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.

John and Deborah Seiter

John Seiter is a professor of Speech Communication. USU's barn was the location of his first office on campus, and the wellspring of many wonderful stories of camaraderie for both he and his wife Debora.

John Seiter remembers:

Antonio (a large ceramic pig from San Antonio that John keeps in his office) ended up being in the barn and it's the best conversation piece for a professor, especially a professor whose office is in the barn.... My students joked that there was a ghost in the barn. And of course a lot of things started being attributed to this, it started as a ghost, and it ended up as a pig ghost....for a while they were blaming it on my pig, and then it went from my pig to it's an actual ghost pig. And they had a name for it, it wasn't Antonio. I can't remember what the name was but, you know that banging (the building had steam heat) that happens at odd times when your in class. Sometimes your teaching and the banging would start and the students would go "It's the ghost pig."

I have an amazing office, third floor of Old Main, just a beautiful view of the Wellsvilles. But if someone was to tell me that I could move back to the barn, with air conditioning, and have the same crew that was there originally, I'd move back. I'm thrilled what they are doing with it because for a while I thought they would tear it down and that's so much a part of my memories of Utah State University.

I never noticed this, but...I do remember students telling me when it rained, that the barn, that they could still smell the hay.... I never smelled it but I heard some many students tell me that 'I can smell hay in here.' I'm saying eight to ten students said it that I thought maybe they had extra sensitive noses or something. I don't know if after years, and years, and years, it gets into the walls.

Debora Seiter remembers:

My uncle Mike (Miles Grant Davidson) is still alive and still lives in Magna, Utah and he is my mother's oldest brother. He was in WWII, and after the war he wanted to be an engineer….He took advantage of the GI bill and he went to USU. The irony of the whole thing is that my mother, who was much younger than my Uncle Mike actually came up here with him to inspect the school with him.... And so when my Uncle Mike knew that John had started teaching here, he wanted to come up and look around, and we walked him all over the campus. And, of course, a lot of the buildings were brand new, but he recognized the older ones, Old Main and he just really honed in on the barn. We took him in there because he knew John's office was in there and he could tell us things about well this used to be here and that used to be there, and thoroughly delighted him that it was still there.

Charlie (Huenemann) was the first person to accept an office outside the barn.... I remember feeling like, well gosh, this isn't going to be the same, and honestly it hasn't. People have kind of branched out and made new connections and networking. But the original group, and I am so glad there had been, three or four years that they were able to make a bond that would carry them elsewhere. But as far as recreating as a group and being able to bounce from office to office, still in your chair rolling around, or being able to have a snake, or whatever. Those times were over.

Dr. Don Smees

Today I had the pleasure of gathering the oral history of Dr. Don Smees of the ADVS who used to work in the virology lab on the second floor of the Art Barn. I am working on transcribing the interview but I think my favorite parts were about how he liked the lab because it had windows, the 400 salamanders he raised there on accident, ad how he thougt it was funny tht they had to cut the railin g to ge the giant hoods that they used up the stairs. He was funny when he was lamenting about wishing there was elevators there-especially when the oxygen guys came to deliver and whined about having to carry the heavy stuff up the stairs. Anywho happy Tuesday.