[BEGINNING OF TAPE 1 SIDE 2]DP: (0:02) When, when you were in East Carolina, there were a lot of social changes. In '59 I think the first Black student came to East Carolina. Do you remember anything about that [unintelligible]?CP: (0:16) I don't remember the first one coming. They didn't make much ado about it. It was handled very quietly. I think the general attitude was expressed a year or two later when someone asked Coach Stasavich if he was recruiting Black football players. He said he was not, but he sure wasn't going to turn him down if any good ones came, and so I think that was sort of the general attitude. Everybody was sort of quiet about it. If anybody applied to come, they admitted them. We didn't stand in the door, like they did in Mississippi and some other places there to say, you shall not enter, but we admitted them, and it was handled, I thought, rather well. The Blacks felt, of course, there was only a small group to begin with, they felt that there were some faculty whom, at least they were charged with being racial, sort of racist. One member of the history department, Howard Clay, was accused by the Blacks of being racist, not because he believed in any inferiority, but because of his pronunciation. When he talked about Blacks, he talked about "nigras," and the Blacks don't mind to call them Negros or Blacks or African-American, but they don't want to use that name "nigra." So they went to Howard and asked him about it. And Howard was from Georgia, so he said, I've been calling these "nigras," I've been talking about "nigras" all my life, and I'm not going to change now. And he never did, but that that's the kind of trouble that we had little, rather minor things, they finally set up a committee at the time I served on it, but I don't remember much about it, to deal with the charges of discrimination. So it was handled very, very well, I thought, the administration set up hearings, and anyone Black and thought he had been discriminated against could appeal to this committee and there would be a complete hearing on it, and any grievances that were found were redressed. And so it was handled without any great difficulty, or mostly individuals dealing with little instance like the "nigra," and they would, I think the Blacks were appreciative of the way it was done, not that all of them were satisfied that there weren't discrimination, but when they had a complaint, it was heard, and there was hearings and it properly was redressed. We did have a little bit earlier, one member of the history department, fellow with the name of LeBaron, who was an out and out racist, he was, this was before the integration.DP: (3:39) You know what year this was?CP: (3:44) Late '50s, I believe I can't remember exactly before we had a history department, anyway. LeBaron started a radio broadcast that he called "History Behind the News," and some of it was quite legitimate in the issue that was in the news, give the historical background of it. But he also got involved in a lot of racism, and it was a very widely [dog barking] LeBaron was, started this program called "History Behind the News," and was very racist in the approach that he had and tried to, there was a great number of listeners in Eastern North Carolina, it was a very popular program, but he caused up a great deal of controversy on the campus. It became so serious that one member of our department, Cliff Johnson, who used to teach at Le Moyne College, Black college, and was probably the most integrated person I know. He was one of those people who had been taught at Black colleges lived with the Blacks, when a Black person came into the room, he never noticed what the color was. So he resented very much LeBaron's racist attitudes and programs. So he used to have controversies with him. There were some, a lot of newspapers that are writing, and at one time, it got so bad that LeBaron challenged Cliff to a duel. It never took place, but anyway, that's how serious the thing was. The, LeBaron lived next door to an English professor, name of H.D. Rowe, and he was used to give him all kinds of what he thought was private conversation. Well, H.D. was about as liberal as Cliff was, but LeBaron didn't know that. And so finally, H.D. wrote a series of letters, sort of ironies that talking about his, his uncle someplace, and quite obviously it was LeBaron they were talking about. And gave all the inside information about the challenge of the duel, everything that LeBaron was telling H.D., thinking he was talking in private to his neighbor. So H.D. rolled out, wrote all that up, put it in the paper, in a formal letter, and so it became widely publicized. So they finally decided to look into the background of LeBaron, and so they, he was. came here with supposedly good credentials. His degree was supposedly a PhD from the University of Rome. They, he chose that because the Hall of Records at the University of Rome had burned, and no one knew what was what. But after the public, publicizing of this incident, then people contacted the university, people that had known LeBaron elsewhere, and he found out that he was a complete fraud. He had no degrees whatsoever, not only not a PhD. He didn't even have an undergraduate degree. And so, and he had done this before, he'd go to other schools, have false credentials, and get a job teaching, he would get into controversies, usually over the racist questions, and they'd finally catch up with him, and then he would resign and go elsewhere. He had developed a pattern when he left teaching, he would become a marriage counselor. So when he, they finally, of course, they fired him at East Carolina. I think he went down, I believe, it was Alabama, someplace down there, and opened up a marriage counseling service. So he followed his pattern. What happened to him after that? I don't know.DP: (8:28) See him prosecuted for falsely,CP: (8:30) Well, I don't know. I'm not sure what law he broke anyway,DP: (8:35) Impersonating a professor, I think, is a crime, yeah.CP: (8:38) Well, it may be,DP: (8:39) But they just ran him off.CP: (8:40) May have been, but the best thing to do is get him out, quiet the thing down. You know, you don't want that to publicized. East Carolina's had enough trouble, you know, they already had one president that went the jail, so they decided that, get him out of town and end it. But you can rest assured that everybody who has taught at East Carolina at that time, and ever since, his credentials have been fully checked out. So that isn't going to happen again.DP: (9:13) Were your students, did they talk about desegregation in class? Or did they ever ask you any questions or talk amongst themselves about it?CP: (9:22) Not a great deal. We talked, particularly then I was serving on the committee there, and we were dealing with the setting up of committees to hearings, and so forth. Some of the Blacks would talk to me, and one of them told me something that I was not conscious of, they said that when I was talking about integration and racial matters, that I was a little bit uneasy, and I guess which is understandable, but I was not conscious of any uneasiness at all until they pointed it out. They didn't accuse me of any racism. But it, that kind of, everyone would talk about it openly, if you wanted to talk about it, and I think there's a relatively little controversy about the integration, it was, I think, handled very well. Any Blacks applied that were qualified, got in, and the only problem that they had, and I don't know how to handle this, was that sometimes the grades of the Blacks were lower than the grades of the whites, which is understandable because of the social background, that is, most, very few of them had any college background in their families. When they grew up, they had few books and little training at home, and so they just didn't have the background that some of the whites. But when they got to college, and their grades were not as good. I remember one, in one case, John Davis, who taught math, was teaching in a, a teacher's training course out in, with teachers, it was in one community, I forgot where, and at the end of the class, he told them that anybody who was having any trouble, he planned to talk to them, and said to anybody that, let's do it this way, let's anybody that has made a D or lower remain, and we'll give you some extra tutoring, everybody C and above, then you can dismiss, all the whites got up and left, all the Blacks stayed. That's the kind of, it's not discrimination. It's a problem that we never, were never able to solve. We tried not to drop standards, whether race was never a factor in grading. So whatever they made, we'd work with them and help them any way they could. But so far as any, we didn't discriminate. So whereas grading was concerned, if they made an F, they got an F, we would help, help them whenever they asked us to, but usually they did. DP: (12:27) Did things get better, though, over time? Did this change?CP: (12:32) The quality of students got better, yes. Talking about a problem relative to integration, the Blacks have always said that we should have the same percentage of Blacks as whites. So if you have 10% of the population, 10% of students should be Blacks. Then we have a half a dozen black colleges, and they have very few whites, so the Blacks go to those colleges, it don't leave many left over for the 10% in the white colleges. And that's a problem, I don't know, if North Carolina has ever solved. You just don't have the potential for bringing in as good of Black students because of the large number of Black colleges. They would say we don't have any Black colleges, they're all integrated, but we have government Black colleges and we have government white colleges, and the Blacks frequently go in large numbers to the Black schools, that takes away many good students who would otherwise come to East Carolina. And now, I think, seems to me all the time, and I don't have the statistics to back this up, that the students did get better. Why or how that happened? I don't know. But I still, very few ever really dropped standards with this. When they got it, a B, they made a B. That's the same as everybody elseDP: (14:15) What about women on campus. During the 60s, there were a lot of changes with women's issues.CP: (14:21) Well we've, of course, we've always had a large percentage of women because of the teachers college background. Many, when I first came here, the percentage, I forgot, don't have the percentage, but there were more women than there were men. Then, I guess, it was the only time, and it would become more equal. So particularly some of us that taught courses that were oriented toward teaching, I taught North Carolina history, North Carolina history was a requirement for teachers. We would have classes sometimes that would be 90% women, because more women went into teaching. One day, wasn't in my class, but another teacher, this one boy, signed up for North Carolina history, not knowing that there were all these teachers in there. And he walked into the class, and he was the only male in the class. He looked at that class, he said, I must have died and gone to heaven, all these beautiful girls in there and just him! Well, that was not rare at all to have that large percentage of women, particularly courses going towards teaching. On the other classes, I mean, there was not much difficulty, as far as sexual discrimination is concerned. I don't know, I can't give you any example of any troubles we had, but I felt there was discrimination against women.DP: (16:15) What about women's rights, where there's a lot of calls on campus, "Oh, women's rights," do you remember any talk about that?CP: (16:25) If it did, it didn't get to me.DP: (16:25) It didn't come in the classroom. Well,CP: (16:25) The only thing that I can think of, there were some feeling among some of the women faculty members that they were discriminated against, which I don't think was true, certainly not in history. Women would, felt that they didn't have their proper percentage of full professors. Well, the men had been here longer, and so if you looked at the qualifications, I don't think there's any discrimination at all. The fact is, probably we had, if you look at the whole thing, the history department had more full professors of women than they had any right to expect, as far as proportional numbers were concerned. But some of the women faculty members did complain. I don't think they had any justification of it, but they complained anyway. And they'd go around, banging on Herb Paschal's desk when he was chairman, would say that they were discriminated against, and he would pull out his statistics to show that they were not. I don't know how many were persuaded. But it was the sort of thing that was handled quietly, mostly in the office, we would hear about it, but no outward problem whatsoever. DP: (17:54) The women, the young girls in the classes, when you first started, there were a lot of changes in their dress, their appearance. Do you remember when, like in the late '50s and when there were changes?CP: (18:06) When we first came here, there was a Dean of Women, Ruth White, who had very, very strict requirements for women, and she wouldn't let them walk across campus in shorts. So when women went to, they would take classes in tennis, they'd put on their white shirt and shorts to go play tennis, they'd have to wear a raincoat to walk across campus. That's how strict that she was. And that gradually broke down in the '60s, across the clothing requirements, there were gradually, Dick [Richard Eakin] left and Ruth White left, retired. And that was relaxed, and people didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it, as long as you had on clothes. They did have one little brief period of where the, what do you call this? When you're streaking? So we had that at East Carolina. It didn't last long, fortunately. They would take off their clothes and streak across campus, male, sometimes females would join them. This one, one boy was running across campus, taking his clothes off, streaking, and this girl took her clothes off and streaking beside him. He kept looking around at it, she was going side to side, ran straight into a tree. I don't think he was seriously hurt, but he was banging right in that tree, watching, watching her as he was streaking! That lasted just a few weeks and then that was over with now, [unintelligible] with anyone. DP: (19:43) What about changes in the students over the 30 years you're there? Do you see any big trends or did the quality?CP: (19:56) Oh increase in quality, very much so that's we didn't get the illiterates that we did in the early days. And of course, you tend increase the entrance requirements, and that solves a lot of little problems, so that anybody who came here at least were capable of doing the work. And if they didn't do it, of course, you flunked out, but you didn't, you didn't have the large number of drop outs and flunk outs that you had in the freshman year. First, I have no figures, maybe sometimes half of them would come in flunk out, but depending on the instructors. But later you just had the normal percentage in it.DP: (20:45) Do you think there were any differences in the way faculty and the students interacted when you first got there, toward, and towards the end? Were there changes in the way faculty and students behaved towards one another?CP: (21:00) I'm sure there was one of the things, no, when you're part of, you're not conscious of it, but it's like in the military, you know, officers and enlisted, faculty and students don't have a lot to do with each other, and so I think they got along very well, but not so much socializing. And I don't know of any real controversies that came between the faculty and the students, rather than the normal separation you would have between the two. DP: (21:36) What do you remember about the Thonen versus ECU [Thonen v. Jenkins] case?CP: (21:41) I was on the, I was chairman of the committee that was, heard that case. I get mixed up. There were a couple of them all there together. It started off with a, some rather lurid drawings, sexual drawings, things and the local newspaper. And so the editor of the paper, whoever was with the paper, and I don't believe these [unintelligible] were brought before the committee, the administration checked with the Attorney General, and they said that the administration had control of that paper. The professor, whose name I can't recall, who taught journalism, told the committee that that was a very common problem you have that people, that students come in as running school newspapers didn't use the same standard that they would in [?], but it's a phase they go through, and that they would gradually grow out of it. So he said the best thing to do is leave it be. Well, the committee on the recommendation of administration, we've cleared it with the Attorney General, convicted that first person. I've forgotten, what I was in favor of was a reprimand. But we found it hard to get there. You had to convict and then decide the punishment. And so after they had been convicted, then the punishment was a lot stricter than many of us favored. After that one case, I became very concerned about the interference with students rights, freedom of the press. And I don't remember exactly what Rob did, but he was brought up before the committee. First of all, he would not come. So he was tried without even being present. He just would not come there which which was legal, he can do that. And the committee split on whether to convict him or not, and I tried to talk them out of, just letting the thing drop, but the committee insisted anyway of convicting him. And after this, then he appealed, of course, to the courts, and courts overruled the Attorney General, and then administration saying that, that this newspaper utilization is exercise of freedom of press. And so I think he sued Jenkins and university, whatever came about, I don't recall. DP: (25:09) I think he used foul language, right, in an editorial that he wrote? I think it was a foul language in an editorial that he wrote.CP: (25:21) But that may have been. It may have been, I just couldn't remember what it was that he wrote.DP: (25:26) What was your stand on the case? What did you,CP: (25:31) My stand?DP: (25:31) What did you personally think?CP: (25:34) You should ignore it. Just the best thing to do is sweep it under the rug, the more you blow it up, the worse it gets. And so that's, I couldn't persuade, and to me, there was a freedom, freedom of press thing and all that. But I couldn't persuade the majority of the committee, and some of the students were the worst ones. I thought [unintelligible]. We had one Black student I was, thought highly of, but he was one of the strictest ones about, uncompromising on those issues. It's like in the military, where you have enlisted people, years ago, long before you could remember, they ruled that when you court martialed an enlisted person, he had the right to have enlisted people on the court martial. Well, they found out that the worst thing you could do is to have enlisted people on court martial, because what you ended up with some old time regular who has strict standards that, far more than the officers on the board did. Well, that's the same way here, that one of the students was very strict on it, and they refused to compromise, and they convicted him. I don't think, what Rob ever knew or not that we voted, I guess it's alright now, after all these years, that we would not make open how we voted on the thing. So I voted on for acquittal all the way down the line. And Rob always thought that, later when something came up, I think it was a course or something he was going to take, didn't want to take me because I'd been on that committee. So I did tell him, did send him word that not everybody on that committee voted against him, it did become [unintelligible] would have been a lot better just to ignore him and him outgrow it.DP: (27:39) The GI Bill had a big impact allowing veterans to go to college. What impact do you think veterans had on East Carolina, in the way the campus changed, and generally?CP: (27:54) I can't answer that. Frequently, we didn't even know who veterans were. I could give my own background because I went through school, on the GI Bill. When I first went to Davidson, let me, this, come back, before I get toDavidson, and the term before I got there, or the year before I got there, at 1945, Davidson would not let veterans take a full load if they had been away out of high school too long, so veterans have to take a reduced load. Well, at the end of the first term, the grades were way, way, way above the average. So they dropped that after one term. And the maturity that you have, the experience that they had, more than made up for any thing you might have forgot out of high school. So I went through, Davidson in those days, and this was the World War II GI Bill, they paid all tuition, don't matter what it was, private school like Davidson, they paid it all. They paid all the books. And then, if you wanted to, you could take a vacation, that's when school was out. If you wanted to keep drawing your, you didn't get any school expenses, but you keep drawing your monthly stipend of $160, whatever it was. I always cut that off.Figured if I was going to be on GI Bill then I want them paying tuition and books. So every time school was out, I'd go off the GI Bill. So I was able to squeeze the four years of school, not only through Davidson, but I believe I got it up through my master's degree. So just because, taking those vacations, and if you're not in school, you're not on the GI Bill. So without that, I don't find it difficult to go and until I got married at the end of my freshman year. So Doris was working but didn't make a lot of money, but with the GI Bill, and money that I got from being in the reserve, and we had come up very well, so it allowed many, many of us, to go to school who would not have, and I'm sure that that was true later. Of course, they later changed the law so that they did pay all the expenses, bet you're more familiar with that than I would. But it's, I'm sure, this was considered GI Bill's probably the best legislation ever passed at the end of World War II. And I think that's probably still true, that allowed people, good students, mature students, to come back and get their education, and they did very well. Now those, you asked about how they were doing in the classes, of those that I knew, were veterans, almost always were better students than the average, of course, among other things, people who had to work the way through school, had to work more, that was extra money they have that could have been more time. But I think it, just the, when they went to school, they went for a purpose, had a more serious and hard working, and more mature than the others. So I think it worked extremely well.CP: (31:45) Vietnam veterans, their situation was a little bit different. Vietnam was a very different,CP: (31:45) Well, I was a Vietnam veteran, but I, my GI Bill went to the other war, so.DP: (31:45) What do you think about the Vietnam veterans at ECU? Do you know, CP: (31:45) I don't know what it was. I didn't, wasn't,DP: (31:58) You didn't see anything, you don't remember anything happening at that time in the '60s, about, CP: (32:07) Oh, you mean, about the, DP: (32:08) Right, when the, when the men came back from Vietnam, those students, do, were there any changes?CP: (32:14) So far as the Korean War was concerned, nothing. I saw no indication there. There had been, I guess there had been opposition there. But after the Vietnam, of course, totally different things, DP: (32:31) Right.CP: (32:33) There was a great deal of peace marches, this type of thing. I don't, I don't recall it had any great impact on East Carolina. DP: (32:45) Was there any marches at East Carolina you remember? CP: (32:47) Well, I'm sure there were, but nothing major that I, difficulty, real difficulties. Seems like I recall, my memory is not good enough to remember exactly what the problem was. There was some difficulties there at one time, but I don't remember enough about it to talk about it.DP: (33:13) Well there's a rumor that Brewster building was, was built in the way it was built because of the anti-war riots that were going on in the country, that it was designed to, CP: (33:26) [It's a fort, won't it?]DP: (33:28) Yes, to prevent rioting. You did you hear anything about that?CP: (33:31) I heard nothing about that? I don't believe it.DP: (33:33) [Darlene laughs] You don't, you think it's just a rumor, right?CP: (33:35) No, that was strictly a rumor.DP: (33:36) [Darlene laughs] Over the 30 years that you were in the history department, what are some of the major changes in the history department that you thought that were good or you thought that should have been made?CP: (33:55) Probably faculty government, as much as anything. In the early days, you sort of had all power to the administration. And then as time went on, they particularly developed a department. There was more faculty voice in the running of the department, and that's, you can't pinpoint and say, okay, this happened in 1960 or anything, it was a gradual thing when we when we set up the history department, the faculty voted on the chairmanship. Now he, was a vote that we never saw. You voted administration took the votes, counted them, and then made the appointment. To make sure that our vote, voice was being heard, we polled a delegation, see how everybody voted, and so we, the majority voted for Paul Murray, who became the chairman. In the English department, they were not quite as strict on the polling as we were, but from the evidence they had, the department did not vote for the man that got the chairmanship, and who knows, the administration had the votes. So that's the kind of thing, you begin to have more and more voice in the faculty. And then as time went on, of course, we started a faculty senate and drew up a system of government for the administration, for the administration of the department, administration of all the departments together. And so I think the faculty played a large, had a large voice relative to the policies made and carried out, and not always without a great deal of disagreement among the faculty people. We would, some people thought that didn't get elected to committee, so they thought That's discrimination, well, sometimes that might be democracy, but I think on the whole that everybody didn't get everything they wanted, but the majority, I think, pretty much controlled what went on in the department. And I'm not sure that went all the way up to the chancellor, to the vice president, Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, it's up there someplace you lose your democracy. But I think on the whole that the faculty voice was much, much more heard toward the end of my tenure than it was at the beginning.DP: (37:19) You started the teachers union, or did you? Were you involved in it?CP: (37:19) No they, we never had a teacher's union. DP: (37:19) No, no you didn't,CP: (37:19) We had an American, Association of American University Professors. That's not a union. DP: (37:19) It's not a union, okay.CP: (37:20) They got involved in union and sponsored unionism, but that was not a union. The primary purpose of that was to protect faculty tenure and faculty freedom of the faculty in the classroom, that is, you can't tell them what to teach. And so that's the kind of thing that we emphasized like unions. Later, the AUP did, get involved, which I think was a big mistake, you're weakening the protection of tenure in the faculty, freedom of expression and classrooms by getting involved in union activities that which, of course, an animal with a different color. So I never, would not, in fact, the argument that I used, and I think a lot of us use, is that there is a clash of interests with faculty unions. Faculty is management. That is, if you have faculty government, how you going to deal with the union? There's not a separation between management and labor as you did in private industry. So what we emphasized, and always worked towards, was more voice of the faculty in control of policy, and of course, that would include economic factors. When the legislature allots money, sometimes they give across the board raises, sometimes they give a lump sum of money, and this would be divided up among departments, then the chairman would decide how that money is to be distributed to the faculty. Okay, our position, AUP and facultyn government in general, was that faculty should not have a voice as to how much raise I get, but you should set up a system that is fair. That is, how is this money going to be distributed? What is your criteria? How much are you going to put into teaching, how much on publication, how much on administrative committee work, this type of thing, how much on outside activities, reputation, national reputation, this type of thing. So what you have and I think we, in the history department had it to a certain extent, was a faculty voice relative to a system, a fair system of distribution of, where the finances were going and what they were and including raises. Now, of course, another thing that the AUP was deeply involved in was tenure. When we, when I first came here, tenure was unknown. Fact, nobody knew what their rank was. Sometimes, the faculty was required to fill out a form saying, and they'd ask me, what is your academic rank? You'd have to put an administration and say, what am I? Am I assistant professor, an associate professor, full professor? We didn't know. And so the way the faculty determined this was to look at your pay. How much do you make? If you made a certain amount, you were associate professor, if you made a certain, more than that, you're a full professor, so it was strictly on the basis of your pay. So that, of course, needed to be addressed and eventually was. So that we did set up a system of tenure, which you have everybody was assigned to rank, and something that meant a great deal more. There'd be a certain amount of leeway, financial was in there, if you get over a certain amount, I mean, if you're assistant professor, you only make so much, but if you get a rate beyond that, then you're automatically becoming, you couldn't be rated beyond that, unless you were promoted to the next rank. And so faculty rank became a major faculty relative to you, promotions, and qualifications. And at same time, tenure, when I first got here, was very loosely handled. If you stayed here three years, you could certainly have tenure. Now that's probably the best system anybody ever had. People didn't always appreciate that. But if you, if they let you come back for the fourth year, you got tenure, and you didn't have to go through any system or hearings or anything else, you just automatically, if they hire you back the fourth year, you got tenure. Well, that was changed, and it should have been changed, that's too loose, so that you would have a faculty committee that would be set up to recommend to the Department of the Chairman that person be given tenure. Of course, if you don't get tenure, then you don't, you can't stay. And so the AUP did a great deal of work in developing a systematic method of adding tenure. Of course, anyone they, that was accused of being fired or discriminated against relative to tenure then the AUP would step in on their behalf. Sometimes that, when I was president of the AUP, I took a very strict requirement on this, that if you have got tenure, that we don't intervene on your behalf. So you had one case came out which a professor in psychology who had tenure, the wife was teaching without tenure, and so she was cut off and was kind of not renewed. And he made a big fuss about that. Wanted AUP to take up her case, and I said absolutely not. She hadn't got tenure, so we have no business interfering in that case. The Professor involved there laughed at me, for not protecting the faculty rights, so I finally turned it over to my vice president, who was Frank Adams, and Frank went to the administration and worked out a compromise. I forgot what it was. They let her teach in the summer school, summer school, and they just get some money there. But we didn't want the AUP to get involved promoting tenure, or retention where there was no tenure. To get tenure, the faculty did pretty much what they pleased, in the administration of and once you get tenure, of course you have some, want tenure, there's much misunderstanding of it. A lot of people think and some schools operate this way, if you've got tenure, you can't be fired, you've got a job for life. That's not true. What it means, that if you have tenure, you can't be fired without cause and without a hearing by your peers, so that you can't have, strictly, arbitrary firing by the administration. And if they want to go through the procedure, then it can't be done. A lot of them don't want to go through the procedure, so they they just ignore it and keep the person anyway. But you can fire a person with tenure. All you gotta do is go through the proper procedure. DP: (45:52) What was your involvement in the creation of the ECU manuscript collection?CP: (45:58) Yeah, I was, Herb Paschal, was chairman of his department, was the chief promoter of the collection. [END OF TAPE 1 SIDE 2][BEGINNING OF TAPE 2 SIDE 1] DP: (0:00) October 3rd, 2001.CP: (0:03) Herbert Paschal was the chairman of the history department, promoted the idea that manuscript be, he owned some papers himself, and so he said, I will donate those to a collection, if we'll set up a manuscript collection. So he asked me if I would work with him in establishing that and become the first director of the manuscript collection, which I agreed to do. And we went, first we went to the librarian, Wendell Smiley, at that time, I asked him about facilities within the library, and Wendell took the position that he was against it. He thought that we did not need a manuscript collection, that he would be strongly opposed to it. But he says, I'm a librarian. My job is to service the faculty. So if you want a manuscript collection, then I will work with you. I thought was a very professional attitude. So he assigned us a, one room, in the library and Herb and I worked with those, it was very slow, we didn't always know what we're doing, but we gradually used Herb's papers at the beginning, contacts from other people, and Herb had a lot of contacts down in Little Washington, Grimes family, all the Grimes papers, and so we just gradually built it up the second year the collection, Fred Ragan, it was about the second year we had the manuscript collection, Fred Ragan was hired and was asked to work with the collection. We had hoped that he would maybe be the, takeover as director, but his interest, his qualifications, were about as limited as mine, and he did a good job working with it. Still works with it to this day, but we decided that we needed a real professional to come in and take over the collection. So after, I forgot how many years, a few years, we went to the State Archives, and brought one of my former students, Don Lennon back, who was working with the archives and had a background in manuscripts and collection archival work. And he took over, and that's when the collection really took off. He was a little bit fearful. We knew he'd be real good in handling the paperwork, but we didn't know whether he could go out and handle the Federal Relations work, but he was a natural at it, and so he took over and built that collection into one of the real great collections. Probably one of the top manuscript collections, not THE top, but one of the top ones in missionary records and in military records. And of course, we have a good deal more than that, but in those two areas, we had particularly outstanding, and Don has put a good deal of effort in building that. So where it'll go from here, and now we've got new leadership, we don't know, but Don certainly did a great deal of building this into a reputation, not only a reputation within the state, but nationally. Leo Jenkins was always very cooperative with building the, building the collection, because he appreciated the value. [Dog barking] It's the greatest public relation thing you could ever get, because you're dealing with the top people in the state. So every time we'd get a new collection, Jenkins would be over there with his photographer and have his picture in the paper there about this collection. And this is something I think that later chancellors have missed, the public relations value of that manuscript collection.DP: (4:37) Did you do any research when you were at ECU or did you publish anything?CP: (4:39)I beg your pardon?DP: (4:40) Did you do any research while you were teaching at ECU or did you publish anything?CP: (4:46)With spending 10 years time in committee work, and of course, I've always had a heavy teaching load, but I did a little publishing. I didn't publish any books, but I published a few articles, of course there was railroads, and military history, this type of thing, so. [Unintelligible] on the Louisiana Historical, it was a South Carolina magazine of history, a number of articles in State Magazine, I've forgotten exactly how many it was but sixteen or so articles altogether.DP: (5:28) My last question to you is, can you think of anything you haven't talked about that you might like to speak about? Anything in particular?CP: (4:38) [Whistles as if calling dog] Luann had mentioned, we're talking about possibility of a little about Leo Jenkins. If you want to talk about him. DP: (4:48) Yes, please do. CP: (4:49) Jenkins, when I came here, John Messick was the president, they called him back then, and he brought in Jenkins from New Jersey. Messick had, he was up at a school in New Jersey before then, so at least, he taught there. He brought Jenkins with him to be the dean of, we get our terminology mixed up these days, he would be the dean, which would be the second in command over there. After Messick resigned, there was some controversy about his resignation. I can tell you., you want some rumors? [Charles laughs] One of the things that the, that's rumored that's why Messick left was that he got infuriated at the Board of Trustees, and he said, said to him, you know, if you don't adopt this policy, then I'm going to resign. So they said, we accept your resignation. So he didn't intend to resign, but he was out, and so that's a vacancy. And the position that I know the, AUP and a number of other organizations on campus took was that we should make a national search for the best man to become the new president. They didn't do that. The board of trustees simply hired Jenkins. No search or nothing. Now our position was, that if Jenkins is the best man, he'll come out after search, and if he's not, then maybe we ought to have somebody else. But what the rumors were, and I assume this is true, that Jenkins had an offer from the University of Georgia system to head up their university system, and if they didn't hire him immediately, he was going to go to Georgia. So they said, okay, we're not going to search, here's your jpb, it's yours. So he took over, and many of us felt at that time that, so like Don Lennon, that he would be real good at internally operating the college, but we're not so sure he's very good at handling the legislature, but we couldn't have been more wrong about that. He was a press master. They played the legislature getting support. In fact, there was one time, there's a strong movement setting up in Charlotte about, to run him for governor. So he was very, very good at that. And so Jenkins, I think, did a good job. And relative to it, somehow was, had some hesitations when he came in. But quickly, I think, we were won over. He was one of those people, both as dean and as president, later we called him chancellor that you could go in and talk to, that is, the lowest professor in this campus could go into Jenkins' office and sit down and talk to him, and he would, he would listen to you. You could get mad at him, as we frequently did, you could go in and pound on it, pound on his desk and "read the riot act" to him, and then the next day, it was as though it never happened. No ill, feelings, no discrimination. And so he was a very, very fine person to work with. One of my most frustrating experiences happened when, back when we were first put in teaching by television, which we experimented for time, you put the teacher in a studio and then have television sets in the classrooms. Well, we'd been working that for a couple of years, so I went to Jenkins and told him that I wanted to try something new, that we would put all the students, which would be about 150 students, in this case, in one room, library, auditorium, and then we would use the TV to work with supplements to the teacher. The teacher would be in the room, actually in the room, teaching. And then when I wanted put picture, up it'd come on screen, you'd have a whole crew back in the studio, that you would properly clue that they would give you the, whatever map or picture or whatever that you, outline, or whatever you wanted. And so I'd work this out in great detail. I was going to go down to talk Jenkins, that's when he was Dean, I was going to talk to him and put this into effect. Went in, presented about two minutes, what I had, and the most frustrating thing, he said, I was ready to spend a half hour, hour arguing about these things. Just do it. That's the way that he operated. Immediate decisions. No dilly dally, when it came down to make decisions, he would make them, and that went over to his presidency too. So I think he, we could have done a lot worse than Leo Jenkins, as far as chancellors were concerned.DP: (11:59) I've been speaking with Dr. Charles Price. I'm thanking Dr. Price for your time.CP: (12:04)I enjoyed it.DP: (12:06) It is currently 4:22. [END OF TAPE 2 SIDE 1]