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