Oral History Program Caril Jennings Interviewed by Ruby Licona 14 February 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Caril Jennings Interviewed by Ruby Licona 14 February 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ 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: Jennings, Caril, an oral history by Ruby Licona, 14 February 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Caril Jennings February 14, 2014 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Caril Jennings conducted on February 14, 2014 by Ruby Licona. Jennings discusses her background and her career at Weber State in the Department of Performing Arts for over 22 years. RL: Good morning. It’s Valentine’s Day of 2014, I’m Ruby Licona from the Stewart Library at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. This morning we are talking with Caril Jennings, who worked in the Department of Performing Arts and retired in 2013 after 22 and a half years. So, Caril, why don’t you fill us in a little bit? Are you a native of Ogden? CJ: No, but I came here as a very small child. I was born in Oklahoma and came here when I was two and grew up here. RL: What is the background of your experiences and contact with Weber State? CJ: Well, going to Weber State was always a thrill. I came to Weber State in junior high for a language fair in French, a science fair, and almost every year from junior high through high school for debate and theater—speech and drama and that sort of thing. In the old days, they used to take the junior high school kids out to the Weber campus for fairs all the time. I know that our department doesn’t do that anymore, they have a statewide conference. The kids don’t get that same opportunity, but it meant a lot to me. When I graduated from high school I just assumed this is where I was going to go, and I did. RL: Well, good. I guess it was a positive experience because in 1990 you came to work here. Were you always in the Performing Arts department? 2 CJ: For work, yes I was. However, I met my husband here in 1967. I came as a student in 1966 and met my husband in 1967, but we didn’t get married until 1969. I didn’t get a degree and we left the state. RL: Where’d you go? CJ: We went to California and then came back and then we went to Canada and came back. By this time, I was in my early thirties and I realized I needed to finish my degree, so I decided I wanted to be a science teacher. I came back as a non-traditional student in geography and geology. While I was in the geography area, I was a NASA scholar in the GIS program, which was pretty new at the time. RL: Did you get to work with any of the Alabama training? CJ: No. We were like the guinea pigs, trying out different GIS programs. In the early nineties there was no common language with GPS. Every company had their own language. NASA was trying to consolidate the languages that these programs spoke so that we’d have a big picture, so that was the NASA scholar. RL: Okay, what’s the difference between GPS and GIS? CJ: Essentially, they’re the same. RL: It’s a locating system either way. CJ: Right. GIS is the big subject—Geographic Information Systems and then GPS is the device that you use. RL: The positioning system. Okay. It sounds like you’ve had an interesting background. 3 CJ: Yes, I had a hard time deciding about being in the arts or the sciences, because I really am very interested in the sciences. My degree is in science—I got a BIS in philosophy, anthropology and GIS. When I graduated, I intended to work for the Forest Service, but by this time I was working in the Performing Arts department. I started out as a theater student and when I came back to Weber as an employee, theater, dance and music were all consolidated into one department. My daughter happened to be in the orchestra—even though she’s a scientist. She was in math and science, but she worked her way through school with an orchestra scholarship on campus. She came home one day from school and said, “Mom, mom! The secretary is quitting.” This was in September. She said, “You should apply for the job.” I did apply for the job and it took quite a long time for the hiring process. I didn’t get actually on campus until the end of December. So, actually, I got here by accident because my daughter knew about the position. I had been working in town at a chemical plant because I’m pretty organized—believe it or not. I could use my theater experience as a credit manager for this company. I was doing really well and they were paying me a great salary for a person without any background, but for my lunch hour I would take a class at Weber and every day I’d drive and I’d be so happy. Driving back down to my job I was saying, “I’m going in the wrong direction.” So, I put in my notice. I really had decided I needed to get a job at Weber State because that’s where I wanted to be. I thought that I would be hired right away. RL: You didn’t know about all the hoops to jump through, huh? 4 CJ: Well, when I had turned in my notice there were quite a few secretary jobs, but I gave my company three months’ notice so they could replace me and by the time that three months came, there was not a single job at Weber State on the horizon. RL: It’s Murphy’s Law. CJ: I know it. So, I was only out of work for a week. I went across the street to the McKay Dee Hospital as a medical transcriber and just kept watching the notices. Then my daughter came home and told me about the secretarial job before the notice went up. We know that a position gets empty and it can be weeks or months before they’ll put the new notice up. RL: But with 23 years, I’m sure your position and title has changed. You came in December of 1990 and you pretty much stayed in a secretarial position. CJ: Right, for seven years. In 1995, I got my degree by taking one or two hours at a time. I had been here for five years and Dean June Phillips said, “Well, Caril, what are you going to do now that you’ve graduated?” I said, “Well, I’m going to stay here.” She said, “You mean you want to be a secretary now that you have your degree?” I said, “Well, you know, there’s the Secretary of State, there’s the Secretary of Defense, and I’m the Secretary of Performing Arts.” She never asked me again what I was going to do because I was perfectly happy to stay there. I got my degree because my daughter was graduating and I thought, “This is the perfect opportunity.” RL: That way you only have to have one party. 5 CJ: Yes. So, we walked one Jennings right after another together to get our diplomas and that was wonderful. RL: That must have been really special. CJ: It really was. Besides being the department secretary, I had always done a lot of marketing, or I call it publicity, for various arts groups. RL: When you came, the Utah Musical Theater was still going strong. CJ: That’s right. They were separate from the department, but there was a lot going on for marketing. RL: That was a great program. I remember I came here in January of 1990 and I read a Sunset Magazine or something that said, “Utah’s a wonderful place to be in the summer because of all the outdoor activities, but two things you should not miss are the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City and the Utah Musical Theater in Ogden.” That gave me such relief to know that I wasn’t—well, I moved here from New Orleans, so to know that there was going to be such a bright program here— and I thoroughly enjoyed it for many years. You did the PR with that— CJ: Actually, I only worked for UMT for like two or three summers because my job in the department was 11 months. It was hard to do. Utah Musical Theater was a big deal and they really needed a full-time person doing that kind of marketing and other kinds of paperwork for the program. So, I got to assist, but I really was way down on the pole. RL: But it was a well-recognized program out of that department. 6 CJ: Jim, the director of the program, was one of our faculty members, so our department got a lot of credit and street credit from that program. RL: Well, that was one of the early outreach programs. CJ: Yes, because a lot of our students would spend the summer doing Utah Musical Theater so it was a really great combination. RL: It wasn’t just students. I know that there was at least one program where the University president’s wife was on stage. It was Secret Garden, I think. CJ: Actually, it was a really good opportunity for a lot of people and they hired professionals too. That was very good for our students to be working with professional actors or professional designers for that matter. It really worked well as a stand-alone program, but as an adjunct program for our students it was terrific. RL: We’ve got a great theater program. CJ: The best. I would put our theater students up against—our theater productions— against any of the ones that you’d see in Salt Lake as far as the quality. We might not get 100 percent, but I’d say we’re right at about 95 percent on the excellent performances. One of the reasons is our faculty members are not teaching our students like they’re children—or like they’re even students—once they get into a production they act as if they’re professionals or they don’t get hired for the next performance. 7 RL: You got to work with some good people over the years. When you came, were there any particular individuals that you got to know well that mentored you or that you would consider a strong colleague in the department? CJ: That’s kind of a hard question to answer because if you’re a department secretary and you show you’ve got a favorite faculty member, that doesn’t play well with the other faculty members. In a sense, I was more like the mother than anyone’s pal. One thing I can say about performing arts faculty is that they are so wrapped up in their performances that it’s not like they have a lot of time for chumming around. However, as for friends in the department over the years, I had been a volunteer for the Myra Powell Gallery at Union Station and was on the board there. One of the shows that I produced was a show of Catherine Zublin’s costumes. She didn’t know me, but I had seen her costumes on stage because before I worked here when I used to go to see theater. When I was a theater student, the costumes designer, all he cared about was what the colors looked like and that costumes didn’t fall apart before the end of the play. Catherine Zublin teaches her costume people how to create a period costume. When you look at her costumes and the costumes that her students have made, they’re tailored and excellently finished from start to finish. RL: She’s a perfectionist with her costumes. CJ: She teaches people how to make real clothes. RL: Any of the students here are prepared to go wherever. 8 CJ: By the time our students get through the theater department, half of them are already working professionally. Once they graduate, theaters in Salt Lake snap them up like crazy because they know that students coming out of the theater area have a high quality education with really rigorous standards. All the technicians, the lighting designers, the set designers, and the costume designers compete very well for jobs. And then so do our actors—especially in musical theater. RL: As a department secretary, did you get to know some of the students who went on to— CJ: Oh quite a few of them. RL: Because we’ve had a few that have gone on to Broadway and— CJ: Right. André Ward is one of them. Tim Goins, he went south and has spent quite a lot of time working in Orlando at Disneyworld there. Jim Wrap is still a dance captain for Off-Broadway productions that tour the world. One who I consider a friend of mine now, her name is Christie Davis. She was a designer, but she was also an English major and she’s working for Oprah magazine now, living in Brooklyn. Some of these people are not students who were friends, but who are now friends. Another woman named, Jen McGrew, came through Catherine Zublin’s as a costume designer and she runs a very high end character costume company in Salt Lake. So, yes, there are lots of students that I have had the privilege of working with and knowing. It’s always a lot of fun to see them again. A couple of years ago, they had a theater event down at Eccles— kind of a reunion—it was just like seeing the whole family. Some of the people I hadn’t 9 seen in 15 or 20 years. It’s interesting to see these young people grow up and get older. I don’t think it’s happening to me if I don’t look in a mirror and to see someone who left at 20 and now they’re 40, that’s just an eye-opener to remind you that time is going by. RL: As a faculty member, it’s always startling to have students whose parents you taught. CJ: Yes. That did happen a few times—students who came through the department and I knew their parents in high school. RL: Now, you worked in the performing arts under three different deans? CJ: Yes. There was Sherwin, then Sesh [Candadai Seshachari] as an interim dean, June, and now Madonne. So, with Sesh that’s four. RL: I realize you were in a department, but you still worked closely with the Dean’s Office if you were doing any PR and so forth. CJ: That’s true—once I got the marketing job. I also had some intuition that the marketing person that was there when I got my degree was burning herself out. To work for artists, you have to love artists, and to her, artists were just a confusing mess. She never caught on because it’s a certain kind of crazy passion that makes you be an artist and it’s not for most people. It makes them different in, to me, charming and interesting ways. I’m married to an artist. This woman, she was doing a good job, but keeping up with all the personalities was hard on her. Two years after I got my degree she left and they didn’t hire anyone for seven months. By the time they got to the hiring department, my portfolio was 10 huge from thirty years of—I did my first publicity for a performance in junior high school and still had the little flyer I made for it on a mimeograph machine. I had my hand in all along and I had been helping with her. As a matter of fact, one of the ways I got my extra credit (because going the five hours at a time was taking a long time) was that I would take a practicum credit and I would market one of the performances. So, I had a great portfolio. One year as a student in the eighties, I did an internship at Union Station for the National Western Film Festival and I got a lot of really good experience there. So, when they were asking for a marketing person, I didn’t have any credentials in marketing, but I had a portfolio of marketing the arts. My competition, they were selling garage doors and chain link fences, so hands down, I was the one they chose and I already knew the department. They already knew what I could do. RL: Well, all of your earlier experience then helped to build the basis for things that you’ve done subsequently. You were there when they started the Jazz at the Station. CJ: I started Jazz at the Station. RL: You started Jazz at the Station. I knew you were involved with it, but—I think it’s a beautiful community outreach program. CJ: I’ll tell you why I did it. It’s because for years I was the department secretary and when students would take Introduction to Jazz class they would have to attend three or four performances during the quarter. Our department would do one jazz concert and then they had to go out in the world and see jazz concerts. Well, there wasn’t any other venue in Ogden that was doing jazz unless you went to a 11 bar. In those days besides drinking, you could smoke in a bar, so there was a whole element of students in our department who couldn’t attend a jazz venue like that. Either they were underage, or they didn’t want to be in association with alcohol and cigarette smoking. Concerts in Salt Lake could be 25 to 40 bucks. For a student, that was terrible. So, the second quarter I was a marketing director, we were being urged across campus to do diversity and community outreach. I thought a jazz program on campus would be a great step in both of those directions. I was really right. It didn’t take very long at all for that program to be popular. It used to be called Jazz in the Sky Room. Then, the fire marshal started coming and said, “You’re going to have to find another venue because you’ve overloaded this room.” RL: Well, and the programs I’ve gone to, it’s always been standing room only. CJ: Exactly. So, we went from the Sky Room down to The Junction—this was before Union Station—and we would have standing room only down there. What was really cool about that program is not only were the kids who needed the credit able to get the credit for free, but the nontraditional students could bring their children and they could also afford it because it was free. RL: And some of the students got to perform. CJ: Yes. That’s another thing because here were these jazz students who love the music and they could only do one concert a year. Because of the Jazz at the Station they could do at least two and if they were in the smaller combo, they’d get three performance opportunities. It just turned out to be a really great idea. Of 12 course, Don Keipp, supported it entirely and it was his influence that helped us get professional performers. RL: You had contacts at Union Station. CJ: Well, the Union Station thing was kind of an accident. We lost our venue when they did the remodel and we went for a semester without Jazz at the Station and people kept calling to ask, “When is it? Where is it?” Union Station had the same kind of model, they needed to show that they were doing diversity and community outreach. Roberta Beverly contacted me to see if we’d be interested in going down there and I said, “Would I?” So, we went down there in a sense to fill in the gap while the Union Building was being remodeled. By the time the Union Building became available again, it was a favorite at the station and it’s so much easier to find parking for older people. It’s hard for older people to come up on campus at night if you don’t know the campus. RL: I bet the parking and the lighting and everything— CJ: And often when you get a parking place it’s so far from the venue. At the Union Station it’s all on one level, you find a lot of people with walkers and wheelchairs. RL: When were the first performances there? CJ: We’ve been down there for seven years. I can’t remember. RL: It would have been about 2006 or 2007. CJ: Yes. It was when they shut down the west wing of the Union Building. 13 RL It’s also been great in terms of the community outreach thing. Most of the people you see are community residents. You see some people from Weber State out there. CJ: I’d say during the school year it’s about 20-25 percent students and the rest of it is all ages. When we were there the other day there were more than a dozen kids at the back RL: And they were having a ball. CJ: I don’t care if they’re not sitting in a seat. They’re in the back, they’re dancing and they’re running around listening to music. It’s the only all-ages event that we offer for children out of the department. You have to be eight or older to attend the other events, so it’s a good way for them to be introduced to the music. Sometimes they’ll sit for a little while and look, but I don’t expect two or three year olds to be well-behaved audience members, there’s just no way they can do it. I want them to be hearing the music. RL: Well, and they’re exposed to it at an early age, so that’s good. CJ: I took my kids to music events from when they were tied to me on a sling. Consequently, they’re both musicians, even though they do different things for a living. They both love all kinds of music because of the exposure that they’ve had. RL: You haven’t been devoted just to the drama programs and so forth here, you’ve also been tied to the art department and at least in contact peripherally. What’s it been—about ten years since you opened the gallery downtown? 14 CJ: Well, we opened it in December of 2004, but we closed it in 2011. That art gallery really relied on my contacts in the art department throughout my whole life. We featured students that I knew in the art department when I was a student and then students that I met through all the years of coming up to see student shows as well as current students and faculty members. We had quite a few of the faculty members that had their own show down there. I’m interested in all the arts. The arts, to me, are what really make us human and what makes life to be more interesting. I used to do a lot of tours and talks about the department and about the arts. I would tell people, “If you want to know what’s wrong with people you can watch the news, but if you want to know what we’re doing right you should come see our performances or you should go see an art gallery and see what people do.” The way we express ourselves is so important. I also encourage people to make sure that their children have some art, some expressive art that they can participate in, whether or not they intend to do anything work related with it—especially teenagers. If you could—your heart’s breaking and you can spend a half an hour at a piano and play a sad song, or make one up or go to your journal and write a long story or a short poem, or just express all the up and downs. RL: The angst. CJ: Yes. Everything it takes to be human, if you have a way to express it or even to hear an art piece and relate it to what you’re experiencing that’s—if you don’t have those outlets, it’s easy to get distracted by the lower realms—to get stuck in 15 anger, or gossip, or stupid television. I watch T.V., but there’s some stupid television. RL: And there’s some mindless television that we watch. You started out talking about the fact that you were a scientist and an artist. It’s amazing how often you see that kind of relationship within an individual and I think there have been people that I’ve run into up in the science building that have that soft side to them where they expose themselves through the arts. So, I’m sure that some of the people that you’ve run into aren’t necessarily all from the art departments, but throughout the campus, aren’t they? CJ: Yes, I’m friends with a lot of people in the physics department and we meet each other in the audience of the performing arts events. Through the years I’ve noticed that, especially in music. You can’t have another major and be in theater. You just can’t. Theater consumes all of your time if you’re in a performance. It’s even hard for theater students to keep good grades because of the demands on their time at night. In music, I’ve met a lot of students who were physics majors, chemistry majors, and a lot of people in the nursing program. The music was their consolation and their expressive side. There was a clarinetist—an incredible clarinet player named Lee Hammond, in the early nineties when I first came into the department. I bet his parents would probably like to sue me, because he was a physics major and although he did graduate with a degree in physics, he also graduated with a degree in music. He always blames me for that, but credits me at the same time because he now is a working musician. He works for a symphony. I asked him, “What do you mean you want to be a music major and 16 yet you’re being a physics major? It seems to me you’re smart enough to do both. Why would you not do what you love?” So, I’m kind of a dangerous person to have talking to people, because I’m going to encourage you to follow your heart instead of your head because money can’t buy you happiness if you’re not doing what you love. RL: As long as you have what you need. CJ: Yes. RL: We talked about you having worked under several different deans and of course, if they’re deans for the Arts and Humanities, they’re going to be supportive, but were there other administrators through your years here that were particularly helpful or built road blocks? CJ: Oh no road blocks at all. RL: You were here during three different presidents? CJ: I do know that when, I’ve forgotten his name, there was some guy that came in and his concern was the bottom line on everything. So, budgets were cut. RL: Oh, so that was one of the business VP’s? CJ: Yes, he didn’t stay long. Mostly I found that the support for the administration for the Department of Performing Arts has been very strong. For one thing, we win a lot—ACTF [American College Theater Festival] and— RL: Every year they go to the Kennedy center, don’t they? CJ: Well— 17 RL: Close to every year—more often than not. CJ: More often than not we take a play to the regional competitions and then many times we have gone to the Kennedy Center. Because we keep having these good outcomes, we do get good support. It’s not the same thing as the football team, but don’t get me started on that. I’ve always found that we’ve had very good support. There’s another program that I’ve done since I became the Marketing Director, starting in September of 1998, I started doing Weber State WSU Greek Festival. That idea is— RL: That’s really caught on. CJ: Yes. I’ve been doing it every year. Even though I’m retired, I did it. Kathryn McKay has got the history department to keep it going now that I’m no longer employed, but I am a community volunteer to keep that going. The thing that was interesting to me about that was how many academic people at one time in their life were just in love with the Greek stories, archaeology, and art. There’s something about the ancient Greeks the way they’re presented to us when we’re children—they’re just fascinating. Almost everyone I could talk to would tell me some story in their early life when they were really in love with the Greeks. It occurred to me that half the academic programs that we have up here, in the first week when you’re taking a Gen Ed course, you find out the name of the discipline comes from Greeks. You find out what the Greeks had to say about it and you get a little history today. I thought it would be a pretty interesting thing to find the Greek influences in everyone’s academics and put that together as a festival. We’d find three, four or five people each year that could speak and then 18 I’d use all of those events to get the attention of people about the Greek play that was coming. That’s the whole thing about the festival is we have been bringing the Classical Group Theater festival performance onto campus for years. RL: There are the performances and there are also films that are shown. There’s reading that people do in all of the lectures and I’ve noticed a lot of people from the community get involved in that. It’s not just a hoity toity university kind of thing. Everybody loves it. CJ: Since we do it in the middle of the day, people from the community can come up. I’ve noticed that a lot of times, half the people in the audience are retired people, who sometime in their youth were in love with the Greeks too. We hadn’t been doing this for very long—two or three years—when I decided to add Reader’s Theater to it. The idea is tragedy tomorrow because the Greek plays are always a tragedy tomorrow, comedy today, so we’d do the Reader’s Theater as a comedy the day before. We started with Lysistrata, because I had done Lysistrata in 1968. RL: I’m sure it was more accepted in 1998 than in 1968. CJ: Oh yes. As a matter of fact, we lost some donors when we did it in 1968 because we played it as an anti-war piece, which it is, and there were some people who were offended by it. That’s another story. Anyway, I started with the Aristophanes Lysistrata. The next year I’m thinking, “What play are we going to do? Well, we’ll do another Aristophanes.” Then I’m thinking about it and Aristophanes only has eleven existing plays. He may have written a lot of them, but we only have eleven of them. 19 RL: Then you jump to Sophocles or— CJ: Well, no, it took us eleven years to do all of Aristophanes. The last one was this past September. I used to say, “My goal in life is to finish doing all of Aristophanes in the Reader’s Theater.” So, when the performance ended in September, I said, “Well, now I can die. I got through Aristophanes.” RL: Well, let’s hope not. CJ: So, we’re either going to start all over again with the scripts we already have next year, or there is a—next year the play we’re bringing is Hecuba, by Euripides. The Greek playwrights would write three tragedies and then a comedy or a farce. There apparently is one, The Cyclops that Euripides wrote that went along with the three plays that went along with Hecuba. The Cyclops has nothing to do with Hecuba, but it just happens to be written by the same person. So, we might do that one. I’m looking for my theater people in the community to help me figure out how to do it because it’s a physical comedy. We can’t do physical comedy with Weber’s Theater, so we’ll figure it out. I’ll let you know. RL: Were there other programs that have crossed between the university—town and gown kinds of things? CJ: In 1999, Betty Moore, who recently died, did a community organization—a community group to bring us a traveling show from the Smithsonian called, Wade in the Water. Every community that had this exhibit was encouraged to do community activities. One of the things that she thought we would have was Gospel Music Festival. So, she got in touch with Mark Henderson and he said, 20 “Sure. Caril will do that for you.” I worked with the community and we did the first Gospel Music Festival in 2000. It was supposed to be a one year event for that traveling exhibit, but we had such a good outcome from the whole thing—the feedback from the community and the most colorful audience I had ever seen at Weber State. I mean, it was the Rainbow Coalition in the audience and it was just a thrill to see such a colorful audience and people who would not normally be on campus. I thought, “Well, this is a great way to introduce people to the campus.” I asked if my department wouldn’t stop doing it and if we could do it the next year and he said, “Sure.” The one thing I liked about working in my department was that if I had an idea, and I was willing to do the work, no one said, “No.” As a matter of fact, that was the best part of my job. Essentially, I worked without a supervisor the entire time that I was the Marketing Director. I don’t recall being called on anything—only encouraged. I was not ignored, but just left to go and do what I wanted. RL: Sometimes a pat on the back goes a long way. CJ: It does. The department kept getting good credit for the Gospel Music Festival. It was about the time that I was thinking about Jim and Utah Musical Theater and when Jim pulled back from having so many obligations when he was a single parent with a teenage daughter that he wanted to spend quality time with. UMT didn’t recover from losing that important person. I realized that if something happened to me, there wasn’t anybody in my department that would promote or do the Gospel Music Festival. I started working with Keith Wilder in the Diversity 21 Center and they took it over. So, it was a joint event, but it’s just strictly the Diversity Center’s, now that I’m completely out of the department. RL: Well, the Diversity Center and the Assistant to the President for Diversity have both done a lot in terms of community outreach and unification of different groups. CJ: Yes. It’s been a vehicle for me because I totally buy the Diversity Program. I’m a child of the Civil Rights era. I became politically conscious in the early sixties and most Civil Rights songs were on my heart. So, being in the position that I was, I was able to do a lot of connecting with diversity issues and the department. I’m taking credit for this again, but there’s a reason why we have at least one show every semester that has American Sign Language provided. We did a show in the late nineties of Mother Hicks and an integral part of that show is a person who speaks in sign language. I got my foot in the pool of working with people who use ASL. It was a thrilling experience. A year went by and we didn’t do anything else and then there was another call for diversity to step up our business, our relations and diverse— RL: Populations? CJ: Yes, and ASL is certainly one of them. So, I started doing that routinely, not from anybody’s direction and then one of our students came to Weber State after getting her ASL certificate from Salt Lake Community College. She came here to finish her theater degree because of the ASL part. Her name is Amelia Williams and she went to work in our Office for Students with Disabilities. Now, she’s the 22 partner, so I’m gone but they’re still doing the ASL. Those kinds of things I’m glad to see that are continuing. By the way, there is a question about Jazz at the Station. That might go to the Diversity Office too. That’s another story. You might want to cut this out. RL: You did mention at the last performance that there was a possibility that the program would be ending. CJ: Yes. See, we don’t offer jazz as a major, so we don’t have a jazz program, and the new person didn’t see a benefit of it. RL: The new percussionist? CJ: No, the new person that replaced me. She’s not from here and that community outreach aspect of it didn’t ring any heart strings with her. So, they decided to drop the program. I said, “Well, you can’t do that because it’s on the calendar for the entire year and where are the underage students going to see their jazz programs? Once a month are you going to say, “We’ve cancelled Jazz at the Station this month? Are you going to say that for the entire year?” So, they realized they had to keep it going at least for this year because by the time I retired, this calendar season was already up and we had our acts all lined up because you have to work in advance for those kind of things. They realized they had to finish out this year, but the department isn’t doing it. It’s being fostered by the Dean—she said that she would support it for the rest of the year, but by April they’re going to make up their mind. I’m positive they’re not going to keep it 23 because they don’t go. They don’t see how much the audience likes it. They don’t have the same kind of idea about diversity. Younger people, I think, don’t understand in the same way because they haven’t seen the before. It doesn’t mean the same thing to them and I can understand. There are a lot of things that I’ve started that they think are dependent on me and that now that I’m gone those things are gone, too, but that’s not true. I don’t have to be at Jazz at the Station for those people to show up. They’re not coming to see me. They’re coming to see jazz. As long as someone is calling them there once a month, the audience is going to show up. The Dean may be made to see the light, but the Diversity Office says that if the Arts and Humanities don’t want to continue to support it, they’re certainly interested in keeping it going because the Diversity Office sees that it’s an important relationship that we have we our community. RL: Well, is it a money draining program? CJ: Well, you know, this is what happened with the job and me. I loved this stuff so much, that—when I first took the job, the job only covered 40 performances a year—the major ensembles and the plays. Well, I’m thinking to myself, “Well, in all the smaller ensembles the students have to spend the same amount of time rehearsing, so why should the smaller ensembles get any less attention than the larger ensembles.” So, I started marketing every single thing we did. On top of that, I added the Greek Festival, the Gospel Music Festival, Jazz at the Station, and our interaction with Weber Reads. By the time I left, I was marketing 125 to 130 shows or performances a year plus the last minute things like guest artists 24 coming in. Well, the new person is saying, “What? That’s not possible for one person to do.” It really isn’t. I mean, it was impossible for me to do it. I just didn’t take no for an answer. That was taking up my private life. My whole family was involved in all of this. My son, Benjamin, helps me run Jazz at the Station, he’s the co-producer. So, my job was a family event. I had a hundred percent support from my family on everything I did, so it’s not like I was being torn between job and home life. My job and my home life were a bundle. RL: Were a good mesh. CJ: It was easy for me to just work myself and be a silly working fool to get everything accomplished because that was what I was doing to have fun and make my life and to contribute to the arts. I wasn’t out feeding people’s bellies, but I was feeding their souls and hearts. RL: Did you do any of the marketing for the Peery’s Egyptian? CJ: When we were out of our Browning Center, I marketed all of our events that took place at Peery’s. I had spoken earlier about doing an internship in the eighties and it was with the National Western Film Festival at the Union Station at the same time we were saving the Egyptian Theater. I was on the committee of saving the Egyptian Theater and then half of the movies from the film festival were presented at the Egyptian. I was also the House Manager and Stage Manager for the Egyptian for that summer. I had the keys to the building and once again, I involved my family. My kids were the custodians; they’d sweep the popcorn between the shows and stuff like that. So, I have an association with the Egyptian. I was on the board for several years while I was the marketing person, 25 so I did assist in that way, but never professionally for them. I’ve never actually worked for them. I love that place. I think it’s really cool that Diane [Stern] does a lot of our cultural affairs events down there because it’s such a beautiful venue. RL: And you get a wonderful turn out. CJ: Yes. RL: Everything is always full down there. CJ: Yes. It’s a thrill to see that the building didn’t get knocked down. The funniest part was they would have had to blow it up. You couldn’t have knocked that building down, it is built pretty solid—from the ground all the way to the top is solid concrete. It’s built to last. Anyway, my association with the Egyptian has been peripheral, but lots of fun. RL: Are there other arts programs around the city that you’ve been involved with? CJ: Well, I’ve done the Ogden Arts Festival a couple of times, but it’s a different kind of art to me. It’s more of a carnival and I’m more contemplative about art than that. Besides, I don’t go out on hot asphalt in June. I’m not built for it. Weber Reads is another program that involves the community because it’s fostered by the Weber County Commissioners and the Weber County Library. RL: Well, it’s part of the R.A.M.P. thing, isn’t it? CJ: Yes, but the library gets the R.A.M.P. grants. It’s a three part Weber connection. The Weber County Library does all the work with the children in the public schools and then we take care of programming up here on campus for the grown-ups. 26 RL: Did you ever get involved with the Storytelling Festival on campus? CJ: You know, I always used to support it on my calendar and on the back of my programs, but it’s not anything I’ve ever done. I think it’s a great event, but I’ve never been in any part of the producing. RL: Well, the library had started it and then the Teacher Education Program helped with it and I know I had friends from around the country that came to the festival to take part and so forth. CJ: It’s a really great program. As I was saying earlier how I overloaded my job. I actually got to a point where I couldn’t do one more thing. If one more thing came into the schedule, something would have to pop out. So, while I’ve often thought I wouldn’t mind trying to be a storyteller and actually be a participant, I haven’t done it yet—yet. RL: You’ve mentioned a few students that you had gotten to know and a couple of them that you helped to sway in one direction or another. In the years that you were here, did you see a difference in the kinds of students we were having come in or a difference in where they were from or anything else? CJ: I’m always surprised at how so many of the people in our department who are not from Ogden. They come from all over Utah and parts of Wyoming. We do have occasional students who are from out of the area, but the one thing I do know—this is the real difference to me between when I came in as a theater student and now—the difference in the quality of skill, maybe not necessarily talent, but skill, is incredible. 27 RL: So they’re coming in with more skills? CJ: Yes. Because they’ve had community theater experience. When I came in as a student, there was no community theater. There had been one or two, but they weren’t for children, they were for grown-ups. I’m really amazed at the level of skill that these kids show up with now. Every year it seems to me that they’re just so much more experienced. It’s not that they’ve been in a couple of high school plays, they’ve been in every high school play and every community theater and they’ve put up a few things of their own and they video tape themselves and they do a lot of dancing. A person in the arts now has a lot more opportunities to practice their art than previously. RL: Oh sure. I’ve seen church presentations of Fiddler on the Roof that just amaze me and I think the kids here in Utah get a lot more musical training—either singing or playing an instrument or dance or combinations—and there are a lot more opportunities. In Ogden we’ve got the Terrace Playhouse and how many of our students have gone on to productions at the Salt Lake Acting Company. CJ: Yes, they couldn’t do the summer show, what’s the parody? Saturday’s Voyeur. They couldn’t do that without Weber State students. We’re usually two-thirds or three-fourths of the cast. There’s a theater in Cache County and Box Elder County too. RL: In Perry. 28 CJ: Yes. People get a lot of good experience there. The level of confidence that the new students are bringing with them is pretty eye opening to me. There will be freshmen on stage the first semester that give the seniors a run for their money. RL: They’re not afraid of jumping on stage right off the bat. In another time, they would have hesitated. CJ: Right. They might not have auditioned for a while. This is the good thing about the theater area. Every theater major or minor has to audition if they’re actors. If they fall in the design track, they don’t have to, but they have to have auditioned for a couple of shows. I don’t remember the details because once I became the Marketing Director, I lost all my smarts for being the secretary. The secretary knows everything, so I got a lot dumber when I was no longer the secretary. RL: No, it was not a matter of dumber; you just had more room on your brain for other things. CJ: Yes and I didn’t have to know the answers to those questions any longer. Every student has to audition, so that’s really good experience for when they have to go out and audition in the real world. That increases their likelihood of being cast. The acting programs at other schools, you have to put in your time doing this before you’re allowed on stage. Here, you’re allowed on our stage if you’re good enough, and it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been on campus. If you’re a freshman and you’re good enough for that part, you get that part. They don’t hold it against you that you’re a freshman and I think that’s a wonderful opportunity for our theater people. You can imagine a lot of students would be discouraged before they finally got on stage if they had to go through the two year acting 29 program before they could be on a main stage production. They’d get married or decide they want another major or fall away, but because our students are encouraged to participate right from the get-go, they do. It’s really good for them. RL: I think one of the things that’s important here is the quality of the faculty that we attract. CJ: Yes. I’m always amazed that we keep them because they seem to be so good and their reputation is so good that why aren’t they being lured away by more money someplace else. There’s a real dedication that our faculty members have to the program. I think that if you get past the first two or three years of working at Weber—or working in Utah if you’re coming from someplace else—if you can go through the first couple of years and survive the culture shock, you find that this is a very nice place to live. RL: And it’s not just theater. The music department is internationally renowned for— CJ: Oh yes, those are some of the people I’m thinking of about why they haven’t been lured away. Shi Hwa spends the summer every year being a concert master up in an internationally famous symphony. RL: Yu Jane has had some wonderful piano students who have gone on to— CJ: And she’s world renowned as a pedagogist. She studied with some of the famous ones. To have those people here, it’s just a wonder. We’ve got piano and violin covered and then Viktor Uzur, he’s young yet, nevertheless, he’s still here. He’s been here for five or six years and the students adore him. It raises the level 30 of their playing when the faculty members are good examples of practicing their art. They’re not just teachers. RL: Well, and they do some of the outreach to the community too. I know people love the summer concerts for the 24th of July and the 4th of July celebrations. Even performances that we have here on campus, you do see a variety of people that come to the programs. CJ: Right. We have world-class performing faculty members, so when they’re performing, the audiences are full. RL: And here’s little old Weber, with an all Steinway studio. That’s an accomplishment for that area. CJ: It really has been. Our fantastic faculty members are a good deal of the reason why that’s happening. You come to this school for the arts, or at least in the performing arts, you know you’re going to get a good and rigorous education and all the opportunities to perform that you have time for. In our dance area, Eric Stern could be anywhere. He travels the world. He’s an artist in demand. His schedule every year is very interesting. He spent some time in Australia last year and just to hear where these people are going on their breaks during the summer to be performers is pretty interesting to me. RL: Well, you’ve told us about a lot of things that you started and some that you’re just taking credit for, but I don’t think that was the case, I think you were an integral part of the things that got started. Can you choose a favorite? 31 CJ: A favorite. Well, actually, after not very long, Jazz at the Station really became a favorite for me. For one thing it turned my son from being a head-banging punk rocker to a jazz musician. So, I’ll always be grateful for that. It’s just endearing to me to see in some cases the same faces in the audience month after month. There are some people in the community, especially older folks on limited income where a free event is important. There are some older people that come to Jazz at the Station and it’s like seeing my aunt or uncle. I hug people when they come in the door. There’s a very familial experience to me for Jazz at the Station and it comes with the music too. The music isn’t formal. It’s not like you have to sit in the chair and be quiet. There’s this give and take that the audience and the musicians have that I really, really like. I don’t like to go to concerts where people yell and scream. RL: Then you don’t hear the music. CJ: Right. They’re going for a different experience. I don’t like even being in big crowds, but I don’t mind being in a big crowd in the Austad Auditorium because I know no one’s going to start screaming and jumping up and down. You’re there for a contemplative experience of music—I like that formal setting. It’s very calming for me. It’s almost a kind of yoga to sit still for an hour or hour and a half and listen. It’s a form of meditation. There’s this informal quality about jazz that’s appealing to me that’s not quite over to the screaming and yelling part. It’s like you can say, “Oh yeah,” when someone does a great thing, or you can clap at the end of one of their solos in the middle of a song. It’s a give and take with the performer that I didn’t understand until I actually started seeing them frequently. 32 So, Jazz at the Station has given me a different understanding in that way. I also like the Greek Festival, because I’m a Greek fan from the word go. RL: We were talking in terms of favorites. Now, is there any one thing that you consider your greatest accomplishment? CJ: My greatest accomplishment. RL: In terms of the position and things that you did. CJ: I never missed a program. Every show had a program in the audiences’ hands. The first couple of years I worked, I’d be worried, “How am I going to get all of this done? What if I have forgotten?” So, my greatest accomplishment for doing that job for 15 years was never missing a program because there were a lot of things to keep track of and it’s not just music, it’s not just theater, it’s not just dance. Some nights we had two or three things going on at the same time. So, just juggling and getting it all done. Adding my own contributions to the programming, whether people think it was good or not, I enjoyed that part. My greatest accomplishment was getting that job. RL: And keeping it for so, so long. CJ: I couldn’t have landed in a better spot for me personally. I got to be my own boss doing what I loved in my heart. I wanted to be an artist or performer, I’m okay on stage, I was a passable singer and I could dance when I was younger. But, I didn’t have what it takes to give up everything for my craft. RL: The drive. 33 CJ: I didn’t have it. I could see it in the people who had it and I realized, “I want a family. I want a life. I don’t want to travel.” I realized that I didn’t have the burning desire to do the one thing and you have to do that. You have to have that to be a successful artist. RL: You had to have time to do your Mardi Gras party. CJ: Yes. So, what I did by default was become an arts advocate. I could appreciate art and hang around artists and promote what they do. When I was talking about my portfolio with years of promoting the arts, that was a way to use my skills because I’m very organized and a good writer. I’m not an artist, but I have a good eye for graphics and I have an interest in that kind of tedious detail. I had these skills that I could give to the arts out of love because no one paid me to do it. Then I got paid to do it when I came to work at Weber State and I used to tell people, “I’d do this job for free if I could afford it.” So, this is funny. I retired June, I did the Greek Festival in September, and we’re working on Weber Reads right now. I did the program for the Gospel Music Festival in January and— RL: Now you’re volunteering in the library. CJ: I’m running three shows in the Shepherd Union Building. I just got finished with the Air art exhibit, which was paintings of the sky and photography from the bird refuge that went along with the engaged learning conversation here on air. See, I did it last year on water. We closed our gallery in 2011, so 2012 came by and I didn’t get to do basin and range; that’s a show about our environment and I use it 34 as a vehicle for social commentary in that art brings you to look at things and contemplate the subject, but then while you’re thinking about the environment that we’re living in, these are the environmental issues we have to talk about. So, for basin and range we talked about not building a ski resort on the west-facing slope, how we need to preserve green space in town, where are our transportation issues. Every year there was a new topic. So, last year when they did this topic on water, I thought, “Universe City can live now.” That’s my new gallery name now and my venue is wherever I can find a place to do the art. “Universe City lives,” you can catch us on Facebook. Last year I did a show in the basin and range in January and then I had done the costume show called Arti Gras every year where I had the gallery featuring Weber State theater costumes. Then, every March I did a show concentrating on a material or fabric—it all ended up being about the material. I thought, “The perfect group to be involved in that would be the sculpture students.” There was a new faculty, Jason Andley, and he hadn’t been here long enough to say no, so he said yes right off. I did those three shows last year, kind of feeling out my retirement like, “Could I do this next year?” So, I took advantage of having this working relationship with the gallery director and I lined up the three shows again this year. We just finished the one on air. Right now, the costumes exhibit is up. This is cool—the foyer has three costumes from the 125th Steampunk birthday party because our theater people made the costumes for the entertainment. The birthday party costumes get to live again and then next month Jason Andley is bringing the sculpture students in. The only thing I’m 35 doing is producing it, I don’t have anything to say about the content. I could, but I’m just going to market it. RL: We’ve talked about the difference you’ve seen in students and what you’ve seen in the faculty. What are your observations in changes in audiences over the years? Is there a greater level of sophistication or acceptance? CJ: Theater audiences have much broader minds now than they used to, meaning almost all of our theater performances have sell-out audiences. RL: You didn’t lose donors over them. CJ: Right. The local audience seems to think that local theater has more merit than it used to I think. A long time ago, people were thinking of a college theater on an amateur level. If they wanted to see “real” theater they’d go to Salt Lake and I don’t think people have that opinion anymore. RL: Now they know that they see the same people on stage in Salt Lake as here. CJ: I think our theater audiences have increased a great deal. Dance is probably about the same but then they always had a pretty good audience for all of the music performances that we give. I would have thought that splitting the audience into so many shows we would have smaller audiences on each show, but the orchestra can fill the bottom of the Austad. That didn’t used to happen. I’m not saying that’s me marketing, I do think that people now are more inclined to go out. RL: With a hunger for outlets. 36 CJ: Yes. The world is talking about people not coming to live performances the way they used to because there are so many other things. Not only is there television, but you can record your own shows and see them at any time you want and see them at home, but I haven’t found that our audiences went down at all. In 2008, when the economy went south, people were saying around the country how orchestra audiences and theater audiences were barely making it because people couldn’t afford to go out. It’s not the case here. It’s so inexpensive to see our shows that we did not lose any audience numbers when the economy took a downturn. As a matter of fact, in some cases the attendance increased because you could go and see music for less than five dollars. It’s now like $5.50 or $6, I don’t know what the current price is this year, but still it’s less than ten dollars to see a live theater concert. You could go to a coffee shop and buy two fancy coffees and it costs twelve dollars. RL: There’s one place here in town that you can go buy a beer and it’ll be $12 or $14. CJ: Yes. So, I do think that the fact of the economy took a downturn; it made our offering more important because you could afford to take your family to things. Once we set up Jazz at the Station, that’s always been standing room only. Free is the best price for a family. If you’ve got 2, 3, 4, 5 kids, and you have to pay 10 dollars a ticket for them plus your tickets, it can run up between 50 and 100 dollars. Half of our events in our department are free—the smaller ensembles. With the smaller ensembles it’s the same quality, it’s the same students, just a different repertoire. I think our audiences are as strong as ever and they’re far 37 more open-minded than when I was a student. Actually, I think they were more open-minded when I came on as an employee as the department secretary. RL: It sounds like the 23 years you were here a very positive experience. Any regrets? CJ: Well, I would regret that maybe I didn’t get up here sooner, but I might not have gotten into the Performing Arts Department and I might not have had all the other skills that I’ve picked up in my working career that I was able to lend to my job. My being an organized person in the business world and being able to talk well with people, all of those things played out to help me be a good department secretary. Because I loved the arts, I just loved every one of those students. I mean, there were a couple of obnoxious ones, but— RL: Yeah but you can give them a boot in their britches and they straighten out. CJ: I practiced a form of tough love and I was the same way with my kids. Before I came here I was a credit manager and one of the things that I was really good at was getting people to pay their bills without being mean. So, that skill really helped me be kind to students. On our staff training there was a phase when we were supposed to be thinking of our students as customers, which I think is hooey. I understand what they were talking about, but that wasn’t why I ever went to—I never was in education to buy a job. To me, education is almost like religion. It is. It’s an improvement of everything about you. Any time being educated is not a wasted minute. You may be wasting your own time by not taking advantage. By the time I got here, I so knew everything about myself. 38 I knew this was going to be the good place. Every job I had, the mission and my internal experience were not aligned. At Weber, my heart and the mission were the same. When they talked about the mission of education and diversity in our community for the entire university, I’m with it. Then they talk about the individual things in the department about informed citizens who understand and can practice art but also to understand and appreciate art. I’m right there. I may not have been as skilled or as prepared if I had come earlier, so I came at exactly the right time in my life. The University has had its ups and downs financially, but it hasn’t impacted me directly. RL: Do you think it’s gone in a good direction? CJ: You know, that’s hard for me to tell. RL: Just from the things that you’ve observed. CJ: This is such a different place than when I first came here. I think the direction that it’s gone is just toward higher levels of teaching and higher levels of opportunity for students in every area. What our science people are doing, what the planetarium is doing, what our tech people are doing, those kinds of things give our university credibility. Those kinds of things are great. It appears to me that our disciplines across the campus are keeping up with what’s going on in the world. RL: The needs, yes. CJ: A couple of things were even out there like our technology students and their satellite, what a thrilling thing. I do worry when we are always worried about a 39 bottom line, but I understand why that has to happen. I worry about what I’ve heard is going to happen to the library. To me, a library is like a sacred space. You have this hushed quality, you’re here not necessarily making a social relationship with someone, but you’re in a society of scholars. To think about it being—there was some talk about putting a coffee shop here. I’m thinking, “Wait, there’s a coffee shop right across the plaza.” Vending machines? Wait, I didn’t think you were supposed to eat in the library. Places where you can go and talk? Wait, I go to the library for it to be quiet. A testing center? Wait, there’s a testing center right across the plaza. Less books, more technology—see, this is actually one of the reasons why I retired is that the world is moving on. There’s a reason why you get old and die because the world changes and there are some parts of us that don’t. This was a funny part about being a marketing director. I knew all the ways to get in touch with free advertisement. I knew how to make connections with people face-to-face across the campus and the community, but social media sticks its ugly head—that’s what I thought at first. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed social media, personally. At first, I was kind of apprehensive and I didn’t really get seriously involved in Facebook until 2008 and while I was getting personally involved I thought, “I need to be marketing like this.” But I didn’t know how to do it in addition to everything else because to do that kind of marketing, you have to have the frame of mind and you have to have the skill. RL: And you’ve got to have fast thumbs. CJ: Yes. You know, it’s a second job to the traditional stuff. I started having a guilty conscience about not being on the forefront of doing that kind of marketing. 40 About three or four years ago, I got some students to start helping me, but there was still this over-arching project that I wasn’t doing and I realized I’m never going to be that person. I’m the person that loves paper. I’m the person that loves face-to-face. I enjoy doing the Facebook stuff, but Twitter [gestures overhead]. I know it’s important to people and people make good use of it in marketing, but that person was never going to be me. So, I thought, “Yeah, you’re old Caril.” If you’re not making that connection with young students, that’s a marketing opportunity that’s being missed. I had always thought I was going to work until I was 70. Then I got cancer, and I thought, “Hey, you know what, maybe I’m going to have a different thought about dying at my desk. Maybe I’m going to want to have a couple of years living away from my desk.” It was just a year and a half after I had my cancer surgery that I started thinking about retirement seriously. Six months after that I said, “This is my last year.” I almost thought about getting out in December, but I thought about it again and there’s no way to quit in the middle of the season. It’s like putting down a book in the middle of the book—you can’t do that. So, I finished out the season and my big recommendation was that they hire someone who could do the marketing with the social media and that is who they hired. She’s half my age, and has a different idea about what has value. One of the things that I did with my calendar is I put every arts and humanities performance I could find on my calendar, whether it was coming from our department or not, because our students have to attend performances and there’s not a requirement that they have to attend ours. I also thought that it was 41 really cool to get information about how much art there is going on in town. When I grew up, art was an isolated experience. Now, it’s hard to do all of the art that’s going on around you—you can’t. There are two or three things going on in one night, or you can’t go out every night of the week. I think it’s really cool for our students and anyone else to think about performing arts in our community and see a big long list of things that they can do. The new idea is they’re only marketing what’s coming out of the department, so they’re missing that connection. But that’s my old-fashioned way of looking at it and it’s not my job anymore, it’s being done in a different way. I would imagine it’s reaching more young people and the old folks will just know that it’s still here and will just work a little harder to find the information. RL: Well, hitting the spark is what matters, regardless of how you do it. CJ: Right, and this is an academic institution that aims toward young people. Our mission includes everyone, but we know the majority of our students are young, so why not meet them where they are. RL: I was going to ask you if there was something you would have done differently, but it sounds like there were some different things that were better to leave to the next generation. CJ: I had just reached the maximum of my resources. There was this aggravation about getting older. I started thinking, “How am I going to keep this up?” My enthusiasm can account for a lot of energy, but I noticed that some nights I felt like I’d been through the wringer. I hadn’t had a bad day, it’s just when I’m out in the world I’m “on” and you have to turn up the energy to be on. I can’t just go 42 through and be my interior meditative self when I go out in public, there’s no way I cannot be on. It must be my theater training, or even when I was younger than that. There was a book when we were young, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. One of the things I read in that book when I was a kid was, “You have to go out, you have to make the contact with the person, otherwise the world is just going to pass you by.” If you’re a wallflower or you’re just—the world goes by without you. RL: They’re not going to notice it. CJ: Very few people will come to you and take your hand. If you want to be involved, you have to be out. Once I became an arts advocate as a paid person, that was part of my job—always being out there making these relationships. As you get older that kind of energy is not always on tap. Having cancer surgery was an eye-opener too just to rethink, “Okay, you’re not going to live forever, you’re not as young as you used to be.” RL: A greater sense of appreciation for what you do have. CJ: Yes and then I had a grandkid about the same time, so I thought, “Yeah, I can retire.” I’ve been poor before and I can do it again. I didn’t have any nest egg to speak of and I could coast for a long time on my happy memories. I learned so many things doing this job that I can be a valuable service person in the community for other things. For this year, I had all of the fun of my job with none of the work. I had all the fun things without having to market 140 shows. So, I have enough energy to do that and I’m having a good time collecting my papers for—I’m a chronic chronicler—an archivist. I’ve always been an archivist of my 43 own. I have more than 250 three ring binders of my life and that doesn’t include the four wide five cabinet drawers and the six narrow cabinet drawers, that are not in binders yet of stuff that I’ve collected because I’ve done a lot of things. So, I gave 24 boxes of those papers to archives this semester and being a history intern with Kathryn McKay, she suggested that I do this with my Universe City papers—the art gallery papers. RL: I’m sure Sarah would love to have those. CJ: They’re already over there and I’m just cleaning them up and I’ll be filling in some missing pieces. It never occurred to me that it would be of any interest to anyone. RL: It’s part of the history of the city and this is one of the emphases that we have here. CJ: Exactly. If anyone wanted to know who was an artist on the wall from 2004 to 2011 and now it’s still going on, I’ve got a good inventory of the local artists. The other galleries downtown I don’t think have an archivist on their staff, so there’s not that kind of public record. If someone wanted to look at artists at other galleries, they’d have to do a newspaper search under the name of the galleries. RL: Do you have any last observations or pearls of wisdom? CJ: Maybe not wisdom, but there is one thing I want to say. RL: You said there was a story you wanted to tell. CJ: Oh, that was about that I wanted to be the Secretary of Performing Arts. But there is a different story. My name in Caril Jennings, so I’m a C.J., my mother-in-law’s name was Carrie Jennings, so she’s a C.J. Carrie Jennings was the voice 44 of Weber State—that’s what they called her. She used to be the telephone operator, so if you called Weber State, she answered and then plugged you in to whoever it was that you wanted to talk to. She was here for so long that when they automated the telephone system, they installed her voice in the information booth. It used to be down by the social science building. So, there’s a C. Jennings. Then she retired and I got hired, so here’s a C. Jennings and now I’m retired, but my daughter works here in the Math department. She’s a musician, but she’s a math teacher. She’s now married so it’s Christine Jennings-Lewis, but her email still says C. Jennings. So, there’s been a C. Jennings employed on this campus since the fifties and I think it’s a fine tradition. My husband worked here when he was 14, all the way through high school, building the grounds and taking care of the grass. My kids went here. I brought my kids up here from when they were really little. They didn’t used to restrict children to see performing arts events. I brought both my kids tucked inside a coat when they were babies. I was the parent who got the seat by the door so if they started making a noise we left immediately and that’s how they learned. If they acted up, they missed the show. They got from me, the pleasure of watching people perform and they got most of that experience here on campus. RL: You’re passing the torch on that love of the arts. CJ: Yes. I was very happy. I thought my children would rebel against me by becoming bankers and lawyers. I thought they would be rich or try to be rich because they hadn’t been well-off when they were little, but they both are musicians. 45 RL: There are different kinds of richness. CJ: I always told them—it’s that Cornelius story, Cornelius’ Jewels—that I’m the richest woman in the world because my jewels are my children. My kids also have had a life that’s been full of art. My husband’s paintings are on the wall, we’ve known artists, they’ve been surrounded by music and theater and dance. When I grew up, working class people didn’t consider the arts their domain. I hit puberty when Jackie Kennedy was promoting the arts for everyone and I believed her. So my parents were grocers, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t be an artist, or it didn’t mean that I couldn’t go to see Utah Symphony. I do have a story. RL: Alright, well, tell it to us. CJ: I’ll make it short because this is going to be all day. When I was in junior high school, Maurice Abravanel, who was the conductor of the Utah Symphony, had that same sort of missionary spirit that Jackie Kennedy did and there was funding for the arts in the public schools. He brought the Utah Symphony to the junior high school and I’d never seen anything like that in my entire life. I’d just read this Dale Carnegie book that if someone does something and you like it you should thank them. So, the concert was over and we all got up to march out like we do when we’re in junior high school. The kids go this way and I went this way toward the stage and I went right up on the stage and I stuck out my hand and thanked Maurice Abravanel for bringing this music. I think he was stunned. The next year he came I did the same thing. So, the three years at Roy Junior High and then two years at Bonneville High School and then Roy Senior High—I was in the first 46 graduating class at Roy Senior. After the second or third year, he was looking for me and we had a nice chatty fan relationship. So, I’m here at Weber as a theater student and one night I’m backstage all dressed up and we’re doing this play and I’m stunning. I was the dark lady in the shadows. I had no speaking part, but I was just supposed to be beautiful and I was able to do it then. Here I am all done up in the glory that you can have when you’re nineteen and I’m waiting. It was a one act festival and my play hadn’t started yet so I’m down in the very basement of the Browning Center and so is Maurice Abravanel. He was waiting to go on in the symphony and we see each other and we hug and he was just so happy to see that I was in the arts. It turns out that it was a dress rehearsal night for me. The next night for the opening of the play he sent me flowers and it was really cool, I think I was the only person in the theater that got a bouquet of roses from Maurice Abravanel. In some ways I’ve been encouraged in the best possible way to love my art because there’s nothing that an artist loves better than to see someone who likes what they’re doing. I have this kind of a puppy dog liking face, if I like what’s going on there’s no way that I can be cool. So, artists who need fans, they’ve got one with me. Anyway, I’ve had a great life and a great life in the arts and so much of it has been tied up in Weber State that it’s very hard for me to separate it. I’ve lived out in other worlds and the arts aren’t accessible. They’re either more expensive or they’re more expensive. Where I was living in British Columbia, we made our own art. I used to have singing parties and I volunteered 47 in the elementary school to do arts in the elementary schools with the kids. As far as just seeing art, Ogden is a great place for art. It’s not so big that you have to travel three hours to get across town, it’s not so big that you can’t get a ticket and if you make a plan you can always get a ticket to what you want to see. There are so many things that come to Weber State with Cultural Affairs and what we do and just people who use this as a venue and rent it out. I thought growing up that I wanted to get out of Ogden and I did. The first time I left I went to Los Angeles and as soon as we found out we were going to have a baby we came right back here. We were having fun being young adults in the Los Angeles arts community too, but having a family we didn’t want to do that in Los Angeles. Then, we thought when our baby was little that the world was going to come to an end. I was really quite concerned about the nuclear end of the world, so we went to Canada in the middle of nowhere. We tried to get back into the other century and that was very good for my children because it was like Heidi with her grandpa. It was a perfect environment to be a child, but it made me realize how much I missed Ogden. First of all, these mountains, I just love these mountains. Then I started to count up all the opportunities that I was missing because Weber State wasn’t a 15 minute drive from my house. Every time I came back here for a vacation, we’d come up here. This has been a playground for me and for my kids and it still is. I’m retired and I’m still here. RL: Sounds like it’s going to keep going. CJ: Yes. What else? I do want to plug Weber Reads because that’s a great thing that includes the arts plus the other things we’re talking about. 48 RL: It draws in such an audience. CJ: It’s a pretty new program, so that’s a recent addition to the agenda and it makes it pretty interesting to me. Who knows what’s going to happen up here. I think the new president seems very—I don’t know what his personal vision is, but I sure like seeing him around campus. He seems to be paying attention to what’s going on. RL: Very approachable and very observant. CJ: I saw him in a pair of Levi’s and a hoodie. I had to look twice, “Is that who I think it is?” He was just chatting with kids and students in the Union Building. RL: He’s real. CJ: Yes. I hear he’s a saxophone player. RL: And he’s a chemist. CJ: Another one of those arts and sciences things. I can’t see this place not being valuable to me until I’m dead. Everything is handicap accessible so if I end up in a wheelchair or walker I’ll be able to get to things. RL: I certainly appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us. CJ: Obviously I’ve had a good time. RL: Well, good. That’s what this program is all about, we want to get the perspective of people who spent time here and touch on all the different points and you’ve managed to touch on all of that and bring us a few laughs. 49 CJ: Well, not everyone has had the pleasant experience that I’ve had, but I’m certainly glad that I did. Since it’s my life, that’s what counts. RL: Yeah. It sounds like you enjoy every moment of it and that’s to be appreciated. Thank you for coming today. CJ: Thanks for listening.