Interview with David Burress

David Burress #15 Transcript

LS: Well, would you start off by telling me where you were born and your family and educational background and that sort of thing?

DB: Well, I was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but my parents lived in Illinois at the time and we moved to Kansas three months later, so --

LS: To Kansas?

DB: To Kansas.

LS: Hmm.

DB: I'm a Midwesterner.

LS: Yeah.

DB: I don't think I can tag it down too much, but I went to high school in Stevens Point after never having seen Wisconsin in between. I went to college at Oberlin College, where I met my wife. I got involved in radical politics right away at Oberlin, which was 1962.

LS: That was in the period of the -- the south -- the Civil Rights Movement. Is that right?

DB: Yeah. I was involved in some local things at Oberlin: um, NAACP and Young Democrats had a radical group which took over leadership, and I was involved in that. Um, there was a group of radicals there that were sort of left by 00:01:00renegadists, um, he'd left the year before that.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And I was influenced by them. I was sort of radical when I got there, though.

LS: Tell me about your family . . . were your parents liberals or radicals, or --

DB: Left-wings.

LS: Ah-huh.

DB: Um, they're both some variety. They're Christian -- Christian Liberal; they're Methodists. My mother still is and my father doesn't belong to any church now. My father was an ordained Methodist minister.

LS: Oh, really? That's what he did?

DB: No, it's not what he did, but it was something that happened to him.

LS: Hmm.

DB: Ah, he became an English teacher and became head of the English Department at Stevens Point and was academic dean of a couple of places and then he went back to Stevens Point, where he still teaches.

LS: So you have an academic background, then.

DB: Right.

LS: So you're used to a university atmosphere then. O.K. . . . carry on.

DB: I came to Madison in 1966 with my wife. I had a teaching assistantship in physics and I was a TA there for two years.

LS: Why did you decide to go here?

DB: Um, it was the best school that offered me money.

LS: Mmm-humm. O.K.

DB: Um, I probably joined the TAA as soon as I got here, but I got actively involved in the TAA as a result of a grievance for a fellow named Robert Turberville, who was an RA that got into a hassle with his thesis advisor over personalities and also over some rock samples, or core samples, that Turberville had collected; that Turberville thought were his property and the thesis advisor thought were his, and the thesis advisor had him arrested and thrown in jail.

LS: Was this somebody in the physics department?

DB: No, this was in Geology.

LS: Oh. It sounded like Geology, but . . .

DB: I got involved in the TAA committee that was working with his grievance.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And it turned out, I was good at that. And after that, I became a grievance chairman of the Teaching Assistants Association and I held that job from 1968 until 1971 when I dropped out of the University. Um --

LS: When did that incident happen? Was that before the Dow --

DB: I can't place it.

LS: I guess it doesn't matter very much. Were you in SDS?

DB: Um, I attended a couple of meetings on this campus. I never got interested in them. I belonged to SDS when I was at Oberlin. They didn't really have a chapter there, but I was a national member. I guess I was still on their mailing list probably until about 1968, which --

LS: It sort of split apart, didn't it, in '68?

DB: No. It was really that 1970 that split apart.

LS: Oh, I think Haslach was in it and then he said he left at about 1968 or '69.

DB: Yeah. People were in and out of it, but there ceased to be any kind like that in 1970, I guess.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: No, I guess it was PL Front used that name on campus for awhile.

LS: Well, that's what I meant by split apart -- got taken over by one particular group.

DB: Well, the National SDS -- I think it was 1970 that they fell apart. Isn't that right?

LS: I have that written down somewhere.

LS: Did this case -- how did it come out?

DB: Um, we lost it.

LS: You did.

DB: We didn't manage to do anything for Turberville.

LS: Hmm.

DB: It was the usual thing with our grievances. The professor holds all the marbles; there's no job rights for research assistants.

LS: Well, is the man still here? The professor?

DB: Yeah, he's still here.

LS: Who was it

DB: Um . . . Moore? I think that's his name. He sort of -- it was an interesting 00:05:00business. He has grants from oil companies. It was one of Turberville's objections. Turberville sort of came here as a right-winger and turned into a leftist while he was here, and that created conflicts with his right-wing professor.

DB: Um, and I was involved with maybe 35 different grievances, I can't remember, but --

LS: This was before -- in 1977 --

DB: No. From 1968 to 1971 -- 35 grievances with maybe 200 grievers.

LS: But were they grievances before the strike?

DB: Yeah.

LS: I guess I didn't realize that.

DB: We passed an informal grievance procedure, which was -- it was falling apart, but it was a definite sequence of people we would go to -- a chain of command, people we would appeal to, and we'd go onto the next step when we decided that we weren't getting any place with a certain step.

LS: And what were you doing while you turned out to be good at it?

DB: Well, I was good at making detailed, legalistic arguments. I was good at 00:06:00intimidating people; I mean, I'd threaten lawsuits and figure out complex ways in which we could sue them.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: Subpoena and harass them; different ways of bringing pressure to bear on the professors. Also, I was good at writing letters and march impacts and that kind of thing.

LS: There's some awfully good writing that comes out of the TAA. I suppose most of the people in there, after all, are tough like -- lots of guys.

When did you get to know -- well, did you get to know the others? Like Jim Marketti and Bob Muehlenkamp?

DB: Yeah, as soon as I -- they sort of -- I got involved in this grievance and Muehlenkamp said to me, well, I'm going to be grievance chairman. Because he'd been at a couple of meetings and saw that I could do that kind of work, and that involved going to the executive board meetings, so I started going to executive meetings right after that.

LS: Who else was on the executive board, besides those three and yourself?

DB: Ah, I don't know . . . it's hard to remember when people came and went. I've forgotten a lot of names by now; I'm not very good with names. Um . . . the names you haven't mentioned --

LS: Well, it doesn't matter.

DB: Let's see . . . Paul Schollaert, Schram --

LS: Oh yeah, um-hmm.

DS: Um -- the executive board was sort of defined as people who came and worked plus some elected positions -- but if anyone was willing to work, they could have a committee chairmanship and be part of the executive vote.

LS: Well, here's about -- the people who were the bargainers, but were some of the others equally effective, but not so physical? Or were Muehlenkamp and Marketti the -- definitely the -- they seemed to have been the ones to address classes.

DB: Yeah, they were important front people. Um, Muehlenkamp tended to be kind of 00:08:00strong in small mediums because he had a class. He had a lot of people in the English Department that were -- that liked him too much. They were on pretty important -- and would pretty much vote whatever he said. Um . . . some other ways . . . I guess you're asking me what was the authority. There were different -- two different questions as to who did -- who got the work done --

LS: Yeah.

DB: And who had -- and that's a kind of power -- I mean, if you do work, you're making decisions. So I made all the decisions about how the grievances got handled, essentially. Ah . . . another issue would be the status inside the organization, and those would be people with high status, I would say. Ah, there were quite a few people that could get listened to and could change the mind of an executive board meeting, I would say. It wasn't just a couple of people.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: I think I could get listened to.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Um . . . certainly Haslach could get listened to. There were people that had less ability to get listened to on executive meetings, but still had a sort of impact. There was a fellow who's name I can't think of who was our publicity guy in the German Department who was good at -- he really did a good job of, you know, external publicity with the newspapers, radios and --

LS: How often did they meet? I suppose that the number of meetings accelerated as you got close to 1970, but I really haven't gotten a picture of what it was like before that.

DB: Um . . . when?

LS: Yeah. Well, let's say after -- when the bargaining started . . .

DB: O.K. . . . 19 --

LS: '69.

DB: 1969, we got recognized and started bargaining. Ah, well, I probably went to 00:10:00-- the meetings I attended -- I went to executive meetings every Sunday night and I went to every bargaining session, which might be once a week, twice a week. I went to the sessions to prepare for the bargaining session maybe once a week. Um, I went to grievance committee meetings, which basically would be preparing for a definite grievance, whenever we had one, and I probably had a caseload of three to four pending grievances at that time, and I'd do something maybe once a week on some grievance.

LS: You were really busy. And you were also TA in physics?

DB: No. I got an RA right about then.

LS: Oh, um-hmm.

DB: I was a research assistant.

LS: But you must have had a good impression of what things were like in the various departments since you were handling the grievances. I've gotten the notion of -- a lot of departments, five of them, say that their TAs were happy, but they felt that people in other departments were not, and that's why they went out on strike. What would you say was the most -- the department that made 00:11:00it hardest for the TA?

DB: Well, the departments with the least money. So, that would be places like Political Sciences, History -- English was pretty bad on TAs, created a certain amount of animosity, and it's fucked without RAs, you know. The departments with the only money you had went to TAs, and the competition for them was high. You needed patronage to keep your TA job. In the physical sciences, a TA was something anyone could have, and people wanted out of it. They wanted an RA that would be worth -- that led toward a dissertation.

LS: Yeah, but you prefer not to be a TA.

DB: But everyone supported them in the physical sciences.

LS: Ah-huh.

DB: In Mathematics, of course, but there aren't RAs there. There was that extra research money around.

LS: But there was plenty of money for TA's, wasn't there?

DB: Well, there's no -- the real issue is -- is there RA money? If there's a lot 00:12:00of RA money than the TAs had an easier time with it, because they had job security. Because they can always go find an RA someplace and no one cares about the TAs; they're not important, but when there's no RA money, then the TAs are the source for the money and they are important, and then, of course, you have them.

LS: You mean . . . I'm just trying to get this here.

DB: O.K. . . . I don't know where to start it. The important grievance is always over money. If you're going to lose, you're going to lose your job; you're going to lose money.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: Um, in the physical sciences, and the places with a lot of RAs, there's always more money, so no one cares about the TA-ship. You don't fight it and I didn't even know that somebody lost their job there, because he didn't care.

LS: Yeah.

DB: He went and got an RA. Everyone's supportive, you see?

LS: Yeah.

DB: Where there's a lot of RA's. The only time anyone cared to fight it would be where there was no other money, and that was the only money there was.

LS: Well, you -- so, really, the concern was TAs who lost their jobs.

DB: Yeah.

LS: Because I was thinking of TAs who felt that they had too many people in their classes, or that they had too much work to do and that they had grievances on that.

DB: Well, that's why we had contracts that started worrying about those [dilucet?] things, but that's just not important when you lose your job.

LS: That was the problem before hand.

DB: Oh, sure, but nobody was going to file a grievance for that.

LS: Yeah.

DB: It was too frivolous. They couldn't win it, and it just wasn't important compared to losing your job.

LS: Ah-huh. O.K. Well, it was that I was at, thinking about when I said which departments were hardest on the TAs?

DB: O.K., but then I'd have to think about after the contracts, and what kind of grievances was then, and then I'd say it's the same situation. Um . . . everything was easier in a department with more money.

LS: Yeah. You don't have to have the big classes, or --

DB: Yeah . . . class size is smaller. Ah, there tends to be less pressure coming down from the professor. They don't care as much; they're off doing research; they're not worrying about teaching.

LS: Hmm.

DB: They teach less. They teach one class. If they had to teach two classes then departments would not allow them outside jobs.

LS: I thought maybe the silly people who went into this, the sciences, would be different from the kind of people who were the TAs.

DB: Yeah, there's differences in that end, too. It would be less -- um, you don't get into the freedom of speech issue much in the physical sciences --

LS: Yeah.

DB: Because there's not much you're going to be saying that anyone cares about, and also because the people that are talking are maybe not as likely to have radical opinions, in some of them. That would be [paying really much?]. That would be true in chemistry or engineering, but -- and in certain physics, too.

LS: But not as much, I would imagine. I can imagine chemistry and engineering would be -- would have the most conservative, professionally oriented -- Um . . . and in the physics department, did you -- well, what professors were you working with? Did you have any run-ins with them?

DB: Um, well, I had personal contacts -- I don't believe we ever had a civil grievance. I might have known of some potential grievance, but the guy weren't (sic) willing to file it. They were over RAs, you know? We didn't have much for a record of when we're filing grievances, and all that stuff. I didn't try to push them to file. Um, but we never had any actual grievances in physics.

LS: You were fairly well off, then, would you say?

DB: In general, yeah. Things were well off. I didn't like the professors.

LS: Who were your -- particularly who were you working with? Are those the ones you didn't like?

DB: Oh, I TA'd for six or seven different professors; a different one each semester. A couple of times I'd be TAing for two different professors. And I've forgotten most of the names of them. I had a certain amount of contact with Blanchard, because he had kind of a soft, delegated position as assistant 00:16:00chairman for dealing with TA's. It's sort of a shitty job that, according to the gossip, he accepted many years ago.

LS: Hmm.

DB: On the condition of getting tenure. I don't know if it's true.

LS: Um-hmm. He was known as one of the loopholes.

DB: Ah-huh.

LS: I remember doing a --

DB: Ah-huh -- he used to -- but I didn't really like his brand of liberalism, so I argued with him a certain amount. He had a way of saying, "I hear you," as though that meant anything, but I didn't do anything for him, really. And so, O.K., that was the first step, and nothing ever came of being heard; it didn't matter to be heard.

LS: Yeah, right.

DB: So in the end, it was a very irritating thing to hear someone say, "I hear you," and nothing was going to happen.

LS: It's come to be a bad expression, hasn't it? Ah -- Richards -- wasn't that his name? Who was on the Merlin Committee?

DB: Um-hmm. Actually, I sat on some of the faculty committee with him. I can't 00:17:00remember what graduate assistants -- around 1970 -- on all of them, committees -- except for the tenure committees and like that, personnel.

LS: Incidentally, were you involved in the Battle protest?

DB: Um . . . in a sense that there was a riot going on and I went out and stood around and got tear gassed. I didn't throw any rocks. I didn't sit in; I didn't strike.

LS: You weren't among the leaders of that?

DB: No.

LS: I've been trying to find out what confidence blow it was, but you probably wouldn't have known, then.

DB: No.

LS: Ah -- was there -- at any -- were many physics TAs in the TAA?

DB: Um . . . yeah, not many that were active, but we pretty well had them organized. We got the majority -- we got -- two-thirds of them were out on strike. Most of them were striking on the theory that it was their long 00:18:00obligation to the TAs for those less fortunate departments, I think.

LS: Yes, at least that's the story I keep hearing.

DB: Everyone was striking for everyone else.

LS: Yeah [Laughing.] I gathered from -- it must have been some department, I think perhaps the History Department, that somebody said that.

DB: And there were striking -- was that in history?

LS: Yes.

DB: And it took a little more courage to do it.

LS: Yes. So, do you want to talk about the bargaining? What your impressions of it were and with the faculty and who were the most effective bargainers? What you --

DB: Oh, Fred Sherman probably got mentioned. Did he get mentioned? He was important.

LS: I mean, I know his name, but . . .

DB: Um . . . in a sort of way -- he got -- he was a little bit of an outsider. He wasn't a TA. He was actually a faculty member. He was in --

LS: He was here as an advisor, was he? The weekly advisor?

DB: He sort of came --

LS: Yeah, that's right.

DB: You could describe him that way. He really functioned like another member of the executive board.

LS: Now how did that happen if he was a faculty member?

DB: He came around. He didn't -- you know, he was the same age as the rest of us, similar thinking, which wasn't any real extension. He wasn't tenured. He was, ah, a lecturer or something for the School for Workers.

LS: Ah, I see. He was just what Jim Marketti was working on.

DB: No. Marketti was in the industrial relations department. But Sherman was effective at the bargaining table. There was one dramatic confrontation the night before the strike when the faculty brought in a bunch of departmental representatives, faculty from a lot of different departments: chairmen, muky-muks, and we brought in a lot of our people. It was sort of this confrontation and Sherman put on a really great show.

LS: Was he doing the talking for --

DB: He was doing the talking.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And making an argument which I can't reconstruct now; pushing them on what 00:20:00their position was on why there shouldn't be TA participation in educational planning, and he defined the issue in some really -- it's just a really, brilliant job, which I can't reconstruct at all.

LS: That's interesting. I wouldn't think that.

DB: Really bringing the faculty guys -- he had maybe two-thirds of them half convinced, and he went off and talked with some hard liners who were ducked out and when he came back in they were hard as ever. We knew there was going to be a strike.

LS: Who were the hard liners?

DB: Um . . . I just -- I've forgotten some of their names.

LS: I can tell you some of the names of the people. There was Doremus and Loren and Brogonau and Mulvihill and --

DB: Doremus was there. Ah, Blanner -- Um, Mulvihill wasn't there that much. He was softer. Ah -- the fellow from Chemistry . . . what was his name?

LS: Ah . . . Kotch . . . Alex Kotch

DB: Yeah, he was a real --

LS: What about Camden Coberly. Do you remember him? He was in engineering.

DB: Mmmm . . . was he a regular?

LS: I'm not -- he may not have gone all the time, but he was one of the council 00:21:00of ten. I know he went some -- I think he went about every third meeting. You don't remember him?

DB: No.

LS: No. And then, ah, Christenson.

DB: He was a lib.

LS: You mean, you were more sympathetic to him?

DB: Not necessarily.

LS: Oh. But, I mean, was he one of the hardliners --

DB: No, no.

LS: And Neil Buckley was --

DB: He was their spokesman -- hardly a brain in the man's head.

LS: [Laughing.]

DB: He knew a bunch of [nods and?] clichés.

LS: I see.

Db: He really couldn't think anything through to the second paragraph. That's all he would say, was how to say, "No." But he couldn't even follow the argument so alone to respond to them.

LS: I've heard some criticisms about him.

LS: Um, did you ever think that it might have been solved by negotiation, if 00:22:00there had been different people on the negotiating committee? Or did you think it was inevitable?

DB: Well, the fact of the matter is we were planning for a strike. We wanted a strike. Um, now what does that mean to say, "Could it be solved?" We got a lot more in our contract by striking than we would have got, than we could have ever settled for. Um, we could have got them to offer a bit more than they did offer, I think, if we'd gone in hat in hand playing nice guys instead of playing tough guys, but we played as tough people all along. We said that, "you're going to have to do more than this, and we're going to make you do it." And we said, "You're being the bad guys," and they filled the role with perfection and we were able to sell our people that they were being the bad guys.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And similarly, they did the same thing to us. So the fact remains --

LS: They had you as the bad guys, then.

DB: Yeah, we were the wild men, the barbarian gulags I'll say; tear down the 00:23:00pillars of civilization. And the faculty had nothing against the TAs and the TAs didn't necessarily have anything against the faculty. Now the question is, could you have split it differently? That is, could you have the faculty neutralized and then the TAs against administration? I kind of doubt it, because most of these issues -- the real gut issue was controlling the jobs in the departments without enough money. I'm a TA with patronage.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: It's something that increases a professor's power at the expense of a teaching assistant, a graduate assistant. Ah, so there's a direct conflict, and I don't see any way to settle it, so I strive to find out what the real power relations are.

LS: So, you were just as glad that there wasn't somebody awfully good at [consensus?] I gather, or Christenson might have been better if he had been the head of bargaining. It suited your purposes to have someone who didn't like it.

DB: I don't know. I mean, events are complex and you tell a story about them afterwards and --

LS: Yeah.

DB: Some stories are better than other stories. If it had turned out that they'd been interested in negotiating something like a reasonable teachers' labor agreement, I don't see we'd have any choice but to negotiate it. We couldn't have gotten our people to strike, for one thing, and we might have seen everything differently. [Tape cuts out.]

LS: You had that as a consequence of this strike.

DB: Well, that's what we wanted out of the strike. I'm not sure they got it. They were never able to pass another strike vote.

LS: Oh. Other things changed.

LS: Ah, do you think that the leadership manipulated the TAs? I've gotten the 00:25:00impression that it didn't, that is from a couple of people I've talked to.

DB: What do you mean by "manipulated"?

LS: In the meetings -- because it would have been possible to give particular kinds of information to get people thinking one way and to withhold information so --

DB: Well, in politics, you can't help but do that, so you make a speech, you marshal the collection of facts under a certain framework; you've selected the framework, you selected the facts -- in a way, that's manipulation. I suppose the boundaries of it are . . . what? . . . Telling a deliberate falsehood, or withholding something that occurs to you and say that somebody might need to know but you don't want them to know? I'm sure there were things that were 00:26:00withheld, but it strikes me that really, that was one of the most open organizations. It was really a big organization -- a lot of people, particularly during the strike. You know, at that point we had not only some thousand TAs or graduate students involved, but also we had an undergraduate committee with, I don't know, I would estimate some 500 people that were sort of active and interested and thousands of hangers-on.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And, ah, the things that happened were, I mean, massive information got passed. Um, I think it was one of the things that turned the faculty into hard line was how everything they said would end up in our newsletter. Um . . . usually labor unions were much more secretive about the way they carry on bargaining than we were.

LS: Well, see, you mean things that were said at the negotiating -- not necessarily in --

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: Do you remember the --- there were some meetings. I guess there was a 00:27:00principal meeting, a big one, of the TAA members. I guess the issue was whether to go on strike or not. Do you remember that?

DB: It was sort of a sad meeting at -- what the hell's that building on Ag Campus?

LS: Yeah. You said it was a sad meeting?

DB: Yeah, sort of a sad meeting. I mean, we could see that -- I'm not sure which meeting -- this is one of them, I know.

LS: Well, I know it was up on the Ag Campus.

DB: Is this the meeting when we decided to basically, to fold?

LS: Ah . . . I think -- the way I've been hearing it --

DB: Or is this the evening before? Or two evenings before?

LS: It must have been before, because some people wanted to continue -- oh, not -- to go to the -- to use violence, I guess. That was the question: whether they would escalate to violence?

DB: Oh, I see. Oh, yeah. O.K. Well, that was basically the meeting when we decided to fold, I guess. The issue was around, but it was directly addressed. 00:28:00At that point, it looked to us like to keep going, we'd have to -- either escalate or else quit. That was that up to the leadership.

LS: That was what?

DB: It seemed to the leadership at that point in the strike, we either had to stop, or else we had to start doing some much more aggressive kinds of tactics.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Which might be violence or nasty sit-ins or something.

LS: And you felt you wanted to escalate, that you say was sad.

DB: Well, um -- no, I didn't exactly . . . I don't know. I argued for escalating. I don't know that that would have helped. I mean, it was sad because it seemed that things were over either way, really.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And it was stronger opposed, and we just hadn't won what we wanted to win.

LS: You hadn't gotten what you --

DB: We actually got an awful lot. We got still the best TA contract in the country, I believe. I don't know . . . . Besides, I'm not in that anymore.

LS: I guess the one thing that slightly tipped it was the class sizes, that you might have gotten slightly better ones before the strike, is that right? Well, something had changed.

DB: I don't remember . . . it was a substantially better contract after the strike than the ones they were proposing.

LS: Yes. Did you, yourself, go out and picket, or were you in the office? Do you remember any of the events during the strike that you want to talk about?

DB: Oh, yeah. I worked 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week, TAing in the strike and being a TA.

LS: Picketing, and --

DB: Well, I was on the bargaining teams a lot of that time.

LS: Oh, yeah.

DB: Sitting in mediation and being -- having my time wasted.

LS: You regard it as a waste of time, too, did you? [Laughing.]

DB: Didn't everyone?

LS: Yes, I think it was -- I guess it took a lot of -- made a big hole in everybody's schedules.

DB: You'd sit around in that little room, waiting for something to happen.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Marketti got sick of it after awhile and kept going out with the picketers.

LS: Do you remember any particular incidents from the strike that you want to talk about?

DB: I don't know how to -- how you can talk about it. There were just millions of little things. I don't know . . . people in the picket line, the sense of excitement, a lot of, kind of, high school boys together pounding on cars when they'd go by and carrying on. Had some people brought in --

LS: Girls.

DB: Girls on the picket line?

LS: Yes. You said "boys" and I just point out that there were girls, too.

DB: I know, I mean -- the atmosphere reminded me of high school males in groups.

LS: Oh, O.K. Yeah, I see.

DB: It was definitely a high -- a lot of hard work, driving cars around late at night. We kept picketers, all interns, 24 hours, which is a big logistic expense, supporting it; making sure there's always somebody there; picket captains, groups, and we did some of that work, too, although I wasn't always on the picketing team because I was on the bargaining team.

LS: Did the physics department picketers stick together?

DB: I wasn't with them.

LS: Oh, I think they --

DB: I think they did, but --

LS: It's interesting that some department picketers did, and some didn't, and --

DB: But I think the physics people didn't have anything like the spirit that some of the other groups did.

LS: You don't remember the chemistry incident. You weren't involved in that, were you?

DB: Ah, is this the one with the liquid nitrogen?

LS: Yeah.

DB: Yeah, I was there.

LS: Oh, you were? Could you talk about it, because there seems to be a difference of opinion about what happened.

DB: Um, I don't remember it too well. A difference of opinion . . . well, we had an obstructive picket line. We were trying to stop them from delivering it. We sort of -- one driver refused to deliver the stuff, and we got another driver who was non-union, and he just backed his truck through the picket line. Um, the police did a bunch of pushing and shoving.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And arrested a few people. What was the difference of opinion?

LS: Well, it was just -- actually, it was whether Al Kotch was there or not. I thought one of the TAs said --

DB: It seems to me perhaps he was. I'm not sure, though.

LS: I think it was perhaps just a different impression of how he expressed himself [Laughter.] He didn't think he had -- you know . . . the more I think he made them mad -- kept shouting, somebody said.

LS: So it ended, and what -- how did you feel when it ended?

DB: Everybody felt the same -- sort of let down. And everybody really felt kind of defeated, which was wrong. I mean, that was -- we sold it to ourselves as a loss, and it turned more, what was actually a victory into a loss, I think. I think that's the most reason -- important reason -- that they could never pass any more strike votes.

LS: You do?

DB: Yeah, I do.

LS: Hmm . . . gee -- if you look around at what was happening to the University, I should think that they did remarkably well to get as big a vote as they did in 00:34:00favor of the strike; loss of jobs, you know, fear about jobs, that sort of thing.

DB: I mean, I see what you're saying.

DB: Yeah -- I wasn't there in '71 --

LS: What happened? Did you leave the university then?

DB: In '71.

LS: That's the following year. Why did you leave?

DB: I decided not to write a dissertation in physics. I don't know how to answer a question like that.

LS: I mean, was that --

DB: I never found any physicists that, personally, could be my models. I suppose that's why.

LS: So it was an intellectual reason and not a reason having to do with the university.

DB: Well, it was this particular department and the people in it. Um, what it was like; what academics were like. The experiment I was working on had things wrong with it. In physics, you work on big, huge projects and not some little laboratory thing, organized in groups; what that was like, and the difference 00:35:00between that kind of organization manned enterprise and the kind of intellectual freedom I had in mind for me.

LS: Well, is this because the way the physics department here at the UW was, or would it have been different 20 years ago, or --

DB: It could have been different 20 years ago. Um, it's hard to say. Partly, I think there's a really big, intellectual hole in physics that people don't recognize too much. Um, they publish 10,000 papers a year; most of them don't matter very much, but they do get people tenure.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: But, decreasingly, there's fewer slots and new Ph.D.s in physics are permanent senior scientists. They're not really on the tenure track. Hopefully there's a pretense. Um, and I don't think that much important work ever gets done. I think it's not very --

LS: [Inaudible] Um-hmm.

DB: I think this is everywhere, not just in Madison. But Madison was a fairly dull department.

LS: That surprises me, because you'd think physics would be an exciting subject anywhere.

DB: The subject is. I'm describing an organism of people.

LS: Oh, that's interesting. I expect to be talking to somebody in the physics department. Do you have any other comments to make about it?

DB: About dropping out?

LS: Well, or about, you know --

DB: I don't know. I probably have lots of them, but I wouldn't know how to organize them.

LS: You didn't think of going somewhere else?

DB: No. I think I probably will go back and get a doctorate in something someday, just because it doesn't have the same meaning.

LS: It's a meal ticket, you mean.

DB: It's -- yeah, it's a softer birth. I have a meal ticket. I can hold a job. I 00:37:00can get -- I've discovered a certain kind of job that I can get almost anywhere in the country. But it's not that great of a job, it's not as soft as being your own professor.

DB: But it's hard to get tenure -- very demanding. You have to narrow your brain down into --

LS: Hard to get what?

DB: Tenure.

LS: Yes.

DB: The cost is kind of great. You really have to give up intellectual freedom. You have to accept a fairly narrow definition of what your interests are, what you're interested in.

LS: Do you think that's true everywhere, or just here?

DB: Yeah.

LS: Do you think because of the ---

DB: It's the general--it's what happens when you specialize knowledge and you build up academic disciplines and sub-disciplines and you split departments in the middle and then you subsequently split those departments and you end up with a very narrow definition of what you're supposed to be thinking about.

LS: When did you become aware that this was happening? That this was what you 00:38:00were in for?

DB: Oh, I don't know . . . maybe my sophomore year in college. I'd dropped out of physics before, but it wasn't so final.

LS: You had majored in it in college?

DB: Yeah, well I'd switched to math at one point, and they gave me a summer job to get me to come back so I did.

LS: Um-hmm. So you were good at it.

DB: Well, I didn't work very hard. But, ah, I was their best student in terms of needing the [building?] that year. Other years, they had better students.

LS: Did the TA strike influence you at all, or would you have done it anyway, do you think, dropped out?

DB: It influenced me. Not so much the strike, but the whole radical atmosphere; the idea that there were other ways to live. The Hitton movement was important.

LS: The Hitton movement, did you say?

DB: Yeah.

LS: Yeah.

DB: I think it's a little hard to separate that from the new left people. I 00:39:00don't think it's a good split. Ah . . . [Sigh.] I don't know to talk about these things. It's being recorded . . .

LS: If you don't want to --

DB: I don't mean I don't want to.

LS: Yeah.

DB: I just mean -- it's too big . . . there's too much for any one sentence to seem very important. I guess I just prefer to answer questions or something.

LS: Did you get -- Were you active in any of the other -- even though you were -- not in the university, in any of the other issues -- the issues that came up in the 70's like the AMRC or -- that's a major one; any of the tenure cases. Did any of those concern you, or did you drop out altogether?

DB: I've always taken a Daily Cardinal and read it, that's about it. I went and 00:40:00demonstrated against Nixon's '72 nomination in Miami.

LS: Hmmm . . . that was fun for you.

DB: Well, I didn't have a job and I needed a vacation, so I took one [Laughing.] -- got maced and thrown in jail. Neither one, fortunately, I'd ever done before -- been tear gassed a few times, but never maced.

LS: How long were you in jail for?

DB: Just overnight. They arrested about 1,000 people, hauled them in trucks.

LS: It's all very different nowadays, isn't it?

DB: Yeah, it's different. The students are apparently a lot different.

LS: Well, you say you don't know how to talk about it, and I don't know how to 00:41:00ask you about it, so it will be . . . it's, ah . . . Have you had many friends who have also gone through leaving in the midst of their Ph.D. work and getting other jobs -- out of disillusionment, I suppose that's what you'd say.

DB: Um . . . I had friends that dropped out without completing a doctorate that could have helped me by having interacted in politics, if that describes it. But, I mean, I know there was a lot of people like that. I'm just saying people I know directly. I don't really know lots of people. I'm not somebody that remembers lots of names.

LS: Mmm. Do you have -- have you kept in touch with any of the TAs? There's quite a lot of them around, still, that weren't -- people who were still with them.

DB: Ah, mostly not. Ah, I had -- I'd see Haslach on the streets once in awhile. 00:42:00Ah, I've been seeing Gail Sherman, who's Fred Sherman's wife, split up from him. She's in town working on her dissertation. From her, I've heard things about Marketti and Muehlenkamp.

LS: Hmm. Marketti -- they both went east somewhere, I guess.

DB: Yes. Both divorced, or separated.

LS: Hmm. That's the thing we're not to talk about in the 70's, is the number of divorces.

DB: I guess your focus is really more on the university, than on the new left.

LS: Yes, it is. But insofar as the new left affected the university, and I think 00:43:00it certainly did in the late 60's. I suppose many of the younger faculty who -- there were several names -- I don't know if you'd call them the new left or not. Do you remember them? David Sift is the name that comes to my mind.

DB: Yeah.

LS: Tell me about your opinions of people like Anna Tolbeck and some of the people who have been active in politics.

DB: Ah, mostly I've forgotten them, because what I had was a whole relationship to them rather than an opinion of them as persons.

LS: Mmm.

DB: So it's not too interesting to me, and I mostly discarded it.

LS: Alright, skip that. What would you say about the new left, then?

DB: What would I say about the new left . . .I don't know.

LS: Or how it's influenced the university, if you could --

DB: How to be less self-assured -- you know, I'm not in this university, really. 00:44:00Actually, I am -- I'm a graduate student in computer science. I'm taking a couple of courses.

LS: Oh, you are?

DB: Yeah.

LS: So you already are back in --

DB: Sort of. I get time off of my job to take courses.

LS: Ah.

DB: It doesn't really give me an impression of the university.

LS: Is computer science -- I know it's a department, but it seems to me it must be so -- it must not be like the other departments, or is it?

DB: Eddie Zietman was the steward of computer science. He was sort of on [his head?]. You know, there's always one or two advocates in the department. It's hard for me to distinguish departments.

LS: Is he still around?

DB: No, he was from [Tape cuts out]

LS: Did you say Muehlenkamp had a commune in Baltimore?

DB: Didn't you hear about that?

LS: No, I didn't.

DB: Well, Muehlenkamp and a whole bunch of English Department people who had been in -- ah, who were all those people? Um . . . God . . . I keep forgetting names; these are people I knew, though. They went off and -- they bought three houses in a working class area of south Baltimore so it [seemed like nothing?] --

LS: This would have to be --

DB: This was around '71.

LS: Hmmm.

DB: '72. Some of those people are still living there, but most have moved.

LS: And this was all an outsource of the TAA movement then.

DB: Some of the same people.

LS: Did it serve you for the taking of English that graduate students [walked with you?]?

DB: No. What's actually important to all these radical people.

LS: Yeah, but if --

DB: Well, that's what everyone does is support [the sign?] . It's sort of one of 00:46:00the things that's left over from the new left is disassociation with your job.

LS: Um-hmm. And is that satisfactory, or no?

DB: No, it's not satisfactory, but it's necessary.

LS: But the alternative seems to be [insisting?] to be a professor and I would think that wouldn't be --

DB: Well, the problem is buying the social network that goes with the job, really; buying the values and lifestyle and the way you look at yourself.

LS: And you don't think the university recognizes the [inaudible]?

DB: It's a bureaucracy like any other one. I've gotten a job in a bureaucracy which in some ways is tighter than the university in other ways looser. My bureaucracy is less concerned about what you do wrong, and more concerned about what you do when you're on the job. But it turns out that if you fight them 00:47:00pretty hard and if you're confident, they'll put up with more than you think, but it's kind of a painful process. It would be the same way in academics.

LS: Did you say -- I don't think you said on tape what you were doing now. No, you didn't say --

DB: Oh, I'm -- well, my title at the moment is systems analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. What my actual job is I lead a research project which has a sample of income tax returns which is computerized and we run computer models to see would happen if you made changes in the tax law or to see who's getting advantage of each of the loopholes in tax law.

LS: I can't believe that somebody's doing that.

DB: It's worth doing.

LS: It's really, ah -- it's just research, then. You don't work with actual income tax returns?

DB: They're real income tax returns, but it's a sample.

LS: Yeah.

DB: We don't' care who they belong to.

LS: Does anybody act in your finding?

DB: Ah, we've been tooling up for two years, and we haven't really had any findings yet. [Laughing.] But we're supposed to produce some any minute now.

LS: How many people are on it?

DB: Ah, we have to sample 11,000.

LS: But you said you were the head of it.

DB: Oh, how many people were in the group?

LS: Yes.

DB: Well, that's kind of hard to keep on, exactly. I am sort of a -- I'm a technical team leader, is how you'd describe it.

LS: Um-hm.

DB: Ah, there are economists who work with the group. They don't report to me. At any given time, there's usually about two programmers who do report to me. Um, I also have relationships with people at Madison Computer Center, who do work on contract, programming and data entry. And also with our own -- we have another bureau which does data entry key punch, and stuff like that. And also we hire out statisticians and people like that to consult with; research design, and I usually coordinate with them.

LS: It's very complex. Where's the -- where's your office?

DB: Ah, general executive facility number one.

LS: [Laughing.] That sounds like the White House.

DB: It's a big warehouse, a block off the square.

LS: I see. And you've been doing this for how long?

DB: Well, I got a job as a programmer in the data processing department three years ago and gradually migrated into the research bureau from there. My transfer was official a few months ago.

LS: They didn't mind your long hair?

DB: No. They didn't mind long hair. I had a lot of battles about the coat I wore or the hours I worked and things like that.

LS: But you won.

DB: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a condition of my working there, so it may come up again.

LS: Yeah.

DB: If it does, if I don't want it, I'll leave.

LS: So that's how -- you paint like a funny, funny -- well, it's worthwhile, 00:50:00obviously. O.K. . . . unusual outcome for a new left physicist.

DB: It's something I'm doing for now.

LS: Yeah.

DB: I don't -- I think I'll probably -- I'd like to define a field which is somewhere around computational linguistic or semantics or philosophy or something like that. I have some things to work out.

LS: And you can save up money so you can perhaps go back and do all that.

DB: Yeah. I might get some kind of interdisciplinary Ph.D. and try to find some school to hire me.

LS: Hmm. That's interesting. [Tape cuts off.]

LS: We're starting the interview again, and it's now April. It's the 13th. You 00:51:00very kindly agreed to come back and talk about your life in Madison in the 1960's. You came from Oberlin.

DB: Yes, I think the issues we were raising had to do with the New Left and I suppose things like the hippy movement, although we didn't mention that.

LS: Yeah.

DB: And, ah what life was like if you were sort of counter-cultural. And to talk about those things, I'd really like to talk about Oberlin.

LS: O.K.

DB: Which is a lot of how I got into it.

LS: Yeah.

DB: And I'd like to talk about [inaudible]. I guess all these truths are going to come out in little stages.

LS: Is that a comfortable -- would you rather sit in that chair?

DB: Um, the chair's comfortable.

LS: Oh, O.K. Did Oberlin convert you?

DB: Not exactly. I think Oberlin -- I applied to three schools: Cal Tech, Carter and Oberlin and Carter rejected me, but I'd already rejected them. Cal Tech 00:52:00accepted me, but I'd pretty much decided to go to Oberlin, and the reason had to do with things like no fraternities, social equalitarian, and political lefty and it had the largest, small college library in the country and so on.

LS: Although probably not a great physics department.

DB: No.

LS: Oh, you were in math, anyway.

DB: No, I was in physics.

LS: Oh.

DB: I was in math for about one week.

LS: So, did Oberlin satisfy you?

DB: I'd say I pretty much got what I expected. I was glad I went there. Um, at Oberlin, I was involved in the Young Democrats and I was also a national SDS member but I wasn't active locally. Um, the Young Democrats were taken over by a group before I got there. Well, the first year I was there, they were taken over 00:53:00by a group that were protégés of Eddie Diaz, who was no longer at Oberlin, but who'd been active in the idea of radicals taking over the democratic party and we did a lot of work in the local election at Oberlin after we captured the Young Democrats, and I did that for a couple of years and then I sort of withdrew.

LS: Why?

DB: I don't know. I'd always been active for awhile. Partly, it's my relationship to the other people in the group. I stopped being comfortable with them, or maybe I was envious of not having as much status as some other people did. And I got married and lived in an apartment off campus, which is very 00:54:00unusual at Oberlin. And the people I hung out with were -- they didn't have hippies yet, but they had long hair and beards; not as long as later.

LS: Did you also?

DB: Yeah, my hair was long, too, and I started growing a beard and mustache, then. That made it a little hard to be active in the Democratic Party.

LS: Yes. I can imagine.

DB: But when I came to Madison --

LS: What --

DB: I did go on demonstrations and so on.

LS: At Oberlin?

DB: Yeah. There was a demonstration against the telephone company for not hiring blacks and there were demonstrations in Cleveland to ban the bomb and I'd forgotten what all I went on. I went along with some communists to picket the governor once to pardon; things like that -- sort of in a recreational kind of way.

LS: And your studies were sort of just there --

DB: Yeah.

LS: And you didn't have to worry about them very much, I gather?

DB: I didn't work very hard, but a few times I got A's and a few times I got C's, and sometimes I did the whole semester in the last week. But I squeaked by well enough that I got in with the physics department, here.

LS: But the SDS, the national SDS, you say you were in that. Did you go to national conventions?

DB: No. I was just there for the money.

LS: Oh, I see.

DB: And other stuff.

LS: Were they very active?

DB: Yeah, um, first anti-war demonstrations were pretty much SDS in 1965. Um, there were a lot of different SDS -- it's hard to remember what all there was. There was a political education project in 1964 with a -- maybe they were in 00:56:00Cleveland or Boston, I forgot where, but they worked to support Johnson, and got clear inside of SDS, and that was sort of the end, I would say, with the radicals and the democratic party movement. Ah, I'd forgotten what some of the other projects SDS was doing . . . SDS shortly reorganized itself in 1962 and went through several stages, and 1965 was a big change and they started getting into -- and they were suddenly much larger and they got into mass demonstrations against the war.

LS: Um-hmm. Were you already against the war at that time?

DB: Ah, probably -- I wasn't decided until the end of the summer of '65.

LS: You had thought about it, but you were still ambivalent.

DB: Yes.

LS: I mean, it wasn't that you weren't thinking about it.

DB: Right.

DB: It may have been into the fall, but there were demonstrations going on 00:57:00against it before I really made my mind up. Um, when I came to the University of Wisconsin in 1966, there had already been some big protests here. I felt at home here with all the corresponding groups to what I was used to, except the intellectual level was lower.

LS: Here?

DB: More rhetorical plus careful discussions. The parliamentary maneuvers were here in the meetings.

LS: But cruder.

LS: Where did you live?

DB: On the east side.

LS: In an apartment, or --

DB: Um, we rented a flat in '66 on the second floor and moved out and after nine 00:58:00months, the landlord raised the rent five dollars. [Laughing.]

LS: It was a lot, then, or not a lot?

DB: We were just young and inexperienced. It was $80 and it went to $85, and we thought that was outrageous.

LS: Oh, I see.

DB: I was paying $55 at Oberlin. And then we went through three or four more flats in about a year until we bought a house in 1968.

LS: On the east side also?

DB: On the east side near Marquette School, and I still live there.

LS: Oh, really? So you had enough money to buy a house?

DB: It didn't cost any more. We got an FHA loan with three percent down, monthly payments were probably about $118 and that included taxes and the other. It just went up to $129.

LS: And was your wife also at school?

DB: She was in American History for a semester, and then she dropped out because she sort of got that big block that a lot of women get about not being able to 00:59:00produce real original research. She did fine in her other courses, but she froze up in her seminar.

LS: Really?

DB: Then she had odd jobs for awhile, and then she got a social worker job. And she's still a social worker. She picked up an MSW studying like that.

LS: So you have her income, too, as well as yours.

DB: After the first year.

LS: Oh. Did you get money from your parents?

DB: No, we had quite enough. I had TA income and RA income. She had -- well, she got a loan, educational loan, the first year, and after that, she was working. And when she went back to her MSW, she got some kind of a small grant. There was enough money.

LS: But I've gotten -- were you an RA all along, or were you a TA?

DB: I was a TA for two years and then an RA.

LS: But you had enough to live on? It gave you enough to live on?

DB: Yeah. Again, well, my wife was also getting some money.

LS: Yeah. I mean that first year.

DB: Oh, we --

LS: I just wondered if it was more than --

DB: The previous year we bought an Edsel, and it died and we bought a Volkswagen on Helen's educational loan, a brand new Volkswagen, which she cracked up after nine months.

LS: Oh.

DB: You know, we were doing alright; student lifestyle didn't demand that much money.

LS: I was just going to try to repeat it . . . Obviously, you did have plenty of money to live on.

DB: Well, I guess you want me to talk about what I said about alcohol.

LS: Yeah, well you said you didn't need much --

DB: Yeah, that's what I said.

LS: Yeah.

DB: What I had to spend it on -- we went to the movies and we drank a lot, and then I said that I actually kept an expensive liquor cabinet and mixed drinks, which probably wasn't too typical.

LS: Yeah. And I asked if you got into drugs, at all?

DB: I started using marijuana at Oberlin, occasionally -- used it more and more 01:01:00as time went on. Um, when Helen left me last fall, she was probably smoking up something like $100 a month, and I said that she was really an honest-to-God addict. And then she got withdrawal symptoms and she couldn't sleep; headaches and the whole bit. And she stopped smoking marijuana. And I had quit smoking. There was a time when I smoked as heavily as she did, although not as heavy as she does now. But I sort of quit around 1971 because I had a friend that got caught which I'd first I'd stopped smoking tobacco and that didn't cure it, and then stopped smoking marijuana regularly. And then gave it up almost entirely after I went to work in the bureaucracy in 1974 because I'd get bad feelings 01:02:00about all the interactions I had even thinking about at work that I'd been pushing under the rug.

LS: Anxiety?

DB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

DB: It's hard to remember what else we said.

LS: Well -- ah . . . I wondered about how you got it? Did you ever have any trouble getting it, or what was the process?

DB: O.K. I'd talk about dealing, then. Um, normally the more you got, the more you smoked, the more you tried to get together with other people in a buying coop to buy the marijuana, and after awhile, we'd usually buy it in five gallon lots. At first we'd buy the one gallon, and then the five gallon.

LS: And who would you buy it from?

DB: Dealers. All around town, different types.

LS: How'd you find out who they were?

DB: Um, well, once you knew them, then you would go back to the same guy, but if 01:03:00he quit dealing, you could always go to somebody else, because he'd have friends that would want the business.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: Or you would ask people to buy you some, and they'd get you some, and then you would ask to buy some more from that person, and then he'd introduce you to him.

LS: Were these students, the dealers?

DB: Yes, and you'd tend to meet them -- I didn't -- I didn't hang around the 602 Club, but a friend of mine hung around the 602 Club and he'd meet people that -- some of them knew him and introduced him to others and they'd go together to buy some, buy a pound or buy five pounds.

LS: What's the 602 Club?

DB: This is a bar on 602 University. It's still there. It's sort of a graduate student bar.

LS: And this was a center where you could be pretty sure of finding somebody who'd know somebody --

DB: No, no, not at all. It just so happened that there were some people that 01:04:00hung out there. You know, the graduate students are in the bars for people with more money than undergraduate bars. There's a lot of regulars, and there's sort of extensive social living around that, which included some people who would be dealing on the side.

LS: That's very interesting. I mean, I didn't know about it, but that will --

DB: Yeah, like the English Department people and the TAA -- all of them hung out there, you know, at the next club. Ah, the physics crabs hung out there; Bob March -- some of his friends. Mr. [Krapanich?] from the physics department, not a political person.

LS: Hmm. But the one you mean you got the drugs from.

DB: Yeah, well, he -- I didn't get any drugs from him, but he would meet people.

LS: Yeah.

DB: And go buy some.

LS: And you said sometimes you went to the others on the South Beltline.

DB: Yeah, occasionally there -- usually the people that live around central Madison have -- sometimes the east side of Madison, but there were times when I'd buy from somebody that lived in one of those spiffy apartments south of the beltline.

LS: Hmm. You mentioned somebody who'd been stopped once, twice by the police.

DB: Right. Um, my brother-in-law, I met in the Teaching Assistant Association. I rented him my house in the summer of 1971 and [Tape cuts out.] sister there and married her. He spent that summer dealing, and at the end of summer, he got arrested with a carload of pharmaceuticals in Illinois, and then before he got convicted on that, the same thing happened again. Both times, because of errors he made -- because he was speeding. He was really strung out on speed.

LS: And I asked if he got put in jail, and you said, "yes, and he got fat." [Laughing.]

DB: Yeah. He was sentenced to 15 to 50 for that. His first bust was in Springfield, Illinois, and the police decided that he was the source of all of 01:06:00the drug problems in Springfield and they were going to wipe it out by wiping him out, but actually he was just mostly passing through.

LS: What happened to him? What's happened to him now?

DB: Um, he's a teaching assistant in mathematics at Southern Illinois University.

LS: Is he making a go of it?

DB: Um, well, he's being a TA in math.

LS: Yes. Um, what about -- did you ever get into the harder drugs than marijuana?

DB: I've had acid maybe 10 times. Um, I had cocaine once; smoked some opium. I've used quite a bit of hash.

LS: Was this in groups at parties, or mostly by yourself?

DB: Ah, mostly in groups of two or three. I've had speed and MDA a few times.

LS: Are you sorry now that you did, or are you glad?

DB: No, no. No, I had some really bad trips on acid, but I don't resent having them and they didn't -- done me harm.

LS: And would you do it again, or do you --

DB: I'm afraid -- I'd probably be afraid to do it, but I keep thinking about it.

LS: Hmm. You mean, there was enough interest in it, enough --

DB: There was some horrible things. There was once when I was trapped for all eternity in another place that wasn't very nice where I was sort of a weak God who created that other place. I could create any place, but couldn't find a way back to this place, and it was actually infinitely long.

LS: Hmm.

DB: And it happened more than once. There'd be this thing about -- um, time -- there really is another place, there. It's really scary. That is, the trip doesn't just get over. In time, here, you know, the trip is over in eight or ten hours.

LS: Yeah.

DB: But in time there, it could be infinitely long.

LS: Yeah.

DB: So saying you're going to come down sometime does not help at all. It really might be infinitely long from now.

LS: Do you go to the same place? Did you go to the same place the second time?

DB: In a way, it's always the same place. In a way, it's different places each time.

LS: Yeah, I can imagine.

DB: Ah, there have been times when I've gotten there, pretty close, not quite the same, on grass. Well, maybe not on grass, but on hash.

LS: But other pleasures may avoid the possibility of that kind of --

DB: It's not -- it's not other pleasures. That is it. The fact of being in a different place.

LS: So, scary isn't all -- all --

DB: No. Sometimes there's some really beautiful things. But I'm intellectual, and I would get off on head trips. I'd be much more likely to have bad trips than people who were more aesthetic and central.

LS: Would you --

DB: I would try to think about things, and you can't think.

LS: Yeah.

DB: You get your brain stuck in a groove, and --

LS: Would you do this on weekends, so you'd be over it by when you had to go back to classes, or didn't that matter?

DB: Usually, but occasionally you might do it on a weekday. Usually it'd be a Friday night or Saturday night thing. You'd probably drop -- oh, it depends . . . sometimes friends would come and visit us from out of town and we would take acid Saturday afternoon and maybe come down and be done with it -- after you start -- you go up for two hours of really high stuff on an ideal trip where you don't get into a bad thing and it takes forever or something -- you go up for a couple of hours and weird stuff happens and then you start coming down. You're no longer confused and all flashy and stuff. It's still reasonable, but there's still weird stuff going on, and you can go back up, then, by smoking some marijuana.

LS: Oh.

DB: And so we'd do that and maybe keep blowing dope until 4 o'clock in the 01:10:00morning or so. It takes a long time to get enough off it so you can go to sleep, and you try to go to sleep, but you're still coming down. You get all these really strong, flashy, buzzy, hallucinating pictures as soon as you close your eyes and its' so exciting, you couldn't possibly go to sleep.

LS: But you don't feel sick?

DB: Oh, the first few times you take it, you do feel sick, yeah.

LS: Was this a sort of principal part of your life for awhile, or is this just going along with everything else, physics and politics and TA --

DB: The principal part. It was part of self-identity, I guess. There were people that didn't take drugs and they were different from people that did.

LS: Do you know which ones were and which ones weren't?

DB: Yeah, the people that did had long hair and beards and wore dirty clothes, and the people that didn't, didn't. There was really a big split there for awhile. You couldn't tell who took drugs by their clothes, in one way. That is, there could be straight looking people that took drugs, but you could be 01:11:00absolutely certain that somebody that wore hippy clothes took drugs.

LS: Really?

DB: Yep. For a while.

LS: Oh, until it cut off so that everybody --

DB: Well, at first -- if you're walking down the street with long hair, you were a homosexual, not that you were, but everyone responded to you that way.

LS: How?

DB: Because the long hair meant women and it really upset men who had long hair.

LS: That was a long time ago, isn't it?

DB: If you were doing anything, you were on the other side of the social divide, and the other things that went along with being on the other side of the social divide were using drugs. Maybe a lot of other things; a lot of attitude things about politics and sex and --

LS: That's true. I'd forgotten that there was a period when long hair was just new, and you definitely put a bunch of qualities to anybody with long hair. I hadn't thought homosexuality, though, was part of it.

DB: Well, I think that's what it really came down to was that men's homosexual 01:12:00fears were aroused, and that's what was most outrageous about it. The point of doing it was the outrageousness. It meant the same thing, but the way in which it was outrageous was -- and it is; it was intended to be sensual and sexual and --

LS: But, so, when you let your hair grow long, was the intent to cause the divide as though you act like that to shock everybody?

DB: Yeah.

LS: Whereas five years later, people like it that way.

DB: Yeah, but it still is, you know, there was some of that left, but all the edges had gotten buzzed over and there were people with long hair that didn't do drugs and things were not so clear-cut and -- there was still that core of -- I was among the TA leadership. I had the longest hair, and the TAs were older, for one thing. They were an older generation of radicals.

LS: Thank you.

DB: Not than me, but than the people -- the hippy movement and people with long 01:13:00hair. And another thing is there was sort of distinctions in the radical movement -- I don't know what the radical movement is, but in the thing that was going on, there were -- well, after the riot started, we would talk about "street radicals," or "street lefties"; someone who had a little bit of a jargon and threw rocks and had long hair and probably did a lot of, "well, you knows," and "ohs," and all that when you talked to them.

LS: Yeah.

DB: It was extremely imprecise, so it's sort of the idea that long hair and hippy clothes would go along with talking slow and being careless in thought, and I was sort of a contradiction to that. What I was trying to say is that the TAA people weren't so much into the hippy side of things, although almost all of them used grass, and probably half of them had had acid once or twice.

LS: Um-hmm. And the street hippies were -- so a TA wouldn't have been a street hippy.

DB: No, not the leadership group I'm talking about. No, they were a very different group. You know, they were intellectual radicals, the sort I felt comfortable with from Oberlin.

LS: So you really belonged to both? Would that be the --

DB: Well, or dis-belonged to both, I don't know. I used more drugs than the other TA people did.

LS: But you were more intellectual than the straight hippies.

DB: Probably than the TA people, too.

LS: Ah. So, yeah, go on about that.

DB: What's there to say?

LS: Ah, the leadership of the TAA, then, was not -- were really more interested in the politics and power than they were in their own -- what, their graduate work?

DB: Well, I was not very interested in graduate work, exactly.

LS: But you -- I know you were very bright and what you're saying is that you were, is that --

DB: I wasn't saying I was bright, which I am. I was saying that I was serious. I'm interested in truth, you know, as an objective.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And I put energy into constructing that thing, more than most people do.

LS: So you come along to the TAA and you're sort of an oddity to them, because you're much more extreme. Is that right that most of them are?

DB: Well, I'm --yeah, to some extent, but I think they enjoyed having me around.

LS: Did they make you respectable, is that it?

DB: No, well, I don't know. I guess to some extent, I had a following in the union; people who liked it when I stood up to speak in the membership, anyway.

LS: Yes. Why?

DB: Well, I made very reasonable sounding speeches from a certain point of view.

DB: Something I wanted to talk which changes the subject slightly -- in 1967, a friend of ours from Oberlin came to visit with a new girlfriend that he had from Oberlin. He dropped out of Oberlin and hung around the SDS national office for awhile, hung around the Joint Project in Chicago for awhile and there he met some people that we had independently met here and we had a party where those people, and this fella, his name is Walt Millikan, and those people were Jack Kittredge; Jack and Marge Kittredge and Millikan had sort of a mascot type on the Joint Project and he had sort of a mascot type at our group in Oberlin. He 01:17:00was younger. He was about 16 when he came to Oberlin and acted real young, sort of a child protégé. He ran around with a lot of ideas that were half-baked, and we were both trying to treat him as an equal, even though both of us sort of thought of him as a mascot. So it was sort of a strange thing; we realized we both had the same view of him.

LS: Is he somebody who's name I should know?

DB: No, just some fella. Anyhow, I decided it'd be better to name names than not to, and Kittredge was the name I was mentioning, because that would be more interesting -- because Kittredge organized the Near East Side Community Coop on the east side.

LS: Oh.

DB: I don't know if you've run across that particular group, but --

LS: Well, I have the question -- I mean, I don't know much about it except --

DB: I don't either. It's defunct, defunct like most of them. It was just a storefront. They did child care, community organizing. They had a mothers' 01:18:00group. They published a community newsletter for awhile.

LS: When?

DB: '68/'69.

LS: Is this the coop -- this isn't the coop --

DB: No. It's a completely different one of many different ones.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: It's not the common market, and it's not the Mif -- no, not Mifflin, the Williamson Street Coop, and it wasn't a grocery coop.

LS: It must have been one of the first ones.

DB: It wasn't a coop.

LS: Oh.

DB: Except in terms of daycare. It's sort of an organizing project, and they had a printing press for a while -- what'd they call it . . . printing, printers -- they needed printing jobs and they printed up some of the propaganda used in the TA strike.

LS: Mmm . . . that's interesting. What motivated that?

DB: I steered the business to them.

LS: But they weren't students?

DB: Um . . . let's see . . . no, I guess Kittredge never was a student. He was 01:19:00always a non-student. He was -- Kittredge was from -- they're divorced now so her name is no longer Kittredge. They were from Carlton College.

DB: Well, anyhow, Walt Millikan came and visited us in the summer of '67. He visited us a couple of times, but in 1967, the last time I saw him, I drove with him to California, and that summer, he was being a leader in a leaderless commune of hippies in Berkeley called the Berkeley Provos and I spent a week there, living in their Provo commune.

LS: It's a term that comes from the old Provos in Holland. I know they were rather a delightful group because they drew on things with a sense of humor, which was rather rare.

DB: They had a -- the Berkeley Provos had a bus with the usual hippy, multi-colored stuff on the side and we'd drive around to the bus stops in the afternoons and pick people up and take them places for free, and have a lot of fun with who would be willing to accept the ride and who'd refuse.

LS: Yeah.

DB: And there was a park called Provo Park -- that wasn't its original name, but it started being called that, where they'd eat free lunch every supper and later on it was scrounge food from the grocery stores and they'd put out lunch for the winos and hippies and students and -- there were just hippies all over the Bay Area -- people -- a lot of them were students. People had been students in the winter, and that summer, they'd decided not to work and they became hippies instead and they went back to being students in the winter. Others -- there's a lot of working class people, though, that had no place to go back to.

LS: But they didn't call themselves hippies.

DB: No, these were all hippies.

LS: Oh, I see.

DB: This was the hippy movement. It included a lot of different types. It's a [??] member of the working class. That's not the image --

LS: No.

DB: --people had. We went to a convention of sociologists in San Francisco. 01:21:00There was a little -- they gave a thing where the organization of hippies, I think that's what the name of it was -- the umbrella organization of hippy organizations which had various front groups like a switchboard, communications and so on. It organized a get-together with the sociologist convention there. They did a sort of a presentation which was amusing and, of course, the hippies broke it up at the end, you know, radically ignoring the questions and throwing balls and all that.

LS: Did the sociologists wish they weren't there?

DB: No, no. They got the show they came for, I think.

LS: Did you find this all very typical of things that were happening in Madison?

DB: Well, I knew those things were going on. It cast a light on what was happening.

LS: Ah-huh.

DB: Everyone knew. Um--

DB: There was a period of time, there, when being hippy was the flash of your dress, you know. The student dress is drab, you know, denim sport shirt. The hippies dressed a lot flashier, and that didn't come to Madison so much, although it did a little, and it was a little farther out, the dress flashy in addition -- flashy in a costume sense, not in a sense of necessarily spending a lot of money. And I took a plane back. I didn't plan on hitchhiking back, because someone cracked up Volkswagen and right after that, the Provos split in two as they'd been planning and one group went to establish another commune in Denver, which made a lot newspaper headlines. The story went around that some woman in that commune had killed her young daughter, I guess, with a broken Coke 01:23:00bottle and then the follow-ups came around four days later on the back pages saying it wasn't true at all.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: I never heard what really happened.

LS: So this was all definitely a very different experience from being in Madison, this trip out to San Francisco.

DB: Yeah, in a way, but it also cast a light on what was happening -- shifted perceptions. My hair wasn't long then. It was maybe a little bushy by comparison. I did have a beard and mustache, but the sociologists took me for a hippy.

LS: The sociologist what?

DB: The sociologists took me for a hippy.

LS: Oh, O.K., yes -- by comparison.

LS: Where does the anti-war -- were you active at all in the anti-war movement here?

DB: Oh, I went to the demonstrations. No, I guess not. I went to demonstrations. That was about it, and the riots. I was a hanger-on around at all the riots like all the rioters except for 15 stone throwers.

LS: You mean there were 15 people doing things and everybody else was --

DB: Was providing cover.

LS: Oh, what do you mean by that?

DB: Meaning innocent bystanders -- guilty, innocent bystanders.

LS: You mean deliberately being --

DB: Yeah, yeah. I mean, they were there to have a good time and being excited and --

LS: So you're not talking about the groups that were completely unassociated people who were --

DB: There are no innocent bystanders at a riot.

LS: Oh.

DB: If you're there, it's because you want to be entertained or something, you know? You're not entirely innocent. The innocent bystanders run the other way.

LS: I guess you're right. I thought maybe you meant that it was deliberately 01:25:00planned that there would be some people who would do the acting and some people who would --

DB: Well, it was a matter of guts or malicious intent or something, I don't know. Um, but in a way, it was certainly intentional. I mean, everyone knew what the mechanics were. You were right in the riot core. You understood what was happening. There's no secret, and the police hated them all equally. Well, they knew who the real actives were after awhile. They got to recognize them on sight and run after them in the crowds. That's part of the job of the crowds was to provide cover for the stone throwers. There was sort of an inter-penetration: the demonstrations and the riots, you know, it's hard to know which is which, and demonstrations would get more aggressive as time went on, even when they weren't planned as a riot, and the most aggressive people in the demonstrations would be the same people that were throwing stones in the riots, so in our picket lines during the TAA strike, the real aggressive people that were really hassling the trucks that were coming through would be the same guys that were 01:26:00stone throwers and the police knew exactly who they were, and you could stand there and they really hated these guys and they'd go after them and do numerous illegal things because they knew what was going on, and even if they didn't catch him yet and couldn't prove it, they knew who was doing it.

LS: There were, too, enough people who do this.

DB: Right.

LS: Were you at the Dow riot?

DB: Yeah. I came in after it turned into a riot. I was an innocent bystander. I got up close enough to see where people were throwing rocks, and I knew something was going on. I walked up the hill, and somebody came walking down the hill with blood running down his face.

LS: Where had you been?

DB: Sterling Hall.

LS: Hmm.

DB: And I got up there --

LS: Even though you knew it was --

DB: I hadn't gone to sit in and play [commerce?] or anything.

LS: So you were curious to see what was happening.

DB: Yeah, and there were the police in full riot gear and crowds around shouting at them and the police dancing every so often in quadrants and clubbing somebody down and people throwing rocks out of -- the rock throwers would stand sort of in the middle of the crowd. They wouldn't be in the front lines, and throw over the tops of the heads.

LS: And did you just stand there, or did you get involved?

DB: I sort of -- I mean, I was right up in the press of the crowd. I wasn't throwing any rocks. Um, and the police started tear-gassing and the crowds dispersed. That was the first time I ever got tear-gassed, just slightly.

LS: Hmm. How did you feel about the protest itself?

DB: Ah, I was very angry at the police. I felt it was more their fault.

LS: And about the handling of the thing by the chancellor --

DB: I'd forgotten how the University responded. The TAAs had a strike and I went 01:28:00out on strike. I voted for the strike. Um, and I met my students and I told them that I wasn't going to teach class that day and why, and said that I would be willing to go out and sit in the lawn, not in the university building, and talked about things at random, which we did. One of my students complained very vociferously -- Steven Jorenson was his name, and two years later, I ran into him again in the middle of a welfare rights demonstration and he had grown his hair long and shifted sides.

LS: Huh.

DB: And he ended up sitting in and I sat in in the Capitol on my mother's demonstration. I think that was two years later. I'm not sure -- whenever that was.

LS: Did he say anything disparaging?

DB: No. I kidded him a little.

LS: You couldn't have done much of that as a teenage -- of talking about things 01:29:00that weren't physics, I suppose --

DB: Well, my general rule is I talk about anything people want to talk about. It's their worry what they're going to learn, not mine. But it usually ended up being about physics, because they were worried about the next test.

LS: Was it usually more than two or three times, that you'd talk about other things, or -- I mean, this was a problem, then, because English and History TAs could more or less easily talk about other subjects, but math --

DB: Sometimes I would talk about what physics was like as a career, but there aren't any easy lead-ins from forced diagrams to tear gas.

LS: No.

DB: What else is there to talk about?

LS: Did you know Robert Cadmus?

DB: I can't remember who he is.

LS: He was another TA and he was in the TAA program and the he dropped out because he felt that it was too -- he was interested in teaching.

DB: There was definitely a movement in the TAA that was interested in finding what good teaching is, and trying to be good at teaching.

LS: And he felt that the TAA was really more interested in the economic concerns.

DB: Yeah, the physics TAs were kind of conservative. They were the -- they went on strike on the theory that people were being heard in other departments, and they needed to have some of that. They folded before the strike was over.

LS: Oh, they did. Do you think it was their own conservatism, or fear of the people in the department or --

DB: Oh, probably a little of each.

LS: What -- you said you worked at one time or another with six

LS: --or fear of the people in the department or --

DB: Oh, probably a little of each.

LS: What -- you said you worked at one time or another with six or seven faculty members.

DB: Yes.

LS: Which ones -- what part of physics were you in?

DB: High energy.

LS: That's not with the accelerators, is it?

DB: Yes.

LS: Oh, it is.

DB: Not the -- there's a low energy accelerator, and the nuclear physics group has an accelerator in the basement at Sterling.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Not that accelerator. High energy physics works with bigger accelerators in other places.

LS: So who did you work with?

DB: Um, well, my major professor was Pondrom, Lee G. Pondrom, and I fired him 01:32:00and worked for -- I can't think of his name . . . I can see his face, but I had very little --

LS: An older man or a young one?

DB: Um, younger.

LS: I just wonder if --

DB: Not younger than Pondrom.

LS: You met anyone like Barshall. Did you know him?

DB: Well, I knew who they all were, but I've forgotten them.

LS: Hmm.

DB: I was at faculty meetings and I sat on committees and --

LS: So you did go to faculty meetings.

DB: Well, I pioneered it.

LS: Oh, you did.

DB: I went to them and said, "If you don't let us in, you're in violation of the open meetings law of the state and I will take you to court." And they said, "Oh, well, we don't want to violate the law," and so they let me in.

LS: Is that when Hugh Richards was chairman then?

DB: Yeah.

LS: Was it Durand?

DB: I don't remember who was chair.

LS: Oh.

DB: But Hugh Richards was chairing part of that time. Yeah, Durand -- maybe he was the chairman next, after that.

LS: Well, they didn't raise a fuss.

DB: Well, you know, they didn't like it much, because they had been closed before that.

LS: Hmm.

DB: And then for awhile, I made sure that there was some student at every faculty meeting.

LS: Did it have any effect? I mean --

DB: I wouldn't know. I'm sure it made their conversations more stilted. Some faculty members came around and told me it was the best thing that ever happened to the faculty meetings, because they're much shorter. The faculty were not as willing to make fools of themselves with students present.

LS: Where were you when Sterling Hall was bombed?

DB: Lying in bed.

LS: Do you remember --

DB: Is that a police question? The police asked me that question.

LS: Did they think you might have done it? Why were you talking to police about it?

DB: Well, a week before Sterling Hall was bombed, I moved a big stack of Teaching Assistants Association files from the grievance committee from my 01:34:00office in Sterling Hall to the TA office on Brooks Street and on the way, they were too much to carry and I had to put them down and the secretary of department was walking by, who knew me, and he said, "Well, I'll watch those, if they're too much for you to carry. You can go back and get a cardboard box," which I did. So I knew the police would be coming around.

LS: You mean, because they say you had a fast mouth.

DB: Yeah, right, so they asked a bunch of pseudo-coy questions which were ridiculous. I can't even remember what they were. They asked me to take a lie detector test, which I refused.

LS: How did you feel about it?

DB: Having the police hassle me?

LS: The whole thing, the beginning of the bombing.

DB: I don't know -- that whole period, there was this feeling of mixed emotions. It really was a pre-revolutionary situation, and I was sort of in favor of there being a revolution. Um . . . in a limited sense -- there was maybe one or two 01:35:00percent of the population that really felt that the current order was not legitimate, and that was enough of the germs that could have spread. It was possible. It didn't -- partly because of the bombing at Sterling Hall. At the same -- I always had these constant feelings, like when SDS would get together and I went to an SDS meeting where they voted to take over a building and then they didn't. This was -- when the hell was that -- '68, maybe?

LS: Ah-huh.

DB: Big meeting -- 600 people in Chemistry. I argued against taking over the building, maybe a little, although not too precipitously because the audience was too obviously going to do it, I mean vote for it.

LS: For taking?

DB: Yeah, taking the building.

LS: Didn't leaving them [?] also a threat?

DB: I don't recall Soglin addressing it.

LS: I thought -- I know of a meeting in which they voted not to take -- anyway . . . All right. . . let's not bother -- go ahead -- you were feeling that things 01:36:00were coming to a head.

DB: Well, I felt that the real actives, the street radicals, the stone throwers, the "let's take a building type" -- they didn't have a lot of theory -- they weren't too clear on where they were going, what they were going to accomplish, or what they were going to do when they go there, and they weren't giving it careful discussion, but yet they were moving things along, so I always had a very ambivalent feeling about them and about the riots and all that, about what the effects were going to be. You couldn't help but be excited and interested in what was happening and also a lot of negative feelings; you couldn't see out [good work?], and yet you couldn't deal with the alternative was; you couldn't see how you could have a revolution without these crazies. And I probably had some of those same feelings about Sterling Hall, although probably more negative. I don't remember too clearly. I don't know that if I knew at that 01:37:00point that that was sort of the end of the new left. I think at some point it seemed to me that the bombing of Sterling Hall was the end of the new left; it was possible to put in political force.

LS: But when you heard that it had happened, had you thought of it in terms of this is possibly the beginning, is that what you were thinking?

DB: No. I can't see how anything -- I can't see myself thinking that something great was going to come out of the bombing at Sterling Hall, particularly -- you know, you knew right away that some people died.

LS: Yes.

DB: No. I think my reaction right away was that's sort of it . . . that's a cross that we're going to have to bear, and it was really going to dampen things down.

LS: Is that too bad or is that just as well?

DB: It's too bad. I mean, that would be sort of the end of the political 01:38:00movement that had some promise, at least.

LS: What, then -- you woke up, then, you heard about it and you came over to the building?

DB: I can't remember when I saw the building, if it was that day or the next day; maybe you couldn't get close that day.

LS: But your own particular area wasn't affected?

DB: That's right. I must have tried to get over -- I must have tried to get in that afternoon to go see what had happened to my office. My office was shaken by the blast, I think, but nothing too much messed up; maybe some things were moved around. Um . . . I can't remember. It was probably two or three days before they let us in, but -- to see what the damage was.

LS: A week, I think -- and when did the police come and question you?

DB: It was about a week later. They were slow getting around to it.

LS: Did that make you angry?

DB: That they were so slow, or that they questioned me?

LS: That they questioned you.

DB: Well, I mean, I sort of generally had a chip on my shoulder towards the police. I didn't -- I probably started calling the police "pigs" about 1969 and 01:39:00probably stopped about two years ago. It took that long to get out of the habit, even though no one was reinforcing it.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: I definitely hated them. I guess I'm over sort of reflex hatred when I see them now. You don't get a very kind view of them when you go on demonstration.

LS: No. Even some of the best of us were affected very easily. Um, you didn't know the Armstrong brothers, did you?

DB: No. Um, one of the Armstrongs may have hung out at the 602 Club once in a while; Carlton, I think. It was kind of long before he got involved in politics. I knew people that knew him, but I didn't know him.

LS: Do you have any more, else to say about -- I've interviewed Hugh Richards on 01:40:00the bombing. You know, they were working for months after that to get everything, well, I guess even longer than that to get back to shape again.

DB: I think I might have told you last time about Barbara Kennedy calling up. It was the day after the bombing.

LS: No, what was that?

DB: By then, Barbara Kennedy had moved to Michigan where she had gone to school before. She was with some radical group out there. She called up to hear about it. She was really excited and pleased and happy and laughing.

LS: How many of the people you knew were responding that way?

DB: I knew some people that responded -- leftists that were, "Well, it had to happen, and we're just going to have to get used to it . . . casualties," but 01:41:00none of them that were really pleased around here, I don't think.

LS: Did many of them comment on the fact that it was the Army Math Research Center, not the physics department?

DB: Well, the Army Math Research Center did get it, too.

LS: People were saying all they had to do was pick up their pencils and paper and move to another building.

DB: Right -- in terms of -- I see what you're saying, right, yeah. No, I don't believe I ever heard that comment from a leftist.

LS: So we're back on April 26th, I think, at 2:30 -- nice day. Um, to ask you to talk some more about that period in the late 60's. I had some more questions about it, but anything you can think of that you can elaborate about.

LS: I was wondering, for one thing, whether you had anything to do with the Union, with the -- whether you went there to eat.

DB: Probably in 1968/'69, 1970, I'd go to the Union maybe three times a month with a couple of other people from physics and we'd -- particularly in the spring or fall, we'd eat out on the terrace and -- a lot of physics people went there regularly. It was a regular -- people like Bob March and other professors and high energy physics students.

LS: Um, so this was faculty and graduate students, eating together?

DB: Yeah.

LS: Were you in on that?

DB: Not too much. I knew some of the people out there.

LS: Hmm. And did -- when you didn't eat there, where did you eat when you were on campus?

DB: I often brought my own lunch and I'd just eat in my office.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: I guess that was my usual thing. I would take a lunch.

LS: Yeah, and then otherwise you'd eat at home.

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: Did you mix with other graduates much?

DB: Um, you brought that question up before, and I was thinking about the parties I went to; that would be about the only time. The parties -- usually they'd be a bunch of graduate student parties, although occasionally there'd be some undergraduates there.

LS: And is this just the way things usually are? The graduate students have their own social life, and --

DB: I think so. I met some undergraduates when I was in -- when I got involved with helping MULO organize and Res Hall organized.

LS: Oh. And that's later on.

DB: Right. It's after the TAA strike.

LS: O.K. I'll ask you about that later. Ah, what about faculty? Did you go to any faculty homes, or --

DB: Um, a couple of times I went to functions that physics professors invited me to and they were kind of strained and uncomfortable and I have no desire to repeat the experience. I went to one at Hugh Richards' house.

LS: Hmm, and this was before all the graduate students are through?

DB: I guess it must have been because I was taking a course from him, but I can't remember what course I took from him, which is strange. I don't remember having a course with him. I don't know why.

LS: Yeah. Was this before -- did you take sort of -- you spoke last time of having -- the way you put it, was you fired Pondrom.

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: What did you mean? I mean, I knew what you meant, but what was your -- why did you use that word?

DB: Well, I wasn't getting along with him very well. I decided to get another major professor.

LS: Was he trying to direct you too much, or politics or legal matters?

DB: Um, not getting along with him was most -- well, I was once in a car where 01:45:00he and another professor and another graduate student, we were -- in high energy physics, you tend to go off and live in dormitories around accelerators for weeks on end sometimes when you're running experiments and you all go out for dinner together on expense accounts. And then that's about the only pleasant time of the day. The rest of the time you're working or sleeping. And out in the car, we got into a discussion or argument about Bordieu and I don't back down just because somebody happens to be my professor, and we were talking about the Soviet Union and I was giving my opinion on what economics and society are like, and Pondrom said, "Burress, how do you know? You've never been there," and I said, "That's a profoundly anti-logic statement. How do you know about a high energy physics experiment that you haven't done yourself? The answer is: I can read." And the other physics professor said, "He's really got ya," and Pondrom sort of fumed all the rest of the night. And after that, we just didn't talk much.

LS: Hmm. That's a small trip on which to --

DB: It's an example.

LS: Yeah.

DB: He was conservative and I'm not.

LS: Oh, I see. He was generally really conservative.

DB: Fairly conservative, yeah.

LS: And where was the campus that you --

DB: That's only one side of it. Another side of it was -- I just -- I wasn't working very hard, and I can't imagine he was too happy about that. I did do some work and some of the things I did were worthwhile, so he didn't really ride me too much, although occasionally he sort of suggested that maybe I should work harder at physics and watch the TAA another time. I got my prelims put off because I was in the middle of the TA strike and I'd been enjoying it and just didn't want to worry about prelims right then.

LS: Yeah. So this was already four years after you had been working already four years -- three.

DB: Let's see . . . this was 1970. I took my prelims and also went through the strike.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Yeah. Half way through there.

LS: But you must have severed relationships with him long before that.

DB: No. It was after this.

LS: Oh, I see. So you did work with him for quite a long time.

DB: Well, for a couple of years, yeah. I was a TA until '68 and then I was with Pondrom till '70.

LS: Ah-huh. So not a TA for him?

DB: No.

LS: So I can't ask you how he was as a teacher.

DB: And I -- generally, I was not very excited about the work, I guess, a lot of it, and I just shifted to a cosmic ray group, which wasn't that different. And I wasn't that excited about the professional -- the life that was opening up before me, and I couldn't -- say here was somebody I wanted to be like. Here was a group I aspired to join. They were just functionaries doing their job and they 01:48:00had a fairly narrow kind of expertise; not a real broad, intellectual interest in a lot of things.

LS: Have you met physicists elsewhere with whom you think might have inspired you more if they had been working with you, or -- I mean, was it because of the people here, or because of the subject matter, do you think?

DB: I'd say this is probably a fairly dull school for physics. The men are kind of dull. I mean, I had that sense from what people say about other schools.

LS: Hmm.

DB: I mean, as physics goes, physics is kind of still trying to get people who are a little more intellectually interested than, say, chemists.

LS: A little more what?

DB: Intellectually interested.

LS: Yes, that's what I thought. I guess they were -- I mean, maybe they were -- in comparison to some other places, I gather they were quite a liberal department than --

DB: Yes.

LS: With their politics and compared to Chemistry.

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: As an example.

LS: I was just wondering if there was any particular time where you sort of turned off physics, or whether it happened so gradually that you can't pinpoint?

DB: No, I couldn't pinpoint it. I mean, I know exactly the time that I made the decision.

LS: To get out?

DB: Right.

LS: Yes.

DB: It was very definite event. I had a fight with a post-doc that I was working with and I said, "I quit," and I took a plane home and started an experiment in Colorado.

LS: Hmm. Was this a post-doc from Madison?

DB: Yes. He's still there. Now he's a research scientist, might be his title. He's still a friend of mine.

LS: Hmm. Was it an academic argument or a political one?

DB: Oh, I suppose his politics are moderate left-lib. The argument was over -- I don't remember what it was. It was some trivial thing about our work. I just felt shitty and wasn't going to put up with it anymore and I quit.

LS: You must have been ready to anyway.

DB: Um-hmm. I spent a depressed summer up in the mountains and -- the owner of the grant, the prime investigator--it was a collaboration of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan--and the prime investigator for Michigan would come into do an experiment three, four times a year, mostly in the winter for two weeks, which he would spend one and a half weeks off skiing Vail, and then he'd sort of review the troops and then fly off to go home to physics conferences, and the work was being done by graduate students and post-docs living in dormitories up on the mountains.

LS: Were the others bitter about this?

DB: Oh, I think everyone was aware of the little status distinctions.

LS: This was a Michigan man; not a UW man.

DB: Yeah, although that was true of not Reeder, but it wasn't so blatant. Reeder was my professor. He's the only one I can think of.

LS: I know Robert Cadmus spoke of that a little delicately -- I mean, the problem of doing research and having somebody else have his name, or I guess the custom in the physics department is that the student puts his name first and then the faculty member has his second.

DB: I don't know. I never got in any publications.

LS: A problem of everyone in graduate school.

DB: I didn't crack it.

LS: What was your -- let's see . . . I'm still thinking of the year '66, '67. 01:52:00The SDS was very active then, but you had dropped -- you said you went to some of the meetings?

DB: Um, maybe two or three.

LS: But you really just weren't -- you weren't part of that whole group.

DB: No, I didn't identify with their line of reflections. They were too gung ho and didn't want to stop and think.

LS: Hmm. That's interesting.

LS: What was your draft status?

DB: 2S all the way through.

LS: What was 2S?

DB: Student deferment.

LS: Oh. I see how removed I was from this.

DB: I was the last cohort that could parlay 2S permanently. They changed regulations so that you could only do it for four years and then you were 1A and it was the draw and all that.

LS: And you just got out just in time?

DB: Yeah. I could keep my 2S for --

LS: Forever, did you say?

DB: Um-hmm. As long as I was a student.

LS: So what happened when you left the -- whatever it was.

DB: What did happen? I can't remember. When I dropped out, it was 1971. I planned to apply for a CO, but I never got around to it.

LS: So you didn't have to, presumably?

DB: Nothing -- they just never came and got me. I'm not sure why. Maybe there was a number. I guess the first drawing did apply to my people, too. That's how it worked.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: Maybe I got a high number? I just -- I don't remember.

LS: Anyway --

DB: But, anyhow, I got out of it, without doing much about it. Except once or twice, I forgot to send in my credentials to prove I was still a student, and then I sent them a last minute telegram saying, "Hold your horses," because they classified me as 1A, and I appealed, and they always shipped it back.

LS: And there was no problem with that? It just happened nobody came to say, "Are you really . . .? "

DB: No. They just changed it back to 2S. And my younger brother was 1A and got drafted. He filed -- actually, he got classified 1A. He knew he was going to get drafted. He took a test to join the Air Force and then he applied for a CO and got it and did his work at University Hospitals here, so my draft board is not [in hands?] with him.

LS: That was Stevens Point.

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: Did you suffer from any of the guilt feelings that students were said to have suffered at that time?

DB: I don't know. I mean, I felt it was wrong. I didn't feel people should be drafted. I -- yeah, I suppose it's guilt. I don't know what it is. It's a sense of self-consciousness. It's the same feeling I have about any kind of things 01:55:00where I'm being treated the way anybody ought to be treated and a lot of other people aren't, and there's a certain awareness I have; maybe it's guilt. I don't exactly see it as guilt. It's sort of -- I guess what I have is the feeling I wouldn't know what to say to the people that are being screwed.

LS: Hmm. Your [right?] was coming out of the time, I see more how that can --

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: Um, The Cardinal -- I've just been reading through that year's issue, and it occurred to me to wonder how much the radical students read The Cardinal, and what they thought of the newspaper.

DB: Well, I read it. It was certainly inferior to The Oberlin Review in terms of quality of writing and thought. Ah, on the other hand, I'd say it was all 01:56:00through this period the best underground newspaper in Madison.

LS: The best --

DB: Underground newspaper in Madison.

LS: Underground -- why do you say "underground?"

DB: Ah, they had a underground newspaper style, style of writing, language, comic strips, news articles.

LS: As Kaleidoscope was coming out. What about -- do you remember that?

DB: Yeah. I didn't read Kaleidoscope much. After it folded, I knew some of the people that worked on it.

LS: Who -- who did you know?

DB: Ah, there was a woman . . . Ann Kossen, is that her name? No.

LS: Don't know. All I know is the name of [Knobsen?] Mozel. Is that right?

DB: Who?

LS: Mozel?

DB: I don't know. Ann Gordon, there we go.

LS: Oh, Ann Gordon. She was a TA also.

DB: Um-hmm. And she was involved in TAA.

LS: Yeah.

DB: She was a dilettante. She sort of collected politic movements.

LS: But Kaleidoscope was too hard to get a hold of, or --

DB: Ah, maybe I'm confused. Um . . . Connections -- that was the predecessor to Kaleidoscope.

LS: Connections, that's right. That came out.

DB: And then after it folded, Kaleidoscope pretty much got what was left of it. That's the one Ann Gordon worked on.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And I'm not sure, but Mark Knox may have been in on that one, too. I don't remember.

LS: Were they important, these papers, do you think, for --

DB: Well, there'd be an event, like a poster or something, and everyone would hear about it and get the issue and it would get passed around. That was true of Connections and Kaleidoscope and it's still true, occasionally with Takeover. You know, they do things that get in the Cap Times and left community [Dig Sale?]. Or sometimes they do things that don't get in the Cap Times because the Cap Times wouldn't have the guts to run them. [Laughing.]

LS: But The Cardinal you read because that was sort of the --

DB: That was just sort of a basic newspaper.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Like people read The New York Times.

LS: Did you read the Cap Times or State Journal?

DB: Yeah. I always took one or the other, usually the Cap Times. Right now, I'm taking both, mostly so I can get the want ads in the morning.

LS: Oh.

DB: And call people up and buy things before they're sold.

LS: You said you were involved in Guerilla Theater at one point, and I'd be very curious to know how that -- how you got into it, what happened, where it happened.

DB: Ah, it was the summer of 1972. I dropped out -- I was at loose ends. I wasn't able to find a job. I spent some time trying to write, blew a lot of dope; did a lot of different things. One of the things I did was -- there was a workshop weekend to learn about Guerilla Theater, so I signed up for it and went to it.

LS: Where, here in Madison?

DB: Yes. On the outside, a fella whose name I forgot came in to lead it. He was 01:59:00into Guerilla Theater in New York City.

LS: Hmm. And where did the workshop happen?

DB: Um, it was over a weekend with sleeping bags and all in a Unitarian Church on the far west side.

LS: You don't mean the --

DB: No, not that one. I think it was Unitarian. It's way out -- at that point, it was still pretty much country where it is, but I think there's being built around there. They were obviously about to build around there. Um, off Gammon Road -- someplace out there.

LS: So, ah, and how many people were involved in this?

DB: In the workshop there were only 35 people. In the Guerilla Theater Group was maybe eight people, and it lasted about a summer. We just worked on a few skits.

LS: I think we better stop it.

LS: So, I think you were going to describe the Guerilla Theater, which --

DB: There's nothing to say about it.

LS: Did you say it went the whole summer?

DB: Yes.

LS: But you didn't sleep out there in sleeping bags.

DB: No. The workshop was just the one weekend.

LS: Ah.

DB: But then there was a troop that lasted for the summer and pulled around the time. I guess it lasted past the Republican convention. We talked about going there and doing some skits, but we never got it together. But I did go by myself.

LS: Down to Miami. That's when you got arrested? When you say some people came from New York to train the group, did any of them stay, or was your Guerilla Theater group just Madison?

DB: Our group was just Madison.

LS: Ah-huh.

DB: And just one fella came from New York.

LS: Well, what did he have to tell you that you didn't know?

DB: Well, a lot of it was just energy; just getting people to work things out, and showing you that a group really can work out a skit pretty quickly and 02:01:00convincing you that you can do it. Some of the stuff was techniques on painting, makeup, hand puppets, just a lot of different ideas on how to proceed, what to do, and we did, you know, he got us to go out in public and do some, so just got you passed the hurdles.

LS: That weekend.

DB: Um-hmm. We went and did a Vietnam thing for some church goers and, of course, we were very careful with -- what is this church right over here? Ah, the Lutheran Church, is that what it is?

LS: Probably.

DB: Got the bookstore up there, so you knew people that people coming to this church were not going to be a hard target. We were careful to pick such a target. We did --- I'd forgotten how the skit went, but it involved -- it was 02:02:00something that had to do with American soldiers -- no, I guess it was [inaudible] with some punch line. It was kind of nasty, which I'd forgotten.

LS: But you had written it yourself.

DB: Yes -- kind of strong makeup, skeleton makeup, and I recall it as being an effective skit, but I'd forgotten what it was.

LS: What time of day did you perform?

DB: People coming and going to worship.

LS: Oh, I see, outside.

DB: Outside the church.

LS: Ah, and did they want you around, or what was their reaction?

DB: Um, I suppose there were two -- some people listened and took it seriously, and some people left quickly.

LS: They didn't -- they might have felt threatened by it, I suppose.

DB: Um-hmm. And then we did another one for graduation. I can't remember how it went, but it was on, along the lines of "Now What?" trying to make a point, "now where do you go?" and getting lots of tongue-in-cheek possibilities as to what 02:03:00you were going to do now that you've graduated.

LS: And where was that done?

DB: Um, at the graduation ceremonies.

LS: In the -- outside?

DB: Yeah. We just wandered around in the crowds with people coming to it and then going in front to do our skit whenever we would find a crowd.

LS: Did you have any sort of props, like a piece of cloth that would be a curtain, or did you not bother with that?

DB: I've forgotten the skits now. Ah, we probably did have some props, like maybe -- oh, there was a little girl, "the naïve", who was trying to decide what to do next, and I think she carried a balloon.

LS: Hmm.

DB: Oh, we handed out balloons. What did they say? We wrote mottos on a balloon for that, and went around and handed them out.

LS: Did people take them?

DB: Yeah. Mostly kids took them.

LS: Was the reception reasonably friendly?

DB: Yeah. Nobody got real angry at us, which I suppose is a bit of a disappointment. [Laughing.]

LS: Well this was '72, you said.

DB: Yes.

LS: And the worst was over by then.

DB: Um-hmm. And then we did some skits later in the summer. We did some skits just to advertise a free medical clinic that was being organized on the East Side. We went around to some shopping malls and --

LS: And they let you in?

DB: Well, we never asked. We just went and did it. [Phone rings.]

LS: O.K. You're at the shopping mall, and I'm surprised that they let you stay around, because you tend to get really conservative people at shopping malls.

DB: The skits were so short that no one had time to object. We just delivered it and people reacted and we left.

LS: How long did they go on?

DB: A couple of minutes, probably.

LS: Oh, O.K. Who else was in the group?

DB: I've forgotten the names, but the people were mostly undergraduates.

LS: Oh.

DB: So I just answered an ad, and there was this group of people that were mostly undergraduates.

LS: Were they in theater, or necessarily or not necessarily?

DB: No, they were in various fields: political science and -- none of them were in theater.

LS: So, how long did this last, the Guerilla Theater?

DB: Ah, the group sort of trickled off maybe a month or two after Nixon's convention, so I guess altogether it would have -- it lasted maybe four months.

LS: Do you think it was effective?

DB: For whom?

LS: Do you --

DB: Well, I learned some things.

LS: Was it effective for you?

DB: Well, I didn't change the world. It was part of the last flower in a cultural renaissance. I don't know who all set it off, but the hippies and civil rights movements and --

LS: Was this the first Guerilla Theater that made it to Madison?

DB: No. There had been other troupes. I don't know the history of that, and I don't know any of the other troupes, but I knew that there had been other troupes and I believed that at that point, there was no other troupe, just at that particular point, but there were troupes later.

LS: There were after yours.

DB: After ours.

LS: But there aren't any now, are there?

DB: Not that I'm aware of.

LS: Occasionally you see people over in the library or on the mall, but I just never -- they were dressed up and performing in some way or another, but I guess you wouldn't call them -- I mean, what makes Guerilla Theater as against just a bunch of people deciding to put on a performance?

DB: Um, a didactic message. The idea of doing it in the stage that you create by the act of starting. You go and grab a stage in a public place and you perceive yourself as doing Guerilla Theater. I guess those are the three --

LS: And what got you interested in this? You'd left college by then.

DB: Um-hmm. Well, I'd done some theater in high school and I wasn't totally bored with it. I hadn't done any in college. I wasn't that good at it, but I liked the idea. I was trying to pick up on different things that I hadn't done.

LS: And so you sort of --

DB: Drawing.

LS: Starting exploring yourself, then.

DB: Yeah, but mostly I was trying to write, and reading and thinking.

LS: Did it peter out from lack of enthusiasm or because people left, or --

DB: Ah, it was various things. Partly -- a good part of it was my fault. I was -- I tended to inhibit people by trying too hard and really wanting to do a real professional job. And, you know, being inhibitive was always a big problem and that kind of thing.

LS: Yes -- just about the opposite of you [being an actor?], I suppose.

DB: People -- you know, I delve around in the fact that people are afraid in the 02:08:00strength of my criticisms and I find a little hard to withhold them because I think of them. And there were other things. One of the chief organizers in there was a very moralistic sort of leftist that felt an obligation to do this sort of thing for the purpose of changing society and I think that was maybe a little inhibiting, too.

LS: So, not for fun?

DB: Yeah. It wasn't really fun for him.

LS: And it should be fun.

DB: Yeah. But a lot of parts of it were fun. It was fun when things worked right and you worked things out and you did some things where we checked out a television camera, a videotape unit, and so we recorded ourselves doing stuff, spontaneous skits and exercises. The exercises were, um, you take turns being 02:09:00it, and "it" is the group just hands you a situation and a roll, or you have two or three people, and you give them a role, and you say, "O.K., go. Here's the role," and then we videotaped them and played them back.

LS: And that was just for the fun of it?

DB: Yeah, but --

LS: You couldn't go perform that somewhere.

DB: No. Well, occasionally we would. We'd do that as a way of working something out.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And I enjoyed running the camera quite a bit. Like, some people were doing -- being in an automobile. One guy was driving it, and another woman was hassling him and, you know, he'd mess up the driving, and I really got into making the camera move all around when he'd be going around corners and stuff.

LS: What'd you do with the film?

DB: Well, it isn't film. It's put on magnetic tape and you can just play it back through a television.

LS: Oh, I see.

DB: And we just had one reel of tape, so we'd have to keep riding it over each time we did one.

LS: Oh, so you never did keep it.

DB: Right. It's just something we checked out from someplace in the university.

LS: Did anybody in your theater department or T.V. or anything get interested in 02:10:00you and --

DB: I think we got film going, but I'd forgotten where, now. Some news photographers happened to see us and filmed us, but I don't know if it ever got on T.V.

LS: Hmm.

DB: That's it.

LS: Probably a good technique for training drama students.

DB: Yeah, I learned some things about not just drama, but drama education.

LS: But you've never done anything with it?

DB: Um-mm.

LS: Where did you practice?

DB: Um, sometimes outside, parks and grass, and sometimes in -- one of the girls that -- actually there were three girls that were involved that lived together in a house with a really huge living room, and we'd practice in there. We met there pretty often.

LS: You were coming to an end of your taking drugs. Did any of them take drugs 02:11:00at that time, or was that part of making an [inaudible]?

DB: No. The group was a -- the group wasn't much into drugs, except sometimes we ate together and did marijuana with it, but we didn't normally get marijuana or alcohol or anything while we were doing theater.

LS: Well, I'm glad you talked about that. Is there anything else that I haven't thought of asking that you're thinking of?

DB: Oh, probably (laughing). I don't know what.

LS: If you think about it, just step in, come in. Ah -- the Free University, when we made references to that. I know the TA strike and I know somebody in the physics department was opposed to it, one of the faculty members. There was a meeting and a broadcast which angered this man -- but you said you taught at the university.

DB: My memory's hazy. Ah, Barbara Kennedy and I taught a pre-physics course and I just don't remember if it was associated with the Free University or not.

LS: Let's say it was. I mean, it's a time that it might very well have been. Where did you teach it?

DB: Um, in different people's apartments with [clothing?].

LS: How did you get students for it?

DB: Um, mainly I think we probably recruited from Barbara Kennedy's classes, but some of them we just found. Barbara Kennedy had a group of undergraduates, who were [younger?] to a certain extent, and she knew some people.

LS: So, what was it about?

DB: I don't know. It's hard to say what it was about.

LS: It must have been theoretical, because you couldn't have done the experiments, and --

DB: Yeah, it was talk. Um, it was just talk. We talked about what physics was 02:13:00trying to do, what it was about, what was wrong with it.

LS: You must have --

DB: The philosophy of science -- no, no. I can barely remember very little, but talk, except I remember something I did. Um, we were talking about operationalism and the meaning of sentences and it was something that was sort of subject matter. I can't remember the lecture too well.

LS: Did you have to work to prepare the talks?

DB: Well, that particular one, I did. Other times we met without preparation.

LS: And these were undergraduates?

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: And they took it because it wasn't offered in the physics department, and it was material that you couldn't get.

DB: I don't know why they took it.[Laughing.] They were interested in Barbara 02:14:00Kennedy, and they were interested in the idea of science, I think, and probably they weren't interested in mathematics in terms of being able to learn it.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: But they still wanted some flavor of what physics might be about.

LS: That sounds like very chemistry for an [inaudible].

DB: Ah, later Bob March taught a poetry class, which he did a little bit what we were doing probably quite a bit better because he put a lot more energy into it and was being paid for it.

LS: I'd heard about that. That you could analyze the physics in the music, physics for the arts. So I guess it was very difficult, and you had to have a [founder?] for vibrations and that sort of thing. So you're not really -- this may or may not have been the Free University, but you're not particularly confident about the Free University.

DB: Oh, I knew it existed and I would read their bulletin from time to time. I never took any of their courses. Maybe they taught one or -- I'm not sure [Laughing.]

LS: Um, I keep asking questions. Can you think of anything to say around here?

DB: Not too much. Um . . . what are you trying to accomplish?

LS: I'm just trying to get a feel for what -- I read about things that were going on and they're just in the paper, you know, you see the term "Guerilla Theater," and you don't know what went on, how -- I'm just trying to get a feel for what was -- for what somebody like you perceived life to be at that time. That's what we're after. Some of these things make people [turn in this case] 02:16:00and very confused when I read about it in a catalog that was really close but I can't see.

LS: And you say that this is what caused you to join the TAA?

DB: Ah, what caused me was getting a sense that I was good at dealing with this sort of thing, and that here was a group that was interested in my skill, and that I'd be able to get into that group, and that the people in that group had skills I was interested in being around. It wasn't that I was outraged by the university.

LS: Yeah, I understand that.

DB: Because I knew what the university was like. And I'd always been interested in the TAA, you know? I belonged, joined right away, and I went to their meetings. I hadn't really infiltrated it, you know, I had to become known, and that gave me a way to become known.

LS: As grievance chairman, you -- somebody would call you up from a department to say, "We're having a problem," and would you go there, then, and talk to the chairman?

DB: Um-hmm. First we'd talk with the grievant and ask him if he wanted us to represent him, and we'd discuss what our tactics were, and ask him if that was alright, or try to work out some others if he didn't like them.

LS: Do you remember any specific cases?

DB: I can remember specific meetings. I can't remember the details of -- I can't put the cases together with the meetings too well. And I could not take you all the way through a case. If I went back to the TAA office and got the files out, I might be able to reconstruct the whole thing, but --

LS: I kind of was wondering if anybody ever wanted to back out? They decided that they didn't really want to go that far.

DB: Ah, that would happen right at the beginning sometimes. People would say, "Well, there could be some dangers here," which there were, you know, we wouldn't always be -- and in a department where the TAA was weak, then this guy was going to become visible and known as a troublemaker. So that was one that 02:18:00probably caused the department quite a bit of grief, so it gave us good reason not to go through our routes.

LS: Yeah. And did you let him off, then?

DB: Oh, sure.

LS: You didn't try to persuade him.

DB: No, we were -- our job was to be the agent for the guy, using the tactics that we had, using what we had. To an extent, once we fought a grievance successfully, we might try to organize people using it, but we didn't -- I mean, our goal was to do a service for the guy.

LS: He was doing a service for you by making the TAA visible.

DB: Well, that was certainly one of our motives. I always -- you know, a lot of us looked at filing a grievance as sort of the core of what the organization was about. That was an important part of it.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: It certainly was a powerful organizing tool. We -- occasionally we were 02:19:00spectacularly successful in a department and we got every TA in the department to sign up as a result of it. Um, a good example would be math.

LS: Oh, really?

DB: We fought some successful grievances, all the details of which I've forgotten. So we got all the TA super organized.

LS: Of course you had a lot of that already. A lot of --

DB: Yeah, right.

LS: Sort of previous, and I think, again, it's a really liberal department.

DB: Right, yeah. All the right ingredients.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Home-grown organizers and some good issues and a department that would feel like it was in the wrong if it was in the wrong, and --

LS: Yes.

DB: You know?

LS: Yes. Do you --

DB: I remember -- I remember a case now -- I can't remember what the grievance was -- it was all TAs, I guess, there was no particular grievant. The grievance was that they hadn't given enough -- this was after we had a contract -- they 02:20:00hadn't given enough TAs long term right in mathematics and I did a -- the language of the contract was, had to do with something about how many TAs -- I mean, it wasn't the language of the contract, it was the language of our argument -- how many TAs would have been hired with long-term rights if the department had reasonably projected its workload, and the language of the contract required something like that. So what I did is I did a regression on TA workloads against time to make a predictor, start using the previous year's data to predict what the workload was going to be that year, and my predicator was too good; I hit it right on the head, which was a little embarrassing. You don't want to be too perfect with a statistical thing like this, and then I showed that the amount that they actually hired was far below the number they could 02:21:00reasonably anticipated they needed, as it was, and then they hired a bunch of people at the last minute who didn't have long-term rights. We were arguing that they should have been given long-term rights, which went all the way to arbitration and we won it. I thought it was a pretty sophisticated sort of thing to do in a labor arbitration, coming up with a regression analysis on the workload.

LS: You have to watch their [face?] though.

DB: And the math professors, you know, they knew what regression analysis was, and they asked the right questions and I fielded them correctly. You know, I was very careful -- I "under the assumption that . . . " and all this.

LS: Yeah.

DB: There was nothing they could say.

LS: Were they chagrined or amused, or --

DB: Probably both.

LS: And it really wasn't a matter of getting more money, it was just a matter of getting long-term --

DB: Long-term job rights.

LS: And they probably really hadn't tried to screw them out of it.

DB: Oh yeah, they had been trying to -- they were trying to keep their options open.

LS: Oh.

DB: If you got too many people with long-term job rights, you can get into trouble, so the department always tried to keep the number down. We tried to up it, and we had sort of vague language in there that we were always fighting over.

LS: Did the Dean's office get in on this at all?

DB: Yeah. The Dean's office had a contract administrator who was the third step in the grievance procedure. We'd go to him, but he'd often get involved in the second step, advising the departments.

LS: Who was that?

DB: Um, I was thinking of his name maybe a half hour ago, and I've forgotten -- ah, he's still around, though.

LS: And he's not one of the associate deans, probably somebody -- it wasn't Doremus or Millikan or anybody.

DB: No, it was not that. None of those people.

LS: Oh, or Mulvihill --

LS: Do you remember any others?

DB: Other grievances?

LS: Yeah. What about the history department? That case from '71?

DB: I've forgotten the details.

LS: With Bill O'Brien and somebody else -- [Vanderbelt?]. Bruce [Vanderbelt?].

DB: I brought it, but I've forgotten the details of it.

LS: I think they actually had a hearing at the Wisconsin Center.

DB: Ah-huh, I remember, and --

LS: Were you involved in that?

DB: Sure. I organized the -- I prepared the case. I didn't do the arguing, though. Our lawyer did it.

LS: Did you talk to Mort Rothstein over that?

DB: Yeah. I'm -- now I can remember some meetings with Mort Rothstein. I can't remember the details.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Arguments.

LS: Ah, were you conscious of the women TAs as having cause of their own and as 02:24:00being interfering with the makers' goals of TAA. What is your attitude towards them?

DB: I don't know if we talked about this, but there was a faction side. Did I talk about all that stuff?

LS: Uh-huh.

DB: Um, after 1970, after the strike, the first rank of leadership mostly left; Marketti and Neiland Gant.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And so a new crop became the first rank leaders, which included me and Haslach, of course; was always around, still is. Um, I keep blocking on names that I know well. I forget names all the time. The leadership pretty much passed the word that the women had to win war on the major side of this, and Pat Russian would be the woman to win.

LS: Hmm.

DB: I think is what basically happened, and I lost, although not too soundly.

LS: No, you were -- it was just about 30 different -- 30 votes difference --

DB: Um, and then that leadership left, and the true leadership, therefore was different -- was somewhat different from the elective leadership, as Pat Russian was not a first-ranked leader.

LS: Hmm.

DB: Um, Zorne also was not a very strong president. Um, a lot of the direction was coming from people that had no elected office, except for a committee post which I continued to have. The leadership knew I'd keep working, even if they didn't give me an elected post; the old leadership, which was true. So there were -- that was one factor. There was sort of a status conflict between elected positions and actual authority in the organization. And then the women's issues got tied in with that quite a bit. Um, a lot of the women felt that they didn't have appropriate status, but these words were not used. Um, and that was because 02:26:00they were women, and because the style of the leadership made it harder for women to operate, which had some truth to it. Um, we were very much into power and aggression, and that was the style I was running the grievances, was extremely aggressive. You'd go in and intimidate the departmental chairman, basically, until he didn't want to have to deal with me and so they sold to the locals, and it was effective in some departments.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: In other departments where the locals were very weak, it wasn't so effective, but it still worked to a certain extent. And we were very aggressive in dealing with the administration and a lot of the women didn't like that style.

LS: Ann Gordon --

DB: And weren't good at it.

LS: And Jean Turner are the names.

DB: Ann Gordon was part of the group that, um -- anyhow, there was a faction fight and four or five of us got purged over these issues, and that was pretty 02:27:00much the end of my involvement with the TAA.

LS: Actually purging of your committee-ship?

DB: No. It wasn't exactly like that. It was sort of a crisis point. The decision became clear that that group was not willing to work with my group; facts became crystallized. There were two definite groups, and to stay around, their group did a better job at making contacts with the rest of the organization, and there was no--really, there was nothing to stay around for.

LS: Yeah. They called you "elitist" didn't they?

DB: Right.

LS: Yeah. Now, who -- was Zorne one of them, or --

DB: Zorne sort of passively went along with them. He did kind of a lousy job as leader, I felt. He should have kept the faction fight from happening.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: He didn't -- he just really didn't have personal authority and ability to --

LS: Why did he get elected?

DB: Ah, the leadership looked around and took a chance on him. They thought he 02:28:00could do it and he couldn't.

LS: They wanted to pick somebody to put in the middle, who wouldn't --

DB: No. The faction side didn't exist until after this election.

LS: Oh.

DB: Ah, sometime after that -- a year and a half later.

LS: Oh.

DB: But it resulted in --

LS: Haslach stayed around, though. Or was he one of the ones who was purged?

DB: Um, he was neither. He was sort of neutral, but he sort of agreed with the arguments that were being made.

LS: By them.

DB: By the women.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: And he, you know, he took some criticism from them, too, but he mostly took the line well yeah, he saw their point.

LS: And how do you think this affected the TAA?

DB: Well, in the short run, I think it sort of destroyed its effectiveness. In the long run, I don't know. I mean, I can't even say that, because I wasn't 02:29:00around that much after that.

LS: Yeah. Did you feel bitter when you were thrown out after you--?

DB: Um, I felt specific anger at the faction that won. Ah, they just closed off at a certain point, they got -- both sides got very caught up in their own party line. I learned a lot about how faction fights work. It's been kind of useful things and bureaucratic infighting are the things I learned there.

LS: Hmm.

DB: And something about how rigid the thought processes get after awhile, and the way the clock goes around and around and you lose track of who thought of an idea, but everyone believes it whether it was true or not at a certain point; everyone in a particular faction. It's really a very interesting process. Ah, I was very involved in it, you know, because the TAA was the center of our lives for three or four years, and --

LS: Who were some of the others that were --

DB: Paul Schollaert, um --

LS: He was chosen by the president then, wasn't he?

DB: Yeah.

LS: So, he was purged out of office, or was this an elected --

DB: No, just um--

LS: Or just his power --

DB: He just -- you know, he wouldn't want to come to the meetings anymore after -- it was a critical event where we had a meeting where we tried to patch it up, and in the course of that meeting, I feel my faction, and particularly me, I was sort of the spokesman -- was really quite open, trying to say, "Yeah, there's problems, but let's halfway work them out," and the other side was just completely closed and unwilling to do anything, and at the end of the meeting -- um, the meeting basically ended when I suddenly became enraged and I said to Ann Gordon, "I think you're completely disingenuous," which she was, and I left.

LS: Hmm.

DB: And I think that the whole event, you know, pretty much the outcome after that was that my group didn't come around so much anymore, except just to observe and to see what was happening, occasionally. But the rule of the game was that executive meetings were open. Any member could come.

LS: But there was never any effort to have a counter group, or --?

DB: No.

LS: Because you were probably, most people, all ready to leave, anyway, I suppose?

DB: Well, I mean, we weren't until that point, but --

LS: I mean, to leave the university, or --

DB: Yeah, well, I dropped out of the university about six months later, I guess.

LS: Do you think that was a factor, or --

DB: It was a factor.

LS: What about some of the -- Paul Schollaert you mentioned. Who else?

DB: Carl Schram, Mo Adams --

LS: And it was all men? No women were on that side?

DB: Right.

LS: So it really was women against men, with some men on the women's side.

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: And it was a matter of tactics and --

DB: I think the most important thing was personal status inside the organization; status -- just proportions and people taking action that other people felt was illegitimate.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: I don't know. . . It's impossible to describe what it was like. It was sort 02:33:00of a big event.

LS: Well try.

DB: Well, I mean, I had been, but --

LS: Yeah.

DB: It's hard to know what I missed, except that I sort of missed all of it.

LS: Where was this meeting? This official meeting?

DB: In the office.

LS: In the --

DB: Brooks Street.

LS: Were a lot of people there?

DB: Um, 25 at most.

LS: Did people shout at each other? I mean, was it done in a rational way?

DB: Well, there was a great deal of emotion. Um, we were discussing a lot -- there was all these atrocity stories were collected in the course of events leading up to it. The whole thing lasted over a period of, maybe, up to two 02:34:00months. It was right before the election, and sort of the question in our minds was whether we'd have an electoral ballot with them or not.

LS: When you say "atrocity stories," you're not talking about the proper treatment of TAs, but --

DB: I'm talking about the women's atrocity stories against us.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Um, many of which just weren't accurate, as is usual in a faction fight, but I guess we probably had our atrocity stories against them, which was a different sort. They were just to prove to us how unreasonable they were.

LS: So people came out --

DB: Yeah, so they were throwing their atrocity stories at us and we were responding.

LS: Did they cry?

DB: [Sighing.] I don't recall if anyone cried; maybe somebody did. I think maybe some of the -- there were women on our side, but it was mostly our wives -- people that weren't -- you know, they weren't active leadership people. I really 02:35:00felt that the meeting was a moral victory for us. That is, I think -- they had the troops, they'd won. They'd isolated us successfully and we were defeated, so we weren't going to fight them. But I think we convinced them that they were really wrong [basically?].

LS: Hmm. Apparent victory.

DB: No, not entirely. I didn't -- I mean, I had to leave the organization.

LS: I mean for them. Did they ever come to you afterwards for help or advice or anything like that?

DB: Not that I remember.

LS: You were just looking through Pat Russian's tape -- the question is whether you want to say anything about the Women's Caucus and their -- they came in in 02:36:00the midst of the strike and raised the issue, I think.

DB: Um, it's hard to know what to say. I guess I could say something about Women's Lib in general. It's an issue I felt very ambivalent about and so did most of the men, so it was hard to deal with and I think the main way that the women pursued the issue was by means of guilt-induction, which was an effective tactic for awhile. Um, that was the significance of the atrocity stories was to say, "Here, you did "X" and you should feel guilty about it and change," and they did get confessions based on that, and also built up a backlog of resentment. I don't remember too clearly what the atrocity stories were during the strike, but I do remember that there was a session of various women, and I 02:37:00do remember Jean Turner, maybe Pat Russian; I don't remember who the others were, complaining about Haslach and they may have complained about me, and I've forgotten what they said, but I was certainly aware that I was on a list. And generally they were complaining about the fact that the bargaining team was all men and its leadership, the first ranked leaders, were all men. And it was hard to respond to that, because it was true. And it's hard to talk about why that was true. Ah, my feeling is now is that yeah, men and women have got different roles; women are different than men, on sort of on an average basis, at least, in society, and a lot of those differences have to do with aggression and 02:38:00qualities that go along with being a leadership -- holding a leadership role in a bureaucracy like the TAA, so women are not likely to get those positions unless they become more like men, which most women really don't want to do. The women are caught in a contradiction: do they want to be like men, or do they not want to have a leadership role? And you can blame that contradiction on men, but I don't think that makes a lot of sense. I think we're caught up in some joint choices that everyone has agreed to. And I resented them, and then I didn't have quite the same thoughts as I do now and I resent now being blamed for a contradiction which is everybody's. Um, it's hard to remember now what the atrocity stories were, but I suppose they probably complained because Hank 02:39:00Haslach used to call his women "cunt", which is sort of a complex event. You know, it's sort of endearing, in a way, and also it's referring to sex differences and roles and it was down-putting and I don't remember if they discussed it specifically, but I'm sure it stuck in their craw and they discussed it among themselves, whether they brought it up with Hank or not.

LS: Was she a TA?

DB: No, not really. Somehow, the relationship between men and women is so much more complex than the other things they were saying, and I ended up out of sympathy with an awful lot of women for it.

LS: Hmm. It was just sort of a flashing head at that point. It was a particularly complex --

DB: What say?

LS: Nothing very important. I was just -- I mean, it was -- let's see . . . the challenge which was something that hadn't developed them, so --

DB: I'm not sure that they ever had. My feeling is that Women's Lib has never gotten out of a pattern of running on guilt-induction, except with maybe social change and I think in the long run, that will turn out to be sort of ineffectual for the women, just as it dried up for the blacks.

LS: Well, um, is there anything more to say about this, do you think?

DB: I don't know.

LS: The TA strike, or --

LS: Does the MULO or residence hall -- you said you helped the undergraduates 02:41:00organize. How did you get into doing that?

DB: Um, I suppose I got into it because I had close contact with Paul Schollaert and Schram, and they'd gotten into it, and I was somebody they could call on that they felt was confident to do things, and they were used to working with me, and so I got into it, even though I had other things that were involved in grievance stuff, and then I stayed in it because it got interesting. Here was something, you know, some strikes, and it's more fun to be where the action is. It's the same reason I got on the grievance committee; same reason I got on the bargaining team.

LS: You really like to be active, don't you?

DB: Yeah.

LS: And involved in some -- you don't look like somebody that --

DB: Well, I like both. Every so often, I drop out in certain things for a long time.

LS: Were they in this because they had been sort of dismissed from the TAA? Or 02:42:00was this happening before the TAA strike?

DB: Um, MULO and Res Hall?

LS: Yes.

DB: This was after the TA strike.

LS: Yeah, that's what I thought, but you said both of them were unseated in this power struggle --

DB: Schram and --

LS: Was this something they turned their attention to because of that, or --

DB: No. Um, the sequence of events was the TA strike, then the election for new leadership, um, the election that I didn't get elected in.

LS: Yes.

DB: Then -- oh, various events. There was a retreat that summer where we went off and discussed what we were going to try to accomplish the next year, including -- we talked about organizing Res Hall with MULO.

LS: Now, where was the retreat?

DB: Um, we went to a park on Kegonsa, I believe.

LS: Were women at the --

DB: Yes.

LS: Because the women had a retreat of their own, too, I know.

DB: They did?

LS: Yes.

DB: A different one? I don't know about it.

LS: I'm not sure. It wasn't necessarily -- I think it was women TAs, but whether it was about the TAA, I don't know. But they --

DB: When did that occur?

LS: Well, that summer.

DB: I think your sources might be confused. The idea was originally mine for a retreat that summer.

LS: Yeah. I think maybe it wasn't -- I think it was TA, but not having to do with the TAA, so it would have been -- it would have had to do with women --

DB: Well maybe it was some other thing, O.K. But some of the same women that were later in this issue were at that retreat; Haslach was there. I forgot if Schram was there; Schollaert was there.

LS: Um-hmm. Was this just a day or overnight meeting?

DB: We camped out overnight.

LS: Oh.

DB: So it was two days and night, I guess.

LS: It must have been a crowd.

DB: Um, there were four tents with between two and eight people in each tent.

LS: Was it fun?

DB: Um-hmm, yeah. We played football and talked and had a good time. I don't 02:44:00think we accomplished that much of what I'd hoped we might accomplish in terms of getting a clearer idea of what -- where we were going for the next year. And as it turned out, most of the things significant except purging us -- well, a lot of things happened, I'm sure.

DB: The most exciting thing that happened were MULO and Res Hall strikes, though, and the four people that got purged were deactive TA, people involved in that.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: So that left us in the same position that we had been criticized for being in in the first strike; that is, we were at the center, we knew what was going on, we were in leadership, and the women were on the outside. They probably were bitter all over again.

LS: Excuse me . . . this relates to the Residence Hall MULO?

DB: Um-hmm.

LS: Are you saying the same thing happened again?

DB: As it happened in the TAA strike.

LS: Oh, I see. But you're not saying you got purged again, really, that you --

DB: No, no.

LS: -- were the leader and the women were on the outside?

DB: No. This was before the purge.

LS: Yeah, yeah.

DB: But after the TA strike.

LS: I think, though, that undergraduates were there.

DB: They were.

LS: The residents [almost?] --

DB: They were.

LS: Yeah.

DB: Um-hmm. Some of the people involved were graduates, but -- in MULO--but Res Hall was all really young people, and, of course, their strike lost.

LS: And they didn't mind your being an undergraduate?

DB: Um, there was some outside agitator feeling, but it was also an appreciation of having some help with something that they weren't that good at.

LS: Um-hmm.

DB: You were saying that you weren't interested in MULO because it was basically just a labor strike?

LS: Yeah.

DB: And I was saying, well, but the laborers were all students, and the style was much the same style as the TAA had pioneered in its strike, going for 02:46:00student support and rhetoric of participatory democracy and some of the things of people in the leadership and --