Victor Strecher
                                          February 4,2003
                                           Fred Honhart,
                                            interviewer
Honhart: This is Fred Honhart and I'm with Vic Strecher. It is February 4, 2003. As you can see,
we've got a tape recorder here. Do you we have your permission to tape this?
Strecher: Yes, you have.
Honhart: Good. If you could start out just giving some of your background, where you were born
and raised.
Strecher: Like Ralph [Turner], I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, actually spent
about eight of my years on Pewaukee Lake, and then moved to Milwaukee and attended the public
schools through high school and then attended the University of Wisconsin Extension in
Milwauk,ee as a chemistry student for almost two years.
        My folks were both-factory workers, immigrants from Slovenia and Hungary, and my dad
                                  \
was a welder and my mother was an inspector of electrical parts at Globe Union. My dad worked
on airplane engines during World War II and all of that, so we had some connection with the war
effort.
        We lived on the north side, whereas Ralph lived on the west side of the city. He went to
Washington High School and I went to Rufus King High School, but my wife went to Washington
some years after Ralph did. We're about fifteen years' different in age.
                                                 1


 Honhart: What's your birth date?
 Strecher: July 29, '31, and just about fifteen years, half a generation separated us. I went to
 Madison, after being a chemistry student, to be a music student. 1'd been studying music, privately
 scratching a few bucks together here and there in Milwaukee, with an old composer and a choral
conductor and a sax player, who once played with [Stan] Kenton, and things like that.
         So I majored in music at Wisconsin in Madison-starving-spring semester of '51, and
that's how I got to find my way to Ralph. What happened, I took all my classes in Bascom Hall up
on the hill, or in Music Hall at the bottom of that hill, and I lived in a two-dollar-a-week room
across from the railroad tracks, and on my way to school, I would walk past a row of buildings on
State Street, one of which was the Wisconsin State Crime Lab. It was just a storefront lab with
paint up to about chin level, so I would walk past and 1'd look in at these guys.
         Back then I was just a total musician. I went in one day and I said, "What are you cats
doing here?" you know, like some dance musician. [Laughs]
         They said, "Well, we analyze evidence." I met the head of the lab, who was named Wilson,
and he showed me around. He was very cordial, and he knew I was a student.
         I said, "How do you get to be one of these?"
         He said, "Well, old Doc Matthews, the head of the chemistry department here, trained a few
people, but the person he trained the most highly is over at Michigan State, but why don't you go
and see Doc. He might take you on since you've had two years of chern." So I did, and he was in
his office and he showed me through his lab, all of the instruments that he himself had developed
that, later, Ralph acquired, in fact, wanted to put on display here on the campus, and that didn't
                                                    2


 work out. But he showed me his comparison microscope and he showed me his little camera that
 goes over a developed fingerprint with an internal light source, and demonstrated all these.
          1 asked him if he would take me on through the rest of my chemistry degree and if 1 could
 become his apprentice, and he said "I would, but I'm going on a sabbatical for two years and it's a
 retirement sabbatical, and I'm going to spend as much of it in Europe as 1 can, but here." Gave me
 Ralph Turner's name, address, and phone number. So 1 wrote a letter, not expecting-you know, 1
 didn't know anything at that time. So 1 wrote a letter saying that I'd be interested in working with
 Ralph, and he immediately-I mean, 1 don't think a week passed-he immediately sent me an
 application for Michigan State [University], and a nice letter, and invited me to come over. He
 said, "Get your transcripts and so forth." Well, 1 did, right away.
          This was 1951, and it was late spring. Michigan State had an enormous influx of veterans
 at that time. They were jammed in everywhere, the married housing complexes and the Quonset
huts, all the rest of it.
          So 1 stayed in touch with Ralph and asked if 1 was going to be accepted, because 1 hadn't
gotten an acceptance. So he said, "Come on over."
          So 1 packed my one suitcase and got on a bus and came to East Lansing. 1 got off the bus
and walked across to the campus with my suitcase and went into the administration building, and
they said, "Yes, you have been accepted." They directed me to the College of Business and Public
Service, and Dean Weingarten [phonetic] was in charge at that time. They had an acceptance for
me and they said, "You have to stay in a dormitory. Go to Philips Hall," and all the rest of that.
So 1 did that, and then 1 walked over to the Quonset huts, where 1 was directed, and met Ralph for
the first time, during registration week of the fall term. We had quarters then. So 1 met him, 1 took
                                                     3


 his criminalistics investigation courses and others, fingerprint course for one credit, everything he
 offered.
 Honhart: What was he like as a teacher?
 Strecher: Of course, because of his speech impediment, he was a very deliberate, careful teacher,
 and his style of delivery was not especially liked by a lot of students. They would get impatient.
 He would hang up on a word and he would then get out a cigar. Today that would be unthinkable,
but he'd get out a cigar and he'd handle it a little bit and sometimes he'd light it, if he really got
hung up.
Well, the impediment, over the years, really changed a great deal. Back then it was still a little bit
severe. He told me at one time, when he took over the Kansas City Crime Lab in 1938, It think it
was, or started it, really, initiated it, I've been told, he told me he could barely speak at all. It was
very hard for him to communicate, and sometimes on the witness stand that was difficult. But by
this time-he used to tell me, "Well, at one time, I couldn't talk and now I make my living
talking," and he was quite proud of the fact that he had beaten it.
         But I was one of those who thought, "Well, he does take a long time to say things, but he is
the most thorough preparer." I'll tell you how thorough. I took police records management from
him, and a lot of students would say, "Ah, that stuff." Ten years later, in 1962, I was assistant
director of planning in the St. Louis Police Department, and we had to redo our entire record
system. We were going to move into new quarters and computerize it. Everything that Ralph
taught in 1952, spring, worked ten years later in st. Louis. Every single thing. Master name index
files, numbers connected with alphabetic file. Everything. All the principles he taught were
                                                       4


 absolutely germane to what I did, and it ended up with a fifty-four-page project in the procedures
 manual, how to run the records bureau, and it was about half Ralph Turner. Just astonishing how
 well he had taught me because I just plain remembered what he had taught me.
         Among teachers, Bob Scott, of course, was the philosopher lawyer, and he was entertaining,
he was popular, he was glib.
Honhart: Lots of puns.
Strecher: Yes, oh, yes, pun master.
Honhart: Exactly.
Strecher: He got off some puns that were unbelievably quick and could not have been forethought.
Astonishing mind. But that's not Ralph.
Honhart: No.
Strecher: But years later, my reflection was that I may have used Bob's ethical teachings a great
deal and, perhaps, humanistic outlook, but I used Ralph's knowledge much more. So they
influenced students in totally different ways. Ralph, what he taught was so principled and
grounded in reality that it all stayed. The investigation course, I can deal with criminal
investigation today from the notebook that I wrote in his course. It's as good as most of what we
see in the textbooks.
                                                    5


         Of course, he had us do a lot of practical work, and he taught us about firearms. He would
 bring all kinds of guns to the class, which today you'd have a furor over something like that. But
 we'd go to a range and fire some and he'd show how the FBI teaches quick loading and things like
 that. He taught us about the practical pistol course versus target shooting.
         His breadth of knowledge was astonishing. Everywhere he went, he learned something, and
 he went everywhere he could. He had a list at one time of nineteen or twenty things he wanted to
 do in his lifetime, and I once saw the list, but it's been so many years. But one of the things was
 Machu Picchu, and that was way back before it became a tourist attraction. He wanted to see China
 very much, and he wanted to see Polynesia. He wanted to see South America, Australia, Africa,
 and the Middle East. But that was just one item. He wanted at see the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon, for instance.
Honhart: You'd have a little problem with that one.
Strecher: He wrote these things at some point in his life out of intense curiosity to see what is that
really like. So he had the list and he may have scratched some of them off, but my feeling is that he
probably got most ofthem. He was pretty persistent about getting to China and getting back to
China. He wanted the mainland so badly, but he took Taiwan as a substitute two or three times,
and then finally got to the mainland.
         Back to-I realize I've strayed way off Ralph as a teacher, but, you know, we were in those
Quonset huts and they were connected to the campus police station, because Art was the chief of
the campus police as well as having the school. So our offices were right there and we would see
                                                      6


 each other all the time. One thing Ralph didn't do, he didn't forget about students once they
 graduated.
 Honhart: That's my next question.
 Strecher: He always stayed in touch with people and remembered who they were and what they
were doing and was always interested in how they were doing. So on the campus police, when I
made sergeant, he-
Honhart: Okay, let me clarify. You went from graduating from MSU and then joined the campus
police?
Strecher: I did.
Honhart: That's my assumption.
Strecher: I did. Los Angeles PD [Police Department] at that time was advertising that they wanted
educated people from all over the country, and my field training partner, Charlie Eggleer, and I
both wrote them letters, to personnel, and never got a response. Charlie went with the Department
of Corrections, I went with the campus police because I wanted some immediate experience.
Actually, I got to do things I wouldn't have got to do in a big city department for several years. I
got a detective assignment in which I worked on a homicide and several sexual assaults, and some
serious drug things.
                                                   7


Honhart: Here on campus?
Strecher: Yes, all on campus, or involving the campus in some way. For instance, there was a
gang of people who were stripping cars and stealing cars and they were working out of Laingsburg.
I was on detective duty at that time, so I got to work on a stolen-car ring, a car-stripping ring, and
this was four or five people out there in a ramshackle house. One night I'm tailing them there, at
my lieutenant's direction, and I get stuck in a ditch and they come out of the house and I thought,
"Oh boy." Well, our radio in the plain car was in the glove compartment, so they come by and they
say, "Hey, buddy, can we help?" They helped me get my car out there, and about three months
later, we arrested them, after we had compiled everything. They looked at me and said, "Hey,
you're the guy-." But that's a different story, too.
        But, yes, back then, field service training was three semesters long. After you finished all
of your academic work, you had to go-have you heard any of this before?
Honhart: No, go ahead.
Strecher: Ralph said, more than once, that the major difference between Michigan State's program
and any other program in the country was that every student who completed the degree had nine
months of intensive exposure to every agency in criminal justice. Now, that sounds exaggerated,
but we would spend between one and four weeks, four weeks with a state police post, living at the
post, two weeks with a sheriffs department, a total, probably, oftwo or three months in Detroit
with various segments of the Detroit PD, Recorder's Court. We had to be assigned to a court, to
                                                    8


 the Liquor Control Commission, to a retail credit investigative agency, to an industrial security
 plant-I was with Oldsmobile for two weeks on that-with a fire marshal, a major prison for a
 month, a youth facility. Altogether, if you look at the whole thing, you looked at everything at the
 front end of the justice process, juvenile and adult, police, city, county, state, and federal, we all
 went to the Secret Service or the FBI or one of those. I went to three. I went to U.S. Bureau of
Narcotics, U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tax, and Secret Service.
         So we got a view of the local, state, and federal agencies in enforcement. Then we saw the
courts. We spent a week with the prosecuting attorneys' office to see what they do. Then we went
to the juvenile and adult probation, and parole offices, and at least two prisons and several jails.
Well, you can imagine how that was for us. You suddenly have a fairly realistic idea of how the
whole system works.
         Ralph always said that's the difference between Michigan State and these schools where
they crank students through four years of classroom work and out into the field, and you've got to
decide, without any real knowledge, whether you want to be a cop or go into the law or corrections
work or juvenile work. We had a fair idea, after going through all ofthat, and I think our people
went into every one of those kinds of agencies. Everything I just named, I think, people went into,
including, you know, Gordon Kettler [phonetic], who was very big. He started in plant security-
I'm going to get the company wrong-with a major automotive company, and he's now a major
contributor to the program. He's a vice president for security and something else. Anyway, he
started that way. Two heads of the U.S. Secret Service came through the program, you know.
Things like that. The head of the U.S narcotics bureau.
                                                    9


         I look at that and I think this thing was something they put together, between Art and Ralph,
because Ralph was his true sidekick. He was Sancho Panza all the way. But I asked Ralph a
couple times, "Haven't you ever wanted to run it?"
         He said, "No, actually not." Well, that became my ambition, to run a program, but Ralph
said, "No, I'm doing the things that I think are important and Art does what he thinks is important,
and I help him all I can." And he was satisfied with that role all through his career. He knew what
he wanted to be and he was that. But he turned out to be one other thing, and, again, I'm straying
here. I think we'll have to get back to it later. He became the host for the school. I don't think it
was ever explicit. I don't think Art ever said that this would be good. It came out of Ralph's
natural proclivity to get to know people and to enjoy their company and to want to eat and drink
with them.
         But I guess you started this with where I came from, so we pretty much have that.
Honhart: When you came here to MSU, what year was that?
Strecher: '51, September.
Honhart: Ralph had been involved, I know from my work on him, with alcohol research. Was he
still doing that or had he finished that when you came here?
Strecher: Had not at all finished it. He was doing it, and in '53, as a member of the campus police,
I was actually involved in driving home his subjects. He used a lot of police officers from
surrounding agencies as alcohol testing subjects. I remember a lot of East Lansing officers, some
                                                     10


 Lansing, some state police. He never used students; he used police officers who could give
 informed consent. In going through the experiments and doing the tests and everything, they would
 get pretty plastered. Ralph was careful to inform their spouses that this was going on, and I had to
take these guys and had to help them get up to their door in many cases. The fact that I was in
uniform, he thought, would help, and it did. We'd explain, "He's been in this experiment and we
just want to be sure-," because we'd get them to Ralph's lab and we'd get them back home.
         So I watched this with great interest and I would watch them doing the tests, the mirror
tracings and the brake-pedal test response time and all of that, reaction time, and I thought it was
great work. I realized what was going on. At that time, he and his friend, close friend, Bob
Borkenstein at Indiana University, were both doing this kind of work and they were trying to
correlate volumetric results from breath, from urine, and from blood, to see how they compare with
degree of impairment, because obviously there are some differences in where the alcohol is at
various times after ingestion. Borkenstein invented the Breathalyzer and became quite rich from
that. Ralph did a lot of the work that went into that sort of thing, and never went for any kind of a
commercial side of it at all, which is an interesting thing about him. "Borkie" did. Borkie just died
two weeks ago, three weeks ago. Long retired from Indiana. But, yes, the alcohol work was great
work.
         Many years later, I'm now at Sam Houston State University as dean of the College of
Criminal Justice there, and we have fifty Saudi Arabian students, okay? We're training them for
the highway patrol, and it's a two-and-a-half-year project. This was a big program. I hired another
graduate ofMSU, who had been head of investigations for AID for twelve years and then retired
from that, Paul Shields.
                                                    11


 Honhart: Oh, yes.
 Strecher: You know about Paul?
 Honhart: I've met him, I think. He came here for the-
 Strecher: For the opening.
Honhart: Right. Exactly.
 Strecher: Sure. Well, Paul, I hired him to run the program because it was a big thing, and we had a
big segment on alcohol because it is such a problem in Saudi Arabia, which is supposed to be a dry
country, but when they drink-
Honhart: They drink.
Strecher: And that went for the students, too. Well, Ralph ran them through the entire alcohol-
training thing. He spent a week with us, I think. Maybe a little more. So he took all of the results
from those 1950s studies and made use of them in the 1980s with an international audience, and he
used some of the staff there. We had one guy who must have weighed 300 pounds, a former
highway patrolman from California, Art Smith, and Ralph tried to get him impaired, and Art Smith
drank close to a quart of whiskey and was still doing everything well. Ralph wrote this up as a
note. I don't know if it's in his archives, but he wrote it up because he said, "I have never in all my
                                                   12


 years of doing this found anyone who could drink that much and not be impaired." But this guy
 was huge.
         So Ralph still was adjusting his sights thirty years after he did that work, and he wrote it up.
 I don't know ifhe published it anywhere, but he certainly made note of it and said here's a case
 now, where you could take this guy to court with an enormous blood alcohol level and he's doing
 everything correctly. [Laughs] So that was a sidelight on the alcohol studies. But the alcohol
 studies also connected with Marshall Houts, and I'm sure you know about Marsh.
Honhart: Why don't you go ahead.
Strecher: Okay. Marsh Houts came to MSU in about 1956 or '57, and he had been an FBI agent
who worked on the Nazis in South America, helped crack that ring. He'd been a judge. He was
obviously a lawyer, and he was on Erie Stanley Gardner's Court of Last Resort as their head
counsel. He led the law team. In fact, I brought this book because there's a long foreword about
Marsh Houts in The Worried Waitress by Erie Stanley Gardner, and this is not just a note; it's a
three-page dedication to Marsh Houts.
         Well, he was close to Gardner for many years in California before he came to Michigan
State, and then when he started his medical legal journal, Trauma magazine, he moved back and
lived just south of Los Angeles. Anyway, he had a big hillside home and a bunch of kids, eight or
nine kids, and a room for everyone of them in this place. Laguna Beach.
         Trauma magazine was a huge success. It was for lawyers and physicians in all medical
legal cases. It dealt with every issue of dealing with trauma, but especially the legal side that both
doctors and lawyers-
                                                    13


 [Begin Tape 1, Side B]
 Honhart: Okay. We're on tape two, side one, and you're talking about Marshall Houts.
 Strecher: Yes. He was a very, very close friend of Ralph's. I was on the campus police for just
three years, almost exactly, when Art called me in one day. A faculty member had left, Fred
Jurgens, a former FBI agent, who was running the field training program, which was a big job.
Honhart: Yes, from what you described.
Strecher: Oh, yes, and Art needed somebody right now. Fred tripled his salary by going to the
Ford Motor Security detail. They had a twelve-man former FBI outfit run by John Bugas
[phonetic], who had been agent-in-charge in Detroit, and Bugas later became vice president of
International Operations for Ford, moved up the ladder, and so Fred-all the FBI guys who joined
them-this was an elite undercover unit, so-Fred dashed off there on a week's notice and Art
needed somebody, and I'd been through the program just three years before and I knew how it was
run, so I went through all of the things they did. Fred did one more briefing of the students before
he left, the incoming students, and I sat through all of it. So I took over the field training program.
         That involved scheduling-I forget how many at a time, but it would be sixty or eighty
students per term, in all of these agencies and making sure they got everything on the shopping list
and making sure that no more than three went here, no more than four there, no more than two here,
and so forth. Sometimes there were onesies, like the Secret Service. So it was a big scheduling job
                                                   14


 and they wrote two reports a week on things they had observed, and sent them in and those were to
 be graded. Well, I had just left the campus police when Art called me in and said, "How would you
 like to become an instructor here? I'll match your annual salary with a ten-month salary."
         I said, "I'll have to talk to my wife."
         I went to Barbara and she said, "Go back there. Take it." [Laughs] She didn't like my
 being a policeman. She didn't like the gun, you know. So I went back and got on and started doing
this job.
         Fred was doing quite ajob of it and he had tremendous rapport with the agencies. He was
very good with them. For one thing, he was about six-five, you know, big, burly guy, and looked
like a cop.
         So I took that on and I'd just worked for Dick Bemitt, who was director of public safety on
campus at that time. Dick Bemitt came in my last year in the department and one thing he did
influence me greatly, he insisted upon excellent reporting. Up to then, it had been kind of slapdash.
They just weren't that careful, and that's when they split it off from Art and made a full-time chief.
Honhart: Dick was already on the force at that time, wasn't he?
Strecher: No. Dick was then fire marshal.
Honhart: Oh, that's right.
Strecher: And all the campus cops resented this. We all did. We didn't like it at all that Art had
taken the fire marshal, who he'd known many, many years. I think they had a common military
                                                   15


 background. Charlie Becker [phonetic], our campus police lieutenant, had been in the military with
Art, and Charlie was a great interrogator.
         But Dick Bernitt, you know, we saw him checking fire extinguishers and things, and we
didn't think he knew anything about police work. Well, he knew enough to run the department
quite well. But the reporting thing, he bounced back every report he got in his first four months, I
think, and all marked up. I mean, like an editor would do at a newspaper. He was so particular.
Everything had to be correct. "Is this a fact or your surmise?" You know, "The punctuation is
wrong here. Bad choice of words." He did that personally, and then he pushed a lieutenant to do it,
Al Ellis, and then he pushed the sergeants to do it, and I was a sergeant at that time. I went to him
and I said, "I don't think we can get this done. Some of these guys can't write that way."
         He said, "They'll get it done." So we pushed everyone very, very hard. I could write, so I
c.ould also critique.
         Well, when I got into the field training program, I read these reports from the students, and
they were dreadful. I mean, they were worse than the campus police reports, and these were
seniors, you know, within nine months of graduating. So I started doing the same thing. Every
report that came in, I'd bounce back ifit wasn't letter-perfect. Art became aware of this because a
lot of students complained and said, "We can't do this."
         So he called me and he said, "How are you doing this?" I showed him a batch of this stuff
marked up, and he said, "Keep it up." He gave me a grad assistant, Roger Reinke, who had just
graduated and was working on a master's in something, and Roger helped me. He was another
Milwaukean. See, the Milwaukee schools at that time were as good as any in the country, and the
one thing they did was teach you to read and write. If you came out of the public school system,
you could write.
                                                    16


          I think about this a lot because I track it from Dick Bernitt to me and to my successor. They
 kept it up and these guys learned how to write reports because they had to. They were rewriting
 every one of them for quite a while into their first semester in field training.
          So I got the field training program and I had it from 1956 until I left for Vietnam in 1959,
 and Reinke was with me, I think, two of those years.
Honhart: So you were on campus from '51 to '59?
Strecher: Yes.
Honhart: What was it like? From when you first came to when you left, what was it like when you
came, and what sort of changes did you see?
Strecher: You know, part of it' s just plain social change. We lived in the Quonsets. I should say,
we worked in the Quonsets. Most of the campus cops lived in married housing because it was the
most reasonable thing around until they got enough put together to buy a small home. Some of the
faculty lived in the faculty flat-top housing, which was just south of the Quonset huts. Al
Germann, for instance, lived there. I succeeded him in teaching a couple of courses in ' 57 when he
left, for Long Beach.
         The Quonsets had a flavor all their own. The campus police were in Quonset 104, and then
you went to the next Quonset, which had Art's office and the field training office and Betty Rideout
with him. Then there were three more offices, and by that time, by the time I got on the faculty,
Art had made it a true School of Criminal Justice, not police administration anymore. He had
                                                       17


 brought Gordon Sheehe aboard, and I took Sheehe's first course in 1952, fall. That was traffic.
 He'd been a highway patrolman in Massachusetts or Connecticut. Sheehe was a national authority
 on traffic.
         Then Jim Brennan came in. He had been in the New York City Police, a lieutenant in
juvenile, and he had a doctor's degree in social work from St. John's. Got it at night, like most
cops do there.
         Then Frank Day came about the same time. I'm not sure whether Frank Day came before
or after Brennan. They may have been a year apart. But he had been a lieutenant in the New York
City PD and he was the aide to Steve Kennedy, the commissioner, when they were visited by
Carmen DiSapio and some other top political guys and the local head of the mafia. Steve Kennedy
was told, "You're going to open up on prostitution and gambling in certain precincts, and the
detectives from these precincts will do the pick-ups and bring it to the precinct station, where the
captain will then handle it from there on."
         And Kennedy said, "I won't do that," and so within less than a month, he was vice president
of Consolidated Edison, and the chief of detectives was brought in and he did open up and Frank
Day quit. That's why he left. He had gotten his law degree at St. John's at night, so he joined the
faculty.
         This is maybe too much detail. I don't know.
Honhart: No. It's great.
Strecher: Okay. But Frank came, occupied the office right next to Jim Brennan, so in the morning,
you know, there'd be coffee. Gordon Sheehe and Frank Day and Jim Brennan, and I'd be just
                                                  18


 down the hall from them, one office, I think, from Day. So we'd all get together over coffee and
 talk a little bit in the morning, do our classes.
          Then Houts came. Houts came maybe when I did. Anyway, he took over a lot of law
 courses that had been taught by Jack Ryan, who went overseas to head the Vietnam project. Jack
had run the field training program, too, before Jurgens, so we had a succession of people through
there and we got to know each other. For instance, just a vignette. When I was a campus cop, yes,
Marsh Houts was there my last year as a campus cop, because they were having moot court trials
based on setup investigations, so they had these police officer classes, basic classes, and the FBI
was involved in helping with those. They made me Johnny Lightfingers, a notorious burglar. I was
in a room in Kellogg Center and they came to arrest me, and I ran for it and went to the car and
they surrounded the car and they pulled me out and handcuffed me, and I tried to get away. In
searching me, they found lock picks taped to the inside of my belt and so forth. They were
thorough.
          So Marsh Houts was the judge, because he had been one. The coppers were all there
testifying about how they caught me with burglar tools and so forth. So they got me on the stand
and the prosecutor, who was an FBI agent, asked me, "How do you explain those burglar tools?"
         I said, "Well, I'm a saxophone player and that's where my name comes from, Johnny
Lightfingers. "
         They said, "No, it comes from twirling dials on safes."
         I said, "No, I'm a sax player."
         They said, "Well, what do you use those tools for?"
         I said, "To fix my sax when the springs come off. They do on saxophones."
         They said, "Is there a saxophone nearby?"
                                                   19


         I said, "I have one here."
         So I got my tenor out and the prosecutor said, "Just to show us, let's see if you can play."
 So I tore into "How High the Moon," and he said, "Okay, okay." Then he said, "Now, what do you
 do with those lock picks?"
         I showed him, "See when a spring comes off there, I take. this little thing here," which was a
 lock pick, "and I put the spring back." And Marsh Houts is almost falling out of his judge's chair
at this point.
         The guy said, "Why do you put them in your belt?"
         I said, "You're on the bandstand, you know. You don't have your case up there, you don't
have all kinds of stuff. You put a tool in a pocket, it tears the pocket. I keep them taped on the
inside of my belt so they're handy in case a spring comes loose on my sax." I'm doing this
number, and Marsh finally breaks up laughing so hard he can hardly continue with this thing.
[Laughs] And Ralph who had suggested I bring my tenor is there and Ralph is all into this thing,
too.
         So the faculty was involved in that kind of work at that time. Jim Brennan would be an
expert witness on these cases, and Frank Day would be a defense attorney or a prosecutor, and Joe
Nicol, who joined Ralph, as a criminalist. Joe was also a very good forensic scientist. When he
left Michigan State, he went to head the Illinois State Crime Lab. He was a good guy. He had
eleven children. Lived on Abbott Road in a huge old barn of a house.
        But we were all pals and we worked together. The spirit in the Quonset huts was something
that's hard to describe. In some ways, of course, we had not achieved academic respectability, and
we were left in the Quonset huts and that was fairly symbolic in a way, both to the rest of the
faculty and to us, and we were there and we knew we were doing pretty good work. Al Germann
                                                   20


 had a doctorate and Jim Brennan did. Other than that, there were none. The rest were law degrees
 or master's degrees. But we were doing awfully good work with the students and some good
 research.
         Ralph was doing the best research. Day did some good legal research and wrote a couple of
 very fine books. In fact, the all-time bestseller, Germann, Day, and Galatti. Galatti was still with
the New York City PD, then became commissioner, then took over the Port Authority. Germann
was on the faculty at Michigan State and then became head at Long Beach. Day, of course, was on
the faculty until his death. But that textbook, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, is in its
thirty-somethingth printing and has sold millions, I mean millions. Frank once showed me one of
his quarterly or semi-annual checks for $23,000, which was one quarter of the royalties, because
Germann got half. He was the primary writer. So it was a very enriching writing process going on.
Honhart: I'd say so.
Strecher: Yes. That book is still out there all these years later.
         So we were a team. We played poker. We would get together at someone's house and
there would be five or six or seven. We included Chief Charlie Pegg of East Lansing. Every time
he was playing poker with us for money on the table. The head of the police training program,
Harold Haun. Jack Ryan, while he was still there, and then, of course, I was there, and Frank Day
and Ralph would come, have refreshments and talk and have a grand time.
         We did some drinking together. We'd go to Monty's. Sometimes we even went to
Dagwood's. Ralph and I would go to Monty's after I got on the faculty. He'd say, "Bar whiskey
and beer and a boiled egg," you know. [Laughter] That was Ralph's style. Bar whiskey.
                                                    21


        But the spirit there was extremely cohesive. Everyone helped everyone, and we took the
students very seriously. We taught in the Quonsets and only in the Quonsets. We didn't go to any
other classrooms on campus at that time. We had enough classrooms to do the whole thing. Ralph
had set up a pretty good lab just beyond Art's office-well, one wall away from Jim Brennan's
office and Sheehe's office, in two adjoining Quonsets, and the roofed over space between all these
Quonsets to join them all. We went down, I think five or six Quonsets. Primitive. Heating
systems weren't too good. There was no air conditioning. We'd open the windows, and, of course,
the smell from Ralph's lab when he was using hydrogen sulfide or something for analysis, you
know, that would drift down the hall. [Laughs]
Honhart: Oh, jeez.
Strecher: He had a crude fume hood and a few other things there and he had some instruments, but
nothing like he later got. But he did have a spectrograph and some other stuff there.
        He ran his part of the show very pragmatically, but the rest of us were pretty academic, I
was doing field training and then I got to teach intro to administration. I even taught investigation
one year when Ralph went to Taiwan. I taught criminal law one time for some reason. I can't
remember what. But anyway, I took enough forensics to help Ralph, not to teach it, really, but to
help.
        Where was I going with that?
Honhart: About Ralph and the lab.
                                                   22


 Strecher: Oh, yes. The way he handled the whole forensic science part of it. He would require
 students to get a degree in chemistry while they were in the program. So they had to complete all
 of the courses that would be required of a chern major, including the math. So they would not end
 up with 128 hours the way the rest of the students did; they'd end up with another 40 or 50 because
 of the lab work. He would literally work with them as Doc Matthews had done with him at
 Wisconsin take a chern major and make an apprentice of him, as sort of a master's. But they didn't
 get a master's degree; they just came out with an apprenticeship in forensic science and a bachelor
of science degree.
         I don't know that he ever referred to it as an apprenticeship, but I know he and I talked in
those terms. I once said, "Well, Doc Matthews told me that it was his practice to train chemistry
majors in forensic science." And Ralph laughed. This was many years later. He laughed and he
said, "Yeah, Matthews did one that way." He said, "I was the one." He said, "He didn't do any
others." What he did was establish a model for how you turn out a forensic scientist from a
chemist, and he said, "I've basically copied his M.O. in this thing. So I take a student, and before
he's through, he knows fingerprinting and he knows blood spot analysis and he knows firearms
comparison microscopy, and he can run the instruments, the basic instruments. He can do all of the
field tests for blood and drugs, all of this stuff. He can take a wax mold of a hand to see if there are
any gunpowder particles in there, in the skin."
         Most of the students going through the police administration program at that time also took
at least one course like that, the evidence course, and that was fairly thorough, much more than any
school does today, really. But these majors, they really knew it, and they could even come in as
teaching assistants for Ralph to do one subject maybe, like fingerprint development, with brushes
and iodine fumes and so forth. All of us learned a fair amount.
                                                     23


         The social life, a pattern evolved. Certain people ate together, for instance. Some of us
 brought bag lunches. When I was a poor young guy just out of policehood, I brought lunches, but
 then Ralph and Marshall Houts invited me to join them at the Union. Those were, to me, the great
 days. I think it started sometime in '56 and went all the way through '59. We would walk over
 there. We'd walk through the pine grove that was south ofDem Hall, Demonstration Hall, right
 over there and past Sparty and across the bridge and up to the Union, down to the cafeteria. Ralph
was a friend of Mike Demochowski, who ran the food service there, and every time we went, we
talked to Mike and he'd always ask how the food was.
         I remember this. I was a hungry guy at that time, I was skinny, if you can believe that, and I
always ordered some kind of a meat dish and something like spinach or something, and then a
double order of potatoes, and Marshall Houts would break up because he tended to be pudgy and he
was always watching his diet. [Laughs] He'd almost drop his tray.
         We would go over to a table and we would talk about things in the business, Ralph and
Marsh and I, and a lot of it had to do-he was starting Trauma magazine at that time, and it was
just getting going and he had a sponsor. I can't remember the sponsor's name, but he was very
much in touch with Gardner, who loved the idea of Trauma magazine, and so he would tell us the
latest anecdotes about Gardner. He had a hot item one day. He said, "This is going into this issue
of Trauma," and naturally we were interested. He said, "There was this Taiwanese doctor who was
in a residency in anesthesiology at one of the hospitals in Los Angeles. They thought he should
have thorough training, so they had him at the county for a while and then they had him at another
one," and I'm not sure in which order, but anyway, he had been in a place where everything was
pretty automated, and he was moved over to this other hospital and they were doing an operation on
the mastoid of the arranger for the Herb Alpert's outfit.
                                                   24


Honhart: The Tijuana Brass.
Strecher: The Tijuana Brass. The arranger. He did all their arrangements, this kid, and they were
just doing a simple operation, a mastoidectomy or something. So the surgeon is working back there
and he says, "Boy, this blood looks pretty dark to me. Would you check the oxygen?" And this
Taiwanese resident, who was not all that fluent in English, had been pumping pure C02 into this
patient, and killed him. Marsh took said the hospital and the doctor were trying to settle and all
this, because this guy was making like, I think, like 200,000 a year as an arranger. At that time, it
was enormous money.
Honhart: Oh, yes.
Strecher: But he was one of a kind, and they killed him. So that was the sort of thing we talked
about. Then we would go up to the Faculty Men's Club. Now, this is one of the anachronisms that
I dearly love, because the Faculty Men's Club was just that; there were no women at all. We had
four pool tables, one of them was a big snooker table, and we would shoot bottle pool every day.
We got to be experts, you know, at different kinds of shots, the three of us. We played ferociously
every day for at least an hour.
        Then they moved a small food operation up there. They talked Mike Demochowski into
doing this, so he had a little catering operation. So we'd go up and have a bowl of soup and a
sandwich and then shoot pool. It was more efficient.
                                                   25


        Then they talked about building this new one, you know, the new Faculty Club, and, oh, we
were against that. [Laughs] We just thought that was an awful idea. Out near the golf course.
Honhart: And it was. [Laughter]
Strecher: Well, we thought that was just terrible. Here we could walk up here every day and have
lunch and shoot bottle pool and visit with other faculty. There was Bonn Stewart, for instance, a
great mathematician. He taught matrix algebra and complex equations, and he did nothing but
shoot three-cushion billiards, all by himself. Once in a while someone was good enough to join
him, but he was really an expert. We invited him to play bottle pool once or twice, but he just
killed us. [Laughter] He was so good.
        But there again, you have a certain spirit ofthe thing. An anachronism, a Men's Club on a
campus, but we would go there and we made great use of it all the time that we were there. We
were still doing it until we left for Vietnam. By that time, Marsh had gone to Laguna Beach, had
his magazine up and running very well. He left, I think, in '58.
        Al Germann left and I took over his courses and he went to Long Beach State College and
became a crusader and wrote some big pieces in the local papers about the police-
[Begin Tape 2, Side A]
Honhart: This is tape two, side one, Fred Honhart and Vic Strecher, and we're talking about the
Men's Club at MSU.
                                                   26


 Strecher: Yes, and Al Germann, who was really part of our circle, went to Long Beach State
 College, was the head of the program, wrote that the police were rousting crapshooters, poker
players, all day long, and then when they got off, they would go to this veterans post and do the
 same thing. He said they had slot machines with payouts. They had money poker and crap tables,
the whole works. He wrote this piece, and Chief Parker, at that time, the reform chief, said, "No
officer of the Los Angeles Police Department will any longer attend the program at Long Beach
 State College." He was trying to kill the program off. So they were going to Los Angeles State
College then, which was run by one of his former officers, and Al lost his directorship at Long
Beach because of pressure from Parker.
         But, you know, when we heard about that, Brennan's reaction was, "AI, you know, it's that
Jesuit training." He and Frank would talk about that Jesuit training having come out of St. John's,
and he said, "It's that Jesuit training. He's a moral man and he goes right down that path." And
that's what Al Germann did. He became a gadfly because he decided there was a role for one in
this field and it would make it easier for all the rest of us if some guy gets out there on point and
takes the arrows, then the rest of us could open the parameters a little bit, too. He's right about that.
There's no question that he had a capacity for adding to the moral tone. He did that all the time he
was at Michigan State in this school.
         He would come up to the Faculty Club. He wasn't a regular with Houts and Ralph and me,
but he would come up there and join us and eat with us. So would Brennan and Day, now and then.
But we were in each other's homes, playing poker and eating sandwiches together. And all of that,
the Faculty Men's Club was a great institution for our school at that time. Even though we had to
walk all the way across the campus to get there, we did it every day, rain or shine, snow. I don't
                                                    27


think a day went by, after a certain point in my time there that we did anything else, unless
 someone was traveling. So that was quite wonderful.
         We talked about so many interesting things. Houts was a little bit like Ralph; he was
curious and interested and he liked depth. He didn't like the one-inch-thick stuff. He liked to get
way down into it and find out about things, and he was an extremely thorough lawyer. So we had a
great threesome, Houts and Ralph and 1.
         Later, when I moved to Arizona State, I took the family out-Marsh invited us-we drove
out to Laguna Beach and went through all the security gates and all of that, and he had another
room for us and all his remaining kids who were in the house, and an opulent setting. His wife,
Mary, a lovely lady. When he got a form ofleukemia, she wrote it in a quaint way, wrote us all
notes and said, "For some reason, Marsh's bones are no longer producing red blood cells." You
know, she kept us informed about everything, and we wrote back.
         But he'd always terrified of cancer. He knew a lot, because he read the medical literature so
much, and he would say, "We're that close to getting it, to nailing cancer and working it out."
This was, of course, long before the DNA breakthroughs, but he was reading all the literature on it
and he had a fixation about it. He was terribly afraid of getting cancer, and it's ironic that a form of
it hit him finally.
         But he and Ralph and Erle Stanley Gardner were buddies, and I remember when I did my
master's thesis, it was on the Sam Sheppard case-
Honhart: Oh, sure.
                                                  28


 Strecher: -and Bay Village, Ohio. It was an analysis of the criminal investigation, with an ideal-
 type investigation sketched out and then how this didn't meet the criteria. Norton Long, up in
 political science, was my mentor, and he would go over it with me, because he knew the people in
 Cleveland, at [Case] Western Reserve [University]. So I got there and I interviewed virtually
 everyone, and I got into the archives of the newspaper, the Plain Dealer, and I drove down to
 Columbus to see Sheppard. At the last second, his lawyer said, "Don't talk to him." His lawyers
 gave me a copy of the transcript-it was this high [gestures ]-to keep and they opened the way for
me to get down there, but an appeals lawyer said, "Don't do it," and that may have been the guy
who eventually got him out, the guy in Florida. [F. Lee Bailey]
Honhart: I know exactly who you mean.
Strecher: Yes, I'mjust losing his name right now.
Honhart: Yes, he was even on the 0.1. [Simpson] case.
Strecher: Yes. High roller. But anyway, at the last second, I was in Columbus, I was in the
warden's office, and they said, "Sorry. He's refusing now."
         So, anyway, I did that case, and in it I implied some criticism of Sam Gerber, who was the
coroner, because he was in deep conflict with the Village of Bay Village chief and the cop who
discovered the homicide scene and the homicide detectives from Cleveland, who had been loaned
to Bay Village because the Village Police had just never handled a homicide. The conflicts were
enormous. The guy named Paul Kirk, who's a criminalist out of Berkeley, Califomia-
                                                    29


 Honhart: Oh, yes, I read about him.
 Strecher: -did all the defense blood work. Yes, he was a very big-time blood analyst. He wrote a
 lot on blood spatters, very precise measurement of where people were when this happened and that
 happened. He testified in the Sheppard case, and Gerber and he just got into it. They hated each
 other; it's not exaggerating. So at one point, I found criticism of Kirk and Gerber, and Houts was
upset. I was just finishing my master's in '57, and he said, "Gerber's a very good man. He's one
of the best in the country. Be careful there, because he knows what he's doing." Gerber had
testified that the murder weapon was a surgical tool, and Kirk said it probably was not, from the
blood spatters.
         Anyway, I think I implied that they should have let the detectives do their work before the
medical legal people got into it, and Houts said, "Be very careful. Be very careful, because he's
probably one of the ten best in the country." He said, "Halpern in New York is probably number
one, and Gerber may be number two or three." Kirk, at that time, wasn't in the top ten at all.
         So stuff like that was always coming up as I finished my thesis.
Honhart: Just as an aside, after your study of the Sheppard case-because I remember that as a
boy, when I was growing up in Detroit. Then I went to Case Western Reserve, and right about the
time I went there is when he got the new trial and was acquitted.
Strecher: Yes.
                                                    30


 Hon11art: What was your assessment as to who was guilty or not guilty?
 Strecher: You know, everything I've done on that case, I still don't know, because it was a bungled
 investigation. My conclusion in my thesis was that we'll never really know what happened because
 there were too many fingers in the pie. First of all, after the discovery of the homicide scene, a lot
 of mistakes were made in the first twenty-four, thirty-six hours. For the first few weeks, there was
 so much tangling about who was in charge, that there's probably some evidence lost. They never
 checked some of the areas between the house and the lake. It's right on Lake Erie.
         My judgment is that the bungled investigation means that we never really will know. I
think what really sank Sheppard was the womanizing. The jury didn't like that at all. When this
gal, his nurse, his office nurse, Sue something, got on the witness stand and described their trysts in
cars and in his office and parts of the hospital and so forth, they just went cold on him and didn't
believe anything he said after that, because he had denied that at the outset, during all the police
interrogations and everything, because they were looking for a motive, that he wanted to dump her
and they had a battle about it. Well, I think it was so purely a circumstantial case that they just
punished him for being a dirty guy.
        I think I felt nothing but pity for the officer who walked in on this mess. I interviewed him
at length, maybe half a day, and he gave me all the details and he just didn't know what to do, you
know. Right away he called the chief and then someone called the mayor. Right away, you're
talking about small-town politics, and then small town goes big town when someone says, "Well,
who here has ever handled a homicide? Well, let's get Cleveland in there," and Gerber wants to be
in charge, and so forth and so on. So it was like that. It's too bad, because some of the Cleveland
dicks did some pretty good work on it and Gerber tended to discount it because they tried to shut
                                                     31


him out, I think. Anyway, I really don't know, and I've been asked that a hundred times and I've
always said, "I really do not know." This bushy-headed stranger and all that, you know, things like
that happen. And they were highly vulnerable to a break-in there. It was customary for them to
leave all their doors and windows open. He was sleeping on the couch he said. He probably was.
He drank quite a bit for a surgeon, and had a number of drinks and probably half passed out. I
don't know. I've seen lots better cases.
Honhart: Going back to your work at Michigan State, how did you end up over in Vietnam?
Strecher: This was one of the neat episodes. In 1958, I was called in one day-no, I was not called
in. An announcement went out of Art's office that "We are interested in having several faculty
members join the MSU group in Saigon. We'd like to know who's interested." It went out to all
the faculty. I talked to Ralph, and Ralph said, "Well, I'm going to go."
Honhart: Now, he'd been there in '56, if! remember correctly.
Strecher: He'd been there a number of times.
Honhart: Or '57. He went there for a summer, I know that.
Strecher: Yes, he'd go over for short stints to get the crime lab started, and he brought some people
over to study forensics, and he did some training over there, short-term stuff. I talked to Ralph, and .
he was going to go.
                                                  32


Paul Shields, at that time, was working in the police training program, not in the faculty, and he
indicated an interest. The criticism of MSU at that time was that in the police area, it was MSU in
name only. We didn't have anyone from MSU except Jack Ryan there, and he was identified as
primarily FBI. Then you had Howard Hoyt, who had been chief over in Battle Creek, and Charlie
Sloan, who'd been in the New York state police, and Bud Handville from the New York State
Police. So the MSU faculty types regarded these guys as hired guns, not interested in the academic
side of things, but there was great competence there administratively. They had some good people.
        But they wanted to fatten up the MSU presence there. I think it was straightforward, that.
So this announcement came out, so I went to Barbara and I said, "How'd you like to go to Vietnam
for two years?"
        And she said, "Where is that?"
        I said, "It's Indochina." And I said, "The French got beaten there by the Viet Minh at Dien
Bien Phu. Remember that?"
        She said, "Oh, yeah." We'd just had our third son born just a short time before, November,
and she said, "Would we have servants?"
        I said, "Yes."
        She said, "Really?"
        I sai d, "Yes. We'd have a house staff of maybe three or four."
        She said, "My gosh." And she said, "Well, maybe." So I got her to talk to Arnelle
[Turner], as I recall, and I did more talking with Ralph, and then Paul Shields came forward. I
didn't know Paul, except casual contact, and Paul had now indicated interest, so it looked like
Ralph and Paul and me.
                                                   33


        So Art had the three of us in and talked to us about it and laid the thing out. Stanley
 Scheinbaum was running the business end of it out of Olds Hall, and we had to go over to see Stan
to negotiate salaries and all of that. At that time, I was doing consulting for the St. Louis Police
Department, sort of developing their senior staff, and I was a kid, you know. I was twenty-nine
years old and I was in there teaching their assistant chiefs administration. [Laughter]
        I remember-this won't get into print, but I remember the chief, Joe Casey, one time calling
me in and saying, "You know, young fellow, I like you." He said, "You've got balls." [Laughter]
Because here I was, dealing with these guys who were three times my age. Two of them were
reaching seventy that year and had to retire as chief and deputy chief, and here I was, a kid, coming
in and talking about management.
        So, anyway, I was doing that and I was getting $50 a day, so we factored that into my salary
for Vietnam and I was really impressed with what I got, because I asked for it and Scheinbaum
said okay,. So I said, "How much could I have gotten?"
        He said, "You'll never know." [Laughter]
        So I went home and told Barbara, "We'll get $10,000 a year, tax-exempt."
        And she said, "My gosh." I was making about $6,200 at that time [academic year]. So she
said, "My gosh."
        So we got that, and Barbara had some misgivings, but she thought, "You know, I've kind of
stuck with him and done all these things, and he goes to Detroit and he goes to St. Louis all the
time and so forth."
        We had a Vietnamese student at that time working on a master's, and he taught me a lot of
Vietnamese in the next six months before we actually went. It was like three times a week he
                                                    34


 would be in my office. Then I went to the Foreign Service Institute for a few weeks and got their
 basic briefing.
         We put our stuff into storage and sold our car, and took our three little boys and the two of
 us for nineteen or twenty shots, in some cases, series. Like the plague shots, we had to go to
 Detroit for those. Typhus, paratyphoid, typhoid, yellow fever, the works. Little Johnny was only
 six months old when he started the shot series.
Honhart: Oh, jeez.
 Strecher: Barbara still tells the story. We flew to Chicago Midway, got on a helicopter and went
out to O'Hare, which was brand new.
Honhart: Took a helicopter? That's fabulous.
Strecher: Helicopter to O'Hare, got one of the earliest 707 flights to San Francisco, and at Paul
Shields' suggestion, we had booked passage on the Lurline, a luxury ship, but we got into an
Aleutian storm, pretty bad seas, so Barb and the little guys were not too well some of the time. But
we got to Hawaii and then things were fine.
         But back then, no jets flew overseas; they didn't have the range. So we stayed in Honolulu
a week and we got a DC-7, with berths, to go to Tokyo. I remember a Philippine consul was on the
plane with his wife, who was eight months pregnant, sitting there, and she was very uncomfortable,
so I gave her my berth and sat in a seat, and the stewardess hated that. The stewardess was really,
really angry with me that I gave away a first-class berth.
                                                    35


        But I wanted to watch anyway, because we were going to land at Wake Island for a
refueling, and I asked the stewardess to alert me when we were going to go to Wake. She said,
"You'll know it because we have to circle a couple of times, lose altitude and go in, it's such a
short runway." So I watched this whole operation and this looked like a postage stamp down there
when we circled it, a tiny little piece of rock.
        Went there, stayed in Tokyo some days. All kinds of adventures trying to figure things out,
you know, going to buy diapers and they were about this big [gestures] for little Japanese kids.
        Flew from there to Hong Kong on a Boeing Stratocruiser, one of those old two-deckers. It
was one of the last years they flew those, and I stayed up all night to look at the islands off the
China coast as we went down to Hong Kong, just to see it. I deliberately got a westside seat, and I
stayed up all night. And into Hong Kong and spent, oh, a week or two in Hong Kong, getting
things. Clothing, for one thing. We were told, "Don't bring a lot of clothing; buy it in Hong Kong.
If you're going to have electronics, buy it there." So I bought a stereo system at the Radio People
out on the island and things like that. Had a white suit made, because we had to have a white suit.
Bought Barbara a string of perals and an ivory chess set for myself.
        Then we went down to Saigon. And I made a big mistake; I drank some unboiled water in
Hong Kong.
Honhart: Oh, dear.
Strecher: I didn't know it. I didn't know it. I thought the taps there were okay and I got mixed up.
They were okay in Tokyo, but they weren't okay in Hong Kong. So, a few days after we got to
Saigon, I was pretty sick and went to the hospital and they did the checking, and this one lab guy
                                                   36


 yells, "Hey, come here and look at this. Have you ever seen that many amoebae in your life?" and,
 you know, I was just loaded with amoebae, and it lasted a year and a half, the dysentery. It was just
 a dreadful thing.
         But, you know, like everything else-and back then, they treated it with an arsenic
 compound that affected your eye dilation, so when you got out of a car, for instance, and stepped
 into the sunlight, it would almost knock you over because the eyes would not adjust very quickly.
But that's the only treatment they had.
         But we went there. I got the job of handling all of the what we called participants, all ofthe
people who were sent to the States for police training. They would go first for a month or two to
what we called Mr. Smith's organization. It was a CIA operation called the International Police
Academy in the old Car Bam in Washington. They said "former" CIA agent; well, he was a senior
guy. I taught there after I got back a couple times.
         But we sent them there for some orientation, then all over the country to police departments
to see how they were run and so forth, and that had been going on since about '56. So I took over
that operation, and it was similar in a way to field training, you know. I had to set up itineraries for
detectives, for forensics, for undercover work, for every sort of specialization, communications
traffic. So I did that, and that was no great strain.
         Then we traveled around the country and did schools in the provinces. We'd go into a
province town, and invariably we'd get there and the province security chief would get us into his
office and we'd be there at eight in the morning and he would pour a glass of scotch for us, at eight
in the morning. Their view of Americans was that way, you know, that we've got to have whiskey
right away. I couldn't drink with the dysentery. It almost killed me, but you had to make a
showing of it.
                                                    37


          On one of those training visits, we were in Qui Nhon, province security chief s office, and
 he brought out a bottle of wine with an interesting label on it. I looked at it and I said, "Is that
 sacramental wine?"
          He looked at it and he said, "Oh, yes, yes."
         I said, "How do we come by sacramental wine?"
         And he said, "Well, the Viet Cong burned a church and killed the nuns and kidnapped the
 priest and went away, and we caught up with them and killed them and brought this back." So they
 ended up with the sacramental wine at the security office and gave it to the visiting Americans.
 [Laughs] And I thought my dad would finally have been proud of me because I was getting
 sacramental wine. He was always jealous ofthe priests, who were the only ones who got the wine
in our Catholic church. The peasants only get the host. You just get a little wafer.
Honhart: Yes, right. Exactly.
Strecher: He always said, "They get that wine."
         So we put on schools around the country. When I first got there, we could go anywhere in
jeeps and we took a three-jeep convoy all the way up the middle of Vietnam, Buon Me Thuot, Dac
To, Dac Sut, which is so near-you could walk to the Cambodian and Laotian borders there.
Nothing but rock piles. That's all there was up there. It wasn't even really desert, it was just rocks.
         Then back down to Pleiku and to the coast, and then up the coast road all the way to the
demilitarized zone, where we were not supposed to go, but the security chief up there smuggled us
into a little bunker very near to the entrance to the Ben Hai Bridge, so we could see that the north
half of the bridge was painted red and the south side of it was painted black, symbolic-
                                                    38


  [Begin Tape 2, Side B]
  Honhart: Okay, we're now on tape two, side two.
  Strecher: I'm afraid I wander quite a bit.
 Honhart: Keep going. No, that's great.
 Strecher: Well, the Vietnam years were quite interesting. The American colony there mixed with
 the other international types, and we were an American colony, no question about it. We didn't
.live all clustered. I had a house in back of the ambassador's house, and next door to me there was
 an intelligence guy who worked directly for the ambassador. But I was afraid in that house,
 because I was way off from the rest of the Michigan Staters. Ralph's house was kitty-corner from
 the palace, the backside of the palace, on Hong Thap Tu Street, and I was on Hien Vuong Street.
          It was a nice house, a big house, two rooms were air conditioned. We did have, I think, four
 servants. We had a cook, we had an amah for little Johnny, the young one. He was only nine
 months old by the time we got there. The other two kids didn't need an amah. They played around
 the house mostly, and with other kids, Paul's kids, especially. Paul had two boys and two girls and
 they were just a little older, but not much. So the kids got together with the others and they would
 have parties.
          We got into a bigger international group there, too. The Danish guy, who sold
 Volkswagens there, who everyone thought was a spy-well, we thought everyone was a spy, really.
                                                    39


 I never saw anything like it. But they warned us, to begin, at the Foreign Service Institute, assume
 that every one of your household servants will be reporting to somebody, either the police or the
 Viet Cong or to the Germans or Russians or to the International Control Commission, someone,
 because there's a lot of money floating around for information on what you're doing and
 vulnerability.
         About a week after I got there, a CIA agent came into my office and handed me a piece of
paper and said, "We just translated this from Radio Hanoi." And I can still remember the wording
of it. It said, "We welcome Victor Strecher and his wife Barbara and their three sons, Victor (age),
Michael (age), and Jonathan (age). They are living at 232 Hien Vuong in Saigon. Anybody who
finds it possible to execute Strecher will be considered a Vietnamese patriot." Address, everything,
you know. Talk about intimidation. I think I lost that in one of my moves, because I've moved so
many times since then. It was a flimsy, and I've written it down. I've put that in my personal
recall files.
         But that came about a week after I got there and I thought, "Oooh, they're inside
everything." And the ages really impressed me, because they were correct.
         Oh, there was another sentence in the middle: "Strecher's joining the infamous MSU group
whose work includes the burning of villages, the torture of citizens, and the training of the brutal
South Vietnamese Diem's police." So they were referring to the civil guard, which was out there a
lot.
         That scared me very much. Every time I left town, I worried that they might victimize
Barbara or the kids. When I'd leave, whoever was staying there, one of the guys, like Handville or
if Paul didn't go-Paul and I traveled a lot together, but when he didn't go, I'd ask him to stop in
every day and see Barb. They did a lot of that.
                                                  40


 Honhart: Did other faculty get similar notification?
 Strecher: About going there?
 Honhart: From the Viet Congo
 Strecher: Oh, you know, I never asked. I showed it to Ralph and I said, "What about this?"
        And he said, "Yeah, they do that." He said, "Noone's been hurt." So I never showed it to
Barbara.
Honhart: Probably a good idea. You would have been on the next boat home.
Strecher: I never showed it to her. When we went to Milwaukee to see our relatives before we
flew over, her dad had clipped an article from a news magazine that said, "Saigon, the sin capital of
the world." And he thought, "Oh, jeez, you're taking my daughter to the sin capital of the Far
East," I guess it said. And it was a lurid kind of a story, but it wasn't as bad as Macao or some of
those other places, really. And Diem was a puritan, so he was really beating down on the vice. I
have an opium pipe and other things that they confiscated, you know.
        But the intimidation was all they could make it. The Viet Cong did try to scare us and the
South Vietnamese Government tried to scare everyone. They had lurid tales-I have a few of them
I brought back with me-in daily news bulletins about people beheaded and tortured in the villages
                                                   41


and the land development centers, where they were trying to put a lot of people so that it would be
harder for the Viet Cong to operate out there.
          I sent my family home early. I was criticized for it, but I just didn't like it. When we got
there, we could drive anywhere and we did. The first Christmas, Barbara and I drove up to a town
called Da Lat in the mountains, and there were French chateaux up there from the French colonial
days. One of them was rented by the      u.s. Government for employees of US OM and the other
outfits. So we got it for a week, we'd get one wing, and it was so big that there'd be two or three
other families there. It was nice and cool up there, the first cool weather we'd had since we got
there in July, and it rained. Thunderstorms in the mountains were nice.
          We drove back in the Volkswagen and we had taken Thi Hai with us, to take care of Jon
while we were up there, because she was indispensable to give Barb a little freedom. Thi Hui was
sitting in the back seat. Her papers, showed that she was born syphilitic, her face was pock-marked
and so forth, and she was a little bit homely. We loved her. On our way back, we saw a
Montegnard family. These were Jarais, and they were wearing the baskets on the back and this fine
woven cloth with patterns on it, and the man had a pipe in his mouth and the inevitable bow and
arrow and his wife had a coup-coup, which is a chopping thing, and they had two children. We
drove past them and they watched us, and I slowed down a little so we could see them clearly, and
Thi Hui holds her nose and said, "Ugh."
         And I said, "What's that, Thi Hai?"
         And she said, "Mois." Now that's like the "N" word. Montegnard is the real title, but Moi
is the "N" word, and the Vietnamese call those people Mois. And she held her nose, this homely
little girl, without any prospect in the world, looking at a magnificent little family group along the
                                                    42


 roadside, and 1 thought, "Everyone needs their underclass." It was such an interesting thing for her
 to say that, "Phooey. Dirty. Dirty people."
          One day 1 was lecturing on records administration to a High Command school in Saigon. It
 was a big room and it had maybe fifty people in it, all captains and higher, some very high-ranking.
 I had an interpreter, so I'd give a sentence, he'd interpret, and I'd draw up pictures of the things that
 interacted-I was teaching Ralph's old MSU course, you know. So 1 finished the course and asked
 if there were any questions, and they would get up and stand next to their seat and give their name
 and then ask a question in Vietnamese. The interpreter said, "Colonel Bai wants to know what
about Little Rock." I've written this up, too, by the way, in my recall. "What about Little Rock?"
         1 said, "I'm not sure 1 understand." So he translated that.
         And he said, "He wants to know why you have to use military to get colored people into the
high school in Little Rock, why your president has to send troops."
         1 thought about that and 1 said, "Well, there are people who have prejudice against black
people in America, and against other people unlike themselves, too, not just black. Sometimes it's
religion." He translated that.
         He said, "But why can this happen in America?"
         1 said, "Well," 1 said to the interpreter, ~ask Colonel Bai how many Montegnards are in the
room." And this could have got me in trouble, I've thought since. "How many Montegnards are in
the room?"
         The interpreter looked at me and said, "I can't ask him that."
         1 said, "Ask him."
         He said, "I can't." So we had a little argument and finally he did ask him, and this guy
stiffens, and everyone in the room-you know, the eyes are going around.
                                                      43


          Finally, the guy kind of sputters, and he said, "Of course there are none," translated.
          I said, "Why not? There are a lot of Montegnards in Vietnam."
          And the answer came back, fast. He said, "Because they're ignorant, they're stupid, they're
 dirty, they can't learn, they can't read or write, they live like animals."
          In reply, I said, "Tell Colonel Bai that that's what some white people in America say about
 black people."
          I don't know what I started there, but I was sort of pissed off at this guy, because they're so
 biased toward the native people there. Well, that course ended in disarray. I don't know if anyone
 every complained formally, but they were not happy with me. [Laughter]
Honhart: Nobody likes to have shown the hypocrisy.
Strecher: Everybody has an underclass, has someone they consider inferior to them, apparently.
That's one of the experiences that I sort of cherish, because it brought it home so forcibly.
         Ralph is one of the people in the world who has none of that in him. He just doesn't. And
he taught me that. I hope I learned it from him, because I came from a family that was from eastern
Europe and they hung together. They had the pejorative term for every other ethnicity there was.
No one was Polish. You know what they were. No one was Jewish. I grew up in that setting, and
ethnicity is very big in Milwaukee. It comes from being a big immigrant city. And a lot of them
are natural enemies.
         So Ralph grew way beyond all that somehow, having come from the same place. I think he
taught me a lot about all people being people. I have a note-foreign students. He was the guy,
when we got foreign students, he was the guy who took care of them. The first Korean was Yung
                                                     44


 Chung Sok, got a master's degree from us, and I was on his thesis committee. Several of the other
 faculty wanted nothing to do with foreign students, you know, they didn't like Korea because of the
war, and it was a little chilly. But Ralph would have them out to the house and he helped everyone
of them.
          At one point I heard-and you know better than I, probably, whether this is so-that Ralph
actually trained a forensic scientist for almost sixty or even more different countries. I don't know
if this is actual number.
Honhart: It's certainly something close to that.
Strecher: It's a number up there. I knew this, I knew that he could go into any country that we
would ever think about going to, and visit someone in a crime lab whom he had trained, and get
taken around and shown things. He was inside every country-Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore,
Japan, Taiwan,parts of Africa, parts of South America. Just an astonishing array. Philippines. He
trained several guys for the Philippines. That part of him, we'd get invited to Ralph's house, we'd
meet foreign students there.
Honhart: Oh, yes.
Strecher: He made sure they met the faculty in a social setting, because there was no real other
setting. Art didn't do much of that. Art was a-you know, I think at some point, up to about '55,
he was overworked rmming the campus police and the school and the police training program,
                                                    45


which was pretty extensive. That was a big operation. Always had three or four staff therefor that,
sometimes maybe five. That's how Jack Ryan and the FBI guys got in there, the police training.
        So Ralph simply took on the social function and became our bridge to international
students. He'd put them in touch with other people who spoke their language. He knew the people
in languages, and he would learn a little of all the languages he needed when he was traveling, but
he would get mixed up sometimes and talk French in a Chinese restaurant or something, you know.
[Honhart laughs.] Barbara once was with him in England when he was asking for the bill in French
in a place where Chinese was spoken. It was pretty funny. [Laughs]
Honhart: That sounds like Ralph. It really does.
Strecher: Oh, he was quite something.
Honhart: When did you come back from Vietnam? You said you sent your family back first.
Strecher: Yes.
Honhart: Was this after the coup or what was the reason?
Strecher: It was after the coup.
Honhart: Coup attempt, I guess we should say.
                                                   46


 Strecher: That was November of sixty-just a few weeks before that, and this---{)h, this is another
Ralph story, and I've written it. One of our members who was a contract worker with our mission,
was down at the basic police training school at Vung Tau-Cap St. Jacques-and he got in his jeep
one morning to go-he was a firearms instructor-got in his jeep, with his driver, and they're
driving along and an ox cart pulls across, and shooters on both side down in the ditch shot them
with-we counted like six different calibers. But, anyway, shot them all up, set the jeep on fire
from its gas tank, so there was some burning and so forth and so on.
         So Ralph says, "I want your help on something." Paul and I both did one thing, it was the
autopsy, and then I went with Ralph on the other-and it was the autopsy, because if there's a
violent death, it has to be investigated, you have to have a pretty much a full autopsy sent to the
ambassador, who sends it to the State Department.
        So we kept the bodies in the commissary freezer until we could get to them, which was a
couple days later, and we had them brought into this Seventh Day Adventist Hospital. It had a little
wing on it where we could have them brought in. They put them on a table and we had a French
surgeon do the cutting. So Ralph and Paul and I did the autopsy on one of our colleagues. His
name was Adolph. He'd been a military type, military police, hired on. So we did this autopsy.
We dug these bullets out. The doctor would say, "Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
        And Ralph would say-and he'd probe and get the slug and bring it out and put it in a
tray-and Ralph would mark it the way---{)n the base of the bullet, put it in a glassine envelope,
and say where it came from on the body. Photographed everything.
        I remember when we were done with it, we had eight or ten slugs out of him. He really got
shot up. Ralph said, "Okay, take his ankles, Vic," and he and Paul took his upper side, and we
were going to put him back on the gurney, and the skin started coming offhis ankles because he'd
                                                   47


 been dead a couple days. It started turning under me and I thought I would drop him-I know this
 is ugly, but that happened in October.
          Then in November, we get the attempted coup, and that was a very close thing. If it hadn't
been for the Muong troops that Diem brought down, with a promise for very, very big pay-he
brought them down from the border with China-very quickly, and one general remained loyal to
him, brought him up from Vung Tau, and brought this other group in, and their orders were, "Seem
to join the rebels, and in the morning at six o'clock, kill the rebel next to you." That was the third
day, and on the third day, each one of the Muongs turned to the guy next to him and popped him.
They killed an awful lot of rebels and took Saigon back, because at that time the rebels had Saigon
and Diem was holed up in his palace, which was all full of holes.
         So that's how Diem put it down, but there was the basic insecurity of the country, the
contentiousness of the regime, and then one day some guy flipped a grenade over a wall of the
home of one of our guys, who was in the tax group for MSUG. He got out of his car to go to lunch
at home and-you always got a two-hour siesta period-he closed the gate and started walking for
the house, and he heard something clink on the gravel and he looked and it was a grenade, and it
blinded him.
         I looked at that and I thought, "Aah," so they were cautioning us, "Don't send your families
home. We need a show of support here." Well, at that time, I was just plain afraid because I was
going to do a lot of traveling. Jerry Hemmye our radio engineer with MSU, and I went up to Buon
Me Thuot to find a location for a new civil guard radio tower, and he was doing tests there. We
went tiger hunting, incidentally, but that was after I sent my family home. They went to
Milwaukee and stayed with my folks. Then Barbara flew over and met me in Geneva and we spent
a couple weeks traveling in Europe and then went home.
                                                    48


 Honhart: How long were you there by yourself then?
 Strecher: About four months, four and a half. I sent them home in late January, and I left in May.
 I left the week that Lyndon [Baines] Johnson came. He was there at the time I flew out, and I have
pictures of all the little Vietnamese kids holding American flags along the route in from the airport
and all that. Signs, "Thousand years for Lyndon Johnson," you know. And, of course, we'd been
asking for either reinforcements or get out of there. We were asking for mules and all sorts of low
tech things to help the civil guard out there.
          I'll tell you an apocalyptic story. One of the guys comes back with his group that had
traveled in the U.S., comes back, and I always debriefed them. He was a Vietnamese lieutenant,
and he had criticized the Vietnamese government at some place in the U.S., I forget now, big city
PD setting, several other guys there with him, and they heard him say, "Well, there's a lot of
brutality," or something like that. And there was.
          So anyway, someone informed on him, and he came to me, and he was terror-stricken. He
said, "You've got to save me."
          And I said, "From what?"
          He said, "They're going to put me on the Cambodian border."
          And I said, "Well, is it a post?"
          He said, "They're sending me there with one elephant and a Moi guard to get me there, and
I'm going to be by myself with a little radio."
          And I said, "I don't know ifI can do anything."
          He said, "They'll kill me there."
                                                     49


        I said, "Who?"
        "The Viet Cong." He said, "I have no chance there."
        I talked to Ralph about it, and he said, "We can't do a thing. Can't do a thing." He talked
to General La, who was head of police and security, but this guy went to the border and we never
heard from him again. So don't speak ill of the Vietnamese government. [Laughs] You get an
elephant and a radio.
Honhart: Good luck.
Strecher: Yes. [Laughs]
Honhart: Maybe it was time to change sides. [Laughs]
Strecher: Oh, it was about that time that they kidnapped some Americans and kept them hostages
for-they were in a different group, they were in USOM, but they kept them for three or four years.
Some died in captivity, of illnesses, mostly. They just took them along with them, chained up, you
know, tied with bamboo threads and stuff. It got to be a dangerous place.
       A year after we could drive anywhere, you couldn't leave Saigon. Jerry Hemmye and I
went up to Buon Me Thuot on a Vietnamese Air Force plane, which was almost as dangerous, but
we drove around in jeeps.
       When I first got there, and we did this great big tour of Vietnam, Charlie Sloan and Ryan
and I-Jack was just a hell ofa guy. I don't know if you've-
                                                   50


Honhart: I've heard about him.
Strecher: Well, his mother was a French army nurse. His father was the chief of police of
Minneapolis and then the sheriff of Helmepin County later, in Minnesota, and Jack came out of the
FBI. But, during World War II, he was a B-24 or -5 pilot-I forget which-shot down, parachutes
in, fluent in French from his mother's side, joins the Maquis, they get him out to Marseilles and to
Britain. They put him right back on another bomber, he got shot down a second time. This really
did happen. He gets out again, the same way. By then I think the war was almost over, but you
know, that was the kind of background. He was tough, but he was smart. He joined the FBI as
soon as he got out of the air force, or the army air force, I guess. No, the air force. Anyway, joined
the FBI, got a lot of the spy stuff because of his language-
[End of recording]
                                                    51