Oral history interview with Don Bendel (part 1) [with transcript], July 25, 2005.

              Don Bendel- Part 1
Interviewed by Monte Poen
July 25, 2005

Poen:  Hello, this is Monte Poen.  I’m sitting with Dr. Don Bendel, Regents Professor of Ceramic Art-I guess Emeritus, right, Don?
Bendel:  That’s right.
Poen:  And we’re in Don’s yard, not too far away from his kiln and his studio.  I’ve been enjoying your art.
Well Don, I’d like to start at the beginning.  Where were you born and raised?
Bendel:  La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1935.
Poen:  What’s La Crosse like?
Bendel:  It’s right on the Mississippi River, and I spent a lot of time there fishing and growing up in the greatest place.  In fact, I thought I was in paradise ’til I moved here.  (chuckles)  But it was a great place to grow up.  There’s lots of hills and bluffs.
Poen:  And you went to school in La Crosse?
Bendel:  I did.  I went to Central High School when there were three high schools in La Crosse.  One was a Catholic high school, one was on the north side, and we were on the south side.  And then I ended up going to the college there for a year before I joined the Navy.
Poen:  What was the name of the college?
Bendel:  La Crosse State College.
Poen:  Part of the Wisconsin system?
Bendel:  It was, before they became a university.  It was quite small, it was about-I think there was about 6,000 students when I started, which is quite small.
Poen:  What did you major in?
Bendel:  Well, I tried several things.  In high school, I was in art.  And the other most successful thing I did at that time was track.  It just so happened the track coach from the college came over and recruited most of the track team, because we had a better team than the college did!  So that’s why I went there, actually.  It was kind of a reason to go to school.  So I did major in physical education-and history, actually.
Poen:  History as well!
Bendel:  Yeah [yes].  They didn’t have much of an art program, it was just a couple of courses, so I couldn’t take much art there.  I didn’t really start art school until after I got out of the Navy.
Poen:  Oh, I see.  So it was the Navy right after college?
Bendel:  I just went for a year and decided it wasn’t for me.
Poen:  Oh, you went to college for a year.
Bendel:  I joined the reserve in 1954, and then went into the Navy.  The reason I joined is because our track coach was the commander there, and one day he said, "If you guys join, we’ll give you a nice warm coat, and nice warm shoes that you can wear anytime you want."  (laughs)  In the Korean War, a lot of the guys were actually quitting high school, joining the services to go to the Korean War.  And my dad said I can’t do that.  He said, "You’ve got to do something else."  I don’t want you to go in the Army, so you should join the reserves," which was only a couple blocks away, so we just joined it.
Poen:  And then how long was it before they called you up?
Bendel:  Well, I just went to school and decided school wasn’t for me, and I just joined.  There were several of us, about half our track team joined.  And so several of us joined at the same time.
Poen:  I see.  How long an enlistment was that?
Bendel:  It was an eight-year enlistment in the reserves, and two years of active duty we had to have.  And so after a year I just went in for active duty.
Poen:  And you ended up on a missile ship?
Bendel:  A heavy cruiser missile ship.  It was the first one, and it was the only ship in America’s fleet named after a foreign capital, which was Canberra.  And the reason for that was in the Battle of the Coral Sea they sunk the entire Australian Navy, and about a third of the American ships.  But it was a good battle for us that sunk most of the Japanese ships too.  Shot down a lot of airplanes.  So they dragged this ship, which was the Philadelphia, a heavy cruiser, all the way back, and they converted it into a guided missile ship, and it was the first one.  Actually it was the second one, but the first one didn’t work.  And so I was on a pretty high-tech ship at the time.
Poen:  What was your job?
Bendel:  I was a radar man and an electronic countermeasures person.  So I did that for a couple of years.  And then fortunately I found out I could get out about a month early if I went back to school.  So that was my drive to go back to school!  So I wrote the dean and he said, "Yeah, you can come back."  So I did.
Poen:  So this time you finished?
Bendel:  No, I just stayed a semester, and I didn’t like it very well because they didn’t have-I really wasn’t interested.  And my wife said, "Well, why don’t you study art?  That’s the only thing you really like to do."  We had gotten married when I was in the Navy.  And she said, "Well, Winona," which is only thirty miles away, "has an art program."  So I did.  I transferred up to Winona and went for another three years before I started teaching.  So it worked pretty good.
Poen:  What kind of teaching?
Bendel:  I taught art.  Actually, I ended up with three degrees:  history, social studies, and art.  And I tried out teaching in all of those-student teaching.  It became apparent to me that the only thing I wanted to do was teach art, so I started out.  One day a guy came and offered me a job in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and I didn’t even know how to say it or spell it.  But it was not too far from La Crosse, so I went there, and taught art there for eight years.
Poen:  Eight years.  Wow.  So at the end of that period, what happened then?
Bendel:  Well, it was kind of strange; I ended up with a master’s in painting.  I went back for summer schools, and I wrote a thesis on the psychological effects of color.  This lady, who was the chairman of the department at Mankato State in Minnesota, read it, and called up one day and offered me a job.  I had no idea I wanted to teach in a university, so I told her I’d think about it.  So I thought about it, and I had to get an MFA within five years to stay there.  Driving from Mankato to Minneapolis, to me, was a ridiculous thing in the winter, so I told her I wouldn’t do it.  And then Ann decided that maybe I should get my MFA.  So I went into Milwaukee, which is only forty miles away, and went to the university there and got an MFA in ceramics.
Poen:  So then did you look for a job?
Bendel:  Actually, I did.  I gotta back up a little.  The reason I got it in ceramics, was because after I was teaching two weeks, the principal of this high school said to me, "Are you ready for your evening division class?"  And I said, "Well what is that?"  He said, "It’s ceramics."  And I’d never had a course in ceramics before.  So I said, "Well, let me take inventory."  So I drove into the university and asked them if I could come at night, and they said, "Yeah, we have this class that starts tomorrow night."  So I signed up and I started taking evening courses in ceramics, and stayed two weeks ahead of my students.  And then I just got hooked on it.  And so I finally decided to go back after eight years.  So I quit my job and went back.  But I had so many credits at that time, I only needed to finish one year of a four-year program, because I just kept going every night.  It worked out pretty fine.  And then I got offered a job in the school I graduated from, at Winona State.  And I got offered a job in Colorado, but our son had a lot of problems with allergies and asthma, and the job in Colorado was about two hours away from a hospital, so I decided to stay in Winona.  So that’s why I started teaching at the college level.
Poen:  Okay.  Does that bring us to the eve of you coming west?
Bendel:  No, not quite.  It was kind of interesting.  When I quit the high school I was at the top of the scale, making $12,000; and when I went to the college at Winona, I was making $8,000.  So I had to try to sell my art to make a living, so I used to go to these art fairs.  It was a new thing that started at that time, and the art fairs, I went to the one in La Crosse-we went to several around the state-and at that one a guy came up and said, "Would you like to be our artist in residence at University of Wisconsin at Whitewater?"  And I said, "I don’t know.  What’s it mean?"  And he said, "Well, you don’t have to teach, but you just make stuff.  I’d also like you to work on our kilns, because they’re falling down."  So I said, "Well, does it pay anything?"  And he said, "Yeah, it pays $11,000."  So I didn’t even ask Ann.  And we were in a nice house in Winona, and I had been teaching there a couple of years already, and I said, "Well, I think I’ll take it."  When I told Ann, she freaked out.  She wanted to stay there.  It was really nice up there.  So I went to Whitewater for that year, and it was really nice except there were lots of riots.  It was ’69 and there was a big political riot going. At the Chicago Art Institute, there was a park next door and the students asked me if I’d like to go to their concert.  I said, "As soon as I finish this work."  And I was going to the concert-I think it was about nine or ten at night-and I decided I’d go to the concert before I went home.  I was staying up in Northbrook.  (pause for wind interference)  So then I became an artist in residence at the Chicago Art Institute for the summer, and I stayed in Northbrook, which was a short train ride from downtown.  And I was going back and forth, and I was on my second-to-the-last week of working there when the riots came.  I walked outside-I didn’t know the riot was taking place-and thousands of people, this huge crowd, and there were cars tipped over, burning, and a police car.  People were breaking those great big windows on Michigan Avenue, and just marching down the street.  And I thought, What is this?!"  So I worked my way through this crowd.  I had to walk to the railroad station, which is about three-quarters of a mile, and I got up there and decided I wasn’t going to go back there.  So instead of taking the train ride to Northbrook, I decided to catch the train all the way to Minnesota, because we had moved back there, because we decided we weren’t going to stay in Whitewater-we were going to stay in Whitewater.  We moved back to move.  Ann was there packing.  I took the train and she didn’t hear from me, of course, I didn’t call her.  And so I got there at eight in the morning.  And when I was there, I was really tired, and she said, "Why didn’t you call me?"  I said, "How do I call you from a train?!"  (laughs)  So she said, "Well, you should have called me."  And the phone rang just as we went in the house, and it was Ellery Gibson, the chairman of the art department at NAU.  And he said, "Don, we have a vacancy in ceramics here, and I have your letter here."  I wrote him four years before, because we had camped here and our son didn’t have any problem at the canyon, and so I wrote him a letter and asked him if they had a job for me.  And it was four years before.  Ellery said, "I’ve got your letter here.  I wonder if you’re still interested in a job up here.  And I said, "Well, do you have any riots there?"  He just said, "No.  We had a panty raid once."  And so I said, "Well, yeah, I’m interested."  And he said, "Can you meet our president, President Walkup?  He’ll be in Chicago Monday."  And I’d decided not to go back.  Isn’t that funny, though?  But there was also a riot when I had my MFA show.  (camera operator requests repeat)  So Ellery said, "Could you go to Chicago and meet President Walkup and interview [with] him at this hotel?"  And I said, "Yeah, I can do that."  So I had to change my mind, and I went back for the last week of working at the institute.  I went to the hotel, and they interviewed me....
Poen:  They, or he?
Bendel:  He.  He interviewed me.  But Arthur Hughes, is that his....
Poen:  Yes, Arthur.
Bendel:  He was also there.  I didn’t have any pictures or slides to show them, because when I was an artist in residence in Whitewater, that was the year-let’s see, ’68 was it?-’68 or ’9-anyway, that was the year that there were a lot of protests [against] the Vietnam War.  Somebody had just bombed the science building in Madison, and two days later they bombed our building and burned it up.  It was a beautiful, old, old-it was the oldest structure in higher education in Wisconsin.  It was huge, it covered almost the entire block, and it burned to the ground.  So I had those two not-so-nice experiences.  So that’s why I asked Ellery if they had riots out there.  And he said no, just panty raids.  So they offered me this job.  He said, "Well, how much money do you want?"  I said, "Well, I want to get more than I’m getting now at Whitewater," although I wasn’t at there then.  So I said, "I’d like at least $11,000 or better."  So he offered me $11,400.  So I said, "I’ll take it."  So that’s what we did then, we moved out here.  That was 1970.
Poen:  And then you worked on your doctorate.
Bendel:  Yeah-not right away.  What had happened there, the first thing, they had a brand new building, it was a year old, for art and ceramics, and I was teaching ceramics, except they weren’t quite ready schedule-wise, so I taught painting for a semester, and then I taught ceramics.  But the ceramics was really quite limited, and I was used to doing a lot of things with the ceramic kilns and firing processes.  So I heard there was a bunch of bricks down in Clarkdale.  I went down there, and the Clarkdale Mine was closed, but there were millions of bricks there.  Apparently when they closed the mine, they were afraid the chimneys would fall down, so they blew ‘em up, and they were just layin’ all over the ground.  There was nobody there, and there was nobody in Jerome, and finally I met this guy, and I said, "Do you know anything about the bricks over there in Clarkdale?"  And he said, "Yeah, I’m the caretaker for Jerome and Clarkdale.  Why?  What do you want to know?"  And I told him I was just hired at NAU and I wanted to, if I could, get some of these bricks to make some ceramic pottery kilns.  He said, "You can have anything you want!"  So as soon as school started, I organized the students and we went down and we ended up getting 40,000 bricks.  One of the reasons I wanted so many is because I decided at Whitewater that students had to know how to make these ceramic kilns, because if they didn’t, once they graduated they couldn’t afford it, because they cost so much money.  So when I started the program for upper ceramics-it was only beginning students then-was I just made it a problem for them.  They all had to learn how to make and fire these kilns out of these bricks, before they graduated.  So it was part of their program.And so what I did, I was on the curriculum committee with Dick Beasley and a guy named Jake Brookenson [phonetic].  Nobody else wanted to be on it, I guess.  So we were on it for three years, and we created the BFAs, and added lots of courses.
Poen:  Bachelor of Fine Arts?
Bendel:  Bachelor of Fine Arts.  And we added courses.  We had a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture, but nothing else.  And so we added courses in all the other areas at the other three levels, because basically they had beginning courses, and that’s what we did.  And so from that point on, we had a pretty comprehensive art program.
Poen:  What made you decide to get a doctorate?
Bendel:  Well, in 1973 I was pretty active in national ceramics, and we have a conference every year, and it’s the National Conference for the Education of Ceramic Arts.  And it was in its fourth year at the time, and they asked me if they could come to our school, because we had this unusual kiln-building situation.  And so I said sure.  So I organized that.  I’d never do it again!  It took a year out of my life to organize it, and another year to relax.  But what happened was, 1,200 people came, which was more than they ever had at the time, and it’s always in March, and it was beautiful weather, and when the three-day conference started, it snowed a foot and a half.  And then the next day it snowed another foot, and it surprised everybody.  But during the day it was beautiful, and it was a very successful conference, except at that time there was a lot of people that some people would call hippies, I guess.  But they were serious ceramic students from all around the United States.  A couple of the faculties weren’t too pleased with this conference, and they went and complained to Walkup that there was just a bunch of hippies here.  And the dean went to stick up for me-and that was Wybrew [phonetic].  Walkup said, "Well, if you don’t like it-" he was going to confront me with these people-he said, "I don’t believe in this.  He brought all these people here as a big conference."  And so Wybrew resigned.  And he’d only been our dean for three or four years.  And then the chairman also was called in, and he was sticking up for me, and Walkup gave him an ultimatum.  And so he just quit also.
Poen:  Wait a minute.  Your chairman was sticking up for you?
Bendel:  Yeah, because Walkup-these people on the faculty said they should fire me, because I brought this group of characters to NAU.  And then the chairman, who was Peter Jacobs, Walkup just told him he only had another year to go, so he fired him.
Poen:  Because of the conference, because he defended the conference?
Bendel:  Well, he defended me, but he said there were other reasons, which I have no idea what they could be.  But then I had to go see him, and it’s funny, because Walkup really liked me, you know, because I had lots and lots of students.  It just skyrocketed.  And he liked the idea of building these kilns and stuff.  And so he said, "Well, Don, you don’t have a terminal degree."  Well, in every other university, an MFA is a terminal degree for art.  I had talked to my wife ahead.  She said, "You’ve gotta stay here, so you should see what he has to say."  And so I said to him, "Well, what do I have to do to get a terminal degree?"  And he said, "Well, you really should have a doctorate."  And I said, "Well, can I think about this?"  And he said, "Sure.  Let me know tomorrow."  So I went home, told Ann, and we had to stay here because of John, so she said, "Well, why don’t you go to school?  You’ve got so many credits anyway."  So I went to ASU, and they accepted everything I did, and so I had to put in a couple of full-time years, mostly just because of what I needed, but I really had plenty of credits.  So I did.  I went on half-time down here for a year, and took full credits down there.  So I drove back and forth, and stayed overnight, and stuff.  Then I went three summers, and then I had a year where I wrote the dissertation.
Poen:  What was that on?
Bendel:  It was single- and double-fire ceramics with haptic and visual experimentation, or something.  I can’t even remember the name of it!
Poen:  What does that mean?
Bendel:  Well, people in art-haptic, it was Lowenfeld theory that people are either haptic or visual.  And haptic people are people who get involved mechanically, using their hands.  And visual people are more-I guess it’s right-brain people-or left-brain, I don’t know, one of those.  But they’re more visual, and they do things visual.  So the single- and double-fire ceramics involved firing twice, like is usually done, or doing a single type firing, where you can do all this at once, which is more of a haptic thing.  So I had to set it up way ahead of time, and they really liked the idea of this thing.  And so that was pretty simple, coming up with it.  And I got most of the ideas driving back and forth, so I set it up, and I had taken a few classes up here just for fun, the years I was teaching, and all of those transferred.  And all the psychology courses transferred, which I just enjoyed like crazy, because I’d never taken them before.  And so the only one I had trouble with was the last psychology course, which was statistics.  I got "A’s" in all the statistics courses but the last one, which was called Design, and when I took it I thought, Well, this’ll be easy, I’m in design, you know.  But it wasn’t, it was hard.  And Jerry Peterson was my teacher.  After the course he said, "Well, Bendel, I’m gonna give you a ‘C,’ but in reality you should flunk.  You just don’t understand this stuff."  And I said, "Well, I gotta figure it out."  So he said, "Well, I’ll just take the course [unclear] just set in on my courses."  So I sat in on ‘em for two more semesters, and I finally figured it out!  It was so simple!  And so it was really something.  I was on a trip-I was so tired, working day and night-I went on a trip with the kids out east, but I had to defend my dissertation that summer.  And suddenly it dawned on me I’m not gonna make it back in time.  So we got back to Wisconsin, and I said, "Ann, I gotta fly back to defend this thing."  She said okay.  So I flew back, a friend of mine picked me up and took me to the place where I was defending it, and I got there about a half-hour....
Poen:  Half hour early or half hour late?
Bendel:  Half hour early.  And there were five of us that were going up for this, and there were also five interrogators, I called ‘em.  And the first three guys failed.  They had to do something over.  And I didn’t know this until just before I went in.  He told me this, and I said, "Oh, for cryin’ out loud!"  It never dawned on me I could fail.  I went in there, and they introduced me.  There were two guys I’d never met before, and one was from Psychology, but I took all my psych classes up here, from Jerry.  The first question was all about my statistics, and I’m tellin’ you, I thought this question took a half hour.  He just kept talking and asking me [questions].  And it’s a good thing it took a long time, because I didn’t understand what he was asking me, until right before he quit.  And so when he stopped, I just knew the answer.  So I told him the answer, and he looked so surprised.  It was perfect.  And then after that-it was a hard question, but after that everything was easy, because the rest of it pretty much I just didn’t have any trouble writing.  I never had to rewrite anything, it was amazing.  And so I didn’t have any trouble writing it.  The way I wrote it was, I’d have to go back to the university every night almost to fire kilns, but I got students to do it for me.  And what I did was, I borrowed an office where no one could find me.  So after supper every day I’d go down and write on this thing, get home about midnight every night.  So I had it pretty well organized, and everything was pretty well done.
Poen:  So what year was that, Don?
Bendel:  ’75 I think, when I graduated.  The double- and single-fire, I had six classes I was teaching, because I had to have equal classes.  I had to have pretty much all volunteer people.  It worked out real good.  I divided three classes on one type of fire, and one on the other.  And then I trained some judges, and it was a lot of fun doing that.
Poen:  Now, is it at ASU, while you were working on your doctorate, that you met Yamamoto?
Bendel:  No, I had a sabbatical in Australia in....  (cameraman requests re-take)
Poen:  Is this when you met Yamamoto?
Bendel:  No, I met Yamamoto....  Let me back up a little.  I had a year’s sabbatical, and I went to Australia, and I did a bunch of demonstrations and talks over there.  While I was there, the art department in the college had some kind of a big row going on.  It turned out the dean fired Ron Piotrowski, our chairman at the time.  And so they were havin’ this real hard time....
Poen:  Here at NAU?
Bendel:  Yeah.
Poen:  While you were in Australia?
Bendel:  Yeah.  What it was, I stayed there for a semester, then I was a resident artist at ASU for a semester.  And this row went on all year.
Poen:  Here at NAU.
Bendel:  Yeah.  And I heard about it in Australia, people calling me.  But then when I got to ASU, it got to the point where they fired Ron Piotrowski as a chairman, but he remained on the faculty.  And two new people that I hadn’t met, Cox....
Poen:  Joe Cox.
Bendel:  Joe Cox and Henry Hooper-I guess Joe became-what did they call it then?
Poen:  Vice-president?
Bendel:  Vice-president.  I don’t know what Henry was one, too.
Poen:  Graduate dean, I think.
Bendel:  Joe called me up and introduced himself, whom I’d never met.  And he said, "Don, this has happened...."
Poen:  What was the row?
Bendel:  You know, I don’t know the whole story, because I was gone, but it was something about, it started off with-it was funny, because Ron Piotrowski and-who was the dean then?  I can’t remember who the dean was.
Poen:  The dean of Humanities?
Bendel:  No, of Art.  I know him like the back of my hand, but I can’t remember.
Poen:  It wasn’t Stevens?
Bendel:  No.
Poen:  Was it Davies?
Bendel:  No, I’ll think of it.  And then anyway, the  had a falling out over something, which I never did understand.  So the whole faculty was involved, and it was kind of a problem, I guess.  And so Joe Cox came down to see me, and he said, "Don...."  He was telling me about these problems, they need a chairman, and he said, "I’d like you to be chairman."  And I said, "I don’t want to be chairman.  You’ll have to look for somebody else."  Then I was up there, and they invited me, they said, "Are you comin’ up to Flag?"  I said, "Yeah, I’ll come up."  And so Henry and Joe were there, and Hughes, you know.  They said, "Well, Don, we’d like you to be the chairman.  You don’t have to be there long, but just [be it?]."  And I said, "Well I don’t really want to be the chairman."  And they said, "Well how about if it’s just for a year?"  And I said, "Well, okay, I’ll do it."  He said, "Well, if you don’t, we’re gonna have to do something drastic with the art department."  I said, "No, I’ll do it just for a year, but then you can find somebody."  Well it turned out I was there three years, and I really didn’t want to be it any longer.  And so I had told-every year, you know, they‘d come in and talk with....  Aurand. That’s the dean-Dean Aurand.  They’d talk about funds for the art department.  So there was Joe there, and Aurand  and Henry, and they were asking me all these questions.  I presented our budget and everything.  You know, at the end of that thing they’d always say, "Well, is there anything else, Don?"  And I said, "Well, yes, there is.  There’s one more thing.  I met this guy, Yukio Yamamoto," and I told ‘em where I met him.  I said, "I got a letter from Dr. Brotherton"-this was 1984-and I said, "They told me he’s an artist exchange person between Himeji and Phoenix.  They just became sister cities and they exchanged artists.  "And he’s going to be at ASU, and he’s going to bring a hundred pieces of pottery with him.  And these hundred pieces of pottery will be exhibited.  I’d like to know if you’d like to have him come up for a workshop."  And they said, "By all means."
Poen:  They said that?
Bendel:  Yeah.  And I said, "We’ve got the only wood-fired kilns in the Southwest."  And so he said, "Okay."  Well, I called down to ASU, and they had promised him a show of his hundred pieces of work, and be adjunct professor, and a place to work.  And so I called, and no one ever answered my call.  So one day I said, "I’m going down there."  And I was quite familiar with these people, because I worked with them, we exchanged shows and all kinds of stuff.  They were good people.  But I got down there, and there’s nobody in the ceramics studio except this little guy, kind of off in a corner, outside, drawing in the dirt by the ceramic kilns.  I thought, That’s gotta be him.  So I said, "Yamamoto sensei?"  And he jumped up in the air, and he started talking to me in Japanese.  I only knew a couple words, you know.  And so it was really neat.  We couldn’t communicate by talking, so we both sat down and drew in the dirt.  I drew some kilns, and he drew that, and I drew pots, and we drew/talked, and he said, finally-it was about forty-five minutes, just doing that-and some little girl walked in, that I thought was about thirteen years old, and it was a Japanese graduate student.  She looked so young!  Yukio said, "This is ..." So-and-So, and he introduced me.  And she said, "Nice to meet you," in perfect English.  And I said, "Could you translate for us?"  And she said, "Yes.  Yukio Yamamoto just asked me if I’d do that."  And so she did.  So I told him we had these kilns, and we’d like to have you come up and do a workshop with my students, throw some pottery, and maybe show some pictures, and then we’ll fire this kiln.  We had quite a large anagama at the time.
Poen:  What’s that?
Bendel:  Oh, an anagama is a wood-fired kiln that looks something like a big tube.  Ana means "cellar," and gama means "kiln."  And so it’s a partially underground thing.  And we had made one, and we had just moved to this other location and made it, and it worked fine.  So he came up-he said yes-and so he came up in a week or so and we walked around, I showed him all of our facilities, and we walked over to this kiln, and he said to me, "This is not a very good kiln"-through the interpreter, you know.  And I started laughing.  I said, "Well, that’s good, we can take it down and make a new one!"  Then he said, "These are not good bricks."  (laughs)  So he said we can’t use these bricks!  So I said, "That’s okay.  Maybe we can get new ones.  How much does it cost to build this kiln you want to build?"  He wanted to build a noborigama, which means "climbing kiln," several units tied together that go like this up a hill.  We had already had one, but we’d taken it down and built this other one.  So I knew all about ‘em.  He said, "Well, it’d cost $160,000."  And I said, "Wow.  The university has no money, so we’d have to raise the money."  And he said, "Okay, we can do that."  And so they had just started the Arizona Japanese Society between Phoenix and Himeji-Japanese American Society.  He had been to the first meeting, and then he had missed the second meeting because he was up by us, but the third meeting, he went down there.  But during the first meeting, there was a guy named Jack Compton, and his wife was one of the people.  Her name was Linda Compton.  At that very first meeting, Linda met Yukio, of course, because he was one of the main people.  And she showed him a book that they were writing for her husband, and the book was about his paintings.  Yukio was so impressed with these paintings that he said to her, "These should be shown in Japan."  And she said, "Oh that would be wonderful.  Could you arrange it?"  And he said, "Yes, I can do that."  So he called up at the very moment, because it was morning in Japan.  He called up his friend at the National Museum in Tokyo and arranged to have these pictures.  And Linda was so excited to have these pictures on display in Japan about a year from that time.  She said she was so excited to tell her husband-she was going home to see him.  Well unfortunately, Jack was a manic depressive guy, and he was a very successful businessman, he was worth two hundred million dollars.  They had a house on top of Camelback, and next to it he built another house, which looked like a house, but it was a studio where he-whenever he got depressed, he’d go paint, and it was full of these beautiful abstract expressionist paintings-color, just gorgeous-all different sizes, huge things too, and little things.  Well, unfortunately he got so depressed he shot himself.  She went in to tell him that night, and she found him.  And so that third meeting when Yukio went down there, he requested that the society support him in his endeavor to build this kiln at NAU, instead of ASU, because they couldn’t fire wood there-they have no wood, you know.  So she came up after their meetings, and she said, "I would like to help you.  I’ll give you $30,000."  And so Yukio came up to see me with the interpreter, and they told me this lady would do this.  And so at that time I had secured a position for him, which was Cox and Hughes....
Poen:  This is Gene Hughes now?
Bendel:  Gene Hughes and Joe Cox and Henry Hooper had said they would do this.  What I had asked for, it takes six months just for him to work with the students, and I didn’t know that we were going to build a kiln at the time.  And told them who he was, of course, and they said, "Yes, we will do this."  And what I asked for was to give him a thousand dollars a month and a place to live on campus, and one of those eating passes for he and his wife, and also....  (wind interference, cameraman asks for retake)
Poen:  So they agreed to those stipulations:  You had a thousand dollars a month, a place to live, a meal ticket for him and his wife.  What else?
Bendel:  Oh, and one more thing.  Two graduate students for the semester, and to pay them $500 apiece just to do anything Yukio would like to have done, to help him do stuff.  And they agreed to everything.  I was so surprised!  It was my last really important thing I did as chairman.  And I was so relieved, because I wouldn’t be chairman anymore.  So it was pretty hard, because in order to keep my students, I also taught fulltime when I was chairman, and it was really a tough job. And so then when Yukio came, I still had to be chairman for the rest of the semester while he was here, but it was a lot nicer at the time.  And so that’s how we got Yukio here.  And ASU only exhibited three of his pieces of the hundred, and they never gave him a studio to work in, and they didn’t make him an adjunct professor.  So he was real excited to be up here, because that’s what he had up here.
Poen:  How could a famous artist like that get by with a thousand dollars a month?
Bendel:  I think they didn’t pay him anything down there.  And the idea was, he was supported by the city as long as he was down there-the City of Himeji-you know, they gave him a stipend.  But when he moved up here, there was some question whether they were going to do that.  But what eventually happened was, they were so excited that Yukio was working here, and things came together for him, I think they probably gave him a stipend-I think that’s how.  But when he first came up here, this wasn’t where he was supposed to be.  But what had happened was, I didn’t want to handle the money, and Joel Eide was the assistant dean.  And so I went to the dean and I said, "Well, this is going to happen, but I don’t want to handle this money."  And so we were gonna put it in the foundation, but I told him I didn’t want to deal with any of the financial part of this.  And so he assigned Joel Eide in the gallery to do all that.  Well, that was a stroke of genius, because Joel was a master at asking people for money and stuff.  So we figured out how many bricks we needed, because Yukio wanted to build this kiln, and it was thirty-three thousand bricks.  And the bricks were also specially made, some of them.
Poen:  Where?
Bendel:  In Mexico, Missouri.  A. P. Green makes them.  They were the best company there was.  And what happened was, Joel just called ‘em up, told ‘em what we wanted, and they sent a person to talk to us, and so we met with them and we told them we needed all these bricks.  And lo and behold, A. P. Green gave us all the bricks.
Poen:  Wow.
Bendel:  I don’t know what the total was they were worth, but the special-made ones for the door were like twenty dollars apiece.  There was about two hundred of ‘em.  And all the rest of the bricks, it must have come to like forty-thousand dollars.  They not only sent that, but they sent mortar, a very expensive mortar to put all this thing together.
Poen:  What was their incentive?  Did they get a lot of publicity out of this?
Bendel:  Well, we gave ‘em a tax thing-Joel gave ‘em the tax....  We said, "We can do this for you."  Then we gave them publicity.  I have a plaque down there with everybody’s name on, the main people who helped build it.  And another plaque for the money I raised for the kiln.  But this particular thing, we did give them quite a bit of PR, but then also the whole city got behind it.  We needed wood for the structure over the top.
Poen:  City of Flagstaff?
Bendel:  Yeah, different companies.  Hunt’s Lumber Yard gave us all the wood for building everything we had to build.  The rental place that’s still in town, gave us free all kinds of equipment, like diamond saws and stuff to cut the bricks-just an enormous amount of stuff.  And then there was four alumni that gave us a lot of stuff, plus their time.  One was David Frank who owned a contracting company, and he used all his trucks to go get things.  He helped also, himself, with some of his crew.  And another guy named Howie Hearn, who is still in town, he did all our welding for us, and he helped build the kilns.  And then there was a gal named Ellen Tibbetts who stayed pretty much every day and worked with Yukio.  And one other alumni named Andy Iventosch , who’d just graduated with his MFA and was living in Tucson, and he came up to see Yukio right as we started building.  And I just called him, I said, "You just gotta come up here."  And so he rode his bicycle here from Tucson, and he said, "I can’t stay, but I want to meet him."  So he came up.  Well, he was so enamored with this guy, he couldn’t leave.  And so he’s the only person who came every day.  He had quit his job in Tucson-and he had a ceramic business also-and washed dishes up here every night, and worked with Yukio all day, until the kilns were finished.  And the other one that worked a lot was Ellen Tibbetts.  And there were others.  In fact, we didn’t really tell a lot of people we were doing this, but I kept track, and in total, 196 people came and worked on the kiln.  Some worked  long periods of time, some less.  Students worked a lot, but they had to go to classes.  And alumni worked, and some townspeople.  Some townspeople came and worked.  I figured out, if I paid everybody minimum wage-I kept track of stuff like this, you know-it would have cost $178,000 to build this thing. And so the only glitch was, when they gave us all of these bricks, we thought they also paid for the shipping.  But one day I got a call from the president, Gene Hughes, and he said, "Don, we seem to have a little problem here.  Could you come see me?"  And I got over there, he said, "I got a bill from this A. P. Green Company that made your bricks."  They were happy to give us the bricks, but we had to pay for the shipping.  We had already spent our $30,000 on other things.  I said, "We don’t have any more money left.  And he said, "Well, I can take care of this.  This is such a great project."  He’s the one that really encouraged Yukio to find the right spot to build it.  So he was really great for it.
Poen:  Gene Hughes?
Bendel:  Yeah.
Poen:  He was president by this time?
Bendel:  He was president, and there was no studio down there, and so Gene said, "I can pay for it this time, but don’t give me any more of these big surprises."  (laughs)  And so he paid for that, which was nice.  But I guess I forgot to tell you, when I introduced Yukio to Gene Hughes, he was quite impressed.  They were impressed with each other.  I told him we wanted to find the spot for this kiln, and he said, "Well, we have 500 acres down there, see if you can find one."  So we walked and walked and looked-and Gene did too.  He looked at some stuff with us, and then we decided on this one area, because it had fairly easy access, plus it had a nice hill for the climbing kiln.  And so I said, "Well, you know, we also would like a studio down here someday."  And he said, "Well, okay, we could have room for that.  We’ve got all this room."  I said, "Well, we’ve discussed having a Japanese garden and tea house."  And he said, "Well, okay, how much land are we talking about?"  I said, "I don’t know, five acres?"  "There’s plenty of land here," he said.  So that’s how the whole thing started.  And then as the kilns were built and they progressed, it actually took six months to build these things, and there are two of them.  There’s the noborigama and the anagama  they’re both tozan kilns, and that’s because Yukio was the master of the tozan kiln.  And tozan simply means "east mountain."  I can back up there and tell you where that comes from too, if you like.  One of the last big, important shoguns was at Himeji, and it’s one of the last big, beautiful castles.  In fact, it’s the only wooden structure that’s the same-all the rest burned down or somehow were destroyed.  And they rebuilt ‘em, but they did it mostly with poured concrete, so it looks like wood.  And so this is the last one, and it’s magnificent.  And that shogun, ceramics was the most high-tech thing in the world at the time, and the proper thing for all these important people was to give pottery to their friends, or to bribe somebody for something.  Or to make money, they’d sell ‘em.  So this shogun wanted a pottery, so he asked a couple of potters from Kyoto to come and build him a kiln.  So they came and built it on the mountain that’s east of the castle.  And so it’s called tozan.  And so that’s what Yukio....  There’s a little history behind that.  When the army started to take over in the early 1900s, they eventually closed all these ceramic-type kilns because they’re very inefficient, and they wanted to be modern, you know.  They modernized their army and everything.  And so they closed most of ‘em [i.e., the tozan kilns].  Well after World War II, they opened ... they wanted to build up some of their ... because Himeji was a place where they built Zero airplanes.  And of course we leveled it.  Fortunately, they didn’t hurt the castle-on purpose the Allies [or the Americans] didn’t bomb the castle.  So what happened was, when they were rebuilding....  I forgot my thought!  What was I thinking about?
Poen:  Well, you said that we had leveled the city because they were building Zero aircraft, but they avoided damaging the castle.
Bendel:  Oh yeah!  And so what happened was, in 1950, Yukio’s wife, who was born in America, when she was eleven years old they saw the war coming, so her parents took her back so she’d be safe in Japan.  They became man and wife.  But she, because she spoke English, was interpreter for the city government.  And they wanted to start some of the cultural activities, and her husband was the only working potter at the time-which is kind of funny, because he wasn’t trained as a potter.  Can I talk about Yukio for a minute?
Poen:  Sure!
Bendel:  His family was like a noble family.  His dad had lots of, I guess we’d call them serfs or something, working for him.  And so what happened after the war....  I’ve gotta back up even more!  Yukio was only fourteen years old, and they were fighting in Manchuria, and some of his friends died over there.  And he didn’t like the war, and then they talked about war with America.  And this little guy went to Osaka, by himself, and protested the war.  And he protested wars, and I’ll be darned, they threw him in jail.  And they kept him there.  But because his dad [was such an] important person, his dad got him out.  But he detested the Army and the Navy and everything about the war.  And he had to do something for his country, but he loved the emperor.  And so the opportunity came up for him to join the kamikazes, so he joined ‘em.  He told me a lot about it, there were actually three groups of kamikazes, five hundred each.  And when we were attacking Okinawa, they took every available person they could.  And his five hundred group of kamikazes were taken to Okinawa, to defend Okinawa.  And he said, "I never shot a gun in my life."  And he was only sixteen, I think, at the time-fifteen or something.  He said they gave him a gun and sent ‘em all over there.  Well, they all got killed, except some were wounded.  He happened to get out of there, but he had a big hole in his back.  I said, "Well, did you have medics?"  He said, "No, we didn’t have medics.  They just told us if we got shot to dig down until we found clay, and put that on the wound.  So I’ve liked clay ever since!"  But he was in one of the last schools for training like the shoguns would have gotten, where it’s all about writing and reading and art and historical things, and calligraphy.  So he was well trained in art, painting, and calligraphy.  He was introduced to ceramics, but he never did it.  So when the war was finally over, he was well-educated, so he went to a school to learn how to teach, and he taught primary school with his wife.  But his wife’s dad had a raku kiln, a very small kiln.  So he started playing around with his.  Well, suddenly people bought these things, so he got a little more involved.  So at his own home-they built their own home a couple of years after they were married-and he built a small, wood-fired, bigger noborigama with two chambers, and he started making stuff.  He was the only potter doing this in the area, and they decided to start the tozan kilns, and they asked him to be the master.  So he was a potter, but he was really into sculpture, and he designed some really quite impressive sculptures around the city ad stuff.
Poen:  Was he a relative to the famous Admiral Yamamoto?
Bendel:  No, and I asked him this.  He said, "No, that Yamamoto was adopted, and he changed his name."  Yukio admired him but he said they should have never started the war, you know.  I’ve got more stories about that thing.  I don’t know if you want to hear all this stuff.  We should probably....
Poen:  What an opportunity to have this world-famous ceramicist come to NAU.  How long did he work on the kiln?
Bendel:  It took six months to complete, and then that didn’t include the structure over it.  And I kind of drew the structure out but they needed....  Oh, that’s another interesting story.  They needed an architect to approve it.  There was a gentleman by the name of Shimisaki in town.  It turned out that he was a well-known American bridge builder, and he was a third-generation Japanese-[American].  He was one of the ones that were in the [internment] camps.  But he became famous and he retired here-Bill Shimisaki.
Cameraman:  Hold that thought, Don.  We’re going to change tapes.
Bendel:  ... which is really strange.  He lived right by you.
Poen:  Something like that.
Bendel:  Bill Shimisaki.
Poen:  He lived up there?
Bendel:  Yeah.
Poen:  He’s not there anymore?
Bendel:  No, he retired here, but the mountain got to be too much for him, so he moved down to Sedona for a while, then he...