Larry Romine Oral History, 2004

[00:00:00] Elizabeth Uhlig:
This is an oral history interview with Larry Romine. Today is July 9, 2004. We're in the Archives at Lane Community College. My name is Elizabeth Uhlig, and I'm the Archivist. Larry, to get started with, could you tell us where you were born and raised?

[00:00:19] Larry Romine:
I was born in East Unincorporated Clark County, Washington, and raised in that area, graduated from high school, Camas High School, which was nearby to where I was born. Then went to Clark College, Clark, sometimes called Clark Community College, they use it both ways, in 1949-50. I was in my second year there, winter term, when I got called to active duty in the Air Force, so I could not stay long enough to graduate. The Korean War was on, and so they were calling up a bunch of us. And I was a personnel sergeant in the Air Force, came out after the Korean War ended, went to Midland College, Fremont, Nebraska,

don't know why exactly, except that some people who were formative in my life wanted me to go to that church college, it was the Lutheran College. Graduated from there in 1956 in sociology, minored in English, journalism, and Greek, of all stupid things. I had a Greek friend, and he would give me comics from the old country, and I would read the lines under the cartoons, and I could do it in Greek, and so what a stupid reason to take Greek, right? But you had to have a language to get a bachelor's degree there, so I had to take 18 semester hours. After that, I went to Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary at Berkeley, California, and only stayed about a year because I was told by a bishop that if I was going to ask questions and be a destroyer, I could just go on down the road, close quote. So I decided to go on down the road. I'm a guy who irritates people with questions,

and I came up looking for a job in journalism since I'd been very active in journalism in college, and I hadn't majored in journalism, so there were no jobs, but I'd majored in sociology, so I became a counselor at the juvenile court at Salem for Marion County, and soon thereafter was appointed assistant director, and they told me I needed more administrative experience. So I took a job as director of juvenile court at Lincoln County at Newport, and stayed there a year, and the politics got to me. I decided I better get out of that.

Went looking for a job in journalism, got on a weekly newspaper at Florence,

stayed there six months, and I got a letter from the Vancouver Columbian saying that we would take you on immediately, and it was a much bigger deal and much more money. So I went to Vancouver Columbian, took a leave from there after a year or two, and came to University of Oregon as a graduate assistant in journalism and got a master's science in journalism. Went back to the Columbian and was sitting by the managing editor on the copy desk one day when the phone rang, and it was the register guard of Eugene and said, we'll give you, I think, two or three thousand dollars more if you'll come here, and it was very embarrassing because the boss was sitting right there. Anyway, I said I'll come down Saturday and talk to you. I can't talk to you at this moment. Came down Saturday and they hired me, and I was at the register guard when all this community college stuff started, and they wanted somebody to write about community colleges who

knew what community colleges had been because the person had been there and they looked at the personnel records, and lo and behold, it was I. Or is it? It was me. Anyway.

[00:04:42] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How did you become interested in journalism? Were you always a writer?

[00:04:47] Larry Romine:
Yes, yes. In the third grade, my teacher asked me to come to the head of the class and speak with her privately and said that in the sixth grade central school, I was the best writer, and she said I should work on that and become a writer when I got older, and then in junior high, the English teacher told the class that someday I would be a great writer and they would know my name. Well, I didn't, but because I'm just not a fiction writer. I mean, it's just not my thing. And so all the way through, I was writing, and that's what got me through college. That and a great memory, you know, you open the textbook on the way to class, memorize one important thing, and then get your hand in the air when the discussion starts and deliver your important thing, and then the teacher never calls on you again because he knows you must have studied. In other words, I went through like most guys baking it.

[00:05:56] Elizabeth Uhlig:
When you studied for your master's at the U of O, what did you specialize in? I mean, what kind of journalism?

[00:06:02] Larry Romine:
It was news editorial. News editorial. Yeah, and I was named, when as soon as I arrived, they named me graduate assistant to an advertising professor, and I never had a course in advertising. I knew nothing about advertising, and I think the guy hated me till he died. I couldn't help him much. I graded papers. I, you know, I did foolish things, but I didn't help him very much. So when you started at the Vancouver paper and then Florence and then at the register guard, were you a general reporter or? Education, mostly. But I did do a lot of general assignment filling in here and there and wherever they had a need. But education was my interest, and it's where they sent me, and that's partly why I was familiar with the needs of vocational technical students, because I wrote about Eugene Technical Vocational School. I covered School District 4J, Eugene, and also Bethel, and I was the substitute

for Springfield. And then I also covered juvenile courts and a few things, because that's what I had that experience in.

[00:07:21] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How then did you become a strong advocate for community colleges?

[00:07:27] Larry Romine:
Well, this takes us back to Dale Parnell, not only the founding president of Lane Community College after it started, but the father of Lane Community College, because he had been principal at Springfield High School in the 1950s. Burt Dotson, who also came to LCC, was his dean of boys or vice principal. And Dale was bothered by the fact that he had no place to send people who were non-academics, but who were inclined toward technical vocational careers. Once in a while, he could send a person to Eugene Technical Vocational School if they had a vacancy. And all the K-12 school districts in the county were in the same boat of Springfield. They had nowhere to train these people. And Dale, I think, was researching places to send them and came upon the concept of the community college, loved it, bought it, started promoting it as early, I think, as 1959. He went to Bill Cox, who was the director of ETVS,

Eugene Technical Vocational School, and said, you know, if we had a community college, ETVS could be the nucleus of it if it started. And Bill Cox, who came to the college and became the director of administrative services or dean of administrative services, was a big enough person that he didn't stand in the way. He told me once that this would mean new buildings, bigger buildings for these vocational technical students, more money, more support for them, and more prestige. They could say they were going to a college instead of a tech school. And so he put his own career goals to the side. And I think he knew that he probably wouldn't want to be the president. He would just want to be one of the helpers. And when Dale convinced him to be part of this effort, it pushed the college ahead five to ten years. If Bill Cox had said no way, unless you name me

president or you give me a million dollars, you know, something, he could have held up the establishment of the college by five to ten years. And so Dale got that encouragement and he went around. Well, then he got an offer to be the superintendent of the Intermediate Education District, Lane County. It's now called Education Service District. And he looked at that job and thought he would take it because it would enable him to contact all the superintendents and talk about a community college. It would enable him to go to the college legislature and lobby. He could talk to elected legislators and so on. It just gave him, and it gave him more time and more money to devote to this. And he went to the University of Oregon Research Bureau in 1963, asked them to do a study of the need, which they did, and of course it came out as a big need, and they were supportive. He himself wrote a paper, I think it was 60 pages,

suggesting what a community college could be, what it could do, what every course could be offered. So, of course, when he got to be president, he had already worked out the whole plan. I don't know if he thought he would be the president, but he, you know, he was working behind the scenes and he wasn't really making himself very, giving himself very high visibility. He was sort of sitting behind the scenes. And he got to the University of Oregon president, who had been secretary of health education and welfare for the federal government,

trouble with being old, his names. His wife later taught here, and if I had that book, The Parnelliers, I could find his wife Vernice's last name, but we can do that later or whatever you want. One of the things that, when we put that book together, that I insisted on, was a list in the back of the book of every employee of the college

in the first two years, and Fleming.

Yeah, and she was a social science instructor, especially American government, and so in the first year, she joined the staff and stayed a few years until his first name was Arthur. Was it Arthur Fleming? Anyway, he was really important because there were people at the University, probably some administrators. I never pinned that down. I never wrote a story about it for the register guard because I didn't want to raise, I didn't want to make the objections very obvious, but they thought that if they got the community college to be an adjunct to the university, they could control it, and any money that the legislature sent toward the community college as a university could get a bite out of it, and they were hard up as they've always been at the university. They never had enough money, but Parnell talked to Fleming, and Fleming said, of course we don't want to exploit a community college. We'll keep it separate, but we'll

support you all the way. That was a great achievement by Parnell. Then he went around to all the superintendents in the county and asked them if community college were voted in, would they give a nickel per, I wouldn't say per FTE, but that's an LCC term. They had a K-12 term. Anyway, it wouldn't amount to a whole lot of money, but it'd be a little money to help the college get rolling, and he got every superintendent to support it.

And the Eugene and Springfield superintendents also were willing to give space and equipment and some staff time, and I don't think that's well known. Millard Pond was very generous for school district 4J, and he thought he was going to get to be the president of this community college, and when he didn't, it really hurt his feelings. He thought it would be a great retirement job. And I forget the name of the superintendent right now of Springfield at that time, but he was very much in Parnell's corner. And then Parnell organized what was called the Lane County Community College Study Committee. I don't think it's written anywhere that he named the people who would serve on the committee and that they would help decide if there should be a community college, and he didn't name himself to the committee. But he told the committee, he kind of got Bill Jones, the associate superintendent at Bethel, named chairman.

Dale really was behind all this. I don't know if he didn't admit all this, but I was there watching. And Bill Jones was a wonderful guy, and he said, well, we superintendents can't run around the county espousing this thing. We've got our own jobs. And Dale said, well, I'd like you to hire an executive secretary kind of person. And he said, I suggest Burt Dotson, his former aide. And so Burt was called and went over to talk to Bill Jones. And Burt said, well, I'm here for my interview. How many candidates do you have? And Bill Jones said, what do you mean, candidates? Dale said, you're the man. And so Burt didn't even meet with the committee. He just met with Bill, who told him why you were hired a long time ago. I'm just telling you about it. Dale Parnell said, you're the guy. And so Burt started going around the county. He got some buttons printed up, and he got some documents printed up to hand out.

And he spoke to various civic groups, and he let him in around the whole county. And I think he didn't know how far the district would stretch. By this time, it was 1964. And here's Dale again, behind the scenes. The Metropolitan Civic Club did a study in favor of the college. And guess who was supplying them information, and who had talked them into doing it, none other but Dale Parnell. And then he talked to the Register Guard owner and publisher, Bunkie Baker, and Bunkie got the two editorial writers into the conversation, and Dale convinced them that the Register Guard should support this thing. So what was your role? I mean, at the Register Guard as a reporter, you said you were in on a lot of these meetings? I wasn't in on too many of these meetings about the community college, but at this point is where I came in. They looked at the personnel records and said, who knew about community colleges in the newsroom, because

somebody had to write these stories. And so the city editor told me, you're the guy. You're the education anyway, so you interview anybody you think and write positive stories about this college. The editor and publisher and the editorial writers say, we are going to have a community college. Stop being non-objective. On this issue, you sell the community college. Which surprised the heck out of me, because it goes against all the training you get in journalism. But anyway, so I started interviewing Burt Dotson and Dale Parnell, and Dale knew a lot more about it than anybody, and I wrote stories and so many stories that people complained that we were giving too much space to this fantasy college that somebody wanted.

And then the other media in the county picked up on it too, the Weeklies, and I guess at that time Springfield News was twice a week, and they all started supporting it. And sometimes I interviewed Dale and attributed his remarks to Burt, because it was too much Dale. And people said, you know, get some other authorities too, so it doesn't sound like it's only Dale. And Dale was very big about it. He said, yes, absolutely do it. He didn't want it to look like he was the only one promoting this, and that he was the only one who knew anything about community colleges.

Anyway, he, I thought, was working as much for Lane Community College in the 50s, in the late 50s, early 60s, as he was in his superintendency, because he was sold. Though he had been from Willamette University, where he played football at a private liberal arts college. And Burt Dotson had gone to the university, so they hadn't been community college people. Was this impetus to former community college, this was happening throughout the state, not just in Lane County? So was Parnell involved in any of this wider movement? I don't think very directly. I mean, he was talking it up to Lane County legislators, and any state ones that would ask him to tell them about it. But Central Oregon had started quite a few years earlier, and I'm not sure if Portland was a year before Lane. It was just starting to bubble out here in the western part of the state. So it was being talked about all

over the state, and the legislature was very nervous, because they weren't sure how they were going to support all this. When the college was founded then, was Burt Dotson the first employee? Yes, he was. The election, which the Register Guard with me covered extensively, was October 19, 1964. And I was hanging on Burt's coattails so thoroughly that the night of the election, I stayed up all night with him counting the ballots. They used paper ballots, put in wooden boxes held by a padlock. And there were, at that time, the person calling the election conducted it and sent these boxes out to how many ever polling places? October 19, 1964 was a cold, icy night, terrible night. People skating off the road, and it was really really cold. The turnout at one precinct, South Eugene High School, still the one we got now, was very heavy. That's a lot of university people living out there, and a lot of education

people living out there. And when the polls closed at eight o'clock, they still had a line outside may have been a block long. So they invited them all in and tried to help them warm up and write, or check off, I guess on their paper ballots, which Burt had designed and had duplicated. I don't know if he had 4J or Springfield running for him, but it was a hit-and-miss deal. So we were in the offices of the IED in downtown Eugene, which was a basement area. And we had to wait until each box came in, and then Burt would unpadlock it and count the ballots. He didn't let me see them. He didn't think that was cricket, according to the rules, and so of course I cooperated. I didn't mean to stay all night, but the people in the outlying areas didn't get their boxes in because of the ice. And finally, I don't know if Burt made it happen, but Deputy Sheriff's went and got those boxes from Florence and Mapleton and

way up to McKinsey and brought them in. And I think it was about seven o'clock in the morning before we got the last one in. During the night, we got hungry and flipped to see who would go to Skippy's for a couple of hamburgers, which it was illegal to eat then.

And he said one flip, so he flipped the coin and I won, and he was very disappointed. And he didn't want to go outside, so I said, well, I flipped again. And I'll end up losing. Well, I flipped again and he lost again. It was two out of three, so he went. And the guy who went didn't have to pay. And he was gone for a long time, and of course no boxes came in. It must have been four in the morning or something. He came back, and what he brought me was a hamburger wrapped in paper, and it was as if he'd taken it out of the freezer. And I have accused him to this day of holding that thing out the window as he drove back from Skippy's.

Anyway, by seven o'clock we knew we had a college, and I went over to the register guard and wrote the story which is reprinted in this document, the Parnell document, something about it doesn't have a name, it doesn't have a budget, it doesn't have something, but today there's a community college in Lane County. And it went from there. They advertised for a president, and somebody from Guam applied, and somebody from the east, Millard Pond locally applied, Parnell applied. They got it down to, I think, to Parnell and Pond and offered Parnell less money than he was making as IED superintendent. And he was back east at a conference. Burt called him, and he was shocked at that pitiful offer and didn't answer immediately and called back a little later and said he would accept. And then Burt explained that the pay was too low, so they raised it a bit. And actually a vote was five to two. Lyle Sweatland

was a board member, he was a printer at the register guard at the time, and secretary treasurer of the Lane County Labor Council. For some reason, at the first he didn't like Dale, and then also Olga Freeman, who had been Lane County treasurer and had clashed with Parnell over what Parnell felt was a late distribution of tax monies to the schools. And so it was his job to challenge her, and he did, and so she didn't like him one bit.

Later, oh, 20 years later, I think, just before she died, she told me that I was her only friend at the college, and she wanted me to know that she felt that Dale had done a good job. But if I ever told anybody or printed that, she would deny I said that. She was a nice person, but strong willed.

Came out to the college often and went through the budget, almost sometimes every few days, and she would hold up a pencil and say, you could have got this for three cents, and you pay three and a half cents. Well, that bugged Dale, he had so many things to do that he wasn't worried about a half cent on a pencil.

And Lyle, you know, as soon as he got to know Dale better, he was on Dale's side. In fact, he's written a letter, at least he said a week or so ago, to me that he was writing a letter to Mary Spieldy proposing that Dale be named President Emeritus, which they didn't do in the past because he was only here three years, but they don't know he was here six years before that. And Al Brower at Florence, a retired physician, wrote the same letter and who was the other one? Oh, Bob Ackerman, who was on the board in those early years, was going to write a letter, and I don't know if Mary Spieldy has received those or not, but you know, if you want, you can make a copy of this thing that I sent to the board members proposing this. And how far have we gotten? When did you begin to work for LCC? When did you leave the register garden and begin working for the college?

Okay, in about 1963 or somewhere in there, Clark College that I had attended right out of high school called me and said, would you be the journalism instructor here? And it was a nine month job paying as much as I was making working 12 at the guard. And so I went there for nine months, and then the phone rang and it was Bert Dotson saying, would you come here and be our journalism instructor at first and work week or holidays and stuff, putting up college publications and news releases. And then Dale got on the phone and put some pressure on. And so I said, okay, I can be there in a week. And I came in the second year. And that was an interesting time because we had no campus yet. I think we had about 60 part-time rental places. And I was at 200 North Monroe with some other part-time administrators and full-time administrators. And we basically lived out of the trunk of our cars.

[00:30:00] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Were you an instructor of journalism or were you an administrator or both?

[00:30:06] Larry Romine:
They did not want the college to think or the public to think that they were hiring a PR guy. Money was tight. And so they said, you know, you'll have a faculty contract until we feel that we can, without getting in trouble with public opinion, actually announce that you're going to do public relations and marketing. And so I think I was not the greatest instructor they ever had, but because I was going over and trying to work in the present or out of Bert Dotson's and Dale Parnell's offices in my spare time writing things for them. And I think it was in the college's third year or something like that that they said, you're going to come to the administration building now full-time and we'll get somebody else to do that other work. And I was delighted. Well, in fact, they said you'll still advise the student newspaper. Well, I couldn't because every time the kids wanted something, I was in a

newspaper available or I was down at the paper trying to get a release in or something. And

anyway, they finally said, okay, we're appointing somebody else. And I don't remember who it was as advisor to the torch. And then I was a full-time PR marketing guy. And I assisted in a very modest way with fundraising and I assisted with elections. We had funding elections about every year or every other year. And a year or two later, Dick Hyman, who had been in charge of elections, left the college. Then I got elections. And that's how my job just grew every time somebody left. They didn't have money to hire people, so they said, here, you take that too. Yeah, could you talk about some of these different programs that you started or that you worked with? For example, the election fundraising. What kind of election? We did not have a, what did they call it? You could get a firm budget passed and then if you wanted to exceed that, you had to go to the voters. And that could be every year or every other

year, depending on what your needs were. And the enrollment was just growing by leaps and bounds.

So yeah, you know, you just put on the regular election campaign and you could not ask for a yes vote by law. You had to just give out information, which I liked. I mean, and sometimes I made some speeches and bird dots and made speeches around. And the various presidents made speeches and lots of news releases, lots of publications that said how great the college was doing and how it was growing and serving people and just general good information, good stories. And we had excellent coverage by the register guard during those years. It's kind of faded away now, but at that time, the coverage was amazing.

[00:33:58] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Were you involved with high school relations?

[00:34:04] Larry Romine:
Yeah, it was in counseling, I think at the beginning, in the counseling department, and for some reason it got transferred over to me. I didn't actually do anything myself. They gave me people. And for a while I had a pretty big staff doing all those things. And then finally they said, well, you know, after a few years of that, they said it wasn't working in counseling. I usually got things when they weren't working. And then after two or three years, when things were humming along, they would take it back. And I minded and I didn't mind, you know. You always got more to do than you can do. I had college tours, for example. I don't know if the name Anne Stewart means anything to you. She led tours for a long time, and then they said, well, tours should be part of counseling. So I said, okay, there goes Anne. And what was the name of this lady who did

high school relations? Anyway, we didn't have enough money in our department to support some of these things. And if they went back to counseling or someplace, they did have money. So a lot of stuff passed from us to other places. At one point they gave me printing graphics. It was here. And because they said, what you've done all these years has to do with printing, so you must know about printing. And they had assigned it to the computer department, and that guy was really lost. Nice guy, but he didn't know anything. And they gave it to me, and Carol Beckley, who was then in finance, said, I think it was, printing graphics is $140,000 overspent in the red. You will pay that back. And I said, well, come on. You can't give me a department, another department, on top of what I already have. And they told me I got to pay back $140,000. They said, you got it, you got it. So it took us two or three years, but we

restructured the whole thing, and I got some better leadership in there. And I really liked the printing graphics people. A lot of them are still there, and they're still pretty nice people, and Gary Anderson was one of them. And after that, well, I guess I had it then until I retired in 1992. And my successor was Diane Dan, in charge of what was then called institutional advancement. And it had gotten that broader title, because when Iles Wetland retired as head of the fundraising,

then again, they said, you take care of it. And I said, I can't do it. I just can't. So I just gave that nominal attention, was the best I could do.

And they didn't change the name after Diane took over. But they took, and they took printing graphics away, and they took the, you know, she had a good job. She had the job I wish I'd had. It was a little narrower in school. Were you involved with the development fund, which eventually became the foundation? Yes. When Lyle retired, see, he had started the thing, and he called it development fund. And that name didn't attract any money. He didn't make it, you know, Lyle's a good friend of mine, but, and Pat Williams was his assistant. And they weren't even earning their salaries. Never in all the years did they even bring in enough to pay their salaries. And I said, well, one thing that you got to do is change your image by calling it the foundation, because that's what all the universities use. Well, I didn't get anywhere with them. And so when it got assigned to me, the first day I called Ed

Harms, the college attorney in Springfield. He was, it was Harms and Harold at that time, and they're both retired now. Anyway, I said, Ed, can I change it to foundation? What do I have to do? And he says, just a few papers. I'll do it for you, and we'll get some signatures, and in a week we'll, you know, we'll go to the state, a week or two we'll, it'll be LCC Foundation. So I changed the name. I didn't ask the then president or anybody, because I just wasn't going to do that. And, and we changed it, and things started popping right away. We got, I don't know if it was a half a million or what it was, a check from the guy who built Valley River Center, and his name is on the building. Shields? Yeah, Wayne Shields, nice gentleman.

And I think we would, one of his close advisors told me on the phone that there would be another 500,000, but it didn't come because I guess his family said, you know, you're giving too much away. You're not leaving enough for us. He was soon to die. And the interesting thing was that I, it was about 445, one day when Pat Williams came over and said, I just opened the mail for today, and look, here's this check from Wayne. And I said, good God, get it out of the bank, fast. We'll get interest today. And she said, well, I can't, because I'm doing X and Y, I got somebody in there. So I grabbed the check, raced over the hill to the bank, got it in there just before they were locking the door. The guard was standing by the door with a key, and I sent to the teller, you know, can we get interest for today? And she said yes, and she named the figure of several hundred bucks. Well, several hundred bucks was money to me.

Anyway, it was peripheral. Larry Warford had been named assistant to the president, and so he was supposed to oversee our end of it, and he got involved in the foundation, and so I backed away. We didn't see the thing in the same way, and so he got more involved than I did in that. By the time I left, I wasn't really doing much with the foundation.

What about the, I believe they called it the Productivity Center, which is now the Institutional Research and Planning? Yeah, it was Institutional Research and Planning, and then Casey Fast, who was head of the Mass department, they call them departments in those days, got interested in productivity and talked to Eldon Shafer, who was the president. I wonder if this would have been about 1980. I'm not sure there are documents around, and I guess Eldon and Casey both said, you know, you got to help us with some promotions for this.

So I sent out information, and I backed them up anyway. They asked me to, and I said, are you going to have a song? And I was totally joking. They said, yes, and you write it. So I went into the, I suppose, in the library to see what songs were in the public domain, and I found My Funny Valentine, and the syllables work, My Productivity. So I wrote new lyrics for My Funny Valentine, and it was sung at an all-staff meeting over in the theater by a prominent soprano in town who had been in many Ed Regasino productions, and I can't remember her name now, and so we, you know, it's in the daily for those years. The words were, you know, My Productivity, Sweet Productivity, I do this, and you know, I went along with My Funny Valentine, and one of the secretaries of the president's office was a church pianist, and she kept playing it for me until we hit every note with the right.

Syllable and so on, and so we had a little fun doing things like that.

One more question about, was there an alumni association back in the 70s? Were you involved with that? The development fund, as it was called at that time, tried to get something going, and I don't think it worked because trying to find where our graduates went was very tough, and Pat Williams just didn't have enough time to try to find all those people, and she probably had a short list, but it never really worked, and I did research on that nationally to see, and there were a few community colleges, I think Delta in Michigan, if I got the right one, had a successful one at that time, but they had a staff just for an alumni association, and those community colleges that have been successful, and there haven't been a whole lot of them, at building alumni groups were those that put in a staff time and money, and we had neither, so it was just fiddling around. We didn't do very well

on that. We did come up with the idea of giving some alumni awards, and I think I was one of the people who suggested that as the next best thing, and I noticed that they were asking for nominees to give another one of those, but at the time we gave that, the first student body president got one, John Lively, I think was his name, and four or five others. I can see the faces of the people, but I can't tell you the names, but it's all in the records, and in fact, the announcement calling for nominees cited those first about five people, Sid Voorhees, and a real estate lady. I nominated her, and she got it. She's very big in town still. Anyway, those names are readily available. In the 20 years when you were with institutional advancement, what do you think was your greatest or were some of your greatest achievements? Well, we certainly had a good reputation during those years with the local media. At that time KUGN was a local station

rather than a station that was just purchased, and now it's playing music from somewhere else, some other part of the country, and you know, but that a great news team, a morning news team of Wendy Ray and two other gentlemen, and if there was a board meeting at night, and I had a thing called a codophone, which was a device I could put a message on for radio, and then the radio stations could pick it up for their morning newscasts, and Wendy Ray, he is still around, has a great sense of humor, and one time I remember that there was a big debate on campus about the use of union lettuce or non-union lettuce grown in California and sent up here, and so I made a report on the lettuce thing and how will it all come out? Well, let us see. So every time it played all day, the next day, Wendy Ray had a siren saying, the cops are coming to get you, Larry. You can't make remarks like that,

and various people, administrators at LCC told me how bad that was to the college, and I said, well, do you want people to know what's going on out here or not, and they said, well, it's embarrassing, and I pointed out that everybody in town is talking about it because of the way Wendy played it, and telling me, you know, every hour on the hour, all day long, the cops are coming to get you and the siren going, and so we had many of those things, and so I was really on the radio much in those years. The codophone was a new invention that you could do this with, and all I had to do was dial the phone, and we had a special line to make it play. So I thought we did very well with the print media, very well with radio television. John Doyle was a news editor at K-Val, a big fan of LCC, was always sending people out here to interview people, and so on, so we were doing well with the media, and then almost as soon as

I got into the PR office, I wanted not a house organ, but a daily publication, and I named it daily, and that was partly because I wanted to make the point that this was going to be daily by golly, no matter whether the president thought it was spending too much money or not, or too much staff time, and because I thought if the staff aren't informed about what's going on, you know, they can't support it, and we did put things in the daily that enraged every president we ever had, and many of the administrators, because they didn't want people around the college to know what was going on. Shared governance was a fiction, so I was never very popular with upper management around here. I worked very well with Dale, with, yeah, with Dale and with Sheldon Shafer, but some of the others I was not too popular with, and we would do readership surveys to see if people were reading it, and not everybody was, and so we've

said, what do we have to do to make you want to pick it up every morning, because we tried to get it over here to printing graphics by seven o'clock, so we get it distributed first thing in the morning to every department, and enough copies for every staff member, and they said, well, why don't you put in classified ads? So we put in classified ads, and to this day there are people who think it's a service. It wasn't a service at all. It was to get readership, and readership did come, and people wanted personal messages too, but I could never sell that to any president or anybody. They just said, oh my gosh, it's, you know, what will the taxpayers say, and, and, you know, they'll put silly things in, you know, meet me behind doors, it's such and such an hour or something, and we can't do that. So a lot of the faculty wanted to put those messages in. They wanted to have little vignettes about

teaching successes and little feature items short, but I could never get anybody to support me on that. So, and once in a while they would say, we're short of money, so you go money Wednesday, Friday, but that only lasted a short time, and the staff would say, hey, I didn't get Tuesday, Thursday, and they would gripe to the president, and the president would bow to the politics, and back we would go to being a daily. Joan Ashem changed it to a, a computer. Yeah, to an electronic format, and that was coming. We knew that was coming, but that didn't happen until, I think, until after I was gone. We had some good people through the years working in our office.

[00:51:47] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How did your office change over the years, in the 20, 30 years?

[00:51:59] Larry Romine:
Well, when we first started out, we were pushing publications like the catalog, the schedule of classes, the news releases for print and the other media, and then when Elvin Shafer was hired, he called each of us in the ad building, or second floor, into his office individually and said, what can I do to help you do your job? And I said, well, I think what we should talk about is, what can I do to help you do your job? You know, let's get beyond this phony bologna of you trying to help me. And he, and I, and he said, what do you mean? I said, what do you want to be? Do you want to be president of the American Association of Community Colleges? Do you want to be, you know, do you want to be a big speaker at things around the country? And he had come from Inventon Community College, where he was invisible, as far as the nation was concerned, and not too visible statewide, except that when he went to a meeting, he couldn't miss seeing him,

because he was taller and wider than everybody else, except maybe the president of Mount Hood. And so he told me what he secretly wanted to be. On our first meeting like that, it was amazing. But he and I just were on the same wavelength, although I was not nearly as conservative as he. And I wrote all those things down. I said, I'll be back in a day or two, and I'll suggest to you how we'll achieve each of these things. And I came back, and I was hoping he would say, write articles, because I was a lot better at writing articles than writing speeches. And from what he had delivered to the staff when he first came, I knew he wasn't a great speaker. But he said, well, what I like to do is deliver speeches. And so I had taken lots of speech classes, of course. And so I said, okay, you call your mentor at Coast Community College, whose name I forget right now. He was one of the well-known community college people in the nation,

and get you a speaking assignment. And so he came back to me and said, well, I'll speak at 4.30 in this little room to 20 people. I said, no, call them back and tell them you can't do that. You've got to speak to at least a few hundred. And it's got to be just before the afternoon break for wine tasting and stuff. And so we really bargained hard to get him. And I said, now we've got to have a subject that really turns people on, gets them excited nationally. And then we've got to prepare a great speech, and you've got to do a good job of delivering it. And then the invitations to speak will come from all over every conference that's held about the community college. And then each time we'll give you some zingers, and we'll follow up. We'll publish a speech in various publications in the community college. So your views are heard. Well, he didn't really have any views. I had the views.

So anyway, he went to this conference at L.A., and he was speaking to 500 community college presidents. That's a rarity, even today getting 500 in one room. And I don't remember what he spoke about anymore, but you have most of his speeches. Some of them I wrote, the lousy ones he wrote. He didn't know how to write a speech. He didn't know how to deliver it. It was that way 25 years later, he still couldn't catch on. And he could not deliver one-liners, but he loved to have anecdotes, like Lincoln and some other people that he admired. So we – and I was well-read because I was in the doctoral program at the university. So I knew what the hot-button issues were nationally, and I knew what people were saying. And he didn't know it, but I often put him on the opposite side to raise hell and throw out speeches and jokes for him and put them in these speeches. And the first one,

he came back from L.A., and he was at the bottom of the stairs, and I heard somebody going up the steps. He ran up the steps. He was not a young man, and he didn't go to his office. He came into my office, which was several offices, to the west of his. And he said – and he worked. I went to the cocktail hour, because this was our way to see whether it worked. He said everybody in the room was buying me drinks. He said I couldn't drink them. I had drinks all in front of me, people laying them there and shaking my hand and wanting to meet me. And he said, I've got an invitation to speak at Phoenix. So we went from there. Pretty soon we had him on every major podium in the country. He was elected to the community college board nationally. His stature helped us get named to the League for Innovation in the Community College in the early 80s. He was on that board. He was president of that group. Eventually

collected bargaining wasn't in yet at community colleges in Oregon. But it came in, and so he got invited to speak at some national place on collective bargaining. And we wrote jokes for him in kind of putting down the labor movement, although I was very pro-labor and very pro-staff participation and so on. But that's as low-level as I could get it. And he got really good mention around the country on that speech. As it turned out, when the union got going here, he changed his mind totally, became pro-union. He said that the unions and the state laws suddenly made it clear who was responsible for what and made it better for everybody. And of course, I was delighted at that because I was pro-union. In fact, I tried to start a union for administrators, which was against the law. And it stills, the law says administrators cannot organize. And so he came down and thunked me on the head.

But we got to be friends, and he would call me out here like one time the main water intake between the theater and the, what do you call that, building over there, where the mail room was? The general service of that home. Yeah. The main E-Web thing broke about four in the morning, and he called me, got me out of bed, and said, get out here to the college, pass. It's an emergency. And I ran out, you know, I went out there as fast as I could. He said, come over between the theater. And what he wanted to show me was this 40-foot-high spout of water from the broken pipe against the rising sun over in the east, and beautiful shades of red. And it was just gorgeous. He was, people don't generally know that he had an artistic side. He sculpted, he painted, and some of his stuff was around the college for a while. I don't know where it is now. But he had this sensitive side,

and yet he'd been in the Helms Foundation Hall of Fame in three sports. He was quite an athlete in college. And I guess, you know, when you were his size, he was probably 225 at his best you can't even get a scholarship if you're that little. But in his day, he was a very big man.

So anyway, it kind of didn't match up, that sensitivity. But he had grown up, and I may be off track now, but he'd grown up in a sort of a one-room cabin when Canby, Oregon was very rural. His father had deserted his mother, and she didn't have a career in how she got money to pay for food and stuff. I don't know, they had an outhouse out in the back of the cabin. His first store-bought haircut was his high school graduation present. And he graduated in a class of two people. He was valedictorian. So sometimes he infuriated me, and sometimes, you know, and he and Lucy were always having Vala and me over to their house for dinner or just drinks. He didn't drink a lot, but in those years she did. She was frustrated. In her later years, I think she was a teetotaler again. She started going to the Congregational Church. And anyway, there were good people, and she was always asking me to write the Schaeffer

story, but I couldn't, because I was too close. And I didn't know what to put in there, and I still know things that he did that I think were mistakes, and I don't want to criticize him because I've never been as close to any supervisor as I was to him. And then he and I don't know where we were before we got off on that. Well, maybe you'd like to talk about some of the other presidents, like Robert Hamill. Okay. He followed Dale. And Dale liked the job and was prepared to stay at LCC, but Tom McCall was governor of Oregon, and he liked Dale. And he saw Dale as succeeding him as governor. And he didn't like the superintendent of public schools, the state superintendent, and he asked Dale to run against him. And Dale fought long and hard, and he didn't want to do it, but yes, he did want to do it. Finally, he decided to do it, leaving LCC after only three years from

he was 65 to mid-68, I guess. And Bob Hamill was in charge of institutional research at that time, but he was such a nice guy and respected by so many and liked by so many, and they needed someone to be acting president for one year until the board could select another president. And the board didn't know what a winner they had in Parnell. Parnell later, I should say, dropped out of the politics because a Portland PR firm said you're too short. We're going to put an inch on your soles of your shoes. We want you to wear longer pants to make you look like you got longer legs. We want you to wear your hair a little higher. We want you to lose weight so you're a little thinner, and he was a stocky guy. Anyway, he's a natural PR guy. I think he could have been governor, but he wasn't going to let them make a phony out of him. So after a few years of superintendent, he accepted a job

in California as a president at San Diego and then Sacramento and then went national. But Bob Hamill, he did a good job in that one year. We still had some boards to people to walk on. The pass hadn't all been changed to concrete, and there were just a ton of things to do. I thought Hamill did a good job, but the board thought that he just didn't have enough experience, and so they did a national search. And how they got Pickering as the head of that, I'll never know, he was elected the head of a tri-state educational improvement group. That was his sole connection to education, his sole background. When Bob left here, incidentally, he went as a vice president to a Washington Community College at Midway, Washington. I forget the name of it. It's in that document. Anyway, they hired Pickering, and what a mistake that was, he had been a psychologist in Phoenix, working one-to-one with people. He really didn't

know much about education. When he came here, he kept calling it Lane Junior College. And I said, Bob, Bob, I got to sit down with you. And I explained to him the difference between a junior college and a comprehensive community college. And then after that, he caught on.

And when he first came, he came without his family, and I got him invitations to dinner with prominent citizens, one of whom was the managing editor of the register guard, because I thought, let's get on good terms with them. We went to their house, and Mary got any games we could play, and so they got out monopoly. And I didn't expect to be invited, but they said, well, you know him and we don't, so you come to dinner, too. So I went to dinner with them. And about two in the morning, I said, Barry Hartman, you have to go to the bathroom. He said, I don't have to go to the bathroom. I said, you have to go to the bathroom. And Bob said, well, excuse me, and he got up. And so Barry went to the other bathroom, and I followed him in. And I said, we're going to be here until about four, five o'clock in the morning if we don't suddenly let him win all the houses and stuff. So every time either one of us shakes the dice, you know,

look at the number and don't even count, just land on his property. So he'll win it all, and in 15, 20 minutes, we'll be out of here. Because I got to go to work at eight in the next, and it was, you know, those two hours. And so I said, well, all right, let's do it. And so in 15, 20 minutes, because Bob wouldn't let us go. He was down to almost nothing. And we had all the property, and so it was apparent. I mean, I tell you this just to show you what kind of personality he had. He was very competitive, and he just couldn't lose. And then when we, in 15, 20 minutes, when he had all the property, he said, I never lose. And he got up and went, oh. And there were just repeated incidents of things like that. He couldn't understand budget. I wasn't the greatest guy with numbers that ever lived, but he called me in and said, explain the budget to me. And I, you know,

tried to say, well, each department has, you know, this is carry over, this is that. And he couldn't grasp it. So whenever we had budget sessions, the budget manager had to explain everything. And I think the board members were wondering. And

Pickering, he was very religious, very fundamentalistically religious. And he had a son who was a teenager, and we were shooting the movie, getting straight on campus. Very frustrating at that time. What was that lady's name who was the star? Yeah, Candy was skinny as a rail in those years. And I didn't get to really know these people very well, but they thought I was the closest thing to them because I was a PR guy. And so they would talk to me sometimes. And their PR guy lived in my office. And so he trumped up a big fight between Bob and his teenage son because they hired him as an extra just to be in a crowd scene. And father didn't want son in that scene because this was a nasty movie that was putting on sex scenes. And if you go to the movie, you don't see much of that at all. If they filmed it, they didn't put it in the movie. And so that made headlines. And the father was being very religious, and he was with some fundamental,

fundamentalistic Baptist churches in town. And oh, I was talking about Candy Bergen, and she was trying to eat at our food service. And she called it the word that begins with S. And to my ear, she became, well, she's still a feisty lady. But then she was still that way, hustling like a trooper all the time she was on campus. That offended Bob. And he did some strange things, like, for example, Christmas came. And he'd been here since September. Bert Dotson's wife, Loy, came on campus during a lunch hour. So I thought she would catch Bert, but Bert had gone to a meeting. So her high school best friend in high school in Portland was with her. And so she went into Bert's office, and he wasn't there. And he came out, and Bob was in his office. He noticed her, and he races over. And he points out, it wasn't, what's that stuff you hang, and you can get a kiss under it? A mistletoe.

It wasn't mistletoe. He'd gotten a bush and put it up there. And he grabbed Loy, and he not only kissed her, he French kissed her. She said it was a regular vacuum job in her tonsils. And then this friend of hers from Portland who didn't know Bob or the college or anybody, then he grabbed her and did the same thing to her. And Loy walked out, you know, supposed days. She said, Bert will kill him. What are we going to do? So she came down the hall to my office and stepped inside and shut the door and told me what went on. And she said, what'll I do when Bert finds out about this? I know he'll get man, he'll do something, he'll lose his job, and so on. And well, eventually she told him, and he was mad as heck, and the word got back to the board about these outrageous things. He was up in Portland with the head of the Mass Com department. Well, it's in here. She's deceased now. But he said, where's a good place to go? And she said, well,

too bad that we're not a member of the Portland City Club because they serve pretty good lunches.

So he went to the door, banged on the door, said, I am the president of Lane Community College. I'm having lunch here. And the major D said, well, we can't admit you because it's members only. So he shouted. Pickering was a dork. Finally, to stop all the noise and stuff, they put him at a table way in the back by the kitchen.

But Ginny, Ginny DeShane came back and told the story. And there were too many stories like that, and Bob was just wrecking his reputation, and he didn't know how to manage anything because he hadn't had the experience, wasn't he? He wasn't a good guy. And at noon hour, he would go down to Lower Willamette Street before the thing was all remodeled and urban-renewed, and he would come back with eight by ten glossy prints, and he would call me in his office about 1-1-30, and he'd say, you see this. I paid $3 for this on your Lower Willamette Street, and it was a sex picture. And I said, well, Bob, what do you want to bring it here for? And he would store it in that drawer right in front of him in the middle of his desk, and he would bring it. Finally, I told him, you know, I know that any town our size is going to have that available, and I don't go down and purchase it.

You shouldn't go down and purchase it. You shouldn't bring it here and wave it around. And he just was a wild man.

So the board finally let him go? Yeah. People were talking to board members and about six or eight months into the thing, they fired him. It's in the records. But they told him, you know, we're the ones who made a mistake hiring an inexperienced man, so you can use your office and make phone calls and try to get another job somewhere. And they kept him on salary for 13 months. By then, they had advertised nationally and hired Schaefer. And they didn't go far because they wanted to know who they were getting this time. They were a lot more careful. They wanted a religious person when they hired Pickering. And Bob Hamill had been a Sunday School teacher at St. Mary's for years, and so had Richard Williams, who knew him from that church and from teaching Sunday School at that Catholic Church, and why they didn't take Bob. He eventually became a president in Washington State and then came back to the State Department at Salem

and was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died.

[01:16:10] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you work then with his successor, with Richard Turner?

[01:16:15] Larry Romine:
Yes. I was still here when Turner Elden was here for 15 years. And in the 15th year, he had had cancer when he was in California, but he beat it and was very pleased and proud that he had, but it was coming back. And so in his last year, he went to the Mayo Clinic in various places and they told him, you're a dead man, this is going to kill you in X months. He didn't believe them. He went golfing and did everything he usually did. And he would say to me, I can't believe it, but they say, I'm going to be dead in 90 days. And the local doctors agree. And so he resigned about three months short of his 15th year and very quickly went into a hospital and they gave them permission to try exotic, untested drugs on him. And I think they killed him because he really died of septicemia. These medicines eat holes in your intestines and the fecal matter is into your blood and you got infections and you're gone. And I talked to him

a few hours before he died and he was just clear and lucid as everything. He said, now, when I get out of here, we've got to put more emphasis on raising money through the foundation. And he said, that's why I assigned it to you. We've got to go for broke with that. And he said, we'll talk about this soon. Well, he didn't come out of the hospital and he knew it wasn't. In fact, I walked out the hospital, said goodbye, walked out the hospital door and I heard him say to Lucy, you suppose he knows that I probably will be dead in a few hours. And he was that clear about it. She had him cremated and she and Ken, their adopted son, went abandoned to their cabin and walked out into the waves and put his ashes into the surf because he loved it down there. Let's see, we were back. How did the college community react to his death? I imagine, did people know that he was that sick?

Yeah. They, key people knew. And he was at retirement age. I think he was 65 when he died. So they knew he was going to be leaving and some people were, some of the union people were down on him a bit. You know, the average tenure for a typical community college president at that time was five to seven years. And I hear some around the country now are not making it to five to seven years. In fact, you may be hearing a little scuttlebutt about Spildy in his, what, this is her third year or something. It's very hard to survive as a community college president. But anyway, he did for a long time. Turner, that was an interesting situation. The person who wanted Turner was Charlene Curry. She was a board member. She wanted a minority, you know, all good things. And she heard about this guy who was in Connecticut.

And she had met him because she was an officer in the Association of Community College Trustees.

And she liked him and decided that he was the one. And she apparently, you know, she's still around, widowed now in Springfield. Her husband was a pharmacist. She worked at the university for a lot of years in various supportive roles.

So she set him up and he had big limousines to haul the visiting people from LCC around and people to promote him. And the board members were sold a bill of goods. He was a good guy. He stays in touch with me. I don't know why, except that he considers me his friend. It's like Olga. I attract a lot of these people and they think I'm their big buddy. And I sent you one of his things he sent me at Christmas or just before Christmas, an email. I wanted to know, since it was sent to my wife's email, whether I had a sex change and a bunch of stuff like that. Anyway, he wasn't prepared for the job. At that time, Connecticut had no local boards. So they had a state board and they would meet once or twice a year. They would go to the Capitol and meet with the state board and all the presidents of the community college. There probably weren't that many. But anyway, so he wasn't used to working with the local board.

Let's see. He had three degrees in applied piano. No training, not even one course in community colleges. He had been a top-down administrator at this Connecticut college. LCC from Dale Parnell on had been participating, not wildly so, but at least staff were asked for input. He had no experience with this, did not believe in it, told me that he wanted no part of such a thing. We don't ask the staff what they want, we tell them what they want. Anyway, there were four or five of these things where he simply had no background, no experience, or didn't believe in, and I thought, wow, the guy is going to have a hard time here. In fact, he asked all the administrators to evaluate him, and I wrote a blistering evaluation. About five o'clock one day he called all the administrators about seven or eight of the top administrators and said, we're going down to Mosley's, I'm buying pizza, I want to talk to you.

So we went down there and he told us about these evaluations, and then he said, and I got this one, and I was sitting next to Bob Marshall on one side and then Turner on the other, and he said, it's the worst thing I ever had in my life, I just, it was terrible, I felt so bad, and all this stuff, and I said, well, I got to admit, I wrote that, and the whole table just went flat, and Bob Marshall, who was then acting president for student services, or acting vice president, or maybe he was vice president by then, he says, oh, rule of mind, you always got to make jokes. Well, that let everybody burst out laughter and saved my skin, because then nobody believed I'd really written it, but I hadn't, I admitted it, and

anyway, he, we had a word processing center, and I thought it was wonderful because the financing was so bad at the college that 20 plus departments didn't have a clerical person. I was, our department was one of them, so with this word processing center, which became part of printing and graphics, and therefore was part of my area, we had three women, one of them is still in printing graphics, she runs a typesending machine, I think, or something, forgot her name. Anyway, she's still here, and you could call stuff in and dictate at any time of the day or night, and by nine o'clock in the morning, your letter or your paper or whatever would be typed up beautifully, these women were brilliant, and they'd have copies ready for you, and people who didn't have clerical services loved it. Well, Turner had agreed with the black presidents of America that he would have a full-time secretary at LCC, this very rich college he was allegedly

going to handle all this stuff for the black presidents. It was very soon he discovered there was no money at Lane Community College, and so he eliminated the word processing center in order to take that money and add to his staff. It just devastated 20 plus departments, and right away, he had 20 plus departments that hated his guts, and these three women, two of them stayed at the college and one left, but the two who stayed didn't have anything good to say about him. Then he had troubles at home, which he never admitted to anybody.

His wife became a counselor at one of the Springfield high schools and would get up early and go to the school. He would sleep in and go to the store, buy some snacks and stuff, and come to LCC in time for lunch, and then he would stay. He was going to stay his eight hours, but he was just learning about computers, so he got himself a real nice computer. He would stay in there until midnight working on a computer, and he had cheese and crackers and things, and of course we all went home at five, so people weren't seeing him, weren't briefing him on many things. He was isolating himself, and he wasn't a bad guy. He's a good guy, but he just did not size up the thing here. Somebody told him, well, he'd never been in the West, so why not buy himself some cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and come to an all-staff meeting that way? Well, that offended people. You know, we weren't a bunch of cowboys. The poor guy was

getting bad advice from all directions and then doing it to himself, and I wrote a few speeches for him and maybe an article or two to put in national publications, and finally he was to speak to the NAACP state meeting in Portland, and he said, write me a speech, and it was on the anniversary of Martin Luther King and really go heavy on Martin Luther. Well, I came to the library and got a stack of books and found out all about him and wrote him a speech, and they gave him a standing ovation, and that made me his fair-haired boy. And they said, did you have help writing this? And he said yes, and he gave him my name, and they said, he doesn't sound, that's not a black name. And Richard had a sense of humor, so he didn't say anything, and they said, well, we're looking for somebody to be our contact in Eugene if we need to do something in that town. So on Monday or Tuesday following that Friday night or Saturday

night speech, I guess it was Saturday night, a person called me and asked me to be the Eugene guy, and I said, well, wouldn't it be better to have a black person? And he said, well, you didn't sound black. And he said, yes, we wouldn't want a white person. And he said, he says, doggone Richard, do you play the game with us? Just kidding. And so anyway, Richard was on my side then from then on, and the last two or three weeks of his tenure, he brought a paper bagged lunch and came to my office. And if I was planning to go out, I was trapped. I was just there. And he sat down, and he would talk about his whole life and everything. And by then, Giorgio Vergi was, I think, either president of the faculty or was still an officer, and he had sent Richard a letter saying that they were going to vote no confidence. Richard did not want that no vote confidence. So he said, he wrote back to Al Vergi

and said, I'll resign if you don't want me. And that was about his third year, I think, about 88. And so then when he left, he got a job in Tennessee, and he was more authoritarian and top down than ever there. And then he went to Detroit and was so authoritarian there as a dean that the president, who was his friend, canned him. And now he's got a service in a Detroit suburb advising presidents how to run colleges. I hope he has no client. Well, geez, I could soon have said that. But... Larry, after you retired, after several years, you came back to Lane, and you were appointed and elected to the Board of Education. Why did you decide to come back? I retired in 1992, and I made sure that I had no connection with the college in the following several years. And I made sure I did not go near Diane Dannon. I didn't want a reputation for trying to tell her how to run that department. And let's see, I retired in 92, then 96 or so.

Somehow, somebody asked me to run for the board. And I was living at Fernridge Lake. We had a bunch of boats. We lived on the shore. It was an idyllic life, as far as I was concerned. I was having a great time. Zone one, nobody was running. Cindy Cable had been in that spot. So I ran, and I had two opponents. And I really don't know why I ran or who talked me into it. But I got elected in 97 and served, or, yeah, I guess the spring of 97 and was seated then in would be July 1 or something, right in there, and served four years. And I thought, I was all alone on many votes. I just thought it was a terrible job. I didn't want any part of it. I couldn't influence anything. Until the last year or so, when I talked George Alvergy into running because I couldn't stand it being alone, and then Bob Ackerman was running again. He had been on the board in the early years. And suddenly, we had three people who were on the moderate side.

They might call us liberal, but we were more moderate than liberal. And so I had a year or two that was really fun, at least a year, but I still decided I really didn't want to do this. There was a lot of trouble. I don't think the public knows that the board was rather split on Moskis during most of his tenure. He came in 1990, right? And in 1994 or so, there was an attempt to get him booted out. One board member, I think, took the lead, and a couple of staff members joined in, and they went around to board members' houses and tried to talk them into firing him. I don't have all the details because they all swore to secrecy. It was a three-to-three vote, and Jim Pitney told me later that he didn't know which way to vote. So being conservative and being a bit religious, he decided to give the guy a break, and he voted to keep him. So it was a four-to-three to keep him, but three who didn't want him

were still on the board. They apparently felt that he wasn't doing things they were wanting him to do. Anyway, so somebody in that group, maybe it was somebody from the faculty through Alvergi who was retiring about that time, said, please run, so I ran, and I didn't do much, but you didn't have to do much, and you didn't have to spend much money in those years in the late 90s. Now, the last election, people were spending five, ten, twelve thousand dollars. I wouldn't run and spend that kind of money. It isn't that big a thrill. So I went off the board. I just discussed it. I was very pro-faculty union, and I was pro-classified union too, but I was more with the faculty because they were on my back and taking me to lunch, or actually we went to Dutch. So I went off in 01. Alvergi and Ackerman were still on. Then George, I was off about a year, I think, and then George

got brain tumors, and we were in touch because we were friends, and we both had, during my years at LCC, we both had lived in South Eugene, and sometimes he'd call me and say, pick me up, my car won't start or something, and so I'd give him a ride to work, and so we were friends.

And then we were both interested in shared governance, and he was making trips to California to find out about it, and I was writing about it and studying it, and so we were allies in that way. And I wanted to start a union, and they came down hard on me being unlawful, and I'd better not try to change the law if I wanted to stay around, and so on. So George said, I won't accept anybody else to finish out the rest of my term, except you, and I said, George, I'm not going to do it.

And, well, you know, after a lot of trouble, and I was one of the guys who was writing to have coffee with him one day. He picked me up, and he was going through stop signs and lights, and he didn't see other cars, and I said, George, what's happening? And then he picked up a newspaper, and he couldn't read the words, and I said, get yourself to the doctor today, you know, or get on the phone, go to the emergency room, do something. And so he stopped driving, thank God, and it wasn't long before they diagnosed it, and he had surgery, and it didn't make any difference. They did take out a tumor, but there were others, and he went to California and to the specialist in San Francisco, and so on, and he got worse and worse, and we kept, and Larry Perry, former board member, and I were meeting him for coffee once or twice a week, and had been for many years, and he got to the point where he couldn't speak and say what he

wanted to anymore, and he was retaining water, and his ankles got real big, and, you know, he just, it was terrible, and finally we couldn't, he couldn't leave his home very much anymore, and then he died, and apparently he had talked to other board members saying that the only one I want replacing me is Larry, and so I felt terrible, you know, you can't say no to a guy under those circumstances, so it must have been in 01 or 02 or somewhere there that they wanted people to apply to be appointed, and there were five or six applied, and they appointed me, and although they didn't want to appoint me, there are several of them who Jim Pitney and what's the lady who's still on the board? Yeah, Kathleen, they didn't want me because they'd been very squeaky to the far right, and I was more to the middle, and didn't support them, and, uh, but I must have got the majority vote, because I was on for a year or two, and then

I had to promise, when you're appointed, you have to promise you'll run the next election. I said, well, I won't do anything, I won't get elected, and I didn't do a thing, but nobody ran against me, so, you know, I didn't spend a penny, and I, even when you go in to sign up, they want you to sign a paper saying how much you'll spend, and I just put a big fat zero, and so nobody ran against me, so here I am, and I have to say that sometimes I really don't enjoy it all that much. I can't get a majority vote on anything of consequence, and I often vote with the majority just because I, you know, if I support them, then maybe they'll support me on something, uh, and I'm very pro shared governance, and there aren't very many on the board that are. Uh, I'm very pro not spending, uh, money on, on, uh, frivolities like they wanted to hold a board retreat, so they went up the river and rented, uh, some kind of facility up there, and, uh,

and also took a ton of staff with them, and I thought, you know, we don't have enough money to pay decent wages, we have three, three groups that are, and the president, that are underpaid, we don't have enough money to run certain classes, we're laying people off, and they're spending money on things like that, uh, and I made a big speech at a recent board meeting about not paying dues to ACCT because it's a worthless organization, and they don't do us any good, and we send people to their meetings, uh, and Kathleen again said, well, I learned things from their meetings, and, you know, and I, I didn't say that loud, but I, one thing she said she learned, and we have people on staff here, if they want to know about archives, they can come over for half an hour with you and learn everything they'd learned by going to New York City or somewhere

to a conference, and, and it was the same way on this thing that she mentioned, and I didn't want to say it out loud, so I did, but, uh, and, you know, I was the one who said, I don't understand free meals for everybody on board night. The food server puts on a lovely spread, and they do a good job, and it's very nice. Uh, sometimes I'll eat something the last time I ate, uh, three chocolate chip cookies, uh, but I don't understand why they're using tax money for that. I don't understand why they run meetings late into the night when the administrators have worked all day long, and then they got to get up and get out here at eight or seven thirty in the morning the next day, so I said start early in the afternoon. Don't uh, so I don't, I'm not sure I fit in. I will never be elected board chair. I will never run because I'm not stupid enough. I won't get any votes, uh, but it's an input group anyway because

of that 1990 measure five. We don't control money. If you don't control money, you don't control much. Yeah, I was going to ask you, what have been some of the changes then? Maybe you could start in the board, you know, maybe because of the funding situation. Yeah, well, the board members took an interest in fundraising a little bit in the earlier years, and sometimes you could get a board member to speak to civic groups and so on because it was local levies, and you had to have a close tie with your local people. They had to believe in you. If they didn't vote you money, you didn't, you didn't operate very well, and so board members got involved and things were more important, and now it's pretty routine. If you look at the board minutes, you see 7-0 votes time after time after time because

most of the things are no big deals, and the presidents have gotten much stronger than they ever were in the old days. They announced to us things now where board members used to vote on these. So Spildy is, you know, she's just following in the way things have gone.

We don't attract the same kind of board member anymore. We used to get people who were well known in the community, and the community would ask questions of, you know, why are you building this building? Why are you raising your levy? Why are you doing things? And now we don't hear much from the community. The news coverage is almost not there anymore because it's not controversial when the money comes from Salem.

So, and the president really is the front person now, a lot more than perhaps in the past, and we get board members who might not have been elected in the past and maybe don't have the same broad view, don't have the same strong background in terms of what the community wants, and, you know, people that you'd like to get on the board now who are big in local politics and so on, they don't see this as a place that has the same importance, and they don't see it as a place that they can influence very much. So, you know, it's a different situation. What do you think are the main challenges facing the college now? You say facing the college and facing the boards? Money will always be the challenge. Raising tuition, I thought, was a tragedy. I voted for it. It's either vote for it or lay off a bunch of people and cut back your class offerings and so on.

Here we are. The community college was started to help people at a low level. I think when I went to community college, $25 or $30 was paid for 15 hours for a term, and books, gee, if it was a bad term, you might have to spend $25 on books, and now some kids are telling me that it'll be $100 and something on books. We're closing out people like myself, a mill worker's kid.

I couldn't pay today's tuition at that time. In fact, I worked in the paper mill a good share of the time while I was at community college, and I didn't have the energy or the time to devote to studies that I should have and would have wanted to. I did make the honor roll one term, but it was tough trying to work and go to school at the same time. But money is always going to be an issue.

I think legislative control is an issue. When legislators get control, then the state board gets more control and starts telling us what's going to be. In the early years, the community colleges of the state acted as one when we went to the legislature. Now, they're going on their own, and like SWOC and Central Oregon went to the legislature and asked for and got special grants. All comes out of the community college pot, which means all the rest of us get less. We don't work together anymore like we used to, which I think is a shame, because if you're going to influence legislators, you've got to go in as one person with one point of view. And then, of course, we don't have the power that we used to have. And let's see, so money, tuition. The board only meets officially 11 times a year. So we're not on top of things as we once were, and some of these board members don't know what

questions to ask. I've been asking hard questions about diversity, because we didn't know how much money we were spending, except that they told us it was millions of dollars, but we have 965 minority students out of 40,000 now. And I believe in taking care of them, but I'd just like to be accountable about it. And so I'm the dirty guy who's now asking some of these tough questions, and I think that the administrators are not too happy with me. I don't say take the money away from them, I just say make it accountable, tell us about it. And so the president did give us a document saying that it was three point something million, but she said it's not all spent on those 965. So we're back to square one again. And we have lots of things like that. She tries to be as open as possible, and she really does a good job in a lot of areas, but it's difficult for board members to have enough background

to really do or say anything. And we keep cutting programs, and we just have to trust the president, because we don't have the background, and we're not getting the information. We had an announcement some months back that FlightTech would be self-supporting, but they didn't tell us that that didn't include insurance. Well, if there's ever a program that better have lots of insurance, and so they're not supporting themselves on insurance. And if people just aren't asking those questions, I'm the only guy who's asking those questions, although Dennis does ask some sharp questions about diversity, because he wants more of it. But I wish he would ask more about reporting. And we've got good people working in that area, and I'm glad for what we're doing, and I'd like to see us do more, but I'd like the lights to shine more brightly on every phase of the institution. We have been accused of having an all-female administration,

and that's not quite true, but there have been quite a few. And as long as they do a good job, I don't give a hoot about that. But I'm getting calls from faculty who say, I should have been consulted on this change in our department, and this associate vice president or that director or something didn't call me and give me any heads up. So there's a communication problem. I don't know if it's the last board meeting or the one before that, that we talked about diversity, and they said they wanted a professor in social science who would know a lot about statistics on diversity and so on. And the union president for the faculty is in social science, and he just sat back to his chair. He claims they don't have enough regular staff to meet the student needs, but here's the diversity people saying they're going to add a professor to social science, and social science allegedly doesn't know about it.

So there are some communication problems. More things should be out in the open, but this is any organization. I mean LCC is probably an exception in that we do communicate as well as we do, and I think Mary is a good president, and I hope she stays till she decides to retire.

What would you hope Lane would be like in the next 40 years, looking back over the past 40 years, and then if we look to the future, how would you like Lane to be? Well, we've been diminishing ourselves in the vocational technical areas because they're very funding so that we could strengthen those areas, and we don't control the funding. It's controlled by the legislature, which is controlled by conservatives. That is going to change very soon, but I do wish our funding would get better because then we could strengthen all the areas that people really feel they have needs in. I think for a time we didn't even have an archivist, did we? Was there a time? Well, there was about a year there was vacant before I came. They get hard up and they eliminate things, and archives I think is really crucially important, and I wish they would look back to the beginning and see some of the

high ideals that the college started with and see if we could bring back some of that.

[01:53:56] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What are those ideals?

[01:53:59] Larry Romine:
Well, students first was certainly, you know, everything was for the students, and they did a good job of taking care of them, and I suppose they're doing a good job today.

You know, I'd have to look and compare the numbers of state counselors, the counselor-to-student ratio in the past to what it is today. I suspect that we're falling behind a little, but it's a money issue. It isn't because we want to not have a lot of people, and I think we ought to constantly examine what we're doing, really look at everything with a hard eye. Every program, every service, I think right now they're very down on athletics. I don't know why that is because I think the President and Vice President both played women's sports in their life. I played very badly myself, but I learned lessons that are with me as much as any lessons I learned in the regular classes, and pretty soon KLCC will be on its own, and I don't think that's a bad thing, but I wish we had money to send them off in a very strong fashion financially. Incidentally, board members today are being solicited much harder than they ever were in

the past for money, for the foundation, for KLCC, for the Long House, and a lot of our board members are not wealthy. Some of them are retired. In fact, four of us are retired, I think. Mike Rose has money because he married it, so he's in better shape than the other. I think there's thinking of us the way they think of boards of private colleges. They get rich people on the boards and they support them with a million dollar gift occasionally, and we don't have that kind of person on our board. This stuff all ought to be talked over, but we don't. We don't talk about this. We have a lot more doctoral holders on the faculty today than we ever had in the past, but there's only about 19 or 20 or something like that. I kind of favor that, except it's more expensive, but people with doctorates in the subject field that they're teaching and some teaching experience, they do

bring some things to the classroom that maybe non-doctor holders don't. So I don't know, but I would like us to talk about things like that. What kind of a college do we want? Do we want

to upgrade the level of the faculty? Can we afford it? I wish we would look at things like that. We don't hear from instruction. The purpose of this whole institution is instruction, but we mostly hear from business. Every meeting that the board has, it's how we're spending money for this or that or how we're going to adjust the money, and we don't hear much from instruction. We ought to be hearing and talking about philosophy and the whole thing, and I don't think we do enough of that, and that's the reason for this place. Before we end, then, is there anything else I haven't covered that you wish you had? I suppose there are lots of little anecdotes and so on, but I probably won't remember them until I'm halfway down the hill. There are still some things that we don't know about at the beginning of the college that I wish we could find out before

Burt Dotson passes on. In the beginning, there were 20 people who pledged each $1,000. They never put up any money, and they never had to, but 20 people in the community pledged $20,000, and a bank gave Burt $20,000 to operate on. Then when the college got money, it was paid back to the bank. I've called the bank, and they've changed their name, and they say, well, they have no records, and they say, we're not the same bank, and I say, you have those records. You just don't want to share them, and they say, you're right. But we did identify in Burt's tape several people, and Dale Pardell told me that he and Bill Cox each pledged $1,000, and that was Dale's monthly salary. So that would have been if the college had gone belly up or something, or we found out it was illegal to do that. They still think it might have been illegal, so they're not owning up, and a lot of those people are probably dead now,

so I don't know how it could hurt them. But it'd be nice to know, because without that money, I don't know how Burt could have published publications or bought buttons or done a lot of things. And let's see, I wonder if Dick Williams was one of those guys. Well, Burt won't say a thing. So I guess we've got to wait a while to find that out. But if you can find that out and put it in the archives, that would be something good. Anyway, you know, maybe anything comes to mind. You can call me. There were interesting little things. Community College snake oil. Oh, yeah. Could you tell us that story about the snake oil? Because we do have that bottle still. Oh, okay, good. One is a hot mustard, and the other one is a snake oil. So why don't we end with those two stories? Well, the snake oil I remember the best, because who was that guy? He's now Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. He's from the

House of Representatives. The Community College presidents together came in the early middle Cornell years and made their request for money. And this guy stood up and said, we're giving more and more money every time we meet to the community colleges. And these presidents come and tell us all the people who are enrolling more and more every year. And he says, they're snake oil salesmen. He said this on the floor of the House of Representatives. He's a good guy. It was and is. But he was wondering about these constant increases for more money. And it was because the enrollment was growing so fast all over the state. So Pardell came back from a session and he threw an excerpt from the minutes in front of me. And he said, write this guy a letter and tell him off. Don't use cuss words, but get right up to the edge and, you know, a letter for Dale's signature and really tell him off, you know, for calling us snake oil salesmen.

And I thought, holy mackerel, you know, if we're ever going to get any money again, we can't do a stupid thing like this. I think he was then chairman of one of the finance committees. It was really important, really crucial to stay on his good side. And so it was a couple hours before the end of the day. And I just thought to myself, you know, I can't do this. This is stupid. So I thought and thought, what can we do? And then it occurred to me, well, we could create snake oil and give him a bottle and some of the other prominent members of the legislature. So on the way home, I lived in South Eugene. And at 40th and Donald, at that time they had a place called Steve's Pharmacy. And so at 515, I was there on my way home. And I went in there and I said, I need some apothecary bottles. I'm making kind of a creation. And he said, well, I got some old bottles that I don't use anymore for cough

syrup and you know what it looks like. And so I said, I'll take what you got. And he said, I got 25 and I'll sell them to you cheap. And I don't know if he charged me a dime or 50 cents or whatever it was. I never got reimbursed. I didn't have the courage to ask.

And then I went next door to Safeway, which is still at 40th and Donald, and I bought some light colored oil, cookie oil. And I took that home and I filled the bottles and put the caps on. And then I wrote the copy. And I didn't know what the label should look like, but I knew that there was room for a good sized label on those bottles. And I wrote community college snake oil and you know all the little sayings on that label. And I took it over to printing graphics the first thing the next morning and these 25 bottles full of cooking oil. And Don Johnson was the director of printing graphics and he had been a graphic artist and I told him what the deal was and I said, I can't let Eldon do this and this is our way out. And he said, well, I got some time this morning and he says, this is going to be a fun thing. I'll do it. And it wasn't, I guess, the end of the day that

he called me over there and he had these labels. He had designed it, set the type, pasted it up, which was the procedure in those days, printed the labels and trimmed them, glued them onto the bottles and handed me the 25 in a little box. And I took them over and laid them on Eldon's desk. And suddenly his eyes lit up and he knew that what he had wanted me to do was not right and this was the way to do it, to win this guy over. And I said, you got to call OCCA, Oregon Community College Association of Salem and find out when they always hold at the end of session party in the evening and all the legislators come and have a glass of wine and slap each other on the back or give each other a finger, whatever is appropriate and tell jokes at each other. And so the master's ceremony was given one of these bottles and he presented it to this guy and the guy just was won over.

He went to the microphone and said that he was the next day he was going to move for passage of the community college funding bill intact, no cuts. And he did. So Eldon gave these things he had a pair of jeans to go to school in all his life and no money. And I thought that this was such a coup that I was really going to get known around the state among the presidents. Eldon could not bring himself. It was greeted with such acceptance and the result. Eldon couldn't say he hadn't done it himself or even thought of it. And so years later when I was in the office of the president, Lynn Benton, who was then a guy who later applied at OCC, and I tubed him myself because I was in favor of Moschus. Well, it was between Moschus and the president at Salem. Anyway, he asked me what I did at OCC and I said, I think like that. And I pointed to the bottle and he said, you didn't do that. Eldon Schaeffer did that. And the interview was over.

And I suddenly knew that Eldon had taken the credit and so on, which he'd taken the credit for everything I wrote for him, many articles and publications across the country and every speech. But he would often thank me and he would invite Molly and me to the town club for dinner. And I didn't know that he couldn't emotionally admit he hadn't done much of the stuff for which he got credit. And eventually it didn't matter to me anymore. I suddenly realized, hey, I got a great job. The guy likes me. We get along. I'm not going to worry about it. And I'm not trying to be a president. I just didn't. I was one year into my doctoral program at the College of Education at the university when I said, you know, I wouldn't be a president for any money. I don't want to do what they're telling me about. So it just didn't matter to me. And I was so far along in my career that I would be retiring in, you know, he left in 85 and I retired in 92.

So that's only seven years left. And of course I took early retirement because I couldn't work they were working for themselves and not the college. Better erase that or get more for the sumi. It's an opinion. Anyway, but there were things like that. And the muster deal was with Dale Parnell, would get mad at Olga Freeman, board member, for some of her outrageous remarks about conserving tax money. I don't think they ever had anything dealing with money that she didn't deliver a long oration that we shouldn't spend it. I mean, it could be to turn the water on. It was that fundamental. And so the board chairman was Bill Bristol, a Eugene jeweler, a wonderful guy. He came to our house for dinner because we were friends outside the college and he had a neat wife. And he was to die of cancer quickly within two or three years. And every time Dale would be lectured by Olga, he would sort of slide his chair around

face the other way because you could see his face getting red. I think he must be Irish anyway. Dale's a good guy, very religious. I mean, he just doesn't want to hurt anybody and all that stuff. But here was Olga in the public meetings attacking him for spending money on things, pencils. So, Bristol, one time Dale was sitting here and Bristol was the chairman there and he turned around and he was, you know, his teeth or something and Bristol took out of his bag or something a jar of red hot mustard and handed it to Dale. It had some significance at the time to Kua's temper or something like that. Well, I don't know what happened to that jar of mustard. Well, I think you've got the later one, later when Eldon was president and he knew about this situation and at times he had talked to Dale about working with Olga. And so at some meeting or something, I don't remember the details anymore,

but Bert Dotson and I were trying to cook up something. And so we came upon the idea, the story about the mustard. And so we created and Dale was mad at somebody about something. So we created another jar of mustard and it's got to be the one you have. And I don't know what it says on the label, but somehow, anyway, Eldon at some meeting presented it to Dale, you know, to sort of take some of the heat off some situation. And I don't remember the exact details of that because Bert was in on it as much as I was. And Dale, of course, remembered the first jar of mustard. And I don't know if he's kept them both or what, but we're lucky we've had some good people here. We've had some weak presidents, but we've had some good ones, too. I think Parnell, Schaeffer, and Spildee, I think, are the three affected presidents we've had. And Spildee's record is still being built.

But anyway, there were other fun things we did. I can't remember them all. Once the League for Innovation met here, and this was when we had Prefontaine and Roscoe Divine and a bunch of those runners. And we were Tracktown USA and stuff, and the League met here. And so the invitation that went out, and again, I got to give credit to Bert because we both worked on this, but you know, I'd give the credit to Bert. And he thought up, or maybe I thought up the idea of somehow having track with these stars running and then looming above them in these kind of shirts with labels on them were Bert and Eldon. It was a pay stub job. And so I wish you had a copy of that invitation to the League members because it says, you know, come and run with us and something like that. And here were Eldon and Bert behind these stars in this pay stub. It looked real. And then there was a Chinese visit

in about 82. Dale was president of AACJC, now called AACC. And so China, which was then very much isolated and they wanted to send a delegation of seven or eight people here or to the United States to look at community colleges, and Dale said, quote, Elaine. So they came here, and we had somewhere in your archives, you got a picture from the register guard of these guys around the fountain we used to have out there. There's now a dirt pile.

And we took them over to the coast and did all kinds of things. They had never seen a Polaroid before. So I came out not knowing that, of course, and started taking some Polaroid shots and handing it to them. And they were all gathering around, and then they wanted to look at my camera and finally I put it in the hands of one and pointed to the pusher because only one of them could speak English. And then they started taking pictures of each other. And they were on such short rations that there was no money for more than one meal a day at the Eugene Hotel. And so we made arrangements that they got lots of fruit sent down there, and they would fill their pockets. And they each had one suit, one pair of shoes, and some of them were deans of universities over there in China. But, you know, they weren't paid big salaries, and China was not the booming industrial

nation it's becoming now. And I suppose, I don't know if we asked Bert about that, but he took the lead. I was just a backup guy. But those things, if we could, especially that invitation, because...