DYER: Walt, why don’t you first give us an idea of the courses that you had back in the Eagle Cottage days.

LEINEKE: Back then, due to the signs of the faculty, we were all generalists, so I was teaching in what I don’t consider my area as well what I do consider my area.  Fundamentals of Speech—the public speaking course, the group discussion, all of the interpretation of literature, which we call something similar, but not exactly that. 

DYER: All interpretation literature?

LEINEKE: yeah, that’s it.  That’s what the course is.  Somehow, somewhere, some way, or someone who wrote the first catalogue gave it an actual name, and I’ve never been able to accommodate myself to that.

DYER: were you involved in developing these courses…Walt, or did you inherit them? 

LEINEKE: I inherited catalogue descriptions, which were probably pretty brief… and I think we all inherited catalogue descriptions and had to flush out courses out of them.  And in addition to those three speech classes, I had to help pick up some English load, and I taught English 51…which has since been subdivided into 51-A and 51-B—a non-transfer, terminal English composition course.

DYER: where were you located when you had most of the classes?  Columbia State Park (laughs)?

LEINEKE: Yeah, in the park in two different locations.  We were housed there in Eagle Cottage with all of our offices and one…two…three classrooms. And at one time or another I used all three of the classrooms in the main building.  There was a forth classroom downstairs, which was exclusively the domain of the science department…their lab.

DYER: That was new… the library…

LEINEKE: …that was in the basement by the library and bookstore.  The main floor had the old dinning hall, which was a classroom—I used that quite often.  And the back room, which was a sleeping bay, or dormitory, and I used that for several classes, and then upstairs there was that weird little attic room where (laughing) one of the more peculiar classrooms I have ever operated in, and we all had a taste of that at one time or another, I suppose. And then there was another in-the-park campus location in the Odd Fellows building—which was a unique facility—and that’s where we are on the highway.  It’s right on the corner, I don’t know the names, but it’s the main highway going through town and one of the side streets, right across the street from what was then the Payora corner and since became the candle shop, and now I understand is about to undergo a new transformation—they are going to tare that building down, and build something new in there. Mumbled talk: Which is history, you might want to go and cry. Um, what’s his name…Kessle is going to be the new building.

DYER: What about the size of the classes, will the typical size class that you had in the past, or do they tend to be rather small. 

LEINEKE:   They vary a bit. I recall one group-dissuasion class had eight students in it.  One of my speech classes was well above twenty-five—twenty-eight or twenty-nine students.  English comp hung in about twenty to twenty-five students.  So, some of them were quite small, some were average.  Uh, we didn’t really have any large classes. Two large classes would have taken up entire student body (laughs).

DYER: What about the obstacles that you had? It’s fascinating for those of us that weren’t there to think about it, but I’m sure that, uh, it wasn’t all that easy for people trying to conduct an academic program.

LEINEKE: Each of the teaching environments, or even the non-teaching environments presented kinds of obstacles.  For example the Odd Fellows building—during a good rainstorm—was kind of teaching in a shower stall.  We were on the bottom floor.  Above us was a hole of some sort; I don’t know what ever got up into there. And the (don’t understand) about that. The whole structure leaked quite magnificently, and the result was that down there on the main floor, in our classroom, water would drip from all of the beams overhead and through cracks in the floor of the rooms above.  It would come raining down on us in quite a broad pattern.  It pretty well blanketed the whole way.  You would have to sit very carefully to be in between drips.  The major leaks we put buckets under and the minor leaks we’d ignore, like they weren’t there.  That was one obstacle; of course it wasn’t always raining.  During the drying parts of the year—the Fall quarter and the Spring quarter when the logging operation were going full swing—the big logging trucks would come pulling through town and they would make a tremendous racket as they were gearing down their engines…high RPM and the tires riding on the pavement, and the air breaks going kchhchhh…(making the sound of brakes) right outside the windows.

DYER: During a speech or…? (laughing)

LEINEKE: Oh, yeah.  During a student’s speech, or during a lecture in an English class or whatever.  And all things would come to a halt while it passed by and after that we learned to accommodate ourselves to it; even students were able to just stop in mid-sentence until the noise went by and then continue on again as if there had been no interruption.  Unique; but, you know, we’ve all suffered under the same strain, so we kind of build in a spree that way—because we’re all mutually in the same predicament.  That building had windows that faced the road.  The only real ventilation to the building were these windows that started a little lower than what you would consider window-sill-height, and went up either to the ceiling, or darn near to the ceiling—they were two-an-a-half, three-feet wide—and they were shuttered with those big iron shutters that were prevalent in those days.  Well, to get any ventilation of course, we had to open up the shutters and then open up the windows and of course that really gave us access to the noise problem outside.  If we didn’t do that, in would beat up on the noise, but we would suffocate in that hot little room with no air circulation at all. 

DYER: Well, now, was that the only classroom there?

LEINEKE: It was the only room in the building that we were using.  Though, with kind of a minor exception—the front end of that building (apparently we entered through the back end—literally through the back door) the front end of the building apparently had originally been designed to serve a little vestibule area that one would enter from the street entrance. And then from the vestibule go through either one of the two doors into the main hall operation which we used for a classroom.  But that little vestibule thing was sealed off at the street. And the only way into it would be coming through the back way if the building, past the little kitchen facility in there (for potluck dinners, or whatever), into the classroom, through the classroom and into one of those little doors in the vestibule.  And Virginia Blackburn had that thing packed with cages and rats and rat food and all sorts of supplies for the site because he’s using the building for a psychology lab.  So, you know, the English would walk out and out would come the rats (laughing) into their experimental container.  I have to go back and check to see if she left any of those.  I don’t know, but that duly is probably infested. 

DYER: during the warmer moths, you knew the rats were there. 

LEINEKE: You couldn’t hear them, but you’d sure smell them. 

DYER: I’m sure it took some special techniques in order to cope with the rain and rats and the other problems that came up.  Are there things that you remember—memorable occasions or innovative techniques that you use in order to get your points across?

LEINEKE: Um, nothing other than what I’ve mentioned.  Uh, well that other facility that I talked about the attic in Eagle Cottage.  Part of the building structure were two posts, or beams, about eight-by-eight or ten-by-ten beams, that really kind of went up in the middle of the room, supporting part of the roof.  Without them the whole thing would have collapsed on itself.  And they were located in such a manner that you couldn’t possibly put a class in there without incorporating one or both of the posts.  So no matter where I stood or sat, or where students sat, somebody was blocked off by one or another post.  I was always kind of leaning back and everything to make sure that everyone was still there.  That was kin of fun.  Actually, as far affected me those unique facilities were, well you now, obstacle to getting a job done right.  They were a minor annoyance, but it’s something that I could certainly live with for a year, or two years, or even ten years, I suppose.  In a way we’re all anxious to come to this modern facility, but in a way we lost something in the transition.

DYER: Yeah, the closeness.

LEINEKE: Also closeness. Here we were all comfortable.  There we were all a little bit uncomfortable.  And there is something about being companions in pain that breeds closeness; whereas companions in comfort don’t have that same kind of a thing.

DYER: Is that true in the faculty offices too?  Did you get claustrophobia or

LEINEKE: In the faculty offices one little guy gets a ten-by-twelve bedroom—maybe it wasn’t even that big—that I was housed in accommodated John Hagstrom, who was English and Reading, Virginia Blackbird was the entire psychology department, and myself, and we had one really small area next to two doors, left over, it was just big enough to put a two-and-a-half foot table at and a little plastic chair. And we felt so sorry for the president of the student body because he has no place to call his own, and we put a little table in there and a chair and we gave it to him for the student body offices.  That really packed the room up very nicely, he got stepped on a lot because of the two doorways, but he was happy to even have that.  And we knew what the other guy was doing.  I probably learned more about teaching English because John Hagstrom was literally within hands reach of me most of the day.  I’d hear him discussing papers with students—I had to, the students were practically sitting in my lap to that with him;  he’d hear me discussing papers with my students; we’d talk about papers with each other.  And I learned a great deal about teaching from him, and perhaps he learned something from me (I doubt it).

DYER: It must have been cozy, though, maybe with the three instructors and two students there and different conversations at the same time?

LEINEKE:   Again, yeah, it was an annoyance.  It was hard to concentrate on what you were doing, but at the same time I knew something about the psychology program then.  I don’t know anything about it now because I don’t have to live in Virginia Blackbird’s purse, as I did then.  Of course, she lived in my pocket too.

DYER: (Blur) about the speech program

LEINEKE:   It made for an intimacy that transcended your friendship or companionship.  It was an intimacy on an academic level too, which I don’t know how else you’re going to get other than putting up with the discomfort that was attented.

DYER: With the student who refer to this, their tapes indicating nostalgic feeling for the good old days, I suppose.  It’s the kind of thing that I suppose you have to expect to being a part of the past as you become a real formal institution and move into the larger buildings. 

LEINEKE:   I can appreciate the nostalgia, but like most memory game, we tend to remember those things that are the most pleasant and forget the uncomfortable and every time I get nostalgic about the Eagle Cottage days, I remember some of the inconveniences too and I’m almost content with the sacrifice that which I now miss.  (Laughing).

DYER: Well Walt, we do appreciate it.  Thank you very for the moment with you, and we’ll put this down for posterity.

END OF INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW #2

Interviewer:  Richard L. Dyer

Interviewee: John Hagstrom

DYER: John, you started teaching at Modesto, didn’t you, before coming aboard here at Columbia?

HAGSTROM: Yes, I did. I taught at…came aboard at Modesto Junior College at 1962 and taught there for six years before being asked to come aboard, uh, the then-developing Columbia Junior College.  So that midyear in 1967, actually, I was first approached and asked to be the director of the Learning Skills Center or head of the Basic Skill Program as they called it at that time, which I volunteered to do.  After a lengthy discussion with my family, and so forth, we decided we would make the move.  So in July of 1968 we moved to Sonora.

DYER: And any problem with finding any accommodations?

HAGSTROM: well, we had looked for six to eight months proceeding our arrival for a rental, because we did not want to buy (at first we did not want to buy).  At first it was advised that we might want to look over the community to find out where we wanted to live before we go ahead and make a purchase.  We did that and, uh, so we, took a rental to…I had not seen my wife agree to rent the place—I didn’t have the opportunity to see it before she rented it. 

DYER: Was it a wise decision John?

HAGSTROM: Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t as bad as I envisioned it, although I’m still convinced that the nails that put that house together were bread around the horn. 

DYER: You are probably right (laughing).

HAGSTROM: But, as soon as we moved up, I asked for and got a desk at 77N. Washington Street—what you might call the developmental home of the college—and was placed between two secretaries in that very small office, which our store room in the back was…you walked in and you faced immediately…dirt. And we built shelves on top of the dirt to store the secretarial supplies.

DYER: Dirt inside the building itself?

HAGSTROM: Right off of the restroom there was a little storage room, but it was never designed to store as much as we had.  So we had to simply put the supplies on boards on dirt; and it was a very cramped quarters.  We had Dr. Roth and his secretary, and Bill Haskins and his secretary, and Dick Dodge, and I think Dick shared a secretary (blur).  And then all the secretaries, and so on (I don’t know how per square footage (mumble)).  And then we had a visitor reception area.

DYER: I remember being interviewed there, and it was a bit close.

HAGSTROM: Close, yeah. But it was particularly educational for me to sit and watch the deans and the president construct or write the first catalogue for Columbia Junior College.  And they ask some very penetrating questions as to, you know, what’s the catalogue for, and so on.  And that principle, and of course, they concluded that the catalogue is for students, (primarily) so it was designed to serve their need, and answer their questions.  And when there was a proposal for an inclusion in that catalogue that came up, that in any way violated that primary concept, there was a great deal of verbal exchange. (Laughing…there was sharp verbalizing, I tell you). So it was quite an education process, but it was certainly enjoyable. 

From that, of course they had started construction on the campus itself at that time—psych development and actual underground networks like sewage and water and so forth that had to be put in…and power.  And I recall late one afternoon, we received a call that there was a fire out by the campus.  And so all of us immediately pile into the car and we went out and stood on the parking lot (the upper level of the first parking lot).  And the fire was across us on the flat road, and you could still see the scars from it today. 

DYER: Well, that was in ’68 then. It must have been in the fall of ’68.

HAGSTROM: I believe it was.  Jack Ametson who is currently teaching for us, happened to be, at that point, the fire director, and he was controlling the (???) bombers and the fire crews from that parking lot.  And it so weird on the first hand that had the fire jumped we would have been in serious trouble because of Manzanita.  So we were all so concerned; of course, Jack was too, and he directed the operation from the parking lot which was kind of an interesting afternoon. 

DYER: Now you also worked off of the office on Stockton Street, did you, the…

D and Hagstrom together: Washing Well.

DYER: Why such a title?

HAGSTROM: Well, that was the name of the establishment, because it was a Laundromat prior to that, and we presumed that it had gone out of business or something.  And Bob Deil, because of his need for an office occupations facility and because of the numerous electrical outlets that were available that were previously used by washing machines were now used for typewriters adding machines and so on, and so it worked out very well for our particular needs.  Yes, I did do some curriculum development there.  As it turned out, although I was asked to come up and to develop the curriculum and be the principle instructor for basic skills, the budgetary problems that continually plague us precluded the hiring of an English instructor or someone to head up the English department.  So I was asked to assume that responsibility too—which meant that I only had to develop the basic skills, reading, study skills, and so forth—portion of the curriculum.  But also to write the English curriculum—which was a big job.

DYER: Was that modeled on any other curriculum—Modesto’s curriculum or other institutions?

HAGSTROM: It was modeled (although I’m sure I did have to look at these other kind of courses and course descriptions and so forth) but I attempted, in that, to develop courses that would be academically respectable and at the same time fulfill the needs of the non-transfer student.  So, I developed and named a course called College Composition, which is English 51 as we have it now.  And that was designed for the non-transfer student.  But it got away from the onus of “bonehead English” or

DYER: Uhu, uhu

HAGSTROM: and there was an additional problem, because we had decided to go on the quarter system—to start out on the quarter system.  All of my previous experience had been under the semester system, so that meant the course from the semester to the quarter system.  That proves to be not as difficult as I had imagined because there were precedence across the state.  I believe I used the Shobau College Breakout for English 101 A, B, and C as somewhat of a model for that.  We’ve been very carefully warned about the (???) from most instructors that come from a semester into a quarter system of jamming a semester’s work into one quarter, so we were conscious of that when we started.

DYER: Is there any difference of opinion about merits of the quarter system or were people generally in agreement that it was a better system to follow than a semester system for Columbia?

HAGSTROM: Well, I think that there were two considerations there.  One, that at least for those present at the initial stages, that many of the had had experience with the quarter system and felt that it was a better way to go, simply because students did not have to take as many classes and could concentrate more.  Secondly, however, we were anticipating the coordination council decision, or the California Higher Education Act: that by 1975 all colleges and Universities and community colleges would be on the quarter system.  So we though we would start out that way and in anticipation of that, it has proved, however, in the recent past that that’s not going to happen.

DYER: (jokingly) so the master plan is not absolute.

HAGSTROM: We had some interesting psych development and curricular problems we were finally able to convince the state that we could use Eagle Cottage for at least the first year.  We had to go out in the science lab, for example, which was in the basement of that.  We had to pour concrete to make a floor that wouldn’t be wet and muddy in the winter time, and to in effect winterize that.

DYER: That’s where the library was located too…

HAGSTROM: There was also adjacent to the library in the basement. We had interviewed a number of people and brought them aboard in effect.  We had to distribute those faculty according to the amount of bedrooms in Eagle Cottage for their office space.  As it ended up Walt Leineke and Virginia Blackbird and I shared a bedroom (laughs). And, uh, if you could…

DYER: (____) along with some students?

HAGSTROM: Yes, well of course we had to have, first of all, our libraries in that area, as well as out desks, and a file cabinet, and a chair, and so forth, for student exchange. 

DYER: …..interesting bed partners….

HAGSTROM: The Eagle Cottage was at one time reputed to be a house of irrepute. We also made may puns on that fact—historical fact.  But the fact remains that as you may have know, or may have heard form other sources, Virginia Blackbird is the kind of an instructor who attracts students in drewels. And Walter and I, of course, had similar kinds of experiences, so that the students—often six, or eight, or ten students in that bed room—as well as the three instructors and all of their paraphernalia.  So it made for a very close relationship, to put it mildly. 

DYER: Did you check to see if the people had claustrophobia before you hired them?

HAGSTROM: (Laughing) No, we didn’t go that far; but there was kind of a comrade, I think, that existed.  We had approximately three-hundred students—not all of whom, thank goodness, we in the same place in the same time.  But we has approximately three-hundred students when we began; and we virtually knew every student by their first name, and they, by our fist name.  So it was a very close kind of relationship that developed for a verity of reasons, one of them being small offices. 

DYER: when the school officially opened in the Fall of 1968, what was your course schedule?

HAGSTROM: Well, I taught courses in developmental reading—two sections of that (as I recall anyway).  I taught English 101A, 101B, and I believe the 101C—all thereof those in that first quarter. Because some students came in with transfer (transferring of other institution who already had 101A or its equivalent). Now, one of things that we decided to do, and when we hired Walt Leineke he was primarily speech, but he had taught English before.  So he taught the English 51 course—the College Composition—and that helped a great deal.  One thing that we had determined early, however, in our planning (program planning), was that we were not going to use entrance exams, and such.  So what we did initially—at least that first year—was to read the transcript of every student in our English classes, and also provide he wrote for us a sample—writing samples.  Those two factors combined gave us, then, some direction in terms of placement for that student.  And we also, in the writing sample, we were very much more careful about it than we are now--I think, because of size, the numbers—about diagnosing problems based on their writing sample.  The use of the transcript was a pretty good indicator for us initially. 

DYER: Did you have large classes, John?

HAGSTROM: Yeah, they were pretty big…twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five in a composition class.  It was a pretty good size.  I found the students to be very responsive, and most of then\m did quite well. 

DYER: So where did you have most of your classes?  Eagle Cottage, or were you a….?

HAGSTROM: Eagle Cottage.  All of my classes were in Eagle Cottage.  But for the developmental reading class, for example, I was teaching out of boxes because we had received the materials in from the publishers, and so forth, and there was no place to store them.  So we simply kept them in the boxes.  And then because there were so many other kinds of classes it that one room, which was the primary teaching station, that we often had to move our stuff out, so that the next class could move their materials in.  And so that went on for, well, all the time we were at Eagle Cottage and it was very unsuccessful, or unsatisfying, in that respect.  But the students adjusted to it, also.  It’s amazing how adaptive people are.

DYER: I understand some of the informal classes were held during coffee breaks or down at the saloon.  Do you have nay experience there?

HAGSTROM: I didn’t conduct any classes at the saloon, or at the Douglass, or the St. Charles, but we did, on occasion, go into the Columbia House and took over a table or two in the back.  That’s also, by the way, where we had our faculty senate meetings, on occasion, and our just faculty meetings…which were not very frequent. 

DYER: Now, you were president of the senate at that time.

HAGSTROM: I was first president of the senate, and I declined initially, simply because I felt that I would not provide…well, that would bring too many prejudices too because I had been senate president at Modesto Junior College just a year or two before.  But my colleagues felt that would be a good asset—to provide a liaison between the two institutions. 

DYER: That’s a nice way of saying it anyway…

HAGSTROM: Yes. (Laughing) right.

DYER: John, thank you for opportunity to sit here in your office and talk about the memorable events during the formative years of Columbia Junior College. 

LAST 36 SECONDS OF BLANK TAPE

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Dyer, Richard L.

Interviewee of interview #1: Leineke, Walter (continued from the last tape CC_hist_6_1)

Interviewee of interview #2: Hagstrom. John

Name of Tape: Continuation of the History of Columbia Junior College: Interviews by original faculty of Columbia Junior College (CC_hist_7_1)

When: Winter of 1973

Transcriber: Ariella (September 2008)

Transcriber’s Note: n/a