Oral History Program Reed Swenson Interviewed by Richard Sadler 28 July and 1 December 1981 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Reed Swenson Interviewed by Richard Sadler 28 July and 1 December 1981 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State 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: Swenson, Reed, an oral history by Richard Sadler, 28 July and 1 December 1981, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Reed K. Swenson Abstract: The following is an interview conducted with Dr. Reed K. Swenson (born 1903) by Richard Sadler on July 28 and December 1, 1981. Dr. Swenson talks about his experience teaching and coaching various subjects and sports at all levels of education. He discusses the numerous individuals who have greatly impacted his teaching philosophies and Weber State as a whole. Dr. Swenson served as Weber College Athletic Director from 1933 to 1971. RS: This is an interview conducted on the evening of July 28, 1981, at the home of Mr. Reed Knute Swenson, 1484 24th Street, Ogden, Utah. Dr. Swenson is being interviewed by Richard Sadler. Reed, it’s a pleasure to talk with you this evening. I’d like you just to tell me a little bit about your early life: when were you born and where were you born and some things you remember? RKS: I was born February 16, 1903, on a cold winter night, as they tell me. I was the third boy in our family. There was seven boys and two girls. My dad was John C. Swenson, a teacher at BYU, and my mother was Morgan Davis, from Panguitch, Utah, who was a great singer and musician. We lived in Provo. We lived with these kids and a small amount of money my dad made in teaching. We had a barn, horses, two cows, chickens, a pig, a garden, and a farm. They put these kids to work to help raise fruit, and hay, and so on. Our dad was also head of the licensing bureau there at BYU. At that time, they brought in some of the great personalities of the country, musicians and many others. He would bring them into our home, or we would go to the performance and meet them all, so I became rather familiar with them and comfortable around some of the finest people. One of the things about our family 1 was that it was rather friendly, and we talked about art and music and so on. My mother and dad were not preachers. We discussed things. My dad wanted to know what was going on so he’d ask questions. If it was good, well, he’d compliment it and he was pleased: “Well, what do you think about it?” If things were satisfactory in their reply, why, he continued to discuss until he got the whole thing settled out. Later on, I used to ask him, “What do you think about this?” He’d say, “Well, what do you think about it?” And I’d say, “I think it’s okay.” Then, occasionally, I would get quite stressed at some of the problems that I had met in school—particularly, here at Weber. He would laugh and say, “That’s funny. That man is an unconscious human.” And so it would go over. My mother was much the same, only she would discipline people in a different manner. Usually, she was not disciplined, but you were. I learned one or two things about that. If you are going to discipline somebody, why let the discipline fit the offender and not the one who is giving it? Mother was also a great singer and piano player. She used to play the piano and we would sing, so our home was one of music and education and so on. She had nine children, then she went back and finished her high school. Went to college, got her teaching certificate, and taught music at the public schools and made a great reputation with her boys’ courses. She also graduated the same time as my youngest sister did, and she was a younger lady when she 2 died at 80. She had just got to having her ninth kid. We had a tremendously interesting thing. My dad also—in our family, along with several other BYU professors— bought about 200 acres of land up in Provo Canyon in Wildwood. They all built cabins, and we’d go up there in the summer. Not only that, but they then went at the same time and would go up to Timpanogos and make the hikes. I was just a kid, but I used to remember the great times we’d have. The bonfire and the program before and the hike. We would stop, and I remember—Walt Buss’ dad, Fred Buss, explained the whole geological situation. We had quite a number of biologists that would point out the grass and many of the birds and several others the flora. So, this was a very interesting thing. As a result of that, they formed what was called the Timpanogos Nature Club, they held back in Provo. We would go out at various times to—by gal, we went up early one morning down in the mouth of the Provo River to see the beavers build their dams. We’d go up South Fork to Rock Canyon to catch moths and mount them. We had another man who would take the telescope and we would see the stars and he would explain it. Our whole families would go to those. It wasn’t just one or two others, it was one of these that everybody participated in. This was somewhat the nature of our family. As I look back, there are hundreds of things that, if I have ever run across a problem that I don’t know how to solve, I think, “Well, what would my dad or my mother do with this? What would my brothers do, or my sisters?” Pretty soon the answer would come, 3 because they would reverse and say, “What would you do?” So I would do what they did. Some of my early family—E.L. Roberts was one of my dad’s best friends. He led this Timpanogos hike, and he was in our home a lot. Sometimes these people—while they were educated, were also great family friends, and were in our home many, many times. I recall that I went to elementary training school in BYU, and on the top floor of that building was the men’s gym. So I went up one day and met E.L. Roberts and asked him if he had an old basketball I could have. He was tickled to death, and he gave me an old one that my dad had then fixed up and I was number one kid on the block. We put a hoop up on a barn and played basketball. When I coached, I gave hundreds of old worn-out balls to kids. Every one of them in their manhood has come back and sometimes tell me about, “Remember when you gave me that basketball? One of the great things.” I always added a few little items: that this was the ball that we won the championship, and this, that, and the other. So it was a home life that I don’t think could have been beaten. I had a great love for the outdoors, for music, for education, and friends, and family. That gives you a little background of where I came from. RS: Let me ask you a couple of questions about Provo. When you were growing up, what do you remember about Provo? What size town was it? RKS: Well, it was a pretty big town. I know that I took our horses and I had a job for the city and the snowplow. I would take one quarter of the town and get up early in 4 the morning and do it. They had sidewalks, and there was Main Street and Academy Avenue. I don’t know how many people were there. There was enough, I know that. We would always walk the town and so on. They’d have parades. I would always have a parade. In many of these parades, I’d just take one of our horses and blacken my face and put a feather in my hat, and put a rope and ride it bareback. It was one of those that we had a lot of fun we made by sleighing with our horses. Many other things. These were the days before they had skiing, so you’d take your sled and go sleigh riding, or many things of that nature. The town was centered around BYU and our church and the home. Of course, everybody knew everybody that was downtown had a store. You knew them by first name and so on. It was like any small town at that time. I was born in 1903, which is 78 years ago. I’ve grown a little, and so has the town. RS: Was this snowplow job your first job earning money? RKS: Oh no, I had jobs of various types. That was one of the other things, that my dad would not give me a job, but he made it so that he opened up jobs for me. I used to pass out window cards for BYU; I would take them downtown and put them in the windows and I’d get two and a half, which is a tremendous amount of money for me. I had a lot of jobs thinning beets for 50 cents. All of them were very smallpaying jobs. Now, when you get a little bit older, I was still in high school, I was hauling gravel, and I could haul gravel on the roads and so on. I’d get two dollars a load and I’d make eight dollars a day, which was more than my dad would make. I didn’t see much use in going back to school except that I liked to play football. You couldn’t haul gravel during the fall quarter and still play football. 5 Then I had a number of other jobs. I worked often in the coal mines down in Price. My brother was an accountant in Spring Canyon Coal and he’d get me a job. Then I’d go down in the winter time, during Christmas holidays. I could make me eight to ten dollars a day—was the average. Salary was three dollars a day. Then I also had selling jobs. I figured that if I made so many calls a day, I could sell a certain percentage. I hated it, but I could make money. I also got me what I thought was one of the finest jobs in the world, and that was making a traffic census at the mouth of Provo Canyon. There was three ways that you would go, so I had six things that I would take. You came on the Provo Bench and went up the canyon and down to Provo, you’d slip in one of each. If you came through Provo and went up the canyon—you did that if it went across the bench, the other would take them down. Now, there wasn’t too much traffic, and I sat there for twelve hours. I’d threw every rock that was in a hundred yards of me. I just waited so I could press that button once more, and I learned at that time that there’s no greater punishment than solitary confinement with nothing to do. Many of the times, I learned as I went along from these jobs that I had—that I had to be rather active, and I liked certain things and not others. Though this is what those days were like in Provo at that time. RS: Do you remember automobiles coming to town, and what they were like? RKS: The first automobile I saw was Dr. Herr. He had an old red two-seater without a top and a hand bulb for its horn and hard tires and a steering rod, not a wheel. Horses were afraid of it. First automobile Dad had, he got when I was in high school. Model T Ford, secondhand. We used that to go to our farm out on Provo 6 Bench, along with our horses and whatever we would get with it. So automobiles were rather a rarity. I recall one of them. Later on, one of my rich friends there had an automobile, and we went up to Salt Lake in it and went down on Dugway, and he poured it on as fast as it could go to hit 60 miles an hour. We yelled, it was a mile a minute—was the greatest. RS: That’s interesting. Tell me about E.L. Roberts. Who was he, and what impact did he have on your life? RKS: E.L. Roberts was a friend of my dad’s, and he was a coach. He had every innovative idea on clinical education and people that you could imagine. I knew him before I went to school, up on the Timpanogos hikes and in our home, so I got to know him very well. But my first year I played basketball, I dressed the first time and went over to Spanish Fork, and just at the half, the captain—who had been out with the flu, came back to play—dropped dead. Of course, they canceled the game, and it made such an impression on me that I never forgot that. When I would go to coach, I insisted on the medical examination of my athletes. I got the doctor down there to see if he would give these examines [sic], and he said he would. So I had him give all of my athletes and P.E. people medical examines. The interesting thing was that there wasn’t any of them that had anything that would keep them from playing ball or activity, but there was 60% of them that needed their tonsils out. Then I went to Murray and I had the 7 same problem. This I think is extremely important. I learned this from E.L. Roberts. The other thing I learned from E. L. Roberts was, basically, I learned most of my basketball from him. We were playing basketball and the opposing team was hitting and shoving and so on. At the half, we said, “What do we do? Should we hit them?” “No, definitely not. Take it as a compliment. Anytime a person has to cheat to win, pays you a compliment. He indicates that he’s not as clever as you are.” I found that to be definitely true anytime a person is in a position and is incompetent that he has to pull or shove in basketball. He also said that he would rather have a pretty team than a winning team, and I thought that when you see a team with good sportsmanship and good team play and condition and unselfishness, it is a beautiful team—and most of the time that’s a winning team. He also said that if you are going to coach, you should be like a magnet. If you are too close, you have no drawing back. If you are too far above, you’ve lost any room to bow your head. He was always giving some type of statement like that. I have put those into practice, and I think that I would have to give him credit for my philosophy of basketball. He did give me some very, very great ideas. He taught me the beauty of physical movement, if properly done; the beauty of nature, and that if you’re going to teach, you should use the method that will bring the results that you are trying to get. If that’s beautiful movement based upon skills and wits—use those. He also gave the idea that his classes 8 and so on should be informal—well prepared, but informal. I learned that if you are sitting in the front and they are down here looking at you, no one will respond. But he had us up in his office and around in a circle. He responded. He taught us humor and thoroughness. He also did many things like the invitation track meet he started. He had all of his majors run that for him, so you knew how to do it when he was through. He also started the posture parade with that time. He gave us a skeleton and we had our kinesiology—the first time I had ever heard of it. But he used that and developed his Olympic high jumpers, both at BYU and later on at Southern Cal. He was just a great guy. I would go later on with my ball clubs down to Southern Cal while he would come and see me. I knew him as a teacher, coach, and so on. He had so many many things. When I get on to my education, I started majoring in horticulture because we had the [inaudible]. M.C. Merrill was a terrific teacher, but he left and went to the federal government. I didn’t not like him, but he didn’t stimulate me, so I shifted over to E.L. Roberts and his philosophy of P.E. and athletics. At that time, he had the girls take all of us football players and have us develop a dance. If the girl couldn’t teach us the dance that was satisfactory, she would fail, and if we couldn’t do it, we would fail. So, I tell you, when you saw those guys up there doing the club and the oak dance and so on, it was remarkable. You had to be a pretty good teacher. Sometime, I’ll let you read the letter that he wrote to me. I wrote to him, and he indicated that he was glad that he was doing for me what my dad had 9 done for him. He said he thought it would be a great idea if we carried that on for three or four more generations and see if I would give that same idea to some of the other kids, to thank he and my dad and others for them. He was a great, great guy. One of the few—well, one of the others. I think as you go along with your degree, I have never taken a class that I thought was great unless they were an inspirational teacher—for me. I’d have many good ones for somebody else, but for me. This goes along with some of the things that I had at my school. RS: Tell me about your education. RKS: Well, I started at the BYU Training School. Kindergarten, first eight grades, high school—four years. College—four years, and graduated. You’re looking at a product of BYU education. Now, I don’t know whether they advertise that very much about it. Well, I tell you I started out with great ambitions and did very well in all of my course work the first two years. Then I got into athletics, and athletics had more appeal. I never got the applause in classwork that I got in athletics. I didn’t have the trips. We’d go on trips as far as Logan, and oh, you would go to Ogden and then stay overnight and then the rest of the way to Logan. This was great. Then, at the same time I was more interested on the other days in doing work to make money. But, when I started at The Y—college—I had some great teachers and I got interested in school, particularly when I got into E.L. Roberts’ classes that I told you about. Now, the education there—I’ve got to say that I can’t quite tell the difference between education and schooling. I learned most of my lessons outside of the school, and not that schooling wasn’t important, but the application 10 of it is more important when you get into this area. I’ve often said that I had all my years of schooling; that when I went down to Monroe to teach, I learned more about teaching that first year than all of the other years together. I think when you get talking about your experience, that would be it. Now, the next thing about that was that I also finished there and went to teach, but then another very interesting thing happened to me in my education. That was after I went to work at Murray, from '29-'33; in '22, there was the Olympics in Los Angeles, which I wanted to see. We recall that E.L. Roberts was also an assistant professor at USC, so we decided we’d all go down and get our Master’s degree, and we sold our wives on that, so we went. The Olympics were great, but also the teaching was terrific. I recall we had down there at that time tremendous teachers: E.L. Roberts, William Report—who was an expert in curriculum. We had one of the cousins who was an expert in Philosophy, Nelson in statistics, and one of the others in help. Jesse Fyre Williamson was one of the great men of all times in the beginnings of Physical Education, and many others that came for the summer. So this was a great one. For three more years, three more summers, we were down there and met such interesting people. Finally, I got my Master’s degree, writing on the organization on the administration of physical education in the high schools of Utah. I didn’t do anything—the results were not great, that of the high schools of Utah, but I set up some fundamental principles of what physical education in high schools should be, and that forms a foundation for what my philosophy of physical education could be. 11 It wasn’t long after that ‘til the war broke out. When the war ended, I decided I’d go back and finish my Ph.D. I could only go in the summer because I was coaching and couldn’t get away any other time. We were on a quarter system and they were on a semester system. So I went down there; I learned another thing. We still had the old-timers there. We also had some new ones. I had Morehouse—Lawrence Morehouse, one of the great authorities of the physiology of exercise, Who later made a great name for himself at UCLA and also in the treatment of his astronauts. But I saw another thing about him, and that is, be a little careful about taking classes under a young Ph.D. that hasn’t been out in the field for very long. He wants to give you all of his information and work and so on, and you may not be quite as enthused about it as he is. We also had, down there, Cureton, who was another great one from the University of Illinois on physical fitness. RS: How do you spell his name? RKS: C-u-r-e-t-o-n, and another one that I had, which I enjoyed very much, was Travis. Lee R. Travis, a psychologist. He had been in the war and he’d spent a lot of time on battle fatigue and so on. He was great at some of his methods of understanding, and so his book that he used was Problems of Everyday Psychology. Very, very stimulating. Then, in addition to that, I had one from Brown Peabody. His main methods that I got from him was that you could take kids anywhere, with any type of equipment—or lack of equipment—and with little imagination, have a very interesting program, if you knew what you were going to get. Whether it be 12 sociability, or fitness, or whether it be strength, or whether it be something else. He indicated that you could use a rope, or you could use old automobile tires, or you could do anything that you happen to have around the house, like buttons and an egg carton, or beans and a calendar, and so on. You could have anything you could use. Your imagination was one of the great things that he had. Also, I had another one from down in San Diego that taught us about the community and school cooperation and recreation programs, which later was very good for me because we had the fields in here and the community. Each of these played a very important part. I got in there a semester; I had to go down there and couldn’t make it, so, I shifted to the University of Utah, again with a blessing, because I come across some excellent teachers there too. One of them was John Walquist, one of the great ones I had run across. Also M.P Nelson and many others, but these stood out as far as I was concerned. Not only that, but I got acquainted with the U, which made it a great deal more interesting to associate and work with later on. So I got my degree there. Now, along with that, I also took many courses in coaching at Utah State and had some of the greatest coaches in the country. They’d bring them in the summer. But I was disappointed in most of them because their big concern was if you didn’t have two big tackles and a quarterback and a couple of fast running backs, you couldn’t win anyways. You may as well quit. But I got most of my experience and so on. Those were some great discussions that we had with the various coaches that had the same problems that I had. We’d attempt to solve them. 13 Now, there’s many other types of education that I got that I think are equally as great as the schooling. One of them was, I was in the National Guard. It was called that on strike duty down in Scofield, and I recall some of the things I was going on guard duty at night, and I was put on a horse with a gun loaded and the call for anyone to give the password, advance and be recognized. Anyone that didn’t do, shoot and be killed. Now, for a 21-year-old kid, that is a pretty frightening thing, anything that moves in the dark and doesn’t answer. But we were there for about three months. I also made several great trips in that to Seattle, Washington, to many other California places, and over to Wyoming. You learn people in various types of good things. Another one that I had was that I spent 13 years teaching Sunday School out in industrial school, and I was a much better teacher afterwards than I was before. I had found out what the kids had before, and so we would start from there and give them what they needed. The main thing we had to have them do was to respond. Once we got them responding, that was recognition. They would blossom and fight to see which one could pray and which one could give talks and sit on the stand. It was great. The other thing that I learned a great deal more than I ever could have gotten in school was 13 years, I was president of the NJCA. We had so many problems to begin with… Well, we had everybody against us. The one before didn’t pay the bills at what they said they would do, and we had lawsuits, and we finally got together with the people involved and worked it out, so that before we were through, we developed a pattern of rules and regulations and philosophy 14 and so on. We had an attorney that helped us write our constitution. We had cooperation with the American Association of Junior Colleges. I was not picked because I was a member of the AAJC and writing the philosophy for junior college athletics, and so there were so many things of that nature. I found that we had problems with the NCAA and others. “Finally, if you listen and explain your viewpoint, we’ll have them listen to you.” Most of your opposition turns to cooperation after a while. RS: Let me take you back to high school for just a minute. Let me ask you a bit about your athletic participation there. What sports did you play? RKS: In high school? RS: In high school. RKS: I played basketball and football. I played on the first football team that we had at BYU, since it was stopped the first of the century when somebody got killed. My first football game was one of the first football games I ever saw, I played in. I didn’t know much about it, but I learned that we went along. Basketball, I had already seen so much of that. I played in the backyard and the barns and so on, so I was pretty well… Now the thing about football was one day, I came home from school with a football uniform and was going to go with E.L. Roberts in a truck to Mt. Pleasant the next morning. My mother wanted to know what that was, and I said, “It is a football uniform and I’m going to play football.” She says, “You are not. I’m not going to have my boy killed.” 15 So I took that football suit and I showed her the hip pads, shoulder pads, the knee pads, and pads here, the shoes, the braces, the head gear, and I gave one of the finest speeches a man ever gave, and she let me go. But she never saw me play football at all. My last game of football at the University of Utah, she and Dad went. Dad was very much enthused and he would go to all of them, and she went up and was going to see me play. But she got up there in the Hotel Utah and watched the parade and here comes a hearse, and it said, “BYU will bury you.” She could not stand it so back she went. RS: Who won the ball game? RKS: Oh, which one? The BYU, Utah? RS: At this last ball game you played, at Utah. RKS: No, we got beat, but I made the first touchdown against Utah. I picked up the fumble and 80 yards we scored, so she missed something. RS: Which game did you prefer? Basketball or football, what do you think? RKS: Oh, I liked football better, but I was not very big. I learned most of my football from E.L. Roberts by watching his teams play in the gym and so on. He had every man a score, a good defense, and there’s so many—team play, condition, and so on. But I liked basketball to coach because in those days, you had a better place to coach them, and the small schools didn’t have the material that the larger school had. But in basketball, when I came to Weber you couldn’t… they didn’t have any place there. You just go up in one park and if you had a vacant spot on it, you played there. If you had no equipment, so on. 16 RS: Now when you graduated from BYU, you took a job teaching—coaching?—at Monroe? RKS: Monroe, teaching in Monroe. RS: Teaching in Monroe. RKS: I was coach of all sports. I taught all P.E. for men. I taught physiology and I taught civics and I had one study hall. I did all the work. Now, the other thing about it, nobody asked me any questions because I was hired as an expert, which I wasn’t. But I learned how to get things done by telling what I needed and how we could do it. We had a great track there next to the school where we would meet in the spring. The kids brought some horses and we scraped it out and we hauled out the cinders from the sugar factory and got it done. I learned many things. Here’s a small town, and in my study hall, they would come up and want me to help them with their algebra and geometry. I had it twice and I’d forgotten it three times. So, the next year, I asked to teach one of the algebra, and I dropped the physiology. The next year, I took geometry. In each case, I maintained that there wasn’t anything I couldn’t learn three days faster than the students in high school. I was getting bored with some of the things I was teaching, so I was going to teach English and become a great scholar of English the next year. But I left and went to Murray. RS: Just before you leave Monroe, which sports did you coach there? RKS: Football, basketball, and track. We won the title to go to state two out of the three years. The last year, this doctor had a girl die for some reason or another, so he 17 quarantined the town and closed the schools. Nobody cared about closing the schools, but we now had to go to Gunnison to play their team to see who would go to state. They wouldn’t let us come and they wouldn’t come here, so we had to forfeit, and then they were already lynching. That was my experience in Monroe. But I learned more about teaching and I had everything to do—organize it, order. I think you really don’t learn to teach in your college work. The other thing that I enjoyed the most about my college work was that when I went back, I took classes to help me with my teaching in the wintertime. So I would think that after you are through with college, that a person should then get into his job and then come back and take his classes that he has some deficiency in, if you can find any. RS: Tell me about Murray. What was that like and how long were you there? RKS: I was there for four years: ’29-’33. The first year, I taught… I think it was a junior high and a high school. I taught all the P.E. I also taught history. History was one of my minors, by the way. I taught football, basketball, track, and I sifted baseball over somebody else. But this is a little town that has a great deal of pride, and so the first year I was there, we went to the tournament, and we lost the next night. But I had a very good club. The next year—this of course was during the depression—I took the other kids that were back and we won state. It was one of the interesting things, that here is a bunch of kids. They like to sing—they would sing opera and they would sing classical music in parts and so on. They had a great music teacher. They would tell me what to do. We went up to the first game of the tournament; I couldn’t get a parking place except down 18 on South Temple. So we walked from there through the church grounds, climbed over the fence, crossed back to the Deseret Gym and over another fence, and into the gym, and we won. The next day, I tried to get closer and they wouldn’t let me. We had to go to the same spot. Climbed over the same fences and we won. By that time, it was pretty well decided that the reason why we won is because we traveled that same course, ad if that wins both games, well, I’m for it. The fourth night, we did the same thing. I climbed over fences four nights in a row and won. And so if you can get your ball club to tell you the winning techniques out of winning—you’ll do it. RS: Now, did you coach all sports at Murray? RKS: Yes. RS: All but baseball games. What schools did you play in your league? RKS: We played Jordan, Bingham, Cyprus, Tooele, and of course we also played Granite. Not in the same league, they were in the Salt Lake league, but we were in a different one. There’s one thing about it that I found is that there are just as good of ball players as there are at Monroe as there is at Murray. But we didn’t have any competition at Monroe. Every ball game we played, we might not have been the best team at the beginning of the game, but we were at the end, and I think that’s an important factor. If you are going to improve, you have to play somebody better than you are at the beginning of the game. RS: How was the competition, Jordan and Bingham and Cyprus? RKS: Very good. I’ll tell you, this was down to the wire. We got in because I think that we had a bunch of kids that believed that they could put in the winning basket. If 19 you believe that, why, you do it. If you stutter a little bit on it, you miss it. If you go through their fire often enough, you develop that confidence, once you think of it. Now, the other interesting thing about it was, this was the second year that I was at Murray, and there had been no raises. Eon Bateman came up to me afterward and said, “I’m going to give you a raise, because you really are an excellent physical education teacher and I didn’t quite give you enough.” Well, I said, “That’s rather funny that you didn’t find that out until we won the state.” He laughed, but, that was one of the nice things I could kid all of my spears without being canned. RS: Has a sense of humor helped you through the whole situation? RKS: Oh, without any question. I’ll tell you, there’s no other better way to get out of a tough spot than to laugh at it. I think that’s as far as humor is concerned. He was always a questioned point of view. If you follow out of field it’s not humor to you, but it is if you watch it. So many times, whether you have embarrassments and feeling guilty of various things, forget it. I learned one thing up in Yellowstone. I had my family up there one time, and I had been diving into the pool and splashing all over and so was everyone else. Then, all of a sudden, out of the dressing room came a guy that threw out his zest and got on that diving and took two or three springs and went up in the air with a two-and-a-half somersault with a full twist and never made a ripple. How many more times did I dive? I thought, “How ridiculous this is.” If you stop doing something because somebody does it a little better than you, you better 20 stay away from somebody that has better abilities. So here again is one of those: here was 50 or 60 people stopped having fun because somebody made a dive. You can learn when you get in education. I learned as much from my kids playing ball by observing them as I ever taught them. I have learned from other people as much of what to do and from certain other ones what not to do. I have thought of this many times: I don’t know what a good teacher is, but I know what a good faculty is. I often said this: “Would it be bad if you had all of your people leading?” But if you had all of those and then so in a few others, that makes you look a little better than that to me. It gives a student a chance to analyze and learn human abilities and so on. So, here again, is one of those things that I think is a learning experience. I don’t know if I’ve even stopped learning now. I don’t learn as much, I don’t know as much. The only time I’ve ever gotten into trouble was when I knew too much. RS: Let me move you from Murray in 1933, and then you went to Weber? RKS: Came to Weber. RS: What were you hired to do at Weber in 1933? RKS: I was hired at Weber to run the joint, with no money. I had been to Southern Cal, the school. I came up there. I deposited my last sec at Murray, which the bank took, but didn’t accept any checks that I wrote when they closed their bank. At the school, I came back the first of August thinking that I had a job there and didn’t get any money then. Carl Belliston was there, who had run the gym, so there was Carl and I. We taught the men and women at first. We did not get a 21 check until the first of October. A little while later, why, they hired Lucille Owens Clark for our women. Now, we also had to run the gym and we sold memberships for $25 a year, but everybody was angry because the church had given their gym away, which they had built, and they didn’t like it, so there was a lot of opposition, and also to the school. So, in this case, we had to keep these night classes going. I had class at noon and at night, and we had to bear each other's assignments of physical education and health ed and coaching. I coached football and basketball and tennis and wrestling and boxing. Belliston had track and intramurals and swimming. I put in for some equipment, and I wanted four sets of boxing gloves, three volleyballs, four basketballs, and a few other items, and they come back for nine dollars. The state board of supplies and purchases put it out for bid and Woolworths, I think, supplied them all. Here was one of our returns; from then, you ordered by specification and number made. Then again, we had no lifeguards. You have to have lifeguards, so I got people. If they would be a lifeguard for one night, we would give them a membership. I needed somebody else to teach wrestling, so Vern O’Branchely taught wrestling for a membership. Two or three others, so we had memberships all the way along to help us run it. Then we organized basketball leagues, and we didn’t have any money for referees, so we had decided that when a guy was fouled, he’d say he was fouled, 22 and they called their own fouls. They thought that was a great idea for about three days, and then we changed it up. But there was no money. The sad part about that was that this went on for a long time. At Weber, every time you have a budget, they base it on what you had the previous year, so here we were without funds for any assistance at all. You could never get it because there wasn’t any in the budget from the year before. The other thing that we had to do was that anytime you wanted to do something, if it didn’t cost any money and you could do it, you were able to do it. So here I needed some help on the officials. We had lousy officials for our athletics, so we got Don Barney and Puck Warner to come and teach our night class, and after that we got some excellent ones. They were so good that they kept that as a requirement for all of your state high schools, and these guys were our intramurals and so on. I also was a scout leader. It was hard to get scout leaders, so I had to organize the class with [inaudible]. We taught it, so we had an ample number of adults for our district committees. Anytime you needed anything, we just started a new class. That was all. The great thing about it was that you didn’t have to go to the curriculum committee or the treasury or anything. You just had to do it on your own. It was fun. The interesting fact about it was, I taught night classes and noon classes and others I had no idea I was overworked. RS: Who hired you? RKS: The State Board of Education. Tracy was the President at that time, and up until that point, Van Buren ran the gym. Merlin Stevenson was the coach and also 23 head of the engineering and mathematics and physics department. When I came, we had to handle the gym and everything. But here again, the question of seeing what you have, what you need, is one of the great things. We also had a lot of kids that wanted to go on through working in the parks, so we started some recreation classes for them. We placed them all over Yellowstone and down south and numerous others, and also on the city parks and county parks. Here again, we did this for quite a while and then we went to the U, and the U said, “Oh, you can’t teach that because that is an upper division class.” I said, “Well, so what?” They took it. Again, I think this is one of the great things. I think about junior college and its early days. It wasn’t group-bound. You could do things that needed to be done, and that’s one of the difficulties, I think, when I quit Weber was that you had too many restrictions to go through. RS: Was President Tracy very supportive of athletics? RKS: Yes and no. He, first of all, had been under the state, and the state finances and funds and so on—quite different. He had constant trouble with Skid Morder—was the state superintendent—on keeping his funds properly set up and dispensed. But Tracy was an idealist. I think he did a lot of great things, but he lacked the ability at that time to unify the community. H. Aldous Dixon came along, and he was a great one to get the community set up for them. He didn’t come then; before he came we had Lee Creer. He was a great one, I thought. He was the one that made a college out of our school. He set up more money in the Library. He set up leaves of absence for the teachers—sabbaticals. And we had Admiral Bird. He had a big one down 24 there in the old Egyptian Theater, everybody free, advertised and so on. He comes there, and there isn’t fifteen there to hear him, but he started out on that. RS: Creer? RKS: President Creer. He went with me on all of my basketball trips, and he was a great companion. He saw what the others were and he was very much interested in athletics. They went to some of the assemblies at each other's schools, and they had excellent programs, and then he talked. He is one of those that I enjoyed very much. He was just there for two years and then he got a chance to move to the U as head of the history department. RS: You suggested that he made Weber into a real college. RKS: Yes, beginnings, but then Dixon came along and united the town. He had a group of people from all over: Brigham and Morgan, about 30 or 40 or 50 of them, and gave his advice. We did a lot of things that brought about... Creer was antagonistic to the paper. He objected about having big pictures about our contests of kissable lips and swallowing of mouths and would never give anything of any value. He would come right out and he would antagonize them somewhat. Rightfully so, but this was one of them. If you knew him very well he had certain beliefs that he was strong on. He knew what he was after. Dixon, he did a lot of things that unified them. He started during the war and brought in the girls and all others to prepare them for training at Hill Field on various types of welding and machine shops and so on. They weren’t our students, but we count them as such. That was one of the great things about Dixon. He was an opportunist. He used that for the next 15, 20 years as those 25 same figures to get money from the legislature to keep his vocational program going. Some of it was on campus, and some of it wasn’t. End of first interview. 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 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 26 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, intramurals 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. 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 27 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 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 28 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 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 29 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 handle about a hundred and fifty, two hundred in our auditorium, so we went 30 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. RWS: I would have protested. 31 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? 32 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 into 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. 33 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? 34 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, 35 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. 36 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, intermural. 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 intramurals 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. 37 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 38 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. 39 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. 40 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? 41 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 42 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 43 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 Hill Field. 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 44 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 45 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. 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 46 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 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. 47 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? 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 48 basketball courts. We had to widen the two balconies so that we had regulation volleyball and other courts. 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 intramurals, and the fourth for individual players. This was to be done with all of these eight areas, so that sometime 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 49 different activities. This way was really so that you can handle—we have about 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 50 communities at all. They still had to find a girl and that’s where a lot of the conflict arose. 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 51 the University of Utah, and teachers there were changed from 100 to less than 100, both from the outside. Well, it couldn’t possibly get inbred. RWS: What about Dick Williams? 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 52 can handle. This is true all the way along. If they have it, put them in a spot where they’ll succeed. 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 53 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. 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 54 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 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?” 55 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.” 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. 56