DYER: This interview is with Dr. Hertert. Dr. Hertert is more commonly known as Pat Rhodes, wife of our college president. Pat, will you just give us a sketch of your sketchy idea of your involvement at the Yosemite Junior College District office, first?

DR. HERTERT: At the present time?

DYER: At the time that you were involved in the planning –

DR. HERTERT: At the time. Okay. In 1963, a program was developed on an outreach basis in Sonora, in Los Banos by Modesto Junior College. At that time I was curriculum assistant in the adult division, and provided advice like a program adviser to adult students. So periodically all members of the staff came to Sonora and/or Los Banos, and provided advisement for students enrolling in off-campus programs here. So I had been coming as a program advisor from 63 to 65 when the program of an enlarged district began. In addition to that, my field of responsibility was an evening elementary program. And at that time, Bill Haskins, who was the coordinator of the total outreach program here in Sonora, requested me to meet with the sawmill workers union’ at Pickering, because they were in the process of mechanizing the mill, and there were a large number of workers who would be automated out of a job who at that point did not have the fundamental skills in literacy and either had not gone to school or had left before the fourth grade. So at that point we set up a program with Dorothy Francis who was then at Soulsbyville, and she developed the first evening elementary program, which was a literacy program, and I was responsible to maintain contact with that program and assist her as I could.

DYER: That was the elementary level, though?

DR. HERTERT: The elementary level for adults, which is the realm of my responsibility at that time. I also provided in-service training in methods and materials for adult instructors and did a number of the training sessions for staff here at Sonora at that time. So I had somewhat of a familiarity with the problems of the county, from the point of view from the shift in the mill at that point. I had a familiarity with students, from the point of view of advisement, and I had a reference with the various people who were teaching from the local community through my in-service training activities. At the same time, I did some of the basic planning, as did all other administrative staff, for the enlargement of the district beyond the boundaries of Modesto High School District. At which point we all worked on the election, the campaign, and I did some of the stumping along with other members of the staff. And visited the community a good deal at that point.

DYER: So when you’re talking in terms of the enlargement of the district, were you also talking about a significant expansion in the offering of the district?

DR. HERTERT: Well, the decision had to be made at that point – one of the conditions for the enlarging of the district would be that some type of program would be offered here in Tuolumne County, probably either a branch campus or an autonomous campus. As you may know, up to that time three busloads of students had come from Tuolumne County, and had gone to school in Modesto for years. And these students – many of them left before sunrise and got back after dark. And many of the people in this area had done their first two years of college or their occupational training work through this, and that’s a pretty stiff price to pay for higher education. So this was part of the discussion.

DYER: Well, as a satellite campus though, would it be – was it envisioned that there would be a full offering, though, to the local students?

DR. HERTERT: Well, part of the discussion at the ’65 tax election – and you probably will want to discuss this with Dusty when you do – was that there would be a campus here to provide services for students in this area. So in ’65 the district was enlarged with Tuolumne County voting to join the district, with the understanding that they would have expanded educational services. And so as soon as that tax – as that election, that district election was completed, the initial planning for the college started. There was a planning team, which I assume you’ve identified in other tapes. Um, Fred-

DYER: (interrupting) This was the group that met for breakfast here?

DR. HERTERT: In our house for breakfast, yes.

DYER: Early morning group?

DR. HERTERT: With my terrible scrambled eggs. Yes, this was an early morning group and this was done over and above our regular assignment, so we met for breakfast. And we were in the process then of developing program specifications for Tuolumne County and for the campus here. Along with that, then, my responsibility was to define instructional support requirements. And we were just moving into an extensive concern on methodology of instruction and what sort of support services would be needed, so that I worked through the design of the specifications for the learning resource center. Particularly library, instructional materials, faculty services. I worked with John Hegstrom in the reading skills area, and –

DYER: Now john was a, a – (Interrupted)

DR. HERTERT: He was an instructor at Modesto Junior College, and had taught on the evening staff and also here, on the outreach program and had also been one of our instructors on the summer schedule at New Hope, which was a retraining facility in which we were heavily involved at that point.

DYER: Barbara Painter was –

DR. HERTERT: And Barbara was also on the New Hope faculty. Barbara came to substitute for me for two days, and has been with us ever since. Bob Davits was on the faculty, Bob Deal is on that staff. There were - ??? running a three-ring circus at that point, with a full adult continuing education program at the college, plus a massive retraining program, plus the planning for this facility.

DYER: So the first staff really evolved as a result of some of these early programs and the breakfast meetings? Was it something that sort of spontaneously happened?

DR. HERTERT: No, actually these were people who had specific skills. We were drawn together to develop a design, first of all a philosophy, and Frank Pierce worked us unmercifully for the design of the philosophy, because he said we couldn’t do anything else for the buildings or the site or anything else without that philosophy first. And we just really hate him because he made us work so hard. But we hammered it out. It has since of course been revised, and reviewed periodically I think it’s every two or three years, but in essence it remains the same. As soon as that was approved by the board, then that became the foundation for any building specification that went on here.

DYER: So before you got down to the nuts and bolts of it, you really sat down and came up with your overall formula and –

DR. HERTERT: The philosophy, yes, and guiding principles that every instructor which appears in the catalogue – Yes, this was the first step. Frank said you can’t go – can’t do a thing without that. Now that was the hardest work, especially when we were doing it at 6:30 in the morning, and working a full load besides. But Frank just really tutored us through this process. The process itself was a difficult one, but he said now, you know, you’re just talking pie in the sky until you can get down a framework against which you’re working. So in this particular building, into the specifications are written those aspects of the guiding principles that pertain, such as – if you look at this building –

DYER: We’re in the Rotunda of the library.

DR. HERTERT: Of the learning resource center. The concept is much broader than library, and this was a departure, you see, from the older library-oriented kind of thing. If you’ll look at the learning skills area, the reason there are two windows there is so that the student who needed specific help could see there other people to help him, and he wouldn’t say “well, I went and there was no-one there.” Because you could see the action, it would be inviting action and you could see in. That’s why, initially, there were no curtains on the windows for offices. So that the instructors couldn’t hide from the students, and the students would then not say “Well, I couldn’t find him”, you see.

DYER: I see, so it wasn’t a convenient excuse.

DR. HERTERT: There’s not that convenient excuse, and that convenient excuse was one that I used for four years at the university, so I felt very strongly about the convenient excuse. It’s also the reason that the dean of instruction actually is right next to the faculty reading area. And the coffee pile and the mailboxes. Because we felt very strongly that if the faculty didn’t trip over the dean of instruction, and the dean of instruction didn’t trip over the faculty, they could cleverly avoid each other all the time. You see, this is why this was designed this way. Initially then, the instructor – the director of instructional materials’ office, which is right across from the mailboxes, was designed that way also, but it didn’t have a wall, and for the same reason. So there was instant accessibility to the faculty, so that they wouldn’t feel that they had to go around through ??? and steps to get to someone to help them plan their instructional program. Of course, we had the luxury at that point of a little planning space, which we do not any longer have. That area has grown in terms of demands and equipment and services, much more than we had anticipated at the time. And actually, Jack Helthis in the planning of that –

DYER: Jack Ross.

DR. HERTERT: Jack Ross did, but you know, none of us foresaw how extensively that area would grow.

DYER: So actually then, you’re starting with the philosophy, then you’re designing the physical plan around the philosophy and expecting this, then, to be the great moulder of the moulding forces that are going to shape the people, then.

DR. HERTERT: To be the instructional support services for this institution. We started from the point of view that no-one would be here forever. Therefore you would design the facilities for a given individual’s program. But rather, you would design the facilities to provide a variety of programs over a long period of time. Then with this building we had a very specific problem. Initially it was designed round, and then all the functions wouldn’t fit in and so these two mid-sections, this one and this one, there and there, were elongated out, and added additional space. Because we couldn’t handle – this is designed, this learning skills area is designed – as you know, there’s learning skills lab and there’s a classroom. Then the current admission and records area is two additional classrooms. And in the math room is an additional classroom. There would then be four classrooms related to this lab. And so that – and they all open to that lab, the doors have been changed now. But as this program in reading skills and other lab-related kinds of things – math and composition and spelling – as the needs grew, then that would all cluster around this lab and teachers could interact directly with the lab, as could students. Students could be working in the lab individually or in groups, and they could also be working in their classrooms back and forth.

DR. HERTERT: So this building had to provide, then, for the instructional support capability for the college for the life of the college. We had to make that decision. Whereas the other clusters would grow, this one would be the total change, so that this building is designed so that it not only – the library is in this area, but it also can move into this area – we had initially talked about a mezzanine, up above –

DYER: Oh, here, in the rotunda?

DR. HERTERT: Uh-huh, in the rotunda, having access back into those – back in there, you know, above there, and then this outer area could serve as a reading room. See, this is built like a big circus tent so any one of these walls can be removed. It’s all built on these concrete piers with this kind of waffle arrangement.

DYER: So then you just remove the panel and then you have an option section.

DR. HERTERT: You go right through, yes. So that if you wanted to develop – and we will have to, eventually – develop the reading room, we would be reducing this portion that’s moved – this is the main traffic pattern, here. And would be, then, turning more of it over to library services. Including, then, the president’s office that we don’t anticipate going into an administration building but eventually admissions and records is going to outgrow its area and the program then will fill this up. The area that is now the Mother Lode study room where the history collection is was designed for dialects as retrieval. So that we would have all the equipment in any place throughout the campus you could dial into a particular program and, you know, plug right in.

DYER: Instant retrieval of information.

DR. HERTERT: Instant retrieval, uh-huh. And this is a system that was under development at ???. We have since decided not to do that because there were so many problems at ???, and being far out back we knew that it would never – we would never have the maintenance necessary. Plus it was an excrutiatingly expensive system, and we found we could do the same thing with tape cassettes and synced –

DYER: And a lot less expensive.

DR. HERTERT: Lot less expensive, much more manageable on campus, it didn’t go out of whack all the time, it wouldn’t have that big initial investment, so as I understand it as they moved more into an all-campus television system they planned the head-in system up there, when it’s no longer needed. The library itself – the emphasis was – we had had a rather bad situation in Modesto where students didn’t want to study by themselves quietly. They liked to study in groups. And so they would proceed to do that at the tables and disrupt the whole library and it was, you know, in the old days when you had discipline in the library that was a terrible problem.

DYER: You mean they wouldn’t study quietly.

DR. HERTERT: No. And they didn’t have a student center there, either, so the library became the student center and they finally got a student center – and you know how things go. So what we did design into this library were a whole series of group study rooms. Which are no longer that. Which is unfortunately. They are now all sorts of special interest kind of things like microfilm and librarian’s office and reserve book room and so forth. And so that has forced group study into the rotunda. I don’t think that’s all bad – except that for those students who are able to study together and with a certain amount of activity and hubbub it works fine. But to go in for a small group discussion with a blackboard and so forth, that’s what those were designed for. We also were somewhat radical in that we did put in the student support area with typewriters so that they could type their term papers and you know, an adding machine and that sort of thing because those things were never available and so we decided to design that right into the system. We had visited at Mt. San Antonio in Walnut, and they had this kind of a system except that they charged the students to use it.

DYER: To use any of the –

DR. HERTERT: Every typewriter had a coin slot.

DYER: Oh, I see.

DR. HERTERT: And so we felt that the – if you were talking about providing services for students, number 1 you wouldn’t have a maintenance problem, number 2 you wouldn’t have ??? problem, and thirdly, it really wasn’t fair to ask the student to pay to use ten cents’ worth of time on the typewriters. So that was built into that area. Then we had to be ready to accommodate the listening and viewing and the independent study area. And so they developed a system where the floor goes up in the independent study area. It was much cheaper to run all of the conduit under that floor than it was to sink it in these waffle kind of concrete platform that’s here.

DYER: It’s taken me years to get used to that step up when you walk in there.

DR. HERTERT: But it is there. Hello!

PASSERBY: Hiya, Dick.

DR. HERTERT: Anyhow, that – and, again, the question is, as the uses change then we might want to remove that floor and use that for other library purposes. And move the independent study to some other facility.

DYER: Several times you have mentioned that there have been some changes – physical changes. Do you feel that this has created a deviation from the original philosophy?

DR. HERTERT: No, this particular building was designed to accommodate whatever changes came along. And it has maintained that kind of flexibility. In reality, the design of all of the functions coming together in this central core worked well in terms of accessibility from inside to the area, and outside.

DYER: It’s a comfortable building.

DR. HERTERT: Mhrmm.

DYER: The only problem that I have here is that I think it would be impossible to be a member of the secretarial staff and have people crossing trails in front of my desk all the time, or to have so much activity going on. But it’s the nerve center of the campus.

DR. HERTERT: Well, this area was made as the hub of the wheel. And –

DYER: To have an office here, in this building, is chaotic at times. Because there are so many other people with their interest who are dropping in to talk about things or –

DR. HERTERT: That’s true. But I think that the areas where we’ve had problems with this have mainly been – Well, but if you look at the service those people are to provide, that’s precisely what they’re there to handle.

DYER: It’s the socializing, though, that – whereas, I’ll get a lot more done away from this area if I have a need for instructional materials I can come here.

DR. HERTERT: This was exactly the point of each person having their own office. We never did anticipate that people would be grading papers here. They would be using their own private office for that purpose. And their own particular need for sociability is what has caused that. We did anticipate that the area where the table is that became the social area –

DYER: In the faculty lounge.

DR. HERTERT: Well, it is not the faculty lounge.

DYER: Called the faculty lounge?

DR. HERTERT: No. There was a small coffee area, that has since grown and it’s been crowded over. Initially the planning for that area where the big table was a faculty reading area. And it was broken up – the furniture was broken up with some carols, and some small reading tables so that you would not have those large congregations. Then the decision when the furniture was bought was that the space was too small. What had happened then of course was that the dean’s secretary had moved far beyond the 125 square feet that she’s allowed by the assignable square footage, you see. And so that had crowded the faculty reading area over. And the coffeeing became much more important. But if we had stuck with the requirements-

DYER: –The original plan-

DR. HERTERT: –and the original plan, that whole aura would have been somewhat different there. But unfortunately the table came like three months after the sofas came. And that was unfortunate. OK. Let me see what else has happened here. Oh, initially the lower area was not planned to be finished at all for some time to come, to the second or third stage of the building.

DYER: That’s the buildings- building the grounds and the bookstore and the cafeteria –

DR. HERTERT: Yes, and the cafeteria place and the – whatever is down there. Well, the first year we had a very wet winter and there was really no place for students to go. So the board approved a – a kind of an interim finishing, and then that was – at least put the floor down, there was just mud or dirt. And it was to be used for interim storage. And so that did not change.

DYER: All of this was planned – well, let me say a significant portion of it was planned at these breakfast meetings as you ??? ???

DR. HERTERT: Well, we shared our responsibility. First of all we did the guiding principles. Then we identified people’s responsibility. Mine happened to be this total instructional support sort of thing. So then I would deal with my functions that I would develop at, and my functions were library, independent study, instructional materials and learning skills. Now we didn’t plan for administration at all in this building. We’re putting it in. But it was not planned. Basically those permanent units were what were planned. So as then I would deal with my functions and I would tie my functions back to these principles and then I would expand those out. Those are still available in the office and you may want to look at those sometime because they’re kind of interesting and we have since used those on several statewide committees and designing learning resource centers, which is what this is all about. Then from there, that led you to what you were going to accomplish in there. What were the job descriptions it took to do those things? How many stations did that take? How many were going to be professional stations, how many were going to be support stations? How many were going to be student stations? Then besides that, we had the limitations of the assignable square footage arrangement for the state school standards or whatever you call them, college standards. So that we knew that we got 125 square feet per reading station, and that we got – I think it’s 185 square feet for a – uh, whatever it is. It’s all set up. And let’s so much for an office, so much for this and that and library shelf. You know, we were talking about how many books are on the shelf and how many linear feet that would take. Then we were talking about what kind of furniture that would take. And then you come out with spaces, and that’s all part of that detailed planning.

DYER: I admire your ability – the committee’s ability to do all of this in your head or on a piece of paper without getting a good hand on what’s really going on.

DR. HERTERT: Well, and you see we were also working in a vacuum in that we were not going to be the people who developed the program. So in my case, John helped me with lining out the learning skills center and then Jack was helping with the instructional materials center. And we were dealing with questions. “How do you get the materials in and out.” “Where do you hold them?” “How do you get them distributed to the mailboxes?” “Where do you put the work orders?” “What has to have a vent for darkroom and lightroom?” “What has to be noise-oriented?” “What can be carpeted?” “What cannot?” And it’s really quite complex.

DYER: And all this is done without the benefit of a model or even a blueprint?

DR. HERTERT: Well, you do your written work, and then once you’ve done your specifications, your program specifications, then that goes to the architect. And he gives you this rendering – just like we did in the interdisciplinary building. We did our program specifications, we said “This is what we want to accomplish, this is how many students, this is how many staff, this is the kind of furniture, these are the kinds of wets and drys, this is where the storage has to come in” and then we made all those circles that you see. Then the architect took it and it came out like this. And then he came back and he said “Well, you know, about this, here the best way to make this function inside and out is this ring arrangement.”

DYER: Oval rather than round.

DR. HERTERT: Well, first it was the ring. And with everything going this way and crossing through the center and accessibility between these units, because you see there’s two rings here, and then we thought “OK, but we need this and we need that, and we can do without this, but we don’t have” – and in this building, a serious problem because we do not have room for custodial space, we just have that little closet. And then there under the porch is a small, under that room is a small little closet. So it was at that point he came back and he said “This won’t all fit.” In this much space, but now we’ve got to elongate it and make this oval. So that’s how we did it. And we had a super, super architect working on this building. Bill Minkley was a super person to be able to take a concept and put that into walls. Was really a fine experience.

DYER: Now, you had the concepts as they relate to the educational environment – but what about the actual structure itself? Did you have a concept based on the way the building should be designed?

DR. HERTERT: No, he absolutely refused to talk about the way the building would be designed. He took each of the functions for each program, together with more circles, and more of those circles – you know how we make them with what has to be next to what – and pretty soon he had this whole network of circles. And that proposed to him how the building ought to be designed.

DYER: So these circles limited what he could do.

DR. HERTERT: Well, he’d come back and he would say “Well, how does this relate to that? Can I move these over here?” and the answer would be yes or no. “No, you can”, “Yes, you can”, “No, you can’t.”

DYER: I see, so there was some transferring of these circles in different areas.

DR. HERTERT: Well, ???, and he might flip-flop them or do this, and then as those things all worked together, and related to the weather, and the movement inside of here, the problem of mud was a very serious problem to us –

DYER: I remember the first year.

DR. HERTERT: And so then it just came out that way, and he said “I really don’t see any other way to make this work except this large circus-tent arrangement with the double core here. The possibility of an upstairs and this central core that later could be moved out. Now the materials area likely would not be moved out. That’s dirty work and we don’t want that visible. We want that to be able to shut off. Initially you see the – we had a 3-dean structure, as you recall. We had a dean of general education, which was to be in this building, the dean of occupational education was to be out, in the occupational areas. But they never did design the buildings, the office, so that building was usurped. That was the instructional materials director’s. Which I still feel was an error but there was nothing else to do. And then you remember when Dick Dodge was science and natural resources. He actually was out, and that’s what we had intended.

DYER: Across the lake

DR. HERTERT: Yes. Then when we reorganized, that whole thing then came in here and took in the librarian’s office. And again I feel that that really did disrupt the whole basic intent of instructional support. But there was no other alternative. So what’re you going to do?

DYER: So you have to make some changes. Well, we’re running out of tape, Pat, let me ask you a last question. Now that you have seen the way the learning resources center has been used, if you were go back to the concepts, the philosophy and the drawing board, would you make any significant changes?

DR. HERTERT: Oh really, the –

DYER: Not the little things –

DR. HERTERT: No, the change would be primarily one of technology. And the movement of faculty towards the use of technology and media in the classroom. This was an unknown ten years ago. It was really on the cutting edge. Someone really didn’t know how many would use the more – we didn’t know how videotape would be used in the classroom. Microteaching. All of these kinds of things were new concepts. So we underestimated the needs in the instructional materi-

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Dyer, Richard

Interviewee: Dr. Hertert-Rhodes— a.k.a. Pat Rhodes (Wife of the college president)

Name of Tape: (a section of) History of Columbia Junior College (CC_hist_5_1)

When: Late 60’s early 70’s

Transcriber: Alden (4/4/08)

Transcriber’s Note: n/a