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AN INTERVIEW WITH DON WHIPPLE
Interviewer: Brower Burchill
The Oral History Project
Of the Endacott Society
The University of Kansas
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DON WHIPPLE
EDUCATION
1970 B.S. Southwest Missouri State
Construction Technology, Industrial Technology Department
SERVICE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Design and Construction Management
December 15, 1971 – March 12, 2007
RETIREMENT
March 12, 2007
TITLES/RANK
1971 Director of Architectural Services, Design and Construction Management
1982 Assistant Director of Architectural Services, Facilities Planning
1988 Assistant Director of Facilities Planning, Facilities Planning
1993 Project Manager, Design and Construction Management
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Burchill: “This is Brower Burchill, and on behalf of the Endacott Society I am here with
Don Whipple on July 30, 2007. Don retired from the university this past spring after
thirty-five plus years at KU. I have known Don for much of that time and am looking
forward to this chat. This is meant to be an informal, casual conversation, not a formal
interview. So let’s enjoy ourselves, okay?”
Whipple: “Okay.”
Burchill: “All right. I want first to clarify exactly when you started to work at KU.”
Whipple: “December 15, 1971.”
Burchill: “All right. And when you retired?”
Whipple: “March 12, 2007.”
Burchill: “And the specific office in which you worked?”
Whipple: “Design and Construction Management.”
Burchill: “All right. That’s good. Now, with that behind us, let’s get on to the
particulars of your life and your career. Let’s start with family issues. Where were you
born?”
Whipple: “I was born at St. Francis, Kansas. That’s the very northwestern corner of the
state, Cheyenne County. My parents were farmers. My dad was both a dairy farmer and
a wheat farmer. We lived there until about 1951, and the family moved because of my
health reasons. I had chronic asthma, and during harvest season, my parents many times
rushed me to the hospital. Frequently, I just wasn’t able to breathe. Finally, the doctor
told my parents that if they stayed another year that I wouldn’t survive, so they should
look for another climate. The family moved to southwest Missouri in 1951. By the way,
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I have two siblings, two sisters. They are a year and a half and two and a half years
younger than me.”
Burchill: “What are their names?”
Whipple: “Lindell is the older one and Kathy is the younger one. We settled in a little
community called Rocky Comfort, Missouri.”
Burchill: “That’s great.”
Whipple: “It was very rural. We had to do some adapting to fit in to that community.
They were very near hillbillies. We were very close to the Arkansas line in a very kind
of rugged, mountainous Ozark area.”
Burchill: “How did your parents decide to go there?”
Whipple: “Another family member had moved there, and they had been there and really
liked the area, and had high hopes that my health would be fine, and it was. I never had
any more asthma attacks at all.”
Burchill: “Did your dad continue to farm? Was it a farm existence?”
Whipple: “He did for awhile. He moved his dairy cattle to Missouri. There was a
drought that lasted two years, 1953 and ’54. That just really wiped out his dairy
operation. It kept expanding but that wiped it out. He then went into industry. He made
the transition. He drove quite a ways to work at Joplin, Missouri, and worked for the
Vickers Company, where they built hydraulic pumps for aircraft. He began to really like
industry. Then a little later, in the later ‘50s, NASA was building up and there was a
rocket engine plant that went in fairly close to where we lived, within seventeen miles,
called Rocketdyne. My father went to work for Rocketdyne right after the plant opened.
He kind of moved up and went from a machinist to finally what they called a planner,
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where he would plan the processes for making a part all the way through, and even
estimate the cost of doing it.”
Burchill: “Did his involvement in that sort of technical stuff influence your decision to
go into your profession?”
Whipple: “I think it did. I was very fascinated by some of the things that he was doing.
At one point, the plant was visited by Werner Van Braun and I got to go. The kids whose
parents worked at the plant could go, even though there was some high security, for
special events. I got to meet Werner Van Braun in about, I think, 1959 or ’60.”
Burchill: “My goodness. Things were heating up back then, weren’t they? Those were
the rocket engines, yeah.”
Whipple: “That’s right, yes, it certainly was. Another thing that happened about that
time that I think was significant to me was my parents moved from that real rural place
where they had been, closer to a town that had a nice school system. The school system
at this Rocky Comfort community – I was only there through my freshman year, and I
took a science class my freshman year – the lab for that science class was the same room
you were in, and they had a wooden box with a few little toys in it. That was pretty
disappointing. It was just such a low budget school district that they couldn’t do any
more than that.”
Burchill: “Did you press leaves? That’s what I did in my high school science class, I
pressed leaves.”
Whipple: “I don’t recall that.”
Burchill: “That’s good.”
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Whipple: “They didn’t even have a microscope. My parents just didn’t want to settle for
that. They had talked to school board members and it had seemed kind of hopeless, so
they bought a little farm near Neosho, Missouri. Neosho had a very modern school.
There were a thousand kids in their high school. They had wonderful labs. I could take
Architectural Drafting, for one of the things, and did my sophomore year. I got to take
Biology and use a real microscope. My sisters thrived there too. So that was a great
experience, and I really commend my parents for making a change like that. It wasn’t
easy for them to do that.”
Burchill: “Was your mother a homemaker, pretty much?”
Whipple: “Yes, she was a homemaker at that point, until they were empty-nesters.”
Burchill: “What else do you remember from your public school years? Were you in
Athletics or Drama or…”
Whipple: “No. I’ll regress just a little bit in time. Back when we lived in that Rocky
Comfort community, when I was aged twelve we had a neighbor lady kind of frantically
come to our house, and school was out for the summer, and she had the responsibility of
three thousand laying hens. Her husband had left her and she didn’t know how she was
going to manage. She asked my parents if I could come help her six days a week. They
talked to me about it, and she was going to pay me well. I could ride my horse up to her
place, it was just less than a mile, and leave my horse there, so I decided I wanted to do
that. It was probably not a good choice. Another kind of health problem arose, multiple
health problems. I worked there the whole summer. It wasn’t so much helping her –
pretty soon she was helping me, and pretty soon she became an alcoholic and I was kind
of running the whole thing. I was just a kid, twelve years old. It was really hard work. I
ended up getting typhoid fever from her well water. I somehow contracted a disease
called histoplasmosis from the fungus from chicken litter. Then I also came down with
rheumatic fever. The local doctors could not figure out what was wrong with me because
there were too many symptoms, but they finally found this woman pediatrician in
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Monett, Missouri, and she isolated these symptoms, and quickly found out that I didn’t
have just one disease, I had three. The rheumatic fever – I was on penicillin for the next
five years – but I was not allowed to participate. In fact, from the ages of twelve to
thirteen I spent the whole time in bed. I practically had to learn to walk again and I
became very weak. Meanwhile, I even caught pneumonia, and coughed so much from
pneumonia that I had a hernia rupture and had to have surgery. So I was a sick little kid.”
Burchill: “So you didn’t play football.” [Laughter]
Whipple: “No, no sports at all. I couldn’t even take a gym class until, finally, my senior
year, until I reached seventeen. I was told by doctors, ‘Well, you’ll never have to worry
about going into the military’. The thing was, I wanted to go in the military. I always
looked forward to an uncle who had been in the Air Force. He always brought me little
model airplanes every time he’d come to visit, you know. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Burchill: “If I remember from your resume, you did pull that off.”
Whipple: “Well, I did!”
Burchill: “We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but that worked out.”
Whipple: “That did.”
Burchill: “Can we talk about your present family a little bit?”
Whipple: “Sure. Well, it’s kind of two families. I married a Neosho high school
sweetheart and we had four children, wonderful children, two of which attended KU.
The other two went to Emporia State. Then we went through a divorce around 1981. I
ended up with custody of all four of my kids. It was a tough time. They were still all in
school. And I kept my place. Things were difficult for just a few years. Then about ten
years later I re-married, a lady, Karen, I had met in Carruth-O’Leary Hall. It’s one of the
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best things that ever happened to me. She and I have been married now a little over
eighteen years, and we enjoy life together on a daily basis. She’s a little younger than I
am, so she didn’t get to retire when I did. She works at the Alumni Association. She’s a
budget person over there.”
Burchill: “That’s great. Well, anything else you want to say about your present
situation?”
Whipple: “She has a son, and he has two sweet little children, so we often see these
grandchildren, and I have five grandchildren also…”
Burchill: “Oh, my goodness.”
Whipple: “… and we’re very much enjoying watching all those grandkids grow up.”
Burchill: “Do they live in the area? Do they all live here?”
Whipple: “Yeah, they all live… the furthest is Kansas City, or just south of Kansas
City.”
Burchill: “Do you do a lot of baby sitting?”
Whipple: “I do. I do some babysitting and watching the grandkids. They’re old enough
now I usually get them in my woodworking shop and we build something. Just a week or
so ago we built a butterfly house.”
Burchill: “Really? What is a butterfly house?”
Whipple: “Well, it’s somewhat like a bird house, but it has vertical slots for butterflies,
and it has multiple ones on the front. You put it in your garden, usually near butterfly
bushes.”
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Burchill: “And they rest in the house?”
Whipple: “Yes, you have tree bark on the inside of it and they perch on that.”
Burchill: “For heaven’s sake.”
Whipple: “We built this butterfly house out of cedar from one of my trees.”
Burchill: “So you live out in the…”
Whipple: “I live about ten miles south and a little bit west of town.”
Burchill: “Okay. Do you do any farming on your land?”
Whipple: “No, I only have ten acres and it’s mostly timber. At one time I had some
horses but I don’t anymore.”
Burchill: “Well, let’s move on to your college days then. I think we pretty well did the
public schools.”
Whipple: “Okay. After Neosho High School, I went one year to college pretty nearby,
across the state line down into Oklahoma, and that was Northeastern Oklahoma A & M.
It’s just a two-year college. I shouldn’t have done that, but it was to be able to come
home and see the girlfriend real often because it was only about thirty miles away. Then
the next year I went to Southwest Missouri State College, which is now Missouri State. I
attended just one year and then had a break – I went in to the Air Force and was in the
Air Force for four years, and then went back to Southwest Missouri State and finished on
the G.I. Bill. Meanwhile, I had a family. I got married and went in to the Air Force all at
the same time in 1964.”
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Burchill: “How did you support yourself while you were in that year of college and you
had a family? Was that Air Force?”
Whipple: “Partially, and I worked part-time.”
Burchill: “What did you do there?”
Whipple: “I worked for a little while for a company owned by a guy from England. He
was a real character, and I really enjoyed working for him. It was Pete Jones Engineering
Company in Springfield, Missouri. What we did was re-bar detailing. We worked
mostly for the Laclead Steel Company out of St. Louis. We sub-worked for them, and
also a company in Colorado – Colorado Fuel and Iron – that provided re-bar for big
building projects. We did all the detailing. We would have the architectural and
engineering plans, and then we would do the detailing for all the bar.”
Burchill: “Now detailing re-bar to me would mean the kind of little ridge type things…”
Whipple: “The bends hooks, yeah, whether it was continuous end or non-continuous end,
the laps – and so every piece of bar we put on lists and how to bend them, because they
weren’t ever detailed that much. Whoever supplied the steel had to do the detailing.
Those became shop drawings that were then approved by the civil engineer who designed
the project.”
Burchill: “I never would have thought about that.”
Whipple: “I spent about a year doing that. Then I opened a photography business and
started photographing weddings.”
Burchill: “Were you out of the Air Force by this time?”
Whipple: “Yes.”
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Burchill: “Okay, let’s talk about the Air Force.”
Whipple: “Okay. Well, the Air Force was great duty. The duty I had was very
beneficial to me later. I went in to a new career field where they had combined four
different career fields which were drafting, construction estimating, surveying… what
was another one?… oh, inspection – onsite inspection. I took a bypass exam when I went
into basic training. First, I had orders to become a medic, and I typically had fainted at
the sight of blood, and I questioned that. I went up through the chain of command, and I
mentioned to this Colonel that I had taken a bypass exam, and I had had a couple of years
of college, and kind of felt like I might have scored fairly high on that. He did some
checking and said, ‘Yes, you did – ninety-fifth percentile. That’s the exam you take at
the end of (I don’t remember how many weeks) tech. school. We’re going to make you a
draftsman. We have an opening at Lowery Air Force Base in Denver. Would you like to
go there?’, and I said, ‘Yes, Sir, I would’. So they cut me new orders, but then it changed
into this multiple career field which was great. I was one of the first in that. I found out
later that Allen Wiechert helped. He was in the Air Force earlier and he had helped
develop that career field. He had been on some task force to merge some things that
worked well, and he helped develop that.”
Burchill: “Tell me about your experience with the Southeast Asia Air Base.”
Whipple: “This was in Thailand. I had been working out at Lowery in Denver. I had
been there for about two years, doing probably more surveying than anything else. I
really enjoyed the surveying. I got on-the-job training on that because I didn’t go to a
tech. school, but I had a fairly good math background. There’s a lot of trig. involved in
surveying, and I love trigonometry. All of a sudden I got orders to go to Southeast Asia.
They were building Udon Air Base.”
Burchill: “How do you spell that?”
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Whipple: “It’s U-D-O-N, pronounced Udorn. It was in a pretty remote area of Thailand.
It’s kind of the northern central area, or maybe, I should say, kind of northeastern central
area of Thailand. I went there in April. The monsoon had just started. It made it rough
to start construction because about two in the afternoon every day a monsoon rain would
hit. There was never any wind – the rain would just pound the ground for about an hour
to an hour and a half, and then just stop. All the ditches would be flooded, so we had to
create some drainage. We were building this base on two sides of a local little stream. I
wasn’t real pleased with the military because the Commander decided that we would
dump our sewage, and we were building a base for five thousand men, and we were
going to dump that [the sewage] in that river. Two miles downstream from that river was
a little town. Unfortunately, that’s what they did. I tried to talk them in to some changes
but I was enlisted and didn’t have much clout.”
Burchill: “Yeah. You saluted them, they didn’t salute you.”
Whipple: “That’s right, that’s right.”
Burchill: “Well, I thought when I read your resume that looked really interesting, to be
able to do that.”
Whipple: “Well, and when I would get caught up on the surveying, then they would
allow me to operate heavy equipment – big bulldozers and loaders and euclids, and all
kinds of things.”
Burchill: “What’s a ‘euchlid’?”
Whipple: “A euchlid is a big dirt mover, a big scraper. It can eject the dirt as well, it will
roll it out. When I was surveying, I would get upset with the grader operator for
knocking out my blue top stakes. I would set the elevations with these blue top stakes
(they’re actually painted blue on the top). The fellow on the grader is looking down
through the windows in his big grader and he is skimming the top, but he is not supposed
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to ever… he is supposed to like, be maybe a half inch over the tops of those, you know.
Every once in awhile he would get a little low and he would clip one, and then I would
have to go re-set those elevations, drive these stakes. One day the guy said, ‘Why don’t
you try it?’. So I did. I knocked them all out! So I had a lot more respect for him after
that because it wasn’t that easy to do, to look down on the height of your blade when you
are moving.”
Burchill: “That’s why they get the big bucks though, isn’t it?”
Whipple: “I guess so. Conditions there – I really got to experience some real poverty.
The local people – I saw children drinking water out of little gullies and ditches that I
don’t know if my dog would survive after drinking that water, it was so polluted. We had
trouble – we were building barracks as fast as we can. We started running out of space
and so I designed some two-story barracks. We started building the two-story ones. We
couldn’t get lumber cut the way we wanted it, so we bought a sawmill, a local sawmill,
and then we hired all the Thai nationals from that. We already had four hundred fifty
Thai nationals working for us to build the base. It was hard to get interpreters was the
only real problem. They were hard-working people, we didn’t have any problem with
them working hard. One day, one of the sawmill workers cut a finger off, an index
finger. Our Captain sent a Telex back to the United States to find out what kind of
compensation this man was owed. They said, ‘Well, in American money about five
hundred dollars’. We were paying these people about eleven cents an hour because we
were told not to upset the local economy. Converted into their money which was bought,
that was a good living. Well, five hundred dollars for a finger, to him, was like winning
the lottery. The very next day, two others cut off fingers. So then we had to put out the
word we wouldn’t pay for any more fingers.”
Burchill: “Wow, is that interesting.”
Whipple: “We think we wouldn’t do that, but if we only had a third grade education and
our family had no running water, and all of a sudden, that was the chance for your family
to have something, maybe we would do that.”
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Burchill: “That is so, so interesting. Well, I’d like to win the lottery. I’m not sure about
the finger. We’re getting close to your start at KU, but there’s one more job: Bendix.”
Whipple: “Yes. When I graduated in the summer semester of 1970, jobs were… in fact,
there was a wage / price freeze… I believe Nixon was President at that time… and it was
really difficult to find a job. I was trying to find a job with an architectural firm.
Construction was way down and I wasn’t having any luck at all. I had branched out, and
I had started looking at the Kansas City area and the St. Louis area. I had interviewed…
Bendix Company had come to our campus and interviewed people from the program I
was in. I had interviewed there and I got a letter from them and they wanted me to come
up to the plant for a second interview, and so I did. They hired me and I was to go in to
Plant Facilities, which I thought would be good. It would be the kind of position where
you might start a new process in the plant, so you’re laying out where to put machines
and people, and that sort of thing. Bendix had a lot of security because they were
building components for nuclear weapons: electrical and mechanical components. So it
took one hundred twenty days for the FBI to do a security search on you, or background
investigation on you. Everybody who was hired went through that. By the time I
reported, the position wasn’t there any longer. I was going to fill a position that
somebody was going to go into active duty in the military. Something happened and they
didn’t go. So they put me in a different department, they put me into tool and gage
design, and some training. I didn’t enjoy that. I really wanted to work in architecture. I
was there almost a year and a half. I interviewed here at KU…”
Burchill: “Why? Why did you interview at KU? Did you interview at other universities
as well?”
Whipple: “No, no I hadn’t. I was looking around, still looking in Kansas City for
architectural positions. I was living on the Kansas side. I was living in the little town of
Edgerton, Kansas, driving in to work in Kansas City. I saw a position, it was called
‘Architectural Services’ at the University of Kansas, and I applied. I received a call a
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little later from Keith Lawton, and he asked if I would like to come for an interview. He
said, ‘It will be all day. You will need to take off that whole day’. I said, ‘Very well, I’ll
do that’. For the first half of the day it was… his office then was in Strong Hall… he was
a… I believe, a Vice Chancellor, at that time, for Facilities Planning and Operations. I
spent most of that morning in his office with different staff members and Mr. Lawton.
They kept mentioning ‘The Old House’, and that Allen Wiechert would take me over to
‘The Old House’ where I would work if I got the job. That turned out to be Sudler
House. I was really delighted with what this… I was imagining some old house that was
something ready to be bulldozed down, but when I saw how beautiful Sudler House
was… just right at the edge of the campus. At that point, you looked to the north and you
didn’t see apartment buildings like today. You just saw a lot of trees. It was kind of like
the ‘Corporate Woods’ of the campus.”
Burchill: “And you got the job.”
Whipple: “And I ended up getting the job, and enjoyed the job, and enjoyed all the
people. I enjoyed working with all the various campus departments. To me, that was the
exciting thing because the jobs varied so much. I especially liked working with people
who had labs because helping them set up some new labs was, to me, very interesting.”
Burchill: “Okay, I want to get into this in some detail, but tell me the titles that you held
from your first job to what you had when you retired. I’m a little… I knew you as…”
Whipple: “It changed quite a bit. In the beginning, it was Director of Architectural
Services. What that was, I was running their in-house design. We had up to about
fifteen, maybe even seventeen students. I would even come in on Saturdays and work so
those students could get in more hours. It was difficult for students sometimes to justify
the job if they could only get in, you know, fifteen hours a week. So I and Al Thomas,
who was the landscape architect, we’d kind of take turns coming in on Saturday
mornings so the students could then work Saturday mornings, and maybe get twenty
hours in. That was before we did CADD on computers. It was all freehand work on
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drawing boards – well, not freehand – but with some drafting equipment. It was much
slower than with today’s AutoCADD systems. In later years we didn’t have to have that
many part-time students to get that much production. Anyway, the job…”
Burchill: “…you got this job in ’71?”
Whipple: “Yes, very late in ’71.”
Burchill: “Okay, okay.”
Whipple: “Then there was, at one point… I’m a little fuzzy on when this happened… I
was a Director working under a Director, and at one point they decided that they
wouldn’t have Directors under Directors like that, so they made me an Assistant Director
of Facilities Planning for Architectural Services. Then later, Design and Construction
Management, which had been Facilities Planning, underwent numerous reorganizations.
Each time there was a reorganization, there would be a job title change. Somewhere
about 19… I guess about 1988, the operation we had in Sudler House merged with
Facilities Planning. Facilities Planning had moved a little prior to that into Carruth
O’Leary, and then so the office I had also merged into Carruth O’Leary. It was a job title
change when that happened, and I think that might be when I went into…”
Burchill: “Ninety-three was the Office of Design and Construction Management.”
Whipple: “Okay, it was when that name had changed I guess.”
Burchill: “I have trouble with that because I always knew you as Director of Facilities
Planning.”
Whipple: “Well, it was Director of Architectural Services.”
Burchill: “Well, yeah, but there was another title…”
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Whipple: “I was Assistant Director of Facilities Planning for awhile.”
Burchill: “That’s the way I knew you, and the thing that happened in ’93, I never really
caught on to that because I just had two years left and I never understood what had
happened.”
Whipple: “Well, I think that was a result of one of the reorganizations, and I’m fuzzy on
which reorganization affected which people, but at one time, Facilities Planning got
broken up again and Capital Programs was established, and Allen Wiechert headed that
up in Strong Hall. Some of the people that had been in Carruth went to Strong Hall. A
guy named Tom Waechter and Dave Schaecher and Greg Wade – they all went to Strong
Hall to work. That lasted about four or five years, and then the administration decided
there ought to be another reorganization, and then it all merged again, back to Carruth
O’Leary.”
Burchill: “Now I don’t feel so bad. I was so confused.” [Laughter]
Whipple: “I get confused too, because there have been… I went through four
reorganizations. I suppose there was some logic or wisdom to all of it.” [Laughter]
Burchill: “The administration has lots of logic in it. Okay, now what I’d like you to do is
take me through some of the projects that you really remember as being the most
enjoyable – things that you had to do. I know you mentioned one to me on the way in,
but there must have been some that you were really, really excited about.”
Whipple: “One task I had was projects out at the Kansas Law Enforcement Training
Center, which is quite a ways. It’s near Hutchinson in a little town called Yoder, Kansas.
Burchill: “Oh, sure.”
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Whipple: “The site for that had been a naval air station during World War II. There
were a couple of buildings and we added on to those buildings, and finally brought the
two buildings together into one, then acquired a few other buildings. I had numerous
projects out there, and I really enjoyed working out there. Then I had a number of
projects at the Edwards campus as well. In fact, the second building I was the
construction manager on it. It was finished about four years ago.”
Burchill: “Did you like that because of the nature of the curriculum that they had out
there?”
Whipple: “Well, and getting to know… it’s the people, to me, that I worked with too,
getting to know a lot of the people, you know, and helping them solve problems when it
was difficult for them to get things solved because they were so remote from the campus,
you know. You become kind of an instrument of helping things to come together. Then
on campus, I don’t know, there were so many projects, I really… I think I…”
Burchill: “You were in charge of multiple projects at the same time...”
Whipple: “Always, always.”
Burchill: “…which just boggles my mind.”
Whipple: “Always concurrent projects, most certainly, anywhere from – the fewest I
think I ever had at one time was maybe ten, and up to thirty, forty projects. You really
try to make sure there is progress on all of them concurrently. Of course, the hard part is
keeping them on time and keeping them in budget.”
Burchill: “This wasn’t just design. You had to do the construction management?”
19
Whipple: “No, well, once I went into the consultant services part, then I was involved in
the construction. The first few years I was not, but the latter years I did do a lot of
construction management.”
Burchill: “Onsite inspection?”
Whipple: “Project management and construction management. The difference between
the two: Construction management is after you take bids, then your work starts on that
project, but if you are a project manager you follow it all the way through. From the very
inception of the project you are involved. You are involved in the design, you’re in all
those meetings, you’re setting those meetings for the design with the committee and
making sure that even the design is within budget and that the design is on time. If
you’re not within the budget, you have to do a little value engineering, or you have to
pull some things out of the base bid and make those things bid alternates, you know. We
can’t take it to bid if we know it’s over the budget. We’re just not allowed to do that.
Then you would follow that project all the way through bidding and construction and
closing it out – final inspections, and…”
Burchill: “What are some of the really big projects that you were involved in?”
Whipple: “Oh, the biggest one that I think I had was at the Edwards campus – Regnier
Hall. It was around, as I recall, a $14 – $15 million project. My last large project was the
– over on west campus – the F & O Shops building. Another project I did that I really
enjoyed was here at the Audio Reader site. It was the offices and studios for KANU, and
worked with a great architect, I think, a local architect named Kurt
Van Achen. I’ve always really enjoyed working with him. Some architects get a little
stubborn and want to do their own thing, and don’t seem to want to pay too much
attention to the budget. You have to put them in the real world. You have to stop the
whole process if they’re going too far astray. I never had that problem with
Mr. Van Achen. I’ve had that problem with some others.”
20
Burchill: “Were you involved in the Haworth addition – the Biological Sciences?”
Whipple: “No, I wasn’t.”
Burchill: “Well, how would you describe what you think were your accomplishments?
How did you change the Facilities here at KU – the office – did you instigate any lasting
changes in the way it operates?”
Whipple: “I just feel like I was one of the ants in the anthill. It was real rewarding to see
projects come to a close, and see them finished, and see people move in, and see that
people liked the environment they had. I can’t think of any particular project because
there were hundreds of them. Whether it was a remodel space or a new space, quite often
there were doubters. One of the interesting things was that on any project, especially a
new project, it would seem that the user group committee – the mindset that they had
when you were planning the facility – there was one particular mindset, but once you
started excavating, it was no longer a myth to them. There was a different mindset, just
like, ‘Hey, this is really happening, you know, I’m going to be in that building someday’.
You could sort of see in the way they’d talk about it that they were seeing it in a different
way, because before it was like it was a myth, or, ‘This may never happen’, you know. It
was always interesting to watch that process.”
Burchill: “Very good. Well, do you want to move on to something besides professional
issues?”
Whipple: “Oh, sure.”
Burchill: “Okay. I like to get into hobbies, and I’ve known about you that you’re a
photographer, and I wonder if you would describe the development of that interest and
what you’ve done with it.”
21
Whipple: “Well, it was almost accidental. I enjoyed photography when I was in high
school…”
Burchill: “What does that mean? You got your first camera?”
Whipple: “Yes, I had a number of cameras, including an old Range Finder, back in the
late ‘50s, and subscribed to a few photography magazines, and read every article I could,
even though I didn’t think I really wanted to be a photographer. I just was interested. I
thought it would be a hobby. Well, when I got in the Air Force, I was able to… in fact,
when I was over in Thailand I bought a Nikon F, and that was the first good camera that I
had, and it would do some things that I couldn’t do before. In fact, I got to do some
aerial photography when we first started that base project, that air base. Aerial maps
were supposed to have been provided and it hadn’t happened. The Captain asked if I
would be willing to go up with my Nikon and one roll of thirty-six exposure film and
take some straight down shots…”
Burchill: “Was this with a helicopter?”
Whipple: “Yeah, well, they put me in the cargo net. They strung a cargo net between the
runners. The helicopter took me up about one hundred feet and then I crawled into the
cargo net (I did have a rope tied to my belt), and then the pilot swung my camera down
just with a strap, and yelled at me, ‘Here it comes!’, and I caught it. So I was in the net,
and then we had placed four by four sheets of plywood at many points, and then the pilot
did a zigzag pattern. Then they flew me to another air base where we developed that film
and made a base map – taped the sixteen by twenty prints together. We had a few gaps
and a lot of overlaps, but we ended up making a base map to work from. We started our
master planning for this new base that way. I got real interested in aerial photography at
that point. When I went back to Lowery Air Force Base, one of the neat things that base
had was a little studio that was just available as a hobby thing for people to use. I would
go there, take pictures and…”
22
Burchill: “You did your own development, printing and…”
Whipple: “Oh, yes, and enjoyed that very much. Then I started entering Air Force
contests – photography contests. Well, I got really lucky, and out of five categories, I
won first place in three, one year.”
Burchill: “What would those categories have been?”
Whipple: “One was animals. My dad had… I had gone home on leave, and he raised
Appaloosa horses. He had a new foal with what we call a ‘blanket rump’, a dark colored
foal, white rump and dark spots. I did several shots of that foal and I got a great one, and
I titled it: P J Bottoms. Another one was a sister-in-law’s high school graduation. I had
a telephoto lens, and she was holding… she was in her cap and gown seated, and I was up
in a balcony above, and she was holding this red rose. I just got a great shot. Then
another one that was human interest was one of my children in an old tree swing with
another child pushing them. I think there was even another one with an old yellow lab
dog and my little boy that I had entered too. Anyway, those did very well. It encouraged
me to kind of keep going with photography. So I was wondering when I got out of the
Air Force, ‘How am I going to support my family?’; I had three children at that point. I
went back to Springfield, Missouri, bought a new mobile home, and was at the edge of
town there in a mobile home park. So I opened a studio, a photography studio. As I had
mentioned earlier, when I first went back to college I worked for this Pete Jones
Engineering Company and did that for about a year or so. I was doing some part-time
photography and enjoying it more and more. It would work out better with my schedule,
with classes. In between classes I could do a little photography sometimes and it was
making me some money. I finally just went in to it pretty much full time, even though I
was a full time student.”
Burchill: “What sort of photography – were these family photos?”
23
Whipple: “I did a full range. I did industrial photography. There’s a tourist attraction
down at Springfield called ‘Fantastic Caverns’, where they take people in Jeeps and
trailers through there. At that point, they were just completing building a bridge inside,
and they hired me to photograph the construction process. They had to bring in huge fans
and pull all the smoke from the diesel bulldozers out of there so I could photograph it. It
was their first color brochure, so I did all the photography for their brochure. There was
a steel mill there called ‘Rayco’, and they built cast-iron big truck wheels and other
things. They had me do all the photography for, oh, a couple of years – just anything
they needed – brochures, and things like that. I’d get in there where they were pouring
hot metal, sparks flying, taking pictures, it was great. I did a lot of architectural
photography. There were several different firms there.”
Burchill: “Had you gotten lots of different cameras to use for different situations?”
Whipple: “Yes. Oh, yes, including even view cameras, at that point. Then I started
doing weddings and seniors, and just a variety, any kind of special events, you know. I
tried to stay away from some of the fraternity and sorority party things. I did a little of
that and said I didn’t want anymore of that, you know. They got to where they would be
calling you at two in the morning, you know, to come take pictures. I had a family and
didn’t want to do that. I thought I would give up the photography after I graduated, but
after I got finished with school and started working full time, I had so much time on my
hands. I went back into photography and continued doing wedding photography, and
ended up doing that over a span of thirty-eight years. I only stopped doing it – Karen
worked with me the last eighteen years doing weddings – and last year, ’06, the end of
’06, we did our last wedding. She needed more time for flower gardening and I needed
some more time for… I had really gotten into woodworking.”
Burchill: “Did you do photography for KU?”
Whipple: “I did for our department. I did some aerial photography. I went up maybe a
dozen times to photograph the campus doing aerial photography.”
24
Burchill: “For construction projects?”
Whipple: “Yes, related to them, but quite often, just overviews of the whole campus too.
There is still one of my aerial photos up in the Burge Union that’s… oh, it’s kind of dated
now, it was done probably ten or twelve years ago.”
Burchill: “The entire campus, most of the buildings that were here then?”
Whipple: “Most of the campus, yes.”
Burchill: “It would be dated, wouldn’t it, if it was that old?”
Whipple: “Yeah, and it’s a large print. It’s about six foot square. I took it out of a Huey
helicopter. The Kansas National Guard (the Air Guard) furnished the university a
helicopter all day long. We got to even fly to the Edwards campus that time. After that,
they wouldn’t do it anymore, but they did it one time.”
Burchill: “Tell me about your 4-H involvement.”
Whipple: “My kids wanted to be in 4-H, I had been in 4-H, and they loved it. They were
in a variety of things. The one thing I always felt I could do in 4-H was be a project
leader in photography. So, for twenty-one years I was a project leader of the
Woodworkers Club. Then after I gave that up, I was asked just every single year to do
photography judging at various counties. I’ve done Miami County and Franklin County
and Jefferson County and Douglas County many times, and the State Fair twice. This
year I am doing two counties – I am doing the Douglas County photography tomorrow,
and I am doing Leavenworth County. Oh, I also did Johnson County once. Then I will
be doing the State Fair photography judging again this year too.”
Burchill: “Do you get paid for those activities or is it all…”
25
Whipple: “Just for the travel.”
Burchill: “Okay. Does your family travel? Do you like to go on vacations?”
Whipple: “Oh, yes. Karen and I enjoy… we haven’t traveled much out of the country.
We went to the Bahamas once.”
Burchill: “Do you have a part of the country you like best?”
Whipple: “We really like going to the Southwest. We’ve gone to Florida a lot, but I
think we enjoy the Southwest the most. We go to Santa Fe quite often, the Sedona area
quite often, and keep finding new areas.”
Burchill: “Just having gotten back from those areas on a vacation, I totally agree with
you. Now fly fishing…”
Whipple: “I grew up doing fly fishing in southwest Missouri. In fact, I don’t fish in
Kansas. I’m a little partial to those clear streams where you can count all the rocks in the
bottom of the stream, and you can pick out that trout you want to try to get to your fly. I
haven’t advanced to the point that I tie my own flies, but perhaps someday I will. You
almost need to be an entomologist to do that.”
Burchill: “Any other hobby-type activities that you…”
Whipple: “Just the woodworking.”
Burchill: “Oh yeah. Tell us about that.”
Whipple: “I built a new wood shop. I’ve always enjoyed woodworking, but not able to
do it well because I didn’t have access to a good shop until recently. I built a very nice
26
shop building and equipped it with high quality industrial machines so I wouldn’t really
have many limitations. Just recently, I hauled six logs down to a sawmill and had those
all slabbed out.”
Burchill: “Walnut?”
Whipple: “I have eight logs of walnut but I’m waiting a year before I take them. A lot of
people have told me that you will get better wood if you will hold them for a year. So I
took four huge logs of white oak, and that’s going to become a new bedroom set. It will
be quarter-sawn – it has been quarter-sawn. I’m designing a mission-style bedroom set
that I’ll build for my wife. And new stairs – we’re going to put hardwood oak flooring in
our house. We already have that pre-finished flooring, but, at the same time, I’m going to
put new stair treads and risers in, out of some of this white oak, so I had some slab just
the right thickness for that too, at the same time. Then I had, oh, some cedar cut, and
then also some honey locust that’s going to be my woodworking bench. Honey locust is
a beautiful wood – very dense and very heavy. I had a tree that was about twenty-eight
inches in diameter. That’s going to be the new woodworking bench.”
Burchill: “You’re a multi-talented individual, Don. I’m sure you maybe don’t like to
tout that, but you are. Let’s move on to retirement. Why did you retire at this time?”
Whipple: “I think it really had to do with the woodworking more than anything. I retired
at age sixty-three, and I just wanted to make sure that I had enough time to get in all the
woodworking I was really going to want, and I thought I was going to need about fifteen
years of that to really feel like I’d…”
Burchill: “A lot of projects lined up.”
Whipple: “Well, I do have a lot of projects lined up.”
Burchill: “Are they mainly for your family, or…”
27
Whipple: “They are, they are. I’m making things for the grandkids and getting them
involved to help make things, which I think is kind of a fun thing too. I plan on probably
making most of the Christmas gifts out of woodworking. All the grandkids now have
been given a really cool little nameplate out of walnut that came from a tree on my place.
The smaller logs of walnut I can cut on my own bandsaw. I can cut twelve inch diameter
logs on my own bandsaw.”
Burchill: “You did it right, didn’t you? Are you glad you came to KU?”
Whipple: “Oh, I think it’s just one of the best things that ever happened to me. I am so
grateful that I got that call from Keith Lawton, and especially that second call from him.
I just enjoyed working with all the people at KU over the years. It was always such a
great variety of work, getting to see what people were doing in labs, what their needs
were for research and helping them see that happen. It just has always been very
satisfying.”
Burchill: “Your assessment of KU as a university, having been around it this long, might
be what? Academically, do you think KU ranks as a strong university?”
Whipple: “I think it does, yes, I think it does rank as a strong… I think, in fact, I really
like what I’ve seen with the leadership of Chancellor Hemenway. I think that he has
strived to raise the standards at KU and make KU more competitive, especially in
research. I’m certainly not an expert in that area but I can certainly see some of his
efforts. I think some of them have paid off very well.”
Burchill: “Okay, now I know from looking at your business card that you have sort of a
new business going. Would you describe that for us?”
Whipple: “I am a licensed architect, and it’s kind of just hard to give that up. I still love
architecture. I have always, over the years, managed to somehow keep very busy in the
28
winter months, and when I wasn’t doing wedding photography I was designing homes for
people. I’ve designed about thirty-five or forty homes in the area, and I’m interested in
some commercial work too. I’m maintaining a little practice out of my home. I have a
couple of little projects right now which are just some additions. The housing market is
kind of off right now. There are not very many people building new homes, but once that
picks up, I’m kind of hopeful that maybe I’ll get to design some interesting new homes.”
Burchill: “Do you specialize at all in energy efficiency, or green concepts?”
Whipple: “Well, every architect certainly should be doing that today. We can see we’re
going to have serious limitations on fuel and power and energy.”
Burchill: “Are there some that you think are most appropriate, like solar now, or…”
Whipple: “Solar is getting better – photo-voltaic – the prices are beginning to come
down on photo-voltaic. It’s getting better. Even just passive solar is a very wise thing to
do. I designed a home that was built out by Clinton Lake probably twenty years ago, that
probably eighty percent of that house’s heating was done with passive solar, and still is.
It’s an earth-integrated house. It has a sun room, but that sun room is shaded by a nice
tree in the summer time. That tree was already there, and so the house has an orientation
that was very critical, at least that sun room to that tree. Even for years, any time I
designed a home I limited winds to the north, and tried to have really good insulating
glass on all windows, and the right balance of windows in the right orientation.”
Burchill: “What about wind? Are you giving any consideration to windmills?”
Whipple: “No, that probably really wouldn’t be part of your home design anyway. It
would be an auxiliary thing that the homeowner would deal with, and I’d like to see that.
Another thing is geothermal energy. It pays off really well. Some of the early efforts in
heat pumps weren’t real good. In fact, when I built my house I put in a heat pump, and
the quality of the heat pump, the engineering on them, wasn’t as good as they should
29
have been at that time. I ended up having some very high heating bills from that. Now,
there have been a lot of refinements. When it comes to green design, I think it’s really
crucial that people try to incorporate a lot of the techniques for green design now into
building, including looking at even how far you’ve had to… or someone has had to
transport those materials. You try to build with a material that’s less than five hundred
miles away, for one thing.
Burchill: “Very interesting, I hadn’t thought about that.”
Whipple: “There’s so many things. Recycled materials – materials that you use that
either can be recycled, or the materials have been recycled that you are using, you know.
We’re just filling up our landfills. We can put in carpeting, for instance, that can be re-
used – made into new carpeting.”
Burchill: “I guess there’s a plastic – you can use plastic bottles to make rugs and
carpeting.”
Whipple: “Yes, that’s right. I think the goal of every architect today is just to do more
green design. We have to do that.”
Burchill: “So do you encourage your customers to do that?”
Whipple: “It’s a responsibility. Yes, absolutely.”
Burchill: “To point out the options and work with them?”
Whipple: “Right. That’s right.”
Burchill: “Anything else you’re doing in the way of career now that you’ve retired?”
Whipple: “No, I think that’s about it.”
30
Burchill: “Okay, then the last thing I want to do is give you an opportunity to say things
that you had hoped we would talk about that we haven’t – any issues, personal items,
religion, philosophy, politics, anything?”
Whipple: “I can’t think of anything along those lines.”
Burchill: “If that does it, then thank you so much. It was very interesting. I enjoyed it
very much. I’ve known you for a long time and I learned a lot about you in the last hour
that I didn’t know. You had a very nice career here and I hope your retirement is the
same.”
Whipple: “I feel honored that I was asked to do this.”
Burchill: “That’s fine. Thank you, Don.”
Whipple: “Thank you.”
