Eldred Stephenson

              Crowder, Dr. David L. Oral History Project
Eldred Stephenson- Experiences at Ricks College
By Eldred Stephenson
March 1, 1984
Box 2 Folder 40
Oral Interview conducted by Larry Ostler
Transcribed by Sarah McCorristin February 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
Eldred Stephenson: I am 71, and I will be 71 in another week. Except for a little arthritis in my fingers and toes, I feel pretty good. I still go wading in the streams and play racquetball every day.
Larry Ostler: That is probably why you are in such good shape. I’m going to follow a sheet here, but we will probably wander around a little bit. You came in ’ 37?
ES: Yes, September 1, 1937.
LO: When you first came, did you have anything administrative to do with the library, in the thirties, any responsibilities associated with it?
ES: Not directly. No, the librarian was…. well, we were all sort of autonomous.
LO: You did your thing over there….
ES: Yes, I guess they talked to the President and that was about the connection. There wasn’t an administrative setup other than departments and almost directly the president. I don’t think we had a dean of faculty or anyone like that.
LO: You probably didn’t need one.
ES: No, we only had a dozen or fifteen teachers. The only non- teaching member on the staff was the librarian. The President taught class or two and I taught five hours a week.
LO: Tell me now, you came on as the Business Manager?
ES: No, when I came I was the Registrar, Business Manager, Head of Business Department and Bookstore Manager.
LO: So you did all these things? In your teaching, did you have reasons to send your students to the library? Did you use it or was it pretty much of a place to send kids to study?
ES: I think it was more to study. I was teaching business subjects, accounting and marketing and things like that. Some religion later, but not a lot of library work.
LO: What were your impression, Eldred, over those years, especially when you first came, of the kind of library you had. Was it kind of a crummy place, a fairly good place, or an important part of the school or just kind of an auxiliary to the school? What was your perception of it?
ES: I thought it was an important part of the school. We didn’t have facilities or we didn’t have a lot of money for books, but I thought it was a vital part of the school.
LO: Was it Edith Rich that was the librarian there?
ES: Yes, it was Edith Rich. She is still alive.
LO: Oh, is she.
ES: Yes, she lives in Salt Lake.
LO: Oh, I needed to know that.
ES: Yes, she retired from the University of Utah. She left here and went to Utah State and then she went to University of Utah in Salt Lake, then she retired from there. It must have been fifteen years or so ago.
LO: I’m thinking of doing a major study of the library. If I do I will defiantly get in touch with her.
ES: She’s there and there was Eulalia Jones that was living in Cedar City that last time I knew.
LO: I’ve come across her name.
ES: And then Eldon, of course.
LO: I’ve interviewed Eldon.
ES: At the time of the war, he came and took my job when I went into the service. But he was hired as a librarian.
LO: Was it your impression that the faculty considered the library an important part of the school? Or generally not, or what would you think? I guess you were a young fellow coming in.
ES: Oh, I think they appreciated the library. I don’t think there was a lot of research done- we didn’t have the collection to do that. Yes, we had some library work.
LO: One of the things I am discovering in my interviews is what a generally tough time it was during the thirties.
ES: Well, I came in ’ 37, I wasn’t aware of the fact that that spring, the previous January, had offered it again to the state, the school. I really wasn’t aware of that and I didn’t know how tenuous the life was. I was working for my dad in Pocatello and wasn’t making anything. This was a little improvement, but not much. I don’t know if I would have changed my mind or not. I’m glad I didn’t know now.
LO: So Pocatello is your home? ES: Yes, that is where I was raised. I was born in Ogden but I was raised in Pocatello.
LO: My uncle had a paint/ glass store there for years.
ES: Oh, I remember that.
LO: Yes, Uncle Howard. My dad started that in about 1933 or ’ 34, or maybe as late as the middle thirties. It went bankrupt, and like what happened in the thirties all the time, nobody had any money so my dad just left and my uncle, his older brother, just took over the store and the debts and eventually made it.
ES: Yes, I remember that Ostler. Now I don’t remember the person but I remember that name.
LO: Yes, that was Uncle Howard, and he just sold that a couple of years ago. So there really were troubled times.
ES: Oh, yes. Well, our budget from the Church was about $ 30,000 when I first came.
LO: I don’t suppose the library really didn’t much of a budget.
ES: I would guess they had less than $ 500.
LO: I have started to gather that that was the case. That there wasn’t any official budget and they gave them just what they could each year.
ES: Yes, well our maintenance budget was about the same way. I remember about the second or third year that we were here we had saved up $ 5,000 and we used that all summer long painting the old Spori Building. We had a guy come up from Salt Lake that knew President Manwaring and he spent all summer. We bought the paint and he spent his whole summer spraying that whole building for $ 5,000 bucks.
LO: That is almost unreal.
ES: Well, this $ 30,000 was enough to pay all the faculty salaries.
LO: It wasn’t much.
ES: No, the president got $ 250 a month and that was the high one. I was the low one when I came and that was $ 110 a month.
LO: Was that more than you were making in Pocatello?
ES: Well, I thought it was going to be. I was making about a hundred down there, but I thought I was going to get $ 1,100 for nine months, and I was figuring it would be about $ 125 so it would be about a twenty percent increase, but it wasn’t quite that much.
LO: During that time, especially those early years, did the library seem to accomplish anything in particular or were they just going along? Were there any changes that you saw? Was it upgraded at all?
ES: I think Edith was probably one of the first trained librarians we had.
LO: So she probably did bring some changes with her?
ES: Yes, she knew more about library work, collections, and that sort thing, and had some impact that way. Some of the earlier ones I think were people they had hired about without any training. Well, Lucy Lloyd was one. And you remember that her son was on the faculty at the BYU, Dr. Wesley Lloyd. Well, as a matter fact she was a Parkinson. She was an aunt of Brick.
LO: So this was her country up here?
ES: Yes, this and the Preston area and Franklin and that area. But there wasn’t a lot they could do as far as upgrading the library.
LO: So previous to Edith all they had was a body to fill in.
ES: Yes, to maintain a little order in the library as a study hall, and keep track of some of the books they had.
LO: We talked about budget- there probably wasn’t much of a budget. You said probably $ 500 or less?
ES: Well, as a matter of fact we didn’t have a formal budget that was allocated to the departments.
LO: Oh, is that right. You mean President Manwaring got a lump sum and he did just did the best he could do.
ES: Yes, he and I worked together on it and if someone would put in a request for a amazing we would get together and see if we could do it. We would order a subscription to a magazine if we thought we could.
LO: In those late thirties, other than students did Edith have any help?
ES: Student help is all. No full time. It was all student help. You see, that NYA Program, National Young Administration Program, came in about that time before the war, and she would have more people than anyone else but they were all part- times. They would get 35 cents an hour.
LO: Of course I guess if your salaries were what they were a month, that wasn’t too bad of pay.
ES: No, they were glad to get it.
LO: You were in the old Spori Building, second floor?
ES: Third floor. There were the four classrooms on the four corners, and then that center section was all open and that was the library.
LO: I understand it was a noisy room?
ES: Yes, it was hardwood floors and that type of thing. That is where the cow and chickens went that time.
LO: That’s what I understand. Everyone seems to know that story pretty well. There is a pretty good chance, Eldred, I don’t know how interested President Hafen is, but there is a pretty good chance that a centennial history will be written of the school. I hope it is. What I have learned in this little study I am doing is that it is so fascinating, funny and sad all wrapped up together.
ES: It is funny now, but it wasn’t then.
LO: Yes, it us humorous now, but it does need to be written. Assuming that that gets done, again will the library be an important part of that history, or will it sort of a side issue? I guess really what I am trying to get at in my study is whether or not we could just simply done without a library? You k now a lot of schools at that time like Ricks College just didn’t have the libraries, or they just said that someday they would get a great library. I wondered if it was really that important? We didn’t have much of a budget and had mostly gift books, I imagine.
ES: No, I don’t know as we had many gift books. I wasn’t aware of any gift books or many that way. We didn’t have donation like you have been getting recently.
LO: Oh, yes, we get gigantic donations now. You didn’t?
ES: No, we didn’t have any donations. The books we had were ones we would buy would be one at a time, like that. I wouldn’t’ think that that was a facility that we could do away with.
LO: I guess if those were really as hard of times as people felt they were, you know the thirties, that whole thirties period sounds like a really rough time. The depression was on plus the fact that the church was trying to get rid of the school. ES: Yes, but they had changed that when I came. As recently as that spring they had said that they felt they shouldn’t do it.
LO: They did hang on to the library during that period, so I guess that says something.
ES: They hired Edith as a professional librarian.
LO: That was an interesting signal that she was a professional librarian. I’m trying to make a case for that, but I don’t want to make a case for it if I’m just fabricating the case. If I say in my report, “ Boy, the library was a great part of the school,” I want it to be reasonably true, that it was true. I guess if the school was in such financial straights most of the period, I guess they could have got rid of the library if it wasn’t important.
ES: Yes, well it was interesting too in another way. The library was the center of the clock system.
LO: Yes, I’ve heard.
ES: And Edith, when I first came, rang the bells physically. She had the clock there and she would ring the bells. She had a buzzer there like a doorbell and she would push it. She had to watch the clock to time the classes and it ended the classes and started a new one, whatever the time schedule was. We changed the time schedule at times from the full hour to forty- five minutes, so it wasn’t always on the hour. She had to watch that and maintain order in the library, and help the study hall, that sort of thing, so I don’t think there was any notion that we could get rid of the library.
LO: I guess now that I am starting to reflect on it and I’m talking to you, that if the library wasn’t valuable during those years they surely would have got rid of it.
ES: They could have shunted it off. But on the other hand, it may have been because it was valuable as a study hall. That was the one place on campus they could go with tables and chairs and it was warm.
LO: That is pretty typical of the libraries at that period, it seems like; they were primarily study halls. They weren’t research centered and no one expected them to be.
ES: Well, I went to Idaho State, the University of Idaho- Southern Branch, and the library there was essentially there a study hall, although they did have more books there than we did here.
LO: I think that was pretty true of that era. Thinking about your experience at Idaho State, the difference then you see between Ricks and Idaho State is that they had a bigger collection?
ES: Oh yes. LO: But in terms of what they used it for it was probably about the same.
ES: Well, the building of course had been built; it was a combination building, auditorium and library building. The second floor was the library, so it was much larger facility. There weren’t a lot more students, although it was some. It was a larger facility and a better collection too.
LO: Anything else that occurs to you about the library. I know I am taking you back a lot of years to the late thirties, anything that would be of interest about the library?
ES: Well, when we put in the first automatic bells- we put a timer that would ring the bells automatically. We would set the timer and that was a big assistance to Edith.
LO: High technology?
ES: Yes, she still took care of the time schedule.
LO: When Edith come. Do you recall? She was here when you came?
ES: Yes, she had only been there a year or two when I came. That doesn’t show on there does it. It may have the day she came.
LO: Let me see if is in the front.
ES: Ricks College, 1936. So she came the year before I did. She got her BS in Library Science at the University of Denver in 1936, and then she came here that year.
LO: In 1936 to have a BS in library was really something. There weren’t many of those around.
ES: Well there wasn’t very many schools that were giving them, were there?
LO: No, very unusual. Library Science program was really just starting and not long after that it shifted to a Masters, which I presume Edith probably got after she left here.
ES: I don’t k now if she did or not.
LO: Well, that helps. I hadn’t thought of that angle about Edith coming and that was a pretty clear signal that they were serious about maybe trying to upgrade the library.
ES: Well, the year I came too there was a lady who came in the Art Department which was the first time we had a professional, trained artist here. They only kept her one year was all, I think, but the other art work was done by Oswald Christensen was a Physics and Math teacher, although he was interested in art and did some nice art work, but he taught studio art, pictorial art, as well as his physics and math. LO: I guess people had to be willing to do a lot of things.
ES: Yes, the teachers, if you didn’t have eighteen hour load you were loafing. Some of them would have three or four preparations. Well, I was teaching five hours a week. I was teaching three hours of accounting and the other two, the first quarter I would teach Introduction to Business, and the second one Marketing, and the third one was General Finance. Then I was doing the Registrar work, managing the bookstore, the bookstore was only open part of the day.
LO: Did you have a clerk up there?
ES: I had students that would help. I didn’t have full- time help. Just students. When I came I had a full- time secretary. I was the one person on the faculty that had a full- time secretary. The President didn’t even have one- he had a part- time secretary.
LO: What was President Manwaring like during those years when you first came? Was he about ready to give up? He had been through a lot of war. He had really been battered down, I know.
ES: Yes, he had been battered and they had tried to give the school away, but he was a proud man in many ways. No I don’t think he was ready to give up.
LO: I have just read enough of that history of that period to realize that he must have had some terrible dark periods where he really struggled.
ES: Well, you know, I think President Clarke had some darker ones, and I think he was probably more abused by Wilkinson that President Manwaring ever was.
LO: So probably the post- Manwaring period was probably even tougher.
ES: Yes, I think during President Clark’s time was from a personal point of view. President Manwaring knew the situation he was in and had just worked and worked and worked. He had been on the faculty about fourteen years before he became President. He came in about 1916 or ’ 17.
LO: Yes, I have read through that period.
ES: And then he wasn’t President until 1931. He became President in sort of an unpopular manner.
LO: Didn’t he leave? Hadn’t he already left? Didn’t I read where he actually left school and thought he wasn’t coming back?
ES: No, that was President Romney. He had gone away to school. I don’t know what the circumstances were, but I think the Romney family felt for a long time, and maybe Marion still does, that he was just kind of booted out. He was too strict.
LO: I read quite a bit of the history of the Romney, and he had a run- in with President McMurrin, George Romney, and President Heber J. Grant. I have read the correspondence and it was rough. There were some really strong feelings. President Romney had been in California working on his degree and had run on to a lady missionary who could fill a position here at the college and had spoken to her. President McMurrin heard about it and he didn’t want her to come. You could just see in the correspondence what happened. They were framed in the Gospel, but they were pretty nasty. I can’t remember- did Joseph McMurrin eventually become general authority? I think he was my father’s mission president. He was the Mission President in California for years.
ES: If he was in there he was in the Seventies.
LO: I’m almost positive that President McMurrin was my father’s mission president in 1928.
ES: Oh, that was the father of the McMurrin that was at the University of Utah, isn’t it, Sterling?
LO: I think so. They were an interesting family. Anyway there were some very sharp words exchanged between the three of them. Of course, President Grant didn’t talk that way in his letters, he was trying to cool things off. The correspondence was really interesting. Well, Eldred, I really appreciate you taking time for this interview.