Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: ONE, SIDE ONE August 16, 1966
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: ONE, SIDE TWO August 20, 1966
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: TWO, SIDE ONE October 4, 1966
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: TWO, SIDE TWO November 15, 1966
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: THREE, SIDE ONE November 18, 1966
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: THREE, SIDE TWO November 29, 1966
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: FOUR, SIDE ONE December 6, 1966
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: FOUR, SIDE TWO December 13, 1966
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: ONE, SIDE ONE August 16, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- I would like, first of all, for you to give me your full name and where
and when you were born.
-
DEANE
- My name is Martha Blanchard Deane and I was born in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania, January 10th, 1896. I was the second of four children. My
father was William Henry Deane; my mother was Elizabeth May Chapman. My
father was a chemist and metallurgist and, I think, before I was born,
he was teaching in a private school for boys in Wilkes-Barre. Soon after
my older brother was born, he and another professor bought the school.
So, by the time I arrived on this earth, he was the joint owner and
headmaster of this private school for boys which was called Harry
Hillman Academy. My mother also taught school. My father, as I say, was
a chemist and metallurgist and was a graduate of Lehigh University. My
mother taught school just briefly before she and my father were married.
There were four children, two boys and two girls—first a boy, then a
girl, then a boy, and then a girl. I'm the second in that family. As far
as I can remember, education was always very important. We had to do
well in school or we received very stern rebukes from our parents. But
it was never a burden in the sense that we didn't enjoy it. I really
always enjoyed school, although I was a very spotty student. The things
I liked, I was very good in, and the things I didn't like, I was very
bad in. But I had to work enough on them so that I could have passing
grades because of my father.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What were your mother's educational interests?
-
DEANE
- My mother, as I understand it (I don't really know very much about
this), taught in the public school in Wilkes-Barre in the grade school.
I think maybe she just took examinations and qualified because, as far
as I know, she never went to any school beyond high school.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What religious faith was the family?
-
DEANE
- My father was a Methodist, and my mother was an Episcopalian. In our
early years, we went to the Methodist Church and later, we sort of
split. Some of the family went to the Episcopal Church, and some went to
the Methodist Church. There was no friction about it at all. It was
where we preferred to go. But, finally, the whole family was in the
Methodist Church. My mother and father were both Bible students, and I
think, very fine ones. Father had a men's Bible class, and mother had
the women's Bible class. And as long as I can remember, Bible study was
one of their very strong interest. My first few years in school, I went
to the public school, and then my sister and I went to a private school.
My father had a boys' private school and there was also a girls' private
school in the same town—the Wilkes-Barre Institute—and my sister and I
then went to the Institute. I graduated from there.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What sort of course concentration was there?
-
DEANE
- The Institute probably helped shape my interests more than anything. It
was a very, very fine school. The principal, Miss [Anna M.] Olcott, a
cultured woman of wide interests. So we had a great deal of art and
music. And literature was one of the main interests of the students. We
had a marvelous English teacher. Vie were assigned our summer reading
every year, and then when school started in the fall, our opening time
would be writing about the things that we had read in the summer. And
the school gave little books for presents for some of this reading. They
were given out at commencement, and I used to get a book every
commencement because I loved that summer reading. It was marvelous. We
read all the staple, all the regular classics that children should read
and that young people should read. It was never a burden as far as I was
concerned.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What [were some of the things?]
-
DEANE
- Well one I remember is Cranford, which was, to
me, simply marvelous. The little women peeking out of the lace curtains
to see who was going up and down the street and all the gossipy kind of
thing is as vivid now at this age as it was when I read it at fifteen.
There were others such as The Mill on the Floss,
and Tale of Two Cities, you know, the regular
series of classics that children read.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was the reading school-oriented?
-
DEANE
- It was school oriented inthe fact that it was assigned by the school,
but these books were all in our library at home, in my family's library.
My family had all read them, so it was never a hardship to get hold of
the books or to be encouraged to read them or have someone to talk to
about them. I can still remember the flood in Mill on
the Floss. I was so torn apart by it. It was just so awful. I
went to Mother and said, "I don't think I can finish reading this," and
she said, "Oh, yes, you can, because you noticed this and this and this.
And what did you think about this?" And she would talk with me about it,
so that this was not, to me, a separate experience. It was a shared
experience with the family. So I think that was very nice. It helped me
not rebel about having to spend my summer reading books that had been
assigned.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was the Institute different, do you think, than the average school?
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think so. I think I was very, very fortunate. It had high
scholastic standards. The girls who went to college from there went
directly into Bryn Mawr and Wellesley and Smith and Vassar. There was no
question about its scholarly standing. We had languages and mathematics
and history and geography, and all of these were done on a better level,
I think, than on the average. It's not fair to say [that it was better
than] in the public schools, because I know so many of the public
schools that have done superb jobs. But in the Wilkes-Barre setup at
that time (I don't know what it is now), it offered a very superior
education.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do I detect that it was somewhat progressive, although not in the modern
sense.
-
DEANE
- Yes it was. I think it was very definitely centered on the students. For
example, I was never good in mathematics, but I was never beaten down
about the fact that I wasn't up at the top in mathematics. I was
encouraged, and people would stop and talk to me about problems. The
math teacher would have me in her office, and we would have nice,
friendly discussions about why I was confused, why I didn't see what the
issue was. So, within the limits of what they were thinking then (they
weren't thinking of a child-centered school by any manner or means),
they were very helpful to people who had problems incertain areas. They
somehow felt that you were important and not the subject. This I think
is the best way I can say it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Can you ascribe this sort of attitude to the person you mentioned
earlier?
-
DEANE
- To Miss Olcott? I do indeed. I think she was a great educator, really
great. She had assembled faculty who were equally fine in the things
they did. I remember some of the outstanding ones. One was the English
teacher who was a person who just lived her subject. It was just not a
lesson to be learned; it was something to be shared. This was your
feeling always. And then there was the teacher who taught German. I was
not very good in languages, but I learned enough German in the two years
of German I had there so that I can still pick up a German book and have
a sense of what it's about. I can't translate it, really my vocabulary
isn't there, but I can sense what this whole discussion is about. And I
haven't even looked at German in forty years. So we were well taught,
this I know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now this was roughly analogous to your junior high and high school
experience?
-
DEANE
- Yes, it was really from the second grade through. I went through the
first and second grades in the public school, and then I went to the
Institute and I graduated from there.
-
SCHIPPERS
- From high school?
-
DEANE
- That was the equivalent of high school. Yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You said that inlooking back, this had a very definite influence on your
career interests. In what way?
-
DEANE
- Well, I don't think it did, now that you put the question that way, I
think it made learning interesting and exciting to me. It gave me lots
of experiences, just fragmentary experiences, in the arts. I mean, I was
in the little school play, and we went to the YWCA for our gymnasium
classes where we had a little dance which was exciting for me. It was my
first experience in anything other than ballroom dancing. We had
concerts just for the students where they would play music and talk
about music, you know. All of those things were not [things I could
experience] in my home. I mean, my family was not musical. Literature
was in my home but music and dance and theater were not there. And this
is where I got my first taste of them and some of the excitement of
success, because I was successful in the little things that I did there.
It was a pretty tiny high school experience, being the leading dancer in
a Greek thing that we were doing. I can't even remember what it was
except that we wore long white robes. It was very Grecian. And playing
the lead in the school play—all this challenged something in me. I just
was excited about it. I immediately wanted to go on the stage. That was
my future. I was to be an actress. Naturally, this was the last thing in
the world my family wanted. Then I decided I would get married, so that
was another big change, because it was just then that the war came, the
First World War. [I had switched from college preparatory course to a
general course since] I had decided not to go to college and that I
would be married. And then, as I say, the war came. This was an awfully
stern blow to my father's business because the school enrollment went
down and so did his chemistry work. At this time (I'm not sure of time
element here), I think he sold the school and joined the Springbrook
Water Company as their chemist and was doing private work in chemistry.
He did work for court cases and for people who wanted work done. But,
anyway, this was his business. And the War was a real blow, financially,
and I just had to go to work. I hadn't taken any training for anything,
so I went to a teachers' college at Bloomsburg to get a teaching
credential. That was in 1914.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Before we go on, I would like to ask a few more questions about this
area. Were you pretty much school and home oriented, or were there other
community activities that stimulated your interest during this period?
-
DEANE
- No, it was home, school and social things. We had an awfully good time,
you know. I mean there were parties arid it was a different kind of good
times than the kids have nowadays. We did everything in groups. We had
corn roasts and skating parties and hay rides and all that kind of thing
which were pretty much group oriented. We skated and we danced, but our
dancing was not in public places. We went to dances that were either in
someone's home or at the country club, someplace like that. But public
dancing just wasn't part of it. Young people nowadays, go to the
Biltmore or to the Ambassador or someplace where there is public
dancing. They have a date and go there without chaperons. But we didn't
do that kind of thing at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was the atmosphere or attitude toward the dance and stagey things
congenial?
-
DEANE
- Yes, it was. The thing was that both my father and my mother enjoyed
good theater. But, at first, we didn't have too much good theater in
Wilkes-Barre. Then it became one of the tryout towns for New York, and
plays came there which I saw and was thrilled with, of course. But my
family was very critical about what I could see and what I couldn't see,
so what I couldn't see, I saw anyway. This was my first rebellion. When
they thought this was something that wasn't for me, I still went with
some of my friends and we would get balcony seats and sit up in the
balcony in the old grand opera house in Wilkes-Barre. So I saw a great
many plays during this time of tryouts for New York. The first
legitimate play I ever saw was Peter Pan. Maude
Adams played the lead. I was a real little kid, and my family took me.
So you see, there was no block against the theater except they were very
critical and very selective in looking at it. The same thing happened
when movies came along. This was just not for me, and I wasn't supposed
to go. So I had to do it anyway. But they weren't antagonistic and they
weren't against movies. They were just very selective as far as these
things were concerned.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did your brothers and sisters share much of these same interests?
-
DEANE
- Well, we split two and two. My older brother is an architect. He's
retired now, but he's always been interested in all these things. And so
he and I have always been very close, and my younger brother and younger
sister have always been very close. And while there is no family rift in
the sense that we don't get along, we just don't share common interests.
My younger brother is a minister and a very good one. And my sister is a
widow with two children and three grandchildren. She lives up in
Connecticut, near her son and his wife and children. That's where the
grandchildren are. But it was Herb and I who always had a feeling for
these things and an interest in them, Allen and Helen were never as
excited by them. They're, I think, more practical. Allen, the brother
who is a minister, is as fine a public speaker as I have ever heard. He
has a beautiful voice and a fine vocabulary and a very convincing
delivery. He is not a pounder of the table, but he shakes you just the
same, he's very good.
-
SCHIPPERS
- To borrow some hackneyed sociological phrasing, would you say that the
family was middle class or upper middle class in its aspirations, ?
-
DEANE
- I would say that it's kind of intriguing because my mother was a
Daughter of the American Revolution, and my great grandfather's picture
hangs in the library in Wilkes-Barre. I mean that side of the family had
position, social position, If you want to call it that. My father was
the son of an Iowa farmer. He worked his way through college. Everything
that he had, he had achieved, through determination and grit. And he had
a very fine mind and was a very Intelligent man. We lived in a very
social town, and Wilkes-Barre is a very wealthy town. It's right in the
heart of the anthracite coal region. We were friends and acquaintances
with all of the people with tremendous wealth, but economically, we
didn't have it. So, I would say that we were middle class definitely. I
don't think we, as a family, had any social aspirations. What Father
wanted for us was to be well housed and well fed and well clothed, well
educated and happy. And his whole life was dedicated to this. We were
his life, completely. He was a wonderful man. I don't think Mother cared
[about social status.] I mean, she had opportunities to go everyplace
and do everything, but she wasn't competitive socially. And, as she got
older, she got more and more interested in her Bible studies and her
Bible classes, and, I think, withdrew pretty much from other social
things that were not related to this. This was her main interest—the
Church and the Bible classes—study. I don't think it was ever a
conscious choice. I don't think she ever said, "Well, I'm giving up
this." 'I don't think this was part of it at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How did your grandfather's picture [come to hang] in the Wilkes-Barre
Public Library?
-
DEANE
- Oh, [laughter] I wish I knew more about the family history, but I never
remember. My sister could tell you all about it. Charles Isaac Able
Chapman was one of the figures in the establishment of the whole Wyoming
valley. It was an historic place where the Indians had gathered and it
had been impossible to develop it because they were antagonistic to any
incoming peoples. And my great-grandfather was the one who made friends
with the Indians and made a treaty with them and enabled the early
development of the Wyoming Valley to really begin. Now, this is as much
as I know about it. You will find as we go through this, that I am the
most uncurious person about these things, and I regret it very much,
because I honestly don't know very much about things that have to do
with my family that I should know about. I was always bored when they
were telling me about it. [laughter] I was too busy, and why stop to
hear about what some old man did, you know?
-
SCHIPPERS
- But during this period that you were in school and being socially
active, you had developed a distinct liking for literature and had
developed apparently some desire for dance.
-
DEANE
- No, dance was secondary. I mean it was theater, and I wanted to be an
actress so badly, that's all. This is really what I wanted to do. But I
couldn't. But I will say that any of the performing arts at that time,
were, to me, stimulating and exciting. Sometimes I think that maybe it
was because my attendance at the theater and the movies so often was
clandestine, I don't know. [laughter] It seemed special. But, on the
other hand, I don't think I would have risked my family's displeasure
for anything else, because I wasn't really a rebel in that sense. I
don't think I would have risked it if it hadn't been important to me,
and it was important.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now you say that it didn't have any bearing on your later career, but,
in some ways, it does seem to all fit in, doesn't it ?
-
DEANE
- Yes, it does, and I never thought of it before, [laughter] I really
never did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You said that when it came to the end of your course of study, that you
had decided not to go to college.
-
DEANE
- I had, at that time, something that was complete puppy love. I was going
to be married, and that would be that. And then this business of the war
came, and marriage wasn't possible. Then, by the time that it might have
been possible, I didn't even remember who it was, you know? It was that
kind of thing. So I went to Bloomsburg Normal School to get a teaching
credential so I could earn my living which I had to do.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I'm not quite clear on how the war would have interfered with your
father's efforts?
-
DEANE
- Well, as far as I can tell, after he sold the school he had a straight
salary from the water company for his chemistry, but the main part of
his income was from his private business. He used to go to Philadelphia
and all around to testify in court cases and things like that. Well,
with the all-out business of the war, I just know that it walloped. a
big part out of his income. What it did, I don't know, but the money
just wasn't coming in. My brother enlisted right away and was in camp in
Georgia, I think. I can't remember at this time.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So then it became necessary that you prepare yourself in some way by
going to Normal School.
-
DEANE
- That's right. By going to Normal School.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And did you do this with reticence?
-
DEANE
- I did it dragging my heels. I didn't want to do it a bit, and I guess I
was a very selfish kid. But you know, really, the Institute and all my
friends and my own home [was my world.] While we never lived lavishly,
we had a nice home. It was well furnished, and we had nice linen on the
table and silver and china and, you know, this sort of thing. And in
those days, Bloomsburg Normal School had great big thick cups that you
had to drink your coffee out of, and they had showers that you shared
with other people, you know, and you stood in line to go to the john. I
was so revolted by everything I couldn't eat. I just hated it. But,
then, all at once, I got interested in what was going on.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What was it that made you get interested in it?
-
DEANE
- Theater. I was in the first Christmas play that they did that first
year. And then I was in the spring play, and I was in the fall play. So
this more than anything else, I think, interested me.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You started to realize some of your ambitions.
-
DEANE
- Some of my ambitions, yes. But after I got over being squeamish and
snobbish (I was very snobbish about it all, I have to admit) [I began to
enjoy it.] But I think it's a jolt for a girl who has never lived in
circumstances where dishes of this kind were used and where they had
bathroom setups like this. I had my own sheets and my own blankets and
my own towels from home, you know, so this was all right. I could go to
bed and be comfortable, but it was the eating and the bathing that
bothered me most. And that is a very superficial thing, really. But it
was important to me then.
-
SCHIPPERS
- It's analogous to the shock of a young man going into the Army.
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think this probably is true. Well, it was a good school. It had
some very, very good teachers, and I learned some things there that have
stood me in good stead all through my teaching career. I can still
remember one wonderful professor who talked to us in terms of being
teachers, I mean not just teaching subject matter. He said, "Now we've
taken it apart; we've analyzed it (history was his subject); we've
looked at what was happening all around the world at this time, and it's
a complicated view. Now, how are you going to work with boys and girls
to get them to see this without confusing them?" And so we all made big
suggestions, but they were all pretty complicated. So he said, "Let's
start with this as a thesis. You can never make anything too simple for
people to understand, and he said, "Start there." So he pushed us on
that thesis. What is the simplest thing you can say about this? Don't
show off all your vast knowledge, but think about how you hook on to
people's minds. How do you get the first bite? I've always remembered
that and this was in 1914. So you see I did have good experiences there.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you recall his name?
-
DEANE
- No, but I will really put my mind to it. I remember what he said, and I
remember what he looked like.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Does anyone else stand out during that period of your instruction?
-
DEANE
- No, not really. Well, I remember the drama coach, although I think that
she was kind of arty, and I don't think her art was very genuine or very
sincere. When I think of some of the things that she coached us to do in
some of the plays. You know they were pasted on the outside rather than
showing this is how you feel inside and this motivates what you are
going to do. But we did very interesting plays, I will admit that.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What other courses of study did you take?
-
DEANE
- Oh, we had to take everything. We had courses in education, you know,
about which I remember absolutely nothing. I have no idea about them at
all. And we had one person, whose name I do remember, Professor
Hartline, who taught the biological sciences. We had physiology. I don't
think we had any anatomy, but I don't remember exactly what we had.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was it a good normal school, conventional in its course offerings, or
was it unusual in any way?
-
DEANE
- I think it was pretty conventional. We had the regular courses, and
there was a training school where we did our practice teaching under
supervision. It was my first experience with it, and I've never been in
another two-year teachers' college to look at their program, so in a
comparing kind of way, I don't know whether what I had was good or bad.
Evidently, whatever I learned, I used, but I think part of it was that I
had a natural ability to teach. I think that teaching was something that
went on in my home all the time without its being called teaching,
formally. But both of my parents helped us all the time and they never
refused to answer questions when we had questions. They answered them
and we could pursue them until we understood. I think that's part of the
reason why I did well, but I think some of it was because of some of the
things I got out of Bloomsburg without being able to Identify them. I
remember the one thing about the history professor, but I can't remember
the specifics about my practice teaching or any specific courses or
anything like that. I played on the basketball team there. I was captain
of the basketball team and enjoyed it very much. But I had played
basketball at the Institute, so this was not a new experience for me.
-
SCHIPPERS
- By the time you had gotten into your practice teaching, you had lost
your reticence?
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes, I was one of the big shots. I was one of the leaders in the
school by that time. If I was going to do it, I was going to do it
right, so I went into everything. I was in all of the plays while I was
there, and I was captain of the basketball team, and, although I wasn't
the editor, I was the assistant editor of the little school paper that
they had. I wrote poems for it. [laughter] Isn't that ecstatic? And what
else did I do there? I can't remember. That's about it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What had you in mind for teaching?
-
DEANE
- Getting a general elementary credential and getting a teaching job.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Teaching all subjects?
-
DEANE
- Yes, teaching first grade or whatever elementary school job that I could
get.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And you had developed no particular idea about a specialty.
-
DEANE
- I was going to teach school.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now, considering what you did in your later career, was the physical
education aspect of any importance to you at that time?
-
DEANE
- No, except I loved basketball. That was fun. But to think about teaching
basketball or becoming a gym teacher never entered my head at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So you finished your course work and...
-
DEANE
- Got a job.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Where was that?
-
DEANE
- In Milton, Pennsylvania, teaching first grade and coaching the
basketball team.
-
SCHIPPERS
- For the first grade or for the school?
-
DEANE
- No, for the high school.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I see.
-
DEANE
- And this has an interesting tie-up. The first year I taught, the
superintendent of the Milton Schools was Mr. Millward. It was my first
teaching assignment (this was during the war), and I had sixty-six first
graders but only fifty seats and only about twenty percent of the
children spoke English. The big Italian Car and Foundry Company, and a
big munition plant were there. That's on the west branch of the
Susquehanna River. These industries were there, and the foreign workers
were in there, and they lived three families in a house. You see, they
worked three eight-hour shifts a day. One family got out of bed and the
next family got in, you know. These children were simply marvelous, but
oh, they smelled to high heaven. But here were these little bright eyes,
and they were so eager to learn. They were just wonderful. But I was
floored. I just didn't know where to begin or what to do except somehow
to keep them busy. You had to teach the reading all by pictures, and
while you were working with one little group, you had to have something
for the other little group. I had colored papers and did all the things
that they say are bad to do in education—busy work, you know. You must
never have any busy work. Well I had busy work, believe me, because I
really couldn't deal with sixty-six at once. I really couldn't. So I
would have this little group doing this, while all the others would be
doing something else. Well, you know, these kids were so thrilled with a
pair of scissors and a piece of colored paper that this was heaven. And
we strung beads, learning to count, and all this kind of stuff. Mr.
Millward came practically every day to my classroom and I would say, "I
wish I had something [else to work with,"] and he would say, "I'll get
you something, " and he'd get it. He worked with me, and I'm perfectly
sure that I never would have survived that year without his real staunch
support and his interest and the little quiet suggestions he would make
and things that he would do. In the winter, you would come to school in
the morning, and this whole line of kids would be there waiting for you.
It would be fifty below zero and the snow was piled up like this, so
that you walked down the sidewalk,[which was like a tunnel, and] you had
absolutely no idea if there was anything in the street or not. I had to
wear a scarf around my face. I think [the temperatures] probably broke
all records that winter. And you'd get there, and here these kids would
be waiting for you. Their underclothes were sewn on them and they'd wet
their panties and they would be frozen, so you spent the first hour of
the morning thawing them out. It was just awful, and you never smelled
anything like it. But, you know, they were just marvelous. They learned
quickly, and at the end of that year, every child in that I room could
read. They would just eat it up. It was so marvelous.
-
SCHIPPERS
- It was, then, your first contact with a deprived income group. Did it
teach you something?
-
DEANE
- Yes, it certainly did. The thing that I thought was so dreadful about it
(this was my number one reaction) was that they didn't prepare us for
this in our education. We had absolutely no discussion ever about it.
They probably do, now. But we had no thought of the fact that everybody
didn't speak language the way we did and that they didn't understand
things on the same middle-class level, what life is, what is polite and
what's not polite, and what is the courteous way to behave. Nobody had
ever given me a glimmer of the fact that this is what I might have to
deal with. Number two, was the tremendous respect I gained for them. I
could never again look at a dirty filthy kid and think because he was
dirty and filthy, he didn't have anything in here, because, boy, they
sure do love, they hate, they fight. They would do anything for you if
you won their respect, and they work like beavers. They really do. They
learn.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you try to inculcate any of the middle class values in them, or did
you go along with them?
-
DEANE
- Oh, I went right along with them. I mean there's no point in showing
them table manners, for example. They never sat down at a table in their
lives. They wouldn't know what you were talking about. The things that I
taught them were the courtesies of saying please and thank you, just
ordinary things like this— not to bump people and not to push people.
They were just the living-together-kinds-of-things that don't require a
home experience to back it up. Table manners and things of that sort
would be a strange language to them. They wouldn't understand it. But by
working with them where they are, you can teach them to take turns, you
can teach them not to push and to look at something someone else did and
to admire it, to share praise. This kind of thing you can teach.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now, how did you happen to get into the coaching?
-
DEANE
- Well, because I had been captain of the basketball team at Bloomsburg.
In my first interview with Mr. Millward before school started, he was
asking me about what kinds of things I had done. I told him I had been
captain of the basketball team and he said, "Well, how would you like to
coach our high school team after school?" I said, "I think that would be
fine." So I did. [laughter] I didn't know what I was getting into,
because they were very competitive and they played teams all up and down
the river. We'd go up to Williamsport for a game and down to here or
there for a game, and, oh, that was really something. This is very
funny, but many years later, here at UCLA, when [Clarence A.] Dykstra
was the Provost, my telephone rang. I answered, and it was Dyke. He
said "Are you a tall, thin, red-haired woman, who coached basketball in
Milton, Pennsylvania, in 1915, 1916?" And I laughed and I said, "I don't
know, [about all that, but I certainly coached basketball there. Why?"
And he said, "Well, the new dean of the School of Nursing said she was
the captain of your team." Lou [Lulu K.] Wolf was the captain of the
high school girls' basketball team of Milton, when I coached it. Isn't
that funny? I had never heard of her since. I didn't even know she had
gone into. nursing, then she winds up here as dean of our new School of
Nursing. So that's a chain that goes back to my basketball coaching in
Milton.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How long did you stay?
-
DEANE
- I stayed two years, and I was paid fifty dollars a month, my first year,
and seventy-five dollars a month my 'second year, So I did very well.
[laughter] This is exactly what I got. Then I left and went home to
teach in Wilkes-Barre and taught there one year in the first grade. At
that time in Pennsylvania, they had what they called Continuation
School. This was started to abate the child labor business. All the
children who worked in the silk mills and in the lace mills had to go to
school one day a week. And so every Monday, one group would go, and
every Tuesday, another group would go, and every Wednesday, another
group would go. In addition to this, teachers were supposed to visit all
these industries and see that the working conditions for the children
were all right. Well, this job opened up, and it paid, if you will
believe it or not one hundred fifteen dollars a month. So, I went to
summer school at Penn State to take a course to prepare myself for the
Continuation School job.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Tell me about that course.
-
DEANE
- Well, all the course really was, was the industrial geography sort of
stuff that taught you what the Industries of certain communities were.
Then you had a course in education, but I don't remember what I did in
that course. All I can remember is writing dozens of papers. We were
supposed to read a lot of magazines and reference stuff, but I couldn't
tell you about it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was it a state operated and sponsored course?
-
DEANE
- I don't know, I really don't know. All I know is that I thought I had to
do this in preparation for the next fall.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How do you feel about the Continuation School's effectiveness ?
-
DEANE
- Oh, I think it was simply dreadful. These children were earning three
times as much as the teachers, you know, and the boys were Impossible.
You had them one day a week and there was no continuity. Here you had
this bunch of boys on Monday this week, and you didn't see them again
until Monday the next week. And the rest of the time they had worked
during the day and clowned around the streets at night. You'd go to the
places where they worked and these were the most depressing experiences
I ever had. Two stand out in my mind. One had to do with the dorfers in
the silk mill. Do you know what a dorfer is?
-
SCHIPPERS
- No.
-
DEANE
- Well, there's a great big cart on wheels with spindles and spools of the
different colored threads on it. The big machines are weaving and, when
the thread breaks or it comes to the end of a spool, it stops the
machine. The dorfer has to locate and get the spool off, put a new one
on, fasten the thread, and then the machine starts. There's a record
kept of every time the machine stops and how long it stopped, and these
kids are just nervous wrecks. You never saw anything like it. They are
just like schizophrenics the way they have to go. And they do this eight
hours a day. And they were little kids. That was horrible to see. The
other [experience has to do with] girls in the Planter's Nut and
Chocolate Factory. In one room, they had the big nuts that were to be
individually coated with chocolate. There's a vat where the chocolate
is, the hot room, and the nuts are all mixed in this, and then the nuts
come up on a wide belt through a slit in the wall. And these girls stand
on either side of this moving band with two sticks in their hands, two
long spindles. They push these nuts apart, so they don't harden in
clusters and so they will, harden as individual nuts. And they have to
have every one done. It goes from there into a refrigerated room. Eight
hours a day, they do it and can't take their eyes off of it. They can't
lift their eyes off of it for a second, can't even take a deep breath.
And this is what these kids were doing. Then they were supposed to come
to school and be excited about something that I could tell them, you
know, something that I could give them to do. Well, I read books to them
practically the whole year and got them interested. The boys were more
interested in the books than the girls were. Heading was number one, so
we would read, and we had to do a certain amount of mathematics, we had
simple mathematics. And the kind of math that I was supposed to teach
them, they weren't interested in at all. These boys could add like a
flash. They had no idea of how to do fractions or how to look at a
problem and say, "Well, this is how you solve this problem." Adding they
were just great at, but nothing else. They weren't interested in
anything. It was really an experience.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What did you come away from the experience with?
-
DEANE
- Well, number one, a great dedication to child labor- laws that make this
impossible, because I don't see how any child who had been through that
experience could ever have quiet nerves again, I mean the dorfers
particularly. The boys who worked in the Carr Biscuit Company were
different, because they were going to be bakers, and they would be good
ones. They were having good elementary training there and could earn a
good living at that. But none of them saw ahead. As one boy said, "What
do I want education for?" I said, "Well, right now you're young; you're
earning your living. This is fine, but what do you want to be
eventually? Some day you're going to want to marry and have a family and
have responsibilities in the community. Don't you want to?" He said,
"Hell, what do I want to do that for? I'm making more money right now
than you are." This was his answer. He was making more right now.
Looking ahead? No, this is right now? Everything is rosy. So I think
this whole concept of partial schooling that has no continuity to it, no
objective, is a waste, a dreadful waste. I don't know how any teacher
could have survived it more than one year. It was the most defeating
thing. The whole program was a farce. It not only failed to educate
them, but it gave them disrespect for education. 'I thought it was
dreadful.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did it challenge you to do something better in education, or did it tend
to defeat you?
-
DEANE
- I was very defeated at the end of that year. Well, I wasn't really
defeated. I just knew that l didn't want to do that anymore. I think
you're asking me some very interesting questions, things that I never
thought about. Yes, I think eventually this paid off, because,
eventually, I became a real educator, I mean an educator with a concept
of what should happen to people that, at this point, I didn't have at
all.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: ONE, SIDE TWO August 20, 1966
-
DEANE
- One of the things that I have Increasingly realized is how helpful Mr.
Millward was to me in my first year of teaching. I had an impossible
problem with the language difficulties and the crowded schoolroom. And
yet he took time to watch what I was doing, to encourage me when I did
something that was good and to show me the error of my ways when I was
doing something that wasn't constructive. I feel that there is a great
lack of that now. Many young teachers don't have this kind of support
and encouragement and help. Somehow educators seem to feel that when
you've finished your work in school and graduate and get a job, that now
you know it all. But you're just starting to learn in your first years
of. teaching, and this is where so many teachers get off the track. They
decide that all it amounts to is doing the mechanical stuff right. Make
the children behave so there are no riots in your room, number one, and
get your roll-book properly done and your reports in one time, and get
your attendance records straight. That is teaching. But what Mr.
Millward did for me was that he made me see the youngsters as people. He
made me understand the problems of these very deprived but very bright
youngsters, and I don't know that I would have learned it otherwise. I
hope I would have, but I'm sure that I wouldn't have learned it as
quickly without his help. I think that's all I wanted to say about it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- About your experience in the Continuation School, what brought your stay
there to an end?
-
DEANE
- Well, I told you I really felt defeated by this whole Continuation School
program. It was the most unsatisfactory kind of teaching I ever tried to
do. And my brother came home that summer, the one that was an architect
in New York, and saw that I was very unhappy and disturbed. I really
didn't want to go back to Continuation School the following year, so he
asked me why didn't I come down to New York and get a part-time job and
go to Columbia and study and keep house for him? That was a brand new
idea for me. And this was how I gave it up and went to New York. I got a
job, but it was a full-time job [instead of a part-time one] in a
private school up on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. It was just a
hop and a jump from Columbia, and I went to Columbia. Of course, there's
more to it than that. I had to decide what it was that I was going to
study with the training that I had and the fact that I had gone out of
the college preparatory into the general course work at the Institute.
So I didn't have all of the necessary subjects, but, in the meantime, I
had had two years in Normal School and the summer session at Penn state,
so I looked at the catalogue, and this is a ridiculous thing to have to
say, but [I did it with the idea of finding] how I could meet the
requirements and still have things that I was interested in doing?
Physical education was the subject I hit on because I could complete the
work there in two years. The only things that I had credit for, of
course, were all my languages and things like that which I had had at
Institute. All during the war my brother and I had corresponded in
French. He is a very good French scholar, by the way.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Then your decision to take P. E. was a strictly practical one?
-
DEANE
- It was really a practical one and not because of any knowledge about the
field or dedication to it, other than that I had been a good basketball
player and had been the coach of the Milton High School girls'
basketball team. So that was how I came to go into physical education.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And what school were you in at Columbia?
-
DEANE
- In the Teachers' College, and I had a very interesting time there,
because the very first excitement was the dance. To me that was just the
most thrilling and satisfying thing that I had ever done. So I really
worked very hard at it. I have to get the years straight, but I guess it
was in my junior year that one of the teachers there, Miss [Ruth V.]
Atkinson, went to what was then the Southern Branch of the University of
California on Vermont Avenue. She became chairman of the Physical
Education Department, and she wrote back to me and said that they were
going to need a dance teacher the following year, so I had my job here
before I graduated from Columbia. And I came out here to teach dance at
the Southern Branch.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you take some special courses in dance at Columbia?
-
DEANE
- No, it was the regular dance that you had as part of the physical
education curriculum there, and this was an exciting time to have hit
Teachers' College because it was a transition time and the old formal
physical education [was giving way.] The staff at Teachers' College were
trained in what they called natural gymnastics and they were trying to
relate physical training to what the body does naturally and to
implement that rather than imposing all the formal gymnastic kinds of
things. This was the beginning of the whole feeling of physical
education as an educational thing, not as a training thing. Before then
it had always been called physical training. You went through these
stringent routines just to build up endurance or to build up muscle. But
they were looking at the whole person, physically, so there was the
dance and gymnastics were called natural gymnastics and they were built
on natural body activities. Of course, the sports were all just as the
sports are now. We played hockey and tennis and basketball and
volleyball, swimming. You know, all the natural sort of things. The
dance was called natural dance, and Gertrude Colby who was my teacher
there was the pioneer in this type of dance for educational programs. It
was made up of what she called free rhythms which were all the natural
locomotor things that you do—walking, hopping, running, skipping,
sliding, galloping. All of these were done with musical accompaniment
that helped the student recognize these qualities in music. If the music
Indicates a run, you hear it, and you run, or if you hear it as a skip,
you skip, or if you hear it as a slide, you slide. That was part of the
program. The next thing that we did was natural dance. But, in this, she
would set a situation and we would then, in pantomime and rhythm, make
your own expression of the idea. And then we had a whole series of
dances which she had created herself and which were published in a book
called Natural Dance, and we learned these
dances. So this was the dance program. But it was all very free and very
creative and had a lot of dramatic opportunities in it which appealed to
me, of course, tremendously. So that was the training. I really worked
hard at it and was good at it. I did it well. So when Miss Atkinson
wanted a dance person she wrote aid asked if I would come here. So when
I came out in the fall, after my graduation from Teachers' College, this
is all I knew about dance. I had seen dance concerts, the ballet, and
this sort of thing but any real concept of dance as an educational
medium was still way out in limbo somewhere. But it was fun to do and it
was exciting to do and I enjoyed teaching and working with it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How did other students receive this innovation at Columbia?
-
DEANE
- I think most of them were interested in it. I say most of them, but
that's not really true. You could almost divide the class in half
between the girls who were interested in sports and athletics and
swimming and hockey and the ones who were interested in dance. I would
say if there was a shading one way or the other, that there were fewer
of the dance ones than there were of the others. It was a new experience
for all of us. None of us had done it before. Some of the girls had
taken ballet training, but there was no idea of becoming a dancer at all
that in it. This wasn't part of the concept.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was this your outstanding experience at Columbia or were there other
classes that [stand out as] important?
-
DEANE
- I think I enjoyed this most, but I had some other classes [I liked very
much.] I was trying to remember the name of the professor the other day
that I had for geography, but it's gone. At the Institute, geography had
not been one of my favorite subjects at all, but this was entirely
different. It was economic geography in which, Instead of thinking about
the land forms of the country, you thought about what its products were
and what its people did—this kind of thing. To me that was an altogether
new idea. It never entered my head that there were things to be learned
like this, and it was fascinating. I enjoyed it very much. But I would
say that those two [areas were my favorites.] Then I had an English
class in which we did a great deal of writing. [I don't remember the
teacher's name but] I can see her little blue eyes and her
ground-gripper shoes. She was a funny little gal, but she was a very
inspirational teacher. We read a lot of poetry and we wrote a lot of
essays. I really don't remember too much about it except that I remember
I enjoyed it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- This was a period when the Columbia Teachers' College was undergoing a
large scale transition in its whole outlook on education, wasn't it?
-
DEANE
- Yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And obviously you were caught up in that spirit. Do you think that this
spirit had a very important impact on education throughout the country?
-
DEANE
- Well, it was a tremendously important to me. Two years later, I went
back to summer school and worked with Dr. [William Heard] Kilpatrick. Of
course, this was the greatest experience that I ever had. Before, while
I was there, the education course that I had (I don't remember who
taught it) left me cold because it didn't tie in with anything that had
been my experience. I had taught, by that time, two years in Milton, two
years in Wilkes-Barre and I was teaching at this private school in New
York. All that had been quite varied, and what we were getting there
didn't ring a bell with me at all. And it was not until I got into Dr.
Kilpatrick's class, that I was so thrilled [by the new concepts and, at
the same time, ] so ashamed about the things I was doing. And, really,
this woke me up and helped me to be cone an educator.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Could you be more specific about what the concepts were?
-
DEANE
- Well number one, the learning process was not in me telling people, but
in creating a situation in which a person could discover [things for
himself then you helped] him move in that direction of discovery,
releasing power in others to do, instead of doing it yourself. I had
thought my teaching was good when I said, "Well, you do it like this, "
then did it. Then they would do it, you see. I'd say, "You never do
this, or you always do this, " then I'd feel I had taught them. But,
now, to me, this isn't teaching at all. The teacher has to create
situations to challenge the student to use what he has himself. And,
until he's used it [and been challenged to extend it, ] there's no real
learning in the sense of change in the person. And this is the thing I
learned from Dr. Kilpatrick.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Without wishing to skip ahead too far, I would like to know how your
training with Dr. Kilpatrick affected your teaching when you came back
to the coast?
-
DEANE
- Well, we'd been taught to make lesson plans, you know: first you do
this, and the students do this, and then you do this and the students do
this. So, instead of that, we did a warm-up and then we talked about
things. I began to know that the students had ideas, and instead of my
thinking up something that was cute and tricky for them to do, [or
instead of discussing] the whole concept of space or rhythm or time or
whatever with them, I'd find out ways of exploring it with them. I
shifted from thinking about dance as a thing that you taught to people,
to thinking of it as a series of experiences through which people really
learned something. They learned something about themselves, about the
people they were moving with. They were learning to relate to one
another. They learned to adjust and adapt and react. All of these things
became part of what we were working for rather than achieving skills,
such as leaping higher or running faster or doing a more beautiful fall.
That was no longer the important thing. The important thing was to
develop this power in the individual to know where he was, and what he
was doing and what the effect of what he was doing had on others and
what effect what they were doing was having on him. This kind of
sensitivity is just something people need for living. It seemed to me
that, all at once, a concept of what dance in education meant was
opening up to me. It's not the same thing as becoming a professional
dancer, but it is a dance experience that every human being ought to
have, in my opinion. It's the most freeing, self-realizing kind of
experience you can have, because you can't be divided up into pieces
when you're doing it. What you think and what you hear and what you feel
is all poured out in one line at one time. It's a single thing, and it's
you.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You must have been one of the first from the Southern Branch to have
studied with Kilpatrick. Were there others?
-
DEANE
- Yes. Miss Seeds who was at the University Elementary school is the one
who inspired me to do this. I used to go down to the school because she
was interested in what I was doing because she thought it was kind of
exciting and creative. It was the sort of experience she could see as
part of the whole program that they were doing at the University
Elementary School, And I used to go down and work with the kindergarten
teacher and her youngsters in rhythms, and then I would work for Miss
Seeds', group, for her teachers, and help them, so as part of the
culminations that they did at the end of every little social study unit,
there would be a rhythmic expression of the study. And it was terribly
exciting to see this grow in the elementary school, and I was delighted
with it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- She encouraged you to go back to Columbia?
-
DEANE
- Yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And study with Kilpatrick?
-
DEANE
- Not in so many words, but her concepts were from Kilpatrick, and she was
always talking about him. She didn't tell me to go, bat the heart of her
educational philosophy was taken from Dr. Kilpatrick. She quoted him and
talked about him, and she would say, "Dr. Kilpatrick says..." So, I
decided I would go and find out what Dr. Kilpatrick said for myself, and
it was very thrilling. It was just a summer session course, but it was
an eye-opener to me.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you know others who went back to study?
-
DEANE
- I really don't. I presume a lot of them did, but there was no cult where
we got together and talked about it or anything like that. There could
have been others who did, but I know nobody from the Physical Education
Department did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now I'm going to break the sequence entirely, which I probably shouldn't
do, but I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about your
experiences teaching at the girls' school in terms of what that did in
shaping your educational outlook.
-
DEANE
- I don't think it did very much. It was a private school and the
chauffeurs brought the youngsters to school in their cars, and the kids
were pretty spoiled. I was teaching first grade and I was successful as
far as the school was concerned in that the youngsters learned to read,
and they liked me all right, you know. But I don't think I did any
shattering thing for them. And, at this time in my life, I wasn't
dedicated to education. I was getting my education at Columbia in a
completely new field. This was a job that was paying my living, and I
did it honestly and well. But I don't look back on it with anything
except embarrassment. I never saw anything like it. At Christmas time,
they came in carrying these tons of presents for me. And you know, it
was embarrassing. I had never had that experience before. It was really
awful.
-
SCHIPPERS
- It must have been quite a jolt, going from the Continuation School
experience into that.
-
DEANE
- It was. It was. And you see my first experience had been in Milton, with
the non-English speaking children of workers for the Italian Car and
Foundry Company. So it was a complete change. Well, I'll say this about
the children. There was nothing that you could do that hadn't been done
for them already, you know. In Milton, if they had a piece of colored
paper and a pair of scissors or colored beads to work with or play with
or do something with, it was excitement beyond words. These children had
every toy, every accessory, and the only thing I finally found [that
interested them was] Here and Now story book. It
was all about how the water came when you turn on the faucet and about
where the water came from and all the things it had gone through and
about the subway trains. They had never been on a subway in their lives,
you know, this kind of thing. Reality was the fascination for these
youngsters. Isn't that funny? I had forgotten all about that. Well, it
was tremendously different from anything I had done. And, as I say, I'm
perfectly sure that I did. an adequate job, but I
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were you also involved in some of their dramatic and dance efforts.
-
DEANE
- For the little school? Well, yes, there was a Christmas celebration that
we did and something on Halloween. We did all kinds of little plays and
things like that, but I don't think I did anything really creative
there. If I did, I have forgotten it,
-
SCHIPPERS
- During that period when you were at Columbia, did you also get involved
in the Inter-Theatre Arts?
-
DEANE
- Yes, there was, at that time (well it still is there, but it's entirely
different), a group of young theater people and they waited someone to
come on a part-time basis to teach movement. And I got the job. At this
moment, I couldn't tell you how I got it. I think I just went and asked
for it. I had heard about it and did it. For a whole year there, I went
over after school, in the afternoon, and we had classes. We did fencing,
and we did free rhythms, and we did pantomime and we did some basic
exercises. It was shaped to fit what they wanted to do. They wanted to
move easily and to move freely, and they wanted to have command of their
bodies, I was learning enough at Columbia to be able to do this. I knew
physiology, which was one of our basic courses, and anatomy, and I had
enough feeling for the techniques of all different physical activities,
I mean all the games and things, plus my enthusiasm for the dance, for
this rhythmic expressive kind of thing. It was kind of a nervy thing for
me to do, I suspect, because I really was an authority for this class.
But I was out of my realm, really, in doing it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Then, this was your first practical application in teaching what you had
learned at Columbia?
-
DEANE
- That's right. It was the very first.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And what other involvements did you have besides teaching?
-
DEANE
- Not any. I mean I just taught this class. I was, at that time, very
busy, because I was teaching school in the morning, you see, until noon.
I went up to Columbia for my classes in the afternoon, and then I did
this other thing. I had my homework to do and you have a heavy program
in physical education, anatomy, physiology, psychology, all the basic
solids that people have to have. In addition, I had to have a social
science credit and all this required preparation. So I didn't have time
to do very much else, but I did the play and the dance recital at
Teachers' College.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And you received your B.S. at Columbia?
-
DEANE
- Yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And then you went back to study with Kilpatrick.
-
DEANE
- That was just in summer school. I was taking graduate work towards a
master's.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I see. Now, I'd like you to explain, again, how you were brought out to
the coast.
-
DEANE
- Miss Atkinson was one of my teachers at Teachers' College. She taught
Physical Education for the Elementary School and had been my teacher in
that course. In my junior year, she left Columbia and came to the
Southern Branch to be chairman of the Physical Education Department, she
wrote and said, "I am going to need a dance teacher next year. Wouldn't
you be interested in this job?" I was thrilled, and I thought it would
be fun to come and see California, be here for a year or two, and then
go back to God's country, [laughter] And so I said yes, and was very
happy because, here I was, with a job in my pocket for next year and
everything all set, and I didn't have to worry. So I finished up in
Columbia and went home and spent the summer with the family and came out
here in September. That was in September of 1924, and here I still am.
[laughter]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Never got back to God's country?
-
DEANE
- That's right, I never did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What were your impressions of the Vermont campus when you arrived?
-
DEANE
- Well, it was a very pleasant and very friendly place. Everybody was very
nice, Miss Atkinson was a charming person, herself, and had made friends
on the campus and had established a place for herself. So, whenever, new
faculty people came in they were received and made very much at home. I
don't remember any jolt or any shock of any kind, because it was so
warm and friendly. There was a lot going on and we had big physical
education classes in those days. There were ninety in the senior class
and seventy in the junior class because it was really the only source of
supply of teachers for the public schools in the area at that time.
After the war, of course, the whole upswing in physical education had
come about when they found so many of the people weren't fit for the
service. Then they decided that this had to be compulsory, so they put
it in all the schools, but there were no trains d teachers for it. So
they grabbed anybody who could play golf or tennis or swim or anything
and inducted them into teaching jobs. But these people didn't stick, and
they weren't really interested in teaching, most of them. There was a
big demand for teachers. So my job was a big one, and I met with a good
deal of resistance from the students because natural dance was
completely different from anything they had ever seen or done or thought
of. So it was not easy. Incidentally, that's the first time I ever met
Mr. Dykstra. He was on that campus teaching political science, I just
remembered that I had known him there and that we had some laughs over
[a skit we had done for] one of the faculty's parties. But we were very
much in the faculty life. We did skits for their parties, and we put on
dance recitals. The first recital I did was The
Odyssey, and that was really something, but I had to learn that
you don't start knowing all about it. I think the campus was smaller
than I had thought it would be. The buildings weren't very new or sharp,
but I thought the people were interesting and friendly and nice. That
was my first impression of things,
-
SCHIPPERS
- How did the faculty respond to the innovation in physical education?
-
DEANE
- They were very nice. They were at first a little bewildered but kind of
intrigued, too, and then when we did this great big splashy recital in
the spring, they were very warm and accepted it as quite a to-do.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How about some of your educational philosophies. Did they cause any
stir?
-
DEANE
- I. didn't have any then.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did those of Miss Atkinson?
-
DEANE
- No, I don't think so. I think she was a good administrator, and she was,
socially, a very well-brought-up and well-bred human being with a lot of
charm. But I doubt very much whether she had argued any educational
philosophies with them at all. I don't know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I am intrigued with your connection with Miss Seeds, she was creating a
little attention.
-
DEANE
- Yes, but I didn't get to know her right away. The old campus of the
University Elementary School was over on Melrose Avenue there. The way I
got to know her was through Mrs. [Edith Wallop] Swarts who was really a
creative person. She was one of the people in the Elementary School with
Miss Seeds, and she came up to visit my classes, as a matter of fact. In
the old gymnasium, there was a balcony up at the end of the gym, and I
remember, one day, looking up and seeing Edith sitting up in the
balcony. She came afterwards and said, "I want you to come down and do
some of this with my children at the Elementary School. So, she is the
one who took me to the Elementary School to do rhythms with the
children. And then through that, I met Miss Seeds. I really didn't do
very much there though. I just remember being active down there on
Melrose at that place and getting to know Miss Seeds, and having long
talks with her about rhythmic experience. There was a group of boys [I
worked with, though, because] I had said, certainly, boys would like
this just as well as girls. They had said, "Well, will you try it with
them?" so they came over to North Hall (North Hall had a room with a
platform and a piano and curtains that pulled across the stage) and
before I could turn around these boys were on the piano and wrapped up
inside of the draperies, having a wonderful time. I shall never forget
trying to get them going. I finally did it with gallops and runs and
falls. I ran them until their tongues hung out, and then they quieted
down a little and we could do more interesting things.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was that work voluntary on your part?
-
DEANE
- Yes, oh yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- There was no formalized agreement.
-
DEANE
- Not at all. These were things I was interested in. And, at that time, I
was defending my point of view, because so many people out here felt
that the dance that I was doing didn't make sense. It had no formalized
technique. It had none of the things that they were used to in terms of
dance, and they couldn't see value in it. At that time, I saw value in
it, but not with any depth. I saw value in it because I liked to do it,
and I knew If you gave people a nice experience, they would enjoy it and
go on with it. But the concept of what was really happening through this
experience, I didn't have any ideas about at all. I really was very
naive and, educationally, very unawakened to what teaching really means.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But your awakening really started with Kilpatrick?
-
DEANE
- Yes, but this was after I had done all these things. Any time I had a
chance to do something, I did it, you know, somebody would say, "Come
and try it, " and I'd say, "sure, I'll go try it."
-
SCHIPPERS
- I wonder if you could give me some more of your impressions of Miss
Seeds and also a little bit on how other people reacted to her.
-
DEANE
- Well I always had tremendous respect and affection for Miss Seeds. I
think she's a marvelous woman. I think she was a really great educator.
I think it's too bad that she didn't have some dance experiences of her
own when she was young and growing. I think that a whole side of her
that needed to be freed never was. I think because of her blind-
spots—she wasn't able to yield, to give, to compromise, is why she
antagonized a great many people. But her vision was clear. Her goal was
sharp and shining, and she went after it right down the line. But I used
to wish she knew what it was like to just do something completely free
with her body. It would have changed so much of this tension that she
had, but this was what was left out. It's too bad. In my opinion, she is
one of the greatest educators I ever knew.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Some other people, however, would take exception to that.
-
DEANE
- Oh, they certainly would.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Could you name a few for me?
-
DEANE
- Well, it's kind of hard to remember. There was Mr. [Jesse A.] Bond and
who was the man who was the head of the School of Education
-
SCHIPPERS
- Would it be Lee?
-
DEANE
- This was before Lee. But the people in the School of Education in the
early days (this was long before Ed came here), were very traditional,
and I think that they had no concept of what Miss Seeds was trying to
do. And they didn't make it easy for her. They bucked her on salaries;
they bucked her on appointments; they bucked her on schedules; they
bucked her on equipment. I mean, she really had to fight for every
single thing that she got. And she got the reputation for always
fighting. Well, she was always backed into a corner. But she really
understood what she was trying to do, and I don't think that there's any
question that she had a real feeling for learning as experience, she
knew that, with the right direction, and the right opening up of things,
that a valuable thing would happen to the individual. It shouldn't be a
stamp where you all have to meet this or that requirement. It should be,
I go where I can, and you go where you can.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were you able to aid her in any of her battles?
-
DEANE
- No, I never was in a position to, you know. In the early days, I was
just a little dance teacher, and I wasn't on any committees where I
could do her any good.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Could you later, after you moved to Westwood?
-
DEANE
- Well, at the time that they wanted to do away with the Elementary School,
I was very helpful I think. I worked with Ed Lee and I worked with her.
And there were a group of mothers from the Family School Alliance that I
worked with.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Peggy Kiskadden was one of them.
-
DEANE
- Yes, and I did everything I could at that time, which was mostly in
going over materials and making suggestions about what could be done and
speaking up in meetings when I had a chance to do it. This is about as
much as I did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did the Physical Education Department continue a relationship with the
Elementary School after it moved to Westwood?
-
DEANE
- Yes. Well you see, part of our program was in teacher training. We had a
double program; one for our professional students and the other for the
general university students. [Since elementary school teachers are
responsible for the required daily P. E. in the public schools, we
always included in our program courses designed to equip them for this
responsibility.] On our staff, we always had one person who was in
charge of this elementary school program who worked with the training
school. [she supervised the practice teachers there in their P. E. work
with the elementary school children.] I can't remember what year Diana
[W.] Anderson became the member of the physical education staff who
worked there, but she worked with Miss Seeds very closely. We still did
demonstrations for them, and I went to all of their culminations to see
the rhythms that they did and then would talk with the teachers about
them afterwards. I was so impressed with them. I thought that they were
just marvelous. Some of these things that the children had created out
of the study that they had just completed were about as dramatic as you
could want to see.
-
SCHIPPERS
- We may have reason to refer to some of these relationships again, but we
go back again to when you first came here. You assumed what specific
duties then as an instructor?
-
DEANE
- I was in charge of the dance program for the majors, and so I had all
four groups: the freshmen, the sophomores, the juniors, and the seniors.
And, in addition, I had classes for the general university students.
Physical education was required. It was P. E. 4 or something like that.
But every student was required to take two years of physical education,
or four semesters of it. And they chose what they wanted to take. They
could take swimming, tennis, archery, volleyball, dance, folk dance— you
know, we had this great long program. And I had the students who
selected natural dance for their P. E. 4 activity. So I had sections of
that, and that was my program. I think I had one section of folk dance
the first year I was here, but I don't remember. I think there were
three of us who were teaching dance, but I don't remember, because the
size of the department changed so rapidly. We had one other girl who
taught natural dance, Marjorie Forchemer, and then Berenice [H.] Hooper
came and she did folk dancing, largely, but she had one or two sections
of natural dance. The dancing sections became more popular because we
got better at teaching it, in the first place, and because people got
more used to the idea, in the second place, and they didn't object so
violently to the costume, the little rhythm suits, that they used to
wear for this.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was that the first real efforts at the Southern Branch in any kind of
dance activity?
-
DEANE
- Oh, no, they always had had some dance in physical education, but it
hadn't been this particular kind. They had always had folk dancing, and
they had had, I don't know what you would call it, a kind of a mixture
of basic ballet technique and theater dance.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But Miss Atkinson had not started the kind of dance instruction that you
brought?
-
DEANE
- She didn't teach dance at all, herself.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Oh, I see.
-
DEANE
- She knew me because I was good in dance at Teachers' College.
-
SCHIPPERS
- so, actually, you brought this innovation with you.
-
DEANE
- Yes, really. There had always been dance in the physical education
program. But it wasn't exactly this. It was different. Schippers'; And
what about theater activity?
-
DEANE
- Well, at that time, Evalyn Thomas did the Greek drama every year, and
this was the big theatrical production of the year. I can't remember
whether she was in the Speech Department or whether she taught Greek
drama in the English Department. Well, English and Speech were one
department in the beginning, and I think maybe that's where she was—in
the English-speech Department. That was the one big production of the
year—the Greek drama. Any other plays that were done were done by
students as far as I know. But there was no other dramatic activity
except student skits.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And, in those early years, did anyone call upon you for cooperation in
the dramatic productions?
-
DEANE
- Well, yes after my second year there, I guess, Miss Thomas wanted me to
do the movement for this Greek drama, to move the choruses around or
something. I am very vague about that; I don't remember much about it. I
think it was done very much within the framework of what she wanted, she
didn't say, "This is yours. Do something with it."
-
SCHIPPERS
- [Did you pursue] this liaison [with dramatic efforts there?]
-
DEANE
- No, I didn't. Of course my first love always has been theater. Every
time that I have been any place where you could relate what you were
doing with theater, I have done it. And I have worked with the students
just on getting skits that were good, you know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Why wasn't theatrical [fare more varied?]
-
DEANE
- Well, I am vague about this, but I had the impression that the only
theater that Dr. Moore thought was good was Greek theater. I know that
it used to be very difficult to get the auditorium assigned. He had to
give permission for anything that went on in the main auditorium, and,
as I remember it, the only push for theater was from the students. I
really think I'm right about this. I don't think the faculty of the
English-Speech Department [was interested.] They had a great debate
team, so they had debating and oratorical contests and the Greek drama,
and I don't remember their ever putting on a play. Now you could
probably look at the record and find they did one every six weeks, but I
doubt it, I really do. I can't remember a single play put on by the
English-Speech Department while we were on the Vermont Avenue campus.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did the kids come to you?
-
DEANE
- Well, they would come and say, "Can we rehearse down here, " and so we
let them use the gym. They had two nights, one when the boys put on
skits (It was a men's jamboree sort of thing), and another which was a
contest in which all the girls did skits. I used to help them rehearse
and develop these. I think student organizations did them. The Women's
Athletic Association and the Art Club and the different sororities, all
did a skit in a competition of some kind. And that was about as much
theater as I remember. I think it would be very interesting to know if
there were plays done other than the Greek drama, on the Vermont Avenue
campus. I really doubt it though.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How were the faculty relations, interdepartmentally on the Vermont
campus.
-
DEANE
- Well, there was a little group who ran everything, but aside, from that
I think people were pretty friendly. And, in those days, I didn't know
there was such things as promotion committees or anything like that. The
mechanics of the administration and the politics of the university were
very much out of my ken in those days. I didn't even know that there was
such a thing, so we had friends in all the departments, and the faculty
used to do a lot of very pleasant things together. They bad faculty
dances once a month, and everyone knew everybody else, of course,
because it was so small. The men's faculty club did the jamboree sort of
thing, where they did crazy skits, and, as I remember it, it was very
friendly. I knew people in all departments I guess.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What little group ran things?
-
DEANE
- Well, let's see if I can remember names.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Maybe you could just indicate what positions they had.
-
DEANE
- Well, there was a man, I think, who was in zoology.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Bennet Mills Allen?
-
DEANE
- No, someone else. I knew Bennet Allen very well, and Bennet was in that
group. He was supposed to be a great progressive in those days, but
Bennet became less than progressive later on.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was Mr. Moore very much present?
-
DEANE
- Well, he was, but he was very withdrawn, I mean in the sense that you
didn't ever feel a freedom with him. He would listen to you kindly if
you went with a problem, but he was a very rigid kind of man, very
rigid. He was a scholar, there was no question about that. And he had
very little insight into anything that didn't fit into his scholarly
pattern. I think he hadn't the vaguest idea what physical education was
about except [as it related to] the ancient Greeks. And the business of
a healthy mind and a healthy body made a fine quotation, but I don't
think he was in touch with the feelings of the younger faculty. Now I
wish I could go down the line on this little group of men, because I can
see some of their faces.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Well, I want you to think about that and next time, we might do
something with it.
-
DEANE
- Yes, I wish I could get an old, old catalogue.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Well, I'll get you one. How did they feel about Berkeley?
-
DEANE
- The word came down from Berkeley. Anything people wanted to do was met
with, "Well, I don't think Berkeley would agree," or "Berkeley is
against this," or "We'd never get by with this at Berkeley." I mean it
was ad nauseam. We were completely dominated.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was there any feeling of rebellion growing?
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think there was. I think it probably was stewing then, but I
didn't know it until after I had been there awhile. I didn't know very
much about it. As I said, I was not in the know about politics or
anything of that sort.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: TWO, SIDE ONE October 4, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- This morning we had been reviewing the Southern Campus annuals from 1924
through 1927. One was missing. The 1925 one was missing. This review
began prompting a series of reflections, and one of the things that
developed was this new attitude towards the dance [that was emerging] in
1926 but also what some of the attitude was towards theatre in general
on the campus at that time. One of the personalities that stands out
most, of course, is Miss Evalyn [A.] Thomas. I wondered if you would
give a description of her and describe what her attitude toward theatre
was.
-
DEANE
- Well, Miss Thomas, was a fabulous person, she was deeply steeped in
Greek drama which was her first love and, as a person, she just
dominated that whole field on the campus. She was tall and stately. She
always wore a wimple. I never saw her without a wimple, even early in
the morning. She wore lots of beads and lots of scarves, which sort of
floated around her. She was a very impressive person, except when you
first saw her, you were inclined to smile and think, "Well, here is an
erratic individual." But she wasn't at all. This was her role, and she
played it to the hilt. She also coached the annual play that was done
by, I think, Kap and Bells, which was the student dramatic organization.
And, aside from that, and the Greek drama, there was no real theatre on
the campus at all. The Greek drama came once a year, and it was the
highlight of dramatic productions. The auditorium was not used for
anything else but the Greek drama because the sets were built right on
the stage. There was just one mammouth set for each one. And it was
there enough days before the production itself to give them ample time
for rehearsing on the set. This irked some of the other people who
wanted to use the auditorium, but this was law. It was done this way
every year. The productions were beautiful in costuming and in setting.
They were somewhat limited by the ability of the students, but they had
been thoroughly rehearsed in gesture and in voice and in diction. My
memory of them now is rather sketchy, but I was impressed, although not
moved by them. I can make that distinction. The Kap and Bells
productions were on an equally high level. They were always plays of
real literary merit, and they were beautifully staged and costumed. But
there was no spontaneous feeling about them. They were rigidly directed
all the way through. The spontaneous theatre came from the students. We
had the Hi-Jinx and others. I can't remember the names of them all now.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned that she was the type who had a very well-modulated voice
and so on.
-
DEANE
- She did. Her own speech was beautiful. She was completely dominating in
that she never came down off her high horse, you might say. She always
discussed things on this same level which was in accord with her social
and professional manner. She had a lovely, voice, beautiful diction,
and; she never brooked any baiting or any teasing or anything like this.
I mean, you wouldn't dare. [laughter] You just wouldn't dare. But people
who knew her said she was a very warm, very genuine person. I never knew
her that well. But I know that her will was absolutely immovable when
she had an idea about a production. This is how it was done. There was
no arguing or debating or changing. If she didn't like it, we wouldn't
have it. If she liked it, this was the way it was going to be. And she
never gave an inch on anything.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You were asked to assist her once.
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes. She asked If I would do the movement for a production. I cannot
remember whether it was for a chorus in one of the Greek dramas or
whether it was for some Shakespearean thing. I really can't remember.
But, at one point, at the climax, I had some of the dancers picked up by
the fauns or something, and slung over the shoulder and rushed off the
stage. And this did not meet with her approval, not at all. So this came
out immediately. We didn't do any shoulder slinging. [laughter] That was
too risque. She didn't like the implications of it, so it came out. And
I don't remember, at this moment, what we did do to get them off the
stage. We got them off, I'm sure, but in a more routine fashion, not
quite so dramatic.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You were impressed by, the lavishness of the costumes and the sets.
-
DEANE
- They always were beautiful, and I haven't the least idea where the money
came from, but I know there never was any cutting down on either the
costumes or the sets. They were just beautiful, beautiful fabrics,
beautifully draped, wonderful colors. I don't think they were rented,
but I honestly don't know. But I do know there must have been funds from
somewhere to costume and stage these things, because they were
beautifully done.
-
SCHIPPERS
- [This reflected the] great reverence for the classical drama on campus.
-
DEANE
- There's no question about that. The academic standards of the campus
could accept theatre as long it was in terms of the Greek drama or
anything that related to it. It must be something of high literary
merit, something that had been an established work of art as far as the
literature of the play was concerned. And this was wholeheartedly
accepted. But beneath that were the stirrings of the students who
wanted to express themselves and this was not a really satisfying
medium. There was no authority for them to do anything other than as
student affairs. There were no theatre courses, or acting courses as
such. There were courses in the English Department that dealt with
Shakespeare and others in which drama was discussed, but it was all in
an academic vein. It wasn't theatre as a live experience. You didn't
have any feeling that anyone cared about it, anywhere.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And you said that some of the student groups, like the Press Club Vode,
the Men's Do and the Hi-Jinx turned to you. In what way did they do
that?
-
DEANE
- Well, any group that was interested in movement, any pantomime or any
dance or any arrangement of groups, used to come and ask if I would help
them. And they'd come down to the gym to re hear sec; And I worked on
these various things for student skits. It was never a full production,
but sometimes there were two or three skits in one show. Number one,
they liked having a place to rehearse. Number two, they liked somebody
who really was interested and who would help them. And if you had a cute
idea to add to their ideas, well, so much the better. They thought it
was great. So I used to work with these groups whenever one of their
performances was coming up.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So this is where their spontaneous dramatic effort started to show.
-
DEANE
- Right. It was there, but it was carefully supervised. I can remember,
Mrs. [Helen Matthewson] Laughlin would come in to be sure that there was
nothing risque in the skit or that would carry it beyond the bounds of
what was legitimate for a university to do. And they had to be very
careful with their double entendres and the words of their songs, which
sometimes were hysterically funny. You know, kids are just great. They
have so much imagination. And they would just let themselves romp on
these things. Well, I was sort of a pre-censor. I would see this in
rehearsal and say, "You'll never get by with that. You better [laughter]
make an adjustment here." And sometimes they would object and just go
ahead and do it. Then it would get cut out in the final rehearsal. But
it was fun. And it gave me a great feeling that, somehow, there should
be a place for the students to really express themselves. They wanted
very badly to take their own plays and their own ideas and do them
themselves. They didn't mind being helped a little bit, they wanted to
have some push in it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- In looking through some of the annuals with you, I noticed that you
seemed to recognize' quite a few of the photos [of the activities] in
which these groups were involved. I wondered if they turned to you with
rather great frequency?
-
DEANE
- Well, yes. But, of course, I had a lot of the people in classes, too.
You see, every lower division student had to take four semesters of
physical education. They could select what activities they wanted to
take, and after they got to know me, more and more of them came in to
the dancing classes because they thought it was fun. It was real fun. So
I knew them both as students and as people that I worked with in
rehearsal time. Of course, you get to know people very much better in
the informality of a rehearsal than you do in class time. So I remember
them because of seeing them both places, I think,
-
SCHIPPERS
- We were also taking note from the 1925 annual, that the first dance
recital of the Dance Department was based on a Grecian odyssey.
-
DEANE
- Some of the costumes were Grecian, and the main theme was Homer's Odyssey. We took a series of episodes from that
and turned them into dance pantomimes. Some of it was pantomime. Some of
it was just straight dance. And the costumes were of that period. Some
of them were imaginative and some of them were pretty straight. But we
made our own costumes for it. There were no rented costumes. They were
all made, even the warriors' helmets and their shields were made by the
students themselves.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you direct that almost exclusively or did you have help from others?
-
DEANE
- No, I directed it all myself. Every bit of it. As a matter of fact, this
is interesting. I had a friend who was a very, very fine pianist who
lived in El Paso at that time, she has since moved to Mexico City [but,
at that time, ] her husband was with a mining machinery company, and
they were headquartered in Texas. I wrote to Betsy [Rodriguez] and said,
"I have to do this, and it's my first recital, and it has to be good. I
can work on the dance, but I don't know enough music to do it. Won't you
come up and help me with the music?" So she came up and stayed a month
with me. As we worked out these various dances, she worked on the music
for it. borne of it was selections from music already written that we;
could adapt to an episode, and some was music she composed, she played
for all of our rehearsals, and played for the production itself. So that
part of it, Betsy did. There was a student in the Art Department whose
name was Rita Glover. Her father was a scenic designer and she had often
helped him in the theatre with things. Rita did the sets and the
lighting for the production. So when I said it was all mine, I mean it
was really mine and the students because they worked on it too. They
helped develop the program itself, the stories and the dances, the
movement, the presentation. I didn't do anything with the music; Betsy
did it all, and Rita did the sets and the lighting.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How about the choreography?
-
DEANE
- Oh, this is what I did—the whole thing, with the students. Some of it I
just did myself and said, "This is how it is going to be, " and for some
episodes, where it was a dance pantomime, the students worked as much as
I did on it. It was kind of a creative thing, and that's where the music
was so helpful, because, when we would have the music selected, the
students and I, together, would work on this. I would be seeing it, and
they would be sensing what they wanted to do and moving, aid I'd say, no
or yes, this sort of thing.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You didn't use notations then?
-
DEANE
- Oh, no.
-
SCHIPPERS
- None at all. Did you find the reference to the Greek a helpful way to
satisfy the tastes for drama at the time?
-
DEANE
- I think it was one of the reasons I did it in the first place. I didn't
think that to go whipping off into something very modem would be too
effective. It was my first year, and it was necessary that it be
acceptable from all standpoints. So, it was a combination, and using the
Odyssey as a springboard established this as
legitimate. As long a s they could see that you weren't changing the
story, and you were just taking bits out of it and giving a quick
glimpse at it, it was acceptable.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now this was the first dance recital.
-
DEANE
- The very first one I did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was it the first recital that had ever been staged?
-
DEANE
- Oh, no. Every spring, they had had a dance recital. I don't know too
much about, the ones before I came. I just know that, in the 1924
yearbook that we looked at, there were pictures of this dance program.
Again, they were draped in Greek robes, but I never saw one and I never
saw a program of one, so I don't know what they did before. But I do
know they had had dance recitals.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How was your effort received?
-
DEANE
- Very well. It was really marvelous. I was even invited to go and speak
to the Friday Morning Club, and [laughter] it was really very nice. The
one person who I think was most gracious about it all was Mrs. Moore,
Dorothea Moore, she liked it very much and made a point of having me get
a chance to talk about it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was this a basis of encouragement for further efforts in the direction
you were going?
-
DEANE
- Yes, there's no question about that. Up to that moment, I had no feeling
of having done more than my job well, you know. I had taught well. My
classes had been successful, in terms of my standards at that time,
which weren't very high. You feel your first year, if you get by, you've
done all right, you know. I had gotten by, but the test was, could I
deliver on this? And I did deliver. I don't think there's any question
about that.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you remember at all where the funds came from for the recital?
-
DEANE
- Well, we didn't have very much. We made our own costumes. Vie must have
had some money to buy cloth, but I have no idea where funds came from,
unless they were in the physical education budget. As a matter of fact,
I think that's where they were. It was not any tremendous amount, but I
think it was budgeted every year in those days.
-
SCHIPPERS
- In reviewing, we also took note of Agnes deMille. I wonder if you could
give a little vignette of her.
-
DEANE
- Well, I can't do too much vignetting, because I didn't really ever work
with her. The first year when I was getting ready to do this, my first
dance recital, I asked her if she would dance in the program. And she
was not interested in doing it, so I never asked her again. I haven't
any idea whether she was too busy or whether she wasn't interested in
what we were doing or couldn't see a place for it. I think she was not
particularly interested since she was a dancer, and we were not trying
to develop dancers. These girls had no technical skill in the sense of
trained dancers. They had nice natural movements and, as I say, I never
choreographed anything that would demand a skill that they didn't have.
So the level of technique was low, but the performance was high because
it was within the limitations of the dancers themselves, Wow whether or
not that was why Agnes didn't want to join us, I really don't know. But
we always have been very cordial acquaintances. Several times when I
went to New York when she was there, we would have lunch together. I've
seen her two or three times maybe in the last thirty years.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But you did make the point to me that there might be a danger on the
part of some of overemphasizing her importance in influencing dance on
the campus.
-
DEANE
- Well, as a matter of fact, I don't think that she influenced the
development of dance itself on the campus. I think she was a highly
talented, very skillful young dancer in those days, and that, where she
was given an opportunity to dance, she did a tremendous performance.
But, in terms of initiating dance as an undertaking for students or for
the university to undertake, no I don't think she had any influence on
it, I think they were very proud of having her there and very proud of
the things that she did, but I don't think that you would say that she
left a mark on the development of any program there.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Along this line of developing the student attitude toward dance, we came
across a page in the 1926 album that seemed to stir some memories which
make a rather important point. I want you to look at it again and repeat
some of the things you've said to me, and also to read some of the
comments down there on the bottom, the reactions you had from reading
those. What page is that incidentally?
-
DEANE
- It's page 311. The men's activities and athletics always had the big,
important spread [in the yearbooks, and there was always a report] on
the Women's Athletic Association. But this is the first time in which
you find dancing mentioned as one of the W. A. A. activities. And since
all of the activities in W. A. A. were on a competitive basis, that is,
you had interclass teams in team sports and individual competition in
individual sports and so forth, how to present dancing for competition
or for award or for anything of that sort was very difficult. It wasn't
an award other than you got honors if you achieved a certain standing.
And they had a folk dance honors and then they had a natural dancing
honors. I was fascinated to see this, because I had forgotten all about
it. In the required practices thirty-five girls tried out and, it says,
"In the required practices, these girls were taught two dances, 'The
Faun' and 'Vintage,' which they performed before the judges. They were
also required to present one of a group of four Child Rhythms, and in
addition to this each was expected to present an original composition, "
You see, I had forgotten about it myself, but I'm sure it's the first
time that students were required to create their own dance in order to
receive honors in the dance. And later on it says, "Much praise for the
success enjoyed in this field of athletics" (and you see it is a 'field
of athletics') "is due to Miss Forchemer" (That was Marjorie Forchemer),
"who coached the folk dancing and to Miss Deane who coached natural
dancing, as well as to the head of this sport." That was a student who
was interested in dance who was elected by the other W. A. A. members to
be head and to manage the setting up of the program for dancing. "The
two types of dancing expounded to willing scholars by these two
Instructors were quickly assimilated, and after a short period of
practice, the women who participated in this field became very
proficient in the art, executing dances taught in a most satisfactory
manner." I think that's very funny—most proficient. "The W. A. A. is
looking forward to the time when dancing will become one of its largest
departments, and this situation should soon be brought about if interest
in dancing continues to develop as it has this year." Now this was the
start of student interest because W. A. A. was completely a girls'
athletic association. It was sponsored by the Physical Education
Department, but it was open to any girl in the University who wanted to
participate in sports. And even though they still called it, "field of
athletics", dancing was what was interesting to a lot of the students,
and they did care about it enough to come out and go through the routine
that they had to go through in order to win their honors in dance. But
before they did that, they must have participated in classes, you see,
to have found an interest in this.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now you mentioned that this was probably the first mention of "natural
dancing."
-
DEANE
- Yes. Well natural dance was what I had been taught at Teachers' College,
and it was called natural dance largely because it was part of the whole
natural movement in the physical education program. It was definitely an
innovation that came from Teachers' College to break away from the
formality of European gymnastic training, the use of stall bars and
dumbbells and Indian clubs and wand drills. All of the things that were
part of the formal training were supplanted by activities based on
natural body movement. And the dance was the same. It was based
primarily on locomotor activities, running, skipping, jumping,
galloping, together with reaching and bending and natural pantomimic
gestures that the body makes. So this was what I was teaching at this
time. It's all I knew at this time.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So, in other words, the competitive spirit reflected in other athletic
activities on the campus, became an important element in the furtherance
of this new kind of dance.
-
DEANE
- Yes, this is right. I didn't recognize that this really was what had
happened until I saw this article.
-
SCHIPPERS
- This is in regards to your first dance recital. What were some of your
objectives in giving this recital? lb build an audience and an
appreciation of this kind of dance?
-
DEANE
- Ho. I think both of those things happened, but my motivation, true and
simple, was that the dance teacher put on a dance recital in the spring.
I had no noble motives, I think, other than to do the best job I could.
And I was very challenged by it. But I do think it did build an
audience. I think it was a beginning in making people willing to come
and watch dance. But I wasn't motivated by any fine, high ideals at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- For the moment, I think we can leave talking about the development of
the dance and start to focus, perhaps, on some of these personalities
that you mentioned who helped, in some regards didn't help. You
mentioned one man, Squire...
-
DEANE
- squire Coop. He was one of my first disappointments in that he was
chairman of the Music Department, and I had felt that student activities
in dance and music should work together. There was no reason why we
couldn't have music that was composed for us or played for us by music
students, so we could have, say, an orchestra. It could be just a little
combo or something. But he was not at all interested in this kind of
cooperation. As a matter of fact, over the years, this has always been a
problem. In the last few years with the dance major and creative music
people working there, like Pia Gilbert, it's a different thing, and you
have, now, a different kind of cooperation. But we couldn't get any. I
couldn't get any help from squire Coop at all. He just wasn't
interested.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You also mentioned that he was very respectful toward Berkeley.
-
DEANE
- Well, I don't think there was any question of that. It was such a tiny
campus you know, this was back on Vermont Avenue (Southern Branch was
our official name), and although I didn't even think of it at that time,
a great many of the people were very anxious to establish it as a fine
academic institution patterned after Berkeley. I mean there was no
feeling that we were in any way a separate institution, that we could
have our own personality or our own interests or our own drives. And
Squire Coop was one of the people who wouldn't dream of stepping out of
the line established by Berkeley in whatever he did. And I feel that he
limited the Music Department very much in his unwillingness to
experiment or to try new ideas or to broaden what it could do other than
the academic things. It was a pretty traditional music setup.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You got some rather unexpected help from Bennet Allen?
-
DEANE
- Indeed I did. He was very much interested in the arts. He had a great
belief in what they could do. It was when we had come to the Westwood
campus that I knew Bennet Allen. He and I were on a committee. I'm sure
it was the first committee called the Committee on Drama, Lectures and
Music that arranged for the first concert series in Royce Hall and that
really tried to bring cultural events to the campus and to make the
campus a center to which the community would come for its cultural
events. He was a very gentle person, and very warm and friendly. He
encouraged me. He felt that we ought to have an organization like the
Town and Gown at USC that would stimulate the interest of people in the
community toward our cultural events. And with his encouragement, I
started the University Affiliates which has since become a big group. It
did very well. I think that he had tremendous respect for dance,
although he didn't know anything about it. He sensed in himself, I'm
sure, a lack of the thing that dance does for you, that freeing kind of
experience. His experience was on a completely intellectual level. And I
think this was one of the reasons why he was so encouraging and
supporting in the things that we were trying to do.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you remember any specific occasions when he helped you to bring
artists to the campus?
-
DEANE
- Well, you see, it wasn't a matter of me bringing them. He was chairman
of this committee, and I was on it. This committee was charged with [the
responsibility of overseeing] everything that came to the campus and
everything came under the auspices of this committee. One branch of it
did a lecture series which we used to present in that little downstairs
place in the Chemistry Building, Art Warner was in charge of that one
segment of our committee that was assigned with setting up this lecture
series by faculty members. But everything that came into Royce Hall in
the way of a concert, or an orchestra, or any of the performing arts,
came under the auspices of this committee. I can remember our first
struggles in those first years. We had to pay our way and we had no
money to back up a loss. So, what we would do, was pick one terrific
artist who would sell the series, and then balance that with people who
charged much less money. That way, the total amount for the expenses of
the series would come within our budget. And our budget was established
on what we could get if we sold a certain number of season tickets.
There were concerts when we had [Artur] Rubinstein and Marian Anderson.
Well, I couldn't even begin to go back and remember all we had, but we
always had a big artist who would sell the series and then balance
around that.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I'd like to talk more about those things later. Now, I would like to go
over some of these names that we had spotted in the annual [and for you
to make some comments.] Previously I had asked you who some of the
powers, some of the lights, on the campus and one of the first you
mentioned was Dr. Loye [Holmes] Miller.
-
DEANE
- Well, again, my memory of these people is simply that they were
important. You have to recognize that I was a green young teacher. I was
eager. There's no question about that. I liked meeting people, and I
liked knowing who was who, but, in terms of what was going on in terms
of campus politics, ! had no knowledge. But I do know Loye Miller was a
leader. He was an important person on the campus, and I think he was a
highly respected member of the faculty.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Mr. [Frederick P.] Woellner.
-
DEANE
- Well, Mr. Woellner was a very popular lecturer. I think he spent as much
time off campus giving lectures as he did on. He was very facile. He had
a nice. sense of humor, and he had a very fine delivery. The students
loved his classes. I think he was often smiled at by the more
academically minded people on the campus because they felt that he was
too glib to have depth. Whether this was true or not, I can't possibly
judge, but I know this was the general feeling about it. I remember him
very well as an individual, but I don't think he was a political force
on the campus.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now, and Vern O. Knudsen.
-
DEANE
- Well Vern was a very important person. He was tremendously interested in
the arts, in the development of a cultural life for the campus. He
always gave support to anything that furthered student experience in the
arts. He was very supportive, and I think was one of the most open
minded of the leaders on the campus.
-
SCHIPPERS
- He had a very important role, apparently, in separating theater arts
from the English Department. Is that correct?
-
DEANE
- Yes, he did. He was chairman of a committee that was appointed [by Mr.
Dykstra to make concrete proposals to the Committee on Education Policy
for the establishment of [Fraud] a Department of Theater Arts. I know
Ralph and Alfred Longueil and I were on it, but I cannot remember who
the others were. There had been four; prior committees that had worked
on various aspects of this and nothing had happened. Mr. Dykstra then
appointed the joint committee from the membership of the previous
committees to draw up a detailed proposal.]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Could you say anything about what some of the issues were for that
committee. Do you recall?
-
DEANE
- Well, I hope I can get this right, in order. The determination was made
that [a Theater Arts Department should be established at UCLA to include
theater, radio, motion pictures, T. V. and visual education. I think we
recommended a departmental organization and proposed a specific
curriculum for theater and possible ones for motion pictures and radio.
At any rate the report of this joint committee was approved by the
southern section of Educational Policy and sent to Berkeley. Kenneth
Macgowan was appointed Professor of Theater Arts to head up the new
department but Berkeley took no action so everything was held up. This
dragged on for more than a year and I know at one time Ralph and Mac
Jones went to Berkeley and still no action. The next year the Statewide
Committee on Educational Policy met in Berkeley and I had just been
appointed to that committee.] Max [Malcolm S.] Maclean can tell you
about this. It was absolutely a riot. [laughter] We went up on the Lark
and were hailed into Berkeley and deposited in the Men's Faculty Club. I
was the only woman on the committee. I was shunted in the side door into
a little Women's Parlor that was there and the men all disappeared.
Well, you know, this was just horrible. I had to go to the bathroom so
badly I was ready to die, and I couldn't see one around. I'd peer out of
the door, and here was a hall with men in it and no sign to direct me.
Finally, Max realized that nobody had taken care of me, and he came
rushing back and led me by the hand and waited for me. Then I'll never
forget, to get to the room in which we were meeting, we had to go
through a lounge and dining room, clear over to the far side, with
nothing but men around. You will never know, how I felt, and the only
person who knew that I was having a tough time was Max. [laughter] So he
took care of me the rest of the day and nothing else got as bad as that.
But, at that meeting of the committee up there, we just stood our ground
and let them fulminate and go on. I don't suppose I really ought to say
this, but in all of my experiences with the League of Women Voters and
with various groups that I have worked with, I have never known people
who can pontificate and carry on over nothing the way a group of
academic people who take themselves seriously can. It was obvious that
this department should come being down here. All this time and money and
effort had gone into developing it. So after all of the ifs, ands, and
buts, it finally passed in that meeting in Berkeley. We came back with a
department and a curriculum in Theater Arts.
-
SCHIPPERS
- This might call to mind Frederick [Thomas] Blanchard.
-
DEANE
- Yes. Well, Mr. Blandchard was chairman of the English Department, and he
was a very fine scholar himself, I judge. I don't know very much about
his work. But I do know he was a very traditional-minded person in terms
of the department. I keep using the word academic, and I don't mean it
in an unpleasant fashion. I simply mean the person who judges everything
in terms of a certain high standard of scholarship alone, and who
doesn't judge it in relation to other things. Now I think that he set a
very high standard in terms of academic achievement, but he didn't see
relationships. I think he could see no reason for theater, other than as
an attachment to the English Department. I mean he thought that
Shakespeare was a great writer and that his output had happened to be
plays, but what you did with a play and what the play did for people in
terms of experiencing it and producing it and making it visual and oral,
this wasn't too important. I may be doing him a great injustice, but
this was his attitude. I am certain we would have ha d a drama
department earlier, if it hadn't been for him and his unwillingness to
give up these little courses in speech and that part of his domain.
That's as much as I know about him.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: TWO, SIDE TWO November 15, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- Last time when we left off [talking about the Vermont Campus.] We had
been reviewing the 1927 Southern Campus Yearbook,
and we're starting with that today again. One thing we were
concentrating on was some of the people who were more or less in
power—one might call the "in" group. First on my list here, I have
[William Conger] Morgan.
-
DEANE
- Well, I didn't know him very well. He was certainly a leader on the
campus and certainly was in a position of influence in academic matters.
But I was not in any "in" group at all at the time. I was just a novice.
But I knew all of these people because we had very nice faculty
relationships in those days. The faculty was small and everybody came to
a faculty party or whatever it was. So I just know that Mr. Morgan was
one of the highly respected and one of the people who was certainly in a
leadership position at that time. But that's about as much as I really
know about him I think.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Another one, Dean [Charles Henry] Rieber.
-
DEANE
- Dean Rieber was a highly intellectual and charming person. I didn't know
him well, but I had had several contacts with him. He was reserved and
not particularly outgoing, but if you had a problem to talk over with
him, he gave you his complete attention. He gave his best and dealt with
it, not as though it was something that was inconsequential, but as
though he really knew that it was important to you. I think he probably
was very. influential behind the scenes. I don't think he was out waving
his hands and directing traffic, so to speak, but my memory of him is
that he was a very poised and reserved and yet positive kind of person.
That's as much as I can say about him.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Dean [Marvin Lloyd] Darsie.
-
DEANE
- Dean Darsie was Dean of the School of Education, and in my humble role
as a physical education person, I knew Dean Darsie better than I knew
Dean Rieber. He was a very nice person. You liked him, and he was not
withdrawn and stiff and difficult to get to. He was a person who was
willing to talk to you, and he had a very quiet, but very dry sense of
humor.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But he was not particularly an innovator.
-
DEANE
- He was not an innovator. He was not a creative person at all. He was
just a very nice human being. I don't think that he gave any great
leadership at all. I think he still had the teachers' college, teacher
training point of view about things. I honestly don't remember enough to
go into detail about it, except that I knew that I was never very
impressed with him as a creative person or an innovator, as you say, or
as a person who could release in other people a drive to do things I
just think he was nice and friendly, had a nice sense of humor and was
tolerant.
-
SCHIPPERS
- One person you knew much better was Dean Laughlin.
-
DEANE
- Helen Laughlin was the Dean of Women. Yes, I did. She was very good to me
and very helpful in a great many ways. She was a very positive person, a
commanding person. I've always had a kind of regret about something that
happened to her, something that happens to a great many people. They're
very able, and they have fine personalities, and they have lots of
courage. And because they have these things, they are constantly moved
ahead into another job and then another job and then another job when
they really haven't had the training or the experience to do them. And I
really feel that Mrs. Laughlin did a tremendous amount of good for the
students on campus. Certainly she was helpful to the faculty, at least
she was helpful to the physical education faculty in the problems that
we had with the extra-curricular program. But I always felt that as the
University grew so big, that [she showed a] lack of real training and
real understanding of what the problems of, I don't know what you call
it — "Deaning," maybe—really were. The job got bigger, and I think she
couldn't accept the fact that she needed some help.
-
SCHIPPERS
- In what ways did she specifically help you in problems?
-
DEANE
- Well, she was very supporting. For example, as the programs grew, and we
had more and more students who were in extra-curricular activities she
passed the supervision of what went on in our field to us. There was a
time when she had everything under her control, completely—rehearsals,
and what time students came and what time they left. She was in charge
of everything that went on. And the program got very big, and we talked
with her about it. I said, "Now, there are going to be rehearsals for a
dance recital. Students will be here late. I will be here, and I will
stay in the building until they are all, gone." Then the boys began to
dance in the dance recitals, and it meant that the dressing rooms had to
be opened for both men and women. Well all of [this involved] terrific
changes in her thinking about what was desirable and what was good. But
she gave us permission to handle this, and we really had no trouble in
building this program up, and eventually it got to be a very big
program. She gave us that kind of help. She supported the students, the
Women's Athletic Association, and she was always behind us in the
programs, in the things that we wanted to do. She, I think, did. a very
fine thing when she established the Helen Matthewson Club. Her maiden
name was Helen Matthewson. She established this club and got the funds
to build the building. It was for the girls who hadn't money to live in
a sorority house and who hadn't transportation funds. The house itself
was run completely by the students. They did their own shopping and
cooking and cleaning and everything, and every girl had her regular
schedule. This club was just marvelous. Several of our physical
education majors were residents in this club, and we were frequently
invited for dinner and for various activities that they had. The whole
atmosphere that she created in that club was a very fine thing. She was
very helpful to students. She really was.
-
SCHIPPERS
- She also was of some personal assistance to you.
-
DEANE
- Yes. For example, when the plans for the women's gymnasium were drawn
the chairman of the women's department was ill. At that time, the
women's department and men's department were separate. She was ill and
away from campus when the plans came to be approved and signed and
things of that sort. Well, I had never even seen the plans, and Mrs.
Laughlin called me to her office and said Miss Atkinson said I should be
her representative and do what approval work that had to be done. She
helped me go through that whole routine I had to go through to see that
what had been in the original specifications were translated into the
building plans themselves. So that was all very nice and very helpful.
Well, when the decision was made that we were to have a women's
gymnasium, the women on the faculty, all except the junior supervisors
who were just temporary people who were there for one or two years, met
together in faculty meetings. And we drew up, over a period of months (I
can't remember now how long it was, maybe two years), specifications of
various things that we needed. And I remember the first plans that came
back. We were horrified by them because the relationship of things was
so bad. The toilets were right next to the swimming pool, and there were
only one little set of toilets, I can't remember, ten or twelve or
something like that. And it was all out of kilter. The relationship of
one part wasn't right with another. So we made all of our criticisms of
that plan and went back over our specifications to see where they could
have been misread [to come up with such] bad planning. We then changed
what we thought the mistakes were. We didn't see the building plans, per
se, but we saw the relationships of units in the building [and specified
the] way they should be to make [the traffic flow] easily so they would
be effective for the program we wanted to develop. So, when I say, I
hadn't seen the plans, I hadn't seen the drawings, but I had worked on
the specifications with the other people on the staff. I had seen the
first set of plans, and I had worked on redoing the specifications, but
I had not seen these plans when they came. They came, as everything does
in the University, with the message, "We want them back before the last
week before last." And this is why I was called In, and Mrs. Laughlin
helped me check from specifications to plans. And my signature is on the
plans for that building, which I have always regretted, because it is
such a lousy building.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Oh, really, what is wrong with it?
-
DEANE
- Well, a large percent of it is in corridors and stairways and stairwells
and the square footage of actually usable space is just badly planned.
The things we wanted are in it, but there is so much waste.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But it was a truly cooperative effort as far as the faculty was
concerned.
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did the architects interfere?
-
DEANE
- Well, you don't have anything to do with it after you have handed in
your specifications. We said, "We need one large gymnasium floor that
can be used for this, this, and this, and has at least this many square
feet in it." And we knew exactly how many square feet we needed to make
six badminton courts or two basketball courts or whatever it was to be
used for. Then we needed a second gymnasium that could be used for
social dancing and folk dancing, and that could also be used for
instructional purposes in handling groups. And then we wanted a dance
studio that was separate and had a mirrored wall and this sort of thing.
We put an awful lot of study in it, and we got the plans from all the
new gymnasiums and the various schools all across the country. And it
was not carelessly done. It was done with a great deal of study, and we
worked out measurements and worked out relationships so people coming
and going wouldn't be [getting in each other's ] way and so it would
make a flow from the dressing rooms to the equipment rooms, to the
field, from the dressing rooms to the swimming pool, from the dressing
rooms to the dance studios, and so forth. Traffic is a big problem in a
gymnasium. And so we worked on all these things, and it kind of stays in
my mind, even though it's a long time back. We had disagreements and
agreements and finally a consensus.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What was the disagreement about?
-
DEANE
- Well, some people felt it was a mistake to insist on stall showers. We
wanted to have individual cubbyholes with a stall shower between every
two of them so that people had privacy. The big thing, then, in all the
high schools, was to have gang showers. Well, this was the biggest
argument, I think we had in the whole thing, because a lot of people
felt that gang showers were just great, and a lot of us didn't think
they were. There are times when you don't want to strip down in front of
a whole lot of other gals and you should be able to take your shower in
privacy and then get dressed.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did the building accurately reflect the curriculum in the P. E.
Department as it had developed up to that time?
-
DEANE
- That's a very sticky question, because you're asking me to unlearn. At
the time the building was built, our program was a pretty traditional
program. And, in the span of a very few years, it had swung over to an
experimental program. We were really doing things that were exciting. So
I think the building had the possibilities to accommodate some of the
new ideas, but I think it was the reflection of a pretty traditional
program and pretty traditional thinking about it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And one small detail. Did you have anything to say about the
architectural style?
-
DEANE
- Not a thing, not a thing.
-
SCHIPPERS
- We could continue down that line, and I think we will have a chance to
talk more about curriculum and that sort of thing later, but I thought I
would bring up a few more of these names, just for a brief comment. You
also mentioned Shepherd [Ivory] Franz.
-
DEANE
- Yes, he was a very interesting man. I think he was a brilliant man, and
he had what was known then as radical ideas. He was not a cut-and-dried,
in-a-mold sort of person. And he had a great deal of influence in
everything that went on on the campus. I think that the direction the
Psychology Department took in being pretty much animal psychology is due
to him. He certainly formed this, but I have no right to say because I
don't honestly know. But this is my very strong impression. But he was
interested in everything that went on in the campus. He had a point of
view about things and he was a creative kind of thinker. I think he was
very influential in the whole development of the campus.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned that he acted with dispatch.
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think that when an issue came up, when a problem came up that had
to be taken care of, his decision was immediate. I think that lots of
students and faculty profited. by his help when there were problems that
they had to solve.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Another is Gordon S. Watkins.
-
DEANE
- Well, Gordon Watkins, was young when I first knew him on the campus. He
was young and very smart. I don't know enough about his work to know
whether it was scholarly or not, but he had a lot of vision about many
things. And, as he grew, I felt that his influence was quite widely felt
on the campus. I knew him best when he was Dean of Summer Session, and
we always ted a pretty big program in the summer time. He was the person
who could see the value of an unusual offering in summer session. If you
went to him and said, "We would like to change this and do this kind of
a workshop or conduct a creative experiment," he could see the value and
give you an opportunity to do it. He was very often handicapped by the
fact that, in summer session, in those days, you had. to pay your own
way. If a course didn't pay one year, you just didn't get the chance to
offer it again. So he was always having to balance budget against idea.
But within the limits of what he could do, he was a very forward-looking
person.
-
SCHIPPERS
- One of his causes was the development of the Santa Barbara campus.
-
DEANE
- Yes. Santa Barbara didn't have its own Senate, but there were people on
the Los Angeles campus who operated in connection with the faculty in
Santa Barbara, and I was on that committee when we had a meeting in
Berkeley that President Sproul had called to discuss the direction the
Santa Barbara campus should take. I always remember Gordon Watkins
saying, "Mr. President, you have promised us that Santa Barbara shall be
the Williams of the West." And this was his ideal of what should happen
on that campus. He was not interested in having it made into just
another chapter of Berkeley and UCLA with engineering and all of the
heavy emphasis on science and so forth. I don't know whether that's come
true. I do know they have engineering there now, but I don't know what
their emphasis is really.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were there many who backed him up in this ideal?
-
DEANE
- Well, it seems to me that there was a lot of discussion. You're asking
me to recall something is so far back. I remember that one of the issues
at stake was that Santa Barbara had a department of mechanic arts and of
the people at that meeting were very anxious to have that taken out.
They felt that it was beneath the academic interests, and that it should
go into a junior college. And that happened at that meeting. The
decision was made to take it out. My memory is that there would, have
been a good deal of support for Watkins' point of view, but I can't
remember any definite decision being made. The only definite thing I can
remember is that mechanic arts was taken out of the program.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Another person who was a real influence, I understand, was Mr. [Waldemar
Christian] Westergaard.
-
DEANE
- Well, he was. He was very well liked, and he was, I think, quite a
scholar and quite an influential person in a great many ways. I didn't
know him awfully well other than meeting him at the parties or whenever
I was in a meeting where he was present. We had a very pleasant
relationship. I just knew his reputation for scholarship, and he was, I
think, one of the people who really enjoyed dancing.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did he support your dance activities in any way?
-
DEANE
- Well I don't know. I mean they came to the dance recitals, but I don't
know that he was ever in a position to do anything to support it, let's
say.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned some others that I haven't listed, do any more come to
mind?
-
DEANE
- No, I don't think so. A lot of these people I knew well enough to speak
to, Loye [Holmes] Miller and Professor [Charles Grove] Haines, for
example, but I didn't know enough about them to say anything about them
here. I do know they were influential people in those early days And, it
never occurred to me as a young person, on campus, who made the wheels
go round. I wasn't really interested very much. I didn't pay much
attention to it until later when I began to really sense that there were
problems and there were different points of view and that there were
people who were wanting to get out from under the Berkeley influence. We
couldn't try any innovations. Berkeley set the standard, and we imitated
or copied or reproduced what they did. And, in those early days, this
seemed perfectly fine to me. Remember we were the Southern Branch.
[laughter]
-
SCHIPPERS
- To pick up again, we were looking through some of the later annuals,
1928 and '29 and the name of M. Effie Shambaugh came to the fore.
-
DEANE
- Well Effie Shambaugh was a most remarkable person. She was a scholar in
the whole area of folk dance and folklore. She was a marvelous teacher.
She taught with such enthusiasm and such a spirit, the students just
loved her classes. And when we first moved to the new campus, we didn't
have a gymnasium, so she used to stand out on the driveway that went out
to the back of Royce Hall with her violin and play the folk tunes and
teach her classes in the driveway. And the students would come by and
see this going on, and she would say, "Come on, come on," and they'd all
come in and join. And she'd start with a class that maybe had fourteen
people in it, and she'd wind up in the end of the period with sixty in
it. They were just drifters who came along and came in because she had
that kind of real joy in it. It was marvelous. She was a terrific loss
to the University and to the Department when she died. She had,
underway, at that time, a research project of some sort, but,
unfortunately I can't tell you anything about it, other than that she
was working with Mr. [Joseph A.] Gengerelli in the Psychology
Department. And what it was or what it was to achieve, I honestly don't
know. I'm not a research-minded person, myself, so when people say to
me, "We're going to do this project to find out about this," I'll say,
"Oh, I think that's very interesting. Let me know what you find out."
[laughter] This is a very weak part of my nature. It isn't my way of
thinking, although it should be I know. Well, at any rate, Effie went
every year, for years and years, to a country in which she was
particularly interested. She would live for three months with the people
and come back with tremendous insight into the folklore that went. with
the dances. She would find for example, a dance that was done in
Hungary, one year, and she would find the same dance the next year in
Czechoslovakia with certain differences. Then she would find out what
had brought about these modifications. She had an unquenchable
enthusiasm for it, and had a very skillful way of going about it. She
would live very simply with the people. She recorded their music. When
she couldn't get anything else, she would play it with her violin, and
then transcribe what she played until she would get it right. And then
she would write it down, so that she would have a record of it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How did she teach the dances?
-
DEANE
- Well she always [began where it was danced and in what relation it was
done. Then she'd say,] "Here's the music and here's the dance." And it
was not, "Take your partners, and take two steps to the right, and two
steps to the left." It started with a feel. This is done at the harvest
time or this or that happened. I can't really recreate her method,
except to say this was always done with a meaning and an enthusiasm.
[You got into it quickly, ]and then there was an analysis as she went
along to straighten things out. But I don't think I ever saw her say,
"Line up in twos, in a circle and face your partner. Now put your weight
on your left foot. Now it's two steps right and two steps left." I don't
think I ever saw her do it that way.
-
SCHIPPERS
- That spirit certainly was not alien to the kind of thing you were trying
to do yourself, was it?
-
DEANE
- Oh, not at all, it was exactly this fresh, direct approach to it as an
experience for people, which is one reason, I think, I was so
enthusiastic about her teaching. I thought she was great.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned that bringing back the idea of natural movement from the
East was a bit of a shock at first because nobody had ever seen it
before. I wish you'd tell me again, how and why it became acceptable.
-
DEANE
- Well, when I say that nobody had seen natural movement, that isn't
really quite true. They had seen Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and
Dalcroze and things of that sort. But this approach was so absolutely
different just starting with natural movements, with runs and skips and
slides and gallops and so forth and combinations and rhythmic changes
instead of starting with techniques. The average teacher in the schools
couldn't see this because it didn't give her a sense of security. She
didn't have a specific technique to teach [and without it to lean on she
was lost.] So she really thought it was kind of mad and uncontrolled and
didn't have much meaning. Gradually, a few of the girls who graduated
went out into the high schools and used some of it in their classes and
had very nice results. People were interested, and they needed to know
more. Over the years, I was gradually invited to come into the various
high schools with a group of my own students from UCLA and we would,
give a little demonstration class in the gym. Then the high school
students would join in with us, and we would have just sort of a general
dance experience together. We would do some little improvisations, and,
at first, they thought it was kind of impossible to do, but suddenly
they realized that there was nothing to stop them from trying. And so
these improvisations became kind of fun to do. And they were very
effective. You know, you take a group of people and lead them along with
a situation, some music, an idea, whatever it is, and you are going to
have half a dozen really exciting things come out of it. They're just
little quick sketches, but they're exciting and the students would be
very thrilled. We'd all sit down on the floor, and we'd look at this one
and look at this one and look at this one. And for them to feel that
they themselves had done this (they were either humorous or dramatic or
just beautiful), gave them confidence in themselves. From then on, I
didn't have the same kind of resistance to what we were teaching. We
were educating the teachers for the physical education programs in the
southern California schools, that was the job that we were doing, and it
was important that we teach something that could be used and something
that would be acceptable. So I think that as time went on, the girls who
had enjoyed dance at UCLA pretty much had the dancing jobs in the
various high schools around the area.
-
SCHIPPERS
- The point, then, is that really the success of the effort was due to the
student response to it more than the faculty's.
-
DEANE
- Yes, I don't think there's any question about that. The students saw it
first and when they experienced it themselves, they knew that it wasn't
some alien thing. And the problem, of course, was then to have teachers
who had confidence enough to keep their hands off, you see. This I think
slowed it down an awful lot, because a lot of teachers who were willing
to accept the fact that if you put the students in this kind of
situation, that they will do a creative thing, [they felt, they, as
teacher] must do the creative thing. And the minute they began fixing
[what the students did] and making suggestions and changing it, then it
didn't have this spark and fire that it should have. But a lot of them
did very exciting jobs with it. I've seen dance recitals by my students'
students in the schools that I thought were quite exquisite.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: THREE, SIDE ONE November 18, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- I've confronted you with some information about the curriculum of the
Physical Education Department between the years 1934 and '54, and you
were commenting on some of the changes and obvious trends in the course
offerings, and I was asking you for an explanation about how some of
these changes came about.
-
DEANE
- Well, [when I first came], it was a fairly small department and most
people did a little bit of everything except for a specialist. If you
were a dancer, or if you were a hockey player, you were assigned in the
area of your competency. But as the department grew and more people came
in, there was a changing feeling about physical education as we kept
looking at the program. 'These people were able to expand the curriculum
in the direction of their own special abilities, and new courses were
added. I think that this happened pretty generally in both the men's
department and the women's department. But I think it was more true in
the women's department, because I think we wore more concerned with
looking at what our program was and what it was doing rather than being
centered on developing coaches as the men's department was. That's the
way their graduates prepared to be hired in high school, because [high
schools wanted] a boy who had a particular ability as a coach. We were
less interested in that than we were in the all around physical
education teacher. Now as these courses began to proliferate, starting
around people's abilities, it became clear that we had' separate areas
of interest within the total physical education structure. There was
health education, a whole group of courses developing around health
education, a whole group coming in around elementary education, which
had a big impetus from the community, and a whole area around the
therapeutic, the correctives and physical therapy concept, as well as
the whole general physical education activity program. So from then on,
new people who were added to the staff were added because they had the
specific skills that were necessary in this or that [aspect of the
program.] As we became sort of sub-departmentalized, there was a real
concern in the women's department as to what we were really trying to do
in physical education. We couldn't justify our existence by making good
basketball players, or good dancers, or good fencers or whatever the
activity happened to be, and we really didn't know what the program
should be, what it should do. So the staff of the women's division met
together two or three times a week through a whole year, planning,
little by little. Some of the staff fell by; the wayside, they weren't
interested. But there was a core group who carried through with this. We
finally came up with a design for a course which we called Professional
Activities which was based on the concept that, when a student walked
into a class in Physical Education, [we should ask, ] who was she, what
did she want, what did she expect, what could we hope to do that would
be of benefit to her? Suppose she wanted a basketball class, but not to
become a professional basketball player, certainly, [or swimming, but
not to become] a professional swimmer or [dancing without wanting to be]
a professional dancer so what kinds of experiences did she need that we
could provide that would help her, as a person, gain security in
herself, make her realize her own selfhood, what happened to her when
she moved, what powers she had over her own movement, what happened, to
others when she moved with them, what kinds of interaction went on? This
whole pattern of personal growth through physical education became our
goal. We wanted to find out what movement was and what happened to a
person when she moved. This was a big change, and we had no teachers who
had had this kind, of experience themselves. So we decided that the best
thing to do was to have a course in which the teachers and the students
could learn together, and we decided to have three teachers in a class
where each one would be responsible for one aspect, and where the
students would be brought in to design their program and to understand
what the program meant. This way, you would have constant evaluation
between the teachers on what was effective, what did really happen. Was
there something we did that blocked, or was there something we did that
helped? We felt that we would really have a new kind of physical
education teacher who really understood what she was talking about when
she talked about movement and the values of movement. This is how the
program moved along. And out of it there came the necessity for
interaction with other departments. We had to know more about
physiology. We had to know more about anatomy, although anatomy is a
pretty basic part of any physical education person's training. I have to
stop for a minute and get my breath. [tape recorder turned off]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Who were some of the group that were interested in this sort of thing?
-
DEANE
- The people who were most interested in it were Margaret Duncan Greene
and Marjory Allen and Ruth [E.] Fulton. Isn't it funny? Some of the
names are gone. Lillian Little, Josephine Ketcik Murray, Eleanor Brooks.
Oh, I'm sorry, the names don't come quickly. But there was quite a large
group who were interested and really worked very hard;, Barbara Mack was
one of the really enthusiastic people and one of the very helpful ones.
I'd have to go back and really look, but these were some of the people
who were most involved. Actually, the first year that we started to
teach the course, the three people who were, I think, just listed as
staff in the catalogue, were Mrs. Josephine Murray, myself and Berenice
Hooper, who did some work with the folk dancing part of the program.
Mrs. [Dorothy E.] Johnson worked with the health education part of it,
because that was what her field was. And Mrs. Dunham was the
accompanist. When Mrs. Dunham died, I think it must have been the
following year that Pia Gilbert joined our staff. She was there for
music and accompaniment, that was her role [but she was active in the
whole program.] I was a supervisor, I did absolutely no teaching, but I
sat in at every meeting of the class and watched and worked with the
staff on evaluation as we went along, because you see, we honestly
didn't know what would be the most effective way of doing this. We knew
that the students had to do it themselves, that they had to plan the
various units that they had to take with our help and our guidance, and
that we were there as a resource more than anything else, although we
did more teaching than we should have in the first time through. But we
learned where to move in and where to stay out in our evaluation after
each class. We sat right down and went through everything. If the two
members of the staff who were observing and making notes of things
wanted to question and discuss something or if they thought something
wasn't good or something wasn't understood, they could speak up and
bring their comment into the class. So it was a time of learning for us
and for the students at the same time, I think that the course grew
tremendously the first year. We started it with the freshmen, and, as
they went on to be sophomores, we added a sophomore year, and when they
went on to be juniors, we added a junior year,
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did this continue over to a graduate course level?
-
DEANE
- No, because you see for graduate courses, people had to have academic
standing, and the unfortunate part about the Physical Education
Department was that most of them had the title of supervisors and so
they were not approved as people who could teach graduate courses or who
could be part of theses committees or anything like that. But this core
curriculum never went on, as far as I can remember, into the graduate
level.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now, one other very large change occurred when the [men and women's
division were] unified and called the P. E. Department, and this was in
the year 1944/45.
-
DEANE
- Yes, well there were two very difficult things to adjust. One I've
already [talked about and that was] the philosophy of the women's
department was very different than the philosophy of the men's
department. Their chief concern was in developing skilled people in the
various fields, and while they did have the whole aspect of the
intramural program, which was a very big program, it still was based on
competition and personal skills. That was one aspect. The second one was
that they were not geared to study, and the whole women's staff was
geared to study. All of us had homework, and all of us did a constant
evaluation. We met, as I say, three times a week and the men's staff was
not willing to invest in that kind of study program. So how to work
together amicably was pretty difficult to figure out. I think the thing
that did happen was that there were some courses that were opened to the
men that were taught by women, and some of the courses that the men
taught were open to women students, so we began to have a kind of
co-educational, instructional program, which was very beneficial, I
think, both to the women and to the men. This sounds like sort of a
praising of the women and damning the men, but I don't mean it that way,
because this is what the men's pattern had been, and it was a perfectly
understandable one. But the problem of building a department philosophy
can only come if people are willing to sit down and talk together and if
they're willing to have honest criticism. And this we found very
difficult to do, because if your aim is to develop a high jumper, then
you do this. And they knew how to do it superbly. But if your aim is to
give an experience to high school kids that doesn't necessarily make
them into high jumpers but makes them into better people and maybe gives
them some kind of recreational outlet, then you do it a different way.
High jumping can be part of it, but you don't teach high jumping [with
the same emphasis] you would if you were making a specialist. So there
has always been this tug and pull between the two divisions in the
department. Of course, I've been away for so long now, that I honestly
have no idea what's happened and I have no idea of whether this is
solved or not. But this was the problem then the departments were first
put together. We, gradually, through (this sounds like a silly term) a
rainy day program got something started. You see, when you have a
required lower division physical education course, which we did at that
time, on rainy days your fields, your tennis courts, are not available.
So what did you do? What kind of program do you set up. It was a
madhouse to start with, but we really got a pretty good program
working—social dancing and folk dancing and indoor recreational things
that you would use in playgrounds and games of that sort. So the men and
women came together at these times, and had, I think, what was one of
the most spontaneous kinds of programs where real learning took place. I
thought that this was a lot better than some of the straight activity
courses. This was one of the good things that came out of the
departments going together.
-
SCHIPPERS
- [Would you comment on some of the courses that were offered? To begin
with, there was a] lower division course, number four, which was very
comprehensive in its nature. Had that been in existence as long as you
had been at the University?
-
DEANE
- Yes, it had a different course number, but that was the course for
required physical education. It gave a half-unit credit and every lower
division student had to take four semesters. But they could choose any
activity that they wanted. When I first came to the campus, there was a
requirement that they had to have one semester of a field sport and one
semester of an individual sport and one semester of some kind of dance,
such as folk dance. I don't remember whether they taught social dance, I
think they did, but I don't remember. Anyway, they had this kind of
requirement. And, then, the fourth semester, they could choose anything
they wanted. If they wanted another semester of swimming or of tennis,
or whatever, they could take it. But, as the school grew, it was
impossible to administer. They were allowed to take four semesters in
anything they wanted, except that they could not take more than two in
the same activity unless there was an advance course offered in it, so
we arranged that, some sections of P.E. 4, there would be beginning
tennis, for example, and intermediate tennis and advanced tennis. So a
student who was really interested in tennis could achieve some skill in
tennis. It was the same way with swimming. A lot of the courses didn't
have advanced sections, but most of the individual sports did. So that's
what P. E. H was. It was all inclusive and had every kind of activity.
Included in that was corrective physical education for people who had
postural difficulties or handicaps of one sort or another.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now, your course in elementary rhythms and natural dancing. Was that
created when you arrived?
-
DEANE
- I don't really know whether it was there or whether it was a course that
was added.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How about Music Analysis?
-
DEANE
- Well, that was a course that was added. [It was for our major students
who were going to be teachers in the public schools and was designed to
help them understand how to develop some kind of accompaniment for dance
classes. In many schools there was no piano or Victrola but a teacher
could always buy or borrow or make a drum or some percussion instrument.
Whatever the source of accompaniment our student needed, to understand,
how to use it effectively. They needed to understand simple music
structure, rhythmic forms etc.] It was a very elementary course, but it
was very helpful to these girls.
-
SCHIPPERS
- That was quite an innovation, how did people receive it?
-
DEANE
- The girls loved it. Oh, you mean the administration? I don't have any
idea. In those days, I'm perfectly sure that I didn't even know there
was a Committee on Courses. [laughter] Later I found out, but at that
time I'm sure that I didn't know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- That does [indicate there was a good deal of freedom] in the planning at
the time.
-
DEANE
- Yes, that's right.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Now, there was a pageantry course in the upper division.
-
DEANE
- Yes. Well this was a brainstorm that I had that really grew out of the
summer school demand So many of the teachers in summer school would come
to me and say, "Well, we don't have a chance to do any big recitals, but
we have an all-school pageant and we do Greek games and so forth and so
on." They would outline the kinds of things that they had to do, and
they didn't know how to go about it. But because they were usually
teaching dance in the physical education department, they were called on
to contribute to this. So I thought that this was something that we
ought really to help them understand I felt they should know some of the
historic kinds of pageantry there has been in the past and what really
constitutes a pageant and what can be done—from these tremendous things
down to the simple kinds of things. I used to urge them to read and urge
them to use resources, but most of the resources were so academic that
they weren't very practical. So it was a combination discussion and
experimentation and lecture course in which we did a lot of problem
solving, I would pose the problem, and they would, have to say how they
would, handle it and what they would do with it, and then we would talk
about it in the group as a whole. We'd see where something was too fixed
and where it ceased having the spontaneous thing that pageantry should
have, where it had become too formalized— this kind of things you know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- There was also a Principles of Teaching Dance which was an upper
division course which you gave. Did you originate that?
-
DEANE
- No, I didn't. This was a carry-over from the old teachers college days—a
course in methodology. You had to have a methods course for everything,
and instead of calling it methods of teaching, we took a step forward in
calling it principles of teaching. So, instead of saying, "You line the
class up like this, and you do this" which is methodology, we said,
"When you are teaching, what do you want to accomplish, and what are the
means by which you accomplish this?" That changed the focus a little. I
think changing from methods to principles, while it seems very tiny, was
a growth in oar looking at what we were doing. I can't even begin to get
into the discussion about the whole business of education courses and
actual teaching. The gap between the two is pretty tremendous. But there
is a thing about teaching that can be taught. I mean, you can through
getting your students to have an experience that shows what a difference
different ways of saying something makes, and how tremendously different
your response will be if you go at it one way, rather than if you go at
it another way. To me, these courses were not wasted time. I think they
were effective because they were dealing with something that was right
at the heart of what these students had to face the first day they went
out to teach. And I know that this is something your practice teaching
doesn't do for you, because, there, you have the fear of being graded.
It's an altogether different thing. You aren't alone. This isn't free
space for you to operate in. But the day you face your first class, boy,
it's all free space, and [laughter] you have to have something to cling
to. And these principles really do help.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So there was a strong emphasis on dance in the department. Was this, in
part, because of your interest in it?
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think so. I think that to me it was the most satisfying kind of
activity you could have. I was sold and you know If you're sold on
something, you become a pretty good salesman. I really pushed for
everything I could get for the dance program because I felt that it was
important. In the first place, a great many of the students who came
into our department, came from high schools where they had had no
dancing or, if they had had any, they had had a little clog dancing and
a little bit of folk dancing maybe. They were pretty good basketball
players and pretty good tennis players and pretty good swimmers, but
dance was something that they had no knowledge of at all. And to have
them experience it themselves, something good had to happen first before
you could make teachers out of them. So this is why I think the program
developed as much as it did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- One of the striking innovations in a course was the introduction of the
Dance Recital course in 1938.
-
DEANE
- Well, this is very interesting, because this brings Bob [Robert Tyler]
Lee into the picture. Bob was a student in the Art Department, and he
was active and interested in the student campus theatre group. He wanted
to do a Noh drama, and he came to me and asked if I would help with this
drama, help with the movement and so forth. We worked together on that,
and it was very beautiful. It was very lovely. Bob is the most creative
person I have ever known. He is a real genius. We got permission to have
a recital and (at this minute I can't remember what the first one was)
we chose records, but Bob designed the whole thing, the costumes, the
color, the lighting, and everything, and the students worked out the
choreography within this design. Our first dance recital, I could say,
was more Bob's than mine, except that I know it couldn't have happened
if I hadn't been there to work with him, and we worked very well
together. I could get the creative thing from the students, and Bob saw
the whole thing in the color and the light and the movement. It was very
handsome, and people were very excited about it. As a matter of fact,
that first year about half of the students, who were in it, were not P.
E. students, and about half of them were. It took an awful lot of time
to do this. There were students who wanted to be in dance recital but
couldn't afford to give the time for it, [so this class was established
for them.] We did a lot of the planning [and movement development here.]
Then all of the extra work came afterwards [hours of rehearsal, making
costumes, working on sets, all the endless details.] This was how the
class came about, and it had both men and women in it and it got to be a
big group.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I notice that it was given in 1937, '38 and, apparently, was continued
until about 1941.
-
DEANE
- Well I don't remember. Dance Recital was one of the most exciting
experiences I ever had because the interest [of the whole] campus [was,
so great.] If you could have watched one of our rehearsal times when we
were really working on developing the choreography with this group of
students who were involved and so creative about it, you'd see, around
the edge, a half a dozen camera bugs taking pictures. And there would be
eight or ten students there from the Art Department with their sketching
pads doing sketches of the dancers, even on their rest periods when they
were on the floor listening to music. They'd just be going like mad,
sketching. We would rehearse late in the afternoon and then on into the
evening. And one of the girls from the Home Economics Department got
approval from the head of her department for her project which was to
develop, a menu for the dancers that was balanced and inexpensive and to
actually feed them. So she used to come down to the gym and cook the
dinner in the gym kitchen for seventy [of us when we had night
rehearsals.] Everybody worked on costumes, and you would see the boys
sitting there sewing things on a scarf and so on, because everybody
worked on a costume. We didn't have money, you know like Greek drama,
but we used to have beautiful costumes. They were made of the cheapest
materials that we could get that would still be effective. They dyed
them, and you'd see the kids with the color all over their arms from
dyeing the materials. Doreen Baverstock, a girl from the Art Department,
was a marvelous seamstress and she cut the costumes. Then she would pin
them and hand the costume, [to the] boy or girl [who would wear it and
they] made it. And then they came for a fitting and they made it fit
right and made it swing right, if it was a skirt, or made it do what it
was intended to do. So this group worked just like mad day after day
after day for three months to do this performance. The performance had
all of this in it—this spontaneity, this dedication. I used to just sit
out in front and want to cry. All of this beautiful youth was just
pouring out at you. It was so wonderful. It wasn't just that the dance
was beautiful to look at, it was these things that were in it. It was so
lovely!
-
SCHIPPERS
- Where was it given? In Royce Hall?
-
DEANE
- Royce Hall. By this time we had achieved permission [laughter] to have
Royce Hall which we weren't in the early days. As a matter of fact, the
Noh drama was the first thing that we performed in Royce Hall. I taught
the dancing classes on the stage of Royce Hall when Effie Shambaugh was
doing her folk dancing with her violin out on the roadway [in back
because we didn't have any other place.] So I had my natural dancing
classes out on the stage in Royce Hall. The auditorium was dark and I
had to stand with my back to the orchestra pit to keep the girls (you
know they were doing free stuff) from going over into the orchestra pit.
And I'll never forget one day, Mrs. Dunham, who was our pianist, was
sitting at the piano and, zip, from up in the flies came a knife, right
down like this, and went into the floor right beside her. Well that was
the first time that we really thought it was dangerous [to have men
working up there, so] from then on, no workmen were up there and Nothing
was going on when we were having the classes on the stage. So we really
worked under great difficulties those first years on the campus. They
finally built the shack with a dance floor, but it was horrible because
the flies, just millions of them, came in, and when you're in a little
rhythm robe and sweaty, these flies stuck to your legs and arms and your
back. So, I talked to Miss Atkinson I said, "We just have to have those
windows screened. It's just impossible." So she put in an order for the
screening, and one day when I was teaching a class, a ladder came up on
the outside and this workman came up over the edge to look at us. He
began putting up chicken wire. I said, "You must be mistaken."
[laughter] He said, "No, lady I got the order right here. They put
chicken wire up there on those windows, to keep out the flies. And it
was there till the end. [laughter] Oh, really, it was something.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Maybe that was a forecast of the bureaucracy to come.
-
DEANE
- Yes, it could be, it could be. {laughter] But it was really awful.
-
SCHIPPERS
- On the dance recital. How many evenings did they play?
-
DEANE
- Generally, they did three performances, Friday night and Saturday
afternoon and Saturday night. That was the usual pattern.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did they charge admission?
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes. We made money. Each year, we would get a little bit. All of our
funds came from the Associated Students, and so each year they would
give us this much and we would make a little over our budget, so the
next year they would give us a little more to spend. And this was how we
got enough money to really do some of the very elaborate costumes which
were very beautifully done. But this was also because of Bob's great,
great skill. He was, really, the most important person in it. Then
Josephine Murray who was one of my students came back Into the
department as a dance teacher. I remember saying to you that I thought
it was a pretty bad thing to do as a rule, but there was nobody else who
could do it, she was a very fine teacher—an artist-teacher, as a matter
of fact. She came back into the department as the dancing program grew
[and was a very important part of Dance Recital. Myra Kinch [Galea] came
and taught, for, I guess, three years before she went to New York. There
were also Eleanor [B.] Pasternak and Letitia Innes, who were all very
fine, and Maria Maginnis who was from the Doris Humphrey's group. I
don't remember how many years Maria taught. At any rate, the program
grew and the staff grew, and as I went out of dancing, we had more
variety in the kinds of people who came into teach. For the last eight
years, anyway, I didn't do any dance teaching at all. I was entirely
busy with the administrative business and, as a matter of fact, I taught
only one course.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Back again to the Dance Recital. How was this received by the
administration?
-
DEANE
- Well, I think they simply loved it. Ed Lee and his wife used to bring a
party every time for dress rehearsal, and then they'd come back to see
all the performances. I think that it was more wholeheartedly received
[than any other activity] than I can remember. I never once had any
criticism other than one year when we did Grapes of Wrath. Archibald
MacLeish had written this poem, and we used it as the basis for a dance
that was really marvelous. We had written to MacLeish and had gotten his
permission, and Ralph Freud read it and thought it was just marvelous,
but Mr. [Edward Augustus] Dickson, who was one of our Regents, thought
it wasn't very suitable material for University students to be doing.
But that's the only negative word I ever had about anything. The high
school pupils came in droves. We reserved whole sections for them, and,
every year, there was a big influx of people who had been in Dance
Recital and who were now teaching in the schools—people who knew, about
it who would bring their students to it. They'd come from Brawley and
from San Bernardino—they really did—busloads of them—for the Saturday
matinee.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did this have any effect in creating interest in more student
productions in the theatre arts? [Freud]
-
DEANE
- Well, I will say that Ralph was always most helpful about this. To me,
he was just the perfect person to be at UCLA in these developmental
years, because he saw this creative thing that was happening with the
students, and he encouraged those who were interested in theatre to come
in and work with us. They worked on productions, and all of them worked
on Bob's scenic designs and helped him paint them and rig them all. It
was entirely student done. Ralph really worked so hard with us. For
example, he used to come to rehearsals of this MacLeish thing all the
time. He had as much the feeling of what the dancers were doing, as he
had a feeling for the words themselves. So, when he did this, it was
just a beautiful melting of voice, of idea, of movement, of light, of
color, of everything. It was very thrilling. Being able to count on
Ralph was one of the really fortunate things that happened, in those
early days.
-
SCHIPPERS
- [Why did the Dance Recitals come to an end ?]
-
DEANE
- I think there were three reasons. One was it got want to go on repeating
this way, so they began to move out into other things. The greatest
thing that was done [during this transition time] was Feather in Your Hat which was theatre and dance. It was
different. Bob had a series of recordings of folk music, and he thought
that it would be just marvelous to do a series of dances based on them
and to tie it all together [with a funny theme.] There were two boys I
remember, Joe Grensback and Bruce Cassidy, who were English majors and
they both were interested in and excited about Dance Recital. There was
a whole group of them but I can't even begin to tell you how many there
were. These were the ones that I remember best. They decided that it
would be riotously funny to tie these folk dances together, by [casting
two people as] a stuffy old professor and his wife who were giving
lectures on their trip through rural America. They would do this utterly
stuffy, fantastic presentation, and then they would sink down into the
orchestra pit and the curtains would open and here would be the dance.
Well, we just got so excited about this, it was so wonderful. Ralph and
I were the professor and his wife and Joe and Bruce did the script. They
would come to my house with all of these old National
Geographic magazines, and each one would take one and lie there
on their stomachs and read them. Then, all of a sudden, one would say,
"Haw, haw, haw, listen to this," and would read a description of
something. So they just picked this whole thing out of these old National Geographic's, the stuffiest kind of
stuff you've ever heard. They made this lecture, and Ralph was Mr.
Twitchell and I was Mrs. Twitchell. We came up out of the pit on this
platform and we had a blackboard for it and various things. Ralph would
do his lecture, and I would chime in on this [with gentle corrections or
additions.] Then I would lead a song and we'd sink down into the
orchestra pit. Then the dance would come. Well, we played, six or seven
performances. It was just wonderful. So this was our step into a more
theatrical sort of thing. Then, the next year, instead of doing Dance
Recital we did something called Woman's Place Is
In, I think, which was about great people in history or something.
Well, this was completely Bob's concept all the way through. We worked
with the dancers for the various groups, but I can't remember too much
about it. It was a series of episodes. but how they were tied together I
really don't remember. In 1936, we did the Dance Recital at the Biltmore
Theatre and at the Hollywood Bowl. You asked me why these things came to
an end. One thing was that they had gotten larger and larger and had
expanded to theatre productions. Also, at that time, the men's
department and the women's department were joined into one department
and I was given an administrative position as director of the women's
division. This was a time-consuming assignment, I just didn't have time
to work with Dance Recitals anymore. So that was the end of my Dance
Recital career. I still kept on with the developments in the theatre
department, and, subsequent to that, I participated in several of the
plays they did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was that primarily because of your close relationship with Ralph Freud?
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think so. I had come to know Ralph when I used to act over at the
Pasadena Playhouse. Ralph was a director over there, so I had known him
for years and years before he came to the University. He knew the sort
of things I did, and he thought it would be fun to do some plays
together, so he and I did several. I also was in several that he wasn't
in, but we had a lot of fun. I think that Dance Recital was probably the
most exciting experience that I ever had. It also, I must admit, helped
me in my professional career; I think it helped me gain status on the
campus and made it possible for me to have an academic appointment which
I hadn't had before. But the important thing about Dance Recital was
that, if I hadn't believed in the creative power and the tremendous
enthusiasm of the students before, I certainly believe in it now. That's
something we so often lose by trying to shape it and direct it instead
of looking at it and listening to it. I can still feel the thrill.
-
SCHIPPERS
- It's interesting that they went so far as to have performances at the
Biltmore Theater. Could you explain a little bit more, how that came
about?
-
DEANE
- It was a benefit for something, but I can't even remember what for. We
were asked to do it, and because it was a benefit, we did do it. That's
all I remember about it except what a horrible old theater it was.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you think that Dance Recital helped in any way to create an audience
for student activities?
-
DEANE
- I don't think there was any question about that. I'm sure the students
really cared about it. I can remember that when Gil Harrison was editor
of the Bruin, he came to our dress rehearsal and, in the next day's
Bruin, the editorial column was absolutely blank the whole way down
except just in the middle where it said, "Dance Recital" with an
exclamation point after it. [laughter] We had this kind of terrific
support and reviews in the Bruin and they were always wonderful, and the
students came. You see one thing was that there was a very broad
representation in the Recital. because it didn't make any difference
what your major was if you were interested in this kind of thing. Some
students just came year after year and worked on the scenery or worked
on the stage crew.
-
SCHIPPERS
- How about community attention?
-
DEANE
- Well, the schools came, the faculty came, but I would say it wasn't
community representation. The University was just beginning to be a
place that people from the outside community came to. Now, this is what
we had been struggling for all the years that I had been on the Drama,
Lectures and Music Committee We were struggling to make people feel that
they didn't have to go downtown for things, that things were here. And
it took a long time before it became easy to have a community audience.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did this help to attract any attention as far as professional dancers or
professional groups are concerned?
-
DEANE
- Yes, they did. There were several of the local groups, Lester Horton's
group and, what was her name, Gray, something Gray. There were three or
four modern dance groups developing in Los Angeles, and they always came
to the Recital. They were always there. They were impressed because they
were lovely to look at, but they weren't impressed by our technique. I
mean that the dancing was not something that you would oh and ah about
as far as skills were involved. But you were never aware of that,
because they had created the movements themselves, and they were within
their range of accomplishment. There was nothing in it that their bodies
couldn't do, because they themselves had developed these movements. And
so it was done accurately, and nobody was out of step or out of time.
But the thing that was thrilling about it was that it was part of them
and there was so much thrill in what they did. It communicated so much
more than perfect technique with no soul behind it. It wasn't a matter
of virtuosity. It was a matter of genius. [laughter] The kids had real
genius. There's no question about it.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: THREE, SIDE TWO November 29, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- Last week we ended up talking about Dance Recital class, and we wanted
to be sure to add the names of two young men who were responsible for
the script of Feather In Your Hat.
-
DEANE
- Yes, that was Joe Grensback and Bruce Cassidy. I think there were a lot
of contributions from other people, but they were the sparkplugs, and
they were the ones who really put it in final form. There were so many
people involved in this. Certainly Bob Lee was the moving spirit for the
whole thing. Ralph Freud got caught up in the fun of it. He and I had
great fun playing Mr. and Mrs. Twitchell. And the students,
individually, did the dance forms for the various folk songs that were
the meat of it. But the script that Mr. and Mrs. Twitchell worked from
came from the National Geographic magazine. These
two boys had humor and a marvelous sense of theatre. It was really a
very, very funny show.
-
SCHIPPERS
- The Dance Recital classes also apparently were in part responsible for
the organization of a course called Organization of Dance.
-
DEANE
- Well, Dance Recital was really quite far-reaching in the influence it
had on the courses that were given in the next few years. There was
widespread interest from students from other departments who didn't have
an opportunity to do more dance than just what was offered in the four
required physical education classes. They wanted more, because the P. E.
majors had more in their courses, but these students were not eligible
for these physical education classes. So there were several courses that
grew up directly from Dance Recital interests, and that was the
organization of Dance Recital and Related Arts in which [how to handle]
the relationship and the coordination of theatre production and design
and movement and music was the meat. Then there were others who were
interested in knowing more about dance itself, and that led to the
development of a History of Dance Class. And there were a lot who wanted
experience, creative experience, such as they had in Dance Recital but
more centered and with more chance to learn. And so the Dance Workshop
was developed. And, in this, the students had certain activity training,
certain skills training, but the emphasis was on the creative part,
giving them a chance to solve problems. Then, every few weeks, we would
have a studio evening and any of the students who were interested could
come, or parents could come. It was not an advertised thing. It was held
right in the dance studio, and the students presented their various
solutions to these problems. Then we did just a spontaneous evaluation
of them, what were the outstanding aspects and where had they failed in
meeting the problem, or where could they have handled it in a different
way? This kind of thing was done. They were very honest and very
stimulating kind of discussions. And I think the students enjoyed this
very much. I would say that four or five of them developed a real
feeling for dance form and for real creative expression. It was quite
exciting. But when Dance Recital stopped, I don't quite know what
happened. I remember there was a big push for the development of the
dance major, and it was a push that came largely from these students who
were not physical education majors, although there were, in each class,
a few of the P. E. majors who were very much interested in dance and
very highly skilled. They kept feeling we should have a chance to
concentrate in the area of dance and the related arts. But every time,
we worked on the curriculum for such a dance major, we ran into the
problem of certification— what kind of degree could they have, and what
kind of certification to teach could they have? The public schools
didn't have any such thing, so you had to have a physical education
major or, you know, one of the accepted majors. So this was quite a
frustrating business. I worked with it for maybe three years and finally
gave it up. It was just one interest, and as the director of the Women's
Division, I had a tremendously heavy schedule, just administratively. So
this was just one problem out of hundreds. It was finally abandoned
because there didn't seem to be any solution at that time to the
certification problem. The College of Applied. Arts was in the college
of which Physical Education was a part. But except for Theater Arts,
there really was no interest [from other departments, ] The Music
[Department had no part in the] development of this at all. I think that
some of the people in education were very much interested, but there was
this block on certification and state requirements and so forth. I think
these problems have been solved now, but this has been because of a
whole reorganization in the college structure.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you remember any of the faculty members in particular who gave
support or opposed the development of it?
-
DEANE
- No, I don't. We always had support from Theater Arts. They were
interested and they used to send their major students down for classes
with us. They felt that movement was very much a part of their whole
theater training, and they were very interested in what we did and very
supporting and full of suggestions and help. Other than Ralph, who was
always a really sterling supporter of what we did, I would say that, at
that time, John Jones, who was a student or was a teaching assistant,
was interested. I think he's always been interested in dance. He worked
on all of our Dance Recitals. [An English Professor—Claude Jones was a
great help. He did an arrangement of Dr. Faustus that was a combination
of theater and movement that was very beautiful.] I think Bob Lee was as
much in Theater Arts as he was in the dance at this time and, of course,
he was a very supportive person. Names just don't come to me, I'm sorry.
-
SCHIPPERS
- in the struggle to try to get the dance declared as a major, did you
have to set up curriculums or courses?
-
DEANE
- Yes, I don't know where the outlines are or whatever happened to them,
but we had to meet all of the University requirements and all of the
college requirements just as though it were a major in anything else.
They had to have the social sciences and English, Anatomy and Physiology
[some other things], I can't remember. But we did have to meet all of
the requirements of the University, plus the emphasis on the preparation
in the dance.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were you primarily responsible for setting up that curriculum or did you
get help?
-
DEANE
- Oh, no, I was the one who was doing this. When I say I did it, I mean I
was in a leadership position, and I had a great many people on my staff
who were very interested and supporting. At this time we had Josephine
Murray and Eleanor [B.] Pasternak and Letitia Innes and Myra Kinch and,
later, Jean Riley, Maria Maginnis and Carol Scothorn. They were all very
fine dance people who were very much interested in this. They were
physical education majors who had gone into the dance and had gone ahead
and done additional study outside of the University, and they were very
good people. So they had a richness of background in dance that I didn't
have. I was just the person who was responsible for making things move.
And they all helped on this. But the academic requirements and this kind
of thing I had to work on. They were all very creative about what kinds
of experiences should be included for the students. So, when I say I did
it, all I did was organize and direct and keep it moving and be
responsible for the form and meeting requirements and that sort of
thing.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned another thing that grew out of Dance Recital and this is
the History of Dance and Related Arts. That course first was offered by
Mr. Lee. Do you recall what materials he used, what textbooks?
-
DEANE
- I haven't any idea.
-
SCHIPPERS
- The next year you taught a history course yourself, the History of Dance
in America. How did you approach that one?
-
DEANE
- Well, first of all, I never worked harder in my life on a course.
[laughter] I had a general knowledge, plus the kind of knowledge you get
from reading everything you can put your hands on, which I had done, but
when we had the feeling that this should be offered, I took a whole year
and just read everything I could dig up. I had a lot of help from Ralph
on this course, which went back to the earliest form of theatre dance
that we had here. At this minute I can't tell you exactly what books we
used, but we dealt with the minstrel shows and the early theatre, the
kinds of theatre, the early playwrights, the early actors and we used
lots of pictures that we dug out from every possible source. Again Ralph
helped us there very much. He had marvelous ideas about this. I would
say that his sense of growth in the theater and change in the theater in
relation to the people and the times was very helpful. But it was the
kind of thing that we looked at—the dancers in blackface. I can't even
think of the names of the shows [now, but it dealt with the] chorus line
sort of thing that they had early in the theaters. Then there was the
dancing of the people around the campfires in the western trek and the
folk dance growth and so on.
-
SCHIPPERS
- That course was given in 1941 and
-
DEANE
- Yes that's twenty-two years ago.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you use Curt Sachs' History of Dance?
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes, we had all kinds of books. I don't have many of them because I
gave most of them to the library. But we used Curt Sachs, and Dancer's Quest, and Cheney's The Theatre which has a lot about the dance in it. And there
was another one, that I can't remember at all. It was a book by Merle
Armitage which was really not a textbook at all, but in it, he had shown
the early development of Isadora Duncan and of Ruth St. Denis and the
various groups that had danced here on the Pacific Coast. That was just
to be used as a reference, I can't remember any others right now.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you remember any point or emphasis that you were trying to make in
the course?
-
DEANE
- The first thing I wanted them to know was that dancing wasn't something
unusual and different and strange, because a lot of the students felt
this is just not a basic human experience. I wanted to give them the
feeling that, no matter how simple the whole development was in the
United States, that it didn't begin here and that people had always
danced. The reflection of the mores of the times was always in the dance
and that was why there was all this conflict about it [in this country.
But I wanted to show that even though] there had been conflict, the
conflict had nothing to do with the drive in people that makes them want
to move and that this had come through in spite of any restrictions or
anything else. I think this was the basic thing, and then I wanted to
show the various ways it had come through and had been expressed over
the years? It was a very simple course, but it was a very simple group
of people that I was dealing with. I mean they were not sophisticated in
the arts. They hadn't been brought up with it as part of their lives,
Lots of them had really never seen more than one or two ballets in their
life, and this was a world apart. They knew very little about dance as
creative activity. [And they were afraid of it. I wanted them to see how
very basic the enjoyment of dance had been whether in the formality of
the cotillion or the freedom of the campfire. People have always found
satisfaction in painting or singing without being great artists and they
find the same basic pleasure in dance.] You see, it was just kind of
trying to waken them up and let them know what sources were and let them
know that they weren't unique, that this was part of the race. That's
kind of a silly summing up, but that's the way I remember it. [laughter]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you remember what Mr. Lee's emphasis was?
-
DEANE
- I never visited his class, so I honestly don't know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Your exposure to the dance wasn't confined entirely to the West Coast
was it?
-
DEANE
- My first exposure to dance, the first I had done anything about it, was
when I went to Columbia. I was so excited about what I learned there; of
course, I saw everything I could see in New York, I saw Isadora in her
last performance in New York, which was pretty tragic, and I saw the
ballets and every bit of dancing going on. There was a lot of small
group things. But I really am not a dance person in the sense of being a
dancer. I never have been a dancer, but it has been a consuming
interesting, and I have read and watched and seen and thought about it.
I think, because I wasn't a performer I was more able to keep my hands
off the things that students did and to release the power in them to
create and to act and to do. And I think it's the reason why I became
convinced that as an educational medium, it was a tremendously powerful
one.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You went back East on several occasions and you went to Europe. Did you
see anything there that you brought back with you?
-
DEANE
- Well I went to an International Congress of the Dance. It was
interesting, how I was invited to that. There was a dancer whose
professional name was Lorca. She was Madame [Charles] Huizile, and she
was married to a French Army officer. He had had a serious operation,
and they came to California for him to recuperate. She came to UCLA to
see one of our Dance Recitals and was very impressed with it. She was a
dancer who had studied all over the world with everybody and was a
highly cultured, educated woman. She was fascinated with what we were
able to do with untrained dancers. Her thesis was that with what we were
doing, we had more technical training that this would be something
magnifique. I said that I didn't figure that the technical training was
the thing, because we weren't aiming to develop dancers. She talked with
me for a long time about this. And then she said, "I would like to teach
a summer school class for you." So I took her, I think it was, Gordon
Watkins, who was to be dean of the summer session that summer. He was
enchanted with her and with her background and all the experiences that
she had had and the people she had studied with and so forth. So she
taught a class, but it was a selective class. She chose who she would
have in it. And they did a very charming little recital at the end of
the summer session. It was really very charming and very delightful.
Well, this developed into quite a friendship. She and I got along very
well together, and I just drank in everything I could learn from her.
She was curious about and fascinated by the educational theory that I
had, I mean, I don't think she had ever come in contact with the kinds
of things John Dewey had said. She didn't know about [our educational
theories] at all. So I gave her the book Art as
Experience to read, and again she thought this was pretty
exciting. The next year they went back to Paris, and I received a letter
from her saying that she was organizing an international congress of
dance as a medium in education. They were inviting people from all the
different countries, Germany and England, and from eight or ten other
countries, and she wanted me to come and present a paper on dance in
education. I was simply flabbergasted, you know, but delighted, and said
certainly I'd come. [[laughter] I was willing to tell anybody who wanted
to hear what I thought, so I went. I wrote my paper in English and then
had it translated Into French, and I had both a French and English
version. She said I could do it only in English, but I thought I would
wait and [see until I got there!] At any rate, it was a fascinating
meeting. The thing that pleased me most was that although nobody
understood what this whole educational approach was they would ask me
questions, and we sat and talked over coffee and over aperitifs because
they really wanted to understand what I was talking about. To me it was
a most amazing thing that the whole European concept of education is so
completely different from ours. Well, I suppose they haven't had a Dewey
or somebody who gets right down and says what the nature of learning is
and asks how people learn and what this experience is. At least that was
my impression. But it was a very exciting experience and, for years, I
corresponded with two or three of the people there. We corresponded once
or twice a year. That was the trip to Paris, to the University [and the
Congres International de la Danse Consideree comme un Moyen
d'Education].
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you remember who the people were that you wrote to?
-
DEANE
- Well, I still have the programs, and I can dig it all out. Do you want
me to?
-
SCHIPPERS
- Yes.
-
DEANE
- The thing that interested me most was that I didn't think that anybody
understood what I was talking about. When I say not anybody, I mean to
except Margaret H'Doubler who was there from Wisconsin. She certainly
understood what I was talking about. But the persons that I seemed able
to communicate with best were the two from England, Mr. Kennedy who was
from the folk dance society there, and Ruby Ginner who taught Greek
dancing. To me it's fascinating that, in England, they have separated
dance so that here is a school that is dealing just with Greek dancing
and another group that is dealing with the whole folk dancing idea. The
people who interested me most were the ones who kept trying to find out
what I meant, kept asking questions. They would push and push and push,
and I would think that I had said it so simply that. it had to ring a
bell. But the words didn't mean the same thing. There was just no basis
for understanding. They were talking about art and were all full of
these classical rules about the art and basic techniques and basic forms
of expression, and it was just another world when I came along and sang
about a high school student having this freeing experience and this
ability to move freely and not being ashamed of his body etc. They
didn't understand at all. So I don't think I was a great success, except
I caused a lot of interest and a lot of headshaking This I did, I'm
sure. It was interesting because at the end of the various sessions
there was always a discussion period. And, in spite of the differences
in language, the translation came through very quickly for anybody who
didn't understand I sort of halfway understood French and halfway
didn't. I could speak adequate French, and I could get the gist of
things, but when people are asking] pointed questions, you really have
to have a translation if you're going to make an accurate answer. But
this they did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Who were the people who you corresponded with?
-
DEANE
- With Ruby Ginner and with Mr. Kennedy. He was very thrilled with the
kinds of folk dance things we were doing, and we had a long talk about
folk dance. He knew Effie Shambaugh and knew the kind of research that
she did and the kind of work that she did. So I had a very warm
relationship with him. I think the only time we corresponded, was when I
sent him programs from two or three things or when he sent me programs
with little notes written on them, that sort of thing. Ruby Ginner
wanted very much to come to the United States. She would liked to have
come to UCLA, and that's why I think she was as warm in her
correspondence as she was because she wrote to me, I would say, four or
five times within the next year. That's about all I can tell you about
this.
-
SCHIPPERS
- The congress was in July, 1938, ran for four-days, and there were about
three sessions a day.
-
DEANE
- There were two sessions a day. We had a free time, but actually, there
were three working days and we were there four days. In the middle, we
had one day off during which we had tours and meetings and you could see
anything you wanted to or meet with anyone you wanted to. It was very
nice.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Besides this impression you've given me, did you bring any ideas back
with you that applied?
-
DEANE
- No, I learned more about the real art form of dance and about the kinds
of things people who were specialists thought were important, but it's
hard for me to say that it was particularly helpful to me because it all
went back to the same thing: If you are going to make a dancer, you have
to do one thing; If you're going to have dance a learning experience for
lots of people, you do another thing. And I really had not been
interested in the development of dancers, specialists, or artists.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Which might bring up comment on one of these professional courses in
method that you gave, one course in particular, Principles in Teaching
Dance.
-
DEANE
- Yes, this was the base of it. You're not teaching dance as you would the
multiplication table, a thing to be learned. The actual principle on
which you operate is that you're helping a person to free himself of
fears or restrictions or self-consciousness through an experience in
dance and that, in this, he gets to know himself better and accepts
himself. Well, it's an ego thing. It's, I am, and this is my body and
this is what it will do. I am responsible [for what it does, ] not
somebody else. It isn't what someone else does that makes me dance. It
is what I am, and what I feel, and how I control and direct it. It's a
personal growth experience. In order to develop this, your approach [as
a teacher] is not by starting with technique, [which is a "training"
activity.] You start by doing something the pupils know how to do, and
then you help them learn how to do it better. Then, as they want to do
something they haven't the control to do, you build a technique [for
them to develop] this control. [In this way] technique is a natural
development of the whole process it is not a precondition to learning
[but is a purposeful activity which answers a need they recognize.] You
free them with this experience, and then you give them the tools to
develop it farther. This was the principle then. There are many facets
that come into it. I can't remember everything, but I do remember that
we started with this principle and then we developed ways of handling
classes, ways of bringing the music in, ways of having accompaniment,
sources for creative problems, etc, [We also examined ways of developing
feeling for rhythm, for space, for force.] If you start with a great big
overall concept, like space, or time, or rhythm, this doesn't mean
anything. But if, you say, I'm going to reach as far as I can, and I'm
going to reach a little farther and a little farther all that space is
mine. All of that. What about that out there? You know, you get into it,
by asking how can I get into it, how can I use it? These things are very
hard to explain because it's something you do, and in the doing there's
a learning and there's a growth. Now there has to be guidance. There has
to be the person who says, "How much of this space is yours?" Most have
never thought about this as space, you know. The teacher isa person who
begins to bring this concept in and this concept grows and grows, and
then you can talk in abstractions You can then talk about force and
energy and rhythm. And you know, these things are exciting because they
are part of life. But you don't dump them on the person to start with.
You develop them through these experiences with a very observant, very
sensitive person who really can say, "Take this next step." I tell you,
it's something I can't relate to you in words.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you think that the concept behind your kind of teaching, your kind of
dance, is still being followed or is that an era that's come to an end?
-
DEANE
- No, I think there are a few people [who use it, but] I haven't any idea
how many are still working this way. I know that Jo Murray did when she
went to Fullerton, and I know that Sally Parker did when she went to
Laguna. But unless they come back and tell me about this or unless
somebody comes back and says, "I saw so-and-so's dance recital," I don't
know. One of the defeating things about teaching is that you never know
unless in some way or another it comes back to you through a person or
through an experience or through seeing it yourself. Of course, I never
get into the schools anymore, so I haven't any idea of what's going on.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you think, though, that UCLA's approach to dance in the department is
somewhat more academic now?
-
DEANE
- You mean in the Dance Department?
-
SCHIPPERS
- Yes.
-
DEANE
- I don't know anything about it, I really don't. My feeling would be that
it is. But they're trying to do something else. They're trying to
develop dancers, at least this is my impression of what they're trying
to do. This is a question I can't answer. But I know that some people
had fabulous experiences with our approach that they'll never forget.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I understand Dean [Everett] Carter's wife once danced in the Recitals.
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes. She and Chuck [Charles] Ferguson's wife were little, short
roly-polys, and they did the Bach fugue. They were the chain base, and
they were wonderful'. Well, they'll never forget that.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Certainly 1944-45 was a big year. This is when the department became
coed. What happened to some of this impulse? We know it put an end to
the Dance Recital.
-
DEANE
- Well it slowed down a lot of the things we were doing, and I think this
is understandable, really. But we had a remarkable women's staff at that
time. They were young, intelligent, searching. They were willing to
spend time studying and time at staff meetings. Usually a faculty that
meets once a week for an hour thinks they're put upon. Well, we used to
meet, not just after school for an hour? we'd come to my house in the
evening and work all evening. We really were trying to understand what
we were doing and why we were doing it. How it could be done better? If
you take a group that is working that way and put them together with a
men's department that is completely concerned in the skill aspect, it's
bound to slow down the creative thing that the one group is trying to do
and tends to raise the hackles of the other group a bit. I think the men
would, have liked a little bit of this, but they were not sure, They
didn't feel secure in it. There was a period of time, particularly. when
John [F.] Bovard was chairman of the department, when we came close to
really working together on problems, but it never came to the place
where the majority of the men felt secure, and where they were willing
to accept any kind of teaching that wasn't focused on a skill, on a
performance kind of thing. I think it was very unfortunate, because some
people say that physical education can't move ahead any faster than the
men in the profession allow it to. This is true as long as the men
dominate the profession. But I think there are many creative, exciting
and research-minded women who really want to know what happens to a
person when he moves. [When Rosalind Cassidy joined our staff to work on
the graduate program, she made progress by stimulating the thinking of
some of the men. I think her enthusiasm for the women's experiment and
very real help in its development modified some of the opposition.]
-
SCHIPPERS
- And yet there was a course in the '45/46 year called Organization of
Public Performance which was offered to both men and women.
-
DEANE
- Well that was my doing. The men at that time had a wonderful gymnast
team, you know, where they are on the bars and so forth, and Cec [Cecil
B.] Hollingsworth was the coach of this. The men were absolutely superb,
they were so beautiful in motion and so skilled. They had a show for
people, I guess it must have been a convention here or something, I
can't remember what but they put it on and it was a beautiful
performance but so stinking in the way it was run. It was just awful. I
mean it was noisy. It was confused. Therewas no effort at staging. The
whole thing was based on, if you come to see gymnasts perform, well here
they are, look at them. I couldn't help but believe that swimming meets
and gymnast meets and all of these things that the men do are a public
relationship job, and they should be done with all the skill and all the
finesse and all the beauty of any kind of performance. I got excited
about this, and so we had this course in which we used all of the basic
stuff that we used to use for Dance Recital—what you have to do about
the comfort of your audience, sight lines, color, ventilation, programs,
reception committee, greeters. We just went right down the line with
everything that could happen at swimming meets and at other kinds of
meets. Who looks after this? How can it be done? What do you do with a
gymnasium? What can you do with a swimming pool? What kinds of effects
can you get with it? How can you make it more interesting? How can you
involve the public in it more? You know, this sort of thing. They loved
it. I don't think it did any good, but I don't know. [laughter]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Well certainly after the merger, there was a proliferation of courses,
and I note that many of the dance classes and music analysis classes
continued.
-
DEANE
- Yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did the men respond to them? Finally?
-
DEANE
- No, we never had any real response from men's P. E. in the dance that
was satisfactory. They used to come to class, and Bill [William F.]
Pillich had a class, but I can't remember who else did one. We tried to
involve the physical education men in dance per se on the basis that it
was good training for a football player, it was good training for a
swimmer, it was good training for everybody to give them this basic
dance experience, but it never received any kind of response. We would
open classes for them, and we would say, "if you just want to come
Wednesday afternoon at four o'clock, we'll work with you." You know,
they were not regularly scheduled things, but there was a real effort to
involve the men in it. We really were not successful in it at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were the regular P. E. courses you were involved in also geared toward
your concept of movement?
-
DEANE
- Well, the professional activities courses which was our core curriculum
was. It was developing, I should say, in a very exciting way. It was
easier to do with dance than it was to do with, let's say, basketball,
but the difference was that almost every girl knew how to play
basketball already, you know. So then we had to see how we could help
them look at what they were doing and develop the technique that they
needed instead of our saying, you do it this way. This is what was
really happening. The students were looking at one another and saying
things like, well if you had done this or your problem is that you don't
get up enough or you don't reach enough or you're too slow starting,
you're frozen to the floor, you don't get away fast, this sort of thing.
Now, I am not in a position to tell you exactly what they did in all
these classes, because I really don't know. But Pia Gilbert, for
example, who did all the music for the dances, would get in a gym suit
and a baseball cap and go out on the field with the girls in the part of
their unit that had to do with baseball and get involved, completely in
it. She said, I need to see what's happening so I understand what's
happening here. Now this was the spirit that went through this whole
thing. It was a very exciting, honest effort by a group of very
intelligent women to understand and to learn how to do the things they
wanted to do better.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You said Pia Gilbert did all of the music for the dances?
-
DEANE
- Pia played for the dance classes, and she taught the class on dance
accompaniment.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did she compose any of her own music?
-
DEANE
- Yes. All the time. She used to sit at the piano and do something, and
the students would Improvise. They were given a problem such as, how
much can you do with your body without getting more than this off the
floor, you know? And they would be working, and she'd see something and
the music would start coming out. Pia was. marvelous, just wonderful.
She came as an accompanist, just to play for the dance classes, and then
she played for the major courses. I was struggling along trying to give
them some ideas on accompaniment but, in one semester, Pia had them
playing the piano, you know, doing enough to make it possible for them
to provide music in the schools where they didn't have anybody to play
for their dancing classes. Oh, she was just marvelous. I think she's a
great person.
-
SCHIPPERS
- After the merger, and you started to be strapped with more
administrative responsibilities, what was your primary function would
you say? Was it a liaison work?
-
DEANE
- Well it's hard to say, because there was just so much. I was on so many
University committees that required work and preparation, and as far as
administration was concerned, just the administration of a women's
gymnasium is a big job. I mean if you think of the equipment and the
equipment room and the people who issue the equipment and check it back
in again. There was always a fight in the equipment room. You had to
keep the peace and you had to keep them pleasant, and you had to make
them realize that they saw more public than you did and that they must
be polite to the girls and not snappy and so forth. Then you had the
problem of stealing which, in a big open building like that, goes on all
the time. Then there was the dealing with the faculty people. I don't
know how many women we had at that time, but it must have been something
like forty. Then there was the supervision of the young teaching
assistants, and every teaching assistant that came, I saw teach, and
every junior supervisor who came in on a three-year appointment, I saw
teach several times. I had conferences with them all. I was concerned
that they learned to be good teachers, and I thought that they were
there for an experience that was as important as any class that they had
taken in their pretraining, and it was up to me to see that they had a
good experience. So I spent a great deal of time visiting classes and
having conferences with these young junior supervisors and teaching
assistants. I can't even begin to tell you [about all the work that goes
on] all the time with the chairman of a department on various problems
like assignments and this kind of thing. I don't remember all I did. I
was very busy. I know that.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you have an important place in curriculum policy?
-
DEANE
- Oh, we had a curriculum committee that was made up of both men and
women, and we met regularly all the time. We had a good many common
departmental committees. My chief role in this curriculum committee was
protecting the women's major curriculum, because the men couldn't see
this. I mean they thought it was completely nuts from the very beginning
And when it came to division of . labor, you know, this was [laughter]
kind of a tricky thing, particularly with three people teaching a
course. The men wouldn't think anything of having three separate courses
with a person teaching each of those separate courses, but they couldn't
see this core curriculum that covered the sports and the individual
sports and the athletics and the dance, the folk dance, and all this
being taught by three people. This just wasn't good. Who's going to want
somebody sitting around watching you teach? Well, you know this is the
thing. Group teaching is a very threatening thing if it's done right,
because it means that the other two people are there to evaluate what
you've done. They might sit down and say, "Oh, did you get the reaction
when you said that. This was what was wrong about it. You should never
use that word. It threatened them. It made them shut up just when they
were ready to do something. You cut it off by the way you said that."
But you know you never say anything like the way those teachers
developed and grew. No, the men just couldn't see this at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- When did the idea of group teaching first start?
-
DEANE
- We started when we began discussing this thing of what we really were
trying to do. And over a period of two years or more, we worked
regularly on it, and we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to do
and we decided the only way to do it was to learn together. The students
had to learn; we had to learn. And this was the decision of the group
themselves to start this way.
-
SCHIPPERS
- That was unique to the P. E. Department?
-
DEANE
- Oh, it had never been done anyplace else as far as I know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- It also came to an end.
-
DEANE
- It sure did.
-
SCHIPPERS
- When?
-
DEANE
- Well, I don't know when things ended, but when I left, it was all in a
turmoil.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But it was still going on then.
-
DEANE
- Yes, as far as I know. We even had people who tried it with the science
courses, with physiology of exercise and kinesiology, and we had three
people on that who had developed a core in the class.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Well how did you approach it with three people in a class. Did two just
sit there?
-
DEANE
- Oh, no. [laughter] This, again, is difficult to explain. The class and
the teachers all met together aid discussed what this class was for and
what was it about and [what they hoped to accomplish. Then they planned]
what they were going to need to do [to achieve these goals.] If they
were going to lay the foundation of, let us say, a freshman class [for
people who wanted] to be teachers of physical education, [they'd discuss
what they were] going to need to know. How can you find out? Well, let's
try some things. You begin with a very free kind of discussion. The
teachers as a team worked together all the time and in their planning.
You never can go to this kind of class unprepared; you don't pull your
lecture out of a file. What happened today is the basis of what's going
to happen tomorrow. And you meet right after class, and you plan where
you're going to try and take the group the next day. [At the same time,
the students are planning how to carry out; their responsibilities and
are going to resource materials and deciding what each is to do for the
next day. It is a very stretching, growing experience for both staff and
students.]
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: FOUR, SIDE ONE December 6, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- [We were just saying, that there is another] major supporter of dance
[whom should receive credit.]
-
DEANE
- Yes, I don't know how this name slipped me, because he was so very much a
part of everything we did, and that was Claude Jones or Mack Jones, as
we called him, in the English Department. From the very beginning he was
interested in the kinds of programs we were doing and very helpful in
the effort that we were making in experimenting with theater and dance
forms together. He did the cutting of Dr. Faustus
that we did. That was simply stunning, and he worked on the production
all the way through. There was a balcony up in the back of the stage on
which the chorus stood, and this mass voice spoke for all the people who
were playing the different characters below. Then, on the stage, were
the figures in movement and dance. It was a very exciting production.
Mack was entirely responsible for this. He made the proposal in the
first place that we try this. He thought it would be fun. And he worked
with us on so many different things, in words that we used, in forms
that we were interested in experimenting with. He was a very interesting
and supportive person. And I also remember in the early days, in the
very beginning, there was a young professor in the Philosophy
Department, and he and his wife were very helpful, Richard [B. O'Reilly]
Hocking and his wife Kay. Richard was, I think, just an assistant
professor or an instructor. I don't know what his rank was in the
Philosophy Department, but his wife was a very interesting and exciting
person to work with. Both of them were interested. As a matter of fact,
they participated in several of the programs that we did. Both of them
danced in them. They were also very helpful people. And then, way back
at the very beginnings of dance, there was a professor (I think he was
in zoology) whose name was Boris Krichesky. He used to come down and
watch the classes, and he was fascinated by the approach that we were
making and the opportunity for individual growth. He was what we were
after and was interested enough to take time and come down and talk with
us about it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- At the last session, we had started to talk about the group teaching
experiment, and I wondered if you could tell me more about how the idea
came about, what criticism of it there was, and who were the ones who
were interested in it?
-
DEANE
- Well, I told you about this long period of searching study that this
little central group on the staff had done and during which we had faced
ourselves with really basic problems. What are we trying to do? What do
we hope can happen? Then through what sort of program, through what sort
of experience can this happen for people? And we arrived at the
conclusion that we had never had this experience ourselves. No one had
ever taught us this way, and [so we decided] that we would have to
experiment to find the way for teaching this as well as [concentrating
on] the experiences that the students had. And we developed the concept
of teaching in groups of three where people could really learn through
the evaluation of what goes on. To learn what they did that brought
something out from people and what they did that didn't communicate and
didn't help people act. So this was the beginning of it. In the first
year we started it just with the incoming freshman class. And the three
teachers who were involved in that, as I remember, were Marjory [G.]
Allen, Margaret [D.] Greene and Lillian Little. I was a fourth member,
ex-officio, because I sat in on most of the classes whenever I could.
Mostly, I would just be there part of the time and I would try to get in
at the end for their staff evaluation. And the growth that happened to
these people as teachers was phenomenal. To me, as an observer, it was
phenomenal. The amount that the students could achieve when given the
problem was also. (Literally they made their own program. Through
questioning you started saying, "You want to be a teacher of physical
education. Now what are the things you think you have to know? What are
the things you think you have to understand?" And then after putting
them in the situations where they had to learn this kind of thing, we
took the next step through in the questioning. "Now, is this enough?
What have you found out about this?" And so forth. So, while the classes
were going on, the students themselves would be presenting materials
that they had dug out and prepared. And then, their own classmates would
be critical of their method of presentation and would give their
reaction to it. Then, we, in turn, came in, as the next level of
evaluation, and raised more questions. So it was a very stimulating and
exciting thing, and the students were caught up in it from the very
beginning. They were bewildered because they were used to being told,
this is what you do. You read this book and you make a report on it. You
do thus and so. But, suddenly, here they were being asked to think,
asked to dig out materials, asked to look at what they'd done critically
and to evaluate honestly. All of these things were experiences that were
equally good for us as teachers, because we were skilled people and had
been effective in our teaching until now. So, now, suddenly, here we
were having equally effective teachers sitting down and saying, "Well,
this is good but when you said this, there was no response in the eyes.
There were no response in the faces. They heard, but it didn't mean
anything, you see. Why?" And then came suggestions, "Try it this way,"
Very often, as they gained confidence in this, the teachers who were
observing saw this, they would speak right up not in criticism but in
this completely informal way and say, "Miss Allen, did you mean this? I
had a feeling that most people didn't understand and I wasn't sure
myself." The class would say, "Oh yes, this is true. We didn't really."
And then, right there students learned how not to do it, and it was done
correctly. They got the point, you see. All of this real experience with
guidance and with leadership and with help put the onus on the kids to
be honest and say, "I don't understand" and to be interested in finding
better ways of doing things to realize that teachers weren't gods but
were helpful people who had had more experience than they had and could
help them grow. All of this was a most interesting experience for me,
and I know it was for the students and for the teachers.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did it attract any attention from the Department of Education?
-
DEANE
- Yes, indeed it did. May [V.] Seagoe and Malcolm [S.] MacLean, were very
enthusiastic and came down to visit the classes and saw them in action
and talked with us afterwards. Usually their comments were very
laudatory and they thought what foe were doing was very exciting. They
would raise questions such as, where are you going from here? Do you
feel this is going to be productive if you go farther here? How will you
do it? And we got a great deal of guidance and a great deal of help from
them. They were the two in the Education Department who were the most
interested.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you think they ever considered applying it?
-
DEANE
- Well I don't think either Max or May were in the teacher training field.
The School of Education was divided, There was one section that was for
teacher training and there was very little rapport between the two parts
of the school as far as I know. Mr. Bond was in charge of the teacher
training classes and the supervision of practice teaching in the public
schools. He was not interested at all, not at all.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were there any criticisms of the approach?
-
DEANE
- There were a great many criticisms of it. In the first place, the men's
department couldn't understand how we could feel that students were
learning by experiencing themselves. They, as teachers, were specialists
in football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, and so forth. And because
they were specialists, they were there to teach the fellows how to do
it. That was their job, and they thought that this was dream stuff. It
didn't make any sense. And the fact that students did come through and
work and were adequate performers didn't prove anything. There were no
specialists. We didn't come out with people got jobs in football or a
person who was going to be a basketball coach. Our students came out to
be teachers, and they could be equally effective [in teaching any
activity] although some of them were more talented in dance, let us say,
or some of them were more highly skilled in swimming but they still
could handle any activity that was in their program and handle it with
assurance. So our biggest criticism was from the men's department. Then
from our own women's division, there were members of the staff who
thought that this was pretty ridiculous and wouldn't go along with it
and didn't go along with it. But as we moved, as we added each year, we
began to approach the time when we needed to involve courses like
Physiology of Exercise and Corrective Physical Education and
Kinesiology, in this way of working. Finally one man in the men's
division, John Sellwood, and Ruth Pulton who did Kinesiology and
Physiology of Exercise in the women's division and (John did these in
the men's division) got together with Val [Valarie] Hunt who was doing
the corrective work in the department, and developed this course which
was a combination of physiology of exercise and kinesiology based on
this whole concept of the body in motion. This took a year or more of
experimenting by themselves before they were willing to even try this.
And it was a pretty tentative try when they got at it. But it was
interesting and it did work. Again, the concept of team teaching where
you had checks on one another and where you could see what was
communicated I think they felt was very valuable. I think that our
biggest criticisms came from the men's division and from the few in the
women's [division] who hadn't been willing to give the time for the
study on this. And certainly the administration decided it was very
expensive. Well I don't think the administration would have thought so,
but, in as much, from the men's division point of view, you see, it was
a single budget, this was where the shoe began to pinch. So that's as
much as I know of criticism, except, I think the people from the public
schools, the supervisor of girls' physical education in the Los Angeles
schools, thought we were crazy, you know. She couldn't understand what
we were doing at all. She used to come and visit our classes, but until
our first graduates went out and began to teach, and people began to say
this is the best teacher I've ever had, you know, there was a pretty
general rejection of it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was the idea still growing or was it diminishing by the time you'd left?
-
DEANE
- No, I think the idea was growing. It had tightened up. A lot of things
that we did at the very beginning didn't seem to be as essential [as we
thought] and some cords in it we pursued more directly than we had. I
think it was a growing thing but growing more slowly because, as you
begin to narrow it down, your focus becomes more intense and you have
less new fluff coming into it. You are more sure of what it is that
you're doing. Of course, I evaluate it in terms of my own looking at it.
To me, we were on the way of developing a concept of physical education
that should be basic to all education. To me it should be the core.
Instead of starting with all of the things a person needs to know, you
start with a person. And you bring the answers to these needs as the
needs are felt.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you know if anyone else picked up on the idea?
-
DEANE
- I don't know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned that at one time Mary Wigman visited the department. Could
you describe that?
-
DEANE
- Well she came to a dance concert. Just she herself did the concert and,
then, after the concert, we had a reception with coffee and tea so that
the students had a chance to meet with her and talk with her. She did
not do a class with the students, but her accompanist; did. She had a
wonderful group of percussionists who worked with her, and we were just
starting to make use of percussion in accompaniment, so they came down
and gave a class. They gave a demonstration of how to [use the
instruments] then they played for the students to move to. Then we had
an evaluation and a discussion time, where the students could ask
questions and they answered them. They were very generous with their
time. They were there two hours I guess, and the class was just to have
been an hour. But they stayed on and talked with the students and let
the students handle their instruments and that sort of thing. So that's
what it was, when Wigman came for a dance concert in Royce Hall.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Who sponsored that?
-
DEANE
- Well, the Committee on Drama, Lectures and Music of which I was a
member. I was trying awfully hard to get dance on the campus, and it was
very difficult to do, because, in the early days, people didn't come to
the campus for things. We had to pay our own way, we couldn't lose money
on any concert, so it was always a struggle to have them. We didn't have
as many as I would have liked to have, but we had quite a few dance
concerts.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you suggest the idea of having Wigman?
-
DEANE
- Yes, there's no question about that. On this Drama, Lectures and Music
Committee, we laid out the program for the concert series for a year. We
had to approve everything that was scheduled—the lectures—any special
events at all. The request for room and time assignment, and so forth
came to the committee, and we made the arrangements for it.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You told me about a rather touchy situation that developed when Wigman
was there that day.
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes. After all this consulting with the students, her accompanists L
wanted to see around the building. I walked out with them on what was
then the balcony on the back of the gym that looked out over the
swimming pool and the dancing green. And they said it was a very sad day
for them, and I thought something had gone wrong. I said, "Oh, what is
the matter? Is there something I can do?" They said, "We have just
received the word that Hitler has taken over, that he's come into power.
" I don't remember the history of what happened in Germany, and the only
thing I do remember is that it didn't mean anything to me. I had
absolutely no concept of its significance. In thinking about it
afterwards, I have felt it's another measure you have of yourself on
your growth. Here I was so interested in my little job and what I was
doing, I was not concerned [about the rest of the world.] Now I'm so
concerned in all events of this sort that it's hard to realize that I
was not concerned and didn't know [what was going on] and didn't know
how to interpret [this sadness.] Thank God we grow.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Yes, what other people were you able to bring in?
-
DEANE
- Oh, we had Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey and Charles [Weidman]. We
never did have Hanya [Holm]. She danced at Mills and we wanted her to
come down but she didn't have time on her schedule.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Tell me about Graham's visit. Did she come once or several times?
-
DEANE
- She was just here once. I don't know why I say that, because I'm not
sure. I really couldn't tell you. But she was [here at least] once and
did a dance concert and had a reception. This was the pattern in those
days. This whole group, Hanya and Martha and Doris and so forth, went to
colleges where there was an interest in dance. This is how they
supported themselves really, and they'd give a master class for the
students who were there. They'd give a performance, and then you'd have
a reception for them, and everybody would come and talk to them, the
students and faculty and anyone who wanted to. It was pretty much a set
kind of thing that they did. Now some of them did not do the master
classes, and some of them did. Sometimes the school that had them come
did not arrange for a master class. It all depended on what the
circumstances were, what the situation was and how much money was
involved.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Usually how much was given? Can you recollect?
-
DEANE
- I couldn't even guess. It must be in the minutes of the Drama Lecture
and Music Committee way back somewhere.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What sort of things did Humphrey do?
-
DEANE
- She did her dances. Graham had a group with her and Humphrey had a group
with her and they did the regular things that they were doing at that
time, I couldn't even begin to remember the dances.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Could you assess the campus response to the appearances?
-
DEANE
- Well I thought that there was a group on the campus who thought it was
great and who were interested and came and supported it. Another of our
big supporters, Ed Lee, (I hope I mentioned he was before) thought the
performances we did were just marvelous, thought we ought to have more
of them, and for Dance Recitals, he always invited a lot of friends and
came to dress rehearsals. Then he brought another whole crowd back to
see the performance. So there were a lot of people who were interested
in dance and who were interested in the efforts to bring dance to the
campus. There was another group who didn't support it at all and who
couldn't have cared less that we had them. I don't think that I was in a
position to ever hear anything unpleasant about it or negative other
than from people on the committee who would say, "Well, Martha wants
this. Let's let her have this." You know, it wasn't, "isn't that a great
idea?" But, little by little, we got support from the dance people in
the community and in the public schools so we had good audiences. In the
beginning we had a real struggle to get dance audiences other than our
own students.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What was your primary purpose in bringing them in educational?
-
DEANE
- Yes. Most of our students had never even seen a real professional dance
performance. A few of them had seen ballet, but the kind of ballet done
out of the Fanchon and Marco School, you know, not classical ballet. A
few of them had been to see the ballets that had come to the
Philharmonic. But they knew so little about it. I used to have to assign
readings, for example, from the Golden Bough. The
students knew nothing about Greek mythology; they knew nothing about the
classics; they knew nothing about any of the foundations of the arts.
And I had a real feeling that not only the students, but the whole
community needed to have these things.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So you were trying to create an audience also?
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And do you think you were successful?
-
DEANE
- Yes. I don't know what they call the committee now, the Committee on
Performing Arts or something, but it's a direct outgrowth of the Drama,
Lectures and Music Committee. In our first attempts, we just went out to
try and sell tickets, you know, to get enough people into Royce Hall to
pay for our first concert series, because people just didn't think in
terms of coming to the campus. I don't think that there's any question
that we succeeded.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was your idea of movement in any way influenced by the dancers?
-
DEANE
- Well, no. I may sound awfully stubborn about this business, [but my
feeling was these dancers were professionals whose achievements were
exciting and stimulating to watch. The techniques they had used to free
their bodies as instruments of expression were obviously successful. But
what happened to most teachers who went for summer study with them was
sad. They learned these techniques and came back to teach them as dance!
You know when you start with technique for people who don't know what it
leads to, it becomes the end and aim of the whole experience—to do falls
or stretches or bends or leaps.] My whole orientation was the opposite,
I think the pupils should be moving freely and finding out about their
bodies and finding out what it's like to move. Then when they need to
hold their balance better or they need to know how to fall, you teach
them how. To me, this is such a simple direct way, if you're doing it as
an educational experience. So when you ask me if the movements that they
made influenced me, I presume that they did in the fact that I
recognized that they had seen the need for flexibility or for extension
or for something of this sort and had created this technique to do it. I
understood this. But I don't think that it was incorporated into the
kind of teaching that I did. But it certainly became part of the girls
who came into, carry on with the dance as I moved out of it and as I
stopped teaching dance. But they still taught the philosophy that I had
established, and they were more highly skilled themselves.
-
SCHIPPERS
- In speaking of people who supported some of your activities, I note that
Dykstra was one of your big helps when he was provost.
-
DEANE
- Oh, he was a tremendous help. In the first place, he was a marvelous
human being who had widespread interests. He was interested in theatre,
in music and dance, and he was tremendously interested in what we were
trying, to do in the department. I don't think he ever missed a dance
performance or; any of the performances when we moved on into things
like the Romeo and Juliet thing Bob did. He was right there supporting
and making comments. He was very frank about, what he thought was good
and what wasn't. But he never did this with any sense of punishing you,
you know. If we bit off a little more than we could chew, [his approach
would be, that it's] fine for you to bite off more [than you can chew
because] you learn something by doing it. He was a fabulous man in
really knowing and understanding what people were doing.
-
SCHIPPERS
- And how about Earle R. Hedrick?
-
DEANE
- I never knew what he was. I mean he never participated in a sense that
would let me know that he was interested. The only really human thing
about Mr. Hedrick, I mean in terms of theater that I remember is that
they had a student show in Royce Hall, the year that Bertrand Russell
was here. There had been all this turmoil about it and so Hedrick and
Russell did a skit. This was during Homecoming or something like that.
And so he did this skit where he was criticizing Russell for what he had
done, and Russell was justifying himself, or the other way around I
can't remember. But, anyway, it was very funny, and I thought it was
very sharp of him to do it. But that's as much as I know. I mean Mr.
Hedrick was not a person that you went to. You took problems to Dyke. He
wanted you to. His door was open and you went. I understand that this
isn't the way the campus is at all now. Faculty people have to go to
their own dean, and your own dean has to go up the line. But, then, you
see, if I had something on my mind, I just went right to Mr. Dykstra and
this is what he expected you to do. To me, to have what you want
filtered through other people's interpretation makes it pretty
impossible for the person who's in the top spot to know what it is he's
ruling on or what it is you're talking about. If you want to really have
an educational institution, the closer you can get to the students and
the closer you can get to the processes that are going on, the better.
To me it seems they've turned the whole thing upside down and the most
important thing is how at the bottom. This I really believe. After Mr.
Dykstra there was the troika—Staff [Stafford L.] Warren, Gustave Arlt
and Paul Dodd. Then, after that, came Mr. Allen.
-
SCHIPPERS
- During that period when the troika was in, were things confused?
-
DEANE
- They were very confused. It's a time that I couldn't even sort out in my
mind if I had to. It was a time of the break-up of a great many things
and there was quite a big disintegration of a lot of the things that I
was caring about.
-
SCHIPPERS
- This was pretty much true all over campus?
-
DEANE
- Yes, as far as I know. I think that people were having problems, but 1
wasn't in as close touch as I might have been. I think that there seemed
to be problems everywhere, and I think that people were pretty upset
that we didn't have a chancellor. It's very difficult to work with a
three-headed administration, particularly three people as different as
they were,
-
SCHIPPERS
- What were some of the things that started to break up. Support of your
courses?
-
DEANE
- Support of our core curriculum, very definitely. Well, I'm having blocks
now, but that, chiefly, was the thing as far as I was concerned. They
said there was a great pressure on finances and too many staff members
and that we would have to do away with the requirement in physical
education. We would have to justify this curriculum and these courses;
It was as though we had been let go for a long time, and now we better
stand up and wash our face and hands and get cleaned up and be
academically respectable. It was a general feeling of, I won't say
antagonism, but a lack of understanding of anything we were trying to
do. And they thought they were making a real effort to put us on an
academically sound basis.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you think that was the main charge?
-
DEANE
- No, I think that they wanted to save money, and they really didn't know
what we were trying to do. There were so many other problems and other
places where they would like to put the money, they wanted to chop us
down to size. We were a terribly expensive department, you know. At one
time, I think, we had forty women teachers. We had as many as ten and
twelve teaching assistants and junior supervisors, and a regular staff
above that for the academic classes. It was a really big department.
-
SCHIPPERS
- In other words, you were beginning to be classified as an educational
frill.
-
DEANE
- Yes, absolutely. I mean, they felt, if the money's short, then it ought
to go into something solid like physics or mathematics or chemistry or
our medical school.
-
SCHIPPERS
- This was really the beginning of the reaction to, what can we call it,
the Dewey approach.
-
DEANE
- Yes. Well, you see along about this time, or about this same time, they
began tramping down on Miss Seeds at the Elementary School, too. You saw
this happen, and you saw [the same thing] happen in Physical Education,
and you saw them begin to pick at Home Economics, and you saw the [the]
problems in Music and Art Department which were struggling with internal
difficulties and internal turmoils. It was a time of great turbulence on
the campus I think, and a real reactionary kind of force coming in.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Were they in agreement, pretty much, or did they fight among themselves?
-
DEANE
- I honestly don't know. I didn't have enough contact with them to know,
-
SCHIPPERS
- But you felt pretty steady pressure?
-
DEANE
- Very steady pressure from them, yes.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You wouldn't know which one was more responsible than the others in
exerting this?
-
DEANE
- No, I don't.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Working with a rather extensive vitae of your activities that we have, I
note there are lists of committee activities, and I've asked you to pick
out the activities and the services that, in your mind are the ones that
were most important.
-
DEANE
- Well, you have to sort of separate them, because I worked in a lot of
different areas and had a fairly wide contact with people on the campus.
I will pick for example the Committee on Drama, Lectures, and Music and
followed down that line. Then we can take another line. But this
committee was founded right after we moved out to the new campus to try
and develop this campus as a cultural center, We were out in the wilds,
really, so nobody had thought of coming to the campus for cultural
events. And this committee was asked to establish events that would
attract the public to the campus. I think we were appointed I don't know
by whom, the administration. I would suppose that people who consulted
with Dr. Moore proposed this and that he had asked the Senate to appoint
the committee. It was a Senate Committee, so it would have probably been
appointed by the Committee on Committees I'm sure that this is how it
was. On the first committee I can just remember three people, or four,
let's see. Bennet Allen was chairman, [and Art Warner who] did the
faculty lecture series and the visiting lectures. Isn't that awful? I
can't say names now, when I want to. Anyway, I was the one woman, and I
think there were five men on the original committee. We established a
series of faculty lectures that were given once a week in the old
Chemistry Building in that basement auditorium, and a concert series. I
think our first concert series had five events. And we arranged anything
else, any special thing, that someone wanted to have come to campus.
There weren't very many in those days, and when I look at the weekly
calendar today of what isgoing on, it's simply tremendous. It's just
unbelievable when I can think of this as being our whole weekly
happening. Then the Music Department did its noon music organ concerts.
I can't even remember the name of the organist who was there, but, every
day, at noon, there was a free organ concert. They kept trying to do
this sort of thing, and students would come and the faculty would drop
in, but it was a very small beginning. But this was the whole purpose of
that committee, and I enjoyed very much being on it. It was through this
committee, the suggestion of this committee, that we established the
Affiliates. We said that we need an organization like Town and Gown at
SC that ties the campus and the community together and people who act as
hostesses the nights of the concerts, have dinner parties before the
concert, and this sort of thing. So Daisy Dunham, who was my
accompanist, and I started talking to a group of women, and this is how
the Affiliates was started. It was done to support the efforts of the
committee in bringing cultural things to the campus. So I found that a
very interesting and a very growing kind of thing. It's fun to be part
of a committee that starts out and gets something done. And the
beginnings of a great many things were in that committee. Moving along
this line, I worked with the Public Ceremonies Committee that was then
developed. I worked on that committee with Ralph and other people from
the theater. The purpose was to make our commencements more attractive
and any other kind of public ceremony, Charter Day, and so on. And I
think that's all I want to say about that. It's interesting to see the
growth from these beginnings where the community was not campus oriented
to the place where now it is a center for such varied activities, it's
very interesting to see these changes, but I somehow don't feel that
there's the same campus enthusiasm. I think that the student
participation is gone. The student enthusiasm is gone. I think they made
it a cultural center for the community and the community comes and
enjoys these things, but I don't feel it's as much a part of the
University life which is very sad.
-
SCHIPPERS
- That certainly was not the original intent.
-
DEANE
- No, it was not the original intention. The original intention certainly
was always to [have enlarging experiences] for the students, but also to
make people recognize that these things were of value and to come and
share them with us and to think of this as a center. But the students
really, as far as I can see, are out of it now [except for their own
special programs. I really have no right to say this for I am out of
touch with the campus, but this is hew it looks to me.]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you see that transition taking place while you were active on the
committee?
-
DEANE
- No, I didn't. I don't quite know how to say it, but I really think it
was a very subtle and very gradual kind of change. I don't think there
was a break. My feeling is that theater things haven't been as exciting
in the last few years as they used to be at all, I don't think they've
done as interesting shows. Maybe it's because, in the old days, when
they had Royce Hall 170 and the main stage and they had nothing to work
with, really, that they were more ingenious and more creative and more
resourceful, and that with this gorgeous plant, now, it doesn't bring
out the same thing in the students. I don't know what it is.
-
SCHIPPERS
- What about Theater Group?
-
DEANE
- Well, of course, the Theater Group was a tremendously exciting thing,
but I never had the feeling it was part of the campus. It was Extension,
and it wasn't a student participation thing at all. It was a
professional production, and a professional undertaking, I thought their
programs were marvelous, and they were beautifully acted, and it was a
very stimulating, exciting thing. It would seem to me that it would be
very good to have this kind of thing alongside a student effort, if
there is this flow between the two, and if the students have a chance to
really learn from it and if the people in this kind of Theater Group
have a chance to do evaluation with the students of what they are doing
and so forth. It could be a wonderful thing. But this way, I felt that
they were just marching down two separate lines.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Might it have been one of the factors that started tipping that balance?
-
DEANE
- Yes, it might very well have been. I really don't know. I think you have
to be on campus to know, and all I have to go on is the productions I've
seen. I think perhaps because I was interested in the theater and had
been working on the Drama, Lectures and Music Committee, when the
discussion of the establishment of a theater arts department became more
than just chit-chat and suggestion, I was appointed to this committee
they established that was to work with the motion picture industry to
explore what should be and what could become part of a program on the
campus. It was a very interesting committee. We visited the motion
picture studios and went all the way through them and through everything
that they did, you know, the costumes and the place where they make the
little mock-up things and where they did the miniature photographing. We
met with the various people in the studios and discussed the kinds of
experiences that their industry needed if there was to be such a
department, And, in turn, they came to the campus. We met sometimes on
the campus and sometimes at the studio, and it was a revelation to me. I
never had been behind the scenes. I had been in a studio and had seen a
movie being filmed, but I had no idea at all of the tremendous
organization that goes into things, script readers and librarians and
all that, you know. It just goes on and on. So, apparently, at the end
of our meetings, the decision had been made that they would assist in
certain ways. At this moment, I couldn't tell you what their commitments
were. It seems to me that they would provide a sound stage, I honestly
don't know. I think you should ask Ralph or somebody like that who
really remembers what the final agreements were. But, at any rate, then
we went to work on outlining a curriculum that would meet all of the
degree demands of the University, and answer the demands of the
University. And [it was interesting] to have been part of this early
planning and part of the decision in making this campus the place to
establish a theater arts department. We did have the interest and the
cooperation of the motion picture industry, and there was no reason to
believe that we didn't have the resources on the campus in terms of
basic courses that had to be developed and people to do it. So that was
an interesting committee experience. Then I happened to be on the
Educational Policies Committee at the time that this was finally fought
through and the statewide, committee approved the establishment of the
theater arts on the UCLA campus.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Is that the time you went up to Berkeley?
-
DEANE
- That's the time we went to Berkeley, that ghastly time. [laughter] Oh,
I'll never forget that trip. But we came back with the approval for the
establishment of the department here, so I saw this happen all the way
through from the beginning, through the various explorations that went
on and then into the final academic approval by the Educational Policies
Committee.
-
SCHIPPERS
- It's a surprise that it wasn't more motion picture oriented.
-
DEANE
- Well, I don't think so because the people who were here then were the
theater people. They wanted this to happen, but from the beginning there
was the horrible expense of a motion picture curriculum which was a
block, you know. It just loomed. There wasn't money to do the kinds of
things that industry itself says are essential. Even with; some
contributions from them, it was way too much, way too much.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But, yet, the course offerings were, in part, designed with an eye to
needs in the motion picture industry.
-
DEANE
- Oh, yes. It was from the very beginning. You see, the concept from the
beginning was that you're going to have to deal with theater as an
entity and all of its contributing aspects. Radio was a very specific
aspect, and then there was motion pictures and the television field. So,
in the beginning, the orientation was for the total background for the
whole thing. No matter where you're going to specialize, eventually,
there are certain basic understandings that flow through the whole
process. Then the specializations come out here and here and here.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did dance figure in this in any way?
-
DEANE
- Well, the theater students came down to take dance in our department. We
were not in the Theater Arts Department.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I understand that.
-
DEANE
- But movement and dance was there.
-
SCHIPPERS
- But there was the element of cooperation, interdepartmentally, in this.
-
DEANE
- Very strong. But, you know, this is what seems to me is one of the
wasteful things. I don't know whether it is necessary, but there are
millions of tentative moves they make toward an idea. You know when it
first started, everything in theater was in the English Department under
Speech. Then people began looking at it, and saying, "Well, what kind of
courses can we make to have a little specialization here in theater?"
Then the College of Applied Arts began to have committees to study
curriculum for that. Then it was dropped for a while, and nobody did
anything. Then they picked it up and did this big, splendiferous thing
with the movies. Then all this business came down. Finally, somebody sat
down and said, "Well, it's all here. You have all of this. We don't need
to say, can it be done? because it can be done." And it took a long time
to get it to happen. But I think, from the beginning there has never
been any question that at least the women's division in Physical
Education was concerned that this did happen. And that there was a great
deal of cooperation between the departments, always.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: FOUR, SIDE TWO December 13, 1966
-
SCHIPPERS
- We ended last time talking about the early planning of the Theater Arts
Department. Now, I've asked you to go through this vitae that was
prepared, and you were going to make some comments about your committee
activities in general.
-
DEANE
- Well, in general, it seemed to me they took a lot of time and
accomplished comparatively little. Curriculum committees, yes, Those
were ones in which a real discussion of what should be done and how it
could be done and who could do it and so forth took place. But a great
many of the Senate committees, it seemed to me, were rubber stamps. When
you went to the meeting, you had a feeling that there was an
undercurrent, that decisions had already been made, or that people knew
in general what the outcome of this committee was going to be. And while
they were perfectly courteous in listening to your suggestions or your
questions or your comments, there was never any pursuit of them in any
way. So I felt frustrated on a great many of these committees, because
did my homework and I felt that I really did more than a lot of them. I
felt a lot of them hadn't really due anything except maybe in the
planning that had gone on before the committee went to work. I don't
know, but I felt very dissatisfied with a lot of them and I think many
of them were appointed to stop discussion. There would be different
points of view, and then someone would propose a committee be
established to do this and report back. I think, in general, it's a good
technique if you don't want to waste time in discussion and in the
airing of ideas. But it's only effective if the committee really does
get in and explore. And a great many of the committees I was on did very
little exploration. So that was, in general, my feeling about it. As I
look back, there were so many of them, I don't even remember what we
talked about on them, and I don't remember what the real job was that we
were doing. I think that's all that I can really say.
-
SCHIPPERS
- You mentioned that the Committee of Reinstatement was the first one that
you served on.
-
DEANE
- Well, that was the first real learning that I had about the way the
University functioned, and that was a marvelous committee. Joe [Joseph]
Kaplan was chairman of it, and he was really concerned about students
and finding out why they got in trouble and why they didn't make their
grades. He was very insightful in the ways of handling them [and in
understanding] what could be done. A great many of them were sent to
Extension to bring [their grades] up. They found out what the weakness
was, [would work on improving] and then come back in. Some were
reinstated with an examination. But through all of this, what you got to
see, was the different departments and how the departments functioned
and what their effect on the students was and what the students'
reactions to the department and to the faculties were. So you really
learned a tremendous amount. It was a very stimulating experience, and
it was a marvelous place to start. I think this was the first academic
committee that I was on. I have always been grateful that I had that
experience. Another committee on which you learn a lot about the
departments and the way they function is the Committee on Committees.
There the discussion is very frank and very free. It is never meant to
say mean things about any person; it is simply a conscious evaluation of
a person and the role he plays and whether or not he could be effective
here or here or here or maybe isn't a good committee person at all. So I
think that those were the two opportunities I had to really get a look
at the personnel and the departments and the way they operated. Then as
the University got bigger and more complicated, my knowledge about what
was going on became much dimmer. I wasn't as close to it as I had been.
I think that's about as much as I can say. There were just millions of
committees, [tape recorder turned off]
-
SCHIPPERS
- You've made notes on the margin there regarding a couple of activities
that were beyond the confines of the University.
-
DEANE
- Well, the first one isthe committee that was called the National
Advisory Committee for Community Service. This was organized by Mrs.
Eleanor Roosevelt, and she had an idea that, if she gathered together a
group of people who were interested in various aspects of community life
and gave them an opportunity to see what kinds of needs the WPA was
meeting in its program, it would give them a picture of ways that this
could be carried on after WPA was over. If your government can do this,
why can't communities take care of these needs and these problems?
Hopefully, the people who were on this committee would continuing
program to meet needs in their various communities. This was a very
exciting experience, because we met in the White House for our first
meeting. Mrs. Roosevelt met us all, and talked with us and explained
what she wanted so clearly that there was no question in your mind. Lots
of times you go to a meeting of this sort and it all sounds kind of hazy
and foggy, but she was very clear. She was very clear about the fact
that we couldn't begin unless we had seen and sensed and knew and
understood. become The program was set for this committee so that we
were to go to the South and through the northern and southern part of
the Midwest, the West Coast and New England, And we were to have six or
seven meetings which were to be preparatory. Then out of this,
hopefully, each one of us would have a contribution to make to an
ongoing program. Me met in Washington the first time. That was largely
organizational and really trying to digest what the program was to be.
Each one of us accepted certain things we would do to prepare for the
next trip. The second, meeting, we met in Nashville and went through the
whole TVA setup there, which was fascinating. We went into the mountains
and saw the school-lunch program in these rural schools. We went into
the places where they were doing the handcrafts, the hand-arts, the
hand-weaving. We saw, in general, what was being done in that area of
the country. Our next one was to have been in the Midwest, and then
Pearl Harbor came and the war so the committee never met again. It was
really an abortive thing, but I think it was an exciting idea. In just
two meetings, there had been exchange with these various people, a man
like Mr. Dubinsky from the Lady Garment Workers and the president of the
Farmer's Union, and Rosamond Gilder who was editor of Theater Arts
magazine, and Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was an actress and had
political experience as well. There were about thirty people. I was
there [as a person] very deeply interested in activities in the
community in recreation in physical education and in the arts, These
were the things that I had been doing. So that was one of the
committees that I found very exciting, And another one that came out of
the WPA was the WPA theater project. As they became organized and had
their various productions underway, they realized that they needed to do
something with a lot of dancers who were signing up in the theater
project but who were not real actors. They were people whose experience
had been in dancing. So they wanted a project organized, and they wanted
somebody to administer it who would look at the whole program through
the state but who wouldn't necessarily do the work. They asked me If I
would organize it and I did. I went to San Francisco and had meetings
with all the dance people up there, and I had meetings in Los Angeles
with all the dance people from around here. The program was finally
organized, and we set up auditions and screening for the people who were
eligible. Myra Kinch [Galea] became the director of the dance unit of
the theater project here in Los Angeles, and I've forgotten the name of
the girl who was in charge in San Francisco. But that was an interesting
experience, and my job was to see that the thing was really handled
well, that the people who were there were doing a good job. I went to
see the auditions, and I went to see Myra at work. I knew her well, so I
knew the kinds of things that she did. I saw all their performances.
They did some just straight dance concerts, and they provided dancing
for any of the musical productions the theater project put on. So that
was that. Now those were the two that I had made notes about. But you
know it's very, very funny. If anybody had asked me, these would not
have come to my mind. But, now, when I sit down and actually read this,
I think of them. There was one other that had to do with the University
that I made notes on. This comes out of those millions of speeches that
I used to make all over the place. One entry says that I was a speaker
at the Philosophical Union at UCLA in May of 1940. When I tried to
remember about that, I remembered Kate [Katherin] Gordon, now Mrs. More,
was then the professor of aesthetics, and she always came to the Dance
Recitals and to the dance programs and liked them very much. I can't
even remember whether it was at a party or a faculty meeting or what
that she started talking to me about [aesthetics]. I began, with the
brashness of youth and inexperience, explaining my whole concept of the
aesthetic values that lay in [these dance experiences.] And she asked me
if I would come and talk to her group, and I said certainly I would. And
so I went to talk there. I haven't the vaguest idea what I said. But I
went because Miss Gordon invited me to go. Apparently, whatever I did
was all right, because the next year, in April, the Carnegie Corporation
had a conference in aesthetics at the Huntington Library in Pasadena,
and I was asked to speak at that conference. My topic was dance as a
laboratory for aesthetic experience. Those two were kind of interesting
to me, because I had absolutely no academic background in this field.
But here were people who were scholars in the field who had never put
their minds to the thought that these things are only abstractions
unless they're experiences. They were, I think, so surprised to find a
physical education teacher who would be interested and concerned in this
kind of thing, and they also were rather amazed at the insight that
comes from just working with people. To me, it was a very interesting
experience. [It opened a whole field of knowledge] that I would have
liked to pursue. But it just wasn't the most important thing, and I
never went on with it. But I found it very interesting. So that was one
kind of speech. Another kind was also very interesting to me. I told you
earlier that when I first came to California, there was a great
resistance and people thought I was crazy with the concepts I had about
dancing and my insistence on a creative experience for students rather
than teaching them dances. And, for a long time, this was a wall. But as
the students went out to teach, as they graduated and got jobs, I began
to see this feeding back in requests to speak at the teachers'
institutes, requests to talk to supervisors' groups, to do
demonstrations at high schools and so forth. All of these began coming
back in as people began to be curious instead of coldly rejecting. They
began to inquire, and I would say that about a third of these stemmed
directly from what the students did as teachers when they went out into
the schools. It reflected a changing attitude on the part of the public
school people as far as what UCLA was trying to do in physical
education. So you can go right down this list. I went to San Francisco,
to Sacramento, to San Diego, to San Bernardino, to Ojai and, really,
people all over the state wanted to know. They wanted to know, and I was
quite willing to go. It was exhausting to carry my program on here and
still get out to San Bernardino for an evening meeting or to go on
Saturdays and so forth, but I did. I felt that it was part of my job as
a faculty member at UCLA to give a picture of the University as a
contributing factor to the community as a whole. Well there's just no
point in enumerating these, because they just go on and on. You know
recalling this is really upsetting in a way, because you see yourself
moving through various growth patterns. I started out to teach dance,
and then I became interested in education itself, in the whole process
of learning. And, instead of rushing out and taking lessons from famous
dancers or going back and getting degrees in education, I read
everything voraciously—all the theories—and I talked endlessly until I
drove everybody mad. I discussed it with the students and tried out
things with the students, and I learned to be very secure. When you did
something with kids and you got a terrific response, you knew what you
had done and you knew why you had done it. So, all through this, I see a
growing interest and enthusiasm and dedication to education itself.
Dance happened to be my medium. It wasn't a growing skill as a dancer or
knowledge as a dancer. What I was interested in was teaching really.
Then, as a person, I began to reach out into the community and into a
political awareness through the League of Women Voters. This comes into
this whole picture of giving speeches again?; because I was not afraid
to talk and I had convictions about things I was called on to do the
orientation meetings and the ballot measure meetings where you explain
the ballot measures to the voters. And that began along around 1946.
Then, at this time, we were beginning to develop our core curriculum.
The rest of [this list of speeches shows I talked] to supervisors and
teachers and various groups of that sort. You see, our Alumni
Association asked that I come and explain what this core curriculum that
they're hearing about was because they themselves had graduated and this
had not been part of their experience. What they heard about it sounded
kind of screwy, and they'd like to have this explained. So then this
comes in, and isthe beginning of a whole series of speeches where I was
asked to come and discuss and explain what our experiment in curriculum
was at UCLA, Then I had a sabbatical, and I went to the University of
Michigan as an observer at the Research Center for Group Dynamics there.
Paul [A.] Sheats made this possible for me. Paul was very interested in
the experimentation that we were doing, the kinds of things that we were
trying, and he was on the board of directors of the Research Center at
that time. He had recommended that they make it possible for me to come
as an observer, so all their courses were open to me. I sat in on all of
their planning meetings, all of their staff meetings. I had the use of
their library, and it was a marvelous experience. I was there for one
whole semester. It was spring semester, and before the semester was
over, they had invited me to go to Bethel for the summer as an assistant
trainer. Now I had been through the planning of all their research
projects; I had discussed it with the faculty people who were sent out
to Bell Telephone Company and all the places that were doing the
training programs, and then would report back to the staff and the staff
would hash it apart. It was a terrific learning experience for me, so I
went to Bethel. I was teamed with Hugh Coffee from Berkeley. Hugh was
the trainer and I was his assistant trainer. And, again, I was convinced
that you learn most by doing something. You live right along with the
group in the training, and you're sharing the experiences with them. If
you read about it in a book or were told about it. It would never mean
the same thing as being in there and doing it and seeing it and helping
it happen. So, here a new enthusiasm was added, and I decided when I
came back, I would look at physical education in the concept of what
people do to one another, what the human relations factor was. Up to
this time I had been interested in the physical awareness, the mastery,
the acceptance of yourself and the mastery of yourself and the
appreciation of your physical experience, Now here was a new
dimension—what you do to others and what others do to you. How do you
work with others to be most effective and most efficient? I think that
one of the things that stands out most clearly to me as I go through
this, is that I see myself change. I am aghast at my brashness in being
willing to do all these things, except they had become part of me and
people wanted me to share it with them and I shared, it. At no time did
I ever pretend to be an authority. I could only say what I knew and had
experienced. I think it's very funny on one side that I dared do it and,
on the other side, I don't think it could have been me not to do it, you
know. I had to. So, anyway, this was the next great change in this whole
sequence of speaking engagements. Then here's one that had nothing to do
with anything but that was really fun. The University had a faculty
dinner honoring President Sproul's Twentieth Anniversary as President.
Each campus was to send one representative to speak for that campus and,
I don't know whether it was really a toast, but you were supposed to say
how your campus felt about him. Why I was chosen to go, I'll never know.
But I was, and the Faculty Men's Club and the Faculty Women's Club got
together, and I think they just thought it would be kind of different to
send a woman, and I was the only woman [speaker at the dinner.] But, at
any rate, I had a marvelous time working on this. I consulted with
everybody—Ralph and Rosalind Cassldy and all my friends — about an
approach to make for this. Ralph had said to me, "Now look, there are
some things that he has done that haven't been perfect, and there are
some things we didn't agree with. And for goodness sake don't forget
Mrs. Sproul, because she's a cutie." So I got these things in, I was the
only person to make a criticism. And when President Sproul responded to
this, he mentioned it and said that he was so glad because he had gotten
to feel that he could do no wrong and this was not good. [laughter] But
that was real fun. That was just a special treat. Now let's see. Oh,
dear. This goes on and on and on. I think because of all of this talking
and experimenting that I was doing with this group process concept, the
American Academy of Physical Education, of which I am a member, asked me
to be on their program and to speak on the recent research in the area
of group dynamics that was the special concern of physical education. I
was very glad to do this because I knew what the research was. I read it
all. I had been through it all. I had heard evaluations of it, and I
could talk about this without understanding one thing about research.
But I knew what the research was and what the outcomes had been and how
this could be interpreted into action, into our program. So that was, I
think, a kind of important speech. Then through Miss Seeds and the
Family School Alliance and the things that I did there, both with this
human relations concept and with the rhythm and creativity sort of
thing, parents who had enjoyed it would talk about it to another group,
so then there was a whole group of speeches that I went out into the
community to give. I'm sure they stemmed from that. I don't know why I
gave them, other than that I would have been asked to do that. But now
that is, in general, what these speeches were all about. If you asked me
to tell you what I had said in any one of them, I couldn't, but I know
that they couldn't have been superficial, because I spent an awful lot
of time on them. I never went unprepared anyplace. I didn't have a
speech number three that I pulled out of my file and went and gave it,
you know. Whatever I was asked to talk about, I did in terms of the
group that I was talking with, and I did it as thoughtfully and as
carefully as I could, because to me this was just one other aspect of
teaching. It was one other way of, releasing power in people to act,
which is teaching.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was this encouraged by the administration, or was it something that you
more or less volunteered yourself for?
-
DEANE
- Well I never volunteered. People asked me, and I went and it sort of
mushroomed. I did it on my own time. If I spoke at a convention, I was
already on leave from the University to go to a national convention or
to a state convention whatever it was. I never was refused permission to
go anyplace that I asked. I think they were very generous in this. I
don't think I quite understood your question.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Well, I was just wondering if it was the policy for them to encourage
people to go out and speak?
-
DEANE
- Oh, no, I don't think this was true. I think that in the first place,
most of these things came at times when I was. perfectly free to go. If
it was a Wednesday afternoon, and I didn't have a class on a Wednesday
afternoon I went. Any professor is there for his classes and his office
hours, but aside from that, he's perfectly free to do whatever he wants
to do.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Did you keep notes for any of these speeches or are they all gone?
-
DEANE
- They're all gone. I had volumes of them. I talked from an outline with
maybe a whole sentence or maybe just a phrase and then subpoints under
it. I talk better that way than I do if I write it. I get frozen to
words if they're written down, but if I know what I want to say and I
want to say it in this sequence [I can do it.] I had sort of a formula
that I used which was this is what we're going to talk about, and this,
in general, will be the points we'll touch on. Then I'd talk about it,
and then I do a resume. That works in some situations and not in others,
you know, so I had to adapt; it. It wasn't a set thing.
-
SCHIPPERS
- I just asked you about some of your contacts with creative people
outside of the University.
-
DEANE
- Well I knew most of the people who were working in the field of modern
dance—Lester Horton, Bella Lewitsky, and I can't remember Gray's first
name. They were the chief groups. They used to come out to see the Dance
Recitals, and I think they felt that they were beautiful in production,
but they never thought that our dancing amounted to very much because it
wasn't technically up to their standards. Lester Horton was developing
his own technique. It was not Martha Graham's and not Doris'. This was
his own, although it had elements of all of these others in it. And they
worked. It was a very strenuous basic technical training. And I think
that they looked at what we were doing from their own standpoint, which
is perfectly natural, because they were developing performers and they
were developing for performance. We were teaching young people through a
dance experience, and we were as much interested in the light and the
color and the music as we were in the movement. I mean, it was all a
coordinated experiment. So I never felt that we learned very much from
them or that they learned very much from us other than a standard of
production that we had which was very high. There were quite a few
ethnic dancers but my mind is so blurry on this I just really can't pull
names out of the hat. I do think that there was a tremendous change in
the ten years after we came out to the Westwood campus, a change in the
kind of performance that was seen in Los Angeles. Mr. [Lynden Ellsworth]
Behymer and his Philharmonic program was the only thing here to start
with. And then other impresarios came in and there were other groups who
presented things. There was much more ballet to be seen and more of the
dancers came more frequently. At first, their programs were given almost
exclusively in the schools and in the colleges. But, one by one, they
came and then you saw these performances at the Philharmonic which was
really the only place we had to see them. The same way with music. The
orchestra grew. The attendance grew, and I feel that this was the real
stirring, way back there, that made it possible for us to have the Music
Center now and the theaters, the art galleries. All of these things
didn't just happen now—the beginnings are way back there, and you felt
It in people's interest in things, in the excitement that a really good
production creates. Well, I can remember when Kreutzberg came and
danced. We had him at UCLA. They also had him at the Philharmonic. And
this was a constant topic of conversation. You would go to dinner and
people would be talking about the Three Mad Faces
or whatever the particular dance was that they had enjoyed. So it was a
stirring time, a growing time, that made possible this fruition that's
coming about now, this much wider interest.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Of course, it's necessarily complex. We know that the population was
growing at the time, and perhaps that in itself gave companies a greater
audience. But, would you explain it other than that? What was this
impulse or interest?
-
DEANE
- Well I don't know. I'm just guessing. I know that most of the students
in the first classes that I had way back on Vermont Avenue had never
heard a live orchestra or seen a dance concert and most of them had
never been to the theater. I mean, they'd never read anything except
whatever the popular novel was. They didn't know anything about Greek
mythology; they didn't know anything about the standard literary works.
When we tried to do the Odyssey, they never even
had heard of the Odyssey, a lot of them. But,
over the years, you didn't have to explain a Greek god to the youngsters
coming in if the name came up. They knew what it was. They had vague
concepts of a broader field of knowledge, although they hadn't delved
into it. But they at least knew it was there. Whether it came from
better experiences in their school, or from richer experiences in their
own environment, I really don't know.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you know why people like Horton and Cole and others came to this
area?
-
DEANE
- Well I think the movies probably attracted them very much. And there were
hundreds, well I say hundreds and I don't know that that's accurate, but
there were a great many dance schools, like Fanchon and Marco where they
were training little kids to do tap dance, stage dancing, and that kind
of thing. There were dozens of schools like that with the eye on the
motion picture, on training children or training young people for a
chance in the movies. I don't think it was a very healthy thing. I
objected to it very much. I think it was just awful what it did to
children. I opposed it, very frankly, because I think this kind of
training kills anything creative in a child. You never are going to get
anything but the superficial after this. You can get a person who is
technically very versatile. You get a virtuoso, but with no soul or no
spirit or no real creative drive. So, I didn't like what was going on
and was quite outspoken in my objection to it with the people we had in
our classes—people who were going to be elementary school teachers. [Our
program for them had to include singing games, simple folk dances and
rhythms as well as playground games. But they had so much to learn in
this one course they didn't want to take time to really experience the
rhythm thing themselves. They wanted to have material to teach—not a
feeling or a philosophy. So we at least tried to set standards and give
sources to which they could turn. Of course the students who went thru
Miss Seeds' "box course" had a different experience, for rhythmic
expression was part of each culmination. The rhythmic expressions of the
U.E.S. children were the kind of experiences all children should have as
a basic for creativity in movement. For example, I'll never forget a
group who were expressing their feeling of what an ice floe was like as
it knocked down and covered a forest. A group of little boys with a
piece of blue-white cheesecloth over their heads started in the back of
the room. The other children were trees growing and moving in the wind.
The ice floe started to move and walked slowly, steadily forward and the
trees fell one by one until the ice cap covered them all. And then it
was still and silent! Don't you think that is a better experience for
children than three steps right and kick, three steps left and kick and
roll your eyes?]
-
SCHIPPERS
- Indeed, An item on that list that we haven't said anything about was
that year when you acted as dean.
-
DEANE
- I don't know how much I really want to say about that, because I have
very personal feelings about it. When the College of Applied Arts was
founded, I was one of the people who thought it was a terrible mistake.
It was like taking all of the odds and ends of the University you didn't
know what to do with and putting them in this one basket. [What could
you do with] Military Science and Music and Art and Physical Education
and Theater and Home Economics and all the so-called un-academic or
non-academic departments without a dream to make it work? You know, it
was just an administrative thing. Put them all together, and put a dean
over them. Well, what happened first was that Fred [Frederick W.] Cozens
who was chairman of the Physical Education Department was taken from his
job in Physical Education and made dean. [There in a few years Fred was
sent to Berkeley to be chairman of their P. E. Department. I'm not very
clear on what happened next but eventually] I was on a committee of
selection for a new dean for the College of Applied Arts. We screened
the papers of dozens of people, and we interviewed dozens of people.
There was one candidate that I thought was a man who had imagination and
vision. I think some other people on the committee did too. The people
who did not approve of this candidate wanted to have Dave [David P.]
Jackey who was in industrial education or something. To me and to some
other people on the committee, the thing that we had lacked up to this
point was a creative point of view about what this college could be and
what it could mean and where it should go, and we couldn't see Dave
Jackey in that role. We could see this other man. So there was a
terrific split, and Mr. Dykstra said we are going to give this a rest
and that we were going to Interview some people around the country and
see what happened. So he appointed me acting dean of the college because
of this impasse. I was acting dean for a semester and a summer, and, in
the fall, the group who were pushing for Jackey had pushed to the point
where he was appointed dean. As far as I was concerned, this was the
living end of that college. I mean, he wasn't a big enough man. He
didn't have vision. He was not a creative person in the sense of ever
having experienced any of these things himself. I think that it was
rather unfortunate that my letter to Dyke expressing my opinion of him
was in the files. So, from the beginning, he knew that I was not one of
the people who had voted for him, and I think that we had a pretty
difficult time getting some of our promotions through and getting some
things accomplished because of this. Now whether or not this should ever
be on the record, I don't know. But [being acting dean] was a very
interesting experience. Everybody was most cooperative and very helpful,
and they knew that I was no person to instigate program. All I could do
was to keep the thing moving and help with some of the problems that had
to be solved which I did very much in Theater Arts and in the Physical
Education Department. I couldn't do much else. I mean Military Science
just said, "We're going to do this or we're not going to do it," you
know. That was how they operated. And both the Music and the Art
Department were in complete confusion, and all you could do was keep the
lid on and try not to interfere too. much. I knew I was just going to be
there for this one semester, [so I knew that was] a peace-keeping job.
When you're there for one semester, it's not a creative job. But I still
think that it could have helped very materially if we had put a creative
person in there, developing and airing it out. But, anyway, that was my
experience and I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot about interschool
relationships, the College of Applied Arts and the College of Letters
and Sciences, and so on.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Do you recall any of the specific problems the Theater Arts Department
was having at that time?
-
DEANE
- Well, I don't really. I do know that this was before the theater was
built, and they needed a theater very badly. There was always the
problem of using Royce 170 for production, rehearsals, all of this sort
of thing, because the facilities of Royce Hall were for everyone. There
weren't other auditoriums on the campus. Schoenberg Hall and all these
others weren't there, and the life of the campus was growing, and all of
these activities were moving forward. Theater Arts was just vibrant with
growth, and so were other things. I mean the Music Department was trying
to do more performances than it had and they all wanted to use Royce
Hall Auditorium, so this was one of the problems. Whose fault was that,
and who was responsible for this? It was largely ironing out
difficulties with Buildings and Grounds, and that is a department that
can be very, very difficult.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Could you say more about why you opposed the idea of the Applied Arts
College?
-
DEANE
- Well, in the first place, it seems to me by saying that we are Applied
Arts, we're saying that we're not creative. And this to me from the very
beginning was a bad word, because I think that our whole power lies in
our great creativity—theater, music, painting, physical j education.
This is what we are. This is what we do, and why try to cover us up? It
seems to me that the whole concept that there is a respectable kind of
learning which is [purely intellectual] and there is all [this other
part of life] which is the trimming kind of thing which Isn't quite as
respectable and that the two ought not to get mixed up, is so wrong! I
do feel that there has been a big change. Art is no longer sneered at.
It is accepted. It is culturally sound. The dance has come out so that
they have their own School of Dance and their own department. So they
are willing to accept it. But I still think. that physical education,
when done correctly, is a creative field of human endeavor. And this is
why I objected to the whole concept because it implied that we weren't
creative and that we weren't supposed to be, that our function was to
apply something that somebody else creates,
-
SCHIPPERS
- This was an attempt, as you say, to collect odds and ends in the
administrative package. Was there an alternative? Was there any other
idea for ordering this in some manner?
-
DEANE
- Well, to be perfectly honest, I don't know that there was any other
proposed. I think, personally, [it would have been good] at that time,
to have developed a School of Physical Education or a School of
[Movement Arts & Sciences] physical education - recreation
complex with correctives and therapeutics etc., including dance. If this
had been developed as a school and each of these was a division within
it and was given a chance to really grow. [It would have worked]. Of
course that would have run up against the block of the men in Physical
Education. John Bovard would have been great in this kind of setup,
because he did have a feeling for creative experiencing, but the rest of
them wanted to develop athletes and performers. So whether we could ever
have done this I don't know. I really don't.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Was this a result of the campus just having come to that point of being
so big that transition was inevitably brought about in an awkward
fashion?
-
DEANE
- Yes, I think that's largely it. I think the difficulties were these. You
see you had an education department or school of education, as it is
now, and yet, all of the people who are going to be elementary school
teachers came into, let us say, the College of Letters and Science as an
English major or a history major or something. Right there, you have
destroyed a flow for developing teachers. I never have had the chance to
try this out, so I'm not sure, but it seems to me that If you started
with a concept that they're going to be elementary school teachers and
through a whole development of courses you had English and history and
all of these things, you would have them, not in relation to the fact
that you're going to concentrate on Dryden or Shakespeare, but [in
relation to what] that literature is going to be as a part of the
experiences of the children you are going to teach. You would do a
different kind of teaching, and I think that the University should do
this kind of teaching if they're turning out teachers. If they don't
want to be teachers then I think that's all right. They're just going to
be scholars, so let them be scholars. But if they say they're going to
be teachers, then I think that they have to have a faculty that's
willing to give teachers experience that they can use.
-
SCHIPPERS
- So your emphasis was on the production of teachers primarily.
-
DEANE
- Primarily.
-
SCHIPPERS
- However, you were interested also in expanding the educational approach
in general, broadening the educational philosophy,
-
DEANE
- That's right.
-
SCHIPPERS
- One thing that's been sort of awkward in preparing for this is that a
lot of your materials and papers and so forth and so on have been
scattered or are missing. Do you have any idea where a lot of the
materials, for example, photographs of the dance concerts and these
other things might be?
-
DEANE
- Well at one time I had a whole set. I don't know whether Bob Lee still
has them or not. He might. I think it's worth asking, because I don't
have anything anymore except some programs. I'll be glad to let you have
mine if you're interested in them.
-
SCHIPPERS
- Well Dr. [Juana de] Laban is particularly interested in finding out
where some of these materials are, because they seem to have difficulty
in locating and reassembling some of this, past history pictorially.
-
DEANE
- Well I had, at one time, a whole set of pictures from Dance Recital, and
I don't have them anymore. I haven't the vaguest idea of where they went
as a matter of fact. I think Bob Lee probably has some of them. Maybe
Josephine Murray has some. John Jones might have some, because John was
part of the Dance Recitals from the very beginning. I think he was a
sophomore when he first started working, and he worked all the way
through. After he was graduated and had a job somewhere, he used to come
back and work on Dance Recitals. So he might perfectly well have them.