RICHARD DYER: This tape is a part of the History of Columbia Junior College. The interview on this side is with Mr. Robert Deal, dean of the Occupational Education division at Columbia Junior College.

TAPE SPLICE

DYER: Uh, Bob, why don’t we take a little bit of time and talk about your position in the district during the formative years of Columbia Junior College.

MR. DEAL: All right, fine. When I was first approached about being a member of the Columbia team, Dusty felt that a lot of us who were working together in Modesto in the adult education program might well be the nucleus for the new college. And so I suspect he move without authority, perhaps taking – seizing the initiative if that’s the word and I can recall early morning breakfasts at his home when he and Pat hosted us, and we used to come for scrambled eggs, bacon and toast and then after breakfast we’d sit around the table prior to going to our regular jobs, and we would discuss many of the phases of the question of how to start a school. I suspect this is one of the most stimulating things that has ever occurred to me, because not only everything that I knew in a background of professional education had to be tested and either discarded or kept. And so you really review what you think you know, and what is good, and what you’ve seen that’s bad and you suddenly realize that you really are a part of a – well, it’s almost like a blackboard that has nothing on it yet, but the minute you put a mark on that board someone’s going to start to read it.

DYER: Well, did you actually go back, Bob, and study some of the books or talked to people about some of the things you felt should be a part of Columbia Junior College?

MR. DEAL: Not so much talking with people, in the beginning, as talking with the team that was to be the nucleus for the college. And this was very strenuous dialogue, some of the most – I would say most mentally, how should I put it, some of the hardest thinking that I’ve ever gone through was trying to formulate something that I really felt that I really believed, that I knew was good, that would work, if I just had a chance to try. And then having to defend it, before my fellow man, as to “Why is this any good?”, “Why do you believe that?”, and I suspect those “Why” questions were much like nettles, they just kept coming and after a while you began to wonder what you really did believe.

DYER: Was there any question about the role of a occupational education division in a junior college?

MR. DEAL: Not really. And I suspect this comes from perhaps Dusty’s own philosophy first, that he feels the need for education to be of a practical nature, people should be able to make use of what they know, and he has felt that there needs to be a balance, that there are all kinds of people in this world, many of them going in different directions and having different needs, and as you look at the occupational world, whether it be professional or unskilled, the gamut is broad enough that there seems to be room for education for all. And I can imagine that his having had experiences in the navy, and lived in the very masculine world, as having been Mr. Adult Education in Modesto and generated a tremendous program there, having seen the success of this, knowing that people would come to school in the evening and far exceed the day enrollments, that his philosophy was pretty deeply ingrained and I – when I came to Modesto, I was amazed at the size of the adult education program. And particularly those parts of the program that went into specialized groups, and the hard-core unemployed, the impoverished, this kind of thing. And that’s where I began to see that there was much more to education than I had ever learned before. And I suspect I also became acquainted with perhaps the hardest student to teach, and that is the embittered, seasoned hard-core adult, who almost has a philosophy of “Teach me something, I dare you.” And yet this person has only built a shell around himself out of self-protection, and you begin to realize that underneath he’s saying “Please help me, help me be a person, let me be a part of America and the great dream”, and to each his own and we’re all different and I suspect that’s where the real challenge comes in as to how can you help this person, does he need a technical background or does he need an academic background, is he an artistic person, is he creative, does he follow directions, what kind of a person is he? And then how can education help?

DYER: Did you feel, based on your experiences at Modesto, that what eventually was to evolve during the Eagle Cottage days was a bit like that of the Modesto occupational education division, or was it something that was unique?

MR. DEAL: Well, coming into the community was a complete change of atmosphere because in Modesto, everything was a bear, and it was a question of having people, having staff, facilities, equipment, program, all of those things that people take for granted when they show up the first night in a schoolroom. And here, when we came to Columbia, we had none of this. And so you asked – to start with, some very startling questions. “Where do I hang my hat?” And this gets to be interesting because you actually comb a town for the physical facilities that need to be. But we knew that from an administrative point of view, we would have the need for some office space, prior to any educational program, that we would have to be here for a while to build this sort of thing, and so we just found a place on Main St. that was convenient, offered parking and had a good coffee shop next door, and a few fringe benefits, and we moved in. And it – that was the beginning. Then, the second major question was, “Okay, now we have a place to hang our hat. Now, where shall we find a place for the instructional program?” And we had been offered a variety of facilities such as the high school programs at night – we were turned down, strangely enough, by one of the local churches that did not want the college program in its parish hall – very definite about this – and that disturbed many of the members of the church but they were definite about it. We used to make very light of it, in fact after-dinner jokes wrapped around the sites that we did use. I recall we found an old Laundromat, and when I went in to see what was there I noticed that it had two restrooms, and that had something going for it – it had an office, or storeroom that could have been the teacher’s office, and it had 28 floor plugs. And I thought to myself, “That takes care of my electric typewriters, this will be the home of the first business program.”

DYER: Is that the one on Stockton Street?

MR. DEAL: Yes. And so we rented the room and told people facetiously that we have our business program in a Laundromat. And then looking around for other places, I remember a newspaper reporter told us about Eagle Cottage. And so we went to see it, and we began to convert the basement into the lab for Dick’s program in science and Deb’s bookstore, and the first library for Virginia, and then we moved to the second floor- was a dormitory for girls, and that became a classroom, and we moved a potter’s wheel in and we threw clay all over the place, and that became the beginnings of our art program,  and we moved the drafting tables in and set them up in the boy’s dormitory and that was the home for many classrooms, in addition to the drafting classes. And the dining room of Eagle Cottage we had some of our major programs, like history and English, and then we made light of the fact that psychology was offered – I think it was rather significant that psychology was offered in the Oddfellows’ Hall. That got to be one of the earlier jokes about the school. And we enjoyed that. And then there were other places where we’d met – well, we had off-campus programs in Freako Boys’ Ranch, where their staff, over in Calaveras County.

DYER: This was the first year then, back in Fall of 1968?

MR. DEAL: Yes. We started the first program for the nurses in the basement of the hospital, and we had nothing except the basement, and they brought in beds and we set up desks and put in temporary walls and hung some lights and finally ended up with the first classroom, and our total inventory for the program was 12 thermometers. And with that, we just begged and borrowed everything else.

DYER: Now did you and some of the students do a lot of this work, Bob?

MR. DEAL: No, no, the students were nurses and so they couldn’t, but well the maintenance crew did. And we made an agreement with the hospital that after we put it in, it would become theirs. So now they have lighting fixtures in the basement and we left it in goodwill, they loaned us a place for schooling for a year, and we appreciated that. IN fact, it was more than a year, because as we came on campus and we began to add the buildings, the need was so great for other buildings beyond the occupational program that we only built one of the seven buildings for occupations. The other six were all general education. And we had a science building, and an art building, and we had three kinds of general ed buildings, and then of course the learning center. So the first building in occupations that we built was a combination drafting room and typing room. Later, we moved the drafting out and and gave the entire building to business because there wasn’t room, it’s expanded and drafting did not. So we put away the drafting tables – and they’re still in storage, incidentally, we do not have a drawing facility – and we went back to using the high school at night.

DYER: Do you feel that the Eagle Cottage experience, perhaps even the Modesto Junior College experience, conditioned your attitude towards what should be a part of the occupational education buildings?

MR. DEAL: I think so, and the reason being that as you become a part of a community, you talk with people and they converse with you, they give you ideas, they give you their hopes and aspirations, they speak lovingly about “I hope my youngster will get a chance to study something-or-other”, and it’s this kind of a reading that you begin to stockpile in your mental computer and that, coupled with a real reading of the economics of the community, and you begin to realize for example that in this community, forestry is a very definite factor. And we were fortunate to have Dick’s leadership in that area, and the fellows who were both academically and occupationally oriented, and they built both professional and technical programs at the same time. And this provided a good strong thrust in the beginning, in that area.

DYER: So you had – Initially, you had quite a bit of support from some of the community leaders.

MR. DEAL: Yes, I would say the greatest support however though came from the community itself, because of the surveys that were done by Dr. Frank Pierce. Frank, I think, turned in total responses from over 8,100 people. By the time he had surveyed past students at the college, future students to come, businessmen, present students at the college, parents of those students, people in general, every tenth name in the phone book – he had nine different surveys that he generated with tremendous backup of knowledge. So, when we started our programs, we had a pretty good idea of what the community felt. And there were a lot of interesting things that came out of that. They asked, for example, specifically for a program involving heavy equipment. And the reason is rather simple; we have a lot of snow up here, we have a lot of ranchers with equipment, we have a lot of roads, the forestry and the lumber business use a lot of heavy equipment, and with the two dams being built, there’s a tremendous amount of exercise of heavy equipment for this community.

DYER: Were you able to start any of the courses while at Eagle Cottage?

MR. DEAL: Not too many of those. We did start some basic classes, as I mentioned, in the Laundromat – we had typing and shorthand classes going, and we were able then to expand beyond that with some things – the introduction of business, and business law, business math and we tried some courses that didn’t work, we put in courses like “Principles of Insurance”, nobody wanted – we plugged in Salesmanship classes that nobody took – sounds interesting when you can’t sell a salesmanship class, you know – that’s a little bit of hurt that you take along the way, but it – by the same token, people will gradually show you ways to go if you’re sensitive to listening to them. I think it stands, you know, without even saying, the greatest threat to our community is fire, with the woods. And so we automatically considered that we would be a center for fire science. And we only found out through some assistance by our people in the insurance business, for example, that our insurance rates would be cut considerably – as much as nine thousand dollars a year if we, in fact, put in a full-blown fire department. And so by plugging in the necessity for maintenance and protection against fire, and coupling that with an educational program, we now have the fire department with the trucks and the live-in capacity for the students and the fire chief, and all that came along notch by notch but it’s all here. And when we first started, we were just scared to death that we would have a fire on campus before we had the adequate protection. Now we feel very comfortable about it. So, the nursing program grew up, we built a health occupations building for them, the fire department is here, heavy equipment now has a home, business is booming with the building that we are sitting in presently, and now the question comes, “Where shall we go from here?” I guess that’s really the future and not history, so maybe we don’t even want to delve into that this afternoon.

DYER: What about the plans that you had for resort management programs? Did that start during the 1968-69 year?

MR. DEAL: Yes, I think the dream concept came about that time. There are sub-programs we’re developing where we do not build on the campus, and resort management will be one. We met, in Columbia State Park, with director of Parks and Recreation, Mr. Bill Mott, and Bill just frankly asked the question, “Why can’t we do something cooperatively between the two, the parks system and the college, to help the town of Columbia and the total concept of the restoration of a park and its operation using the old-fashioned features and fixtures and the climate of the day? The more we got to thinking about it, we first thought about drama, with the theater that’s there. And that is operated of course by the University of the Pacific, and they do a marvelous job in summertime with their programs, so we felt it was best to leave well enough alone; this shall not be a function of our college. So then ??? ??? ??? ??? about other avenues we could go. And we thought in the tourism business and entertaining, feeding people and housing them was a natural, and Bill said well, if you would like to run it, I will rebuild the old City Hotel. We’ll restore it as it was 100 years ago, and turn it over to the college for the Home for Resort Management and Food Service. And so I’ve been working behind the scenes quietly, with their department – we now have the legal agreements, we have the plans in Sacramento, we have gone clear to Washington and have two cabinet members behind this project – at least until the other day they were both in the Cabinet, I see Secretary Steinz resigned for other reasons and Bob Finch has since gone into the White House, but both of those gentlemen, in terms of secretary of commerce and secretary of H.E.W, were behind this restoration and so we got a federal grant totaling close to a third of a million. And that’s sitting now, waiting for the finished plans. As far as we know, nothing is in our way now. And we will start the final drawings here shortly, and I suspect that two years from now, we will open that hotel. As a result, we are on campus now with the beginnings of our resort management program, we have offered two classes and we will have the third in the spring, and with Bob Rosenthal who is a former owner and manager of the Hotel ??? Mc??? Hill, Bob comes to us from a graduate in business administration from Vanderbilt, a lot of background in the resort business, and he will be instructing our program. By the time the hotel is open, we will have just about graduated our first class of resort management students. So we will have been in the business long enough to know how to run a hotel, when that hotel is given to us. So I think the timing of that, while it’s two years down the road, it’s a healthy set-in-line set of ingredients, and I look forward for it to be a success.

DYER: So that would be about 1973, then ???.

MR. DEAL: Yes.

DYER: ’74, ’73.

MR. DEAL: Yeah. September ’73, I think, we’ll open that hotel.

DYER: Have you been the beneficiary of a lot of federal, state and local aid, the grants that you talked about earlier – have these programs made it possible for you to purchase this equipment or to get some of the exciting program started?

MR. DEAL: Yes, we have. We’ve been very fortunate, particularly in the case of heavy equipment. I think that one is the most outstanding, because through our instructors and their special know-how, we were able to obtain about a third of a million dollars worth of hardware, and this is not small. When you think of somebody giving you two cranes, and two dozers, and approximately 150 thousand dollars worth of parts, if you go out there and look today under the snow, you’ll find what looks like a pile of junk, but we are actually building from scratch our own bulldozer from the parts that they were given, they’d given to us. And we’re photographing each step along the way, and we have found that through excess property of the federal government, this is probably the biggest thrust into the college’s program. I recall people telling me I wouldn’t be able to even buy one tire for one piece of equipment in this program, and I said well, I didn’t expect to buy it, I thought somebody would give it me, and sure enough they did. We’ve had success elsewhere. In the fire department we got war surplus equipment. And there we were successful in, with the help of federal money and state money, in equipping an old fire truck that the Navy gave us. We got some help from the prisoners down in Sierra Conservation Center, who have painted the equipment, and that’s a big help to keep it up. So yes, in answer to your question, we have received quite a bit of help, and this we’re very proud of because it represents a way that we can furnish our program with equipment without a direct, just absolutely impossible cost to the local taxpayer. We just couldn’t take that stuff out of the college budget at all.

DYER: Well, it would seem in order to make what appears to be a pile of junk into a bulldozer it takes a lot of innovation and imagination. As I look at it, these must be the key words in your programs, Bob. Have you had a lot of success in trying to establish new programs and different approaches?

MR. DEAL: Well, I don’t think you could say it’s a lot, and I’m perhaps the kind of person who’s really never satisfied, and I want to see more, but I would just list a few, and let me say right at the outset that the most important thing an administrator ever does is to hire a teacher. Because without him you have nothing. And that’s the key to the whole program. I’ve heard many people say, the most important person in the room is the student. And I’m – often on occasion I have debated that issue for lots of reasons. So I’m a firm believer that the most important person in the room is the instructor. We have found, for example, in - going back to heavy equipment again for one brief example – we have used the students. They have made the audio tutorial units, each student specializing in a part. So he may one day take a starter, for example, tear that starter completely apart, lay out on the table all the components, photograph them, put them in a set of slides that makes an order of assembly so that you can teach from this, one slide to the next. And the student then puts his own sound track on, with his own set of slides. Now, educationally this is fine. The student then complains about “I know a lot about starters, and nothing about anything else.” So we soon found that after a little while, we had to shift that emphasis and let him get his hands dirty on something else. But it did make for a good educational beginning to teach them how to teach. And they were excited to take pictures of their projects and things. That was one thrust. We were successful in working with the operating engineers from four Western states – this involves California, Nevada, Utah and Hawaii – and they are meeting currently in San Francisco to determine a grant for this college, and we will then be generating the pilot educational materials for four western states in heavy equipment maintenance. And this is directly the result of the instructors turning the students around to this media.

MR. DEAL: Now in other areas, we’ve had successes – our crime prevention program is not well-known on the campus, but we have taken students from a lot of varieties of life – sheriff’s department, highway patrol, prison, parole officers, probation officers, sheriff department, a number of – a cross section of the law enforcement profession, and we have found that by taking these people and putting them in different areas, foreign to themselves, that they really learned a great deal about what’s happening. And we found, by taking entry level students and putting them into a situation immediately, they can determine whether this is going to be their thing. It’s a rather threatening thing to take a youngster who says “Well, I think I’d like to be in law enforcement”, and within the first week put them inside a prison. And letting them see what happens on the other end. What is an inmate. And how did he get there, and what did he do, and what do we have to do with, for and to that inmate? And then let him decide whether law enforcement is really his thing, his choice, and not wait until he has spent a number of years preparing and then find out that that was the wrong choice. I think in some other areas, in business we’re very proud of our instructor who is teaching the business office skills - she is a capable person to the point where, right now, she can handle twelve different kinds of instruction in the room at the same time. So if I come in and I want to learn Greg, and I’m only doing 45 words a minute, she’ll send me over someplace and say “Dial channel four”, and there’s the dictating that fits my individual speed. IF you were a court reporter and wanted to learn speed writing or steno typing, she’d send you to a different area and say “turn to channel 6 and go off and do your thing.” So here’s a gal who really has been able, through the technology and the tapes and the cassettes, and our twelve channel instructional unit in the steno lab, she can teach twelve things in the class at the same time. And I think there’s a little bit of something miraculous in that. So we do have some innovative things, and I’m very proud of our bunch, I think they’re a grand – really a grand bunch. And we’re not there yet, but I think we’re doing some interesting things.

DYER: Well, the important thing is to keep moving. One thing – do you see yourself as a builder of bridges between the college and the community? Programs that you have to offer your philosophy, your attitude towards college and community?

MR. DEAL: Well, I think very much so, Dick, for two reasons. One – Let’s take the community’s concept first. When many people say college, I think they first go back and analyze their own educational background. And they may think of themselves in terms of scholarship, or whether school was a successful experience for them, or whether school to them, and particularly the word “College”, means professionalism, the doctor-lawyer routine – whether school to them means learning how to be a better person at the very thing they already know how to do. So I find a great success in my programs is the in-service aspect, the person who comes back to school, the firemen in the local community who come here at night to take more training at our fire department, the nurses who come and take pharmacology, for example. The policemen, who will come and study the juvenile procedures to understand youth better before he has to arrest some of them. I think in terms of the man who’s just been appointed the boss at the lumber company, and comes here and takes our supervisory course to learn how to handle people and thinking in terms of – well, any number of students who are really adult and who come back to school, and I think that is bridging to your community if you can draw them back into school again. And I certainly lean on the rest of the campus for support and I’m very pleased with the people with whom I work here, who lend that support.

DYER: Well Bob, we thank you very much for sharing with us some of your ideas and certainly the programs and the enthusiasm, I’m sure, will live on in bigger and better things to come. Thank you, Bob.

MR. DEAL: Thank you for the privilege.

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Dyer, Richard

Interviewee: Deal, Robert (Dean of the Occupational Education division)

Name of Tape: (a section of) History of Columbia Junior College (CC_hist_6_0)

When: Late 60’s early 70’s

Transcriber: Alden (4/9/08)

Transcriber’s Note: n/a