Oral History Program Julie Rich Interviewed by Jamie J. Weeks 30 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Julie Rich Interviewed by Jamie J. Weeks 30 October 2013 Copyright © 2013 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: Rich, Julie, an oral history by Jamie J. Weeks, 30 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Julie Rich, student portait, 1980-1981 Julie Rich, faculty portait, 2002 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Dr. Julie Rich. It is being conducted on October 30, 2013, in the Waterstradt Room of the Stewart Library. The interviewer is Jamie J. Weeks and the subject of the interview is Dr. Rich’s time spent at Weber State College as a student from 1977 to 1981, and then throughout her career in the Geography Department, from 1986 to the present. Also present is Stacie Gallagher, our video technician. JW: To begin with, I’d like you to talk about your early life—when and where you were born, and maybe some background on your early life. Also, some of the schools you attended before you came to Weber State and, even more interesting for this interview, your family’s ties to Weber State as you were growing up. JR: So, I am a true Ogdenite. This is my home. The old Dee Hospital, which was located on Harrison between about 24th and 23rd, was where I came into this life. Ogden has always been my home—I don’t mean to say that I haven’t ventured and traveled out, but we’ll get to that. Growing up in Ogden, I went to Ben Lomond High School. I spent all my years at Ben Lomond High School and I remember always knowing that I was going to attend Weber State because my mother had worked at Weber State. It was a college then and she was working in housing. She was the “Housing Mother,” she called herself, and would make accommodations for all the students who came into the area to live on campus. There would be this train of students coming through our home because a lot of them were here living without their families and they were quite lonely. Being the 2 person my mother is, she always took them in and would invite them for supper, so we had this group of students that would come that were part of the football team that were living in promontory tower. We also had some foreign students come through. I remember that there was one, “Joe from Nigeria,” that’s what he called himself. His last name to me was unpronounceable, so he said, “Just call me, ‘Joe from Nigeria.’” He came and visited with our family quite often. Forrest Crawford was one of the young men my mother would bring to our home and just kind of gave him a place where he felt like he was surrounded by family. I’ve known Forrest for years, so whenever I see him on campus it’s like “Oh, Forrest, my brother!” We would give each other a big hug. Weber State was always a big part of our family. We would come up to the games because mother was a staff member and she’d get tickets for the family. So we would come up for the basketball and the football games. There wasn’t really any doubt in my mind where I was going to attend college, and I was able to get a scholarship from the Ogden Key Club. I got my first year scholarship here and I really enjoyed it a lot. But like most freshmen, I didn’t really understand what needed be done to get decent grades. I remember Leland Sather was one of my first history professors and I did abysmal in his class. He was very good, but you know, as a freshman I didn’t know how to crack some of these courses. I didn’t understand what needed to be done. I was out playing, going to the games, social life, and then getting “D’s” on the exam. I remember Doctor Sather writing on one of my exams, “Please come and see me.” I never did because I felt so embarrassed because I got a “D”. I am now sitting on a 3 committee with Leland Sather and I told him when we were first meeting, “You gave me my first ‘D.’ Fortunately, I graduated cum laude, but you gave me my first ‘D,’ which was a wakeup call.” I needed to kind of get right on track, even though I didn’t talk to him it was like, “Wake up, you really need to be throwing your energy into these classes.” That was kind of a turning point, Leland Sather’s “D.” I continued taking classes up here and I was able to get a music scholarship. Lyneer C.Smith was the choral conductor on campus and had been here for many years. I came from a family where my father taught music, so music was an integral part of the fabric of our family. I wasn’t one to learn an instrument because I had four other siblings ahead of me, and I think my poor father burned out trying to teach piano and violin. He got to me and said, “Forget it. Do what you want.” So, I followed the vocal music side of things. When I was in high school I was in the choirs and plays and things like that, but I was interested in singing here at Weber State. I talked to Lyneer and was able to get a music scholarship for two years, which helped. The first year was the Key Club Scholarship, and then two years after that was the music scholarship. My parents were the kind of people who said, “You want a higher education, you earn a higher education.” So it wasn’t like it would just happen. I had to use my own ingenuity to figure out how I was going to pay for it. I was working at the bookstore under Dee Shank, and was working with the financial side of things, so I was balancing out all the registers and taking care of the money and sending that to the bank every day. When I think about it, okay, here 4 was this student who was taking all the money from all the registers at the bookstore, but it taught me some good habits, in terms of money. Of course, I had Dee and a couple of other people to work with me at that kind of occupation. So I had those years of scholarship and I sang my fourth year, but there wasn’t any scholarship money available, so I remember having to save and pinch pennies to cover that final year. I learned it’s quite a bit of money to pay for tuition and you take it very, very seriously when it’s your own dime—not that I didn’t prior to that. JW: Did you get a tuition break because of your mom? JR: I did. I got almost three credit hours, because we were on the quarter system. So that helped in getting my bachelor’s degree. I was kind of going in and out of different departments as freshman and young people do. You don’t really know what you want to get focused on—you don’t know what you want to major in. As I took different classes in history and botany, I was kind of leaning more towards the sciences. I wasn’t a big math whiz, so I knew I couldn’t be in the really hard, hard sciences, but I really like the Earth. JW: Like geoscience. JR: Like geosciences, because growing up I’d collect rocks and do all these things. I’d bring home bugs, and make little leaf presses, so the natural world was really intriguing to me. We were an outdoors family. We’d go camping, hiking, so that was kind of instilled in me quite young. I took some geography courses and thought “I really, really like this a lot.” And as you do, you talk to some of the 5 faculty and they guide you down that path, and I focused on cartography, which is map making, and so that was my focus and emphasis when I was an undergraduate. JW: What was cartography like back then? JR: The old style. So you’re using pen or ink on what they would call a vellum or mylar. When you were doing maps that were, say forest service quality—we did some contracts for the forest service and I worked at the forest service as an intern—you did scribing, so you would have this material that would have a coating on it, and you would scribe, in negative form, what the map was supposed to look like. You’d have layers of information, so you’d have the base, the roads, then another base of contours, then your lettering and then water. You would have maps of multiple layers that they would then run off on a plate and a press to put the ink on, and all these different layers would occur on the map, it’s completely different now. JW: Well, no wonder why it was so intriguing to you. JR: It was. In geography, you can kind of bring in your artistic side—because I loved art—so with map making, you take your artistic side and blend that with the science of geography and understanding the land. JW: Who are some of the professors that stand out in your mind that maybe made a difference for you? 6 JR: Well, in terms of geography, I think of Dr. Murphy. He was a part of the department for many, many years, and he took field trips. I don’t know how many field trips I went on to Southern Utah to Arches, Capitol Reef, to Havasu, and down in the Grand Canyon area. He got us out of the classroom and into the field, which ignited one’s passion for the natural world. Dr. Walquist was another professor who was more on the cultural side of things. Looking at more how people position themselves on the landscape and how communities are made, so that was quite interesting. Dr. Greer was more of a political economics geographer, and that was intriguing. My interest was lying more in the physical world and the map making side of things. In terms of history, I remember Dr. Sadler being a great teacher in history. Steve Clark, who is still on campus, I took some of his classes and I’ve probably known him longer than anyone else that I’ve mentioned. I still keep in contact with all of these individuals because of campus activities and such, but Steve Clark is probably the one I’ve known the longest. I remember taking his course, Native and Pioneer Uses of the Western Plants, and going out to the Weber river area and hunting morel mushrooms in the flood plain and then taking them back to the labs, slicing them up, cooking them in butter and eating wild morel mushrooms. So, there are a lot of very choice memories of this place, even though it’s changed a lot, physically, there are a lot of very good memories. I think there were two different presidents here during my tenure. The one that I remember was President Brady. JW: Right, he had just come in 1978. 7 JR: I think it might have been Joe Bishop that was before President Brady, and I just have vague, vague memories of President Bishop. Then President Brady stepped in and, wow, every one of the performances we did as a Weber State A Capella Choir, and in Weber State Singers, he was there with his wife. Any other play that I got involved with, and I was in the Summer Stock plays for a couple of summers, he was there with his wife. Football games, he was there. He was one of the most visible presidents I had ever seen on campus and was always there to support the students and their activities, and was very, very engaging. So, very fond memories of President Brady, and it’s always nice to see him at the graduation events. JW: Yes, because he is still around. JR: He is! I go up and talk to him and remind him of those times, and say, “Remember you came to my concert when I was this little young freshman.” You know, a lot of time has passed since then but it’s always great to see President Brady. JW: I don’t know how diverse the campus was in the 1970s. We have some great photographs in the archives from students campaigning against the Vietnam War and those kinds of things, but then when we get into the later 1970s, do you know what kind of political atmosphere was happening on campus? JR: What I remember, I was the Geography Club President—when I finally declared my major I went on to become the president—and it was the Iraq and Iran problems that were going on. There were some definite Middle-East problems. 8 The hostage situation had taken place. So, I put together this panel discussion between some prominent people from the Persian and Iranian societies here, along with some political scientists and geographers and we had a discussion panel talking about the flash point issues in the Middle East at that time. So, that was big on campus. That panel discussion created a bit of controversy because of what had happened with the embassy, and Iran, and the hostage crisis that had taken place, but I thought it was something that needed to be flushed out a bit more, and to put a face on these that were our students, we had a lot of Iranian students on campus at the time. It was something that they didn’t choose to do, it was some other radical elements within their own society and I didn’t want them to be painted with a negative image on campus, so I was kind of trying to help the situation a bit. JW: Probably stemming from the time you spent as a child with your mom bringing home everyone that came in that needed a family. JR: Exactly. She kind of helped foster the fact that we’re all here on this earth, and we’re all a part of this human family, we just need to learn to get along. She was an important and powerful influence in our family’s life. I was in the ROTC program. Because my mom worked over at the promontory tower, the whole ROTC program was there and when I was here on campus, I’d go visit her maybe once a day. There would be the military people there, so I got to know the ROTC officers that were over at the building, and they would say, “Oh come on, we need more women in the military.” So again, on a 9 fluke, I decided to sign up for one of the classes and just loved it. We would go out and do great things. We would do these field training exercises and we’d dress up in fatigues—which was kind of interesting—and carry these M-16 rifles around, drop and roll and run around in our platoons. We went up to Snowbasin one time, and they brought in the military helicopter so they were picking us up and dropping us off. We would play war up at Snowbasin. We would go down to Callao, outside of Wendover, Utah and go mountain climbing. We’d go up to Powder Mountain and do these winter survival courses, we’d build snow caves, this was up my alley. This was the outdoor component of ROTC and I was in it for three years and after three years they said I had to sign the form and commit and I would have to go on to be an officer. My father had served in the military, in WWII, in the Army, and his idea of Army was not good. JW: Not for his daughter… JR: Exactly. Oh my gosh, I received so much hate from him. There were award ceremonies and I won the outstanding cadet one year, and the National Soldier Award. He wouldn’t even come to the presentations, which was really difficult for me because my father and I were very, very close. It got me thinking, “Is this something I really want? I don’t want to alienate him.” So, my third year I basically just walked away from it and focused everything on geography. I mean, I came that close to entering the military and becoming full-time military. My mother wanted me to go for it. She was all for it, so it created some contention in the family. I just backed off and the peace came back because it’s not worth it. Sometimes I wonder, because I would’ve been 30 plus years in the military, 10 would I have been close to retirement? Who knows what the ranking could’ve been or how many wars I would’ve seen. It would’ve been a completely different avenue. Sometimes I find myself thinking about what JW: What would’ve happened? JR: Yes—but by no means am I disappointed—I am happy right where I am. JW: But three years spent in something, that’s a big decision to make. Have we covered everything about your student life? JR: Well, I graduated from Weber State in ’81. JW: Did you go straight on to the “U” from there? JR: No, I didn’t. Well, in a way I knew I eventually wanted to get my Ph. D., but I didn’t quite know when. I had these cartographic skills and I went to go work for Precision Built Homes and they taught me how to become a draftsman, because of the cartographic skills from making maps, you draw houses and renderings. I worked there for about a year and I didn’t like coming in and doing the punch card thing and having people right over you all the time. There was an opening out at May-G Resource Consultants and I thought maybe they were looking for someone who can do both mapping and environmental type work, so I applied and got the job and worked there for a couple of years. I was kind of missing the academic life, when another position came open in Salt Lake City with my cousin. He had an engineering firm and was looking for somebody again to draw land plots and engineering drawings. By that time I was fairly well trained, so I 11 went to work for him in Salt Lake. And you know, the grind of driving there day in and day out, I was thinking, “Is this really what I want to be doing?” My father was an educator. JW: And were you still living at home? JR: Still living at home, and I thought, “I need to look into getting my degree.” So I was working or going to classes at the University of Utah, and I hadn’t been accepted into the master’s program yet, but I was taking graduate courses. Then, a position became available here in the Geography Department where they wanted someone to run the Cartography Lab. I thought that sounded really good, so I went back to the people I knew quite well and said, “I’ve got all this experience, this is what I want to do with the lab, and I would like to apply for the job.” Fortunately, I got that job and continued to work in Salt Lake. So I was here part-time and continued to go down to the University of Utah for master’s degree courses. I was accepted, finally, when I applied and that was when they gave me a teaching assistantship job. I quit my Salt Lake job and went to teach at the “U.” They gave me their regular cartography courses to teach like a regular faculty member. I was teaching cartography at the “U,” working on my degree, and also working part-time here. I started dating one of the faculty members here, Deon Greer, and that kind of created a stir—you know, faculty and a student. JW: Right, a former student. JR: It all worked out. I sat down and talked with the chairman and told him there was no problem here, get over it. So, it all worked out and we eventually got married 12 in 1986 and then I finished my degree at the “U,” They hired me on a full-time lecture faculty position and I started teaching. JW: You were able to obtain a faculty position with a master’s degree? JR: It was low-strung. It was lecture level. I did that for a number of years, I’d have to actually sit down to calculate, but they were kind of lean times because there were some significant budget cuts that came down from the state legislature, and they were talking about cutting geography. This department, which had been viable and that I had grown up in, all of a sudden was going to be cut. So, we had to rally together. JW: Who was the dean at this time? JR: It was Bob Smith. JW: And the chair? JR: If I remember correctly, it was Wayne Wahlquist at the time. Bob Smith had closed down the Geography Department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, so we’re all looking at each other thinking, “The writing is on the wall, we’re all going to be out on the street.” We really started to put numbers together and said, “Why are they doing this to us?” We checked other departments around campus, brought their numbers in and said, “Why are you targeting us? There are others in worse shape than we are.” That gave us a bit of a reprieve. Then, about 1998, you know you can only stay in lecture so long until you decide that you need to get a higher degree. So, my husband and I took some time off so I 13 could go look for graduate universities. We took our time and went to South Africa and New Zealand. We looked at different universities in England, and happened to stop in at the Geography Department at the University of Oxford and thought, “Oh, let’s go in.” JW: Yeah, let’s just go in to Oxford. (Laughs) JR: Yeah, it was that kind of thing. We were laughing about it and we went in and started looking at the list of papers and publications on the wall, and I noticed that one fellow was doing research in an area I was interested in—which was climates and climate change. I asked these porters—these gentlemen that usually sit at the front and just kind of keep people from going into the office areas—I asked, “Is there a Steven Stokes here?” He said, “Oh yeah, let me track him down for you.” JW: I know that name from your publications. JR: Yeah, so Steven finally shows up after doing something and we sit in a room similar to this, something with a conference table, and he’s sitting across the table from us and says, “Tell me about yourself.” So, I gave him a thumbnail sketch—my time at Weber State, what I did with the University of Utah, my work background. He said, “This sounds really good.” He was a young faculty member there and there was a great rapport. The more I talk to him, the more excited he became and the more excited I became. He said, “Let me bring in some American students who have been here studying so you can see what life is like.” The whole blood pressure starts to rise and the energy level, and I thought, “Oh 14 my gosh, this might happen.” We talked with some of these other students and before we got ready to leave, he said, “Send in your application, send me a copy of your Master’s thesis,” and he gave me a list of things to do. We left there and sat in a restaurant dumbfounded. JW: That’s awesome. JR: It wasn’t a done deal, I still had to apply and this and that, but I had a friend in the system that was going to help, so I put in the application and he sent me a letter and said, “Send all your materials in, it looks really good. They should be sending you a letter of acceptance or rejection in the next couple of weeks.” I waited for two weeks and it was the longest two weeks of my life, until finally the letter came in that said, “You have been accepted to the University of Oxford. You can begin in April.” I got this in December of 1997 and then we left in 1998. In January of 1998, I ended up in the hospital nearly dead because of a bowel obstruction, and I thought, “Well, there goes Oxford down the tubes.” I’m there about a week and I thought, “There is no way I’m going to let this opportunity pass me by.” I think that’s what kept me going and by the time we left in April, they had just barely taken stitches out and I hobbled in. JW: So did your husband take leave? JR: By that time he had retired and taught part-time for the U.S. Military there. So we spent three and a half years there in England, living in married student housing. It was fun. It was a grand time and it was a dream come true living in this town that, educationally, is one of the grandest in the world. The people they would bring in 15 for special talks or Nobel Laureates would talk about physics or whatever. It was palpable, the education, and the whole education side of things, you could feel it, it was there. Libraries on every corner, there wasn’t just one central library, they were scattered throughout the town. JW: So you spent three years there? JR: Three and a half. Then it was time, because I had taken a year off before that, so it was four and a half years that I was away from Weber State getting my Ph.D. JW: Well, during that time Weber State had moved to a university. JR: And we had changed colleges. We went from science, when we nearly lost the department and there were problems, and we decided to move down to social sciences. Sadler was the one who helped facilitate that because they were talking about combining departments and getting rid of the regional geography and the cultural geography. So Dean Sadler said, “We’ll take you.” So, we moved down to social science and Dean Sadler was the one who said, “Yeah, you can take leave of absence to get your Ph.D.” Mike Vaughan, the Provost, he was the one who authorized it, but when it became the second year, third year and a half he said, “I think it’s time for you to come home.” So I came home. JW: But you hadn’t quite finished. JR: I hadn’t quite finished, I hadn’t written up the dissertation. I was doing teaching and writing at the same time, and I don’t know if any of you have gone through that, but you don’t sleep. It’s a miserable time. I took another two years to do 16 that, so I finished up in 2003 and I went to Dean Sadler again and said, “We’ve been encouraged, my husband and I, to go on a mission for the LDS church, would you give me another two years? And I remember seeing him in my office just slump down. JW: And it’s Sadler, so he’s like, “Oh no.” There are other things hanging over his head, he can’t say no. JR: Exactly. He said, “We’ll make this work.” I said. “There was a Morris Sterrett in the English Department who was called on a mission and you gave him leave.” Although Morris hadn’t spent three and a half years away, and come back for two and then decided to go away again. That’s what I did. JW: Where did you go? JR: We went on our LDS mission to Geneva, Switzerland. JW: You’re way too young to be going on a mission in 2003. JR: Oh, but it was a grand time to go. I mean, it was tailored for us because we were working with the United Nations and we made some very interesting partnerships, which when we finished up, it was a public affairs...[audio break] JW: Well there is just a different commitment with those kids, and it’s a more intense program than in the U.S.A. JR: It’s a good concept of what it’s like, in terms of distance and time commitment. 17 JW: When I read that I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s a big commitment while you’re in school and working on a Ph.D.” JR: It was, because my husband was teaching at Lakenheath at the military base there. He would drive to Lakenheath, teach a night class and get back at 11:00 p.m., and I would have studied for the next morning seminary lesson. I would’ve probably started at 9:00 p.m. till the time he got home. Then, at 4:30 a.m. our alarm would go off and we’d gather the kids. I remember sitting in my lab at school, in the geography department there at Oxford thinking, “I’m so tired.” I was just screaming for sleep, but we did that for three and a half years. We would look at each other and say, “If someone were to pay us to do this, we wouldn’t do it,” but, because it’s a volunteer thing.... There was another couple in London that I knew because they lived in the area where I grew up. They were serving a mission for the LDS Church and doing the same thing we were, but they weren’t teaching and the wife wasn’t working on a Ph.D. “It was the best of times; but it was the worst of times.” When I open that Dickens’ novel and read that, I can relate to it, because it was the highest point in my life and it was the lowest point in my life. JW: Well you have to have the low to have the high. JR: When one low hit, the next high was just going to be to the stratosphere. JW: So the mission goes from… JR: 2003 to 2005. 18 JW: Did you finish the Ph.D. before? Because I know the Ph.D. came in 2003. JR: Do you want the whole story? JW: Sure, that’s why we’re here! It’s interesting. You can cut out what you don’t want. JR: Everything gets okayed through the university and I’m thinking I’m going to fly to England, finish everything up because I’ve written everything I’ve needed to write, and be back in a couple of months. So I left. We were supposed to be starting our mission in July and I left in the first part of May so I’d be back in June and we’d have whatever we needed to do. I don’t know if either of you are LDS, but you have a farewell, talk about where you’re going, and certain things that take place. I packed a little bag, a very little carry-on—just jeans because I’m just going to be living the student life, and one skirt. I went over there and the first day I met with Steven. I loved him and I hated him, but I met with Steven and said, “Here are my papers. Here’s what I’ve written up for my dissertation. I’ve got all my papers here.” He looked at it and threw it in the trash. This was two years. The range of the emotions that surge the body you just can’t imagine. I looked at him and said, “Really?” He said, “You need another year here.” I’m thinking, “I’m going on a mission in July, that’s two months down the road.” So began this fight where I was saying, “What’s wrong with this?” I pulled it out of the garbage, “What’s wrong with this, let’s go through and work on this.” He was being very obstinate and I could never understand why. So, I got to the point a week into this where he was rebuffing me at every turn and I blew up one day and said, 19 “Forget it. I’ve had it.” I stormed out of the School of Geography, and I headed back to the dorms where I was staying at one of the colleges and I thought, “I’ve got my ticket to go back home, I can change the date.” It’s that point where I would’ve been ABD (All but dissertation) and that would’ve been for the rest of my life. Then, these two students that I had known the whole time I was there and had kept in contact with, sat down with me and said, “We’re going to do this. You’re not going home.” They knew that I had crashed, they knew that I had reached the lowest of the low, and I was ready to get on a plane and toss five years of my life to the wind, just gone. They picked me up, they took my laptop computer—I was working at the dorm at that time—and they moved me to the School of Geography because there was this depression watch, and they just kind of worked with me. The one kid said, “Okay, what did he like about it? Let’s work on this.” So, I had these two students, and other faculty members knew what was going on and they took me aside and said, “We’re going to help you, you’re going to get through this.” JW: Where is your team? It’s not one person’s decision. JR: All of a sudden, this team assembled, and it was like, have you ever seen these people that are being carried by others in a concert? Here was me just wanting to die and throw life away, and over the course of the next six weeks, they helped me put together this document that didn’t stand a chance of being turned down. They would give me these task lists of what I needed to do, so I would start really early and go home late at night, and the whole thing was like that for the next six weeks. I was surviving on three or four hours of sleep a night, trying to get this 20 document together. Then I went to Steven and said, “I’m going over your head. There’s a clause in the student bylaws that said you can’t hold me back. I’m doing this with or without you. You can be with me and we will rally this or you can just turn your back on me.” He just stormed off. By this time my husband is calling me saying, “You should be home by now.” And I’m saying, “I can’t come home.” JW: And he’s thinking, “But we have to get ready.” JR: Right. So he’s preparing and he leaves on the time he’s supposed to leave and I’m thinking that maybe I can meet him in London and I’m still not done. I call him the day he leaves, “Don’t wait for me at London-Heathrow, just go onto Geneva, because I’m here.” So he flies to Geneva, Switzerland to meet all of these church members to start this mission—without his wife. JW: So the farewell happened here without you? JR: His farewell happened, he was set apart. He went through this line of people and shook their hand—they didn’t know I wasn’t coming; the word hadn’t got to them yet. He was the deliverer of the message. They asked, “Where’s your wife?” and he said, “She’s not here.” So, he sat in the apartment they set up for us for a week and our headquarters was in Solihull, England, which is not too far from Birmingham. He flew to Birmingham and sat there at our main office for another two weeks, training sessions, alone. “My wife is working on her Ph.D.” Finally, one of the area authorities said, “You go get your wife, this can’t go on.” Fortunately, it was right to the very end when I was close to being done, he flew 21 down. I hadn’t seen him in two and a half months now. I was working with my team and they knew I had to finish. This was Friday and the area authorities said, “Either she is here on Monday, or all bets are off.” So he shows up and I haven’t seen him for two and a half months and I desperately missed him, but I just kind of waived and went back to working. All these little worker bees knew what needed to be done. I had to have five bound copies, soft bound, to go out to different locations for reading. So, they were assembling all these copies, and it was about three in the afternoon and everything closed at five. I’m thinking, “I’ve got to do all of this before the end of the work day or the mission’s off.” Fortunately, everything was assembled, there was a printer nearby, we got them all bound. I had to run—this is in July, so the streets of Oxford are filled with tourists, you can’t get a cab or a bus, you can’t drive on the streets, it’s crazy. So I had to get two copies to the graduate office. It’s not like our Weber State campus, its everywhere; the whole town is campus buildings. I had to run a mile and a half with these two things under my arms before five o’clock and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, I don’t I know if I can do it.” So, I’m running down the streets of Oxford, middle of the streets, and I’ve got my team and they’re following me because it has to be me that signs this. It’s funny to think about, but I was so stressed. I get there and I put them on the desk and the lady was about to close the window and I said, “Please, these need to go out, these are the people they need to be going to right now. They have to go out today.” She took them and then I had to take them to mail to outside readers beyond the School of Geography. I got a bike from one of my fellow students, it 22 had no brakes, and I have to get across town before 5:30 p.m. before the post office closes. So here I am, jetting across town, trying to get to the post office, and there is a line going out the door and I’m thinking, “This is where it all ends.” Fortunately, the line moved fast and I got to that point at 5:30 p.m. and the last copy stayed in the department. We gathered all the people up that had helped and took them out to dinner. Sunday was spent setting me apart and doing the farewell at Oxford, where we had spent three and a half years, which was appropriate. Then we took the train up, and Monday morning I clipped one of those black and white tabs to the only skit I brought and started this crazy mission. Still, while we were serving in Geneva, I had to go back and defend, an oral defense, after about six weeks. Then had to return again when we had the graduation in October. JW: Wow, it is a good story isn’t it. JR: It was crazy, I don’t know of anyone that started an LDS mission that way. JW: I have never heard of anyone doing one that way. It’s a good thing you were a couple doing it because you were allowed to go back and do things that single missionaries are not allowed to do. JR: Well, what was fortunate was that our main headquarters was in Solihull. So, each time we had to go back they made a planning meeting around our return— which was good. 23 JW: As I’m reading what I can about you, I think that’s what I found the most intriguing was the way you kept with the Ph.D. goal in your head. It was years down the road, but you stuck with it. I just think that’s the coolest part of the story is that you didn’t give up, you know you could easily think, “I have a job, I have a master’s degree and I’ll just stick with this,” but ten years later, you decide to go back and get the Ph.D. JR: Well, it was always a goal that was there, and something that I wanted to accomplish. I had my fortieth birthday celebration in Oxford with Steven and some of the other faculty and students, and it was a sweet time. Sure, I was older than most of the other students. I had a colleague that was my same age. We were both married, he had children, and we were both from a university job trying to get a higher degree. It helped having him there so we could support each other, but I tell older students a lot of times that think they are too old to go back, I will say to them, “You’re going to turn forty anyway, you’re going to be fifty anyway. Do you want to be forty with your Ph.D. or fifty and I can call you Doctor Smith, or I just call you James.” That sort of thing. It’s never too late, and that’s the take away point. If you’ve got a dream out there, don’t downsize your dreams, supersize your courage to do it. JW: I think that’s one of my favorite things. I guess because I came back as a returning student. I did the same thing, I was in school for ten years and it was always the decision, do I keep going? But I do think that’s really cool. 24 JR: I applaud those people that do come back, that do try to finish things up. I’ve known a couple of people who’ve got to that point of all but their master’s degree, all but their dissertation and that’s always hanging on them. There was one person who taught for our department in geography, and went through the University of Chicago and did all of this coursework and he just didn’t finish the Ph.D. and he was always on my mind whenever I felt like going home, “I have got to finish, I don’t want to do that.” JW: Right, you don’t want to be the one who does all the course work and doesn’t write the paper. Okay, so you finished the mission in… JR: 2005. JW: And you came back, and you do have a job? JR: I know. I don’t know whose feet I need to kiss but there are probably a lot. Weber State has been very supportive of me with my wild adventures. Be they heading off for three and a half years and getting a Ph.D., or to Geneva, Switzerland to work at the U.N., or a mission, or whatever. They’ve allowed me that flexibility, which I’ve been able to bring that into the classroom to do projects with my students. Now I’m sending students to the U.N. to work with different people that are there with interns. Had I not had that experience, these students wouldn’t have had that enriching time in their life. I have had students that have been speaking at the U.N. after the member country of Switzerland. Our Weber State student will stand up and give her statement. That’s huge for our Weber State students! So, that built the connections that I tend to use today for these extra 25 projects for students to get this engaged learning in their life. I came back and started my tenure track, which is really late in the game because there have been a lot of people come into the game. JW: And there is a new President, again. JR: Yes, Ann came in after… JW: Thompson was here. JR: I knew Thompson. Nadauld, in fact, was my mission President. JW: Oh really? JR: Well, he wasn’t our president, but he was the president in our area, so we had a lot of dealings with President Nadauld and Margaret Nadauld, which was interesting because there was that Weber State connection. JW: Exactly. That is interesting. JR: I can remember him saying, “Now, you have your Ph.D. from Oxford. Do you really want to go back to Weber State?” That was the first time I had ever thought about that. He said, “You can go anywhere with this degree.” I thought, “Why?” To bring the skills I learned back to the people here at Weber State and my family here at Weber State—roots are so deep. I don’t know if I could uproot myself and go someplace else. I thought about it but— JW: But the give back here has been incredible. JR: Oh, it’s been utterly incredible. Completely, the give back has been stupendous. 26 JW: You received the Lindquist award in 2012, but I don’t want to miss all the stuff in-between the coming back and the current. I know there are a million programs you have been involved in. JR: Not a million, no— JW: Well, there are all these little things on the side you kind of chalk up as no big deal, but you did run some marathons, and did some important things for important causes. I would like you to talk about some of those, if you would like to include them in here. JR: Well, I have had two aunts that have passed away from breast cancer and so I got involved in a few of those running events—Susan G. Komen events. Not only to raise awareness of breast cancer, but as a time for me to remember them. I was very close to these women and to see them cut down in the prime of their life was very hard for me. So it’s been something I have felt strongly and passionate about, so I did that for a little bit. The Rwanda Well Project—I think that was when we came back. I had met this woman from Rwanda while we were in Geneva and it was interesting because our lives kept crossing. We went to Tunisia to check on different humanitarian projects, because the LDS church had been involved in some areas of North Africa, but Tunisia and Morocco not as much. So we wanted to go there to investigate to see if there were some areas we could maybe start to create some inroads to doing humanitarian work. We knew them from Geneva and we ended up in the airport. 27 There was this couple and we ended up going on a little excursion with them into the desert and got to know them quite well. We went over to their house one night while we were in Geneva and in the corner of her home she had this little curio cabinet—not too dissimilar to that one that’s in this room, but not with figurines in it, there were photographs of people. I commented on it, “Oh is this your aunt, is this your mother, brother?” She said, “These are all my family members who died in the genocide in Rwanda.” The breath was just taken away. How can I have all my family members and hers are gone because of where she was born? So, that started a journey together where we talked about Rwanda and the political struggles there. She’s the kind of woman I really admire because she’s not going to just sit and stew and feel sorry for herself because she’s the only family member left. She says, “No, I’m going to get money, build a school, and take in these orphans and teach them about acceptance and not to treat each other poorly and with disrespect.” And that’s what she did. The providence of Geneva was able to give her organization enough money to build a school, and that was just finished up when I came back to Weber State. I remember calling her one day and saying, “Wandene, how’s life? How’s the school coming?” She says, “Oh, the school’s great.” I said, “Well, what do you mean?” She says, “We need water!” I said, “Well, let me see what I can do.” We had made a number of contacts with the church’s humanitarian program and I said, “How much do you usually spend to drill a well in Africa?” They said, “Well, it’s about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars.” I thought, “Well, we can do this.” I called her back and said, “We can do this for you, I’ll get the Weber State 28 students on this. They’ll come through.” We got the Geography Club, Language Club, Botany Club—all these clubs together and shared this idea and how we would resolve this. They said, “Let’s have auctions, let’s do a concert…” They had a litany of different things. So we did. We had a silent auction, a concert where T Minus 5 performed for us—he was one of my students, Jared Allen. JW: They are a wonderful group. JR: We had private donors and people that just got on board with this project. So, rather than twelve thousand, we had over twenty-three thousand raised. We have money to drill a well, put solar panels on the school, do water harvesting and storage, so additional things besides the well. Why not take these students there and let them see the fruits of their labor? So six of the twelve core students went and we had an exceptional experience there, so that was good. I’ve been involved in, not a million, but a lot of fun little things. Joann Lawrence, who is in the performing arts department, she and I decided to blend dance and geography together—a cross-curriculum thing. People looked at us like we were out of our minds, but we had heard about this green mapping program. This woman down in Salt Lake at the Repertory Dance Theatre was the one that really got it started and championed it. It’s mapping your community with icons. Like if there is a local business, you have a local business icon, and you’ll map businesses that are owned by local people. Or if there is a recycling center, you would map that. So she got us connected, because she knew that it required mapping and dance. Joann and I got together 29 and created the Green Mapping Project of Ogden. We would take our geography students and our dance students and go to Horace Mann Elementary one semester, every Wednesday and Friday, and teach them about mapping and dancing the map. We would make maps on the floor and create icons and the dancers would make a motion and icon dances, so the students would stand at different locations and begin to dance the map. We had a wetlands area and there were wetland dances. We had all these different sorts of areas and we gave them a test on the information before and after, and they were learning this concept by movement and by touching and feeling and creating. So that was really fun to do. JW: That is fun. JR: We did a project from both students from Weber State and my neighborhood I live in. We wanted to something in Kyrgyzstan. I found out that our Utah National Guard flies to the base in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan used to be part of the USSR, but when we had the iron curtain go down and everything fragmented, they’re not their own entity. I found out there is transportation to this far off place, and this chaplain who does outreach work in Kyrgyzstan was looking for somebody to help gather supplies and things for an orphanage there. So again, we got Weber State students and community people involved. One of the things we wanted to buy was a swing set for the orphanage because they showed photos and all they had were these half old tires in this play ground area. We thought, “How fun would it be to send over swing sets, we have a whole cargo ship, why can’t we send swings?” We got two different huge swing sets that we sent over there. 30 They had six swings on these things. We raised enough money to buy those and then we contacted the LDS church for some wheelchairs. Then, they needed hats, gloves, coats, toys, hygiene kits and stuff like that. We gathered all that up and shipped it to the Utah National Guard, which was good, and they were able to distribute it. They sent us back photos, which were fun to see the kids swinging. It was fun. It was very satisfying. I like to get involved in these humanitarian projects and get the students involved. JW: It’s such a good mix of community and students, and then bringing the education in. JR: If there is a way, in my mind, I can get students, faculty, community and anybody else involved, it makes my day. So many people can benefit from a certain endeavor, it’s thrilling to me. Like this Mozambique project, the non-profit is very, very small. They don’t have the infrastructure; they don’t have the network like we have. I approached them on it and said, “I know you want to build this; let us help you.” The students can get great experience from this, we have no profit benefitting from the cooperation with Weber State. Right now, the students are helping to fundraise. We’ve got architecture students that are designing the building that will actually be built. They’re going to be able to actually put that on their resume and say, “Look, I’ve been able to do this. I designed it. It’s now a structure and it’s sitting in a village in Mozambique.” So, the non-profit is being helped, the women and children in Mozambique, and our Weber State students have an experience outside the classroom—outside the boundaries of Utah. Utah is wonderful. I’m happy I live here and my roots run deep, but there is a 31 whole world out there to explore. I’ve been able to travel to nearly ninety countries, I learned so much with each new adventure, new excursion, new place that I see that you can’t get from a text book, or from a PowerPoint presentation—you just can’t. JW: And the world becomes smaller. JR: The world becomes smaller. You’re able to address the issues that face us today with better knowledge, better understanding and deeper compassion. So, if I can take some students and get them involved in the project, take them there, it’s life-changing for me, it really is. I ran into one of my former students at Smith’s the other day—she’s moved back into the region and she was one that went to Rwanda with us. After that program she started her own non-profit and now she’s focusing on the air quality and some of the diseases and other health issues with the environment that we have in Utah—air quality, water quality, trying to map that and bring awareness—which is good. They go on and do great things. I had a fellow that went to Rwanda with us. He took care of the financial side of things and now he’s working for an investment office, part of it based on the fact that he was able to help with the fundraising, organize the funding and get the funds disbursed. So, it helps the students, it helps the kids—they’re my kids. I am their Weber State mother. I want to create this really rich learning environment for them, and it’s in the classroom, yet it’s also out kicking around the dirt of Africa sometimes. 32 What’s interesting—I don’t ever feel like I plan it. I feel like I’m just pushed a long and things happen and I just help facilitate it. I like to link things together and once they’re plugged in sparks fly, and things happen. We get together for our Mozambique meetings and there is so much energy in that room. Ideas are flying and we are discussing that by the time the meeting ends, we’re exhausted and we look around at each other, “Are you tired? Are you tired?” But it’s that energy of wanting to do good things that feeds us all. JW: Is there anything you would do differently? I just can’t think of anything that you would do different, just because it’s all created who you are and what has happened. JR: The only thing that has been a little challenging is that I joined tenure track so late in the career, but… JW: But how could you go back and change it? JR: How could I got back and change things? So I said, “This is just the way it happened, you just move on.” I don’t know if there is anything I would change. I am really satisfied with my life and with the people I work with. And these kids— we get to work with these students day-in and day-out, they are a highlight. They’re great. JW: I think we’ll end it there. We want to thank you for your time and this has been a great story. JR: Well, I’m happy to do it. What a great group of people.