Oral history interview with Lucy Walkup (part 1), June 6, 2005.

              Lucy Walkup
Interviewed by Monte Poen
June 6, 2005
Flagstaff, Arizona

Poen:  This is Monte Poen, and I’m talking with Mrs. J. Lawrence Walkup, who I’ve known for almost forty years, and I’ve known her as Lucy, as everyone has over the years.  Lucy and I share the same birthday, November 25.  I was going to ask her now about where she was born.  Where were you born, Lucy?
Walkup:  I was born in Benton, Wisconsin.  And Benton is a very small town, and it’s near Dubuque, Iowa, fifteen miles from Platteville, Wisconsin, where there is a university.  It was at one time what they called the agricultural college, but it’s now a full-fledged university.  My father was a superintendent of mines, so I grew up in a mining town.  But I went to school at Benton, Wisconsin, and then after I finish high school I went to college at River Forest, Illinois, at a Catholic girls’ school.  I went to school there and I stayed four years.  Then after that, I was looking for a job.
Poen:  Right.  Did you have any siblings?
Walkup:  Yes, I had two sisters.  One of them went to school at Madison, and the other one went to a business college.
Poen:  What was your maiden name?
Walkup:  Meloy.
Poen:  What was your mother’s maiden name?
Walkup:  My mother’s maiden name was Temple.
Poen:  Sounds English.
Walkup:  It was.
~00:01:51
Poen:  And then after college you looked for a job?
Walkup:  When I was in college, I majored in English and music, because at that time it was important to have about as much as you could do to find a job.  It was hard to find a job.  And so I thought if I did both of those, because during my high school years I played the piano in the orchestra and I did things like that, and I thought I’d like to go into music.  But when I got to college, I liked literature, and I thought I’d like to teach English, and maybe if somebody wanted me to do something in the music line, I could do it.  In that period I joined organizations that helped me with either one of those two majors.  But the one thing--and I’ll point to this later--the one thing that was my undoing as far as that goes, was that I was not athletic.  But I had a roommate who was into anything that had to do with athletics.  So she talked me into belonging to the athletic association, but there wasn’t really any way that I could get into the athletic association because I couldn’t do anything!  I finally found a way, by walking to Oak Park several times a week, I’d get two points for every time I walked.  And at the end of four years, I was inducted into the athletic association.  But that was my own doing, because I didn’t have anything to back it up, so to speak.
But after I finished college, I came home and I started looking for a job, and they were extremely hard to come by.  I enrolled at the teachers’ agency.  That was very common in those days, put your name in, it was a teachers’ agency at Clinton, Iowa.  I found a job in South Dakota, but I really didn’t want to go there too much.  It was a job, and I would have taken it, but on this particular evening, I had a call from Lawrence Walkup, and he was the superintendent of schools at Sheridan, Missouri, and he wanted to hire a teacher.  I was interested, I wanted to go someplace else, and Missouri was closer than [South Dakota].  It was easier to get back and forth to Missouri.  So I was interested.  And so he said he needed an English teacher, and that it was a consolidated school.  He had been the superintendent I think a year or so.  So I said I’d think about it, and I took the job.  I quit my other job, which I could have done.  I was in a time frame where I could quit it with honor, so I quit and went to Missouri.
Lawrence at that time was twenty-three years old, and he was the youngest superintendent in the state of Missouri.  And so I thought, "I wonder if he can do this," because I thought he was too young to do it.  "What if he can’t?"  But he was a good superintendent.  So we got our assignments, and he said, "Of course you know you’re going to have to do extracurricular."  When anyone said extracurricular to me, I thought in terms of a play, a debate, maybe leading the glee club or something like that.  But it ended that I was to coach the girls’ softball team and basketball team, and I knew nothing about it.  And I was afraid to tell him, because I thought I’d lose my job, and I’d already given up one, and I didn’t know whether I could get another job or not.  So he told me that’s what I had to do.  And he said, "I’m pleased that you are in good standing with the athletic association."  So that was my undoing, even though I didn’t have any ability.
I went out to teach the girls softball.  I knew nothing.  In a week, one of the girls came to Lawrence and said, "Mr. Walkup, that Miss Meloy you hired doesn’t know a ball from a strike," which was generous!  I didn’t know anything about it.  So he said, "Well, I’ll take care of that."  The only thing I could think of was that he was going to fire me--but he didn’t!  He said, "My extracurricular job is to direct the play.  I’ll trade you.  You do the play, and I’ll do the athletics."  That was wonderful!  So I decided to do that.  He took the girls’ basketball team, and they won the state tournament at Kansas City.  And he was the only male coach (chuckles) in the state of Missouri at that time, for a girls’ club [i.e., team].  I was able to get out of that.  It was a wonderful--it was Sheridan, Missouri--and it was a small town, but a wonderful place to begin teaching.
~00:08:11
Poen:  What did you teach?
Walkup:  I taught English and I taught the music.  And it was a great place.  They were so enthusiastic about teachers, and they were willing to put money into the school.  It turned out that we had a great time there.  But then we started to go together, and when he went to the service--see, that was during the war, the war had started--and so he was sent to....  Let’s see, where did he go?  Oh! he went to Ottumwa, Iowa.  He thought that he would be sent overseas, but he wasn’t.  He said the closest he got to sea was putting sandbags on the Ottumwa River.  So he went to the service, and I followed him, so to speak.  I got a job at Gardner, Kansas.  Later, he was moved to Olathe Naval Base, and I went to Gardner, Kansas, so that we could be together.  He never got sent overseas because of his math and science background.  They put him as a teacher, and so he was there.  Then we went to Pasco, Washington, and we were married in Pasco, Washington.  And then we came back and he....
Poen:  What was the date, Lucy, that you were married?
Walkup:  1943.  And we came back, and he decided he’d take advantage of the [G.I.  Bill], so he went to school at University of Missouri, and I went into the library and worked in the library while he was getting his doctorate.  Then he decided that he’d come out here.  Having been in the West, he wanted more of the West, and he wanted us to be in a small college, wherever he could get in.  So he came out here, and we came out.  In June he finished his degree, and two hours later we were out here.  He was in the training school.  First of all, they hired him, really, for psychology.  And then later on, Dr. Eastburn realized that he had been a superintendent of schools, he put him in charge of the training school.  You remember the training school they had with the....  What is it now?  It has big columns in front.  They had an elementary school, and so they put him in charge of that.  He was the principal.  And he did that, and then he just moved up a little bit.
~00:11:28
Poen:  Right.  What was your first house that you lived in when you got here?
Walkup:  The first house we lived in was Clark Homes.
Poen:  That’s amazing.
Walkup:  I remember Mrs. Eastburn, the president’s wife, coming out an apologizing for our having to live in Clark Homes.  But we had lived practically in every attic and basement in Columbia, and it didn’t seem so bad to us.  But it wasn’t the best place in the world.
Poen:  I think they were made from barracks that were pulled from Navajo Army Depot.
Walkup:  Yeah, the Army Depot.  And they were barracks.  We fixed ours up, but the thing about it is that a lot of the faculty lived out there, because at that time it was almost impossible, impossible to find a place to live.  And so the thing that they did is, they had this cheap housing, and you were permitted to fix it up any way you wanted to, so the faculty went out there.  Garland Downum was there, and Derifields.  Oh, it was just a big group.  And so we had a good time.  I wouldn’t want to go back, but I mean we had a good time when we were out there.
~00:13:01
Poen:  And then from there what was your next house?
Walkup:  We decided that we’d try to build a house, or buy a house, or get some kind of a [house].  Dr. Tinsley, who was on the faculty, in history, they had a house.  And so we rented that house.
Poen:  The one up by the hospital?
Walkup:  It was down on Mogollon Street, right by the park.  You know that park down there?  And so we rented that, and then we decided that we’d try to build our own house.  So we built our house on Havasupai Road.  That’s down near the back of the school, that first subdivision.  We built our own house, and we hadn’t lived in it any more than, I don’t think, a year or a year and a half, until Dr. Eastburn passed away, and Lawrence was made president.  So we had to move up to the campus.  Dr. Eastburn had lived in that old brown house.  Do you remember that, the old brown house?
Poen:  The engineering, on the corner?
Walkup:  No, the one that was back of Old Main.  They tore it down.
Poen:  Right.  Yeah.
Walkup:  And he lived in that house.  So we left our new house and moved into this older house on campus.  When Dr. Eastburn became ill and Lawrence was made president, Lawrence said the first thing he was going to do was try to get a president’s home, because this house was just a house.  It wasn’t set up for entertaining or for doing anything that a president would do.  So what we did, he said he was going to move in that direction.  He made out some plans, we talked about what we thought we ought to have, and he presented it to the Board of Regents, and they were in agreement that a house was needed on this campus.  And Dr. Eastburn had thought so, but his health was so bad that he didn’t want to pursue it.  In case he ran into conflicts, he didn’t want to pursue it.  So we got the money for the house, $50,000.  Can you imagine that?!
~00:15:40
Poen:  From the legislature?
Walkup:  I can’t remember how it was financed, but it didn’t cost them very much.  But we had $50,000, and so Lawrence made the plan, first of all; then he knew he’d have to have the architect, and it would have to go out for bids.  So we had an architect draw up a plan, and it went out for bids.  It came to, I think, like $48,000.  We were planning to have a lot of space up in front, and so that’s why, when you go into the inn, there’s a lot of--the living room’s 24 by 48 [feet], so there’s a lot of space up there.  And then we left the back, our quarters, smaller, but they were very nice.  That’s how we presented the plan to the Regents.  The Regents had to okay it.  And it had to go out for bids.  I think that’s common, isn’t it, to have it go out for bids?  It was bid on by a man--can’t remember his name--but he was from Phoenix.  And he and I disagreed on what a president’s home ought to look like.  He gave us a lot of good ideas, but when it came, like for instance, the beamed ceiling would drum out--it’s very nice, don’t you think?  It’s very nice.  So we went along with a lot of these.  But every time, when we got to the kitchen, I kept telling him that I needed lots of space for entertaining, to put plates and so forth, and he wouldn’t go for that at all.  So every time I disagreed with him, he went to San Francisco to visit his daughter.  And so finally he came back, and we dilly-dallied along, and it was getting to be the weather was not good.  So Lawrence came in one day and he said, "Well, I’ve settled everything, we’re going to build the house without the kitchen."  I couldn’t believe that, that we’d build the house without the kitchen!  But that’s the way it was built.  It was built without the kitchen, and he had all the piping put in.  Lawrence wasn’t accustomed to being around a kitchen, so he didn’t think it was necessary.  (laughs)  But anyway, we had the pipes and everything put in.  That’s it, it was just a shell, and all the rest of the house was built, but we still didn’t have the kitchen.  And a man--and I wish I could remember his name, so I could give him credit--but he built all these homes out on Havasupai Road, out by the back of the high school there--and he came up one day and he said, "I want to build the kitchen."  So I set in the middle of the floor and said, "Put this here, this here," you know, and it just went up perfect.  And so that’s how we got the kitchen.
Then Lehman Brothers, or Mr. Lehman, sold electrical appliances, especially G.E., and he came up and said he wanted to donate the oven.  And we got the kitchen donated.  So that’s how that house got going.
~00:19:32
Poen:  Wow.  Oh my.  Well, did it prove satisfactory for entertaining?
Walkup:  Oh! it was absolutely a wonderful house for entertaining--absolutely wonderful.
Poen:  Now that was built before I got here in ’66, I know that.  When was it, do you think, in the early sixties?
Walkup:  I think it was like....  When did you get here?
Poen:  I got here in ’66.
~00:19:57
Walkup:  I think it was built around 1960.
Poen:  Ah yes.  Now, you stayed there....
Walkup:  Twenty-two years.
Poen:  In that house?
Walkup:  Uh-huh.
Poen:  Oh really?!
Walkup:  Yes, twenty-two years before we built this one.
Poen:  Oh my!  Okay.  Now, you were the first First Lady of Northern Arizona University.  It became a university in 1966.  What did you see as your role, Lucy?
Walkup:  Well, at that time I followed the same pattern that Mrs. Eastburn had followed.  Dr. Eastburn had been president, and he and Mrs. Eastburn had lived in that brown house.  She entertained small groups.  There was a set pattern of what could be done at that time, and it fit very well that small school--very well.  She was a delightful person, very warm, and just willing to help anybody.  I followed pretty much what she did, because I was on what they called the social committee and helped her with teas and so forth.  Alright, so I followed her pattern.  And that pattern was that every fall we had a dance for the students when they came on the campus.  It was called a freshman orientation dance, but all the students were invited.  We had that.  Then in October she entertained faculty groups.  Well, we did that in the new house.  At Christmas time, she had a tea for all the faculty and students.  I did that.  Then in May, we had a tea for the senior class and their parents.  I followed her pattern.  But when I say I followed it, I don’t mean that I did it myself, because at that time, there were faculty wives.  Faculty wives was a very close organization.  I don’t think it’s even in existence anymore, because I don’t think the need for it is there.  And so they would help and be hostesses.  It was very nice.
~00:22:50
Poen:  So faculty wives, as an organization, preceded you, it was organized earlier?
Walkup:  Yeah, the faculty wives.  And then I think the reason--I don’t know why it disintegrated.  I think part of it was just the times.  When I came there wasn’t too much to belong to except the faculty wives.  And I think that as different organizations in the community, as they came forward and took new members, the faculty wives joined those.
Poen:  Right.  Did you sort of have your own responsibilities, and Dr. Walkup had his?  This was asked of Harry Truman one time:  if his wife ever gave him advice.  Did he discuss issues with you?
Walkup:  No.  Lawrence, when he came home, he left his problem at school.  He never came home with worries or gossip about this or that.  In fact, it was so bad that I got in trouble over a few things that he did, because I didn’t know what was going on.  Well, when I went out to play bridge, and somebody would say what was going on, "news to me!"  I didn’t know.  If it was something big, for instance the student uprising in the sixties, yes, I knew about that.  Or, especially if he’s going to build the dome.  Of course he was always going to build something.  But the dome or South Campus, that kind of thing, yes, I knew.  But as far as the little day-to-day activities of the faculty on campus, I didn’t know about it.  He wasn’t that kind.  Was Harry Truman?  I read the book.
Poen:  Well, his daughter says that he discussed the atomic bomb and some other things with his wife, Bess.
Walkup:  Well maybe the big things, but like when he was thinking of trying to get it to be a university, that kind of thing.
~00:25:27
Poen:  He did talk about that?
Walkup:  He did talk about that, uh-huh.
Poen:  You know, Dr. Walkup is credited with being very effective with the Board of Regents and the state legislature.  Did you ever talk about anything like politics....
Walkup:  Well Lawrence, with the Board of Regents, Lawrence, I can’t think of anybody that prepared himself any better to go to a Regents’ meeting.  He would spend hours getting ready for the Regents’ meeting.  And he had a wonderful finance person in Pitch, Mr. Pitcher.  And the two of them would get together so that when they were asked a question from a Regent, they knew the answer.  And Lawrence knew it very well, because he would sit and write out what he wanted to accomplish.  And he tried to get it condensed so that he wouldn’t ramble on.  He really worked at it.  And I think that was one of the keys to some of the success that he had.  He knew what he wanted, he knew how much it was going to cost, he knew what he didn’t want.  He did that with almost everything.
Poen:  Well now let me ask you this--and we have extended video interviews with Dr. Walkup, maybe six or seven sessions, and I think we’ve covered the waterfront pretty well.
Walkup:  Oh, I’m sure you have.
Poen:  But why did he think it was time to try to become a university?
Walkup:  Well when he came to Flagstaff, he thought he liked it because it was a small school, and he was interested in a school where a lot of attention was placed on the students.  He always was that way.  He wanted the faculty to be that way--don’t you think?
~00:27:48
Poen:  Yes.
Walkup:  He wanted the faculty to be interested in the students.  And then, I think that as he went to the meetings at Tempe and at the U. of A., I think he thought, "Well, it’s time for us to try for something and go through the research."  But he was never one to give up the idea of the student.  The student came first.  But he wanted to get university status, he thought that would help us.  And it did!  It did help us.  And that was one of the things he pushed for.
Poen:  How did it help?  What’s the difference between the college life and the university life?  Did you see any changes in maybe your responsibilities?
Walkup:  Our responsibilities increased, because we were invited and encouraged to go to quite a few things in Phoenix, to represent the university.  When it became a university, he was able to get professors, say, from Stanford.  Even before that, he was getting them from Stanford--people he had met in Chicago at meetings and all--and he’d ask them if they’d like to come to a nice cool climate for the summer--and of course they did!  And we had one thing going for us, they had those apartments.  And so to a faculty member from Stanford or anyplace over on [the West] Coast....  And they came from Michigan, and they thought it was great to come to a place with a climate like this, to teach a lot of incoming teachers, who were coming back to get their credits, and they were given these apartments.
~00:29:51
Poen:  How many apartments?  I’m hazy on that, Lucy.  How many apartments were there?
Walkup:  I think they tore them down just recently.
Poen:  Oh?
Walkup:  I don’t know.  Oh, maybe....  No! the apartments were in--you know Babbitt Hall?  (Poen:  Yes.)  I think they were on that side.
Poen:  Ah, I see.  And then there’s, I think, an apartment or two by the original student union?
Walkup:  Yes, and there’s an apartment by the old business administration, where the Forestry, up in there, is an apartment.  And I don’t know whether they’re still there or not, but they would come, and he had named people come.  They wanted to come to a place that was like this.
Poen:  I know that my first years of teaching, we had a lot of California schoolteachers coming over and taking courses.
Walkup:  Yes, that’s right.  And that resulted from these....  He had named people come to teach the summer classes.  And then that benefitted our students because the teachers in the state had to increase their credentials, get enough for a master’s degree.  And so they came, and they had an apartment.  See, it worked out very well, because if you had two children, it was nice for you to have a little apartment.
Poen:  Right.  You mentioned you played bridge.  Who did you play bridge with?
~00:31:33
Walkup:  Well, I played bridge with Therese Fronske, Ruby Wick.  Ruby was a good teacher for me.  And I played with Nina Hanning [phonetic].  She’s recently passed away.  And Martha Chapman--she’s recently passed away.  But Martha, at one time, had been the nurse in the old days, when the building was across from North Hall.
Poen:  Was Marie Rolle?
Walkup:  And Marie.
Poen:  You and Marie were close, weren’t you?
Walkup:  Uh-huh.
Poen:  What other organizations on campus were you involved in?
Walkup:  Well, we entertained student groups a lot, and I wasn’t so involved in them as it was our pattern to invite the Spurs, for instance, or the Chain Gang.  We even let the students, if the students had--when we got the new house, if the students were having a dignitary or something [where] they were trying to entertain an important person, they had no place to go.  When you came, I’ll bet there weren’t very many places that you could have a get-together.  (Poen:  Right.)  And so we let them have the house.  We were there, though.  But we let them have their organization come to the house.  And so it was our custom to entertain most of those organizations at least once a year.  So that was my involvement with most of them.
Poen:  Well you were kept busy with all of that.
Walkup:  Oh yes, it was very, very....
Poen:  Yeah.  I noticed, reading Dr. Walkup’s book, that you were involved--both of you, really--in the home economics program.
~00:33:57
Walkup:  Yes.  The home economics house was right next door to us.  I can’t even say what’s what now.
Poen:  That’s part of the communications complex now.  There used to be a swimming pool in one of those buildings, I know, and maybe even a gym.  If you’re talking about the old house....
Walkup:  I’m talking about right next to the....  You know, the Eugene Hughes Building?
Poen:  Oh yes.
Walkup:  Right in front of that.  And that was the home economics house.
Poen:  Oh!  I didn’t know that.
Walkup:  And that was built--right shortly after our house was built, they built the home economics house, because I remember that Lawrence had gone over the plans and they had said what they wanted in a home economics house, and he....  I got up one morning and I pulled the shade, and there was the house.  I said, "That house looks strange to me, the way it’s going up."  And Lawrence came and looked out and he said, "They have it on the lot backwards."
Poen:  Oh really?!
Walkup:  Uh-huh.  He was on top of all that kind of thing, and he went over, and sure enough, they had it backwards.  So that meant that the garbage and everything was at the front--you know, the cans and everything.  So if you look at that house, it has in the front, when you go by, it has a brick barrier.
Poen:  Uh-huh, kind of a wall.
~00:35:33
Walkup:  And actually Therese says it turned out better.  But they had it on, they just turned it around.  The entrance is on the south, and it should have been on the north.
Poen:  I see.
Walkup:  Like our house.
Poen:  Right.  I noticed also in the book that there was a blood drive for you, because you were going to have surgery.
Walkup:  Oh yes.  That was great.
Poen:  Can you tell that story?
Walkup:  Yes.  I had to have surgery, and it was pretty tricky.  And so we were trying to make....  I had to have a lot of transfusions, and the Chain Gang marched up, and they gave blood.  And I laughed....  Of course at the time, being young and athletic, I said, "Well, you know, this might help me a lot, to have the Chain Gang helping me."  Yes, they did.  At that time, the students were very much in tune with that kind of thing.  When Max Spilsbury was here as a coach, there was one of his football players injured, and he got a wheelbarrow--I remember that--and he started, the boy was injured over at the filling station, and he started out with the wheelbarrow, getting money--people from town throwing money in the wheelbarrow.  And my father was here, and he was in his late eighties, and he marched up to the hospital.  There was a lot of that kind of thing, just original ideas.  It was really great.
Poen:  Did you ever feel that you wanted more privacy?
Walkup:  No, I never did.  I felt that....  See, what I wanted to teach....  I was teaching when Lawrence was made president, and I had to quit.
~00:37:59
Poen:  And you were teaching....
Walkup:  At the high school.
Poen:  At the high school.  What were you teaching there?
Walkup:  I was teaching English at the high school.  And when Lawrence was made president, I had to quit.  Nowadays, that’s unheard of, but at that time they wanted somebody who was going to be here full-time, doing the job.  So I didn’t mind quitting.  At first I did.  At first I hated to give it up.  But I substituted the college students for the high school students.  And see, both Lawrence and I liked the student groups.  Well, it wasn’t a chore that way.  Oh, once in a while we’d think we’d like to have more privacy, but actually they never knocked on your door asking for things.  They’d come to his office, but they weren’t knocking on the door all the time, even though we lived on campus.
Poen:  Did it ever get a little noisy?
Walkup:  Not too bad, uh-uh.  See, there weren’t that many students.
Poen:  Well, yeah.  I saw Dr. Walkup driving to the house one day, and he drove rather fast, didn’t he?
Walkup:  I’m sure he did.
Poen:  Did he ever make you a bit nervous with his driving?
Walkup:  Oh yes.  One of the things that made me nervous was when we were....  He was always looking at buildings.  And so I can recall one time we were going down Central Avenue in Phoenix, and he said, "Lucy--" and he pointed.  "Lucy, look at this building over here.  I want that front on--" some building that they were doing.  This scared the wits out of me!  He was not noted for....
~00:40:10
Poen:  A lot of fond recollections I’ve heard about his driving.
Walkup:  Oh yes.
Poen:  Dr. Walkup drove me around the campus one time because I was on what was called the beautification committee.  My job was to talk to Dr. Walkup and learn about the different buildings that had been built during his presidency.  He made the comment that he had to wear many different hats:  that he was a builder of buildings, and then an academic.  And he went on and he named about four or five different roles and responsibilities that he had.
Walkup:  He did have that.  And I know that although he was noted for all the buildings that he put up, he really enjoyed that.  It wasn’t a chore, believe me.  He liked to plan the buildings.  And he was pretty good at it too, I think.
Poen:  Yes.
Walkup:  But when he came, the school was in trouble with North Central, and he worked more on that than anything I think he ever....
Poen:  Didn’t he, in a way, make his mark by....
Walkup:  By getting--because we were not accredited, you know.
Poen:  Right.
Walkup:  And they were losing their accreditation.  And so he did that.  That is true, he liked building, and he was trained as an administrator, he liked that.
Poen:  Well, did you wear many hats?
~00:42:02
Walkup:  I didn’t wear so many, except I entertain a lot--we entertained a lot.  And we entertained, as I [said], we had set patterns of what we were going to do throughout the year.  And it was important to entertain our faculty because they were very helpful.  You don’t do all this by yourself.  And Lawrence always said he was so fortunate that he had faculty who liked the students, and faculty who were willing to do some little thing around, extra, besides their job, and they were very good at that.  You could call on them, they’d show up, and so we entertained faculty groups, and we entertained the Regents, and I was busy.  And in that day, the students did a lot of entertaining too.  They liked to entertain.  And so when they’d have a party or a barbecue, we’d be invited down here to Fort Tuthill--Joe and Marie....  They included a lot of faculty.  And when they turned Old Main....  Do you remember when there was a move to tear down Old Main?
Poen:  Vaguely.
Walkup:  Of course the alums were furious about that!  They weren’t about to give up that.  So they turned it into a dorm.  Well, the students really went all out fixing that up as a dorm.  And so we would be invited over there for cookies and coffee.  Oh! some of the ways they had those decorated was interesting, you know.  There was a lot of that kind of thing, probably because the school was small.  We couldn’t possibly do that now.
Poen:  Did you involve yourself with the alumni?
Walkup:  Yeah, we were involved with the alumni.  We entertained the board at our house.
Poen:  Did you ever make a speech, did you speak?
Walkup:   I didn’t like to.  I suppose I could, but I didn’t like to, and I never spoke on anything that had to do with the university.  I figured--and Lawrence did too--that was his job--do or die.  That was his role.  And I was in faculty wives.  I was active in faculty wives, and I belonged to the cancer board--that kind of thing I did.
~00:45:01
Poen:  The cancer board?  Okay.
Walkup:  But as far as getting up and talking in any group, no, I didn’t do that.
Poen:  Okay.  Can you recall any other differences between the college days and the university days?  For one thing, didn’t the college have a local board of trustees or something?
Walkup:  No.
Poen:  Oh, they didn’t--not in your time.
Walkup:  Uh-uh.
Poen:  I think early on they may have.
Walkup:  Maybe so earlier, but they had....  John Babbitt was on the Board of [Regents].  You’re talking about the Board of Regents?
Poen:  There was a local board of trustees.
Walkup:  No, uh-huh.
Poen:  Each college had  a local [board] earlier on, I think.
Walkup:  Earlier on.
Poen:  Okay.  Did you go down to Phoenix then when Dr. Walkup made some of his trips?
Walkup:  I went to almost everything that he went to.  If something important was going on up here, I stayed up here and represented him.  I represented him.  If Phi Kappa Phi had a dinner, and we were invited, I went--and he went to the board meeting.
~00:46:22
Poen:  Well you mentioned earlier the student uprising.
Walkup:  Oh yeah.
Poen:  Now how did that unfold?  I’ve heard bits and pieces.
Walkup:  Well, it was interesting because that year, in September when the students arrived, we were going around the campus, and the bookstore was small.  It was where it is now, but it was not extended in that way.  We were riding around campus, so we saw these boys going into the bookstore.  They had on athletic shirts, and oh, they looked pretty bad in their attire.  So I said to Lawrence--this was prior to all this starting--"Look at those students.  These are some of our students coming.  Look at them!  Are you going to say anything to them?"  And he said, "No, the climate will take care of them."  Because they weren’t dressed....  They’d come from Phoenix probably.  And he said, "No, the climate will take care of them."  But then, throughout the nation, they had this uprising in schools.  And so Lawrence--and there’s a picture--called a meeting of the faculty.  So they stationed themselves--they came at night and they stationed themselves all around the campus, to talk to the students.  And the students could ask questions.  And Harvey Butchart who was in math, was playing checkers or something with some young boy on the hood of car, and they just circulated.  Then they had doughnuts and coffee, and they aired their views.
Poen:  Now this was about the Vietnam War, I think, wasn’t it?
~00:48:30
Walkup:  And everything.  They just aired their views.  Well, that worked pretty well, and all the faculty--I think they all participated.  There was nothing said about it, it was just you’d go up, and you’d see somebody who was disturbed, and you’d go over and talk to them.  And then they had several meetings over in the old auditorium, where they could meet, and they’d fill it sometimes.  And then they’d express their views.  But the hard part was that different friends of Lawrence’s, different presidents whom he knew, had been dragged out of their homes, they had been....  It was just a molesting kind of thing.  Every time they went someplace, there would be something wrong with their car.  And we didn’t have anything like that.  And I can’t remember that any student knocked on our door.  I can’t remember that anybody came.  In that way, we were very private.  If they had anything to say, they always went to the office to say it.  But I think that there was always that dread, because after all, if you’re reading the papers you’re expecting it might happen to you.
Poen:  That’s right.  I notice you have a few notes.
Walkup:  I was just putting dates of when Lawrence was president.  Oh, one thing we had--I’m glad you mentioned that--because one thing that we did that we thought was good, we entertained the international students as a group.  The first time we did it, we didn’t have that porch on the.... You remember up at the inn there’s a porch on there?
Poen:  Right.
Walkup:  We didn’t have that.  And they came, and they were real nervous.  We tried to have foods that they liked.  But it was a success.  So the next year, we had the porch on.  Then it was really a success, because the other was a little formal.
~00:51:06
Poen:  Oh, being inside.
Walkup:  We sat out on the porch.  Some of them came in native dress.  Do you remember Ruth Tuari [phonetic]?  Or Schott, Ruth Schott [phonetic].  She was in charge of it, plus Dr. Merchant
Poen:  Oh yes, that’s right!  I remember that young man.  That’s right.  And he got shot in a restaurant in Los Angeles, didn’t he?
Walkup:  Yeah, with Dr. Merchant.
Poen:  He was with Dr. Merchant.
Walkup:  And the other person was--oh, she’s retired.
Poen:  From Hawaii?
Walkup:  No.  She was a dean of students, or dean of all of the....  I can see her.
Poen:  Was she from some other country?
Walkup:  No.  But we did that every year, had the international students, so that was one thing I did have down here.  The other thing that Lawrence did was....  Well, we had problems with....  Because of the fact we entertained so much, we’d notice different things that students would do, that they might need help on.  We had a social director, Margaret Pipes.  Do you remember Margaret Pipes?  She was dean of students, and she was also home economics.
Poen:  Yeah, she’s mentioned a number of times.
Walkup:  She was noted for her ability to entertain nicely--home economics, you know.  She was noted for that.  And different organizations on campus--faculty organizations--for instance, if they were going to have a breakfast, they’d ask Margaret to help them with the decorations, and she would do that.  Because the dining hall at that time was not the same as it is now.  They didn’t do a lot of fancy things--they just did things that were more student....
~00:53:24
Poen:  Was that Hanley Hall?
Walkup:  No, Mother Hanley was the one who started it.  That was when Joe Rolle was in school.  But then the first....  I can’t remember who was in charge of the dining room, but they didn’t do tea kinds of things.  I think they could have been directed how to do it, but they didn’t do it at that time.  And so Margaret Pipes was asked, Lawrence called her in the office, and asked her to be in charge of a social organization or a resource for students.  And so the students, if they wanted to know what to wear to something....  I don’t know if that would fly now. [ laughing]  They don’t worry that much [nowadays].  But if they were invited to a tea--which is kind of outdated too--they could just ask Margaret casually.  And they needed to know....  They wanted to know about weddings.  She’d help them with anything that they wanted to know.  And if they had a visiting dignitary--for instance with a sorority or fraternity--she’d help them get ready for it, and things like that.  It was a wonderful service, I thought.  And it certainly paid off.
Poen:  You said that there were some problems along the way.  I recall in talking with Dr. Chuck Little--used to live right across the street here--and he was saying that the development of faculty housing, that whole program, development of the land that this house is on....
Walkup:  See, what happened was that Lawrence could get....  When he went to recruit faculty, he couldn’t, because if you lived in the Midwest and you owned a home, and you thought you’d like to come here, you wanted to come to ASC to teach, you were handicapped because you couldn’t find a house.  You were also handicapped because Flagstaff has a high [cost of] living.  And so Lawrence got the idea of getting this land through Riordon and Walter Bennett.  And they got this land and they divided it.  It was divided into lots.  And they did not intend for the lots to have faculty names on them, but they do because they had to identify the lot, and the easiest way would be to put it that this is Walkup Drive or Little Drive over here.  The original intent was that those would be changed.  But then they didn’t change it, they left it as it was.  But each faculty member could buy a lot--anybody on the faculty could buy a lot.  And they drew for the lot, and if you didn’t like the lot you got, you traded it with somebody else.  For instance, if you wanted to live up on the hill, and your lot was down here.  Now, the place where we are was to be left for a school, but they didn’t take it and build DeMiguel instead.  This was flat land, and Lawrence said, "I’m leaving this for the school.  This is flat land, great for a school."  That whole block.  Then at the last minute, they had to get rid of this lot, so we took it, Mehrhoff took part of it, Bob Dickeson took part of it, and they finally were able to get rid of it in the three-day period.  That’s how that happened.  And the idea was that once you had your lot, you were not kept from selling it to somebody in the town or Phoenix or anything.  It wasn’t just to be a faculty grouping.
Poen:  Well, yeah, but wasn’t there a question about the legality of the whole process?
Walkup:  Yes, there was a question about that.
Poen:  And it made the Phoenix newspapers?
Walkup:  It’s in here, about the legality of it.  And they said that Dr. Walkup had no business being in the real estate business.  But then they came and supported him.  That’s in here, in his book.
~00:58:46
Poen:  Well Dr. Little was saying that he became sort of the treasurer or executive director or whatever, because Dr. Walkup and Mr. Pritchard both said, "We need to get out of this."
Walkup:  Yeah, they wanted to get out of it.  But at first it was kind of--the town too thought that they were getting into, I think, getting into the real estate.  They were getting into the real estate business!  But it was a good thing for the community.
Poen:  Sure.  Well now there’s talk now about the need for faculty housing.
Walkup:  Yeah.  And the need for faculty housing was very severe.  He just couldn’t get anybody to come because there was no place for them, not even an apartment.  It seems strange now with so much housing; but there wasn’t anything out at Continental; there wasn’t anything out here; and throughout town just old houses, and many of those were not for rent or anything.
Poen:  Did Dr. Walkup talk with you about his ideas concerning South Campus and what kind of mission it would have?  I think it’s been noted that the University of California at Santa Cruz may have been a model for that.
Walkup:  He went everywhere.
Poen:  He had this idea of the South Campus as being a part of the main campus, but still have its own identity back there.  In fact, he had the idea of three campuses.
Poen:  Three campuses?
~01:00:45
Walkup:  He wanted three campuses.  And I can’t remember what he was going to put on the third.  But he went to Santa Cruz, he went anyplace where he thought they had anything similar to what he had in mind to build.  He did that a lot.  Before he built the dome, we went to visit Houston, where they have the big dome--he went there.  He went to Idaho.  He went everyplace that had a dome, to see what it looked like, and to see how it operated.
Poen:  Right.  Do you remember the philosophy behind it?