AN INTERVIEW WITH FRED MCELHENIE

Interviewer: Pat Kelly

The Oral History Project

of the Endacott Society

The University of Kansas

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FRED MCELHENIE

EDUCATION

1958 B.S. Rockhurst College, Kansas City, MO

Education / English

1961 M.S. University of Kansas

Educational Psychology

SERVICE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

Associate Director of Residence Life

1985 - 2000

RETIREMENT

March 1, 2007

TITLES/RANK

Associate Director of Residence Life, Student Housing, 1985 - 2000

Director, Office of Residential Programs, Student Affairs, 1978 - 1985

Associate Dean, Dean of Men, 1968 - 1978

Assistant Director, CLAS, 1968 - 1970

Assistant Dean of Men, 1962 - 1968

ADMINISTRATIVE/CHAIRMANSHIP POSITIONS

See Resume Provided

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Kelly: “I am Pat Kelly. I am interviewing Fred McElhenie on October 16, 2007 in

Lawrence, Kansas. Fred retired on March 1, 2007 as Associate Director of Residence

Life from the University of Kansas. I think perhaps the most appropriate place to start,

Fred, would be: When and where were you born?”

McElhenie: “I was born August 13, 1936 in Leavenworth, Kansas.”

Kelly: “And your parents were…?”

McElhenie: “My parents were John and Julianne Fisher McElhenie.”

Kelly: “What about them? What were their roots, their educations, their occupations –

tell us a little about them.”

McElhenie: “On my father’s side of the family they were folks who had come from

LaSalle, Indiana to Pittsburg, Kansas, where my grandfather was associated with

Pittsburg and Midway Coal Mining Company, later bought by Mr. Spencer of Spencer

Chemical. He then worked with Spencer Chemical. My father is somewhat unknown.

He and my mother parted company after one year. I, unfortunately, never, ever saw him

or met him.

Kelly: “Oh.”

McElhenie: “On my mother’s side of the family they were native folks from

Leavenworth, Kansas, where I grew up. Her family was mostly associated with the

United States Prison Service at Leavenworth. She had two sisters and one brother, all of

whom lived in Leavenworth for most of their lives.

Kelly: “I see.”

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McElhenie: “My parents – my mother re-married after World War II, and she and her

new husband, my step-father, George Van Eerde (a Dutch name in an Irish community)

and my mother Julianne, in 1948 bought a restaurant. That was most of their lives. They

worked at that and bought a lot of real estate in Leavenworth. To this day, I have a bit of

a reaction to having to cook, since I did this from about age fourteen forward until I left

to go to college. Then I never came home. [Laughter]

Kelly: “How do you think these early childhood experiences influenced you, Fred?”

McElhenie: “I think it showed me very vividly that the old cliché – ‘If you want

something done you’d best do it yourself’ – my parents pretty much ran this restaurant by

themselves, except for an occasional helper on the weekends when they were quite busy.

We all ran this restaurant. I had a lot of work to do – cleaning up, dishes to wash,

potatoes to peel, food to cook. They were a success (as I was to find out later) in this

business, but it was a lot of hard work.”

Kelly: “It sounds like it.”

McElhenie: “About a twenty-four hour a day job.”

Kelly: “Now, did you have siblings?”

McElhenie: “I had a half-sister who was born when I was thirteen years old. She

currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri with her own family. The distance between the

two of us was such that we were never that close, so I was really an older, older half-

brother.”

Kelly: “So you stayed in Leavenworth until you left to go to college?”

McElhenie: “Correct.”

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Kelly: “What schools did you go to?”

McElhenie: “In Leavenworth?”

Kelly: “Um-hm, grade school?”

McElhenie: “I went to the Cathedral Grade School. The school was called Immaculate

Conception. Then I went to Immaculata High School, and then I proceeded to go to

Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Missouri. Leavenworth was an interesting town in

those days.”

Kelly: “Oh, I’ll bet it was. I can’t remember, did you tell us what year you were born?”

McElhenie: “Yes, 1936.”

Kelly: “I see, okay. What influence did these schools have on your life, do you think?”

McElhenie: “Well, I really couldn’t appreciate it at the time, but I think that the

dedication of the nuns that I had all through school were a great influence on my love of

reading and writing. I didn’t come to appreciate that until much later in life when I

started to do a lot more serious reading and writing, and typing, by the way. I recall one

nun who told me, ‘Mr. McElhenie, if you continue as you are, you will never become a

good typist’. I was a wise guy and said, ‘Sister Mary Joseph, I am going to get a job

where I don’t need to do any typing’. [Laughter] The computer generation proved me

absolutely wrong. I had to learn how to type really well.”

Kelly: “Right, right. Did you have any particular interests or activities in school during

your early education?”

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McElhenie: “Yes, I was always very interested in athletics, so I played all the sports that

most fellows play in high school and grade school. I had a chance to try out for a

scholarship at Rockhurst on the basketball team, but that came to naught.”

Kelly: “I see.”

McElhenie: “I was not as good of an athlete as I thought, which I think is the case with

so many of us. Additionally, I was very much interested in journalism and in writing,

and did quite a bit of that around the school with the guidance of some of the staff there.”

Kelly: “Did you have any particular friends, or the memories of any particular friends, or

things that happened at school, or anything that would be interesting to share?”

McElhenie: “Well, as I said, Leavenworth is an interesting town. I would say that I had

lots of adventures in Leavenworth, most of which I would not reveal here. [Laughter] I

had a wide array of friends and we did a lot of things together. Most of all, we played (as

I had indicated earlier) sports. We were very much focused on that area. Other than that,

nothing of great import in my activities other than various and sundry jobs that I had as a

young fellow.”

Kelly: “Well, it sounds like you had some. You were kept busy.”

McElhenie: “I was always working because my mother was very frugal. Even when I

left for college, she said, ‘I’m going to give you seven dollars a week, and you need to

live on that’, which was virtually impossible.”

Kelly: [Laughter] “I can imagine.”

McElhenie: “It was a lot of fun, because the first thing I did when I got to Kansas City

for college was to go up to a local diner and tell the fellow that I needed any kind of a job

just to get my meals. He handed me a mop and a mop bucket. Sooner than later, I was

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behind the counter and I was cooking, after I told him of my background. He liked to

wander across the street and have a few cold ones, so he was really, really glad to see

someone like me come along because he always had ‘errands’ to do.” [Laughter]

Kelly: “Oh, dear. What did you study at Rockhurst? You were in Rockhurst, what, in

1958? Oh, you got your B.S. in 1958.”

McElhenie: “Correct, so I started in ’54. I started out in sort of a pre-Business

curriculum, then I changed my mind to Law, and then finally, Education. Education is

what I stuck with, so my degree is Education with a minor in English, which set the stage

for me to go out and teach in the public schools.”

Kelly: “It sounds like you ended up in the right place with that.”

McElhenie: “Sort of. You know, I did my student teaching and that raised a few red

flags with me about the whole art of teaching in high schools. I had visions of doing lots

of wonderful things – Julius Caesar and other things – in that kind of elite area, and what

I found was that I was teaching students how to read back at a third or fourth grade level.

That was very discouraging.”

Kelly: “I guess it was.”

McElhenie: “So, at one point, the first thing I did was to come to KU in ’58. Well,

before that I got married.”

Kelly: “I was going to ask about that, but I thought maybe we’d go through the

background first.”

McElhenie: “Okay. So, the… I’m forgetting where we were at there.”

Kelly: “We were talking about Rockhurst and your major.”

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McElhenie: “Oh, right. That was where I ended up, in Education. My career at

Rockhurst was also one where I worked a lot, mainly at nights and at the diner. I was

elected to student government at Rockhurst for a couple of minor offices, but again, the

guys I ran around with were the sports-oriented fellows.”

Kelly: “Okay. Then you mentioned about getting married. Was there a delay, then,

between Rockhurst and KU, or did you come to KU pretty much directly after

Rockhurst?”

McElhenie: “The chronology was that I graduated from Rockhurst in June of ’58 and

was married in August of 1958, and came to KU in early September of ’58…”

Kelly: “I see.”

McElhenie: “…so not much grass grew.”

Kelly: “Well, that’s good. How many years ago was this?”

McElhenie: “Oh, heavens… forty…?”

Kelly: “You said forty-seven in your book.”

McElhenie: “Is that forty-seven? Well, it might be forty-eight, forty-nine, eight…

probably forty-nine years ago…yeah, because, well, this is our fiftieth anniversary

coming up, so, yeah, forty-nine years ago. I came here and checked out the Counseling

Center in Bailey Hall because I thought maybe rather than teach English I might try the

counseling business. It was on the day we came up here (my wife Marilyn and I) that we

drove out as far as we could go to Rusty’s on Iowa Street, and of course we could see the

park (what I called Peppermint Park at that time, Centennial Park now). I said, ‘Marilyn,

this is the town where I want to raise my family’. That’s a true statement. So I made

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arrangements to enroll in KU, and we did that. She went to work for Standard Life. I

went to work in the Counseling department, the Guidance Bureau at that time. That’s

what it was called, the Guidance Bureau. I went to work there, and eventually went to

work a couple of years later for Bob Billings in the Aids and Awards office, which

preceded the Financial Aid office.”

Kelly: “I noticed in your book you mentioned having been involved with the Dean of

Men.”

McElhenie: “Right. When I went to work in Aids and Awards, I was there probably

nine, ten months, and a fellow came across the hall from the Dean of Men’s office, Don

Alderson, who many people would know. He came in to my office and said, ‘Mr.

McElhenie, we’ve been looking at you, and were wondering if you would be interested in

taking a position with the Dean of Men’, which really made my heart beat much faster,

because we were working then on our second child, so the funds were really getting kind

of short. This was in the days before Affirmative Action, why, within a week I had been

hired. I went to work for the Dean of Men on August 16, 1962. That was the beginning

of my KU career full time.”

Kelly: “So you had your M.S. by that time?”

McElhenie: “I had gotten that in ’61, right. I had thought I would work on a Ph.D., but

in those days the ability to get hold of money was limited.”

Kelly: “Yes, I remember those days.” [Laughter]

McElhenie: “Yes. There were no loans out there for anybody, and the families just

didn’t have the money or at least not willing to give it, so I took the full time job and at

the end of that particular semester stopped my studies in the Guidance Bureau. I was

ABD.”

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Kelly: “I see. How long were you then with the Dean of Men’s office?”

McElhenie: “I worked for Don Alderson for seventeen years. The arrival of a new Vice-

Chancellor for Student Affairs, David Ambler, promised that there would be a re-

organization of the division. I then went to run my own show, or shop, in Strong Hall –

the Office of Residential Programs – in 1978, and Don became Dean of Student Services.

At that time, in 1978, the whole concept of the Dean of Men and Dean of Women left.

We were then working on a functional basis rather than a gender basis which makes all

the sense in the world.”

Kelly: “It does, indeed. Well, I am a good friend of Don Alderson’s, and I know how

much he thought of you.”

McElhenie: “Well, you are very kind.”

Kelly: “He always spoke so highly of you, Fred.”

McElhenie: “I learned a lot from Don Alderson in those seventeen years.”

Kelly: “I notice something about Assistant Director of Centennial College.”

McElhenie: “Right. At some point in my tenure in the Dean of Men’s office, and I

believe it was in the latter part of the ‘60s, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences had

an experimental program that they tried to install. It was called the Colleges within the

College. Not to go into that too much, but it required that there be a representative from

the Student Affairs division in each of the Colleges, and there were five Colleges. So I

was an Assistant Director in Centennial, which was located in Ellsworth Hall. The

Director was Jerry Lewis who is a well known fellow on campus. The representative

from the Dean of Women’s Office was Mary Lynn Mangan.”

Kelly: “How did this concept pan out?”

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McElhenie: “Well, it seemed to work fairly well, but like so many things, it ran out of

money. At that point, that plus a little bit of probably not the best publicity in the world,

caused the program to stop. So it went back to the ways it had been in for a long time.”

Kelly: “As Director of Residential Programs, what did you do?”

McElhenie: “In that position, I… in the former position I was very much into campus-

wide discipline. I was also responsible for the personnel program and the programming

in the residence halls and the scholarship halls for men. Then, in ’78, it was across-the-

board programming for the halls and for the scholarship halls, plus we took on the

Stouffer Place and, eventually, Jayhawker Towers. So the scope increased an awful lot.

Discipline, then, was focused on those particular areas, and other people in the Dean of

Students office took care of campus-wide discipline.”

Kelly: “I see. Now, were you working with Ken Stoner at this point?”

McElhenie: “I worked with Joe Wilson until 1985. Joe was a long-time Director of

Housing. In 1985, Ken Stoner was selected to be the Director of Housing. At that point,

he and I sat down and decided that there was no reason for Residential Programs to be

outside of the umbrella of the Housing department. Within that year, we moved to the

McCollum Hall lower level and waited for our new offices to be built in the lower level

of Corbin Hall. So, yes, I worked closely with Ken for the next twenty years or more –

probably twenty-five.”

Kelly: “So you actually retired from within that area?”

McElhenie: “Correct, from the Associate Director’s position, I retired from that. I spent

a few years writing a book and then I figured, ‘I’ve been here forty-five years, that’s long

enough, I think I’ll do something on my own’.”

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Kelly: “Enough’s enough, huh? [Laughter] Oh, dear. Well, what are your thoughts

about the housing arrangements and things at KU?”

McElhenie: “Well, I’ve seen a lot of… obviously seen a lot of change over all that time,

and I just marvel lately when I see the freedoms that students have, and I think back to

the early days with Don Alderson, Emily Taylor and those folks, because we had

virtually absolute control over students. They knew it and they were afraid of it.

Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing when you think of the degree to which we became

involved in a student’s life. I can recall being directed to tell a student to either get a

haircut or go home.”

Kelly: “Oh, no.”

McElhenie: “A student would come… one student chose to come in to our office without

shoes, and I was directed to show him out and tell him, ‘Don’t come back until you have

shoes on’. One of my favorite stories, if I may, is we handled, as I said, discipline.

When students would shoplift from the bookstore, and when they were caught, it wasn’t

that they were sent to the police or the police were called. They called me. The student

was directed to walk straight over to our office, and I can’t think of an instance where the

student did not show up. This one time, a student was sent over by the director of the

bookstore, and he and I talked about why he stole the book, and this, that, and the other

thing, and what could possibly happen to him in the future. At the end of our little

conversation, I said, ‘Incidentally, what book did you take?’, and he said, ‘The Life and

Teachings of Jesus Christ’. [Laughter] I thought, ‘This is quite ironic’, for this fellow, to

get to the commandments.”

Kelly: [Laughter] Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There must have been lots of very

interesting times.”

McElhenie: “During the ‘60s and early ‘70s it was a scary time, it really was, with the

Civil Rights movement and the militancy that was shown there. The other groups that

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were against the war made life very scary for a lot of us because we were very much on

the front lines. It was nothing, seriously… not unheard of for someone like myself to get

assaulted. At one time, after the disruption of the ROTC proceedings in the football

stadium, there was a discipline hearing. Russ Bradt, who was the head of the

Disciplinary Board, said, ‘I want you to stand out here in front of this door and also your

friend here, Bill Robinson, and I don’t want anyone to come in unless you two are

coming in, in front of them’. That had a double meaning because when the crowd of

about two hundred people in the hallway decided they were going to come in, they started

beating on Bill and myself. I ended up with two broken ribs and a bloody nose. We went

through two doors and in to the inner sanctum of the Disciplinary Board. At that point,

the meeting was over. [Laughter] That’s just one instance of which things got rather

rough.”

Kelly: “Were they rowdy – the sit-in in the Chancellor’s office – or would they just not

leave?”

McElhenie: “They just would not leave, from my observations. It was just… ‘This is a

sit-in, and you can drag us out if you want to’.”

Kelly: “ ‘That’s when we’ll leave’.”

McElhenie: “Yeah, ‘That’s the way we’ll leave’. Of all the things that happened, you

know, I could go on and on for a long time, but, you know, the university began to listen,

fortunately. There were a lot of things that happened on the steps of Strong Hall. The

day that they put out the microphones and the speakers on the steps of Strong so that the

students could hear what was being said – this made all the difference in the world – to

what I call the ‘rebels’ or the ‘reactionaries’, whatever they were – they thought they had

scored a major gain, and they had, that we said, ‘We will listen’. I think that was the

attitude across the whole institution, was generally, ‘We will listen to you, and if things

seem reasonable we will try to incorporate them’.”

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Kelly: “You were dealing with people, really, on the verge of adulthood.” [Laughter]

McElhenie: “Yes, yes.”

Kelly: “Had some of them still been in the service and…”

McElhenie: “Well, I think very few of them had been in the service. As we would find

out later, so many of these fellows and girls were not enrolled as students.

Kelly: “Oh.”

McElhenie: “That made it kind of galling to some of us, that we thought we were dealing

with some of our own students, and we weren’t. They were people who were trucked in

from other places.”

Kelly: “That’s so interesting, and this is such a vital part of what went on at KU, and the

whole ball of wax, that if you think of any others that would be interesting in

immortalizing or whatever, why, tell us.”

McElhenie: “I can remember one night… it’s really interesting that we worked for a long

time, day and part of the nights. I was going to visit Oliver Hall in the summer, about

1971, I think it was. I walked up… I couldn’t find a parking place in the lot. I parked

over in old ‘O’ Zone. I walked across the street and was walking up the sidewalk to

Oliver, and I noticed all kinds of shadows around me. They were policemen in full riot

gear. Apparently, there were a group of black students who were in the lobby of Oliver,

which for that summer was sort of their oasis, if you will. They felt safe there. I walked

up to the front door, and I looked, and behind me were these policemen in full riot gear

with large weapons. I luckily got inside real quickly, and our housing department

employee locked the door and wouldn’t let the policemen in, which I thought was really

enlightened thinking on his part because all we needed for that place to go crazy was for

someone to hit someone or to show a gun. That was the rumor that brought the police to

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Oliver, that someone in Oliver lobby had a gun. I’m not saying there weren’t but I didn’t

see any. Again, I don’t remember this fellow’s name, but he deserved a medal for saving,

I think, a lot of banged heads and police who might have over-reacted to these students.”

Kelly: “Times were pretty tense all around at that time.”

McElhenie: “Absolutely. Absolutely.”

Kelly: “Now, we’re going to talk about your book in a little bit, but it doesn’t deal with

Stouffer Place and such. What kind of an impact did that have on your work?”

McElhenie: “You know, one of the easiest units, or series of units, to work with was

Stouffer Place. These were generally a little bit older students, married (that was a

requirement), had children. You know, it was just a matter of… there were no problems

at Stouffer Place, to speak of, other than people being late on their rent or, you know,

things with the plumbing, whatever. It was a delight that you didn’t have to think about

them being in the mix. They pretty much behaved themselves. The thing that I also

realized was that during this whole period of disruption, whatever you wish to call it, the

residence halls may have had students on campus and in a group outside and at a location

where things were going on, very little if anything happened within the confines of the

halls – the residence halls or the scholarship halls or Stouffer. When they walked through

the door, this was where you lived, where you slept, ate and…”

Kelly: “You don’t foul up the place.”

McElhenie: “You don’t mess up the place, and there’s no reason… you know, who

would you fight with? I mean, it was just your fellow students. It wasn’t really a matter

of ‘fight’ – who would you argue with? You know, ninety-nine percent of the people

there were your fellow students, so it’s sort of like you went into another universe when

you walked in there. I always had expected that there would be problems in the halls,

and it just, for the most part, did not happen. The only thing I can compare to that was

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when we won the National Championship in 1988. We were prepared for people to be

breaking windows and doing all kinds of things in the halls. We had all of our staff

assigned to halls. I was stationed over on the bridge behind Daisy field. When we won

the game, everybody left the halls and went to the main campus. The halls were

absolutely empty.” [Laughter]

Kelly: “I was up on the campus with everybody else…”

McElhenie: “I went too.”

Kelly: “… and it was a jubilant crowd, wasn’t it?”

McElhenie: “It was.”

Kelly: “But even there, it wasn’t rowdyism, it was just celebration.”

McElhenie: “Happy – horns honkin’ and cars trying to get through. The same thing

happened, when they got back they didn’t tear up the hall.”

Kelly: “That speaks well for their feeling toward where they lived, and I’m sure the

direction that they were under and your department and such.”

McElhenie: “We always seemed to have a good staff of Resident Assistants and

Assistant Hall Directors in the buildings, and they are young enough that they get along

with the students quite well.”

Kelly: “It’s so different from when I was in school, this men and women sharing a dorm.

What kind of excitement did that produce?”

McElhenie: “That was one of the things I really dreaded when it got some wheels on it,

but it was something that in only limited cases did we have anyone complain. We had

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people who would initially raise questions, and we would explain how things were set up,

and that assured them that the possibility, or probability, of all the things that they would

imagine would happen were rather low, and that they could probably have it much easier

in an apartment or a room off-campus. When you’ve got seventy other people living on

the floor with you there, there is kind of a group that is watching out for each other (at

least in those days). The number of people who were victims of sexual assault or things

of that sort were extremely minimal, and things happening like that were very rare.”

Kelly: “Oh, wonderful.”

McElhenie: “It was only when the generation of students whose parents were in the

initial group who lived in co-ed halls – when their children got to be old enough to go to

college, these parents began to raise questions as though they had been in amnesia for all

these years – eighteen, nineteen, twenty years. They said, ‘What do you mean, boys and

girls in the same hall together?’ Holy cats, you’re the people who started this whole

thing! [Laughter] So I found that to be very interesting. Still, we don’t… I think this has

become accepted when you see it everywhere in the country.”

Kelly: “Or when these boys and girls are living in apartments together.”

McElhenie: “Yeah. As I say in my book, I often scratched my head at parents who

would say, ‘We don’t want our children living in that environment’, and then they stick

them out in an apartment, where not only do they miss all the activities of the programs,

they miss all the orientation to the university that goes on in the living units. So they

really have short-changed their sons and daughters in that respect, but there’s nothing we

could do about that.”

Kelly: “Well, then I think McCollum was so much larger than the others. What size do

you think is best?”

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McElhenie: “I think if we were probably to do it again, we would build… if the money

were available, we would build a series of buildings about the size of Carruth O’Leary,

about two hundred people, and do it in a quad-type situation. Of course these are my

thoughts on it. They don’t represent the thoughts of anyone else in the Administration. I

think that when Carruth O’Leary was in our system, this was a very easy hall to run and

an easy hall to live in, even though we had part of the football team and part of the

basketball team living, and we had men and women both in the early ‘60s living in

Carruth O’Leary. It worked only because of the physical layout of the building, that you

can’t get from one side to the other except going through the basement. We had that all

covered.”

Kelly: [Laughter] “You thought that out.”

McElhenie: “Yes, that was all taken care of. We like to say we were probably among the

very first in the United States to have co-ed housing.”

Kelly: “Oh really?”

McElhenie: “With a few conditions.”

Kelly: [Laughter] “A big stone wall.”

McElhenie: “A big iron gate, that’s what it was, in the cafeteria in the basement.”

Kelly: “Before we get to the book again, I’d like to kind of fill in on your life. You have,

what, three children?”

McElhenie: “I have three children. They all attended the university. One is currently

living in Wisconsin with his four children. We have one in the Seattle area in Puget

Sound, and she has one child. I have a son in Kansas City who has no children. They all

have the KU experience. Only two of the three lived in the residence halls.”

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Kelly: “And I was wondering about you in Rockhurst.”

McElhenie: “Oh, yes.”

Kelly: “Where did you live? What were your living arrangements?”

McElhenie: “When I was in Rockhurst, my freshman year I lived in a hall. It was sort of

a make-do hall, but it was fine. It was the third story of the building that housed the high

school, Rockhurst High School students. As I have always felt and experienced myself,

it was the people who lived there that were the most important. It wasn’t the physical

surroundings. And we just had a ball living there, just a good bunch of guys. Then I

went out to an apartment with a good friend for two years, and then my senior year I was,

as usual, in search of more funds, and I went… the wonderful thing about being in a

small institution… I went to the President’s office one day – I had heard a rumor that

there was an opening on the staff in a brand new hall that Rockhurst had just built. Sure

enough, I was right. I told him I would work for meals and an apartment in the new

building. He agreed, sort of upped the ante – apartment, plus meals, plus a very small

stipend. So this was really my orientation to working with students in an organized living

unit, as one who is responsible, to some degree, for their conduct. And believe me, when

you go to a Catholic college, those Jesuits really know how to write the rules. [Laughter]

And the students, of course, being good Irishmen, would put the list up on their bulletin

board and just start going down the list – ‘Here’s what we’re going to do tonight’.

[Laughter] But, again, it was a great opportunity to learn how students think, operate,

and the kinds of responses that work when you are dealing with those individuals.”

Kelly: “I’ve asked you before about what had an influence on your life, and, actually, as

things evolved, that may have been one of the most important influences that you had.”

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McElhenie: “Right, it really was, because I immediately, as soon as I got to the Dean of

Men’s office, that was my job, to supervise those folks who were the Hall Directors. So,

yeah, you’ve made a good bridge there because that was very true.”

Kelly: “Can you think of anything about the dorms and such that we haven’t discussed?”

McElhenie: “Oh, you probably don’t want me to start…”

Kelly: “Oh, I do, I do. Go ahead.”

McElhenie: “Could we just take a time-out for a minute?”

Kelly: “Fred, you’ve written a book that I’m sure has taken a great deal of time. In fact,

I think it says in here about how long it took, but I hope you will tell us. It’s called:

Making Do, Getting Through, KU Co-ops, Halls and Houses, 1919 – 1966. Tell us about

it, Fred.”

McElhenie: “Well, in 1999, late in the year, I decided to retire from my administrative

position in Housing, and then had the opportunity to devote my energies to research in

the Department of Student Housing. One thing that had never been done formally was a

history of the old, old housing that is described by many people in their memories of the

university, and so in cooperation with Ken Stoner, who was the Director of Housing at

that time, he gave me the opportunity to spend my time doing just some research. No one

mentioned the word ‘book’ in 1999. I started out with great help from the Alumni

Association and the Endowment Association, and identified people who had lived in

these old buildings. Maybe I should back up and say the first thing I had to do was figure

out what these buildings were. The mix is: The KU Co-ops were somewhat like the

current scholarship halls, except that they were not run by the University of Kansas. I

stuck the title ‘KU Co-ops’ on just to identify where they were located, but they were

very independent. They were buildings that housed high-ability students, and they did

their own selections (which is not to say that there wasn’t input to the leaders of those

21

houses from university faculty and administration), but we did not have much of a say-so

back then. So, once I identified all of the buildings, then the challenge was to find out

who lived in them, which, when you think of it, there were forty-three different halls that

I identified, beginning in 1919. It was really a daunting task, but like eating an elephant,

it was just one bite at a time. I spent hours and hours and hours in the archives, mostly

going through the yearbook and the telephone directories, which was just terrible work in

terms of being really close to drudgery. I hadn’t said yet, but the yearbook was a really

great help to me. It had the names and the home towns of the people, plus a photograph

of the people who lived in some of the particular halls. That was really a godsend.

Occasionally, I would find that the yearbook just completely forgot about some halls. In

those instances, it was imperative that I go to the student directory and go name by name

to select who lived where, depending upon the address (in the student directory). Well,

that was – as I also said in my book – that was fine until the years wore on, and the

directory got bigger and the type got smaller, and I wasn’t getting any younger. I came

up with, oh, thousands and thousands of names. Then the question was, ‘How do I know

if these folks are still alive yet?’, and this is where the Alumni Association was so

helpful. I would send a list over to them, and within three, four or five days, I would get

a list back and they would indicate those people who were around and their current

addresses. What a wonderful thing! So this went on for probably a good two years. At

the same time, when I was looking in the yearbooks I would try to get descriptions of that

group, or of the building (the hall) that they lived in, and began copying or interpreting

what I had read into a big database, some of the then current looks at the building and the

folks who lived there. Finally, after about four years, I got most of it put together. What

I did, also, as we went along, I would send a letter to the individual and hopefully a

photograph of the building they lived in. That was the thing that just thrilled so many

people. They said, ‘God, the best thing you sent us was the picture of the hall (or the

house). It brought back a flood of memories’. I also sent them a brief history of the hall.

Then I sent them an information sheet where I asked them to list their name, their

remembrances – anecdotal memories of what went on while they lived there. To send

that back to me, I gave them an envelope that was self-addressed. They had to put a

stamp on it, but that’s okay. The next thing I knew, I had an office full of mail and

22

people who were just chomping at the bit to share with me. I had letters that were twelve

and fifteen pages long, and I had said, ‘Write a couple of paragraphs’. [Laughter] I think

most everyone decided it was when they were going to start on their great American

novel. [Laughter] So I was just swamped with mail, which was great, I mean, that

was… there is nothing like being prosperous, at least in terms of mail. Little by little, I

typed in every one of their reminiscences into my computer. I kept records of who wrote

in, because I felt that even if they wrote in just their name, what they were doing or what

they had done in their careers – most of these folks were retired – they got credit for

responding. At one point in the book I had the names listed of every one (and that totaled

nine hundred folks) who responded by mail, and the hall that they had lived in. At least,

since we couldn’t use all of them. If we tried, the book, I swear, would have been

probably, oh, eight or nine hundred pages long if we had used every reply that we got.”

Kelly: “And it is a good-sized book as it is.”

McElhenie: “It’s four hundred pages now and weighs four pounds. My editor, Barbara

Watkins, and I were generally nose to nose when it came to cutting out certain sections of

the materials that I would send her for the book. She would just say, ‘Fred, we’re going

to end up with the longest book that’s ever been written if we don’t do something to chop

this section down’. That was a very amicable relationship that we had. When it finally

came out, I had to admit that she was right, that we just couldn’t include everything.

Everything is still saved, both on disk and the original documents that I got from those

folks. When you read all those, you just feel that the most difficult choice is: Who is

going to win the prize and get in to the book, and who is going to wonder, ‘Did my letter

arrive?’, or, ‘Did they like what I said?’, or whatever. There were a lot of hard choices.

In a year or so, with the help of my editor and lots of other folks, I put it together. This

was probably the most stressful year that I had experienced during the book writing time,

was this last year, and trying to deal with the publisher, or I should say, the printer. Our

publisher… the book was published in the name of the Friends of Mt. Oread, and so they

were not difficult to deal with, but it was just trying to get things right and straight –

23

re-doing copy that I would send to Barbara online, and the need to make sure that all the

footnoting was correct…”

Kelly: “I think I’d better…”

McElhenie: “…and the things that had to be done before the book could go to the printer.

The number of stories and reminiscences – I’ll call them ‘stories’ in the future here –

were both funny and sad, and really revealed a lot of history that has been overlooked,

especially those people who were in the halls during the Depression years and the years

following the Depression and World War II. The really interesting ones came a lot from

the vets who got back to Lawrence, and of course, at that time, the housing situation was

deplorable. There was none. The university was buying up old houses. They were using

the facility out at De Soto (the ordinance works). So anything that the university could

get their hands on, they would turn in to a hall, when it was university housing.”

Kelly: “How about Sunnyside too?”

McElhenie: “Sunnyside also. They bought… as I have read… reading Irvin

Youngberg’s account, that I believe Sunnyside cost one dollar.”

Kelly: “Oh, really?”

McElhenie: “Yes, purchased from the government, because this was all surplus property,

that they had nothing to do with it. I mean, the government wanted nothing to do with it.

They were through with it.”

Kelly: “And these were old barracks?”

McElhenie: “Old barracks, generally. They might have been married housing for

officers, or, in the case of Oread Hall, it was bachelor officer’s quarters, which were

private rooms. Then the facilities out in De Soto were generally a bedroom and a

24

kitchen, dining room, the baby bath was the kitchen sink, [Laughter] everything you

could imagine.”

Kelly: “Did you heat it with a stove?”

McElhenie: “With a pot belly stove, right. I did some subsequent research on that

facility out there, and everyone who wrote in, I know that ninety-nine percent mentioned

the pot bellied stove.”

Kelly: “Oh yes, I’ve heard of that too. And that was at Sunflower?”

McElhenie: “Sunflower Ordinance Works, right.”

Kelly: “And Sunnyside was…”

McElhenie: “Faculty Housing was down on Sunnyside Avenue.”

Kelly: “About how many barracks were there in there, do you remember?”

McElhenie: “Oh, you know… I don’t… I don’t recall. I would really have to get in my

files because those aren’t in the book, but they were also interesting times. The guys who

came back… the guys and gals from the war, they had a heck of a time finding a place to

live and were very thankful when they could get hold of a place. Those individuals, for

the most part, were all business. It was: ‘We’re back here; this war has taken three years

(or four years) out of my life, and, by golly, I want to get that degree and get on with my

life’. So that, coupled with the G.I. Bill – it was frequently mentioned, ‘That’s, of course,

the only way I could have gotten through school, was with the G.I. Bill’, and, ‘Thank

God for the G.I. Bill’. So we have people who look at those things in a very positive

way: ‘This allowed me, it wasn’t enough money but it was… I mean it was not an excess

of money, but it was enough money to get me through school’. You know, we’ve all

heard of or read Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation. You know, that was

25

something that just confirmed it with me, that I wanted, especially the areas in the book

on Oread Hall, Spooner-Thayer (which was also used as a place for fellows to live) – I

wanted those to be as complete as possible. I couldn’t do it on Oread, I just had so many

letters. I wanted to make sure that these guys didn’t get short shrift because of how much

they had done. It was just so interesting that occasionally someone would mention, ‘I

was a tail gunner [or a pilot, or a mechanic] on Iwo Jima’, or, you know, but no war

stories. It was all positive, look ahead, ‘This is what I did when I got home’. They were

reluctant to even talk about it. That carried through to their daily lives, that they just

chose not to talk about it until recently, when the series came out: The War. Anyway,

those were pleasant reading. The women who wrote in were very funny because for

almost all that period they were under the parietal rules of either the Advisor to Women

or the Dean of Women. They had their curfews at the various houses and halls, and they

talked about being one minute late, five minutes late, what happened when they didn’t

make it in the front door on time, with the threat always being, ‘If you are a repeat

offender we’re going to call your parents’. In those days, that was quite the threat. But,

also, the women would refer to the fellow they met over in such and such hall, and the

fact that they have been married now for fifty-five or sixty years was another interesting

theme to these things. People not only lived in one hall, they lived in a series of halls.

These halls were not what you would say ‘in perpetuity’ – one year they would be a hall,

and then the next year they would be a boarding house for some construction workers or

something like that. So, people lived in a series of halls, and they must have wondered

when they kept getting mail from this guy over in Lawrence who kept sending it to them,

because they came up on every list. There were a lot of those. They all, again, had that

kind of positive outlook. I think they really got shoved into that mode of thinking by

World War II – that they, too, wanted to get things going and raise a family. The stories

that came out of there at times, I don’t know whether to believe or just kind of take with a

really big grain of salt. There are so many I wouldn’t know where to start. Probably the

most… the story that affected me the most, of all of the ones that are in there, came from

a Chinese student whose name is Mou-Hui King, who lived in, as I recall, Carruth, I

think. I’m a little unsure on that. He described Christmas in, oh, 1942 or something like

that. No, New Year’s in, say, 1942. He indicated that there was no Christmas vacation

26

that year. He had nowhere to go. He couldn’t go back to China. He said something to

the effect that as they went to bed that night – they stayed up until midnight – they heard

bells ringing, and he said something to the effect… okay, correction. I’m going to read

this quote from Mou-Hui King: ‘It was New Year’s Eve 1943. Prior to the quote it says,

‘We were lying in bed in the cold sleeping porch waiting for the advent of 1944. At

midnight we heard bells chiming. I don’t know where they came from but, no, it was not

the Campanile, since it not been yet built. All of us felt homesick. For some of the boys,

that was the last New Year’s Eve before going off to war. For a few, it was to be the last

New Year’s Eve ever’. That really made an impression upon me, and I point it out to

people who like to look at the book. I send them to that particular one as something that

was a very good insight on his part as a young man. Anyway, the book came out in May

of 2006 and it’s been fairly well received.”

Kelly: “I thought it was very interesting because, of course, I was in school during some

of those years. [Laughter] The pictures – you have so many wonderful pictures. It

brought back so many memories to me. I can imagine all the hundreds and hundreds of

people you contacted.”

McElhenie: “That was another element that I had almost forgotten, was that I, in that

request for remembrances, I had also said that if you can send me a picture or copies of a

picture I promise to return them. If we write a book, we plan to use as many pictures as

we can. I have, on my disks at home, and in the office in a safe place – disks of

photographs that we used in the book. To me, and to many people, they really do make it

interesting because it was very… since they’re almost all… well, in the book they are all

black and white, and almost all that came in were black and white. They really make the

point that this was not the new era yet. It’s just kind of driven home by the fact that they

were black and white photos. They’re usually photos of groups of people doing things in

the kitchens, or in the yard, or playing ball, or trying to fix an old Jeep up, or get some

kind of an old car running. The pictures are really marvelous, so I appreciate you

bringing that up.”

27

Kelly: “That’s good. I think that you have enriched many people’s lives with the

publishing of that because it’s fun to have old memories stirred up. It’s great.”

McElhenie: “I can’t think of anyone’s life who is enriched more than mine.”

Kelly: “Well, probably not, possibly not. I suppose we’d better move on and see what

we can talk about regarding your KU career.”

McElhenie: “Some of the things that I think might need mentioning is that even though I

was pretty much associated with Housing, that for many years my friend Kayla Stroup

and I taught Assertiveness Training at the Edwards campus in Kansas City (which most

people have probably never heard of), then I did some teaching in the area of Counseling

Psychology for the staff of the halls that I was supervising at that time. We limited those

to Junior and Senior students. One thing that I am very proud of is the fact that on four

separate occasions I was nominated for the Employee of the Year, but ‘always the

bridesmaid and never a bride’. That was fine, but I have those four Jayhawks that made

me think that it was really worth it to do that – to stay around here for as long as I have. I

was on (as any retired KU person would know), I was on about a million and a half

committees. The most interesting was, probably, not a committee, but the assignment to

the Colleges within the College was one of the more interesting experiments that we had

done. I’m really sorry that it didn’t continue, but at least we got the new Nunemaker

Center built, through the generosity of Mrs. Irene Nunemaker. She really was the one

who funded the whole College within the College program. I believe she was associated

with Avon Cosmetics.”

Kelly: “Oh, yes, I believe she was.”

McElhenie: “At one point I told my wife she needed to go to work selling Avon. She

did! [Laughter] Some of the professional organizations that I was affiliated with were

the ACPA (American College Personnel Association), National Association for

Personnel Administrators, ACUHO-I (Association of College and University Housing

28

Officers – International), and the Kansas Association of Personnel Administrators. Those

were some of the national organizations that I belonged to almost the whole time that I

was in the employ of the university. I also tried to make myself available to the

community of Lawrence, and have had direct contact with groups like Alcoholics

Anonymous, First Step House (I was among the co-founders of that organization),

Women’s Transitional Care group (I helped on the founding of that), Friends of the

Library (Clark Coan and other people and I were co-founders of that). I was on the

Board of Directors for Headquarters for many years, served on the Board for DCCCA,

and was also very involved in the founding of Hearthstone, which is a halfway house for

alcoholic men. That was an organization that really was interesting to get off the ground,

and is still going today after… I think we did that in about 1976… still going strong

today down at, I think, 7th and Ohio St. Currently my wife and I are involved in Meals on

Wheels and I have been a long time volunteer at Health Care Access. I’m very proud of

being with those organizations, and at least giving them an initial push and see it prosper,

and then gently step back and go on to something else.”

Kelly: “That’s good. I recently received something that had a listing of the committee

for the retirees’ rights and benefits and saw a familiar name on that.”

McElhenie: “Yes, I am on that committee. I still haven’t gotten away from all those

committee assignments at the university. Yes, I have been on that for three years now.

Those are some of the things that I felt it was important that if my children ever come

back and read about their old man, why, they get to [Laughter] see those things.”

Kelly: “That’s right.”

McElhenie: “I think I’ve already talked about the special memories.”

Kelly: “What about… do you have an assessment of KU as a university, past and

present, and hopes for KU’s future?”

29

McElhenie: “You know, it might be presumptuous for me to make an assessment of KU

as a university. I can look at the past and say that I think we have been a pretty quality

organization, or institution over the years, and I think we’ve done things generally right.

There are such wonderful opportunities here, and I think the quality of people that are

attracted to this institution over the years are the kinds of people you really want, as

evidenced by the fact that how many of them go off to somewhere else to work for

awhile, but will eventually end up back here, either working or retiring in the community

because of their great love for KU. There are days, quite honestly, when I have my

concerns about priorities at the university, whether Athletics or Academics is more

important. I think we obviously know what should be uppermost in the minds of all

people associated with the institution, but then it has its other days too. I think we’ve

done a good job in the past. An observation I would make is that things – institutions like

KU – change rather slowly, and so much of it is personality-driven that if someone

retires, goes to another institution, or, God forbid, if they die, and they are the head of a

facility or a department or division, whatever – that’s when you can expect that there will

be change. Now, that may be a little naïve, but I wish it wasn’t always that way, that

people could change on their own, and we wouldn’t… the old expression of, ‘We can’t

do that while he’s in… or he or she is in this particular position’. I guess that would be

my negative take on the university in the past. In the future, I have a hope that somehow

the university could use its influence, its power, or whatever, to reach down into the

school systems below (K through 12 high school) and shake it up. I am extremely

concerned about the educational level and the type of learning that occurs. I am even

concerned about the quality of teachers in the public schools and private, that whether

they, coming from all sorts of different institutions, really have gotten a good education

themselves. If we have teachers who are under-prepared, we can’t expect much from

their students. So, I wish there was a way that we could wave a magic wand and go back

down into those lower grades and get these kids into an atmosphere where they enjoy

learning. It’s just not spending your time in school and waiting to get out to go play

computer games or whatever.”

Kelly: “…or learning how to take a test.”

30

McElhenie: “…and do well.” [Laughter]

Kelly: “…and do well on the test, yes. Well, this has been really interesting, Fred. I

knew it would be. I have enjoyed it so much, and if you have any last-minute thoughts,

why, we still have a little time.”

McElhenie: “Really, I think I have covered a lot. When I get home I’m sure I’ll think of

what I should have said. We’ll have to do with what we have now.”

Kelly: “I think we’ve done pretty well, really, and thank you so much.”

McElhenie: “All right, thanks. My pleasure.”