Oral history interview with Joseph Cox [with transcript], February 2, 2012.

              Joseph Cox
Interviewed by Monte Poen
February 23, 2012

Poen:  I’m Monte Poen, and I’m delighted and honored and pleased and all those things, to be visiting with Dr. Joseph Cox, now Chancellor Emeritus of the entire Oregon University System.  But I know Dr. Cox as "Joe," and so that’s how I’ll be addressing him this morning. Joe comes from Maryland.  That’s where your education....  And he taught history.  How long did you teach history?
Cox:  I was at Towson-where you seem to get all of your provosts from-I was there for seventeen years, everything from instructor to acting president.
Poen:  Is that right?!
Cox:  Came here in [unclear].  Gene Hughes got me to come here in ’87, Monte, now that I think about it-1987.
Poen:  Eighty-one [1981].
Cox:  Eighty-one, forgive me.  I left in ’87.
Poen:  Yeah, you left in ’87.
Cox:  I always knew you were better than I was!
Poen:  (laughs)  As a vice-president of academic affairs, Joe has published a very fine book.  I think this was published by the American Philosophical Society, wasn’t it, Joe?
Cox:  It may have been under their auspices, but I think it actually came out under Kennikat Press, which was a Long Island, New York, firm.  I think the hardbound copy cost all of $17.50.  And when I called to complain about the price, the editor said, "Would you like print on the page?"  (laughter)
Poen:  Well, I want you to know that this book is being used by students, because it was mis-shelved, and so someone was taking it out, and that’s wonderful.
Cox:  We can talk about that later, if you want, so we can come back to that.
Poen:  Okay.  Joe, as I say, you were vice-president of academic affairs, and I looked at Platt Cline’s book, Mountain Campus, and he said that the administration, President Hughes, had gone through-and I’m quoting now-three complete searches before they found you.
Cox:  That’s what I’ve heard.  I don’t know that that’s fact, but that’s what I’ve heard.  I’m sure if Platt said it, it must be fact.
Poen:  Right.  And also Platt Cline wrote in that book that because of this delay-we can call it a delay-he said that important decisions had to be delayed.
Cox:  That was true.
Poen:  Do you know what those important decisions were?
Cox:  Yes, I think so.  I think when we first met, when Virginia and I first met Gene Hughes in Baltimore-and it seems Towson is where you go to get your provost, which is what we used to call it, now called vice-president for academic affairs.  He made it very clear that as a former academic vice-president himself, before becoming president, there was a lot of pent-up academic program decision making that needed to occur.  And we went down through that list.  I was thinking back on-coming up here this morning from Sedona-the things that I’m most proud of here were all related to those decisions.  For example, the graduate program, the research program, which was alive here and doing pretty well, just needed to think about what the next plateau of development was.  And we already had doctoral programs-and you were part of one of them-but there were other things that needed to be added.  We wanted to expand in the sciences, particularly in forestry as it applied to the environment.  There was a whole new direction in the Colorado Plateau study area, and I knew that the first thing that had to happen was that I had to find someone who shared the reverence that I feel for the combination of teaching and scholarship, and someone who would take our graduate programs and research it to the next level.  And I found Henry Hooper, who you’ll remember fondly. I found Henry at University of Maine-Orono, where he was vice-president, and convinced him to come, and we just took off.  Henry had the ability to spot talent.  He was a physicist himself, but he had a view of-he was equally devoted to the humanities, to the fine arts, and particularly for reasons that I’ve never really fully understood, to the Native Americans who were here before all of us, and to that history and that culture and that anthropology.  He wanted to reestablish the relationship with the Museum of Northern Arizona, which was part of us too.  It just seemed to me that from that point on, NAU never has looked back.  And I was up here last week, touring some of the newer research buildings, and I’m just thrilled, absolutely thrilled, to have been a small part of laying that foundation.  In fact, I called Henry up in Colorado, and I said, "Hank, I’ve just been up to NAU, and honest to gosh, I’m just so pleased that you and I were some small piece of that.  He said, "Well, you know, the most important thing was, we hired awfully good faculty," and we really did-just some stellar people-and that’s continued. The other thing that needed attention was the enrichment of undergraduate education.  NAU always had a reputation for classroom excellence-we really did.  That’s why people sent their kids here.  We were smaller, but it wasn’t just small, it was the fact that the undergraduate student mattered.  And that’s when we hit upon trying to do something with the honors program, which had existed but had kind of languished.  And we knew we needed someone with a totally different view of what honors ought to be.  That’s when I found Dick Skeen,who was at that time in sociology.  And gosh, the lecture series that evolved, and the honors program, and then the offshoot of that, that was so interesting, was the creation of the Native American Honor Society, which was terribly important, far more important, I think, than we realized when we thought about creating it.  And I will never forget the first honor society banquet when I sat on the stage with President Hughes and the governor; Governor Bruce Babbitt, who came to everything; the chair of the Hopi Tribal Council; and the chairman of the Navajo Nation.  And all of these families who had come to see their young people be honored for academic achievement.  I think it sent a message, perhaps for the first time, that it was okay to be Native American and to achieve academically in anything you wanted to do.  And all of a sudden our retention rates went up, and we’re running around wondering what did we do that worked?  Dave Markee who was vice-president for student services, "What did we do that worked?"  It was [unclear].  The fact that there was now the university saying, for the first time, "You don’t have to give up your culture to be academically successful."  And I’m very, very proud of that, and I want to go see the Native American Center over here, which I’ve not had a chance to [do].  That was a part of it.
Poen:  Would you say, Joe, that with your coming, there was a shift toward research?
Cox:  Yes, there was.
Poen:  There was definitely a shift toward research, scholarship....
Cox:  And you didn’t have to do that at the expense of good teaching.  The point Henry and I kept trying to make was we’re going to reward people for achievement, but you gotta do both.  You can’t come here and just be a researcher.  You can’t come here and just teach using the same materials you got in graduate school for the next thirty years.  And I’ve used you as an example more than once-then and since-that it was possible to be an extraordinary teacher-I’m almost tempted to say legendary....  (Poen chuckles)  No, it’s true!  It’s absolutely true.  ... but also to produce first-rate scholarship.  I would have an occasional argument with someone who wanted to argue that the two were mutually exclusive, and I said au contraire, I can point out examples across this campus-gee whiz, you and Ostheimer [John] in the humanities, and people in business doing wonderful things in research.  The sciences, Jim Wick, was just blossoming in geology.  You’ve got the finest geology lab in the world at the Grand Canyon.  If we didn’t achieve in geology, we ought to close shop!  And we did. The relationship with MNA, I feel good about that.
Poen:  MNA?
Cox:  Museum of Northern Arizona.  What a gem.
Poen:  Oh yeah.
Cox:  Something had happened to the working relationship, and I don’t know, I think Jim Wick and others, and Henry, worked, and it got reestablished and we went off.  Will Thompson came as director, and a whole new relationship evolved. The other thing I wanted to mention, because this has happened everywhere I’ve been, I have this commitment to public broadcasting, and at Towson in Baltimore I helped create an NPR station, WCST, still on the air.  I came here, and Gene said, "We’ve got this opportunity apparently for an NPR station.  What do you think?"  I said, "Give me the papers!"  And it’s still going.  It’s wonderful.  When I cross the border into Arizona and I pick it up, I’m home when I pick it up, crossing that border.  It does marvelous things, and I’m proud of that. The hotel, restaurant, resort management program, which is a gem here, I think it’s fair to say.  And it gave NAU, early on, a uniqueness.  I mean, we’re up there with Cornell, for Pete’s sake.  I think at last report there were a thousand majors, or something.  We had to fight ASU tooth and nail over that.  I’ll never forget the board meeting we went into, and [J. Russell] Russ Nelson, president at ASU, had made it clear they were going to oppose our having that.  I think the feeling was that if NAU had forestry, that was distinction enough.  Well, it wasn’t enough, and we wanted this one too.  And we’re going into the meeting, and I’m thinking, "Good heavens, I’m going to be debating Russ Nelson.  He’s the president at ASU," and I had a tremendous amount of respect for Russ.  We’re walking into the room, and Frank Besnette said, "Go get 'em!  We’re right behind you!"  And he and Markee were in the back, you know.  Well, we got it.  There were some objections from some of the traditional faculty at NAU that it didn’t belong on the campus; it wasn’t an academic program.  I said, "Well, tell that to Cornell University, that made that premier program in the United States, if not the world."  And that’s doing well.  I’m happy about that. The other area that I feel good about, in terms of its lasting impact, Monte, was the expansion of NAU off-campus statewide.  There was a lot of objection and concern expressed at ASU, U of A, but we were prepared to serve parts of the world that no one else cared to.  They could go do it too-and in fact, they have, since.  But we were in Yuma, we were on the reservations.  We had an air force landing faculty on the highways up there, so they could go teach at night.  There were parts of the reservation we were serving-the Navajo Reservation-that didn’t have air service.  One night we had a bird go through the wing of a plane with three NAU faculty on it, and I got a call about ten o’clock that night, and you talk about scary!  I mean, the hole was this big, right through the bloody wing. When you go around the state, as I used to do with some of the alumni visits, with Joe Rolle and Lewie McDonald, it was an experience.  Those two guys could walk into any café, any restaurant, in the state of Arizona, and be instantly recognized.  And you started hearing, "Thanks for the program," in wherever it was, in Kingman, or Chinle....  And we’re now in Phoenix, because there are people there who wanted the programs we had too.  And John Glenn, who never got a lot of credit for that work as dean of continuing education, deserves recognition somewhere-maybe this is it-that it helped give NAU a statewide presence, that I think politically didn’t hurt us at all.  Certainly it was serving a market. Another one of the areas that I feel awfully good about my time here-and I want to be careful how I say this, because I don’t want to suggest that there was anything going on that wasn’t-but federal agencies have trouble occasionally speaking with one another.  I think that’s probably fair to say.  And NAU, especially the school of forestry, played a very quiet role that never got much noticed, at bringing together forest service, park service, BLM, into conversations.  And we would occasionally get a question or a request from one of those agencies-the park service or the forest service or the BLM-"There needs to be a meeting to talk about ‘X.’  Do you suppose NAU could host?"  And we did!  Quiet, never got a lot of notoriety, but I think that the improved working relationships in this part of the world between those agencies, we had a little small part in doing that.  And those kinds of things leave a lasting foundation. When it comes right down to it, though, the thing that I most remember from NAU were the people.  I made so many wonderful friends here.  We left here twenty-five years ago.  We were talking this morning, coming up Oak Creek, "Do you realize we left NAU twenty-five years ago, and we still come back?"  I run into NAU alums all over the Northwest.  The two folks who operate the little convenience store near our little place over at the coast, on the beach, are NAU grads.  And I was bugging them, were their alumni dues paid?, the other day. NAU, we had a great time here, truly, and made such lasting friendships.  I mean, we still have this little gathering where we come-you were there the other day-[unclear].
Poen:  Yes.
Cox:  These are good friends.  We go back a quarter of a century, and that’s a long time.
Poen:  That’s wonderful.
Cox:  And a lot of folks who are gone from here, I miss greatly:  Ann Foster, for example, who was one of the kindest, most dedicated faculty members I ever met in my life, died tragically young of cancer.  Ann was in integrated studies, and she was in, oh golly, the humanities.  I was a brand new vice-president and needed someone who knew the inside.  A number of people suggested, "Well, you ought to talk to Ann, because she’s been around here a while, and she’s well thought of, and she’s just one of those quietly competent ... but get it done."  Marvelous collaboration.  Just thoroughly....  She and Henry and I became dear, dear friends.  And again, not recognized, never got the regents award or one of the prestigious....  But she was just the kind of faculty member that if you were going to....  Somebody once said about Oriole baseball, to which I’m equally passionately devoted, because I go back to the old days....  Now, of course, the saying is, "We’re first in war, first in peace, last in the American League."  I used to say about Oriole baseball, that if you were ever going to start a team with one person, you’d start with a Brooks Robinson, the classic third baseman who made everything else happen.  And if I was going to start a faculty, I’d want to have a couple of folks around like Ann, who loved her discipline, loved teaching, thoroughly enjoyed students.  Peg Morely, another person in our department....  I have to confess, we were in the same department, so I....
Poen:  Yes, history department.
Cox:  Oh, marvelous teacher.  I team taught with her a couple of times.
Poen:  Joe, you bring up something.  It was under your period that so many more women joined the faculty.  It’s almost revolutionary.  It had been male dominated, and then we got women academics into faculty and administrative positions.
Cox:  Oh yes.  And that was, again, kind of a quiet revolution, as Pierre Trudeau used to say about Canada:  a quiet revolution, but one that made a permanent, indelible change.  There’ll never be any going back.  Promotion and tenure:  when I first got here, and you guys told me the stories about how it had worked in the old days, I just kind of went in the office and put my head down and thought, "Oh my gosh, what am I gonna do with this?!"  The point is that there wasn’t a lot of peer faculty participation.  Names would bubble up to the vice-president and the president, and that was about it.  And that’s not how a 21st century university needs to work.  There was no way I could know enough about physics to make a decision as to whether Candidate A, or Candidate....  You had to have the peers say, "Well, look at what she has done and where she has done it, and what she’s doing," or if it was George, or whatever.  So we completely rewrote-Henry and Ann and I completely rewrote the promotion and tenure document, and the governance document, in large part, creating a real faculty senate, which we needed.  And truly, a promotion and tenure system that built on the strengths of faculty.  And chairs became really significant people.  And I had a marvelous group [unclear] and the deans.  Gosh, I walked into-just by dumb luck-a situation where I had some of the most extraordinary deans I’d ever run across:  Charles Aurand-  Chuck Aurand, in creative arts.  Chuck Little in arts and sciences, who really wasn’t appreciated as much as he probably might have been by the faculty, in terms of his commitment to them.  Clyde Holland in engineering, and folks of that sort. I think, I guess what it all comes down to in the final analysis is that I have been all my life a professor, and there’s a little plaque in Spanish at my front door that says, "Here lives a professor."  I was a professor first, I remained one; every place I’ve ever been, I’ve taught.  When I became president in Oregon and I announced that I was going to teach, the deans and my secretary said, "You must be joking!  When are you going to do that?"  I said, "I don’t know, but I will.  I will teach one term a year, because that’s how you stay honest."  Otherwise, you get into your little administrative cocoon, and that’s not where it’s going on.  I always tell people the story about Towson, I’d been a vice-president for about a month, and very full of myself, as you can imagine, knowing me as well as you do.  My administrative assistant came to the door of the conference room-I was having an important meeting-must have been-knocks and said, "Professor Diffendorfer’s [phonetic] on the phone, from geography.  You’ve got to talk to him, he has an emergency."  I thought, "Oh my God, someone’s fallen over in the hall, or someone’s jumped out a window."  It’s finals week, first day.  I went to the phone, picked it up, I said, "Diff, what’s the emergency?"  He said, "Joe, the Xerox is down!"  There was some expletive that we probably ought to delete that appeared, and I said, "Diffendorfer, for Pete’s sake!"  He said, "Joe, it’s the first day of finals."  I said, "My friend, you’re right, in that situation, it’s an emergency."  And I made the call and got somebody.  You can’t forget that.  And if you have to walk into the classroom three days a week or two days a week, and do what you set out to do with your life, you can’t fake it anymore.  You’ve got to still be reading.  You can’t do a lot of research, but you’ve got to still try to stay up.  And it kept me honest. And I taught after retirement.  You’ll laugh.  I’ve always had a lot of friends in engineering, and so when I retired in Oregon, the faculty of the school of engineering at Portland State said, "Would you come and teach with us?"  I said, "Gentlemen, you need to understand that I was thrown out of the school of engineering at the University of Maryland in the spring of 1957 because of my sterling performance in Calculus II," or something.  Differential equations probably.  They said, "No, we want a liberal arts course."  I said, "You want what?!"  It was a graduate program, fully graduate, Ph.D. master’s, in the management of engineering technology.  These were all people who had master’s degrees, bachelor degrees.  They worked for Intel, Techtronics, whatever.  Most of them were European trained engineers, and they regretted the fact that the last liberal arts course their students had seen was as freshmen, probably, or sophomores.  I said, "What do you want?"  They said, "We want a history of science."  I said, "Gentlemen, I’d be okay up until about the middle of the 19th century, and then I would be in deep doo-doo."  "Okay, how about an ethics course?"  I said, "Ah-ha!  What do you mean?"  "Well, ethical issues in the use of material technology."  A lot of those today.  So they gave me cart blanche, and I created a semester-long graduate course in ethical issues in the management of technology.  Monte, I had a ball!  These students would work nine or ten hours, come to [class], knowing they were still on call out at Intel at Beaverton, and do amazing.  And they were studying Socrates and Plato and Kant, Aristotle.  And now let’s apply rigorous philosophical thinking to an ethnical question of the use of nanotechnology or genomic engineering, or whatever-the myriad issues that face us today.  Had a ball!  And I only gave it up because it was preventing our coming to Arizona in the winter, because that’s when they wanted me to teach.  But I was still doing it.  I still do an occasional lecture.  I just did a lecture a couple of weeks ago on, of all things, this is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.  My family home is on a Civil War battlefield [unclear] and was there at the time, in Antietam, Western Maryland, Lee’s first invasion of the North.  My grandfather described us as "fallen away," lower-case "mennonite," slash "amish," lower-case [fallen away mennonite/amish]-meaning pacifist, Church of the Brethren.  Actually Dwight Eisenhower’s family, who you probably know, his family were River Brethren out of Missouri.  [My dad’s] mother didn’t want him to go to West Point.  My dad would have been the first person in our family to get to college, he had an appointment to the Naval Academy, and my grandmother would not let him take it. So I did this lecture on Antietam in Eugene about three weeks ago.  Gosh it was fun!  I’d forgotten....  Well, you know, historians, we’re all frustrated politicians/actors. It’s been a great run, Monte.  I have thoroughly enjoyed myself everywhere I’ve ever been.  NAU was special.  And you’ll probably see us as long as I’m able to get the truck down the road.
Poen:  That’s terrific.  Well, I’ve got a couple of questions to ask.  I looked at Platt Cline’s book, Mountain Campus, and in the back, he has quite a few statistics.  The book came out in 1982-you’d been here one year.  And in one of his columns, he said that NAU had 12,000 students in 1982.  Do you have any idea of the growth of enrollment during your seven years?
Cox:  Well, I know it took off.  We did quite well, and then there was that pretty precipitous dip in enrollment following Gene Hughes’ presidency, but now we’re back.  My gosh, they’re back to-they’re larger than the University of Oregon.
Poen:  Well, didn’t you have some economic challenges while you were vice-president?
Cox:  I like to say that everywhere I’ve ever gone, the state then experienced it’s first recession since the Second World War.  It happened to me here, when the copper economy bottomed and we went through that period of recession in the middle 1980’s-first time, really, since the fifties.  But there’d been that kind of decline.  And Gene said to me one day, "Gosh, I wish I could have brought you here during the halcyon years."  I said, "Well, we’re still doing fine."  It was tough, we had to make some difficult decisions about structure.  You know, it forces you to think what the priorities are.
Poen:  Was Babbitt governor during that time?
Cox:  Bruce was governor for the first major part of it.  This was the finest Board of Regents I’d ever run into.  I just couldn’t get over it.  You walked in, and here was the governor, three representatives of the Phoenix 40, and Mrs. [Esther] Capin from Nogales, Herman Chanen from Phoenix, Bill O’Reilly.  Look around this campus, half the buildings are named for people out of that period.  And politically, we had some just stellar representatives:  Tony Gabaldon.  I’m so pleased to see a building named for him.  No one ever worked harder than he did, except maybe John Wettaw.  I have to say, he’s still doing it!
Poen:  He’s still teaching!
Cox:  He was telling me the other day....  But we had a first-rate Board of Regents.  We had a marvelous legislative delegation, and a very receptive governor.  And then you went through some difficult times there with Governor Mecham and others.
Poen:  Do you remember any of the major changes that had to be made in curriculum or personnel or...?
Cox:  Actually, they were in process about the time I left.  I think the most significant impact that we had to face was that if we were going to put money into the sciences and into forestry, there was going to be a recognition that some programs cost more than others.  And that was tough at NAU, because there has always been a pretty even-handed distribution.  But I came to confront, because out of the humanities, Henry and I made a pretty good team.  I was the chalk-and-talk, give me a map and a blackboard and thirty students and I’m fine, and he was the, "We’ve got to have equipment, because we’re talking about physics here, or geology."  We had some interesting discussions, I have to say, but I think we found a balance, and we did finally have to admit chemistry costs more to do than history; engineering is not cheap if you’re going to do it right, and you can’t do it any other way but right.  But not just the sciences.  The allied health programs here, physical therapy, excellent building and what we’ve got here.  Nursing was coming into it’s own.  These are not cheap, and you don’t do 'em....  Well, you can’t get by the accreditation, among other things.  But I know John Haeger fairly well.  John was on the faculty at Towson when I was there, and he eventually became the provost there before coming here.  John’s been through this a number of times, and he’s pretty clear about what his priorities are, I think.  The fact that you’ve made a commitment to green buildings and being a leader in sustainability, and selling that in Arizona, to a legislature which didn’t like tree-huggers-never has, never will.  But when you show them it costs them less long-term, you get an audience.
Poen:  The Hughes presidency isn’t known for a lot of construction, new buildings.
Cox:  No.
Poen:  Walkup is described as the building president, and then there’s Gene.  But you know, were you here when the decision was made not to knock down Old Main, but to....
Cox:  Came after me.
Poen:  Oh, it came after you.  Okay.
Cox:  That was close, from what I understand.
Poen:  Gene said that the Board of Regents wanted him to just knock it down.  And then they remodeled it, a beautiful job, just a beautiful job.
Cox:  You and I are historians, and so we have a particular passion about understanding where we’ve come from, and understanding who we owe for what we’re standing on.  People need to be rooted somehow, and we’ve become a rootless society.  The notion that my family lived on the same farm for 200 years is unheard of today, doesn’t happen.  It doesn’t happen.  And so when you use physical facilities to tie yourselves to what came before you, you’re building a bridge not just to the past, but to what you hope might come.  And you hope you build on that.  As Henry and I were talking the other day by e-mail, the thing we feel most proud of was that the human....  The building we did didn’t show right away.  And I think a lot of the building that Gene did didn’t show in another sense, that I kind of learned my lessons at, and that was building the endowment and alumni support and the foundation.  We drank a lot of coffee in ranch house living rooms.  He said to me once, "You and I are never gonna see any results of this.  It’s gonna come later."  And you know, it is.  It’s coming now at NAU, major bequests, people all over the state, who had a marvelous experience here, whose kids had a great experience here-it somehow touched them-and so those are showing up.  But presidents, we’re Type A, "I wanna see it now!"  I had to learn that the hard way.  I learned it here.  I got to Oregon, and I have to say that after my presidency, it’s begun to show up, some of the work I did in the eighties.  People who aren’t even remembered today, but you get a call from an attorney, "Mrs. So-and-So has left a million dollars to support whatever."  And you know, it’s a nice feeling.  Gene saw that before I think a lot of the rest of us saw it.  And I owe him a debt.  I always like to pay the debts I owe, but I owe him a debt for showing me that it was not something we were ever gonna get much beneficiation from.  It’s nice to see it now.  (laughs)
Poen:  Sure.
Cox:  This has been fun.
Poen:  This has.  I really appreciate you coming up from Sedona on a wintry day.  You’ve really added to our oral history collection.
Cox:  I hope so.
Poen:  You know, we have the ability to have these interviews now seen on the Net, through the Cline Library, Colorado Plateau.  You can go right to the interview that you want to watch.
Cox:  How many have you done?
Poen:  Twenty-eight, I think it is.
Cox:  Oh my gosh.
Poen:  We started with Platt Cline back in about ’94.
Cox:  Good for you.
Poen:  I started in ’94 because as a historian, I knew that these people were going to pass on, and we had to....
Cox:  What a gentleman.  He had a memory that would just blow your socks off sometimes.  I mentioned to him once that if he ever decided to sell that classic Volkswagen, would he call me.  I want you to know that thirteen years later, not long before he passed away, I got a call in Oregon, and he said, "Joe, it’s Platt."  I said, "Mr. Cline!"  He said, "You still want to buy that car?"  And my wife goes....  I was at that time rebuilding a 1939 Model A in the garage, and she just went, "[No!]."  So I didn’t.  Virginia and I would visit him and Barbara up on the hill and have tea.  My definition of gentleman.  He could be tough!  I’ve read some of those editorials that he wrote.  Oh my gosh!
Poen:  Really?
Cox:  Go back.  He could be pretty tough, especially on politicians who he felt hadn’t lived up to their responsibilities.  And his two books are eminently fair.  I’ve read them both, and there’s no one in there that comes off not getting....  I mean, fair and balanced, he understood that.  But thanks again.  I’ll look forward to it.
Poen:  I appreciate it.
Cox:  Good to be here.  Good to see you, Monte!
Poen:  Good to see you.
Cox:  Susan, thank you!
McGlothlin:  Thank you!
Platt:  Yes.
Poen:  That went well.
Cox:  That okay?
Poen:  Very well.
McGlothlin:  Thank you so much.
Cox:  I was doing some oral interviews for the historical society in Southern Oregon, and finally the director called up one day and he said, "I’m going to be a little sheepish, but you talk too much as the interviewer."  You are very good at planting a question. And I’ve got to tell you the other funny thing that happened.  I had retired as chancellor, and my wife was very involved in quite a number of things in Eugene-president of Planned Parenthood and a variety of things.  I went to this one function as the trailing spouse, which for me was a new experience.  She’s the Big Cheese, and I’m just over here.  So she’s doing her thing, and I’m talking with these three very attractive forty-ish young women.  After about twenty minutes one of them said, "Excuse me, I know this is terribly rude, but didn’t you used to be somebody?"  (laughs)  So I now go to retirement parties and I tell that story.  I said, "Dear, yes, I still am somebody, but I used to be somebody important."  That’ll put you....  "Didn’t you used to be somebody?"
Poen:  You know, when I was interviewing Gene when he was in Wichita, they had....
Cox:  Oh, you went there to do it?  He had an interesting career there.
Poen:  Yeah.  I was going back and forth from here to the Truman Library in Independence, and I would drive, and I’d spend the night.  They were very gracious.  And I was interviewing Gene, and the cameraman....  Well, it was the university’s set-up, and [I asked] the fellow on the camera, after one of the interviews, "How’d I do?"  He said, "Well, you’ve got a problem.  You tend to intrude on the interviewee.  You interrupt them."  So I’ve tried.
Cox:  Oh no, you’re good.  It’s an art.  I finally stopped doing it, because I wasn’t doing a very good job, frankly.  I do other things now.  I edit collections occasionally for them. Thank you much!
Poen:  Thank you.  Thank you.