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AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES TAYLOR

Interviewer: Alan Newton

Oral History Project

Endacott Society

University of Kansas

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AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES TAYLOR

Interviewer: Alan Newton

Q: I’m speaking with James Taylor, who retired in 2002 as Professor in the

School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas. We’re in

Lawrence, Kansas, at the Adams Alumni Center. The date is July 2, 2002.

Professor Taylor, I take it you prefer to be called Jim rather than James.

A: Yeah.

Q: Okay, great. Where were you born and in what year?

A: Seattle. October 23, 1930.

Q: What were your parents’ names?

A: Fred W. Taylor and Gladys Bentley Taylor.

Q: What were your parents’ educational backgrounds?

A: My mother had a Masters degree in Education. Father had, I think, one or

two years of college.

Q: Did your mother teach?

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A: Yes.

Q: What did she teach?

A: Primary grades. Mainly kindergarten and the first three years.

Q: And what was your father’s occupation?

A: He was with the federal government in various roles during the Second World

War and during some of the Depression era. During the McCarthy era, he

quit that and joined my grandfather in a family-owned furniture store.

Q: In Seattle?

A: No, in a small town to the south called Sumner.

Q: Did you have brothers or sisters?

A: One sister.

Q: Is she still living?

A: Yes.

Q: And what’s her name?

A: Susan.

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Q: Did you grow up in Seattle?

A: Yes.

Q: Attend elementary school there as well?

A: Yes.

Q: What do you remember about Seattle in the >30’s?

A: I went to a large number of, well, I think, about seven grade schools. So,

what I really remember is a lot of different houses, and getting into different

grade schools. I don’t know, every time you go to a new grade school, you

get into kind of a peer group competition. In those days, there was a fair

amount of fighting among the kids. I remember a lot of that. Beyond there,

I went to Franklin High School for four years. We had settled down in an

area called Mount Baker. I worked downtown in the library in high school,

and this, of course, was during the Second World War. At that point,

Seattle was very definitely a sailor town. Sailors everywhere, and Merchant

Marines. It was a fairly bustling kind of patriotic, wide open city that, at one

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point, was declared off limits to Army/Navy personnel, because it was little

too wide open. It was a strong union town, and there were a huge number

of workers in for the war industries. Apart from that, it had a heritage of

being kind of a blue collar, workingman’s town, with big lumber industries---

lots of local publicity given to Paul Bunyan, all that sort of thing. Very

strongly Democrat, New Deal. It was a home for Wobblies---you know, the

IWW were still around there. You could still see them passing out papers.

It’s where Harry Bridges was. It’s where a number of union activities

started. It was a fairly radical section of the country at the time. I

remember also, just before the war, seeing people in Hoovervilles. My

father took me for a walk one day through the local Hooverville. But it was

also a town that was trying very strongly to become more, I don’t know,

cultured. Mother, at the point, I think, about the 1940’s, was very much

involved in art, and ended up becoming a fairly good artist. So, I used to

wander around with her when she went on painting trips, this sort of thing. I

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think one important part of the area---well, there were two. One was the

University of Washington. It was fairly big. Then, the other was the Seattle

Art Museum, which had an outstanding collection of Asian art. We used to

go visit that, maybe once every couple of weeks for things. And I got

entranced by the anthropology museum and the other museums on campus.

So, I used to go over there. In high school, I decided that I wanted to

become a marine biologist, and I trooped over and talked to a Professor

Kincaid, who was the granddaddy of marine biologists in the area, to see if I

could arrange to take any courses at the University of Washington. No.

There weren’t any such programs then. Then, unfortunately, in Franklin

High School, the biology teacher was a little old lady whose main interest, I

think, was in making sure that none of the microscopes ever got broken.

Q: I had a few like that myself.

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A: Well, I remember when we had to leave class, she would announce,

AStudents in the back row will stand up and pass out,@ which used to give

us great humor. But I think I got no biology there from her, really.

Q: So, what led to the interest in marine biology?

A: I had spent time in the summers up at a YMCA camp in Orkus Island,

called Orkilia. The seashore turned out to be fascinating. So, I really spent

a lot of my time there, tramping about, turning up rocks, learning about the

various kinds of animals and plants. I ended up as a camp counselor up

there in my last two years of high school. Actually, I went up the first time

as a dishwasher, and the second year, I got promoted to counselor.

Q: Back to elementary school, you said you went to a number of different

schools. Did your family move around a lot during that time?

A: Yes. For some reason, my father was very uninterested in buying a house.

I think probably he didn’t have two dimes to rub together for a lot of that

period. I don’t really know why there was so much movement, but there

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was. I have a suspicion that it had to do with the fact that jobs were very

hard to get.

Q: Yeah, I was going to ask if that was just typical of the Depression era.

A: I think so, probably.

Q: I guess a lot of people simply moved around as part of a general

restlessness. You mentioned that, during the war, Seattle was a sailors

town. I guess, when the war started, you would have been eleven, and

then on into high school. What are some specific memories you have of the

war? If you lived on the west coast, wasn’t there a scare after Pearl

Harbor?

A: Yeah. We were visiting my aunt and uncle, who ran a dairy farm in the

area of Salt Flats down near Olympia, Washington. It was a charming old

house, huge fireplace. I remember it as a place we’d go for Christmas or

Thanksgiving. It was very, very pleasant. A little brook ran through it.

When we heard the news of December 7, and were just kind of shocked by

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it, I had the usual callow kid’s approach to things: AWe’re strong. This is

just Japs.@ You know, all of this. I think the partner of my uncle, who was

a very wise old guy, said, AI’m not so sure.@ There was this kind of sense

of, I don’t know, something momentous breaking. Even as a little kid, I felt

it. I had just turned eleven, but there I was. What I remember is a great

excitement over the mobilization going on. People being drafted, and lives

changing in the sense that, we’d gone here, then, all of the sudden, we’re

going there. I remember little details. As, for instance, having to have

blackouts, where you would keep the lights from showing inside. One poor

pilot from, I think, the newspaper, The Post-Intelligence, there, wanted to

report on how blacked-out the place was. But, of course, Seattle is

surrounded by water---Puget Sound on one side, and Lake Washington on

the other. It was a clear, moonlit night, and things could not have been

clearer! There was Boeing, there was every target going, and you could

see it beautifully. So, there he was, up there, and you could hear him

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stammering, trying to make the best of a bad situation, which was kind of

sweet, I guess. I remember looking around to see if anybody might have

toilet paper, for example, in the shops. And bacon was in very short supply.

We had little round, red coupons---not coupons---quasi-cardboard coins that

we spent for this, and ration books, and the rest. At one point, there was

all this big thing about, ALet us get scrap iron.@ As a little kid, I went out

and collected scrap iron.

Q: I’ve heard that from several people whom I’ve interviewed.

A: Yeah. Downtown was bustling with all of this. Another thing which

somehow is heavy in my memory were the train stations. Because this is

where everybody came into town, where you’d see the massive movement

of the soldiers and the sailors on the trains. And the excitement, if you’re a

kid, seeing these huge, chuffing, steaming engines going Ashhhhh!@ as the

came in. There’s always a sense of anticipation on the train---getting off,

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the cries of the conductors, the Pullman bustle. Airports are not at all like

that.

Q: You mentioned that you went to the YMCA camp. Were you involved in

other ways in the Y? Or was this just sort of a summer activity?

A: It was a summer activity, relatively inexpensive.

Q: Were you in Boy Scouts, as well?

A: I didn’t make it to Boy Scouts. I was in the Cubs. I think I might have

been more involved in that sort of thing if, in fact, we hadn’t moved so

much. But, as it was, I never got into an integrated sense of being with

other kids.

Q: You said you went to high school at Franklin High School. This was in what

part of Seattle?

A: Essentially in the southern area. It was a school kind of bound on one side

by an ethnically diverse, working class, blue collar area---Chinese, black,

Italian. And on the other side by middle or upper middle class white Anglo

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Saxon Protestants and Catholics. So it was split quite evenly. I was over

on the white side, and the kids I knew were over there. We didn’t know

any of the people on the other side.

Q: Was the high school integrated? Would they have gone to different high

schools?

A: No. Washington was far away from Kansas. I think it had been integrated

from Civil War times.

Q: So, you did actually go to high school with kids from different ethnic

backgrounds?

A: Yeah. It’s just that internally, as with all integrated schools I know about,

there is segregation within.

Q: Do you remember any favorite classes? You’ve talked some about your

biology teacher. Were there more influential teachers than her at that time

that you remember?

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A: There were several. One was a chap who taught social studies, whose

name was Samuelson, who, I think, gave a very modern view---you know,

modern in 1930’s view---of history, U. S. history. It was not the standard

stuffBmythology of what happened whenByou know, George Washington’s

cherry tree. It’s a caricature, but it tends to be that kind of thing. Rather, I

think of Charles Beard, and other historians who were looking, at that point,

at an economic interpretation of history. So, that’s kind of what we got in

class. He was also the debate coach, and I got into debate. I ended up

kind of interested through that in what used to be called oratory. I think it’s

entirely gone from schools now.

Q: They have something called forensics now.

A: I don’t know if that would be the same thing or not. It wasn’t debate. It

was the ability to get up and memorize a speech and deliver it---very often,

someone else’s speech---which was fairly good training for things. So, I

think he was influential. There was a very nice chemistry teacher, whose

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name I forget---it was French---and he tended to be the chap whom the

kids who were interested in science revolved around. I was with the group

of home experimenters, you know, chemistry mainly, biology some. One of

them went on to become a doctor. One of them became a chemist who

committed suicide. He was a close friend of mine. One I just ran into, I

suppose, about fifteen years ago. I was fund-raising with the Menninger

Foundation and visited Boeing, and the vice president took us out on the

shop floor. There, in gray dungarees, was my old friend from high school.

Q: Wow.

A: So, there’s kind of a mixed group there. The other teachers---there were a

number of them, but there are just little vignettes. I had an interest in

writing. I had an interest in---for some reason, I had set myself the goal of

trying to read everything I had heard about that I didn’t understand. I

haunted the libraries. It was a very quirk-ish reading list. H. G. Wells,

everything.

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Q: This was extracurricular reading?

A: Extracurricular. I think I went through, oh, let me think---Theory of the

Leisure Class---am I getting that right? I tried to read Karl Marx, with no

success at all. I was reading Freud. I was trying to go through Plato’s

Republic. You know, all of this, extracurricular. I don’t think my parents

knew at all what to make of me.

Q: Nor your teachers, probably, for that matter!

A: Yeah.

Q: Did you play any sports in high school?

A: No, I didn’t. There was, in a certain sense, in high schoolBand I don’t know

where this came from, but I think a lot of the kids had it that I ran

withBthere was a kind of counter culture among the high school students.

There was the big, rah rah sports stuff, the sense that we’re all getting out

there to rally. And, then, there’s a group who were saying, in effect, AOh,

fuck it.@ I belonged to the latter group.

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Q: I think that’s how it still is today with high school as I remember it.

A: Yeah.

Q: You mention that, at one point, you were a counselor at the camp. Did you

have other jobs during the summers, or during the school year, as well?

A: I did that in the summers. I also had a job at the public library downtown.

I was a page. And I did that for, I suppose, about most of my high school.

Before then, I was a carrier for the Times and the P. I.. I remember the P.

I. especially, because I had to get up in the wee small hours of the morning,

and that was not something that came naturally to me.

Q: I remember, when I was carrier, always hoping on Sunday mornings for bad

weather, so I could wake my parents up to drive me!

A: Yes.

Q: During high school, was it assumed that you would go to college?

A: Yes. It was not necessarily assumed that I would go to the University of

Washington, even though that was what was there. In high school, my

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habits of reading had caught the interest of one of the school counselors,

who was a Reed graduate and recommended that I try Reed. As a matter

of fact, it was the only school I applied to, and that’s where I ended up

going.

Q: Reed is in Oregon?

A: It’s in Oregon.

Q: In what city?

A: Portland.

Q: Okay. So, off the Reed. Had you been to Portland prior to that? Did you

go off to interview with the school?

A: I don’t recall going to interview. I had an uncle who lived in Portland, so we

visited often. And, as you know, it’s a fairly short train ride down from

Seattle.

Q: Right. And your undergraduate major was in psychology and anthropology?

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A: Yeah. It was kind of a progression. Reed is one of those small liberal arts

colleges like Antioch or Oberlin that tends to pride itself on a highly

academic atmosphere, very small classes, sort of an intensity about things.

It also is, more than the others, a place that had a tradition of doing away

with the notion of in loco parentis, which meant that the kids were given

absolute freedom as long as they didn’t cause problems to other people.

So, this was a very different kind of place, and I ended up using that

freedom to explore a lot of different things. I went with the notion that I was

going to become a biologist. I took biology and did very well in it, so much

so that I was offered a job as a lab assistant/instructor kind of the thing the

next year. But, unfortunately, I discovered that I had absolutely no talent for

chemistry or math at the college level. So, I thought, what else can I do?

Psychology seemed interesting and fit my other interests, so I moved in that

direction. I must say that I was always a little bit at war internally with what

I was getting in class with what I interested in in psychology. At that time, it

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was very much a matter of memorizing syllables, of conditioning

experiments, a very different sort of thing than the psychology that I was

reading in the personality arena. Freud. I was also intrigued by Margaret

Mead, Benedict, and all these other people. So, I found, even though I

moved into psychology, I was moving more and more into the social science

side of the thing. Of the people at Reed, the chap who was most influential

was a chap by the name of Dave French, who was an anthropologist who

had become very intrigued by a field called culture and personality. So, I

ended up taking a number of courses from him, too. Well, is all this of

interest?

Q: Absolutely.

A: Basically, I think there were several formative things at Reed. One of the

most important was their intensive humanities instruction in the first two

years. You had a course called Humanities in which the first year---and I’m

talking about a seven hour course, eight hours---in which you managed to

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get from the Hittites and the Sumerians up to about 1600. The second

year, you went from there to modern times. This is the kind of education

that I’ve been drawing on ever since. There was absolutely no vocational

feel about the school. I think that it’s probably best regarded as a prep

school for doctoral work. So, that was very, very useful, and thoroughly

molded my interests away from the narrower focus that one gets in

professional training. The second thing was the culture and personality

anthropology, finding somebody there I resonated with. The third, oddly

enough, was the beginning of the Beat movement. Reed had a number of

students that I knew there, my year or a year or two earlier, who later on

became kind of---oh, Gary Snyder---I don’t know whether you know him or

not.

Q: I do know him. I met him, actually.

A: Phil Whalen. A number of them that went down to San Francisco and kind

of hooked up with Ginsberg and the rest of those. Anyhow, there were

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people I knew, so I got involved in poetry writing, working on literary

magazines, etc., which was interesting enough. I fancied myself a bit of a

poet. Now, I read the stuff I wrote with a sense of acute embarrassment

Q: Don’t we all!

A: Yeah. Anyhow, but some of it was---what the hell. That was that. All of

those things melded and met. During the time I was in college, I ended up

also discovering girls and sex, which came as a great revelation to me. I

ended up getting married my junior year, which led to a huge split with my

family. So, I ended up essentially working my way through Reed the last

couple of years, but with some surreptitious help from relatives, and Mother.

So, that part of it was sort of off-campus. I was just working on my

dissertation---no, thesis, it was called there. This was the only school I

know of---I’m sure there are others---that has both a qualifying exam to get

to your senior year, and also requires a thesis.

Q: So, everyone has to write a thesis? Not just for an honors program?

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A: Right. Totally. So, I tried to combine all of that, and I did an experimental

psychological study, what I called the Alinguistic communication of affect,@

which is how poetry creates feelings. I brought in the anthropology through

looking at the kinds of things in different cultures which serve the function of

poetry, and whether they used such things as metaphor in the same way

that poets did. It was kind of an interesting dissertation as I look back on it,

because I don’t think it’s like anything else that I’ve seen in the literature

since. It was question that nobody else was asking. I was approaching it

through the galvanic skin response.

Q: So, you were married in college---

A: And that lasted until my second year of graduate school.

Q: Were your parents---was your family opposed to marriage in general

because of your age? Or were they opposed to this particular woman?

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A: Well, they never met her before I came home and said I was going to marry

her. So, it’s hard to separate which was which. I think it was largely the

age and their lack of involvement in it.

Q: Right. Did you have any children from the first marriage?

A: No.

Q: Did you have any kind of employment when you were at Reed? In

summers or otherwise?

A: Well, let’s see. I picked up odd jobs as I could. The ones I rememberBI

was servingBit wasn’t called the copy boy, but it amounted to itBat the

Oregonian newspaper, during the night shift. We did the wire dispatches,

and I’d circulate them to whoever needed them. And, during the last

summer there, I worked as a forest service lookout, which was a rather nice

job for the summer. I did that also my first graduate school year. One

summer, my wife and I hitchhiked down to Mexico and back. We ended up

in San Francisco for a couple of months. I took such jobs as I could get

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there. Actually, I was working for a department store just off Union Square,

which has now folded. They offered me a kind of management training job

if I wanted to stay. No. My wife was offered something similar with another

store. Anyhow, we went back, finished the year at Reed, and then the

Korean War was right there. I had decided that I wanted to go and get a

Ph.D. in anthropology. I applied at Berkeley. Again, that was the only

place I applied, which was sheer foolishness, and was accepted, but was

told that I was missing a course in linguistics and they would have to put me

in the general graduate school program. Legally, that meant that I would be

eligible to be drafted. I did not particularly relish that. Korea was fairly hot

at the time. So, what I did was to quickly apply to graduate school in

psychology.

Q: At Washington or Berkeley?

A: No, at the University of Portland. Because, I knew this just about one

month before I was due back to school, and I had to go quick. And I could

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do it at the University of Portland, which had just started a clinical

psychology degree. So, I went there for a year, and then was offered a

small assistantship at the University of Washington, so I moved up there.

Q: So, you didn’t actually take any degree at the University of Portland? You

just moved?

A: Yeah. Took some beginning classes.

Q: And that kept you out of Korea.

A: That kept me out of Korea. I can’t imagine, though, that I need to go into

all this much detail about this period in the past. Because this could run

into hours!

Q: It’s whatever you wish to talk about. It’s fine. We’ve got no limits here.

A: But I feel like I’m taking advantage of your good nature!

Q: No, we’re doing fine. Believe me, we’re doing fine. So, you graduated

from Reed in 1952, and spent a year in Portland, so you moved to the

University of Washington in ‘53 or ‘54?

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A: ‘53 to ‘54, sounds right.

Q: To begin work in clinical psychology. You mentioned earlier that you had

sort of moved more in social psychology. What led you into clinical at that

time?

A: Well, actually, when I say Asocial,@ what I was interested in was the

personality theory dynamics with a social kind of--

Q: As opposed to Skinnerian kinds of---?

A: Yeah. I was interested in psychoanalysis. I was interested in Erik

Erickson’s approaches to things. I found that compatible. At that time,

anthropology was very much influenced by psychoanalysis, so you had those

two things going. In psychiatry, too, psychoanalysis was the big hot topic.

Very different days. The net result was that I decided that clinical

psychology was probably the best bet for me. It did not involve me too

much with the behaviorist schools, or the antecedents of that, which were

called learning theory. I’d get some hands-on experience. I had become

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quite convinced that there was more to learn about people than you’d find

out from laboratory experiments, even though those could be useful. I would

learn about Rorschach, and all of these things. So, this seemed like a fairly

good thing for me. One small difficulty was that the University of

Washington prided itself on its behaviorist emphasis. It had been the seed

of that. But that was okay. I could learn about it, and I could give this

back, and be happy. Clinical psychology was, I think, intensely interesting.

And, just as I found the immersion in the humanities at Reed very useful, so

I found the immersion in clinical practice very useful, because I was one of

the cohort who got into the VA training program. I don’t know whether you

know about this.

Q: Well, I know that. I’ve interviewed a professor of psychology here, Rue

Cromwell. His internship that he did during his training was at a VA

hospital, as opposed to, say, teaching, a GTAship. Was that the same with

you?

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A: It amounted to about two and a half---if you thought it was full-time, it

amounted to about two years of hands-on stuff. We were circulated so that

we went---I was at American Lake, which was a psychiatric hospital. I was

at Beacon Hill, which was a general medical and surgical hospital. I was at

a downtown clinic, which was a walk-in psychiatric clinic. I spent one

summer down at Palo Alto VA, because I was kind of interested in the stuff

that Gregory Bateson was doing down there. I ended up with a fairly good

grounding in the field at the time---a lot of experience with schizophrenics,

and manic depressives, people who were suffering from post-traumatic

stress disorder, although no such diagnosis existed. So, this was good.

The difficulty was that I’d gotten divorced along the way. I’d spent some

time in therapy trying to recover from the effects of the divorce, and so my

VA thing ran out before I was through with my doctorate. At that point,

there was a decision: do I want to continue where I was going and become

a good practitioner?

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Q: Had that been your goal early on, to become a therapist? As opposed to

an academic?

A: No, I had no such goal. I liked the training, I was interested in it, but what I

was basically interested in was two things. One is the personality/culture

stuff. Now, I could use all of this. I could see myself wandering off and

doing my clinical psychology things, Rorschach testing, what have you,

among the South American natives, or something of that sort. But, in any

case, I thought, okay, this was a branching choice. I could become a

specialist psychologist and do therapy and testing. Or I can go on this other

wild path. So, what I really decided I should do is get some similar training

in the social sciences. So, I went over and talked to the Sociology

Department. They had a unit there which was largely concerned with

polling, survey work. Well, that was interesting. So, I went over there. The

sociologist who was kind of behind that was Lundberg, who was very well

known at the time and a cohort of Stuart Dodd, who was probably the first

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mathematical sociologist in the world. But a very, very decent sort of chap,

who was quite open to all kinds of things. And the first project I got

involved in was, of all things, a study of Zionism, and especially of an anti-

Zionist group in the United States, which was made up, it turned out, of

people largely of German Jewish background. So, I found myself all of the

sudden learning about the Jewish subculture and doing interviews there.

Well, I won’t go into all of this, but it was a very intensive and interesting

five years on the sociological side. Among other things, I did a survey of

the effects of a science pavilion the U. S. government was paying for for

NSF. I had learned enough survey stuff to do that kind of research. I did

this rather intensive sociological cultural study of social movement. And I

picked up another little grant from vocational rehabilitation to look at some

testing and prediction issues with the mildly mentally retarded, as they were

called then, because I’d also gotten a psych job at Goodwill Industries that

had a program for them. I’m taking up too much time.

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Q: No, that’s fine, honestly. We have plenty of tapes. So after your VA

assistantship ran out, you managed to collect all of these side jobs to put

you through.

A: Actually, it was more than that, because I stayed on after my doctorate,

because they asked me, as a research assistant professor in the same

place. So, I moved ahead. I had that title while I was---at one point, I

think I had three separate research grants going. I had to move off campus,

set up offices there, run that, and, I think, encountered a fair amount of

annoyance from the sociologists. None of them had any research grants in

the whole department. This was known as ATaylor’s Enterprises,

Incorporated.@ At the end of the thing, or the last grant I was going to take,

I was told by the dean, who had been pressured by the sociologists, that I

couldn’t do this because I was a research faculty person. There were no

rules. So, I wrote to the vocational rehab agency who were funding the

grant, saying, ASorry, I’m going to have to turn your money down this

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second year.@ At which point all the shit hit the fan, and the dean backed

down. I learned a little bit about the internal politics of organizations, as

well.

Q: Let me back up and ask you, what was your dissertation? What was its

title?

A: I forget the title. There was a problem that---okay. At that time, there was

great interest in something called the social desirability set in the answering

of personality scale questions. The idea was that everybody thought these

were answers, true or false, to such questions as, AMy stools are black and

tarry,@ or AI don’t feel good in the morning,@ etc. But, it had become fairly

apparent that people answered them in terms of social desirability. Socially

undesirable items did not get answered nearly as often as socially desirable

ones. I did some later work that seemed to indicate strongly that this was

because people were using these tests, not as true or false, but as a way of

presenting themselves to others, and to themselves, in ways that are

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congruent with their self-concept and self-respect. But, anyhow, this was

back in the early days.

Q: Who was your advisor?

A: Allen Edwards.

Q: So you worked with a---you had a control group of students, or---?

A: No, not really. I was working with schizophrenics in the state hospital.

Q: Oh, okay.

A: Essentially what I did was to---well, what’s interesting here is that

schizophrenics answered such questions in a socially undesirable way, which

is how they have high scores on the schizophrenia scale. Was this because

they didn’t know what the social desirability norms were? Because they

were crazy? Or was it because they knew but were answering differently

anyhow? Or was it because they were just so scattered, they were putting

their marks down at random? Well, so what I did was to have them rate

the social desirability of the items, and I’d score the test and then do a

34

correlation within each individual between their true-false answers and the

social desirability ratings. So far as I know, this was the first use of a

computer in the Psychology Department for a dissertation. I had a friend---

this was the days when you programmed a computer by putting plugs in it.

So, we went down with cards, and he plugged it up so we could get the

correlations for, I think it was about a hundred subjects who filled out the

scales. What I showed was, yes, the people knew that they were answering

in a socially undesirable way. Well, they were doing it somewhat more

randomly than normal folks, but that didn’t account for their scores. Well,

there was more, but that was what it was. I ended up publishing it as an

article for Journal of Consulting.

Q: So, you stayed at Washington then from 1958 to1963 as a research

assistant professor. Did that involve any kind of teaching?

A: I taught one course, in the evening. I didn’t like it. Essentially, I’d only

been to graduate school or to Reed courses. Reed’s consisted of small

35

conferences of nine or ten people, or else tutorials, in which you sat and

went over a paper you’d written. It was very different from what people

were expecting at the undergraduate level, and I didn’t do it very well, and I

didn’t like it. I decided, no, I don’t want to do this.

Q: You mentioned a while earlier some of the things you were doing as a

research assistant professor. You had a number of projects and grants

going on, you said. What were, in general, some research interest areas

during that time? Were you still interested in mental illness, schizophrenia,

mental retardation?

A: I wasn’t terribly interested in mental retardation, but I wanted to learn a bit

about psychometrics. I’ve always had a feeling that, if you want to learn

about something, it is helpful to get involved in a research project, or write a

book about it, or do something. So, I really think of these as post-doctoral

years, in which I was just trying lots of things to get involved. But I was still

mainly interested in that whole area of culture and personality. I suppose I

36

might explain something here. One of the intriguing things about

anthropology is that it gives you such huge varieties of settings and lifestyles

and patterns, so that one starts asking questions about human behavior in a

much broader way than when you’re restricted to one culture. Because you

have such great variety in child-raising patterns across world cultures, such

varieties and assumptions, it theoretically is possible to test a lot of notions

about personality, in terms of the variation in culture. Therefore, I was still

wanting to get involved in cultural studies that allowed you to use them as

testing grounds for psychological theory. The second thing about that kind

of approach is you start asking questions about your own culture and

changes in it. In that tradition, you can ask about historical changes, what

the French call mentalites---views of the world, ways of thinking about

things. So, you can get a cross-sectional variety through anthropology, and

it also gives you a road into thinking historically. I don’t know whether that

makes sense.

37

Q: Well, certainly.

A: That was the area I was still interested in, because it also brought in the

issues from the humanities that I had learned. So, I was looking for some

place that would allow me the same frame for movement. When I finished

at the University of Washington, all those projects came to an end at the

same time. I had to write them up. I had, in the meantime, gotten

acquainted with an absolutely charming English woman, whom I ended up

marrying in 1963. And we decided to take a freighter out of Seattle and go

spend some time in England, and I’d write up the results of this. So, I

knew that I needed to move out of Seattle. Seattle, right now, is regarded

as a very glamorous place to be. Microsoft, and all those things.

Q: Starbucks!

A: Starbucks, yeah. But in 1963, it was a provincial capital and a bit of a

Aback of beyond.@ I’d been there all my life, except for Portland, which

was much the same. Little sojourns in San Francisco and around there. I

38

needed to get out. At about this point in my life, I heard that the Menninger

Foundation was looking for somebody to come and work with them on a

research project. Now, the Menninger Foundation is just about to go the

way of the dodo. But, at that time, that was equivalent, in my field, to be

asked to go to Harvard. So, I flew in, talked to them, got on my freighter,

got down to San Francisco, phoned---yes, I had the job---so, I went on to

England and came back in September.

Q: Before moving onto Menninger, I want to ask you about your second wife.

What was her name?

A: Thelma, Thelma Mary.

Q: And she’s still your wife?

A: Oh, yeah.

Q: What was she doing in the United States?

A: She grew up in England. She’s one month older than myself. Following the

war, during the period of privation, she came across with some girlfriends, all

39

of whom were physical therapists like herself. They went to St. John in New

Brunswick, worked there a year, and then came over to Vancouver. She

then moved down to work as a physical therapist in Seattle, and I met her in

Seattle. At that point, I don’t know, we met. She was certain she was

going to go back to England. So, we just kind of met and finally agreed

that no, she wasn’t. But I’d go to England with her for a while.

Q: And do you have children?

A: Yeah, two. The oldest is---we have lots of family obligations---so, Jonathan

Mark Bentley Taylor is his name, for all kinds of family reasons. He grew

up largely in Lawrence and Topeka, graduated from law school here, had

also picked up a fair amount of computer---I can’t call it training, because it

wasn’t in any formal sense. But, Microsoft has kind of a progression. You

can learn about computers, take their exams, get certified, and go up the

certification route. So, he, while doing a law degree, alongside that had

gotten a degree in religion and psychology here. Then went into law, got a

40

law degree. In the meantime, he had picked up enough so that he ended

up doing computer consulting. He decided he liked computer consulting

better than he liked the law, and ended up working for Microsoft, and is in

Dallas now in charge of doing systems work of some sort with several

corporations. But, he will be moving to Seattle, I think, in January or

February.

Q: I assume he had visited Seattle a good bit during his childhood. Is there

some desire to return to that area?

A: Well, it’s more Microsoft’s desire than his, but he really dislikes Dallas. So,

he’s happy with this, too. Yeah, we have a summer place up on an island

near Seattle that I share with my sister that we had visited.

Q: And your other child?

A: He’s my oldest. Then, five years later, we had a daughter, Hilary Joan

Carmichael Taylor. Again, a four-barrel name. She is currently working as

an interior designer in London. That’s nice for Thelma’s branch of the

41

family, because she goes out and she’s the granddaughter for Joan, who’s a

physician---Thelma’s sister. We share a house with Joan, that Thelma

inherited, which is nice, because we get back to England about once every

year or two. We’ll probably, now that I’ve retired, spend about six months

of the year over there.

Q: Good. Okay, so on to Kansas. You were at Menningers from 1963 through

1976. Tell me about some of your various positions and responsibilities and

areas of research there.

A: Okay. Menningers had a grant from vocational rehabilitation to work with

low income families in a mental health kind of way, to see if that kind of

intervention would help them overcome employment problems. Looking back

on it, it was a rather naïve proposition. But, at that time, there was a vast

amount of research that seemed to show that, the higher the class level---

well, the lower the class level, the more the mental health problems. And,

that poverty itself---and, remember, we’re in the War on Poverty in ‘63---

42

that poverty itself was related to mental health. The net result was that

Menningers wanted to see whether maybe giving mental health help would

create changes in poverty level. So, I came along because I’d had training

both as a clinical psychologist, and a five-year essentially post-doctoral in

sociology, and this made good sense. We ended up doing a quasi-

controlled study in which we had teams of psychologists and social workers,

or psychiatrists and social workers, going and getting acquainted with

people, talking with them about their life and feelings and problems and all

the rest, and, then, in half of the cases, if there was a need, offering to

help. We ended up setting a storefront mental health clinic over in east

Topeka.

Q: So, this was impoverished people just in Topeka?

A: In Topeka. We were working in an area of east Topeka. In the meantime,

there was another study on the effects of urban displacement upon poor

people that Bill Key was doing, in which he was doing largely survey work

43

on the mental health implications of urban renewal, the mental health

implications of highway displacement, and whether offering some kinds of

help and support during those periods made a difference.

Q: Did you ever have a private practice?

A: No. No, it’s absurd. I went through clinical training, spent all that time. I

never went into practice at all.

Q: I’m sure you worked with patients at Menningers in various capacities.

A: Not really.

Q: More research?

A: It was all research. Of course, the closest thing I got was this home

interviewing, because I went out on a few of those and worked with the case

that was having problems, like that. No, I think the closest thing beyond

that was when I was working with Goodwill and I was working with mentally

retarded clients.

Q: How long did the project on poverty last?

44

A: It was about five years.

Q: Were there other projects of note that you worked on there?

A: Well, it wasn’t quite a project. But, by the time we were through---because

the War on Poverty, you know, although the inklings were becoming clear in

‘63, there wasn’t an organized force---but somewhere along that period,

monies became available to communities to set up all kinds of things, and

they were unique in that they didn’t go through the city government. They

were given to the poor themselves to do things. So, we ended up setting

up a kind of community center, which was designed to empower the poor.

So, there were a number of little things like this going on. Louis Zurcher

came along, who was just fresh out of Arizona, and he took on that kind of

stuff, working there. Bill Key was doing this. And, then, in the middle of all

this, a tornado came to Topeka. So, all of us took a few months off to

investigate the psycho-social effects of the tornado. Key and Zurcher and

myself ended up writing a book---I was the senior author of it.

45

Q: Entitled Tornado, right?

A: Right. Gardner Murphy, who was the psychologist in charge, was pushing

us to get it out fast, but it didn’t get out quite that fast. Even so, it still gets

referenced, still gets read. It was, for my mind, the closest thing that I had

done to the interests I had, because you could look at the impact of this

huge disaster on the culture of the community. We were able to talk to

people who were victims right afterwards, look at the effects of it on them,

look at the effects of it on spontaneous organization---there was a huge

amount of volunteer activity---try to make sense of the wholly different

mentality that the community had after the disaster experience, and also

tease out why that view of life faded so quickly. Among other things, why

everybody hates the Red Cross right after disaster. Why some people get

involved in volunteer activities, and some people do not. Lots of interesting

little questions there. We ended up with some kind of a little cohesive

model of the disaster experience. It was kind of nice.

46

Q: You also wrote another book during the time you were at Menningers,

Community Worker.

A: Yeah. That was based on the stuff we were doing with the poor. And I

was arguing for a new model for working with these groups who are in very

deprived circumstancesCwhich was essentially much more of a social work

kind of approach to thingsBin which reality needs had to be worked on the

same time you were dealing with psychological needs, in which you might

utilize indigenous people to act in ways like aides would act, you know, to

support the activities, etc. It was kind of a grandiose scheme, because we

had a grandiose opportunity. For a while, the War on Poverty was getting a

lot of attention, but didn’t thereafter.

Q: To back up just a moment, how was the move to Kansas for you and your

wife? Had you ever been to Kansas before?

A: No. And, surprise! It did not have a terribly good reputation on the West

Coast.

47

Q: Or the East Coast!

A: Yes. It was a matter of astonishment to all the mental health people that

there was this place called AMenningers@ in a place called AKansas.@ It

seemed to be incongruent. Well, like so many things I believed when I was

twenty, I don’t quite believe that now. But, there it was. So, anyhow,

Thelma and I were going to come for five years, get the benefits from

Menningers, and move on. I was so busy, and I really liked Menningers so

much at that time---it was just a hugely bubbling place with people whose

works you’d read, or who had just left whose works you’d read. The

training program in clinical psychology, the major texts on the Rorschach,

was written at Menningers, through their work with the mental hospital here.

It was a beacon. So, there you were. There was a kind of openness and

communication across disciplines, and all the rest of this. I’d have to say

that Reed was a hugely stimulating place. The University of Washington

was less so, because everybody was in their own little corners. Menningers

48

was about as stimulating as Reed. So, this was a very good atmosphere

for me.

Q: Did your wife continue to work in her field?

A: Yeah. I think the move to Kansas and to Topeka was far harder on her

than it was on me. We had been in England for five months for something.

Then, all the sudden, from England to Topeka with no roles for her, no

community built in. It was hard.

Q: You were recently married at that point, and had no children?

A: Right. The saving grace for her is that she’s a very keen musician. She

really had wanted to become a violinist, and so she joined the orchestra,

switched to the viola, and that gave her a built-in setting, as well as a work

setting in physical therapy.

Q: So, you came to KU in 1976. What led to that move?

A: Well, what had happened at Menningers was that, somewhat earlier, there

was a whole shift in the management. There had been a kind of palace

49

revolution. A group of young Turks in the psychoanalytic institute had

ousted Dr. Karl. Dr. Will Menninger died. Gardner Murphy retired. What

was left, then, was the second generation of Menningers. I won’t go off into

the problem of succession in private firms, but you saw all of them occurring

at Menningers. The first generation came up the hard way. The second

generation---well, when I went, it struck me a little bit as if the Menningers

of Topeka were like the Duke of Northumberland, in that they expected the

world to come to them. And, the world didn’t work that way over time. The

net result at the time was that you had a huge amount of in-fighting going

on. The crisis of succession at the top level was met with all kinds of

power plays among the psychiatrists. The psychoanalysts especially, which

were the top of the heap in that particular situation, are not noted as humble

and placatory individuals. I sat on the---well, Dr. Roy, who was the

president, put together an executive council, and I was on it. I watched as

a small cabal within there managed to pick off about two-thirds of the people

50

who were on the executive council and replace them with their own people.

That happened to me. At which point, I said, AOkay, I’m going to have to

find somewhere else.@ So, there I was, two kids in school. I had been

enough disrupted in my own youth that I didn’t want to put that on them.

Thelma was very happily ensconced in the orchestra, and had a good job.

I’d been promoted up to Director of Research there. So, I was either

looking for Topeka or for Seattle. And ‘76 was a very, very bad year for

hiring anybody. It was a recession year, and budgets were being cut. So,

when the University of Kansas offered me a position, I went and interviewed

and I talked to people. It started off as a position in social work. Actually, I

was also interviewed in psychology and in sociology. But, I thought, social

work really (because of the interest I’d developed in poverty, and my larger

interest in culture and personality) seemed more to the point. So, at that

point, I made the move over. Since I’d published a fair amount and who

51

knows what else, they offered me a full professorship with tenure, and that’s

what I took.

Q: In the School of Social Welfare.

A: Yeah.

Q: And, at that point, were you made Director of Research and Development

Programs, or did that come later?

A: Well, I’m surprised that title is there. Because, in fact, that was something

that I went into at the very beginning. The notion was that we were going

to do research and development programs. The trouble was that none of

the people in the School of Social Welfare had any training in research.

Q: They were more field oriented?

A: Field oriented people. There were two psychologists there, but they were

not particularly interested in it. In other words, it was illusory. The Ph.D.

was not the usual degree for social worker faculty. There were some, but

not many. They were all involved in practice, too.

52

Q: They had M.S.W. degrees?

A: They were then. The field has changed considerably in the twenty-five or

so years. So, I saw that there was absolutely nothing there to work with

on developing research. So, I came, did a study or two, and then got rather

intrigued by the---well, there were some other things. About that time, I

went on the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) Council and ended

up eventually as chairman of one of the study groups at NIMH, which was

nice, because it kept me in contact with people in the social science arena.

But, here I decided, by and large, to work on my own stuff. I did get a

grant from NIMH, looking at the historical epidemiology of a number of

mental health issues---suicide, homicide, heart disease, in so far as I could

measure that with angina records and so on.

Q: So, the move to Lawrence was not so traumatic. Or did you stay living in

Topeka?

A: Did for a year, then moved here.

53

Q: What do you remember about Lawrence at the time, when you moved here

in >76?

A: It was small and it was less cosmopolitan. We moved to what was then the

outskirts. The road was not much more developed than where we were.

We were looking over blank fields. Now we look over housing.

Q: So, you live in the same place?

A: Yeah. One of the architecture faculty designed the house, and we bought it

at the framing period and moved in. I don’t know, the nice thing about a

unique design is that it’s a unique design. The bad thing about it is, being

unique, it’s been untested. There’s a lot of debugging that goes on. So,

that’s what we did, and that’s what we’ve been doing with the housing. The

town itself has really become a joy. I do like Lawrence. And every time we

go back to Seattle, and we spent, what, three months in England, I come

back here and breathe a sigh of relief. Good books, and good dining, and

friends. It’s a lovely little town, that doesn’t have the hassles and the traffic

54

and all the rest of it. I don’t know, Starbucks is omnipresent everywhere.

In Victoria Station, there are two, count them, two Starbucks cafes. I kind of

like it, because I remember when it was only down in the public market in

Seattle. It’s a little feeling of home.

Q: At KU, what have been some of the classes that you taught over the years?

A: Essentially, I taught two kinds of classes. First of all, as a psychologist in

the School of Social Welfare---well, the School of Social Welfare, although

they would probably not like this description, is essentially a vocational

training class. The first year, they have a certain number of courses that

are required for all students by the Council on Social Work Education. The

one they have hated most is research, because that’s not social workers.

So, I taught research. The second one, which is again is a little difficult for

them, although not nearly as much, is Ahuman behavior in the social

environment,@ which is everything social workers need to know about

psychology, sociology, everything. So, I taught that, too. Earlier, I was

55

mainly teaching research. Secondarily, I taught human behavior. Now, it’s

swung the other way. For a while, I was also teaching and working with

their new doctoral program, and teaching doctoral students about research

methods. I quit doing that about five or six years ago.

Q: Does the School of Social Welfare still have a Ph.D. program?

A: Yeah.

Q: So, they’ve emphasized more research over the years.

A: Yeah. Now, that has changed tremendously, because with the Ph.D.

program, they moved in two directions. One is, they want students trained

in research, trained very much largely in statistics---a psychological

approach to research. One of the struggles I had was to also get them to

incorporate the kind of qualitative research you get with anthropology---

Q: Sociology?

A: Sociology sometimes, and so on. So, that is also taught, and I think the

students prefer that approach to the other.

56

Q: Have you had any courtesy appointments to the other departments?

A: No. Actually, I’ve not really sought out any. I did not feel that anything

going there was, to my knowledge, something that I was particularly

interested in.

Q: What have been some other research areas that you’ve developed over your

time here at KU?

A: Well, one of the reasons that I came to KU, and was okay with it, was not

because it was particularly stimulating in the interdisciplinary areas I was

concerned with. As a matter of fact, it was a desert. The possibility,

however, was that it would allow me time to do a project that I had a lot of

interest in myself, which was thinking through some of the issues and

developing a---it’s a field that has a misleading name---psycho-history, in

which you look at the patterns within historical change and try to look at

possible causal things with them. So, I spent a fair amount of time, without

any research support particularly, except for the first epidemiological grant,

57

which enabled me to learn about epidemiology and time-series analysis. But

mostly it’s been spent reading and writing and doing my own stuff, kind of

quietly in the corner. And so I wasn’t really pushing to get too involved in

everything else.

Q: Are there any former students that you had close relationships with?

A: Not really.

Q: Most of the students, then, have gone on to be field workers.

A: Field workers. And the portion who turned out for the doctorate program

was for research in social work practice, which, although I might have ideas

to contribute, was not really my own cup of tea.

Q: This is always a question fraught with a certain danger. Any University

committee work that stands out?

A: No, absolutely not. I served on a couple, but wasn’t really involved with

that. As a matter of fact, if I had to put it in a straightforward nutshell, in my

career I came to KU and then, for a while---although I did things and got

58

involved in NIMH and published some---I did a little book on using

microcomputers in social agencies---but, it was as if I was in KU, doing my

job, but not really of it.

Q: I’m very interested to talk with you about your video project and traveling,

the AUndiscovered Europe@ series. Well, I have lots of questions, but I

guess I’ll just let you talk a little bit about how that came about, and where

it’s headed now.

A: Okay. Well, basically, my project on history had gotten me very much

involved in learning more than would be expected about history, especially

European history, because that’s where the records were that I had access

to. Also, the fact that my wife is English and we went over often got me a

bit involved. So, I’ve not given up on the history thing yet. Also, I’ve

always had a fascination, every since my first introduction to computers as a

doctoral student, with the implications of new technology, and what was

possible, which is one reason I wrote the book about microcomputers. On

59

the grounds that, since I didn’t know anything about it, I’d write a book

about it.

Q: Can I ask you, I just wondered if that had anything to do with Seattle.

Was there, growing up in Seattle, some kind of culture of technology that led

to its tie with Microsoft? Or is that all purely coincidental?

A: I don’t know. It’s a little hard to tell on the workings of things. It’s a little

like asking, AWell, Steve Jobs went to Reed---is that. . .?@ You know. I

suppose it is and it isn’t.

Q: That’s all right. I was just wondering, with the Seattle background.

A: Well, there was a lot of technological interest growing up, because of

Boeing, I think. But, I’d be stretching to say there was anything there. The

issue with technology rose again here partly with computers, but partly also

because of the digital revolution in video. When I wrote the book about

microcomputers, I published it in 1980, which was right before the first PC

came out. I’d read somewhere about microcomputers on a chip, and so I

60

started pursuing that to see what was there. This was a Radio Shack thing

back in ‘78, or somewhere in there. I think, to be honest, the interest in

computers came about because I was working in research at Menningers,

and it was such a total pain to deal with big computer centers. So, the

notion that you could have a microcomputer you could use yourself for

statistics, instead of having all that stuff, was very, very appealing. And,

that’s what got me interested. When I got into that and wrote the book, I

found myself talking about what was coming. You could talk about the

possibilities of something like computing at a distance, message exchanging

at a distance, Internet-like things, databases, computers taking over

publishing. And, in 1978, these ideas were not widely spread. So, the

book was kind of useful for a lot of people. It got reprinted, although I don’t

know if that’s official, modified and reprinted by the Department of Highway

Transportation for their engineers. They were interested in it. So, anyhow, I

saw the same thing was coming with video, changing from a situation in

61

which you needed a 500,000 dollar investment in a studio to a 1,000 dollar

investment---I’m overdoing it. Four thousand will get you there. In the

past, one of the things I’d done at the University of Washington was to have

a project that used time-lapse photography for crowd flow. We had a lot of

stock left over, and we had a couple of Bolex 16-milliliter cameras. So, very

much it was like, AHey, fellows, let’s put on a show!@ We got the Bolexes

out and we tried to do a documentary about the project. And that was fun,

because you have to write it---well, lots of it. When the time came here,

and I saw this coming, and I talked to Ann about---the dean of the school--

-about starting a small unit for documentary stuff. Well, in the past, I’d

gotten her in the school, along with another colleague, to start getting little

computer workshops going, and stuff, before most people were into it. So,

she took my word that this was going to be another good thing. We got this

little unit going---I can’t say it worked out as successfully. But we did get

KU students in, and they taught me how to use a camera, and how to edit.

62

We started moving over more and more editing into the computer. So,

when we lost our last chap who was working with us---while he was

working with us, he was doing a documentary on the gay rights legislation

here in town, so he went off and did that more. We went ahead, and I

said, AWell, look. Let me try to do all these. I’ll do the writing and the

editing and the narration. I think I can, I think I can!@ So, we did it, and it

worked okay for the level of stuff we needed. Then, when retirement came

along, I said to myself, this is really kind of an awakening period. I said,

okay, I can think about this retirement as simply withdrawal from the work

world. And I’ve seen all these people who spend twenty-four hours a day

thinking about golf. I couldn’t imagine it. Then, it occurred to me that there

was another way of looking at it. Forgive me, but this is how I put it to

myself, and it’s not a very politic way of putting it: AThese suckers are

paying me to do anything I want!@ So, what do I want to do? What parts

of my life have been neglected, that I really want to go do? Well, I haven’t

63

done enough traveling. I thought of going back to marine biology, but I

discovered that I really didn’t like scuba diving. You know, I had a little

episode where I thought, no, no, this isn’t me. But I really enjoyed doing

the video stuff, so why I don’t I form a video production company? What

would I do with that? Well, I want to travel. Maybe I can put together a

travel series. So, that’s what I did. Somebody else pointed out to me that,

if it’s a for profit company, then the expenses of travel are income tax

deductible, which was another nice thing. But, to be honest, it wasn’t a

motivating thing, because I find that I can travel fairly cheaply with frequent

flyer miles, and so on. With friends abroad, it’s easy. I was in London for,

what was it?---a third of November, December, part of January. A friend

offered us her house while she was on a cruise. So, it’s not terribly

expensive to do this. And that’s how we got into it. But it’s a real joy,

because I’m doing what every student is absolutely trained against. It’s

always a collaborative endeavor, making a video. You need a script person.

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You need a narrator. You need a writer. You need an editor. Well, I do it

all, and that really is fun. I showed the one on Burgundy, when I was in

England, to one of the people who’s tied in with BBC. And he said, and I

think he was overstating it, AGee, you’ve done the work of twenty different

people in here, and you’ve done it well.@

Q: That’s very nice.

A: That was a very nice feeling.

Q: And so you contacted PBS?

A: No. What I did to was to go over and talk to---well, hey. Here I am, at

this point seventy-one, almost seventy-two, trying to break into television

with no training, no background. If I walk into your average television

station and say, AHey, I would like to be an intern,@ well you know what

kind of reaction I would get. I mean, respectful, after all. Actually, that’s

one of the pains about being seventy-two. Everybody’s so damned

respectful that there’s not much openness to it. But, with this, I could go

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around and say, AHey, look at this.@ The difficulty I found was that people

didn’t look at it unless you had some kind of friend. So, I did have that kind

of inroad into the local TV station in Topeka. They looked at it, and said,

AHey, let’s try it, and see whether people like it. And, then, if they do, give

us a schedule for finishing the series, and we’ll make it available to PBS

stations and so a certain amount of buzzing about it, connections, and so

on.@

Q: So, you approached the station first?

A: Approached the station. There are really two ways into this. One is through

the station route, because they have a mechanism that allows stations to put

up things they produce for work regionally and across the nation. And then

you have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting kinds of things. CPB that

has its own production facilities, or else farms things out. But there are only

a small group of producer studios that it farms to. And if you want to get in

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there, you have to affiliate with a producer studio, and I’m not in a situation

where I particularly want to go and schmooze, and all the rest of that.

Q: And your wife accompanies you on these trips?

A: Yeah, yeah, and actually does things even with that. She’s a wonderful

publicist. She has a great head for what’s going to work and what doesn’t.

With her musical background, she knows all the musicians in town. I really

much prefer to record my own music for this stuff, and so that works out

very well. Also, I came down with a kidney stone in London and was in the

hospital for about a week, and she went over to France during that period

and got some footage that I needed. Yeah, so it works out well.

Q: Where is your series at this point in time?

A: Sidetracked. What happened is that I’m working now on the footage I shot

in London. It’s about off-season London. It’s about London as a city. The

trouble with tourism is that there is a certain number of landmarks you’ve

got to go see, and then you’ve done London. What you don’t see is the

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organic city, what it’s about and how it got there, and all the rest of that.

So, I wanted to look at the subtext, so to speak, of London. And, I’m

working on that. But I also have taken on a contract to do an instructional

video, and so I spent the last two days shooting for that. The reason that I

forgot about one o’clock was that I was in the middle of editing some

footage to get a sense of what that was like.

Q: What is this instructional video about? What is the area?

A: Okay, it’s for a group over at the School of Social Welfare that have a grant

for training to work with foster children. We had a little focus group going,

plus a meeting with a small group of foster kids, and they put on a skit. So,

I went over and I videotaped it. What was beautiful and rich was the focus

group in which the foster kids talked about their life experiences in foster

care. I got some beautiful footage there, and so I thought, oh, well, I’ll just

try one thing. It’s very interesting. I think that there’s actually a PBS-style

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documentary latent in this stuff---that absolutely miserable foster care

system.

Q: So, you have some continued involvement with your department, then?

A: Oh, yeah, sure. They’re lovely people, the social workers. I look around

and I hear about this explosion in the German Department, or feuding in

Computer Science, or the absolutely disgraceful stuff in Anthropology, so it’s

very nice to be in a quiet department.

Q: Where people get along.

A: People get along reasonably well.

Q: Are you looking even beyond Europe for your series?

A: No. Basically, I think, what I want to do is the one on London---the one on

Burgundy we’ve gotten done---the one called ANorth of York,@ which is

about the border area of England, and one on the Midi region in France,

around Carcascone. And I have the footage for all that done. So, now it’s

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just a matter of writing and editing, getting all that going, and finding the

time to do that.

Q: And you sell your videos as well?

A: Yeah. The idea here is that we do the video, we give it free to any PBS

station that wants to broadcast it, and there’s a thirty second announcement

in it that if you want a copy of this video plus another thirty minutes on how

to take such a trip---what you need to arrange to rent a villa in France---

what you need to do to have a u-drive canal boat, etc.---send so much

money to---A24.95, plus shipping and handling, to Sea Roads,@ and you’ll

get it. I also have a little web page going for that. So, when I do those

four---and I really have enough for a fifth one around the area of northern

England---then I think I’m going to be through with that particular project. I

have some others that I’m kind of intrigued by, called AWhen Kansas Was

Cutting Edge,@ which may just be of local interest, I don’t know. It has to

do with the Populist era, when William Allen White was writing, and

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Menningers was setting up their brand-new thing. There was a whole heroic

period, I think, when Kansas really was regarded as kind of a leading state.

Even Prohibition was really regarded as a public health progressive matter.

I stumbled across a very interesting way to do it---at least I think it is---over

in a little town. We’re in the middle of Kansas in which a folk artist had

created a whole series of sculptures which were essentially the objectification

of Populist ideas. I’m blocking on the name of it. Do you know the place

I’m thinking of?

Q: I don’t.

A: Oh, well. It’s the AGarden of Eden@ at Lucas, Kansas

Q: Do you have grandchildren?

A: No.

Q: Well, is there anything else you’d like to add?

A: Look, I’m sure I’ll have reflections at the staircase afterwards, but no, I don’t

have any more.

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Q: Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed it.

A: I’ve enjoyed it having a chance to do so. You’re a very good interviewer

and very good listener.

Q: Well, thank you very much. I really enjoy this job.