Darnel Haney Interview

A short while ago I had the privilege of interviewing Darnel Haney in Ogden, Utah. He was a very pleasant gentleman and gave great perspective as seeing the Barn not only as a place of learning, classes, and office space but also as a place of sanctuary in a racial atmosphere. Darnel played basketball at USU in the early 1960s and encountered racism and ostracism from both the college and community. He was blamed for the basketball team's failure his first year and received negative feedback for dating and marrying a local white girl from the community. The excerpts I have included only a short blurb for the blog and I would encourage anyone interested to listen to the full interview for greater perspective into racism.

Darnel Haney Interview

Born: February 6, 1937 in Phoenix, Arizona

Recruited by Utah State University to play basketball

“I was contacted by Utah State, at that time the head basketball coach was Cec Baker. They had won the NIT the year before and they were looking forward to a great year in basketball…That was a disaster that first year, it was absolutely a disaster. We had conflicts in basketball on the court. We were rated first in the nation and we didn’t live up that expectation. The coach was fired that year and much of it had to do with my being there at Utah State. I was an Art major and during my frustration I would go to the Art Barn. I had an advisor by the name of Larry Elsner who took the time and talked to me. They blamed much of the non-success of Utah basketball team on me. At the time I was dating my wife. She is a white girl from North Logan, Utah. She wasn’t a student at Utah State and they did not like that situation at all. As I remember Larry Elsner was one neatest people I have ever met because he himself was married to a Japanese woman. Occasionally he would talk to me about situations, he said ‘my marriage is not recognized in this community either.’…He was a quit giant I call him, Larry was just a sweet person, had limited conversation, but what he said, it meant a lot. I would go to that Art Barn many times and throw pots. Throw pots means you put them on the wheel. You could take your frustrations out there…We would sit in the Barn until 11 o’clock at night, throwing clay, making pots, doing what have you. It was a sort of therapy for me. And it was a lonely time for me because I had very few friends.”

“On the basketball team we had conflicts. As I said the coach was fired the one year. The players were in disarray and were constantly at each others throats. And the community felt that I was responsible for much of this. In all the frustrations which you have in a community, I had no one who I could talk to.”

Describing the Art Barn and impressions – he stated that there was “a lot of enthusiasm. I walked in there and there were a lot of people doing different things. It was a relaxed atmosphere. There was a freedom in there that was not every place where you go on a campus. Smiles were there and helpful hands were always there. And most of all the instructors were just a part of the students. It wasn’t just a person up there, an authority but he was a part of his class.”

-Jason Neil-

Adrian Van Suchtelen Interview

This week I had the opportunity to interview Adrian Van Suchtelen. Adrian taught at Utah State University in the Art Department from 1967 to 2003. He was born in Java in the East Indies and has some amazing travel experiences including being raised in a Japanese concentration camp (I am actually going to do an independent interview for that experience). He had some great stories about his work in the Art Barn. Some of these experiences include:

“We had this custodian, he was a pretty old guy, he had no teeth. He was very poor, he couldn’t afford to go to the dental services. He talked kind of funny but he cared about the art barn. He cared so much about them that he looked out for the students. He looked after students, he looked after me, he looked after Larry. He had discovered that this other janitor had been stealing tools. I mean expensive power tools, because sculpture has a lot of expensive tools. And he had been watching him. This guy had figured out how to take the tools and hide them in the garbage can. He would come back later and take them out of the garbage can. But this guy was onto him and he had taken the tools out of the garbage can before he came back at night. He had saved us, he had saved the Art Department just a huge amount of money the way he looked after us. I was so thankful for that and the students were very excited and thankful about it. We decided to have this raffle and this fundraising. I went around my fellow faculty and they went around to the students saying ‘we are raising enough money to buy him a set of teeth for Christmas.’ And he was so happy; I don’t have to tell you. We bought him a set of teeth for Christmas and it was the best Christmas present that he ever got.”

“The Ayatollah was in, at that time still called Persia, now it is Iran. They had the revolution there and it even hit a small place like Logan, Utah. We felt it hear and things were happening…I remember one morning, suddenly I was stopped there [in Art Barn] before I went up the stairs. [Somebody said] ‘Adrian, do you realize we are having some problems with people, somebody came in last night and turned on the gas valves on the ceramic kilns.’ They turned them on, didn’t light the kilns, just turned it on and we happened to think that there must have been some terrorist from this Middle East situation that could have done that, I don’t know. If somebody had lit a cigarette and the whole place would have blown up and there would not have been an art barn anymore. I was obliged to warn the student to keep their eyes out for any suspicious happenings, strangers in the art barn, etc. And to always be on the lookout. We left the back door open, the back door to the back stairs, to the fire escape. We left the back door open in case.”

“Students would bring in their dogs because we were bye ourselves in the art barn. It was sort of an isolated place and one of the custodians had become very annoyed with that idea. So he wrote on the wall ‘No Dogs Allowed” [but he spelled it] A-L-O-U-D. Some student had written, right underneath it, “And No Dogs A-Quiet Either,” He wrote it in big, big letters.”

-Jason Neil-

Horse Barn Is Modern

While working on another project in the USU Special Collections I discovered an article in the old Student Life Newspaper in 1919 about the new modern horse barn. I transcribed it quickly and thought you all might like to see it.

Jason

“Horse Barn is Modern”

Student Life,

Logan City, Utah

Friday, October 10, 1919

Volume XVIII, Number 4

“The old students of the school who were not here last year, are no doubt surprised at not seeing such a familiar landmark as the old horse barn. There is now nothing left to show where it stood except a few rocks. No matter what happened to the old barn, a new one has been built to take its place. The new horse barn was built by Alston & Hoggan of Salt Lake City, at a cost of about six thousand dollars. The plans were drawn up by the Animal Husbandry Departments with the assistance of a local architect. It is made to hold eleven horses; there are six individual ventilated stalls, four large rommy[sic] box stalls, running water, grain bins, hay and straw chutes, a harness room and an office. The floors are made of cement, thus making it possible to keep them clean without difficulty. It is newly painted inside and outside giving it a very attractive appearance. Those who have visited it and know what a barn should be seem very well pleased with it. When it was first finished, it was planned to have a real old barn dance in the loft, which has a good hardwood floor, but it had to be used for storing hay, so we may expect this dance to be given later. Those interested in good farm buildings should not miss seeing this one."

Dear Fellow Barn Members,

Here is a small version of the Architectual drawing which was discovered in the USU Special Collections. It is a proposed Music Hall from 1952 (well before the Art Barn). It has some names and details attached to it that are most interesting. Unfortuntately the quality is not excellent as I had to downgrade resolution for blogger purposes. If you would like to access the full print quality image just ask me and I am sure we can work it out. Otherwise I will be giving Bonnie a burned disc with this drawing in good resolution as well as the other documents I have posted on it as well.

Jason

*Hint - Click on the image and it will enlarge so you can read the writing for the Music Barn.

More Discovered Documents 5

Copy of actual project request form for remodel of Art Barn and letters from William Lye and others. It appears in the third letter that they were toying with the idea of demolishing the Barn and putting up a new structure in its place, but they wanted to retain the historic significance of the building and took steps to help that.

Jason

More Discovered Documents 4

These are copies of the work order for renovation and a proposal to turn the Barn into a Hobby center

Jason

More Discovered Documents 3

Dear Fellow Barn Work Members,

These are letters and memos from Harold Kinzer who apparently had a large role to play in getting use of the Barn for his own department and utilizing the space.

Jason

More Discovered Documents 2

Dear Fellow Barn Members,
These are drawings done by Harold Kinzer and the use of the Barn space by the various departments. The letter is from Gael Lindstrom about using the Barn.

Jason

More Discovered Documents

Dear Fellow Barn Work Group Members,

Here are a few more documents which you might find interesting. They relate to proposed uses of the Art Barn and give insight into who was involved in the decision and renovation process. These are documents from the Food Services and the Photography department for space in the Barn.

Jason

New Discovered Documents

Dear Fellow Barn Project Members,

Today while I was at the special collections Bob Parson told me that he had come across some Art Barn documents that I might find interesting. I looked through several folders and discovered quite a few documents of interest. It seems that when the Art Department shifted to the new Art building there were quite a few departments debating and asking for the space.

There were several letters and proposed architectural drawings which were created by the departments as a proposal for the space. I made a few copies of some interesting documents for my own use and thought that you might find them interesting as well. One of which was from Thad Box (I was able to interview him recently and thought this added some context to it) about the use of the Barn by his College, another from the Art Department still wishing to use the kilns and space, and was a floor layout of the first two floors being used by different departments (unfortunately the third floor drawing is not in the collection).

One thing which I could not copy due to size but which I thought was interesting were two architectural drawing (fairly large size) of a proposed Music Hall from 1952. Apparently the university was proposing, planning, or toying with the idea of transforming the Horse Barn into a Music Hall and musical instruction facility. From the date it is possible that this idea formulated well before the university even thought of the Art Barn.

Jason Neil

Thad Box Interview

Last week I had the privilege of interviewing Thad Box about his experience with the Barn. We had a great time and he was one of the most jovial people I have met in a long while. I have posted below some interesting excerpts from the interview. While the excerpts posted below are fairly humorous if you have the chance I would recommend listening to the whole twenty five minute interview as Thad shared some great context about what was happening at the time, the changes Utah State was undergoing, etc. It is definately an interview for posterity and irreplaceable memories.



Interviewee: Thad Box
Born: May 9, 1929 in Llano County Texas

Thad: I came to Utah State in 1959 right out of graduate school at Texas A&M. This was my first teaching job here and at that time the range department at the forestry college that I was in…we were building a new building for forestry. It was the building that is now called the Biology natural resources building. But that was built in 1960-1961 so I was a brand new faculty member. I would walk up there with the construction all during that and we would pass by the barn….There was still evidence of pens and stuff around there.

Thad: It wasn’t until after I came back here in 1970 as Dean of the College of Natural Resources and my office was right across there. And we were just growing like mad during those days. We had over 1400 hundred students in Natural Resources in the early 60s. We were adding new faculty and looking for new graduate student space, we were out of space. So I saw that big barn there and I started trying to get a hold of part of it. By that time the Art Department had it pretty well used as their Art Barn for classes and labs and so on. But I was able to get part of the second floor and I think we put in seven or eight offices on the second floor. They were mostly graduate students and new faculty members. By then I was in the Barn practically every day for a couple of years then…

The graduate students over there really liked those offices. Not the offices so much but some of them became models for the nude modeling on the third floor there. There was one guy from Australia in particular, I didn’t know he was one of the nude models until one day I walked into an art exhibit and there he was in full color. He had already gone back to Australia before then.

Another one of my memories thinking about nude models in the Barn, I don’t remember the exact time, it was probably in the late 60s or early 70s, but Gerald Sheratt, he is Mayor of St. George now, he went down there to be their President of Southern Utah University. He was the University beggar, the Development Officer at the time and very good at that. He was a very modest sort of a guy, nothing off color around Gerry. One day he was bringing a group of donors they were trying to get money from, I don’t know if it was money to redo that building or what. But he had a number of men and women both and he brought them around by our offices. And then he took them up to the third floor. He walked in on an art class with a nude model sitting there. He got them out of there so quickly it was sort of a standing joke over there about how fast he got the donors out of there. I don’t think it was well known at the time that they were having art classes with nude models. Once it got to the vice presidents office, well I don’t know what happended.

1950's Document about transformation of barn

Dear Fellow Barn Members,

I have attached above a copy of a document which I found from the USU special collections. I happened upon this document while looking through the class schedule boxes in the the back rooms of the Special Collections and Archives. I noticed to my right a box that said "USU Buildings" which captured my attention and after a brief perusal discovered in a miscellaneous file this page. I thought it was interesting and hope that you find it as well. You may need to expand the page to see the document more clearly as the original is a little faded. Based on the writing it appears that the document was a draft writen a few months after the renovations in 1959. Please let me know if anyone wants to use this document and I can provide a better copy and permission for public use.

-Jason Neil -

Kevin Krogh Interview

The other day I had a great interview with Kevin Krogh and have included some of the excerpts from the interview in this post. Kevin was one of the last to leave the Barn before it closed as office and classroom space. His interview represents the last era before the rebirth of the Barn as the new Museum of Anthropology.

-Jason Neil-

Occupation: Professor of Spanish in Languages, Philosophy, and Speech Communication Department

Where Born: Salt Lake City, Utah
When Born: July 4, 1952

How he came into contact with the barn: As an undergraduate student once, but later had an office in the Barn from 2004 – Summer 2008, was the last or one of the last to leave the barn.

Description of Barn

“Downstairs there were four or five offices and a conference room on the West Side of the Main floor. The four of us in our department were all over there. Harold Kinzer had an office on the second floor. There was a classroom on the second floor. On the third floor who knows what was going on there, there were all kinds of people in a small space. I think it was a software producing business connected in some way with the university. Downstairs also was the rat lab and the psychology department grad students were who they were. Four or five students on the East side of the main floor.”

Describing the environment of the Barn

“It wasn’t quiet at all. The psychology graduate students who ran the rat lab, their office wasn’t entirely enclosed, it was a half wall, you couldn’t see over the wall, there was probably a space of a foot and a half to two feet between the ceiling and the wall. It was a large space and that was open to the main entrance area where students would come, that were in the speech program to be interviewed by other graduate students. So there were people in and out all the time. It was really quite noisy. It you wanted quiet you had to shut your door because the graduate students were always chatting, students were always waiting in the hall for interviews in the conference room”

Describing His Office

The window (of his office) that I had was directly out to the parking kiosk where you paid for parking. If I opened my window, constantly the cars would come by, the parking attendant at the parking kiosk would say ‘Good Morning,’ ‘How are you?,’ the same thing over and over again. If I wanted to avoid that I had to close the window. If I closed the door and closed the window that was fine unless it was a hot day because, there was air conditioning, but it didn’t always work and it didn’t always work equally in the building… One summer I was there I remember it was so hot that I got into the habit of coming in at four in the morning, because I had a lot to do that summer, and working in the office until about ten and then I would leave for the rest of the day.”


Describing the “Environmental” Conditions of the Barn

“In the Barn it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer.”

“The heating system (in the Barn) was steam and I remember one Christmas vacation I had left the office a couple of days before Christmas. For some reason on Christmas Eve Day I had to come to the office to get something or do something, probably something on the computer. At the time I didn’t have a computer at home that worked. I came to the office and when I opened the door to the main office I could hear this hissing sound. I thought ‘What in the world is that?’ As I got closer to my office door I could hear the hissing sound was coming from my office…also I could feel that it was kind of humid in there. When I opened the office I discovered that the steam valve in the office had broken. Steam was going everywhere and water was dripping off the ceiling, off my books, and onto my desk. You could see water everywhere.”

“There were people from maintenance, USU physical facilities, there all the time. Fixing things all the time, replacing valves, wires. They we doing something all the time it seemed.”

Describing his connection with others who occupied space in the Barn.

“The four or five of us that were there, we identified ourselves as those in the Barn. Everybody else in our department were over here in Old Main. We supported each other and we had the camaraderie of being in the Barn. You get to know somebody if you are walking across campus from your office in the Barn to Old Main where you are teaching or back. It was a great opportunity to get to know people. The people around me right now I know them fairly well but not as well and I don’t feel the closeness as a colleague as I did with those who were in the Barn, even though they weren’t in my discipline. But I just knew them better because we had more opportunity to converse and to talk about things. Things kind of get boring over there in the Barn when you are there for a while, so you would go down the hall and visit with a person in the office down the hall.”

Rose Milovich Interview

Here are some excerpts from my interview with Rose Milovich who was a student from the late 1970's. Rose is currently the Preservation Manager and Exhibition Program Director of the Special Collections and Archives at Utah State University. Our inteview lasted almost half an hour and she had some great memories of professors, descriptions of the use of the barn, and other fun tidbits. Hope these help.

-Jason Neil-

Born: Price Utah
First came into contact with Barn “through ceramics class as a freshman” in “a beginning wheelthrow class” – Art Barn Era
Attended at USU between 1976 – 1980
Raku Kiln Cookout

“One of the things that I remember in the old days is that they used to have the raku kilns at the back of the barn and there was a kind of a fence around it. There was cluster of students who were there eighteen to twenty four hours a day and I was one of those students. We would eat together and fire pots and make pots. One of our friends Masihiro decided that we should cook dinner over the raku kilns and so he made fried rice over the raku kiln. In those days I don’t think knew or maybe it wasn’t illegal to have beer on campus, so he would throw a little beer in the fried rice and drink some beer. It was a lot of fun, it was like a family, we were all different people and all from different places. We helped each other, if we needed to mix clay together we’d mix clay together, glazes. We would take turns watching the kiln. In the raku kiln you would pull things out when they were hot, when they were glowing red hot and you would put them in combustible material. We helped each other with different things…The other kilns you had to watch pretty much from whenever you started it for another day. We would take turns and relieve each other. Somebody would stay there for three hours, somebody else would stay for six, somebody else would go through the night.”

Talking about sleeping overnight at the barn

“That wasn’t uncommon. It was actually pretty common. There were a few couches around, the drawing studio was on the third level. There was a little loft on the top and a little ladder you could go up if you wanted to sleep. You could bring a sleeping bag. Now you would never think of doing that…It’s a whole different world of security and safety.”

**Describing the Barn***

“When I was taking ceramics in the Art Barn there was an area that was set aside for glazes and doing glaze work, that was on the east side of the building, pretty much the whole length of it. (I am guessing the first floor) On the west side, the larger part, they had all the potters wheels. They had some kick wheels and they also had some shimpo electric wheels…The second floor when I was there was strictly sculpture. The third floor was drawing. There was some jewelry casting that was taught underneath sculpture. They did some metal casting.”

"My most vivid memory is walking in and seeing all the potters wheels and the clay all over the place. They had a room that was humidified so that your ceramics wouldn’t dry out too quickly. You would walk through it and you would have to go through it sideways because it was so small. If you turned this way you would knock somebody’s pots over.”

Complete Phone Book Directory from USU

Dear Fellow Barn Members,

After working on the Phone Directories of USU for the last two months I have finished a comprehensive list of those listed in the directories of those who had offices in the barn. The directories started in 1951 and ended in 2007 with a small gap in the 1950's. I researched the phone directories in the Special Collections and Archives at Utah State. The directories took a while to research as I had to go name by name through each of the directories but I believe that it was worth it. The directories provided great insight into the transitions that the Barn went through over the years. Hopefully the information will provide helpful information for everyone in the future. I have attached the pages as picture files, if would like the document as a PDF or Word document please email me.

Jason Neil

Class Schedules for Summer Semesters at Art Barn

One of the challenges I have taken on as an oral historian is to build a comprehensive list of those who had offices or taught in the Barn over its near 100 year history. It has already helped me to track down a few potential important interviewees such as Grayson Osborne who likely operated a Human Behavior lab in the Barn for many years. I have been compiling this list little by little in the Special Collections through USU phone directories, bulletins, and class schedules. I hope to post to the blog or if desired email my finished findings to those who would like access to the research. I thought you might want to see a few items that I discovered, summer class schedules from 1962, 1970, and 1972. I hope to be able to share the finished product as soon as I am done. Until then enjoy the images below and I hope that the effort will be beneficial to all.

-Jason Neil-

On the right hand side of the schedules AB stands for Art Barn. The class schedules are a great way to track who taught in the barn and what classes were taught as well.

Newel Daines and the Horse Barn

On January 28, 2011 I had the pleasure of interviewing Newel Daines, a gentleman of 87, whom many may remember for his longevity in the community both as a doctor of medicine and as Mayor of Logan from 1982-1990. Though the interview was not lengthy it provided some great memories from his childhood about the Horse barn in the 1930's. Here are the main excerpts from his interview, sorry about the lack of picture, we had such a great time together that I forgot in the end to take the picture, it should be coming soon, we can use a picture of the old barn if desired to match his description until then.

- Jason Neil -

Breeding Cows at the Barn:

My first contact with the barn was about the age of 8 or 9 and we were living on 317 E 3^rd North and we had a cow and I would take up the cow up to the corral just adjacent to the barn where I would have her bred by a bull that was a part of the university. And that is when I first came into contact with the barn...adjacent to the horse barn they had corrals. They had cattle and we had a jersey cow and so we’d take her up there to have her bred there by the college bull. I would be about 8 years old, so that would be probably about 1932.

I remember it was a big oval top barn that had a Jackson fork that came out of one end that they would haul hay into the loft of the barn. And it was a beautiful building at that time.

School trips to the horse barn:

I was a student at the Whittier school which is on the corner of 3^rd North and 5^th East or 4^th East and since it was the school we would go up there on trips to examine the barn and see what was going on at that time...we would walk up there and look at the barn and see what was going on in the barn. And see the horses that were in that barn. It was an interesting thing for a 9 or a ten year old to do.

Mother riding barn horse at old stadium:

My mother rode horses in the horse shows that were held in the old stadium. She rode horses that belonged to my uncle, Uncle Laveer. Some of those outstanding horses were owned and operated by the University at that same time.

Description of the Barn:

It had an attic and everything else was on the ground floor. There were stables in there for the horses to be separated.

Impressions about the Barn over time:

The University had kept the barn as a kind of historic building. I enjoyed that because I had seen it when it was containing animals...It is a good example of the buildings that have endured for a long period of time. Certainly they have been transitionalised from a functioning barn and now that it will ultimately be a museum, it seems appropriate.

Still smell the grass hay and horse “biscuits”

George Morrison '66 says that he spent many happy hours on that campus just visiting and playing around on the quad. I attended Boy Scout functions, 4-H functions, church related functions and dozens of dances there even before I eventually became a student. When he heard what was happening to the barn, he sent us his recollections of time spent on campus and in the barn. He wrote:

I grew up in Hyde Park. My parents met as they attended USAC as did I many years later. My father eventually became a faculty member - Ag Econ in 1947. One neighbor in Hyde Park, Jay Hansen, tended horses in the Horse Barn. One fall evening, Jay brought me and a friend with him on his evening chores. The barn was poorly lit back then and the three of us had to carefully move about trying not to spook the horses and get kicked. I can still smell the grass hay, horse "biscuits" and sweat. USAC became USU while I studied Forestry and I met my wife in the library before remodeling changed the edifice to the Milton R. Merrill Library (a distant cousin). I made many trips through the Art (Horse) Barn during my student years as I worked on the custodial staff. I'm delighted to see the old concrete building finding continued usefulness instead of disappearing to make way for more parking slots.

Mr. Morrison along wife Betty '66 divides his time between Quartzsite, Arizona in the winter and Santaquin, Utah in the spring and summer.