Oral History Program Ronald Ross Interviewed by Brian Simmons 27 March 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ronald Ross Interviewed by Brian Simmons 27 March 2014 Copyright © 2024 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. 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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 Special Collections 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: Ross, Ronald, an oral history by Brian Simmons, 27 March 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Ronald Ross March 27, 2014 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ron Ross, conducted on March 27, 2014 by Brian Simmons. Ron discusses his life experiences, from childhood to retirement. He touches on his educational experiences and his career in entertainment and performance. BS: Here we are with Ron Ross. It's March 27, 2014, and he has been kind enough to do an interview with us at his home, so we're going to talk to him a little bit. Ron, your career is pretty well-known here in the area, but tell me a little about your childhood: where you were born, where you grew up. RR: That's easy, and do talk louder, please. I was born in my grandmother and grandfather’s house in their front bedroom at 744 Ogden Avenue, so that lets you know exactly where I was born. That was when doctors made house calls. BS: Great, and so you grew up here in Ogden? RR: Yes. BS: Your dad was involved in show business, right? RR: My dad was Shorty Ross, who played vibes and marimbas, and went into the Berthana for one night and actually lasted 13 years. But you said something about childhood? Well, my mother and dad lived on Ogden Avenue in a little house, then we went over on Washington Boulevard. One day there were shots, and I was a little kid and I wanted to go see what was happening in the house next door, and my dad wouldn't let me because somebody had committed suicide. It was a wild childhood. From there, moved up to Jefferson near 24th Street, and at age five… I just found a picture the other day—I don't have it with me, my daughter has it—that shows the date when I was ready to go to the first grade, and I was five years old, 1 so I was underage. I went in crying to my mother that I wanted to go to school with my buddies, and she got all cleaned up—because ladies at that time working in the house, and as they do now, don't necessarily wear clothes they want people to see them in. She took me up to Madison School to show I couldn't go to school, and a Ms. Blucher, with hennaed hair, told my mother to leave me with her. I stayed there that day. Well, when my mother came to pick me up, she said, "Well thank you, I'll talk to him tomorrow." The teacher said, "Oh no, he did fine. Bring him back tomorrow; he already knows how to read!" That was from a mother who never graduated from high school, who used to read to me all the time. From there, high school, gee; I was in show business because we had a family band that went out and entertained like [at] the Deaf and Blind School, or clubs around the town, as a family. My dad had a marimba band, and I would go out and play with the marimba band; I played xylophone. Got in the drum corps, which a lot of kids did; was in a play in sixth grade, did Tom Sawyer. We had a little musical for kids, and I played Tom Sawyer, and I had to sing. I had a pretty good voice. The young man—because they double cast—who was supposed to do it the other night’s voice started changing, so I sang off-stage while he mouthed the words. So I learned about voice-overs [at a] very, very early age. BS: That's great. You talked about your experience with debate and speech in school. RR: Yes. BS: Tell me: there was a teacher you mentioned that really helped you get started. RR: Margaret Smaltz. I was in the eighth grade, which they had eighth, ninth, and 10th at Central Junior High School. Central Junior High School was in the old Ogden 2 High School building on 25th and Monroe, and that's where my dad went to high school. I went in there and I took a business of life class, and about two weeks Margaret Smaltz said, “I think you don't need this class, and I could use you in debate.” So I went home and talked to my folks, and they said "Oh, ok." I went into debate, and what a teacher she was. She made us write out a complete brief, affirmative and negative, on whatever subject we were debating, so that we could defend either side. We had to make a complete brief—and I didn't type, write it out by hand—every six weeks. So we learned, and she wouldn't let us can our speeches: we couldn't write 'em, we had to know our material, so we adlibbed; we were very, very flexible. From there, we went to Ogden High School, where Mary Woolley took over as debate coach, and she polished us up. Lawrence Burton, who was a year ahead of me, went into the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., and that shows the kind of background he had. I wound up going into radio and TV, and my buddy and my partner, Bob Louder—who was a fantastic violinist—wound up going up into Idaho somewhere. I don't know where he is now or what he's doing, but we had a lot of fun in debate. Do you want to know the story about the time all four of us—'cuz there were four on the debate team, and Mary Woolley took us to a debate tournament in Denver. At the end of the first round, kids on the campus, I was told later, would say, "Hey, have you heard those guys from Ogden High? Watch out for them!" Well, we wiped 'em out. One night, we slipped out of the hotel and went to a burlesque show. When we came back, Mary Woolley was sitting in the chair in our room waiting for us. She 3 was very, very angry. Not because we'd gone to the burlesque show, but because we hadn't taken her with us. So the next night, I took her to the burlesque show, and the other guys played poker with people from all the other schools—and beat 'em, apparently. They were very good poker players. I wasn't; I was a good burlesque watcher, however. BS: So that was your experience there in Denver. Didn't you also do something with the debate at Weber State? Didn't you face them? RR: Yes. There I was in public speaking; that was after the army. I came back and Thatcher Allred was in charge of the speech program. I took some classes from him and from nobody else. We went to Phi Rho Pi meet up in Oregon, Willamette. We went there, and I was entered in three things, and I won first place in all three. I was very adaptable. That was a record in Phi-Ro-Pi up to that point, but a young lady has made it in five since that time, so I no longer hold the record. BS: But it's still a great accomplishment. RR: Well, it was fun. One of them was to apply for a job in radio, and I had never been in radio, but I applied for the job, and apparently talked my way through to get the job. I went into radio much later. BS: If we go back a little bit, you mentioned you went to BYU and then into the Army. What experiences did you have at BYU and in the Army that helped prepare you to go into radio and entertainment? RR: When I went to BYU, I had three choices; I had three scholarships, because I was a good debater. I went to BYU with Pardo, and he taught a system that was adopted by many little old ladies in the United States. It was where you'd say, "Four-andtwenty years ago, my forefathers brought forth upon this continent," and it was all4 slated as to what you should do. Not necessarily motivated. But Pardo taught us the techniques, knowing that we weren't going to be using them; he didn't want us to use them on stage. But we learned the technique that if you stand straight, that's position number one. When you put your legs out to the side, that's a vulgar position, so that's position number two. It went on from there. It was just fantastic. I appeared in one show. My hair was much redder at that time, not this color, he called me his red-headed, Jewish-Italian. In that show, Belfro Adono. From there, I went into the Army. I was going to be drafted, and I said I don't want to be drafted. I went in: "What can I enlist for?" They let me enlist for 18 months. In the army, I was listed as a ‘critically needed specialist’ because I played piano, and sang, which is stuff I'd done at BYU as well as a little bit that I'd done at Weber. I did shows down at the BYU with a guy named Ariel Baliff, who got his master’s degree at Yale in set designing; just tremendous. We did shows in the Joseph Smith building, and one of the songs that we wrote was called "Candles in the Snow." I sat at a grand piano in a tuxedo and played it. He had four different levels of things that looked like candles; he had the girls, each with different colored hair, but flame-colored dress on, and they sang “Candles in the Snow.” What he had done—and I didn't know about it—while they were singing, he had snow come down from the ceiling. So I had a good background with good people who had creative imaginations. In the Army, well, I wound up being stationed at Walter Reed General Hospital in a band. I was in the dance band, and so we had rehearsal once a week, played a concert once a week. Because I couldn't play any other instrument, I had 5 something else to do, so I went over to the psycho-neurotic wards at Walter Reed Hospital, and they let me in through these doors that got locked all the time, and I taught piano to the patients to help them in therapy. Wild experience. BS: So you came back from the Army, came to Weber State, and had schooling there. Where did you go from there, as far as schooling goes? RR: Well, I got my Associate degree at Weber, and then I went to University of Utah, and I wanted to be a music major. I took one class from Leroy Robertson in theory and found out that the background I had in jazz piano—swing piano—didn't go along with the classical thing, so I wised up and got out and went into speech and drama. I got my first degree there, my bachelor's degree, at the University of Utah. While I was beginning to work on graduate work, I took a class from Bill Christiansen, William F., the man who choreographed the Nutcracker. He said, "You know, I think you could be a ballet dancer." I thought, “That's not a bad idea; all these pretty girls around,” and so I became a ballet dancer. Within a short time I was his assistant—not because I was a good ballet dancer, but because I tried. The girls, some of them were terrific, but there were no other men to speak of, so in the Nutcracker, I got to play three roles. I learned all of 'em as his assistant and became his secretary, basically, and would write program things and take care of interviews and all sorts of things like that. Did my Master's; my thesis was a creative ballet. I made the story up: "The Day it was Night," and a friend in the music department wrote the music, and I choreographed a full-length ballet for children. That was my master’s thesis. Then I went to work in TV and did some things there, and then went back for my PhD later, and was going to do something on Charlie Chaplain: the creative use 6 of hand props and milieu in some of his movies. Then I had to take a class in oral interp, and in oral interp I had to write a television program on poetry and had to present on poetry for Wanda Clayton Thomas, who was my last class. She said, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I don't understand poetry." She went right through the ceiling, made me do that and I did some programs for her. When I took a very badly-written script in to the head of my committee, Dr. Margetz, he looked at it and said, "Well, Ronny Pao—" cause that's what he called me, “that's gonna be your dissertation. You're going to write, produce programs on how to present poetry on television. You're gonna have an English subject matter in a speech medium for a degree in drama. You're gonna use everything you've learned: you're gonna sing, play the piano, dance, have people to reader's theater,” and I'd become a director on T.V. by that time— “You're gonna direct your own programs as well as write 'em." Says, "That's your dissertation." I said, "No!" He said, "Yeah, that's what you're gonna do. Let's go fishin'.” So we went fishing. And I did; it took me seven years because I didn't know anything about poetry. I had to study hard, and eventually I did four half­-hour programs on how to present poetry on television and produced them. The Channel 4 let me do it there. We'd have people for reader's theater come in, or the young lady when we did the Romeo and Juliet sonnet that most people don't know is hidden in Shakespeare— had the words over the top, and she and I did the ballet as Romeo and Juliet. All sorts of other devices. So I got to do a creative dissertation as well, and as I was told later, [it] was 7 the first time it had ever been done, because some of the speakers in the ballet had to act, so it was a dramatic ballet with lines. We had fun. BS: What was your experience in TV before your PhD? You mentioned you were in TV and you were directing. RR: I was working and doing lots of children's theatre up at the University. I loved that. Directed two plays, by the way, for children as a graduate student. But they had auditions at Channel 5 and I went down and auditioned, and they made me Engineer Ron. That was my first children's program. I had never been on TV before, didn't know anything about it. I'd been a radio announcer, but never TV, and we had 75 live children in bleachers behind me, five days a week, for two-and-a-half hours. I was Engineer Ron and took them to Cartoonville and Chimney Peak, or Chimneysomething, Western things. I had to play three characters. I not only had to run the trains—and by the way, when I ran out of things to talk about, we'd cause a wreck with either Dinky-Poo, Cecil the Diesel—as one of the children named our Cecil—or our Diesel engine, and I played Captain RX1000, first spaceman for children's program in the nation. I would come down a ladder, and we'd do all sorts of strange things, and we'd take children to different places. Then I did Sir Ronald Redbeard. Put on a false beard, cape, the whole works, sword, and we did ad-lib scenes with the ladies who were secretaries; we'd put a sheet around 'em so it looked like a costume, and the director, Alden Richards, who had been a children's personality on TV once before, he was my director, and he wrote these little scripts that we would do and ad-lib our way through. Every so often, Blackbeard would get out of hand, and Redbeard would have to have a sword fight with him. Blackbeard was my roommate, Larry 8 Schumate, who was a backstage man, very very strong in the wrist. He would attack me, because we both took fencing, and he'd throw a sword at me, and I'd have to defend myself in tears, and that would—whack, he was so strong it'd whack my foil into my head and practically knock me out. He did that as revenge because I had to win all the fights. Anyway, that got me started on TV, and I'd never been around children before. I learned how to get along with them and got a pretty highly-rated show within six weeks. I just treated them gently and they fed off me like my dogs I knew fed off me. They understood my physical actions and the sound of my voice, the emotion behind it, like dogs do. Children feed off that and I learned it. Alden Richards said, "Never stand above one of the people you're interviewing, the children." He said, "Get down on their level so that they don't have to look up like this, so that you can talk back and forth." Just tremendous, it worked beautifully. I grew to love kids. I had a lot of fun with them for three years, and then from there, I was through with television for a while and worked on school. Had a family to take care of, so I had to play dance jobs to make money and be a radio announcer after the TV was over and went back to school on that. Then I went to Channel 2, where they gave me a program that I really wasn't suited for, building things on television. I was supposed to show how much progress I'd made the next day, and I wouldn't have time because I was too busy. I developed a tic, and that tic got noticeable, and I quit. Later on, when they had auditions on Channel 4, Alden Richards had moved over there, and they auditioned me for Fireman Frank, and I got that one. Fireman 9 Frank was a very different character. I got well-acquainted with firemen and lots of children: they would come and we'd interview them. I'd either pick them up and put them where they were on a level with me there, or I'd kneel down and talk to them there, and we had some wild things there. I had dogs on the show: we talked about how you have to take care of a dog, and then I would have people come down from the ballet department and I would dance with them, so the kids were learning that men could be ballet dancers. I did Nightmare Theatre: I did the voice, and so I'd tell children, “You can hear but you don't have to be frightened, because it's all imagination. We all make it up, and it's just for fun.” I had professional actors come in, and we'd ad-lib back and forth. Captain Hook came in one time, and I'd already interviewed him one day and we had a lot of fun, and he had told me about the crocodile who was after his other arm. As he came in he laughed and said, "O-ho, Fireman Frank, I've finally caught him!" "Who did you catch?" "Peter Pan. Peter Pan!" "Peter Pan! What did you do with him?" "I took him out on me ship, out in the Great Salt Lake!" "Oh, what are you going to do with him?" "I'm going to make him walk the plank!" "Oh no!" Then I turned to the camera and said, "And he doesn't know that when Peter Pan goes into the lake, he won't sink because it's salt water!" "He won't sink?! But I wanted him to sink." Just then, one of the guys started tapping on the sound effects so that it was tick-tick. He says, "Oh, there's a crocodile, he's after me other arm! Goodbye Fireman Frank!" and he took off. 10 We did things like that that were just fascinating, because at that time on television, it wasn't, "Hey you've got five minutes, three minutes." We got to stretch our time, and we made adjustments. It was a very, very good thing for me to do because I was used to ad-libbing on stage when something went wrong. BS: Great. What else did you do as far as your career went? You taught for a while. What did you do after you were done with TV? RR: Well I stayed on TV for a while, had not finished my PhD, all but dissertation. I applied for a job and got it in the speech department at Utah State, where I taught for 10 years and had a marvelous time up there. I taught not only speech, but we got to do reader's theatre. We took reader's theatre with the students out into the elementary schools. Reader's theatre was poetry with children, and Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree, and then we would take programs from the speech department out into all the other departments and do things that they wanted. So I spent 10 years there, thoroughly enjoyed it, loved it, but there was a time when I felt it was time for me to move on. So I went down to Las Vegas; didn't have a job down there, but I worked with a theatre company, TAS—Theatre Arts Society—and worked there for a while. Then I got my teaching certificate and taught in a high school for four years, and while I was in the high school teaching and directed a couple of plays, I auditioned for the part of the advertising manager at Finley Oldsmobile and got it. That was a big surprise, but that worked out fine. I wrote and produced all their commercials on radio and TV and learned how to set up ads in the newspaper. I'd also auditioned for a part on TV with the experience I had had before, and I'd done weather and sports and news at Channel 4 when I was at Salt Lake, and I 11 became a weather announcer in Las Vegas. People would say, “Well, all you ever get is sunny weather here, so why do you have to have a weather announcer?” Say back to them, “Oh, they're interested in the weather they have back home,” so you get that. BS: So that was Vegas. Did you end up coming back to Utah after Vegas? RR: Well in Vegas, yes; I went by Doc Ross down there because I had a PhD. Most people thought I had a PhD in weather. I didn't. I took two classes in meteorology from the man who found out whether they should have an explosion up in the desert country, and that was fine, I thoroughly enjoyed that. Thought "Gee, I'd love to become a weatherman." We were the first people who ever did a weather show using computers. The computer, we'd set it up, got it all ready, and I was so up about doing it that I blew the computer out, and so there was a guy crawling down around my feet setting the computer back up so we could put it on television because we had advertised it that way. I started doing teaching out at the community college: did plays, did musicals especially, and was doing fine, and then the heat got to me—too much of it, and I started having problems with the heart. So I moved back to Utah, into Clearfield, and then from Clearfield, went to Hawaii and lived on the big island for 10 months, and found that it was too moldy for my musical instruments and my books, so I came back to Ogden, up near Weber University, and… They call it retirement. There's no retirement. If you think you're gonna retire, you are incorrect, because now I get to practice piano; I've taken up cello, trombone; I'm having a marvelous time. Going down and teaching little girls and boys that are [of] Spanish background how to read English and help them out with their vocabulary and how to make it 12 sound, and it's very, very interesting. I'm having a wonderful time. BS: That's great. In retirement, do you ever miss being on screen or being on stage and acting? Do you miss that, or is it just a past chapter now? RR: That's a good question, good question. Well, I've done some acting. After I came back here, I went out to Washington Terrace, and I think I did three musicals and helped with the choreography on one of them, as well as being in it. I did one for one of my former students down in Bountiful, and I did the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. But then my memory started going out on me, and I started having physical problems with balance—which, for an ex-ballet dancer is horrible—and so I couldn't remember the lines well enough. So I thought, "Okay, time for me to quit, good time." I did. I wanted to do TV, and I started going down from Ogden to Salt Lake to get back on maybe just television, commercials, but they were building the roadways, getting ready for the Olympics to come, and they tied up the roads, and the health got bad, so I said, "Well, just forget it." So I have. Now, if I could be on TV once in a while, I would. I've got another thing going: my son-in-law said that he would like some help on a speech he had to give, would I help him out? My daughter was into that field too, so we both worked with him, and he had a good speech. All I had to teach him: how to relax a little more and have a little more self-confidence, and I coached him, and he was delighted with the results. [He] told a young lady in another business about it, and I coached her to the point that she went down once and ad-libbed a whole speech at a class at BYU and was ecstatic about that. He has given more speeches on an international basis now, and he found once when he was preparing 13 his own material, ready to speak. The curtain went up and there were 450 people out there from different countries, and he had to give his speech. He said, "I felt pretty comfortable." My daughter said, his wife, said, "Comfortable?! He got a standing ovation when he was through!" He had learned the techniques, and I know the techniques of how to present, and I love to do it. So if anybody needs some help on how to present something, give me a call. That's a commercial. BS: That's great! You mentioned your children: some of them followed in your footsteps with TV and performing as well, right? RR: Oh right, I'll start with the daughter who went into TV. She called me one day—she was going up to the U—and she said, "Daddy, I want to do the news. What do I do?" She said, "It's only going to be up here on campus." I said, "Well, dear, you do two things. Number one: you talk through the camera to the cameraman, never to all those people out there, because they're listening by themselves. Even if they're with a group of people, by themselves. Talk through the camera to the cameraman,” which I used to do on television. I'd talk to the cameraman as the character and say, "Well, do you like that?" Pretty soon they learned to jiggle the camera back and forth, yes or no. I said, "The other thing is, if you have a script, don't be afraid to put it in front of you and look down at your script once in a while, grab words, and talk to people again. Always talk to one person." She called me a few days later and said, "I got the job!" So she did that working with Roy Gibson, who used to be the news announcer at Channel 4. She worked with him, went down got a job on her own at Channel 2 and got into 14 production. Later, she set up her own production company, until she had a baby and she had a production company to take care of herself. Another daughter, the oldest one, Robin, went out and did singing telegrams and things around town; finished her school, got a scholarship, by the way, in art; went to the Utah State, but decided to go back to theatre. I've worked a great deal with Robert Hyde Wilson, whom we called Rawhide Wilson 'cuz he was a little bit acerbic sometimes, but she didn't. She loved the man and worked hard. Went back to break into New York, was doing well. Auditioned once before 21 people that were all looking for people to do summer jobs, and she got 18 call backs out of 21. She was doing well. Then she fell in love, decided to have a family. Now her two boys are in college and she's going back and studying down in New York. She wants to break into acting if she can. If not, she has taken up interior design and is going back to school, specializing in kitchen designs. She's busy with that. My son plays beautiful guitar, and did it, all sorts, when he was growing up. Can't read music, plays by ear; he used to listen to my exercises I was doing on piano, reading them, and he could hear 'em and he could play 'em on his guitar. He went from that into something else and then wound up doing computer work. Lawyers contact him, send information to him, and on his computer he makes the final blueprints, in a sense, or the prints that they send in for the patent office. So he has a musical background, and then he has an artistic thing in him 'cuz he's very good at sketching and he's done this other. That's the way he makes his living now. BS: That's great. Well, this has been great, Ron. In conclusion, maybe you could just tell us what piece of advice or counsel you would give to a young person who wants to get into the entertainment industry? What advice would you give to them, or what 15 would you say to them? RR: Train. Train. Study. If you're going to go into acting, study dancing. I used to do modern dance for two years with the ladies who started the Ririe-Woodbury Company. Then I went into ballet. I went into mime back in New York and became part of a mime company they called ‘Mime Back There.’ You learn to move. Then take singing lessons. You not only learn to sing, but you learn to speak, and you become hyper-aware of language. Take acting lessons and apply the other things. You have to know how to move on stage, you have to know how to appeal to an audience. You've got one piece of yourself over here analyzing what you're doing, and how is the audience responding? How do you have to take them for the character you're playing? You study Stanislavsky and Bolislavsky. Stanislavsky had it from the insideout, the heart going out. Bolislavsky came to America and found that Americans didn't know how to move as actors, and so he worked with the physical point of view and made you work that way. Remember this: the people in Canada are so well-trained in theatre that when they started some company—I forgot which one it was, in New York—they didn't hire any American actors; they hired them all from Canada because they knew all the things they had to know. You have to have good teachers, but you have to be the student those teachers are looking for. BS: Great, thank you Ron. Is there anything you'd like to add? RR: Yes. I enjoyed school. I loved it. I hated to miss class. That was me. If you don't like school, study. Learn to get into some field where you don't have to go to school, but if you're smart, you'll always go to school. If you go into radio and you get a job in 16 radio, you have to learn a whole lot of techniques: little things like, as a radio announcer, or [on] TV, you ‘inhale a smile’ and that changes the quality of your voice, because if you're very serious, it changes the quality of your voice as well. But if you inhale a smile, you're setting your audience up and relaxing them. You do that on radio, television, and as an actor. You do it as your character. If your character's playing a certain kind of role, you inhale and it sets your body up. You need to go far enough in all those studies so they become almost automatic, but never quite. You have to keep adding and adding and learning more, and watching people, and picking up tricks like this one. When I asked a little girl one day how old she was, on television, she said, "Three" [imitates hand movement]. I'd never seen that before. I've never forgotten it. A mime from Japan came over and did a show and I got to see her in San Francisco. She did the part of a little boy whose kite took off and went away, and she—he—waved goodbye to the kite like this [waves uniquely]. I've never forgotten. You pick up gestures and movements. BS: Great, thank you. [Interview ends.] [Interview begins again for additional question.] BS: Tell us about Joe McQueen and when you played with him. RR: That was manifold years ago when the mouth of Ogden Canyon was Rainbow Gardens, and you could go downstairs to a room where we held jam sessions some Sundays. Joe McQueen was there, and his pianist, and all musicians in the area were invited to come in and we'd have a jam session for two or three hours 'til we got tired of it, and then we quit and head for home. But Joe played beautiful saxophone, as he still does, and just an incredible, long­-lived musician. 17 WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY STEWART LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW AGREEMENT This Interview Agreement is made and entered into this l L\ day(s) of by and between the Weber State University, Stewart Library (WSUSL) and Ros R.o 'I\ , hereinafter called "Interviewee." Interviewee agrees to participate in a recorded interview, commencing on or about with r; (Nv\ A (?Yi I S , IMITTI? 'LJ Mo--vc time/date, VV\ This Interview Agreement relates to any and all materials originating from the interview, namely the recording of the interview and any written materials, including but not limited to the transcript or other finding aids prepared from the recording. In consideration of the mutual covenants, conditions, and terms set forth below, the parties hereby agree as follows: 1. Interviewee irrevocably assigns to WSUSL all his or her copyright, title and interest in and to the interview. 2. WSUSL will have the right to use and disseminate the interview for research, educational, and other purposes, including print, present and future technologies, and digitization to provide internet access. 3. Interviewee acknowledges that he/she will receive no remuneration or compensation for either his/her participation in the interview or for the rights assigned hereunder. 4. WSUSL agrees to honor any and all reasonable interviewee restrictions on the use of the interview, if any, for the time specified below, as follows: __________________ Interviewer and Interviewee have executed this Interview Agreement on the date first written above. INTERVIEWER (Signature) V"; V\ (Printed Name) I STEWART LIBRARY WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY (801) 626-6403 I 2901 UNIVERSITY CIRCLE (801) 626-7045 FAX OGDEN UT 84408-2901 s W\-0\'.0 1M