1 CHARLES "LASH" LARROWE December 11, 2000 Jeff Charnley, interviewer Charnley: Today is Monday, December 11, year 2000. We're in East Lansing, Michigan. I am Jeff Charnley interviewing Dr. Charles Patrick "Lash" Larrowe for the MSU Oral History Project, for the sesquicentennial. The university will be commemorating this in the year 2005. As you can see, Lash, we have a tape recorder for this oral history. Do you give us permission to tape this interview? Larrowe: Correct. I did. Charnley: I'd like to start first with some personal, educational background. Where were you born and where did you go to school prior to going to college? Larrowe: How far back do we go? Charnley: At the beginning. Larrowe: Portland, Oregon. And because I was a [unclear] Catholic, I went to Madeline Grade School, a Catholic grade school in Portland. I followed that by going to another Catholic school, Columbia Preparatory--which is Catholic--High School, in Portland. Then I went to the University of Washington in Seattle. Do we need dates for this? Charnley: Only if you want to put them in. That makes it a little easier, as you recall them. 2 Larrowe: I can't remember when I started grade school, but I was born in 1916, so it must have been '22, I suppose. Wait a minute. Must have been '24. And then I got out of grade school in 1930, I think it was. Started Columbia Prep in '30, graduated in '34. I started University of Washington in 1936. There's a gap between finishing high school and starting college, a two-year gap. Charnley: That was during the depression? Larrowe: Yes. You know, when I think about it, it's really bizarre in a way. I never doubted that I'd go to college, and yet I didn't have the money to go to college. When I finished high school, I enlisted in the Army. Back in those days, you could sign up for three years, and every year the Army admitted two enlisted men to West Point by national competitive exam. See, in those days the Army was only, I don't know, 180,000 men, most of whom were World War I veterans stayed on. When I think of World War I and World War II, it seems like a long period between the two, but its really only, what, roughly twenty-one years. So to say somebody was a World War I vet and still in the Army is not all that peculiar. Anyway, most of the people were World War I or they were semi-literate kids who maybe didn't even go to high school, came off the farm or something. So an uncle of mine who was a West Pointer said, "Look, you enlist in the Army, you take this competitive exam, you'll be one of the two winners, and you go to West Point and you get a fine college education. And if you want to stay in the Army, you can. If not, you've got that education." So I went across the river to Vancouver, Washington, enlisted in the Army. No recruiting stations the way there are now, you know, in cities. So I went to Fort Vancouver, I guess they called it. Signed up, sailed through the physical exam with no reservations at all. They sent me down to the Presidio, San Francisco. I was in the infantry there, Third Division, which I just noticed the other day when I got a letter from a brother of mine, that the stamp has a picture of Audie Murphy. Are you familiar with him? Charnley: Highly decorated World War II hero. 3 Larrowe: Number-one decorated, yes. And he's got a Third Division shoulder patch in this stamp. So that brought back memories. So, anyway, about six months after I'm in the Army, the captain called me in and said, "I understand you're interested in competing for admission to West Point." I said, "Yes." "Well," he said,"the first step is to have a physical exam." I said, "I just had one." "Well," he said, "the standards are higher for West Point than they are for enlisted personnel." [Laughter] Well, I went over to the hospital there, and by the time that physical exam was through, I felt I was ready for the grave. I had some degree of flat feet. Eyesight wasn't up to par. Malocclusion, which I discovered means your teeth don't fit properly. I don't know if I had a heart murmur. But anyway, that just eliminated any hope of going to West Point because I couldn't pass the physical. So I saved up my money. I was getting paid twenty-one bucks a month, and I saved fifteen bucks. Well, out of the twenty-one, the Army took three bucks for something. I don't know what it was. So I'm really talking a net of eighteen a month. I saved fifteen a month for eight months and I bought myself out of the Army. But just before I did, I was a model--are you familiar with the difference between a garrison soldier and a field soldier? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: Well, I was a good garrison soldier. My equipment was all shined. As a matter of fact, people criticize me nowadays for being compulsive. I like to line things up squarely with the edge of the table and that kind of thing. While I was at the Presidio, a general was coming out from Washington--this was long before the Pentagon was built--to inspect the Third Division there. So, in order to make sure that the beds were properly made--you 4 know how the Army is--you're supposed to be able to drop a quarter on the bed, the blanket and it'll bounce up. Somebody, division commander or somebody, went around all the barracks looking at the ways the beds were made. Picked mine. We carried it out onto the parade ground. The whole damned regiment--it wasn't the division; it was regiment--they had to go by and inspect my bed. [Laughter] I didn't know whether to be proud of that or embarrassed by that. Charnley: Put that on your resume. [Laughter] Larrowe: So I was a good garrison soldier. Anyway, I got out, and just before I got out, there was some kind of international exposition in San Diego in 1935. The Presidio made up a company of men all matched pretty much by height, so they looked uniform. No pun intended. And they picked out people who were good garrison soldiers, 120, and I was one of them. Went down and we built a camp in the fairgrounds, a model Army camp, with a floor and a frame and then a pyramidal tent on top of that and the company street with crushed oyster shells, and boundaries. Beautiful example of a peacetime Army. So I was down there, and one day a guy came in and he said, "Hey, Larrowe, there's a guy looking for you, and he's wearing a uniform and he's packing a gun." I thought, "My god, what have I done?" Well it turned out it was a deputy sheriff who, somehow or another, was assigned the job of delivering to me a letter from a law firm in New York someplace. He informed me that I had just inherited 5,000 bucks. I didn't even know the uncle who left me the money. I had saved enough money to buy myself out, so I didn't have to touch the five grand for that. But the first thing I did was I bought a car. It was a '36 Ford. It was used. It had a convertible top, but it was a four-door car. Quite a rarity. If I had it now, probably worth half a million, but I wasn't smart enough to hang on to it. So I bought that car, toured all around the U.S., went on down to Mexico City and back. Never gave a thought to the possibility I might have a breakdown or a flat or anything. Just took off. 5 Charnley: Good reliable Ford. Larrowe: Yes. And then I enrolled in the University of Washington, and that amount of money carried me through. That 4,000 bucks took me through four years of college. But, unlike what you might have expected from a guy who's been in the Army and seen what it's like if you don't have an education, and would consequently be a mature, hard-working student, I was a George [W.] Bush kind of student. [Laughter] Drinking, frat boy, the whole works. Charnley: So your scholarly work you don't remember that much of as an undergraduate? Larrowe: I actually got a very good education, but it was only because I had to go every quarter to see my academic advisor, who would sign off on the courses I was going to take that quarter. He was a professor of Greek and I never took any Greek, but I was assigned to him. And he would say to me--and I've recommended this to people over the years now that I've been a prof-- he'd say to me, "Larrowe, do you know anything about architecture?" I'd say, "No." "Well we've got an excellent person teaching a course in architectural appreciation," or something. Or, "Do you know anything about American lit?" I'd say, "No." "Well, we've got a really fine person teaching that this term. You should take it." So it wasn't the subject so much he directed me into, but it was the person teaching it. And in that way I got a really broad liberal education, picked up a lot by osmosis because I was half in the bag a lot of the time I was in class. Charnley: Do you feel your Catholic education, primary education, prepared you well? 6 Larrowe: Very definitely, yes. I was way ahead when it came to writing, of my contemporaries in--well I can't say high school because they were all in the same school. At the university I was. Yes, it really paid off. And when I was teaching here, I could spot a student who came from a Catholic high school. Charnley: How so? Larrowe: Reading an essay exam the person would write. I'd say,"You went to a Catholic high school, didn't you?" They'd say, "How'd you know that?" "Well, I read your exam and you could write." Charnley: That's interesting. At the University of Washington, what did you major in? Larrowe: It was called General Studies. Probably doesn't exist anymore, but it should, because a student who approached college the way I did can get a good education. That's a testimonial to a good general studies program. I had no idea what I wanted to do. As a matter of fact, it's really strange. Did you ever read the Saturday Evening Post? Charnley: I did, yes. Larrowe: Well, I grew up reading that, and there was a series about a guy who sold heavy earth-moving equipment. Somehow or another I thought, "Now that would really be a fine way to make a living, sell earth- moving equipment." So that was what I was going to do when I got out of college. [Laughter] Charnley: When you graduated, what did you go into? 7 Larrowe: Well, when I graduated from the University of Washington, I had no idea, still, what I wanted to do. Here again, I didn't get through in four years. It took me about six years of attendance with four years out for military service during World War II. So when I came back, I still didn't know what I wanted to do, but I figured, well, I've got the G.I. Bill. Up to the master's level or something is going to be paid for, so why not take advantage of that. So I thought economics might be a good subject to take, because I was interested in participating in social reform in a kind of a vague way, and I figured, if you want to do that, it'd be useful to know something about the economy. When I was an undergraduate, I took a beginning econ course that would now be called microeconomics. That was before Keynesian economics came into existence, so there wasn't any macro at that time. But this was a course in a big amphitheater, probably three hundred of us, with a prof down there that couldn't be improved on by Central Casting. A big, heavy-set guy, no offense. [Laughter] But a three-piece suit with a watch-chain and a Phi Beta Kappa, and the dullest guy that I ever listened to in my life. I thought, "Boy, this is a subject I'm going to avoid like the plague." But then when I got out of the Army and came back to school, I thought, "Well, economics is a good subject for me." So I took it. I was never bitten by the economics bug, I don't think, as I look back on it. I never really thought like an economist. I don't know if you've hung out much with economists, but if you do, a quality they typically have is they can't talk about anything without suggesting it to some form of economic analysis. They use the jargon of the trade all the time, and I never did that. Some of my colleagues wonder if I knew any economics. [Laughter] I didn't know as much as I probably should have, but I found out I really wasn't much interested in economics. I liked teaching beginning economics, but what I really liked teaching was labor relations and labor laws at the undergraduate level. So that's what I wound up doing. Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your war service? How did that come about? 8 Larrowe: Apparently you're not going to get very far with this tape. Charnley: That's all right. I've got lots of tape. That's important, because don't you feel it shaped your experience in your later life? Larrowe: It did. But the reason I cautioned you about how it's a long story is this: here I was a goof-off in school, but I had a social conscience that somehow was awakened, which led me to withdraw from the university I belonged to when they wouldn't take in a Hawaiian football player, really a nice guy. As a matter of fact, talk about extreme bigotry. Here I was in a fraternity in Seattle, Washington, Sigma Chi fraternity. As you might guess, it had a sordid record. We were informed by the national office that the Prince of Siam, who I think was studying at Princeton or someplace–-what's Siam? Thailand now, I guess. The Prince of Siam was on his way back home from the eastern part of the U.S. He was going to go through Seattle, and he would like to drop out and meet the boys, the brothers, at the frat house. They took a vote. "No, we don't want him. He's a--" The "N" word or some damn thing. Can you imagine that? Somehow or another that went by me and I didn't protest that. Well, I argued, "Why the hell are we not inviting this guy? God, I'd love to meet the Prince of Siam." "Oh, no, no. He's not a white man." But then I proposed this Hawaiian football player who was really a great guy, for membership, and they turned him down. So I figured I've had it. So I moved off and rented a houseboat on the lake near the university with four other guys. It was a big improvement over the fraternity house. But anyway, along the way, somehow I developed this social conscience and I began, in the late thirties, reading passivist literature, people like Gandhi, Nehru. There was an American named Gregg, I think. That was his last name, who wrote about passivism and the futility of war, etc. Did you ever hear of the--I think it's called the Oxford Pledge. Maybe it's the Swedish Pledge, I don't know. There was a debate at Oxford on the question, "Will we (being the college generation in the thirties), will we let ourselves be used as cannon fodder the way our uncles and etc., were in World War I?" I think the people who debated, "Yes, we will. We'll rally around the flag," I think 9 they won. But the losing side then circulated a petition or a statement which I think was signed by people all around the world, saying, "I will not be used as cannon fodder in any future war." Well, I never got a chance to sign that thing, but I would have if I had seen it. It's a small regret I have that I can't say I signed that, the Stockholm Pledge or something. So anyway, I was casting around after I had signed up for the draft. What would I do? I knew I couldn't claim that I was a conscientious objector, because the Catholic Church didn't approve of that. While I was pondering that, I heard about an outfit that had headquarters in New York, which had contracted with Chrysler to buy Dodge ambulances. That's the kind the Army-you'd see them on "M*A*S*H." It was that kind of ambulance. They had these ambulances on order and they were going to give them to the French, because its outfit was called the American Field Service, had been established in World War I, when, if I remember correctly, the Battle at Verdun produced so many casualties it exhausted the French Medical Corps, the ability to get these people back away from the battle area. So American expatriates in Paris somehow got their hands on pickup trucks and vans and vehicles of one kind and another and drove up to the front in Verdun and brought these people back, and then they formed a permanent organization which kept it alive during the two wars, I think mainly because most of the people in it, in World War I, were well-to-do New Englanders, Ivy League types, with money. So they kept it alive. When World War II came on, they ordered these ambulances. They were going to provide them to the French and they were going to provide volunteer drivers as well. But France fell so quickly. They had to do something with these things. They were coming off the assembly line. So they offered them to the French who were fighting the Germans in Syria, I think it was. Maybe it was Lebanon and Syria. Anyway, that didn't take very long for the Germans to resolve that. So they still had these ambulances and they had people who had signed up to drive them. So they offered them to the British. So I signed on with this for a year, as a volunteer ambulance driver. I went back to New York on my own, and the ship left from Brooklyn. We went down along the Atlantic coast in this passenger ship converted to a troop ship. But you could misunderstand that term "troop ship" if I don't explain that here was a passenger boat designed 10 to carry fifty-four passengers, and there were only 110 of us. So we weren't exactly crowded. [Laughter] Had a swimming pool, four meals a day, lie out on the deck in the sun. But as we were going down the Atlantic coast, I saw one ship after another that had been hit by a torpedo and had run aground. It was up on the shore there. Charnley: So German U-boats were operating in the area? Larrowe: They were, yes. There was something in the paper just recently about that, the fact that the British had broken the German code and they knew that there were U-boats operating along the shore. But we went down all by ourselves to Trinidad, and seeing these ships made me a little bit nervous, but one of the reasons it's good to have young people fight wars is they think they're immortal. Charnley: "It won't be me." Larrowe: You can't scare them very well. But anyway, we went by ourselves to Trinidad, Port of Spain, Trinidad, formed a big convoy, then went around the southern part of South Africa. We couldn't go into the Mediterranean. The German and Italian Air Force controlled that. Down around South Africa, stopped off in Cape Town for, I think, two weeks, or something like that, in an Army camp. Then we took a train to Durbin and got aboard the New Amsterdam, which was a beautiful passenger ship. But there were 8,000 of us on that thing, designed for maybe 300. One of the nice things about this outfit I was in was, we bought our uniforms at Abercrombie and Fitch. I was really glamorized by that idea. Bush jackets, and, you know, young and thin you look pretty good in one of those outfits. Shorts, long socks that you would associate with a British colonial manager of a rubber plantation or something. Anyway, nobody could tell, in the British Army, what we were. We weren't enlisted men and we weren't officers. So they resolved that in favor of we were officers, which meant 8,000 troops were out on the deck, 11 and they can't even get a beer. We could hit the bar, officers' bar, around 7 p.m. and close at around midnight or something. [Laughter] Charnley: So the British class system won out. Larrowe: Sure did. So then we went on up from South Africa into the Red Sea and got off at portside. Took a train from there into the desert. This was September '42. Now, if you're an historian of World War II, you know that October of '42 was the Battle of El Alamain [phonetic], the first major victory the Allies had won in World War II, I believe, on land, anyway. So we got there just one month before the El Alamaine battle, and spent that time out in the desert training how to operate in the desert. Now, we never had to use it, but we had something called a sun compass, which was mounted on the left side of the driver's door, and it was a metal plate about maybe six inches in diameter, then sort of a spike which was about six inches high in the center of it, which cast a shadow. I can't remember how we used that in detail, but somehow you align the vehicle up using a metal compass, true north. So now you're heading true north and you see where the shadow falls down this metal base. And somehow, by keeping the shadow where it is when you're going, let's say, forty degrees or fifty degrees, you could go maybe ten miles into the trackless desert and find a fifty-gallon drum out there. That was your target. And the theory, of course, was because the desert was like being in the ocean, a good part of the desert has no shrubs, nothing, just flat, hard sand so you can drive in it. So we spent a month learning how to do that and how to maintain the ambulance in the sand and whatnot. We had a grease gun and we'd have to grease, I think the term is spines, which has something to do with parts that move around and had to do with the steering of the vehicle. We'd pump this grease in until we couldn't see the sand coming through and then we know that we'd gotten all the sand out of it. Of course, if you don't do that, you get to the point where--well, what happened to that episode in Iran, remember, when the Delta Force tried to rescue those people with helicopters and couldn't operate in the sand. We resolved that. Of course, it was much simpler with those ambulances, by greasing those things every evening. 12 Charnley: Did you have training in first aid? Larrowe: No, all we did was, we would drive up to a battalion aid station, which would probably be, oh, I don't know, maybe seven hundred yards or something, back from the front line. That would be where somebody who was wounded would get elementary treatment, put a tourniquet on or whatever. And then we'd pick up the wounded. We had four stretchers, and if we were going to pick up walking wounded, we had benches on each side that folded down. So you could get something like eight walking wounded in there comfortably, as against four stretchers. We'd pick them up at the battalion aid station and take them back to another part of the medical service called a casualty clearing station, which I think it was very much like what you see on "M*A*S*H," on television. They would take the bandages off, do a little surgery, then we'd take them on back to a hospital in Cairo or some larger, more permanent hospital. No, we didn't do any first aid. I ran into another idiotic example of racial bigotry. I noticed after I got to New York and saw some of the other people who were going to go on this enterprise with me, there were no blacks. Well, the blacks weren't serving in the American Army either, in those days. But I said, "How come no blacks?" Some guy said, "Well, we thought about it, but we decided that, given the attitude that so many whites have toward blacks, if a white soldier is on his back out on the battlefield and he's being picked up to be put in your ambulance, and he sees a black face, he might have a heart attack and die." That was in the days when the Red Cross wouldn't take black blood, because somebody might think it would be contaminated. Charnley: How long did you end up serving in that force? Larrowe: Well, I got there just in time for the El Alamaine battle. We pursued the Africa Corps, I put it that way, because there was an Italian component of the Africa Corps. They were side by side. But they surrendered so quickly, they didn't really have a corps. All the way across North Africa. When we got to Tripoli, where Kadhafi 13 now has his headquarters, we stopped and Winston Churchill flew out and addressed the British Eighth Army, and we were part of it because we were attached to various divisions of the British Eighth Army. And it was one of those-–was it Henry the Eighth--"We band of brothers" or something kind of speech. "Nobody will ever forget you." Which, of course, I know now is baloney. Nobody ever heard of it, us being in Tripoli. [Laughter] Then we continued on to-–I got as far as Tunisia, and by that time the Americans had landed in Algeria and they were closing the gap between the British Eighth Army and the American forces and the Africa Corps was squeezed in between. By this time I was a--if you saw me, you would think I was a first lieutenant in the British Army. I had two pips. I managed to look like an officer, and I was responsible for something like thirty ambulances. I had a motorcycle part of the time, a jeep part of the time, to deal with the people I was responsible for, because the way we moved across the desert was to position all the vehicles, tanks, trucks, every vehicle, I think something like 150 yards from the next vehicle. So if this is my ambulance, and this is another one, there's 150 yards this way, 150 yards that way. That turned out to be helpful, because every once in a while the Germans would swoop down and bomb convoys and whatnot. There were some times when you had to stay on a road because the ground wouldn't be passable, and you were really a nice target for a Stuka to come. Charnley: For strafing. Larrowe: To strafe. So if I was going to get the word out to thirty ambulances, I couldn't do it on foot very well. So they gave me a motorcycle part of the time and a jeep part of the time. Then they sent me up to Aleppo, Syria. I drove through what was then Palestine from Cairo-- [Begin Tape 1, side 2] 14 Charnley: We were talking about World War II experiences of Lash Larrowe. You were mentioning you were in Palestine with a British colonial. Larrowe: Yes, we drove from Cairo. I don't how the hell we got across the canal, but somehow we did. He had been in command of the force in the thirties which protected the Jewish settlers when they were settling in what is now Israel. So we'd be driving along, and we'd look up and there'd be a hillside running up maybe three hundred feet or so up into the air there, and there'd be grass, green grass, be covered with huge, white boulders. He would say, "See those boulders, there?" I'd say "Yes." He'd say, "The goddamn," or, "the bloody Arabs, with their white outfits would hide behind those boulders and snipe at us." Sort of reminded me of movies of the Wild West. Charnley: Where they'd snipe at the cowboys. Larrowe: Yes. And then he'd point to a little village on top of one of these places. He'd say, "We knew there were Arabs up there who were shooting at us, but we'd creep up there in the nighttime, not making a sound, and we'd think, 'Boy, we're going to make it this time,' and we'd be maybe 100 feet from that village and the dogs would start barking." [Laughter] Charnley: First line of defense. Larrowe: It was a great experience. We stopped off one night at the King David Hotel, which is where Begin and his [unclear] terrorists blew up and killed nineteen British officers or something. Remember that, after World War II? 15 Anyway, they installed me in an apartment in Aleppo, and we had about thirty ambulances attached to the British Tenth Army, which was all around the area there, out in the desert in Syria, training for the invasion of Sicily. My job, I had a jeep and a driver, because nobody knew whether I was an officer or what the hell I was. I would go to a unit where one of my drivers was working, and I'd go into the officers' mess and have drinks and a good meal. Or If I wanted to, I could go into the British non-coms' mess. Charnley: You were headed both ways. Larrowe: Yes. So, that was really great. But after, I think, three months of that my year was up and I came back home. So that's when I re-enrolled at the University of Washington, in economics. Charnley: And you ended up in the U.S. Army, at some point. Larrowe: Yes, I came back. I left something out there. What I noticed was when I pursuing the Africa Corps with the British Eighth Army, and they put four wounded people in the ambulance on stretchers, the policy we adopted there, which apparently the U.S. Army has not followed since World War II, and I don't know if they ever did it anymore, they must have in World War II, but the policy was when we would get to an aid station, an orderly there would say, "Who comes out first?" And the answer would be, "This guy here." And it didn't make any difference whether the guy who came off first was a German soldier, or Indian, or New Zealander, Free Frenchman or Greek, whatever it was, whether it was on our side or their side. They took them off in order, the person most urgently in need of medical treatment. And so the chivalry of the old days still survived. Then I began to realize, if I put somebody on that ambulance who had his leg blown off, and he was a German, it didn't bother me emotionally at all. But if he was on our side, it really got to me emotionally. So I said to myself, "Hell, I really want us to win. I should be fighting. I shouldn't be on the sidelines like this." 16 So when I came home, I just went down, enlisted in the Army. Put me through basic training out in California. No recognition of my experience with the British or in peacetime. I had an Army serial number, which identified me to anybody who was looking at these records as virtually a lifer, because I was in there back in the thirties. Nobody ever mentioned that. So I just went through basic training for the infantry the way everybody else did. But they called me-–I don't know if it would be recognition--I think it was because I had all but one quarter to go to finish college. I was called off the training field one day in basic training camp, and I went over to a building where they were interviewing possible trainees with a view toward sending them to officers' training corps, training camp. It was the damnedest experience. It's one of these wooden buildings, temporary wooden buildings. If I'm right, I think there were about five officers sitting at a table, facing the candidate, and then behind the candidate was a wall of windows, the kind you push up. As you look through the windows, you saw the boys out there marching around and doing exercises and all that. So they said to me, "Stand facing those windows, and pretend that you're commanding a battalion." Well, I don't have a piercing voice, so I'm giving battalion attention, parade rest, all that kind of crap. And after a few minutes of that, they said, "Don't call us, we'll call you." [Laughter] So, I was shipped out to Hawaii, and I was at the Scofield Barracks for a while as a replacement, an individual replacement. You never knew where you were going to be sent. I think I stayed out of Scofield Barracks. That's about thirty miles, I think, from Honolulu. Charnley: What year is this, now, '44? Larrowe: '44. Yes, it would have to be '44. I can't remember for sure. It was either '43 or '44. Anyway, they gave me a job driving officers from Scofield into Honolulu for recreation, see, so I'd be driving these in. I was like a chauffeur, you know. They'd go in and have drinks, you know, and I'd stand outside. I don't think I had enough sense to get a book to read; I just waited for those guys. I didn't mind that too much. But 17 one day as we were driving into town, there were two lieutenants in the back, and one of them had just arrived in the States--one of these ninety-day wonders, ROTC types--and the other one had been in some battle out in one of the islands somewhere. So the new man said to the other one, "What's it like killing Japs? Does it bother you?" The guy says, "Bother me? Hell, no," he says "it's like shooting rats at a water hole." I damn near ran off the road, I was so shocked at that. But later I found out that I felt pretty much the same way. So anyway, and here we get to an incident that bears on this interview so far as explaining how I'd get to be the way I am. I was in a kind of a M.A.S.H. outfit. They assigned me to that in Hawaii. We went out into the countryside and trained for, oh hell, maybe two months or something. They made a sergeant out of me, and put me in charge of thirty ambulances. And now you see some-- Charnley: Some connection with your other experience. Larrowe: But it turned out to be unfortunate in a way for them, because as I looked around at this outfit I was in, I said to myself, "There's something wrong with this. Everybody else in this outfit, they're all eight-balls. There's something's wrong. They've all screwed up in some other outfit and they've been dumped in here. What in the hell am I doing in here? Here I am a good boy. They carried my bunk out." [Laughter] Charnley: Good soldier. Larrowe: Yes. So, I was criticizing the captain and the first sergeant for the way they ran things. So one day I'm in the mess hall having lunch. Everybody else left except the first sergeant, who was a lifer, and me. So he says "Hey, Larrowe, come over here." So I went over there. He says, "I just want you to know something." He says, "The captain and I know you're a communist." [Laughter] I had joined the Young Communist League, but I got out of it in about three months when I figured out what democratic centralism meant, you know. You'd debate two hours in your little group, and then at the end of 18 the two hours, the guy who's heading it up says, "Well, that was an interesting discussion, but what the party says about this is this." It was a total waste of your time. Three months was all I could stand of that. But I never considered that being a communist, anyway. So I said "What makes you think that?" He says, "Well, you're always criticizing the captain and me." That was his idea. Charnley: Of being a communist. Larrowe: So I went to the captain, and I said--I went AWOL. They sent us into the Philippines. We got to the Philippines, and went ashore the same day [Douglas] MacArthur did. I didn't see him, but I always think of that when I see pictures of him walking ashore. That's the same day we arrived there. Charnley: The restaging of his returning. Larrowe: Yes. We were sent down to the little fishing village there, and from time to time the wounded would be brought down from the battle area, north or wherever it was, by barge. They'd come off the barge and we'd take him into our little field hospital there. We were so far to the rear, I couldn't even hear artillery. That's how safe that was. I got acquainted with some of the local people, because I'd go down swimming and they'd be fishing and all that. A guy says to me, "How'd you like to go to a wedding?" This was a Filipino. I said, "Great." "Well" he says, "let's go." So we start walking. Pretty soon, we're out of town. We're going up a hill. And it starts to get dark. I said, "Wait a minute. Where the hell's this wedding?" "Oh, it's just a little farther." 19 So we stayed overnight, and we stayed another night. [Laughter] I think it took us three days to get to the wedding. We caroused for a couple of days, and started back. I had now been gone a week. That's AWOL. People had gone to jail for that. [Laughter] So I got back. One of the other guys in this unit, as I approached the field hospital, he says, "Hey, Larrowe, the captain wants to talk to you, and, boy, he's mad." The captain says, "You're no longer a sergeant; you're a private." Well, who gives a damn, you know, in wartime? So I didn't care about that. But then I thought, "This is a good time for me to get the hell out of this outfit." So I said to the captain, "How do I get out of this? I want to transfer to the infantry." "Well," he says, "I'm not going to allow it." I said, "There must be an appeal I can take from your decision." "Oh, yes," he says, "you can go." I think it was called the inspector general, or something. So I went to see the inspector general, told him I wanted to transfer out. He said, "Where do you want to go?" I says, "To the infantry." He damn near fell off his chair. He says, "Nobody volunteers for the infantry. You've got to be nuts." I said, "Well, that's the way I feel." So he said, "Okay." So he transferred me into the infantry, and that was the best damn decision I ever made, especially after this chicken-shit outfit I was in, with this screwball captain and first sergeant and all that. Because this was the Seventh Infantry Division, which is an old regular Army division, been put on the shelf, whatever the term is, between the two wars. Then it was reactivated by General "Vinegar" Joe Stilwell [phonetic], who was my kind of a guy. His stamp which he put on that was, "This is not going to be a spit-and-polish division. This is going to be a fighting division. It was going to be, as much as you can make a military outfit, a kind of a democratic outfit." 20 One example of why I liked it was, after I joined it and found out that next door to us was the 77th Infantry Division. They had fought in the battle for this island, Leyte Island, so they were resting while we all waited to go aboard ships and go to some other island. So here we are sitting around, not doing a damn thing. We look over here and here's these guys in the 77th painting their--you know what blanco is? Charnley: No. Larrowe: You know what webbing is? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: If you want that to look as sharp, like MPs, you paint that stuff white. Then you go into combat, you've got to clean it off. So they're over there blancoing all their web equipment, you know, scraps and packs. It looked like a goddamn MP outfit. All we had to do was keep our rifles clean and fall out for reveille and retreat, and the rest of the time we're playing cards or having a swim or something. And I thought, "Boy, this is the outfit for me." So then the captain calls me in and says, "I see here." He had my file. He says, "I see you have some college. Well, you got here just at the right time." He said, "We've got to send somebody to chemical warfare school." That had an ominous sound to it. I said, "What happens there?" He said, "Well, you learn how to operate a flame thrower, which you carry on your back." Two tanks, you know, one with napalm, the other with compressed air, something like that. Rubber hoses would come out and you push one lever and the napalm shoots out. Push the other one or squeeze it and it ignites a spark and flame shoots out. So I knew this was bad news. I go over there. The training consisted of some guy telling me, "Put this on your back." So I put it on my back. I didn't know what it weighed, forty pounds or something like that. Some other guy comes up behind me, 21 opens the valves. Now I can activate the flame thrower. I just described to you the entire training program. [Laughter] So I went back, and I said, "Captain, that flame thrower's heavy." I said, "I see some big guys around here. Why don't you assign that to one of them?" "Oh, you'll never carry it in combat," he said. "What you'll do is train them, now that you've learned how." I wound up carrying that goddamned thing when we landed on Okinawa. I remember the way we got aboard the landing craft was come down the side of the ship on those cargo nets. Down on the ocean level, the waves would push the barge away from the ship and then back, you know, and it'd be banging up against the side of the ship. You had to drop about three feet, I guess, from the bottom of the cargo net into this barge, and all the time I'm climbing down there, all I'm worrying about is, what if the goddamn barge moves away from the ship just when I jump into it, and I go in the water I'll never come up? [Laughter] Charnley: You had a forty-pound anchor on your back. Larrowe: I managed to make it. So I carried that damn thing. We landed on April 1, '45. The weather was very much like the weather would be in Portland or Seattle, temperate climate at that time. I can remember just sweating. We'd climb up hills and down hills and up and down. My uniform turned white from the salt, and I was popping those goddamn salt pills until I was nauseated. I only had to use it twice, but then I got rid of it. I never taught anybody how to use one. We just stopped using them for some reason. Charnley: Did you use it against the bunkers? Larrowe: Yes. Okinawa consisted of a lot of hills. I don't know how high they were, several hundred feet, I guess, maybe five hundred feet, at the base of which there were caves, in addition to which there were caves that were 22 excavated by the Okinawans to bury their dead. They would put the body into a huge ceramic urn about three and a half feet high. Okinawans were fairly small people. They put the body in that urn, and then they'd take it in and then they'd seal up the entrance to this cave they had excavated. You see them there today. I went back in '95 for the fiftieth anniversary of that battle, and I was reminded of how the entrances to some of these were ornamented with bright-colored tiles and whatnot. But those caves, and the artificial caves, were perfect pillboxes for Japanese machine gunner, who, of course, was in there to die, with this suicidal assignment. He wasn't going to emerge. Chances are he'd never get out of there. But it was great for them, because we'd be moving along and all of a sudden this guy would open up a machine gun and take out maybe ten people with a couple of bursts. So they would call for me. In addition to mine, there were tanks that had these things mounted on them, and, god, they could throw flame out there, oh, probably the length of a football field. Hell of a thing to watch. Of course, if it's your side using the thing, it's kind of nice to watch. Charnley: Not on the receiving end. Larrowe: Yes. So, anyway, that turned out to be a good experience. I graduated to being a rifleman, and I finally was discharged as a staff sergeant. So, there again, given the turnover of second lieutenants, I was in command of a platoon for, oh, hell, about a month, I guess. I didn't realize this until fairly recently, somehow, but the day before that battle ended, it was getting dark and there'd been a sniper. There were a lot of coral boulders. I guess Okinawa must have been coral that somehow pushed up out of the ocean. So this guy was in among some of these boulders, and he was picking off members of my platoon, and we couldn't move. We called up a tank to come up there. The tank came up, and I don't think the tank was any farther than from here to the blackboard there. Charnley: Twenty feet. 23 Larrowe: Twenty feet or so. Fired his cannon right into to those boulders, and I thought, "Well, that's the end of that son of a bitch. We can move." We started to move. By god, he came out somewhere, starts picking people off again. So we just couldn't make any headway. And it started to get dark, so I was saying to one of the people in the platoon, "You dig a trench here," and somebody dig one here, and that kind of thing. Bed down for the night, when all of a sudden, wham, this guy got me right through the shoulder. I've always thought of it as a million-dollar wound, you know. Because you get out of combat, but you survive. So I always felt kind of grateful to that guy. [Laughter] Charnley: So that was you ticket home? Larrowe: That was my ticket home. Then I found out that if I'd survived another day, the battle would have been over anyway. Charnley: How long was your recovery from the shoulder wound? Larrowe: It was the damnedest thing. They put me in a cast that started about the navel, went all around my body, and held my arm up level with my shoulder. This cast, somehow. I saw a picture of the X-ray of the bone, and it went right through where the arm meets the shoulder. The top of the bone, it swells out the way your hand does from your wrist. Went right through the center of that, was a beautiful sunburst on the X-ray. I wish I'd been able to hang onto that. It'd be fun to light that up. Charnley: Have that mounted in your office. 24 Larrowe: Yes. [Laughter] But now that I've gone through having my knee replaced and all the rehabilitation that accompanies that, I'm amazed that the fact that there was no physical rehab at all. Well, in this recovery period, I never felt any pain. Shock, I suppose, prevented that. But some of these guys carried me down this hillside, put me in a jeep down there. The jeep drove down to a little airfield. At that airfield there was a bubble helicopter, just big enough for the pilot. You couldn't even have a passenger inside, but a couple of stretchers were rigged up on the outside of that little bubble helicopter. I had never even seen a helicopter before. So they put me on there. And by now it's almost dark, and the pilot says to me, "You know," he says, "all day long," he says, "a Jap sniper's been trying to get me." Says, "It's just my luck he'll get me this time." I thought, "Thanks a lot." [Laughter] Charnley: So you didn't have the benefit of an ambulance ride. Larrowe: No. Charnley: Kind of ironic. When you were wounded, then-- Larrowe: Yes. That's right Charnley: Even though you'd had experience as an ambulance driver. Larrowe: I'm having a hell of a time remembering the details of that. I don't know how people remember all the details. Charnley: Well, the trauma, too, of that. And, obviously it's a natural-- 25 Larrowe: So we ended up first on Guam, in a hospital there. I was the only non-Marine in a ward of something like thirty people. Twenty-nine Marines and me. So, day after day, for about a month, I had to listen to these guys talk about "The goddamn Army's no good. They won't move ahead." I felt like saying, "You guys might want to ponder this fact. There's twenty-nine of you, and one of me. That tells something about your tactics as against ours." [Laughter] But I never let on I wasn't a Marine. They'd probably assassinate me in my sleep if they found out I wasn't one of them. Then I wound up in a hospital in Walla Walla, Washington, for something like two months, with my arm in this damn cast all that time. So as I'm going out of the hospital, there was a Legionnaire at a card table by the door. He said, "Hey, Buddy, come on over." Well, that wasn't good. I figured Marines are fascists, you know, with busting strikes in the thirties, and hostile to the First Amendment, and all that sort of thing. But oh, no, hell no. "No, come on." Well, nobody's waiting for me, or anything. I thought, "Why not?" So I go over. He says, "Have you put in for disability classification?" Something like that. I said, "No," I said, "I don't feel disabled. I can move my arm okay." "Well," he said, "we found out after world War I, if you don't apply for disability status right at the time you're discharged, and then twenty years later you're incapacitated because this catches up with you, you can't apply that." So he said, "Look, we'll fill out all the papers. You just sign this one piece of paper, here, and we'll handle the whole thing for you." So I applied, and I was classified 10 percent disabled. So then at the risk of carrying this story on beyond your patience, I go back up to Seattle, re-enroll. About a year after I was discharged, I got a letter from the VA [Veterans Administration], saying, "We're reexamining all the classifications of disabled military personnel. So you go down --" some doctor's office in Seattle, "and he'll give you a physical exam." So I was in good shape by this time. I was playing handball and whatnot. I was about 175 pounds, I guess. 26 So I go down there, and this doctor turns out to be small and thin. He said, "Now what I'm going to do first is," he says, "you shake hands as if we're just shaking hands, and I'm going to push against, I want to see how that shoulder works, forward and back." Well, I get into some kind of a game with this guy, for some crazy reason, and I just pushed him right up against the wall. So then he said, "Now we try it laterally. I want to see how it goes when I push your arm up." Well, I practically picked him up off the floor, up against his desk. So then he says, "One more try. Try it the other way." I flipped him up over against the filing cabinet, or some damn thing. He says, "Well, I think I have enough information now." I'll be damned if the guy didn't confirm my classification as disabled. Charnley: As 10 percent? Larrowe: Yes. Now, see that's not resistance to authority, that's just idiocy, that kind of behavior. But it was beautiful, because as a partially disabled person, I had a better G.I. Bill, called it Public Law 16, which meant I got more generous living allowance, more generous book allowance, and I think it carried me farther into graduate school than regular G.I. Bill. Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about the G.I. Bill, and how it influenced you and your studies? Larrowe: Well, it certainly influenced me because it meant I could continue on after the master's if I wanted to. By that time, I was trying to figure out what the hell am I going to do now. I still had no clear idea of what I wanted to do, which gave me a lot of empathy with students who didn't know whether they wanted to be engineers or economists or sales people or whatnot. 27 So anyway, I was talking with one of my profs one day, about this, and I said, "You know, I can tell you a lot of things I do not want to do." By this time I was active in the ACLU in Seattle. My wife and I helped establish a branch there. Charnley: Were you married at the time? Larrowe: Yes. I got married not long after I was discharged. Charnley: In 1945 or '46? Larrowe: '46. Another good thing, because my wife insisted that I keep my nose to the grindstone. She was supporting me in part. So I became a serious student. But anyway, see the Truman loyalty program was just getting started at that time. I wasn't fearful that they'd find out that I'd been in the YCL, which they never did, as far as I know, but I just didn't like the political climate, the idea of working for the government, and having to toe the line and you were always being accused. You know, in those days, people in the Loyalty Review Program would be asked, "Is it true that you had a Negro for dinner at your house?" If you did, see, they'd question your loyalty. That's how low-level that was. With no appeal, at the beginning of that thing. So okay, that took care--I don't want to work for the government. I don't want to work for a corporation. To me, a corporation was IBM with a hat that looked like an FBI man's, snap-brimmed hat that's straight, the dark suit, a white shirt and a dark tie, you know, that dress code they had. I figured, that's out. Somehow, shortly after I got out of the Army, before I was married, I decided to augment my income. So I got a job as a father substitute in a center for disturbed kids. There'd be like twenty kids ranging in age from maybe three years all the way up to eighteen, living in this big house. 28 Larrowe: Group home. Charnley: A group home, yes. So they had a father substitute and a mother substitute, college-age people, during the day and then another set overnight. So I got a job in this place. Almost immediately, I realized that the people working there, the social workers, were extremely unhappy with their working conditions and their salaries and so on. So I went down and I joined the CIO Office and Professional Workers. My intention was, I was a professional. [Laughter] And they were happy to have me, so I thought, "Well, I'll organize this group." These were people who were carrying a New York newspaper called PM, which was sort of like the Nation magazine. They'd have that in their pocket, you know, sort of a symbol to everybody else, "I'm a liberal." So I thought this would be duck soup, organizing people. Turned out quite the contrary. They're all scared to join the union. But after a couple of weeks of talking to them, the head of this treatment center called me in. This was a woman who was about forty, I think, a psychiatric social worker. She seemed pleasant enough. [Begin Tape 2, side 1] Larrowe: ...why I was a thorn in the side of some of those boys on the forth floor of the ad building. Anyway, she said, "Why didn't you talk to me?" I said, "Look, I'm not carrying a teamster card. You don't organize people by going to the boss and signing up the boss. You talk to the workers first." "Well," she said--god, I thought this was marvelous--she says, "I know why you're doing this." I said, "Why?" She said, "You hate your mother and you're projecting that onto me." [Laughter] Charnley: There's the answer. 29 Larrowe: Talk about a brilliant anti-union one-liner. I became the president of the local. Most of the members were secretaries working for CIO offices there in Seattle. Now, the national president of this union was widely thought to be a member of the communist party. Probably was, I suppose. So, when I got my FBI file in 1975, sure enough, the first item in there was, "The subject was an officer of a communist-dominated union, the CIO office." They were one of the unions kicked out of the CIO for communist domination. Charnley: This before the AFL and CIO were joined, right? Larrowe: Oh yes, long before. The AFL absorbed the CIO in 1955. This was back in '46 or thereabouts. So I don't think I got another job. I think has lost my enthusiasm for part-time employment after that. [Laughter] Charnley: And then you finished your degree there? Larrowe: I got the master's. I started by saying I was going down the list of things I did not want to do. I didn't want to work for a corporation. I didn't want to work for the government. Some people said-–and this is the why I digressed-–"You could have a future in the labor movement." A lot of people in the Seattle CIO were communist and they would tell tall stories about how, "You join the party and we'll make damn sure you've got a good career in the CIO." And then they'd say, "So-and-so, he's one of ours." And I think a lot of the time it was made it up out of whole cloth. I think they even told me Eleanor Roosevelt was a member one time. [Laughter] It shows you how the circle closes. The right wing says she a commie and the left wing says she's one of ours. So anyway, a career in the union movement was out, too, because you've got to toe the party line. So, god, I'm telling this guy, "I don't know what the hell I'm going to do." 30 And he said, "Have you ever thought of getting a Ph.D. in teaching?" Well, with my undergraduate record, and my high school record, and my grade school record, which is one of goofing off, the idea of getting a Ph.D. was so foreign to me. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I said, "God, you think I could ever make to the Ph.D.?" "Well," he said, "look. Look around at the faculty. You think you're as smart as they are?" And I said, "Well, I sure as hell am." He says, "Well, then you can make it." So I applied to Yale. That's the only school I applied to, and I got a form postcard back, not even the dignity of a letter, saying, "Thank you for applying." And they were crying for Ph.D. candidates after the war, you know. "We don't have room for you," or something. So I told a friend of mine in Seattle about this and he said, "I think I could help." I said, "How?" He said, "My brother is the captain of the Yale football team, and he can run interference for you." I said, "Jesus, the head of the football team is going to recommend a guy for a Ph.D. program? This is the last thing I would ever do." Well, he wrote to his brother, and the next thing I knew, I was invited by the chairman of the Yale alumni organization in Seattle to come down to his office. I go down to his office, and I'm waiting in the outer office, where he had a big table. This table's just loaded with Birch Society magazines and right-wing stuff. I thought, "Jeez, if this guy ever finds out I had something to do with the ACLU, my goose is cooked." But I went in, and in those days I used to wear a suit and I looked pretty sharp, see, shoes shined and all that. You could get these little metal replicas of a medal and put them in your coat. I had one of those on, and that made a big impression on this guy. Charnley: That was your war medal? 31 Larrowe: Yes. I'll be damned if the guy didn't recommend me to Yale, and I got in. [Laughter] Which again gives me empathy with students who want letters of recommendation and you might say they don't deserve it. Charnley: And the way the G.I. Bill worked at that time, you were able to go to an Ivy League school? Larrowe: Well, see, I went to Yale, and I think it ran out after the first year, if I'm not mistaken. But I had a job teaching three classes. Assistant instructor, I think I was called. But they were my own classes, you know. They did everything. There were about fifteen of us, all teaching small sections of beginning econ, and we were all Ph.D. candidates. Faculty did what the English department does; they shoved it off on grad students. But it was a great experience. I learned a lot. You know, the best way to learn is to teach something. So that was good. Now I had tuition paid for as part of my assignment, and a salary to go with it. So with my G.I. Bill and that, I lived quite comfortably. So that was a great arrangement. But here again, the reason I wanted to go to Yale was because there was a prof in the econ department who had written a textbook in labor economics, a lot of articles and whatnot, and that's what I wanted to go into. Charnley: Who was that, do you remember? Larrowe: I had it in my head and I carried a grudge against that guy for all these years. [Laughter] I ought to remember it. It'll come back to me. I had it right on the tip of my tongue. Any way, I went there because I wanted to study under this guy. Well, my wife got a job in the Labor Management Center at Yale soon as we got there. I think after we'd been there about two weeks, the head of the center, which included this prof I went there to study under, you know, joint appointment, the head of the center had a cookout or something one Sunday afternoon, a nice pleasant day and whatnot. I arrived driving, I think it was a 1947 or '48 Studebaker convertible, battleship grey or a silver color, with red leather and big whitewall tires, you know. The thing was just absolutely spotless all the time. 32 So I pull up at this place. This guy, his place was out in the country and he had a kind of a split-rail fence. You pull up to this fence, see, and park, and you can go on into the house. So I parked my car there and I went in. About fifteen minutes later, here comes this prof, Lloyd Reynolds--that was the guy's name--he arrives, and he was in a fury. It turned out he was a thin-skinned, insecure bastard, even though he was highly respected and made big money and all the rest of it, a Yale prof. I could see something was really bothering him. Somebody asked him, "What's the trouble?" He says, "Who owns that Studebaker convertible out there?" Somebody says, "The new guy," or something. What got under his skin was he had a car just like it. But when I went out, it looked like his had been bought after somebody had run it into the ground fifteen years or so. It's in a mess. And to see mine, just gleaming got under his skin for some damn reason. So I started off on the wrong foot with that guy. We had a graduate economics club, and we would invite people from Harvard and various other places to come and give talks and then we'd discuss their talks. This was held in a pretty posh Graduate Studies Center or something like that. I think might have been the first one I went to. Had leather chairs, overstuffed chairs, very comfortable. But there was a big crowd there, so we got there fairly early and we wound up sitting the couch with room for one more person. Lloyd Reynolds wound up late, so the only place he could sit was next to me on this couch. Well, I had read in the Times that day or the day before, that Lloyd Reynolds had testified before the House on American Activities Committee as a hostile witness, not because he was under any accusations, but he was being asked about colleagues or something. And he had stood up to this committee. So I said to him, "You know, I want to commend you for that position you took with the House on American Activities committee. "What are you talking about?" I said, "Well, I read in the Times that you stood up to the committee, and I think it's about time somebody did." 33 "Well, it certainly wasn't me," he says. And he's pissed off. Well, turned out it was a guy named Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College in Portland. [Laughter] You can see how I dug myself in deeper. So I managed to do okay. I was up against guys who had gone to prep schools and Ivy League colleges. I felt kind of intimidated at first, but I discovered fairly soon that they really weren't all that better than I was, despite my record, which on paper was really miserable, academic record. So, I was taking a course from a guy named E. White Bakke, same name as that guy whose case-– Charnley: In California. Larrowe: In California. E. White Bakke, at Yale, was working on a concept that he thought he could sell or could be useful-–I shouldn't put it that way-–would be useful to corporations and government officials. It was called Bonds Organization. How do you get people in an organization to bond together and develop and team spirit and work cooperatively? I think that was the point of it. So I had to do a term paper for this seminar, and I thought, "I'll apply this Bonds Organization theory to the econ department at Yale." [Laughter] So there were about maybe fifteen grad students in the group there, and I interviewed all these guys and I finished the paper. To a person, they were disgusted, absolutely disgusted with the Yale faculty. They said they didn't help them, they didn't make any effort to help them to get jobs, oftentimes unprepared, treated teaching as an annoyance rather than a calling. All the things that you, you know, might say about some faculty. And this was unanimous, see. So I called one person and another. Turned the damn thing in. I'll be damned if this guy Bakke didn't make copies and circulate that to the entire Yale faculty. [Laughter] You could imagine the kind of help I got out of those bastards. But I survived it. Charnley: What was your dissertation on? 34 Larrowe: That was another thing that disgruntled me a little bit. I thought I had a marvelous opportunity to do something that's almost the sort of thing you would do in science. And that was, I was doing the dissertation just at a time when the East Coast Longshoremen's Union was under a lot of attack for being gangster-dominated and corrupt and etc. And so I thought, here is a laboratory that you're rarely going to find in social science. You study the East Coast Longshoremen's Union and the relations between the union and the employers. The employers operated on both coasts. Steamships. Many of them operated the same. So we have a corrupt gangster-dominated union on the East Coast. You have a clean, democratic communist-led union on the West Coast. On the East Coast, the way you get hired is through a shape-up. You're familiar with that term? Charnley: No. Larrowe: Well, if you work on a job that's intermittent or even casual, where you might be hired to work for two or three hours, that particular job is done, you're dismissed, or you might work thirty-six hours right straight through, because they want to finish that and they don't want to lay people off and hire new people. So the way you get hired is, you go down to wherever-–you see it in construction, too. You go to the job site, and you get there let's say around seven-thirty in the morning. The hiring foreman comes out of the shed, or whatever it is, around quarter to eight or thereabouts, and he starts picking people out of the crowd to go to work. That's a shape-up. Well the result of that kind of hiring is, if there are two hundred jobs, there're going to be five hundred people down there in this mass. The shape-up derives from the idea of somebody-–you've got people milling around in a kind of a formless shape. The hiring boss comes out, blows the whistle. They form a kind of a horseshoe. The "shape up" is the horseshoe. And then you pick people out. Well, that lends itself to all kinds of corruption. For one thing, in order to work, you're going to have to reward the hiring boss for picking you, and that takes all kinds of forms. For another thing, if organized crime wants to use this hiring method to engage in large-scale theft from cargos coming off ships, you make an arrangement. 35 You get the hiring foreman in your pocket either by threatening him or paying him. Then he is notified that people you're supposed to hire who have a toothpick on their right ear, or some sign like that, then he'll pick the people. In New York harbor they were making off with tons of steel, grand pianos, imported liquor, perfume. You can imagine perfume in little bottles, in a box not very big, how you could load a truck with that and it'd be worth maybe 50,000 bucks, that kind of thing. And then, see, when you're doing all this, if the police arrest you for theft or something, then you start paying off the police. Then when some of your people get called into court, you corrupt the judge, who gives your people a little slap on the wrist, then you go on your way, that kind of thing. So it's a poisonous influence in the whole city. So I figured I'll study that and see if I'm right and think the shape-up is either the cause of all this or facilitates it, and then I'll compare that with the West Coast, where the way you get hired is through a hiring hall, where you're registered in the port by a joint committee of employers and the union and you rotate people through this hiring hall in such a way as to equalize job opportunities. Now, that can lead to corruption, too, but if you know corruption is possible, maybe even likely, you can guard against that and do it in open places. So I took Seattle as representative of the West, because I knew people there, having been in the CIO in Seattle, and compared that with New York. So I thought this ought to appeal to a place like the Social Science Research Council and so on. But what I discovered was, whenever I made a application, it would go to this bastard Reynolds, who was the director of graduate studies. [Laughter] Charnley: He remembered your Studebaker. Larrowe: Yes. [Laughter] So if I had any tendency to be hostile to people in power, that sure as hell reinforced it. But that was a great dissertation. I managed to get the California press to publish it. When I arrived here, I had a book under my belt already. Charnley: You did interviews as part of that research? 36 Larrowe: Oh god, yes. I sure did. I didn't use a tape recorder. I didn't know how to use one, and I figured it would intimidate people. I was asking people embarrassing questions. Charnley: What was your method of research? When you did the interviews, did you take notes? Larrowe: No, actually, I didn't. As soon as the interview was over, I would immediately head for a coffee shop and I'd have some coffee and I'd record what I picked up in the interview. Not a very systematic way to do it. Certainly not anywhere near as good a way to do that. Charnley: But at the time you had a good memory and you got down a lot of those-- Larrowe: It seemed to work pretty well, too. Then I would corroborate what I was told by talking to other people and reading. Did a lot of library research. Went to New York Library, Library of Congress, places like that. Charnley: Did the unions have any archives themselves? Larrowe: East Coast unions did not, but the West Coast union did. They had a marvelous research department with a professional librarian running it. I was allowed to use their library almost as if I were on their payroll. Charnley: Was that in Seattle? Larrowe: No, it was in San Francisco. So I had to spend a lot of time both in New York and in San Francisco and Washington and whatnot. 37 Charnley: What year did you graduate, get your Ph.D.? Larrowe: I got the Ph.D. in '52. The only even nibble, so far as a job goes, was at the University of Utah, and that was because of the prof that I'd studied under at the University of Washington recommended me to the head of the economics department, who was also the dean. Tells you something about the kind of university it was. But he recommended me to the dean. Utah was considering the idea of establishing a Labor Management Center, and what they wanted was somebody who would head it up, who wasn't going to cost them very much money. So if they could get some guy right out of his Ph.D. program, he'd be happy to accept some modest salary. I didn't want to head up any center like that. I didn't like the idea of being in the administration. But it was the only job offer I had, so I took it. Then it turns out the center never got off the ground, so I wasn't corrupted by administrative experience. Charnley: This was in Salt Lake City? Larrowe: Salt Lake city, the University of Utah. And that was pretty nice, although I think I had just been there a month or so, this was 1952, fall of 1952, when the guy I was hired in the econ department to replace was retiring, said to me one day, he said, "I've been invited to have a panel discussion on the campus radio." It would be like WKR. "I thought I'd invite you and one of the management profs to come on the program with me and we can talk about the Taft-Hartley Law," which unions hated with a passion in those days, and management loved. He said, "Would you like to do that?" And I thought, yes, this is a great way to bring myself to the attention of the local community here. So the three of us start walking from the building over to the radio station. And this prof says to the management guy, "What would you like to talk about?" I don't know, he had some answer like that. Says to me, "What would you like to talk about?" Are you familiar with the Taft-Hartley Law, by chance? Charnley: Yes. 38 Larrowe: You know Section 9H? Charnley: Not the exact one. Larrowe: That was the non-communist affidavit you had to sign every year if you were a union official. I said, "I'd like to talk about that goddamn non-communist affidavit. I think that's an outrage and the Supreme Court ought to strike it down," which they ultimately did. This guy damn near fainted. "Oh no, no, no," he said, "you can't do that now. That's too controversial in this community." And I said, "Okay, I'll talk about something else." So we get over there. We're sitting around the table, the light comes on. This prof says, "Isn't it wonderful to live in a society where free speech is protected, and you can discuss anything you want to over the air, and not have to worry about being persecuted?" I thought, "I ought to strangle this bastard." [Laughter] Charnley: He hadn't read that section of the Taft-Hartley Act. Larrowe: All the administrators at the University of Utah were Mormons in those days. I don't know that that's all that relevant, but the department needed to fill a couple of positions, so we were convened, the faculty. I came there as an associate prof right off the bat, see, because I was going to build this Labor Management Center. So I had it both ways there. Charnley: So you got a promotion before you got there, before you came in. 39 Larrowe: Yes, and I think in two years I had tenure there. I gave up tenure and an associate professorship to come here as an assistant prof without tenure. But it was a lot better job and I'll explain to you why my days at Utah were numbered. So anyway, we convened the department to talk about filling this position. I think I recommended a guy, or somebody did, with a name that was pretty likely to be Jewish, like Goldberg or something like that. And the department said, "Oh no, no, we're not going to consider him." I said, "Why not?" He says, "Well, he wouldn't be happy here." And I said, "Why don't we offer him the job and let him decide." Of course, that wasn't all that unusual back at that time, 1952, to exclude Jews from university faculties, so I didn't make an issue of it. I don't know whether he caught on to the fact that I thought it's pretty bad policy, but he and I got along okay. But then in my fourth year there, this was now '56. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower was President. The Secretary of Agriculture was man named Ezra Taft Benson, who came from Utah. I used to have one of these brown bag lunches with the people in the econ department, about eight of us, I guess, from time to time. One day I was having lunch with these guys, and it turned out that about a week before we were having this lunch, Secretary of Agriculture Benson had been asked by a reporter, "Are you going to raise the support price for (I think it was) wheat?" And he said, "No, I don't believe the government should be in the business of supporting private enterprise. I'm opposed to that." That was Mormon doctrine, you know. Well, that struck me as something you'd expect from them, so I didn't think much about it. But a week later, I read that the whatever industry had asked for the subsidy had made a big contribution to the Republican party. A day later, Secretary Benson raised the support price for that. [Laughter] So I'm having lunch with these guys, and I just read that in the paper. I said to them, "You know, that goddamn Benson, he's got to be the worst fraud in that Cabinet, and that's saying a hell of a lot." I'd shared a room 40 with a Jack Mormon, a kind of back-slid Mormon. All but this guy who shared this office with me got up and left. Not a word, just left. I said, "What the hell did I say?" He said, "You criticized one of the Twelve Apostles." Well given my background, I have a picture of Christ. [Laughter] I said, "I never said a word about the Twelve Apostles." Charnley: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Larrowe: He said, "Ezra Taft Benson is one of the Twelve Apostles, and one of these days, he's going to be the president of the church." That's tantamount to being the Pope, you know. They both had this idea of divine revelations. Mormons have that too. I thought, "Oh boy, I'd better get the hell out of here." [Laughter] Fortunately, just about the time I realized that, they were building a Labor Management Center here, which they started in '55. I was invited to join this faculty, so I grabbed the job and that's how I wound up here. Charnley: That was my next question. How did you end up back at Michigan State? How did you first hear about the labor management program that was being developed here? Larrowe: Actually, you know, life is full of coincidences. Mine is full of them. In the Christmas holiday period in 1955-1956, I had gone back from Salt Lake to New Haven to visit some friends at Yale, and as we were driving back, I thought, "I'll go through East Lansing, Michigan," never having been there. Never even heard of the place. But I had a fellow grad student who was in the social science department, guy named Chuck Winston, who was on the faculty here. He'd invited us to visit him, so I said, "I'll stop by there." So I stopped off and we stayed here a couple of days, in the course of which he had several people from the econ department for dinner, one of whom was Walter Adams and Pauline. 41 So Walter, who was tight with a guy named [Charles C.] Killingsworth, who headed both the econ department and this new labor school, they were very friendly. So Walter suggested to Killingsworth, "We're hiring a bunch of people on joint appointments on labor school and sociology and like that. Why don't we hire Larrowe. He's got a book out and so on. He'd be a good addition to the faculty." So Killingsworth called me up and asked would I be interested in coming back here. I said, "Who's picking up the tab for my trip?" He said, "We'll pay the fare," as if anybody ought to know that, which I didn't. So we met, and I was quite impressed with Killingsworth. I'd read about him and heard about him. I'd never met him before. But he offered me a job, so I grabbed it. See, if I hadn't stopped off on the way back from New Haven to Salt Lake, I don't think I ever would have been brought to Killingsworth's attention. Charnley: Was that the first time you had met Walter Adams? Larrowe: Yes. The day we were having this dinner, I picked up the State News this guy had brought home from the campus here, and here was a letter from the football coach, named "Biggie" [Clarence L.] Munn. Do you remember him? Charnley: I don't personally, but I know the name. Larrowe: He was accusing a member of the English department, named Adrian Jaffe, of being a communist, because Jaffe had written a letter to the State News saying football is overemphasized to the detriment of the academic program. [Laughter] Charnley: And he was accused of being a communist. 42 Larrowe: Yes. I thought, "Jesus Christ, what kind of a place is this, that that happens to you?" Well, they pointed out nothing came of that after all, and nothing did. Charnley: It's interesting, you were an early reader in the State News. Larrowe: Yes, I sure was. [Laughter] Charnley: That seems to be an interesting feature when you first got here. What was Michigan State like when you came? I should say, was your wife enthusiastic about coming, too? Larrowe: You know, I think she was indifferent. That really is troublesome, because she had--the University of Utah had a law school, and we didn't have any kids, and so she decided, "Why don't I go to law school. I could be a labor lawyer," something like that. So she enrolled in law school. She was sixth in her class, doing well, enjoyed it, part of a study group that included some people fun to be with, and so on. And when I got this offer to come here, it didn't even occur to me to ask does Michigan State have a law school and what about her. It just didn't even occur to me. See, now it would occur to you. Your spouse would bring it to your attention, I think. Charnley: I sorry, I didn't ask her name. Larrowe: Pat was her name. Pat Fall. She was the cousin of Albert B. Fall, who was a big figure in the teapot dome. He was secretary of the- [Begin Tape 2, Side 2] 43 Larrowe: ...union meeting of this Office and Professional Workers Union. She had become a member before I did. And I went to this meeting. Here was this very attractive woman, and she announced in this meeting that she had been appointed chairman of to study something, and needed some members of the committee. So I volunteered. [Laughter] Next thing you know, we get engaged and married. But she came from a poor family. What would a Marxist call--petty bourgeois. Sort of lower middle class. Her old man had a job all during the depression, but it wasn't much of a job. Right at the bottom of the management hierarchy, for a big private utility company. But she was a sorority girl and had all the middle-class attitudes. Her mother came from a fairly well-to-do family. But she had gotten a job, after she finished college, in an organization in Seattle which did research for unions to support their demands for wage increases and that kind of thing, where she was thrown in with a bunch of left-wing secretaries who educated her. The time came when there was a state legislative committee looking for reds on the University of Washington campus, and she and I took the lead in organizing an ACLU branch there. When we went to New Haven, we found out there was no ACLU branch there, and we helped organize that one. We went to Salt Lake City, no ACLU, so we organized a branch there. She went along with me and would be the secretary of the local branch and that kind of thing, which is why I think she thought getting a law degree was an appealing idea. But as I think back on it, god. We found out there was no law school here. She could have gotten into U of M, I'm pretty sure, with a good first year at Utah, but she didn't like the idea of driving back and forth. In those days, to go from here to Ann Arbor it was all two-lane highway. Charnley: Grand River. Larrowe: Yes, Grand River, and dangerous as hell under any conditions, but especially like now. So she never pursued the career in law after that. I think that contributed a lot-–we were divorced after twenty-four years of marriage, and I think that had a lot to do with it. 44 Charnley: The climate on campus when you first got here, how would you describe it in 1956? Larrowe: I used to complain to Walter all the time. We got to be friends pretty quickly after I got here. But what a hick place this was. You know, rubes all over the damn place. The term "foreign student" at that time meant somebody from out of state. [Laughter] I noticed in the springtime, I'd see women students walking across the campus wearing raincoats when it was hotter than hell. I asked somebody, "Why the hell do they wear raincoats?" "Oh, they're going to the gym and they've got gym shorts, they're wearing gym shorts. The university doesn't think it would be appropriate to be walking in around the campus in skimpy gym outfits, so they wear rain coats." [Laughter] So I said to Walter, "You know, I've got to get out of this damn place and get back to the West Coast, to a more civilized atmosphere." So for about ten years I kept writing to people out there saying, "If you know of a job that pays well and doesn't have qualifications that are too impressive, let me know." So I would get an inquiry now and then, but nothing I really wanted to pursue. Anyway, I think it took me ten years finally to realize, and Walter used to point this out, "If you think this is a hick place, you should go to some other school and find out that they're all the same." I should have known that, because I went through a red witch hunt at the University of Washington. There was a similar kind of activity going on at Yale while I was there, and I was involved in both of those. Now Utah, it was a pretty good place from the standpoint of protecting the faculty, but then there were no reds at Utah. [Laughter] Charnley: You assumed there were no reds at Utah. 45 Larrowe: There weren't any here either. Anyway, I had a low opinion of Michigan State. On the other hand, I could see that it had a lot of promise. This building program that's going on now must impress newcomers, but it was at least as active as it is now back in those days. Every month there seemed to be a new building springing up somewhere. We used to have meetings of an organization called the Faculty Senate. I don't know if it even exists anymore. But this was a body to which everybody in the tenure stream was invited to attend. [John A.] Hannah, who was president then, would use this as an opportunity to give a kind of a "state of the university" address. There was no discussion. Nobody ever offered motions or anything. We'd just come listen to this icon. Of course, they called him "Uncle John" back in those days. He was revered and feared at the same time, I think. I took a dislike to his management style, as you might guess. I look back on him now, I call him a benevolent despot. There weren't very many rules that you had to abide by, you see. All that stuff's codified now and you have the faculty handbook and this, that, and the other. None of that existed. It was all done on the basis of sort of a handshake or something, which was kind of attractive. I used to wear a suit faithfully in those days. Charnley: Three-piece? Larrowe: No, it wasn't three-piece. I didn't follow my old econ prof. But Walter used to say I looked like a banker in this suit. On days I wasn't teaching, I might wear pants from a suit or a good-looking pair of slacks and a shirt and tie, and maybe a sweater. So one day I'm wearing a shirt and tie and sweater, and I got a call to go over to the president's office. I don't know what he wanted to talk to me about, but it wasn't very exciting. But as I went in he said, "We're pretty informal, aren't we?" I said, "I'm not teaching today." "Oh, well, then, that's okay," he says. [Laughter] Charnley: So there was a dress code?" 46 Larrowe: Yes. Just unspoken. Charnley: Those first years, do you remember what courses you were teaching? Introductory? Larrowe: I taught beginning economics. I taught intermediate price theory. I taught national income accounting, not how to aggregate the gross national product, etc., but how the Commerce Department goes about compiling the national income statistics. That was the course--I had taken a course in that at Yale, and somebody thought it would be nice to have. I think I only taught it once. It gets kind of ridiculous to teach a course around something like that. Charnley: Did you have a blend of large classes, small classes? Larrowe: Actually, in those days, even beginning economics was only about thirty-five or forty people. Yes, they were all what we now call small classes. Beginning econ, labor economics, which was really labor relations the way I taught it, one time I taught that, and then labor law. We used to teach three classes a term and didn't think we were overburdened at all in those days. Charnley: And you came as an assistant professor, you said? Larrowe: I came as an assistant prof. Charnley: Without tenure. 47 Larrowe: Without tenure. Get this, soon as I got here, I said to myself, "I'm going to have to start research and publish something." Later when I became [unclear], I couldn't believe didn't seem to realize that's what you had to do to survive in the universities. God, there were never a shortage of them. So anyway, I cast around for something to work on. I was half time in the labor school and half time in economics. I wasn't in the research branch of the labor school. I was teaching classes for union members on how to handle grievances and things like that. Utterly boring. But anyway, I figured, "I'm going to have to publish something. So what should I work on?" I made up a list of about ten possible topics, any one of which I was willing to plunge into, and one of the them had to do with the fact that the St. Lawrence Seaway was going to open in a year or two after I got here, and I figured, when I discovered the people working on these oar boats in the Great Lakes, and the longshoremen and the courts were all either non-union or they were in a company union, so I figured when these oceangoing ships come into the Great Lakes, they're going to be carrying union crews and they're going to carry the union message in he area, and this is all going to change. So I figured that'd be a good topic, to study labor relations, maritime labor relations on the Great Lakes. So that was one of the ten. I went to Jack Stieber who was the Associate Director for Research, and he was in the econ department, too. So I went to him and I said, "I've got these projects. If there's any one of these that the labor school would like me to work on, I'm perfectly happy to do that." And he said, "Well, I think that one on the Great Lakes, that'd be a good subject." So in connection with that, I went down to Washington to do some work in the Library of Congress. In the course of it, somehow I wound up over in the Commerce Department talking to a man who had been a Great Lakes ship captain, and he was their expert on labor relations, this guy. He was about ready to retire. I interviewed him to get some information from him about the Lake Carriers Association and their policies. I think I made sure he knew that I'd already published a book on the longshoring industry. So we got along quite well. So I got back here. About a week after I got back, I got a call from him, saying he had just been given an assignment that he wasn't qualified to fill, and he couldn't find anybody in the Labor Department who would claim 48 to know anything about the longshoring industry. But he says, "I know that you do. My assignment is this." He said the International Labor Organization-–are you familiar with that? ILO. It's a branch of the U.N. It was a part of the League of Nations, one of the only agencies that survived, I think. Anyway, they hold conferences from time to time concerning various industries, and they were going to hold a conference in Geneva, Switzerland. And I think there were about 140 countries involved, and each country was to send to this conference a representative of management in that country, of labor, a public member. The people who organized this conference, which was going to have to do with productivity in ports, cargo handling and ports, they had put together a list of something like two hundred questions, many of which had to do with collective bargaining in these various countries. Then the delegates from each country were to participate in the discussions and then they were going to issue a report based on these discussions and how these two hundred questions were answered. So he said to me, "I'd really appreciate it if you would help me on this." He said, "I could either come up there for a couple of weeks, or you could come here." So I said, "Well, why don't I come down there?" because the Labor Department's right there. There are representatives in Washington of the unions in the longshoring industry and the employers and all that. So I did, I went down there and spent a couple of weeks and we prepared the answers for all these questions. Then these answers were submitted to the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Department of State, and the Defense Department, and this was because the Defense had an interest in improving cargo handling in ports. In Vietnam, for example, they didn't have docks. You'd drop anchor out in the stream somewhere and then you'd unload onto barges and so on. So the Defense Department had an interest in it. The State Department did because ports involve treaties among different countries which have ships going in and out of those ports, and the Labor Department, for obvious reasons, I guess. So the report was completed and I brought this to the attention of my department head. After I had been here about three months, the department was looking around for somebody to put up for promotion, because a couple of years had gone by and they hadn't been able to put anybody up, and they figured, "Here's a guy who's got a 49 book out, published by University of California Press. He's an advisor to three departments of the U.S. Government." On paper it looks tremendous. So they put me up, and I think in four months I was an associate prof with tenure. [Laughter] And I've been milking that ever since. But, see, there's a case where you make your break. You're lucky as hell that things happen just at that time. But in a way you make it too, because you have some control over yourself. A lot of people let other influences determine their lives and they're pushed this way and pushed that way. I was determined not to let that happen to me. Charnley: But the other thing, it seems to me, is people's attitude to research. It sounded like you saw research as an opportunity. Larrowe: Oh yes. Charnley: Both for learning and advancing. You weren't afraid of it. Larrowe: No, that's right. And I had subjects I was fascinated by, and it was fun to talk to people. The New York experience was really something. While I was working on this, there was a huge investigation of racketeering on the waterfront. I met the priest, if you saw the film On the Waterfront, there was a Catholic priest involved, Father Corrigan. I met him, and I rode up one time from New York to New Haven on the train with him. Having been raised a Catholic, you know, I felt a little uncomfortable being with a priest. As soon as the train got out of the station, he says, "What do you think about a drink?" [Laughter] I was tempted to say, "You mean holy water?" So we had several Old Fashions on the way up. One of my interviews was with a guy who went by the name "Tough Tony" Anastasia, the brother of Albert Anastasia. Is that a familiar name? 50 Charnley: Not to me. Larrowe: Well, you never heard of a outfit call Murder Incorporated? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: Well, he was referred to in the papers as the Lord High Executioner of Murder Incorporated. And his brother--that's Albert-–his brother was the head of the Longshore Union in Brooklyn. He was probably the most liberal union official in the East Coast Longshoreman's Union, which didn't require much, but he was. So I went over to interview him at his headquarters over there. I had to wait. We made an appointment for two o'clock. He wasn't there. So I waited outside. I was sitting there, and all of a sudden here came about six big burley guys, all dressed like they came off the set of a Hollywood movie. Wide brimmed hats, long overcoats, you know, practically to the floor, and they're surrounding a guy who's built about the size of Jim Hoffa, Sr., about 5'7" maybe. Strong as a bull. But he's in the center. These are his bodyguards. They all went on past and back into the back somewhere. One of these guys came out and he says, "You the guy waiting to see Tony?" I said, "Yes." He says, "Come on." We go back. We get into an office about the size of this, but it was dark, and he's sitting at a huge desk. Over in the corner was one of these bodyguards, who stayed there the whole time we're talking. So that made me just a little bit uncomfortable. We had a pleasant enough interview, and I sort of praised him for some of the things I had read about him doing with the union. Then he said, "You know," he says, "I can't understand it. The papers are always, whenever they write about me they say, 'And he's the brother of Albert Anastasia.'" He says, "Why don't they mention my brother Gerardo? He's a Jesuit." [Laughter] 51 And then he pulls-–"I want to give you something." He pulls out of his desk a big eight-by-eleven photograph of himself at Christmastime dispensing presents to little kids in the neighborhood, with moms, big busty moms behind him. I don't know what I did with that photograph. Charnley: He gave you that picture? Larrowe: He gave it to me. I said, "How about autographing it?" So he did. Anthony Anastasia. I told some New Yorkers who were grad students with me at Yale about that and they says, "My god, you went down there? You could have been killed." I said, "Oh shit, they wouldn't kill a young grad student. [Laughter] Actually, I had the feeling Tony was pretty impressed with the fact that I was paying attention to him. Charnley: Did ultimately any of that research, did you publish that, on the Great Lakes maritime? Larrowe: I've got a little paperback. One of the artists in the press did a nice sketch of an ore carrier coming down the canal, or whatever it was. Then somehow I got a cartoon from The New Yorker showing a farmer who's looking up at one of these ore carriers, you know, going down the canal there. I think the captain's asking for directions or something. This was when the seaway just opened up. Those things, they're immense anyway, but to be down on the ground looking up, boy, you're really impressed with how huge those things are. Yes, I published it. We didn't sell very many. I was left with a overstocked supply of those things. But several people have written and asked for it, used it in research they were doing about labor relations on the Great Lakes. A couple of years ago, some guy who's an official of the East Coast Longshore Union, which represents people on some of these Great Lakes ports, he asked me if I could send him something like eight copies of this thing. I think that exhausted what I had left. Never heard from him, of course. Those things got good reviews, though, which I was quite gratified. 52 Charnley: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, how would you describe the students at that time? Larrowe: Quite a bit like they are now. Not all that interested in studies or pursuing knowledge for its own sake, or whatever. Sort of the way I was. [Laughter] More interested in social life, and drinking beer and having fun. That was the impression. But pleasant, and they seemed to respect the faculty a lot more than students did. I retired in '89, and by that time, faculty members were not getting the kind of respect they did back in the fifties. But they weren't a very interesting group of students to teach, I didn't think. Picked up a lot in the sixties. I look back on the sixties, see, I started teaching at the University of Washington. I taught a course there, too, as a grad student. So I started in about '47. In all those years,'47 to '89, the sixties and early seventies were the most exciting for me. People would challenge you, you know. They'd say, "Where are you coming from?" the first day of class or something. It would take me an hour to answer that question. Charnley: What would you say was the source of that activism, and what brought the change from the fifties? Larrowe: I think becoming aware of the racial discrimination and the activities that surrounded the civil rights movement, which didn't touch Michigan State all that much. But I think that started it. See, SDS [Students for Democratic Society] was founded over here in Port Huron, you know, Lake Huron. Then they got into the war, took over their interests pretty quickly. Charnley: Did you have early contacts with the Students for Democratic Society? Larrowe: I was their advisor for a while. 53 Charnley: On campus? Larrowe: Yes. Charnley: Did they approach you? Larrowe: Before I forget, I want to tell you about an experience I had with the campus NAACP, which tells us something about the fifties. You remember the incident down at Central High School in Little Rock, where the troops had to be sent down by President Eisenhower? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: That would have been mid-fifties, correct? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: Well, President Hannah became the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission in the Eisenhower years, and he invited a guy whose name escapes me for the moment now, but who was one of the boys in that group of blacks who had to be protected to go to Central High School. Ernest Green, that was the guy. He came here. So, sometime in about '59 or thereabouts, I was asked by-–I used to talk about discrimination and whatnot in my labor class. I brought in all kinds of subjects that somebody could easily have challenged me by asking, "What's that got to do with economics?" you know. I'd say, "Look, it was to do with a broad environment." I was fully prepared to be attacked on that, and some people were in those days. But I was disappointed I never was. [Laughter] Because I talked about that, I think must been the reason. 54 So the black students formed an NAACP branch on the campus, and Ernie was the chairman of it. Now, at that time I think there was one black faculty member who was in the English department, who was tight with Hannah, but who didn't want anything to do with the NAACP. He just wanted to maintain a low profile, as we say nowadays, this guy. There was a black grad student in, I think, education. That was about it, so far as faculty and staff go. So one day Ernie, or one of the people from this NAACP branch, asked me would I meet with them over in the Union Building. So I go over there, and there are about, oh, I don't know, fifteen young black students there. So they invite me to join them in this sitting around in a circle. So I did, and they said, "We've discovered that to have a registered student organization, we have to have a faculty sponsor, so would you be interested in doing that? I said, "Yes, sure." But I said, "I'd better put you on notice. Here's my attitude. If we organize a branch, I will consider this a do-nothing branch until President Hannah attacks us for something you're doing." And they literally moved back. [Laughter] They said, "Would you mind going up on the balcony there?" or whatever the hell that was, concourse. Well, we discussed this. I could see them talking animatedly, but I couldn't hear them. I think it took them half a hour before they finally decided. They called me back in and said, "We've decided we'd like you to be our faculty sponsor." So, fine. Well, one condition I laid down was, "I'm not going to come to your meetings and I'm not going to look over your shoulder to see that you're handling our finances properly. I won't give you any advice. You're adults; you don't need it from me. If I make a mistake and offer it, reject it, but I don't think I will. So what I will do is what you ask me to do, and that's mostly sign papers for various things where you have to have a signature." Well, a few weeks later, they had discovered that black students couldn't rent a room in East Lansing, much less buy a house or anything. It was really lily white in those days. So they did what you do in a situation like that. In order to test the existence of discrimination, they would send a black student-–they'd see an add in the State News or posted at the housing office or something. They'd send a black student to see if he or she could rent a room. The landlady would say, "Oh sorry. It's just been taken. Too bad." So they go off. Then here comes a white student. 55 They had some white kids in the group, too. "Oh, love to have you," you know. "Here's what the rent's going to be." So they reported this, and, sure enough, Hannah, here he was, head of the Civil Rights Commission, he even held hearings in Mississippi and elsewhere, he denounced this as a dirty trick. He was embarrassed that the students at Michigan State would do anything as underhanded as that. And that's a standard procedure for identifying discrimination. So I figured this is a pretty good outfit. [Laughter] Charnley: So it wasn't long after you were advisor then that this happened? Larrowe: Yes. So I felt pretty good about that. One of the things they did that was really kind of fun. I think it was 1960. The national NAACP asked its branches all around the country, including campus branches, to picket Northern branches of chain stores that operated in the South and wouldn't let a black person sit at the counter and have a cup of coffee or a hamburger or something, to picket the Northern branches, get publicity, put pressure that way on these chains. Well, there was a branch right across from Berkey hall. Some national chain, I don't know what, Kresge or some such outfit. So we decided we'd picket there. So we're picketing and we're going around a kind of oval shape like this, and when we came to a certain point, here was a guy taking our mug shots. Just like this, this close. So somebody in the group--there were a few faculty members, but mostly students. This is a side issue, one you might enjoy. I was living in a duplex at that time, and there was a woman who lived in the other part who worked for, I think, a real estate firm here. So she was coming out of this store and saw me there, and wondered what the hell we were doing. She didn't approve of it. But in order to carry on a conversation, she walked along side of me as if she were picketing. And she caught all kinds of hell from her boss when her picture appeared. [Laughter] Charnley: She got her picture taken. 56 Larrowe: And here she was telling me I was wrong to do this. But anyway, somebody in this group said, "You know, that guy's taking our pictures. He's a campus cop in plainclothes." So we went over to the police station, which was in a Quonset hut in those days, and they had a counter and the offices were back a ways. So we asked if we could talk to Art Brandstetter. He was the chief of police and the head of police administration at that time. Could we see him. So he came out to this counter. He didn't invite us back into his office. He came out to the counter and asked what we wanted. We said, "We want to protest your sending one of your police officers over there to take our photographs. And why are you doing it?" He says, "Well, in the first place, if anybody took your picture, it certainly wasn't a member of my staff." So while we're talking, in comes the guy. [Begin Tape 3, Side 1] Larrowe: ...and he said, "Well," he said, "the FBI has notified police departments all around the country, including campus police departments, has asked us, whenever there's a demonstration or a rally or whatever, take photographs of the people who seem to be leaders, and that way we'll be able to identify people who cruise around the country." At one time they're stirring up trouble at Berkeley, and then they're stirring up a ruckus at Stanford, and then they move on to--you know, like that. So he said, "What are you objecting to? Are you afraid? Are you embarrassed to have your picture taken on a picket line?" "No," we said, "but what we don't like is this. As members of the faculty, if we are teaching a course where it seems appropriate to urge students to act consistently with their beliefs or to stand up for the underprivileged or something, if we do that, then they have their picture taken at a demonstration, and then it winds up in the FBI files, and they are under consideration for a commission in the military or whatever, and they're denied that, then we have entrapped them. That's what we're objecting to." 57 And you know I didn't have a thing to worry about. If Hannah or somebody didn't approve of what I was doing, I had tenure. I figured that was going to protect me anyway. So he said, "Well, I guess I understand that, but I'm going to continue, because, after all, I am a loyal American. I'm going to cooperate with the FBI." So then we went to see Hannah. Hannah--you couldn't imagine--Hannah was the sort of a guy people did not talk back to or question, you know. So we met in the boardroom. Not the one now but-- Charnley: That was in Linton Hall. Larrowe: Yes, in Linton Hall. But it was a big table, like this, and there must have been half a dozen of us. Some were black, some were white. And we must have looked like radicals to him, the students, you know, especially. So he denied. He said, "I don't believe this." He says, "I think you people are exaggerating. I can't believe that one of our police department would do that." So, well, what are you going to say? So we said, "Well, okay, I guess we'll have to leave." So we left. Then I went over to see the head of the East Lansing police, whose name escapes me right now, but he turned out to be a guy I got along with very well. We told him about this and we said, "By chance, could you get copies of those?" "Oh," he says, "I don't have to get them." He said, "I have a set of them." He said, "The campus police gave me a set." So we said, "Can we borrow them?" And he said, "Sure." So we scheduled another meeting with Hannah, put them on the table. [Laughter] Oh, he was shocked. He said, "I am going to give instructions that that will not be done in the future." 58 Well then, one of the black students who was a pretty militant guy, as we were leaving he said, "It was a sad day when they appointed you Chairman of the Civil Rights Commission." This was an icon he's saying this to, see. And I thought, "Jesus, I wouldn't say a thing like that." So I go home, and about five thirty the phone rings and it's Hannah. He had a raspy voice. "Larrowe," he called me. "Professor Larrowe," he said, "did you agree with that black student who said it was a sad day, etc.?" I said, "No. I think you've made an excellent Chairman of the Civil Rights Commission." And I did. It's just that he didn't want to apply it locally. But I thought, "God, here I am a little pipsqueak down in the ranks, and this guy's so crushed by this that he calls me to get reassurance." Well, when he left here in '69, he left pretty abruptly to head up AID. There was a little going-away party for him in the Ad Building, and Walter said to me, "Why don't you come over and say goodbye to the old man." I said, "Shit, he wouldn't want me coming up there with all these toadies of his hanging around." "Oh, I think he would." So as I went through the receiving line, Hannah says to me, "You know, Larrowe," he says, "you and I disagreed on quite a few things, but I always knew you had the best interest on Michigan State at heart." See, now there's a big difference between a guy named Bob Repas--–do you ever come across him? Charnley: I've heard the name. Larrowe: I don't think he's in very good health, but he'd be a wonderful person to interview. He is so hostile to authority, it doesn't make any difference whether it's the people running the UAW or some employer outfit, or the president of the university. He just hates people in authority. And Hannah sensed that in him. Bob and I did almost exactly the same things. We worked as partners on a lot of academic freedom issues and whatnot around here, and we were active in the ACLU. But Bob is a hard guy to like, and Hannah sensed that he hated him, I think. He would never have said to Bob--and Bob did have the best interest of the university at heart, but he came across as, "I hate you because you have authority." 59 Charnley: That's interesting. Larrowe: What happened in the SDS was, there was a guy named Carson. I can't think of his first name right now. Anyway, he was in ATL, retired of course, now. He was the advisor to the SDS. You know, you get these profs who put out a liberal line in their class and the students think they're guys who are going to put their body where their mouth is, and they find out that he won't. It's true, most faculty, in my experience. I think Carson must have done that. He must have created the impression that he was a far-out leftist or something. So he was the first advisor of the local SDS, and he used to attend their meetings. He was a serious, responsible faculty advisor. So he was at this meeting when one of the SDS members offered a motion that the SDS collaborate with a group called the DuBois Club. Are you familiar with them? Charnley: No. Larrowe: Well, W.E.B. DuBois, first black Ph.D. of Harvard or something, he became a communist in his declining years, I think in his nineties when he was living in Ghana or somewhere. So an outfit called the DuBois Club, which [Richard M.] Nixon thought was "The Boys Clubs." [Laughter] This was for young blacks, and it was a pretty militant, maybe even a communist-led outfit. So the suggestion was that the SDS and the DuBois Clubs work together on some discrimination problem or something, at which point this guy Carson--Al Carson, that was his name--says, "Well, if you folks are even interested in discussing this with a commie outfit, I'm out of here as your faculty advisor." So he left [unclear]. So they found a grad student whose name escapes me now, in English or somewhere, and he was their advisor for a while. But for some reason they dropped him and they picked me up. And of course I was delighted. See, I took the position, I accumulated about fifteen student groups at one time there, because I would be their sponsor. I figured, "I don't give a damn what their doing. That's their business. But if they need a sponsor and they 60 can get one anywhere else, I'll be their sponsor." And I was praying that the Ku Klux Klan would ask me. No, I never thought of the Klan, but I did think of the Young Americans for Freedom, which is kind of a fascist organization, in my book. I was hoping they would-- Charnley: But they didn't ask you? Larrowe: They didn't ask me. I used to get their mail all the time, though, because the campus mail department wouldn't know where some of these groups were and they figured, "Well, Larrowe must be their sponsor, he seems to sponsor so many groups." I'd get mail for all kinds of strange Flat Earth Society type of outfits. So they asked me would I do that, and I had some really fine experiences in that. For example, there was a guy named Mike Price. Now there's a guy you should interview if you haven't. Mike Price, he's a stagehand at Wharton [Center for Performing Arts], and he was one of the leaders of the campus SDS. Very creative guy. Well, he had a contact in New York who would rent films which the SDS would show in Wells Hall, and these films would be like Salt of the Earth. Did you ever see that movie? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: Come Back, Africa, I think was another one. Battle for Algiers, movies like that. They were showing these in Wells Hall. Well the time came when they were informed by--I don't know, might have been Vice President for Student Affairs, somebody in administration, "We're not going to let you show these films anymore." So Mike Price, I guess, came over, so we were discussing what are we going to do about this. I don't know which one of us thought of it, but somehow or another we concocted the bright idea that instead of SDS showing the film, Professor Larrowe is showing the film. And Professor Larrowe and the SDS Education Committee are showing the film. Said we'd have an ad in the State News, Battle for Algiers. Well, the first couple of times we 61 showed the film, I would come down on the front of the hall there before the film started and make some comments about the film, very brief, and then they'd show the film. No problem at all, see. Another time, they decided to have a book sale that they had rounded up a lot of used books and they had a table in the concourse where frequently students in the Union Building, where they often have sales of t-shirts and things there. So they're selling these books when along comes some guy from the administration, "You can't sell these books here." So Mike calls me up. I said, "Well, I've got a suggestion. You stay there and I'll come over. I'll get a State News photographer and we'll have this photographer take a picture of me buying books. I think that'll put an end to this." And it did. [Laughter] That was fun. But I really enjoyed tweaking the nose of the beastly administrators who run for cover. It's remarkable how ready they are to head for the storm shelter when you fight back a little bit. Charnley: Did you have support within your department? Larrowe: No, I really didn't. At one time the advisory committee in econ played quite an active role in recommending salary increases the things like that. So one time they were meeting to make recommendations for salary increases, and at that time that particular year, I hadn't published anything. I was boycotting student evaluations--I'll explain why--and I forget what the hell-–I was just teaching my classes, that's all. And so they came to my name, and these guys liked me, so that wasn't a problem. But they said, "God, we haven't got anything in the record here that would justify an increase." And one of the people said, "Well, what about all the work he does with students?" And one of the guys says, "I think we ought to punish him for that, not reward him. [Laughter] No, they just ignored it. Nobody said, "You shouldn't be doing it." I had one colleague over there, Max Krynan [phonetic]. Do you happen to know him? charnley: I do. I mean I've met him at lunch and that sort of thing. 62 Larrowe: He and I shared an office when we first got here in '56, both fresh out of our Ph.D., or shortly out. So we had desks facing each other, and he was a boy fresh out of Israel and he didn't understand what certain colloquial expressions meant, and he'd ask me. Now he knows. He's a fast learner, a very sharp guy. But just think of this now, I shared an office with this guy for, I think, a year. I've been around here damn near half a century. I have never had a real conversation with that guy in that entire time. I've had him lecture to me about all kinds of things in that time, but no real conversation. To me, that tells a lot about what kind of guy he is. Well anyway, one day, it was toward the end of the academic year, he said, "What are you going to do about this outrage that I read about in the paper?" Well, I hadn't seen the paper. I said, "What's the problem?" He said, "At commencement, the Green Berets are going to send a unit up here and they're going to put on a demonstration of how the Green Berets operate in Vietnam." He knew I was active in opposing the Vietnam War, etc. I said, "Well, you know about it. I take it you're opposed to the Green Berets being on the campus." He said, "Yes." I said, "Why don't you do something?" He said, "Well," he said, "I never get involved in things like that, but you do." So I did. [Laughter] God, I wish we had that on film. I go over there, and somehow or other I looked around, and it turned out there were a few people standing around by Beaumont Tower, so I headed over there, figuring maybe their forming up to protest the Green Beret activity. So I go over there and I couldn't find anybody who would admit to having called this gathering or being in charge. Well, along came Jim Anderson. You know Jim Anderson in social science. And he had a bullhorn. So I figured, "Any guy who comes with a bullhorn is a leader." So I said, "I have a recommendation for the spokesman for this group. It's Jim Anderson." So anyway, we go over to the field there by Dem [Demonstration] Hall, and they had the bleachers set up. And there were probably a platoon of Green Berets, tough-looking guys, god almighty. And they had constructed 63 what was supposed to be a Vietnamese hooch out in the field there, made of cardboard boxes, huge boxes, twigs on the top to represent thatch and whatnot. We found out somehow they were going to blow this thing up as part of their demonstration, and they had people rappelling down the wall of Dem Hall. They constructed what would look like a bridge across a stream, ropes and logs. This was going to be the demonstration and this was to honor the people graduating from ROTC and getting their commissions there. So the bleachers were loaded with their parents, you know, proud of Junior. So Anderson led us around in kind of an oval in front of the bleachers. Somebody had prepared some leaflets denouncing the idea of the Green Berets being on the campus, passed them out, and people immediately threw them down as if they were red hot. So somebody hit upon the bright idea of sitting in a circle around this hooch. So we all sat down on the grass there. Pretty soon here comes a major, and he says, "I want to tell you folks that in five minutes that hooch is going to be blown up, whether you're sitting here or not." Well, I had my twelve-year-old son with me. I said, "I'll be goddamned if I'm going to be blown up." So I said, "I'm moving off to the side." I was the only one who moved away. All these others sat there, see. They were mostly motivated by some religious conviction, I think. Some of them had even wanted to be blown up. So we sat there. And then the Pershing Rifles, which was a-–you know the Pershing Rifles? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: They were putting on a demonstration in which they had chrome-plated bayonets attached to their rifles and they're throwing them up in the air and they're spinning around. You know, if you're in among them, you could easily be injured. So right in the middle of this, here's Jim Anderson and his wife and a couple of their kids throwing balls back and forth, right in among these spinning rifles with their bayonets. Found out later what they were trying to convey was that in Vietnam people are living in these villages and the kids were throwing balls around, here comes the U.S. Army. [Laughter] 64 I think Walter was president at the time. This was '69. I didn't know if they motioned me to come over, but here I am wearing a suit. I have my Silver Star badge there, and he was talking with the captain of the Green Berets and so he wanted me to explain to this captain why the hell I was there, I guess. So all the time I'm talking, I see the captain looking at that medal, thinking, "Jesus Christ, this guy's a veteran of World War II. What's he doing? He's not a damn hippie." [Laughter] I don't know how I got-–that seemed a logical outgrowth of being advisor to the SDS. Charnley: The war itself, the manifestations, were there other groups besides the SDS that you worked with on campus? Larrowe: Oh, yes. Every once in a while there'd be an ad hoc committee would have to form for some demonstration or another. One of them was the G.I.-Civilian Anti-War Alliance. The problem there was, we wanted to go down to Washington to protest the war, and we needed to rent some buses, hire drivers to take us down there. So I, as a faculty member, signed all these papers for that. That ended up in my both Red Squad file and FBI file, that whole episode, the fact that I was involved and considered to the a leader of the G.I.-Civilian Anti-War Alliance. I wasn't a leader; I was just a guy who was willing to help out. In fact, when I got my state Red Squad file, I came across a sheet of paper which, when I first read it, really aggravated me. But on second thought, I reacted the other way. Well, this was sheet of paper that size, consisting of a list of faculty members and then comments about each one of these written by somebody from SDS, identifying-- well, for instance , one would say, "He's a real radical," you know, "true blue," something like that. I forget the others. But it came to me and said, "Not a radical, but we can use him." [Laughter] At first I was miffed, you know. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, I'm using them. They're my troops when I give these harangues against the war. I'm using them. They're using me. It's perfect arrangement." Charnley: Do you remember the incident when, obviously, the Ramparts article came out? 65 Larrowe: Oh god, I should say so. Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about that and what happened in response to the Vietnam Project on campus? Larrowe: Yes. There's something about that that I remember vividly and nobody else seems to. Anyway, to go back, the way we got into Vietnam, maybe you know about this already--incidentally, I had a dispute with Milton Muelder about a year ago over this issue. He really got huffy. We were having dinner at Jane Vieth Suits' and Alan Suits's house. Anyway, going back, we got into Vietnam, into that project, because Hannah had been Assistant Secretary of Defense in the early fifties. And when Vietnam was divided into two parts, North and South and so on, and we were the supporter of the South, it turned out when the French left, they left a vacuum in the area of civil service people, and somebody had to train in a crash course all kinds of police and tax gatherers and etc. So somebody in the State Department had the idea, "Why don't we send some people from an American university to Vietnam and establish an Institute of Public Administration, and they can train all these civil servants which are needed." So they came to Hannah because of his connections in the Pentagon. He sent Killingsworth, a guy named Ed [Edward] Weidner from political science, Brandstetter from police ed, and somebody else, sociology or somewhere, to Vietnam. They looked around to see whether or not they would recommend that Michigan State do that. They came back and they recommended, "Yes, that's a good idea to do that. So in '55, I think, our first team of people, I think two people from each of four departments, maybe more, went out there and that's what they did. They started this Institute for Public Administration. Now, to run an operation like that, you've got to have somebody out there who's the person you contact, etc., but you have to have people here to run this end. So Killingsworth was the campus coordinator for the project, and we had a young guy in the department who was handsome, youthful, ladies' man, stanford Ph.D. candidate--hadn't finished his dissertation--a man named Stan [Stanley K.] Sheinbaum, and he was tight with Killingsworth. Beverly 66 Killingsworth looked upon Sheinbaum as kind of a son or something, was very fond of him, having him over to dinner all the time, whatnot. So he became Killingsworth's assistant coordinator at this end of the Vietnam Project. Well, the time came when he had to make a decision as to what he was going to do about being in the econ department, because he hadn't finished his Ph.D. thesis, and the future looked pretty bleak so far as getting tenure, etc. So he decided he'd leave and he'd go out to the West Coast, where he had contacts in the Stanford department and all that. He and I lived a half a block away from each other back in those days, and I happened to see him as he was leaving town. He had a little English Triumph or Spitfire or something, which had a little pad for a seat, about this thick. I don't know how it came up, but I think I asked him, "What are you going to do about your dissertation?" So he says, "Well, let me show you how much progress." He pulls out an envelope like that. He had about four pieces of paper in there. That's what he had accomplished so far. So he heads out to California. Somehow or another he must have left his car in Chicago or somewhere. He gets on the plane and they get off someplace, he goes in to urinate, and he finds himself standing next to William O. Douglas, who was heading West also. So they get into conversation, and he made a big impression on Douglas. He said to him, "You know, you look like the kind of person who could fill a need we have at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara," or whatever the hell it was located. So Stan went over there, and the next thing you know he's hired on as the economist for the center and, talk about luck, when I tell you how much in the way of paper he had for his thesis, a fire broke out in his office and burned all the papers he had in there, etc. So the head of the center figured he must have had at least 10,000 dollars' worth of research materials in there, so he awards him 10,000 bucks. [Laughter] See here's Sheinbaum, he's a likeable guy, but he's too damn typical for my money, of campus operators. While he's here and the atmosphere is either neutral toward the Vietnam Project or pro--and I had never heard serious discussion about "What the hell are we doing over there" until that Ramparts thing. The faculty didn't discuss it, and I didn't even object to it, oddly enough, when I think back on it. I remember telling him I thought it was a shitty thing to be connected with, but I didn't go beyond that. 67 So while the atmosphere's sympathetic to him being in it, he's for it. He gets out there, he starts hanging out with these left-of-center people at the Center For the Study of Democratic Institutions, all of a sudden he's against it. So then when this guy Shearer [phonetic] decides to write a piece about Michigan State being a front for the CIA and Vietnam, having this project, Sheinbaum's the ideal guy. He's a Deep Throat, only he's out in public. So first we get that issue devoted solely to the Vietnam Project, with Madame Nhu on the cover and that kind of thing. And it's clear from that way it's written, a guy named Stan Sheinbaum, formally of Michigan State, was a source for a lot of the information, all of which I think was accurate, as a matter of fact. Anyway, some guy in the state legislature whose name, another name I can't remember, decided he could get some favorable publicity by conducting a hearing into why Michigan State was involved in all that, so he scheduled a committee hearing, to which he invited President Hannah, Muelder, Killingsworth, various other people in the administration who'd had some connection with it, plus Shearer, who wrote the article for Ramparts, and Stanley K. Sheinbaum. Well, you know, wild horses couldn't have kept me away from that thing. So I go down there to the hearing and I'm sitting about two-thirds of the way back, and one of the first things I noticed was Sheinbaum was up in the front where he was going to be called upon to answer questions. A couple seats behind him, a couple rows behind him, are Killingsworth and Beverly Killingsworth. Then I'm a couple rows behind them. Anyway, one of the things that struck me that I alluded to a moment ago was, when Hannah was called to explain to this committee why was Michigan State involved, the way he answered was absolutely fascinating. He had a huge--bigger than a folio--I don't know what a folio size is, but it was a great big map book about this wide. And he opened this book and he said, "Now, the reason the United States is interested in Vietnam is not because they have resources that we need. That isn't it. But they have resources we want to deny the enemy access to." And he'd turn a page, "Now this page, this shows tungsten deposits," we'll say. And he turns a page. He must have gone through about ten pages, and each one contained a map of South Vietnam and where these exotic materials were. That was his explanation for the U.S. interest in Vietnam. You ever hear that before, that explanation? 68 Charnley: No. Larrowe: No, I never have either. And I've told people about it after I listened to him. They don't seem to think there's anything strange about that. Anyway, that was high drama for me, that part. So anyway, Stan gave his response to these questions, and the meeting finally came to an end. So he got up and he started toward the back, and as he came abreast of the Killingsworths--see, this was a guy they used to have to dinner all the time-–he put his hand out, and Killingsworth put his hands behind him, "I won't shake the hand of a traitor," or some damn thing. Beverly broke into tears. [Laughter] Oh god, it was quite a scene there. I remember one time talking with Sheinbaum and a guy named Dick Rudner, who was in the philosophy department, about a project that the Michigan State group had thought up, which was to provide the South Vietnamese-–this is while Jim was still president-–to provide the South Vietnamese government with a huge computer. I said to this guy, "What in the hell would the South Vietnamese do with a computer?" "Well, it's going to aid in tax collection." And I thought, holy hell, given the kind of society South Vietnam was, you know, the Mandarins who ran the place were not going to pay any taxes. They sure as hell wouldn't want a computer." [Laughter] But I didn't bring that up. I said, "Where they going to get the electric power?" You know, in those days a computer, something bigger than that closet over there, great big things that required a lot of power. I said, "Vietnam doesn't have a constant source of power. You couldn't even use the goddamn thing." Charnley: Do you remember how students reacted to the Ramparts or that whole revelation? Larrowe: I don't remember student reaction to that. Charnley: Were they interested? 69 Larrowe: I don't know. You know, people think that when you're a teacher, you know how students feel about things, but they don't level with you, you know, all that much. That's been my experience, anyway. Charnley: Interested in the grade. Larrowe: SDS, they thought it was great. They were just delighted to have the thing exposed, because it confirmed their view of the establishment. Charnley: Did you continue with the SDS support, or was there a point where-- [Begin Tape 3, Side 2] Larrowe: Fortunately for me, right? Charnley: Because you weren't radical enough? Larrowe: No, we just sort of-–it's like you have a relationship with somebody and it just sort of unravels or something. You suddenly think, "God, I haven't seen so-and-so in a couple years. Wonder why we're out of touch." Charnley: Were you surprised when President Hannah left at the time he did? Larrowe: I was, because nobody had ever raised the question, "What are we going to do when he retires?" He was old enough, I think. He was old enough that he could have retired. See, we didn't have firm rules about retirement back in those days. But they came in when we became part of the TIA-CREF and Social Security, sometime in the late fifties. 70 I guess I was surprised. Without really thinking about it, I guess I just assumed he would always be president. He'd been president since 1940 or so. Charnley: And then in the interim period, Walter Adams. Larrowe: Boy, that was a shock to a lot of people. Charnley: That Walter became interim president? Larrowe: Oh, yes. Some people thought they had a claim on the job. Killingsworth was one of them. And they were passed over. We had a provost who had gotten his Ph.D. in our department, a guy named--oh shit, I'm terrible about these damn names. Anyway. As far as I could see, he was a perfectly good provost, but he was passed over because the Democrats had five members on the board, and they had developed an animosity toward Hannah. I never was clear exactly why, but they couldn't stand Hannah, and this provost struck them as being part of the Hannah regime, so they figured, "We finally got rid of Hannah. We're not going to perpetuate him by making this guy president." So this guy left and went out to Claremont Men's College. Then when Walter was appointed, he was as amazed as anybody, because he'd never been a department head. He had no aspirations to be an administrator. He was out at Oregon State denouncing monopolies or something. They called him out there and said, "You're the acting president." He called me and he said, "I don't whether to take that seriously or not." But anyway, he was. Then it turned out the people in agriculture were very nervous. See, you could make a pretty good argument, I think, that agriculture as a part of the Michigan economy has been dwindling for years and years and years, and now it's not really all that important to their economy, yet the ag college keeps growing. So they were fearful that he would consider this wasteful or something and they wouldn't benefit. But the engineering college was in danger of losing its accreditation in those days, so they were worried. 71 So he had plenty of opposition among the faculty. There was even a time when an effort was--well, you can't say launched, but was attempted to impeach him. He had a vote of "no confidence" from the faculty at his presidency. Charnley: Do you remember what brought that on? Larrowe: Oh, yes. See, first, let me put it this way. When Walter became acting president--they later made him president, but when he became acting president, the first thing he did was he called the head of the campus police. It was a guy named Bernitt, who's still alive, by the way. And he said, "Now, we're going to have some demonstrations. These are turbulent times. But I don't want the police called out, because that's too provocative. So before you send the police to any demonstration, clear it with me first." And they installed a red phone in his house, etc. So the police were never called. There were three demonstrations, any one of which could have just exploded. One of them, it might have been within a month of his appointment, some black employees in the Wilson Hall cafeteria claimed that they were being mistreated by white supervisors, and they went to their local union, 1585, which was a union by the bosses back in those days, and they tried to file a grievance, and Local 1585 wouldn't do anything for them, except take their dues, of course. Sounds kind of anti-union, but you can get a little pissed off at some unions, the way they behave sometimes. So they were still grousing, and finally, some of the black athletes who were living in Wilson Hall--that apparently was a place where there were a lot of athletes, white and black--the black athletes decided they would take the matter in hand and they'd do something about this. So they hit upon the idea of a sit-in in the cafeteria. So they staged a sit-in. So Walter was called, to alert him to the potentially dangerous result of all this. So he went over, by himself. Didn't even call the campus police. He went over there to see if he could resolve this. So he gets over there, and, sure enough, the place is wall to wall black athletes in the cafeteria, and outside were a bunch of white 72 athletes just spoiling for a chance to go in there and beat the hell out of these black athletes. Tells you something about how hard it is to break down these racial barriers. You know like we talk about the Vietnam War, how the blacks and the whites shoulder to shoulder, I think that's a lot of baloney, myself. But you can't get a straight answer out of a Vietnam veteran on that either. But anyway, so he decided, "I will spend my time keeping these white athletes calmed down, so they don't go in there and start a fight with these other guys." I think he was there for twenty-four hours straight. Well, toward the end of the second day, he decided, "We've somehow got to get these guys out of there and resolve this whole thing. So he hit upon the idea of creating a tripartite panel to conduct a hearing in the cafeteria, because they weren't going to leave until they got some kind of a resolution of this. So they held the hearing. He appointed two housing administrators, white. Two black, I think one might have been an administrator and a grad student. They're blacks. And then to chair this, he appointed a guy who was the Vice President for Student Affairs, who was a lawyer and a former FBI man. He figured, "This guy will know how to conduct a hearing and respect the requirements of due process," and all that. So he appointed him. Well, the blacks then said, "Wait a minute. That's not a balanced panel. You've got three whites and two blacks." So he appointed a black grad student as co-chairman. So then it's three and three. So they hold the hearing. Well, one thing that occurred was, somehow these two supervisors, who were now defendants, in effect, got a lawyer to come out there. And as the guy started to enter the cafeteria, some of the black students said, "Hey, wait a minute. What you got in that briefcase? You got a tape recorder in there?" And the guy said, "Oh no, I wouldn't do a thing like that." "Well, let's look." So they opened it up. Sure enough, he has a tape recorder. [Laughter] So they conducted the hearing and so on. I don't know how long it took. Couple of hours, I think. The panel then retired and they came back with a recommendation that the evidence showed that these supervisors had discriminated against these black employees. So the solution they recommended was, transfer these two supervisors to jobs elsewhere around the campus at no reduction in pay or grade, which I thought was an inspired idea. I mean, 73 you've got a situation where how in the hell else are you going to get those guys out of there? And I have a fondness for tripartite panels, anyway. Well, all hell busted loose. People in the legislature were demanding to know, "Why did President Adams coddle these blacks when they were violating the rights of others? They should be routed out of there if it took cold steel," and all that kind of talk. Our department head, a guy named Lanzilotti [phonetic], wrote up a statement of "no confidence" in Adams. Adams called a special meeting to respond to all the complaints about how he handled this. He got threatening letters. He got letters denouncing him and a goddamn Jew, and all kinds of just nasty stuff, and letters in the State News and letters to him personally, and all that kind of thing. Walter decided, "I'm going to hold a meeting of the Academic Senate and I will explain why I did what I did, and that will defuse this whole thing." So I go over there and here's my department head, Lanzilotti, and one of his supporters with a huge pile of these statements, vote of "no confidence" by the statement, explaining you know, "whereas," and all that kind of thing. Well, it turned out Lanzilotti for some reason didn't have the nerve to distribute those, so that nothing came of that. But people got up in the meeting and denounced Adams for adopting some kind of affirmative action policy and bringing black students to the campus who were not prepared to do college work and so on. And he responded to that by that there was such a program, but it started under Hannah, this icon. [Laughter] Charnley: Project Ethyl, probably. Larrowe: Yes, something like that, yes. So the whole thing blew over. Was I responding to some question you put to me? Charnley: Yes, we were talking about the attach on interim President Adams, the vote of "no confidence." 74 Larrowe: Yes, there was another one. Boy, talk about [unclear]. I think must have been the SDS found out that the Oakland, California Police Department had sent recruiters to Michigan State to interview students in police ad, or wherever they were, who might want to go to work for he Oakland, California Police Department. So they found out that these interviews are going to be held from two in the afternoon or something on a certain day in the Student Services Building. Had to reserve a place. They had reserved a room there for these interviews. So a huge mob of, oh, hell, two or three hundred students showed up over there to object. About a week before these interviews were to be conducted, an article appeared in some magazine, some national circulation magazine identifying the Oakland, California Police as the most racist in the nation. That's a week before these interviews. So you can imagine in those days what that would produce. So here are about three hundred students. It was wall to wall. You couldn't get down the hallway unless they made a big effort to get out of your way. So I was teaching a class over in Erickson. Some guy came over and told me, "God, all hell's busting loose. You've got to get over there." I was considered a guy who'd quell, calm down excited students. I'll tell you, if you can stand it, I'll tell you an incident that shows there was some truth to that. But anyway, I go over there, and they let me make my way down the hall, but it was really difficult, they were so packed in there. I get down there, and here's the door to this office which is open, and Adams is standing in the door and people are all around him. We had a visiting professor from India, a guy named Durindera Sharmah [phonetic] at that time in philosophy, who was kind of a radical. You could always count on him to show up at an anti-war demonstration and so on. Well, here he was. He was supporting the students. He had a--might have been a copy of Ramparts, but it was some magazine, and he's fanning Adams. And I kept thinking of these guys in India, you know in those movies, where the guy's pulling on a rope. [Laughter] There was a woman student, kind of a chubby, unattractive little woman, and the temperature in there must have been ninety degrees, hotter than hell, she's wearing a leopard-skin coat and she's screaming at Adams, "You're a dirty, no good fascist. You burn Jews in the ovens," and all that kind of thing. 75 So I figured, "I've got to help out somehow." So I managed to get in behind Adams and I put my arms against the sides of the doors and prevented people from-–they were going to go into the office and have a sit-in in the office, I suppose. So I figured I'm trying to help him that way. So then I thought I had a brilliant idea to settle this whole thing. I said, "I have a suggestion for you." I said, "Why don't we suggest to the Oakland interviewers that they go on down to Ann Arbor and hold interviews down there." [unclear]. "Then they come back, and while they're down there, we meet and we work out a policy to decide what kind of institutions are welcome to conduct interviews for jobs on our campus." And he quite rightly said, "No, that's not a good idea. These students have scheduled interviews. They're entitled to have those interviews, and I'm going to lead them in personally, by the hand." He went out and he brought a student in and they had the interviews. Meanwhile, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what kind of a policy could you put together like that, and you can't, you know. You sure as hell can't deny a government agency freedom to conduct interviews in a state university. See, I myself had just as soon the CIA recruited elsewhere, but I couldn't say in a policy, "The CIA can't recruit on the campus." So the whole thing died down. That was that. But he handled that with great skill, I thought. Then I can remember there was one other incident. I think they were going to try to invade Dem Hall, which contains the offices of the ROTC, or it did then, anyway. He went over there and he just kind of joked around with the students and got them laughing. The radicals, they could have killed him, the way he defused that thing. But no cops. Charnley: So they weren't visibly present? Larrowe: I don't think they were even--we had an episode here in Bessey Hall, where a member of the Orange Horse Three incident-- 76 Charnley: Were you aware of that? Larrowe: Oh yes. I was one of the speakers. I knew Ben Strandness, who was the department head then. He was a likeable guy. But as I got the story, they weren't given any reasons as to why they were denied reappointment, and I couldn't find out why they'd been denied reappointment. So when I was asked would I speak, I figured, "I'll talk about that," and try to persuade the department to give these guys some explanation or maybe an opportunity to explain their side of their being denied reappointment. Strandness wrote me a letter, and each letter was about this high. He wasn't in good shape, I guess, at that time. Yes, it wasn't Bernie Engel, it was Strandness. Did you coincide with him? Charnley: No. Bern was here when I came. Larrowe: Strandness was a campus liberal, which was sort of a peculiar aspect to that. But, see, that was at a time when the university policy was, if you decide not to reappoint somebody, you don't give the person reasons, even if they ask for them. They had a rationale which I thought was totally idiotic, but anyway, that was the policy. Charnley: Why was it called "Orange Horse"? Larrowe: Fogerty, Groat, and Lawless, those were the guys' names. I don't know if it was Groat or Fogarty, one of them had written a poem called "The Orange Horse" that appeared in some little literary publication of some kind. I think some of the more intemperate students might have thought these guys were fired because of that poem, you know. There's something about that poem too political, sort of conspiracy idea they tend to go in for sometimes. Charnley: Did the university have a formal grievance procedure at that time, or not? 77 Larrowe: No, no. Charnley: Did they naturally come to you? Larrowe: Actually, I started writing columns, or points of view before I became a columnist in the State News, denouncing such events as the Orange Horse Three, the fact that these guys are told, "We're not reappointing you, but we won't tell you why," you know. Kind of introduced me to these people that way, and so on. And the Hildebrand case came up following that. Do you remember that? Charnley: No. Could you talk a little bit about that in general terms? Larrowe: Well, one of the things, first, about the Orange Horse Three, I have a feeling these guys really weren't doing a hell of a lot. They were teaching, but that was about it. So you could make an argument that they didn't deserve to be reappointed, but the fact was, which bothered me, they couldn't even get that kind of a statement out of the administration. Hannah was still president in--I don't know when the hell this was, the mid-sixties somewhere. How did this go? Oh, I know. He decided he would try to make the university a less authoritarian kind of institution, so he was going to introduce some small steps in the direction of the faculty participation in decision-making. One of the forms that took was to change the title from "department head" to "chairperson." "Head" sounds like the boss." "Chairperson," and so on. I think the word came down from the administration that departments should write constitutions to govern the way they conducted their affairs, constitutions and bylaws. Well, the University College had a lot of new people who had been attracted to come here to teach as generalists, and a lot of them had pretty good, respectable degrees, and a lot of the old guard did not. They'd been hired with master's degrees and they got a degree in education so the university could meet the requirements of the accrediting body. So the old guard tended to be fuddy-duddies, that's 78 the way I perceived them. And the new people, who made up maybe half of some of these departments, you know, like ATL here and so on, they expected that they'd have a voice in decision-making and whatnot. So when the time came to start writing these constitutions and bylaws, it created a pretty unpleasant situation within some of these departments. Well, one of them was social science, where a guy named [John] Hildebrand, who had been, I think, a bomber pilot in World War II, who was somewhat older than some of the other new people, he took an active part in writing the constitution for social science and the bylaws, which the old guard were not happy with. So he came up for reappointment, and he was denied reappointment, with no explanation. He couldn't get any explanation, even though he asked for it. He came to me, and I think my first suggestion was, "We'll go to the state agency that administers the labor relations law." I forget what it's called now. "And we'll contend that he was fired for engaging in concerted activity to change the working conditions in his unit." That was the argument with which we'd bring him within the orbit of that agency. Well, that didn't get us anywhere. So I started writing pieces in the State News from time to time on the subject of the Hildebrand case and the Orange Horse Three. There was a woman in natural science named Vantassel [phonetic], who was also under the gun, and she was denied reappointment as well. So I kept writing about these. Finally, I don't know whether the ACLU got into the Hildebrand case, but it wound up as a lawsuit in federal court, the argument being that he was denied his First Amendment right of freedom of speech by being fired for speaking up in support of these bylaws which bothered the old guard. Am I still responding to your question? Charnley: Yes, absolutely. Larrowe: So anyway, he had a trial down there, and the jury ruled in his favor. Now, the judge had said during the course of the trial, "The plaintiff--" He was represented by an ACLU lawyer from Lansing. "The plaintiff has mixed up a claim of a Fourteenth Amendment right," which would have been denial of due process, "and a First Amendment right. So I want you to disregard," I think he told the jury, "disregard the Fourteenth Amendment." 79 Well, they didn't understand that, or whatever. They ruled in his favor, and I think they awarded him some amount of back pay or something. Then the judge overturned that on the grounds that the jury had misunderstood what they were supposed to be ruling on. So he appealed to the court of appeals. I think they heard the case, but they supported the judge's ruling. A couple years later, he's back in federal court again. Sounds like the Florida situation, doesn't it? He got another favorable jury verdict, which the same judge overruled again. He tried to get this up to the Supreme Court of the U.S. and didn't get anywhere. But I kept writing columns about this. I didn't participate in the first trial, wasn't asked to, but in the second trial, his lawyer, whom I knew pretty well--we'd helped start the ACLU in Lansing--asked me would I testify in Hildebrand's support. Well, Hildebrand had published a book, one of these Vantage Press publications, which turned out to be a collection of articles that he had published somewhere else, and then this last chapter was a talk that he gave at the end of the term every term to his students in social science. I don't remember it too well, but one of the things that sticks with me was he told them, "Don't feel bad if you only got a C, because employers are more likely to hire people with C grades than they are with A grades." [Laughter] Oh, it was just so low-level. This damn thing contained articles supporting the Vietnam War with a vengeance. This guy, by this time he's calling himself a radical. So why he put that in that book, damned if I know. I read one review of the book by some guy somewhere who said, "It's a damn shame that trees get cut down in the north woods to make paper to publish books like this. [Laughter] So I said to his lawyer, I said, "Hell, I couldn't testify to that." "Well he said, "How about this?" By this time I was FGO. He said, "Would you be willing to testify if Hildebrand came to you as FGO?" When he did, with some guy else being FGO. I can't remember, Bruce Miller or somebody. "Would you be willing to say that he should have been allowed to use the grievance procedure, even though he wasn't an employee anymore?" 80 And I said, "I sure as hell would." He was denied that. The FGO wouldn't listen to him. I thought that was a hell of the way to interpret that, because the Hildebrand case was one of the cases that led to the grievance procedure. So I said, "Sure." So I went over to federal court, and it was a typical scene, you know. You've got the administration folks over on one side of the gallery, and the pro-Hildebrand people over here. So I was called to the stand, and I said, "Yes, I think that was the intent of the trustees when they adopted the grievance procedure." I had no basis for knowing that that was their intent, but I would have processed the grievance for him. Lee Carr was the university attorney, and I'd known him because he would represent people in grievance hearings. His approach was, narrow the concept of a grievance to this razor-edge point you could, and mine was, widen it out, make a grievance, any complaint somebody has that he's mistreated, whether the language of the grievance procedure seems to support that or not. Term "grievance" was written by Killingsworth, who took it out of a union contract. So in a union contract, a grievance is something that violates the contract. You can't file a grievance if you're mistreated, but you can make it based on that. Anyway, Lee Carr says to the judge, he says, "You know, Judge," he says, "Dr. Larrowe, he's a fine man. I like him. We're friends. But he doesn't know what the intent of the board of trustees was. If we're going to go into that, why don't we get somebody from the board of trustees who was there, and ask him?" I happened to be driving back and forth with this lawyer. So on the way back he asked me, "Do you think you could get somebody from the trustees who helped write that grievance procedure to testify?" And I said, "Yes." I said, "There's a guy named Clare White from Bay City." Did you ever know him? Charnley: I know the name. 81 Larrowe: I'm afraid he's dead now. But he hated Hannah. He hated the administration. So I called him and said, "Would you be willing to testify in the Hildebrand case?" Of course he knew about it. He says, "Will I be able to stick it to the administration?" I said, "Damn right." He said, "Okay." So it was like Perry Mason. We get over there. He drove down here, and for some reason left his car here and we drove over. I had a Mazda RX7. Maybe that's why we drove over in that. Well, as we entered the courtroom, Hildebrand's lawyer is just winding up his summation, and he'd probably been looking over his shoulder wondering if we were going to show, because I told him we were going to be there. "Oh," he says. "Your honor," he says, "Professor Larrowe has just arrived and he's brought Trustee White here, who will answer the question that you denied him," or something. And I thought, "That's all I need. Here's the goddamn provost sitting there. A troublemaker comes in and produces his witness." So Clare White goes to the stand, and he was asked by Lee Carr, "Was that the intent of the trustees?" Carr knew there was no statement by anybody on the board that that was their intent, because he was in those meetings. Clare White said, "Yes, that was. That definitely was our intent." [Laughter] Under oath. So Hildebrand won that one and the judge set that one aside. But anyway, going back to the grievance procedure. Every time I wrote one of these pieces about Hildebrand or the Orange Horse Three or Vantassel, I would send copies to the board members. I never got a response from any of them except Clare White. I'd always include the president, because I figured if I don't, one of them will show it to him anyway, so I might as well do him the courtesy of sending it to him. And never got a response from any of them, one way or the other. They seemed to have a "them and us" attitude. But anyway, I kept them apprised. Finally, the time came when Don Stevens, who was an AFL-CIO official and a board member--and I think I raised a question, "Would the UAW allow an employer to treat its 82 employees the way our Democrat members of the board of trustees allow the administration to treat these people?" And I finally got to them. And one of the ways I got to them was, the last piece I wrote about that, I figured, "I'd better not put my name on this, because they've heard this same argument too many times before." So I got a guy named Chuck Craypool [phonetic] who was in-- [Begin Tape 4, Side 1] Charnley: We're talking about the Hildebrand case and an article that you wrote. Larrowe: Yes. I wrote this piece and I thought it was pretty good, but I figured I'd better get somebody else to sign it. So I asked Craypool would he. He was kind of hesitant, but he said okay. So it appeared. A couple of days later I ran into Don Stevens, and he said, "Did you read that piece by Craypool?" I said, "Yes." And he said, "Boy, that's the best piece I've seen on that subject." He said, "We're going to have to do something about this." [Laughter] They told Hannah, "You get the faculty to draw up a grievance procedure, and you give rights to people who're being denied reappointment to know the reasons and to have a hearing," and so on. So they created a committee. Hannah created a committee with Killingsworth, who was the logical guy to head it up, head of the labor school. Killingsworth went through various union contracts. If you read union contracts and read the grievance procedure, you'll see how that grew out of union contracts, but I think it's better than the usual grievance process in a union contract. One serious flaw is that the president is the final arbiter. Oh god, I've got to tell you story about that. I came into the grievance office in '76 I think it was, and Lee had had an anti-discrimination procedure on the books for four or five years by that time, and they had procedure for filing a claim of discrimination and appeal and so on. The final step was arbitration. Now, they had only had one arbitration in the five years or whatever it was, of the 83 existence of that procedure in which Ferency represented somebody in the art department. It went to an arbitrator and lost. So there was absolutely no evidence that there was any danger to the university that a wild-eyed arbitrator would turn the store over to the complainant, you know. No evidence of that. But for some damn reason, somebody connected with the anti-discrimination procedure, had decided to go to the board of trustees and recommend that arbitration be removed and let the president be the final arbiter. They didn't do me the courtesy of sending me a copy of this. I just got it somehow by accident. I thought, "God, here I've been just waiting for a chance to go to the trustees and recommend making an arbitration the final step in the grievance procedure, and that'd be symmetrical with the anti-discrimination, etc." So I figured, "I've got to do something about this." So the first step was, I'd vaguely read--I don't get the State Journal, so I'm not always apprised of local events, but I vaguely knew that the State of Michigan had just rewritten the anti-discrimination [unclear] Civil Rights Act, and they had broadened the categories of people who were covered by that, you know, height and weight and marital status, or lack thereof and so on. So I went to the meeting of the board of trustees, prepared to argue, one, we should broaden the protection we give the faculty in the anti-discrimination procedure, and we ought to add arbitration. We should not remove it there, but keep it there and add it to our grievance procedure. Well the chairman was a guy named John [B.] Bruff. You ever come across him? Charnley: I've seen his name on the list. Larrowe: Well, he's supposed to be a liberal Democrat. When Ferency ran for governor, I don't know, twenty years or so ago, Bruff was running on the ticket as his lieutenant governor, so he was a card-carrying liberal Democrat. He's the chairman of the board. So when I said we should have arbitration because they had it, he said, "They don't have it. They don't have arbitration in their procedure." 84 I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "I've got it right here." I had the damn thing with me, of course. I said, "It says, 'The final step, if it can't be resolved until that point, shall be the formation of a panel consisting of someone representing the plaintiff, somebody representing the respondent, with an impartial chairman.'" I said, "That's a standard tripartite arbitration procedure. You find it in collective bargaining agreements all over the place." "No, no, you're wrong about that." What the hell would you do? I mean, here's a guy, a card-carrying Democrat, and he does something like that. So then a Republican, a guy named Dr. Jack Stack, from Alma, Michigan, whom I hadn't gotten acquainted with, found out later was really a very nice guy, he said to me, "Lash, I like what you suggested here in the way of adding of categories to our anti-discrimination policy. What would you think of adding 'sexual preference'?" Well, I didn't know what in the hell "sexual preference" meant. Now you say "sexual orientation." If you say "preference," it confers the idea you think somebody prefers to be gay. So I wouldn't use that anyway. But I said, "You mean protect homosexuals against discrimination? He says, "Yes." "Well," I said, "I think it's a terrific idea." Well, the secretary of the anti-discrimination office pipes up. I forget her name now. It's a woman. She was a lawyer. She said, "I object to that." She said, "Homosexuality is a disease and it can be cured." So Dr. Stack gave her about a fifteen-minute lecture on that wasn't the attitude of the medical profession, etc., for a long time. They abandoned that ten years earlier or something like that. So they added it. So it turned out we made a little progress, even though I didn't get anywhere with Bruff. But I could have strangled that guy Bruff, when he pulled that on me. Jesus, that was just contemptible, isn't it? Well, you're an interviewer. You don't have to respond to that. [Laughter] That's how we got a grievance procedure. Larrowe: Were you involved in any of the various attempts to unionize the faculty? 85 Larrowe: [Laughter] God, that's another one. No. The answer is no. I got involved to this extent. I think there were two or three attempts to organize the faculty, leading to elections. I could see right from the start that to try to organize the faculty under the MEA banner was doomed to failure, because the faculty looks down on the elementary and high school teachers who were in the MEA, and they would fear that the MEA would dominate the branch embracing the faculty. So I could see that wasn't going to get anywhere. In addition to that, the people who were trying to organize on behalf of the MEA seemed to me mostly to be junior faculty, untenured people. And I went to somebody, Phil [Philip] Korth or somebody, and I said, "Look, this is not like organizing a bunch of factory hands. You're organizing a lot of professional people who take a lot of pride in what they do. They're snobs when it comes right down to it. And what you should do is what some unions have done. The UAW would be a case in point. You take the highly skilled people and let them be the leaders. So what you ought to do is get people who are the public spokespersons for the organizing drive who are highly respected around the faculty. And there are liberals, you know. They may not be Nobel laureates, but they're highly respected. Let them be out front. See, then it's respectable to join the union." Paid no attention to me at all. Well, then one of these efforts, the MEA was trying to organize. The AAUP local here was very hostile to the idea of a union of faculty. Then there was some guy in engineering who had organized the "vote no on the union issue" group. So one of the guys on the State News, who was very witty guy, Louie Bender was his name, said to me, "Lash, I've got an idea for a story." He said, "Here's what we'll do. I used to have a briefcase that had a 'Free Hoffa' sticker on it." Hoffa was in federal pen at this time. He says, "We'll get you, bring your briefcase, and a sort of half- assed cowboy hat there, go out to a truck stop out on I-69. And when some guy comes in in one of these big trucks, we'll ask if we can talk to him for a little while. I'll get a State News photographer, and you'll have your foot on the bumper of this truck, or the fender, and have the 'Free Hoffa' sticker showing for the camera and so on. And you pretend that you're talking to this guy about organizing. But you're organizing under the banner of the Teamsters, and you've been asked by Jimmy Hoffa, the way we'll write it up, people will think it's a real story, see, really happened." 86 And you say, "Wait a minute. Hoffa? Why would we organize under his banner?" He said, "Well, Hoffa knows about this." See, Hoffa's son was a student here at one time. He says, "He knows that if you're going to get anywhere with the MSU administration, you've got to have a union that'll bite a chunk out of management's arm." [Laughter] So he brought this story, front page in the State News. Oh god, it was marvelous, with this picture. Some people wrote into the State News, I think a sociologist somewhere, saying, "Here I bust my buns to get out of the working class into the middle class, and now Larrowe comes along and he wants to push me right back down." [Laughter] So, anyway, I thought about it. You'd expect me to support the union. But I could also see that these young people who are organizing the union were going to be screwed if we had a union, because the bulk of the members are going to be tenured and established people and they're going to outvote the younger people. When it comes to salaries and whatnot, they'll do what the University Committee and Faculty Affairs does, and recommend pay increases which benefit the higher percent increases, not dollar increases. They'll screw these poor bastards. So anyway, I was in my office one day, a couple days before the last election, I think it was. Somebody from the State News called me and said, "Do you think the faculty need a union?" I said, "You know, I've given a lot of thought to that, and I really don't think the faculty does." The reporter said, "Why?" I said, "Look, in any self-respecting department, the faculty determines who is going to be promoted, who's going to be hired. They make recommendations for salary increases. It's kind of a [unclear] kind of operation, self- government. And now if you asked me that question before the grievance procedure," and I was FGO by this time, "I would have said yes, we've got to have some way of readdressing arbitrary treatment of faculty by administrators. But we have it now, and it works well. So, no, I don't." Oh god, I caught more damn flak when that came out. But that's my belief. See, you lose something when you organize a union in a university. I've talked to people who operate under union contracts, and the administration retaliates by cutting back on various perks that you just assumed you had a right to. I can't remember all the reasons 87 why. In any other atmosphere I would have said, "You're damn right, we need a union." But see, where you've got something that amounts, de facto, to self-government, I don't think you need it. Charnley: That's an interesting concept. Larrowe: Well, take my own experience in econ, which I know best. I was never one of the higher-paid people. I was pretty much down at the bottom, but I knew why I was down there. I wrote a book that got a lot of good reviews published on page three of the New York Times Book Review, a very flattering review, etc., but it took me eleven years to do it. And for most of that time, I wasn't publishing anything. So when the department is trying to figure out, "Do we give this guy a salary increase?" and the emphasis on publication, for eleven years I'm not going to get a reward. Then when the damn thing came out, it was a bad year. They would have given me a good raise, but they didn't have the money. Charnley: What was that book? Larrowe: The title is Harry Bridges: The Rise and Decline of Radical Labor in the U.S. Does the name Harry Bridges mean anything to you? Charnley: No. Was he a longshoreman? Larrowe: He was an Australian emigrant who came to this country as a sailor on an Australian sailing ship, came ashore in, I think, 1920 or thereabouts, at a time when he was around twenty. Decided to stay in San Francisco. So he got a job working on the waterfront. They had a company union at that time, and he decided he'd try to organize a real union. I think in 1924 he tried that. It failed. He just bided his time, and when the New Deal came in- remember the NRA? 88 Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: There was a provision in the NRA to the effect that a company which qualified under the NRA would have to give its employees freedom to organize and bargain through representatives of their own choosing. So he took advantage of that, and the upshot was, they organized a union independent of employers in 1934. Shortly thereafter, the Immigration Service decided to deport him. He was accused of being a red by these red squads in Portland and Los Angeles and whatnot. But not in San Francisco, oddly enough. So anyway, the government made four attempts to deport him on that same charge. The first hearing was before an administrative law judge, who ruled that the government had not shown that he was a communist, and so there was no reason to deport him. Then in 1950, with the Korean War under way, they went after him again in federal court. What the hell was the charge? I think that he lied when he said he wasn't a communist, or some such thing. And the government won that case at the trial level, but the Supreme Court overturned it. They made four attempts, and they lost all four to deport him. Meanwhile, he headed up a union which had a constitution which I thought was admirable. Now, the charge against him, it came from liberals as well as anti-union people, was that he had this democratic structure, but he really dominated the whole thing. I don't know how you cope with that kind of an argument. But anyway, so I wrote a book about this guy. I was fascinated by what it would be like to be subjected to these damn trials. National news, and I have noticed the union had a clipping service, and whenever there was a charge by the House on Un-American activities Committee or another attempt to deport him, there'd be editorials all around the country, absolutely identical in some little podunk cow town in Kentucky, Pittsburgh. Charnley: The boilerplate was prepared. 89 Larrowe: Boilerplate, yes. Perfectly obvious. So I thought that made a great story. Here he organized these people, got terrific benefits for them, and all the time he's fending off these attempts by the government to deport him. But one of the things I noticed was, I mean, he was a Stalinist, and I never could figure out if he was a member of the party, but he sure as hell was a Stalinist, and so there was naturally opposition to him within the union. But people wouldn't run against him because he was so damn popular. Sort of like running against George Washington, father of the union. They were local heavily Catholic, and they couldn't stand his pro-Soviet Union attitude. He came back from the Soviet Union sometime after World War II, and he said, "Soviet unions are more democratic than American unions." Now, that's just, on its face, just ridiculous, right? I asked one of the other guys in the leadership of the union one time, "How the hell does the membership let him get by with the crazy statements he makes?" The guy said, "Look, they know what they see. They've got better wages, they've got this equalization of work opportunity. They got damn good health coverage, good pensions. That's what they know. And he got them for them. And they don't give a damn what he says. He wants to come across with some crazy statement like the Soviet Union is a wonderful place, so what? You can't prove that one way or the other. They don't care." Well, that's true, and that was true about Hoffa. Same thing. They ignored his racketeering. Charnley: Improved their benefits and status. Larrowe: Don't you think the faculty of Michigan State would take the same position? I do. I think they would. I think I would have. [Laughter] Charnley: I'm going to pause here for a few minutes. [End of recording] 90 Index AAUP 92 ACLU 28, 46, 63, 85 Adams, Pauline 43 Adams, Walter 43, 47, 48, 62, 68, 75-81 AID 62 Anderson, Jim 67, 68 Bakke, E. White 35, 36 Bender, Louie 92, 93 Benson, Ezra Taft 42, 43 Bessey Hall 82 Brandsteader, Art 70 Bruff, John B. 90, 91 Burnett, _______ 77 Carr, Lee 86-88 Carson, Al 63 Civil Rights Commission 57, 62 Craypool, Chuck 88, 89 Douglas, William O. 71 DuBois Club 63, 64 DuBois, W.E.B. 63 East Coast Longshoremen's Union 36 Farensee, _______ 89, 90 Fogerty, _______ 83 G.I.-Civilian Anti-War Alliance 69 Green, Ernest 57 Groat, _______ 83 Hannah, John A. 48, 57, 58, 61-63, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 83, 89 Hildebrand, _______ 84, 85, 88 Institute for Public Administration (Vietnam) 70 Jaffe, Adrian 44 Killingsworth, Beverly 71, 73 Killingsworth, Charles C. 43, 70-73, 76, 87, 89 Korth, Philip 92 Krynan, Max 66 91 Lanzilotti, _______ 79 Larrowe, Pat Fall 45-47 Lawless, _______ 83 Linton Hall 61 MEA 92 Melder, Milton 70, 72 Michigan State University Affirmative action policy 79 Anti-Vietnam War activities 68, 69 Board of Trustees 76, 88, 90 Campus in 1956 47 Faculty Senate 48 NAACP 57-59 Project Ethyl 79 Student demonstrations 77, 81 Students for Democratic Society (SDS) 56 Unionization attempts 92, 93 University College 84 Vietnam Project 70, 72 1Miller, Bruce 86 Munn, Clarence L. "Biggie" 44 NAACP 57-59 Orange Horse Three 82, 83 Price, Mike 64, 65 Ramparts 69, 74 Repas, Bob 62, 63 Reynolds, Lloyd 34, 38 Rudner, Dick 73 Sharmah, Durindera 80 Shearer, _______ 72 Sheinbaum, Stanley K. 71-73 Stack, Jack 91 State News 83, 84, 92, 93 Stevens, Don 88, 89 Stever, Jack 50 Strandness, Ben 82 Student Services Building 80 Students for Democratic Society (SDS) 56, 63-65, 69, 74, 80 University College 84 University of Utah 39-41, 45, 47 University of Washington 2, 5, 47, 56 Vantassel, ______ 85 92 Weidner, Edward 70 Wells Hall 65 White, Clare 87, 88 Wilson Hall 77 Winston, Chuck 43 World War II 2, 4, 10-25 Yale University 32, 35, 47 Young Americans for Freedom 64 Young Communist League 19 1 CHARLES "LASH" LARROWE December 13, 2000 Jeff Charnley, interviewer Charnley: This is part two of the interview with "Lash" Larrowe, and today is December 13th, the year 2000. When we were talking last time, you were commenting on the Ramparts article. I asked you about that and you wanted to talk a little more about that, that you remembered, and the impact on campus. Larrowe: Yes. One of the most embarrassing disclosures in that, or exposés in that Ramparts article was that Michigan State's project over there was operating in effect as a front for the CIA. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the CIA might have gotten involved. But first I should point out, I came here in 1956, and the member of the econ department who took me around the campus was a fellow named John Hunter, long since retired now. But he had been in Vietnam as part of our project. We had two economists there while that project was operating. And so he told me a little bit about it, etc. I can't remember whether it was John Hunter or some of the other people who had been there and come back, who talked about 2 a mysterious group of about half a dozen people who were assigned to that project. Apparently, they had a bull pen there with desks for various members of the project. These people would come in, stake out a desk for themselves, put some material around the desk or something to show it was their desk, then they'd leave and they'd never see them again. And they referred to them as "spooks," which is obviously a slang expression for Secret Service people or spies, or whatever. They were intrigued with the fact that these guys came, staked out a desk, left, never came back. And they suspected they were probably CIA agents, but they didn't push it and they didn't know for sure whether they were or not. Well, it turned out they were. We did have some. Now, here's my understanding of how they got there. Not long after that institute was established, the opposition to the Diem regime mounted. We called them Viet Cong, which I always thought was a misnomer, Charnley: The opposition. Larrowe: Well, it was the opposition. Viet Cong apparently means Vietnamese communists. Well, some were and some weren't, you know. But there was a lot of opposition to Diem. So it occurred to the people out there in the project that what we needed were some counterinsurgency experts. So they communicated that back here. 3 This story is full of coincidences, one of which I alluded to with respect as to why Michigan State was chosen. It was because President Hannah had been Assistant Secretary of Defense, etc. Anyway, the head of police administration at that time was a guy named Art Brandstatter, who was a reserve general in the military police, and he had a lot of contacts in the Pentagon. So when the word came back to the campus that what they needed out there were some counterinsurgency experts. This was passed on to Brandstatter, who, in turn, got in touch with these friends in the Pentagon and told them of our need. They did the natural thing, they got in touch with the CIA and they--I'm assuming this, sort of like a novel, you know--told the CIA people, who said, "What a beautiful opportunity for us to infiltrate some people as adjunct professors," or whatever, "at Michigan State University as part of this Institute for Public Administration." So the CIA fed these people into the stream of participants in that program out there. By coincidence, I was at a dinner, I guess a month or so ago, where there were some people who had come to Michigan State long after that Ramparts article appeared. Somebody mentioned this, there was a group of maybe ten, which included former Vice President Milton Muelder, vice president for research and development, I think, formerly in the history department. So he was there. Somebody said, "Could one of you people who was around at the time explain how we got mixed up with the CIA in 4 Vietnam?" I didn't realize Muelder had anything to do with that project. I don't know that he did. But I waited for him, as sort of the senior person to explain. He didn't say anything. I said, "Well, I'll offer my recollection of that." So I told the story the way I've told it here, and everything seemed perfectly logical to me, logical that we would be chosen to do that, logical that when we got word from out in the field we needed some counterintelligence people, the Army would hear about it, they'd get in touch with the CIA. All of that seemed perfectly natural to me. And I sort of took it as a joke, you know. Muelder got furious. To say that he was perturbed is a gross understatement. "That is absolutely wrong. That's not correct at all." He said, "There was never more than one person, one CIA person there." And he said, "I went out to Vietnam as a representative of Michigan State to see how things were going, and when I discovered there was a CIA representative in that group, I came back and I told President Hannah, 'We've got to get that CIA man out of there,' and we did." I don't believe him for a moment. [Laughter] That's his recollection of it. Charnley: Did you have any contact with Wesley Fishel or not at that time? Did his name come up? 5 Larrowe: It came up all the time. Some of the SDS people went in his classroom in Harriston, and I told him, "Cut that out. That's really gross. You have no business disrupting somebody's classroom." I don't know whether they cut that out or not. I didn't monitor my injunction. But he was subjected to a lot of nasty criticism, mostly from students. A lot of the faculty didn't approve of his involvement in Vietnam, but they didn't say anything really unpleasant about it. But by coincidence, I had a locker in the gym right next to his locker. [Laughter] I think it was more awkward for him that it was for me. He knew who I was. I'd never actually met him. But he knew that I was wound up with anti-Vietnam protests and probably an advisor to the SDS. So we never exchanged a word. I think I said hello to him, but I don't think he responded. He must have thought, "My God, why did I wind up next to this guy?" [Laughter] But you know, it was pathetic, and I shouldn't laugh about it, but he couldn't have been more than forty-five at that time, I suppose. He was in absolutely perfect physical condition. He was a medium-sized person, but there wasn't an ounce of fat on him. He ran all the time. He exercised. And he died suddenly. I don't know what the cause was. He couldn't have been more than about forty-five or so. Really sad. He left here and went over for a year, I think it was, to Southern Illinois, and people always said it was to get away from all this harassment he was subjected to here. But 6 inevitably the students over there discovered who he was and they gave him a hard time over there, too. His life was miserable. I had students who took his course and would tell me that he would apologize so much. Well, not really apologize, try to explain what he was doing over there. He would pass around a photograph countering the attack, one attack made on him, that he lived in a mansion. He said, "No. Look how modest this place is." I think he was also accused--and it seems reasonable that he probably did this--of having a car with--you know how a general will have a star flying from the fender? Well, he was accused, I think, of having a limousine chauffeur-driven. Well, he was very close to Jim, and probably did have a limousine. It would be normal, with a flag, you know. And he did object to those stories. He explained to the students that they were grossly exaggerated. Charnley: It's interesting, the impact. People are still talking about debating that article. Larrowe: Still debating it, yes. Charnley: And the impact of it. Larrowe: Well, It was terribly embarrassing at the time. 7 Now, another thought struck me as I was reflecting on last time. You asked about the grievance procedure. I don't know if you asked how did it come into being, or I just thought I would tell you without being asked. See, here's the way I see that, and I want to tell abut one more incident that contributed toward the sentiment which led the board to instruct the president to establish a grievance procedure. The first episode was Orange Horse Three, a big furor, lots of coverage in the State News, and negative coverage in the State Journal. We used to have a reporter named Helen Clegg, who covered the campus for the State Journal, and she apparently had a very intense hostility to Michigan State, because as I remember it, she never wrote a story about Michigan State without getting a bunch of digs in, what a wretched place it was. Maybe she was a Michigan grad, I don't know. [Laughter] So the Orange Horse Three got a lot of publicity, some of it negative, on the grounds that they were being dismissed. Couldn't find out why. Then came the Hildebrand case. That got a lot of publicity. Then there was an uproar in the natural science department, growing out of the new people who were just about evenly in number to the people who had been here quite a while. Now, my recollection is that some of the people, at least, who had been here for some time, had gotten jobs teaching this generalized natural science course, and they had master's degrees in some natural science area. And that seemed appropriate. Michigan 8 State was just in the process of developing into a university when they were hired. These people had prepared a textbook for the course. They had written it themselves, and they all taught from this textbook. Well, these new people came in, and they had Ph.D.s in physics and various natural science areas, and they looked down their noses at this textbook and didn't want to teach it. So inevitably there was a lot of conflict between what I'll call the old guard, for lack of a better term, and the newcomers. And all this came to a head when they started writing a constitution and bylaws for the department. So the time came when--this was 1969--a delegation of I think about five of the new natural science faculty went over to see the president, who at that time was Adams, to ask him what could they do about this, because they kept being blocked by the old guard, I think that was their story, when it came to adopting some of these bylaws in the constitution. So he told them--and he reported this to me--he said, "Well, it wouldn't be appropriate for me as president to mastermind or be a consultant for a revolution in your department, but I have a colleague who's a specialist in that." [Laughter] Charnley: And you were the colleague? Larrowe: I was the colleague. So he sent them over to see me. 9 I did, in fact, consult with them and the way to go about what they were trying to do. Charnley: In an informal basis. Larrowe: Oh yes. I wasn't paid for it or anything. I considered that part of my teaching duties. [Laughter] Well, the time came when one of the faculty, a woman named Eileen Van Tassell was told, "You're not going to be reappointed." She was the leader, one of the leaders in this rebellion. And so I thought by giving advice to this group, and then the upshot of it turns out to be she's told she's not being reappointed, I had an obligation to help her get reappointed somehow. So I don't remember the way I went about that evolved, but the time came when I went to the trustees privately, and not all the trustees. There was one member of the board at that time named Clare White. He's dead now. He was a teacher in economics in a high school up in Bay City, and he had tried to organize a branch of the AFT in the school where he was teaching, and he got fired for that. [Laughter] That was Michigan in those days. I think he went to the head of the CIO. The AFL wasn't much interested in helping teachers at that time. I don't know if there was an AFT local in Detroit or not. There's a powerful local down there now. Anyway, I think he went to Gus Scholle, who was the head of 10 the CIO in Michigan. Gus Scholle, I don't know how he did it, but he got him reinstated on the job. I think that was probably not the only time he locked horns with the administrators, but it certainly reinforced his hostility to them. So he was a Democratic member of the board. There were five Democrats on the board at that time. And as I think I said last time, they all owed their jobs to UAW support. So I got in touch with him. I think I had met him one time at some social gathering somehow. I told him all about this, and he showed sympathetic interest. So I got a lot of publicity connected with her denial of reappointment, too, in the State News and, to some extent, the State Journal. So the time came when I went to him and we started talking about how we ought to have a grievance procedure and the board should lay down a rule that if somebody's being denied reappointment, that person's entitled to be given reasons why, in writing, if asked for. So they were discussing that, and even though there were five Democrats on the board owing their positions to the UAW, they were dragging their feet on this. But he and I would talk, and I'd say, "You've got to get moving, get that grievance procedure, so some of these people who've been denied reappointment can file a grievance on that." Well, ultimately he decided he would present a motion to the board, under which the board would continue Van Tassel in her job for another year, while we awaited the grievance procedure, which I think a committee was working on at the 11 glacial pace you would expect in an academic committee. Not everybody in the faculty was all that excited about having grievance procedures. You know, guys with tenure didn't see any need for it. So anyway, by board action, she got one more year. Well, that year came and was almost gone, and we still didn't have a grievance procedure. Non-tenured people still didn't have a right to find out why they were being denied reappointment. So with great effort contributed toward urging the board to give her another year, finally they did that. There was a lot of grumbling on the faculty about that. Why they grumbled, I don't know. But I've been active in the American Civil Liberties Union, as I think I said last time, for fifty years now, right after World War II, and faculty members are not all that sensitive to civil liberties issues, even academic freedom questions. Most of them are not. So maybe that's why. Some of them thought that the board exceeded its authority or intruded into the affairs of the department, etc. I think they assumed that the departments were well run, and most of them probably were, but it would be my view that any department, no matter how well run, for the permanent members which treats untenured people that way, is not well run. The people who supported her, of whom I was one, rubbed some of these people the wrong way. I think I mentioned some people in social science writing to the provost and complaining about my writing columns. 12 Charnley: John Cantlon was the provost at that time? Larrowe: Yes. I wrote one column, I don't know if it's in that Lashing Out, but I really was pleased with that one. There was an incident in Vietnam where you would see, if you were watching television, that a helicopter had landed. This wasn't when we were leaving Vietnam, this was before that, or maybe it was about that time. Anyway, this helicopter had landed, was lifting off, and there were some Vietnamese desperately trying to come aboard, and they were hanging on the skids. It was reminiscent of the Hindenberg dirigible in Minders, New Jersey, where people are hanging onto those ropes, and you see them falling off. It's a poignant scene for these poor devils hanging on the skids and dropping off. So the title for the column was, "Hanging on the Chopper's Skids," or something. It was about these untenured people being dropped, and desperately clinging, or trying to, to their jobs. Charnley: Interesting analogy. Eileen Van Tassell, was she in University College? Larrowe: Yes. We had a department of University College, natural science. The natural science department. Charnley: Within University College. And American Thought language in the Orange Horse incident was also was also under 13 University College. Larrowe: Yes. Ed Carlin was the dean at that time. Not a bad guy, but he reflected the policy, the philosophy, of the administration, which was, "We don't give people reasons when we deny them reappointment. They'll know why." Charnley: Was there a perception in the late sixties that University College was a hotbed of radicalism? Larrowe: Well, it seemed to be. Just think, you've got a ruckus in ATL. You've got another ruckus giving us a bad name in social science and then natural science. That'd be the last place I'd expect faculty uproar, natural science. Charnley: So you think the board saw a pattern there. Larrowe: They might well have. Charnley: And also all the efforts to unionize the faculty. Larrowe: But we had another incident which didn't get much publicity. But it always comes to mind, or used to, when I would discuss with Adams the position of Michigan State during the red-hunt days as compared with U of M. You know, some people got fired at U of M on the suspicion that they were reds, 14 one of whom was a Nobel Laureate in economics, Lawrence Klein, who left the United States and lived in England for, I don't know, fifteen years or so. I don't know whether he was a communist or not, but he finally came back. And Michigan finally apologized to those people it fired for that. So Adams would always say, "Look how much better Hannah handled that problem." And I would say to him, "The difference is, we didn't have a problem." There was one guy on the faculty who had been a member of the Communist Party, and when the [unclear] got in touch with President Hannah and said, "We're going to investigate Michigan State to see if there are any reds on your faculty," Hannah announced in a meeting of the Senate if anybody on the faculty had been a member of the Communist Party, or was presently, let him know, and if he could help that person dealing with the House on Un-American Activities Committee, he would. Something like that. Well, there was a guy named Williams in the English department, long dead now, who had been a member of the party at one time, and he explained that to Hannah, and Hannah then told the committee, "There was one member of my faculty, or there is, who was a member of the Communist Party, but he isn't anymore. He's not sympathetic with that philosophy and practices, whatever they are of the Communist Party." So we weren't touched by that, never had a hearing, or people from here weren't summoned before the committee, etc. But the first time I locked horns with Hannah--that's an 15 exaggeration of how important I was--you remember the Berkeley free speech movement in 64? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: Well, in the spring of '65, President Hannah was addressing a town-and-gown group down in Lansing, and during the question period, somebody said to him, "President Hannah, do you think Michigan State is likely to be the scene of student protests similar to what we've read about happening in Berkeley last year?" Hannah said, "No," he said, "I'm not worried about that." He said, "The FBI have warned us that there are three communist- trained agitators who are enrolled in Michigan State in order to stir up trouble, but we know who they are and we keep an eye on them." Well, I read that, and I was absolutely furious at that. I thought, for God's sake, here it is '65. I would have thought all the fear of reds everywhere had abated by that time. But in addition to that, I asked myself, "What students could he possibly have in mind?" There were three students who were in the news on the campus quite frequently at that time, because they were the leaders of a little band of students--probably fifty at the outside--called The Committee for Student Rights. Now, get this with respect to their program and see if you see red anywhere. One, they wanted the rules governing life in 16 the dorms relaxed. A woman student had to be in the dorm at 11 p.m. on school nights, and, I think, midnight on weekends. If she arrived after the "witching hour," eleven o'clock, she'd find the door of the dorm locked. And there was a house mother who would admit this student when she rang the bell, but take her name, and after she came in late a couple of times, she'd be notified, "You're suspended indefinitely." In one case, the father of a young woman who came from Cleveland or somewhere, came up here to ask, "What does 'indefinitely' mean? When's my daughter going to be readmitted?" And the answer was, "Your daughter has had the ill fortune to associate with some other students who are goofing off all the time, drinking beer and whatnot, and over the last several terms, her grades have steadily gone down. Now, when those students who create the temptation to party instead of study, when they're gone, she can come back." [Laughter] The old man thought, "My God, how long's that going to be?" So he put her in some other school. So they were objecting to that. Also in those days, a male student who went in for dinner in the dorm had to wear a tie and jacket. They thought that was extreme or something. I can't remember what other elements there were in their program, but it was all that kind of thing, which was a national development, you know. It was going on all over the country at the same time. 17 Charnley: Liberalized the living conditions on campus. Larrowe: Yes, right. See, we were guided by an expression that you don't hear anymore, but you heard it all the time in those days, "in loco parentis." The university stands in the place of the parent and protects the student while under our care, against temptation, the way Mom and Dad would if they were living at home. Not an unreasonable attitude in some ways, but not popular with the students. Charnley: Not with eighteen-year-olds. Larrowe: So they got into trouble, this Committee for Student Rights, because they would print up leaflets and announcements of meetings they would hold and so on. There was a rule in the dorms that you couldn't distribute advertising material without permission from the dorm management. Well, when they were told you can't distribute these leaflets and whatnot, they'd come in late in the evening and slip them under the doors of the students. So they were apprehended doing that and told, "You've got to stop that." And they kept on doing it. So that seemed to be the catalyst which led to the crackdown against them. One of these three people who led this organization was a student named Paul Schiff. I've often wondered if he was related to the publisher of the New York Post, I think it was, 18 Dorothy Schiff, I seem to remember. He came from New Rochelle, I think it was. He was a grad student in economics, with a minor in history. I think it was the summer of '65, he went over to enroll and he was told, "We can't issue any class cards until we're notified it's all right to do that by Dr. Gordon Sabine." So Schiff came over to our department. He talked to the director of graduate studies, to try to find out why was he denied class cards. He had about a 3.5 average. Whoever this guy was who headed the graduate study, he didn't want to do anything about it, so he sent him to me. I was on the floor right above this other guy's office. So I don't know whether I smelled a rat or curiosity or what. I asked the director of graduate studies, "Is there any reason that you know about in the econ department which would lead to denying him class cards for the summer session?" He said, "No, he's a good student. But he has a minor in history." So I called over and I asked the head of that department. It was Richard Sullivan back in those days, and he didn't know, either. And then I got hold of my colleague Bob Repas from the labor school, the only person in the labor school who has, in my experience, ever showed the slightest interest in civil liberties or academic freedom. But he was an absolute tiger. I think it grew out of his hostility to authority. Anyway I called him, and so we got together and we decided, 19 "We'll divide up people in the administration." I'll call some and he'll call some. Well, as it happened, my neighbor, who was Jake Neville, I mentioned him, provost at that time. We didn't socialize. The only time I ever saw him in the neighborhood was when we were cutting the grass and we arrived at the same point. [Laughter] But he was my neighbor, so I said, "I'll call [Howard] Neville." And he had gotten his Ph.D. in econ with us, anyway, before I got here. So I asked him did he know of any reason why this had happened to Paul Schiff. And he said, "No," he said, "I don't." But he said, "Why are you interested in him?" Well, I told him and he said, "Look," he said, "we suspend several hundred students a year. How come you have an interest in him and not the rest?" I said, "Well, if the rest of them came to me with that kind of a problem, I'd have an interest in them. You might want to send some to me." [Laughter] "Well," he said, "there isn't anything that you can do about it, anyway." He said, "We as a group, the administrative group, spent some time discussing the Schiff case and we decided, as a group, to suspend him, and you're bound by that." I said, "How can I be bound by a decision I wasn't a party to?" I said, "You've got to be nuts." Well, we left it at that. [Begin Tape 5, Side 2] 20 Charnley: When the tape ended, you were talking about what President Hannah's reaction to-- Larrowe: --to Repas calling about this guy Schiff. So Hannah says to him, "Don't you have anything better to do than to try to run the university?" What Repas should have said was, "No," but it didn't occur to him. He said, "Yes." But anyway, Hannah did know about the Schiff case because they had to have this group discussion. But anyway, he said, "We had good reasons to dismiss him. You tell him if he wants to know why he's been dismissed or suspended, he certainly ought to know." So then the two of us went to see the vice president of student affairs, a guy named John Fuzak, who's a nice guy, but he some kind of back problem, and he was so uncomfortable when we tried to grill him to find out why this guy Schiff had been denied those class cards, he was squirming. So I began to think, "God, if we don't let up on this guy, he's going to have a heart attack right here in his office." Charnley: You said "we." That was Bob Repas and you. Larrowe: Repas was a kind of a bull dog. I don't think of myself that way. I'm more moderate. I'm stubborn and persistent and I can have good staying power, but I don't 21 threaten people, apparently. Sometimes I wonder why the hell I don't, when I want to. [Laughter] Anyway, Fuzak, if a remember correctly, he blurted out some of the reasons why this had happened to Schiff, and one of them was this incident of shoving these fliers under the students' doors in the dorm and whatnot. He said, "He broke the rules. He knew what the rules were. He deliberately violated them." And then I think there was something about they're a disruptive force on the campus. That had to do with holding meetings, and they'd have a bull horn. But the place where they held the meetings was that grassy area with the museum in one place, the Student Union Building in another, and the music school. And then Morrill Hall. Quite a large area. And that rock that's outside here, across the street from Bessey Hall, that was a meeting place, kind of a Hyde Park. Well, they were so far away from the library or any classrooms, I don't see how, even with a bull horn, they could possibly have disrupted what was termed the normal processes of a university, which I assume meant classes. But anyway, that came out of our meeting with Cusack. So Repas and I were both active, we were both on the ACLU board, so we went to the ACLU, and said, "We think the ACLU ought to support this guy Schiff, and maybe we could negotiate this with President Hannah, get him back in school." So the board agreed to do that, and then we decided that given the icon status of President Hannah--and I think it was a 22 little touchiness on his part, about anybody challenging him--we would send a committee to meet with him, but it wouldn't include anybody from the faculty. So we got the general counsel of ACLU for the State of Michigan to come from Detroit, and another person from Detroit, and I think we got George Griffiths, who might have been mayor of East Lansing at that time. He either was or became mayor. So this committee consisted of people outside the campus. They met with Hannah and, I think, the provost and whatnot, and explained to the president that it appeared to us and the ACLU that Schiff had been denied readmission in violation of his First Amendment rights, and the conclusion was the university ought to let him back in. Well, Hannah refused to budge. So they said, "You force us to go to court if you take that position." "Well," he said, "that's your decision. You do what you have to do." So the ACLU filed a suit in federal court, which at time was over in Grand Rapids, and by chance, we got the one judge on that court--you know how a district court might have several judges assigned to it--I think he was the one judge who might have shown a little sympathy for the Schiff matter, and he was the guy who took the case. So a whole bunch of us piled into cars and went over to observe the court. An ACLU lawyer from Lansing, a guy named Ken Laing--he's still around, by the way--Laing represented 23 Hildebrand in these two court cases I talked about. Well, he took the case on a pro bono basis. There were half a dozen of us. President Hannah was over there, the vice president for student affairs, a couple of other administrators were there in the courtroom. Charnley: Was Gordon Sabine there? Larrowe: I wouldn't have known Sabine if he came up and smacked me in the face with a dead salmon. I used to revile him, you know. I'd say "Gordon Sabine" as if I were pronouncing some evil word or something. He was in charge of special projects. That has a kind of unsavory sound to it, doesn't it? Especially when you're talking about students being arbitrarily mistreated. One of his special projects I tried to convey was weed out dissenters, protesters. [Laughter] So anyway, Judge Fox, after he listened to all this--one of the things that came up that struck me as ridiculous at that time was, the university attorney was a guy named Lee Carr. We used to call him "Judge." I think he might have been a judge or his old man might have been a judge. He was a pretty nice guy, but he represented the university. He would defend the university because that was his job, regardless of how he might have felt about it. I asked him one time, "When the university gets in all these scrapes and we take them to court, or they're hauled into court, do they consult with you before they embark 24 on these actions? He says, "Oh, no, they do it and then they call me in to save them." [Laughter] Anyway, he cited several cases going back to the 1920s or so, which had been cited by the Michigan Supreme Court, which was considered in legal circles, until the fifties, as one of the worst Supreme Courts in the nation. These cases which were upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court involved actions taken by the university against a student, of the most outrageously arbitrary manner. Here's an example. A woman student, back in the early twenties, was observed walking across the campus smoking a cigarette. She was kicked out for that. And that was upheld by the Michigan Supreme Court. The university has virtually unlimited authority to do any damn thing. Charnley: And that established that in in loco parentis principle. Larrowe: Yes. So anyway, he cited these cases, and the attorney for the ACLU cited four or five cases that had been decided just a few years earlier in Southern federal courts, in which black students would be arrested for sitting at a lunch counter, etc., or they'd be kicked out of school for sitting at a lunch counter and causing a problem for the store. Whatever group, probably NAACP, I suppose, in those cases, had taken those cases into federal court, which had ruled that these were 25 unlawful deprivations of rights students have in the Constitution. So Judge Fox listened to those, then he told the authorities there, he said, "This court is not going to decide who can be admitted and who can't be admitted at Michigan State. That's for you folks to decide. But you can't just treat somebody as if that person had no rights in the process of deciding admission or not. So you go back to Michigan State, East Lansing, and you put together a representative committee." In those days you didn't say "faculty and student," just said "faculty." "Give this young man a hearing. Tell him what the charges are against him. Give him a hearing before that committee. Make sure all the requirements of due process are met." And he says to Carr, "If you don't know what due process is all about, read such and such a case citing," a couple of these cases decided in the South, which I thought was terribly embarrassing, but nobody else seemed to think so. So we all came back to the campus. We had a standing committee, the faculty at that time called the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, something like that. They scheduled a hearing. First they told Schiff why he had been denied readmission. One charge was violating the rule against distributing advertising material, as if announcement of a meeting to protest in loco parentis is advertising material. That was one charge. I think there were about eight or nine charges. I can't 26 remember all of them, but one of them was, he publicly insulted a member of the faculty. Well, that turned out to be a situation in which Schiff was at a campus NAACP meeting, and they were discussing something that they didn't like. I know what they were discussing. They were discussing the inability of black students to rent a room in East Lansing. So they had asked the mayor of East Lansing, who was a guy named Gordon Thomas, who was on the faculty, mayor not being a full-time job, you know. So here's Mayor Thomas, in his capacity as mayor, not as his capacity as professor of history or whatever he was in. He came to explain to this group why the city didn't adopt an open housing ordinance. So Schiff, in the middle of all this, jumped up and he said, "You're a liar." Thomas said, "Well if you're going to call me a liar, I'm leaving." So Ernest Green, I told you about him last time, who was the chairman of this group, pleaded with Mayor Thomas to stay. So he did and they continued on. They didn't resolve that issue, but he stayed. So that was his charge, "You insulted members of the faculty." Well, he didn't insult a member of the faculty, really; he insulted a mayor, who's fair game, right? So that was the quality of the charges. So this committee met, and Adams and I went over to testify in support of Schiff and Repas, and Lanzilotti, our chairman, 27 was over there to support the administration. It was held over in the Kellogg Center, and in those days they had something called the Heritage Room, about the size of this one. I think there were about ten or twelve faculty members on this Committee on Student Affairs or whatever it was. As we went down the hallway, we noticed there were two rooms, one on each side of the hallway. One room was reserved there for the people who were on the Schiff side of this argument, and the other for the people supporting the administration. So Walter and I figured we'll be in the room for the Schiff side. Well, that was just like a classroom, nothing in there except chairs. Of course, on the other side the administration had laid on a supply of refreshments, coffee, and tea. [Laughter] Charnley: You didn't have any of that? Larrowe: Hell no. We went and pigged out on all that stuff at university expense, and then we went back and told the Schiff supporters, some of them were students in scruffy-looking--like grungy students now, you know, but only they had beards and long hair, just the kind of people the administration was terrified of. We said, "Hey, they got a bunch of goodies over there. Go on over there." [Laughter] So they went over there, and the pro-administration people didn't have the nerve to kick them 28 out, so they partook of that. God, the hostility. We went in one at a time. We were sequestered and went in one at a time. So I'm sitting there, felt like Joan of Arc and her inquisitors or something, and I never felt such a hostile environment as I did there. And these are my colleagues, you know, from all around the campus. Well, they unanimously ruled that the administration was entirely justified when in denying Schiff readmission. So then what to do? We looked up the membership of this committee. We found out that this was not a representative committee. They had all been appointed by deans. Who would want to sit on a committee like that in loco parentis days and pass judgement on whether somebody should be suspended indefinitely for coming in late or something? So these are all stooges for the administration. You know, a sensible person would have refused to serve on a committee like that. That's my judgment. So they considered Walter and me traitors. Just as I started to testify, the lights went out, which I thought was perfectly fitting. They came back on and we resumed. Well, anyway, they ruled unanimously the administration was right to do what it did. So then what to do? We decided we'd go back to the court and contend that the university had not done what it told to do, which was put together a representative committee of the faculty and give Schiff a chance to defend himself. Now, how are you going to get back in court? The ACLU was willing to send a 29 lawyer back in there. Then we held a meeting. Adams happened to be the chairman of the local branch of AAUP at that time. This was '65. So he decided we'll call a meeting. The only item on the agenda will be the Schiff case. Because I had been following this, advising Schiff right along, talking with the ACLU people and the lawyer who represented it, he said, "You give a talk to this group and explain to them what this is all about." So I said, "Okay." Before this meeting could be held, President Hannah had called a meeting of the Academic Senate, the only item of the agenda which was the Schiff case. So I figured, "I've got to be there for that." I usually didn't go to the Senate meetings, but I went and I sat right--shows you what a dumb cluck I can be at times--I sat right in the front row with a clipboard. And Hannah's describing the events involved in this case, and I'm writing them down. And one of the things he said was that the university, after this first court appearance and subsequent to this committee ruling supporting the administration, he said, "We decided to readmit Paul Schiff. And he, instead of accepting that, he took us back into court." And he said, "That behavior's outrageous, and I don't think we'll readmit him," something like that. And I said to myself, "I don't think that's right." Now, if you're going to attack the king--you know it was commonplace to say, "You don't attack the king, you attack his advisors." 30 Well, fortunately for me, Hannah had been off the campus when all this happened, so it was his advisors who gave him bum advice. So how was I going to prove that he's wrong about that? Because that sounded like a dirty trick on Schiff's part. You're told you're going to be readmitted, then you get a lot of publicity, you go back into court, this kind of thing. So I decided I'd prepare a chronology. It finally ran to, I think, three pages, something like that. I called the clerk of the court over in Grand Rapids, and I said, "Could you tell me when Ken Laing filed this action to get back into court and argued that this committee on the campus was not the committee the judge had expected?" So he checks, and he said something like two o'clock or something in the afternoon. I said, "Could you send me a piece of paper with the stamp on it?" You know, "Received" at this time. So he did. Well, what had actually happened was the administration was not negotiating with the ACLU or Schiff to let him back in, but the clerk of the court, as a courtesy to a public institution, had called the university when this filing came in at two in the afternoon, saying we want to have another hearing before Judge Fox, in response to which at five o'clock some minion of the administration went over to Schiff's rooming house to tell him that the university was willing to consider readmitting him. So you see, Hannah had it just upside-down, right? So that was part of my chronology. 31 But I also found out in the process of putting together this chronology that somehow somebody in the econ department, must have been the chairman, changed something on his--what do you call this document that contains a student's grades? Charnley: The transcript. Larrowe: The transcript. Had made some changes of the transcript. Now, a transcript is a secret document. Charnley: Yes. Inviolate. Larrowe: You're not supposed to change anything on there. Or if you do, if you transfer somebody from "academic probation" back onto "off probation," you show both "on" and "off" and the dates and that kind of thing. Well, it wasn't done that way. This change was made. I think the change gave the impression that he was unacceptable as a grad student at that point. I'm not certain, but it was negative. So that's in my chronology. So I gave this talk. I timed the talk so it would be twenty minutes. We called up WKAR. They showed up. It was in the Union Building. Had a mike on a long pole, you know. At the beginning of the meeting, Adams pointed out to the people-- about 200 people there, probably the biggest meeting we ever had before or since of the AAUP--he told everybody "WKAR is here. They're recording the meeting. If you don't want to be taped, 32 then let me know, and you won't be taped, or let the guy with the pole know that." Well, one or two people said to me, "That's a bad idea." I think they were fearful of retaliation or something. But nobody failed to respond when the guy stuck the mike in front of them. [Laughter] So I gave my little pitch there and I handed out copies of this chronology. I said, "Now, if you will look on page one, you'll see" this and that. And pointed out Hannah had this chronology upside-down and made Schiff look bad, when in fact it made the university look bad when you got to straightened out. I was really proud of that. Some people told Adams later, "You know, that Larrowe, he's really scholarly." [Laughter] Charnley: You don't know what Walter said about that? [Laughter] Larrowe: I think he laughed. It was a pretty exciting meeting. People were jumping up and down. And the thing that got them more than anything else was tampering with his transcript. As I remember it, the change was not all that damaging to him, but it was tampering with a transcript. Even one of the people there who decided not to vote, for some reason, I think he had ambitions to go up the ladder in administration, so he didn't vote, even he was very perturbed when he heard about this changing the transcript. 33 Well, anyway, this meeting led to a motion, under which the AAUP chapter filed an amicus brief in federal court. So Adams and a guy named Adrian Jaffe, who was in English, and I were given the assignment of writing the amicus brief. We had a lot of fun writing it. I was called away to work on my Christmas tree or something while they were working on it, and both these guys were Jews, so they never let me forget that. [Laughter] Charnley: You were celebrating Christmas. Larrowe: Yes. Anyway I wasn't contributing much to writing the brief. Jaffe was a very clever writer, and Adams was a clever writer and had a lot of good ideas. And then we discovered, you or I as non-lawyers can't just decide to file an amicus brief; we have to get a lawyer to file it for us. So we went back to the ACLU, we got a local ACLU lawyer named John Brattin. I think he's dead now. But he was a guy who'd been active as an ACLU lawyer before there was any ACLU here, so he was the logical guy. He made only one suggestion about this amicus brief we had prepared, which was about five pages or so, and that was, we were a little too harsh on Hannah in something we said. He said, "You don't need to be harsh, so why do that?" So we scratched that out. So then when we get back onto court, President Hannah--and I always thought this showed that he was a guy who understood leadership--he announced, "Mr. Schiff has been kept out of the 34 university long enough. We're readmitting him." And then he assigned somebody from the ad building to take Schiff by the hand and go through the pit. You don't have that now, I suppose. Charnley: Not anymore. Larrowe: It was a gruesome process. Charnley: The registration process. Larrowe: Yes, and it took a couple of hours for a student to get through there, and students didn't like it. And so he was given priority to move right to the head of the line with this guy from the administration. Then Schiff by this time had decided that economics wasn't a field he wanted to go into, so he abandoned economics and became full-time master's candidate in history. I don't know who was involved in all this, but he dropped out of history after, I think, a term, because the environment there was so hostile to him. These are old guard faculty members who thought that a student who was leading these protests was somehow inappropriate as a student here, or some such thing. But they made his life miserable, so he left and I don't know where he went. I think he got a Ph.D. in history someplace. But I never had any contact with him. That's a typical story, you know. 35 Sometimes I've spent a couple of years helping somebody like that. I invested about a year in his case. My wife complained. She said, "You spend a lot of time on this case. You ought to be working on a book." I said, "Look, I can do both. It's not one or the other." But the students and the faculty as well, you get involved that way, you almost never keep in touch with them afterwards, which is unfortunate. I'd like to know. I'd love to know what happened to Schiff and where he landed, you know. Charnley: It sounds like it was a big case at the time, whereas if you talk to people nowadays, they probably wouldn't have heard of it. Charnley: No, but this case was going on during the summer, and some of us wanted to write points of view and letters to the editor denouncing the administration for its mistreatment of Schiff. The editor at that time said, "No, we're not going to print any of those letters or points of view, because the administrators who are on the receiving end of these criticisms are not on the campus now. They're on vacation somewhere and so they can't respond. So we won't print any of those." Charnley: This was in the student paper, the State News. Larrowe: Yes, in the State News. That led to a big hassle 36 among the State News staff with half a dozen editors quitting and whatnot. Some of them became quite well known. One of them is a guy named Jim Sterba. I think he's a vice president of The Wall Street Journal now, something like that. And then they all left and they founded an underground paper, with not a very creative name, just called The Paper. But that flourished for several years and had pretty wide circulation, as I remember it. Well, it should have, because a lot of the people who were putting out The Paper had been editors and reporters and whatnot on the State News, so they had journalistic experience. Charnley: Students who supported the anti-war movement, did they publish in The Paper? Larrowe: Oh yes, that was a vehicle, almost a pamphlet for the anti-war movement. Charnley: At the time that this case was going on, wasn't Hannah the head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission? Larrowe: Yes, he was. Charnley: This was right after they'd given their first, or one of their earlier, reports. Larrowe: Yes. And this guy Sterba, while on the State News 37 staff, dropped out of school for six months or so and went with the Civil Rights Commission down in the South, Mississippi, I think, and reported for the State News from Mississippi or wherever it was, on hearings held by the Civil Rights Commission and how down there Hannah was accused of being a communist. [Laughter] Charnley: But not on campus. That's interesting. How was the Eileen Van Tassell case finally resolved? She was given that added year? Larrowe: Two extra years. Two separate actions, one year at a time. Charnley: This is by the board of trustees? Larrowe: Yes. Charnley: And then she was, if I remember correctly, promoted to associate prof, and received tenure in the course of it all. And as I mentioned last time, I think a couple years ago she suddenly popped up as the chairwoman of the steering committee of the Academic Senate. Charnley: She'd come a long way. And this was before the grievance? 38 Larrowe: I brought her into this conversation here because the cases that convinced the board of trustees that we ought to have a grievance procedure, we ought to make it a matter of right to the untenured person being denied reappointment could be given the reasons in writing if asked for. The cases that produced that sentiment on the board started with the Orange Horse Three, then Orange Horse Three, then Hildebrand, then there was another guy in natural science named Bert Murray, who, along with Van Tassell, were both told, "You're not going to be reappointed." If I remember correctly, Murray didn't want to contest it. The first step that I suggested to Van Tassell that she might take would be the same thing I suggested to Hildebrand, and that was, file a complaint with the Employment Relations Commission of the State of Michigan, alleging that she had been denied reappointment because she was engaged in concerted action to bring about changes in her employment conditions. Normally a concerted action means a labor union, but you don't have to be a labor union. Anybody who engages in that kind of group action is protected by that law, sort of a state version of-- [Begin Tape 6, Side 1] Charnley: She filed a complaint. Larrowe: Yes, with unfair labor. 39 Charnley: Unfair labor practice. Larrowe: Michigan Employment Relations Commission. And so a hearing was scheduled and then subpoenas were issued for some of the people in the natural science department, the old guard who had acted to deny her reappointment. That was a faculty decision in natural science. We wanted to subpoena some of those people. I remember I had two subpoenas to serve. One was a guy whose name I forget now, but I went to his house, and as I was walking toward the door, through the living room window I could see this guy sitting in there. And he must have seen me, because when I rang the doorbell, his teenage son came to the door, and I said, "I would like to see your father." "Oh, he's not here." He apparently ducked out the back. [Laughter] The other one was to serve a subpoena on the department head, guy named Manny Hackel. He's in the med school now. I think he's an expert on blood. And he's really a nice guy, but I had a picture of him, because I held him responsible for what happened to Murray and Van Tassell, and I served a subpoena on him. He didn't want to accept it, so he threw it down on the desk. We were in an office with the door closed, and outside were half dozen secretaries tapping away. When they saw me come in, they stopped typing to hear what was going on. I'm standing 40 in front of this guy's desk, and at some point or other I said, "If you don't accept that subpoena, goddamn it, I'm going to come over there and I'm going to ram it down your throat." I didn't know whether to be humiliated when I reflected on that. Now I feel embarrassed. And we're friends now. He's a bigger man than I--well, yes, he's a bigger man that I am. I have no reason not to like him. He has a good reason not to like me. But, you know, the passage of time really does heal wounds. I think we have evidence of that. Charnley: Interesting. You mentioned the State News and you mentioned the effort to deny you being able to publish in it. Does that lead at all into your writing letters or ultimately your column? Why don't we talk about that a little bit. Larrowe: I'd never thought about writing to the State News. Matter of fact, just the thought has a chilling effect on the idea of doing it, because when you're on the faculty, you think of publishing something and you want to be absolutely meticulous in your research and be sure that what you're saying is accurate and supported by evidence and that kind of thing. It's a painful experience sometimes. So the idea of writing a letter to the State News or a newspaper struck me as a pretty formidable job, because I wanted to be absolutely certain of the truth of what I was saying and that kind of thing. 41 Charnley: That reflected your background as an economist and as a scholar. Larrowe: Yes, because I had published a couple of books about this stuff. I'd had people go over it and correct statements I had made and put in the margins, you know, "What evidence do you have for this?" and that kind of thing. In fact, one book was gone over by lawyers for the publisher, who said, "Can you document this?" and so on. This was the first book about the longshore industry and I'd made a statement that some official of the East Coast Longshoremen Union was a criminal, and the lawyer would say, "What is your basis for that?" I'd say, "Well, he's been arrested fifteen times," or something. "Was he convicted?" "No." "Then he's not a criminal. You can't say he's a criminal. You can say he's been arrested." Well, you know, you can learn from those experiences. So it seemed like a pretty formidable thing to be doing. So I never gave any serious consideration to writing to the State News until the Schiff case came up and Hannah made that statement about the three communist-trained agitators. So I wrote an outraged letter, or point of view, to the State News, fairly long, expressing my outrage at the fact that the 42 president would engage in red-baiting this way, etc. I showed it to Adams, and he said, "Well, two comments." He says, "One, it's way to long. Two, it's the kind of thing nobody will finish reading. It's too deadly serious. What you should do is poke fun at the idea of a big institution quaking at the thought of three undergraduates threatening the institution." Well in those days, what we now call Beijing was Peking. So I titled this thing "Three Pied Pipers from Peking." I thought that was pretty clever. [Laughter] I still think it was pretty clever. Now it would have to be "Three Lousy Bastards from Beijing." [Laughter] But anyway, I laid the lash on Hannah. I think I even called him a fascist in this thing, and they published that. And so that encouraged me, so I started writing. That was '65. I started writing "Points of View" and I wrote about these cases that led to the grievance procedure. The Schiff case led to the Academic Freedom Report, which gives students rights they have in a grievance procedure. There's a whole company of people over in the Student Services Building who would monitor student judiciary meetings and so on, try to ensure the people enjoy due process, etc. That all grew out of the Schiff case. So I started writing about these incidents. The time came, I think was 1971, they would always be called "Points of View" and then at the bottom it would say, "Professor Larrowe, economics" or something, and they had regular columnists on the 43 staff as they do now, I think much better than the ones they have now, but anyway. A columnist, this, of course, would be a student, would have a photograph and the person's name in large type. The significance of that to me was that if somebody scanning the editorial or the Op Ed page, and you see a picture of somebody there and a name, you're more likely to read that if you've read the person before than if you don't have the picture and the name. So I went to the opinion page editor, and I said, "Look," I said, "I'm writing about one a week,'Points of View.' Why don't you make me a columnist and I'll have my picture and name in big type." He said, "The policy of the paper is you have to be student to be a columnist." So I said, "If I become a student, will you make me a columnist?" "Well," he said, "I'll have to check that out with the editor-in-chief." Then he came back and he said, "Yes." So I enrolled as a grad student, and it was the damnedest experience. I had to do all the things that anybody else would do enrolling as a grad student. I had to get my undergraduate transcript, which revealed to anybody who saw it that I had been a goof-off as an undergrad. Then they got my Yale transcript, which showed that I did pretty well. Well, for instance, on my undergraduate transcript, down on the lower left corner was a little space, maybe two little 44 postage stamps could have covered that little space, that was so covered with "On academic probation," "Off academic probation," they went over on the back side. [Laughter] So George [W.] Bush hasn't got anything on me. I should say President-elect Bush. Charnley: So that became part of the university record. Larrowe: Yes, and I got these letters just addressed, "Dear Applicant", you know, etc. But they decided to admit me on the strength of my Yale transcript. Charnley: You don't think it gave a chuckle to the people in administration who reviewed your application? Larrowe: They never mentioned that to me. Charnley: They must have really scrutinized it. Larrowe: They must have thought that was really weird. So then what would I take? See, I had to sign up for courses. I thought, "Well, I'll take Adams' course. Maybe I could embarrass him or something." But you can't take a course in your own department. I think people violate that sometimes, but that's what I'm told. So I'm trying to figure out what course I'll take. I got a 45 call from a woman over in the business school, Mary--I can't remember her name now. Anyway, she was the head of office administration, which had a course in typing. She said, "Do you know how to type?" I said, "No, I don't." She said, "Well, how do you do those columns?" I said, "I write them out and turn them in that way." "Well," she said, "why don't you take a course in typing. Then you can type those columns." I said, "Will you admit me to your department?" She said, "Sure." So I took a course in typing. I think it was '71, somewhere in there. And it was a great experience. There were I think, about thirty glamorous-looking coeds and one man, undergraduate, and me. So he and I sat together. God, I was so terrible at typing, I think I got a 1.5 in the course, and that was the generosity of the instructor. But I would go up after class each day and compliment him on his teaching techniques and the use of graphic aids. [Laughter] Charnley: Had to B.S. your way to a 1.5. Larrowe: I attended faithfully, except for one day, and he asked the undergraduate who was setting next to me, "You know where Dr. Larrowe is?" He always called me "Mr. Larrowe." [Laughter] I don't know if he had a doctorate, I don't imagine 46 he would, to teach typing. He was a pretty effective teacher, I thought. He says, "You don't think Dr. Larrowe's out on Grand River in that anti-war protest, do you?" We were out there overnight. And this guy says, "Yes, I'm pretty sure he is." And this guy went,"Oh, tsk, tsk, I don't approve of that." [Laughter] So having heard that he had inquired about that, I tried to make it up to him by flattering him. I guess it worked, because I didn't deserve that 1.5. But I did go every day. And I did learn how. I still hunt and peck, but I could make columns and do things like that. Charnley: Do you remember what was the speed you were typing at the end? Larrowe: The less said about that, the better. I don't remember. If I ever heard, I repress it. But I do remember one time I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing, and I turned to this other guy and said, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" a question or something. And he sort of ignored me or something. The instructor came down and he said, [whispering], "Dr. Larrowe, we're taking a test." [Laughter] I hadn't even known that. 47 Charnley: So this allowed you to be a columnist. Larrowe: Yes. Then I would write every week, including summer. I must have written 350 columns, because I went from '71 to '89. That's almost twenty years. And I usually taught in the summertime to augment my modest salary. Charnley: Did you start with any guiding principles on your own columns? You mentioned using humor. Larrowe: That's interesting. You noticed in that introduction or whatever by Adams, I just started doing that, I don't know why, and it turned out to have very substantial benefits, because after I'd been writing all those columns in that satirical Mr. Dooley [phonetic] fashion, or Peter Finley Dunn [phonetic], rather, fashion, I was trying to rewrite my book about Harry Bridges. I'd been rebuffed by publishers all over the place, including a leftist who was the dean of editors in New York at that time, working for Alfred Knopf, and I can't remember the guy's name right now. But he wrote to me. I sent him the manuscript. I had an agent, I think the editor of the Nation magazine, whom I had talked to somehow or other, suggested an agent for me. You could say I had an agent, and she had shown the manuscript to this guy at Alfred Knopf. He rejected it and I think in a letter he said, "You got a great story there, but the way you've written it, I wouldn't know 48 where to start editing it." God, talk about feeling crushed, you know. I figured, "I'm going to go talk to this guy." So I went to New York to talk to him, and he just repeated what he had said. I think I must have rewritten the damn manuscript at least eight times. But when I got down to the last number seven and number eight, I was writing in this satirical way, and I loosened up my writing in the Bridges book, and people said to me, "You know, I can hear you talking when I read that book," which I think is a complement for nonfiction. So it really benefited me. And I also used to wonder, is it absurd for a professor to write a regular column in a student paper? You know, which could be looked upon as something strange or something. But then I realized the State News goes to the legislature, goes to all government departments, etc. You go into a supermarket in town now and you see a State News stand there. And all kinds of people have come up to me at various times and said hello and so on, and I have no idea who they are, but they've read that damn column, including legislators and government officials. So there's a huge audience for that State News. Now, at one point I think I'd been writing for about ten years or so, the State News commissioned someone in the journalism department to do a survey of readership, and one of the things, the report which emerged from that, I think the report said the first part of the paper students turn to is the comics, then they go to sports, then they go to Lash's column. 49 Charnley: Yours was singled out. Larrowe: So I had reason to believe, through some evidence, that it was widely read. Charnley: Obviously, you collected some of what you considered your best articles in the book called Lashing Out: The Best of Lash Larrowe. You published this book? Larrowe: It's self-published. There was a woman in the journalism department named Carole Eberly, who was recommended to me as somebody who could help me get a book published, and she advised me about getting a printer and getting somebody to bind it, etc. I have a feeling I don't acknowledge any debt to her in the damn thing, but I sure should have. That photograph on the front, that was a photograph in connection with one of the columns, and some people were upset over that. What I have in the picture, I have a combat infantry badge, which is a serious medal you notice when people like Colin Powell wear uniforms. Charnley: That's not given out in Crackerjack boxes. Larrowe: I think you have to be in combat for thirty days to get that medal, and they always put it at the top. You could 50 have five layers at the top. The other medal is a good conduct medal. In three years in the Army, I think I got one of those. You get them every year if you're a good boy. And then I've got the flag up-side down, see. That's supposed to convey, "America is in distress." Well, it was during the Vietnam War. And this cap, which looks like a legion cap, that's Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I was really proud of that picture. That was taken by the man who supervised photographers for the State News. He's now in Detroit on either the News or the Free Press. I can't remember the guy's name. I asked him, "What are you going to charge me for that?" He said, "You couldn't afford to pay what I'd have to charge you for that. I'll do that for free." Then on the back cover, you see me from behind as if I'm disappearing back into the book. That was his idea. I thought it was pretty clever. Charnley: This picture of you in a uniform, that appeared in the column regularly? Larrowe: No, not regularly. That was a lot of fun. I would hand-deliver my column to the news room, and the opinion page editor read it. If he liked it, he'd summon a cartoonist or a photographer. I have several cartoons that were done to go with the column and photographs. I remember one time, I don't know what the subject of the column was, but I went to great effort 51 to find a World War I German helmet, with the spike. I found out that that spike has a function. You turn it one way, if the weather's cold, and it shuts off air, in or out. Turn it the other way and allows air to circulate around the top of your head inside the helmet. Charnley: You appeared also, obviously, in Hawaiian shirt. Larrowe: I adopted the Hawaiian shirt, because until 1970 I was the model of the university prof. I always wore a suit and bow tie. Charnley: That's where Walter Adams heard you look like a banker. You mentioned that. Larrowe: That's right. I used to wear tweeds at one time. As I got older, it has to do with your metabolism, I suppose, I would notice that I'd perspire when I was teaching. I'd take my jacket off and I'd untie my tie. The collar would start choking me. I discovered that people in physics and math taught in open-collar shirts, no jackets, and I thought, "If those guys can do it, I can do it." I was divorced in 1970, so I didn't have anybody to tell me, "Put on your suit." So I just stopped wearing a suit in 1970, and I've never worn one since. But I did it for comfort. Well, in the course of doing my book about Bridges, I spent 52 a lot of time in Hawaii, because the union organized people in the sugar and pineapple industries over there, and they've had a tremendous impact on the politics of Hawaii, which is now a democratic state, probably has a body of laws that are more progressive than any other state. They used to be a colony, you know, with the governor appointed by the president and so on. This is largely due to the impact of the union, organized all those workers. So I'd go over there and spend a month at a time, or two weeks and so on. I'd buy Hawaiian shirts. When I was grievance officer, the woman who worked in the office with me said, "You buy some material on the next trip and I'll make some shirts for you." So she made four shirts. You can appreciate this. The first one she made was too small. She underestimated my bulk, I guess. So we discarded that one. Then she made some really nice ones. So I figured I'm really comfortable wearing a shirt like that and I stand out as different, too. Charnley: The colorful Hawaiian style shirt. Larrowe: One student wrote on an evaluation one time, "The very first day I came to class I felt right at home, because I come from Hawaii." And I'd wear them the year 'round. A day like this, where the temperature outside's about 15, I'd come in with a Hawaiian shirt and a warm coat, arrive on a bicycle. 53 Charnley: I didn't know there was any connection with your research with Harry Bridges, the connection between the shirt. Larrowe: If it hadn't been for spending all that time in Hawaii, I never would have hit upon the idea of those Hawaiian shirts. Charnley: It makes sense. Did the faculty give you any flak about that? Larrowe: You know, that's interesting. My department head was an active reserve lieutenant in the Navy and he was very straight sort of person. I think two different times he's said to me, "Pretty informal, aren't we?" And I said, "Yeah." And that was that. [Laughter] What the hell? You're an associate department head, aren't you? Charnley: That's right. Larrowe: What can you do with some guy who insists on wearing a shirt? Charnley: Dress code, yes. Just so it's clean. Larrowe: Yes. Well, I washed them and actually had to iron them, because they were cotton. So they were always clean. 54 Now, I noticed in the econ department, when I'd be wearing these Hawaiian shirts, I never got any criticism in student evaluations for my failure to live up to some tacit dress code, but I noticed young faculty members would leave a tie and a jacket in their office so that when they went into class, they'd put on the tie and the jacket. When they'd come back, they'd take it off and hang it up. I asked one of them, "Why do you do that? Why do you insist of wearing a tie and a jacket?" "Well," he said, "I got criticism in my student evaluations. You should dress the way a prof is expected to dress." I never got anything like that. There's another guy, he's due for retirement now, who always wore a suit, and he said to me, "You know, you ought to wear a tie and a jacket." I said, "Why?" "Well," he said, "to show respect for the students." And this is a guy who would never speak to a student. He always told a student who wanted to talk about his exam, "See my T.A." I mean literally. He would not talk to a student. That's the kind of respect he had for them. I figured the students will respect you if there's some positive correlation between what you talk about, especially in a field like labor relations, and what you do. So to me, in a way, wearing that Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans, they were tattered sometimes, and I had a pair of tennis shoes I particularly liked and they got to the point where I had to take duct tape to hold them together. [Laughter] 55 I figured if a student ever asked me that, I'd say, "Because I want to demonstrate to you that how you dress and how you look is irrelevant to teaching. Not only that, but once you get tenure, you can survive without having to meet somebody's tacit- -especially if it's a tacit dress code." I have one student, an African-American student, who came to class wearing a three-piece suit every time. And I asked him one time, "How come you wear a three-piece suit?" "Oh," he said, "I work at Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, and I drive over here for this class and I drive right back. When I'm there, I have to wear a suit." This poor guy gave me a book by John Malloy, Dress for Success. [Laughter] I said to him, "You know, you gave that to the wrong guy. I am a success by my rights. I'm right where I want to be in life." At the end of the term, you know, that's the only conversation I had with this guy. I had T.A.s who read exams and I would make up the grades with one of my T.A.s. We came to this poor guy's name and I think he got a D, or one point or something. Just didn't have it when it came to writing exams. Now, I was torn there for a while. Here he is trying to help me, giving me Dress for Success, and I reward him with a 1.0 grade. [Laughter] Charnley: Were there any of your columns that any of the legislators talked with you about that you remember? You mentioned that they read them. 56 Larrowe: Oh, they just said they read them and enjoyed them, that was all. They didn't talk about any particular one. Charnley: Did you have a problem where people would take what you wrote in a satirical sense, where they took it literally? Was that ever a problem? Regular readers would know your style. I remember reading some of your columns when I was a student. Larrowe: There were people who took them seriously. I was even been told by some students that when they first got here as freshmen, they read those things for years, thinking I was a wild-eyed reactionary. And then they finally caught on it was satire, but it took them a year. [Laughter] We had an Iranian grad student in economics who, I don't know how it came about, but I made a suggestion to him that he was misusing English grammar or something. He said, "What would you know about proper grammar?" He says, "I read what you write in the State News." [Laughter] Charnley: The malapropisms and the spellings. Larrowe: My intent was to portray myself as a venal, semi- literate prof, of whom there some in the profession around the country. I'd met them, you know, in various universities, a few of them here, too. We don't have any more. 57 Charnley: Stuffed shirts. Larrowe: Stuffed shirts, yes. There are a lot of faculty members whose grammar is deplorable, and they inflict that on students, you know, and here they are role models for students. So that's what I was trying to convey. That's the kind of guy I was in class. Charnley: Obviously the creative writing aspect about your column seems to be an important one. Did you see it as an outlet for any of that-- Larrowe: I don't know if this is what you're thinking about, but I was told by several different profs who were teaching writing that they used my columns. Now, whether they used them as a sort of thing to avoid or as examples of satire, or how they used them, I don't know. The way they described it, I did have the impression it was used in a positive way, from my standpoint. Is that what you were saying? Charnley: Yes. Obviously it's part of a scholar's outlet. Some people have traditional publishing and then there's also the creative writing. Obviously, looking at your career as a teacher and as an author, you'd have to consider the columns as an important part of your body of work, I would think. In terms 58 of the creativity and the thought that you put behind it, it seems like that is an important aspect in understanding your contributions to the university, really. Larrowe: I would rewrite those columns several times. The first draft would be the kind of thing you'd expect a professor to write--proper grammar, serious tone and all that kind of thing. The second draft would be sort of loosening up and so on. Then by the time I get to the fourth, my grammar is deplorable and you'd have that scene at the beginning to catch their interest, where I'm doing something utterly absurd. That just evolved without my thinking about doing it in a conscious way. Charnley: Did you talk with any of your colleagues, like Walter Adams or others about ideas relating to columns or did they just come to you? Larrowe: Actually, I have a friend who was assigned to me as a teaching assistant in 1967, and somehow he and I formed a partnership in which he wanted to be a silent partner. He didn't want to call attention to himself, whereas I was delighted to attract attention to myself. He and I would get together once a week. Before he was married, we'd have dinner, then we'd start consuming whiskey and water and start talking about ideas for a column. He was the one who suggested these 59 zany openings in which I portrayed myself as a total idiot. I would balk at that sometimes, but then he would prevail. The time came when we'd be meeting and we'd put away so much booze while we were talking about ideas for the column, the way to say things, and laugh up a storm as the evening progressed, the next morning I couldn't remember what the hell we talked about. So I got in the habit of writing down a skeletal column, and then the next morning, that would remind me. [Laughter] So I owe him a lot if that was a worthy enterprise. He's entitled to a lot of credit, but he didn't want to be identified with it. Charnley: Did you end up selling many of the books, Lashing Out? Larrowe: I wish you hadn't asked that. [Laughter] [Begin Tape 7, Side 1] Charnley: You were talking about the volumes that you sold of Lashing Out. Larrowe: Well, I figured 2,000 copies would go fairly fast, and I made arrangements with several of the bookstores to have signing affairs, and they'd lay on cookies and pop and that kind of thing, and advertise it in the paper, and I managed to sell a 60 few that way. But if you ever write a book and you go to a signing, prepare to be disappointed in the number of people who show up, because I think other people have told me they had the same experience. Then I had the idea that alumni might be interested in it because it would remind them. The book spans from '71 to '82 or something like that, and that would remind them of what was going on when they were here. So I went to the editor of the alumni magazine and I said, "How about letting me make use of the membership list?" I figured 30,000 members or something at the alumni association. "Could I use that to mail out advertisements for the book?" So he checked with somebody. Of course they said, "No, if we do that for you, every other faculty member is going to want it." You can imagine how I reacted to that. Anyway, I said, "How about taking out an ad in the magazine?" I think the damned ad cost something like 700 bucks. A full page in the back. And I wrote the ad and whatnot. Well, when I first was trying to sell the book through the bookstores, I don't know why I hit upon a price of $4.95. I just pulled it out of thin air, you know. I thought, "Well, alumni can pay more than that." So I think I said, "You get the book at an alumni discount at $6.95." [Laughter] "And I'll eat the charges, shipping and handling." Well, I lost about 300 bucks. No, I think the damned ad cost 1,000, and I got back 700 bucks from the sale. 61 Charnley: So publishing entrepreneur is not part of-- Larrowe: No, God no. I made a good decision when I decided not to go into business. Charnley: Could we talk a little bit about teaching? A lot of the interviews we've done so far have been with administrators, and we're just starting now to branch out into faculty and instructors. I'd like to talk a little bit about your philosophy of teaching and how you approached the task of being a teacher. Was there any favorite technique that you used when you approached teaching your classes? Larrowe: You know, I don't really know how to answer that, but I'll just rattle off some things that occur to me. When I first got here, the econ department was suffering from an inadequate supply of students. We never did have many majors in econ. We had tremendous teaching responsibilities, but these were required courses for all business students. In addition to that, Beginning Econ is required in fields like engineering and all around the campus, so we had large classes and thousands of students, but we didn't have very many majors. There was some feeling that maybe some of the members of the department could improve their teaching skills. So President Hannah had invited a man--I think his name was 62 George S. Counts, who had been on the faculty at University of Columbia Teachers College and had retired, and he was well known. If you'd read articles about college teaching in those days, you'd see this man's name. So Hannah had brought him out here to be a consultant to the president on teaching methods. So we invited him to conduct a seminar for the members of our department on how to be an effective teacher. Well, I don't think any of us really learned much from that, which is maybe a commentary on us, for all I know. But you ask the questioned, "What's a good teacher?" The answer seemed to me is, you might be a good teacher doing it the way you do it. I might be a good teacher doing it a different way. For example, Adams taught using what he called the Socratic method. He would grill students on passages in the book that he was using, and he would just really come down hard on them. Women students would burst into tears and so on, and he thought that was great. And sometimes it does put a student in a position where he or she is more attentive, because you might be called on to read the book more carefully. It can have that effect. I think he won some kind of an award as Teacher of the Year, nationally, appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. [Laughter] Now, I could not use that method, because it embarrasses people. and I figure I want to make the class sufficiently interesting and enjoyable that people will want to come to class. I had three different courses that I taught time after 63 time. Beginning economics, which is for freshmen and sophomores, it was always a huge class, anywhere from 250, finally 608 in D108 Wells Hall, once or twice. Well, it's just a lecture. That's about the only way I could handle a big class like that. And then labor economics, which was junior-level class, where I would have in Erickson [unclear], for example, a couple hundred or 300 or something like that. And then I had a class in labor law, in which I used the same casebook that people at Harvard or various other places in law school used. And on labor law I would announce at the beginning, or put it on the syllabus, "Thirty percent of the grade is going to turn on how well you perform in class, which means you'll be called upon to- -" Did you ever watch Paper Chase? Charnley: Yes. Larrowe: Well, see, that was sort of my model, in a way, for the labor law. So you have to teach these differently. You can't teach the same way in a 400-student auditorium that you can with, say, forty-five, if you can manage to keep it to that size in labor law. I guess it wouldn't be too much to say "crushed" when I read Grubner's Grading the Prof. He was in one of my classes one time. Charnley: He was a former student, Mark Grubner. Grading the 64 Prof. Larrowe: Yes. Of me he said, "Poor lecturer." That really hurt. Because I would have people who would sit in on that class three times in a row sometimes just to listen to me go on about labor relations and the history of unions and etc., and so I saw myself as a kind of a storyteller. The students would complain sometimes on evaluations in labor economics. They'd say, "You go off on too many tangents." Well, their idea of a tangent was my idea of an anecdote or an incident in some detail that would illustrate some general concept I was trying to explain. Now, in the beginning of macro, either macro or micro for the freshmen and sophomores, I would follow the textbook carefully, and I would try to rephrase in my own way, however these concepts of demand and supply and all those things. And I kept rewriting my lecture notes every time I taught it, to try to make as clear as I possibly could what some of these terms meant. How could you define them? So that's one approach I took there. I saw myself not as a storyteller so much, but as explaining. Explicating, I guess, is the word. But the approach I took in labor economics was, if you're going to try to understand why unions behaved the way they do in the year 2000, it's pretty useful to know how they got the way they are, what their history is all about. So students called the class "labor history." I called it "labor 65 relations." But I could see why they would call it labor history. I would do a lot of research into the history of unions. I'd spend a couple of weeks on how the teamsters got to be corrupt and the effect of prohibition on the corruption of labor unions in certain fields of activity, like the clothing industry, the produce markets in New York, and so on, where you have a perishable product, which means a union has the employer over barrel. You can't let a shutdown occur, because you'd lose too much money. I'd raise the question, "Why is it that coal miners seem to be prone to violence in strikes, where they blow up mines and whatnot?" See, and I have an explanation for that. Charnley: What was that? Larrowe: Well, I'd put it this way, if you as a matter of your employment have to provide your own dynamite to blast the face of the coal seam, then when you get into a strike, it sort of comes naturally to blow up a building or a mine entrance. Charnley: You have that expertise. Larrowe: By contrast, suppose I got sore at the administration. I'm not going to go over and blow up the ad building, as much as I might like to, because I don't work with dynamite all the time 66 and I'd probably blow myself up instead of the administration. [Laughter] Charnley: Did you bring any guest speakers in? Did you ever do that? Larrowe: Once in a while I would. I don't know whether I stopped doing it because people in their evaluations would say, "We should have more speakers." [Laughter] But once in a while I would. Once in a while, a student would say, "My dad is a teamster. Why don't you invite him to talk to the class. He can tell all about what it's like." This is when the teamsters union was corrupt. So I'd invite Dad and Mom, and his brother and sister would show up. And then the old man would spend his time talking about how your kidneys were adversely affected by bouncing in the seat when you ride in the trucks, instead of talking about the movement to try to throw out the rascals in the leadership. So it didn't work out too well. But I felt--still feel this way--that in a subject like that, where, in effect, telling these stories and going over the struggles in labor-management relations and so on, by implication I think I was urging them to stand up for their rights and whatnot. I figured, if I'm doing that, then I should behave that way myself. So I figured, dressing the way, in what you'd say, this eccentric fashion, supporting students in difficulties with the administration, and young faculty and so 67 on, and writing the paper, it was all part of what I considered teaching. So I felt I was teaching in and out of the classroom and trying to make everything consistent. Now, every once in a while somebody in psychology would assign students to interview a member of the faculty to decide are they happy with what they're doing and is there a consistency between the way they behave and what they teach and so on. I remember one of these profs, I can't remember who he was now, calling me up after some of the students had interviewed me for his class that way. He said, "I always thought you were just a crazy, but I realize now, all these things you do are all perfectly consistent, from your standpoint, anyway." I felt pretty good about that. Charnley: There was a thoughtful analysis behind it. Larrowe: Well, it was consistent with what I was trying to do, anyway. Charnley: Also it's interesting, the idea of your listening to students and what directions they were headed. Almost like a counselor. Larrowe: I always wanted to deal with students as if they were adults. I never said, "kiddies" or "kids," or something, the way a lot of faculty do. And I never thought I was all that 68 much smarter than they were. I couldn't have proved it if I thought that. And I think they must have sensed that. Charnley: In the course of your career, obviously you spanned quite a few presidents or provosts and that sort of thing. And in the direction you've already mentioned Dr. Hannah at length. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other presidents that you worked with? Larrowe: I thought it was fun to poke fun at Hannah when he acted in a way I didn't approve of. I mentioned, I think, about some guy who was working on a dictionary. Charnley: No, I don't think so. Larrowe: I don't know what Hannah did, but before I started writing columns, it might have been my accusation that he was red-baiting those three communist-trained agitators or something. I went to the AAUP, which I didn't belong to, and went to a meeting, and I offered a motion of censure of Hannah for whatever he said. And before I did, I went to my unabridged dictionary, and I looked up "censure", "criticized", you know, etc. I wanted to get just the shade of meaning that I wanted the motion to convey. So I think I used the word "censure." Well, there was some guy in the group there, whom I didn't know, who wanted to put a friendly amendment on the one I 69 proposed. I can't remember what word he wanted, but he wanted some other word. "No," I said, "I absolutely insist on 'censure.'" I had looked that up and I think even written down the shades of meaning of the different words that would be synonyms. So he backed off and it went through the way I proposed it. I found out the next day, he was a guy named Fred Reeves, who was in the English department, and he was working for some dictionary outfit on a new dictionary. [Laughter] Oh god, I was embarrassed when I found that out. Anyway, this motion, which was pretty sharp criticism of Hannah, was adopted. But the next day, the top leaders of the branch got together and rescinded the motion, so it never saw the light of day. But anyway, I think I mentioned that despite taking potshots, well, not just potshots. If you're instrumental in hauling the university into federal court and they're embarrassed the way they were, they're entitled to think you're the kind of guy they'd like to see at some other institution. So I'd take a few potshots at him in points of view in those days. But I think I mentioned the other day, when he left in '69 he said, as I was going through the line saying goodbye to him, he said, "You and I disagreed on several issues, but I always knew you have the best interests of Michigan State at heart." So as the years go by, I think back on him increasingly in a positive way. I mean, the guy was a tremendous leader. I say he was the Henry Ford of higher education. I think 70 of him as taking the faculty, right after World War II, by the scruff of the neck, and over their objections, making this a university instead of a cow college. See, you'd never get the kind of changes that converted us into a university out of faculty, which troubled me because here I was campaigning when I could, for more faculty participation. Now we have a tremendous amount of faculty participation, committees for this and committees for that. I don't think it has changed the way the place is run one damn bit. Charnley: You'd call him a benevolent dictator in other areas? Larrowe: Yes. He used to know every member of the faculty. That was another parallel I saw between him and Henry Ford in the early days. So he would get the recommendations for salary increases and he would go down the list, and he would see somebody's name there who was recommended, let's say, for a modest increase, and Hannah thought he was making a better contribution then, he'd scratch out the amount and increase it. Then the same thing would happen with some guy who was a troublemaker, like this guy Jaffe. See, Jaffe did something that I thought was really great. He was called over to the president's office one time when the president had been going down this salary list, recommended salary increases, and he said, "Professor Jaffe, you're not getting much of an increase here. You're aware of that, aren't you?" 71 And Jaffe said, "Yes." And he said, "You know, if you'd just quit carping and criticizing, you'd get a better salary increase than you're getting." So Jaffe says, "How big an increase?" He told him. See, in those days, a big increase would be 500 bucks. So he told him [unclear] or something. Jaffe said, "Not worth it." [Laughter] I used to tell people that, a variant of that, people would say to me, when the salary list came out, they could see I had a modest salary, as economists go, and they'd say, "Is your salary held down because you write these columns and you do these things?" I said, "I don't think so. I have no evidence of that. I know I'd have a better salary if I'd publish more, if I could write faster and do research faster and write articles, instead of taking eleven years to get out a book, or something. So I know what I have to do to get a salary increase, I just don't feel like doing it. I like doing what I'm doing." But I said, "Suppose I were punished by, say, instead of getting a salary increase of 500 bucks, I get a salary increase of 250, or whatever it is. Think of it this way, what is that difference after taxes, and then divide it by 12? So what is the difference month by month? And it's going to come out 25, 30 bucks. Hell, I put that under the heading of entertainment." [Laughter] And that's true, you know, the difference between 72 the salary you'd get if you kept your mouth shut, and what you would get if you sound off, the difference isn't very damn much. Nowadays it isn't much either, is it? Charnley: No. How did Clifton [R.] Wharton [Jr.] respond to the columns? Obviously you started writing the columns on a regular basis. Larrowe: I was going full steam ahead, because he came in 1970. Oh no, I wasn't. I was still writing Points of View in 1970. But I was really hard on Wharton. He would give a speech somewhere in which he would criticize the faculty without identifying who it was, or whatever, or he'd make a statement that I couldn't figure out. I couldn't understand what he was saying. I'd ask people, "What did he mean by that statement that I read in the State News?" They'd say, "I don't know." I found out later he had a speech writer who had been a reporter for one of the Detroit papers, a guy named Bob Perrin. [phonetic]. Perrin wrote the speeches and Wharton gave them. So I opened a column one time, I said, "Our new [unclear]." He was always our new [unclear], for eight years. [Laughter] "Every time he gives a speech, my mailbag is bulging with letters. 'Pompous windbag,' is a typical comment." Now that's a nasty thing to say about somebody. But he never complained about that. In fact, he was friendly to me. 73 Now, we did have one situation there where his distaste for me came through. We needed a new faculty grievance officer. A guy named Harrison in chemistry had been the first one, then a guy named Bruce Miller in philosophy followed him. And Bruce, I think, left the position after three years to become department head of philosophy, something like that. So the position was open. Well, the University Committee on Faculty Affairs has supervisory authority over the grievance procedure, and when there's a vacancy in the office, their responsibility is to recommend somebody to the president. I think the way the grievance procedure reads, recommend one person. So they were setting about looking at people who might be considered for the position, and Pauline Adams was on the committee at that time. I think I got a letter from the chairman of the Committee on Faculty Affairs, would I sent a resume to them. And I thought to myself, "What the hell? They would never appoint me." I wouldn't appoint myself, at least on my public persona, you know. I would appoint myself based on what I think of myself, but not the other way. So I wasn't going to respond. But she or somebody said, "Look, you've got to respond. They might actually choose you." So I sent in a resume. Then I got a notice that there was going to be a meeting of the committee to which various people would be invited, who were candidates, potential candidates for the job. I wasn't going to go to that either, but I did. And 74 because I was convinced they wouldn't appoint me, I acted as if I wasn't eager to get the position. Well, it turned out that made a good impression, so they recommended me. So they sent my name up to President Wharton, and I forget the name of the prov at that time, I think a guy named Boger from ag econ. Charnley: Larry Boger? Larrowe: Larry [Lawrence L.] Boger. Pretty far off to the right of center, if I remember correctly. And he didn't think my columns were funny at all. I remember one time, it must have been before this FGO thing came up, I poked fun at the idea of Michigan State. You know, Michigan State and Cornell have big ag colleges, and I think Michigan State had developed a cabbage which was green. For Christ sakes, wasting your time doing that is silly. So I poked fun at that in the column. I think that got under Boger's skin. Anyway, what happened was the committee recommended me for the job. So Wharton and Boger didn't want to appoint me. So they met with the committee, and they said, "We want you to submit three names, and we'll pick one." The committee got their backs up, probably the only time in the history of that committee they ever did. I used to think of it as a do-nothing committee. Anyway, they said, "No, the way we read this document, we're charged with making a recommendation and you're charged 75 with appointing that person." Well, I think three months went by, with nobody in the job, and there were, I think, two editorials in the State News. "Why is the administration dragging its feet when Larrowe has been recommended and he'd be an ideal grievance officer?" Nothing, nothing happened. Then Wharton appointed a provost intern. I think it might have been Chitra Smith, if I'm not mistaken, out of political science, to go around to deans and department heads and ask them, "Could you work with Larrowe if he's appointed as FGO?" Because a big part of your job is to try to mediate disputes between administrators and faculty. "Could you work with him?" And so she made a report back to them and they called me over to the president's office and they said, "You're aware, of course, that your name has been put up for FGO and we've been delaying action on it, and one of the things we did was to have this survey done, and what was reported to us was that administrators who have never met you say, 'No, I couldn't work with him. The guy's crazy.' But people who have actually worked with you, where you were actually representing somebody informally or through the grievance procedure, say you're perfectly practical and sensible and they could work with you. So on the strength of this second set of responses, we're going to appoint you." And then they said, "Of course you'll have to give up writing your column." I said, "Then forget it." 76 So they said, "Okay, but you can't use anything in the column which you could only learn from a grievance, because you're supposed to keep those things confidential." I said, "Okay." Then they said, "And of course you wouldn't be teaching." And I said, "Well, that's another reason you're going to have to find somebody else, because I don't like giving up teaching." Well, to be truthful about it, I didn't want to leave the department for five years and then come back and nobody would know me. Charnley: It was a five-year assignment? Larrowe: Put me through a test, you know. "Do you know enough economics to teach beginning economics?" I think that's the real motivation. But I enjoyed teaching anyway. So they said, "Well, you can teach one course." Well, at the end of the first year--let's see, the grievance officer is in the President's Office, in the table of organization, as is the ombudsman. But because I was teaching in the business school--econ being in the business school--when the President's Office made a recommendation for a salary increase, it went over to the dean in the business school for his confirmation or approval or whatever. And this guy wanted the increase to be less than the president's office was recommending, and he explained to the 77 administrative assistant, guy named Al Ballard, at the time he was negotiating all this for the president, "If we give Larrowe this kind of an increase, and we do that for five years, he's going to come back into the college with a salary that's a lot higher than he deserves." [Laughter] I think that was resolved in favor of the president's recommendation, but it confirmed my suspicion that I wasn't high up on the dean's list of approved faculty. Charnley: So how long did you end up as FGO? Larrowe: Well, I had two terms in the grievance office. The first, after I was appointed in '76. [M. Cecil] Mackey came on in 1980, and it was evident to me that he had no use for a really meaningful grievance procedure. He proposed a alternative to it, and it was so bad, I resigned. I said, "I can't work with a guy who disagrees as much as he and I do over how to run the grievance procedure." And while that was going on, I happened to be down in Lubbock, Texas for something. My son was a cop in Texas and I went down and visit him. I think he picked me up in Lubbock at the airport there. We had to wait awhile for some reason, so I thought, "Why don't I go over to," whatever that Texas university is. Charnley: Texas Tech. 78 Larrowe: Texas Tech, where Mackey had been president. And I go over there and see what these guys think, what kind of president he was. So I went over there and I sought out the president of the Faculty Senate, I think it was. He said something to the effect that "our gain was your loss." [Begin Tape 7, Side 2] Charnley: When the tape ended, you were talking about the grievance procedure at Texas Tech when President Mackey was there. Larrowe: Yes. So I said, "Do you have a grievance?" "Yes," he says, "but it's not much good." And I said, "Could you give me a copy of it?" He didn't have a copy of it. So while we're talking, another guy came in, the president of the local AAUP chapter. So I asked him could he give me a copy. He says, "I don't have one." Well, that told me all I needed to know abut what kind of grievance procedure that was. So anyway, I started out liking Mackey, but I ended up disliking him, and I resigned at the end of four years because of that difference of opinion between him and me, and that was 1980. But I was invited to come back in 1988, to fill in while they searched around for somebody to occupy that position 79 permanently. That was really gratifying, because [John A.] DiBiaggio was president in 1988, and I had written several columns poking fun at him. So I got a message in my mailbox one day, "Call the president. He wants to talk to you." I thought, "This is going to be bad news." So I didn't call him. [Laughter] So he called the next day, and turned out he was inviting me to serve as interim faculty grievance officer while they searched for a new one, which meant--see, this was my last year on the faculty. It meant I suddenly jump up from whatever salary I was getting, to a nice increase, because, one, you go from what they call ten months, which is really nine months, to twelve. And that's, I don't know, a thirty-three percent increase in salary, something like that. And then you get another addition for administrative responsibilities, which included grievance officer. So all of a sudden my salary went way up, thanks to being interim faculty grievance officer. But, to tell you the truth, I was just on the brink of resigning anyway at the end of four years. The job was taking a hell of an emotional toll on me. For instance, if you've got a grievant who really has a good solid grievance, the weakness in the grievance procedure is the final arbiter, is the president. And when I look back over most of the decisions handed down by the president in the time before I was grievance officer and while I was grievance officer, it seemed to me the president 80 ruled pretty much the way an arbitrator would have. In fact, it really didn't make all that much difference, see, in practice. But it's dangerous to give up arbitration, where you have a disinterested person making a ruling, and turn it over to the head of the organization, who has an obligation to support his subordinates in administration. That's a real problem for a president in a case like that. But one thing I did discover, I learned a lot from that job. I went into it thinking administrators were all rascals and arbitrary, etc. Then I found out oftentimes administrators seem to me to be right and the grievant seemed to be wrong. I had no authority. I couldn't say to anybody, "You can't file a grievance." If somebody wanted to, I would first try to mediate it, and most the time we could mediate it. Time and again, I would ask people to meet on neutral ground in the grievance office. We had a little roundtable there. So the three of us would be there, the administrator and the grievant and I. I would say, "To start out, let's have the grievant tell us what the grievance is all about." And so the grievant would lay that out, and time after time, the administrator would say, "I didn't realize that's what was sticking in your craw. For hell sakes, we can fix that." Once in a while I'd listen to the grievant tell me what the problem was, then I'd go over to the administrator. I never summoned them to my office. I'd go over to theirs and lay all this out. And once in a while the administrator, if it was a 81 salary thing, would say, "Oh, for god's sake. Why the hell do we spend time arguing about a couple hundred bucks. We'll meet that." It was really easy to settle some of them, but some of them you couldn't. I don't know, somehow or other it was wearing me down after four years. I don't know how R____ puts up with it. I think he's in his seventh or eighth year as grievance officer now. Charnley: The size of the university, sounds like a lot of stress. Larrowe: I was under a lot of stress then, yes. Charnley: The issue of your retirement. At the time that you were contemplating retirement, there was a requirement of seventy years? Larrowe: Mandatory at seventy. See, when I reached age sixty- nine, I got a notice from the provost's office, with a form to fill out, and it said, "If you want to apply for a consulting year in which you don't have committee duties," and I guess you don't have to teach under most arrangements, in effect, you're getting a year's salary for doing minimal work. A routine kind of thing. But I wrote back saying, "I can't very well apply for this, because I intend to challenge mandatory retirement. I think 82 mandatory retirement is in direct conflict with the state civil rights law, which says you can't discriminate." It was [unclear] Civil Rights Act. You can't discriminate against somebody in employment because of age. Nobody had said I was over the hill or incompetent to go on or whatever. Furthermore, I figured, "I've been teaching labor law here for thirty-five years or so. If I don't know that there's a civil rights law which is in direct conflict with a Michigan State ordinance, I shouldn't have been teaching labor law." Now, that's a self- serving kind of justification for objecting to it. My real reason--well, that was part of it--but also I was having a good time writing columns. I was having a good time teaching. I enjoyed it. My teaching evaluations were good. I had no trouble filling up a classroom. God, as a matter of fact, it was the opposite. Here I was teaching labor law, trying to do it by the Socratic method, and I could never get the damn class full, eighty or ninety. And that's too damn many for me. Thirty would be about right, or thirty-five. But whenever I would try to persuade the department head to cut the class, or divide it into two, he'd say, "Oh, we can't afford to divide it. And if I only have one section, that's you. And you only have thirty-five, I'm going to have forty people in here complaining bitterly. And I can't put up with that." I remember one time some student was going on at great length about what a wonderful prof his history prof was and how he spent time with students or something. I said, "How many 83 students does he have?" He says, "Twelve. He won't allow more than twelve." [Laughter] Charnley: You had a lot more than that. Larrowe: God, I sure as hell did. Well, you know, I liked it, but teaching a course like labor law would have been so much more enjoyable for me and for the students if there were thirty- five, maybe, instead of eighty. So anyway, the time came when I filed that. So I wrote to DiBiaggio. He was new in '89. I said, "I just received this notice that I'm going to have to retire a year from now, and I want you to know that I object to mandatory retirement and I'm going to have to do something to try to prevent this." I wrote it in a respectful way. I had met him once or twice and I liked the guy. So it wasn't personal at all. But he wrote back and said, "I'm sorry you feel that way, but I think it's a good policy and I'm going to enforce it." So I just wrote back and said, "Well, in that case, I'm going to have to file a suit in court to see if we can't get this straightened out to my satisfaction," something like that. So I went to the woman who teaches down at Cooley, who was the head of the ACLU at that time. I can't think of her name right now. Doris--what the hell. Oh, well you don't care. 84 Charnley: We can look it up. Larrowe: Yes. Anyway, she, in addition to teaching at Cooley, was in charge of a clinic or group of law students there who worked on legal problems of people who were up in years, legal problems of the aging, something like that. So I went to her to ask could she recommend a lawyer who would represent me in this lawsuit. When I contemplated that, I don't know where I got this figure, but I thought, "That'll probably cost me about ten grand." I had taken two trips in winter terms traveling around the world for a whole term at a time. They both cost me about ten grand, and I figured, "I'll write this lawsuit off against entertainment." Well, that ten grand was gone in about three months, and the bill was climbing, climbing. But it's like having a tiger by the tail; you can't let go. And you figure, "Well, it'll only be 2,500 more, and then we'll reach the end." By the time we got into court, it was 21,500. [Laughter] Well, anyway we appeared in Judge Houk, Judge Peter Houk, in his court, and I had a feeling he was sympathetic to me. The university responded with a boilerplate motion to dismiss the case because I don't have a chance of winning it after a trial, and that really kind of unnerved me, but my lawyer representing me said, "That's just routine. Don't worry about that." So we won on that one. There was a chance I could win after a trial. So then the lawyer representing me said, "I would like to 85 ask you to issue an injunction to prevent the university from retaliating against Professor Larrowe because he's filed this lawsuit, and he's an outspoken critic of the administration, and he probably will continue to be while this lawsuit is pending." Well, Judge Houk said, "I can't issue an injunction based on conjecture." He said to me, "Has the university retaliated against you?" I said, "No." "Well," he said, "then I can't issue an injunction just based on conjecture. But if the university does retaliate you, you come back and we'll consider it." Well, about a month later, my department head sent a memo to all the regular faculty saying, "I'm in the process of making teaching assignments for the coming year, and I want to match up what you want to teach with the departmental needs. So if you'll send me, in order of preference, three courses you're interested in teaching, I'll try to match that up with our needs." Didn't send one to me. So one of the people in the department showed me this memo. So I wrote to the department head, and I said, "Somehow or other, you missed me in sending out that memo, but here are the courses I would like to teach." So I took it into the department office. It was just before noon. I gave it to the secretary. I think ten minutes later I got a note back, hand-delivered from the department head, saying, "I've read your request for teaching assignments, 86 but I have to point out to you it's not in the university's interest to employ you while this lawsuit is pending." I couldn't wait to get on the horn to this lawyer and say, "We just got what we're looking for." Charnley: You had your evidence. Larrowe: So I also notified the State News. That was something I always did. Whenever I did anything, I made sure the State News knew about it and hoped they'd write a story. Charnley: Power of the press. Larrowe: Well, it really works, too. And you know, they're always grateful for stories that are interesting and controversial and that kind of thing. So anyway, there was a story in the State News saying that I was going to appear in court the day the paper came out, to ask for an injunction against retaliation. So Adams called me up and he said, "Would you like me to testify?" He didn't like the department head. [Laughter] I said,"Oh, that would be marvelous." So he went down there and he accused this department head of ours as being the kind of guy who was vindictive and would retaliate against people. A big, very strong argument for an injunction to prevent that. So I got that injunction. 87 Well, it took two years before the judge finally got down to where our case was on his docket, and he wrote to the provost's office and to me, saying, "Be in my chambers," on whatever date it was, "at 8:30 in the morning, prepared to remain until 5:30 in order to settle this between yourselves." Which was a reasonable thing to do, because to settle that, you'd have to think about are you going to let this plaintiff teach a course, or if so, one course, or two courses, and things like that. So that resulted in Bob Banks, assistant provost for human resources, I think, faculty personnel, something like that, down in his court in Mason at that time, representing the provost's office, and I'm down there representing myself, and the lawyers representing the university and me went into another room. They didn't let us come into the room, which struck me as sort of strange, but they had us wait outside, and from time to time the guy representing me would come out and say, "Well, they've offered such and such. Is that acceptable to you?" And I'd say, "No," or whatever, and he'd go back. Around noon he came out and he said, "Here's what they proposed. We'll settle the case this way. You continue teaching one course." That's all I wanted to do anyway. "One course, next year at a salary," at about the level of a grad student, which is appropriate, because if you're a regular full- time faculty member, you have committee duties, etc., you have publication duties. They use the term "research" but it was 88 really publication. You have teaching duties and some public service, too. Whereas all I was going to do was teach that one course, and so I wouldn't expect to be paid more than--about what a grad student would get paid. And I wasn't interested in the money, anyway. The pleasure of teaching and sniping away at my betters with my pen. [Laughter] So, "You teach one more year, and they will pay your legal fees." Now, the reason for that is, if you file a civil rights lawsuit under the federal or the state law, and the respondent changes the conditions you're complaining about, that can be construed by a judge as evidence that they're guilty of what you're charging them with, and then the judge can order the respondent to pay your legal fees. So I got a big check for twenty-one-five. [Laughter] Charnley: To pay the legal fees. Larrowe: And I withdrew the lawsuit. By that time, I was ready to retire anyway, so it was perfect. Charnley: Then ultimately was that law changed? Larrowe: That's really something. The reason I didn't think I was going to win was, I found out after I filed, that there had been a case before the Michigan Court of Appeals several years 89 earlier, involving a guy who worked for the State Department of Transportation, I think it was, and he came up to age sixty-nine and was told, "You're going to have to retire." And he and his department wanted to keep him on for about six months to finish some kind of project he was working on, but the civil service people said, "No, you've got to retire at seventy." So he filed a suit and the Court of Appeals ruled against him. Courts do this all the time. They weigh up conflicting claims. They said, here's the claim made by the state. Their interest is in mandatory retirement, so they will know ahead of time when So-and-so is going to retire, etc., and they can plan to fill that position. That's one thing. The other is that if they can replace somebody who's been employed for a long time, and consequently has a salary reflecting years of service, with somebody who's coming on the job and who will accept a lower salary, then they can do that and they can save money for the taxpayers and so on. That's their interest. The plaintiff's interest is continuing to teach, and that would carry a lot of weight if being forced to retire would cast the plaintiff out into the ranks of the poor, because he's not working for the state anymore. But he isn't going to be in the ranks of the poor because he has a good pension and medical coverage, etc. So as we weigh these competing claims, the state claim is entitled to more weight. So we're going to enforce the mandatory retirement policy. 90 That really undercut my claim. But somebody had managed to get a bill through the House of Representatives which would have, in effect, repealed the mandatory retirement policy as it affected state employees, and that passed the House, but didn't pass the Senate. But shortly after I settled my case, a man down at the U. of M., I can't remember who it was now, a history prof, I think, came up for retirement, and he called me and he asked me about the lawsuit and so on. Well, he turned out to have been a prof who was greatly admired by Senator Schwartz [phonetic], who headed up the Higher Education Committee. Charnley: Joseph Schwartz. Larrowe: Yes, he's a doctor, pretty much a right-winger, but he liked his old prof. So to help the old prof, he managed to get the bill passed in the Senate, and so the legislature amended the Civil Rights Act to make clear that the Court of Appeals decision was one they didn't like, and so mandatory retirement for civil service employees and state employees no longer enforceable. A lot of people think I accomplished that. [Laughter] It was Schwartz and his favorite prof who accomplished that. Isn't that great? Charnley: It sure is. When did you ultimately retire? 91 Larrowe: '89. I got into trouble, which you probably know about, in '89. Charnley: Would you talk about that? What happened? Larrowe: We don't want to forget all these presidents, do we? Charnley: There are some other ones here, but we want to talk about that too. You talked a little bit abut Mackey. Larrowe: Ed [Edgar L.] Harden followed. Charnley: As interim. Larrowe: I got along fine with Wharton, but as I said, it was because he was big enough to put up with these snide cracks I was making about him. Well, he did appoint me, after all. That was nice. It's helping me a lot in retirement now, because for those four years I had a much bigger salary than I would have had. Charnley: This is President DiBiaggio? Larrowe: No, Wharton was the guy. Then Wharton left and Ed Harden was appointed, and I used to write about him in a friendly fashion. Called him "Big Ed." I used to refer to 92 Clare White, who came from Bay City, as the "Bay City Bomber." [Laughter] And Warren Huff, who is a very straight-laced guy, but he was a Democrat, he was kind of a Southern Democrat type, came from Plymouth, and I used to refer to him as "The Plymouth Polecat." [Laughter] Now, I think if somebody were writing stuff like that today, it wouldn't be taken funny. They'd probably retaliate against it. Charnley: You could get away with it. Larrowe: Yes. And a matter of fact, I asked Huff one time, "Does that bother you?" "Oh, no," he said. They like the attention. Then Harden came in. He demonstrated a leadership quality that is extremely rare, and it's too bad. See, he had been on the staff here as part of Ag Extension, and then he was president of Northern Michigan or something. I think they have a library named after him. And then he became the head of the Story Olds consortium, or whatever that is. You know they have that car business, and then they have several other businesses that were all under the heading of Story Olds. He became the CEO, I think, of that. So when he was named president, some people were grumbling on the faculty. "How come we have a used- car salesman as president?" and all that kind of thing. But I liked the guy, and one of the reasons I did was, in maybe his second week as president, the secretary calls from the 93 president's office and says, "The president would like to have lunch with you at the Kellogg Center, and he's reserved a small room." So I go over there. He had decided, "If you've got a troublemaker, you might as well get to know him." I think that was it. So we meet in this small room, and the first thing he said was, "How'd you like a martini?" Well, I don't normally drink martinis, but I wasn't going to say no. So the martini comes in a great big glass, about as high as this styrofoam thing, but twice the size. So we put that down. He says, "How would you like another one?" Oh, great. So we had another one. Then they served lunch, and we'd have a bottle of white wine that we shared. By the time that lunch was over, he had a friend for life in me. He could do no wrong from then on. But I would write the columns once in a while poking fun at him. For example, I figured I'll address this charge that he's a used-car salesman. So I remember one of them, I had Big Ed, he wanted to improve the performance of the football team, so he promised any football player who did some damn thing or another in the game, would get an Oldsmobile convertible. [Laughter] Well, some people thought, you know, "This is criticism." But he loved it. He really got a kick out of that. Charnley: He recognizes satire. 94 Larrowe: Yes. And he liked the attention, too. But along the line, maybe before I started calling him "Big Ed," I heard these grumblings among the faculty over this used-car salesman heading up the university and all that. And I thought, "Maybe the goddamn trustees will take that seriously." This was after our lunch then, now that I was thinking about this. So I wrote a letter in longhand on eight-by-eleven-size paper, took up the whole thing, addressed to each member of the trustees, saying, "I've heard these rumblings that some faculty are complaining about Harden being president, and I hope you don't take that seriously, because I can assure you that these grumblers would be grumbling if we got a Nobel Laureate in here as president. There'd be something wrong with him. So don't take that seriously," something like that. Never a response from any member of the trustees. I used to do that every once in a while, write to each member of the board, and if it was something the president was involved in, I'd include him, copy to him. Never got a response on it. I must have done that at least four times over the years. No response. Charnley: They didn't respond directly? Larrowe: No. Of course, when Adams was president, I couldn't think of anything to criticize him for, so I stymied, just like Rush Limbaugh, now that Bush is going to be president. What's 95 he going to talk about? Charnley: What's he going to complain about? Larrowe: Let's see. Who followed Harden? Charnley: Mackey. Cecil Mackey. He's an economist and lawyer. Larrowe: He's an economist and a lawyer, that's right. And he had known Adams way back in the fifties when they were both young people, both economists, and they were working for the Kefauver Committee studying monopolies. Charnley: Estes Kefauver. Larrowe: So they knew each other from way back there. In addition to which, when the guy who directed Mackey's Ph.D. thesis, who was a collaborator with Walter on one of his books on the economy, Illinois I think it was, he wrote to Walter and said, "You're going to like Cecil Mackey. He's a Southern liberal, and you're going to like him." Well, Mackey arrived. Walter got a call from the president's office saying, "The president would like to speak with you." So Walter said, "I'll be over right away. It'll take me about five minutes. 96 "Oh," she said, "No, he's going to come to your office." So Walter called the department head--that time it was Byron Brown--and me, and he said, "Mackey's coming over here and he's going to meet with me from 11:30. When we complete whatever business he has with me, I'm going to take him up to the conference room and have coffee, and you guys come up and I'll introduce you to him." Well, I was so impressed with the idea that this new president would come to the office of one of the underlings instead of summoning him to the president's office, he really started off on the right foot with me. And in that introductory session with just the four of us, he really came across as a sensible guy, knowledgeable and all that kind of thing. So I think I wrote at least two, maybe three columns praising Mackey. And then he started behaving in a manner totally opposite from the way I expected him to, and I started writing columns criticizing him, which led Adams to complain bitterly, "You're unfair to him," and so on. "He can't respond." And I said, "Bullshit, he can't respond. He's capable of writing to the State News if he wants to respond to those things. And he has other ways of getting at me, too." [Laughter] Well, it turned out that I went to some kind of gathering in the board room one time after Mackey had been president about a year, and he was there. Somebody was retiring or something. 97 So he came from his office to the board room. And he came over to me and he said, "You know," he said, "those articles you write about me, that's unfair." I said, "Why?" "Well," he said, "I can't respond." I said, "Why the hell can't you respond? You're capable of writing. You probably write better than I do. I don't see why you can't respond." "Well, it wouldn't be seemly," or some damn thing. But I was getting to him. That pleased me. [Laughter] You know, he didn't have the first idea what leadership is all about. To give you an example, while he was president, the auto industry was on the shorts, and when they're on the shorts, the State of Michigan is on the shorts. So the state government asked every unit of government to return to the state treasury one and a half percent of their operating budget. I had read that the president of Wayne State had cut his salary 10,000 bucks to set an example, that kind of thing. So there was some discussion about how we would raise the one and a half percent, where that would come from, out of our budget. And that discussion went on for a couple of weeks, in the course of which I hit upon this idea, why don't we use a kind of a progressive tax approach to this? We used to have something called the Center for Institutional Records, or some such thing as that. I think they've cut it out as a luxury we can't afford. Anyway, you could go there and if you were lucky, sometimes it took some 98 skill to get information out of them, but you could find out how many full professors are there, and what is the average salary of full profs, associate profs, assistant profs, etc. You could get that kind of information. So I concocted this idea, dock the pay of-- [Begin Tape 8, Side 1] Larrowe: Okay. So we docked full profs 10, the associate profs 7,500, assistant profs, 4,000, something like that. Don't cut the salaries of secretaries at all. And I wrote this to the trustees with a copy to Mackey, "This is the way to do it." No response. And the way they did it was they cut everybody's, secretaries and everybody else. I forget what the percent was, but it was similar to this--what's this tax proposal nowadays? Charnley: The flat tax? Larrowe: It was like a flat tax, yes. Charnley: Not very progressive, at any rate. Larrowe: Not progressive. We had one guy who was on the board of trustees back in the sixties, he was the regional director of the telephone company for Southeastern Michigan or some such 99 place. I used to go to the board of trustees meetings looking for material for columns and I always managed to get some up there. One time I went to one. I used to sit right near the president at the sort of a gallery there. So if he took a picture, sometimes I'd be in the picture. One time I was in a picture wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt. [Laughter] So anyway, I was sitting in my usual place one time, everybody's at the table. The president sitting in the chair, all the trustees and all the other people who were at the table were there in place. Clare White came in and he was going to sit right next to the president, and he motioned to me, "Come on over." So I get up, figured everybody's wondering, "What the hell is this guy up to?" We go out of the room, cross the hall, go into another room. He says, "Lash," he says, "I'm going to introduce a motion that the president's chair is vacant. What do you think of that?" I said, "That's a great idea, Clare. Why don't you do that." Well, he never did do it. [Laughter] He was just trying to freak out people. I don't know why I brought that up; it just came back to mind. Charnley: Do you think the economic problems had a lot to do with President Mackey's difficulties? 100 Larrowe: No. He was asked by the State News, "Are you going to follow the example of the president of Wayne State and cut your salary?" He said, "No. I definitely am not." He said, "If the university can't pay me what I'm worth, I'll leave, go elsewhere." See, that's what I mean by no leadership. Because that was a demoralizing thing to do, a flat-tax way of cutting everybody, no matter who much money they make. It was cruel, so far as secretaries were concerned, in my opinion. No, he's a classic example to me of a guy who starts out in life as poor, and just can't get enough money to ensure that he'll never slide back into poverty. You see that sort of thing. A classic example that I used to talk about in my labor classes, a guy named Dave Beck, who was the president of the Teamsters, national president, he was forced out of office because he took a fifteen--this guy was a millionaire--he got tips from businesspeople on good investments and so on. I don't think he stole money from the union. I think he parlayed his salary. He lived modestly, and he played the market, in effect, with real estate tips and whatnot. Charnley: With insider information. Larrowe: Yes. Inside information. But he got thrown out of office because a fifteen-hundred-dollar check that was supposed 101 to go to the widow, a pension check, to the widow of one of the officers of the union who had died, he took the check and used it for some business enterprise that somebody had recommended to him, and he was going to pay it back, but he apparently hadn't by the time the union's convention occurred. The people at the convention were all hand-picked people; it wasn't a democratic organization. When they found out that he had done that, they were so appalled that they threw him out of office. Why would somebody do something like that? Jeopardize his whole damn career for a pittance. See, my explanation is, one explanation would be, if you started out in poverty, you may spend your whole life fearing that you're going to slide back into poverty. So you accumulate as much money and property as you possibly can, as insurance that you won't slide back into poverty. That, to me, explains Mackey's behavior. He was not popular with the board of trustees. He wasn't all that popular with the faculty either. He managed to antagonize, within about a year, every group the university depends on: farmers, state legislature, alumni association. Called in the head of the alumni association, who probably should have been bounced, called him in, "Clear out your office by 5 p.m." Guy says, "You can't fire me. The board of trustees of the alumni association can, but you can't." Well, it took Mackey about a year to get this guy fired. In all that time, there's constant stories in the State News and 102 the State Journal about this struggle between the new president to get rid of this guy. Now, Mackey told me one time that when he took the job, he was told by the board of trustees, "One thing we want you to do is straighten up the alumni association. They are draining our finances when they ought to be raising money for the university." So he took that seriously. But look at the way he went about it. I mean, if you don't have the power to do something, you shouldn't act as if you do, because it's going to undermine your credibility if you do that. That's what I mean by not understanding leadership. Charnley: So you obviously had some contact with Dr. DiBiaggio, too, just before you retired. Larrowe: Just that exchange of letters about mandatory retirement. That was long in the past when they needed somebody to fill the grievance office and he called me up and said he was going to appoint me. [Laughter] So, I felt friendly toward him. Who the hell followed him? Charnley: Gordon Guyer was interim. Larrowe: Gordon Guyer. I never had any dealings with him. I remember going to see him one time and I can't remember why, but I had made some comment to the effect that if he needed a stand- 103 in, I was available, because we were both bald. [Laughter] And he seemed like a pretty friendly guy, to me. Charnley: And have you had any contact with our current president [M. Peter McPherson]? Larrowe: Well, indirectly. If I mention to you something called the Williams case, does that bring back your memory? Charnley: Yes. Not that you have to get into the details of that. I don't know if that's still going on? Larrowe: That was resolved. That was a very satisfying experience for me, because here was this guy in microbiology who was victimized by one of his former employees, and he expected the administration to support him and to order this former employee to return some research materials that she had taken out of the refrigerator in his lab. She wouldn't do it, and the administration, instead of them telling her, "Either return those materials or you're out," turned on him, started punishing him. Put him on nine months instead of twelve months, for example. That's a substantial salary cut. In effect, were hounding him. So he had supporters and he had people who didn't care much for him. You could say he was arrogant, I think, and a hard- driving guy. You know how somebody who works himself to the 104 bone expects people working for him to work themselves to the bone. They don't have the same incentive he has. But lots of people don't appreciate that. He had that kind of a reputation, too. But he was right, in my opinion, and the administration was completely wrong. I think the reason they supported this woman who stole those--when I say research materials, these were tissue samples taken from people in the Sudan to study to see if there was some way river blindness could be prevented or treated. That's what this project was. She had taken these tissue samples out of his lab here, where they were being kept for study, and put them in her own refrigerator someplace. And she wouldn't return them, and he kept trying to get the administration to order her to do so, and they wouldn't do it. So he had a group of about five or six microbiologists and people in the med school there who were trying to help him get this thing resolved in his favor, and they weren't getting anywhere. So somebody suggested to him that maybe I could be of help. I think by this time I was retired. Yes, I was, because I was at home recovering from a complete knee replacement. He told me about all this, and so the upshot was that I met with this committee, and they struck me as well-intentioned guys who had no idea of how to approach trying to get this remedied, how to put pressure on the administration, is what it comes down to. 105 Charnley: You weren't FGO at this time? Larrowe: No, I was retired. This was '93 and I retired in '89. So anyway, I thought here's an outrage that I should try to help resolve if I could. So I met with these people from time to time. One of the things we did was take out a full-page ad in the State News urging the president, I think it was DiBiaggio at the time, but he was on his way, he was leaving. He left before this thing got under way, really. But urging the administration to meet with Williams and committee people from medical sciences and try to resolve this. We got people to sign that, and we got a lot of prestigious people from the medical field to sign that ad. The first full-page ad we tried to minimize the amount of text, so it left quite a bit of space for signatures. We must have had a couple hundred signatures for that one. That didn't get us anywhere. The provost would not meet with him or with this committee of scientists. I said to these people, "Don't put my name on a committee going to deal with her, because she'll figure I'm a troublemaker. So leave me off, but you guys are in the same area, so you'd be the proper people to meet with." No response from the provost or the president. Took out another full-page ad. Didn't do any more. Took another half- page ad saying, "Here is what Williams would find acceptable," and it was a modest set of requirements, "so why don't you agree to get this thing resolved?" And that was signed by--oh hell, I 106 think about 300 people. We're not getting anywhere. Well, then I'm really desperate trying to figure out what the hell can we do. I thought when you took out those full-page ads there would be an uprising of the faculty in general at this shabby treatment of one of the faculty by the administration. Didn't happen. So I'm sitting at home, trying to figure out if we can do something else, when I got a call from a guy named Sam Riddle. He's a lawyer now. He was a student here in the sixties. He's an African-American. He was the leader of militant blacks while he was a student, sit-ins and that sort of thing. A very creative guy when it comes to exerting pressure on somebody. And he has continued to do that sort of thing even after graduating. He went down to U. of M. law school from here, and led a campaign asking the university down there to recruit black students until they constituted ten percent of the student body. They now have about fifteen percent blacks in the student body. So he's a creative guy. He knows how to do things. So he was passing through town. His home is in Virginia now. He'll be a campaign manager for somebody running for political office, that kind of thing. He'll make videos that are shown on television, that kind of thing. So he's going through town and he thought, "I haven't seen that guy Larrowe for a long time." I used to be a supporter of these militant blacks when he was here and he remembered that. So he called me and asked me, "What are you doing?" and so on. 107 I said, "Well, I think you'll be interested in what I'm doing." So I told him. He said, "If you would like," he said, "I'll come back. I'm going over to Flint," where his family lives. "I'll be back tomorrow. You get this guy Williams and some of his committee, and I'll meet with you and we can discuss what we can do." So he did. We met at my place, and here I am recovering from this damned knee operation. I showed him these ads we had taken and things we'd tried to do, and he said, "Well," he said, "what you guys have done so far is pretty good, but it hasn't gotten anywhere. And the reason it hasn't is, you've missed the main point of all this." So, you know, I naturally said, "What the hell is the main point?" He says, "What you're up against is institutional racism. That's what you've got to make your argument about." I said, "Well, what the hell? How do we do that?" And he said, "Here's the situation you've got. You've got a professor at Michigan State who's conducting research in the Sudan in an attempt to find a cure and a preventive of river blindness, which is rampant in the Sudan. This prof is not getting the support of the administration. We've got a black chairman of the board of trustees. We've got black officials throughout the university. They are blocking an effort on the part of this prof to cure river blindness. And what you've got to point out is, if these people were white, they'd probably be 108 supporting this prof and they'd be looking for a cure for river blindness. But because they're blacks in the Sudan, they're not." Something along that line. So I said, "How are we going to get this point to the attention of the people who can do something about it?" "Well," he said, "I happened to be friendly with Joel Ferguson [phonetic]." He was the chairman of the board at that time. They were both active in the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, I think co-chaired the state committee for Jackson, something like that. He says, "I'll write him a letter." And I think he and I wrote it together. I think he signed it. "But we'll get in touch with Joel Ferguson and we'll point out to him that if he doesn't instruct the administration to straighten this thing out, there's a group of faculty here who are prepared to go public with the denunciation of the administration and Joel Ferguson, and we'll argue that you, Ferguson, have no business running for Senate (which he was, in the primary) when you allow this thing to go on this way." I was all for it. I was going to do that. And I think these guys in the medical field, they would have signed something like that, too. Well, that didn't work. He called Ferguson when he found out from Ferguson's assistant that Ferguson was not moved by all this. So we went down and talked to him. Ferguson said, "Look, I know something about that Williams case. He just wants publicity." Well, totally ridiculous statement. And he said, "Furthermore, he 109 picked up a stick and he hit me with it." What that meant was, Williams had filed a suit in court trying to get the university to do something about this problem, and he'd filed it against the trustees and the administration, which included Ferguson, as a member of the board. That's what he meant. He beat him over the head with this lawsuit. That was when Riddle was threatened that this group of faculty were going to go public with all this. I think the next day, Ferguson's administrative assistant called Riddle and said, "Ferguson would like to talk with you." So he went down and talked to him. Sam said, "All you have to do as chairman of the board is tell Ferguson to settle this damn case, and it's going to be settled." Charnley: McPherson? Larrowe: McPherson. He was president by that time. And, see, we had been trying to make the argument to McPherson, "You inherited this problem. You have no legal involvement in all this." His answer was, "I want to get the lay of the land here before I get involved in any controversies like this." So I could understand McPherson's position. But when Ferguson was threatened, that got his attention. And I can't swear to this, because I wasn't present, but my understanding of all this is-- 110 and it makes sense because of the short time span involved--once Ferguson decided to act, he called up McPherson and said, "Why don't you meet with Williams and settle it." McPherson called Williams and said, "I think this controversy's gone on long enough. Why don't you come over to Cowles House at seven o'clock tonight and you and I will settle this between ourselves." And it was settled on precisely the terms we'd been putting in those ads. It took about fifteen minutes or so at Cowles House to do that. I was really proud of that. To me, see, that's casting your bread upon the waters and it comes back to you. Here again, you've got coincidence. See, if I hadn't supported blacks in the sixties, Sam Riddle wouldn't have called me up in 1993. Charnley: Because you were the faculty advisor for his group? Larrowe: No, I just supported him. I wrote several columns on the subject of racial discrimination, which they liked. Are you familiar with the name Saul Alinsky? He was a guy who lived in Chicago. He was a master at figuring out ways to put pressure on people in authority who wouldn't talk to him. One case, it had to do with blacks in Chicago, and they tried to get an audience with Mayor Daley, you know, the father of the current mayor, who wouldn't talk to them. So Alinsky called a meeting of blacks, Chicago blacks, and he said, "Now here's the 111 way we're going to get Daley's attention." I think he asked, "What is Daley most proud of that has come about during his administration?" It turned out to be O'Hare Airport, as I remember it. He said, "Here's the way we get his attention. We go out there and recruit a large number of blacks. We get to the airport. We go into all the men's and women's lavatories, and when people get off the airplane where they've been waiting to land so they can relieve themselves, and they head for the john, they see wall to wall us." [Laughter] See, Alinsky knew that there is always somebody in the crowd who's going to go right to Daley, the guy you're trying to pressure, and tell him, "You'd better do something about this." So that got Daley's attention. And I said, "God, if I could just think of something creative like that." But I couldn't. But it worked out just fine. Well, I think I'd call that throwing your bread on the waters, comes back to you. Charnley: In looking back at your career at Michigan State-- Larrowe: Oh, I've got one more. Can you stand it? Charnley: Sure. Of course. Larrowe: Hold that thought. One time in, I don't know, sometime in the early nineties, 112 I guess, a Japanese national student came to see me, and the guy could barely speak English. He was like a caricature of a Japanese. He pronounced my name "Rash Ravoo." [Laughter] I had to ask him to repeat everything he said to me, his accent was so godawful. He was in electrical engineering, a grad student, I think. He informed me that he was the head of something called Box Office Spectaculars, and they were showing porn films in Wells Hall. They had been told by Turner, who was vice president of student affairs, "You can't show them anymore." So, would I be their faculty advisor. So I said, "yes, sure." So I'm now their faculty advisor. So Turner is shutting them down, and so we went to the ACLU and we got ourselves over in federal court over in Grand Rapids, arguing that this was an unconstitutional deprivation of their First Amendment Rights to show the film and for people to want to see them to see them. So that resulted in a big pompous guy from the Honigman Miller, the premier law firm in Detroit, you know, 500 bucks an hour, that kind of thing, this guy shows up over in the court there. We're there, and we have to wait in a room together. This guy from Detroit is throwing his weight around, etc. And the upshot of it was the ACLU lawyer argued--well, first we had a lawyer from here who went over there, and he went into a huddle with this lawyer representing the university, and they concocted an idea that was an absolute outrage. It was going to 113 be a committee composed of students and faculty and administrators who would preview films Box Office Spectaculars wanted to show, and if they were acceptable, they could be shown. If they weren't, they wouldn't show them. Well, that's censorship, isn't it? So we drop this lawyer and we got a lawyer from Grand Rapids. He informed the judge, who I could see didn't want to deal with this case because of the First Amendment aspect of it, that this case didn't belong in federal court. It belonged in state court, under the Michigan obscenity law, which is enforced by the attorney general and/or the local prosecutor. So the judge was so relieved, he threw the case out. Then it turned out the attorney general didn't want to mess with it, nor did any local prosecutor. The happy ending to that story was, once they got the green light to show the films, it turned out not enough students wanted to see it to cover the cost of renting the film, so it just died a natural death. But I was dying to get into court and have this Japanese guy on the stand, and this pompous lawyer trying to ask him questions and be unable to understand him. But I was deprived of that when the case got thrown out. [Laughter] Charnley: When you came here in 1956, did you anticipate you'd spend your entire career at Michigan State? 114 Larrowe: No, I thought I'd go back to the West coast somehow. I grew up in Portland and lived in Seattle for thirteen years, eighteen years in Portland, thirteen years in Seattle, five years or so down in California. I figured, "I can't live anywhere but the West Coast." But I never got a decent job offer, so I finally reconciled myself to staying here, and I haven't been unhappy about that at all. I've been great. Charnley: From your view and your experience at Michigan State, how has it changed over the years? What do you see as maybe some strong point, or in a sense, dealing with the issue of who you stayed? Larrowe: Well, Michigan State used to pride itself on the quality of undergraduate teaching. See, that's gone now, because once a university becomes determined to be a research university, which we have decided we want to be, and tries to compete in the field of research, etc., with the U. of M., teaching is going to go by the boards. Now, I know that people will say, "Well, there's no necessary conflict between a prof being a teacher and a researcher." That's true, and research can enrich teaching. I'm familiar with all that, but the fact of the matter is, research universities are notorious all over the country for slighting undergraduate teaching. There are all kinds of reports by experts on that. I wrote a column one time, "The Ann Arborization of 115 Michigan State," attacking that idea. Of course, falling on deaf ears. I think that's unfortunate. Our comparative advantage was in undergraduate teaching, whereas U.of M.'s advantage is in research and publication. So for us to try to compete with them in that way, to me, it's a terrible mistake. And we've lost one quality that made this an attractive place for students to come and get a good education. This all preceded McPherson. His arrival with this "What's the bottom line?" approach to running a university and how would a corporation handle the employees and so on, that just increased its downhill speed. Charnley: Students as customers. Larrowe: Yes. Students as customers. Think of the implication of students as customers. You give a student a bum grade. He protests, "I paid money for this course. I should have a 4.0.," and gets a sympathetic ear upstairs. I'm glad I'm not teaching now, because I could just picture, one, the political correctness that's so prevalent, which created a serious problem for me. I mean, you can't be a satirist and fastball that past the P.C. Police. But also, I wasn't considered a tough grader. Some students thought I was, but I don't think most of them thought that. But it's pretty damn hard to be a rigorous grader nowadays, when you have to worry about the possibility that 116 somebody in administration is going to hold that against you, or hell, maybe even change grades, for all you can tell. This has always been a place where I've felt free to speak up however I wanted to, criticize my betters in administration, etc., sometimes without adequate justification, I suppose. But I never felt threatened. I never felt that my salary was held down because of my behavior. I knew how to get my salary up if I really wanted to, if that was my main objective. Charnley: In looking back, or in thinking about this project, in terms of documenting the undocumented as far as the university and commemoration of its history, is there anything that you'd like to add to the record, that maybe you haven't thought of and maybe someone says, "Well, I had Professor Larrowe for an instructor. I remember him this way," or anything like that? Larrowe: Some of this going to end up in print? [Laughter] Charnley: We hope so. Larrowe: Well, I enjoyed teaching immensely, and I taught for three years at Yale, had three sections each term on the quarter system, which were my sole responsibility as an assistant instructor. When I went out to Utah, people would ask me, "How do you compare the quality of students here with the students at 117 Yale?" Well, I had to admit, Yale students, at least the general impression you got was, a great many of them had gone to prep school, where they had reading to do in the summertime, long list of books they had to read. They knew a lot more about a lot of things as undergraduates that people at Utah did. But the good students at Utah could have held their own perfectly well at Yale. And that's true here, too. We've got students here who go on to prestigious grad schools and do well for themselves and do well after they get away, which-- [Begin Tape 8, Side 2] Larrowe: That was. I'm just repeating myself, I'm afraid, but that's what comes to mind. Charnley: I want to thank you on behalf of the project for your time we've spent, and especially your perspective and your insight. Larrowe: Thank you for your patience. God, I really wore you out. Charnley: Thanks a lot. [End of interview] 118 Index AAUP, 29, 69 ACLU, 22, 23, 25, 29, 34, 84, 113 Adams, Pauline, 74 Adams, Walter, 8, 14, 27, 29, 32, 33, 34, 42, 45, 52, 59, 63, 87, 96, 97 Alinsky, Saul, 111 Banks, Bob, 88 Boger, Lawrence L., 75 Brandsteader, Art, 3 Brattin, John, 34 Brown, Byron, 97 Cantlon, John, 12 Carr, Lee, 24 CIA, 1, 2, 3, 4 Clegg, Helen, 7 Collin, Ed, 13 Counts, George S., 62 Cusack, John, 20, 21, 22 DiBiaggio, John A., 79, 84, 103, 106 Eberly, Carol, 50 Ferguson, Joel, 109, 110, 111 Fishel, Wesley, 4, 5 Green, Ernest, 27 Griffiths, George, 22 Guyer, Gordon, 104 Hackel, Manny, 40 Hannah, John A., 3, 4, 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 42, 62, 69, 70, 71 Harden, Edgar L., 92, 93, 94, 95 Harrison, _______, 73 Haupt, Peter, 86 Hildebrand, _______, 7, 23 Houck, Peter, 85 Huff, Warren, 93 Hunter, John, 1 2 Institute for Public Administration (Vietnam), 3 Jaffee, Adrian, 33, 34, 71 Kellogg Center, 27 Klein, Lawrence, 14 Laing, Ken, 23, 30 Lanzalotti, _______, 27 Lashing Out: The Best of Lash Larrowe, 12, 50, 60 Mackey, M. Cecil, 78, 79, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103 McPherson, M. Peter, 104, 110, 116 Melder, Milton, 3, 4 Michigan State University Department of Economics, 62 Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, 26 University College, 13 University Committee on Faculty Affairs, 74 Miller, Bruce, 73 Murray, Burt, 39 Neville, Jake, 19 Orange Horse Three, 7 Perrin, Bob, 73 Points of View, 73 Ramparts, 1 Reeves, Fred, 69 Repas, Bob, 19, 21 Riddle, Sam, 107, 110, 111 Sabine, Gordon, 23 Schiff, Paul, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 42, 43 Schwartz, Joseph, 91 SDS, 5 Shoal, Gus, 10 Smith, Chitra, 76 State Journal, 7, 10, 103 State News, 7, 10, 36, 37, 41, 42, 49, 87, 101, 103, 106 Sturba, Jim, 36, 37 Sullivan, Richard, 19 3 Thomas, Gordon, 26 Van Tassle, Eileen, 9, 11, 12, 38 Wharton, Clifton R., Jr., 72, 73, 75, 92 White, Clare, 9, 93, 100 Williams, _______, 14 WKAR, 32