Interview with Dean Schneider
Date of Interview: April 13, 2004
Interviewer: Rob Teeter
Transcriber: Jaime Raysick

Q: Could you tell me about student life? Any stories that come to mind?

DS: Ok. Well, we talked just a minute about Cook College before it was Cook College . I mean, student life prior to July of ‘73; prior to September when school opened students went to Cook College or prior to that the College of Agriculture Environmental Science . We lived at either Rutgers College , Douglass College or Livingston and we were like the other professional schools, like engineering or pharmacy or anything like that, where students lived at one of the residential colleges and then took their classes on the campus where their college was located. In ‘73, Cook College became a residential campus and, in order for us to do that, we had to create residence halls. So rather than building dormitories in the beginning, we determined that the best kind of housing for us, the most practical option, would be to build apartments. And that's why the Newell Apartments were put up.

Q: And they were before the Starkeys?

DS: Oh, yes. Newell's first. Newell was supposed to be ready for the opening of school in September of 1973. Some of them were. Apartments 1 - 64 were ready; the rest were not. They were still being constructed and put up. They were prefab buildings so the ducts on the inside, the plumbing, and everything was put up and then they dropped the sides and the top around them. And, so, only 1-64 were inhabitable. As you know, we had somewhere in the vicinity of 1200 students when Cook opened and we had apartments. Again, there were 252 apartments so you're looking at about 1000 students that could live there once they were all completed. So we had every intention of having a lot of people there.

In addition to the apartments, however, we also obtained Woodbury, a residence hall that used to belong to Douglass. It was built in 1957 and it housed Douglass students. It was part of their residential campus and I'm not sure exactly of the negotiations but through working with Housing it was determined that we would inhabit one of those buildings and Woodbury was the one that we took on. And the reason is we wanted to, for the most part, was to put as many first-year students in a residence hall as we could. We were not able to because Woodbury housed 240 students under normal conditions. So we weren't able to; we wouldn't be able to house all of our freshmen in there, if they wanted to live there. Since the apartments weren't open, however, we had a difficult time. We had to determine how we would house students when school opened up. And the group of students that was here working with the governing association, or what we call the class day or the group of students that we sat with and met with on a regular basis, we basically asked the question, “Well, what do you want to do? If we can't house everybody, the apartments are not ready, do we draw circles around the campus and say that if you live within that circle, you must commute until the apartments are ready so that we can house people under normal conditions? Do we have a lottery where your name gets picked out and if your name is picked you get a spot or do we try and house everybody?” And the students and Administration sat back and said, “We'd like to try and house everybody.”

So when we opened in 1973, there were, in some cases, four people to a dorm room. The lounges in Woodbury, which are the same as Nicholas, now there are three-person suites. We put ten people in a lounge; we gave them nothing but a cot. We put 80 people in the basement of Woodbury for school to open. All they got was a cot and they had stays [Note to DS: please clarify] in one of the rooms down there. They weren't 80 in all one lounge area. They were in the rooms, maybe 10 to 12 in a room. Again they didn't have a desk, they didn't have a dresser, they weren't charged the same as students that had a room. There was a really regulated [?] way for them to stay there, but they could live on campus and had to use the library and other classrooms to do their studying and whatever. But they had a place to stay; they didn't have to commute. And I believe, I'm not sure exactly the timing, but the middle section of Newell opened up somewhere in the mid-part of October. So we really lived under these conditions for about 6 weeks. And then, as soon as more apartments opened up, we were able to move students into more normal housing situations. We did house freshmen, however, in apartments because we didn't have enough space in Woodbury to house all the freshmen. So some of the freshmen did live in apartments and some concerns that happened were, now well, you're thrown into an apartment with four, five others and we got concerns like, “Oh, he drank my milk.” “Well, ok. Tell him not to drink your milk. Figure out a way to share the costs.” And there were a lot of issues because it's not like a residence hall; you're not dealing with the food and everything, you're just kind of sleeping in the room and using other spaces you know to interact.

So we had some interesting things that went on in the beginning, in the opening of that. And so the first group that literally went through from September '73 to May ‘77, a lot of those people are still around. For instance, Nicki Graf works in the Floriculture Department. She's in the greenhouse over by the bookstore. She was in that 1973 class that came into there. Bruce Clark, he's a professor here and chair of the Plant Pathology Department. I think that's correct in terms of what his title is; he was in the class of ‘73. So these were people who were…these were students at the time who are now working for the University. And there are others. I'm just saying there are people still connected with us who came in under those early years. Mike Quinlan, who is the Vice President right now for Business Services, graduated in ‘76 so he spent three years at Cook and one year at the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science. So there are a lot of people who were here in those early years. And [word missing?] couldn't tell you what it was like, unlike Nicki or Bruce who lived in the dorm and know that. Bruce may have started in an apartment, Nicki definitely started in the residence hall.

It was an interesting opening. It was a big change for students who were College of Agriculture , students who were maybe living at Rutgers College or Douglas or Livingston . Some of them stayed there, they stayed in their normal housing. They didn't come over to Cook right away because you know they didn't. But all the new students coming in, the new transfers and the new freshman, were all told that if they're going to live on campus, they'll live over here. It was exciting to them. Everything started from scratch. There was nothing. There was no Campus Center . The Campus Center wasn't built until 1978. We're actually having the 25 th anniversary in November this year. So there was no central location where you could go and hang out and run programs so all of our programming was run out of the Rec Center , which was just the gym floor. Only the basketball courts section was available and the basement of Woodbury. That lounge down there, which is now the RU lounge in Nicholas, the same kind of facility was available in Woodbury. And we had dances, coffee houses, and programs that were in Woodbury and it was crowded. It was hot and people lived in the building so you now had the concern that the people who lived in the building, you're opening your building up to the rest of the community for activities and events, and that kind of opened the space in the building so there were a lot of concerns about things like that.

Times were different in terms of…I'd say the biggest difference from then to now is the drinking age in the state of NJ was 18 so anybody, well, almost anybody, 95% or more of the people who came in the college were eligible to drink and drinking certainly was a part of some of the programming and activities that went on in the community. That was probably a big change, well certainly a big change, from what people know now today because the whole situation has changed with the drinking age being raised to 21.

But those were the early years; it was a lot of fun. A lot of the people who were on the Board of Managers lived in the residence halls. We were flying by the seat of our pants as far as making up the rules as we went along. I was the first Resident Director. I was also an assistant dean and one of my responsibilities was the Residents' Life Program. So I said I would live in the residence hall as a part of my responsibility. We tried to get our Residents' Life Program, one of the things we wanted to do, we wanted to keep people from the community and we wanted them to be the resident directors and things like that, to work with the students who lived on campus. Again, we were trying to develop a community so in the beginning I hired faculty members as resident directors and staff members as resident directors. So as an example, the first person that was hired as a resident director was Rick Stammer. He was a professor in the Agriculture and Business Economics Department. And so he was in Newell 178, which is where the first residents director's apartment was. Dean Foster, who is now the director of the UF program, was a resident director with me for a while. Dean Hills was a resident director for a while. So a lot of the people working in the community, faculty and staff, were the number one candidates, you know, for these positions as they opened up. The first year there was only one resident director, that was me, so I was on duty every weekend. I kind of spent my time kind of getting to know this place and we really developed things that year. I mean that was the year that we talked about what do we want to do, how do we want to do it. We looked at how we picked people to live in different locations on campus. That's when the housing sign-up forms got developed and, you know, we didn't have any rules. We didn't have a campus or a community so we were able to plan it as we went and that was really exciting, I think, for the students as well as the people who were working here. It was really a nice aspect of starting a new residential college.

The same thing happened in the academic venue. You know, the faculty, we didn't have all the procedures in place. There was a catalogue and there were programs but there were lots of options. We would need to upgrade programs, change things, create new options for people that had environmental concerns, which I think, was really exciting. It was a really exciting time from an academic standpoint.

Q: Now just for reference, when were the Starkee Apartments put up and was that because there were so many new students coming into Cook that you needed…?

DS: One of the things that we determined, as time went on through the ‘70s, was we needed more space. 252 apartments in Woodbury and 240 residents, so that's like 1240 people was not enough to accommodate Cook College [DS: please clarify]. We had now gone from 1200 to 1700, for all I know by ‘76-‘77 we were at 1900 or 2000. I don't know the exact numbers but we can certainly look them up; all that information is available. So we said, “Okay, we want to house.” We were always a community that wanted to, as much as possible, be a community. We wanted to create jobs on campus for students. We wanted students to live on campus and be a part of the Cook community. We never set ourselves up to be a commuter college. We wanted people to come here and get involved.

And that's how most of the things started. The first building that we did after Newell was Voorhees. Okay. Voorhees was built in '76; I know that date. Okay, and that was to provide more residence halls-- space for first year students. We had enough apartments for upper-class students, for sophomores, juniors and seniors, but we only had Woodbury at that point in time for resident students and so 240 spaces and we needed to create another residence hall for students. One of the other interesting things, I think, concepts that changed and, again, I'd have to look at dates, but in the mid-70s some place, initially when Woodbury opened each floor had each wing that was either male or female in terms of the residents in that wing. So there was an A wing might have been men, B wing was me, I think, C wing was women and that was in the residence hall. That wing was women and we changed somewhere down the line, I'm not exactly sure where. We went co-ed by room so we had men and women in the same wing and then we just had the bathrooms split where males used one side of the floor bathroom and the women used the other side of the wing floor. That changed over the years. That changed the whole dynamics of how things went on in residence halls. I think it made it so much more of a community when everybody lived there. It was a difficult call for some students and a lot of the parents, “excuse me, my daughter or my son is going to be next to men or women” depending on who you were. “Uh, yeah.” “Don't we have other options?” Well no, we only have one residence hall so that's the only option we have. And then when Voorhees started, same thing, we went right to, I don't know if it was ‘76, we might have still had all male or all female floors in ‘76 when Voorhees opened, but soon after that we were co-ed by room. And again, we could go back over the housing records and we could determine when that actually occurred. That was a big change and again the whole structure of the community at Cook. It made everything, it put everybody on the same page I think. You didn't isolate sections and groups. The other thing we never really did, and I know some of the other colleges did it, we never provided a special-interest housing other than Helyar House which is a [NOTE: missing word?] Living group, it wasn't a special interest housing. So we couldn't say, “Well, if you're an honor student, you get to live in this section” or you know whatever, or if you're an athlete you get to live here. We said, “No, no. We need to disperse people throughout.” One of the things in the honors program, this is sort of off the student life area, when we brought students into the honors program, the general honors program, they interviewed and whatever, in the beginning we used to put them in the same biology course, the same English course, the same chemistry section. It was pretty evident relatively early that the students would come in and say, “Lee, no offense, I can't live with these people, go to school with them. I want to be in the community. I want to be in the honors program but don't assign us here.” So in the beginning we tried to do certain things we thought we're going to help. We were going to create this great section for you to interact and talk and what we found was students interact and talk in the honors seminar, the thing that's set up for us, but the rest of our college experience really should be dispersed throughout the community and we shouldn't be the same. So that was one of the things we learned early. We thought in the beginning that maybe this would be a good thing and that students would want it, and then the students basically said, “No, I don't think I want it, I want to be more community more the whole thing and then we can go out and participate in the things that are of real interest to us. We don't want to be housed with them, live with them and do that all the time.”

The other thing I think I remember from the early years is the faculty and staff really interacted in a lot of ways with the students. Everything, from participating and playing intramural sports. Bob Boikus [Note: correct name?], who wrote the textbook for chemistry, who teaches and chairs the undergraduate chemistry program here, was a professor of chemistry at the time. He used to play softball on a softball team. Anytime we had events where you could, for instance, throw a football through a tire or knock something down and then you get to throw a bucket of water over somebody's head, he would volunteer to sit in the booth and so did I and so did other professors. Professor DeBoer, Dr. Applegate, these are all people who were here and we always wanted to be on the same group as Bob because anybody who did anything, if you got to dump something over somebody's head, well they're going to go get him because he's the chemistry professor. And so Bob and I still laugh about how fun it was to really have them interact with people. We do now. We're starting to get back to that a little bit because we have faculty mentors for all the residence halls so people like in Voorhees [Note: please clarify, did we miss a word?] And Al Gomes and Rick Ludashir, George Clark, Bon Berg [Note: please check names], these are all people that are interacting again in that way and I think that really enhances our community, that makes us special and so that's kind of, I think we saw a lot of that in the beginning with the faculty and staff being the resident directors and things like that and now I see us kind of moving back to that a little bit more. I think we got away from it for a while.

And that's pretty exciting. There are so many things that I think were important parts of student life; some of them were planned and organized and some of them weren't. For instance, the Cookie Jar. The Cookie Jar was formed in 1976. Again, just when we talked about Cook, we always talked about this great community and if you're going to have a community, well one of the things you want to do is create job opportunities for people in the community so they don't have to drive some place to work. So one of the things we said, “Wow, with all these apartments, wouldn't it be nice if we could provide some food products for the people who live there in a close location.” And two students and I went around and we kind of looked for donations and space. The two students were Jane Kramer and Heidi Price and in 1976 we went around and the Housing Department gave us the space because that was part of the housing storage area in the PAL building. So they gave us the space, the libraries donated all the shelves and things like that and somebody, I want to say National Cash Register or some company, donated the first cash register. Jane and Heidi worked the store. We hired some students and then we priced product based upon the fact that we didn't have any rent because the University didn't charge us rent for the building but we had to pay the students that worked there. So the markup was basically, the goal of the Cookie Jar was to provide service for the people who lived here, pay the people that worked there and break-even. That's how we priced things. And that's still kind of the same goal as we have now. We want to provide a service to the students who live predominately in Newell and Starkee because those are the people but some of the residence halls, too, I think, use the Cookie Jar. And that was sort of one of the goals. Our Housing Director at the time, her name was Kay Juronics, Katherine,[Note: check names] she's the one who actually named the PAL building and I don't think PAL building is a name in the University. You won't be able to look up on the buildings directory and see PAL building but the story behind it was Kay was Mother Hen to all Cook College students. She loved all Cook College students and she said, “I want people to want to come here and interact with housing and I want them to know that we care and all.” So she said we need to create a name for our building, so she said, “Well, we have the post office in here, we have the laundry room, and we have housing but you know what? Housing is really Administration and I'll call it Administration and this building can be the students pal, the PAL building.” So, I mean it's a true story. It sounds corny but the label has stuck. For students, you know where you're going, “Oh, well, I'm going to the PAL building.” Okay, and you know that's great; it just sort of got passed down and Kay Juronics was the one who did it. She was just a wonderful person who tried to do everything she could to meet the needs of the students. We would sit down, “How do you want to select the apartments you live in?” So all these things were determined by students sitting down saying, “Okay, it's our community. What do we do?” That's kind of how we got things going.

And there were some other interesting things. I talked to you a little bit before, there was a fad at some point in time, I guess in the mid-70s, I'm not sure when, of streaking and students would streak classrooms, they would streak churches and various things that happened and where someone would just get naked and run across the stage or through an audience or whatever. Well, someone determined that it would be good to have a coordinated streaking event and students determined, again not officially, determined through some organizational structure here that in front of Woodbury on Friday evening, Friday or Thursday, I'm not sure which, but they would all meet and anybody who would like to, they would have a mass streak where they would run through New Brunswick or through the town and whatever. And so they met in the circular area in front of Woodbury, approximately 80 who actually went streaking. And they were a variety of streakers. You had the biker streaker who wore just a chain and then you had the formal streaker who wore just a bow tie then you had the debutant streaker who had a necklace on and they all had some sort of the thing and some people just took their clothes off and went streaking with the group. There were literally thousands of people watching, sitting at Woodbury.

The comical things I remember. Walking around residence halls saying, “lock your doors.” I mean, there were just people from all over. We don't know who they are, if they're students, live in town, why they're here--just lock your doors. And some of the more comical comments were from streakers that would look at you and say, “Well, where would you like me to keep the key?” “I don't know, you know. I still think you should lock your door but I don't know where you should put the key.” So it was a fun night and it was like I said, if you talked to people who were here during that year, I guarantee you they will all remember that night and it was interesting.

We also had one of our biggest programming events of the year, other than Ag Field Day which has obviously transcended Cook College , when it was CAES, College of Agriculture right up until now. But one of the big events of the year was an October Fest. So we had an October Fest and a Spring Fest. It started out with a couple of students in somewhere in Section 1-24 of Newell scheduling a party, an event and they wanted to have an October Fest and everybody started to say, “Well, invite the whole community and we'll all go over and between in that rectangular area between Newell 1and 24.” We were going to have oompa band and they were going to wear lederhosen and, of course, beer and stuff became part of that because it was part of the programming at that time. And we said, “Well, you know, maybe if were going to make this a big thing we should have it in the Rec Center on the gym floor” and they did. I want to say 1976 was the first October Fest. I'd have to look at my mugs because I know I have one from the first October Fest. We had it in the Rec Center . We used to let 2000 people in and then we'd close it off and then there were probably 2000 on line outside. It was amazing. It was one of the biggest functions. You had to register and buy tickets early. Everybody, I want to say not only Cook students but people from throughout the University, started to realize that we had the October Fest every year. Like I said, it started small by a small group of students and it became a yearly function probably for 6 or so years, maybe from ‘76-'82. Again, it all changed when the drinking age changed in N.

We also had pubs during that period of time at the University on campus. There was a pub located in the Douglass Student Center downstairs where the faculty eating area is, or was recently, that whole downstairs area was the Cook/Douglass Pub. Students ran it; they bartended and, you know, it was like everything else we do here. We have student managers for the student centers; students ran the pub. There was a pub committee with a treasurer and, you know, whatever and activities went on throughout and again, it stayed here as long as the majority of students could partake and participate. Once the drinking age went to 21 from 18, everything changed because now 75% of your population is ineligible to participate. You stop using student fees to purchase alcohol and things like that as a part of your programming. So, I mean, that was a change. So there were some things that were very different on campus and those are some of the things that, you know, if people were here during those days, that's what they'll remember.

The other big thing that everyone's going to remember about Cook College is our recreation program. It is clearly participation by a large percentage of the population. The nice thing about recreation from day one is that it catered to everybody. It tried to provide a healthy avenue of recreation for anybody who wanted to. We had women's programs, men's programs, A, B, C division for people who wanted to be very competitive. For people who didn't, we had co-ed divisions early on, so participation was phenomenal and I would say that of all the things in Cook that really evolved that was the program that I think a lot of folks, again through the ‘73-‘80-‘83 era, I think it continued, but again in those years it was what you did. Everybody participated. There were no lights at the time, remember. There was no pool in the Rec Center , there were no racket ball courts, fitness center, that all came later on. Again the dates, you'll be able to get the dates when these things were developed. Everything we've built and developed from the Campus Center to the expansion of the Rec Center to where Starkee is located all involves students helping us to design what we needed and to site it in areas. You know, working in the Landscape Architecture Department and the people that are professionals here, we all worked together to build it. So that's honestly, I think that's why we have the community we have. I think it's environmentally friendly; we are creating, filling needs that people have: the pool, the Campus Center , opening up space. We're not there yet; we have a ways to go. But I think that's the one nice thing, we've been able to site things where we want, where students will use them. That's why the Campus Center is here and not by Passion Puddle because people live over here, so it's more likely that they're going to use a Campus Center that's over here. And everything is not just administratively run. It's students, faculty, administration, always it's students, faculty, administration, kind of in that order, who're most important and who we need to sit down with and kind of determine what's best for us. Again, I think that's what gives us the real community feel at Cook College . I think people make a difference and we've always kind of listened to people and when that happens, when you sit down and are asked to be actively involved in something and when you have something to say somebody actually listens, not that they do everything you want, but we all kind of throw our ideas on the table and look at these ideas and we put together a plan and I think that's been very successful for us.

Q: What I guess the big question, I mean you hit on this before but what is Ag Field Day? What has that meant to the college?

DS: Ag Field Day has always been the showcasing of the College of Agriculture , the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science and Cook College . I came here in 1965 as a freshman so Ag Field Day for me is both as a student and as an administrator later on. It was that one Saturday, the last Saturday in April, that provided an opportunity to showcase what the College was all about. So when we didn't have a residence hall and when we didn't have students living over here, a residential campus, then the clubs that existed, and it was a much smaller group of clubs and organizations, would work with the faculty to showcase what they did. And I think over the years we've grown. Ag Field Day's grown. The animal shows, the opportunity for students to participate in showing animals, you don't have to be an animal science student to do that. You know that kind of evolved over the years and that's really a highlight of Ag Field Day. Having departments open things up and say, “Here's an opportunity to see what we do for the public, for parents, alumni.” That's who comes back to Ag Field Day. Ag Field Day is about alumni and the public coming and parents and students showcasing and seeing what Cook College has to offer. I think that's the most exciting part of it. Again in the mid-70s Ag Field Day used to have a component, a Friday component, and it used to be for high school recruitment. We used to have thousands of high school students on campus Friday and the things that were set up for Ag Field Day, the demonstration for departments and all, were set up a day early. Then when we brought high school students in, sometimes as many as 80 bus loads of high school students. That's when high schools could afford to do that. Once budgets got tight and all we stopped doing the Friday program but we'd bring any high school, any they could bring a busload of students from their high school. Again we would showcase the College by running tours, letting them see the Ag Field Day demonstrations and displays. There might even be a lecture or two. Before we had facilities like the Rec Center and the Campus Center and things like that, we used to set a tent up on the green around Passion Puddle, right opposite Blake Hall. There was a huge tent and the dean would welcome people there. One of our students would always introduce the dean. Lee Merrill was the dean when I was in school and Charlie Hess was the dean when Cook College opened. You'll see Charlie today at 4:00 . And we used that tent as sort of a congregating place for things. The students would always come in, the buses would drop them off in front of Lipman Hall, and we would have students take each bus on tours of the campus, walking tours, so they went all over the campus. They got to see the farms, again almost everybody who's come to Cook College , if you didn't come as a young child to see the farm when you came from high school one of the parts of the tour was we're going to walk you through the farm. One of our features was we had a fisculated [Note: is this right?] cow that had a plastic circle in its side and so you could actually see in to a cow's stomach. Obviously it was for other testing so you could go in you could check how fast food products were being digested. So it had a lot to do with that but that was always, “Hey that's the holy cow, the cow with the hole in its side.”

Q: Yeah, I remember that. My sister went to Douglass and I came out for Parent's Day and I came out like 8 …

DS: … and you wanted to see the holy cow.

Q: Yeah, that was quite an attraction.

DS: Yes. So that was another thing that was out there. And, obviously, the reason we had things like that was because of the Experiment Station, the fact that there was research and extensions involving Cook College before Cook College became Cook College . We were always that land grant component. So things like that were featured for us. I think one of the things we tried to do when Cook opened was, for lack of a better term, show what new agriculture was. Agriculture was more than plowing the field and growing crops and raising animals. Agriculture was soil, agriculture was medical research, agriculture was marine science. You know, what I mean? These are the kinds of things, I think that when Cook evolved that's what happened. I think it showed more than just your production agriculture. It showed what kinds of things are related to the agriculture community and obviously technology and medical research and things like that are incredible add-ons, then with environmental science coming in ‘65 that obviously opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. So Ag Field Day has always been kind of that feature day in the schools thing and, again, the concept was to showcase what we had to offer and it's for everybody to participate, students, faculty, staff. Everyone.

Q: Well that answers most of my questions unless there's anything else that comes to mind.

DS: Believe me, I could sit, I've been working here since 1970, this is my 34 th year, I think I know every story. I've seen most of the things that have happened here. I can't remember all the dates exactly. I know a lot of faces. I'll get the name. Sometimes I'll hear a name and say, “Oh, I know that person's a Cook student, I don't know if Id recognize you now, if we talk a little bit we'll go.” And there are literally thousands of stories about people at Cook or activities that, over the years, you could easily get them all out. And you have different groups that will have different connections. You know the people at Animal Science will have one set of stories and ideas, the people at Helyar House will know something a little bit different than the resident students about their experience. It's just, it's been an evolving process. That's been a lot of fun to be a part of and it's really kind of nice. I can certainly add to this at any time. I'm probably tired of talking, you're probably tired of listening and like I said, if there's anything else I could add to this or if there is a specific thing identified…. I mean we haven't talked about the development of the rising patio, which is our chance to provide a memorial remembrance of students and faculty who have passed away in an untimely fashion. That developed from Cook College and the students. The expansion of the Campus Center, the expansion of the Rec Center and how we obtained a pool, how we obtained racket ball courts and the fitness center, of students going and saying we need to expand these interests. These are all things that we're talking 30 years of Cook College . You can't sit down in an hour and remember all the stories but they're all out there, and for somebody who's gone through here, it's going to be very exciting to hear that because they're going to remember that.

The other big thing that we really haven't touched on is everything we do on campus is community generated. For instance, the Newell Apartments, the parking lots, the patio outside the PAL building, students did that. Students, faculty and staff working together laid the patio. Students and the landscape architecture department designed what the pattern was going to be, what trees were going to be used in Newell. Students, faculty, staff planted them. So in all cases, we really participated in the growth of our school and the changing of our environment. And I mean literally participated. We dug the holes, put the trees in, it wasn't like you know we're hiring an outside contractor, put that in do whatever you want. No, we took ownership, that active involvement. That to me is key that makes us unique. This is our home, our community; we should take our expertise and help to design things. Then you know what, instead of spending money to have somebody else do it, we'll do it. And so every time we planted trees or did a patio, after it was over, we ate, we had some food, we had a barbeque, we had music you went into something, you know we said hey, that's great. And I think the people that came back now I bet you could ask some of the people who are here today, “Do you know planning.” “Oh yeah, we did the parking lot?” All that was great or we did the patio. That was great. We had 700 people laying bricks and everything then we had a big party at the end. There was food and drinks. And oh, we had a great time. And people like Roy DuBoer and Bruce Hamilton and others, myself and people were here and seen all of that stuff.

Q: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

DS: Thank you, Rob. And like I said if I do anything else or add to any other pieces of those, I would be happy to do that.

Q: Okay.