Second interview with Robert Bless (September 15, 2005: Tapes 3-5)

Robert Bless (#724) Transcript RL: This is tape four, side one of the Sept 15, 2005 oral history interview with Emeritus Professor Robert Bless. RB: Well it turned out that this very staid and by-the-book guy had taken in several Jews during the war and helped them across the border into Spain. In fact, my cousin, one of my cousins, the one I'm closest to, as a matter of fact, had taken some of them. He knew the area, having grown up there, he knew it very well. Take them through passes and so on so they'd get over into Spain. In fact he was at Yale, or is still at Yale, is about to retire. And he, a guy came, visiting scholar came, old man, some years ago, and introduced himself. And he had been, he was one of the people that his uncle had helped, and that Pierre had taken across the border. [laughs] RL: How extraordinary. RB: Wasn't that something? RL: Indeed. RB: So, anyway. So that was the end of my heavy 00:01:00 commitment with Gemini. And it did take an enormous amount of time. Because-- RL: And when did you finally step down as chair? RB: '93. RL: '93. RB: See the HSP, first service emissions in December of '93. The HSP was being taken out then. The PTR was in December of '93. And that was then. And it was taking a great deal of time. But it was, in contrast to many of the massive committees I've been on, this group of people were absolutely first rate, the board members. And they were, they had to protect their parochial interest groups, and the Canadians. And then we had some South Americans, also. But in general, they could see the forest and not be submerged in the trees. So it was really a pleasure working with them. It was one of the best groups of that sort that I've ever been with. RL: Bob, let me ask you, just back on the HSP and your final disengagement from Hubble, as you think back on it and the problems Hubble had, do you attribute the fact that the HSP was not able to be utilized to the poor management of the project ultimately? As I recall, you were talking about the firm that built the mirrors was not the one that they should have used. RB: Well, it did not receive proper oversight, either. In fact, Kodak made a back up mirror. Just in case [Perca?] failed. And their back up mirror is perfect. [laughs] RL: Really. RB: Yeah. So yeah, I mean ultimately, as I indicated earlier, Hubble was one, until after '83 when Jim [Oden?] became project manager, when they really realized they got to get serious about this thing and feed it properly. It was one of the worst managed projects that you can imagine. It was dreadful. So, and ultimately, that's, one of the consequences of that was [the mirror?]. It was a dumb mistake. A mistake that's easy to make. Actually, a spacer had not put in or some optical thing, or the spacing 00:02:00 was wrong on the--but it should have been caught. It should have been checked. There should have been somebody there from NASA who was an expert in that, looking at that, seeing how it was done. Because it was critical, absolutely critical part. So, yeah, ultimately it was a-- RL: So, superb science ended up being sabotaged by poor management. RB: Well, if you're, the Hubble has gone on to do very good science. I'm not sure I'd characterize what HSP was going to do as superb because it was a lot of, we were trying new things. RL: Yes. RB: So it was a lot of groundbreaking, would have been groundbreaking stuff. Which we never got to try. Now maybe it wouldn't have worked. And maybe, but it would have been interesting. In fact, there are satellites up now doing, or trying to do what we were trying to do. So interesting 00:03:00 stuff, certainly, which we did not have a chance to try. RL: Bob, one more question about your dual responsibility as a teaching professor at the UW and as one of the nation's leading consultants for NSF and NASA. Was the university giving you course release time? You were still expected to carry your load? RB: Yeah. None of us got any release time. The only release time was when Ken Nordsieck in our department became a [mastermind?] as part of the working program. Then it was clear he could not, he would have to, he couldn't do a course. But no, the rest of us just tried to do as best we could. And after '93, I served on a few panels that looked at how Gemini was doing. They wanted people who had some of the history of it and so on, things like that. I served also on a few Hubble panels. But that ended fairly quickly. RL: You'd spent enough time on planes and airports. RB: Yeah. Right. Anyway, so the Hubble left a bad taste in my mouth. Gemini left a good taste in my mouth. RL: So perhaps it evens out in a way. RB: Yeah. RL: Bob, can we switch now to your time as chair of the department? 00:04:00 You served as associate chair, you said, for several years. And then I think you took over as chair when Art Code stepped down? RB: No, Don Osterbrock. Code had stepped down before Don Osterbrock, who was the most senior person in the department after Code, took over as chair. And he asked me to stay on as associate chair. And I'd been doing it for, I don't know, by that time, seven or eight years. So yeah, okay, what the heck. It was no big deal. So I, and in that capacity, I was sort of the executive officer. And life was much simpler then for interdepartmental administration than it is now. Nowhere near the junk that you have to do and all the restrictions and forms and regulations and all that stuff. It was beginning then. In fact, the first day I became chair after Don, three years were up, some big survey of something from the feds came. And that actually was sort of the first big piece of review stuff or whatever, I've forgotten exactly what it was, that we had to do. And it got, it's gotten worse since. RL: And so your first year as chair was when? RB: 197--, what is it? Whatever it says there. Chair, no, department, '72-'76. RL: Okay. RB: And Don is a very, very smart guy. Very good astronomer. But he didn't like doing the dirty work that one has to do sometimes as chair. So that was left to me, which annoyed me somewhat. But 00:05:00 we had a typist who was absolutely, utterly, totally incompetent. And this was back in the days when you were still dealing in ditto masters. You remember those? RL: Oh, sure. RB: Purple? RL: Yes. RB: But her keyboard was just covered in purple. RL: Oh, dear. RB: And that was at a time, also, when typists typed your papers. There weren't computers then. RL: Yes. RB: And they would come back in worst shape than-- RL: --you gave the drafts. RB: And he didn't have, she had a very hard family life. And he didn't have the nerve to tell her that, at the end of the probation period, it wasn't going to work out. So it was my job to fire her after that. RB: He had approved her probation. And I was, I told him that he should not. I mean, yes, I feel sorry for her. But we're not a relief organization. We've got to get work out of people. The state, university is paying money for her to do certain things. And she's not doing, she's not capable of doing them. So that was one of the first jobs I had, which I did as gently as I could over a long period of time. Essentially 00:06:00 telling her that I thought she would be better suited to somewhat different kind of job. I found her a different kind of job on campus. RL: Oh, you did. RB: And urged her, which is delicate, because you can't, see, she had passed probation. You can't say, "I'm going to fire you." You'll get in big trouble with social, with civil service. Anyway, it finally got taken care of. That was annoying. RL: Yes. RB: A big problem was the one I alluded to the other day with Ted Houck, who had two strikes against him. One was he was alcoholic. The other, he was gay. Whether the alcoholism came from the problems associated with his homosexuality, I have no idea. I can't judge that. But the alcoholism did interfere with his teaching. And he, it also could be that the failure of the first OAO had to do with his alcoholism. We were all terribly depressed at the first, first, failure of the first launch. The launch was successful. The failure, after three days. It had been a very trying time. There were five or six launch attempts. And on two of them, ignition had started, first stage ignition had started. And then there's a time for a few seconds when an automatic check is made of various critical subsystems. And if any of those is not proper, it shuts down automatically. If it's proper, the clamps are lifted off and the thrust is built up and the thing [goes off?]. RL: I see. RB: Well, two times it shut down before the clamps 00:07:00 were released. So we had all kinds of problems. We were all tired, dead tired. When the thing failed, we sat around in the apartment we'd rented near Goddard because we thought we were going to be there for a while, with a jug of wine on the floor and all of us sitting with our heads in our hands and not saying a word all afternoon. And it was only much later that we realized that the OAO had ascended on Good Friday and died on Easter Sunday. So whatever perverse significance you want to put into that. [laughter] But anyway, I thought that was, but we didn't realize it at the time. We were all badly affected by that. And Ted probably more so than most, because he put so much time into it. That could have contributed to his alcoholism, also. But the fact of the matter was, he wasn't meeting classes. And this was a big problem, of course. RL: You and he were friends. RB: We were very good friends. He was my best friend in 00:08:00 Madison up to that point, until I met my wife. And I was his best friend. And so I went to L&S and talked to the associate dean, Dean Oremus, who had been associate dean for a long time, knew all the history, knew everything about the college. And a very nice guy. Very sensible guy. And he told me, oh well, it happens everywhere. There's hardly a department that doesn't have such a case. And you just have to do the best you can, putting him in places where he can do little damage. Not a satisfactory answer, but a humane answer, anyhow. And try to get some work out of him, of course. But it was hard to talk to him about alcoholism, because he wouldn't admit he was an alcoholic. And certainly, I never brought up the fact that I knew he was gay. Because I was afraid he might kill himself. In the early '70s, you know, this was a very, very bad, you didn't come out of the closet without suffering severe repercussions. As I say, he weathered, and it turned out later that after he died of the 00:09:00 liver disease brought on by the alcoholism, I talked to his brother, older brother. And he asked me why did Ted, did I know why Ted drank so much. And I hemmed and hawed and hemmed and hawed. And his brother broke in and said, "Because he was gay?" So the family knew about it and accepted it, had no problem with it. But unfortunately Ted didn't realize that, and never could talk with anybody about it as far as I know. So it was a real, real tragedy. He was an extremely talented astronomer and technical instrumentation guy. And a delight to be with. He had a weird sense of humor. We made up, during the early days of the space program, all kinds of hype from companies about, "Join our company in the new frontier of space," and so on. So we made up a company called Horizons, Limited. [laughter] And this was, you know, "Are you tired of being challenged all the time?" And one of our products was a count down chart that Ted and I made. And two of the numbers were misplaced, you know. [laughter] One of our products Ted and I made. Six-seven-five--[laughter] And lots of foolishness like that. RL: Did you have to actually demote him? RB: No. No, no, no, no. We just got him to do some things that didn't matter when they got done and things like that. But he died soon after. He was drinking himself to death. RL: That is a tragedy. RB: So that was the way it was. So that was a big thing during that time. Another thing that we were trying to do was we had the thirty-six inch at Pine Bluff, which is a very nice telescope, and very useful for training students. But a small telescope in a site that was originally pretty good, but was becoming surrounded by development. And so the skies were getting brighter. So we were looking around for partners to build, go in with a larger telescope. And California was interested because the 120-inch was getting also, it was an old telescope and it was, it was, the sky on (Mt. Helens, ?) and it was getting brighter and so on. So we spent a lot of time on thinking about telescopes and trying to find partners and so on. Maybe it would be a Big Ten telescope, you know. Trying to get, well, a lot of effort, nothing came of it. And ultimately it was [whim?] that came along, Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale. So that was a fair amount of time that we-- 00:10:00 My biggest personal project, though, at that time, was to get women graduate students. Osterbrock was dead set against women in astronomy. He, "What will happen, they'll just go off and get married and have babies and won't do any more astronomy." And he was very, he didn't want to spend his time training somebody who wasn't going to be as much of a replica of Don as he could manage. Well, that's one way to look at it. But my feeling was it's none of our business what people do after they get their degree. We hope, of course, they go in astronomy. But a lot of them have ended up on Wall Street and done very well because of the statistical training they get in astronomy. RL: Interesting. RB: And I thought it was crazy. And we were one of the few departments who had essentially no female students. Most of the other, the rest of the department, didn't much care one way, I mean, they were, "Sure, sure, that's fine." But they weren't going to go out and beat the bushes and try to get some. But I thought we really had to get 00:11:00 off our rears and try to get some students. So, I sort of admitted some students, went around the Admission Committee and admitted some female students. RL: And you had that leeway as chair? RB: Yeah. Because we had very few committees in the department. Most administration was done by the chair. RL: I see. RB: It was simple then. And particularly I'd have [other?] experience, so it wasn't much, it wasn't very hard. So I've forgotten. Maybe I was on the Admissions Committee at the time. Maybe I was the Admissions Committee at the time, I don't know. But I just said, "Okay, we're going to have--" And so we admitted two or three women. And finally got some women going. And some of them turned out to be quite good, and so on. 00:12:00 But this anti-female attitude was very strong on his part. In fact, we didn't get a, I was again unhappy that we didn't have a female faculty member until Linda Spark, we got Linda Spark. And I was, we had lots of good applicants. The quality of the young people that [unclear] just incredible. And a lot of them were women. I said we had absolutely not excuse not to choose a woman. Because there were plenty of good ones. Just as good as the men. And some others, too. We pounded the table and said, "We've got to hire them." So we did. And Linda Spark was the first. Now we have [Amy Barger?] and we have--my mind. [laughs] We have two or three female professors. Oh, yes. A woman from Colorado who's been here just a couple years. Anyway, we have three. I'm sorry about the names, but it's a consequence of my-- RL: Bob, can you speculate as to why you decided to be proactive in this area? Why you, was it a fundamental, I'm just curious what drove you to be proactive in this regard. RB: It seemed crazy! Totally illogical! Here were these women who had as good records and so on as the men. Why shouldn't we take women? And they were not, I 00:13:00 mean, they're having, women at that time were having a tough time in getting jobs in academe in general. The number of women faculty was tiny. And I just thought that was crazy! And I suppose, I'm sure, my wife had something to do with this. Because she ultimately became a faculty member here, too. And she had strong feelings about that. But this, yeah, I was just recently married. And I was trying to [unclear] married. RL: Well, it's just interesting. Some scholars did advocate and others did not. And so I was just curious why you chose to. RB: I just thought they were being gypped. Why shouldn't they? I mean, it was ridiculous. RL: Fundamental issue of fairness. RB: Yeah. Nothing, no deeper motives than that. Also, during that period, I've alluded to the tower, the seventy foot high Forest Service tower that was erected in Pine Bluff, on which we had our standard lamp, and which you tried to use, project for which I was initially hired. And when the project finished, we sort of, well, we put signs up, you know, "Stay off." That has no effect whatsoever. And put boards up the ladder 00:14:00 so that you couldn't climb from the ground. You had to really make an effort to climb, and so on. But still kids from the area were climbing up there. And one night a, I think they were both seventeen, a boy and a girl, went up there. She was wearing clogs she'd borrowed from her sister, which didn't fit. He was carrying a six pack of beer. And it started to rain. They decided to come down. Well, the ill-fitting shoes and the slippery, and then hand over hand, the ladder. She slipped and fell, and was paralyzed. Badly, badly hurt. And, I mean, it was a tragic thing. On the other hand, the reason I mentioned the age is if they'd been eighteen there would have been, I think, no legal case they could have made. The case was, they sued the university. And the case was made that this was an attractive nuisance. Kids used to climb up the outside of the observatory to get on the deck. So we had to try and do things like that 00:15:00 because that was an attractive nuisance. So if they're eighteen, I think they're supposed to be smart enough to know that it's attractive, but it's not that attractive. You should use your head. Well, they were just underneath, or she was just underneath the age. But it still, it was major league stupidity to climb up that tower. And they did not sue the university until a day or two before the elapsed, the time had elapsed. RL: Oh, I see. RB: So probably some lawyer got to them. Anyway, so I had the pleasure of being the, what do you call it, the defendant? RL: You were the defendant. RB: Because I had been the chair of the department at the time. Along with the regents of the university. I was in the best company. So this was a certain amount of stress. One time, I visited the lawyer's office several times, because they were expecting a trial. And the lawyer said, "Oh, great news! Great news!" "Yeah, they dropped things?" "Oh, no, no. They haven't 00:16:00 dropped that. They dropped the regents. You're the only defendant now." I said, "Oh, thanks a lot." He said, "No, no, you don't understand. A jury is much more likely to find for the plaintiff if the defendant is some nebulous group, some corporation, some headless, you know, people-free outfit. Whereas they see you, and you alone, as a human, and more or less like them, then there's much less chance of being found guilty." [laughs] RL: Small comfort. RB: Yes, small comfort, I thought. Anyway, I had to give a deposition among other things before this went to trial. Which was interesting, because this was real stuff, and [unclear] and I had to be as careful as possible. So it was a few hours. And I was, nothing as relaxed as this. This was, I was weighing every word, and so on. [laughs] And a funny thing, a week or two later I got a call from this secretary who had been doing the tippy tapping, recording thing. They weren't using a tape recorder. And she was very apologetic. "I seem to have lost part of the transcript." [laughs] RL: Oh, no! RB: 00:17:00 "Can you remember the answer to this question?" Which I did. But I thought, oh, boy, is this the way this is going to go? Anyway, it turned out that the university, of course, did not want a trial. And the lawyer for the university, by the way, he specialized in tower incidents, talk about specialization. RL: The university's lawyer? RB: Yeah. The lawyer they hired to represent the university. He said he thought they had a very weak, a very weak case. And they settled out of court. I never knew what the settlement was, but they said it was on terms very favorable. Much better than they could have gotten. Of course they didn't have the mess of, the publicity of a trial and so forth. RL: Yes. RB: Because the word had gotten out. And people who knew of me said, "Oh my God, this guy was terrible. He was irresponsible," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so a lot of bad publicity just from the word of mouth on this. Anyway, that worked out okay, except for the fact that the poor girl and her life was totally changed. So we took the tower down after that. RL: Oh, you did. RB: Yeah. We took pictures from every which way, and got the legal okay to take the tower down. We 00:18:00 should have done it before, I guess. [Note: The following segment of the transcript has been edited for style by the narrator and may not correlate directly to the audio.] RL: You had quite a rich period of [during your?] chair for lack of a better word. RB: Yeah. It began in 1970. Wasn't that the year of the bombing? RL: Sterling Hall bombing was 1970. RB: And I was associate chair then. And that was a very grim time. There was the International Astronomical Union meeting, that's the international organization of astronomers. They meet every three years; most of the department was there at the meeting when the bombing took place. Only one faculty member, Lowell Doherty, was here. RL: Were you here or in England? RB: I was in England. The guy who was here tried for days to get in the building. People didn't even, the administration did not remember that the Astronomy Department was in Sterling Hall. They knew the Physics Department was there. They knew the Army Math Center was there. But they did not remember Astronomy--[laughs] That was the extent to which we were on their radar. Part 00:19:00 of the reason for that was because we never gave any problems. We had all this NASA money coming in, so we didn't have financial problems to deal with. And generally speaking, we got along very well as a department, so we didn't have any scandals. We didn't have any people going to the dean to bitch about this, that or the other. So they just forgot about us. But they forgot too completely. [laughs] So it was quite a while until we got in. I always resented the fact that the press believed Armstrong and company when they said they didn't want to kill anybody. They waited till late at night to do it. But they called the police a few minutes before they knew the bomb was going to go off. And the police car was actually turning the corner off of Charter, coming up the alley between the chemistry building and Sterling at the time the explosion went off. The car was blown in the air. Had those guys been a few minutes earlier, they'd have been--[coughing] Excuse me. In the building, and probably killed. [pause in tape] [Note: The following segment of the transcript has been edited for style by the narrator and may not correlate directly to the audio.] RL: Side two, tape four, of the Bless interview. RB: A graduate student of mine had actually just finished his thesis that night and left early. He left around two o'clock in the morning. He was a night person who would work all night. He would have been there above 00:20:00 the thing. His thesis was destroyed, all his work. RL: Oh my gosh! RB: He was a pipe smoker. And he had a bottle of lighter fluid for a pipe lighter. And that caught on fire. His office burned. Most of the building didn't burn. His thesis was based on spectroscopic data which were on, at that time, photographic plates. And he had done an analysis of those plates. And that was the basis for the thesis. The plates had been destroyed. His thesis and all his records had been destroyed. He didn't realize that he had given me a copy of his analysis of the plates. And my office was a mess. But it was inside, it didn't burn. And I could find it and give it to him. So in what was really a remarkable performance, he disappeared for three weeks and came back with a second thesis. RL: How extraordinary. RB: Yeah. Because it was a very, very grim time. [Note: The following segment of the transcript has been edited for style by the narrator and may not correlate directly to the audio.] RL : Were you expecting, or other faculty who worked in Sterling Hall, were you aware that Sterling Hall was a focus of the antiwar protests? RB: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, the Army Math Center was very 00:21:00 much in the news. It was frustrating because I was against the Vietnam War. I thought it was a terrible thing. I still think it's a terrible thing. But I didn't like the way some people were expressing their displeasure with the war. You know, the demonstrators ran the whole gamut, from people who were really sincerely against the war and, to people who took advantage of the lack of law and order to just be thugs. To people who thought there was no price too large to pay to end the war, blah, blah, blah. Whole spectrum. There was one meeting in which this paper was handed out which showed all of the government support and research labs on campus, of which of course there were a lot of them, and they were all targets. In the eyes of some students they were all as 00:22:00 culpable as the government itself. They were accepting government money, although of course in most cases had absolutely nothing to do with military or anything of that sort. But one of our graduate students had been at a meeting, called me up and said, Space Lab, which at that time was at 35 North Park Street, was on this list. So I called up, this was in early evening, I called up John McNall, and he and I went down there and looked around in the building. Nothing. Then we looked outside the back. There was a guy climbing up on the roof, and he was going to set fire to the place. And John let out the loudest sound I've ever heard come from a human. I jumped three feet. And this scared the guy. Off he took.  I think it was John who had the idea: We need police protection. There were a couple of parking places right in front of the lab. And we told the employees, "Don't park there. Leave it open." So we made it known that in the front office of the Space Lab, police could come any time they wanted to. There would be a pot of coffee and donuts. And they could come take a break. This was 00:23:00 when the riots were really bad, really going on. When the National Guard was on campus. RL: Yes. RB: And helicopters flying around at night. Boy, that was a terrible sound. With a searchlight, looking down. Tear gas on campus. Class was a mess. It was awful. So we let the police know about this. And they loved the place to come, because it was close to campus. It was just on the other side of the railroad. So they were there quite often. And people would see this police car in front of the Space Lab. [laughs] We weren't bothered at all. RL: That borders on clever. Perhaps even manipulative. [laughter] RB: Yes, perhaps. But it was very effective. RL: Yes. RB: This guy was certainly going to try to burn the place down. Anyway, after the bombing, Findorff was told to rebuild the building. RL: And that's a local construction firm? RB: That's a local construction company. They've been in business in Madison for many, many years. Very good reputation, as far as I know. In fact, they built our house in 1937. And it was one of the last residences that Findorff built. They now do big buildings and so on. RL: Yes. RB: Anyway, they were told by the UW Administration to rebuild it and we'll pay, we'll settle up at the end. So it was done 00:24:00 completely on the fly. The construction manager was a very reasonable guy. He and I got along very well. And we would get together once or twice a week. And I would say, "Okay, the library used to be here." All the backs of books had glass shards embedded in them because of the windows blowing out and so on. If anybody had been there, they would have been killed by all the glass. "Library used to be here. Let's finish knocking down this wall and let's move it here. Put the outlets here, here and here. Do this. Do that." So that's the way Sterling, our part of Sterling, got reconstructed. And Findorff was very considerate. They would wait until class change, we were still trying to hold classes and so on. And they would wait until, 00:25:00 between classes, the fifteen minutes between classes, to do anything that made a lot of noise. And the rest of the time, they tried to keep it as quiet as possible. Of course things were shuttered off with dust everywhere. I think I've maybe off tape mentioned, that it was not until many years later that drawings representing Sterling Hall the way it really was appeared. [laughs] Because there were no drawings in the reconstruction. It was just-- RL: And so you were the key designer as department chair. RB: I wasn't department chair at the time. That was '70. But I was associate chair. And Osterbrock didn't want anything to do with it. And so I was doing it. Actually, it was good fun because I had some ideas of what I wanted to do. [laughs] And I didn't talk to anybody about it. I just-- RL: How long did it take to get Sterling Hall functional, or rebuilt? RB: We were still, we were still in there. But we couldn't get into the library. We couldn't use the classrooms. Our offices were still, many of our offices were still there and useable, others were not. But it was, I'd say, six months or something like that. Really depressing circumstances because it was cold. They couldn't keep the drafts out. Dirty. All the dust. All the debris. And we were reminded every day of this thing. A guy had been killed. And some of our students could have been killed. The [Elvehjem ], now the Chazen Art Center, had just opened. RL: Oh, that's right. Right that same weekend, wasn't it? RB: Right at the same time.  September was the first month of the, first full month of their 00:26:00 operation, I think. I used to go down there, when I'd get depressed, and sit in the art gallery and think about some of the better aspects of people, rather than the worst aspects of people. It was a very grim and depressing time for us all. RL: A side question, I don't know if you saw the recent alumni magazine that had the feature on Leo Burt, one of the Sterling Hall bombers. RB: No, I didn't. I missed it. RL: The only one who's never been found. And there has been quite a bit of reaction that I've read about the inappropriate nature of On Wisconsin giving, running a profile of him. And I'm wondering if you have an opinion about that. RB: I haven't seen the profile, so it's a little bit hard to say. But as I said, I was from the very beginning, against the Vietnam War. I thought it was a terrible mistake. And I did all the standard things that one does in such instances. But I had no use for people blowing things up and destroying, turning cars over just for the hell of it because they can get away with it. A lot of the students were doing that. And that was really annoying. So I had no sympathy for that. I certainly had no sympathy for people trying to blow up buildings. You know, they tried to bomb the Badger Army--? RL: Oh, the army ammunition-- RB: Army ammunition plant. RL: Up in Baraboo? RB: Yeah. RL: 00:27:00 No, I didn't remember that. RB: They got a small airplane and put some kind of explosive in a bottle and dropped it. Nothing ever happened. They were pretty incompetent. I had no use for them. And in particular, I thought it was just utter nonsense that they said they didn't want to kill somebody. After all, the police were "pigs," if you recall. RL: I do remember. RB: And the police were fair game. And they certainly gave every evidence of trying to kill them. RL: Uh huh. It must have been, in a way, not frightening, disturbing. Here you are, a professor of astronomy, you probably had never envisioned that you would be teaching in this kind of environment. RB: No, it wasn't the usual thing. [laughter] Yeah. In fact, I was teaching Astronomy 100 during this period. Some guys came in-- they were trying to shut down the university. And this was a large class. Some guys came in and said, "you guys shouldn't be here in class," and so on. And, "You, Professor, you shouldn't be teaching," and blah, blah. I said, "Look. I'm hired to teach. If people don't want to show up, that's their business, and I will understand and in some ways be sympathetic. But I'm hired to teach, and I will be here to teach. Now, if you, if the class wants to talk about, wants to spend the rest of 00:28:00 the class talking about the pros and cons of the war, and arguing some other stuff, I'm willing to do that. But I'm going to meet my class. So if you don't like it, just go away." And they did. [laughs] And I asked the class, "Do you want to discuss it?" And they were all so tired of it by then, of all the controversy and all the noise. They said, "No, no, no. Let's get back to astronomy." RL: And Astronomy 100 was one of the intro courses. RB: The most elementary intro course. RL: For science and non-science-- RB: Non-science majors. RL: Bob, anything else on your tenure as department chair? RB: Not that I can recall. Later, you wanted me to talk about-- RL: [Universities?].Yes, I would like to have you make some observations about your university service and the deans and chancellors you worked with. RB: Anyway, so do you want to go ahead down the service business? RL: Yes. What university committees did you sit on? RB: Well, a bunch of them, as a matter of fact. There were a lot of minor ones. The E.B. Fred Fellowship Committee I was on for a while. I was on the Academic Staff Review Committee. That was when they were trying to upgrade the status of the academic staff, as you remember. And there were some, so I was a faculty representative on that. Oh, I was on the review, when they started doing the 00:29:00 internal reviews of departments here. I was on the geology and geophysics committee. That was very interesting. It was led by a guy in geography named Knox. RL: Oh, I know that name. RB: Really good guy. Really smart. Good organizer. That was interesting. RL: Was this because the department was in trouble? Or was this-- RB: No, this was a standard review. RL: This was the standard review. RB: The ten-year reviews that all departments are supposed to have. And they're internal. And the dean wants them to see, get some outside opinion as to what the department's doing. The department, of course, responds. It's a way of getting a status for the dean, getting a status of the department. And what the plans for department are. What they expect, what they hope to get from the dean, and so on. What the review committee thinks makes sense in these long term plans and not. So it's a useful thing. It can be done well, or it can be done superficially, unfortunately, sometimes it's done superficially and it's no use at all. This was a very thorough review. And in fact, one of our recommendations I remember very clearly was to either do something with the geology museum or close it. "You are just, this guy is working his tail off trying to make something of the museum, and you're not supporting him. So make up your mind one way or the other, but don't continue this way." And they decided to continue there, too. And that was a good thing that came out of that. RL: And what year was that review? RB: That was in 1978. RL: How were you picked to sit on that committee? RB: I have no idea. I 00:30:00 suppose the dean's office looked around for some gray beards and for some people who'd have some--well, you know, it helps if you've been around a while, who had some experience on other committees. I'd been on the Physical Sciences Divisional Committees in '71 to '74. So I had that behind me. I'd been on, chair of the department. It's a useful thing. So on. So I suspect it was just that. RL: Probably the review committees are selected, they want distinguished, or certainly experienced faculty. RB: Experienced people, yeah. Experienced. People who have some idea of how departments can be run and so on. Things like that. so that must have been the reason. So that was fun. There were some minor things. but oh, I served two terms on the divisional committee. '71-'74 and '80-'83. RL: Talk about that a little bit. RB: Yeah. People thought I was crazy, knowing what goes on from the first stint to sign up for the second. But actually, it was one of the better committees I'd ever been on. Particularly the '71 to '74 committee. People by and large were rational. Generally could see beyond parochial interests and look at the good of the department, or the L&S, or the university as a whole. I think at least as it was in 1983, which was the last time I served on a divisional committee, I thought at the time, and I don't know anything more now to change my mind. I thought it was one of, UW has one of the best tenure processes I know of. RL: 00:31:00 Really. RB: In some places, the dean does it. He decides. I'm sure he talks to people, but he decides, and so on. Other places, I mean, there are a whole range of ways of doing it. But having it go from the department to this committee that looks at it really very carefully, the way it's done, or it used to be done, is a subcommittee would be appointed for each tenure case. Usually three people. And they would go over the tenure documents in great detail. They would meet with the department chair. They would meet with other people in the department if they thought it was necessary, if there was any controversy, for example. They would, we often called up people from other universities to find, to get their opinions of certain comments that we were not competent to evaluate, things like that. It was done very seriously. Very, as it damn well should be. I mean, you're talking about a guy's future. And so I was very impressed by that process. And I thought in general it was done extremely well and with great fairness. The other thing we got to do was approve courses. The idea being to keep from having too many duplicate courses. And physics teaching astronomy, and astronomy teaching physics, and all that kind of stuff. Or else, make sure there weren't any Mickey Mouse courses getting by. RL: Was that difficult? Both of those issues? RB: 00:32:00 Generally not. I got into an argument with an engineering guy who was, because he was pushing for this course which I thought was just, had no content. We had quite a discussion. Both of us got a little louder than we should have been on it. [laughs] But in general, no. The course stuff was pretty straightforward. We did turn some down because no, this is too much like so and so, or this other course, where you guys, you ought to get together with this guy, and maybe you could have a joint course, or something like that. But in general, those were easy. The tenure cases were, by far, the most interesting. And took, sometimes, a huge amount of time. You find out all kinds of things about departments that you don't know, and many things you wish you didn't know, because-- RL: In the process of doing-- RB: In the process. Particularly in big departments, where you have different groups. And these groups act like departments, each group. And they can be very parochial. [laughs] So there's a certain amount of that that you discover. But no, those were two good committees. I actually enjoyed serving on them, although they took a lot of time. The other major committee I was on was the Graduate School Research Committee. That was when Dean 00:33:00 [Bach?] was still around. RL: And how was that? RB: That was not as satisfying as the divisional committees. On the divisional committee, we had a woman, she was secretary of faculty. She was the wife of a prominent law professor. I'm sure you'd know the name if--oh, rats, I can't remember the name. But anyway, she was very good. She knew everything about L&S. Not just L&S, about the university, because these divisional committees go across colleges, of course, because physical science is engineering, L&S-- RL: Oh, so that was, divisional wasn't just for Letters & Science-- RB: No. No, no, no. RL: It was for the whole university. RB: There are four, or there used to be four divisional committees. One was physical sciences. One was humanities. One was biological sciences. Maybe there are just three. [laughs] Maybe there are just three divisional committees. And so we included all of the physical sciences in L&S. We included a lot of the physical, a lot of the science departments in ag school. We included all of engineering. RL: Oh, so that's why you were going head to head with the engineer. RB: Yeah, yeah, right. So, and the biological sciences had people in med school, had people in L&S biology, and ag biology. Yeah, it's across the campus. RL: So that would be interesting. RB: Yeah. And there are different 00:34:00 practices in different, not only in different departments, but in different colleges. So you came, had to, you came where those--whether you wanted to or not. And you had, then, this person who knew everything about the campus to tell you, "No, the rule is such and such." And, "Yes, you can do that." Or, "I know you don't want my opinion but I'll give it to you anyhow. You ought to do this." And she was absolutely great. So we didn't have anybody quite as effective as she was on the search committee. But the worst part was that it was chaired by [Jim Buck?], who had been dean of the grad school forever at that point. And you know, he was a first rate scientist, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But my interpretation, he was simply tired of being dean. I was appalled. One of the things that you do when you're on the research committee, the main thing you do, is that you're given one or two 00:35:00 departments whose applications for the graduate school you review and recommend accepting or cutting this, or saying no entirely, whatever. And much of this is aimed at new faculty who may not yet be established, and who could use the research committee grants as seed money. Money they can say to NSF or NASA, or whatever, "I have this money and I want some more. The university is providing this. Can you provide that?" And so on. All sorts of things like that. The money comes from WARF. You know about WARF. RL: Yes. RB: So it's a very useful thing, and very important for young faculty, helping them get started. Well I was given one year, every year I had physics. And one time I had kinestheology, or something like that. It's motion-- RL: Movement. RB: Movement in the physical ed-- RL: School of Dance, wasn't it? RB: Dance, yeah, something like that. Yeah. It's a strange combination. [laughs] Anyway, so I would go and talk to the people who were applying for grants. Or why weren't they applying. I've forgotten what the circumstances were. But people in physics, the young people, the new people in physics, didn't know beans about the program. Didn't know what they were expected to do, encouraged to do. So I 00:36:00 spent a lot of time telling them, "Look, you guys ought to, here's what you can do. Here's the form to fill out. here's what, you can try to get a graduate student, you can try to get some support money," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. "And since you're new and so on, the chances are very good that you'll get the money. So please, if you want, take advantage of it." They didn't know about any of this. This happened a couple of years. And I thought look, physics is doing an absolutely lousy job of telling their new people about programs like this. I brought this up at a Research Committee meeting. I said, "Look, if physics is doing it, it's not likely they're the only department on campus. Shouldn't the committee send out a notice to everybody on the faculty saying 'Remember these things, remember young people, your new faculty members, they don't know about this, they've got to be told,'" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the dean just dismissed it. "Oh, no. No. That's not a problem. That's not a problem. Next point." He didn't even discuss it. I brought it up two times. It was just, he dismissed it outright. And we were still using Xerox copies of announcements and documents that had been printed on, not ditto machines, but the-- RL: Mimeograph? RB: Mimeograph machines. They're that old. RL: Wow. RB: He didn't want to change anything. He didn't want to do it. It was 00:37:00 perfect the way it was. So, yeah. RL: How long were you on that committee? RB: Three years. I think the term was three years. And I was not impressed. RL: Okay. And that was, what years were those? RB: '86 to '89. RL: So you were doing that work while you were teaching and also working on Hubble. RB: Oh, yeah. [laughs] RL: You were quite busy. RB: Yeah. RL: Were you ever home? RB: Yeah, I was home. But, yeah, I was on Nominating Committee, '91-'93. Because I'd been on all these committees before. And various other things. But those were the main-- Oh, one thing that was sort of fun. I was the chair of the committee to name the Physics/Pharmacy/Astronomy Building, which is now Chamberlain Hall. RL: Oh. RB: And of course it was obvious why I was chosen as chair. Because you had one big department of physics, one big school of pharmacy. And you had tiny little astronomy. [laughter] And so, I was the--and of course, first meeting, physics wanted to name it for a physicist, pharmacy wanted to name it for a pharmacist. And I just said, I said, "I'm not going to say we 00:38:00 name it for an astronomer. But we'll never get anywhere. So let's meet after a while," I said. So I went. And for the first time, I read the history of the University of Wisconsin, the one that's written by Curti and-- RL: Curvi? RB: Curti. RL: Merle Curti? RB: Merle Curti. RL: From History. And-- RB: Cronon did an update. But anyway, it was this two-volume thing. To see if I could have any ideas. Well, I did have an idea. Namely Chamberlain, who had been dean of the graduate school. And he was the first dean to really emphasize research. And he was a prominent researcher himself. He'd been lured by Rockefeller when the University of Chicago was being formed. He was a geologist. Chamberlain molten theory of the solar system origin. If you're old enough, which you aren't, that was taught in school years and years ago. So I said, "Look, here is a guy, he's not associated with pharmacy, he's not associated with physics, he's not associated with astronomy. He's a geologist. But he was really pushing research. Why don't we 00:39:00 name it Chamberlain Hall?" Grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble. "Well, all right." [laughs] So that's how it became Chamberlain Hall. RL: Really? And it was grudging. RB: Yeah. But-- RL: John Mathis said about you that you were very tactful and wise. RB: Well-- RL: That strikes me, you needed both of those qualities. RB: It was pretty obvious that we were not going to get anywhere if we went physics or astronomy, physics of pharmacy, so that was an obvious kind of thing to do. But it was sort of fun because I was gently telling these two big departments what they ought to do. And that was fun. So that was essentially my experience on committees. RL: Were you involved with