UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Interview #320
BRYSON, REID
BRYSON, Reid (1920-2008)
Graduate Student; Professor of Geography and Meteorology; Director of Institute for Environmental Studies
At UW: 1946-1986
Interviewed: 1986	
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 4 hours

First Interview Session (April 11, 1986): Tapes 1-2

00:00:00 	Start of Interview
LS:  	This is an interview with Reid Bryson.  It is being held on April 11th, 1986, in his office in the Space Sciences Building.  My name is Laura Smail.  I'm doing the interview for the University of Wisconsin Archives Oral History Project.  Test your mike to begin with.
RB:  	What kind of "blah" do you want?  
LS:  	That's fine.  I just want to say that this is an interview primarily about your career in university affairs and presumably the Institute for Research in--Meteorological Research, is it?  
RB:  	Climatic Research.
LS:  	Climatic Research.
RB:  	Center for Climatic Research.
LS:  	Center for Climatic Research.  We'll be doing an interview about your research, and if they don't do it, why, eventually we try to do that, too.  So, we won't go into that.
RB:  	Well, do you want the truth or do you want it embellished?
LS:  	No, as I said, the truth, completely.
RB:  	There's this Chinese visitor who's sitting here this morning saying, "Oh, you know, around the world you're known very well, you're the leading climatologist."  Well, I'd rather have him say that than me.
LS:  	Well, you managed to get it in.  That's nice.  [Laughter]  Well done.  
00:01:22
LS:	But, at least, I'd like you to say a little about your background--your parents, what they did, what in your childhood got you interested in geology.  I know you majored in math.
RB:  	That's very simple, really.  My parents were both farm kids originally.  My mother's parents farmed the same area all their life.  My father's father had been a farmer, and in my father's youth they became storekeepers and railroad brakemen and a little of this and a little of that.  The last I knew of him, he had a little corner store in his house in a small town in southern Illinois, which is where they're both from.  The families had moved in from Tennessee and Kentucky and there were a lot of Cherokee and Powhatan, probably some other Pamlico Indians, mixed in along the way.  
	I like to say that the reason that I got interested in meteorology is because my great, great, great, great grandmother on my mother's side was killed by a lightning bolt--she was a full-blooded Indian, in Virginia--and she was killed by a lightning bolt.  She was watching a storm out the cabin window, which in a way couldn't have been it because she couldn't have had any offspring to affect me after she was killed.
LS:  	What about before?
RB:  	Yes, but see, it couldn't have been the lightning that did it, then.  So, her having been killed by a lightning bolt couldn't have anything to do with me. 
LS:  	Oh, I see.  All right.
RB:  	It's sort of terminal, you know, being killed.  But my father learned some accounting, so he moved to Detroit from south-central Illinois, got a job as a shipping clerk, and took my mother up there.   That was, oh, 1916, ‘15, somewhere in there.  My sister was born about 1917 and I was born in 1920, in Detroit.  
	Well, Detroit's a very dull place in terms of topography or anything else--of history.  You have to see some pretty subtle things to see about you the history of the place.  If you look at the street patterns you can get a feel for the history: combination of a military camp street pattern with a French pattern superimposed on it, and then an English pattern superimposed on that.  But I didn't know all that when I was a kid.  Occasionally we'd drive out in the countryside and I'd see some glacial hills, not very big ones, but those were pretty interesting.  I liked it.  But we were just on clay lake plain.  
	But I did a lot of reading--I was sort of a skinny introvert--and every day on the way home from school I'd be delayed by three bullies who would give me my daily beating up.  So, I did a lot of reading.  You know the kind of kid--imagine the kind of kid I was:  skinny, introverted, good student, which they didn't like.  So, on the way home from school every day they'd let me know they didn't like it.  I did an awful lot of reading.  
	Probably the most important thing I read of the books and books and books of poetry and history and whatever--I was sort of a big fan of Keats and Shelley by the time I was twelve—about fourteen years old I read an article in the National Geographic Magazine about an excavation of a pueblo in Canyon del Muerto, Arizona, part of Canyon de Chelly National Monument.  The story told about an archeologist excavating this ruin and finding a flute that was so well preserved that when he shook the dust out of it he could blow it, and it described beautifully the sound echoing across the canyon.  That just really caught my fancy.  I wanted to be one of those guys who would find neat things like that.  I wanted to know about those people.  So, I wanted to be an archeologist. 
	It wasn't until about two years _________ I really found out who that person was.  That's sort of a funny story in itself.  I was chatting with a woman archeologist in Calgary, Alberta, at the time and telling her about this, how I was very impressed by this dig, and she said, "That's my father," which was doubly coincident because when I'd met her in Calgary I said, "I know you:   you were the young lady who back in 1956 at Christmas time came with two fellows dressed as Kachinas and danced on our front lawn for the amusement of my kids, in Tucson."  Yup, that was the woman.  It was her father that had done the excavation.  Well, it's a small world.  
	That really got me--I wanted to be an archeologist in the worst way.  My high school counsellor, when I told him what I wanted to do, said, "You ought to study geology first, then, to get a good background."  Only by hindsight did I find out that really the reason that he wanted me to do that was because the school that he wanted me to go to didn't have any archeology.  It did have a good geology department, and he wanted me to that school and join his fraternity because they needed some good students or they'd be in trouble.
00:08:31
LS:  	So that's why you went to Dennison?
RB:  	Well, I got a fellowship.  You know, he wrote a good letter and our minister had gone there, my sister was there, so I went there and it was challenging.
LS:  	Is it in Michigan?
RB:  	No, Granville, Ohio, about twenty-six miles east of Columbus.  Well, I majored in geology--it was fun, any science is fun.
LS:  	Did you yourself not consider going to the University of Michigan?
RB:  	Probably it wouldn't have been a good idea.  I think my folks had something to say about that, too.  They sort of thought about that, too, but I got a nice fellowship and my sister was already there, and remember our minister had gone there back around 1920.  So, I think that's why I went there.  It's all right, it was a good school.  Geology was fun, and it was a good geology, one-man department, but he was very good--a geomorphologist, fortunately, because that's the kind of geology that has been useful to me, along with the other kind.  
00:09:52
RB:	So, while down there, and graduating in June of 1941, things were a little upset around the world and in the U.S.--the war coming along--and, boy, was I a pacifist.  I wasn't going to go to any war.  I was going to cross the mountains or something and hide--completely dumb, I couldn't have done it, but nevertheless I didn't want to have any part of that conflict, which didn't have anything to do with me.  So, what do you do at that point?  You know, you can't sort of make much in the way of plans, so I went to graduate school.  And I was offered three fellowships in geology:  one at Wisconsin, a WARF fellowship, and the other two places were Chicago and Harvard.  I decided Wisconsin was the place to come because, to tell the truth, my girlfriend was here.  She had transferred from Dennison to Wisconsin a year earlier--she was a year behind me, so she would have been a senior here when I came here as a graduate student.  It was a wise decision in hindsight, but it wasn't really terribly logical.
LS:  	Except it did have a very good geology department.
RB:  	It had an excellent geology department.  That's why my professor would let me apply here and Chicago and Harvard.  So, it wasn't a mistake, but it was sort of heavily weighted in favor of wherever was close to Franny.  I married her, you know.  I did.  She's the one I'm married to, you know her.  I'm pretty stubborn, too--chased her until she suddenly stopped and caught me.  (Laughs)  
00:12:41
RB:	So, I came up here, but then, of course, in December the war broke out.  Everything became very clear then as to what we ought to do:  about twenty-four hours and the geology department was essentially deserted--practically everybody immediately left and enlisted.  Well, I didn't do that; what I did was look at the enlistment posters that were around and said:  "The Air Force needs you:  pilot, navigator, bombardier," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and in the last column it said "meteorologist."   As I read down it said all these other require 20/20 vision, but meteorologist is 20/100.  I thought, "Aha, I can get in that and that's science; that sounds like a good thing to do."  
	So, I went off to Chicago and talked to Carl Gustaf Arvid-Rossby, the famous meteorologist who was setting up the program down there.  They had a training program in meteorology there, and he said, "Okay, you can come here."  He had a lot to say with the Air Force, too--one of their chief consultants.  So, in March of '42 I went off to the University of Chicago for a training program of nine months' duration that was supposed to make a meteorologist out of me.  But then they kept me on there as an instructor, from November of '42 to I guess it must have been October '43.  Then they sent me to the University of Puerto Rico to be an instructor at the Institute of Tropical Meteorology at the University of Puerto Rico, which was a branch of the University of Chicago--the Institute was, but it was housed on the campus of the University of Puerto Rico.  I was there until about April of the following year and then went back to Chicago for a couple months. 
	Then I got orders transferring me--because I was in the military all this time--to Atlanta, the weather squadron there, weather wing.  I reported in at eight o'clock in the morning, and while I was there during the day got orders to go to Asheville, North Carolina.  So I signed out at four o'clock that afternoon.  One day.  Went to Asheville, where there was some training on what was going on in the Pacific, and it appeared they were gathering together a group of officers to be the advance cadre of the 20th Air Force in the Marianas to fly the B-29s against Japan.  Then from there I went to Washington and got the last training, and directly from Washington, with a couple days at home en route, off to Hamilton Field, California, to catch a flight out to Hawaii, and from there we moved on out into the Pacific.  Hamilton Field's the place where I established my reputation as a gambler.  I don't gamble anymore, but at that place, after the fellows that were with me had played a slot machine until they were out of nickels, I told them that if they'd stand aside I'd show them how and I walked up and put two nickels in and got both jackpots.  So, I haven't gambled since because I don't have to--I've already proved that I'm a master gambler.  
	Well, when I arrived in Hawaii I was the twenty-first officer of the 20th Air Force to arrive in the Pacific, and that leads into a whole bunch of other stories.  So, where do you want me to go from here?  Tell you about that, or what?
00:17:00
LS:  	Oh, I gather there were some important discoveries being made about the weather during the war.
RB:  	Oh yes.  The most important one, other than the personal things of what I learned and things like that, was that in late fall, when we were just getting enough aircraft together to really do something--sometime in November I think it was--things were starting to turn cold and there wasn't much weather data still.  The Pacific was pretty much a big open space, so they'd say okay, make us a forecast for twenty-four hours from now 1500 miles away.  Look at the weather map and there's about ten pieces of information total on the whole thing, so it wasn't exactly a textbook case of, you know, there's the weather map, you analyze it, you do this, you do this, and make your forecast.  Couldn't do that, because there wasn't any data.  We had no previous data to amount to anything for Japan.  
	So, another fellow, by the name Bill Plumley, who's still a geologist in California, and I--and he'd been an instructor at Chicago, too --we went off to the weather station with this job of making a forecast for a bombing mission over Tokyo the next day.  Looked at the map and there wasn't much data, but we had some data from Khabarovsk and from Vladivostok that the Russians had sent us; we had a weather reconnaissance flight over Japan; we had some ships offshore; another weather reconnaissance flight over Iwo Jima; and a few other bits and pieces of data.  So we constructed a diagram of cross sections with the atmosphere from eastern Siberia down to the Marianas, and we said at least we know the principles we learned in school.  There's a principle called the "thermal-wind relationship":  if you know what the horizontal variation of the temperature is, you can calculate the vertical variation of the wind.  Neat.  So we applied that principle and calculated that the next day, over Japan, the winds at the height of the aircraft would be 168 nautical miles per hour--knots.  
	We sent the forecast over to the general, and the general came bouncing right back and was chewing us out for making such a stupid forecast:  "How can you possibly forecast 168 knots when nobody ever, ever has observed a wind that strong?"  "Sorry, sir, that's what we calculated."   He said, "Well, calculate it again, you"--censored, censored, censored.  So we did and it came out 168 knots, and he said, "Well, you"--censored--"I'm not going to ask you what the weather's going to be or what the winds are going to be, we'll go up there and measure them and tell you what they are," and off he stormed.  And since he was a general and I was a captain, all I could say was, "Yes, sir."  The next day, General ‘Rosie’ O'Donnell came back and apologized.  He said, "I thought you were wrong, but we went up there and we measured them and it was 170."  That's the best forecast I ever made, fortunately, but what we had done was predict the discovery of the Jet Stream.  And it was a big blow to the Air Force because, since nobody observed winds like that, there was no way that they could enter those winds into their bombsights--the bombsights' numbers didn't go that high.  What for, you know?  The winds are never that strong.  So they didn't have bombsights that would work.
	So, frantic messages back to Washington:  What are we going to do?  Get us some bombsights that we can put these high winds into.  Then they called Rossby at Chicago and said, "Professor Rossby, what are we going to do?"  He said, "Ah, we will call it the Jet Stream."  He didn't know what to do about it either, except he named it.  So, we went on working with it.  The winds got even stronger than that:  there were times when the aircraft would get up there and try to climb to get over the target and would find themselves going backwards.  Here's Japan approaching on the radar, pretty soon it's standing still--the engine's cranking away and it's standing still, but climbing.  Pretty soon Japan is backing away from them.  That's scary, so they turn around and go home.  They're never going to get there.  Well, that was the discovery of the Jet Stream.
LS:  	Has this been written up?
RB:  	No.
LS:  	Nowhere?
RB:  	No.  It's a chapter in the book I'm working on.  Professor [Edward] Lorenz at MIT, who was actually my tent-mate at the time, teaches his class that this is how it happened, and I talked to one of the kids and he said, "He never said who it was that had forecast the thing," but it was the same story.  And he said, "Gee, I didn't know it was you."  Well, Bill Plumley and I--I think Bill had more to do with it than I did.
LS:  	The Japanese hadn't discovered it?
RB:  	No, apparently they didn't have aircraft flying that high and so--
LS:  	They didn't?
RB:  	No.  Not in bad weather when they had those kind of winds.  But our heavy bombers were up there.
LS:  	I heard this story from somebody, only it had to do with Europe-- bombers going to Berlin--   
RB:  	They didn't fly that high.
LS:  	So she's just mixing up:  she meant the Pacific, is that right?
RB:  	The ones in the European Theatre didn't go as high because they weren't pressurized.  The B-29 was the first pressurized aircraft--bomber.  The winds don't get that strong in Europe, anyhow.  The Jet Stream tends to split.  One part goes very far north in Europe and the other goes over the Mediterranean.  Most of the aircraft that were operating across the Mediterranean weren't flying that high.  The ones over Europe flying as high as they could were sort of in between the two.  Or they didn't get back or whatever.  It just wasn't as clear cut in Europe.  The most clear cut place on Earth is just off Japan--by far the strongest jet streams.  You get Siberia to the north and warm waters of the Kuroshio just offshore, and things just develop at a phenomenal rate.
	I was just talking a fellow on the phone this morning who works for United Airlines.  He makes forecasts for their flights across the Pacific--he's a Wisconsin graduate--and he said, "In our classes we never saw anything develop that fast with the intensity that it does on that coast."  Well, they study U.S. weather, not Pacific weather, in making their forecasts in class.  The Pacific is just a wilder place, that's all there is to it--that coast.  
00:26:08
RB:	We started calling the typhoons in the Pacific--there are many more in the Pacific than hurricanes in the Atlantic, and year around.  So we had a lot of hurricanes--typhoons they're called in the Pacific, same thing as a hurricane anyway.  You got a lot of typhoons to deal with--sometimes we'd have more than one on the map, which is rare in this part of the world.  So to keep them straight, since all of us at one time or another read John [sic-actually George] Stewart's book called Storm--maybe you read it, too; it was published back in the '40s or something like that.  Very nice book about a storm. He named the storm Maria, that developed off Taiwan and came across, and all things that happened in California and so on as a result of this storm named Maria.  So, remembering that, we started naming the typhoons after women.
LS:  	You mean, you're responsible for that?
RB:  	Yes, I was.
LS:  	I've always detested that.
RB:  	Well, but you're a later-day woman that where you--
LS:  	Well, I don't mean after--I just mean naming them after people I don't like.
RB:  	Well, there's a reason why we did it.  We were all lonesome, and because a storm had been called Maria, hey, that's a neat idea, so this one came along and it was called Denata, after Denata Plumley, and this one comes along and it's called Franny, after Franny Bryson--except that one pooped out, and Franny's been a little disappointed ever since that the one named after her didn't amount to anything.  So, we named them after our wives or sweethearts, just because that's what we were thinking about.
LS:  	You didn't insist upon alphabetical order.
RB: 	No.  Whichever came along.  We probably would have run out of wives and sweethearts after a while and probably start naming them after girls we used to know.  What do soldiers overseas think about, anyhow?  The women back home.  So, that's where the naming got started that way, so far as I know.  Well, where do we go from here?
00:28:31
LS:  	So, you stayed in the Pacific Theatre until the end of the war?
RB:  	Oh yes.  The most interesting part of the tail end of the war was the atomic bomb, of course, which was, in terms of winning the war, totally unnecessary.  In the summer of '45--see, we were headquarters 20th Air Force, and the weather station was two doors away from General LeMay's office.  He was the commander of the 20th Air Force.  So, our staff weather officer, Colonel Seaver, would just go back and forth between the buildings, and we'd do the forecasting, take it over, brief the general and so on.  In the summer of--well, let's back up.
	To really sort of have a feel for what was going on, General LeMay had taken over command of the 20th Air Force right at the beginning of that year.  The preceding general had lost like 40 percent of his aircraft, not to enemy action but to just dumb handling.  They were operational losses rather than combat losses.  When LeMay took over he just cleaned house and did everything differently.  
	One of the things he discovered is that the Japanese didn't have any light anti-aircraft gunin Japan. He'd already increased the bomb loads that the planes could change by changing the ratio of bombs to fuel that they were carrying.  He'd tremendously increased the power, of course, just by knowing some engineering.  But when he found out that there weren't any light anti-aircraft guns--because we'd been telling him for years that we were going to have high-level, high-precision, daylight bombing, and so they loaded all their cities with heavy, high-level anti-aircraft guns, but no light ones for low-level.  After all, we said we were going to use high-level; they believed us.  (Laughs)  As soon as LeMay found that out he says okay, we're going in at 4,000 feet.  They won't have any guns that work, because you can't use the big ones:  if you turn them down to use them at 4,000 feet you'll shoot yourself up worse than you do the enemy.  
	So we went down at 4,000 feet with fire bombs and reduced the population of Tokyo by 4,000,000 in one month.  It was incredible what was happening.  We saw pictures of it, you know, we could see sixteen square miles of burning city and things like that.  It wasn't until a few of us got up there and saw it on the ground afterwards that we realized what a totally destructive thing those fire raids were.  But this was so effective that before long there weren't any targets big enough to require using all of our airplanes of one target.  Tokyo was gone.  
	Now, we had 800 airplanes.  Well, there wasn't any target left that we can't destroy with half of that, so we started dropping leaflets.  I've still got some of them around--leaflets with a picture of a B-29 dropping bombs on one side, and on the other side it said in Japanese:  "Here are the names of ten cities.  In the next five days we will completely destroy five of them.  We advise you to leave because we don't really want to kill people, we only want to stop your warlords and stop your war industry."  So, the people didn't know whether their city was one of the five or not.  That was the idea.  Then, we would actually go in and eliminate five cities, and then the next five days we'd eliminate five more, and five more, and five more, and five more.  Then, we had too many airplanes to do only five, so we started doing ten at a time.  
	We had so much force, and this was so effective, that General LeMay had shown that if we'd gone on to October of 1945 at that rate there would not have been a village of 5,000 left in Japan.  He was arguing, in a high-level conference back in the States, don't drop an atomic bomb, don't invade, we can handle it.  Once they don't have anything left--no aircraft, no cities, no villages, no industry--we don't have to invade.  Just wait.  Just sit offshore and wait.  They build something, knock it down.  We don't have to waste 2,000,000 American boys landing in Japan.  Well, the army said, you're not going to keep us from getting some of the glory, so they decided to invade, but they knew that was going to be a big thing.  So it was probably a good decision to--since they weren't going to use LeMay's attrition strategy and they were going to use invasion and lose an awful lot of lives, it probably was a good thing that they decided that they would drop the atomic bomb.  
	Now, a lot of us in the weather station knew that they were working on an atomic bomb and what the Manhattan Project was all about, because when we'd been back at Chicago we'd seen guys walking along the street that we knew from back at our respective colleges.  I'd say, "Hey, that guy's in chemistry at Wisconsin, he's working on radioactivity," and the guy I was with would say, "Yes, and the fellow he's with is from Iowa State and he's working on radioactivity."  Put two and two together--here was this great concentration of physicists and chemist working on radioactivity--so we walked up to these guys that we knew one day and said, "We're not going to ask you what you're making because we think we know, but please tell us whether it works," and the guy said, "Oh yes, it does, and by the way, meet my friend, Professor Fermi."  (Laughs)
	So when we started seeing some of these same faces and this strangely modified aircraft arriving out in the Pacific, well, we had a pretty good idea that finally they were going to try that atomic bomb--whatever we called it.  I think we called it an atomic bomb even before they ever dropped it.  We'd all been trained in physics and geology and stuff like that--physical science--anyhow, so this was not something that was strange to us.  We could imagine it happening.  In fact, the geology thesis I was working on before the war was about the radioactivity of Lake Superior rocks, so that's how I knew these guys in chemistry that were working on the radioactivity.  
	Well, comes the day for dropping the bomb.  We didn’t make the forecast for the bomb as a part of our regular operations–that was a special little group of the best in the weather central who were pulled together to do it.  The preliminary forecast for Hiroshima was made by a guy who is now retired and lives here in Madison, who was my tent-mate on Saipan–lives here in Madison now and is auditing both of my courses this semester.  He made the preliminary forecast.
LS:  	What’s his name?
RB:  	E. Brewster Buxton, a Wisconsin native and a Madison graduate back in the ‘30s.  And he made the final forecast for Nagasaki.  I made the forecast for the return of the bombers to Tinian, because I was the tropical specialist.  At least my memory says I did, I didn’t keep notes or anything.  I also remember somebody in the weather station, when we got the first reports back of what had gone on–debriefed the pilots and navigators –somebody in the weather station opined that “There went the world.”  We could anticipate what it meant downstream.  Well, it wasn’t much longer than that until the war was over.  
00:38:23
RB:	How'd I get home?  I got home the easy way.  The colonel said, "How would you like to be"--everybody was waiting around for transportation or enough points to get out or something, and they didn't know how long it would take to get home--the colonel said, "Bryson, how would you like to be the commander of the weather school at Chanute Field, Illinois?"   Well, I didn't think I would have had enough points to get out within several years, that's a good job, so I said fine.  So, I came home by air right away, because I was on military business instead of just being discharged.  Reported in to Chanute Field and the captain in charge down there said, "Your rank's a little rich for our blood, major."  I said, "Captain, if that's the way you feel about it I don't want any part of this place.  Where's the separation base?"  "Across the street."  So, I walked across the street and got out of the Air Force.  To heck with them.  Went back to Chicago, went to school.
LS:  	You went back to Chicago.   Why do you put it that way?
RB:  	That's where my wife had been living.  She's an Oak Park girl.
00:39:43
LS:  	So you decided to go on in Chicago rather than--
RB:  	Well, I was trying to decide, should I go on and get a Ph.D. in meteorology at Chicago?  Housing was hard to come by at that time, you know, right at the end of the war.  I knew I could stay with my mother-in-law, which we did, and get a Ph.D. in meteorology and then get one in geology.  But during the war--you know, usually war is hectic followed by boredom followed by hectic activity followed by boredom, and terror followed by boredom--I spent the time writing a doctoral dissertation while I was overseas in meteorology. 
LS:  	Without having had any coursework to speak of?  Or did your training in the army count?
RB:  	Well, it was all graduate work that I had in the army.  
LS:  	And you got credit for it?
RB:  	Sure, graduate credit.  After all, it was at the University of Chicago and universities have to do things a certain way, so they did.  It was credit at the University of Chicago, period.  
00:41:06
RB:	So, I had written a doctoral dissertation, and at the same time I had written to [Richard Conrad] ‘Con’ Emmons here at the University of Wisconsin, who I think was chairman during the war or something like that, and I said, "Con, do you suppose there'd be a"--or Stan Tyler, maybe, because he had been my advisor before the war--I don't remember which one, but I asked if there was a possibility of a job teaching after the war.  I got a very positive answer back saying well, after the war come in and see us, there's always that possibility.  So I wrote to them from Chicago when I was a graduate student there and I said, how about talking about the possibility of a job?  So, I got a letter saying well, come up and see us and we'll talk about it.  Came up, and they offered me a job--joint, in geology and geography.
LS:  	You hadn't had anything to do with geography before?
RB:  	No, but they wanted me to teach meteorology as background courses for Trewartha's climatology, and, on the other hand, I would teach geomorphology in the geology department.  So I said fine, and showed up here in the fall of '46.  Actually, I saw my appointment the other day.  I was going through some old papers and here's a letter offering me a job starting 1st of July.  My appointment was effective 1st of July, but I'd start work and be paid starting in September of '46, which is interesting.  I don't whether that gives me a couple months of extra time on the payroll--
LS:  	Gets you on the fiscal year, I suppose.
RB:  	Yes, I suppose that's what it was, but it was a half-time appointment because I was still thinking about talking a bunch of geology courses.  A half-time appointment was half of $3,000, so 1500 bucks a year.  You get [$] 900 for an academic year as a WARF Fellow.  You know, it was a pretty good deal.  I think it was [$] 900, maybe it was [$] 600.  
	Well, anyhow, wanted to get both degrees but Professor Finch--he's a great old guy, Vernon Finch:  geography department, very wise old gentleman--he said don't bother getting two Ph.D.'s.  He said nobody's going to ever ask you "In what did you get your degree?"  It's what you do that counts, not what the degree says.  Fine, because I didn't know until I got here that you couldn't be working here as an assistant professor and finish up a geology degree at the same time.  I found out later that the reason that that rule was on the books--that you couldn't be on a tenure track and get a graduate degree--was because of something that had happened years before in the geology department, where a chairman of the department, and full professor, didn't have a Ph.D.  People had twitted him about it enough times over the years that he went in to his faculty one day and threw a stack of his publications on the table and said, "There's my thesis.  Now do I get a Ph.D. or not?  Ask me some questions if you want to give me an exam."  And they gave him a degree.  But immediately thereafter that became impossible.  That's what I was told, anyhow.  I think it's true, just from the wording of some of the earlier regulations.  I think the guy's name was [George W.] Mead who had done that.  At least, that's the story that I got.  
00:46:02
RB:	Now, I was supposed to teach geomorphology in the geology department, but they had been counting on Freddie Thwaites’ retiring.  He was teaching geomorphology and then I would start teaching it.  But he didn't retire.  And he didn't have a Ph.D. either.  It didn't make any difference:  as a teacher he was excellent.  Had some very funny habits.  He would always stand on his right leg and swing his left leg as he approached the place in notes where there was a marginal notation as to which joke to tell.  Charlie Bradley and I were taking the course together--you know Charlie?  The Doctor Bradley family?  Katherine Bradley's brother-in-law?  Joe Bradley's brother?
LS:  	Oh, yes, I know them.
RB:  	Charlie runs the Leopold Reserve now.  Charlie Bradley and I were taking Freddie Thwaites’ glacial geology course together.  We got on to this habit of his, so we sat where we could see his feet, and every time he'd stand on his right leg and swing his left leg we'd laugh--before he'd told the joke.  It absolutely broke him up.  (Laughs)  We were nasty.  I guess people do that, even today.  
	So, then, teaching meteorology in the geography department, they immediately found in the fall of '46 that, while I was supposed to give a meteorology course, boy, they had a lot more students around than they had ever figured on and how were they going to teach the beginning geography courses --Geography 1?  Professor Finch was teaching it but he couldn't handle 800, so we split it and Professor Finch taught one section and I taught one section.  I followed his lecture notes very closely.  We had a lot of very nice times together teaching these two parallel sections of Geography 1.  Did very nicely, and there are some weird stories that go along with that, like the paranoid girl.
	Here I am, a beginning assistant professor, and of course there was no place to live, so we started first living in a little room on East Wilson Street and then we got one of the tourist cabins out at 2929 University, that the University owned.  About five weeks after I started teaching we were going to have Associate Dean Chan Young and his wife--old friends from before the war--out for dinner in our little cabin.  When Chan Young came in he says, "Professor Bryson, I want you to know I'm a virgin," and already by dinner time he was referring to what had happened to me about eleven o'clock in the morning in that class.  After the class was over and I'd given them their room assignments for the six-weeks' exam, one little girl stayed behind in her seat at the front of the room--in those days we seated people alphabetically, except that if they had bad eyes or something they could be put in a different row--she sat down in the front row and after the class she went up and looked at the list that I'd posted and went down to the bottom of it, to the end of the alphabet, to find her place. 
	Then she turned around to me and said, "Professor Bryson, I want you to know I'm a virgin," and I said, "Did you have a question about the exam?"  No, she knew about the exam, but she didn't want me to have the wrong idea about her and she went on like this, and I was sort of stammering and said, "But, but, but, I, what's your question?"  And she said, "I don't have a question.  I just want you to know what kind of girl I am, that I am a virgin.  If you don't believe me you can ask" doctor so and so, doctor so and so, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  Then she said, "What did you think about the maps?" and I said, "What maps?"  We hadn't had any maps in class, any special map exercise or anything.  She says, "Well, I guess that part of the dream isn't working."  So I assured her that I had no misconceptions about what kind of a girl she was, and I got the hell out of there.  What do you do now?  
	I called the university psychiatrist and he said, "What's her name?"  "I don't know her name!--there's 400 kids in the class, you know."  He said, "Well, I can't do anything for you until you find out what her name is."  So, I remembered end of the alphabet, out of order, in the front of the room, and I asked the TA which of these two girls in the front of the room, which are out of order, if he knew them, and he said yes, one's a blond and one's a brunette.  Well, this was the brunette.  Okay, I knew that it was a girl named Georgia Tsiocolos.  So I called him [the psychiatrist] and, "Oh yes, we know about her.  She's got paranoia.  As a matter of fact, there's a delegation from the university talking to her parents today about getting her out of school, and so on.  But the problem is her parents don't speak English and all the business is done by her older sister, who is also off her rocker."  Fortunately I never saw her again.  That was in the        morning; by dinner time Chan Young comes in and says, "I want you to know I'm a virgin."  Talked to Colonel Schroeder later, who's another old friend of the family in Chicago, who was one of the chief psychiatrists at the Nuremburg trials--very good man, very experienced--and I told him this story.  He said, "Oh yes, not only was she paranoid but I would say from my experience that if you had scoffed at her assertion at all she would probably have made an attempt on your life."  
00:53:40
	Well, it was interesting times.  I couldn't teach geomorphology, so I taught oceanography.  I knew something about that from my work during the war--same principles as atmospheric science, just deal with water instead.  Physical oceanography.  And the biological stuff was no problem because, while I'd only had one course in biology in college, I had taken a biology course in high school.  When I went into the class the high school instructor said, "Does anybody in this class know what photosynthesis is?"  I put up my hand:  I did, I'd read a lot.  He said, "Well, if you know what photosynthesis is you know more about biology than I do, so you teach the course."  So I did.  I made up the assignments, ran the classes, carried on all the discussions, made out the exams, gave the exams, graded the exams--I taught the whole course.  But boy, did I learn biology.  Needless to say, I got A's on the exams (laughs), since I graded them, I made them up.  I wouldn't ask a question I didn't know the answer to.  
	So, that was no problem.  I taught oceanography and enjoyed that, and it was a popular course for that kind of course--maybe forty in it each time.  Taught meteorology and I taught the beginning courses in physical geography and, I'll tell you, this is sort of fun. I'm enjoying this geography stuff and I'm enjoying the geology and I was taking--first I took petrology with Con Emmons and then I was his lab assistant.
LS:  	So you actually took courses here, but your degree was going to be at the University of Chicago?
RB:  	In meteorology, but I had wanted to learn more geology because I still had the idea of getting another Ph.D.  
00:56:01
RB:	I had just about decided well, maybe this is what I should do the rest of my life when Glen Trewartha came into my office and said, "Bryson, there's no future for you at the University of Wisconsin.  I would suggest you find a job elsewhere."
LS:  	So, what was that all about?
RB:  	It means "you're fired."
LS:  	I mean, why?
RB:  	I think it's because--well, I had different ideas for a long time.  That's a sufficiently traumatic thing that you're never going to be able to view that person completely objectively thereafter.  But I have a feeling that he was quite aware that I was slanting my meteorology courses more and more toward emphasis on climate, and there was--it was competitive.  That department's always been pretty good at getting rid of young professors who tend to compete with the older ones.  My philosophy is you should always try and hire somebody who's better than you are, but I don't see any evidence of that in that department.
LS:  	Even though it was a top-ranking department?
RB:  	Was.
LS:  	Was it at that time, in the late '40s?
RB:  	Oh yes, there was Finch and Trewartha and Robinson and Sterling--didn't ever publish much but he was a great teacher--and there'd been some others and it was a pretty darn good department.
LS:  	He was the chairman?
RB:  	He was at that time, yes.  Finch had been two years before when I was hired, but Trewartha was the chairman and he essentially told me I was fired.  Well, that's very traumatic. 
00:58:19
RB:	So, I had been talking around to a number of people, particularly in the Ag School:  Jim Dickson, and Arno Lenz in Engineering, and Bob Muckenhirn in Soils.  These people were all interested in meteorology applied to hydrological and agricultural problems, and I said yes, sure, I'm interested in this, too, but really what you want to do, you need somebody who's good at instrumentation, and I said no.  Well, we'll see if we can bring another guy up here from Chicago, Verner Suomi, who's good at instrumentation.  This little consortium had been talking about this, so when Trewartha told me there was no future for me at Wisconsin, I went to Dean Ingraham and said, "Well, don't you think we ought to have a meteorology department?"  He allowed as how, yes, that was a good idea and approved hiring Verner Suomi.  So, for two weeks I was a one-man department, but we'd already agreed that we could get Suomi.  He came up in the middle of July in 1948, and here we are.
01:00:00	End Tape 1, Side 2; Begin Tape 2, Side 1
LS:  	This is tape two of the interview with Reid Bryson.  What were your relations with the other members of the department?
RB:  	Oh, fine.  
LS:  	Did they have any say in your being fired?
RB:  	Nobody ever told me.
LS:  	You never discussed it with anybody?
RB:  	No.  Well, I assumed that he was speaking for the department.  I have a feeling that he wasn't speaking for the department, though, because there were some rather harsh words that passed back and forth at that time, because though I was told by him, essentially, "Get lost, we don't want you," it was early enough in the spring that there was still business going on.  I was going to faculty meetings and so on.  And Trewartha at one time said, "As long as I am at the University of Wisconsin, climatology will be in the Geography Department."  A brash young fellow whose feelings had been very badly hurt, my reaction was a little nasty; I said, "Well, I'll outwait you."
LS:  	What did you say?
RB:  	"I'll outwait you."  He got a little red and didn't say any more, but the fact is I did outwait him.  
LS:  	Did other people have experiences with him?
RB:  	I don't know, but I suspect you'd get a similar story from Carl Blitzer, who's now probably the best known geographer at Chicago, or Fred Samouns out at Davis, or a couple other bright young fellows here and there.
LS:  	So you think it was just that he didn't like your approach and he saw that you were ahead of him?
RB:  	That's the only interpretation that I can make.  Over the years I've been saying to myself, well, you know, maybe it wasn't that, maybe I was sort of brash and all that, and just--
LS:  	How were you brash?
RB:  	Well, I'd had a lot more training in meteorology as such than Trewartha had.  I'm sure there were times when I said, "I don't think that's a good explanation.  The real answer is this," you know.  
LS:  	You'd say this--well, you weren't teaching in the same--
RB:  	In conversation.
LS:  	In conversation.
RB:  	In conversation, we'd talk about things.  I guess he thought I was some kind of a young whippersnapper, which I probably was.  But I had a lot more training in the actual science of the atmosphere than he had.  It's a very interesting thing:  he was very famous and his textbooks sold like crazy, especially during the war because that's the only one that was available.  I know they burned something like 15,000 copies after the war that they had sort of stored out in Hawaii, but he got a royalty on all of them.  You know, what difference did it make?  They were surplus, so they burned them.  Wish I had one each for all the books they burned out there--surplus and weather training.  They were published very much in the way of research.  One or two articles only in research on climate and a few others joint with graduate students, but nearly all of his fame as a climatologist was based on his textbooks.  In a research setting that doesn't prove anything about your knowledge.
LS:  	So you thought of him as rather behind the times, definitely.
RB:  	Oh yes, very much.  
LS:  	And were the others in the department behind the times?
RB:  	Well, certainly not Robinson.  He was the leading cartographer in the country, and between Robinson and [Edward] Espenshade at Northwestern--they were good friends and I knew them both.
LS:  	Hartshorne?
RB:  	Hartshorne was just top-flight, even then.  Everybody said if you don't read Hartshorne you don't know anything about geography.  Dick and I used to have long, long, very fun discussions--Dick Hartshorne and I.  He was one guy I could sit and just chew the fat with for hours and hours, talk about the philosophy of geography and of science and of other things.  That was really fun.  He was the one guy I could really discuss things with.
LS:  	When?
RB:  	In the early days.
LS:  	When you were--he doesn't mention you in his interview.
RB:  	No, no, but he spent a lot of time talking to me.
LS:  	Did he come to resent you, do you think?
RB:  	Oh not Dick, no.  We're still good friends.  He just doesn't think that I ever had much to do with geography.  I was a climatologist, not a geographer--a meteorologist, not a geographer.  That's one of the things we talked about endlessly--what was the nature of geography?--and it's clear that his definition and mine were quite different.  Of course, he was the authority and I wasn't, but that wasn't going to stop me, so we'd talk about it and--friendly and at great length--but he probably felt no point talking about Bryson because he's not a geographer.  But we're still good friends.
	Robinson and I always got along well together.  In fact, we published a joint paper--I guess one, not two, together.  We were going to do another one, and he lost the notes when he moved, on the discovery of the Gulf Stream.  I'd turned up the earliest map known of the Gulf Stream, but not being a cartographer I said to Robby, "Hey, look what I've got:  the first map of the Gulf Stream.  Let's write a paper about this.  You're the cartographer, you know about the history of cartography."  So we were going to do a paper on the earliest map of the Gulf Stream, but he lost his notes.  I don't know whether he's found them again or not.  It's been ten years at least.
01:07:16
LS:  	You speak of it so casually, of going to Mark Ingraham and saying we ought to have a Department of Meteorology.  Was it really that simple in those days?  You didn't have to go to the faculty meeting and--?
RB:  	Oh heck, no.  What would you do that for?
LS:  	Well, it seems to have been done in later years.
RB: 	Administrators administrated, you know, and the faculty taught.  It was simple in those days.  We probably called some people and kept in touch with all the appropriate places, but we didn't do things then.  We couldn't start a meteorology department now.  No, it would be impossible now, because for every person who can say yes now there's forty people authorized to say no.  Somewhere along the line one of the forty would say no and that would cancel out the yes.  You can't do anything in the university now like you could back then.
LS:  	You told him that other universities had departments of meteorology and it was time the UW had one?
RB:  	I talked to him about that but--I don't know whether he knew that there had been a Meteorology Department at Wisconsin earlier.  There had been.  I told you about that.
LS:  	You mentioned that, yes.
RB:  	I think about 1905-1914 there was a Meteorology Department.  Paleoclimatology, which is of course the--I thought I had invented practically because it was, when I first started teaching it in 1949 or so, the only paleoclimatology course in the country taught by atmospheric science. Found out from Gisela Kutzbach that Chamberlain gave a course by that title in 1883.  So, it has a venerable beginning but I wasn't the first.  
01:09:26
RB:	No, it was much easier to do things in those days.  Shucks, you know, here I was an assistant professor and head of a department in June of 1945 and I didn't even have my Ph.D., because my advisor at Chicago had taken the thesis off to Sweden with him and didn't bother reading it because he lost his glasses and was too vain to admit that he needed glasses and so it just sat.  So, but Ingraham said--you know, I said, "I'm embarrassed.  I told you when you gave me the job as assistant professor that I expected to get the thesis back and approved and have my degree right away and I haven't produced on it.  Here it is two years, and it seems to be getting a little closer but not much."  He knew why, I told him what the holdups were, and old Mark Ingram said, "Well, Bryson, the title 'Professor' is a higher rank than the title 'Doctor.'"
LS:  	He gave you tenure, then.
RB:  	No, not yet.  A couple of months later I got my degree and got tenure about--'52?
LS:  	Who voted you into tenure since your department couldn't very well, since you were the department?
RB:  	Well, it was Suomi and me, both.  We could vote for each other.
LS:  	Oh, I see.  That's the way you did it?
RB:  	There wasn't anybody else.  Two assistant professors, that was the department.  I don't remember doing much voting at all.  I sort of remember Mark Ingraham taking care of it because he couldn't really ask two assistant professors to do something like that.  I think somehow he just did it.  I don't know, I had about four publications or something like that.  That wouldn't fly these days--four publications, forget it.  
	But I think Mark Ingraham and the university ran a lot more on faith then, too.  For years, even before I had tenure, I didn't get a letter saying you're appointed for next year.  The dean might call up and say well, we're going to give you a raise of two hundred bucks or something like that.  Everything was by verbal contract.  I hired Suomi by verbal contract, there was no letter.  Called him up and said, "The dean has approved it, do you accept?"  "Ya sure, okay, we'll see you on such and such day."  "I'll drive down to Chicago and drive you up," is what I said.  Everything was by verbal contract.  I hired [Eberhard] Wahl and [Heinz] Lettau by verbal contract when I was chairman of the department.  They didn't tell me you're appointed for next year or anything like that.  Now, every year I get a nice letter saying all very legal what your salary will be the following year and I've written hundreds of those letters myself.  But not in the olden days.  Sorry, I (noise) use your hands too much to talk with.
LS:  	The Geography Department must have been rather put out at having this new department formed.
RB: 	I suppose so.  Not only that, but they gave us two rooms in Science Hall.  Two rooms:  one for a laboratory and one for an office.
LS:  	"They" meaning Geography or Mark Ingraham?
RB:  	Geography didn't.  Mark Ingram said you will have some space.
LS:  	But did Geography Department members come up to you and accuse you of empire building?
RB:  	No, no, no, no, no, no.
LS:  	They didn't?
RB:  	I think they knew what was going on.  It was quite friendly.  I'd still go to the Geography coffee klatches, where they were morning coffee.  I knew all the Geography graduate students--some of them minored in Meteorology.  
LS:  	So the department didn't mind?
RB:  	By and large, no.  They didn't have much to say to Trewartha, but then he didn't go to coffee klatches anyhow.  You know, that was a little--
01:14:34
LS:  	You said you got together with people in Agriculture and Engineering.  How did that happen?
RB:  	Well, I don't know exactly how it happened, but it sort of turned out in the first year I was here that I got to talking to people like Jim Dickson and Arno Lenz about some of their problems in agricultural and hydrological meteorology, and sort of whether it was a formal committee in Physical Sciences Division, Ag School, who knows what?  I don't know.  It was sort of an ad hoc committee, I think it was, of--there was another guy too, I think it was an agricultural economist but I can't remember his name.  But largely Jim Dickson and Arno Lenz and Bob Muckenhirn and a few people like that were the ones that were interested and I'd been talking to about this kind of problem.  I got some funds to bring Suomi up here at my suggestion to talk about some of the instrumentation problems.  I remember he brought up some kind of device he'd made and we went out in a cornfield and we were sort of playing with it out there and it was very impressive and so on.  So, that's how I got to know those people out there was in this discussion of how we might make meteorology fit into serving these broader interests.  I'm sure that they somehow had conveyed to Ingram the fact that we needed to have more people, and particularly somebody in instrumentation, and that that's one of the reasons that he said sure, go ahead and hire Soumi.
01:17:08
LS:  	You said the other day that you went into some kind of limnology, not because you and Suomi were in the same--
RB:  	Well, when the department started--this is another thing that certainly came from the ad hoc committee as sweetening for him to get here--the Graduate School gave him $12,000 of research support:  summer salary, which wasn't a very large part of the $12,000, and some research support to work on agricultural meteorology.  Naturally to make things go, you know:  how many hands do you have?  Suomi and me and an hourly student secretary--who later married my wife's cousin, because he was visiting here and didn't have a date so we got him a date with her and he married her--he's a professor at Temple.  So, an hourly secretary and Verner Suomi and me and one graduate student by the name of Charley Thorngate and one undergraduate, now dead, who was a geographer who ended up at Northern Illinois.  That was our first bachelor's degree in meteorology, Jack Villmow.  We didn't have a graduate program at that point, so I encouraged him to go and study climatology under Trewartha for his Ph.D., which he did.  He was our first undergraduate major, and our first graduate student was this guy Bill Thorngate who got a master's degree and then went to work for Dupont.  
	We were working out in the area that is now Lot 60--where parking lot 60 is?  That was cornfield.  Hundred and thirty acres of cornfield that had been in corn continuously since about 1890.
LS:  	I think you described this.
RB:  	Well, I'd worked out there with Verner, and how many hands did you have available?  So, we were working together, but when it came down to the question of ideas, hypotheses, gimmicks of one kind or another to make the field experiment go, then there came a clash of personalities and it wasn't very pleasant.  So, when Art Hasler came to see me and said, "We're getting together a Lakes and Streams Studies Committee to study Lake Mendota, do you suppose you could do anything on the physical limnology of the lake?" having taught oceanology, I thought the lake is simple by comparison, I said sure, so I got out of working on the marsh farm and started doing studies on the lake.  For the next ten years we did a lot of physical limnology.
LS:  	So you're saying that you two were at loggerheads, then, you and Soumi?  And went on being so?
RB:  	For a while.  Then there was a while, which goes up to the present time, when we actually became pretty good friends--you know we've been next-door neighbors since 1949.  We bought a piece of land in 1948 and flipped a coin to see who got which half of it, and then 1950-51 we built houses on it.  We've been next-door neighbors and eventually I discovered that the only way we could get along is for us not to discuss business, not discuss science--discuss the department all we want to, but not science because that didn't work.  So, we have sort of hit upon a way to get along of pulling together for the department but never discussing science between the two of us.
LS:  	What were your differences?
RB:  	I even hate to talk about it, because I'm sure you'd get a different story if you talk to him.  But memories are different.  One of our early graduate students was Chuck Stearns--Professor Stearns--whose office is right down there at the end of the hall.   He remembers this because he did his master's degree with me and then his Ph.D. with Soumi:  the master's degree on a physical limnology problem and then his Ph.D. on something else--I can't even remember what it was--he did with Soumi.  In a microclimatology class one day I was talking about why a bridge was a different temperature on the top and on the bottom of the bridge.  It was in a textbook that this was an observational fact, and I was explaining why it was to a class which was about five people.  One of them was a guy name of Pete Kuhn, one of our graduate students, and I said, "You know, you could use that to measure radiation.  If you measure the temperature difference and look in a handbook to get the conductivity of wood, you can calculate the radiational ________ from the top of it.  Pete, why don't you try it"--Pete Kuehn.  So he put a 2 by 6 on a couple of sawhorses out at his house, which was out by Lake Kegonsa, and measured the temperature on the top and the bottom and calculated it, and it came out a very realistic number.  Except every time the wind picked up it didn't work.  
	One day--it was all very close, you know, in those two rooms down there on the second floor of Science Hall--Soumi said, "Hey, I found an interesting thing today:  found out that polyethylene is transparent to infrared radiation."  And I said, "Aha.  If we put a sheet of polyethylene over the top of that log and over the bottom, not touching it, then the wind won't touch it and we can still measure the radiation."  That's been patented now, by Soumi.  Then there was another kind of radiometer, where the whole thing is painted black except two little white bands which are used in opposition, and it takes out the fact that it isn't perfectly black and makes it act as though it is perfectly black.  And that's patented.  But I first used it.  Chuck Stearns says he has a picture of me using one of the radiometers earlier than the time the patent was applied for by Soumi. 
	So that's sort of a sore point, because it was from that radiometer to applying the same principles on a satellite that got him into satellite meteorology and then, you know, that was the take-off point for his career, and I have a feeling--I had a feeling--that I sort of got kicked in the mouth for trying to be helpful.  So, it's sort of a sore point.  But, we managed to work together for the department, even though we didn't get along very well with each other for a long time.  Now we get along very well because we both learned that you don't talk science with the other one, or at least I don't.  We can be good neighbors and fight for a common cause, and I think Verner agrees that we are pulling for the same cause and maybe by now has forgotten that we had some rather harsh words at one time.  I hope.  It's not the proudest moment in my life that I can recall, these arguments that Verner and I had.  It wasn't fun.  Didn't want to fight, just wanted to get a job done.  So we have deliberately gone different routes since about 1950.  One of the ways that I managed to do that and still be able to do something without being in competition was by working on physical limnology.  I've been working on climate.
LS:  	So it wasn't that you disagreed on how you went about work or on findings, but it was specific use of them, really?
RB:  	Personal kinds of things.  
01:29:18	End of Tape 2, Side 1; begin Side 2
LS:  	Your story about your son in Sicily I think we lost.  
RB:  	You think that's worth recording?
LS:  	Not necessarily.
RB:  	Let's skip it then.
LS:  	Alright.  I've been asking you questions and I'm about to turn to the history of IES, which presumably doesn't begin until the end of the '50s, and I realize you were engaged in various research projects during the '50s, getting grants.  Say what you'd like to about that period.
RB:  	Well, actually along in the same time I was working on the limnological things.  We went to an American Meteorological Society meeting in Washington.  Drove down, Suomi and me and a geology student who wanted a ride to Washington, so we gave him a ride--an Indian Muslim Geology student I got to know because I was frequently a minor professor for geologists in those days.  In the early days of meteorology I could understand the problems they were working on, so I worked with them a lot and I got to know a lot of the geology students and I knew a lot of Geography students, too.  It's sort of fun looking around the state and around the university and seeing some of these old timers, you know.  I remember the Geography librarian took a course from me once. 
LS:  	Miriam Kerndt.
RB:  	Miriam Kerndt took a course from me once; I remember a paper that she wrote that was sort of fun.  Gene Musolf in Geography up in the Marathon County Center was one of the graduate students I sort of hobnobbed with over there in Science Hall.  One of the vice presidents of the university was one of those students.  You still see them here and there around, it's sort of fun.  My first undergraduate advisee was Randall Sale, who became a professor of cartography here and is now retired, but I was his advisor when he arrived here as a freshman right after the war.  That's sort of fun, old timers like that.
	But on this trip to Washington I ran across a very skinny, quiet fellow standing there sort of out of all the discussion and I happened to notice his name tag and recognized it as being the author of a paper I'd read in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society about singularities in the atmosphere.  These are times when regularly year after year there's a tendency for something to happen, like the January thaw.  I saw this name, Eberhard Wahl, so I walked up to him and introduced myself and said that I'd been looking at some climatological data from Wisconsin and I thought I could see it in our local data, too.  He was sort of pleased to have somebody talk to him and I was pleased to have somebody to talk to.  It ended up that he was working for the Air Force in Cambridge, Massachusetts:  a German, he'd been brought over on something called "Operation Paperclip," without any visa or anything, after the war.  You know, grabbing German scientists and all that--like von Braun and the rockets and all that.  A lot of that went on in other fields, too.  Wahl was one of these people.
	So, I got acquainted with him and before long he was the project monitor on a contract that I had with the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory on studying singularities in the climate.  A little bit later, as the department was starting to grow, we got Professor Wahl to come to the University of Wisconsin and join our staff in the Meteorology Department--he retired last year.  Starting with that trip to Washington and meeting this shy fellow who became one of our faculty here.  He was the university's resident representative in the Freiburg German exchange--you know, year in Germany program--the first scientist after having linguists as representatives all the time.  He knew German, but he also knew science.  He's retired now.  That's where that one came from.  That gave me an opportunity, you see, to have some research funds that I could do some research:  I didn't have to compete at all with what Werner was doing or anybody else, for that matter.
LS:  	What made you go to the Cambridge--
RB:  	Oh, didn't go there.  Went to Washington.
LS:  	But you had--(reading?) Physics Research Director to the Air Force Cambridge Research Center.  You had grants from there?
RB:  	No, not up to that time.  Not until after I'd met Wahl.
LS:  	So it was because of him that you did go there?
RB:  	It was through him that we got the grant, because he was in charge of this certain sort of material.  That went on for a few years like that, so that made it possible to do some research and one of the students I had working on that project was a kid by the name of Lyle Horn, who'd been in World War II but had been ill and got a late start in school.  He was a graduate student--he'd been a weather observer, I think, during World War II, so after he got out of the hospital he came to graduate school.  Got his Ph.D. under my direction and he's now a member of the faculty in this department.  
	But he wasn't my first graduate student.  My first graduate student was on the limnological work.  As soon as I started working on the limnological stuff, this got me in touch with a lot of students who were interested in that thing, so the first one was a joint Ph.D. between Hasler and me.  This was a guy named Bob Radotsky, who was a professor of meteorology here and headed our Sea Grant program.  So Radotsky was the first, Horn was either second or third, and the third one was a guy by the name of John Dutton, whose father was the U.S. Geological Survey geologist here in Madison for years and years.  John Dutton is now the Dean of the College of Mineral and Natural Sciences, or whatever it's called, at Penn State.  One of Lyle Horn's graduate students, Don Johnson, is a professor of meteorology here at Wisconsin.
01:38:44
LS:  	Are you an inbred department?
RB:  	Partly, but it's almost like two departments anyhow.  Don Johnson and I--he's my doctor-grandson, but we're as different as night and day in the way we do things.  Lyle Horn is not like either one of us.  Chuck Stearns, who was another one of our Ph.D.'s, does things that are not like what anybody else in the department does.
	Well, that switch from limnological things to climatic things was made possible by the work supported by the Air Force.  There is one rather interesting kind of a flashback that I should tell you about, though.  Nineteen fifty-five-'56, when I was feeling the department really isn't going very hard, I'm not very happy with things, Werner and I aren't getting along very well together--I wanted to be an archeologist.  You know?  What am I doing all of this stuff?  So I thought I'm going to see if I can't get myself a job at the University of Arizona working in their new Atmospheric Science program and with the archaeologists down there.  They offered me the job and I said fine, I'll take it.  I said I want to work with the archaeologists, I want to get into this area that I've always wanted to get into.
	I went down there.  The president of the university--I think it was Connie Elvehjem at the time--'56, when was Connie president?
LS:  	Oh, you mean here?  No, it wasn't.  He became president in '58, so it was Fred.  Elvehjem was head of the Graduate School--I mean director, dean.
RB:  	Ah, that's where he was, he was head of the Graduate School.  I was talking to him and he said, "Don't resign, take a leave of absence.  It won't cost you anything and it's better if you change your mind."  Ingram said the same thing.  So I said, "Okay.  I intend to go permanently, but I'll take a leave of absence."  Glad I did.  It wasn't more than a few months down there that I realized I had made an enormous mistake, that I had already become accustomed to a great university and I was not going to ever adjust to a third-rate university.  It was clearly a desert intellectually.  No way was I ever going to adjust to that and I was a very unhappy guy.  Finally when I decided, "Franny, we're going home," then, she said, I became livable again.  (Laughs)  So, we did come home.  Came back in '57--nine months was enough.  Hadn't been able to sell our house here so we moved right back into it.  Got a little raise in pay--full professor.  That had been offered to me before I went, to get me to stay.  
01:43:05
RB:	But an interesting thing had happened about that time.  One of the Geography graduate students that I had gotten well acquainted with in the early days was a guy name of Walt Bailey.  He never got his Ph.D. but he had been a graduate student and he took a job with the Office of Naval Research.  By about 1958 he had become sort of the number two man in the Office of Naval Research, Geography Branch.  So he got me appointed to the National Academy Committee on Geography.  No Wisconsin geographer had ever been on that committee before, and here I was on that committee.  I got to meet all of the great geographers in the country, from all over the country, from being on the committee three years and then a renewal and I was the Chairman of the National Academy Committee on Geography--the only one from Wisconsin ever to have been on the committee, much less its chair.  That was a real sticky thorn under the saddle blanket back here.
LS:  	Since you weren't in the Geography Department.
RB:  	Anymore, no.  But it was an interesting experience and a very important experience, and it's the thing that got me appointed to a committee called Committee on Interdisciplinary Problems.  I told you about that one, I guess.
LS:  	You mentioned the port in Connecticut.
RB:  	Well, they were talking about interdisciplinary problems and they really couldn't talk to each other.  The committee was never quite understanding what the other ones were saying because they really didn't talk in "human-ese" or "science-ese" or "social-ese" or whatever, and it didn't come through loud and clear what they were trying to say across these divisional boundaries.  That's what gave rise to the University Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies that I told you about--going to the Chancellor and saying, "Look, we're failing somehow, we're not making this dialogue between the humanities and the sciences possible by getting people to deal with those problems."  And Harrington agreed.
LS:  	When you say going to the Chancellor, you mean going to the President?
RB:  	President.  At that time there wasn't any Chancellor. 
LS:  	Hadn't Van Potter already formed his group earlier?
RB:  	No, it was an informal little discussion group--
LS:  	That's what I mean.
RB:  	--but when the University Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies was set up, Harrington said, "You set it up but be sure you get Van Potter in because he's been talking about this kind of thing and is very interested in it."  I said fine.  So, the official university action, rather than an ad hoc, "Let's get together Friday evenings and talk about it" kind of thing, was this committee.
LS: 	 And you hadn't been a member of that previous group?
RB:  	No.
LS:  	Did you know about it?
RB:  	No, not until Harrington told me about it.  So I called up Van Potter and said, "We'd better get together and talk."  That's where it started.
LS:  	What was his reaction?
RB:  	Fine, fine.  You know, "Fine."  So, we met for years--Jim Watrous and Van Potter and Erwin Hiebert and Jim McCamy and me.  Then later we expanded into other things, other people.
LS:  	Ferris?
RB:  	He was a later addition.
LS:  	Was Jim Crow on it for a while?  
RB:  	No.
LS:  	No?  That's something else then.  And Rohlich wasn't in it at that time?
RB:  	No.  Rohlich was in this Lakes and Streams thing, where I really got to know Gerry Rohlich.  When the Water Resources Management program was being set up I was on that committee, which was led by Rohlich.
LS:  	The names I'm reading were Van Potter's group, I guess.  I have a list of names.  Siegfried and Watrous and his “Future of Man.”
RB:  	Yes, Bob Siegfried.  That was a sort of informal group.
LS:  	Yes, I know, but yours was an official university committee.
RB:  	Later, van Potter became the chairman of it because I was getting involved in the Institute for Environmental Studies.  Then Van said there's no point in the committee continuing because we now have the Institute that's doing that.  So, that's when the committee ended finally.
01:49:14
LS:  	How--this 1962 committee--were you wanting to set up the Institute?  Was that in your minds already or were you just-- 
RB:  	An Institute or some kind of official teaching operation which would teach people how to communicate between the humanities and the scientists was what we were talking about.  Some way to develop a dialogue across the divisions of the campus was what we were talking about, but with time it became clear that the greatest potential for pulling off anything was in the environmental area because there were already a lot of people trying to do it.  That's why it switched over to that, but the original idea was quite general, you know:  how do we relate humanities and sciences?  
LS:  	Who were the most effective members of the committee?
RB:  	Van Potter was.  Jim McCamy did an awful lot.  Watrous sort of kept us on the straight and narrow on one aspect of the humanities.  Erwin Hiebert until he left was always a good stick on it.  But the intellectual impact, the real ideas, didn't come as much from Hiebert and McCamy as they did from Watrous and Potter and me.  I think we sort of drove the thing.  The others still contributed a lot but I don't they drove it as hard.  Those were exciting years.  Those were exciting guys, at their height.  They were all at the peak of their powers at that time.
01:51:50
LS:  	Several things are happening:  there's a proposal for an Institute for Integrated Studies in science and the humanities.
RB:  	Proposal?
LS:  	Yes, which may have been to NEH.
RB:  	From whom?
LS:  	(Reading document?)  I'm not sure.  Then later, Watrous proposes to establish a research and instructional program in Environmental Design.  Do you remember about that?
RB:  	Oh yes, Environmental Design.  I didn't know Watrous had suggested that.  A program in Environmental Design did indeed get set up and they had some money and they had a couple of guys; Environmental Design to them meant designing new kinds of chairs.
LS:  	Potter, Lemon, Rohlich were also in on that.  But that was not necessarily connected with your committee.
RB:  	No even slightly.  They had their office out in WARF.  I don't exactly what happened with it, but I was on a committee to look at what shall we do with this Environmental Design group--it was people like Leo Jacobsen that were interested in it, and I can't remember the name of the two guys who were really doing most of the stuff.  The Graduate School had a committee to see whether what they were really doing was of graduate calibre or not and eventually it just sort of "Fffft"--folded up--and they went away and the whole thing collapsed.  There was a little squabbling about where it ought to be stuck, and when nobody could agree where it ought to be stuck they did away with it.  Simple way to avoid a university argument:  instead of assigning it anywhere, kill it.
01:54:04
LS:  	And then there was the Environmental Resources Research and Training Center.  Do you remember that?  That was [Lawrence] Suhm and Lewis were proposing that?
RB:  	Oh yes, Suhm and Lewis.  That's Phil Lewis.  Eventually it got changed to Environmental Awareness Center and when the Institute for Environmental Studies was set up--when it was proposed--Glenn Pound tried a little sneaky back-door trick to head it off.  Remember I told you about the committee that was set up to report to the Chancellor about establishing a program in Environmental Studies that had representatives from each College.
LS:  	That's the 1965--Fleming's--
RB:  	A dean's representative from his administration and from his faculty from each of the Colleges, and I represented the Chancellor as Chairman of the thing.  We recommended the establishment of a College of Environmental Studies.  Unanimously.  I can imagine what Glenn Pound said to his representatives.  He immediately, because he had the authority to do it, set up a School of Natural Resources and hired a dean for it, and then told Fleming, when I turned in the report of the committee, "Oh, you don't have to do that because we've already done it in the College of Agriculture."  
LS:  	Was that somebody that needed--?
RB:  	What?  (Break?  Tape stopped and started?)  To make a long story short, I went back to the committee and said have they actually done what we were proposing? and they said no.  I went back to the Chancellor and said that's not what the committee said, but the Dow Chemical riots sort of made it all passé because he wasn't about to think about it anymore.  Our report got there just at the wrong time.  There's still that division between here's a School of Natural Resources and there's an Institute of Environmental Studies and they really should be all working together and all one thing, but he couldn't back down after he'd done it.
01:56:59	End of First Interview Session

Second Interview Session (April 18, 1986): Tapes 3-4

00:00:00 	Start of Interview [Tape 3, Side 1]
LS:  	Are you all right?  Do you want to say something?
RB:  	Yes.  I was thinking about our last session.
LS:  	Hold on.  I'll just say that this the 18th of April [1986] and the second session of the interview with Reid Bryson, tape three.
00:00:16
RB:  	I was thinking about our conversation last week or whenever it was --it was a week ago, wasn't it?--and I hope that I didn't give the wrong impression about people doing things to me along the line because I don't think anybody was trying to do me in deliberately.  I don't have that feeling, you know.  At the time it was hard to take but after years it--I think it's because Wisconsin is a very competitive place.  You have to have a very competitive sort of attitude to make it on the faculty of this University.  If you just sit back, you know, you get ignored and because you're not out there competing-- (Interruption.  Tape stopped and started)  Okay, Charley.  Undergrad student.  Everybody's working real hard and when you're working closely and talking to each other all the time, it's not always obvious where ideas come from.  You might think, "Gee, I had a great idea yesterday," and whether it came out of a conversation or some quiet thinking on your own is sort of hard, especially when you're driving to make a name for yourself.  
	So, I hope I didn't give the impression that anybody had deliberately done anything bad to me.  I'm sure that Trewartha, for example, thought that he was absolutely in the right, that a person who didn't rely upon the literature as much as he did certainly couldn't be a very good scientist.  There's a personality difference:  if it isn't written down in the literature, why, it isn't right, you know.  But I've always been in a field where there isn't any literature yet, so that just didn't cut any ice with me.  I'm sure he thought he was doing the right thing and I'm sure I thought I was doing the right thing, and so when he told me I better go somewhere else it was his interpretation of the university, not that he was really trying to do me in.  He's always been a gentleman, you know, really a gentleman.  He was until he died, a real gentleman and just as pleasant as can be, but his idea of what was right and mine were two different things.  The same with Soumi.  We worked so close together and we car pooled back and forth from home--you know, talk all the way home, talk all the way back, talk after we're home out in the yard working or something.  It's hard to tell where ideas do come from under those circumstances.  So, I just wanted to make it clear that I didn't have any feeling that "Gee, there were people in the university that were evil."  There may be, but not the ones I talked about.
LS:  	I don't think you conveyed that.
RB:  	Good, because I wouldn't want to.
LS:  	You may want to as we go into IES, but—
RB:  	You mean about the occasional "nasty little bastard"?
LS:  	Yes.
RB:  	Yes, there's a few of those around--bound to be in a collection of 2,000, especially as I said in a competitive place where people fight to the top, literally.  We like to think that the University is a college of scholars and a lot of collegiality and all that, but it's not that gentlemanly.  It's a little more like the Senate:  "The Honorable Senator from--" and that's not what you really mean at all.  You know, polite on the surface but underneath you're ready to knife him any time.  The University is a pretty competitive place.
LS: 	 Is this particularly true of the Meteorology Department, do you think?   
RB:  	Well, I've been in Geology, Geography, Meteorology, Environmental Studies and have many friends in other departments, and I don't think it's only in Meteorology because I've seen it other places too.  It's certainly the case in Geography just as much as in Meteorology, and those are the two I know best of the standard disciplinary departments.  IES is a horse of a different color but it still has a certain element of competitiveness.  I think the whole University does.  You know, many of our presidents have said along the way that they couldn't understand how Wisconsin could be a world-class university supported by one of the poorer states with a population of only four and a half million, with the resources behind it.  How did it get to be a Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Berkeley-caliber school?  
	One way to look at it is that the professors here have historically overproduced, really produced more than you'd expect them to under the circumstances.  Well, how come they overproduce?  Part of it is that it's a little competitive, keeps them on their toes and going.  But also, I would be the last to ever say that the academic freedom idea weren't important.  Give you an example of that, and I think this is as good a place as any to put it in.
	At one time I had a member of the National Academy Committee on Atmospheric Sciences come into this office and sit across this table from me and say, "We on the committee want you to shut up."  I said, "What have I said that has offended you?"  He said, "Oh, you know what you've said."  I said, "No, I'm not sure what you're talking about.  I know what I've said in my written, refereed, published papers and I know what reporters have said that I said, but what is it that's bothering you?"  He says, "We don't like the fact that you talk to reporters," and after ascertaining that he had never even read one of my published papers I said, "Now, look, you're a scientist, you ought to know that the newspaper is a bad place to get facts about scientific work.  If I've said anything in my published papers that you disagree with, the refereed papers, then find it and let me know, because they have been refereed by peers.  But when it comes to talking to reporters you, being from a different place, probably don't realize that here at the University of Wisconsin we believe in academic freedom and we believe that we are servants of the people of the state that pay us, and if a reporter from this state calls me up and says, 'Tell me about your research,' being an employee of the people of Wisconsin I'm going to answer him.  That is our duty here.  Maybe not for you, so get lost."
LS:  	I trust he did?
RB:  	He did.  It's the last I've heard of it.  Of course they haven't forgotten it either--you know, sort of a maverick.
00:08:36
LS:  	I've been going through the IES files just in the Chancellor's papers in the Archives, made a lot of notes.  It seemed to me maybe the easy way to do this is to just go along and ask you about various things that came up and in the process maybe we can--the picture that will emerge will be a more or less--
RB:  	Coherent?
LS:  	--complete one, or at least your version and not a--
RB:  	Or incoherent?
LS:  	Coherent, I hope.
RB:  	Did you read the little thing I wrote on the 125th anniversary of the—of the--
LS:  	In Al Bolt's book?
RB:  	Yes, the 125th anniversary--
LS:  	I have read it but I haven't read it recently.
RB:  	Well, that is a summary of the early days in a way, of the thinking behind it, not the politics.
00:09:35
LS:  	You mentioned the School of Natural Resources last time, but I'm starting in 1965 when you're talking about a university for professors.
RB:  	Right.
LS:  	Which you wrote about and it's clear what you were talking about, but did you seriously expect that such a thing could happen?
RB:  	Oh, I've always been an optimistic dreamer.  Yes.  If you take seriously the idea of repairing the rift of many, many, many decades, maybe even a century, between let's say sciences and humanities--
LS:  	Well, I'm not questioning the need for it, I meant—
RB:  	No, no.  But I really thought that if the president of the University was serious he was going to take us seriously, and I assumed that we would have to retrain some professors because they had all been brought up in individual disciplines and that a small program of training scientists to read and talk humanities and training humanists to read and talk science wouldn't be such a big enterprise.  At that time, you know, it was a little different fiscally than today.  Today no, no way because there'd have to be release time for this purpose.  But in those days the University was sort of growing and, you know, very expansive and it was--
LS:  	So it was a sort of a large-scale version of the Committee on the Future of Man, is that it?
RB:  	Of course, only more systematic, too.  Yes.
LS:  	And did you ever actually talk to--it was Fleming that this was addressed to.
RB:  	No, but we had discussed it earlier with Clodius and Harrington, I think.  Maybe not Clodius.
LS:  	You had discussed this university of professors?
RB:  	The idea, yes.
LS:  	What did they say about it?
RB:  	They said be specific:  exactly what are you going to do?  So we went back and started trying to come up with a specific program.  That's when we got the idea that maybe there was a place to start in Environmental Studies, because I put together a questionnaire and sent it to all the faculty to see what their interest in interdisciplinary studies was.  You know, the files of the Interdisciplinary Studies Committee are around, too.
LS:  	Of that committee or of the 1965 committee?
RB:  	No, from '62 on.  Those files are around.  In fact, somebody went through and did a sort of summary of them and Emily Earley knows where that is.
LS:  	Yes, now that you mention it, I went through them when I was interviewing Van Potter but I didn't look through them again.
RB:  	I don't know that Van has ever seen that summary that was done because it was only done a couple of years ago, but some girl was interested in it and, working with Emily, she did a summary of it.  And I know we have some of the tapes of some of the lectures.
LS:  	Yes, I think actually Emily turned those over to the Archives, perhaps.
RB:  	I think there are some that are not in the Archives because there was one that I was hoping would be transcribed, and that was a lecture by Van Potter on the primary concepts of the biological sciences at large.  Magnificent speech, and really it should be transcribed.
LS:  	So, this wasn't just your idea, it was the committee's?  You all worked on it?
RB:  	Oh, no.  We met almost every seek for several hours, so we really spent a lot of time together.  We had lunch together frequently.  It was just a very close-knit group for quite a while there.
LS:  	Were Willard Hurst and Merle Curti involved at this stage?
RB:  	Not ever.
LS:  	Well, they were in Van Potter's committee.
RB:  	Right, but that was an ad hoc committee, apparently.
LS:  	Yes.  So you're talking about the Madison campus official Committee on Environmental Studies?
RB:  	The Madison campus official Committee.  At first was just the five:  Van and me, Jim Watrous, Jim McCamy, Erwin Hiebert.  
LS:  	So, how did Fleming respond to the--?
RB:  	When Fleming came in I figured we had to sort of brief him all over on where we were trying to go.
LS:  	Did you go and talk to him?
RB:  	Oh yes.  An easy man to talk to.  But of course after we had gone through this business of saying well, a specific plan for a university for professors is difficult, to come up with a really clear-cut plan, because we ourselves hadn't put the--even though we worked hours and hours and hours hadn't put enough time into it--we'd spent a very long period of time just learning from each other how to talk the other person's language.  It was a wonderful experience for the five of us.  We were learning new things all the time.  So, knowing what a rewarding experience it was, I thought "Gee, the faculty of this university ought to be delighted to go through the same experience we went through."
LS:  	You know, we're not talking about the same committee, because this Madison campus Special 	Committee has two faculty members appointed by each dean on it, so it's a big committee.
RB:  	Right.  That's a different committee.  The Madison campus Special Committee on Environmental Studies and the Madison campus Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies and the Future of Man were two different things.  The former derived from the other by the thought process I told you about.
LS:  	But still, the Committee on the Future of Man is related to the Van Potter committee that started off in 1962?
RB:  	Only in that the Van Potter group, committee, supper club--whatever you want to call it--brought to the chancellor's or president's attention that Van was interested in this problem.  The only connection I ever had with that group was with the President saying you've got to get Van Potter involved because he has been thinking about this for some time.  I never did know who the whole group was myself that he had been discussing it with.  So, they're related in that respect but there's no sort of successor committee relationship.
LS:  	And I didn't write down the membership of the Madison campus Special Committee but you must have been on it, you were on that, presumably.  Yes?
RB:  	The Madison campus Special Committee on Environmental Studies.
LS:  	Yes, that one.
RB: 	 I represented--I guess, by then it was the chancellor--and the deans appointed from their colleges, and generally speaking they appointed then an administrator and a faculty member.  I think it was [Robert] Hougas and Phil Lewis from Ag, and it was like that--that kind of combination.  My position was as chairman appointed to represent the chancellor.
LS:  	Did that committee actually accomplish anything?
RB:  	Yes.  That committee is the one that came up with a statement, which was actually written by Clay Schoenfeld:  he and I sat one day and talked about summarizing what the discussion had been, and then he actually wrote the thing and took it back to the committee and they approved it.  You'll see that statement excerpted in the Joe Wilson report to Ed Young.  There's sections taken out of--there are Clay's words.
LS:  	Is this On the Purpose of the University?  Is that what you mean?
RB:  	No.
LS:  	That's something else?
RB:  	That's something else.  That came out of the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies and the Future of Man.  Not out of the other one.
LS: 	 Yes, that’s right. Because there had been a regent committee to restate the purpose or the function of the University.  We agreed we didn't like it very well, so Van Potter actually drew up the first draft of that Statement on the Purpose and Function of the University and we modified it a little bit in the committee.  Then we got it on the faculty agenda, and believe it or not it was passed by the faculty unanimously.  I doubt if they ever read it--more than the handful that were at the meeting and then only part of them--but it was passed unanimously.  I think they got a pig in a poke because they weren't really--I don't think the faculty of this University--and it's still valid, it hasn't been rescinded.  But ask anybody in the University whether it is a function of the University to foster studies which will guarantee the future, you know, that kind of thing:  "Hm?  What?  No, we're supposed to be scholars."  Discover, examine, convey values and so on.  It was a great statement.  I think it still is.
00:20:06
LS:  	How important was the notion of having the new campus?  I know that was taken fairly seriously--yes, over on the west side--because you were hoping that that would be set up as the College of Environmental Studies.
RB:  	Yes.  That whole idea was in this very expansionist period, you know.  Harrington was beginning to talk about Madison and Milwaukee and Green Bay and Parkside and to hell with the rest of them, and things were sort of, you know, burgeoning.  First there was talk about being on the west side of the campus and then, no, maybe have an undergraduate college out where the new Research Park is developing.  Phil Lewis always was suggesting it ought to be in Spring Green and develop a rail corridor between them. Gunnar Johansen thought that was a "magnificent idea:  we'll call it the Leonardo Institute."  
	So, all these people get involved in there at one time or another simply because they were brought on as consultants to the committee or we invited them in for a particular discussion or we had lunch with them, you know.  A lot of people other than the five of us were involved in it.  We even brought in consultants from various other places, too.  A guy named Platt--I think he was from Harvard--the political science of science, the politics of science, was his field.  Then the famous anthropologist from Pennsylvania, a great writer, too--I can't remember his name right now.  Oh, and the former socialist mayor of Milwaukee, because he was a very bright guy, he had a lot of things to say to us that were sort of, I think, important about the general question of how we relate values to actualities.  A very interesting guy to talk to.  Now, where were we?
LS:  	Where were--I just--
RB:  	You know, if you ever ask me a question you always get more answer than you want.  Or maybe an answer to a question you didn't want to ask.
LS:  	Well then, what was the other committee doing all this time?  Your Committee on the Future of Man and the five of you were sitting around talking about values and--
RB:  	And science.
LS:  	--and science, but you're not making any specific plans for--
RB:  	We were trying to.
00:23:12
LS:  	But what was the other committee doing?
RB:  	Which other committee?
LS:  	The Madison Special Committee on Environmental Studies, appointed by the deans and with you as the chancellor's representative.
RB:  	That took off about, what, '64-'65, after we'd been going several years.
LS:  	Sixty-five, yes.
RB:  	And it went parallel to it then.  It didn't replace--
LS:  	But it was quite a different committee?
RB:  	It was entirely different, because when we said Environmental Studies is probably the best bet for getting interdisciplinary dialogue going, the Committee on the Future of Man continued but the other committee --I went to the chancellor and he set this other committee to come up with a specific plan of action.  At that point it diverged, but the other one continued until IES was set up, about '69-'70.
LS:  	But it's kind of a dreamy committee?
RB:  	Well, it got dreamier and dreamier as time went on.
LS:  	Whereas this other committee was presumably plowing along?
RB:  	Well, having representatives from the deans and being concerned with action items, we didn't meet every week for two hours, you know.  We had small group sessions on that Environmental Studies-Madison campus Special Committee, but it met occasionally.  Then we were sort of going toward an action, and we finally reached a document that we all agreed to and I took it to Fleming and said here is our plan.  It was the same week as the Dow Chemical riots.
LS:  	But a lot had happened before that, because the School for Natural Resources was set up in 1966.
RB:  	That's exactly--
LS:  	It must have created a bit of a flap in that committee?
RB:  	That's when the riots started--'66.
LS:  	Anyway, the School for Natural Resources was started.  We'll leave the riots out for the time being.
RB:  	Right, but if you check on the time you'll see that the completion of our report--not its submission to the chancellor but the adoption of the report by the committee--came first.  Then the School of Natural Resources was set up, in the interim between when that thing was passed by the committee and when I actually got a letter written and turned in to the chancellor, because so far as I remember the committee did not know anything about the School of Natural Resources at the time they took the action.
LS:  	You didn't, even though Hougas was on the--?
RB:  	That's right.
LS:  	How could that be?
RB:  	It might not have happened until after that.  It might have happened when there appeared to be a threat.  So the best thing to do is quick set up a School of Natural Resources.  By the time I took the letter to Fleming, he said yes, but I've got this letter here--I don't know if it was the same day or next week or something--from Pound that says that he's already preempted that action by setting up--have you seen that letter?  It actually says we don't have to do that because I've already done it. I went back to the committee and they said it wasn't really what we had in mind.  
	There is another letter in there, and it may be in the IES files if not anywhere else--in fact I'm sure it is--where Pound says he has no objection later on, as Environmental Studies matures, to turn over or terminate the School of Natural Resources if it's no longer needed.
LS:  	Did he say to terminate it?
RB:  	Well, implied.  But, you know, a real politician around here knows that, as [Frederick] Ken[neth] Hare from Toronto says, "Nothing good is ever done for the first or last time at a university."  So, you know, we still have a Department of Poultry Science in Agriculture but chickens aren't raised on the farm anymore, they're grown in factories.  It's surprising that we don't have a Department of Buggy Whip Design.  You just don't turn things off. 
	One of my contributions to this university of which I'm proud is that I once terminated something.  There used to be a Division of Statistics.  Many years ago there was also a Division of Earth Sciences, as well as Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Biological Sciences--Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Social Sciences--there are four Divisions?  Years ago there was an Earth Sciences Division.  Back twenty-five years ago or so--I don't know the exact dates--there was a Statistics Division, too, because there was no Department of Statistics, and I was a member of the Statistics Division and I was elected Chairman of the Statistics Division and I didn't see that there was any point because we now in that interim had set up a Department of Statistics.  Why do we need a Statistics Division?  The by-laws of the committee were that they had to meet at least so often and elect new chairmen and so on, so I just let it go for about three years.  Didn't call a meeting, didn't do anything, and at the end of three years I sent a letter to each member of the divisional committee saying, "Have you noticed that we haven't met for three years?  This to me is pretty good evidence that we don't really need a divisional committee.  If you don't reply, I will assume that you agree with me."  There was only one reply that said I agree with you but we ought to get together and talk about it.  The majority was that we didn't need it so I told the administration what had happened and it ended. 
00:30:27	End Tape 3, Side 1; begin side 2
RB:  	Well, you know where we are.  I'm not sure I do.   
LS:  	You were busy with your research all this time, weren't you?  You were doing things with the riddle of the Rajasthan Desert.  How much a proportion of your time were you thinking about Environmental Studies?  How important a part did it play in your life then?
RB:  	Well, what was I doing sitting on airplanes going to Rajasthan?
LS:  	You're not going to tell me about that because somebody is going to ask you about that, but--
RB:  	No, but what was I doing?
LS:  	Oh, yes.
RB:  	I was thinking about a problem that involved science and people, cultures, history, and environmental studies.  I was studying the--I went to Rajasthan because I looked down on that desert through that dense haze and saw these round patches of bare ground around every village where they had stripped everything and I said hey, you know, there's dust in the air, there's terrible stripping of the surface.  All of that simply says gee, how long has it been like this?  What's the cause?  There's so much haze in the air, so much dust in the air, it has to affect their climate.  Can you do something about it?  
	It was sort of pervasive in a lot of things I did, and in the '60s I was working constantly with Dave Baerreis on archaeology and climate.  We set up the Environmental Archaeology program.  In fact, when Dave got the Fryxell Medal for environmental work in archaeology, at the St. Paul meeting of the Society for American Archaeology some years back, the citation, at Dave's insistence, said Bryson and Barris working together did this.  I was working with Dave all the time, every day practically, on questions of archaeology and history and climate and environment.  It just engulfed my whole life at that time.
00:33:04
LS:  	There was an IES already, then, was there?  Under Rohlich, in the Graduate School?
RB:  	During that time it appeared that there was some money available from some place--
LS:  	HEW.
RB:  	HEW.
LS:  	This is the pilot project in Environmental Sciences, is that it?
RB:  	The pilot project--
LS:  	That John Ross organized.
RB:  	John Ross was the executive secretary and Rohlich was the titular head, and that was a lot fun, too.  Got together--
LS:  	You were involved in that, too?
RB:  	They invited me to be in it.  We got together and discussed a lot of different things, had some really interesting seminars, and then would go to write a proposal to get a lot of money and to channel--Gerry Rohlich was a pretty savvy guy politically and he said we have to have sort of a channel here to guarantee that it's multi-contribution, multi-divisional, multi-disciplinary kind of thing.  I use the word "multi" here deliberately rather than "inter."  So, they set up in the Graduate School the Institute for Environmental Studies, and a lot of the same people were involved on the other committee side, the chancellor-level committee, the one that had reported to Fleming and got nowhere--it went on another year and then I went to the chancellor and said look, maybe it's my personality:  I'm sort of a hard-nosed, driving, martinet-type of character and perhaps we would make more progress if someone else were the chairman.  So, Joe Wilson was appointed chairman.  I was still a member of the committee.  
LS:  	That's in 1968.
RB:  	Yes.
LS:  	That's why--you're not even on the committee.
RB:  	No, I was on the committee.
LS:  	You're not listed at all.
RB:  	Oh, yes I was on the committee.  I was in there plugging every day.
LS:  	How interesting.
RB:  	It may not say so, but I sure as heck was.
LS: 	[reads] Fox, Loucks, Rankin, Smith, Tough, Lewis, Ragotzkie and Runge.
RB:  	The Wilson Committee?
LS:  	Yes.
RB:  	Me too.  (Laughs)  It's dumb.  I was there all the time.
LS:  	All right.  Good.  That's one of the questions I had to ask you.
RB:  	Well, it's a mistake, then.  An oversight someplace.  Or maybe I just walked in and said I'm going to be on this committee--I don't know what happened--but I sure was because I remember all the details of all the hassles we went through.  Joe Wilson, you know, was very careful at getting things stated right and clearly:  for example, in our charter there's a statement that the whole University has a right to benefit from the Institute.  He was the guy that actually suggested we put in there that any professor who wanted to join the Institute--get this now because this is really interesting, can't be done now--any professor who wanted to join the Institute could do so by requesting transfer through the chancellor:  go to the chancellor and request "transfer" to the Institute.
LS:  	What do you mean?
RB:  	Transfer from his own department:  "Take me out of Department X and put me in the Institute."  And it was done once.
LS:  	Who?
RB:  	Werner Suomi.  He got fed up with the Meteorology Department frustrating what he was trying to do, so he went to Ed Young and said take me and my salary out of Meteorology and put me in the Institute for Environmental Studies.  Young called me up and said do you want him and I said sure.  
00:37:37
LS:  	You're talking about later IES.
RB:  	Later, sure.  But I mean--
LS:  	Okay.  I see.  This started even then.
RB:  	That proviso was put in by Joe Wilson, you see.  It was never used except by Suomi about two years later.  Incredible.  You can't that now, there's too many people who can say no.  But there it was.  All you have to do is go to the Chancellor and say "Here I am, take me away to where I belong."  Well, so all that stuff we went through, and then we had some preliminary meetings with Ed Young and he said the politics are getting very messy right now and establishing something new is starting to get very difficult--you know, all these riots and the black stuff and everything that's been going on.  I remember I made the suggestion, and it met with acceptance, which is unusual, that what we do is we take the Institute for Environmental Studies from the Graduate School, so we weren't creating something new, and simply move it out of the Graduate School, move it into the campus in general, reporting directly to the chancellor, and give it the mission that we've defined for this Environmental Studies program.  Rohlich and all the others agreed okay, fine.
LS:  	Why did you want to do that?
RB:  	Because it was an existing unit.  We weren't creating anything new.
LS:  	I mean, why did you want to get it out of the Graduate School?
RB:  	Oh, because we wanted it to report to the chancellor.
LS:  	Why?
RB:  	The Graduate School is for the care and feeding of disciplines, always has been.  This was for the care and feeding of "inter-disciplines."  Who on the campus was responsible for all of it?  The chancellor.  So we wanted it to report to the chancellor so that no dean could say, "I've got higher priorities with this," and move the money.  That was written right into the Wilson report.  We didn't come out and say that's why we wanted to report to the chancellor but the discussions made it very, very clear that the reason was to keep it from being vulnerable to pressures that "Gee whiz, you know, we need four more professors here in Botany, so take the money away from IES and put it in Botany" or we need it in History or wherever.  So, that idea of reporting to the chancellor was because it was seen as interdisciplinary, and the idea of taking it out of the Graduate School was well, there it was and if we really succeeded it would have been rather superfluous--by then the money opportunities had disappeared, there was no longer any money for it and it was very clear than HEW wasn't going to do it.  So, here was this thing in name and we didn't have to create anything new, see?  We're clean:  we didn't make anything new, we just revised an existing program.
LS:  	You had to have a sympathetic chancellor to do that.
RB:  	Yes, but Ed Young was a--
LS:  	He was a sympathetic chancellor.
RB:  	He was a wise old bird.  Give you an idea of how wise an old bird he was, still is.  After one of our meetings of the Wilson committee I got Ragotzkie and Rohlich and Phil Lewis together and I said, "Look, let's give this an even better chance of flying," because we all were really eager to have it go, the committee was a really eager committee, "I will take the Center for Climatic Research out of Meteorology and put it in the Institute because it is interdisciplinary"--you know, we had botanists, we had archaeologists, we had meteorologists and all sorts of people, soils people, working together--"Bob, how about taking the Marine Studies Center and putting it in?"  Okay:  if this goes, we'll do this.  We'll give it a head start in research by taking these existing research things, which together totaled maybe 100 people, and make it the research program of the Institute.  Rohlich was supposed to put the Water Resources Center in and Phil Lewis was going to put in the Environmental Awareness Center.  That's fine said Phil.  That was the agreement among the four of us, that if it were set up we'd give it a head start by putting our research programs into it.  Then Joe Wilson took it to the chancellor, and he said fine. 
LS:  	Did the Graduate School mind losing these units?
RB:  	No, no, no, they didn't mind.  It wasn't going anyhow.  You know, it was just a--
LS:  	No, I mean you losing the Center for Climatic Research.
00:43:11
RB:  	The Graduate School didn't have anything to do with that.  It wasn't in the Graduate School, it was in the Meteorology Department.  There aren't any departments in the Graduate School.  Ed Young then said fine and constituted the committee as a search and screen committee to nominate a director.  We had first suggested that there be a College of Environmental Studies; he said that's impossible politically, so then we came to this "move the Institute" idea.  He said fine but the committee has appointed a search and screen committee to come up with a nomination of a director.  So, we got a bunch of nominations, and I nominated myself.
LS:  	I know you did.  Your letter's in the file.
RB:  	I don't know whether anybody else did or not.
LS:  	Nominate themselves?  Or nominate you?
RB:  	I don't know whether anybody did or not.
LS:  	You weren't one of the top candidates.
RB:  	No, I know that.  In fact, the story I'm about to tell you about how wise Ed Young was--I know that, for example, Rohlich was more popular and Fox certainly, probably, was.  Maybe even Ross.  I don't know who was nominated.  But I thought I could do the job, so I wrote to Ed and said I'm going to nominate myself because I think I can do it.  Ed called me up there and he said, "I'm going to name you director.  You're by far not the most popular choice for director but I think you're the least likely to get shot down."  That's an exact quote, I'll never forget it:  "You're not the most popular candidate but I think you're the least likely to get shot down."
LS:  	What did he mean?
RB:  	He knew that the big job would be survival and it has been, simply surviving the onslaughts of people who didn't want it to succeed.
LS:  	I certainly want to go into that, but Fox, he thought, would have--Fox seems to have been a very--
RB:  	He didn't say who he thought would be better or who the--obviously he didn't think the others would be better.  He didn't say who the other nominees were, even.  He just said, "I'm naming you because you're east likely to get shot down."  
LS:  	You proposed, after yourself, you said Hare would be the very best.
RB: 	That's right.  I thought so.  I still think so, because he went off to Toronto and did exactly what we did here.  But he was a better politician and so he's survived and thriven--thrived?  Which is it?  
LS:  	We'll allow all--
RB:  	He's succeeded very nicely.
LS:  	Throve?
RB:  	Hare would have been the best.  Gee, you even read that letter.
LS:  	Yes, well they're all in there.
RB:  	I'm embarrassed. (Laughs)  Nobody ever accused me of not having an ego.
00:46:55
LS:  	No.  The things that happened before that--there was the Rockefeller exploration.
RB:  	Oooh, dirty politics.  Really dirty politics on that one.  The person who can give you the best information on that actually is Chuck Engman because he was sitting up there watching it happen in the administration.  Rockefeller essentially said we're going to put a big chunk of dough into Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin and there was some maneuvers in administration to snatch it and stick it in the College of Agriculture.  I wasn't privy to all of the details of what was going on, but according to my sources this was largely either Kearl or Clodius, I can't remember which one, but he was trying to divert that into Ag.  They both had Ag backgrounds.  I don't know which one or whether they actually did because I wasn't privy to all of the discussion on that.  But it got to be a big flap and finally Rockefeller said well--as I understand it--we're not going to do anything until you guys make up your mind, get your act together.  
	After a year or so--I forget how long--Ross and Engman and I went to the Rockefeller Foundation and talked to them and they did give us roughly half a million bucks.  That was very nice, you know:  when they send a grant to the university they don't just sort of transfer funds or something, they sent a check.  Here came a check to me with the first payment--quarter million bucks--and it's the only time I ever had a quarter million bucks made out to me, with my name on it.  If nobody'd been watching I could have gone down to the bank and cashed it, right?  It didn't say "For the University," it said "Pay to the Order of Reid A. Bryson" signed by "Comptroller of the Rockefeller Foundation."  That was neat.  I guess there were a couple of other times I had big checks later in my hot little hand.  I walked down the hall one day with a check for $350,000 from an anonymous donor and said, "Dorothy"--Dorothy Kleinfelder--"Look what I've got, and it's made out to me," and I looked and it was gone.  She had it.  (Laughs)  It went, "Ffffft."
LS:  	I have a note here that Stephen Smith got Boyce involved--Boyce was the spokesman for Rockefeller or was doing the investigation for them.  You don't know about that?  This is a candid interview.
RB:  	I doubt it.
LS:  	Oh, you doubt what?
RB:  	That he got him involved.
LS:  	That who got whom involved?
RB:  	That Steve Smith got Boyce involved.
LS:  	Did you know who Boyce was?  
RB:  	Sure.  I'd talked to him.
LS:  	He was a kind of layman for Rockefeller?  I mean, we wasn't actually--
RB:  	He was a consultant.
LS:  	A consultant, yes.  I just wondered if maybe that could account for why money was--
RB:  	May have, but I doubt it.  It was at a higher level than that.
00:50:57
LS:  	And then what was Runge's role in all of this?  I think I mentioned to you last time that he had a meeting at his house where you weren't.
RB:  	I was at a meeting at Runge's house.
LS:  	You were?
RB:  	Oh, not with regard to the Rockefeller Foundation.
LS:  	No, this was just about IES.  Kenneth Hare was there and Engman, Caldwell.
RB:  	Sure, Hare was there.  Hare wouldn’t have have been there without me--we're old buddies, you know.  He was staying with me.  Ken Hare was--I remember that meeting very, very well.
LS:  	What was happening at it?  
RB:  	We were talking about Environmental Studies.  
LS:  	And why did Runge have it?
RB:  	Well, because Runge was a consummate politician.  He was really smooth.  He also had a number of agendas, always, and you never quite knew which agenda he was following at any given point.  It was with an idea that Runge got involved with things like Urban and Regional Planning as a sort of a "bring somebody in to straighten it out," but this was a neat opportunity.  So he got very deeply involved in it and it fit his interests.  It was a smart move to appoint him for that job.  He thought we ought to bring together some high level people and have some conversations about how to do this job.  
	Ken Hare was a very experienced academic statesman:   had been the headmaster of some college in London, been a dean at McGill, been the president of the University of British Columbia and got kicked out by the regents because he talked to the rioters--actually very effective, but they were so far right in British Columbia that they thought that was a terrible thing to even talk to them.  It was a traumatic period for Ken Hare.  We had him down here:  he gave a talk on "How Shall We Treat Environmental Studies."  He was a spellbinder, a tremendous guy--very high now in the Church of Canada now that he's been provost of Trinity College, just retiring this spring.  It was a great paper; in fact, the talk that he gave got written up and published in Science.  
	That was at Runge's house, I was there.  We also had another couple of meetings at Runge's house where the National Guard was there, too--I mean officers of the National Guard--and they were telling us what was going on.  There was a lot of coming and going in that great, huge house of his out there on Brittingham Place, which costs I understand several thousand dollars a year to heat.  
LS:  	Why would he have had such a meeting at his house rather than with the committee?  Wasn't he on the Joe Wilson committee?  
RB:  	I don't remember him being on it.
LS:  	Maybe he wasn't.
RB:  	I don't remember him being on it.  He may have been, but I don't remember.
LS:  	Yes, he was on it.  Was the committee not effective enough to--
RB:  	It would have been Jake Beuscher if he'd still been around because he'd been very active all along and was a lawyer.  Carl Hess was--Carl was involved in all this.  For a number of years after IES was set up and right after, I'd talked to Ed about finances, you know, and he said he'd put Carl Runge  quarter time on IES staff with the idea that someday Urban and Regional Planning, because it is environmental management, would be transferred into IES.  That's why Runge was put on quarter time, in the discussions I had with Ed Young.  Now, whether he remembers it or would even admit it anymore I don't know but this is how I understood the conversation, so Runge was actually carried on our payroll for a number of years at quarter time.
LS:  	But that's getting ahead of the story as to why he would have had the meeting at his house instead 	of in the committee.
RB:  	Well, a good politician, to get himself into a position of power in a committee, volunteers things like that.  If you want to have some kind of a position of influence do something, don't just sit there and wait.  
LS:  	So, it wasn't that he thought he couldn't have the same kind of discussion in the actual committee?
RB:  	It was nice to have a meeting of the committee at his house, hosted by him, with him providing cocktails.  It was nice.  It was nicer than being down in some--
LS:  	You said Jake Beuscher.  What did you bring him up for?   
RB:  	As a lawyer with a lot to say about environment Jake was it.  He was the water lawyer and he'd been on a lot of the other committees that were sort of related to this. 
LS:  	So he was there that night, you mean?
RB:  	I think he was dead by then.
LS:  	Oh, I wondered.
RB:  	Because I don't remember him in any of these late discussions at all, but in the earlier ones Jake Beuscher was always involved, in the Lakes and Streams Study Committee and setting up the Water Resources program.  I guess I was even on the committee that set up the Water Resources program.  Who was Clarenbach?
00:57:44
LS:  	We'll get into that some other time, unless it's germane.
RB:  	No, it's not really.
LS:  	Who was [Patrick] McTaggart-Cowan?
RB:  	Patty D. McTaggart-Cowan was actually the--in Canada they called him McFrog--was the head of the Canadian Weather Service, which is now part of Environment Canada.  Patty later became the provost of that college out in Vancouver that's up on the mountain side--I can't remember the name of it.  He became a college president or whatever.
LS:  	He was one of the people to whom a copy of Hare's letter to Runge, which is a very interesting one, in which he says a number of things, such as:  (Reading) "It's not enough to correct existing errors or to clean up Lake Mendota.  Something more exciting and far-reaching is needed."  And he thought it should involve the whole University, and this echoes a criticism that, I think it was, [Robert] Siegfried made that the effort of IES under Rohlich seemed to be very small potatoes.
RB:  	Well, it was sanitary engineering, sort of.
LS:  	So it wasn't--
RB:  	It was sort of a split between the Bob Hanson type of concern with microbiology environment and the Rohlich pollution concern and Phil Lewis with his broader vision of things but largely on the aesthetic side and me with my sort of—well, I’m a sort of a split between the small scale and the broad scale.
LS:  	You considered yourself broad scale?
RB:  	Oh, yes.
LS:  	But even you weren't quite broad scale enough for Van Potter, were you?
RB:  	Well, I didn't bring any theology into it, no.
LS:  	Or population?
RB:  	Oh yes, population.
01:00:21 	End of Tape 3, Side 2; begin tape 4
LS:  	This is tape four.  I'd prefer not to be asking you questions all the time but let's see.  Then Ragotzkie writes a letter to--a number of people really wanted to have something more than just the umbrella organization that it became.
RB:  	Yes.
LS:  	Wanted a college, not problem oriented.  Was there a chance for anything like that?
RB:  	Well, actually after it was set up the politics got even fiercer, and just survival was a big problem.  The way it was set up was a very strange one.  There was an Executive Committee of people from all around the campus, everybody that was anybody in Environmental Studies was on the Executive Committee, and there was an advisory council of deans and I forget the name of it but there was this group of deans which was to advise.  We had all of the controls to keep anybody from doing anything bad.  It also prevented doing anything good.  The Executive Committee, for example, being from all over the campus--we had the authority in those days to hire people to teach courses and so on, and we had some money and we did it with the approval of the Executive Committee.  
	But then comes time to discuss raises.  The Executive Committee didn't have a clue as to what those people had done, and so they weren't really being judged by people who knew them on whether they ought to get a merit increase or not:  "Who's he?  What's he done?" you know.  Yet the Executive Committee was empowered to do that, as they are in any departmental setup, and they would insist on hiring some person without really knowing what the program was and that person didn't fit in at all, and then there'd be "Well, why haven't you done so and so for this historian who's writing a life of Aldo Leopold?"  Well, why didn't the History Department do something?   A life of Aldo Leopold wasn't exactly what we needed at that point.  It just was an ungainly thing that got nowhere, so in 1972 Irv Shain as vice-chancellor and the chancellor's spokesman on IES actually wrote a letter to the faculty, which you have undoubtedly seen, sort of changing the structure and saying that the instructional program has the status of a department, which meant that it was the professors in it that were the Executive Committee rather than some external group.
01:03:49 
LS:  	When you make that comment about the Executive Committee, I have it listed in 1970 as consisting of Fox, Hasler, Loucks, Ross, Runge, Smith and Steinhart.  
RB:  	Hasler?
LS:  	Yes.  They were all very much associated with IES, they knew what was going on didn't they?
RB:  	Fox didn't know what anybody was doing.
LS:  	He wasn't involved at all?
RB:  	No, as soon as I was appointed, Fox had nothing more to do with IES except to come to these meetings nor did --
LS:  	Why was that?
RB:  	He wanted to be Director.  In fact, shortly thereafter he took a job somewhere else, and Gerry Rohlich went off to Texas--
LS:  	Was that because he wanted to be Director, too?
RB:  	Probably because they offered him a pot full of money.  When Fox took over the Water Resources things, I said when are you going to transfer Water Resources into IES? because this was part of our agreement.  Fox said we're not going to do that, we've got $50,000 of state funds and we're not going to let you get your hands on it.  Okay, a verbal contract wasn't enough, and of course with regard to Environmental Awareness I got a call from Glenn Pound about that; he says, "Environmental Awareness Center is an integral part of the School of Natural Resources and you keep your cotton-picking hands off of it."  "Yes, sir."  Okay.  So that didn't happen either.  Well, there were some disappointed people.  Loucks came to me and said well, you need an Associate Director, don't you, and I'm available.  I had to say I'm sorry but I just got one:  John Ross.  
LS:  	How did that happen?
RB:  	John had been working with the Institute for Environmental Studies and he was good at keeping things going there and keeping the program hung together, and I was looking around the campus:  who would be better for it than John?  He knows the background, he's been on a lot of these committees, he's a soft-spoken fellow, he can be the nice guy to counterbalance me, the hard-nosed old S.O.B.  Besides, it represents a tie to the College of Agriculture.  Boo-boo.  That was a flat out mistake on my part.  It wasn't the tie to the College of Agriculture, it was a slap in the face because Ross had been a rising star under [Rudolph] Froker in the administration of the Ag School and when Pound replaced Froker  Ross was out and there was bad blood between them, 
01:07:08
RB:	--which cropped up later.  I hate to put this on tape.  If I tell you what happened, later it's going to have to be sequestered--
LS:  	It can be.
RB:  	--because I have never said it publicly before.  That cutting short of the career of a guy under Froker by Pound taking over and saying, "Out, I'm appointing all my own," festered.  So, when there was no chancellor and Pound was the acting chancellor, all of a sudden the newspapers around wanted to know who is this guy? and we need more information on him. Now he's chancellor but before he was something else, so they started asking around, and some article appeared in I guess it was the Cap Times and it said Pound had sided with the manufacturers of pesticides and was anti-environment and so on.  I saw it and said “good God, who wrote that?  Who would say such a thing?,” because there'd been no evidence of anything like that that I knew of.  Even if I might suspect it I didn't have any evidence.  I certainly hadn't written it.  
	Ross and I got a call from the acting chancellor's office saying get up there right now.  So, we got up there and I said, "I wonder what's on his mind?"  "Don't know."  Get up there and he says, "You two have written this article or said that to that reporter."  I said, "Glen, I didn't do it.  I didn't even talk to him, I've been out of town."  I was, during the time the thing blew up.  I didn't do it and Ross says, "I didn't do it."  The Chancellor chewed us out for at least an hour because he was sure that one or the other or both had done it in collusion.  I came back down here and I said, "Boy, I don't know who did that.  Got any idea, John, who would have done that?"  Finally admitted that he had.  
	The next opportunity I severed the relationship between the two of us.  An administrator cannot tolerate a lie from somebody that works with him, and it was a flat out lie, and so not knowing that that would ever happen I started poking around and there were some other cases where I'd been given less than the truth.  I didn't want to just walk in and say you're fired because you're a damned liar.  But it wasn't very long before there was an opportunity when there were some real personality problems developing between Ross and Ingraham.  An opportunity came up to say well, you've asked to do so and so next year and you can do that, but not also be Associate Director of the Institute.  And he read that right.  He said well, I can't be Associate Director under those circumstances, so he disappeared into his office next door and came back in about five minutes with a letter of resignation and I accepted it.  Too bad, too bad.  
	It's the saddest thing in the whole fifteen years; that made me feel rotten.  Still does, but I didn't think I had any choice.  If he'd told me ahead of time "I did it" I would have taken an entirely different tack with the chancellor and said well, look, somebody from our outfit did do it, I'll reprimand them severely, if you want me to I'll see to it that there's a letter to the Cap Times that says that wasn't true.  You know, I'd have taken an entirely different approach than say, "I didn't do it."  "Yes you did do it."  "No I didn't do it."  "Did you do it?"  "No I didn't do it."  That was dumb.  That was childish.  And it was very painful.  That's another episode that you won't find in the Archives that explains why you have changes in personnel.
LS:  	So it had nothing to do with the shooting down of the instructional or the undergraduate degree?
RB: 	Purely and simply a question of ethics.
LS:  	When I say "it" I mean John Ross's leaving IES.
RB:  	No, didn't have anything to do with that, at all.  It had to do with difficulties which really weren't IES versus Ag School difficulties.  They were within-Ag School difficulties that spilled over on us.  It was very painful.  
01:13:23
RB:	But it explained a lot to me when I put two and two together, finally, understood what was going on, explained why instead of Pound saying well, that's nice, now we've got a direct link between, so that, contact with us, it just infuriated him.  “You come and take our people away without even consulting me."  No, not at this University of Wisconsin.  You don't go into the dean and ask him if you can collaborate with some professor on his faculty.
LS:  	Was that his reaction to begin with?
RB:  	Yes.  I had said to Bob Muckenhirn “You know, you're a wise old guy, how about teaching a course for us?”  “Sure, but it'll have to get part of my pay here.”   “Fine.”  “Why didn't you come and ask me about that?" says Glenn Pound.  Didn't think it was necessary, we'd never operated that way before in the University.  If I wanted to work with Baerreis I would work with Baerreis.  If I wanted to work with Rohlich, Arno Lenz, fine.  No problem.  But everything became a problem vis-à-vis Pound.  I'm sure Joe Wilson--is he still alive?
LS:  	Oh yes.
RB:  	Did you talk to him?
LS:  	Just this morning.
RB:  	I'll bet Joe got chewed out by Glenn Pound shortly after the Wilson Report was accepted, for having let such a document get through him.  I'll bet, because at that point Joe Wilson became--he wouldn't even talk to us.  I'll bet he was told in no uncertain terms what Pound's reaction was to the Wilson Report.
LS:  	That's interesting.  He went over to Medical Microbiology, so he might not have been considered as being in Agriculture, but--
RB:  	Someday I may finish the essay I started once called "The Academic Game Preserve:  Pecking Order and Territoriality in Academia."  The last fifteen years has been so much of a zoo that I really often think that pecking order and territoriality, what happens if you step on somebody else's pea patch--it's awful.
01:16:13
LS:  	But you worked a good deal with Ross, you published things together.
RB:  	Of course.  I've always worked with my associates, my students, and published things.  If I'm working on something, "Hey, you've got some ideas on this, how about being a collaborator?"  Look at my list of publications, usually somebody else on there.  Ninety percent of the time that contribution is very small but I've always had a feeling "Let's you and I think about this and put our heads together on it."  Many times Ross and I have done stuff together.  Or I didn't have time, and said, "John, here's somebody who wants to pay for getting an article written, why don't you write it?"  "Okay."  So they get a big Italian--beautifully printed and beautifully done up--John wrote it though it's got both our names on it.
LS:  	As your Associate Director, how was he in terms of the responsibilities he took, what he accomplished?
RB:  	Good with words.  Good words.  In retrospect I'm not sure he accomplished anything net.  He accomplished many things but whether the accomplishments counterbalance the negative motion is still up for grabs I guess.  Maybe some historian can assess that.  I don't know whether it was a net gain or not.  
	We had some really awful internal problems.  My fault, I suppose, for picking the people I did.  Ross and Engman just did not get along together.  Dorothy Keinfelder alternated between hating John Ross and Chuck Engman being her friend or hating Chuck Engman and John Ross couldn't be her friend.  Then when both of them were gone she found it easy, she didn't have to hate either one of them, she hated me instead.  So eventually she found a place where she could look for somebody else to dislike, I guess.  
01:19:10
LS:  	And Engman, how did you get him?
RB:  	I'd been dealing with him a lot in the period just before the establishment of IES on trying to do certain things.  I'd found that when I went to him--there's some things that I couldn't get from the Chancellor's office.  I'd go to the president's office and say would it be politically expedient if the Madison campus did this? and so on, not in an official sense but just as advice, and Engman was the guy that usually ended up being the one that talked to me.  He'd been interested in the idea of interdisciplinary studies, and I talked to him several times about interdisciplinary studies and had met him socially.  In those days when the regents met here and the Harringtons and/or the Clodius's would entertain them, they'd usually bring in a selection of professors into the--hobnobbing with the regents, so I met all the administration that way.  I found Engman an easy guy to talk to.  
	When Harrington resigned, was fired--whichever you want to call it--and Weaver was going to come in, it was perfectly obvious that there was going to be a change in personnel so I said to Engman if you don't stay up here in administration how about coming down and working with IES?  I thought he was a real tough ex-Marine pilot that didn't need psychological support but he said later he was feeling extremely blue at that point, and when I said come and work with us he said somebody said you have some desirable qualities after all, you know.  
	So he came in and he really worked hard for us.  His approach was so different.  For example, he spent a lot of time maintaining contacts between IES and Washington, at which he was superb.  He was so good at it that congressional aides would call him up to ask him what some other congressional aide was doing about something.  He knew everybody in Washington and people in Washington knew about IES.  I think IES is more famous in Washington than it is in Madison.  It opens doors in Washington, the name.  I remember the head of the Environmental Fund saying, "Guess what?  We are lucky, we just hired one of your graduates."  That kind of thing is nice.  There was a period there where we had just superb connections with Washington.  So, that's how Engman got involved.
01:22:59
RB:	As long as this is a tape that had got to be treated gently, Ed Young didn't know what to do with Eric Rude.  He said can you use him?  I said well, I'll try, so he transferred him to IES half time for a year.  He was so laid back--you know, "Let's talk about it all day today and then make a little dab at it tomorrow."  After a year nothing had happened.  We hadn't done anything that didn't have have to be "Well, we've got to have this next week so I'll finish it."  So, I told Ed that we tried it for a year and it didn't work.  That's when he went to the Grad School, and I guess he's done a superb job up there sort of watching the files of what kind of research funds are available and the foundations and so on.  In those "Go, go, go, we're going to try and make this thing go" first year of night and day and Saturdays and everything else, just working to make IES go, Eric just wasn't up to that kind of energy.  I don't blame him, in a way:  he had an awful lot on his mind with that daughter of his with leukemia, that finally died.  He'd go home at noon and was thinking about her in treatment and so on.  I don't blame him.  He was under a lot of mental stress at the time.  Nice guy, but just wasn't our style and I think I see why.
	He did make one big mistake, though.  When he moved up there he hired a woman that had once been my secretary.  I hate to say this, Laura, but she looks a little bit like you, and she was probably the worst secretary I have ever, ever, ever had.  The prize story is when Eric Rude called his office one day from home and she answered and said, "Hello, this is Ruth Decker, Dean Rude's secretary, good morning, what can I do for you?"  He said, "Ruth, it's afternoon, turn the card over."  So she said, "Good afternoon, this is Ruth Decker."  She had a three by five card by the telephone and at noon she'd turn it over, and it was written up what--she'd forgotten to turn it over that day.  He got stuck with her.  Ah, well.
01:26:14
LS:  	It must have been rather a difficult mix if you think about John Ross had hoped to be Director, perhaps, or at least certainly was a major candidate.
RB:  	And earlier hoped to be associate dean of Agriculture.
LS:  	And Chuck Engman had been--he wasn't vice-president but he--
RB:  	He was vice-president.
LS:  	So, both of them were working under you.  It must have been difficult.
RB:  	It was.  It shows that I'm not that good at administration.
LS:  	You mean you would have picked other people if you thought about it?
RB:  	No, probably not.  I probably wouldn't have, because it was a really gung-ho outfit for quite a while there.  They were—everybody had some particular drive and some particular reason for this or that or the other thing, to be sure.  Nobody started with a totally clean slate.  But it may have been trying hard to accomplish something and needing a pat on the back.  It was an interesting group, though.  Sometimes we scared other people.
LS:  	I suppose so.  Did you report to Shain or to Young?
RB:  	The charter says report to the chancellor, but the chancellor invariably interprets that as being reporting to the Chancellor's office and I don't blame him, I would too.  De facto, the one we reported to was Shain. 
LS:  	He had some rather strong ideas about what IES should not do.
RB:  	He thought it should be like the Chemistry Department.  Well, it isn't.  Bry Kearl had some ideas, too, about what we should or shouldn't be.
LS:  	I didn't come across his name so much.  Did he have much to do with the founding of IES?
RB:  	No, but he had a lot to do later when he was vice-chancellor.  You still don't see much in the Archives that involves IES and Bry Kearl, because I quickly discovered that as long as he was vice-chancellor our best bet for survival was to just lay low and not stir him up.
LS: 	He was opposed to it?
RB:  	Not once did I go in his office but what I was not personally insulted and told "Don't bother me with that, the answer is no."  No matter what it was the answer was no, and I know on certain occasions that the chancellor had said yes, we can go with this, and it was still turned down. That was a very difficult period.  So, when I say survival, I mean literally survival:  just lay low and be patient for as many years as it takes.  If you had been at the--I don't know whether you were or not--when I had a little party for getting out of being Director of IES, the chancellor didn't really know quite what to say but he said, "Well, one thing I can say about Bryson, he persevered.  He really persevered."  Another way of saying "Stubborn old S.O.B."  But survival requires stubbornness and perseverance, and we survived.  And Shain did say IES is not an experiment anymore, it is an integral part of the University.  So we survived.
01:31:00	End Tape 4, Side 1; begin side 2
LS:  	Shain was rather shocked to discover the first course listings of IES in the Timetable.  Did you know about that?
RB:  	He was what?
LS:  	You apparently had called up somebody and gotten a department number for listing your courses?
RB:  	Sure.  You had to have a department number to list your courses.
LS:  	But I guess his position was that he as academic vice-chancellor ought to know what courses are going to be given and didn't--this was in 1970, presumably--and IES didn't have a department status.
RB:  	He wasn't chancellor in 1970, Bry Kearl was.  When IES was set up Shain wasn't here yet, wasn't vice-chancellor.
LS:  	Well, you're writing to him.
RB:  	That was later.
LS:  	He came in '71?
RB:  	Somewhere in there.
LS:  	Interesting.
RB:  	I don't know why he'd be surprised.  The charter said you are to give courses, it doesn't say we're to support courses in other departments.
LS:  	So, anyway, this wasn't something you knew about?
RB:  	No, no reason why he should have been surprised anyhow.  The chancellor's letter to the faculty:  in '72 he says IES has the status of a department and so on and so on and so on.  Divisional members of all four divisional committees.  Of course, in the early years we were reviewed by everybody and then we were reviewed by everybody again and then we were reviewed again and then we were reviewed again, until we were sick and tired of being reviewed.  Then, of course, a couple of years ago we got reviewed again.
LS:  	You had a little trouble with the University Committee.
RB:  	Yes.
LS:  	Maybe not trouble, maybe that's the wrong way to put it, but they were concerned that they didn't know more about what was going on.
RB:  	So, they had me go up and talk to them.  I went up there and sat and talked to them and showed them the documents and said this is what we're doing and here's the authority to do it and that's fine and that was the last I heard of it.
LS:  	Do you remember when that was?
RB:  	It was fairly early on, sometime in '70.
LS:	Because when Bauer was chairman in 1971, he's writing to Shain and saying that they're concerned about the manner of development and status of IES and that the University Committee is not consulted--
RB: 	So he suggested to him that he be ought to be concerned, which is really the important question.  He himself, I don't think, had any interest in the report at all.  But who said to him “I'm concerned therefore you ought to and how about raising this question?”
LS:  	Who did?
RB:  	I don't know, but I'm pretty sure he didn't.  All he had to do is call me up and ask me.  
LS:  	He said:  (reading?) "The faculty were not informed and courses were not subjected to systematic review."
RB:  	Sheer and utter nonsense.  They all went through the appropriate channels.
LS:  	That's what you wrote to him, yes.
RB:  	And the divisional committees, the same as anything else.  Sheer and utter nonsense, which shows that he hadn't even paid any attention to us.  Most of our enemies at least got some facts before they started attacking.
LS:  	You had enemies from the beginning.  I mean, it wasn't just when the whole undergraduate curriculum thing came up.
RB:  	Sure.  Oh, of course.  That had very little to do with it.  The thing that caused the biggest problem early on was not undergraduate at all.  You know what's important in this university, you've been around professors long enough.
LS:  	Faculty appointments.
RB:  	Faculty appointments, but also the number of graduate students studying with you.  Those are the peons that do the work right?  How many graduate students you have is a very big status item.  In the first year we were getting like seventy-five letters a month inquiry about graduate work with IES.  Many of them said, "This is what I wanted to do.  I hear that you have a graduate program and you can give graduate degrees in Environmental Studies.  That's what I want."   We had them coming in by the zillions and we were saying we haven't been authorized to do it but we can set up an individual committee as the university's done for years and years and years:  here's an individual committee that will work with you as a graduate student.  We were sending up to the Graduate School stacks of paper every week on graduate students and the committees and all that.  
	Finally Bock ruled that "You can't do that:  to do that a student must be admitted by a department and have successful work for at least one year in that department and then apply for work with IES," so it was just [snaps fingers] like that.  At the rate we were going, seventy-five a month, we'd have had 10 percent of the graduate students on the campus in a couple of years.  That means not in some other department is the way it was interpreted.  Actually it didn't mean that at all, because these committees were made up of people from all over the campus.  But, that's a very delicate point, that's a pea patch that you're treading in, when you start getting large numbers of graduate students.  Wow, awful thing.  
	So, we were simply by fiat ruled out of it.  There's nothing in the books or anything else that says we have to do that, there's nothing codified that says you have to be in a department first.  In fact, the departments don't admit, the Graduate School does, right?  But Bock simply said from here on you have to be acceptable to a department and do your work in that department for a year, then you can talk about an IES degree.  As soon as we wrote the students and said that, they said well, I'll go somewhere else like UCLA or Berkeley or Davis or wherever else because I don't want to do that, I want to be in Environmental Studies.  So, the total number of graduate students that came here was actually reduced.
00:38:57
LS:  	In the end there isn't a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies, is there?
RB:  	To survive you compromise.  No there isn't, and yet there is.  There is a very well-known program at the University of Wisconsin called the Graduate Program in Environmental Monitoring--monitoring the earth's surface from satellites and so on--headed on the research side by Tom Lillesand and on the instructional side by Ralph Kiefer.  We couldn't get authority for the Ph.D. but out staff got together and proposed that there be a free-standing degree called Environmental Monitoring--
LS:  	We couldn't but our staff could?
RB:  	IES couldn't have a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies.
LS:  	But members of the faculty could?
RB:  	But members of the IES faculty could go to the Graduate School and say we propose a Ph.D. program in Environmental Monitoring and it was approved.  It is administered and staffed by IES plus anybody else on the campus that wants to work on it.  We couldn't get a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies but members of our staff proposed a free-standing degree called Ph.D. Program in Land Resources, and it is administered and supported by IES and involves faculty from something like fifty departments.  In order to feed at the trough and get some logistic support, the Water Resources Management Master's Degree Program transferred to IES [inaudible].  It's sort of an "inter" thing.  So, we have that graduate program.  IES faculty proposed a Ph.D. program in Energy Management.
LS:  	Okay.
01:41:33
RB:  	Sure.  We've got something like ninety graduate students.
LS:  	But they're not called your graduate students.
RB:  	They see themselves as that.  They're members of the Environmental Studies Graduate Student Association--you know, ESSA--active, little newsletter and everything.  There are graduate students.
LS:  	So they do regard themselves as IES graduate students?
RB:  	Sure they do.  We put out an Alumni Bulletin for these people.  But it doesn't have a Ph.D., Environmental Studies.  One of them said--this is the Remote Sensing, the Environmental Monitoring group--by now we're well established, we're an integral part of IES, we request that we be made an integral part of IES's graduate program, and not be a free-standing committee, supported and nurtured by IES but reporting to the Graduate School:  "Make us just like a part of the department," to which the Graduate School has never replied.  I went and asked Bock suppose somebody did say that they wanted this to be a departmental degree rather than a standing committee degree.  Bock said if they request it and you approve it, I will approve it.  Well, they requested it and I approved it--no answer.  That's been at least three, four years now.  It's still the way--
LS:  	Does this mean he's not friendly to IES or just on this particular point?
RB:  	I don't know what it means.  
LS:  	Because they certainly provided you with a lot of money to begin with, didn't they?
RB:  	Well, let's put it in perspective.  Yes they did provide us with some money--not a lot, but some--and it was appreciated and it was important at the time.  In 1970 Bock said to me, we want to get this guy Cal DeWitt to be associate director of the Biotron but we don't have a faculty home for him:  how about IES picking up half of him and we'll do the other, but his academic home will be IES?  Oh, sure, all right, if that will help you out and we need people, and it seemed like a good idea as long as we only have to pay half of it and you really want him for the Biotron, fine.  Except he didn't work out in the Biotron.  He got fired by Bock, whereupon we had to pick up all of his pay and from then on we've been scolded for having such a lousy person on our faculty.  Well, wait a minute, who was it that came up with the idea in the first place?  
LS:  	Why didn't you go up and complain or talk about it?
RB:  	(Whispers) I tried and tried and tried.  (Resumes normal tone)  It's easier said than done.  But I got so sick of being scolded for something that was not my idea in the first place.
LS:  	Do you remember a--
RB:  	We can't have IES have a--this is a quote--"We can't have IES have a graduate degree of its own, that would make Cal DeWitt a member of the graduate faculty and we wouldn't want that to happen." He was your man, you know.  We got stuck with him and I mean stuck, because he's turned out to be not a productive professor at all.  Make a great high school teacher.  Really.  Well, where are we?  Quitting time or what?
01:46:26
LS:  	Well, you wrote a memo or letter to Shain in March 1971 and you said the advisory committee is not serving intended purposes, it's only moderately successful as a communications channel, and let's see--oh, I guess it's later--you wrote a rather despairing letter at some point.  Do you remember that?
RB:  	Oh yes.
LS:  	(Reading) "Downward spiral of credibility and effectiveness," "no action taken on IES list of environmental faculty," "lack of certainty re future," et cetera.  Do you remember that?  That was in December.  Were you down in the dumps?  Was that a pretty bad period?
RB:  	Yes, sure.  I forget exactly when it was but we got a $2,000,000--I put together a proposal with the help of a few other people, just a handful of other people, to the National Science Foundation--we got the very last of their institutional grants, after which there weren't any more.  We got about two million bucks from NSF to do interdisciplinary environmental studies kinds of things.  An institutional grant.  
	I remember the most discouraging thing of all is here we had laid it out how it was to be interdisciplinary and it was to be coordinated and tied together so that it made a coherent package, and the next meeting of the executive committee after that grant had been given to us Jerry Stehr [sp?] said, "When are we going to divide up the pie?"  I said, "There isn't any pie to divide up.  This is not to be parceled out to each of the participating departments, this is for interdisciplinary work."  That led to quite a heated interchange:  "What are we doing here for if we're not going to get a piece of the pie?"  I said, "Everybody's eligible but in proportion to the quality of the proposals they put in to spend this money on."  "Ah, it's got to be divided up."  Somebody else has to have a say on it.  It was hard enough even to get a final report out of the participants and it would have been impossible if there'd been a second and divided it up and then they had to report back as to what happened to it.  That was not a very pleasant time.
LS:  	You brought that up in connection with this letter you wrote to Shain.  Was there some connection between that?
RB:  	Well, there was the Fox-Stehr [sp?] report and I wanted Shain to understand that there was some discontent with the fact that the $2,000,000 wasn't just divided up.
LS:  	But you're talking about the whole setup.  You talk of IES "subject to abuse and gamesmanship by established units"--
RB:  	Sure.
LS:  	--"not represented on campus, planning Senate, can't admit a student, award degree, make appointment."  I mean, it's a whole general cry of despair.
RB:  	Our charter we said we could do it, but every time we tried to do it somebody said no you can't do that.
LS:  	Is there a connection between that and the NSF story you just told?
RB:  	Not directly, except that Stehr [sp?] was one of the people involved and there was this is Fox-Stehrs [sp?] committee report and I don't even remember the content anymore because it really had nothing to do with IES.  It was a power struggle.  So, you know.
LS:  	When was that?
01:51:19
RB:  	The difficulty of dealing with, for example, biology departments, zoology and botany.  In those days everybody thought that ecology equaled environmental studies.  All right, I thought, together we can do great things.  Oh no, it wasn't about to be and there was just an antagonism and I don't know what exactly.  Why I've never figured out to this day, except that they thought we were getting into ecology.  There is no ecology degree on the campus, and I've said many times to individual ecologists, "Why isn't there an ecology degree?"  "Well, there's too much opposition from the systematists, from the cellular biologists, from this or from that," and I said, "Why don't we try and get one put together that won't confuse them at all?" and, well, it never went anywhere.  I don't even want to think about it anymore.  It was such a discouraging time.
LS:  	The whole time?
RB:  	Well, there were high points and low points, there were good times and there were bad times, but there was never a time that I didn't think that it was worth doing and what the University ought to do.  So, for fifteen years I've bulldogged it out.  Then, I went to Shain and said, "Next year I'll be sixty-five:  I suppose this means I'll have to step down as Director," and he said yes.  Shortly after that, of course, they changed the laws--the Feingold Law that says that would be discrimination on the basis of age.
LS:  	Even for administrators?  I thought administrators had to step down?
RB:  	It's sixty-two.  Only those on the executive pay plan.  But now even saying that they have to leave at sixty-two is discrimination on the basis of age, so they don't really have to.
01:53:59
LS:  	So, you'd liked to have stayed on?
RB:  	No, no really.  I was ready to get out, I was burnt out.  I still am.  I can go ahead and teach as long as I want to and I love teaching:  I love the University, I'd love to be here until I'm ninety, but I'm burned out and I'm thinking about retiring come June.  And okay, I'll come up here and do my research and I'll write my papers and I won't have to fight any more battles, won't have to go to any more faculty meetings and hear utter nonsense for hours and hours from grown-up men who ought to know better.  And women.  (Laughs)  I'm really burned out.  It's been a tough time.
LS:  	You say you're thinking of retiring.  Are you going to?
RB:  	I am decided but I'm not going to say until I'm ready.  You only have to give two weeks' notice, you know, because the minute you say "I'm going to retire on this date" you're a lame duck and there's still some things I'd like to done in the University but I don't know if I have the energy--
LS:  	You don't have long.
RB:  	Well, that's why I'm thinking maybe another year, you know.  It's very difficult.  My wife wants me to retire.  As a matter of fact I've been around here so long that it's costing me money to teach:  I'd have more take-home pay if I retired.
LS:  	You say there are things you want to do.  What?
RB:  	Things I want to do in the University still.  Things I'd like to see happen and probably won't ever happen but--
LS:  	You mean to do with IES?
RB:  	Oh, IES, myself, Climatology, Meteorology—the whole University.  A great place.
LS:  	You think you could do it in another year?
RB:  	No.  All my life I worked on a twenty-year planning horizon:  twenty years from now this is what I want to be doing and how do I get to twenty years from now?  Then it's quite a shock to have that horizon shrink to where you say I won't be here twenty years from now.  It's unrealistic.  How am I going to make it ten years?  How am I going to make it five?  Can I do it in one?  The answer's no.  This short-term planning of one year in advance is just not my style.  That's how I made it through to fight through a Meteorology Department and IES was because I wasn't looking at the fact that it was terrible this year.  I was looking at five years from now and whether we've surmounted these obstacles, ten years from now, twenty years from now it'll be a great department, and in twenty years it was a great department. 
	I think people have different perceptions of time.  Some people have very short perception into the future and into the past.  They sort of live in the present.  It's fuzzy out beyond there.  I think your planning horizon is related to your memory horizon.  As long as I was working on a twenty-year planning horizon I was also carrying on all the baggage of twenty years of memories, sharp and clear as though they happened yesterday.  That's painful because you're carrying along also all the mistakes you made and all the things you could have done better, and I wish I could forget them.
LS:  	You mean you haven't had the comfort of having your memory fail?
RB:  	It would be a comfort.
LS:  	Much like--only in your position would it seem to be a comfort.
RB:  	Well, to have them at least blur out:  "Gee, there was something unpleasant back there but I can't remember what it was," then you can forget it.  But if you can hear somebody saying it to you:  I can hear Trewartha saying, "There's no future for you at the University of Wisconsin," thirty-eight years ago.
LS:  	Still rankles.
RB:  	Well, makes me wonder whether there is.  (Laughs)  He was right, maybe he was right.  I don't know.  At least I've had a lot of fun, too, and got paid for it.  That's neat.  
LS:  	The most frequently said statement in oral history interviews.
RB:  	Is it?
LS:  	Yes.
RB:  	But, you know, it also gives you a feeling that you ought to repay the state somehow, with something.  I'm running out of voice.
LS:  	You are?  All right.  Well, the tape is about to run out.
RB:  	The medication I've been taking makes my mouth so dry all the time.
LS:  	Good for you to have gotten this far, then.  Anyway, we are running out so I hadn't actually meant this to be a terminal interview because if and when there are other interviews on IES I might want to come back and ask you some more questions but for the time being I expect it can be called enough.
RB: 	Well, I enjoyed talking to you about it.
LS:  	Me, too.
RB:  	But, jeez, don't tell people what I said.  It's painful.  But I guess the only thing I can tell you is the truth.
LS:  	Yes, I'm glad you did.  It's the only value of oral history.  So, thank you.
02:01:04	End of Second Interview Session
End of Oral History #320