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.
