UMSL @ 60 - Mary Killenberg Riley

Audio file

UMSL 60th Anniversary Alumni Interview Transcript

Interviewer: Justin King

Interviewee: Mary Killenberg Riley

Date: 12/13/23

Duration: 2:

Transcript

Justin King: Alright. So my name is Justin King. Today is December 13th of 2023. This is an interview with a former lung of the class of 68 Mary Riley, um, and we're doing this for the 60th anniversary of UMSL's founding, um, in 196, um. So if you could just spell your name for me, please.

Mary Riley: Mary Killenberg, KILLENBERG, Riley, Riley.

JK: Alright. And so where we'll first start is your background. So where were you born?

MR: I was born in Saint Louis, uh, lived my first years in Affton. Uh, Later moved to the city of Saint Louis, and from 4th grade until my freshman year of College, lived on Flora Place in South Saint Louis City, near Shaw's Garden, uh, attended parochial schools, uh, Seven Holy Founders in Affton, St. Margaret of Scotland, and then Saint Elizabeth Academy or High School.

JK: Mhm, and was your family originally from Saint Louis? Have they been here for many generations?

MR: I wish I knew more about how many generations, but it has been multiple, uh, maybe three to four generations at least coming from uh, Alsace-Lorraine, Ireland, England and Austria.

JK: Hm, and what are the names of your parents and what did they do for a living?

MR: My father, George, uh, Andrew Killenberg, was, um, born in Saint Louis. Uh. He lived his whole life here until his death at 91. He was a newspaper reporter initially. Uh, prior to that, uh, actually did public relations briefly, but started in the newspaper business and after World War 2 returned to a job with a wife and, uh, two young children. So he stayed at the Saint Louis Globe Democrat throughout his career, rising from a reporter to city editor, managing editor and ultimately executive editor, the top editorial position, at the paper. My mother, uh, Teresa Murphy, Therese Mary Murphy grew up in Saint Louis. Um. She went to parochial schools, opted out of college and became an executive secretary pretty quickly and remained in those roles until, uh, she met my father when she was running the Catholic Hospital Association Convention, uh, in Chicago. She was secretary to the President of Catholic Hospital Association at that time. Um. (pause) Um. I think that they, they met because, uh, Dad was hired to do publicity for the conference and, uh, the rest is history. Later, they lived during the war years in Biloxi, Mississippi where Mom rapidly became, uh, secretary to the base commandant, uh, as she said, the uh, how she got the job was “those southern girls were so darn slow.” Anyway, I think her skills were pretty sharp. Later, dad, uh, at the end of his service period, ran a, uh, rehab hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. By that time they, uh, had one child and one on the way, and they returned to Saint Louis, where I was born. I was that one on the way.

JK: Hm. And so when your father was in the military during World War 2, what, what exactly…what branch was he in and what was he doing?

MR: He was in the army and because of vision issues, he was, uh, not going to be able to go overseas, uh, uh, since he had to wear glasses. He ended up in the Medical Corps and throughout that period, because of his writing skills, he also wrote for Stars and Stripes and did the, uh, publicity or newsletters when he was in his jobs in the Medical Corps. Um, he learned a lot about, uh, nutrition and healthcare and, uh, remained an abiding interest of his. Uh, and his last post when he as a Second Lieutenant, was running the largest rehab hospital in the country, he said, “Well, that was just attrition. So many people were leaving the military.” But I happen to think he had very good organizational skills and, uh, was a, uh, bright man who read things quickly and absorbed them well and was good at delegation, so that was a key throughout his career.

JK: Mhm. So that would keep up with him when he was even manager of the of the Globe. Democrat.

MR: Right. Exactly. He was the youngest city editor of a major newspaper in the country when he was named city editor of the Globe Democrat. I'm also proud to say that he appointed the first woman city editor when he was in the role of, uh, leading the newspaper, the first woman city editor of a major daily in the country, Sue Ann Wood. She told me that and was very pleased with, uh, dad's attitude towards women that he was very, uh, already engaging in giving women leadership roles in the 60s and 70s.

JK: Uh. And so did you get to know your grandparents on either side or what they were doing for a living?

MR: I did get to know my maternal grandparents pretty well. In fact, I was, uh, I was in the spring of my, um, freshman year at UMSL when my grandfather died. And I still remember one of my professors. I thought I'd be in difficult circumstances because of an exam, and he was very understanding about, uh, what that loss meant to someone who, uh, adored her grandfather. Uh, he was, uh, an executive at Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company. And, uh, as my mother said about their experience during the Depression, she said I read about it in the paper. People still bought cigarettes during the Depression, apparently. Um, my maternal grandmother survived him by a number of years, and, uh, I spent a lot of happy times at their home in, uh, Webster Groves. Um. Uh, she was of English and Irish descent. Uh, my grandfather Murphy, actually, who sound quite Irish, his mother was a Gruenewald, so he was pretty German in his outlook, I would say towards life, very careful with the money and, uh, at the time of when he was in his 80s he was doing the books for his, uh, Catholic parish, and I remember watching him with awe as he did, uh, additions down, down a long line of figure figures without resorting to an adding machine. Um. My on my father's side, my father's father was a carpenter and a contractor, um, who built churches in East Saint Louis, which is where he met my father's mother, she lived in New Athens, Illinois, um, but he died when my dad was in his early twenties, uh, on a, a job he was, um, finishing roofing a house in their neighborhood and, uh, had a heart attack and, um, sadly died because, uh, I think he was so meticulous he had let go the young men who were helping him because they weren't careful enough. Um, my grandmother, uh, who in that era, I think that no such thing as Social Security for her, was, uh, living with my dad's sister when I was a child, so I encountered her regularly cause Dad and his only sibling were close and this particular grandmother loved, she was kind of a Grandma Moses in terms of painting, and got me interested in drawing and painting, uh, when I was quite young. And I, I still remember those hours with her. But she died when I was six years old, um, of heart, of heart disease so my, my knowledge of - my mother didn't even know my father's father, she uh, he died before they met. So yeah. Just on my mother's side, really long experience with loving grandparents.

JK: Hm. Uh, and so did yours, did you have many cousins and aunts and uncles?

MR: Um. On my mother's side, I had an uncle and two aunts. And among us, there were twenty-one Murphy grandchildren, so we had a pretty good time whenever we got together. Uh, they were dispersed. Uh, one family was in Quincy, Illinois, and an exciting part of my childhood was taking the train up to visit them and Quincy, when we were old enough, which was probably age 12 to be put on a train to Quincy. Uh, my uncle, who was a naval aviator in World War II and the Korean Wars, he was a carrier pilot and had to be very good because he lived through the experience. Uh, they live further afield. Uh, he was head of air safety and his last career post in, urm, Corpus Christi, Texas, as I recall. And then when a cousin who is just his oldest child is just, uh, a year younger, he's a year younger than I. They returned to Saint Louis, so throughout the high school years, the kids could have a stable childhood. He sacrificed the next step in his career, which would have been Admiral. [Laughter] So, um, they returned to Saint Louis and other cousins lived in rural Missouri about an hour and a half. My mother's brother bought a business in Arcadia Valley, um, Missouri, so we saw them occasionally, but not frequently, till I was an adult. Oh, on my father's side. He had just the sister, so I had three cousins on, on that.

JK: Okay. Uh, did you get to spend much time with them in big family gatherings or was it more you going off to visit them where they're at or them coming into town to visit with you?

MR: Um. I would say on my mother's side annual, the big family gathering was often at Christmas when I was young and families would come in for that. Uh, occasionally we would visit, I remember a, a big trip to uh, when my uncle Will, the aviator, was in Minnesota we made a trip up to the Twin Cities to see them, and that was an exciting adventure. Quincy would be a regular summertime trip. We would go at least once and have overnights jammed in two kids or three to a bed. Uh, it was very fun. Uh, we also, my grandparents had a summer cottage, very primitive, but it was at the time kind of upscale, called Cottage Farm, a resort near, um. [pause] What would be the nearest town Hillsboro or DeSoto, Missouri? It was on the Big River. And that would be a gathering place where we'd love to go as kids and un, until I was an adult, I really thought all rivers were brown because that and the Mississippi [laughter] made my river view [laughter] one that it's brown and your, your swimming suit will be brown after you go swimming. Um, but that was a place we, as I said every summer, would gather and we tend to have a, a trip to um, ah, Quincy, on a regular basis, at least yearly. Uh, the fun times in Saint Louis when we lived on Flora Place, we lived in a big old house that we, we said that street with big old houses attracted big old families and, uh, we had eleven rooms. And then my cousins would come and happily stay with us [laughter]. I remember one Christmas when the weather was so bad, my uncle decided he would return to Quincy but not risk his family. So we had a glorious week of ten kids and my aunt [laughter] joining [laughter] us. Not there ten, combined with our family. Uh, we had quite the crowd in the House and it was very fun.

JK: Um and so sort of going to the side of that, uh when you came back to when your family came back to Saint Louis, after being off in Biloxi and in Battle Creek, Michigan, uh, did you just live on Flora Place or did you live in other places?

MR: Um, Oh the before. Before we lived, I mentioned Affton because of school year starting there, but before that we lived in Richmond Heights in an apartment, a third-floor apartment, and that was, I was a, a baby and, um, my brother who was two years older than I, Mike. Uh, uh, we were, we were very lucky, according to my father, to have the apartment. And if it weren't for my, uh, dad's sister's husband. Uh, he was his, his brother had an apartment building in Saint Louis and housing after World War II was so extremely tight. It was very hard to get a place to stay. Hence you see the experience of these suburban neighborhoods that grew up so quickly around Saint Louis after World War II. Um, it was an extraordinary building boom, but, uh, coming back with two children and, um, my grandparents by then, I think that was by then they had moved from their house in Lourdes parish, they had a larger home, into a two-bedroom retirement home in Webster. Uh, Dad and Mom were very grateful to have a place to stay, even though it was a third floor apartment. Um, in those days after pregnancy, uh, women would not be allowed to climb stairs, and I remember Dad's, uh, Dad's memory of after my brother John, who was four years younger than I was born, Dad carried mother up to the third floor, apartment [laughter]. And uh and then we when I was about to start kindergarten, we moved to uh the street New Hampshire in Affton. And that's my fond memory of childhood until fourth grade. It was pretty rural at that time. Uh, Our home was one of the older ones, but there were homes springing up all around us. Uh but it, it was a mix of, uh, industrial with a brickyard nearby and behind our house a really, probably dangerous open culvert that flooded when there are heavy rains. And on the other side of the culvert, a large farm. I remember helping a neighbor pick asparagus and bringing it home to my mother, who was absolutely delighted at an hour old asparagus for dinner. Uhm, it felt very safe and and comfortable. We kids did stupid, dangerous things like putting pennies on the railroad track. [laughter]. It was about a block from our house. We built forts on the side of the hillside and would roof them with sticks and and sod. Uh, crazy, collapsible things that I'm sure no parent would allow today, but we did not have helicopter parents then. Although we did have moms at home, which made, I think, neighborhoods feel extremely safe because if the child would yell, some mother would lean out the window and check on us, so. That was true on Flora Place, in particular, a street where being a city neighborhood houses were closer together. Uh, we had a parkway between, um, our rows of houses, but it felt like in those big old houses pre the advent of, uh, the much-needed air conditioning for those small suburban houses with one story. These older houses on tree shaded lane with multiple stories. Most of them were in my youth were not air conditioned, so windows were always open and it was very easy to get in trouble with other kids parents. Because moms, as I said, we're usually at home and if somebody started, uh, something or someone got hurt, there was always a mom. That was before the post, you know, the post war years so many women became stay at homes after the war effort as men returned to jobs and women, um, during those so-called Happy Days, had, had lives, many had lives at home. Um. Of course, that's not true, depending, it was very dependent on the spouses income, but in my experience as a child, a lot of moms were stay at home. They gave up jobs and their profession. It was kind of expected that that's what they would do and, and returned and become full time wives and mothers.

JK: Um, and so at home, um, how many siblings do you have and what was, what was living with them like?

MR: Well, our family is one of these interestingly divided families. Uh, my, my mother had a couple of, uh, failed pregnancies, very sadly. Uh, my older brother Mike, two years older than I, younger brother John, four years younger, and then there's the gap. Uh, my sister Terry is seven years younger than my brother John, and then two years later, another child came along. So, uh, we had a very interesting family of ultimately, uh, my brother Mike in college and my sister Sue in kindergarten. I was kind of moms lieutenant in terms of caregiving, and that was expected. And oldest daughter syndrome. You do the, uh, the helping. And so I had these, uh, little sisters who I got to practice motherhood on and enjoyed the experience. It was, uh, my parents always tried to make our time together fun. Dad was a great believer of, uh, in simple pleasures, so we might just pile in the car and go to A&W for a little root beer floats or, uh, Dairy Queen was one of dad's favorites and, uh, thankfully, but most Sundays of my childhood I remember, especially if the weather was good going somewhere. When we lived on a Flora Place, Shaw’s Garden was our day-to-day playground. Really. As soon as we were, and since I moved there in fourth grade, I was really old enough to wander the neighborhood we did. Uh, at a high school, or not a high school, grade school reunion, one of my classmates commented that our mothers never really knew where we were. We come home at lunch and tried to be home by dinner, or they'd be yelling out the window for us. Uh, it was I, I feel in the 50s it was a pretty idyllic time, um, if you were a white family in America with a, a father who had a decent job, it was a great time to be growing up, um. It felt safe, and there were lots of, uh, ordinary pleasures. Uh, family trips we usually would do a trip somewhere in the summer. The Great Smoky Mountains is a memorable one. Uh, Dad loved to drive and go places. At a certain point, Mom was tired of feeling like she was leaving pieces of herself behind in every motel room and, uh, we discovered when I was 13, Door County, Wisconsin. Uh, it helped dad's allergies. It was cool most days in the summer in August, when Saint Louis was not. And so, um, for simplicity, year after year, from that point on we rented a cottage in Jacksonport in Door County.

JK: [Pause] Um and so. Um. Let's see. Let's, let's start moving a little bit to school. Um. And what what that was like for you. So could you, um, maybe talk a little bit about your experiences at your grade school and your high school, um, like friendships that you may have had, or what an average day going to school was like for you?

MR: Ah. Well, it was so long ago to recall an average day is is probably beyond my, my capabilities. Um. I remember just vaguely going to kindergarten. I went to a public school in Affton, and, uh, I recall it as just a pleasant experience. It wasn't far from our house, and, and uh, I enjoyed that. Seven Holy Founders was one of those neighborhoods, as I mentioned, the post war years springing up around it. I do remember going to first, second. Yeah, first and 2nd grade, they had, uh, converted part of the church to classrooms that it, they just didn't have a classroom building. So we had classes in, in a church building. And at that point, they were in the midst of a big building boom and a new church was going up. Which is there, the same church building to this day, and a classroom building. So moving from these cramped, tiny little spaces that were so reflective of the boom years of baby boom years everywhere in the country, we moved into a very spacious, um, classroom building where I spent third grade. Um, I had, uh, religious women, I had nuns the first couple years. I wish I could remember throughout my childhood, the names of my teachers. But it was sister, sister, sister and, uh, last names not needed in your own classroom. So the, the teacher I remember most was, uh, a lay teacher. I had Mrs. [Senninger?, unintelligible]. We called her Mrs. Vinegar. She was a little strict in 3rd grade.

Um. And then, uh, for 4th grade we moved, uh, from the… I guess it was just a two-bedroom house?… and we… was it three bedrooms? It was 3 bedrooms… but we moved. Uh. Followed some friends. Actually, we followed these friends a couple of times. The Quinlan family had moved to Flora Place, and as I said, it was a street with big old houses and attracted big old families. They in fact ultimately had eleven children, and, uh, it was a street full of Saint Louis University doctors, Saint Louis University teachers, the mayor of Saint Louis at one point lived on Flora. Uh. It was conveniently located, and they had these big old houses. So, uh. We moved into well, 4 bedrooms on one floor, two more rooms on the in the third floor. So we had big play spaces and it was a delightful experience living there and could walk to school. Um, actually, my mother had lived in that neighborhood in that parish as a girl. So, uh, St. Margaret of Scotland was, uh, familiar, uh, to her and um. Let's see, I, I, again building boom. I, I think we experienced a certain amount of cramp, cramping in terms of space because by the time I hit my, my sixth grade year, I realized I wasn't staying in that building for seventh and eighth. Our classes were moved to an old synagogue building that was a block from the church. The classroom building, oddly, was about four blocks from the church, which is so unusual in Saint Louis. But I, I don't know the history of how that evolved. But uh, I love the move to the synagogue building for seventh and eighth because it was only a half block from my house. We were on a street that was the same 100 as the, the church on 3800 block of Flad and we were on Flora. Um. And again, mostly, I'm trying to think, I had all religious women, they were all sisters of Saint Joseph throughout my grade school years. That was a boom for the Catholic Church too, in terms of attracting, I think the largest numbers in the US of Catholic religious women. So I don't think it was terribly unusual then. Uh, numbers started to diminish after that, as more women either left the order or didn't join. Um. Day-to-day we had we lacked some of the amenities we knew the public school had, um, like, um, real music teachers coming in, our teachers, our nuns did everything. We were probably fairly limited, um, in in other, um, areas, uh, like the the arts, given that we never really changed classes, we'd have one teacher all day long and she had to become an expert on drawing and singing and um. I think we did have somebody who came in and did. No, that was probably high school. I'm not sure we had anyone coming in to do voice lessons or music lessons in grade school. Um but, the classes were pretty crowded. I I remember my experience in at Seven Holy Founders and St., St. Margaret's classes of 35 or 40 kids were I believe pretty common throughout that period. My memory of getting to high school was a class that was under 30, felt pretty small to me. So those women worked miracles with us, but that was an era too, where teachers, especially sisters commanded a lot of respect, and if you acted up in class, you would get in trouble, not the teacher. And that makes me sound sort of conservative, but I think there has been a switch where, uh, there's less trust of whether the teacher is of goodwill or was right. I don't think it's bad for parents to have that point of view like, my child could be, right? But, um, I think it made it easier to teach when you had that sense of, uh, you'll get in trouble if you don't behave in class. I don't recommend that as a, a life choice necessarily, but it's just an observation. I suspect we, we did have that in the Catholic schools, and if kids acted really badly, they could throw them out. Which public schools cannot do. Yeah, you keep, you know, even the really bad, bad boys or girls.

JK: So, eh, in high school, um, what was it like to go there? Were there any interests that you developed and certain subjects there that would carry on to afterwards to college that influenced your life?

MR: Um, probably my father's career most influenced my life. Uh, I chose Saint Elizabeth. I looked at several girls high schools. It was the plan to do the single gender Catholic girls’ school. So, Saint Elizabeth was a school my mother and my her older sister had attended. And I got such a warm welcome there. It made it almost impossible not to choose to go there. It was also walking distance. It was a long walk, but I could walk from home to school. Uh, again mostly religious women, the Sisters of, uh, the Most Precious Blood. Uh, I found them to be, for the most part, excellent teachers. I was very blessed to have my sophomore year a really, um, persnickety, uh, English teacher who was, uh, very stern grammarian, and it served me well later in my career. She made us diagram the heck out of sentences, so you knew when something was dangling or inappropriate. I mean, we just really had a very fine education. Um, I worked for a couple things like the student newspaper, uh, there and was youth page editor for my school. That was a thing the Saint Louis Globe Democrat did. Every high school had someone who'd write for the paper. Um, I think it was a weekly page, um, but you didn't have to submit everything weekly, as I recall. Thank goodness. That would have been pretty demanding. But, uh, it was a good experience writing for publication, and that's when my father, I think, probably gave me my first lesson in how to write for a newspaper when he read my first offering and said, “Now, Mary, when you start to write something, first you have to answer this question. You have to become the reader and ask the question, what does this mean to me? And if you can't answer that question, if you don't have meaning for the reader, you don't have anything to write. So answer that question first. Be the reader. What does this mean to me?” And that, uh, started with my high school writing, I think. Um, I, I didn't. I, I wasn't terribly active in things at school. Did art projects when we were having, uh, a dance or prom. I enjoyed art immensely and loved to draw and paint, but I kind of rushed home after school rather than stay for clubs, because I had these two fascinating little people at home, my younger sisters and my brother being two years older than I. There are always some other fascinating creatures hanging around the house. Uh, I was kind of a tomboy, so I played basketball with the guys in the neighborhood and you know, loved a good game of horse or whatever. Um, it was, um. Yeah, it was pretty compelling to go home, so I wasn't terribly active in high school, not in student government, but that changed remarkably in college. It was just a different scene for me.

JK: Um, so are there any friendships that you had, from either grade school or high school, that carried on afterwards or?

MR: Well, not, not so much. When we were in Affton and moved to the city, I really lost touch with those people from first, second and third grade, so that has not followed me. Except for, well, the Quinlan family is throughout our narrative. Peggy Quinlan, uh, has been not a close friend, but a good friend throughout my life. Um, we we lived in different cities and have lived at distances, but when we get together, enjoy seeing each other. Uh, high school is kind of the same. I was in South Saint Louis City and moved to North County the same year I started my freshman year in college. So due to distance and lack of internet and social media and whatnot, and the fact that some of my friends went off to other cities for college, um I really lost touch with most, um. My friends from college, have re, several of them have remained friends throughout the year, um, but those are meaningful friendships. I go to my high school reunions, which happen now at of five to ten year, I guess five year intervals now and it's always a joy to see the people again. But not all are local and some are still way in South County now, and I'm in North Saint Louis City or County. So there's a geographic and it was also the fact that a separation occurred each time we really relocated. We just didn't stay in one neighborhood throughout the whole of either grade school, well, I did for high school, but then right after high school, kind of left the left the playing field.

JK: So, um what led you to choose UMSL as the college that you were going to attend? Did you expect to be going to college or expect to be going to this particular college?

MR: I did expect to go to college, um. My dad worked very hard to have his college experience and valued it enormously. My mother, who chose not to go to college, regretted it, and I knew she regretted it. Her younger sisters went to college. Um, so it was a given that I would go. Uh, what brought me to UMSL specifically was my brother Mike, who went to Saint Louis U, my dad's alma mater first, and, uh, he found, uh, he was, found there was a disconnect between the tuition that he was paying. He was helping pay for his college. Dad was paying for, for other kids in private grade school and high school. So Mike was contributing to his college education and he said there are too many graduate students teaching. He said they don't care about me. They care about their thesis. Uh, so he was. And his snobbery was not in misplaced. He later became an academic himself. So he had a pretty keen appreciation of what great teaching would mean throughout the college career. Dad being a newspaper editor, was getting news releases, press releases from the University of Missouri about this new school that was changing from the Normandy Resident Center, that in 1963, to a university branch and dad said I'm reading really good stuff about the school. Mike came out and and looked around and talked to people and really liked what he saw so much that he, he had to add an extra year to his college experience to be, um, have the senior level classes he needed to graduate. So he was, um, stayed around till, uh, the first graduating class in 1967, uh, and it was still, it felt more affordable and relevant to him and worth it to do that. Um, his experience was so positive, I thought, why should I go elsewhere, uh, and the faculty level was extraordinary. Most of our key courses were taught by, um, full professors. Uh, we had PHD's and associate and full professors. We had some non, um, full professors for, uh, some of our class work, but again they were really usually extraordinary. I reviewed my yearbook recently and realized in freshman comp I had a Masters level instructor, but she had been a newspaper reporter and she was an extraordinary writer and a really gifted teacher. Um but, I think because I know because they were building a university, they wanted to stock it with, uh, really, um, student focused, talented, young professionals and they knew they were building something from scratch and had to be creative with the lack of space, uh, and lack of facilities, lack of library. Uh, they made-up for any deficiencies and facilities with their, uh, really, um, personal instruction. We had relatively small classes for even our major survey classes, whether it was history or introductory English classes. But, um, some of those were forty, thirty to forty students rather than the typical university grouping of 300 or 400 in the survey class. So we had personal critiques of our, uh, blue books, and I was, really, I had one faculty member say that our senior readings and senior seminar classes were so small and so intense that only on the graduate school level would you get that anywhere, anywhere else.

JK: Hmm. So, uh, you had mentioned that your family, uh, had moved around the university here after you started to attend at, uh, UMSL.

MR: Right.

JK: And what, what was that first couple months that you had spent commuting to campus like

MR: Oh

JK: and compared to moving?

Yeah, [laughter] that was interesting. It was a really long drive. Uh, well, not so long a drive, but I would take the bus occasionally. And it was like, uh, Grand bus to the Natural Bridge bus to a Pine Lawn bus and it was at least an hour to get to school. Uhm, my parents had been they, they had decided to move from that big old house on Flora Place to one on, with at least two bedrooms on one level so Mom would not have to climb stairs with those babies. Mom was in her forties when she had my little sisters, so, um, that was a strategic move. Since three out of the five of us, uhm, got our undergraduate degrees from UMSL entirely at UMSL. And then one of our siblings, uh, did half of her university, uh, two blocks from there and, and later interestingly moved. Because of that age difference, she became a student of my brother Mike, who by then had a PhD in journalism and was one of her instructors at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. He had gone on from UMSL to SIU Carbondale for his Masters and his PhD. So. Yes, the older sibling taught the the younger, who also went into communication and is Assistant Vice Chancellor for Communications at Washington University. One of us who is still working. We older ones, three of us are, no four of us now retired. [laughter] Yeah. So it was, Dad, Dad made a good move there moving a block and 1/2 from campus.

JK: And so um. Oh, go ahead.

MR: Oh, I was going to say that that first, uh, the first, uh, month or so commuting, I think it was October when we moved to our House, I was extraordinarily grateful to end that distance. And I said I learned to drink coffee that first month when I’d ride along with my brother for one of his early classes. Because we were so crowded, classes started, like, at 7:40 to cram in as many day students as possible, and then the campus switched over to the evening college with an equal, if not larger, number of students at night, proving how much the university was needed and valued. But that move also was good for the campus and for our clubs and organizations because, um, they used to lock the campus up at night and, and we would have meetings or do work on the newspaper. Mike and I both were involved in the student newspaper and we do that on our dining room table. And so we came, became a little annex to the university for the years we were attending, especially the early years when there was, we just had the one, the old Country Club building.

JK: Hmm. So was that, was the, what was, what was campus like back then. You mentioned the Country Club building was still there.

MR: Mm-hmm.

JK: Um, were the grounds still pretty much like it had been when it was a golf course?

MR: Yes, except for the fact that they had vast parking lots to accommodate these, uh, students who would show up, uh. We just had these chat covered areas. It was hilly. It was beautiful in places. People had walking dates and go to the back of campus and just go on a walk and you could have serenity and privacy and occasionally people would come back with a little grass in their hair and you think they had a really nice walking date. Uh, but there is nothing at the back of campus then. Uh, and just the, uh, original building, which had a swimming pool, uh, behind it. Well, immediately behind it was a patio, uh, where there were dances and the, uh, first year or two or I don't know how long. I guess that persisted because there really wasn't an outdoor area next to Benton Hall there never has been. Um, and then the swimming pool, uh, was behind that and that stayed open for a number of years long enough for my sisters to enjoy it for a few years, because, uh, by the time they started, uh, enjoying it, I was working for the university. Uh, the summer of 1968 I became an employee, um, and then I believe that was filled in a while after they built the library on the other side of the pool. I think they kept it open? I'm not, I'm really not very clear on that, but uh it was a nice student perk for a while.

JK: Um and so, how, do you remember, how the building was laid out and what the classrooms were like, um, in your first couple of years going there?

MR: Yeah, a little bit vaguely, but if you came the front entrance was a lovely old Country Club entrance with the covered drive in front. It was a very dramatic, uh, entrance with porte-cochères so you wouldn't get rained upon if you were getting dropped off. Uh, if you were parking, you were going to get rained on because there were long walks back from um “East Jesus” as kids called the far lots on campus. But that lobby remained. It had the vestiges, really beautiful woodwork and, uh, mirrored glass and a dramatic staircase, uh, to the second floor. And as you went in to the left was, and the first year was the library, which wasn't very large at all in either in space or volumes, and then to the right, uh, there was another lobby. And that was just kind of a hangout space lined with benches, uh, chairs and benches where people could study or it was the equivalent of a quiet part of the Student, Student Union. And then beyond that was a large, um, it had been a ballroom, I believe, for the Country Club. It was a large, uh, room where that was our big classroom for like it was a lecture hall for for History or English when you had, um, large groups. Um, and then and, and that was, because it was in an old building and not very well insulated and we were in the flight path for Lambert Field, whenever a plane came over we had plane time, where this, the lecture would stop lecturing and we’d just sit there for a minute till it was quiet enough we could hear him again. It was very interesting. That was this built-in part of being a, a student then. Uh, downstairs echoing the same space, large space and it was divided in half, and I don't know why, but that was our student gathering place. It was, uh, filled, with tables always filled with students who would trade places as they went to class. There was usually always a bridge game going down there and as one had to go to class somebody else would slide into their seat. We had nothing but machine food. We had prepared Servomation, which our school paper cartoonist called “Scurvimation” and had funny, funny cartoons about it. It was not delightful food, and that was my first introduction to this modern, new invention called the radar range, the Amana Radarange I think it was, so, uh, microwave ovens were very exciting school which made the uh, the uh dispensed food, the prepackaged food somewhat more edible. At least it would be hot. Um, then on the other, the wings of the building where class spaces were, they had been lounge areas and I don't know whether club rooms or whatever. I know on the as you're facing the building on the right side is where, uh, on the main floor the Evening College was located there. Um, I'm trying to think if there were classrooms on that corridor. The business office was to the right of that lobby room I described as a gathering space. Uh, switchboard was there. It's hard to recall because things moved around so quickly there. Um, the downstairs we had our student activities office my freshman year when I accidentally became editor of the school paper by attrition. We had a closet from the ladies’ locker room. It was a large closet in their storage room. It was maybe 10 by 10. With the closet in the closet, uh, and we had one typewriter that all the activities groups were supposed to share. So, yearbook newspaper, we started, if we had portables, we'd bring our own typewriters because the school didn't provide. Um later. Let's see. I think that first year next to that closet in the old locker room was a classroom because I feel like I remember my freshman English survey of English literature class in there with Doctor Bill Hamlin, an extraordinary teacher and head of the department. Uh, again forty students maybe to have somebody of his stature and he was so dynamic and interesting. And I came back to campus years later as a little segue, but I remember hearing his voice, and, uh, this is probably 10 years later and he had a lecture hall with maybe 300 students. He was working in the room like he did when there were 40 asking for kids to contribute and they were. Hands going up and people offering their ideas. So we were, we had some really gifted teachers. On the other side, as you're facing the building on the left wing, uh, we had faculty offices and they were really like locker room areas with partitions for some of the lesser mortals among the teachers. Doctor Burns, uh, who was head of the history department at that point, had an old shower room there was drain in his floor [laughter]. Uh, it was amazing and they echoed those layers down below. There was another level of basement level faculty members. Um, it was a warren they put up walls here and there and then the next year, when Benton Hall was finished, that library I mentioned moved over from the library area. This, uh, it had been the dining room, I think. It moved into the ballroom and I came running up the stairs, I recall, I guess my sophomore year and rounding the corner to go into that room for the old lecture hall and there was a wall there instead, because they had walled it off and had become our library [laughter]. It had a little proscenium built in because it used to have dance bands I think in this area where these all part of the library, um. It was amazing our, uh, the maintenance people moved walls at will and things shifted around. Um, the switchboard moved to a space in Benton Hall. I guess all the business offices did too. I'm trying to remember. Some went back. Later they built a Butler Building on campus where personnel was and the Sports Information Director, and ultimately they moved Public Information from that original building where they had so many administrative offices in the Country Club building because I was working for the university then and moved out to that building, I think in 1968 or 69. I'm not really certain. I think it was right as I started to work for the university, we moved out to that far, far shore. Um, they built another Butler building next to the, uhm, the activities area in the Country Club that became kind of a student union for the number of black students just started to use that as kind of their own clubhouse. And, and I'm ashamed to say that it was…I don't…well, I'm not ashamed. It became sort of a self-segregated. That, that was mostly where the black students hung out. And then more of the white students or whatever ethnicity were in the Country Club area. Um, it was a volatile time for campus, too. There was an awful lot of, um, I think, more activism on the part of black students because they were trying to find their way to, um, a freer society. So, um, I think there may have been an intent to kind of self-isolate or felt it was, um, more comfortable. I don't know it. I don't feel that there was animosity on the part of the students who are mainly a lot of people who knew each other. In those first years on campus, a heck of a lot. I don't know what the statistics would be on the number of students, but since it started out as the, The Normandy Residence Center, it attracted many Norman, Normandy area students and University City students. Both have really very good school districts and, uh, at the time you know I, I think I expressed earlier that it was easy to get into the university because it was new. It actually, I've since read that it wasn't that it really pretty much had to be in the top third of your class and then it was pretty selective enough that, um, maybe was it one or two out of three students who applied got in on those first years, uh. Again, I guess building the student body and given the demand for public and, um, public, uh, education. Uh, we were so small, we didn't have room for a lot of students. So I guess those of us who got in were actually pretty fortunate.

JK: Hmm. So was UMSL always commuter campus then? You have people who have go to school for the day or for the evening and then go back to their homes.

MR: I think that would be very safe to say that most of our students, uh, were staying at home. It made it so much more affordable. Uh, friend of mine, who started at, at Mizzou in Columbia, said after year working full time all summer and with some help from his parents you, you really couldn't afford to stay in Colombia. So this was a lifesaver for him and I would say for most of the kids I knew a great number. I, I think the statistic as I recall was, certainly by the time I was working for the university, I was starting to look at numbers and as I recall, it was 70% of our students were first time, uh, college students and their families, and, uh, most would rush out of here and go off to some, I think, work pretty much full time throughout their full time college years just stacking their classes as best they could so they could do both. Someone I met many years after my experience here, uh, I didn't know we were on campus the same years and he's, he said. “The reason you didn't know me is I was married, I had kids, and I was working full time, going to school full time. It was the most miserable time of my life. I was exhausted constantly.” And so he couldn't indulge in student activities. Uh, that was what made student life possible. Students who were fortunate enough to live in the neighborhood, perhaps, or just have their parents pretty much covering their tuition, so that they had that liberty to engage in club activity and, and only in hindsight do did I think I realized what a privilege that was because we didn't have a campus that anyone was living on. Uh, I think by my junior year, and I'm not really remembering well, but we had a few fraternity houses, two or three in the neighborhood. So some students lived in those. But we really, uh, did not have people, uh, living on campus. We did have on campus activities, uh I, the Purple Onion put together with student talent would have, be held on a regular basis, uh, in that cafeteria space in the lower part of the building. Um, and we had some off campus dances. I think our we had a homecoming in the church basement of Saint Anne Catholic Church down the road, as I recall, and more my junior senior year. Uh, our off campus was often, like Village Inn Pizza parlor or a, a local neighborhood bar. That was probably most of us in our senior years when we were more legally able to go to bars. Uh, but it yeah, student social life was pretty limited.

JK: Um, even though it was limited what sorts of activities or clubs did you participate in during your time here?

MR: Well, I kind of got plunged into things and, uh, my, my brother had been elected editor of the school paper the year before, so he was starting in on that when I was a freshman and I joined the paper staff, but he lasted a couple issues and my brother is truly an excellent journalist. Uh, in fact, uh, besides being a college professor, running went on sabbatical, he was a copy editor at the LA Times and they wanted him to stay. He was good. But he also realized his grades were really important for Graduate School, which he was planning on. And, uh, after a couple of issues, his perfectionism got in the way, and he resigned so that he hoped his associate editor would take over. I think after one issue, he resigned and the the newspaper staff elected me editor. I had very limited experience except from growing up in a newspaper house, and I, I knew that question. What does this mean to me? So I tried to look at issues that I thought would be important students, and that's how I devised our story strategy and who I would assign what stories. Fortunately, my brother stayed on as our, um uh, layout editor. He he knew how to do that and I was really, I had not done that before. So fortunately, uh, Mike took that on and he felt better about not being responsible for the whole thing. His I think ego got in the way there. Uh, he wanted to either do a perfect job or just be a helper and, and that's how I became, uh, very involved in campus activities because I had to, as the editor of the paper. Uh, I also ultimately, um, I am really not clear on the years. I, I think by my junior year I was elected as student senator and did that my senior year. Senior year again by attrition I had been voted, well I was not even in town, Vice President of the Student, uh, Student government and, um, ended up as president because a resignation happened, uh. It was a complicated time with the Vietnam War going on and student protests. And so that was that was my, an interesting trajectory with, uh, clubs. My, Bill Hamlin, the head of the English department asked me to found the English club, which I did. And, uh, I think it's still operating, but, uh, we lured people with doughnuts and, uh, that’s what it takes to get them in during the daytime and, uh, or anytime. Um, and then let's see, I was selected for the Chancellor's Advisory Council my senior year which was a nice honor. I appreciated that opportunity. I was invited to be on a couple student faculty committees. We decided early on to include the, I should say the governance decided to include, students in the faculty committees. Uh, so I was on the student Faculty Curriculum Committee and a Subcommittee on, um, of the uh. Oh what was the original committee? It was on publications. Uh, ended up on the committee that chose the Riverman. And I'm sorry there weren't any better choices. We paid a price emotionally for that. Ever since people, especially when we got women's sports, they didn't like being Riverwomen and I apologize to those people. At least you're not the Golden Archers. So, thank me for that. [laughter] Um, let's see what else. I, I helped out with different organizations. We were so small and we were crowded into the the Country Club buildings. So, if Theater Group was working on something and they needed someone to do publicity, I mean, that's the kind of thing I volunteered to help with. Uh, publicity was always difficult because, um, students who are not living on campus, so it wasn't always easy to reach commuters or get them to come back in the evenings for our theater productions or other things. Uh, so that was something I kind of enjoyed doing and learned from and it served me well later, when I did a public relations for the first, uh, fifteen years of my career. Um, let's see student activities. What else? Yeah, that's it. Um, it was a variety of things and we all just kind of, um, helped one another do what we could to make our activities successful.

JK: Uh, were you ever involved in any sports or was that something you tend to stay away from?

MR: Ohh, I love sports. I, I would have loved it if we had any sports for women. As far as I know, there was no sports activity for women in our first few years. I'm not sure when it was added, but, uh, I I think the only official men's sports were basketball and baseball then. I'm not even sure about the baseball. I was a basketball fan, so went to those games. But the guys on our team would hang out in that lobby area I described in the Country Club building until the building, the gym at the nearby middle school Normandy Middle School, would open up, and that's where they have their practices. We had no athletic facilities other than the outdoor areas, the tennis courts remaining from the Country Club, uh, basketball area outdoors, uh, just a couple hoops. I don't even know if that was a full court that might have just been kind of 1/2 court and the swimming pool. Maybe we did have a track team then because I know a friend of mine talked about doing cross country and how heartbreaking, that might have been from his high school days running track here. But we, I would have, you would have to ask one of the uh guys who is involved in sports because girls weren't. We just didn't have them. We had women who were cheerleaders, um, so the only sports I played we had regularly during nice weather, there was a volleyball net on that patio in back of the building and I have bad damaged fingers to prove that I didn't know how to bump volleyball, but I love to play. So, I did that and, uh, I'm trying to think. And usually with some of the friends guys, I would shoot hoops because I still loved basketball.

JK: Um, so let's sort of dig a little bit deeper into some of the clubs that you were involved in. So, what was the name of the student newspaper?

MR: The student newspaper started out and when my brother started and I don't know whether they had it before 63 or not, it was called the Tiger Cub. And then we thought, you know, I don't know who prompted the change, but we thought someone thought it would be better to rename it and we, uh, cast about for ideas and came up and I think it was my mother who came up with the idea to call it the Mizzou News, which I thought was a great name, um. And, uh, we used it just for one year and then I think, uh, the powers that be in Colombia were offended by that and let us know that Mizzou in Columbia, that would be the only campus that got to use Mizzou and that was taken away. So then it became the Current. So yeah. I, I did my freshman year stint as the editor and then, um, my, I, I kind of stepped away from the newspaper and a friend, uh, was going to run the the yearbook, Jane Moore, and I became co-copy editor of the yearbook with her. It just, I, I think part of the reason I chose to do that because the person who was going to be editor of the newspaper was someone my brother was dating, and it just didn't feel like a good idea. [laughter] So, uh, yeah, I moved on to that. I failed to mention the yearbook year. And then I think junior senior year, pretty sure by junior year I was working part time for the student, the Public Information Office, I had been asked to do that and I did know the campus intimately by then and all the faculty, so. Um, I started to learn how to really do press releases during the time working for Bob Smith, who had worked for two mayors of Saint Louis and for, um, Mr. Mac at McDonnell-Douglas. So, he was a really consummate PR professional, very rigorous in what he expected in terms of our output and just very professional and gave me my image of what someone who does public information should look like. Um, I just kind of lost my way there. What are your other?

JK: Um so, were there any memorable stories that you had while you were on the student newspaper?

MR: Ah, well, you know, I, I, I don't know that freshmen either were really memorable issues. I remember being a bit of a crusader, which I, I think my father's paper had always been. It was their title was “Fighting for Saint Louis,” so I felt like my job was always fighting for the students. So, in editorials or news stories, I would try to cover things like our entrance, which became terribly dangerous in terms of traffic without any traffic lights and the number of students who were coming in on Normandy Drive and the Natural Bridge. It was the only entrance originally it, it got horrendous. And I, as I recall, I, I wrote a passionate editorial about will someone have to be killed at that intersection before we get a traffic light there? Um, but yeah, I tried to focus on student issues. I'd have to review. It's been a while to remember what our issues were. Um, but the the focus I think was always on facilities, our, uh, problems with parking or, um, or just coverage of activities trying to highlight events that were taking place or things that were to the advantage of students, uh, as far as offerings, or news about the coming building that was very hot topic, trying to figure out what we what our campus would look like. But those of us who were there the, in those first years were the namers of things and, um, it was a very interesting time to be here and, um as my mother would say, someday you'll be telling your grandchildren about this extraordinary experience of being there when there was nothing there. So, um, by the time we graduated, there was just still two buildings, Benton Hall, and as I worked there, we were changing the look of the campus to the JCPenney building, the Mark Twain building, the library, uh, the science, uh, wing of Benton Hall. Because by then when I was working in public information, we were trying to recruit students from the city of Saint Louis in particular, so we'd have groups of students from Vashon and Soldan, and we would try to set up really exciting visits for them by having faculty give demonstrations in physics or chemistry and things that we thought would be a really dramatic and interesting to the students to attract them to UMSL.

JK: Hmm. Yeah. So, you you got to see a lot of the early evolution of what UMSL looked like.

MR: Yeah, it was really a privilege to be here. Uh for 6 1/2 years, almost seven years of its development.

JK: Hmm And then how did you start to get involved in student government? Did that sort of naturally come from advocating for things and being part of that foundational class or?

MR: That's a really good question and, and I'm not sure I could answer it. I, I don't know how I, I feel like I almost fell into it. Uh, it's probably though, because, um, being in the position as a newspaper editor, you, you did get more intimately involved with the details of what was happening and I think developing an opinion or point of view you want to have an opportunity to have that point of view expressed. I, I think initially we may have been just appointed to the student senate by, uh, I'm trying to, to recall Justin. I'm not sure I, I can tell you that. I don't feel it was. I didn't like run for office. Uh, I think there was kind of a nomination process and then whether it was the administration or a different group of students, um, but I don't remember. I think once you were in the Senate, there was an election process within the Senate for the leadership roles. But, um. Yeah, I, I you know, it's really strange that I don't recall that. But I liked it. I enjoyed being part of the process of offering ideas or being able to, uh, influence decisions or request to the university.

JK: Was there any contention or any issues that arose while you were a part of the student government, especially when we got closer to the Vietnam era?

MR: Yeah, that, that, became more, uh, of the case in my senior year, 67 and 68. There started to be more rumbling on campus about the Vietnam War. Uh, I think there was also the social issues of Selma and, uh, some student participation in protests about that. I know a friend went on a bus to Selma to be part of the protest, the civil rights protest. On campus, uh, I I you know, I'm trying to recall and, and I would like to, um, at least say this much about my senior year when I became by attrition, the President of the Student Body or Student Government, there is a book of the early history by Doctor Blanche Touhill, which I have mentioned in as a person who decided to close student government. I assure you, [laughter] I did not. I did not have that power, nor did I have that inclination. I think probably our Dean of students or the chancellor decided due to, um, Student Government the, the President of Student Government, uh, Mike Hughes, got involved in some controversy and whether it was Vietnam, I really can't recall the issue. I think he might have been a member of, uh, SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, whatever. He was advocating for change and was kind of a controversial leader of student government and, um, I, and this has been 60 years, I, I can't remember why, but he was invited, I believe, to resign or thought he had to resign. So, there was that issue and it's related I'm pretty sure to the student activity or demonstrations. Other campuses like Washington U that had, uh, dorms and on campus residents had experienced more unrest than we did. We didn't have, uh, our students didn't have the luxury, the freedom, the time available to do prolonged or active protest. But, um. No, as far as the closing of student government, I think they wanted to erase a couple people who were in student Senate and start over, which I believe they did the following year, the summer of that year. I was really shocked, actually when I read doctor Touhill’s book to see me listed there as the person who closed student government. At this time in fact, I was an employee of the university because I was a student intern in the, uh, Public Information Office. So I was on Team University. [laughter] I would not have been leading any university disruption. In fact, in later years when it became more intense and I was working in Public Information, I was involved in, in discussions of what would happen if students shut the campus down. We had a day of protests that did have a boycott and, and people standing at the entrance trying to keep people off campus. The university had an off-campus site that they could move to, the administration could go to and manage a switchboard. It was in one of the buildings on Natural Bridge. I never visited, but I knew it was there. I was just a junior member of the public. I was called an information specialist at that point. So, uh, I was on the Public Information team, which was pretty small. It was Bob Smith, uh, Don Constantine, Joe Finnegan, uh, Mr. Smith was the, the head person and his office was right across from the Chancellor's office. The Chancellor's really valued, uh, his advice. He was a wise man. Uh, space limitations drove us, and showed how unimportant we were to the back of campus. We were in that blue metal building, which is now, I think, where the public safety is housed. That was supposed to be a temporary building 60 years ago. Um, but we were there. Don was the associate and Joe was the assistant. And then I was their, I was their, little workhorse who did publicity for the, the uh extension division, the arts programs. I was co-author of the faculty newsletter at that point. Uh, I did press releases for the outside besides working on the internal publications. But, um, at that point I mean during, those were volatile years, so our office in particular was, had strategies to, uh, work with, um, problems that might evolve from student protest. Um, so yeah, I did not shut down. I say again, I did not shut down student government. Wasn't me Blanche, Doctor Touhill I never called her Blanche. [laughter]

JK: And so uh, you you were mentioning your internship with the…

MR: Uh huh.

JK: Public Information Office and how you got employed there.

MR: Yeah.

JK: So before, before you got to those positions, were there any other internships that you had, or any other sort of work that you were doing while you were at school?

MR: Uh, just as summer's work, I was recruited actually by someone who, um, ran a separate column for the Globe Democrat. My dad was very careful about not hiring his own children, but they needed an extra, uh, student employee and the person running asks the Globe, uh, answer column for community problems offered me a job working for him and it was so interesting. I was really glad to take it and that taught me a lot about how to research a story. We would get odd questions from the community about rules and it was just like a beginner's reporter’s position. And because my dad was editor at that point I worked so hard not to be seen as a someone who is, um, trading on her father's position and but I would call before the Mercantile Library moved here. It was pretty interesting. The Mercantile Library came here. We would call the Saint Louis Public Library and talked to research departments there. or the Mercantile Library or the mayor's office or, uh, different government institutions to answer readers questions and some of them became pretty repetitive. About like why? What? [clear throat] Excuse me. Why wasn't this pothole on my street repaired? Why is it still there? Or is it against the law to expectorate on the streets? Hmm, there's a word. Yes, it is. How many one? One of the crazier questions was how many bolts are there in, uh, I think this, the new stadium and and one of my colleagues wanted to answer is about as many nuts as there are bolts, you know, [laugh], uh, but that was a interesting internship. And then because of that, I think the student newspaper experience, um, and my involvement in student activities. Uh, Bob Smith had asked me if I would be an intern. I didn't hurt again that my dad, I, I have full awareness, it didn't hurt that my dad was editor of the daily morning, daily newspaper that I got invited to that job. But on the other hand, I wasn't going to say no to a steppingstone to the career I was planning. That one year, summer working at the Globe as a student I, I realized I didn't really want to follow in Dad's steps as a newspaper person. It's a rigorous, demanding job with weird hours and long days and hard questions to bereaved people or people in time of crisis and public relations began to look much more attractive to me. So I was very glad to have that internship offered to me.

JK: Hmm. Uh, let's see.

MR: And then later job…

JK: Right.

MR: and I stayed in that job until I got an offer to be married and moved to rural Missouri with, uh, my husband, who, um, had family there and and came to run a small dairy distributorship, at that time it was smaller and it ultimately became much larger and I had no intentions of moving to rural Missouri. But, uh, something, you know, I became a “whither thou goest” spouse.

JK: Um, so let's see. Let's wrap up a little bit about umm slow for now. So, uh, I guess the last sort of things about UMSL. Um. What was so you? You, you had trans… You basically transitioned from being a student to being on staff here…

MR: Uh huh.

JK: When you are around here. What? What was that transition like? And what was the area, working here and living around here and, like at the time.

MR: Um, becoming a part of the Public Information Office, uh, didn't feel terribly different during the school years because my hours are more limited, um. I became more engaged in work during the summers. Uh, it was a, a nice area to live in and a number of students, um, lived in the area, so our social life, uh, evolved based on some local restaurants or pizza parlors and so, um, the the friendships, I think and the student activities people were more, uh, localized, those that had to come a long, long way, uh, from South City or West County, were not as likely to be engaged, I think in our activities. Uh, it, so my my student experience didn't feel very different even though I was working part time in public information because I continued to do things, um, that related to developing the university and my whole interest in the university was, um, making it better for my fellow students and myself. Uh, so covering news about the university felt, um, not terribly different from doing things, uh, when I was working on the newspaper, the yearbook. Uh, I don't feel that I got less involved in student activities or felt less able to to voice my opinion about things. Um, so I do recall an incident with Doctor Eickhoff when he had come down kind of hard on a friend of mine who was running student activities and, uh, went to his office to protest her. Her treatment cause which I had thought was unfair. This was the point where, I was particularly aware of the poster behind his desk of a cat sitting in a semi open doorway and the caption on this very large poster was, “I don't want in or out. I just want to sit here and whine.” I think in general, Doctor Eickhoff was [laughter] a very fine head of student activities, but um, he, he, um, he. I think he truly loved students and was supportive of our developing into fuller human beings, recognizing the social as well as the academic was important to us, but we had a very small campus you didn't deal with much student and rest we, uh, those in student government student activities. In those days, I could pretty much identify every student hanging around after hours or involved in the clubs. We all knew one another. Uh, so the campus itself was just a really intimate experience of, uh, friends working with friends, and we often overlapped on clubs and committees there were, what I would say, is so few of us really available because of those students who are working so hard and live further away and couldn't participate. So some of the kids. My being from South City, uh, I didn't have friends in. I, I don't think I knew anyone except my brother when I started at UMSL. I later ran into an old grade school, uh, classmate and, uh, and we recognized each other but that was my senior year. Pretty much it was in North county kind of campus then and, um, and that's who we hung out with, and, uh, some of those students had gone to high school with one another, so there were different kind of not cliques, but groups that really were closer and had been in, uh, student activities in their high school and brought that kind of team approach to UMSL. That is probably the most different thing about the campus now, um, that you're, that it really represents a region and not just um, a couple neighboring counties.

JK: Hmm. Okay.

MR: Different flavor.

JK: Right, And then let's see, uhh. Were there any people that you've kept in touch with over the years, um, that had a particular influence on your life while you were here at UMSL?

MR: Well, in particular, Lois Schoemehl, who was a year ahead of me, was friends with my brother. She was very active in things and was given, offered the position to be the first alumni director. But Lois and I during our work years since I worked here from, um, well in student, uh, the information office, she was in the same office I was in my senior year and she was already graduate and that's when she and I really got connected and there were a few of us who were pretty much daily out to lunch together with each other. So that happened from ‘68 until I married in May of 1971. So, she and I developed a really deep friendship to the point that she was my maid of honor when I got married and I was in her wedding party when she married Vince Schoemehl, also a student who we've been in student government together. Vince was closer to, um, I think he graduated after I did, so we were in student Senate together. In fact, I remember Vince as somebody who had so full of ideas and energy he was a little alarming and I thought we've got to control this guy. [laughter] So calm down. We can't do that yet. He, he was very energetic. I always liked Vince, but…So Vince, uh, and Lois and I have remained in contact these sixty years. Um, one of my brothers friends, uh, who I dated briefly in college, later returned to my life and became partners for a number of years after my husband died in, uh, 1995. So, uh, Gary Clearman, who was active in student government and he was the one I mentioned, uh, who came back to UMSL from Mizzou for the affordability of it and, and later had a excellent career, uh, became went from being a history major to being an MBA with a CPA because he felt he needed, he needed a trade and ended his career as a bank president. It was quite the segue from being a history major. It was a direction I don't think he expected to take, but it was such a good foundation, uh, for many people. Um, there are a couple, just, people that I, there are few that I've stayed in in touch with throughout the years. Over the years, faculty that I would visit if I were in Saint Louis, like Doctor Hamlin, remained people I enjoyed seeing, but, uh, I moved to, uh, rural Missouri at an early point of my life and became mother to uh five children ultimately, and lost touch with most of my unusual friends. Later, many years later, when I returned to Saint Louis to work after my husband's death, I discovered some friends in the workplace who were also UMSL graduates. The one in particular I mentioned, who had such an unpleasant experience because he worked so hard, uh, and was raising a family. But, um, I just think there are, are many students throughout the region like that. But my move to rural Missouri really severed ties with a lot of my friends who I saw frequently those first three years after graduation, then really didn't.

JK: Hmm. Okay. Um, let's see. Uhhh. So, um, while you were at UMSL, so how did that help to shape you as a person in your, um, sense of self and your values while at UMSL?

MR: Well, I I think it started day one with the, the chancellor, uh, um, Doctor Bugg, talking to us on our orientation day about what our purpose and their purpose was and that due to the exploding nature of information, their job would be to teach us how to learn how to learn that we would become discriminating in our choice of information and learn how to evaluate information so that we became better able to to find our way in the world and and know how to evaluate, uh, sources. The other, again back to my English lit background. I think our professors were extraordinary, Judy Jenkins, who was one, my freshman comp, one of my teachers, was very disciplined about her approach to writing, but also pretty inspirational in, in teaching us how to be, um, vibrant writers. We had a lot of good instruction, uh, Doctor Burns in history, who sat me down after my first Blue Book experience and told me how to write a proper Blue Book, Blue Book essay. Uh, first you tell me what you're going to tell me. Then you explain why you're telling me that, and then you tell me what you told me. And it was, uh. It was a good foundation for someone who planned to be a writer. Um, English Literature, though in particular I, I feel like the foundation of my ability to be a discriminating reader came from my professors at UMSL. Um, learning how to look at something and feel decide if it feels authentic, if it's real, it permeates my work life, my personal life, uh, my theater going life. My son says he can't come out of a movie with me without getting this analysis that's formed his ability [laughter] to judge whether it's a good film or not, and that that really I, I have to credit, uh, both my my parents are discriminating readers and, and voracious readers, particularly my dad. Um, but UMSL really, really contributed to my ability to both be a good writer and, um, a a careful judge, or reader, an analytic person. It was a terrific education. As I mentioned earlier, those senior seminar and senior readings classes were small and intense, and at the end of, I think it was senior readings, a twenty page analysis of, of… What had I been reading? One of our my classes was a juxtaposition of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. That was pretty extraordinary. Intense semester. I read till my eyes bled. [Laughter]

JK: Um and ohh. It does bring up one thing. Um, so what, what major, did you graduate with and did that change from when you started?

MR: It did. Uh, my dad, uh, majored in history and then got his Masters degree in that, and he was getting the masters when I was old enough to read some of the incoming and I loved reading American Heritage and all these stories. And I just was always interested in history, uh, because I think he knew that history was a large part of his ability to be in the world with a certain degree of astuteness and understanding. And so I started and then I have to say again, going back to Doctor Hamlin, who is really fundamental, the English lit classes were so interesting, absorbing, exciting [clear throat] and and revealing, and in terms of what I was learning about how to be a writer which I thought my future career would be, that I switched to English as a major and minored in history, including a minor minor in art history, because that was always an interest of mine too.

JK: Hmm, okay. And then one last thing before we move on to your career and after your experience here. Um, is there anything, any opportunities or anything along that line that you either wish you could have done or had, wish that UMSL could have provided that it didn't at the time.

MR: Yeah, I interesting. I I hate to quibble because I feel we were so fortunate in the intensity of our experience, our ability to be on key players is that the university developed, whether from, uh, uh, naming of the sports teams to just helping design plans for the future. I, I found a, a letter from my former boss saying that many of the ideas I had given him before I left the university on how to structure a Information Center for the university, he said they were being adapted to the new multi, the student activities, oh what building, the Millennium Center, I guess. Um, it was. It was probably before that it was the JCPenney Building. I think they had the student activities in. But that was, it was wonderfully exciting to be a part of that and I'm grateful. But for myself and other students, there weren't, uh, things like sports activities we could have indulged in because women's students didn't have that, but the men students didn't have much either. And I don't think I would have traded the opportunity we had for the intimate classes of personal classes for more extracurricular. Um, I know that at larger and more established universities, there's more opportunity for a variety of extracurriculars, but I don't think we were short changed whatever classes we lacked, subjects we lacked. Were probably more than made-up for by the quality of the instruction and those fundamental classes. Uh, yeah, I would have liked to have, uh, some more art classes or any even applied art? Yes, but I have no regrets about what I consider an extraordinary education. I'm trying to think what else? What other part of your question I didn't answer just then. Um.

JK: Well, so there, there was, there was a part about if there was anything that you had wished you had or, uhh, any opportunities that you did have that you might have regretted not taking?

MR: Well, one of it was later, not as a student, but as an employee. I still regret when, um, one of my coworkers and public information invited me to do a radio program. The university was hosting. I backed off on it because I just felt, uh, shy about doing something like that. Really, the only regrets I, I have in most areas of my life for things I wasn't brave enough to do. But uhm, given how small we were, public speaking was not my favorite thing. But given the the, the small nature of the campus, I, I ended up having to do large events and do start public speaking. Uh, speaking to the, uh, President of the university came, and there were a couple of us students who had to address a gathering of a fairly august group of, uh, university leaders. Uh, our student groups that were a couple 100 people, which sounds small to me now, but that sounded large at the time. So, being small as a university force, those few of us who are involved in activities to maybe reach outside of our comfort zone, because who else was there to do it? So, I'm grateful for those opportunities, because later as I went into public information and was director of PR at a small hospital, I, I had to do, uh, interviews and public speaking radio, uh, mainly more than not really television in a rural market. But, um, yeah, we had a lot of opportunity to, to, uh, be in charge of things in those early years that probably would not have been available when you're considering a student, uh, population of 10 or 15,000. When we had guests on campus, a few of us were usually able to meet and greet them, whether it was Julian Bond or Saul Alinsky or, uh, I'm trying to think of the name visitors we had, um, Senator Danforth. Uh, it was an interesting time because those of us in student government generally were invited to meet with people like that.

JK: Hmm. Okay. So let's, let's start talking a little bit about career. So you, you had already mentioned that you worked with the Public Information Office. How did how did your education and your background at UMSL help to influence later career decisions that were made, um, in the different areas that you went to.

MR: Mhmm. Um, well, after my UMSL experience in public information when I moved to rural Missouri, there were not job opportunities that were obvious, um, to me. Helping at the family business, uh, the dairy distributorship, really was pretty much out of my wheelhouse, but I did some freelance writing for the local newspaper because that was the obvious place to look for employment, and I also did some, uh, part time, uh, substitute teaching in the school system, which I found highly interesting and uninviting. Uh, being among a group of first graders, you, I found myself devoting a great deal of time to figuring out what they actually owed in terms of milk money or lunch money [laughter] or going to the bathroom. It was extraordinarily interesting experience, but, um, since I married at twenty-four, uh, back in the 70s, it was not unusual for women students to get married in college immediately upon graduation, or even some of my high school classmates married right outside of of high school. So when I was among the latest of my friends to get married twenty-four and I moved to this, I mean that seems incredible now given how much later people get married, um, when I moved to the country and I've been living there a while, I kind of thought what am I going to do? Why don't we start our family? We had intended to have more than a couple of children. My husband was from a family of six kids and five in mine. So that's what we did. I was apparently really good at it because I had four children [laughter] in the space of six years, years and that became a career path for a while. But then I, I started volunteering for the hospital, helped fundraise for the new hospital they were building, a block leader more than a block in rural Missouri, and then was invited to be on the hospital's advisory board. Uh, it was a wonderful thing to do time wise. It felt important to me, having given birth to children in the, uh, old old Saint Mary's of the Ozarks Hospital. It was clearly obvious a new hospital was needed and when that hospital was built, I, I was the first person to have a baby in that hospital.

JK: Wow.

The timing was such that it was supposed to open in July. I was excited about that. And then it was going to be August 1 and then September 1. And it kept getting pushed off. And, uh, luckily, the baby's arrival was a little late, and, uh, so we ended up and, and that was a, a big deal. I started to learn about how hard it was for them to recruit physicians, and I asked my dad if he would do, if he could do a, they didn't have a publicity piece on the hospital, and I asked him if they could do a magazine story on it. So, they sent down a reporter and they did a, a magazine story on this new hospital and we got a whole bunch of extra copies and started using to help recruit people to rural Missouri. And that segued into an awareness of my having a newspaper background. So, I was asked to be on the Advisory Board. And then when I started volunteering to do all the publicity for, uh, the community, uh, uh, the subcommittee of that board to get a medical building built, we needed to get, uh, public support and public funds, rural health initiative funds to build the medical building. And I as a volunteer just did lots of publicity to, uh, solicit funds for this new building. We were so successful in getting people to, uh, one of the meetings in Poplar Bluff, about an hour and a half… An hour and a half away I think it was? We had eighty-five people from our community and they were so impressed by the turnout. They said “we have to give you a grant. We've never seen anything like this.” The hospital president was very pleased and she had just been to a conference about the need for public in for public relations and offered me a job and the youngest of my four children at the time was three and I really didn't plan to go back to work. But she made me a compelling offer that I could bring work home or bring children to the hospital and I thought I'll never have a better, better offer. And so a 10 year career working for SSM in rural Missouri started and it started out as a public relations, but it ended up marketing, and fund development and doing, um, community events, uh, a fun run, a dinner auction, a golf tournament and, uh, running the hospital auxiliary and a telecare program with daily phone calls to area residents who lived alone became quite absorbing. And, uh, fundamentally came out of the, um, the UMSL education in terms of the writing and also events, it really served me well when doing community events. My experience at UMSL where I discovered how hard it was to get people or how hard to let people know about an event and how to structure it so that they would want to come to the event. And that was really fundamentally important to those years doing, uh, fundraising and, uh, and public information for the hospital. And then also during that time we I became an informal, or I should say non-trained recruiter of physicians and helped attract three doctors to our community. And later, after ten years doing working at the hospital, my job was eliminated and really needing to work, I leverage that background at a rural hospital and working for Cejka & Company, who hired me to be a physician, search consultant and my knowledge of healthcare, um, by that time was pretty deep. I was on the Administrative Council of the hospital and had been on the Advisory Board for a number of years and then I was a member of The CIMS Board, Citizens for Improved Medical Services, which ran the medical building. So, it was a really nice meshing of my knowledge of healthcare and my knowledge of communications. And so I became a physician and headhunter for Cejka for, uh, ten years.

JK: Hmm. Uh, so was this was this something that you imagined yourself doing when you graduated in this field, or were you just? What? What? What were your expectations after you had left UMSL as to what you would do?

MR: I think, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, that given the neighborhood I grew up in and the number of, of mothers who had done other things until they married. I think I was one of those people who thought I'd work for a while until I married, and then I would not be working outside of the home anymore and that sounds so strange today.

JK: Mhmm

But it, it didn't necessarily then. The time the times were changing though. I was really glad to have an opportunity to work. I sometimes [clears throat] feel that I was fortunate in that I felt I had to work with five children to supplement my husband's income, because later when he, he died, um, after I'd been working for a number of years. Uh, I've been working for fourteen years, um, outside the home, at the time of his death, so I had a way to support my family and, um, I had to leave rural Missouri. My kids, older kids were away and my youngest, who was born when I was working for the hospital, um, was only ten. So, and because my, my job had been eliminated at the hospital, um, in 1990, there were so many cutbacks at that time because of funding for hospital, Medicare cuts, et cetera, rural hospitals were really struggling and my job seemed cuttable to my then boss. I think he later realized, um, that all my activities were pretty much paying for my salary, all the fundraising I did. After that, he never reported to the auxiliary how much they made on any event. I'm not sure they did. But, um, uh, publicity is important. Uh, Uhh, I I, um, returned to Saint Louis at at that point and I was very glad that my experiences at UMSL, my career abilities that were formed there served me well for the rest of my working life. Uh, I was really thrilled that I had a way. Thrilled is not the right word, but I was, it was good that I could support myself and my family.

JK: Hmm. Alright. So sort of diving a little bit into your family, um, what was what was it like to? Um, well, so let's start before. So you said you'd met your husband, uh, while you were working.

MR: I actually met my husband at a family gathering at my, my uncle's funeral. He was related to my aunt by marriage. Uh, he, her only sibling, uh, was Quinn's father. So we had never met before. Well, we had met at a family wedding and did not really appreciate the merit of each other, but apparently at the family funeral both of us could see how, how committed we were to family, and I saw him as the really kind, wonderful person he was. So we met that there and he had been living in San Antonio, uh, where he was going to Saint Mary's University. He was later graduating than I, even though he was a year older because he dropped out to help this aunt while, uh, my uncle was dying of cancer. Um, so he, he just, uh, wanted to support her, had worked at the dairy summers, loved the area, the lushness, the beauty of Missouri. And I truly thought we'd just be living briefly in rural Missouri. I didn't know it would be for almost quarter of a century, but I grew to love it too, as as did my aunt, who had grown up as a Saint Louisan and, and a lively debutante and cried when she was moved to rural Missouri. She cried and cried, and then would never have chosen to leave. It's a beautiful place. Um, yeah, that that changed my life dramatically moving to the rural area and then because of my job, uh, uh, elimination, I was really forced to start working in Saint Louis and I stayed with my parents during the week and my children were either one out of college? No, no, they were all, when I started that commute to Saint Louis, um, only one was in college and three were high school and then my baby boy was in grade school.

JK: Hmm. [chuckle] So they were fending for themselves for a little bit then.

MR: I’m afraid, [chuchkle] I’m afraid they were. I’m sorry to say they were. My aunt really helped out and would pick up, uh, Dan after school. Uh, summers the girls, uh, were taking care of the little brother or later they did summers in Door County, working at resorts earning college money, um, at a place that was, uh, just beloved to us and I. After my experience with kids going to work between their, their, uh, senior year of high school and their freshman year of college, I advised all parents to send their children off somewhere and not say, oh, it's our last summer at home because sending kids away from home during the summer, um teaches them a lot of resilience. They have to make friends on their own. They have to run their, manage their own money, do their own laundry, make friends without the framework of people they've gone to school with. So they're homesick while they're scooping ice cream or waiting on tables and not homesick and crying and, and not comfortable during those really important first weeks of college, when you want them to be able to settle in quickly and, and not be so confused by life. So, uh, yeah, that was my, my children’s’, uh, useful experience. They loved their rural upbringing, but all of them live in, in cities now.

JK: Hmm. So, did. Did, did they all attend college, and if so, did they did you encourage some of them to try UMSL?

MR: Well, I did because later, um, I, I thought it would be so convenient and inexpensive for them to either live with their grandparents, my parents stayed in their house in Bel Nor until their deaths at ninety ages ninety-one and ninety-three. Uh, my children of that era were having none of it. They wanted the, uh, the elsewhere experience. So, uh, the first born, uh, went to Washington University. Um, she had a really good scholarship, including a Westlake, and that made it very achievable. The second one was accepted at Washington U, but had no idea what she wanted to do career wise and, uh, didn't have the same scholarship level of help and, and so looking around we discovered Truman State, which is an extraordinary, uh, part of the University of Missouri System, so she chose there. The next two children chose there, one the last child, the, the fourth daughter, really chose it because her father had died just while she was in Germany. In Germany, she was a Congress Bundestag scholar living in the former East Germany. And I had a seven, a sixteen year old who came back as a seventeen year old who spoke German fluently after her full twelve month year in the small town outside, maybe 90 kilometers from Berlin, um so. And then my baby boy ended up going to Fordham University in New York. He really wanted New York, so.

JK: Hmm. Okay. Um, let's see. So we're going to, we're going to move more into sort of a values section of this, more about how UMSL influenced that other places in your life influenced those values. Um, so we're going to talk first about religion and sort of what your background was with that and the encounters that you had with different people at UMSL and in your life. So I suppose. I I could sort of imply that you are you, you. You were raised Catholic because these…

MR: Right all, the mention of the parochial schools, et cetera. Yes, I did go to Catholic grade school and high school. UMSL is my first experience with the broader world. And it was so enlightening and wonderful. At that point, uh, again, because of the closeness of University City, which had a very large Jewish population in that day because of major synagogues were there and many who were either Orthodox or conservative stayed in that area rather than further out West. Um, and so is concentration there of of really smart people who were Jewish and wanted to have a good education and we joked about that the, about 40% of the students at UMSL were Catholic, 40% Jewish, and the rest well, you know. Whoever they were. Not that it didn't count, but there was just that kind of dominance there. Uh, and it was so enlightening because my my first classmates and one of a small, small class. I think there were eleven students in my advanced I tested out of the first couple semesters of French. My French is miserable now. I've I've gotten, you know, dumped, I, I only trotted out to, I trotted it out in Paris to humiliate myself so that the French people there would be nice to me and they really are after you humiliate yourself totally. Uh, but they were, you know, Ruth Goldberg, Anna Yaffee, Anita Levin, and Mary Killenberg we just were this group that clicked and I learned about one with my class or yeah, classmates was Orthodox, so I really did a deep dive into the rules of Orthodox Judaism and I found it fascinating. I was really glad to have that more diverse experience outside of the whole Catholic world. Um, since that time, it took me a lot of years, but I've kind of parted company with the Catholic Church over a number of issues, including of, uh, problems of how women are treated and, and certainly the pedophile issue of moving priests around rather than forcing them to, uh, leave the priesthood and instead risking the safety of our children. Uh, I I'm spiritual. I have a a foundation. I think my my beliefs are based on my Catholic teachings, but very basic in terms of treating people with kindness, being ethical in your dealings with people. So it's, the foundation doesn't really need a building to support my views of what living a, a good life means in terms of being a good human being.

JK: Mhmm. So while you were on campus, uh, were you involved much in your faith, um, on campus and in religious activities or groups?

MR: Newman House was here and it was across the street and it's still here on the corner of Natural Bridge and the entrance to Bel Nor. I mainly, uh, was involved in that just as a hangout space, uh, and [unintelligible] was involved in a few of the social activities and, uh, dated one of the, uh, the President of Newman House, the student president at the time I was in school. Um, yeah, I don't know that I would say I was deeply involved. I, I was a Sunday mask goer in my youth and well into adulthood, probably my fifties before I just really found that the Catholic Church was, uh, was not living up to what I thought it was.

JK: Mmm. Okay. And so moving on from faith and religion. Um, let’s sort of talk more about values or sort of the politics of the UMSL campus, the movements that people were involved with or things like that here. Um, so, so while, while you were on campus. Um, were you yourself involved in any activism or things that were happening during campus, even though they were limited…

MR: Mhmm.

JK: …because of the commuter nature of the campus?

MR: Mhmm. Um, I don't feel that I, I really didn't head into the political arena outside of the politics of our student arena. Uh, I, I know other students were, and I really wasn't fully aware of, of that, there was a student unrest at Washington U and some of our students who were in RTOC [ROTC] at the time, uh, I think we're more aware of the conflict of Vietnam. I don't think I engaged in any. I know I didn't do any on campus demonstrations. Um, part of me I guess wishes I had and, and I didn't agree with the Vietnam War. In fact, when my brother became vulnerable to the draft, um, I said I'll drive you to Canada. [laughter] Luckily, he spent his years or a year in the army at Fort Leonard Wood and wasn't sent overseas, but friends were and, and that was a a devastating time. Um, we knew that dropping out of school could be, um, could cause your death. Uh, in fact, a fellow classmate, uh, who I hadn't seen over the summer when I asked about him in the fall another friend said, oh, you didn't hear because he had flunked out the previous semester, got drafted, and by the time we were back in school in the, the fall he had died in Vietnam. So it was, it was a volatile time for some, but I feel like because our campus was really commuter, um, there, there were not the same kind of protest, awareness or involvement. I think there were some students who were more aware and, and engaged in protests elsewhere, but for the most part we were pretty calm campus. And so politically I was reading about it obviously in the paper, but I wasn't, uh, doing student protests.

JK: Hmm. And so what, what was, what was the, the campus culture like when you were going there? What were the sort of ideas or sort of, uh, the feeling of the campus during the time?

MR: Well, during my student years it it felt like we were still early on living in those happy times where people were expecting to have, um, more normal lives. It was only… Well, I guess it was a few years in, people started really having that fear of the draft. That was the key issue among the men students was what their, their registration number was. Uh, I think again to repeat the commuter nature of the school and the fact that so many were first generation college had other thing absorbing them like working outside of their education and not having the luxury or the parental wealth to support their being free enough to engage in political activities. I would say our culture was people were pretty heads down and going to work, uh, a lot of blue collar families represented among those who are going here. And as the Vietnam War escalated and drafts escalated, I think that was when there was more and more protests and unrest and we, I began to see that more after my, my graduation and, and, uh ’68. Um, so then I was more an observer as an employee of the university. And I think our concerns, we're just keeping the university open, having free speech, but not, um, speech that would be damaging to property or people. Uh, that my, so my point of view was a different one I was on the university’s team hoping we would not be shutting down classes. I wish in in a lot of ways I had been more politically aware of what students are supportive of, what students were trying to do, because it was very legitimate protests going on, except the bombing of buildings. I will, would not approve that. Certainly, that's that was the experience at Washington U. And again, that being a more of a dorm campus, there is more opportunity for students to be vocal and, and, uh, and have protests.

JK: Hmmm. So, um, when, when you were at UMSL, you, you, you keep mentioning the the commuter culture of this campus. Was there was, there still, even though there was a commuter culture, was there still some sort of sense of broader community bumps or camaraderie and a sense like that that you can remember?

MR: Well, I I think there there was. There was certainly, um, a number of students who were involved… Those that had enough, uh, free time to be available for student activities certainly interacted regularly. There were a lot of people who were, um, active or or I should say a lot of the people who are active were the people who were active in a number of organizations and overlapped. Uh, there were plenty of students who did not get to engage, and so for them it would be as a friend told me when we were working together in, when were we working together, in the 90s. He, he described how different his experience was. It was surprising to me because I felt I didn't realize how little of the camaraderie and fun and events and student life we had. Others had no, um, access to because of how hard they were working to be in school and because they went, you know, they drove a long distances to get home and, uh, just didn’t. But we were close to faculty, which was extraordinary. We saw most of our faculty every day. They were they would, you know, they, there wasn't a separate faculty dining room or areas for them to be, so if, uh, they wanted a coke or whatever, they were going to be in the same area, students were. Um, and they were particularly helpful to students, uh, and invited our, our presence and we're good about mentoring. So, I think for a certain number of us who were lucky enough to have time to spend time on campus, our experience was very intimate, very warm, and close and for others it remained, uh, not at all, not at all the same thing. Very different experience.

JK: Hmm. And what, what was it like to meet different people and different backgrounds? Much more so than, I think, probably during grade school or during high school. Um, what was it like encountering most people and getting to know those different people? Like we, your Jewish friends that…

MR: Right.

JK: …you had mentioned?

MR: Um, in truth, because of the nature of our campus, uh, we did not have a great deal of diversity. Uh, we had a huge number of students from the local counties, Normandy and U City, and others that were nearby. Um, and since my children have gone to universities, particularly the two that attended Washington U and Fordham in New York, I recognize that there is an entirely different student experience that they have where their classmates are international. Mine were really kind of regional and the region was North County, so I don't know what students experienced later. I know we were trying when I was an employee to increase diversity and draw more students from the City of Saint Louis and beyond, um, and I think I mean they were doing extension classes, kind of remote radio. I think my senior year, uh, one of my classes was connected with the Mineral Area College where they were offering UMSL classes in Farmington, Missouri. So, the University of Missouri, St. Louis, was definitely trying to extend itself that early. But I would say that the diversity experience the greatest was the exposure to a male student body, since I've gone to an all girls high school, Catholic high school and the Jewish influx from U City, where I really had wonderful exposure to people who had a different worldview and certainly a very different religious and cultural outlook. And I loved it. It was, it was mind expanding. But I, I would say in those early years we were pretty local university and I didn't have the experience. Those of us who were early on, I don't know how much it's changed now, but looking at my daughters’ experience since my son who's, they have friends in Spain and friends in, you know, in all over the country and all over the world.

JK: Hmm, alright. And then um, so I suppose, uh, for. During your time at college, were there any hobbies or passions of yours that either blossomed or you picked up and developed and carried with you?

MR: Um, hobbies, really, sketching and painting. I, we didn't get to indulge it because we didn't have an art program. My senior year I had some slack in my schedule and so I could take a course that really wouldn't count towards my degree or my field. It was, we called the education courses and things like Kitty Art and Kitty Lit. [laughter] I took a elemen…, you know, a Kitty Art class because I knew it would be applied art and I had a fabulous time. Got an an A out of that class because I just dove in and really enjoyed making lions heads out of paper bags and it was, it was very fun. And, um, so that was a a little bit of a passion I got to indulge and it was useful. And I did have a minor in art history and had just two, three maybe art classes, art history which I loved and that has enriched my whole life. Uh, the discrimination you got and looking at and admiring and learning about composition and the different periods of art and, and where how they reflected the world at that time, when and what it meant in terms of change, whether it was like the Japanese, the Europe opening up to trade in Japan, making uh the Japanese art become reflected in European art, so I love that. Itwas wonderful and that has stayed with me throughout my life. Um, passions are, one of the things I really enjoy doing, and I did often for other organizations was a publicity element of it because I learned that if I missed something, it was because I hadn't seen anything about it. So, I looked at ways to help that experience and tried to figure out ways, um, to tell people about different events and one of the ways was I would bring an art easel of my own from home, put it up in the corridor, illegally as it happens, in Benton Hall and put a poster out at the main entrance right at the end of the walkway from the Country Club building where you couldn't miss it. And I would do that either indoor or outdoor, depending on the weather until our maintenance chief took my easel away and never gave it back to me. [laughter] They never gave it back. But, um, that was, it was fun to do because I, I the first time I got involved with my friends were doing a play they were putting on Antigone and they worked so hard on that and they were sure everybody would know about it because they did. It was, they're, all consuming and then they had very small attendance and I thought well, because people didn't know about it. And then I, I the next production I offered to help them and so that remained of interest and it became part of my career later.

JK: Hmm. Okay. And, and then let's go back to the values before we sort of end it. Um, so during college were there any values that you had been either raised with or inculcated that either had been changed or grown, that have changed your view of the world as you got older and as you experienced college life at UMSL?

MR: Mhmm. Well, I I grew up in a a progressive household, and despite my dad's position at a editorial, the editorial page of the Globe Democrat was conservative. But Dad was a progressive, uh. He was a New Deal Democrat really and appreciated all of his life, which had humble beginnings with his carpenter father, he appreciated the value of education and ladders out of, of a class system that America was pretty, um, heavily structured as, um. He would not have gotten to college if he hadn't been a really bright lad who got a scholarship to a fine high school and as a result of the fine high school and a good work ethic, he ended up getting to go to college by working for the university, Saint Louis University. An elevator conversation changed his life when the editor or the head of sports information said that he was. He asked Dad first if he was going to college and he said no. There's no way he could do that and he said I'm leaving my job. Why don't you apply for that? And Dad is a high school senior, really, it was an unlikely choice, but the man suggested he talked to the sports information or the sports editors at the other at the local newspapers to see if they would support him. So, thanks to an odd combination of things, Dad got a scholarship and a stipend and started his college education. When a new university president removed his stipend and let him keep the scholarship, he just really couldn't stay in school. He needed lunch money, car fare. So um, he did public relations publicity for people coming into the old Kiel Auditorium and then World War II. And after World War II got to finish college on the GI Bill and also was able to buy a house with a little help from my mother's family. The GI Bill helped returning vets with a variety of things. He, he really believed in a broad middle class and that there needed to be ways for people to get an education. So he, he valued a safety net, he valued progressive government and so I grew up in that kind of atmosphere. And then I think college only reinforced that because the people we met generally, I know there are others who were more conservative and are conservative to this day, but I think faculty members generally without being political, you had a sense of shared belief. I, they certainly believed in public education because they were there building a fine institution, and I know they could have gone to jobs where they would have gotten paid more, perhaps, or other fields. But this is a real commitment to, um public life.

JK: So there, there's a real there was a real sense here then of the public good and of the public sort of facing mission into society.

MR: Ohh exactly. Exactly, exactly. I think staff, administrators and staff and faculty all knew that putting a university in the largest population area of Saint Louis was a game changer for the region. So many people were excluded from higher education, uh, by distance to Columbia and adding housing expense and meal expense to tuition. A lot of these kids uh, that I was classmates with were like my father without, um, a way to sustain themselves and work their way through, it just wasn't doable. So, Dad was really supportive of the institution and in fact did his best to publicize the university and developments. Before I was a student here, I think the university already had a sense of his being a friend to the university and in fact the Alumni Association awarded its first, um, um, Citizen Award. I don't. I can't remember the name of it, but my dad was the first one. Marty Hendon presented it to my, to my dad as a friend to the university. So yeah, he early on really appreciated affordable education and how important it was to the life of any community. He was of the newspaper belief that there are two schools, there may be more, but the key schools of thought with journalism are thermostat versus thermometer journalism and the thermometer just measures things as they are and the thermostat tries to change the community by focusing on things that look like they really need fixing, uh, including clean government or worrying about the state of mental illness. I think that was one, they won a some major awards for an expose of the state of uh, um mental health institutions. So, yeah. I, he believed in the university and I think truly the administrators and staff knew that this was a game changer for the population of the city and really the region starting with those people in Farmington who is who are getting their education from a distance. Pretty amazing, really, at the time. [pause] Pre-Zoom we had a speaker in our classroom where, uh, the professor could talk to the students. I think there were forty kids in our classroom. I have no idea how many were, uh, in the classroom at Mineral Area College, but it was an interesting and, uh, early distance learning opportunity.

JK: Um, and so with those sort of values and the beliefs around here that you were raised with, did you feel that, uh, UMSL challenged them more or that there was more of a reinforcing then of your values in your life that you had.

MR: [sigh] I don't know. You know I was, being English and History major more in the history. I think I got exposed to values. I would guess it based on the way conversations went, particularly in history classes that I was aware that, um, of injustice throughout history or, uh, the dangers to democracy of certain movements or fascism or I'm, I'm sure that those those classes elevated and informed my point of view on, on how government should work. Um, certainly my my influence from home and, developed a lot of my thinking about how government should work because the goal of a really good newspaper is to be the eyes and ears of the public, and to this day it it just hurts me deeply to hear enemies of the public being ascribed to these often low paid but devoted servants to the public who are still doing journalism, and these trying times when not enough people are subscribing to publications, I like to say our freedom isn't free. And if you want to see that we still have a healthy democracy, for God's sake, buy a newspaper or pay your dues by supporting NPR and PBS. And yes, I'm a sustaining member and I subscribed to three different newspapers and pay for this privilege of having people, um cover, uh, the news and dispense the news. It needs to be dispensed. And certainly I would say that in my UMSL experience, um, that would have been supported and particularly, while not politicized, something that from education, uh, you have that advantage of knowing about what happened in history that made, uh the population truly miserable and what changed it for the better. So, I don't see that you can get a really good education without being sensitive to people's problems. And again, when I hear people go after elites, I think who would you rather trust? Highly educated people who have broad reading and broad access to information. Who would you rather have your do your surgery? A really finely trained and highly educated surgeon or Max the butcher? I mean, you know, it's just, I don't know where Max the butcher came from, [laughter] but I, I do think that that was formulated by higher education and anybody who rails against elites is railing against people who have worked really hard for more information, better information, and information that has been vetted by a number of, of, of, uh sources.

JK: Hmm. Okay. Um and so at that, we sort of come to the end of the interview. I guess couple of last minute questions to sort of see if you have anything else you'd like to say. Um, so is there is there anything else that you'd like to share, um either about yourself or about your experience on campus?

MR: Well, I'd like to express gratitude for the Normandy School district that started this with the Resident Center after the Country Club moved out and what an interesting segue from elitist if we want to talk elite, the economically elite of a Country Club to something as egalitarian and wonderful as a public institution that seeks to give access to people who didn't have access before. And I think the enormous accomplishment of that early faculty is to be praised. They had very little to work with, the tiny library, uh, daunting facilities in terms of classroom space. When we moved through the halls when classes changed, we moved like cattle. The corridors were so crowded as we were herded through room to another, and until Benton Hall. Uh, I failed to address the, uh, the time we had um commuting to local churches and, uh, a couple rental storefronts where classes were held because Benton Hall wasn't finished in time for our sophomore year. So, we had an interesting experience there wandering the streets of Bel Nor, finding our way to, I think it was a Methodist Church that's near Bel Nor School. A little bit of a hike. It was good for us. Uh, so you know, and the locking of the campus gates at night, it was, it was a really different start. But, it finished well and it, it continues to serve the community, I think brilliantly and I there's a wonderful article I just read that was written about, um, the whole elitist university thing about these top universities that turn away so many students.

Uh, UMSL is included in a book by Frank Bruni, called where You Go is Not Where You'll End, I think that's, Where You Start is Not Where You'll End, anyway. The first chapter of that book among the top ten institutions where the, the leaders and their schools where they come from, UMSL is among those. It's pretty extraordinary. So, we've had amazing people come out of this institution and I'm forever grateful for my time here and for the generosity of those first faculty members who gave so much of themselves and, and personalized our education and made-up for whatever deficiencies and facilities there were by their dedication to us and their intelligence and their commitment to, um, their specialty areas and just making us people capable of learning throughout our lives.

JK: Well, I want to thank you very much for that statement and for agreeing to interview you today with me to remember a little bit about your past here at UMSL.

MR: And I appreciate the opportunity. I thank you for your great questions and for this chance to leave some memories behind of something that was so formative and important to me.