Old Missoula

Oral History Number: 270-066, 067, 068

Interviewer: Annie Pontrelli

Interviewee: LeRoy W. Hinze

Date of Interview: June 23, 1992

Project: University of Montana Centennial Oral History Project

Annie Pontrelli: LeRoy, we’ve talked about so many interesting things before I even started the tape, but let’s start out by talking about some of your University related experiences. Just for the record, why don’t you tell me first your affiliation with the university, the years you were there and we’ll continue on from there.

LeRoy Hinze: I came here in the fall of 1947 to establish the academic program in theater. H.G. Merriam had been chairman of the English department since shortly before the First World War and they sponsored some work in theater and some work in speech. Many good people had been on campus here in both fields long before I came. After the war, there was an explosion in enrollment with all of the G.I.s coming back. It was pretty obvious to H.G. and everybody else that if these programs were to really mature—well, survive first of all—there would have to be separate departments for speech and for theater. Ralph McGinnis, who had been here before the war doing the work in speech, was assigned the job of establishing a department of speech and I was hired to establish the department of theater. I think it was the Department of Drama at the time.

It was a very exciting time. I had been at the University of Wisconsin working as the Director of Community Theater, through the Extension Division. The year before I came here, I was in graduate school at Cornell. I came here, really, because my major professor, Alexander Drummond, called me in one day and said, “I have an opportunity that you cannot miss.” We were all very young, with a 25-year-old department chairman. The influx of faculty in that first year was tremendous: Herb Carson was one of them, Gene Andre in Music. They may be the only ones who are still in the neighborhood. There was some 50 or 60 new faculty in the fall of 1947.

It was remarkable the way all of this happened. I was married, I had a daughter. When we left Ithaca, our daughter was about 14 months old. We had a little dog. We put all of our worldly possessions in our 1939 Chevy and drove from upstate New York to Missoula, Montana. It took days and days and days. But we made it. Those old Chevys just didn’t stop. I kept a record of expenses and automobile expenses from Ithaca, New York to Missoula, Montana in September 1947 were 35 dollars. I fill my gas tank now, and it’s 25 dollars to go around the block. This was the wild west! I had been as far west as I grew up in Wisconsin. I spent a summer mining gold in the Black Hills when I was 16, so I had seen some of the West. We knew then that this was the West and it was. I remember we got to Miles City and we were having breakfast and, lo and behold, there was a real live cowboy on a real live horse riding down the street! My wife had grown up in Brooklyn, you know. She came out to the wild west in Madison, Wisconsin in her terms, west of the Hudson, to go to graduate school. Our families just wrote us off because we

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

were riding off into the distance.

It was a very exciting time there. There were very few places to live. The campus was just a zoo trying to find places for faculty to sit down, in front of a desk or anywhere else. Our department was housed in the old Simpkins Little Theater building, which had been put up in the First World War as barracks for flu victims. It had been turned into a theater in 1926 and then was used for everything else after 1936 when the Student Union Theater, which is now the University Theater. But there were some empty rooms in that building and the empty theater. So when I came, I said can we have it? We had a hot shot young president at the time, Jim McCain, who had just gotten out of the Navy and he was going mad trying to make things work. You would ask him a question and he would say, “Look, I hired you to settle that for yourself. Get out of my hair!” You really had freedom to work and lots of energy to do it. We were young and ambitious, going to bring the arts to Montana and save the world again. Or for the first time. We got this building and we shared it with the University kindergarten, which was noisy, the Department of Religion, the Bureau of Business Research, and a psychiatric nurse who would look after those of us who were either in trouble or were about to be. It was a great mixture. People would come to visit us in the department and wonder if they were among the patients, the theater department, or if they should join the kindergarten kids.

There were no places to live. Nobody had been building any houses for a long while. Here was this influx, not only of faculty, but of students as well. Another interesting thing about getting a job in this period is that you didn’t go someplace unless they promised you a place to live. I was on leave from the University of Wisconsin and I had four other job offers from around the country and the University of Montana, which was Montana State University at the time. We had a house in Wisconsin, which we gave up, but the University out here said, sure, we’ll find a place for you. Well, we wanted to come. Nobody put it on paper. Fort Missoula had just been vacated and there were 24 living quarters out there that Jim McCain had somehow managed to wangle from whoever was in charge. And nobody was really sure who was in charge of anything. The University couldn’t rent them. They couldn’t assume ownership. They couldn’t even assume responsibility. So Jim McCain talked to Bob Struckman (?), who was a journalism professor at the time, and suggested that he gather together a few of the newcomers and establish some kind of legal umbrella for this Fort Missoula thing. Just before I got here Bob and I forget who else set up the Fort Missoula Faculty Housing Association and incorporated it. They elected a Board of Directors and decided how much rent was to be charged for each place. We didn’t have to pay anything to anybody, except we paid the military for water because it was their water tower, and we paid the garbage people to come out and haul away the garbage. All the rest of the money we put into fixing up and maintaining the places. There was just an amazing group of people: Melvin Morris in Forestry, a lot of the military guys, Herb Carson was there, Gordon Browder, Fred was there, Norman Taylor was there, the Maloufs were there, the Jonkels were there, Chuck’s older brother George was in Wildlife Biology and he and his wife had a place out there. Chuck came out as an undergraduate from Wisconsin and he lived with George and Deanna, which was how I got acquainted with Chuck 100 years ago, give or take a few.

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

There we were with all of this land. We all had dogs, we all had gardens, and we all had kids. Everybody had just one car and there was no way to get to the University except in the car. So wives, mothers, and children were left there. The place became a remarkably close community. Some of my best friends lived there: Carling, the Taylors, and the Jonkels. They are still, after all of these years. Fred and I met a number of years ago at Germaine Conrad’s kitchen. She was running for County Commissioner and there was a beer party to raise money. Fred and I got off in the corner in the kitchen and started talking about Fort Missoula days. People started to gather around and soon, we were in the middle telling stories. The stories got better and better and the lies got bigger and bigger. From time to time, Fred and I still look at each other and say, we should never have left. It did something, I think. It reflected some of our young attitudes and it reflected something of the way we felt about the world, about our jobs, about the University. There was a kind of a standing joke on this campus in those early days that this was the most marvelous place in the world to be because you were given complete freedom to work yourself to death. And this happened. People were building departments. These were things that I might have figured I would have a chance to do when I was 20 years older than I was. Herb might have done the same thing, Carling Malouf in anthropology, and there were others in other fields.

A part of what we were doing, the way we were living out there, was a reflection of the times. We had just won another war. We were short of everything. Buying a refrigerator was a major expense. And it was a major victory to find a refrigerator for someone who was moving in. And a washer. We didn’t have a dryer, of course, we had clotheslines. We all had gardens. I raised chickens. I built a big pen, got three ducks and a drake, and built an incubator. My little four-year-old daughter hatched 40 baby ducklings. She taught them to swim in the kitchen sink. They didn’t know who their mothers were, so Robin took over. I think this kind of attitude, kind of behavior, kind of experience, stays with many of us. My daughter, Robin, who will be 46 years old next month, still calls and we talk about the good old days at the Fort. I built her a wading pool. I dug it in the yard. It was 12 feet across. I lined it with gravel, cemented the whole thing, put in a French crane, and painted it swimming pool blue. This was her fifth birthday present. Carling Malouf still has movies of the big party on the fifth of July, which was her birthday. There were 18 little kids in this swimming pool. Arline Malouf, Carling’s wife, died about a year and a half ago and this brought lots of things back. They asked me to speak at the service, to try to define Arline, who was perhaps one of the three most marvelous people in the world, through our life out there. The four Malouf kids were here. I knew them of course as they were growing up. The grandchildren were here. We had three or four days of reliving the Fort.

This has a lot to do with the University and the kind of school it was. I have lived in other faculty housing situations that I would never touch again with a ten-foot pole. When I walk, and I walk about an hour and a half a day in the good months, I go out to the Fort to walk. Part of it is because I can walk on grass and there are no automobiles around, but part of it is a nostalgia kick. Many of the good things that I was able to do at the University were related to my life at

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

Fort Missoula, my neighbors, and my friends. There was the old joke: things are in such good shape because we’re constantly thinking pure thoughts and doing noble deeds. That’s only half a joke really, because some of that kind of thing pertained to the Fort.

AP: How long were you out there?

LH: I was there until 1956.

AP: Did it disband?

LH: Yes. It happened sort of gradually. I was offered a visiting year at the University of Oregon. These were marvelous times. You were constantly getting job offers all over the place, because everybody wanted to start a department and those of us who had done so were in some kind of a demand. But I had a job here to do and I didn’t want to go elsewhere. Things started to get difficult in lots and lots of ways. We had some presidents that were unfortunate. Much of the joy of the Montana campus was gone. I got a call one day—1956, I guess—from the director of the theater at the University of Oregon in Eugene. We were friends. He said that I’ve been offered a visiting year at the UCLA and my dean says that I can go if I can find someone to fill my chair for a year. We chatted for a bit. I guess I had had a bad week or something. I was tempted. They had a new theater. I was not getting a new theater—one that I had been promised forever and ever. I liked Eugene. I liked the people there. I had lots of friends on campus. I said that I would have to check with my dean. Gordon Castle was my dean at the time. He was a marvelous, marvelous guy. Has anyone ever mentioned his name to you?

AP: No, but go ahead and tell me whatever you want to about these people.

LH: Gordon was an actor. Our department had responded to some requests from people in the community who wanted to start a community theater. I had worked with community theaters in the state of Wisconsin. That had been my job, so I knew something about it. I knew many of the people who were involved. A lot of them are still around. You may know some of the names. Shirley Smuin was involved. Carrie Bryan (?)—does that ring a bell? She was a British actress, and she married Bob Bryan (?) when he was over there in the service. They came back to Montana. He was director Physical Activity or the field house. Well, Carrie arrived on the scene, accent and all, charm to burn. She is just an amazing creature. I love her dearly. Carrie’s about 90 now and she’s still just an absolute marvel. She was a party to this. Also, John Lester, George Hummel, Lee Hummel, Leslie Fiedler, my wife, bunches and bunches. Well, we had a theater. We had the old Simpkins Little Theater and we had it because nobody else wanted it. Gordon was my dean and when all of this came up, I wanted to see if we could do some of the community theater stuff in Simpkins Little Theater. He said that this was your baby, don’t bother me with it. Berta, his wife, was involved. We got going. We got the community theater program going. They played about three productions each year in Simpkins little theater. Sometimes it got to be a real rat race because we were doing three productions there and one or two in the Student Union Theater. There was lots of really good theater in Missoula for a

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

long, long time.

Anyway, when I went to Gordon and said I think I’d like to be a visiting professor at the University of Oregon. Nobody’s ever asked me to do this before and it sounds like fun. He said that if you want to do it, find someone to sit in your chair until you get back. I got Beau Brown, who had been one of my students here. He went on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin and he was teaching at Havre. I asked Beau if he would like to come down here for the year while I was away. Gordon said that was okay. You may know his wife Marjorie who is in law school.

AP: I know who she is.

LH: Marjorie did publicity for us while she was an undergraduate.

In any event, I went and it was marvelous. Absolutely marvelous. I didn’t have the real hassles that I had here, that everybody has when he’s in his own place. He belongs to all of these damn committees, he’s expected to do all of the dumb things that are extraneous to his real job, which is teaching and producing and all the rest. I was given the choice of when I wanted to teach what. I taught one undergraduate course and a couple of graduate seminars. I didn’t do a show until February, in a beautiful new theater. We were wined and dined. I didn’t know that I was being looked over to do Phil Horace’s job if he got invited to stay at UCLA. Well, he didn’t get invited. He came back. But they invited me to stay to develop an opera program. So I did. Anyway, I decided about the middle of that year that the best thing in the world to do was to be a visiting professor all your life. But I could never figure out how to do it! And so I didn’t, but I had some other visiting things.

The Montana campus…I guess this is really what our conversation here is all about. There were fewer than three thousand students when I came. There was some marvelous faculty—lots and lots old guard folks, 24-carat stuff. Dick Jesse, who was chairman of the Chemistry department, but had been dean of everything at various times, as well as acting President, and a Latin and Greek scholar. His favorite book was Alice in Wonderland. I announced somewhere along the line, my second or third year here, that I was going to do Alice in Wonderland. The one done by Eva Le Gallienne, of the American Rep [American Repertory Theater], that she did with Richard Addinsell, a British composer, and Florida Friebus. It was a tremendous thing and it was marvelously successful in New York. Nobody had ever done it outside of New York. I didn’t know this until I sought permission to do the show. I got a call from Eva Le Gallienne herself, who said, “Is this for real? You’re the first one.” So we become friends. It was an odd situation. We announced it as the final production of whatever year it was. Jesse—and, again, campus was still pretty small—let it be known that if this Alice in Wonderland production that this Hinze guy was doing didn’t measure up to his expectations, he was going to have my head. This simmered along for the whole damn year, and he was just the kind of guy to get anybody’s head—including God’s! Well, we did the show, we had some splendid people, and it was a good production. We had a successful run. We also played two or three matinees for school kids, and

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

not just in town, in the old Student Union Theater. I was not surprised that our own Jesse wrote for me the program note, which I still have somewhere or other. It was marvelous, absolutely marvelous. I was not surprised when Dick Jesse came to every evening performance, but I was surprised when he appeared for every matinee. He was a huge man, maybe six foot four inches with shoulders like this. You could see him sitting in the middle of this sea of children.

I say this because it again reflects the spirit of the campus. We were all concerned with each other’s work. I’m sure that everybody didn’t come to the theater, but most everybody came to the theater, the campus that is. Granted, we didn’t have TV then, which has fouled up the work a lot. I thought of this after we talked on the phone the other day. I thought of some of the variety of folks who played in any one of the University Theater productions. They were from every department, from all over the place.

When Carl McFarland was President here—and Carl and I didn’t see eye to eye on anything, except this—he thought law students ought to spend a great deal of time in the theater. And a lot of law students did. Not because he said so, but they did. There were geologists and journalists and foresters and music people, of course. You name it, they were there. Playing in show after show. This bred interest far beyond the parochial guidelines that seem to govern these things now. Most of the people, voice students in music at least, played in show after show after. Some of the best actors we had were music people. We developed an opera program…Maybe John told you about this—

AP: No, he hasn’t told me about it.

LH: Well, this was unbelievable. I was always a lover of opera. How, I don’t know. My parents weren’t interested in this, but I was a lover of opera. I did study, my freshman year at Wisconsin, with a guy by the name of John Culver modern European history. This was in the extension division. I spent a year after high school working in a tractor plant and going to school at night. Anyway, John believed that the study of history was the study of everything in the world. So if you studied—

[End of Tape 1, Side A]

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

[Tape 1, Side B]

LH: —motifs. Whatever. Well, it was 17 hours, but we had about a six week, two evenings a week, in her living room while she went through the operas. By the time we were finished with the course we were either tired of opera for life or completely saturated. I was completely saturated. We got to Montana. I started seeing some operas. You could listen to them on the radio. We got out here and there had been a tradition of doing things like The Chocolate Soldier and The Desert Song and so on every other year as a cooperative effort with music and theater people who were here. The year I came, Desert Song had already been scheduled and I was to direct it. I did and it was fun. There were some real good people. There’s still one person in town that was in that, a guy by the name of George Lewis. The musicians we worked with were far and away better than they needed to be to do Desert Song. So we all got bored to tears with the show before we were ready to stage it. You still needed X number of rehearsals and X number of this, that, and the other thing before you can do the show. Gene Andre was a conductor with John Lester and I and John Crowder, who was with the music school then.

Music used to be a school. They should never have changed it, but they did. Abe Wollock was the designer, an old friend from Cornell, a fellow graduate student. He had been an undergraduate student with my wife at Brooklyn College many, many years ago. We got together and decided that desert songs were for the birds, let’s do something else. We looked about the student body for the voices available and decided that we were going to do Rossini’s Barber of Seville, which was the first opera produced in the state of Montana. John Crowder, the dean, was given a lot of support when word got out that we were embarking on an opera program. You can imagine: this was a university of about 3,000, a community of maybe 2,300 people and we were going to do a major opera. The newspaper got a hold of this and somewhere, kicking around, was an editorial comment saying that Lester, Andre, Hinze, and Wollock have gone mad. There was also an apology after the show. George Lewis played in it. He was Count Almaviva. He was an absolutely splendid baritone. He was a school choral director for many, many years. He’s still around town. I can’t remember his name. It was a good show. I learned a lot. I really learned a lot. I was an experienced director with a great love for opera, but this was my first opera. I had done a lot of musicals, but I had never done an opera.

Anyway, it worked. People said, “Hurray, hurray, hurray,” and assumed now that we had an opera program. We assumed it too. We did and we did one every other year, which is all the music people could fit into their schedule because it took a year of work to get the vocal people ready. It was as much as we could handle.

The second opera we did was La Boheme. Puccini was one of my favorite people and of course his music is glorious. Puccini characters are young and our kids were young. One of the interesting things about that show is that we were scheduled to perform in May. We knew who was going to play. You can’t just hold an open tryout. We have a Rudolf, we have a Mimi, we have a Musetta and so on.

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

John and Gene and I were all hunters. The fall before—late August or early September—the show was to be scheduled we decided that we should go off by ourselves and have a few days undisturbed so that we could plan this production. Our plan for this kind of remote meeting happened to coincide with the opening of an elk season in what is now the Bob Marshall. We made careful plans as to what we going to take and all of the food and what not. We put it all on the floor of Gene Andre’s garage. We were going to drive to this spot and then we were going to hike in about five miles. Then we’d hunt and sit around the campfire and plan an opera, which we did. That was a lot of fun. It was kind of interesting; we made a list of what we were going to eat each day so that we didn’t carry a lot of extra stuff. One thing nobody mentioned was how do we handle the cocktail hour? Well, I thought to myself, “I’ll get a fifth of bourbon and put it in my sleeping bag.” Then, when we got up there that first evening and we were all set to start dinner I would say, “Hey guys, how about a drink?” And I did. John and Gene were so pleased. I was too. We had a couple of drinks out of my bottle. Then it was time to start cooking and John said, “Just a minute.” He went in, unrolled his sleeping bag, and came out with his bottle. And we had a couple of those! We were up at about 6,000 feet. We finished a couple of John’s bourbon. Gene said, “Well, I’m not to be outdone.” He went in, unrolled his sleeping bag, and came out with another jug of booze. We didn’t get any elk. We saw bunches of elk. We had an absolutely marvelous time. We did, in spite of all of the booze of that first evening, get a lot of work done.

I think this too reflects something of what I was trying to say when I was talking before about the Faculty Housing Association about the kind of relationship that people who were directing these programs had with each other. I have never on any other campus, in any other situation, worked with people who were as generous of themselves, as completely unselfish in terms of the big thing we were trying to do. Jeanne Couture played Mimi. Jeanne Couture was an 18-year-old freshman from Arlee, high heeled boots, the whole thing. Manure on her boots. She had been studying with John Lester for several years. She had an absolutely glorious voice. She was a beautiful, beautiful girl. Bob Hoyem was maybe 19 years old—tall, saddle shoes, awkward, and just a beautiful tenor. Somehow we had to take this raw material and turn them into something splendid on stage. There’s lots of ways you can do it. Traditionally, theater people who work with music people think that music people are for the birds. And music people just hate these theater people who are messing up their music. What we had was an understanding and a respect for the whole piece and for the kids in it. We could go up to the Bob [Marshall Wilderness] and sit around the tent and drink booze out of tin cups and plan a show. We did other things too. John and Gene worked on the Alice in Wonderland thing, although it wasn’t a music school production. We did other operas together and lots of short stuff, summer programs, and the like. We toured these things—not all of them, but many of them. There was a rapport that I have never experienced elsewhere. I think it was a reflection of, in part, the place, the time, of course the people. None of us were building empires. I never wanted an empire. I didn’t want the department to be very big and I didn’t want lots and lots of students, but I wanted what we had to be good. I think Gene and John felt very much the same way. We had some other people who were involved with us. Rudy Wendt was head of the piano department. Do you know Rudy?

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

AP: No.

LH: Gentle, sweet, marvelous, marvelous man. He plays the piano like an angel. Best accompanist, people tell me, they’ve ever run into. We had to have lots of rehearsal pianists for the opera. No one person had time to do all of it. Rudy took it upon himself to set up who played at what rehearsals and would hold hands with these people long enough to know that they were working. There’s nothing quite so thankless as the rehearsal pianist job for an opera rehearsal. I’m storming around and we’re just getting going and I’d say, “Stop it!” And everybody has to stop although everybody’s just gotten going. It takes a special kind of person. Rudy was somehow able instill the same kind of thing in his people. He took his turn as a rehearsal pianist. I knew when he was scheduled that I was going to do some particularly important stuff that rehearsal because we were sensitive to each other.

The opera thing attracted some interesting attention. I have two little stories that I want to tell. There was a voice teach on the campus at the time whose name was Hasmeg Adecciam (?). She was a tiny little mite of a person—Serbian I think. Dark, snapping black eyes. She sang like an angel. She probably weighed 89 pounds. Some of the people in the opera, the singers, were her students. So we got to be friends too. We set up a rehearsal space in the old men’s gym for the last months of rehearsal because the place was empty and we could get the whole thing set up. We ended up with a stage on one end, a piano here for the rehearsal pianist, and then a long table here with people like John Lester, Gene Andre, Hasmeg (?), and the hangers on, the costumers, the designers, and all the rest. They weren’t there all the time, but only when it was necessary. I was working one evening…I think I’ll just tell one of these stories. Do you know Alfredo Cipolato?

AP: Yes.

LH: Alfredo was, of course, and still is a real character. We got to be friends because I was directing opera and I must have been a pretty good guy. I guess we were friends anyhow. He and Anne used to come to the plays. I was working one night in this old gym with Rodolfo and Mimi in the death scene. This is very demanding. It’s a killer and everybody has to cry and die and die very well. The music has to come while people are dying of consumption. Rudy was the rehearsal pianist that night. We were just polishing this thing as far as I figured we could take it until we got onto the stage with costume and light. Mimi was stretched out on the bed. Rodolfo was on the left stage side of the bed, kneeling, dying in anguish. I was kneeling on the other side, talking to these kids as we went through the scene. There was piano, they were singing, the whole bit. We’d done it a lot and it wasn’t bad, but I wanted to do some fine tuning. We had worked together enough so that we could do this. We did it and we did it and we did it. Finally, I thought, this is good. I turned around and I started walking back toward this table. Two people, Hasmeg and Alfredo, were there that night. Hasmeg ran and met me just shortly after I got off the stage, threw her arms around me. She was sobbing, tears were pouring down her face. She threw her arms around me and said, “LeRoy, it’s so beautiful!” We stood there for a

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

while and I was the nice guy and I cried with her. When she was able to stagger off, Alfredo was within about ten feet. He came up and he put his arms around me and gave me a big hug. He paid me the biggest compliment, the best compliment anyone in the world has ever paid me. He said, “LeRoy, you have a wop heart.” (laughs)

AP: That’s great because I’m Italian too.

LH: You know what it means!

AP: That’s wonderful.

LH: I still remember. I told this story to his son a couple of weeks ago. And he said, “That’s dad.”

We had good responses. We had really good audiences. From time to time, we would take pieces of an opera around the state. John Lester was deeply involved with the Lion’s Club and they had chapters all over the place. They were interested in assorted affairs; so we would put together a musical program, not just opera, but pieces or scenes. We’d take the Jubileers, which were a marvelous singing group. Lloyd Oakland (?) was a choral guy here for a long, long time. Unbelievable man. He retired. He’s maybe 15 years older than I am. He went back to Iowa, which was his home, and he died. I learned a lot from these music people, just a tremendous amount. There’s an amazing relationship between music and theater, which one knows academically and historically, but until you’re actively involved it’s only academic.

Another interesting thing we did during this period was that we started doing Shakespeare. We tried to do one a year. I had an idea at the time. I think it was valid and I used it elsewhere. When a student is on campus for the normal four years, which used to be the name of the game—you went to school, you stayed for four years and then you finished, instead of going and leaving and coming back—ought to be able to work in or around Shakespeare, some of the Greeks, some modern American, some modern European, and a wide range of types of productions. Also, a student that was in school—not in theater, but in anything else—should have an opportunity to see this variety of stuff while he was on campus. I liked the Shakespeare a year thing because it’s marvelous training for the actor and there’s so very much good Shakespeare. We did a production of Macbeth. There was a statewide alumni meeting on the campus while we were playing. It was accidental; I didn’t plan it that way. Bob Pantzer was president of the University Alumni Association. He was an attorney in Livingston. There was some kind of party afterwards and I was invited. I had never met him, but he’d been at the show. We met and talked. He said, “This is very marvelous. It’s a shame that more people can’t see it.”

I said that I had always wanted to take these things on the road and play the high schools of Montana.

He said, “Are you serious about this?”

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LeRoy W. Hinze Interview, OH 270-066, 067, 068, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library,

University of Montana-Missoula.

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Well, I’m president of Alumni Association. Maybe we can be a party to sponsoring it.” The upshot of the whole thing was that we did in fact begin to tour Shakespeare in Montana, which was absolutely marvelous fun, but the hardest work in the world. We had the charter bus and the old army truck that belonged to the University, full of scenery and heaven knows what. We usually would play a matinee for the schools in the area and then an evening performance for the local community. For quite a long while, for four or five years until I left, the Alumni Association sponsored this and made it possible to do it.

It was very difficult in those days to go on the road because the women students were so carefully guarded. Deans of women were to be reckoned with. I always figured that I was never trusted because sometimes I would want rehearsals, for example, that would last beyond ten-fifteen p.m. Girls of course had to be in at ten-thirty p.m. It took an act of congress. Maurine Clow was dean of women. Maurine and I were really good friends and it was a good natured lore that we carried on. All of the time, I was trying to get some decent work on the stage and to get some of these things out into the state, to take her girls—they were her girls! —on tour with all of these men with no control from her office. This is what we did, and we came onto this marvelously. Grace Martel whose husband is Earl Martel, who is the ticket manager at the Field House or something with the athletic program, was involved with community theater. When we were doing a Shakespeare that we would tour, we would work her into a small part. Maurine thought that Grace was a perfect chaperone. She would be the chaperone for the girls when we went on tour. So it worked very nicely. Although, years later after I came back here, I ran into Maurine somewhere. We got off into a corner at a party and talked about the good old days. She knew when I walked into her office that I was going to ask for something completely outrageous. She was prepared to say no before she said hello!

AP: She knew you well.

LH: Yes. With an opera that plays for three hours, you can’t be finished at ten-fifteen every evening. Well, they were crazy, crazy days anyhow. I really had to promise that I would set up the most Puritan of atmospheres on these tours. This was really very difficult. The alumni groups around the state, the various chapters, would sponsor a performance. After the performance, they would want to throw a feast for the cast, who were hungry of course, but also exhausted. We had gotten up early in the morning, traveled all this distance on a bus, set up the show, played two performances, got everything unpacked and back into the buses, and all we wanted to do was collapse. Our hosts had a big party lined up. Invariably, they had something to drink. 21 years was the drinking age. Besides, some of these people in the company were girls—Maurine’s girls! I just didn’t know what to do. There was nothing I could do to control this. I talked to Bob about it and he said that these were individual chapters and that he couldn’t tell them what to do. He had his own party in Livingston, though. The girls just sort of lived it up and I looked the other way. Maurine must have known about it, but that was

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University of Montana-Missoula.

one thing she never told me I shouldn’t do anymore.

Do you know the Briggs family? Bonnie is the only one left. Edwin Briggs was a law professor.

AP: I’ve heard the name, but I haven’t met them.

LH: Bonnie is still around. Beth Briggs, when she was a freshman on campus, was in theater. She was a little actress. I remember the first Shakespeare she played in was Othello and we toured. Beth was about as innocent a child as anyone could find anywhere. She was a sweet, lovely girl. If I had 14 daughters, I would be very to have all of them be like Beth. We played…I’ve forgotten where it was, and there wasn’t a party afterwards. I was delighted. I was dying to go to sleep. I suggested to the cast, after everything was over, let’s get some sleep tonight. We don’t have to party. Everybody said, “Yes, isn’t that great? We can get some sleep tonight.” I went off to bed, but I was the only one who went off to bed except Grace. These kids ended up in some pub, drinking beer half the night.

[Audio becomes distorted]

Many of them were not the legal age. In any event, I didn’t know about it until the next day. We all met for breakfast, got on the bus, and went to the next place. I was sitting on the bus and suddenly I happened to be sitting along. Beth Briggs walked up and she said, “Can I sit next to you?”

I said, “Sure. How are you? Good to see you. Are you having fun?”

She said yes, but she was very uncomfortable—

[End of Tape 1, Side B]

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University of Montana-Missoula.

[Tape 2, Side A]

LH: She said, “I lost my purse last night with all my money.”

I said, “Where’d you leave it? Did you leave it in the dressing room or something?”

She said, “No, in the tavern.”

I said, “What tavern?!”

She said, “The tavern we all went to!” And she broke into tears. Here I have this sobbing child in my arms.

When she stopped crying, she said, “We just went in for a couple of beers, and I left my purse in the bar.” She had her driver’s license and her student ID and all of the rest in there. She said, “I don’t know what I’m going to tell my father. He’s a law professor!”

“Well,” I said, “I can’t replace anything except the money.” So I gave her some money, so she would have some money to get along with. A couple of days after the tour, I was in my office and there was a tap on the door.

It was Beth and she said, “Could we see you for a minute?”

I said, “Yes, who’s we?” She and her mother had come to call. I knew Bonnie—a lovely, lovely lady.

She said, “LeRoy, I can’t tell you how grateful Ed and I are for the way you took care of Beth when she was in so much trouble—from going into a saloon.” She said, “Beth has some money to give to you.” So she gave me the—whatever it was—ten dollars back. I guess that little story, too, relates to the kind of relationship John and Gene and I had. We had the same sort of thing with our kids.

I can’t really tell you how—the three or four at least that I remember—kids would come out to the house. You know that they were pretty serious about each other; they’d been going together for quite a while. I remember a couple of them pretty clearly that came out. Obviously, they had something difficult they wanted to say. Obviously, they knew that I was home alone that evening. Obviously, they knew that they were welcome, but they didn’t know how to say it. But there were three couples of young people who sort of circled around the barn in conversation for five or ten minutes and then blurted out, “Do you think that we should get married?” (laughs)

Well, what do you say? You can’t say, “Sure I think you should get married.” So you say something like, “You’re great guys. I love you both. If that’s what you want to do and you’re

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University of Montana-Missoula.

sure, this is what you do.” As it happens, all three of the ones I think of have now been married for 45 years or more. Some of them, I’m still in touch with.

I want to tell you about one young lady: Marjorie Loveburgh (?), a blond Norwegian. I knew her. She was a local girl and she played in high school productions at Hellgate. It used to be Missoula County High School. She was good, really good: she sang, she danced, and she was a fine actress by the time she came to us as a freshman. She played a lot of stuff. She did Lady Macbeth and she did Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. She wanted to go into this. This was going to be her work. John spent a lot of time with her in the voice studio. Marge Cooper taught ballet here at the time. She spent a bundle of extra time with Marge. I spent studio time with her too on stage. As a general rule of thumb, I think it’s fair to say that when you’re working with a student in the arts, you get closer to them than you do if you’re just sitting in the lecture hall. How do you get a 19-year-old girl to do Desdemona? That’s one of the things that Marge did. You really get close to the kid. Marge and I had a lot of banter going.

She used to say, “Why don’t you ever play in a show?”

I go, “I’m not nearly as good an actor as I should be. You certainly show me up. So, I’d better be a director.” But she came up with a notion that we ought to have a bijou (?) team, just the two of us. She said, “We’ll call it Loveburgh and Hinze.” Then she’d outline all of these song and dance numbers we’d do. I would listen to her and agree that all of this was fine except that the name of the team should be Hinze and Loveburgh.

“In lights,” I said, “Marjorie, it looks better.”

I saw Marge last 40 years ago. From time to time, the phone will ring, and this very distinctive voice will sound and she will say, “I’m looking for the junior member of the Loveburgh and Hinze song and dance team.”

I would say, “Well, the senior member of the Hinze and Loveburgh team is right here on the telephone.” We spend a bundle of money talking to each other. She’s playing all over the country. Has for years and years and years. I don’t know if we would recognize each other anymore. She was young and beautiful, and she says that now she plays character roles. I was not very old when we worked together. There are others around the country, but I think of Marge because of the Hinze-Loveburgh / Loveburgh-Hinze song and dance team.

AP: Did you ever form the dance team?

LH: No. Neither of us really wanted to. We just wanted to talk about it. From time to time on tour, someone would ask us to do a song.

I worked with some splendid kids on this campus. I don’t know that this obtains today. Maybe it doesn’t anywhere. This was a small school. Most of the kids were Montanans, although not all.

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University of Montana-Missoula.

It was sort of a fresh, clean bunch of kids. It was a joy to work with them. I remember the young man, Jerry something or other. He wanted to be a lighting designer. He came from a ranch up from the Hi-Line somewhere. He was the first kid of the family to go off to college. He lived in the dorm. He said that the first time he tasted beef—his dad had thousands and thousands of cattle—the first time he tasted beef was in the dormitories on campus.

I asked him, “Why?”

He said, “You don’t shoot your cows, you know. We have all of these deer, elk, and antelope that we’ve been feeding all this time and so we eat them.”

I said, “How do you like beef?”

He said, “Oh, I don’t know.” (laughs)

They’re painting the house. They’ve been painting the house for days. I don’t know. Where do we go from here?

AP: LeRoy, this has been wonderful. I’ll just have you look at some of these questions and it might spur some memories or other stories. We’ve covered a lot of ground.

[Extended pause]

LH: One of the interesting things about the University then…I don’t know what it’s like now. I guess some of this is left over. H.G. Merriam really started the Creative Writing program a very, very, very long time ago. It was probably about the time that he got here, which would be just before the First World War He brought people in who were good writing teachers. He had a whole bunch of students who were pretty good writers, people like Dorothy Johnson for example. Some of the teachers here were pretty unbelievable. Leslie Fiedler taught here for a long time. No, Leslie was one of the people who lived at the fort. Walter Van Tilburg Clark was here. He also lived at the fort. We were tennis partners.

Who else? Lucia Mirrielees. Her sister Edith was here for a while too, I think.

Just for a year before I came and I think for a year or two after…Oh, and Bert Hampton was here. He was a pageant guy; he wrote pageants and directed them, which we would sometimes do in the old Dornblaser Field which was the old football stadium and track behind where the University Library is now. Let’s see…the Rockefeller people invested a bundle of money in some of the programs here in Montana: some community based things, some campus based things. I wish I could be more clear. I do know something about one of them. Joseph Kinsey Howard, who lived in Great Falls, was the editor of the Leader which is a Great Falls paper that doesn’t exist anymore. His Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome is still the best history of the state of Montana. If you haven’t read this, you should. It’s a tremendous book. Joe, under the

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University of Montana-Missoula.

sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, had some writers’ conferences here in the summer months when I was here. He had people from all over. I tell you, this was really a hotshot bunch. Joe lived in Great Falls, in an apartment. For the conference, which lasted about six weeks, he would come to Missoula and rent an apartment which wasn’t nearly big enough for the cocktail parties which writers conferences. Well, it’s required! You can’t have one without the other. We lived at the Fort and had a big house. Joe and Helen and I became friends a long time ago. In any event, Joe asked us one evening, before the conference started if we wouldn’t mind having the writers’ conference’s cocktail parties in our house every afternoon. He said, “I’ll furnish the booze, but we do need a place and you people are very nice.” We said that you’re very nice and yes. So we did. Some of the people…Bernard DeVoto was always there, Bud Guthrie was always there, Leslie was usually there, several editors from the east. I remember looking around my living room in one of these parties and there were five Pulitzer Prize winners. We’re just crawling with this kind of talent on this campus. Joe died in 1953 and after that time, I sort of backed off. Walter Clark, I guess, did some of it. I left in ’56, so I wasn’t a party to it anymore.

But if you look at Missoula today, you’ll find that it’s still crawling with writers. Connie Poten. Do you know Connie? She lives up the Rattlesnake. She has an article in the recent National Geographic on poaching.

[Indistinct voices in the background]

LH: Dee McNamer—you see her name. She does movie reviews to buy the groceries, but she writes books. Rima in the Weeds is a splendid book. [James] Welch, of course, is here now. [Richard] Hugo made a big, big splash when he was here. Mildred Walker lived in Great Falls and she was the wife of a cardiologist and she wrote widely. Her Winter Wheat is, I think, the best of her things. She’s returned. Her daughter married Hugo. One of her daughters married Hugo. I guess they say that Wiley Street, you know up the Rattlesnake—Shakespeare after Shakespeare after Shakespeare. Missoula, Montana is widely known as a Mecca for writers. They just come here and stay.

I met some interesting people. I was walking at the Fort the other day and I ran into a man and his wife who’d been here for their son’s graduation from the University. They were spending a couple of days looking at the countryside and we chatted a bit about all sorts of things. He was an engineer, retired. They said, “Our son is going to stay in Missoula. He can’t possibly find a job in his field or any other field in Missoula, but he’s not going to leave.” Well, what’ll we do? Sleep under a bridge or fry hamburgers and McDonalds or something. I think this country gets in your blood. I came back. I left in ’57 and came back in ’77.

AP: You were in Eugene for 20 years?

LH: No, I went back to Wisconsin. I spent a bunch of time working as a consultant on the development of theaters and fine arts centers. For a while, there was a lot of money. There

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University of Montana-Missoula.

used to be a lot of money in this country to do good things, like working with colleges to help them improve their offerings. Among these projects that were going on all over the place were buildings. It takes a little doing. An architect is not able to know all of the needs of a theater, or a library, or a chemistry lab. We have come, fortunately, in recent years to hiring specialists who know what needs to be in the theater building and the relationship of its various parts. So I did a bunch of that. Then, I developed, on paper and in my head, a plan for a regional theater which we don’t have enough time to really talk about.

Out of my work at the University of Wisconsin and the extension program and the touring I did here with Shakespeare, I came more and more to feel the need to take the best of our students in theater—the ones who wanted to make it their life work—and give them an opportunity after they graduate, finish baccalaureate, a master’s degree, or whatever to concentrate on acting, if that’s their bag, or play writing, or design, or whatever under the aegis of the best people one can find. I was going to put together a program that would employ the best directors, the best designers, I could find to work with a cross section of the best students in the country for a 12 month period to prepare and tour productions. I worked it out very carefully—and I’d worked on it for a number of years—and finally had a little encouragement and a little bit of money and a few small grants and started looking for a place to do it. Well, I wanted from the beginning to headquarter in Missoula and encompass all or parts of ten states out here. We called it Western States Regional Theater. But I needed a lot of money—really a lot of money. This was not a penny ante thing; you had to have the bucks to do it. In 1977, I needed 25 million dollars. That is a bundle of money. I came out here to do some exploring. Some of the people on this list and others…I just presented what I had to say and I got…I knew some of the politicians and some of the business people. Some of my former students are now important business people, rich business people. Everybody said, “Hey come, this sounds great.” The governor was interested. George Turman, who was lieutenant governor at the time, was interested, along with a bunch of other people in Helena. The upshot of the whole thing was that I got a major grant—a regional grant—from a program that no longer exists to explore the economic feasibility of this thing.

So I had lots of money for a couple of years to travel around the country, coast-to-coast to meet with foundations, major corporations, and all the rest, to discuss the plan, which everybody said was magnificent, but they were also looking for those few dollars that were kicking around for nonprofit. Nineteen seventy-seven, seventy-eight was exactly the wrong time to start looking for money. Two years earlier, I could have found 25 million dollars. But there were corporations—Champion, for example. The local Champion people were excited about this. They wanted to give me a million bucks, but this had to come out of the corporate headquarters. They figured that if I had that million, then this could act as a lever, a kind of domino. Then Weyerhaeuser would say, “Hey, wait a minute,” and Georgia Pacific would say, “Hey, wait a minute,” and Louisiana Pacific and all the rest. So, you know, the dreamers. But we didn’t get it. I worked on it for a number of years and then I did a couple of other things and then I went off into the Peace Corps. Fiddle-dee-dee, enough of this nonsense—

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University of Montana-Missoula.

But I did want to come back to Montana. I still think this would be an ideal place to do this and I look with great pleasure at what Jim Caron has done with the Children’s Theater program. To do the program I wanted, I need about 40 million today. I don’t have the energy left to do this kind of thing. But, if I were looking for someone to develop the program I had in mind, I would look for someone like Jim Caron who has a tremendous imagination and a lot of skill. I’m delighted to see the program here. I’m, frankly, disappointed in what I’ve seen happen on campus for years and years and years. I don’t go to the theater anymore except to see an occasional thing that Jim does. When I got back, people told me they stopped going to the theater when Bonnie and I left. But Jim Caron has developed something very good and Missoula is a good place for theater.

I don’t know anything about the University now. I’m pretty much disenchanted with what I’ve seen on other campuses over the years: a gradual increase in administration at a point where there are people with titles I would never have dreamt of. I don’t know how many associate and assistant deans one needs to do things. I was around when all of this was happening. I would need somebody in Children’s Theater and couldn’t find money for it, but somebody found twice that much money to buy a dean to help another dean to help another dean. I had a marvelous professor at Cornell of literary and rhetorical criticism. He wanted me to get out of theater and go into something sensible like literary and rhetorical criticism. He used to say, “You get yourself a professorial chair in criticism and don’t mess around with anything after the Renaissance and you’ll have a very pleasant life.”

I would say, “Marvin, how many chairs are available in America.”

He said, “Well, there are three.”

I said, “How many are available?”

He said, “Well, mine isn’t!” But he did have lots of marvelous stories. One of them had them had to do with his first year as a graduate student at the University of Heidelberg on some kind of a grant, umpteen years ago. He’d gone to American universities and when you get on a campus, you go look for the registrar. He got on the campus there and he found a bunch of old, dilapidated buildings and people walking around—some in robes, some not in robes—and he kept asking in German, which he managed reasonably well, for the Registrar’s Office or the administration building or who’s in charge. Here I am a student fresh from America and nobody’s doing anything about it. Finally, someone who had been on an American campus realized what he was faced with and guided him to a building and took him down in the basement. Marvin said that they opened a door and here was a little man, crouching over a desk mounted this high with stuff. He was the registrar, the dean. He wrote the salary checks. He was the administration of the University of Heidelberg.

When I see mention of salaries: these recent remarks in the paper about the regents gathering together. We need some raises for our top administrators. Who is it? The chancellor, who is

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University of Montana-Missoula.

making 98,000 dollars, said he didn’t really need a raise because he was reasonably well paid! How many good teachers could get hired for that? How many fees could you waive for students who don’t have the money? I try not to feel bitter about this, but I went off to college in about 1937 or 8. University of Wisconsin: a good university. I went to it because I couldn’t afford anything else. I was a Wisconsin kid. Tuition there was 38 dollars a semester. I had a four-year tuition fee and book scholarship and I couldn’t have managed without it. And now, you sell your birthright and your life forever and ever.

I have a niece who is in her third year of medical school and she’s going to be something like 175,000 dollars in debt. She’s 24 years old. I asked her once what she was going to do with all of her money when she became an M.D. She said, “I’m going to pay it back.”

I think, in general, the whole university thing disturbs me so much because we’re pricing our kids—and our grandchildren—out of education at a time when, God knows, we need more and more of it—

[End of Tape 2, Side A]

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University of Montana-Missoula.

[Tape 2, Side B]

LH: —you know, we used to have levels of admission requirements, when I started school. You had to be in the upper ten or fifteen percent of your high school graduating class to get into the University of Wisconsin. You could get into some of the, what were then called, normal schools or teachers’ colleges if you were not. And then there was kind of a six-week flunk out date at the university. If you didn’t make the upper whatever it was in your class, you were finished. You went home and they called it the “Sore Eye Special”. You studied so hard, you got sore eyes and you couldn’t study anymore, so you were home. But there were opportunities in occupational areas. There were still people going into apprenticeships in the trades, which were tremendously important: builders, carpenters, plumbers, electricians. I don’t know that these opportunities are available today, but every…This happened in the state of Wisconsin and I think it was pretty typical in the Middle-West and perhaps on the West Coast that every congressional district had a teachers’ college and every county had a normal school. The teachers’ college was four years and that prepared people to teach high school. The county school prepared people to teach in the one room schoolhouse, of which there were still lots and lots and lots.

All of this was, for all practical purposes, free. Everything today is so very expensive. How long does it take today? Five or six years if you’re working, probably. I don’t know what kind of a repair job we’re going to have to make. Again, I hate to say, “It used to be that…” But it was. The presidents of the University of Wisconsin during the time I was there—and I lived in Madison for about ten years—were all scholars. They took administrative jobs reluctantly. Now, people take administrative jobs because it pays a lot of money and there’s an awful lot of prestige. It’s much more important now to be a university president than it is to be a university professor. I do recall when the presidency at the University of Wisconsin was open and E.B. Fred, who taught in one of the agricultural sciences, was urged to take on the presidency. The university at that time was 10,000 students. Faculty from all disciplines knew the man and knew that he would be a good president. He finally agreed to do it, but he said, in effect, “I’ll take the job if it doesn’t interfere with my teaching.” So he was given some help to run the President’s Office at the great university of Wisconsin. Lots of presidents today have lots of help, but it’s a brand new ballgame. You don’t hear anybody say, “Well, I’ll be president if it doesn’t interfere with my teaching.” It used to be that your dean was your equal. He was the guy who was supposed to make it easy for you to get your work done. I have had deans—not in recent years—but I’ve had deans who were your antagonist, presidents who were your antagonist. I don’t know that this is universal. I’m very glad I’m not teaching.

I think if I were to start all over again today, I would not go into the university system. Would not go into the university world. I’m not sure what I would do. I think I would go into agro-forestry and go work around the international scene. The world is full of people who are hungry. The opportunities in third world countries to do good things, useful things, are tremendous. I think this would be very exciting. If I were to make a recommendation to a young person today—and I’ve also been very careful not to make recommendations—I would say this

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University of Montana-Missoula.

is a great thing. Or, go off into the Peace Corps for two years and then make a decision, then come back and decide what you’re going to do with your life. I don’t really know very many university professors anymore. The ones I know are retired, like me who do a lot of grousing about today and how good the good old days were, which is kind of crazy. I remember one of my friends in the University of Oregon days. We were grousing about something really angry, angry, angry and, finally, he looked at me and he said, “Hey, LeRoy, ten years from now these will have been the good old days.” Which of course, is true.

I feel very strongly the need to be of service to fill some of the needs that so many people have. I guess, I’ve felt this and sort of lived with it all my life, but the Peace Corps really did it for me. I didn’t know what I was going to find in Ghana, West Africa. I was appalled by what I found. A man and his wife in Ghana, for example, may need five kids to reach adulthood who will help feed them when they’re unable to work anymore. In order to have those five kids who survive, they better have ten because five of them are going to die. I mentioned earlier before we started the machine going sort of how you get acquainted with people in Africa. I would have a regular route to various stores and places to buy things or do things. I would meet the same little kids all the time. If the kids aren’t afraid of you because they’re looking at white skin, then they’re very, very friendly. Sometimes, in some places and some villages, they’ve never seen anybody with white skin, so they’ll run screaming.

In Ghana, you have a name depending on the day on which you were born. If you were born on Saturday, your name would be Ama. If I were born on Saturday, my name would be Kwami. My name would be Kwami LeRoy William Hinze. It can get very complicated because they do also add names for special relatives. But the name that is very important is your day name, your birth name, because then you have a special relationship with other Kwamis or other Amas. So, one of the first things that people want to know is what is your name. It’s one of the first things you learn in any language in Ghana. There are 25 of them. Your frewasane (?) in Fante and Twi, which is where I worked and what I was doing. This is what the little kids would say: “What is your name, your frewasane?” If I said Kwami and their name was Kwami, then all hell broke loose! They would look for me. We’d shake hands and I’d give them something. Mothers were flattered that their son had a special relationship with a white haired obruni, white man. You walk along the street and you’d meet your little Kwamis and most of them called me Papa Obruni. Obruni is white man. I got to expecting to talk and to meet these little kids, my little kids. From time to time, I wouldn’t see one of them for a while.

I would see the mother in two or three days and say, “Where’s Kwami?”

“Oh, he died.” It doesn’t take very many of these to make you look at what could you have done so that little Kwami didn’t die when he was three years old. And then you think back to what you did for your own kids back here: all of the shots, all of the medical this, the medical that, and the concern you had for what they ate and what they drank and all of the rest of it. Ghanaian mothers are not hard hearted, but they…How can you convince a Ghanaian mother to boil water to kill the bugs in the water? You don’t see any bugs in the water. So, the little kids

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University of Montana-Missoula.

drink it and everybody figures that, over the centuries, their bodies have learned to handle this. In a sense, this is true and, for some of them, it is true—and for some of the whites who live over there. I knew a nun from Rhode Island who lived in Ghana. She was almost my neighbor. She lived in Ghana for 40 years. She didn’t take any of the precautions: she didn’t take chloroquine to ward off the malaria; she didn’t boil water; she didn’t soak the vegetables in an iodine solution. She’d been there forever and she said, “God’s going to take me when he wants me.” Then, you’d look at…this room would be big enough for ten or twelve people.

We talked about service. The high paying manufacturing jobs are gone. This is what we’re talking about today. Everybody’s going to fry hamburgers or wash cars or work in the supermarket and take credit cards and all the rest. The real service jobs are in areas where there is some impact on the wellbeing of people, not only in third world countries, but in the good old US of A: the Indian reservations, the refugee camps. I’ve been working for three years trying to get a gardening program going with some of the immigrant Russian families—a gardening program to raise food for the food bank. All of these things are sort of flopping along, but finally something is happening. We have a piece of land at Fort Missoula. The Refugee Assistance Corporation has gotten themselves involved and suddenly we have some families gardening. Sort of on the principle—it’s a Peace Corps principle really—if you give a man a fish, he can eat a meal. If you give him a fish hook and teach him how to fish, he can take care of himself. The director of the food bank in Missoula is a very interesting guy, Bill Carey. Do you know Bill?

AP: I just know who he is. I’ve heard him talk.

LH: Bill was a Peace Corps volunteer in India about 20, 25 years ago. When I came up with this notion of a volunteer garden program to raise food for the food bank, he, of course, was one of the people I talked with, as well as some of the county officials because I wanted some land and all the rest and some of the environmental science people at the university when Chuck Jonkel was still there. We had a number of things going. There are now some gardens going: the Northside Community Gardens grew out of some of this; there’s a new group of three people, one of them fresh out of the Peace Corps, Clark Fork Organics, who have a couple of acres on River Road, again an organic garden; the Russian people at the fort. Much of this stuff takes time and I think it’s almost necessary to have been in the Peace Corps to be aware of that because time in Ghana for example doesn’t mean the same thing as time in the good old US of A. It’s kind of mind boggling to realize that we live by the clock here. Everybody I knew in Ghana who could afford it had a watch, but it really wasn’t necessary to wind it because time didn’t make all that much difference. I can’t tell you how many times until I discovered the system.

Some of the people on the campus would say, “We’re having a meeting at two o’clock in the director’s office tomorrow afternoon to talk about this and we wish you would to advise with us on this and this.” I would go. There would be nobody there. They hadn’t figured to have a meeting at all. They just thought it would be a nice thing to tell me that they were having a meeting. After a while, you didn’t go. It was a very casual kind of thing. You learned very soon if

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you asked someone on the street, and you needed to in a crowd in the capitol where everything happened, a million and a half people, “How do you get to the British High Commission?” I remember asking somebody that. The British High Commission had a new building and I didn’t know where it was. This very nice guy, very well spoken, excellent English, told me exactly how to get there. I walked a mile and quarter in the heat of the tropics about noon and it wasn’t there, but it would have been rude of him not to tell me! He was a very polite guy, so he told me. You learned very soon that if somebody knew where something was, they would take you there. Very polite people.

The need for things…Just outside the campus wall, one gate that I went through often, was a covered, open pavilion about 30 square feet with a lot of benches. There were meetings of various kinds there. This is one of the places where the visiting nurses came from Accra to vaccinate children, babies. I would, from time to time, see the operation. Everything was wide open. I walked right past them. The nurses would go down the line stabbing a child, going on to the next one, with the same needle, the same everything. They needed needles. They needed needles, period. That’s all they needed. They knew how to do it, but they didn’t have any needles. We were given, as part of our medical kit, a sealed, sterile hypodermic set. If, God willing had never happened, we had to have some kind of injection, instead of letting the doctor or nurse or whoever use their own equipment, we were instructed to say, politely, that we know that you don’t have very many of these and I don’t want to take any of yours away so why don’t you use mine. When I came back, I thought, I could go tell this story to 20 people and raise 1,000 dollars and buy needles. A third of these kids were going to die in their first year.

It was very strange when I came back to the States. I was medevaced. I had a rash that would hop from one part of the body to the other, like hives. The hand would swell up and the foot and my face. They couldn’t figure out what it was except that, obviously, I was allergic to something. I talked to the regional Peace Corps doctor and the medical officer. We fussed with this and I had medication for about a month. Finally, they said you’ve got to go back to Washington and let’s get this thing straightened out. I got back the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. I could see the Peace Corps nurse who took care of the African folks for medevac and make some tentative appointments, but here was a three or four day weekend where nothing could happen. When I landed at Dulles, the rash disappeared. Nobody’s been able to figure that one out. Here I had four or five days and George and Jean Jonkel lived in Laurel. He was at Tucks (?) at the wildlife refuge.

I called him and I said, “Hey, I’m here for the weekend.”

They said, “No, you’re going to come out and stay with us.” We had an absolutely marvelous, marvelous weekend. We shopped because I wanted to take back things for some of the children. Kids over there didn’t get toys; they built their own things—very, very ingenious use of tin cans and sticks to make toy cars and what not. But I never saw anything like a stuffed animal, for example. I told some of these stories to George and Jean and Jean said, “We’re going to make a tour of the second hand shops and buy a whole bunch of those things and you

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University of Montana-Missoula.

can take them back.” Well, I ended up with about 25 stuffed animals.

But, after that weekend—and it was a marvelous one—I went back to my place. The Peace Corps leases a floor on a Ramada Inn in Washington for the medevacs and I had a room there. The first thing they do when they get you in the country…Well, before I left, somebody handed me a couple hundred dollars, which you were rich if you had that kind of money. Then, when I got to Washington, I had to sign lots of papers and somebody gave me some more money. So, I had all this money. My roommate at the Ramada Inn was a medevac out of Central America somewhere and he’d been back for about a week. So, he was back in touch with reality again. He was going to the grocery store. We had a little kitchen in this room.

He said, “Do you want to go along?”

I said, “Sure.” We went into really a very small supermarket. I had all of this money. I had maybe had 300 dollars in my pocket. I got a shopping cart and I walked around this store. I walked and I walked and I walked and I didn’t know what to buy! Here was all of this…everything you wanted. Well, I left. I didn’t buy anything. I went back the next day because I knew I had to adjust to the real world, at least temporarily. I came out of that shopping trip with a bag of M & Ms, which is standard Peace Corps fare. If anybody comes to see you in the Peace Corps—any of the Peace Corps staff from Washington—they bring lots and lots and lots of chewing gum and M & Ms. I ended up with M & Ms. My mind is still boggled when I walk into a big grocery store. I think, when I buy something, I look at these shelves and all I need is some money. It’s here; it’s available. There’s nothing there. Rule of thumb in Ghana—in Africa—if you see something and you think you’ll ever need it, buy it because it won’t be there tomorrow.

I guess this is why I saw that if you want to do something about something—some of the problems that the whole world faces and that summit in Rio really confirmed this—we’ve got to send some of our best young people out into the international scene. While you can get a start with it in the Peace Corps, what happens…and you do touch the lives of people, but it’s only a two year stint. There are an amazing number of people in international service who were Peace Corps volunteers. USAID, Catholic Relief Services, State Department just crawls with former Peace Corps volunteers because they left jobs undone.

It made perfect sense for me to do what I did when I was a young man. I wanted to work in theater, I didn’t want to be in professional theater, I didn’t want to be an actor, and I wanted what I thought was the freedom to work as one would find at a University, and I studied with some splendid people at the University of Wisconsin. It was perfectly clear and perfectly reasonable for me to do what I did at the time. I don’t think that whatever contribution I was able to make over the 35 years or so that I was involved in the university world I could make again. I know I could make if I were to go to Africa. I could make it in just one country. I could make it in Ghana. I could make it in a tiny little piece of Ghana. I think, too, that we should have some universal service for everybody in America, every young person when he finishes high

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University of Montana-Missoula.

school or college or whatever. This could vary an awful lot—high school or college or vocational training or whatever. It could be overseas stuff; it could be like the VISTA program in the United States; it could be something like the Teachers Corps, which is kind of a brand new program that some young person dreamed up two or three years ago and suddenly there are hundreds, I guess, young people going off to teach in schools in America where they need teachers. We’ve got to share this. We’ve got to share what we have.

The whole Indian scene in America is really distressing. You’ll notice that I’ve got Indian stuff all over the place. I have a pretty wide acquaintance among the Indians. This has come a little late in my life. The suicide rate in young Indian people is just mind boggling. I think one of the best things that are happening in the Indian world in Montana is the Salish-Kootenai College in Pablo. I’ve gotten acquainted with some of the folks up there. As a matter of fact, I wanted to bring…I really would like to win the lottery and have some bucks to do some of this stuff. I’d like to bring some young Ghanaians to America to go to school. I’d like to put them not at the University of Montana or the University of Wisconsin—any of these places—but at places like Salish-Kootenai College. I’ve talked with some of the folks there. We’ve tried to figure out ways to do this and haven’t had any success. This is a small school with a lot of personal attention and there’s a lot of caring, which would be necessary bringing Ghanaians into…I’m not saying that everybody over there needs their hands held. One of my good friends in Winneba where I lived was director of the National Academy of Music. He had an MFA from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD from Ohio State. He was back to do good things in his country. He managed an undergraduate degree at the University of London and two graduate degrees in America. He’s more American than he is Ghanaian. Ninety-five percent of other people who might have tried the same thing couldn’t have done it. There are lots of wealthy people in Ghana whose kids go to school in London and graduate school in America

[End of Tape 2, Side B]

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University of Montana-Missoula.

[Tape 3, Side A]

LH: —per capita than any other state. It’s kind of a standing joke. I mentioned this to a couple of friends. I didn’t know about it until I came back. Somebody said, sure you can do anything to get out of the state. If you are serious about this, a stint in the Peace Corps opens an amazing number of doors in other areas. I met, at the American Club in Accra, a young lady who was maybe 35 years old. I met her at breakfast. This is sort of the embassy club. Peace Corps volunteers have honorary memberships. One can have good food there and good drink. It’s a good place to go. Anyway, I met this gal and she was with Catholic Relief Services. She had been in several countries and she was second in command in Ghana. She was told—not in so many words, I guess—that she could never expect to direct a Catholic Relief Services program in any country because she had never served as a Peace Corps volunteer. She had her application in. The movement to other areas. There’s a marvelous lady who is director of the U.S. Information Service in Ghana. Her name is Roberta Jones. She’s a Billings gal. She came on to international service through service in the Peace Corps as a Peace Corps volunteer. This gathering in Swan Lake a couple of weeks ago sort of reminded me of so many of these people who had excellently marvelous lives doing all of these splendid things in a dozen countries. Peace Corps volunteers end up being a country director somewhere. I met a volunteer, a guy by the name of (unintelligible) a very important man at the embassy. It was Kirkland, who served somewhere in Africa in the Peace Corps. When he finished, he managed to get transportation to the tip of Africa and he walked from the tip of Africa all the way to Italy. Because he said, I wanted to see it, I wanted international service. And that’s a long walk.

AP: LeRoy, I hate to do this, but we do need to kind of wind down and there are so many fascinating stories.

LH: Tell me how to do it.

AP: I’m not sure. It just seems so abrupt to go back to the University, but in summary there might be a couple questions there. Maybe this one would be a good summary.

LH: I think my work here at the University was kind of a second step in shaping what I did. My first professional job was with the University of Wisconsin in the Extension Service. The title of the job was Community Theater Director and my territory was the state. This position was a part of a larger program. There was a person in music, one in writing, one in painting. It started out as a rural arts program. The program was predicated on the very important principle of the University of Wisconsin, which states that the borders of the campus of the University are the borders of the state. If you work for the University of Wisconsin, you were expected to serve the state. I was specifically assigned and paid to do just that. I did this for a couple of years. You got to know the immense resources and the immense needs and desires of people in the state to do a lot of things that they could do pretty happily if they had just a little bit of help.

Well, I came to Montana then and here was this massive state—Wisconsin fits in Montana a

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University of Montana-Missoula.

couple of times at least—to start a program which I was expected to develop. This was the assignment. We were told then, this is your job; don’t bother me unless I can help. The department I began to develop and the people I brought in to teach and work in the department had the same concept that we were a service to, not just the students in the classroom, or the other students on the campus, or Missoula county, but the whole state. It was our job to do something in the arts for the whole state. I guess this just went on and on and on whatever I did, wherever I went. I don’t think I really understood it until I had some peace and quiet in the Peace Corps, where I was off doing just this. I’ve done this all my life: I did it in theater, I did it in Eugene, or I did it in Baraboo, Wisconsin or whatever, and now I’m doing it in Ghana. Lo and behold, it didn’t take very long before this one farm I was supposed to help develop—or at least organize and develop—soon attracted the attention of the USAID people as the pilot program for the all of the places in the country. I don’t know. It just happens. This has been delightful. I’m so glad to meet you.

AP: It’s just been wonderful.

[End of Interview]