Tape 1

[tape time - 00:00]

Elizabeth Uhlig (Archivist) – introduction:  This is an oral interview with Bert Dotson conducted by Larry Romine on September 4, 2003.   (testing of microphone)

Larry Romine:  OK.  We have Bert Dotson and the interview has already been introduced by our archivist [Elizabeth Uhlig].  Bert was Director of Curricula for the Springfield School District in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. And you’ve already said in earlier recordings how difficult it was to place people from vocational training, especially in the Springfield school district where you didn’t have any positions for them.  So when did they start talking about having a community college?

[1:00]

Bert Dotson:  That was a period of time in the early ‘60s.  Probably the first meeting, and by meeting, this wasn’t a committee or anything.  It was just mostly word-of-mouth meeting that was held at SpringfieldJunior High School for all of the people of the, in quotes, “Eugene-Springfield Area.”  The meeting was to discuss this new phenomena - a junior college or community college. About 1962 a group gathered – it was amazing – ‘cause it was well over one-hundred people that attended that meeting at Springfield Junior High School in the auditorium and asked how it could be done, is it feasible, what would it cost – all of the normal questions.  And from that the committee was formed.  Now exactly who did the initial formation, it was hard to determine.  Primarily Dale Parnell. 

[2:30]

Dale at that time was the principal of – he had just left the principalship – but anyhow, he was right in the transition of being the principal of SpringfieldHigh School.  And we had a contact to the Eugene Vocational School.  And that was at that time part of the Eugene School District and it was headed by Bill Cox.  At the time that I met Bill I was the Dean of Boys, I think that is what they called it, instead of Dean of Students, Dean of Boys at SpringfieldHigh School.  And Bill would come over in the spring each year and get from SpringfieldHigh School a list of students that would be recommended to take vocational subjects.  The admittance was mighty meager.  As I recall, it was like 8 or 10 students could be admitted. That did not satisfy any of the needs of the Springfield School District and the Eugene School District which had a few hundred in the Vocational School, which incidentally was a fairly new building located at 200 North Monroe Street in Eugene, and featured - one of its prime courses was aircraft mechanics.  And along with other union related things of electricity, plumbing, mostly the crafts of the area - brick laying was another one, masonry of all types. 

[5:00]

I think I’ve wandered off of the main subject, but the reason for forming a committee was to see if Eugene area could possibly support a community college.  There were at that time, there were six, I believe, community colleges that had been formed in the state of Oregon.  The membership of the committee contained one of the very vital legislators by the name of Glen Stadler who was a senator.  And Glen helped form the legislation that was proposed in the late ‘50s for community colleges to be established within the state of Oregon.  He did make one error, which I’ll get to in a little bit.  But with that legislation, colleges such Treasure Valley in Ontario, Oregon; the Central Oregon Community College in Bend, which likes to claim the very first community college in the state;  Portland Community College; Astoria had Clatsop Community College; and Coos Bay had a community college – Southwestern. 

LR:  So that’s about five that were established in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s.

BD:  Late ‘50s and early ‘60s.  There should be one other ‘cause, as I recall, we were the seventh community college.  Do you remember?

LR:  When did Mt. Hood get started?

BD:  We helped…

LR:  Oh, that’s right – they were after us.

BD:  I went up and helped with meetings that they had since I had already gone through this with Lane.

LR:  Did you mention Salem?

BD:  No.

LR:  Did they come later?

BD:  Chemeketa.  Yes, Chemeketa would have been the sixth one.

[7:00]

LR:  So some of these talks started in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and you were Dean of Boys when you met Bill Cox.  But by the time you got involved in this discussion of community colleges you were then Director of Curricula for SpringfieldSchool District.  You got kicked upstairs.  Dale Parnell had gotten promoted up to Superintendent of the Intermediate Education District, now called Education Service District.

BD:  That’s correct.

LR:  …and was then located in Eugene at  - I can’t remember the street.  It was sort of a basement place.  Do you remember?

BD:  Sure.  It was in the basement of the courthouse.  LaneCounty Courthouse.

LR:  Where was that office that you and I spent all night on the night of the election?  That wasn’t the courthouse?

BD:  It was the courthouse.

LR:  Have we got a new courthouse since then?

BD:  That was the brand new courthouse.

LR:  I thought it was an office on a street, maybe even the same street as the Eugene Hotel, or something.  But, I’ll settle for that.  OK.

BD:  There was an office in the Osborne Hotel.  Do you remember the Osborne Hotel?  That’s where they built the courthouse.

LR:  Well, I’ll settle for that.  Anyhow.

BD:  It was primarily in the basement, let’s put it that way.

LR:  OK, I know it was a basement.

BD:  It wasn’t the Lane CountySchool superintendents.  It was a committee of eight of the superintendents.  I wish I could reel off the names.  I think you have it somewhere.  We did identify them.

LR:  Yes, I remember that the guy from Florence was on the committee.

BD:  Dick Schoenberg was on the committee

LR:  Bill Jones was the chairman – he was the assistant or associate superintendent at Bethel.  It was almost as if Dale Parnell had picked the committee.  Had he or had you?

[9:00]

BD:  There is a lot of truth to the fact that Dale had his finger on almost every part of the development.  As far as the committee itself, to my knowledge, it had one meeting and that was to tell Bill Jones to hire somebody to head it up, because none of the superintendents that were involved with it had time on their hands to do something different.  So Bill Jones contacted me.  I had attended that mass meeting and was involved with working with Bill Cox in trying to get students segregated.  Our meager contribution from Springfield School District plus Eugene School District.  Bill called me and asked if I would come to his office.  Well, I went over and I thought I was getting interviewed for a job.

LR:  You’re talking about Bill Jones, not Bill Cox.

BD:  I’m talking about Bill Jones.

LR:  Out at Bethel.

BD:  Out at Bethel.  So we chatted a little bit about how good a community college would be.  And finally he said, “Well, that’s enough.”  And I said, “You’ll let me know your decision.” And he said in typical Bill Jones’ language, “Well, hell, no. You’re hired.”  This is just talking about what you’re going to be doing now.  That’s when I first knew of this job.  That would have been in February of ’63 [sic. ‘64] was when officially I became the executive secretary of the Lane County Community College Study Committee.

LR:  OK.  And you know or think that sort of Dale Parnell hired you before Bill Jones ever notified you, right.

BD:  Yes, I do.

LR:  Dale was behind all this.

[12:00]

BD:  Dale was behind that, because Dale and I had worked together and he knew what I could do.  And evidently had enough faith in me to say, “Here it is.”  Because I talked to Bill Jones and to Dale, both, right after this.  And I said, “Well, do you have any guidelines that you want me to follow?”  They said, “No, I don’t want to be…”  (this is Bill Jones saying - the head of the committee) “I don’t want to be involved. I’ve got too much work to do. It’s your job to get the college formed and get it off the ground.”  And from there on, and it was the new courthouse that I moved into in ’63 [sic ‘64]. That was before we had a Board or anything.

LR:  And you got a desk.  You borrowed a desk from Springfield or somewhere.

BD:  At that time the superintendent, WaltCommons, at that time, said, “Now we’ll be willing to contribute financially. “  And I said, “Is there a chance that I could keep my desk and chair?”  And he said, “Sure.”  So we moved that over.  And there was one empty room there that Dale had provided in the county school office. 

[13:30]

And we moved into that room and Dale said, “I know you’re going to need a secretary to help you keep track of everything that’s going on and to do typing, and etc.  So her name was Gladys.  I don’t think I’ve ever…

LR:  That’s not in the record.  But you don’t remember her last name?

BD:  No.  I can remember that she came from Principalia, Illinois.

LR:  Did Dale’s budget pay for that?  Did the IED budget pay for that secretary?

BD:  Yes, she was put on the payroll of the IED.  And the reason that I can remember that is that Dale was quite religious.  He went to a church that this Gladys belonged to, and knew Gladys through the church holdings, and knew that Gladys was only out here for a short time period of time. Why I don’t know.  But that we didn’t have to retain her. In other words, put her on tenure or anything. 

[15:00]

So I had a secretary, a desk, an office, and I was ready to challenge the state of Oregon legislators at that point in time.  It was a fairly complicated affair.  And I spent quite a bit of time in Salem working with a fellow by the name of Hatton who was an assistant superintendent of the State Department …

LR:  H – A – T – T – A - N. 

BD:  O - N

LR:   What’s his first name?

BD:  That’s what I’m trying to think of.

LR:  That we can get from other sources.

BD:  I’m sure you can.  He was up there.  He showed me the six community colleges - the map on his wall that indicated each area in the state of Oregon that had been designated for cc.

It covered the whole state of Oregon in this proposal, not all of them came about.  But Lane was one.  Lane and the possibility of expanding other borders.  We had to come up with the exact boundaries when we put it to the vote of the people

LR:  Organizational committee, which really was you [Bert]

[16:30] 

We should spend time on Glen Stadler and what happened in the state legislature.  Glen Stadler was a radio station owner, KORE – Eugene’s first radio station at S. Willamette and College Hill, underrated as to his impact on education in Oregon, friendly to education bills, primarily at U of O and public school districts.  Had knowledge about what a cc could do, what it is, and that the state of Oregon should start developing them.  

BD:  In Oregon there was no legislation that permitted our cc to operate. If we wanted to form a school, you had to go through the State Superintendent of Public Education and file a permit for a special school.  So Glen and others, but his name was on the bill, in late 1950s, 1958-59, that permitted people of any area to request that an election for the purpose of establishing a cc.  Through his lobbying they got the bill passed.  From that point on cc could develop.  That’s when the other six cc emerged in 3-4 years. 

[20:00]

He didn’t have a lot to do with Lane CC specifically.  His wife, Helen Stadler, was a teacher at Lane.  Glen became ill and dropped out of politics.  But it was through his help that the cc bill came into being.  There was a flaw.  He forgot totally about funding which was crucial.  But as we went on we voted a board in.  I had to inform the board / committee (Bill Jones) that there were no funds available to do any of these things.  My salary was paid by the Eugene school district, my secretary’s salary was paid by IED, I bought my own notebooks and paper out of my own pocket. Until we could get a vote on a budget – that would provide – but we couldn’t do that until the following year.

[23:00]

In February we started all of the legal detail.  Attorney, Tom Brownhill, offered his services pro bono to deal with any legal question. Neither Tom Brownhill or Glen Stadler received any recognition from college for their role.

[24:00]

Bill Cox was one who did get recognized.

LR:  Were any minutes kept of the superintendent’s committee that met only once? 

BD:  No, no minutes were kept.  The other superintendents told Bill Jones to do whatever was necessary, and he hired me.

[25:00]

LR:  Who arranged for UO education professors Don Tope and Keith Goldhammer to get involved. 

BD:   I had worked in my master’s program with both Tope and Goldhammer.  Then Dale [Parnell] came.  Dale was instrumental in convincing these two to write a paper about cc. There was the Metropolitan Civic Club (Bert was president during the first year of college’s operation, 1965). Tope and Goldhammer didn’t do the study themselves, a graduate student did the actual report.  Report didn’t give credit to the one’s who did the study. Dale loaned him an office at the IED, a doctoral student wrote the majority of the study. 

LR:  Call Elizabeth if you remember his name – it would be neat to invite him to the 40th celebration. 

BD:  The study was published through the Metropolitan Civic Club.

[28:30]

LR:  In arranging for the election to decide if the people would approve the establishment of the college and to elect board members, did you decide that there would be 7 members instead of 5 or some other number?

BD:  Yah.

LR:   I thought that was your genius behind that.

BD:  Well, there wasn’t anybody else.

LR: You were the person.

BD:  I was the one.  And you’re right.  Dale and I would have our meetings.  We’d get together two to three times a week.  What I was doing then from February through October1964 (it was February of 1964 that I was hired officially by Bill Jones; because the vote for the college was in October of 1964, and so I always back it up to February of that same year).  Between February and October besides getting all of the legal paper filed and documented with the state of Oregon, I tried to visit every organization that existed in LaneCounty.  I concentrated primarily on Lane County.  When Southwestern OregonCollege was formed, their boundaries came up the CoastRange Mountains and included Florence and all of the land from the north Lane County border down to Coos Bay, and from the ocean, for some reason it didn’t include Mapleton.  So I concentrated on the Eugene and Springfield area, then I made trips to Belle Fountain which is north in Linn County, Irish Bend, Alpine, then went over to Albany, Corvallis, and then came back down through Oakridge.  And what I hit was if there were any service clubs like the Lions, Rotary, Kiwanis – would arrange to be their noon speaker and talk about community colleges. Or such groups such as the Friendly Happy Hour Club in Marcola, which was primarily a group of older ladies that liked to quilt and they were very pleasant and as I recall had a nice cookie tea spread for me.  There were groups all over the place and I could not detect in any of those groups at that time that there was any serious, any real opposition.  Every once in a while you’d get these anti-government and anti-tax people who’d say if it’s going to cost any tax money then I’m not going to vote for it, and we had a few of those.

[33:30]

And during this time we had to either stay with what the state had outlined as the boundaries.  Or we had to develop our new boundaries. The state did not put Albany or Corvallis in.  The state was the one that put Coos Bay and Florence in their district.  But in talking with Southwestern Oregon Community College – lets see - Wendell Van Loan was their first president and he said he wasn’t happy with having part of his college up in Florence because there was this big rivalry.  The father of one of our budget committee members [Paul Holman) was very much involved with that.  Dave Holman [vice-chair of the LCC Board this year (2003)] who helped.  He wanted to get out of SOCC, didn’t like CoosBay.  There was a vote before our vote to form our district to remove that portion of SOCC from their boundaries, in 1963 or 64.  So they were just waiting for us to get formed.

[37:00]

BD:  We had discussions since then about should we have all seven board members at LCC at-large.  But you and Dale had some rationale for five zones and two at-large.

BD:  Some of that came from what I was relating about Florence not wanting to be part of [SouthwesternOregon Community College].  Florence wanted to have their own say in things, and we felt like if there were seven board members elected at-large, all of the power would be in the most populated area, which is Eugene.  So you could very easily end up with seven board members from downtown Eugene controlling the college.  And it was a type of education that we wanted to be free from any power, from lobbying from any viewpoint, like if the auto dealers would get together and then we would only have only big programs in auto mechanics or body and fender repair.  We wanted a broad representation, since the district would be very representative of the farmer, worker, and the businessman, and the manufacturer.  All of these were very important.  Dale used to keep saying that we want our college to do a common thing uncommonly well.  That was on one of our catalogs.

[39:00]

LR:  Did you and Dale set the date for the election, October 19, 1964? 

BD:  Yes.  We tried to put the date when we could be reasonably be assured of good weather, and when people were back from vacations.  We could set any date for election.  And it turned out to be so cold!

[40:00]

LR:  How did you get the 23 polling places?   

BD:  The whole area probably had 200 polling places and we could not afford 200 polling places.  All we could afford was to make sure that we were representative.  At that time there were 23 school districts that our ballot was in.  18-19 in Lane County and a little bit in LinnCounty, up to Monroe – the Monroe HighSchool district was the boundary, then the HarrisburgUnion HighSchool District.  Not the Mennonites – they did not support the cc in that area.

[42:00]

We hired – got the poll workers from the districts.  I put the polling places in the high schools or in large elementary schools.  These were people who worked in their school elections. 

LR:  Did you have to pay them? 

BD:  When our Legislature failed to provide any funding in the bill for the cc.  Dale came – said he had an idea.  Talk to a banker and see what is possible.  A group like ours was prohibited from borrowing money from a bank because we had no collateral.  There were no laws or Administrative Rules that prohibited it, but in the legislation the district was prohibited from borrowing money in the interim period until they adopted a budget.  Any district that was approved was not permitted to receive or expend any funds until they had developed an operating budget that was approved by the voters. We were broke.  We didn’t have any money.

[Turn the tape over.]

[45:00]

In February when my salary got transferred from the Springfield School District to the vocational school – the vocational school was given grants of money, special grants for vocational teachers.  Millard Pond [Superintendent of Eugene School District] said I was now a teacher at Eugene Vocational School and he told me to work with Bill Jones to get the college going.

[47:00]

When I moved into the courthouse, Dale said I’d need money for paper clips and pencils and a minute book. He suggested we could get the support of all the school districts in Lane County to contribute 5 cents per ADM - average daily membership – to the vocational school fund and use that money to buy supplies. So that was our initial funding and that’s what paid my gas mileage to run all around the county.  It brought in about 5 cents per ADM.  It was collected twice in a 6 month period.  It brought a few thousand dollars into the operating costs

[48:30]

LR:  But you needed more money.  Between October 1964 and July 1, 1965 where did you get your money?

Dale said why don’t you go talk to a banker.  I asked Dale, do you have anyone in mind.  Dale said to go to the First National Bank and talk with this fellow that I know would like to chat about acommunity college.  So I did that.  I met Dave Williams, one of the senior vp’s of First National Bank on Broadway and Willamette St.  We talked about what a community college could do.  And he asked how much money it would take to make you operational until you get your budget on July 1.  I had some papers showing projections for keeping a board operational, conducting a search for a president, doing all of the other little things necessary.  I told Dave we’d need about $20,000.  He reviewed it and said come back tomorrow. When I came back he said I have an account set up for you.  At that time he said he contacted twenty individuals who have pledged $1000 each and if this college is not a success (this happened before the Oct. 19 election).

LR:  He was way out on a limb. 

BD:  I know Dale had talked to him.  He realized the importance of this type of thing in the financial community.  He was very supportive.  We’re going to have a business school, a big construction going on,  jobs – he could see the whole economy starting to come up.

It was a joint account – Dave Williams and Bert Dotson, we both signed.  Dave did all this by telephone – contacted twenty people; to my knowledge they didn’t sign promissory notes. 

LR:  Dale Parnell told me (LR) that he and Bill Cox had each signed a note for $1000. 

BD:  There may have been a note.  And yes I heard that Dale and Bill were involved.  Several others were involved - the Pape’s.  It wasn’t any of the Stewarts, Stub Stewart was not a proponent for cc. 

LR:  Any other names that come to mind that could have been in that original twenty?  At the Register/Guard? 

BD:  Bunky Baker and I think it could have been one of the editorial writers, Al Curry, was the other one.  And Bob Kreiger.

LR:  He and Bob Frasier were very supportive.  Who else? 

So that gave us a little nest egg. 

LR:  Is there any paper work so we could identify all of the twenty signers for the 40th? 

BD:  No, it was all done very ‘back room’ type.  Dave said you can’t tell anybody what we’ve done, or we could be in big trouble.  Now it wouldn’t make any difference. 

LR:  That was First National Bank, wonder if they’d have records?

BD:  Now it’s First Interstate Bank.  They did not keep records. This was all between Dave Williams and myself. Being a poor teacher I didn’t get involved with any $1000 contributions. 

LR:  I was a R/G reporter and I never heard anything about this. I was always wondering how you were funded. 

BD:  It was never mentioned.  In fact there were very few checks that were written.

[51:00]

LR:  Soon after October 1964, there had to be a Budget committee – who picked those people? 

BD:  The Board.  There’s a picture in the Archives. 

LR:  The Board had to pick a president.  I heard some scuttlebutt in the background that one Board member asked Bert Dotson, “Do you want to be the first president of LaneCommunity College?”  Any truth to that?

[52:00]

BD:  Yes there is.  It was kind of a... You’ve been working hard we want to offer you something even though we know you won’t accept it. 

LR:  That was Bill Bristow, a Eugene jeweler.

BD:  He served on the Board for 5 years. 

LR:  Who else on that first Board thought Bert Dotson would be a good first president. 

BD:  Bill was the only one I knew. 

LR:  Anyway, you told them, no. 

BD:  I felt I could do better work supporting.  I served through 4-5 presidents.  I never wanted to become president.  That’s a whole different life.  I was trained to be the supportive type.

[55:00]

BD:  Oh, the original Board.  If I recall there were 23 that filed for the Board positions.  The seven districts were drawn up by school district and population.  We shuffled the zones so that each had about the same number of people in them.  Of the 23 candidates, the ones that were elected were the ones who supported a comprehensive community college, versus the other candidates that said we should just have a vocational school for the area.  No college transfer courses would be permitted.  I think it speaks quite well of the vote of the people and the support of an operating budget.

[56:30] 

LR:  When the job came to hire a president you were the man on top of that?  Do you remember how many candidates?  About four?

BD:  I don’t remember now.  There were quite a few.  One from Guam.  I went through using Keith Goldhammer, through the University of Oregon, Placement Bureau.  And they mailed out for me nationwide, and we got back some wierdos. It was the Board that went through it to decide who to interview.  There were five. 

LR:  Do you know who those five were? One was Dale [Parnell], one was a guy from Guam…

BD:  Somebody from the East Coast, Millard Pond (EugeneSchool Superintendent).  One of the problems that I’m having is that I went through this four times, of being involved with securing applicants for the presidency and sorting through them. I don’t think on this first time that we had a woman. 

LR:  She applied when Schafer applied. 

BD:  She got a better offer from Washington DC. The Board had agreed to hire her; Schafer was down on the list, two ahead of him.  That was the East Coast fellow I’m thinking of.

LR:  We got down to Dale.  Between Millard Pond and Dale Parnell.  Millard did have a good career as superintendent. 

BD:  He was ten years older than Dale. 

LR:  A little  conservative. Not particularly vocational oriented. 

BD:  A loner.  Did not have good rapport with his administrative staff.  He had a series of “yes men” he would call in – that type of administration.  But Millard was brilliant, he did a good job in managing, but he had to do it all himself.

LR:  So the Board decided to hire Dale, the Board didn’t offer much of a salary in the beginning. 

[62:00]

BD:  The scenario – it was interesting.  This occurred during the annual Association of School Administrators.  Dale was one of the representatives to attend the meeting in New Jersey.  When Dale was hired as school superintendent.  They pegged his salary for a county school superintendent, fairly good, at about $14,000 a year, which in 1963 and ‘64 that was a pretty good salary. So when the Board started to deliberate – I wasn’t involved, it was in closed session.  The superintendent of Florence – Dick Schellenberger – was stretched out one of the counters there sound asleep.  This was about midnight – it went on until about 2 or 3 in the morning. 

And Bill Bristow, who was chairman, came out and said,  “We made a decision.”  I said I have the number to call Dale, he said to call him night or day whenever you’ve decided.  So I dialed the number and gave it to Bill Bristow.  And I could hear Dale, and the first comment he said after ‘hello’ was $14,000 – and there was this pause.  And Bristow hung up and he turned to me and he said, well, Dale said that’s not enough and I’ll think about it and I’ll be in contact tomorrow.  He was really upset because they didn’t offer to raise his salary from what he’d been getting to become the president of this rapidly growing community college. 

But Dale did, the next day, he called Bristow back and said I will accept but I’ll put you on notice that that is not enough for a president of a community college.  And, of course, the next year when they negotiated, he got a sizable increase, and rightly so.  Because he had accomplished so much in the next year.  He got so much done, he worked so hard, night and day, and expected his staff to work hard, too.

[66:00]

LR:  Did Millard help Dale in those years? 

BD:  Since this was at 3 am when the announcement was officially made.  I had to tell Millard, but I didn’t want to do it at 3 am.  So the next morning at 8:00 am I walked into his office and he looked at me and said you’re here to tell me I got the presidency.  And I said, not exactly.  The Board offered it to Dale Parnell.  And he said, I will not speak to you for one month.  And out the door he shoved me.  And literally, he did not speak to me.  And I had quite a lot I had to go to him about.  He always had someone else talk to me for one month.  Then after one month, he spoke to me. 

LR’:  Any you didn’t make the decision.

BD:  Well, I was the messenger.

LR:  Anybody else who was a candidate for that first presidency exhibit that kind …?

[68:30]

No.  Dale was the natural choice; there was no question about it. Giving all good wishes to Dale, he did a masterful job in maneuvering this whole development of a college up when he got the presidency.  I think this was on his planned agenda that this was how it would work.

LR:  Did he plan to be the president?

BD:  Yes, Oh, yes, way back when. 

LR:  He wrote a term-paper on it in his doctoral program.

BD:  In the early ‘60s.  He was working on it when I was and he hadn’t gotten his doctorate yet.

LR:  I got a copy of this term-paper at some point, some years back and he had listed every course that would be offered at this LaneCounty Community College and that it is was years before there was a college or he would be a candidate for presidency.  He had it all worked out. So when he stepped in here, he worked the plan he had developed long before.  You were part of his plan, were you not.  He probably looked around Springfield School District and said Bert’s going to be my guy.

Yes, like John the Baptist. 

[69:30]

BD:  Lots of little anecdotes.  When we were moving into 200 North Monroe in early ’65.  This was before any classes except - Lane’s official first class was the nursing, the LPN, the nursing program which went on during that summer of ’65.  But from the start up to the summer, July 1st when we officially became operational and could spend money, we had to develop class offerings and when were they to be offered and on what rented office building.  We scurried around town.  By that time there were several of us working on this, trying to make commitments to rent this school gym or whatever.  I think at one time we counted over 40 different locations in that first year. 

LR:  Were you the one who personally got BethelElementary School or Kelly in Springfield?

[71:00]

BD:  I was involved with both of them.  I personally didn’t do it all.  Those were some of our major space allocations.  There was this fellow by the name of Gibb Bloomquist.  Do you remember Gibb?

LR:  He left LCC and eventually went to ClackamasCommunity College and he was basically not a Dean of Instruction, but he was a guy who arranged instructional issues.

BD:  What I’d like to relate there, we hired 25 employees at the Eugene Vocational School, teachers and administrators.  That wasn’t including any clerical employees at that time. Gibb was the assistant to Bill Cox and he was the one that arranged all of the auto mechanics classes and aircraft mechanics, and so forth.  That was like shooting fish in a barrel.  Because there was one lab for automotive mechanics and the class has to be held in that one lab, and so that one was penciled in.  When Dale called Gibb in and presented it – it was interesting. Dale had his office and right next to it was my office and in between was a conference room.  So most of the planning would go on and I had to shut my door frequently – because it was so loud and so I got to know all of these things that were going on between Dale and listening to what was going on in this conference room with these people.  It provided a good help to what was developing.

Getting back to Gibb. And Dale pointed out all these… and Dale pulled out this list of classes and said we want to offer all these things. Maybe this list was from this paper. It was in his writing.  And he handed it to Gibb and about two days later and we were getting close to have to type it up to get it to the publisher to get the class schedule printed.  And Gibb said I can’t get this class because it interferes with this class.  And about that time – Dale has a short boiling point at times and he gets kind of red faced and he said, Leave this stuff here. And Gibb had all these things. That was about 5:00 o’clock.  The long and short of it was, Dale said, “We are going to do it,’’ looking at me.  So we spent almost all night putting it all together in a logistical way.  Because I had worked with Dale when he was at Springfield High School in trying to schedule what room would hold what.  And we put that thing together in probably twelve hours time. Got a class schedule published and it worked.  Now that was one of the fabulous times.

LR:  So Gilbert, named Gibb Blooomquist was invited to go down the road, or he went up the road. 

BD:  That’s exactly it.  He didn’t just leave.

[76:00]

LR:  There was another guy that was kind of interesting , named Slats Obitz.

BD:  To Slats, the vocational school was his school and he helped Bill Cox but he ran the school.  Because his portion of the school was all of the – like our non-credit classes, the art drawing, fly tying, hiking, all of these ancillary courses. And I’m sure he was an honest person, and it did involve a lot of money that was collected in each of these districts. People would pay, like $4 for a class, and Slats would come by and pick it up and deposit somewhere along the line X dollars. 

At one of our meetings of the administrative staff, and this meeting Dale said we’ve got a new bookkeeping system that we need to implement and a new method for collecting it so we can keep account of everything.  So starting from the next month we’re going to make sure that no staff member handles money directly, but the money for each class needs to be paid at the Business Office or needs to be mailed to the Business Office, so the staff doesn’t get involved.  At that point, Slats, said “No, that’s not how it’s going to happen.”  And anyone who had worked with Dale was about ready to duck under the table at that statement. 

Well, Slats and Dale went at it a couple of times and Dale said, “You are not going to work here if you won’t comply with this.”  And he said, “Well I’m going to work here.”  And Dale said, “Slats, you’re fired.”  Got up and walked out.  And Slats grinned, and said, “He can’t do that.  He doesn’t have the power to fire me.”  And by that time we had gotten back to the main campus office and I went in to cheer Dale up.  And Dale said, “Slats is right, I can’t fire him.  But I know the Board will.”  And that’s what happened.  A week or two later at the next Board meeting and during the Board meeting it was announced that Mr. Obitz was no longer employed at Lane Community College.  So that was the demise of Slats.

[79:00] 

LR:  There was also a Dean of Instruction hired in the first year. I think Bill Cox was Dean of Instruction and did vocational stuff.  But then in the second year a man from Mills College, Bill Hein.  Mills College was in northern California.

BD:  Mills was a very elite women’s college in Oakland. 

LR:  Well, he came here with great expectations and left nine months later with no expectations.  What happened with that situation?

BD:  His expectations were to make Lane an elite junior college and try to get rid of most of the vocational offerings.  That was why he no longer was here.  And that didn’t surface.  He was not in tune with people in this area. He wasn’t adept in finding out about little things before he bumbled into them.  I remember when he first came.  Dale Parnell always was gracious and always had a little dinner at his house for the new Dean of Instruction.  And it was Bill Cox, and myself, and Bill Hein, and someone else, no Board involvement.  When Bill Hein came he didn’t know one thing about Dale that he should have, that Dale was very religious and was a complete teetotaler and Bill Hein came with this nice bottle of wine like his proctor at a high-end junior college felt.  That was part of Bill Hein’s demise. 

There was a fellow by the name of O’Connell that was with the school planning lab at StanfordUniversity.  He was the one who recommended Bill Hein.  Dale was making calls all over to get someone of quality for a Dean of Instruction since he knew that Bill Cox was not this oriented.  Bill could do facilities and things like that.

LR:  Bill was also doing the personnel mangers job and hiring all the support staff.  He had a load.

[83:00] 

BD:  Between Dale and I we tried to keep on top of the faculty. In fact I hired you, as I recall.

LR:  Yes, you called one day and then you talked to me for a few minutes and then you put Dale on the phone for a few minutes.  And that’s all it took. There was no application

BD:  That’s how we hired about fifty people in a few months. 

LR:  School was about to start.  I arrived in September and I had to vent the contract where I was. You guys were moving.

Anybody else in those years that were colorful, like Slats and Bill Hein?

[84:00] 

BD:  Yes, there were a whole lot.  There was one fellow, don’t know if this is what you had in mind. One fellow that we had to terminate. I won’t go into all the wonderful stories about him, but he taught welding.  He had his own little welding shop right next to Mel Gaskill’s airframe place.  But he was always wandering around the campus and you could tell he was a little bit  – well he was quite soused.  And Dale said, what’s he doing.  His name was Russ.  Bright cheeks, bright nose.  And he was an excellent welder. Mel Gaskill used to say I don’t know why we put up with him, but he knows his trade.  But he always had, not a six-pack, but a case of beer, outside the door and once an hour he’d go out and grab another beer and he kept doing that for the first term, until Dale caught him one time doing exactly that and he said, I think you’d better leave.  That’s it, and he did.  So we had a few of those that we inherited from the vocational school.  The hard ones were trying to phase out certain programs.

[90:00]

Elizabeth Uhlig:  [Changes to tape two ] This is tape two of the Bert Dotson interview on September 4, 2003.

LR:  Many of the early board members were interesting people.  Are there any anecdotes that you recall that we don’t have on the record that would help us explain how the college became what it is.  These people were really important in ??? what the college turned into, although they didn’t realize it at the time.

[92:00]

BD:  I think Dale realized it.  He had his finger on almost everything.  Let me go back to say Dale became superintendent of the LaneCounty School District at the time.  One of the charges that his office had was to receive the money that was collected through taxes and distribute that to the school districts by the formula involved. At the same time there was this lady by the name of Olga Freeman that was, I forget, the CountyTreasurer, was elected County Treasurer.  She had her own agenda.  One of the parts of that agenda was don’t ever spend money, always make money, but don’t ever spend it.  So she looked at what was going on in her office. 

As Treasurer, it was her duty to set up the tax collection, collect it, and turn it over to the County School Superintendent.  She thought that was a large sum of money, and it was.  It was the bulk of all the operating funds that a school district had for the year.  We’re talking about hundreds and thousands of dollars, and in the 1950s and ‘60s that was a pretty penny. 

So in her mind she thought, boy what a way, I could invest that money, make a little interest off of it, and at the last minute turn it over to the county schools.  Well, at the last minute, that’s when they needed money. So she started to withhold the payment - taxes would be collected in November, middle of November, and she would hold it into the next fiscal year, into January and February, for some reason she got a pretty good interest rate.  And the school districts were out there, they could write checks but they had no funds. 

And they were on odds. So Dale finally picked up on what was going on.  And he said, I want my money now, when it’s collected.  And Olga said, no, we need to make money off of this money.  And Dale, I wasn’t involved in the conversation, but it took the vein of, saying,  that’s not your money, it belongs to the school district; and Olga said it’s my money, I’m the Treasurer.  And Dale said, I will contact our attorney and we are going to prepare a lawsuit forcing you to turn over this money.  She did. Dale did, I forget who he got at this time, I think it could have been Tom Brownhill ‘cause he worked with the county school.  But anyhow, forced to release that money to Dale.  And from that point on you can understand why Dale and Olga never really got along together. 

[96:00]

So that was one member of the Board.  In fact when they hired Dale, Olga was the most vocal in saying that was too much money to pay for a college that isn’t even in existence.  You can’t pay that man that much money.  And she was the holdout.  They finally – Bill Bristow wanted a unanimous agreement as to who would be the president, and Olga held out to the very end and convinced Lyle [Swetland] who was her Democratic cohort in much of the early works of the Board. Olga and Lyle would almost always vote the same way, no matter what the issue was. I’ve wandered, but I think that the bitterness that Olga had, a lot of it stemmed from the fact that Dale had to, and he had no choice, had to get her to release the funds that she didn’t want to release.

[98:00]

LR:  Wasn’t she also a person who was very careful at the Board spending any money for anything.  I’ve heard anecdotes about pencils.  And didn’t she come to the campus maybe multiple times in one week to look at what the college was buying and to see if the college could get a better bargain, a cheaper pencil, or something like that.

BD:  She went over every expenditure that was made, whether it was a pencil or a thousand dollar piece of equipment.  A lot of the interesting little occurances there – Each Board meeting was provided a printout of what was spent during the two-week or one-month period when the Board met.  She would go over that with a fine-tooth comb, and at one time she raised a question.  Bill Cox had submitted an expense account and entered a trip to downtown Eugene to buy something and returned to the college, which was permissible under college rules.  The expenditure was like twenty cents for the mileage.  She thought that should be deleted and he would have to pay back the twenty cents.  The Board voted her down – it sounds like a legitimate expense. 

[99:00]

She was in a very similar debate, when the college, this was later, the college was debating on getting a building fund established by the means of submitting a bond measure, this was like $9 million bond issue.  During discussion, should it be ten million, or eleven million, or nine million.  She kept talking to Bill Cox about this expenditure at that same point, and she completely missed all of the 9 million dollar talking, talking about a twenty-cent expenditure.  And it was her mode, very much. 

LR:  Did she knowingly or unknowingly for the 9.9 million measure?

BD:  9.9 million.  She voted unknowingly, but she did go along.

LR:  Any other interesting Board members?

[99:30]

BD:  They were all were interesting.  I think one…  The original Board had no concept of what a community college was. And so Dale and I would try to pick up some of the, I guess it wasn’t really video at that time, there were films about the community college development and what it really was and what it could do.  And the Board then began to get this concept.  It was the Board that more or less said we want to visit community colleges and could this be done.  And, sure. 

So this was ’65 that we did this. We visited about twenty community colleges, could have been more than that, in teams of four each.  The people that visited were the Board members, several of the administrative staff, and at that time we had hired Baldheiser, Seeger and Rhodes as our architects for master planning.  And they agreed to foot their own way, but they came along on the trip. 

So we did this in an interesting way.  We flew to a local place, such as we were based in San Francisco, and then we flew to John Wayne, OrangeCounty Airport at that time, and spent about ten days on the trip.  Olga [Freeman] was never quite accepted by the Board except through Lyle [Swetland], that was because Lyle was the head of the union, he was a typographer for the Register/Guard, he was steward.  Anyhow, he was the secretary of the union, and Olga was very much union-oriented. 

[102:30]

Cliff Matsen was very much low-spoken, quiet, tall fellow, from Junction City, a dentist, and he got to me earlier, and he said, now I’ll go on the trip with the provision that you do not book me on a flight with Olga Freeman.  And I thought, wow, that really got to the point quick.  So on all the flight arrangements, I was always careful to keep him separate from Olga.  And, that’s one of the interesting Board sidelights.

Al Brauer, I would say, was one of the leaders.  Bill Bristow was a foremost leader, a brilliant, intuitive person, who could really look ahead and see where things were going.  And Ken Schmidt, he ran, I don’t know why.  He attended Board meetings.  But the luck of the draw, they drew slips with numbers on them for their length of term. We could elect them, but for how long?  We had to stagger the terms.  So Ken Schmidt picked the one-years, recognizing the fact that in October - the one year was only from October to July of the next year.  Ken did not campaign or anything of that nature.  And Bob Ackerman, who was a new fledging attorney, decided he wanted to become political, put on a big campaign.  So Ken Schmidt was only on the Board for only 7 month, 8 months.  I’ve heard that Bob Ackerman said he was one of the original Board members – well, he was early in the Board membership.

LR:  I don’t think Bob says it, but it’s been said about him,

BD:  And he did a pretty good job.  One of our car rentals was a Mustang, a Ford Mustang, which had just been introduced in ‘65, it was that new sports coupe.  And Bob asked me because I was in charge of checking out cars, if it would be all right if some of them go down to wherever it was, the local night club in Los Angeles. There’s a lot of them.  And, on the way, someone rear-ended him, completely totally destroyed the car, didn’t hurt anybody there, but it was sort of embarrassing – he was a Board member and he destroyed one of Hertz’ finest new cars.

[106:00]

LR:  You didn’t mention Dean Webb, of Cottage Grove, also a dentist.

BD:  Dean was very representative of Cottage Grove and it’s through his action, just as Al Brauer at Florence, that there’s a center in Cottage Grove. He went through community colleges or junior colleges in California. That’s where he was raised and went through dental practice or school down there.  And was quite a positive force on the Board.  Contrasting it with Olga’s negative.  In fact, you know, Olga did more for the community college, I think, than she realized or than she even wanted to do.  Olga forced the Board to become a six-one Board.  Because almost every time, and Lyle had swung over by this time, every time that she would propose something it was nearly always voted down, or if there was a vote on it the vote would be six to one. She always took the negative side, if there was one.  And why she would do this, I don’t know.  She was getting back at Dale because she was here during Dale’s tenure. And other people didn’t get to know her.

LR:  She stayed on the Board for about three years.  And wasn’t there a story behind how she left the Board?

BD:  I’m not really sure.

LR:  Didn’t Dale encourage Dick Williams.

BD:  Yah, well there’s a lot of things that went on.  Dick is still friendly with me.

LR:  Her term was over, and he ran for it.

BE:  He was the chief administrator at Sacred Heart; and he was a fund raiser for the University of Oregon. 

LR:  He ran against her, and defeated her.  He served four years and didn’t run again.

BD:  And we had several occasions to invite Board members back to dinner.  Olga never did that until just before she passed away, in the late ‘70s, she did attend one.  He drops by our shop in Coburg once in a great while.

LR:  He must be, well, up there, eighties.

BD:  All of us are.

[110:00]

LR:  Wasn’t there some trouble on the Board in that first two or three years regarding buying extra land from Gonyea.  He gave 100 acres to the college free of charge, hoping to profit from development around the college on land which he still owned. And somebody on the Board did not want to buy extra land from Gonyea, thinking that 100 was sufficient.  Do you remember anything about that?

BD:  Yes, that was Olga.  There were four sites or five sites.  The one in Cottage Grove was eliminated because of its distance.  It was out of sinc with the rest of the population.  The one on the freeway, Harlow Road and the freeway, there was a powerline that ran across it, and it was only twenty-five acres to begin with.  And then there was a site of about fifty acres on the shore of Fern Ridge right at the end of Royal Avenue.  And then this site here, which was being farmed by somebody who leased it from Gonyea.  And we had some real good conversations with, whatever his name, Oscar Sleed….  But you’re right. Gonyea wanted to do something to enhance his property.  He held about 900 acres at that time.  A big chunk was sold to NorthwestChristian College, the southern part.  But he came up with the offer, was presented to the Board, he would gladly donate, free 100 acres of land and offer to sell to the college an additional 100 acres at half the appraised value.  That’s where Sleed came in.  But, we ran into Olga Freeman’s thought of you do not spend any money, get by with the least you possibly can.  And 100 acres would be more than ample for any college.  So the Board ended up buying fifty acres.  So the original campus was 150 acres. 

[114:00]

When the news came out, there was speculative interest.  And immediately, Jon …, he edited the Oregon Research Institute, drafted a proposal that he’d like to purchase 25 acres or so, 20 acres maybe, on the west side of the college, which was then college property, and his proposal was to build an office complex/mall and a dormitory for students.  And, of course, the Board didn’t spend a great deal of time on it. Number one, they didn’t want commercialism to surround the college, in other words, retail stores.  They wanted to keep a buffer, there.  Secondly, they were definitely opposed to any dormitories. They thought the college was a commuter college, and they wanted to keep it that way.  The students that would be attending here would be able to get to the college without undue hardship.  Even Florence was like an hour away.  And there was at that time talk about building a center in Florence and Cottage Grove.  So they turned the offer down completely for that to occur.

LR:  You went to high school with him, didn’t you?  Wasn’t your tie to him.  Wasn’t it somebody you went to high school with who was involved with wanting to develop some property around here?

[117:00]

BD:  Well, Jim Weaver was one that was trying to buy property across the freeway.  When he heard of the announcement that the college was going to accept this, he immediately bought the property where the tavern is, because he thought it was a natural that he could make money.  And he heard about it before the public heard about it because he was on the Budget Committee at that time.

LR:  The LCC Budget Committee.  Was he a federal representative at that time?

BD:  Not at that time.  Later on.

LR:  Well, how about some remarks on why Dale Parnell left LCC after the third year.

[118:00]

BD:  It was an interesting interlude.  Dale had an agenda; in fact I think he still does.  I don’t know how he’s doing health-wise, but he always has a future agenda.  When he became president here I think that was one of the points of his agenda.  But once he got here he knew that he probably would be moving on to someplace else.  So he wasn’t opposed to moving.  There was a lot of mismanagement going on at the state level, Superintendent of Public Instruction – Minear? 

LR:  M-I-N-E-A-R

BD:  Minear was the one, because he knew absolutely nothing about colleges, was the one that hired this Hatton to come in and operate a little separate division.  And there’s lots of stories that could be – and I know very little about the inside story. There was a lot of mismanagement going on. And when it came time for an election to be held, there was a little movement to get him replaced.  And we needed somebody of stature and I’m trying to think where Putnam fits in, was he before or after, when Dale left.  I’m trying to remember who he ran against.  The politicians in Salem did a good job on Dale, to start with.  There was a fellow by the name of Ed Westerdahl who was really running a lot of the government at that time.  And he found time to come down, talk to Dale personally, and tell him that he was the one suited for the office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. And Dale thought it over and said I guess this is the time I need to move on and go to my next agenda.  So he did.  And because of what he learned in politics and the rough road it was, he did not want to run a second time.  He left. But he did a good job in shaping up the office of education in Salem.

[122:00]

LR:  Didn’t Tom McCall see him as a possible gubernatorial candidate?

BD:  Well, yes.  Dale and McCall were very friendly with each other, but particularly after what he went through the election for superintendent he said there’s no way that I’m going to get involved in any elective office.  He said that to me.  I know that that’s how he felt.

LR:  I heard, and I don’t know if it’s from Dale or you who said they sent him to an advertising agency in Portland that said we want to make you taller, put extra soles on your shoes.  We want to dress you in a way that makes you look slimmer.  He was a stocky guy, was on the WillametteUniversity football team.  And we want to change your hair style a little bit.  Anyway, Dale didn’t care for that.

BD:  Not in the least.  That’s what he meant, he says, I’m not going to go through that, no way. Once he got into office, he had the ability to run the ship like he wanted it, but he wasn’t going to do that again.

LR:  He came back years later and served as an interim guy, didn’t he, in Salem?

BD:  He came back, but I’m not sure of the interim part.

LR:  I’m not sure.  Things are getting fuzzy.

[124:00]

BD:  One of the things, and this something that isn’t written anywhere, one of the things that Dale built his success on was how he helped the Board and how he worked with the Board.  There are many examples.  One example I could cite this from my own experience is that, before every Board meeting Dale would come and get me during the day or someplace, and the two of us would go to where ever the chairman of the Board was and sit down and go over the agenda with the chairman and point out what was going to occur, what you might expect, what was Olga up to.  A whole bunch of things.  And it worked out great. 

Particularly, with Brauer over there.  Dale would come and get me and I would go out and crank up the college airplane and I’d fly Dale over to the Florence airport.  We’d sit down and have our chat and come back.  And from that led me for two years to flying Al Brauer to every Board meeting and returning about midnight or 2:00 am to that wonderful little airport over there that is banked by a sand dune at one end and the ocean at the other.  Because of that contact, and the reason that I would go along is that Dale didn’t want to be there by himself.  You could be accused of things.  I was always the witness.  But I was the one developing the Board agenda, so I could add my input.

[126:00]

LR:  How about Bert Dotson the person?  Was Lane Community College the highlight of your life or just another interlude?  What has it meant to you through the years?

BD:  I can truthfully say that starting a community college from scratch has certainly been one of the highlights, probably the highlight of my life.  I’ve done other things, and I’ve enjoyed it, and survived the battle of the bulge, and had some interesting experiences there.  But starting the community college was something.

LR:  Do you think that you’ve gotten proper credit through the years?

BD:  Yes, I do. 

LR:  They think of Dale Parnell as having started the college.

BD:  Well, yah.  It’s my own inner feeling that I go by.  I don’t need a lot of syrup poured over a waffle.

LR:  And you served how many presidents through the years?

BD:  It depends on how you count presidents?

LR:  You can count the interims if you wish.

BD:  Let’s see. There was Dale, and then Bob Hamill.  And then there was Lew Case for a month.  And [Robert] Pickering.  And then Eldon [Schafer].  I’m missing one.

LR:  [Gerry] Rasmussen, for a month or two. 

BD:  That was after I left.

EU:  When did you leave?

BD:  1982.

[128:00]

LR: Didn’t you leave a little bit prematurely?  I mean you could have stayed a little longer, but you were maybe tired of it or a bit disappointed?

BD:  Yah.  I was 59, when I retired.  I could have stayed until I was 65. 

LR:  So you left in 1982.  And Eldon was to leave 3 years later.

BD:  Anyhow, in answer to your question.  After going up to Portland and reviewing the Public Employees Retirement System and plotting what type of retirement I would get if I did it then or wait 2 years or 5 years and so forth.  I found out it would be to my advantage to retire right then.  I talked with Eldon in depth, he was a great guy, anyhow, he said that he was going to be leaving pretty soon, and really felt that my wisest decision would be to retire now.  He wasn’t trying to get rid of my or anything.

LR:  He knew he was dying already in ‘82.  And he was not going to have a retirement.

BD:  Yes, that’s true.  And I thought I didn’t want to go through that with him.  I should have, because we spoke without speaking.

[130:00]

LR:  Out of the presidents you’ve served, permanent and temporary, who was the outstanding one?

BD:  I could answer that two ways.  But the first thing would be Dale.  Dale had a way of looking into the future and finding out how to put it together.  And brilliant, hard worker, cut through all the gobbledy-gook.  Good sense of humor.  And you’ve heard this one before.  At a Board meeting, Dale and Bill Bristow used to  kind of parry words during Board meetings that no one else would understand.  But at this one Board meeting they were discussing a very deep subject and Dale was – the president sits right next to the chairman – and Olga Freeman got up on one of her deals about you can’t do that and you’ve done this and there’s a misspelled word in the Board minutes and I want that to be found and corrected by the next meeting.  Finally Bill Bristow rolled out of his inner pocket a little bottle, handed it to Dale, and I can still see Dale, he looked at the bottle and then his face started to turn a little bit and he turned his chair around, and you could see his shoulders [shaking]  and he turned and came back and we finished the meeting.  And afterwards I said, Dale what did you see on that bottle.  Dale showed it to me - Horse Radish.  Keeping humor that way was what did it.

EU:  That bottle is still in the Archives.

BD:  Is right?  So that story follows.

EU:  Horse radish and we’ve got that other one…

LR:  Community College Snake Oil.  That came later.

LR:  So Schafer was probably your second most respected.

BD:  It’s hard to put one above the other.  Dale was there for the innovative, the go get it, the building. Schafer was there to keep everything on a keel, cohesive, and to not get the college into problems that some colleges have gotten into.

LR:  How much of Eldon Schafer was Bert Dotson?

BD:  Not a great deal.  I’m sure there was some of it.  No, Eldon, at his service, they had this song “I’ll Do It My Way” and that was Eldon.  He was very stubborn in what he wanted to get done.  He was low key, he wasn’t like Dale.  He found a way how to maneuver it.  Part of it was what he had me doing.  You may have noticed this.  But once a week I would wander through campus and I’d pick somebody to talk with and find out what’s going on, how are things, a general conversation.  But I tried to keep in touch with every single room on the campus, with instructors, department heads.  Eldon was not oriented that way.

LR:  He stayed in his office a lot.

BD:  Yes, he stayed in his office.  He let me go out and run with the troops for a while.  And I think that was partly how Lane developed its expert[ise].  It is without a doubt one of the finest community colleges in the country.  And during my stint with the League for Innovation I met with a lot of other colleges.  And I could see why Lane was really rated high, no question about it.

LR:  This is great because you’ve told us things that were not on the record previously; that’s why we’ve needed to do this.  And you’ve probably generated some material that Elizabeth and others can use in thinking about the 40th.  I always thought that Bert never got the credit that he should have gotten, but that’s because he wouldn’t go after it.  So if they name a street after Bert Dotson or something, it won’t hurt my feelings.

End.                                                                                                                 [135:00]