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particularly from
historically black colleges in the south
and we continue to have a long relationship with them. We've had a lot of very successful
alums.
Then see Dr. Patty retired and died.
So we had to get a new dean
And Art Daniels came here.
He was from Ohio State.
We were still in Alpha Hall and John Endright was still Associate Dean, Assistant Dean.
So what happened was that they
built the HPER building
and, of course, part of the athletic department was still in the Wildermuth Fieldhouse.
The athletic department was on one side
and the physical education
department
that taught service courses
was on the other side of the gym.
Wildermuth was the old orignial basketball -
played basketball in there.
Well, Wildermuth Center was just a fieldhouse and it had a dirt floor on it and they put
the basketball floor over it and played basketball on it.
So what they had to do -
they put the flooring in there.
The kids used to run laps around inside. You probably seen them.
Well they used to run on dirt so they paved it.
And they also made that floor a little more permanent.
At the time we first went over there
they're still playing basketball
there and they were having track in there
so at the end of the season they took the floor up
and stored it someplace.
The student union
had just been built
but the School of HPER
was just being built.
There was to the
right -
to the right
they had the gymnasium
but that's all they had.
The new facility was built
in 1961
which made all the difference in the world.
Now we had a space of our own.
It was in January of '61
when what we call now the new addition which isn't so new anymore
was added onto Wildermuth
Fieldhouse
and as a graduate assistant at that time I helped
pack files for our faculty to move into the building
from Alpha Hall. My first semester was at Alpha Hall.
That was a tremendous change.
We went in from a
very crowded little old place. And we had a lot
of charisma. We were a family. We painted the the buildings.
Everybody knew each other.
Into a bigger building and
it changed the character
of our departments.
We were big. We were expanded.
We had
fabulous facilities
in comparison.
So it changed a lot of the
rapport,
the family-like thing,
although we still had some of it.
It really made a difference.
Dr. Eppley, of course, who was the first chair,
was a very homey
individual - down to earth,
and Dr. Carlson, of course, and Ruth
were just
super people to visit with and
Bob Tully and
some of these names you probably don't even know. But,
they were, and they invited
the graduate and undergraduate kids out to their homes.
It was a
very
collegial type of thing. Absolutely.
I think the relationship
changed but not necessarily good or bad. I wouldn't put a value on it. I think
as more new faculty members came in
and the larger you get
the harder that family feeling is to achieve
but the continuing interest in students I think is still there.
That's why Dean Daniels was a good man.
He said this is the way it's going to be
and this is what we're going to do.
So, I remember he brought Anita Aldrich. Anita came from Kansas City.
I'd known her back when she was head of physical ed in the whole Kansas City area.
and so Dean Daniels asked me who I knew and I told him and so
he called her in and he talked her into coming over here.
Well, when she came
over her shoes were for both men and women.
And I was thinking all the time look at all the men
that are getting
college educations
from scholarships and that's wonderful. They should
but we have women out there
that they too
are talented
in athletics and they deserve the same right.
If you're going to really develop
perfection
or
a superior
play,
you had to have
coaches
and you had to have
examples
of teams
and you had to have officials
and you had to have money.
Well, in the meantime,
other schools were thinking the same kind of thing. With the growth of the interest of fitness in the country
and then the growth of the interest in women's athletics in the country which came in the
late 60's and early 70's
that probably was the single most
influential
factor in changing programs.
And so they appointed me
acting chairman of
men's physical education
from '73 to '77
and at that time they merged
and Anita Aldrich
became
a chairman
of the merged department - the entire department.
Well one of the first things I did as dean
was to get involved in the merging of those two departments
into one
and
they were ready and it went very smoothly.
Dean Mobley called me
and he said Anita
you said once
about athletics.
He said I've heard it many times from many people what you said about
men and women
being together
and he said I -
see all the men were upstairs
over
Wildermuth
and all the women were downstairs -
he said I want you to put the two
together.
That's one of the most difficult things I did.
There was absolutely no problem,
certainly not on the men's side.
The dean and
others had
prepared the entire faculty -
men and women pretty well for it.
And Anita Aldrich was a
very well known,
highly recognized,
very competent
person.
Had been the
president of the
national association
for HPER