Oral History Program Paul Cox Jeanette Cox December 4, ca. 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Paul Cox Interviewed by Jeanette Cox 4 December ca. 2008 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Cox, Paul, an oral history by Jeanette Cox, 4 December ca. 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Paul Cox. The interview was conducted on December 4, by Jeanette Cox, in Paul Cox’s home. Mr. Cox discusses his education and his experience through college. JC: State, for the record, your full name please. PC: My name is Paul Cox, I am currently a resident of Brigham City, Utah. JC: Okay so who were your parents and where were you born? PC: My father was Clyde Cox. My mother was Edith Melgard Cox, and I was born in Mount Pleasant, Utah, although I was raised in Fairview. They didn’t happen to have a hospital there. JC: Still don’t. Today I’m going to ask you some questions about your education and about going to school. So, in the first place, why did you go to college? PC: Well, actually my family, it was just a fore gone conclusion that we were going to go to college, although I understood at a very young age how important it was that there were a lot of better opportunities for someone with a college education. A chance to get better jobs, other than just the medial labor type jobs that you would get with just a high school diploma. JC: And did you go to the college, or did you go to the university? PC: I first went to Snow College. I graduated from Snow College in 1979, at which time I then started going to Utah State University where I finished with my Bachelor’s degree in 1982. JC: Why Utah State University? What about the University attracted you? PC: Well there had been some family history. That’s where my dad had gone to college, was at Utah State, as well as my older sister. Plus, we also had a friend 1 of the family who was an associate dean of engineering up at Utah State and he’d had a chance to have a nice little chat with me about the opportunities as an engineering student at Utah State. JC: Which, of course, was you major right? Engineering. PC: Yes, it was. JC: So were you involved in any extra-curricular activities or clubs or anything like that? PC: No, I wasn’t. JC: So, describe just a day of your life, if you can remember just a typical day at the university. PC: Well, I did have the opportunity to work to put myself through college, and so I’ll start with Snow College. I had an opportunity there my second year, I was working in the computer lab, well it wasn’t a computer lab, it was a computer center, doing computer input for the university, or for the college. And my typical day consisted of getting up and going to work at six o’clock in the morning where I would print out reports for the different offices in the college, and then I’d go to classes during the day and back to work again from five, well from about four until six in the evenings, transmitting data. At the time, all of the computer processing was done at a computer at Weber State, so we just transmitted all of our data over phone line up to Weber State and then download the reports and everything to be printed out in the morning. Then after that is was basically home in the evenings for homework. 2 JC: There’s always just bit of that, yeah? You put yourself through college through working. Anything else, or did you just work through college to pay your way? PC: Yes. At my time in Logan I worked in a small fiber glass shop for a while. I worked at Cache Valley Builders, building tresses for about a year and a half. I graded papers for professors, usually had at least one or possibly two jobs going. JC: That’s a lot going on, you had a lot of responsibility, especially when you were at Utah State. PC: That’s right. JC: So what was it like, going to school as a married student? PC: It was, in a lot of ways, it was easier. I didn’t have to worry about taking the time and energy to do all of the dating things. It was fairly entertaining, especially after our oldest child was born, and she was able to entertain her mother and I. JC: That would be me. But what was one of your favorite classes? PC: There were a lot of the engineering classes that I really liked. I liked engineering in general because it seemed very practical to me. I’ve always been cursed as a somewhat practical individual. So I guess, starting out, physics was one of the first classes that I really enjoyed down at Snow. I enjoyed physics because that was kind of an explanation of how things, you know, why things work the way they do. I mean you can get into chemistry and things like that but that’s different. This is more, physics is more on a practical level. JC: Did you have any favorite professors? PC: Um, one of my favorite professors was down at Snow College, Dr. Lester. I guess I could kind of explain. The first time I ever met him I was just coming back 3 to school, getting ready to start my sophomore year and I was—hadn’t quite decided what you major in, and had basically narrowed it down to accounting or engineering. I’d gone down to Snow College to talk to some of the professors to find out more about the programs and just get a feel of what their opinions were. The professor who was in charge of the accounting was not available to talk to that day, he was gone for some reason and so I went to talk to Dr. Lester. We discussed the fact that they were just starting a brand new pre-engineering curriculum down there, and he was one who was going to be teaching the classes. He was coordinating a lot of the coursework with what they were doing at Utah State. He told me about some of the classes I would be taking and so forth, and then he went on to make a comment that if I went into engineering and found out it was too tough, I could always fall back and become an accountant. So I always enjoyed his sense of humor. And then it was kind of fun, the classes down there, because, starting with my sophomore year, I had a math class each quarter, and then each of the rest of my classes were pre-engineering. So, you know, my typical schedule was a calculus class from the math professor, and then all of the rest of my classes were from Dr. Lester. That had its advantages and it had some disadvantages too. I mean he was very willing to work with us and our schedule. There were twelve of us in our calculus class, there were the same twelve in the physics class that we were taking from Dr. Lester, and then there were five of us that were going through the pre-engineering curriculum, so the same five students were in basically all the rest of my classes. So Dr. Lester knew exactly what our schedule was like, since he just had to keep track of one 4 class other than those, he was able to kind of stagger mid-terms and tests and things like that, which was nice. But then came finals time and we had three days, minus a two hour block, to take advantage of the finals. There were some finals I went to that took about four and a half hours to take. JC: It’s a good thing you liked the professor. PC: Yes. So, like I said, there were some minor drawbacks to it, but for the most part, it was pretty much to my advantage. JC: Would you say that going to college was worth it? PC: Oh, I think it was definitely worth it. At the time, trade schools were starting to become a lot more popular, and I talked to some other individuals about the advantages of college over trade school. For some individuals, trade school is the way to go, but realistically, going to college gets you a chance to, because you have to take humanities classes, you have to take the social sciences, natural sciences, and math, you know, you get a more balanced education, a much more rounded education. So I think it really helps an individual that way. And as I said, and what I’ve tried to teach my kids, you kids, was that as you get more of an education, it keeps more options open to you, so for that reason, I think that college education is very important. JC: So do you think having a good, typical, college education is worth it? From the guy that going to school and living in the dorms to living as a married college student, with children, was worth it? PC: Yes, I had the opportunity to experience just about all, I did live in the dorms my first year, my second year, there was just a group of us that rented a house that 5 we lived in. By the time I got up to Utah State, I had gotten married between my sophomore and junior year. So my time up at Utah State was as a married student. JC: What would you say would be the main change between going from Snow College to Utah State? PC: That’s a little bit tough to say, I mean there’s definitely the size difference, was as I told you, there aren’t many classes up at Utah State that were even close to only having five students in them. So, you know, down at Snow it was a lot smaller. You were much more closely associated with the professors and the students that you dealt with every day, but also, as I was going up to Utah State, making that transition, I was going more into, making the transition from more general ed. classes to the more specialized classes, so that made quite a big difference. There were more opportunities, obviously, at Utah State, there were more classes available, more options about what you wanted to do within engineering. I’ve always thought that it’s a good option for a student to go to a smaller junior college for the first two years to kind of ease the transition from high to being on their own and getting into the college life, you know, trying to survive the college environment. JC: What about the fun stuff to do at college, I know there’s lots of fun stuff to do, what did you do for entertainment while you were in school? PC: There were a couple of us that took advantage of the swimming, the racquetball courts, and things like that, they had their, there were just a lot of get-togethers as friends. That was one thing, with the small group of us that were in our 6 classes together, we tended to socialize outside of class too. But there were small parties and always an event to go to. The theater, or go watch a movie on the one screen available at the time, plus we wanted to go on a road trip to Mount Pleasant, see something different, but because, you know, at Snow, everything would tend to be centered around the college, the college students, as big as it was in such a small place. Then up in Logan, there were obviously more activities available on campus, sporting events and all kinds of things like that too. We’d go watch. There as a married student, I was less invited to party, I wasn’t all that wild in my partying days. JC: Well is there anything else you’d like to just mention, that I haven’t asked you yet? PC: I’d just like to kind of reiterate how important it is to go to college, as I said, I’ve seen a lot of local kids around here that, when the Wal-Mart warehouse came in, and they had the chance, had kids graduating from high school and going to work there at twelve dollars an hour. For a kid straight out of high school, that was just a fortune, and my kids have seen a lot of them that have decided that they, you know, are living well now, I don’t need to be bothered about going to college, and then they realize, after they’re a little older, when they’re no longer living with mom and dad, that having to pay for an apartment, or a car, or something like that, that you know, suddenly that just doesn’t make it as easy as it used to be, and that you should do, if you do get a college education, you have more opportunity to provide a better living for your family. I hope that’s something that I’ve passed on to you and the children can pass on to your kids when the 7 time comes. There are a lot of things that are available to do and good colleges available, and I think it’s important that a person get the opportunity to kind of broaden their horizons a little bit. JC: Thank you. 8