, and that was [one reason] for my coming to Weber, and obviously expecting to get a little money, didn’t get it until along in October. So you see, at the beginning, where this money problem was one. We still had to run the gym. They had had gym memberships [priced at] fifteen dollars for two years, included locker and towels, but nobody would respond to that. When they really talk about, “We need you,” is the wrong approach. So a little later on, I began to invite employees in different terms to come as our guests and show them what they could have. So we didn’t need them, but they needed 2 us. That clicked, so we began. Now, in the meantime, I didn’t have any money, so I gave the policemen a membership free if they would be a lifeguard. [I gave] Paul Thatcher a membership and he taught fencing. We didn’t have any money to pay anybody, we just horse-traded, and that made it such that we got by. I think that Tracy had much the same problem, in all of his, he couldn’t do what he wanted to do, and I had all of the memberships given away, so we had enough to get by. Here’s what it was. RWS: Let me ask you this. Were you hired to teach physical education and coach as well, or what was the job? RKS: The job was with Carl Belliston and I and Lucille Owens Clark to do all of the teaching, coaching, intermurals and the gym for the community. There are no details as to that, so it ended up that here is your job. How do you do it? Now, as I have seen and studied in various ways, that any administrator has two major qualities. The first one is that he must have a good understanding of what his objectives are to be, and what his goals are to be for the future. The second thing is that he should employ all of the means to get people, faculty, staff, and community, to help him achieve those. Here’s what you are. You’re an administrator at the school, or will you be a department chairman? Here’s your job, how do you do it? So that’s where we started from. Well, as I told you, we horse-traded, and we did it. The only bad thing about that was that later on, years later, as we’d apply for funds for lifeguards and instructors, they couldn’t give us any because it wasn’t in the budget for the year before. So we had a problem there. 3 They had in their equipment for the gym—which was supposed to be an excellent gym—they had a lot of apparatus, ladders, stall bars, traveling rings, a horse and bucket and so on, which was their continuation of the old formal gymnastics of before. They had one swimming pool. They had four handball courts and the dressing rooms. They also had a ballroom, but that was hired out to somebody else as a private dance studio, so we didn’t have use of that. So you had, theoretically, a great gym. But there was nothing on the outside. For football and track we had to go to parks. Well, they wouldn’t let us into the parks because in those days, the rule was to keep off the grass. So we’d get on that bus and go from one place to another to see if we could find an open spot in some of the parks, which would be on Monroe, or go to the north end of town. If the high school had gone there first, why then, we’d have to go somewhere else. So here again was an adjustment in football. We didn’t have any equipment like tackling dummies or so on. We had to pick a guy, and he was our tackling dummy, if he was dumb enough to stay there. RWS: What kind of competitive sports were you involved in in the 1930s? RKS: We had football, basketball, track, and we had wrestling, boxing. That was it. Mostly all of them we could have inside the gym. We had the same league as Rick’s and Snow and Dixie and Cedar City. Our major problem was to get the transportation and wheels to go. You never knew beforehand. RWS: Which did you coach? RKS: I coached football, basketball, wrestling, boxing, and tennis. I also taught all of the Health Ed, did the PE classes, handled all of the community activities at noon 4 and at 5:30 in the afternoons there was public in the gym. The amazing thing was that I wasn’t particularly worried that I was overworked. This is what happened back in those days, this is one of those that you have a job to do, and you do it in the best way you could. RWS: Let me ask you this, if it’s not too personal. What was the salary that you hired on for the first year? RKS: Fifteen hundred. RWS: Fifteen hundred dollars. Were most people getting paid about that, or a little less? RKS: About that, until they had to hire some others, and then there wasn’t enough money left, so they gave them seven or nine hundred, and some a thousand, and so on. But that was about the size of it. They say thirty-three, that was right in the beginning of the Depression. So you’d had many problems. I think there’s where Tracy had his problems, were adjusting with being used to having considerably more money through the Church than through a state which had run into problems. RWS: What kind of a president was President Tracy? What kind of a man? RKS: He was an idealistic man and he had dreams of the future. The difficulty, as I saw it, was that he had conflicts with the state superintendent, who was our highest administrating head—Skidmore. They had problems. But Tracy had the support of most of his faculty. But again, as I say, he was one that set goals. He, like all of the others, was a good administrator and would set his goals, but he had a difficult time getting the support of people to help him do that. Most of these 5 people resented very much that the Church gave away their gym and their school and their property to the State. They felt that they had been—well, here was Tracy, not in a good position to make that adjustment but he was an inspiring leader. He did a whole lot of things that you would find that a church man would do more than a layperson. But again, I got along nicely with Tracy, and he did a good job. RWS: About how many faculty members were there? RKS: We had three in our department. I imagine there wasn’t over twenty-five total. We had less than five hundred students who were there. I think four hundred and something. So you had a problem at that time with finances and students and so on. RWS: Did most of the students live near the school, or did they travel back and forth every day? RKS: They lived near the school, in Weber County primarily, although we had—there at the beginning quite a few came down from Milad, Idaho. Most everyone from Milad was a good boxer so that’s why most of them came down. I would think some came maybe from around Tremonton and Brigham, maybe Morgan, but they would drive back and forth each day, most of them. RWS: What kind of changes did President Creer make when he came? RKS: When he came, he was a great historian. He came from University of Washington. He attempted to increase funds to the library, and did. He also felt that we should have a lyceum. I recall one of the times he got Admiral Byrd, and he hired the Egyptian Theater to have the event free for the public. We could only 6 handle about a hundred and fifty, two hundred in our auditorium, so we went down there to have it. Only twenty people showed up. But then we had some good ones after that, and so on. But that was the beginning of it. The other thing was that he started leaves of absence. He had run into difficulties with the Standard Examiner because he couldn’t get them to publicize the worthwhile things at the school. I recall they had a big event where they came up and took pictures and wrote up when we’d had a swallowing the mouse contest, and then we had kissable lips. Then Whit Young made a plea for cats for the anatomy department and they’d come out and say that Whit Young was stealing all the cats. So Creer was very much disturbed at this and would respond that he would like to have something good about the school, rather than all of this. RWS: Who was the swallowing the mouse contest? RKS: Somebody at that time would swallow goldfish. Well, so we get a little different type of thing, swallowing a mouse. RWS: What was the kissable lips contest? RKS: Well, we’d line up the women that we wanted to get in it, and then we’d have the fellows kiss them, and whoever had the best would get the prize, whoever that was. RWS: So you had the women secret? RKS: Oh, no. RWS: Who kissed them, the judges? RKS: Well, I don’t know, but they didn’t let me. 7 RWS: I would have protested. RKS: Well, this was some of the thing. There’s a lot of these side effects down in that time was done in that particular time was done all over the country. So here again was Creer, and Creer also would go with me on basketball trips, and he got very well acquainted with all of the administration in our athletic league, Dixie, St. George, Snow, Rexburg, and Albion. So he did well as an administrator. He brought Weber up, because now we had a little better financial picture than the beginning. Just to show you how it was at first on this financial picture, I wanted some athletic supplies. So I put in a requisition for five basketballs, two sets of boxing gloves, two volleyballs. So our treasury had to do it through the State Board of Supplies and Purchases. So they put it up to bid, and the lowest bid they gave, they sent it to us, and this whole group of things cost less than ten dollars. They got them, evidently, from Woolworth or similar like that. So you had a terrific difficult time of ordering supplies and getting them accurate and so on. That was one of Tracy’s biggest problems, I think, to solve and to get it out. He and Blaine Peterson did the best they could. So for two years they left this financial thing in a much better state so that Creer could do it. RWS: Now, you must have begun to have some good athletes and some good students who began to perform in the 1930s and the 1940s. Do you remember some? RKS: Oh, yes. In the first year I came, I made my calls for football, and I had nine turn out. So we had to search the school for anyone who was alive and could come out. In two weeks, we were to have a game with Hawaii, too. This is it. RWS: How many did you finally end up with? 8 RKS: We wound up with enough so we had a pretty good team of individuals. Ron Williams was one that was pulled over, and we knew he had some very good ones. Now, the next year there was quite a few kids came in from—well, basketball didn’t have anyone, because all of them that could play were playing or going somewhere else. So the next year I had two or three kids from Murray come up. With Stan and Krup Snow, Widderson and so on we got along pretty well and at least beat everybody we were in the league with. The next year we won it, and we had Dan Watts who was a great ball player and a great leader, along with Lee Wilcox. Well, when we get talking about the great ones, they all are in their own way RWS: Sure, everyone who comes out. RKS: I had at one time, one of our guards. He was a little bit discouraged, and I said, “Well, everyone on our team is the best at one particular thing. He said, “What am I best at?” Well, I said, “You drive in to the basket harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. The only difficulty is, if a man happens to be in your way, you don’t—” He said, “Well, I’ll do that.” So he turned out to be one of our better guards because of that. So I had more of the boys who won the league. They also won the AAU and went to Chicago to play. The next year we had another group who won the AA Conference and the AAU and went to Denver again. So we had some great boys there, but in every case, you had a call for the sport. In football, the first day of school ended Thanksgiving. You called for basketball the following Monday, with the same coach. Then after basketball is over in the middle of March, then you have your spring sports, with the same coach. 9 Ferinossi had swimming and one followed the other. We had some great swimmers. So here is basketball with everyone that came out. No one was turned away. It’s amazing how many—if you have that type of kid turn out who wants to make it, he will do it. We used to have a lot of our kids go from high school to the senior colleges that were the top-notchers. They sit on the bench and soon they’d become second-raters. Kids that came to our place that played first-string, and soon they become first-string. We had many of them that went from our place to the other schools, and they’d be first-string right off the bat, where the ones who were supposedly better earlier. We had no jobs for them at all, except janitorial jobs where they paid them thirty-five cents an hour. We did have a key room attendant who would help the patrons. But there was no pressure on them. So athletics was entirely different. RWS: Did you have many kids that played three sports? RKS: Oh, yes. RWS: You don’t see very many today do that. RKS: Oh, no. You find today that they go all out at one sport. Well, we found that this was change in athletics until the war in 1941. Then all athletics were cut out until about 1946, when they came home. RWS: So you didn’t have any competitive teams during the war? RKS: No. Why would they be here? They were able-bodied. RWS: What about the Utah team? The Utah basketball team, then, that won the NCAA? Was that right at the end of the war? 10 RKS: Well, it was probably just the beginning of the war. Because Osaka who played for me, went to Utah, so he played right then. So the only thing we had during the war—we had the Navy cadets here. So we taught them calisthenics and swimming and we did have some basketball, but it wasn’t regular league. After the war was over and they all came back, you had just so many of them. They were anxious to come. They were given a PE credit for the military service. They didn’t have to take gym so we organized our gym into recreational activities. Mixed tennis, mixed volleyball, badminton, square dancing, social dance, and we used this as the media for re-establishing the association between the two sexes that they had missed so long. This lasted for about three years. I think, during that time, we had very few absences of either the male or the female. So all the way along we’ve adjusted to what the need was. We had to. We didn’t have to ask anybody, we just knew. RWS: Now, when did you begin to become the chairman of the physical education department or the director of athletics? Did that begin right after the war? RKS: No, that was right at the beginning. I was the whole works, whatever that was. RWS: Right at the start. RKS: I was the head, the basketball coach, the athletics director, the head of the department, and I did everything. I didn’t have to do janitorial work, but everything else, I did. After the war, after they come back, you begin to have more people come out. They also had veterans’ pay. So the first time we begin to have all veterans, including athletes, having time to go to school. That was the beginning of it. We begin to have inter-state and inter-collegiate activities, 11 particularly with Compton and some of those. So in 1946 and 1947 we went down there to Daytona While we were there, there were so many teams who wanted to come that they picked up gladly seeing we were on our way to Daytona. So the need there was for an organization to conduct junior college athletics and also to set accountability rules for them. So while we were down there, they established a beginning again of the National Junior College Athletics Association. I happened to be one of the regional directors, and then the following year, I went to Hutchison with the team, and there was elected President. RWS: That was 1947? RKS: That was 1949. So here, again, there was another change. Now, as soon as that happened, a lot more interest in sports began. I just jotted down some pages here. Receipts were around $13,000 for all sports. RWS: Now, which year would that have been? RKS: That would be around about 1960. It was still a junior college and about 1961 that we really began to more than double that. So there was a change. Also in that period of time we still had calls for each activity, but we didn’t really get out and proselyte until a little later, because we had as many as we could handle. There were so many different schools, and all of these thousands of young men who’d been in the Army. Now we come back and from about 1941 to 1946 we had a lot of them come in. So here you find quite a difference in your athletic ability. You also find that there was a difference in your PE programs, as I indicated. We adjusted to what the demands were at that time. 12 RWS: When did you begin to hire either a football or a basketball coach, so that you began doing a little less there, and more supervision? RKS: Well, in 1937, when Dixon came we hired Bob Davis. So there was the beginning of it. Carl Belliston left, and we also hired Ferinossi, who would be another man. So we had an extra man than we had before now, up to three. RWS: What did Davis do when he was hired? RKS: Football. It involves anything that we needed to be done. He was assigned to it. RWS: What about Losey? What was his expertise? RKS: Swimming, intermurals. At Pineview Dam we had a dock slip. Up until the time the school started in the fall the scouts used it. But after that, we could use it, all except weekends, during the day. With all of these catamarans, sail boats, canoes. So Losey had that and he had one class required that everyone had to have with boats and sailing safety. At least one week. Once they went up there, it was by far the most popular class of all. We used to have intermurals in boating, and canoeing and kayaking, sailing. RWS: Up on Pineview. RKS: Yes. We had our student aid, from the government at that time, which again, we’d use to help run things. You could accomodate about fifty different people there in the boats at one time. So again, we also increased going to Snow Basin in skiing. So we had quite a group of outside activities, off the campus, primarily because we were so limited on the inside. RWS: Now, when Bob Davis was hired to be football coach, did you assist him? RKS: No. 13 RWS: You moved kind of out of football now? RKS: That’s right. He did that himself, most of the time you did the whole thing yourself. I think with football you can have assistants. I don’t see that for basketball that is necessary. For the simple reason that you have basketball where you go from offense to defense so fast that you can’t make a division, whereas in football you have offense and defense, which is specific. You can have different assignments without complicating and confusing kids. RWS: Did most players in football play both ways—offense and defense? RKS: Oh, yes. Yes, it was necessary. Most of them, if they were good athletes, came out to football and basketball and track. RWS: Who was the next football coach you hired? RKS: Milt Mecham. RWS: When was he hired? RKS: Well, he came in and was Bob’s assistant. Not hired as an assistant, but he got the job as dorm supervisor over on the old county courthouse. Then he helped coach it. Then he was called back into the army. Bob left during the war, so after the war when we started again, why we hired Milt again. That was in 1950 or 1946. RWS: Did he have assistants then? RKS: Well, he had assistants. He had a guy Dean Gardner who was teaching English. We attempted to get him to become a full time assistant in football and athletics, but he turned it down because that was too much work, where he only had to teach three classes of English. He later went on into law, so he made up his 14 mind. So we had assistants then. This was after the war, and a great many more took my place. RWS: Now, Milt coached football for how long? RKS: Well, I imagine he was there about six years, maybe longer than that. RWS: Was Wally an assistant to Milt? RKS: No. He had been a great football coach down in Mesa, Arizona. Then he left that and went to the Y [Brigham Young University] as an assistant. So then when he quit the Y and went to contracting work. We contacted him and had him come up. That’s the interesting thing about coaches in the later years, which didn’t happen in the beginning. I think that, due to the fact that if you’re going to be a coach in the later years, you’re going to be fired. The only question is when. You had Milt who was fired, and then Romney was fired. He got his doctorate degree in Burnwright. There’s so many times when that occurs. I go back to the time when Clyde Packer was coaching up at Rick’s. We competed against him. He had a hard time getting along on his salary, so he got some dry land and he would sluff school and go out and plow or plant. He had to leave a little more, he was called carpet, and they finally canned him. So he then got some more [land] and this was during the war. He got some more and two years later he made a donation to Rick’s College of $50,000 in appreciation for canning him. Now, how many times has that occurred? A man has to be a pretty good head and student of human nature, organization, and leadership and so on. He’s good for six or seven years and then you lose a game, I’ve noticed. 15 So there’s been a great change in athletics in the last little while. So here, now we have this gradual shift and change, where they have to have regulation. Basketball can’t start until the Fifteenth of October, officially. Then they can be given their assignments. Football starts two weeks before the first game. But then they can have spring football, and they can have classes, and weekly training and so on. So now it’s primarily recruiting and, I think, without any doubt, they’ve almost made a business. In the old days it didn’t matter whether you won or lost, it’s how you played the game. But how do you play the game? If you don’t have the horses, I don’t care what the coach does. RWS: Let me come back to that. Let me ask you a couple of other questions about some of your teams. On the faculty now at the college, do we have people who started out in athletics here, playing? RKS: You have one—forgot his name, but he was a big, tall center. He was in foreign languages. RWS: Yes, that’s Belka? RKS: Yes, Belka. He was a great one. Of course, you had Milt, and you had Wally. RWS: Did Wally play here? RKS: No. Some of the ones we had are Dick Williams and Ray Reed. RWS: Now, did they both play here? RKS: Yes. RWS: Which sports did they play? RKS: Football and basketball. Dale Gardner was another one. He played football and basketball, and probably more, but I don’t recall right at this moment. 16 RWS: Now, during all this period while Milt was coaching, and Wally’s coaching, are you coaching the basketball team? RKS: Yes, until about 1957. RWS: So you coached basketball for about twenty-four years. RKS: Yes. Then Bruce Larsen came. He brought some good ideas. I was not sold on recruiting. When Wally was here, and Dick Motta was here, I gave Wally three hundred dollars for recruiting. Dick—I offered him one time, I said, I’ll give you thirty-five hundred dollars. He said, “You give me that much, and I’ll have you a winning team every year.” I said, “Okay, will you put that in writing?” But he wouldn’t. But it soon jumped from there, up and up and up and so on—not only the total amount, but the individual amount for room, tuition, and books. RWS: What kind of a coach was Dick Motta? RKS: Dick was a very excellent coach. His fundamental offense, defense and he was an excellent teacher. He also taught my kinesiology, and he took very great interest in that. He also wouldn’t stand for any players getting low on their grades. They had to be in shape, and so on. He did have some negative personality problems with some people. Some athletes, I mean. But primarily because they weren’t doing what he wanted them to do. I think there’s no question about him being a great coach, because he was fundamentally sound in every respect—sportsmanship, so on. RWS: What about Bruce Larsen? 17 RKS: He was excellent too. He won the Nationals as a junior college, second one year. Then he coached down at Arizona. But again, the truism came out there and he finally got canned. Some of these lose the bet, and you’re in trouble. RWS: Do you think it’s possible for a good ethical coach to survive today? RKS: Oh, no question about it. They can survive, and I can give you dozens of illustrations. One of them is down at Southern Cal, and he was not as ethical. There’s another thing—Monarch. He had two or three coming, because he wouldn’t give these kids anything under the table. The parents said, “I want my boy to go to a coach where he’ll learn certain traits,” and so on. This, I think is still good, and I think you get in many of your coaches. Occasionally you’ll find some that will make a great start. Some of them said that this type of person can turn things around. The one that has the most money and the fewest ethics, but they don’t last. I don’t care who it is. Sports will promote all of the qualities that are needed in life, team play, conditioning, perfection in skills, and the will to win. You don’t get that by undercutting the lead strings on the recruiting practices and so on. Some of this you’ve had many times, I thought, that we’re a disgrace to the— the other thing about it is this, that many of your kids have ideas. You better have somebody who’s worth patterning after if you’re going to survive. I think there’s no question about that. RWS: When did you become the director of athletics, and were you still the chairman of the physical education department at the same time? RKS: Yes. I was that right up until 1965. Then I went on to teach for three more years, and then Auckland took me on for two more. I think, without any question, that 18 some of the greatest satisfactions I had were in teaching. I was a better teacher when I retired at age seventy than I ever was before. I had a different class outline each quarter, and I kept up on all of the latest scientific evidence of the physiology of exercise and administration. There’s nothing quite as great as teaching for two reasons. One, you’re dealing directly with students trying to be their best. Secondly, you’re absolutely in command of your class and your methods. They can’t interfere with that. They can if you’re not doing it right. Growth comes from that. I think sometimes in administrative jobs you have to do things that you’re not a hundred percent in agreement with. RWS: You were involved, really kind of wearing three hats. You were coaching, you had administrative jobs, and you were teaching. Did you really prefer one more than the other, do you think? RKS: Well, in the old days I enjoyed the coaching because you have an absolute honesty with all kids. It’s a great. They come out of their own free will, and you teach them the skills and the sportsmanship and the team play and the will to win. I often felt that if my kids played well, I felt better than if they won the game. If they didn’t play well and still won it, then they weren’t pushed. I also felt that you should play the better teams, that are better than you at the beginning of the game, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they are at the end of the game. You have to be pushed. I liked that. I liked the informality of teaching. RWS: Well, they put you in as head of department and so on with certain restrictions. That wasn’t true in the old days. You could horse trade. You could do anything you wanted without going to committee, and then you’d have to justify. The only 19 justification you had there, could you do the work. I don’t know. I enjoyed the teaching. Getting back again to what we were talking about before, that as I go through the periods of each of our Presidents, I saw a distinct chapter but each one of them had certain qualifications that fitted where he advanced at that particular time. RKS: Let’s talk about President Dixon, we haven’t talked about him. What did he do? RWS: Well, first of all, he united the campus. He had an administrative council. We also learned from there that he had an Advisory Board downtown, and from Morgan and Box Elder. They would advise him on what to do. As a result of that, he unified the community to Weber College. They no longer objected that the Church gave away their gym, because they had a better one than what they had. That was one of the things. Another thing that Dixon had was this ability to get ideas and incorporate them. One thing that he had was stress on vocational subjects. He took those, and he also ended up with facilities to train men and women as skilled performers for Hillfield. He counted those as regular students and did for many years. He utilized that, I think, without any question of guilt. The appropriation from the legislature did. But as I say, he did so many things. He also got the land up at Starvation for summer school. Later on he also got us an old lifeboat that we sailed on. We had that up to Pineview and we’d go sailing on that for quite a while. So he was innovating in so many different ways, which was a great thing for expanding and getting some guidance in many different directions and 20 stimulating directions. He was attempting to do things for the school that produced. RWS: What did President Miller do? What kind of a person was he? RKS: Well, Miller was one that didn’t like it too tight. At that particular time, that was a good thing for him, because here was BYU wanting to take over, through the legislature, Weber College back to the church. So here was so many different people at the church saying things, as often occurs, that just because he was a general authority and says his opinion, doesn’t necessarily mean that was the church’s opinion. We had so many different times, there at the school that they were angry at the Church, because of what someone would say. I came home one time and said that to my wife, and she said, “Well, you’d better be careful, running around our authorities like that.” I said, “If I was an authority then I would agree with him.” So the next time she went to stake conference there was an authority there and he said something, and she came home mad as could be. “He had no right to say that in stake conference!” I said, “Listen here, don’t you run down an authority.” Well, that’s the way it was. I’ve seen a guy like Leland get mad, or Peterson, or any of them, in one way or another. Now, Miller was the soother of that. He was a calmer of most things. He also had his visions on increasing the scope of the school, and built new buildings. So he worked in a quiet way, and got a lot of things done. So at the beginning of that upper campus, which was completed under Dixon, Miller continued on with all of the other buildings, and increased the amounts of land. 21 RWS: When we moved to the upper campus, which buildings were completed? RKS: Oh, two, three, or four. RWS: What did the physical education people do? RKS: We still went down to the old campus. We did, in the fall and the spring, have some classes outdoors. So this was in May we began to see what we needed in the gym. At that time, though, we had made a strong push for a four-year school. They had Dixon there, but Governor Lee vetoed it at that time. So here again, this is going on, and we were in the fall and expecting to make a transition from one to the other. We were working on about three different programs. One is the PE program for the four-year school, the athletic program for a four-year school and the professional majors. Now, we’d already got started and were pretty well along on our first two. For our majors, we had a different problem. I’d had sufficient amount of experience in meeting with PE leaders in various places, and one of the criticisms that many schools had against the BYU, Utah, and Utah State was that they were teaching college physical education to junior high and high school students. So when we started our investigation, we looked over the catalogs of many schools. There must have been maybe a hundred of them. Out of that we had certain core requirements that we thought were good. The other thing we did was to contact the principals and the superintendents of the surrounding area because we felt that our majors were primarily for our surrounding areas in the public schools. So we modified it quite a little. As a result, when we started that we had a significant acceptance of our majors in Davis, Granite, Weber, and so 22 on—primarily for that one reason and because we added that dimension to it. I think, many of the four-year students at outside universities stressed preparation for graduate study. Sometimes that is not a good foundation for the public schools. RWS: You mentioned President Creer travelled with you. Did President Dixon and President Miller also travel with you on some of the athletic trips? RKS: Oh, President Dixon would on some. He was a little different on that. He would say, “On one of the buildings we need to look at the colored windows that they have in Ashton, Idaho. Let’s go up and look them over instead of the bland ones,” we’d say. “Where are you going?” “Oh, I bought a new fishing rod.” That was one thing about Dixon, when things got tough, he’d go fishing. Many others, when things got tough, they’d go play golf or something, but I think that’s an important. Now, Miller, I think he’d go various places but he was not as rabid a fisherman. He’d go sometimes on a football trip, but he’d drive one of the extra cars. RWS: Was President Dixon a pretty good fisherman? RKS: Yes. RWS: Was he a fly fisherman or bait fisherman? RKS: Everything, depending on what he wanted. He wasn’t a dedicated fly fisherman, or spinner, he just liked to get out and catch them. RWS: Now, just recently, a building on campus has been named the Reed Swenson physical education building. Who planned the building, who put it together? How was that done? 23 RKS: Our department got together, and in order to do that we decided that we needed certain facilities where we could train all of our people for what we needed. So we jotted down what we needed. We thought there should be dance and there should be swimming. There should be handball or squash. There should be weight training. There should be a basketball floor. There should be other areas for gymnastics and other kinds of things. We had eight different ones. Then with President Miller and Clark Ricks, we would go on trips and see all of the new gyms in Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. We had two questions we’d ask. What do you really like about your new building? The other question we asked was, “If you were building ever again, what would you modify a little or change?” From that, we jotted them down. Many of them, at that time, were making an auditorium out of their gym, with a stage and so on. In every case, they objected to that, because the acoustics aren’t there, and there was a different rowdy-ism when we were in the auditorium style, because they were not in a gym. So from that, we now came back. Now, what we decided to do then was that we wanted all eight places available for use at one time, so they’re separate. We also have a passageway through from the outside without traveling across the floor from these places. We also wanted storage places for each one, so it was based on where you were working. We also decided that, from the gym floor in the original one, that by adding six more feet, we could have three regulation basketball courts. We had to widen the two balconies so that we had regulation volleyball and other courts. 24 We had those particulars. Then we sat down and we decided that the use of each of these would be first, for the physical education classes. Second would be for athletics, the third would be for intermurals, and the fourth for individual players. This was to be done with all of these eight areas, so that some time during the day they could be used by one group or another. This worked out very well. We also had to have, in that case, the locker rooms, dressing rooms, and showers. We also had, adjacent to our classrooms, a kitchen, because in our recreation food and refreshments was a part of it. So I think we had a pretty good outline, which everyone contributed to, the architects and the many places where it was. RWS: Who else was in the physical education department in nineteen—I guess this would have been 1963 or earlier than that? 1955 or 1956? RKS: Well, no, it was about 1957. You had about three years for that particular process. RWS: Okay. Who was involved within the physical education department then? RKS: Walley and Alder. RWS: Who was the football coach? RKS: Yes, Bruce Larsen, and I think Wes Lorren. I’m not sure. Well, I’m sure that Margaret Waterfall was because she was the expert on the dance part of it. The swimming and so on. That was about the size of what we had but we got our ideas from many other places. Most gyms, if it’s just an open space you have different activities. This way was really so that you can handle—we have about 25 that time, around 18,200. We figured that we would have ample for it to go up to five thousand. Up to ten thousand, we’d still have ample room for it. RWS: Now, did you teach most of the courses in that building, from handball to basketball? RKS: Yes, all of them minus the outside ones. We had a room downstairs. We had two classrooms on the main floor. We had the kitchenette right next to one. Then we had the two balconies, the gym, and sometimes we had all of them going at once. RWS: When did black athletes or black people begin coming to the College? RKS: Well, we had quite a number all the way along, for the simple reason that you had, in Ogden, the railway station. Down in the lower 25th, there was a large number of blacks. Porters, cooks, chefs, and they were all high-class people. So we had a lot of those that came here. They weren’t imports, except the few. We did have one, who was Willy Thomas, who came in here. He had been a cook. He came and he played. He made a great track coach out of Lossey and won some national records and so on. He played basketball for me, and he didn’t bother things. Then, later on, he was the first black that was a Rhodes Scholar. We had some good kids that were black, but they all came from here, and that was another reason why it made it rather interesting for us. When we did have some blacks that came in, that were in a black community it was quite different from what they found in Logan, where there wasn’t any black communities at all. They still had to find a girl and that’s where a lot of the conflict arose. 26 RWS: Were there blacks in school, do you remember when you came in 1933? RKS: One or two, but they lived in Ogden. RWS: Did they pick up more after the war, or did you feel it was about the same? RKS: I think so. Because there were a lot of them that came, and we had a community of high-class Negroes that came in. These were mostly employees of the railroad. Porters, cooks, waiters, maybe conductors, I don’t know. All of them were there, and they had two or three really fine black families that took care of those. So we had quite a number after the war, and then Bruce Larsen had Carter Kent, a little later on who was a coach at Ogden High, one of the greatest. We had quite a group of them. RWS: Let me ask you about Larry Reed. When he came to school, what did he do in terms of athletics? RKS: Larry Reed came from Morgan. He went out for football, and played end. Then, when it was over, he played basketball for me. I’ve got pictures here somewhere. He played at the same time as Dan Borden. They both played at that time. I don’t think they did anything off the track, but they played well. That was one of the other things I think is important. Whenever you have outstanding students, or athletes, later on, when you’re looking for hiring, you don’t make any mistakes on that. Where if you look elsewhere, that’s one of the reasons I objected to a lot of the criticism that we were inbred. We weren’t inbred. I went to Southern Cal and the University of Utah, and teachers there were changed from hundred to less than a hundred, both from the outside. Well, it couldn’t possibly get inbred. RWS: What about Dick Williams? 27 RKS: Dick was the same. RWS: Where was he from? RKS: He was here in Ogden. He played football and basketball. He came back out of the war, and played halfback for us. Then he taught in the public schools. He then went into other types of business, and came back here as an assistant. So, you can’t go wrong on many of those. We’ve had a lot of them. Carol Westmore was one of those. Many of them we’ve had our own students, and didn’t make a mistake on any one of them. We’ve had a lot that we brought in from the outside that we made a mistake on. RWS: Tell me about Bob Peterson. He came and was involved in athletics here. RKS: Yes. He played football, and went up to Utah State. He came back here and we didn’t have a place for him at the department at the beginning, so he went over into the night school with Lorenzo Peterson. He was there for quite a long time. Same thing holds true with many of them. I think it’s a mistake to hire a man just because you can get a man. Take another case we had. Here was Larry Crompton. He wanted to come here, and at the present time I didn’t have a job for him. But then, when I had an opening in athletics, as an athletic manager, he was at financial. Same holds true with another. I think if you’re going to hire somebody, you’ve got to hire them where you’re pretty sure they’re going to succeed. I think the unkindest thing is to put a kid in a job that you don’t think he can handle. This is true all the way along. If they have it, put them in a spot where they’ll succeed. 28 RWS: I was interested in your story about Bob Peterson. Why don’t you tell me again on tape please? RKS: Well, he was our track coach, and I think he had listened to Larry Reed, how hard it was to roll that clay track and so on. So Bob saw that they had just put one in down at BYU. They contracted one big company or something, but three times that. So he moved down and contacted all these re-tread, and got them to give us their rubber. They were glad to do it, because they had to haul it away. So he got Stewart Foster, one of his students, who got a school truck, and they would go every day and haul that rubber and dump it and store it. He got 108 tons of this rough rubber, and they got the school to put up the $17,000 to have it put in. That was a saving of at least $33,000 because he couldn’t have gotten that in any other way for less than $50,000. So this, again, is one of those that any of these people that were given an assignment to do, had their objectives and set about the way to achieve it. RWS: If I were to ask you to pick out the two or three most exciting events over your teaching career at Weber, two or three exciting or most memorable events that you can think about, what would come to your mind? RKS: Well, that’s a tough one. There were a lot of exciting ones in athletics. We had a lot of exciting ones in graduations. I would think that some of the great events would be the closing of school, and equally as great is the opening of school. Now, when you get to the others, I’ve seen so many times where we have won games that I haven’t felt too good about, so I don’t ever get too thrilled about victories unless you learn something about it. 29 RWS: What about the two or three best all-around athletes that you’ve coached? Who would come to your mind? I know you’ve had a lot of them, but there’s one or two, three or four stand out in your mind. RKS: I couldn’t have three or four. I could have seventy-five or eighty. Now, what do you call an outstanding athlete? Is it a little fast shooter? Or is it a big tall center? Or is it a rugged, tough—so on. As far as I’m concerned, each individual is great in their own ability. I’d rather think of it that way as being the best of all of them. Now, sometimes you get an all-around, and he’s mediocre in all of them, and he’s got something of each. I’m not sure that that’s what makes a great team, or a great man. I think it’s an ability to do certain things better than anyone else. RWS: Okay, let me ask you this question. What would be the thing that you think you’ve learned most from your experience in higher education—one or two things dealing with people, or students, or teams? RKS: Well, I think in that case the thing I’ve learned most of all is that every individual is different, delightfully different. How thankful I am that that is true. Now, the only time that I see that you have a grateful faculty, is when you have Leland Monson, Thatcher Allred, Dick Sadler, Willy Alder, Walley Bradley, and a Bill Stratford. I could list any great number of others, and from each you can see strengths. You can see in others things to avoid. Now, that to me, the same thing holds true in class. I’ve had many kids in class that I teach to them the philosophy of physical education, and they go to sleep, some of them. Others are absolutely thrilled. On the other hand, I teach a class in physiology of exercise, and the questions are what they can use to get a kid in better condition. A different type of person is 30 thrilled, and so on. Then you get into administration, and you still have a different one. So, I think as far as individuals are concerned, you’ve got to analyze who you’re teaching and adjust your teaching methods accordingly. Now, I was taught at one time—I’d teach several classes one after the other. If you’re not careful, you get into trouble real quick who you’re teaching. So I learned, in that case, to draw a chart and have the numbers, the rows and the seats, and the name. I would say this, we’re discussing these problems, and if anybody has anything to add to the class, good, because if you don’t, I’m going to ask you. I was willing to check here if they answered it right, then over here, and then over here. The next time nobody would answer, and then I’d call. I used to have a lot of oral quizzes. Here’s where I used to have my fun. I would have an oral quiz. Anyone can ask a question that they would like explained, and someone else would have to answer it. If they answered it, then someone else could say, I think they should have another one. Here you’re not dealing with things that they don’t want to hear, but you’re now dealing with the subject. I keep track. I wouldn’t rely on a final exam. I said, “I have a daily record here, and I can tell you.” I had one kid come in, and he said, “How come I get a C?” “Well, because I like you. I feel good towards you—I should have given you a D.” He said, “How come?” I said, “Well, let me just ask you a few questions.” Now, I can ask you a lot of questions that even you couldn’t answer. So I asked him some questions. I said, “What I’m after is when we go out to coach is that you’re going to succeed. So I would like you to answer these.” So by the time he was through, and I was through, he said “You’re right, and I’m going to do better.” 31 Here again is a question. A grade doesn’t mean anything. There’s a whole lot of difference that I find in teaching a PE major that can never be discovered by a written answer. I had one kid that had the most atrocious spelling. So I called him in and said, “Look at this.” I happened to have a writing question. He said, “You’re the first teacher that’s ever said anything about it.” I said, “Well, I’m going to ask you every day to come in and spell ten new words for me,” which he did. Over a period of time, why, that kid had more fun. Here’s what I think is the difference in people, so that you change your techniques. Without giving a great speech about it, I think they can see where their weakness is. There’s where I used to get my biggest thrill, is seeing how kids succeed.