Roger Locandro Interview

Interview with Roger Locandro
Date of Interview: November 5, 2003
Interviewer: Kim Mitala
Transcriber: Kara Kreuter
Date of Transcription: February 3, 2004

Q: My name is Kimberly Ann Mitala. It is Wednesday November 5th and I am going to be interviewing Dr. Locandro.

All right, so, you can tell me little stories in between, too, but I'd like to know how your affiliation started with Cook, as time went on, how your role progressed there. What activities did you get involved in?

RL: Well, actually this is my 50 th year. I count my senior year and, in effect, a bunch of high school which I'll squeeze that in ‘cuz we were on campus every week of the year when I was a senior in agriculture at New Brunswick High School . I actually walked up to the College of Agriculture one day in April of 1954 to look for a job on the farm because I was raising big-time chickens. And my truck was tied up and I walked up from high school with big overalls on like I always wore. I met Dr. Peno, who has become world famous, I think, with the NIH, the National Institute of Health. He was my advisor ultimately, but he said, “Why are you coming to get a job on a farm? You should be going to college?” So by the end of that day I was going to Cook College in September--if I took Algebra II in summer school. We were both lifeguarding and farming at that time and I wasn't really interested in summer school. But I did it and got out from under it.

So that's gets me [unintelligible] freshman ‘54 and wrote my undergraduate work with low grades and went to teach vocational agriculture in Palmyra, New Jersey, which is in the middle of Cherry Hill area and Cherry Hill didn't exist in 1956. Then moving on from there to come back to college and but then getting asked to go to Freehold Regional to fill in for another agriculture teacher, who at that point had passed away. So there were two emergency situations between my sophomore and junior year. Come back in '58, finish in ‘60 with background degrees in education, animal science and I guess what we will just called general ag, which was a little bit of plants, animals and economics and a little bit of everything which I always encouraged lots and lots of students to take because you had enough background to do a lot of different thing rather than to focus on a topic as an undergraduate. So can finish Bruce Hamilton who has been a close friend since 1956 when he started as a student. So that puts Bruce and me together for 47 years. And if I would have normally graduated in '58, that gets me 45 years of teaching at this point in time ‘cuz in 1960 I became a vocational agriculture teacher here at South Hunterdon Regional which you know of here in the Lambertville area.

And then in '62, having served on the county Board of Agriculture for two years, they asked me if I wanted to be the county agent. So in 1962 I entered the faculty as the assistant county agent in Flemington where our offices were in the old courthouse in town where the Lindbergh trial took place. And this chair here that I'm touching is a jury chair, I believe, of the courtroom. They were throwing all those chairs away and if they had those chairs now and auctioned them off, they would be worth billions of dollars. But that actually came out of the courtroom where the Lindbergh trial was handled. So anyhow that was ‘62 and I retired in ‘99 so it came out to about 38 years only on the faculty.

In 1967 Dr. Merritt had had a minor heart attack and he asked me…because Dr. Merritt was a graduate student but he was like the general of the ROTC. He was in charge of this part of the Air Force ROTC and I was like the only Ag student in there and he was like the only Ag person who was an administrator in the ROTC, so we became friends right away and we maintained a friendship. So, in ‘67 he asked me to come down as the Assistant Director of Resident Instruction, which is what the Act 1 campus academic program was called at that time in all land grant colleges. You see, as the Assistant of Director of Resident Instruction, of course, he was the Director of Resident Instruction.

So that started my on campus life in ‘67 and that was just about the time that Dean Merrill and Dean Merritt were putting together the primary concept of the college. That concept was kind of being tested and challenged back and forth through the president and the provost and the other deans in the University and we had to line up and the best position to line up with people and friends was to line up with Douglass College . So for whatever reason at that time, and I think that Dr. Merritt carried the ball on that, we met with those people. At one time I used to play tennis with them so…I played tennis as an undergraduate with the dean of Douglass College . That probably doesn't happen today. But I would call her Margery or Mary--two different deans that I worked with. We were all close personal friends even though I was just a kid at the time. So when it came time to structuring friends and everything we had a network already built. Dr. Merritt is very capable of coming in, sitting down, talking to a person, and getting the system kind of pointed in the right direction. So from not too long after I arrived in '67, plans started to fall in place and advanced all over the place. We were going to leave our campus which I couldn't believe and I think early on I would even consider us leaving the campus and going somewhere else because that was sacred land. You know with the Phelps House, which at that time was probably getting ready to come down and Sears Roebuck moving in, which never should have happened. You don't sell the land that should still be Cook College , College of Agriculture land. But any how, that brought us up into 1970 or so where things started to really get pointed specifically towards a college which would be well defined and focus on man and the environment which means we would move to expand our programs out of our specific focus on agriculture and look at all the areas that interrelated to agriculture. I remember one of the constructive criticisms that was made about the College at the time was that we really need to incorporate the human dimension. That's where our human ecology and anthropology programs came in, social sciences that supported the hard sciences, biological sciences, to give this total dimension. It's almost an eco-system process that if you study agriculture or air, water and soil, you really need somebody really studying the human, social side of that whole puzzle. So, rightfully so and very nicely, that's what extended our college to be much more relevant to not only that time but to the projected relevancy where we were going to continue to solve problems but people were being an important part of those problems so that's great.

I was up to my ears at that time because I was working on my Ph.D. and, just coincidently, 1973 in May-June that was the year I received my Ph.D. and also the kick-off year for Cook College . At that time Dr. Hess had come in as dean. He was the first dean of the College and, again, there was almost a familial relationship between Hess and myself and Dr. Merritt, Tom Concannon and a whole bunch of people there within administration. The relationship went way beyond just simply sitting down at a dean's meeting every now and then. Our families were together and we fought together, we worked together, we played together. I think that strong social bonding there was important in helping to get the College off to a good start. Beyond that, department chairmen were personal friends. I mean, I look at the list now, of course I'm not in the swing of things, but I look at the list of people that were working on campus and Dr. Hess provided not only an excellent intellectual sphere, but he provided an excellent understanding of a social sphere that bonded people together; that made our work an awful lot easier. People liked to work with each other. We all didn't agree. I remember getting reamed out by all for some dumb thing I would do. Of course, I still believe I'm right. But anyhow, there was a unique social structure that Dr. Merritt and Dr. Hess and the department chairmen appreciated. We got a lot of business solved fishing somewhere down on the Chesapeake Bay together as a group. Well, that's the structure that I think was has been very weak in recent years, but again, it's somebody else's turn. We did our thing. We did the best we could at that time and beyond that it's somebody else's turn. Everybody does this a little bit differently.

So that takes you up to a point in time, and I'm not sure I can give you the right date as far as I come into the picture, but at one point in time we had to change the student life process and Dr. Merritt asked me if I would be interested in doing it. And, of course, I was aging into it all of the time because I was half-time from beginning one of the short courses which Ned Lippman now does and I got the short courses up to something like 92 short courses a year. This was from 16, so it was five times bigger than the old program. This was the situation where that component of the College would take teaching and research information and present it to the public, pretty much in the way that the extension people do it. But it was more drawing on the research departments rather than the extension component. So that came off the ground very nicely and obviously there was a lot of room to expand the non-degree program which is now the continuing and professional education program run by Ned Lippman. Well, at the point in time where we had to change student life, somewhere right beyond the ‘73 point, I swung over and picked up the student life program. We hired Ned Lippman--you can check the date on that--and then Ned became the director of the non-degree programs. Now he has some phenomenal amount of, I think he said $70 million gross business running right now from the nickels and dimes that we used to collect. But there are a lot of people throughout New Jersey who never went to real college but like Freddy Klucas, who passed away last year, attended all the short courses at the College of Agriculture and feels a greater alumni understanding of the College or connection with the College than a lot of our contemporary graduates. These people took the salt of the earth courses and learned how to milk cows, feed chickens, milk dairy cows, breed dairy cows, raise forages in a very pragmatic applied experiential way that's not necessarily covered in a regular undergraduate program. So that was a component of Cook College that started in ‘67 with me picking it up with about 16 courses, to bring it up to probably around ‘74 with as many as 90+ courses to now where it is which I think it is over 300 courses that they give. So that was an important part of the college that people relate to, got a lot of solid information out of. A lot of it was high level, certification-type courses where you couldn't be a pest control operator, you couldn't be a sanitarian, you couldn't be a health officer unless you took the courses at Cook College , passed the courses and passed the exams. Then you were certified and licensed for those areas. So you use the word vocational in the broadest context but while young people are coming to Cook College and we were developing our undergraduate program we were also creating this tremendous underpinning of…you can put in a greater context of experiential learning. To interview some of those people that were in that, that were in the 1970 era program, and ask them what the non-degree program really meant to them and I think you would be amazed at some of the comments. I guarantee that there are some of them out there that would say they didn't really have to go to a four-year program, but what they got out of it accelerated them in things like golf course management, turf management, the tremendous food science program that we had, these were 10 weeks a year for two years, I mean they were three day programs.

Then we had Ned Lippman. Ned Lippman was a young boy who could hardly walk on my beach when I was a guard at F Street in Seaside Park . And I used to have to go down and grab him by the neck and throw him out of the water before he drowned. And then beyond that his mother and father thought we should really teach him how to swim so he didn't drown. So we had a swimming program that we picked him up every morning with a whole bunch of kids and taught them how to swim. Then one day this guy walks in my office with some interest in taking graduate degrees and we sat down for a long time and, of course, we had a continuing family relationship and there is Ned Lippman, the son of Jacob Lippman, and here I am as the Assistant Dean, life guard of the beach, talking to Ned Lippman and knowing the family--so that's what I mean about the tremendous kind of web or network that comes out of this social involvement that's woven into a university college experience. So Ned came in, did extremely well and is one of the best teachers we have on the whole campus. So that's the non-degree end of it.

Then, little by little, he swung over and took over my job in the non-degree programs and then I swung over and became what was ultimately identified as the Dean of Students. There was some reluctance to identify--to use that title--but then one day we realized that the students have to know what's the administrative structure. If every body else in the University has a dean at Douglass, a dean at Livingston, and a dean at Rutgers College, well, who is the Dean of Students at Cook College then? And we have an assistant or an associate dean. Well, one time I was the Associate Dean of the College, as we all were, and then we started to break it down. So, then I became Dean of Students in that particular compartment so that people could identify who I was and what we were and that's consistent with the beginning of Cook College .

Then I became a member of the National Student Personnel Administrators and there's another a national program that we worked a little, two other programs we worked with where deans of students nationally would come together and share problems, bring in experts like judges and lawyers to address things like alcohol abuse, financial organization, liability, psychology of people, psychology of alcoholism, drug problems, fellow understanding of how you create penalties. I guess we came around to some very interesting conclusions there where we all agreed penalties of things should be based on, to put back into that college from which you have detracted. That means you don't get fined ten dollars, that's doesn't do anything. So that's where all the community work service projects came onboard. We developed through Dr. Roth Mitchell early on a very excellent program in dealing with alcoholism through an AAA program that he established. AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. We had up to 350 people a week coming to those programs and, unknowing at the time other than to the people that were involved at the time, that was one of the options for penalty. You did something abusive with alcohol and one of the options was you meet with Dr. Mitchell. He gave his heart and soul to the program and he was never really given an award or was recognized and he didn't want that because of the nature of the program, but now I really feel that we saved peoples lives. You know, they had the option of going to AA programs and going through counseling and Dr. Mitchell would just give me a nod of the head and I don't ever remember him saying ever that a person was unwilling to participate or didn't benefit from the program. There was also was a nod of the head and that person has benefited, then that record was pretty much clear. That doesn't mean that it took it off the record but it means that they didn't receive any further penalty. We kind of kept track of those people personally. And I won't tell you the names but I could name five people right off of the top of my head right now that I would believe that at least one of those people would be dead today and maybe all five, maybe two, would be dead. But they were all on their way right down and out and they usually represented that one in ten in the University population that is a well-defined alcoholic. Then beyond that, and again this is all the beginning of the College, beyond that we started a Drug Anonymous program, which was okay but it didn't have the life blood that Dr. Mitchell could put into it. All of his programs became a function of his personality and he couldn't do both programs, so that kind of cursed it, it sort of tapered off.

We got lots of unique stories about alcohol, the use of marijuana, and the marijuana growing by our horticulture students and how 28 of them one night weren't sleeping at Cook College ever again. They decided to use their horticultural expertise in growing marijuana in closets. I got down to a point where as dean, I could identify an 1 ½” marijuana seedling on a second floor landing in Cook Housing, so you better watch out for him and he knows about plants and if you have one sitting on the second floor window ledge and he sees it, the word was you that you would leave before the sun touches the horizon this evening. And that was known well enough that I would come in smiling as usual and they would say, “Uh-oh, I think it's before the sun hits the horizon.” I'd say, “You got that right. Here's your paper, you just had your hearing, your trial and your appeal.” But, you know, it drew a line in the sand that said that this was our college, community wise, that we were simply not going to do that. What you did in your private life was fine but don't disgrace the College and the people around you by doing those things. Marijuana drug usage, which I never will do anything like that at all, was interesting because we never a had an abusive situation. [We had] silly situations with people who are abusing themselves that they weren't hurting anybody but that doesn't justify that it's right. But I had to wade into the middle of the whole entire varsity football team sitting in my office with me standing up and glowering down at them, because if I stood and they sat I was bigger than they were, and having to resolve problems where people were sticking knives into people, you know abusing the alcohol policy a hundred fold, throwing people through walls, picking a person up one at a time and throwing them through a wall because, you know, they could do that, and the people volunteering for the services and all the male/female abuses went on and this is probably not the time and place to tell those stories.

But there is an interesting bunch of stories out there as to things that have happened in the College and then how we resolved and solved them and I think that Dr. Merritt, Dr. Hess and I were unified in our interest in solving problems before they really materialized. I think this was a benefit of a couple of us going out and really learning the job of having to be a dean of students and what it really meant and how to anticipate where things were going and how to understand that in other universities and other colleges--maybe Berkley, maybe Harvard--there were sometimes signals that were forerunners as to what might happen with us. We would sit around a table, deans from all over the country, and have pizza and a beer and simply talk. You know what's going on around your campus and what do you see in the future and I could come home with some one idea and start working on it. I really believe that we solved problems before they ever materialized. I think that the slowest part of my job could have been sitting at my desk waiting for a problem to happen. I guess we thought about that so much that we really didn't have that mindset and were out solving things. Putting the whole student life thing together financially, from the standpoint of student fees, we were the number one in the country. Nobody else had developed matching fees whereas clubs were given an amount of money, a basic stipend, and then they were able to apply for extra fees if they really needed it, not just given a handful of money. That became pretty universal and we kind of got away from that. I think one of the others things was to set up the Cook College Council, not the Student Council, and to set it up in the Cook Campus Center or the Cook College Center, not the Student Center, and really start from the very beginning that those components were based on student leadership and not some dean standing in the front of the room telling the kids where they had to go and what they had to do. Now, I have a degree in education; I was certified, I taught five years in a high school, I became director of science in one school, I became director of adult education. I did a little bit of everything and I understand that if you want to create leadership, it has to be from within. It has to be from the bottom up not the top down and it has to be from the inside out and those comments we have made a hundred times but students, again if you say it often enough everybody begins to buy into it and understand. One of the greatest revelations to the Board of Governors Buildings and Grounds Committee when we finally got authorization to build the Cook Center was when we arrived for a major presentation and the Dean of Students, me, was coming to a meeting with the Board Of Governors Buildings And Grounds Committee so they could hear directly what our presentation was, what we needed, why we needed it. I walked in and I said, “This is [unintelligible –a name?].” You know all these older men sitting around, all older then me even, sitting around and then everybody sat down and pretty soon they said there will be a presentation. Well [name?] had a folder about the size of these two Kodak carousel boxes, a folder, a pretty big folder under his arm. I guess they though he was my little slave, something or other cowering behind me. He sat down and I said, “Well, we're ready to give the presentation.” They kind of looked at me and I said, No, Viola[?] is the president, the student chairman of the Student College Senate Committee and he will make the presentation.” And he was absolutely letter perfect. He was as articulate as anybody in that room. He had all his homework done and he went page by page and he got it all done and I think they applauded. And you know some of them personally came over and said, “We never saw that done before. Usually the dean makes the presentation and the kids kind of sit there and they nod their heads and say that's right very impressive.” But that was Cook style. That was Cook leadership; the student was in charge. And he was really in charge of the committee. We did the same thing when we built Voorhees Dormitory, the same thing. It was the first time and maybe the only time that the University had a student committee that was entirely in charge of building a dormitory. Of course, we were there to review what they were doing and I would say, “Maybe you forgot this and maybe you should re-look at that,” but I was sitting around a table with ten students and I didn't have any more power necessarily then anybody else. It was just a matter of brainstorming it and getting it done. But the University forgot the laundry room at Voorhees and I can remember that telephone call. About the same time, somebody from the students said, “You know we should have a laundry room, what happened there?” So I said, “Whip it up and tell them what you need.” So that development of student leadership, you know a lot of that came out because…you were with us in the Class of '72, 30th Anniversary Class of '73 program just recently and if you heard the students talking, they are now surgeons and doctors and lawyers and Ph.D.s. You have people who know what it was really all about because they talked about their student life, they talked about comfort on campus, talked about their ability to learn, their ability to achieve excellence. They didn't necessarily say, “I was there and I had this great course in organic chemistry and because of that course you know I was able to become a famous biochemist.” They talked about the whole entire structure and they talked about it from the heart and really how it had an impacted on them.

That comes back to another topic where we truly believed that if we created an integrated system at Cook College, from the beginning, that would integrate the academic and the student life component in a total integrated manner and that we as a college controlled what the parameters of student life and the academic programs, that it would be synergistic so that one plus one, student life in academics, equaled three or four or five. The underpinning of that is if you create a structure where you have a safe, warm, friendly place to live and study and to relate with your peers through club work, athletics, that it would have an impact on learning. This has already been tested--that if you have a fully integrated system and if that student life program was comfortable in a greater sense, that it would enhance the learning experience. I used to call that technically a learning habitat, a learning environment. That's what we don't dwell on now. The interesting thing is you don't know anything, I don't know anything until I go the Deans' Conference and we get the pizza and the beer out. “Are you guys doing that at UCLA? How about you guys from Wisconsin ?” We don't do that, we can't do that because ours is set up in a different structure where student life is over here and they live over here and they have clubs over here and they have the Student Center, not a community center but a student center, here and it's not integrated. Rutgers College is set up that way, spread out. We found out in '91, I started getting more national exposure because sooner or later I became one of the senior deans of the country, having done it so long that that comment around the table used to be, “Now tell us again how you guys at Cook College do this.” We realized this is the ultimate in creating good college education, but how did you do it?” Well, we were given the right and the opportunity because the senior deans were able to orchestrate it in such a way that we had that ability to run our whole program. We should never give it up. There‘s always somebody chomping at the bit, taking away, breaking down, you know, deconstructing it. So those are some of the underpinnings that make Cook College a tremendously different place.

Back to Cook College Council--all the students were represented by their majors on an [?] model. The faculty was represented, the administrators were represented and we all had an equal vote. I put my hand up in the air just like any undergraduate would put their hand up in the air and we'd vote on issues. And it was very well defined that students were chairing all committees. Try to have a resource faculty person on every committee and the students practically ran the show.

Q: That's like the Cook College Council today. They meet every Monday, I think it is, and representatives from each class….

RL: We started the leadership program on campus and then we made it to Seaside Park , South Seaside to the Island Beach Motor Inn, and ran it there for a number of years. And that was a neat thing. We also broke away and did other things besides just that leadership group. We usually had the president and the provosts, you know, and the vice-president, [name?], who was a tremendous supporter of all of our programs. He was Vice President of Public Safety. With his help we were able to really provide an excellent program that had to do with safety and security. When college deans talk about academic programs, you know somebody has to worry about the safety, the security and the camaraderie and every thing else. That's kind of what some of the rec centers were all about.

Q: Wow. That's, yeah, I like how, you know, it's just amazing to know that all these things, you know, this is where they started and what I'm experiencing now, it's just, I didn't ever really realized where it all rooted from and that's how it started

RL: Well, of course, to do it, you know, in a short conversation, you know, once I get going it goes on and on. Because you know we were proud of what we did and we worked really hard. Dr. Edwards, who was one of the early deans and professors, he used to say, “You know people say how lucky we are here,” he used to say, “Yeah, the harder we work the luckier we get.”

And that's what it was all about. That it was uniquely different. It's like, I come from the Projects people in New Brunswick with this is a neat little perspective. I come from a big Italian family and a small Dutch family here in New Brunswick / Highland Park . The only thing that my family ever knew was Roger worked at the college farm. And I still feel that that is an honor--Roger worked at the college farm. That was their perspective of who we were over there and what we were doing. And all those people came to see the place. They went over to see the orchards, they went over to see the flowers, and people in New Brunswick were an integral part of our college. And excellent, excellent supporters to the extent and…. There was a point I was going to make about being in your own town. Quite often, when you are in your own town you either not necessarily appreciate it…. As St. Paul says in the bible, “No man is honored in his own town,” you have to go somewhere else. But the thing I did learn, which is very important, is that what we learn and what we put together as a large, integrated college structure is probably far superior to anything in the United States . And I know that from sitting in a chair listening to other people say, “How'd you do it.” We talked about financing, we talked about comfort, safety, security, problem solving. It simply was not being done in almost any other college or university in the United States . That's because those people with whom we worked have the ability to identify those things that would strengthen the college and move forward and that's why we did. A very, very gratifying part of my life. And the hard work never stopped. It was never what you would call easy point but there were lots of fun points. And like I say that Dr. Edwards said, “The harder we work the luckier we got.” So we put in an inordinate amount of time and effort but we pushed it right up hill, right over the edge and it was all down hill after it got plugged in. It went from 365 students when I came in, in 1967, when Dr. Merit and I knew almost everybody by their first name. I would walk down the street and say, “Hi Kim. Hi Jack. How you doing? How's your mother? How is your grandmother doing?” You know that was the College. And then when we both came out, we had 3100, which is a logarithmic increase where just looking in terms of numbers that was a gratifying experience to be able to help grow and develop over that college program.

Q: When did you actually start teaching? I guess when did you start teaching other courses?

RL: I never stopped, never stopped. Dr. Merritt said that in addition to being academic administrators we're academic people. First of all, if you will, get a Ph.D. period.

Q: Yeah, I remember him saying that.

RL: Right and it didn't make any difference, but, of course, I just took my interest in agriculture and natural resources and, of course, I had good mentors like Dr. [ Gillnicky?], who was a world authority on plant ecology, weeds, and he and I worked together in research. He was one of my advisors and one course at a time eventually got a Ph.D... Of course, now I recommend that nobody do that, especially if you have a wife and four kids and a farm and two dogs and two cats and, you know, 60 acres of land. That you go and get your Ph.D., go and get it out of the way and then go and do what you need to do. But that's, back to your question, does that answer your question?

Q: I guess that for some of the classes that I've heard you teaching, when did you start coming up with your own classes? When did you start originating your own?

RL: Well, I was doing this in high school. In 1953, I moved into the slaughter house at the College and I was raising chickens and I needed a place to go to kill chickens ‘cuz I couldn't kill them in New Brunswick any more because a poultry dealer complained that I was taking his business as a high school senior. I raised 11,000 chickens and I was smart enough to sell them to my high school teachers. That enhanced my grade by at least one point. Dr. Davis was one of my customers and he was ultimately the head of the English Department at Rutgers . But I always taught; I even taught when I was in high school. There was always someone who said, “Ask Roger, he will teach us how to do it.” I took over a class one time from a professor and I said I'd help show him what I was trying to explain. I got a C out of that; he didn't like that. But soon as I started, soon after I picked up what we were doing, putting a course together first on animals which was the slaughterhouse course, as the [ word] or better yet the meats lab, or better still, the teaching abattoir. And, quite often, when ever I would answer the phone in the slaughterhouse I would say, “Teaching abattoir.” Then I'd get some string of four letter words out of somebody. We had thousands of people go through that room. That course on Interesting and Edible Meats I began probably about the time I got out from under my Ph.D., because it was almost impossible to do that. So, I would say, maybe, ‘72 I might have started teaching that, which is a carry over from what I was teaching vocational agriculture in high school. So I had all of the understanding and resources to teach a course in meats and meat products from a college perspective. That was just a guise, every time we meat, we eat. And that was spelled m-e-a-t.

There's a gray-jacketed deer hunter. I keep watching him and as soon as I hear a shot I'll go out and help give him a summons. There was a 12-point buck standing out here before. Just before you came, it was standing right here in the yard and that's why that guy is doing that. See how he's driving 2 miles an hour? Yeah, he is looking for him and I will strangle him if I catch him. I was also the game warden here for 25 years.

But in teaching, I started that… first of all, I have a degree in animal science. I had already had all that information as an undergraduate. The last 2 years of college, '58 through '60, we put ourselves through college, Ron [Stakely?] and I, by slaughtering 450 head of pigs and sheep and selling that back to the professors like I used to sell the chickens to my high school teachers. So we got through and I simply institutionalized it as a course. But if you wanted to eat a piece of tissue in the class, a muscle, you had to know what it was. You had to be dealing with the [word??] if you wanted to have a filet mignon. If you didn't know what it was, you couldn't eat it. So that's one-credit silly course, but what's this bone you know? “You don't know what that bone is,” I'd say, “tell him what the bone is,” and then everybody would laugh. That's all you had to do. You didn't test them, you didn't take grades. I told everybody you would either get an A or a zero.

But it's interesting you asked that because then later I developed my plant ecology class which started out as interesting as Interesting and Edible Plants which incorporated lots of interesting things. But the guise there is even more academic, is I used a teaching strategy to attract attention. “Hey, we're going to have a class on edible plants. That sounds great. We're all going to eat weeds and stuff now.” Wait a minute now, first you have to know the family that those plants are in, then you have to know the genus and species and then you have to talk about the habitat and then we're even going to talk about the structural and biological diversity and pretty soon I had an entire ecology class built around eating dandelions, which are one of the most interesting biological lessons on the face of the earth. So I was teaching things that were experiential, hands-on, and that became very, very dynamic. I had 250 students sign up for a class one time; I could only take 25. It brought out the best in students. They all had to present--they all had to talk, they all had to cook--but they all had to present something that was academic. Then they would say, “Okay, now we eat.” That was kind of the bait at the end. That experiential process and that particular course led into me developing a course called the Landscapes of New Jersey. Which is really the New Jersey ecosystem and at that point I expanded the basic theory of experiential learning to a field program which was a capstone for appropriate upper level students using New Jersey then as a teaching laboratory and talking about history, culture, geology, climate, plants, animals, things like biodiversity. And that was all part of this one big program. It never became one of the senior capstone courses because I would allow freshman to take that course even though it tended to be seniors because we had freshman who now have Ph.D.'s who were equal to a lot of seniors. And that's complementary to the freshman, not belittling our seniors. And almost every freshman, even in my other advanced courses like the Newfoundland and the Alaska course, I had taken freshman along and by taking freshman in it meant that it couldn't be one of those, what do you call those courses? Special capstone courses that you are supposed to take, or maybe you don't have to take them any more.

Q: Oh. Like core courses you mean?

RL: Not core courses. There is another word for it. It's like courses that you have to have that kind of provide capstones to all of your learning.

Q: Ok, I remember looking…

RL: Senior, senior, senior, senior something or another. But anyhow, I believed that you taught to the person and their ability to hear the information, not the fact that they were a senior. So that led to the developing about the time I was leaving the administration…before leaving administration I had taught for five years this Newfoundland course. We have now been in Newfoundland 33 years so…. And then I concurrently developed, about 1989, this Alaska course because Jimmy Lyons, both Jimmy Lyons and his wife were in my plants class. Jimmy Lyons was a forestry graduate; he is now a distinguished Professor of Forestry at Yale. He was also the Undersecretary of Agriculture for the Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service. Jimmy Lyons sat in the back of the room holding hands while I'm talking about cooking dandelions. From that comes this great Alaska experience where well over a hundred students have gone through these internships and many of them have excellent jobs. Again it comes back to the network of students that we have. But what I was really doing was taking the plants class amplifying it into an ecosystem class using New Jersey, Newfoundland, Alaska, and also a class in Puerto Rico as ecosystem models, and technically, I'm teaching the same course but with four different models that I would use as I was teaching labs. This goes back to something when I was an undergraduate with Dr. [Beull?] and Dr.Wolfe and Dr. Mallory and Concord and a few other senior professors in the University taught these field courses all over North America . And every summer you would sign up for them and you would go to the desert or you would go to the sub-arctic or you would go to tropics. If you did that for four years you had a whole ecosystem and I was in on the side of all those courses, although I never took them. And I said, “Boy, someday that is something I would like to do.” So essentially I created it, and I'll say one thing blatantly, when I got out of Administration, which was essentially you know a compliment of being fired--which is another long story we won't go into that involves [ Dick Wife?] and the fact that I knew too much and the handling of money. Now, on my part, one time we were seventeen cents over in our accounting for the whole year. So we ran a tight ship. Anyhow he said, “Well, what are you going to do.” And I said in a very, frank, kind of a snotty way, I said, “I'm going to do anything I want to do. I've been here for a long time and I have very, very successful courses and I will not stop teaching.” And so that's when I took the plant science class and developed that into a four-credit field ecology class which is two credits beyond what everybody else taught. And then we had the Alaska course, the Newfoundland course, then I was tailing off on the plants course and tailing off on the meats course. Then little by little I kind of moved aside. If you don't know the students fairly well it is hard to teach an upper class course and be with them for a whole year and be in the field with them for a whole month and then expect them to go out with U.S. Fish and Wildlife or U.S. Forest Service, because I really have to know those people to be able to recommend them for what they need to do with those agencies. It got to the point where teaching [prospectus?], by the way, was one of my most interesting assignments. I had eight o'clock classes. I also had coffee, tea and doughnuts every eight o'clock class. And the second class you know the students come in half asleep and say, “You know this is not too bad. This is pretty good. Are you going to have coffee every week?” I said, “You would have coffee every week. The class starts at exactly eight o'clock and it's over at exactly nine o'clock . And if you're not there at eight o'clock maybe you shouldn't even come in because you're not going to get any coffee.” We had some of the greatest experiences sitting there at the edge of the desk and during the stream of consciousness which other senior faculty were doing with [prospectus?] and just really getting into the philosophical part about becoming an effective person. Which was one of my basic objectives in university teaching, is how do you teach people to convert knowledge into wisdom and how do you teach people to become effective people, good citizens and good stewards? And so, you know philosophically, and maybe that's what a Ph.D. is, is the philosophical understanding of education and how to share and transmit that to other people. So that's been very effective and then we've been rewarded in a very gratifying way with various acknowledgements that the faculty and students have provided to me over the years.

Q: Definitely do appreciate everything.

RL: I think, with the exception of one unique award, and I'm not saying this to brag, but I won all of the teaching excellence awards in the College, including the team teacher for the Puerto Rico class, with the exception of the one award that says “Teaching Excellence.” So I had about six or seven awards there and I have acknowledgement and all those except one from the faculty that says “Teaching Excellence.” At least twice I have the Professor of the Year from Alpha Zeta. So instead of getting the College teaching excellence award, I got the University Teaching Excellence Award. So it's a nice way of coming in the back door, so to speak, and moving right around everything and that was initiated by our faculty, both first in the department then in the College and then confirmed by the students. And I essentially never won a way to be recognized by the administration. I'm not sure you want to be recognized by the administration, then you're one of those guys you know. But this is faculty and students. The students are where it really counts. The faculty, they are colleagues or peers and that's fine, but if the student don't think your much then it's, yeah. So that's probably my highest level of achievement in education is to get the University Teaching Excellence Award.

And so it's all a function of not just me alone but being in a system where deans and colleagues and students were all on the same frequency working together. Because one person doesn't just run out and say, “Well, I'm going to be the best teacher in the university.” We don't do that. Everybody else has to recognize the fact that maybe you're doing something right and they also have to give you the ability to do it. I think, you know, for something to write down, is those people in administration provided the ability for our faculty to do things that enhanced our whole teaching and learning program, and that's really back to the beginning, where Cook College really began. It was social, it was interactive, it was intellectual, it was physical, it was structural and it helped to make us more effective people. So weave all that together. Is that still going on there?

Q: Yes it is. It's on a slow speed.

RL: Oh, ok. I used to use, you know I drove my secretary crazy with one of those. I would dictate up to sixteen letterers--if you figure out how long it takes to get to Cook College . So by the time I would get to the office I would have sixteen letters on there. I would say, “Hi Clare, how you doing today?”

Q: I guess I heard that you met Mrs. Locandro on campus. So it was one last thing that I just wanted to ask you. Where you guys….?

RL: Well, concurrent with killing 450 animals during the last two years of our education, I also took on a job. I was always inside the Animal Science Department; they were my friends. And we ran all the clubs and fed all the people and barbeques and all that stuff. So they needed somebody to milk the Brown Swiss in the dairy barn. And as you face the dairy barn from College Farm Road on the right hand side, there used to be a Dutch door and I milked for two years. And I would do morning and afternoon milking, go to school…. That's another whole bunch of stories, but I would. On Sundays we would mess around and we‘d get at it. I would wear a white engineer cap, which was my trademark, and my big overalls and I would stand in the Dutch door and they would walk down the street and we'd say, “What did you say your name was?” With that cap, “You from Douglass? You ever been in a dairy farm before? Come on in I'll give you a tour.” “Sure, I'd like to go in there.” So, of course, what we were doing actually was interviewing the young ladies as they walked back up and down, always on Sunday afternoons. So Marilyn and her girlfriend came down and you have to hear the story from her, but my end of it: ”Hey you guys want a tour of the barn?” “Yeah, sure.” So up, down and in the hayloft and everything and sure. They either arrived again or we had…what did you say? That was Jamison, was it Jamison? Marilyn was in Jamison and our daughter Teresa, Christine and Teresa went to Douglass, our son Roger went to Cook and Teresa was in the same housing unit there in Jamison. Yeah, Jamison is the one overlooking the campus, isn't it?

Q: I'm almost positive.

RL: Or is that Gibbons?

Q: Oh right, right like near it, like it…

RL: Corwin, Corwin

Q: Ok, ok Corwin

RL: She was in the same house, Corwin, that my wife was in. But anyhow, so we started a tour of the campus, a tour of life which began somewhere around I guess in 1958. So you might say we've been friends since then. So that's it. “Come in for a tour, come in and check it out, hun.”