UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #259
ELVEHJEM, CONSTANCE W.

ELVEHJEM, Constance W. (1905-1999)
Undergraduate Student; Wife of Conrad Elvehjem (Professor of Biochemistry; President)
At UW: 1923-1927

First Interview
Interviewed: 1983		
Series: Life Sciences
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 4.5 hours

Second Interview [Not included on transcript]
Interviewed: c. 1961		
Interviewer: Harriet Bunn
Length: 0.5 hour

FIRST INTERVIEW (1983)
Tape 1, Side 1
00:00:01
CE:  	So I'm really ex-'27.  I go around with all the '27 class and I was in charge of their 50th reunion and all but I'm really not--I kept telling Arlie Mucks, "I'm not legal."
00:00:14
LS:  	I'll just say, this is an interview – are you always called Connie? – actually it’s Constance Elvehjem on March 17, 1983.  This is Laura Smail and we are talking in her home.  
00:00:38
So you married in 1926?  
CE:  	June of '26. 
LS:	And you say this has been -- [Tape recorder turned off.] 
LS:  	Before we started I was asking you about something I'd come across about a student of Dr. Elvehjem's who claimed that he hadn't been given credit for the discovery of niacin.
00:53:00
CE: 	Yes, Jim [Bob?] Madden, his name was, I think, and I always felt a little hurt about that because Connie was so good.  I think one of the first to include his students in all papers.  You know, in the scientific world the head professor's name usually comes first and he would always--he was beginning to move back and if you see it--somewhere I have a whole list of all his 824 papers and--or scientific articles--and it was interesting to see, as I've looked at them how, you know, he began to go farther back in the list of names.  But this [Jim?] Madden, for one reason or another, he was included in the original reports and all, but somehow or another he didn't think he got enough credit or something.  And after my husband's death I got a letter from him saying how he regretted this.  That he was a man not knowing where he was going and struggling for power and he had felt the big man didn't give him enough credit.  He admitted that he had had some time in psychiatry after this.  Then I think he went into medicine.  And he just completely discounted the whole thing.
LS:  	That's very interesting.
CE:  	And it was just immediately after his death.  Now I ought to have that letter someplace, but where?
LS:  	That's too bad.  If you could find it.  Because apparently he wrote a book in which he took credit for it and that's presumably what is remembered about him.  To his--not to his credit.  Because it is discounted.  
CE:  	Well, you know, he was sort of a strange fellow.  Always.  And I wish that Connie had known this because I think that hurt him.  Because if ever there was a man that was fair, he was.  And he had no desire for glory of any sort.  It was purely the excitement of the chase of these scientific things that were going to improve better health.
00:03:09
LS:  	Well I gather that he didn't get the publicity for the discovery, but rather the doctor who gave the medicine to the patients.
CE:  	But that was apt to be true too.  I think that that was a little unfortunate.  Tom was--we knew him very well.  He spent quite a little time with us in our home.  But he was a strange person too, really.  And he went over and sort of talked to the Nobel Prize people, or people who had something to do with the Nobel Prize.  And many people have told me since that Connie would have had the Nobel Prize if it hadn't been for Tom Spies.  Did Van say that too?  Probably--
LS:  	Yes he did.
CE:  	And Olaf Hougen has told me just recently out of the blue.  We weren't even talking about my husband.  Olaf was over there as cultural attaché about this time, and he sat on some of those committees, I guess.  Or gave them advice on scientists in America or something.  And he said Connie's name was to have been taken that year, the year he died.  But they decided to put an older man, in thinking Connie was young enough and he could have it later.  Well that wouldn't have made any difference to my husband, really.
LS:	It wouldn't?
CE:  	I don't think it would.  I think he'd had the fun of the chase and he'd had recognition, and he was always astounded at medals and awards.  He only expressed--once a sort of surprise that he hadn't had one and that amazed me because that was the first time he had ever talked about them.  He'd always come home and say, "Oh look what's happened to me."  But this was the Borden Award.  He worked on the Dairy Council for years and they gave so many people in our University of Wisconsin Ag School the Borden Award and he just wondered why he was skipped and I think probably it was just one of those things.  They thought he was getting other things.  But that's the only time he ever mentioned anything like that.  And you know he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.  And that is really quite a fine honor.  Especially to a scientist because they--and he came home with this beautiful old script engraving invitation.  And he said, "Connie, they must have made some mistake.  I'm not a philosopher, I'm a scientist."  And I said, "Well we probably should look up a little bit more about the American Philosophical Society."  Well, it was one of the nicest things that ever happened to him because we were both included in the meetings and it was just a feast for--every man has to prepare a paper in his own discipline so the other people can understand it.  And you meet in that old Independence Hall that Ben Franklin set up with the same kind of food that he had and--
LS:  	I'll bet that was good.
CE:  	Yes, it was.  You know, fried oysters and ice cream in a pyramid that they carved like this, and Ben Franklin had set up enough funds to take care of that.  And they had to pay, I believe, their own transportation but our hotel and all our meals and everything were paid as were the wives'.  Just think how many years that's been going like that.  And Connie was the first one, I think, on this campus and since then there had been quite a few: Ken Raper, Farrington Daniels, Perry Wilson, I don't know, there are probably more now, but—
00:06:50
LS:  	[Having trouble with the tape recorder.]  [Pause]
00:07:47
We started off--I asked you about yourself as a faculty wife and you said that you didn't have--you put off having children for five years so Connie could finish his Ph.D.  And that you, yourself, didn't work because women didn't.  And you did do a column in your home newspaper.
CE: 	 I did publicity for every volunteer organization for a few years.
LS:  	Did you start right away doing volunteer work?
CE:  	Yes.  In various and sundry places; the church, and I worked for Red Cross and for many years I did publicity for Red Cross.  When we started the blood program, the blood bank program, I was down there three days a week.  I had an office.  Until it got to be such a big thing.  We hired Ethel Parker.  And I typed my husband's thesis.
LS:  	Oh you did?  I see.
CE:  	And that was not easy because I didn't quite understand the decimal points were so important.  So many times the sheets had to be redone.  
00:09:05
And then every article he wrote--you see he spoke only Norwegian until he was six and he went to Norwegian church services every other Sunday.  So he had many little twists of his English that were not just the way you and I would speak or I felt they were not just right.  And so I would--I always was his editor for many, many years.
LS:     	Oh you edited as well as typing--
CE:  	He wrote the first draft on yellow lined paper and I went over it then and then I would often type the first draft before he took it to the secretary to type so we hoped the errors were out and--it was grammatical, exactly, he had a wonderful knowledge of how to--if you told him something was wrong, he immediately made that his correction of himself and I never heard him do it again.  But he had trouble with pronunciation.  Like the `th's.  Norwegian, you know.  He would trash the child and throw out the thrash sort of thing.  So he got--and then I had taken, what do you call it?  When you edit copy?  Proofreading.  I had taken proofreading in college so I did that with him.  And there were many times when the children were little, I can remember, our stairway came out just right outside of his study and I used to hope I could get down and off that last step before he heard me so I could read the paper and just have a few minutes to myself before I had to go into the study.  But he'd say, "Connie..."  And I'd really enjoy it once I got in there but it's just that it was my little time to myself after having had children all day.  So I did enter into that.
00:11:05
And when we were in school I got him through his French exam for his doctorate.  He had taken some French but hadn't gotten much out of it.  And German and Norwegian were more like him. And he hadn't had any Latin. So he always--he publicly acclaimed that when Julian Harris got some kind of, I guess the Legion of Honor, Connie said, "I don't know much French, but my wife taught me what I know," or something like that.  So I was busy with him.  And I did everything he wanted me to.  I really realize now how much I did do.  The children were talking the other night.  This is just a homely thing.  But they said, "Daddy never washed his own hair."  And I said "Yes, a woman today wouldn't allow herself to get into that bind, but somehow or other he wanted me to do that and it was just part of my job."  And that seems ridiculous now, doesn't it?  In today's world?
LS:  	Yes, we look back on very different kinds of lives--
CE:  	Everybody takes a shower or we--
LS:  	It's very hard, I think, probably now for people to understand that one didn't think twice about it.  Although you say you came downstairs and would have liked a moment to yourself.  
CE:  	That's the one thing I remember.  If I could just have had--I love the newspaper.  I always have.  Because having been a newspaper woman.  And, so I guess I probably--that was my big thrill.  And it is today.  I get so cross if my paper isn't there with my morning coffee.  And I don't think the newspaper is that great anymore and we get the news, you know, third or fourth hand after we have listened to radio or television.  Still I like that reading.
00:12:59
LS:     	Did he work nights also?
CE:  	Yes.  And when we were first married he went back to the lab almost every night.  We didn't have a car for three years and we lived on Adams and Oakland so I would walk with him and often take a book and sit in the lab with him.  Or sometimes I did just some cleaning up in the lab.  I thought, this is so dirty.  You know, and he always laughed at that.  Chemistry labs are not notoriously clean but--so I would wash dishes and do things like that.  And just be happy sitting on the stool beside him.  So I learned a lot about his work and because of his papers, too, I learned chemistry terms, and things that probably are--people always say, "Did you take chemistry?"  Well I took a course in high school.  I didn't have any college chemistry. I took other science.  But I think it was just association with him and you asked if he talked about his work. Yes. And even the children remember that.  That daddy had such exciting things to tell us.  And they learned that he liked to talk without being interrupted.  And so, you know, everybody had their turn at the table.  And my son often says that he thinks that was the choicest time in our family.  Around the dinner table. And that isn't true anymore because the children are so programmed, you know. Our children when they got in high school, of course, were--there was basketball, all these extra things that they did.
00:14:35
LS:  	When you say he talked about his work.  You mean literally about the experiments he was working on and about the molecules that he was discovering--
CE:  	The quest.  Yes.  Right.  And I remember one day when he came home he was working on iron and copper and he was hoping to get--he ashed something--a blue ash which would prove that copper was present in some experiment he was doing.  And he didn't get that.  And there was this dour-looking face coming in the door and I knew something was wrong.  And he said, "Well, my weeks of experimentation have kind of gone down the drain today."  Well later it did work out.  So there were the bad times and the good times.  That's one that I remember particularly.  And then there were times when we'd be out someplace and the lights would--we'd notice that the lights in the University were out for some reason or another, power outage or something, and we'd have to rush to biochem to save the animals because they were in the attic and they had to be air conditioned.  It was the first place air conditioned on the campus, I guess.  Long before we knew about air conditioning.  Because they had to have that.  And there were times--once, the outside rats came up the vines--you know biochemistry used to be covered with woodbine, some kind of an ivy vine--and the outside rats came in and mated with the rest.  So that was a terrible time.  A lot of things like that I remember.  And the monkeys got out when they were working with monkeys.  And they called--the security man called my husband.  He got my son out of bed.  They went over there with butterfly nets.  And those crazy things would fly up on the chandeliers, and hang, and just get out of your reach.  Bob always laughs about that.  And that night he drove the car.  He was old enough to drive.  I don't know, he might have been in college.  But they parked in front of biochemistry and this is forbidden, of course.  So they called Bob into student court for that because they didn't dream a professor would be out at three or four o'clock in the morning in his office.  So he had his dad help him get out of that one.  But there were lots of emergencies like that in the lab that he was always involved in.  
00:17:06
LS:  	So you didn't feel isolated from his work at all?
CE:  	No.  And I felt part of it and I would have felt terribly disappointed if I hadn't known as much as I--and I went to scientific meetings with him.  I think that's kind of more common now than it used to be because professors have more money, maybe.  But I just loved to go and sit and listen to the papers.  And I got to know many of his colleagues that way.  
00:17:36
LS:  	Did he talk with you very much about the relationships in the biochemistry department?
CE:  	Yes.  There were some bad ones.
LS: 	Yes, I gather that.
CE:  	Do you know?
LS: 	Yes.
CE:  	Unfortunately.  And I, I didn't worry about Connie's being president because I thought he, as chairman, had handled some pretty tough situations over there, personalities.  And they'd all worked out, he seemed to be friends with everyone.  And I figured that he could do that well.  And of course we got to the Medical School mess and that was something else, I guess.
00:18:13
LS: 	Just to stay with the department awhile.  Van Potter said yesterday that one of the things he appreciated very much was that Connie and E.B. Hart did their journal club together so that the students got the benefit of both.  But he said that really Hart was, he didn't put it this way but that Hart was riding on Connie's coat tail.  I mean that he had ceased to produce very much.
CE:  	See he didn't have a higher degree, for one thing.  And he was just a wonderful man in that he recognized--just think, he hired Steenbock and Peterson and Link and Elvehjem and all those wonderful people.  And so he had to have something special in his quality of choosing people and recognizing their abilities but I think it's true he--they called him the "old man" with great affection.
LS:  	Yes.
CE:  	And they meant it with only real affection not a put down at all.  And I think he was a part of everything they did.  But he saw Connie early as somebody that he thought was going to be successful.  And almost anything Connie wanted he got.  He told Professor Hart he'd like to study in Cambridge and by jove it happened, you know?  And those days Rockefeller grants didn't come so easily.  And it meant going on a ship, and staying a year.  So it came about.  And while we were over there my husband wanted this Barcroft apparatus which, I don't know if Van told you, but that's a tissue respirator.  And it used to be made mostly of glass.
LS:  	Yes, I--also Frank Strong spoke--
CE:  	Yes.  They are almost standard equipment in every laboratory now I guess.  But Connie wrote Professor Hart about this.  It was named after Professor Barcroft over there.  And he said, "I think I could get the glass man to build me one.  If we could have one in our lab it would be great."  Well, I have some correspondence about that too, I think--Professor Hart finally decided he could spare $300.  
LS: 	He was very frugal, I understand.
CE:  	Yes.  So my husband talked this lab man into making this, or this glass man.  And we brought it home in a box.  And Connie insisted it had to be in our state room.  It was in a wooden box.  And my parents met us in New York and we were going to take a little trip on the way home, Niagara Falls and so forth.  And we crossed over on the Canadian side and they didn't want to let this box back into the United States without opening it.  And my husband said, "No way are you going to open that box."  And my mother was the one that saved the day.  She said, "Well, to show you how fragile it is, my daughter and I have had to sit with it between us in the back seat and we weren't even allowed to put our elbows on the box."  And that did it.  So we got it through.  And now, I saw a picture.  I think I have a picture here of him with that. [Recorder turned off.]
CE:  	The scientific part.  She was going to marry a biochemist and I think that probably is pretty good.  As near as I can figure.  Last night I read it.  I think I would catch a great inaccuracy in the sequence of events and all.  But it's--I don't know where she got--she must have gotten some of the pictures from the lab.  And she got some from me I guess.
00:22:06
LS: 	Is that you?
CE:  	This is the picture they put in the paper when my husband was chosen president.  And my son will never forgive me.  You see, we had the Asian flu.  I had been miserable with it and my husband, who never was ill with anything like that, got it.  And when the regents came he had a 103 temperature--when they came to ask him to be president.  I helped him downstairs to the davenport because I just thought--my room was a pest house because I'd been there and then Bob was next door and he had it.  And the Cardinal and all these people descended on me immediately after the announcement.  And wanted pictures.  They wanted to take a picture of me taking Connie's temperature.  And I said, "no way am I going to do that."  And I didn't want a picture because I had been in bed for days and I looked just awful and so they said, "Well don't you have a picture?"  And I said, "Well, there is a picture on the wall in the study if you want that."  I didn't stop to think--we'd always liked this picture--that Bob was now a sophomore in the University when this was--and he never lived that down.  They called him Little Lord Fauntleroy--he was so mad at us.  But it's a good picture, really, of all of us except that--and we had more letters from people.  "My your son must have gone to college young."  These are the two letters I told you I thought you might like to read, from Mrs. Frank and Mrs. Dykstra.  And the reason I like them--[Recorder turned off.]
00:23:40
CE:  	When I was just married and a brand-new bride in the fall of the first year, I was taken by Mrs. J. G. Moore, who lived on West Lawn Avenue, her husband was in the horticulture department, to my first agricultural faculty wives group, which was called Daughters of Demeter.  And I remember when I came home my husband said, "I think that's very important for you to get to know the faculty wives."  He had no aspirations for administration, I know, then.  I don't think he ever did.  But it was just the idea I would have friends and they would be the kind of friends I would like to know.  And so I took that very seriously and I went to the junior division and I was an officer I think in that.  And I always went to all the University League things.  They are having problems now because many of the women work and they are not interested.  And I've talked with them some and I think they should do something new and I think they are.  They are trying this brown bag luncheon and bringing women on campus, which is great.  And then I worked with the alumni.  I was national alumni secretary for some years and on the Board of Directors.  And I tried to do things that were University oriented because I loved the place so much.  You know, after my husband's death they asked me to be on the University Board of Visitors and I talked to--it was when Fred Harrington was president.  I talked to Fred and I asked him if it would embarrass him in any way to have a former president's wife.  And he said no way.  So then I did it and I enjoyed it.  I became president of the board.  At the time we joined with the whole state system and the Board of Visitors then were illegal really because were we the board for the System?  No.  We had been appointed by the legislature way back in 18--something to be a board for this campus and Milwaukee had accepted us so we had gone along with them.  But we knew now that we had--and we didn't think it was possible to be a good board and visit every campus--we did though.  We made ourselves available to any of them and we did visit most of the campuses at their invitation and had some very good sessions.  But we sort of stayed in limbo and I was kind of the person that--LeRoy Luberg and I--that kept it together because we kept trying to have programs.  
00:26:30
We talked to the regents and they finally gave us some choices of things.  And one we took which was up my alley, I thought, was looking into federal funding and other foundation funding and so forth for research on our campus, scientific research.  And Bob Bock, the graduate dean, thinks that's a very good report we made after that year.  We worked with him.  We had these various men talk to us and--so I'm kind of proud of that and I was on until Shain became chancellor and he has a different idea for the Board of Visitors and I wasn't sure I fit into it so he gave me a chance--I thought he gave everyone on the board a chance to say they would like to be reappointed, and he went at me the wrong way, I guess.  He said, "Shall I ask the regents to appoint you?"  Well nobody had ever asked the regents to appoint me.  They had appointed me.  That I knew about.  And I didn't like that.  And I thought, I think he wants my place, so I just said, "I guess I've served my term," and boy I hated to do that.  I enjoyed it so much because, you see, it's almost like going to college again.  You get all these blue ribbon professors coming in to speak to you about their particular area of research or their--even the financing of the University in the different areas.  And then you have problems--we were really valuable to the regents and to the administration during the riots.  I was on the board then.  And we often saw some things coming in the TA strike.  We forecast.  So the--about the first time the administration had any idea that was coming about.  So I felt useful then but when Irv gave me the chance I said no.  Well I found out all the other Visitors had the same chance and they all decided to stay on.  So I kind of cut off my own neck.  But I'm glad now because they tell me it's quite different.  It's made up of men who have influence in the state financially and--
LS:  	So it's really money-related.
CE:  	It's more--a different kind of thing.
00:28:55	End of Tape 1, Side 1.
Tape 1, Side 2
00:28:58
CE:  	There are some funny things that have happened.  You spoke of a faculty wife.  Here's one I might tell you about. Every year we had a dinner dance for the faculty, the University League did.  And it used to be in Great Hall.  And one year Fern Fowler, I don't remember what my function was but apparently I was on the committee or something.  Fern Fowler was the social chairman for the University League.  And she had a little black book that told how to go about all these different events and what they had done the year before.  And we went down to the Union to set places for the dinner that night and Fern Fowler was doing the decorating.  Of course that was her great forte.  And she commented--we were locked in Tripp Commons--and she said, "They locked us in because they've been having so much thieving over here."  This was during the Depression.  And she said there had been fur coats and everything.  So we were asked to keep our coats with us.  And she said, "Well I hope nobody takes my purse today.  I've just been to the bank and I have money that my husband and I are going to go down with to see the first production of 'Oklahoma' in Chicago."  So it was that long ago.  And she was the only one who said anything about money in her purse.  Well not long afterwards her purse was gone.  And the only ones in the room were Professor Iltis's wife, Josephine, John Guy Fowlkes' wife, Agatha, Connie Elvehjem, Fern Fowler--and there may have been some others but those were the ones that I remember.  And the students had been going in and out putting cups and saucers on but they went through the kitchen somehow.  We couldn't figure out how they could have taken a purse and gotten out of there.  And so we called somebody in the office and they came and they questioned these students and they said, "Well we didn't take it.  We didn't see her purse," and so on.  I think it was a man and a woman student.  And the upshot of it was the Union asked them to take a lie detector test.  Matthews in the chemistry department had rigged up this lie detector test. And the students said, "Well why shouldn't they take it?"  And of course I spoke up right away.  "I think they are perfectly right."  Well some of the faculty wives weren't so happy about that.  We didn't do it that day.  I think it was two days before he set it up.  And we went down.  And everybody is a little shaky, you know, just because you've never done this.  And I remember Agatha Fowlkes.  He asked her the names of her children and you know she had to think before she could answer, and whatever it is that goes up and down like a cardiogram, reacted.  So that was kind of an experience.  And it turned out that the boy student admitted--he didn't admit that he had taken the purse, but he admitted that he had been stealing fruit and vegetables from the kitchen right along because he didn't have any money and he was destitute for food sometimes and he just made it a routine thing to pick up some things.  So they thought he was the culprit but they never proved it.  But Fern's purse was found but the billfold was gone.  It was found in one of the restrooms.  And the little black social register of the University League with all the directions for parties.  So, that was really a funny experience and of course our husbands got a big kick out of all this.  Faculty wives taking a lie detector test.  It was really my fault.  I was the one that spoke up right away.
LS:  	You were right.
CE:  	Yes.  I thought so.
LS:  	Of course.  Especially with the girl there.
CE:  	Matthews always kidded me because he said I was the steadiest.  And I said, "Well, it was really my idea that we should do it, I guess."  And he said, "Well you know the worst criminals are the ones that always come through with the steadiest--?"
LS:  	Yes. I imagine it must be fairly easy to--
CE:  	So he really made me feel great.  
00:33:38
LS:  	How important was the University League in your life?
CE:  	I think very important in my life.  And I'd probably--many other people--wives have no use for the League. And I learned so much.  We heard good lectures there from--and then my husband and I liked to dance.  We belonged to two dance clubs.  And we danced at the dinner dance always.  And you got around and met all the faculty men that way, you know, which you wouldn't have known.  It was fun to dance with Henry Ewbank and some of these people that I read about.  And it was a good thing.  And I'm sure that's one of the reasons people knew us when Connie was chosen as dean and president though we had no such idea ever.  
00:34:41
In fact I balked the whole summer about the Graduate School deanship.
LS:  	Oh did you?
CE:  	Yes.  And I didn't know that--I really didn't know how important the graduate dean is to research or I wouldn't have.  But I just thought he had done this wonderful work in biochemistry and I never thought Connie had the greatest strength and I thought he was working hard, E.B. Fred met me one time during the summer when they were trying to decide this and he said, "Are you people living together?  I hear you're--."  And I was hurt by that because I had never balked at anything else but I just thought he had to think about it.  And I felt the same way about the presidency.
LS:  	Did Fred put pressure on Connie to take this?
CE:  	Yes.  And you see it was supposed to be temporary.  He was supposed to be graduate dean until they found someone.  And what he turned out being was chairman of biochemistry and graduate dean both.  Which, if anything was physically hard, that was.  But he said he'd do it if they'd give him some help.  That's when J. Homer Herriott came into the picture, Professor Homer Herriott from the Spanish department.  And then a psychologist, Wilfred Brogden.  You know, that's the only place I seem to be slipping.  Names don't come to me always.
LS:  	If that's the only place, you're lucky.  And you do seem to remember them eventually.
CE:  	Yes.  I remember events in the past I guess, but names I just--I've been exposed to too many people I think.  In my own life I've done that too.  
LS:  	So he came home and said, "Fred wants me to be graduate dean," and you said--but he didn't have to decide right away.
CE:  	No.  For some reason they--maybe Connie just wouldn't say yes.  It could have been.  Because it was most of the summer, I know.  We went up north for a little trip and when we came back he said yes.
LS:  	Even still against your—
00:36:51
CE:  	Well no, you know, I didn't put my foot down but I just kept saying, "Oh you're so valuable where you are, why do you want to do this?"  And I didn't realize how much the graduate dean has to do with the funding for the whole research program for the University.
LS:  	Somebody said they thought he had enjoyed that, being graduate dean.  And was good at it.
CE:  	He did.  He did.  It's the best job on the campus, you know it?
LS:  	I imagine so.  It doesn't have the awful responsibilities of the president.
CE:  	It is.  No.  And you are included in everything that's nice to do, really.  I mean both educationally and socially and everything.  I mean you are entitled to--you sit in on the WARF  meetings, you sit in on, you know, everything that goes on on the campus.  And I think Bob Bock went up there with the same idea.  He wasn't going to leave his biochem--he was doing very interesting work and he told me, "I'm just going to do it for two or three years."  And I kid him every time I see him.  "There you are."  So he's found out that it's essential too.  
00:37:51
And you hate to see someone that you think can't do it take over, I suppose.
LS:  	Who would you think was an example of that?
CE:  	I don't know.  After Connie was made president, the administrative committee chose John Willard. And he's a very able man. Very able.  But for some reason or another the faculty people didn't enjoy his work and I guess he was asked to take the Vilas Professorship instead. And I don't think Connie knew that. I think that happened after his death.  But that would have surprised him, I think.  They said the reason was he just wouldn't give.  You know, standards are so high in the Graduate School, I mean you want to keep them high. But you also want to have a human heart that tells you this man has had some stress or he had maybe taken the wrong things and we will give him a chance.  And both Jongue Herriott and Connie did that.  They said Wolf Brogden wasn't quite--it was hard for him to vacillate. I don't know if you know how the system is--I used to help up there too. They have--A's are so many units and B's are so many units.  So you look over a record and you figure out the number of units this person had.  Well say, I don't remember how many it was, but say they had ten and a half or maybe they only had nine and a half.  Well, Connie might have said, "Well look, in his major field he's done so well and let's give him a chance."  So this seemed to be the problem. Not that John wasn't a scholar and didn't want to do the right thing but--so it does take personality and--
LS:  	Humanity?
CE:  	Yes.
00:39:52
LS:  	While we are on the subject, I'd just be curious if you had any input or opinion or knew about the whole issue of whether there was support for the social sciences and that WARF money, you know, wasn't going--it wasn't being--
CE:  	You mean during Graduate School days?
LS:  	Well this came up when Fred was--yes, Connie would have been graduate dean.  But E.B. Fred was principally, I think, thought responsible for this.
CE:  	Well I think it's sort of unfair but I think it probably was true.  And I--that more money went to science.  But when you stop to think about it, WARF was set up by a scientist.  I mean it was their work that benefitted WARF, you know in the beginning.  So I suppose that could have happened, and then E.B. Fred was a scientist.  But Connie was conscious of this and you know that was one of the things when he became president he started working so hard on this Institute for the Humanities. To counteract this.  And why he chose Fred Harrington as his vice president was because he thought that Fred had such good ideas and would have good input with these humanity people.  But he also said to me one time, which I don't know whether he'd want me to say but I think it's true and it's funny and he said, "It's the darn humanities' own fault.  They never tried hard enough."  Scientists, it's their life blood and they go out after money.  And in a way it was true at that stage.  And they said, "Well, scientists get all the laboratories, all the new buildings or laboratories."  And he said some of those people sat up in the old offices in Bascom Hall for generations and never made any attempt to do anything about it.  And it's true.  I think of some of my professors in American literature.  It was the worst old crummy place and they had been sitting there for years.
LS: 	 I don't know if they would have had much luck if they had gone up.
CE:  	I don't know either.  But I mean it was kind of funny.  
00:42:01
He could say the funniest things, really.  People had to know him to know this I guess.  He was just a joy to live with because it was always something clever.  And his mother was like that.  She was just a--well her famous quote that I love to quote is--see they always thought everything Norwegian was better than anything else.  And of course I'm not Norwegian.  I don't know how I ever managed to get into the family.  But I was looking for a carpenter, I was down there, and she said, "Well, let's get the telephone book, the Madison telephone book."  And she looked down all the Norwegian names and she marked every one of them.  So I kidded her about this and I said, "Isn't there ever a bad Norwegian?"  And she looked at me very seriously and she said, "Well, maybe.  But I never knew one."  And that's just the kind of things they came out with.  One of my stock stories at the president's house was I don't like the process of waking up.  I have no desire to sleep a long time but I just like to be left that ten minutes or so to--and Connie learned this early in our marriage.  So he would go and shave and then he'd say, "It's time for you, mommy."  And I'd get out of bed and go get breakfast and things.  But he always let me have that extra time.  And at the president's house I always ate breakfast with him although we had girls to get the breakfast.  But I got to stay a little bit longer because of this.  So he would come through the room a time or so and then he'd look out the window and we had that big wooded yard there and he'd say, "There goes a rabbit.  He looks like he's had a busy night."  There was some crazy thing like that.  And he knew that would awaken me and then--they had these huge long drawers up there which were for linens I guess.  And for the first time in his life he had a decent place for neckties, so I laid them all out like this and then he'd go there and stand and he'd say, "You know it's a lot harder to choose a necktie from a whole drawer full than it was all hanging on one tie holder."  And he'd just say something like that that could set me off every day.  And I don't know whether he planned it or whether it was just the way he woke up.  He was very alert, immediately in the morning so.  But--and it was true the children had that--my little girl one time got mad at us--her little brother she had had to put up with, she was seven years older.  And he was kind of a pest that day and I guess I'd scolded her a time or so for treating him kind of miserably and she wanted to run out and play and her father said she had to help me with the dishes and so he didn't like something she did because she was ready to tear out, you know they were going to play tag or something outside, and finally she said, "Well I'm going to go away.  Nobody in this family likes me anymore so I'm going to go away."  So she went upstairs and she packed a little doll suitcase and came stomping downstairs and we had an oak stairs without carpeting at that time and I can just hear her little feet.  And stomped outside and she had a playhouse out there and we knew that's where she'd go, or at least we were pretty sure.  Well she stayed and she stayed and it got darker and darker and we were kind of upset because we wanted to take a ride and I said, "Well let's just let her sit it out."  So all of a sudden there was great clatter at the door and she came tearing in and climbed upstairs as fast as she could and went to the bathroom.  So when she came down Connie said, and she was old enough to get this, too, he said, "The next time you run away you'd better be sure they have some good plumbing."
LS:  	Oh dear.
CE:  	And you know that broke the--she just howled, and it was all over.  But he seemed always to know how to handle the kids that way too.  
00:45:54
Well we're off the subject.  This was one thing I wanted to show you and maybe it doesn't go in this interview.
LS:  	Three by five index cards.
CE:  	Yes. He would talk to the student group at the church about his beliefs or something.  And I have quite a few of these and they are amusing because they are more or less notes to himself but not like you and I would make, maybe make notes.  But it's part of a sentence and you have to sort of guess the rest.  But this is one he apparently gave to the students at the church and he's listed the presidents of the University of Wisconsin who were members of our church. It was Paul Chadbourne, John Bascom, Thomas Chamberlin, Charles Kendall Adams, Edward Birge, and Conrad Elvehjem and John Weaver, as a matter of fact since then.  But they were always the same size card he could slip in his pocket.  And they were, some of them were kind of fun.  I think they quoted from one of them down at church in some bulletin.
LS:	You have a lot of them still?
CE:	Yes. At the moment I don't know just--isn't that awful?  I have lost track of some of the things, but they are here.  And most of them--I had those shelves built in so I would have a place for his things and that cupboard over there is pretty much his, and then I have things that I've filed but I really should refile it, I know.  But it's hard to do, to take the time.
LS:  	Well--
CE:  	Now we're back to the faculty wives.
00:47:28
LS:  	What was the relationship.  Yes, but since we're talking about these things, I'll just ask you about the relationship between him and E.B. Fred.
CE:  	It was very close and he knew Fred's strengths and weaknesses, I think.  And he used to get a little perturbed at some of the--well, you know, he didn't make a decision, he talked to everybody and I think everybody would tell you this.
LS:  	Yes, everybody has.
CE:  	Talked around.  And our Sundays--the children would say, "Let's get away before E.B. Fred calls." Because he would have something on his mind he'd want to talk over with Connie.  And it was usually Sunday dinner.  And Connie would be in his office Sunday morning and then he'd--and LeRoy Luberg used to be there sometimes too and he'd shake hands with both of him and say, "Now you can get to church on time to shake hands with people."  And that always irritated both of the men because he did take up most of their morning and they both liked to come to church.  And our children used to be embarrassed because daddy would come walking in just in time for the sermon.  But he, Edwin had some--it probably was a good thing he talked to everybody about every decision he made and he probably arrived at a pretty good one by the time he had everybody's opinion.  But it took so long sometimes that people were unhappy with the length of time and sometimes it was like gnawing a bone, it got to be too much of a problem, you know.  But that was Edwin.
LS:     Was it a strain when Connie was president and--
CE:	Yes, I'm sure.  And unfortunately this is one reason I'd like this locked.  I don't want to hurt his daughter, Rosalie, or anyone.  But that was hard because, you see, when Connie became president the Center had just been opened and Connie thought this was a wonderful place for E.B. Fred.  He was such a good mixer, socializer, he knew all these people that were important to the foundation and so he could be host down there and have his office and it would be just ideal.  Well you see, he never drove a car so he didn't want to walk down there and he just said, "No way.  I'm going to stay in Bascom Hall."  Well you know where his office was?  In the basement of my husband's.  So he had to come in and go through my husband's office to the basement, and shortly before my husband died he told me one morning very--he was really angry.  He said, "I came in this morning"--it was around the time of the Medical School mess too, and he said, "Edwin Fred was at my desk."  And he said, "What are you doing there?"  And he just got up and left.  But he said they had had a leak about some of the things they didn't want to get out until decisions were made and I don't think Connie was insinuating that that's how it happened but you couldn't help but wonder.  
00:50:38
And Fred Harrington told me after Connie's death, he said, "He would have been a much better president if he hadn't had E.B. right there all the time."
LS:	You mean he actually tried to influence decisions?
CE:	I don't know how much he--I think he tried not to.  I really think, to be honest, he tried not to but I think he was--
LS:	But he couldn't help it.
CE:	Yes.  It's not--
LS:	I hear that talk in regard to chairmanship sometimes.  The previous chairman can be very trying if--
CE:	Oh sure.  I see that in our church.  Our Reverend Swan, whom we all dearly love.  He's still around but he never goes to a business meeting, he's tried very hard, but the incoming minister always thinks he's in the shadow of this man.  And I don't believe Connie felt that way because they had been--Fred and he, had been close enough, always.  You see he was my husband's advisor.  Freshman advisor.  So he'd known him all through his college days and I think he had great love for him but--
LS:	But that makes it more difficult in a way, if he's been in the relationship of a faculty member.
CE:	And Edwin wasn't really a scholar.  He did some good work in bacteriology but--I'm being very frank with you now, I've never been this frank--but I think I'm getting old enough now and it's time some of these things can be said.  It's hard.
LS:	Well they have been.
CE:	I'm sure other people have said them.  And--
LS:	Well there certainly is a myth about him that it seems to me--
CE:	It was his charisma I think.  You know?  That made people like him and it made him able to stay so long.  I think even the regents--and they speak of him with great love, you know.  But, it's strange because he was president, I guess, longer than anyone.  Fifteen and a half years I think.
LS:	Yes.  
00:52:42
CE:	You asked me if--talking about faculty--you see, many of these people that were now my associates had been my teachers.
LS:	Yes that's right.  How was that?
CE:	Mrs. Glicksman. And then I moved up in the neighborhood with many of them.  I had Bill Kiekhofer, Carl Russell Fish and I had both Dean Glicksman and--Margaret Pryer was my econ quiz teacher and Helen Patterson and Grant Hyde in journalism school.  In fact Helen Patterson was--Patty as we called her--was my advisor in my sophomore year.  I had Helen White my first year.  So I was really in luck with the kind of people I was exposed to. And here I am now, a faculty wife.  You know, it couldn't help but make me feel good that I now knew them in a different way. And Helen White's middle name was Constance also. We always had that.  And we both loved lavender. So we had that in common.  She wrote such nice things to me after Connie's death. And she helped with the faculty resolution which was beautifully done and I could see her hand in it. So, you know, it was kind of from student to the end of Connie's life I knew her. So I guess I enjoyed the League for that reason.  And Charlotte Wood was one of my favorite English teachers.  
00:54:23
LS:  	Did you have parties very much when you were in--I'm talking about your early days when you were just married and the first ten years or so.
CE:  	Oh yes.  We always had lots of things going on.
LS:  	He had time for that?
CE:  	Yes. And he told me one time.  I guess we had dinner at the table.  I hadn't been any place for a couple of days, had been doing housework or something, and he said, "Connie I can always tell when you've been out because you bring me so much from the outside world."
LS:  	You're talking about what you'd tell him?
CE:  	Yes. You see I hadn't said anything.  Early in our marriage, one day I complained--our first house, we had a counter top that was tile, and we had a student--we always had students living with us.  We had about thirteen I guess, I counted up one time.  This of course was the Depression when kids needed room and board and so they just roomed and they would help fire the furnace and shovel the walks and help me clean and things like that, for their room.  Then the board was kind of flexible depending on how we liked them I guess and how old our children were and so on.  But they ate many meals and always breakfast, I guess.  And they often did the dishes in the evening or helped me.  So I complained because the counters were always wet and I was afraid there was going to get mold in the little grout places, you know.  And I did that two or three nights and my husband said, "Connie, I don't want to hear any more about that.  You and I have so much to talk about and we never have enough time that we are certainly not going to talk about the wet kitchen counter."  And I've told many brides that because it was so true and I never then, after that said, "I ironed so many shirts or I did so many anything, because I knew he didn't want to hear that."  So I was grateful for that because I could have been a perfect bore for friends as well, probably.  And that's the way we helped each other.  I think I said the same kind of thing to him.  But he liked the things I brought from the outside world because the chemistry lab is kind of sterile really.  And he was working so hard.
LS:  	And he was interested in what you had to say?
CE:  	Yes he was.  And in these dance clubs, I'm sure he didn't like to dance as well as I did.  Would you like a cup of coffee and something to eat?
LS:  	Oh, love it.
00:56:49	End of Tape 1, Side 2
Tape 2, Side l
00:00:01
CE:  	She had been given niacin for some--I think she had kind of like a stroke and they do that for nerve regeneration and they use it for other things now.  So she said he would be so glad to know that, and it was very feeble writing.  And I wrote her at the time of--
LS:  	Excuse me.  You're talking about Mary Frank, Mrs. Frank.
CE:  	I wrote, in fact my husband, I guess, in that little note wrote her too, and we said we'd love to have her come and visit us now that we were in the house.  We thought it had been such a long time, maybe she'd like to come back.  And she lived just in Chicago and she wrote immediately and said no way could she do this because the emotion in that house was just still with her and she couldn't--the shock of both husband and son's death and all in Madison. She just couldn't do it.  But then I wrote her and said I wanted to compliment her because she bought some perfectly magnificent table cloths in Brussels, I think, that were reported to have cost $2,400, which to Madison was unbelievable in those days.  This would be 1924 about.  And that I was using those and so had Mrs. Fred, and Mrs. Fred thought they were so valuable she practically slept with them, and I did too.  I kept them in our bedroom.  And I said it just shows it was a good investment and was right for this house because they were huge.  We could sit sixteen people around the table.  And I said I even may use them for my daughter's wedding.  One of them was used for my daughter's wedding.  I thought she might like to know that.  
00:01:56
And at the same time I had talked to Gulesserian (?) about the oriental rugs she had bought there.  Some of them were still being used on the stairway where hundreds and hundreds of feet had gone, and I said that also had turned out to be a good investment.  I understand now what you felt like when you came here.  This house was elegant and you thought you had to do the right thing for it.  And I just want you to know somebody appreciated it. So I think Madison wasn't ready for the Franks, that's all.  
LS:  	I guess that's true.  She does seem to have been rather abrasive, especially to women.
CE:  	Yes she was.  And I think to people who worked for her too, probably.
LS:  	Did you know her well?
CE:  	Well, just as a young bride because I was married, you see, in '26.  And the first time I went there was a University League affair and the butler met us at the door.  And this is another thing I told her.  As you step into the living room at the president's house you go down three steps.  And she had a butler at the bottom of the steps who said, I remember he said Mrs. Albion for my name and I went through the line that way.  But later we had a woman who came in the receiving line, and the line was usually in front of the fireplace and people would be coming in from outside, maybe bright sunlight, and look toward the receiving line and I suppose it's an emotional thing to go through, say if the governor's wife or someone were there.  And this woman stepped right off.  She had her dark glasses on and she didn't see those steps and she was a young woman and she fell flat and luckily didn't hurt herself.  But after that I always had someone there, one of our committee members, stand there and say, "Watch the steps."  And I'll bet that's why Mrs. Frank had the butler.  It's just one of those things, but he seemed more appropriate to her than the committee member probably, which was my style.  But so there were a lot of things that we heard.  And it's true that she probably had more perfume and cosmetics than most Madison women but she came from New York, you know.  And his spats were something to be talked about.  
00:04:22
But the day I went to this tea--I have to tell you that because I don't think I've told this story publicly or on tape or anything.  Sara Longenecker, whose husband is Professor Longenecker of the Arboretum--we knew each other in school and he was a fraternity brother of my husband's so we were very close friends.  The men were nothing alike but very close friends.  And Bill loved to hunt and fish and Connie didn't care a hoot about that.  But we went to this tea together and in those days the ladies had long chiffon gowns they wore to tea parties in the afternoon.  About ankle length, and high heels.  And that was your one good dress.  Back then you had your business clothes and your at home clothes.  So Sara had a blue chiffon and I had a brown chiffon, I can see them yet.  And we went to this tea and while we were there it began to snow just terribly.  One of these quick, I think it was a spring snow, when it comes down in great big flakes, and it accumulated on the ground right away.  Of course we didn't have a car.  We were going to walk home.  I said, "We'll just ruin our dresses and our shoes, too."  And it was a real calamity in those days.  And as we got outside we saw some boys on a big bobsled and they were going to slide down the hill toward University Avenue.  And we asked them if we could get on and we folded up our chiffon dresses around our legs and we rode clear down to Breese Terrace.  And we went home and told our husbands that and they said, "Tomorrow, Mary Frank will say you lose your job if she saw you."
LS:  	Oh that's wonderful--
CE:  	But she didn't.  I guess she didn't see.  But anyway, that's the story.  And we thought afterwards those boys were probably Tom Mendenhall and some of the boys that lived in the neighborhood that we later knew as, well Tom became president of Smith.
LS:  	Oh, that's right.  How interesting.  I didn't realize he was brought up here.  
00:06:25
Did you entertain graduate students very much?
CE:  	Yes a great many.  Connie had so many, you know he had something like eighty-nine, I guess, who got Ph.D.'s with him, and we had parties each semester for them in our home when we had a small home.  And then when we moved into our larger home we had a nice rec room and we entertained a great many.
LS:  	And you enjoyed doing that?
CE:  	Yes. I loved it. And he brought home all kinds of scientists--especially after the War.  You see English people didn't travel too much before that but many of the Europeans really didn't come this way much but scientists began to come here.  And we had Nobel Prize people and all sorts of people. And some stayed with us and some just came for meals.  He found it difficult to--he hadn't the ear, what I call a linguistic ear, I don't know whether there is such a thing or not.  But I have the ability to kind of communicate with foreign people, partly my Latin and I know a little Spanish and French and I've been exposed to German but I never really could speak it.  And some Norwegian.  So I seem to be able to get myself across to them and get from them. Well he would take visitors to the lab and he would be so worn out explaining--but he could do that because it was his science.  And they could nod their head and they understood.  But then he would have to take them out to lunch and I'd get this frantic call about 11:30. "Can you get the kids fed and come down and have lunch with us at the Union or the Club or someplace?  I've just had it."  And then it was my job to take over.  Well, you know, it wasn't always easy.  I enjoyed it of course when I got there, but--and often I didn't have a car so I'd have to hop the bus.  We had just one car.  But I did it and I got lots out of it. And we shared the fun of knowing that person together which was nice.
00:08:31
LS:  	So he really depended on you a good deal.
CE:  	Yes he did.  He did.  I mean the kids would tell you that too, and I think most people who knew us.  And that's why it took an awful chunk out of my life when he was gone.  And I realize--I tell young people today, "Now be sure you have your own, do your own thing because--" 
00:08:51
I never felt Connie in any way restricted me in anything I wanted to do.  And he made lots of sacrifices for that.  I was state president of PEO which took me away a great deal.
LS:  	What's PEO?
CE:  	Well it's kind of like a sorority only we own a College in Nevada, Missouri.  There are about 215,000 of us now.  You are chosen to belong but it's--their letters are secret, which I don't approve of.  I don't care for secret stuff but it really is a philanthropic educational organization.  I mean we've spent millions of dollars for scholarships and bringing IPS, International Peace Scholars, here and so forth.  It's really a good group.  Someone calls it the old ladies sorority but that's not true.  It sort of depends on whom you're talking to but lots of wonderful people in Madison are PEOs.  You're chosen to belong so it's sort of like a sorority that way.
00:09:59
LS:  	Would he discuss decisions he had to make with you?  For instance when he was chairman?
CE:  	Yes. And the thing I didn't really hear as much about was the Medical School mess except that he told me some things and he said you must never tell these.  You must not talk about them.  And whenever we went out any place socially--the cocktail party, of course, had begun to be the in thing at the Bowers' time--and people would button hole either one of us, "How are you making out?"  "What's the latest."  And they'd work at you to find out things in the social way that they would never ask you otherwise.  Connie cautioned me about this.  He said we'd just best not talk about it.  And after it was all over he gave me a fur coat, the likes of which I never had, never wanted.  I even sent back once, and he was quite hurt about it so I finally accepted it.  A mink coat.  And then he said, "It's hush money." It's the only time I've ever done that before but that's hush money because you were such a good scout about that." And I loved to talk, as you can see, so—
00:11:13
LS:  	I'm not asking you to say the things now, but are there things that you knew then that have never yet been know about that?  Because it's still rather a mystery, that whole thing.
CE:  	I think it is to everyone.
LS:  	I mean, have you ever thought of writing it up?  It's all dead now. 
CE:  	I have a suitcase full of clippings. I clipped everything that was in the paper. But of course now historians tell you that you shouldn't rely on newspapers because that's colored and I know that's true.  
LS:     The thing is one knows what's in the newspapers, but did you know things that were not in the newspapers?
CE:  	Well I know some things, like Tony Curreri, for instance, came over to our house one night and you know he was a very emotional--he was Italian, so he was a very emotional man.  And apparently he wanted the deanship which I don't think I had sensed before.  I couldn't imagine anybody--
LS:  	The deanship? 
CE:  	Yes.  Of the Medical School.
LS:  	Well that's interesting.
CE:  	He couldn't stand Bowers.  And he was on some important committee which he resigned from because Connie's out with him was, well you couldn't be dean because you belonged to this committee whatever it was, some administrative committee or something.  So he promptly resigned from that so that almost told us that he really wanted to be dean.  Which was sort of a surprise to Connie.
LS:  	I should think so.
CE:  	And he said to Tony that night, "Well, why on earth would you want to do this?  Gee, you've got everything going for you.  You have plenty of money, you know.  You don't have any--and you have this in with getting money from foundations and so forth."  Well he came over to our house one night and I never exactly knew what it was but Connie said to me, "Tony gets emotional.  If you hear any excitement get the coffee pot."  So I went upstairs.  I greeted him when he came in.  And actually I heard the man sobbing.  And then I got kind of worried.  I thought, "Oh, is that Connie or is it Tony?"  And so I went downstairs and broke in with coffee and Connie said afterwards it was a fortunate thing because Tony had just kind of gotten so emotional.  And my son remembers that because he was in his room studying and he said he could hear it through the register in his room.  Just enough of it to know that Tony was pouring out his heart to Connie.  He didn't really tell me the details but he said it was hard for dad, I know.  
00:13:43
And then, you see, Connie was in the middle of this thing.  He was the--E.B.'s confidant, I suppose, when he chose Bowers.  What E.B. Fred knew that we didn't know, and I don't think my husband knew either when he died, but I have heard since from people out there, he was fired from the job in--was it Utah, where he was?  And they were so glad to get rid of him.  The man that recommended him for our job has met one of my friends socially out there since and he said, "I felt guilty for Conrad Elvehjem's death, a man who was so great, because I am the one who wanted to get rid of Bowers and recommended him to the University.  And that's what made all the mess."  So I don't know how much of this is true.  It's all hearsay but you kind of put it all together.  Anyhow, when he came, Edwin asked Connie and he asked me too to be nice to the Bowers.  Show them around.  They put them up at what they called the castle, the president's house.  The Freds always called it the castle.  And nobody does that anymore and I'm kind of glad because it isn't that great.  They always had that feeling about it.  And so I remember going up there.  I think we took them out to dinner someplace and then we went back up there.  And I told her about the schools for the children.  And I worked on her for--so we felt like we had kind of talked them into coming.
LS:  	Oh, I see.  Yes.
CE:  	And so Connie was loyal up to a point.  He felt, well gosh, I helped hire this guy and then I helped push him over.  
LS:  	Well apparently he did do some very good things for the school.
CE:  	Yes he did.  He's doing very well now.  He's doing a wonderful job, I guess, with the Macy Foundation.  
00:15:40
And then I could see Bowers begin to cultivate us.  I never had seen a lot of that on the faculty.  And I didn't feel like we were--some people said, "Well now you'll know"--when Connie died--"who were your true friends and who were your other friends." And I never felt that with any faculty people.  I think probably because we came up through the ranks.  They knew what we were.  They knew we knew them and they didn't have to do this. Now if you come here from away it's different because everybody begins to think, who are your friends?  I've heard them say that about the Weavers.  The Weavers got to be very good friends with Imogen and they weren't university people.  Well, why are they so close?  And I asked Roberta one day because I was close enough to her.  I said, "Everybody is saying this and I want to know myself.  Because I didn't know you knew them."  And she said, "Well they wrote us before we came and they said they'd help us any way they could."  And she said, "They had no axes to grind and they were nice people so we became close friends."  And so, you know, that's awkward.  And I was out to O'Neils' the other night for dinner and I could feel them feeling around a little bit too, you know.  It's kind of hard to know where--and they've been just great because they've taken up with so many nice young people.  I think they are just great.  So it's interesting.  But to come back to John Bowers.  Then he would come up and complain to Connie and tell Connie one thing and then--Connie's student here was Van Potter and I guess wasn't Harry Waisman still alive by then?  Yes, he died after Connie did.  And see many of those people were biochemists first and then they went into Medical School.  And they were all telling him, this is so and so and he isn't doing this and he is saying this.  And so Connie told me one time, "I feel like I'm walking down a firing line.  With my friends shooting from one side and my enemies from the other and I don't know who's which."  So that must have--but that's the only time, and he slept--well, people said he probably lost a lot of sleep.  Well he didn't.  But he was a great sleeper.  So I think just to go to bed and forget it was his--and he had a firm conviction always,  I'm going to do the best I know in anything and then I have to live with it.  And that's what he did.  
00:18:07
And of course the unfortunate part was John Bowers offered his resignation and for some stupid reason, there was one regent, and I think I know the reason for that now, who voted against it.  So then the regents thought they wanted it unanimous so they refused it.
LS:	It would have saved all the--
CE:	Yes.  He wouldn't have had all that year of horrid goings on.  And Connie trusted John.  He thought he was telling him the truth.  And we were in their house many times as dinner guests.  And finally they invited us twice within one week and I said to Connie, "I'm not going out there again.  I don't like this."  They would have somebody there they wanted us to meet.  And I just said, "This is just too much, you know.  Something is wrong here.  And then he'd have these beautiful dinners down at the Madison Club and we'd be invited and they'd have great barrels of shrimp and all these things that I knew cost a fortune.  So one night I said to my husband, "Who pays for this?"  He said, "I don't know.  It's beginning to worry me."  And I said, "Well you know darn well John Bowers isn't paying for it."  And sure enough, he was using some funds he had that nobody knows where they came from but they were not--but that was to get his way, you see, inviting the right people and so on.  So there was a lot of shenanigans going on. 
00:19:34
And he kept--when he invited us to dinner my husband got quite a kick of Imogen.  She was an army daughter and she had wonderful stories and she amused Connie with all these stories so they had a big thing going.  She had a good mind and I said sometimes, "I'm jealous because you get to listen to Imogen and I have to listen to him."  But anyhow, to make a long story short, we went to a Medical School dinner out at the East Side Businessmen's Club and we got there a little bit early and we were to sit at the speakers' table and I guess Connie always greeted them when they had one of these alumni medical things.  And we got up there and went and looked to see where our places were at the table and I was sitting down here with John and Connie was sitting up here with Imogen, and people between us, and then we turned to go and get a cocktail or talk to somebody and I saw Mrs. Bowers go up there and she was shifting all these place cards around.  So when we got up there we were sitting right beside each other.  Well this was a thrill to us.  We never got to in the president's job.  But he said, "What's happened?"  And I said, "Well I saw Imogen and she apparently didn't want to sit by you."  And he said, "Well, that tells me something.  The boys have been telling me that John tells her things, you know, that aren't true.  And she--now I'm the bad guy in the whole picture, I guess."  And then when we got up there John shook hands with him but Imogen refused to shake hands with either one of us.  Well, we hadn't done anything to them.  It really was the first hurt.  And we never had anything like that in our lives.  Really, we just had never had ill will with anyone and so that was kind of the beginning of the end as I remember it.  Now whether Connie got firmer after that, really saw the picture.  But he saw this man was not telling the truth and that hurt him.  But I think he was just loyal because he knew he was brought here to do some of the things he was doing that the Medical School didn't like.
00:21:36
And of course Karver Puestow was breathing down Connie's neck all the time saying, "You've got to get rid of that man." And some of the Medical  School old-timers were just--
LS:	Well what did you think of him?  Of Karver Puestow?
CE:	Well he's kind--he's hard for me to understand.  I see him a lot now and he dislikes Mr. Harrington and he refused to go to the Harrington retirement dinner and he scolded me because I went.  And I said, "I feel that my husband would have gone had he been alive."
LS:	Well, you're on good terms with--
CE:	Yes. The Harringtons were kind of horrid when I had to move out but it's just one of those things.  It was Nancy. And she doesn't understand, I think.  And we're good friends now.  They've had me to dinner and so on, but Karver can't stand him either--but after all he's an 80-odd year old man so maybe he's getting fuddy duddy, I don't know.
00:22:30
LS:  	Who were the people that were the most helpful during that time?  The associates that he could rely on, whose judgment he could trust?
CE:  	People in the Ag School were very dependable and of course the Graduate School--I think in his administrative committee, which was a wonderful one, I can't remember all the ones that were on, but--Mark Ingraham, you know--and Ed Young.  He appointed Ed Young as dean of the L&S School.  And--
LS:  	I was speaking specifically in regard to the Medical School.  Who were the people that he could share the burden with and he could trust?
CE:  	I don't think really began--I think he began to feel he couldn't.  He depended on Phil Cohen and Phil Cohen, you know, took Bower's place immediately.  Phil had been a student of Connie's.
LS:  	Oh, had he?
CE:  	Yes.  There were just a whole bunch of those fellows that went on to the Medical School.  
LS:  	But Phil was in Medical School and chemistry.
CE:  	Yes.
LS:  	Yes.  I know Phil, I mean I've interviewed him.
CE:  	And, well his own department.  They were all, Marv and all the people in that department were very dependable people.  And they got around with scientists and medics enough to know, I think, and he had some feelings and I think they talked to him.  But you see Edwin was--Edwin pretended he now was against Bowers, but, you know, Edwin Fred---it was really a strange thing and I'm sure it did take its toll.  I got a lovely bouquet from the Medical School immediately, almost, after I got home from the hospital when Connie died.  And I knew it was to say we're sorry, sort of, you know this sort of thing.  So I sat down and wrote them right away, I think about the first people I wrote, a little note and said I didn't in any way blame the--that this must have been a--
LS:  	Was this Ralph Hawley or was it--no, let's see who was--
CE:  	It was Phil Cohen, I think.  Because Connie appointed him I think.
LS:  	Yes he did.
CE:  	But I immediately wrote them a letter and said not to feel guilty about this because he must have had the condition.  He had always worked too hard.  See, it was the major artery of the heart.
LS:  	Had it ever been—
00:24:55
CE:  	No.  Except in the fall he had high blood pressure the day they asked him to be president.
LS:   	Oh I see.
CE:  	And it was the first he'd ever had high blood pressure.  And we thought it was a momentary thing, you know, with the excitement of this.  But of course he was ill too.  He had this--and I think from then on he was probably--
LS:   	He was taking some medicine I've heard.
CE:  	Yes, right.
LS:     	What was that for?
CE:  	It was a diuretic and then he was taking one of these high blood pressure medicines.  But the doctor had stopped that because his blood pressure had gone down to normal.  And I was kind of glad because I thought he seemed sleepier.  And Fred Harrington said he thought from the time he took that medication he was never quite the same.  He said it didn't spoil his work but he could tell that he got tired easily.  And the girls said in the office that he sometimes leaned on their desk when he talked to them, you know, which they hadn't seen before.  He was so straight and--and so it could have been--we were up north the week he died and I said, "How much longer are you going to be in this rat race?"  And he looked up, he was reading something and he said, "Well, what do you mean?"  And I said, "Well, gee, we've taken four years of students through now.  Why don't we call it quits."  And he said, "Well Fred was president for fifteen and a half years, you know."  And I said, "Well, who wants to do that?"  And he said, "Well, maybe another four years of students."  And I said, "O.K., that's a bargain.  I won't go any further than that."
LS:     So he liked being president?
CE:  	Yes he did after he got there, I think.  And it was pretty hard to go back, let's face it.  He had tenure in biochemistry but you've taken quite a little time out of your scientific laboratory and things were getting more and more complicated.  He probably realized this.  
00:26:54
He planned to be a consultant to many--and he was planning to go back.  He was on a lot of boards when he was made president and they paid very well.  And we had to give all those up.  We really were taking less salary.  Just think $23,000 was the big salary they offered him.  And I complained about that that day in front of the regents.  I just looked at him and said, "Well honey, that's less than we are getting now."  Because he was on the Purina board and they paid $6,500 and he was on the Northwestern Mutual board, and Wisconsin Life had asked him but he had refused that because he thought there might be some conflict of interest there.  And Johnson Wax people wanted him.  Purina said--they were just furious.  They called up to congratulate us and Connie said, "Well I have news for you.  Wilbur Renk says we have to get off the Purina board."  And they couldn't believe this and they were going to fight it.  And he said, "There's no use.  It's just Wisconsin is always lily white and we have to be--."  And so they said, "Well, you have a place as soon you finish. Come back."  You see, he was asked to be vice president at Purina because they were going into the dog food nutrition business, and he'd refused that.  It was a fabulous offer.  Neither one of us wanted to do it because we didn't want to leave academic life but--so this was their alternative.  They put him on the board.  And he'd worked with Danforth scholarships for years.  
00:28:31
You know, he went the extra mile in all the volunteer stuff too.  And the nicest award to me in a way, the nicest award that was given for him was given by the Federation of Biological Scientists.  And it's called the "Outstanding Man in Nutrition and Public Service."  It has to be the Public Service as well.  Which is just what he would have liked, I'm sure.  
00:29:00
So--but as far as the Bowers thing is concerned I guess it will always be an enigma and I've heard quite a lot.  He married this Indian woman, you know, who has something to do with health.  They are doing a wonderful job, I guess, at this Macy Foundation.  But he used to call me up and say, "I'm Connie's bad boy."  So he knew this.  Even before.  One funny story I'd like to tell you, I think this is interesting, even maybe to record.  Are you still recording?
LS:  	Yes.
CE:  	One day my husband was going to Washington--
LS:  	Wait.  I'm just going to change the tape.
00:29:49	End of Tape 2, Side 1.                
Tape 2, Side 2
00:29:52
LS: 	So just tell the story and then--
CE:  	Fine.  It's not a long story.  We had a housekeeper at the president's house.  We called her the female dreadnought because she scared the boots off of us.  You know they were civil service in those days. You couldn't fire them unless they murdered you in your bed or something.  So we had this woman.  And at first she sounded pretty good but she began running our lives and we got a little tired of it.  And she was a devout Republican.  And we had Governor Nelson as the governor then.  And Connie and I have never--well we were independents, frankly.  So we never really talked much about politics.  We were--which stood us in good stead in that job.  And Governor Nelson and Connie were quite close friends.  They were Norwegians.  So Grace came to work in this great big Buick car.  She came from Mazomanie or someplace out there.  And she had a great big Republican banner on the back of it.  And she'd park it up in the parking lot up there.  And Connie said, "Grace I wish you wouldn't--first off nobody ever would think of the help coming to work in a big Buick car.  They would obviously think it was ours."  We had a little Chevrolet.  So he said, "I wish you wouldn't--if you've got to have that Republican banner, turn your car around and put the front out."  And she said, "No, I want the people on the street to see it.  It's my right to have that."  So we didn't say any more.  But come Halloween and I don't know who, whether it was my husband or my son, but somebody made away with the Republican sign and she never could get another one.  We were there.  
00:31:32
Well, the day that he was going to Washington and he was going to be--golly, who was president then?  It would have had to have been a Democrat.  Kennedy, I guess.  And he had a note.  He always left his engagement pad, we both used, in the kitchen by the telephone so I could tell where he was and he could tell where I was and so on.  And he wrote that he was having lunch, I guess, with Kennedy, or something and so Grace reads this, you know.  We didn't realize she was reading this all the time.  Of course when we went out she had to know sometimes but she said, "I'm not sure that I want you going down and hobnobbing with the Democrats in Washington."  And that irritated him but he didn't say anything and I said, "Well, it serves you right.  You bring all your papers in.  Even at noon sometimes you bring those papers in and put them on the kitchen table and she sits out there and eats her lunch and reads everything.  We'll just have to be more careful."  So we agreed that we'd keep the engagement pad upstairs on my desk.  And that day Grace went home for the week-end and he was going to Washington and I was going to the Ladies of the Press breakfast.  So we barely kissed goodbye, I didn't even take him to the airport.  And he gave me this itinerary of where he was going to be.  And I didn't look at it.  I took it up and put it on my desk.  And I got home just about l:30 or 2:00.  The telephone rang and it was John Bowers.  And he said, "This is Connie's bad boy."  And this was before things had gotten so bad.  And he said, "Can you tell me where Connie is?"  And I said, "No I can't.  I just don't know.  He's on his way to Washington" and let it go at that.  And in a little while I got a long distance call from Mel Laird from Washington.  And he said, "Do you know where Connie is?"  And I said--or he said, "Do you know where President Elvehjem is?"  Well I knew Melvin well but I thought maybe I could get by with it--I never did anything like this in my life--my husband said I guess we'd better get out of this job, you're getting to be an actress.  But anyway, I didn't want to admit to not knowing where he was so I said, "Well if you'll call back in a few minutes Mrs. Elvehjem will be here and I can find out."  Meanwhile I had to go through this desk and I couldn't find that darn thing.  I practically went through the desk until he called back and then I said, "Hello," and he said, "Is this Connie?" and I said, "Yes."  I'm sure he recognized me the first time.  I'm going to confess to him when I see him some day.  But the whole thing was that he wanted to tell me that Tony Curreri had been to Washington.  He had received this great big grant for cancer research and he wanted Tony to be able to get home to tell Connie and get the credit for it before John Bowers could.  And I said, "Well, I've got news for you.  John Bowers just called me about something.  And he probably already knows."  And he said, "I'll be darned."  But by this time I had found the thing so he called Connie and he wanted Connie to call Tony and talk to him and compliment him.  Well it wasn't but about two minutes later that the telephone rang and it was Tony Curreri in Chicago and he wanted to tell Connie before he got to Madison so John wouldn't get ahead of him.  But then in a little while John called me back and he said, "I just have to tell you the good news."  And here he had somebody in Washington that had tipped him off.  You see this is how devious he was.  So, but that was my--Melvin Laird, I really have laughed about that every time I read his name because--did he die?
LS:	You know I can't tell--I don't know.
CE:	I can't remember.  I'm beginning to think that I wouldn't get to tell him.  
00:35:30
Well, anyhow, LeRoy Luberg got a big kick out of that because he was married to Melvin's sister-in-law, you know, so he thought that was funny.  But.  So a wife gets into a lot of things she doesn't intend to.
[Tape turned off]
00:35:48
CE:  	This was before the awful dress that came later.  And so he asked me if I would have lunch with him on his final day at the University and I said, "Yes.  But I'm going over--I can't have lunch.  But I'll meet you for a cup of coffee.  I'm going to the Center for a luncheon at noon."  So I met him on the steps of the Union.  We were going into the Union to have coffee and he had on shorts and when we got inside they forbade him going in.  And it was quite embarrassing to me because the person who did it had to apologize to me saying, "Mrs. Elvehjem I'm sorry but it's our rule."  And I said, "That's perfectly all right."  So when we got outside I really talked to this lad and I said, "You did that on purpose because you had made a wager with me and probably a dozen other people that you could get into the Union with shorts on."  And he admitted it.  He thought they would let me by, you see, so.  Connie was having lots of fun over that.  He said, "Well you asked for it."  Well then he would find out when--one or two Sundays when my husband was out of town, he would somehow find this out.  He was so attuned to the campus and the goings on.  And I always wondered if he was one of our first, somewhat less militant protesters.  But he would find out when my husband was going to Washington or something and then he would call me up and say, there is a good lecture, or the "Last Lecture" they used to have, you know, the professors had.   So I went to one or two of those with him and then we often went down and had coffee at the Rathskeller.  My husband never approved of that either.  "Because," he said, "he's just, he wants to be seen with you."
LS:  	This is already when he's president?
CE:  	Yes.  Yes.  
00:37:49
And, but you see, we had--I had enough of this rapport with students.  I had worked with, in fact brought the campus Red Cross to the campus with Jennie Stumpf as president when she was in school.  She'd be about fifty-five now so I don't know when that was.  And we brought the Blood Bank to the campus with that.  And we ran into all sorts of snags.  Now this was long before my husband was president.  Well not--maybe eight or ten years before.  And one day the kids decided they would like to have bloody red footsteps down Langdon Street into the Union where the bloodmobile was to be and we got into trouble because you had to ask permission of the city to do that.  They allowed us but we got into a little difficulty.  And then one time we had a loud speaker on our truck and they got--one had to have a permit from the city--and of course I always got the brunt of it because I was the advisor.  But that was good experience too.  
00:38:50
But that gave me this opportunity to be with many kinds of students and I worked with some of the campus religious groups before Connie was president also. 
 [End of first session]
LS: 	This is the second session of the interview on--and it's April 8, l983.  And you were talking about--you started off with a story about a student who had befriended you when Connie was president.  
00:39:36
Would you explain to me--when you were saying you were an advisor to students you said you had brought the Red Cross in and I'd like to know more about that.  Is that two different stories?
CE:  	Yes. Two different stories.  The campus Red Cross started I think, well, we brought the blood bank to the Red Cross in the '40s I believe.
LS: 	Who's we?
CE:	The Red Cross. I mean they started the blood bank at the Red Cross.  Before that there there had been--you could give blood at the hospitals, you know, and be paid for it.  But this was a free donation.  And I was publicity director at Red Cross for those years and so I guess I just thought the campus would be a great place because all the personnel, you know, the maintenance people and the professors and the students offered a wonderful opportunity, so we got students interested and I think my own daughter was vice president once and another girl I knew was the president.  Students became very interested in this and many of them had brothers and sisters in the war, you see, or who had been in the war.  So they felt this was their job to give blood.  And then the fraternities and sororities began a competition thing.  So it turned out to be very--and I guess it's still going. I think they still take blood in the dorms area and other places on campus.  It was solely at the Union in those days.  
00:41:23
Well the student I wanted to tell you about that--in the first part of the tape was--he had some connection, he grew up in Chicago and he had some connection with a bottling company. Or his father did.  So he saw a way to get to our house on a weekend, Sunday or Saturday, when my husband was home.  He would bring some mix for drinks.  Well we didn't drink that much and this used to annoy my husband too because he always got in the door by bringing this gift and whoever went to the door, you know, didn't have the heart to turn him away.  So he got to us a great deal and he didn't agree with Connie's policy always and he would be quite frank to talk this over.  But after my husband died he wrote me that he was always ashamed now.  He was kind of just feeling his way and he really liked to be around people that were in administration and so this was a way.  And I guess I was the gimmick.  Because I was a mother and fell for this.  So, often my husband would say to me he thought I had a very keen sense of people and if I didn't like them he was a little bit cautious and he'd always say, "Put your antenna up, mother," because I often found an insincerity in a person that would come through later.  And not particularly ever in his own field but in appointing administrators and so on.  He would say, "Well I guess you were right," you know, you had some feeling.  I think John Bowers was one of them, the man that came to the Medical School.  So he began to trust me a little bit with this and then I felt that very burdensome because I wasn't that astute.  But it was fun to learn to know people and I guess that was my forte.  I was a little more anxious than he was, perhaps. 
00:43:31
I was very shy as a girl and so was my husband very shy.  So it's kind of a strange combination that we--people think in any article I've ever read about the two of us, they say that I was the outgoing one.  And I think that's probably true but I think he was more self assured then I ever was.  And he gave me that self assurance.  
00:43:57
And the first big job I had to do after he died was in the fall of the year--he died in July and this was in October--I suddenly--on my way--I was all dressed to go in a long dress and officiate at this big banquet, it was the 50th anniversary of the Civics Club--and I suddenly went cold and I thought, you know, I don't think I can do this without Connie.  He always said, "Oh you can do it better than I can."  And I stopped at the cemetery on my way and just--I didn't even get out of the car but I just sat there a minute and went on and that was it.  And I don't believe in going to cemeteries very much.  I've never been one to sit at a grave or put flowers on a lot or any of that.  So this sort of surprised me but I still felt the need of his support.  And I guess we both felt that.  That was one of the challenges of our lives together, that we could support each other.  Now what did you want to talk about next?
00:45:13
LS:  	Well.  You said you were a student advisor at one point.  Were you officially?
CE:  	Well I was the Red Cross student advisor, yes.  
LS:  	Oh, I see.  O.K.
CE:  	I was never a--I wish I--
LS:  	Then you said of religious groups?
CE:  	Then I worked with the campus religious groups.  The ecumenical--they had a movement here to have all campus student work under one head.  And this was a state-wide thing and I was on that committee with ministers from Madison.  We had Catholic and--not Lutheran, as I remember it, but most of the other churches were represented.
LS:  	When was this?
CE:  	Well, this was after my husband died as a matter of fact.  Because I was living in this house.  I remember we went up to a conference at Green Lake and we didn't get home until 3:00 in the morning and my father was walking the floor wondering where I was at that time of night with a bunch of ministers.  I was the only woman.  
00:46:17
But we had what we called, when I was in college, we had what we called religious emphasis week.  When they brought wonderful speakers like Harry Emerson Fosdick or Simon Gilke or someone of that ilk to Madison and all the different faiths participated and it would be maybe a three or four day session.  And students would go.  And then there came this complete apathy to any kind of religious affiliation and they wouldn't like to say when they registered, you know, what faith they belonged to.  It's a thing that swings, you know, I think they are coming back now.  We've seen so many more at our church.  But I remember one of these men, and I don't even remember which one it was, who came to speak this religious emphasis day.  And I met him at the Northwestern Depot.  He came from Chicago.  And I took him down State Street in the car.  And he said, "Oh this is the street I've heard so much about."  And I said, "Well what have you heard?"  And he said, "For one thing, I am anxious to be in Madison.  I've heard that Madison and Geneva, Switzerland, and Cambridge, England, are the three best places to live."  And I said, "Well I feel very proud.  I've lived in Cambridge, England, and in Madison but never in Geneva.  I've been there."  And then he said whoever had told him this said you must walk along State Street and that it was such an intimate street.  That it was narrow enough that you could see in the shops on either side.  You could hear what people were saying on almost either side of the street, and that was true in those days.  Now, they widened State Street after that and they changed the face of it some.  But I hadn't ridden down it for a long time until a week ago Saturday night I went to a concert in Milwaukee on a bus and the bus came down State Street and we all were so happy to be where we could look into the shops again.   So--it's interesting.  
00:48:25
We stopped walking State Street during the protests because that wasn't wise.  But State Street when I was in school was so interesting because the engineers' parade, when they threw eggs at people, and that was our big excitement, you know.  Instead of protests we had this kind of thing.  And then the lawyers would retaliate.  And then we had the bonfire down on the lower campus and that was always a big night.  So it was always the focus.  And then we had hockey games on the lower campus.  And after dates we would always stop and watch the hockey game, you know after we'd been to the movies or someplace.  So it was--it's always been an interesting street.  And I think it's great that students have it now pretty much to themselves.
LS:  	Yes, I agree. [Tape turned off]  
00:49:30
Well--I'm sorry--that was--you were saying that Connie always felt that he should, that both of you should go to all the funerals.
CE:  	Yes, of faculty members.  And if we felt we knew both of them we'd go to call usually.  And if he had a faculty member in the hospital he always--I don't mean just his own faculty, but this was when he was president, he'd stop in, and E.B. Fred did that too.  I'm sure my husband may have gotten that idea from him.  But it was that intimate a thing.  You knew your faculty that well.  And I think most of them called him Connie.  And his feeling was that they were our family, sort of.  And I guess I had the same feeling about students.  Now I think students would resent being thought of that way, or mothered.  
00:50:28
I remember the Milwaukee Journal said I was the motherly type in the newspaper and I didn't really like that very well but I guess it was true.  And of course I had a student in the University at that time so his fraternity was at our house a lot.  They gave their Christmas party there.  And we said there could be no liquor because the University was not supposed to serve liquor in the house.  It was not only University houses, it was state-owned houses.  It was on the statutes.  And of course that was hard to decide but we decided we didn't charge liquor to the University and this was a good out.  So we told the boys if they had the party here there can't be liquor.  But they were going out to dinner afterwards so that didn't bother them.  So they came.  And it was the year we went to the Rose Bowl.  We had a big ice punch bowl with roses in it and goodies and they danced and they had a wonderful time.  And there was only one vote in the fraternity against coming to our house because of the liquor thing.  So that was fun, and Bob had an apartment at the back of the house so students could come up the back steps.  We never knew who was coming in the back door, you know, even when he wasn't home, some of them.  And we had some game things in the basement so they'd go down there and play.  And we felt the house belonged to the University and we were just sort of living there.  It isn't the most comfortable feeling but you get used to it.  I'm glad it didn't go on longer, really.  I think four years is about long enough to live there.
LS:  	Did it come to four years, then, altogether?  '58 to--
CE:  	Just four years.  He just took through--we always had a freshman reception when the students came with their parents.  And then we had a senior reception.  And so we had just finished the senior reception and gone through the commencement and all that when he died, you see.  It was July.  We had had my class reunion for breakfast and I think we'd had his class for something.  So that had been a busy, busy time.  
00:52:50
But one time we tried having the freshmen reception at the president's house and that was kind of a disaster because those poor people--it was one of these Wisconsin days when it couldn't decide what it wanted to do and they were standing outside in lines for a long time and I remember one very funny thing about that.  One of the women, a parent, came and we had a tiny little powder room downstairs.  And it was so tiny, it was sort of made out of a closet and I had gotten a trailer toilet and a trailer washstand to fit in there and the only way they could do it was to put the toilet so it faced the door.  Well, this woman went in there and sat with her--she had a hat on--and she sat on that toilet for just ages with the  door open and finally the help went to her and said, "You know, we have to keep this for other people."  And she said, "I don't care.  Until I get my turn in the line I'm going to sit here.  It's the only place to sit."  So she sat in full observation of everybody--of course I didn't know any of this.  I was in the living room in the reception line.  So there were lots of tales like that that were funny.  But you get all kinds of people.  And she got through the line and got to shake hands with the governor and all and that was nice.  But I think we had like 2,500 and that's a lot of people to go through a house.  And I have forgotten what the last count was but…
00:54:23
Professor Herriott, in the Spanish department, whose wife's name is Margot, and she had managed these receptions pretty much for Mrs. Fred and with the help of Anne Minahan, who is the head of the Union, social and student affairs, and Anne worked with me and so did Margot.  And they had it worked out just beautifully so they had lines with flowers, you know, and they had harps and music going.  Beautiful.  It was really a beautiful event except people had to stand in line and that was hard.  But they stood so they could see the whole thing which was kind of fun.  That Great Hall at the Union lends itself to that.  But I guess that's about the end of that kind of thing.  It was just getting too big, and of course the father and mother bring their lesser children who hadn't yet gotten to college age, so it got to be a big thing.  And yet it was very satisfying to me.  One of my best friends now is a girl we received with her parents when she was a freshman from Chicago and she married and lives here and is on our faculty, her husband is.  And then we took her through her senior reception.  Then we quit.  So she always thinks we were her special president.  
00:55:44
And when Connie died the student prom was-- the summer prom was all set up and the kids cancelled it.  They felt that badly.  I called the girl who was in charge and said, "Don't feel you have to do that.  He would want, you know, everything to go on."  And she said, "We just don't feel in the mood.  He worked with us on it."  There were a lot of things like that.  They gave a bean supper, the students did, to raise money for a portrait they wanted to buy.  They had Aaron Bohrod make a portrait for the Union and they thought they could raise enough money, they only got part of it.  And he suddenly said, "Well, why don't I give the rest of it to the University."  So it's at the Union.  And there were just so many things the students started.  They had a symposium the year after.  So it showed that we were really close to students, I think.  And that to me was the biggest part of the job.  And it's not that way now but it's a different class of people and it's a different world.
LS:  	After you had to leave the president's house you presumably didn't have much chance to have much to do with students.  Is that right?
CE:  	No, not really.  This is maybe why I like this Board of Visitors job so well because we did interview students and the students still invited me to things.  Many of the Chadbourne girls--when they had a tea and things like that, for a long time I was invited to their Christmas tea.  
00:57:18
And I went while I knew some of the students but then it gradually--and the last time I went to a function, I went to this S.A.I. [a music sorority] formal dinner at the Union.  I wore my fur coat which my husband had given me and it was a mink coat which was much too minky for me but he wanted me to have it.  And that was the evening that the Dow Chemical people were setting up their--whatever they were going to do the next day in the lounge in the Union, and the first floor there.  And I went to the desk to check my fur coat and two of these fellows came and just looked me up and down.  And I said to the check girl, "Why was that?"  And she said, "Well you represent the establishment, and that coat, Mrs. Elvehjem, I wouldn't wear it over here again."  And I never did.  But that gave me, a woman alone, a different feeling about being over there, sometimes, to student functions.  And that hurt.  And I felt the same way one night when I walked through the Rathskeller.  I had always gotten off at that entrance, you know, and gone through--and they looked at me and I just didn't belong anymore.  And I suppose maybe it was always that way and I didn't realize it because I knew I did belong, I don't know.  But it's a strange feeling.
LS:  	This was in the late '60s?  Well that would have been a difficult period.
CE:  	And of course there were lots of things happening at the Union then.  But I think that's about the last--where I went to—
00:58:46
The Union always had that beautiful party, you know, at Christmas, I went to that.  Several times.  And I've been invited to--and my husband's fraternity has been awfully good to me.  They've had me down a number of times and they have a picture of Connie over the mantle.  So I have that many contacts.  But it did change pretty fast.  But then my own children grew up then too.  
00:59:17
I worked with international students--before, long before Connie became graduate dean we were made honorary members of the International Club, which was a very going thing.  And of course there weren't so many students in those days on campus, from other countries.  And we worked with them.  And we sponsored an Indian girl who came to this country and became a Ph.D. and married a Ph.D. and they are both in Washington doing wonderful things.  She's with the National Institutes of Health and then we had a Norwegian girl live with us.  So I had that kind of contact.  We had--I think Bob counted, one time--thirteen different students lived with us during the years.  So I was always with kids and I loved them, you know.  That was the most fun of the job, I think, the relationships with faculty and students and the people who came here.
01:00:28	End of Tape 2, Side 2.
Tape 3, Side 1
00:00:01
LS:  	Karl Paul Link's a very interesting figure.  I've read things about him--about some of the problems he had with people in the department, and I wonder how much you were aware of--
CE:  	Very much.  
LS:  	You were?
CE:  	It was frightening at times.
LS:  	What?
CE:  	It was frightening at times because in a way I kept thinking he was, they say genius is a hairline over to the other side.  And it almost seemed that Karl had those--he did some really strange things all our lives.  
00:00:43
The strange thing is that I came to Madison not knowing anyone, boys or any students, as a student and a freshman.  And my high school advisor was a man in Decatur, Illinois, who was an ag teacher and my name was Waltz and I came at the end of the alphabet so they put me in his class, it wasn't even a classroom, for a homeroom.  And he taught us how to play football.  He drew the plays on the blackboard, I remember that.  His name was Walter Leukel.  And the year I came up here to school he came to take some courses up here in biochemistry.  In the meantime he had married our Dean of Women's daughter from my high school so they came to live up here.  And he was working in the laboratory--and my husband was a student then--with Karl Link and Conrad Elvehjem, and he said to Karl, "Can you come over to our house tonight?  We're having a girl from my wife's hometown that I used to know in high school.  We'd like to have a boy for her to meet."  And my husband had had two dates with me and he said, "Well you came from Decatur, Illinois, didn't you?"  And Walt said yes.  And he said, "Hands off Karl, that's my girl."  And I came that close to dating Karl Link.  So we liked to tell that because it was really funny.  
00:02:10
And Karl was a very everyday kind of person then.  We thought he was very bright, of course, but he was not showing as many eccentricities.  Then he went to Europe before we did.  And when he came home he was wearing capes and longer hair and--much handsomer.  But as we went over there we followed him.  We were at many places where he had made a stir that had not been pleasant for people.  So that was our first encounter with his being different at all.  And then as time went on—
00:02:48
LS:  	Do you remember?
CE:  Yes, many incidents.  I don't know how much I--it's all locked up in the vault at biochemistry, I think, unless they've done something since.  But there were many incidents when it was really frightening.  He wanted, for instance, to put--you see vitamin K in aspirin makes you bleed as we all know now because there has been much more about it.  So he wanted to put vitamin K, which aids clotting, into aspirin.  And Harry Steenbock would not have that.  And they had these seminars which I think you said Van Potter had told you about, where they talked and they had quite a discussion one morning about this.  And Harry Steenbock said you would do more harm because many people, like children, who would take aspirin, it would make more problems.  Maybe they would be clotting too much.  So there was all this discussion.  He thought there was a better way to do it.  And they got into such a heated discussion that when they went out of the seminar, Harry and Karl, Harry was going into the men's room and Karl grabbed him by the neck.  And if some of the boys hadn't intervened that would have been a--I think he knocked his glasses off.  Well there are any number of incidents like that I could recount but that's the one that I remember.  He did that to Mark Stahmann one day.  He--and so you never knew when this—
00:04:14
--and then when we had the Enzyme Institute.  My husband was hoping so much to get the Enzyme Institute here.  And he and Perry Wilson and Ed Gordon--I can't remember some,  I could remember if I took time--the other men that were interested.  This was right after the War.  And there could have been an institute in Germany, Warburg, had done some very exciting work in enzymes.  The German chemist.  But they invited them all to this institute here, which was a big thing.  Elizabeth Waters was new.  We all stayed, even we stayed at the dorm--and the other professors from Wisconsin stayed there and their wives and children.  We had a wonderful time.  And then they tried to get the Rockefeller people interested in money to start such a place.  And when it was decided that we could have one here and Rockefeller had gone along--I gave the dinner, or the party of some sort, in my own home.  This was before we were in the president's house, and we had this Norwegian girl living with us.  And she made very fancy Norwegian hors d'oeuvres.  And it was all men and that decided it.  And she always said she made the Norwegian stuff to put in those men that made them give the money.  So every time she comes back to Madison she has to see the Enzyme Institute and she expected it to be as big as Liz Waters or something.  She was so surprised it was such a little building because it's a wonderful thing.  And so we got the Enzyme Institute here.  Well when those important people from all over the world that we were trying to sell on the enzyme thing came, Karl Link apparently wasn't a part of it, I don't know why.  I guess his work didn't touch that.  So he sat and ate his lunch out on the front steps of the biochemistry building as Connie was bringing these people in and out, in sort of red satin shorts.  No men didn't wear shorts just around like they do today.  And he was--it was just things like that all the time.  
00:06:16
When they had Professor Hart's farewell dinner, my husband was toastmaster.  He asked Karl to do something and Connie had just changed black haired rabbits into white and white haired rabbits black.  I mean he found something that did this.  Which caused all kinds of commotion because the beauty parlors heard about this and they thought maybe it was going to be something wonderful.  It was just a little momentary thing in the literature.  I mean it wasn't any big deal, I guess, biochemistry-wise.  But Karl made something of it.  And he gave this eulogy to Professor Hart but in order to kind of get around and do something snide he had a black rabbit and a white rabbit he pulled out at the right moment to show how there had been this experiment in the lab.  And he was always doing--it just seemed as if there were times when he—
00:07:08
--and he wrote nasty letters from time to time.  And I--
LS:  	You mean personal letters?
CE:  	Yes.  And some of them I never saw because they were just horrid, I guess.  And then he went to the T.B. sanatorium, you know he was in the T.B. sanatorium twice.  And for a long time, it was like--well it seems to me it was over a year one time.  And my husband had to keep him on the budget, of course.  And that wasn't easy because, you know, budgets were hard to come by even then, harder probably.  But he never complained and he tried to do right by Karl.  
00:07:44
And then when Karl was ready to leave, this just shows his eccentricities, he had been testing negative--his sputum had been testing negative for a long time.  And every day they took it.  And it was just a simple lab boy at the T.B. sanatorium came in and took the sample and reported it.  Well one day Karl thought he maybe wasn't doing it right.  So he went down the hall himself and got some sputum from an old man who was dying and mixed it with his and of course the kid thought he couldn't, that couldn't be right because it had tested that.  So he reported it negative.  And Karl raised a terrible fuss.  It was all in the newspapers with the T. B. san--their methods were lax and he told all the story--this was the kind of thing he did all the time.  
00:08:32
And when they were going to have their last baby he had a notice on everybody's door that the Karl Links were producing a, I can't remember all that but that was just typical.  It was strange--he didn't come to my husband's funeral and there was never any animosity really.  And Elizabeth came out here a long time after--I hadn't missed him, to tell you the truth--and said, "It's time you heard from the Links, Connie", and she brought me a plant.  That's the first time I had known.  But these are the things he would do, you know, for no reason.  
00:09:05
And it not only my husband, it was Harry.  Oh, he couldn't stand Harry.  
LS:  	Oh, I gathered that.
CE:  	And Stahmann.  He just hated him.  And there were other people.  Our secretary, if you ever want to interview her--
LS:  	Anne Terrio.
CE:  	Yes.  Anne has told me of a letter that Karl wrote that was so terrible about Connie, to Connie, I guess.  And she said, "It was just before he died and I intercepted it."  And she said, "I have never done--I just threw it in the waste basket."
LS:  	My goodness.  Did she ever say what it was about?
CE:  	No.  I don't know whether she put it--she may have put it in the file but Connie never saw it.  And she said, "I don't want you to see it either," so I don't know what that was all about because there was nothing—
00:09:53
--their research didn't even touch each other.  
LS:   	There was something about calf scours.  I don't know whether you knew about that?
CE:  	Yes.  I remember.  But I can't remember that there was much controversy but--.  
LS:  	Well he seemed to--the story was he--Link said that he had gotten a written permission from Connie and that Ward Ross was there at the time to do work off campus on this question and then, I gather, Connie denied that he had given him written permission.  This was in a newspaper article I came across.
CE:  	This could be.
LS:  	Most of his blame was against E.B. Fred and Ira Baldwin for not recognizing his work and not letting him go ahead with it.
CE:  	You just couldn't tell--he was so convincing because he was so bright that people believed him sometimes and I think some of the things were not true.  He may have--I don't remember that—
00:10:59
--I remember seeing calf scours in the literature because I typed all of Connie's papers before they went to Anne who did the final typing.  And we edited them some in that he would ask me if it was something that I as a layperson would understand--and that's why I know this much because he would explain it to me if I didn't--and then I'd say, "Well why don't you say it that way in the paper?"  Because many of his speeches were to nutritionists or home ecs or a lot of things that weren't in the scientific journals.  So I know more about those things than, I guess, the average wife if she wasn't biochemically trained.  Because many of my friends would say, "Well why did you want to know all that?"  Well I don't know as I did in the beginning.  Except you see I had five years without children so I could do that stuff.  And it was a way of being together.  I soon learned that.  I enjoyed that.  
00:12:00
But Karl was just an enigma to me.  I just never could quite understand how he could do some of the really terrible things he did.  He didn't like any administration.  And I think--Anne Terrio always thought it was jealousy of Connie because they were contemporaries.  But he had no reason to be.  Goodness, his things were patented and brought him in all kinds of money.  You see they elect a chairman, as you know, I guess they still do that, don't they, in the department?
LS:  	Yes.
CE:  	And Connie was elected and he was re-elected every year.  And that showed that the rest of the staff felt happy with him.  And when he went up to be president of the University I thought, well I'm not worried about his handling anything up there.  It can't be half as bad as having Harry Steenbock and Karl Link and all of their messes, you know.  
00:12:52
And there were some other prima donnas, too.  
LS:  	Who, what other ones?
CE:  	Well, Frank Strong at one point, I think.  Not as a research man, but he had a lot of problems in his life, with his wife.  And we got involved in those somehow.  And Ann would come to Connie and one night she wanted him to go down to the police station with her because they had found Frank's car someplace.  And I suddenly said, "You know, this isn't very sharp.  I'd better go too.  Because if he is trying to get rid of her he might name you as a co-respondent or something because you were seen with her at that time of the night."  So if I didn't get up and get dressed and go--and that's crazy.  But it turned out that he was at the place of the woman, whom he married, Dorothy Hussemann.  And I always could kind of understand that.  Frank was a very mild, sweet person, really.  I think he just had too much family.  Anyhow, during that time he was kind of hard.  And we never knew when you were going to get called at night by Ann.  Oh dear.  But you see, now nobody would do that now, do you think they'd call a chairman of the department and say, "Help me?"
LS:	Well apparently chairmen do get involved in personal affairs.  They may not be calling in the middle of the night but they often will talk to them.
CE:	Yes. We were talking once. 
00:14:20
Connie would make a decision about Karl, I think, and decide well he thought he knew what was right and he'd just go ahead and not let it bother him.  He never seemed to brood over things, never, even the Medical School.  People said, "Oh he's probably losing--."  He didn't lose sleep, no.  He thought about it when he was there.  And he thought about it from the moment he got up.  But then, you know, he made a decision and he thought he had to abide by it.  And he thought usually that it was a good decision.  I don't think he could have--he was not a person who couldn't be changed, you know, if he--if it was shown that it was not right.  
00:15:00
So he didn't brood over the Link thing either but he just knew it was there always, and everybody in the lab did.  And they were grateful when he really started working at home because it took the burden off the--these showmanship things.  I can't remember half of them.  
LS:  	Did the students like him?
CE:	They liked him.  You know, he was colorful like William Ellery Leonard was colorful or any of the professors we had that were kind of far out.  And I know them all.  I used to walk beside William Ellery Leonard.  
0015:34
And Carl Russell Fish I had.  All those men are colorful.  It seems as if we don't have that kind now.  And yet maybe we do and I just know that.  But--and Keikhofer was just wonderful.  We just loved him, all of us.  And yet he was colorful too.  His life was.  We used to call him the Mexican hairless because he didn't have any hair on his face.  And strange things, you know.
00:16:04
LS:   There was--I came across yesterday in the presidential files a piece of correspondence between Steenbock and Brittingham which was very bitter.  Steenbock was being very bitter about something at WARF.  I don't know whether you'd know--how much you know about the whole WARF story?
CE:	Well quite a bit about WARF because we used to have to go around, sort of--you see every other university began to be envious, but at first they were critical about our having WARF.  And just as I was when they opened Hilldale.  I said, "No university should go into business."  And look what that's done for the University.  And my husband--we had quite a few arguments about that.  And he cut the ribbons for that and I said, "Well I hope--."  In the first year I think it paid a million dollars.  I just thought it was ridiculous for a university to be dabbling in business things.  Well, so do churches now, everything does.  So we had lots of interesting arguments about things and he used to just keep thinking and the first time when they got the million dollar check I just thought, well I have to call him up and tell him because he will really laugh at that.  That's the hard part of losing someone you're so close to because there are so many things--you know it's almost twenty-one years now and I just still think I have to tell him that.  And we did have such fun and lots of sparring.  My husband loved to argue and to take the other side of things just to see really how you felt.   And then he'd sort of smile and come around and you knew he was just razzing you the whole time.  He did that with students too, I think.  And it probably brought out the best or the worst in us, I don't know which.  But it was never nasty arguing.  I mean it was for discussion.  But I think even the children found that true.  That he liked to--and he loved good stories.  So we had a lot of fun at the table, always, that was the most fun I think.  And I think his students felt that.  
00:18:33
LS:	You were going to say something about WARF.  
CE:	Well, you see all that came about--actually the first I remember we lived in an apartment, right after we were married, on Adams and Oakland.  It's still there, a big red brick flat, kind of flatiron building.  It was new.  When we came home from our honeymoon we expected to go right in there.  I had my piano and some furniture from my grandmother's and we had to put it in storage and Connie found a place for us to live over the Rennebohm pharmacy there on Randall and University.  And we lived there a month and then we moved into our apartment.  But one of the first things I remember about that apartment is that I heard the newspaper calling "Extra, Extra" and since I was a journalist, you know, that was kind of exciting.  They used to get out extras quite often.  And that was about my husband's work with iron and copper--and Professor Hart and Frank Strong and Jim Waddell, there were several of them.  But I ran out and got the paper and here the whole headlines were Professor Hart has suggested iron and copper are very important in anemia and so forth.  You have to have the presence of copper.  And there he was, shown with this instrument that I knew he didn't know how to use.  And by the time Connie got home I was frothing at the bit and saying, you know, "What is this?"  So he was so sweet to sit down and explain it to me--that a major professor always gets, pretty much the glory.  It makes it authentic to have this man associated--and then his students, if the professor is the right kind, gradually he's down on the bottom of the list of names--and of course that's exactly what happened.  But I had to be told that right away.  And about that time, then, WARF was formed because they had a patent, these men that did this iron-copper work.  And I think it was in Professor Hart's name.  Maybe they had their, the other fellows' names on it.  But they were all young and we got--Hart would get the money and divide it between the five of them I believe.  And that saved us more than once because the Depression came, you see, right after we bought a house and a baby and a new car, a first car.  And we didn't know how we'd pay our taxes, and then that little bit of a nest egg, it would be like $200 maybe, I don't know if it was that much even.  And that lasted for seventeen years.  So that must have been just about the time we were married.  I don't know when WARF was formed.
LS:	Actually it was formed in 1924 but it was just growing very slowly and then it would--
CE:	See in '26 we were married so it must have been pretty close to the time.
LS:	Yes.  I guess so.
CE:	So and of course I was in school in '24.  So this probably just about--and when the pellagra thing came along I first said, "Will you patent this?" and Connie said, "No because it's a natural substance."  And he said, "I'm glad I won't have to go through all that.  And I won't feel ever apologetic for--."  It's a chemical that already exists.  And somebody said to me one day, "Well why is that?"  Daisy Popp said that the other day. "Why is that?  Sunlight is a natural thing, too. And I said, "Yes, but the process of catching the sunlight--."  
00:22:05
And so there was that and, of course, Harry Steenbock--it was Harry Steenbock's idea, the whole WARF thing.  And I think it's wonderful that he was farseeing enough to see that and it's been exciting to see it grow.  He used to live with his parents, you know.  And of course Evelyn was in the department as a biochemist herself.
LS:	But he became very bitter towards WARF.  There was one point where Link, I think, asked that Steenbock not be allowed to go to meetings anymore and--
CE:	He was not the easiest man to get along with.  I think--after he was married he seemed so happy that I really thought there was a change in the man.    
LS:	Oh really?
CE:	Yes.  Because she says it was some kind of an accident but they don't know what it is, I guess. Anyhow that's water under the bridge. But their marriage was absolutely beautiful. And it was great.  We were all happy. He would probably have married earlier only his mother and dad just didn't want him to, and he lived at home. 
00:23:25
We thought he was going to marry someone at the Kellogg Foundation whose--Dr. Mitchell, a beautiful older woman, and she was on some committees with my husband.  She used to go east with him, meet him in Chicago, and I just hoped that--.  I used to--he'd tell me about this Dr. Mitchell and I'd picture this young woman, and I thought, well, maybe I should be jealous.  I never was jealous but she would write him and wire him and say--they both liked detective stories and he never read that kind of stuff at home but she would read on her way from Detroit to Chicago the first few pages, tear them apart and give him the paperback.  And so she'd say, "I'll have so and so ready for you."  Well I just wondered about this, and so he said one time I went to a meeting of the Federation, "You must meet Dr. Mitchell."  And here was this white haired lovely person, Harry's age.  
LS:  	I can see it.
CE:  	So. He loved to kid me anyway.  He kept me guessing I guess.  That's why he was so much fun.
00:34:32
LS:   Do you, as you think back over it, in terms of how women talk about women's careers today, do you ever regret that you didn't do anything differently or have a job or go ahead with journalism or--?
CE:  	Well I guess one of the reasons I wanted you to see that resume of mine, if you could call it that, was that I was always into things around here.  There is hardly anything that I haven't had an office in in Madison, I guess.  And I don't like offices.  I'm basically shy.  I don't like to preside.  But they always seem to happen to me and often at a critical time when they would impress me, that it was the moment that I had to accept it because they needed me.  I loved being on boards and working with people but I never wanted to be in the top seat.  And it hurts me when I look at it because I hear other women, they say, "Oh she did everything and she always wanted to be the top man."  And I didn't have that in me and my husband would have to push me sometimes.
LS:  	What do you mean it hurts you?  You said--
CE:  	Well I just don't want to be considered somebody that is out seeking, you know, seeking to be in everything.  Because that was not the way I operated but I just got interested in things and the first thing I knew I'd always seem to--like the Visiting Nurses, for instance, and some of those jobs that were kind of out of my line really.  And yet I was on the first Madison League for Nursing and the first state League for Nursing.  I never had any nursing, but--
LS:  	You mean somebody asked you to be on those boards?
CE:  	Well the reason was because the dean of the School of Nursing here, my husband was the undergraduate dean, asked me to be I guess on the Madison League for Nursing when they formed it.  And they were very interested in reorganizing the--it's getting hot and I'll tell you why in a minute--reorganizing the School of Nursing and she was very anxious to have Connie's ear and I think that's why I was invited the first time.  But then I became secretary.  I went to national meetings in St. Louis and in New York--League for Nursing meetings, and did a lot of those things that just opened up a whole new field to me.
00:26:58
LS:  	Did you give talks at these meetings?  
CE:  	Well I did give a talk once on, I think that was in Milwaukee, the state meeting, on what the consumer expects of a nurse, of the nursing profession when you are a patient.  I've hardly ever been a patient except when I had my first baby.  So I don't know why--well I was too.  I was in the University Hospital six weeks when I was in school with pneumonia.   
00:27:22
But I wonder myself that I didn't ever have this feeling and I think I wanted to earn some money myself.  I never earned money when I was in high school.  I worked for the newspaper some and my father didn't want me to do that.  Then came the Depression you know and we thought women shouldn't work.  And after my husband died I really would like to have done something, and I should have.  Financially, I should have.  But I had my dad.  He was eighty some and he had never been alone, mother was always with him and that presented somewhat of a problem.  He was able.  He could have stayed alone if I had come in for meal time.  
00:28:06
And I spoke to LeRoy Luberg about it and he said, "Connie--."  I'd said--you know, I'd think there'd be something at the University in public relations or hostessing or something, and somebody had spoken to me about the Center building.  Why wouldn't you be their hostess down there?  And I thought, that's a natural for me because I know all those people who come there pretty much.  And Roy said, "Don't do it because everyone will think the University created a job for you."  And that's all anybody needed to say to me.  And so I--and I really wasn't trained.  You see I had a year of college left.  I could have easily picked that up.  
00:28:47
But I'd had a lot of experience but it didn't add up to probably a job.  And the closest I ever came to it was when I was on the Red Cross board.  Our director dropped dead one day, he was shoveling snow, and so the board called me together with them and asked me to be the interim director.  Full pay.  And I said, "Well I don't think I should take pay for it."  They said, "If you don't you won't be here.  We want you here all the time."  So I went home and talked it over with Connie and he said, "That's a public function.  I mean the Red Cross uses public money and I don't want you to take that money."  And so then they said, "Well then you have to take at least half time."  So I did.  But I was there full time.  I only got half time.  I was so excited, I came home and bought a bedroom set with my big earnings.  
LS: 	How long did you do that?
CE:  	Oh, it must have been two months or more, until they chose someone.  And it was against national Red Cross policies.  We didn't know it at the time but there was something in the statutes that said a board member cannot be a director.  But you know it turned out to be a very fortunate time actually because we had some--some people were drawing a lot of overtime pay and I turned up something that had been going on for quite a while, nobody knew about.  It wasn't such a bad idea.  But that was fine and I really--and the family was simply great.  The children I think were in high school or beginning college and they all just rallied around to get me off to work every morning.  So I can understand how families do help a mother and—
00:30:30
--but I guess I thought I had a full time job with what I did.
LS:  	Connie thought you had, is that what you're saying?
CE:  	No I think I thought so too.  I think with helping him as much as I felt I did and he was always ready to acknowledge that I was a help and publicly even.  Not so much in his president's job but I mean in his work.  And, as I told you the other day, I washed his hair… 
00:31:05	End of Tape 3, Side 1
Tape 3, Side 2
00:31:07
CE:	It's hard to say.  You really have more intuition than I have.  So he was just the greatest person--
LS:	We just missed out the little bit there where you said that he said that you should have been president.  
CE:  	Well that's not important.
00:31:23
LS:  	Do you feel defensive now when you hear women talking about--
CE:  	A little.  Yes.  Because I think volunteerism is very important and I think you can have--you can learn so much from your associations with people and--I sit on the Methodist Hospital Foundation board now with all the brass from all the banks and financial institutions, practically, downtown and they are talking about things that are just way over my head, you know, and I wonder why I'm there.  But I guess--they re-elected me another two terms, I guess, another one, and yet I can ask questions sometimes that they haven't thought about.  How is this going to look to the community?  And we've just inherited a fabulous sum of money from this man, Henry Sage, who was a Cap Times man, you know.  And they're going to the Cap Times business meetings and all this kind of thing now and I've been able to have some input there because I have a friend who is connected with the Lee Enterprises and told me some of that.  So we're looking ahead to what newspapers are going to be, whether we should sell the stock or whether we should keep it.  And also I just love it.  But I'm just a little nothing compared to these men.  But they've told me things to help me in taxes, you know.
LS:  	You say you're nothing compared to them?
CE:  	Well yes.  I feel that way.  I guess I am, well there is another woman now who represents the retirement center, yes.  But she's a financier.  She's always done that sort of thing.
LS:  	Well, do you think they have you on as a token woman?
CE:  	And Mary Grey from the bank is on.  Well they've always tried to have the community represented on their boards and they've had all kinds of faiths.  Catholic and every faith is represented.  And you have to be approved by the bishop at their sessions.   So I've been on the board and I was on the committee that built the retirement center and those things so I've come up through--and the Nursing Advisory Committee.
00:33:42
LS:   	So you feel you actually have contributed something to all--
CE:  	Yes.  Oh yes.  But I just wonder why, you know, I'm chosen sometimes.  I was ready to go off the board.  I had served all the terms I could, and I had been chairman of the Nominating Committee and Bill Johnson said when I retired from the board, he said, "Connie is the one that's made our board strong because she knows so many people."  And no one has ever turned me down.  Like Mr. Woerple at WARF or--they just are eager to be on this board because they think it's worthwhile.  So now I've just been chairman of the Nominating Committee for the foundation.  They've got some good people.  So I guess I have a function but I'm always just, you know, what am I doing here?  But I'm learning so much and I think that must be more fun than just sticking at one job day after day, 9 to 5?  
00:34:35
So I've been happy and I really worry about things like the United Way and these places where people spend hours and hours of their time free.  And now you know, it's so different.  When you ask a person to be on your board, he says, "Are you insured?  Are board members insured?"  And it's quite a different picture so that you feel a responsibility to a board.  And I think the time will come when they will pay for that.  Many hospitals are paying for their trustees.  So maybe that will bring people back into these boards.  But I would think it would be absolutely deadly to be a secretary.  
LS:     Well you wouldn't necessarily be that after all.
CE:	No, but you know, you might be.  And they think that's greater than being a volunteer, so you know, I can't--of course, I think we expect so much financially nowadays that there are two people working in almost every family.  My daughter feels she has to apologize.  She was a career woman, she worked at Betty Crocker.  And after she was married and then when her children came she decided she should stay home so she and five girls, five former Betty Crockers, formed a company.  And they call it Consumer Services something or other.  They write recipe books and test and they wrote one of the Weight Watchers' cookbooks.  But she said it's not, you know, it's not really a full time job and she would like one now but she's fifty-two and it isn't so easy to get one in today's world.  
00:36:25
But I worry about volunteer causes.  I worry because there are not bodies to sit on the boards and I worry because this new cutting all the human things in our country, the funding for them, this worries me now too.  And plus not being allowed to get tax deductions for charitable gifts.  All those things frighten me for what's ahead for volunteer things.  And now we're having the same trouble with the League, University League.  Now the girls, you see they work so many of them, and so they are not too attracted to just go to tea or to, you know, I can understand.  I have trouble with that myself.  But they've thought up this brown bag lunch at noon.  And that's taken hold and maybe we will have some new gimmicks there that will--it's a changing world and it's hard to fit into it wherever you are now, I think.  I don't believe it's any harder for me as an older woman.  I never thought I would get out of step because I just love young people and I didn't think Connie--he didn't like to reminisce.  He never liked to look back much.  And he said there's so much ahead, you know, to--and of course I suppose that's the research mind, so I got that.  My father was a great person to reminisce but he had a lot to reminisce about.  And he was so interesting to us because of it.  But it bored my husband a little bit.  And so I, early on I decided I can't talk that kind of thing to him.  And we always said we'd always be with young people, we'd never get old.  But now suddenly, when I go to the bank and I don't know anyone in the bank, you know, the officers that run my trust, I get sort of frightened by it.  The paper work, you know it gets to everyone.  And it must be awful to be a department head now in the University because they have so much of that.  My son is taking those grants up and he says it's just, you know, you can hardly carry the boxes some days.
00:38:43
LS:	You know there's one last thing, I don't know whether you have anything that you wanted--but just if you would say something about this Woman's Day because it would be interesting to have that on tape.
CE:	I think we should have that someplace.  Grace Chatterton had been going around to other universities, as I remember it, or at alumni meetings at other universities or something where she had heard that they were thinking of doing something for women, letting them have an alumnae day to themselves.  And there were some women's alumnae clubs, I think the north shore of Chicago had one and I believe Minneapolis had one.  And so she had spoken to President Fred and to John Birge about this several times and they had not caught fire on the idea.  And so she spoke to my husband and he, being her contemporary I guess, was more vulnerable and liked her and so he said, "Why don't we have a talk-around about this?"  And he asked me to have lunch and Grace invited people, I remember this Mrs. Johns who was on the Board of Visitors and Ora Jones from Jefferson or someplace down there, and quite a few people from out-of-town.  And Dean Troxell who was definitely interested in women, who was then the Dean of Women.  And I think Martha Peterson was around then too.  And maybe it was just the transition when Martha and Louise Troxell were changing or maybe Louise just came back for this, I can't remember.  But Grace Chatterton would know that.  Anyhow it was a nice group of people and my husband came to lunch and as I remember it some other men.  I think maybe LeRoy Luberg and I guess John Birge.  
00:40:33
And they dreamed up this Women's Day on Campus.  And  the idea was to sell to the state our blue, what we called our blue-ribbon professors.  That was E.B. Fred's name for students who were super and so forth.  And so we got these in.  And let people--many of them heard them on the radio and they were fans.  They just listened every time they spoke and Petrovich was one, you know, you could just think of the ones that sort of caught fire and let them see them, they are human beings.  You know you can talk to them, ask them questions.  And this was just great.  You'd be surprised the people that came the first time just to have the chance to sit there.  
00:41:16
Well out of that, really, in a way I think, came some of the continuing education things.  Because some of the women who came had the idea they wanted to go back to school and this was a pushover.  Here they could go and from that eventually came E.B. Fred's, you know, what do they call it, the women's--
LS:	The fellowship program.
CE:	Yes.  But I don't know as I should give this women's day all that credit but I think the spark came from these women coming back to campus.
LS:	When was this?
CE:  Well, they had an anniversary last year, I think.  It would have to be during Connie's presidency, maybe '59 or '60.
LS:	No, it would have to be during E.B. Fred's wouldn't it?
CE:	No it was afterwards.  After Connie became president.  The spark was planted with E.B. Fred and John Birge before that.  Connie became president in '58 and I think it would be '59 when this came about because this took about a year.
LS: 	So the first actual day.  Yes.
CE:	What would that have been an anniversary of last year?  Twenty years I think probably they'd said, but it may be twenty-five.  Well that's easy to find out.  And so we started with just one in the spring.  And then they wanted one--they thought they'd like to have one in the fall.  So we thought we shouldn't do the same thing and that we would have one for the arts in the fall and one for general things in the spring.  
00:42:55
And of course it was a beautiful time to come to campus.  Everything is usually budded, you know, and any alumnae love to come back anytime and see Lake Mendota open.  Arlie Mucks would have the crew out in front of the alumni house and so it just caught fire and I think got so big we wondered if we were going to be able to handle it.  
00:43:18
And I don't know if you've ever heard of Carol Morse.  She was a very outstanding student on campus years ago.  Her brother was Wayne Morse, you know.  She was very active in women's work, student government and so on.  And she came through Madison one day and called me and asked me if I could give her any kind of a lead because she wanted to start it out wherever they are, in Pennsylvania I believe.  So it's been copied in many places and it's a going thing and—
00:43:51
--a few years ago they had to change the name to Day on Campus because they didn't want to eliminate the other gender but really it was started for women, you know.  And that's kind of bothered me because I think we've gone a little too far on some of these things.  I just noticed, I got some material from the State Historical at Women's Auxiliary.  They have to change the by-laws to change the gender now on that.  You can't win.  But this Day on Campus has, I think, done a lot of good for the University and one of the reasons we wanted it was to let people see our good professors but also to have it be our own campus thing.  So we kept saying, "We can't have--we don't want to invite talent from the other campuses."  Now whether that will always exist or not, you do kind of exhaust your talent sometimes you think.  But they like to hear them again.  And if they are doing wonderful work they can be repeated many times.  
00:44:58
And then I think the arts people have gotten interested.  Then we have tours of the campus you know.  They go to the Elvehjem, they go to the WHA, they go to the Psychology Lab, they go to see the multivideo stuff, they've gone to the computer center, they do a lot of those things.  And they've taken buses.  And that's been cut down a little bit in the last few years because the mechanics of that are pretty difficult and people, if they come from out-of-town, want to get home.  So now they just have a ballet or opera or something in the afternoon and it's over by 2:30 or so.  But those women, some of them get up at 5:00 in the morning to get here.  And there's one woman who comes from Minneapolis every year.  So it's a big thing.
00:45:52
LS:	Do you want to say anything about the Elvehjem?
CE:	The Elvehjem.  Yes, that would be nice because it's such a wonderful place.  Long before Connie became president he went with Rick Kohler, Jim Watrous and probably other men, but those are the ones I remember, to try and get money for an art center of some sort, or a place to show art.  We did have lots of nice art and it was in the basement of Bascom.  It wasn't very well taken care of.  They tried to have air conditioning of sorts down there and every time they'd go--I remember once they went to the Kresge Foundation and they came back with some paintings, you know, or a work of art of some sort, and it only made another problem in a way.  But no money.  But there would be great discouragement.
00:46:43
LS:	Why was Connie interested in this?
CE:	Well, I don't know how this happened.  Maybe it was when he was graduate dean, I suppose.  But he liked good art.  It was really interesting.  When he came to visit me the first time in my home, my mother had some rather nice things.  She had a cousin who was a painter and she had one or two nice things in the house and she talked to Connie about art.  I guess he asked her about these things.  And he said, "If I ever--if my ship ever comes in, I'm going to have some nice art."  Well now, this was a farm boy who had not been exposed to any of this.  Hardly been out of the state of Wisconsin when I met him.  And so, you know, this was hard to understand.  But you know the Norwegian people have a good deal of art in their homes.  And when we've had Norwegian students here they often say that that's one of the first things they miss in American homes.  Now I think that's not true now.  This would be twenty years ago when we had so many Norwegian students after the war.  But so he had that in mind and when we lived in England we went many, many weekends, of course, to the National Gallery in London and when we were over in France, of course we went to the Louvre.  We always did that.  It was part of our trip.  And he especially liked sculpture.  So he kept saying, "It's not--sculpture doesn't have a place in a home, does it?"  And I said, "Well I had an aunt who had pedestals with marble things but I always thought it was like a cemetery in there."  And so we talked that much about art—
00:48:23
--but the exciting thing was, before he died, one day President Fred and Mrs. Fred were there and we had a luncheon for the Brittinghams.  This was after Tom died.  Tom Brittingham and Connie were very good friends.  We used to be at parties at their house--at the Brittinghams.  This was years ago.  And I wanted to live in Brittingham House but they didn't think there was money enough to set up there.  So somehow or other the family, the Brittinghams, had decided to give this million dollars.  And Connie accepted the check that noon at this luncheon we had.  Just an informal luncheon at the Union.  And Mrs. Fred, Edwin, Connie and I all cried because it was so exciting, you know.  And that's really the beginning of the Art Center.  
00:49:10
Well I never thought of that when he died.  I mean I didn't even think about anything being named after him.  I was too distraught and worn out tackling my own problems.  I had to get a house to live in and a lot of things.  And then they came out to see me from the Foundation, Erv Myers and Malcolm Hoyt from Milwaukee and Bob Rennebohm and two or three others and they proposed this idea.  They said they wanted to build a $3,500,000 building and they would like to name it after Connie.  And I just said, "Well I think that's wonderful but I don't know, I just thought it would be a scientific--if there was anything that it would be something scientific."  And they said, "Well Connie.  You can get government money for scientific buildings and that's easy to come by--"  And, yes, things have changed today.  "And this is bigger than anything scientific.  It's bigger than the University.  It's bigger than the state."  Well I saw that right away and I said, "Well I hope I live to see it."  You know, $3,500,000.00 sounded like--and I'd seen how hard it was to come by--and you know that they had it.  He died in '62 and we moved in in '70.  And they had that money in the hand.  So it was a biggie.  A really great thrill.  
00:50:31
And I kept thinking maybe Connie's name was the gimmick, you know?  That it was the timing and everything was right.  And the timing for the campus was right because we were just out of the riots and they asked me to say something at the dedication and I said, "No, I don't want to."  But then it was so beautiful and Bob turned to me and said, "Surely you want to say something."  So I just stepped to the microphone and said, "This is such a happy place and I think anyone who ever comes in here will be happy.  And that's the greatest gift we can add to this campus today."  And you know, it was true.  It was just--it's been like that ever since.  And it's really--we've never had any of those bad things since.  Of course that's just a happenstance.  But it seemed as if it was kind of a turning point, you know, for--maybe we are looking at something else now instead of all the causes that we-- I'm afraid again now because there are too many things disturbing all of us.  
00:51:31
And I went back the next day by myself and I stood looking at a case with some oriental stuff in it and there was, I didn't know what it was, but there were some fine little pieces of ivory over here and something else down here and I couldn't read the key over there.  And there was a student standing beside me.  She put her books down on the floor and I said, "Can you read me what that is?"  And she told me it was a Parcheesi set.  A very tiny one.  And she said, "Isn't this the most wonderful place?"  And she said, "I'm a freshman," of course she didn't know who I was, "and I came from someplace up north."  And she said, "I've never been in an art museum before.  But this is worth coming to school for."  And I tell you, and then there were kids in bare feet sitting on the floor with their books, you know, and one girl had a feather, she was going up showing this kid so she didn't touch the painting.  I just got so excited about that place and I just knew that it was really going to be something.  Before, well I thought maybe it was a showplace for art for, you know, connoisseurs.  But I think the students really use it and that's just great.
LS:	Oh it's a lovely place.
CE:	And then when I saw the classrooms, of course, that thrilled me.  
00:52:53
And, you know the funniest thing of all, I had this daughter-in-law whose name is McBeath.  Her aunt was Fay McBeath, you know, that gave the humanities thing.  She had something to do with the Milwaukee Journal, the beginning of the Milwaukee Journal, her family.  And if she didn't give a room--now Sally didn't know this. 
00:53:17
And we didn't ever dream that there would ever be anything in the way of an elaborate inauguration or opening and I didn't think about wearing formal clothes and I was up north at the cottage and I got word from Bob Rennebohm, "It's long dress."   And I'm a size I can't just go and buy something off the rack.  So I had to wear an old one, which has always broken my heart.  Of course here I am on the front of the alumni magazine and all the papers.
LS:	Well nobody else knew it was old.
CE:	Well it's really not that except that I wore it with--I had a little mink cape that I used to wear it with.  And they made me take that off that night and I never realized that the armholes kind of showed my big fat arms and didn't quite fit me in.  It was just one of those--it's a pretty dress, I still have it.  My daughter-in-law was one of this new generation and she said, "I will not wear a long dress.  I don't want anything like that."  So she talked my daughter, who could wear anything at that point, into buying a short one too and Peggy came out and all she could find was a navy blue taffeta with black stockings or something, which she never liked.  And Sally came out with a sort of a silvery looking jacket and coat and looked better than any of us.  And she said, "Well I hope you noticed I have lipstick on for you tonight, mother."  She decided she could wear lipstick in Europe too and I had sort of kidded her about it.  And so we went like that.  And when she walked in she said, "For heaven sakes."   And here was this room, the first thing we saw, was a room that Fay McBeath had given in honor of somebody.  So she said, "I have a part in this place, too."  Isn't that funny?
LS:	Yes.
00:55:05
CE:	And then after that Fay gave this money to the humanities and of course that thrilled Sally because she was a social worker so that was great.  But I feel the Elvehjem has filled a great need that we had in Madison.  And, of course, you see, one of the reasons we didn't get the art center at the University, was this animosity from the city.  They wanted their art center and they didn't want any competition.  And I think they've proved there is room for two of them certainly.  Look at all the galleries now.  
LS:	I'll turn this off, I think.  
00:55:46
You wanted to say something about the Depression.
CE:	A year ago I had a church meeting here, and a man came who was just going to talk to us about the David Crosby orchestra and having it perform in our church.  And he came with a book and he said, "Mrs. Elvehjem I've never met you but I want to ask you a question.  I've just read a book that says all the faculty was cut, their salaries were cut, during the Depression for ten years and I can't believe this.  And it says in this book they did it voluntarily."  And I said, "That's true."  And he just couldn't believe it.  So he sat down and talked to me a long time about it and I didn't remember exactly that it was as voluntary as he seems to think.  But it must have been at the faculty meeting.  
00:56:32
We were just kids, you know, we had just put ourselves in debt.  We came back from England and Connie was an assistant professor and we thought we'd arrived, so we could expend a little money.  And the year in England was a total loss financially because it was just a grant and we didn't have money--and we did a lot over there.  We wanted to see as much as we could.  So the Depression was a calamity for all of us because we'd just started.  
00:57:00
I can't remember that people complained very much and I know people were struggling.  And of course that's when we started taking students, because students came down and they didn't have any place to eat or sleep, and there weren't as many dormitories.  And so we took students in and what--they got their room and board or most of the time they just got their room because they didn't want to eat with us.  But I know one of our students lost his meal ticket.  There was a restaurant on the corner of Park and University, about where Rennebohm's was, called the One Minute.  And they gave coupon books.  Now that's kind of not so unusual now because the Union or the dormitories have had those.  But anyway you bought a certain price and you had that for a month or six weeks.  He lost his ticket, he didn't tell us this and he went without food, except what I gave him for breakfast, for those six weeks.  And we just felt terrible that we hadn't known that.  I never--kids like that on campus and faculty people too.  And most of them had, as I say, student debts.  So it was a very hard time for everyone.  I remember that my brother-in-law, who was fifteen years older than my husband, asked us if we had enough money for taxes several times.  And we gritted our teeth and said yes because we wouldn't take a cent.  But, you know, we sometimes had pretty slim goings on the table.  And yet I don't remember that it was a sacrifice much, you know.  
00:58:43
The worst of it was we had thought those cuts would be replaced someday but they never were.  And that--I think maybe that's what kept us going.  That--well when they came back we were going to be rich, you know.  But salaries--my son was surprised not too long ago--he was looking up something.  And I think when he was in high school his father was getting something like $4,200.  And he never asked for a raise but he was always raised because his work was such that they tried to keep him, you see?  It's hard not to say to people, "Well we went through the Depression."  But it really was something to go through.  
00:59:25
And we had tramps at our back door often when we lived in Nakoma.  There was a railroad, you know, that Illinois Central Railroad went very close to us.  And I remember having to make the decision of whether to feed them or not because my mother found they were putting a mark on her house at home so the next tramp could tell that was an easy spot.  
00:59:50
But I think there was no hardship feeling because everyone was in it together.  And University people all had a job.
LS:     Yes I think that was the crucial thing.  There was a little bit coming in.
CE:	And they realized that we were fortunate.  But that isn't true today always.  You know some departments have had to--I don't know whether that's true here but I've heard of other schools where they've had to--because they haven't had tenure, you know.  
LS:	Yes I guess, where, in Michigan maybe there's been some--
CE:	I remember my husband saying when he became president, "I'm still going to be professor of biochemistry because then I have tenure.  If they kick you out from the top job you still have your place to hide."  
01:00:39
Those were difficult times but they taught us a lot.  But I think as a result our children had too much.  I don't mean my own children, but as a generation,  because we were just so happy that we could give them these things, you know, and education.  We never thought about their working for their education.  And I think it's much better.  My grandchildren have had to and they--my granddaughter borrowed last year, her last year.  And I asked her the other day, she was paying her loan off.  And I said, "I don't want to talk about these people that don't pay their loans off if my own family is not doing it, Jill."  "Oh yes, I pay so much every month."  And she's buying a car so that's kind of hard.  Pay your rent.  But she lives in a living room with one chair.  
01:01:35	End of Tape 3, Side 2.
Tape 4, Side 1 
00:00:03
LS:	This is a continuation of the interview with Mrs.  Elvehjem.  We're in her home and this is the twenty-fourth of June.  I was going to ask you about your stay in England and you've just produced a talk that you gave in which you do say quite a bit about it but now you've got a little magazine there which you're describing.
CE:	Yes, this is a magazine that the workers in the lab published every year.  At least this one was published in 1930 and it's called Brighter Biochemistry, and it says it's the illustrated journal of the Biochemical Laboratory of Cambridge.   Well each member of the lab, the staff and graduate students who were working there, were asked to produce something for this magazine--artwork or a poem or  something to do with biochemistry, obviously.  And my husband came home kind of concerned because he had a wonderful idea but he couldn't draw so he wanted to know if I would draw it.  And so we came up with something which was published and it really now turns out to be kind of a historic type of experiment, I guess.  
00:01:23
At the time we were there there was a David Keilin, Professor David Keilin, who was working close by.  He was doing work on cytochrome, which he had found in the wings of butterflies as I remember it.  It's an enzyme.  And, perhaps we should check this with the chemists, but as I remember it it was an enzyme--beginning of the work on enzymes really.  And so he--well actually it interested my husband and he got working with cystein and cytochrome and some of the things that he'd heard Dr. Keilin talking about.  I think he went to some of his seminars.  So his little piece came out of that.  He had found that copper was kind of a catalyst, I guess, for a reaction in the barcroft of cytochrome and cystein and so he decided that that was Dan--Cu is the sign for copper, and he called this Dan Cupid.  And we drew a church and a barcroft, which is a bottle, and these two--oxygen and cystine here in affinity--I have it right here some place.  And so it was kind of fun because it was our contribution.  When we saw the magazine we were a little embarrassed because, my goodness, some of these professors had written poems--and here's our big contribution.  And, see Dan Cupid takes up biochemistry.  And here we have Miss Cystine and Mr. Oxygen going out for a walk and they are not very much attracted to each other and then Dan Cupid, which is copper, shoots them and Mr. Oxygen and Miss Cystine become a little more interested and finally there is a marriage reaction, which is the barcroft, and they used a buffer pH 7.6 solution which helped this reaction, and then finally you get this precipitate which proves that Mr. and Mrs. Cystine are joined.  So that created a lot of fun—
00:03:45
--and really, reading this magazine taught us, even though we knew this before, how wonderfully versatile these people were.  And Professor Hopkins, who won the Nobel Prize while we were there, and was considered the father of vitamins, has poems in here too about Eichman, who was one of the early scientists--had something to do with--
LS:	You said there were some poems in Latin, did you?
00:04:13
CE:	Yes, and Professor--have you heard of Professor Haldane?  He wrote--he's done a lot of exciting things.  He was also arrested, I think, one time, for some political disturbance in England.  And he married a very interesting gal who was a Russian dancer.  She was also a journalist and she wrote a lot of things.  So they were known outside the scientific world.  And he did some very interesting experiments with putting himself in a chamber with just certain things to breath and so forth, I can't remember exactly what, but that caused a lot of attention.  And when we left we said goodbye to them, we were with them quite a bit, they were interesting people.  They had an observatory at their home, and she invited us to tea one day and then she took us into the observatory to show us her pet snake that was wandering around.  It was my first experience with snakes in a home.  And that's the kind of people they were.  But he was very bright and he had written some very interesting things aside from science.  But he wrote poetry.  And he wrote things in Latin and Greek and so forth for this and so it was--it showed us the caliber of the people my husband worked with.  
00:05:38
They were all names that became known, even the ones who came from away, Mr. Elvehjem worked with Sharma, a man from India, I can't remember his first name now.  He's dead, but he became very famous.  And he worked with my husband on anemia and iron and copper.
LS:	He was already working on that?
CE:	Yes, and he came over here.  We had him in our home several times.  An awfully nice man.  We felt very close to him.  We have pictures of our children in his arms and so on.
00:06:15
LS:	But you say--you mean Connie was working on that in Cambridge?
CE:	Yes.  He was working--
LS:	What year was this?
CE:	Well, you see they didn't know--they had done the first work, but apparently they were--I don't just remember why he was working with them because of course the first iron and copper work was done here before that.  But--
LS:	1929.
CE:	Yes.  We were over there in '29 and '30.
LS:	But the patent didn't come out until 1931 or '32, I think.
CE:	Well you see, that's it. I guess he did the work over there first.  I should know that, but I don't remember. Any of his scientific papers would tell us that, I have a list of them somewhere.  
00:07:03
And then there was a man named Perry [sp?], from Canada.  And Professor Glenn King, who was--became very dear friends of ours--did his work, I think most of it over there, on synthesizing vitamin C.  And he, as you may have noticed someplace, came to give a part of my husband's memorial after he died. Speaking of him as a scientist to a fellow scientist. So it was an interesting group and I think every one of them made a contribution while we were there to glorious scientific research, all--most of it to do with vitamins, of course.  
00:07:50
LS:  	Is Keilin the one who was an outstanding scientist?
CE:  	Yes.
LS:  	Somebody spoke--said he should have gotten the Nobel Prize.  Is he the one?
CE:  	I expect that's true because he did wonderful work.  He was--we were over at their home at Christmas time--they were interesting people and we were with them a great deal.  But he was older.  My husband looked up to him very much.  And his daughter now is a very well-known biochemist.  In fact she may be doing something completely different now.  She may have gone into medicine.  But she had made a contribution the last time I heard. 
00:08:29
The unfortunate part of not being a scientist yourself is when my husband died then I didn't see any scientific journals.  Of course I could have gone to the library, I suppose, like I should have.  But I've lost touch with so many people that I--I loved all of that.  I loved the medical journals and everything that we had in our home and I learned a lot.  And of course I had to if I was going to type some of his things.  
00:08:58
I was looking up a word today that Professor Hopkins had in his, in this magazine, and I can't find it.  And I thought, now I could have found it in some scientific encyclopedia.  Porphyrotropic.  And you know, it's written to me, that's why I read it.  He calls it rouge and youngness.  And I guess none of the Cambridge girls wore rouge.  You know it wasn't done much then.  And I did and I wore lipstick.
LS:  	Oh, it was written to you.  I see, I didn't understand that.
CE:  	Yes.  And he doesn't say that, but he told me later.  
"Oh maid of rouge and lipstick, dropping powder in your tea.        
	 A summons to a emesis, your makeup seems to me. 
      	 And yet sometimes I wonder, what my sentiments would be
      	 If I could once be certain that you were making up to me.         
 	Yes, I'd use quite other language once I came to see, 
     	 That you think me porphyrotropic, that your makeup is for me." 
And that was really something, you know, from a Nobel Prize winner.  Well he was such a dear gentleman anyway.  And his wife was also a very, exceedingly modern, much more than most British women at that time, and she it was who was responsible for the rationing program during the War in Britain.  She managed the planning of all that.  
00:10:30
And they lived in a home that was on an old Saxon road so they called it Saxemeadham.  And when they dug up their garden--almost every time you went out there they would show us--once it was amber beads, a whole string of them, that apparently had belonged to a Saxon woman.  And they would find ruins of Romans having gone along that road because they could tell by the oyster shells and things they brought from the sea.  So that was fun.  
00:11:00
And there were so many new experiences that opened up while we were there, with people.  It was just a complete excitement to us because we'd been, you know, pretty much on this campus and in our hometowns.
LS:  	Did this handicap Connie at all?  Did he feel able to keep up with all of it?
CE:  	I think it might have to begin with, in the lab.  They did things differently.  First of all he got there and the gates were locked.  It was a beautiful red brick building.  Much nicer than the Biochemistry Building here.  It was newer.  And these great iron gates and they were locked and he would go and kick those gates in the morning because the British wouldn't get going until after nine o'clock.
LS:  	Oh I see, and he's used to getting--
CE:  	And he was getting there at seven o'clock, usually, and he wanted to be on with it.   Well then they'd just get there and then they'd break for tea, you know.  And he never had much time for coffee breaks and such.  So he would just get so cross and he wouldn't go to these teas.  And he finally found he was missing all the things that they had in seminars.  Here we had, what did the boys call it, they had journal club and other things.  And that's when these men talked over their research and they would stay until late at night and--have another coffee break or tea break in the afternoon and maybe not go home until much later than our men go home.  Well then he learned that, you had to be a part of that system.  And I think then they began to like him too.  
00:12:36
They had lots of fun with him because he had a herringbone suit tailored over there.  He thought the herringbone worsted that the British had was so beautiful so he had a suit made and he was always very thin.  And so he told them that he wanted it tailored just right.  Well when it came out it had-- most of the British men wore braces as they call them.  And it came up  right under his armpits, almost, and if he didn't wear braces it would just slip down.  So they--he had it and tried to get the man to retailor them which he did, but it ended up that the boys in the lab and the girls too would go down the hall behind him and they called him droopy drawers.  And they got so they could kid him about this, you know.  So I think before he left there was wonderful feeling with all of them.  
00:13:31
I do tell in that little--the few cards I gave you--the story of they're going to meet Professor Hopkins when he won the Nobel Prize, which is typically an American attempt to be, you know, gay, like we would meet the team.  And that was not done and they knew that he would not like that, some of the British boys, and they told him.  So they, I mean they--
LS:  	Was this when he came back from the airport?
CE:   	Yes, when he came in.  Well actually he was in London the day the news came and they heard it in the lab before, I guess, he heard it.  But I think by the time he got back to Cambridge he knew, so they went to the station to meet him.
LS:  	The train station, yes.
CE:  	And they stopped at Woolworths and bought these toy horns and all that sort of stuff.  And some of the British boys said, "Don't do that.  'Hoppy' won't like it."  They called him "Hoppy", affectionately.  Then Conrad was invited to the Nobel dinner they gave in London for him.  Not the real Nobel presentation dinner but the British people had one.  And he always remembered  that because he sat next to Professor Hopkins, or close enough to him, that he told him, "Remember you don't drink the toast until the toast has been given to the Queen--the King."  In those days it was King George.  So that--he always remembered that they had--and then Hoppy also told him that there were going to be so many wives and you're not use to this.  Of course this was when--we had prohibition, you know.  And so he said, "Don't drink, you know, skip every one or two."  So they took care of him, I guess.  He seemed young, probably, to them.  
00:15:14
But it was a wonderful group of people and we kept in touch with most of them.  Leslie Harris was another one who was there and he did some very interesting work in nutrition and then went to be in the nutrition labs in Cambridge which was a different branch.  And then they worked with the Tropical Institute in London some.  And, of course, every time we went out on little trips to the Continent, we'd go to the Heidelberg Institute or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute or we'd go to Pasteur Institute and we went to Rowett in Scotland.  Most of our money, we didn't have much, was spent doing these little trips.  And of course my parents had lived in Dresden, Germany, and I'd tell that—
00:16:07
--but socially we were included in many things.  Perhaps not as Americans do, you know, we were kind of, a little, I think they thought of us as freaks from Wisconsin.  They would say, "Where is Wisconsin?"  And we'd say, "Well, you know, 140 miles or whatever from Chicago."  Well then they'd frisk us every time we came because that was during the Chicago Mafia and that awful gang--and that irritated us because we thought of Chicago in many other ways, but--the University of Chicago and lots of other things.  But we had to go through that every time, "Oh these people come from near Chicago."  So, and their parties were very gay.  Perhaps more than we had ever been used to in our own Madison and maybe because we were younger and hadn't gotten into that.  And I think the prohibition probably had something to do with it too.  But we enjoyed--we became good friends with some of the fellows of the Royal Society who were there who were math and physics and other—
00:17:22
--and we had the fortunate good luck of living in a house with, we had an apartment, with a Mrs. Goring, whose son became an actor and she--her husband had been a doctor in India and she wrote beautiful things and she composed music and it was exciting to live in her house.  You sometimes thought you'd go crazy before the music composition was completed, especially I had trouble because the chording was--she played very heavily and I was home all year.   But through that it opened up very interesting things.  We went to productions out in old castles that she had something to do with.  Her son went to the Perse School and he later was the star in many, many stage shows in England and the one that we know best in America was Red Shoes, and then he also was in the Scarlet Pimpernel, which was on WHA for a series some years ago.  And I don't know what's become of him now.  I'd like to know--his name was Marius Goring and he had a brother, Donald, who was in King's College in England so we got to go to the King's College digs of these boys and see some of the real college life which was quite different from the biochemists.  They all lived in other places.  
00:18:50
And through her, opened up some very nice things.  She entertained the--George Bernard Shaw came down every year for the big play and she entertained him.  How she knew him, I don't know.  She knew Isadora Duncan very well and when she came she entertained her.  And when George Bernard Shaw came we went to the Greek play just to see him and sat in a box.  I remember it well.  But he came to her house for dinner first and she couldn't cook what she called chips, which was French fried potatoes.  And I could do that.  So I prepared the potatoes.  She gave me the high sign from downstairs when it was time.  She had a maid but they didn't do that kind of cooking.  And I also made the pudding sauce for him that night.  So I have that claim to glory.  So many things opened up through living in that house.  
00:19:42
And the strange thing was one of Connie's students, Fred Stare, who was his first Ph.D., went over to England a year or so after we did and he wanted to know where to live and we said well we had a wonderful experience but it might not work out for you.  So just look, there may be many other places.  There weren't too many good places for students then and we had looked for several days before we found this.  And wouldn't you know, Fred and his wife, Joyce, turned up in the same place.   They lived there.  She didn't get along with her as well and I guess they, well they didn't stay as long anyway, so.  But it was interesting that out of the whole of Cambridge, they'd turn up in the same place, both biochemists.  
LS:  	Well, that's interesting.
00:20:34
CE:  	I think the Haldanes were probably the most colorful people in the lab.  There was a woman named Miss Lakeman.  She was a single woman, she was a good biochemist.  I don't know that she became famous, but she contributed a lot to some of the other work.  And she had a pet rat.  Most of the animals were always in cages but this rat followed her every place.  And this crazy rat took up an affection for my husband so when he went down there, of course they all said, "With those droopy drawers, he's looking for a place to hide."  They had so much fun with him about those.  But there was a great deal of fun.  There were lots of parties in the lab.  They had a party for us when we left and—
00:21:25
--as I say, most of them told us, good-bye, they thought they'd never see us again, because we went by ship and it was an  expensive trip for most--and they didn't have as many scholarships and things as we do.  Well then came the War and they were all glad to come over here and lecture.  So most of them turned up in our house.  Even Haldane, who said he had no desire to go to America.  
00:21:52
LS:  	So it must have been quite a contrast coming back here where, I gather, the lab wasn't much fun.
CE:  	It was and we wondered if Madison would look so good to us.  We just loved the life of serenity there.  You know, you could read more.  I just read--I'd never been able to read all I'd wanted to and I read so much and then I had the time to go to museums and do the things I'd never really had time for.  And it was fun to shop.  Every time you went out shopping it was an adventure.  So we wondered if we were going to be as happy.  But, my goodness, when we saw Madison, we had the same love for it as ever.
00:22:33
LS:  	I wonder--I didn't ask you before how it was for Connie working with Harry Steenbock, who was--many people have spoken of him and people have some affection for him, the students do, but evidently he was very hard to get along with.  And I'm just curious how--because Connie was, what, 16 years younger than he was.
CE:  	It was difficult at times, but I think as he grew older he respected Harry so much.  I think the first encounter I remember was when my husband wanted to read the--Harry took the Chicago Tribune.  And so Connie would come into the lab and they must have shared an office at that time, I can't--this is before we were married.  And Harry's Chicago Tribune was there and so Connie would sit down and read it and Harry would come in and I guess he saw this two mornings and then he shouted in no uncertain terms that, you know, you do your work before you sit down and read the newspaper.  You will never be a good scientist unless you do that.  Well, Connie said I never touched that newspaper again--at least when he was around.  But, you know, he had been accustomed to a newspaper in his home, the first thing in the morning, and he didn't have one at the fraternity, so this was a natural thing to do.  And he was always a little afraid of Harry then as a student.  And he would not do something that Harry didn't like.  And I think many students were.  Maybe not the ones closest to him, but people in the lab.  
00:24:11
And Professor Hart respected him in the same way.  There were arguments and, of course, the ones I remember the most were between Karl Link and Harry Steenbock.  My husband was the administrator then so, of course, he was in the middle of it.  But I think his real heart lay with Steenbock.
LS:  	But how did he handle that sort of thing?  As chairman?
CE:  	Well he apparently handled it well because--and I-- that's why I wasn't worried the least bit when the Medical School disorder came up.  I thought, "Well he handled Harry and Karl Link and so that can't be any worse."
LS:  	But I mean would he say, "Come on boys, stop fighting" or would he--?
CE:   	Yes, I think he--and I think he sent directives to Karl.  I'm not sure Harry ever got one.  Because he thought in each case that it was Karl's aggressiveness that caused the argument.  The one I particularly remember was about putting vitamin K in aspirin and that was bad because there was some real bodily contact.  And I think if some of the boys hadn't--I'm not sure whether my husband intervened or if some of the lab boys did, but I know it was just outside the men's room on first floor.  And there are records of that in the archives.  And the first thing I asked when my husband died of Anne was, "Are those locked up?"  Because I didn't really think they should be.  They were locked up in a vault.  I didn't think they should just be handled immediately while Harry was alive.  And she assured me they were.  And I suppose they're in the archives.
LS:  	They are still there, no, they're in the Biochemistry Department.  I asked Hector DeLuca about them.
CE:  	 I think there may be some in the President's Office, too, I'm not sure.  There--it was hard.  
00:26:06
You see, Harry and Connie and Jim Waddell and there might have been one more.
LS:  	Was Jim Wadell a student of Connie's?
CE:  	No, he was a colleague.  
LS:  	Colleague?
CE:  	Yes.  Getting his degree about the same time.  And they did this work that Hart got the patent for.  
LS:  	I see.
CE:  	I guess it was Frank Strong in that too, I'm not sure.
LS:  	I don't think so.  I remember Connie, and Steenbock was the senior--
CE:  	Yes, right.   
LS:  	You spoke before we turned the tape on about how--you asked him how he--well just say that.  You heard--you said before about the newspaper, hearing the newspaper business.
CE:  	I was at home when we lived in the apartment and I heard this "Extra."  In Madison they often got out Extras for any exciting thing in Madison, good or bad.  Or something like a discovery at the University.  And since I was a journalist I was always excited because I'd been in on the newspaper end of that sometimes.  So I ran to see what it was and went out and bought one and was amazed to see Professor Hart's picture on the front page with some sort of an instrument that he was supposed to be reading.  A colorimeter maybe, I don't know what it was.  Van Potter would know that.  And I was sort of--read it with the idea that my goodness, my husband had so much to do with this, why doesn't he get more publicity?  And so when he came home I said, "What is this?"  And I think he may have been a little disconcerted but he didn't let on and he said, "Oh well, you know, there's always a major professor and there are students who work under them.  My day will come sometime.  And I am the brains for the beginning of the experiment."  And so he seemed to be perfectly satisfied with it.  
00:28:06
I think when the patent came out Hart divided the money between all of the boys.
LS:  	Oh he did?
CE:   Yes.  It wasn't very much, you know, but it bailed us out several times about tax time.  During the Depression, you see, our salaries were cut.  We bought a house, we got a baby and a new car after we came home from England and then the Depression.  And so it was kind of frightening. 
00:28:34	End of Tape 4, Side 1.
Tape 4, Side 2
00:28:45
LS:  	But Connie had done the major part of the work?  Or he and Waddell had?
CE:  	Well in the lab I think they did it all, I think generally.  And it was Hart's and maybe Harry's idea, I suppose.  In a way that sort of precedes our marriage, I guess, the beginning of it.  So I don't remember that, just exactly.  
00:29:12
But I knew--I'd been over there with him.  I used to go over at night because he had to go back--
LS:  	Yes, you told me this before.  Yes, that's nice.
CE:  	Yes, I hated to miss out on any time with him.  And he never minded that, I'm surprised.  A lot of men wouldn't like that.
00:29:28  
LS:  	Somebody said that he ran his lab the way Steenbock did, that is with very strict hours.  Is that right?
CE:   	And Bob, my son, is working over there now and he said the people over there that are still there, some of the maintenance people and all, say, "Oh your father checked every lab every morning.  He went through everything to be sure things were working."  And I said, "Well, maybe they resented him."  You know, I don't know this but I said, "Maybe that was more checking up than they wanted."  And he said, "Well the men don't talk like that.  They think that's a good thing that somebody knows what's going on in each lab."  And he used to stop and visit with them a little bit and talk about research for the day or tell them a funny story.  He often had stories he picked up with M.D.'s or something that were funny.  
00:30:19
He had one boy that I remember well that had a drinking problem.  And that used to be one of his major concerns to see he was on the job and all right.  And someone who was close to him later told me that she thought he really--his interest had gotten the man straight finally because he just realized that he was being watched every day that way, with love, not criticism.  Conrad was a very self-disciplined man and he expected everyone else to be.  And that's hard on people sometimes, you know.  And I think he didn't like bare feet in the lab and some of those things that you wouldn't dare say you couldn't have them now.  But—
00:31:07
LS:  	Would you say he was close to his graduate students?
CE:  	I think very close although the boys have written me since he died that he was "Dr. Elvehjem" or "Professor Elvehjem" to them all during the time in the lab, but the minute they got their degree and he wrote them--he tried to get them jobs and so they corresponded--then he would sign himself Connie.  Well it's different today, we all call each other by our first names--but one of these boys who wrote me said, "It was very difficult for me the first time to address him 'Dear Connie'."
LS:  	Yes.  That's always a problem, I can see.
00:31:49
CE:  	And they called Professor Hart, with great love, "The Old Man."  I mean it was nothing derogatory.  So, lab people have their own kind of jargon, I guess, it's different.
00:32:22
LS:  	[not clear – who were his favorite] graduate students?
CE:  	Well that would be hard to say.  Some of them--I know one or two that he thought would have problems, they did and they have come out all right now.  One worked with WARF for awhile and then he went to the UNICEF and he's done so well there.  I think he just took longer to find himself then--and that's why my husband always when he was in the Graduate School as dean--he had a little argument with Professor Herriott--no, not Professor Herriott, actually it was Brogden.  Herriott was with him.  You know they add up units.  An "A" is so many units and a "B" and you had to have so many units before you go into graduate school.  Well he would be apt to make an exception if, not of a lot of units, but maybe if it was one and a half or something.  Looking at what the student had been through maybe, or what he had done, you know, and whether he had in his major field, done very well there.  And he often called them late bloomers and he was so anxious that they keep the standards of the University high but they take into consideration sometimes the student's background.  And that's hard to do with 49,000 students, I know, but it was something.  He had seen late bloomers and he kept waiting for them, to catch fire.  He said there's something--when you teach a class so wonderful because you just see it happen sometimes.  And he saw that with his graduate students--working closely with him.  
00:34:19
LS:  	How about Van Potter.
CE:  	Well Van certainly would be one of his favorites and I think--it's hard for me to remember, you see Hank Lardy--and Harry Waisman was one of his favorites.  He was a little cross with Harry because he was going into medicine, but look what it did for him, you know.  And Fred Stare also went into medicine after he got his Ph.D. and Fred has done very well.  And, let's see, Lee Kline went with the Food and Drug people.  All of the boys have gone to wonderful jobs--and they are all across the country.  One of his favorites was, I can't think of his first name, his name was Newell and his father was the head of Horticulture.  Did the decorating for commencement and everything, with the Landscape Department.  And came from England.  And his boy.  And  then, and Briggs was another one.  Soybean Brigg's son.  And he's the head of the biochemistry-- they call it something else but it's nutrition and something out at California now.  So they, all of the boys have done very well. Connie kept in touch with all of them.
00:35:50
LS:  	Did you have them out to the house?
CE:  	Yes.  Many of them, they babysat for us.  And we always had a party about once a year, at least, for students that were working with him.  And that's why it's kind of hard--another one was Axelrod--there were two you see, Van Potter and Axelrod, there were two or three of them who came from the Dakotas about the same time and they all did very well.  It's amazing to think now that they are old enough to retire.  I can hardly believe that.  And I still think of them as "the boys," you know.
LS:  	Or have retired.
00:36:30
CE:  	When my husband died they asked me if I didn't want him to lie in state in the Capitol and I said, "No, he wouldn't like that."  And they talked about honorary pall bearers and I said no.  Finally I said, "Well what about some of his students?"  And the shocking thing, I stayed in the car until they carried him to the grave, and was seated--and I could see that some of them were old men already, you know, Van Potter and Hank Lardy and Bob Bock.  I mean they were really beginning to look older.  And it was the first time that I had realized this.  So.  Well Bob Bock is another one.  He was--but I can't remember whether he did all his work with Connie or with other people, I've forgotten that.  You can look that up.  
00:37:16
LS:  	Did you know Marvin Johnson?
CE:  	Yes very well.  And he was probably the brightest man that ever came out of Biochemistry.
LS:  	That's what almost everybody else, I guess everybody else says, yes.
CE:  	He was just a character really.  We just loved him but he--you never knew what Marv was going to do.  But he was so ingenious with mechanical things as well, you know.  He could-- well the first winter--we started having a Christimas party for the lab and that was a lot of fun and they got up skits.  They took off--they had takeoffs on my husband and they, you know, they had lots of fun.  But Marv, years back before I had ever heard of an electric eye, he had a coffee thing rigged up, you'd put your coffee under it and it ran coffee in it and quit  when it was full.  Now we think nothing of that, now.  We see those every place we go.  But that's the first one I ever saw.  And then he had a Christmas tree that turned around and played tunes, you know, you never knew what Marv was going to do.  And he was just a dear, sweet person, too.  And  so--and I think his students just loved him.
LS:  	He was a new name to me, I mean he doesn't show up in newspaper articles and--
CE:  	Well, I went to the memorial service for him and one of the things the boys said, Moe Cleveland talked and quite a few of them.  And they said he had no desire ever to be an administrator.  He just wanted to do his thing, and I guess that's true.  But he did a lot of very good work on penicillin.  A big part in that.  And of course W. H. Peterson, there were some more wonderful men in that department.  
00:39:06
And that's why I think Professor Hart was great, because he picked most of those.  Including Harry Steenbock, and yet he didn't even have a Ph.D., so.  
LS:  	I gather that as Hart got older that Connie slowly took over, or took on, the duties of chairman without being, and how is it--that Hart asked him to that he saw that things had to be done and weren't getting done.  Or do you know how he felt about that?
CE:  	He never had any animosity towards the things that weren't being done.  I think he just did them as part of his job.  Just didn't realize that he was taking more.  And I think Margaret might be able to put some light on that.  
LS:  	Margaret?
CE:  	Margaret, his daughter.  She's Mrs. Russell Larson.  You ought to talk to her sometime.  Of course not only is she his daughter, but she was a biochemist of sorts.  I mean she worked in the lab.  She lives in Shorewood and her husband was in, related to horticulture, what do they call it?
LS:  	Plant pathology?
CE:  	I guess probably plant pathology.  I think he worked with Walker and some of those people.  And Margaret worked--she worked for Connie.  And she worked for Van Potter when he was at McArdle, I think.  As a lab technician.  
00:40:36
And she said something recently to me, "When I worked for Connie I knew exactly what I was supposed to do and I did it.  And he was pleased.  Or if it didn't work out, he understood."  But she said, "When I worked for Van I never was sure."  And my son worked for Van and he said the same thing.  But then she said she worked for Jack Williams in regular chemistry and she felt the same way, she could know what she was supposed to do and do it.  So it's interesting.  She just told me that.  I see her quite often.  She's a little bit younger than I am.
LS:  	So that's why people say Connie's a good administrator.  Because he could explain thoroughly what he wanted done.
CE:  	He could explain.  And he was never afraid to delegate or to give the reins to someone else.  You know, some people want to be the big boss and kind of keep it all in their hands, but he never had that feeling.  
00:41:38
And he early on, I think it's quite customary every place now, but wanted his graduate students to give their own papers.  And of course if they didn't belong to the Biochemistry Society or wherever they were going to publish the paper, he had to sponsor them and get permission.  But they got their names on the articles, you know, that were published.  And that got to be interesting because his name would be at the front and as he got older his would go farther and farther back and at the end it was trailing.  And, you know, it was always interesting to me to see that happen.  
00:42:18
So I think I really don't know of any student, I mean graduate student, who disliked him unless it was this man who made a little bit of unhappy fuss about the pellagra thing.
LS:  	Madden.
CE:  	Yes.  And he wrote me such a nice letter after Connie died.  And he said he was just a mixed up person at that time.  He wanted to be a medic and he wasn't sure whether he had it and so I don't know, maybe he was just making me feel good.  But I don't think he would have had to do that.  He might not have even known that I knew anything about it.  
LS:  	Did you know Harold Campbell?
CE:  	Yes.
LS:  	Because he was involved in that too.
CE:  	Yes.  I'd forgotten about him.  I haven't thought about him for a long time.  Anne is the one that would really--you ought to have her sit down with you sometime.  
LS:  	Well I did interview her.  But she was--
CE:  	She's changed a lot.  Her physical--she has Parkinson's and her nerves--and it's difficult to talk to her.
LS:  	I wondered if it was that, yes.
CE:  	So I don't see her as much as I did because I think it's hard for her to have me see her that way.  She was very much a part of our family.  We all loved her.  And man, she was a part of that department.
LS:  	Yes, oh yes, it's very obvious.
CE:  	My husband called her his chairman, assistant chairman, because--you know when he went up to Bascom many people thought he'd take her along.  But he said, "No way would I spoil Biochemistry by taking Anne."  He wanted to.
LS:  	I hope she appreciated that.
CE:  	I think she did.
00:44:06
LS:  	I haven't asked you, I don't think, about the University Club, how much you went there.
CE:  	Well we didn't go to the University Club very much as young people.  We didn't belong actually.  We had so much of our own life, we belonged to two dance clubs and my husband belonged to this Norwegian--
LS:  	Maybe I did ask you that.  It seems to me I remember your talking about that.
CE:  	Maybe.  Did I tell you that he had been put on a committee to study why more professors didn't belong?  Did I tell you that?  
LS:  	No.
CE:  	That was quite embarrassing to him so, of course, he belonged.  
00:44:46
And after he was in--you see, it was not a convenient place to have lunch from Biochemistry to go down there.  So he came home.  And he much preferred that.  And so did Hank Ahlgren and Bill Longenecker and the men he knew best, not in his field, but--and I think Tottingham went home.  I think an awful lot of the biochemists did.  And so they didn't go down to the Club like the people on the hill did.  Well then when he began to be on University committees of course he had lunch there with many of them.  And after he was president he often had his own committee meetings there.  And we must have belonged early because I remember my children going to all the University Club parties they had at Christmas time for young people, dances and so on.  So that must have been--I have no idea when we belonged.  And then I was active in helping put on some luncheons, forums and some bridge clubs and things like that down there.  Took my turn at that.  And I like to go down there still.  
00:45:57
LS:  	Did he belong to a dining club?
CE:  	Yes he was asked to belong to Town and Gown, which was kind of the elite dining club at one time.  He belonged, before he was president, a long time, I think even before he was graduate dean.  And it was really a nice group of people, Mr. Schorger and President Fred and Walter Frautschi and Bill Sarles and Ray Straub and Oscar Mayer, Jr. and, I've entertained them so many times, I should know.  But it was a nice group of close friends, they just had the best time just talking.  They had dinner.  
00:46:59
And they wanted a dinner that was from beginning to end, you know, from soup right through to after-dinner drinks.  And they would turn the china--you wouldn't believe these bright men turning the china over to see what the china marking was.  My husband asked me to get service plates.  And I said, "Well, you know, I don't really see any need for them."  We had nice Lennox.  So one day for Christmas he gave me a Willow, cheap Willow plate from the dime store with a blank check and he said, "Now go and buy some service plates.  It doesn't have to be like this one," you know.  That was after we got to the President's House and I thought well maybe I did need them.  So I went around and I didn't see anything that I liked and they were all so expensive, I was telling this to someone and they said, "Why don't you go to Sharratt's?"  Were you here when Sharrat's was--it was a wonderful antique and second hand store.  A great big place down on University Avenue where Gorham Street comes in.  It was a big warehouse, just full of things.  In fact I got the lovely rug that's in the Graduate House there, a gorgeous Chinese, Oriental, huge.  So I went and here he had this beautiful Dresden china, which I will show you before you leave, that had belonged to some family.  I always thought it might be the Schubert family.  They didn't want it known.  I told Mr. Sharrat after I bought it, "As long as it's going to the President's House, wouldn't it be nice for them to know that that's where it is."  But he didn't ever tell me.  And the strange thing was when I brought them home, my parents had lived in Germany and they had worked with this man who had his own workshop of painters, the Dresden china, and his name was Mr. Lamb.  And his insignia, beyond the Dresden insignia, was this lamb.  And so they had brought quite a few pieces which were stolen from me here.  But they didn't take my service plates.  And they are the same marking.  My father was so thrilled when he saw those.  And I think any one of them is an heirloom now.  But my daughter will have them someday.  I can't quite part with them but I only have the kind of service to serve them now.  But--so this all started in Town and Gown Club.  They were so excited about all this.  Isn't that ridiculous?  These men who talked about intellectual things and still--but they liked to be treated like kings and all of us who did the cooking for them were scared to death.  I remember Margaret Schorger and some of us comparing notes and, "What are you going to serve this year?" you know.  So.  That was his club—
00:49:55
--and, Ygdrasil, of course he belonged to because of his Norwegian Heritage, doing that, the Madison Literary, and the Madison Rotary Club.  And the West End Club were others.  Also a social club of close friends which met once a month.
LS:  	Was it a dining club?
CE:  	Yes.  And it was couples.  And I enjoyed the Madison Literary Club, I still go.  It's changed a lot, but I still enjoy certain papers.
00:50:29
LS:  	You said he liked mystery stories.  Were there other diversions that he had?
CE:  	Not really.  He liked--he always read, you know, U.S. News and World Report and Time and Life and things like that, but he--I don't think I ever saw him read a novel.  He must have had to in school somewhere along the line.  He was put in sub-Frosh  English when he first came.  That was a blow to his pride because he had won everything scholastically from the time he was in first grade, you know, a book from teacher, and all this that he--so this was quite a blow to him.  But he picked himself up just like he always did and conquered that and--but it was simply because he spoke only Norwegian until he was six and in their home they spoke Norwegian a great deal.  And he refused to speak it much, even to me or Peggy when we were talking Norwegian because he didn't want to go back to getting those things mixed up.  He had trouble saying the "th"s always.  He did all this work with iron and copper and he had a terrible time saying iron, he'd say "rn."  I'd drill him and drill him and he couldn't get that word because it just wasn't there somehow.  And French was hard for him, but German and Norwegian, of course, he conquered.  But he never had Latin and I think that's a handicap to anybody.
00:52:06
LS:  	Did he do any kind--I think you said he didn't do any kind of physical activity.
CE:  	Well yes, in the yard.  I mean he did all his own yard work and he loved to spade.  And he would go down to the farm, his brother's farm, especially during the war when it was hard to get help, and strip tobacco and pitch hay and that sort of thing.  And they always told him he was the fastest tobacco stripper in the area down there.  So when he came--the last time he did it, they said, "Oh well, you're just so town, city folk now you won't be able to do this."  And he said, "Oh I think I will."  And he got so they gave him a prize or something for that.  And then he had the children go down and they helped plant tobacco and pick strawberries and do the things on the farm.  We often went to the farm, almost once a week, his brother's, and it was the home farm so, where his brother lived.  But Conrad didn't want to own it.  His brother wanted us to buy it but he didn't want to.  He didn't want to farm.  
00:53:14
And our first vacation, the first year we were married, we went down to the farm to take over while the brother and sister went on a trip, and that was certainly the hardest work I ever did.  Washing separators and all this, I--oh boy, I really had it.  And then the threshers came two days early so we had to feed them.  And the cistern went dry and we had to walk down quite a ways to get water to wash the vegetables and everything.  I really thought I'd earned my vacation that year.  So, and I think my husband did too.  I think he had it.  He never wanted to go back to the farm to live and to make his living that way.  
00:54:05
LS:  	I wanted to ask you how you both felt about some of the events that went on, for instance the dismissing of Glenn Frank.
CE:  	That was very hard for me because, being a journalist, I had sort of worshipped him.  His word choice was so unusual and beautiful.  But often you didn't know what he'd said because you got lost in all this maze of word choice and so on, and the average person had that trouble I think more than I did because I just hung on.  He spoke to our classes in journalism and so I  got to know him that way, I guess.  As a person, I didn't know him personally until we were married.  But I sort of followed him around.  And everything he wrote.  And we felt it was unfair really.  He was not an administrator.  He was the editor of the Century Magazine  when he came here and why they expected him to be able to--and it was political, a lot of his dismissal, I think.  And  you know the strange thing is when Dykstra came he had not much training either, I mean he was a city manager and so it was strange the way--it seems that every time they've chosen someone who wasn't a scholar things haven't gone too well.
LS:  	Yes it does.
CE:  	And I think that should be the first requirement.  And not everybody that's an administrator today is a scholar.  Maybe it isn't necessary.  
00:55:47
But as far as the image of the University is concerned, it's always been best when there was a scholar there.
LS:  	How about the McCarthy era?  How did he feel about that.
CE:   	He was--that's when he was upset with some of the lab boys because they were feeling so strongly.  Van was one and--
LS:  	Henry Lardy.
CE:   	And Henry.  And we went east to some meeting and I went along that time.   And when we met the boys at the train--we used to go on the train because you were sure then of getting there, and they used to put the people off of the planes for the military--and the boys got on the train with suitcases with "Joe McCarthy must go" or something like that.  And Connie spoke to them and he said, "I don't want us going down representing the University of Wisconsin with that kind of banner."  And the boys stood up to him, I remember.  They said, you know, "It's our right as individuals.  This is our suitcase."  And they had a few words.  And Connie muttered in his beard to me a little bit afterwards, but.  And he didn't like Van coming out with those opinions, quite as much in the newspaper as he did at that time.  And then of course Van took up the Frank Lloyd Wright--he wanted the Frank Lloyd Wright building so he began being very vocal about that. 
00:57:18	End of Tape 4, Side 2.
Tape 5, Side 1
00:00:12
CE:  	He was in our church at that time, too, and there were, it was quite liberal in a lot of its thinking, which was a little hard for my husband to go along with.  But I don't know if they ever had words about it.  I think he, except the suitcase--that episode, I remember that.  And Connie wasn't for Joe McCarthy.  But he didn't think it was anything to take to a scientific meeting and represent Wisconsin, they were his kids.   He didn't like that.  And he probably was out of line for saying anything.  I'm sure in today's world you'd have to let that go.  
00:00:52
I think he was that way with our children, too, he told his daughter one time that he didn't ever want to see her in blue jeans on the campus, so she never did.  And I said to him one time, "Why do you have--"  And he said, "Blue jeans were things on the farm you took off and hung on the back porch and put on your decent clothes."   And I remember him telling our son one time, "I had to change my clothes five or six times a day on the farm."  We wanted Bob to take off his best pants before he played baseball or something.  So, you see, his heritage was part of it.  And they didn't have a lot of money to begin with, I suppose.  And you took care of your good clothes.  But they'd never--the other girls were wearing blue jeans and she wore those awful bobby socks things and white oxfords, you know, and then her legs bare in the winter time.  And she said to me one time, "If I get pneumonia, it'll be daddy's fault because all of the other girls have jeans."  So--and he didn't like Karl Link wearing shorts to the lab either.  
LS:  	Yes, I can imagine that would have been hard to take.
CE:  	Yes.  You know, they were brand new.  Men didn't wear shorts, you know, except on the tennis court or something.  But his idea was to be--to look nice always, I think.  And that isn't so necessary today, especially in the laboratory.  That's kind of frowned on.
00:02:33
LS:  	I don't suppose he said much about the Enzyme Institute.  I know you told me about the meeting with Rockefeller, and Link's being there.  But were you aware of what happened when David Green came?  I think he wasn't really connected with it except that he helped it a great deal.
CE:   	Well he hired David, I think.  I mean was in on that.
LS:  	Yes.  Well Van Potter found him.
CE:  	And I'm not sure David--how well David was liked, ever.  He was a strange person and some of that happened, I guess, since Connie went up to the top, you know, so I didn't know so much about it.   But actually the Enzyme Institute was exciting to us because it was the first, you know, in the world.  So we thought it was great.  And I guess the work they've done there has been good.  And I don't know, David apparently is retired now.  I met her someplace just lately and asked her.  They both seemed so old to me, I couldn't believe it.  I know I'm getting old but I don't expect other people to.
LS:  	Well it's a comfort that they do, isn't it?
00:03:52
CE:  	Yes.  I've just been to my 60th high school reunion and my 78th birthday so I can't play young very much longer.
LS:  	Well you still have quite a ways to go then.
CE:  	And you know everybody there was just fine.  There were fifty-five of us and I didn't see a single cane and I only saw two hearing aids and they were all just great, the people that came back.  We had such a good time.  It was in Illinois.
LS:  	That's grand.  Well that's about--we're pretty close to the end of the tape.  That's about all I had to ask you so that's nice.  It just fills up a—
00:04:39
CE:  	I think the laboratory over there is very much the same from--I hear Bob talk now some, in that, you know, the labs are very close.  The people that work together get very close and they have parties and they have good times together and so it hasn't changed that much I guess--.
00:05:02
LS:  	Are you going to the Biochemistry Meetings?
CE:  	You mean these ones that are coming up in August?
LS:  	Yes.
CE:  	I'd like to and they've sent me all the literature on it and I think I should go, but you know it takes me away from the cottage and some of it is the time of the music festival up north which I work with.  And I can't very well walk out on that so--and my children from Minneapolis come in August and I just doubt if I'll get down.  Maybe to one.  I must get that literature out and read it again because I think it's around the 19th isn't it?
LS: 	 I think it's the 24th and 25th, you see, Friday and Saturday.
CE:  	Well that's closer to the time when I could come.  So--and some of it—
00:05:45
--you know they established a professorship in Connie's name and they--and then there's, oh, WARF established an honor they give once a year to the man who is outstanding in his field and public service in biochemistry or nutrition.  And I went down to that once or twice but I don't do that anymore.
LS:  	You mean for somebody here at the University?  Or is it a national?
CE:  	No, it's a national.  Some of Connie's students have won it which shows how good they are.  Fred Stave [Stare?] and Glenn King, who's a good friend and Lee Kline.  Some of the girls too.  I have letters from them.   They are all excited about it when it happens.  They think it's a big honor.  And to me it's a thrill because we used to go down and see these others, honors named after like Meade Johnson and the Osborne-Mendel  Award.  So it's fun to see something named after him.  It's almost embarrassing.  Elvehjem is such a hard name, but people seem to get it once--
LS:  	I came across some correspondence to him when he was president with the wildest spellings of his name.  
CE:  	Isn't it amazing?  I give it on the telephone now, I did this just today.  And the girl had absolutely no idea how to spell it.  And I said, "Have you ever heard of the Elvehjem Art--"I've never said that before.  "Oh, is it spelled like that?"  And she knew that.  So that was good.  Well I'm sure there are a lot of things around here I should find for you sometime but you have so much material now.
LS:  	Thank you. 
00:07:41	End of Tape 5, Side 1.
[1961 Interview Session not included on transcript]
End of Interview #259