Interview with Eric Brown

Eric Brown (#588) Transcript

EO: Today is Monday, August 26, 2002. My name is Eric Olmanson and I am about to interview Eric S. Brown, former house fellow at Sellery Hall from 1968 to 1971. [pause]

EB: Do you have the date on there, too?

EO: Date and everything.

EB: I'm--do you want me to just start talking about background?

EO: Sure. Yeah. If you want to start talking, that's fine.

EB: I grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts area. I was born and raised out there until grade nine, which I finished. Starting in grade ten, our family moved to Huntington, Long Island, where I attended and completed high school in 1963. In fall of '63 I enrolled at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Was there for four years and graduated in June of 1967. During that summer, I spent 00:01:00the time living in Mainz, Germany, under an exchange program for business and economics students. My undergraduate major had been economics. I worked for a wine and champagne company in Mainz, Germany, until late August.

And then in September, 1967, I flew out to Madison to enroll in the graduate economics program. I had been accepted as a second semester senior in college. I ended up being accepted into five different PhD programs for economics. And I chose Wisconsin for two reasons. First, they made me a wonderful offer of financial aid. Four years of aid for grad school. That was hard to beat.

Secondly, my undergraduate advisor at Swarthmore told me that the economics department at Wisconsin was very congenial. So that meant a lot to me. Ironically, in my four years here as a graduate student, I ended up having as my 00:02:00thesis advisor, a graduate of Swarthmore College. Obviously someone older than me.

So I was here for four years as a grad student. And I really loved the experience of being a student at the UW. I thought it was just a wonderful campus to be on. I was ready for something bigger after being at a small college with only a thousand students. In fact, I enjoyed being at Wisconsin so much that I used to tell friends that I would like to spend a fifth year here. Not as part of a degree program, but just to go and take advantage of all the wonderful activities that took place on campus which I had no time for as a busy grad student getting a PhD.

I left Wisconsin, actually in my third year of grad school, I met a young woman at a party that my girlfriend gave. And this young woman that I met has been my wife for thirty-one years. Our anniversary was five days ago. She'd actually 00:03:00gone to high school here in Madison and had gone to UW for undergrad.

We got married on August 21, 1971, in the Unitarian Church on University Bay Drive. And after that, we moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Or, actually, Belmont, where we lived for seven years. And then in August of 1978, my wife and I moved back to Madison so my wife could pursue her PhD in psychology. We've lived here for twenty-four years. Our two daughters have been born here, and we love living in Madison. So that's my background and where I grew up. And that brings us up to the present. I'm fifty-seven now.

EO: Let me ask, what's your wife's maiden name?

EB: My wife's maiden name is still her name. It's Karen Kimball. K-I-M-B-A-L-L.

EO: Okay. And who was your advisor?

EB: My advisor was named Martin David.

EO: Okay. Did you know Ed Young?

EB: I have met him once or twice. I think he was not very active in the department when I was there. But I did know who he was. He was older.

EO: Okay.

EB: My experience in the Economics Department was fine. I mean when you take, when you go to grad school in a subject, you pretty much study only that subject. Although I did minor in urban and regional planning, which gave me a little bit of breadth there. But I left Wisconsin ABD and finished a couple years later. And I must say when I was done, I was very glad to be done with school. I really was.

EO: Before we go further, are there, can you think of any personalities in the Economics Department that you remember?

EB: One person that I really liked in the Economics Department was David Johnson. He had actually been the chairman for a while. And I ended up being his teaching assistant for a semester. He and I got along very well. I really liked 00:05:00the fact he was a kind, older guy. And he seemed very caring about his students. And just was a very easy, pleasant guy to deal with. Some of the younger faculty in the department were very bent on establishing their academic reputation, and so their research was their main interest and the teaching was less of a concern.

EO: Well, let's see.

EB: Am I going too fast?

EO: No, no, no. Just fine. What, do you have anything else to say? Or should I start asking you questions?

EB: Sure, you can start asking me questions.

EO: Okay. Well, I guess my first question is how did you become a house fellow?

EB: Sure. That's a good question. As I mentioned earlier, I spent the summer after college graduation living in Germany. That made it impossible for me to come to Wisconsin to locate a place to live. So I took the path of least 00:06:00resistance and responded to a letter from the UW Housing Office, offering me a spot in a dorm. Back in fall of '67, there was one dormitory that was pretty much allocated to the grad students, and that was Witte Hall in the southeast dorm area. Back at that point, the tower facing Gordon Commons was all men. And then the top two floors of the other tower were reserved for graduate women, as I recall. So I figured since I can't go out to find an apartment, I might as well go live in the dorm.

That turned out to be a fateful decision in a positive way. During the first week of school, I ended up being chosen or elected president of my floor, which was the second floor of Witte Hall. I still remember it was called Beale House, B-E-A-L-E. Each floor in the dorm had a name after some notable person 00:07:00affiliated with the university. Then when the group of floor presidents had a meeting with the dorm advisor, or the head resident, or whatever the title was, program advisor, perhaps, we met with Selena Sweet. S-E-L-E-N-A, S-W-E-E-T. And I can still remember her. She was not a whole lot older than we were. And she was quite a character.

Anyway, at this meeting I then ended up being elected or chosen as the social chairman for the dorm. So in the matter of about a week, I became quite actively involved in the dorm. I enjoyed living in Witte Hall. And it was actually quite convenient to have a place to come home to that was always clean, that was well managed. It was very handy having a place where meals were already cooked for you. Although I enjoy cooking as an adult, I didn't know how to cook when I was 00:08:00a grad student. And you know, making breakfast, lunch and dinner every day would have been a real pain. So it was very handy to do that.

So for my first year of grad school, I lived in Witte Hall. I was active in the hall. The head house fellow in Witte Hall, for the men's side, was named Gary Goshgarian, G-O-S-H-G-A-R-I-A-N. He was about three years ahead of me. I think it was his final year of grad school. And because of my involvement in the dorm, I had a number of opportunities to interact with Gary, whose room and office was actually on the same floor as mine. So it was very convenient to hang out with him.

We got to know each other. And in fact we became very good friends. And that was in 1967. He is still a good friend of mine thirty-five years later. And we actually visit him and his family and stay with him when we go to Massachusetts. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Near the end of my first year of grad school--let me back up a moment. Gary and 00:09:00I came up with the idea to provide some entertainment for the thousand or so residents of Witte Hall. So they came up with the idea of showing movies on, I think it was both Friday and Saturday night, down in the large basement lounge of Witte Hall. So we started doing that. We actually showed feature films, they weren't obviously the current movies in the theater, but they were good films. And because Gary was studying English, he was very aware of the arts scene, and knew what would be good films and interesting films. So we had a lot of students. We charged twenty-five cents for students to come. We collected the money in like those popcorn, cardboard popcorn containers like they use in a movie. And we had this huge bucket of quarters at the end of every show. And it was funny, because we'd show the movies like at maybe nine o'clock and eleven o'clock, or ten and twelve, something like that.

And especially for the later show, kids would come down in their bathrobes to the basement, it was coed, and watch the movies. Kids would bring their pillows with them, lie on the floor. We had no seating as such. It was just lie on the floor. But we had a really good time doing that.

And then near the, at the end of the year, we decided to have a big gala. And back then there was a, across from Witte Hall, toward the railroad tracks, there was a tennis practice wall, a large wall. So we went out, we tacked up some sheets, ran a long extension cord from a neighboring house, and we showed the movie A Thousand Clowns with Jason Robards to a huge crowd of kids on an evening outside. It was wonderful. Everybody had a good time. So we had a lot of fun doing that.

Near the end of my first year of grad school, I was sitting with Gary in his room one day and he said, "Eric, how would you like to be a house fellow?" I had never even thought about being a house fellow until he mentioned that. And I said I really didn't know much about it. So he told me about what it involved, 00:11:00and how they paid you and so forth. And I thought it sounded like a pretty neat thing to do. I'd come to enjoy living in the dorm. I was quite active, had a good time, and knew lots of people. So I said sure.

So I applied for a house fellow position. I was interviewed I guess a few weeks later by a small committee. And I believe one of the people on the committee was Jan Jonas, J-O-N-A-S, whose husband, Steve, was the manager of Sellery Hall. And I had the interview. And not too long after I was told that I was selected to be a house fellow. I believe they told me it would be Sellery Hall, rather. And I was quite pleased with that.

I ended up being a house fellow for the next three years when I was a graduate student, in Sellery Hall. And you know, my room number was 924 Sellery, Roe House. R-O-E. And my phone number was 262-2165. So the fact that I remember this 00:12:00thirty years later must say something. I'm not quite sure what.

Being a house fellow was a very interesting experience. And one of the first things I noticed when we had meetings of the house fellows was that the group of house fellows in general was a very, I thought a very impressive group. I mean these were students, mostly grad students, but some, say, seniors, who all seemed pretty committed about what they were doing. Who seemed serious, who seemed responsible. For the most part, from what I could tell, they all were good students. And then they also had these additional abilities to manage something like being a house fellow. They had good social skills. They interacted well. I was really quite impressed with the house fellow group. And I still feel the same today.

In fact, there are other house fellows who I knew when I was either in Witte or 00:13:00in Sellery Hall with whom I still have contact now, thirty, thirty-five years later. One of the other house fellows in Witte Hall when I was a first year student was named Nicholas Burckel. B-U-R-C-K-E-L. He's now the dean of libraries at Marquette University. He and his wife were at our house two weeks ago for a Saturday brunch. Thirty-five years later. And we're still good friends. He was at our wedding. So that illustrates the kinds of friendships that I made among the house fellows. I've had contact with other house fellows since graduation, and that's been fun. So overall, I was very impressed with the other house fellows.

In terms of what it actually meant to me to be a house fellow, I would say it was a very interesting experience, all things considered. And in fact one of, there were several parts of the experience that meant something special to me. The first was that you got to have an influence on the lives and activities of 00:14:00these students who were typically four or five, six years younger than you. Usually in the dorm, at least half the floor would be freshman students and then some sophomores. Not as many juniors and seniors. And you know, some of these kids didn't really quite know what was going on, or they weren't sure of themselves. They had stresses of all kinds. And it was interesting when a kid would want to come in, a boy would come in and want to talk. And sometimes they'd come right out and say, "You know, I'm scared I'm going to flunk out of this place," and they'd be very upfront about what their concerns were. And other times they'd want to just come down and chat with you for a few minutes just to get a sense about you as a person. And then they'd say thank you and leave. Like you know, "Well, I understand we're going to have a party in the dorm next weekend. Should I bring a date?" They'd ask you questions and you 00:15:00could tell that it wasn't so much the actual information they were looking for. They were trying to get a sense about do I feel comfortable with this person? Can I talk to this person? So I tried the, I mean, I didn't figure that out the first time it happened, of course. But eventually I realized what was happening.

I will say that my first year of being a house fellow, it was fun and interesting but it was a little bit stressful because now you're taking on responsibility, basically, for the safety, security, well being, etcetera, and actually control, to an extent, of sixty-four young men. And for many of them, it was their first time away from home.

Kids came with all kinds of expectations. There were the kids who couldn't wait to start drinking. There were the kids who wanted to be serious students. And if you had two of those, one of each as roommates, you could have some serious problems.

EO: Did that happen a lot?

EB: Well, you know, there are all kinds of things. Kids, by the time you're 00:16:00eighteen, you tend to be pretty good at figuring out what other kinds of kids you get along with and who do you want to be friends with, or not friends with. What kinds of activities do you want to do. And it seemed to me that there were all kinds of circumstances here. There were some kids who, they just wanted to come down here and drink and play and party. And frankly, those were the ones who ended up in a lot of cases not being around at the end of the first semester or the end of the second semester. Then there were the kids who had all kinds of personal growing to do, and you could tell that they seemed kind of insecure and uncertain about things. And some of them handled it well, and some of them didn't handle it so well. It was also interesting to watch situations where you had two roommates who were about as mismatched as could be, and to see how they handled it. Then there were other cases where the roommates were buddies from high school, and that was fine, but it didn't push them very much to grow or expand. Because they would spend all their time, eat all their meals with their roommates.

So I saw all kinds of situations. What they did in the dorm was interesting. I suppose in an effort to maximize their revenue from the dorm space, they would fill every room with two students. And in fact each floor in Sellery had a laundry room or an ironing room which was the same size as a dorm room, but it had a little ironing board in it. Except, at the beginning of the school year, it, too, had beds in it. Because they knew that even during the first semester, there would be some attrition. And it was only a matter of months before the laundry room had the furniture moved out and became a laundry room.

So the experience of dealing with the students and all kinds of problems was interesting. I can perhaps give a few anecdotes about some things that came about. One of the things that was difficult, and I didn't realize this right away, the university had various policies back in the late '60s like you weren't 00:18:00allowed to drink in the dorm, you couldn't possess liquor. You weren't allowed to have or use drugs. Although actually there wasn't a whole lot of discussion about drugs at the beginning, because they were still pretty uncommon. And visitation by members of the opposite sex was allowed, I think, from Saturday afternoon from one to six and Sunday from one to six. Well, that was the theory.

I told the students at our initial orientation meeting in the big lounge that was right behind the elevator bank on each floor, I told the students that I wanted them to have a good time, I wanted them to enjoy their stay in Sellery Hall. But I also explained that you know, we have sixty-four people living here together. And it's important that people get to live the way they want, but you can't infringe on other people's rights to privacy, quiet, etcetera. And I also explained to the students what the dorm rules were. I also explained that I 00:19:00don't go looking for trouble, but that if you bring trouble to me, I have no choice but to act on it.

So one day I see this freshman or sophomore guy walking through the hall carrying alcoholic drink. And I made him pour it down the drinking fountain. And he couldn't believe that I was being so unreasonable. And I said, "I don't want to see this happen again." And he just thought I was really unreasonable, and he was mad at me for a few weeks. Well, hello. What am I supposed to do? (laughter)

Then there were times when I would go by a room after visitation hours, or on a day when there was no visitation, and I would hear an unmistakable female voice. So I would knock on, typically, as I recall, I would knock on the door and they'd say, "Who is it?"

And I'd say my name and I'd say--well, I didn't have to say I was a house fellow. They knew I was the house fellow. And I would say something like, "I'm going to be coming back in five minutes with my master key. I hope I don't need 00:20:00to use it." They did issue a master key to the house fellow that would open all rooms on the floor. And, unfortunately, sometimes I had to use it.

Now I know that things would go on on the floor because other students would talk, I'd hear other students talking about visitors or parties or other activities. But if I wasn't there, I didn't know about it.

I did have one amusing incident, probably in my second or third year as a house fellow in Sellery Hall. Students wanted to have a shaving cream fight. I think young guys, they have all this testosterone, and it has to go somewhere. So they wanted to have a shaving cream fight. Now I realize that I, if you think about it, I didn't really have the power to totally stop it unless I sat in my room twenty-four hours a day. So what I did was, I negotiated with the ringleaders of this event and we came up with a set of rules or guidelines to ensure that no 00:21:00one would get hurt. Because shaving cream makes the floors quite slippery. But it really was fun to do. I mean, they loved having shaving cream fights. And they all knew what kinds of shaving cream had the longest range when you'd squirt it. And then some of them would take a can opener, the opposite end of a bottle opener, take a can opener, shake up the shaving cream can, and then open it at the bottom, which of course resulted in almost like a hand grenade going off. All the shaving cream spreading out at once.

Anyway, with the several ringleaders of the group, we negotiated the ground rules like no running in the hall, so no one slips and falls. And everything had to be totally cleaned up. I told them what time I was going to go to the Memorial Library and what time I'd be back. And I came back, the floor was totally quiet. The floor was also very clean. Because of course shaving cream is kind of a soap. And I just had to smile to myself because they did exactly as 00:22:00they said they would. So from my standpoint, they showed a high degree of responsibility. And I did look around, and on one of the overhead light fixtures I saw like a one-inch dab of shaving cream that they had missed in their cleanup. So I knew that the shaving cream fight had taken place. So that was kind of a cute experience. These are some of the fun things that happened.

Now on a more serious note, I was very impressed with--is this sounding like what you want?

EO: Yeah.

EB: On a serious note, I thought the house fellow program did a wonderful job of training house fellows in a variety of areas. And believe me, it ended up being far more necessary than they may have envisioned. They trained us in first aid. They trained us in CPR, as I recall.

EO: Who did the training?

EB: They, I think they might have had some nurses from UW Hospital come, or some trainers or something. I don't recall exactly, but I believe most of the people 00:23:00training us were from within the UW system.

EO: Okay. Did somebody organize this?

EB: Yes. This was all organized. They had an administrator for the whole southeast dorm area. And I believe one of the administrators was a man named Len Fromm. F-R-O-M-M. He and I got along unusually well. I really liked him. He was a really good guy. I can't remember whether Steve Jonas was the administrator just for Sellery or for the whole southeast area. I can't remember. I think in my second year, the administrator of the dorm or the southeast area was a man named W.C. Blanton, B-L-A-N-T-O-N. I liked and got along with all three of them, but they all had very different styles. Anyway, I believe these men were the ones who typically organized the training for the house fellows. So we had training in first aid and CPR. We had training in how to use a fire extinguisher. They actually had a metal tub out in the back and they lit fires 00:24:00in it. We sprayed it with different kinds of extinguishers. And then we had training in interpersonal relations and conflict resolution. And some of that training was handled by a man named Andre Delbecq, D-E-L-B-E-C-Q, who was, I believe, a business school professor. And I believe he's now at the University of California at Santa Cruz or somewhere out there. And he may have been assisted in that effort by Andy Vandeven V-A-N-D-E-V-E-N, who's now a professor of management at the University of Minnesota. And I remember the, actually, all the training we got was excellent. I especially remember the training by Andre Delbecq and how useful it was in handling things for the students.

In the course of my three years at Sellery Hall as a house fellow, I had to handle three serious suicide attempts. That was no fun when someone comes 00:25:00screaming out of the bathroom that someone in there has cut themselves. And you go in and you see that they really have cut themselves. Another case, a guy wanted to jump out the window on the tenth floor. I heard the glass shatter when he punched it with his hand. And then in the third case--oh, I can't remember what the third situation was.

Then I had to handle victims in one or more auto accidents. There was somebody lying on Johnson Street or Park Street outside Sellery Hall who had been hit by a car. Again, I still remember the number: 22957, which is 262-59, whatever, which is protection and security. I had to call that probably once a month for some reason or other. And I still remember that number: 22957. It was just automatic.

Several times I had to ride with a kid to the hospital emergency room. One of my guys came back one night wearing sandals. He'd walked on a broken beer bottle and he didn't know it. And was bleeding all on his feet. This is kind of routine stuff.

One of the most scary incidents for me happened when I had a student on my floor who was in a wheelchair. And he had a refrigerator in his room. And his parents, when they brought him, they said was it okay to have the refrigerator. They got permission beforehand. I said well, sure, if you got permission. They never told me why he had one of these small refrigerators in his dorm, because it was against the rules. And I never knew what his illness was. I figured he might have had polio or something.

One morning about seven o'clock, after he'd been in the dorm for a few months, I get a phone call from the young man. His voice was very weak. He said, "Eric, this is so and so. I'm a hemophiliac. I'm bleeding. Could you please take me to the hospital?"

Well, I had the typical layperson's understanding of hemophilia. And I just kind of freaked out. Called protection and security. I think they sent an ambulance for him. And we took him to the hospital. And that was my first exposure to what happens when someone just bangs himself. He had internal bleeding. And the 00:27:00reason he had the refrigerator, I found out later, was to keep on hand these kind of ice packs that he could use to apply to the bleeding to slow down the bleeding. Well, I'd never known about that. and his parents didn't warn me. So it was kind of strange. After the first time it happened, I was prepared. Then when it happened subsequently, I handled that more comfortably.

So this was all part and parcel of being a house fellow. We had a lot of fun. The guys would plan parties sometimes, and they would invite, let's say, the ninth floor girls to come over. And of course the girls were equally interested in coming over and meeting all the guys. So they would make, there were two bathrooms on each floor, one for each wing. So one of the bathrooms would become the girls' wing. And they would put a sign on the door telling that this was the girls' bathroom. And being ever so helpful, the guys would put up various signs inside the bathroom instructing the girls on how to use the various facilities 00:28:00in the bathroom. I will not explain what these instructional signs said, but they were clearly written by guys. (laughs)

Then, let's see, what other things would happen? There was always the usual complaining about the food in the dorm. The way they would slice the beef in Gordon Common, sometimes it had kind of, if you looked at it at the right angle, it had a greenish shine to the beef. And the guys would talk about that, and about mystery meat. I must admit, some of that Swiss steak they served with the sauce did come close to being mystery meat. So, all in all, I mean, it was just an interesting experience. It was like babysitting sixty-four guys.

Most of the guys, you know, wanted to get along with the house fellow. There are always a few who just from day one had an attitude problem. And that's just the way it was, and you had to live with that. You try to be fair. It's a little 00:29:00hard to not be annoyed when you get awakened at two in the morning because there's some loud yelling either because some guys are drinking and having fun or because they're having an argument. I don't recall any physical fights that I had to break up, which was a good sign. There were a few times when I had to sit with a couple of guys who were at odds with each other or having a roommate problem and try to negotiate that. My own style is to try to let kids talk and see what they can work out with each other as opposed to imposing something. So that worked out pretty well.

On balance, I really value the experience I had as a house fellow because in addition to being able to help these young men with their problems and their growth and development, I also learned a lot about how to deal with people, how to deal with groups, about how to handle conflicts, about how to try to resolve 00:30:00conflicts that may not be reconcilable. About how to juggle all kinds of conflicting demands because I was a full time grad student with a full load, and very busy with that. So I will say in my time at Wisconsin, I was never bored. I was always busy but I liked it that way. And I'm afraid to say that thirty-five years later, I'm still always--

EO: Oh, I think that's outside.

EB: I'm still always busy. You know, it's interesting. In July of this year, my daughter, June or July, my daughter who's just finished tenth grade attended a one-week dance camp at the University of Wisconsin. [pause]

EO: Eric Brown on Monday, August 26, 2002.

EB: As I was saying, my daughter ended up being housed here at the University of 00:31:00Wisconsin in one of the residence halls for the week she was here. Guess which dorm? Sellery Hall. So on the way to the tenth floor, where she was housed, I took my family to the ninth floor. And fortunately, the room that I lived in for three years, room 924, was open, because it was unoccupied. So I got to show the girls -- my wife and my two daughters -- where I lived. Actually, my wife knew where I lived because she had been in the room before when we first started dating.

EO: Legally? (laughs)

EB: Mostly. Mostly legally, yeah. I had to set a bit of an example. Although I remember one time she came up there to talk about something and she came up very quietly. And of course all the guys on the floor knew her. She was very friendly to them.

At the end of the year, I think we used to have an offsite picnic for the floor, and that was always a lot of fun. And I think after my first or second year, we had the picnic maybe at Brittingham Park or something. And it came time for ritual toss the house fellow in the lake. So I took off my watch, I took off my 00:32:00shoes, and they tossed me in the lake. So that was fun.

EO: Did this happen every year?

EB: You know I think, I don't remember whether we had this every year. I sort of recall being dunked twice. Maybe the third year I didn't go. I don't know.

EO: And did this happen to other house fellows, too?

EB: I would imagine. I don't remember.

One of the things I'll comment on that was interesting, if you had several boys on the floor who were committed to making it be a nice living experience and were interested in getting guys together for activities, it made such a difference. It really works better to have social life on the floor organized and run by the kids on the floor because they want to do it. And they go around and organize people and get stuff done. That really made a big difference. So that was, I think my first year there were several returnees on the floor who 00:33:00stayed on from the previous year. And that was nice.

They used to then, of course, talk about the activities that they did with the other house fellow, and that was interesting. I ended up meeting the other house fellow because he was a friend of my, of a former girlfriend. So that was a small world experience.

EO: What was his name?

EB: His name, I think, was something like Mel Shacter, or Mel Shlacter. I'm not sure. But he was a good guy. I met him in New York City.

So my term as a house fellow started in September and ended in, I guess, May or June. And then during the summer I found other housing on campus. I mentioned earlier that the compensation for the house fellow was quite positive. My recollection is that as a house fellow, you paid no tuition. Now in my case, because although I was from out of state, my legal residence was New York, 00:34:00because I was a TA, teaching assistant in the Economics Department, I qualified for in-state tuition. But as a house fellow, I paid no tuition. Then they paid for complete room and board, of course. Meaning I could eat in Gordon Commons. And then they gave us a book allowance. I think fifty dollars a semester. Now that may not sound like very much now, because some books cost more than fifty dollars.

EO: Most.

EB: But thirty-five years ago, as a grad student, that pretty much covered your books. So the bottom line was, I really had, my last three years of grad school, had no real living expenses except during the summer. Then, because I was also a teaching assistant or had a fellowship during one of my years, I was able to save all those checks. And when I finished grad school, I had about five thousand in the bank. And my good friend Gary Goshgarian that I mentioned 00:35:00earlier, told me once, he said, "Eric, you're the only guy I know who made money going to grad school." (Olmanson laughs) So it was nice because we got married in '71. And it was nice to have a little something in the bank. Do you want to ask some questions? [pause]

--talk for a moment about the setting. I did not choose Sellery Hall to be my dorm. It was assigned to me. They may have asked me if I had a preference, but I don't recall. Sellery Hall was just assigned. And actually, I considered it a desirable appointment. At that time I preferred the Southeast dorms over the Lakeshore dorms, because as an economics student, my building was the social science building. And I had a sense that the Southeast dorms were closer. Plus I had to do a lot of reading and research and so forth in Memorial Library. And that was a lot closer to the Southeast dorms. And finally, I liked having access to State Street, although when all is said and done, I didn't go to State Street 00:36:00that much.

Living in Sellery Hall was fairly pleasant. I mean, I wouldn't describe the building as overly aesthetic inside. It's cinderblock walls that have been painted. But my only prior campus living experience had been in a similar type dorm at Swarthmore College, which wasn't a lot different. So I was used to living in a dorm, and that seemed like a reasonable way to do it to me.

The typical room that an undergraduate had had two beds, two dressers, and two closets. And then two sets of bookshelves. The house fellow room I recall was the same size. Maybe a tiny bit smaller than one of the regular rooms. But it only had one desk, one dresser, maybe two dressers. And then it had two closets. So the house fellow room was more spacious because I didn't have to share it. 00:37:00Also, I think I had a better desk and a better desk chair than the undergraduates had. It was a bigger desk and a bigger desk chair. I found the quarters just fine. I mean, I was there to go to grad school. This wasn't meant to be any luxury living. And it was just fine. And since I wasn't paying anything to live there, it seemed like a very good deal.

I should mention one interesting side note that may not have been true for other graduate students, but was true for me. In June of 1967, which is the month I graduated from college, the draft law had been extended. We were deep in the middle of the Vietnam War at that point. So the new draft law said, people graduating in the spring of '67 would get one year of automatic grad school deferment. And then they were eligible for being drafted. So for my first year of grad school, I knew I was exempt from the draft. But I had gone and had a 00:38:00physical and it turned out I was 1A, meaning I was eligible for drafting. I passed my physical. I shouldn't say I was 1A. I passed my physical, meaning I could have become 1A. What I wanted to do was to keep my student deferment, which is called 2S. Again, I'm remembering this stuff thirty-five years later, so it shows you what kind of an impact it had on my generation of male students. And actually females, because it was their boyfriends or husbands who were subject to the draft.

In the late '60s, the UW did something that I think was very, very good, very sound, very helpful. They hired a man named Chuck Dietzel, D-I-E-T-Z-E-L, as I recall, to be a full time draft counselor for the male grad students. He was terrific. He had lots of good ideas. And I recall meeting with him, I believe 00:39:00during my first year of grad school to plan how could I be, how could I stay out of the draft for my remaining years. and I believe it was Chuck, I know it was Chuck who came up with the idea of saying, "Stay in grad school. Keep your teaching assistant position. And then if you get accepted as a house fellow, do that." He might have even helped me with the idea of become a house fellow. Because then what you do is you write a letter to your draft board explaining how these various activities you are doing are in the national interest.

So I had three things to cite: being a grad student in economics, which was an important field. Being a teaching assistant, teaching undergraduate students; and then being a house fellow in charge of sixty-four guys. That must have done the trick, because I kept my 2S student deferment for all three years of grad school. And then, I think it was around 1969 or 1970 that they had the lottery where they assigned you a number. My number, based on my birth date, was 152, as 00:40:00I recall. And I think they only went as high as 95 or 125 in terms of students being drafted. So at that point, my worry about the draft was pretty much over. So ironically, being a house fellow may have helped keep me out of the draft. There was one man in our dorm who I believe did get drafted even though he was a house fellow. I don't know what ever became of him. I don't believe he returned to grad school here.

The dining facilities at Gordon Commons were fine. I mean, there were separate tables that seated, I believe, eight people. But I think they had a few smaller tables. It was always very noisy in Gordon Commons. You had to stand in line. And then the young lady or young man would, you know, check off your number on, you had an ID card, would check off your number on the thing and then you went and got your food. I recall you could go back and get unlimited seconds or thirds, which was great for the guys who liked to eat a lot of food. I remember 00:41:00the food as actually being quite decent for dorm food. I didn't expect it to be like home cooking, but it was decent. There was a wide variety. And I thought they did a good job.

One of the problems you sometimes had in the dining rooms was kids would take food for friends. They would take silverware. Near the end of the year, kids would take plates and other dishes and silverware to furnish their apartment for the following fall. We stopped it when we saw it, but kids got away with it.

In terms of recreation space, there wasn't really a whole lot. There was a lounge in the main floor of Sellery Hall, and Witte Hall and Ogg Hall on the main floor. But it was such a big impersonal space it wasn't, they didn't really get used all that much. I mean, they were used, but not as much as they might have been. And then in the basement of all three dorms, as I recall, they had a large area with a linoleum floor and tables for studying. Behind Witte Hall, or 00:42:00behind Sellery Hall, I should say, and behind Witte Hall, they had some grassy area for playing basketball or Frisbee or football. And young men and young women would play out there. But you could tell you were in an urban environment. It just didn't feel like a big open park space like you might find with the Lakeshore dorms. But it was adequate.

Now in Witte Hall and in Sellery Hall, you had ten floors. The first floor was for administrative offices and recreation. So floors two through ten were the dormitory floors. So you had nine floors of men and nine floors of women in Sellery Hall and in Witte Hall. My recollection was that Ogg Hall was an all-guy dorm. And the nickname back them for Ogg Hall was Animal House, as I recall. And 00:43:00from what I understand, that was quite fitting.

The house fellows, we'd have, as I recall, we'd have a weekly staff meeting. I think sometimes it would be over a meal in the cafeteria. Other times it would be in the dorm manager's office. And that was always fun. We'd talk about problems and issues and so forth, and learn about any new rules there were. I would have contact with house fellows in the other dorm occasionally, but not always. And we didn't actually know all the house fellows in the other dorms. But over time we'd meet them, when they had training sessions and so forth.

In terms of the Southeast dorms versus the Lakeshore dorms, I don't know a whole lot about the Lakeshore dorms because we really didn't have much contact with them. But what I did hear was that things tended to be a lot more liberal down there. They were more spread out. That if you had a boyfriend or girlfriend that 00:44:00you wanted to have visit you, it was easier to do it in the Lakeshore dorms. I guess the kids who lived in Lakeshore liked it quite well. And there would be grassy areas. But I just didn't have much contact with them.

In terms of student self government, that is not something I really remember much about at all, and can't really comment on that.

EO: Do you remember anything about an experimental seminar? Like I believe Andy Vandeven was involved in starting it, called Man, Science and Society? Around 1969 or '70.

EB: I don't recall anything about that. I know Andy, I believe he was a PhD student in the School of Business. He was a rather impressive young man. Seemed very earnest and serious. And I'm not at all surprised that he became a professor of business at Minnesota. I'm sure he's been very successful.

EO: One thing that has struck me, just the little bit I've done looking in the former house fellows, but I guess I looked up you and then trying to find Andy Vandeven, I actually found his website. And it's a very impressive résumé. (laughs)

EB: Really.

EO: I sent him an email. I haven't heard back from him yet. But it makes me think that the experience might have been good preparation for a successful career.

EB: For Andy? Or for all of us?

EO: For all of you. I just have a sense. And you said you--

EB: Yeah. I think early on I mentioned that I thought it was a very good experience, all things considered. The question always is, which came first, the person or the experience? My sense from early on is that most of the house 00:46:00fellows were already pretty motivated, capable, serious, sincere people. And so this was an experience that just helped further develop them. So yeah. I mean, people who became house fellows must have had an orientation toward doing something like that anyway.

EO: Yeah. That's a good point.

EB: Yeah. But I think, again, you could have that orientation. But if you don't have the experience to help you develop it and improve and grow, then you won't grow as much. So I personally found the house fellow experience very challenging, but also very rewarding. And I'm totally glad I did it.

EO: So the floors in Sellery Hall with the people living on them, there was a house fellow for each floor? Is that right?

EB: Yes. There was one house fellow for each floor. So there would be nine house fellows for the men's section and nine for the women's section. And each house fellow had a room--

EO: I'm sorry to interrupt. But the sections were like the end of the building? Or how did that work? Each floor had two sections? Or--

EB: Well, each floor had two wings, but it was all the same floor. The wings were split by the elevator bank. So when you got off the elevator, if you lived on one wing you'd turn left. If you lived on the other wing, you turned right.

EO: Okay. So one wing was for women, the other for men?

EB: Oh, no. Oh, no. Back when I was, I'm sorry, back when I was a house fellow--oh, no, there were two separate towers. One tower--

EO: Oh!

EB: --of Sellery or Witte was for men. One tower was for women.

EO: Okay, I got it.

EB: They're actually separate buildings. But within each building, each floor had two wings. When I was a house fellow, only same sex floors and same sex wings and same sex buildings. So it's not like now. I understand that things are different now. But you actually had physically separate buildings, only joined 00:48:00at the base by the administrative offices and the lounge to separate the men's wing from the, the men's tower from the women's tower. So you had two towers. Each tower had nine dormitory floors. Each floor in Sellery Hall had two wings. And both wings were either--both wings were for same sex.

EO: Okay. Right. And your floor was the ninth--

EB: Ninth floor, Sellery Hall.

EO: Second from the top.

EB: Second from the top. I had a wonderful view over the campus. I got to watch, I believe I watched the humanities building being built, which is the building we're talking in right now. I think I also saw Vilas Hall being built, although I can't remember when that was built. And I had a beautiful view of the lake. It was very nice. You have to pay good money to get that in a private building.

EO: Let's see.

EB: I should also mention that as a house fellow, even though you were assigned to your floor, you were semi-responsible for the other floors. And the pass key 00:49:00that I had worked for floors ten, nine and eight. So each pass key worked for three floors. So if a student would get locked out of his room on eighth, ninth or tenth floor, they could come to me to open his room for him. And I would do that.

EO: Let's see.

EB: This--

EO: Oh, pardon me.

EB: I was going to say there's one other bit of experience that I might mention that I have not talked about yet. And that had to do with the fact that during the four years I lived in the dorms, one year in Witte and three years in Sellery, this was the period of maximum demonstration on campus against the Vietnam War. I came here in September, '67. A month later, in October, '67, was the demonstration against the Dow Chemical interviews in the old Commerce School behind Bascom Hall. And I remember quite vividly being aware of something going 00:50:00on there. During my three years as a house fellow, there were various demonstrations on campus. And sometimes from our dorm windows in Sellery, we could see demonstrations outside. We could see kids marching down Johnson Street. We could see police cars. We could see police chasing students, etcetera. One time we saw from my dorm window, in 924 Sellery, during a night of very active demonstrating and police and student clashes, right on the grounds of Sellery Hall, by the way, we saw a large white car, like maybe a Chevy Impala, come driving down Johnson Street. And our guess was that it was townies from Madison, or townies from some surrounding town. They looked physically sizable, so they might have been student athletes. And they were, their car had 00:51:00things thrown at it by some students, you know, demonstrators. So all of a sudden, the four doors of the car opened and these four big guys go out running after the students. Big mistake. Because when they came back, every window in their car had been smashed.

EO: Oh my gosh.

EB: They just left the car in Johnson Street. So they were going to go get some of the demonstrators. But in turn, the demonstrators--

EO: Oh, wow.

EB: So I don't know how they explained that to their mom and dad when they got home. But that was kind of sad.

But there were, I recall one or two of my students being tear gassed, or maybe even slightly injured during the demonstrations. I also recall one night a student on my floor coming up with a friend of his who said the police were looking for him and could I hide him. And I wasn't quite sure what to do. So the student said, "Why don't we hide him in the luggage hall?" In the luggage room in the stairwell at the end of the wing. So we did that. We hid the student. The police never came up.

I seem to recall on at least one occasion, Sellery Hall was surrounded by 00:52:00police. No one was allowed to go in, and no one was allowed to go out. And I'm guessing that the police strategy was if we can at least stabilize and keep the thousand students interest eh dorm, that will keep them from going out in the street and getting involved. And students can go out. And that was it.

EO: How long did this last?

EB: This might have been for the entire evening, or something like that.

EO: Okay.

EB: I mean, actually, if you think about it, it was probably a smart strategy on the part of the police, because you'd have these, each dorm held over a thousand students. There's three thousand students just in the Southeast dorms. If they can at least keep those three thousand students from getting out onto the street, I mean, not that all of them would have gone out in the street. But you had kids that just wanted to be onlookers. So it was probably a smart strategy.

From the ninth floor window in my room, I could actually, I could hear and see and smell teargas grenades being thrown. It was a pretty scary period at times. 00:53:00I mean, this was, you know, you could hear the sounds of glass being broken. You could hear yelling. You could hear sirens. You'd see fire engines. I mean, kids would light fires on campus. It was a pretty distressing time.

And there were some kids on my floor who were totally befuddled by what was going on, and couldn't understand it, and didn't get it, and didn't want to be involved. There were other kids who were curious onlookers. And then there were other kids who wanted to be involved.

And one of my years in the dorm, there was a young man on my floor who was from New York City. And apparently I heard from some other students that they saw him marching at the head of one of the demonstrations. So I had all kids on the floor. All kinds of reactions by the students.

But this went on for several years. and I guess the culmination was around May of 1970. Well, actually in May of 1970 was the shooting by the National Guard 00:54:00troops at Kent State.

And then in August of 1970, there was the bombing at Sterling Hall here in Wisconsin. And I might mention parenthetically, I'd been a house fellow the previous year, and I was a house fellow the month following that bombing. At the time of the bombing on August 24, 1970, I lived in a house with two other guys on Breeze Terrace. And it was about 3:45 in the morning. And all of a sudden, there was this huge explosion which we could easily hear on Breeze Terrace. It shook our house. It shook the windows. We didn't know what had happened. And we ran out to the front porch. It woke all three of us up. And we saw these huge flames leaping into the air from Sterling Hall.

One of my roommates got in his car at quarter of four in the morning. And he drove to campus. And he came back. He said, "Well, they finally did it." Meaning they finally blew up the Army Math Research Center, which is what they were 00:55:00trying to do. Ironically, the man who headed up the Army Math Research Center was I believe J. Barkley Rosser. His son was a fellow grad student with me in the graduate economics program.

So I remember these days quite vividly at the UW. This was the summer I wasn't living on campus then, I was right on the edge of campus. But I recall that as well.

EO: All together, it must have took an incredible amount of focus in order to get through.

EB: Yeah. It really, it really did, it really did take some focus. Because the bottom line, I came here for grad school. And while the house fellow experience was a bit of a distraction, it was also, in some ways, a welcome distraction. 00:56:00Because if all you do all day is study economics and econometrics and equations, you start going a little nuts. So it was kind of nice to have something different to come back to. And actually, it was quite convenient to have meals in the dorm. You didn't have to worry about that. Can I just comment on a few more of the questions here?

EO: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

EB: One of the questions here, number four, described a job. Did I meet my predecessor? I met my predecessor, but not on campus. And I met him after I was done being a house fellow, so there wasn't much advice to get from him.

I remember my first week of being a house fellow as being both exciting but also a little bit intimidating. Like wow, I'm now in charge of the wellbeing of sixty-four guys here, and what was it going to be like? But the fact of the matter is, I was enough older than the other students that they tended to be pretty respectful and recognize that you're an older guy. When you're a freshman, someone who's a graduate student seems pretty impressive and quite a bit older.

I think I've already described the duties. I mean, basically it was just to kind 00:57:00of be there and be aware of what was going on and make sure no one got hurt. And you'd take appropriate action if rules were being violated or someone needed medical care or something. You just had to sort of use your discretion about how you handled situations. If we had a problem that we couldn't handle, we could always call the dorm manager. And they're even older than us, though not always a whole lot. And they would give you some advice.

Fortunately on my floor, I don't really recall too many problems that I couldn't handle pretty comfortably. I suppose in the girls' dorm, they might have to deal with problems like pregnancy or something like that. You know, that's a little more serious.

The most difficult part of the job was having to deal with an unexpected situation that might be really quite serious. Fortunately I didn't have too many of those. But the three suicide attempts I dealt with, those were kind of 00:58:00serious. Handling things with the demonstrations and helping calm kids down and help them not be too scared, I mean, these were difficult because it's not like I had a whole lot of experience in these areas. The house fellows, in many cases, were, had only been students their whole life, also. So we didn't have a whole lot of real world experience for the most part.

In terms of house fellow traditions, I don't particularly recall any house fellow traditions.

EO: Besides being thrown in the lake?

EB: Besides being thrown in the lake. I would say there was a good sense of camaraderie among the house fellows. But I remember one house fellow who seemed to take a certain amount of delight in becoming like one of his students. He was actually a bit of a problem in the dorm because he was not very mature. And he sort of encouraged the students to go out and demonstrate. Well, you're going to get all kinds doing it.

Over the course of the three years in Sellery, I would say that my 00:59:00responsibilities stayed pretty much the same, but I became more comfortable with each passing year in handling my responsibilities. And by the time I was a third-year house fellow, I felt totally comfortable doing what needed to be done.

In the course of my--this is question five now, important personalities. In the course of my work as a house fellow, I did get to know some of the other individuals who were involved in student housing. I met Newell Smith several times. He seemed like a very nice older gentleman. I liked him, but I didn't really interact with him very much. I did interact more with Larry Halle. And ironically, I've interacted with Larry Halle after leaving Wisconsin and coming back, because he is a neighbor of some good friends of ours down in (Acoma?). So I've actually been to cookouts or picnics with Larry Halle and we enjoyed reminiscing about the old days.

George (Gorda?), I never knew. The other housing staff, it was always fun, they 01:00:00usually had a man or woman who worked at the front desk. Kind of like the main information desk where the mailboxes were on the first floor of Sellery Hall. Usually they had pretty pleasant people, and we'd kid around with them. Sometimes they hired students. And I will say, within the dorm, the house fellows had a certain amount of prestige because they were house fellows. I didn't know the custodial staff super well. I did get to know some of the night watchmen who would go walking through. We got to know them. The program advisors were typically nice guys. We enjoyed working with them. And for the most part, we felt good support from them.

The reason I left the job of being a house fellow is because I finished grad school in, I guess, August of '71, and then was ready to move on. All in all, I really enjoyed the experience of being a house fellow. I would do it over again. And if either of my daughters were ever in a position where they could be a dorm 01:01:00head resident or house fellow, I would encourage them to do that. [pause]

--miscellaneous comments. Each year in the dorm, the Division of Housing would put out a phone directory listing all students and staff associated with, who lived in the housing or who worked in the Division of Student Housing. That could be a useful reference source for the work on this book. [pause]

--attended two house fellow reunions. I've really enjoyed them. I actually wish more people would attend them, because it was kind of fun to see people you knew from before. [pause]

--comment, all things considered, I consider the house fellow experience I have, I had, to be invaluable and important as--