PG:  Can you tell me what you were involved with before coming to LaneCommunity College, can you speak about that? 

RR:  I came to Lane in May 1975 but before that, my wife Carolyn and my kids, which there were five by then, moved to Oregon from Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1967.  We moved out here for me to take the job teaching English at the University of Oregon.  I came as someone who hadn’t finished his Doctorate dissertation but was intending to finish it soon after he got here.  To make a long story short, I did teach at the University of Oregon but I didn’t finish my Doctorate dissertation.  I decided I didn’t want to but I wasn’t a scholar.  It took me a long time to figure that out and I loved teaching but I didn’t love working in libraries.  I didn’t love scholarship.  So I gave it up and I had to leave the university.  That was after four years but then I had to make up my mind what I was going to do. 

So, what I decided what I wanted to do was to go back and recapture the vocation that I had grown up with in thinking that I was going to be when I grew up; which was to be an artist.  When I was a kid I was drawing and thinking that I wanted to be an artist. If you asked any of my teachers they would have said that Dick was going to be an artist when he grows up.  As a matter of fact, one of my teachers when I was in 5th grade, took me to the local art school, the _ of Art, and demanded that the director give me a scholarship.  When I got to the university, for some reason I majored in English.  I don’t know quite why that happened.  I took one art course in my freshmen year and I kind of liked it but I was also taking English courses and somehow I just slid into an English major.   I did enjoy literature, reading and writing about it. I majored in English and went to graduate school and I did really well.  I received all these scholarships and fellowships and so on.  Then, before I knew it, I was going to be teaching English and then applying for jobs.  I got one at the University of Oregon.  That’s how we got out here. 

Then I had to give it up after four years but I got enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute School to pursue a MFA degree.  I thought if I can paint and teach, my God I would have the world by the seat of the pants because then I would be doing what I really loved, that I would be teaching.  I enrolled in that program with the help of a professor from the University of Minnesota.  I got a job part-time teaching English at Stanford to help support my family.  This would have been in the summer of 1971 or 1972 where I drove down to San Francisco to find a place for my family to live.  What we found was, my wife, Carolyn was an occupational therapist but hadn’t been practicing and she was going to obtain a job in the Bay Area as an occupational therapist to get us through this art school period.  There were no jobs in occupational therapy in San Francisco I learned.  I was trying to beat the bushes and figure out where we should live, to be closer to her job and so on.  There were just no openings in the Bay Area.  So, I called her and I said, “What do you think we should do”?  She said I think you should come home and we’ll talk about it. We decided the best thing we can do for our kids was not to bring them to the Bay Area, where the dad had a part-time job teaching and the mother had no job at all. 

So we stayed here in Eugene and I received a one-year lectureship in English at the University, they were good enough to give me and when that was over I began beating the bushes again to find a job.  I ended up copy writing for advertising agencies and some graphic design work, it really wasn’t a living but it was something.   

All the while looking really hard for a job and one of the graphic design jobs I got was for a show that they were doing at Lane Community College, a production of ‘A Man For All Seasons,’ the story of Thomas Moore. That was being directed by Ed Ragozzino and at the same time in this newly housed Performing Arts Department in their new building.  I decided that I was going to try out for a part in it because I sure needed something to do in the evenings, so I did.  I got a part in Ed’s play and I was doing the graphic design for the poster and all that.  That came to Ed’s attention that way, in that show and then he had a woman, Cecilia Smith who was his publicist in this newly formed department and selling the tickets and running the box office.  Suddenly, Cecilia had to give up the job that she hardly begun that year because her mother was seriously ill and she needed to be with her in another state.  Celcilia would come to know me through the graphic design work I was doing for her.  The department called me and said why don’t you apply for my job and I said, “My God what an idea, that’s great.”  This was a job that is paid for by a Federal government program called CETA, which is the Comprehensive Employment Training Act whereby the government gave the school and other institutions money to hire people where they can train in some new line of work that they didn’t have before.  So this job was funded through CETA and I applied for it and I got the job. I can remember that they paid $780 per month, which in 1975 was doable even with five children although by then by wife was working part time also at Sacred Heart hospital. 

I remember talking with Ed in his office, everything was new, this was my first session in the new building about the job and I can remember saying to him, “You know Ed this is not my line of work and I just want you to know that I will be continuing to look for some other kind of work but I certainly do need this job and I see that you need me.”  They were in a bind and they were looking for the end of their season and their first summer theatre program.  So we got the job.  After about twelve or fifteen years I quit looking for another job and realized that I was here and this was my job.  It took me that long really to adjust to mentally to accepting that I was working at this job at Lane Community College.  Being an English teacher, as an artist who was unrealized but who now was doing graphic design work and publicity work.  Yeah, that’s the background. 

PG:  When did you begin at Lane Community College and when did you leave?

RR:  I began in May 1975 and the big push then was to finish the spring season and to crank up for the first summer theatre that Ed was producing and directing in the new theatre which was to be a production of Godspell.  I left there in December 1995, so I was there just about one term under twenty years.  At the beginning, my job was basically a publicist job but I also did the graphic design work because I knew how to do that.  At first I did all that in an office that I had right in the Performing Arts Department.  But then later, the people in the Computer Graphics Department gave me a place over there because I was running over so often.  I had a desk and a drawing board and everything right over there.  So I did all of that and I did all the press releases for the shows.  I managed the box office, which meant mostly student work-study help and some volunteer help.  I was the house manager, which meant I had to be at every performance, of every show, and every concert that was given there.  Running ushers at the shows and so on. 

Eventually I got to do some teaching too which was great because I was qualified and one of the things that was needed in the department was a class that would teach beginning acting students some of the dramatic literature that they were unfamiliar with.  Even thought they wanted to be actors they hadn’t actually studied any plays.  So I started teaching maybe after a couple of years and that was great and eventually I taught more and more until that became a more important part of my job. 

Then in 1985 or 1986, Ed retired from his job at LaneCommunity College and the department was faced with the problem of who was going to be the chair of the department after he left.  The college gave him a year to have an acting department chair during that time they would run a process to find a permanent chair. So they asked me if I would be the acting chair for a year and would some trepidation I agreed to do that.  Officially I was not on the faculty at all. I was a classified employee who was also doing some teaching.  I wasn’t a musician and I wasn’t an actor so I wasn’t a professional in any of those fields but maybe that’s one of the reasons they looked to me because I was sort of this neutral person in the department.  So I got that job and then they asked me after a couple of months if I would apply for the permanent job and I did.  I was interviewed and I got the job.  So then beginning in 1986 I was the permanent new department chair. 

During that first year or maybe it was the second year, I’m not sure, Mary Seereiter knows, the dance program at Lane Community College was very good and had been very good for a long time.  For Mary it was Nicola Foster who ran it.  Nicky as we called her, was an important part of Ed Ragozzino’s musical theatre production team because she was the dancer and the choreographer for many years.  There is a whole history there that I am sure you got from Ed about the summer theatre and so on.  Nicola was an important part of that.  Then she left to form her own dance studio in Eugene.  Mary Seereiter had been in the picture for sometime, I just don’t have a clear history of that, but we wanted Mary Seereiter in the dance program to be part of the performing arts department and to leave the physical education department. I am sure Mary told you that dance programs were often part of the physical education programs across the country and even universities where it was taught but it was clear to all of us that we wanted that program as a performing arts and we persuaded the administration and the college to make that transfer and so it did.  Mary was really the only full-time teacher and carried that whole department.  It was just a great and wonderful thing that made us all very happy when she and her program came over to our department.  So then we had music, theatre and dance. 

PG:  Do you remember what year that was? 

RR:  I think it was about 1987.  There was some friction as I recall with the Health and Physical Education Department over that but what ever it was and there were some other little issues around that because Mary by that time was also teaching Dance Aerobics, I think. In that gray area was this physical education thing or was this a dance thing but whatever the problems were we managed to overcome them more or less. 

Then a couple of other sort of administrative things that were important to us in the department, was that I had hardly become and was getting my feet wet as the department chair when the Vice President of Instruction at that time a woman named Jacquelyn Belcher, who has since gone on to become a community college president in Minneapolis and Atlanta and so on; decided that she was going to create a division of the Arts.  So the chairman of the Art Department, was a wonderful man and the founder of that department named Roger McAlister, who had come on just about the same time Ed had in the Performing Arts and who was as good as what he did as Ed was as what he did, was about to retire.  The Vice President of Instruction wanted me to succeed him as Chairman of the Art Department and add that to my responsibilities.  The Art Department people of course wanted their own department chair and not to be linked to some other department or to be submerged in some larger unit and to make matters even worse from that point of view; the year after that the same Vice President added what was called the Media Arts Department (mass communications and radio/television) to this group. 

Now we had Performing Arts, Fine Arts and Graphic Design, and Media Arts and Technology departments.  After a lot of political difficulties and so on all of those were brought under one umbrella and the person that the performing arts people had chosen to be their department chair was after about two or three years, also chairman of dance, fine arts, graphic design, media arts and technology.  So I was spread very thin.  At first it seemed doable but it really became clear after awhile that it was just a killer.  That if it was going to be done at all, and I guess it was because it was a fact, it couldn’t be done the same way.  You couldn’t run three departments the same way that you had run one department. 

The tradition at Lane and this is very unfortunate that of history but maybe inevitable.  Unfortunately because the tradition at Lane since it’s founding was that you would have a department chair like Ed Ragozzino or like Roger McAllister or Jim Dunne, the three chairs that were involved in my division who had founded their departments, who were very good at what they did, who were professionals in their fields and who had plenty of money and high expectations and motivation to make their departments as good as they could possibly be and those were three outstanding departments.  The department chairs in that scheme were the advocates for their departments, they were the defenders, they were the ones had the money, they were the ones who did the hiring, they were the ones who set the standards, they were everything but that whole framework was changing and I guess I wound up being one of the transitional figures in that transition period. 

It was hard for all of us, it was hard for the faculty, for the staff to see that their department chair wasn’t as available to them as he used to be and it was hard for me because those were the standards that I wanted to uphold and those were the things that I wanted to be able to do for my departments. Physically, there wasn’t enough time in the day or enough energy to do all of those things for all those departments so; I wound up delegating quite a lot of authority and work in each of the departments.  We set up a system of having lead teachers or lead instructors, which were helpful, and the administrative assistants in the departments found their workloads increase and so on. 

We made it work and at the same time there was declining revenues and the beginning of that long history of cuts; 10% this year and or 12% that year, year after year.  In the environment of cutting, there is always this problem especially when you are involved with the arts as I was at Lane of having to defend your whole professional responsibility against the more ‘pragmatic’ people (I say pragmatic with quotes around it) in the vocational programs.  They would say this is why we have a community college for welding and electricity and engineering and nursing and so on.  If anything has to go it’s surely those theatre people and those music and dance people.  I spent a lot of my time and energy doing research and writing and defending actually these programs from cuts. 

I remember one time when the whole dance program was identified to be cut and I spent most of the Fall term once posing this whole notebook of information and studies that I could find all over the country on the value of the arts in general and dance in particular.  We did survive.  We managed to keep the whole thing afloat for those years, thank God it was great.  The quality was still there because we had those really good faculty who kept in there and who kept their standards up but it just got increasingly difficult. 

PG:  Can you describe what it was like to continue after Mr. Ragozzino established the department back in 1968? 

RR:  Ed was wonderful to work for.  I really enjoyed working for him.  He was a very strong leader and he wasn’t only a strong leader in the sense of being a boss but he was also a strong leader in that by example.  He did wonderful work.  He was a wonderful teacher, he was an acting teacher; a lot of people don’t just see him as this director.  He was also this public figure, this kind of celebrity in Eugene because of the wonderful work that he did directing musicals and that was just really something that he did with his left hand.  The rest of the time he was the chairman and founding chairman of this department, this very complex department and all the while that he was chairman he did something that the chairman was certainly not required to do, he taught.  He taught beginning acting classes and he was very good at it as you can imagine, he loved doing it and he also taught history of theatre classes. 

But most people out there knew him as the guy who directed these wonderful musicals.  They knew him from the past when he was at South Eugene High School, before I moved to Eugene when he would direct musicals there using high school students along with Nathan Cammack the orchestra and band teacher at South Eugene as the musical director and David Sherman, the scenic and lighting designer. At first it was Wayte Kirchner who was choir director at South Eugene High. 

When Ed was invited by the president of this new college with a new campus out here on 30th Avenue being built; invited to create this new performing arts department out at Lane, he brought with him this team from SouthEugene High School.  He brought this team with him which was obviously South EugeneHigh School’s great loss but the great gain for LaneCommunity College and that was team that created with him these musicals.  It was the same team who had created the musical theatre summer shows here in Lane, the proceeds of which were contributed to this fund to help raise public awareness for the need for a performing arts center, which eventually became the Hult Center.  Each one of those people were very good at what they did too, so you had this great team. 

Ed continued to do that when he went out to Lane but then we had our own theatre there.  In fact, Ed obviously had an important hand in designing that theatre.  So, it was used for summer musicals.  The first one which was a huge success and I was really delighted to be a part from the point of view of publicity and the box office and so on was ‘Godspell.’  That was in the summer of 1975 and it was an amazing thing for me who was new at all of this to watch and to be part of because the show was new enough in the country for people to be interested in it as a new thing.  I don’t remember how new it wasn’t more than two or three years I think before we had been able to get the rights to produce it and that summer the first big musical in the new theatre we had something like twenty two or twenty four performances which was unheard of.  That would be like Thursday, Friday, Saturday and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday for five to six weeks in the summer and that was way more performances than we had intended or that Ed had intended for summer theatre. Maybe you do two or three weekend’s maximum but we kept selling it out and then we would say well should we do another weekend, should we do another set of three performances.  Ed would agree that we would do it and he would consult the cast.  I would say that we’re available and I would say let’s do it.  He would say let’s crank this up.  Can you get the figures, can you get the publicity, can you get the word out that we were adding performances so I would race around to the radio stations in town and get something out in the paper.  Before I could get back to school, back to the box office, the phone would be ringing for people to buy tickets.  We sold out and I can remember at the end of that run in August sometime by then everyone was truly exhausted even though we were still filling the house, Ed was saying “I don’t really know what we’re trying to prove here, why don’t we just stop.”  “I think we had enough and we all need some vacation time.”  So that was it, we just stopped.  Who knows how much longer it could have gone on. 

That was a heck of a powerful beginning for the performing arts department that first year out at Lane.  Successive summers we did shows like ‘A Man of La Mancha,’ which sold out, sold out, sold out and ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ all of the great musicals that everybody knows and that everybody loves to see and it seems like over and over again.  Ed would have these great casts that he would put together and wonderful music with such great care and professionalism by Nathan Cammack and we did that year after year. 

I need to say though as the years went by it became more and more difficult to do that financially.  The cost of producing a musical, the cost of the costumes and of renting the costumes, the cost of the musical material and scripts, everything became more and more expensive.  In the 1970’s there was an economic depression that most of us had forgotten about that made it hard even for students and our other competent musicians in the community. It made it hard for them to contribute their time to all those rehearsals and all those performances.  I remember actually, I’m sure Nathan would never tell you this but he actually paid some of the people out of his own pocket in order to be in the show.  That’s the kind of guy he was. 

By the time we got up to 1985 and 1986, the last couple of years before I became chairman, we were actually beginning to lose money in the summer theatre. It was hard.  It ground to an economic halt.  We did have a couple of guest directors, guest shows and we tried to make that work in other ways but it was very hard to make it happen.  By then too, Ed was interested in starting up a summer theatre, reinstituting the summer theatre in the community apart from Lane Community College.  So he had started down that track for a while at the Hult Center but that’s another story. 

There is no way anybody even a professional theatre person could replace Ed. He was unique.  He is a uniquely talented and energetic and powerful person. What he did he did extremely well but I wasn’t a professional at all in any of these areas so obviously there was no way that I was going to replace Ed.  I would have to be somebody else, I would have to have some other niche, I would have to have some other purpose almost then what Ed had and I did.  I think the faculty had in mind that I would be something different like well now here’s an opportunity for change and let’s see. 

 I think one of the things we tried to do was to since we couldn’t; one way to say is to make the virtue of necessity.  The department could not be or have the public image that it had under Ed so that’s a necessity.  So how do you make a virtue of that.  You make a virtue of that I think by turning inward and we did.  We tried to focus more on what was going on in the classrooms. We tried to sort of enrich the theatre curriculum in various ways.  We tried to sort of de-emphasize in fact the musical for various reasons because we didn’t have Ed anymore; because there was no way we could produce musicals economically anymore.  It was very difficult to do as we had discovered even before Ed had left and also just because it just inherently makes sense if you’re a school training actors if that’s part of your work not simply to emphasize or focus on musical but on the broader basis of acting. 

We sort of changed and stopped looking so intensively at the main stage in the big theatre and looked more at the little theatre, ‘The Blue Door Theatre’ that we had created in our forty by forty black box theatre.  So we could use more of our students in the productions and have more productions and therefore give the students more actual stage and audience experience than we may have been able to do the former way.  That was part of the change that we tried to make. 

PG:  Were you responsible for creating the ‘Blue Door Theatre” and when did that happen? 

RR:  That was part of the design of the building that we would have this and that was something that Ed built into it, that we would have this smaller theatre, this lab theatre as they were called.  This forty by forty.  I don’t remember what the seating capacity was but it wasn’t very much.  But when we decided, Ed was still there that we were going to do more shows there.  We upgraded the seating, we added a lot of seating, and we enhanced the technology regarding the lighting and sound there to just make it a more playable and more useable theatre.  Not just for rehearsal, not just for class but for public performances.  We did use it more. 

For the main theatre then, by now we had the dance department so once a year (they weren’t there when Ed was there) they had their annual dance concert. So we needed to light that, design that and incorporate that as one of our major shows in our season of shows and that was good to do and we did that. 

Another thing that I almost forgot which is very important was one of the other things we decided to do when I came on was to do more with electronic music.  For some years we had an electronic music lab headed by and mainly taught by Ed McManus. In an area he was proficient at and worked in since he was an undergraduate music student at the University of Oregon on the old moog synthesizers that they had there.  He had learned all that stuff and Ed who was a wonderful musician, just a wonderful hornest, he also has a technical interest, he has a technical side.  He continued his interest in synthesized electronic music and wanted to set up a program at Lane and he did! 

Then we needed to find a suitable place on campus, a classroom in which to teach it.  Ultimately, we identified this room over in the Health Occupations department (I don’t know what they used it for) that we appropriated somehow and we got it.  They were not at all happy about not having one of their rooms but thank God we were able to have it.  So that Ed was able to have a room where he could have twenty students at a time.  Our Electronic Music Program continued to grow and it’s reputation over the years that was out there and there was never any dearth of students.  Ed added a level of advanced instruction and we got money for him to have a permanent assistant in that program which was desperately needed because Ed was trying to do the whole thing. 

Before I left the college had passed this bond measure which enabled us to build some new buildings and one of the facilities we very much wanted was to be sure that we would have a music lab for the Electronic Music Program dedicated to it and Ed went to work on that.  He worked on that and worked on it for how many years before it was finally realized just what last year or the year before last. 

A couple of other things come to mind here.  So there was that Electronic Music Program headed by Ed who also at that time was teaching symphonic band, jazz band and music fundamentals; he just had a killer workload.  I remember one day Ed coming to me and saying “Dick is there anyway that I could stop teaching the band, that would be a big help to me since I’ve been teaching it for twelve years and I’m exhausted.”  Then I forget just how that worked out.  Someone who was retired and we were able to hire another person, a full time music person and we got one of the best music teachers surely in this whole area who had been the band director at NorthEugene High School for a number of years and that’s Ron Bertucci. 

So we got Ron and Ron was a wonderful musician, who like Ed and like Nathan plays the Oregon Mozart Players, the Eugene Symphony Orchestra and other pick up ensembles that happen.  He has his own private studio and music students and is a great teacher. When I say someone is a great teacher I mean that because I’ve been in their classrooms, I’ve watched them, I’ve had to write evaluations of them, and I see how good they are.  Ron wanted not only to teach the band but he wanted to do the jazz program, he wanted to do the chamber orchestra, he wanted to teach. He was of the school that if we have a limited number of student musicians so if you’re going to do a good job in any one of these modes you have to be in touch with those student musicians all day.  He wanted them all.  We gave him all of them and to this day we moved the chamber orchestra to Monday night thinking that it might become a community orchestra and draw some people into the community who would be free to do that Monday night.  I’m not sure how that’s worked out in terms of community membership but I notice in the class schedule that after all these years it’s still going on Monday nights and Ron is a guy of tremendous energy, talent and musicianship who is also I know making the jazz program much better known. I’ve been out when he has this Jazz Festival as a volunteer helper and I see how that’s going. 

The music program I think really has thrived and after Wayte Kirchner retired we hired a young woman.  The choral program I think is strong and obviously, Jim Greenwood.  Our beginning piano instruction program has always been really good and Barbara Myrick is a key person there and Jim Greenwood.  Those are also the anchor people in music theory.   All these years they have been teaching theory and teaching it so well. I’ve asked the students over the years how does it go for you when you are at the University School of Music and get into the stream of theory courses, they’d say we are always better prepared than the other people in the class because in fact they threw the first number of marks and we got it all down. 

So I am very proud of the music program.  I’m proud of the whole thing out there.  Our theatre program even though it has been diminished because of cuts sadly; it’s still anchored there by Patrick Torelle who is just a consonant teacher.  He just a superb teacher and director and Sparky Roberts though she’s part-time she has been there forever.  She just does a great job.  She is devoted to theatre, she is devoted to students, that’s her life; that’s her passion and we are just so blessed by this wonderful faculty. 

Not to speak of course of Mary Seereiter in the dance program which is absolutely first rate.  Wow that college has got a terrific program. 

 I think that the Performing Arts Department at Lane is almost certainly less well known in the community in general than it used to be under Ed.  Because we don’t do the kind of big splash, large audience shows that were the hallmark of Ed’s leadership out there.  Another reason is because there are more performing organizations in town then there used to be.  There’s the Lord Leebrick Theatre, the Ace Theatre, the HultCenter has its shows that come and go.  Something else we noticed before I left there, in the 1980’s, something that happened and I think other producers of entertainment will tell you the same thing is that in the 1970’s and the early 1980’s, you could try to sell out an entire season.  You could sell a season, you know have a season brochure, you could plan your season these are the plays we’re going to do, these are the concerts and you could make an effort get people to buy season tickets and you could do very well. Out at Lane of course we tried to do that, we did that and always be one of the big shows that Ed was going to do that anchored the season and it was really amazing.  I think one time, one season, I can hardly believe this is true we sold out the season almost like at 87%.  For an entire year we sold! 

What we saw happen as the years went by and this is partly attributable to the fact that Ed wasn’t at his work, his shows were decreasingly visible, they were less and less out there but also something changed economically. Something changed in the mix of entertainment opportunities that people have in the greater Eugene area and the result was that we found that people were not buying for the whole season.  People were less and less willing to commit for a whole season (9 or 10 months) of plays and concerts.  Instead, more and more people would buy and make up their minds whether they were going to see a show at the last minute or the week before.  Or people I guess would come home from work on Thursday night and say what do you say we go see a play out at LCC tomorrow night. Instead of deciding in August when we were getting after them what they were going to see in September, October, November and so on through May. 

For that reason people producing organizations like Lane and University Theatre and I suppose the folks downtown too, changed their whole ticket selling approach.  People would buy X number of dollars of commitment into a season and then could choose the tickets they wanted later as the shows came up.  Put together your own season, you don’t have to buy all six or seven of these things; you can just buy this little group of three or that little group of four, mix them or match them.  All those kinds of marketing devices that were tried.  That’s a big change. 

I don’t know how enrollment is and I just couldn’t speak about that right now because I don’t know the facts about how enrollment is in the Performing Arts. I remember years ago that Ed told me something that I believe is true and that is during the depression years in the United States people continued to spend what little money they had on entertainment.  People would go to the movies, people would go to vaudeville and I guess it’s obvious why because it’s a diversion from the grimness of your real life.  So I think it’s been true even when there is economic downturns in the economy here in our local world this doesn’t mean that you’re going to have fewer students taking acting or music fundamentals or learning to play the piano or taking dance classes, not at all. 

It’s the same in fine art that people take these courses.  Art department numbers are always up, are always strong and that’s good.  I think this is true and not just wishful thinking that these days that more and more people have come to understand that the arts are not somehow unimportant or just kind of enhancements to an otherwise serious practical curriculum. People have come to understand through psychological studies, educational studies and learning studies that have been done some of them published in popular books that education in the arts is not something extra or extraneous but it is really is a fundamental part of the development of the human being. 

People are understanding more and more the importance of the holistic approach to well-being and even intellectual development.  Just to site one obvious fact is that everybody knows is that for example, it has been found that students who study music as children tend to do well, better than other students who do not study in all across the range of academic work.  There is something about the discipline of the arts and the passionate dedication to that discipline that carries over to all your other activities. 

Something else that has been discovered and maybe it was Patrick that taught me this but back in those days I told you that I was having to defend the department against the cutters.  I had to do a lot of research in order to write these things up.  We know that there are different modes of learning.  People learn things in different ways. Some people use their bodies generally to learn and some people are very visually oriented.  I recently got interested in Navaho weaving and I am taking a class in Navaho weaving which is a straight vertical loom and I think I am doing this for a number of reasons.  If you ask the Navaho Indian to teach you how to do something let’s say connected to weaving they don’t talk, they show you everything is a demonstration. They say, “See.”  So some people learn better that way.   

Personally, here I am at sixty-five, I’ve only in the last few years begun really to understand that it would have been a whole lot better for me as a developing human being had I actually pursued art–-the visual arts that I love and that are my passion as a young person and continued that through a professional life.  I’m a person who has I think lived too long in his head and I didn’t even understand for that case that a person can do that, that a person can get fouled up that way living too much in your head and not enough in your senses.  The arts, all of them, nurture that side that important dimension of peoples development and that’s just fundamental, that’s just very important and it’s just a great privilege to be a part of that, that part of the educational environment. 

PG:  “Iwas wondering if you can speak about any situations or challenges within the department and how you overcame them or how you resolved them, amongst staff.

RR:  Before I forget I wanted to mention that something that we were able to do toward the beginning of my tenor there as chair was we were able to upgrade the lighting and sound system in the main theatre, which badly needed it.  We were so grateful too get a huge amount of money to do that because it was really expensive.  Because we did that we were able to then begin to offer courses in technical theatre and to try to develop a program.  We did have a program that we never had before so the students could systematically and through a specific curriculum learn about lighting and about sound as it relates to the performing arts. 

Jim McCarty was our scenic and lighting designer for a number of years before financial exigencies forced us to reduce that position right out of the department which was sad because it had taken us a number of years to build it in and to build up the technical side and to get enough staff to make that a really viable component in the department.  Then it was gone.  We were never able to have enough students.  Every term there would be three, four, five or six students who were interested in pursuing technical theatre but never enough.  We kept hoping and did everything we could to build that up but we were never really able to.  So, ultimately that program didn’t I would say ‘get off the ground.’ 

Let’s see, you asked about tensions or problems within the department. A form of amount of tension in the department as I inherited it and because I lived with it was between the disciplines.  We had, as you know, at first the Performing Arts Department, Theatre and Music.  In theatre you have the performance side, the acting and the technical side; the designing, the lighting, the sound folks and the costumes.  Oh, we can talk about costumes and costumers.  Then in music we have choral and instrumental and then breakdowns within those. 

There was a tension (and this was before dance came over) I discovered between the music folks and the theatre folks, which had to do with, I don’t know what you call it ‘a favorite-child kind of syndrome’.  The music people felt—I really don’t judge this I just state this as a fact because I am not smart enough psychologist to discern the truth here but the music people, or some of them or perhaps most of them felt that under Ed Ragozzino the music folks had been secondary in importance and that the theatre people had been first.  I suppose you know they felt that Ed was a theatre person and on the other hand Ed did musicals.  Ed is a great lover of music and very knowledgeable about music and Ed did shows that were all about music and musicals.  On a personal level you certainly can’t say that Ed favored theatre over music but somehow the music people felt in allocation of funds and resources from my point of view he never – he actually bent over backwards to avoid even the perception that he was favoring theatre but there it was, it was there.  So people felt that justified or unjustified. 

That was a source of tension and so we would have our beginning of the year retreats and meetings before students came to layout the year and to deal with problems, renew our acquaintance with one another and so on. That issue would keep coming up.  In my own way I would try to address it and I’m not sure I made any progress in that regard.  I didn’t know really what there was to do and so I can’t recall anything very concrete that I did.  Basically, it’s like the music people needed assurances that you loved them, that you loved all your children equally or something like that as you did. 

When dance came over, I don’t remember that it was a complicating factor but it was entirely a blessing, it was like a child you wanted in your family so it was not like resources are now to be diverted to a third component.  I don’t ever remember feeling that at all. It seems to me that everyone in the department wanted dance. 

Another thing, it reminds me of something, we tried and I think maybe Ed had done this too, I’m just not sure but, I remember that we did try very much to structure the curriculum and even occasionally some specific series of courses in such a way that the student could study all three disciplines. The kind of ‘total performer’ approach. We instituted a series of annual awards; best student in acting, best student in dancing etc., and then the best all-around performance.  We instituted those awards which I still think are there and given every year, to encourage the student who wants to pursue all three and who envisions for himself or herself a career in the performing arts where all three disciplines and we talk with the youths and we talk how they are the synergy between them – how real that is and so on.   That would be a way in which the interaction of the three disciplines we tried to focus on but by gosh when I think back on it, in the musical and musical theatre there they are – all three of them at work to create this single theatrical experience.  I don’t know but, I just point that out to you as a tension and I understand that it’s still there. 

Now and then and this is true of any department anywhere that you would have this difficulty or that difficulty with this faculty person or this students’ behavior and all of that.  I don’t think that there was anything exceptional or particularly anything outstanding or anything of particular interests.  I would say for the most part when I think about it; when I think about other departments and when you’re the department chair you do get an insight to other departments because you have these meetings with other department chairs and you talk to them and you do get an insight about how other departments are run. 

I would say this, that the Performing Arts Department had a much more of a family feeling, that we were much closer as a community of people working together than any other department that I can think of on campus.  I suppose it would be naïve to think that in people who understand one another’s disciplines as well as people in the performing arts do and who have a ton of respect for one another that (and you can have families with squabbles) you can family problems, it’s just part of the deal. I never felt overwhelmed by that or that there was some intractable problem that was just haunting us.  I never felt anything like that, no. 

PG:  Can you tell me, Dick what inspired you when you were the chair person and what inspires you now.

RR:  Since I retired we moved out to the country, which was new.  We bought a 5-acre place.  Mainly my wife, she wanted to move to the country and I said well, ok we’ll go along. We lived in South Eugene since 1967 so we found this 5-acre place.  Now we have some sheep and llama and my wife has a huge garden; we have sixteen raised beds with vegetables.  I know because I built everyone of them and we have huge flowerbeds. Two or three years ago now, I built a study for me to paint in and so the happy ending here of a tale that’s not unhappy is that I spend a lot of time in my studio painting where I am unbelievably happy.    Not without difficulty but happy and satisfied with what I am doing. 

And I do other stuff too, I am on the Board of Habitat For Humanity and I am on the building committee.  So I spend a lot of time over this last nine months helping to build a house and we’re going to be doing another one soon.  I am pretty active in my church and we have a social life with friends and dinners.  We have these five kids, three of whom are married and now we have five grandchildren, all of them are boys, which is great so we love to spend time with them. 

The main point here is that I am now, at long last the way it feels to me able to be or to become that artist that I did not become or pursue as a young man and that I always had to keep on the back burner through the decades when I was working at Lane Community College and doing these other things.  In a way, to some extent I did keep that link there because I would take classes in the art department with some frequency. The Art Department faculty knew me and one or two of them knew me quite well because I had even shared a studio with one of them, Craig Spilman when we first moved to Eugene and I was still doing some in the evenings or Saturdays; I was still doing some painting.  In those days there was studio space available in downtown Eugene that you could get for like $30 a month, something like that.  So I shared a studio with Craig Spilman, so he knew me in the Art Department.  The Art Department knew me which is one of the reasons that they were finally able to accept me as their Chair.  I took classes and I would do some painting sometimes sporadically at home like in the kitchen at night but the problem with that is that you had to clean it up so we could have breakfast in the morning. 

Then working with the Performing Arts Department and with the Media Arts (all of those were Arts related Departments), and then because I was doing for several years the graphic design work; I was able to use my art interest and skill in that way.  But now, I find that as an artist I am learning just a whole lot about the art of painting and about what it means to be an artist and I am finding that I am having to do all of the work that I didn’t do in my thirties, forties and fifties. I am having to do it now. 

It’s like I’ve learned I think it’s in part to reading like some professional artist like Agnes Martin.  A great artist of her time who is even older than I am and lives in New Mexico.  She has written quite a lot about the Krebs cycle and one of the things she says there is no way to go around the mistakes, you have to make all those bad paintings. So, I am making all those bad paintings, you see and occasionally a good one that I didn’t make for all those years and there is no way that you can jump over those.  You just have to go through all those moments, all of those steps and as Martin says or another way she put it; there isn’t a bad painting, there’s just the next one.  That wasn’t a bad painting, there’s just the next one you had to do.  That’s all. 

So, I am going through that and I see the hand to hand combat everyday as David Joyce calls it with my painting, with my artwork and then I’m having a __ develop and I am seeing that through the darkness, the murkiness, through the unclearness of what’s going on here; or what’s going to happen here, I see something emerging that’s very satisfying.  I’m seeing that you have to have trust in the process and that some things just can’t be forced.  I’m learning to allow things to happen.  I’m learning to look at what’s happening instead of trying to force something or to make something happen on the canvas that’s in my head, that it’s a conversation and so on.  I’m learning all of this stuff and it’s not just in my head anymore, it’s in my experience. 

So, when I reflect back on the years when I was doing this other thing especially being an administrator of an arts department I guess, you say well what was your passion then.  Well, underlining it all was a deep passion for and respect for the arts including the Performing Arts of course.  Although I was not and then here was the difficulty for me, here was the tension for me. The tension was that I was not myself professional in any of those arts that I was the administrator of and supposedly the leader of, you see.  I am a person who loves high quality.  I am a person who demands of himself the best that you can possibly come up with, the best that you can possibly develop or fish out of yourself. 

That’s what I am going through now in developing my own art form and my own artwork.  I think I felt over the years a kind of deep incompleteness or level of ongoing chronic frustration that I wasn’t able to get in there and ‘show’ these people how to do something really, really well or to get on the stage myself and be one of them and play the piano like Barbara Myrick or the trombone like Ron Bertucci or Torelle.  I think a lot of people don’t know about Ed Ragozzino, that I know is that he was himself a very good actor.  People know that he is a very wonderful voice-over expert because they hear him on the commercials.  Well, one day a long time ago I was going to be teaching a course in Shakespeare for some production of Shakespeare that we were going to be doing and I was teaching that course and I wanted students to understand a piece of Shakespeare, whether it was one of his poems or a piece of one of the plays which are also poems that things are capable of different interpretations and that a persons’ interpretation had to be the result of some insight or some reasoning about it and that that interpretation then could be defensible.  It was a rational thing. 

I took a tape recorder that I had and I took one of Shakespeare’s’ sonnets and I went around to two acting teachers and had them read that sonnet just cold; cause I knocked on the door of their office into my tape recorder. Then I went to Ed’s office, the boss, and I said Ed would you read this sonnet.  I am doing this little thing for my class.  When I listened to those three readings it was clear to me right away which one was the best one.  It was Ed’s. It was the most nuanced, it was the most sensitive, it was the deepest, it had the best projection, it was just great—it just blew me away.  Because I hadn’t really predicted or I wouldn’t have guessed that Ed brought that level of intelligence and sensitivity to a text of Shakespeare’s. He is so off-the-cuff and he has such a wonderful way of deflecting a certain kind of seriousness with his wit and his humor. 

And that’s another thing I learned from the performance people that I had the privilege to work with that all of them were very good at what they did and that is a contrary to what a lot of people out there in the general public think.  __ are for the most part highly intelligent people.  There is no way to be a very good actor or a very good musician without being a very sensitive, intelligent person.  So that’s something I be persuaded of just working with these folks. 

One time, in just I think three or four years ago, after I had retired and I started to take some printmaking courses from Craig Spilman; it was the end of the term, it was spring I think and I had a bunch of stuff to get out of my locker there in the Art Department.  I had taken my pickup truck and I parked it near the Art Building in some forbidden space and I got my stuff out and I was walking out to the truck and Craig (the printmaking teacher) was walking with me.  We were talking about, he said well you have quite a body of work there now that you’ve developed, you’ve laid it all out and I can see.  You ought to think maybe about, maybe it makes you think about doing a __ at the University of Oregon but you certainly ought to be thinking about having a show somewhere or something.  I don’t remember exactly what my answer was but it was something like “there is so much I want to do with my art, there is like this artist that I want to become and I hope that I have enough time left to become the artist that I want to be and pray without I blink said, “no matter how much time it is, it will be enough.” Since then I thought about it. Here’s Craig just out of the blue saying something which as someone who has been sitting Zen for twenty years I should have known anyway and of course it’s all there in the moment.  You are everything you are in the moment, right then. There is no need about talking about the future.  You are either fully what you are right now, something like that.  I feel that all I have to do in my studio is just be there. 

PG:  You mentioned that you have sheep and llama on your land and you mentioned that you are with Navaho weaving; so I am wondering if you spin your own wool. 

RR:  Well, I haven’t gotten around to that yet but I suppose, what happens is that I got interested in looking at Navaho weavings; incredibly beautiful they are.  We were down in Arizona not long ago and really looked at a number of them and bought a small contemporary Navaho weaving.  If I had a lot of money I would buy lots of weavings and buy lots of things too but I was interested enough to want to learn to weave. The Navaho way of weaving is quite different than a lot of ways you may know.  It’s just a vertical loom and it’s just straight plain weaving.  I thought well if I learn and take a few lessons and learn to weave than even if I don’t continue as a weaver I will have that much more appreciation for how its done. 

When I think back I’ve always been interested in weaving.   It’s like when we bought a rug for the house, it was me who me who bought it and then I started looking at my paintings in the last couple of years and I say I’m really interested in stripes.  It’s just what keeps coming are stripes.  So I think, what’s this all about.  Pretty soon I thought maybe you’re painting in a way that a weaver paints or something and the other thing is I am really interested in (the person that used to teach weaving at Lane Community College is Nancy Hoskins) and some years ago I was admiring one of her weavings.  She said why don’t you keep it in your office for a while and I did.  I kept it in my office and ultimately I bought it from her, she sold it to me for some ridiculous price and so I have that, in fact it’s in my studio now. 

Then Marilyn Robert who is the current weaving instructor at LaneCommunity College is just a wonderful artist.  The weaving is the beginning of her artwork and I’ve always admired her work a lot.  A couple of terms ago I went out there and signed up for the beginning introductory weaving class.  I showed up for the first day and it turns out that the class was over enrolled by seven or eight students.  She said we all can’t just stay here.  I said I well I’ll go, I’m this old guy and these people are taking these courses and they need to take them and I really don’t need to take them.  She said no, we’ll just put all your names in the hat here and the first name she pulled out was mine.  See I had to leave.  It was after that that I decided to take this Navaho weaving class from this other independent teacher in Eugene who’s name is Judy Ness.  So that’s how I got started on that. 

I have a daughter who is a professional artist and she’s also an inspiration to me.  Laurie lives in Berkeley and she is doing well as an artist.  She graduated from Reed College with a major in French.  She was a really good student and received a Fulbright and went to France and taught ____ for a year.  She spent a year between her junior and senior year in France studying in Strasbourg so she’s really proficient in French.  After she graduated she was teaching in a private high school, one in New York on Long Island and one in San Francisco.  One summer she was home and she said, I said to her you know Laurie if you intend to continue teaching you probably ought to get your Masters degree because you are going to need it sooner or later. She said well, actually I’ve been thinking about going to art school and I feel I really want to try that, there’s something there.  I’ve been taking these watercolor classes on Saturday mornings or Wednesday nights at City College in San Francisco.  So she did and she went and got her MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has one of her pieces, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and she’s been in the Whitney Biennial two years ago. 

She’s a star, she’s just doing great.  She’s an inspiration to me and one of the things that she said to me a few years ago that was very helpful and it was something like I can’t remember exactly but it was appropo of something.  I forget, it was a comment I was making on some other artist or maybe about her work or something.  She returned me to my studio, she deflected that interest back into the studio and she said something like, whatever is going to happen has to happen right there in your studio, dad.  She doesn’t like to talk to me about art.  She certainly doesn’t like to talk to me about her art.  That’s a kind of a lesson to me, see but that’s what I was saying I had spent a lifetime talking and thinking and now it’s time to be doing, you see.  What’s amazing and a wonderful gift is that now I have the time and the ability to be doing.  That’s just a tremendous blessing.