AN INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN SLADE

Interviewer: Jewell Willhite

Oral History Project

Endacott Society

University of Kansas

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NORMAN SLADE

B.S., Wildlife Management, Kansas State University, 1965

M.S., Wildlife Biology, Utah State University, 1969

Ph.D., Ecology, Utah State University, 1971

Service at the University of Kansas

First came to KU in 1972

Assistant Professor of Systematics and Ecology and Assistant Curator of Mammals, 1972-1976

Associate Professor of Systematics and Ecology and Associate Curator of Mammals, 1976-81

Professor of Systematics and Ecology and curator of Mammals, 1981-2010

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AN INTERVIEW WITH NORMAN SLADE

Interviewer: Jewell Willhite

Q: I am speaking with Norman Slade, who retired in 2010 as professor of Ecology and

Evolutionary Biology and curator at the Natural History Museum at the University of

Kansas. We are in Lawrence, KS, on July 5, 2010. Where were you born and in what

year?

A: I was born in 1943 in Wichita, KS.

Q: What were your parents’ names?

A: My father’s name was David Lauren Slade and my mother’s name was Ella Catherine

Slade. Her maiden name was Sharp.

Q: What was their educational background?

A: Well, let’s see. My grandfather homesteaded on a rural farm that I grew up on. It is now

almost in Wichita, so it’s not so rural any more. My father was born in 1898, but on a

farm, a homestead farm. So I’m not even sure he finished high school. I know that he

went to high school for a while and he played some football and things. My mother

graduated from what is now Wichita East High School. It was then Wichita High School

with what was then called a Normal Training Certificate, which allowed her at age 16 to

go out and start teaching public school. So she was a public school teacher for all of her

life. Except the state of Kansas decided they would not recognize Normal Training

Certificates as appropriate certification in the 1960s. So she went back to school, going

to school at night and summers and got a degree eventually from Friends University. In

1965 she graduated. The reason I’m saying that is because I graduated from college in

1965. My mother and I graduated in the same year.

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Q: Was your father a farmer?

A: Well, he was a farmer until World War II. In World War II he was old enough that he

was not going to go into the military. So he went to work for Boeing Aircraft in Wichita.

He worked for Boeing Aircraft to make enough money to afford to farm was basically the

way it worked. Our farm was relatively small. My grandfather’s homestead was 160

acres. That was divided, then, among all of his children, and he had I think seven

surviving children. So everybody had about 20 acres. One of my aunts had 40 acres.

When I say we farmed, we farmed that land for my uncles and aunts. By Kansas

standards, it was a very small farm. But it was okay.

Q: Did you have brothers and sisters?

A: I have a brother and a sister. My brother is 20 years older than I am and my sister was 22

years older than I. So I do have a brother and a sister, but they had left our family home

by the time I was born. I have a nephew who is a year older than I am, my sister’s son.

In a way, I am an only child, but I do have a brother and a sister.

Q: So you grew up on this place.

A: I grew up on this farm. It is now 55th

Street South in Wichita. When I grew up there it

was a dirt road. It is now paved and there is a high school across the road from this farm,

etc. It’s very different. The house I lived in until I was in the third grade did not have

running water. It had electricity but no running water. It was actually pretty primitive.

This was 1950 and almost everyone had running water, except us.

Q: Where did you go to elementary school?

A: I actually went to kindergarten in Wichita at Stanley Elementary School. It is near Aley

Park in Wichita. My mother and some of her friends had to car pool us in to

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kindergarten. Then I went to elementary school for two years at Enterprise Elementary

School. That’s a Wichita school. I guess technically when I went there it was a

Sedgwick County school. It wasn’t in the city. Then my parents built a house that did

have running water and we moved onto our property and I went to Haysville Elementary

School in Haysville, Kansas.

Q: Did you become interested in the natural world as a child?

A: Oh, yes. My dad was a farmer. He grew up on the farm. It was very primitive. So he

hunted and fished, etc. He was an avid outdoors person. So that’s what I grew up as. If I

wanted to go hunting or wanted to just go walk, that was just my back yard. I just walked

out and did whatever I wanted to do. So, yes, I have a real affinity for being outdoors.

Q: Where did you go to junior high and high school?

A: Haysville Elementary was an eight-year school. So for one year people from my part of

rural Sedgwick County were bussed to Truesdell Junior High in Wichita. Then the next

year as a sophomore they bussed us to Wichita West. The next year Wichita South

opened and that’s where I went for my junior year. Then the final year Campus High

School, which is a rural high school in Sedgwick County, opened. So I graduated from

Campus High School in 1961.

Q: Were you involved in extracurricular activities in high school?

A: Ones that you would talk about in an oral history….I don’t actually remember a lot of

what I did. I was in some clubs I know, German Club. But I participated in sports,

primarily in the summer. I played on baseball teams and played some church league

basketball and things like that. The only varsity sport I was ever involved in was I played

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golf as a junior at Wichita South and then I played golf at Campus High School on the

golf team. I think that was it as far as sports.

Q: Do you remember influential teachers from those days?

A: I can’t point to one who was really….My favorite subject was math. So I can remember

three mathematics teachers. One’s name was Mr. Widner. He was the math teacher at

Truesdell Junior High. He was just a very interesting character. I remember him. Then I

had a math teacher at West. I believe his last name was Penner. He was a very good

teacher and he was really encouraging with math. Then at Campus High School I was

ready to take calculus. But Campus High didn’t offer that. As a sort of a substitute, the

math teacher there, who was a man named Orr, offered to let some of us come in at seven

o’clock in the morning—I know it was before school began—and we didn’t do calculus

but we did a little bit of advanced algebra and we did some statistics. As it turns out,

that’s what I do now. So I would point to those people, I guess, as people I can

remember from high school.

Q: Did you have honors in high school?

A: I was a National Merit finalist. I got a National Merit scholarship. So that was one thing.

I was the second high academic grade point average in the high school I graduated from.

The high school that I graduated from was this rural high school. Haysville is not an

upscale community. Many of us were from farms. We just had a reunion and there were

six or eight Ph.Ds out of that group. So it is amazing to me that a very working class,

sort of lower middle class produced all those people who did really well academically.

Q: Did you have jobs in addition to working on the farm?

A: When we get to college I can talk about a job.

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Q: I mean like during high school.

A: No, that’s all I ever did. I worked on the farm driving tractors in the spring, summer and

fall.

Q: When did you graduate from high school?

A: 1961.

Q: Was it always assumed that you would go on to college?

A: Yes, I think so. Like I said, I don’t even know if my dad graduated from high school.

But I think he realized education was important. But my mother was a dedicated

educator. So in her mind I was always going to go on to college. Neither my brother or

my sister went to college. That was partly because they grew up during the Depression,

in the 1930s. Then when my brother was about of college age, World War II broke out

and he enlisted in the Navy. My mother, I know, wanted me to go to college. It was

always assumed that I would go to college. Now what I was going to do in college was

quite unknown. The idea that I would get a Ph.D. was probably pretty fantastic.

Q: I suppose you went to college right after high school.

A: Yes, I did.

Q: Where did you go?

A: Kansas State University. I was in interested in Wichita State, Kansas State and the

University of Kansas. At Wichita State I got a scholarship in aeronautical engineering.

But I somehow I decided I wasn’t interested in that. At Kansas University I got one of

the honorific scholarships. But they decided that my parents made enough money that I

wouldn’t get any financial assistance. I would just get the honor. At Kansas State I was

offered a scholarship in chemistry with some money. By the time I graduated from high

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school I loved mathematics, but I didn’t know anything you could do with mathematics,

except maybe teach high school, and I knew I didn’t want to do that. So I entered K-

State as a chemistry major. But it was only for one semester. One of the assignments for

an English class was to write an essay on what you would do with your career. It didn’t

have to be practical, just what would you do if you could do anything. I said I would be a

professional hunter. That’s what I really loved to do was to go out and be out of doors.

That led me into wildlife management. So after one semester as a chemistry major I

switched my major to wildlife biology.

Q: You lived at K-State.

A: Yes. I lived in a rooming house, a boarding house for three years. I actually got married

after three years at Kansas State. My wife graduated from K-State but she graduated in

three years. So she began teaching school and we got married.

Q: Do you remember influential teachers from K-State?

A: Well, there are a lot of them from K State. Bob Robel became my major professor in

wildlife. So he was definitely a big influence on me. But there were a number of other

people who were influential too. One of the English teachers was a person named

Adamany. His last name was Adamany. He was probably a little bit crazy, but a very

interesting guy. He’s one who encouraged the students to do something that they really

had passion for.

Q: Did you have jobs while you were in college?

A: Oh yes, I did. Not while school was in session but during the summer. The first summer,

the summer of 1962, I got a job working as a student trainee for the U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service at a wildlife refuge in Turrell, Arkansas. It is Wapanocca National

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Wildlife Refuge. So I applied for this job and I had no experience that I thought was

worthwhile. I knew how to drive trucks. I knew how to drive tractors. I knew about

agriculture. It turns out that at a wildlife refuge in the summer that’s what we did. We

planted crops and worked on levees and ran heavy machinery in preparation for the

migration of waterfowl. So in the wintertime this area was all flooded. They grew crops

in the summer and then they were flooded and the geese and the ducks came in the

wintertime. So actually the training I had on the farm was just exactly on-the-job training

for working on this wildlife refuge.

Then the summer after my sophomore year I thought I had arranged to work at a

wildlife refuge in Utah. But the paperwork got all fouled up and that didn’t happen. So I

went back and spent the summer in Wichita. I went to summer school at Friends

University, just picking up a couple of extra classes. When the summer school was over I

just went to the employment office and asked for work. So I worked for two days in a

grocery warehouse. The longest job I remember was working for a person who for a

living tore down houses. And they tore them down piece by piece and saved all the

pieces, including even the nails. We were straightening nails and saving them. That guy

called me. He was looking for a younger person to be a partner. So he called me at the

end of the summer, which I thought that was quite a compliment. But I said I was going

back to school. Then the summer after my junior year—that was when I got married.

We lived in Manhattan then for that summer. I worked on a research project at the

university. I had a summer fellowship kind of thing, undergraduate fellowship. So that’s

what I did then.

Q: When did you graduate from K-State?

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A: In 1965.

Q: And you graduated Magna Cum Laude.

A: I think so. Whatever. It was some kind of honor. I’m not too good on these honors.

Q: Then what did you do after that?

A: Then I went directly to Utah State University in Logan, Utah, and began graduate school

in the summer. We moved out there in the summer.

Q: How did you happen to choose that school?

A: Bob Robel, the guy who was my advisor at K-State, had graduated from Utah State. It’s

a very good school in natural resource management and ecology. It’s not much of a

school in a lot of other areas, but it’s an excellent school in that. And my wife’s parents

at that time lived in Ogden, Utah. They lived in Wichita and she started to K-State. They

moved to Utah. So she hadn’t lived near her parents for three years and I thought it

would be nice for her to be closer to them. And it’s a good school and I love the western

United States.

There’s one other part. I was accepted to graduate school while I was a junior in

college. It was bizarre. I didn’t take the GREs. I just submitted my transcript. What I

was really doing was writing them and asking them for materials and indicating I’d be

interested. But, again, they sort of got things a little bit mixed up. So I was actually

admitted. When I finally finished my senior year and we went out to Utah, I took the

GREs like when I arrived in Logan. So they were pretty much irrelevant to my getting

into graduate school. It was good school and they accepted me and I had a good

fellowship there.

Q: What was your major?

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A: I worked on a major degree and the major there was wildlife management, I think. Then

I also eventually did a Ph.D. and the Ph.D. is in ecology.

Q: Were you working outdoors with this kind of major?

A: Oh, yes. My master’s thesis is on use of water catchment basins by mourning doves. So

I spent from dawn till dusk in the semi desert area of Utah watching mourning doves,

banding some of them and making habitat maps etc. Then my Ph.D. is on population

ecology of Uinta ground squirrels. These are ground squirrels that live up in the

mountains. Logan is in the mountains. So there was a forestry field station that was up

Logan Canyon. We went out on snowshoes at the start of the season and we were out

there until the squirrels hibernated in the fall.

Q: So were you counting these squirrels trying to determine if they were increasing or

decreasing?

A: Well, sort of. The main focus of the project was on the influence of animal behavior on

population dynamics. So we were looking at their social behavior, how aggressive they

were towards one another, etc., and trying to figure out how their social system impacted

their reproductive performance and the survival of the young and the eventual settling on

the area, etc. My part of it was all numbers. So I should tell you that if I had known that

I was going to get a Ph.D., I might have gone into mathematics. The second quarter I

was at Utah State I took a class in population ecology. What it was, a mixture of all this

biology I was interested in and mathematics. So I was home. I knew what I wanted to

do. As it turned out, I spent at least two extra years on my master’s degree because when

we were designing the project we had gone to the statistics department and a fellow who

was a new faculty member in statistics showed me how we could use the software and the

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analytical techniques that he had done for his Ph.D. It would apply to analyzing my data

on mourning doves. The problem was he was the only person in the country who could

analyze the data. I took my data to him and it wasn’t his first priority. So this whole

thing just kind of continued and continued. I just decided that I wasn’t going to be that

dependent on somebody else. So I started taking classes in statistics. I ended up with a

Ph.D. in ecology and enough academic credits to have a master’s in statistics. I never did

a thesis or anything.

Q: So you didn’t actually get masters?

A: I did get a master’s in wildlife biology.

Q: When was that?

A: The master’s degree was in 1969. I had completed everything for a Ph.D. in the fall of

1971. But Utah State doesn’t have winter graduation ceremonies. So the official date on

my degree is 1972, which explains an anomaly in my vita. I did a post doc from 1971 to

1972. How can you do a post doc before you’ve done the Doc, you see?

Q: Who are some of influential teachers you recall from graduate school?

A: Ah, boy there were a lot of them from graduate school. Fred Wagner was the person who

got me totally turned on to population ecology. He was the person who taught this

population ecology class. So in terms of my intellectual development, I probably owe

more to Fred Wagner that to any of my official major professors. The major professor

for my master’s degree was Jess Low. He was the director of the Cooperative Wildlife

Research Unit at Utah State. So he provided a lot of financial and logistical support, etc.,

not so much intellectual input. But he was very supportive of me. Then for my Ph.D.,

my major professor was Allen Stokes. He was just a fantastic person, a very good

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scientist but also just a great person, a Quaker. In Logan Utah—I was there in the 60s—

so this is the Vietnam War. When there was chaos everywhere else, in Logan when they

had a peace demonstration, my major professor led it. It was just a peace demonstration.

It was excellent. Doing that in Mormon country is pretty courageous. Then the person

who became my thesis director was David Balph. David was actually Al Stokes’ student.

They had worked on this ground squirrel project for Dave’s dissertation. They had kept

the project going. But Al Stokes had cataracts. When we did a lot of this work on the

snow, it caused him to go snow blind. So he no longer worked in the field. And Dave

did. Dave was the one who supervised all the work in the field. So they decided to make

sure Dave got some credit for what he was doing so he was my dissertation director and

Al was my major professor. They are both dead now. All of those people were very

influential.

There’s another person, Ivan Palmblad, who was a botanist. I took a couple of

classes from him. Evolutionary ecology was one of them. There was something else.

But he was just a terrific teacher, a tremendous teacher. I was always interested in

teaching. I thought that was what I would do when I finished my degree. But he let me

be a T.A. I wasn’t paid. On the other hand, he never had let anybody be a T.A. before.

So I was honored. I didn’t know this, but he wrote a letter for me that was sent to KU

when I applied, just out of the blue.

Q: Did you have children at this time?

A: Yes. When we moved to Logan my wife first worked at Thiokol Chemical as a secretary.

They made rocket engines. Then she worked as a teacher at North Cache Junior High in

Richmond, Utah. When she got pregnant, it turned out that in Utah they didn’t allow

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women to be pregnant and teach in the schools. And this is Utah, which has an enormous

birth rate. So it was very bizarre. She actually started teaching math at the university

because she’s a high school teacher in math. Nobody likes to teach high school level

math at the university. And she was good at it, so she did that. So we had two sons and a

daughter and they were all born while I was in grad school in Logan. My wife was doing

all of this stuff. She was teaching, she was typing for me and for other graduate students

because in the 1960s you didn’t have Xerox machines. When you had to do a

dissertation or a thesis you typed it on some stencil and then ran it. So she typed these

stencils for people. She’s a remarkable person.

Q: I don’t think you mentioned her name.

A: Sherry Lynn Irons was her name before she was married. She was the same age as I was.

She was born in 1943 and went to high school most of the time in Wichita.

Q: What are your children’s names?

A: My oldest son is David Andrew Slade and he’s now in 2010 42 years old. He lives in

Ames, Iowa, and works for a bio diesel company. He has a wife, Cathy, and two

children, Ella and Sam. Ella just turned nine and Sam is seven. Then I have a son Rick,

Richard Charles, who has a wife, Ashley. They live in Roswell, Georgia. That’s a

suburb of Atlanta. They have two children, Ava and Henry. Ava is eight and Henry is

five. Rick works at the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area. He works for the

National Park Service. He is one of the administrators. I think his title is resource

manager or something. And I have a daughter, Shauna Lynn Slade, who is married to

Ben Booth. And they have just had a baby, who is three weeks old now, named Cooper

Harrison Booth. Shauna, being with this baby, is right now unemployed. But Rick

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works for the National Park Service. David works in environmentally friendly fuels and

neither one of them was at all interested in ecology as an academic discipline when they

were in school. But both of them have jobs that I could see myself having when I started

all of this a long time ago. Because when I went into graduate school I thought I would

come out of graduate school and go to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or for

a state game agency or something. But I got much more interested in the theory of

wildlife management than the practice of wildlife management.

Q: You said that you did a post doc.

A: Yes.

Q: Where was that?

A: The post doc was at San Diego State University. The last year I was in grad school I

worked with a group on a big research project. We did computer simulation modeling of

biological systems. I went to San Diego to do more of that kind of ecosystem analysis. It

was a different project but it was in the same general area. The people I worked with

there, the person at San Diego State that I had the most to do with was Phil Miller. He

actually is a plant ecologist. He worked on the energetics of plants, energy balances and

water balances of plants, ecophysiology of plants. But I didn’t have very much in

common with him. So the person I worked mostly with was Hal Mooney, who is at

Stanford. Hal was the principal investigator on this big grant. The fieldwork was down

in San Diego County. But the person who directed it was up at Stanford. So if you asked

me who my postdoctoral advisor was, I would have said Hal Monney, although I actually

saw Phil Miller a lot too.

Q: So you were in post doc about a year.

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A: It was supposed to be a two-year post doc. I was supposed to go from ’71 to ’73. But in

1971 I saw an ad for this position at Kansas. And I talked to the kids and my wife. And

the kids thought it would be good to be closer to grandma. So I applied for the job at the

University of Kansas and came and interviewed and got it.

Q: You came here in 1972.

A: I officially began with the fall term in August. I really didn’t come until the first of

September.

Q: What was your title then and what was the department’s name?

A: The department was Systematics and Ecology. My title was assistant professor of

Systematics and Ecology and assistant curator of mammals at the Natural History

Museum.

Q: So you got the job at the museum at the same time.

A: Yes. It’s very interesting because the museum is a systematics museum, meaning they do

evolutionary biology but with an emphasis on taxonomy, and I knew nothing about any

of that. Along the way in graduate school, I had picked up statistics because of my

frustration with this person. And I learned to program computers. Again, in 1965 or ’66

that was an unusual skill to have. So when I applied for jobs, I was a population

ecologist. I worked on mammals, at least for my dissertation had worked on a mammal,

the Uinta ground squirrel. So I knew something about mammals and I knew statistics and

I knew how to program computers. Well, here in the Natural History Museum they were

developing a computer database of all the collection records. So they were interested in

somebody who had computer skills. They were also interested in somebody who in-

house in the museum could provide statistical consulting and teach some statistics classes

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in the department. And I could do that. And I worked on mammals. But as far as the

main consideration for some people at the university, this familiarity with systematics

collection and systematic biology, I didn’t know anything.

When I interviewed, I told them I didn’t, but that I thought, for me, in my career

that would be a good thing to learn about. That would be a good supplement to what I

already knew. So I was interested in coming here. It was just a question of whether they

thought I was qualified for the job. And it turned out, I have heard since, in the

department there was disagreement about whether I was qualified or not, whether I was

really the person they wanted. But Bob Hoffman was the curator of mammals here and

Phil Humphrey was the director of the museum. And they both had very broad

perspectives on what a natural history museum was about. And so through their

emphases—and at the time a person in the department named Jack Schlager, who

eventually became department chair, also was interested in me as a statistical colleague,

and Ken Armitage—he’s emeritus but he’s still here at KU—were strong people. Ken

because he was trying to build the program in ecology here. So he was all for having an

ecologist. And the other people were interested in my ancillary skills. But when I

counsel students and things, I always tell them I got my job not because of the main thing

that I did but because of the other things that I learned to do when I was in grad school.

Q: What do you remember about Lawrence at that time?

A: We came to Lawrence in 1972. It was probably 55,000 people or something instead of

90,000, just a little more than half the size. Lawrence went out to probably Kasold.

Well, Alvamar was already in place. But there wasn’t anything beyond Alvamar. So

Kasold was kind of the west edge of town. Wakarusa was dragstrip road and there was a

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dragstrip out there, just off the road, not on the road. Then of course there was not

anything in what is now southeastern Lawrence. So it was a much smaller place. But in

terms of like the general tenor of the town, etc., it wasn’t that different.

Q: What courses have you taught while you’ve been here?

A: Oh, there’s quite a list. But when I first came I taught General Ecology and I taught

Multivariate Statistics. Those were the things that I was hired to teach. Those were the

principal teaching things. Then through the years I have actually taught quite a list of

courses. But the course that I sort of helped start was an undergraduate course called

Introduction to Biostatistics. So I helped get that started and then I really didn’t keep

track of how many times I taught it, but for 20 years at least. But I’ve also taught

specialty courses in quantitative methods and mathematical modeling. At one time for

several semesters I taught a graduate seminar class that was really kind of calculus

refresher or calculus introduction for the students. Because they really didn’t want to put

in the time to retake an undergraduate calculus class but at the same time they were in

graduate school and they recognized they needed to sort of understand a little more than

they did. So we did that. A few times I taught a class called the Philosophy of Biology

or something. We actually talked a little bit about the philosophy of science and how it

interdigitated with ecology and systematics. At least twice, and I think it was only twice,

I taught a class in teaching college biology. We took all the kinds of things,

considerations that students might have when they would go out to become teachers and

designing a curriculum, designing a course, writing a lecture. We videotaped them, etc.

That was pretty fun too.

Q: So you were doing mostly theoretical rather than fieldwork with your students.

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A: No. When I came, actually, I started mark and recapture studies of small mammals. So

out at what is now the Nelson Environmental Study Area, northeast of town, some land

the university owns, we put out traps, little box traps for mammals. The idea is not to kill

them, but to catch them. You mark them with either an ear tag or some other method and

turn them loose. Then you come back and see how many of them you can catch again in

a month or another month.

Q: What is the purpose of that?

A: The purpose of this is to monitor the numbers in the population because in the process of

catching them you can estimate how many are actually there. You don’t catch everything

that is there. You only catch part of the things but by looking at how frequently you

catch what is there you can estimate how many are missing. So we estimate population

size by looking at how many survive from one month to the next. We get estimates of

survival and pay attention to whether they are actively reproductive or not. We can get

some estimate of the number that is produced on the area.

This all may sound kind of strange, but it’s the basis of wildlife management. If

you are trying to manage a pest population, you want to figure out what the reproductive

rate is, where the most vulnerable life stages are, where if you wanted to try to reduce

them, what you might do that. On the other hand, if you are managing a game

population, you’re interested in their reproduction rate because their net production is

what can be harvested in the fall. And if you are interested in rare and endangered

species, the basic data are population dynamics. So that’s what it is.

Q: So you said that you originated that one course. Any others?

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A: Probably, but that’s the one that has persisted and is offered every semester every year

now in our department. That was the one I thought about. There have been a number of

others, but they kind of came and went.

Q: What have been your research interests while you have been here?

A: My research interests are population dynamics and quantitative methods in general. So

we were talking about the mark recapture study that I started. And I thought I would be

able to do some things that were related to what I did for my doctoral dissertation. But it

turned out that the populations that I was studying here were so erratic, they fluctuated so

much, that it was kind of hard to come up with a control and experiment design. So one

thing led to another and we just kept coming up with new questions. We kept running

this trapping grid. So this mark recapture study is one that I started in 1972. Then we

moved to a new area in 1973 and it persisted until 2003, 30 years.

Q: What kind of animals were you capturing?

A: Cotton rats and prairie voles. Microtus ochrogaster is the prairie vole. That’s the

scientific name. And cotton rats are Sigmodon hispidus. These are both quite common

rodents in natural areas. Curators in the Museum have some administrative duties,

supervising students and other employees. The only other administrative aspect was that

I was department chair a couple of different times for short periods of time, enough to

know that I really didn’t want anything to do with real administration. I just don’t like

having that much potential influence on people. It’s not part of my make up.

Q: What exactly does a curator of the museum do here?

A: Well, they take care of the collection. There are 165,000 scientific specimens in the

mammal collection. So people come to visit the university to study those. Some people

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want to borrow specimens to be examined. You can think of a natural history collection

as like a library. Only instead of books we have scientific specimens that have been

collected in various places. The one difference is that every one of our specimens is

different. They may look a lot alike, but even having several things that look very much

alike gives you some idea of natural variability. So curators are supposed to take care of

these specimens. They are vulnerable to pests getting into them. We have some

specimens that are well over 100 years old. So they have been well taken care of.

Q: I suppose the museum is still adding to its collection.

A: Yes. In the last month we have catalogued 1,056 specimens, or something like that.

Q: Oh my.

A: Those came from the Philippines. There is a joint project between several of the museum

divisions that is going on in the Philippines. One of our grad students has just finished

his dissertation. These specimens were collected by him for his dissertation. When I first

came in ’72, the collection was probably growing by 4,000 or 5,000 specimens a year.

Now it is more like 1,000 to 2,000 specimens a year. A lot of things have changed with

laws and regulations and the way you collect. And also just the attitude toward collecting

has changed. Now when we collect something it’s with a specific question and a specific

objective. Really before I came here, before 1972, there used to be summer expeditions

where they just went out to a place and tried to collect everything they could at that place.

That is what would bring back thousands of specimens from a single collecting trip.

Q: So these are from all over the world then. They are not just local or Midwestern.

A: Right. My research project, which was right here near Lawrence, the only things we ever

contributed to the collection were sort of our mistakes. Sometimes animals would die in

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the trap. If they were interesting specimens, we would bring them in. So I’ve been here

38 years, and I probably have contributed a dozen specimens to the collection. The

current curator of mammals here, Bob Timm, most of his work is in Costa Rica, or at

least Central and South America. So we have a lot of stuff coming in from there, or we

have had. Then there is this project in the Philippines. And we have some things from

South Africa. But the University of Kansas is known for its North American collections,

Canada, the United States, especially the Western United States and Alaska and Mexico.

We still have more specimens from Mexico than any other collection in the world, I

think. But this is historical from the collecting trips that went to Mexico in the 1950s and

‘60s.

Q: Have you ever had a sabbatical?

A: Yes. Actually, I’ve had two sabbaticals. But I never really went anywhere, because my

research project is here and all the things I was working on were here. But in 1976, when

I had just been here for four years—so it wasn’t a sabbatical—I went on a leave of

absence. I was excused from my on-campus duties is the way it was expressed. I worked

at a research lab at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I

worked on a project with a man named John Calhoun. He was interested in the

interaction of behavior and population growth, etc. But he worked on colonies of lab rats

and mice. At least he worked in a laboratory setting with mice and rats. So for a year I

worked with him doing this behavioral work. I was working on the numbers. I was

doing the mathematics. So that was as close to a kind of a real sabbatical experience that

I had because we moved to Maryland and lived in Gaithersburg for a year. But then

when I actually had real sabbaticals—I didn’t do one for a long time—but when I had a

23

real sabbatical I spent most of my time here. I spent some time at Purdue University

working with one of my former students. He’s a really good friend and colleague. So I

was working with him on some research projects. The second sabbatical I know I went

somewhere but just for a couple of weeks. But I don’t remember where it was. It might

have been back to Purdue to work on some more things.

Q: Sometimes people write books on sabbatical. Did you ever write a book?

A: No. I’ve never written a book. The products of my sabbatical were some more regular

research papers. But they were things I wouldn’t have gotten done if I hadn’t gone on a

sabbatical. One of the things that happened while I was on sabbatical that I find most

fascinating was some colleagues in Oklahoma published a paper dealing with cotton rats

and some aspects of cotton rats and I had an idea how to reanalyze their data. With

teaching and regular departmental responsibilities and things going on, I think I probably

would have just let it drop. But I was on sabbatical, so I just wrote them and asked them

for their data. And they sent their data and I reanalyzed it and the three of us published a

paper, just something that would not have happened if I had not had a sabbatical, as well

as the other projects I got to finish up.

Q: I assume you have been on university committees. Do you especially remember any of

those?

A: I’ve tried to avoid university committees. In preparation for this I’ve popped up my CV.

On my CV I probably don’t have committees because they are not some of my favorite

things.

Q: Okay.

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A: I will tell you that I was for the last five years on phased retirement. One of the things I

negotiated with phased retirement was I didn’t have to be on committees.

Q: That’s when you go to half time, isn’t it?

A: Yes, that is correct. I went to half time with that. University committees, well one

committee that is a University committee, there used to be something that was called the

Field Facilities Committee. That was the committee that oversaw the land holdings that

the university has for research. So it was a very self-serving committee for me because

we were overseeing the land that I worked on for my research project. I felt like that was

a worthwhile committee because the university does have a number of different land

holdings. Now they have an actual director. There is a little bureaucracy involved. But

in the old days it was just a bunch of us who met Friday noons and talked about what

needed to be done. So I was on that committee. I know that I have been on a couple of

other university committees but I don’t remember which ones.

Q: Have you had honors?

A: Well, I think getting to work here for a long time was probably an honor. I’ve had some

teaching awards. I did get one of the Kemper awards, the Kemper Teaching Award. I’ve

been on a bunch of committees for national organizations. The American Society of

Mammalogists is one that I am involved in. And I was an editor for the Journal of

Ecology for a little bit. That’s a service kind of thing. Here we go, awards. I got a

Kemper Award in 1999. I was favorite professor of biology. That one is kind of a small

thing but it is a really important one because the students do that completely. That was in

2000. Then I got the Archie and Nancy Dykes award for undergraduate teaching and

mentoring in 2004. I got an award from the American Society of Mammalogists. That’s

25

kind of a big deal because it is a national award for graduate teaching and mentoring.

And it’s interesting to me because it is from the American Society of Mammalogists and

normally they recognize your ability in teaching mammalogy. But I’ve never taught

mammalogy. All of the classes I have taught are either ecology or statistics, applied

statistics. Then I got the Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award in 2005. I think that

was one where I had to go to the graduation. I stood up and waved to people at the

graduation in the stadium. I got the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Career

Teaching Achievement Award in 2006. I guess that’s it.

Q: That’s quite a few.

A: But one of them that is really good is, again, the students, two graduate students got me

up for…There’s a thing called the Celebration of Teaching each year at the end of the

school year. Students get to nominate somebody to go to this. So I was our departmental

representative of that. I like that. I like the things the student did.

Q: What do you think makes a good teacher?

A: Caring about the students. I think realizing that they are people with all kinds of things in

their lives and your class, even though you think it is the most important and it is the

most important contact with you and the students, they’ve got other things going on too.

Also I always tried to learn everybody’s name. For my graduate classes that was easy.

But for my undergraduate classes, the Bio Stats class was about 60 students. By halfway

through I would learn all of their names. That turns out, I think, to be important just

because of the rapport that you establish. You can make a lot of mistakes, and if

everybody thinks that they are in this together, they’ll forgive you. But if you come in

there being authoritative and it’s you and them, you make one mistake and they are on

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you. So I think it’s that, just the empathy or a sincere interest in them. Once you create

that attitude in the classroom, then I think learning can really take place.

I always encourage questions from the students. I try. Sometimes I catch myself

reacting, kind of laughing or something when they ask a question, but I try to encourage

them to ask. I love teaching that way. Since I retired I can say this. I never used

blackboard, (the online teaching site). I never used power point in the classroom. I just

thought it should be me talking to the students and their asking questions. That’s the way

it should work. I love teaching. I have all along.

Q: Do you have outstanding former students who have gone on to greater things?

A: Oh, yes. I’m very proud of them. These are graduate students. Actually, I mean there

are some undergraduate students that I have had contact with who I think are just

amazing people. One of the guys, years and years ago, I had a student named Blaine

Cole, who as an undergraduate. He didn’t do any research with me, I think, just was in a

few classes. He went to graduate school at Harvard and worked with a person who is an

internationally prominent scholar. He was just a Kansas kid. I thought that was

interesting. That happened in the 1970s and I was brand new. And I had no idea whether

this guy from Kansas could go to Harvard and work with John Maynard Smith, I think,

was his major professor. Any how, it all worked out well.

One of the undergraduates most recently was—I’ve forgotten her name now. She

was a student who was an undergraduate T.A. in biostatistics for a couple of years.

Alhambra Frarey. She’s a physician now. I think she got her medical degree just this last

year. I’ve kind of lost track of her. She’s a remarkable young lady, really fun to be

27

around. Anyhow, there are a lot of undergraduates who I think are really interesting

people. But my graduate students, okay?

George Korch worked with me for a master’s degree and then he went on to do a

Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. He is now science advisor to one of Kathleen Sebelius’s aides

or assistants in Washington, D.C. He’s done that after he retired from the military where

he was the head of USAMeRID. In the old days it was the biological warfare unit at Fort

Detrich, Maryland. We don’t do biological warfare any more. We do biological counter

measures, or whatever. But he became the commanding officer of that. When he retired

now, he’s this influential person in Washington, D.C. So that’s George Korch.

Greg Glass did a master’s and a Ph.D. with me. When George finished his Ph.D.

at Hopkins, he got a grant from the National Institute of Health to study diseases. He

hired Greg Glass on a post doc to go to Hopkins. Greg is a faculty member at Johns

Hopkins now. He travels all over the world working on emerging diseases. When the

concern about Haunta Virus in the Four Corners area broke out, he was one of the people

who the Center for Disease Control sent to the area to work on the disease, to catch mice

and look at the prevalence of the disease in them. So he’s a very prominent faculty at

Hopkins.

Ron Debry. He actually did a master’s degree with Bob Hoffman but I ended up

as his co-advisor. I saw him just this last year. He is on the faculty of the University of

Cincinnati and works on molecular biology and genetics. Michael Stokes did a master’s

degree and a Ph.D. with me. He’s a professor at Western Kentucky University in

Bowling Green and has a summer program in Africa where he takes students to Africa

each summer. And his wife actually worked here as an assistant in the division of

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mammals. That’s how they met. He was a graduate student and she was working as an

assistant. She’s head of a Western Kentucky program. It’s called Distributive Studies.

She’s been in China with a bunch of students just lately.

Bob Griffin did a master’s with me and then got a Ph.D. at Rhode Island. He’s an

expert on whales, does whale behavior and biology. One of the local people, a guy who

still lives here, Mike Campbell, did a master’s degree with me and then worked for the

Johnson County Park Service for a while. But he’s a freelance writer now. He lives in

Eudora. His wife is on the staff here at KU. But the Ph.D. students.

Bruce Carns did a Ph.D. here and went on a post doc to Argon National

Laboratories and became very well known in human survival and morbidity statistics.

He’s written a book on aging, kind of the fallacy of people going to live to indefinite

ages, as some people have projected. He’s part of the medical faculty at the University of

Oklahoma. He’s a medical research faculty. So he’s done really well. I told you about

Greg Glass. Rob Swihart is the person at Purdue who I worked with on sabbatical. I

think both times we did some stuff together when I was on sabbatical. He’s the chair of

the Department of Forestry and Wildlife. He’s department head there and very, very

successful. And at the same time that he was a student, there was another student, John

Sauer. Rob and John both had University honors fellowships. In the old days there were

five of these university wide, and I had two of them working with me at the same time. I

knew that was the pinnacle of my career. John Sauer works for the U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service at the Patuxent National Research Center. He is a world expert on

analysis of bird band returns. So he travels all over the world. Whenever there is an

international conference and they are worried about fluctuations in bird populations, he’s

29

probably going to be there. I think he has an amazing career. Marianna Wood did a

Ph.D. with me and is a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. Terry

Doonan did a Ph.D. and he’s now with the Florida Freshwater Fish and Game

Commission. He’s nongame biologist with them and has been for many years. I’ve had

a lot of people who have done really well.

Q: You really have.

A: Christy McCain is one of my most recent students. She’s now curator of mammals and

assistant professor at U.C. Boulder. So she’s been out seven years. She did a couple of

different post docs. But now she has this nice faculty position. All my students have

turned out really well. I think it’s not due to me. I have just had good students. I think I

am friends with all of them still, so that’s good.

Q: Have you been involved in community activities here?

A: Well, mostly through sports. We haven’t talked about this but for about from ’72 to ’96,

about 24 years, I played a lot of local sports, softball. I played fast pitch softball on some

really good teams that traveled all over the country.

Q: Does K.U. have teams that do that?

A: We were talking about how K.U. has changed. When I came in ’72 there was a summer

league for faculty and graduate students. We played softball, and it was fast pitch

softball, not just slow pitch. Del Shankel, who is locally famous at K.U., broke his ankle

sliding into second base in one of these games. So there was that. But by the time I came

to Lawrence in ’72 there really wasn’t any fast pitch softball in the city of Lawrence. So

I went over to Topeka and played. When I was in Washington, D.C., I played on a team.

We played games in Clearwater, Florida. We played games in Stratford, Connecticut,

30

and we just played all over the East Coast. So anyhow I did all that. Because of my

interest in sports and my boys and my daughter, the community things I was involved in

where mostly coaching kids’ sports, soccer and baseball mostly that they were involved

in and I helped with. Other than that, my wife was very involved because she was a high

school counselor. So she knows people all over town. She’s been involved in a number

of things.

Q: What do you plan to do in retirement?

A: I play golf now. I’m involved in a number of research projects that I’m going to keep

involved in. Actually, I do a lot of statistical consulting helping students and faculty with

their statistical questions. I think I’ll keep doing that. I’ve only been retired for three

weeks and two days or something. But nothing has changed very much and I don’t know

that it will. I also am going to keep involved as long as I can in maintenance of the

Museum database. We have all the collection records on computer. Right now I am the

only person who works with mammals who knows how to do all this stuff. I’ll try to get

my colleague educated.

Q: To kind of finish up, what is your assessment of K.U., your department, the museum,

past, present, hopes for the future, that kind of thing?

A: You know, I knew you were going to ask this because I had a little script before. I’ve

never been very prospective. I’ve just kind of let things happen as they happen. So I’m

not one who is very good at long-term planning. In fact, I’m actually opposed to a lot of

the effort we spend doing long-term planning. Short-term planning you can do, if you

know what’s going to happen in the next year or two, maybe. Talk about 10 years. All

I’ve learned is that you don’t know what is going to be happening in 10 years.

31

But our department, I think, is really….If I was a young person, I would be

excited to be there because I think it has a nice future ahead of it, a lot of active…a nice

mixture of young people, sort of middle career people and older people who all get along

fairly well together. All seem to have to have a fairly good idea of where they would like

to see the department go, or at least now and where it will be in the near future. So I’m

very enthusiastic. We have a lot of really good young faculty who, I think, have to work

a lot harder than I did when I was new. I don’t know. When you are a new faculty

member, you always work hard. But these people seem to have so many more demands

on them than I remember. I knew that I needed to get teaching going, and that was hard

to start. But these people have teaching and they are expected to have research projects

with external funding from almost the moment they hit the door.

The one thing we don’t do with them, they are not required to do very much

departmental or university service. I think that’s a good thing. When I started, there was

probably a little more emphasis on that than there is today. They wanted us to apply for

external grants, etc., but if you just applied, if you just made the effort, that was

sufficient. Nowadays, they want you to have that grant. There’s a big difference,

because anybody can do the effort to apply, but there only about 10 percent of those

applications that are successful. So I’m very enthusiastic about the department and the

future. I think it is a very good department. I think it’s a nice working atmosphere.

The museum is not the same museum that I came into because it is a research

institution and you’re supposed to have grants. When I came I think the emphasis was

more on care of the collections first. I mean the collections are for research. So research

32

was always a part of this. But I would say now the emphasis now is far more on external

research dollars and less on the actual care of the collection.

For the university as a whole, I don’t know. I’m probably like many faculty. I

enjoy athletics. I enjoy participating in athletics. I think the intramural program for

students is excellent. And I think the Interscholastic Athletic Department is totally out of

control. On paper I still have season tickets. We share with some people to the

basketball games. But they have become enormously expensive. I don’t think I am

going to be able to keep them up when I’m retired. When there are multi-millions of

dollars being misplaced in the Athletic Department, and the university is just scrounging

for thousands, a few thousand dollars for this or that. I guess if I’m pessimistic, it looks

like the academic-athletic balance is totally out of whack, just completely.

When I came to Lawrence, there was no question that the university was part of

the general community. The Fourth of July fireworks. We are doing this on the 5th

of

July. The Fourth of July fireworks used to be in the stadium before they had synthetic

turf and all of that. There were just lots of things. We talked about town-gown friction

or whatever, but there were lots of community-university interactions. I see, especially

on the athletic end of things, less and less of that.

The other thing about just Lawrence in general and maybe I wasn’t as sensitive

when I came is I think the variance in economic status has increased because many of the

new areas of Lawrence have housing that I wouldn’t even think of trying to afford. But

half of the population or whatever still live as middle class or maybe not quite middle

class. I just see this increase because I think the greatest influx of people into Lawrence

has been of people with relatively high incomes. At least the new housing is all for

33

somebody who has a lot more money than I do. I love Lawrence. I think we are going to

stay in Lawrence forever. For one thing, our kids all seem to move around, so there is

not like moving next to them. Both my wife and I like Lawrence. We’ve lived in

Lawrence longer than we have ever lived anywhere in our lives. So I really like

Lawrence. I like the university and the opportunities at the university for entertainment

and intellectual involvement.

Q: Is there anything I’ve left out that you would like to add?

A: There is. Because we were talking about my research and you asked about fieldwork,

etc. So I had this project that was fieldwork for 30 years, going out every month and

trapping these animals. That turned out to be very beneficial for student training because

the students could just work right into an ongoing project.

Q: You were trapping cotton rats?

A: Cotton rats and prairie voles. But you said something that I was more involved in theory.

But it turns out that even though we did all of this field work, the real reason for doing

that field work was generating the data that we analyzed using some fairly sophisticated

statistical and analytical methods, then also some mathematical modeling. So after 30

years, I got a post doc. I had never had a post doc.

Q: I thought you did do a post doc.

A: Oh, I had done a post doc. I had never had a postdoctoral associate of my own. I had

graduate students, lots of graduate students

Q: Oh, I see.

A: There was a guy who did his degree, Aaron Reed, who approached me about doing a post

doc. He came over and in three years he analyzed and we did a lot of modeling of these

data that I thought was going to be like my 10 years of retirement would be working

through all of this stuff. But he was exceptionally good and fast. So the end result of 30

years of field data is that we published quite a number of papers on the analysis and

modeling of the data. And so everything has really come back full circle because those

analytical techniques and the mathematical models we’re using are things that would

apply to wildlife management and to the preservation of endangered species and things

like that.

Q: Okay, thank you very much.

A: You’re welcome.