Paul Sparks Oral History Interview

Item

Identifier

SparksPaul

Title

Paul Sparks Oral History Interview

Date

21 October 2021

1 November 2021

Creator

Paul Sparks

Contributor

Bob Haft

extracted text

Paul Sparks
Interviewed by Bob Haft
The Evergreen State College oral history project
October 21, 2021
FINAL

[Begin Part 1 of 2 of Paul Sparks on 10-21-2021]
Haft: It’s October 21, 2021, and I’m with Paul Sparks. We’re going to talk about his life, and Evergreen
at some point. Let me just ask you about your history pre-Evergreen.
Sparks: Oh, boy. Born in the Midwest.
Haft: Whereabouts?
Sparks: I was born in Missouri. My grandfather was a tenant farmer and a sharecropper. My dad
moved to town because his father would not give up farming with horses and borrow money to buy a
tractor. My mother was abandoned by her parents as an infant and was later adopted out of an
orphanage. She didn’t discover who her brothers and her sisters were until late in life.
My mother got out of the orphanage because her oldest sister, Ruby. Ruby was the wife of a
gangster in Kansas City. She used his money and influence to see that mom was adopted. Her adoptive
father was a railroad worker on the Katy [Kansas and Texas] railroad. Her mother was an assistant to a
country physician.
That was the starting point. About the time I was born, my dad was working day shifts at the US
Steel plant in north Kansas City, I think it was. He worked there in the foundry before he enlisted in the
Navy during World War Two. After the war, he welded barrels days and at night sold pots and pans door
to door.
Haft: That’s what I remember you saying years ago.
Sparks: Selling the pots and pans pulled us into the middle class. It turned out he was quite good at it.
So at some point, he quit the other jobs, and the company he was working for transferred him to
Omaha. We moved to Omaha when I was about first grade, maybe kindergarten. Kindergarten
probably.
He did well in Omaha, and as his fortunes improved, we kept moving from a smaller house to a
little bit larger house and after that another little bit larger house.
Haft: Still in Omaha?

1

Sparks: Still in Omaha. At some point, someone discovered that his business—he trained salesmen; in
addition to still selling things and became more of a manager there—that he and his salesmen sold more
merchandise on credit than anybody else in the country, and they had the least bad debt loss, so they
wanted to know how he did that.
It turned out that he was very, very customer oriented. Most of the customers he sold to were
people like him, people who had just moved from country to town. This was an era when most women
thought their role in life was going to be a mother of a family, so they thought that buying a set of pots
from him was a wise purchase.
He would go back and show them how to use them, and fix them, so the company decided that
he would be more useful not selling pots and pans but working for the other part of the company that
financed stuff. They moved him out there, so his job became ultimately to teach salesmen in other parts
of the country a better way of selling things that was more customer friendly.
Haft: On credit, too.
Sparks: On credit, yeah. When an area had a problem, he’d take a look at the problem because it was
probably a customer dissatisfaction problem also. He traveled all over the country for years doing that.
Haft: Do you have memories pre-Omaha of what life was like for you before first grade?
Sparks: Very dim ones. I can remember things happening on the farm. My grandfather farmed with
horses so the horse memories are strong. In the depression, he fell on ice and broke both his legs, and
my 12-year-old father ran the farm by himself. When he was, I think, a freshman or sophomore in high
school, he was playing football and he caught rheumatic fever. At first, they thought he was going to
die. The preacher came, and the doctor told my parents to pray. He’s not going to make it through the
next two days, and he did.
Then they decided that he would never be anything but an invalid, and he’d never walk again,
and he did. Then he decided he needed to finish high school, so he went back to high school when he
was, I think, 20. He worked on the farm in the early morning. He milked the cows. They had a mixed
farm. They had 16 Shorthorns that they both milked and raised for beef.
He went back to high school when he was 20. Farm hand in the predawn, then school and
worked in a bakery at night. He met my mother, who was probably 17 at that time. In the process of
getting through high school, he won a scholarship in an accounting competition, which he won, and
Margaret Truman was the second-place finisher. He won a scholarship to a non-accredited business
school. My mother won a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute.

2

My grandparents on both sides opposed the marriage. Also both thought that if they went to
school they could never be together. So they decided to get married, so neither one of them went past
high school.
Haft: Neither one followed up on those scholarships?
Sparks: No. They were seriously in love.
Haft: Oh my gosh.
Sparks: Both sets of parents opposed the marriage. My dad butchered hogs on the day they were
married. They were married at 7:30 in the evening and he butchered hogs till 6:00. The early years
were pretty grim in our family.
Haft: Do you have memories of your dad and mom from your early days as being around? Your mom
was probably in the kitchen a lot.
Sparks: Yeah, my mom was around all the time. My mom had health problems all through her life, so I
probably quit being a kid early. I was taking care of my sister because my mom was in the hospital. She
was in the hospital several times when I was a little kid.
Haft: Oh, wow. Were you the oldest?
Sparks: Yeah. I was 10 and I was taking care of my little sister because my dad worked a lot at night.
That was the beginnings.
Haft: Just one sister?
Sparks: I have one sister and one brother. My brother made it through high school, but no further. He
was mentally ill for a number of years. He was in the military and worked for the Defense Department a
number of years. Always marginal and, on the edge of getting fired. He lives in North Carolina in a 60year-old single-wide rental trailer.
Haft: How about you as the eldest who had to take care of your siblings? You say you grew up quickly
then.
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: Did that carry over into other things in your life?
Sparks: There’s stuff that’s formative for teaching, which I’ll unravel for you as I go.
Haft: How about schools? Do you remember school?
Sparks: Very good schools in Omaha. I loved school. Straight-A student. When I was in first grade, the
school classrooms were the old-fashioned school—big, high ceilings, and the white globe lamps and big,
tall windows.

3

Under the window in all the classrooms was a bookshelf filled with books. I could already read
when I was in first grade. I don’t know when I started reading. I started reading pretty early. Teachers
picked up on that, so all the time, all the way through sixth grade, instead of going by the seating chart,
which was alphabetical, they always seated me next to the bookshelf. It was understood that if I was on
top of things, I could read those books.
When I was in fifth grade in Omaha, a sympathetic librarian realized . . . well first, Omaha had a
competition. If you read six books during the summer, you got free baseball tickets to the Omaha
Cardinals home game. I probably read 30 books that summer.
Haft: Did you have an old . . . what were those libraries called? . . . Carnegie library?
Sparks: Yeah. The librarian took pity on me and she said, “As long as I’m here, or that lady over there”—
there were two ladies—“you can use the adult section of the library.”
Haft: Yeah, because there was a Carnegie library where I grew up and where Debbie grew up, and the
basement was where the kids were.
Sparks: Yes.
Haft: And you weren’t allowed to go upstairs.
Sparks: Upstairs was where they put the adult books. So, I graduated from Freddy the Detective Pig and
stuff like that to Bruce Catton and civil war histories and then discovered science fiction. Sometimes I’d
read novels and not really understand what was going on. Or I’d hit a lot of words that I still
mispronounce because I couldn’t sound them out or they didn’t avail themselves to sounding out.
That was good. I was really happy in Omaha. I got to ninth grade and then we moved. We got
transferred to Pennsylvania. My dad oversold Pennsylvania to us. Pennsylvania, in his story, was a
Garden of Eden and the place we were moving was its navel. In actuality, it was a mill town.
Not only that, the stuff that I had been doing in eighth grade in Omaha, they did again in ninth
grade in Pennsylvania. So I had to basically retake the eighth grade. I kind of quit school in my head
then. All the way through high school, I was low, middle. I still read profusely, and I tested well. When I
graduated from high school, I was in the middle of a class of 700 or 800.
Haft: What were your aspirations? Did you think about going to college?
Sparks: My parents had strong expectations that I would go to college. I liked art, but art would not be
something that a male in my family was supposed to take seriously. But, I also really liked history. I
didn’t know about political science or what it was, but I had a sense of an interest in that stuff. I think
my dad had aspirations that I would become a lawyer.

4

When I did go to college, I started out as a history major. I did well on the college boards and
scored very well in the National Merit Scholarships. Sadly, those kinds of scholarships simply weren’t
available to someone with grades like mine. That was a more rigorous era.
Haft: Where did you go to college?
Sparks: I went to the college that was easiest for me to get in. It was a small Christian college called
Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. [Sighs]
Haft: Were you religious?
Sparks: My family was religious, yeah. We went to church every Sunday. I kind of fell out of religion
there. I was really immature although I had lots of responsibility, I was sheltered about what the world
really was, while my peers, more worldly peers, had an entirely different perspective on life.
Some things about Pennsylvania were great. The town I was in was all immigrants.
Haft: Working in the mills?
Sparks: Yeah. The mills were built at the turn of the last century and built up until in the ‘30s. The big
magnates didn’t think that American workers would accept jobs or do well in mill jobs. Also, they’d have
to pay them more because they had unions, so they went to Europe and recruited workers, so my town
was filled with first- and second-generation Syrians, Lebanese, Greeks, Italians, Polish.
The big events every year in the town were the ethnic picnics. The Syrian picnic was a three-day
event. The Italian picnic was a three-day event. The Polish picnic was a Saturnalia. That was a whole
different universe, and that was a big piece of my education.
Also, the Catholic kids got out of school for their catechism class, and the Jewish kids did too.
Teachers didn’t keep close track of it, so I walked with the kids to their classes and went with them to
catechism.
Haft: It must have been a pretty hard transition. You were in the ninth grade when you left Omaha,
didn’t you say?
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: That’s a hard time to shift gears as a young person in school.
Sparks: I hated it. I became very reactive in that period of my life. I still loved to learn, but I didn’t
really love school so much anymore.
Haft: When you got to college, were you disappointed in how it was set up?
Sparks: The school was very strict. Except for seniors, women had to be back in their dorms by 9:00.
Weekends, they got 10:00 or 11:00 on occasion. If you consumed alcohol while you were a student
there, it was grounds for suspension.
5

Several students while I was there became pregnant and were drummed out of the school… a
lot of hypocrisy. But… also, a lot of good people, a lot of good teachers. I had an English teacher who
was a friend of Frost and corresponded with Frost about his work, so he would read Frost’s letters in
class.
Haft: That’s incredible! Wow.
Sparks: It was incredible.
Haft: You stayed there for four years?
Sparks: No, I became a dissipated youth. I did all those things they suspended you for. I had a job. I
was a campus mailman. At that time, in the tower of the Old Main which was also where the chapel
was, they had a bell tower with a 100-foot spiral staircase in it, and I would go up that every day to the
roof and raise the flag. At night, I’d bring it back down. I received 67 cents for that chore.
Anyway, I flunked out for no other reason than I was just not ready to be in college, I think. But,
as a freshman, I made the varsity debate team. I loved that, but there were other things I probably
should have been doing instead.
Haft: What did your parents think about this?
Sparks: I don’t think they realized that the walls were crumbling until they fell in. In that school, if you
dropped below a C average for a semester you went on academic probation. Then if you didn’t get
better than C in the next semester, you were out. I didn’t do that. I didn’t get better than a C average in
my second semester.
One factor in my going on the skids is they had required chapel. That just rankled me to be
required to go to chapel. Before going to school there, I was doing all that stuff, president of
Presbyterian Youth Fellowship and all that nonsense. It just bothered me that they were coercive about
it.
Haft: You were raising the flag and raising hell, too, it sounds like.
Sparks: Yeah, and so they took points off your grade point average for your chapel absences, and that
did me in. That, and third-year Latin. I tested well on college boards test for Latin, so they moved me
right up to third-year Latin, where I was just way over my head. Although, the class was interesting. The
teacher was J. Hilton Turner, this wonderful little old mousy guy. He wrote his own textbooks, and what
he did is he used material like Roman tombstones and graffiti, poetry and political stuff that you don’t
see in other sources. It was interesting, but I was awful. History, I loved, and English class was a joy.
Haft: There was some good faculty there.

6

Sparks: There were excellent faculty. That worked well for me. After dropping out, I enlisted in the
Army.
Haft: By choice?
Sparks: Partly by choice, and partly because in those days, there was a very good chance you were
going to get drafted. There was universal military service.
Haft: What year are we talking about?
Sparks: This was probably spring of ’62. I went down and talked to the recruiting sergeant, and they
gave me some tests. I got a call one day and they said, “If you’re willing to come down to Pittsburgh,
we’d like to talk to you.”
What that was—it was a big event to drive into Pittsburgh—was that that the request was from
a detachment of the Army Intelligence Corps, and they were interviewing me, so I enlisted in the military
to go into the Army Intelligence Corps conditioned on how I did in basic training.
Haft: They must have seen something in your records that clued them in that this guy’s probably not
going to be in the infantry.
Sparks: I did three years at the Army Intelligence Corps. After Intelligence School I got to choose my first
duty station. Unlike other branches of the military, enlisted men in the Corps got to choose where they
went if there was more than one option available. But it was a not a slam dunk. I almost failed my class.
I’m too clumsy really to a master typewriter keyboard. I never learned to type, which makes for some
irony regarding my use of computers today in my art. But I couldn’t get 30 words a minute. I couldn’t
make it. I had high 90s on all my other courses, but I was failing typing. Somebody gave me a pass.
They let me go.
When I graduated, I had a choice of the US Embassy in Ghana for a duty station, the US Embassy
in Turkey, a station in an undisclosed location near the border in Germany, or Alaska. I grew up on
outdoor magazines and outdoor fantasies, Outdoor Life and Field & Stream and stuff like that, so I said
I’d go to Alaska.
Haft: Well, yeah. The promise of mountains and wildlife.
Sparks: Yes. When I made the commitment—I was not very good in basic training because all that stuff
is physical, and I was never very athletic. Although one thing I learned in basic training is my capacity to
do things was much more than I thought it was. The idea of helping people to learn what their real
capacities are later became an element of my teaching. Why wait until you are thirty to learn to use
your full adult powers? But to do that, you have to challenge people which TESC did well in the
beginning but turned away from in later years.
7

Haft: Once you’ve been taught to see past your own limitations, you feel incumbent to pass that on to
younger people.
Sparks: Yeah, but there is a caveat there. In basic training I struggled with authority and, as I said earlier,
I wasn’t good on the physical stuff. But it turns out, I’m a really good shot. I could consistently hit the
silhouette of a human being at 100 yards. I think I was one of the top five shots in my battalion. The
military will look past a lot of other failings if you can do that.
Haft: Yeah. Had you grown up hunting as well?
Sparks: Yeah. My dad and his brothers hunted, ran hounds, and they all trapped, my dad especially
with skunks. He went to a one-room schoolhouse, and he never missed a day of school through eighth
grade, so can you imagine what it was like being with him in a one room schoolhouse? Anyway, I ended
up in Alaska and in in an operational intelligence unit.
Haft: Whereabouts?
Sparks: I was stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. Alaska was still a frontier then. That would
vanish in the next decade.
Haft: Were you happy with your decision once you got there?
Sparks: Oh, yeah. Even though I never liked the Army much.
Haft: But Alaska you liked.
Sparks: Yeah, Alaska, I loved, and I loved some aspects of what I did in the Intelligence Corps.
Haft: What did you do? Can you talk about that?
Sparks: The part of my job I can talk about is that I coordinated an office that did investigations, several
different kinds of investigations. The most common investigation we did was for security clearances.
Haft: You did that for how many years?
Sparks: I did that for three years.
Haft: When you were done, were you ready to get out of the service?
Sparks: I was ready to be out of the service. I got out early.
Haft: Yeah, because usually it’s a four-year stint.
Sparks: I had to go back to the Lower 48 to get my discharge. Then I returned to Alaska. I had a hard
winter without a job, living off my savings. Almost ran out of money. I signed up for the smokejumper
school at the Bureau of Land Management. As the big thaw came, they transferred some smokejumpers
from Montana to Alaska as a money saving thing, because it looked like there wasn’t going to be much
of a fire year in the Lower 48. Smoke jumper school went away as an option for me.

8

My friend, Kate, who worked at the Bureau of Land Management, went and talked to
somebody. She apparently told some lies about me that impressed them, so she said, “You need to go
in and talk to this person.” I went in, and they looked at my academic record, and I got a job working on
a survey crew in the bush running a chainsaw.
Haft: Had you been actively looking for work yourself? Were you pounding the pavement trying to get
a job?
Sparks: I didn’t find out about the cancellation of fire school thing until the last moment. I was lucky to
have a good friend in the right place at the right time, in Alaska, as soon as breakup, everything happens
fast. Before then, I had done nothing. I thought I was secure. It was probably just as well, I was
petrified at the idea of jumping out of an airplane.
The survey job looked good, and as soon as ice went out that year, I went out with a guy whose
name was Curly West. We flew into a lake on the other side of Cook Inlet called Redshirt Lake. He was
not a good leader of men, but he was a very good teacher. He started teaching me some basic survey
skills, but basically, I had been hired as a laborer and my job was to run the chainsaw.
Haft: Just cutting down trees?
Sparks: Just cutting down trees…a mile a day in easy going. When you go across country with a survey
line in a dense virgin forest, you can’t see where you are going. So, I would cut down every tree that
was on line, and blaze trees above eye level as I went so the line would be marked for as long as the
trees were there. If we went down into a gulch, I had to cut out the overhead on either side. At that
time the area north of Cook Inlet was densely forested with black spruce, white spruce, and birch.
Probably the biggest stand of birch in those days outside of Siberia. It was a good place to be. The lake
was full of lake trout. There were lot of bears. It was my first prolonged experience living under canvas,
and my introduction to living in the bush.
I settled in and enjoyed the work. I had learned to fall and buck trees by hand from my dad so
the adjustment to using a chainsaw was not that hard. Although the chainsaws of that era were heavy
and real man killers. Didn’t know it at that time but I really had been signed up for another guy’s crew, a
guy named Henry J. Grimonpre. Henry J. was a child of the Depression. He was a CCC—Civilian
Conservation Corps—kid, and they taught him to be an engineer… taught him how to survey. When he
was drafted for World War II—they also did military training, the CCC—he went right in and served in
the Army Corps of Engineers and served in Europe.
So that would become another piece of my education. They sent me up to work for him. I flew
into that camp. Most of what I did in the army I learned hands on. Ditto for woods work and
9

engineering. In both instances my mentors were veterans of the second war or two war guys who also
had served in Korea. This also carried over into my teaching; the idea of learning by doing and that an
education should be purposeful.
You want to stop for a minute?
Haft: Yeah, let’s take a break here.
[End Part 1 of 2 of Paul Sparks on 10-21-2021]
[Begin Part 2 of 2 of Paul Sparks on 10-21-2021]
Haft: Okay, this is part two of our talk and we’re in Alaska.
Sparks: I transferred up to Camp 3. We flew in on an elderly Grumman Goose to Susitna Lake in the
Nelchina Basin.
Haft: Whoever’s transcribing this is going to have a heck of a time with those names.
Sparks: S-U-S-I-T-N-A.
Haft: We’ll work it out.
Sparks: I joined Henry J. Grimonpre. Who was a mentor and friend. He also was a good old school
cadastral engineer. I also met these people I worked with for a number of years after that. I had a
homesteader’s kid named Mark Poe working for me. Mark, at that time, was 16 years old.
Haft: Working for the BLM?
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: Wow.
Sparks: He displaced me and became the chainsaw man for the crew. Also, he was usually the guy on
the crew that carried a weapon, although I sometimes carried a gun.
The head chainman, Bill Andreanoff, was a Tlingit from Petersburg, Alaska in the Southeast. Bill
was probably early middle age at that time and another WW II veteran. He was a good woodsman and
good on the water. Mark was a skilled boat handler and also ran our boats. We worked out of a boat on
the upper Susitna Lake, we worked on Crosswind Lake, Ewan Lake . . . oh, golly . . . Seven Mile Lake, and
Lake Louise. Henry taught me to be an engineer and introduced me to the drudgery of double meridian
distance calculations. I also got promoted to assistant party chief over the heads of some of my peers
who were working in some of the other camps.
Haft: Was that what you were thinking of doing when you quit, or when you went back to school?
Sparks: The BLM was strongly encouraging and would have made it easy to return to school for an
engineering degree but I did not go that way. I decided to go back to school several years later, while
working somewhere else. I was on a transit station in a giant muskeg swamp about five miles from a
10

Yupik village called Manakotak. The latter is on the Bering Peninsula, just below the Bering Sea. It’s on
the river of the same name.
I was out in the middle of the muskeg, maybe a mile-and-a-half from any solid ground. It was
blowing, cold and snowing. Every time I moved or shifted my weight, the bubble of my transit would
move with me. Basically, I was on top of a mass of vegetation floating in the muskeg. I decided there’s
better ways to make a living. [Laughter] So, I decided to go back to school.
Haft: You hadn’t grown tired of Alaska, though?
Sparks: No. We’ve been back and forth to Alaska a lot. Morgan (Paul’s son) did his master’s at the
University of Alaska in the Fisheries program before he went to Purdue for his PhD.
Haft: But when you decided to go back to school, were you thinking of going to school in Alaska?
Sparks: Yes and No. I convinced myself that what I really wanted to be was an outdoor writer. To sell
my stories, I thought I would be better off if I was a photographer. Also, I had this faint nagging thing
about art. The reasoning for the next step was a bit tortuous. In my mind, the best place to learn
photography might be in an art school, so I could become the guy who painted the deer jumping over
the log on the cover of the outdoor magazines. I had little exposure to real art and, in truth, backed into
a life as an artist.
Haft: I’ve seen that cover. [Laughter]
Sparks: I was just a very conservative person trying to keep all those fantasies afloat, so I applied to all
the big-name art schools. I applied to Philadelphia Museum School. I applied to Art Institute of Chicago.
Prat, and the Kansas City Art Institute. I got accepted by all of them, but even with the scholarships, I
couldn’t afford to go to any of them.
Haft: Wow.
Sparks: My best friend from Alaska was going to school in Sacramento. He says, “Why don’t you look at
the California University and college system? They’re really good,” which they were in those days. I
looked up the Art Department at San Francisco State. Went to the library, because you did that in the
library in those days. They looked pretty good on paper, and they were affordable for me. If I was there
for a year, I’d be a resident, and I would go to school for practically nothing except my housing. I applied
there and got in. I arrived at San Francisco State right when their photo program was peaking.
Haft: What year, do you know?
Sparks: This might have been about ’64-’65. Simultaneously, it was the birth of the hippie era. I was
living in the Haight Ashbury.
Haft: Wow. What a switch from Alaska.
11

Sparks: Oh, yes.
Haft: Or Omaha, for that matter.
Sparks: I was probably the only guy on campus with short hair and a full beard.
Haft: You started studying art and photography there?
Sparks: This is where my teaching career begins. I arrived in an art department that had 500 more
students than capacity. I arrived just as the Boomers started to go to school, and I’m just a few years
older than the Boomers.
The first semester I went there, I couldn’t get any of the classes I wanted because there just
were no slots. Too many students. Too few classes. The upper classmen filled them in. I decided this
wasn’t going to happen to me again. Another student suggested, “If you’re part of the advising program,
you get to enroll before the other students. You get first choice of classes. So I went out and signed up
to be a counselor. After a year or two, I found myself doing the pre-enrollment counseling for the whole
art department. I was older than the other students and self-confident.
Haft: Counseling in what capacity?
Sparks: At first, they were doing stuff like you do for orientation. Gradually, I persuaded the Art
Department that we could do some of the intake counseling by helping folks find the right fit for classes
and teachers, so I started doing that. By the time I left San Francisco State as a graduate student, I was
running the orientation program for the school of fine arts.
Haft: Were you older than most of the students?
Sparks: Yeah. The difference in calendar age was not that big but the life experience gap was huge.
But that changed when I arrived here. I was probably the youngest faculty member at Evergreen when I
came. I was 26 or 27.
Haft: Let’s go back to San Francisco. I know you studied with Imogen Cunningham, did you not?
Sparks: Imogen taught part-time. Don Worth and Jack Welpott were full time faculty and were later on
my Master’s committee. Ansel Adams had founded the program, so I had access to Ansel and Brett
Weston.
Haft: Wow. Good faculty.
Sparks: And Wynn Bullock through an encounter with his daughter.
Haft: Oh my gosh!
Sparks: Oliver Gagliani lived close at hand. So I was there in the hotbed of the old West Coast photo
tradition. At the same time, things were changing. It was a time of turmoil and exploration in the visual
arts. The new photography was starting. Also, there was other stuff going on, there’s other art stuff
12

going on. What would become the West Coast style was starting. At Davis, Robert Arneson was starting
his sculptural thing, and Roy De Forest was there.
Haft: William Wiley as well.
Sparks: Wiley and all of that. Wiley was still playing bluegrass in the Bay Area. There was this formative
stuff. The old surrealist stuff hung on there longer than it did anyplace else and then reinvented itself.
Elsewhere in the country, everyone else was jumping into minimalist styles in abstraction while a kind of
hip surrealism was being reborn in the Bay area. At the same time, in our own art department the
painters started to embrace photography and were inventing photo realism. Bob Bechtel was influential
in that change.
Also the Fluxus movement was still alive and doing well. I just climbed into that. I started
getting really interested in teaching, as I started as a graduate student. That was another thing--when I
got ready to look for a graduate school, they said, “Don’t look for a graduate school. We want you to
stay here.” I and a guy named Michael Bishop were the first people out of their undergraduate program
that they let into the graduate program.
Haft: Yeah, Michael Bishop became pretty famous as a photographer, didn’t he?
Sparks: Yeah. I was the underachiever. I didn’t become famous but everybody around me did. Judy
Dater is the best example.
Haft: Yeah, Judy Dater, I know you said she was a classmate. But what prompted your interest in
teaching? Do you have any clue?
Sparks: A bad deal. The Art Department didn’t have stipends for graduate teaching, so they made it a
required course.
Haft: Oh, wow.
Sparks: So, you go out and teach for credit. I taught a class for Don Worth. I taught a Beginning
Photography class, which forced me to learn a lot about photography I didn’t know. Stuff I’d been
coached on that I thought I knew, and I didn’t.
In doing that, I discovered I really liked it, so I was probably the first person in the history of the
department to re-up again. As I did that, I started getting interested in the critique process. What I did
was that I started going to the other schools in the Bay Area, hanging out in people’s classes, and sitting
in on classes at the Art Institute, and other schools in the Bay Area. Dorothea Lang wasn’t teaching
formally, but she was successful, and had sessions, so I hung out with her some. She was very influential
on me, because of her FSA images but even more by her passion. I just started looking at the process of
teaching.
13

I would add that I have always been lucky. That extends to being in the right place at the right time and
being lucky enough to be around extraordinary people.
Haft: You said you got interested in critiquing. Why? Were your own critiques good, bad? The words
you got from your professors.
Sparks: We had some good critiques. Imogen Cunningham told you the truth all the time, even if you
didn’t want to hear the truth. She wasn’t doing it maliciously to be damaging. You have to know what is
not working if you want to get better. That was important. But was an important asset to me in the last
couple of decades at evergreen. It guaranteed me a long waiting list for my programs.
You are not doing your job if you are not willing to say to someone, “That’s not working,”
knowing how to give them some alternatives. “Here’s this, this and this.” The other thing I was learning
was how important art history was. I took way more stuff than I needed to graduate.
Also, keep in mind that since I had a long time completing my degree—more than most other
people did as an undergraduate—I got the equivalent of a biology degree, which I never applied for, and
close to enough units for political science degree.
Haft: Were you on the GI Bill at this time?
Sparks: The GI Bill didn’t come in until I was right at the end of my undergraduate career, but working in
Alaska, I had income. I didn’t have to work during the school, although I did. I took photographs of
objects for the de Young Museum. I took slides.
I got real interested in art history. One of the things that influenced me was John Guttmann.
John Guttmann had been at the Bauhaus. John has some small fame as a photographer, but photograph
financed his escape from Germany. That’s how he supported himself going across Siberia and coming
eventually to the US.
Haft: Wow.
Sparks: Finally, he was working for magazines like National Geographic Magazine and stuff like that.
But he was also a good journeyman painter.
Haft: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Sparks: Yeah. A larger-than-life figure than many people would tolerate today. There were other
things going on. The sexual revolution. Jack (Welpott) and Judy (Dater) had an apartment down by the
water in . . . I can’t remember the name of the district anymore but there apartment was near
Finocchios.
Haft: Oh, sure. I know that, too, because I used to live in the Bay Area.
Sparks: I can’t remember the name of the district. North Bay?
14

Haft: North Beach.
Sparks: Yeah. There was poetry stuff going on. It was just a time when there was a creative explosion
and a lot of encouragement. And I had a design teacher named Jay Baldwin who may have been the
person who thought up the Whole earth Catalogue. He was really encouraging of thinking alternatively.
He was really good at coming up with open-ended assignments that would really stretch your thinking
or your seeing, or whatever you did. He was a real influence on me.
I had all these powerful people in my environment. For a while, I lived on Oak, off of Divisadero.
Then I lived on Page Street in the Haight District. I had a girlfriend in Berkeley on Haste Street off of
Telegraph Ave. All these scenes, political and otherwise. Going on and swirling around me. I was just
cooked in this broth of good stuff, at a time that the stuff, not knowing that nothing like this would
happen again for a long time.
Meanwhile, I’m systematically wrestling with the question of how should art history relate to
teaching? How should critique relate to practice? How do you not get caught into lecturing the content
and letting a mechanical approach to teaching technique dominate the process?
Also, how do you deal with two kinds of students? One kind of student is never going to be an
artist, quite possibly, but needs to have an appreciation of what artists are like, and how what they do
shapes their life and the passion to do their thing against the dead weight of a culture that took very
little of it seriously. The other was, how do you give a student who wants to be an artist a decent
chance of attaining their dreams?
If you go to a real art school, you have role models. Sometimes they actually know that they’re
role models and they act accordingly. Sometimes, they don’t. What does a working artist look like? No
one suggests to you that you are probably not going to be another DeKooning but that can be ok. By the
way you need to think about a day job and, do know that you’re going to be a small businessman the
rest of your life? Schools aren’t good at teaching that.
I just started thinking about all the spaces between mystique and craft and how to work with
ideation and imagination. Meanwhile, the San Francisco State strike comes along. We didn’t have any
school for I don’t know how many months. We had a pitched battle on campus every day.
Haft: Because of Vietnam.
Sparks: To some degree the Vietnam War. The strike was driven more by local issues. The radicals
wanted a Black Studies program. They wanted graduate students to have some kind of better
compensation. They wanted structural and curriculum changes. So, we had a pitched battle on campus,
and the campus shut down. Some teachers taught on campus.
15

Out of context…I forgot to note that Steve DeStaebler was another great influence. He was a great
person for hooking up work and play as covalent, as the same thing. He was also good at teaching you
to use things the wrong way, which is taboo; whoever’s running the woodshop today would be horrified
by that concept.
Back to the strike. I had a class taught off campus by a writer named, I think, Leo Litwak. A
World War II vet. He was a real stimulus. He was big on working habits. I already had a good start. I’d
been out in the real world, so I had pretty good working habits. He made me start thinking about how
you transmit that to other people.
Also, I started realizing how many people in college are terribly immature. I felt like an old man.
In Alaska, in the bush, I had this kid Duane Oozeva from Saint Lawrence Island who worked for me
several years in a row. He was a teenager but was an adult in every other way. In that world, Eskimo and
Indian kids typically were treated as adults when young and were doing things to sustain their families
when they’re 10, 12 years old.
Again, I was chewing on the problem of why should we have to wait till we’re well advanced in
our lives before we become adults?
All that stuff is cooking and distilling in my head. The Art Department dealt with the strike by
saying you could just go work with any teacher anytime you wanted to.
Haft: That was pretty forward thinking.
Sparks: Yeah, so I started letting other kids come into my classes. Typically the ones who were really
motivated showed up whether they were registered or not. They were doing the same thing I was doing
by going to the Art Institute. We were making it richer. I encouraged that for all the rest of my career.
After San Francisco State, and my MA. I wanted to be near my parents for a while. I didn’t want
to really go back East. My parents were in Ohio. I accepted a tenure track job at Ohio State, which was
big school with a seriously constipated Art Department
I was ready to move to Ohio. Two days before I was to set out on a trek east, they sent me a
telegram. “We’re really, really, immensely sorry. We had a budget cut, and your position has been
eliminated.”
Haft: Before you even started?
Sparks: Yeah. “And we’d encourage you to apply next year, but it’s no longer a tenure track position.”
So, I had to get a job, quick. Somehow or other, Don Worth told me about this job at a community
college in southern California. Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California. It was then, at that time,

16

the 47th poorest community college district in the state that had 48 community college districts. It was
on the border. It also had a hot young art department and an exciting place to be.
As part of a border consortium, there are three schools on the southern border—one in El Paso,
and one somewhere in New Mexico, and Southwestern—that took students from Mexico on the same
basis as from the US. The student body was completely blue-collar. Mexicans from Mexico and
Mexicans from the US. White folks from national City and enlisted men from the Navy centers in San
Diego and Imperial Beach. Working stiffs trying to improve their lives from National City and places like
that. It was just rich stuff. It was.
Again, it was also a hot art department. They hired me because the photo program in the Art
was a problem. Department was run by a guy who essentially had hobby-level skills who had been
promoted from the local high school, owned a Porsche, and basically, using his camera as a tool for
seducing girls.
They wanted me to fix and change the focus of the photo program for them. That was hard. I
succeeded to a degree. It helped that the climate was right because the place was being run by a crew of
hot young artists. Just before I arrived, John Baldisseri had been hired away by Cal Arts, so he was still
actively involved with the people in the department. I met him very early on. He and a couple of other
younger faculty got me involved with the whole conceptual movement. I had experienced the fluxus
stuff, but had not been willing to turn loose of the success I was having with photography.
So, as this is going on, I was getting all these exposures to all this art stuff. The school was also
in on the ground floor of the border arts movement. Stuff was going on that would congeal into Los
Artista’s de Aztlan and what’s the other one? “Taller De Artes Fronteriza. Some of these folks were
doing murals based on the Mexican Muralists and somewhere this would fuse with graffiti and explode.
There were a lot of people doing murals. That’s probably the point where the graffiti movement
and the mural movement moved together. Also, all along in the background for me were underground
comics.
I’m just feasting on all this stuff, and I started teaching in the Photography Department, so I
started experimenting with doing what I had done at San Francisco State during the strike, and saying,
“In this class, I’m doing this.” “In this class, I’m doing this.” And “In this class, I’m doing this.” “If this
class is going too slow, you could come over here.”
So, I started teaching beginners alongside advanced students, and discovered that I got much
better results that way from both. The advanced students thought they knew how to do it, and had quit
thinking about their ideas, and the beginners learned technique from the advanced students, probably
17

better than I was teaching it. At the same time, they threatened the advanced students because they
still had ideas and tried them, so that prospered. And I made sure that we looked at a lot of art including
stuff they would not normally experience in a photo class and I did my damndest to expose them to real
working artists. In this process, the slide collection was the door to an alternate universe but wherever I
could, I put real working artist in front of them. We started an art lifestyles speaker series within the
department and the speakers ranged from Judy Chicago to outlaw bikers and Mexican Tattoo Artists.
At the same time, before I went down there, Don Worth, again—a great connection for me, one
of my favorite teachers ever—had turned me over to these doctors in Portland. The doctors who were
rich gifted amateur photographers who had been sponsoring a summer school program at Portland
State in photography. What they really wanted was people doing traditional West Coast stuff, which I
didn’t do. Don Worth, somehow or other, convinced them that they needed to try something different.
I drove up and talked with them and somehow they gave me the greenlight which surprised me because
my photography at that time was pretty radical. I was doing all camera-less images.
So, I came up there and taught. The first or second year I taught there, I had Craig Hickman, Kirk
Thompson, and Ann Hughes along with several other folks sitting in. Although, I think Kirk and Craig
were probably registered. You know her (Anne) probably from Blue Sky Gallery. She and Craig with
others were the founders.
Haft: What’s her name again?
Sparks: I think it was Anne Hughes. Also, Terry Toedtemeier. These people were all sitting in on my
class and probably the summer before I taught at Southwestern.
Apparently, just after this, Craig Hickman and then Terry would be being hired to work in the
Photo Services.
Haft: At Evergreen.
Sparks: Yeah, and Kirk Thompson was an Evergreen first-year faculty. Kirk Thompson came back and
told Charlie Teske that he needed to hire me, so sometime during that winter, I got a call from Charlie.
Charlie Teske said, “There’s some people here who are interested in what you do. Are you interested in
Evergreen?” I said, “I don’t know what Evergreen is. What’s an Evergreen?” He said, “Are you willing to
come to Los Angeles to talk to me?” Basically, my students were behind the recruiting effort.
I went to Los Angeles to the Hilton Hotel, where he was staying, and we talked for a while about
Evergreen. We also talked an awful lot about the Yale Glee Club’s trip to Russia . . . on and on about the
Yale Glee Club. You’ve had conversations with Charlie.
Haft: Yes.
18

Sparks: All the while, Charlie was just probably using that to draw me out and size me up. Right?
Haft: You couldn’t have talked to a better person than Charlie.
Sparks: He said, “If you had a chance to work with people from different backgrounds, what kind of
class would you design?” Road trips—the whole hippie migration thing—was going on then, so I said, “I
think you ought to call this the “On the Road in America.” It would be a group of students who are
doing writing, visual art and film, and performing. What they’d do is travel around America, stay for a
while in campgrounds, and do the performance, and make their audience part of their product of the
performance.” Charlie kind of liked that idea.
Haft: I bet he did.
Sparks: He said, “I think we may have an opening for you in two years. Would you keep us in mind?”
Two months later, he called me up and says, “I think we can get you in now. Come up.” He said, “You
need to come to Evergreen and be willing to teach a course. Can you teach a workshop or something?”
I said, “Yeah.”
I came up to the photography studio and I taught a class. If I really thought about it, it was a
way to use photo tools differently. I taught them paper negatives. I said, “I’ve been engrossed with art
history, and I realized at some point that we make the same old variations of images over and over
through history, so what I’ve been doing is going through the slide library at San Francisco State and
taking slides, and making high contrast negative images from those slides and using those as paper
negatives collaged with my images. Every image that’s ever been made through all time can belong to
you that way. You could work with anybody.”
That’s the part of the workshop I taught, and I said, “Where do you guys live?” A lot of them
said they were living on the east side. I said, “Let’s go over to that neighborhood and walk around and
see what we can see.” You know where that ended up.
Haft: Yes.
Sparks: It took a few more years.
I had a little exhibition in the library. About 10 color pictures. Whatshisname? The video artist?
The Japanese video artist? They did a faculty show at Cal Arts, and John Baldessari invited us up. I
decided to come up early. Oh, Kim . . .
Haft: Korean artist maybe?
Sparks: I’m trying to remember his name. He was a video artist.
Haft: I’m blanking.

19

Sparks: Nam June Paik! What he did was he was doing was manipulating TVs. I came up to Cal Arts a
day early, and he had an installation in the gallery that was going to be part of a faculty show. Great
faculty show. Gawd, what great people they had. All of them Disney fired within a year or two. Nam
June Paik had a brace of video cameras and was shooting color, and then was manipulating the screen
with big electro-magnets.
I was shooting images right off the screen. We were running back and forth to the cameras and
stuff, and just having a great time. I had a series of color prints from that session that I exhibited at
Evergreen
So they called me back in a month or two and they hired me! The first year, I worked with Kirk
Thompson, my former student. He and I clashed almost immediately.
Haft: Oh, my gosh! [Laughing] That’s typical Evergreen. You’re teaching with Kirk and who else?
Sparks: Sid White. And whatshisname, from the library? Gordon Beck.
Haft: Oh, really? Oh, my gosh.
Sparks: And Bill Winden.
Haft: Five faculty.
Sparks: And each quarter, a visiting artist/filmmaker.
Haft: Oh, man.
Sparks: The most anal program I’ve ever been in. Just constant friction. Oh my, it was awful. Everyone
was at everyone else’s throat. It was the first program in the history of Evergreen to break up. I was
blamed for the breakup.
The filmmakers couldn’t stand any of the Evergreen faculty except Bill Winden and myself. Bill
Winden got along with people.
Haft: He was great. He really was. I talked to Hiro about this, too, how we’d have those Expressive Arts
meetings that would just tie my guts up in knots because they were so fractious. Bill would just clear his
throat, and everybody would calm down.
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: He had that effect on people.
Sparks: Yeah. Bill told me later that that program was the worst experience he ever had at Evergreen
until he became a dean. When he became a dean, he realized how everyone was backstabbing all the
time. [Laughter]
So, the program broke up, and we became little satellites. The program did a few good things.
Some film students just soared. Steve DeJarnatt worked with me on contract made a film called Out on
20

the Periphery that got him into the American Film Institute. It ran for six weeks in Boston. I was in his
film. For years after that, people would stop me on the street and say, “Are you Professor Q?” That was
the character’s name. Professor Q smoked dope continuously through the film.
Jim Cox did Neptune also in an individual contract. While he was an Evergreen freshman, he got
a bid from the University of Iowa to come and do a residency there.
Haft: Wow.
Sparks: So, an Evergreen freshman rising sophomore went and started his next film at the Cinema Lab
at the University of Iowa. He came back and then he did Eat the Sun. again on contract.
Haft: That’s one of my favorites.
Sparks: Some careers got launched there. At the same time, I’m hanging out with students because I’m
the youngest faculty member. I’m closer to the students than I am with faculty.
Haft: Is Kirk older than you are?
Sparks: Oh, yeah.
Haft: Really?
Sparks: Yes. In later years, when we quit competing with one another, I came to have a tremendous
admiration of him as a teacher and an anchor for important stuff at Evergreen.
Haft: That’s cool.
Sparks: He was one of the best advocates for writing the school ever had. When he retired, that was a
big loss for the school.
We started planning the curriculum for the next year. The program broke up. There was
already little satellite things going on. I proposed the program that I designed with Charlie Teske. In the
meantime, the deans had gotten upset—some had gotten upset—about we’d used the handball court in
the Rec Center to shoot Out on the Periphery, and someone had spilled water on the floor, which got
mopped up. No damage done but after the breakup of my previous program I was probably viewed as a
radical and a less than benign influence.
I had proposed that program, and in that year, they did something they never did again. All the
drafts of programs, they put out to the students, and they said, “Which ones interest you?” (Evergreen
never did that again.) More students were interested in my program than any of the other programs.
Haft: Do you remember what it was called?
Sparks: “On the Road in America.”
Haft: You did that program. Oh, my gosh.

21

Sparks: I did that. At least I proposed it. While I was an undergraduate, Don Worth gave me . . . New
Mexico painter . . . Georgia O’Keefe. He gave me her mailing address and said, “Talk to her. You’ll find
her interesting.” This was after I’d told him I really liked her work.
So I corresponded with her. I had envisioned the idea of truck stops where we would stop with
a person who’s somebody important in the art world of arts and ideas, and we’d stay with them for a
while, and weave that into it. We were talking about making her ranch in New Mexico one of the truck
stops.
I met Buckminster Fuller in Oakland through Jay. Buckminster Fuller had done a lecture. He just
lectured on and on for like three hours and drove most of the audience out of the room. He said, “Now,
you’ve noted they’ve left. The real people left are the ones who are interested. What’s your favorite
bar?” We spent the rest of the night in a bar with Buckminster Fuller. [Laughter]
I had talked about having him as a truck stop, although he wasn’t sure because of health issues.
Merv Cadwallader, who was a dean, had talked to me about my program, and he said, “We could let you
teach this program if you will agree to resign at the end of the program.” I said, “Yeah.”
Haft: Why?
Sparks: I think they considered me a loose cannon. The year before that, one program taught that year,
one of the things they asked students to do was hitchhike to San Francisco without money.
Haft: Gawd.
Sparks: …and survive for a week in San Francisco before they came back. What was that? America
something. They saw something like that happening. Evergreen faculty, living with the students out on
the road. No control. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” Apparently, the deans were very upset that Merv did
that, but I thought it was a great idea because at that point, I decided that I was doing well enough as an
artist then. And, when I first came to Evergreen, I was only going to stay for a year. That was in my
head. Evergreen was a side-stop before I moved back down to live in LA or New York and be more of a
mainstream artist, although the siren call of teaching was still tugging at me.
Apparently, the deans had a big powwow about it. The notion was I deserved a second chance.
It was never clear whether they were going to fire me without doing that program, but many of us at
Evergreen during the first two years, half those folks had been fired, or had been threatened to be fired.
So we were willing to stick our necks out.
Haft: Oh, yeah.
Sparks: They said, “We’d like you to stay on. In your student evaluations, the students speak highly of
you.” That’s always been my history. I am good at what I do.
22

Haft: To me, you have always been capable of—you mentioned this earlier—pushing students into
places they don’t think they’re capable of going.
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: And getting a lot more work out of them than anybody I’d ever seen. That always struck me as
one of your fortes.
Sparks: What happened was they gave me a second chance. There was a program with Willi Unsoeld.
Willi Unsoeld came around to me and talked to me. He said, “We’d like you to join our team. We don’t
know if you’re going to stay here or not, but if you stay here, join us.” It was another one of those
monster teams. There was Willi Unsoeld, Sig Kutter . . .
Haft: What field is it?
Sparks: Oceanography. Business before that. Nazi concentration camps.
Haft: Yeah, Niels Skov.
Sparks: Niels, Sig Kutter . . . Willi . . . I forget who the coordinator was . . . and this geologist who’s an
alcoholic. The alcoholic geologist became a problem so early that—
Haft: Linda Kahn told me about this guy.
Sparks: We got rid of him, so the program was reduced from six faculty to five. Oh, and Bob Sluss was
in that program.
Haft: Oh, wow. Man. That was an all-star team.
Sparks: Niels’s model was he didn’t care if students made cottage cheese, but they had to make the
best cottage cheese in the world. That was a great program. It was a really good program. I did really
well in that program and had a good time doing it.
Haft: What was that one called?
Sparks: “Man and Nature.” They never could teach that program today at Evergreen with that title.
[Laughter] Willi brought in a strong Outward Bound theme into the program, which combined science,
writing, art, outdoor education.
Haft: Did you sail, too?
Sparks: No, no. That would be a year or two later. Sluss and I would hook up with Pete Sinclair and
without intention ended up being the coordinator Vancouver and Puget and convener of the Marine
History area. Vancouver and Puget was another good one. We did math. Even though I’ve worked with
surveying, I’m not really hot in math. The first day that, we started working with calculus and precalculus. I said to my seminar, “Look, here are my limits. I can get through this stuff and do moderately
well on my own. I’m not competent enough to be good at teaching it, so who’s hot here?” We
23

organized ourselves as a math commune and the students worked together to create schemes for us to
teach each other.
That’s another feature of my teaching--I organize my seminars to take care of a lot of the
running of the program and hold each other accountable.
Haft: Yeah, giving students some authority and some recognition that they often have skills that we
don’t. Right?
Sparks: When we did our final exams on calculus, my seminar had the highest scores. Kort Jungel was a
big factor.
Haft: Kort?
Sparks: Kort was in my seminar.
Haft: Oh, my gosh.
Sparks: Kort was very good in math, among other things. Our program retreat at the start was a big
deal, the whole program went to Rainier for two weeks.
Haft: Wow.
Sparks: We showed up in the rain. Willi had told the students he’d buy the food, so all these early
Greener types show up and they discover that the food that Willi has purchased for the first week
consists of dehydrated vegetables and frozen beef hearts. [Laughter] I have Alaska bush standards, so I
always had a week of food stashed in the car. I had chili, Dinty Moore beef stew and Beanie Weenies,
hard candy, candy bars and a few c-rations. Survival stuff. Meanwhile the students were near mutiny,
wet and cold.
We started with basic climbing technique and a week of Outward Bound initiative tests.
Petrifying for me. I’m a bit of an acrophobe and I had to—everybody did a Tyrolean traverse across the
Nisqually canyon, and to hold my own—I couldn’t face my seminar if I dodged that, or if I didn’t do it
with some bravado. I was petrified the whole time. And we rappelled on the cliffs and all that crap.
Haft: But you had Willi as one of the faculty. He’s a mountaineer.
Sparks: Willi’s teenaged kids ran a lot of that stuff.
Haft: Oh, man.
Sparks: The kids loved it. We started classes there, too. But the second week, my seminar—there’s a
power line that comes in from Ashford. I forget what that big first campground was. It was a big
campground. My seminar brush-cleared it. It was maybe a hundred and twenty feet wide and I don’t
know how many miles it was, but we cleared that all the way up to the campground.
Haft: Wow.
24

Sparks: The rest of the program was building trails and stuff like that, so we were bonded as a group by
that time in the program, so I saw a lot of value in program retreats. Building stuff together.
In the spring, Bob Sluss and I did Desert Ecology together. We took a group of students down to
French Glen/Page Springs in the Oregon desert, down at Malheur. We were down there for six or eight
weeks, I forget how long.
The first two weeks—I took clay with me, and the clay was frozen—I was going to work with the
students on doing primitive pottery, which I knew little to nothing about other than researching it
beforehand. We were going to fire it with stuff there and dig clay there, which was a bit shocking when
we found out how alkaline the clay was. The clay was so alkaline that if you fired it, it was going to melt.
I fortunately brought a supply of raku clay. Sluss had all the students doing little projects on
biology, and Sluss and I did a population survey together on a little stream that came out of a spring in
the canyon wall, and Sluss made pots.
Haft: Really?
Sparks: We started having a bit of success when we figured out to fire pots with cow dung. We had this
van. We got a pickup later. After that, I taught summer classes at Malheur for several years at the field
station. We had these giant plastic bags filled with cow poop, dry cow poop. We trucked a bunch of
students over into the Owyhee Canyon and they did a traverse of the Canyon. We trout fished in the
Donner and Blitzen River. There was a hot springs right there at Page Springs. It had a ranch.
Haft: It just strikes me that so much of this is Outward Bound-ish.
Sparks: It was Outward Bound heavily laced with educational expectations. We picked this little
stream that was like less than 100 yards longs. It came out of the springs in the side of the canyon wall
and meandered down to join the Donner and Blitzen River. You could step over it anywhere but we
found hundreds of species there. I showed the kids how to survey the stream and make an accurate
map of it. Just a simple, baseline survey. Just all sorts of good stuff came out of that and a lot of lifelong
friendships that held up for over a half century.
Haft: Yeah, it sounds like it. I’m going to have to stop because I’ve got to get back home, but we will
continue this later on.
[End Part 2 of 2 of Paul Sparks on 10-21-2021]

25


Paul Sparks
Interviewed by Bob Haft
The Evergreen State College oral history project
November 1, 2021
FINAL

Haft: This is November 1, 2021, and I’m with Paul Sparks in our second interview. At our last session,
you were talking about the first couple years you were there. But you mentioned that there was a
possibility that you weren’t going to be coming back. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
Sparks: In my first year, I was a member of the first team that ever blew up, the first program that blew
up. So there was a bit of baggage attached to that. That spring, I designed a program that was wildly
attractive to students where we’d go out on the road for a year. The students had a number of
collective passions and skills where we would perform out in the world and document our performance.
That would be the product. Also, in route, we’d try to spend time with interesting people around the
country. I think I mentioned Georgia O’Keefe as one. Buckminster Fuller was another. The Deans
declined to do that program, but not without some rumbles from the students. So there was yet
another layer of complication to my first year.
As far as I know there is no documentation from that era of the flap that provoked, however
some years later York Wong did an evaluation where he termed me as the “enfant terrible” of
Evergreen.
The rejected program requires some explanation. That year, the deans and the faculty made
the mistake of posting the various program proposals and letting the students vote on them. Mine was,
by a significant margin, the most popular proposal.
Merv Cadwallader, who was then the senior dean, and he was also the father of coordinated
studies, called me in and said, “If we let you do this program, would you agree to resign if we asked you
when you came back?” I said, “Yeah,” because I thought if I did this program, if it even came close to
working, the results could be incredible and at a minimum it might give me a national platform for my
ideas about art and teaching. My response to Merv, was, “Hell yes!”
Haft: Yeah. Do you think there was pressure from whom to . . .?
Sparks: I have no idea.
Haft: Was York a dean at that time?

1

Sparks: No, York wasn’t a dean at that time. York was speaking retrospectively about something that
happened in previous years in referencing my reputation.
So, I said “yes” to Merv. But the other deans balked and wanted to go the other direction. If I
remember correctly, Oscar (Soule) was a dean then. He said, “What we’d really like you to do is do
another program and see how you do with that.” Because in those days, we had three years . . .
Haft . . . to prove yourself.
Sparks: To prove yourself. “In our minds, you haven’t proven yourself.” In my mind, I thought I was
soaring but that’s another story. [Laughter] I thought I was doing well, but not in the form something
that they appreciated. The program went gully wumpus but my students had some impressive public
successes and I am pretty sure the deans never looked at my evaluations when they made that decision.
That led me into the next year, a great year, with some really good faculty in a program called
Man and Nature that was wildly successful. This was not a surprise even after the disaster of the
program I did in the first year. When Charlie Teske, recruited me in Los Angeles, he really got me
interested in the idea of coordinated studies.
Having said that, I hadn’t been there more than a year or two when I realized that putting all our
eggs into coordinated studies’ basket was a big mistake. It became really apparent to me there were
things that were hard to teach well in coordinated studies. Studio art was one of those things. Science
was another. Also, the quality and chemistry of the team was really important and everyone had to be
willing to teach writing. It is a labor intensive mode and as the years went on people were less willing to
do it in a committed way. Also, the stress of reinventing the curriculum every year with a new team was
something that a handful of people did brilliantly but was a challenge for many folks and got dodgier
over time.
Haft: Yeah.
Sparks: Unless you wanted a community college basic, basic, basic everything, coordinated studies was
not always successful. There are lots of things that you could teach coordinated studies that would
work right through to the most advanced kind of work, but the arts and sciences weren’t necessarily
those things. That was question number one.
Two, it also was apparent to me that it took a very special kind of person to be successful in
coordinated studies, and we weren’t necessarily recruiting those people. And that was early in the
game.
Three, it was apparent to me that our hiring process and our governance process were badly
flawed.
2

Haft: In what ways?
Sparks: Oh . . . the thing I loved most was that we had almost unlimited freedom and that allowed me
to take risks and have some spectacular accomplishments. I never could have been successful as I was
without that. That was great for me, but the problem was that the same freedom created a lot of
problems when some faculty abused it. There was an excess of freedom and very little accountability.
Our evaluation system should/could have solved this problem but didn’t. A number of years later, I
spent some time under Laura Coghlan’s supervision reading student transcripts and saw that while a few
of our students did really well we were also failing a lot of folks.
Haft: Yeah. [Laughing]
Sparks: Much of this revolved around personalities. Someone would be living in Seattle, not be
spending much time on campus and not teaching very well in Olympia and could get away with it.
Someone needed to be there to call that person to account, and the system had to support that. That
never happened. I expect similar problems exist today.
We had too many factions, too many political factions, trying to control the hiring process, so in
any given year, the hiring committee might represent one of the factions. Ideas of treating students like
adults or perfecting the art of teaching were pushed aside favoring disciplinary agendas or any one of
the political ideologies of the moment. What was then termed “political correctness” and is now called
“wokeness” captured the school. Rather than risk bitter confrontations, we hived off into different cells.
It became easy to teach by yourself and do something you did really well, enjoyed or was amounted to a
light work load and ignore everything and everyone else. Meanwhile, the governance system became
even softer and less effective.
Haft: Another thing I wanted to ask you about. Last time you mentioned Kirk Thompson being an
advocate for writing. Was that not part of the…
Sparks: In the early days, writing was a big thing, and there was support for teaching writing well at all
levels and in all parts of the curriculum. There was a woman who was close to Al Weideman who I think,
was from New Zealand. She was a reading specialist so for the first two or three years we had tools to
see how well our freshman or transfer students read. This was a big deal when you are trying to teach
someone to write effectively. If you can’t read well, you can’t necessarily write well… I take that back.
You can put interesting stuff down on paper, but your writing needs to be redirected in a way that’s
going to allow someone else to understand it in the way you do.
Writing across the Curriculum was an important issue. Every faculty member who was hired
was supposed to be able to teach writing. About six years in, that started to disappear from the hiring
3

process. We started hiring people who couldn’t teach writing. And, on occasions, we hired faculty who
were not themselves literate at the college level. This is not a problem only at Evergreen but it was
painful to see it happen here.
I remember well working with the deans over a mess a colleague who was an alcoholic and who
couldn’t write left for us. I was the coordinator of the program and his last teaching partner and ended
up writing all of his evaluations. Ironically, the faction that got him hired the first time got him back a
second time.
Haft: I know when I was hired, that was never mentioned, but it quickly became clear that that was one
of my responsibilities. I was sort of appalled. I thought, I’m not ready for this. I’m not capable or
competent.
Sparks: About five years in, people were still using institutional money to foster people to encourage
thinking about how to teach writing effectively. One example would be Pete Sinclair and his Journal of
Exploration. Similarly, Mark Levinsky wrote about using intensive subject journals as a writing tool, and
teaching tool. Leo Daugherty was another example and there were many others. There was a whole
shelf of those things in the bookstore.
Haft: When did modules come in? Was that from the onset?
Sparks: No, modules came in for, I think, several reasons. Remember, this is my version of it. I may not
be historically accurate. One is we were under pressure from the legislature to have more in-state
students. Two, it was clear there were some things not being taught well. Three, we were starting to
slide on enrollment and weren’t meeting our own enrollment numbers.
Part-time classes were seen as the answer to that. The problem, initially, was they wanted
faculty to teach part-time classes as part of their regular load, which, given our 16 units as a fulltime
load, was an impossible job. It was a crushing job. I taught some of the first modules and it quickly
became apparent to me that wasn’t going to work. Faculty were increasingly reluctant to teach them
and one solution was to hire part-time faculty.
This went on for a while, and I was not impressed with the skill levels or the teaching chops of
some of our local hires. Also the school was reluctant to advertise or hire folks from Seattle. However,
when they did we got excellent results. Meg Ford was one example.
While I was convener of the Expressive Arts. I decided to try to sell the idea we’d hire people who both
taught modules and supported our facilities which already was a de facto practice in the library. I
pushed this idea because at that time it was clear to me that basic skills in visual arts weren’t being
taught well by the Expressive Arts full-time faculty. What I wanted us to do was to bundle a teaching
4

load into the job description for the folks who maintained and supported our arts and media studios and
to make sure that we hired people of exceptional ability for those areas and to compensate them
accordingly. The people who taught the skills modules would be the same people who ran the facilities,
so they were an integrated part of the support system. Mike Moran and Peter Randlette are examples of
people who did exceptionally well in that capacity. Typically, our modules were fully enrolled and had
long waiting lines. Several years later, Phil Harding and I did an analysis of the enrollment patterns of our
graduates and nearly all our students had used modules but few did them to excess.
There were two problems with this that were evident from the start. The people we hired often
had the credentials to be faculty but were hired at staff pay levels. At one level, this was exploitive but
had some advantages for the artists. What I did not think enough about were the toxic political turmoil
and faculty versus faculty and faculty vs staff turf wars this system would produce. An example of a
fabulous success would be the teaching of Mike Moran who, through the years did all things well and
over time was probably one of our better teachers. On the other hand, since the staff, who controlled
space, had more continuity than the faculty did (especially in the library) they began to see their
modules as the only legitimate curriculum. This occasionally provoked bitter power struggles between
the faculty who wanted to determine how spaces would be used when they taught there, and the
agendas of some of the module faculty, who in essence owned the facilities and as I noted above who
grew to think their classes were the only real curriculum. In this sense, my idea, which worked well in all
of its other parts, produced a measure of ongoing heart burn. In a larger sense, it underlined one of the
bigger flaws of the design of the college. Faculty and some staff enjoyed enormous amounts of freedom
but with very little accountability and the various divisions of the college had different game plans.
Haft: Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask about, which I don’t know when it arose and when it
disappeared, was self-paced learning something? SPLUs or something?
Sparks: Yeah. That was Bob Barnard. Bob was hired early. I don’t know what his real role was. He was,
I think a member of the faculty, but I don’t remember seeing him teach or heard about his teaching. He
had a strong computer orientation. SPLUs were his brainchild. And, he created a lot of SPLUs, most of
which were on science subjects, and for the most part, they were not wildly successful or sought after.
Haft: But it was in an era when—
Sparks: We were still trying things.
Haft: Yeah, right, so it was an experiment.
Sparks: Yeah. A lot of the best experiments were not in coordinated studies. They were outside of
coordinated studies. Like Phil Harding’s “Experimental Structures.” He’d already built one pole building
5

on campus that was down by the corner of . . . was it Driftwood Road? It’s the next block down from
Driftwood Road, the corner where you go down from Driftwood Road that jogs and that road parallels
the Organic Farm.
Haft: I had no idea.
Sparks: There was a 3-story structure down there built by students. Then the Organic Farm House was
an experimental structure. The SeaWulff was another. Evergreen students built two 38-foot auxiliarypowered/sail-powered research vessels and over the years, a number of other traditional small wooden
boats.
Haft: Who was in charge of that?
Sparks: A variety of people. Pete Sinclair did it for a while. I was the coordinator of Marine History,
Vancouver and Puget program convener of that area for two years. The area died a natural death
because the convener and faculty of any given year had an enormous job in maintaining and keeping our
fleet sea worthy.
Haft: When did the Expressive Arts and those other areas arise, or were they there from the beginning,
too?
Sparks: They were there kind of in the beginning, because very early on, the Expressive Arts people
started feeling threatened by the system and tended to circle wagons around curriculum and space.
Also, the school was slow to provide the facilities promised to them when they were hired. They were
teaching coordinated studies, and what they were teaching was either devalued by their colleagues, or
their colleagues were not understanding the time-intensive, skill-intensive needs of the arts and were
reluctant to build the time in for those things to happen.
The problem for the Expressive Arts faculty was how you could fairly present your discipline in
that format. That drove a tendency toward cliquishness. Some of the first arts faculty left early. Peggy
Dickinson, who I think was second-year faculty, said, “You’re never going to be able to successfully teach
art here,” and left. She went to the north coast of California, the California State College at Humboldt,
and had a successful career teaching ceramics there.
Haft: There were other questions about those early days, because I came later. It seemed to me when I
arrived that when I’d go to a faculty meeting, there was a lot of fighting. People respected one another,
I think, but nobody was afraid not to state their opinion and to really—
Sparks: Yeah, there was debate. It was real debate. That disappeared.

6

Probably the disappearance occurred when the ideological orthodoxies around the themes of
race, class and gender started asserting themselves at just about the same time that some elements of
the faculty created an increasingly inflexible orthodoxy around coordinated studies.
Haft: How about the administrative stuff? Because I know the deans traditionally came from the
faculty, but then at some point, they started hiring outside the college. No?
Sparks: Barbara Smith was the first outsider hired. She did a really excellent job, although I think a lot
of us in the beginning thought she wouldn’t.
Haft: But what prompted that switch?
Sparks: We have had some really good deans, but from my perspective the deanery never collectively
performed very well at any time over the entire history of the college. Usually there’s been one dean
who performed well, and that was the Dean of Space and Budget. That was usually a science faculty.
Willy Smith was good. Ken Tabbut was excellent. Whatshisname? . . . Mushrooms . . .
Haft: Oh, Mike Beug.
Sparks: Mike Beug was an excellent dean. We’ve always had a strong dean in that role. When we had
Barbara Smith and a strong dean in that role, we did pretty well. Actually my take on the Deans
performance may be too extreme.
Haft: Okay.
Sparks: But a lot of the deans, I think—this is a personal opinion— were usually compromised by the
fact that they were from the faculty.
This made making tough decisions or saying no to their friends difficult. Our faculty evaluation
scheme was great on paper but foundered in practice because the persons charged with saying or doing
tough things were too close to their subjects.
Haft: I’m trying to think. I don’t remember who was a dean when I arrived. I remember John Cushing. I
thought he did a good job. I liked him very much.
Sparks: Yeah. I agree.
Haft: I heard about Bill Winden being a great dean, but I don’t know.
Sparks: Bill was a pretty good dean.
Haft: I imagine Charlie Teske had to be a pretty good dean.
Sparks: Charlie was a great dean but he had already filled that role at Oberlin.
He singlehandedly talked the legislature into giving us the Com Building. But he was early on. Charlie
was fabulous to have as a friend and neighbor. One of the best things for me at Evergreen is on my floor
in Lab II. I always had these incredible, bright, powerful figures for neighbors. That’s where a lot of
7

really good conversations went on. I had Charlie Teske for my next-door neighbor for years. I had Phil
Harding for my next-door neighbor. Fred Tebbutt, had an office across the hall and so did Marianne
Bailey. Dave Marr was around the corner and Next to Mark Levinsky. Just all sorts of neat people that I
could interact with. I know I profited by that.
Haft: What do you think was your best experience at Evergreen?
Sparks: I tried to have a best experience every year. That sounds brash, but I did.
Haft: I think that’s a good answer.
Sparks: Some of my students got to be famous. I don’t think that’s my best experience. In some kinds
of programs, I taught I was pretty experimental. But to do well in a context like that I had to quit being
an artist to conform to what my colleague’s notions would be about where the program should be
going. It was like dancing in overshoes. Perhaps that is too dark. It would have surprised a lot of folks,
but I probably had more breadth as an interdisciplinary teacher than most of them. One best experience
was listening to Stefani Kuntz make a case for Marxism.
Part of the problem was the values of my colleague which often were politically liberal but
artistically ultra conservative. Early on, I tried to make the art conform to the theme of the program, so I
taught a very reduced kind of drawing. For example, I taught contour drawing in basic science programs.
Because for a science student, a lot of the illustrating techniques for science use contour. But I taught
contour with a content. Like in . . . what program was it? . . . it was one of those big science programs. I
ended up in a lot of those. Another one of those was a history-related program.
Haft: Did you ever get the feeling that sometimes artists were just plugged into a program because they
thought, we need an artist?
Sparks: Yes, we were ornaments, but I tried to make the ornament work. As I noted earlier, in one of
the Marine History programs, I taught contour drawing. Then I set a project for the students where they
had to use their drawing to document something about people in the Northwest who work with or on
the water. That included interviewing their subjects when possible and making that narrative part of the
project.
Haft: Wow.
Sparks: I also taught photography in that program. It was using—and it was also connected to writing—
so we had a package, and that worked really, really well. I don’t know if I still have slides of that stuff,
but some of the work they produced was just really incredible.

8

Haft: That leads me to another question about your personal expertise as an artist. Because you’ve
taught ceramics, woodworking, I’m pretty sure, painting, drawing, photography. Did all of that stuff
come out of San Francisco?
Sparks: All that stuff came out from me self-teaching myself. One of my themes is that we should turn
folks into independent learners, learning how to learn. Ceramics I started . . . when I taught at
Southwestern College, Judy Nicolaides was there—I think she went on to a big-name brand school after
that. That school was kind of a place that the faculty stayed there for a while and then went to
someplace bigtime. You could just walk in and sit in on her classes, so I started making pinch pots and
started making little, funky coil pots and she fired them for me. I had just a very passing interest.
When I got to Evergreen, Bob Sluss and I did Desert Ecology. We decided that we each would do
a big project that the other one would participate in. I decided what we’d do would be primitive
pottery. When we got to Page Springs, we found this little creek that came out of the wall of the
canyon, and went about 100 yards, and joined the Donner and Blitzen River. He ran a population study,
and I used surveying techniques to survey the stream so we could illustrate that. Then I did primitive
pottery that we pit fired with cow dung; you know the area is open range, so there was plenty of cow
dung. And I learned how to successfully do pit firings with dried cow pies. Then I got ambitious.
Frenchglen, Oregon had a dump that was about 150 years old. One of my inventions was the
dump kiln. We went to the dump and found stuff that I could build forms out of, so we packed clay
around these forms and slow-cooked them. We fired the clay into the kiln itself and then burned out
the metal parts that we’d used from the dump. We built pots and sculpture in the campground. Then we
fired them with sagebrush and greasewood and deadwood from the river, cottonwood. At night, we’d
do firings and cookouts in the Frenchglen dump.
Haft: Amazing.
Sparks: There was an old, retired cowboy from Warner Valley living behind the store/Post Office there.
He got real interested and would come to the campground in Page Springs, where we camped for about
two months. He’d come make things with us, and one day, he showed up with this big thing wrapped in
a rag. It was a figure of a person that he carved out of a big chunk of gypsum with his pocketknife. He
was so proud of that. He was in his eighties and would show up at our dump kiln firings with a small
bottle of rye whiskey which he shared around. We had a bunch of pictures of our students, cowboy kids
from the one room school in Frenchglen with Bob Sluss, myself. Also our students and this old
gentleman with his statue.

9

We fished a lot. The little streams coming off of Steens Mountain turned out to have
populations of cutthroat trout in them. What we didn’t know was that each stream had its own
population of fish that were genetically unique, and probably no one should be fishing these fish. They
were relic glacial populations.
Haft: I also wonder about your relationship, or what you saw as the school’s relationship, with the
town. Because when I came, I was just appalled at the divide between town and gown.
Sparks: Oh, yeah.
Haft: I thought the college, from what I had heard when I was in California, that the reputation was
good, and I thought the community would be in love with this place and I found that that was not the
case when I arrived.
Sparks: Yeah, from the very beginning, “they” (the townspeople) were seen by Greeners and
characterized in much the way reference Trump supporters today. We were the enlightened radicals
who were going to bring this place to a new light. But Olympia, you have to admit, was very
conservative in those days. And to be fair, the locals thought that they were getting something like
Central or WSU and that we would bring some fixes to the enormous economic problems of Southwestern Washington.
Haft: I know.
Sparks: They were extremely conservative, as was the Washington Legislature. But what was
interesting was people never kept in mind that the person who founded that college was a Republican,
Governor Dan Evans, who was an outstanding governor and one of our better College Presidents.
Haft: Yeah.
Sparks: Keep in mind, too, both my marriages have been part of the community. There’s a lot of staff
people at Evergreen who thought that I was a staff person.
Haft: Yeah, when I had my interview, I talked about that. One of the things that really stuck in my craw
was the rift between faculty and staff. That existed simply because some of the faculty treated the staff
like second-class citizens, where others would treat you just as a peer.
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: Working on the staff, I learned my lessons about that very, very quickly.
Sparks: Funny thing is that in the beginning that rift was not there. In our first two faculty retreats, all
the staff of the college was invited to the retreat. Janitors, everybody. And for many staff positions
hiring was done within the school.
Haft: Oh, wow.
10

Sparks: Some, as late as—when did I teach that program? Maybe that was third or fourth year—the
janitorial staff were dedicated to certain building spaces. First, there was Whatshisname, Mr. Cleveland.
What was his name? We included him in all our program events. Then there was a guy named Ed Harris,
who was really cool. When I did “Stones, Bones, and Skin,” he’d go on fieldtrips with us. He’d sit in on
our lectures. We kind of coopted and brought those people in, or at least I did, and made them part of
the family.
Haft: Let’s jump way ahead then. What led to your retirement? When did you decided it was time to
quit?
Sparks: When I thought that the Evergreen dream was dead. The place had become very ideological,
and eventually, I was going to get fired. Actually, not… I exaggerate…
Haft: I don’t think that, no.
Sparks: The ideological hurdles really just got to be too much for me.
Haft: Yeah. I remember when Olander came, what a shock that was, and how divisive it became in the
faculty, too. People who were pushing for him to leave. Eventually, they proved to be right.
Sparks: My grandfather used to say that his big mistake was joining the Ku Klux Klan. I think he was a
member less than a year. And my big mistake was supporting Joe. When Joe was being introduced
around campus, there was a woman down in the registrar’s office. I can’t remember her name. She had
six or seven kids, and four of them had gone to Evergreen. She was very good at her job. (Transcriber’s
note: Anna Mae Livingston)
But when Joe Olander was getting a tour for his hiring interview, he went out and introduced
himself and said to her, “You’re So-and-So,” and told her what a good job that people had said that she
was doing, and what she was doing at her job. In all the interactions with Joe, I never got a chance to
meet him, but I had heard that, and I thought, geez, that’s a great This is a big thing.
Silly me. I could have thought back to that and seen that one coming. I supported Joe until Joe
showed his true colors.
Sparks: To turn back to a less depressing subject, Summerwork was a great thing.
Haft: Yeah. I can’t remember how that started, to tell you the truth.
Sparks: I think it goes back to when I first met you in in the slide library, I was impressed from the
beginning. I think I designed Summerwork around what I saw in you and your images, and then started
lobbying people to hire you so I could have you to work with me in the program.
Haft: Oh, okay. [Laughter]
Sparks: I’d been working on Barbara Smith for like two years.
11

Haft: I know I owe you the job. I know that for a fact.
Sparks: My aim in designing the program was that it should be intensive, a working community, and
target a conservative audience that would only risk a creative class in a summer school fling. Also, a big
piece of my scheme revolved around you. You were everything I wasn’t as a teacher. I pushed. You
coaxed. What I did intuitively you did systematically. I could be the wild man from Borneo and you could
be the quiet voice of reason. Part of that success came out of who you are as an artist. A lot of your
work depends on sophisticated narratives and that played into my conceit that photography could be
taught like writing if the critique process and art history components became a dialogue on how to see
and read images.
Also, after the first year we always had the right game plan even if it was always in a process of
incremental evolution. By having a predictable, repeatable framework built in to our program design, we
got better every year we did it. Knowing how we did things, meant that once we understood the
character of our audience in any given year we could customize our efforts to fit them. Finally, by
treating the whole enterprise as a collective enterprise everyone felt they owned a piece of what we
were doing. And, in truth… it would not be an exaggeration… to say that they did.
We worked our butts off in that program but we swooped and soared and it was probably the best thing
of its kind anywhere.

To the reader: I took some liberties in editing the previous paragraphs. Bob’s prosaic yeah in the next
line is in response to some lines that differ materially from those you have just read.
An interviewer in an oral history is supposed to stay unobtrusively in the background. Bob did that. But it
is worth noting that in the references above to our adventures together, I often was clinging to his coat
tails whilst we were swooping and soaring.

Haft: Yeah.
Sparks: Your photography and your style and your personality made that infinitely well matched.
Haft: But that program, Summerwork, had a run of 20-some years.
Sparks: Yes, 20-plus years. I expect that it may have been the longest run for any program period.
Haft: I still hear from some of those folks. Brad Sweek, for instance.
Sparks: Oh. Bradley was pretty amazing. He dropped out at one time but he came back, and he did
contracts with me, and became a designer. When I last had contact with him, he had the biggest design
operation in Seattle.
12

Haft: He still does. He’s very successful. That leads me to another topic, students. Over the years, we
both had students who were troubled.
Sparks: Right.
Haft: For whom Evergreen was a life preserver in some ways.
Sparks: Yeah. Some of that got hard to do. I was kind of a magnet for bipolar kids.
Haft: I think the arts in general attract them.
Sparks: Yeah. I realized I had to change the way I taught instead of being so accepting for so many of
those students because three incidents happened.
One was I encountered a guy at an Academic Fair who was evidently psychotic. He’d been
thrown out of the Marines because he’d stabbed somebody. He couldn’t get the programs he wanted,
and he went over to try to talk to Byron Youtz, and Byron, for some reason, didn’t have the time to talk
to him, and he came back and told me how he was going to kill Byron.
In the same year, Jean Mandeberg had given me another student who was in her program she
couldn’t work with who was like that guy.
Haft: Yeah, I remember him.
Sparks: That was the guy who set his drawing on fire in the wall in one of her critiques. I got him
through, and I got him into a counseling program, but I think he eventually got jailed somewhere.
There was a guy Mark Levinsky and I had that we both worked with who piled all the furniture
against Mark Levinsky’s door and set it on fire. He later came back and peed on Levinsky’s door. How I
came out of that one as a good guy and Levinsky was a bad guy, I don’t know.
In “Through African Arts,” we had a Black student who’d gone to Africa and discovered that
Africans didn’t like American Blacks very much. He came back and was indignant and angry and my
colleagues asked me if I would take him into my seminar and deal with his problems, which I did.
All of that just got to be too hard eventually I pulled back.
Haft: How about the other end of the spectrum? The kids who went on and were very successful.
Because you had Lynda Barry, didn’t you?
Sparks: Lynda Barry, Steve DeJarnette, and Jim Cox.
Haft: Matt Groening.
Sparks: And Charles Burns, who wrote Black Hole and a whole bunch of other graphic novels.
I’m real proud of those folks, but I need to emphasize that in working with that kind of student the best
thing is stay out of their way but be available when they need it. However, I will take credit for
introducing Lynda to the Chicago Imagists, the Hairy Who, and Jim Nutt.
13

There are other kinds of success stories too but without fame. An example would be Mariko Mars,
whom you don’t know. Japanese. She had married then divorced a GI. She came to Evergreen and
wanted to do arts, so I worked with her on her painting. Eventually, she started doing very, very
exquisite kind of rectilinear abstractions. Really nice stuff and she went on to make a modest living at it.
Her daughter, Stella Mars became my student. This was in the era where adding language was part of
the art, and Stella Mars became successful selling her stuff to shops and online. Then Audrey Mars,
Stella’s baby sister came my way, and I had a pretty good rapport with her also. I kind of advised her
and counseled her, sometimes taught her but she was never officially my student. There were a lot of
students like that for me who were never officially my students, but I had a great deal of influence on.
Audrey Mars got an Academy Award.
Haft: Oh, did she?
Sparks: She was a producer along with another guy of a documentary about the war in Iraq.
Haft: One of the other things that Evergreen was famous for, I think, is the cartoonists that came out of
there.
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: You must have had a hand in some of those people
Sparks: Yeah. But keep in mind other folks did to. For instance, Richard Alexander had a near
encyclopedic knowledge of the comics in underground newspapers. Marilyn Frasca had an enormous
influence on the way Lynda Barry wrote and looked at the world and Merv Cadwallader introduced her
to the classical world.
Haft: Did you work with Steve Willis at all? Do you remember him?
Sparks: No, he was never my student but he was a guy I talked to every day at the Bookstore. We’d talk
about comics. A lot of my best students weren’t my students though I did have some families where I
got several generations of students, or I got all the brothers and sisters. Like the Knutson—Kathy
Knutson, who married Andy Harper.
One of the things I did was when I saw talented students who liked people, sometimes I’d scout
them and groom them, and try to persuade them to go back into public schools and teach. Both of
them did that but they did so without a push from me. They married each other and were very
successful teachers. Andy, three years out from Evergreen, got a Golden Apple award, and Kathy got
several awards. Then she became a big deal in curriculum development. They were good.

14

Then I got Kathy’s brother and I got Kathy’s sister, Kari. Then another sister had a boyfriend
whose name was Dan Braddock, and Dan Braddock was an actor on the stage, also doing social work.
Dan worked with me on theater stuff, and he developed a thing called “A Date with the Personals.”
What happened is he got two actresses and another actor, and they did performances where
they would work with personal ads. They’d circulate the newspaper from the day back in the days when
they still had personal ads in the newspaper, before the Internet. People could look at the newspaper
and then suggest topics from the personal ads, and they’d do an improv around it. They’d do first dates
between two people from two different ads. Then the next generation down, their kids became my
students.
Haft: There were some early staff, and I don’t know if there were faculty at all that I’ve always
wondered about, too, like Young Harvill. I know his name, but I don’t know—
Sparks: There was a lady named Anne Lasko who was maintaining the printmaking studio. And she was
a printmaker. And Young was interested in printmaking. He was a student.
Haft: Oh, he was a student.
Sparks: Yeah. He got really, really interested in printmaking. He had a very precise linear drawing style,
well suited for a lot of different printmaking modes, and a very keen imagination. He was gaining steam
about the same time I had a group of students who were doing filmmaking and were interested in
computers, so they were doing computer-generated films. I had a student named Jim Cox, who I told
you about in our last interview, and Jim Cox had a film working on TV-camera feedback called Neptune.
That was wildly successful.
So, there was a group of people who were working with this digital stuff and film. Young also
had great digital skills and a great interest, so when he left Evergreen, he developed some sort of
program for virtual reality and joined a company that developed that, and he became rich and very
successful. He developed software for film and video applications and other art applications.
Haft: But didn’t he run the printmaking shop at some point?
Sparks: He ran it for a while because Anne had a baby.
Haft: Oh, okay. They married then. Okay, I’ve got you.
Sparks: I lost the thread.
Haft: Let’s jump way ahead now. What would be your advice to young faculty who are hired at
Evergreen now?
Sparks: Don’t come. [Laughter] No, I wouldn’t advise it for a student either.
Haft: How come?
15

Sparks: There are still some very extraordinary students, but it’s a bad school.
Haft: What has changed? Is it the ethos about faculty having the freedom that they wanted, or faculty
being forced to teach outside their areas of expertise?
Sparks: At the start of our conversation, I elucidated some reasons why I thought the school died, or
lost its way, and I think an excess of freedom without accountability and a consensus on what the school
was about is a big thing.
Haft: Yeah.
Sparks: I think accountability is a big issue. You’ve got to deliver. I think we lost the notion of what our
function was. Basically, we went from a place that prized good teaching and taught people how to think
to a place that taught them what to think. That’s the poison pill.
Haft: It’s a sad case.
Sparks: One thing that makes it special but doesn’t often get addressed is that Evergreen came at a
peak, a peak in a youth movement. Evergreen in its early years got the best and the brightest and the
most adventurous students. Once that initial group went through—remember people like Matt
Groening and Lynda Barry, Jim Cox, Chris Rauschenberg, Steve DeJarnette and Charles Burns—they were
in that first wave. Also, it is worth noting that people like Chris and his friend Marty Oppenheimer were
the children of people associated with Black Mountain. Another factor early on, was that when a
powerful or beloved faculty member decamped from brand X to Evergreen students followed them
here. For example, when Byron Youtz left Reed some very good students followed him up the interstate.
As the alternative schools around the country went down, we’d get a recolonization. When
Mount Angel closed, a bunch of its students came here. When Bard changed, those students came
here. When UC-Santa Cruz quit being an alternative school, they came here. That infusion of talent and
energy may have kept us above water past what our natural lifespan should have been.
There’s this other thing. Experimental institutions have a lifespan. If you look at Black Mountain
College, it had a lifespan. When the original faculty and the original students went different directions—
it hung on for 15 years more on life support. For years, students would come to Evergreen and learned
how to take charge of their lives and then went someplace else to get what they really needed that was
not necessarily available here. It is also worth noting that the folks who became famous, often ignored
coordinated studies and worked exclusively in individual contracts. If you were a person with passion
and ability you could access facilities or toys that normally were not available to undergraduates.
Haft: I remember years and years when Dixie Lee [Ray] was Governor, Evergreen was constantly being
under fire to close or be shut down.
16

Sparks: Yeah. There was a bill in the Legislature every year to shut Evergreen down and turn it into a
police academy.
Haft: What was it about the college that kept it going? Was it the people’s commitment to it?
Sparks: We continued to attract really good students. Even after hiring went astray, we had a core of
exceptional faculty. A student could get a pretty good education drifting from one really good teacher to
another. For years, I counseled students to do just that. Find the best people and work with them.
Also, there are some more pedestrian reasons. We were also a tremendous deal for out-of-state
students.
Haft: Yes.
Sparks: In the early years, it was a great deal for anyone who wanted to get a good education at a
bargain price. Also, we were a tremendous option for those students who couldn’t get into the Ivy
League schools. Always, we were an excellent option for those older students who were ready to go
back to school and wanted to do so without a lot of the obstacles and bull shit that characterized some
traditional institutions. Evergreen was a great option for them and that group as a whole did very well
and added luster to our reputation.
Haft: Yeah.
Sparks: We got lots of bright students whose applications got cut at Yale or Princeton or Harvard and
showed up at our doorstep.
Haft: Some of the initial faculty, it seems, were like that, too.
Sparks: Indeed they did. A lot of us were out of step where we came from and came here because we
thought we could build a better mouse trap. I took a pay cut to get here and never regretted it.
The outside world occasionally intruded. Out-of-state students brought more dollars with them and
reassured some faculty who wanted to feel like they were teaching at a more cosmopolitan place with a
national audience. Also, as I noted previously, we were very attractive to older students. They added a
lot to the institution because an older student, or several older students in a program, could add role
models and a stabilizing influence, and other students could rally around them, or learn from their
example. Unfortunately this put us in conflict with the legislature which wanted us to take more high
school directs from in state and more local students overall.
Haft: I always wondered about that because when I started teaching there, I think the average age was
35.
Sparks: Yeah, and so to get local students, they had to recruit from high schools. That high school
recruitment brought the average age level down, and we were getting more and more students who
17

thought it was just like any other school, and in turn, we recruited more faculty who could/would teach
to the lowest common denominator just like any other school.
I think I said this earlier, the college was supposed to serve southwest Washington, which at that
time was the most impoverished part of the state, with the fish industry and the timber industry in the
ditch. But the faculty saw those people as the enemy and they had little love for us.
Haft: Yeah, that was sad. I remember when there was this big push to educate southwest
Washingtonians, and it seemed that—you’re right—it was at the expense of students coming from the
East Coast who were getting a good bargain because they didn’t have to pay an exorbitant fee.
Sparks: There were models. There was model for us of colleges that targeted blue collar audiences and
prospered because they got the best and brightest of those students. People who were motivated to
change their lives. But our class prejudices got in the way. We built a satellite on the hill in Tacoma.
When we developed our teacher certification program, when we were still hung up with PLU, I was in
the group. I didn’t get on very many DTFs ever. People would not choose me for a DTF.
Haft: Wasn’t there a mandate that you had to be on some governance committee?
Sparks: Yeah. I would get the ones that did the skunk work, that didn’t develop policy or anything to do
with teaching. Maybe there was some utility in that. Being a pariah has its advantages sometimes.
But some of us working with doing the teacher cert program wanted a model less like brand X
and more like us. There was a very strong contingent of us who wanted three things in the teacher cert
program. One, that we not make the program so much about theory but more about the art and craft
of teaching. Second was that every person who came into the program had to do a first quarter in the
classroom. The reason being there would be a lot of people who applied for teacher’s programs. Go
through them and discovered they don’t like teaching or students. They don’t like the workload. Finally,
some of us felt strongly that teachers should start from the position of really knowing something. Toss
the undergraduate degree in in teacher’s cert and replace it with specific expertise.
Haft: That was one of the best things about Evergreen, in my mind, was the chance to do an internship
while you were an undergraduate because it was like a safety net. You could go there and do it for a
quarter and decide, ooh, this isn’t at all what I was expecting. You could drop out.
Sparks: Or you could go out there and do an internship and get a really good job.
Haft: Yeah. I had students in both of those camps.
Sparks: I had a student, when I was doing the Marine History program. Technically, he was Pete
Sinclair’s student, but Pete couldn’t work with him for a quarter for some reason, so he turned him over
to me because he wanted to be careful. You protect your good ones. Right?
18

This guy went up to do an internship with Bob Perry, who the yacht designer who designed the
SeaWulff. He was going to work with Perry in the design studio. Perry did what a lot of designers do.
They had a yacht sales division that produced the funds that kept their design work afloat. Perry fired
the guy who ran that, and he said to my student, “I’m too busy right now to hire a new guy. Can you go
over there and run this place for 10 days? You’re absolved if you screw anything up badly. Just be there
and come to me if you’ve got any big problems.” This kid went over there and started selling yachts. He
was doing really well, so he graduated and became Perry’s Vice President of Sales.
Haft: Wow. That’s a great story.
Sparks: People could to that. I had a student who was interested in working with the people who do
music for Hollywood films, who planned the music and hired the musicians and got the rights and all
that stuff. She went and did an internship, and it turned into a job.
I used to have a woman who was an Evergreen student who was interested in doing little
cartoons and writing. She went down—Matt Groening was working with the magazine called Wet
magazine. Are you familiar with Wet? She did an internship with him and stayed for another semester.
In those days, you could do another quarter. That changed her life. You can do stuff like that. Yeah,
internships.
Haft: One thing that touched me this last week or two was the death of Peta Henderson, our old
colleague and student. We had her in Summerwork one year. Remember?
Sparks: Yeah.
Haft: She was great, and we tried to convince her that she could now teach photography. I don’t think
she ever believed us, but she definitely could have. She was wonderful.
Well, do you have any parting words at all?
Sparks: About 20 years ago when we first started having intimations that things weren’t going to stay
wonderful, we had conversations in Lab II, hanging out around the Xerox, about starting our own school.
Maybe we should have done that. But for a while there, this place burned with an intense hot white
light and there were quite possibly days when we were the best small college on the planet. I took a pay
cut to come here and I never regretted it.
Haft: Okay. Well I think that’s it, so thank you for very much for this. This was a lot of fun for me.
Sparks: This has been really good for me, too.

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Item sets

The Evergreen State College Faculty and Staff Oral History Project

Media

SparksPaul_20211021_Transcript_pt1.pdf

SparksPaul_20211101_Transcript_pt2.pdf