Interview with David Swingle, Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana, on Robert Pirsig, ZMM, MSC, and Bozeman, Montana -- August 3rd, 2014

By Dennis Gary, BS, Montana State College, 1960; MS, University of Oregon, 1964

While attending the Gallatin County High School Reunion of the Class of 1956, which took place July 31 & August 1, 2014, Dennis Gary took the opportunity to visit several long time residents of Bozeman, Montana, and interview them, concerning their thoughts on Robert Pirsig, his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), and the influence of Bozeman, particularly the Montana State College campus, its faculty, and its history.

Below, please find, such an interview, with David Swingle in his office at the Museum of the Rockies on the Montana State University campus. Note, especially, the discussion of the political and educational malaise of the 1950's and '60s which educators in general, and Robert Pirsig, in particular, faced. Robert Pirsig writes an account of this in ZMM, from the point of view of his alter ego, Phaedrus, using Montana State as the setting.

Note: In this interview DG = Dennis Gary, DS = David Swingle.

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DG: This is Dennis Gary. I'm representing Dr. Henry Gurr of the University of South Carolina, Aiken, Professor Emeritus of Physics, who has an interest in Robert Pirsig and his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and has devoted an entire website to that and the history around it, especially that of Montana State College in the late 50's and early 60's. Now, of course, Montana State is called Montana State University and I'm about to interview David A. Swingle who is an official, an instructor and advisor of Museum Studies in the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University.

Mr. Swingle, do we have your permission to use your name, if we transcribe this interview?

DS: Yes.

DG: And it's okay to quote you in doing so?

DS: Yes.

DG: And if we decide to publish this as an audio file on our website, that's okay, too?

DS: Yes.

DG: Okay, thank you very much.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, about getting to Montana State and things like that.

DS: All right. Very quickly, my family has more than a century association with this university [Montana State University, Bozeman MT]. My grandparents came to MSC in 1906 to establish the Departments of Botany and Bacteriology. They established the Nursing Department, they established the country's first Health Service for students at MSC after many students died in the 1919 influenza [epidemic] for lack of care. My parents eventually ended up in California at the University of California [Davis and subsequently, University of California Irvine]. I graduated from Montana State with a bachelor's in history and English and a minor in science, a minor in theater, and a minor in industrial arts. And then I went to the University of California at Berkeley, after teaching a few years in Detroit and San Rafael, CA. At UC [Berkeley], I completed what is called at ASC, an Administrative Services Credential. I have been a public school teacher and administrator for fifty years. My wife and I, between us, have ninety years in the classroom. I taught at all levels, public and private, and I've been with this museum since its founding in 1957. I knew the founders, Carolyn McGill and Dr. Merrill Burlingame, so I kind of go way back on this subject. I have an extensive background with this community. I possess a fairly good memory, and a fairly extensive reading on regional history.

DG: Wow! So let's go on. Have you ever taught on the college level?

DS: Yes.

DG: Okay.

DS: I've taught at five different universities.

DG: You might tell us a few of them.

DS: I taught at the University of San Francisco which was a Catholic college, Dominican College in San Rafael, California, Montana State University, and two courses at Berkeley, There are others in there. I just don't remember all of them in a long career.

DG: What kind of things did you usually teach?

DS: I usually taught either film history courses or educational administration courses.

DG: Okay. So while you were at MSC, did you know Sarah Vinke?

DS: Distantly. I was a child at the time. My parents had five kids. My sister closest to me in age, Diane, – Sarah was her godmother. Sarah was a member of the Episcopal Church, as were my parents. They also knew each other socially through the very small faculty of Montana State College at the time.

DG: Okay. How about Jack Barsness?

DS: I knew Jack Barsness through the English Department and I also knew his brother who was associated with the Virginia City Players, which was an established regional theater group in a nearby ghost town. He was one of the establishing members of the Virginia City Players.

DG: I 've heard about that off and on. I have contact with Tina DeWeese. And she mentions Ann Dunbar and one of the Dusenberry children. They were involved in things like that.

DS: Lynn …
Lynn Dusenberry's father, Verne, converted himself from an English professor into an anthropologist and did a great deal of seminal work on Plains Indians. Part of this museum's primary Plains Indian collection is from Verne Dusenberry, and Verne Dusenberry was a founder, with Burlingame, of the Museum of the Rockies.

DG: And I believe he's featured in Robert Pirsig's second book, Lila, as a character.

DS: Maybe, I have not read that.

DG: John Parker. Do you remember him?

DS: John Parker was actually a mentor of mine in the English Department. A very fine English teacher. I rook Twain and Melville from him, in particular. He [Parker] was a very clear, good stylist. For those of us who could really do literature well and write well, he was really very helpful.

DG: He switched fields then. What I took from him was Major British Writers – which Jack Barsness said was because nobody else wanted the darn thing. Parker taught Technical Writing, I know, and one of my roommates in the Phi Sig house, Floyd Knopes, was in his class and was having trouble with grammar and John Parker told Floyd, “You should find somebody, some A English student to coach you on this. Otherwise, you're going to flunk.” And Floyd said, “What about my roommate, Dennis Gary? And Parker said, “He should do.”

I went over and corrected Floyd's paper. Floyd redid it and took both versions into to Parker, and he looked them over and said, “Your troubles are over.”

And then Floyd said, “ How can I ever thank Dennis Gary?” And Parker said, “Twenty dollars.”

That made me feel good.

And I believe in talking about background you mentioned the DeWeeses in the Art Department.

DS: Yes. My family was pretty straight arrow and the DeWeeses and the Art community were pretty far out for the 1950's. So it was kind of fun to hang around the DeWeeses. They had a big studio in the top of an old brewery on Main Street. And there was always something going on there in small theater or presentation art or small gallery stuff. Both Gennie and Robert. I didn't really know them well, but I was interested in observing their sort of new version of the world and through them I also knew Francis Senska and Jessie Wilbur, who were essentially the founders of the modern Montana State University Art Department and major mentors of ours.

DG: Kay Campeau speaks fondly of them and, of course, her husband Ray Campeau was in art.

DS: All very closely knit.

DG: Going a little further afield, in the History Department, Robert Dunbar?

DS: Yes, I knew of him. I never had a course from him. Robert Dunbar's wife, Mary, was a cellist. My mother, Margaret Swingle, was a pianist and organist. They often produced duets together in small concerts.

DG: Dunbar got in hot water when he and an organization he belonged to invited Eleanor Roosevelt to speak on campus. And Dr. Renne wouldn't allow it.

Do you remember that?

DS: Well, I don't know that Renne was involved. As I remember, the Roosevelt incident . . . I actually went to the Roosevelt presentation in the Willson Auditorium.

DG: I was there, too. Do you remember anything about that?

DS: I remember pretty clearly and since then I've researched the ugly behavior of the town. The John Birch Society, anti-Communist types in town – in a sense, tried to refuse her a hotel room; they placed a red chair on stage, which would be her chair, among the delegates on the stage of the Willson. And other really small minded, small town stuff like that was evident with her. There is sort of a history of stuff like that in these western towns of nineteenth century racism. It's a very serious matter. In my historic tours of Bozeman, I mention the brutality to the nineteenth century, and we're not over it yet.

But I remember the presentation. She was clear and lucid . I think I was about a ninth grader at the time. I could gain the gist of it quite well. But I'm also appalled, in what I figured out later on, at the treatment of her.

DG: Dunbar mentions it in a monograph I happen to have, about academic freedom between 1947 and the 1960's here in Bozeman and especially on the campus. Dunbar taught here until 1974. I guess this issue sort of evaporated later on.

DS: Maybe.

DG: At least Dunbar stopped writing about it era 1961. And he mentions the fact that he introduced her as “the First Lady of the World.”

DS: We need to go back a little bit on Montana history. Although it's a remote and isolated state, when World War I started, Montana had twice the normal rate of draft because of an error in the census. The 1910 census had burned up so somebody in DC took a guess at how many men should be conscripted and the state developed an enormous paranoia of the Hun. In fact, there are many articles I have over here on the shelves of the Museum about Gotha bombers being hidden in the caves. The Alien and Sedition Acts originated in Montana and were eventually adopted by the nation as a whole, but they originated here, and about eighty people were imprisoned. They were only pardoned posthumously by Governor Schweitzer about five years ago. Montana has a nasty, brutal political history. Part of it was that the IWW (International Workers of the World) was strong here in the Butte mines and the progressive movements among the agriculturalists on the eastern prairies were quite threatening. Some town even had a Socialist mayor of, I think, it was Sidney, Montana, or it may have been Poplar, Montana. So there was quite a bit of “barroom” ignorance afloat everywhere.

DG: Right. And getting back to the Eleanor Roosevelt affair, Dr. Renne did refuse her permission to speak on campus. That's been documented.

DS: Okay.

DG: Pirsig mentions that in ZMM and they're talking in a restaurant or a bar in Miles City, Montana, in their trip across the United States and John Sutherland says they are talking about it in the bar. And what they were talking about was that there were some forty or fifty professors at Montana State College that Governor Nutter said he had identified and said he wanted fired. Then Nutter was killed in a plane crash and the new governor, Tim Babcock, decided not to pursue it. And Pirsig says something to the effect or Phaedrus says something to the effect that Gallatin County is a little different than any other county in the United States. The conservatives there are much different than elsewhere and it has all of these so-called radicals. This was the college where Eleanor Roosevelt was refused permission to speak on campus. And somebody says, “That was wild.”

It was quite an incident at the time, but I, too, went. I talked a bunch of my Phi Sig brothers into going. They didn't know how to get to the Willson Auditorium, but I did because I graduated from Gallatin County High School whose auditorium was renamed the Willson Auditorium when the high school closed down. And then we walked up the street to the Emerson auditorium for a reception. And we got in a line and got to shake her hand and exchanged a few remarks with her. I wanted to say something more than just “How are you” or “Welcome to Montana” to her so I said something to the effect of “Have you ever thought that the Soviet Union, which we criticize for having all of these satellite nations surrounding it as a protection, might criticize us for having sponsored NATO, in fact, making its affiliates our satellite nations.” Eleanor replied, “Why that's interesting Dennis. I'll have to think on that.” And I thought afterward, if I hadn't had Robert Dunbar for a professor, I would never have thought of saying that. So I felt really good about somebody out here in the wilderness like Dr. Dunbar. And I felt the same way about Sarah Vinke. How did Shakespeare and Sophocles make the giant leap from the East Coast universities to a cow college in Montana. And it was people like Sarah Vinke who brought it here. And Bob Dunbar, I think.

DS: Well, during the formation of statehood, there was an intentional policy of importing New England education into the State.

DG: The Ivy League.

DS: Well, just generally from the great number of people who came from the New England colleges and also particularly the Universities of Wisconsin and Kansas. So they brought intact those bodies of learning and viewpoints and academic disciplines. When you look at the very early yearbooks on the campus, and I have them all the way back to 1906, you see everybody there is certified somewhere else. So you get these values that came out and produced a pretty good university system both at Missoula and here and in the later Montana University System branches, which weren't too bad. So you do get the East Coast influences.

You also have a strong, strong populist movement during the Farmers' Union years. You have the IWW, as I've mentioned before. You have European, tremendous number of Germans, Ukrainians, Central and Eastern European people who move in with the Homesteaders . . . so there is a lot of foment and ferment.

You also have powerful capitalists move in who are determined to control the situation and those operated generally out of Butte or were absentees, living in New York City, Boston, New Jersey, etc. So you have the labor unions operating in Butte, but you also had master capitalists, brutal capitalists, working there and in the East, too. You end up at one point with major strikes in Butte before and during World War I. You have Montana National Guard boys looking down water-cooled machine guns at Butte strikers during the day and during the night they're all drinking together. We have that documented by some of Dr. Mike Malone's work over here on the shelf.

So it’s a vigorous place and vigorous time. I was just looking at the book here and it mentions a person named Harvey Griffin. Griffin was an Agricultural Experiment Station technician who, as far as I can tell, was fired. I find him in the yearbooks around World War (?), and then he suddenly disappears. It looks to me like he got sacked. So [perhaps] he became bitter and later started his own paper called the Gallatin Country Tribune, which was a right-wing, extreme right- wing mouthpiece. Eventually, it becomes a John Birch Society mouth piece – the John Birch Society was a predecessor of the Tea Party. And Griffin was particularly active and nasty in its politics in dealing with the campus. You get people like moderate governors for a while and then you get Nutter who probably, who probably, in effect, inadvertently engineered his own airplane crash. He was a very successful B-24 pilot, who had gotten away with a lot during World War II. And he forced the National Guard to fly him in bad weather to a speaking engagement in Great Falls, tore a wing off the plane, an improperly maintained, C-47, and piled into Wolf Creek Canyon.

I remember the next day on campus people were sort of looking at each other with a half smile and saying, “I didn't do it.” “I didn't do it.” “I didn't do it.” There was real relief here. Nutter was the reason my parents left this campus and went to the University of California, Davis. It wasn't worth being here. Among the first things that Nutter did by fiat was to demolish the Veterinary Research Department. Here you have an agricultural state and the governor, the first thing he does in is that which benefits the farm population the most. It was an irrational time. Babcock was more moderate and brought the state back to center.

DG: That's interesting because Robert Dunbar in his Monograph mentions that some group of students on campus, I don't have the name in front of me unfortunately, were sponsoring these talks on foreign relations and the like and Dunbar gave the concluding one in the Student Union Building about the United Nations and this and that – what he thought our policies should be like. And then his talk was rebroadcast on KBMN on Sunday. And, two people who attended were Harvey Griffin and Malcolm Story.

DS: Terrible people, politically, but nice enough in person.

DG: And he said they were polite enough at his talk in the SUB, but when he appeared on KBMN, Malcolm Story demanded equal time, which the station gave him. And during that broadcast Story said that the State Board of Education, or Regents, should fire Robert Dunbar and if it didn't a vigilante committee should. And that rang a bell with me, and I looked up the vigilantes of Virginia City, Montana, and the fact that at one time Nelson Story was watching somebody being strung up. And he was afraid the guy's friends were going shoot the rope down. So Nelson races forward and pulls the box out from under the guy to make sure he gets hanged.

DS: Yes. Nelson Story the First, was a typical man of his time. He was actually a draft dodger in the Civil War, in my view. He was a schoolteacher in Ohio who went west instead and saved his money. In Virginia City he was a teetotaler. So he didn't drink it up and womanize it away. He went to Texas and bought a lot of stray cattle and drove them to Montana. Larry McMurtry sort of glamorizes it in Lonesome Dove, which is not very close to the truth. Story was a very strong willed capitalist. There were several instances of him caning or pistol-whipping rivals in the streets of Bozeman. As for Malcolm Story and Harvey Griffin, as a kid, . . . it was kind of fun to prod them a little bit and have them go into lecturing rants. Malcolm was a grandson of Nelson's. Malcolm did not complete either public or private education. In fact, he never went to public school. He was hostile to public education. Hostile to taxes. Hostile to city government. For some reason his statue is on the grounds of the administrative school buildings in Bozeman. It's ironic, but it was a superintendent that put him there, put the statue there, who had no idea of local history. But Malcolm was very much against everything. The good thing about him was he had a very good historical memory, was a good secondary source on Nelson Story and the era of the settling of Bozeman.

Yes, he also worshiped the Vigilantes . . . Nelson Story among other things nearly got into a shooting fight with the U. S. Army for pasturing his cattle on the way north from Texas to Montana, pasturing them on Fort Hayes Cavalry land, and nearly another shooting war with the Indians. He almost produced a war with the U.S. Army and another war with the Indians on the way through. He armed his men with Remington breach loading rifles (probably Model 1865 “Split Breech” .50 cal.) he bought surplus after the Civil War. Actually, the Army was out gunned, and the Indians were somewhat out gunned. Nelson had a number of escapades. He finally ends up in Los Angeles. He dies in 1922 owning much of the center part of the city and part of Long Beach. His descendants were more moderate people, and the current seventh, eighth, ninth generation are very civic minded and very strong community supporters. The last time I saw Malcolm was on Willson. He couldn't drive any more. He still carried his big cane. He was jay walking and some car cut him off and so he whacked the car with the cane as it went by. That’s the last time I saw Malcolm. But he always was kind of fun.

Harvey Griffin was no fun at all. As to Harvey Griffin, another student and I used to go out to his home on South Nineteenth and have a talk with him, but he would just go into these irrational rants. It seemed to be an anger-based thing specific to the University. I can't prove it, but I think he was fired by the then college. Maybe he never got over it.

So these are the kind of people that Pirsig may have encountered out here.

DG: Or at least the values they espoused.

And Pirsig, incidentally, mentions in ZMM, he and Chris taking a walk up toward the campus and passing the Story Mansion. Now, what would you call the Story Mansion?

DS: That would be the [former] SAE house.

DG: That's what I would say. Because Dr. Gurr got the impression that it was Malcom Story's house, the pink house. But I think it was the SAE house.

DS: Malcolm and his wife, Rose, lived in what I think was the Mendenhall house, lived there from the '50's onward. I'm pretty sure he [Pirsig] was referring to the SAE house.

DG: Thank you. Which is getting us closer to Robert Pirsig and the book. You never had an encounter with Pirsig? Is that correct?

DS: No and it's not likely. You know I would have been a high school student at the time he was teaching here. He was just another obscure, I think, a non-tenure track professor, slaving his way through what we now call English 101. I think in your time it was probably called English 1A.

DG: Actually it was 101, 102, 103.

DS: They finally went to the university numbering system when I got to the campus.

DG: I wonder if I can find out what the course was because Pirsig gave a presentation included on Anthony McWatt's website devoted to ZMM. McWatt is from Oxford University in England and has spoken on this campus at that Chautauqua that they had. Anthony McWatt's Robert Pirsig WebSite Of Jan 22 2018, As Saved By Archive.org.

DG: And Pirsig mentions that Howard Dean was the de-facto head of the department. Did you know Howard Dean?

DS: Yup, Howard Dean was another member of St. James Episcopal and his wife taught a very competent Sunday school. In fact, my wife also teaches at church school, and she actually refers to Helen Dean's lessons. They were so well designed for little children to make sense of basic theology, Christian theology. But Howard Dean always struck me as a sort of distant but very fair man. He always had a real sense of fairness and justice. I never took a class from him, but he had the reputation of being very appropriate at all times.

DG: And he was head of the program called Oral and Written Communication, which was an alternative to straight English composition, where, instead of getting three credits you got four credits, met four days a week and you not only wrote but you learned to speak, analyze the media and things like that. And he authored the course textbook called Effective Communication. Later, Dr. Ken Bryson was also listed as the co-author.

DS: I knew Ken pretty well.

DG: I did too. I took a course on the history of public address from Ken. He seemed like a nice guy.

DS: I was just thinking about these people. Most of them are imports, and I was thinking about the conflict . . . You know, Pirsig refers to sort of these dead classes that he had and students only being able to learn by rote, and I don't think that Pirsig had the perspective of the time to completely understand what he was dealing with. As a professor here now, I still deal with some of it, but you had an enormous culture clash . . . a lot of first generation immigrant kids come into a state school and you had virtually no out of state students because it wasn't a reputation school but also out of state tuitions were prohibitive, even then. It's prohibitive now. And so you get kids who are really off the farm, off the ranch with little, small town coffee shop values and they come to a campus and they're suddenly confronted with more than rote. Because Montana high schools, and I travel – there's my travel map where I supervise teachers. I travel the state and I still run into school boards that think that colleges are just big high schools, just for recitation. And because we have an annual school tax election in this state in every district, and there are 540 districts, politics is very sensitive so if the kids do something or have an idea, or start an underground newspaper or write a paper that is more than just a recitation of a textbook, it can sink that levy, which means the school then starves for the next year. So there are a lot of consequences.

A guy like Pirsig who is having mental illness troubles, and people I know who had his classes say he was just incoherent in class as far as they were concerned. He would have parentheticals within parentheticals, because he was also writing texts or tech manuals at the time. He would try to use them as models. Also, remember there was no audio-visual presentation of anything and there weren't many mimeograph copies. As I know from Burlingame, these were very expensive. So it’s lecture-learn, and its very drab circumstances. I know the building he taught in was the Montana Hall Annex.

DG: Didn't he teach in Montana Hall proper sometimes?

DS: He probably did, but from what I can tell, I have some place here I have a campus catalog.

DG: I'd like to see that sometime.

DS: But the thing I'd like to mention is he's teaching in a wooden, echo-y, noisy World War II surplus building. Classes did not necessarily all change at the same time. So he's up against a tough teaching situation, I would guess. And he's talking to people who have no philosophic background, whatsoever, and if they have anything, its abstract, probably a Protestant Church or a simplified Catholic education. So he has students who are really not prepared for what he thinks should be a university education.

You know I had a terrible time when I first read his book, of sorting through it. One thing was interesting is when I first looked up Phaedrus, I couldn't find a proper reference for it. It's sort of an obscure corruption of a Greek term. So I would take a guess that his teaching style and his own illnesses and the class sections that he had were probably more than a hundred students at a time. A lot of the freshman subjects were three hundred students . . . taught in one of the biggest buildings, an ag sales barn down on the campus, now gone, a big eight sided octagonal building on Eleventh – it had three hundred students in freshman math classes.

Remember its post-war. The campus is crowded and the campus is understaffed and it’s underpaid and you can't attract and keep good people. So this is a pretty dark time in this place, and Roland Renne's trying to fight the legislature for modern buildings and a more modern outlook, and so Renne has to compromise on political things like Eleanor Roosevelt and Leslie Fiedler and many other compromises were made. Personally speaking, at least he didn't compromise when founding the Museum of the Rockies. When Burlingame brought the idea of the museum forth, Renne jumped on it.. The University of Montana had rejected it.

DG: My experience was that all the English courses that I took, except one or two, were in Montana Hall. Including the freshman communications courses. Although, one year, Titus Kurtichanov offered his course in Russian Literature and something like seventy-five or eighty people signed up so I think they transferred it to Reid Hall to an almost a theater like classroom.

DS: Reid Hall would have just been built while you were here.

DG: Yes, this would have been about '58 or '59.

DS: Those are good lecture halls still.

DG: What was so ironic is that Paul Grieder would offer a class in Major American Writers and twenty people would sign up, and Titus Kurtichanov would offer a course in Bible Literature or Russian Literature and up to eighty would sign up.

DS: That was quite a personality there. A personality as big as the name.

DG: Titius Kurtichanov. He was such a happy person. A big smile . . .

Anyway, getting back to Pirsig for the moment, I have a list of some of the topics he assigned students to write on. Like write on your thumbnail. Or a penny. Or an article from Harper's Magazine. Or write a 350 word essay answering the question, “What is quality in thought and statement.” Or narrow it (your topic) down to the front of one building on Main Street of Bozeman, the Bozeman Opera House. Start with the upper left hand brick. . . Assignments like that.

DS: Remember at that point Pirsig was in a very obsessive state of mind, and by his own accounts, he was obsessing over Vinke's question on “What is quality?” In fact, much later, when I was teaching literature, I used to give the question to high school students. And it was very perplexing to them. They had a terrible time with these things like the thumbnail and brick and so forth. You know, take a bunch of farm kids . . . probably had never written anything creative ever.

By the way, most of the high school teachers in Montana post war were not certified or they were only partially certified. Or they were some farm wives with a couple of courses in English. They had a whole department in some class C schools out in the boondocks . . . So again, it's a pretty serious time, but I was thinking about it last night after we first met. I think it, the situation provoked Pirsig to think more obsessively and out of this came some pretty good philosophic thought.

DG: Getting back to both Sarah Vinke and Howard Dean . . . Well, Howard Dean . . . he was very tightly organized. I took two classes from him: Introduction to Literature, which was essentially the New Criticism as put forth by I. A. Richards. [For any chosen book.] He didn't talk about the author's background or history, just the story and what was in it. But I think it was an excellent way to start literature. The other things could come later. Other people would argue with me on that. And then he did something similar with [his course on] the Modern Novel. But he was so well organized, on the other hand, he was very high strung.

DS: Yes. I never did the course, but I do remember as an English major one way around analyzing the assigned text was to tie in background material – like when we were working on Blake, we could go into Blake's various circumstances and obsessions and art work and sort of BS our way around the actual poem. So I think Howard Dean was probably tired of that and decided “You guys write about what you're supposed to write about.” I guess that [I do this] as an English teacher myself.

DG: And then some of the earlier criticism, say of a previous generation, thought that biography passed for critical analysis and it really doesn't. You know, if you know where Shakespeare was born, you'll understand Shakespeare. Well, you have to know a lot more than that.

Sarah Vinke, interestingly . . . you know you mentioned the University of Wisconsin . . . Vinke, Burlingame, and Dunbar all had PhD's from the University of Wisconsin. At any rate, when Sarah came in the first day of Shakespeare, she asked why had Shakespeare lasted all these hundreds of years and people were talking about the beauty of expression and nobility of thought, and she said, “Nuts, all great drama is blood, guts, and sex and don't you ever forget it.” So she had a sense that she was talking to kids just off a ranch. I think that she could relate. Probably because she grew up in rural Iowa.

DS: What I remember of her is . . . I was about eleven or twelve when my sister was christened and all that. In those days there were Sunday dinners . . . everybody had Sunday dinners and usually . . . Sarah was very nice to me as just a kid. She wouldn't talk down to me. She would talk with me. She would ask about my ideas and can't recall her hectoring me at all. I never had her for a class because when I finally got to the university, she was gone.

DG: Jack Barsness told me she had a deteriorative spinal condition.

DS: Yes she had a profound dowager hump, as I recall. Probably was very arthritic. As I remember in our house . . . she liked our house, it was a long flat floored single story house and think she was using one, if not two canes. . .

DG: I think she was even on crutches for a while, but . . .

DS: On the third floor of Montana Hall, she'd have to stump up there.

DG: There was an elevator, but you could walk up to the third floor quicker than the elevator could get you there, when I was there anyway, and I know that the Hall has changed over the years, but she was able to communicate with farm kids and I was a farm kid.

DS: I think she would be able to do so with [because the campus circumstances where difficult & corrupted] a troubled personality . . . I've been around this campus for a long time and I've seen lost souls that show up out here on some kind of a teaching contract, a tenure or a non-tenure contract, and the community even now is so different and the values of the university are better than they used to be, but the values then (in Pirsig's day) were so corrupted or simply not established yet or they were the values of classical people like Vinke, with standards that were very hard to meet. I think it was pretty discouraging and there was (and still is) a very, very fast turn over in every department, except for the lifer's who, of course, had worked their way in. And some of those were high quality people. People like Pirsig were just academic cannon fodder, often given 150 freshmen in Reid Hall and all that stuff, assigning typed or hand written, probably hand written, papers . . . and then hand corrected. I wonder if he ever had them turn in a second draft. Because that's really a chore when you need to read the revisions compared to the originals.

DG: I learned great deal about writing from Jack Barsness, as a matter of fact, because he taught a course in** . . . they couldn't duplicate the University of Montana so they named the same courses other things so he didn't teach journalism class, he taught Informal Exposition, though it was essentially magazine and newspaper article writing. He didn't teach creative writing, he taught Narrative and Descriptive Writing, which was essentially short story writing.
[NOTE: At ** the course may have been => Informal Exposition,
Narrative and Descriptive Writing, ]

And the English Department itself was in the Division of Science.

DS: So you have a Bachelor of Science and I have a Bachelor of Science in English.

DG: Yeah. Actually, I had to get my Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education with an academic major in English.

DS: Yes, there were ways of trying to work around it. The legislature . . . the Board of Regents wasn't as effective then as it is now . . . There were a lot of work-arounds to get anything going on this campus.

DG: You were talking about assignments. One of Jack's earliest assignments in creative writing was to take three unrelated inanimate objects and write a story connecting them. Stuff like that. A brick, a shoe and whatever . . .

DS: I took Short Story from Paul Grieder, and it was a pretty conventional class, but . . . I actually have some of my drafts. He really carefully corrected stuff.

DG: He wasn't too well liked, as a teacher, when I was there. In fact, he stepped in once for about a week or so to pinch hit for Jack Barsness in one of the writing courses and students started skipping the class and on the last day that Barsness was out, I was headed up the stairs to the class and a bunch of my fellow classmates were headed down the stairs, and they literally picked me up and carried me down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, telling me. “You're not going up there either. We're boycotting this class.”

And Grieder retaliated, this was in the magazine article writing class, and told Jack Barsness he had to dock us all one-letter grade. I complained, “I've worked so hard to get that A.” And Barsness told me, “I can't up you from a B to an A because it would be obvious then that I haven't docked your grade.” But he went on, “I'll tell you what. I'll make you a deal. If you write anything good at all in short story writing, I'll guarantee you an A.”

DS: I had Grieder as my academic adviser. You know, I was always on time, and he was always right to the point. And they were good fifteen-minute sessions.

DG: He was good about that with me, also. Once Howard Dean walked in on us and said, “Paul, this can't wait.” And Grieder said, “Well, it will have to wait. This time is for Mr. Gary; you'll have to come back later.” And I said to Paul after Dean left, “You didn't have to do that.” And he said, “Oh, yes I did.” So he was good there.

DS: That's my experience with him, too.

DG: And when he concluded I might be writing for the college newspaper Exponent, he invited me into his office, “Are you the same Gary whose writing for the Exponent?” He knew me by my first name, Robert, which was on all the official records, and I was signing my articles Dennis Gary, which is my middle name. “Will you please step into my office if you have time? I'd like to talk to you about this. We really like somebody whose major is English writing for the Exponent. Let's go over to a table, and we'll go through a couple of your articles.” He told me, “You are a master of indirection. You have pulled me through subjects I don't even care about wondering what in the heck you're writing about and I'd get out my blue marking pencil, thinking this time he's off the subject and then in the last paragraph, frequently in the last sentence of the last paragraph, and just as frequently in one of those darn German-ically structured sentences where the verb is the last word, everything falls into place. You've accounted for this, that, everything.”

DS: That's a nice compliment.

DG: Yes. Then he asked, “What kind of reading do you do during summer vacation? . . . if you do read then.” And I told him I'd been reading Bennett Cerf's anthology An Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor and E.B. and Katherine Anne White's A Sub-treasury of American Humor. And Paul replies, “That's where you're picking up your style, as if by osmosis! You're reading the best stylists of the twentieth century.” So that was encouraging, too.

And you had a positive . . .

DS: Yes. I have a generally favorable view of most of these people, and I think the thing we all have to have is an historical perspective of the political times of McCarthy-ism and post-war paranoia and also a real envy factor. There was a big factor I still see in the rural towns of “that family is wealthy enough to send a kid to college and I'm kind of envious of that.” There's a certain resentment and back biting that goes with that.

I was principal of schools in West Yellowstone for five years, and the town was really factionalized by the Forest Service and Park Service people there that clearly wanted something for their kids and much of the rest of the town which just wanted their kids to play basketball and evaluated schools on the basis of how well the team was doing and which never did well.

DG: When I was in the seventh and eighth grade I went to Salesville Elementary School in Gallatin Gateway, Montana. Sales – a Mr. Sales had founded Gallatin Gateway, and the district had never changed the name of the school when I was there to Gallatin Gateway School.

DS: That was a politically riven district. So, Gateway, Slap Town, Salesville, whatever you want to call it, has a very rapid turnover of school administrators and staff. Virtually everything there is controversial. The Monforton family and now there's Simes. Enders – all these families held very tight opinions of what there taxes should be, and they figure they can keep costs down by not allowing people tenure. It's better now.

DG: I think maybe the ranch has sold again, but Ernest Monforton bought my Grandmother Gary's ranch, which we were ranching on after she and my father passed away, and the Monfortons were our next-door neighbors, although Ernest had built a very large brick or cement block house over by Bozeman Hot Springs. His relatives and employees stayed on the ranch in the old houses there, and we were sort of like their next-door neighbors.

There was always this conflict because he had been living in our house while he had a ten-year lease on the property and when that was up, my father took the place. So there was a certain conflict there, although the two were always civil with each other. In fact, Ernest told my father if we were going to start raising cattle, be sure it's Herefords not Angus, and he'd even give us the use of one of his bulls so that there wouldn't be any danger of interference with his purebred Hereford line. So there was some cooperation between the two.

Back to Montana politics, my father was an ultra-conservative, reactionary – sort of a John Birch type.

DS: So he probably read Harvey Griffin's paper.

DG: I don't remember it. I know we read the Bozeman Chronicle, but under who was it, Nicholas Ifft the third?

DS: And it wasn't quite an Anaconda paper any more. But it didn't have much content.

DG: So as I was saying, my father was more or less a reactionary Republican. My mother was just so-so. I never told them about going to listen to Eleanor Roosevelt, believe you me. And a Mrs. Ora Olson, Hazel Olson, was my teacher at the Salesville school and there was a Mrs. Hanno there. That is where I went to the seventh and eighth grade and then I was off to Gallatin County High School – stuff like that.

DS: Under Homer Anderson . . .

DG: He seemed so non-committal.

DS: The most corrupt school administrator I ever knew. One of the things about Homer Anderson is he helped found the Bridger Ski Bowl because he loved to ski, but he also . . . he also ‘borrowed’ the high school district's back up war surplus generator and it went up to Bridger to power stuff up there. So we don't need to get into all that, but until Hiney Lund became high school principal, there weren't any standards.

DG: I know. There were several good teachers there, though.

DS: Teachers like Miss Russell, the Latin teacher.

DG: I didn't get along too well with . . . I had dropped Latin because I got an F on the first test . . .

DS: Everybody got an F in Latin. That's all she could give out.

DG: But I took junior English from her then. She was more interesting than Miss Neibel; Winifred Robertson was just awful. Ivan Hunt came to Gallatin High, and he was really a good teacher and think he ended up at Great Falls . . .

DS: He was essentially the one that I modeled my teaching after.

DG: I don't know. [any more about this, but] … I was good in literature and composition because my usage was good, but in analytical noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, I was poor and that always dragged my grades down. I get to Montana State and I say to Mr. Grieder that I was concerned about that because I wanted to major in English, and he told me that ninety percent of traditional grammar is bullshit anyway. When you need something like that, we'll teach it to you. And it was true. I was having trouble with subject-verb agreement. Jack Barsness gives me a couple of examples on the board. And here's a prepositional phrase and all that, and I had it.

DS: You see, what you're getting at is the core of the conflict between the high school students coming from everywhere to this university and what the university expects. The high schools think English is all mechanics and so their students come prepared in all the prepositions and usages, but if you get here to a university and are supposed to think, and what Pirsig would want is he would want the students to actually delve into . . . In fact, the matter of the brick [relates in ZMM Pirsig writes => “He told her angrily, ‘Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick. ’] is really interesting, because I am about to do a presentation at the Head Waters in two weeks, and I'm taking a brick out there, because what I'm doing is I'm teaching it from the standpoint – on how large equipment was brought to the Northern mines, post-Civil War. I mean, how do you move a ten-ton boiler from Los Angeles across the Mojave and the Great Basin to Montana for some stamp mill or saw mill? So I'm going into that, but I'm also – in my architectural tour I ask while the old Bozeman houses are beautiful, who dug the clay for all this and who sifted all this, who dug the coal? Who fired the boiler? Who were the teamsters and the people dealing with all the hundreds of horses that were involved? I go into the labor of the Nineteenth Century and I use that thing, the brick, as a metaphor, all because the brick in the Opera House analogy [in Pirsig's book].

I would have no trouble writing an essay on that. . . that is, what Pirsig would want because I can think like that…. But most kids never had the advantage of a family that every meal in my household was a pretty good academic discussion. My parents were both biochemists and my mother was a fine musician and they were from, they were educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania, so I had a lot going for me as a university brat. So I was lucky. I wasn't particularly bright, but I came from a great background.

You've done very well because you didn't come from an academic background.

DG: Well, no. But my father had a degree in Electrical Engineering from Montana State. So he wasn't ignorant.

DS: No. I'm not saying ignorant but what I'm saying is he'd be working so hard on any Gallatin Valley ranch – it would be incredibly demanding during the season.

DG: Usually too tired and too tied up with ranch problems.

Any way, my mother taught fifth grade in Vernal, Utah, and so she had studied two years, I think at the University of Utah, but you didn't need a full four years to teach elementary school at the time and one summer she went to the University of Chicago during the Robert Maynard Hutchins era, so she had the ability, maybe not the training . . .

DS: Well, then we, both of us, had the advantages that most of the kids coming out of the boondocks, out of the poor families in Butte or Great Falls wouldn't have.

DG: That's interesting . . . I’m thinking of two things . . . The first two years I taught in Klamath Falls, Oregon, at Klamath Union High School . . . it was the best high school I ever taught in. [It had much =>] Four years of Latin, four years of German, French, Spanish, Advanced Placement English, Advanced Placement Physics and Chemistry, full Orchestra, Band . . . for this lumber mill town in southern Oregon, but I just got in there and I was told by one of the vice-principals in charge of scheduling that by a fluke any freshman who signed up for General Science and Latin I, had to take college prep Freshman English from me. “So by a process of selection, you got the cream of the crop.” And I asked if he would have any advice for me and he said, “Take the ball and run with it.”

So I did. I said to myself, “I'm going to make this as much like a college course as I can.” I gave them open book essay tests like in Shakespeare and I told my students, “These questions require you to make up your mind, to take a stand. If you write on both sides of the issue, I'm going to give you a poor grade. If you take one side and defend it with quotations, examples, details, even if I don't agree with you, I'll give you a good grade. And those ninth graders loved that. The other teachers didn't. They were . . .”Oh, no. Multiple choice, true-false, matching – that's the way to go. And you save yourself a lot of work in the process.”

DS: Gets you home by 4:00 o'clock.

DG: Yeah. And I argued that life wasn't a multiple-choice test. But they said, “Our job isn't to teach critical thinking. It's to teach mental discipline. And we should be teaching values.” And I said, “Whose values? Your values or my values?” “Our values”, you know.

DS: That's a vague word like “quality.”

DG: So I scandalized them.

DS: Define that one [quality].

DG: Four or five years later I'm completing a Master's Degree at the University of Oregon, and I meet the boy friend of who I think was one of the best students I ever had, and I told him I had taught at Klamath Union High School, and we were just busing dishes in the school cafeteria to make ends meet during Summer School, and so I told him I had taught at KU [Klamath Union High School] and he said, “Oh, that's where I went my last year, not my first three years, but I graduated from KU.” And I said, I rattled off a list of my former college prep students and he said, “I know all of them. I'm going back to Klamath Falls this weekend to a party at one of their homes.” And I said, “Well, tell them that Mr. Gary or Dennis Gary says, 'Hi.'”

Well, he comes back the next Monday, and he says, “We've got to talk. At first, I didn't really believe you. You look about my age. But I went back there. I mentioned you. They asked me to describe you at this party. And suddenly they said, “He's the one. He's the one we've been telling you about. He's the teacher who made the difference!” And he said, “It didn't matter what class we were in. We took classes together. We gave parties at each other’s homes. We went to ball games and school dances together. Sometime during the day, you always came up, the teacher who made the difference. And I told my mother about you and she said, 'From what you tell me, your friends had the good fortune to get a skills teacher.' A so called subject matter teacher, with a dichotomy being made in educational circles of the subject versus skills teacher, the subject matter teacher throws the subject at you sink or swim. The skills teacher gives you the tools, the whys, the wherefores of the discipline. That's what you did. We ran our classes. If the teacher was goofing up, we let him have it.”

Any way, it me feel good when he told me that. I could remember in Shakespeare, I gave them their tests back and I told them I was generally very pleased with the results. “But the real test will be the next Shakespeare play you read. The one on your own. And you'll be better prepared for having taken this course.” So I think we can relate to things like that.

DS: Yes, at Berkeley we did a casual [causal?] study of effective teaching and it didn't matter age, gender, politics, but what did matter was verbal skill – the key thing that would show up with memorable teachers. But anyway, getting back to Pirsig for a minute here . . .

DG: Yes, I want to get back to ZMM and your use of it, if we could.

DS: Well, how I was first introduced to it is kind of weird. My wife and I first taught in Detroit, on the edge of Detroit in a pretty backwards school situation where we actually had a lot of influence because we cared – bothered to do anything there. And then we moved to San Francisco where she was in the American Conservatory Theater while I was teaching school, and she went overseas with a USO tour for a year which gave me even more latitude to really deal with my teaching, and when we got back together we were really concerned about how provincial the Bay Area students were. This is about the time that movie Deliverance had come out and so Bay Area kids, kind of left-wing high school kids, were sure that the inland areas were full of bow hunters killing outsiders. They had a very negative view of the rest of the country, very isolated. So we decided we'd form a traveling school in the summers. We put together a 501c3 Corporation and bought an Air Force surplus bus and our students formed a co-operative and they raised all the money. No matter how wealthy they were, they had to raise all the money, without having Aunt Bessie write the check. So we would travel doing community stuff, community works during the summer. And some times we'd travel a bit during the school year on weekends and we'd travel out of California. Also we'd travel into rural areas of California, and so they'd get a much better view of reality.

Because I knew Montana well and had a place here in Bozeman, we'd come here. We had one student along named Rick Rodriguez. Rick was a big, heavy-set kid, but he was one of the brightest students I ever had. I could deal with Twain, Melville, or anything with him on pretty much a peer basis, and while we were here in Montana, Spring, 1969,we took him to the MSU Student Bookstore; of course, it was just a playground for Rick and the others. They loved it. He bought a copy of a weird book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he said, after I asked him, “Yeah. This book is written about this campus.”

So I thought, oh, good here's another one of this type, because there were a number of books out bashing inland campuses, about how backwards they were and so forth. So I avoided reading the book because I thought “its just another trashing of a poor campus, poor in quality and poor financially.”

But then he said, “No, you really have to read this.”

So I began to read and I came across Sarah Vinke and so I became more personally attached to the book. And I bought my own copy and struggled on through the first parts of it. When I got to the second part, because coincidentally in California, I'd been teaching Advanced Placement English and then abruptly, (this was in a big high school, about 2,500 student high school in San Rafael), the head of Industrial Arts killed himself and because I had an Industrial Arts minor from here (MSC) and on a California certificate you could teach anything in those days, I was transferred from Advanced Placement English right out into heading Industrial Arts!

DG: I can remember that era. I had a General Secondary Credential which qualified me to teach any subject offerred in the California high school, despite the fact I had no training in many of them.

DS: Yes, so the next day they said you're running an 800 student Industrial Arts program. And so I was yanked out of what I had been teaching and put in the shops out behind the school. But because we needed some extra money, I also began teaching night school, too. So I taught for the junior college (College of Marin), and I originated a course in Auto Mechanics for Women. As I prepared curriculum for it, I recalled reading the second part of ZMM, which really deals with the matter of logic and causality. It's so clear and so vivid. What I did was take cuttings out of the book [ZMM].
… I actually literally cut a book up because this was pre-computer and photocopied the paste-up. So the course was designed for mostly divorced and widowed women who had to deal with automobiles and they were getting ripped-off by dealership service managers and private mechanics all over the place. For tuition and living I'd worked as a mechanic for years and I saw horrendous problems with this.
…So I would use quotes from the book. I'd actually cut the book up and put it on a Xerox machine and run it off for them, so they'd have it in class, and we really got used to the idea that there's nothing ‘magical’ in the machine.

The Sutherland family, in ZMM, is always concerned about getting there, not about how a machine runs and not how to prevent trouble. So because of ZMM, I was able to really stress preventive maintenance. Check your tires. Check your oil. Don't burn the car up unnecessarily. And when you deal with a service manager, here are the questions you ask. But they really liked the book and some of them would go back and read the front of the book. So I found the book tremendously useful. I think other teachers could still do this.

Since that time there's been a real change in public thinking because of computers. Computers are like what Pirsig was writing about in his manuals, I expect. You have to do it right, or it flat-out doesn't work. Computers aren't intuitive, not even Macintosh's, which are closer to being intuitive. If you don't enter the right date, you don't get the right result. Now, Google is beginning to use a kind of generalized thinking like a human does, but you have to search correctly or it won't run, not because its evil or that I.T. [Information Technology] can help you, but because you didn't do it right.
…So you have to go in there and you have to analyze what you did stage by stage. When Pirsig is dealing with a fuel/air mixture, a carburetor mixture on a motorcycle, he analyzed the [amount on black soot on the spark plugs or he'd look at the [spark timing] setting or if the changed altitude . . . I think there's one part in the book . . . I think they're coming into Miles City which is a higher elevation that Dakota and the bikes aren't running well because the air density has changed. And Pirsig goes through what he did for carb[urrator] adjustment. And the Sutherlands won't go through it because they’d rather just blame the machine. They had a BMW motorcycle, a much better cycle than the Honda that Pirsig had. They'd blame the machine, instead of becoming logical. They could only believe in frustrated irrationality .[as viewed by more scientifically minded people.]

Now I taught with a guy in San Rafael called John Kenward. And John Kenward was a close friend of the Sutherlands, and he had lived in a commune with them. A communal situation, I believe in Minneapolis. Kenward has been dead now 25 years. An enormous, heavy-set man, and he died of small cell lung cancer. But Kenward would tell me stories about the Sutherlands and said that Pirsig got it absolutely right; that they were very nice people, but they really wouldn't figure out how anything worked, including the household they were in. They refused to solve simple plumbing problems. I remember he mentioned that. She would try to make bread that would rise but it wouldn’t and she said they couldn't figure out the yeast mixtures.

And here is Pirsig, with all of his mental disabilities, who was able to logically sort out a situation to get through it. And I've always been fascinated by his comments and his views on his son as he tries to intuit how his relatively silent son is interpreting his trip. A Honda 305 is a very small motorcycle, and with the load they had, it must have been really uncomfortable for the kid on that. There is a great deal there, and I still get the book out and work my way through it.

Here in the Museum of the Rockies I teach exhibit design among other things. Here's a mock-up that a student did – a scale drawing that I'm working on right now. – But we have to worry about the quality. Is the exhibit absolutely as true as we can make it? Are the labels readable at 25 feet by somebody with an eighth-grade education and can they learn from it? I'll take you upstairs later, and this is a different museum than you usually see. These are not just glass boxes. So I refer back to my influence by Pirsig to get writing really clear and how to actually field-test most of what we do here. Make sure it's going to work. And now, in this museum, we're dealing with Japanese and Chinese cultures – we have a number of overseas exhibits and so we have to completely shift culturally. So Pirsig was an influence on me, and I found some pictures of him in Hyalite Canyon when he was living in his truck up there at the end of the road. Have you been up there, seen those steep walled canyons?

DG: Rapidly the other day . . .

DS: When you get to the end of the road it turns into a trail to Hyalite Lake.

DG: Yes, well we went past Tina DeWeese's place, which I guess was . . .

DS: That was Cottonwood [Canyon] which is not as steep and dramatic as Hyalite Canyon is, but he (Pirsig) was in Hyalite with the truck camper. Upper Hyalite is like Glacier Park, but is darker colored because of the lava and basalt. I think that is probably where he got refreshed quite a bit mentally. I don't know very much about his time in Cottonwood which was . . . until recently a dead-end canyon.

DG: This is Pirsig you're talking about?

DS: Pirsig, yes; Pirsig, I know stayed in Cottonwood Canyon, but there was a landowner-blocked the end of the canyon so he couldn't have gotten much further than pretty much to the DeWeese's house. That was almost at the end of the road at that point. So he has sort of a Montana influence, but he's never shown much sign of returning. He couldn't come back for his honorary degree last year. Pirsig claimed a health issue. I think he still harbored bitterness toward the campus. And he was not here long enough in the ‘50’s to become known or helped in any way. He was just more academic cannon fodder as far as 1959 goes.
[NOTE by Henry Gurr: Indeed “a landowner-blocked the end of the Cottonwood Canyon”: But, long ago, the Gallatin National Forest has shifted the hiking trail around the private property. So, Pirsig could have followed a trail on private land or followed the shifted trail.
Click Here To Learn When & Where Robert Pirsig, With Chris, Actually Hiked In Cottonwood Canyon. Also learn how the “Actual” Differs From The ZMM Mountain Climb Narrative”. ]

DG: Well, he talks about all the parties he went to at the DeWeese's, and Kay Campeau recalls all the liquor . . .

DS: The DeWeeses introduced us all to red wine, which was not actually readily available in the state liquor stores. So that when you went to California you could bring back these jugs of red table wine . . . Chianti of some kind. In 1960, my parents moved to California, I remained here and so I loaded up cheap wine in the Bay Area and would bring it back.

DG: I gave up drinking in 1971 because I was having problems with it. Yet, going to California and then occasionally even just go up to the state of Oregon, like Eugene, Oregon, in the summer, and I'd order a glass of a particular wine and there'd be this sort of pause and pretty soon the bartender would come over to the my table and say, “I can help you. The waitress doesn't know what you're talking about. She has no idea about popping the cork, letting you sniff it – or red from white wine or anything else.”

DS: When we lived at the edge of Detroit, we tried to buy wine and the only thing they had was Manischewitz.

DG: Well, but if you lived in the Sacramento Valley for a number of years, you knew about wine.

DS: Well, yes, it's a culturally different world. I was just saying living in Detroit, there was no wine at all except a Jewish conventional table wine, a Manischewitz and living in an anti-semetic community as we did, we were looked upon with great suspicion. We're talking 1965 and here are these out of state teachers and they're drinking Jewish wine? The Klan was still active there. This was on the edge of Pontiac (Michigan). And that was a tough, nasty right-wing area, just like rural Montana.

DG: And you knew the Sutherland's too, then?

DS: I only knew the Sutherland's through Kenward. I never knew the Sutherland's directly. John Kenward was a teacher I worked with in San Rafael. In his early days, Kenward had lived with them in Minneapolis. So it’s a secondary, a second hand relationship that I have here.

DG: Do you have any other memories of Bozeman back in that day or not?

DS: No . . . well,

DG: Did you grow up here or did you grow up somewhere else.

DS: No, I grew up here. I grew up in a family that was both academic and also raised Morgan horses and raised Irish Setters for the hunting crowd.

DG: I suppose that you went to Bozeman High School.

DS: No, I started at Gallatin County High School with Principal Homer Anderson in the last year of GCHS and then we moved down the street to the new high school.

DG: Like I graduated with the class of 1956 and I think the last year (of Gallatin High) was 1957.

DS: I was the class of ‘60, which was the first full class of Bozeman Senior High School which in those days was a miracle of Scandinavian design. Now it has been ruined by the district. But there was all of this glass and wood and brick and lawns. It was a wonderful place to go after the overcrowding in the old high school.

DG: I didn't mind the new building at Gallatin High School but the old 1903 brick building was rundown.

DS: The new high school was terrific until the district spoiled it by not maintaining it carefully, rather than cheaply.

DG: I had a few good teachers there. Like Ivan Hunt, we've mentioned, Mr. Shellenberger . . .

DS: I had Shellenberger, Hunt, Russell; Placek was very good in teaching science. I had Neibel, I guess in the eighth grade, had Eva Goetchius as a senior teacher. There's the one who taught me to write.

DG: Neibel tried hard, but she was boring.

DS: She couldn't help it. She was a normal school graduate.

DG: Clifford Knapp I just detested as a biology teacher.

DS: He was interesting because he drove a Studebaker Hawk, a real hot rod, which was unusual for a high school teacher.

DG: It wasn't that. It was his way of teaching biology.

DS: The worst one I had was Tilney Erhardt for …

DG: Oh, I had him for Algebra I.

DS: Yeah, he was the most sardonic, boring . . .

DG: Tilney Erhardt . . .

DS: He was not what you really wanted in a teacher.

DG: Yeah, I deliberately angled to get Wally Eagle for Algebra II . . .

DS: Wally Eagle was my ski coach.

DG: And then I got Mr. Monroe for Plane Geometry. He got very upset when I didn't sign up for his Trig and Solid Geometry course.

DS: No, I have very favorable memories of the high school staff. There was a one-year teacher there after your time called Leona Lampi, who was Finnish from Red Lodge. She'd worked in the State Department a long time, and then she came back to teach high school. She was the first of my teachers with a real worldview. That was my junior year and she taught her students modern literature and drama. She was very disciplined, but also very fair-minded, but she really brought her students forward . . . she was the one who introduced me to true cross-country skiing…. She was the first one to introduce us to Nordic skiing. I'd never seen cross country skis before and we got on the ski bus one day, I loaded her skis and they just floated up in the air compared to the heavy war surplus planks that we were all skiing on.

DG: Maybe we had better sort of wrap up your feelings about ZMM. You've used it in teaching a lot.

DS: Yes, I've adapted it for all kinds of teaching, and I've used it to revise my own thinking. I still think along some of the questions Pirsig had. And also I was founder and principal of the at “risk high school” here (in Bozeman) for fifteen years. I started what's called the Bridger program, actually, in the Willson School (old Gallatin County High School). I had a thousand students in the 15 years I was there, before I came back to the Museum in 2006 and many of them had mental health issues, a lot were developing schizophrenia, which manifests itself in the teenage years. I had alcoholic families, marijuana use, and tragically, quite a few deaths. I had quite a few professors' kids who just couldn't relate to Dad and Mom being geniuses.

But one of the things I could do, having really looked at Pirsig, was to help in terms of mental illness and obsession. He's so obsessive about stuff. I would often have students who were obsessive. I had some insight into how to help them, maybe, with assignments which were like his assignments which were on “What are you obsessing about?” I had a student who was obsessed with bacteria in the drinking fountain. He worried and worried and worried about this. We finally cultured the drinking fountain. And you know what? There were bacteria in the drinking fountain that shouldn't have been there.

We had a number of suicidal students. It makes me very sad when we drive a museum tour through the cemetery because there is a section of the graveyard that is full of dead at-risk students. In my fifty years of teaching, I've been to thirty-three funerals. Car deaths, overdoses, suicides, murders, both in California and here. In Detroit, we didn't even count them. So many people die too early all the time, and Pirsig could easily have been one of these.

So it has been kind of an adventure, but Pirsig is something that still helps me. My first copy of ZMM disappeared. I have a newer copy now. So all my annotations are lost. Somebody borrowed and didn't return it. My original ZMM was broken backed and dog-eared. My current copy isn't as large and lacks the margin width to write in. Pirsig's still relevant and important. As I said yesterday, my wife and I were very saddened when he lost his son. We were still living near San Francisco when his son was murdered in some stupid, violent, random street attack. I guess it was never solved.

DG: Maybe it was a hold up and he resisted?

DS: He was at a Zen Center.

DG: I took a San Francisco Muni Bus and I tried to visualize where on that block he was because I live in San Francisco. I took a bus.

DS: Geary Street, wasn't it?

DG: I think I took the 21 Hayes up to . . . so I could see the Zen Center, and I think I actually got out. I almost wanted to walk in and say something to the people at the Zen Center. But then I thought, I don't even know what a Zen Center is. I better not knock on the door.

DS: Yes, I wouldn't. We were just simply bothered by it. Before we had children, we used to be real night owls in San Francisco. But I'll tell you what. Once our son was born in 1974, we knocked that off. It was too dangerous to go off and get ourselves killed and leave a widow or widower or a kid behind. We stopped going out. We used to go to the Opera and we'd park where Louise Davies Symphony Hall is now. It was problematic. My wife never carried a purse and I carried a throw down wallet, never had to use it. Know what a throw down wallet is?

DG: No.

DS: It has a few dollars in it, but no I.D. So if somebody holds you up, you give him or her something and you get away. And that was just pretty standard procedure. But I felt badly about that. I would have liked to have met Pirsig when he was younger. I've wondered what the electro - shock therapy did to permanently change him. Because the electro - shock was after his Montana State years?

DG: Yes, it was. I think he had his breakdown while at the University of Chicago.

DS: Well, what do you think it did to him?

DG: I don't know. I have no theories on that.

DS: At least he didn't get a frontal lobotomy, which was still a possibility in those days.

DG: I was voluntarily on a psychiatric ward at Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento for three weeks, sort of going through this nervous breakdown period, and there was someone there getting electro - shock treatments back in the late '60's. And she'd come back so discombobulated. She wouldn't even remember her name for about an hour and then everything would start coming together again. One of her troubles was her son and he was this hippy-ish, cook-ish guy and I thought, “I don't think she's crazy. I think her son is.” You know . . . and since then we've had books like the Manufacture of Madness by Thomas Szasz and thinks like that.

DS: One of my most bitter memories in California was when Reagan was governor and cleaned out the State Mental Hospitals into the street. We started getting homeless people on the streets throughout the state. One of my student's fathers was murdered in the office of KGO-TV by a released Mendocino State Hospital patient, leaving 5 kids and a widow – just so Caligula Reagan could toady up to the Right.

DG: My understanding was they were supposed to provide some state financed outpatient clinics.

DS: Oh, that was the myth.

DG: They simply got rid of the hospitals . . .

DS: Got rid of the expense and tried to shift it on to the communities. So you end up with this nightmare of helpless, degraded street people.

DG: Did you ever give compositions to the at-risk students then?

DS: Oh, yeah. We taught them at the highest possible levels. Our standardized scores were the same as the main high school, even though some of these kids had never [substancially] been in schools and almost invariably had terrible attendance problems.

DG: So you can relate to Pirsig in your assignments to the psychologically disturbed?

DS: No, just that the reason we had an alternative high school here was because Bozeman High School was a fascist-like school. It was in your time, and it was in my time. If you were compliant and good and not pregnant, you got to stay. But especially with Hiney Lund as principal, if you weren't compliant, you were out without a hearing. This was the practice of all subsequent principals until Godfrey Saunders, [who was] Black and from a Southern poverty background, became principal. This was the reason we had to have an alternative school here. And I had run three such schools in California and they knew it here, and so they hired me away from the Museum for two years and I ended up 15 years gone from the Museum.
…But the real deal was the students were leaving Bozeman High School, because they were being bullied by fellow students, and they were being bullied by the teachers. They'd get untoward comments in the class. Their self-esteem was damaged. They were so glad to come down to [the alternative school], where they would be treated respectfully no matter how much of a mess they were. We had a close staff. We had a staff meeting every noon, 187 days a year. So we knew what we were doing with everybody and we could shape our next or immediate contacts with each of them into positives. We taught them civilized manners, and we respected their intelligence. Even if they couldn't write very well, we'd get those ideas out. We'd overcome the math deficiencies.
…I was very proud of what we did, and I'm very disappointed that when I left they took our independent school back into the high school and destroyed it. Now, they're back to a 15% dropout rate again, which is inexcusable and good kids are again being thrown away, if they are not Goody Two Shoes.

DG: So how can we conclude what you are stating about Pirsig and ZMM and Quality?

DS: What's actually happening in the United States is that we're much better about tolerating variation and novelty in our fellow beings.

You know the '50s were definitely a fascistic time. You were either “with the program” or you were a Commie. And now, just look at the number of street and sidewalk ramps and [with concrete] cuts for handicapped? It's a simple symbol of toleration. We try to deal with people who are different and have disadvantages. Not so much among teaching staffs but in many industries, people with limitations are allowed to thrive, are encouraged to thrive.
…I think we are a more democratic society and I'm guessing that Pirsig's book, all 4 million copies of it helped. Who knows how many readers of copies purchase and passed around -- maybe between sixteen, twenty million readers in this country. I think it’s had an effect, causing us to rethink, about guys who are more than a little weird.

I think that the matter of Quality also . . .remember planned obsolescence? It was a big deal when we were young. Well, not so much now. I know a great deal about mechanics and worked as a mechanic, and I'm pretty good attending to Porsches, which are a complicated car. Yet now, your basic Kia is a much better car in every sense, than a Porsche thirty years ago. Cheap new cars are faster, handle better, and are more reliable than expensive cars of two decades back. A Porsche used to be a great car. Now a Porsche is no better than an average new sedan.

Automobiles, the quality of appliances, the quality of computers, [has] evolved faster than could have been imagined years ago. My master’s degree at San Francisco State was in educational technology in 1970, and we used to envision having teaching machines that would never get tired and now we have them and computer-based curricula work very well.

I started a second alternative high school at Belgrade, MT which is completely computer-based and as fast as students work through what is called the Plato program, they can gain credits and they can go on. They didn't learn good manners, but they learned content quickly, without any teacher fatigue.

And I think we are in better times now, despite the 24-hour deluge of bad news. I think people are better. I think ethics are better. I think Pirsig's ability to weather the terrible circumstances of his life, including the death of his son . . . I think he is one of many models of people who got through the '50's, which I think was the lowest time in U.S. History. I watched a thing this morning on the tube about an actress who was blacklisted for twelve years right at the height of her career simply because she had gone to somebody's funeral, a Communist party member's funeral and [she] gave a eulogy and she got blacklisted. But we're beyond that B.S. Ted Cruz, Rick Perry et. al are trying to bring back fear by association, but Ted Cruz and R. Perry are not going to be President.

DG: But you know, it's just like when I was at Montana State . . . Pirsig was only there the last year I was there and I thought, ha-ha, he's a little nobody. Little did I realize he was about to leap into cultural history.

DS: That's often the case. Who would have thought that a guy like Samual Clemens [Mark Twain pen name], who was helmsman on the hurricane deck of a steamboat, would actually become a pretty major writer. That worked out pretty damn well.

DG: Mark Twain. One of the great writers I think.

DS: And speaking of at risk, Charles M. Russell was kicked out of his St. Louis home because he was a brat, and they sent him upriver to grow up on the plains of Montana, and he too did damn well as a fine painter, writer, humorist, and man.

DG: I upset some of the other English teachers at Klamath Union High School. I, with the permission of Mrs. Noggle, the head of the English Department, instead of teaching Great Expectations to my freshman, because I couldn't relate to it as a ranch kid and here you had these kids in a lumber mill town, how could they relate to it? So I got permission from her to substitute Huckleberry Finn instead. And I think it was really a great choice.

DS: Still controversial.

DG: If you look back at what happened in the 1960's, you know, the equal rights thing was coming to the fore, the hippie movement with the kids revolting against their parental figures, and I taught them 'Huckleberry Finn.''
'''

DS: My at risk students loved it. They couldn't read it well at first. What puzzled them about Huck Finn is they were confused by the argot of the time. We actually did a glossary with them. And then they could read it smoothly, and they thought that they were Huckleberry, and they loved the humor . . . You know, square kids, don't get it; and square teachers don't get it; and we had a black principal here didn't like the “n” word in it. He wanted to ban it.

You know I think times have improved. A sort of world intelligence is developing on the Internet. I've even noticed that Wikipedia is getting disciplined now, is getting good citations.

DG: I go to the Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco sometimes just to relax and meet a friend, and here are these people with their little five year olds and the five year olds are using the keyboard on iPads.

DS: It's like, in your time, you probably grew up being able to handle a team of four draft horses, now a lost skill.

DG: Well, we had manual typewriters and stuff like that. And making capital letters was a major effort. An assembly speaker once told us that typing for an hour took the physical energy equivalent of shoveling a ton of coal.

DS: I had Eleanor Buzalsky for typing, the most important formal course I ever took.

DG: I had Margaret Thorpe.

DS: It was the most useful lifetime skill I took away from high school. I didn't learn a damn thing in high school, except typing and literature from Leona Lampi. Touch typing, people still watch me and say you learned to type on a Remington, because, like you know now you could use a light touch. I'm still pounding the keys.

DG: Now you have to protect your keyboard so much . . . when I did Wang word processing in the 1980's, I could spill coffee in the keyboard and as soon as it dried out, it was okay.

DS: Not this one. When people throw away computer stuff, I grab it. That's why there's so much stuff on the floor here.

DG: So lets wrap this thing up. I have your business card with your contact information, your email and your street address. I want to thank you very much for this interview.

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Comments, Questions, Suggestions Regarding This Interview Are Welcomed.
Please send an email to HenryG__USCA.edu (insert the appropriate symbol).
…We would appreciate your permission to add your comments to this page, should we choose to do so.

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We Are Saddened To Report That Robert Dennis Gary Passed Away In Jan 9, 2020, Likely From Covid19. You May Read About His Life Here => A Robert Dennis Gary Memorial Tribute Page & Autobiography : ALSO PLEASE SEND EMAIL To HenryG__USCA.edu With Your Memories Of Dennis. Click Here.

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Links To Additional Reading Related to the Events Described Above:

1) A Student’s Memories of “Mrs.” Professor Sarah Vinke and Her English Department at Montana State College, Bozeman MT (1956-1960)

2) Pirsig Memory, “The Divine Sarah”

3) The Sarah Vinke Biography Resource Page (SVBRP), Having Extended Information About Sarah Vinke’s Life & Times.

4)
Howard Dean, Nemesis to Robert Pirsig while Teaching in the MSC English Department

5) Shirley Luhrsen and Sarah Vinke: Letters to and from Bozeman.

6) “THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT MONTANA STATE COLLEGE” (MSC) This Document, Recreated Below, Is A 1977 Monograph By History Professor Robert G. Dunbar, Montana State College, Which Is Now Montana State University.

7) ” …a "radical" in Gallatin County, Montana, is a little different from a radical somewhere else." The Eleanor Roosevelt Affair.

8) Mr Dennis Gary’s Memories of The Late 1950’s Montana Political Situation:“Ultra Conservatives” +”Senator Joe McCarthy-Ites”,vs “Political Radicals“

9) MSC President Roland R. Renne

10) “Montana; or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” The Leslie Fiedler essay in the Partisan Review which angered a member of the University of Montana Board of Regents

11) Pirsig, MSC, and Zen, a selection from In the People's Interest, A Centennial History of Montana State University

12) A Brief Biography of Sarah Jennings Vinke, Found in the Burlingame Special Collections, Montana State University Bozeman

13) Sarah Vinke’s Passing [BOZEMAN DAILY CHRONICLE January 31, 1978. From Obituary Page 10.2]

14) MSC Instructor Asks Probe Over Budget Issue [BOZEMAN DAILY CHRONICLE April 4, 1961]

15a) Photos of Faculty, Administrators, and Students at Montana State College: 1956-1960
15b) Further Photos of Faculty, Adminstators, and Students at Montana State College: 1956-1960

16) Interview with Kay Campeau, Bozeman, Montana, resident on Robert Pirsig, ZMM, MSC, and Bozeman, Montana

17) 'Click Here, To View 10 Photos Of Dennis Gary’s Laptop Computer “Daily Work Arena” at San Francisco’s Internet Accessible ''H2O Café '.
...Here you may see an additional self portrait of Dennis Gary, created by Dennis himself, using the Camera of his Laptop Computer.

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Interview, transcription, editorial material by Dennis Gary posted 22 Sept. 2014.
RevHSG14Nov2023.

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