Today is February 29th 2012 and we're conducting an interview for the A. S.
U. Retirees Association video history project and we have a special guest
with us, which I'll introduce in just a moment. My name is Elmer Gooding
and we have technical support staff here. All volunteer that are doing the
work behind the scenes. Roger carter is doing the audio and video. Dave
Schatz lee is doing the directing and linda Vance coy, who's chair of our
video history project is here as well too. Help in any way that she can
our special guest today. I'll let you introduce yourself, Connie and tell
us your name and okay, I'm Connie MacNeil born Connie White. So Connie
White, McNeil. Okay and How many years were you at 30, 30 for 30 years?
We're going to talk a lot about that here. Although that's an argument
because I was here for 30 academic years and not three. It was short this
summer for them to make 30 calendar years. We'll we'll we'll allow you one
summer short. Okay. Before we get started on that though, I'd like to have
you tell us just a little bit more about yourself and your background and
your family where you were born and all that. Because the reason I'm
asking that question is that I think a issue is important because of the
people that make up the the faculty and staff here and so you're certainly
one of those important people. So tell us about your your beginnings um I
was born in pullman Washington. That's where Washington State University
is. It's a small college town. My dad was on the faculty. You know, I had
, I guess what you'd think of as one of those idyllic american childhoods
. I had um, My parents, my mother didn't work, it was in the 50s. Um Dad
went, dad walked up to the campus every day from our nice home and I
walked home for lunch and I walked to school and
uh even when I was in high school and the high school was on the other
side of town, the other side of town was still walking distance and I
walked to high school and I went This past summer to my 50th high school
reunion And my high school class had been about 120 people. And of that
some 50 of us had gone through all 12
First through 12th grade together because it was a very stable small
college town and you know, I had friends in the neighborhood was, you know
, it was in those days I could go out and just play and run all over town
and we were completely safe. There was never any worry. And um, I adored
my parents and I had an older sister and a younger sister. Mom and dad had
been very college oriented um for us. And so that we were four years apart
so that they could afford to send us to college serially. And uh,
you know, my um, my younger sister and I are still very close even though
we're distant and it's no longer much of a distance isn't in years, but my
older sister has passed away um But yeah I had an idyllic childhood and um
I did all kinds of stuff in high school, the sports that women could enter
, you know any kind of sport that the women could participate in outside
of, you know pe it was bad man, so I did that and I played competitive
badminton, went to tournaments and stuff about the time I was getting
ready to go to college, my dad was promoted to Dean of the pharmacy
college, so they felt they could afford to send me to stanford and I had
been admitted, so I went to stanford, got my bachelor's degree in math And
then worked at Stanford for 10 years, my first year was a secretary
because that was all I could get a job doing. But a girlfriend of mine who
had also been a math major had gone to work for IBM
and she felt that I was under employed as a secretary and that I should do
something else. And so she arranged for me to take IBM aptitude test
program or aptitude test, which was really how people were hiring
programmers in those days and I sent the results both to the person she
had wanted to have higher me and to stanford and people at stanford said
well and they offered me a job as a trainee Programmers. So I worked there
for 10 years. And when um I left, I was manager of administrative
computing services and in those days, you know, you moved along pretty
quickly because there weren't a lot of us. Um and I left because I had
married and my husband had finished his PhD and got a job at Arizona State
University, but tell me a little bit more about what you did at stanford
and that that role, were you still using the cards, the punch cards and
all of that back at that time? Yes. Um we I came in just after they
stopped wiring boards to do the computing and we were using punched cards.
We had a computer called the 1401. It was an IBM and it didn't have any
disk, it was all tape and card readers. And so yes, we we wrote our
programs on big big tablets that were made for the purpose. Um it wasn't
um cobalt at that time it was a language that that stanford had developed
called so pad, which was basically just a tiny step up from machine
language for The 1401. So carrying those cards around, is that part of
their physical fitness program. Yes. And in fact the back problems I still
have the day came when I was working all night one night and I had three,
the trays were this long, I had three trays of cards and I was tired and I
was hefting those to run them through the card reader and out went my back.
It's never been quite right since then. Part of part of the occupational
hazard. It was a lot of fun though. I just really enjoyed it. So you were
starting to tell me then you arrived at A. S. U. When your husband
accepted a position here? Yeah. He's he got a job on the mechanical
engineering faculty after he got his PhD at stanford. Okay. I mean yeah at
stanford. So were you married while he was in school? You were there? Yes.
Um We had met several years before we married um and we're good friends,
he was actually dating my roommate and I was dating someone else, but we
liked each other and eventually he um went to the, into the Peace Corps.
Um This was at the time of the Vietnam War and it was an option that was
right for him. Um and he spent three years in Ghana and when he came back
I said I basically said let's get married and we did. And so yeah, and he
had come back to stanford um sort of both looking for me and looking for
grad school opportunity and his old college professor that he'd worked for
in the summers took him on as a grad student, was able to give him support.
So he was able to get his PhD did that in four years and then we came
here. And what kind of role did you have here at? Msu when you first
arrived? What? Well that's kind of an interesting thing when when barry
got the, when barry was interviewing for his job here. Um We I looked
around and of course having worked at stanford was thinking I'd like to
work in the university here and although my boss back at stanford said
don't work for issue, it's a really bad situation there. Yes, in in the
computing environment and he said it's really bad you won't be happy there.
But I looked at the campus and I thought it's gonna be hard to not want
to work here. How bad can it be? So I put in an application for database
manager for which I was rather poorly qualified but a couple three months
later I got a phone call it was Lynn bellamy and he offered me a job um
over the phone, he hadn't even ever met me. But um he had looked at not as
the database manager, but he wanted to hire me to be payroll project
manager. They needed to put in a new human resources system as we call it
now. And so I got hired to do that. This was in the summer of 1976 I
started August of 76.
Well I'm sure some of those problems today issued got much better after
you arrived. Well it turned out that my boss whose name was mike roberts,
I was thinking of the crew that had been there a couple years earlier,
just a year before I arrived. Or maybe not even a full year. Lynn had been
hired to come in and head up computing services and he had brought Darryl
s box with him. So they had both been here under a year and when I came um
they kind of, even though Lynn had already offered me a job, they kind of
gave me an interview and as the day wore on, um that seemed to be very
strange to me because I kept the interview kept getting longer and longer
instead of just an hour as I had been expecting. Eventually I was there
the whole day and what you know, you have to know, Lynne to understand
these things a little bit, which I know you do
and so what it turned out is the job that was Head of Administrative
Computing Services was open. And Lynn was becoming interested in my
qualifications for that after he met me and so on. So, so this was like an
instant promotion before you even had your first job. Well, they went
through, they had to go through the hiring process and I didn't know what
was going on. I really never did know what was going on. I took the job as
parral project manager and got started and Lynn told me well interview for
this Administrative computing director, you won't get it because there's a
person with the inside job and I thought why should I do it then? But I
did. And make a long story short um I was promoted so I within two or
three months
so I did that for five years. Tell me what what was your perception of a
other than just computing, what was your perception of A. S. U. And what
was the campus like when you arrived in 76? Well it was really different
from stanford and in many, many ways. Um and I uh it was
one of the things that became very apparent to me during my interview
process and shortly thereafter was that it was very male dominated. Um It
was I was one of only two women out of the 30 and computing services and
every person I interviewed with was male except for Helen gator. And they
several of them made it sort of clear to me that I shouldn't be
interviewing for a job like that. And Lynn showed me the reviews that he
had received after I had interviewed and only two people said he should
hire me that Lynn being lenny did anyway, it was very male dominated. It
was
dusty, I remember thinking it was pretty dusty in august maybe. Yeah and
but it was it was interesting, you know, it's hard to separate how you
feel about the institution from how you feel about the department you got
into and I love, I really loved Lynn and Daryl and enjoyed working with
him. But the staff I had was, well, tell me more about the department, how
advanced or lack of being advanced worthy at that point. Well, they were
in big trouble. Um that was a lot of why men was brought in. I think it
was administrative computing, which means all of the systems. In those
days, we didn't buy packages. We all wrote our own, every university wrote
their own programs to do their own business. And
this staff was,
I don't know how they ever even got into the profession because none of
them really seem to know much about how to go about designing and writing
administrative systems for universities and the systems were really
struggling And and the department was struggling. I think it, I think we
had about 23 on my staff when I took the job back at that time. The
systems were all independent. So student information system was
independent of the administrative and all the other areas. Well, we had,
yeah, we had a separate housing system. We had a student information
system that was integrated in the sense that it had admissions, financial
aid and registration. All kind of integrated payroll was a separate thing.
And financial systems, there were there were more than one financial
system that were only loosely integrated, but really the payroll system
was the big, the payroll and the student information systems were the big
problems when I came on. But the thing that the thing was that it wasn't
just those systems that were the problem, It was the whole environment. It
was and maybe I thought this about AS. U. two. Um, I was used to something
I thought of as a very professional environment, you know, in a production
, we call it a production environment, we knew the difference between
development and something that was going to run week in and week out and
my staff that I had had no concept of that. Um, they, they each just,
there were no standards, there were no procedures, there was nothing, each
person just did whatever he or she wanted and the production systems
weren't ever kind of moved into a state called production, they were just
run whatever the programmer had, I told the people to run. So my first
thing I really had to do was um revamp that whole environment so that
people understood that you can't, that the university is depending on this
to run and you can't just mess around with it then, you know, the night
before registration, do something and then have it not work. Um, which
they were doing and you know, it was really an eye opener and I did think
the whole university was kind of cowboy like that way, you know, you may
remember, I guess you'd call it cowboy, you know, I wasn't used to that.
It was the staff open to your idea of bringing in an outside vendor to
bring all these systems together. I didn't have that idea. It wasn't, no,
no, it was early days then and I was part of that time. I was part of that
environment. No, my idea was to, you know, get the staff together and and
write the systems ourselves, which as I say, nobody did anything else in
those days. Maybe with the library. I did advocate for purchasing a
library system but you know, that's what we did. Um, in a couple of years
we had a payroll system and I had hired a project leader um, for that who
was a woman And in five years we had an integrated student information
system in, we had put it in in pieces first registration, first admissions
and registration, then financial aid integrated. And that was also by a
woman project leader named joan miller. Um, and uh, who I saw recently on
our issue retirees. I saw her obituary go by, I'm sorry to say. But anyway
, that's what we did. So we had a completely homegrown Set of systems and
kind of the interesting thing to me was that that student information
system that we finished putting in in 1981 again in those days after all
thinking that the first systems any of us were really writing, um, We're
for the 1401 and then that computer line died and we wrote all new after
that and then that line died and we wrote all new after that. We were all
of the opinion that what we were writing was good for Four or five years
at the very most and then it'd be replaced. Well that system in 1981 was
fiddled with for the year 2000 And um it lasted almost, it lasted 25 years.
That's amazing. Yeah, it was, it was well stretched by that point. Well,
how did your career progress then from the initial appointment that you
got there? Well, um In 1981, I guess it was the university went through
some reorganization, I think that was when um President Russ nelson came
in I believe. And um he did quite a bit of reorganizing. So my boss lin
bellamy who had been head of computing services was promoted to what was
then called Information resources management or I R. M. And had computing
services and several other units reporting to him and he promoted me to be
head of computing services. Um So that's what I did. I was noticing as I
went over your resume that you must have had to order out new business
cards on a regular basis with all the different, well there were title
changes. Yeah, it was, But I stayed as executive director of computing
services for quite a long time. Um 10 years really sort of, I mean there
were tidal changes in a few things and during one of those years um Lynn
went back to the faculty and ken Pollack came in and took over for Lynn
and then ken left, and the year after ken left, I was head of the I. R. M.
Organization as well as computing services, you know, an interim
appointment. So during that time period you saw the advent of
supercomputers uh and also the computerization, maybe that should put that
in quotation marks of the faculty. Yes, yes, I think that would be a big
undertaking. Yes. You know, it's just amazing when you think at what
things were like um really for the first many years, um I was here, the,
you know, the faculty used the mainframe computer if they, but only those
faculty who were in the sciences and so forth. For the most part social
sciences, it wasn't easy to use. Um We really, at first they were bringing
card decks even even in 1970s, um and then um
you know, there were a lot of fun and interesting things, but really what
computing services was doing at that time and when it came into the notion
of academic computing was helping people effectively share that single
computer resource, everybody, you know, we had a lot of ways that it was,
we were trying to be fair, so that no one person would dominate and we
spent a lot of time with the few, the small percentage of the faculty that
really was using that, and then as the microcomputer started to develop um
there was of course two schools of thought, those that thought it was a
fun toy and we shouldn't be wasting our time on it. And those that thought
maybe it was gonna be something and maybe a lot of them didn't understand
it as well as well and there were, you know, the industry was still
sorting itself out, um there were lots of different brands Commodores and
all other kinds of, remember all kinds of computers with funny names to us
now. And then IBM got in and decided that they were gonna, that it was
gonna be serious, they had a separate division in boca raton um florida
for microcomputers.
And one of the most, You know, interesting times for me was when uh this
would be in 1986, the summer of 1986, early in the spring, IBM came out
with an offer that um if we could put together a deal for 500
microcomputers um we could get them at a very much reduced price, Which I
think, I don't know for sure, but looking back, I'm guessing we were
paying $3,000 a computer and we were getting, you know, that would be what
the microbes were, we're costing in those days instead of what they cost
now weigh less and I think we could get them for a couple of 1000 if we
Put this order of 500. Well that just seemed impossible. But I decided I
was going to try and that one of the ways I would try to do it would I
would be I would try to collaborate with U. Of A and N. Au. I was allowed
to do that and if they would buy in and we could pull that and get 100
then everybody would get the price. Well um anyway, you said they'd like
to join but of course you have a um they were too good for us and they
told me absolutely not, they thought it was stupid and that they didn't
think micro computers is the head of their computing services, possibly it
wasn't their idea. But
I managed, I called all the, at that time I was on Dean's Council and I
was able to work with the Deans and the department chairs and um get um
the order put together and we we left, each person really have a custom
configuration was probably something of a mistake. We really didn't know
what we were doing and they all came in And we were trying to get them set
up for the fall of 1986 before classes started Darrell bock and his crew
was unpacking this truck full of stuff and there was just there were parts
and boxes absolutely everywhere, all outside the building. We had it all
cluttered up for several days and his guys worked on, that took him the
whole summer. And as a side note, the guy that you've got fired for it, he
lost his job because there must have been a huge educational process that
you all had to do as well for all the faculty that, many of whom had never
probably never had a laptop or a PC at that time, not to mention ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's one of the things that's kind of
interesting about how things progressed. Um,
we didn't, we had been a central organization providing all services.
There weren't computing support people in the units with the advent of the
microcomputer that began to be a little bit of a stress. And um, there was
a lot of interest in, um, having some technology support people in the
units. And so, uh, I favored that. Now we're the people still under your
direction that were, that were farmed out to the individual units or were
they, I favored not having them do that. I thought they'd be more
responsive. And so we move people and we did move, I mean, I didn't do it
without any kicking and screaming at all, but I began to see the light and
we did move people actually out of our staff on to the Dean's staff. Um,
and they didn't report to us anymore. We had a connection. Um, it was
moderately successful, but um, you know, they're needed, as you said,
there needed to be a lot of training of all concerned and some of the
people that were supposed to be supporting in the units were better than
others and the deans and this is still going on today. Um The dean
sometimes ask, I know I believe whatever it's called College of Human
Humanities and Sciences I think has asked the U. T. O. To provide all of
their support again. Um So it goes back and forth. Um They the dean's
don't like to manage the technology really, but they want control. So it's
always been an interesting thing. Um What what do you feel were some of
the major accomplishments that you and your staff made during your years
here on the main campus or the Tempe campus, I guess I should call it now.
Well um
you know, I think we moved from this really cowboy organization to what I
like to think of as a very professional organization. Um We um
you know, in terms of anything concrete um one of the things that I think
of is that we were able to go through the microcomputer revolution without
um having to give up the support of the super computers and the mainframe
computers for those people who still needed them. Um one of my own
personal
top accomplishments I think Is the year um I think 1990 maybe in the 1991
, it had to be 1990 that I did actually succeed in working a deal with
Cray and IBM. So we got two supercomputers that year um instead of just an
upgrade to our IBM mainframe for the money I had in the budget for just an
upgrade. So, you know, we did really well in terms of the mainframe at the
same time that we were creating student computing sites with
microcomputers in them and so forth. Um you know, it was, but as a, as a
body, you know, you think of the body of work and as a body, I think the
important thing was um like it was in the rest of the university surviving
explosive growth um, with um,
you know, with out, you know, basically having any major failures, I mean
, we had failures and we had problems, but we didn't, we didn't fail to
register students or fail to pay people at stanford that did happen. I
when I put a new system in there, I wasn't the project leader, it's early
in my career, we, we didn't get the payroll system up on schedule and
nobody got paid, we wound up having to manually pay people that yes, you
don't want that. Um, I tried very hard not to ever have that happen here
and we didn't, we didn't have things, one of the things I remember that
was, you know, you have to laugh, you have to laugh about in retrospect,
but this was, you have a very special laugh to.
This was in the days when we now had terminals out in, in the office is
not in faculty offices at that yet. Um that didn't come until after I was
at west, but we had them in administrative offices, terminals that people
were using to inter payroll data and access systems, but they are all what
was called home run, they were cable to the, to the computer center. Um
each one was wired all the way through to the computer center. Um, things
are different now, but that's how it was done in those days. So all the
data was on the central, everything was on the central computer and all
the wiring was actually, you know, the terminal itself actually was cabled
through all the tunnels and everything into the computer center and this
was in the august and september timeframe when we were having are monsoons
and um, we had done some major upgrades and expansions of the, of the
terminal infrastructure of the university and we were starting to have all
these lightning storms
and every time we had a major lightning storm, some or all of the
buildings, terminals went out and it got, so that I would just pray that
it wouldn't, we wouldn't have lightning because we would have a major
problem. Nobody could access anything, Everything was down the next day
and this went on, it seemed like forever. But I'm sure it was only a
couple of weeks until we finally got the vendor to, um, of the terminals
to acknowledge that there was a problem with the way that the terminals
were protected. The building wiring. I mean the building wiring was
interfering with the cables and you know, you'd have this electric storm,
it would come in and it would cause interference and it would bring down
the equipment. So they, they came and installed something Darryl would be
able to tell you what it was, I can't remember, but they installed
something on every single one of those cables. And as they got that
installed for all of those terminals, we stopped having them go down. But
it was just, it was scary and we, we put up a big poster in our hallway of
a, of a one of those beautiful posters of all the lightning strikes coming
down, you know, just, just a joke with ourselves. Just a reminder. Did you
have a little byline? My Lord, that's had sleepless nights or something.
It spoke for itself. We all knew we didn't need any reminders. Mac versus
PC. That's a question.
How did that topic go through your history.
I always felt once those became the established two players, um, I always
felt that they should both be supported. Um, there were faculty who really
wanted to use a Mac for a variety of reasons. Some of the reasons were,
you know, inarguable. The software they wanted to use only ran on a Mac.
And so we always tried to support both. Um, at the event and I always did
support both. I remember one of the first things that happened when I got
to the west campus was the dean of the, of the business group. It wasn't
called a college at the time, I don't think um,
came to me and said he had a faculty member who wanted a Mac computer. And
what did I think? I said, well, what do you know, why not? Why shouldn't
he have it? Well, he said then you pay for it and I did, I would have
never done that in Tempe, but at West I was, things were different. So I
bought the guy a computer and he's been a friend for life,
his name is Phil meets, he's very instrumental in the,
okay, I'm losing the thought of this. Um, anyway, it's a big ball and
there was a big article in the paper recently about the pizza ovens at um
, it's not the Salvation Army. Anyway, I can't think of a saint Vincent,
that's it ST Vincent de paul Phil. Anyway, I think that um, personally I
used a Mac for a number of years and then it just became not suitable for
what I needed to do. And so I switched to pc. And I also, I've always,
when I do use a Mac, I have a lot of trouble with it because for a
computing type person, a lot of this stuff is hidden and it's harder to,
it's harder to get at what I want to be able to get at on it, but for some
people um it's it's the right tool and I still feel that way haven't
changed my mind a bit. We did have some classrooms at West for a long time
that had max as the presenter, you know, the faculty workstation as it
were in the classroom, because we had some people that wanted to use them
, but over time those just got used less and less and we eventually didn't
have any um but what we did was support if you had a laptop we had plug in
so you could bring that in and use your own Mac. You've mentioned a couple
individuals that were ones that had an impact on your career. Are there
any other individuals or you want to say anything more about?
Well, well Darrell and Lynn were certainly the big guys on the block for
me um you know, they were the ones I worked most closely with. Um I worked
with, I guess one other person that was very instrumental um in many ways
for me was Roland Hayden, who was Dean of Engineering for many years um
When I was head of computing services, which as I say was for 10 years,
give or take depending on how you want to call that changes in titles,
I had an advisory committee um of Deans and sometimes Dean's delegates,
but for much of the time it was actually the Dean's themselves. And um,
you know, they helped us plan policies and make decisions about what was
going to be done in the area of computing because there's a lot of money,
as you remember, Elmer, you were important too, because we worked with the
money a lot. Um, and Allen carol, you know, we were always working on the
money together. But anyway, um, Roland chaired that committee one year and
this was fairly late because ken Pollack was on the scene and we were
having a meeting and there was some, I can't remember, I really can't
remember what the discussion was about. It had something to do with Apple
and some kind of grant that Apple wanted to do or something like that. And
Roland was being very difficult and um, I thought was way off track about
what this issue was and I said something to that effect and oh man, um he
just hit the fan, he got up and said he didn't have to take this and he,
and he wasn't gonna chair this committee anymore and he stomped out and I
just felt absolutely horrible. In fact, I went back to my office and I
cried for an hour. I just felt so bad that I had created this big problem
because Roland was important and he was important to us. And of course ken
came and we wrote a letter and talked to Roland and he was very nice about
it and he said, believe me, I've done far worse. And we got over after
that Roland and I were friends and worked together very well and he was
very helpful on many things, including helping getting the funding for the
computing commons. So other questions, Yes. Um
from my vantage point on campus, I just saw I. T over there in there,
computing comments in the empire and I knew Bill Lewis but I didn't know
all the other players and you didn't mention Bill Lewis, I knew Darryl
Fischbach, but how about give me some of the leadership changes. Bill was
up there somewhere. Well, Bill Bill was very late in my, Bill took over
really after I went to West when I, you know, I worked for Lynn and then I
, I was head of computing services and Darryl was head of telecom services
, we were peers and ken Pollack took over from Lynn for the head of the
two of us, you know, we, we reported to him Darrell and I and then when
ken left um
there are stories about that too, but let me forget forget that when ken
left, um I took over for a year as head while they were searching. Um so
Darryl reported to me for that one year and then they searched and hired
really to replace, basically ken at the head of I r. M, which again Darryl
and I reported to and um
when ken left, it was again vacant while they decided what to do when I
mean lee lee ah lee when lee left. So for that I was already at West and
working at West by then. So for that for for that year, right after lee
was removed, Dear Bill and I worked together, I was asked to come to Tempe
in addition to working at West and co lead the I am Bill and I renamed it
at that time organization And Bill took the academic computing part and I
took the administrative in the mainframe computing operations part. And um
we worked together that year and at the end of that year Bill became the
head of the organization and I went back to West full time and then Bill.
Bill, was it until Adrian Sandler was hired. Can you give us a synopsis
of Darryl? S bach? He seemed to be
longstanding person there and seem to do a lot of things with
telecommunications. How about just a little Well Darrell, when I was hired
um Darrell had
kind of left out a guy I was thinking about it. Darrell had what we called
operations, which meant the, the equipment, the machine room, the
mainframes, the people that actually ran the mainframes and the
communications network such as it was at that time, I had the
administrative computing, which was the development and writing of all the
programs that the administration used and there's a guy named max ivy that
was responsible for the academic computing, which meant the support, the
direct support to the faculty, the educational mission, all of the
outreach to the faculty and the support of the faculties use of the
computers. So that was what Darryl did when I was first there um um over
the course of time, um we hired somebody else. We hired a guy named Bruce
johnson to take over operations and Darryl focused on the communicate the
growing communications network and the phone network. He did that he was
responsible for the phone system as well. And um one of the things that
Daryl had um all for a long time was the thing he called the tech shop
that um did the repair of microcomputers. Um so he had the communications
network, he had the phone network and he had that tech shop for most of
the rest of the years that I worked with him. And really um at at one at
some point the tech shot became
something that wasn't effective because there were so many microcomputers
out there and there were other better ways to deal with it than to have a
single central constrained resource trying to be responsible for repairs.
And so the tech shop was basically abolished and Darrell had the
communications networks and the and the and the phone infrastructure of
course over time the importance of the phone network has deteriorated
substantially too because people don't, the wired phones aren't being used
in the dorms where all the money was coming from. Um So that was what
Darryl did and he, you know Daryl and Daryl had a you know, we we worked
as a team, we all had our hands in each other's business a lot. Um you
know, um but that's what Daryl did. Was there anything
The more that you'd like to tell me about your department as it progressed
over that 10-year period obviously developed a lot during that time? Well
yeah, I do have a couple of other things that are sort of I think
interesting the the department just grew like crazy we added because the
university was expanding. But also the whole notion as as we talked about
of what computing support needed to include. I mean first it was just a
mainframe computer with some terminals in a central area. Then it was a
mainframe computer with terminals all over the place. And then it was, you
know, the microcomputers added to that and student microcomputers and so
forth. So it was just growing like crazy. And the number of administration
administrative systems we supported was growing. So the department went
from what I think was in the neighborhood of under 60 people when Lynn and
I and Darryl first started 2 275 people over the space of the 15 years. I
was on the Tempe campus. And so space to house the people was an enormous
problem. Yes. And I don't know if you remember what some of our solutions
were, But at one point um we decided that we could put the administrative
computing group out in that renovated motel out on Apache Road. Um The
police were on the lower level and we put administrative computing on the
upper level and they weren't very happy. The building didn't collapse. It
did. It did yes. As a matter because there were issues, as a matter of
fact they hadn't been in, you know, we had it renovated but of course not
really renovated for that kind of occupancy. It was a former motel and
they hadn't been in there a year. I don't think maybe it was a year when
um it was found unsafe because of termite damage. And I had I had this
whole staff, I had 50, 60 people in there and so I had to find something
else for them. And I don't know who actually came up with the idea but it
was to temporarily move them into more hall which the the central had been
the basketball arena. And so at some point in the past, so it was on the
basketball floor we put up cubicles and and got everybody in there. It was
just a massive scramble and got everybody in there in the MARS program.
People were mighty unhappy because they had been promised that space. We
had him in there long enough to renovate space in what was at the time,
the purchasing building. And we got him in there later. But that was the
whole kind of reason for the computing commons. We do. I just had people
all over the university had three people here and five people there and 60
people here. And you know, it was just we couldn't be together. It was
just the space wars are I always felt very scarred by that. I remember
once actually looking at the women's bathroom and thinking if I could cut
off an end of it and get an office out of it. You know,
we didn't have the women's bathroom, had more space in it than the
yeah, we had trailers out on palm block. I mean we we did everything we
could and we had those for so many years we did everything we could think
of to house all these people. I remember um I think it was Jack Kinzinger
saying to me one time when I put in another budget request, he said why is
it that Every time I ask you to do something you always say, okay, but
I'll need to more people. Why can't you ever do anything with your new
with your existing staff? And I think that was actually at the time I just
thought well what does he know? But later on I realized he was right and I
got really involved in the quality movement and and at the West Campus I
started with 25 people And who had no, I mean I had 25 budget lines, not
25 people and no function, nothing installed, just a fresh clean slate.
And I ended with that same number of people with a very significant
function and infrastructure. I learned how to, you know, how to do more
with less and use team team management. So you mentioned the computer
commons. Yeah, what was that actually finished after you moved? Yes, but
you obviously were involved in some of the planning, I assume. Um yeah,
actually it may have precipitated my move to west. I I did um I did with
Roland and everybody else's help, but I was the spearhead from the
computing services standpoint, get that building uh funded um you know, I
worked on it for many years because of our space problems and I did get
that far and about the time we had the funding and we're ready to get
started with when leon was hired and so I was still there for a year,
maybe, I can't remember exactly, but a year, maybe two years, um just a
year I think, and we were doing the building planning at that time and um
you know, there were a lot of different opinions about how the building
ought to, ought to be configured in my opinion, didn't win. And I felt
unhappy enough about that, that I thought, you know, I just really have to
get out of here, you know, I can't go around being grumpy all the time
because I don't get my own way, I got to get out of here um, in the
programming of the computer commons building, you said you had a different
idea than what actually was implemented. What was your idea? Well, what
was implemented, I was fine with for the most part, um I think having the
commons downstairs was in the, in the classrooms around at the meeting
rooms around it was, it was great. Um I was all for that, as you can tell
from the way I talked about the space wars, my big concern, however, was
housing, getting all of the staff housed in that building and um and I
wanted them to be housed comfortably and I wasn't convinced that the open
plan offices were a good solution for them, they were going to be, and
that's what was done was the open plan, it was over that, that I had my
biggest um disagreement, I didn't think that was very nice housing for
professionals and I wanted them to have offices with windows, you know,
and it wasn't practical or no doubt, I, you know, they, they did find it,
I had an office in the commons for a long time because after I, while I
was still on the Tempe campus, I um decided I really wanted to get my
Masters degree and actually figured out that I needed to do it in
something other than math because by this time, which was well over 20
years since I've been in college, I no longer could remember anything,
that you know even I couldn't do simple calculus, I mean I was completely
hopeless, I would have had to start all over and so I said if I was going
to do it, I had small Children, if I was going to do it I had to pick
something that I would really love or I would just not be able to stick to
it. So through a variety of things, I've picked english linguistics and
and had dan brink as my faculty advisor, wonderful guy, I just adored dan
, I'm so sad when he passed, but dan was just great to work with and in
fact later on I hired dan to work for RM for a year when he was desperate
for a change, but um so I did my degree in english linguistics, I didn't
finish it until I was on the west campus and they were kind enough to let
me have an office on the Tempe campus. Both were when I was here for here
, yeah, here, I guess for meetings and when I had to come down to go to
class um but yeah, I didn't, I wanted the staff to be together, I wanted
them to all have the same kind of housing. We before we had people with
good housing and people with bad housing and people with termite housing
and you know, I wanted everybody to and I remember I actually had a
disagreement with Elmer at that time. Um he probably doesn't remember this
, but um you know, I was so protective about the space and while the
building was getting built um and I could see and being programmed, I
could see that there was with the commons on the ground floor, there was
just barely gonna be room to house all the staff we had at that time. And
meanwhile there were space problems all over everybody else was having
problems too. And Elmer had suggested that the second one of the floors be
set aside, or a big portion of one of the floors be set aside as
transition space as people's space was being remodeled elsewhere. And it
was perfectly good idea, but I don't want any part of that because it
would mean we didn't have enough space, you know, for the staff and we did
were able to keep the space and now the staff is reduced enough. I think
there are other things going on in that building. Let's talk about the
west campus. And when you made that move. And yeah, you started
essentially with a blank sheet of paper and I did it from there. I did
tell me more about how that all evolved and well, it was another case of
coming into a place where there was a little bit of a staff, but no
leadership and um, you know, I was, even though I've been a manager for
many years, I was pretty darn naive about one problem, which was that the
fibers. So staff that I did have turned out as I learned later all to have
drug and alcohol problems and I didn't recognize it. I didn't know that
was going on. So it took me quite awhile to kind of get a functional staff.
Um, anytime we interviewed anybody new, they would kind of scare them
away if they could see they weren't going to join the club.
I think they did. And I again all naive me didn't know what was going on.
But um, eventually we got that sorted out and we got a good staff, but
you know, it was actually, it was just an awful lot of fun. It was, it was
, it was scary and difficult at first, but um, it's a very collegial small
town feel to it at the west campus and we were all excited about what we
were doing and um, there was actually enough money to do the kinds of
things I, I thought we ought to be doing and we were able to, you know,
get every faculty office wired. I do remember that when I arrived, we were
, they had moved on to the the final campus instead of at the Montessori
school. I never was at the Montessori school where it had been housed
previously, but
the only buildings were the library
and a classroom building. And so all of the faculty and staff were housed
in trailers and the other buildings, the other classroom building and
what's called the faculty administration building were being built and I
remember looking out my window and going, please slow down come storm,
make them stop working because I haven't had time to figure out how to get
the technology infrastructure into those buildings and I didn't, you know
, they went up with whatever. Now Darrell had worked with them some and so
there were communications closets, you can count on Darrell for that. But
a lot of what else I would have wanted to do, we had to retrofit like you
would in any old building. Well now you were involved out there and also
some of the new buildings that took place and planning for that. I'm sure
that was those were the main buildings and they were there for those, we
had the five buildings for the book of my time there, but in the last two
or three years that I was there um we did get money to build well the
dorms. Um the start of the dorms and also the what we call the second half
of the classroom lab, computer classroom building and um yeah, I had a lot
of fun working on that project. I got to be on the building committee that
time I, you know, in West, we weren't so constrained about what our roles
were. B we were smaller and so I didn't have to just worry about the
technology, I could worry about the pedagogy and you know, do things like
, you know, talk with the faculty about what arrangement they wanted for
the, you know, do they want tiered classrooms? Do they want flat
classrooms? How many big ones? How many little ones? How many little team
rooms? And um we are and we had a lot of we had a lot of fun and I think I
did have a very modern, successful building go up. Yeah. And you hadn't we
hadn't talked about classrooms before, but that must have been an
additional challenge, not only here, but on the west campus to get all of
them mediated. So that was that was what I did from the last I would say
four or 5 years of my career with over the years, I focused on different
things. I said I started an administrative computing. And then I when I
took over computing services. The thing I didn't know was academic
computing and so I didn't spend much more time on the administrative, I
had people I knew there and I was scared stiff honestly when I first took
it over, but I learned about it and then I had to learn telecom when I
went to west because I was a little more on my own. But um, yeah, the
thing I spent my time on and got really interested in the last few years
was classrooms and how they're used pedagogic lian classroom technology
and we had every classroom mediated. Um, we had long before the Tempe
campus had very many mediated. Honestly. Again, we were lucky, we were
smaller and we had enough money and people were very supportive. And I
remember when Adrian senior who, you know, was the previous to now
university technology officer came out to see me, um, he was very, he was
very taken and I think not pleased that we were so successful in having
all those mediated classrooms because he felt like we were getting an
unfair share of the resources as well as talking about a studio. Yeah,
yeah, he roger helped us a few times. Um, we had um, video studio that
it was kind of a strange deal. We had a, a faculty member who was very
successful in the movies in Los Angeles and his career and he had taken a
job at the West campus in the, as a movie professor, I guess you would say.
And he wanted a theater. Originally we had a movie, it was to, the
building was designed even before I got there to have a a video theater
for distance education, which was why Roger had such a direct interest in
it, but we weren't really doing any of that there, and so um we revamped
that video studio to be a movie theater for this professor, he was never
very happy with it, he was one of those that was never very happy with
much of anything, um and then eventually um that space was was repurposed
completely, but we really never um we really never did a lot with the
video, we didn't, we had a presence for distance education that was out of
Rogers department, you know, we sort of provided some services for the
students who were taking distance education classes physically on our
campus and we, my unit provided some support for them, um did had some
equipment and administered the tests and did stuff like that, and I began
complaining about that too um From the West Campus, you didn't talk about
the leadership that was out there, when you you went out there in about
90-91.
january 91 and who were the leaders at that time, you know, I'm having
trouble thinking of his last name, but we had a person who was, I think it
was called Vice President at the time and his name was Vern vernon land,
thank you very much linda. Um and when I was hired, I was hired reporting
to him um which was not very comfortable for him and kind of weird for me
because um I didn't go to um I didn't, he didn't include me as if I were a
dean. And so I was kind of not included in a lot of what was going on. But
I reported to him um before too long he hired um to be um administrative
vice president and um moved me to reporting to go which I protested
greatly at the time because I again I had notions that I no longer think
are really all that valid, but I had notions that the faculty would not
accept our services as well if we were reporting into an administrative
vice president. I since learned the faculty have no idea who you report to.
So it doesn't make it doesn't make any difference.
Yeah
they didn't they didn't and anyway God was extremely popular with all the
faculty and he was very fun to work for a very dynamic guy. I just really
enjoyed working with him. We had a nice team of people that work for him
that we're all, we all just so wanted to you know have the campus succeed.
And um it was at a time when the campus was, I remember Jack Kinzinger
saying
I got the right guy. No um milk click yeah milk click. He said you guys
want to be part of a S. You when it suits you and not when it doesn't and
I thought is that ever true? You know I mean when whenever I need services
from the main campus, I'm part of a S. U. And whenever I want them out of
my hair were separate, We had some years where we got away with that and
eventually of course we didn't get away with it anymore and the whole
thing is kind of withered up out there, but um you know, we had a lot of
fun while we were growing and he was God was just a real treat to work
with. We almost went from One campus with several locations to almost
separate campuses back to one campus with several locations during that
time period as well. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean vernon Latin had had a
very separatist attitude and that start was the root of our troubles I
think at West and the fact that he had such a separatist attitude really
angered people in Tempe. I remember when he hired me, he really wanted me
to say that we ought to have our own separate administrative systems out
there and I said no, you know, we're never going to be, that's never going
to be a good plan, that's not good for the students. That's not
financially good, that's just not good. No, and he accepted that, you know
, but he would have liked to just be really separate and then um and I
think for that reason he got fired in essence and um we brought Ben
foresight um in as uh you know, sort of to whip us into shape out there.
Um he was laddies, you know guy to come and bring us into line I think. Um
but he kind of got infected with the spirit of the West and and stayed out
there for five years I think it was and really kind of as I say, got
infected with the enthusiasm we had for the campus and the vision that was
being developed for the campus, which after all had been started by the
citizenry. Um and you know, wasn't a creature of a S. U. In that sense,
Tempe and then after um Ben was done with hard Elaine Maimon. We the
university did and she also was a little too separatist for most people's
taste. And uh I think that's kind of the way it ended was that we just
needed to really be brought to heel. And then um you know, Michael Crowe
came in and he had a whole different view of how things ought to be. So
until Michael Crowe came in, were you getting fairly good financial
support? Yes. We had the legislators that the legislature had a separate
appropriation for the west campus and that was honored by S. U. Until
microcode came. And so with our separate appropriation and are separate,
we could make our own budget requests and so forth. We were financially,
you know, not wealthy, but we had the money to do the things we thought we
ought to do and we were able to set our own priorities. Um When Michael
came on, he said no, it's all one budget. And he reduce the resources at
West very significantly as God did everything. Um, you know, I always said
at the time that I was reporting was moved, reporting to God and I was
worried about that and complaining, I finally said to myself, you know, I
think this guy's gonna have all the money and I always want to report
wherever the money is because it takes a lot of money to do technology and
not everybody understands that and I need to be where there's somebody
that will understand it, appreciate it and give me money and God was
really good at that. You know, he would, I mean, I didn't when at the time
where we needed to hire faculty, I didn't say, well I need more staff. I
said, you know, if we need more faculty, I'll get by with a couple of
fewer lines. But you know, at the time where we really needed to put
technology in the classrooms and there was enough money to do that. Um, I
was able to get the money because I had very supportive administration.
Well, you talked about some of the challenges. What were, what were some
of the most satisfying things that, that you did during, Well, either the
main campus or Tempe campus or the west campus. Um, I think by far the
most satisfying thing maybe because it's the most recent in my mind, but
the most satisfying thing was working really closely with the faculty at
West at Tempe, I was removed A level or two and didn't really talk to very
many faculties, some that were on my advisory committees. But at West I
knew absolutely everyone. Um, I talked to them about what they were doing
in their classroom and what we could do to help them and I was able to do
things for individual faculty who had special programs that needed special
help. That was very satisfying. Along with, I guess I want to see in terms
of what I got satisfaction out of was um, you know, building a
professional staff who was really trying to understand their role in terms
of being supporting the faculty and the students and not telling the
faculty and students what was good for them, but doing what the faculty
and students said they needed, you know, although we had to provide some
direction for technology still. Um, I felt really good about um, what I
learned the hard way. It took me five years of soul searching and pain too
to understand what the quality movement was trying to, to teach me. It was
, it was amazingly difficult, but I got a lot of satisfaction when I felt
like I understood that and had implemented it effectively with the staff
at West and I was sorry to see all of that go out the window to a large
extent. I really was well, uh if you were to sit down and talk to a young
person that's thinking about a career in the areas that you've been in and
what, what kind of advice would you give them go to stanford first or
things are so different now. You know, it's just so much more difficult.
You know, I think, you know, first they have to, they do in fact have to
today you have to have an education of some sort that is in that field to
some extent, although it depends, um, you know, be prepared to do an
apprenticeship, um work, you know, either as an intern or um, you know,
take a, take an entry level type job, be willing to try to get an entry
level type job. Maybe not even in the field you want, but so that you can
get, you know, recognized and known as somebody who might be successful
because when I got hired, you know, there weren't any, I mean there was
almost nobody in the field and we could be 21 and green as grass and if we
did well on an aptitude test, we'd get hired. That's just not the case
today. You know, it's much harder. You have to have much more in the way
of credentials to get hired into the field, but I think don't do it if you
don't love it. You know, it's like any other field, do what you love and
and enjoy it. Look for look for what's fun and try to minimize what's not
fun. You know, there's always something that's not fun. But you know, have
fun. Um, if you, if you're not gonna have fun, you're going to just be a
miserable person. And um, I was very lucky. I love the field. I still do,
I still diddle around with computers all the time and I think it's fun,
you know, Well, I can remember calling you on more than one occasion and
you were always very helpful and I knew you enjoyed what you did that's
consistent with your advice. And in fact, that was one of the things that
when I was on the nominating committee many years ago, that prompted me to
pick up the phone and call you and said Connie, we need your help. And the
retirees association, I certainly came because you did that. Tell me, tell
me now, let's see what year you're retired, then 2000 and 6 to 6. Okay.
And then after that, tell me about your involvement with the retirees
association. Well, that that next fall, I guess it was or maybe late fall
, you called me and asked if I'd be willing to be on the board and, you
know, after determining that it didn't mean much more than going to meet
some people. I knew I liked once a month. I thought I said, sure, I'll do
that and you sort of said, well, you know, if you're on the ballot you'll
just pretty much be elected. And I said, okay, well I didn't hear anything
so I assumed I hadn't been elected somehow and I didn't think anything
about it. And then in the fall I got a meeting notice and I said well we
elected in april yes, I missed that meeting.
But you've done so much to remember going from Rolodex system too.
Well that was that was heavily Dave's doing um I couldn't really help
myself of course. Um the minute I started sort of looking around and
seeing, you know, really old computers and I remember I asked to go look
at the computers and I think Dave and Doug johnson went with me and um
they were so old and they were running such old operating systems that we
were actually presenting a real security threat to the campus by having
those because they were no longer having secure updates on the operating
system for those. And so they were open to all kinds of viruses. And I was
kind of going, well, you know, we really ought to do something about that.
Of course. That was the end of me
and Dave was working on trying to automate the membership records and um I
kind of hung back from that thinking if Dave wants to do that, that's good
with me, I'm not going to get my nose in there. And he did. He got a he he
and I guess had some help and got some God, he had an on Excel then he
took a course and because we had discussed it and I said, I think we need
to write an access database, that's what this really is. And he did that
and then after he got it kind of done, I said, all right, well it's not
fair to dave to have to keep working on that. All take it over. And I did.
And that was of course that he took was on access wasn't? Yes. And he got
an a Yeah, there you go. You know, and he and he put the system together
the initial system and I, you know, I revamped it heavily, but the
gathering of the data and the initial effort was something that Dave did
and you know, I worked on it and now we have it so that I don't have to
spend very much time on it and we can run a little membership report once
a month with with just pressing a button. I always appreciate that. Well,
and I I did that because I enjoyed working with you and Dave in the same,
same for us. You know, we both enjoyed working with you uh in this
organization. Just like any other one though, you seem to have progressed
right up through and uh I spent a year as president. Well, yeah, I mean
that was that was sort of in my opinion because nobody else would do it
that year that, you know, we all take our turn in the barrel. Yeah, yeah.
I wasn't too crazy about having to do that to be honest because I was
still putting an awful lot of time into the, and I still am into the
website and the database and that was about as much as I wanted to do. But
I was um, Val asked me to do it and I said, well, what about this faculty
? I thought it should be a faculty person for one thing because Val and
mary had preceded were preceding me. Um, Val was the outgoing president
and mary was the incoming president at the time. And so I would be the
third non faculty and I didn't think that was, I was afraid the
organization would start looking, you know, to staff e, but Val assured me
he talked to you and you said it'd be fine. And so I said, okay if Elmer
thinks it's okay, I guess I can do this so well tell me about some of the
other things that occupy your time. I think I can remember stories about
baseball games and birdwatching and a few other things. Tell me about what
else occupies your time. Beside the retirees association, just an
extension of what our interests have been since we've been young. Um, I'm
a big barry and I are big bird watchers. Um, I got that Hobby when I was
in my 20s from my sister and my mother. And the whole family kind of has
done it over the years. We go places and we we try to identify new birds.
My sister and her husband are active and the four of us go on trips a lot.
We're big baseball fans had season tickets to the Diamondbacks for the
1st 10 years but got really tired when the team got really bad. We just
couldn't stand going anymore. And I haven't been to a game since in the
last two years but A. S. U. Baseball now that's something we really like
which reminds me of another little story that my embarrassing, one of my
many embarrassing moments. I wasn't gonna ask you about embarrassing
moments that go ahead.
Barry and I had we're taking the kids when they were growing up, we were
taking them to the baseball games and I think about when they were in high
school or so um they stopped wanting to come but we still had four tickets.
So we would go to the games, the two of us and have these two spare
tickets and we would look at people standing in line and offer them our
tickets instead of buying them. You know just take these two. And um I
would usually try to barry was very we're both pretty shy anyway in
situations like that. But I felt like you know somebody ought to use these
tickets and I usually look for somebody with a child? Well one day I
offered the tickets to a man in the line with a with a child, a young
person and he said thank you very much and he took him and later on maybe
not that day, but a few days later I realized that was last week or so.
That's a pretty embarrassed. A great story. Oh
that's great. Well you know, we never did get into your your family. Tell
me more about. Mhm. Um well um Barry and I have been married, I think it's
38 years, maybe something like that short of 40. Um and we have two
Children, two grown Children. Um Kent is
in Australia at the present moment with his partner. They are working
there and um they don't have any Children. And my daughter jennifer is on
the faculty at A S. U. She's at the poly campus in engineering. And um
she's married to a man who was born in Turkey, raised in Turkey also with
a PhD. And they have a little son named who's just a little over a year
old, that's our only grandchild. Grandchild. So I think that maybe all the
way to, well we never know, we never know but that that maybe there'll be
one more but I don't I don't know, Connie, we've we've asked you a lot of
questions and like maybe as we wind this up to give you an opportunity. Is
there anything that you might want to share with us that we failed to ask
you or anything else that you'd like to say is I don't I don't think so, I
I think maybe you have gotten the gist of what I had in mind, which was
that um I really, I really, although there were some tough times and there
were a couple of times when I came close to getting fired, um I take I
take a lot of pride in the fact that I actually survived as long as I did
in um in the field that I did, because I'm one of the very rare that way,
heads of uh computing services and universities typically don't last 10
years because something sure to go wrong and you're sure to get blamed for
it, like I always felt it was like being a coach, you know? Um you, you
know, it was it was, it's risky, you know? Yeah, I can't complain about
that either, but the, you know, people
expect that when they plug their computer and it's gonna work and it
doesn't always, and that can be very frustrating if you're depending on it
and so you got to blame somebody and uh you know, I feel good that I
survived. Um But I did have, I did enjoy my career very much, there were,
as I say, a few bad times, but I enjoyed it. Um I think I was very lucky
that I came to the issue at the time I did. Um I feel very lucky that I
got out at the time. I did tell you the truth if things were gonna change
for dramatically again for me um I was going to have to come back to the
Tempe campus if I stayed on and um it would have just been a big change
and I was glad I could retire instead of whether another major sea change
like that. Well I think we're we were lucky that you were here as well and
and I know that you made a major contribution to help not only
administrative but the faculty and and everybody on campus and we deeply
appreciate your time today as well as as well as all the things that
you've done for us over all the years and so in a. S. U. Retirees
association as well. So we we thank you so much and we're delighted that
you're here today so thank you and also wanted to thank Roger and Dave and
linda for all of their work behind the scenes today. And so we we
appreciate that as well. And once again Connie thank you so much, thankyou