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Identifier
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StenbergLarry
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Title
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Larry Stenberg Oral History Interview
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Date
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23 March 2021
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Creator
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Larry Stenberg
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Contributor
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Nancy Taylor
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extracted text
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Larry Stenberg/Lawrence Stone
Interviewed by Nancy Taylor
The Evergreen State College oral history project
March 23, 2021
FINAL
Taylor: This is March 23, 2021. I’m at a café in Tacoma with Larry Stenberg, who is now Lawrence
Stone. Just heard that story. Larry, welcome.
Stenberg/Stone: Thank you.
Taylor: We’ll just put this down here and hope for the best. We’ll watch when it runs out because it’s
got just 36 percent. Where do you want to start?
Stenberg/Stone: Where do I want to start? I think the place to start is in the planning trailers.
Taylor: Even before that. I wanted to know how you found out about Evergreen and how you got hired.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, okay. I can do that. I had read a book that was very student-centered that said,
“Faculty exists because there are students.” They even traced back to the great philosophers and said,
“The philosophers were hired by students. The students controlled them. If they weren’t being taught
the way they wanted, they’d fire them.” Aristotle and Socrates, a lot of times students would just fire
them. He started there.
Then he talked about Mieklejohn and the experiment that was going on at Berkeley. On and on
and on. I loved him. I’ve always been student-oriented, and knew, by the time I was a sophomore in
Stadium High School in Tacoma, that I wanted to have a teaching certification, and I wanted to be
involved in administrative work, and wanted to get a credential to be a principal. I went through that
whole process through my master’s at UPS.
The thing that happened before Joe Shoben was when the Kent State incident hit in the early
‘60s, I joined the students in a sit-in in the President’s office as the Dean of Admissions at UPS. He
wanted to fire me, and my boss, who was the Vice President for Student Life—which eventually was a
title that I had at Evergreen for—came to my defense, and so did the faculty. I was the youngest faculty
member, and the only one who was asked to come to the Faculty Senate meeting. They gave me faculty
status, which then started me on TIAA-CREF.
Taylor: That was at UPS?
Stenberg/Stone: That was at UPS. The point of it is I was a maverick, even in those days, and had
always been one in thinking, so Evergreen was perfect for me. I went down to see Joe Shoben. I called
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him on the phone. He said, “Come down and I’ll be happy to spend a little time.” I raved about him. I
said, “I’m a real fan of yours. You’ve had a lot of influence on my thinking about education, and I would
love to meet you.” He said, “I’d love to meet you. C’mon down.”
I came down and he said, “Come later in the afternoon. We don’t need half an hour. We can
take a couple hours if you want to.” Joe was like that. He should have been the first Dean of the faculty,
not Barry.
Taylor: Barry was never a good fit.
Stenberg/Stone: No, he never was. I don’t know how he—Dean Clabaugh was the one who hired him,
and he had never worked on the college level.
Taylor: You only met Joe Shoben at the college?
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
Taylor: You didn’t know him before?
Stenberg/Stone: No. Anyway, we talked for an hour or two and he said, “Do you have to rush back?
Would you mind coming to the house for dinner?”
Taylor: I remember where he lived. [laughing]
Stenberg/Stone: I met his wife—magnificent gal. I don’t know if you ever met her.
Taylor: He had a son named Zacharay, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: She was a terrific human being. Anyway, I left there with a job. The very first day I
met him, we spent six hours together he says, “I want you to come to work for me and help me put
together the Student Services program.” I had taken a job at Hawaii Pacific College because I had gone
over there to consult with them. They had learned that I was community-minded and they offered me a
job as director of their cooperative education program. The guy’s name was George Wormer, who had
been the Vice President at Boston University for years.
I was to get one year of free residence in a really nice place in Hawaii, a car, and two gas credit
cards so I could travel around and set up business internships for students. I was wired for Evergreen. I
was just simply wired for it. The other thing is my wife—we had two very young children—had a
housemaid that came in three times a week to do housework. The benefits were amazing. I had to call
him—he didn’t believe it—and say, “Sorry, I’m going to work at Evergreen.”
Taylor: How old were you when you came to Evergreen?
Stenberg/Stone: I would have been . . .
Taylor: . . . about 30?
Stenberg/Stone: No, I was 25 or 26. I think I was 26.
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Taylor: Because it’s funny that I was hired by Joe Shoben, too, and he told me, “I don’t know what job
you’ll have. I just want you to come.”
Stenberg/Stone: He was like that.
Taylor: It sounds like he did the same for you. “I don’t know what job, because I don’t know what the
Student Service picture is going to look like.” But you’re going to be one, and Larry is going to be one,
and then there was . . .
Stenberg/Stone: Pete Steilberg.
Taylor: And Dave Brown.
Stenberg/Stone: Dave Brown. He was not a good choice.
Taylor: He was not a good choice and he knew it, and he quit.
Stenberg/Stone: But the first Registrar . . .
Taylor: Perrine Smith?
Stenberg/Stone: . . . he was a terrific man. I loved him.
Taylor: Yeah, and he was there for a long time. He was replaced by Walker Allen.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes. He was another one who just simply did not fit with the college. [laughing]
Taylor: But there were lots of interesting hires that first year. So, you arrived in 1970, I assume?
Stenberg/Stone: Correct.
Taylor: That same year I did..
Stenberg/Stone: The planning year. I was there darn near the whole planning year.
Taylor: What are the stories that you wanted to start with about the planning year?
Stenberg/Stone: First of all—I have several things for you—one of the things people don’t know is at
lunchtime, the planning faculty invited me to their meetings. They immediately adopted me and
wanted me to be a faculty member, and I said, “No, I’ve been hired to do this. I’ve always wanted to
work with students in this capacity. I did it at UPS, and this is what I want to do.”
At halftime, the faculty would play football. Really! The wilderness area was surrounding those
trailers and they’d play football, or they’d light up their pipes and walk around in the woods getting
high. [laughing] The reality of it was a lot of planning went on with guys who were pretty high when
they were doing it.
Taylor: Do you remember when Willi Unsoeld had everybody knitting?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah. Then they asked me to set up the retreat out at . . .
Taylor: . . . Pack Forest?
Stenberg/Stone: Out at the park.
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Taylor: Oh, Millersylvania.
Stenberg/Stone: Millersylvania. They asked me to set that up. We went out—everybody—
Taylor: I remember that one well.
Stenberg/Stone: I said, “I won’t do this unless all the Business people come, everybody comes.” We
cemented that weekend. It was a very important thing.
Taylor: Yeah, I remember that that’s when the geoduck was named the mascot.
Stenberg/Stone: Al Wiedemann.
Taylor: Yeah, and I think that’s probably when Malcolm Stilson came up with the song.
Stenberg/Stone: It was. That’s the first place we ever sang it—Richard Brian, Dave Hitchens, and me.
Taylor: Yeah, I remember.
Stenberg/Stone: Teske, Cadwallader and Hump. In fact, I can still remember my line. My line was, “I
am the Dean of the Social life, a master of revelry. For students who can entertain, we have the PhD.”
[laughter]
Taylor: Oh, I remember it so well! And there are some pictures of that.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh god. He did so many live plays that I loved. One of them was—I was telling the
folks up north—called “Sir Lunch-a Lot.” I was Sir Lunch-a-Lot. I had a cardboard crown that had spires
on it, and a bathrobe. That was my attire. Finally, in the dialog, I’m talking to Charlie McCann and I said,
“You’ve got to do something about this.” And in the play, we really threw food at each other. Guys and
gals would have food hanging—we had a food fight as a part of it. Malcolm insisted on that.
Finally, it wasn’t me, it was someone else, one of the gals that was in the play, turned to Charlie
and said, “Charlie, you’ve got to stop this. Somebody’s going to get hurt. Somebody’s going to slip and
fall. Then you’re going to be in trouble and we’re going to get sued.” She went on and on. The gal next
to her said, “Yes.” Guess what? Then we broke into the song that we’d already created: “If anybody
can, McCann can.” [laughing]
Taylor: Oh, yes, I remember that. I don’t know whether she was your secretary, or she was David
Brown’s secretary, but do you remember somebody named Mabel Whitney?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: She might have been the one who was singing that part. There was Susie Kent. She was your
secretary, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. We had fun. We really did have fun.
Taylor: We did have fun.
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Stenberg/Stone: We celebrated being there. Most of the people—certainly all those in plays—Business
Office people, Custodial staff people, the guy who didn’t want his gender known who had the wings.
Taylor: I don’t remember that.
Stenberg/Stone: Johnson.
Taylor: Oh, my goodness. I don’t remember that. The only thing I remember was the computer guy
who had twin boys.
Stenberg/Stone: Richard Johnson. He was around real early on, but he emerged about Super Saturday
time, about ’75.
Taylor: We need to talk about Super Saturday eventually, but what do you remember besides we were
having a lot of fun? We really did have a lot of fun. I, too, felt like the split between faculty and staff
didn’t matter. We were included in everything as members of the staff.
Stenberg/Stone: That’s not really quite true. Most of the faculty did not like the Business people,
except one, Ken Winkley. Everybody loved Ken Winkley. Do you remember him?
Taylor: I do.
Stenberg/Stone: He was a sweetheart. He had five children and his wife was a rock.
Taylor: He was there for a very, very long time. There was tension with Dean Clabaugh, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I remember a Gail Martin story that’s hysterical. It wasn’t Kate
. . . Julie . . . just a minute . . . anyway, beautiful young woman. Clabaugh entered and immediately
started hustling her. “Do you want to go for a walk in the woods? Do you want to”—he kept trying to
get her to go with him right then. She said, “You’re a lech. I’m not going with you anywhere. You just
salivate over women. Get the hell out of here.”
She refused him, so he’s kind of walking away, heading toward the elevator. Remember, our
area was open for a long time. I designed that intentionally. Anyhow—Julie Grant was her name—Julie
Grant said to Gail, who was doing Career Planning and Placement by that point, “I shouldn’t have been
quite that harsh.” Gail looks at her and says, “Don’t worry. He won’t hustle another woman until he
gets on that elevator.” [laughter] There were things like that that went on.
The other thing, it happened because of our children. The planning faculty and staff and a lot of
our first-year employees of the college, even some of the Business Office people—my son and daughter,
who were in elementary school at the time, literally fought their way home. People hated the Greeners.
They thought we were going to become a Communist Party and dippie hippies.
Taylor: You mean in school?
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Stenberg/Stone: Remember, every year for the first 10 years, they introduced some kind of legislation
to change the college.
Taylor: Yes, make it a police academy.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, that was the first year. Toward the end, they realized that there was a college
around that wasn’t going to go away. They wanted to convert it to a branch of WSU. That was even
introduced. All that happened.
But the thing that I take pride in—and I was primarily responsible for this, and I have consulted,
even up until four months ago, I went to a school down in the Arcadia area—we employed students in
the Women’s Center, in the Health Center, Admissions. The only person who resisted it was Walker
Allen. He didn’t want to hire any students to touch his records. He had, for lack of a better word, he
had a hard-on about that. He was impossible. I never was able to work with him, but Judy Huntley, who
worked for him, his secretary, she loved me, and she protected me a lot. She would come over and say,
“You can come over and talk to the staff now because Walker’s going to be gone. We want you to come
over here.” [laughing]
Taylor: That was three or four years in. That wasn’t—
Stenberg/Stone: Then he went down to Texas, which fit him perfect, and had the same job. I think part
of it was—I tried to talk to him about it once—was that one bad arm he had. I think he always had some
kind of thing going on about missing an arm. Anyway, we started a Daycare Center.
Taylor: I was going to ask you about that because I remember—
Stenberg/Stone: It was in that little house that was out right on the bay.
Taylor: That was very early. That was for the first students.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, we opened the first day of the college, and we had at least 20 kids. It was an
instant success. I really take pride in that.
The other thing that we did that was very unusual was the gal who started daycare—Cecelia . . .
her name became Bunyan . . . but Peter Pugh was the guy’s name that I hired, and we got him certified
to drive a van with multiple passengers. Because one of the very first things I did was go down to talk
with the people at the bus terminal and the director of the bus service. They just laughed at us. They
said, “No, we’re not going to come out that far. We’re just not going to do that.”
We developed our own system where we would run the bus from 4:00 in the afternoon till
11:00 at night six days a week. We didn’t do it on Sunday. We set up our own transit system that was
student-operated. We got so successful at it that in 1975, the new bus director came to us and said,
“We want to start bus service tomorrow.”
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Taylor: It was crazy that there wasn’t bus service.
Stenberg/Stone: It would have never happened if we—they saw us becoming so reliable, and made
such a profit—we operated on tips. Students didn’t have to pay going either way. Rumor got out that
we were making a thousand bucks a month on tips!
Taylor: And you just had a van.
Stenberg/Stone: The bus guy says, “Hmm. We’re losing a lot of money here.” [laughing] Those were
the two things that I remember well.
We had Health Services the day we opened. We had probably 40 or 50 students working in staff
capacities. We became a model for schools all over America. Literally. I’m trying to think.
Then we developed a concept where students would need to interact with each other, because
we had Health Services, we had Admissions, we had Career Planning and Placement, Veterans’ Affairs,
Student Activities. We had Academic Advising and we had started that program of rotating faculty into
it. In fact, Larry remembers that fondly. He ended up doing it two times.
Taylor: Larry Eickstaedt?
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
Taylor: I never did that.
Stenberg/Stone: He said that was one of the best experiences he had at Evergreen.
Taylor: Russ Fox talked about that, too.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes. Caroline Dobbs spent a year.
Taylor: We did the same thing. We rotated into the Library. I did that once.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
Taylor: What about sports? Were you part of anything to do with sports? Was that under your
umbrella? Stenberg/Stone: I was never interested in setting up an intercollegiate—we had rugby and
all kinds of sports that were club sports.
Taylor: Yeah, but you were responsible for that, do you think?
Stenberg/Stone: Club sports? No, that was Pete Steilberg.
Taylor: Oh, that was Pete Steilberg.
Stenberg/Stone: Pete Steilberg was another made-for-Evergreen guy. He climbed Mount Everest. He
was in charge of what was basically in Canada a VISTA program for students. He was the middleweight
boxing amateur champion in Canada. The guy could do anything in sports. He was a great pool player.
Taylor: How did the college find him?
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Stenberg/Stone: I was involved in that. He got interested in Evergreen and came down. I went to Joe
Shulman, because he was still doing the hiring, but by the end of the first year, I did all the hiring in my
division, every bit of it. I said to Joe, “You’ve got to hire this guy. Do you want to meet him?” He said, “I
don’t need to.” I said, “No, I really want you to.” He talked to Pete for maybe a half an hour, came out
of his office and he said, “You’re right. I just hired him.”
Taylor: How long was Pete there? He was there a long time, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh god, he was there until I left. He was still there in ’93.
Taylor: You left when?
Stenberg/Stone: I left in ’93.
Taylor: You were there 23 years.
Stenberg/Stone: But my last five, six years were a little bit of a torment for me, except I liked parts of it.
I liked working with ECCO. Remember ECCO?
Taylor: Oh, yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: There were some leaders in ECCO who were fantastic and just bled for Evergreen.
Taylor: Did you have something to do with starting that?
Stenberg/Stone: Yes, I did. Not only that, but I was their liaison. I went to all their meetings and ran
workshops for them when they trained. You had to go through a training to get involved in ECCO. You
couldn’t just say, “I want to volunteer.” You had to actually be trained?
Taylor: What was their mission?
Stenberg/Stone: We just went through the mission statement of the college. I’d walk them through it.
Like our first year of orientation for our first group of 1,100 students, they all had to go through an entry
and an orientation. Every one of them had to sign a document saying, “I support these philosophical
approaches.”
Taylor: They had to support the Social Contract.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, they had to sign the Social Contract. Faculty even had to do that. But I think
theirs was put together, again, mostly by Joe. Dave Barry had nothing to do with that. And the deans.
Merv was into that big.
Taylor: So was Don Humphrey, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. Dave Hitchens was into it bigtime, too. Those probably were the three guys.
Taylor: Because I remember Don Humphrey was in charge of something called Committee on
Government, the COG documents.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
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Taylor: And all of that business about—
Stenberg/Stone: He was not liked by his colleagues. Very much. They knew that he was abusing his
wife is one of the things that was going on.
Taylor: I never knew that.
Stenberg/Stone: He was overly aggressive with her. I don’t know that he abused her, but he didn’t like
her. The faculty had an affection for each other, even some of them who were a little too pompous.
There were a couple of faculty who were pretty pompous.
Taylor: Yes.
Stenberg/Stone: Our mountain climber, Willi Unsoeld, whose daughter died on the mountain. They
embraced him, but they didn’t invite him very much to parties. [laughing] And his wife became one of
the strongest advocates for the National Rifle Association. There’s some interesting dynamics that are
attached to the place.
Taylor: Yes.
Stenberg/Stone: But the beauty of it now is we have totally integrated the State government.
Taylor: Into the community.
Stenberg/Stone: It didn’t take very long. About the seventh or eighth year, when we started some of
the master’s work, there were people coming to campus.
Taylor: What do you think it was that was special about it as an educational institution that you think
we contributed, and that we might be losing now, I don’t know.
Stenberg/Stone: It’s become more traditional, and there’s a faculty union, and there’s tenure. Those
things were never meant to be as far as the original faculty was concerned, so it’s become more
traditional. A lot more.
Taylor: What do you think was key to its not only success, but its values and its ambience, what we did.
What were the most important things?
Stenberg/Stone: I think we knew right away that—even, like I said earlier, through our kids—we had to
lock arms, and that we needed to protect our goals. There was a blessing almost in the city not
accepting and embracing us. We really had to rely on each other.
Taylor: We did, I think. But what were the things that we valued so much that would make us—
Stenberg/Stone: I think I mentioned almost all of them. We knew on some level that there was value in
finding a way to embrace the community; that we needed to find ways to reach out and close that gap.
That’s when I think it started to really turn.
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Taylor: With the community or with the students? Because I think it was the community of students
that—
Stenberg/Stone: They influenced it.
Taylor: Yeah, there was something about the way students learned and the way students—
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. One of the things—again, I was involved in it—that turned the city around,
because they spent weekends and nights constantly downtown when there were a lot of people around,
and go to the Art Walks and all that—was the Pub. The Pub became the center of the hangout for kids.
I was so proud of that.
Taylor: When did that happen?
Stenberg/Stone: I owned it in 1988 to 1993.
Taylor: It took a long time, though, to get that center. That’s 18 years in.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: I always thought there was—
Stenberg/Stone: Super Saturday had already done a lot for us. It really did do a lot.
Taylor: Tell the story of Super Saturday. When did it start, and what inspired you?
Stenberg/Stone: I have finally proven to Nancy and Ryan, her student. They’d originally said to me that
the first Super Saturday was in ’79. I said, “Not even close. It was way earlier than that.”
I found the very first poster that had the puffy clouds and the Super Saturday logo basically, and
it was on the third of the month, but it didn’t have the year. We didn’t put the year on the posters for
years, we just put the date. Anyway, that was hand-done, all the lettering and everything. You’ll have
to get a picture of it. It’s very simple and it says, “Food, entertainment, dance, hands-on.” Wyatt Cates
did the first one.
Taylor: Who helped you? Who gave you support?
Stenberg/Stone: Judy McNickle.
Taylor: It was your idea?
Stenberg/Stone: We both came up with it together. I think it emerged as we talked.
Taylor: It was because we needed to merge with the community?
Stenberg/Stone: We knew we had to embrace the community, and we had to bring them out and show
them that we could be hospitable.
Taylor: The first one I can think of—and I know I can date it back—was the third year of the college,
1973. There was something that was like Super Saturday.
Stenberg/Stone: No, our first Super Saturday was ’75.
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Taylor: Okay, because I can remember an academic program, and we put on an art show, and it was
part of Super Saturday.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
Taylor: I thought it was ’73, but maybe it was the program of ’75.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: Because at that time, student presentations and things were all a part of Super Saturday, so the
whole campus was open.
Stenberg/Stone: It was an ingenious idea. I would do Super Saturday exactly the same. Judy and I said,
“What we need to do here is we need to have a built-in audience at our first one.” Our very first year,
we had about 3,000, which was more than we expected, but we planned it intentionally the night before
graduation, so parents would come. We promoted it among students, gave them fliers and pamphlets
and said, “Invite your family to come and celebrate with you, and then be there the next day for your
graduation.”
Taylor: It was perfect.
Stenberg/Stone: It was smart as hell, one of the smarter things I’ve ever done. [laughing] So, we did
that. We had about 3,000 people. It was an instant success. By the third year, we had between 35,000
and 40,000 people every year until they stopped doing it. I’ll tell you when I think that was in a minute.
We became the darlings. It changed our total image in the community. And the fun part of it,
the fun story, Safeway, Bayview, the one up on the hill . . .
Taylor: It used to be called Top Foods.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes, they would ask me about three or four months before Super Saturday what the
date was. Finally, I thought, why do they want to know? And Safeway ended up telling me. They said,
“We need to know because we cut our staff in half on that day because the entire town goes out to the
college. It’s a waste of money for us to—they literally cut their staffs in half. [laughing]
Taylor: But it stopped being a celebration of the academic college at some point and just became a
gigantic fair, kind of a festival, and at that point, it had very little to do with the college.
Stenberg/Stone: What? Super Saturday?
Taylor: Yes, at the very end. I think it took so much work and so much volunteering from the staff and
from everybody at the college to make it happen, and I think people just said they couldn’t do it
anymore, and they couldn’t clean up for graduation.
Stenberg/Stone: That was an excuse. Sorry.
Taylor: What was the real reason?
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Stenberg/Stone: The real reason was the President at the time—Les Purce, I think it was—said, “We are
now being required by the State to have a festival insurance policy.” It was going to cost almost $45,000
for one day because of the number of people we were going to have on campus. Within a year, it was
gone.
Taylor: I never heard that. That’s interesting.
Stenberg/Stone: That would have been mid-to-late ‘90s.
Taylor: Purce wasn’t there then, was he? Was he there that long ago?
Stenberg/Stone: No, I’m sorry. It was 2009.
Taylor: Yes, that makes more sense.
Stenberg/Stone: But it had become very formal by then, and it had changed.
Taylor: Yes, it had changed. At some point, I stopped going because it wasn’t what I celebrated.
Stenberg/Stone: They’re hoping to get it started again.
Taylor: Are they? That’s good.
Stenberg/Stone: There have been five or six feeble attempts to do it. It started about 10 or 15 years
ago when my daughter came back from New York, she made contact with a lot of her Greener kids, the
kids that were fighting their way home from school. Richard Nesbitt’s daughter was a Greener.
Taylor: Mara? yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes. Anyway, she had all kinds of connections, and almost every one of them said, “I
keep running into people who want Super Saturday back, and who want to create Super Saturday
again.” I did meet with a couple different groups around that. One of them was—I think he was still at
the college at the time, or somehow was just in town—was Michael Huntsberger.
Taylor: Oh, yeah. I remember him.
Stenberg/Stone: From the radio station. And Karen, who were died-in-the-wool Greeners. He got
involved with me some. I think I tried to track down Judy McNickle, but I wasn’t successful.
Taylor: Didn’t she move to Bellingham?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, she had moved somewhere north. I know it was north.
Taylor: I think she moved to Bellingham.
Stenberg/Stone: Rumor was she was in Canada, but it may have been Bellingham.
Taylor: I think she was in Bellingham for a while.
Stenberg/Stone: Because she always—even though she didn’t teach—loved education.
Taylor: The other guy was the PR guy from the very beginning, Dick Nichols.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
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Taylor: He was pretty good, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. A lot of people didn’t know about him. He was the sportscaster for all the high
school football and basketball games, so he was very well known in the community.
Taylor: And he was kind of the connection with The Daily Zero is what they called it.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah, he did. The other one who actually had even more involvement was
somebody I love to this day—I haven’t seen him this time down, but I saw him two years ago—Keith
Eisner.
Taylor: Oh, I haven’t thought about him for a long time.
Stenberg/Stone: He had a closer relationship with the paper than Dick Nichols. Much, much closer,
because that was his assignment.
Taylor: We had some troubles with the newspaper in the way they presented the college.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh god yes.
Taylor: The first day we were going to open, they were going to close us down.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah. But the two most significant things that I think happened to the college,
one was internal and the other one was . . . but what happened with the community was Super
Saturday. The internal one was—Malcolm Stilson even wrote a play about it, and it had a song in it
about “Oh, lord, why is there so much elephant-ankle gray and not enough ivy?”
Taylor: That was Wintergreen?
Stenberg/Stone: The guy who designed the college built buildings that were exactly the opposite of
nature.
Taylor: Yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: Green River Community College, you can’t find it because it blends in with nature. We
did the opposite. He left a permanent mark on the college.
Taylor: Jerry Schillinger.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: It was going to be an urban center in a rural environment or something.
Stenberg/Stone: Ugh. But the irony of him, he was so anti-Evergreen, and yet, he is the person who
forever will be the most lasting influence on the environment of the college. Isn’t that odd?
Taylor: It is.
Stenberg/Stone: He had a henchman, though, a bigger guy, 6’4”, 6’5”. I can’t remember his name. For
some reason, he decided he really, really liked me. He was local theater. He protected Schillinger, but
he didn’t like him. [laughter] He drove the truck with the bales of hay up and down the parkway. Super
13
Saturday, people walked five miles. He was the one who came up with the idea. He ran that with a
tractor. People could hop on and hop off. He ran that thing for, oh, god, he’d let people get off and pick
lupin; we had that trail of lupin that came up through that little creek for years and years. It was so
beautifully colorful.
Taylor: It was the casualness and the no rules and the sort of informality of the place that couldn’t
survive, I guess, as it’s grown up.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: We miss all those things. You talk about the way you designed the Student Services area. It was
very welcoming. It was open. There were students around.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, that was a great move.
Taylor: Now they’ve set it up so that they’re all separated.
Stenberg/Stone: Now it’s all cubicles. They ruined it.
Taylor: It’s cubicles, it’s hospital green. I couldn’t believe it when I went down there. You have to go
through three barricades before you can talk to anybody. There’re no students at all, and then they
have all these admissions advisors who are in a closet, in a little cubicle. The atmosphere has changed.
Stenberg/Stone: And there wouldn’t be a Keith Eisner there now. You know why? God, I just love that
guy. In the mornings, a lot of times he’d come upstairs. I got moved upstairs eventually, where they
had the Personnel Office. I was in there for a while.
Taylor: I can’t remember that. I remember when you were downstairs.
Stenberg/Stone: I remember I insisted on moving back down, but I was upstairs for a while. In the
morning, he’d come walking down the hall toward the President’s Office. His office was literally next
door to Rita, who ran the college.
Taylor: Rita. Rita Grace. Later Rita Quackenbush, then Rita Sevcik.
Stenberg/Stone: I had an award made for her that I gave her the week I left. It was called “Evergreen
Ms. Evergreen’s Glue.” [laughing] She was a person who carried that place through a couple of
Presidents who didn’t belong there.
Taylor: She was with every President until up to Les Purce. She was hired before I was.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah, she was one of the real early employees.
Taylor: Really, really early.
Stenberg/Stone: In fact, she was one of Clabaugh’s hires.
Taylor: Maybe.
Stenberg/Stone: No, she was.
14
Taylor: Because I was hired in April, before the planning year started the next September. You must
have been hired about that same time.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: Rita was already there, because Rita was in the mink ranch building where Charlie McCann’s
office was, that blue metal building by the trailers. That’s where Rita was.
Stenberg/Stone: I started late July or early August, right in there.
Taylor: Yeah, we came exactly at the same time.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, I think so.
Taylor: I don’t know if you were at the meeting where we decided what the admissions criteria was
going to be.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: It was the faculty, I think you were there, Charlie was there. It was the decision about who was
going to come. Those decisions were made about that time, August-September, at the beginning of the
planning year.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. A lot was resolved pretty early. Let’s put it this way. The sequence of what
needed to happen. The faculty was really good about that.
Taylor: It’s just that what they were going to do took a while. I remember when I was out recruiting,
when I was out talking about the college with students, you had to go a lot on faith.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: And everybody described what they thought was going to happen, but nobody knew. The
catalog just said, “Welcome to a place that’s changing.” Because we didn’t know what we were doing.
[laughing]
Stenberg/Stone: We were an instant resident campus. Instant. The reason we were is because there
were a lot of students who discovered us through things like they would look through the Chronicle of
Higher Education, or these kids that were really—we had a bright bunch of kids that came here right off
the bat—or they were attending private schools in the East.
Taylor: Yep.
Stenberg/Stone: We had 300 or 400 kids of our 1,100 that came from private schools.
Taylor: We often laughed about the biggest compliment of students the first year were faculty brats.
They were the sons and daughters of faculty members from all over the country because the parents
heard about it. My husband told me once that the first time he ever heard of Evergreen—he was
teaching at the University of Washington—was somebody that he knew as a professional historian in
15
some Eastern college called up and said, “What’s this new college? My son is thinking of going there.”
That’s the first Fritz ever heard about Evergreen. There were a lot of kids like that.
I don’t know if you remember—you probably had lots to do with it—that first group of students,
there was no place for them to live because the dorms weren’t open yet.
Stenberg/Stone: We opened up about a month into the college year. It wasn’t long.
Taylor: It wasn’t too long, but—
Stenberg/Stone: But everybody went on retreat. It cemented the programs.
Taylor: We went on retreats, and we had to house our students somehow. In my program, we went
over to the Blue Mountains in Walla Walla and then we came back, and we had class in the Legislative
Building, in the middle of the capital campus. But I think it was like November before they moved in.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, it was not long. Maybe a little before that.
Taylor: For a while, we had our students living in the Villa Capri, that apartment house.
Stenberg/Stone: The two biggest tragedies of my being there were two people. You might remember
both of them. One was Donna Matson, who found her way to the top floor in the resident hall, the
tenth floor. Went off the top of the building and shortened her body six inches. She died instantly. She
had just read Bell Jar.
Taylor: Oh, my goodness.
Stenberg/Stone: Which is exactly the book not to read. She was from Texas. Her family had sent her
up here, as it turns out. I had to make all the contacts after that because they thought she might stop
her suicidal instincts. They basically got rid of her, and she went off the top of the building and died
instantly. The very first thing we had to do was have Head Residents counseling the students. Kids got
spooked about this. We ended up figuring out how to cut off any access to the roof.
Taylor: They want to tear that building down, you know?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: That was never a success.
Stenberg/Stone: Then the other one, you’ll probably remember, was one of the most beautiful young
people I’ve ever seen who also was brilliant and treated everybody kindly. She started befriending a guy
that nobody else would hardly even talk to who was a gun-for-hire. He was a mercenary. He had been
all over Europe and stuff. He was about, oh, maybe five to eight years older. He was probably in his late
twenties. Elisa Tissot. Do you remember Elisa Tissot? He walked in to—
Taylor: He was a student?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
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Taylor: No.
Stenberg/Stone: He walked into the Student Center, emptied six bullets into her. Killed her instantly.
Taylor: Tissot was the one that dies?
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
Taylor: Oh, I remember. It was in the cafeteria.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah, and I had to deal with that. That’s the only migraine headache I’ve ever had
in my life. I went back, had to get ahold of police, the families, the friends. She was loved on campus.
Adored.
Taylor: That was about eight years in or something. That must have been about ’78 or ’80.
Stenberg/Stone: No, it was 1984.
Taylor: I know it happened in the cafeteria, in the CAB Building.
Stenberg/Stone: It did. Those are the two things that I wish I couldn’t remember, especially her.
Nobody had really interacted with Donna Matson. Most people don’t even know that there was a death
that year.
Taylor: I don’t actually remember.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, it was before we started the first year. She came up early.
Taylor: Oh, my goodness, so right at the very, very beginning.
Stenberg/Stone: Mm-hm.
Taylor: One of the horrible things I remember the first year is a student in the program that I was
teaching was raped on the trail walking from the dorms to the campus. You remember where I lived?
Pretty close by?
Stenberg/Stone: Right.
Taylor: I got a knock on the door at 1:00 in the morning and it was this student, who was absolutely
distraught. She had walked from the college to my house.
Stenberg/Stone: Wow.
Taylor: That was the worst encounter I ever had. After that, they put lights up going between the
library and the dorms. I’m sure there were more cases. She was from New York. She now lives in
Seattle. I’ve stayed in touch with her for 50 years.
Stenberg/Stone: There are a lot of kids, even in private schools, particularly in certain parts of the
country—very true in Hawaii, when we started drawing students from Hawaii, we started drawing large
numbers.
17
In fact, I was the advisor for the gay men’s group. In fact, that’s another interesting story is
Parsons’s story about the well-known faculty member at the University of Washington who was gay.
What was his name?
Taylor: Carl Solberg I think was his name.
Stenberg/Stone: I would remember. No, it’s somebody—but Willie Parsons went public and said, “We
should not have anybody gay on our faculty.” Willie Parsons did that. Then, I was the adjudicator and
mediator for the college board for . . . what did we call that?
Taylor: Wasn’t it called the Sounding Board? It was something else, I remember. Yes.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, and in 20 years, I never had a case to go to it. Not one, except the Willie Parsons
one. Oh, no, there was one other, and it happened the first year. God bless Rudy Martin. [laughing] I
had called a meeting because the security—remember Max Smith?
Taylor: Oh, yeah, I do remember Max Smith.
Stenberg/Stone: I hired him. I’ll stop a minute. Ninety percent of my hires for directors of my 15
divisions for my entire time there were women or Third World.
Taylor: People of color.
Stenberg/Stone: I set an example for the whole campus for diversity. We were a very diverse group.
[laughing]
Taylor: But we didn’t start out that way. You contributed.
Stenberg/Stone: No, but it happened pretty fast.
Taylor: It did happen pretty fast, but both with women and—I remember Rudy Martin said, “If we don’t
teach this program on contemporary American minorities, I’m leaving. I’m quitting.” It was a tough sell.
For women, there were no women on the planning faculty at all. There were eight women hired the
first year.
Stenberg/Stone: There are only three left of the originals. Did you know that?
Taylor: Richard Brian, Bill Aldrich, and Larry Eickstaedt.
Stenberg/Stone: Yep, of the planning year. But I do have a question for you around that. Anyway, Max
Smith? said, “We caught, at 4:00 in the morning, students who had jacked up a car in the resident
parking lot and were taking off the wheels.” They were going to steel the wheels, rims and all. And they
happened to be black. There were three of them.
So, Max didn’t arrest them, but he knew who they were. He came and told me, and I called a
Sounding Board together. I wasn’t going to let them get away with it.
Taylor: What happened to them?
18
Stenberg/Stone: They came into the room and I said, “I’m not going to assume anything. We’re going
to be objective here.” I had four or five faculty members because they were on the side of the students
already. Most people who came in were already supportive of the students. There were two or three
women in there. I had Dale come in because I knew she would be very objective. Wendy Shaw, I knew
she would be objective.
Anyway, so they tell their story. Didn’t leave anything out. They’re giggling and looking around
the room and saying, “What are you going to do about it?” I looked at them and I said, “You know
something? My interpretation”—not ‘you are’—“of what you’re saying is that it’s a total stupid lie.” It
became totally quiet in the room. Rudy looks at me, looks at the students, and said, “Do you really think
we’re going to believe your bullshit?” He cut if off right at the core. [laughing]
Taylor: Whatever happened?
Stenberg/Stone: They admitted they did it. I put them on probation.
Taylor: That was the end of it?
Stenberg/Stone: That was the end of it. But Rudy Martin all but saved my life. Those kids, they were
home free because Rudy was in the room. It totally backfired on them.
Taylor: For a long, long time, we didn’t have very many students of color, and we tried to say we did
because we included Tacoma. That was a joke. It was not true that we—
Stenberg/Stone: We started with Arnaldo Rodriguez and Doug Scrima. We just started an all-out
campaign to get a diverse student body.
Taylor: We did, but Olympia was not a very welcoming place.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: And there wasn’t a critical mass of—and the college, I think, has changed, or had to change, to
be more welcoming for students. I remember so clearly—this was much later, the end of the ‘80s, I
think—when we decided to have a basketball team.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: You were there then. They recruited all these basketball players from California, and it had
absolutely nothing to do with education, it all had to do with they wanted to come and play basketball.
They didn’t know what they were getting into at all.
Stenberg/Stone: But most of them stayed.
Taylor: Most of them did stay. I’m still in touch with one of them.
Stenberg/Stone: That’s my hat. I wore that just for you.
Taylor: I remember that hat.
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Stenberg/Stone: It was given to me by the Costume Shop on campus. They ordered it from New York.
They gave it to me at the second Super Saturday in 1976. I wore it every year after that.
Taylor: I just remember your Halloween party. I don’t know why. October the first year, that’s when I
first I really got to know you. It was at the Halloween party of the planning year.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: Merv came dressed up like a chicken, and I came dressed up like a farmer. You lived out on
Cooper Point Road.
Stenberg/Stone: We threw glasses into the fireplace.
Taylor: Yeah, we did that with Beryl Crowe, remember?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: And Sid White. That was very comic.
Stenberg/Stone: I had a lot of parties in the house.
Taylor: Yeah, you had a lot of parties at the house.
Stenberg/Stone: You’ve been to my house a lot. It was just convenient for people.
Taylor: We lived and breathed the college.
Stenberg/Stone: Most people lived somewhere within a 10-mile radius of the college.
Taylor: Some didn’t, but we were together. That’s what we did.
Stenberg/Stone: Is Oscar Soule still around?
Taylor: Oh, yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: And Barbara?
Taylor: Yeah, they still live in the same house, I think.
Stenberg/Stone: I’m going to have to get phone numbers for them.
Taylor: They’re still living. And Sandie Nisbet is around.
Stenberg/Stone: Did you hear the story about her? Larry Eickstaedt invited to his 75th birthday a few
years ago Bill Aldridge and Sandie and Richard Brian. A lot of the third-, fourth-, fifth-year faculty. I
guess they’re still around.
Taylor: Yeah, there are some.
Stenberg/Stone: Some of them were really quite young when they came, so they’re probably still here.
But anyway, where was I going with that?
Taylor: Larry had a party and invited Sandie.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah. At that party, Bill Aldridge and Sandie hooked up. They’re now a thing.
Taylor: They’re now a thing. I know that.
20
Stenberg/Stone: Did you know that?
Taylor: I did know that, and Sandie has laughed about it.
Stenberg/Stone: You know most of the rumors. [laughing]
Taylor: That’s not a rumor, that’s real. He’s now called William. He’s not Bill anymore, he’s William.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, god, I thought he’d never change his name.
Taylor: Sandie described what she remembers of Bill in the 1970s and she says, “Now we spend three
or four days together a week.”
Stenberg/Stone: I remember I was getting on at Evergreen. It was, I’d say, mid-to-late ‘80s, and I had
started my different job after I came back from my one-year leave. I took a one-year leave when my
kids went off on their own. I remember coming back from that and going to work as the Director of
Community Relations, which I did then for the rest of my career there. I liked ECCO, as I told you. There
were some parts of it that I really enjoyed. But it was boring. It got boring to me. I wanted to work with
students again. Almost every faculty member said, “We want you back with the students.” I was
considered a faculty member by the faculty. Always.
Taylor: Yeah, you were not external, you were an internal person. You were associated with the
students. That’s what I always think of you as.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah.
Taylor: Your role was Head of Student Services—whatever that’s called—but all of that worked directly
with students. It was your world.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. I could decide whether I was going to be a mediator or an arbitrator. The only
time I was ever an arbitrator was—they can go unnamed—with one staff member, who was the Director
of Counseling for a short time, Asian guy, and I put him on probation, and then I decided, no, I’m going
to fire him. “You’ve got two weeks to leave.” I fired him. And he never took it to court because he
would have been baked there. He was mis-touching the young women that would come in to see him.
Taylor: Whoops.
Stenberg/Stone: George Fong?
Taylor: Oh, I remember, yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: He walked over the line. The other one was Dr. Peterson in Health Services, only in his
case, he was trying to talk gals into spending time with him. I put him on probation and he left. I didn’t
fire him. He left in about three or four months.
Taylor: Then there was Dumi Maraire, the faculty member, that drummer.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
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Taylor: I think Byron Youtz fired him—flat out—for the same. He was the one that loaned his car to a
student, and when the student brought the car back, he said, “You owe me.”
Stenberg/Stone: Wow.
Taylor: That was the end of that. There was all kinds of hanky-panky going on.
Stenberg/Stone: One of the first hires, for me—I don’t know if you ever met her—was gentle,
stunningly beautiful, and the sweetest person that was hired. Edwina Dorsey. Do you remember her?
Taylor: Oh, yeah, I do. I don’t remember very much about her.
Stenberg/Stone: She was a sweetheart, but Joe had me—the first Health Services Office was down on
the loading dock because he wanted to be close to emergency vehicles. [laughing] That lasted about
four months and I said, “Joe, I’ve got a concept I want to establish. I want to move Health Services up
right by my area.” He said, “Okay, that’s a good idea.” But she started out on the loading dock. She’d
come to work on days that were like Labor Day, and she’d be the only one on campus. [laughing]
Taylor: Did you establish a Counseling Center?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: Not academic.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, no. Richard Rowan was one of the people who ran it. Smitty—Le Roi Smith. The
only one who got away with it who refused to call him by a Cajun name—he wasn’t Cajun—Rudy Martin
would call him “Leroy.” [laughter] “His name isn’t Le Roi, his name is Leroy.” [laughter]
Yeah, I established a Counseling Office. We had a bit of a turnover there. The Academic
Advising Office, as I mentioned, was rotation of faculty, which was really smart to do. A lot of those
people went back out into teaching and said, “That was my best experience to understand what
students have to go through to adjust to being here.” Especially the homesick part of it. You get to be
18, 19, you’ve lived your whole life in South Carolina, you’ve got to be homesick at some point.
[laughing]
Let me show you some of what I’ve got in here. I have a couple things for you to have. There’s
a lot of stuff in here that does not involve you. I think when I talked to you once, you were interested in
maybe seeing some of my own art, which I’ve got in here to show you. But the first thing is I’ve been
saving this and saving this for you, if you want.
Taylor: Oh, my goodness. Isn’t that fantastic? 1990—isn’t that fantastic?
Stenberg/Stone: It would be a nightshirt.
Taylor: No, I’ll take it to the gym. How about that? .
Stenberg/Stone: You’ll enjoy that.
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Taylor: Thank you. Is that for real?
Stenberg/Stone: That’s for you. I’ve been saving that for you. I wanted to show you, I’ve created
countless events since I left here. In fact, while I was here, as you know, I ran the Washington
Centennial Festival for the whole state. Booth Gardner asked me to do that.
I’ll tell you another interesting story. Booth Gardner asked me to do that, and then had his wife
be the contact with me and serve on my committee. She came to all the committee meetings. She was
a Weyerhaeuser, and I had met him. He was a faculty member and became Director of the Business
Department—after he came out of Harvard—at UPS. We’d become good friends—I mean good
friends—at UPS. We’d hang out together, eat together. One of the first things he did when he became
Governor was look me up. He knew where I was because I’d come up and visit him. I loved his wife.
She was a sweetheart, too.
About a month, maybe two months, after I bought the pub and got it open and up and running,
he heard about it. One night about 11:00, there was a knock on the door. We had just closed up. It was
midweek. During the week, we’d close at 11:00. Weekends we’d close at 1:00.
There’s a knock on the door and I peek out the door—knock, knock, knock—and it’s a security
guard. I thought he was local police at first and I opened the door and said, “Anything wrong?’ He says,
“Can I come in a minute? I want to talk to you.” Then I knew he just wanted to tell me something, like
maybe somebody had robbed my place or there was something going on.
He said, “Booth just discovered that you own this pub, and he is a microbrew connoisseur. I
wonder if I could bring him in?” I said, “Oh, yeah, bring him in anytime.” He says, “How about now?”
He had a chauffeur’s car across the street. He chauffeured him around in a limousine. He came in, had
a taster of all eight of my microbrews that were on tap. It was half-lit. He said, “Thank you, Larry, this is
great,” and went out and got in the rig. I said, well, that was nice of him. He did that at least once a
month for the next four or five years. [laughter] He used to send all kinds of people and groups down
to the pub. He created a lot of business for us.
Taylor: Weren’t you a co-owner of that pub? You did it with somebody else?
Stenberg/Stone: Yes. I did it with two other people, Larry Eickstaedt and Joan.
Taylor: I didn’t know Larry was one of them.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, Larry Eickstaedt and Joan. They were one. The other one was a guy by the
name of Roberts, Doug Roberts. He was an Evergreen graduate, a really good poet, who was a master
at crafting and improving sawmills. He traveled all over the world, especially in Japan and some of their
islands where they had lots of trees. He’d help them set up their shop. He was extremely wealthy. He
23
never did have his own sawmill. He just told people how to design them and tell them what they
needed.
Taylor: Whatever happened to him?
Stenberg/Stone: He lives in San Diego now. I just found that out this week.
Taylor: What else have you got in here?
Stenberg/Stone: I’ve got to show you this. This is one of my events that I created, and I drew this.
Taylor: This is the town that you live in now, Silverton, Oregon?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, this is Silverton. I always have a sponsor. Here is the sponsor on the back. We
sell a lot of T-shirts every year. These are posters from there. This is another poster that I did.
Taylor: You’ve been there for 20 years or something, huh?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. That’s still alive. We were voted the best new festival by the Northwest
Conference Association the very first year we did this. It was an instant success. I drew this.
Taylor: I didn’t know you were such a wonderful artist.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, I’ve been a closet artist. I sell a lot of art.
Taylor: Oh, I recognize that.
Stenberg/Stone: By the way, I have something for you.
Taylor: Founding Faculty.
Stenberg/Stone: He was a co-speaker for the graduating class. He was very famous. I can’t remember
his name.
Taylor: Yeah, Tim Girvin.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes! He’s the one who did all that.
Taylor: Yeah, he did. He designed the original Evergreen logo. His mother was a Trustee for a while,
Lila Girvin. I liked her a lot. Look at all this stuff.
Stenberg/Stone: I was certainly involved with . . .
Taylor: You just kept all this.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes.
Taylor: Eventually, when you don’t want it anymore, it should go to the Archives.
Stenberg/Stone: This is the other one that I designed. This is Evergreen promotional stuff.
Taylor: Did you show this to Nancy Koppelman?
Stenberg/Stone: Yes, and it’s like “You can have all of this if you want it. I’ll pull it out of here. I don’t
need anything. I don’t need one thing.”
Taylor: It should go to the Archives, absolutely.
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Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. I designed this.
Taylor: This is in Silverton.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. This was an event that was sponsored by the Pub that was on the state campus
a few years after the Centennial. There’s my pub. There’s the logo.
Taylor: This is fun stuff!
Stenberg/Stone: Home away from home.
Taylor: Once you left Evergreen, did you have another job, or did you retire at that point?
Stenberg/Stone: I’d gone through a painful divorce. I moved to Hawaii, and I was in Hawaii from ’93 to
’97. But here’s a piece I did recently. It’s a picture I took in Hawaii. See these marks? She had the most
interesting, beautiful hair that was not salt and pepper, but the little lines of white and black. I
scratched every single one of these lines in here. Just preparing this took me about eight hours.
Taylor: It’s good.
Stenberg/Stone: This is my second wife.
Taylor: What’s her name?
Stenberg/Stone: Helen.
Taylor: You were done by then.
Stenberg/Stone: Right.
Taylor: Is she still with you?
Stenberg/Stone: And I always had fun with her. She didn’t have any earrings on, but she always wore
earrings. She was watching television. I could read this. It was the Sunday Seattle Times. What I did
was I made this—it was just black. The photograph I worked with was about this big, and then I just
decided how to shade it in. I used strong whites when I used them, and I put them on here, and the guy
on TV, so you could see him. She was watching television. It looked like the television was on.
Taylor: Are you still together?
Stenberg/Stone: No. We were married for four years.
Taylor: You were in Hawaii then?
Stenberg/Stone: No, but we had gone to Hawaii. That’s when I fell in love with it. I went back over
there. This is an interesting story. On the island of Hawaii, there are cliffs at the volcano. That island is
growing five miles a year. Five square miles. It’s the youngest place on the plant. I climbed down this
long cliff where it had hardened. I got down to the bottom. This image is from here to there. This
image that’s here is at least 20 feet—it was overpowering—and I immediately saw a Pele warrior, his
25
butt, leg, shoulder, head tucked under his arm. They have a coloring where you can use on
photographs, so I made this brown to accentuate what was here.
Taylor: That is something. Have you shown it to anybody?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah. In fact, your friends up north. And any one of these that you would like a
copy of, I will send to you. Any of these. That was also one that I did. This one, I did the handleathering on.
Taylor: Are you still doing them, still for the festival?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah. I started five different festivals in Olympia, but the most fun one, and the
most successful one, that’s in here. It’s here somewhere.
I did this for a buddy of mine whose wife went out in the middle—I’m going to tell you the
story—of the desert on their 30th anniversary about 30 years ago. She stripped off her clothes and went
dancing in the moonlight. She had this long, red hair. He had this photograph that was hardly visible.
He had bought some of my art and he said, “Would you please do one of these for me?”
The woman on here also reminds me of a dear friend of mine who has been taking care of
invalid children for about 30 years who also had red hair. I’m dating myself. We’re pretty kindred
spirits. There it is.
Taylor: That’s good. I like that.
Stenberg/Stone: I love moons, and I’m a big stars guy.
Taylor: Were you ever doing art when you were at Evergreen?
Stenberg/Stone: I did some. Let’s see . . . is there anything else in here? . . . Oh, yeah, there is one
other thing that I think is here that I drew every line on this. It’s become my most popular event that I
started in Silverton.
Taylor: Your daughter is moving up to Silverton?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, from Arizona. She’s down there right now.
Taylor: That’s fun.
Stenberg/Stone: I created an event called Silverton Sidewalk Shindig. From 11:00 in the morning right
in front of the theater—we have a beautiful theater that seats about 500 people that nobody’s been
able to sit in for a while. Every seat in it is a lounge with elbows. This is a beautiful theater.
Taylor: How big a town is Silverton?
Stenberg/Stone: I think we’re 10,500, heading toward 11,000. Anyway, we have music all day long, and
we have at least seven locations going on every single hour, outside and inside. It’s all free. I would
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never do a festival where people are required to pay admission. I don’t do fundraising. There’s
something about that that doesn’t work for me.
I drew—and this is the exact colors, a little more vibrant and proportionate—every line on
there, every single line.
Taylor: That’s fun!
Stenberg/Stone: That’s my logo. Silverton Sidewalk Shindig. Here are the different kinds of music. We
have at least 20 different kinds of music?
Taylor: Is it going to happen again this year?
Stenberg/Stone: Didn’t last year because we couldn’t, but we plan on it this year. Crows own
downtown, so I had crows everywhere. I’m a crows guy anyway. We’ve got everything from line
dancers to women playing violins. There’s all kinds of stuff here. I can’t remember where he is now, but
Where’s Waldo, he’s on here somewhere.
Taylor: During the pandemic, I’ve become a big jigsaw puzzle fan, because what else could you do? This
would make a great jigsaw puzzle.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: It would be very hard, but it would be very good, in any case.
Stenberg/Stone: Check this out.
Taylor: Bigfoot. Shindigger Bus. Very good. It sounds like you’re still having a fun life.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: I just remember you as one of the most fun people at the college.
Stenberg/Stone: We have things like a harp up on top of the roof. And we had a heart that we took up
the stairwell and had them play the harp on top of the roof. [laughing] We do some great things. We
had a Marimba band. We had this barbershop quartet, and they played on the roof. There are a lot of
flat roofs in town.
Taylor: You’ve got a community of friends that you’re tight with in Silverton.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, I probably know a thousand people there. I have about 30 to 35 who are
lifetime friends.
Taylor: You’ve been there 20 years or so.
Stenberg/Stone: We also did something every year risqué, and then one of the church groups in town
said they were offended, so we stopped doing it for one year and then I started doing it again, but I put
a little bit of clothing on her. If you hold this a second . . .
Taylor: Oh, yeah. [laughing] And they didn’t like that?
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Stenberg/Stone: They did not like the idea of nipples. [laughing]
Taylor: You gave her a bikini, huh?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, we put a top on her.
Taylor: This is fun.
Stenberg/Stone: This is one of the really early posters that was given to me by the Super Saturday
Committee. June ’77. There’s my proof that it wasn’t ’79. The year before that—well, you can tell by
how this is created that there had to be a year at least one year before that, maybe two. Do you
remember Fred Goldberg from the Goldberg family?
Taylor: From the furniture store.
Stenberg/Stone: One of the people who created this was Goldberg. No, here he is right here.
Taylor: Yep.
Stenberg/Stone: That’s his son, who went to Evergreen.
Taylor: And who’s still very active. He’s the head of the Governors Board or something now.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, really? The son?
Taylor: I think so. Somebody named Goldberg.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, that would be him.
Taylor: Do you remember a doctor, Hannah and Jess Spielholz? They were ECCO people.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, the Spielholzes. They were our first Olympia Man of the Year Award.
Taylor: Citizens of the Year or something.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, the very first one went to the Spielholzes.
Taylor: Wonderful people.
Stenberg/Stone: Before I forget, this is yours. That’s from our very first—award that was presented at
that event that night.
Taylor: We had a lot of good times, didn’t we?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, we did.
Taylor: It was certainly my life.
Stenberg/Stone: That was one of the more fun events I put together. I loved that.
Taylor: Where was it? In the CAB?
Stenberg/Stone: No, it was on the first floor where you walked into the library.
Taylor: Have you been to the college recently?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, it’s all chewed up now.
Taylor: Yeah.
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Stenberg/Stone: I don’t like the feel there. It does not have a good feel.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s lost a lot of charm.
Stenberg/Stone: I’ve always been a hawk guy and an eye guy, and I did this last year. I just call it The
Outer Worldly Rainbow Hawk. It’s just the upper body.
This was a good friend of mine. I helped her raise her kids. If you feel here, I used chrome a lot
where I’ll just bring something bright to it.
This was inspired by a hand picking up the phone in a little ad that was about this big. I
immediately saw that hand on the stomach of a woman that was about to give birth. This is the hand I
took on and just created this scene.
Taylor: I’d recognize your style.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. Let’s see . . . I’m a big art deco guy, so that’s an art deco piece. These are ferns
that were six feet high and the heads on them were that big around from the island. This is an actual
photograph, and I just said Fern Lovers. Because she looked to me like a female form, and the male. I
just love that thing.
Taylor: That’s a photograph.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, and no kidding, the ferns were up in the mountainous areas on the Big Island,
and the ferns were at least six feet high, and those heads are this big around. It was really powerful.
Taylor: That’s amazing. Have you seen Larry Eickstaedt this trip?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah. I spent three hours with him yesterday.
Taylor: Oh, good. How is he?
Stenberg/Stone: He’s doing grand.
Taylor: He’s become quite an artist.
Stenberg/Stone: Yes. He’s a stone carver.
Taylor: Yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: I guess he’s written a book of poetry, and he’s going to send a copy to me. If you want
a copy of his book of poetry, you can get a hold of him.
Taylor: Okay. He’s a good guy. He wears well.
Stenberg/Stone: I love him. He’s right up there as one of my three or four all-time favorite faculty
members. And friend. He’s been a friend of mine for just forever.
Taylor: He’s been a friend for a long, long time.
Stenberg/Stone: We hit it off right at the beginning. He was a great father.
Taylor: He was a great father.
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Stenberg/Stone: Even though I think both of them were adopted.
Taylor: No, he had three, two adopted and one with him.
Stenberg/Stone: He had three?
Taylor: Didn’t he? He had a son.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yes, he had a son who went to Boise State.
Taylor: I don’t know.
Stenberg/Stone: Played football.
Taylor: Who else have you kept up with?
Stenberg/Stone: Connected with? This trip, that’s about it. And you. I was hoping to get together—
every month there’s a group of those that are still alive out of that original group that get together, but
they stopped doing it this year. I was hoping to get to do that.
Taylor: There are a few people that I see, not many. You know Gail is not at all good?
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, she’s hung on pretty darn well.
Taylor: Yeah. Nancy Koppelman. Did you know Nancy Koppelman early on?
Stenberg/Stone: No.
Taylor: She was Gail’s secretary at the very, very beginning.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah, that’s what she said.
Taylor: She has been really good to Gail. She’s watched over her.
Stenberg/Stone: The one person that we knew in common—in fact, she lives across the gulch from
where I lived for a long time. She lived on Thomas Street, and I knew right where it was. I drove
immediately right to her place. I bought a home and lived four blocks away, and right across the gulch
from me was a guy—we both had tin cans and a string and a bell, and we’d ring a bell, and that would
mean you’d go over and pick up your can, pull it tight, and that was our form of communication.
Taylor: “Come over and have a drink.”
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah, right. David Powell. David Powell lived just across the gulch from me.
Taylor: I’d forgotten about him, but he died a few years ago.
Stenberg/Stone: Yeah. It’s eight years now. Yeah, I sort of ran the funeral for him. What most people
don’t know about him, he raised four teenaged boys. Four of them.
Taylor: No, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know him very well.
Stenberg/Stone: He raised them. He was a hell of a parent. He was so devoted to those kids. We used
to joke. We’d put our kids to bed and then we’d get together, and . . . what did he say one time? We
played cribbage for hours—that, and chess—but cribbage, he said one time after we’d done this for four
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or five years—we played for a penny a point, and sometimes we’d get up to 10 bucks or 15 bucks—he
says, “I figured it out. Over the last four years, one of us is ahead probably 10 cents.” One of us would
win one night and then the next night . . . [laughing]
Other thoughts might come to you, and you have my number.
Taylor: I do have your number.
Stenberg/Stone: You can call me anytime. I am coming back up here in May.
Taylor: I appreciate this, but now that I know that you talked to Nancy, too, your story is going to be
told. Because you were a very significant part of the early years. You set a tone that mattered to the
college.
Stenberg/Stone: I know as much history as anybody does.
Taylor: Yeah, and we lived through it together.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: Lots of good times.
Stenberg/Stone: That’s what Larry told them. He said, “This guy knows as much history as anybody.”
But there are several of us around . . .
Taylor: There are?
Stenberg/Stone: . . . that really share. You know some things that I have no idea about. We all do.
Taylor: We all do, and you have a side of the college that needs to be represented. I sort of knew, but I
left Admissions after the first year, so then I wasn’t so wrapped up in that.
Stenberg/Stone: I need to sign this for you before we forget.
Taylor: You need to sign that, yeah.
Stenberg/Stone: And then you can stamp me on the forehead. There was Phil Harding, Randy, Rudy
Martin. We had about eight of us and we played poker.
Taylor: I don’t know if that was the same group, but the group with Pete Sinclair—
Stenberg/Stone: Pete Sinclair, yeah, he played.
Taylor: And Al Leisenring. Do you remember a woman named Betty Ruth Estes?
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, yeah.
Taylor: She was the only woman that was ever allowed to play in that poker group.
Stenberg/Stone: She played at my house.
Taylor: She just died two weeks ago.
Stenberg/Stone: You know who else did? Pat White.
Taylor: Pat Matheny-White?
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Stenberg/Stone: Yes, she played, and Sid. I just was razzing you. One time we were playing back and
forth, back and forth, and finally we said, “That’s enough for tonight.” We disbanded. Phil Harding was
light a certain amount of money and we just said, “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s been fun tonight,”
so he walked out.
The next day, I come to work and there’s an envelope on my door with Phil Harding’s signature
on it. Sixteen cents. [laughter] No kidding! He wrote me a check for 16 cents. I loved that guy. He was
so off-the-wall.
Taylor: He was off-the-wall. There were some real characters. Beryl Crowe was another one.
Stenberg/Stone: Oh, I loved Beryl. Unfortunately, I wasn’t here when he died. It was the mid-to-late
‘90s. But I was here when he retired, and he asked me to emcee. We went out to the old Grange Hall.
You might have been there.
Taylor: I might have been there.
Stenberg/Stone: That was about ’91, ’92, something like that. It was before ’93. He made the greatest
bouillabaisse. It took him 24 hours. Nothing has ever touched it. He had a girlfriend that ended up—
she was the one who worked with research on monkeys for a very long time. I know you know her.
I’ve got to go.
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