CAROLINA MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW #121
Capt. Charles J. Merdinger
USNA Class of 1941
March 31, 1990
Interview #1

Donald R. Lennon:
Let's pick up with your retirement from your Naval career and take a look at your second career.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Okay. Well, I sort of wandered into education with no particular fixed idea. When I was at the Naval Academy on the faculty, as I mentioned, I was head of the English History and Government Department. This brought me into contact with a number of people in the academic world. While I was there, a number of people started offering me college presidencies! Well, I had never even thought about anything beyond the Navy, quite honestly. I listened to a few people. There were a couple of firm offers. I began to think, "Well, no, I'm not really ready yet to do this. But, there is something beyond the Navy, and perhaps this is something I ought to look into down the road."

Well, first of all, this was before Vietnam. I felt, well, I've got to go there. . . Civil engineer and Seabee and so on. That was a big part. I think that high percentages of Civil Engineer Corps, probably 80 percent or more, all went to Vietnam. I felt that's where I had to go. I would start to think about this after I came back.

Well, when I got back to my final assignment in the Navy, I was commanding the Western Division Facilities Engineering Command, which is located out in the San Francisco Bay area.

Donald R. Lennon:
This is what year?

Charles J. Merdinger:
This is '68. I came back from Vietnam. I was in the Tet Offensive. I do have a few sea stories about Vietnam.

So I came back there and at that time I began to look around. I could have stayed a number of years more in the Navy, but I figured it was about time to go.

So I remembered that I'd served on the Rhodes Scholar Selection Board in Maryland back when I was at the Academy. The chairman of these Rhodes selection committees is always a non-Rhodes Scholar. This fellow happened to be Dan Gibson who was the president of Washington College.

When I got back, I wrote to him and I said, "Well, I'm thinking it's about time to close my Navy career and some people have kind of excited my interest in academe. Here's a resumé." I said, "If you know anybody who might be interested in qualifications such as these, I would appreciate your passing it on." I think I invested a six-cent stamp or something like that.

Well, within a week I got a letter back from him that said, "It's interesting that you should write to me at this time. I have just decided to retire as president. So I have turned your letter over to the chairman of the board." The next thing you know, I'm the president of Washington College. Well, I had to go through an interview process and all that. But you must remember now, this is 1970, the time of Kent State, a great time for a


military man to go into academics. After all, this is an old-line liberal college, the tenth oldest in the United States.

Before I ever got there, there were all kinds of complaints about "No military man for president" and that sort of thing. So I arrived on the scene and found that it was in a bit of disarray administratively. The faculty had risen up against the dean who had been in office less than a year. So he was out. The business manager had just died. The dean of students took a job someplace else. So clear across the board, the whole top level of the administration wasn't there and I didn't really realize this until I got into the spot. It was a rather hectic time. Fortunately, we managed to get a few good people in there and put things together.

I might add that it was beginning to run into the red as well. So one of the first things I had to do was put a freeze on salaries, which of course, was not a very popular move. On one hand, as a private college, we had to depend on all these good folks who were going to support us. Most of them were of a pretty conservative bent. This was just at a time when they were beginning to desegregate the dormitories and everything in the world was going on, along with the Vietnam War. So I immediately, of course, tried to shed the old military image. People found out that I'd been a Naval officer, obviously, but I still tried to coast along on the "doctor" bit, and not use a military title. That didn't help much.

It was just a very, very rocky road. I became a member of the Independent College Presidents' Association of Maryland. I think that there were about twenty of us. This was a time of rapid turnover in college presidents. After two years, I think I was about the fourth senior in terms of service in the group!


As a matter of fact, I remember one day we were scheduled to meet at Johns Hopkins and a few hours before, we were told that the president had left! So things went rapidly. I found myself on the same roller coaster. After a while I said, "Boy, I don't know if this is really worth it." It wasn't so much the students. A lot of people felt that it was the students who were behind this. In many of the other colleges, the other presidents I'd talk to confirmed this and said, "No, really much of this is hard-core faculty. These are people who are kind of dissatisfied with things and they're egging the students on. So you see the students in the paper and everything. . . sure, some part of this is student unrest, but, the hard core of this is really being directed by some of the faculty." You find this kind of animosity building up. People are annoyed. They don't get paid what they think they're worth. On and on.

Finally, I got to the point where obviously some of the people were calling for my resignation. I don't know a president in those days who wasn't faced with that. I said, "Well, do I really want to tough it out, or not?" Well, fortunately, an old friend of mine from Oxford had become the director of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. They were looking for a college president to come in and set up a whole slew of Aspens all over the United States. They said, "Well, it's such a great idea here, but we don't really know whether this will work. We need somebody to come in and study it and if indeed it is feasible, then we will establish a number of these." This person will kind of head a consortium of these things. I don't know if you're familiar with what the Aspen Institute does or anything?

Donald R. Lennon:
I'm just familiar with its existence.


Charles J. Merdinger:
Well, basically, it was a "Great Books" kind of an operation initially. It got started by some folks: Hutchins of Chicago, Mortimer Adler, and a few people like that. They reasoned that if they could get some of the top executives in the country together to get into a retreat kind of place--Aspen is where it turned out--and give them a dose of the "Great Books" for a while that they would go back further refreshed and run their companies in a more enlightened fashion, if you will. They would mix these executives with a sprinkling of black activists, supreme court justices, and odds and ends of people who came from completely different environments. Then this branched out to include not only the "Great Books" program, but also a series of topics--communications, environment, and so on--that would bring people together in a seminar situation.

So at any rate, the thought was, "If it's good at Aspen, several Aspens would be even much better." So it was my out. I was able to move from the college to that with my skin intact.

Well, when I left the college, I really felt a sense of both winning and losing, of success and failure. Failure from the sense that I could tell that a lot of people just hated me. This was a kind of new experience because just shortly before, in Vietnam, when we'd had the last night as Seabees, we had about five hundred of them there at the farewell party, and I really felt that I could have gone anywhere and they would have followed me. In other words, I really felt the kind of support that you get in a combat situation. Then to come to a campus like this and find that a lot of people just hated my guts, that was a little tough to take.

But I looked back and said, "Well, what did we accomplish around here?"


Well, for one thing, we brought the place into the black. We brought the registration up. When I got there we had six hundred and some students; we had over seven-fifty when I left because we put out an intense recruiting campaign. We were re-accredited. We got the money and built three new dormitories. All these things were stumbling blocks. Everybody would fight me every minute of the way. I felt we needed a larger student body to support a better faculty. If you've got just so few students, you can't cover all the bases.

Donald R. Lennon:
And the faculty was opposed to the increases?

Charles J. Merdinger:
Oh yes. "We don't want that. We don't want to be another University of Maryland." We had a faculty-student ratio of about 10-1.

Donald R. Lennon:
That's very difficult financially to maintain.

Charles J. Merdinger:
That's a tough thing to do. But it was really funny, despite all the animosities; not everybody was opposed to me. I found when I got there that one-third of the faculty hadn't talked to each other in the last seven years! So it wasn't only against the administration or me. I also found that no dean was able to say in the saddle longer than two years in a seven-year period. As a matter of fact, with the dean I brought in, after he had been there a year and a half, I felt I had to get him another job. They were just driving him out of his mind.

Donald R. Lennon:
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that's fairly typical of higher education.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Yes. Well, I found, as I say, that the only people that I could completely confide in were my fellow presidents. They all seemed to be confronted with the same thing. So I suppose I could have stuck it out. But I thought, "Why do I want to do this?" I was waking up early. . . and you know, I'd been in combat in World War II; in Korea I was in


the Aleutians, which was a kind of combat situation of its own; and then of course, in Vietnam I was there in the middle of the Tet Offensive. I was at Da Nang, Hue, and Khe Sanh. . . all these places. And yet, I felt much more embattled when I was in this presidency. As I say, it was a new feeling, and as I looked back I felt we had accomplished something, however there wasn't much I was going to accomplish in the next few years except man the battlements. This Aspen Institute thing was really a Godsend.

Donald R. Lennon:
So how long were you there? Four years?

Charles J. Merdinger:
I was there from '70 to '73. As I say, my dean only lasted two years. I managed to help get him a job as academic vice-president in another school. Some of the other people I brought in with me didn't fare too well either.

I got over to the Aspen Institute and that was a very heady experience. We lived part of the time in an apartment in New York City.

To go back to the college for just a minute, there were a lot of bright spots. I don't mean to imply that it was all on the down side. There were some wonderful people there, wonderful faculty members and wonderful students. One of the things that my wife and I used to do was to invite about fifteen seniors over for dinner. We went through the whole senior class. We would sit on the floor and talk about life and where we were going and all this sort of thing. It was a great experience. We had a lot of interesting people come over.

Donald R. Lennon:
It was rewarding for the students considering your breadth of background and everything.


Charles J. Merdinger:
Well, we had a lot of fun. I only remember one negative thing. We had gotten some beautiful Oriental rugs when we lived in Japan. We put them over this old colonial floor. By the way, we lived in what was called the Henson Ringgold House, which is one of the great houses of America. It's in the National Registry. It was kind of a creaky old place, and drafty, and so on, but it was also magnificent in many ways. The one negative thing I remember was that one kid put a cigarette hole in one of my beautiful rugs! But I think that that was more than compensated for by all the energy and enthusiasm and everything we got. But one thing that used to bother me was the feeling that now they're seniors, they're going to graduate in a few months, and fully 75 percent of them didn't have a clue as to what they were going to do after they graduated.

Donald R. Lennon:
In that period of '70 to '73, did you see a great deal of idealism among them?

Charles J. Merdinger:
I find that hard to support. Sure, a lot of students are always idealistic, at any age at any time. Of course, the people who were brought to my attention were the dissident types, the kind who wanted to come into my office in bare feet. I said, "Well, I just don't want to entertain people in my office in bare feet."

Well, they're just trying to show their independence, you see. Then there was the fellow who was really very much against the war and everything, but he wanted to stay in college until he graduated. He didn't want to make a martyr of himself before then. We had Rennie Davis, who was one of the great antiwar types, come to talk. I sat in the back of the auditorium and listened to that, and my blood boiled! It was all I could do to keep from saying something but I just kept my peace. We invited every stripe to come to the place and if they wanted to say something, fine, let them say it.


Donald R. Lennon:
Why I asked is that, if you are on a campus nowadays, you do not see that idealism at all. The entire thrust is "I want an MBA so I can go out and make a million dollars, drive a new BMW, and live in a big house.

Charles J. Merdinger:
I would say, as I mentioned, most of them didn't really know what they were going to do when they graduated. They had some vague ideas. They might go into law--they might go into social work. I mean a lot of things of that nature. I don't recall any very strong feelings about, "I must get a job." As a matter of fact, it used to bother me. We had an awful lot of them in the buildings and grounds after they graduated! I wished

that somewhere they would have a little more of the business of the entrepreneurial spirit to go someplace. But I think that most of them turned out pretty well. It was the kind of place where many of them had Ivy League parents. The youngster didn't quite make it to Dartmouth so he ended up at Washington College. We had a very fine faculty in terms of the preparation and so on. As I said, I didn't particularly appreciate some of their antics but they were good teachers. I think the students got an excellent education there. So it's a mixed bag.

I got into the Aspen Institute and we lived part of the time in New York City and part of the time in Aspen. This was both winter and summer. We'd move the whole office from one place to the other. The secretary, the files, everything would go. That was a heady experience in that I was going around the country trying to determine, "Now where can we put one of these places and what will it cost to do it, and so on." I finally came up with a program. We were going to try four pilot operations. One would be connected with the university and another would be completely by itself, and so on. But when I totaled up the figures, it was just horrendous. It was tough enough to balance the


existing budget. Well, as a matter of fact, I don't know that Aspen ever did balance its budget because the chairman of the board of Arco was the chief agent of the place. If the balance was negative, I got the impression at the end of the year that he wrote a personal check.

Donald R. Lennon:
Arco made a contribution.

Charles J. Merdinger:
No, I think he made it. I don't know that Arco did. Well, Arco did probably as well. But he enjoyed this sort of thing. He felt he was doing something good for the country and so on.

Donald R. Lennon:
Now the approach there was to contact a particular corporation and convince them that all of their executive and administrative staff should participate in this?

Charles J. Merdinger:
Generally speaking, this would be the top-level. I recall the instance, I believe, when one [of the participants] had been the executive vice-president of American Can or a company of that stature.

Donald R. Lennon:
But they went as a group?

Charles J. Merdinger:
No.

Donald R. Lennon:
Just as individuals.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Yes, and they would meet other individuals from around the country. This case I think is typical. His president had decided that he ought to go. So he went and he spent two weeks there discussing Plato and Thucydidis and Martin Luther King and a few other things. He came back and was expected to write a written report. He said, "I really appreciate the vacation. It's a wonderful place. I enjoyed meeting the people. It was great from that standpoint. But, I don't really see how it is going to be of value to the company for us to send all of our executives to this thing."


So, he dropped the memo on the president's desk and went away and through the next several months, he began to reflect on his experience there. Every now and then, something would come up and he would remember something somebody had said or something he had read. At the end of six months, he wrote a memo reversing himself. He said, "I was wrong in my first evaluation of this thing. I have found that that experience was one of the most compelling experiences in my life. I have noticed I am making much better decisions on complex issues than I would have before. I think much of this comes from the stimulation that I received from that Aspen experience. So I recommend that we go ahead with it."

I think this happened to a lot of people. It was a kind of delayed sort of thing.

Donald R. Lennon:
It was in their subconscious.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Exactly. There was another feature there, too. They had what they called the "Scholars and Artists in Residence." They would invite, oh, maybe up to a hundred of them to come and spend the summer or part of the summer with them. At that time, Herman Wouk was concerned with writing the sequel to the Winds of War. So I assumed the dialogue went something like this: "Well, Herman we understand that you're writing a sequel to the Winds of War. How would you like to come out to Aspen? We'll provide you with a place to live and we'll give you a little stipend--walking around money. You don't have to do anything, but if you'd like to join some of our little functions, give a lecture, show up at a cocktail party, or whatever, we'd be delighted to have you."

Well, Herman Wouk shows up and Saul Bellow and also Henry Steele Commager, all sorts of people in arts and letters and everything else.

Donald R. Lennon:
That would be wonderful.


Charles J. Merdinger:
Well, I'm not so sure it was all that wonderful because sometimes there were so many great ones that they cancelled each other out a bit. But it was a very, very heady experience. That was just a marvelous environment to roll around in.

I was out on the road, of course, trying to set up these various things. I was just about to set up the first one and I turned in my budget. I could have dragged it out a little, but in all good conscience, I couldn't. "This is what it's going to cost. And I don't know where the money is coming from." They agreed.

So that terminated that program, so this put me on the job-hunting market again.

Donald R. Lennon:
How long were you with them--a year, two years?

Charles J. Merdinger:
Oh, no. It lasted under a year. But it was wonderful. I thought it was a great episode in my life. It enabled me to escape from one environment, put me into another. Of course, with the Navy retirement pay in the background, I didn't feel compelled to grab the first thing that came along. I was on certain headhunters' lists apparently, because a number of things were thrust my way. They were all over the lot. They weren't in education necessarily. One was to take charge of a project building up the old seaport in New York City. Another was to run all of those famous "cottages" in Newport, Rhode Island. You would have to live at the Breakers, a twenty-three-room apartment!

Donald R. Lennon:
A sacrifice!

Charles J. Merdinger:
A military academy! A number of other things all came up. It was fun going to those interviews. It almost got to the point where it was more fun not having a job and being interviewed for them than it was having a job itself. But then Scripps Institution of Oceanography decided that it needed a deputy director. The director was, of course, a


world-class scientist and he was always in Paris or in Washington or someplace and they were looking for somebody who'd sort of mind the store while he was gone. Then, if he didn't want to go, there'd be somebody to send in his place. So, I ended up in that particular job.

That was fascinating because we had world-class scientists coming through the place all the time. I got involved in putting a lot of international projects together. I also got involved in this deep sea drilling project, which you may have heard of--The Glomar Challenger.

We had what amounted to a board of directors. It was a multi-national operation. We had representatives from France, West Germany, Soviet Union, Japan, Great Britain and the U.S. The directors of the various oceanographic institutions comprised the board members. Well, our director was supposed to send a member, or me, but I think most of the time I used to go to the meetings so I, in effect, became the board member. This was true of a couple of other institutions, too.

Donald R. Lennon:
Did any of your experience as a civil engineer and with the Seabees in any way prepare you for this oceanography?

Charles J. Merdinger:
Well, only from an organizational standpoint. I had no pretensions of knowing much about oceanography. This was a twelve-hundred person institution and we had a fleet of ships that made us, I think, about the fifth largest naval power in the world! So from that standpoint and my Navy background, I obviously could understand a little of all that. I was the only civil engineer in the place. I didn't really do any civil engineering. Whatever expertise I brought to the place was more in the field of management. One small example: The medical school and the Scripps Institution had gotten together in an


area that they both had a mutual interest in--it was doing something in the way of pulmonary and heart and other things in animals, particularly in sea animals and so on--physiology. Well, they had come together but then they drew apart. They just couldn't work together. So I was able to get four from one school and four from the other and say, "Look, I'm a dumb civil engineer. I don't really understand all of the things that we're trying to do here but perhaps you could explain them to me."

As we worked together, we were able to forge a very strong, new institute out of that. So I was able to act as a facilitator. In other words, I had enough scientific background and knowledge to at least understand when they told me what they were doing. At least I got the general drift. In some way, I was able to bring them together. Then the same thing was true in another instance: We had a number of scientific institutions down in Mexico and Baja California and the idea was to get their scientists working with our scientists. Again, I was able to play a major role in getting what we called CIBCUSIO(?)--the centers of investigation, or whatever it was--this international effort going. Then when I sat on the board for the deep-sea drilling project, there was a lot of coordination to be done and I played a role in that.

So the answer is, yes, I guess you might say. I used my managerial experience. It wasn't really technical knowledge. But the fact that I could at least listen to technical terms and somehow play a role in getting the thing organized. . . . That was a beautiful period. I spent about six years doing that.

While I was on that, it turned out that Avco Corporation, which was a multi-national conglomerate, was looking for a director for one of their satellites, Community Developers. They were looking for somebody to come onto their board of directors--an


outside director--who had had a sort of multi-national experience and had also been in the building business a bit. Well, I ended up on that board. Then it turned out that at the major Avco Corporation, of which this was a subsidiary, the scientist on the board was retiring and they were looking for somebody to kind of be the token scientist among the outside directors, so I fleeted up to that.

That became an interesting experience because, well, to give you a few titles of the people on the board: the retired president of AT&T, the former chairman of Metropolitan Life, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange, and the head of the Center for International and Strategic Studies. It was a fourteen-man board but it was really a wonderful, wonderful group.

First of all I should say there were certain people, certain types in the Navy that I enjoyed working with. They were just my kind of guy, the kind of people I like. It was fascinating to get over the academe, because you got a different group over there. But after a while you get kind of tired of that. I kind of longed for the sort of people I used to deal with in the Navy. Well, I found on the Avco board exactly those people.

I used to have to go back once a month. We did all kinds of things. We were in the movies. We made "The Graduate." We were in the defense business in many ways--making the wings for the B-1 bomber. We were in the space program. We made most of the engines for general aircraft in the country, the Avco Lycoming engines. We ran all the airfields in Saudi Arabia. We were involved in various types of research, and heart pumps, and that sort of thing. We also had a Christmas paper organization that manufactured Christmas paper.

Donald R. Lennon:
You needed a diverse board then.


Charles J. Merdinger:
This was a diverse conglomerate. It was also a conglomerate with a soul. One of the things that was included was an outfit called the New Ideal Farm Equipment Company. They made certain farm equipment that was particularly well known in the Midwest. But it was a loser. As you know, there was a period then, I'm not sure if they've come out of it yet, when the farming industry was dead flat, particularly as a market for all these pieces of equipment. So the company was looking for some way to sell this thing. There were many people who came forward but the company looked them over and said, "No, we don't think they're going to take care of these customers." We thought we still had an obligation to supply them the spare parts that we had contracted with them to provide when we sold them this equipment.

So lots of people talk about the corporation without a soul, but that was not true. This was a marvelous group of executives and people who really had a social conscience. So I was very disappointed when ultimately we got hit by a raider. So we had been through all this business of "white knights" and "golden parachutes" and all these other things, when we were hit by some outfit, and there wasn't one person on that board that had ever heard of this company. It was about one-tenth our size and all of a sudden they had 5 percent of the shares or something. That begins to get to be a critical area, you see, in this takeover game. This took place in about 1984, as I recall, because I was on the board for six years. It was 1985 when this first raider hit us. We hired a number of lawyers to come in and they were supposed to be the best ones in the anti-takeover business or maybe the takeover business, whatever it was. We paid them a bundle and basically they said, "Buy them out."


It wasn't greenmail because we paid them at the going market rate, but it was darn close to it. Disney had just previously run into a tremendous amount of criticism because apparently they had paid more than what the stock was worth to get some raider off their backs.

Donald R. Lennon:
I remember the Disney episode.

Charles J. Merdinger:
I don't recall the details, but it was something along those lines.

Well, here we are, almost in the same boat, but not quite. What that did, of course, was jack the stock up. So it went from here to a much higher value. In the meantime, people were getting kind of antsy. Then we got hit with yet another raider. This boosted the stock up still further.

Donald R. Lennon:
And all the time, the corporation is having to go more and more into debt to try to ward off the takeovers.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Yes. You certainly get the impression that a lot of things are standing still. In other words, there is more manning the barricades than turning out widgets. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that Textron came in with a friendly takeover offer. The board was urged by the lawyers, who by the way, I guess had taken in millions in this. . . . They said, "We think you ought to go for this because you're really ripe for the picking." The point was that the company was a good company but being a conglomerate with all these odds and ends, it was very easy to say, "Ah, we'll slice off a piece here and we'll slice off a piece there."

Well, in the long run it wasn't good, certainly, for people's morale. Some people will argue, "Okay, so the company's leaner and meaner" and so on. And I think this is probably true in a number of cases. But in this particular case I found it hard to believe.


When Textron took over, that ended my days as a corporate director. I really enjoyed the experience. It was once a month going back to New York or someplace else so that we might meet at one of the divisions. I traveled to just about every division in the corporation, so I knew all the top executives. I've never been so impressed with how in the world the company managed to get so many fine people in such an organization. As I said, they were not only competent and smart, but they were also compassionate. They had all the things you like to think of in American industry. So that was a wonderful experience. I look back on those days with a great deal of fondness.

After I retired from Scripps, we owned the home up in Lake Tahoe as well as the one down in La Jolla. We decided to make Tahoe our home. I should add that Tahoe got in the picture way back in Vietnam. I was headquartered in Da Nang as I mentioned, and I had troops all over I-Corps. Every now and again I would go down to Saigon. I had to talk to logistics people down there. I ran into a Navy captain who played tennis and we played at Circle Sportef and became good friends. Then, after Vietnam, we both ended up in the Bay area in our assignments, and there was more tennis. Well, when I retired from the Navy to go to Washington College, he retired shortly thereafter and went up to Lake Tahoe. I used to get letters and post cards from him that said, "Jeez, you've been in three wars and now you're in a fourth war! So, why don't you come up here and we'll just go skiing and play tennis."

I thought, "Gee, that's a very tempting idea." I had never thought about Lake Tahoe, retiring, or anything else. But it seemed worth looking into. Well, as I mentioned, when the Aspen thing folded, and Scripps now became the job, we came from New York and we said, "Well, let's drive by Lake Tahoe in route to San Diego and we'll


see where old George lives." Well, the point of all this was that we stopped for maybe overnight, maybe two days. The sky was blue, you could see forever, and you could smell the pines, and we bought a place. We had never owned a place in our lives. We now bought that one and we bought the one in La Jolla. So, after having never owned anything, in our fifties, we now buy two places within two weeks and they turn out to be two of the most lovely places in the world, La Jolla and Lake Tahoe.

So when my days at Scripps were over--I could have stayed thee longer too--but I thought it was about time to go. I had been reading about and hearing from people who were always going to take a trip and they never got around to it. Financially, it was no problem. As a matter of fact, the business with Avco had certainly helped. I had invested in Avco and had ridden this thing up. Nevertheless, I had rather not have made the money and continued the activity on the board. I felt that we were doing something useful and important.

So we had the place up at Tahoe and said, "Well, let's shift," So, what had been the vacation home became the number one home and La Jolla received the number two, and we've been up there ever since. I found that it was a lot of fun to go skiing and play tennis and so on, but I also became actively involved with a college there, right in Incline Village where we live.

I'd dropped in, as a matter of fact, before I retired from Scripps. It was and is the only four-year degree-granting accredited college in the state apart from the University of Nevada system itself. So this is a little school that scrubbed its way up from nothing.

Donald R. Lennon:
What's the name of it?


Charles J. Merdinger:
Sierra Nevada College. Well, I told the president, although, he wasn't the president, he was called the director of this thing. . . . it had been a proprietary school and a few of these people owned it. They were just struggling. They were in the first stages of recognition for candidacy for accreditation. I told the president, "Well, I'm in town now and if there's anything I can do, let me know."

He said, "Well, we're going to have an art show next week. We're inviting some of the citizens from around the place to make an early viewing. I'm going to send you an invitation."

Well, we get over there and I have a badge that says "Trustee." I said, "What's this?"

He said, "Oh, well, we voted you in as a trustee of the college."

I said, "Well, that's very nice. When do you meet?"

He said, "We meet at the trustee's meeting once a year."

I said, "Fine, when's the next meeting?"

He said, "It's going to be next week."

Well, I went to the meeting and just before, this fellow, the president, Ben Sahn, takes me aside. He'd have made a wonderful junk dealer. He's one of those entrepreneurs. He's a very bright guy. His background in education wasn't all that great but he was interested in the thing and he ultimately acted as the janitor and the president and the instructor in mathematics and a few other things.

Donald R. Lennon:
Whatever was needed.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Yes. Whatever was needed. So he took me aside and he said, "Chuck, we've got a number of people on this board who are very willing workers and so on, but nobody


really knows anything about education. Would you mind being elected chairman of the board?"

Donald R. Lennon:
You'd been there one week!

Charles J. Merdinger:
So I said, "Well, okay."

Well, that started seven years of being chairman of the board. We started changing things almost immediately. I said, "If this board is going to be worth anything, it's got to meet at a minimum of four times a year. Then, we've got to form committees and do this and that and the other thing." So, we just dragged this thing from scratch. It was a heady experience doing this.

The school started out by advertising in Rolling Stone, and a few other prestigious publications for its students. By golly, they got all kinds of young people in there--some a little older, who hadn't quite made it or didn't like it someplace else.

Donald R. Lennon:
Was the fact that they were in Lake Tahoe an incentive?

Charles J. Merdinger:
Yes, it was a real incentive. So we started with a magnificent environment and we gradually accumulated a faculty. There wasn't any permanent faculty, it was just the president and the so-called dean, who was a buddy--an old college buddy of the president's--neither of them were educators, but as I said, they managed to accumulate a few of these people around.

Well, in time, it truly became organized as a bonafide college. We got to the point where we got a lot of very fine people on the board. We got it to the point that the college is flourishing today. They probably have, let's say, 165 full-time students and then an equal number who are not quite taking a full course load--working in the casinos and other things. You see, the lake is part in California and part in Nevada.


Donald R. Lennon:
Right, I realize that.

Charles J. Merdinger:
We're on the Nevada side. Then we've started what amounts to a community college element of the thing, too. We give all kinds of basket-weaving courses, real estate, and this and that and the other thing. That, in turn, has attracted another large number. So, there are probably, in the course of a year, 700 different people.

Donald R. Lennon:
But it has to be self-sustaining.

Charles J. Merdinger:
Right, it has to be a self-sustaining college, absolutely.

Donald R. Lennon:
No money coming from the state of Nevada?

Charles J. Merdinger:
Fortunately, Incline Village is a very up-scale place and many of the members of the board are multi-millionaires and they have been willing to support this thing. We've gotten a foundation behind us now. So the thing is really going.