UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #216
RUTH B. DOYLE

DOYLE, Ruth B.  (1916- )
Undergraduate Student; Assistant to Dean of Law School
At UW: 1934-38; 1961-79

Interviewed: 1982	
Length: 2 hours, 30 minutes

[See Index for Key Words]

Background
Ruth Bachhuber Doyle was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1916. She attended the University of Wisconsin and received her B.A. in 1938; then went to Columbia University for an M.A. in history and education. In 194 0 she married James E. Doyle (who later became Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District, Wisconsin). They spent the war years in Washington D.C. where he worked as a law clerk in the Supreme Court and served in the Navy, and she held a variety of wartime jobs. They returned to Madison in 1947.  In 1948 Ruth Doyle was elected to the State Assembly. She served two terms, from 1949 to 1953. She then ran for and was elected to the Dane County Board on which she served for seven years. In 1963 she was elected to the Madison Board of Education, and she held that post until 1972.
In 1961 Mrs. Doyle became Assistant Dean of Women at the University of Wisconsin. She worked with the Faculty Committee on Human Rights, which was concerned with cases of racial discrimination. Later she began to work with minority students, recruiting students to come to the UW, and working with students once they came. She founded and directed what came to be known as the Five-Year Program, which began in 1965. In 1969, at the time of the black student strike, she was forced to resign from this job, but in later years she has been honored by minority alumni groups for her work on their behalf.
In 1969 she started working in the Law School as financial aids director, pre-law students' advisor, and editor and publisher of the Gargoyle, the Law School's alumni quarterly. She retired from that job in 1979. Among her many other activities in retirement, she has been working with a group of volunteers to develop a collection of oral history interviews with Madison residents about earlier years in Madison. In 1985 an endowed professorship, anonymously funded, was set up in the Law School in honor of Ruth and James Doyle.
This interview was conducted by Donna DH in 1982 for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives Oral History Project. The Oral History Project is indebted to Doris Wallsch of the Law School staff for undertaking to have the interview transcribed, and to Kathleen Kaap for doing the transcribing and making the corrections. Mrs. Doyle has looked through and lightly edited the transcript.
-	Laura Smail, Madison, Wis., October 1986

Interview Session (1982)
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:03	Start of Interview
DH:	 It would be nice to sort of start at the beginning.  Tell me something about your early background and education.
RD:	 O.K. I grew up in Wisconsin.  My ancestors on all sides came from Germany and Ireland in the early 1840s and settled in Milwaukee and in the southeastern part of the state.  That's where my forebears are located in the various cemeteries around the town of Erin or Mayville, Wisconsin.  My mother was Irish and my father German, and that was a natural combination in those days because of the mingling of these two groups of people.  But I grew up most of my life in Wausau, Wisconsin.  My father was a lawyer –
00:00:55
	--and I came to the University as a freshman in 1934, and for several of years my two brothers and I were all here at the same time.  Things were cheaper then and more possible. And I value my college education more highly than any other part of my life, I think.  Those four years stand out in my memory more vividly than any of the rest of the other sixty-one years of my life.  This university suited me just fine and I think I got as much out of it, curricular and extra-curricular, as I possibly could.
00:02:03
DH: 	What did you study?
RD:	I was a history major and after I graduated I spent one year and a summer school at Columbia Teachers College. I got a masters degree in history and education and a teachers license.  Education has been my interest always. And when I was in politics like in the legislature I was on the education committee.  My last political experience was for nine years on the Madison Board of Education and in between those experiences I taught a couple of years which gave me an undying admiration for the hard work that teachers do.  It was just a never-ending burden which I found extremely strenuous, and gave up because it was too strenuous.  But education—and then of course I worked for twenty years for the University—has been my main interest.
00:02:55
DH: 	Getting back to college—we’ll go into those other things in more detail, but before we do, you mentioned extra-curricular activities also when you were in college.  What interested you there?
RD:	 I was interested in politics, in the student body. I was elected to the Board of Control of the Daily Cardinal which wound up my college career in a slam-bang fashion with a strike on the Cardinal.
00:03:28
DH: 	Will you tell me about that?
RD:	Well, it was a very important experience, and a very important issue.  The strike was a question of anti-Semitism and I was president of the board.  And in those days, on the Cardinal, the old board would elect a new editor and then retire and a new board took over the next day.  This time, in my senior year, we elected for the second time in a row a Jewish editor and we had been told that if another Jew was elected editor, there would be a major ruckus.  But we chose what we thought to be the best qualified person who happened to be Jewish.  And he took office at a banquet one night and the next day the new board came in and fired him which left the old board, of which I was the president, in a position of participating heavily in a staff strike of the Cardinal which lasted six weeks.  We published a strike Cardinal every day out at the East Side News—Mr.  Marshall Brown—it was an issue which was widely covered in the press all over the country because the subject was so sensitive.  We split the faculty down the middle.  We made a schism between Selig Perlman and Edwin Witte who had been friends for fifty years. Mr. Witte's son was on the new Cardinal board that fired the editor.  Well, it was a profound effect, and it was very, very tense.  The Silver Shirts, Nazi groups, offered to come to work with our opponents during the struggle and it had to be solved.  In those days, Parents Weekend was a very important occasion and the president Mr. Dykstra, who was new in Madison at that time, thought that we could not have a strike go on into Parents Weekend.  And we had planned for our stockholders’ meeting.  We were getting proxies signed.  The stockholders were getting all the students in the University and we had proxies that were signed for about 4,200 for our stockholders’ meeting which we were going to have at the Field House, which could have been just a disaster.  
00:06:20
	So, Mr. Dykstra took firm hold and asked Dean Garrison, who was one of the great corporation lawyers in the United States and dean of the Law School, to redraw the articles of incorporation of the Daily Cardinal to arrange for the election—to vacate the old corporation—arrange for an election of the new board. And when that event occurred, we lost—our side lost by twenty-six votes.  I say twenty-six, it might be 260 votes in the largest student election that the campus had ever had.  So, that was the end of it.  But the experience itself, I think, is one that we all treasure. Fannie Taylor, Bob Taylor, well, many, many people who are in Madison now were important parts of that effort.  And it was an education that you could not have gotten in any other way.
DH: 	Must have been.  Must have been.  This was sort of a precursor of later discrimination problems, wasn’t it?
RD:	Yes.  And much more serious in many ways.  This was before the World War II—the Nazi movements were springing up all over the world in various places.  We never thought we would see them here, but when the issue was drawn it was very clear.  There was no question; the motive for the firing of Richard Davis was that he was Jewish.
DH: 	He was never reinstated?
RD:	 Never reinstated, no. And the Cardinal went on.  Everybody lived through it.
DH: 	Yes.  It certainly did.  
00:08:23
	Well, how soon after completing your schooling did you start teaching?
RD:	Well, I taught.  I took one year out to get a graduate degree in New York.  Then I taught one year at Lake Mills—'39 and '40.  And my teaching career had that year and two other years later.  It is the dimmest part of my career.  I did not feel I was a success in any way, but after one year of teaching, while my husband finished law school, we were married and that altered plans.
DH: 	Changed your plans a little?
RD:	Oh, yes.  Although we had made plans for years. But in those days, you didn't get married if you weren't through school and you didn't have a job.  I would never have gone to my father and said, "I want to get married and I expect you to support me."  You just didn't do that.
DH: 	A lot of that changed during the war, I think, where people did not necessarily finish their schooling before they were married.
RD:	Yes.  Everybody was leaving, and I’d had that experience along with everybody else.  I went home and had my baby in Wausau.  All my friends were there and we were a large, baby-buggy brigade.  These were girls that I had grown up with.  They were all home, or most of us were home again with our babies.
DH: 	This was during the war?
RD:	 During the war, yes.
DH: 	That changed a lot of people's lives, I guess. 
00:10:00
	Well, I am aware that you did some work for the government during the war.  How did that fit in with having babies?
RD:	 Well, it was all pre-baby, of course.  No matter what the war did to change the prejudices and difficulties of women, they were as great then as they had been before and since.  I had a hard time finding a good job in Washington after we were married.  I did wind up for a while as the only person in the patents department of the Alien Property Custodian's Office, and for a few heady weeks I actually licensed American firms to use German and Hungarian patents that had been seized by the government, not knowing anything about what I was doing. But fortunately, they got a good staff organized around me and then I went back to doing what I was able to do—write a few press releases and a little report and help out with a speech now and then.
DH: 	That is sort of different activity, isn't it? How long did this last?
RD:	 Not very long.  About a year.  My husband was in the Navy and I went to Wausau and had my baby.  We went back to Washington in 1944 and stayed there.  And Jim then worked at the White House and for the Secretary of State and we lived there for another couple years.  But I was always very homesick.  Everybody in Washington was from somewhere else and I was very anxious to get back.  I was glad that we promptly made the break and came to Madison to live.
00:12:03
DH: 	What was your husband doing in the White House?
RD:	 Well, he had been the law clerk to Justice James Byrnes on the Supreme Court.  Then when Mr. Byrnes left to go to the White House to be War Mobilizer, Jim went overseas, but then he came back and worked for Byrnes. And then after Roosevelt's death when Truman was president, Byrnes became Secretary of State.  So Jim had a couple of marvelous years.
DH: 	So he continued working for him?
RD:	 Yes.  He went to the peace conferences in Paris and he had a wonderful time.  I stayed home with a couple of little kids.
00:12:42
DH: 	You told me something the other day about going to the White House.  Can you tell me about that occasion?
RD:	Well, that was another heady experience that happened in 1940 in the fall.  During the campaign for Roosevelt's third term, I volunteered my services at the Democratic National Committee Women's Division where I was kind of a typist and stranger.  But that only lasted for a couple of weeks.  On the day after the election in 1940, we watched Mrs.  Roosevelt.  We were standing in the streets to watch her go in the big open car that they used up to the Union Station and come back with the President who had been at Hyde Park for the election.  And we saw that. Then I went over to Woodward and Lothrop where I worked as a clerk in the Better Dresses.  I say teaching was the worst part of my career, I think being a clerk was my least talent.  But anyway I had this note to call the White House.  Of course everybody was agog, including me. But they invited me that night to a party at the White House for the staff of the Democratic National Committee. And when I got there, there were only twenty people, and we got to meet the president, and as I told you the other day, I just happened to be pushing the wheel chair of a very bright and able woman who had worked for the National Committee.  Of course the president found in her a kindred soul and she stopped.  He had a long conversation with her and I was in on it.
DH: 	Because you were pushing the chair?
RD:	Because I just happened to push the chair, which is really one of my treasured memories.  But of course, I was like a lot of other people.  I simply adored him and it comes very much to my mind as we celebrate his hundredth birthday this year.
00:14:55
DH: 	Had your family been Democrats?
RD:	Always.  For four generations.  My great grandfather, my grandfather, and my father were all members of the Wisconsin Legislature, and so I was, too.
DH: 	That is quite a tradition.
RD:	Yeah, it really is.  I have a daughter that is making noises now about running for the legislature. In many ways I hope she doesn't do it.
DH: 	Why do you hope she doesn't?
RD:	Well, I hope for the same reason my mother hoped I would never do such things, she has two children and she works very hard.  She has a career and lives in Milwaukee, and I think she's got too much to do.  This ought to be stricken from here.  Don't want anybody to hear that I am talking about my daughter and organizing her life for her.  She would have a fit.  My mother was tactful. She never said anything.
00:15:55
DH: 	Well, then your husband and you did come back to Wisconsin.
RD:	Uh-huh. And we chose Madison. He worked for the federal government for a year. He was Assistant United States Attorney for year or two when we first came back, and then he became one of the founding partners of LaFollette, Sinykin, and Doyle. And that’s where he served for eighteen years – worked for eighteen years - before he was appointed to the bench.  And during that time was my political time. 
[Phone rings, break in tape]
00:16:31
DH: 	You were saying that this was the period of time when you did your political work.
RD:	Yes, I was very active.  And the Democratic Party was just beginning to emerge and there were a number of us that devoted a great deal of time to it.  And it was our social life, our family life, our friendships were among them. And now as we are older looking back on it, it was a great period when we were just getting started.
DH: 	Who were some of these people?
RD:	Well, Gaylord and Carrie Lee Nelson, and Pat Lucey, Marion and Hoss Wilke, Tom and Eleanor Fairchild. There were lots of us.  Many judges now.  Many former this-or-thats because we are all getting older.  But it was a wonderful period.  
00:17:28
	I had found myself—when I was in the legislature, I was elected by surprise.  Of course we all were in 1948.
DH: 	What do you mean by surprise?
RD:	We were not expected to win, and it was when Truman was not expected to win.
DH: 	Oh, I remember that.
RD:	None of us were expected to get anywhere.  I was quite appalled when I discovered I had been elected to the legislature.  I had three pre-school children and I really hadn't counted on having a political career.
DH: 	You’d campaigned, hadn't you?
RD:	Yes, and I enjoyed that.  Campaigning was lots of fun.  Holding office was always more difficult than getting around talking to people.  But Gaylord was elected to the state senate and I was elected to the assembly.  There was no polling in those days so the results were truly a surprise.  There was no -- the only poll we had was at the senior high schools, and that showed that Truman was carrying Madison. And we thought that was because he had been here and kids had seen him and were all excited about having him here.
DH:	He had been here?
RD:	He came, yeah.  And we never thought it had any greater significance than that.  So we were all elected. I don't think partisan politics is as much fun now as it was then.  Once you have a lot of successful candidates, the office holders running for reelection, the party disintegrates.  You have a Kastenmeier group and a Nelson group and a Lucey group, or whatever.  And all the fun of that whole unified experience is sort of gone. Carl Thompson ran for governor then and came very close to winning, although whether you can believe it or not, my husband managed that campaign.
DH: 	Carl Thompson campaign?
RD:	Yes, in 1948. And our total expenditure for the whole campaign was $5,000.
DH: 	Oh my goodness.

RD:	And he almost won.  That is what gave us kind of hope.  But later on I found that I had a rather independent turn of mind and I really did not enjoy the partisan—I didn't have enough loyalty, or commitment maybe, to be able to go into a caucus and do what they told me to do with a majority of the Democrats.  When I was elected to the legislature there were twenty-four Democrats.  That was up from twelve from the year before.  And among those were Patrick Lucey, who was a stranger in town and he was elected at the same time I was—and Bill Duffy from Green Bay, Tom Taylor from Racine—we had a little group of young people.
DH: 	Was Lucey in the assembly?
RD:	In the assembly, yes.  Just served one term and then he ran for Congress in the third district.  The second term that I was in, Bill Proxmire reared up and became a member of the legislature.  He had defeated a very respectable, elderly Democratic farmer from Sun Prairie, John Blaska, and he had done it by going door-to-door.  He talked to every voter in the whole district and he was a stranger to everybody.  But he won, and of course that became an interesting political history.
DH:	Do you recall any particular issues that came up when you were in the assembly?
RD:	Well, we were generally just sort of a thorn in people's sides, I think.  As I say, I was interested in education and I have served on the Education Committee and that was my main occupation.  It was the reorganization of school districts in which we virtually abolished the little one-room school district in Wisconsin.  Cut the number of districts from 4,000 and some to 300, I think.  And in those days, in that first or second term, it was the first time that the state budget went over $200 million and everybody was appalled—and of course now we are talking about four and a half billion dollars.  It's a whole different world.  But then we had also a lot of procedural problems that we worked on.  Reapportionment—the state hadn't been reapportioned since 1920 although the Constitution required it—so we were agitating.  We were not strictly successful there for a couple of years. Finally there was a law suit, I think, that brought it about.  And the Supreme Court of the United States one man-one vote decisions made a difference too.  I don't feel that I have had any great, terrific success.  
00:23:07
	There had only been a few women on the legislature before that and for many years before I came there had been none.  When I was elected there was a woman from Chippewa Falls, Sylvia Raihle, who became a good friend.  She was a Republican lady and she served three terms.  I served two.  So she was a comfort to me, but I didn't mind being the only one. A few incidents would occur, of course.  One time I was fleeing from a call on the house—that is when they bring everybody in and lock the doors, make you stay for some political purpose.  This had to do with General MacArthur's return from Korea, as you remember, I ran to hide in the women's room.  That required that the male sergeant-at-arms come walking into the ladies' room.  It was about noon on a certain day and the women were going out to lunch.  Lot of women workers.  They were just appalled, everybody was frozen with fright when Norris Kellman came into the women's room.  That was the result.  
00:24:32
	This is an interesting feminist battle which I waged on behalf of a young woman who was a law student who wanted to be on the sergeant-at-arms staff.  And those are the people that run errands, carry messages, set up meeting rooms, do all that kind of work around.  This young woman was turned down because she was a woman.  And there had never been a woman on the sergeant-at-arms staff and so there was a great to-do.  Again, one of my losing battles.  They had retired men.  They had men with physical disabilities, epileptics, and one thing and another.  Old men working as sergeants. But a woman, they said, couldn't carry a typewriter, couldn't run an errand like that.  So, that battle was lost and of course, ultimately, won.  It was a big to-do. My running into the ladies' room was partly to demonstrate that they needed a lady on the sergeant-at-arms staff, but it turns out they didn't.  A man could do a woman's work, but a woman couldn't do a man's work.  At that time it was decided there were two places in state service where women were not to work: one was in the Central State Hospital for the criminally insane and the other was the legislature, which was not safe, they felt.  And I don't know.  Maybe it wasn't.  I never had any problem, but a younger girl conceivably would, from what we hear now about legislators.
00:26:22
DH: 	Yes, of course.  Well, you only did two terms. Is that because you chose not to run?
RD:	I chose not to run in 1952. I'm not just sure why. But I was kind of tired of it.  And I also was interested in the campaign in 1952 which was the big Eisenhower-Stevenson-McCarthy-Fairchild year in 1952. It was very important.  I ran for state treasurer that year which gave me an opportunity to travel all over the whole state and participate in that campaign.  I enjoyed it very much.  Mrs.  Fairchild and I went together.  We were out for six weeks.  We would come home Friday nights, but we were traveling all that time and we had a very interesting experience.  But of course, we lost the election which was to be expected.  I've lost twice.  That was one of them. My life has always been so full and I never really was terribly troubled if I didn't win what I was after. I think one of the problems with me as a politician—I think of a lot of people—is that I never could be persuaded that I was the only one that could do something.  That was Mr. Stevenson's problem too.  He used to say, I remember—we were good friends—"Hubert Humphrey is a fine man. Wouldn't he make an excellent president?"  He could never believe that he was the only person in the world that was suited for that job.  And I certainly had that feeling too about my legislative duties.  I felt it was time for me to do something else.
00:28:14
DH: 	Well, you went out and did do something else. Is this when you became a member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors?
RD:	Yes, in 1953. And I was on there for seven years.
DH: 	How did you happen to do that?
RD:	Well, the person in our ward was just not going to run again and I was told about this and asked if I would permit my name to go in at the last minute.  Nobody knew that the incumbent wasn't going to run except the incumbent and his managers.  So I went in five minutes before the filing date with my papers and turned out to be the only one.  It was kind of a tricky little thing to do, but I was elected and then I was reelected two more times, and I resigned from the county board when we moved out of the ward, the thirteenth ward.  But that was an interesting experience and I was the only woman all that time.  I think everybody forgot I was a woman, although all of the messages to the board—all reports for that seven year period—start out “Mrs. Doyle and Gentlemen.”  Because all that time I was the only woman there. And during that time I became pregnant with Anne, went through a very long pregnancy—she came about three weeks later than I thought she was supposed to arrive—and it worked out that I never missed a meeting of the board or a committee meeting either before or after her birth in 1954. But nobody noticed.  Nobody said a word.  And in fact the chairman of the board—that was 1954, the year my husband ran for governor in the Democratic primary, so there were pictures of the family around various places—said to me that he had seen our family pictures somewhere.  I said that that was not the whole family.  He said but what do you mean?  He said, "You have a baby?  When did you have a baby?"  I said about three weeks ago.  I had been contributing all those years, several years, to the flower fund.  We all put in a dollar so that when anyone goes to the hospital they get a bouquet of flowers from the board. Nobody ever sent me any flowers or paid any attention to the fact that I had a baby.  I think really truly I sort of fit into the woodwork there.
DH:	Sounds like it.
RD:	Yes.  My colleagues simply did not notice. Nobody was ever very restrained about me.  I had taken a lot of abuse various places, public and private.  So it wasn't that they were embarrassed to talk about the baby. They just didn't know.
DH:	That’s funny. What were your responsibilities on the board?
RD:	I was secretary of everything. I remember Jim saying those days that women's rights will be established when the woman does not have to be the secretary of every committee. But I was on the Public Health Committee, Public Welfare --
00:31:40	End of Tape 1, Side 1
[Subsequent portion of interview is not included on audio file.]
	--and then my largest duty was as a member of the Judiciary Committee which has many responsibilities on the county board.
DH: 	Such as?
RD:	One that I remember is dog claims.  If a dog attacks a neighbor's cows or other animals and kills them—dogs unknown—they file dog claims.  And we had to listen to those cases and then we would allot so many dollars from a special fund to replace Mr. Smith's cow that was bitten by dog unknown or killed by dog unknown.  That is one thing. Dog claims.  We had to get other—.
DH: 	Where did you get special funds?
RD:	Well, it was sort of an appropriation as part of the budget.
[Audio resumes after this point]
Tape 1, Side 2
00:31:56
DH:	What were some of your other responsibilities besides the dog claims?
00:32:00
RD:	Well, my biggest responsibility and one for which I bore a great deal of the burden was a reorganization of the juvenile court system in Dane County.  When I first went on the county board, there was one juvenile judge, Judge Proctor, and one juvenile probation officer who handled 1,200 cases a year.  It was a kind of a farce.  It became a matter of great concern.  There was a joint committee made up by appointees of the mayor, and I was a sort of a dual appointment because I was a joint responsibility to the city council and the Dane County Board.  And that was an education and very interesting experience.  It resulted in the reorganization of the juvenile justice system which of course has been revamped several times since because circumstances have changed so much that handling of young people is very different.  In the course of that I wrote an article published by Harpers Magazine called "What Nobody Knows About Juvenile Delinquency,” which got a great deal of comment all over the country.  And I found it a very satisfying experience.  I don't think we did anything to turn bad kids into good kids, which is what the whole system is all about.  But I think we did make a sensible reorganization of the department and Judge Bruner became the juvenile judge at that time.  Of course as I say it is all expanded terrifically now.
DH: 	How is it that everything is different now?
RD:	Well, there is a large staff of workers in the department.  There is much more service available to kids. Civil rights have been established in a way they never were before and they have rights to the lawyers and—lawyers were not permitted in juvenile court previously.
DH: 	They weren't?
RD:	No, and there was all just informal supervision—very seldom tried a young person for anything.  Guilt was never determined—guilt or innocence—in any formal way.  It was always just presumed that the kid was guilty for whatever they brought him in for.  Then they put him on probation or he would be assigned to come in once a month or something.  It was all just very informal, very loose, very useless.  What we are doing now is more detailed, more personal, but— and I suppose in many cases it does help—we still haven't solved that problem of course.
00:35:26
DH:	That was one of the major things you did. Anything else that comes to mind?  In that period of time?
RD:	Well, no.  It was the county budget and those things that were a continuous responsibility.  The budget was always, and I think it still is, always wound up the night before deer hunting season opened.  Sometimes we stayed all night to finish it.  We could never have deer hunting without the budget being finished so we would do that. There were many late nights that we spent on that. I worked as a board member on the public health and Public Welfare with the county nurses and mostly just as their representative on the board.  And I don't remember any particularly important events that occurred.  But that also was a very interesting learning experience.  For instance, I discovered that Stoughton was a city—that beautiful, idyllic little place that you drive through—where they had to alternate the workloads of the Dane County social workers because the burden in Stoughton was so heavy nobody could bear it for very long.  There were more social problems in Stoughton thirty years ago than in any other place in Dane County.
DH: 	I wouldn't have thought that.
RD:	No. I wouldn't have either. I was surprised. There are many surprising little things.
DH:	Well, you did that for about seven years. That's a long time.
RD:	Yes.
DH: 	I never had any troubles getting reelected. I do remember I had some kids circulating a little leaflet for me—I had just token opposition—in which I listed my qualifications.  One of them was being a housewife and mother of three children.  And I got one of them back with a note on the back saying if you are a housewife and mother of three children, why in hell don't you stay home and take care of them?  But I had not many incidents like that.
DH: 	Well, there are still people around who feel that wives and mothers should stay home and tend to the domestic responsibilities.
RD:	Yes.  Well, you just wonder.  It all worked out all right for us, but I don't know.  Maybe I should have stayed home.  I would have gone balmy, I think.  I think there are some people, you are probably one of them, who have to have some outlet of your very own.  Something that you do well and your family doesn't do and isn't in on.
DH:	Something that is yours.
RD:	Yes.  A skill that belongs to you. 
DH:	Your own personal accomplishment. 
RD:	Yes.
DH:	Well, did you stop this because you just decided not to do anymore?
RD:	No, we moved.  We moved from the thirteenth ward which is over near Vilas Park to our house on Prospect and Chadbourne.
DH:	And that’s a different ward?
RD:	Yeah. So I resigned. 
00:39:18
	And then we had been looking for a better house for a long time and so it was the next year then that I ran for the school board.
DH:	Now tell me about that.
RD:	Now that is something that I had in my mind all along.  And I hadn't had—as I told you for two years I taught out in the village of Oregon, two years while I was on the county board, which made the burden very heavy.
DH:	Well, I would think so.
RD:	Then, as I say, I was not a successful teacher. I have not considered that as a very successful part of my life.  But the school board did kind of interest me. And when I decided to run, I did that.  Just sort of decided on my own.  Nobody was howling for me to run for the school board.  But I always have done very well when the whole city was involved.  I had lots of votes.  So I was a natural.  I ran against a lady that had been appointed to the board.  There had always been one woman on the board. And her duties were to choose the colors for the various school buildings and read the plays for the Madison Theatre Guild to see whether they were suitable for being performed in school buildings and stuff like that.  And I did that sort of thing for awhile, but then I realized that no matter what colors I chose for the school—the new schools, we had a lot of new ones in those days—no matter what colors I chose, when I go out to see the school later, I would swear that I hadn't—I think what happened was I would go out with the art supervisor and she and I would discuss the colors and make our selections like the Abraham Lincoln school—I know I didn't pick that orange color they put on the lockers.  I think then they went ahead and did what they were going to do anyway.  I don't think they feel there was a lot to be said.  The last school I did was Memorial High School.  And I did choose those bricks. I still think they are very beautiful.
DH:	Yes, I like those bricks.  My son went to Memorial the first year it opened.
RD:	That was just about the time.
DH:	I saw a lot of that building.
RD:	Well, and I enjoyed being on the school board. I have missed it although nine years was sufficient not only for me, but for the board.  Until I went on, I was the only uninvited guest on that board in many, many years. Vacancies had been filled by appointment in between elections and then the appointed person would be elected. So it is very carefully controlled.  Mr. Glenn Stephens had been on it for thirty-seven years and Dr. Huegel over thirty.  He was on thirty-four years before he retired, I think.  But the board assumed no responsibility in those days.  The system had a very strong superintendent, Phil Falk, for many years.  He was good friends with everybody on the board.  So I was viewed with a great deal of suspicion when I first went on.  And for a good long time after that too, I guess.  But school boards, it seemed to me, all over the country, had isolated themselves so much from the political life of the cities.  Any questions raised about the schools they yell, "Foul Politics. Why are you interfering?"  When they got into trouble, they had no constituencies left which I think is why they have come to such a terrible state, in the big cities particularly. For generations the public did not participate in anything to do with the public schools.  Now, of course, everybody is participating.  And in a way, it is nice.  I miss the board because you cannot believe what you read in the papers about what the board is doing.
00:44:05
DH:	You can't?
RD:	I miss not being in on what is really going on because I found so often the reporters would simply cover the board meetings and lose track entirely of what was really the main purpose of the meeting, and decide for themselves what the real agenda is.  Now maybe that is not true anymore but I would like to be around to see whether it's true or not.
DH:	Find out for certain. I hope you didn't always have to just pick colors and read plays and things.
RD:	No. I tried all the time—and I think other people did too—as new people came onto the board, we tried to get the board into the main stream—the main decision-making power.  It had developed to be just the reverse.  The staff was making the major decisions and then assuming board approval.  The board was doing the picayune little things like choosing the colors.  I don't mean to say that's little because we were doing a lot of building and it involved a great deal of expense.  But it was the sort of thing that required some special sort of skills that of course the board didn't have.  Whenever there was a question about a bus route—any difficulty with a bus— Dynie Mansfield would go out as a member of the school board and ride the bus in dispute and see what was going on.  So he was the bus man.  I was the color person. We had peculiar little responsibilities.  We tried to reverse that and I think these newer boards have to a very large extent changed that around.  They participate a great deal more in what is really the public interest in the schools.
DH:	You didn't feel you made much progress in the years you were on the board?
RD:	Well, I suppose we did make progress.  It just seems to me there has been a lot more made since.  The world has changed a lot.  I have been off the board for nearly ten years.  It seems hard to believe.  It took an enormous amount of time, of course, too.  I would often go from my office at the Law School at 4:00 over to the board, particularly during negotiating times, and go home at 2:00 in the morning.  There were lots of nights like that.
DH:	That sounds difficult.
RD:	Mm-hmmm.  It was difficult.  It made nine years about right as a length of time to serve.
00:47:10
DH:	Now when did you begin working in some capacity at the University?
RD:	In 1961. In 1961 I started to work for the University half-time, and got a job, to start out with, in Martha Peterson's office.  She was Dean of Women then. And that was the time when the University was getting interested in the older woman and making educational opportunities available to women who during the war had gone home to have their babies, never finished college, or whatever.  So I worked there for a year or so.  And then I became the staff person for the Faculty/Student Committee on Human Rights which was dealing mostly in those days with discrimination in sororities and fraternities.  It was a long racial and tedious process in which Wisconsin took the lead to get national organizations to remove their discriminatory, racial discrimination from their national constitutions.  It was a big thing.  It was a nation-wide struggle.  It was the time when Patty Hamilton, you remember a Madison girl, was pledged to Delta Gamma. Maybe you aren't interested in all this.
DH:	I wasn't in Wisconsin at that time, but I have heard something about this.
RD:	Yes.  It was a national movement, and we were, of course—as always in such things Wisconsin is always kind of in the forefront.  It was very interesting.
DH:	What happened about Patty Hamilton?  Was she admitted?
RD:	Well, no she was not.  Delta Gamma at Beloit College had pledged her, but their national officers had said they could not do that, and when they persisted, they kicked the Beloit chapter out of national Delta Gamma.  That was sort of the beginning of a nation-wide struggle on this whole question.  And for most organizations, to amend their constitutions required two national conventions, so we set up—and Richard Hartshorne can remember very well—an elaborate system of waiting, getting through two national conventions and all these groups.  And then getting the amendments so that these groups could be approved on these campuses.  The time limit set was 1972, and of course by that time nobody cared anymore.  Fraternities and sororities had almost all but disappeared.  If they did survive, they didn't require any approval.  They were just working on their own.  It wasn't a matter of life and death to them anymore, and much larger and more important issues were absorbing everybody's attention.  So all of our work—as I was getting ready to leave the University, I had two huge file drawers full of all that work which we just wrapped up and sent to the archives.  There is a thing where the subject was closed.  Nevertheless, it was an interesting thing.  And we had national officers and organizations and law firms from New York and other places.  And we had hearings on this campus of groups that were held to be in violation of the University of Wisconsin's nondiscrimination policies.  That was the main thing.  Then we also worked on housing discrimination, and in the course of my work for the committee I became aware of a census of Negro students that was being taken by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Madison, and it was unfinished.  And Mr. John McGrath, who was conducting it—he was from the outside, he was not a university employee—turned it over to me.  So I was able to finish up a census of American blacks on the campus. I did it once and found that there were about ninety. This was an informal census.  We asked for names and then I had to interview some of the people and ask them for names. Then when we began getting all the same names back again, we thought we had just about everybody.  It was about ninety.  A shock to everybody and was when it was given some publicity.  Other big ten schools, like Michigan, a state where I suppose a third of the population is black, and Illinois, also, found they had no more, probably even less, than we did.
DH:	That surprises me.
RD:	Yes, it was very surprising.  And that was the beginning of our consideration of the special five-year program that I was connected with.
00:52:40
DH:	Before we talk about that, I heard you say something about doing a study of students living—paying board and room, in rooming houses.
RD:	I did that for another committee that I was working for.  It was called the Remington Committee and was studying the non-curricular life of students.  And I did it kind of on my own.  I interviewed fifty students who did not live in organized housing, that is, not in fraternities and sororities or in dormitories.  And I just sent out letters asking them to come to my office.  And I just looked this last few days ago at those interviews.  It was really wonderful.  Everybody came.  And I learned more about students—these were long conversations that lasted for two to three hours, usually I allotted an afternoon for one—and I learned a great deal about students and what life was like.  And what makes that important now is, of course, that was just before the life of students changed so substantially—when the troubles began, and students demanded and were given their rights as individual citizens.  All of this changed.  Before that, of course, when I was in the dean of women's office, if a girl came in late—say three nights in a row—there would be a hearing in the dean's office.  And Dean Luberg, who was then the dean of students, would come down from Bascom Hall, and somebody from the major department would come and a girl with usually her parents—and for these minor infractions! Miss Peterson would say, "Now, Debbie, I think it would be nice if you went home with your mother and father for the rest of this year.  And by next fall, if things are better, get in touch with me and I'll see if we can let you come back to school."  All of these things are so hard to believe ever happened.  That's the way we did things. That is less than twenty five-years ago.  
DH:	That’s right:
00:55:06
RD:	So, these interviews reveal very much of what students’ views of themselves and of the University were.  I think one of the nice little things I have down in my files is the report of those interviews.
DH:	What kind of things did you find out?
RD:	Well, one thing that surprised me—and I thought should have gone up in electric lights all over the country.  In order to find out how aware students were of student services that were being offered to them, like the counseling center or student psychiatric services and so on, I asked each one where would they go if they had a problem they didn't feel they could solve by themselves. Way over half of them said they would go to their mother and father, which I don't think any mother and father ever realized—that their children, college children, felt about them.  But that was an eye-opener for me and a lot of people.  One of them would say, "My mother and father never went to college, but they have very good judgment about these things," or "My father was at the University twenty-five years ago and he would know and would be able to help me decide what I wanted to do."  Hardly any of them said they would go to the dean of men or the dean of women.  Most of them hadn't even heard of them.  If you were in a sorority, you would hear about the deans because you would invite them to dinner or something.  But if you lived in a little rooming house on Johnson Street—there is one story that is maybe too long to put in here—one particular boy that has stuck with me.  He came from a little town up in northern Wisconsin, and the local judge up there, who in fact, was the present Chief Justice Beilfuss, had taken an interest in him and had helped him financially to come down here and go to college—he was a football player in high school.  He rented a room on Johnson Street, and he gave me the details.  This was—he was now a senior when I talked to him about his freshman and sophomore years—when he never had a meaningful conversation with anybody at this university.  He would like to play basketball, so he would go over to the armory, but it just happened that everybody would come with whole teams and he never got to play.  He went to a mixer for pre-commerce students.  Nobody spoke to him, so he went through two years of total isolation on this campus. And then somebody persuaded him to transfer into the Ag School where he got on a meat judging team and became part of an agriculture fraternity and so on.  So everything had turned out right for him, but his account of those two years—he had tears and I had tears.  It was so touching.  And of course I had thought how could we ever know how many students this had happened to in those days, who just left school and never came back. And we never knew about them, and nobody ever helped them. I suppose that is true today too maybe even to a greater extent than then.
DH:	Well, the University is so much larger now and it makes personal contact more difficult, I suppose.
RD:	Yes, and living arrangements are so much less organized and students are spread out all over the whole city.  There is no student ghetto much anymore.  They have torn down all those buildings.
DH: 	Yes, I guess that is true.  And if the individual isn't naturally gregarious and outgoing, it might be very difficult to.
RD:	On the other hand, students have been contributing and participating in the life of Madison in the last fifteen years in a way that they never did.  Student city council members—Paul Soglin, after all, was a student when his political career was launched in Madison.  And I think you would find all over the city in campaigns, and holding office and participating in various kinds of activity, that students are now involved on a much broader scale. So maybe in the long run there are fewer isolates.  But we don't know.  We don't really know.  And now we have this whole thing about privacy which means we don't ask. I don't suppose anybody would approve of just calling random students to talk to them anymore.  But that is how we got going in the Black student movement too, was calling students in.  And I had long conversations with the ninety black students, and the next year we did it again. And then Miss Peterson was then vice president of the University in dealing with student affairs—it was she to whom I went—saying why can't we do something about this. Some of these kids had financial troubles, the ones that I had met, and so we decided.  And then when the federal aid, the basic opportunity grants, which are now going to be cut out, were established, it seemed that we ought to seek out some students and try to encourage a little mixture of color on the campus.  So that’s what started it.
00:01:11
DH:	In other words, increase the number of blacks –
RD:	Mm-hmmm. American blacks, yes.  And I started in a very small way.  I wrote letters to people that I knew or knew about who had things to do with young people—YMCAs in the big cities and some individuals—and asked them if they knew about students who might want to come to the University of Wisconsin.  And we began getting some applications. And the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members (SNCC in those days) was working in the south in the summertime.  Voter registration projects were going on, and so on.  And a lot of students from this campus, or some students from this campus, were going to Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama in the summertime.  And we encouraged them to stimulate some interest.  The first year we had twenty-four students and it grew from there.
DH:	 How did you pick?  You must have had more than twenty-four applications.
RD:	Yes, we had no more than fifty applications. Well, we never could decide very well.  We had a committee that went over them—a committee of somebody from the counseling center, somebody from the Letters and Science dean's office, Chet Ruedisili, Nolan Penn was on the counseling center then, and a couple of other people who read applications, and just on the basis of the application and recommendations, plus our feeling that these people who were academically as well as financially disadvantaged.
DH: 	How do you mean?
RD:	Well, they all had to take an ACT or an SAT test and we looked for people who were in the bottom 1 percent of people who, on the scale of who is going to succeed in the university, were the ones we took.  But also they had to have some indications that they could do well.
DH: 	What kind of indications would you look for?
RD:	Well, it's very difficult.  What the teachers would say.  We dealt with some particularly important people, certain guidance counselors from Chicago and Milwaukee high schools, for instance.  They would say such interesting things as "even though she’s grown up in public housing, Debbie is a very nice girl."  Things that indicated factors in the lives of these people that we had no way of judging ahead of time.
01:03:57	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side 1
00:00:02
RD:	You were asking about the factors.  We would just use a kind of an agreement.  I discovered in the very beginning of this project where the real power in the University lies.  This is a secret that has been well kept, but the office of financial aids, the director there, was given wide latitude in making awards of scholarship funds. The admissions director—the guidelines were rather firmly set but were always stated in such a way that the director of admissions could make exceptions to the rules that the faculty had established—and the registrar, who could help arrange special programs and things.  These people were all very helpful and interested in this project and, I must say, in the very first group we had, we didn't know what we were doing and we had many problems.  We brought them all here for the summer, or most of them.
DH: Before they started?
RD:	Yes, and they were going to take extension courses which had been offered for many years for kids that are going to start college—like improving your writing. Those were the first days of the work/study jobs.  So they were to have full-time work/study jobs and take these evening courses.  And we got it all set up and then I went off on a three weeks’ vacation in Europe.  And when I came back, the two women that I had left in the office said, "Shall we start with yesterday and go backwards or shall we start on the first day and go forward?"  There were innumerable problems, including an emergency appendectomy.  We never thought about health insurance or anything.  So fortunately we were working with a very small group—absolutely unpublicized for the first couple years of this program. Nothing was ever put in the paper.

DH: 	You still counted on personal contacts to find applicants?
RD:	Yes.  We did more traveling in the state of Wisconsin ourselves—worked with upward bound programs which were federal programs, also, I suppose, about to be destroyed.  The people that worked in those programs were very hep to the potentially bright but disadvantaged students.  So many of them came from there.  And then we had this wonderful man from Chicago, Mr. Silas Parnell, who had just started as a hobby looking for opportunities for blacks.  I just happened onto him.  A woman in the office of financial aids was cleaning out her desk and she came across this little slip of paper with a name and address and phone number on it.  She called me and said that months and months earlier this man had walked into her office and asked what special arrangements could be made for black students that didn't have any money at all.  There was nothing.  So when we started the program we got in touch with him.  He works for a small foundation in Chicago on the south side.  His office is in the basement of one of those grotesque public housing projects.  And he is a big booming man.  He is still doing the Lord's work, I think. I haven't seen him in many years.  But for a long time after that, the best applicants we had were the people who would say, "Dear Mrs.  Doyle, Mr. Silas Parnell suggested that I write to you."  In the first place, he travelled a great deal in the Midwest visiting college campuses. He knew more about colleges than almost anybody and he could judge better than almost anybody who would fit where and in what way.  So he was an enormous help to us.  
00:04:11
	And we had students that came from New York.  We had very few residents of Wisconsin in the beginning, so we concentrated on that.  We went to the schools where there were large Indian enrollments and we went to Milwaukee North and Milwaukee Lincoln which were the two big black high schools in Milwaukee in those days.  And we sought, as I said, people from the upward bound programs and any other things that were going on we sought references from them.  And it just developed.  It was a marvelous experience for me. I still to this day don't know anybody who is like me—white, middle aged, and middle class—who had as much and as intense an experience with people of another culture and another color and another age group as I had with those students.  And I still treasure them.  Many of them are still my good friends and I hear from a lot of them. Every once in awhile somebody will call me up from God knows where to just say hello and it is very heartening.  Many of them have been very successful.  I don't think people realize, generally, how well so many of those students have done.
DH: 	Even though they were in the bottom 1 percent?
00:05:45
RD:	Yes, we had a full-blown tutoring program. Each entering student had a tutor in every course and the tutors were volunteer upper class students.  And that phase of it did not work perfectly, of course.  But when it did work, it was marvelous.  And when it did work it was for the student's who were disadvantaged, but naturally very bright, eager, dying to take the University on.
DH:	Motivation was the biggest part.
RD:	 Yes.  And a lot of very good friendships were formed.  For many of the white tutors, it was their very first opportunity to talk and become well acquainted with people of dark skins—natives, that is.  They probably all knew foreign students, but American negroes were unknown, especially to Wisconsin residents.
DH: 	How did you pick the tutors?
RD:	 Departments would recommend them.  We chose honor students.  And as I say, it didn't work perfectly, but it worked quite well.  But in English, the students who were English majors and were very intelligent, had a hard time explaining to the disadvantaged students why they talked incorrectly.  If you sit down and think, could I teach somebody to talk correctly?  Could I teach somebody to read and get meaning out of a reading that has just been a part of me my whole life?  It is very difficult.  Some of those didn't work.  As I say, the bright black students got a lot out of that because they could, by being motivated themselves, just concentrate on it.  There was trouble with math.  And I think that was largely due to their high school background.  The courses in math that they took were no good in many cases.
DH: 	The high school courses?
RD:	 The school staffs were so afraid that kids were going to quit.  You know, a kid says I can't get math so I am going to quit school.  So they dilute, dilute, and dilute the course to keep him in until he gets his diploma.  And science was difficult, too. Foreign languages were just impossible.  Why, they often wondered, would they have to learn French?  I must say I had to wonder too.  But we never made any exceptions to the curriculum.
DH: 	You didn't?
RD:	 No, they were allowed to drop courses, but they met the same graduation requirements as any other student.
00:08:39
DH: 	Did they take the same course load during the semester?
RD:	Well, no.  It was called a five- year program, and that was for purposes of Selective Service. Selective Service in those days said you had to earn 25 percent, each year in order to maintain your draft deferment—25 percent of the degree requirement.  We, with the help of Selective Service of Wisconsin and national Selective Service—and this was Tom Hoover the registrar who suggested we call it a five-year program—our students were then only required to make 20 percent.

DH:	Spread out over five years instead of four?
RD:	 Yes.  And as far as I know, nobody ever got drafted out of the program.  So, we let them take it a little slower, and sometimes they dropped down to nine credits, but eventually almost all of them, or at least a great many of them, did graduate in the same proportions that other students graduated.  Some of them dropped out, of course, and we lost track, as they do with other students. [You] talk about college dropouts, but you never really know whether they aren't enrolled at some other college somewhere.  Unless they tell you, there is no way to keep track of them.  And I think these students were the same as other students in that regard.  But I have met many of them.  Several of them went through Medical School. A number of them through Law School.
DH: 	That's interesting.  They certainly didn't settle in easy fields.
RD:	 No, they didn't.  There was one particular girl that I remember from Milwaukee who wanted to be a librarian. She wanted to be a librarian when she was in high school. She worked in a high school library at Lincoln High School, and she came out of an upward-bound program.  She wanted to be a librarian.  She went to library school, got a masters degree, married another young person in the program, who also wanted to be a librarian—and several years ago somebody showed me a copy of a professional library journal in which there was an article by Veronica Gillespie who was the curator of the Theodore Roosevelt papers of the Library of Congress.  This was a professional article about her work with the Theodore Roosevelt collections.  This was really remarkable.  Just marvelous.
DH:	 My word.  Was she a part of the very first group.
RD:	 Yes, one of the early groups.  She was very determined and very interested in what she was doing. Just kept at it.  Not a distinguished student, particularly, I mean in the total spectrum.  Her husband did better academically, I think.  He also is employed by the Library of Congress.  They have two little children, live in Washington.  But really it's just marvelous.
DH: 	Very nice success story, isn't it?
RD:	 Yes, there are a number of those.  That made it very heartening.  
00:11:58
	Of course it all came smash around me, too.
DH: 	Tell me how that happened.  I read that it did happen, but I never quite understood.
RD:	 I never quite understood either, as a matter of fact, I think what happened—I've always thought it would make a great drama.  Me, played by Helen Hayes or somebody against a tall, black young man named Willy Edwards who was just determined to do me in, and he did.  But it was going to happen anyway, I think.
DH:	Why do you say that?
RD:	Well, I think the black people were beginning to rise up.  I had been to some national conferences. Our program was considered to be a very good one, and I was invited a number of times to meetings to advise and consult with groups.  And I went to Washington to one group—one meeting of people from all over the United States who had programs like this.  And I was appalled.  They were going out just taking kids off the streets—just squashing them into colleges.  The University of Illinois along in there had suddenly admitted 300 black students into its Champaign-Urbana campus without any preparations and had riots the first day.  We were fortunate to have had several years of working very quietly with relatively small groups of people and establishing a supervisory staff to supervise the students and keep in touch with the tutors, you know. We were established as a small group.  But the uprisings were beginning to occur in various places.  And here it began when I gave a speech to a little luncheon group of Democrats that met every week in some little restaurant about the program, in which I said that I was opposed and would always oppose anything that would segregate these people and that we didn't need to have a black enclave on this campus, we should have an integrated student body, that is what the whole movement was about.  Some students took great offense at that.  That was when they were establishing—the students themselves and the black people themselves—the black power movement.  The need for—they wanted a black floor in the dorm; they wanted a black student center which would have been—our office became the black student center.  I must say that I was quite firm about my own position on that.  They, the students, would argue with me and say, "Oh, you talk just like my mother. She thinks Roy Wilkins is wonderful."  And you know Roy Wilkins was an old Uncle Tom to many of these young militant blacks.  So, I gave this little speech and a State Journal reporter walked in and covered it just by chance and wrote a story for the paper which the students read, and they felt that I was doing them in.  That day—it was in the fall of 1968. It was a beautiful fall day and they apparently marched on the chancellor's office.  They were up in Ed Young's office.
00:15:33
DH:	The same day that you gave the speech?
RD:	 No, just a few days later.  But it had been brewing for awhile before I gave the speech, and so I was called up to the chancellor's office.  And there was a sea of black faces who were so terrifying to other university officials.  Not to me because I knew them all.  I had met most of their mothers and I knew them individually. We never admitted anybody to the program without a lot of correspondence and sort of an establishment of an individual identity for each one.  So I knew that they were just pulling my leg.  One boy said, "I have friends in Chicago that are so afraid of you they wouldn't even come to this college."  I said, "Oh, cut it out.  Don't give me that stuff."  Of course there were weeks in there afterwards in which the black students were on strike for black history and black curriculum and black identity, black housing, black everything.  And so they had the strike here in which they made thirteen nonnegotiable demands, one of which was that I was to be fired. During the course of that—it was Thanksgiving time, I think—I had gone to Chicago with my family, just for a couple days away, and I got a notice at the hotel down there that I was to be at a meeting on Friday the day after Thanksgiving it was in Sam Proctor's office.  He was the high mogul black man that had been brought into the president's office. He was a very able, very nice guy.  He was made chairman of the committee that was to review the program and make suggestions about changing it.  So I was to be there at 2:00, so I came back specially and went up there at 2:00 on Friday afternoon.  They made me wait in the hall for awhile while they discussed it.  There were three black students on the committee and then some University faculty people. And the black students were running it.  The University faculty was terrified.  There was no getting around it. They were scared stiff of Willy Edwards and his wife. So after twenty minutes they let me come in and then he said "You have twenty minutes to say what you have to say." And I said, "You can't mean this."
DH:	Who said this to you?
RD:	 Sam Proctor who was acting as chairman.  I said, "You can't mean this.  I have been working on this for years.  There are many things about it that none of you know.  And I think it is most unfair."  Nevertheless, they gave me twenty minutes and when the twenty minutes was up, he said "O.k., time's up.  So I had to leave.  They wrote a report and it was very critical of me and demanded that I be fired.  Sam Proctor put that report on Ed Young's desk and left town.  And he never came back—literally never came back, until last year he came to give a speech to the Urban League.  So, my days were numbered.  There was no question about that.  And they set up all sorts of little things.  They couldn't fire me because it would have been too obvious—discrimination on the basis of sex and age and race and everything.  So they set up a committee that was kind of to run the program, and of course that didn't work.  And the whole work of planning next year's program stopped because it had been announced that it was going to be all reorganized and I didn't want to be in a position of writing to all these kids that had applied for next year explaining to them when I didn't know what the program was going to be or who it was going to be.  So it became necessary at a certain point for me to resign and I did. And then I went to work at the Law School.  It was just lucky that a job opened at the Law School.  It suited me fine.  And that’s where I stayed for ten years.  
DH: 	They opened it just in time.
RD:	 Yes.
00:20:13
DH: 	Where did Sam Proctor go, do you know?
RD:	 Well, it is interesting.  He is a Professor of Education at Rutgers.  But he is also the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist church, Adam Clayton Powell's church in New York.  He is the pastor.  And every time I have been to New York—I go often because I have a daughter that lives there—I have often thought I would just like to, on some Sunday morning, mosey out to the Abyssinian Baptist church and see what it is like there.  Sam Proctor is a very able guy and a very realistic man.  He was caught here in something that he had no experience in.  He had been president of a couple of black colleges and he had had important positions in the Peace Corps and so on.  But this kind of controversy had never touched him before.  And I have to feel kind of sorry for him.  I remember during that period going to Chicago with him to a meeting—every Big Ten university had a vice president like him who was black.  Suddenly everybody scrounged around and found one, and they were a collection of very interesting and very able people.  But I remember Sam giving them a little speech saying, "Look at you.  Here we all are.  We've got great big titles.  There isn't one of us that has a staff or a budget or a line responsibility.  We are just sort of window dressing."  And many of them were and I think lots of them have left those jobs.  It was a period when it was possible in the country to take some giant steps backward and I think we did for about a year there.  This is what I guess I mentioned the other day.  I am going to do some writing on this because I think it's a part of history that is disappearing very fast and people won't remember. And it is possible that, not remembering, they will start making the same mistakes again in dealing with it.
DH:	That could be.  That sort of thing does happen.  
00:22:40
	It sounds as though the program ground to a halt at that time.
RD:	No, it didn't.  Temporarily.  It’s a functioning program now.  It’s quite different from what it was.  I have recently had some encounters with one of the people that work there.  It has a much bigger staff than it had.
DH:	 Are they all black?
RD:	 There is one Indian among them, I think.  A couple of Indians.  But they don't—the enrollment has gone down. The financing of it is a permanent part of the University budget now, appropriated by the state, so that the recruiting is the regular sort of routinized thing. The tutoring and all that is just voluntary.  And it is quite different.  It is more just an administrative thing than anything else.  I suppose that would have come to us as it got bigger and bigger, too.  My main concern was to get them integrated with each other and with the program and on an individual basis where you try to get to know every single person.  So that we are aware of them.  And during the strike many of the very protective parents of these kids would take them home to Milwaukee or Chicago.
DH: 	Because of the strike?
RD:	Yes, and call me up at night and see if it was safe for Jody to come back to school next week.  I would say they had better wait a little while.  It wasn't over yet. Then there were two tiny little kids from Mississippi—little girls—that just made it a game. They were determined not to miss a single class, and they didn't.  They went down coal chutes and back windows, climbed fire escapes and everything to get in without having to cross the black picket lines.  They never missed a class.
DH: 	That's wonderful.

RD:	Yes.  There were some interesting things about that whole thing.  And some rather scary ones.
DH: 	What kind of scary things?
RD:	A girl that had lived with us a year who was a house fellow in the dorm came over one night and said that one of the freshman girls who had been at a meeting of the black students that afternoon had told her and wanted her to get the word to us that somebody made a motion to burn our house down.  And it lost by about one vote, so she came over to tell us that.  Anne and I were alone, I think. Jim was out of town.  So we went and stayed at the neighbors for a couple of nights and I let the word get out that we knew that this had been reported to us.  I also reported to Madison Police and campus police.  And it didn't happen, but the search was on for that little girl who had squealed.  And they never found her.  But I don't know what they would have done.  There was enough ill feeling going on in those days.  Right now I don't know what they would have done to her if they had found her.  But she was also pretty smart and cagey.  But think of the courage that that took.  And for the two kids who weren't going to miss any classes.  Lots of those people, I suppose, are the ones who turned out to be great successes because of their very strong characters.
00:26:27
DH: 	Yes, I guess it must take something like that to overcome the obstacles and disadvantages that they started with.
RD:	As those early kids did, to come from Louisiana to Madison.  You know they get frightened just of the weather.
DH:  	I suppose.
RD:	Several times kids would come in and say, "I think I am going to go home next week because somebody in the dorm has told me we are going to freeze to death."  They might have I suppose this winter, but they were terrified of some of those things that we knew to be just jokes.  And then the sea of white faces—these kids from Chicago that had lived in the black communities always—they found very disturbing.  And the fact that students would ask them questions, often quite inappropriate and improper.  In the dorms for instance.  We had to spend quite a lot of time with these kids persuading them that they have a teaching role even though they are only seventeen and freshmen in college.  They are living among people who had never seen or talked to anybody with black skin before.  And so they are going to ask them dumb questions and you can't be offended.
DH: 	A reverse role of teaching.
RD:	Yes, it really is—was.  And I suppose still is, because I gather that there is still this difficulty. The enrollment among minority students all over the country has gone down substantially.  Maybe because there are many more opportunities available than there were in those days so they are spread out thinner.
DH: 	More colleges taking more students, so therefore there aren't as many for any one institution?
RD:	 That may be.  I hope that is what it is.
DH: 	Certainly seems that there are a lot more blacks on the campus here at Wisconsin now than I remember during the sixties.
RD:	Yes, there are.  I think when I left the program in 1968-69, there were about maybe 200 students in it. I think now they count about 500. And it stays at about that level.  They don't seem to—nobody seems to know—how to counteract that.  There are more Indian students, of course.  There were none when we started out.  And we began picking up a few.  Some very interesting characters. Mostly from Wisconsin.  But not all.
DH: 	You did mention making an effort to get minorities from Wisconsin.
RD:	Yes, went to places like Shawano, Minocqua—high schools where Indian students are enrolled, and never felt we had much luck.  But once it got started, we would gradually get more and more.  There have been, I think, in Wisconsin—in the Law School—probably fifteen Indians graduating in the last couple of years, when before that there was never an Indian lawyer in the state of Wisconsin.
DH: 	Well, that sounds like a good step.
RD:	Yes.  Some of them remarkable too. Wonderful attorneys and successful people.
DH: 	Have they gone into general practice or do they specialize in problems with their own people?
RD:	Yes.  The Indian people never had any lawyers, you know, so that they are under a great deal of pressure to go back to the Indian communities, and I think most of them knew that.  I think not all, though.  But they go into Indian legal programs, and that sort of thing.  There is a lot of that going on.  These wonderful law suits, you know.  Our son was in one of those. In Maine, where they claim three quarters of the state or something belongs to the Indians from way back. There is a lot going on in the country like that, as it should be, of course.
00:31:28
[Subsequent portion of interview is not included on audio file.]
DH: 	Has that ever been resolved?  I haven't heard anything about it for awhile.
RD:	I think they came to some agreement in which they didn't get the whole state, but they got a very substantial settlement.
[Audio resumes after this point]
Tape 2, Side 2
00:31:42
DH: 	One thing we didn't get to last time was the period of time you worked in the Law School and I would like to discuss that with you if that is all right. When did you start, and how long were you there?
RD:	Well, I was there ten years as it turned out. I started at the time of my resignation from the five-year program.  There needed to be a job for me, and I was not just about to fade away into the woodwork.  It happened that they were looking for an assistant to the dean and that Bill Mett, who had been assistant dean, was leaving, so that there was a natural spot for me.  I fit into it perfectly well.  This was my kind of people.  Me being the daughter and the sister of lawyers, and the wife and the mother of three lawyers.
DH: 	Three lawyers?
RD:	Three.  Our fourth child is not a lawyer, but she practices law in a legal services program.  She is a paralegal associate, they call it.  So I felt very much at home among lawyers.  Of course I knew the faculty there well, and it was a natural for me and it turned out to be a very happy and rewarding ten years, I think.  My job consisted of the financial aids for students—scholarships and loans—which brought me into very close contact with many, many students.  I got to know them very well, and over a ten-year period that means that I am well acquainted with about 2,900 lawyers that graduated from the Law School during that time.  I see them around at meetings now, and other places, and it really is fun.  I enjoyed the students very much.  Found them rather surprising in a way. For instance, when it was announced that I was going to retire, several of them came in and said they envied me. Second-year law students.  They wished they could retire.
DH:	Already?
RD:	They had no desire to go through the whole career bit.  And I don't think a lot of people recognized that. I was also the prelaw advisor and particularly for students—although there were other prelaw advisors on the campus—for potential students who were presently not enrolled in the University.  I had seen so many of them—in one year about 500 appointments with people who wanted to go to Law School, who were considering it and had a lot of questions about it.  And of course that is very interesting too; you meet wonderful, interesting people.  Much more diverse than you would think.  Women principals of schools.  One woman I remember wanted to go to Law School. She was the administrator of a number of daycare centers. She wanted to go to Law School; she thought she would be better at her job, but I think I persuaded her.  But if she was as good at her job as she was, if she needed a lawyer, to hire one, but devote her whole career—
DH: 	She was going to study law to be good at her daycare work?  I see.
RD:	Yes.  And there were other things like that.  But in any case, it was very enjoyable.  And then the third major part of my job was the Gargoyle, which was a gleam in Spencer Kimball's eye when I got to Law School.  He was dean at that time, in 1969. But they hadn't been able to get it off the ground, so it came in at a time—it was very interesting for me.  I had never done anything like this before, but I set it up from the very beginning—found the printers, arranged for the format—and for ten years, published this quarterly magazine, most of which I wrote, although there were some pieces that faculty people wrote. It was well received by the alumni and it was mailed to them.  It was, on the whole, a very creative and interesting kind of a job to have for ten years. Beyond ten years, I had the feeling it was getting harder and harder to make it interesting.  It was getting more and more difficult to keep my time schedules, myself made deadlines, and so on.  So, I wrapped it up in ten years. It's still being published, but intermittently and not with as much of an investment as it was when I was working on it—investment of money, I mean.
00:36:41
DH: 	Did it begin with you or was it in existence before?
RD:	No, it began with me.  And I had a chance to do almost anything.  If I was going to New York to visit my daughter, I could interview Lloyd Garrison or alumni of the Law School who live in New York.  Or if I am going to Chicago—I have one memorable interview with Mr. W. J. Hagenah, a famous alumnus who—
DH: 	Of the fountain fame?
RD:	Yes, the fountain fame.  A great benefactor of the University.  Not so much of the Law School.  But I met him at the Union League Club.  He was then ninety-five years old, I think.  And we had a fascinating talk.  He was a very interesting man.  And this is the kind of person I never would have met if I hadn't had some professional legitimate reason to call on him.
DH: 	What kind of material did you have in it other than interviews with people?
RD:	 Well, things about the Law School. Changes, honors—we had one issue every year that included all the honors that students had won.  We published the fund drive major report; actually the magazine was part of a fund drive.  It was to stimulate interest of alumni in the school and I think it probably did that.  New courses, shifts in the legal education, a wide variety of subjects all connected to the Law School and to alumni.  I remember one piece about couples, pairs of people who had gone to Law School together or married and were practicing law together.  We had a number of those.  We had some things about the early women practitioners.  I remember another story.  It was an interview with a man named Ernie Fiedler, who recently died.  He was the director of the National Gallery in Washington and one of our alums.  And he described for this piece an effort he made to bring the one Leonardo to the United States which is now in the National Gallery.  Apparently there is that prince in Lichenstein or somewhere who has a vast art collection and offers things for sale from time to time when he needs money.  And so Ernie Fiedler, with the money given to the government by the Mellon family, went to Austria and brought the painting back with him on a commercial airline.  He bought it a seat.  And he fixed a container for it that would keep its temperature perfectly steady all the way through his flight.
DH: 	My word.
RD:	 And he brought it back to this country, surreptitiously, more or less.  So that the art—I suppose pictures like that actually—although there are a number of them being stolen now—they are so recognizable that very often we don't have to worry about thieves, but nevertheless you don't travel with a $4 million painting.
DH: 	Most of us don't.
RD:	No. There are other things like that, that I was able to find out about.  So it was fun.  That was ten years at the Law School.
DH: 	And this came out how often?
RD:	Four times a year.  There were forty.
DH: 	Forty in ten years? That's a lot of work. Did you have somebody helping with this?
RD:	Just the secretary.  And the last secretary I had was sort of artistic.  So she helped with the layout. We were not without our critics.  Some faculty people thought it was very corny—couldnft understand it.  But I resisted attempts to make it into another Law Review and publish scholarly articles which is what they would have liked, but which our alumni, whom I polled a couple of times along the way to see what they thought about it—they said they had plenty of law reviews.  They didn't need any more. They liked this because it was something you could read in half an hour and leave on the coffee table in your waiting room for people to pick up when they came in.
DH: 	Oh, yes.  I never thought of that aspect. Of course people in waiting rooms aren't there, hopefully, too long.  
00:41:41
	Let's talk about financial aids a little bit. First of all, what was the situation with regard to this?
RD:	Well, there was always trouble.  It was always in trouble.  The Law School has a modest endowment and a small scholarship fund and then some other scholarships that are available to the office of financial aids.  So that the majority of the money, the major portion of the money which students had to seek, came in loans. The scholarships—there were a few that were granted for very particular kinds of people.  But mostly we were able to keep them a little loose and give them to people on the basis of need.  But the scholarship funds that we had to use never amounted to more than about a quarter or certainly more than a third of the financial need of the student who received the scholarship.  So Law School students depend very heavily on the guaranteed student loan, the bank loan that the federal government guarantees the interest payment of—and on national direct student loans.  These are the things that are now in jeopardy and particularly the guaranteed student loan which is going to be cut back in total amount, and the interest will be raised.  Most of the students, I gather, will be required to pay the interest while they are in school.  Of course if you borrow $2,500 and at 10 percent interest, that is $250 a year.  That is a major amount in these limited budgets that so many law students have.  I would say that half of the students, at least, or more, were getting some form of scholarship and/or loan, mostly loan.  
00:44:00
	The job market for young lawyers has held up remarkably well, and I think even now while there is uncertainty in many other fields, the lawyers are still finding acceptable and appropriate and well compensated careers available to them.  When that is going to change, I don't know.  But it hasn't.  And at least it certainly hadn't when I was there, and my understanding is that it still is very good.  The market is very good.  It takes a little longer to find a job now, maybe.  And students often don't have the choice of three, four, or five jobs to start out with the way they used to. But in times of economic trouble, of course, the lawyers are very important.  Businesses are reorganizing. Changes are being made.  All sorts of legal problems are being dealt with that require the services of some of these young people.  But they graduate, some of them now, I expect, with debts covering their undergraduate and law school careers—ten, fifteen, twenty five thousand dollars—which seems like an awful lot of money, particularly if you are going to start out on a job that pays you $20,000 to start, which I suppose is about an average entering wage for many of the lawyers now.  Of course that is peanuts when you think that other students in other fields are winding up with heavy debt also, and starting out with no income because there is no job.
DH: 	That's true.
RD:	 But I was always impressed with how well these young people managed their affairs.  There were a few of them that were reckless and careless, and being my age and my general demeanor, I can scold them good without getting hit or anything.  They respect an older woman telling them off.  There are some that were very careless about borrowing, didn't seem to have any feeling that it would have to be paid back.  But generally speaking, they were very orderly, very careful.  They had many sudden problems.
DH: 	Oh?
RD:	The divorce rate.  The marriage rate, for one thing was, while they were in Law School, rather high.  But the number of young couples that broke up was, to me, quite astonishing.
DH: 	During Law School?
RD:	During Law School, yes.  Of course that creates financial crisis instantly.  That is when I get acquainted with quite a few people—when that moment comes.  When he or she walks out or takes all the money out of the savings account or something, and is gone.  Then they have special emergency problems.  We have an excellent office of financial aids on this campus.  They have been very cooperative always and very helpful as they could possibly be when these emergencies developed.
00:47:33
DH: 	What was the relationship between the campus office and financial aids and your activities?
RD:	Well, all of our loans came through them.  Much of the scholarship money came through them.  Not all of it. Some of it was administered right in the Law School by the Law School Alumni Association, but there was one person in the office of financial aids who devoted a substantial part of his time to the Law School.  So most of this stuff, all of our scholarships, most of the loans, were based on the determination of need which was a formula prepared and used by the office of financial aid so that when we got applications for financial assistance, the office of financial aids determined the need of the applicant. And on that basis, we arranged for a scholarship and loan. We tried to use our scholarship money to attract very well qualified students into the first year and tried to provide more scholarships for them.  Then if they came and were successful, they could go more heavily into loans.  We also had a legal education opportunities program for minority students which I avoided being very closely connected with since I had spent quite a bit of my career on that subject, but nevertheless did deal with the financial aid of the minority students.  And their situation, because of the way the state budget was drawn, made it possible for most of them to have their entire need met with grants and without having to borrow the money from any source.  That brought to Wisconsin a number of excellent minority students because it was a better arrangement than almost any other Law School in the country.
DH: 	That is good to know.
RD:	That is permanent as I understand.  It’s a permanent part of the budget of the State of Wisconsin to make special provisions for these people that had been categorically excluded.  I mean hadn't been excluded, but hadn't been able to come because of the tremendous expense and risk involved in it.
DH: 	Well, I can imagine that there must be a great need for minority lawyers.
RD:	Yes, and it's interesting to see it change. They have, of course, broadened out into many, many fields, these minority lawyers.  Again, most of them I knew very well and they have interesting jobs.  It wasn't automatically the case, but over the years, big firms have taken them and many of them have worked for the federal government in a variety of ways.  They have opened little law practices in Milwaukee or in other big cities. They have broadened out in a lot of different ways and it's kind of nice to see them successful.  For instance—I suppose this shouldn't be made note of even, but it did warm my heart—we had a very fancy resort up in Door County last summer when we went to dinner there to see a couple of the LEO students married to each other there, having dinner in a place where I am sure no black faces had entered very often before.  They fit right in and it seemed nice to see them there.  I hope this year we will see a lot more of them.  They are moving around and doing well, generally speaking.
DH: 	Well, that's good news.  I did read that there was a Black American Law Student Association at the Law School.
RD:	Yes, and it's been a very active group in selecting, encouraging and selecting LEO students, legal education opportunity students.  The minority students themselves serve on a special admissions committee with several faculty people in the selection of students.  They play a very great part and have an active interest in bringing more like themselves to the Law School.  And that is kind of heartening to see, too.  My experiences with them again—I haven't been there, it's been almost three years—is hard to believe.  But I have attended many of their meetings.  They were sensible and orderly and diligent about their responsibilities in establishing this program and making it work.  And so it has worked.
DH: 	Well, there are a number of other topics; let's see.
00:53:31
RD:	 I could say something about the women law students.
DH: 	Yes.  While we are on—they are a minority, too, I gather.
RD:	Yes.  Not much of a minority anymore.  I think that the Law School must be 40 percent female now, and when I first went there in 1969, I think there were fewer than thirty enrolled.
DH: 	Just suddenly in that one year?
RD:	Yes, in that one year it got to be about thirty or forty.  Then, by the time I left ten years later, out of an enrollment of 900, there were probably 350 women.  Now, of course, they represent, in most law schools, about half the enrollment, which means that employers who exclude them now are cutting themselves off from about half of the young lawyers coming out of the Law School.  That changes the whole job opportunity for them, too.  It really is fascinating.  But they stay girls.  Last Saturday night we had dinner with two of my husband's former law clerks, two young women, who were getting together for the first time in a year.  They hadn't seen each other.  And their conversation was—they are both practicing law; one in New York and one in Milwaukee—what do you wear when you go to court?  Do you ever wear pants to the office and so on. All sorts of girlish concerns.
DH: 	Definitely.  Female concerns.
RD:	Yes, but it is interesting to see them.
00:55:15
DH: 	How do you account for such a seemingly sudden upsurge in women?
RD:	 I suppose it is the whole consciousness-raising that has gone on in the last ten years in this country.  I know when I talked about the other day being on the county board and nobody noticed that I was a woman—or at least that I was a pregnant woman.  And in the legislature, very shortly after I went, within a couple of days, I lost all my feminine prerogatives and they were beating me up just the way they did each other without any particular notice of my sex.  The only difference there was that I used a microphone in those days and none of the rest of them did. But that has all changed.  And I don't know.  You probably would have ideas too about what it is that made women change so markedly, but the need for professional training and for professional positions seemed to come rather suddenly and almost naturally.  Although there was some stimulation by the leading feminists, many of these women who have gone this route, taken on heavy professional responsibilities, were not really angry even though they were not part of any kind of movement.  They were just intelligent people who now seem to take it for granted that they are entitled to a profession just as anybody else is.
DH: 	Well, there has been quite a change.  It seems to be more accepted that women will have responsible positions.  And going along with this, although perhaps it's not as common as women in professions, men in families are taking more responsibility for things at home.
RD:	 Yes, and enjoying it.
DH: 	At least in younger families.
RD:	 That's right.  And of course it is both cause and effect, I think, of the rather larger divorce rate that we see.  Women who are well trained and professionally situated are in a much better position to make it on their own than women of your generation or even mine where you were apt to be very dependent on a spouse.  So that women who are raising children alone—and there are a number of those in the Law School—are able to get positions that make it possible for them to live well, maintain a high standard of living by themselves without having to have two incomes in the family.  Those were some of the women in the Law School that were so impressive to me.  There were several women who had never been married who were raising their children alone.  There were others, of course, who were divorced.  Many of the slightly older people coming to the Law School were divorced women with children. They seemed to get along fine.  They made use of all the services available in the city but once in awhile you would see a little plaintive note on the student bulletin board that reflected some of the loneliness—
DH: 	Such as?
RD:	"Anybody interested in a Sunday afternoon program for single parents and children sign up here."  Ways to try to establish some social life for themselves.  I am sure that it was very hard work to carry the heavy burden of Law School part-time jobs often, and they raised their children.  But the children I got to know quite well.
00:59:25
DH: 	Oh did you?
RD:	They were lovely.  Of course I've never seen a child that wasn't lovely, but these kids particularly seemed to be very bright and able, affable.  Of course those were strong women—probably make excellent lawyers too, probably employable because of their strength and their determination and their brains and their willingness to work hard.
DH: 	How about the men students who were married? Does this have any effect on the quality of their work? As opposed to those students who were single?
RD:	Well, you often wonder.  The wives, generally speaking, if there were children, were the major bread winners in the family.  Although a number of the men students had part-time jobs and rather good ones in law firms or government agencies around town, so that they were contributing to the support.  I used to wonder a good deal about the students that would sit in the student lounge or come down to watch Star Trek at 4:30 in the afternoon, or the bridge tables that were active during the day.
DH: 	Ones who came to watch TV or play bridge.
RD:	Yes.  Play bridge all afternoon.  I must say this is a small number of people I am talking about who would pick up their briefcases about 5:45 and amble home. Meantime their wives had come from work, gone to get the kids at the babysitter, and prepared the supper, and Dad comes in saying, "Boy, what a hard day at the Law School."  I often wanted to tattle on some of them.  But as I say, this wasn't a very large group of people.  
00:01:40
	On the whole, I think, the Law School students are serious and determined people.  A lot of them don't find the work very challenging.  And of course there is this thing that is apparently true; going to law school is totally different from being a lawyer.  There is no resemblance.  When you go to medical school, after the first year you spend a certain amount of time in the hospital.  You see people who are ill.  You are in the medical world.  But the law school student is in a scholarly world until the day he gets admitted to the bar.
01:02:21
DH: 	Wasn't there some effort, or is it still going on, to have some sort of internship-like program?
RD:	Yes, there is.  There is a General Practice Course which apparently is very popular—and my encounters with students gave it very high marks—in which practicing lawyers came into the Law School four at a time to tell about practicing law, and they talk about probate and domestic relations and criminal law and so on.  That is a very popular course for third-years students.  And the other is the clinical placements.  Students are placed in various places where they work for credit under the supervision of practicing lawyers in a variety of ways. And that, also, is very popular.  
01:03:22 	End of Tape 2, Side 2
[Subsequent portion of interview is not included on audio file. Interview audio resumes with Tape 3, Side 2]
Tape 3, Side 1 – NO AUDIO AVAILABLE
DH: 	I would think some of this on-the-spot experience would be an almost necessary part of the education process.
RD:  	Well, it's been eliminated from most law schools. I think it's because law schools are taught by scholars and they all took the form, even the order the courses are taught and so on, from the Harvard Law School in the late nineteenth century.  That's when the curriculum was established and that's when the methods of teaching were established, and the people who teach in law schools generally speaking are the people who liked law school very much themselves when they were in it.  They have a scholarly interest or were very high achieving students so their interest brings them to law school to be teachers. And so they're interested not in this general practice. One of the things that they worry about in the practicing courses is that it takes a great deal of time in the third year.  I think it's ten credits of the General Practice Course.  I guess what we're saying is that students are very interested in practical training.
DH: 	You are also saying that it takes a lot of time in their third year.
RD:	 Yes.  It takes a lot of time and they have to award large amounts of credit for the General Practice Course. This does not ride easily with other members of the faculty of course, who consider that their courses are extremely important, which they are, and who also consider that students will have their whole lives to practice law, but to be a student, it is a very limited little interval in their experience, so that maybe we should be more concerned with scholarly study in the third-year.  Students share this view too, I think.  The method of teaching was established years ago and is now only going under some changes.  But there has been great dissatisfaction by students and faculty with a limited amount of writing that students do during their years in Law School.  The grades and their total success or failure is based on one examination at the end of the semester in some law schools at the end of the year in each course.  And that, of course, is a slim basis on which to evaluate the work of law students.  It is interesting.  The Law Review has always been traditionally published by the best students in the class.  This is changing all over the country now too, and people are being allowed to apply for positions on the Law Review even if they aren't in the top ten percent of the student body.  But once you have made the Law Review, and this has traditionally been the case, that announcement is made before even you finish your first year.  You are somewhere in the second semester when Law Review selection is made, but if you make the Law Review, traditionally it was the case that your success in the profession was assured, even though it is based on only one and a half semesters of work.  The elitism involved in that—this turned out to be one of the changes of the sixties, I think.  The students and eventually the faculty, I think, agree that they need broader bases for determining people's success.  So that as is possible, they are requiring more writing, more original research of students while they are in Law School.
DH: 	I read about a research-writing seminar.
RD:	 Yes.  There will be in some of the smaller courses, of course, a chance to have a couple of papers required during a semester course.  But it is funny.  It seemed to me funny that many of the methods of teaching that were being considered in the Law School were methods that good elementary school teachers had been using for hundreds of years; practice writing, precise work, careful checking on what students were doing, a lot of testing.  These are things that have been part of the educational system from the time anybody started going to school.  Law schools have been, over the last ten years or so, beginning to loosen up and get out of their formal classroom structure which has always been what we call the Socratic Method.  The teacher asks questions of people on a seating chart; picks one out and asks questions.  Very often the student hasn't read the material.  Very often the students read the whole course within the last three or four weeks of the semester.  It is not a very satisfactory way of educating lawyers and I think more and more people agree.  And as a result, changes are taking place.
DH: 	Sounds like a good thing to have changed.
RD:	Yes.  But the burdens on the faculties are very great.  Law School professors don't have teaching assistants.  If they have a large course that has fifty to 100 students in it, the blue books are borne singly by the professor.  And the reading of the examination becomes very tedious, very difficult.  As a result, sometimes the grades are very late being recorded and since I have dealt with students, I would hear a great deal about that which other people didn't hear.  I think one of the reasons it was good to have somebody like me there was that I was not a regular faculty member.
DH:	Was it all right to come complain to you?
RD:	Spout off without endangering their position in the Law School community.  Of course it was lots of fun for me.  I enjoyed that.
DH: 	How do you account for the fact that there aren't TAs in the Law School when the other schools and colleges in the University have them?
RD:	 I don't know.  Law schools have always been run cheap.  All law schools in all universities are money makers because they have this rather stratified way of teaching large groups without a lot of assistance. I suppose one of the reasons they don't have teaching assistants is that there are not qualified people around available to be teaching assistants.  In a third-year course, I suppose you could have other third-year students grading examinations.  But I don't suppose students would like that very well.  And there are no graduate students in law schools except in special programs working on LL.M.'s, master's degrees.  There would never be more than one or two in a law school.

DH:	 I suppose, and they don't consider hiring instructors?
RD:	 No, they don't.  They hire professors, and at higher salaries than other professors get in other departments. Substantially higher.  Partly because they don't take people, almost never, right out of law school to be faculty members.  The law professors, traditionally again, have had some experience practicing law, working for the government, being law clerks to judges and other kinds of experiences they can bring to the Law School—three, four, five years of experience.  So that when they start out, they start on a higher salary because the law schools are competing at that point for people who are rather well paid.
DH: 	Experienced staff.
RD:	Yes.  And of course, very bright, as I say. People go into law school teaching, at least it's my observation, loved law school themselves and this has been in the back of their mind that they want to be teachers.
DH: 	Rather than signing up or joining a firm.
RD:	Yes, or doing something else.  Yes, this is their career.  And again, of course, they are looking for women and minority teachers.  Our Law School has been pretty lucky in having more women professors than most other law schools, and to have more minority faculty members. By more, I mean two or three.
DH: 	It would seem possible that if more minority and women students are going through Law School that, in time, the availability of these will lead to having more women professors on the faculty.
RD:	Yes, I think so.  I think there are probably many women out there now in that first five years out of Law School who are thinking about what they want to do, who will wind up looking for faculty positions.  We've had, of course, excellent women at this law school.  It's been a major banner.  We've had Justice Abrahamson.
DH: 	She is the only one that I personally know.
RD:	 Well, there is a woman there now who was the solicitor in the labor department.  She worked for the federal government for eighteen years.  An excellent, competent, professional woman.
DH: 	What is her name?
RD:	 Carin Clauss.  Clauss, I think it is.  Then June Weisberger, who is a good role model for many young woman. She was married right after she finished college and was the proper suburban housewife.  She raised three children, and at the time she was divorced decided to go to Law School.  So she developed at a relatively later period in life, a marvelous career.  She is a very active teacher. She is in labor law.  She is an arbitrator and a mediator for labor disputes.  She is a remarkable, active, vigorous woman, who I suppose, when she was twenty one, could never dream what she was going to be when she was forty.  And, of course, we have what I call an old timer, Margo Melli, who has been on the Law School faculty for at least twenty years.  She is one of the very first women professors and she has also made a remarkably effective contribution. She has carried a heavy burden in the Law School, on the campus, and again, her special interest is in social problems and welfare.  I think she's been a very important figure in the development of legislation and practices in the welfare field.  There are others, too, that have come. Some of them have gone.  But they make a fine example to the women in the Law School, I think.  They are very fortunate to have the kind of women that they have.  And I don't know what it says about this Law School that we seem to be able to have more well qualified women than other law schools.  But it certainly is to the credit of the University.
DH: 	Yes, it's very heartening. Something else I am interested in—before I get to that, what do you know about the office of legal services which is supposed to help poor people?
RD:	Well, there is Legal Action of Wisconsin which handles the legal problems of people who can't afford to pay.  They have an office over on Mills Street and they have a lot of recent graduates, and I think some students who work there.  Then there are the public defenders offices.  Those are state supported offices which provide legal service for people involved with criminal prosecutions who can't afford lawyers.  They are legal defenders of people, but I don't know the office of legal services.
DH: 	Well, I just came across it and was wondering about it.
RD:	 No. Of course, those offices are very good places to provide experience for people.  Then, of course, connected with the Law School—and this is something that I am not an expert on—is the very important Center for Public Representation, which is privately supported and handles legal problems of groups or individuals before administrative agencies and tries to effect changes in the law and trains people, trains non-lawyers with ways of handling their own groups' efforts and so on.  This uses legal faculty from the Law School.  There are one or two of them assigned part-time all the time to work with the students who make up the majority of the staff.  And that's an interesting and very active operation which has now been in existence for a number of years and has done very well.
DH: 	How are the students selected?
RD:	 Students apply for a position.  It becomes a clinical placement for a student.  He gets credit for working there on particular projects and there are two or three faculty people there to provide proper supervision so that the students are getting good experience, so it's worth however many credits they are going to give them for it.  Students enjoy it, too.
DH:	 It sounds like the work would be varied. 
RD:	 Yes.
DH: 	Well, something else I would like to know that's a little bit different is about the role of the deans in the Law School.  You said that—who was there?

RD:	 Spencer Kimball was the dean when I was there. I have worked with Spencer Kimball and George Bunn and Orrin Helstad.
DH: 	Tell me something about first of all what their role is and something about them.
RD:	 It's not a very popular job.  The dean listens to a lot of guff and is responsible for determination of salaries, for one thing.  Law professors are not above being rather petty and complaining about things.  The dean has to represent the Law School to the campus and to the University administration and has to deal with umpteen details.  He is not the towering figure that you think. And I wonder if maybe that is part of this new time. Years ago, when I was in college, Dean Garrison was dean of the Law School.  Dean Sellery was dean of the College of Letters and Science.  These were towering figures of enormous power.  That doesn't seem to be the case much anymore.  The deans are advocates for the Law School and they have to work, pleading and groaning and complaining—always about budget, of course—to the administration.  The Law School has been rather successful in this, although they have received some extra special attention via the budget after many years in which they felt they were falling behind, neglected, and so on.
DH: 	What kind of respects are you thinking of?
RD:	 I have been thinking particularly about salaries, about staff expansion.  The Law School grew terrifically in size without a corresponding growth in staff and faculty, that tied it up in knots.  That has to be worked at all the time.  Dean George Young, who recently died—he's a former dean—used to give a wonderful speech about when the new Law School was built.  It had been in the work for forty years, I think, before they finally started to build it. And so he talked about being the dean of a law school that didn't have a building, almost had no students, and they were scattered all over the campus.  But, nevertheless, under him, the building was built.  But now, of course, in recent years, it's needed change and development and even some consideration of another building.  That is the kind of thing that the dean has to get the faculty to agree to in the first place.  Once he has that, then it's his job to sell the University on what the Law School's position is. It's a very difficult job.  Some people enjoy that kind of work and some don't.  I think that that's quite clear. But in recent times, the deans have not lasted very long. They go back to do other things.  Dean Kimball lasted five years.  George Bunn was there—not five, I don't think—maybe four.  And Dean Helstad is finishing his fifth year now.
DH: 	Is he going to stay?
RD:	 I don't know.  He is teaching a course, I notice, this year.  That kind of dean work is really not a whole lot of fun.  They get it from everybody.  The faculty complains.  The students beat him over the head. The regents beat him over the head.  The University Committee—everything sort of centers on the poor dean. But I think we have had very able people as dean.  All of the ones that I worked with are very good.
DH: 	You mentioned George Young. Do you know anything about the circumstances of his resignation?
RD:	 It was long before I came to the Law School.
DH: 	That is what I thought.
RD:	 It was maybe five years earlier.  It was a matter of controversy, I think.  I think the faculty decided—I really shouldn't say anything about it because I don't know.  I know that it was a matter of controversy, and I think he was persuaded to resign.  And then Dean Kimball came who was a very dynamic, active kind of a man. He always had a couple of jobs going on.  I think George Bunn was a very popular dean in the beginning, but then he began stepping on toes.  You can't be a dean without making people angry.  You take one position, you make the faculty happy, students mad.  If you take another position, you make the students happy, the faculty mad.  And then you always have this outside constituency—the alumni and the University community—after you.  I was called an assistant to the dean.
DH: 	What does that mean? 
RD:	 That means I'm not a lawyer. 
DH:  	I see.
RD:	 If you're a lawyer, that means you can be an assistant dean.  The administrative structure of the Law School has expanded.  There are a couple of associate deans now.  There used to be associate deans who were faculty members who took the job part-time for a temporary two-year period.  Now I think there are two full-time associate deans and other rearrangements in the staff of the Law School.  Of course that is inevitable.  That happens mostly because of the kind of people you have.  The people that are on the job change the jobs.  Jobs get tailored to suit certain talents and personalities, and they change.
DH: 	What do you know about the relationship between the Law School and the administrations as presidents changed?
RD:	 Well, of course now they have a very happy situation.  The president, Bob O'Neil, is a lawyer himself.  He is teaching a course in the Law School.  He is teaching a regular course.  It’s not something where he drops in to give a lecture occasionally or have a little seminar meeting once every three weeks.  He teaches a regular course.  He enjoys teaching.  He feels very close to the Law School faculty.  And of course the Law School faculty is just eating it up and it's nice to have somebody that really understands them.  I think the problem of the salary differential between Law School and other departments has always made relationships a little thorny with the administration.
DH: 	Because the Law School professors get more?
RD:	 Get more, yes.  To start out with.
DH: 	Well, so do the Medical School people.
RD:	 Yes. And it's the same problem. Although I suppose the Medical School people get even more. I don't know what the salary levels are and I don't know what the differentials are. But they are substantial enough that it causes a little friction. Law School people, in my opinion, have tended to keep themselves apart from the rest of the campus which is too bad.
DH: 	Why is this?
RD:	 Well, I think it's more of a monolithic group. What they are doing is all contained in one building. They don't have any need to go outside much.  They tend to stick together and not associate very deeply.  Although I did attend—on occasion when Dean Helstad was not available—I did attend the chancellor's deans meetings which was a weekly thing, I think.  And I found that group rather friendly.
DH: 	This was across the campus?
RD:	 Across the campus, yes.  And then I also attended the associate administrators' council which was a meeting of associate deans who deal with all of the problems I thought were just fascinating on the campus. Exam schedules, standardized procedures, you know, so that all the people all across the campus understood each other about various things.  I attended those, but only as kind of an observer.  And mostly I went because I enjoyed going.  I enjoyed meeting them.  But often the Law School has tended to remove itself.  This is changing too, I think.  The chairman of the University Committee is, I think, now a law professor and in recent years we have had several law professors who have served as chairmen of the University Committee, which means they take a heavy responsibility for things that go on all over the campus.
DH: 	That's true.  That is the important committee in terms of faculty governance.
RD:	 I think both Shirley Abrahamson and Margo Melli, and I think Ted Finman, and a number of people on the University Committee who have served as chairmen within the last twelve years or so.
DH: 	If things are nice under O'Neil, how were they before O'Neil?
RD:	 Well, I guess I don't know. You mean in relation to the administration?
DH: 	Yes.
RD:	 I think the Law School has done well financially. I think they have been pleased with the way their relative position financially to the rest of the campus has been dealt with in recent years.  A lot of that, I think, happened during George Bunn's time when he worked very hard at it.  And he got into some trouble with alumni, I remember, particularly.  He said it was a mediocre law school, or he gave a speech once or wrote something that implied that he was concerned because our students were not getting a good education.  Recent graduates who then were out practicing law took great offense, and he got a couple of very tart letters from students saying they had taken the Michigan bar and they had done very well and they were doing as well as any other young person in their firms and so on.  And they would thank him not to talk about their mediocre school.
DH: 	Downgrading it.
RD:	 You have to be very careful if you're a dean.
DH: 	I suppose so.  Well, you said there weren't any TAs in the law school, but I am wondering—you started there in about '69, didn't you?  Well, this was the time of the protest movements on campus.  Do you recall what the law students’ attitude was?
RD:	 I had mixed feelings since I was the mother of a Harvard Law School student at the same time who went through the troubles and I had the cynical feeling that law students all over the country were trying hard to get out of exams much more than to get out of Cambodia at the time.  And it resulted in a very loosening of all sorts of procedures not only in this Law School but all law schools having to do with examinations and so on.  And the students were active participants and, I think, students and faculty in the Law School participated in the strikes that went on during that time and postponed their exams.  Oh, there were some places where they just didn't give exams.  That whole year wrapped up in a very fuzzy kind of a way, which didn't seem to hurt the students.  That is, they recovered from whatever deprivation they might have suffered as a result. But I remember our own son was in Law School then and he used the summer—at the Harvard Law, they said students didn't have to take their exams in the regular order; if they were busy doing their protesting and making their wishes known in Washington and so on, they could postpone their exams.  So, our son did that which meant that he took his exams throughout the whole summer.  He studied real hard for one and then he would take it.  He would study real hard and take the next one.  Gave himself about four months to write examinations.  He probably got better grades than he would have had—he finished up the last exam within two days of the start of school in the fall. He probably learned a whole lot, but he wasn't out politicking during that time.  He was studying law most of that time.
RD:	-- Most students want to be lawyers.  They want to know what it is like.  They can hardly wait to get practicing law. 
DH: 	How did this compare with what happened here?
RD:	What happened here was the great surge of take-home examinations which are still being used, only under much more restraint than they used to be.  That is, students could take the examination home, work on them over 
 [Audio resumes after this point]	
Tape 3, Side 2
00:00:00
00:00:01
RD:	--for an extended period of time, and very few sit-down exams were given that year.  I don't know why that happened.  I can't figure out why exams got so important that particular time.  That was the time when they wanted to go to Washington, but—I think thousands and thousands of students did go to Washington.  But that was over in a couple days.  They wanted to campaign, I suppose.  But a lot of them didn't really get to do that.  I suppose it had some real and maybe some lasting effects on the scheduling of law school courses and examinations.
DH: 	It sounds as though this take-home exam has lingered on.
RD:	Yes, it has lingered on.  And that, of course, has much to be said for it and much to be said against it. The old-fashioned view of the monitored exam has relaxed terrifically.  Faculty are ready to recognize now that you don't have to carry it all in your head.  Lawyers don't have to carry it all in their heads.  They have to know where to go to find things, but they don't have to remember everything when they go in and take the four-hour exam.
DH: 	What are the things you see against take-home exams?
RD:	Well, the problem of original work becomes one that has to be considered—honest presentations.  I think now students sign an affidavit that they have not had any illegal assistance.  One student, I remember, I felt so sorry for him.  He was an athlete, long gone from the campus now, whose grades in that particular semester went up substantially over what they were before or after. It was because of his grades in that semester that he was able to graduate.  He had not done well.  He was uneasy always about that, and I had this feeling that somebody had done his work for him with his take-home exams.  Raised him that semester into a grade level that he never achieved again.
00:02:53
DH: 	I read in the paper in the Cardinal at the time which was around the early '70s that there was some question as to whether the Law School was going to continue to be accredited.  Can you tell me anything about that?
RD:	Well, law schools are periodically visited and examined by the Association of American Law Schools and a committee of the American Bar Association on a regular basis of every five or ten years.  They are inspected and observed and studied for purposes of continuing their accreditation.  At the time that that happened—'73, ‘74—the Law School was—and George Bunn was the dean—in its biggest squabble and fight with the legislature and campus administration on the question of budget: the question of salaries compared to professors of law schools, the question of the size of the faculty compared to the number of students, the fact that they had grown substantially, the fact that the building was inadequate. All of these things were noted by the accreditation team that came and the Law School tried to make rather judicious use of that information which meant that there was a good deal of publicity about it.
DH: 	This I recall.
RD:	 Yes, there was a lot of talk about it. Worried people.  It worried alumni, particularly the younger alumni.  We were just talking a minute ago about how they didn't want to be called graduates of a mediocre law school.  The younger alumni were alarmed that they would be graduating from school that might not be accredited. Prospective students, of course, wanted to know—particularly good students who had choices of many law schools — wanted to know what would happen if this school was no longer accredited.  I don't think it ever was even a possibility.  It was a kind of a thing that the Law School tried to take advantage of for purposes of improvements which—I think it worked.  I think the faculty was increased.  The pupil-teacher ratio, which I have always considered kind of a false measure of quality, was lower.  That is they added faculty to make the number of teachers available to the students—more teaching time available to the students.  Even at that time, Harvard Law School had many more students per teacher than most other law schools.  It is a very large law school.  But I don't think anybody would say on that basis that it wasn't a good law school.  I think, you know, you would take your life in your hands if you said that.  So that this was part of the whole scene at the time and it did work.  I remember, myself, talking to the man who had been chairman of the committee that came here from the Association of the American Law Schools.  I called him on the phone because I was writing something for the Gargoyle about the whole subject.  He said, "Of course, we would have to remove the accreditation of 150 law schools before we would get to Wisconsin."  
00:06:49
	Wisconsin is considered, always has been, a very good law school among the state university law schools.  But there are in the country, historically, and I think at the present time, about five law schools that are in a class by themselves. They are different from other law schools and don't measure themselves by the same standards.  That would be Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago and Stanford.
DH: 	What's different about them?
RD:	Well, the fact that they have the best students in the country.  They have the pick of the best students in the country.  They operate—except for Michigan, they're private institutions connected with very, very prestigious universities.  So they tend to be sort of in a class by themselves.  Sort of pacesetters.  But then, just below them, or in addition to them, there are a large group of very good law schools and, of course, Wisconsin would certainly be one of them.  But you don't hear much talk about that anymore in the last five or six years.  That has changed.  We aren't so worried about our relative position anymore as we were at that time.
DH: 	You are right about the publicity.  There was quite a lot of it.
RD:	Yeah.
00:08:33

DH: 	Wasn't it about this time, or was it a little later that the extra library wing was added?
RD:	It was about that time that it was put into the works.  It was finished, I think, in 1978. Now, of course, they are talking about another building.
DH: 	There are two possibilities.  One, I read recently is putting another addition onto the present building, and the other is moving the school off the hill to a different location.  How do you feel about it?
RD:	 I don't know.  The Law School faculty always resisted any idea that they might have some part of their classes in another building.  That just seemed to be an abhorrent idea.  I never could figure out why.  I could see why they'd want all the offices in one building for purposes of administration and delivering the mail and that sort of thing—answering the phone.  But why they resisted so, having an occasional class taught in another part of the campus, I never could figure out.  It might jazz up the whole place a little bit and be different.  The building is too small, clearly.  And something has to be done. They had talked about building onto the tower.  I think there are five stories in the tower—six, seven.  They could add another couple of floors to the tower.  I don't know. I think the school is permanently larger now than it was before.  This increased enrollment is not just a passing phase.  This school is permanently, apparently, between 900 and 1,000 students now.  I notice—our daughter teaches out at Arizona.  They had what I thought was quite a nice building which was there before.  Then she went to Washington for four years and went back and they have a lovely brand new building now.  A beautiful building—lovely offices and classrooms.  And a permanent enrollment of 450. They are not going to let their Law School get big.
DH: 	Well, there has been some attempt, hasn't there, to limit or cut down somewhat the size of this Law School?
RD:	 Well, during the first years I was at the Law School, there was a lot of talk about a second law school in Wisconsin.  We were one of the few states that doesn't have two public law schools.  There are many complications connected with that.  Then, of course, there was all this movement to have a part-time or a night program which they now have, I guess.  But as the faculty thought, the legislature must now know there aren't many people in Madison that want to go to a night law school.  There are a few state employees who might want to do that.  But the system has been set up at the insistence of the legislature to provide a certain number of courses taught at night, which added up in five years would give a student everything he needed to be a graduate.
DH: 	To pass his bar exam.  Or he doesn't have to pass a bar exam in Wisconsin.
RD:	Not in Wisconsin, no.  But enough to make him admissible to the bar.  Of course the talk of another law school alarmed Marquette.  I worked a little on some of the preliminary studies that went into that, studying the population of Wisconsin.  It would seem quite clear—studying the population of Wisconsin and the applications to the Law School that were turned down because there wasn't space, it was quite clear that if there were going to be a second law school, it would have to be in Milwaukee or in the southeast corner of the state somewhere.  And, of course, that alarmed Marquette Law School and all their alumni.  I think the idea was laid to rest because this law school proved itself able to absorb 900 students, and because this law school at the time that that discussion was going on had a major increase in its appropriations and in its own facilities.  So it didn't seem as necessary to have a second law school.
DH: 	Do you think the subject may come up again?
RD:	 It's possible, although I don't think there is any cry, now, that there aren't enough lawyers.  People are beginning to feel that we don't have to expand facilities.
DH: 	Well, we'll just have to wait and see about that.
RD:	There are still about the same number of people applying to law school, I understand.  For an entering class of about 3 00 to 350, for the last number of years, they have had about 1,900 to 2,000 applications.  Very few applications from people that are clearly unqualified.
DH: 	They are turning away many, many more than they are taking, then?
RD:	Yes.  That is true at all schools, I think.
DH: 	Well, I think I have pretty much run you out of questions in this area.  Can you think of anything else we should discuss?
RD:	 No, not at the moment.  Four o'clock tomorrow morning I will.
DH: 	Well, you can call me up.
RD:	Turn on this machine then, huh?  
00:15:10
	I did enjoy working at the Law School.  I enjoyed working with the students. I should probably have been a lawyer myself.  My father wanted me to be a lawyer.  He would have sent me to law school.  He was a lawyer.  My brother was a lawyer.
DH: 	Did you consider this seriously at any time?
RD:	No, I didn't really.  It didn't hit me until just a couple years ago why I didn't.  My father was a good lawyer, a busy, active lawyer.  But he was interested in business and banking and building and loans, real estate and that sort of thing.  It didn't seem to me that—there's nothing wrong with it, but I just wasn't terribly interested in probate and that kind of thing.  And then after I had been in the legislature, and I was staying at home, I could have gone to law school very easily.  Jim was practicing law.  But I saw how hard he worked at things that didn't interest me terribly much.  It just didn't occur to me.  If I were coming along now, there would be no question in my mind.  Because lawyers are doing so many more things than they used to do.  The profession itself has expanded into so many interesting avenues that I think there would be no question.  My daughters are lawyers and I certainly would have been right there with them—if I were young.
00:16:46
DH:	 If you were to be in an area of law now, what particular aspect would interest you most?
RD:	Well, one of the new fields that I have noticed in certain areas of legal advocacy and legislation—for instance I know some young women that work for a juvenile policy program law for young children and so on. They helped draft the legislation the new children's code that was adopted a few years ago.  And then they went around training juvenile judges and other people around the state as to what the new law meant, which is a marvelous development.  Years ago they would adopt a new big code, you know, and the legislature would pass it and that would then be the end of it.  It would go out to the judges who would go on doing things pretty much the way they had always done.  Now there is a real effort to make these things actually work—to make the law work for the benefit of the people that it is going to serve.  That sort of thing is new and it would be fun, I think.  There are many interesting ways and things that lawyers are doing now. The public defenders programs and legal aid programs have expanded terrifically in what sorts of things they do. The whole profession itself is much more diverse than it used to be.  I suppose if everybody my age went to law school, there would suddenly be too many lawyers.  There we would be.
DH: 	I don't think that’s a real danger. 
RD:	No, not now.
00:18:42
DH: 	Did you want to tell me something about your lawyer family?
RD:	Well, I was just thinking about how it’s been fortunate in all of my activities that when I was teaching high school, my kids were entering high school.  When I went to work for the University among undergraduates, my own children were undergraduates at other colleges.  When I went to work at the Law School, they were law students, or just recently out of law school.
DH: 	Here?
RD:	One of them went here.  Catey went to law school here.  But Mary went to Boston College Law School her first year and then transferred to Columbia, and Jim went to Harvard Law School.  And our kids did not go to college here.  They went elsewhere to college.  But nevertheless, I always felt as though I understood more of what was going on with them because I was in it myself.  But my kids have been very good students.  We have been very proud of all of them.  And it's nice to see them now going along, although I fuss at them about being too busy.  They take on too much.
DH: 	Your son Jim is our district attorney right now.  And busy he is.
RD:	Yes.  And his wife is very busy.  And they have two adopted sons.  Mary, our eldest, practiced law in New York.  And she worked at the investigations in Attica. She was one of the administrators of the investigation after the terrible disorders at Attica, the prison in New York. Then she worked for the Board of Corrections of the City of New York in a justice improvement program.  Then she went to teach out at Arizona for a year or two.  And then she went to Washington for the Carter years in which she was an associate general counsel in the Environmental Protection Agency for part of that time.  She also taught a semester at Georgetown and a semester at the University of Virginia during those four years.  So she has been a terribly active and busy person.  And when I complain to her about that, she says, "It’s the very same words I have heard grandma saying to you when you were in your thirties, you know." It is the same sort of thing, and I suppose I have given them that kind of drive.  But they have made good use of it.
DH: 	That's nice.
RD:	Yes.  And they are all interested in the law, and of course, that is not so much from me, I suppose, as from their father, who has been at it a long time.  It's kind of embarrassing in a way.
DH: 	I don't see why.
RD:	 Anne has not gone to Law School, but she realizes now what the work is she is interested in.  She works as a legal associate for the Brooklyn legal services and it would require work if she wants to have a full career and if she wants to stick with it.  She'll have to go to law school then.  In spite of her pronouncements that she was never going to do it—everybody else had done it, and she was never going to do it—I think she probably will be thinking about it.  In the meantime, she functions as a lawyer for about half the pay.
DH: 	That would be an inducement to go to school.
00:22:33 	End of Interview
END

Donna Taylor Hartshorne was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1924. She received a B.A. from Smith College in 1946. For many years she cooperated with her historian husband in scholarly research at Harvard University and the Library of Congress. From 1967 to 1969 she was a free-lance editor for the University of Wisconsin Press. In 1970 she joined the staff of the Division of Archives, University of Wisconsin, and in July 1972 was appointed director of the Archives Oral History Project. She married Richard Hartshorne (a second marriage) in 1978. She has five children by her first marriage. Mrs. Hartshorne retired from the Oral History Project in 1982.