Bert Dotson Oral History, 1984

[00:00:00] Interviewer:
Tell me who you are and what you do now and what you did with Lane.

[00:00:06] Bert Dotson:
Okay, my name is Bert Dotson. I am retired from Lane Community College. I am now working with my wife in the antique business. In the beginning of the college, I had the great fortune of what I consider very great to be selected as the secretary of a study committee that formed Lane Community College.

[00:00:36] Interviewer:
When you say great fortune, why do you say that?

[00:00:38] Bert Dotson:
The reason I said that is that it only happens once, really, on any college. Lane is, I think, one of the best community colleges in the nation. And this is, of course, from a prejudice point of view, but is substantiated by many other sources all over the country. To be involved with the beginning of such a great school is indeed an honor. I had to be in the right place at the right time.

[00:01:09] Interviewer:
What is it that makes it so good?

[00:01:14] Bert Dotson:
Many factors, but probably in one word, it's people. Lane has attracted great people to help it, and that's what makes it good. I think it was done with probably the foresight of the original board and the founding president. All of these people had the philosophy that if we're going to do something, let's do it the best we know how, and not let tradition take hold. In other words, it could stifle it. It was something brand new, a new concept for this area. The people wholeheartedly supported it. Our first several money majors passed by an overwhelming majority. So we had, I will say, the enthusiasm, the finances, and the people that were interested in doing something of this nature were all together right here.

[00:02:18] Interviewer:
How did they know how to do it differently? Can you tell me a little bit about the people and the sort of backgrounds they were from?

[00:02:31] Bert Dotson:
The people were from a wide variety of backgrounds. Our early recruiting purposely did not recruit from education, meaning that we didn't just go to the local school district and purposely try to get people on the staff. We wanted people with experience, with a career-related or job or working type of experience. Proven successful, these type of people were high on the priority of being hired, and we did. But we attracted people. I don't know whether it was the area. Eugene, of course, has been for many years, a very desirable place to be. So I think that had some of it. We had good support from the University of Oregon in helping develop a concept. Some communities that start a community college, if there's a four-year institution within that district, the four-year institution looks at it very negatively and fear for competition.

Oh, you're here. Well, I'm pausing here. I don't know how much further to kind of get into detail.

[00:03:54] Interviewer:
Well, yeah. I guess I shouldn't ask you more than one question at the same time. That was a very broad question, though, and I could talk for quite a while on, we'll say, the people that were here.

[00:04:10] Bert Dotson:
Now, I mustn't slight the fact that we had a very strong vocational school operated by the Eugene School District. There were 25 staff members on that vocational school. Those people were excellent. They were well-versed in their trade. Most of these were not the education related, you know, the school teacher type, although they had good backgrounds in how to teach. They were machinists, welders, craftsmen, woodworking, electronics. We had a good selection there, and I mustn't leave out. We had a good nursing program in a licensed practical nurse, and we had the beginnings of a business education department.

[00:05:01] Interviewer:
Well, did you hire those people?

[00:05:03] Bert Dotson:
Yes. All 25 were transferred from the Eugene School District to the community college. Now, of course, there was some definite dates involved, and let me just digress for a minute.

And excuse my plugged up here. I'm just finishing a good cold, which is this time of year. I hope you can cut this out of the tape.

[00:05:31] Interviewer:
Oh, yes. Okay, thank you.

[00:05:34] Bert Dotson:
The community college movement in the United States is a little over 80 years old, so it's very new. Of course, education in the world has been, from the Roman and the Greek times, coming up to, of course, Horace Mann in the United States, putting together an educational system. These all were patterned after the European style. Community colleges are uniquely American. No other country in the world has developed it. Just beginning now, our community colleges patterned after the American type of community college emerging in Europe. And, of course, President Schaeffer just went to China to help them develop some type of a vocational program. But for only 80 years has community colleges been something in the United States. They started in the Midwest. There's some doubt about exactly where, but somewhere in Indiana, supposedly. As a two year educational program, stressing careers.

Now, this doesn't mean that it's just purely vocational. It's a comprehensive type of education. In 1900, a little after they began in the United States, California started a good system. And in 1923, as long ago as that, Oregon legislature passed a resolution saying they were good and they supported them. That's as far as it went. And, of course, by just saying you support them and putting some funding behind them are two different things. It wasn't until the legislature of 1959 that Oregon actually had a bill introduced and passed it, saying that not only were they good, but they were ready to put some money behind the concept and help develop community colleges. Now, in the state, there is the claim by the band public school system that they were the first community college in the state. Starting in 1949, that could well be true because they had a very extensive adult education program operating out of the public schools.

And they appointed a person to direct it, a fellow the name of Don Pence, who, of course, later became the president of Central Oregon Community College. But it wasn't until 1959 that they could legally exist as a community college. At that time, there were six community colleges that emerged in 1959. And I won't relate to who they were because it doesn't make that amount of difference. But out of that, starting in 1959, there was a state senator by the name of Glenn Stadler, who incidentally owned a radio station here in Eugene, and was very active in supporting education. So from 1959 to about 1962, there were a few meetings held in the area. Now, at that time, I was with the Springfield School District as director of curriculum for the district. And so I became very interested in this whole new concept. Prior to that, I used to be Dean of Boys at the high school and worked with the vocational school.

And Springfield was allocated five slots to place students in the vocational school in the area. And I always thought that was a rather sad thing because there were many more than five people who could really profit by going to this type of an educational program. So, yeah, if I could do anything to help students, because basically, out of most of the schools in the area, no more than 20 percent ever went on to the University of Oregon or to any four-year education. Eighty percent of them just went out in the work field.

[00:09:46] Interviewer:
Do you know what it is now?

[00:09:48] Bert Dotson:
I could look it up. I don't know what it is now. I would say that of the graduating students out of high school, I don't think that 20 percent has changed at all. In fact, it may have gone down. There are many more coming to the community college, of course, is why it hasn't gone up. The percentage that we anticipated coming to the community college directly out of high school has not gone up. I should word it differently. It has not even gone to the percentage that we thought it would. We thought we'd attract at least 33 percent. In other words, a third of our enrollment. That's not true. It's probably less than 20 percent directly out of high school. Now, the reason for that is that we are attracting the people probably after they've gone out and tried to work for two years or five years.

We have a lot of older people because the average age is still, and I don't know what it is this year, but was around 28 or 29 is the average age of the student here. We have many, many students that are here for second, third, fourth careers. Like myself, I'm retired. However, I'm in another career. I may well have chosen to come back and take in classes at Lane Community College in my 50s and 60s age group to do something a little different. But I digress here, which is very, very normal. Excuse me a minute.

[00:11:28] Interviewer:
Would you like some water?

[00:11:31] Bert Dotson:
You'll find that the people that are in the cafeteria are not really truly a cross-section of the students that attend. There are many students that attend the college that are never, well, some of them are never on this campus ever. Many of them, you see, go to the evening classes, to the downtown center, and the older student, no, I guess I'll use that word, the older student normally just comes to the college, goes to class, gets in the car and goes home and studies, and doesn't spend much time at the cafeteria. But let me get back to the early days, and the reason that I'm pointing out a couple of three of these people is that they are very important in the life of Lane Community College in the beginning.

[00:12:25] Interviewer:
That reminds me, is Stadler still alive?

[00:12:28] Bert Dotson:
Stadler is still here. His wife used to be a counselor at Lane Community College. She retired. Her name is Helene. She retired, and they both moved to California. Their address is available, I know. It's in my office, my former office. We tried to keep tabs on all of the people that retired. But anyhow, Glen Stadler was very active, and there were several meetings held. In 1963, the meetings were held primarily with a group of school superintendents from Lane County, and realizing that the school superintendents are busy like everyone else, and a state senator who has a full-time business, particularly in radio, doesn't have much extra time to spend, they decided they'd better do something a little different. To begin with, they commissioned the Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Oregon, and contracted with two people, Donald Tope and Keith Goldhammer, are the two professors. Neither one of them are around.

To do a study, and of course, if you're familiar with higher education, the study was always farmed out to students that were in these professors' classes, and they had some excellent students, and I knew two of them, that worked on the study. But they did a study. Does Lane County, and that's what it was called at the time, does Lane County need a community college? They published a 64-page report, which I used extensively for quite a while, and it still is in archives, it's available. And to get down to the bottom line of the report, it said, not only does Lane County need a community college, but it's at least five years behind in trying to provide it, and this was in 1963. As I mentioned before, the high schools of the area were very anxious to try to place students in career-type programs, and they only had one facility. That facility could accommodate up to 500 students,

and that was not nearly enough to satisfy the several thousand that were here. Coupled with the study that was done, and the fact that Lane County was identified, Lane County needed a community college, these school superintendents, along with Glenn Stadler, actually formed a study committee and said, we can't do this piecemeal with about a meeting every other month, and that was about five or six meetings held. Let's go out and hire somebody full-time to do the job and report to the committee. That was when I was contacted at Springfield and was given the opportunity to say, yes, the school district would give me a leave of absence if I'd work full-time. So after thinking it over, and it was, in my opinion, a definite major decision. Of course, we all have decisions in our lives, but from that decision, I started putting my full-time effort and the charge that I was given by the committee was to do two things.

Number one, to go through all of the legal hoops and paperwork to get a community college formed, and there were quite a lot of legal things to be done. And secondly, to produce an information program and try to inform as many people in this area as to what a community college was and what its benefits could be. In other words, to do some good PR work. So that was my charge back in the 1st of February of 1964 is when I officially was appointed. I know it must be very hard to formulate these things right away, but I'm curious as to who was paying your salary at that point. Okay, that's part of the story, and there are several other little parts that went into it. I have to go back because there is some basis for a lot of these things that happened. Out of the 1959 legislation that created Community College was a booklet produced by the State Department of Education

called A Plan for the Sixties, and in that was the plan for the orderly development of community colleges. That's when, of course, the first six emerged in the state, and when others had the opportunity at that time to also emerge. The reason that they were doing that is there were several educational districts which were called vocational schools attached to the public school district. There was funding available from the state to offset some of the expenses. In other words, there were some matching subsidies that went on.

The Springfield School District agreed to give me a leave of absence and to contribute a certain portion of my salary. The Eugene School District offered to put me on the staff of the vocational school and receive money for my salary for a period of time from the state. Now, that was good for my salary. I had no other available funds. The Lane County School Office, which is now called the ESD, it's the Lane County School District, and it's now called Educational Service District. It went through several. It used to be the Intermediate Education District, the IED, and it is now the ESD. It had a little bit of space in their offices at the county courthouse. So they said, okay, you can have a space down here if you bring your own desk. They didn't have a desk. So the Springfield School District said I could take the desk that I was using at the time. That must have been comforting. Oh, yeah, right.

The County School District also said, we will let you use our secretarial staff if they don't have anything else on priority to do. So I did have some secretarial services. I had a telephone. They put that, an extension was already in that room. And I was all set up for business, but I had no funding. So the first thing that I sought the approval of through the study committee, and incidentally, this was called the Lane County, let's see, LCCC. Lane County, I'd have to look in my notes, but it was, what I'm trying to stress, it was Lane County purely. Lane County Study Committee is what it was for community college. Lane County Community College Study Committee, that was at LCCCSC. Granted me the approval to contact all of the school districts within Lane County and make an assessment from the school districts.

Since there were eight school superintendents from Lane County on this committee, plus the one state senator making a nine person committee. And they agreed to assess five cents per ADM, that's average daily membership of each of the county school districts. Over a six month period, this assessment was made twice. And that gave me enough money to buy gasoline and do some printing. And I traveled for several months throughout the county extensively and made many trips to Salem. In fact, practically lived there a couple of weeks to get all of the necessary petition material to research the laws and the provisions that were in this 1959 bill that the state legislature passed. So the emergence of the college depended upon five cents per ADM of all of the local school districts and all of the children that were attending there. They all contributed whether they do it or not.

This didn't raise a lot of money, but it was just enough to help it get going on that. Let me pause a minute.

It was, I think, a lot of fun in doing this. What I tried to do was to start some committees to function in each of the major towns. Florence and, well, excuse me, not Florence. That's a whole different story, but Cottage Grove and Marcola and Oak Ridge and Junction City. I tried to work with local school districts in their PTAs. I remember there was one group in Marcola called the Happy Hour Get Together Club, which was very helpful. All of the people were very friendly, but they knew absolutely nothing about this word community college.

[00:22:56] Interviewer:
What do you mean?

[00:22:59] Bert Dotson:
Some of them thought, okay, you're just going to expand the Eugene Vocational School. That was fine with them, because these kids need to work with their hands type concept. But they never, at that point in time, never could really quite grasp when you just quickly said community college with a comprehensive program. They could never grasp what that meant. So I developed several speeches that I would give to groups. I think I met with every Lions Club, Kiwanis Club, Junior Chamber, of course the Rotary Club, which I was a member of all during that period of time. They were all very helpful in giving me a space on their program and letting me tell about community colleges. And so I would go through some of the well-known community colleges that existed in the nation and point out the different types of programming that was offered and what benefit could be gained in a community by having a college like that exist.

And the idea started catching on. The groups, of course, whenever you form a committee isn't very active, but whenever I'd get to the community, I'd try to get a meeting going, and the attendance was always sparse. If we got 20 people out, we felt good. But the important thing was that I almost always got coverage in the local papers, the weeklies. I got to know most of the, well, in fact, all of the weekly papers and their editors and a delightful group of people. They were, too. Each had their own little peculiarities, and most of them were very critical, particularly if the college were to come into existence, how are you going to fund it, and is my property taxes going to go up? We made some estimates on that, and we've stayed well within the financial impact on people's property taxes, but certainly never denying the fact that it wasn't going to cost some money. I always tried to stress what the money would do in turn.

In other words, it would really produce some revenue, which definitely has made an economic impact on the whole area. Let me talk very briefly about two things that happened, and I'll preface it by saying the state legislation at that time and still exists is that the state cannot start a community college. It has to be started through an initiative petition of the people of the area. In other words, it has to come from the grassroots the other way and ask the state, will you please hold an election to determine whether or not the people of this area will support it? With that in mind, I started beating the ground swells and having people circulate petitions. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was like five or six hundred names from people that resided within the district. Now, when you say resided within the district, again, it's up to somebody to determine where the boundaries are going to be, because at that time, Umpqua was not formed,

Lynn Benton Community College was not formed, Southwestern Community College at Coos Bay had just been formed about a year earlier. So we could say, okay, we'll take everything from, and there was no community college in the Salem district. The closest one was up in the Portland area, so we had free reigns from anything from Portland down to Coos Bay, and it was kind of interesting at that point in time. I knew that Umpqua Community College had a formation committee working, so we decided to definitely let Douglas County do its own thing. It was interesting that at the time we were forming, there was a vote taken. Let me back up one step further. Two years earlier, Southwestern Oregon Community College was formed by a vote. It included everything from Lincoln County south down the coast to beyond Bandon. The people of Florence and the people of Coos Bay are bitter rivals as far as cities, and it's been that way for many, many years.

The people of Florence didn't realize what was going on because only a few votes were taken. Only a few people voted in the whole issue, and when they found out that they were included in a community college district that was based in Coos Bay, they were very upset, and a very active group in Florence petitioned the state to hold another election to remove them from that community college district. There's a provision in the law that that can happen, and the vote was going on and was quite successful in removing them from a community college district. That delegation then contacted me and saying, if one is formed, will you please include us? Because our initial proposal was only going to the coast range and leaving out Mapleton and Florence and the coastal area over there. But we decided we would include the coastal area at that time because there seemed to be support for it. Also, we were supposedly to take in the Lynn County area

up by Lebanon and Sweet Home, the central high school district up there. There was a group of people that came down and said, we don't want to be in yours because we would like to have a community college of our own based in Lynn County. The reverse happened when the people of Harrisburg and Monroe found out that we were planning on dropping it, contacted me and said, but Eugene is our trading district, and if you form a community college, please include us. So it was very interesting how all of it kind of fit together finally. So we said, okay, let's take all of the Lane County school districts and use it as our boundaries because those political lines, subdivisions are already drawn and we know exactly where they are. Now that meant that there were, and then we said, and we'll add Monroe and we'll add Harrisburg. That meant that not all of Lane County is in the Lane Community College district

because there's a portion north of Florence that is in Lane County but part of the Lincoln County school district. Not many people live there, but it is. There's a portion that's south of Florence that is in Douglas County that is in the Lane County school district. So we dip down into Douglas County a little bit south of Cottage Grove in the South Lane School district. We go into Douglas County just slightly. In fact, a humorous episode, and I mentioned that Umpqua Community College was formed almost simultaneously. When the first tax receipts were sent out, I got a call from this one fellow saying, how come I'm taxed for both Umpqua Community College and for Lane Community College? And I said, well, I don't know. We found out that both of us claimed one little strip of land and I think there were five owners in that one little strip of land. And since Umpqua actually was first approved,

we told them, you go ahead and take them and we'll back off from that. So we had to get the boundaries, or the description redrawn again, but we actually were taxing, double taxing a few people that first year.

Let's see, I'm losing my train of thought when I diverse with some of these kind of interesting little tidbits. The election occurred in October 19th of 1964 to form the district. So from the 1st of February to October 19th of 1964, there was a study committee working composed of nine members, just a non-paid volunteer. And it's interesting, I think I met with the full committee once and a fellow by the name of Bill Jones, who used to be the assistant superintendent of the Bethel School District, and then went on to be the Lane County school superintendent and is now retired and still in the area. He was about the only one that I had any contact with. And I would see him and he would say, well, do what you think because we don't have time to call a meeting and if things go wrong, you're to blame. And that was about it. There was several... That must encourage you. It encouraged me a lot. I was, we'll say, a naive type person

and I had a very positive mindset saying, this is going to be the greatest thing for the whole area in education that has ever happened. I believe that truly today, even, that it is one of the greatest things in education that has ever happened for Lane County and or the district, realizing it goes into Lane and Benton County and Douglas too.

During this formation period, a lot of interesting meetings were held, but along with it, I had to make sure that a petition was circulated to create a seven-person board that was part of the legislation. So I don't know why it happened. I didn't have to go out and beat the Bushes for any candidates. They started coming into the office, of course, prior to the filing deadline, which was a month before the election, and we ended up with 23 candidates for the first board of education. We had decided that it should be zoned. Now, we, I keep using the term we. A lot of these were just unilateral decisions by one side of my brain to the other side type of thing, but it had to do it. A person by the name of Bill Cox, which you definitely need to interview, was the director of the vocational school, and he and I got together and chatted. I made good use of Dale Parnell, who was the county school superintendent at that time,

and again, some people think there may have been collusion because he was the first president, but there was nothing about my being quartered in the county school office and his being the first superintendent that added one way or the other. Also, to digress, Dale and I followed each other, kind of hop, skip, and a jump through our educational programs. I began teaching in 1950 at Springfield High School, and Dale showed up one year later to teach biology at the same school, so we kind of met at that period of time.

We went on, and there's a lot of interesting things because we became friends with his family, and we were social, but then I went on to become a counselor. Well, I'll back off. In 1953, I was a little bit irked at the Springfield School superintendent because, in fact, many people were, and so I abruptly quit and left education. I was never going to get an education again. At that time, my uncle owned a camera store in Eugene and made me a fairly attractive offer, particularly financially, which school teachers at that time and still are fairly underpaid, in my opinion.

The offer was to manage his retail. He had a large photo finishing business and a wholesale business, and then he had what they called the front store, the retail camera, and so forth. So I left and went over to Manny Jett, and in about a year and a half, I was approached by a group of teachers to run for the Springfield School Board, and so I agreed, and lo and behold, I was elected, and after I was seated on the board, the superintendent resigned and took a job elsewhere.

[00:37:16] Interviewer:
Because you were on the board?

[00:37:18] Bert Dotson:
Well, no one ever really proved that, but that was a five-person board, and there was at least three of us at that time on the board that were not very much enhanced with how he conducted the school district. He had the cheapest cost per student of any school in the state, and it was true, but he would brag about it, an incident that really triggered my leaving the district. At that time, I was teaching both math and art, a good combination, but one of my specialties was ceramics. So I had been trying all the last year, and I had convinced the principal that we should have a kiln to do a little, just a small kiln, and do a little firing right there in the art room, and there was a place for it, but it never came about. So I went out, and on my salary of less than 3,000 a year, I can well remember that, bought a kiln for myself, brought it in, and used it, and one day the superintendent came into my classroom,

saw the kiln, said, what's that, and I told him, and he said, you take it out, it uses electricity. So I took it out and put it in my home and fired it there, but that was the triggering thing. I said, no way, unless I can do something that I believe is really beneficial for the students. So anyhow, we hired a new superintendent,

a person that is very different from that, we'll say penny-pincher type thing. Incidentally, he went up to the Reynolds School District within two years. It was a year and a half. They bought up his contract, and, well, I can tell you one other thing. Then he came to Eugene and was one of the principals in building Valley River Center.

So he had an interesting life, but he was not good for education. He was a good conservative builder, and that's about it.

Now, let's see how that brings me up to when I went back to school. The art teacher that they hired to replace me was not, temperamentally, was not able to cope with high school students. So he quit right in the middle of that year. At that time, my service on the Springfield School Board, no one should ever be elected with just an axe-grinding type thing, but that kind of is what happened. The leaving of this art teacher, and they weren't able to find anybody else, and I really did miss being with students. Even though I financially was better off, I did agree to come back and finish out the year, and I thought, well, I'll just finish the year and maybe do something else.

[00:40:39] Interviewer:
How did you do both jobs?

[00:40:40] Bert Dotson:
I didn't. I had to quit managing the Photoshop at that time. Oh, my gosh. See, there was a lot of transitions in my life. I had completed, at that time, my master's degree, and I had two fields. One was in guidance and counseling, and the other was in school administration, and that was, I actually had two masters at that time. So when I went back, there was an opening along with teaching art for a counselor. You know, they had one period a day they would assign somebody to be a counselor. So I did that for the balance of that year, and then I was the dean of boys at that time left, and I was appointed dean of boys. Well, I had left Dale Parnell. He was teaching biology, and I was teaching art. And when I came back, he was the principal of the school, so I became his dean of boys, along with George Zoellick, who was the vice principal. It's interesting because the principal basically establishes the policies and what will be done.

The vice principal enforces it, and the dean of boys counsels about the enforcement. So the dean of boys wears the white hat. The vice principal wears the black hat, and the principal has to answer to everything. It was a good relationship. The three of us worked quite well together. You know, you bring a student in and the vice principal will say, I'm going to do this and this, and I would say, oh, but let's, you know. And pretty soon it worked out fine, and they're all. We were building a new high school, Thurston High School, at that point in time. And actually, this is kind of where the community college concept started to emerge, is when I was dealing with Bill Cox and assigning students over to the vocational school, we were building Thurston High School, and we wanted to build a good vocational portion in that school. But George Zoellick was then selected or offered the principalship of Thurston High School.

And at that time, I was offered the vice principalship. Well, wearing the black hat never appealed to me. And so another opportunity came. They were creating at the district level what they called a curriculum director to coordinate because we were getting more schools all the time, and there needed to be coordination. So I left the high school. I went to the district level and left Dale Parnell and worked directly with the superintendent. Harold Bell was the person's name, which is the one that the board hired at that point in time.

[00:43:44] Interviewer:
What interests me is that it seems like

[00:43:47] Bert Dotson:
you're a natural teacher and like being around students, and yet you keep on getting yourself in administrative positions where you don't see them anymore. That was where the dollar came in. It meant more money. I was placed on a 12-month contract then. I literally did not get any more money per hour. In fact, I probably earned less because I'd spend more hours. But I was able to have full-time employment during the summer before I was always going to school, completing my master's. But I had that out of the way, so I didn't have to do that at this point. And it was a challenge. I like to move on to maybe different things at that point in time, because it's amazing that this stint at Lane Community College, although there was a lot of different things that went on, the job changed fantastically. But being here 18 years, a little over, is the longest I've naturally been anywhere in one job. I've worked for the railroad,

the telephone company, I've worked for my uncle, for my father, who was in the radio and television business, a variety of things in education and out of education and back into it again. But I think the point that was rather interesting is I got to the district level. Dale Parnell then was offered the Lane County School Superintendency, which was kind of another step up in the educational ladder. So he left and went over there, and I was at the district level. Then this thing came about, and he offered me the office space there, so we were kind of back together again in OA. And so for a six-month period, we worked very hard in getting the college established. Then on October 19th of 1964, we were one.

[00:45:57] Interviewer:
And what do you do now?

[00:45:59] Bert Dotson:
I had a board of seven people and myself, and that was it. By quirks of the law at that time, which has now been changed, and we were instrumental in getting that change, it was illegal for me to, we'll say accept money even, or to get money, and illegal for me to expend money until July 1st of 1964. And I'll backtrack one step further. Until the district formed, we still could not do that. We were just a study committee. There was money for the study, but not for you. Illegally, I was getting part of the attitude of what I was saying is that in the life, particularly in the formative years, now there's periods in the college, which I might relate to if we have time. There's periods of times, and the early period was, we've got a job to be done, and we're going to do it the best way we can figure out how. Now, if there's regulations against it, forget that we're going to do what we can. If somebody blows a whistle, they blow a whistle.

And knowing that we had to have money, and particularly after the formation, which in my own mind, there was no doubt, we were going to be formed, but it may have been turned down. And if it was turned down, all of the funds that were spent were spent, and there was no return.

[00:47:40] Interviewer:
When you say turned down, do you mean by the voters?

[00:47:43] Bert Dotson:
By the voters. It had to carry a positive, just a majority was all.

[00:47:48] Interviewer:
Okay, let me clear this up in my own mind.

[00:47:50] Bert Dotson:
Yes, uh-huh.

[00:47:54] Interviewer:
July of 1964, did you say, or October?

[00:47:57] Bert Dotson:
You said you were in the... October of 1964 was the date of the election to form the district, but we couldn't become a district until the start of the next fiscal year.

[00:48:11] Interviewer:
Okay, so there was that time,

[00:48:12] Bert Dotson:
you were in between the vote. So there was a limbo time.

[00:48:15] Interviewer:
Well, yeah, right.

[00:48:16] Bert Dotson:
So the voters had said yes, but you couldn't do anything for six months.

[00:48:21] Interviewer:
Is that right?

[00:48:22] Bert Dotson:
Couldn't do anything for about eight months, from October until the next July.

[00:48:27] Interviewer:
Okay, so what the law said was,

[00:48:29] Bert Dotson:
stop, everything has to stop. The law didn't say stop, but the law said you can't fiscally operate until the start of the next fiscal year. I understand.

[00:48:40] Interviewer:
Okay.

[00:48:43] Bert Dotson:
Now, knowing that that was coming up, even before the vote, I started some work. Well, in fact, there was a local banker that I hadn't known before, but I became friendly with one of the major banks. Now I'll be anonymous, because we were doing some things that... I would not call them illegal, but they could be challenged, and I think if it went to court, the challenge would be thrown out. But I went to the bank, and I just laid it on the table, and I says, here's a problem. Everything's going along fine. I've got some printing money that I've been collecting from school districts, and that was ruled to be legal. I could do that, because that was just informing, and the local school districts were doing that, not the community college, you see. I was working at that time legally on the payroll of the Eugene Public School District's vocational school, so I could do that. But when it became a community college,

then I no longer would be on that payroll. I would be on the community college payroll, and yet we didn't have any funds. We also had to do three basic things. And of course, the first thing was to get the board formed and organized so that they could understand what was going on and start developing some directions. Now, a board of education, all boards of education, they are a policy-making group, and whatever they determine should be done, that's legally what is going to be done. The second thing that had to be done was to hire a chief executive officer. Now, I have always, in my whole education career, I've always said I never want to be a chief executive officer, and this has been a help to me. I love being the help, the whatever it might be, but not the head person. So I was not in the running for becoming president. A lot of people said, well, you'll become the president now,

and I said, no, no way, and they could not understand that. And I still had to make a choice in my own mind whether at the end of getting the board going, I still could return to the Springfield School District as director of curriculum. That job was still held for me. So I had to make the decision by July 1st and let them know whether it was going to come back or not. So that was another thing. It was an interesting time for you. It was an interesting time, really interesting. So I made friends with this local banker and showed him everything that we had done and where we were, and I says, I've got to have some money. So he said, well, how much do you need? And I quickly whipped out a little tentative budget to take care of the next eight months, and it was modest, but I thought it was a huge sum. It totaled about $20,000, and that was doing, you know, we had to get a presidential search going,

and I didn't mention the third thing that had to be done was developing a budget for the college, because that, again, is a very strict state procedure under local budgeting laws. Things had to be started in January and February, and by March you had to have something to put up for a vote of the people, and if that passed, fine, you could begin operating in July, but if that didn't pass, we'd have to wait until the next fiscal year. By that time, things could be totally changed. Notes, yeah. See, on the formation election, there was no money measure. It was just we formed the district, and we hired seven people. So the banker contacted 20 local citizens, and I have no idea who they were. Each one of these signed a blank note for $1,000. With the thorough knowledge that if the college failed, now this was before the formation election in October, but if the college failed, they might be out some or all of the $1,000,

but the 20 people all agreed to support it through the bank. So I had a bank account under my name, because it couldn't be under the community college, which provided $20,000, and with that, we were able to then cover all of the expenses for the next eight months, which was a real fantastic support of the people of the area. I should think on a bad day, you thought about just taking a plane to the Bahamas.

Well, actually, that thought didn't cost my mind, because I was so wrapped up in it, and I was so dedicated to it. But yeah, it would have been a good thought. I think if the election had failed, that thought might have crossed my mind at that point. Well, so October was a real fateful month. The measure passed by an eight-to-one majority. However, I must say that it was like 7.8% turnout of voters.

[00:54:12] Interviewer:
Was that the only thing on the ballot that time?

[00:54:15] Bert Dotson:
At that point in time, you could call an election at any date you wanted to. You could even call it on a Sunday if you wanted it. But there was no provisions for elections, and that didn't come in until quite some time later, several years later, that the state is now on this only so many elections per year. But yes, that was the only thing that was on the elections that day. We had basically 23 polling places, because there were 23 high schools in the district. And I had to go out and get my own crew for each polling place. And what I did was to contact the school district and ask if we could use their normal election crew. So that day I went out, I had the ballots printed myself, went out and distributed them the day before to the polling, what the clerk of the district, who in turn gave it to the crew. And then we went around and had the sheriff's department bring all the ballots in, and we counted them that night.

And there were very few of them, and it passed. But it was an overwhelming majority, which is true. It's interesting that you were really a one-man band. Yes, but I had a lot of people helping. You know, they were not kind of directing anything, but I'd call somebody, you know, like getting the ballots delivered. Sure, I'd be glad to help you. So yeah, but it's true. Everything was centered around that one little office, loaned office space in the county school district. It's funny how you see from that little tiny beginnings, it must be strange sometimes to come back here and to see this big huge building. I don't think it's strange because I grew up with it,

[00:56:20] Interviewer:
but it's, or am I being a valley girl when I say it's awesome?

[00:56:27] Bert Dotson:
I think back on the early beginnings, and I could tell you many stories about the early board meetings that we had too. But that first board was a fantastic board. It had its own internal problems, like you get seven different kinds of people together. But with only one exception, one board member, all of the other members thought what I would say big. They didn't think in pennies. They said, here is a unique opportunity. We're in an area here with good support. We have a lot of good people. We know we have resources. We can become the best community college in the nation. And credit certainly goes to Dale Parnell, who thought that way too when he was hired, but the first board thought that way. And maybe it was because of some of the in-service training that I had provided for the board when we first, our first few meetings. I contacted Keith Goldhammer at the university, and he was a very, what you would say,

a liberal, progressive type educator. And he went elsewhere. He's back in Michigan now, heading up a big consortium. But he instilled to the board the fact that community colleges are unique. They can provide educational benefits to all levels of the whole community. And here's the opportunity. All you got to do is to set that in gear as your policy. And the rule of thumb at that time was, we're going to do things well. We're going to do them the best we can, and we're going to provide funding for them. If we can't do it well, or if the funding is minimal, we're going to not do that then. We're just going to do the things we can do well. Of course, in the first five or six years of the college, we did have good funding background, and we were growing. And in a growth situation, that's always helpful. The state was coming through with their portion. The building funds were available,

and one of the most fortunate decisions this board ever made was to build a full campus all at once. There was the thought, particularly by one of the board members, well, let's not hurry too much. Maybe we'll build a building a year over the next 10 years or 15 years. Now, if that had taken place, we would be sitting here with three or four buildings, and that would be all. But we build 14 buildings all at once. We put up a bond issue, and again, they were going to say, well, let's go for a million dollars and build a building. That was one of the proposals. Of course, at that time, both Dale and myself were working with the board, saying, now, look, this is a one-time opportunity. We can sell a multimillion-dollar bond issue as easy as we can sell a one-million-dollar bond issue at this point in time. So the board said, well, how much do we really need? And so we figured out we needed somewhere between $10 and $12 million to build,

and of course, building costs at that time was a lot less. We had previously the year that, on the very first election, see, I'm kind of leapfrogging and getting a little bit out of sequence, but on the very first election that we had as a money major, excuse me, on the second election, the very first election was our first budget, and that was before we started classes in July of 65. The next year, we had a budget election, and we put up a $2 million serial levy over a period of five years. We collected $400,000 a year for five years because we knew we were going to need some type of money to buy equipment, maybe some land purchase, things of this nature. So we had the $2 million already coming in, and we decided to go for another $10 million. Then they said, well, let's go for $9.9 million. That sounds better. So that was the bond issue. So we had basically close to $12 million to work with, and the state had matching funds.

Now, they really didn't, but we were given credit for it, and we slowly were getting some of that money coming in. So we had about $24 million, and we spent most of it now, but our investment is $23, $24 million in what you see right here. Today, it would be valued at about triple that to replace, if we had to replace it in its condition. So the first board established the fact that, OK, let's do things and do them well, and we sold the bond issue with a good majority. We really worked on that, and we had a large turnout at that time because it was in conjunction with some local school districts, and that was done purposely, so we would have a larger turnout.

[01:01:59] Interviewer:
How did the vote go that time?

[01:02:02] Bert Dotson:
I would have to refer to my chart, but it was like about a 60% yes vote on that one, and there was probably about 25 to 30% turnout of the people somewhere in there.

Now, is this making any sense to you?

[01:02:26] Interviewer:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, absolutely.

[01:02:27] Bert Dotson:
Because, you see, my own mind, I've lived it so much that I may get disjointed here. I'm trying to think of some of the interesting things. One little fact that was interesting, I set up forums in the outlying cities when the board candidates were trying to do their thing for 23 of them, and so we had kind of a traveling troop. We did it, I think, three times was all. We did it in Eugene, we did it in Mapleton, and we did it in Oak Ridge.

The humorous part was that the group totaled about 40 that attended these meetings. There were the 23 candidates and the spouses of the 23 candidates, and maybe the school superintendent of that local district would show up. After the third one, we kind of sat around and talked, and we decided that the candidates had heard each other enough, and we wouldn't do any more of these forums because nobody else seemed to be interested. The thing that it pointed out, each one of them had their definite reasons for running and what their philosophy was in education. I had some very direct questions that I would ask each one of them. Several of them wanted to have a pure vocational school. Several of them were kind of in between, and several of them wanted to have a pure comprehensive community college, which meant lower division courses and the full thing.

[01:04:26] Interviewer:
Did any of them want just a junior college type of arrangement?

[01:04:30] Bert Dotson:
Well, they really didn't talk in terms of junior college, I think because I had laid groundwork enough to separate what a junior college was versus a community college.

[01:04:42] Interviewer:
I see.

[01:04:43] Bert Dotson:
None of them were on this junior college bit.

[01:04:46] Interviewer:
Okay.

[01:04:46] Bert Dotson:
So that, in other words, the junior college concept is just a preparatory for going on to the higher degrees. But no, all of them that were elected, the seven that were elected, all supported the comprehensive, not one of the ones that wanted a vocational school was elected. So in the years since the election, many times the criticism that is levied, particularly at election time, saying, well, I'd vote for you, but you didn't carry through with your promise of just being a vocational school. You went on, and you're having lower division classes. And I keep saying, but that's what you were told, is this was the college, and you elected those board members that supported that concept. That must be frustrating. Well, it was frustrating. There was a little brochure that I developed with Larry Romine several years ago, and the title of the brochure is comprehensive from the start. And it traces from the very first speeches that I made,

the speeches Dale Parnell made, the editorials written in the guard, everything kept emphasizing the fact that Lane Community College was going to become a comprehensive community college, offering not only vocational programs, but lower division, collegiate, transferable courses. But it points out that when it comes down to voting on tax money, people will use any excuse they can to say, no, I don't want it. And that frequently is what happens. Lane Community College got caught like everyone else in the financial binds after its initial growth for about five years, but in the 70s, we started getting into the financial crunches. And of course, in the 80s now, it's a lot more. Our very first class in July of 1965 was the License Practical Nurse class. It was the only class the vocational school had that went during the summer. And so that was our first group of students, or the LPNs. The first president came on duty

on the 1st of June of that year, of 1965.

He had been working with me and with Bill Cox. He was appointed in February of 1965 when the board identified him. And the, well, many interesting stories there. I'm trying to think of which ones I could really tell. I can remember the night he was hired.

He was, of course, the county school superintendent. We used the county board room, where the county school board holds its meetings. So let me start a little bit differently. Many meetings would go on into all hours of the night. And I was involved with taking the minutes of all their meetings and got well trained in working with boards at that point in time. And like I mentioned earlier, this was really an interesting board. They had a lot of good in-depth discussions. We had a lot of things to do. Forming a whole thing is just unbelievable, all of the things. And we were developing policy, whether or not we called it policy or not. Every time the board made a motion, that set a policy. And so I would start writing all of these down. Now, right now we have a board policy handbook, which was the outgrowth of all of these things being put together. But we would meet till 2 or 3 in the morning sometimes

before they'd say, let's quit and go home. The one board member lived in Florence and would drive over.

I'll digress. He was very faithful. And I used to help him out a lot. And for several years, I would fly him back and forth to meetings. I'd fly over to Florence, pick him up in a little plane, and bring him back to the airport. And then at 2 in the morning, flying back to the Florence airport again. Because, see, that would save that hour. So it's only a 15-minute hop in a plane to get over there. And I think only once did we get weathered out due to fog, because it was just unique. But that was a little bit later in the career. I didn't know him well enough, nor I don't think he would trust me in that early part to fly late at night. But that was a real enjoyable part of helping the board. But this one meeting, we had these candidates. And we interviewed many. We flew some in. They came from as far as these were presidential candidates. One of them was in Florida. One was in Michigan. One was in the state of Washington.

And two of them were in Eugene. And again, there's no secret as to the two that were here. One was the superintendent of the Eugene School District. And the other was the superintendent of the Lane County School District. So the board narrowed...

Eugene, that was Millard Pond at that time, who is now retired.

I had just finished talking to Millard that day. Of course, I had to work with him because I was part of the Eugene school system. I was getting my paycheck there. So literally, I kept him well informed as to what was going on. But he knew the meeting was held that night. And he said, now, if you don't select me as president, I won't speak to you for at least a month. And I kind of laughed it off. But that night, I remember Dick Schallenberger was there. And Dick was the superintendent of the Florence School District, one of the members of the study committee. And so he went to sleep like he normally does on a desk out in the other room and said, wake me up when they decide. So at about 3 a.m., I went in and woke him up and told him the decision was Dale Parnell. Now, Dale was at the annual meeting of the school superintendents. And he was actually in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Dale had said, no matter what time it is, call me.

So it was like 3 a.m., which would have been 6 a.m. there. And I woke him up, told him the decision, and he said, how much money? And I told him, and he said, well, I'll let you know when I get back. That doesn't sound like very much. And so, in fact, what they had done was to offer him the same salary he was getting as county school superintendent. And he didn't know as he really wanted it. So I just kind of let it go at that. But he did call me back a few hours later, and he said, yes, tell them I will accept. So I went over and told Millard Pond the decision. And he literally did not speak to me for at least 30 days. He kept his word. He was very put out. And it would have been an entirely different community college. He was a very traditional type person, a very meticulous man, would do a good job, but it would have been a very mediocre college type thing. And Dale was the very kind of a young upstart, let's push on.

[01:13:19] Interviewer:
Did he ever improve his salary? Oh, yes.

[01:13:22] Bert Dotson:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he knew that that could happen.

[01:13:27] Interviewer:
Interesting that he did that at first.

[01:13:30] Bert Dotson:
Well, let me give you another thing that is fairly well known, and it's an insight. One of the board members used to be the county treasurer. Her name was Olga Freeman. And incidentally, she was the person on the board that created a unified six-to-one board because she had the knack of alienating almost everybody, and particularly males. She hated a male, and literally.

So by the time, we'll say after about a year, it was a six-to-one board. Any time she'd make a motion, it would be six-to-one, no matter what. Well, during the time of her tenure as the county treasurer, she figured that she could make the county a lot of money by when the tax returns came in November to invest them and not pay the local school districts until March or April, and she'd get six months' interest. The local school districts had to then go to their bankers and borrow money to cover the payroll because the funds were being withheld. And she said, but I'm the treasurer, and I can make that decision. And at that time, Dale Parnell was the county school superintendent. So he went to the district attorney and got a subpoena to show cause or something like that and forced her to pay the school district money. So she hated him. Now, he was one of the five candidates for president, so you can guess how she voted each time.

And she was the person that didn't want to even pay him as much salary as he was getting now because it's a small college. You don't have a staff yet. What do you do? And it was amazing. But anyhow, he did accept. I think he was very fortunate. So from February until... And he had a month vacation coming at the county school superintendent. So he literally took no vacation. He just immediately, on the 1st of June, moved over to the county, to our office. And at that time, we'd arranged to lease the vocational school facilities so we could establish some type of administrative quarters there. And we moved out of the county school office at that time.

Now, that's a lot of the early beginnings.

We could talk for a long time more on many interesting things, but time is getting away. Yeah, you need to get that.

[01:16:22] Interviewer:
Could I get you to come back, or could I?

[01:16:24] Bert Dotson:
Oh, sure. Yeah. So I feel like we've got quite a few things that I would really like to talk to you about. I'm sure that... You see, I've just been talking about little things here and there. Yeah, I feel like there's just several things. I would very much like to know... Well, there's 18 years' worth of happenings. Yes, that's right. I think because of it, I think we ought to talk a little bit more about what happened once it was established. I think we ought to talk a lot more about Parnell

[01:16:51] Interviewer:
and what kind of things did that mean.

[01:16:56] Bert Dotson:
I mean, you just touched on the whole thing of, you know, had someone else been president, it would have been a very different thing. That's correct. Or had we had a different board, it would have been different. And I think that we haven't really got into that yet. If I'd have been a different person, it would have been different. You see, each person puts their own little something into it. Yes. And now, a person coming into the college now can make a little bit of a change, but not much. In other words, it's set. It's already done, it's forming. But when you have something brand new, whatever you're doing leads the direction, and that's what it's going to be from there on out. That must have been really exciting, to be really aware of that. Oh, and I'd like to relate a little bit about the, we'll say, the way in which we were kind of discovered nationally and how we've been included in national happenings.

And, you know, the president gets involved now in President Schaeffer in many things, and not taking anything away from him because he's a fantastic person and can handle it. But if he hadn't been at this community college, those things may not have happened because automatically we were involved with being a national leader in community college. Once we were discovered, in quotes, things started to happen to us, and then we were able to carry through. Was it a case that you actually

[01:18:33] Interviewer:
made sure you were discovered?

[01:18:35] Bert Dotson:
Well, some of that.

I would say that, and I'm going back, you know, my own mind is why these things happen. Our board, with one exception, was quite good in allowing people well like myself to attend regional and national meetings. And that's one of the reasons why we were discovered, is, well, I can only relate to the meetings that I would go. I'd go and I'd report on something, or I'd hear a report on something. Now, most frequently, when I'd hear somebody was doing something unique, I'd say, gosh, we've been doing that since we started. And they'd say, you have? Well, we're just now planning on doing it. Could we come and visit you and see how it really works? And I'd say, great. So we started getting visits. Then in 1973, there was a group that was just five years old. That's called the League for Innovation in Community College, which is one of the top elite kind of closed segments. It's only by invitation can you become a member.

And at that time, there was only 16 members. And the community college in Oklahoma City was forced to drop out because of a state ban on any travel out of the state, which was very unfortunate for them. And the League was looking for a member in the Northwest because it wanted to be representative around the country, and they didn't have anybody in the Northwest. They literally interviewed Lane, Portland Community College. They went up to Washington, to Bellevue, and to Mount Hood. And when they came back, they said, Lane is head and shoulders above any of them. Will you consider being a member? So since 1973, we've been involved with that group, which has just opened door after door after door. And we have been the main consultant for the Hawaii Community College system. We're still sending people over, and they come over here. We're involved with a computer project with a new University of Ulster in Ireland.

There's so many things that it would take a long time to relate all of those. Now, I'm trying to kind of resurrect and get us kind of on keys to where we were. As I recall, what we really did was talk about the early formation of the board, and then the... We talked about community colleges kind of in general. Yes. We talked about Lane's initial beginnings actually starting in 1963. And then we went in and kind of vacillated a little bit into the 64-65 period. I'll tell you one of the things... Yeah, please go ahead, because I'd like to get a focus. And if I can get a focus, then I can start bringing out some of the things that would focus. Yeah. One of the things that I would be interested in is, I think we got to the point where the college is actually established. And the voters have said, okay. And there was that time between October and July, which did a lot of formation and so forth.

But what I'd like to know then is about the early times at the community college before this building was built, and the actual building of the building. And some of the... This is going to take more than just this session. That will be fine. And then, actually, some of the events within the board at that time, and some of the characters or the personalities around those decisions that were made at that point.

[01:22:42] Interviewer:
Okay.

Okay.

[01:22:46] Bert Dotson:
We're all set and we're rolling. Trying to recall the period of time in 1965 when the college actually was legal. Let's put it that way. As you recall, we went through a period of formation in which we had to use, in quotes, devious means to do the things that were mandated to be done. But at that time, the community college legislative provisions actually prohibited the college from doing those things. So the law was conflicting with itself.

Can you turn it off for a minute?

To continue with that same statement, we certainly called this to the attention of the state legislature during the next session, which was in 1965 the group met. I mean, we called it to their attention then. And it was corrected in time for Mount Hood Community College to benefit from being created legally because they had provisions that on the same formation ballot could be a provision to provide money for an interim period of time. And of course, if the college was voted in, the people would certainly support a minimal amount of interim money. And this proved true in the community colleges that emerged after we did.

I recall Mount Hood Community College. This is deviating a little bit because I was asked to be a consultant to the formation of Mount Hood Community College. And in fact, they wanted to hire me in the same capacity up there. And I told them that I couldn't work both sides of the fence at the same time. But I did go up and was the consultant for several meetings that their formation group had. And worked with the person who was a retired military man that they hired to be the executive secretary that started that group. And of course, gave him all the information that I had. And so they paralleled our whole program of how to start a community college. That's something I wanted to ask you though. Now, you were telling me last week that at one time you went to a banker and he came up with some money.

[01:25:36] Interviewer:
Did you ever tell the legislature that sort of arrangement?

[01:25:40] Bert Dotson:
I could never formally tell the legislature this, no, because this was not a permissible thing to do. I can assure you that many key members of the state legislature knew that this happened, but not officially. And since actually it would be debatable as to whether this was a real bad thing or not, there was nothing in the law that had a penalty if you did it. It just says you can't do it and that was all. So it was an interesting interim activity that the college got involved with. Going back into that period of time, I spoke earlier about the boundaries. And there's a lot of interesting stories, but I don't think I want to get involved in that as to how the boundaries were established. I do recall one incident which was somewhat tense, gripping, and actually humorous as far as I was concerned. The law provided that there must be at least one advertised public hearing.

This would occur prior to any formation of the ballot title for the election. Now, the ballot title actually described where the boundaries were. It was in June that we held our official public hearing. The state superintendent of public construction, Leon Meinier, at that time, conducted the hearing. We had several members of the state legislature down. We had some visiting people from the State Department of Education. Bob Hatton was one name because he was an assistant superintendent in charge of community colleges. He had just been recently hired by the state of Oregon from the state of Michigan, where he was working with community colleges, and Michigan was quite well advanced at that time. The problem there was that he and the state superintendent of public construction rarely spoke to one another because they had different philosophies.

In fact, the whole state of Oregon still was a little bit uncertain about what a community college was. I think it was fortunate that the legislature put the control with the State Department of Education rather than with the State Department of Higher Education. But the community college was kind of an orphan bouncing around in there because the State Department of Education only really could understand grades 1 through 12. You see, at that time, there was no talk even of kindergarten or of anything beyond the 12th grade. But nevertheless, they did hire a person, put him in charge, and I worked with Bob Hatton, but Bob Hatton was down for this hearing. The hearing went along fine describing the desire of the people on the coast to be included, which wasn't the original intent. The discussion about the central Lynn area of why this really at this time, we proposed that it be excluded, no one had anything.

We talked about the Monroe School District, and then we had a person get up and launch really a tirade on education primarily. And then it got down to the key issue about he's being taxed to death, and he certainly didn't want a community college to come in and tax him. Therefore, he would oppose all this legislation. So finally, I had to go around and point out to Leon Minear, kind of quietly, where the person was living. And so the State Superintendent then said, can you tell me exactly where you live? And the person said, yes, I live at such and such a place. And he, Minear just calmly said, well, you're not included in the community college district, so you don't have anything to worry about. And he just went right on, and the fellow was real red-faced and stomped out of the meeting, and at least he had his say on taxes.

So we did not include several of the school districts in the Monroe School District, only the Monroe Elementary School District. And later, of course, that district went into Lynn Benton Community College District. Let me talk about a couple of key issues that were facing a brand new board at that time.

This was an interesting board. It was composed of very different kind of people, kind of going around the district and recalling. We had a professional board in quotes, I guess. We had a physician, Dr. Brower from Florence. We had two dentists, which was interesting. One from Junction City, Cliff Mattson, and Dean Webb from Cottage Grove. We had a manufacturer of heavy trailers by the name of Ken Schmidt. This person was, we'll say, a person who could think big because he had a big business. And let me diverse again, like I will. I can always remember, and I spoke about it earlier, that practically all-night session. In which we were hiring a president of the community college. In which there was opposition by one board member for a little different reasons, but it got down to the salary. And the salary that was offered was somewhere around $14,000.

And when they started quibbling about that, I can remember Ken Schmidt in a very kind of a quiet lull in part of this kind of deadlock, said, hell, I pay my shop foreman $25,000 a year. And that just kind of shook everybody to think that those kind of wages were being paid to a shop foreman. No one really realized some of the money that the real industrial world has versus that which the educational world. So Ken Schmidt was a very effective person, although he was only on the board literally for about eight months. Ken was the one that drew the short straw. Now, going back, the first board had to be separated as to the length of term of each board member. And that was to be done either by action of the board to determine how or by drawing lots. That's what the provision said. So the board said, well, rather than to draw lots, let's just do it by how many total votes each person got.

Well, that was all right, but it was not really fair because in some of the districts, there were several candidates running. And in other districts, there may have been only two. In fact, that's kind of what happened. There were only two running in Florence. That's why Al Brower got a four-year term right away. Ken Schmidt's district, which was the Springfield-McKenzie-Marcola area, I think had about six candidates. So, of course, the votes were split up. But Ken got the least number, so he drew a one-year term. And there was one one-year term, two two-year terms, two three-year terms, and two four-year terms. So Ken was only there for one year, but actually the board was only formed in October. So the next July 1st would be the start of the second year. He did rerun for election, but did absolutely no work on the election. There was a young attorney in Springfield by the name of Bob Ackerman, who really went out and worked.

And naturally, he got elected. That was the first election for a board member. We had Lyle Swetland, a board member. He was a labor leader. He worked at the Register Guard as a typographer, but he was also the executive secretary of the AFL-CIO in the area, kind of the county consortium. I had worked with Lyle. It was about the only one that I had any acquaintance of at all. And I had worked with him on a couple of committees earlier when I was with the Springfield School District. We had a very unique person by the name of Bill Bristow. He had a jewelry store in downtown Eugene. In fact, his father had a jewelry store, and it's a long tradition. And his grandfather settled in this area, Elijah Bristow. In fact, he settled with the Pleasant Hill School District area. One of the squares on the present campus is named for the Bristows because they were a very influential pioneering family of the area.

Bill, as a young boy, I will have to say I also knew Bill, but I was not on a speaking acquaintance with Bill. Many a young person in Eugene knew Bill Bristow because it was always fun to walk by the jewelry store that was then on about 6th and Willamette. And see this 300 pound little kid trying to get in and out of the display areas while he was trying to help his father with the jewelry store.

Bill would be the first to say he was very obese. Now with the obesity, he was ridiculed, and Bill developed quite early in his life the ability to be a satirist, a very bitter man, a very sharp individual, able to verbally defend himself and cut somebody to the quick, just beautifully with words. Nothing physical, but if you ever got into a verbal discussion with him, you were lost. He could handle that so beautifully. This we really didn't know, but we found out as time went on. And he was very straightforward. He was not a devious person, but I'll tell you, he helped the college in many ways. And it was very sad to see that his life was taken away by a cancer condition, and he did leave the board during this period of time and didn't survive but about 6 months after he resigned. What do you mean by how, don't give me some examples of how he helped.

Okay, I was kind of leading into some of these things in my own mind trying to sort out. As you recall, the one woman on the board was very adept at making it a 6 to 1 board, finally. Del Bristo would make comments to the one woman, of which she rarely understood, but almost everybody in the audience would understand. I think I could relate one and still be, let's say, clear and clean enough.

This occurred maybe two years. We were well into the planning stage, but we were trying to determine in the boardroom of the new campus the type of chair that should be at the board table. So we had some ideas. Some chairs were there on display. Naturally, all the manufacturers want to sell you something. And, you know, there was a lot of things, but one of the chairs was the proposal for a board chair. Now, Mrs. Freeman kept her position saying, at the local furniture store in last month's paper, they had an advertisement for $39.95 for a chair, a swivel chair. And I think we ought to do that. And the chair that you're proposing is $100. Why on earth would we want to spend that amount of money? Of course, all of the talk then centered around that it was a chair that would last. You buy a cheap chair and it goes to pieces. It's not too comfortable to set in and all like that.

Well, this had gone on for a long period of time. Well, long, you know, like 30, 40 minutes, this bickering back and forth. So Bill Bristow finally said, Mrs. Freeman, would you please just sit in the chair? All the other members had been, you know, it had been moved around and she was there and the chair was right beside her and she didn't want to sit on it. He finally turned to her and said, please give it your acid test.

Everyone just collapsed and she just sat there and looked around and didn't know what was going on. They finally voted six to one to buy the chair and she never did give it her acid test. But that's the type of person Bill Bristow was. Let me do one other thing. He'd be pulling some real neat little things that were premeditated to. Frequently, our first president was always the target of Mrs. Freeman's accusations. Most normally they were innuendos based on maybe some partial type of information and never did get the same thing twice. But you never knew who would be singled out. But almost, well, at every board meeting, at least once or twice, Dale Parnell would be the center of her thrust. Now, I can't tell you what the for instance was in this one, but I can remember quite well.

Dale Parnell would be seated next to the chairman and it wasn't Bill Bristow at that time, but Bill Bristow was seated next to the president also and then came Mrs. Freeman in the seating. It had gone on and, of course, Dale just keeps quiet. Finally, I could see Bill Bristow reach into his pocket and pull out something in hand to Dale Parnell. And Dale Parnell, in his swivel chair, kind of looked at it and then he slowly turned around and faced the wall. And you could see his shoulders and I thought, he's crying. Something really got to him. He finally turned around and I could tell, well, he really wasn't crying, but he was straight faced and then everything went on. And at the break, I went up to him and I said, what happened? And he handed me this little tiny jar and on the jar label, it said horseradish.

And it broke Dale up. He just, you know, that was because Bill Bristow had a knack of telling when the president was getting so uptight he was going to get mad. And once you get mad and lose your temper, you've lost control. So he would look for these signs and try to avoid Dale Parnell ever losing control. Just help him out. A very unique person and very sharp, very straightforward. He helped the college a tremendous amount in his tenure. He was the board chairman for the first two years, remembering the first year was only about an eight month period. But they did elect him the first chairman and then he did such a nice job of it. And he hadn't served really a year yet, so they put him right through as the second year.

Let's see, some other interesting things.

The naming of the college was an interesting episode. We had asked people to give suggestions. The board members were invited to try to come up with their own determination.

There were many names really submitted. You know, Whitewater, Emerald Valley, all of the evergreen, that type of thing.

The name of Lane, of course, was the, because it was primarily Lane County, it seemed to kind of emerge to not only identify it, but to honor one of the pioneers of the state.

Again, this was a split vote, as most of the votes were split. And there was quite a lengthy dialogue. In fact, there was a page of a, not an autobiography, a biography written about Joseph Lane, whom Lane County was named after. Part of that was quoted in one of the meetings because it was determined by Mrs. Freeman that Joseph Lane beat his wife upon occasions, and we should never name a community college after a person like that. And so we did name it Lane Community College. It was, again, part of that formation years. Everything that was done set a precedence to a degree. For instance, naming the college is going, that kind of stays forever. You rarely change the name of the college. I can't say that nowadays because of what's happening in higher education. If you're named a college, you want to be named a university next. But Lane Community College will stay that for many years.

Trying to find a place was another big task of the board, a place to locate the community college. We had negotiated with the Eugene School District, actually this negotiation went on by myself before the college was formed, tentative negotiations, to lease the vocational building from the Eugene School District. When we found out that we were formed, we also were able to obtain the Bethel Elementary School as one of the major campus sites. And the reason was that it had been condemned by the fire marshal for use as a elementary or secondary school, but there were no laws prohibiting a community college from using it. So we could move in and use it. I guess they thought the older people could fend for themselves better if it caught on fire than the younger people, which may be true. We also at that time had the opportunity to pick up on a rental basis an office building that was the old Booth Kelly general offices.

Now Booth Kelly was a mill that sold out to the Georgia Pacific Corporation, and when they sold out to Georgia Pacific, they no longer had needs of the corporate office. And that was located in Springfield, so we did negotiate with them. At one time we had about 45 different locations in the community that we were either leasing or renting. Now that may sound like a lot, but I would guess we have still 30 or 40 places in the district that we lease or rent for classes, either school buildings or garages or some offices. There are many classes that are held. The emergence of our downtown center just recently helped consolidate a lot of these, because we had a lot of them in the downtown core. Now we've consolidated those in the 11th and Willamette location, but we still rent a lot. But we had basically three campuses.

We had a great increase in the number of students wanting to come, particularly during the second and third years, once we got going. We had anticipated that the Eugene Vocational School had about 500 students, and we thought, well, our first year will probably double and maybe have 1,000 students. We ended up with about 1,500 students the first year, and we were not really prepared to handle that many. But again, giving credit to the staff, who did a fantastic job in crowding students in and starting classes in the middle of the term even. We did things very unprecedented, but we were careful in doing things that were quality, that we could be assured that the students were getting a educational program that they could rely upon, use it as a background for further studies.

In 1965, actually it was before then, we started a committee on the board. One of the very first committees was the Land Acquisition Committee. But in 1965, we really pursued it in depth. There were basically five sites in the area that it kind of boiled down to. I can almost discount one of them, and yet it was a site that was there because it was a free site in the city of Cottage Grove. It was adjacent to one of the junior high schools down there, about 25 acres. And because it was free with water, city waters, lights, all the utilities, we really had to look at it, and we did. But it was out of the center of population, well, 18 miles out of the center of population. So that left us with four sites, and there was a site that was on the east shore of Fernridge Lake at the end of Royal Avenue. That could be, two of the other sites had expandable acreage, and that was one that we could start with 50 or 100 acres and whatever we needed.

There was, now I'm leaving this site to last, but then there was a site, a very interesting site, that was on the east side of Greenhill Road, just opposite the airport, the road that you go to the airport. So it would be just east of it. And incidentally, that's where they're now proposing to put an additional landing strip for light planes, is on that particular site. That was only about 30 to 40 acres, and it was pretty well closed in. It was non-expandable. We were concerned about future traffic noise from aircraft. Although, it probably wouldn't have been too bad where it is, because that's not in any of the landing patterns. And there was a provision for a sewer right there, because the city had built a sewer for the airport, which supposedly was large enough that could handle a college there also. There was what we call the Shelley property, and it's still called Shelley Street. It was kind of at the junction of...

But I think we're okay. Well, I need to go one step further. And the Shelley property consisted of 25 acres. It actually is in the city of Springfield or adjacent to it. So it could be served by either sewer or electricity. Its primary drawback was that it had Bonneville's power line running right down through the middle of the whole property, the exact middle. And we had to have an easement there, and then there was the potential danger of the power lines being either hit by a pole falter or something. And so we rejected it. But during all of this, and it didn't emerge until almost the last minute, the trustee... Yeah, the word is trustees of the Garnier Corporation, came in and made an offer and a very top-of-the-table offer saying, We will give you 100 acres of land in this Russell Basin. This is what this is called, the Russell Basin District. Not many people at that time even knew the word Russell Basin.

We'll give you 100 acres of your choice, whichever acreage you want. They owned a little over 900 acres here. We'll give you 100 acres, and then we will also agree to sell to you up to 100 more acres at half the assessed valuation, which was a very attractive offer. They said, we're doing this because it's a tax advantage for the Garnier Corporation. But they say, also, we want to see a community college, so they did this. So the attorneys got together and drew up a proposal. We had an assessed valuation by three different people in the area that do that, and it boiled down to the fact that the acreage here at that time, and it was kept quiet because once they knew the college was here, the value goes up. But they agreed that it would be approximately $2,000 an acre. So immediately we proposed that we buy 100 acres for $1,000 an acre. And we did have the serial levy going, so we did have the cash to do it.

And, of course, one board member held out vehemently saying, we don't even need any. 100 acres is more than enough to build a community college for years. And going through, and it's interesting, you could read some of the minutes to see how this happens, but after a lengthy discussion, they finally ended up buying 50 acres. In other words, they compromised, the board compromised with themselves. I think it would have been a definite advantage had we gotten the extra 50 acres at that time, because you can't buy property out here at $1,000 an acre anymore.

We made one error in negotiations. Now, again, some of the timing is not really in sequence on this when I'm talking about these things.

The matter of providing the sanitary treatment facility, we were promised by EWAB that they would go out of the district and provide us water. Power already was strung along the road, but sewers were not available. See, that's on the other side of the hill here, so we knew that that wouldn't be available. There was a development, which we now call Gasoline Alley, which the service stations are situated. They were there at that point in time, and they had their own little package sewer treatment plant, which went into the river. So we explored and found out that if we built a sewer lagoon system, we could exist out here temporarily until sewers came to us. Now, temporarily, and we knew it full well, it could mean forever. But we wanted to be assured that we did have a good, well-designed plant. At that time, part of the ownership, which was Garnier and some other people in the area, said,

if anything is to be developed out here, we're going to need sewers, too. So if we give you some land, will you please allow us to hook into the sewer system that you're going to build? And we said yes.

We gave up three-sevenths of the capacity of the sewer system. Now, we were going to put in a four-acre, four-water level, or water surface area, four-acre lagoon. But we were encouraged to put in a seven-acre lagoon, and the cost was not much different. You still did about the same amount of scraping and dyke building. In turn, we were given three additional acres. So we bought four acres extra. Now, this was beyond the 150. We were given three acres, so we had 157 acres at that time. And the property that's just west of the college did have, in its title, the provisions that went, and if they needed access to the lagoon, it was theirs. Years later, some enterprising young people, young, well, yeah, I guess, they were my age, is why I'm saying it, well, I'd gone through high school with him. They bought up the acreage and hired an architect to develop a whole dormitory setup to rent to students,

which could create all kinds of problems. Number one, we didn't want to be a dormitory college. They were going to house between 800 and 900 students on this acreage. To do that, we would have to think seriously about other things on the college, including, number one, a beefed-up security, because we had literally one person on campus during the night, and that was our whole security, because no one comes out here. But if you've got 800 or 900 students over there, this was happening kind of in the period just following the Martin Luther race riots, the student unrest, the Vietnam, we could also envision that this would be the potential for student unrest. If they want to get a cause going, let's go over to the dorms and dream it up. Anyhow, it was totally counter, and this was subjective, but the one thing that was very positive was the fact that if we put an 800 student dormitory

and allowed it to hook up to our seven-acre lagoon, it could overload it to the point where it would not operate, and we'd have to close the college. We wouldn't be permitted to operate out here. So at that juncture, we finally got together with the principals and did purchase a 20-acre plot over there, which included two-sevenths of the lagoon. There is still one seventh that is kind of dangling that no one knows legally quite where it is, although it's very doubtful that it'll ever be used for any major impact on the sewer lagoon. But we did get through that.

[02:00:57] Interviewer:
In a way, you sort of got blackmailed to buy more land, didn't you?

[02:01:00] Bert Dotson:
We kind of did, and yet it's not a bad thing.

The property is very desirable. It's original planning, and we worked with the original landscape architects that did our campus, did a proposal that showed this piece of property being a commercial complex, primarily of professional offices, doctors, attorneys, perhaps a medical lab or a drugstore, something of this nature, that could be housed right there on this 20-acre. So we feel like at some point in time, when and if the sewer situation, and that's what's going to cause this whole area, because I didn't mention in my earlier conversation, but one of the negative points of this land was that the land is deemed unsuitable for any septic tank.

And then its development was just stopped. When that was found out, I'll back up and say several homes were built out here, way back in the 30s and the 40s, or even earlier, literally earlier, because most people, well, to begin with, there wasn't any laws on septic tanks. You could do almost anything you wanted to. And then you could put a septic tank in here, but they didn't realize that during certain months of the year, that the effluent just rises to the surface and runs off, which is a basic cause for the disease hepatitis. And the River Road District found that out several times. And then the county stopped any building out here, unless you put in a packaged sewer treatment plant, which is very expensive for a home to do. So until they get some sewer piped in out here, this whole area will not develop.

After that, it's going to develop rapidly, because it is a very good location. It's quick to downtown Eugene, quick to the freeway, quick to most anything. We did a study when we located here and found out that, and this is maintained even up to today, that this location is within approximately 30 minutes driving time of 90% of the people of the district. It's amazing. You see, about the only people are those that are in the extreme western end that go beyond that 30 minutes driving time, because we're within 30 minutes of Cottage Grove and 30 minutes of Junction City, so it's only Oak Ridge and Florence, primarily, that is out of it. And it's located at a good junction in the freeway system, so we can get in or out very easily.

[02:04:11] Interviewer:
One of the questions I wanted to ask you is, what was the sort of attitude of the board members? Do you remember about selecting this location?

[02:04:24] Bert Dotson:
Yes. There were two criterias. Accessibility for students was number one in most of the board members' minds. Secondly was the cost involved and future implications of costs. So it was, in other words, how accessible is it and what's it going to mean fiscally or financially.

Like I mentioned, this kind of came later in the offerings. It wasn't one of the first ones, because we didn't even know that it existed. So later in the offerings, both criterias fit so beautifully for this property that it was a unanimous choice. One of the few unanimous board votes we had for this site, now as to whether we acquire a little more land with it, was another matter. But to locate here was definitely a unanimous choice. There was some opposition to it. No matter where we locate, there will always be opposition. But the people that opposed it were primarily from the Junction City area, some opposition from the coast, because they'd say, well, we have to go clear through Eugene to get to it, so it's kind of out of the way. Those in Springfield and Cottage Grove and Oak Ridge said it's great for us, so you've got to kind of strike a happy medium.

Yet I believe has been an ideal location for a community college, both in practicality, the financial costs, and the other ingredient, I think, aesthetically. It was certainly a good location, because it is surrounded by the typical Oregon greenery, and it is undisturbed as far as commercial developments because of the building restrictions.

[02:06:24] Interviewer:
Do you see that? You were saying that as soon as they get the sewer in, it'll certainly boom. Do you see that happening in the future?

[02:06:31] Bert Dotson:
I remember that there were some plans for developing the land. Yes, I do see it happening, not in the immediate future.

We got involved, we meaning people from the college, several of us were on many committees, in looking at the 1990 plan. One of the thrusts of the 1990 plan is to stop any rural development, subdivisions and things like that, and force the urban area to be more dense, more compact.

It's certainly a theory, a philosophy, and I can see some validity in it. If this basin were to open, that would be counter to that, because we'd be taking what we consider a rural area here, and start filling it up, because it's a little more desirable than to try to rebuild a section of decayed downtown Eugene, or downtown Springfield. Until the 1990 plan, and then let me interject, for some, and I'm sure it was not an oversight, but for some reason, this whole basin was left out of the 1990 plan. There is no mention of it in there, no recommendations, no direction, so it's just kind of left as a void. Other than just the general Lane County building requirements, there is no direct reference as to what this might become. Now, there have been many private proposals, and I can talk about some land that is just north of 30th Avenue, that has been owned either by the city or by the Eugene Public School District, or by some churches.

At one time, there was a private hospital that was on the drawing boards to go right across 30th Avenue. The Eugene School District talked about a school being built over there at one time. Of course, that was at a time where they owned Laurelwood Gulf Course, and so there's been a lot of changes, kind of in ownership, changes in planning. All, I would say, part of the orderly development of any community. I don't think anyone realized at one point in time that Lane Community College was going to become literally the state's, I think, ninth largest city or tenth largest city within its complex here. Because we're at a size, now it isn't a permanent residence, and you really can't call it a city, but our enrollment of, we'll say, 10,000 students or whatever might show up is certainly larger than many cities in the state of Oregon. In fact, you see, it's larger than any of the cities in Lane County, except Springfield or Eugene.

I try to think of some other kind of unique little things that I hate to pick on one board member all the time, but once you kind of get on to it. In the fall of 1965, we had, our first real faculty were being gathered together, both Dale Parnell and myself and Bill Cox. Some of the other people had been actively interviewing, recruiting, trying to determine not only what classes we should offer that first year, but who could be the qualified instructor for those classes. And I'd mentioned earlier, we were trying to get people that had knowledge of education, that's certainly true, but also had experience as what we termed in as journeymen, had actually worked at a job for, successfully worked at a job for a period of time other than teaching. We didn't just want to hire a classroom teacher that had done nothing but just teach. So our first faculty was primarily composed of people like this.

They didn't know each other. We had the one little group of 25 from the vocational school that certainly worked together and knew each other, but we had all of these other strangers coming in. So we wanted to spend some time in service training, talking about things, so we had planned about a week. We had one particularly intense day in which we had a consultant come in, and we wanted to hold the whole group together. And during that process, we said, well, let's keep them here during the noon hour, too, and we'll go out and get some box lunches. There was like 50 people, so I can remember going out to the local. We didn't have a Kentucky Fried Chicken at that time, but we did have a place that would put up box chicken lunches. We had no kitchen, no food services, nothing like this. So I bought the lunches, and we, of course, charged it to the college.

And at the next board meeting, when the approval of the bills came, there was this big outcry about, we are all going to be indicted because we spent the public taxpayers' fund for food, for people, and they certainly shouldn't have been paid for by the taxpayers' money. And there's going to be a lawsuit filed by the citizens against the college. It's all going to go down the drain. We're going to have to dissolve. And there were literally tears by one board, literally tears, crying, saying, you can't do this. And the other six members smiled and voted six to one to approve the bill. And that story has lingered, and Dale Parnell, to this day, every once in a while, has asked how he would like to have a chicken box lunch at the courtesy of a board member.

So, at that time, the bills, by state law, had to be approved one by one. And at every board meeting, we had to have the list, well, it started out, you know, a few hundred at every board meeting. And finally, it got up to be several thousand at each board meeting. And as long as this one board member was on there, it took us about 30 minutes to an hour to go through the bills, because there'd always be these little check marks after.

[02:14:01] Interviewer:
Now, can you explain this one?

[02:14:04] Bert Dotson:
To give you another example, we had a bond issue. It was quite an issue. At that time, they were trying to decide whether to go a million dollars or ten million. During the final vote that finally approved the ten million dollars, one board member did not vote, because she was in a discussion with Bill Cox at that time, who had turned in for mileage at, and at that time we were paying like seven cents a mile or six cents a mile, turned in for mileage twice that month to go down to the post office and back. So it was like, you know, 30 or 40 cents. And she was arguing that he shouldn't have turned that in at all. That was not a legitimate excuse. He could have done that on his way home and on his way back to the college, and he kept saying, but they're closed then. I get here early and I leave late. Well, nevertheless, she missed that whole vote. Never did vote on that.

So it was, I think we recorded her as being yes, because there was no no's against it.

The, let's see, some of the other interesting things about the board members.

I told you about Ken Schmidt only being there eight months, and Bob Ackerman came on and again was a very supportive person for the college, and still kind of maintained somewhat of the six to one, although it became more and more of a five to two. Bob was more of a politician than Ken Schmidt, and so he enjoyed sometimes siding with the early board member. But he was a very positive person in the development of the college, a very active individual that studied the issues in depth. I really can't give enough credit to those early board members, the first board members, because they were a fantastic group working with a thought in mind that we have the chance to create one of the best colleges in the nation, and that's literally what happened.

One of the best colleges emerged, and I did an excellent job in coming out of a complete unknown. Nobody was experienced. Nobody knew what they were doing, literally, but we had a dream, and the people that we kept getting involved with helped every step of the way. We had quite a few consultants that we either contacted, or we, by chance, ran across.

We did something, and this calls to mind, something that this board did that very few boards have done in the past, I know, or maybe would even want to do. It was during our planning stages, and there's a whole story about all the committees and all the things that were done to plan this particular campus, but one of them that involved the board. We finally decided that it would be to the advantage of the whole college in the future to do some actual visitation of other community colleges. So I got assigned to put together a trip that included the basic administrative staff of the college, a team from the architects, and all of the board members. And I actually identified 28 community colleges in California, and five in the state of Washington that we should visit. So we did this trip, and it was something else.

[02:18:33] Interviewer:
How did you travel?

[02:18:35] Bert Dotson:
Well, we traveled by air to California, and then we rented cars. There was almost 40 of us. Let's see, there was seven times five. There was 35, and then interspersed was another three or four that kind of came because I remember renting five cars. I really should have rented, I wanted to rent more than five, but again, this one board member said, well, you can easily get five people in a car. Well, that was kind of hard, but then people did that. Another thing was to separate the smokers from the nonsmokers, and also there were two board members that would not fly on an airplane with another board member. So I had to make sure that these were on two different flights.

[02:19:25] Interviewer:
You mean a specific board member?

[02:19:28] Bert Dotson:
A specific board member.

[02:19:30] Interviewer:
The board member you've been speaking with?

[02:19:32] Bert Dotson:
Well, I don't want to say that, but it was very interesting on that trip to try to keep personalities separated and still accomplish the task. And I learned a lot about people on that trip, and I feel like it was very successful.

The hardest part is that there was only two women on the trip. One of them was a smoker and one a nonsmoker. The board member was the nonsmoker, and our business manager was the smoker. So I had to very cleverly conceal the fact that I was not renting a single room, that it was a doubled room. Although, literally, I paid for a single room, but I kind of buried the expense, saying, no, they gave us this single room for you because we were such a large group. That was one of the things. And then in shuffling the cars back and forth to make sure that there were smokers and nonsmokers, there was always a couple of lap overs. You can't squeeze five to a car and have it come out even. So some of the people had a little bit of problems in having to get to a college and leap out immediately and go to the lounge area for their cigarette rather than smoking in the car.

Because most of the visitations from our motel where we were based, and we were based in two areas, one in the Los Angeles area and one in the San Francisco area. But the distance from the motel would be up to an hour driving time until you got to the college that you were visiting. Not everyone saw the 28 colleges. Most of them saw about seven or eight during this period of time.

We even had a nice experience on the way back. From the San Francisco airport, we had, well, one group had already gone back, and there was about 15 of us that were scheduled. I had two planes scheduled, largely because of different time that the people had that they had to get back to things. So 15 of us stayed a little bit later. The plane that we were scheduled on was a United plane, and they said they'd cancel their flight because of foggy conditions in Eugene. Well, that was typical. So then I went over to Hughes at that time. No, it wasn't Hughes. I think it was called Hughes at that time. No, no. Well, no. But anyhow, it was the Hughes, the Air West, and I found out that they were going to take their flight in. They were flying these Fairchilds F-47s, the little 30-some passenger one. They did have room for about 15.

And at that time, this board member, Mrs. Freeman, said, no, I won't go if there's going to be a doubt that we're going to land. And Dale Parnell said, well, that's your choice. If you don't want to go, you stay right here. We're going. And we all got up and walked out, and pretty soon she came. And there we were.

And we got in.