Good morning. Today is December 19th 2012 and we are conducting an
interview for the Arizona State University retirees association video
history project. We are located in the S. U. Community Services building.
Uh I'm Dave swan. Retired faculty member and administrator from A. S. U.
The technical staff today include john macintosh operating the camera,
roger carter audio and Dave shots. Lee director linda Vance coy, the chair
of the as you are, a video history project is here with us as well.
Please introduce yourself stating your name and your positions are at a. S.
U. Gary Kraehenbuehl. Um I came to a S. U. As an assistant professor and
worked my way through the academic ranks and then uh served at various
times as director of what was the then called the exercise and sport
research institute. Then I was the department chair, Uh served as
associate dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences for five years, then Dean for
11 years and then finished as senior vice president of the university.
Well to begin with, would you let our viewers know a little about your
early life where you were born and raised, trace your path through
schooling and jobs and until, until you arrived today, this year, um I was
born and raised on the family farm in Illinois. My parents were both
college graduates, which I think is probably a little unusual in farming
but they thought that the rural life was what appealed to them and so my
grandfather was quitting farming and so my dad and mother moved into the
house on the farm and that's where we grew up. I started, I started school
in a, in 1949 in a one room country school with no running water And one
teacher and 16 kids. And I attended that for the first several years. And
then uh they were consolidating the schools and so they closed that school
and we went to uh a little bit bigger school in a town nearby.
Anyway, we went through uh grade school and high school. In high school,
we had really good basketball teams One year we were 31 and 1 um losing
only in the state champion and out of the state championship game, but in
the state tournament um and that my basketball that gave me, it got me a
scholarship to go to Northern Illinois university. And so I attended
Northern Illinois University on a basketball scholarship. And uh just a
little funny story about that when I was in the spring, they had a, an
event which they call May fate, which is sort of like homecoming, but it's
in the spring and it's a big campus affair that the fraternities and
sororities get involved in. And uh anyway, one night in the spring I was
in the library and I happened to be sitting by the door where everybody
had to come in and it seemed like everybody I knew in the university that
night came in and and uh stopped and spoke to me and unbeknownst to me,
there was a woman sitting across the room watching this whole thing and
her sorority was trying to figure out who can we put up for May Fate King.
Well she saw that everybody that came into the library seemed to know me
and so she went back to her sorority and said we need to put this guy up
for May 5th King. Well anyway, to make a long story short, I ended up as
being maybe king only because I went to the library that night and I
didn't get any work done. I just visited with friends who are coming
through. Um anyway, um when I graduated, I wasn't sure what I was going to
do, but the basketball coach asked me to stay and coached the freshman
team and work on my masters and that seemed like a good plan. So I stayed
and uh coached the freshman basketball team and worked on my master's
degree and I completed that in a year and a summer and then I got married
and went to work teaching in a middle school in Illinois 78th and 9th
grades and I coached basketball, baseball and football and I did that for
two years
in those two years. I decided I didn't want to do that the rest of my life.
And so I started working on my doctorate at the University of Northern
Colorado And I completed my degree, work there in the summer of 1969
and uh, I knew I wanted to move to the Sun belt and so I look for look for
jobs in the south and I had an offer from Tulane and one from the
University of Arkansas And one from the University of Hawaii. And so I
said I'm going to Hawaii and so my first university position was at the
University of Hawaii. It was like a 4-year vacation. Um, and that's both
good and bad. It was good because
you couldn't have kind of slid into higher education in a much easier way.
There was, there wasn't much pressure. They people claim that everybody
that was their head Polynesian paralysis, which meant that what he really
was motivated to do. Very much so if he did anything, you got ahead anyway
, I spent four years there and then decided that we wanted to get back to
the mainland. Our daughter was ready to start school and we really schools
over there weren't very good. So we wanted to get back to the mainland.
Anyway, I had offers from the University of texas and from Arizona state.
And uh for a variety of reasons I came to msu,
What, what year was that 1973, and what were those reasons you'd like to
share them? Well, um I had been to phoenix before, I had a brother that
was married here. I had a brother who lived here. Um, I like the people in
the department better and it just seemed like there were going to be more
opportunities. I actually liked the fact that the department was in, the
department was in the College of liberal arts and Sciences. We're at the
University of texas. It was in the College of Education and I felt like
because I was interested in research that really wasn't related to
teaching, that I would, I would thrive or do better in a place where I was
in the liberal arts and sciences. So I ended up coming here. An
interesting little sidelight there too is um when I received the offer
from a issue, it was a Western Union telegram with two incomplete
sentences. I mean written away telegrams are written, the first, the first
partial sentence was offer position, assistant professor, some salary and
this whatever. I mean, it was just very cryptic and the next one said
respond via cable to and that was it. And I always laugh about that
because over the years the offer letters got to be three pages of legalese
and you had to sign it four ways and have it notarized and so on in any
way. It was, it was, it was funny to think back that my offer came in a
two line Western Union telegram.
So what, what, what, what occupies your time now after having such a full
career at the university? Well I didn't, I didn't stop stone cold when I
retired. I actually did a few things to sort of wind down. I had a book
that had just come out and so for a couple of years I was on the lecture
circuit consulting circuit and, and did a lot of that. The government, the
governor appointed me to the Arizona biomedical commission. So I served a
term on that and I helped the group that was trying to found the Arizona
Academy of Arts Sciences and Technology. Um, so anyway, I did those things.
In the early years. I got tired of the travel and uh, and now I, you know
, I come to occasional events on campus, but mostly I, I do things that I
enjoy. I'm interested in family history and do a lot of family history
work. Um, I read, oh, I love to read history and biographies. And so I do
a lot of reading. I enjoy photography and do a lot with photography.
My wife and I travel and anyway, I'm, I have a backlog of things to do
that. I won't have enough time to do in this lifetime. So I stay very busy
play a little golf too, not much, alittle