An Interview With Edward Kehde Interviewer: Calder Pickett Oral History Project Endacott Society University of Kansas Q: This is August 21, 2003, and I'm Calder Pickett, and it's my pleasure today to interview a man who really gave me a lot of help over the years when he was over in University Archives providing material for me about the different people being interviewed. In fact, I have some stuff here that Barry gave me that he looked up about you. And, I'll use that as part of a background. For example, my learning that you, of all things, were an MU man. A: Yes, I was. Q: Well, there are a few of them around here, you know. My friend Torn Eblen is one. A: I know Torn very well indeed. Q: And, Chuck Woodling down at the Journal-World is an MU man, and who is probably a much bigger booster of KU than of MU. A: I know that. He was my box for ten years, when I wrote for the outdoor page. Q: Oh, did you do that, through him? A: Well, he used to set me up every morning, on the computer, and he's a really good guy. Oh yeah, a nice guy. And he's a very literate, intelligent man. He's not just a hack sports-writer who knows only sports. He can talk with you about all kinds of stuff. That's what makes him a good man, I think. Q: Ned, I would like you to start with some kind of basic material about yourself. Tell us your date of birth, your place of birth, and then tell us the names of your parents and what your father did for a living and so on, to get us started here. A: Sure, I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 27, 1940, at St . Mary's Hospital, and my mother and father were in the restaurant business. My father, for a while, worked for Southwestern Bell. They went to school at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1947, we moved from Webster Groves, which was a suburb of St. Louis, to Sedalia, Missouri . Q: Your parents were college people? 2 A: College people, yes they were. Q: Well, that's a rarity. A: Yes, it was. Q: Among the people I have been interviewing, frequently their parents went through the eighth grade, or something like that. A: Well, then they grew up in a more urban environment, too, you know, so that may be a little bit different, and my grandfather Garstang was a lawyer. He was my mother's father. So, yeah, they were kind of, so they were on that track. All of his kids went to college, all of my grandfather's children, he had three of them. One went to the University of Illinois, one went to Westminster, and then went to law school at Washington University in St. Louis. Q: Now, what did you say your grandfather's name was? A: My grandfather's name was James Garstang, and he was a lawyer in St . Louis . H died in 1948. he actually died in a courtroom of a heart attack. He was one of those H. L. Mencken-looking guys, with a big cigar, and a bucket of beer. After my grandmother died in 1942, he moved in with us. My grandmother died of a blackwidow bite, actually . Q: Did you live with your grandparents? A: No, we didn't. But my grandfather moved into our house in Webster Groves after his wife died. Q: Now, I'm still not sure I got what your father's name was. A: Well, my father's name was Edward. Q: Edward? A: Edward Kehde. Q: Well, isn't that ... A: That's my name, too . Yeah . 3 ( Q: That's your name . A: I was named after him. Edward G. , actually, the "G" was for Gustav, my father was from German heritage, and after my grandfather moved over, he dropped the "Gustav," and was just Edward G. Q: Now, this is a German name? A: Right . Q: I've been wondering, how come "Ned" instead of "Ed"? A: Just to keep me from, so I would be distinguished from my father. When m mother would yell "Ned", he would know that she was dealing with me, rather than with my father. Q; When I first went through the list of retirees, I guess my eyes slipped right over your name because I wasn't looking for an Edward, so I was a little startled at that point. In St. Louis, so you were a city boy? A: A city boy until 1947 . Then in 1947 we moved to Sedalia. It was the year after my grandfather died. Q: So, seven years old? A: Right. Q: Do you have man memories of St. Louis? A: Oh, yes, quite a few. They were reinforced because we used to go back with astonishing regularity. You know, every two or three weeks. My father's mother, my grandmother, still lived in St. Louis. She lived till she was ninety-eight. Q: Did you live near the river? A: No, we lived quite a ways, we lived in Webster Groves, which is ... Q: Oh, yeah, Webster Groves. the river? Kehde is a German name. Did you ever go fishing in 4 A: No, but my grandfather started going to Minnesota in 1935, and regularly from August 1935 to 2003 a member of our clan has been to Minnesota. That's where I became afflicted with fishing feber, and nowadays I've got a pretty severe case of it. Q: You're talking just a little fast. A: Fast? Q: I'd like you to slow it down. A: Slow down? Q: I was just wondering whether you were like the young Sam Clemens? A: Sam Clemens? I wish I was. I'm actually rereading The Adventures of Mark Twain right now . Q: Oh, are you? A: I try to reread it once every ten years, it's a delightful book. Q: I've done a lot with him, there's just something that fascinates me. The Mississippi River, every time we get near there. It just excites me. Years ago, we went up, drove up, to the top of the hill there, overlooking Hannibal, overlooking the Mississippi. Boy, I was wishing a steamboat would come along there, and I also got to wishing that I, instead of doing a radio program, that I was doing television, because I could move around there ... A: Yes. Q: Get pictures of all the Mark Twain stuff, and maybe even see a steamboat, maybe hear a steamboat, I don't know. But, oh, I was just reading recently that up until . the time of Mark Twain, that America's great river was the Hudson, because of Washington Irving. A: Sure. Q: But, when Mark Twain came along it became the Mississippi, and it's been the Mississippi ever since. Okay. All right, sure. 5 A: The Hudson's a beautiful river , though. Q: Oh it is, it is. A; Yes, it is. We have a daughter who lives in Brooklyn, and every year we take the train from Lawrence, and we get off in New York City, and on the way we go along the eastern shore of the Hudson, and it ' s a splendid valley to go through. Q: Were there any brothers and sisters? A: I have a brother. My brother, John, who actually took over my parents' restaurant business in Sedalia, and he annd his son now do that business. Q: Why did they move to Sedalia? A: My father was working for Southwestern Bell, and t hey transferred him there. In 1952, they opened a restaurant, and my father quit working for Southwestern Bell . Q: You' re one of the guys, one of· the young guys I'm interviewing now . I can't really ask you about the Great Depression . Maybe I can ask you about World War II . I don't know A: I have some recollections. I can remember the day that Roosevelt died. And, I think I can remember the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, I don't know if I've recreated that in my mind or what. The main thing I can remember is when Roosevelt died. I can remember people honking horns, and that could have been the end of the war in Europe, but I just can't quite remember. Q: And, lots of things that we remember are things that our parents have told us . I keep wondering whether I have a memory of some of these things about the Depression, or World War II, or whether it's just something I've gleaned out of the reading, I'm tell ing you, or writi ng I've done. But, there are some memories. A: Yes, my wife is such a World War II and Winston Churchill buff that she talks about World War II regularly; we talk about it on a dai ly basis almost . 6 I don't know what I remember. Most of what I know about World War II comes from my wife, because she's a ravenous reader about it. Q: Were your parents fairly well off, Ned? A: They were middle class folks. Yes, middle class. My brother came into business with them in 1970, and they went through that period of economic woes in the seventies. As they tried to incorporate my brother into the buwsiness, it got to be very hard. Q: Did you ever have to go to work when you were a boy? A: Oh, yes. I worked as a fishing guide in Minnesota from 1953 to 1958. I started as a fishing guide when I was thirteen, and I worked until my first year in college. Q: What kind of fish do you catch in the Mississippi? Catfish? A: Catfish, right. Q: Catfish are mighty good fish. A: Mighty good fish, oh yes. And, there's been a resurgence, kind of a renaissance in catfish fishing here. That's actually what I write a lot about. I'm a field editor for a big fishing magazine called "InFisherman". Since I live here, I'm the only InFisherman writer that lives in the heart of catfish land; therefore, most of my writings on the national front are about catfish. Q: I want to talk with you a bit more later, after we get you out of here. Tell me about your home life. Did you have books and magazines? A: Yes. Q: By that time, did you have television? A: No television, we had our first television in 1956 . Not until '56? We got our first one here in '52. They just hadn't existed where we'd been before. Q: In that part of the Mississippi. 7 A: Some people in Sedalia had one by probably '52, also. But, the reception was so poor because it's in the center of the state, and Kansas City was the venue that we had, and my father was a frugal German, too. It took a lot of talking on my brother's and my part to convince him to get one. Q: Did your parents encourage you to get an education? Were you interested in an education? A: Yes, they did. But, they were not feverish about it. My mother was more feverish about it than my father. Q: Now, you probably started school in Webster Groves? A: Webster Groves, in kindergarten, yes. Q: Then moved to Sedalia? A: Second grade. Q: So, did you go clear through high school? A: Yes, I went through high school in Sedalia. Q: Were you a good student? A: Well, I've always been a mediocre student. I suffer from dyslexia, a terrible case of dyslexia . Q: Oh, did you? A: Yes. I've conquered it a little bit, but it made school trying. It was a tough go in a way. Q: Well, I never heard about it when I was a boy. A: Me, either. Q: Now, maybe that existed for some of the children in our school, but I don't have any memories of that . A: I didn't even know what I had. uc" student. Q: What did you like? First grade . I knew that I was a Oh, it was history . 8 A: History, yeah. r had a great high school teacher in history . Hazel Gray, she ' s just a charming woman , a delight to know. Like most teachers in those days, she wasn't married, but she just had a wave of children that she educated. She was one of those people who had the charisma and the ability to really get you energized and enthralled. So, I made A's in history because of her. I had another teacher, Mr. OWens, Bob OWens, and he introduced me to H. L. Mencken, and that was a great revelation in my life when I was a junior in high school . Q: Really? That young? I don't really think that I was conscious of him until at least my college years . A: At that time Alistaire Cooke published Mencken's essays, and they were on our reading list. Mencken was such a character, and that appealed to me. I liked his iconoclastic nature, and I suffer from a terrible case of cynicism, and Mencken's cynicism caught my fancy. Q: Well, you can both like and dislike H.L. Mencken . A: Oh, yes. Q: You can like the way he wrote and the things he said, but then when you hear about some of his views, he was practically a Nazi in World War II. A: Oh, sure. Q: For that matter, he was very pro-German in World War I. Of course, a great many people were. I'm interested in your Germanic background because my mother was in a German family. In fact, she used to, when she used to get mad at us sometimes, she'd swear in German. I didn't know what it meant, but that was clearly in the background that I have, too. You graduated in what year? A: 1958. Q: 1958. So, by your age, you were able, you had nothing to do with the war in Korea either. A: I was one of those very fortunate people, in a way . I never went to war or the military, but at times I do Oh, definitely. 9 regret that I missed the experiences that my colleague John Nugent endured in World War II. His war tales were grand, and I wish that I could have such tales to tell. Q: will carry until the day I die the fact that I went irito the service and was discharged after a short time because my left ear was so bad, the hearing was so bad. And, all of my friends were in the service, and I really thought about this recently, in the Bob Dole stuff. We went to the cemetery, up there above the Oday beaches, the Omaha Beach cemetery, I walked along there looking at the gravestones and reading th names and the ages, and I started to bawl. Because of these guys, so many of them, were my age, born in 1921. It just, something, it really gets you. And, also, the fact that my wife was in the Waves. She was the veteran in our family. You graduated in 1958. What did you do then, Ned? A; I had aspirations of being a baseball player, too. Fishing and baseball were my two passions. Q: What rivers in Sedalia? A: we lived right adjacent to the Lake of the Ozarks. Q: Okay. A: So, it was the Osage River. I fished all the way through that area. We'd even sneak out of school and go fishing. A friend of mine, Leland Payton, and I went fishing incessantly. We went to creeks. We rode our bicycles, when I was a kid in the early fifties, miles to go fishing. Just one of those terrible passions that afflicts you, and you don't know why. Q: Had you been good in sports in high school? A: Oh, yes. I was good. I played sports, all sports in high school, and I wanted to be a baseball player. I went to the University of Missouri and played freshman baseball there. My roommate, Art Shamsky, came up to Topeka, and we were both going to try out for the Cincinnati Reds. He got picked up by the Reds and ended up playing in the 1969 World Series with the Mets. I 10 Q: Were you a St. Louis Cardinals fan? A: Yes, I was. I grew up with Harry Caray. In fact, my father went to school with Harry Caray. Remember Harry Caray? The St. Louis Cardinal broadcaster, and then he went on to broadcast for the Cubs. But, my dad and Harry Caray were in the same class in Webster Groves, all the way from Kindergarten to their senior year in high school. Q: Well, the Cardinals and the Cubs, they are America's teams. I think people throughout the land have that feeling about them. Some of the people who were playing for the Cardinals back in those days, when I was growing up. They were frequently in the World Series. A: I can remember the first time my father took me to a game. I used to listen to Harry Caray. I'd go to bed at night with the radio on and listen to harry, and Harry had a son the same age as I named Skip. Skip broadcasts for the Atlanta Braves. He'd always say 'Goodnight Skip' about the fifth inning, and that was about the same time I'd pass out, too. My dad took me to the first game of my life, and I said, "This is not s interesting as listening to Harry broadcast it." Harry would make the game better than it was, like a great writer. Q: Harry had some illness toward the end of his life. Our daughter lives in Chicago, and she lived very near Wrigley Field. We went to the game the day that Harry Caray returned from his illness. He got up there and led everybody in singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," and so on. Well, now, this is kind of off the subject. I mean I got you off. You were thinking you might become a baseball player? A: Well, I had aspirations to do that, but I wasn't good enough. o, I went to MU for a year, then left with a friend, Leland Payton, who was going to KU. We went to Mexico for six months. After six months in Mexico, we went to Aspen, Colorado, lived in Aspen and helped build a ski lift. Then, I was kind of a trout bum. Q: You were doing this just as a young guy? 11 A: Yes, as a young guy. We were young trout bums. We were eighteen, nineteen years old. That was the first time I rebelled against my parents. My parents and I had an idyllic relationship. I can't remember a cross word ever said. But, after I realized that baseball wasn't to be a part of my life, I quit school at MU and went to mexico. That, of course, worried my parents. Q: What did you do in Mexico? A Oh, my friend was an artist and photographer, and we just had aspirations of livings some sort of bohemian life. In other words, we just lollygagged around and acted as if we were artists and writers. Q: Did you stay in mainly one place? A: Yes, we stayed primarily in mexico City. home. Q: Oh? A: We hitchhiked down there . Q: You did? A Yes, I can imagine my mother and father were just absolutely petrified. Q: You know, I've got a friend who's still afraid to go to mexico because he still thinks about the banditos he saw in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. A: Well, he could be right. Q: You know, you think about stuff like that. A: Sure, sure . Q: We found Mexico City an extremely civilized a nd pleasant city. A: it is, it is. Q: Beautiful city, too, when there's not a lot of smoke . A; Yes, it is . Then we came Okay. A great place. It ' s a charming place. 12 Q: Yes. A: I was naive and young, and I really didn't know what I was doing. But, we just did it because we were kind of influenced by Jack Kerouac at that time. Q: Were you really? A: Yeah, so, yeah . Well, that was the heyday of Jack Kerouac. Leland was an art student up here at KU, and art students had a propensity to be bohemians. So, I picked up oh it. And, then I crune to KU the next year. Q: Now, did you ever get mixed up in the beatnik... A: No, I didn't. Q: You crune here when, you said? A: I crune here in 1960. think. Q: Why did you come here? A: Well, 'cause Leland, my friend, was here. Soon after I began studying history, Cliff Griffin becrune my mentor. He was a young professor, and he was a tremendous lecturer, an unbelievable one. I took History 5 from him, and after his first lecture, students stood up and applauded him. I looked at him in awe . He was a terrible cynic, and he reinforced my bad habits of being too cynical and critical. Q: We never could get Cliff to participate, give an oral history, and I don't know why, because he had a story. A: Yes, he did. Cliff was a cynic, and I think he battled the bottle a bit, to tell you the truth. But he was very good, a great mentor. He taught me a lot about writing, and helped me with my dyslexia a lot . He was a very helpful person. I used to dread turning in a paper to him, because it would come back looking like blood, he would rewrite the dickens out of it with a red pen. Q: Where did you live while you were here? I crune up here and enrolled in history. And, I left here about 1963, I 13 A: I lived at 1237 Oread. Now, it's a parking garage. Q: What did you do, live in an apartment? A: Yes, it was an apartment there . It was right next to Roberto's Pizza. Remember Roberto's Pizza? Then the Gaslight? There was a barber shop, and the Abbington bookshop was there too. We lived upstairs. Lived with a guy named Mike Carmichael; his father was a physician at the Med Center in Kansas City. Mike transferred from Dartmouth to KU. He was a philosophy student. He ended up going to the Medical School. Mike was a tremendous drawer of fish. He worked for Frank Cross. In fact, Fishes of Kansas contains many of Carmichael's fish drawings. Q: Ever try to mount any? A: No, I never have. Q: My niece's husband does that mount... A: Taxidermy? Q: Yes. we were out west for a family reunion a number of years ago, and my grandson caught at a little fishing pond there, easy to catch fish, of course, and he caught this beautiful trout. Sid took it back to Salt Lake City and mounted it for him, and boy, is my grandson proud. A: Oh, I'll betcha. Q: Oh yeah, that fish he mounted, there on the wall. A: Oh, nice I see . Q: I took pictures of him holding the fish. Now, after you were here, you went to Central Missouri State. Where's that? A: That's in Warrensburg. Q: That's in Warrensburg? A: Yeah, that's right near Sedalia. Never have. 14 Q: Why did you go there? A: Well, I'd decided to get a teaching degree, and that was kind of teaching school, and it was a mistake, essentially. I wasn't suited to be a teacher. But, I got a teaching degree in 1965. Q: Well, 1965 when you got, having the degree, the B.A. degree. A: Right, then I went to the University of Missouri, after that. Q: It was just logical, I guess, for you to go to Missouri. This is your home country. A: Right. Q: Now, were you a better student, ned, than you'd been previously? A: Yes, a much more serious student. I guess Cliff Griffin made me a serious student. He was a tough taskmaster. Cliff taught me a lot. Up until the day he died, he was supportive. He would read a lot of the columns I wrote for the newspaper, and always wrote me back, and said things to me, and called me also. He occasionally wrote kind words of praise about some of the columns. Q: Did you have a thesis? A: No, I didn't. I didn't write a thesis. We had an option, either thesis or non-thesis. I thought about going and getting a Ph.D., but that was just during the period when the economy was just going to hell in a hand-basket for Ph.D.s in history. Instead, I got hired at the library. This is how it happened - the head librarian at MU asked me if I wanted to be a librarian. I said, Yeah, I'll be one." It was just one of those serendipitous things in life. That's how I got into library work. My home state. 11 Q: I used to tell students when they were in a kind of floundering mode, kind of like that boy in "The Graduate," that what they should do is get their bachelor's degree in some strong program such as history or political science, and then come over to 15 the School of Journalism where they could get their master's degree and get a job. A: A job. Q: Because that, of course, is a problem, I'm sure, for a person who gets a degree in, oh, in I would suppose, many of the liberal arts. A; Definitely . Q: Yeah. Got you interested in Library? How did you get interested in that, do you think? What was there about Library that appealed to you? A: Well, I was working on a paper for Louis Atherton, who was a fairly renowned western historian and he taught at MU. Q: What was his name? A: Louis Atherton. He wrote a bunch of histories about small towns in the middle border. I was researching pretty hard in the library, and the Missouri Historical Society, and the head of the Library at MU was a University of Texas graduate in history, he didn't have a library degree either, and he had an opening. That library was divided, they had a Journalism Library, they had a History Library, it was a departmentalized library . He said, he had a hard time pronouncing my name, he said, "Mr. Kee-Dee, how would you like to work up there in the library for me?" And, I said, "Well, yeah, I'll do that." So, I became a librarian. That was about 1967 when he hired me. Q: Hey, did you ever know Bill Taft over there? School of Journalism? A: Journalism? Q: William Howard Taft? A: Oh, is he? Q: Oh , yeah. He and I worked together for years. That's when I got some national award, I think it was for my Ed Howe book. Bill came over here for the program. In the Yes, sure. He's a good friend of mine. 16 He and I always got together. subject. It's kind of off the A: Sure, sure. Is he still alive? Q: I think he is. Somebody, in fact, somebody told me not too long ago, I think it was Tom Eblen, that Bill Taft had been asking about me. A: Oh, really? Q: we used to always talk about going over to Kansas City, with our wives, and having dinner, and so on. I don't think we ever did. I just, mainly I saw him at national meetings, and stuff like that. A number of the other people you know over there. The great journalism historian, Frank Luther Mott, he and I became very good friends too. A: Sure, I can imagine that. Q: He used to write to me, for me that was a real honor to have an association with a man like Frank Luther Mott . Probably the best journalism historian in America at that time. A: Just being a colleague of John Bremner was a hell of an honor, you know. I always like Bremner, you know. His papers are in the archives, and his papers included a critique of the New York Times, and it is an astonishing piece of work. Q: So, you stayed there at MU and got your degree in library science. Were you married? A: Yes, I was married. Actually what happened was in 1970 we got a new librarian at MU, the old librarian that hired me retired. They got a new guy and he was a heavy-duty professional librarian. And, I didn't have a library degree. Heck, I didn't think I needed to have a library degree. I am a negative type of guy in a lot of ways. So I said, "No, I don't need one. I'm do i ng fine here and I am doing a fine job, so why do I need one?" He said, "Well, if you're not going to get one then I'm firing you." So, they fired me. And, my wife was actually getting a degree in library science and she got a job here at KU. I came here on her shoestrings. 17 Q: Your first wife? A: No, was married before and her name was Martha. Martha and I were married for 20 years, and she left and went to Mexico and decided to never come back. I didn't want to go to Mexico. We got divorced about a year after she left in about 1980, and a year or two later I married Pat. So, I came here and David Heron hired me. Back in the days when you came in for an interview and it took 20 minutes, and you were hired. I started working on May 1, 1970, in the Kansas Collection. And, I moved up to work for John Nugent in the archives in 1972. Q: Where were you first? A: The Kansas Collection, which is downstairs in Spencer . I worked there for a couple of years and while there I worked on the Wilcox collection. At that time, I was doing a book for Greenwood Press; it was a national union catalog of left-wing publications. Q: I saw something about that . very well? A: I didn't know him very well. But, when I worked at the library at the University of Missouri, I lent him three hundred dollars so he could publish one of his guides . And, he has never paid me back that three hundred dollars . Q: He's now become as conservative as he was liberal back then. His wife is a good friend of my daughter. Carolyn told me that Laird has asked about me, and I didn't really know him, I just knew he had that collection over there, and I knew that it fascinated quite a few of the students because they knew of some of the kind of offbeat stuff that he had. Offbeat by what standards? A: About middle class standards, straight-line politicians. Political people, you know? Democrats, Republicans . Q: Then you moved up to University Archives? Did you know Laird Wilcox 18 A: Yeah, the best thing in the history of my life. When Nugent and I worked together, we never had one disagreement or one foul thought about one another for the entirety of our career. Q: He was a very sweet man. A: Oh, yeah, a great man. Q: He was always so good to me. That was really great the kind of relationship I was able to have with him. Then, with you and Barry, and I could call and get stuff over there. I think we are toward the end of the story here. I want to ask you about what the situation is like now. I know there are still aspects about it I don't like. Now, what year, see that would have been 1972, and then you went up to the Archives. A: I came up here in 1970, May 1, 1970. About 1972 I went to the Archives . On a full-time basis working for Nugent. We just started doing it from scratch. It was the greatest job I ever had; moreover, it's an easy and simple job. I think since 1972 I indexed every UDK ever published. And, Barry's continuing to do that now. Even though it's on-line, we are still going to do it. We indexed the Journal-World, the Topeka paper, and the Kansas City Star. And, the Wichita Eagle, too . It's one of those things Nugent thought up, and then I started to do for full-time. I have a knack for doing indexing. For example, I ran an indexing service from 1975 until last year. It's called Access: The Supplementary Index to Periodicals. Q: Well, you must have amassed a great deal of knowledge and understanding about the university. A: Oh, yeah, you do. But, you tend to forget a little bit of it, too. Like when you're writing a regular newspaper column. You start to write one and you say, I think I've written this column before, but you can't remember for sure. After several decades of doing the same routine, some elements become a tough foggy. Q: Every once in a while, I would check back and I'd fine that I had written the same thing before. A: After thirty years, it's inevitable. You know Jim Fisher, who used to work for the Kansas City Star? 19 Jinuny and I went to school here at KU together, as did his brother Mike. we were all friends. Jim was a tremendous writer; he wrote scores of fine columns. Jim used to forget and then he would rewrite a column that he had written ten years earlier. Q: I remember he was the one who came over from the history department and took my History of American Journalism. I was always pleased to have a guy like him in there, you know. Of course, I worked over there at the Star and I'd gotten to know him when I was over there. A: His dad was an editor for the Star, too; did you know that? He worked on the editorial page. Q: He was a good fella. Well, tell me something about your work there in the archives. A: Besides the UDK and the newspaper indexing? Nugent had this theory you do everything as it comes in and you do it quickly. And he had that old G.K. Chesterton idea that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. The Archives are worth doing, even if it's done badly, and done badly is better than doing it all. Moreover, you got to do the stuff quickly, or going to get a big mountain of stuff and you are not going to get it done at all. And, the natural tendency for most archivists is to think about it and not do it. It's laborious, too. In fact, I got two hernias in my career. Barry's had one. John got out of it without suffering a hernia, but he had all kinds of back problems. It's often a manual labor job. Essentially an archivist is nothing more than a supersecretary. You are taking care of all the records of the university, and that's just like being a secretary, but because of the vast volume, you've got to be a damn good secretary . And, we created a number for everything, we put papers into folders and folders into boxes. In fact, the number for the School of Journalism is twenty-three. So, anything in the School of Journalism goes back in the section called twenty-three. We just arrange it chronologically, or under Calder Pickett or John Bremner or whatever. In the archival world John Nugent was a maverick. He fabricated the scheme as he worked, but it worked well and simply . One reason why it worked was that Nugent was there every day and never in meetings, as he 20 processed different collections, he also answered the phone, welcomed patrons and fetched collections from the stacks for patrons to read. Although Nugent's system worked well, other archivists would call it anathema to the profession. For example, if you called up and you wanted a picture of anybody, even yourself, we could get it in less than a minute. Q: Well, after John retired, you were in charge, weren't you? A: No, I'm too much of a maverick to be in charge. wouldn't put me in charge. Q: Well, you seemed to be. A: No, Sherry Williams was. actually in charge. Q: Well, you see I didn't know that. A: Librarians were intimidated by Nugent, me and Barry. Therefore, they never gave us any grief . Nugent set up an autonomy; we were an autonomous unit up there for a long time; we always did our own thing . And, we never went to meetings; in fact, I worked here 33 years, I don't think I went to 33 meetings during my tenure. I just refused to go. Q: You never got involved in committees? A: Occasionally, they asked us to get involved, but I didn't, and Nugent never did it either, but he went to a few more meetings during his many years at KU than I did. Q: Did you have an academic rank? A Yeah, I had an academic rank. Q: What was it? A: It's Librarian III. I was tenured; the tenure routing is similar but less rigorous than that of the facu l ty. The same university committee on promotions and tenure that reviewed the librarians also reviewed the faculty; but for librarians it was merely a perfunctory matter. They She was the woman who was 21 Q: Well, you know I was on that committee on two different terms and I'm sure I had to evaluate people who were in the library . A Librarian III would be the equivalent of what? A: It's the highest level you can go in a library . Librarian I is like assistant professor. Q: Ranked like the highest professor? A: Oh, probably. They probably think they are that high. It's not a demanding job. It's the simplest job in the world. You get a book, you put it on the shelf, somebody comes in, and you give it to him. Q: I think I've got an article by you in which you have something to say about librarians and how they should rank on the academic totem pole. A: Yes, I wrote when we were going through some great changes in Spencer Library . I told Barry and another librarian that I was going to write an op-ed piece . I called it "The Pity of Professionalism" and I think the editor changed the name of it. Q: Oh, yeah, "The Tyranny of Professionalism." Well, now, what kind of contact did you fellows have with the university librarians? A: We didn't have much. At heart, John was a librarian rather than an archivist. He worked as circulation librarian for decades. He was a World War II veteran, he went to school at Emporia, then he got hired here by Mr. Baker, and then Vesper put him to the head of circulation. He originally came here and worked with old Raymond Hall doing some cataloguing of a collection of natural history books . Q: Oh, that would have been one to work with . A: One great character . I got a great story about E . Raymond Hall . A friend of mine, Leland Payton, the guy I went to Mexico with, was doing a photographic essay on the Flint Hills . E . Raymond was alway s wanting to have a National Prairie Park in the Flint Hills. He was leader of the national prairie park crusade . Hall had some photographs of Leland's up on 22 the top floor of Dyche Hall, and one Saturday Leland came to town and called Professor Hall. When he got Hall on the phone Leland said, "Professor Hall, this is Leland Payton, can I get those photographs?" Hall says , "Yeah, Goddangit, Payton, I just cut off two of my fingers on my lawn mower, and I can't get up there for about two hours . Doctor says I gotta lay low for about two hours." Payton says, "I can get them tomorrow." Hall says , "Oh , no , I ' ll meet you in two hours." So, we went up there, and when we got up there, there's Hall with his hands up in the air like this and blood was still dripping down his elbow. He was reaching with his other hand into his vertical file pulling out Payton's photographs. That story shows you how tough of an old coot Hall was . Q: He hated the Kansan, and the kids wanted to do a story about the horse Comanche, so this student went over there and wanted to take a picture of Comanche. And Hall said, "No, you can't take one, we won't let you do that." So, I went over there with the student and asked why not. They said you just can't do that. I looked down in the cabinet there, and there was a postcard showing Comanche, and I said, "Okay, I want to buy this postcard." The girl said, No , I can ' t sell it to you . " And I said, "What? Why can't you sell it to me? I ' m a member of the public, I have a right to buy that." She didn't want to sell it, but she did sell me the postcard and then we just had the postcard copied and had a picture of Comanche in the Kansan. But, that was the kind of character he was. Believe me, the people I have talked with over in his department, every one of them, would understand that story. 11 A: Oh, yeah, I understand it very well indeed, that's typical E. Raymond Hall, isn't it." Q: You didn't have to deal with the various librarians? A: Not very much . We tried to stay out of their way; we had such a good go in the Archives. We were just out there by ourselves: Barry, I and Nugent, it was like being in a newspaper off ice back in the old days before everybody had cubicles . We sat in the same room and worked. There was great camaraderie , it was one of those great, great situations of life, i n wh ich 23 everybody got along. work done. What's more, we got a lot of Q: How about the other people there in the building? A: We didn't get along with them very well; we tolerated them; we were nice and they tolerated us. Sandy Mason and I have since become good friends. But, we had several stormy times. Q: Sandy's another who must be bitter about something because I called her to interview her, and she doesn't want to have anything to do with it. Maybe, there are things she is so mad about, that she wouldn't want to have them down on paper, I don't know. A: Yeah, I think that's the case. Q: I think that's the case with a number of people . You know, I've always gotten along well with the people over there. Except they are kind of a law onto themselves, and that is what is happening; that's one of the things I wanted to ask you about. A year ago, I went over there, and the anniversary of KANU was corning up, and I wanted to use the interviews I had done myself with Jim Seaver and Dick Wright. And, Barry told me the new rule that I couldn't do it. I said, "Well, why can't I borrow, or take those tapes. After all, I'm the one who put them here. "No, you can't." I talked to Sherry Williams about it, "No, that's the best policy, and so on." So, what I had to do was bring my own tape recorder over there and put that cassette on and put my own in there and copy the sound I wanted from those interviews. That made me mad as hell. A: I would be mad as hell, too. Q: I just think that is a very capricious policy and this is what's happening now. A: You know, the same thing is happening with the Alumni Magazine photographs and Journal-World photographs. Those are their records, not Spencer Library's records. Even the people at University Relations are severely hampered when they want to use some of their old records . The Archives are essentially part of the University Relations' function. We should be giving 24 that stuff to folks as a public service. We deal mainly with journalists and they have a deadline. Librarians don't realize what the heck a deadline is. Q: You know now why I didn't put my radio program in there. A: I wouldn't have put it in there. it to somebody else. Q: It's in the Marr Archives. A: Well, that's a working archive, yeah . Q: People can come in there and use that stuff and they do. A: I wouldn't have given it to them. Q: It would just sit on the shelf if it were there. You guys used to help me. I remember back when I was first doing my radio program, I wanted to do an anniversary show on the assassination of Kennedy, and I had gone to the program in Hoch the Monday after he was killed, and I remembered one of the things we did was sing the grand "Navy Hymn." I don't know who it was, whether it was John, whether it was you, one of you guys, I wanted to know whether that program had been copied, and, yes, it had. And, you let me take that tape an I was able to get for my program on Kennedy the singing of the congregation there in Hoch Auditorium. Instead of using a recording, like a wonderful recording I have of the Naval Academy choir. But, this was the real thing, and that was the way things used to be here. I could go in there and use things. Hell, now I'd have to sign my life away to use things. A: Yes, that's what happens. You have two alternatives for librarians, they either have to be centralized or decentralized, and now the boss wants centralization. We ran well on a decentralized system in the Archives. Now, researchers go to a central reference department and nobody knows you, nobody knows the collection. Propinquity is an important function in an archives, you have to be with the collection that you are dealing with right there, talking with people who work with that collection every day. A centralized I would have given 25 reference person' not going to know diddly-squat about that stuff. Centralization just doesn ' t work for archives. Q: Well, there are a lot of people who have a very bureaucratic attitude about a lot of these things. I have some people over at KANU who don't approve of my copying and giving things to people. Well, hell, it might as well be used, otherwise, it's gone. I let a fellow in the School of Journalism use my notes for History of American Journalism. And, I let him borrow my slide collection. Well, why not? A: Yeah, that's what that stuff 's for. That's what you spent forty years of your life doing, you might as well pass it on; that's a great way to pass it on. Q: I'm glad to be able to help people do these things. I remember a while back a guy called me and says, "I got your name, and I was riding along in my car, and I was listening to a program you were doing about Henry Adams. I was always interested in Henry Adams." I said, "What's your name and your address?" He told me. And I said, "I'm going to send you a copy of that." I copied a cassette and sent it to him. And, felt good about it. A: Sure, that's good, that's good, that's what we are here for: to pass this stuff on to other people and make it as easy as possible. You talk to Jennifer Sanner over there at the Alumni Magazine. Nowadays, it's a complicated affair for her and her journalists to get something out of the Archives. If Bill Snead of the Journal-World wants to get some photographs out of the Archives, it's difficult for him to get them. We used to be able to do it like that (snaps fingers), but now it ' s a rigmarole. Why make a rigmarole out of everything out of everything? It should be simple. Q: Now, you have to push so many buttons on the telephone to get qanything done these days . Now I want to ask about the column you did . Do you stil l do the column? A: Yeah , well, I don ' t do it with the Journal-World anymore . You, I and Gurley and a bunch of guys got pinched back, and I got cut back to once a month. The Topeka paper called up and asked if I would like to work with them. I said, yeah, I'm working one week a 26 month with the Journal-World, I can just fill in with you guys . I can do once a week for you or three times a month or whatever . Then, the Journal-World found out that I was working for them and they didn't want me to work for them for some reason. I guess they thought Topeka Capital-Journal was their competition. And I said, "They hired me when you guys didn't want me." So, I am going to have to stay with them. So, I've been working for the Topeka Capital for more than a year now. Q: We were going to a basketball game one night and we got on the elevator. And here comes Dolph Jr. and his wife. And she looks at me and she says, "I've been wanting to tell you how much I always loved your column, and I've kept so many of them and so on . " And, Dolph just stood there, he didn't say anything. I wondered if he knows my column is no longer in the paper. I thought that was a very interesting that happened. His wife says something like that. I figured it was only once a month, the hell with it . A: You had a heck of a string of Sundays, you never missed one; I had never missed a Sunday for them either. And you had been writing for them a lot longer for them. Q: Well, I started in 1988, or just after I retired. Bob Nordyke called me. He had been a student of mine. And he asked me whether or not I would be willing to do that. A: Yeah, I started in 1991 and went till last year. Q: Okay, you are doing the column now for the Daily Capital. Do you go over there or do it on the computer? A: Computer. Q: Who do you deal with over there? A: Kirk Caywood. It's a better deal - they give me more words. The hardest thing in the world is to write briefly. They give me a thousand words. Heck during my last days at the Journal-World, I was down to five hundred words. It takes some hard writing to do five hundred words. You got to go over it, over it, and I send it on e-mail. 27 over it. It's always harder for me to be brief than is for me to be long-winded. Q: Do you ever repeat yourself? A: Yeah, I find myself repeating myself. Q: Now, where do you fish? A: I fish primarily in Kansas and Missouri . to Minnesota . Q: Where are you going today? A: I'm going to Lone Star Lake this afternoon at four o'clock. I'm taking a kid who wants to be a professional fisherman. The fishing world, like everything else now has become professionalized. So, there are professional fishermen and this guy is a young burgeoning fisherman, and he recently won angler-of-the-year award in a minor league tournament circuit. And, I've been working with him on a certain technique; so, we are going to work o this technique today. Q: What kinds of fish are out there? A: We are going to fish for large mouth bass today. I try to fish for every species. I have to write about every species. I went fishing Tuesday morning with a fellow from Topeka, and we went to Perry Lake. We fished from eight till eleven, and we caught a hundred and thirty-five white bass. Q: Does your wife go with you? A: She goes with me to Minnesota now. And we fish in Minnesota. We just got back Sunday from there. Q: Where do you fish up there? A: We fish up by Grand Rapids now. For years, I fished in Brainard, Minnesota; that's where I was a guide when I was a kid from 1953 until 1958. Q: What was it you liked about fishing? And, I go up 28 A: It's a difficult thing to describe. It's like looking at a great painting, you can see it's great. You can't quite figure out why it's great. You just know it's great; it's passion and it's uncontrollable. Or, it's like falling in love. It's something I've tried to explain to people a number of times, and it goes beyond my ability to describe. It's just one of those things that my mind is focused on frequently throughout the day. For example, I rode my bicycle over here, and during most of the trip up this damn hill I was thinking about this fishing trip I'm taking this afternoon. It's a preoccupation. Q: Is it being outdoors? A: Part of that, part of is just fish. Q: Do you fish in bad weather? A: I try to fish year round. Q: My dad used to like to fish when it was raining. A: I like to fish when it's raining, I like to fish when it's snowing. This is the hardest time, especially when it's a hundred degrees. As a young buy, heat didn't bother me. But, as I've gotten older it's harder. weather has a greater effect on me at the age of 63 than it did as a younger man. Q: My dad fished in the Snake River, up near Idaho Falls, which is not too far from Yellowstone and Teton and so on. A: Wonderful place. It's God's country essentially. It's a trite thing to say, but it really is. Wonderful place. When your dad was young, it was a heck of a place, but it's a much different place now. It's probably been yuppie-ized. Q: He never had time to fish much when he Because some nights he would come home o'clock; he had been working all day. retired that he really started doing a And, every time we would visit him out he would have some trout for us. ·What did your dad do for a living? was working . at seven It was after he lot of fishing. in Idaho Falls, 29 A: He was a butcher. A very hard-working man all of his life. He wasn't much of an outdoor man. He didn't care for hunting at all. We never had a gun in our house. Q: Yeah, I'm not a hunter either . A: But he fished . we Once in a while he River . But, where catch were suckers damn many bones in Q: Sucker is a nice fish though. though, it really is. A: What I remember when I was a boy scout we went seining for trout in the raids of the Bear River. Th is was a wonderful time. I remember when we did that. Q: I gradated from high school in 1939, so it must have been 1935 or 1936 or something like that . Is that your main passion, or your main hobby, or do you do other things? A: It's my main passion . But, for years I also ran an indexing service with a friend of mine from the University of Missouri Library. His name is Gordon Burke . He now lives in Evanston, Illinois, not far from Northwestern. We ran a thing called Access, and we indexed periodicals for years, and years, and years, starting in 1975. Q: You're apparently a cook though, too. A: Yeah, I'm a cook . Q: Something I didn't know about you your knowledge about that. But, of course, you're talking about food now I'm not supposed to eat. A; I don't eat it any more either. I ' ve actually become friends with Pok-Chi Lau. He teaches photography in the design department. Pok-Chi taught me Chinese cooking. That's my other passion, cooking Chinese. As I get older I don't eat meat very much anyway. I eat a lot of vegetables, but I also eat a lot of used to go fishing constantly . would take us fishing in the Bear we fished, mainly all we could and chubs and carp, which had so them you could hardly eat them . It's a delicious fish 30 steamed fish. I eat steamed fish about twice a week . In fact, that's what we had last night, steamed white bass. I am going to have some catfish tonight. Q: I could eat barbecue spare ribs at least once a week. A: I grew up eating them! Q: I love that kind of food, I just do. guess that's fact more than beef. A: I don't eat beef, but I still eat pork. Pork still tastes good to me. My parents ran a barbecue, th.a t 's what they did for years. That's the restaurant they started in Sedalia. My brother still runs it. Barbecue has been in my blood for decades, and the smell of hickory still lingers in my nose. My brother and nephew's clothes smell of hickory. Their clothes and their skin become permeated with smoke and barbecue residue . It's just part of their life . The smell of food just permeates the body. Q: Do you have children? A: Yeah, I have a daughter, Gretchen, who is 40. Now, she lives in Brooklyn, I think she's forty - she may be 39. And, I have a son John, who is 36; he just moved to next to Urbana, Illinois. He works for the United States Tennis Association. I have a daughter Nancy, who works here at KU in the Political Research Institute. It ' s the old office on top of Blake Hall, James Drury's old place. They changed the names of that office incessantly, it's hard to keep track of it . She works there. She's a grant writer for them and got a master's degree in public administration here . I have a daughter Anna, who lives in San Antonio. She's getting a degree in public administration from the University of Texas . She's 30. Q: I guess I thought of you as being a lot younger, Ned. A: I am an old man, Calder. was 65. I am 63 . Q: Wait until you're 82. I love pork . I I retired a little before I 31 A: I know, don't want any more days to go by. I just told my wife when we were in Minnesota that I really like being retired. My job was easy, it was a great job. But, being retired is better than working. Besides writing for the Topeka newspaper, I write for another magazine, and it's great not having to write after I come home from work. Q: Have you and your wife been able to do any traveling? A: We travel a little bit. My wife still owns the Raven Bookstore, so she's still very active in the bookstore business . She travels just a little bit more than I do. Before I retired, I had the indexing service I was running, and I was writing about fishing at the same time, and I also was working at KU. So, I was beleaguered with work, making travel a difficult chore. Q: Have you been able to get out in that mountain country that I come from very much? A: Yeah, my grandfather Garstang took me out that way. He used to go to the Gunnison River, which is on the west side . But, I really haven't been back to Colorado since I went to Aspen after I went to Mexico City in the late 1950s. Q: Have you ever been up in the Canadian parks? A: Yes, I have. Q: We were there last summer right up there, Jasper and Banff. A: It's incredibly beautiful, it's just breathtaking, isn't it? I was up fly-fishing with my father up there in about 1957. Q: We're going back in the lobster-crab country in two weeks. We're going back there on a short cruise that will go to Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and all those places; the Moby Dick country , that's what I call it. I'm quite excited about seeing that country back there. Wonderful place. 32 A: I used to have a friend who lived in Provincetown and we used to drive there in August and fish around Provincetown for striped bass. Q: We're hoping there'll be some autumn leaves. know, I think we're a little early. A: I think you're early . Q: Anything like this. weather. A: It's a hundred and six today. Q: It is? Oh, my God, it just keeps getting worse and worse all the time, doesn't it? Do you read a lot? A: I read a lot. I read the New York Times five days a week. But, the New York Times is such an ordeal, some days it's more than I can do. Q: Yeah, that's the way I am. By the time I read the Journal-World and the Kansas City paper, I can't read as much as I used to. A: My wife is in the book business, so I read. But since I am plagued with dyslexia, I read l aboriously. I'm reading right now The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . I read every night and I read every morning a little . But, I spend most of my time writing. It takes me a long time to write. I'm not a quick writer. In the month of July, I wrote fifteen thousand words for magazine stories. But, it's long and hard, and I don't do a very good job of it. Q: Have you written for any other sports magazines or anything like that? A: I did small things for Field and Stream and Sports Afield, but just briefs. I mainly write for InFisherman magazine, which is the biggest freshwater fishing magazine. I'm on the staff now. After I retired from here, they gave me a staff position. And , they also gave me six big assignments , which is good. I like to write about fishint . Q: Is your health good? I don't I can't stand much more of this 33 A: Good health, yeah. I went to the doctor the other day and he said some of my body parts are beginning to wear out on time, other than that it's just natural. It seems like I'll be all right. I hope I can last like Mickey Ryther did. Old Mickey used to be up in the Archives for years. Here's a story about Mickey Ryther. The day he died, Marjorie Ryther called John Nugent up and said, "Mr. Nugent, Mickey will not be in to work today. He died last night." That's how matter-of-factly people of that age take death. John said, "Oh, my goodness gracious, Mrs. Ryther, I hate to hear that." "Oh, that's all right," she said. "He was quite an old man and he knew it was his time to go." Q: I went to his funeral, and Marjorie, who was practically blind, knew me. She must have known the sound of my voice. I don't know. Of course, we had been on the faculty all those years, and all those people . You're the one who told me to interview Dick Harp. Well, you know that damn cuss. He called me and I had been nagging him for years to get it back to me. I think maybe that's when he had a stroke or something. I'm going to have to call his wife and see whether she has those papers somewhere. Otherwise, it's lost. A: And, the tape is gone on that thing? Q: The gal who taped it worked in the law school and she left it here, and went to some other place. The people in the law school didn't know how to get hold of her and whether she even kept the tape. I have an idea that she just threw her stuff away. So, it makes me kind of sick cause Dick and I had some good stuff in that interview. A: Harp used to come to the archives when he was working on a biography of Coach Phog Allen. He would sit around and tell us stories. He was a great storyteller. I don't know if he could tell them on tape as well as he did when he was lollygagging around the Archives. Some of his stories would make you roll on the floor in fits of laughter. Q: Yeah, we got some pretty good stuff. His son had been one of my Western Civ students and we had gotten to know each other pretty well. I really liked Dick. He 34 didn't have quite the record as some of the other guys. A: A decent man, wasn't he? A damn decent man. Q: Didn't you retire a bit early? A: Yes, I did. Q: Were you tired? A: It was an easy job. But, I worked in the library for 33 years, doing the same thing. If Nugent were here, I would've stayed on, but the place has been going down hill. I know Barry has five more years and he's kind of dreading it. It wasn't a great place, but i t was a fun place - we tried to make people happy or at least pleased that they were there researching. Q: I used to love to come up there. I call and talk to Barry, but I don't want to tangle with those other people up there. Of course, I think this is the university these days. A: Yeah, it's run by bureaucrats essentially, they always have had a tendency to be bureaucratic. That's just the nature of the folks who run the thing. But, it's more so than it ever has been. You can't believe the minutes of meetings that we collected during the past 15 years; minutes of meetings are a good measure of the depth of a bureaucracy. Q: That had a lot to do with my retirement. I got tired of being on a committee where I didn't know what I was doing. Where I had no interest, and I knew there was somebody who could do a better job there. That, and some of the politics that were starting to emerge here. The School of Journalism and then the University. I got an invitation yesterday to the dedication of the new Kansas Public Radio facilities, and I can't figure out why that invitation came from Chancellor Hemenway and one of the Menningers. I figured it should have come from Janet Campbell or somebody like that. I'm not going to be here at that time, so I won't be able to attend it. I don't know, that kind of bugged me. That's the way everything ' s done around here these days. Well, anyway, has this been a good place for you to live? 35 A: Great place to live, yeah. anywhere else essentially. I don't want to live I'm happy. Q: You don't want to go back to Missouri? A: No, I'm fine. Q: Do you fish over in Missouri? A: I do. Q: That ' s a great commercial on television on whether you really know Missouri and so on. Cause I know there are some marvelous places in that state. A: Yeah, I'm going Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. I'll be over in Missouri. I'm going there more often. My brother fishes and so does one of my nephews, so I go over and fish with them. Every Easter we get together and have a family fishing affair . And, every Thanksgiving we do. Q: We don't take the interstate any more, well this time we're going to take 24 across, usually we take 36. if you get behind one old man in a van going thirty miles an hour, and is holding up everybody when you're going in near Hannibal, and that's not a good way to be traveling. So, we'll see what 24 is like. A: We just came back from Minnesota and we traveled on I35 occasionally, but we prefer Highway 15 and 69. It's such a great joy to go through those small towns. The truck traffic and noise is incredible on t he interstates. I just don't like it. I don't l i ke the pace. Q: The only problem that I miss is the rest areas, which I badly need. A: As our age progresses, my bladder is. Q: I've got to have those. It is nice when you are on those interstates . Well, hey, Ned, I think we 've covered most of it. I've been looking forward to his . You're a guy I always liked, and I figured that we could have a good time. I'm going over Sunday to fish. 36 A: Yeah, it's great just jawing for a bit. Q: Okay, thank you. A: Okay, thank you!