FoxRuss_20170927_Transcript pt2.pdf

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Part of Russ Fox Oral History Interview

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Russ Fox
Interviewed by Eric Stein
The Evergreen State College oral history project
September 27, 2017
FINAL

Stein: It is September 27, 2017, and I’m here with Russ Fox at his home in Olympia, Washington. We
are starting an oral history interview that’s going to be part of the Evergreen oral history archives. It
focuses on Emeritus Faculty.
I’m very lucky to have an opportunity to speak with Russ. We talked a few days ago and set out
some ideas for what we might want to discuss during this particular interview. I was really interested in
what Russ had to say about growing up in East Cleveland in the 1950s, and I wanted to ask how that
shaped your ideas about community.
Fox: Thank you, Eric. I’m delighted to have this opportunity. It’s going to be fun. Yes, I grew up in East
Cleveland, Ohio. I was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C. We moved back to Cleveland where my
mother and father were born and had grown up.
I was really raised by my mother and both sets of grandparents due to the fact that my father
was killed in a civil airplane crash in 1947 as he was just getting out of the Navy and had been in
Pittsburgh for an interview. My mother moved my brother and me back to Cleveland when I was only
three, and I lived there until I graduated from high school in 1962. So I really did grow up there; we
didn’t travel very much, pretty much just knew northeast Ohio.
The East Side of Cleveland at that time was so rich with different ethnic culture and
communities. It was a time when—as I realized later more than I realized it at the time—each
neighborhood or even each elementary school in East Cleveland was the hub or the center for a
different Central or Eastern European community of families that had immigrated to Cleveland.
Typically, the father was working in the steel mills or in the industrial section of Cleveland. Usually there
would be a grandparent or two speaking the native language, and mothers and kids pretty much staying
home.
But it was a time when we just played in the streets all the time. We played hockey or stick
hockey and baseball and soccer and basketball. Always outside playing with other kids. I went to school
part of the time on the city bus, where I would just pay three cents or a nickel to take a bus to school.
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Just part of the community life without really being very separate or isolated from a lot of either public
exposure to the realities of an urban life, or the messiness sometimes of growing up in a city.
It was just natural for me to grow up in a very publicly social community neighborhood
environment. I think that really did frame how I wanted to be a part of a community in the rest of my
life. When I went to college at the University of California Santa Barbara, I met my first roommate. We
did the usual “Where are you from? What are you going to major in?” He was from the suburbs of Los
Angeles and hadn’t had a lot of, I think, exposure to cultural diversity or richness or maybe even street
life that I’d had.
But when he said he was going to major in anthropology, I had never heard the word. I had
grown up in this industrial city where if you were male and in the upper third or fourth of your class, the
only counseling or vision of a future that anyone had for us—family as well as teachers—was “How are
you going to contribute to the industrial future of the Northeast or the Midwest? What kind of scientist
are you going to be?” All my friends and I went off to college saying that we were going to be a
chemistry major or a physics major. I was going to be a math major. That was our frame of reference
for going on with our educations.
When he said anthropology, I said, “What’s that?” He started talking about interest in different
ethnic communities around the world, and cultural experiences. To me, I said to myself—I probably said
it to him—“Look, you could just go and live in East Cleveland for a while because that sounds like what
you’re interested in.” It really did frame my sense of participation in community, of community as a
place where people’s experiences and values are important in a community context and not just in a
personal or family or professional way.
My mother was raising us—my brother and me--and we had another half-brother come along in
another year or so. She had finished a couple years of college and spent most of her career working as
secretarial support. She was the vice principal’s assistant or secretary in the junior high where I went.
So, it was a modest but very comfortable upbringing in our family life.
My one set of grandparents bought a house that we could share with them, sort of like a duplex.
It was a big house divided into two. My other set of grandparents lived just a mile away, so I had a really
wonderful intergenerational upbringing, which really added to the way that growing up affected my
sense of being in a community with multigenerational activities and experiences.
Stein: You said there was a pressure to become a chemistry major or a math major and build the future
of the city or the United States at that particular time. But you got to college and started off in math but
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then some of your interests changed. How did that come about and what was it that shaped your path
toward a career in urban planning and community-based studies?
Fox: I don’t know if pressure was quite the right word. That was just the frame of reference in all the
conversations. It was an assumption without saying I had to be a math major or a scientist in some way.
I was interested in science. It wasn’t something I was in any way moved into by others’ will rather than
my own interest and the environment around me.
But when I got into college and discovered that I was expected to take many other courses as
part of a liberal arts education, I just became fascinated in the arts, other social science, humanities. I
took 20 or 22 credits every term so that I could fit in more non-math or non-science courses to round
out my education or to discover new interests. I remember particularly art history, music appreciation,
different philosophy courses, literature of different times and places. They were all really fascinating to
me.
But I trudged along, and also did my math work, as I was in that major track. Fortunately—this
was the next step in developing both a connection to community in a way that I really still grew more
from, and also started some of the seeds that became my more graduate work and more professional
identity in the future—I’d also along the way taken French language every quarter during my first two
years. That let me qualify to apply for the University of California Study Abroad program in France.
It was only the second year of their program at the University of Bordeaux. The first year they
did not have any science students enroll, or they didn’t recruit science students for their program. I
think there were 100 students each year from all of the UC campuses. They’d all go in one group to the
University of Bordeaux. I said, really, this is a chance to get to know another part of the world. I
qualified having minimum French background that I needed. I’ll just take a chance and see if they’re
interested in someone who’s a math major.
It turns out that they were, and there were two of us—another woman from Berkeley who was
a biology major—who was accepted into the program in 1964-65, so I got to spend a year in France.
That further enriched me in the appreciation of community life in the sense of a lot of street activity, a
lot of pedestrian life, a lot of appreciating the relationship between city and town and countryside in
ways that were different from what I saw in the U.S., particularly being in California, the way cities were
just sprawling and spreading and there really didn’t seem to be a whole lot of clear distinction between
urban and rural. Even within urban, what could our neighborhoods be? That was another experience

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that added to my wondering about communities—how they happen, why they attract me in certain
ways.
I came back from that experience thinking about, what about architecture? I hadn’t even heard
the term urban planning yet, but I was thinking about city/countryside kinds of relationships, and the
natural world relating to the built-in human world. Among all these different kinds of classes, I was
really spreading myself into as many different other fields of inquiry as I could. As a senior, I took an
urban sociology class. It was a seminar class, the closest I ever had to an Evergreen seminar experience,
only a few students, 12 students and a faculty. We would read a book each week, and usually in the
faculty’s office or sitting around in small area, talk about that book, do our research, write papers, etc.
One of the books we read was Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
which had been published a few years before, and that really captured my. . . gave me some language
and concepts to frame my experience and interests around. Jane Jacobs was talking about the vitality of
cities being based on and needing to be planned for around people’s experience and values rather than
around more analytical, administrative, engineering ways of thinking about the physical aspect of cities.
Instead, we should be thinking about it, talking about it, and celebrating and planning around the more
human, experiential, value-based ways of thinking about our lives rather than the physical structures
that we have to live in, maneuver in, that frame us, define us, or limit us.
That book caught my attention and it led me to looking at graduate programs in urban planning
as a possibility. I wanted to stay on the West Coast because I was really enjoying that part of the world
and meeting friends there. By then my mother had moved my brothers and her father, my grandfather,
to California also because her sister had already moved there and it gave the family a gathering place
down in Southern California.
My other grandparents had moved to Baltimore to be closer to their son, who interestingly—
this is a side comment—was my father’s identical twin. I guess that was another interesting thing about
my growing up in a context of family. Whereas I didn’t get to know my father because he was killed in
the plane crash before I was three, yet I had an uncle who was an identical twin. Even though we didn’t
live in the same city, I always could use him as a framework of seeing and experiencing and knowing
something at least about what my father would have been like had he been alive and growing up in our
family.

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I guess the point is there wasn’t a particular need to go back or feel a draw to go back to
Cleveland since the grandparents and my mother had migrated west and gone back to the East Coast in
Baltimore.
I applied to graduate programs in urban planning at the University of California Berkeley and the
University of Washington. It was a fascinating interview when I was invited up to Berkeley to see if I
might be interested in going there. They made an appointment with a faculty member. I was really
naïve about what I should have been doing. I hadn’t even looked up what is the professional journal in
this profession, and I hadn’t looked up who are some of the other important writers and thinkers and
activists. I just loved this Jane Jacobs’s whole way of talking and thinking and writing about cities and
how they can be more vital and humane and safe and viable economically. She wrote a lot about city
economics that related to her thinking about other aspects of city life.
I had my appointment with the faculty member at Berkeley. We were chatting along as he was
doing his interview, and when it came to the question about how did I get interested in city and regional
planning or urban planning from my math background, I said, “It really was more from having read this
book in this seminar class I had.” I mentioned The Death and Life of Great American Cities and it’s really
clear in my memory how the conversation changed at that moment. It was almost like there was
different body language, maybe he put down his pen or his notebook closed. He didn’t exactly look at
his watch, but he said, “Well, good. I think we’ve probably done all we need to do. Thank you for
coming.”
The interview was very quickly over, which I thought, well, maybe that’s fine, he got what he
needed and he seemed like a nice person. Later I realized that I had had this interview with somebody
who was one of the four or five top thinkers at the time about how to look at cities and city growth and
city planning as a systems analysis, not necessarily mathematical but a systems way of understanding
everything that wasn’t at all based on the kind of values and experiences that Jane Jacobs was
promoting as a way to be thinking about our cities and their futures. I quickly realized that to him –a
scholar in the prominent analytically-based paradigm of thinking about planning in the ‘60s--that Jane
Jacobs was a woman writing in a man’s profession and she was not trained as a planner. She was an
architectural historian and architectural critic, and the theories and the practices and the proposals that
she was making were, to some people, heresy.
This was an era of urban renewal where we were going into very healthy—in many ways, not all
ways—thriving, vital communities, and labeling them as slums or as poverty areas that need to be
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replaced with modern, many times high-rise housing. In one big city—mainly in the East Coast—after
another, we moved in and replaced the kind of communities that I had grown up in with housing
projects or modern housing complexes, even if they were for more moderate and upper-income folks
rather than the folks who had been living there.
I can’t remember if I was accepted or not, but I didn’t go to the University of California Berkeley.
I’m sure that down the hall there would have been somebody—a graduate student or a younger up-andcoming professor—who was interested in some different ideas who would have loved to talk to me
about Jane Jacobs’s book, but it didn’t lead to an engaged conversation in the interview I had.
I went to the University of Washington graduate school Master’s Degree program in Urban
Planning. It was part of the School of Architecture—and still is—at the UW. This was 1966. It was a
time when not only in the profession of planning there were some of these new ideas of Jane Jacobs and
others interested in social planning and social justice issues rather than just efficiency of systems and
models. There was a lot of excitement about the potential of planning as a career or a field and that we
could make a difference in the world and we could get involved in organizing as well as zoning. It wasn’t
going to be only highway planning and zoning; that we could break out of that paradigm that had been
defining the profession.
Stein: How was your outlook on urban planning and community studies further shaped by your
graduate work at the University of Washington?
Fox: As I think now about my experience of community, being at the University of California Santa
Barbara living in student housing really didn’t add much to what I had experienced growing up in
Cleveland, but a little bit of the year in France did. Then when I went up to the University of
Washington, living in Seattle, I was back in an urban neighborhood again and a more complex,
interesting, to me, city than Santa Barbara had been.
So, in addition to the richness and the vitality and the challenging nature of our class—the
particular class of us that started in the fall of 1966—my work study job to help put me through the
expenses of going to college was as a social worker in one of the housing projects in South Seattle, the
Rainier Vista housing project. This put me right back into the experience of the richness, the diversity,
the struggles of people who are not just the wealthy and the upper-middle-class folks that we were
mostly reading about or talking about in a lot of the early city planning courses.
I was actually a group worker for young boys of the ages of 11 to 14. At that time in the Seattle
public schools, if students were not behaving as they were expected to they were pretty much put back
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on the street until they behaved better. So a lot of the kids hung around the community center there at
the housing project. There were a couple other work study students on the staff and we just tried to
help these young people figure out how to navigate their lives given the things that were being thrown
at them, whether at home in their family life, or in the community context, or the systems such as
schools that were ignoring them or rejecting them. I really enjoyed working with those kids and how
much I learned from them, and how much I learned from getting to know their families. That was the
experiential part of being a part of a city neighborhood that was going through lots of social, economic,
and sometimes physical challenges of survival.
That was a really enriching part of my experience there. But back in the graduate program
classroom—I really liked the program because it had a lot of emphasis on small-group projects where
we were in teams and were given an assignment to work on either a neighborhood or community issue.
I was working on one team that worked on a planning problem with one of the local Native American
communities north of Seattle, so it had some real-world problem-solving components to it, which were
really the part I loved the best because the more historical and theoretical classroom work was still
pretty old school, as I understood later.
I found interestingly that the coursework for me was really easy compared to having been a
math major. The only Cs I ever got in college were in my major. I struggled in math even though I liked
logic and geometry and some aspects of it, but it wasn’t really my strength. That’s why I only took the
minimum needed to get a degree and discovered all these other life and intellectual and experiential
interests.
The coursework was easy because I discovered that what they were trying to teach us in urban
planning was how to take large issues or problems and break them down into smaller pieces that could
be looked at and put together differently, or how to build something more complex and larger out of
some smaller building block units of knowledge or of experience. I kind of learned how to do that in
math, the relationship between small data or larger solutions or theorems or whatever, so the
intellectual process was pretty easy. The knowledge was different, and some was interesting to me and
some wasn’t.
The part that was most interesting to me was what was increasingly being defined as social
planning, community organizing. The group of students in my class really pushed our department to
open up more options for us for our electives so we could take courses in social work, anthropology, and
have those be part of our degree rather than in addition to the required courses in public administration
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and housing and transportation planning, which was mostly engineering systems. It was a nice balance
to be able to find more of those humanities and social movement courses that became part of our
curriculum.
I kind of breezed through that. Most of my interest was in my work study job down at the
Rainier Vista housing project. I had that position for two years. Along the way, I read another book that
piqued my interest and framed my eventual thinking about pedagogy once I became a teacher, or found
myself in a position of being an educator in a college setting as well as in a community setting, which is
what I had expected to be doing. I expected myself to be more of a community educator, community
planner, community organizer.
When I read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed—which I thought later it was fascinating
that that would be a book that we would read in an urban planning course, or be an urban planning
approved elective—that was a real gift to me because it gave me a really challenging, theoretical, ethical
kind of way of thinking, another language to use in thinking about people’s experiences, and how people
themselves, in collaboration and partnership and unity with others, can define their own experience and
their own engagement with the community in ways that they weren’t really allowed to given the forces
and institutions of the societal context that they were in. Another way of thinking about how learning
happens and for whom, and the role of oppression in learning, which I hadn’t really thought about in the
same way or maybe even hardly at all. So, another book that got stuck in the back of my mind. There
were others, of course, but Jacobs and Freire were authors who influenced me greatly.
At the end of my two-year master’s program, for the second time I was faced with “what do I do
now?” given that my draft board back in East Cleveland was keeping an eye on me, and waiting for me
to finish whatever little deferments they might want to give me, and then send me to Vietnam, which
was not a very attractive thought in my mind. I had friends who went into the Army and the Navy right
after high school. Not all of them survived, and at least one good friend I specifically remember did not.
It’s sort of interesting because I’m starting to talk about this a little bit given that I’m watching
the PBS series on Vietnam last week and this week. For someone my age, just cascading waves of
emotions and memories. And now, new knowledge and new insights that we weren’t exposed to at that
time that we’re gaining out of this series on TV. I’ve already been talking to my son, and I’m hoping that
younger generations will be interested in learning that history, even though they won’t be able to
address it, lacking the experiential part of growing up at that time.

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I wasn’t particularly interested in supporting our military efforts in Southeast Asia. I was,
however, very interested and committed to being of service. I was a pretty patriotic guy. I grew up in a
family where my father was in the Navy, my uncle was in the Army. Like most of us, I had a lot of
relatives that in earlier generations had been in the military--and were now. I wasn’t necessarily a
fanatic or a leader of antiwar movements. I participated—I gave my support in quiet ways, in solidarity
ways.
But I just wanted something other than more academic work. I felt I was ready to do something
in the community rather than immediately think about a PhD. I didn’t know if I would even want to do
that in the future. I was ready to get out in the communities and do some good work that would affect
people’s lives at a community level.
So, I looked at the Peace Corps as a possibility of serving. It turns out there were two Peace
Corps programs in 1968 that were specifically recruiting graduates from urban planning master’s
programs rather than the recruitment of anybody with a degree to do teaching of English or maybe
some low-level community development work that Peace Corps would train us to do.
These two programs were in two very interesting countries, both at that time and now--Iran and
Chile. I looked into both of them. The program in Iran, which I really didn’t know a lot about—I hadn’t
been as engaged in international politics and history and culture as maybe I should have been other
than being kind of intrigued based on my experience in France and European North American history
and relationships—but when I looked at the Iran Peace Corps program, it was pretty obvious that it was
very top-down. We’d be in the Ministry of Housing in the capital doing the planning for the people and
for the cities. It didn’t seem to have a lot of engagement with the community or with the population. It
was pretty much “We’re the planners. We know best and we’re going to build cities of the world.”
Again, mostly focusing on physical structures, assuming that people’s lives would fit into that in some
way that would work.
On the contrary, the program in Chile was almost the opposite. In the government of Chile at
the time, the president was Eduardo Frei, Sr., a Christian Democrat. His party was in power. It turns
out—I didn’t know this till later—that when Paulo Freire was kicked out of Brazil for being a little too
radical in how he was teaching people to think rather than teaching them literacy by teaching them the
alphabet, and Dick and Jane kinds of stories, he at the time was a friend of Eduardo Frei and kind of a
kitchen cabinet member to Frei’s government helping the government agencies think about ways that
they could decentralize their systems, whether it was education of healthcare or, in this case, housing,
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to get more of the planning and the policymaking and the engagement of voices in government more at
the community level and not just at the ministry level in the capital with the professionals and the upper
and upper middle class folks that knew how to work those systems.
That program seemed really intriguing to me so I said, “This sounds like it would be really fun
and perhaps valuable.” I was interested in learning Spanish, so I signed up and was accepted. At that
time, the Peace Corps training—for all of the Americas at least—was being done in the U.S. Our training
was at a fraternity house in Rutgers University in New Jersey in the middle of summer. Very hot. No air
conditioning. We could only watch and listen to Spanish-speaking TV and radio. We had intensive
Spanish language for six hours a day. It was great. I learned some Spanish really quickly.
It wasn’t until I was at the end of the program—when I realized that we were getting called into
our final interviews or sessions with the staff, and the folks from Chile who were coming up to meet us
or welcome us—that there was some uncertainty about those meetings, which I hadn’t figured out or
realized. Essentially, we were given the information or the news that “We have a ticket in this envelope
for you to go to Chile. This is when we need you to be there.” Or, “This envelope has a ticket home
because you aren’t able to be accepted into this program.”
It was for one of two reasons. One is your draft board was not giving you a continued
deferment, or our staff—meaning our psychiatrist, who was watching us all the time—felt that we really
weren’t quite ready for the experiences we were going to have in terms of cultural immersion. It was
like, oh, my gosh, some of my friends that I had been with are not going to be going to Chile. There
were a few whose draft boards or the psychological powers-that-be felt that they were not appropriate
for this program. Ninety percent of us went. It was just unexpected. I was a little naïve about it. Oh,
this is all just going to work out fine for everybody.
So, I went off into the Peace Corps. I had a lot of good friends that I left behind from the UW
graduate program. One of them was Carolyn Dobbs, who had also come to Washington—in her case
from Tennessee and Kentucky—to join the graduate program in 1966. Carolyn already had a bachelor’s
degree in history, a master’s degree in political science from the University of Kentucky, and a year or
two of experience working as a planner in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. She had discovered
planning through getting what started as a political science internship, and then realized, oh, this is
something I want to now get some more education in. She already had a master’s degree, already had
some planning in the field experience, and was one of the 40 of us or so who were in the program I was
in.
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She and about another 8 or 10 of us were really close. We did a lot of things together. We did a
lot of mountain-climbing and skiing. In our community project work, she got engaged with working with
the neighborhood of the Queen Anne Hill in Seattle in some of their community development work,
where the community was empowered—or was both being given some authority by the City, but also
assuming and taking more on their own—to try to have more control themselves over the planning for
their neighborhood rather than just filling out a survey that the planners downtown would then take
back to their offices and tabulate and then make some decision based on that. It was an example of a
really urban neighborhood community participation, a neighborhood starting to push for more and
more opportunity to be engaged with their own experience and values rather than just input into
someone else’s either PhD research or planning policy and implementation of programs.
I’m mentioning Carolyn now because when I came back from the Peace Corps—I’ll come back to
the Peace Corps work in a second—I reconnected with some of the friends from that program.
Reconnecting with Carolyn is what led me to Evergreen. I’ll come back to that. I was just making that
initial connection.
The Peace Corps work was with the Ministry of Housing and Urbanization. Most of us, except
for a few, were sent out into the provinces. We each had a Chilean co-worker—a young graduate our
age coming out of the universities in Chile. They didn’t have urban planning programs, so they came
from political science or architecture or public administration.
Stein: Tell us a little bit more about your Peace Corps work in Chile.
Fox: That was a real highlight, and it really further framed the work I ended up going on and doing at
Evergreen and in the local communities here in my own community engagement and volunteer work.
As I mentioned, it was a program to get us, with our partners—young Chilean graduates—out
into the communities in the different provinces of Chile to work with the local communities—which
meant everything from having access to, or be invited to meet, the governor and the mayors, the
officialdom of the local communities, but also labor groups and neighborhood groups and other
organizations in segments in the community, whether they were organized or not—about their
community experience, and how their ideas could be fed back into the process of eventually the
Ministry of Housing deciding how to invest public monies in community infrastructure in these towns.
For example, I was working in the province of Aconcagua, which is the next province north of
Santiago in Chile, an agricultural province. It had two small cities of about 20,000 people, and lots of
smaller villages and agricultural lands and scattered housing with the farmworkers. We were pretty
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much on our own to work in these communities to try to do some organizing, have some meetings, and
bring different perspectives of the community together.
We knew, for example, that the Ministry of Housing was going to spend, say, a million dollars in
housing or public works infrastructure—water systems, sewer systems—or different kinds of housing
programs in that province in the next year. We were given the data about how much different kinds of
programs cost. You could build a certain number of houses of this type or quality with this much money,
and this is what a water system costs for 500 families, etc.
They wanted input from the community about what their priorities might be for using that much
money in this kind of array of possible investment programs. Fortunately—this was some of the
forward thinking that Eduardo Frei’s government was generating—their thinking about what housing
meant was not just everybody having a nice, so-many-square-foot house per person with flush toilets
and running water and electricity, but that housing meant also just having a safe, secure parcel of land
that you could put up whatever you could afford or manage to put without either being over your head
in debt. Supporting folks that perhaps just settling in what became known in different countries as
“squatter communities”—”callampas” (mushrooms) in Chile—and just giving them a safe, secure parcel
of land with water and electrical power access, and letting them build whatever they could or afford to
build or manage to build.
We had a nice array of projects that could be supporting different segments of the community
rather than only the segment of the community that could afford a house of a standard that we might
expect in our communities here.
It was fascinating. The Peace Corps left us alone. They just said, “You’re working with the
Ministry of Housing. We’re not going to mess with you too much.” I had a great camaraderie with some
of the folks I met, young people as well as professional-level people, and people I hung out with in the
lower-income neighborhoods in the town of Los Andes where I lived. The first year, the priority that we
sent—that our community process sent back to the Ministry of Housing office in Santiago—was to
spend almost all of the available money on getting the 500 families living in the Aconcagua riverbed—
which flooded every other year and flooded them out and they had to go back in and try to rebuild—
families that were just building their own shacks or putting up whatever they could on land they didn’t
own but was a riverbed. We had participated in the 1970 census to do a census in that community, so
we were in there a lot, getting to know the people who lived there, and not only doing the census datagathering that was related to the housing work, but also getting more of a trusting, valuable relationship
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with some of those folks in terms of letting them see that there is actually some potential of someone
asking them what they would like rather than just being another survey that they never hear anything
more about in the future. So, it builds some trust.
The community’s recommendation was that these 500 families be given ownership of a parcel
of land that’s dry, that won’t flood every other year, and be given water and sewer and electrical
service, and then still just build whatever they could afford. It wouldn’t be something that was putting
them in any kind of debt of having to pay a mortgage. There was no mortgage, it was just giving them
land.
The other projects that didn’t make it to the top of the list were more of the traditional ones,
like the Municipal Workers Union wanted to have some nicer houses for their union employees. They
were folks who already had a house but they wanted a better house. And the traditional—this was not
just in Chile at the time and not just South America, it was many of the southern continent countries,
then and now—decision-making or the influence of decisions about who gets the benefit with what kind
of facilities and services is based on who knows the people in power, who knows the senators or who
knows the cabinet ministers. Typically, those union worker houses would, by the more normal ways
that things get decided, be the ones who would get their project built because they were in the political
system that was in power, or they supported the right people at the right time to get their projects
supported.
This different perspective coming from the community was deliberately meant to muddle that a
little bit. But as we discovered, it didn’t replace it because six months later we would receive the
feedback from the Ministry of Housing and they’d say, “Well, your project number one has been moved
down to number 2C and these others have been moved ahead of it.” The others were the more
traditional ones.
On the other hand, the second year I was there, that project stayed up at the top. The seeds
were planted for that process, and that input would not at least be totally shelved and wasted, which
gave me a better feeling about being a foreigner coming into somebody else’s community. At least I
wasn’t in an assignment or a program or a mentality that assumed I knew anything that would be of use
to them, other than I might be helpful in a process of learning and getting engaged in civic or political
processes that may or may not lead to some fruition, short-term or long-term, so I put it in the back of
my mind as well. At least my Peace Corps experience was a do-no-harm—at least that I know of—

13

experience, so I felt good about it. I enjoyed the friendships that I made. Some of those people I’m still
in touch with.
The other thing that was going on at that time—this was 1968-70—it was the last two years of
Eduardo Frei’s government. I was there during the election in 1970 when Salvador Allende was elected
to be President of Chile. The Chilean constitution at that time—and it is again now—included a
requirement that the president is elected for six years but it’s not renewable. It’s a one-term six-year
term. They were also very proud at their—at that time—150-some years of uninterrupted democracy,
even though that meant that not 100 percent of the population was actually represented in the kind of
parties that kept being the winners back and forth.
Salvador Allende had been in the Chilean Senate for 35, 36 years. Very influential senator, a
socialist from one of the many socialist parties. He was the head of one of those. He had run for
president five different times as one of the socialist party candidates, so he was extremely well known
politically. He was one candidate that was running during 1970—again.
A man named Jorge Alessandri, who had been president before Frei and who represented the
titans of industry in Chile, whose family owned the paper mills, everything related to wood products as
well as other industries—people knew his policies—he represented the idea that Chile needs to
reinforce their industrial corporations to be better players in the international game of development.
He was representing that sector of the economy and the society. He was extremely well known because
he had been president.
Eduardo Frei, the current president, was extremely popular. He would have easily won again,
but he couldn’t run again. His party put up a man named Radomiro Tomic as their candidate. He had
been a senator, was at the time Chile’s representative at the United Nations, but he wasn’t as well
known as the other two.
The leftist parties never had been able to win because there were anywhere from six to 15 of
them. They would always split the more progressive, leftist vote. In this campaign, they organized what
they called Unidad Popular—the Popular Unity—and this was actually one of the programs that was
somewhat influenced by Paulo Freire’s thinking. They had this big conference to see if, among all of the
different communist and socialist parties, they could agree on one candidate to represent them. I
wasn’t privy to any of this, but it was fascinating reading in the papers about it.

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The Communist Party candidate was Pablo Neruda. The Communist Party represented the
intellectual left. He, of course, was very well known, not as a politician but as a thinker and the
conscience of the country.
Then there was Salvador Allende and a whole bunch of others, some of whom had also run
before. Let me back up a little bit. Allende’s party had figured, “He’s had a chance five times.” They put
up somebody else, so Allende wasn’t in this initial group. But the Unidad Popular couldn’t agree on
anybody except Allende at the end.
So, they did have a Unidad Popular leftist candidate, an industrial/corporate family monopoly
representative of that segment and a vision of the future that was represented by that type of thinking
about development and future, and a relatively unknown candidate from the party who was in power
and whose current president could have easily won.
All the polls were always about 25 to 35 for each of them as it got closer and closer to the
election. The Christian Democrats’ candidate, Radomiro Tomic was increasingly realizing that the
general mood of the country was to support more leftist, progressive, either the Christian Democrat or
the Unidad Popular. But there was nervousness about the leftists being too leftist for some of the
Christian Democrat folks, so they increasingly were promoting more and more policies that sounded like
Allende’s policies. They were moving more and more progressively to the left. But the way Tomic
would present himself in these rallies would be “Viva Tomic! This is what I will do.” Because he was
trying to get his own name—my interpretation—well known. Whereas when I’d go to Allende’s rallies,
it would never be first-person singular. It would be “This is what we will do together.” It was just
fascinating. And yet, there was very little violence. These were three different futures for the country,
much more diverse than we’d end up having in most of our elections.
The constitution provided that if no one candidate wins 50 percent, then the National Congress
decides between the top two. None of them got 50 percent. The Congress was controlled by the
Christian Democratic Party, and their candidate came in third. The Congress then was left with deciding
between the right and the left candidates, Alessandri and Allende. They selected Allende to be the
President.
It was just really a fascinating time to be there. There were some other things that I could tell
more stories about. Allende did not take office until after our program was done. My two-year program
ended in December, so I didn’t get to be in Chile when he was in power for a few years before he was
assassinated by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
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My experience had been at the community level there. It had kept alive my fascination and
experience of thinking about and experiencing how community building can happen with people at the
community level that are working with folks with technical and professional training, but whose
professional and technical training isn’t identifying themselves as folks who know the answers, but as
folks who know how to guide people through a process of learning and empowerment and engagement,
and that can be facilitated, supported, or in different ways informed by professional and technical folks
like us in the Peace Corps, or we planners in city planning departments here and in other places.
Stein: Did you apply for your doctoral studies at the University of Washington from Chile while you
were enmeshed in that community studies-based work?
Fox: No. I’ll do one step to get to that. I had one more little experience on the way back home. There
had been a really major earthquake in Peru in May of 1970, and any Peace Corps volunteer who was
finishing their program who wanted to continue and volunteer for a while longer from any of the South
American countries could go to Peru and increase the pool of help there. It was an earthquake with
devastation and tragedy, similar to what we’ve just seen in Mexico in these last few weeks.
So, I volunteered and went to Peru. I worked in Peru for six months, so I was taking my time
getting back. That experience actually—without going into a lot of detail—led to an opportunity, if I had
wanted to, to stay and have a job with the Peruvian government as a housing planner in Cuzco, which
was a pretty cool place as a young person. I had gone there mostly just to be able to go to Machu
Picchu and experience that segment of the mountains of Peru, which was different from where I’d been
working in the earthquake recovery.
I realized I needed to get back and finish up my degree. I was in the two-year master’s program
but hadn’t turned in my thesis yet because I wasn’t really happy with it. I was discouraged about it,
actually, and was getting more excited about just doing this Peace Corps experience. I came back and I
had already formed in my mind a whole different replacement thesis for my master’s degree based on
the Peace Corps experience and some other work I was already starting to be interested in in terms of
housing policy and housing programs that are defined by people’s experiences rather than architects.
I did come back to the UW. The one correction for the question, though, is that I didn’t enroll in
a PhD program, I finished my master’s program. While this was happening—while I was in Peru and
getting back, I think that’s about the time, or maybe I was still in Chile— the U.S. decided to have a
lottery for the draft rather than just enrollment. I did have a fairly low lottery number. Somehow by
then, maybe things were changing enough, or maybe there weren’t as many new people needed, or my
16

draft board had forgotten about me, but I snuck through a little longer, even after I’d finished my twoyear deferment for being in the Peace Corps. To be honest, the way our engagement in Vietnam had
evolved and, from my perspective, the tragedy of sending young people like me over there for reasons
that I really didn’t believe were our own justification for doing it, I was, among many others, ready to
just move a few miles north into Canada, but didn’t. I was still interested in knowing other ways I could
serve if needed.
I finished my dissertation. I was doing the post-Peace Corps immersion back into our culture of
a crisis of identity and, what am I going to do now in my life? How could it ever be as wonderful here as
it was there?
The experience overseas had been really deeply valuable to me, not just for the little, in my
case, sort of interesting professional work on my resume, but just for the humanness of being a minority
in another country where I didn’t speak the language well, making friends, and having an immersion that
was deep enough to be more than just a visitor, even though legitimately, in the eyes of many, dropping
into their lives for two years and then leaving was still just a visitor. We all, I think, are sensitive to
that—cultural exploitation and who benefits more in these exchanges? We have to come to some
resolution of that in our own identities and work.
I was doing some housing consulting with the Puget Sound Council of Governments—a kind of
regional planning consortium—and I reconnected with Carolyn Dobbs as well as with others. In the
meantime, while I was in the Peace Corps, she had gone on and finished her PhD. She was the first
woman to get a PhD in the University of Washington Urban Planning Department. During her last year,
while she was finishing her dissertation, she had been hired by a dean who was given the charge of
trying to create a few little experimental programs within the University system.
End Part 3 of 4 of Russ Fox on 9-27-17
Begin Part 4 of 4 of Russ Fox on 9-27-17
Fox: I came back and turned in my master’s thesis. The comment I got was similar to the comments
that I enjoy making at student evaluation time in my thinking back at teaching at Evergreen. What I was
told was “You’ve got this fascinating thesis that’s already the seeds and the roots and the branches and
some of the leaves of what could easily be a PhD dissertation.” I always enjoyed being able to tell
students, “This work you did is already master’s level work and could easily be continued on and
become the core of your graduate work.”

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Carolyn had been hired at the University of Washington during her last year to be a halftime
faculty in an experimental program called The Environmental Community. It was a faculty member, two
resident assistants, and about 40 students who lived together on the top floor of Lander Hall. This
community was living together in the dorms, which included the faculty bringing guests and having
seminars and activities as part of the student’s learning experience. I think they each got like six credits
for the learning community experience and the additional knowledge about communities that was
brought into that living environment. Plus, they were music majors, geologists, whatever their academic
work was.
This was during the planning year for Evergreen and some of the Planning Faculty heard about
this program. They were trying to learn from as many different models around the country as they
could as they were putting together Evergreen’s pedagogy and model, so several times different
subgroups from the Evergreen Planning Faculty would come up and spend an evening, or an afternoon
and evening, with Carolyn and the students, and they would get engaged in all kinds of fascinating
discussions about learning as well as about what the students were doing.
Carolyn learned more about what they were doing about planning for Evergreen. Essentially,
she was almost on the spot offered a job in that first year of Evergreen teaching, so she did. She actually
brought a whole bunch of those UW students down to Evergreen with her because they wanted to have
more of this kind of experience.
Carolyn was hired in the first-year faculty group in 1971, so she said, “Come on down to
Olympia. There’s a lot of State government jobs, and I’m doing these interesting things at Evergreen.”
Our relationship started developing into a more intimate one than when we had been just friends and
part of a group.
I was in Olympia and I was interviewed for some jobs with the State. There was interestingly
one that I thought I did really well on the interview. It was for the Office of Economic Opportunity—
OEO—that was taking federal money that was for poverty relief and all these kinds of programs and
getting it out in the communities. I thought it sounded perfect for me. I didn’t get the job, but I later
became a good friend with one of people who was on the interviewing panel. I said, “Why didn’t I get
that job?” [chuckles] He says, “There was one person on that committee—I think each person on the
committee had one veto—who vetoed it because you had talked so enthusiastically about having
worked in your Peace Corps experience in a town with a socialist mayor”—which was true. That was
fortunate, I guess, maybe for me and Evergreen in the long run.
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This is an interesting piece of college history. One of the programs in the first year of Evergreen
was called Environmental Design. It was one of the many four-faculty first-year programs. The faculty
were Carolyn Dobbs, Larry Eickstaedt, a marine biologist, Chuck Nisbet, an economist, and Phil Harding,
architect.
One of the assignments that Carolyn framed for the students was that the college was located
on Cooper Point—obviously, where it is now—but there was no land use planning, there was no zoning,
there were no guidelines about what was going to happen around the college. It was sort of open
territory. This was before we were doing land use planning in the rural areas—it was mostly city
planning at that time—and the County Commissioners were concerned about what was going to happen
around the college. They had created a typical blue-ribbon community leaders taskforce to be a
Planning Commission to come up with a proposal. The assignment for the students in the program was
to go and observe these hearings. They were using the early video equipment, these great, big cameras
with tripods to try to videotape these to document the planning process.
The students came back from those hearings just aghast at what they were seeing because here
was this proposal being given to the community. The students didn’t know whether it was a good
proposal or not given planning principles and practices because this was at the start of their year. But
what they were observing was the community’s reaction, which was almost universally “We don’t know
if we like this or not because we weren’t involved with any input into it. We don’t even know if we even
understand it because you’re just presenting it as a finished product”—which is typical. The Planning
Commission presents a plan, the community doesn’t like it, it gets shelved, and we start over. Or, it gets
rammed through and becomes the plan without people feeling they had an engagement in it.
The students and the faculty said, “Here’s an opportunity to engage with this a little bit.” They
organized a meeting for all the residents of Cooper Point—put fliers in everybody’s mailbox—for the
community to come to the fourth floor of the Library Building for a big meeting to talk as the follow-up
of the public meeting about what they had heard and what they learned; get a deeper understanding of
what was going on.
That led to a series of other meetings. People who were interested in transportation got a little
subgroup, others were interested in housing. How are we going to protect the environment and the
streams? Where should different kinds of housing be? Some folks said, “How do we keep it real rural
like it is now?” Other folks were saying, “Wait a minute. I own land here that is my retirement
investment and I want to develop this land and put some housing on it.” It was a conversation where
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people could talk to each other rather than have three minutes in front of a microphone and not have to
listen to anyone else.
The students got all excited about this and they started working with these little subgroups,
subcommittees. But along the way, within a month or so, the residents realized that they needed to
somehow formalize this, so they created the Cooper Point Association. Then they said, “We need some
guidance to manage this process,” because the students weren’t able to do it themselves--this was just
one of their academic projects.
They put out this call for proposals and I said, “I’m sitting around looking for something to do.
Here’s what I would do”—because I was participating just as a person in the community. “Here’s how I
would facilitate some sequence of work—meetings, readings, research—over the next few months to
work toward our community members doing our own plan.” That led to what’s known as the Cooper
Point Plan. It was finished within six months. It was already supported by the membership of 750
people in the Association at that time.
When it was presented back to the Planning Commission and the County Commissioners there
was no legitimate way that people could say, “Where did this come from? We had no opportunity to
participate in it.” Even though some chose not to, at least it was there. This was a plan that actually was
adopted—because it had so much community support—really quickly.
For me, it was a lot of fun working with the combination of the students and the community,
and the kind of work I wanted to do. I’ll just keep floating around and getting these opportunities of
working with community organizations. But I also realized it was really fun working with the students.
There were 50 faculty hired the first year in ’71 and another 50 faculty were going to be hired in ’72.
The faculty positions were defined really broadly, much more so than they are now.
There was one something like “the relationship between the built and the natural
environment.” The applicants were landscape architects, architects, planners and probably
philosophers—all kinds of folks. PhD’s were not required. It was the last position hired that year. I
understand why. It was really a difficult decision for the Deans and the President. Everybody got
interviewed by the President in those days, all faculty candidates.
Because there were three finalists, all of us would have been equally wonderful, I think, at least
in terms of what we were bringing to start with. One had already been offered a position the year
before but didn’t take it because they wanted a position at another school, wasn’t happy, and applied
again. Another was a good friend of one of the other faculty, and this person had a really well-known
20

career in the private consulting sector. And then there was me, who represented this positive
relationship with the local community through the Cooper Point Association. And, I think, maybe my
interesting combination of Peace Corps and math.
I guess I was interesting enough of a candidate to be hired. When I was hired, I was still only 27
years old. I was hired at the end of August to start teaching before the end of September. I was
assigned to teach by myself in an advanced group contract, mostly with students coming out of that
Environmental Design program who wanted more advanced work.
That’s how I got here to Evergreen. That first year was an interesting one to talk about. I guess
we’ll probably come back in another session.
Stein: That sounds great. Thank you so much for your time.

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