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                                              PATRICIA M. CARRIGAN
                                                   November 2, 2000
                                                     Jeff Charnley,
                                                      interviewer
Charnley: Today is November 2, the year 2000. I'm Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. Patricia Carrigan, a former
member of the Michigan State Board of Trustees. We're here in Bay City, Michigan, and this interview is part of
the Michigan State University's Sesquicentennial Oral History Project, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the
university, coming up in 2005.
          Dr. Carrigan, you can see that we're using a tape recorder today. Do you give us permission to record his
interview?
Carrigan: As long as you call me Pat, you can do whatever you want. [Laughter]
Charnley: Let's start first with your personal educational background. Where did you grow up and where did
you go to high school and then college?
Carrigan: I grew up in Lansing, Michigan, not too far from the shadows of Beaumont Tower, and attended J.W.
Sexton High School, graduated in the first graduating class to have its whole high school experience at Sexton,
which made it a mid-year class. Then went to Michigan State as the first roll of veterans from World War II were
hitting the campus and the green beanies were being challenged and whatnot. The enrollment at that time, as I
recall, was something like 19,000 people, being so large because of the influx of veterans. That sounds rather odd
today.
          I did a four-year bachelor's at Michigan State in eduction, and subsequently, after I had been teaching for
several years, I went to the University of Michigan to add to my knowledge and skills in dealing with exceptional


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children with problems, because in the system I was in by that time there was no special program for kids like that,
or special help.
          I started teaching in Battle Creek, Michigan, and ended up in kind of a suburb of Ypsilanti called Willow
Run. That was bomber veteran city. All the married studies from U of M were there at the time, and I was
married to one when I went there.
          Anyway, I started back to school, taking some courses in special ed and things related to emotionally
disturbed children and learning disabilities, although that term wasn't in paper or even used then. I did a master's in
education of the emotionally disturbed and another one in educational psych, and got hooked on psychology while I
was there and stayed on to do a doctorate. I was living in Ann Arbor at the time, which made it a logical choice,
but at that time--and I think this is still true--U of M was regarded as one of the top schools in the country in clinical
psychology, which was the field that I did my doctorate in.
Charnley: What attracted you to that field initially?
Carrigan: I think initially it was that I had kids in my classroom that I could not help and that obviously needed it,
and that led me into courses that had to do with behavior, broadly defined, and the more that I took courses in that
area, the more interested I got, the more curious I got.
          I went to work. I started going out on Saturdays, you know, a couple courses a semester sort of thing, and
then when I went back to really wrap up the master's, I had a half-time position as assistant director or associate
director of the Reading Clinic at the University of Michigan. We did a fair amount of research there. I
co-authored a book during that time with the director, who was Donald E.P. Smith. One thing led to another. Don
and another professor, my statistics professor, both encouraged me to continue on and get a doctorate, but I was
interested in, quote, the "domain of behavior," and that just said psych.
Charnley: That's interesting. You mentioned the green beanie being challenged. What was that?


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Carrigan: Haven't you heard about the green beanie yet?
Charnley: I've heard various forms of it, but I'm interested in hearing it from a student at the time.
Carrigan: Living in Lansing at the time, of course I knew about green beanies before I went. Green beanies were
the official ID card of the incoming freshmen, and you were to wear them throughout the year. Students did what
they had to do when those came on board. By the time I was in school, we had a lot of older students who were
just coming out of the service, and the idea of wearing a green beanie was the last thing on their minds, and some of
them flat out refused to do it. Now, when you're a young kid and you go to--not today, but in that era, you go to a
large school, probably 7,000 or something, and there is an old, old tradition that says this is what you do as a
freshman, you do it. The veterans were not going to do it, and they did not do it, and pretty soon other people
stopped wearing theirs, and they just went away.
Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your experiences? Had you always been interested in going to
Michigan State as an undergrad?
Carrigan: Yes and no. The "no" part I need to make sure you understand, because I never lacked interest in
Michigan State. Having grown up in Lansing, to me that was synonymous with university, and I literally used to
go roller skating on the campus in the shadow of the Beaumont Tower when somebody would take me out to the
campus as a little girl and let me do that. So I had an affection for the university that went way back.
          I had an aspiration professionally, however, that could not be accommodated there; I wanted to be a doctor.
 I wanted to be a doctor for a long time. My first job other than some clerical filing when I was sixteen, when you
could first get a work permit, was with a hospital in Lansing, probably the predecessor of--I'm not sure which
campus--of Bingham Regional now, but it was the McLaughlin [phonetic] Osteopathic Hospital. I started working


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there as a nurse's aide when I was in the tenth or eleventh grade--tenth grade, because I worked there for three years.
 But I loved that. Everything I did or was required to do that I could make a medical focus was fun to do. I think
it was probably the eleventh grade we first had to write a term paper. I wrote mine on anesthesia and did a whole
lot of research on it.
          My first speech in college, which I will never forget because it was a silly one, I can't believe--today I
would do silly things like this. I can't believe I had the courage to do it as a freshman. But we had to give a
speech in freshman English, the speech component of it, that was an instruction to somebody as to how to do a task.
 My speech was titled "How to Remove an Appendix." I took props. I had an eggbeater and I had a knife and just
a whole lot of silly kitchen gadgets, you know, and gave a humorous speech which wasn't very well delivered, but it
was kind of funny.
          But for recreation, I read a book called Gray's Anatomy, which is sort of the bible, and I read that in high
school. When I could go to bed early at night, I would just hole up in the bedroom and read Gray's. So I really
was very serious about this, and of course the only way--as large as my horizons were then, the only way I could do
that was to go to U of M, and I did, in fact, have an interview for medical school and was encouraged to come, but
we were not able to afford. I could have gotten a scholarship, as they had one at Michigan State also, but I could
not afford to live away from home. So I couldn't do that.
          Then I made a run at it a couple of other times, thinking that maybe I would do it. Someplace along the
line in the seventies I thought of doing a master's in nursing instead, and had, in fact, been accepted at Johns
Hopkins [University] to participate in the special program there. I married out of that opportunity. [Laughter]
          When I started the doctorate, I gave it a last thought and I thought for a long time, because it was a
commitment of several years, and did I want to do the psych or did I want to go back and redo pre-med which I had
taken, you know, pick up what I needed to again and do the medical thing?
          The decision was really a pragmatic one. My husband at the time was an architect in Ann Arbor, went to
school there, and was very interested in moving to Colorado, which was at that point in time becoming the avant
garde sort of architectural center, and he wanted to be able to go there sometime in the next few years.


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          I could look at doing a doctorate in three years, I was told. That's probably, if you're going to do anything
worthwhile, you don't do it in three years. I know that now, but I was counseled poorly about the time
commitment. I knew that the medical deal would be at least four years plus some catch-up, you know, or
refreshment or whatever, probably six years before I'd be ready to do an internship, which I could do anyplace, you
know, assuming I could get in. Pretty much because of looking at three years versus six years, I decided on psych
because it was that close. It took me nine years to get my doctorate, because I worked full time the whole time, so
it was a bad call. But anyway, that's how it happened.
Charnley: What else do you remember about your undergraduate years at Michigan State?
Carrigan: A lot. A lot. I lived at home the first two years. That is not the way to experience college. It wasn't
the way for me to experience college. I lived on the west side of Lansing, very near Sexton High School. I had to
take a bus that got me on campus at about 7:10 in the morning to make an 8:00 class, which meant get up early, get
to the bus, and it also meant almost an hour once you were on campus that you--well, you could study, theoretically.
 I played bridge. [Laughter]
          I got to be a very good bridge player when I was in college, as many people still do, I understand, because
of the spread of courses over the day. There was one semester--one term, it was at the time--when I had eight
o'clocks in the morning, which meant I was going to play bridge for probably fifty minutes before my first class,
and then I would maybe not have another course till close to lunchtime, but at lunchtime I could play bridge. Then
I had to wait for an algebra class, freshman algebra, first college algebra course that met at 7:30 at night. Now, I
could have taken the bus home, but that would have been an hour travel each way, you know, a complete waste of
time. So you should stay and study or do something, but I played bridge.
          And sometimes, Jeff, and I don't know that I'm very proud of it--in fact, I know I'm not very proud of
this--but sometimes I would go in the morning and at eight o'clock there wouldn't be somebody there to take my
place, so I couldn't leave. Right? So I would play through a class. And in the evening after supper, you know,


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we would always have a game going around the supper hour, and I couldn't go home because I had to go to a 7:30
class, but sometimes if there just wasn't someone to take my place at 7:30, I'd play bridge all day. I didn't do that
very often, but I shaded a C in college algebra. It was the only C I had ever gotten in anything up to that point in
time, and that was why. [Laughter]
Charnley: Where did you play?
Carrigan: In the Union Building, in what was then the Women's Lounge. There was always a game going on
there. So that's one thing I remember vividly because my grade-point average was such at the end of the first year
that they were not going to renew my scholarship. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough, and, in fact, did not
renew my scholarship, but I was able to get another one and I settled down a bit after that.
          I was kind of adrift, Jeff, I think, because I knew that I could not afford to go to medical school, and that's
the only thing I ever really wanted to do. So I kind of flirted with this and that and the other thing. I did med tech
for a year and I knew that was going to bore me to death. I took one semester with a major recorded as
bacteriology, and that was boring. I think I did some time as an English major because I do like to read and write
and that sort of thing, but I didn't find that stimulating particularly in terms of a career or career opportunities,
really. I never thought about writing as a career, and here I am starting to do it at age almost seventy-two, which is
sort of neat. I really didn't find a slot that was good until I got into graduate school, because the thing I really
wanted to do was out of reach, and I didn't make very good accommodation.
          The thing that helped, though, was at the end of the second year my stepfather was transferred to a--he was
a salesman for Addressograph Multigraph [phonetic], which is a business machine company. It's now part of some
other company, I don't remember which. I have one share of Addressograph Multigraph stock. There's nothing to
do with it, you know. It doesn't exist anymore. It wouldn't be worth anything today.
          But anyway, he was transferred to an office that served Wright-Patterson Airfield in Dayton, Ohio, so they
moved down to Dayton, and that meant I had to live on campus. That really is when I began to be a college


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student, and that was good. I had a lot of the play out of my system. I still didn't have a major that was engaging
me, but I was a sorority member and that was a good activity for me, especially coming onto campus that late.
         I was engaged in my senior year in high school and came on campus as an engaged woman, which meant I
really never got into the dating game at all. We broke it off at the start of my senior year, and that was a bummer,
because if you're out of circulation for three years, it's pretty hard to get back in. And I'd never been in it.
[Laughter] I did a lot of blind date sort of stuff, but I never really liked that much.
         I enjoyed my time at Michigan State once I got on the campus. Being in the sorority was important. I
needed to belong to a group of some sort that did things, and we participated in charitable fundraising kinds of
things and we participated, of course, in the intrafraternity kinds of events like the Spring Sing, which they probably
don't have anymore. They probably have an equivalent. Things like that were good.
Charnley: What was the sorority?
Carrigan: Zeta Tau Alpha.
Charnley: Were there any important professors that had influence on you in those undergraduate years that you
recall?
Carrigan: Yes, and I'm trying to think of them. There was a man by the name of Troy Sterns [phonetic], in
education, that I remembered as one of the best professors I had. I didn't, until my last two years, really get to
know any of the professors very well because I was switching majors all the time and not having repeat experiences.
         There was a young man whose name I do not know, do not remember, that I took a creative writing class
from, that was excellent. I think he was the best professor I had, and part of it was that he challenged his students.
He did not believe in giving an A, because A, to him, meant perfection, and he said he had yet to find a perfect
student. And I write pretty well. This was a creative writing class, and I write fairly well, and I learned some


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things from him, I'm sure, that helped that along and probably helped what I'm starting to do today. But we had to
write something every week and it would come back graded the next week, and I always got an A-minus. It was
just going to be that way. And the last one of the semester I got an A on, and he wrote a note and said, "This is
perfect." My mom had kept my papers and so on. When they had to give up their home, I would still have that,
because I kept it. I was very proud of that. And it was a funny little caricature of one of my grandmothers, who
was a bit crotchety and rigid and sometimes difficult, and yet sometimes very warm in some ways, and it was
humorous. It was one in a humorous way. And he liked that a lot. So, yes, he's the one that would stand out.
         There was a woman in education by the name of Elizabeth somebody at that time, who encouraged me to
do creative things in education. I got sort of interested in crafts and some things like that because of that program I
was in for elementary education. She was somebody that I--I wouldn't say that she was a role model. I wasn't
wedded to education, really, as, "Gee, I want to be like her," or like him or whatever. But she was somebody I
found very helpful.
         I just drifted around too much to form any good relationships. I'm thinking that man's name might have
been Conrad Posner. If there's a Conrad Posner who taught English at that time, that's who it was, I expect. But
he did make an impression on me, and part of the impression was to understand what perfection is about and that it
is not necessary to reach it all the time, but that if you do, it should be treasured, that it is not cheap. And that's the
message that stayed with me, that's with me, part of me. That's where it came from.
Charnley: Did you have any contact with President [John A.] Hannah?
Carrigan: Not when I was an undergrad. First time I met President Hannah was when I decided to run for the
board and went in to talk to him. I shouldn't say first time I met him; I'd been introduced to him a couple of times.
But I had been away from the campus, of course, for quite a few years when I ran for the board, and I went in to talk
to him about it and see what he thought about my candidacy and so on. By then I had a bit of a record as an alum,


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you know, and had started the Washington and Livingston Alum Club in the heart of Mason Blue [phonetic]
country, which attracted some attention, as you might guess. [Laughter]
Charnley: So you were living in Ann Arbor?
Carrigan: Yes. When I was married in 1951, my husband, the architect, was a senior in art and design at U of M,
so we moved to Ann Arbor and I taught in that area in the Willow Run Public Schools.
         Then we moved into Ann Arbor after a couple of years. We lived in Willow Run. You could live there if
you were a teacher in the system. You could live there at a reduced rent. I think we paid $35 a month.
[Laughter] Unbelievable today. And lived in one of the better-type homes. We had flat tops and peaked roofs,
and the peaked roofs were the better ones. We were able to live there for $35 a month.
         It's funny, reminiscing about these things. These were equipped with iceboxes, not refrigerators, and the
place was heated with an oil stove. The first big event was the next spring when we managed to scrape together
enough to get a refrigerator and came home and made ice all night. [Laughter] And drank ice water like crazy.
Charnley: Simple pleasure.
Carrigan: Yes, really. It's good to recall those sometimes, you know.
Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about your work experience after maybe you left Ann Arbor?
Carrigan: I had some very significant work experience when I was there, and I should tell you about some of that.
 I mentioned that I co-authored a book with the director of the Reading Clinic while I was there. We were doing
research on reading problems, the style of problem readers and how that might relate to neuro functioning. I've got
a copy of the book around someplace, but you don't want to read it. It wasn't a large book, but it was a theoretical


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model that has proved to have some validity, although the chemical transmitters that we thought would be maybe
the active ingredients in the process probably aren't in quite the way we imagined them. But it was something kind
of different at the time. I spent quite a bit of time doing research relative to that.
          Then when I got to graduate school and it came time to do a dissertation, I had a chairman by the name of
Lowell Kelly [phonetic], who was also chairman of the psych department and a man who had established a national
reputation as the first director of selection for the Peace Corps, had been with the OSS earlier and just one of the
names in psychology. I was privileged to have him as my chairman.
          I wanted to do some further research along the lines we had done the reading disability in the neurological
area, and he said, "You know, I have every reason to think that this might prove out. I don't have any reason to
think not. But if it doesn't, you won't have the dissertation. I would suggest, with the amount of time it's going to
take you to do that, you find something that has a pretty sure probability of generating an acceptable dissertation,"
which was very good advice.
          I had had an opportunity to join up with a federally funded research project at Ypsilanti State Hospital on
schizophrenia, and because of the work I had done with the Reading Clinic, I had gotten very interested in the
impact on behavior of neurotransmitters and the variability in the human being around things like that over time and
between individuals as well. Since schizophrenia had shown itself to take many different forms, assuming it is a
disease, and I don't think that we know that it is, but there are some common denominators that spread across a
variety of types of mental illness that we lump under that heading, but one of the things that struck me is that when
you look at that population we called schizophrenics, there's just an enormous amount of variability. Symptoms
vary from day to day in the same person, things vary from person to person, and what always got looked at, if
anything, was the differences between people, which generated categories of catatonic schizophrenics or
hypophrenic schizophrenics or paranoid schizophrenics or whatever.
          Nobody every paid much attention to the variability within the individual, and that hadn't really been
studied, so I decided that's what I would like to do. I was able, because of my location and ability to connect with
this project that was under way, to have access to measurements on a captive population and a control group of


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mental illness other than schizophrenia, in a state hospital setting, with very rigid controls around the environment
because they were housed in special wards and so on.
          I could measure anything I wanted to measure on a daily basis or several-times-a-day basis. All the
anatomic nervous system measures, for example, we got morning and night. The blood we did on a daily basis.
But I could look at day to day and sometimes within a day variations, certainly in behavior. We did some
psychological measurement that we had two sessions a day with each patient over a period of time. We had some
staff ratings of patient behavior that were done four times a day. So I had just a wealth of data available.
          This was before personal computers. In fact, the mainframe computer at the university was something that
only a skilled operator had access to, and one of my biggest, proudest moments was when I learned to write a
program in FORTRAN, self-taught, and, of course, nobody does that anymore.
          That was an interesting experience. I was interfacing with people in all of the disciplines. This was a
multidisciplinary study based at the University of Michigan. The director was the director of the Mental Health
Institute there, but it had a physiologist from Scotland, had a biochemist from California, a psychologist from
Sweden. It was just a wonderful group of resources at hand for me to tap into. So I learned a lot as well as being
able to do a pretty meaningful dissertation, which is about that thick. I can't lift it today. [Laughter] So that was
while I was still at Ann Arbor. Ypsilanti is very close to Ann Arbor, as you probably know.
          When I finished that and I did leave the university intending to do something probably in--well, probably
the best phrase would be "assessment" in today's terminology, and I guess it wasn't bad then. But having looked at
individuals and their behavior over a period of time, I got very interested in how we make decisions in a work place,
for example, about people to go into jobs. My chairman, having been the director of selection for the Peace Corps,
had been one of the early people in the field of assessment and one of the two or three major names. Although I
was enrolled in the clinical program, I had no interest in being a therapist. I didn't pursue that line. I took
everything in assessment that I could and everything in physiology that I could. So I was kind of interested in
doing something in that area. I had no intention of going back into public education. I'd sort of done the course
there and I wanted to do something different.


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          Then the Ann Arbor School District decided to involve itself in a major busing program to address racial
imbalance, and we had one school there that was 99 percent, maybe 98 percent black children. We had one school
that was close to 50-50, and almost everything else was predominantly white. That was a natural setting. They
were going to close the school that was predominately black and move the kids to predominantly white schools.
Somebody there had the wisdom to say, "If we're going to do this, we ought to research it and find out what happens
to kids when you do it."
          So they decided they were going to do a research project on that. They didn't have any research
capability, so they went out [unclear] looking for a research director. I had gotten somewhat interested in politics,
not in running for political office, but I was very interested in the racial difficulties that were predominant at the
time and the poor kinds of solutions we seemed to come up with. I was very much interested in this project. I
didn't know what might come out of it, but I knew that I had the skills to do the job and do it well. It is today still
one of the, I think, four or maybe five researchs on school desegregation that meets all the criteria that one must
meet to be able to draw any conclusions.
          That's not a topic that's talked about a lot today, so it's not in the news or anything like that, but it is still on
that short list, and that makes me very proud. We worked at it for a lot of years by the time we thrashed out all the
data and mainframe computers and that sort of stuff. It did not turn out to be real definitive; it certainly indicated
that there was no harm to the black kids or the white kids that were involved in this. We saw some educational
improvement in the black kids.
          The control group we had, which was a 50-50 group, didn't really help us as much as we thought, but we
had a lot of data about kids and their behavior. Clearly there was some academic improvement in the black kids.
You have to wait a number of years before you draw conclusions, because anything that's new tends to excite
results, you know.
          There was a lot of opposition in the community. It was really a hotbed kind of situation for a while, but it
was a good learning experience for me and probably the first time I'd ever faced an angry crowd and had to defend
what I was doing.


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Charnley: What years were that study?
Carrigan: Let's see. I went to Bendix in--oh shoot. I went to GM in 1974. I must have gone to Bendix about
1970. It would have been the sixties.
Charnley: Late sixties?
Carrigan: Yes. Well, no, not late--
[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Charnley: This is side two.
          When the tape ended, we were talking about the years for the study in Ann Arbor on desegregation. So, in
the mid-sixties the study was?
Carrigan: It would have been in 1964 that I took the position, and I stayed there for several years, quite a few.
Nine.
          The [John F.] Kennedy assassination really, I think, probably impacted that decision to go into that. When
he was running for office, I was in graduate school and I was on the steps of the Union Building the night he
announced the Peace Corps formation, met him at the airport and drove my car on election day with the cover of
Time magazine, which had his picture, and a caption, "It's Time For a Change" on both my doors, took people to the
polls all day. I was really into that campaign.


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          The night that I was to have my doctoral orals was the night before he was assassinated, and I had them.
That's a story in itself, but it doesn't pertain to Michigan State, so I won't worry with it. It's sort of funny, though.
You don't often have them in a bar. [Laughter]
Charnley: You had your orals at a bar?
Carrigan: Yes. At Al Green Restaurant, which was at the [unclear] Airport at the time. For good reason. I had
a chairman that was flying in from the East and a vice chairman that was flying in from California, and they both
had to fly out that same night, so we had to find a common ground, and that was it.
Charnley: Sounds like the best place for it, having gone through it myself. [Laughter]
Carrigan: I will tell you the story, but remind me if we have time at the end when you've got what you need.
          Anyway, the next day I had planned a big party to celebrate, of course, and the next day I was cooking and
baking all day and getting things ready for the party, and my husband walked in the house in the middle of the
afternoon and he said, "Did you hear the news?"
          I said, "What news?"
          He said, "President Kennedy was shot."
          And I said, "Okay. What's the story?" I thought he was kidding, which a lot of people did.
          He said, "Turn on the television." I just turned it on in time to get the [Walter] Cronkite broadcast. So
that wiped out the party, of course, and nobody showed up. I didn't call anybody, but nobody showed up. I gave
my friends credit for that.
          That had a profound influence on me, and what I did thereafter was driven by concern for some of the
social issues of the time, and that's where I was. Willard Wirtz, who was Kennedy's labor secretary, was the
speaker at my doctoral commencement, and it was just a very emotional time for me. I needed to do something


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meaningful, that would be meaningful to me. So I did, in fact, go back to the school system and thought that was
probably the driving force.
Charnley: You were involved in Ann Arbor politics?
Carrigan: Only very minimally. I was a registered Democrat and I would make phone calls for the party once in
a while or hand out flyers, take them around to the doors once in a while, but I was not very active. A man that I
worked with in the school system was mayor at one point in time, a Democrat, and he, in fact, was my chairman
when I decided to run for the board. But at that time I had to work pretty hard in my local party to get known,
because I didn't have a track record there. I was not really into politics.
Charnley: What influenced you in your decision to run for the board of trustees at Michigan State?
Carrigan: Well, I'm not sure I can give them to you in any particular order. Walter Adams and Duffy Daugherty,
and serving on a Democratic committee to select or identify good candidates for the board. I was a member of that
committee, and the committee persuaded me that I should do it. I had a lot of pressure from Walter Adams, who
thought I was the kind of trustee the university needed. And Duffy--I'm a football nut. I'm not so bad anymore,
but I was a real football nut then. I went to away games, I went to home games, and I knew Duffy well. We were
good friends. He thought I should run for the board. But Walter had a serious influence, you know, in terms of
the university, and I was, of course, very interested in the university and active in the Alumni Association.
          We jumped over the local Alum Club in Ann Arbor, but I did establish that, and that was kind of an
interesting challenge in that community.
Charnley: Was there a hotbed, an undercurrent of Spartan supporters there, underground?


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Carrigan: Well, there was one person, his name was David Bishop, and he was one of the editors on the Ann
Arbor newspaper at the time, and he was interested in getting something going. He and I worked together on it.
What we had to do, of course, was get the list from the Alumni Association of all of the alums they had a record of,
at least that lived within the two-country area, Washington and Livingston Counties. We made a lot of contacts
with people. I know we contacted everyone on the list that we could reach.
           Sometime during that time frame Martin Luther King [Jr.] was assassinated, and the public schools were
closed for the day of his funeral, and I felt the need to do something meaningful that day, and I didn't quite know
what it was. It wasn't to sit in front of the tube and watch a funeral; I'd done that for Kennedy. It didn't do him
any good or me, particularly. There were three elderly people on the list of alums that we had, that had indicated
they had some interest, but, no, they couldn't come to the dinner. We were going to have an organizational dinner.
They could not come to the dinner. I thought, well, one of them had indicated that he did not get out of the house
very much, and the others just said they wouldn't be able to come.
           So I decided I would go call on those people. I went to the flower shop and I got three long-stemmed
roses. One lived in Saline [phonetic] and two lived in Ann Arbor. I went to visit them and introduced myself and
thought perhaps the problem was transportation or maybe they were handicapped, you know, and maybe there was
something we could do to get them to come.
           One of the more amusing experiences of my life occurred on that day at the second house I went to, which
was a gentleman in Ann Arbor. When I ran his bell, he came to the door and I told him who I was and why I was
there, and he didn't invite me in. He came out and stood on the porch and we talked for a few minutes. I'm getting
a little bit--I'm shifting back from one foot to the other, I suppose, but he was intuitive enough to see that maybe I
was wondering why I wasn't invited in. He said, "I can't invite you in, you know, because the neighbors would
talk." [Laughter] And he was almost ninety years old. I loved it. I thought that was wonderful.
           One of them did subsequently come to the dinner, and the one in Saline became very active. His reason
for not coming originally was that his wife had a very bad case of skin cancer on the face that had been quite
disfiguring, and she would not want to come and he didn't want to come alone. He did finally come alone. I went


                                                                                                                        17
to get him and brought him, and he came and had a great time and was very active. He and his wife got to be really
good friends. We went out the next two Christmases and put up a tree for them, because they hadn't had a tree.
He was not well; he'd had a heart attack. She always held a handkerchief in front of her face because part of her
nose was gone, and she got to the point with us finally when it was okay to take that down. They were wonderful
people. His name was Harold Clark. He graduated back in the twenties. He was just a nice, nice man. He lived
to be a real old man. I can't remember now when he died, but it's not been all that many years ago.
          But it was a very active club. We established a scholarship to help kids in the Detroit Project, which you
probably have heard something about. They were having all kinds of problems trying to underwrite costs of
glasses and dental repairs and things if you have wrong with you, you really can't focus very well on scholarly
things.
          A vice president by the name of Gordon Sabine and Dr. Gwen Norella of the Counseling Center headed up
an activity to help kids out with that sort of thing. I got in on that early and the club got in on it. That was
something very meaningful that we felt pretty good about.
          But it was always great fun, the days of the big games, for example, it was always great fun to have a club
of loyalists there in the heart of hot Wolverine country. [Laughter] And it is hot.
Charnley: What was it that you liked about Spartan football in the sixties?
Carrigan: Everything. Everything. The National Championship in '65 is probably the thing I liked best about it.
 In fact, I have a little gold football that Duffy gave me that I wore for years. I never took it off. I wore it for
years. That was just very special.
          I liked the game, but I liked the spirit, Jeff. I saw it from afar, because I lived in Ann Arbor, but before I
started going to all the games, I always listened. I read the papers avidly. At that time there was a Detroit News, a
Detroit Free Press, and a Detroit Times, and I would go out Sunday morning and get all three papers, and I would
spend the day reading everything about Michigan State and the game.


                                                                                                                       18
         The thing that interested me was the newspapers tended to be pretty negative, and at that time we didn't yet
have television, but if you could listen on the radio to Duffy or some of the folks in East Lansing, it seemed like
they were willing to take the heat, but their real interest was putting it behind them and getting on and doing better.
I respected an attitude I sensed there, and Duffy was a part of that. I admired him from a distance for a long time.
         I don't know, I was meant to do--and this never occurred to me until this minute--since my national
reputation has come out of the industrial world and the motivation of workers and so on, I think maybe I was meant
to do that, and if I'd paid attention to my relationship with Michigan State football, maybe I'd have started doing it
earlier. I felt a real compulsion to be supportive when the team lost. I always wrote a letter to Duffy when the
team lost a bad game. If it was one that you expected to lose, it wasn't an embarrassing game or something, I might
not. But almost always I wrote a letter to Duffy, which, of course, was to the staff, saying some good things that I
saw or heard, and encouraging the attitude that they showed about getting in there and doing better. That was just
part of my fall season, to do that sort of thing.
         Duffy would answer most of the letters, so we kind of had a correspondence going. I didn't meet him until
the year of the National Championship. I was on campus for something, I don't remember what. The campus was
much smaller then, so you weren't too far away from the stadium, wherever you were. This would have been in
'65. Spring of '65, I know what it was, I was serving on a committee for the Michigan Department of Education,
and I had a meeting up there that was going to depart and go to Boeing for a weekend off-site. I was staying
overnight because I was riding with some folks from Lansing. I thought, well, maybe I'll just wander over to the
football office and maybe I can meet Duffy.
         So when I got done with what I had to do on the campus, I went over there and walked into his office, and
his secretary, who is now secretary to Clarence Understood, Sylvia Thompson, said, "Gee, I'm sorry, he's not here.
He's over at the stadium."
         I said, "Well, it was just a thought. I was just passing through and thought I would say hello."
         She said, "Could I give him your name?"
         I said, "Pat Carrigan."


                                                                                                                 19
         She said, "Don't move. Let me call him." [Laughter] She said, "He will not forgive himself if I let you
get away." So she called over at the stadium and he wanted me to come over there.
         So I went over to the stadium. They were finishing practice. He came out and sat in the car and we
talked for probably an hour, an hour and a half.
         When I came back from the weekend at Boeing, I was staying over for a meeting on campus on Monday,
some alumni thing, I don't remember what, and I had mentioned that when I saw him. He said, "Well, call me
when you get back and maybe we can have a drink."
         So that's how the friendship started, and we got to be good friends.
Charnley: So your letters opened that door.
Carrigan: Yes.
Charnley: Did you retain any of those letters?
Carrigan: You know, I don't think I did. I think the only letter I have, and it's not one I wrote, is one Duffy
wrote me just before he died, to say how much our friendship had meant to him. I knew that he was terminal, and
his wife had called me and Sylvia had called me and said, "I know he would appreciate hearing from you." We'd
been out of touch. He had moved away. So I wrote him a letter and he wrote back to say how much he
appreciated it.
Charnley: That's interesting. So the sixties were glory years, of course, for football.
Carrigan: Yes. But I was faithful through the ones that weren't, but we haven't had a decade, really, that's been
as good as that one.


                                                                                                                     20
          I got hooked on that in high school, because in high school I played in the marching band, and the Sexton
Band often performed at the football games and did perform at all the high school games. So that's where I first
learned about football, was in high school.
Charnley: What instrument did you play?
Carrigan: I played clarinet.
Charnley: You started that at what level?
Carrigan: In the eighth grade, I think, was where you could start instruments. I loved it. I loved the marching
band, I loved the concerts. My love for classical music certainly came out of that experience. I was never going
to be a star on the clarinet. I studied for two years with Keith Stein [phonetic] at Michigan State, and I had second
chair all the way through high school, but I was never going to be first. It was not something I felt I wanted to try
to make a career at. That being the case, I recognized what I could and couldn't do. I would have been a very
adequate player in an orchestra, but I would never have been a soloist. When it came time to go to college, I
needed the money for tuition, so I told my clarinet.
          But the love for woodwinds is there today. That's why I funded a woodwinds scholarship at Michigan
State, and that's why it is woodwind rather than just music. The older of that scholarship is this good-looking man
here.
Charnley: You have his picture right there.
Carrigan: I have his pictures all over the house; that's my kid. His name is Jonathan Bickham [phonetic] and he's
a very highly regarded bassoon talent.


                                                                                                                      21
Charnley: Beautiful picture.
Carrigan: That was taken after the first concert this year when he first met J-Cat [phonetic]. J-Cat is "J" for
Jonathan, so J-Cat is really his namesake. But they had never met in person before, and it was a mutual love affair
right away. Jonathan kept saying, "He's so cool. He's so cool. Oh, he's got an earring just like mine. Oh, he's
wearing a bassoon pin just like mine." He was really excited. Music is a big thing in my life.
Charnley: The road to becoming a trustee.
Carrigan: Started with the committee. I had become very active in the Alumni Association, with the
establishment of the club in Ann Arbor and so on. I was kind of the liaison with East Lansing for the club. This
would have been in the late sixties when there was a lot of concern about the quality and caliber of trustees and the
level of their interest in the university. Both political parties appointed trustees to kind of screen candidates,
encourage good people to run, and that sort of thing. I was asked to serve.
          John [B.] Bruff, who was subsequently a trustee, was at the luncheon the other day, and I co-chaired that
committee. As the season wore on, we were not coming up with--we had an incumbent candidate in Don Stevens,
so we just had one slot we needed to fill. The committee began to encourage me to think about it, and as I said,
both Duffy and Walter Adams got on my case pretty hard.
          I had a curiosity, Jeff, that is what probably led me to run as much as anything. I had seen enough of
politics over the last few years prior to that, to understand a little bit about how they work and how they influence
behavior and decisions in universities and so on. I've always been a person that felt a need to speak out on issues
that I feel about. I've never had a vote that was for sale and never will have. I'm looking at and being asked to
think about running for a position where that's kind of the way business is done, and I was curious to know whether
you could be your own person, live your own conscience, perform the duties of office successfully, and part of


                                                                                                                      22
those are to influence without selling yourself. I had watched souls being sold at higher levels. This is a low-level
position with low pay. Could you do it there? I didn't know if you could or not. I had seen a lot of political stuff
on the board by this time. But that was my burning question: can I do this job and be Pat Carrigan and maintain my
integrity?
          I campaigned for that job harder than anybody ever will. I traveled the whole state of Michigan. I spent
a week in the U.P., where nobody ever campaigns, and that congressional district up there, to this day, would bow
and scrape if I went up there, because I went. They sent a delegation to the convention to get me nominated, and
that's why they were there. They were in their boots and their plaid shirts and their jeans, and they walked into my
hospitality room and said, "You got a drink for us?"
          But it took a long time to get to that point with them, because they were very distrustful people. Of
course, their knowledge of Michigan State filtered through very different channels, but one person in the little town
of Iron River, which at that point was a dead town, the mines had closed, they had a bar and a grocery store and
those were the only active businesses there, and people went to ball games at night because there was nothing else
to do, and if they hadn't, I never would have gotten in there. That was open to the public, so I would go to the ball
game. But I sure didn't get any encouragement to come, because they weren't interested in a woman candidate for
anything.
          But I was pretty persistent, and I went. The chairman up there, whose name escapes me at the moment, I
couldn't imagine that it ever would, and it'll come to me, he was a rough and tough sort of guy, a little gruff on the
telephone. He had all kinds of reasons why he didn't have time to see me. He was one of the unemployed, but he
didn't have any time to see me. I tried to call ahead always and set up things for where I was going. Ellsworth
Bangree [phonetic] was his name. He's a man that had a very important influence on my life.
          Finally he got tired of my calling him, I guess, and he said, "Well, the only time I could see you would be
at the ball game." And I said, "Fine. Where's the ball game?" So he gave me directions to the ball game.
          I went to the ball game, and they played three games during an evening. They did that every night all
summer. I got there in time for the first game, and it was just about to get under way. I asked people, and nobody


                                                                                                                          23
seemed to be looking for me. "Do you know where I would find Ellsworth Bangree?" "Oh, he's around
somewhere." And nobody was really very interested in helping me find him.
          I walked around during a good part of the first game before I found him, and finally they said, "Well, that's
him over there."
          I went over and introduced myself. His enthusiasm was less than overwhelming, but he was very gracious
and very polite. He wanted to know if he could buy me a Coke, and I was dry as a bone after walking around on
this hot night, you know, saying over and over again, "Have you seen Ellsworth Bangree?" [Laughter]
          So he bought me a Coke and I sat through a game and a half. People around would come and kind of join
in when they saw that he was there, so I ended up with quite a group around me.
          This was the year of the sit-in on campus and the Tent City. The sit-in on Grand River, rather; not on
campus. Of course, they all knew about that stuff. "What are you going to do about it?"
          "What am I going to do about what?"
          "Well, the fact that nobody goes to class up there."
          "Tell me more about that."
          "Well, it's a fact. We know about that. This young man over here went to school there, but nobody went
to class in the spring."
          And I said, "Well, you know, that's funny, because I spent quite a bit of time on campus in the spring and I
saw a lot of people out sitting in the street and I saw a lot of people sitting in the Tent City area, but I saw a lot of
kids going to class, too. Quite a lot. Maybe more than I saw sitting out." So I challenged them, but I didn't say,
"You're a liar. You're wrong," or anything like that. Some of them almost said that to me, but some of them
listened. They were not what I'd call a friendly audience, just generally speaking, but they were not rude to me.
          I stayed through the ball games, and Bangree said, "Well, I'll walk you back to your car. Where are you
going tonight?"
          I said, "Well, I've got to drive up to [unclear] because I've got a breakfast meeting there in the morning."


                                                                                                                     24
          He said, "Well, you be very careful driving, because there are a lot of deer out across the road between
here and there, and it could be very dangerous." And he probably saved my life, telling me that, because I counted
twenty deer between there and--shoot in front of you. I drove very slowly and very carefully. I decided that Mr.
Bangree wasn't all bad before that, because when he walked me back to my car, what do you talk about with
somebody that you know doesn't agree with anything you think or believe? "This is a really pretty area here," you
know, and you scratch your head and say, "What can I say that might be meaningful?" [Telephone rings. Tape
recorder turned off.]
          I was thinking, "I'm lucky to get out of here with my life," you know, and all kind of thoughts like that. I
opened the car and started to get in, and Mr. Bangree said to me, "Got any literature?"
          And I said, "Yeah, I've got a whole trunkful."
          "Well, how can we campaign for you if we don't have any literature?" And I could have fallen over, Jeff.
I just could have flipped out. So I gave him a whole bunch of brochures and some little postcards they could put
up with my picture on it.
          As I alluded to earlier, at state convention time, they came in early. There were about ten of them. They
marched into the hospitality room, which we were just setting up, it wasn't time for convention yet, and said, "Well,
we came all this way to get you nominated. You got a drink for us?" And they worked the floor for me against
Coleman Young [phonetic], who was then a state senator, and who thought he was going to run for the board and
control the election. Turned out that he did not put his name in the hat. These guys did a job for me. It was
unbelievable.
Charnley: The loyalty that they created.
Carrigan: Yes. But the thing that taught me is that people do not have to agree with you to support you, and that
if you have a different position and you can articulate it in a way that is meaningful and honest, that they may not


                                                                                                                      25
like what you stand for or what you believe in, but they will understand that you're honest, and that's maybe the
most important thing people want in a politician.
          I'll give you a real good case in point on that. My opponents that year were a couple of very conservative
Republicans, and I won't pick on either one of them. One of them is dead now and was a very nice man. Ken
Thompson was his name. Frank Hartman, who I loved to pieces, and I did not get on well at all the years I was on
the board because we were always on the other side from each other, but we respected one another as people.
Frank was an honest man. I don't know who was running their campaign, but they had to campaign because I was
campaigning, and the newspapers were writing about me, so they had to do stuff.
          There was a meeting at the People's Church at East Lansing for all candidates that would interrelate in any
way with that area: the Lansing City Council, the university, anything in that arena. Twenty-nine people were on
the roster to speak that night; I was twenty-seven. [Laughter] When I walked into the room, there was a flyer on
every chair that said something like--and this isn't the exact wording--"Is this what you want for your daughter?"
And coed living was a big issue. These men were absolutely violent about that.
          I took a trip to Stanford [University] that summer to see what coed living was about. It was the first
school to implement it. I lived in a dorm with the kids for a week, and I found that to be a very rich experience. It
was like being in a big family, and I never had a big family. Because everybody looked out for each other.
"Anybody want to go to a movie tonight?" and whoever wanted to go, went. You didn't date within the group.
That was the family. You didn't date your brothers and sisters. There was no rule about that; you just didn't do it,
you know. I thought that was just great. I thought it would be just fine if we had some opportunity like that at
Michigan State. My opponents thought it was the first step into hell, and they were very clear about that.
          So I walked into the meeting. There was a piece of literature on every chair, with great big headlines
about that. I thought, well, this is going to be a friendly group, I'm sure. And I had to sit and listen to, of course,
everything else that went before me. The last two candidates were two councilmen that for some reason were on
last. So the other two trustees had said what they were going to say, which wasn't much. They didn't want to say
much.


                                                                                                                      26
          When I got up, I made my pitch and I addressed the issue in the brochure and told them what I could about
my experience at Stanford. After I finished my remarks, of course, people are allowed to ask questions of a
minimum amount of time. Most people just wanted to get out of there, it was so late. They were tired. But one
woman stood up and she had this paper in her hand that had been on her chair. She shook her fist at me and she
said, "I want to hear more about this!"
          And I said, "Well, maybe we could talk privately."
          She said, "I just want to hear you tell me that there isn't anything bad going on there."
          So I had to say a few things about that. She was just enraged. Her eyes were--you could see fire coming
out of her eyes. So she finally settled down, and that was the only challenge I got. People wanted to get out of
there. They were kind of pushing her away anyway.
          They were serving coffee in the back of the church then, and after the meeting you could adjourn to go
back for coffee. I just had the feeling that she was going to come after me. [Laughter] So I got back there as
quick as I could and tried to find a corner where nobody would particularly notice me, but she found me. She came
up and she still had that piece of paper in her hand. I thought, "Here we go." Because other people saw it, too,
and they began to come over.
          She said to me--and this may not be an exact quote, but it's darn close--she said, "I don't agree with
anything I heard you say tonight, but I believe you're an honest person and I would like to work on your campaign."
 And that lady addressed 500 envelopes. If I needed any reinforcement for can you be honest in doing the job and
still win, I got it that night. That was a very important thing for me to learn, because it influenced everything I've
ever done since then. I have never given a thought to compromising my principles, because I know I don't have to
do that. I don't even know her name anymore. She was very important in my life.
Charnley: Very interesting. After your election, I don't know the exact number, but you were obviously pleased
with the outcome. Were there any surprises?


                                                                                                                        27
Carrigan: Yes. I was the top vote-getter in the state, and William Milliken was one of the people who was
running, and he was a very popular governor. I outpolled him.
         The election came out as it was not close. Don Stevens was an incumbent and his name was somewhat
known.
[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]
Carrigan: It highlights the gubernatorial campaign. But I suppose it's just a matter of custom, anyone who was
elected to a state office is invited to that. Well, I had never been invited to a state office before. I was invited to
the inaugural breakfast, so I went. I had met Governor Milliken before, and he came over and congratulated me,
and a few other people did. Nobody I knew from the Democratic party was there, and I found out afterwards
Democrats don't go to things like that for Republicans, and vice versa. It's just a courtesy invitation. I thought I
should go. And it did me some good, because a lot of people said, "It's really good that you came. That really
says something about how you feel about this job." So I got lucky a few times.
Charnley: Do you remember your first board meeting?
Carrigan: I remember a lot of them, yes. There were a lot of things that happened fairly suddenly after I came on
the board, because I was the first woman to be on the board in many years, and the first one ever elected. The last
one was, I think, Sara Van Heusen Jones [phonetic] or Matilda Wilson, I'm not sure which, but they were both
appointed. It had been thirty-five years since there was a woman in that hallowed hall of trustees, which made it
somewhat difficult for the gentlemen who were there, of course.
         The first board meeting does not stand out as the event that it was, because I had an absolutely splitting
headache that was excruciating. I could hardly sit through it. Roger Wilkinson, who was then vice president for
finance, detected my discomfort and asked if he could do something and got me some aspirin, and that didn't do


                                                                                                                     28
much. I drove back to Ann Arbor after the meeting, and I wasn't sure I could make it. I had never had a headache
in my life that was anything of consequence, and this was terrible.
          I got home and I went to bed, and in the middle of the night I woke up screaming, it was so bad. My
husband took me into emergency, and I had blood pressure of about 280 over 150 and was so close to stroke. I
know it was just the pressure of the first meeting, something very important, and the fatigue from a long campaign,
because I campaigned a whole summer. I took summer off from work and campaigned for a job that didn't pay
anything. I have a good precedent for writing stories and giving them away. [Laughter]
          So, you know, that is a blur, really, that meeting, except for remembering the pain. But the next one that
came along, things started to happen. At the time we did not have a Sunshine Law in Michigan about board
meetings. Decisions could be made wherever people wanted to make them. Decisions in most political bodies, I
expect, were made behind closed doors, because it's more convenient that way. That was not consistent with my
beliefs or my style, but at that time there was a meeting before the board meeting, a breakfast meeting of the trustees
at Kellogg Center, which was a closed-door meeting, and the agenda was gone over and discussed. No votes were
officially taken there, but the decisions were made there.
          That bothered me, and I spoke to that at that occasion. Don Stevens was right there with me, always. He
was always in favor of being more open. "I think we should talk about this in the public meeting," he'd say. So
that was one thing I noticed.
          The other thing I noticed, which is more frivolous but funny and represents the culture, I'm in a room with
seven male trustees, probably seven or eight male administrators, and a few people who would come in here and
there with data or whatever for us, that were also male. When I would get up from the table, everyone in the room
would rise. When I would sit down, everyone would sit down. At that meeting I said, "I really appreciate your
courtesy, but I'm here as a trustee, not a woman, and this is kind of disruptive," because it was crowded around the
table. We all put our briefcases at the end of the room, and I was usually at the far end, so I would go back to my
briefcase once in a while to get something and everybody else would do that, too.


                                                                                                                       29
          People appreciated my giving them that latitude, I expect, but they had bee well trained for a lot of years,
and every time I got up, this went on. I got embarrassed saying over and over again, "You know, you don't really
need to do that, but thank you for the courtesy."
          At the second meeting that that happened, it got to be really disruptive. We had a lot of paper to handle,
and people were going back and forth to their briefcases, and every time I went to mine, you know. So I thought,
well, you know, I'm going to make a point of this. So I made a point of going to my briefcase a lot.
Charnley: It was up and down.
Carrigan: And I don't remember who it was, somebody on the board, it might have been Frank Merriman, who
was one of the worst offenders, looked around and got kind of a grin on his face and sat back down, and it never
happened again. I never said a word. [Laughter] But there were some things like that to overcome. They were
not used to a situation where social amenities didn't prevail, and they had to learn that this was a business
environment.
Charnley: You were trustee during the [Clifton R.] Wharton [Jr.] administration.
Carrigan: Yes. I came with Cliff and left with Cliff.
Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about his presidency? What was your overall assessment of his presidency?
Carrigan: I have a lot of good things to say about it, and I don't want to say anything negative for publication.
The only negative I could say would be that Cliff found it difficult to make decisions. The reason for that, in large
part, I don't think was his style, I think it was that he had a divided board the whole time he was here, and some of


                                                                                                                       30
the members of my party who were on the board opposed his appointment. I won't say it was racial; I don't know
for sure. I think that may have had some influence. But for whatever reason, they were opposed.
           They had a political reason for being opposed. Mennon Williams [phonetic] wanted the job, and, of
course, he was a very prominent Democrat in the state, and that's who they wanted. They were courteous to Cliff
in public settings. They were not ever generous to his thoughts or whatever. They just had a closed mind.
           Frank, I think, out of--I don't mean to say "ignorance" to mean that he's an ignorant man, he's not, he's very
knowledgeable in his field, but Frank was not really--Warren [M.] Huff was a politician. Warren Huff was a
politician. He played the political role to the hilt, and I learned some political lessons from him, as a matter of fact,
because he played them with me. I came out on the short end of the stick because I didn't understand the game.
I'll share one of those with you.
           But as far as Cliff was concerned, Don and Blanche Martin had been the two strong supporters of his
appointment, and they continued to be in his corner. When I was elected, I was there also. I believe a board needs
to choose a president and then help him do his job, not do it for him, but help him do it, support him in the effort of
doing the job. I think we had people on the board that thought they could do it better or that didn't like the way he
wanted to do it, didn't like his style, or whatever.
           He never had full board support for anything. I don't mean that we always had somebody that voted
against anything he suggested; that's not so. But he just never could look around the room and say, "These people
are here to support me." And I think that's dreadful. It's a terrible situation to be in, and it does make you a little
scared. It makes you a little--about making decisions, a little hesitant, always having to think about how it's going
to play and what you're going to do as a fallback position and all of that sort of thing.
           I like and admire Cliff Wharton immensely. I'm very fond of both he and Dolores, and we were very
close then and we stay in touch now. I think he came in with baggage that he didn't invent and nobody would let
him unload it. I think the Wharton Center [for Performing Arts] is the finest tribute that ever could be paid to a
president, and it is the right one for the Whartons. Every time I go there, I give thanks for the fact that they were
on our campus and part of our university.


                                                                                                                     31
          The year that Cliff left, at commencement that year, I asked for an opportunity to speak on the program. I
had written a little poem which I tried to deliver at commencement, honoring them, and I got choked up and didn't
do it very well, but that's on tape someplace. I think I probably have a copy of it someplace.
          They were a graceful addition to our campus and to our experience, and it was not always appreciated
while they were here. Certainly the people who appreciate Wharton Center have to appreciate something about
them now. They're fine people.
Charnley: Were you involved in the Center for the Performing Arts, in either the fundraising or--
Carrigan: Only as a trustee. I was not actively involved. That was what taught me about philanthropy, though.
I didn't know a thing about fundraising. I came from a family that didn't have money. We never gave gifts to
universities. That's where I learned that people did. That's when the Presidents Club was established and I
worked to belong to that, and was proud when I could. I'm very proud to be a Kedzie [Hall] member now.
Charnley: Some of those political lessons Warren Huff taught you, would you talk about that?
Carrigan: Yes. I'll tell you about an interesting one. Because of the division on the board, there was an inherent
problem on a regular basis in electing a chairman, and the chairperson now is a rotating position which is safe. It
wasn't then. The chairman was a chairman, wasn't a chairperson until I came on the board and put that name on it.
But it was a person of power, a particular power, the person that could put the president in his place if he needed to
be put in his place, and whatever. So it was aspired to, and Warren Huff aspired to it.
          Don Stevens and Warren were sworn enemies from day one. It happened, I think, before the Wharton
presidency was on the table, but that would have cemented it, because Don was a strong supporter of Cliff and
Warren didn't think he should be on the campus or allowed there. So there was some real, real enmity there
between the two of them.


                                                                                                                       32
          Warren was always fighting to be chairman, and after the election when I was elected, I was nominated for
chair. I say "chair" now because that's okay. It wasn't then. I wouldn't have said it then. I made a short speech
saying that I was a newly elected trustee, I had a lot to learn about the board and a lot to learn about the university,
and I did not think it was appropriate for me to assume that role, but I hoped that maybe some day I would be
worthy of it, but didn't, I would decline.
          We had a 4-4 tie over the nomination of Warren Huff, and he needed one vote. At the next meeting, I had
come to appreciate the fact, I told you, about our closed meetings and that really that's how business was done, and I
came with a proposal to open the meetings. I had talked to Warren, because he was a Democrat, and, yes, he was
all in favor of that. He thought we should do that and he thought that was very sound. Talked to Don. Talked to
Blanche. I'm missing somebody there. I did not talk to Thompson and Merriman, other than to say, "I'm going to
do this," and they were opposed to it, of course. I knew they would be. I'm missing another name there. Clare
White [phonetic]. Clare would do whatever Warren told him to do, most of the time anyway. He was kind of a
loose cannon.
          I counted the votes and said, "I've got them," so I came into the board meeting with it and presented it to
the board. I had sent it around to everybody first and presented it in a public meeting. We were going to
discontinue the closed meetings before the board meeting and all the business would come to the board except for
things that would now be excluded. The audiences were quite big, because I think people sensed that some things
were going to happen with this new composition of the board and the new president. So we always had the room
packed.
          We got around and put that up for a vote, and I can't remember if it was Warren or Frank Merriman, one of
them made a motion to table, and the other seconded it, and it just died, you know. Not debateable, you know. So
I went out with my tail between my legs, saying, "Why did they do this?" [Laughter]
          Warren Huff called me at home the next morning and he said, "I imagine you're a little disappointed about
the vote yesterday," because he told me he was going to support it. He had said that to me.
          I said, "Yes, you could say that."


                                                                                                                    33
          He said, "Do you understand why you did not get your proposal adopted?"
          I said, "Frankly, no. I thought I counted six votes." Of course, Clare voted with Warren against it, to
table, and the two Republicans did, and that just did it.
          He said, "Well, you know, I think it's a good proposal. I'm glad to see somebody take this problem on. I
should have done it myself years ago. I really want to support it, but you know until there's a chairman, there's no
way to make it implementable, because people will go right on doing what they've been doing until there's a
chairperson there." He didn't say "chairperson," it was chairman. "To give some direction and exert some
influence." And he said, "I'll tell you, the minute we have a chairman, I'm going to make a motion to take that off
the table." Is there a message there? I heard it. I heard it. It never came off the table because I was never going
to give him my vote. [Laughter] But that was a good political lesson for me.
Charnley: So that 5-3 ratio was maintained.
Carrigan: It was a 5-3 vote on almost everything, yes.
Charnley: Which part of that 5-3 ratio did you occupy?
Carrigan: The 5. Yes, the two Republicans and often Warren Huff would vote with them. Sometimes it was
not that clear. Clare White would sometimes, sometimes he wouldn't. He had his own agenda. But we had a
pretty good--Don and Blanche and I and Frank Merriman. He was the wavery Democrat. Frank sometimes voted
with the Republicans.
Charnley: Were you ever elected chair during your tenure?
Carrigan: Yes.


                                                                                                                     34
Charnley: What year was that?
Carrigan: I'm trying to think if I was chair my last year or the year before that. I think it was in '77. It was
either that or '78, and '78 I think it was somebody else. I'm pretty sure it was. Yes, we served without a chair for
all the years I was on the board, until I was elected chair, because the complexion of the board didn't change in that
time. In the last years, Barbara Ward came on board. I'm trying to think of who else. Thompson went off.
Merriman went off. I'm fuzzy about that.
          But we operated without a chair, and we did fine without it, but there's some things that a chair can do,
especially if it's a chair that can help the president, work with the president. That was the scary thing about
Warren's bid for the chair, because he would shoot Cliff Wharton down at any opportunity publicly. I'm sure he
would have privately, too. In fact, he did when we used to [unclear] meetings.
Charnley: What were some of the key issues that you faced, the board? Student activism obviously was one.
Do you remember how that came up in the board? Were you involved?
Carrigan: I remember how I was involved, certainly. I was an activist. [Laughter] With students. The Kent
State [University] shootings, a case in point. But let me preface it by saying that students were very distressed by a
lot of things that were happening then. They were not finding an opportunity to voice their concerns to the board
in any formal way at the time, although not too long after that, I persuaded the board to go along with a student
spokesperson in attendance at the board table and an undergrad student one as well, undergrad and a grad student.
But during the time that you're speaking of, we had no official mechanism for the student voice to be heard, and we
still had people on the board that did not think that voice needed to be hard. I thought it did, and that was one of
the things Thompson and Merriman and I disagreed on.


                                                                                                                       35
           I was very accessible to students the whole time I was on the board. They worked on my campaign to get
me elected. I knew where they were coming from. I knew what their issues were. I was invited frequently to
dorms to speak to students in the evening or to have dinner with them. I lived at McDonel Hall for a week every
year I was on the board as a trustee in residence, loved that experience. Went home ready to die at the end of the
week because I'd had no sleep. Around the clock they were in my room. I was young enough then to take it. I
did a couple of all-nighters week before last that made me think about that. I thought I was a lot better at that when
I was on the board than I am now. All-nighters are hard for me now. But now that I'm back in business, I'll have
to do some once in a while.
           But it was great, because they could talk to somebody who couldn't change the world necessarily, and they
had to understand that about me. The reason for seeking me out was sometimes "Fix it," you know. It was faculty
people and sometimes I could fix it, and it was students and sometimes I could fix it. But I could not fix anything
by myself. I had to be convinced that there was something to fix and that I had to get some people to help me fix it.
 I got to be pretty good at that.
           Students found me willing to listen, asking hard questions, really challenging their positions sometimes on
things, even if I agreed with them, because I thought it was good for them to have to think a little, you know, and
not just kind of sweep along on the tide. But I really enjoyed my work with students while I was a trustee, as much
as anything, and I'll extend that to those of their parents who wrote letters to me because they were in disagreement
with the policy that the board had implemented that I had supported. I answered every letter I ever got as a trustee.
 I felt that anyone who was concerned enough about something to write a letter to me deserved an answer.
           The big issues, the biggest was should abortions be performed at Olin [Memorial Health Center], and I
think the total number of letters that I received on that, as best I remember, was someplace between 100 and 200,
and I answered all of those. That was my nightly chore, was to read the abortion letters. I had some standard
paragraphs that expressed my view, that I put in most every letter, but I tried to address personally the issues that I
saw being raised. They weren't all the same, of course.


                                                                                                                       36
          The second biggest was the grape boycott the board took to only Michigan-grown grapes if we were not
going to buy--let me turn that around. It was lettuce with the Michigan thing, but we would not buy union grapes
unless they were the Chavez farms. We took a position on that, that led some people to believe that when we got to
the lettuce issue, which was the same, that we could not use or would not use lettuce that was grown in the state of
Michigan, which, of course, was never the intent. It was, if you're going to buy union stuff, then you're going to
buy it from Chavez and not the scab concerns. And we were part of the national boycott issue on that. People like
Ken Thompson and Frank Merriman just had to vomit every time they thought about it, because it was so foreign,
contrary to their beliefs. They were very strongly anti-union. I guess it was okay if we bought union grapes, but
they didn't want any big thing about it. [unclear] to not buy any grapes. [Laughter]
          The lettuce boycott, of course, took on a little different thing, because lettuce is a big Michigan product.
The Farm Bureau got really incensed over our position on that, which was a global kind of policy. If we are going
to buy union stuff, we'll buy from Chavez. It was never intended to say we won't buy Michigan products, and we
did, but the Farm Bureau construed our vote, and they had good reason to, the way it was written up in the paper,
saying that we would not buy Michigan agricultural products.
          We came into one board meeting, Jeff, and there was a beautiful big head of lettuce sitting in front of each
trustee. [Laughter] Might have been the only humorous thing the Farm Bureau ever did, because they were pretty
straight about things. I came in and sat down, and people in the audience were sitting there, "What's Pat Carrigan
going to do now?" Because I did stand out, being the only female the first few years. There was this titter around
the room, and the president hadn't come in yet with the administrative group. I was there with most of the trustees
or some of the trustees. I picked it up and inspected it, nodded my head, and took it out of the bag and started to
eat it. [Laughter] That got written up in the paper. I pronounced it good, and when the meeting was in session,
in my opportunity to speak I said I wanted to thank the Farm Bureau for providing the lettuce, that it was wonderful
lettuce, I had never had better, and if we could store it, I would say we should go out and buy enough for a year's
supply. And everybody was happy. [Laughter]


                                                                                                                      37
          So there were those kinds of issues which I'll call political issues. There were university issues, too, and
there was one very serious one which I got involved in very early, and that was faculty salaries. Again, it fell under
the umbrella of the secret meeting sort of thing. At least it was a part of the same bedding, if you will. Salaries
were not published. People were not allowed to know what other people earned. Sometimes people found out or
thought they did, and got upset.
          There was a group of people on campus, I don't know exactly what to call them except academic advisors.
They were wives of professors, by and large. They were degreed people. They were part-time faculty, and they
had no benefits. I think some of them had been in the job as long as twenty years at that time. They had no
benefits because they were part time. No part-time people at that point were entitled to benefits. I think I learned
about that through students, because they were getting their advising from these people, and some of them were
aware that they were paid very poorly and worked very hard and were not getting any benefits. So I just raised the
question, "Is this so?" We wanted to get some data about it and found out, yes, indeed, this is so.
          So I brought that up at a board meeting as something that we needed to discuss. I brought that up in a
closed meeting because of the nature of it, and just said, "Tell me, somebody, why we do this. These people are
more service than a lot of the people that are tenured faculty members." Of course, they weren't eligible for tenure
either.
          Well, what that led to eventually was an awareness that there were people who were working and had no
benefits, and that nobody knew about it because nobody could know what anybody got. And maybe the real issue
was, we ought to know, be able to know, for legitimate reason, what other people earned.
          So I took that one on, and we had a real brouhaha over publishing faculty salaries. Some faculty people,
the lower ranked one, of course, wanted them published. Some people who were adjunct professors or whatever,
maybe pulling in a pile, the medical people especially, although the medical school, the College of Osteopathic
Medicine was new then and the Human Medicine College was still getting born, but people in medical disciplines,
at least, were being paid very well, and they are now, and they should be. There's no quarrel with that. There just
shouldn't be a secret about it in a public institution.


                                                                                                                    38
          So I went to work on behalf of the women who were doing the academic advising. John Cantlon was
provost at the time, and I was in his case a lot. John and I got to be very fond of each other and we had a very
warm reunion the other day, with his wife Irene. But John was uptight with me on the board for a lot of years
because some of the sacred cows in academia were the things that I saw needing a hard look, and that just troubled
John a lot. [Laughter] We were never rude to each other. We never hated each other. We respected each other.
 But I know he thought I was wrong about a lot of things. Today he would tell you I was not, but he changed a lot
over the years, and I am pleased about that.
          But eventually we got to the point where a committee, not a board committee, but an appropriate university
committee, was given the task of defining that job of academic advising and building it in as a permanent type of
position that would be eligible for benefits, and looking at the salary. They were earning something like $10,000 a
year.
Charnley: For full-time work?
Carrigan: No, this was half time. But that was, I think, the top salary. I know one woman I got to know fairly
well, whose name I don't remember, was earning $7,500 in her fifty year there. Half-time jobs don't exist. You
know that and I know that. So they were doing full time.
          Anyway, that got taken care of. The salaries got published. The day that that vote was taken, the room
was absolutely jam-packed. The press was there from Detroit and all over the place. Everyone on campus, I
think, was in that could squeeze in. That was, I think, one of the things that I take special pride in, because it
opened the door for people to look honestly at the university, and it got rid of an awful lot of back-biting and
gossiping and speculation and things that are not only distracting, but destructive sometimes. It put the issues out
on the table where they could be addressed. So I guess I would say in my first year that was probably the big thing,
as I see it, that got accomplished. I was very proud to be part of making that happen and to have been the
instigator.


                                                                                                                  39
Charnley: During that time that you served, what was the board's position on both faculty unionization and staff?
Carrigan: Well, divided, 5 to 3. You say the word "union" to two people on the board, at least, and it would be
immediately this. Frank Hartman was an educator. He was a principal in Flint, I believe. Yes, Flint. He was an
educator, so issues like that, he kind of had to--but he was superintendent, so he was management, so he was a "no"
on that. That was generally how it went. The other five of us who were Democrats generally supported a union
position. I can't remember any Democrat in the years when we had Democrats who were responsible and did their
homework and noncapricious, when all of the Democrats except for Warren were of that sort, when we didn't
support something that was a union position. We had a couple of flakes on the board. One was a--
[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]
Carrigan: ...were quite different because of the presence of those two people, and it was never real predictable
just what was going to happen. Smidrun [phonetic] probably would have been removed from office if he had not
take himself out, because he was doing funny things with his expense account. Not funny, even.
Charnley: The status of women both as employees and also as faculty members, did you take a position on that?
Carrigan: I told you I did. You already know that.
Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about that?
Carrigan: I still get thanked for it by Elsa Verdehr in the music school as recently as three weeks ago.
[Laughter] Yes, this came about because of the two things we just talked about, the group of women on campus


                                                                                                                       40
who were performing an important function and not being adequately compensated, the fact that salaries weren't
published so people didn't know whether they were being adequately compensated, and the two kind of came
together.
          The School of Music was a case in point, not one that I was personally involved in at all, but for the first
time women could look at salaries. Well, men could, too. Look at salaries across the board. That gave them
some data to pursue a remedy, and they did. The School of Music, I'm sure, was no worse off than any other one in
that respect, but what happened was, indeed, that they discovered that the women were paid--I'll use the number of
$5,000, it's been said to me, but I don't know that that's the right one--but on average, $5,000 less than men doing
exactly the same work. Because it had surfaced, become an issue with the newspapers and an issue with the
university, people had to start addressing it. I am very, very proud of having had a role in that, and it's made a
difference. Now that stuff is all just accepted now, that that's just information people should have.
          My role, Jeff, was not so much to change things as to raise questions about why they were the way they
were, and somebody needed to do that on that board.
Charnley: The Vincent Voice Library has collections of hearings that you conducted or that were conducted on
that. Do you remember anything related to those hearings?
Carrigan: I know that we had them, but I don't remember in particular. A lot of them were not board hearings;
they were academic. But I knew they were conducted.
Charnley: It seems to be an important source that are available.
Carrigan: I'll bet it is.


                                                                                                                          41
Charnley: So we'll probably get some of them transcribed. I think it will be nice, especially for understanding
some of key issues at the time.
Carrigan: Yes. The issues were kind of old-boys' network-slash-traditional secrecy-slash-that just emanated out
of every corner of the universe. Once it hiccuped a little bit, then it began to hiccup a little bit in place, and that's
what should have happened, and it did. People that had never thought to question anything before suddenly said,
"Oh, we can ask questions. Oh, we can get data. Oh, maybe we should do something." That's how change
occurs.
         I guess in any role I've ever been in, I've been probably described as a change agent, and it's because I have
never found a perfect organization, one that struck me as perfect. I don't expect I ever will. I never found a
perfect human being, myself included, and I don't expect I ever will. But perfection, as I told you earlier, is a
concept that I learned at Michigan State, the importance of perfection, the A, the final A. And it never struck me
until today, but when I go into an organization or I meet a person, I don't mean to say I'm looking for the flaw in a
negative way, but I'm looking for what needs to be fixed to make it perfect. And I'll bet you that's where that came
from.
Charnley: That's interesting. The challenge an undergraduate writing professor gave to you.
Carrigan: I never had thought about that till today, and I've wondered where it came from. My mom was kind of
a perfectionist, but not in the sense--and I'm not a perfectionist. I understand that perfection is in the hands of God
and not in my hands and in yours or anybody else's, but the striving for it is very important to me. I admire and
love people who do that and work at it hard.
         That young man there. [Referring to photograph of Jonathan Bickham] Very talented. I hardly ever see
him except after a concert, because he's too busy to make a phone call most of the time. The only place is the
Symphony Orchestra, the Symphony Band, the Wind Symphony, the Chamber Winds, the Graduate Student Wind


                                                                                                                        42
Quintet, even though he's just a junior, each of those groups has a concert in preparation all the time, so he's doing
five rehearsals a week for different sources. He's a straight-A 4.0 honors college student. I don't know how many
hours he's taking this year; he was taking twenty last year. Practices two hours a day off the top of the head, as any
music major does that's in performance. Plays ultimate frisbee, plays pickup basketball, plays the guitar in his
spare time. You know.
Charnley: Sounds like he's got a fan.
Carrigan: Oh, he's got a fan. I love that kid. I really do. I love him to pieces. We have a real close
relationship. I'm not his mom, I don't want to be his mom, but his mom's in Wisconsin and I can make goodies for
him, so I take cookies to him. We have a good time. I see him after every concert and say hi, sometimes take him
back to the dorm. We went out to dinner last May. He was going to be twenty-one on the fifteenth of May, and
he was going to be home in Wisconsin. I said, "I would like to take you out to dinner for your twenty-first birthday
and celebrate it here."
          If I can take a minute, I will tell you about that, because it was such a special time for both of us. I picked
him up at the dorm and we went out to Hershey's on Grand River. I had been in there and scouted the place. We'd
never had time by ourselves before. We went out to dinner after his mom and his high school band teacher came to
hear his solo performance of one of the concerts last year, and we went out to dinner with Jim [James] Forger and
his wife and Barry [Barrick R.] Stees, the bassoon professor, after Jonathan's solo. But we'd never been together by
ourselves.
          I had a lot of things I wanted to talk to him about. Over the course of the year I wrote to him quite a bit.
He would send me a note once in a while, quite rarely, but one he did was after my kitty died last January. I got a
very sweet card from him, sending me loving thoughts and saying that he, too, had a cat, so he knew what it was
like to lose one. Now, this is a kid who's twenty years old at the time, and he knows what it's like to lose a cat I've


                                                                                                                       43
had for twenty years? I don't think so. But he thought he did. He just wrote a few nice little lines, and at the
bottom of it he wrote, "Smile for me," and drew a smile face.
          I was standing right there in the kitchen door when I read that. This was the end of January. The kitty
died early in January, had her put to sleep. And I was still pretty much a basket case. I stood there and I read that,
and that phrase "Smile for me," just glued itself to me and I said, "Maybe that's something I can do." I had a
picture of Jonathan taken with me when we met at the music awards banquet the year before, when he was awarded
the scholarship. I had it enlarged on computer, put it up on my bedroom door and it's still there. You can look at
it if you want. I put the caption under it, "Smile for me."
          The next morning when I got up, I made myself walk over to that picture and try to smile, and in two
weeks' time I could do it without too much effort. I give him credit for that.
Charnley: That's nice.
Carrigan: When I had my knee surgery this summer, Jonathan sent me a note and said--this is a quote. He's 6'6".
 "I can hardly wait until I have to run to keep up with you when we're walking someplace together." That just
pushed me to work hard at therapy, you know. I do, I work very hard at it. My surgeon does a lot of that, too.
He's something else.
          But anyway, we went out to dinner at Hershey's. I had scouted the place for a spot that would be quiet and
we could talk and we wouldn't have a lot of traffic, but wouldn't be hidden away in the back where it might be kind
of scary, you know, when you're a twenty-year-old kid about to turn twenty-one, and here's this old lady here
hauling you off in a dark corner. [Laughter] But we had a nice dinner.
          I had told Scott, the owner, I guess he is now, his dad's turned it over to him, Scott Hershey, I said, "I'm
bringing at student here that is somebody very special and we're going to celebrate a birthday. I want a bottle of
non-alcoholic bubbly, because the birthday's a few weeks away. We're probably going to hang out here for a
while. If it's a problem that we're tying up a table, tell the waitress not to worry, we will take care of her, and if


                                                                                                                        44
we're tying it up for you, tell me and I will take care of it. Just don't let that be a problem and don't let anybody
press us to leave, because we might be here all evening."
           Well, we went at five o'clock and we drank toasts. I'll show you a picture of that. That was fun. I drank
one to him, of course, but then he had to drink one to our friendship, which I thought was really very cute and very
tender, very sincere. Cute in a funny sense.
           But he had said on the way over there, "We could go listen to some bassoon music tonight if you'd like to."
 I said, "Oh?" He said, "One of the guys at school is doing a lecture recital tonight." I didn't know what a lecture
recital was. I said, "Is it something you want to do?" He said, "I know you like to listen to bassoon music. I
thought maybe you'd like to go." And my thought is, I can't tell if he wants to go or not. I don't know if he should
go, if it's something that he should attend and he won't tell me, and I don't know if I want to go. I don't know what
it's about. I do know I want to talk to Jonathan, because we've never had a chance to talk about his dreams, his
plans, his hopes, and I really wanted to hook into that because I had started to get into kind of a mentoring role with
him, and I would not have recognized it, except the night we went out to dinner after his recital, Jim Forger said to
me the next day, "I love watching you mentor him last night."
           I said, "I wasn't even talking to him most of the time. He was off to the side and the rest of you were
over."
           He said, "Yes, I know you were not looking at him. That's why you don't know that's what you were
doing, but he was absolutely wrapped up in what you were saying and he was thinking a lot about it."
           So then I started viewing my role as something I needed to pay some attention to, and that's why I wanted
to do the dinner part of it. So I thought, well, I don't know which toe I'm going to step on with what answer I might
give. I said, "How about if we just hang loose and see how we feel after dinner?" He said, "That's fine." So we
did. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about his hopes to go to Eastman. We talked about his master's,
his hopes of performing in a big symphony some day, a pact we made on the spot that if that comes to pass, I will be
there if I'm still on the planet--I didn't say that--and on his side that I would have the best seat in the house. That
was neat. That was cool.


                                                                                                                       45
          So anyway, we went through all of the stuff. I had all kinds of silly presents for him. I had kind of an
inspirational plaque that really excited him, and he said, "That's going to be beside my desk always," and it was one
of these motivational plaques that just seemed to fit him. I had made a pinwheel for him with his mom's picture on
one of the blades and mine on one, and his high school band teacher's on one, and his mom's best friend on one,
because the four of us had dinner with him after his recital. So I got a picture of him holding the pinwheel. We
just had a lot of fun.
          You know, when you're at a dinner or something like that, there's a lot of conversation, a lot of milling
around, and every once in a while there's a lull, and then you either move your body or you change the topic or you
do something, but there's a lull and then it goes away and you're off and running again. We hit one of those. I
don't wear a watch because I have arthritis too badly to be comfortable with something around my wrist. I said,
"What time is it?"
          He looked at his watch. "It's five till eight." This lecture recital was scheduled for eight o'clock.
          I looked at him. He had kind of a twinkle in his eye. I said, "You want to make a run for it?"
          He said, "Yes, let's."
          So we hopped out. We got there about five minutes late. I was using a walker then and I couldn't move
too fast. I couldn't make a run for anything if I had to. I would not have missed that for the world. A young man
who is now a bassoon professor at University of Missouri, who has also become a very good friend, was the person
doing the lecture recital. Do you know what a lecture recital is?
Charnley: Where they have a performance and then respond to questions.
Carrigan: The performance is part of illustrating the lecture, and this guy's research was on the Mozart bassoon
concerto, which is a very famous one, an analysis of the structure of it, its relationship to other concertos, and he
had a discography of all the recordings that had been made of it. Like a doctoral thesis, you know. He would talk
about a piece of it and then he would illustrate it with his instrument. I got to sit right in front of him. I'd never


                                                                                                                    46
been that close to a bassoon in action. I love the instrument. I'm just hooked on that instrument. I sat there,
fascinated. I would not have missed that.
          I learned later, when Jonathan brought Albee [phonetic] over to meet me, Albee said, "I have heard so
much about you from Jonathan. I've been wanting to meet you. I'm really glad you came." Turns out that he's
been kind of a big brother to Jonathan.
          I said, "You know, you needed to be there."
          He said, "Well, I told Albee beforehand that I might not be because I had dinner plans."
          I said, "You should not have done that," but at least we got together.
Charnley: Sounds nice. While you were on the board, what was happening professionally with you in your work
life?
Carrigan: Part of the time I was on the board, most of it, I was still with the Ann Arbor schools doing the board
on desegregation and what followed from that, which was heading an Office of Evaluation and Educational
Research. I got my fill of that. It was the mundane kind of stuff, not the exciting discovery kind of stuff, and I did
my share of it. I was there for nine years.
          I decided I was going to look for something else that would be different, maybe take me back to my
original focus in assessment or whatever, but something different. I didn't really care what I looked at; I just
wanted to do something different, in a different environment. I kind of put that word out to people I knew.
          I got a phone call one day from a young man who said, "Would you be interested in interviewing for a
position with Bendix?"
          I said, "What's Bendix?" [Laughter] He explained to me that it was a large company that made
aeronautical and automotive parts and did many, many different kinds of things, a very different kind of company.
I said, sure, I'd come talk to them.


                                                                                                                      47
           And I went to work for Bendix. I went to work in a job called manager of something or other. I went to
work for them at the same salary I was earning in Ann Arbor in the school system because the man that hired me
correctly assessed that I would come even if he wouldn't give me more money. I made a reasonable pitch for some,
and he said, "I'll tell you what. If you're as good as I think you're going to be, your salary will double before the
first year is out." But he said, "Right now I don't know if you're worth any more to me than you are to Ann Arbor,
and maybe not as much."
           I thought that was fair, but I was going to have to commute to Southfield from Ann Arbor every day. I
said, "How about paying my mileage then?"
           And he said, "I'll think about that." He called me back the next morning and said no. Then I really had to
bite the bullet. My pride wanted to say, "No, I'm not coming," and it just seemed like such an exciting opportunity,
and I thought to myself, where else can I go and earn what I'm earning now and do something exciting and find out
if I like it and have a guaranteed job to come back to if I want to? Shoot. So I went. I ate humble pie and went.
           Within a year, I had more than doubled my salary and been promoted twice, and, you know, it was a good
fit. I started out running assessment programs, developing them and running them, and I became the head of the
department that had responsibility for that.
           General Motors got word about the assessment programs that Bendix was running and had some interest in
talking to me, and I went to talk to them. The first person who interviewed me at General Motors was a woman
named Edna Forth, who is now deceased, but she was one of the first women in General Motors to be able to
survive in that hotbed of male chauvinism, so I was kind of interested in her. When I went into her office, she
offered me a cup of coffee, and I sat down. She looked at me and she said, "Are you any good?"
           I said, "I think so."
           She said, "What are you good at?" And she won my heart. [Laughter] And I won hers. They hired me
and I got promoted there.
           Immediately the divisional manager wanted me to go spend a year with a good manager and then become a
plant manager. Chuck Catco [phonetic] was his name. I said, "Chuck, I don't know your business at all, but I


                                                                                                                      48
know one thing, that if you go into an organization as a rookie and you're at the top the next year or the year after or
whatever, you're going to get killed. You can't do it that way."
         He said, "What's reasonable?
         I said, "Maybe a five-year plan." So we put together a five-year plan that would have me getting various
kinds of experiences and so on along the way, and within a day of that fifth year ending, I was plant manager.
Charnley: Where was that?
Carrigan: That was at Willow Run in Ypsilanti. No, wait a minute. I said that wrong. I was not plant manager
at Willow Run. Willow Run is where I did the five years. The first plant manager assignment was in Atlanta,
Georgia. Then it was at Bay City after that. After I spent time at Bay City, I retired and started my own business,
which I'm doing all over again.
Charnley: So you worked for General Motors while you were on the board?
Carrigan: Yes, and I did not run for a second term for that reason. I could not any longer give the time to it as I
had been accustomed to doing it. I could do my work in Ann Arbor, a good deal of it, at home in the evenings and
on weekends. I was not constrained to be in the office every day. At General Motors, you are in the office every
day unless you're someplace on General Motors business.
         The first thing I had to give up, and the thing that hurt the most, was traveling with the football team.
[Laughter] That first Friday that I wasn't in Lansing at eleven o'clock to get on the bus to go to the airport, I didn't
think that day was ever going to end. That was one of the worst days of my life. [Laughter] I've adjusted a lot
since then.
Charnley: Do you think that your experience on the board helped you in the transition to the corporate world?


                                                                                                                     49
Carrigan: Sure. Sure.
Charnley: In what ways?
Carrigan: Well, in learning about the way people interact in organizations. My work as a classroom teacher
didn't afford me that kind of opportunity. Learning some things about influence and how you need to operate to try
to bring an organization with you, which is how I made my national reputation, because I was good at that. Sure, I
suppose Warren Huff had something to do with that. [Laughter] I'd never say that to him.
Charnley: The lessons learned.
Carrigan: Yes, lessons learned. I think one thing I came to appreciate was that when I came in as a trustee,
universities, like all organizations, had pecking orders that were fairly rigid. There were not lines that were crossed
readily back and forth, so there was not communication back and forth. I saw that very quickly and I saw what
happened when you began to break those barriers down.
          That's what I did uniquely particularly in General Motors. I was in a different kind of position working
mostly with management folks at Bendix, because I was running assessment programs until I became a corner office
manager with a lot of different departments that were having fun and I was just there minding the store. That's not
fair to say that, but you know what I mean.
          The excitement of breaking down barriers and letting people discover that they can do almost anything if
they just want to do it is where it was always about for me, and I learned some of that through Michigan State in my
board capacity, in the salaried area and the closed-meeting area. People didn't want students to sit in on board
meetings. Well, when they started sitting in, Pat Carrigan thought maybe we should have someone who was
officially in the capacity of representing students there, and that other students could go to and filter stuff up.


                                                                                                                       50
           When that came to pass, we had the first students, I don't even remember now, but they were both very
responsible. They came to every meeting, closed or open, unless it was a personnel issue of a particular kind that if
there was a reprimand or a dismissal up for grabs, the student would not attend that. But anything that might
impact their lives, they did.
           It made them understand that they could make a difference. It made board people understand that they
could make a valuable input, you know, and it fit my style, so it was real easy for me. But certainly I got
experience seeing it in action that helped me when I got into a corporate capacity, because corporations were very
stratified. They weren't with me around very long.
           I walked into the Bay City plant the first day I was reporting for duty. No, I wasn't reporting for duty; I
was to be introduced that day. A couple of the people met me at the door from the plant, and my boss was with me
and a couple of other corporate types from Detroit. They said, "We're going to have lunch first. We'll be eating in
the salaried dining room."
           I said, "The what?"
           "The salaried dining room."
           I said, "What is that?" Because in Lakewood plant, we all ate together in the same dining room.
           "Well, that's where the salaried people eat."
           I said, "Where do the other people eat?"
           "Well, they have a cafeteria of their own."
           I said, "Where do you eat?"
           "Well, sometimes we eat in the executive dining room."
           I thought, "Well, another job for Pat." [Laughter] The executive dining room survived for probably four
or five months, but the attendance got poorer and poorer because people were more and more embarrassed to go in
there because I didn't eat there. I ate there sometimes. I ate in the salaried dining room sometimes, and I ate in the
hourly cafeteria sometimes, and I wasn't especially welcomed there. This was a place with prison-type tables with
little fastened-on pie-tin seats, you know, so you couldn't pick up the chair and steal it, and fastened to the floor.


                                                                                                                      51
          We got rid of that in a year, and that plant has the most beautiful cafeteria. It's painted sunshine yellow
and if they still do what they did when I was there, we started populating the walls with life-size photographs of
employees at their work. They would be up for maybe a month at most, maybe two weeks, then the employee
could take it home, and we'd have some new ones up.
          We had a television studio that was very active. The best thing in the world for scotching rumors was to
go to the people and tell them what's happening, you know. We could do that right on the spot, had monitors all
through the plant. We did a lot of good stuff.
Charnley: That's interesting.
Carrigan: I learned the need for that part through my experience on the board. I had a chance to see what
happens when you can't do it or don't do it.
Charnley: Were you surprised when Dr. Wharton left?
Carrigan: No. It was clear that he was not going to be a long-term candidate there. I think people were after
him all the time for other positions, and he had a very distinguished reputation in a lot of areas, was highly regarded
nationally as one of the first prominent blacks to assume a position like that and do it well. I was disappointed that
they left, but I wasn't surprised.
Charnley: The issues of the NCAA investigations happened obviously during your tenure, and your interest as a
football fan. Would you talk a little bit about that? When did you first hear about either the investigation or some
of those circumstances? Anything you can share?


                                                                                                                        52
Carrigan: What everybody else did is my only answer. The years I couldn't tell you. There was a lot of--I'm not
sure where to start with that topic.
          Those are squirrels running on my roof. Don't worry, they don't come in. They sure make a lot of noise.
          I think the beginning of that process that worried me was, of course, there are always rumors about things
that are going on in athletics and so on. I was fairly close to the athletic program when I was on the board because
I had been before. I did travel on the team plane after I won that battle, and that's a story you don't have to hear,
because you're not going to report it, but it was pretty funny after it was over. A concerted effort was made to keep
me from going on the team plane because women were not supposed to go on the team plane. A significant
administrator was at least as instrumental as anybody else in trying to keep me off the team plane, and it backfired
and I went. I went to every game till I went to General Motors.
          There was a lot of division over athletic on the board. There were people who were anti-Duffy. There
were people who were pro-Duffy. I guess [George] "Biggie" Mann was in it, not long enough at that time to be a
major divisive force, but Duffy certainly was. The two Republicans that were on the board then for some reason
were anti-Duffy; I don't know why. There were just a lot of strange things going on that the board never got much
information about.
          I spent quite a bit of time when I was working on faculty salaries, I got interested in the athletic salaries
and staffing because in other Big Ten schools it was very different. Our coaches were paid less. We had fewer
assistant coaches, not just in football but in basketball. We had fewer revenue sports. We had fewer non-revenue
sports. We had just a lot of it. The athletic department was not getting support at that time, and I fussed about that
a bit and made some waves.
          So that brought me in touch with people who were subsequently--I'm sure Jack Breslin was mentioned in
the investigations. He was vice president to whom athletics reported for a while, when I was on the board, anyway,
and in all innocence, I'm sure, had done some things that were not allowed.
          I think it would be fair to say we got little information about the investigation until it really blew up. We
did not know ahead. Until it got to the point where the board had to sit down and make some hard decisions about


                                                                                                                    53
people that were involved, we really didn't get a lot of information. I probably knew a little bit more about some of
the things than some people did because I was in touch with the athletic activity more than most were, but it was
very distressing. It's the kind of thing that's hard to build back from.
          In the same period of time we had a student named Jess Phillips [phonetic], who was a football player that
he's in prison now and has been for years, if he's still alive.
[Begin Tape 3, Side 1]
Carrigan: ...was coming from the university to take him back to campus, to pick him up, and that was when I
learned that you don't go into jail to get somebody out with a personal check. I walked the streets quite a while
finding a place to get a check cashed at night to do that. I learned that women bailing out football players,
especially black football players, if the woman was white, was reason enough to treat the woman very
discourteously and with contempt and suspicion. That was a bad scene. I was only asked to do it once, and I'm
glad.
          The board had to spend a lot of time looking into nasty stuff, looking into dirty laundry, and almost
everybody that had some serious involvement implication-wise, anyway, was somebody on whom members of the
board had divided opinions. So that was not a pleasant thing to go through.
          I think maybe because of that, there was maybe less meddling by the board in that than there might have
been. We had to, of course, oversee the outcome of the investigations and whatnot, but as far as really wanting to
get in--we had one board member that kind of wanted to get the dirty laundry out in the air because he was titillated
by things like that. But most of us were not, and we oversaw the administrative process of the investigation and
tried to keep that line drawn well. We didn't always do that as a board because of some members who liked to
cross that regular line.


                                                                                                                       54
Charnley: The issue of athletics and academics obviously has continued as an important part of the last fifty years
especially, and that push and pull between the trustees and the president and the athletic directors. It seems like
that has been a major theme and has continued.
Carrigan: I think the academics-athletics thing was greatly enhanced by the development of the Clare Smith
facility, and there is some attention to academics there now that didn't use to be.
Charnley: So you see that as a positive?
Carrigan: I do. I very definitely do. Kids come to school to play ball so that they can afford to come to school
sometimes, and I guess that's okay, but if the reason for them being in school is only to play ball, then I think they
don't need to be there. Maybe that's unfair. Maybe some kids' only shot at a good life is to play ball, and if that's
so, then maybe that's all right. But we are, after all, an educational institution in which academics are important.
I've done my turn over the years in doing a little coaching and counseling with kids on academic problems, and I
was a teacher, I had some skills, and I helped out a kid or two here or there to learn something, and tried to explain
some things to them, not a lot, but I used to get asked to do that occasionally. I was glad to do it if I could.
Charnley: After you left the board in 1978, in the 1980s were you involved and in contact with the university at
all?
Carrigan: I was on the Development Fund board in that kind of capacity. But when you work for General
Motors in an executive position, you're working a sixty- to eighty-hour week. I didn't have time to go to football
games, and that should tell you, if you heard what I said earlier, that I was very busy. [Laughter] I would get up
there usually for homecoming or the presidential luncheon or something or other that would be a Presidents Club


                                                                                                                         55
function, I would try to get to, but I frequently could not. It's just been since I've retired that I've been able to do
some things with the university again.
Charnley: The issue of endowment and the university's lack of it at the time when Cliff Wharton came.
Carrigan: That may be one of his most significant contributions, really.
Charnley: Starting there.
Carrigan: Yes.
Charnley: You were involved in the development.
Carrigan: Yes.
Charnley: Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I think there's not a lot on the record yet about his role
and also what happened.
Carrigan: What we were about was developing a Presidents Club which was the first piece of that. I'm not sure,
Jeff, where the Wharton Center began to come into play as a focus for that. It did at some point, obviously. As I
said to you earlier, that was my first exposure to the information that people gave money to universities. I didn't
know that, that that was obviously a desirable thing, as I saw it, for a trustee, who was playing that kind of role at
the university to become one of the supporters, and I quickly made a deferred gift to get Presidents Club status. Of
course, as you know, I've done some things since then.


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           As plans for the Wharton Center began to unfold, the concept, I should say, not the plans for the Center,
but the concept began to unfold, I got kind of excited about that.
           During the time I was on the board I divorced my first husband and moved into Farmington Hills, which
was closer to Bendix than Ann Arbor was. I had an apartment with a long hallway, probably the length at least of
the one I have in this house, with bare white walls. We had very little artwork in the home that I left. It was one
that he designed. He was an architect. A beautiful home. The walls were all walnut-paneled. So we didn't have
a lot of artwork hanging on the walls, and I needed some artwork. So I talked to the head of the art department and
said, "How could I get in touch with some student or faculty work? Because I need to buy some artwork. I'd be
very proud to have some Michigan State artwork."
           I can't think who the guy was at the time, but anyway, whoever it was put together a private art show for
me one week when the board was meeting, in one of the rooms in the Administration Building. Any faculty person
or graduate student, I guess it was, a student that they selected, anyway, that had work they would like to sell could
bring it. And here was this whole gallery for Pat Carrigan to look and pick and choose from.
           The picture over there with the sand dunes and the blue sky, and the big one on this wall over here, were
both done by Stacy Profit [phonetic], and that's one of my all-time favorites. The two silkscreen prints to the left of
it were done by a graduate student and purchased in the same time. I had one done by Irv [Irving] Taran, who I
saw at the luncheon the other day for the first time in years, and he came up and again thanked me for buying one of
his favorite paintings, which I had done years ago. I gifted it to the Art Museum a few years ago because my house
is full of cats.
           Those are the only non-cats anyplace on a wall in here. My walls are full. I keep taking down cats to put
up new cats. I had to make room for Jonathan's picture in my bedroom, on the back of my bedroom door, because I
didn't have any wall space. I have one in the kitchen of our tête-à-tête on his birthday that is just a dear picture. I
have to have that up. That's my surgical team there, and we've got to be really close friends, all three of us. So I
just got blown-up pictures yesterday from Herb Ross, and I've got to get one of those framed and put it up. I just
don't have room on my wall for that, so I had offered it to the museum, not realizing that faculty could not donate


                                                                                                                        57
their own work to the museum because of the possibility of influence. So Irv is very proud to have that hanging
there, and I'm very proud.
Charnley: So you bought it and then you gifted it there.
Carrigan: Yes.
Charnley: That's interesting.
Carrigan: And same thing with the Wharton Center. The model for that building was done by L______. I have
trouble with his name. I have a denture that I'm not used to yet. But it was done on a chrome base and a chrome
backing, and the model, the sculpture, you know, that you see up front, that was one of the things that was for sale.
It was not designed for the Wharton Center, but it was one of the things that was for sale at that little art show that
was put together for just Pat Carrigan. It grabbed me. I really liked it, and I bought it and I had it for years. I had
it after I came here, sitting where that cabinet is now attached, that's full of cats, on a black base. It's a very unusual
piece. You know the sculpture, I'm sure.
Charnley: Yes.
Carrigan: Again, I was running out of space. My cat collection was driving me out of house and home, if you
will. I thought, well, that is something that should go to the university some day. There wasn't even a plan to do
that. So I talked to--what's her name at the museum? I'm getting forgetful with names. Susan. And said, "I
have this in my collection. I need to make space and relocate it someplace else. I want it to come to the museum
eventually if you want it." Well, they wanted it, of course, so that's at the museum now.


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         So I've been able to contribute in some other ways than money, and that piece especially should never get
away. Of course, they didn't know it was going to be that kind of a piece when they let me buy it. This sounds
unbelievable. I think I paid $250 for it. Look what it is, you know.
Charnley: Your support for the School of Music, you're interested in that. Obviously that was longstanding.
Carrigan: Yes.
Charnley: Would you talk a little bit about how that came about?
Carrigan: Well, I think that goes back to my clarinet-playing days. I've always loved music. I'm trying to think
how I first got connected with Jim Forger. I was invited to some--of course, Elsa I had met when I was on the
board. Elsa Verdehr was the one who talked to me about faculty salaries of women in the School of Music. But I
can't remember now how I got connected with Jim Forger.
         Anyway, I've always gone to an occasional concert if I could. I did when I was on the board. Probably
that board time stimulated that as much as anything because Ken Bloomquist was director of the band at that time.
I'm a great marching band fan, even though most of my activity now is not marching band director, that's largely
because so many other people are supporting the marching band. That was my first thought when I thought about a
music scholarship, was marching band, and I found out they have probably 50,000 of them. [Laughter] That isn't
where the need is. The next one came up real easy in the woodwind area, because they had none.
         I think it probably is because I played, I enjoyed music, I played in the orchestra in junior high and the
band as well, and in high school I just played in the band, but we did symphonic concerts in the band, you know. I
just have always liked that.
         When I was on the board, I had a very strong thing about commencement that came out of my own
doctoral commencement, which, as I told you, was a rather emotional occasion because it was so soon after


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Kennedy's death and Willard Wirtz was the speaker. But there was a regent at Michigan at the time by the name of
Irene Murphy, and she was the only woman on the platform at commencement, and that impressed me that a woman
was on the platform, because those guys were all men, you know. At that time I was just thinking, well, that's a
nice thing. I don't think it ever crossed my mind at that time that maybe I would look at doing something like that
some day. But when I went up on stage to be hooded, she got up from her chair and came over and shook my
hand, congratulated me personally, and that made a real impression on me.
          When I became a trustee, I said to myself, "One thing I'm always going to do is go to commencement, and
I'm going to be sure especially at the graduate commencements that if there is a woman candidate there, I will
personally congratulate her." And I never missed a commencement. When you go to commencement, one of the
nicest things that you do while you're there is get to listen to the band perform or the orchestra. So at least three or
four times a year I had an opportunity to be close to our music department's products in that capacity.
          So the board service has done an awful lot for Pat Carrigan. People will say the reverse, and I'm pleased
that they do, but it's a two-way street. It's kind of like a friendship or a marriage, you know; you put something into
it, you get twice as much out, I'm convinced. The music scholarship certainly that's true of.
          Anyway, I guess it was at the time that I began--it was after I retired from GM. No, it was before I retired
from GM, for some reason I began thinking about my mortality. I don't know what it was. But it occurred to me,
that--well, it probably was partly because I did very well with GM, I made good money with GM, I had bonuses
that were bigger than my salary, and I don't have a family. I have two cousins. My parents died during the
eighties. I didn't want to just let things sit in limbo.
          I wanted to make some plans, and the first thing, of course, was to think about doing something for the
feline variety, since it was my favorite thing. I endowed a fund that is now named the Mouse Fund, but it was
originally named the Pat Carrigan Fund for Feline Health, which supports faculty research. It was renamed the
Mouse Fund at the suggestion of the vet school last year after my cat died. My cat was named Mouse. Everybody
there knew her. They came to her birthday parties here every year. They had a luncheon honoring her when she


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died. A bronze plaque was made with her likeness on it, which will hang in the Feline Reception Center when it
has real estate. It's now hanging in an office. Mouse was a pretty special kitty to a lot of people.
          Anyway, that was a suggestion that was made, that the Feline Health Fund be renamed the Mouse Fund
because when I endowed the chair, there was some room for some confusion, the Pat Carrigan Chair, the Pat
Carrigan Fund, which was what. So there is now officially a Mouse Fund.
Charnley: Interesting story.
Carrigan: So that, of course, was the first thing I did. The development person involved early on was somebody
named Marge Gerlack [phonetic], who's been gone for a long time from the university, but she brought Dr.
Schirmer [phonetic] up to me when he was quite ill, he'd had a stroke and recovered somewhat, but he came up to
see the small collection I had of cat things at the time. That was about the time the First Companion Animal Fund
was established at the vet school, and I was a donor to that. Then I endowed a fund of my own later on.
          That, of course, was my initial venture after a commitment to the Wharton Center, which I did make when
that became available for funding. I had a personal stake in that because of having worked with Cliff, and that was
my first gift to the university, I think.
Charnley: Do you attend concerts and things there regularly?
Carrigan: Do you see that young man there? [Jonathan Brickham]
Charnley: That's right.
Carrigan: Do I attend concerts. Does the sun shine sometimes in the winter? I had a goal for this year which
I'm not going to make; I wanted to attend every concert, every performance that he is in. That would be a large


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number, because he plays in five groups, plus he will do a private recital this year again, as he did last year. I don't
mean a private one, but a solo recital.
          Next week I'll go to Lansing for a concert Friday night, I'll go back up Sunday for another one, and I would
be going mid-week except that my birthday is next week and people have made plans for me that would interfere
with the concert. But the Verdehrs [Elsa and Walter] are doing another concert, and I know them both real well
and would like to go.
          If it weren't for--and don't publish this or I'll kill you--
Charnley: You want me to stop the recorder?
Carrigan: No. If it weren't for this house full of cats--and these all go to the MSU Museum when I'm gone, the
collection goes--it's going to be a massive job for somebody to catalog it, because I am never going to get it done
unless I get some help. The last time Val [R.] Berryman was here with [C.] Kurt Dewhurst, they both said, "You
have got to get some help to do this, and we have to get you some." Well, I appreciate that, and I think if I bug
them, maybe they would, but I don't have time. [Laughter] So that's kind of sitting. But I cannot move
this--before you leave, I'll just make you walk through the house quickly, you'll see what I mean. I cannot move
this collection. I am going to live here until I die, or I'm going to have the university talked into taking it away
sooner so I can move.
          If I could do that--and I don't want to do it now because I don't want to live without my collection around
me, but if I were to do that, I would move back to Lansing. I'm there a lot. I was there three different days last
week. I missed a concert Tuesday night because I couldn't make a fourth trip up there last week. But I was up
there all day Thursday and I was up there Friday part of the day, I was up there Monday part of the day, and I love
being around the campus. I love that place, I really do. But I can't move.


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Charnley: In looking back on your experience as a board member and also as a student, almost sixty years we're
talking, is there anything that stands out as maybe most important? I know that's a tough question for someone
that's been associated with the--
Carrigan: It's too vague to answer. Can you be a little more specific?
Charnley: You mentioned maybe a little bit about this issue of perfection and thinking about how you were
influenced in that early time. Maybe you've already answered that question.
Carrigan: I think I've answered that one, but I'd never answered it before. Your question provoked me to
thinking. I'm sure there are other factors involved in that, but the psychologist in me says that when you perceive a
distance between yourself and the goal, the closer you get to the goal, the stronger the pressure is to get to it. I
know that psychologically there's a name for it, called the Zygarnic [phonetic] Effect. Maybe I latched onto that
because of that experience I had. I don't know.
          The university, to me, Jeff--and I don't even know if I can put this into words--it has an aura about it that I
have not ever found on any other campus. It's probably partly because of the time I went there. It was small.
When I stand on the steps of the Music Building, I have just an enormous nostalgia. I never studied in the Music
Building, but the circle and what's enclosed in it is so precious, it almost has a life. I love the place, and I get very
emotional about it, as you can probably tell.
          Music is part of that. I never participated as a performer in music on the campus, but I have had more
pleasure as a result of that young man [Jonathan Brickham] and the scholarship that he has than probably with any
single thing I could identify in my life, the things that that has brought to me. Anybody that needs to persuade
somebody that there is something in it for you if you do something for a university, needs to be sent to talk to me,
and I will talk to them for days. I could go on with a list forever. I have made friendships I would never have
made in any other way. I get invited to things, of course. You do that whenever you give money. But I'm talking


                                                                                                                       63
about the rewards that matter, and the money is not that. That kid and I will be close all of my life, and it's a
wonderful thing, you know.
Charnley: Benefits for the benefactor.
Carrigan: Yes. That was my first donor organization. Well, after the Presidents Club. But I think every time I
go to a concert I meet somebody I didn't know before and I see somebody I met at the last one that is now a friend.
          The athletic connection is not really there anymore. When Duffy left, Denny Stoltz took over and Denny
came to me for help with a couple of things, to ask my help with a couple of things, the first one being to support
him for coach. [Laughter] And I did. I knew Denny when he was assistant coach, and he got into some trouble.
I don't know a lot about that because I was not really a part of the discussions about it. But then we got into a
different era in athletics and some connections between board members and a coach that were maybe less than
honorable, and there's still some residue from that being resolved, I think.
          I kind of got divorced from the athletic picture per se, but in a curious way I have come into it again, and
this is definitely not for publication because it doesn't have any bearing on what we're talking about. But Herb
Ross was my surgeon. Herb Ross is the team physician and head of sports medicine for the university and for the
intercollegiate athletics department and on the faculty of the osteopathic medicine college.
          The curiosity about it is that I've known his name for years. I never connected him with anything to do
with me, and I never met him. But I had mentioned Gwen Norella to you earlier as somebody who was involved in
the Detroit Project, helping the inner-city kids get adjustment at Michigan State. In her connection in athletics, she
was Big Ten faculty rep for years, the first woman to do that, and was just inducted into the Hall of Fame a couple
of weeks ago, the Michigan Hall of Fame. I think she's the second woman, maybe, to be inducted. She and Herb
had a lot of contact because of their mutual association with athletics, so she knew him very well.
          When I had a problem with my knee that needed some attention, I had seen two orthopedic surgeons here
over a period of a few years, and I knew I was going to have to have knee replacement and I wanted to talk to


                                                                                                                     64
somebody that was state of the art about knees. So I started putting out feelers. Lonnie King [phonetic] in the vet
school, I said, "I know you interface with a lot of people who are vets, and your vets interface with people that aren't
vets. I'm looking for somebody I can talk to." And I talked to a variety of people at Michigan State mostly, but a
couple at University of Michigan. The name that kept coming up was Herb Ross, and I thought, well, I'd better talk
to this man, I guess.
          I mentioned to Gwen I was going to do it. She said, "I know Herb. He is a wonderful, wonderful
person." And she told me something about her association with him. Gwen's a very dear friend. She's
eighty-two now and she has cancer and she's not going to be with us probably too much longer, but she's still baking
cookies. She is a fighter. She's been, in a sense, a role model for me. We have different interests and so on, but
we're very close. I look at her and say, "If I can be that good ten years from now, I'm going to be great." So in a
sense, she's a role model.
          But she had things to say about Herb that told me a little bit about him. I would know if she thought he
was a great person, that he was kind, I would know that he was bright, I would know that he was honest, a whole lot
of qualities that I value.
          So I went to see him and I spent probably an hour, an hour and a half in his office being tested and
measured and X-rayed and all that kind of stuff. At the end of that time he sat down with me, looked me in the eye
and said, "I can fix your leg," and I knew that he could. I'm not somebody that doesn't challenge. I'm not
somebody that doesn't question. I'm a bit of a skeptic, and I don't have the highest regard for the way most doctors
treat patients. I knew he could fix it because he said it, and I knew I could believe that. Now, some of it is I knew
he was an honest man from Gwen, but there's something about that man that just tells you the kind of person he is.
          Of course, everybody says state of the art for knee, talk to Herb Ross. So he was my surgeon as of that
moment, and we have gotten to be, as a result of my bad knee and the surgery, which was then in August, we have
gotten to be very close friends, along with the young man in the picture, who is another MSU D.O., graduated,
best-looking guy you'll ever see. This is the worst picture of him I could show you, but he is really a handsome


                                                                                                                        65
young man, with three little girls, three, four, and five, that he reads to every night, and they're hooked on J-Cat.
Herb's granddaughter, Samantha, is hooked on J-Cat, and so is Herb. [Laughter] It's just curious.
         So I hear things about athletics, you know, from Herb once in a while, now the latest one being a grumble
not about athletics, but that for the first time in twenty-five years--this is not your typical athletic person, you know,
quote, unquote--the last twenty-five years he has always sung in "The Messiah." This year the team meetings are
on the night of "The Messiah" rehearsals, and he is not going to be able to sing in "The Messiah," and he's very
distressed about it. He loves music, too.
Charnley: I want to thank you on behalf of the project for your insights and your candid views.
Carrigan: You're certainly welcome. I've talked your arm off, but that's what you came for, so I won't apologize.
Charnley: That's right. Thank you very much.
Carrigan: You're certainly welcome, and it's been nice to get to know you.
[End of interview]


                                                            66
                                                      Index
Adams, Walter 16, 23
Bangree, Ellsworth 24, 26
Bendix 51, 54
Berryman, Val R. 67
Bickham, Jonathan 22, 45
Bishop, David 17
Bloomquist, Ken 63
Breslin, Jack 57
Brickham, Jonathan 46-49, 61, 66, 68
Bruff, John B. 23
Cantlon, John 41
Carrigan, Mouse 46, 47, 65
Clark, Harold 18
Daugherty, Duffy 16, 19-21, 23, 57, 68
Detroit Project 18, 69
Dewhurst, C. Kurt 67
Forger, James 46, 48, 63
General Motors 51, 53, 54, 59
Gerlack, Marge 65
Hannah, John A. 9
Hartman, Frank 27, 42
Huff, Warren M. 32, 34-37, 43, 53
Jones, Sara Van Heusen 30
Kellogg Center 31
Kennedy, John F. 14
Kennedy, John F. assassination 15
King, Lonnie 69
King, Martin Luther, Jr. 17
Mann, George "Biggie" 57
Martin, Blanche 33, 35, 36
Merriman, Frank 32, 35-39
Michigan State University
Abortion issue 39
Alumni Association 17, 23
Board of Trustees 16, 23, 27, 30-32, 35-37, 53, 54, 56-58
Campus in 1965 20
Coed living on campus 27
Development Fund 59


                                                      67
Faculty salary issue 40, 41, 42, 44
Faculty unionization 42
First Companion Animal Fund 66
Grape boycott issue 39
Lettuce boycott issue 39
Mouse Fund 65
NCAA investigations 56
Olin Memorial Health Center 39
Presidents Club 34, 60
School of Music 44, 63
Spartan football 19-21
Spring Sing 7
Student activism 37
Student enrollment 1
Student representation on board of trustees 37, 54
Milliken, William 29
Mouse Fund 65
Norella, Gwen 69, 70
Pat Carrigan Fund for Feline Health 65
Phillips, Jess 58
Profit, Stacy 61
Ross, Herb 62, 69, 70
Smidrun, _______ 43
Smith, Clare 59
Smith, Donald E.P. 2
Stees, Barrick R. 46
Stein, Keith 22
Sterns, Troy 8
Stevens, Don 23, 29, 31, 33-36
Stoltz, Denny 68
Taran, Irving 61
Thompson, Ken 27, 35, 37-39
Thompson, Sylvia 20
Union Building 6, 14
Verdehr, Elsa 43, 63, 66
Verdehr, Walter 66
Vincent Voice Library 44
Ward, Barbara 37
Wharton Center for Performing Arts 33, 34, 60, 62, 66
Wharton, Clifton R., Jr. 32-34, 37, 56, 60
Wharton, Dolores 33, 34, 56
White, Clare 35, 36
Wilkinson, Roger 30


                    68
Williams, Mennon 32
Wilson, Matilda 30
Young, Coleman 26