Oral History Program Lee Sather Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 30 July-1 October 2024 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Lee Sather Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 30 July-1 October 2024 Copyright © 2025 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State 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: Sather, Lee, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 30 July-1 October 2024, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Lee Sather, recorded over four sessions from July 30-October 1, 2024 with Lorrie Rands at Lee’s home in South Ogden. Lee talks about his time at Weber State University from 1970-2002 and the changes he saw over the years. He also shares memories of his personal life. Kyle Jackson is present for the first two sessions, and Raegan Baird is present for the last two. LR: Today is July 30, 2024. We are here with Lee Sather at his home in South Ogden. I am conducting the interview, Lorrie Rands, and Kyle Jackson is on the camera. I just want to say thank you for your willingness to share your story and to talk about Weber State. So, let's just kind of jump in with when and where you were born? LS: If you insist. LR: I do. LS: Well, I'm happy to do that. Actually, I was thinking about, like, writing my own autobiography, but this is so much easier. Anyway, I was born on January 18, 1942. I was born actually in Mitchell, South Dakota, at the hospital there. But my parents, my dad at the time was the superintendent of schools at Mount Vernon, South Dakota, which was close by. Well, my parents said that's an influence on me. They were both teachers. My dad, of course, was the superintendent of schools, and my mom at that time wasn't teaching because she was raising us kids. I have a sister, Sonia, that's about three or four years older than I am; my sister Marlis, who was born 13 months after me; then my brother Gordon, who is about four years younger than me; and my brother Paul, who is 10 years. He was a runt. You know, being born in that high school environment always was an influence on me. I remember that my dad was a superintendent of schools. It was a one through high school, one building, it was a small town. We lived right across the street from the high school, so from the time I was little, I had to horse around, of 1 course at home, before I went to school until school was out. But when I saw the kids leaving the school, I knew that I could just go over to the high school and run around. I run up to my dad's office, or I especially liked going down to the gym. Mount Vernon didn't have a football team at the time, but they had a basketball team, and the coach would just, I don't know, he was just like my uncle or something like that. He'd let me run around, stay out of the player's way, but you know, do everything else. My dad, well, he did still teach but it was just a little bit, because he was running the school. I remember this time, this guy later on wrote sort of his anecdotes about going up there and how my dad ran the study hall. My dad was in and out because he had all kinds of administrative things to do. It meant that the kids, a lot of times when he was gone, would just start horsing around. This one kid was a real clown and he started imitating my dad when he saw my dad wasn't around, then he sort of backed up and bumped right into my dad [laughing]. That was not a good experience for him. I guess one of the things that's always influenced me, including my experiences at Weber, was just that my dad loved sports too. One year, about the time I was born, it was during World War II, he even ended up coaching the basketball team. He said that was an experience [laughing]. I remember both Mom and Dad had an influence on me, but I think my dad most of all. I knew he was a good teacher. After we lived in Mount Vernon, we moved to Yankton, South Dakota, where he was the Assistant Superintendent of Schools. He first of all would do, you know, administrative duties, but he also ended up teaching some. One of the things that he taught for a year or so was a class on, I guess, current events or political science or something like that. One of his students at the time was this guy named Tom 2 Brokaw, who later on, of course, was a big-time reporter and anchor. Tom once gave a talk back home, and my mom and dad and I went, and Tom pointed at my dad and said, “This is the guy that had an influence upon me and helped make me who I am.” Which, you know, I thought was pretty high honor. I think Dad just, he always wanted something better. But when I was like, a freshman in high school, he ended up teaching first year algebra. I was one of his students, and I sat in the back row, and of course, I could see everything that was going on in front of me. You know, with Dad in front, and then all the students and the ones who were paying attention and those that were just horsing around. There was this one guy, I think his name was Ron Ducial, who was always just a pest and acting up and passing notes and everything else, particularly when he didn't think Dad was watching. But Dad was, and finally he'd had enough, and he went over to this kid, dragged him out of his seat and walked him out of the door. I guess they went to the principal's office. Never saw that kid again. My dad, you know, was a good teacher. The first algebra grade, the first paper that I handed in, he was going to be the grader, and of course, he gave me a C-plus. He handed the papers out and everyone just took theirs off, and of course, I was the last person in the whole room to know what grade I got. Everybody's just going along, looking at theirs; they saw what my grade was before I did. When I got it, I was embarrassed, and I just said that not going to happen again, and it worked. I got to the point where later that year, the University of South Dakota had a math contest for high school kids, and Dad picked me for one of the five or six kids from that group of freshmen classes to go to take that proctored test. One that he never graded. Of course, as my grade got better and better over the year, people were saying, well dad is just favoring his son, and all this kind of garbage. I think one of 3 the best times I ever felt was later on when Dad got a list of the scores of everyone that took that test. He came home one afternoon for lunch, and he said, “Well, I got back those results, and you got the best score of everyone in that class.” There were some good, smart kids in that class of mine. It was one of the proudest moments I ever had. I think it's not unusual when you know that your parent is proud of you, that's always pretty neat. I remember the times when Dad would put his arm on my shoulder and just say, “I'm proud of you,” or “You've done a good job.” I think that's always special, that being a positive influence on your kids. I graduated from Yankton High School, and then I went to Augustana College, University now, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. That was, I think one of those turning points in my life, because teachers don't make a lot of money. Less than they do now. I think Mom and Dad wanted me to stay at home and go to Yankton College. I didn't want that, I wanted to get away from home. I mean, that's a natural thing, so I went to Augie and, you know how spell that? LR: I was going to Google it. LS: A-U-G-U-S-T-A-N-A. Just like it sounds, I guess. Again, one of those kind of stepping stones because I had some friends in Yankton, but not like I met at Augustana, and it's where I developed a real interest in history. The history department wasn't very big, but it was good. Especially this professor named Lyn Oyos. O-Y-O-S. He taught Modern European History. He just he made it so interesting. It wasn't just names, dates, genealogy tables or whatever. He got the information there, but he tells these pithy stories to make it interesting. I think that is something that helped me learn what you had to do to be a good teacher. We got to make stuff interesting or you lose them. Oyos was particularly, I think, instrumental because he had been a high school history teacher and coach. I didn't know that until later on. He gotten his PhD 4 at Nebraska, and when I started to think about grad school, he's the one that pointed me towards going, and actually getting me into Nebraska. It would have been nice to have academic scholarship for grad school, but that didn't turn out so, I got a teaching assistantship. Again, I think, being able to teach as well as study, was really a lot better than the other way around. LR: Before we go too much further, what year did you graduate from high school and start Augustana College? LS: Started in 1960, and graduated in ‘64. LR: Okay, so you went to Nebraska in 1964? LS: 1964 to ‘67. At that point, I wasn't rich or anything else, and I thought about just teaching, and as a matter of fact, a couple of times I had taken teacher education classes at Augie. I had offers, you know, interviewed and then offered jobs at different places in the Midwest. Then I had decided to go on, you know, instead, to grad school. Again, I didn't know where I was going to go, if I wanted a PhD. One of the things I had developed was European history, but increasingly an emphasis on French history, particularly the French Revolution. My advisor at Nebraska for my master's was kind of a jerk. He was a Princeton PhD, la-tee-da, and a guy that I never really felt close to. [Recording stops] [Recording resumes] LR: Go ahead, you were talking about the Princeton PhD advisor. LS: I wasn't impressed by that Ivy League da-da-da, and the guy was stuffy as hell. LR: That makes sense. LS: He said, “I know this guy, a fellow Princeton grad who is at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You might just get in touch with him and see if you could study under him.” It took a while to get in touch with him, because I think he was off 5 in Sweden at the time or something like that. But anyway, I got in to UCSB. Again, it's one of those turning points. First of all, I met Arnold Vartan for the first time, and just the difference between night and day in terms of personality. He was affable, kind, interested, and you know, the kind of, I think advisor you just need. So, there was this kind of instant contact. I was developing, because of my heritage I think, an interest in Norway because my family was Norwegian. Anyway, you have to, of course, for academic advanced degrees have their language requirements, and I had taken at Nebraska some reading classes in French and German. When it comes to Scandinavian history, that helps some, but you know. Anyway, Santa Barbara, strangely enough, had a lower division class in Swedish. They happened to have a woman there who could do that, and so I got in that class. I felt kind of, you know, dorky. I'm this relatively old guy, mid-20s, in there with a bunch of, sometimes, college freshmen. But, you know, I just was learning and one of the, not the first day, I'd been there for just a while. Just come in, sit down, get to work. This young lady came in to the class, and she sat down right next to me. I found out that she had already been to Sweden actually several times, and I think she knew more Swedish than the teacher. Her name was Wendy, and we started going to coffee after class and stuff like that. Then we started going with each other, and a year later we got married. I was mid-20s, and some of my relatives literally were worried whether I was ever going to get married or not. There were too many bachelors in my dad's family, and they were afraid [laughing]. LR: That you were going to be one of them. What year was that, that you got married? LS: Let's see, it was, I think, ‘68 when I got my PhD and so it would have been ‘67 or ‘68, that Wendy and I got married. She was from Southern California, and not a 6 midwestern girl at all. We just got along. We'd study, and in the evening could take a stroll on the beach, and all that kind of good stuff, and after a year we got married. I was still working on my dissertation, seemingly forever, but in order to get my dissertation done, I had to go back to Scandinavia. You know, get work done there. We lived that year in Lund, Sweden. It’s southern Sweden, and it was one of the most remarkable years in my life. I'd go to work; I could do work in the library and archives at the University of Lund. I tried every once in a while, to—you could take a ferry from Malmö, Sweden, nearby, to Copenhagen to do work there. It was not a bad, you know, easy. That year I took research trips, like to Schleswig in West Germany, and just visited many places. I had packed together different scholarships to pay for that trip. One of them was a Fulbright, and the woman who ran the Fulbright office in Sweden was an amazing person. She was married to a Swedish count, so she had a lot of clout. One time, I can't remember what the occasion was, but we were invited and had our expenses paid to go to Stockholm from Lund for a dinner. It must have been in the spring, and that was one of the most amazing parties I've ever been to. They just did everything. They had waiters that were walking around with drinks. You could just pick one up and I remember one kind of drink, it had a rosebud on a toothpick. You hold a toothpick and you hold the drink, but sooner or later you go, “What are you going to do with the flower?” Catherine's husband just took it and stuck it in his lapel. All of us that had been standing around figure, “Oh, okay, we’ll do that too.” After the dinner, I knew nothing about proper Swedish etiquette or whatever, but at the end of the dinner, I think it has to be a man that has to give what they call the tack for maten (middagspratet), thanks for the dinner talk. I didn't know that. My wife was sitting across the table from me, and she starts kicking me [laughing]. She's kicking me and she says, “Get up, you got to say something.” It's supposed to 7 be very flowery, loquacious, all this kind of stuff, and I didn’t know that. I just sort of said, “Well, thank you for the food,” and sat down. Everybody else was doing exactly that [head down shaking it with hand on top of head], just going, “Oh, God.” Then this other guy, who had been there before, got up and gave this flowery, gracious, sickening talk. I learned a lot in that meal. That year in Sweden was just a special occasion. Wendy had lived there before because she had gone to the University of Lund in a junior exchange program in college. So, she knew all the ins and outs and stuff like that. I'm just this [says something in Swedish]. She was a very patient person, because I would go to work every day doing research every day. But she found ways to keep herself. You probably haven't been to Lund, Sweden. LR: No. LS: Oh, it is beautiful. It was fairly small then. It's a lot bigger now. But it is one of the cathedral cities in the Church of Sweden. Well, it started out all Catholic, but they have, in the cathedral there, they have this clock that at noon every day, something comes out. The bird or something does the hour. Then it has this parade, this clock that just, it goes and a parade of people. It's one of the most beautiful sights to see, I think. Copenhagen's not bad either. I’d applied beforehand for different jobs when I got done. Well, when I finished that year, and there weren't any bites. There were a lot of places I'd like to have gone, and particularly in California, and nothing was happening. ‘Course, when I'm gone abroad, I'm not there to lobby or whatever. We came back. Well, our son John was born in Sweden while we were over there. The following year, went back and I just worked on my dissertation. I guess Wendy was home. Wendy's parents had this little guest house, and we could stay there for free. Anyway, I think at the last minute, I've forgotten how it went, but all of a sudden 8 there was this opening at Weber State. We just stayed in Santa Paula through—I was still working. Then in late summer, I think just before Labor Day, we got a UHaul, and we really had nothing for furniture or anything like that. Wendy's mom, they pillaged everything they could find in Santa Paula. At least we had a little bit of furniture. With that in a U-Haul, we drove out here. I was just thinking today that I had driven from Nebraska to Santa Barbara with this buddy of mine, Dave Griffin. I think we drove down through like, Provo Canyon, and then just zipped right through Utah. I think we stayed overnight in Las Vegas, and then continued on to Santa Barbara the next day. When we drove through California around L.A. up to Santa Barbara, I just thought I died and gone to heaven. The palm trees and all of this stuff. Dave and I room together the first year, and that's when I met Wendy. Anyway, we tried to cook, Dave and I, but we didn't do a very good job. Wendy would come over and fix especially dinners for us, and our diet improved considerably [laughing]. LR: So, you were going to tell, I think, a comparison story between driving to California and coming here to Utah. When you drove into Utah, what was your first impression as you got to Ogden? LS: Well, I remember that it was around Labor Day. I think there was still snow on some of the mountains. You know, it's like California. I was born and raised in the flatland. Back in South Dakota, you get a lot of snow. Here most of the time it’s up there [pointing to mountain]. In South Dakota it was right in your—God knows the number of snow drifts I got caught in, had to dig myself out of. I've done that a few times here too, but I didn't know what to expect coming to Weber State. I think they hired me because all of a sudden there had been a vacancy. One guy said I was their pig in a poke. They didn't know what to expect of me. I just sort of figured that, and I'm trying to think about what I was, I guess I was teaching 9 World Civ. I'm not sure what upper division classes. I don't think they let me teach upper division classes the first year. They were trying me out. I started out, I think, as an instructor, which, it's not even in the basement [laughing]. One of those things where you're so vulnerable that they can let you go any time they want to. What that taught me was that I'd better be pretty nice to everybody. LR: What year did you come to Weber? LS: 1970. I retired I think it was ‘92. Has it been that long? I guess so. 2002 or three. You can look it up. I started out as an assistant, but then I got on the tenure track. Then you start just going through the mill: assistant professor, associate professor, full professor. Eventually, as you probably know, I became the chair of the department, which was both a blessing and a curse. LR: I've heard that. LS: The guy who was the chair when I first came here, was a guy named Joe Dixon. You couldn't have asked for a better chair. We had no place to live. There was a guy in the department then named Jerry Bernstein. He was a story in and of itself. I know what he did was, before we got here, hang out in the office of some mucky mucks, until the guy gave us a house that was then on college property. It's on Dixon Drive now. Then it was Joe who met us when we rolled into town, helped us unload the little furniture that we had. He lived right across the street from us, and you couldn't ask for a better deal when your chair is just across the street from you. The department secretary, Dorothy Draney, lived right next to him, and that was even better. It was interesting, and we knew it, we didn't know exactly what, but coming to Utah we knew, obviously, that there were a lot of Mormons. We obviously were not. We didn't want to offend people, but you know, we also were ourselves. On that street that we 10 lived, it was almost all Mormon. We didn't know if we'd be like, shunned or something like that, and we were not, not at all. I'm kind of running out of gas. LR: I know, I can tell. I think this is a really good place to stop. Day Two: 13 August 2024 LR: Today is August 13, 2024, and we are continuing our conversation with Lee Sather on his time at Weber State University. When we left off, you were talking about coming to Weber. You moved into the home on Dixon Drive, and Joe Dixon, who was the department chair, was helping you move in. You mentioned that Dorothy Draney was the secretary, and she helped a little bit. Then, the fact that you were surrounded mostly by Mormons but was not your religion. That's kind of where we left off. So, let's talk about what campus was like when you first came to Weber State. LS: Well, I was just an instructor. Not even on the tenure track at that point, which meant that I could be let go at any time. That kind of tends to make one cautious, as you might imagine. You don't say or do stuff that's really stupid if you can avoid it. I had a beard at the time, and it was during the Vietnam War, and beards were kind of like a sign of rebellion. At that point, that was just me, and I just figured that come hell or high water, I just had to be myself. I had smoked the pipe, but I'd given that up earlier. But I'd go into class, and I always had a cup of coffee. At Weber, half of the people didn’t drink coffee and you know, they were kind of like, “What's that stuff?” Who made a difference is the people in the department at that time. They were all gracious and welcoming. At the time, Weber had just become a four-year school, so the size of the department had gone from about four to about seven or eight just overnight. There were some other folks in the faculty who were in the same boat that I was. One of the guys in the department was a guy named Jim 11 Dolph who taught Colonial and American Revolution, and that kind of stuff. Another was Richard Sadler, who taught Utah. There was this guy in the department, I think he was one of the senior professors. His name was Don Moorman, and he taught Utah History. He’d always tell his classes I'm Don Moorman, but I'm not [laughing]. He went out of his way, particularly teaching Utah History, to rock the boat, and he usually started his first class that way, and half the class would get up and walk out. I think he did it intentionally. Another guy who was still at Weber, but not in the department per se anymore, was Richard Ulibarri, who taught Spanish-America, I guess, that kind of stuff. Do you know that about him? LR: No. LS: Anyway, another guy was George Williams, who taught Russian and European History, that kind of stuff. They all shake my hand, wanted to know how I was doing and so on. The first department meeting I had was a real education. Joe, of course, was chair and running the show. But Don Moorman and Ulibarri—who would come to the meetings even though he didn't teach at the time; he was a dean someplace else—really would get into it. They'd holler and scream at each other. I'd seen that before in other departments, and I'm sure you have too. But anyway, I didn't want to get caught in the middle, especially just being at that point an instructor. It was George Williams who intervened and told them both to basically knock it off. George was an interesting guy. He was born and raised, lived his whole life I think practically in Ogden. His family had owned what was called the Williams Candy Company. George had been an all-star golfer and everything in his prime. That point, though, he wasn't because he was suffering from, I guess it was emphysema. Anyway, there were, of course, a few of us who were at that point new and just trying to stay away from the flack. 12 Sadler, I guess he came from Magna, but you know, a Utah guy. He immediately had a lot of network, because he was Mormon and he was like already, within that church structure, a pretty important guy. He pretty much had leverage that most of us young guys didn't. Joe as chair just tried to keep everything cool. I just tried to stay as under the cover as I could. I think that George really became kind of a mentor to me. Another guy that had just come was Gordon Harrington, who taught Asian History. He was just new to Weber, but he'd been around a lot and I think he already had tenure. But he was scared of his own shadow. I think some of these guys have done oral histories, that kind of stuff, for Weber. So, I guess you get that version too. As faculty members at that point, no women at all. There was a group, it was called The Faculty Wives, and they got together for lunches or dinners or social activities. But it was good for my wife to kind of network with them. I remember this one time she said, “We're going to have dinner on Saturday night with the Bozniaks and the Stocklands.” I said, “Who are they?” They were new faculty members up in the sciences someplace. It kind of became couples who were new to Weber from outside the state. It kind of became our network socially. It took care of us every way there was. I think one of the things, I think it was during my first year, it meant a lot to me. We all had offices down on the second floor, you know, just went one after the other. One afternoon, I know I was there working and happened to stick my head in George Williams’ office, and I sort of just plopped down on chair. We talked and he says, “I hear you're doing a good job,” and that meant so much to me, because if he was on my side he was going to protect me. George, and then you have Joe as chair, who would give the shirt off his back for us, and it just gave us some security. 13 After, I think a year or two, I went from an instructor to tenure track, an associate professor. Which I think meant, I should know because I became chair later on, that at that point they had to show cause to let you go. They can't just throw you out. My wife and I had, after moving here, just rented one place after another because our situation was so unclear. It was after I got on the tenure track, but it's also money that, we decided we could buy a house. We ended up buying and living in that house on Jefferson I think for about 28 years. That first year, when we came to Ogden, we had a little baby boy, John. In the fall, we hadn't been here much more than a month, he got sick. Wendy took him to the doctor and the doc says after a while, he was there for a while. He says, “I don't think we can do very much for him here.” It was night, we had to take him down ourselves to the University of Utah Medical Center. He was in an incubator there for almost two months. Being new, and everything else, that was a tough time. We just had bought a car, finally, and every day Wendy would go down to Salt Lake to the hospital and I'd just stay at home and teach classes, write lectures. Because it was my first year, I had a lot of lectures to write. Then on weekends, there were a lot of times when I’d go down with her and we would just practically live at the hospital. I can remember writing lectures in the waiting room or wherever at the hospital, which was not exactly the, you know, it didn't have a lot of books or anything like that to do it from, but they got me through. At that time, of course, the Social Science Building had not been built. I had classes literally all over campus. I have one class like, in the Art Building, and then the next hour had to be up at the Science Building. One day, I guess I got frazzled, and I gave my first lecture, but I had to give an upper division lecture up in the Science Building. I got up there and realized that I'd left my notes back in my office. 14 They didn't get much of a lecture that day. It just taught me I had to be better prepared. LR: You said your son was in the hospital for two months in an incubator? Were you finally able to bring him home? LS: Yeah. I don't know what they did. I can't remember now what was wrong with him. But they looked us in the eye, and they said, “You know, he might not ever be able to run.” At that point I was just, “Hell, if you can walk, that's something.” He was never a great soccer player. There were some of the kids his age who were really good, but at least he was able to walk, he played better than some people. When we brought him home, it was right before Thanksgiving, and at Thanksgiving, you're supposed to give thanks. The fact that he was back home and alive, it almost brought tears to our eyes. LR: You mentioned that the Social Science Building hadn't been built yet. When did that get built? LS: Well, you can look it up, but it's ‘78 or ‘79 or something like that. Needless to say, all of us were happy that we were just in one building. Before we had been really physically fit because we walked all over campus. The thing is that you could teach your classes, and you could talk to your colleagues all the way up and down the hall. The way they had that set up, had the history department on the west end, and then the criminal justice department kind of on the corner. Then along the far end on the other side was the English department. Then the political science department was kind of on that far end on the other side. You got to know really well, I think, or I did anyway, most of the faculty on that second floor. One of them that I got to know lives here now, it's that Scott Loughton. He's English department. If you're not interviewing him, he would really like to do that sometime. 15 Within a year or two of the time I came, a woman whom I had known really very well at Augustana became a member of the political science department. Nancy Newcomb. Nancy Hanstead as she was after she got married. They were down in Salt Lake, but we still got together with them sometimes too. They were all good folks. LR: Speaking of women, when did the first woman start teaching in the history department, and what was her name? LS: Kathryn McKay. She came mid to late 70s, I think. That was about the time that Don Moorman retired and Gene Sessions took his place. Kathryn and Gene did not get along at all. I don't know what the reasons were, I think they both had egos that were about like that, but that's just my opinion. LR: Okay. I know them both. LS: Oh, you do? Then maybe I said too much. LR: Oh, no. This is completely fascinating. They've both retired. LS: By that time, there was a woman in the department also, American History, she was called Jill Watts. She had the office then next to me. You know, next door, you become friends and talk and stuff like that. She's a nice person. I just tried to be a good colleague. One day, I'm in my office with the door closed, and I could hear Gene and Kathryn walking down the hall hollering and screaming at each other. That's my version, but anyway then I heard a knock on the door, and it was Jill. They had had a meeting of the American Historians, and apparently had not been good. I mean, nasty. Of course, Jill was new, and she said, “I just don't know what I should do.” I just said, “Hang tough, try to take it easy.” But she didn't want to get caught in their wars, so I kind of became her sounding board. I think she was a really good historian, one that really, you know, published some good stuff. But in a year, she 16 left. She just said, “I just can't stand this.” I think she missed the beaches, too. Still, I can understand, you don't want to get caught in anybody's fight. LR: Right. Who was president of the university when you started? LS: A guy named William Miller. LR: He was still president then? LS: Yeah, he was. I think it was about his last year. Well, that first year we had rented this house that was, well, now it's Dixon Drive. It wasn't called that then, but we were living at the bottom, and they lived at the top. Of course, they lived in a place that the university had provided for them. We were not so lucky. Although we couldn't complain because when we came from California, we didn't have a place to live. There was this guy in the history department named Jerry Bernstein, who had sat in the office of, I think the guy who must have been like the head of buildings and grounds, that basically supervised all kinds of activity on any property the college possessed. Jerry sat in that guy's office, according to the story, for several weeks in the summer. “I'm not leaving until you get me a house.” He had one on that same street. Jerry was a great guy. He only had, I think, a master’s, but he's one of the smartest people I think I ever knew. He just come up with all these things. His wife, Barbara, was a hoot too. She was a first-class writer, and they had a couple of kids who were young at the time. But, you know, you just made friends primarily with the folks in your department. LR: Miller was the president when you started, and then who was the president after that? Was that Bishop? LS: Yeah [laughing]. The Joey Bishop Show. I mean, Miller was this older patriarch and dignified as all get out. Bishop was, he was a Mormon too, of course, but just the flimflam man. I remember the first faculty meeting that we had in the fall like now, 17 and Bishop was doing this dog and pony show, just putting on an act. I happened to be sitting next to George Williams, and he just shook his head and said, “This guy is not going to last.” Well, Miller kept the old house, so they got another house for Bishop. I think his kids burned that one down. I mean, that guy was just, you know, George was right. That guy was a mistake. As a matter of fact, I think he's so bad that there were no faculty meetings. I remember this one guy, Merryl Mane, was in Psych, who was just the leader for raising hell, and he sort of like, “Bishop's got to go.” It got so bad that I think some of those meetings were, if I remember right, had TV crews from Salt Lake televising these things. By that time, I think Sadler had gotten to the point he rose fast to, he was only like, an assistant or associate professor, but he was chair of the Faculty Senate or— LR: It wasn't called that then. LS: No. LR: I'm trying to remember what it was called. LS: I can't remember either. But anyway, Sadler got up there and he just said, “Let's write this down. This is going to get taken care of.” I guess he had the ties with the Board of Regents. It wasn't that long and Bishop was gone. He got called to some LDS—he got shipped off to Argentina, I think it was. You can check the report on that or something. But anyway, it's just like, boom, he's gone. The Vice President for Academic Affairs at that point was Helmut Hofmann. Do you know him or of him? LR: I've heard of him. LS: Yeah, I'm sure you have. He had been, I think, like a tank commander in the German Army during World War II something like that. When he said something, it 18 was going to happen. Through all of this, I'm just trying to weasel my way through, not cause too much trouble. I survived. LR: Right. Did you ever get caught up in any of that with Bishop, or did you, like you said, stay out of it? LS: I just tried to stay out of it. Sadler had enough clout that he could deal with things. With Bishop gone, everybody, just this sigh of relief. Part of it was that the guy was making a mess of things, tearing the place down, and you don't want that kind of publicity, at all. I felt that if I'm going to keep my job, the tenure requirements were getting stiffer and stiffer and stiffer. The emphasis in the past, as it should be, was on teaching. But they also were more of this publish or perish. I felt like I had to do some serious work, you know, get papers, etcetera. I couldn't do them on Utah history or anything like that. But if I remember right, my dissertation adviser at Santa Barbara had set it up for me to participate, give a paper at this Scandinavian Studies Convention. I think was in New York at that point. Joe managed to get me travel money so that I could go back there and give it. I'd been to conventions of different kinds before that, but it was the first time that I came not just to listen, but to participate. I was kind of nervous, and particularly going where there was in the field of Scandinavian studies, a lot of mucky mucks. But it was my first introduction to going there not just to listen, but to participate. I tried to make a paper that would be interesting, and be positively received and so on. I went to the convention, and if I remember right, they had, the evening before the convention began, a little reception party or whatever. It was where you got to really meet people. I met several new people, which was good. I realized that there was this guy there, the crowd around him was, you know, you would think he 19 was a rock star or sort of politician or something. There’re tons of people around him. I looked at that, and it was this guy named Einar Haugen, who was the recognized authority on the Norwegian language. My dad had known him very well when they were young. I just moved with the crowd, I just sort of let him go. But as that crowd gave way, I just sort of said, “My name is Lee Sather, I believe my dad knew you.” He looked at me, and it was just like I'd slapped him in the face. He staggers back and he says, “That goes back a long, long way.” Because they had known each other. Well, my grandparents lived on a farm, the whole family. Einar Haugen's parents had lived, like in Sioux City, a town. Every summer, Haugen's parents would send him out to my grandparent’s farm, just to get him out of town and find out what farm life was about and so on. My dad had talked about him, as one of the most famous people that he'd known when he was young. After some time, he and I talked, and he pats me on the shoulder. He was such a honcho in that whole field, that having someone of that importance kind of as your friend goes a long ways, particularly when you don't know anybody else. He introduced me to all these people, and I think in terms of elevating my status within that community, you know, that trip and knowing him did a great deal. I couldn't wait to tell my dad that I'd met him, and that Haugen remembered him. Well, he sort of did. Haugen remembered particularly one of my dad's older brothers, because my dad had about, well, there were nine in the family. Ten, one died, but he had nine and they'd all been farmers, and the women had married farmers, and most of dad's older brothers had become farmers. Good people. Giving that paper helped me kind of figure out how to turn that paper into an article, and you know, brownie points. Joe was the kind of guy that he took me by the hand, said “This is what you need to do. This is the first step; this is the second.” 20 He's saying, “I can only protect you for so long. You got to do the rest yourself.” But he always had my back. He was a major impact on my life in that regard. Sometime during that, Wendy, after John had had that surgery and we had spent so much time with him, she said, “I want to become a nurse,” because she had been there right next door. I mean, holding him in her arms, seeing what doctors and nurses did. Her degree had been in like, elementary education. I think she started the next year, taking some elementary science courses so that eventually she could get into the nursing program, which was highly competitive. It's one of those things where in order to get into the nursing program, you really had to have recommendations from other people. Joe made the right phone calls to the nursing department so that she could get into the program. Once she got in, she was so good. She didn't need any help after that. She got a bachelor's in nursing, which at that point was a rare thing. She was picked at the end of her senior year to get a plaque for the best student in that class, and she got it for that year. I'm not surprised. She was thorough about everything. You know, it was crazy. She was working already part-time as a nurse's aide at McKay. We had, at that point, two young kids, and Wendy was gone half the time with classes and everything else. There were many times while she was studying or working at McKay or whatever, that for a long time she'd be working late afternoons, early evenings. So, I had to be at home and working and then fetching dinner for the kids, or warming up stuff that had been left before. It was a crazy, crazy time. I think it was after I got like, an assistant professor; first of all, that means more money, but also greater chance we're going to stick around for a while, that we bought the house at Jefferson. That's where Joe lived, across the street, and Dorothy was next door. I think I told you before, you couldn't ask for a better 21 situation than that. There was times I’d write out a quiz and longhand at night, run across the street to Dorothy and say, “Would you type this up for me so I can give this quiz in the morning? Or this test?” Then I learned how to type, and that made things a lot easier. LR: When did you receive or earn your tenure? LS: I got my tenure, honestly, I've forgotten now. But when you got tenure, that's a big step, because it means, well they can fire you off of moral turpitude, but other than that, they can't fire you. It must have been about ‘78, I'm guessing. I think that's about right. LR: How did your teaching evolve through the years? LS: Well, at first, I was hired to do World Civ, the bread-and-butter course. Also, for upper division, I taught Modern France. Which, given my background, was the way to go. As the program of the department increased, more courses specialized in the upper division, I finally said, “I want to teach a class on Scandinavian history,” which was the one I really wanted to. They said, “Nobody will take it.” I said, “Well, let's see.” Classes the first year or two were not big, to say the least. I think more than anything else, what I tried to do was to make my classes interesting. You know, factual but interesting, and if you can throw in a little sense of humor, that helps too. Or snide remarks or whatever. Eventually, there was a class called The French Revolution and Napolean, which was my cup of tea. You can make that real interesting, and Scandinavian history is really interesting, too. Then I added a course I called Revolutionary Europe. The point being that you didn't have just revolution in France, but you know, all over. 22 I started with the American Revolution, because that was the spark. It was the humanists that really, I think, set all that off. Because it's not a matter before of people being, say, believe, but the use of reason. I'll never forget somebody was saying, “Is it reasonable that people are born free and everywhere in chains?” Was that Voltaire? I think so. LR: I'll have to take your word for it. That sounds like something Voltaire would say. LS: It sounds like something he'd say. The challenging of all established beliefs. Before it had been, love God, honor the king. People are saying, “Why should we believe and why should we honor that clown?” Which by the 1700s, there were many. But you had an American Revolution, you had the English Revolution, you had a French Revolution. But it was just like a wave, and it kept going through Europe again and again and again. Sorry if I get a little bit passionate. I tried to throw in Scandinavia every place I could. I had a class on the Vikings. They were wild guys, which is why I like the Minnesota Vikings. But anyway, one of the things I ended up talking about, because I knew an awful lot about it, was—I don't know if I'm boring you, but the Norwegians were subject to the Danes, and had been for centuries. Then in 1814, they threw off that Danish yoke, which is what they called it, and they declared their independence on the 17th of May. Danes said that you won't be able to defend yourself from the Swedes, but they did. One of the reasons that they did was that the Danes had sent a commander of their forces to Norway before this. The Norwegians convinced, the guy's name was Christian August, that he should lead them against the Swedes, because he was afraid of the Swedes and also the Russians. Christian August took this ragtag peasant army and drilled it into a fairly good army. He did that, and you know, he was a prince. He didn't do that by being lofty and just above everybody else, but he 23 did it by running with them during exercises, camping with them, eating their food, just being one of the guys. The Norwegians were not used to a prince treating ‘em in that fashion. As a result, when he took over the army, and even when they threw off Danish rule, he was willing to lead the Norwegians, first of all, against the Danes. The Danish king at the time, Frederick VI, was mad as hell, to say the least, that Christian August would desert in his eyes, the Danes, because they had been boyhood friends. Christian August said, “Too bad.” He beat the Swedes. Are you recording this? LR: Yeah. LS: Okay, well good. Anyway, sorry for the history lesson. LR: No, it's interesting to see how, you know, it's interesting. I'm curious, and we only have a few minutes left here, but—I've written down so many questions, so let me find the one I want to ask here. During your time at Weber, you went through a lot of presidents. LS: At Weber? Yeah. LR: Well, who was your favorite? LS: Well, Mortensen’s a pretty darn good guy. But, another one I didn't know real well, but I liked just instinctively. I've forgotten his name. He'd been at the U of U as a vice president or something. Do you know who that is? I'm grasping for the name. LR: Was he recent? LS: It's been a while. LR: Okay. Because the only one I know of that was at the U was Charles Wight. LS: That's the one I was thinking of. Well, Helmer Hofmann wasn't Mormon. I think he was vice president of Weber. No, I don't think he was. He got fired. I think he went to Westminster. But anyway, I didn’t have a chance to meet Wight very often, but I just liked him. Again, I may be speaking out of terms, but he made no bones about 24 the fact that he wasn't Mormon. I think we were at a party or two, I was at his house, served wine and just seemed like an open but gracious fellow. But I think there was a guy, a member of the state legislature from North Ogden, who was Mormon, that for that reason didn't like Wight. Do you remember? Anyway, he put enough pressure on the Board of Regents that Wight ended up getting fired. That was the feeling on campus anyway. LR: Well, that was after you retired from Weber. LS: Yeah, well, he retired under pressure. LR: Right. But it was after you had retired. LS: Oh, I had yeah. I guess I just knew enough anyway. LR: Okay. That's just interesting. When you were working at Weber, who was your favorite president? LS: I'm trying to think. You know, I forgot. I don't have a list of presidents in front of me. LR: I don't either. I know a few. Brady. LS: Brady was not bad. The thing about him, in my opinion, was that he had all the right connections. He could work the legislature really well. He'd been in business so he could, I think, pull money out of the hat. But the story I heard, I think from a fairly reliable source, was that, for some reason, a group of the faculty were meeting with him, and I guess in some place on campus, his office, whatever. He opened up this cabinet and he says, “What are you guys drinking?” [laughing]. But when the president is doing it, you’re not going to get fired. LR: [Laughing] I know, but still. LS: In my dreams, you know. LR: It’s a dry campus. LS: Well, not his office. LR: Not his office. That's interesting. 25 LS: What happened to Brady? Who was next after Brady? LR: I don't know. This is where Kandice would be helpful. LS: I just like Brady because he was open and he had muscle off campus, everywhere. He'd come up with money for travel, whatever, when nobody else could. Who was it before Brady? LR: I don't know. LS: Bishop. LR: Was it Bishop before Brady? LS: I think it was. LR: Brady was a breath of fresh air. LS: Definitely. Anything was better than Bishop. I hope Bishop doesn't hear this. Brady, I guess that's one of those things where when there aren't high expectations, anything positive is great. When he performed miracles, there was like this breath of fresh air. Really. Culturally he’s one thing, but he's very open and tolerant, and could do things for Weber that I think nobody else could do. Was that when we became a university? LR: That didn't happen until ’93, I think. Let me do some history, and when we come back, I can tell you. LS: Okay. I'll say this, just having that name of university as opposed to college did wonders for this institution. LR: Okay. Let's pick up there when we come back. LS: Okay. Day Three: 21 August 2024 LR: Okay. Today is August 21, 2024. We are here again with Lee Sather, continuing his interview for Weber State University. With me today is Raegan Baird. Getting back to where we were, you had been talking about the presidents that you worked with 26 at Weber State. You mentioned Joe Bishop and then we talked about Rodney Brady and how much you enjoyed working with him. LS: He was a surprise. The whole faculty, he just—I guess, who was the president before that? LR: Bishop. LS: Bishop? Yeah. Bishop had carried through what we call the Saturday Night Massacre. He'd come in and he swept out all the old deans and put in his own men. For the Arts, Letters, and Science—it was a big conglomerate at that time of the art departments, Letters, English. I mean, it was just about every department on campus. The dean was, at that time of our Arts, Letters, and Science, was Dello Dayton. He had been in the history department. He was there after World War II, and he taught just about every class in the department. Both American history and then he taught some world history classes too. When he moved out of the department and became a dean is why I got a job. I came in, and I told you Joe Dixon was my chair, but Dello was the dean. He could be kind of intimidating. He tried to be friendly, but I don’t know, you sort of figured he had the salute or something like that. But he was a good dean. When he got fired by Bishop, there was practically a revolt among all the faculty. In every, not departments but schools, he put in his own guys. I can't remember who he put in over us. You don't have that down there? LR: I don’t. I don't know the specific deans. LS: Anyway, we didn't trust the guy. Eventually Bishop got fired, to everyone's great satisfaction. At that point the new president, when he came in, appointed Dello as his Academic Vice President. He was just going to set things really in order, but that's when they split the departments, created the Social Sciences, the Arts, and 27 the separate one for the sciences that previously had just been all together. I've forgotten who our dean was after. Well, things got better anyway. But I came in and I felt I was launching into a hornet's nest all the way around. My chair, Joe Jackson, he really helped my wife and I out a lot and made it easier. LR: You've talked about how helpful he was. LS: Yeah. He was chair for about the first six years that I was there, but then he was really forced to resign. He had been arrested down in Salt Lake. He got busted in I guess some kind of a gay bar or something like that, and it made the papers. Weber State couldn't afford that kind of bad publicity. I mean, that got on the news and everything. But when I first heard of that, I just, I couldn't believe it because that wasn't—well, I kind of had felt maybe Joe was gay. I mean, I got nothing against gays, but it's just I felt sorry for him, the way people looked at him and stuff like that. Who was my chair after that? LR: I honestly don't know. I forgot to find the department chairs. So, there was Joseph Dixon. It wasn’t Sadler, was it? LS: Well, by that time I was on the tenure track. I mean, I didn't have tenure yet, so I still had to kind of walk a thin line. At one point I became chair. LR: Right. I do know that. LS: What was I before I came became chair? I was probably at least an associate. One of the guys that joined the faculty at that point was a guy named Mark Dyreson. Rob went on a trip to the AHA, and without interviewing anybody else, he brought Mark Dyreson [in]. I was really all for that because, again, we're trying to develop a faculty that published, you know, has some kind of academic standing outside of Weber. Mark had a record of publications. It was interesting because his field really was sports history, and I'm a sports fan. Addict, really. So, it was just fun to talk to him. 28 LR: I'll bet. LS: After a while, I began to get a feeling that he had an agenda. One of the places he had taught, it was someplace in Texas that he taught, and he had there hooked up with another faculty, woman faculty member. He really wanted her to come to Weber State too. I think maybe that was about the time that I became chair, or at least had enough clout that I could help out, so I kind of agreed to push it. This gal's name was Jodi. Mark was, I think, a Midwesterner or something, but she was Texas. You know that twang? As soon as she came, I knew we bought ourselves trouble. The Dyresons really went out of their way to invite us to dinner, all this kind of stuff. I think I was chair by that time. They wanted Jodi to get a fulltime job with us, be on a tenure track. She, I don't know, I began to feel that that was bad news. In the same time, I think, it was when I became chair. Mark was the kind of guy that—arrogant, and he would drive kids intentionally out of class, just be obnoxious as possible. He taught American history classes, so the smaller the class, the easier it is for him. I'm sorry if I'm trash talking him, but it's the truth and that's not good for the department. I can remember as chair, you have to have these interviews with faculty that are geared towards salary recommendations and stuff like that. Well, the guy who had been the provost when this whole thing started, named Bob Smith. Do you know the name? RB: It sounds familiar, but I don’t know him. LS: He was as arrogant as Mark Dyreson, and he thought Mark Dyreson just walked on water. Increasingly then it was one of those things where I wasn't happy with what he was doing. By that time, I think Dick Sadler was the dean, and Mark was rubbing Sadler the wrong way too. 29 So, I do remember that time that I had to sit down with Mark to do one of these performance things. I ask the associate provost, a woman by the name of Kathleen Luckan, to sit in. Like everybody else, she thought that Mark was just so cool. I started outlining to Mark the concerns that I had and had talked over with Sadler, who shared my views. To me, it’s documenting what would be an unfavorable review. Halfway through this discussion, Mark stood up and looked at me and said, “You dumb son of a bitch” and walked out. Kathleen Luckan’s eyes just got way, couldn't believe that he—I think he said even worse things than that, which to me it was normal. It was also a step—he didn't have tenure to document an unfavorable review by me as chair as a way to getting rid of him. Most of the time among faculty we can just settle things orally, just sit down and talk about things. But they insisted, the Dyresons, that everything be by correspondence. So, I thought, “Okay, that's good enough for me.” I just kept this file, and I led the charge as department chair to deny Mark tenure. You do that and he could still stay there for a year and teach. I think Sadler and I realized that if he was around for a year within the department that he was just going to make life living hell for everybody. So, at that point, Bob Smith left and we got a new provost whose name was David Eisler. It was by this time Mark still had a year. I remember during the summer of that, when we still had to have Mark for a year, I just happened to run into Eisler on the sidewalk between the Social Science Building and the Union Building. I just went over and I introduced myself, and I said, “Well, you may have heard we had some trouble.” He said, “I've already read Mark Dyreson’s file.” He said, “We're going to find a way to get rid of him.” What they did was to buy him out. You know, he had an opportunity to stay for a year and be paid. They just said, “We'll pay your salary if 30 you leave.” He got out of town, to everybody's relief. Well, most people's really. Never saw him again, which did not bother me one bit. It was in the spring before all of that, while this stuff was all boiling, the house that we had where we live—my family and I—burned down. I knew it was my fault. I left the grill on that night, and I forgot to turn it off. It was in the spring, and one thing led to another, and we were lucky to get out alive, my wife, my daughter, and I. A couple of days later, because there had been a fire there had to be some people from investigating about arson. They said, “Is there anybody that you know with whom you've had some conflict?” I bit my tongue, because I could have mentioned Dyreson, and they would have been after him. But I didn't, because I knew that wasn't the case. That whole fall after that, we had the bounce around, while they were rebuilding our house. But first of all, everybody on campus knew that we'd had trouble with the Dyresons. There's always this, “Do you think Mark Dyreson had anything to do with it?” Again, I could have planted rumors and utterly, utterly destroyed his credibility. But I didn't, I was honest. Well, they were rebuilding the house, but it wasn't until around November, I think, before we were able to move back into the house. But, you know, we'd lost everything. It's just amazing that from the get-go we were just overwhelmed by the number of people that stopped to help us. The constant thing that people ask us was simply, “How can we help?” By the way, I gave kind of like a graduation address to Social Science graduates a few years ago, and I told them about that story. The idea being that message to seniors would be, if there's ever any way that they can help, what they need to do is stop somebody and say, “How can I help?” Because you can't believe the number of people, friends, neighbors, people from our church, the people who 31 we knew were Mormon, they just all did everything. There still were a few things that we could salvage. I had this liquor cabinet downstairs. I remember there was a time I went down in what was left of the house, and there were ladies, I think from the local ward, who were lifting bottles of booze and putting them in a box. That cracked me up, and I shouldn't say that, but it's true. But everyone pitched in. Like, for example, the fire was about four o’clock in the morning, and all we could do then was to stand across the street and just watch our home and everything in it burn down. You know, that is about as humility, just terrible feeling, and I mean all of us [felt it]. We had this couple who were good friends who lived about a half a block away or something. They heard all the fuss, and so they got blankets for us because it was early morning. They finally got us, my wife, my daughter and me, to their house for the night. The way that people pitched in, it was just amazing. All three of us have barely gotten out of here alive, let alone have anything. I remember I had a copy of my dissertation and all my notes that were in my study. Quite a few of those, actually, I think a lot of that stuff is in the Weber State archives. But, like, I was trying to convert that dissertation into a book, and I had notes and stuff like that. They, people from the printing office at Weber—it was in a book form. The pages were charred, but still salvageable, and they took those up, reprinted them, so that I had something. I remember that the guy who was Weber’s football coach, of all people, helped to lead a fund drive telling people that if they wanted to help that they set up, I think, an account at the Weber State Credit Union. People could donate so we had that money to buy whatever we needed. I remember that when the fire happened, of course we just tried to get out of there as fast as we could, but my wife was going to leave the next day on a trip to Colorado, because our son's wedding was going to be at the end of that week. So, 32 she had all her suitcases and stuff like that in the car, and the whole thing was just burned to a crisp. There was nothing left. I remember my daughter, Britt, was a student at Judge in Salt Lake. That's another story. But anyway, we all got out of there, and at Judge, like most schools like that, they had to wear uniforms. LR: Oh, she went to Judge High School. LS: Yeah. Well, she'd been at St. Joe's, but then she transferred to—that's another story. But anyways, the first day that she was going to go to school, and she's a high school junior, or something like that. She said, “I'm not going because I don't have my uniform.” Finally, she had a friend who lived here in Ogden, I think it was a daughter of Doctor Wellman. Medical doctor, had lots of money. She got a uniform from her. Just all of a sudden with Britt, it calmed her down. The first day, it was like Sunday night that this fire happened. I just told him, I said on Monday, “I'm not coming in today. I can't.” But the interesting thing about it is that this Eisler, who was the provost, lived just around the block from me. He noticed the fire and stuff like that, and he cared enough about people that he had to stop to see if I was okay. To me, that's one of the ways where he was such a better man than Bob Smith. LR: How long did it take to rebuild? LS: Well, we bounced around. Different people let us stay for nothing in empty houses that they had. It was sometime in the spring. I didn't go to school on that Monday, but, the next day I did. I just kind of showed up with whatever clothes I had, which weren't many, but I figured that—I think I was chair at that time, but anyway, I had to be there. But, you know, all my kids, we let them know what had happened. The two older ones who were not with us, they had moved elsewhere by then, well, they just cared. We went to John's wedding at the end of that week, and the whole family 33 was there, but everybody was hugging us, and I guess they were happy that we were alive. In the whole process, Mark Dyreson didn't show his face on campus again. That decision not to give him tenure was not necessarily a popular one, even within the department. But getting rid of Mark was, to me, one of the classic things, important things to recreate the department in a better way. First of all, he's gone, and it also was at a time when enough of the older faculty retired that you could bring in newer people. Go ahead. LR: I'm just looking at, when you say the old faculty, so like Joe Dixon retired. Gordon Harrington, did he retire? LS: Gordon Harrington, you could say I guess he finally retired, but he was a good guy. He was an Asian historian and his wife was something else. But anyway, Gordon was there before I got there. Had gone to the University of Chicago, which made him kind of a whoop-de-doo. But it was strange because he taught Asian history, and I don't think he’d ever been to the Far East at all. To me, that was—well, I wouldn’t say weird, but strange. He had two sons. The older one, John, was a real smart guy. He became a professor of political science someplace. Then the younger son, Charles, he was something else. I don't know if it's attention deficit disorder or something. I shouldn't trash talk people, but he drove everybody nuts, and Gordon decided he needed to take a class from me. I'm going, “Geez, thanks.” But he prided himself on being the senior professor, so I couldn't argue. Putting up with Charles was a task, to say the least, but we got through it. LR: Then there's Richard Ulibarri. LS: Oh yeah. Did I tell you about him? LR: No. 34 LS: No. He had left the department right before I left. He became the dean in Continuing Education. But, you know, he still at least occasionally came to History Department meetings. In truth, when he left the department, people in the department had been very happy he left. He and this Don Moorman didn't get along at all. Don was still in the department, and Ulibarri came, and they would almost get in fistfights. This is when I first came there and I'm going, “Holy hell, what is this?” Never really seen anything like that or heard of anything like that when I had been in graduate school. I'm trying to just keep a low profile, not get caught in the crossfire. There was this guy also in the department called George Williams. I didn't tell you about him? Anyway, George was from Ogden and his family had owned this Williams Candy Company. LR: Oh, you did talk about George. LS: Yeah. He would try to mediate these fights between Ulibarri and Moorman. But I told you all about George? LR: Well, you talked about him. You didn't tell this specific portion of it between how he would mediate between Don and Richard. LS: Well, if those guys were going at it, George would speak up and say, “Would you guys shut up and quit fighting?” You know, bring some order to the things. He said, “We got business to—" you know, to kind of try. George was from here, I think he'd gone to Weber when it was a junior college. He was apparently back then a good golfer. He taught American history, but he taught Russian history, I mean he taught just about anything they’d ask him to do. I really liked George because I remember during my first year, by then he’d probably sat on tenure committees within the department and so on. One day, one afternoon—and I’d always drop by and say hello to them and maybe talk a bit in the afternoon. He said, “Lee.” He said, “I've heard you've been doing a good job,” and 35 you know how much that meant to me? When an established member of the department thinks I'm doing a good job, it really means he's got my back, and that's important. LR: Then there's, let's see, Richard Eberle. LS: Oh, yeah. LR: Was he there for very long? Richard Eberle? LS: He was there for a while. LR: He came in later? LS: Yeah. But after—actually, George died, then Richard Eberle came in, and we kind of divided up the European history classes. Richard Eberle was a local guy too. But he was just the nicest fellow, and his wife was nice to Morna, and they had a son who taught in someplace in the health professions. LR: Okay, and then James Dolph? LS: Jim Dolph. I may have told you, but Jim became—within my department, there were a bunch of us who were the newbies, Jim and Sadler, Herrington, although he was older, we all came in. Well, it’s when the department grew from, I think, the original four before that, to quite a few more. But Jim became my very best friend within the department. He was just the kindest guy. He wouldn't, literally, hurt a flea. He had the nicest wife and we did an awful lot together as couples. The thing about Jim that always puzzled me was that his wife, Joan, was just the nicest person. But we would say, “Joan is nice.” He'd go, “Well—” He'd still pine for this gal that he had met, like in high school or something. [We] thought, “Be thankful for what you have.” When Ulibarri became a dean, then this guy named Henry Bardwin took over the Latin America and stuff like that. Henry was good. Henry was the most 36 passionate person about anything he ever saw. When I became department chair, the strategy that I employed would be, maybe sometime during the day, I would intentionally sort of say, “Henry, do you have anything to say to us?” because he was so passionate. You had to give him about a half an hour, he would rant and rave about damn near everything. People in the department would say, “Why do you let him do that?” I said, “Listen.” I said, “Either he can rant and rave to us as a group, or can rant and rave to each one of us all week, so let's just get it over with.” LR: That’s funny. LS: He was the kind of guy who wanted to burn the administration building down half the time. But he was the most caring, thoughtful person, one of the kindest people I've ever met. When he got passionate about something—I remember there was this one time when we invited the Bardwins over for Thanksgiving dinner. I was going to of course carve the turkey, and I've got the knife and fork and going at it. Henry says, “Let me do this,” and he grabs the knife from me. I thought, “I'm getting out of here, ‘cause I might die or get slashed to death otherwise.” Later on, after I retired, I get together a lot with Henry and also this guy, Bob Becker, who was an adjunct. He wrote me this letter this one summer, and he'd been in Louisiana because he and his wife had lived there. Then she got a job as a manager of the bookstore, and so they were going to move up here. He just inquired if he might teach just a few sections of American history, just to keep busy and stuff like that. I can't remember where he'd gotten his PhD, but it was a legitimate, you know, meaning it was a good school. I just told him, like I said to a lot of people who wanted to teach part-time, “We'll give you a class, see what you can do.” He did great and became a really good teacher. 37 Later on, after we all retired, Henry and Bob and I would get together for coffee real often. I can't find—well, with Henry Bardwin, you know, be a good friend. First of all, his wife ran off and left him, and I don't think he was ever quite the same after that. But he, after retired, one time he was crossing Harrison and he got hit. His car got hit by someone, and he was in the hospital for a couple of days, and that really did him in. Pretty soon, I mean— I remember I went one time, I just stopped by Henry's house to see if I could take him to coffee. He said, “Not today. I just don't feel good,” which really concerned me. Then I guess I met somebody for lunch. I can't remember who it was, but the same day found out from his son that he died. That really upset me a lot, because everybody had Henry stories, put it that way. I think his son, Danny, as a matter of fact, is still around someplace here in Ogden. I mean, somebody really ought to talk to him. But Henry was Latin American. I think he was born in Guatemala or something like that. Anyway, he could make salsa that would knock your socks off, and Henry’d say, “You want some salsa?” I said, “No way.” LR: So, kind of moving back to what you did on campus, you were part of the Athletic Board for three years. What are some of the things that you did on the Athletic Board? LS: I think there's some kind of provision that every college athletic department has to have a board of directors or whatever. It represented different segments, you know, boosters, whatever, and also faculty members. I guess because we went to athletic games, my wife and I, I got picked to serve on that board. Athletic director would get up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the good stuff. I knew enough about the program that I would ask some nasty questions and really make them tell the truth and so on. 38 Well, that was being on the Athletic Board. I was asked to be the faculty Athletic representative. That was an interesting experience, because what they have to do is before any athlete can compete at Weber or any other school, the Athletic representative has to certify, put their name on the dotted line, that this guy is eligible to participate. The people who had that job before had just signed stuff, anything that was put before them, whether it was true or not. Finally, I said, if I'm going to have this job, I'm going to have to look at everything. I knew that meant that—well, I got release time that way. But still, I’d spend hours literally going through transcripts, the kids’ grades for the year, incoming kids to make sure they had the right test scores, etcetera. It was a timeconsuming job. Other faculty reps before me, they’d just sign it and I guess hope it was right. But I told them, I said, “I want the records of every one of these kids so I can look at it myself.” They said, “Nobody asked for that before.” I said, “I am.” I guess the registrar didn't like me very much because I wasn't just taking their word for it. Well, you're not always very popular if you're going to do a good job. I really got to find out about what was going on, for faculty and for everything else. Like, you could look at them and say, “Well, what classes are they taking?” You could normally see that they were getting put in underwater basket weaving. I mean, just Mickey Mouse classes, just enough hours and just enough credits to stay eligible. They didn't really care if they graduated or not. I remember this guy, it was during the summer one year, and he was in criminal justice, which then at least some professors were notorious for just giving jocks easy grades, not really ask ‘em to do too much except sign their name, and 39 some of them couldn't do that. This one guy, C.J., came to me one time and he said, “What do I need to give so-and-so so he can play basketball?” I said, “Give him what he deserves. If that means you flunk him, you flunk him.” But, you know, no one deserves to just have it easy. You found out the coaches who really cared about their players, wanted them to graduate and get a degree in something where they could get a good job when they graduated, instead of just sliding by. I remember there was this one guy, I think his name was Rico Washington, who was a really good basketball player. But when I looked at his transcript of when he was going to transfer to Weber, he had been to about six schools before that in two years, at schools that would just slide him by. I thought, “Do we really want this kid here?” But the coaches were leaning on me. What I did, Weber has to certify they're eligible, but then you send all the certificates to the Big Sky Conference, and then they're the ones that can step in and say, “This kid can't play,” like with this Rico Washington in particular. But other kids, too. Schools, they could challenge somebody's eligibility. So, like with this Rico Washington, I sent the commissioner of the conference his records—I think it was him—and anyway, I showed him how to that point the kid was eligible to play. I said, “Believe me, if he comes to Weber State, he's going to possibly get a degree in something that means something.” But that guy's eligibility was questioned by every school in the conference before we played him. Well, we had this Big Sky meeting. Part of the agenda was that you could talk about eligibility, and I was getting a lot of grief from the other schools. “How come this kid can play? Are you [going] to testify that this kid can play?” It was one of the few times that the commissioner sat in on the meeting and he said, “Listen.” He said, “Lee has sent me all the records and this kid can play.” 40 The other coaches, other refs grumbled, but he ended up being one of the best basketball players Weber ever had. Dumb as a board, but he could play basketball. LR: I think that's going to be a good place to stop. LS: Oh, it is? Would it be possible maybe to come back again? LR: Yeah, we're not quite done. Day Four: 12 September 2024 LR: Okay. Today is September 12, 2024, and we are here again with Lee Sather and Raegan Baird is with me as well. All right Lee, let's jump back in to the Athletic Board of Directors. Remind me how long you served on that? LS: Well, I served on it for a long time. The dates are fuzzy, but I think it might have been about 1988. I was just originally on the board, and then from that, I was asked to be the faculty rep to the conference and then the NCAA. LR: So, I know you talked quite a bit about that already, the Athletic Board of Directors, but is there a memory or a moment when you were on that board that stands out? LS: Yeah, when I was the faculty rep, and I was thinking of this the other day, and that is that the ADs generally wanted to go easy on athletes and so on. When the athletic director was this guy named Dick Hannan, he and I, for the most part, got along a lot better. I remember this one time when the passing grade for the American Institutions requirement was a C-minus. We really, Dick and I, were both unhappy with that. That just seems too easy for everybody. So, he and I agreed that for student athletes that they would have to get a C to be eligible for, you know, participate, which was higher than what the conference demanded and everything else. First of all, I was at a meeting of the coaches when we told them that’s what 41 was going to happen, and all hell broke loose. “These kids are going to have to study!” We said, “Exactly.” Then we decided that we would extend that requirement to the like, cheerleaders, everybody connected with athletics was going to have to get, to be on the drill team or cheerleaders or whatever. That really caused an uproar. Somehow, well I know what, I got a hold of the other chairs of Poli Sci and the Economics department, because that American Institutions requirement was that they could pass it by taking U.S. history, or American government and poli sci, or economic history. I got the other chairs, Roger Lander, I think Dick Alston, to go along with that. I guess, in order to make that happen, somehow we had to go to the Faculty Senate. We thought everybody would agree to that. Well, I sat there in the meeting. I didn't have a vote, but I sat there, and I was surprised that one department chair after another across campus was just upset with that, because it meant that all their students would have to get the C instead of a C-minus. They were saying, “They're going to have to study.” So, finally, all this uproar—and I think Dick Hannan was there with me—and came to a vote and it was put on the floor, but it died for lack of a second. There were members of my department who were on the Faculty Senate. Gene Sessions I know was one, and even Roger Lander and Dick Alston in the long run wouldn't stand up and vote for it. So, I was left sort of just dangling in the wind by myself. I felt so stupid and betrayed by everybody across the campus. It was one of the saddest days I think I ever had at Weber State, the lack of standards that everyone was willing to, you know, they didn't care. I said, “What kind of an academic institution are we if we allow this kind of thing to happen?” and nobody cared. I would like to think that maybe now things have changed. I know that people 42 in the history department, if the issue ever came up again—and I don't know what the standard is now. LR: So, during your time did it ever come up again? LS: No. People later on said, “Gee, I wish we’d done that.” Well, it’s a little bit too late, and they weren't going to bring it up again. Like I said, it was just one of the most disappointing days in my life there. LR: Thank you for sharing that. You also mentioned you wanted to talk a little bit about Dutch Belnap. LS: Dutch Belnap? I'm not sure what I said before. LR: You haven't said anything about him. LS: It's probably the best. [Laughter] Do you know who he is? LR: I know who he is. LS: Yeah. He was always so well liked. He had been the coach at Utah State, but he was from Ogden. I think he'd been a star at high school here or something. He was a big wig, after he retired, in one of the banks. But he was always on, his work just seemed like it was God when it came to athletics, and he was on the board at the same time I was. LR: So, he was on the Athletic Board? LS: [Yes,] the Athletic Board. Those meetings, they were basically just local people who were on the board, representatives of different groups, alumni, etcetera, and he was on that. When Denny Houston was the basketball coach, all he did was, excuse me, bitch about Denny, how what a lousy coach he was and so on. I felt entirely differently. Denny, I got to know him pretty well. He had been an assistant coach before I came here, at Stanford. When he was coach, he brought in, excuse me, kids who could play basketball that also, instead of majoring in Mickey Mouse majors, he would make sure that they took classes and encouraged them to major 43 in disciplines that would, in the long run, do them some good when they got out of college. I think Larry Farmer had just been the coach at Weber, and he had brought in a bunch of kids that—brainless. So, Denny had to get rid of those guys and then try to get in his own kids, and that takes time. In my opinion, you have to give a coach at least three to four or five years to build a program, then you can see what kind of a coach he really is when he's got his own kids to work with. Dutch did everything he could to get Denny out of there. I didn't tell you none of this? He was slowly bringing in some good kids, and Dutch was the one on the board and downtown and everywhere who would just nitpick and criticize Denny, the players, the whole program. Dutch was trying to ride Denny out of here as soon as he could. Because of Dutch's influence, Denny got fired. That set an agenda, because he was really in cahoots with, from the past, this guy Ron Abegglen, who had been a successful coach at small places before that. When he was considered, I called the NCAA beforehand just to see what kind of a record, in a sense, they had of him, and it read like a rap sheet. Every place he'd gone, there had been violations. I argued and argued, including to the president, that we shouldn't hire that guy. They just said, “Well, he'll win.” I said, “Well.” I predicted that if they hired Abegglen that we would—I said, “You're going to face an NCAA violation and possible impact on the program if you hire him.” But the guy said, including the president said, “He can win.” So, they hired him. I stuck around, I think, for about a year as faculty rep, and by the end of the year—well, I was tracking him. I remember one time, there's, according to the rules, you can't hold practices with a coach present before a certain time. Found out what 44 was going on, I walked into this gym and there were the coaches with these kids, which was a violation. After that, I just said, “I quit. Somebody else can be the guy who takes the rap for this.” In some ways, I hated giving that job up. But on the other hand, I couldn't stand it anymore. So, you know, I just quit. Then they sent out a message to the campus saying, “We thank you. Thank Lee Sather for his service. If there's anyone interested in serving in that position, let us know.” So, then they immediately take this guy named Earl McCain, who was in education. He was reverting back to this signing everything, not really doing the job. Like I said, I hated giving that job up, but I just—Abegglen, pretty soon Weber did get hit. You can look it up with NCAA violations. I don't think they could go to the tournament for a year or two. Every team that participates—or just about all teams period—get a cut of all the revenue that the NCAA gets off that basketball tournament, whether they’re in it or not, and we didn't. LR: Do you know when they finally got rid of Abegglen? LS: I think it probably was about 1992 when I quit as faculty rep. I was tired of playing public defender for a program I didn't really at that point believe in. I told the guy, there was like a member of the administration—it should have been the president, but the president didn't handle that. So, it was one of his assistant presidents that handled Athletics. I just said “Jess.” I said, “You’re going to have nothing but trouble here,” and they did. But I was on the board for a long time after that. On that board nobody, for the most part, the people on that board don't ask any serious questions, but I would. I mean, I wasn't trying to cause trouble. I just wanted them, you know, put their feet to the fire. I was on the board for quite some time. I can't remember how long. I usually was on pretty good terms with those guys. LR: Interesting. There was also the name Gary Crompton. 45 LS: Don't remind me. LR: [Laughing] Okay. Well, you said you wanted to talk about it. LS: Oh, I did? LR: Yeah. LS: Well, he was the Athletic Director when I first had any contact with Athletics at all. He could be so gracious and charming and flowery. Maybe it's just the nature of a job, but I remember that the head of Campus Recreation at the time was a guy named John Knight, and I knew John pretty well, too. He's a friend of mine. John, as part of his job, had to work with the athletic department for scheduling of gyms for basketball or fields for touch football or whatever, and he would push for his programs. Gary Crompton felt very defensive whenever John showed up. I remember one time, I guess I was with Gary, and he said, “I wish they would get rid of that John Knight.” He just was nasty. He was vile. Calling him, John, all kinds of things. I thought, I mean, I was embarrassed that someone would act that way. Eventually Crompton did get fired, did not break my heart one bit. I think at that point, they’d always hired ADs from the local area. That was later, I think. Well, I guess I was still faculty rep because when Dick Hannan was the AD, and he was the guy I was telling you, man, he had standards. He's the one that I work with. LR: So, Hannan came after Gary Crompton? LS: Yeah, and I can't remember. Dutch was in there as AD at one point too, but I can't remember what the exact sequence is there. LR: Okay, let's see. We've talked about all of that. All right. So, after you leave the Athletic Board of Directors, your kind of in the latter part of your career because you retired in—what year did you retire in? LS: 2002, I think. 46 LR: Okay. So, you have about 10 years left before you retire. Is there any other organization that you worked with on campus besides the Board of Directors for Athletics? LS: Well, I'll tell you another story, and that is they sent this e-mail out to everybody saying, “Lee has stepped down as faculty rep, blah, blah, blah. Thank him so much.” If I remember right, I mentioned that to my wife, and she said, “They didn't give you anything or what?” I said, “No.” She got a hold of Jeff Livingston and read him the riot act over the phone. I wasn’t around, good thing. [She] said, “You got to do something besides that.” So, I think there's a plaque in my room here. That's one of my treasured things, that at least I got that. But when I stepped down, cut loose from Athletics completely, the administrative head—there was this Norm Tarbox. I'm not sure if he's still there or not. LR: I think he might be. RB: Or he just barely left. LR: I think he just retired. LS: Yeah. I always got along with Norm very well. It was either when I stepped down from the Athletic Board or when I retired, Norm says, “We'd like to do something for you.” So, for one football game, they let me use one of these skyboxes. Have you ever been up there? LR: I haven't. LS: Got to invite, like, I don't know, up to a dozen people to sit in the box with me. You know, it’s a nice place to watch a football game. You've never been up at that area? Oh, you should. LR: I’ve never been to a football game at Weber. 47 LS: You haven't? LR: No. LS: Dee and I went Saturday, which is another story. But when you go up there—they have a lot of meetings there, not just for Athletics—you go up to the second floor. There's an elevator that takes you from the ground floor to the second floor. They’ve sometimes served meals there. LR: I think we did a library function there, so yeah, I think I've been in that part that you’re talking about. LS: Right, yeah. I know, for example, that Julie Rich held something a year or two ago. That was, I think, for current and retired history faculty, which was, it was a wonderful time. A couple of times I had department meetings up there. I remember once I tried even with our adjunct faculty, make them feel like they were part of the whole faculty. I remember once I arranged—it was a working session where I gave them something to read ahead of time. We had lunch and then we sat around up there and just had a wonderful time talking history stuff. But for a lot of those people, just about everybody, they weren't used to that kind of cushy type of setting, so they will abuse that. When we went to that football game, it was a mess. They had everything blocked off. I don't know. That's another story. LR: So, during the early 90s, Weber State became a university. Did that change anything for you as a history professor? LS: It meant a lot. It's status. When I first came, they called Weber Harrison High. Which, people from here in Ogden wouldn't even come here, because they didn't want that stigma. Because it had been a junior college and had just become a fouryear school. Originally it was called Weber College and then it was called Weber 48 State College. Then, I think it was Rodney Brady, I've forgotten, but you could check. Well, what they did is that you had Southern State, it was college and so on, and they moved all of us from being colleges to universities and just the status. You had people would say, “Well, my boy is going to BYU.” [I sat] there, “Yeah, yeah, big whoo.” Or the University of U, or just the U, or USU. Utah State fought like crazy to prevent us from getting that university status, because they wanted that status for themselves, but they didn't want to share it. For Weber, I think it meant tremendous things. You expanded the number of departments and the courses they could offer. Before, Utah State would offer extension courses down here. When we started offering the same courses, it meant people didn't have to go up to Logan or down to Salt Lake for this, that, or the other. They could just get the degree here. It took a long while for Weber though, to be considered on par with BYU or Utah State or the U—or Utah, I mean. I refuse to call it “The U,” because we are WSU. I think it changed just the mentality of all of us who taught here. We weren't just college professors, but we were university professors, for whatever that means. But to some folks it meant a lot. LR: That makes sense. And it was Paul Thompson who was the president when you became a university. LS: Yep. Have you heard about him? LR: We're interviewing him on Monday. LS: I better keep my mouth shut, though. LR: That's up to you. LS: No. What we say is privileged, right? LR: I'll put it like this. You will be able to review this transcript before it goes online. 49 LS: I will say this, and that is, I didn't always agree with him, but he always listened respectfully. Well, you can talk to Paul Thompson about it. You know, each university has an advisory board, and there was, I think, one guy on it. Oh, I know. Sorry, I'm trying to remember. LR: You're fine. LS: There was a guy who was on the college board, and I also knew him because he was a member of exchange club. That guy, had a reputation of just being a horse’s patootie. This guy, I've forgotten this name. It'll come to me, but I've forgotten. You can ask Paul about it, too, for that matter. Oh, I know what it was. We in the history department had decided to, when we expanded the number of courses that we had, to rename them, kind of to describe better what they really were about. I had this class, it was on world civ, and it had been from B.C. to A.D. But in some terminology, more of a world context, it makes sense to call it B.C.E. before the common era, and then afterwards or something. LR: Right, A.D.E or something. I don't remember. LS: That, before it went on, it was going to be reviewed by this advisory board, and this guy had just a fit. He didn't want us to change it from B.C./A.D because B.C. is before Christ and A.D. is anno dominion, something like that. He said, “That's not Christian.” The point was the whole world isn't Christian. It made more sense, to me, to make it as what it should be. This guy didn’t want us to change it, and we knew it. It was going to come up, I think, fairly soon before that. But I sat down with Paul and with this guy named Tom Davidson. Do you know about him? At the time, he was one of Ogden's most prominent people. He and his wife were extremely generous to all kinds of things, especially Weber State. Paul and I and Tom Davidson kind of got together in a war council. Tom just said, 50 “I'll take care of him.” This guy didn't cause a bit of fuss, mainly I think because Tom got a hold of the other board members and made it so this guy didn't have a leg to stand. That's one of the reasons that I think Tom was one of the men I've always admired the most. You probably don't notice up there, but up by the—well, they have a special locker room for track. Do you know what I mean? Track and crosscountry, you know, their own place where they can dress and so on. It was Tom and Nancy that gave money to Weber State to make that possible. They donated money for absolutely everything. My wife and I got to know Tom and Nancy well, because my wife was, for a long time, on the family counseling board, and Tom and Nancy were on that as well. I remember that this family counseling center—I can't remember who was the director for a long time, but they had a banquet. It was particularly for members of the board, and this guy had what he called the big stick award. You know, someone who would carry a big stick and carry a lot of weight. The first time that I remember going to that, Tom and Nancy were the ones that got that award, as they should have, because they gave generously to so many institutions all over town. Tom worked I think, for Thiokol, and he was a retired honcho there, and I got to know him really well. My wife got that award too, once, because she carried a big stick too. LR: So, you end up retiring in 2002. Was that something that you were looking forward to? LS: I was. After I quit as faculty rep, shortly thereafter I became department chair. Did I tell you about that? LR: A little bit, but not a lot. 51 LS: Well, I did it. I didn't want to. But Dick Roberts—Richard Roberts, Dick, same thing—was department chair, and he just didn't do anything, at least related to his job. He was some honcho in like retired member of the National Guard, or something like that, and a Mormon bishop, and he just had too many irons in the fire. I remember once I had this request for something that needed his signature, and I walked in and he said, “Just put it in that pile over there.” I said, “Rob, I'm standing here until you sign that thing, because if I leave it here, it will be here forever.” It was a tribal request or something like that. I just stood there for about five minutes. He says, “All right.” I said, “Thank you,” and then I took it down to Dick Sadler who was the next in line there. But when Rob's term was up, I told Sadler, I said, “Rob needs to retire, at least step down as chair.” He wanted to be chair forever because he got release time and everything else. I told Sadler, I said, “I'm going to run, and if that means there's a fight between me and Rob, so be it.” Sadler said, “No, we see what we can do.” Sadler talked to Roberts and talked Roberts into stepping down so that the job was open. I applied, and I had talked to other members of the department ahead of time, and so I was unopposed. LR: How long did you do that? How long were you the chair? LR: Too long. [Laughter] No, I did it—well, the term was three I think, so I did it for six years. See, Rob had been there as chair for 16, and the thing is, he had just run out of gas. So, I just vowed that after six years I was going to quit. But anyway, it did mean I got release time. But on the other hand, with all due respect, I think I was a pretty good chair. 52 I remember one guy who had kind of given me advice, and it's like, management is by moving around. So, I didn't sit in my office much. I would go down in the afternoon, I’d just go and sit down and visit with everybody in the department that was there, and if you just sit down and sort of talk casually with somebody, you learn a lot. Like, “How's things going? Is there anybody in your classes that are giving you trouble?” You know, just shoot the breeze with ‘em. If you talk to them enough, you learn all kinds of things. Did I tell you about George Williams? LR: You did. LS: I did. Okay. That was before him, when I first started. But the only guy in the department, I think that was kind of a real pain, was this Gene Sessions. Do you know about him? LR: Gene Sessions, yes. LS: Yeah. He was a good teacher. I think he gave—it was easy. His classes were always full because he didn't make kids study. My son took an American history class from, he gave my son an A, and I think my son is a pretty smart guy, but he's not an A student. But you learn a lot just by walking around. I didn't tell you about—you know, yesterday was the anniversary of 9/11— about the impact that it had on campus. LR: You did not, no. I'd love to hear it, though. LS: Well, I was just in my office and I was just walking down the hall one day, and every classroom by then had a television set. I walked past this criminal justice class, and everybody in that room deathly silent and looking at the TV screen. I just sort of peeked in, and it was that day of 9/11. They were watching that morning, that terrible event in New York. What I did then was walk down the corridors where there were history classes being taught. I remember I went in this one and I just 53 stepped in and I thought, “Why don't you turn your TV set on for a minute and see it? Not history in the past, but history in the making.” Watching that morning was just catastrophic. I think what we did—you could check, but anyway—was to cancel classes pretty soon, because people weren't interested in learning very much. They were worried about themselves and their families. Pretty soon that campus was just like a tomb. LR: Did you stay on campus or did you go home? LS: I think if there was nobody else on campus, I went home too. I was worried about getting my kids home and making sure—well, I don't know where my wife was, because she worked part time as a nurse. So, I don't know if she was at work at that point, but just a flurry of everybody checking on everybody else. You know, were they okay? Do you remember 9/11? LR: I do, very well. LS: Yeah. It was just an eerie and— LR: Agreed. LS: I'm not sure because, you know, Hill was just outside of town. I think people were worried, “Where are they going to strike next?” Because they'd already hit in Pennsylvania, they tried to get the White House, they got the Pentagon, and there was probably more paranoia everywhere that day. People calling friends and relatives, and especially if they knew that they were on the East Coast, see if they were okay. It was a crazy, crazy day. LR: Yeah. What was campus like the next day? LS: I don't even know if they still had classes. I think they closed. You can check, but it seems to me like they just closed the campus until Monday or something like that. LR: Okay. That's interesting. Is there anything else that you want to talk about while you were chair, or the last part of your time as a history professor at Weber? 54 LS: I remember one time, this LaRae Larkin, who was in the department; to me, one of the nicest—good teacher, just nice. Some student got really mad at her, so I said, “Well, I want to talk to him.” I think she waited outside in the secretary's office. But he had been abusive and threatening I think, so there was even a guy from campus security that sat in the office posing as a student, just in case something went wrong. I just sat in my office. We closed the door, sort of. I told the secretary she might want to sit out in the outer office as well, ‘cause I didn't know what this guy was going to do. We talked for a while and it calmed him down, and I think that was the end of it. But I said, “If you give her a hard time again, you're going to hear from us. You can't do that.” After that, I think things for her were just fine. LR: Looking at the time, I want to spend some time on your retirement and how you have still maintained a relationship with Weber State. So, I think we're going to have to do one more time. LS: Okay. LR: Unless you think you can wrap it up in 15 minutes. LS: I don't think so. LR: I don't think so either. Day Five: 1 October 2024 LR: Today is October 1, 2024. We are here with Lee again and we are finishing up his oral history interview. Raegan Baird is with me again as well. So, Lee, we made it to when you retired from Weber State University. Remind me what year that was? ‘02? LS: 2002. LR: Okay. So, you didn't work much past 9/11, then? 55 LS: I can't remember. I think when I quit it was cold turkey. I've seen too many people who had stuck around and taught part-time or stuff like that, way past when they should have. I think they didn't have anything else to do. So, if I remember right that first September, when classes started, my wife and I were at my cabin. We just stayed there for a couple of weeks just to stay away from Ogden and Weber State for a while. LR: Right. That's smart. LS: It was, because I don't want to be one of those guys that wander off to the history department or something like that when I have nothing to do. LR: Makes sense. So, what were your plans? Did you have any plans after you retired? Did you know what you wanted to do? LS: Well, we had summer vacation, but we didn't have a chance to do anything normally the rest of the year. So, we spent a lot of time traveling, especially to see our kids. That was fun, because they worked all the time, so we would sometimes just go and hang out at their place. But even if they were working, we had a chance to do whatever we could in the area. You don’t have any questions for me? LR: I do, I just wanted to make sure you were— LS: Why don't you ask your questions first? LR: Had your wife retired at this point as well? LS: She retired. I think she had hung around for an extra year, and she retired at the same time that I did. LR: Okay. That's nice. LS: So, we could do whatever we wanted. Go up to our cabin when we wanted to, see our kids. I was talking to the people here last night. I think it probably was during the summer, but we visited my daughter Britt and her husband, and we went—long trip, and part of that was like going to Gettysburg. That was fun. I was a European 56 historian, but I love American history too. So, we went on that one trip and went to Gettysburg, and then I think we went down to where Antietam is. Not that far from D.C., I guess. I don't know my U.S. geography as well as I should. We just had a wonderful time traveling the world where we wanted to. LR: So, after you'd gotten used to retirement, how did you stay connected to Weber? LS: Well, through the history department, because sometimes I might just go up to campus to have a cup of coffee with somebody. But I always felt like I wanted to be invited. I think there were a couple of times when colleagues invited me to come up and lecture to their classes. The other thing I did was that I had this dissertation, and I had never turned that into a book. When I was retired, I had plenty of time, so I spent a lot of time just at home working on that. I usually had a lot of free time or quiet because my wife was off playing bridge someplace. It was okay, except for the times when she had bridge at our house. Then sometimes I just planned ahead to get out of the house. But I guess I fulfilled that kind of ambition; I turned my dissertation into a book. Well, it was kind of based on the research I had been doing on it. I wrote articles for different things. I kept active in this—there was like a Norwegian studies group and a Scandinavian group. I remember this one time, I think the meeting of that one group, I think it was that Scandinavian group. Well, one time it was in Salt Lake, so I just had the time to go to that. Whenever I went there it was fun, because me and all these colleagues from all over, I'd always gotten along with those guys. Not just guys, but people. But when I'm an old guy and I show up, they were always glad to see me. I think they were glad to know I was still alive. I remember there was this one time, I was wondering if I should go to this one convention. Well, a couple of them, one of them was down in Salt Lake. All I 57 did then was grab the bus. It took me within a block from where the group was. I don't know if I told you about this or not. I was thinking about this the other day, that there was this, I think it was Norwegian studies group that had their—I wrangled it, put enough pressure on them so that they had the meeting convention right here. It was a small group, and the meeting was here, and I talked the administration into spending some bucks to make it nice. They had a reception that Weber State paid for. It was at the, I think, that convention center downtown. LR: The Eccles? LS: Yeah. Made sure that there was plenty of coffee and wine and booze, open bar, which with Weber was a tough sell. Anyway, they always have a final banquet. We arranged for it to be, I think, up at Wolf Creek, which is a nice place. Even invited a couple of members of the administration. Well, it was in the fall, so it was at a time when the golf course and the surroundings were just immaculate, and they had a good time. We got a bus, I think it was, to take everybody up there and sort of showed ‘em some of the local sites. There was this old ski jump hill just at the mouth of the canyon, so I had ‘em stop there because I had written an article on all of that. So, I gave my spiel, and then we continued on the journey. I remember this one guy—I mean, we were there early enough that people could just wander around for a while. It was fall. Beautiful. This one guy who was a friend of mine at the University of Washington, which had hosted that meeting a lot of times, he came up to me afterwards, and he said, “Lee, I can understand the way you decided to stay here. This is so beautiful.” I had to laugh in a way, because I thought if I had had a chance to go to the University of Washington, I would have bailed on Weber in no time flat. 58 In retrospect, I'm glad I stayed because the—well, I think by then I was a full professor, and I just knew there was no way that I was going to have the same rank and tenure if I went anywhere else. As a matter of fact, I knew really well this woman who taught the Norwegian language at the University of Colorado. They had an opening in their history department, not specifically for Scandinavia, but for European history. So, I talked to the people there. That would have been nice because I have a son that lives near Denver. But I guess I'd rather be a big fish in a little pond than little fish in a large pond, or the ocean or something like that. LR: Let's see. I have like a few questions here, so I'm trying to put them in the right order. As you look back on your career, have you had the opportunity to be a mentor to other history professors or history students? LS: Well, I was really in charge of hiring a bunch of the people in the department. Some of them became good friends, Greg Lewis and Susan Matt in particular. I would like to think that just about everybody that I knew well would have thought of me as a friend. I know Greg still does. I think. Check with him, I guess. But to get back to it, I'm glad that I retired when I did, because it wasn't that much longer before my wife discovered she had cancer. She had a lot of chemos, and so we'd be in town so she could have a chemo. I guess it made us understand that there's a stopwatch on all of us, and we might as well enjoy life together. So, we'd go and, like, she might have a chemo, and then we did as much traveling as we could. That was the first priority. Then when we were home I worked on my book. Sometimes I'd be frustrated about—I said, “Why should I be doing this?” You know, if A, I need a publisher, and secondly, write a book that nobody's going to read. She would always stick her finger right in front of me, almost hitting me in my eyes, said “You get back in that damn study and write.” So, I wrote when I could. 59 I was fortunate because through some of our travels and so on, I'd gotten to know this fellow named Kidute Arstead, who was part of the history division of the Norwegian Defense Department. I’d given some papers where he was attending, and I was telling him some time I'd really like to write the book, but I said, “Who's going to publish it?” He said, “We will.” So, that made all the difference in the world, when you know that the book is going to be out there anyway. It just made me double down, I think, on getting that thing done. I got it done, and—did I tell you the story about how my wife was kind of like the copy editor? I'd write and then she'd check it for grammar, punctuation, this kind of stuff. LR: When you wrote your dissertation? LS: It was based on my dissertation, yeah. LR: Right. You kind of mentioned that when you wrote your dissertation that she would do that. So, she continued doing that with your—? LS: Oh yeah. I'd write something and then she would check it out. I remember there were this one place where, in the copy that I was [working, that] I wanted to send in. Well, it wasn’t a complete sentence. I was talking about this Norwegian kind of like radical. There were a bunch of them, and they had all buckled down, sort of selfcensored, censored this Danish king, but he [the radical] didn't. So, what I wrote was simply, “Everybody quit.” I just said, “Except for Wilson.” It’s not a complete sentence, but I did it for emphasis. She came in one day and she said, “You can't do this.” I said, “Why not?” She said, “It's not a complete sentence.” 60 I said, “I know it isn’t.” Well, we argued a bit about that, and I just said, “Listen, let me just put it that way, and let's send it to Kidute, and if he doesn't like it then we'll change it.” I think she was angry because it turned out that way. But without her help, first of all, it wouldn't have happened. She gave me the discipline to make sure it got done. You haven’t seen a copy of the book, have you? LR: No. LS: I think there's one in the Weber State library. LR: I can look it up. LS: There are a few copies floating around here too. Anyway, when they put that book out, it was extremely well done. I included pictures in the book that only they had access to. They made it into a first-class work. Of course, it was put out in Oslo, so they flew me to Oslo and we had kind of a book presentation, or whatever you want to call it. I wouldn't say it was a huge crowd, but some of ‘em were relatives and friends and so on. But when you put something out, that much work into it, you like people who would appreciate it. I think I was the only one of my family, extended family, that had published a book. I was kind of like the lion of Oslo for one night, or one day, or something like that. Those were the first books, actual books, that they had. My kids have them, I know that, and never read them. My wife by that time was really sick, and the only way that I could go to Oslo, even for a few days, was for my daughter Kate to fly out and be with her while I was gone. I got back and I was so excited to show Wendy that book, and she was so sick she couldn't even look at it. Which is, to me, one of the largest disappointments I have ever had. Because she was dying, is what it amounts to. I think she wouldn’t have lived a few more months. But I owe so much to all my kids. Just, when she was sick, the way they— well, Kate came out I don't know how many times to be with my wife. I think 61 honestly, I shouldn't say this, but I think it cost Kate her marriage, because a lot of times when she came out here, she left—their boy was very, very young. So, she had to leave him with her husband at the time. Brett’s a nice guy, but he couldn't handle that kind of responsibility. Britt was at that point someplace else, and there were so many times when I needed help that it had to be Kate. LR: So, besides the publishing of your book, what are some of your other greatest accomplishments? LS: I wrote a bunch of minor things. I wrote this article. Well, there was a book by Dick Sadler on the history of Weber State, and he asked me to write the chapter on Athletics. Did I tell you that before? LR: Yeah. I've seen it, actually. I've seen the book. LS: That was so much fun. It’s been quite a few years since that was published. LR: 1985. LS: Yeah. But there were a lot of old geezers who were still alive. That, and you could just find out, like, the first time there was football played or basketball played and where. I remember there was this guy, Merlin Stevenson I think was his name. He had, I think, coached everything starting in the 1920s, and the guy was still alive. So, I interviewed him, kind of like this, only no tapes or anything like that. I'd just take notes. But I was asking like, when did this happen, or whatever. I think he just started coaching like in 1922 or something. I just said—you know, you want to be specific if you can—"When was it?” He's going, “Well, I don't know if it was early October or late October of 1922, but we'll call it the fall.” He was so much fun to talk to, and you found out all this stuff about what had been happening way back when. You probably talked to Sadler about the book itself. LR: I haven't myself. 62 LS: Oh, you should. LR: If I get a chance, I will. LS: Yeah. The other thing I wrote, again was just an article. There was this guy, Stan Layton. He was an adjunct in the History Department, but he also worked at the Utah State Historical Society, and they put out this monthly magazine. He says, “Do you want to write an article for that?” That was kind of interesting because, you know, you do some research and you find out things. I talked to one guy who was an old ski jumper, and that was long before they had lifts and all that kind of stuff. He said they had to walk up the steps from the bottom to the top in order to get ready to jump. He said that he looked down at that ski jump, and you got to go down it and then up in the air and then down without breaking your leg or a head or something. He said, “We always carried this little flask with us, a little liquid called courage.” But there was this guy named Haulver Billgoard. Actually, he had been hired I think by Ogden City to give skiing lessons to local kids and whatever. I think it was about out there were they all wanted the golf courses right now. But being a Norwegian he loved ski jump. By that time, around Salt Lake, they had some Norwegians and did some ski jumping. That attracted a lot of Norwegians to the area. This guy that I found out about was this Haulver Billgoard, because he was the one that was hired in order to give skiing lessons here. He and some other guy carved this ski jump. It's about where Pineview is right now. You could check that article and check my facts, but they set up in Ogden as I think the Chamber of Commerce did a sort of a winter sports festival. They had dog team races and probably guys in cross-country ski and stuff like that. He's the one that got the ski jump made up. When that was built, people really got 63 it. The public loved that, to go out there and watch the people ski jump. The best ski jumpers, of course, were Norwegian. So, he talked a bunch of the ski jumpers from the Salt Lake area into coming up and ski jumping there too, including the Engen brothers. You don't know them? They're the ones, the Engens, who got all the credit for the ski jumping around Snow Basin and others. Skiing and all those things, it was first developed by these Norwegians in the 30s, which is why they came to the US, because of the depression everywhere. They all came to Salt Lake, and then he talked them into coming up here to Ogden when that ski jump was built. In many ways I think it's kind of unfair, because the Engens get all the credit for inventing or pioneering skiing in Utah, and it really had been Haulver Billgoard who had gotten these guys here in the first place. It's kind of a revisionist history, I guess, but it's true. LR: Yeah. What advice would you give to history students starting out? LS: History students starting out? I always told my students—and I think I told you this before—the most important skills that maybe any scholar, but particularly history scholars, is the ability to read, to write, and to think, and tell the truth. That is woefully inadequate so many times these days. LR: Agreed. Okay. Kind of as a couple of last questions, what are some of your favorite memories of Weber State? LS: Well, especially when someone sees me and said, “Dr. Sather,” it means they've remembered me. I guess that's kind of egotistical, but I kind of get a charge out of that, because too often I'll see somebody and I recognize him, even though it could be years. But if they don't recognize me, or sometimes I think they choose not to recognize me, it kind of hurts my feelings. I mean, I guess it's human, you know, to be recognized in a positive way. 64 LR: How do you think Weber State is doing today, or what can they do to improve as Weber State continues to age? LS: I don't know, because when I came here obviously it was so small, and it's grown so much. Mostly for the better. I think that as long as they put the student first, and your faculty are willing to help students—you have faculty that care about their students. Because I think that's what students remember. LR: As a final question, what do you hope that you'll be remembered for? LS: Well, I hope people just think about me positively. You know, don’t say, “That old fart, he finally died.” [Laughter] LR: [Laughter] That's funny. LS: You can edit that however you want, or maybe just leave it alone. LR: I'll leave it alone. Is there any other story or memory that you'd like to share? LS: There was this time when I was asked to give this graduation talk to social science graduates. I said, “What should I say?” I think it was Bob Ferguson said, “Just say something that's important to you.” So, I told them about that—did I tell you about the fire? LR: Yes. LS: Well, I told people about the fire, but also to me and my family, when everything we had was gone, people just said, “How can we help?” You’re supposed to leave people with a message, so I guess the message that I gave them is that being remembered as someone who has helped. I had a couple of the parents afterwards come up and shake my hand. But I think that's the thing you ought to be able to do is to help one another. You know, around here it’s—well, because we always have new people. I know from experience that people who just walk by and have nothing to do with you, that's hard, so I try to be friendly to people. 65 LR: Yeah. I'm appreciative for your time and your willingness to sit and talk with us. I think we're going to end there. 66