1 Colorado State University Libraries
Archives & Special Collections University Archives
Transcript of Andrew G. Clark oral history (copy 1, tape 2 of 2), 1974-07-09
Item Metadata
Collection: Oral History Tapes (UOHT)
Author(s): Hansen, James E., 1938-, Clark, Andrew G.
Title: Andrew G. Clark oral history (copy 1, tape 2 of 2) Date: 1974-07-09
Identifier: UOHT_0018_access_sideA Date Edited: March 2021
Editors: Victoria Lopez-Terrill, Mary Swing Transcript Provided By: Memnon
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00:00:10.650 00:00:15.050 Hansen: Tell me a little bit about your background before you got to CSU.
00:00:15.880 00:00:19.920 Parents occupation, your early schooling that kind of thing.
00:00:21.100 00:00:47.680 Clark: Well, I was born in Evansville, Indiana. My father was a lawyer.
We used to come out to Colorado for summer vacations. I had a younger brother, four years younger.
00:00:50.280 00:02:35.280 One of our vacations in Colorado when I was six years old, my father developed an appendicitis and before they could get him in Denver to the hospital he died of peritonitis when I was six years old.
And believe it or not, a lawyer, and he left no will. He had not been too prominent. But I started to school at the age of six there in Evansville which is a German community. I actually studied German for three years. But both my brother and I were subject to malaria and my mother thought that we should move. Since we had been in Colorado, she chose Colorado, and she chose Boulder. Well, my mother had no occupation. We didn't have much to live on. I started to work on one thing or another from the time I got there at the age of 9. Went through high school.
00:02:37.650 00:03:13.460 Did very well in some subjects such as Latin and German. Did very poorly in mathematics. I worked a partial shift in a tungsten mill while I was going. I did everything, worked at everything. I was agent for a one of the Denver newspapers in Boulder.
00:03:14.000 00:03:18.870 So naturally living there, I couldn't afford to go away to school.
00:03:19.100 00:04:28.210 So I started my university education at the University of Colorado, thinking I would major in chemistry. To my amazement, you can't
2 take much chemistry without taking mathematics. So I had to take mathematics. But I had matured. Mathematics which had been difficult for me in high school because I tried to memorize, now became easy. And I changed my major to mathematics. Graduated. I continued to work shifts in tungsten mills. I played on the baseball team. I played a little professional baseball in the summer times. But I wasn't very good at that and knew I’d better give that up.
00:04:34.690 00:05:01.090 When I started out at the University of Colorado, it was in 1917.
There was a period in part of 1918 when I was in the army. But still studying. But I graduated in ‘21.
00:05:04.150 00:05:05.770 I never got overseas, by the way.
00:05:10.660 00:09:32.220 And continued on to take graduate work. Working on the side. I was about two thirds or more of the way through to a master's degree when the head of the department at the University of Wyoming died suddenly and they needed somebody to do some teaching. I had been practice teaching so I accepted the opportunity.
I went up there and taught the rest of that year. And the year after.
At the end of that time, they had a new department head. I met the lady you met. We married in June of twenty-three. So we've been married 51 years. I planned, with what little money we had saved, to take more graduate work, a doctorate at the University of Chicago when suddenly an opportunity arose to come up here and join the staff which was, in mathematics, which was, to be very frank, it wasn't very efficient.
It had a couple of ladies who didn't know much mathematics or much about how to teach it. The head of the department was an old timer who came here in nineteen two. His name was Stuart L.
Macdonald. So I started in, thankfully, expecting to save a little money and go ahead with my plans for the graduate work.
But things tend to interfere. This thing that interfered was a baby. I continued here to teach. Macdonald approved of me. I don't know how good a teacher I was. I had no way of knowing but he did approve of me. In 1931 or 2 I was granted a sabbatical leave.
And I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana and for a particular reason. I had a desire to become an actuary. I did my advanced work in this field and qualified as an actuary. But by this time, we had not one but three children. After I qualified as an actuary, this is in ‘32, long before you were born. It was in the midst of a terrible
depression. I couldn't get a job as an actuary.
00:09:34.580 00:09:58.390 And I had a wife and three children to support. I came back to Colorado Agricultural College as it was then known. And continued teaching. I served on
00:10:01.390 00:11:04.260 some minor committees. But my main interest, I began to love to teach. We had people come and go in the department. You've got to know something of the philosophy of the administration to
understand how this come and go business worked. Because the president who had been president since, his name was Lory, Charles
3 A. Lory. I don't know when he succeeded to the presidency, about 1912 or something.
Hansen: It was 1909.
Clark: His philosophy evidently was to maintain the original function of this institution, according to its name,
00:11:06.280 00:11:49.080 the precepts laid down, and that was all. He cared little whether young people who were brought in here to teach, and particularly in the supporting fields. Your field would be a supporting field.
Hansen: Definitely.
Clark: Mine would be a supporting field. The principal fields would be agriculture and engineering, veterinary medicine, home economics. Brilliant young people would come here 00:11:50.190 00:12:39.770 and would leave because they weren't recognized in these
supporting fields. Do you see what I mean? But I stayed on. I was sort of the senior and Macdonald, as I said, had taken a liking to me.
In this period, the Depression, I continued to teach. I also coached baseball team. Did pretty well at it too, I'd say. Winning about two thirds or more of all the games we played. And in nineteen thirty nine,
00:12:40.820 00:12:49.250 I took another sabbatical. This time, it was related to actuarial work, but statistics.
00:12:50.780 00:14:32.320 With one of the top men in the country, Jerzy Neyman at the University of California Berkeley who accepted me as a candidate.
And I spent a year there, but I was unable to finish in a year. This is in ‘39 and ‘40. Now I'm not just certain when Lory retired.
Hansen: In 1940.
Clark: 1940. He was gone, or going, when I got back. A new president came then. And I don't not know any of the circumstances. His name was Green. And Macdonald, the retirement age then for these old timers like Macdonald was 68. And it came time for him to retire and he recommended that I would be made head of the Department of Mathematics. I became head of the Department of Mathematics.
That was in 1941 because it was a year after Lory retired and Macdonald induced President Green to
00:14:34.120 00:15:02.280 name me to that post. Things started out pretty well, and then everything blew up. We got in a war. And as far as the mathematics department was concerned, we lost our first man
00:15:03.450 00:17:25.690 in 1940, even before we declared war because he was a member of the National Guard. One by one we lost all of our male instructors, assistant professors and so forth. I and three ladies, and I had to recruit two of these ladies to replace these people, were all that
4 were left. The enrollment of the university began to, of course,
decline and very sharply.
In nineteen forty-three, I was introduced under the auspices of Princeton University, to accept a job in Washington at the Pentagon Building as statistical advisor to the Army Air Forces. That was quite an experience. I had my troubles, but I affected some real changes through statistical analysis of the photographs of where bombs fell, all of that. The principal thing that I affected, improved, was that the 20th Air Force, which was located in Burma to bomb Japan at very high altitudes because they were afraid of Japanese fighters, 00:17:26.370 00:17:59.960 and they had no fighters to accompany them, was a complete
failure because one of the geographical phenomena was that at 30,000 feet, the winds over that part of the world were a hundred miles an hour greater than over Europe.
00:18:02.760 00:18:51.410 And the result was, and of course we had no guided missiles, they just dropped these bombs, they couldn't even come close to [unclear]. I influenced the head of the Army Air Forces to, it was a terrific logistics problem to supply a place as far away as Burma anyway, to combine the 20th and 21st areas in the Marianas, Guam.
00:18:54.080 00:19:13.730 But still of course they couldn't hit anything. The next thing of course was to try to use the B-29s which had been built as very high-
altitude bombers,
00:19:14.780 00:19:31.650 to use them at low levels. That presented a problem, they would need fighter support. And this led to the capturing of an island 00:19:35.450 00:19:44.100 called Iwo Jima in order to base fighter support close.
00:19:45.140 00:21:55.110 And the type of bombing changed entirely. In other words, instead of dropping strategic bombs on factories and so forth, we began to use incendiary bombs and just tear the cities apart. Finally, the war ended. I came back Colorado State University.
It was a real problem here. Because we began to get a terrific influx of new students, GI’s supported under the G.I. Bill of Rights. And to find staff that was competent was extremely difficult. I made several mistakes and had to let people go.
Now during that period, President Green was in a very difficult position you see. I don't know how competent this man was, but I would suspect he never had a chance. He just didn't have a chance.
First in the war and dwindling student body, perhaps less than a thousand, most of them girls. And then this influx of GI’s. He died. I don't know when it was, ‘47.
Hansen: ‘48.
Clark: ‘48. We had to get a new president.
00:21:57.450 00:22:03.440 And a very able man on this campus, who in my opinion was never thoroughly appreciated,
00:22:06.420 00:24:37.710 although he didn't want it, accepted the job as interim president. His name was Newsom.
5 My first connection with the President Newsom, or Dr. Newsom as he was called when he was in veterinary medicine, went way back to 1929 when he found out that I was interested in actuarial work, and this institution had no pension plan whatsoever for its faculty, President Lory wasn't interested whether we had or we didn't have.
But Newsom and I worked together and of course he had by far the more prestige. And we developed a pension plan whereby with the teachers’ insurance and annuity company, wherein we put in 5 percent of our salary and it was matched by the state of Colorado.
And this maintained until 1945.
In 1945, something really happened. I don't know whether to be ashamed of it or to be proud of it. But we had a man on the campus then in charge of fiscal affairs named Joe Whalley. Who was an Irishman, and he just didn't let people run over him. He conceived the idea that this institution could join what is called the Colorado PERA.
00:24:42.530 00:25:03.760 For our faculty who stayed here, it was a wonderful thing. We paid 6 percent of our salary. It was matched by the state. And if you stayed 20 years, you had it. You had it made. Now I said,
00:25:05.570 00:25:25.590 from the standpoint of the faculty who were able wanted to stay, I am very proud of the part that I played along with Joe who took charge of the fiscal aspect in Denver principally.
00:25:27.340 00:25:36.220 But at the other side of it was this. There were those who didn't stay. And I'm not talking just about instructors,
00:25:38.440 00:25:48.460 assistant professors. I'm talking about janitors, groundskeepers, kitchen workers,
00:25:50.900 00:26:10.070 People in the support system who rarely stayed. And when they left, all they got was the money that they had put in without interest. The interest that had been accumulated went into the general PERA fund and also the state’s
00:26:10.910 00:26:28.700 portion that had been apportioned to them. That's why this institution has so much better pension plan for its faculty who stay than does the University of Colorado who are still under TIAA.
00:26:32.170 00:26:35.530 As I say, I am not proud. Just look
00:26:37.390 00:26:47.540 at the unfairness to these people who didn't stay. All these people who’s salaries were
00:26:49.370 00:26:55.530 rather low, who were not professionals. [Unclear].
00:26:57.290 00:27:10.630 But for those who stayed. It has been a lifesaver. In these days of which we now see an inflation.
00:27:14.590 00:29:21.460 I was chairman of a committee to get a new president. Course I would have liked to have seen Doctor Newsom stay. But he was an academician. But the time he was in there he did a very good job as a president. He was one of the outstanding men on this campus. I doubt if he’s ever been properly appreciated.
On the campus there were two men that were considered. One of them was head of the, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, Cross, who very much desired the position. The other person who was considered was Hap Dotson. And I don't know whether he
6 desired the position or not. There is no evidence that he actually worked for it. The committee, after some time, decided on this man, William Morgan. His background at Texas and Arkansas, and he made quite an impression on us when he visited us. He was named president, and this occurred, I don’t know, ‘49?
Hansen: Yeah.
Clark: He had quite a job too because this was still the cleanup of this GI business. And the state was growing.
00:29:22.940 00:30:44.800 Hansen: Excuse me, I’m just gonna pop this over.
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