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Interview with Merry FitzPatrick

Interviewer: Mary A. Allen
Transcriber: Mary A. Allen
Date of Interview: December 5, 1991
Location: Professor FitzPatrick’s Office

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Ms. Mary A. Allen:  This is December 5, 1991, and we are in Professor FitzPatrick’s office at SWT.  I understand you graduated from this institution. 

Professor Merry FitzPatrick:  I did in 1942 with a BA and in 1947 with a MA, and then I did about forty graduate hours at the University of Texas.

Ms. Allen:  Is your undergraduate and master’s degree with a history?

Professor FitzPatrick:  My undergraduate degree is in art.

Ms. Allen:  What history professors did you have here?

Professor FitzPatrick:  I’m trying to think. At that time nearly everybody took the American History survey when I started in 1939, but then about 1945 or ‘46 they switched to Western Civilization as the requirement.  A lot of universities and colleges do.  Texas is one of the few schools, by the way, that require American History, the State of Texas.  When we hire these people that come from out of state, they are very shocked that Texas State Colleges are required to teach American History.

Ms. Allen:  In going back over the curriculum, via the catalogs, to the beginning of SWT, initially everyone took American History. Then is switched to World History to Western Civ. then it switched back to American History.  It’s gone through two or three changes.

Professor FitzPatrick:  The first two requirements, that is when I started, and then when we switched to Western Civ. that was our that was our school requirement. When we went back to American History that was a Texas legislative requirement.  So all state schools in Texas such as Texas University and A&M, all of them have to teach American History.  What are there, thirty-seven state schools in Texas?

Ms. Allen:  Is it a requirement for teacher's certification that they have a course in Texas History as well?

Professor FitzPatrick:  I don't think so.  In fact, I'm sure that's right because for a long time people thought we had that requirement. A person that comes from out of state to get a Texas teaching certificate, as I understand it, has to take the half of political science that deals with Texas government.

Ms. Allen:  Tell me about the history professors that were here when you were going to school.

Professor FitzPatrick:  When I started to school my first teacher as a freshman was Professor Green.  I'm sure you know who that is.

Ms. Allen:  Did you have him for history?  I'm getting mixed signals.  Some people say he always taught political science, and other people say he taught history as well.

Professor FitzPatrick:  I had him as history.

Ms. Allen:  What was he like?

Professor FitzPatrick:  This was 1939 and I think the height of his powers were gone.  My older brother, seven years older than I, had had him and thought he was wonderful.  For them it was more like a course for current events than it was history.  By the time I had him he was not that dynamic anymore.  He talked too much about his family.  He didn't talk about history, and it is true that he chewed tobacco and it is true.

Ms. Allen:  In class?

Professor FitzPatrick:  In class and this is on the second floor of Old Main and he did spit out the window.  There were some complaints about that.  I think maybe some people who had received the benefit of that complained so somebody spoke to him.  By the time I had him as a graduate teacher, he no longer spat out the window, he had a can in his drawer in the desk, and he'd pull it out and spit in that.  I'm not sure you'd want to say all that. Well, you know of course that Lyndon Johnson looked on him as a dear friend and had him at the inauguration when he was first president.  I guess when he was inaugurated after he was elected.

Professor [Green] was there in Washington as part of his entourage.  So, during that time I think he was coach for the debate team and Lyndon Johnson was on his debate team.  He was very much, a very dynamic man.  I think he must have been during that time.  Had all the world events right at his fingertips but I didn't get any benefit of that.  It was mainly talking about his family and wide-ranging topics and so when we had an exam he wanted big loopy answers, big overall general statements of this, that, and the other which I understood, and as a seventeen-year-old freshman I made an A in the class.  Then the second semester I had Dr. Retta Murphy.  My first exam that I wrote under her that way I made an F.  In my whole life I had never made an F on anything.  I nearly fainted and fell over.  She wanted very specific, detailed answers with historical evidence and examples of what I was talking about.  So I had to overcome that for her. You can't imagine two more different people than Professor Green and Dr. Murphy.

Ms. Allen:  I imagine you did overcome that, a complete turnaround.

Professor FitzPatrick:  You bet! She is to me the perfect teacher.  She is the best teacher I ever had.

Ms. Allen:  Why is that do you think?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Because it was very clear about what she wanted from her students, and if I had listened carefully, I wouldn't have made that first mistake. I never made it again.  She was extremely precise in her lectures.  They were extremely well organized and yet they were fun, and if you were interested in history, you felt like she'd been there and she was describing events in a very logical sequence of what had happened.  The people were really alive to her and events were very important.  She was extremely demanding and she will of course, I'm sure you've heard many of the Murphy stories.

Ms. Allen:  No I haven't and I'm looking forward to some.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Number one, she to me, epitomized the kind of woman that had worked hard for the vote for women.  She was, I'm sure; she had that kind of strength and drive and that kind of presence.  She had one of the sharpest intellects that I've ever known.  Saying that, she came from a little bitty town, I don't remember exactly, in Falls County. She went to a little Presbyterian, (she was Presbyterian) school there that eventually moved from that little town to somewhere else and then became Trinity University.  Then she went from there to the University of Texas where she worked on here PhD. Took her a while to get her PhD, I think she got it about 1937 or so. More women got PhDs in the thirties than they did in the eighties.  I kind of think that those women that were left over for that drive for votes for women.  I think that they had accomplished that, so they go on to bigger and better things. In fact, my mother, who was also from Falls County, had a first cousin who got a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1927, her name was Alma Gillespie and her work on the Nineteenth-Century English working class is still a classic piece of work.  That's 1927 we're talking about.  Dr. Murphy was one of that kind of woman in that period.

Ms. Allen: I understand that was a very imposing presence.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Very!  And she was not afraid of the devil, but she would not hurt anybody's feelings.  Her criticisms were always fair and you knew that she wanted you to improve on it.  This is a funny story. In our church, you can imagine what kind of a scholar she was, and she didn't just talk about books of theology, she read them.  In her later life when she was very imposing, she would grade the preachers. She'd say, "well I think that about a C minus today" to the preacher “or maybe a B plus”.  It was very difficult to make an A. [laughter] In other words you better shape up.  I'll tell you a couple of the funny stories.  There are hundreds of these stories about Dr. Murphy but one was that after Dr. Arnold died, he was chairman of the department and I don't know exactly when he died, but in the 1940s, they made her acting chairman until they could find a man that would become chairman and her remark was that "if my pants had been wool instead of rayon, I would have been chairman of the department".

Ms. Allen:  I understand she smoked.

Professor FitzPatrick:  She smoked a pipe.  She and her companion that lived with her – lived on San Antonio Street – and during the war she said they had an outside porch that you could see from the street and they would sit out there in the afternoon, that was long before air conditioning, in the late afternoon and she would smoke her pipe and she said people would drive by and people who didn't know her would see her and quite often almost run into the telephone pole. She had a rack of pipes she smoked.  Since we knew her and knew that was the way she did it didn't seem that strange to us.

Ms. Allen:  What was her field of interest?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Latin American history and British. I had Tudor Stuart England under her besides the American History as an undergraduate. Then I had a couple of courses as a graduate student.  I had US-Argentine relations.  This was 1946 or 1947. I still remember that class. I still remember the paper I did. That's the kind of teacher she was, that you remembered. And the kind of work she demanded.  When I started my thesis, I did a rough draft of the first chapter as we all do.  I would not say either one was the first reader or second reader; I think they were both first readers.  But Dr. James Taylor was the main person, mentor. She was the other.  I turned in that paper. She had about fifty in pages of notes about what was wrong with it and he had thirteen.  It took my hide off.  But I tell you one thing, I have never split another infinitive. Furthermore, she knew the rules of writing, I think she had all the grammar books memorized. You just dare not make a mistake when you write.

Ms. Allen:  Did she publish?

Professor FitzPatrick:  I don't think so.  All her work went into teaching.  She never stopped reading.  She read copiously.

Ms. Allen:  Dr. Craddock told me that.  She said that the last day she taught she was reading her books before class.

Professor FitzPatrick:  I don't think you can be a history teacher and not to that.  History has changed incredibly since I began to teach Western Civ.  I've always taught Western Civ.  Archaeologists in the last thirty or forty years have made enormous finds and interpretations.  Somebody said to me one time, one of my science friends, once you learn an issue you don't have to study anymore.

Ms. Allen:  There's always new material available?

Professor FitzPatrick:  New interpretations.

Ms. Allen:  New methodologies that might come up with different results?

Professor FitzPatrick:  For example, one of the most boring things I ever did in my life as a graduate student at Texas University, I had to read a whole series of American History textbooks of the 1800s.  In 1896, James Fords Rhodes was the most popular American historian.  It was hard to understand how that could have been a history textbook.  The blatant racism in it, openly spoke of the Negroes as inferiors and all that.  No women whatsoever.  You might think that all the men that ran this country got here by immaculate conception because they had so wives, mothers, or sisters. It was all military and political history. That was all it was in this book.  That was the most popular textbook in the United States.

Ms. Allen:  That would be a project, to take the most popular textbook by decade and do a study on them.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Suppose if you learn your history and got your degree in 1900 and you never changed your perspective.  To me you put that law to any topic.  That's how much it’s changed and how much our attitudes have changed and how much new knowledge and new interpretations.  If you don't read all the time, you are a dead duck.

Ms. Allen:  History is more than just events and dates.  It’s not just 1066 is important and 1792 and it’s more than that.

Professor FitzPatrick:  In fact, you can say if had happened in 1065 it wouldn't have made any difference.  The date is not important.

Ms. Allen:  Someone that would say “once you know history” is looking at it from that perspective, plugging in an event with a time and without any explanation or cause and effect evaluation.

Professor FitzPatrick:  The textbooks today are so different from the ones I started with.  The Middle East has changed. Archaeology in the Middle East has made such a difference in the way we view that area.  A lot of what I've taught in 1948 when I started teaching is wrong.  Some of it hasn't gotten into the textbooks yet.

Ms. Allen:  New finds make some of that obsolete. And by the time it does there will be another discovery that will replace it.  Tell me about Jimmy Taylor, other than he was red-headed.

Professor FitzPatrick:  He was hired in 1946.  He was fresh out of the Army, a colonel, I guess.  He spent some of his time in the military writing a history of the events of the World War. He had his PhD when he came here.  We didn't have a whole lot of people on campus who had a terminal degree. He came here and he was a feisty young man.  Interestingly enough he and Dr. Murphy always got along just fine.  She liked him a lot.  He respected her enormously, so they did just fine.  She could have been bitter and resentful that she hadn't been made chairman, but she liked Jimmy, and they got along just fine.  He called her Miss Retta.  I'm going to talk next week at the CCC so the reason why I have some of this in my mind, a lot of people did not like to call Dr. Murphy by that title after she became a PhD because they didn't want to admit that a woman had gotten the degree.  So to the end there were a lot of old citizens who called her Miss Retta.  In a sense it was a way of putting her down and keeping women in their places.

Ms. Allen:  Rather than acknowledging her accomplishment?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Oh, no. If she did, she would have thought it was amusing.  She would have gotten a laugh out of it.  She goes by Retta Murphy and that's what I didn't realize until many years later that Henrietta was her name.   She didn't like it; she hated that name.  Dr. Taylor's thesis was on the Berlin to Bagdad railway that was attempted by Germany previous to WWI.  So European history.  I came back to school as a master's student very unthinkingly.  I had practically nothing in my head.  I couldn't take a major in art because we didn't have a MA in art.  So I took it in History which was my minor, which was happenstance. This is 1946. I had a teaching fellowship in art and I took a seminar with Dr. Taylor, and there were seven of us in that class, and six of them were veterans and I was the youngest one in the class and the only female. Dr. Taylor made me go first making my report. You understand here this is probably [a] child who is not giving very much serious thought to history and who thought of herself as an art student. I made my first presentation, probably nervous as anybody.  Dr. Taylor absolutely took off my hide. He just criticized it so unmercifully that I felt like I was three inches high. And I felt that when the men in the class gave their reports he wasn't nearly as tough on them as he was on me.  I didn't think their papers were that much better.  He was equally stringent when we had to turn in our papers before they were finished and let him critique them and we redo and finish them.  He was so rough on them.  I just hated him beyond belief.  It was only later that I realized that he thought I was the only one in the class worth taking any time with. He didn't think the rest of them were going on to be scholars, and he wanted me to be a scholar.  That's why he was doing it.  So, once I realized that, things got better.

Ms. Allen:  Didn't you teach some here?

Professor FitzPatrick: Yes. I finished the summer of 1947, and he wanted me to teach that fall.  Again, keep in mind that I never had dreamed of teaching number one, certainly not teaching history and third not teaching at the college level. So I said "no, I'm not going to do that''.  All that summer he'd say, "I want a yes or no answer". I'd say, "No, Dr. Taylor, I don't want to do that".  Next week he'd start all over again.  I bet he asked me ten times.  You'd be interested in the salary; he offered me twenty-four hundred dollars.   I kept saying no.   I think he finally thought that I thought it wasn't enough money.  So it upped it to twenty-six hundred dollars and he said, "Merry, do you understand that this is for a nine month contract?"  Well I didn't know that, not that I cared about the money. I was a widow, by the way, a war widow.  Then he said "I only make thirty-two hundred dollars".  So I started teaching, and it was the most miserable year of my whole life.  I didn't know anything because I hadn't been serious about it, serious enough to organize and teach.   I taught that western civ then for two years, really about two and a half years.  Then I went to part time and started working on a PhD. I got married also. Practically everybody in the class was older than I was because they were mostly GIs.

Ms. Allen:  That seems to me, in that period of time – the 1940s and 1950s – there were older students as well. Then it went back to the traditional high school graduates in the 1960s and 1970s and now there seems to be another.

Professor FitzPatrick: I saw a statistic on that the other day. Something like twenty-three or twenty-four percent of our students are older.  I think it’s wonderful. I love having older students. I have one in my Honors class that's probably thirty-two or thirty-three. He's just eating up learning like its apple pie. But the GIs, most of them had been in combat in the army or navy for six or seven years. 

Ms. Allen:  They were taking advantage of schooling benefits?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Yes, the GI bill was passed right after the war. The average age was probably twenty-seven to thirty.  I had dated a young man when I was an undergraduate, when I was a freshman; he was a senior in 1940.  He thought he saw war coming and he said, "I'm going to join the Navy so I can get my year over with".  He joined in 1940 and became a naval officer and he didn't get out until 1946. So much for his year.

Ms. Allen:  Retta Murphy was acting chair for a good while until Jimmy Taylor came. A couple of years. I had not realized that she ever served in that capacity.

Professor FitzPatrick: Let me say about Dr. Taylor and hiring women. He was not at all afraid of hiring women.  He liked to hire women.  He hired Dr. Craddock, Dr. Kissler, me.  He hired several women who went on, either got married or moved to other schools, Kay Farquhar, Madge ??, Mary Lee Nance who is now Spence and who is a professor, just retired, at the University of Illinois.  Her husband was also in the history department there.  Betty Brooke Eakle Dobkins.  She did a book on; her dissertation was on Spanish Water Law in Texas. What year did she finish that?  It may have been the early 1960s but Will Wilson was the Attorney General of Texas, and he wanted that published so he could use it in a case he was trying.  Laredo was claiming pueblo water rights meaning that they could take all the water out of the Rio Grande that they wanted. Will Wilson wanted her book in publication form so that he could show the documents that Spanish Water Law says that communities along a running stream have rights.  No one upstream can block the water. The water belongs to the community and so in Texas half Texas is settled under Spanish law and half under English common law.  So the water rights are different.  Under English common law you own to the middle of the river. Under Spanish law you don't own the river. That's quite a bit of difference.  Using her book was part of the way that he was able to defend his position.

Ms. Allen:  Did she go on to another university?

Professor FitzPatrick: She taught here, at several other universities, and ended up teaching in Tulsa Junior College.  She is still called by the US government as an expert witness in water. She has been called to one of the cases where they are trying to move water from Colorado down across some Indian lands into New Mexico. The developers wanted that water and didn't want to share with the Indians.  She was called to that cause. 

Ms. Allen:  Water is a big issue in that part of the country now.

Professor FitzPatrick:  It’s going to get bigger too. Those are two outstanding women and there were others. He wasn't afraid of women. I think that those who are afraid to hire them are afraid of them. But he used to laugh and say, "I get twice as much work out a woman than I do out of a man".  That's probably true.  But I also want to say in Dr. Flowers defense who was the president, he didn't mind. That was fine with him too, to hire women.

Ms. Allen:  The changes in the president over the years. Did those cause much of a flap in the department?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Actually, it hasn't.  I don't think it has. One of the reasons for that is that this department has remained so united. There's a sense of collegiality and camaraderie I think that has been evident over the years and occasionally when we have defied orders from the administration, we've been able to do it because they can't break the unanimity we've had. I think that is changing but I think all that goes back to the years that Dr. Taylor built that kind of a department. All the chairman that I've served under, except for Dr. Wilson, were people who had been hired by Dr. Taylor, Dr. Henderson was the first when we were still the social science department and then Dr. Swinney who was hired by Jimmy Taylor, Dr. Kissler.

Ms. Allen:  There was Cecil Hahn.

Professor FitzPatrick:   He was only chairman two years.  I'd forgotten that.   He was not hired by Dr. Taylor.  They came at the same time.  That's right. Almost like you'd say, this department had a common goal, though we disagreed, and disagreed violently from time to time as senior staff, once a decision was made that was it.  Everybody accepted that.  That was the way we were going to take it.

Ms. Allen:  Could you give me an example of what a conflict might arise over? You don't have to mention names, but a topic?

Professor FitzPatrick:  I'm going to have to mention a name.  I would like you to use it very carefully.  When Dr. Swinney decided that he no longer wanted to be chairman, he'd been chairman thirteen years and he was just A-plus, number one, wonderful chairman, our choice was Dr. Kissler.  The administration at that time did not want her, absolutely did not want her, absolutely did everything they could including somethings that we all thought were extremely underhanded.  Tried to break this unanimity, the front that we had. To the point of telling outright lies about what was going on. The then dean called us in one at a time to talk to us about it. We absolutely would not break and would not give in. Their tactics didn't work.

Ms. Allen:  Did they want someone else?

Professor FitzPatrick:  They wanted a man.  From outside.  We wouldn't have it. Even when Dr. Wilson was hired we told them that's who we wanted. That's what we do, choose a chairman and tell them who it’s going to be, and they want us to have these outside searches, spend thousands of dollars bringing people here and taking their time and ours, bringing them in. I think an outside search is good in some cases, but we for a long time have been a little top heavy in full professors.  If you bring in an outsider, that would add another full professor.  We felt that for our money, we could hire two young people which we all felt we needed young people to help build up the department again rather than one full professor.  I'm not sure it will work from here on out but it certainly worked over the years.  We'd say, "this is who we want" and they'd say "no you can't have them" and we'd say "yes we do".

Ms. Allen:  And stick by your guns?

Professor FitzPatrick: And stick by our guns. With Dr. Kissler, they called her in and said there is somebody else in your department that wants that job, in other words saying to her you're not as unanimous as you think. There are others, men, who really want your job which was an absolute fib.

Ms. Allen: Who was president?

Professor FitzPatrick: Mr. Smith. Of course he was fired at the end, you know.  He was absolutely, I think, crazy. I think it wasn't so much they opposed Dr. Kissler, although it partially was, but it was he didn't like anybody trying to tell him what to do about anything.

Ms. Allen:  He was going to run the show his way?

Professor FitzPatrick:  That's right, and to him this represented defiance and it was of course. That's what just infuriated him. She was at that time when she was made chairman; she was state president of AAUP.

Ms. Allen:  She was more than well qualified.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Yes, but he did not like AAUP which stood as faculty as opposed to administrations. Being the kind of honest upright forthright person she was, she went and talked to him before she accepted and said, "because I am state president of AAUP, will this make a difference?" He said absolutely not. Well, it turned out later she found out that he was doing everything he could within his power to keep her from getting it. Partially because she was the state president of AAUP.

Ms. Allen:  So the department weathered that storm?

Professor FitzPatrick: We won! [laughter]

Ms. Allen:  What do you think the focus of the department is? Does it have a particular focus or goal?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Yes, I think so. For many years our goal would be to train people who see history as truly important, that it is a process of a world view, that you aren't truly a world citizen unless you understand the past. You are not an educated person unless you understand the past. You are a better citizen because you understand the past. Citizenship, which is kind of an old cliché but none the less we feel, I think the truth that you make important choices because you understand what has gone before. You don't try to reinvent the wheel.  I think that has been diluted somewhat with this silly law that we have now that says publish or perish so that young people coming in have to publish books, or they don't get tenure and they can't stay anywhere.  So, the concentration has to be on individual efforts and you get more wrapped up in "what I'm going to do and what I'm going to publish and the name I'm going to make for myself" rather that pouring out all this work for your students. I remember one time Dr. Ron Jager said he thought it took as much to write a good lecture as to write a paper for publication. I agree. But if your job depends on whether or not you publish then you can not.

Ms. Allen:  That would be distracting?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Now, everybody up there doesn't agree with that. I believe certainly in research, but I think it needs to be more balanced. When we say to people who are not, and we have let young wonderful people go who were wonderful teachers and the students liked them.  They got good results, but we had to let them go because they had not published a book. There is something wrong with that, to me. That's very much I think a minority position.

Ms. Allen:  You think that's changing, you think the focus is more so on publishing?

Professor FitzPatrick: Oh, heavens yes. Because that's a university rule. If we in our department tried to put somebody who was not interested in publishing, that did good work, that had a PhD but was not interested in publishing, then they wouldn't last ten minutes in the tenure process.  Outside our department because it isn't just us that makes those decisions. That's at the university level.

Ms. Allen:  Is that pretty much standard across the board?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Yes, right. Now understand that they are finally moving away from that in the eastern universities. It will take about twenty years to percolate down.

Ms. Allen: To Texas. We're always the last. Some innovations in the public school systems also seem to be last to trickle down to us as well.

Professor FitzPatrick: You've talked to Dr. Kissler?

Ms. Allen: Yes.

Professor FitzPatrick:  You know that we, SWT, have been unique in that subject-matter people supervise student teachers rather than education people.  I did that twenty-eight years, and I felt it was a privilege. There are some who look down on that job, I felt it was a privilege to go out and see in the classroom what our products were like.

Professor FitzPatrick:  I definitely would say that. I'm hesitating because I'm sure you are aware that it’s almost impossible for anybody with just a history degree to get a job teaching history in public schools because they save the job for coaches.  And coaches are not interested. I'm making this blanket statement and people say oh there are some.  Well there are, but in the twenty eight years I have dealt with those coaches and I would say one in one hundred is pretty good. But ninety-nine are pretty bad because, and it's not all their fault. They are coaches and if they don't win, the schools fire them.  What would you do?  Where would you spend most of your time? Not in preparing for your history classes.

Ms. Allen:  Do you think they've been better as a whole because the discipline itself supervises?

Professor FitzPatrick: I think so.

Ms. Allen:  Across the board, the feeling I get is not one of overwhelming confidence in the Education Department. That's a whole other project, I suppose.

Professor FitzPatrick  I definitely would say that. I'm hesitating because I'm sure you are aware that it’s almost impossible for anybody with just a history degree to get a job teaching history in public schools because they save the job, quote-unquote, for coaches.

Ms. Allen: I realize that.

Ms. Allen: In casting about for students to interview I was told to go see coach so n’ so and coach so in so at our high school. And I said, No I don't want to talk to a coach that can teach history, I want to talk to a person that graduated with a history major and there is not very many of them. That's scary for me.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Then they say our students are so ignorant as they are. Twenty-five years ago, twenty years ago, I can mention Moses and Abraham and they would know who they are. Now they have no idea. Probably Dr. Kissler just told you that they don't know the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew. They've gotten no history in the high schools; therefore, they've gotten almost no geography also.  A good history teaches geography too. They've gotten none of that.  My daughters both had coaches in high school. They are thirty-four and thirty-one, and so they can tell you how ignorant the coaches were.

Ms. Allen:  My sons hoped and managed to get coach so-and-so for history and coach so-and-so for typing or for biology because they knew, the reputation was that this is an easy class over here. You didn't want Ms. so-and-so, that was her specialty, and she would work you to death.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Well, they pay the price when they get to college because then they -- my older daughter took drivers ed[ucation] at this high school out here and had Coach Somebody. She called him Mr. Samson and he said, ''call me coach", and she said, "you are not my coach", and she wouldn't call him that, and he gave her a B in the class. Hurt her average. Obviously she is a brilliant young woman, but she wouldn't call him coach. She learned at her mother's knee! [Laughter] But that grieves me, so and I argue with Dr. Kissler all the time about this. She talks about the reforms; she is on the state board.  She talks about these reforms and I say, "but Betty, you are not facing the coaches in the schools and that's where the problem is, and until we face that we're not going to come to any real improvement, I don't think". I don't mind and look at this right now our basketball coach quit yesterday so he could go to New Mexico.  I mean it’s such an obvious professional activity here. He has no loyalty to the university to stay the semester.

Ms. Allen:  It’s an economic thing, probably.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Sure.

Ms. Allen:  You have to put something of yourself into something before it becomes part of you.

Professor FitzPatrick:  I have a young friend, a woman, who teaches political science in New Braunfels, but her husband is a coach teaching history over there. He quit last spring and went to San Antonio in the middle of the semester as an assistant football coach. Just quit in the middle of a public school semester so what about his history classes that he was teaching? That's not important, what's important is being assistant football coach at a bigger high school.

Ms. Allen:  I think economically the public schools look to hire a coach that can win the games because that brings money in a well, when they get to the playoffs. If they can also teach –

Professor FitzPatrick: The fallacy is, I don't think these games pay as much as we've been told they do.  I think the cost is more.

Ms. Allen:  I don't they pay until they get to the playoffs.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Even then, I'm not sure. Dr. Swinney said that when his son was in high school, they had more coaches hired in the San Marcos High School than they did players on the team. When you add the coaches’ salaries and all of that that goes along with it, I doubt that it does. We've been sold a bill of goods, I think. I know what we spend on the athletic departments doesn't pay.

Ms. Allen:  I know the athletics at New Braunfels, as my kids say, if you're not a jock, you're not anything. The emphasis is definitely on you lettering in some sport. My boys, while they are plenty capable, were not interested. Number one they preferred to go dove hunting in September than be on the football field. Number two; they weren't impressed by all that.

Professor FitzPatrick: For their knees sake I'm glad they didn't. [laughter]

Ms. Allen: They enjoyed a game in the back yard that was probably more dangerous because they don't have the pads and the equipment.  I'm glad they didn't fall into that trap. I let they do what they wanted, I didn't push them but they, I hope, would have more an appreciation for learning rather than putting all their marbles all in that basket.

Professor FitzPatrick: You know, it’s really hard to tell high school students that.

Ms. Allen:  Especially when they see all the glitz and glamour and there's a lot of the teachers and the administrations who put a lot of emphasis on those kids.

Professor FitzPatrick:  That's because nearly all principals and superintendents are ex-coaches.

Ms. Allen:  I hadn't known that.  What changes do you perceive in the department over your tenure or the length of time that you've been familiar with it?

Professor FitzPatrick:  One of the things of course was that when I started teaching here, I don't know, I guess I do, roughly we had about twenty-five hundred students in 1947.  Then I left, I got married and left, and my husband was killed, and I came back in 1961. Dr. Taylor hired me back again.  I came back by the way to replace Dr. Kissler for a year who was going to finish her course work. She had come here to replace Dr. Craddock who had gone off to finish her degree. Our school was beginning to grow pretty big by then, so she never left. Then she only came temporarily she really thought.  I came back in 1961 just to replace her for a year and look around for what I was going to do, and then we were going again I think this is right.  In 196, I think we had thirty-two hundred students, and so by the time I retired in 1988 we had twenty thousand students. So that's a big thing, trying to deal with all those students.  When I came back in 1961, our faculty was less than a hundred. Now we are over nine-hundred.  When I came back in 1961, I knew everybody.  We'd have a party; we'd invite everybody from chemistry, English, industrial arts.   Everybody came because you knew everybody.  And the administrators came, the deans, well we didn't have Dr. Flowers, he didn't come, but everybody else did, the vice-president, the academic deans, they all came.

Ms. Allen:  Well, it would be almost impossible to have a party for a thousand people. What a bash!

Professor FitzPatrick:  Right. [laughter] But you don't know anybody anymore. I hear this all the time that we miss the collegiality of talking to people in other disciplines, of really talking, not just visiting. Because we would sit down and talk and that's another thing.  We had six-day classes, which were required. We had Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes and Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday classes.

Ms. Allen:  You actually taught on six days of the week?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Six days.  Dr. Flowers was so adamant about that, he said, "we'll go to a five day week over my dead body" and that's what it was. We didn't get it until he was gone. When the resistance began to grow, he required that every student had at least one Saturday class and every faculty member had at least one Saturday class. That's what he thought we should do. He was a product of a teachers college, and this was a teachers college.  We had a lot of Saturday teachers that came in, people that came in on Saturdays to take education classes largely but others too. So he felt very strongly that they needed to be accommodated, and he was afraid that if we went to a five day week that we'd water down the offerings.  Those things make quite a bit of difference. We were through teaching by two o'clock in the afternoon. Nobody was around here after two o'clock. So we would congregate somewhere and talk and have time.

Ms. Allen:  For fellowship?

Professor FitzPatrick: That's exactly right.

Ms. Allen: Which probably had a lot to do with your strong close-knit feeling about each other.

Professor FitzPatrick: This was everybody. We felt very close to the English Department for example and the science people.  The people in the sciences too were especially close. Really, then the Political Science people, of course we were in their department, Social Sciences, although Dr. Taylor hated that word. He said, “there is nothing scientific about history” and there certainly is not. I heard the phrase, exactly this week, one of those talks on the public television channels, an historian saying, ''history is not a science" when you are dealing with human beings it can't be scientific.  So that changed.  When I began teaching here I required three or four books to be read per semester.  They came in and did those oral reports. Imagine having time for that now! Every student came in and did four oral reports to me, and I would question them about what they had read.

Ms. Allen:  How many students would you be responsible for?

Professor FitzPatrick: We had five classes; they would run anywhere from twenty to thirty students.

Ms. Allen:  So roughly a hundred?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Yes, to a hundred and twenty or thirty.

Ms. Allen:  Wonder how that compares now? Did you do your own grading?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Yes.  Mainly you taught in the morning. Very few classes after noon. So you had the afternoon then for students, to talk to students, for students to come by.  And they came by a lot and talked and came in for book reports and stay and talk. You didn't feel so pressured to get them out.

Ms. Allen: What changes do you see in the students?

Professor FitzPatrick: I find their lack of intellectual curiosity; they have no curiosity.  Because I did go out into the public schools I know that they were getting some good work out there. I very seldom saw a civics class that I didn't think was well taught and ____ (??) good work and they get up here and act like they never heard of the Supreme Court. They don't know the difference between the Supreme Court and Texas legislature.  They don't know the difference between the Texas legislature and congress. And don't want to.

Ms. Allen: Don't have any desire?

Professor FitzPatrick: No, it’s that curiosity that I just can't imagine not wanting to know.  And good students. They are like they're apathetic, and I don't know if that is the times or. I do think students today face ten times the enormous problems that I did. I think peer pressure to do things that are perhaps not socially acceptable is incredible. Sex for example.

Ms. Allen:  Well, that may be one reason they are not interested, they've had so much else to fill their hours rather than a love of reading and exploring things.

Professor FitzPatrick: I feel like, too, those things they plug in their ears and turn on the noise as loud as they can is another way of drugging, of not having to think.  It just booms your thoughts out of your head.

Ms. Allen:  It’s like letting something else take over and you don't have to be cognizant of anything. I agree with you.

Professor FitzPatrick: Are your children into that?

Ms. Allen:  I won't let them. It’s been almost a running gun battle, not so much now, they are older, and the baby is nineteen.  But when they were twelve, thirteen, or fourteen it was "why not, so-and-so's got one".  Fine, if you want to listen to the radio, you go in there and turn it on at a decent level. But I refused to see somebody sitting there just oblivious, twilight zone. I didn't think it was a good idea to see them riding bicycles, you can't hear anything up, you can't hear the birds around you or –

Professor FitzPatrick: Or the train coming.

Ms. Allen: Right!  Let these six senses do what they should do rather than trying to cover them up.

Professor FitzPatrick:  I wouldn't let my girls turn that music up loud too.  If I walked in the house, they immediately cut it down.

Ms. Allen:  My husband is a policeman and the kids sometimes in the summertime would be outside doing something and have the radio going, washing the car or whatever.  And his favorite phrase is "you're welcome to listen to whatever music you want to and that is your right, but if you force me to or the neighbors to listen to it, you are infringing on my rights and I'll see to it that doesn't happen".  In other words, it had to be kept to an acceptable level.  What they did when they were around the corner, you're never quite sure of.  But that got said quite often, and twice in one week, usually the radio was confiscated a couple of days.  But I think they lived over it.

Professor FitzPatrick:  I'm really convinced that young people or all people like rules, and I think we have done them a disservice by letting them get by with breaking the rules.

Ms. Allen: I think sometimes they need to know you love them enough to tell them they can operate anywhere in this [zone].

Professor FitzPatrick:  Ron Brown talked to the Campus Christian Community yesterday about the CCC in the thirties. That government program that took unemployed youth and put them to work and he interviewed ten last summer.  Most of whom said that they would have been either in prison or hobos if they hadn't had the CCC. One of the things they liked about the CCC was the discipline. They'd never had that kind of discipline, and it's made a difference all their lives.

They didn't get rich or anything like that, it’s just that it opened and I think it would even a few boys and girls today if we could take them there and put them in this regimen where they had to get up at a certain time, eat certain foods, and live a certain way.  I think they would love it. But I think the adults also, for years, I don't know whether it still goes on, but for years there were people who wouldn't turn their grades in on time. That's why they had to get so strong because here these adults were, without the rules, they wouldn't turn their grades in.  They wouldn't get their check if they didn't turn their grades in. [laughter] I think we all do better [with rules].  I do better with rules myself.  I'm saying that in defense of the youth today.   There are so many factors that I didn't have to face, drugs.

Ms. Allen: I would not want to go back myself and have to go through teenage years.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Aren't you glad your children are past that?

Ms. Allen: We've almost got Jonathan through those years. Yes, I think things work well, but I worry so about grandchildren now. It’s going to be rough.

Professor FitzPatrick:  We are such a mobile society also. That makes a big difference. I still teach Honors. About five years ago I had – out of thirteen kids there were eight or nine whose parents were divorced, and the young women in my class said they would not stay at home with their step fathers. Most of them. They were afraid of sexual assault. Here are problems, you just look at them [students], and we don't see all that. They are sick at heart about it, a lot of them. I think they have a lot more problems than I had to face as a young person or even when I began teaching.

Ms. Allen:  What do you see for the future of the department? Care to make some predictions?

Professor FitzPatrick:  No. I really don't know. Because I think we've really got some brilliant young people here, and I would hope that they could continue the collegiality, but I think it’s going to be hard because we are more diverse now. Well, some live in Austin, one or two in New Braunfels. We're more scattered but don't have the time to visit and know each other and know each other's children.

Ms. Allen:  Has the curriculum changed some?

Professor FitzPatrick:  Well, it’s better. I think that's obvious because we can offer, you know Dr. Yick in oriental studies. I think it’s wonderful.  We've tried for years to find somebody in Asiatic, and so we've got him, and we've got women teaching women's studies which I think is great. We've got Pierre Cagniart who is from France. I think it’s wonderful to get this kind of diversity. Several years ago we had a young woman who was –

Ms. Allen:  What about the new technology?

Professor FitzPatrick: I think it’s wonderful. The opportunity to do research  I told my students, my daughters when they were both working on their masters, I really resented that they didn't have to take care of all. Those little cards we had to use. You can put your material on the computer and have it there and add or delete.  Not wasting time on that kind of drudgery.

Ms. Allen:  Typing and re-typing.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Well your bibliography, to have it all there and edit it.  We spent on enormous time with cards, shuffling around those stupid cards and keeping up with it. Seems to me that I always left off one vital piece of information like the date of publication or something. I'd have to go back and look it up. Now you can put all that down. That really is helpful, I think. I think that's grand. I think that we have the opportunity, one of the things I was talking about, archaeologists are able to put so much more information on computers and then do comparisons that speed up the process, the by hand process. You can see patterns that you couldn't see otherwise. I think it is a boom.  I think any child today who doesn't learn to work a computer is going to be a ditch digger.

Ms. Allen:  I think you are probably right. I clipped a thing from the Sunday paper a couple of weeks ago. There are some colleges that are requiring freshmen to show up with a personal computer, and if they don't have one, they have to buy one through the local bookstore.

Professor FitzPatrick:  The only disagreement I would say there was that I heard on a publication show the other night was the new computers called the New Know, have you heard about the New Know?

Ms. Allen:  No.

Professor FitzPatrick:  The New Know, takes the place of the microcomputer. They make the micro look like orangutans because they can put ten times more information now on those little chips than they did, or a hundred times more, so all the computers we have now are out of date and you won't even need a screen by 1995, it will be holograms, it will just be in the air. I don't in what field you are, if you are a garage mechanic, you're going to have to have that computer. You keep up with your taxes, you keep up with your invoices, you keep up with all that kind of stuff, and I just think if you learn when you're young that you are a thousand years ahead.  Do your children know?

Ms. Allen:  They each took computer course in high school and of course they will have to take a college level course too. The oldest one did not, he is twenty-nine and they did not have them. It was something that was just getting started in the schools so he kind of fell in the cracks. He plays with my old Apple. I don't have a printer. I was petrified. I learned with Dr. Swinney's class up here. I had no experience. But the other two did it in grade school. They are comfortable with them, they may not be experts but they are comfortable with learning. What about involvement in other organizations on campus or extracurricular activities while you were here?

Professor FitzPatrick:  All of us served enormous times on committees. The last five years before I retired in 1988, I was always on the hiring committee because at that time I was the only tenured female faculty and they had to have a token woman on the hiring committee. I was it. It takes an enormous amount of time. We would average a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty applications per position, and you've got to try to assimilate them. Furthermore, for twenty four years now I've taught in the Honors Program. Since the second year. Dr. Craddock always gets up when she makes speeches and says Merry Fitzpatrick was here from the beginning, well I wasn't.  There's no use arguing with her.             

The course I teach is the Greek Civilization and Greek Thought. The young woman they had, I think she is long gone, she was an art historian and she taught it. She absolutely fell on her face because she really didn't have any historical background and she didn't give any to the students. She just walked in cold as if they knew they knew everything there was to know about fifth- century Greece, and it almost killed it. Nobody wanted to take it. So she [Craddock] asked me to do it simply because I taught Greek history in Western civ. Then after I taught it, you know you have to learn to shut up in Honors Class. You've got to lay out what you want them to do, and I give them about two and a half weeks of background and then you've got to keep your mouth shut and let them talk. That's the hardest thing for a teacher to do is shut up. 

I have learned to do that and it took me a while, two or three years. Then you've got to find a technique where you can make them talk. I've discovered that they are not afraid of me, they are afraid of their colleagues.  They are afraid their colleagues in the class will say they are silly.  So they still to this day will start off with "this probably isn't right but" If it’s your opinion, its right. There is no right or wrong.  If they can get past that, then it’s just wonderful.  They talk and argue and kid each other and they exchange ideas. For many of them it’s the first time in their whole life they ever said what they thought about ethics and laws and human relationships. Some of their statements are as silly as can be, and you can see it on their face when they are saying it. They know, all of a sudden it dawns on them, 'this is a pretty silly statement'. Had a kid do it this morning. To get it out is the important thing.

Ms. Allen: Where you can look at it?

Professor FitzPatrick: Certainly. Then you can say, well I don't really believe that. [laughter] Then you move back and come from another direction.

Ms. Allen: I had four honors classes. Three of them were wonderful experiences.  The fourth one could have been, had that person learned your lesson. It could have been wonderful. But that’s part of education

Professor FitzPatrick: Kids tell me that Dr. Waltz, who was part of the English Department, he taught an honors course for years and years, and they all said he was wonderful, but he wouldn’t let them talk. His information was good, but he wouldn’t let them talk. I think you defeat the purpose of being in honors.

Ms. Allen: This wasn't Dr. Waltz. I have a friend who thought he hung the moon.

Professor FitzPatrick: He must have been a wonderful teacher. I've had students who have had him, especially in his Shakespeare classes.

Ms. Allen:  That's what my friend liked, Shakespeare, and she couldn't get enough of his class.

Professor FitzPatrick:  But for me to be able to get them to talk. See it's not how much they are going to learn it's can they express an opinion?   Can they read this and come back and say this is the way? We've been having a real battle of the sexes this semester.  The Greeks, this great society with the emphasis on reason, treat women so horribly and so the girls who have been very intimidated by a couple of boys there this semester are finally fighting back and it’s been real funny. Finally, they've gotten the courage to say what they think.  It’s been fun.

Ms. Allen: Do you plan on continuing to teach the Honors? I know they count on you.

Professor FitzPatrick: I keep saying every year; I'm not going to do it one more time. I don't know. You know if you teach one class you might as well teach four because you can't leave. I do know that I'm not going to skip a semester. If I ever quit then that's it. I've got to quit soon, obviously.   It’s fun, I like teaching, I love teaching. But also, there comes a time, just like there came a time for me to retire so I did.

Ms. Allen: Well, the department going to lose something.

Professor FitzPatrick: Oh poop.

Ms. Allen:  Everyone I have talked to, and I've tried to talk to someone who has been here a while and then to a newer one. I've tried to vary this so that I'd get more out of it than if I stayed in one grouping. But what do you contribute the stability of this department to? And I think perhaps you've already said the hiring policies early on, maybe Jimmy Taylor.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Just the very fact that he wasn't afraid to hire women. Can you imagine this department without Dr. Kissler or Dr. Craddock?  They've really had more leadership roles than I have. That's part of it. To have women that are stable that have the respect of their total school and community.   Both Dr. Kissler ran for city council three times and never had anything but a token opponent.  She could run tomorrow, and nobody would run against her.  Dr. Craddock was the same way until that last go round.  So, the community as well the just the college respect them.

Ms. Allen: Strong role models.

Professor FitzPatrick: That's right.  Imagine and I think that goes back to the fact that we had Dr. Murphy.  Now as opposed to when I was at the University of Texas, they would no more hire a woman in the History Department than they would have flown to the moon. They are still reluctant to hire women up there.

Ms. Allen:  There is one woman on tenure at UTSA in the history department, and there was an article in the paper during the Thomas Hill business where she was saying they make it almost impossible. They will not hire any women and if they do [because of] the intimidation factor, people leave. They will not stay.

Professor FitzPatrick:  Dr. Eakle, Dr. Dobkins. When they moved to Tulsa there was an opening at the University of Tulsa, she should have had it but the chairman was absolutely terrified of a woman with a PhD, a Walter P. Webb scholar. She got a job at the junior college and later was glad she did. She said she felt like she was ---- more service. She's in this mold, the Kissler, Craddock, me mold. I think the University of Tulsa lost not to have had that woman, that scholar. She's a wonderful teacher. She always gets incredible marks for teaching.

Ms. Allen: You think teaching is still the emphasis here? Rather than publish?

Professor FitzPatrick:  No, you have to publish. Have to publish or you can’t get tenure. So that’s there. When Dr. Pohl went up one year to take over one year temporarily the Texas State Historical Association and he taught at the University one year he allowed his freshmen to come in and talk to him. They just couldn’t get over it that a full professor would speak to a freshman. That’s a tradition here. Full professors here still teach freshmen.  I hope we never get away from that.  Maybe we can escape being a Texas University. Texas University didn't have more that fifteen-hundred when I was there.   So it’s not bigness, this is twenty-thousand. It’s just the way that you get started. People don't think the past is important. The seeds of how you get started are important. Dr. Murphy left her imprint, meant that Dr. Taylor would maybe have had more battles if she wasn't here.

Ms. Allen:  Traditions carried on, maybe the type of people hired. And they have continued to hire into this compatibility.

Professor FitzPatrick: I think so. In fact, one young woman that they are considering for offering a job to, I've heard one of the comments was, 'she will fit in with the department'. See, that feeling is still there.

Ms. Allen: It’s a subjective thing  It’s a subjectivity that has been an overriding factor and responsible for the stability over time.

Professor FitzPatrick: You couldn't hire people; well, you can because we've done it that are incompatible.  We have done it.  Not meaning to think that it was going to work out, but it didn't. Luckily they haven't stayed. [laughter]

Ms. Allen: They evidently feel the difference too. But if it was the whole department was incompatible you just had these satellites then it wouldn't be a problem.

Professor FitzPatrick: There are departments like that up here. There are departments here where the infighting has just been bloody and in fact Dr. Kissler and I have talked about that. I'm not sure I could have stayed and I'm talking about five or six years, I'm talking about ten or fifteen the fighting. It doesn't matter if the personnel changes, it still goes on.

Ms. Allen: It’s almost like the atmosphere stays and the people just change.

Professor FitzPatrick: That's why we all feel so fortunate that we didn't have that.

Ms. Allen: Do you have anything you want to tell me for posterity?   Good juicy gossip or good stories?

Professor FitzPatrick:  We, Dr. Kissler and I were trying to think of some funny things. We haven't been very peripatetic. I started teaching in Old Main which is where the history department was; I think she started in Lueders. Then when I came back we were in Flowers, then we moved to Evans then here, then to Medina and back here. I don't know that there's been anybody that has moved around as much as we have.

[Tape runs out, interview almost over. Professor FitzPatrick relates a story about replacing the glass in the men's restroom window on second floor of Flowers Hall.   It was one way glass, and it replaced wrong side out, so that it created quite a stir for a few days until corrected.]

(End of Interview)

TO THE READER:

I have taken the liberty of editing in order to make the transcript more readable but taking care not to change the context or meaning. In doing so I have deleted false starts, “uhs”, misstatements, and rephrased statements. The process has been difficult; however, I have endeavored to render a transcription as true as possible. Laughter, smiles, facial expressions and other such body language cannot be faithfully portrayed in this form and thus the document can be labeled as “fallible” (51, Oral History for Texans). Words added for clarification of the reader are placed inside  [ ].  

This project began as a term paper for Dr. Swinney’s graduate Historiography class. It seemed like a clever idea to learn more about the department from which I had received an undergraduate degree and hoped to earn another. The original plan called for interviewing a few of the older faculty in hopes of tracing the evolution and changes occurring within department over the discernible past. From here the project I initially perceived as simple enough to manage became more detailed and involved.   After my interview with Dr. Brown, he explained his interest in oral history and asked if I would be interested in transcribing the tapes and placing them in the SWT archives. Already desirous of hard copy from which to take notes for my original paper, I agreed. Thus, the Taylor/Murphy History Department Collection began along with my own interest in the methodology of oral history.   I would have liked to interview all current faculty members and I would have liked to have had more of them become comfortable enough with me to share anecdotes and memories of their days here. Regretfully, practical time restraints did not permit this, and I found myself constantly needing to “stick to the history” of the department. Personal glimpses of someone's world are often the most interesting and the most telling.  Hopefully others will add to this collection in order to leave a record of this outstanding department.