Autobiography
The questions I now want to address are: What are the events that have contributed to the gestalt that is Me? What are the social institutions that have filtered my existence? What are the spatial arrangements that have influenced my pathways through life? In what ways have I been creative? In what ways have I modified the material world? What are the narratives that make up my cultural, geographical autobiography? And how am I connected to other events that overlap an ecosystem that is focused on me?
I view myself from within as well but also try to see me as if I were an observer. I try to show how I relate to dominant American worldviews and to the particular experiences of my generation. And I want to indicate some of the objective facts and their systematic organization that link me to a larger material world.
My narrative starts with my childhood and family and continues through my formal education, my adult life and my life in retirement. I look at the socialization and learning that has influenced me and at the spatial (geographic and artifactual) settings of my life. I write about the ways I have altered the cultural and material worlds. And finally, I look at the ways I have uniquely accepted worldviews as a member of the “Depression Baby” generation.
Early Life—1931-1949
Family Life. I was born into a middle-class American family at the beginning of the Great Depression. My mother and father already had two daughters, four and six years older than I. Although without regular employment during part of the Great Depression, my father worked odd jobs, making enough money accompanied by much scrimping to keep the family with food and shelter. I do not remember being deprived in any way during what must have been grim times for my parents. I was a much loved and protected child. My mother much later told me that she had worried much about how to raise her first child, Janice, with just my father for emotional support. Her second child, Joann, was gravely ill much of the time as a baby and thus a constant worry. (There were no sulfa or other anti-bacterial drugs available.) But with me, Mother said that she was going to enjoy and love a healthy and happy baby. Thus I was given a warm, loving start to life in a household that maintained, often barely, adequate food and shelter.
As I remember, not only was my mother caring, but as I grew older, my sisters were as well. The three of them were the main focus of my early life. I remember my father almost exclusively as merely a presence, not a close participant in my childhood. I now know that he was working very hard, often at backbreaking jobs, just to keep his children from being hungry. My parents were not demonstrably affectionate, at least in front of me.
I have been told that I was an easy child to get along with. I was healthy and good natured. Not being a very adventurous child, I was also obedient and quite self-contained. Family life was almost always calm and regular. The spats among siblings were minor and discipline was not corporeal. The family always ate meals together and at regular times. I don’t remember doing many activities outside the home or neighborhood with the exceptions of holiday outings and yearly vacations to the Oregon beaches or mountains. We visited my maternal grandparents most weekends for very short visits. By the time I was born, they had moved to Portland after the retirement of my grandfather.
The ethics of my parents reflected in many ways those of their parents (and in turn mine.) My father’s father, who had been born in 1868 in Ontario to Scots immigrants, had worked his way across the United States as a blacksmith for a railroad. He settled in Sherman County, Oregon, owning a ranch in Erskine, and later a store and finally as the postmaster of Moro. He knew how to work hard, as did my father, for whom hard work became a fundamental driving force. (My paternal grandmother had died before I was born. I am told that her death greatly affected my grandfather’s spirit for the rest of his life. I primarily remember him when he lived with us for some months for the pinochle games he played with my sister and me when we got home from school.) I know nothing about my grandfather’s immediate family. My father was the third child of six; he was the first child in his family born in Oregon. He grew up in Moro, graduating from Moro High School before attending Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis for two years. He returned to Sherman county where he worked on the family farm. He moved to Portland after marrying my mother.
My mother’s father came from a Quaker family who valued education highly. Born in Indiana in 1856, Grandfather Cox had attended Kansas State University before he and his four brothers came west. Three of his brothers had graduated from Haverford College and his youngest brother, after whom I am named, from Stanford. All Cox brothers had taught school or university at least during one part of their lives. (Two at Stanford University, one in Santa Rosa, San Rafael, and Oakland, where he was assistant superintendent of schools, and the fourth in Honolulu.) My grandfather–named Horace Mann, after the 19th century educator—taught at many schools in Oregon, including at the George Fox Academy in Newberg. In 1878 Grandfather Cox came to Oregon where he worked in stores, farmed, as well as taught in several schools before he settled in Arlington, Oregon, in 1901 and worked his way from being a clerk and bookkeeper to manager of the local bank. He married, Joie Hamer, one of his high school students in Echo, Oregon. Grandmother Cox, born in Missouri, came with her family to a farm near Elko, Nevada, when she was two years old. Her family moved to Echo, Oregon, when she was ten. She married at seventeen. I first remember her when she ran a variety store in Portland, to which my grandparents had moved upon my grandfather’s retirement. Grandmother Cox enjoyed writing poetry and painting, activities that my mother also came to enjoy, especially after my sisters and I had left home.
My mother and her three sisters reflect the upbringing of a family that valued education and art. Her oldest sister, Elma, became a milliner. Although she had not gone to high school, Elma’s two sons completed graduate college degrees, Carl, becoming a career naval officer and Frederick an artist and university professor. Esther, her second sister, studied and taught music, was a professional pianist and organist, and composed music. Her son, Ted, became an electrical engineer. And Janet, her younger sister, taught English in high schools in Oregon and Oakland, California. Mother, born in 1902 and the third daughter, was in the first graduating class of Arlington High School. She attended Willamette University for a year before transferring to Oregon Normal School (now Western Oregon University) in Monmouth where she received a teaching certificate. She taught school in Moro, Oregon, where she met my father, and in The Dalles, Oregon, until she and my father married. This familial background that valued education and art was an implicit part of my life.[1]
I learned to read before going to school. My mother and both of my sisters often read to me. I have strong memories of my older sister reading the Sunday funny papers to me. In grade school I very much liked going to the school library as well as to the Montavilla branch of the Multnomah County Library, where I regularly took out as many books as they allowed.
I started to play the violin when very young but gave it up when I found that playing the piano was more interesting. My Aunt Esther gave me lessons most of the time I was in elementary school. I enjoyed reading and playing folk and popular music although I was little interested in performing or practicing enough to become a pianist. I could carry a tune but never sang except at school or to myself. What I am saying is that I learned to value reading and playing the piano when I was young. This reflected, I believe, the emphasis on learning and artistic activities that allowed me to spend time pleasantly by myself.
In contrast to many American families, I had almost no exposure to activities associated with either church or sports. I can not recall either of my parents ever attending a regular church service. And I can not recall ever playing ball, walking, swimming or other physical activities with either of my parents. I only attended Sunday school occasionally to see what my friends did on Sunday mornings. And I rarely attended any sporting event preferring to keep statistics on the Portland Beavers baseball team while listening to the radio and reading the daily newspaper, the Oregon Journal. Thus, for me, the rituals of religion and sports largely remained as an observer rather than as a participant.
School, starting with kindergarten, remained throughout my life, until retirement, a major focus of my life. I eagerly anticipated the approach of Labor Day and fall because it heralded the joyful return to school. Even today, the lengthening days of late August and September seem the highpoints of the year.
Elementary school was a rich feast (and a breeze) for me. My public school, John L. Vestal grade school, was quite new, having been built to satisfy the recently growing population at the eastern edge of the city of Portland. However, being a ‘depression baby’ meant that there were fewer of us than the children born in the 1920s; therefore there was lots of room for us in school. The teachers were still there to serve the large boom of students who preceded us. In addition to the home room classes we had regularly scheduled special classes in music, art, auditorium, library, health, and gymnasium.
My schoolmates were nearly all lower middle-class, white, Protestant kids. There must have been a few children from poorer families, but they were not distinguishable from the rest of us at the time. I remember a couple of families who had escaped the Dust Bowl conditions of the Great Plains and a couple of families whose fathers were Pullman porters. But I was unaware of serious class or economic distinctions probably because almost all of the parents of my classmates ‘worked’ and were not ‘professionals.’
I was well-prepared before I came to school and never felt challenged beyond my abilities. I was ‘the bright boy’ in most classes, excelling in all of the academic subjects and confident in all but sports activities. And even there, I was self assured enough not to be greatly disappointed when I was chosen last for softball or football teams. I had few close friends and got along with all of my classmates. I received encouragement from my teachers, probably because I did well in class and was never a disciplinary problem. My mother was always supportive; and she participated actively in the P.T.A. to insure that her children were well taught and the school well supported.
I learned well the ways of school and how to take tests, to write to please, to quickly pick up the classroom routines, to not be bored, and how to ‘get along’ with both teachers and classmates. I believe, now, that all but one or two of my teachers were excellent; I remember them clearly and fondly.
My sisters and I walked about one mile to school until I was old enough to ride my bicycle. I received my bike on my eighth birthday. It was second hand, repainted and put in good order by my dad. What a joy that birthday was! Grades five through eight corresponded with the Second World War and the settling in to a newer home my parents were able to buy on the east slope of Mount Tabor. It was a little farther from school, but easily reached by bike. And I could still visit my friends who now lived somewhat farther away.
Because both my parents had jobs during WWII—my mother in the shipyards, both before and later as a sales clerk in the largest department store in Portland, and my father in a wholesale plumbing supply warehouse—I was on my own between the end of school and their arrival home at about six o’clock. My sisters were in high school and worked as well. I had a paper route that kept me busy for a couple of hours after school and provided me with pocket money. It gave me experience with many people in the neighborhood, some of whom were extraordinarily kind, others sometime ‘dead beats.’ I had to be home to start dinner which usually meant simply peeling and boiling potatoes and sometimes going to the store for last minute items that were on the list left by my mother.
As a child, my sisters and I all had chores around the house and we needed to take care of our pet dog. The first chores I remember were watering the house plants, dusting the furniture, and cleaning up the messes left in the yard by the dog. The last family dog was completely in my care. She even rode in a basket on my bicycle when I simply went for ‘a ride.’
Our next door neighbor, an immigrant from Sweden, was very good to me. She let me trail her around her yard. Many flower names I first learned from her. My dad also had a garden in a neighboring vacant lot. I enjoyed helping him there. He let me grow pumpkins that I later sold to neighbors at Halloween time. As I grew older I mowed lawns and weeded gardens. The most memorable times that I had with my grandfather Cox, who was 75 years older than I, was walking through his large, immaculately kept vegetable garden and fruit trees, many of which contained several grafts. These experiences in garden, yard and orchard were pleasant and may account for my continuing joy in working in yard and garden and making beautiful landscapes.
During the summers in WW II, I picked raspberries (at 4 cents/box) to make some money for movies and odds and ends. I also mowed the large lawn of the family of my sister’s future in-laws. That family, the Matsens, and my own did many things together and I, as the youngest and only boy (my future brother-in-law, Ken, was in the Army), felt a part of that family which was very generous and warm. I sometimes felt that it would be great to be a son and brother in that family. In fact, I was treated as such anyway.
I think that the impact of WW II, when I was age 10-14, was primarily through reading the newspaper and listening to the radio. I was fascinated with the maps of the location of our troops and of the battlegrounds and front lines. The pictures of the strange places in Asia, Africa, and Europe were exciting, especially as shown in Life Magazine and the newsreels that accompanied the weekly movies I went to. They followed the earlier interests I had had with the tales of visits to Alaska and Mexico that one of my teachers had made. I also remember van Loon’s Geography and his Story of Mankind.[2] I was given an atlas by my mother and I copied many of the maps. After the war, I tried to collect all of the available road maps, which were given free at gasoline service stations. It was, I believe, the interest in maps and foreign places that I developed during the war that helped set the course of much of my life.
I grew up in detached single-family houses located near the eastern edge of Portland, Oregon. The first house that I remember was a modest, two-bedroom, rental house in which I shared one bedroom with my two sisters. As we grew older I slept in the basement, sharing it with the laundry trays, ironer, washing machine and clothes lines, as well as the sawdust bin which held the fuel for the furnace and water heater. We had a backyard with fruit trees, lawn, and small artificial lily pond. Vacant lots were common: the one next door was used for our vegetable garden. Behind, the vacant lot was overgrown with scotch broom that sheltered paths and hiding places. The house was four blocks north of Glisan Street, along which ran the Montavilla streetcar line, which extended from downtown to East 90th. Glisan Street had businesses that grew up near the streetcar stops scattered along its length. Because my sisters and I twice daily walked along Glisan Street from 71st to Vestal school, located between 80th and 82nd, I remember many of the stores—Balsinger’s Drugs, the Mobil gas station, the Evergreen market, a variety store with its Oshkosh B’gosh overalls sign, Bill’s barber shop, the Granada theatre, a couple of second-hand or junk stores, to name but a few of the shops that existed in the first four decades of the 20th Century. Most of the houses and the few churches in the streets that ran parallel or at right angles to Glisan Street were built during the same decades.
When I was 10, we moved to a house that was just a few years old. It was located on the eastern slopes of Mt. Tabor, along the Mt. Tabor streetcar line. Unlike the rented house, this had two stories and a separate garage. I had a bedroom to myself. From it, I could see Mt. Hood and the Cascade mountains. From the dining room, Mount St. Helens was visible. Living here gave me a sense of what a mountain should look like—a snow-capped, conical feature that rose up above tree covered hills. This three bedroom house was a symbol that our family had become firmly fixed in the middle class of America and put the Great Depression behind us. Located not far from the edge of town with vacant lots behind and across the street, yet with direct access to downtown by electric streetcar, this house remains for me the standard of success.
Because my family had a car—first a Model A, then a 1936 Chevy sedan, and after the War, a 1948 Chevy—my father drove to work. The family often took Sunday drives into the countryside to the east of town. Berry fields and orchards and other small farms lined the roads east to Gresham, the county fair town. We explored the old Swan Island Airport on an artificially expanded island in the Willamette River. During the Second World War it was converted to a shipyard occupied by the Kaiser Corporation. We drove up the Columbia River Highway past waterfalls and the new dam at Bonneville, the first of many large dams in the Pacific Northwest. For me they were Northwest symbols of Progress and thrilled me with the big projects that were transforming America. We drove on the roads to Larch Mountain to pick huckleberries and to the Sandy River on the road to the mountains. And we drove to Bend and to Eugene, to visit my aunts.
Each year we vacationed at the Oregon coast, sometimes taking bedding, cooking utensils, etc. and staying in small cottages near the beach. In particular I remember cabins at Canon Beach, Rockaway, and Long Beach, Washington, which was reached only after a long wait for the ferry across the Columbia River at Astoria. When I was older, we stayed with the Matsens at their old cabin at Gearhart or their new cottage at Lincoln Beach. On weekends or holidays we went to their forest cabin in federal lands along the Zig Zag River in the Cascades.
Driving to the beach, digging for razor clams, jumping waves in the cold surf, getting sunburned while digging in the sand, building bon fires in the evening, playing hearts and pinochle, pitching horseshoes, and enjoying the good food set my standard for many years of how to enjoy a holiday. The beaches were not crowded and the small seaside towns were places to spend a little time and money for salt water taffy, for looking into tourists shops, and maybe buying an ice cream cone.
When still quite young I rode the streetcar and busses to my music lessons, and when in high school, to ball games at other high schools. I was always fascinated with public transportation; and with cheap student fares—five cents—I rode all over town. I collected transfer slips, each line having its route and stops printed on it. These adventures were really very tame. The bike rides were on streets that were safe and little travelled. The streetcars, busses, and trolley busses were also safe and frequent. And Portland’s downtown was compact, busy, and safe. And wider excursions were family affairs. My first long trip was to the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island in 1939 and on to Los Angeles, San Diego, with a day trip to Tijuana, Mexico. And in 1948, my parents, a neighborhood couple, and I toured the great national parks of the West. On the latter trip, I collected many state highway maps, which were produced and given free at the service stations.
Because the vacant lots near my house were gradually being built on after the Second World War, I was fascinated with the ways houses were constructed, in particular with architectural and lot plans. Earlier I had drawn plans for world’s fairs, having been intrigued with the guide book to the San Francisco fair. I sketched out house plans after visiting construction sites. Much earlier I had liked playing with Lincoln Logs and an erector set, which had once belonged to my brother-in-law. And I collected the pop-up cards that were included with packages of Parliament cigarettes. They depicted world famous buildings.
As a boy, the physical object that most influenced me directly was my bike. I was also strongly influenced by radios, first the family’s and then my own, which I kept in my own bedroom. Later I bought a 45 rpm record player with money from my paper route earnings. Possibly the eagerness to own and listen to my radio influenced my choosing to major in radio technology in high school. The spinet piano that my parents bought for me, of course, was very important. Of much lesser importance were other play things. I built model airplanes and boats but never with great success. I didn’t seem handy with Xacto knife or airplane dope. I think now, that I was more fascinated with the plans and scale model drawings than I was with the process of building. Building and repairing things never interested me much. Although I had to repair my bike, I usually found the process very frustrating. And even in my high school shop classes, the ‘hands on’ activities rarely satisfied me.
High School Days. I made a major break from school and neighborhood friends when I decided to go to an all boys’ technical high school. I have tried to understand why I chose to go to Benson Polytechnic rather than Washington High School, which was my district’s academic high school and to which both of my sisters had attended. I may have looked to the men who preceded me as examples. My future brother-in-law, Ken, and the only male first cousin that I knew moderately well had both graduated from Benson. Also I was, at fourteen, still a small boy, who was not prepared for the sexual tensions that went on at a co-ed school. And in retrospect, I may have not consciously recognized my homosexual feelings but still expressed them by choosing an all boys’ school.
Rather than majoring in foundry, blacksmith, carpentry, electric, machine, automotive, or aviation shop, I chose ‘technical radio,’ because in addition to ‘shop’ we could take a complete academic program that prepared one for college. I took a college prep program and also found time to participate in school plays and student governance.[3]
I attended most sporting events by myself until I gained friends from my classes. During my last two years, the radio shop classes met together several hours each day thus I got to know my fellow students quite well. Nevertheless, because we lived in neighborhoods that were scattered all over the city, we didn’t get to know each other outside of school activities. The social and economic backgrounds of my fellow students were mainly lower middle or lower class. This was, for Portland in the 1940s a fairly diverse mix of students. Many students were looking for vocational training with as little academic work as possible. Others were interested in technical training with supporting academic subjects so that they could go on to engineering careers. And a minority, such as I, was planning to attend college not knowing what we might study.
In high school I continued as ‘bright boy.’ (I received all A’s.) But I had learned to remain inconspicuous among my class mates. Activities with class mates focused on sports teams, interest groups, or clubs. I ran for student body treasurer, probably because the office was uncontested. However, it allowed me to be part of the student government. I was also co-editor of the yearbook, again a job that few wanted but allowed me to be involved with all elements of the school without conflict with the ‘in group’ of athletes or student leaders. Even so, I was asked to join the “in club” which included the major “jocks” and socially more active students.
At home, I became, practically speaking, an only child because my older sister, Janice, worked and Joann attended college. My parents benefitted from the post-war boom with better incomes and ability to buy ‘goods’ unavailable to them during the Depression and WW II. They had a new car, new appliances, and the ability to take vacation trips.
As I grew older, I continued the warm relationship with my sister Janice’s in-laws. I still mowed their lawn and as I grew stronger, worked in their commercial greenhouses which produced cut flowers, carnations and chrysanthemums. The gang of young men, friends, and relatives of my brother-in-law, of which I was much the youngest, was hard-working, exuberant, and playful. Inspired by the practical joking atmosphere set by the owner, we enjoyed the hard work because it was recognized. I had to learn to accept the practical jokes played on me. I was innocent and took myself too seriously so the lesson of joking was alleviated by the warmth of the atmosphere. My father sometimes joined in kidding me. In fact that is probably the closest form of relationship with him that I remember.
The period of 1945-1949 was one of national expansion, of progress, of growth, and of the expectation that the future would be better after the grim days of the Great Depression and WW II. For me, it was a time in which doing well in high school was most importance. I learned to really enjoy reading for my English classes, to find chemistry and physics fascinating, and to participate in school activities. My mother eventually quit working and my father found a new job where he was better appreciated and compensated. During my last year in school he was sent by his employers, Consolidated Supply Company, to Spokane to set up the warehouse for a branch of the company. Later he became the manager of the company’s branch in Walla Walla, Washington. He and my mother moved from the home I knew in Portland shortly after I left for college.
Summary of Early Life and High School Days. I was most strongly determined by living in a supportive family in a lower middle class American suburban neighborhood. I was a healthy, intelligent boy who felt secure in both my family and schools. I learned ways to excel in schoolwork and satisfy my parents’ expectations and was sure enough of my abilities to socialize with my classmates. I did not make strong gang or group alliances; instead I was quite independent, if sometimes lonely. I was sexually naïve, neither dating nor feeling the need to interact with girls my own age.
My world expanded from house to neighborhood, from family to school. And from bike and public transportation I got to know the larger city and nearby neighborhood. And with family auto trips, I became acquainted with western Oregon and the Cascade Mountains. My awareness of the wider world came from reading newspapers and listening to the radio. Especially significant world events became important to me through following the battles and troop movements of the Allied Forces during WWII as shown in the short news reels that accompanied the weekly movies that I attended.
Young Adulthood—1949-1955
Oregon State College (now Oregon State University). Once I had gone to college, I never returned home except for brief holidays. And home, as I had known it, vanished when my parents moved from Portland. College life and friends came to dominate my experiences. I had chosen to attend Oregon State College in Corvallis, Oregon, upon graduation from high school in part because it was inexpensive. I had received both a high school graduation award and a State of Oregon scholarship. I saved money from working in the greenhouses, as a house boy at a sorority house, and as a desk clerk at Crater Lake Lodge in the summer. My sister, Joann, and her husband also attended Oregon State. In retrospect, I now see that Oregon State was a safe, next step in leaving home and becoming independent.
I lived only one term in a dormitory. My roommate was a returning veteran of WW II, who was much more experienced in the ways of the world than I. I felt uncomfortable in the dormitory and was recruited to join a social fraternity. I joined because it was less expensive than the dorm and it was noted for having the highest grade point average of any living group on campus. I fit in well and formed close bonds with my fellow pledges to the fraternity. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was really a part of a group of like-minded people. Fraternity life was enjoyable. It involved duties, such as keeping the house and property clean and maintained, helping in the kitchen and serving meals, as well as supplying the joys of buddies and common activities. Dances, serenades, and interfraternity sports as well as card games and long conversations were all exciting to me. My fraternity brothers, all of whom were very active in many college activities, encouraged me to join college service groups. Unlike many fraternities and colleges, drinking was strictly prohibited on campus and in all campus living units. Only very occasional picnics off campus were the scene of any beer drinking.
I dated primarily to participate in fraternity or college dances and parties. But college girls little attracted me sexually. I much more enjoyed the camaraderie of my fraternity brothers. In fact, I was asexual in my thinking. I dated just enough to show my fraternity brothers that I was not a ‘faggot’, a term if applied to anyone would have meant great derision or ostracizing. I had learned well to follow the social mores of the fraternity. I had gotten very good academic grades and I had participated extensively in several college activities. As a result, my ego was greatly raised when I was chosen to represent the fraternity in the college men’s sophomore honor society.
I had hoped to become a science or chemistry major because I had liked best my chemistry and physics classes in high school. But at Oregon State, introductory chemistry lectures were large and impersonal. Labs consisted of set experiments taught by assistants in windowless, smelly rooms. Calculus was done by rote. I did well on assigned problems but never understood what the subject was about.
I found economics dull, probably because it was one of the 7:30, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday classes. The instructor was resentful of the hour as well. Psychology, philosophy, and history classes were OK, but the classes were large and the textbooks dull. I also took several geology and geography classes whose instructors simply repeated what was found in the textbooks. However, unlike the texts of most of my classes, I found the geology and geography texts to be interesting because they gave me a vocabulary that I could use to describe the natural world around me. As well they used maps, which continued to intrigue me.
Because I knew well how to prepare for and take examinations, I did very well academically. I would have had a near perfect GPA if I had not receiver Bs and Cs in swimming, golf, and folk dancing. Two years of ROTC were required of all male students. Because I had been a ‘technical radio’ major in high school, I was accepted in the Signal Corps unit rather than the engineering or infantry units.
In 1949, Oregon State College enrolled about 4500 students and had been enlarged by many students enrolled under the G.I. Bill. Classes were very large; and classrooms were filled to overflowing. Some classes even met at 7:30 a.m. on Saturdays. This was the college depicted by Bernard Malamud in his novel, A New Life. The town of Corvallis was a county seat of a small, conservative agricultural county. Oregon State College was founded as a land grant institution in the late 19th Century. Corvallis was my introduction to small town America in the 1950s. The Willamette River bordered the town to the east, beyond which were broad agricultural fields. The downtown was compact; suburban growth was still in the future. The campus extended from downtown to the college’s agricultural fields. The town and campus were not overrun with cars. Students walked to class, to their residences, and to the churches and movie houses downtown. The campus had large brick buildings surrounding grassy, park like quadrangles. The football field had a small grandstand on one side and temporary bleachers on the other. Basketball was played in the old, very small college gymnasium. Pleasant middle class houses and fraternity and sorority houses on tree lined streets surrounded the campus. The fraternity and sorority houses were attractive buildings. My house was built in southern antebellum style and like other houses, was more impressively furnished than the homes of many of its occupants.
Oregon State College was very important to me because I found out that I could be accepted in social groups and that the academic and extracurricular activities in which I participated were valued by others. I also learned a bit about life in a small town, both its attractions and limitations. However, the great social attractions of Oregon State were not enough for me. Academic life had been a disappointment. I was stimulated intellectually by neither my classes nor instructors. I discussed this disappointment with some of my fraternity brothers and found that several of them agreed with me. I then looked for some instructor with whom I could discuss this feeling. The only teacher that had really stimulated me was my English composition and literature instructor, Rose Combellack.[4]
Mrs. Combellack recognized my frustrations and suggested that I might find the University of California, Berkeley, to be stimulating. She had also been the instructor of one of my buddies. He, I, and two other fraternity brothers went to Berkeley during the Spring break of our sophomore year. We were excited by the people we met there and by the numerous activities of the San Francisco Bay region. Three of us took the California entrance examinations and applied for admission. We were all accepted and moved to Berkeley in the fall of 1951.[5]
University of California, Berkeley. As an independent person, the most influential decision I made was to transfer to the University of California. The intellectual patterns and the friends that I met there have been important the rest of my life.
I needed to complete a bachelor’s degree in two years beyond the two that I had finished at Oregon State. To do so, I had to consider how to finance the greater expenses of being an out-of-state student,[6] how to complete two more years of ROTC, which I wanted to do to avoid being drafted and sent to fight in the Korean War, and how to complete the University requirements which were much greater than those at Oregon State.
The finances were satisfied by being accepted into the Signal Corps unit of advanced ROTC, which had a monthly stipend attached but with duties of additional class work, weekly drills, and a six-week long summer military training camp at Camp Gordon, Georgia. During my first year in Berkeley, I lived off my summer earnings as a desk clerk at Crater Lake Lodge. With my two buddies from Oregon, I lived in very inexpensive rental rooms where we prepared and ate our meals. During most of my second year I lived in a room in a private home for $15/month and had my meals provided in exchange for cleaning bathrooms in a group-housing building. And to finish all of the requirements of classes at the end of the second year I borrowed $500 from my parents.
Because I needed to complete two courses in American history, two years of foreign languages, ROTC credit classes, and an academic major for which I lacked most prerequisites, I needed to enroll for 21 or 22 credits each semester. The class load simply meant that I had to study hard and not participate in many non academic activities. More difficult was finding a stimulating major that I could complete in two years.
I thought of the ideas and courses that had most interested me. I focused on my childhood interest in maps and the interesting geography and geology textbooks that I had read at Oregon State. After an intensive study of the University of California Catalog, I discovered that I could major in geography, a university academic field that I had not known existed. My first meeting with a faculty member in the fall of 1951 was with the undergraduate advisor of the Department of Geography, John Kesseli. Professor Kesseli was a tall, lean man with a full head of wavy, silver hair. His gruff, heavily accented German-Swiss voice was accompanied by piercing blue eyes.
I arrived at his office several days before the fall semester began. Professor Kesseli asked me where I had attended college my first two years. When I replied, Oregon State, he said in his particular accent, “Corwallis? Why didn’t you stay? We don’t want you here!” I was greatly taken aback because my decision to come to the University of California and to major in geography had been the most important decision I had ever made. I became upset, somewhat angry, and replied “I left Oregon State because I didn’t think it very stimulating and that I thought that the University of California would be. I am going to stay, whatever you think.” Professor Kesseli broke into a big smile and said, “Well, OK! Let me put you through your paces.” It was obvious that he wanted students with spunk and who would question the teacher’s authority. Professor Kesseli did “put me through my paces” in his classes in map reading and geomorphology. He practiced the Socratic method of teaching and one had to be prepared to answer his penetrating questions without hesitation. I responded well to his methods; they truly involved me directly in the learning process. Through a growing mutual respect, he and I became good friends until his death.
I did not realize when I chose my major that the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, was the most distinguished geography department in the country. Its chairman, Carl Sauer, was honored throughout the world. As I mentioned in Part I, his classes The Conservation of Natural Resources and The Domestication of Plants and Animals as well as The Geography of Latin America were truly inspirational. They offered me the intellectual stimulation that I had not found at Oregon State. Each course was a carefully thought out story that was founded on a consistent philosophical background. Professor Sauer had gathered the evidence that underpinned his ideas from broad readings in geology, history, anthropology, and archeology. He synthesized the evidence with sound speculation and great verbal skill. He was not highly theoretical as was the fashion in most social sciences. Instead he wove stories about the ways objects and ideas were geographically distributed and ordered historically. His stories were the most thought-provoking of any I had ever heard. I even tried to record his classes in writing as close to word for word as possible so that I could reflect on his ideas, sometimes much later.
Erhard Rotund, who taught courses in introductory cultural geography and the geography of the United States and Canada, was a large, white haired Swede who had a heavily accented voice. He had been a seaman who came to an academic life in middle age. From him, I learned that teachers, even in very large classes, could take individual care of students. I still remember the detailed comments he made on written assignments. Sometimes his comments were longer than the student’s original paper. He introduced me to studies in soil erosion, deforestation, fisheries depletion, and regional variations within the United States and Canada. From Professor Rotund I first learned of Aldo Leopold’s book, The Sand County Almanac, which may be thought of as the first popular account of ecology. It was the first book, other than textbooks or atlases that I felt compelled to buy with my limited finances.[7]
John Leighly taught climatology, meteorology, cartography, and the history of American geography. Professor Leighly was the most traditionally scientific member of the department. From him I learned about the processes that create weather and climate and the ways in which map projections are derived. A brilliant man but an extremely dull lecturer, John Leighly was precise in his speech and writing. The careless use of punctuation or of which and that did not slip by his scrutiny. He loved to talk about current events and was a gracious host to the students from his classes, which he often held at his home. He led me to respect the care for accuracy that a good teacher must have.
The fifth professor in the Department of Geography, James Parsons, taught a field class that took its students all over the San Francisco Bay region, some place new every Saturday. “Parsons” or “Jim” as we called him had started as a journalist. He carried with him throughout his life the curiosity about everything he saw or read. Field trips with him were constant discovery. Professor Parsons stopped frequently, often precipitously, whenever he saw something that struck his interest. He asked class members questions about what they saw; and he asked strangers who were part of the local scene what they could tell us about the place. I learned from him that every place is interesting and that curiosity and lack of inhibition in asking questions will contribute greatly to understanding the world.
As an undergraduate student who took classes with many advanced graduate students, I was surrounded by intelligent intermediaries with whom classroom ideas could be discussed. And on a spring break field trip to Sonora, Mexico, with five graduate students I was stimulated by their enthusiasm to explore new places with the knowledge that they had gained as nascent professional geographers.
Truly my choice to study geography at the University of California transformed my life. I found intellectual stimulation beyond my wildest expectations. I found extraordinary teachers. And I found fellow students who were as interested as I in learning about the world, especially from the perspectives of geography.[8]
Not only was I stimulated academically at the University of California but I was also exposed to the wide array of theater, music, and political activity of the region. For me, who had only known neighborhood, small town and small city, the abundance of cultural activities of the San Francisco Bay region was more than I could take in, especially because my work and academic schedule was demanding. Nevertheless I was introduced to the possibilities that were to be found in one of America’s great metropolitan areas.
With the exception of 1953-1955 when I was in the US Army, Berkeley was my home and geographic focus until 1960. Gradually Portland became the past, and Berkeley became my present and future. When I was an undergraduate student no freeways or large shopping malls existed in the Bay Area. San Pablo Boulevard was the main artery through the area connecting Sacramento and the north to San Francisco. Berkeley was linked to San Francisco and Oakland by the ‘F’ Train. And San Francisco, ‘The City’, was accessible by bus, car, and the interurban train over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and by the Southern Pacific ferry between the Oakland Mole and the Ferry Building in the City.
The natural environment of the Bay region was marvelously interesting to me. Dominated by the San Francisco Bay itself and surrounded by high hills, the region as a whole could be viewed from many vantage points throughout the area. I remember staring out of classrooms at the grand scene. As I walked home from classes, I caught glimpses of the Bay and felt part of the larger scene. My senses were activated by the smells and pleasant aromas of the diverse trees and flowers that scented so many of the walks through campus or the residential neighborhoods (and from the roasting coffee as one approached San Francisco on the Bay Bridge.) On campus the eucalyptus trees emitted their distinctive and pervasive smell. The way in which the hills behind the campus changed from the yellow/brown of dry grasses in late summer and fall to the brilliant greens of newly sprouting grasses after late fall/early winter rains was the key to understanding the seasonal changes of California’s Mediterranean climate. In the late summer, the unique coastal fog that often rolled in to smother the region offered a clue to the cold offshore ocean current and the temperature inversions associated with it. And to me, a western Oregonian, the short period of grey, winter rain storms reminded me of home.
My impressions of Berkeley were mainly confined to the streets within a half mile of the campus of the University of California. This area was largely built up between 1900 and 1930. I lived and walked through most of the streets northwest, south, and west of the campus. In addition to the residential neighborhoods, commercial activities were found along the major streets that led to or were adjacent to the campus: Telegraph, College, Shattuck, and University Avenues. Usually I preferred to walk along residential streets because they were tree-lined and the homes often had pleasant, flower filled front yards. I also enjoyed walking along Telegraph Avenue with its groceries, restaurants, cleaners, bakeries, and other businesses that catered to both neighbors and students. Especially attractive to me, in large part because I had never seen such before, were the many book stores, in particular those selling used books. When I and my Oregon buddies moved northwest of campus, I often walked along Shattuck Avenue, the main commercial street of downtown Berkeley. Usually, however, I preferred the residential streets east of Shattuck because, like the area south of campus, they had many older homes, often of distinctive redwood style. And west of Shattuck Ave. the houses were interesting to me because many of them were of a distinctive ‘Mediterranean stucco’ style common to the 1920s.
During my second year in Berkeley I first lived in an older apartment building on University Avenue. My walk to school was on University Avenue, which was lined with commercial activities that were marginal to the central business district and included an auto dealership, an older movie theater, a large grocery store, and many small shops. I often took a less direct route to see what was playing at the several movie theaters in central Berkeley. And finally I lived in one of the large, older redwood homes the once lined College Avenue a few blocks south of campus.[9] Apartment buildings and fraternal organizations’ buildings were the norm on College Avenue as it approached the campus.
The University of California campus stretched down hill from the crest of the Berkeley Hills to the central business district of Berkeley. The upper slopes were not part of the main teaching campus, which was bounded on the east by the football stadium, astride the Hayward geologic fault, the International House, the Greek Theatre, and a large dormitory. The campus proper lay on the foot slope at the base of the hills. Strawberry Creek, which flowed in a steep canyon through the hills, was confined to landscaped channels through the campus. The campus was originally laid out, mid foot slope and had good views of the city and bay below. The center of the campus was the broad formal quadrangle with its tall campanile, which can be seen even from San Francisco.
The classroom buildings, the offices, the library and other major buildings were widely spaced and formally placed along winding roads and carefully maintained open spaces. Many of the buildings were built of white stone or covered with light-colored stucco. Some of the buildings were monumental with an eye to beauty as expressed in the style of ‘beaux arts’. A few were of the Bay Area redwood style. And the large new labs, classroom and office buildings were recently constructed in a less ornamental post war style. Large glens with shady spots and groves of redwood and eucalyptus trees provided many places to sit, relax, and be by oneself. Temporary buildings to house the increased demands of an expanding student population after the Second World War still occupied several of the open spaces.
I was focused on Giannini Hall, the home of the Department of Geography. Giannini Hall was part of a complex of three buildings mostly associated with the School of Agriculture. These buildings were sited on a knoll above the north branch of Strawberry Creek. Giannini Hall contained the office of the Dean of Agriculture and had a spacious foyer and wide halls, although the Department of Geography was tucked into a small suite of offices at the back of the building on the second floor and was most commonly reached by a back stairway. In particular I remember the lacey Olive trees near the entrances and an extraordinarily beautiful gingko tree, which, each fall, precipitously dropped its brilliant yellow leaves in a perfect golden circle on the deep green lawn that sloped away from the building.
I also spent many hours in the Doe Library, the stunningly beautiful main university library with its magnificent formal reading room and beautiful smaller room filled with comfortable chairs and a great collection of books to be read simply for pleasure. On hot days the library was cool and on rainy days it was good to curl up in a comfortable chair with a good book. Large lecture halls in Wheeler Hall were the location of a couple of my required classes. Wheeler Hall was located near Sather Gate, then the main entrance to campus, which had only recently spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue with the construction of a new administration building.
The spaces I traversed or used in Berkeley and the larger San Francisco Bay Region made me aware, for the first time, of the ways in which extremely great wealth could be concentrated in public buildings and spaces, in large homes in well landscaped neighborhoods, and in huge commercial structures in dynamic business districts. I had known the concentration of local banks, commercial and public buildings, and a few areas of expensive houses in Portland, but I was unprepared to realize that wealth could be expressed in the urban landscape as strongly as it was in the San Francisco Bay area. In my daily life, I became aware of the value placed on and expended by the State of California on the monumental buildings and extraordinary library of the University of California. And when I occasionally visited the City of San Francisco, I was amazed by the extent of the neighborhoods of expensive homes, in the large numbers of big stores, offices and public buildings in the downtown, and of the museums and Golden Gate Park. Of course, the expenditure of wealth on the Golden Gate and Bay bridges was impressive and visible from many places throughout the region.
And it made me feel good to participate in this concentration of wealth which could build beautiful buildings, create pleasant neighborhoods of large homes, and maintain magnificent parks and tree-lined streets. Yet the natural setting was not overwhelmed. The overriding character of the Bay Region dominated the landscape. The combination of natural and cultural features provided me with a great sensual experience that supported the stimulating intellectual journey I had started at the University of California.
Army Days—1953-1955. In June 1953 I received my Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Army Signal Corps. While I was travelling to basic officers’ training at Fort Monmouth, N.J., the Korean War ended. This meant that I would not have to serve in wartime. I remember the training, not for its technical instruction which soon became outdated, but for the experience of military authority, the meeting with other recent college graduates from all over the country, and for the opportunity to see the cultural, political, and financial heartland of the United States.
I found it easy to follow both the military routine and the prescribed training schedules. As an officer, I shared bachelor officer quarters with a fellow trainee, had access to the officers’ clubs on the base, and had weekends free to visit New York City, the beaches and towns of northern New Jersey, and to take an excursion to Washington, D.C.
The officer trainees with whom I lived on a daily basis were almost all from middle class backgrounds and had attended state universities, not prestigious private colleges. Coming from the South, New England, the West, and Middle West, we had regional accents and preferences yet realized that we had common American ways that over rode the regional patterns. We were part of similar social institutions and had socialized within similar middle class institutions. We were part of a progressive America with prospects of full participation in good careers and the American dream. We were all 21 or 22 and looking for and finding good times in the greatest of American cities, New York City.
For me that meant visiting museums, going to Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Opera, and walking the streets of the city from the Battery to Harlem and the East River to the Hudson. The walks let me observe the great diversity of ethnic backgrounds, wealth, and ways of living and working in a close proximity to one another. While I had been aware of differences in wealth as shown by the concentration of large homes, public buildings, and corporate headquarters, banks, and luxurious stores in San Francisco, I was unprepared to see the scale of these landscape features in New York City and Washington, D.C. And I reflected on the economic and governmental systems that they made manifest in the material and artifactual worlds. But I also became aware of the landscapes of urban poverty that was expressed in New York’s deteriorating tenements and the decaying row houses of Baltimore that lined Highway 1.
After signal officers’ school, I was sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, and a signal battalion that was in and out of training as its personnel were brought in and then soon sent out to Japan or Korea. I was made adjutant to this holding unit. The commanding officer, a colonel in the Army Reserve, was scheduled to revert to his permanent rank of master sergeant in the Regular Army as the Army downsized after the end of the Korean War. The administrative officer was simply putting in time and was ineffective. The supply officer was an alcoholic. And I and the assistant adjutant, who had been a fellow trainee with me, were inexperienced in routine administration. In other words, the officers were little motivated, inefficient, or marginally functioning in a unit that had little to do other than shuffle papers and men on their way to the Far East.
For me, life was a dull routine of dealing with the daily paper requirements of Army regulations and forms. I slept and ate at the BOQ and officers’ club, looking forward to frequent opportunities to visit my family in Portland, a couple of hours away, or to visiting Tacoma and Seattle, both of which seemed familiar in their similarities with Portland and the rest of the Pacific Northwest. I did not use any of the communication training I had received in four years in the ROTC or at Fort Monmouth. Little skill was needed as Battalion Adjutant, especially as the master sergeant, assigned to the battalion headquarters did most of the actual work. Life in the Pacific Northwest was familiar to me; my fellow officers were not stimulating or challenging. Thus I and my friend, the Assistant Adjutant who had grown up but a couple of miles from me in Portland, requested a transfer to a unit that would be more demanding.
We were granted our request. George Frisbie was sent to Darmstadt, Germany, and I, because I had a top-secret intelligence clearance, was sent to SHAPE (the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe) headquarters in Paris, France. I was to be a communication officer attached to an American Army Signal Battalion. SHAPE, the military wing of NATO, was staffed largely by high ranking officers from all of the NATO nations. For the first couple of weeks I was assigned to the Communication Center, but was soon replaced by a more experienced British lieutenant. Since I was already attached to the signal battalion, I was reassigned first as an Assistant Adjutant, and then as the Motor Pool and Mess Officer.
As the responsible officer my duties were to supervise very experienced, long-term master sergeants, who relished their assignment to a unit that was freed from strict application of US Army regulations because it was not part of a regular line of command. The unit was allowed great flexibility in carrying out its support functions. The two master sergeants were very capable, experienced, intelligent, hard working, and did not require my supervision. In addition to this responsibility, I was assigned to carry out routine classes for battalion personnel in such things as driver safety and relations with the natives.
The only demanding duty I had was to co-ordinate the logistical establishment of signal communication facilities in an exercise involving the movement of SHAPE headquarters into “the field.” This meant dealing with all of the units that would need communications for the simulated move. I became competent in finding out what administrative units needed and in getting the services they needed from the signal battalion. I assume that I performed well because I was promoted to First Lieutenant on schedule and was asked several times if I would consider becoming a Regular Army officer. (I did not need a second thought to say that I did not want to remain in the Army.)
My Army service was routine; I learned how to operate easily within a military organization. But the value to me of my time in France was not military, but cultural. Because the unit was uniquely attached to an international organization, the associated officers lived “on the French economy” and were given funds to rent accommodations. At the time, Paris was considered to have a high cost of living; therefore officers were also given extra funds to allow for the additional cost of finding accommodations. Designed to support the expectations of high ranking officers, the funds for lower ranking officers was extremely generous. Four of us bachelor lieutenants rented a very large and well furnished apartment in Versailles, a couple of miles from the headquarters. We hired a maid who not only cleaned but prepared meals when we wanted to entertain. The monetary allowance was more than adequate to live at a scale that, at least, I had not experienced before.
Living in France, in particular Paris exposed me to a culture quite different from that of America. Luxury and opulence were apparent in Paris, the economic, political, and social center of France, yet large parts of the population were still recovering from the effects of WW II. Especially in some rural areas people were still rebuilding their homes, towns, and personal economies. I felt strongly the contrast of the condition of their lives with that of my relatively luxurious, subsidized life in Versailles.
The events of the past were evident everywhere I looked. Sumptuous public and private buildings, museums, theaters, churches, monuments, gardens and parks, and majestic boulevards reflected the social institutions that had been centralized in Paris. I was in awe of the way that this centralized power was reflected in the landscape. I was daily reminded of the former power of monarchy as I drove home past the gates, buildings, gardens, and geometric boulevards leading from the palace at Versailles to my apartment a few blocks away.
I was also impressed by the intimate life of the residents of many of the arrondisements where less affluent people lived. Small shops, restaurants, bars were intermixed with the tightly packed residential buildings that lined narrow streets. And people filled the streets much of the time. This pattern of neighborhood life and buildings was as foreign to me as were the grand monuments of the central city. Both were far cries from the homes, neighborhoods, and downtown of my youth in Portland, Oregon.
Weekend excursions or visits of a few days took me to the French countryside, the Rhine valley, Rome, London, and Oslo. These visits left me with a tourist’s impressions, that is, I could say simply that I had been there and seen a few of the major monuments and attractions, but little more. In Paris, as well much of my experience was that of a tourist, largely because I spoke little French. Nevertheless, I worked and lived there for most of a year and had to relate what I saw to my own life and thoughts.
Graduate School at the University of California—1955-1960
Academic Life. I was discharged earlier than planned because the Army was being rapidly reduced in size following the end of the Korean War. I returned to New York in style on the USS United States, then the fastest ocean liner that crossed the Atlantic. I bought a new car from a Chevrolet dealer on Broadway and drove across the United States to the West Coast. Not having made plans for my life after the Army, I returned to Berkeley and inquired about getting a Masters degree in Geography. I was eligible for the GI Bill, which could pay for most of my education. I found an apartment in a private home on Summer Street in which I lived by myself for most of the next three years. It was within walking distance of the campus and had good views of San Francisco Bay. The classes that I needed for my program did not start until fall; thus I had a summer to do as I pleased.
My advisor and friend, Professor John Kesseli suggested that I enroll in an eight-week, field course offered by the Department of Soil Science. The class consisted of six or eight students, who majored in soil sciences, and Professor Frank Harradine, who had experience both as a teacher and as part of the massive field study that surveyed the soils of California. We traveled hundreds of miles throughout California, from the Klamath Mountains in the north to the deserts east of San Diego, from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Nevada. Everyday we stopped many times, dug 4-5 foot deep holes with a soil auger, and recorded detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the soil, the specific geomorphic and geologic conditions of the surface and surroundings, the climate, natural vegetation, and the land use of the site. We recorded additional information from road cuts, made cross sections from the mountains to the coast, and systematically categorized each recording from the nearly 500 stops we made.
On weekends or during brief respites from the field we organized our notes and records into reports that reflected our understanding of how the diverse soils of California could be grouped into meaningful geographical suites. The soils field course was the most important class I have ever taken. It let me see how I could combine systematic visual observations of the natural (physical) world with a series of categories from many different disciplines. And it demanded intense focus of the body/mind in its execution. It required an understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that were impressed through land uses by agricultural, forestry, and urban institutions. The experience taught me that every spot in the world, from an area with a diameter of a few inches and only a few feet deep can be interesting and is related to an expanding network of material and ethereal worlds beyond.
I remember little of the remainder of the summer of 1955 except for a couple of camping trips that I took. For the first time I went by myself into areas that might be called wild or natural. The experience was notable for the feelings of awe and wonder that I did not have words to express, even to myself. I realized how little I knew of plants, animals, stars, insects, rocks, and water and how they came together in beautiful combinations. At the end of the summer, I met several English graduate students, who, like me, were just starting their graduate education. They became close friends. The summer of 1955 was the base on which rested the next several years of my life.
The three years from the fall of 1955 through June 1958 were the most stimulating years of my life. With the background of my undergraduate years as a foundation, I was poised to discover the richness of ideas that the faculty of the University of California had to offer. Graduate seminars, classes, and interactions with other students stimulated me more than I had ever before experienced.
Courses. With more time to experiment with courses outside my major, I took classes in several different departments. The study of nomadic societies of Asia was given by Wolfram Eberhard, who was later to become a member of my dissertation committee. Professor Eberhard was German by birth and education but had taught in both Turkey and China before coming to the University of California. He studied and did research on the social characteristics and history of nomadic societies throughout Asia. My research paper for his class was a study of the origins and spread of equestrian nomadism in Central Asia. It was the first time I had had to use sources written primarily in German.
From Professor George Forster, I took a class that compared cultural practices that had originated in Spain with those that had been transformed in Latin America. The course was a great introduction to understanding ways in which cultures can be modified by powerful, new political and religious forces, especially as seen by the receiving culture. The class stimulated my interests in Latin America, which remained dormant until my retirement some forty years later.
A course by Professor John Rowe, at the time the leading archeologist of Andean culture, introduced me to the ways an archeologist may look at the world. Although he gave some emphasis to the beginnings of civilizations in the Old World, I remember more about his reconstruction of former Andean civilizations from intimate knowledge of found artifacts. Unlike several of my other teachers, Professor Rowe was little prone to speculate about possible links between found objects; instead he introduced me to a way of looking at physical evidence, strictly in and of itself, without speculating how it might be connected with other objects that were not directly linked to it physically.
Courses in other departments of the University introduced me to the natural world. Probably the most stimulating to me at the time was Professor Hans Jenny’s course in the factors of soil formation. Hans Jenny was native to Switzerland. Having taken the summer soils field course, I was eager to learn more about how the great diversity of soils was created. The course fixed in my mind the fundamental importance of soils as major ways of focusing interests in mineral, organic, climatic, geomorphologic, and human worlds. As a focus soils link the cultural and physical worlds directly. Professor Jenny was stimulating not only in his theoretical genius but also in his field studies of the soils of the north California coast.
Less stimulating, but highly informative, was Professor Norman Hinds’ seminar in geomorphology. His approach used current, basic geologic literature, which helped me fill in ideas I had been first exposed to as and undergraduate. In the 1950s, geology was very conservative and had not yet exploded with newer geophysical and technological understandings.
My graduate class in plant ecology given by Professor Herbert Baker was exciting in the ways in which it explored the emerging concepts of the interrelationships among plants, animals, soils, water, and climate. And in a practical sense, my plant taxonomy class given by Lincoln Constance made me collect, identify, and then classify plants that grew in the nearby California countryside. In the process I became aware not only of plant identification methods, but also of ways in which plant species, genera, and families were connected through the processes of evolution and local plant ecology.
Within the Geography Department, I was excited by the research seminars in which I participated. The first seminar that I took was offered by Professor James Parsons. It explored the many ways in which early ‘native’ farmers cultivated crops through the use of the periodic shifting of fields (milpa agriculture) which could maintain long-term productive farming communities. Many of the seminar’s participants investigated a particular cultural group or region to try to understand the local farming processes and their effect on the land. I researched the great variety of terms that were used to describe this form of agriculture. Because shifting field agriculture has been widely used, many techniques have become associated with it, often with unique names to describe its sophisticated methods in different parts of the world. I learned to explore the stacks of the library of the University of California in my search of ethnographic and agricultural literature. Because every search led to a discovery, I came to love this form of library research. The love remains today.
One of Carl Sauer’s seminars explored the processes of plant and animal domestication. The American Geographical Society had recently published a series of lectures about the origins and dispersals of domesticated plants and animals given by him.[10] These lectures, based on the limited archeological and ethnographic evidence then available, were highly speculative. They outlined the possible geographic centers of domestication and the geographic routes by which domesticated plants and animals were diffused to new areas. They provided a geographic perspective to the topic which students of the seminar might expand.
Each member of the seminar chose a particular plant or animal to follow from its possible site of domestication to its current distribution. I chose to investigate the domestication and keeping of honey bees. I followed the record of beekeeping through ethnographic literature that depicted or described beehives and the uses of honey and beeswax. Although I had largely limited my research to apis mellifera, which is an Old World bee only later introduced to the Americas by Europeans, I also searched the literature on New World, stingless bees, which were also a source of honey.
The second seminar that I took from Professor Sauer dealt with pre-Columbian transfer of plants, animals, and other objects between the Old and New Worlds. Because I was doing research on West Africa in preparation for field work, I was allowed to look at the links from both South Asia and the Americas to West Africa. The seminar was important for me to explore the ideas about the long distance spread of objects, ideas, and peoples. It introduced me to the evidence of possible theoretical connections between places and of the limitations of fitting evidence to theory. Carl Sauer’s fascination with geographical interpretations of cultural origins and diffusions has also become a fundamental approach to my understanding of cultural geography. To map the geographic location of objects or ideas at various historical moments and to subsequently interpret their distributions is for me one of the fundamental ideas of geography
Another of my graduate seminars focused on the interpretation of major geographic patterns of distribution and the natural processes that created them. John Leighly’s seminar explored some of the emerging ideas that connected oceanography and climatology. Although I was unable to follow some of the geophysical processes, I became aware of the processes of short term climate changes and their relation to ocean currents, temperatures, and salinity. The ideas informed other ideas from Sauer’s classes about longer term climate changes, especially Pleistocene changes in sea levels and shore lines.
In some ways Professor Kesseli’s geomorphology seminar on the processes of hill slope and valley formations was one of the most important to my academic career. This focus on geomorphology and later, my master’s thesis on a geomorphologic topic were major reasons that I received my first two university teaching positions. John Kesseli had translated excerpts from a German geologist’s newer approaches to understanding how land surfaces and landforms were modified. Walther Penck’s entire book had recently been translated just prior to the seminar. The members of the seminar studied Penck’s ideas on the ways in which the forms of hill slopes are related to base levels; i.e. the level to which streams were eroding adjacent lands. These ideas were in large part revolutionary at the time. They did not support the dominant ideas of the ‘aging’ of landscapes from ‘youthful valleys’ through to ‘old age’ plains.[11] I had never seen how these earlier ideas could be anything more than descriptive and a part of a not very adventurous geology. Thus when a possible way of explaining (not simply describing) most landforms surface features was made available to me, I “ate it up.”
A seminar on the beginnings of American environmental thought given by Clarence Glacken was fundamental in introducing me to the roots of the environmental movement that only later emerged. I was fascinated by the wealth of environmental ideas that were to be found in the early Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, the subject of my seminar research. The ferment in the early days of the United States extended to thought about humans’ relations with nature. Professor Glacken’s monumental work, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, had followed the earliest environmental thought in the Western world up to the beginning of the 19th Century. During the 19th Century environmental ideas began to explode, going in many directions. It was the beginnings of this explosion in America that the seminar addressed. I returned to these ideas many years later when I developed a course that explored late 19th and early 20th Century environmental thought.
The years 1955-1958 formed the intellectual base for most of the years that followed. I became part of the traditions focused on 1) ecology and evolution; 2) cultural and natural history; 3) the making of both cultural and natural landscapes, and 4) the cartographic representation of geographic distributions from the scale of a house or building with its surrounding fields or neighborhoods to worldwide patterns of distribution of both cultural and natural phenomena
Teaching. The graduate seminars and courses provided many of the ideas and approaches that I used throughout my academic life. They introduced me to unending pathways to follow with enthusiasm and pleasure. The other major part of my early graduate student days was as a teaching assistant in introductory courses in physical and cultural geography. These basic classes brought home to me the fundamental factual bases of academic geography. They stood me in good stead as a teacher. Throughout my years of teaching, I especially enjoyed teaching introductory cultural geography, although the nature of my teaching steadily evolved.
Cartography, as practiced in the 1950s was largely a pen and ink, hands on method of making maps. Although I have always had a love of reading maps, I had little interest in making cartographically beautiful maps because they demanded patient, meticulous use of liquid ink and clean paper, which I seemed to find many ways of smudging. Nevertheless, I was a teaching assistant for both John Leighly and John Kesseli, when they taught the upper division class at Berkeley. I learned a great deal from them about how to make maps but have become enthusiastic about producing good maps only with techniques developed through the use of computers.
Field work—Jamaica. A major part of the graduate program in geography at the University of California was to do field work in a foreign country. The idea behind this was that a cultural geographer, in particular, had to broaden his perspectives beyond those of America. Fortunately for me, grants to study abroad were relatively easy to get. Carl Sauer was in charge of grants to Caribbean countries that were supported by the US Office of Naval Research. The grants did not need to relate to the Navy’s operations. I was offered a summer field grants to study karst (limestone) landforms in central Jamaica. I knew little about limestone formations but studied the literature intensively. Little had been written about Jamaican limestone topography, so I approached the study naively. Before leaving for a two month’s study I had obtained good aerial photos of the area from Kaiser Aluminum Corporation, whose interest was in the aluminum ore that overlay some of the limestone.
In Jamaica I found accommodation in a boarding house in Mandeville, which was the largest town near the Cockpit Country, a very rugged, nearly impassable limestone topography in central Jamaica. In the early 19th Century, the Cockpit Country was a place in which runaway slaves hid. Its name derives from the very high, steep walled limestone hills that surround hundreds of deep depressions. The soluble limestone is undermined by underground caves and stream channels. No water flows on the surface. Because I was imbued with ideas about slope formation as related to base levels, I tried to apply the ideas I had learned in Professor Kesseli’s seminar. The base levels were the underground streams. Solution of the limestone hill slopes in this tropical area was rapid. The resulting hill slopes were straight or slightly convex. The initial points of erosion, where solution occurred most rapidly, were located in the nearly thick, level beds of limestone where minor faulting or fracturing had occurred. Solution was most active at the juncture of the fractures which were arranged in two series that were aligned nearly at right angles. The Cockpits usually drained to underground streams, the base level of the hill slopes. Although I was only partially successful in understanding tropical karst topography I was able to organize the results of my observations into a master’s thesis.[12] I also learned a great deal about how to work with aerial photos in the field and to convert my results into maps. Possibly more importantly, I learned how to work by myself in a foreign country.
Social Life as a Graduate Student—1955-58. Several of my colleagues and I met almost daily for dinner at the university cafeteria. David Harris, Elinore Magee, John Beattie, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Fox formed the regular core of the group although not everyone attended every day. David Harris, Elinore Magee and I started the Geography graduate program at the same time. Yi-Fu Tuan had started the program a year earlier, David Fox a year later. John Beatty was a beginning graduate student in English History.
David Harris is English and had received an undergraduate degree from Oxford University. Yi-Fu Tuan, from a nationalist Chinese family had also received an undergraduate degree from Oxford. His initial emphasis at Berkeley was geomorphology, writing a dissertation on pediments in Arizona. Elinore Magee had an undergraduate degree in Economics from Berkeley. More recently she had been working for the Bank of America in San Francisco. Later she wrote a dissertation based on field work in the Balsas river basin in Mexico. John Beattie and David Harris roomed at the same house and became friends through that connection. We were all within a year or two of the same age and were united by our interests in the ferment of ideas at Berkeley in the late 1950s and by the congeniality we found over dinner and many Friday night sherry parties and weekend meals at a couple of local bars. Although we went our separate ways as we individually met other people, for me, this group and other friends at the University were the primary ways in which I initially connected to a rich academic social life.
In 1957, Elinore Magee introduced me to her roommate, Elizabeth (Beth) McGehan, who had worked with her at the Bank of America. Beth had graduated from Mills College, in Oakland with a degree in English Literature. She had worked at Sather Gate Bookstore in Berkeley and at The Bank of America in San Francisco. Beth had just been accepted to enter the Boalt School of Law of the University of California. She often joined us for weekend activities.
Besides this closely linked group, University of California geographers were bonded by the generous gatherings of Professor Jim Parsons and his wife Betty. They opened their home at the top of the Berkeley Hills to numerous parties on holidays and on the occasion of visits by eminent scholars. Clarence and Mildred Glacken also held yearly social gatherings for all graduate students in geography. Occasionally Erhard Rotund and his wife Esther also entertained local geographers. And a sumptuous yearly party, given by Anna Marie and Adjunct Professor Edwin Loeb was always anticipated. The secretary of the department, Westher Hess and her physicist husband Bill regularly had small groups of geographers to their home. These social bonds strongly reinforced the intellectual strengths of the Department of Geography.
In yet another way my social life connected with other geographers. Although I knew that I had homosexual feelings, I had largely suppressed them. In the 1950s homosexuality was still classified by psychiatrists as a disease and might be criminally prosecuted if expressed publicly and the military services banned homosexuals for serving. Therefore, I knew no community of people who felt the same as I. As an undergraduate I had found identity with a geography graduate student. Ward Barrett had left a teaching position in New York to come to Berkeley to study as well as to discover the underground homosexual community of San Francisco. He knew of my feelings toward him even as he kept me at arms’ length until I had returned to Berkeley from my army duty and he from field work in Samoa and New Zealand. In the meantime I had been approached by another graduate student, Tom Pagenhart, who was then working in Sacramento. Ward and Tom let me express my sexuality more openly as well as being interested in the same sorts of academic ideas as I.[13]
From 1955 to 1958, my social life focused on my friends on campus and on the eating and drinking places of Berkeley and nearby Oakland. I lived nearly three years in a room in a private home on Summer Street, below the Berkeley Rose Gardens and tennis courts. My usual route to the University was down Arch Street, which was lined with pleasant homes, including those of Professors Sauer, Kroeber, and Leighly. Because I had a car, I and friends explored nearby parts of California—The Delta of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers, the Gold Country along Hi-way 49, the wine country of Sonoma and Napa Valleys, Highway 1, north and south of San Francisco, and Yosemite and Lassen National Parks.
Fieldwork in Angola and Dissertation Research. In June 1958, Beth McGehan and I married. In June, I had also received my MA degree, passed my doctoral examinations, and had been given a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study in Angola.
I prepared for field research focused on land use among the indigenous peoples of southwestern Angola. I had chosen the area in the tradition of 19th Century explorers: to look for a place that was little known to most of the world. I chose an area first by looking at an alphabetical list of countries, and then going to the library of the University of California to see what materials about the area were available. The UC Library is one of the largest research libraries in the country and had a budget that allowed it to expand its collections extensively. Not getting beyond the ‘A’s in my list of countries, I fell to looking for materials on Angola. I wracked the library stacks; but other than a very few highly generalized works, Portuguese government documents, and accounts of the history of overseas colonization by Portugal, could I find much published data. An American geographer had published contemporary studies of the ports of Angola. Some American missionaries had written of their experiences in central Angola. Anthropologists had written a handful of ethnographies of Angolan tribes. The most extensive ethnographic account had been made by Carlos Estermann, a Catholic priest who had lived in southwestern Angola for many years. However, his work, published in 1951 and 1957, was not yet available in the University of California Library.
For me the most interesting account of Angola was a geomorphologic and natural history study by a German, academic, Otto Jensen. Through his writings and those of the South African geologist, Lester King,[14] I could understand how the landscape surfaces of Angola developed. The planalto of southern Africa, which has been relatively geologically stable for long periods, has hill slopes and plains as described by Walther Penck and which I studied in John Kesseli’s seminar. Further, because King’s views had worldwide implications, I was reintroduced to the ideas of continental break-up. Those ideas had earlier been sketched out for me by reference to the ideas of Alfred Wegener, who recognized the similarities between continents and had written a much maligned book, The Origins of Continents and Oceans. This study as well as the description of the uni-familial species, Welwitshia mirabilis, which grows on the Namib Desert, further whetted my appetite for going to this little known part of the world.
On the basis of the limited available knowledge at my disposal, I thought that Angola would be a good site for geographic exploration. I applied for and received a grant of $5,000 from the Office of Naval Research. I sold my three year old Chevrolet, and later received $500 from my wife’s aunt and uncle. Beth and I prepared by deciding what to take with us. Two changes of clothing, boots, sunhats, a small but extensive collection of medical supplies, including malaria prophylactics, strong antibiotics for both internal and external uses, and water purifying equipment. I took an umbrella tent and two cameras, one for black and white photography and a 35 mm Argus camera for colored slide film, as well as fifteen rolls of films sealed in moisture proof containers. We loaded these things along with several books and office supplies into one foot locker. In addition we carried a tent pole and two pieces of hand luggage. The $6,500, supplemented by my GI Bill college payments had to last us from the time we left Berkeley until we returned a little over a year later.
We travelled by plane and train across the United States, making our final travel arrangements to Lisbon, while staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Our trans-Atlantic trip was on the Greek Line’s Olympia. We landed in Lisbon late at night and found a pensão, which served us as a base while I looked for an inexpensive way to get to Angola, studied Portuguese, and visited the governmental offices where I hoped to find assistance for my research in Angola. Because Angola was still a colony, I also had to get special governmental approval to stay in the country
The least expensive way to go to Angola was on a small, aging passenger ship, O Cuanza. First class, deluxe passage consisted of ten cabins, each with its own toilet and direct access to a deck. The thirty-five ordinary first class cabins had a small porthole, a wash basin with fresh water, and bunk beds. Two toilet rooms, separated by gender, and one bathroom with salt water showers served the first class passengers. The toilets leaked on the floor; and the lighting sometimes did not work. All first class passengers ate in their private dining room in which a string quartet sometimes played classical music. Beth and I traveled ordinary first class.
Second class passengers slept in even smaller cabins and had access to some deck space. Third class and supplementary passengers occupied a few cabins, which served four to six people, or slept in open dormitories. Poor Portuguese peasants were sent to Angola, hoping to find a better life than in Portugal. They were to be carefully monitored in Angola because Portugal under its dictator, António Salazar, feared anti-colonial unrest.
At a maximum of 15 knots, the ship took twenty-one days to go from Lisbon to Luanda with stops at Dakar and Pointe Noire. Shortly after boarding an older German couple overheard Beth and me commenting on the small size of the cabin. It was a fortunate meeting. Frau and Herr Smit had created an extensive coffee plantation out of the native forests of the northern highlands of Angola. They, as had other Germans, left Germany in the 1920s, looking for a better life than they had had in post WW I Germany. We communicated in a mixture of German (I had taken a year of German as an undergraduate), Portuguese, which Beth and I were just learning, and English, which Herr Smit had learned when he was a trader in India. We became good friends and were treated royally on their plantation when driving north or south between southwestern Angola and Luanda. We also became friends of the Costa-Ramos family, a Portuguese engineer, his wife and two boys, who were on their way to a small town in southern Angola. We, they, and the Smits all played cards, which let us get to know each other better on the long voyage. John Kemball, an Englishman who was traveling south to manage a British trading company in Luanda, also befriended us and later helped us get ready for our travels south in Angola. Later we got to know his wife, Rachael and his children.
We landed in Luanda, the capital city and most highly organized place in Angola. Luanda had paved streets, a beach front promenade with patterned mosaic sidewalks, a la Rio de Janeiro, several hotels and restaurants, and other three and four story buildings,. The center of the city was largely Portuguese. Most Africans lived in the shanty town that ringed the city. In addition to being the center of government activity, Luanda was an export/import trading center. Several American families also lived in Luanda because Gulf Oil Corporation operated oil fields in Cabinda, a Portuguese territorial enclave that lies north of the mouth of the Zaire (Congo) River.
The Smits graciously made arrangements for us to stay at the Hotel Turismo, the best in town. However, our limited budget soon made it necessary for us to find cheaper accommodations. Beth negotiated a smaller room that was usually occupied by an assistant manager. It was less well appointed than the usual hotel rooms but clean and much less costly.
Through contacts made by John Kemball and an Irishman, Mr. Klein, the manager of Casa Americana, a major American trading company, we found an aging Jeep which was to take us to southwestern Angola. The Jeep had to be repaired several times before we sold it just before leaving the country. I scoured the town for other needed supplies. I was very frustrated to discover that no word of our expected arrival had yet come down from Lisbon. Only after a couple of weeks did I become a person with a legitimate reason for being in Angola. I later learned that Lisbon made inquiries about my research by contacting the Portuguese Consul in San Francisco, who in turn contacted my professors at Berkeley. It had been a typically slow bureaucratic process. However, once I was recognized as a professional researcher by O Instituto de Investigacão Scientifica de Angola, I was introduced to several people who might help me in my study. Especially important was the arrangements made to lend me a vehicle with driver and camp boy. We met them in Nova Lisboa and they accompanied us throughout our time in Angola. In addition, they lent us camping equipment, not only for our own use, but cooking utensils, camp beds, and camp chairs as well.
Sr. Cruz de Carvalho was to introduce us to officials in the government outposts in southwestern Angola. He was based in Nova Lisboa and knew most officials in southern Angola. Cruz de Carvalho was polite and helpful at first but became less so possibly because he wanted to be elsewhere, doing other things rather than help me. He thought that I should carry out a written survey and use questionnaire in my project, an approach I was unprepared to do. I had first wanted to inspect fields, farms, and settlements and then ask questions of the local residents. However, my Portuguese language skills, like those of almost all of the native Africans I had hoped to interview, were inadequate for my intended purpose. I found that interviewing or understanding in any detail the agricultural activities of the indigenous peoples would be extremely difficult. And I was little interested in studying the farms and trading of the few Portuguese colonists in the region. Furthermore, many of the Portuguese to whom I was initially introduced viewed the native peoples as inferior and from whom little useful information could be learned.
After arriving in Sá da Bandeira (now called Lubango) I realized that I would be unable to carry out either the research that I had planned or the research that Sr. Cruz de Carvalho thought I should do. From that time on Sr. Cruz de Carvalho and I had a strained relationship that only ended when he finally left us entirely on our own. I developed a new research plan that depended primarily on my own direct visual observations. I had noticed that each tribal group that we had visited had distinctive house types, field pattern, storage facilities, and cattle corals. My project became the visiting, sketching, measuring, and photographing of several farms, buildings, and settlement patterns within each tribal area. The settlements consisted of large familial homesteads, focused on a cattle coral and surrounded by agricultural fields. The family homesteads, made up of many small buildings, grouped together in traditional patterns, were widely scattered, no two directly adjacent.[15]
The Portuguese officials of the lowest geographic subdivisions were often generous in helping me by instructing one of their native police officers to show me typical settlements within their jurisdictions. Occasionally a Portuguese veterinarian or agronomist was of great help because of their knowledge of local crops, cattle, diseases, and indigenous soils and vegetation. But by far the greatest aid was given me by Padre Bernardo Keane, a long-time catholic missionary at Chiulo. He asked his catechist to show me good sites to visit and to interpret between the native language and Portuguese. Father Keane, an Irishman, helped in translating between the catechist’s Portuguese and my English. The catechist was very helpful, knowledgeable and friendly.
We camped where water was available within walking distance. In the dry season, the water sources were widely spaced. All water for cooking and drinking as well as for washing body or clothes had to be both filtered and boiled. This became the unending task of my wife, Beth, and the camp boy, Pedro. We usually camped in the same spot for several days while I visited and mapped nearby settlements. Every two or three weeks we headed back to Sá de Bandeira for rest and recuperation. (Our young marriage suffered simply because of the rigors of simple day to day life.)
Sá da Bandeira (Lubango), the capital of Huila province was a small provincial city with limited services. However, it was the largest Portuguese settlement in the southern part of the country. It was located on a rail line that connected the interior of southern Angola with the port town of Moçamedes. For Beth and me, it represented civilization for the time we spent in southern Angola. It was the place where we could soak the grime of the field from our bodies in long warm baths. It was where I could get the Jeep repaired and supplies replenished. It was where other people prepared our food and washed our dirty clothes. It was where we could receive mail. And it was where we met several young Portuguese men, who could help us to understand the ways of colonial Portugal and with whom we could laugh about life.
Although we met several Portuguese families who worked for the colonial government, for the most part we simply enjoyed the relief we felt in visiting with educated, literate people, who likewise found us interesting in that we interrupted their isolated life in the “mato” or “bush”. However, our best knowledge of the colonial social and political activities came from occasional incidents we observed in the local “postes”, from some discussions with Father Keane and the three Irish medical nuns at the mission of Chiulo where we stayed for three weeks while I was sick with malaria, and especially from the young men in Sá de Bandeira, who wanted to ride around town with us because only isolated in our Jeep did they feel safe to speak openly. They were afraid that the Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE), the national agency in charge of the defense of the Portuguese state, had its spies even in this remote part of Angola.
Although fifty years have passed, impressions and memories of my experiences in Angola remain strong. Probably the strongest is my introduction to cultures in which traditional rural practices still existed and which had been only indirectly influenced by colonial intrusions. This was a Third World area with little modern goods or services. More importantly, the area showed the deterioration of local traditional activities because many men were forced to work in the fish factories along the coast, on Portuguese farms, or in building roads. Many native men went to South Africa to work in the mines to earn money or to escape forced labor in Angola. The effect of these migrations was the deterioration of most activities usually carried out by men and by the increased dependence on women to maintain most of the agricultural practices. Women traditionally tilled, planted, weeded, and harvested the fields; but men traditionally cleared the fields, built the buildings and kept the cattle. Then, boys, rather than grown men increasingly herded the cattle, sheep and goats. In general the native connections with the world of trade were limited to agricultural products—sorghum, millet, maize and cattle—in exchange for kerosene, padlocks, machetes, and other minor bits of hardware.
Control by force, or the threat of force was very evident. We saw men knocked about in their own homesteads by native police. We saw a truckload of men brought into a “post”; heard them being beaten; and saw them leaving in the same truck unable to hold on to the sides because the palms of their hands had been beaten raw by paddles which had holes in them. We were told by one of the Catholic fathers that men of the tribal group with which he had spent many years, were killed by native police, who were told to bring back the ears of those they had killed as evidence that adequate punishment had been meted out to the tribal group, some of which had earlier decapitated the Portuguese Chef de Poste, who had directed his men to steal the cattle of the tribe when they had refused to sell them. Cattle had been the major source of wealth and prestige of this tribal group.
In Sá da Bandeira we saw three, large flatbed trucks loaded shoulder to shoulder with African men who had been used as forced labor and who were being brought into a jail that was so small that not all of the men would be able to lie down for a night’s rest. Some of the Portuguese who lived in town were in fear of being imprisoned for saying something that might be considered against “the State.”
Eventually, I was firmly, but politely, asked by the Governor of Huila Province, to conclude my studies quickly and leave the province. The reason may have been that an African from Southwest Africa (now Namibia) who spoke English had been caught in the province. He was said to have asked for “o señor, doctor Americano.” I, being the only American in the province must therefore be the man he was seeking. During a time of anti-colonial unrest elsewhere in Africa, Portugal did not want outside agitators to stir up revolutionary thoughts in the native population.
I saw the disparity at all levels between Portuguese colonials, private citizens or governmental officials and the native population that lived in southwestern Angola. In spite of the Portuguese claims of a policy of assimilation of educated Africans to citizenship, it was largely meaningless in southern Angola, where Portuguese education was largely unavailable, even if desired, to the African population. Social and economic power lay with the colonial Portuguese and political power lay with the home country through its colonial tentacles. Economic development in Angola was very limited. Outside of Luanda, Nova Lisboa, Benguela, Moçamedes, and Sá da Bandeira, none of the roads were paved. The longest stretch of paved rural road was a sixteen mile stretch leading east of Luanda. A few miles of a north-south road were being graded for eventual use by the military. My eyes were opened forever to the great contrasts in culture between the modern, capitalistic ways of America and Western Europe and the small, largely self sustaining isolated communities, just then being shattered by external forces.
On a personal level, I felt social connection with the Portuguese with whom I stayed or visited. They were part of the cultural world common to European traditions. To converse with them was to find relief from the extreme isolation of our daily life in “the field.” To have sympathy with the restrictions on their freedoms imposed by a dictatorial state was necessary to understand some of their actions. And at the same time to be confronted by some of their actions as power holders over the native Africans was mind-wrenching. Only when talking with English and American expatriates did I feel at ease even as I realized most of them were unaware of the life and plight of most native Angolans. I had felt exhausted by the difficulties of camping in the African bush and by the frustrations of dealing with a dictatorial colonial bureaucracy in its remotest posts. Loss of weight and energy caused by a restricted diet and malaria had left me weak and tired. And the isolation and lack of community support in Angola had left our marriage in need of repair.
With great relief Beth and I left Luanda for Lisboa on O Mozambique, a much newer, faster, and larger passenger ship than O Cuanza. On our way home, we visited Professor Parsons and family in Seville, sailed on to London where we visited our friends David and Helen Harris and then to Cambridge to visit John and Susan Beattie. I had enough material to write a dissertation, if not theoretically important, at least descriptive of a little known part of the world that was poised for radical changes as colonialism was replace by civil war and eventually by a highly corrupt new nation state.
Early Teaching Days—1960-1969
After we returned to Berkeley from Angola in the fall of 1959, Beth found an apartment and a job. We reconnected with supportive friends and family and I began writing my dissertation. During the winter and spring of 1959-60, I looked for academic employment and found a one-year temporary appointment as an instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon.
The next phase of my development was the introduction to full-time teaching. From the fall of 1960 until the fall of 1963 I taught at four different universities: the University of Oregon (1960-61); Michigan State University (summer 1961); Dartmouth College (1961-1963); and University of Wisconsin (summer 1963). My strongest memories of this period are of constant preparation for classes, which were soon over and new preparations required. In addition I finished writing and editing my dissertation. The settings for this activity were pleasant campuses set within pleasant small cities or towns.
University of Oregon–1960–1961. My first appointment at the University of Oregon was as a one-year replacement for Forrest Pitts, an economic-urban geographer with a regional specialty of East Asia. When asked if I could teach some of his courses, I replied “If having read Love is a Many Splendored Thing and The Good Earth is enough to teach the geography of East Asia, I can do it. Because they also wanted me to teach geomorphology, they could excuse my lack of experience in the other classes that needed teaching. That first year I taught geomorphology, a three-term course in economic geography, the geography of Asia, the geography of Africa, as well as classes in introductory physical geography. Because the salary was only $5,400 I also needed to supplement my earnings by teaching an evening extension class in the geography of Africa. With late night cramming and early morning outlining and assembling of my notes, I was able, barely, to present nine different lectures each week. Needless to say, the writing of my dissertation was largely passed over for the year.
My departmental colleagues, Clyde Patton, Gene Martin, and Fritz Kramer were all very supportive. Sam Dicken, the Head of the Department was on leave, but had set the tone for the heavy teaching loads. Carl Johannessen also held a temporary position, which turned out to be permanent. Sam, Clyde, Fritz, and Carl had, received their PhDs at UC, Berkeley. Gene had been at Syracuse University where Clyde had previously taught. The academic society within the department carried on the spirit of the Geography Department at Berkeley. That spirit was reinforced two years later when I rejoined the department and Edward Price, also a Berkeley PhD, became the Department’s new Head. Indeed, this was the epitome of an ‘old boys club’ which prospered when applicants for jobs were few, universities required professors to have a doctorate, and very few US universities offered PhDs in Geography.
The University campus, like the town of Eugene, was growing rapidly. In 1960, the University of Oregon was still largely an undergraduate college with several booming professional schools. However, graduate programs in the arts and sciences were expanding. New PhD programs were largely supported by grants from the federal government. Classes were large and classrooms were crowded. Condon Hall was the home of a combined Geology/Geography Department as well as of the Psychology Department. The geology and geography programs were split in 1962 and geography admitted its first PhD student in1963. Demand for space for both teaching and office use was increasing. As a result, many temporary buildings were scattered around the campus. My office was in a Quonset hut located on one of the inner campus quadrangles. Some classes were also taught in buildings left over from the Second World War.
My social life was mainly within the Department. We ate bag lunches and went to coffee together. My wife and I regularly met with other families associated with the geography faculty. I walked to campus each day from an older house at 19th and Willamette Street. Willamette was the main commercial street that extended south from the small, but busy central business district. 18th Avenue was, in 1961, the start of the residential area of south Eugene.
Because my appointment at the UO had been for only one year, I looked for a new position from the moment I arrived in Eugene. By the end of Winter Term, I had secured a two year appointment as an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. To pay for the move to Dartmouth, I found a summer teaching job at Michigan State University, where I taught an introductory course and the Geography of Africa. Because I had just taught these courses, I was less pressured to devise all new materials and had time to write on my dissertation. The experience in East Lansing was enhanced by its being the location that summer of the national meetings of the Association of American Geographers. I got to meet geographers from all over the country and to hear professional papers which gave me new perspectives. I also experienced two and a half months of hot, humid summer days and nights of Middle West. It was memorable because Beth and I had a non-air conditioned attic flat, which never cooled down.
Dartmouth College 1961 to1963. We arrived in Norwich, Vermont, a week or so before the Fall Semester at Dartmouth College began. Bob Huke, the Chairman of the Department of Geography, arranged for us to rent an apartment in a colonial house facing the village green. A Congregational and an Episcopal Church, the village school, and a row of two-story colonial houses faced the green. The towns only general store lay a short distance up the main street which was lined with more colonial houses and huge, old trees. Norwich Township focused on the village from which roads led away to scattered old farm houses, some pasture land, and abandoned fields that had grown back to woods which were laced with stone walls and old house foundations.
New England’s autumnal blaze of color had just begun and Beth and I felt that we had found the classic New England site that had scarcely made it into the 20th Century. Further explorations in the surrounding countryside served to reinforce the pleasures of having found a peaceful retreat from endless “progress.” As we came to meet our village neighbors, our feelings were strengthened by their open friendliness. Our appreciation of the area grew the longer we lived in Norwich. The beauty of the fall was succeeded by the glorious clear blue skies of winter that alternated with fresh falls of snow that accumulated foot on top of foot. The town was prepared for winter. The roads and sidewalks were cleared by early morning and winter activities were geared to snow. The short spring of late April, although muddy, was bright with anticipation of the rapid onset of summer, with its green exuberance.
While still planning to remain at Dartmouth, we searched for and found a rural property in nearby Thetford. It had an1810 Cape Cod style house as well as the original 1770s farmhouse and thirty-five acres of woods and pasture. Only in winter could another house be seen from the property. Living in Vermont was the most pleasantly comfortable memory of my married life. Beth and I were learning how to enjoy our life together. We had adequate money, new but close friends, and we began to fit into the life of a community, both village and college. After a difficult year in Africa and with the pressures of starting teaching and earning money to finance our moves, we finally, at age thirty, felt we were on the path to a good, fulfilling life.
Dartmouth College, during the early 1960s was an all male school, almost exclusively for undergraduates, with a couple of professional schools including a major teaching and research hospital. Hanover, New Hampshire, was a small town that basically served the College. Well financed and endowed, Dartmouth was the most isolated of the Ivy League schools. The student body was chosen from a large pool of applicants from all over the country. Every student was fully capable of undertaking a rigorous academic program. As an instructor, I could demand and expect all of my students to perform well. Students took two courses each semester as well as some short term classes. I found the academic schedule ideal.
I taught only four different courses my first year at Dartmouth: Geography of Africa, Geomorphology, Cultural Geography, and Cartography. Because I had taught all of these courses before, I was able to spend much time filling in the many gaps in my knowledge and organizing the material into more coherent and interesting presentations. I found that I did not need to review much of the material in textbooks in class because most of the students could actually comprehend it with little explanation. The teaching process was becoming more and more fun. More time could be spent talking with individual students, who responded well and with interest.
My new colleagues had taught at Dartmouth for many years. Al Carlson was a boisterous, easy going man who had become wrapped up in the promotion of the “Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee” region of New Hampshire. His interest in scholarship had dwindled greatly since his graduate student days at Clark University. Van English was the model of a gentleman-teacher. He also had received his PhD from Clark. The dynamo who led the department was Bob Huke, a WWII veteran who received his degree at Syracuse University, by writing a PhD dissertation based on field work in Burma. Bob was a gregarious, generous, enthusiastic teacher and organizer. In addition to the regular staff, two temporary positions were held by Donald Lynch who was finishing a dissertation on the USSR at the University of Washington, and Peter Fielding, a New Zealander, who was a PhD candidate in economic geography at UCLA. Don has long taught at University of Alaska; and Pete finished his teaching career at University of California, Irvine.
I commuted daily across the Connecticut River from Norwich to Hanover with Bob Huke and Frank Ryder, a distinguished professor of German, who later taught at the University of Indiana and the University of Virginia. Beth had a part-time job with Dartmouth’s Polar Institute. Beth and I socialized with Van and Fran English and Bob and Ellie Huke from the geography department. We became good friends with Frank and Shirley Ryder and Mel (Mary Louise) and Dan Clouser. Dan taught philosophy, later at Carleton College and then at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania.
During both years I taught at Dartmouth, Clyde Patton urged me to return to a full time faculty position at the University of Oregon. The first time he asked, I said ‘no’ because I was enjoying teaching and was finding a comfortable niche in both the local academic and village life and because I had signed a two-year contract. By the second year, my feelings about Dartmouth College had changed. Although the Geography Department was a democratic community, the College administration was highly autocratic. It was dominated by old Dartmouth graduates who assumed the air of being superior to other people. These elitist ideas were directly opposite those of the democratic, open academic community at the University of Oregon, where the faculty in open meetings discussed and directed the curriculum, the academic standards, and other problems of the University. There a faculty committee was also primarily responsible for the promotion and tenure of its colleagues.
The contrast between the political climates of the two institutions was sharp. The one at Dartmouth was autocratic if benevolent. At the University of Oregon I found a society, which was the most open I have ever experienced. Beth and I discussed at great length the choice between staying and leaving Dartmouth. The joys of life of the Norwich community were strong; the benevolence of the College was great. They had to be weighed against the problems that Eugene and the University of Oregon faced as they both continued to grow very rapidly. Possibly our decision to leave was strongly influenced by several of our friends, who were also considering taking positions at other universities. With sadness in our hearts, we decided to leave the good life of Vermont and New Hampshire and return to the bustle of Eugene and the University of Oregon.
To pay for our return trip in the aging 1951 Packard that Beth’s father had given us for our initial move to Eugene, I accepted a summer teaching job at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The teaching schedule was light; the University’s faculty apartments were pleasant; and we joined some of the younger geographers of Wisconsin in the happy dinner parties, picnics, and summer life in southern Wisconsin.
University of Oregon 1963–1967. With my dissertation completed, the hard work of establishing eight or nine new courses under my belt, the security that comes with being wanted by professional colleagues, and the easing of financial worries, the pressures on my marriage lessened. Beth was pregnant with our first child after having experienced a couple of miscarriages. My salary, $6,400, would allow Beth the chance of staying home and not working. With the low interest rates of an Oregon Veteran’s Home Loan we were able to buy a small two bedroom house, located on Alder Street a few blocks from the University campus. A new phase in life was about to begin.
I settled into teaching and department life at the University of Oregon. I was able to improve my courses through greater library research and time for preparation. I also had the support of my colleagues, Clyde Patton, Gene Martin, Ed Price, and later, Ev Smith. Their intellectual and social support continued throughout my academic career at the University of Oregon.
In a small department, all faculty members advised students, both graduate and undergraduate majors as well as lower division students who had not yet declared a major. One of the departmental chores that I often performed and liked was that of ordering of library books and maps of interest to geographers. The Department met weekly over lunch at which time we discussed departmental or university issues. We enjoyed good camaraderie as well as business at our lunches, which were held at a different site each week.
I taught courses in geomorphology and introductory physical geography until Anke Neumann, and later Bill Loy, was hired to teach these classes. I continued to teach the geography of Africa and cultural geography until I retired years later. Ed Price and I developed an upper division sequence in cultural geography that became the mainstay of my teaching career, later merging with another current of my teaching: environmental thought.
The University faculty met as a whole once monthly. It was responsible for determining the University curriculum and other broader academic issues. The faculty of both the Department and the University was very active in running the University. Anyone who cared could, and often did, speak in the meetings. The result was an awareness of most aspects of the functioning of the University. Faculty governance was direct and as close to participatory democracy as I ever known. Through the meetings as well as occasionally eating lunch in the faculty club, I came to know faculty members from many departments.
Beth and I worked hard at setting up a good home for our first child, Sarah, who was born five months after we arrived in Eugene. Her birth and babyhood was a focus of our marriage. Fortunately Sarah was a very easy child to care for. She was the center of our domestic life. I also took great pleasure in preparing my first garden and yard since leaving my parent’s home. Between teaching and domestic activities my life was full, enjoyable and stable. We had wanted a second child but were unsuccessful in conceiving because of an Rh factor incompatibility. However, we were able to adopt a newborn baby through the efforts of a lawyer who acted on behalf of a young, single girl who did not want to keep her child. Helen came home to us directly from the hospital. She was a beautiful, healthy baby but became highly colicky. Nevertheless, after a few fretful months, Helen became an active, playful and bright addition to the family.
Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria–1967–1969. In 1967 I was asked if I would like to teach at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. I saw this as an opportunity to learn about a different region of Africa and to improve my knowledge of African geography. Beth was also enthusiastic about going to Nigeria, whose political fortunes she had been following since its independence from Britain. Recently, the Southeastern Region of Nigeria had seceded from the Nigerian federal government, declaring itself the independent nation of Biafra. This precipitated a civil war which was largely fought in the southeastern part of the country. Zaria and most of the Northern Region was not a battle field after most Ibos—the largest ethnic group of southeastern Nigeria—fled back to their traditional homeland after many Ibos had been killed in violent riots in several northern Nigerian cities.
Because Ahmadu Bello University was considered safe and had adequate housing and medical facilities, we decided to accept the offer. Our travel expenses and a salary supplement were to be provided by the Overseas Educational Association. My salary was provided by the Nigerian government. The University of Oregon granted me a two-year leave of absence. Beth, Sarah, then 3, Helen, then 1, and I arranged passage on a Ferrell Lines freighter, The African Lightning, which left Brooklyn and stopped in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Dahomey (now Benin) before lying off shore several days until a dock was available at the harbor of Lagos.
The Friday night we arrived at the docks, a Biafran plane bombed Lagos harbor, setting some storage facilities ablaze. The confusion that reigned in the port the following morning was great in part because The African Lightning was docked next to a Russian freighter that was loaded with military supplies. I was anxious to get my family safely out of the docks area and on our way to Zaria. The representative of ABU who was supposed to meet us and arrange our flight to Zaria did not show up and no Nigerian customs officials were to be found. So, with the help of a Nigerian who had come to meet a friend on the ship, we were able to load ourselves and our possessions—suitcases and a 50 gallon drum containing clothes and household items—into a taxi that successfully took us through a gate in the dockyard by offering its guard a dash. This was our first of many experiences with “the dash”, a bribe that greases the wheels of most official and business operations in Nigeria.
As soon as I was able on Saturday morning, I had arranged for a room at a nearby hotel. There, Beth and the children could remain while I arranged to ship the 50 gallon drum to Zaria by rail and bought airplane tickets to Kaduna, the nearest city to Zaria that had an airport. Because we had no Nigerian money to pay for the hotel or for a taxi to the airport, Beth went to a bank to exchange the $500 that her aunt had given her as an emergency fund just before we left the United States. All banks and government offices closed early on Saturdays, therefore if our departure was not to be delayed until later in the next week, we had to complete these preparations before12:30 p.m.
We calmed ourselves Saturday evening and Sunday, packing for the early morning Monday flight to Kaduna. I telegraphed Ahmadu Bello University of our arrival time, thinking that we would at least be met in Kaduna. After “dashing” the boarding officer to let us get on the plane, we left Lagos airport. No one met us in Kaduna. Fortunately a US AID officer who was stationed near Zaria was met by a car and driver. He took us under his wing and offered to drive us the eighty miles to ABU. No one met us at the University; but fortunately the University’s guest house could accommodate us until a house on the campus was made ready for us.
Ed and Monnette Thatcher, members of the Eugene Friends Meeting in Eugene to which Beth belonged, helped us get settled into the area. (Ed was on leave from the University of Oregon Library). Bob and Bonnie Ferrens were also at Ahmadu Bello University, where Bob chaired the Department of Architecture while on leave from the University of Oregon. They also helped us become familiar with the Zaria region.
We were the first occupants of a new house in a new senior staff housing area. It was flat-roofed, stuccoed, and enclosed an open patio. It had not been completely cleared of building debris; nevertheless we were happy when we were able to get enough furniture and supplies to move in. We hired three African men to help us: a steward, who lived in a small house near our house, a “small boy,” who helped in whatever way we needed, and a gardener, who was to establish and maintain a vegetable garden. The housing area was occupied by other expatriates who taught at ABU, three English couples, an Irish priest, another American with an Irish wife, a Brazilian couple, as well as a Nigerian administrative officer and his wife. The area had only recently been cleared from the savanna bush landscape which extended miles to the south across the Kubani River. Cattle often passed through as did many farmers and cattle raisers on their way to the nearby town of Samaru. The main part of the university’s campus was about a mile away and although I often walked across the open landscape to the campus, more often I was driven at least one way in the Volkswagen bug that we had bought from my American predecessor in the Department of Geography.
Academic Life. Ahmadu Bello University was the first full scale university in Northern Nigeria. It had been created by merging several existing academic, research, and other facilities in Zaria and Kano. Founded in 1962, it was still a small university in 1967. [16] The University was modeled on the British system in which students specialized in two or three subjects, majoring in only one. I got to know the majors in geography quite well because they spent much of their life in the Geography Department. They were capable students who had done well in secondary school exams. Advancement towards a degree was largely based on end of term examinations. The students were from many parts of Nigeria but, at the time, largely from Kwara State, which had been the southernmost part of the old Northern Region of Nigeria. Many of these students spoke Yoruba and were Christians. Very few students came from the northern states, which were largely based on the 19th century Muslim, Fulani emirates. Western style education was less important in these areas. Today, the student body is drawn from all of Nigeria, reflecting a greater diversity than that of most other universities of the nation.
The Department of Geography was chaired by a British-trained, Indian climatologist, Dr. P.N. Hore. The other two geographers were Michael Mortimore, an Englishman, who was interested in land use and economic geography of Kano and Zaria, and Hans Van Raay, a Dutchman interested in cattle raising and trade in northern Nigeria. I taught the Geography of Africa and introduced students to American ideas about cultural geography. We all participated in talks and discussion about geography, supervised student research projects, and led field trips to other parts of northern Nigeria.
When the University was not in session, I travelled to several parts of northern Nigeria, partly as a tourist, and partly doing research to see how northern Nigerian cities were laid out on the ground. I also did research in the archives in Kaduna, where I discovered plans and official documents that described the layouts and factors that created the British colonial towns located adjacent to the old, walled, traditional cities. I also walked the walls, streets, and pathways of the urbanized area of Zaria; and I talked with officials of the old city of Zaria, the merchants of the commercial centers, and other residents of other parts of the urban center. As a result I was able to piece together a topographic history of the contemporary urban area of Zaria and of several other cities of northern Nigeria. My study was published by the Ahmadu Bello University Press in 1977. [17]
Social Institutions. Other than the University, the most important social institutions in which I participated were those of an expatriate community located in a modernizing segment of Nigeria. I was aware of the continuing traditional cultural ways of the local Nigerians; however my life was embedded in the culture of Western Europe and America as it adapted to life in a formerly colonial state which was emerging as a nation-state. Many traditional Nigerian ways were changing slowly; however, the University and the commercial sectors of the area were rapidly changing from their colonial roots to more modern ways based upon elements of “western” capitalism and nation statehood. And while I was in Nigeria, the civil war, which was underlain by political, ethnic, religious, economic, and regional differences, strongly influenced the politics and economy of the nation.
Because I was one of the few expatriates who remained at ABU in Nigeria during the summer intersession, I was asked to evaluate applications for admission to the University, judging them on their academic merits. Nevertheless I was made fully aware of the politics of admission. In particular, I was told to look favorably on students from northern Nigeria who spoke Hausa or Fulani. The best educated secondary graduates came from southern Nigeria, where greater emphasis was given to educating all students and where many more secondary schools existed. (Because of the civil war, no applications were from Biafra, where western style education may have been most highly valued.) I did my best to uphold the basic standards of academic merit while realizing that it was probably more difficult to weigh potential success at the University when the educational and social backgrounds of the applicants were extremely diverse. I submitted my recommendations but never heard whether or not they were valued; nor did I even receive acknowledgement of my service. Later, when I had written an unsolicited letter of recommendation for a colleague, the vice-chancellor, himself, told me that I was “to confine myself strictly to teaching and nothing else.” I had used my values as an expatriate American professor to take part in a Nigerian university that was modeled after a British pattern but administered by native Nigerians. The confusion was great because the institution was in a constant state of flux.
Personal Life. Because expatriates were part of a very small society, we were more closely concerned with each other than we would have been in our own countries or cultures. We were more caring of each other’s needs, forming rapid and strong bonds. We may have been more isolated because the ongoing war limited the availability of goods and services. International news was limited because Nigerian papers and media were more concerned with local events. And many major American and European events were reduced to headlines in the inner pages of the papers. My isolation was much greater than I imagined at the time. America had changed radically during the period I was in Nigeria. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated; LBJ had decided not to run for another term as president; riots disrupted the Democratic national convention in Chicago; and the Viet Nam war caused increasingly great divisions within the US. I was largely unaware of the emotional and social unrest created by these events.
Our expatriate community talked of local things; ate dinner at each other’s homes, played cards, went walking, swam at the club pool. We organized play reading groups; we went to the cinema at the Lebanon Club; we went to Kaduna for major shopping trips. Most Sundays, Beth and I participated in a silent Quaker Meeting which was attended by eight to ten people. Potluck dinners and a social gathering followed at the home of whoever hosted the meeting.
Almost my only interaction with students was in class or in the common room of the Geography Department. Because most of the students were strangers to the local culture and society, they in some ways were also expatriates. Like me few of them spoke Hausa, the local language. They usually spoke English in class or with others whose familial language they did not know. Many of them felt that they were strangers in a strange land.
The most intimate daily social interaction I and my family had with Nigerians was with Gabriel, Bala, and Tinamu, the three men who worked for us in the house and garden. We felt responsible for their health and general welfare as well as for that of their immediate families. We paid them the going salary rate but, in addition, made sure they got medical treatment when needed. We provided them with work clothes. We trained them in their jobs and for better jobs. We taught them how to drive. We searched for employment opportunities for them. And especially Beth worked very closely with them on a daily basis. She taught Gabriel to cook. She taught Bala the necessity of cleanliness. She helped them to learn more English. Our steward, Gabriel, lived with his family in a building adjacent to ours. Bala, his assistant, and Tinamu, the gardener, lived in nearby Samaru village. We saw them everyday. They played with our children, who loved them dearly. They were part of our family, yet were in many ways dependent on us. It was not a permanent social institution, but in many ways the most important one for my family while we lived in Zaria. And from them we learned friendliness, resourcefulness, and how to maintain good spirits even in the daily struggles they faced in entering a rapidly changing society.
Physical Setting. Most of the events in my life in Nigeria took place within the enclaves of the University and its nearby housing complex which were connected by a road and trails through the bush. The buildings were similar to modern concrete structures that could be found in many other tropical countries. The landscaping of the University consisted of common tropical plants. The next most usual events in my life took place on the roads in the commercial areas in Zaria and Kaduna. Because I explored many parts of the landscape of Zaria, I came to understand the setting of the urban region and its surrounding agricultural lands.[18]
In July 1969, we left Nigeria by plane from Kano, flying over the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea to Rome and, the next day, to Florence. We stayed in a pension in Fiesole and took daily excursions into Florence. Its greatest attractions for us were the beautiful, clean displays of fruits and vegetables in the central market. This was the welcome we most enjoyed in our reacquaintance with Western society. Of course the rich artistic heritage of Florence and Western Europe was intellectually enriching; nevertheless, our spirits were most raised by the availability of items and cleanliness of everyday life in a modern society.
One event of my experiences in Florence stands out sharply. I visited the building in which one of the world’s earliest (1657) scientific societies had met. It was filled with the artistic and sophisticated scientific instruments of the time. And when I came out, photographers were interviewing people about their impression of the moon landing which had just happened. I could not but reflect on the juxtaposition of my experience in Zaria, the science of 17th Century Florence, and the technological marvel of men walking on the moon. From Zaria to Florence to the Moon—it was mind boggling! [19]
We continued a family vacation in Holland with the Van Raay’s, in Wales with our housing area neighbors, the Hendersons, and with the Harris’s, our friends from Berkeley. Before flying home we spent a week in the English Lake District on a working farm near the home of Beatrix Potter, where she created Peter Rabbit and Mrs. Tiggy Winkle. These three weeks of vacationing bridged our life in Nigeria with our return to America.
University of Oregon—1969-1980
Arrival in Eugene was bittersweet—sweet to see many friends and a familiar landscape but bitter because our house, which we had rented while in Nigeria, was dirty, had fleas, and a long neglected yard. After cleaning the house and putting the yard in order, we began to think of finding another house where Sarah and Helen each would have her own room.
We settled into a new house on Agate Street. It was only two blocks from campus and twelve blocks from my office. I could walk through the campus, enjoying its calm, green beauty. I continued to teach my regular classes in cultural geography and the geography of Africa as well as introductory courses. Academic life in the Department of Geography was stimulating because several, extraordinarily well qualified graduate students were supported by federally funded fellowships. Little changed in my approaches to teaching for the next two years.
However the atmosphere of the University and the nation differed radically from what it had been two years earlier. Discontent with the politics of the Vietnam War was rising to fever pitch. I scarcely recognized the attitudes and thoughts of my colleagues and students. Protests, demonstrations, near riots, sit-ins and teach-ins were the norm at the University. And, in April, 1972, the ROTC building was burned, streets were barricaded, and the National Guard surrounded the campus. Often teaching scheduled classes took back seat to discussing national concerns as they played out on the campus.
City and Campus Planning. Upon return to Eugene and the University, I immediately became involved with both University and local planning issues. I was made chairman of the Campus Planning Committee and a freeway was proposed for the block next to my home. The University of Oregon was developing a plan to directing its physical expansion. And the Eugene-Springfield area had just unveiled its 1990 Plan, which was to guide its development for the next 20 years.
The 1990 Plan addressed several elements of great general concern to me: population growth, resource use, nuclear power, and citizen participation in decision-making. I was particularly concerned because it incorporated a transportation plan (the Eugene/Springfield Area Transportation Study or E-SATS) that proposed building a network of freeways that was denser than that of Los Angeles. The freeways were to encircle both the campus and the city’s central business district as well as line the banks of the Willamette River. One of the proposed freeways was to be located only one and a half blocks from my house. I realized that the environmental impact on the University and the Willamette River would be huge and that the planning tools that had been used to design the proposed network of freeways were highly flawed. I helped lead public opposition to this particular part of the 1990 Plan. We were successful in stopping the building of the freeways, however, not because of our efforts but because federal and state funds were not available to build the highways.
Other issues of the 1990 Plan also demanded my attention, e.g., assumptions about the amount and desirability of rapid population growth, the location of projected expansion of built up areas, and their impact on the natural environment. Conflict arose between many people who supported all growth in general because it meant more jobs, business, and economic expansion and other people who were concerned about the environmental dangers and incremental costs of urban sprawl. The plan addressed these issues indirectly in anticipation to State planning goals that would require an ‘urban growth boundary.’ Urban growth boundaries were to be designed to limit urban sprawl and preserve rural farm or forest lands. As a geographer concerned both with the ways urban areas grew and the desirability of preserving rural landscapes, I became directly involved in the politics and culture of these discussions. To a lesser extent I was a supporter of the citizens group that opposed the building of a nuclear plant by the local public utility. Four possible sites for a nuclear power plant were identified within fifteen miles of Eugene. Fortunately a ballot measure which limited the utility’s authority to construct nuclear power plants in Lane County was successful.
I was also involved with a specific planning proposal to change the zoning from residential to limited commercial of property located directly across the street from the house I had recently bought. Through opposing the zone change, which would have allowed the building of a dental clinic immediately next to a city park, I came to understand the intricacies of the Eugene planning laws and of the role politics play in local issues. The zoning change was denied because of the astute detailed understanding of the particulars of the case by the lawyer of a wealthy businessman, whose property overlooked the site.
Campus Planning. The most important issue facing the Campus Planning Committee was the search for an architectural or planning firm to develop a long-range plan for the campus. As chairman of the committee, I became deeply involved with understanding the desires and role of University administrative officers, members of the faculty, who wanted to get new facilities, as well as members of the committee, which included architects and landscape architects with professional experience. After interviewing several nationally recognized firms, we chose “The Center for Environmental Structure” which was led by Christopher Alexander. Alexander and his colleagues worked closely with the Campus Planning Committee in designing The Oregon Experiment, [20]in which specific ‘patterns’ were to be used as guidelines for the ‘users’ of new or altered buildings. The ‘patterns’ are physical descriptions associated with particular events at all scales from details such as presence or absence of light and shade to concerns with the form of neighborhoods. Each pattern describes the physical solution to a particular event, always in the context of its component patterns and of the patterns within which it fits. As a cultural geographer, I was bowled over by the ways in which the ‘pattern language’ let me better understand the relationships between the physical world and the cultural events that it may support. And the plan was to be used directly by the users of the proposed change in facilities. Not a master plan, The Oregon Experiment is a planning process which depends upon user participation in designing all projected changes in the campus. As a campus planner, I learned much about the ways in which a conservative institution—the University—reacted to this radically new creative approach to changing its physical expression.
During the years 1969-1971, I became influenced strongly by the local social institutions within which I actively participated—the University of Oregon, the City of Eugene, the metropolitan and State of Oregon planning organizations. Within the constraints of their legal and political positions, I encouraged new ways of thinking about citizen participation, transportation planning, and other actions that would alter the local physical landscape. On a national level, my concerns about the destructiveness of the Vietnam War led me to become aware of national political issues as I had never been before. These changes in my thinking have been a major part of my concerns ever since.
Gradual Transitions—1971–1976. In 1971-1972 I was granted a sabbatical leave to complete my manuscript on northern Nigerian urban landscapes and to do research on traditional African house types at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. The Urquhart family moved first to Highgate in London and because of the high costs of living in London, then to the village of Burtersett in Wensleydale, North Riding, Yorkshire. John and Jill Gibson’s[21] stone cottage was in the heart of the village. It was unoccupied and offered freely to us. Stone walled pastures surrounded the village. Heaths covered the higher hills which were crossed by a Roman roadway. It was an ideal place for me to write and was but a few hours from London by local bus and train from York.
On a walk to the shops of Highgate, Beth had discovered the house of Mary Kingsley, an 19th Century African woman explorer, who had written extensively about her travels in West Africa. Beth had read her books and admired her writing and her adventures as a single woman who trouped courageously through country largely unknown to Europeans. A local librarian helped Beth find more information about Mary Kingsley and set her on an extensive research project, which she continued after we moved to Yorkshire. As I could go to London to continue my research while Beth watched Sarah and Helen, she could go to Liverpool to meet Harold MacMillan and do research in the unpublished letters of the MacMillan Publishing Company, the major sponsor of Miss Kingsley’s trips, while I stayed with the girls.
Sarah and Helen, then 7 and 4, attended the local school in Hawes, the nearest market town. Although they took a bus to school with the other village children, I usually walked across the pastures when we needed provisions that the tiny village shop did not stock. The peaceful setting of Burtersett gave us the opportunity to experience village life as strangers with whom the locals were eager to gossip about their neighbors as well as talk about their own lives. It was, in some ways, comparable to our life in Norwich, Vermont: both small villages with many natives whose lives had been bound together for decades, yet who were thrust into a rapidly changing modern society that was not space-bound to the local landscape.
The sabbatical year was tranquil. The research was interesting. We enjoyed the life of the village and the walks in the Yorkshire countryside. Yet we had television, read London papers, and visited English towns and cities.
Academic Responsibilities–1972-1980.
Upon my return to the United States, I became Department Head in which capacity I remained until 1975 and again in 1979-80. The administrative duties required much time. Nevertheless I continued to teach all of my regular courses as well as serve as the Program Chairman for the Association of American Geographers for the their national meeting in Seattle in 1974. In 1979-1989 I was president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. Throughout this period I enjoyed working with several students on their research for graduate degrees. I was chief advisor for six PhD Dissertations and nine Masters Theses.[22] I also continued my interests in neighborhood, city and campus planning issues.
National unrest had stirred my conscience and I developed new classes that I thought were more directly relevant to contemporary society than my traditional geographic interests. The 1970s saw a dramatic increase in interest in ‘environmental’ issues. Although Rachael Carson had stimulated interest in the early1960s, the real ferment in concern emerged in the revolutionary period of the 1970s. President Jimmy Carter gave national importance to many environmental and energy problems. At the University of Oregon several experimental environmental classes stimulated hundreds of eager students. However, few permanent changes in the University’s curriculum occurred. University support for faculty time to teach environmentally related courses was not forthcoming. Only those few senior faculty members who could and wanted to reorient their existing classes or seminars responded to the national concerns about environmental issues. An Environmental Studies Center had been formed by a group of interested students and faculty. It collected the burgeoning amount of ephemeral and governmental materials about environmental issues and created a library for material that the University Library did not collect. The University gave it space in a peripheral building north of the Millrace. However, the University eventually wanted that space for other uses and was about to evict the Environmental Studies Center. I was concerned that the University gave Environmental Studies such a low priority that I, as chair of the Geography Department, was willing to allocate some departmental space to house the Environmental Studies materials. I was also able to convince the Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, to provide funds to hire a half-time secretary to give administrative help to the students who volunteered to maintain the collection.
Domestic Concerns and Social Life.
I became more concerned with family matters as Beth’s life increasingly began to focus on alcohol. She refused to face her dependence on drinking, going so far as to discontinue going to our family doctor, who had established a major drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Eugene, instead she found a doctor who did not recognize her disease and who prescribed tranquilizers for her. As Beth escaped into alcoholism and became incapable of an active role in home and marital life, I took over most parental responsibilities. More and more of my time was spent taking care of the girls and keeping the house. In the process I become a classic example of an enabling family member. Finally realizing that Beth was unable to give basic care and love to Sarah and Helen, I filed for divorce and custody of the children. The shock of this action made Beth immediately go into a recovery program where she gained some control over her addiction and was able to function outside of herself. However, I was unable to bridge the emotional gulf that separated us. We were divorced in 1976 and Beth was awarded custody of the girls.
I was permitted visitation rights on weekends and access to the girls at specified holidays. I moved to an apartment, where Helen and Sarah could stay with me on those occasions. Our relationship was strained because, I believe, they blamed me for the break-up of the family. Beth refused to act in any way as an intermediary between me and Sarah and Helen. She would not even pass messages from me to them. To contact them became extremely difficult when Beth, Sarah, and Helen moved to Oregon City when Beth’s job was transferred to Tigard.
My principal social life was with a group of graduate students and with Ev Smith and Clyde Patton, my longtime friends and colleagues. I had been introduced to jogging by Bill Preston, one of the graduate
students whose dissertation I was supervising. I found running to be a great way to calm the stresses I felt during my divorce and the break up of my family. We often ran across the Willamette River in Alton Baker Park. I continued running for pleasure and began bicycling to the campus when I moved to a large apartment on East Amazon Drive
I dated several women, only to realize that I had largely repressed my homosexual feelings throughout eighteen years of marriage. I sought help in understanding my emerging awareness by contacting two faculty members whom I knew were openly gay.[23] They helped me by letting me talk about my feelings and by introducing me to other gay men. For the next three years, 1977-1979, I began to come to terms with my sexuality. I had lived as a heterosexual man in a largely heterosexual society, for most of the time in which even psychologists labeled homosexuality as a disease.
I was attracted sexually to several male colleagues and students, all of whom were ‘straight.’ Thus my sexual passions stayed repressed; I reconciled myself to a life as a single, probably celibate, gay man. To this end I eventually adjusted my living quarters by buying an 800 square foot house on Washington Street on the northwest slope of College Hill. The yard was undeveloped. I planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden in back and forty-three blueberry bushes in the front yard. I continued to bicycle to campus and run in the South Hills.
A sabbatical leave in the spring of 1979 allowed me to collect my thoughts about the future of my academic and personal life. I drove across the United States, stopping in Laredo, Texas, before going into Mexico by bus to Monterrey, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas, Morelia, and Mexico City. I continued across the southern United States on my way to the meeting of the AAG in Philadelphia. My car was irreparably wrecked near Columbia, South Carolina. I rented a car to go to the Philadelphia meetings, and with Ev Smith, after returning to South Carolina to buy a car, drove across the country on back roads and highways, only once on a freeway. We visited former students, checked out the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which had recently closed, and we talked ‘geography’, visited small towns, and enjoyed rural landscapes. I returned invigorated to the University, which along with the rest of the country was soon to embrace the conservative philosophy of President Ronald Reagan.
University of Oregon—1980 to 1994
My last fourteen years on the faculty of the University of Oregon were elaborations of many of earlier activities: administration of the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program; teaching and the evolution of courses in environmental geography; teaching introductory classes in geography and graduate seminars in environmental studies; supervising master’s theses and doctoral dissertations; doing research and giving presentations on the evolution of the landscapes of Eugene/Springfield and of the Willamette Valley; and dealing with issues of local urban and campus planning.
Academic Life.
I was chair of the Environmental Studies program from 1980 to1982 and again from 1990 to 1993. I and other concerned faculty members gave time and effort in establishing an interdisciplinary masters degree program focused on environmental concerns. This hard core of dedicated faculty included Stan Cook, an ecologist who had established the first permanent interdisciplinary course in environmental studies; Dan Goldrich, a political scientist who had organized a major study of the ways in which student environmental concerns could be integrated into the University; Glen Love, a literature professor, who taught classes in “nature” in literature; Dick Gale, a sociologist who introduced courses in environmental sociology; Chet Bowers, an educational philosopher whose studies focused on environmental education in its broadest sense; John Bonine and Michael Axline, who led environmental interests in the Law School; and, after 1980, John Baldwin, an ecologist who was hired by the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management to teach and do research in environmental policy and planning. The graduate program was approved in 1982 and John Baldwin was named its Director. He was the major driving force in promoting environmental issues at the University until his death in 2005.
The interdisciplinary program attracted extraordinarily good students from all over the country because no other university had developed such a flexible, yet rigorous masters degree program. For the ten students we admitted each year, two or three hundred applications were received. Most students that we admitted were older and had had work experience that allowed them to know how the University’s program would help them. The weekly seminars that all of the new graduate students attended were lively and exciting. Guest speakers from the faculty of many departments introduced the students to the diverse perspectives of environmentalists. The seminars stimulated conversations that often continued long after the seminars were over. Since no two students had the same specific interests nor took exactly the same classes, the spontaneous discussions in the Environmental Studies Center and over coffee or beer, were diverse and informative as well as socially bonding. The Program’s students and faculty also met informally at pot-luck dinners, usually at my home. For me, this program was the most interesting and stimulating of my academic career.
I developed a proposal for a very demanding undergraduate program which required both a full major in an established department as well as broad major in environmentally related courses, seminar, and thesis. But it did not receive approval by the State Board of Higher Education because the University administration and the State Board gave environmental concerns low priority. The times were not right; the recession of the 1980s and the anti environmental agenda of President Reagan did not bode well for environmental issues.
From 1987 to 1990 I again chaired the Department of Geography. As was the common departmental practice, all seven of its faculty participated fully in administering the Department. We continued to meet once a week over lunch to discuss the needs and concerns of the moment. Everyone was a member of several committees, e.g. committees for graduate admissions, graduate and undergraduate advising, curriculum, faculty search, promotion and tenure. My role as department head was as an intermediary on routine matters between the Department and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
During the years before my retirement I was the principal dissertation advisor for nine PhD candidates, chief thesis advisor for ten Master’s candidates in Geography and was on the program committee for eleven Environmental Studies master’s candidates.[24] Although working with theses students was very demanding, it was also extremely rewarding. Their research was fascinating and my close personal connections with them were gratifying. Their research enriched me intellectually and their personalities enriched me emotionally.
My most satisfying classroom teaching came through the gradual refinement of three upper division and graduate classes in cultural geography. Geographic Landscapes was focused on the ways in which humans have created the physical settings in which they work and live. I emphasized the desires of cultural groups in transforming the natural world. Environmental Alterations focused on the negative impacts that humans have on the natural world. The course I called Historical and Contemporary Views of Environment focused on the ideas and attitudes that major thinkers, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, have had on recent environmental thought. These three courses represent my complete transition from the cultural geography I first taught to one that emphasized the environmental concerns I now found most relevant. I also continued to enjoy teaching classes in introductory cultural geography which, in addition to basic ideas, required field projects that demanded mapping and personal observations of local landscapes.
My research interests in the historical development of the physical and cultural landscapes of Eugene and the Willamette Valley continued and were reflected in my classroom teaching and in my presentations to both academic and local groups. I also created a series of maps to illustrate the history of the massive cutting over of the forest lands that border the Willamette Valley and presented papers on the broad scope of ideas of cultural geographic ideas that Carl Sauer developed during his lifetime and of the concepts about landscape that J.B. Jackson’s presented in his privately owned journal, Landscape Magazine.
Planning Concerns.
Because the economic recession during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan affected Eugene greatly, the mayor of Eugene, Brian Obie, and the president of the University of Oregon, Paul Olum, got together in 1984 and decided that the University could help the local economy by converting open space that the University owned along the Willamette River into a massive research facility to be known as the Riverfront Research Park. Although no actual tenants for the proposed facility were identified, the dream was carried forward in conceptual drawings; and legal procedures were started to change the zoning of the area.
Earlier, I had been involved in the development of a campus plan for the riverfront site. That plan, which had been approved by President Olum in 1983, was to create a series of sports fields and an ecologic study area. I was concerned that the Riverfront Research Park proposal did not follow the planning procedures that the University had adopted in the Oregon Experiment. Instead it reverted to heavy handed, top-down ways of making planning decisions. But more importantly, my main concern was that the proposal flew in the face of the State of Oregon’s planning legislation to maintain the Willamette Greenway, whose primary purpose was to protect the use of all lands adjacent to the Willamette River from intensification or to reclaim abandoned wastelands. This issue was so important to me because it clearly was local and dealt with major concerns with which I had been dealing ever since freeways had been proposed for the banks of the Willamette River.
In 1984, after failing to convince the President and the Campus Planning Committee of the deficiencies of the proposal and their rejection of alternative sites for a research park, I felt that I needed to oppose the proposal as it worked its way through the metropolitan planning procedures. To change the zoning of the existing Metropolitan Plan, the planning committees and governing bodies of the cities of both Eugene and Springfield as well as of Lane County had to approve the proposal. I submitted oral and written testimony to each of those bodies, never successfully. I then submitted written legal briefs to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), who sent the proposal back for modifications. After going through the same procedures with a modified plan, which was adopted by both the cities and the county, the Land Use Board of Appeals rejected my arguments. In 1987, I and other opponents unsuccessfully carried that appeal to the Oregon Court of Appeals.
At the same time the City of Eugene, with the backing of the University, proposed to include the Riverfront Research Park within a much larger urban renewal districts, whose primary purpose was to provide funds for infrastructure within the research park. My written and oral objections to that proposal had to be made to the planning commission and City Council of Eugene. They were rejected as was an initiative ballot measure to oppose the urban renewal district. In 2011, twenty-seven years after the initial proposal, the area of the Riverfront Research Park within the Willamette Greenway has yet to be developed. The idea of making money on the project has fallen far short of its optimistic beginnings; and the hastily conceived proposals of the mayor and university president remain merely dreams. The site of a proposed research facility was, in 2011, relocated from the riverfront area.
My multi-year involvement caused me to learn about the intricacies of the planning processes of local governments and of the judicial processes of the State government. I learned how to write legal briefs, which the judges of LUBA said were better than most they received from practicing attorneys. More importantly I also learned that basic issues may depend on narrow legal interpretations rather than on merit and that when dreams of economic development conflict with existing environmental conditions, especially during a period of economic recession, environment takes a back seat.
From 1985-1986, I was a member of the University Faculty Advisory Council to the President, which met weekly with Provost, Richard Hill, and President, Paul Olum, to discuss matters that concerned either the President or the Faculty. As chair of the Council in 1986, I also met with the President to set the meetings’ agendas and discuss other University business. The principal concerns of the University administration and of the faculty were the finances of the University at a time of greatly reduced funding by the State. No other major crises developed during my time on the committee. Although general faculty meetings were still held, few faculty members attended and their “town hall” democratic character diminished. The Faculty Senate came to assume much of the power of the general faculty meetings while the Faculty Advisory Council dealt with day to day concerns.
Personal Life 1980-1993.
In late fall, 1980, my life changed radically when I met Michael Shellenbarger. We were intimately connected for the next 12 year until Mike’s death in February 1993. At a concert of the School of Music, my friend, Jack Powers, introduced me to Mike, a gay man who taught architecture at the University. One month later, Mike asked me to the next concert in the series. We went for coffee after the concert, and talked for hours. and were immediately attracted to each other. We had very similar interests, attitudes, and backgrounds, although Mike was six years younger than I. Mike was born and grew up in Plattsmouth, Nebraska. He received a degree in architecture from Iowa State University and first practiced in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He latter received a masters degree in architecture from Columbia University and worked in New England. He married, lived and worked in Connecticut where he designed a large elementary school before being asked to join the Department of Architecture at the University of Oregon in the 1970s.
While in Eugene, Mike taught courses in building materials and construction, historic preservation, as well as conducting architecture design studios. Much of his time was devoted to being the chair of the Historic Preservation Program at the University. During a year long leave from the University, Mike designed the Contra Costa County jail while working for a San Francisco firm. He also served on a Eugene School Board committee that considered reorganizing and closing schools. Mike and his wife, who was the ombudsman for the City of Eugene, bought a large, old, California bungalow style house on Olive Street, which they shared with several other new Eugeneans. By the time I met Mike, he had divorced, his housemates had moved, and he had nearly completed the renovation of the house in its authentic historic style.
Mike had attended several counseling and discussion programs which explored sexuality, especially for gay men. These discussions helped him greatly to understand his homosexuality; and when we met he was able to share with me his understanding of some of the issues of sexuality that I had been experiencing. Because of his newly gained skills of openly addressing his sexuality and associated problems of interpersonal relationships, he was able to lead our early relationship in an open, positive way. Throughout our life together we were able to confront any disagreement or confusion we might have immediately, openly, and without any resentment or anger. Although this had been my approach and experience with my academic colleagues, it had never been true in my marriage. Mike and I never argued, instead were able to talk through calmly and without rancor all of our potential disagreements.
For four years we daily alternated between staying at his house on Olive Street and my house on Washington Street. We ate breakfast and dinner together, slept together, and usually rode our bicycles to the University at the same time. We entertained together, sharing hosting at the pot-luck dinners of both students and faculty of the Environmental Studies and Historic Preservation Programs. We enjoyed biking around town, working out at a local gym, playing duets on the piano, and Sunday coffee and brioches at the Metropole Bakery in the Fifth Street Public Market.
We also traveled together. Mike had a sabbatical leave, 1982-83, in which he studied the construction of older masonry buildings in England and Spain. I took leave of absence for the winter quarter, 1983, and joined Mike in Spain where I reconstructed the topographic history of Seville from the evidence that still remained in the urban landscape as well as from written urban histories and old maps. We visited several other cities in Spain, Portugal, and France on our way to London where, in the spring quarter, I taught classes to American students from universities in the Pacific Northwest. I lectured about the landscapes of London and England and guided weekly tours of typical areas of London. The following summer, Mike and I traveled throughout Great Britain.
In the summer, 1984, we drove to Mike’s family home in Nebraska returning by way of the American Southwest. In summer, 1985, we flew to New York City where Mike did library research in Columbia University on ‘tuck pointing’ in brick buildings and I explored the urban landscape of “the Big Apple.” In 1986 we attended the World’s Fair in Vancouver, B.C. and camped in national parks on Vancouver Island. During the winter and spring quarters of 1987 I had a sabbatical leave to study the landscapes of Galicia in northwestern Spain where the climatic patterns are very close to those of western Oregon. Mike took a leave of absence to study the use of granite in the buildings of Galicia. Almost all structures are made of granite, from walls around fields to grain storage buildings and most homes and public buildings. We rented a car in Frankfurt, Germany, and drove through France and northern Spain to Vigo, our headquarters for exploring most of the paved highways of Galicia.
Having been asked to give a lecture in the Geography Department of the University of Tübingen, Germany, I, accompanied by Mike, drove from Spain through France to Tübingen, taking different routes than we had in 1983. In Tübingen we joined a travelling seminar of German graduate students of geography, going to Austria, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland before returning to Eugene. In subsequent years we travelled to California as well as other places in Oregon and Washington.
After several months of unexplained pain, Mike was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in the spring of 1992. He immediately began chemo-therapy to which, unfortunately, he did not respond positively. By the fall he had stopped treatment for the cancer and was treated simply to relieve pain and discomfort. Mike never stayed overnight in hospital, remaining home for care throughout his illness. Unable to leave the house after Christmas, he received hospice care until he died at the end of February, 1993. I was Mike’s caregiver throughout his illness, going with him to all doctor’s visits and chemo treatments as well as during his last months at home in bed. Mike always had a positive outlook and continued to address his and my concerns immediately as they arose. In many ways we became increasingly close throughout his illness. We talked joyously of the good life we shared, even as he became more dependent on me for his care. We talked openly of death and how to face it. We were both thankful for the most emotionally satisfying years of both of our lives.
Mike’s death left me with a feeling of great loss. I was given great emotional support by Stan and Joan Cook, Ev and Sally Smith, and Jack Powers as well as by many other friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My work with students in the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Geography helped fill my days. As executor and principal beneficiary of Mike’s estate, I expended energy that let me continue to understand what a good person he had been and how fortunate I was in having been his soul mate for over twelve years. At a memorial service for Mike, organized by his colleagues in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, his students and fellow faculty member offered good tribute to Mike’s professional career and friendships. I was able to find great release in telling of his and my deep love for each other and in describing how our day by day activities were joyfully in accord. I still feel blessed to have experienced the deep love we had for each other. I learned from Mike, both how to love and how to enjoy every moment of life.
I taught one academic year after Mike’s death, retiring in June, 1994. I had thought that I would then take a year off and return to teach one-third time for several more years; but that was not to be. I did not return to teaching because I found that many enjoyable activities filled my days and that my finances exceeded my needs.
Retirement—1994-2011
Social and Personal Life.
During the summer of 1993, I came to know a younger Mexican man, Anastasio (Tacho) Flores, who by chance had heard me speak at Mike’s memorial service. Tacho had gone there to meet one of Mike’s students. Later in the spring, he came to my office and told me how he too had lost his lover to cancer a short time before and had moved to Eugene from Los Angeles. At the time I thought little about his seeking me out because I was still grieving Mike’s death. However, in late spring, I attended an outdoor pot-luck dinner for older gay men at the home of the student that Tacho had gone to meet at Mike’s memorial service. Anastasio was there and made sure that I remembered him by giving me his telephone number. However, when several weeks later I called, I found that the number was incorrect. Only by chance did I later meet Tacho when we made arrangements to visit one of his friends who lived at the Oregon coast. On the trip we found that we were strongly attracted to each other, in part because of the similar emotions we were feeling about the loss of our lovers and in part because we found each other physically attractive. We continued to see each other and, eventually, decided to live together.
Anastasio had grown up in a large middle-class Mexican family that lived in a small sugar-factory town in the state of Puebla, Mexico. He had gone to secondary school in Mexico City and had come to Los Angeles to continue his studies. Tacho met his lover, a former Catholic priest who then worked for the city of Pasadena and, in his off time, was an excellent landscape painter. He encouraged Tacho to develop his artistic skills, while working part-time as a teacher’s assistant for the Los Angeles school district. After his partner’s death, Tacho left Los Angeles and moved to Eugene.[25]
Anastasio was driven by several passions—sculpture, tennis, cooking, and physical fitness. He particularly enjoyed carving in stone, taking classes when he could at both Lane Community College and the University of Oregon. He was an excellent tennis player and taught me the basic skills of the game so that we could enjoy playing wherever we found an open court. Tacho took care to work out religiously and was always concerned with keeping his body in shape. And he enjoyed cooking good Mexican food, having learned much from his mother as well as experimenting with new dishes whenever he had the chance.
Anastasio was a good travelling companion. During the Christmas holidays of 1993, we flew to Mexico City, from which we went by bus to Oaxaca, Puerto Escondido, and Cuernavaca before I flew home and he continued to the family home in Atencingo. After I had retired in 1994, we drove to Yosemite and King’s Canyon National Parks. The following winter, we spent three months travelling in Mexico, mostly in Colima and Puebla. Later that year we drove to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rainier National Parks. In 1996 we visited the states of Vera Cruz, Tlaxcala, and Puebla, Mexico, and in 1997 drove the length of Baja California. In1997 we visited both Vancouver, British Columbia, and New York City. In 2001 we explored art galleries and museums in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and Paris.
Our relationship was strongly reinforced by our mutual sexual attraction. We both came to enjoy physical sex as we had never before experienced it. We shared domestic life, however as I became the exclusive economic provider, Anastasio became more dependent on me. And he spent little time as a sculptor, his self proclaimed career. Tacho had also expressed a strong interest in becoming a chef and was accepted as a student at major culinary schools in San Francisco and Vancouver, B.C. However, after a very short time in residence, he left both schools. Because I did not want to continue to enable his dependency on me, I gradually emotionally separated myself from Anastasio, finally completely separating from him in 2001.
Most important among my new friends were Scott Downey and Fred Dodge. Scott, formerly a professional skate- and snow-boarder, now a building contractor and I have jointly owned, remodeled, and sold or rented six houses in Eugene. Fred, a former Lutheran minister and social worker, now lives in a cottage that Scott built behind my house. We share patio, yard, and garden and often go to concerts together. The three of us often eat together and share companionship.
Jon Cruson has become on extremely close friend with whom I share my thoughts during our regular meetings over coffee. Jon, a printmaker and painter, has introduced me to the art world of Eugene and Oregon. We have taken many short trips together in the Pacific Northwest as well as travelling to Alaska on the Alaska Ferry, to Puerto Rico in 2009, and to Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City in 2011 and 2012.
Jack Powers, the man who introduced me to Michael Shellenbarger, remained a very close friend until his death in 2011at the age of 91. We usually met for lunch at least once a month as well as seeing each other at the Chamber Music concerts of the University of Oregon’s School of Music. Jack had taught Spanish literature at the University and had enjoyed playing violin in a local chamber quartet. He always enjoyed good conversation in which he shared his literary insights. He, like I, was an avid gardener and bird watcher. We went on a bird watching trip to the San Juan Islands, Washington, and, with his partner, Don Kelley, to the Hawaiian Islands.
Two or three times a week for the last ten years or so I have met a group of older retired men for morning coffee. We banter, joke, and kid each other as we talk about the day’s happenings, sporting events, domestic relationships, aging bodies, and whatever else may come to mind. Our backgrounds are varied and include a dentist, a physical trainer, a secondary school history teacher, an engineer and developer, a university professor, a former shop owner, a forester, and a legally trained man of many experiences in business. I come to the coffee hour because we are always assured of laughing at the vagaries of life and can empathize with each other as we grow older together.
In 2001, Dan Goldrich and I decided to ask four other retired men to join us in forming a book group.[26] The six of us, all teachers who had received PhDs, have been meeting once a month for the past 10 years. Before discussing the month’s novel, we talk about local and political events of the day while drinking wine and nibbling on nuts. Because we have had similar life experiences and grew up at about the same time, we understand much of each others’ perspectives and our discussions are spirited.
After talking together but once in the past thirty years, I contacted Charles Martinson, one of the more interesting geography graduate students of the 1970s. We started to correspond by email and later met in Arizona to go camping in the Chiracahua Mountains, Carlos’—as I call him—favorite natural area. Since that initial camping trip, we have met again six times in some of the more natural areas of southwestern United States. Our camping trips to Owens Valley, California, Organ Pipe National Monument, Zion National Park, southwestern Colorado, and Gila National Forest, New Mexico, have been filled with the beauties of careful observation of nature and with extensive discussions of human existence. After writing a doctoral dissertation based on living a year by himself on one of the Aleutian Islands and teaching geography at San Fernando State College, California., Carlos lived much of his working life in False Pass, Alaska, before eventually retiring in Bisbee, Arizona. He has travelled, lived, and studied Buddhism in India. Carlos is an excellent photographer of the natural world, especially of wild flowering plants. Through the beauty of his photos, he hopes to inspire people to respect and love nature as a way of preserving and conserving our natural habitats. He lives extremely modestly but keeps abreast of the world through the internet. Carlos has introduced me to a very wide range of ideas, especially about consciousness, evolution, and Buddhist thought, and the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber. He is my cuate (buddy) friend!
I continue to be sustained both emotionally and intellectually by my long time friends and colleagues, Ev Smith and Stan Cook. Ev and I regularly talk of geographical interests that we developed during our teaching days and of neighborhood matters that started when we both lived in the South University Neighborhood.[27]
Stan and Joan Cook and I have travelled on several bird watching expeditions: in 1990 to wildlife refuges in Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona; in 1997 to Great Bend National Park, Texas and the Copper Canyon, Chihuahua , Mexico; in 1998 to the Amazon and Andean regions of Ecuador; in 1998 to Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla; in 2000 to Australia, especially the Blue Mountains; in 2002 to wildlife refuges along the Columbia River and later to southeastern Oregon; in 2003 to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon. Stan and I spent a month in Oaxaca in 2006, tracking down sites where his father had photographed rural villages and soil erosion in 1939. And in 2009 we travelled together by bus from Santiago, Chile, to the Atacama Desert and the Andes Mountain near the Bolivian border. We then flew to the Chilean Patagonia and bussed back to Santiago. In both Mexico and Chile, Stan and I were interested in observing geology, vegetation, and cultural landscapes. As an ecologist, his knowledge of plants informed me greatly. We speculated often as to the nature of the countryside we passed through. Stan’s unending curiosity about the natural world coupled with his concerns about the human use of resources makes him a highly valued companion for me. Our decades long friendship has been so close that I think of Stan as the brother I never had.
In 2001 I reconnected with Dan Gade, who had taught geography for a year at the University of Oregon in the 1960s before moving to the University of Vermont, where he taught until his retirement. Dan had done research in the Peruvian Andes near Cuzco for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his interest in Latin America but also did research in southern France, Spain, and Madagascar, and Quebec. His interest in cultural geography is extraordinarily broad. He has an insatiable curiosity which has piqued his interests about many diverse topics. Dan had planned a trip to Bolivia to inquire about shamanic uses of psychedelic drugs and also to investigate wine growing in southern Bolivia. When he asked if I wanted to join him, I did not hesitate. We enjoyed visiting Sucre, La Paz, Potosi, and other cities on the Bolivian planalto and Andes. A year later we planned a trip to the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where we visited Belo Horizonte and other colonial mining towns as well as the historic routes from the mines to the Atlantic coast. And in 2007 we met in Montreal, Canada, where Dan showed me some of the delights of that city, Quebec City, and other interesting parts of the surrounding Quebecoise rural landscape that he had come to know from his base in Vermont.
Family.
In 1973 my parents returned to Portland upon my dad’s retirement at age 72. He died in 1991. My mother, who had taken up painting and other artistic activities when they moved to Walla Walla, Washington, in the early 1950s, continued painting almost to the end of her life at age 101. She inspired me with her involvement in life even as she became less able to move around and hear well. She read the newspaper daily; she read novels; and she kept close track of all of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. I discovered among her many creative works very thoughtful poems and ideas that expressed her deep concern for the natural world and the meaning of life.
My ex-wife, Beth, died of oral cancer in 1998. She had moved to Marin County, California, where she lived with her widowed mother and owned a children’s bookstore in Sausalito. My older daughter, Sarah, left her mother’s home in Oregon City to live with me while she finished her last year of high school. She enrolled at the University of Oregon, completing a joint degree in international studies and history with a minor in French. She had spent her “junior year abroad” in Poitiers, France. After graduation she worked in a local bookstore before moving to San Francisco, where she also worked in a bookstore. She completed course work for a master’s degree in museum studies at San Francisco State College. As part of her program she interned at the Museum of California in Oakland, where she was later employed as an educational specialist for the museum’s history outreach program. Upon the death of both her grandmother and mother, Sarah bought a small California bungalow in Berkeley, which she remodeled and developed a garden landscape, mainly with plants native to California.
Sarah met and for several years lived with Jeff Holmes, who was a research biologist at a laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. Jeff wanted to teach biology and after several temporary jobs in San Francisco found a position at Warren Wilson College, located near Asheville, North Carolina. In 1999, Sarah and Jeff married and moved to a ranch style house set on the wooded slopes above a small rural valley near the college. Sarah found or created several interesting jobs and developed many connections with people in the local community as well as at the college.
I had driven Sarah, her orchids and cactus plants, to Ashville when she moved from Berkeley. Subsequently in 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2006 I visited Sarah and Jeff, each time exploring new landscapes in North and South Carolina, Virginia, or Georgia. In 2002, Sarah, Jeff, and his son, Kevin, spent the Christmas holidays in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Palenque, Mexico. In 2004, for her 40th birthday, I took Sarah on an Elderhostel tour of the archaeological ruins of Yucatan. She was the delight of all of the ‘elders.’ In 2008, Sarah, Jeff, and I drove to southeastern Oregon and on to Boise, where Kevin was graduating from high school. And in January, 2009, Sarah, Jeff, Kevin, Jon Cruson, and I visited the northeastern coast and mountains of Puerto Rico. In 2011, Sarah and Jeff divorced and Sarah moved to Kelso, Washington. Sarah is self assured, competent, intelligent, and resourceful. I enjoy her company greatly and am informed by her wide-ranging interest in literature, art, antiques, garden plants, and birding. She is alert to the moods and emotions of those around her. Sarah is calm and well balanced psychologically and takes care of her physical health. She is one of the best women I have known.
Activities in retirement.
Because I realized that I was especially good as a caregiver for Michael, I thought I might also be a good caregiver for others. I became a member of the local organization that supported people living with HIV/AIDs and educated the local community about HIV/AIDs. I was the organization’s liaison with the Acorn House advisory board, which oversaw an AIDs hospice. As hospice care became less necessary with the discovery of better treatments for HIV and AIDs and other ways of supporting people who were living HIV were developed, the two organizations merged. Probably because I had administrative experience at the University and knew how to run a meeting efficiently, I was made co-chair of the joint organization. The other co-chair was skilled at fund-raising. I left the board after the two organizations merged, we hired a new executive director, and we initiated efforts to rent expanded office space. I later trained to be a hospice volunteer for the local hospital and for a short time visited dying men. After only a few months, I quit volunteering because I was only used to relieve primary caregivers rather than offer care to dying patients.
I became a volunteer at the University Museum of Natural History. Although I gave several tours of the museum’s exhibits and I lectured to other volunteers on an exhibit of ancient pottery from Mexico’s west coast, I found my niche as a gardener of the Museum’s courtyard display of native Oregon plants. Because the courtyard was partially destroyed by new construction of a nearby building and an area adjacent to a new wing of the Museum was available for extending the native plant garden, I was given the opportunity to design and select plants for the new garden areas. After its establishment and early care, I turned the garden over to other volunteers. As is the nature of volunteer organizations in which one shows active interest, the Friends of the Museum asked me to join its board of directors. Again, I was able to use my administrative skills as the secretary/treasurer of the board to improve its financial arrangements as well as keep its minutes.
On the neighborhood level, I joined Ev and Sally Smith and Nancy McFadden in initiating a proposal for creating the South University Neighborhood National Historic District. The core of the South University Area was one of Eugene’s premier housing areas in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost all of the houses in the neighborhood had been built before or immediately after World War II, and thus were more than fifty years old. The growth of the University was changing the character of the neighborhood in that increasing numbers of students were being accommodated in apartments and older houses. Our committee grew to include many other residents; and because of our participatory approach to achieving the proposal, we were given the annual award for historic preservation by the State’s Office of Historic Preservation. Nevertheless, implementing the proposal was thwarted by misleading and false information circulated by neighbors, who felt threatened by the possibility of additional government regulations. One of the opponents disrupted neighborhood meetings and spent over $100,000 in petition and legal fees to prevent the plan from being implemented. The mayor of Eugene, who had to forward the proposal to the State office, delayed action, largely at the request of the wealthy opponents. As a result the designation as an historic district died.
When I moved from the South University Neighborhood to the College Crest Neighborhood, I prepared a landscape history of a large area of south Eugene which included both the College Crest and Friendly Area neighborhoods.[28]
My individual activities have been varied. In the 1980s, I started working out in a gym and have continued thrice weekly workouts. For many years, I regularly walked up Mt. Pisgah, a 1500’ mountain in a nearby county park. I also helped build hiking trails within the park. During the 1990s I regularly played tennis, usually with Anastasio Flores. When I retired I enrolled in several colored pencil, watercolor, and acrylic painting classes through the Lane Community College extension service. I used the skills I learned there to make watercolor sketches and colored pencil drawings on many of the trips I have taken. In 2008, I attended a watercolor Elderhostel in the mountains of Queretaro, Mexico. From the many photographs, sketches, and drawings that I have made on my trips, I have selected many to modify and enhance on my computer using Adobe Photoshop software.
After retirement I began to spend time watching birds, first in the patio of my home, later in local areas, and then elsewhere in the United States and Latin America. I do not keep a list of birds that I have seen; instead my joy comes from the peace, quiet, and patience needed to locate and sight birds. Bird-watching attracts me because it requires alertness to natural landscapes and habitats, vegetation and individual plants, as well as to the sounds of individual and flocks of birds. I attended several Elderhostel trips focused on bird watching: Port Aransas, Texas, on the Gulf coast; Ecuador, with trips to the Amazon headwaters and the slopes of the Andes; the San Juan Islands; and to Mexico City and Oaxaca, Mexico. I have also enjoyed watching birds in Peru, Greece, on safari in Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia, and in the Blue Mountains of Australia. Whenever I travel with Sarah, Stan Cook, or Carlos Martinson, bird watching has always been a focus.
Off and on in my retirement I have written on the project of which this is a part. I have revised it several times as friendly readers have offered their criticisms. I write by hand and then transcribe my manuscript to the computer, only then revising my words before asking others to read this extended essay.
Homes and Gardens.
The house at 1820 Olive Street that I inherited from Michael Shellenbarger was much too large for Anastasio and me. This 1913 California bungalow with a full basement and carriage house had two, bedroom suites, two additional bedrooms, and a studio/TV room. When I retired, I looked for another home as far away as Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Coast Range of California, and several places in Oregon, but, in 1995, moved but twelve blocks to the east to 1045 East 20th Avenue. It was the newest house in the South University Neighborhood, having been built in 1992. An architect-designed house, its interior was well-laid out, but had a rather non-descript outside, with the exception of an enclosed patio that opened south of the living room. To the north, west, and east only five feet separated the house from a six foot perimeter fence. On the south an attached two-car carport jutted out toward the street.
I redesigned the kitchen and added a full bath to the first floor. I also had removable Plexiglas panels built to convert the front porch into a winter greenhouse where tender container plants could be saved from the winter frosts. I added large planters for flowers and bird feeders and a bird bath to the existing patio. I extended the attractive open cedar fence that divided the front yard into a small, sunny public garden and a shady private area lined by an alley fence. A new gate and fence separated the carport from the shady garden. By adding low stone retaining walls, decorative gravel paths, a concrete bench and statue of Buddha, and shade tolerant plants, the area gained the sense of a Japanese garden.
I was also able to buy thirty feet of blackberry-covered property to the north. After clearing the tangle of berry bushes, I had raised wooden decks built outside the living room and studio. I then installed sliding glass doors from the living room and French doors from the study/studio to the decks. Because this area faced north, I planted most of it with shade tolerant native Oregon plants, reserving the shadiest areas for perennial fuchsias, which are natives of the cooler parts of southern Chile. As a result of these efforts, I created three outdoor rooms which could be used all year round. In addition the living room and studio had become much more light-filled and connected with the organic world of plants and birds.
When Anastasio and I separated, even this house became too large and I sold it, moving to a garden apartment complex adjacent to the Willamette River where my gardening was restricted to containers on a small north-facing patio. Although I was content with apartment living, I later moved to a house that Scott Downey and I had purchased to remodel and sell speculatively. The house at 1165 McLean Boulevard, located near the foot of the College Crest section of the south hills of Eugene, needed to be completely rebuilt and the blackberries that overtopped part of it had to be removed. Scott and I completely redesigned the floor plan of the house, leaving only one room in its original position. We incorporated the former garage and back porch into the living area and opened up the living and kitchen areas. Everything from the foundation to the roof was rebuilt; the insulation, wiring and plumbing were replaced. Only the basic exterior frame of the house was retained.
I liked the new house so much that I decided to live in it. The property was large enough that we could also build on it a secondary dwelling for Fred Dodge. Using Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, I designed an 800 square foot cottage that faced south onto a patio that Fred and I could share. Unlike my previous two houses, the house and cottage received full sun, whenever it appeared. Only the areas immediately north of the carport and a small storage shed were in perpetual shade. I planted hydrangeas or fuchsias there. The backyard that surrounds the patio, was planted with ‘ecolawn’, a combination of grass, clover, and yarrow that needs much less fertilizer, water, and mowing than most lawns of grass only. Mixtures of perennial and annual flowering plants border the lawn. Open metal fencing mounted within wooden frames separated the yard from the raised bed vegetable garden to the south. These open structures, like one that partially shields the patio from the view from a neighboring house, are covered with vines and a climbing rose. Decorative pottery planters cluster together on the patio. The whole of the yard between the two dwellings is fenced from intrusion by deer.
Because parking is not permitted on the street, much of the area in front of the house is covered with compressed gravel where cars may park. The property is shielded from the street by shrubs and trees as well as perennial flowering plants and self seeding annuals. I have planted rhododendrons and an ecolawn directly in front of the house. Between the lawn and the street I have planted a perennial garden backed by a decorative, six foot, open cedar fence. The southern perimeter of the property is planted with a hedge of blueberries. A fig tree is espaliered on the south side of the shed in the backyard. Hanging baskets of fuchsias and begonias line the pathway to the cottage.
Scott and I have jointly bought and completely remodeled other old houses. We have designed and constructed new landscapes around them. These projects may be seen as our efforts to preserve old houses and integrate them within their neighborhoods. For me, they are the most evident ways in which I have been directly creative in altering the artifacts of the physical world.
[In 2016 I moved to a continuing care community–Cascade Manor.]
Footnotes. See book if you want full references.
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As an adult, I took the Strong-Campbell Inventory that compares some 365 answers with those of people in over ninety occupations. My interests were most similar to occupations associated with music, writing, art, teaching, and nature, but only average or low when compared with other occupations. ↑
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(H. W. Van Loon 1921) (H. W. Van Loon 1932) ↑
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My training in the theory of radio technology and the practice of building radio equipment became largely irrelevant because vacuum tube radios were almost immediately replaced by those with transistors. Further, television became the frontier of transmission technology. ↑
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Mrs. Combellack taught at Oregon State because nepotism rules did not allow her to do so at the University of Oregon where her husband was a professor of classics. She had received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and was better qualified than many of her male colleagues who, unlike her, were given full time positions at a higher rank. This was my first lesson in gender discrimination in academia. ↑
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We all received bachelors and masters degrees at UC, Berkeley. David Perry and I received doctorates there and subsequently taught at universities. Malcolm Putnam became a labor negotiator. ↑
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$500 in 1951. ↑
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I also bought a book of poetry, The Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman, that Mrs. Combellack had used in her literature class. It was my first introduction to poetry. And I bought Bartholomew’s Advanced Atlas of Modern Geography, Edition of 1950, which I still use on a regular basis. ↑
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Four other fellow students in my undergraduate geography classes went on to become chairmen of departments of geography in American universities: William Denevan, Donald Vermeer, Richard Nuysten ↑
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It and its neighbors have long been torn down as the University residential dorms moved into the neighborhood. ↑
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(Sauer 1952) ↑
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The views of William Morris Davis prevailed at the time. ↑
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(A. W. Urquhart, The Landforms of the Cockpit Country and its Borderlands, Jamaica 1958) ↑
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Ward and Tom became lovers and lived together until Ward left Berkeley for a teaching position at the University of Minnesota. Elinore, Beth, Tom, Ward and I became good friends and later more closely linked. Beth and I married in June 1958; Elinore married Ward in 1959. They later divorced. Tom married another long-time graduate student, Marsha McLean and taught at Hayward State, California. John Beattie married Susan, a student he met at Berkeley before they left for Cambridge University, where John completed a PhD in English History. They then moved to Toronto, where John taught until his retirement. David Harris married Helen, his English girl friend, finished his PhD in Geography at Berkeley, and began a distinguished career at University College, London, later as the director of the Institute of Archaeology. David Fox never married and had a long teaching career at the University of Manchester. Yi-Fu Tuan has become one of America’s most thoughtful writers, retiring from the University of Wisconsin after teaching in New Mexico, Toronto, and the University of Minnesota. His many books and essays display his unique humanistic interests and scholarship. After Ward and Elinore Barrett divorced, Elinore completed her PhD and accepted a position on the faculty of the University of New Mexico. She has recently completed several studies of the New Mexican pueblos and their relationships with the Spanish conquerors. ↑
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(Jessen 1936) (King 1951) ↑
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See my monograph, (Urquhart, Patterns of Settlement in Southwestern Angola, 1963) for the results of this study. ↑
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In 2011, with over 30,000 students, it is the second largest university in Africa, only exceeded in size by Cairo University. Dr. Audu, the Vice-Chancellor (the executive officer of the University) was a Christian pediatrician, from a small ethnic group and who was born just outside the walled city of Zaria and educated in Ibadan, Nigeria, Britain, and the United States. He later became the Nigerian minister for external affairs and its representative at the United Nations. Following a military coup, Dr. Audu was exiled only later returning to Zaria to run a medical clinic. ↑
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(A. W. Urquhart, Planned Urban Landscapes of Northern Nigeria 1977) ↑
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(Urquhart, Morphology of Zaria 1970)See my monograph (footnote 59) and the Occasional Paper Number 4, Department of Geography entitled Zaria and Its Region edited by Michael Mortimore 1970, for a description of the vegetation, soils, agriculture, markets, geology and history of the region. ↑
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See my article on the Origins and diffusion of Scientific organization. (Urquhart, Diffusion of Scientific Societies 1985) ↑
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(C. M. Alexander 1975) ↑
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The Gibsons were teachers in Zaria when I was at ABU. ↑
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Fusch, Towle, Klee, Williams, Malarky, Preston, Hilden; Spyrou, Reynolds, McConnell, Eagan, Sharrod, Wilson, Grassetti, Mehnert, Adams and on the committee of others ↑
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Dominic Vetri and Jack Powers ↑
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I chaired 16 PhD committees while at the University of Oregon: David Smith, Richard Fusch, Gary Klee, Jerry Williams, Deidre Malarky, William Preston, Clark Hilden, Susan Pommering, Henry Lawrence, Hershal Stern, Morris Uebelacher, Barbara Craig, Elizabeth Keeler, Gary Cummisk, and Lincoln DeBunce. In addition I chaired 20 Masters committees in Geography: Archie Mboghu, Michael Spirou, Wesley Reynolds, Millard Burr, Gregory McConnell, Eugene Organ, Sally Sharrard, Jeffrey Wilson, Paul Mehnert, Rodger Adams, Karen Yoerger, Elizabeth Keeler, Tawfiq Tabib, Richard Grassetti, Joseph Eagan, Richard Duerr, Sally Butler, Timothy McGrath, Eric Ewert, and Cindy Mendoza. I was on the Masters Committee of 11 students of Environmental Studies: Greg Ringer, Billy Sullivan, Sean Demerith, Mike Medlar, James Stickler, Todd Everts, Diane Albino, Kate Joost, Mike Schut, Suzanne Twight-Alexander, and Stefan Bjarnason. ↑
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Anastasio was given legal status (a green card) by the amnesty program created under the Reagan administration. He became a full United States citizen while in Eugene. ↑
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Stan Cook, Norman DeLue, Ray Mitchell, and Dale Kramer ↑
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SUNA ↑
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See my Landscape Change in South Eugene, Oregon; 2010; Blurb. This was my first experience at self publication. ↑