UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1014
BRUNER, CATHERINE M.

BRUNER, CATHERINE M. (1948-)
University of Wisconsin-Madison Physical Plant and Field Manager of the Lakeshore Preserve, University of Wisconsin Arboretum
At UW: [as student] 1968-1972; [as field manager] 1997-

Interviewed: 	2009 (2 sessions)
Interviewer: 	Allison Page
Index by: 	Stephen A. Pierce
Length: 	4 hours, 1 minute

Abstract: In her August 2009 interviews with Allison Page, Cathie Bruner details her experiences as a student and staff member at UW-Madison. Bruner includes her recollections of the following topics: Vietnam protests, TAA strike, and the women’s liberation movement on campus; her interest in horticulture and her literary inspirations; her work at CUNA Mutual Insurance, the UW Arboretum and Physical Plant. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the UW-Madison Oral History Program.

Key Words: University of Wisconsin-Madison; Wisconsin High School; 4-H; farm life; the 1960s; assassination of John F. Kennedy; NAACP; Grinnell College; Vietnam protests; TAA strike; horticulture; Darrel Morrison; UW-Arboretum; CUNA Mutual Insurance; John Muir School; Midwest Land & Culture; Gary Beck (Physical Plant); Tim Allen (History); Arthur Kelman (Plant Pathology); Theodore Koslovski (Forestry); Francis D. Hole (Soils); Ed Hasselkus (Horticulture); Glen Stanosz (Plant Pathology); Virginia Kline (Arboretum); Campus Natural Areas; William Cronon; Ray Guries; 

First Interview Session (August 10, 2009): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:19	Question: Talk about your childhood and parents. Answer: Bruner related that her parents met at UW in the 1940s, her mother coming from Massachusetts and her father from North Carolina. She remembered going to nursery school on campus, living in the “Triangle” development on Park St, and moving to a farm near Verona, where she attended elementary school with the children of Harvey Littleton. 

00:02:20	[no question] Because she wasn’t getting arithmetic training in her one-room elementary schoolhouse, she noted, her parents sent her to Wisconsin High School, UW’s laboratory school.

00:03:07	[no question] After HS, she said, she went to Grinnell College for 2 years, had some formative experiences in Central America, and returned to UW for a degree in history. During this process she discovered her “true vocation with land management” that brought her to where she was.

00:04:30	Question: When you were born? Answer: Thanksgiving 1948. Question: Your parents were educated? Answer: Yes and highly motivated for social causes; she talked about her father’s involvement in starting cooperatives in Madison, political aspirations with Gaylord Nelson, and activism. 

00:05:50	Follow up: Your father’s war experience? Answer: Bruner observed that her father didn’t talk much about it until late in life, when he discussed his war injuries and pain. She also talked about the beneficial training ROTC provided her father.

00:07:18	Follow up: How your parents met? Answer: She thought they met at a political rally.

00:08:06	Question: The “Triangle”? Answer: She explained where the triangle redevelopment was and how it was three separate communities coexisting in peace.

00:09:05	Follow up: Refugees? Answer: She explained how Jewish refugees from World War II had settled in the Triangle, citing some examples. Follow up: Did you grow up in a Jewish community? Answer: No; her father was Methodist and her mother Jewish, but both non-practicing.

00:10:45	Question: Siblings? Answer: She talked about her older sister and younger brother, for whom the farm experience was critical. She talked about raising animals, being part of 4-H, and having long talks with farmers.

00:13:09	Follow up: Strong childhood memories? Answer: The ones which were strongest and she tried to recreate for children revolved around play on the farm and the blurriness of the lines between humans and the natural world.

00:14:26	Question: Was it difficult to move from Wisconsin HS to Central? Answer: It was; she talked about the disorientation of the whole class, citing memories she’d shared with classmates when they had their reunion and her father’s involvement with court cases and Head Start.

00:16:09	Follow up: Talk about Head Start. Answer: She said that it was started in the culture of the late 1960s to provide children with pre-kindergarten support for learning. She helped out very early in Head Start, then later in Montessori schools.

00:17:38	Question: Close HS relationships? Answer: She talked about a few friends from Shorewood Hills, and how she was compared with her older sister a lot. She related going “her own direction” from her sister, becoming more artsy and tom-boyish.

00:18:55	Follow up: That’s interesting considering your later career. Answer: Yes; she related advice her art teacher gave her to go into design, and how her art and science interests were in the service of landscape interpretation.

00:20:36	[no question] She talked about “getting radicalized” at an early age in the environ-ment of the late 1960s. Follow up: Were you politically aware? Answer: She reflected on how the Democratic Party was a central component of their childhood life, but she also said there was a disconnect since her family was privileged and affluent. She talked about the work ethic she learned on the farm.

00:24:12	Question: Memories of JFK? Answer: She very clearly remembered being a JV cheerleader at a pep-rally at Wisconsin HS when she learned about JFK being shot, and feeling absolutely devastated. Follow up: Your parents’ reactions? Answer: She said everyone was glued to the TV for days.

00:26:14	[no question] She noted that another unusual thing in HS was that she was the only white member of the Youth NAACP, which was a very interesting experience.

00:27:47	Follow up: Impressions of Father Groppi? Answer: She described him as a “gentle, strong human being” with great, if quiet, charisma.

00:29:11	Question: What kinds of things did you do on rallies? Answer: She didn’t have strong memories other than feeling naïve and that it was the right thing to do.

00:29:50	[no question] She thought her comfort with being different started there and with life on the farm. This tendency, she thought, had lasted. Follow up: Anything negative about that? Answer: She did reflect that she didn’t ever feel like she “belonged.”

00:32:50	Question: After HS? Answer: She thought she wanted to be a writer or an artist with no clear direction into science or nature. But when she went to Grinnell, she found herself on a dorm floor of radial seniors with whom she got along well and wished she’d kept up with. 

00:34:54	She related her plans to go to a kibbutz until the 1967 war broke out, at which point she went with the Peace Corps to Honduras, which she considered the most formative experience of her life, confronting abject poverty.

00:37:28	Follow up: Close relationships from there? Answer: She described one friendship that she kept up for some time, and a protective “relationship” she had there that was a bit of a rude awakening, and a Peace Corps leader who advised her to tone down her language for political purposes.

00:39:14	[no question] After that summer in Honduras was when the Dow riot happened at UW, and at Grinnell she was experiencing a personal/academic crisis with her Spanish-language classes that brought her back to UW.

00:41:18	Question: What was hard about coming back from Honduras? Answer: She described how her journals showed that she was in shock from her experiences with the poverty, medical care, and real experiences in Honduran communities. 

00:42:59	Question: What made you decide to come to UW? Answer: Needing to finish her degree, but in counseling in Madison, she got jobs and enrolled at UW. She talked about how reading Daniel Daronda helped introduce her to her Jewish heritage, how she struggled with her classes, travelled in Mexico between her junior and senior years, and almost died of infection in her senior year.

00:46:12	[no question] Continuing to describe her senior year at UW, she talked about the TAA strike, during which she met her husband, and protests against Vietnam.

00:48:55	Follow up: Black Thursday at UW-Oshkosh? Answer: She didn’t remember this, because it was during her time of severe illness. 

00:50:41	[no question] Bruner discussed feminism and women’s consciousness-raising groups, with famous feminists like Adrienne Rich and Betty Friedan coming to UW.

00:52:01	[no question] She related how she struggled to integrate her interests in history, art (which she found competitive and cold) and plants. She started in horticulture, in which there were no women, and then followed the work of a graduate student who was working on Curtis Prairie for the Arboretum and helped the family to do prairie restoration at their farm. She then met Darrel Morrison, who started the Prairie Restoration program at UW.

00:55:33	[no question] She talked about beginning her “battling against women’s status” when Morrison asked her to oversee one of his prairie landscape projects at CUNA Mutual insurance company. She said she learned there to prove herself and it snowballed so that the prairie became an educational program for UW students and local schools.

00:58:08	[no question] Continuing her story about CUNA Mutual, she noted that the prairie project was later destroyed in political infighting, but she stayed on as the landscape manager for the company until facilities management got outsourced in the 1990s. At that point, she went into business (“Midwest Land & Culture”) with a colleague.

00:59:46	[no question] She explained how she came to the UW Arboretum through her friendship with Virginia Kline, who wanted her to head up campus natural areas. Though this was a ½ time appointment, Gary Beck (Asst. Dir. of Physical Plant) took her on ½ for physical plant as well. She talked glowingly about Beck, the best supervisor she’d ever had.

01:03:13	Question: What about “Plants and Man” particularly sparked your interest? Answer: She recounted how she was struck by the relationship between the natural world and human culture.  She quipped that it was the last class she needed to graduate with her BA in history, but then she had to start all over.

01:04:56	Follow up: Did you work for CUNA after your BA? Answer: She started her second BA in horticulture and started working for CUNA at the same time, switching to a MA program in horticulture when the school system said they preferred that.

01:06:44	Question: What gave you the strength to fight sexism in the workplace? Answer: She said recalled meeting Art Dish during those years at CUNA—she said they garnered mutual respect and this respect grounded her and allowed her to stand her ground. She cited examples of how her team worked together, though there were politics above.

01:10:28	Follow up: How was your work experience at CUNA? Answer: Though she had negative feelings about the institution, she thought it made her who she was.

01:12:25	Follow up: Talk about the public backlash to your work at CUNA. Answer: Because it was cutting edge, she said people didn’t understand it and thought that the insurance company just wasn’t cutting the lawn. She related sabotage against the company, being put on a committee to fight for natural landscapes, and fights she had when she worked on a NSF-granted program teaching elementary students how to use their backyards to restore landscapes at the John Muir school. She reflected that some of these projects were just too early, when people didn’t know what to make of it.

01:16:56	Follow up: And how was your job liquidated? Answer: She said it happened in phases, first with the prairie being plowed under and her relegation to smaller landscape projects; then, when the grounds supervisor retired, she took over that unit too; but in 1995 when the company merged, the facilities were all outsourced and she lost her job. Follow up: How did you feel? Answer: She was devastated, mostly because she’d devoted so much time to it and didn’t know where to go from there.

01:21:12	Follow up: This is when you started Midwest Land & Culture? Answer: Yes; she started it as a way of kind of starting a new life in a tumultuous time. Follow up: What kind of work did you do? Answer: Her partner was doing an oral history, and she got a grant for a forestry management plan for Vilas Zoo. But because she needed more work and benefits, she dropped it as soon as she got the job at UW.

01:26:37	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (August 13, 2009): Digital File

Time	Keywords
00:00:00	Start of Interview/Interviewer’s Introduction

00:00:29	Question: Talk about your influences while a student. Answer: Bruner said she realized that her family dynamic was still very patriarchal, though they were progressive, which meant that discussions of what was “meaningful to do” weren’t very specific. This caused her to struggle when she discovered how hard it was to survive as an artist, and made her discovery of a career in horticulture more profound. She discussed how nurturing faculty like Tim Allen and Morrison and colleagues like Pam O’Neill, who participated in her spiritual connection with family, the land and farm, helped her find an identity in landscape architecture.

00:06:04	[no question] Another influence, she said, was Arthur Kelman in Plant Pathology. Following realizing her spiritual connection with the land, becoming Morrison’s student, and beginning work at CUNA, she took his class, which helped her understand the interaction and symbiosis between plants, land, and other organisms. She also took Koslovski’s course in forestry and wanted to become his graduate student, but couldn’t work and be his student.

00:08:10	[no question] She noted that another influence was George Whitford, a VP at CUNA who’d had experience working with the relationship between landscapes and crime rates in inner-city schools. Others were Paul Williams, who inspired her that working with plants was valuable; and Virginia Kline, Evelyn Howell, and Harriet Irwin, with whom she walked in the Arboretum and discussed being a woman in industry.

00:10:31	[no question] Continuing to talk about inspiring influences, she added Francis Hole, who mentored her at CUNA and showed her that soils could be a living thing.

00:11:33	[no question] Outside of the science aspect, literary influences include women’s literature like Eudora Welty and George Eliot and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad. She also pointed to references to “women’s lib” as a source of strength. But she was surprised by how hard it would be to be a woman in a male-dominated world.

00:15:08	[no question] She noted that she’d never been a good student, because she’d rather be out of doors “doing.”

00:15:40	Question: Was your spiritual connection with nature shared with male colleagues? Answer: She thought that she got this from her family and her farm experience, a kind of religion of nature; though she didn’t know if her family or any other men shared this relationship.

00:17:40	Follow up: What was driving the men? Answer: She observed that for the grounds crew at CUNA Mutual, it was a job; but for her best supervisor it was a good work ethic. At the Morton Arboretum, there was also a kind of religious zeal about the land, though few other “back to the earth” movements were of this religious type.

00:21:13	[no question] Continuing to discuss “back to the earth” movements, she pointed out Germanic influences of ridding the land of aliens that crept in. Follow up: What would you substitute for ideas of “exotics” and “aliens”? Answer: They used “undesirable plants,” which could be foreign or domestic, and avoided “weed.”

00:22:21	[no question] This line of questioning brought up the influence of Ed Hasselkus, who mentored her in traditional horticulture skills during difficult days at CUNA.

00:23:39	Question: After CUNA? Answer: After the prairie project and then managing grounds, stormwater management, and urban forestry, she reviewed the takeover of the company and working for Glen Stanosz in forestry for a summer.

00:26:16	[no question] She reviewed how the opportunity came up to serve part-time on an Arboretum grant to implement the Kline-Bader campus natural areas plan, explaining how the plan had come into existence. She reviewed how campus natural areas had been used sporadically before the natural areas plan, but how having not been cared for, the spread of foreign plants like honeysuckle and buckthorn, indigenous plants had been overtaken and erosion had taken a toll. She applied for and got the position (mainly to control garlic mustard) in 1997.

00:31:44	[no question] She explained how they publicized the program in a meeting at the Union which tried to drum up action, and then how she got “handed off” to Tom & Cathy Brock from the Shorewood Nature Conservancy, which gave the program a momentum, but also caused differences in opinion about the direction of it.

00:33:47	[no question] Because there wasn’t more than 10 months funding, she said she worked at the natural areas plan job basically full time, which led Glen Beck at Physical Plant to recognize her work and offer her a job.

00:34:38	[no question] She observed that after this, value issues began to encroach on the project, which caused controversy in the community and led to a moratorium of Arboretum involvement in campus natural areas. During this standoff, she put together a committee (at the advice of Bob Goodman and Howell) to study what should happen in campus natural areas—this recommended that the Arboretum and the campus natural areas should be separate, which Chancellor Wiley implemented. She reflected on the participatory nature of the process, which led to a great deal of disagreement about what should be done with campus natural areas.

00:41:20	[no question] She discussed crises after the 2000 implementation of the master plan committee. At one point, there was a proposal to pave the lakeshore path, which raised many objections; and when the cogeneration facility was approved, it bumped the CALS plot and put pressure on Campus Natural Areas to return land to CALS. 

00:43:35	[no question] Reflecting on difficulties in the master plan, she discussed the participation of Bill Cronon, who directed the committee after Harrington went on sabbatical, and essentially rewrote the master plan. She emphasized his ability to articulate cultural debates over what “nature” is and should be preserved and his help shepherding the process through public controversy. She recounted his suggestions of changing the names of the natural areas (like Lakeshore Nature Preserve, etc.).

00:46:38	[no question] On a side note, she discussed how a shift had occurred at UW to try to give the landscape of campus an identity, rather than just “property.” Related to this was the realization that Lake Mendota was what gave identity to the campus and had been an effective recruiting tool.

00:49:14	[no question] Continuing to talk about Cronon’s contribution, she related how he held meetings to define what the meaning was of campus natural areas and how he worked with donors to get funding to publicize the project. He also helped with institutiona-lize the project. After Bill Cronon, Ray Guries became chair of the committee.

00:51:42	[no question] She emphasized the importance of who was put in charge of campus areas—if it were Physical Plant, it would be seen as property; if it were a committee from the humanities, it would be about understanding the meaning of the land.

00:53:34	[no question] She observed that she’d been impressed by students’ zeal to be involved in cleanup, preservation, and education. She explained the origin of the Muir Mentors group, which paired undergrads with elementary schools in mentoring relationships through education in Muir Woods. She related some anecdotes from this program.

00:59:07	[no question] She returned to talking about the values that go along with grounds being under Physical Plant, which is set up to “get things done,” rather than see land as a living system. This created a disconnect and made it difficult to be a woman in Physical Plant, since women are more collaborative rather than just getting things done by a metric.

01:03:11	Follow up: Have you noticed changes in the roles of women at Physical Plant? Answer: She responded that two women had achieved leadership in particular trade roles (Carpentry and Project Management) by rising through their trades, which wasn’t easy but garnered respect. Otherwise, women were mostly in human resources or clerical work. She quickly reviewed the organization of Physical Plant, and suggested changes that could be made to make landscape architecture more prominent

01:07:22	[no question] Citing the example of her female colleague in Grounds, she observed that women rising through the ranks today face a different environment than she did, because her only validation was to do better than the men did and achieve support from her coworkers by being collaborative and “meek.”

01:12:22	Question: How did your job change when you came into Physical Plant? Answer: She 

02:34:16	End of Second Interview Session

End of Oral History #1014