Recorded in 1979
Interview by Donna Taylor Hartshorne
Transcription by Jim Rogers
Editing by Porter and Mary-Louise Butts
This interview is with Porter F. Butts, the director of the Wisconsin Union from 1928-1968. This interview is part of a collection of interviews completed by Donna Taylor Hartshorne in Porter Butt's office in the Memorial Union beginning on August 2, 1979. The complete set of interviews is included in the publication The Wisconsin Union--The First 75 Years.
Although Porter Butts was initially interviewed beginning in 1979, these interviews were not transcribed and edited by Porter and Mary Louis Butts until 1990. At that time Jim Rogers, 1990-92 Wisconsin Union President, lived with the Butts in Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin. Porter Butts died at the age of 88 in March of 1991 while still active in his life's area of speciality and vision --the college union--having helped design the buildings and programs for over 100 unions in the United States and around the world.
(c)1993 Wisconsin Union; 800 Langdon Street; Madison, WI 53706-1495. All rights reserved.
Well, to the forefront then comes the example of Wisconsin Hoofers, the Union outing club, as a unique and maybe salient example of how this all works in practice and worth spending a few comments on because at Wisconsin the outing club, the Hoofers, is probably now--oh, I'm sure it is now--the largest and most varied outing club on any college campus in America--some 5500 students are participants in the course of a year and pay dues to the Hoofers club in order to participate. They are that eager and that interested.
The other thing that I think I can rightfully say is that the Hoofers are noted for, are responsible for, is the establishment of skiing interest in Wisconsin. This wouldn't seem possible now with skiing universal in Wisconsin and throughout the country but in the 1920s when the Union came along, there was no such thing as skiing activity except for a few hardy Norwegians and Finns who brought their ski jumping interests and skills with them to the State and practiced on ski jumps in northern Wisconsin and northern Michigan and, indeed, the Norwegian students had built a wooden ski scaffold on Muir Knoll just a stone's throw from the Union. But this was in the early 1920s and when most interested Norwegian students left the campus, the wooden scaffold fell into disrepair and the jumping activity was not very visible at the time when the Union opened.
In all of Madison you couldn't buy a pair of skis except for these pine boards with leather toe straps put forth mainly for children to slide down hills with and tumble. There was no such thing as a ski with a binding, for example, or boots to fit the bindings or with poles either for downhill or for cross country skiing. So, one of the first and earliest achievements of Hoofers was to find a source of supply for proper ski equipment via the Dartmouth Outing Club which was flourishing already in New Hampshire at that time and which was acquiring its ski equipment from Switzerland. Through the Dartmouth club we were able to come by some twenty sets of hickory skis with leather thong bindings--it was the only thing available at that time--and boots to fit and poles, and so on. We racked these up, of all places, in the billiard room, for rental. They were checked out in at the billiard desk by students who wanted to give skiing a try and, of course--in accord with the theme that I have just expressed--with instruction in how to do it. How to use skis was a pioneer program for the Union.
Well, going back a bit on how Hoofers came into existence in the first place: I think it's right to say that as this was due as much as anything to the interest and leadership of Dr. Harold Bradley who was chairman of the Physiological Chemistry Department, member of the Union Council, and had been as the chairman of the Planning Committee for the Union deeply involved in what the Union could do recreationally for the students, and was himself a pioneer skier. He had seven boys who he was training in learning how to ski. But among other things, he, being a close associate of mine and some other folks associated with the Union, led us on a canoe trip in the Quetico forest in Canada one summer--a month-long trip throughout the wilderness by canoe--and in these long evenings we talked together about what a great experience this was out of doors and how satisfying it was to us; but why, we thought, couldn't this be extended to more people than just us? Why isn't this the kind of thing students on the campus ought to have the chance to do?
There followed several other kinds of trips including winter ski trips among close friends of ours and Bradley's, and this notion persisted: "if this is as fun and rewarding as it was--we were very excited about it--why not make it possible for students generally?" This led to a notice posted on the Union bulletin board in 1931, "Please sign here if you're interested in participating in an outing club with skiing, camping, and canoeing as a prospect." There were numbers of sign-ups. We still have that original sign-up sheet as part of the Hoofer archives. Then there was a meeting and seven people including Dr. Bradley and his son Charles and myself and two or three others decided it was time to try an outing club.
So, in a modest way we went ahead and formed what is still known as the "Wisconsin Hoofers." The name Hoofers deriving from a kind of an example of the Dartmouth Outing Club where to be a member of the Dartmouth Outing Club you have to first serve as a "heel." They called them "Heelers." This rather promoted the idea that the people who graduated from heels ought to be called "Hoofers." Hoofers was appropriate enough because it signified that you go there under your own power, "on the hoof," so to speak, and it gave us the horseshoe as the emblem for a shoulder patch and stationary and all the rest--kind of a symbol of good luck--and you do these things on your own. We had an apprentice system, too, where those who wanted to become Hoofers had to first serve as "heels." We called them "Heels" and they had to give a certain number of hours to the club over a period of several months and careful record keeping showed how many hours they spent and what they did to qualify themselves as part of the senior group of Hoofers which ran the club and planned the programs, and so on.
Well, in the earliest years the rental of the ski equipment and teaching how to use it was one of the prime evidences of the Hoofer activities, but it wasn't only that. There were overnight camping trips. We had an arrangement with the State Parks System in which we had the use of the Kirkland Lodge--the old lodge at the south end of Devil's Lake--which in the wintertime was made available to us for overnight and people would gather up their gear and skis and go out on weekend outings into the near countryside or Devil's Lake. Anyhow, right along through those first years, the interest flowered. It came on strongly.
The ski jump was sitting there in disrepair and dangerous--it couldn't be used--and Dr. Bradley himself, an ardent fan of ski jumping as a sport, led a movement to replace the old wooden scaffold with a steel scaffold and I managed to get the Class of 1931 to put up $700 or $800 to buy it. Dr. Bradley added some money of his own and raised some money elsewhere and we managed, finally, to get the wherewithall to design and install a steel ski scaffold. There were very few ski jumping hills or slides in the State. What there were were up in Ishpeming in Michigan and one or two in northern Wisconsin. This prompted the Central U.S. Ski Association to hold its tournaments here including jumpers from the Wisconsin Hoofers.
So, annually we had a ski jumping tournament on Muir Knoll and it was the income--admissions from those tournaments--that gave us the wherewithall to finance much of the rest of the outing program that the Hoofers undertook--plus the rental of the skis out of the billiard room. But the winter weather in Madison brought with it all sorts of painful difficulties in arranging for a ski jumping tournament on the campus because almost inevitably when we picked the most weather proof date, the weather people would tell us "sorry, the snow would melt the week before." On at least one or two occasions we had to send up north for freight cars of snow. It was then piled up for highway trucks bringing it to Muir Knoll and dump it at the bottom of the hill. Then came the arduous process of carrying the snow up the hill and up this scaffold in bushel baskets. And for this we needed scores and scores of helpers to do it. This is where the Heels came in. It was one of the jobs they performed and so did the skiers themselves and so did anybody else that we could persuade to do the job.
So, despite the weather, somehow we usually got a ski tournament off the ground and jumping took place. We soon found that the students and others were glad to come and watch but they didn't want to pay so we arranged with the Athletic Department to bring down their canvas fence that they surrounded the football practice field with in the fall and we drilled holes in the ice and up and down the hill and arranged these canvas screens to try to route people through an entrance where they bought a ticket for fifty cents. This succeeded only in part but enough to pay the bills with a little left over.
So, ski jumping came to Madison/southern Wisconsin area because of the Hoofers as did an interest in cross country skiing. It is literally true that the Hoofers, particularly through the leadership of Dr. Bradley, that this came about decades before skiing was a popular sport such as it is now.
Although there is no longer a ski jump on Muir Knoll. When did that cease?
Well, that went on through the years until the late '40s or early '50s when the University decided to put a parking area on the bottom of the hill. The ski jumpers landed at the bottom of the ski hill at the lake shore and ran out over the ice on the lake but cars parked on the landing hill outrun meant the end of ski jumping and it was at that time that the Hoofers donated the ski scaffold to the city recreation department to be installed at Hoyt Park--it is still there--and it is the privilege of Hoofers, still, to practice on it and to use it.
I should add that part of the ski jumping history at Wisconsin included at least four Olympic ski jumper members of the U.S. Ski Team. So, it's a signal of how when you get into something and do it reasonably well, you get some real competence and skill among students that flowers, in this case, into Olympic jumpers. This is partly because Dr. Bradley himself encouraged the Bietila brothers, who were Finnish boys up in Ishpeming, Michigan to come to the University of Wisconsin. They had grown up with ski jumping as children and high school students. He brought them here, housed them, paid their way, so they could get a college education and both the Bietila brothers became members of the U.S. Olympic ski jumping team, and two others did.
One of our original Hoofer founders, Sally Owen Marshall, by name, was a student in 1931, a member of the Union governing board, as well as one of the seven founders of the Wisconsin Hoofers. She came the first woman to jump off the ski slide and this won a lot of press and interested people to come up and see what was this woman doing trying to commit suicide but she didn't and managed to come off pretty well.
Well, that sounds like a lot on skiing but that isn't the only thing that was going on in the '30s. We became aware that in Canada that there were toboggan slides and in our innocence we thought we would try a toboggan slide off of Observatory Hill running down where Elizabeth Waters Hall now is, down to the lakeshore and out onto the lake. We trenched out this slide. We got Oscar Mayer to ice it with their blocks of ice, filling it in with frozen snow. We built a little tool shed at the top with an attendant who charged ten cents a ride and provided the toboggans. This was a thrilling, if I must say hazardous ride, downhill and onto the lake.
Well, Observatory Drive must not have been there?
Observatory Drive was there and this was where the toboggan slide took off from. We were able to do it because we persuaded the Class of 1931 to put up the money for it as their senior class gift to the University. But as some things go and still do, somebody in their off moment decided to burn down the shed where the attendant did his work and had the tools and collected the money, and that ended the toboggan rides for the time being. And before we could reconstruct and try to get going again, the University decided to build Elizabeth Waters Hall which, of course, blocked out the possibility of continuing the toboggan slide all together. And as I must say as I look back on it, I am full of fright as to what might have happened if the toboggan came roaring down that slide and somebody walking along the lake path happened to be stepping over the slide at just that moment; or if the wooden bridge platform that covered the slide had not been lifted out and the toboggan had run into this wooden bridge crossing the chute. It never happened but we weren't all that fearful in those years of what might have actually happened.
Well, what I was about to say is that as skiing as a prime interest and major activity, it wasn't the only one in the 1930s. We all began to realize we had a lake as part of the campus as well as land. Here we sat in the unparalleled situation, a Union building right on the lake shore with no access by students to the lake in terms of canoes or sailing or ice boats except as they were willing to pay high prices for rentals at the Bernard boathouse that used to stand behind the gym and that was a modest operation at best.
So, we began to encourage sailing--buying first wooden hull boats which the Hoofers were able to pay for by charging sailing dues and which they kept in repair because the sailors and heels did the work.
Then we realized we had possibilities for general outing activities starting with camping trips not far from the campus, and we saw this mounting interest in whatever new kinds of outing activity the Hoofers undertook. So, when the theater was planned in the mid-thirties, one of the proposals was to create an outing center in the basement of the theater, with a ramp down from the terrace for the purpose of easing down the steps with gear and bikes and skis and toboggans--with washrooms adjacent-- for the benefit partly not only of the outers, but also the swimmers off the Union pier, as a sanitation measure. This actually turned out to be one of the main reasons why the federal government gave us a grant to build the theater wing because we were solving the hygiene problem along the lake shore with two small washrooms. And so we stressed this quite a lot when we made our application for the theater. Of course, this was a modest two room facility with lockers so you could change clothes and so forth.
In this outing quarters were to be the ski racks now moved from the billiard room, a work bench for repairing and waxing skis, a canteen or snack bar with a counter where students could get coffee coming in from a wintery trip and a lounge where they could sit around and talk over the day's adventures or assemble before a trip and gather together before a bus took them out to their next outing place.
In the discussion of the theater wing costs it looked like we were not going to have enough money and so there was a proposal to eliminate the outing clubs. But Dr. Bradley and I held out because we were resolved that this kind of activity and interest needed a home, and in the end this prevailed. It was constructed and is there now. In the far end of the basement under the theater lobby, which was excavated but not floored over, there was an empty open space which we converted into an archery range. We had had archery out on the athletic practice fields but the Athletic Department wasn't happy with this. They didn't encourage us to put up our archery butts, the straw backing for the target. By the way, that is where my name comes from, an old-English terminology. The archery butts in England is where the archers were sent forth to practice their bow and arrow work. They were called the butts and apparently that is where my name comes from. So, we had archery going indoors.
Then a mountaineers group developed and they found Devil's Lake an ideal practice place for rock climbing, getting ready for trips that took them to the Rocky Mountains and the Canadian mountains for high mountain climbing. The hunt club--there was a hunt club sponsored by the Physical Education Department for Women--fell on hard times and lack of interest because the men weren't included. Also, they ran out of stable space with the growth of Shorewood Hills. There was a stable in Shorewood Hills. So the hunt club joined the Hoofers and we had a Hoofer Riding Club. A Hoofer horse show became an annual event out at the Stock Pavilion that attracted horse riders/competitors from all over the middle west. It was a big thing and made some money. There were stables and fields that were brought into the picture. So riding became an on-going thing. The Sailing Club added new types of boats and now got up to around twenty, something like that.
The weekend trips multiplied. There were sign-up sheets down in the outing quarters for at least two and sometimes three or more trips. This was going on through the late '30s and the '40s and the trips began to go really quite far afield especially at Christmas holiday time and spring recess. There were trips to the Colorado Mountains, trips to the British Columbia mountains, canoe trips to Canada lakes-- The Quetico--and down the Tennessee River.
At that time, also, we took on the old WAA (that's the Women's Athletic Association) cottage out in Shorewood Hills which they had used as an outing cottage. It is on the lake shore just below Eagle Heights and we converted that into a rest stop for canoers and sailors and hikers and bikers. One of the favorite Hoofer occasions was an annual hike around Lake Mendota--see who could make the twenty-five to twenty-six miles in the fastest time. We installed a resident couple who lived there and were always there as host when groups showed up on their way hiking or just wanting a short weekend retreat for picnics and maybe softball, or for canoeists who wanted to make a stop before they came back to the Union. This went on into the late '40s; I guess it was around then. At this time, however, automobiles became very prevalent on the campus which was now after the war. There were no automobiles moving during the war and very few before the war but with the end of the war and the straightening up of the economic situation, student cars became fairly prevalent, at least by the '50s and so the student instinct was to go far afield to start their outing, their camping trip, or their canoe trip, or their mountain climbing, and so on. So, the WAA cottage--the "Blackhawk Lodge" as we called it because it was right near Blackhawk cave, with Blackhawk being the chief who was supposed to have hidden out there on his retreat across this port of the country in face of the military pursuing him. Blackhawk Lodge was just wasn't interesting enough. It wasn't enough of an adventure and we closed that out.
But we did some other things. We developed a downhill skiing area out near Cross Plains with a rope tow. Downhill skiing was just not beginning to mature as an interest among students and others. So, we found ourselves spreading in all kinds of directions with the corollary student interest. Each of these interest groups formed a sub-club of its own. It was the Outing Club, the Mountaineering Club, the Archery Club, the Riding Club, the Sailing Club, and so on, but they were all brought together in a federation under the banner of the Hoofer name. The head of each of these subgroups was on the Hoofer Central Council to determine policy and promote the cause of outdoor recreation generally. Well, caving got into the picture too.
All through this whole multiple development, teaching how to do it was central. The sailors produced very extensive manuals on sailing and a student had to pass a land test first to qualify to take out a sailboat. This was for safety reasons and to teach him how to be a good sailor so that he would want to come back. He would take satisfaction in what he was doing. The canoers developed manuals on the rivers of northern Wisconsin: where the rapids were, what seasons to avoid low water or too high water, and so on. There were all kinds of instructor recruiting programs going with the older sailors or older canoeists who had been through the mill signing up as instructors; and because of their time devoted teaching newcomers on how to do it, they were given sailing privileges without charge.
And, of course, in the process we had employed by now a full-time outing director. We started in the late '30s with a half-time director but it soon turned out that this was, indeed, a full-time job. He, in turn, was an experienced outer and instructor himself and worked with the student instructors.
As we went along the program flowered and kept on flowering. There were busloads to ski resorts on long weekends, between sessions, and Christmas time--a couple of hundred students at a time by bus to northern Wisconsin or to a northern Michigan ski resort. There were charter ski trips organized overseas to Switzerland, to France--by plane, of course. There were numerous charters by bus to Aspen, and to Vail and to the other Colorado ski resorts.
We gradually acquired more boats. Some of them were gifts. We organized intercollegiate regattas and again the Wisconsin sailors got good enough so that one or two of them became Olympic sailors. We still have a Hoofer graduate who is the champion single-handed sailor of the U.S. right now.
Who is that?
His name is Peter Barrett and is over at Milwaukee running a sail shop.
The whitewater canoeing came on strong. We started renting bikes. Our facilities started out just with the basement of the old president's house which is where the theater now stands but as I have mentioned, we got our sizeable outing quarters when the theater was built plus an archery range plus this auxiliary lodge; Blackhawk Lodge, out on Lake Mendota shore plus the downhill skiing at Cross Plains.
Then there came the time when there was a strong move on to develop what we called an "Outdoor Union" out at Halverson's Park which was privately owned adjacent to Governor Dodge Park out at Dodgeville and our governing board and the Hoofers were strong for this. It was about a 500 acre area with rock out crops for rock climbing; deep valleys; four or five ponds for fishing, swimming; the horse riding stable of Governor Dodge Park next door and it looked like the kind of a place where we could encourage weekend outings by student families or by student organizations who wanted weekend retreats for conference purposes, and so on, with a view to building cabins and a central dining hall and gathering place and at the same time, be a demonstration center for the camp and resort people of Wisconsin for institute symposiums and conferences in a resort setting led by university environmental studies group and an extension staff on how best to develop a public camp site or a resort--what to do and what not to do and so on.
It had, we thought, a lot of potential in these several directions. It was only forty miles away. You could get there in an hour --spectacular scenery, deep valleys, and right up against Governor Dodge Park which is something over 5,000 acres and being a State institution we had established that we could have certain mutual privileges and access to the Governor Dodge trails for skiing in the winter, and so on. The Memorial Union trustees had the money to take an option on it and to buy it. So, we got a price on this area--$135,000--and took it to Chancellor Fleming who thought it was a great idea and encouraged us; and we were in the middle of negotiations to take an option on this when we got the news from President Harrington that he didn't think it was a very good idea because if the legislature, which was then in session, heard that the land was being bought for University purposes forty miles from the campus at the time when the University was begging for money to build buildings on the campus, it would be fatal to the University's requests even though there was no State money involved. We were going to buy this through the gift money of the Memorial Union Trustees and make it as a gift to the University but we were turned down. About five weeks later Halverson's Park was sold to the Milwaukee Labor Union for $325,000.
Well, we began to look for more modest and alternate areas where we could do something of the same thing and for some reason, the report of our governing board meeting on this got printed in the Milwaukee Journal. I got a telephone call from Milwaukee saying "We saw that you are interested in an outing area for the University and we might have the kind of thing you might like." Well, I said "Where is it?" This was all over the phone. "Well, it's about so and so and so and so up in Iowa County." I said, "Does it happen to be off of County ZZ?" "Yeah." "Is it a place that used to be called Halverson's Park." "Yes." "Well, what is your asking price on it?" "$350,000." And we could have had it for $135,000 five or six weeks before. It was ultimately sold to the State Park Department for, I think it was, $285,000, or something like that, and is now part of Governor Dodge Park. So we lost it. I thought while I was mentioning all of our achievements and successes I might mention one that didn't succeed.
Well, at about the same time, however, we were doing something about expanding the outing quarters here at the Union. Again, with the sailing just zooming and canoeing, particularly kayak, whitewater excursions coming on strong and the crew house going out. (The crew house was part of the boathouse that Bernard ran as a boat rental agency back of the gym and the crew house occupied about half of that. The crew was relocated up near the dormitories and Bernard was growing old and was anxious to get out of the rental business and not doing much with it anyhow, and the University was developing the Alumni House and wanted to dispose of the boat house.) . . .
This would have been in the '60s, wouldn't it?
Yes, I think so. The boat house was falling apart anyhow in the early '60s. So, we thought, well maybe this is the time when maybe we should go into full force as a lakeshore boat center, and did. The area I called the archery range was also a place where we stored theater scenery. The scenery was moved out. Archery disappeared by this time and the dirt floor was floored over and compartments were made for each of our outing clubs with wire mesh caging to keep their gear and supplies under protection. A paint shop for repainting boats or fiberglassing boats was installed with a very important exhaust fan and filtering arrangement so that the paint and fiberglass fumes would dissipate and not be a hazard and, plus, a general work and repair center.
Then we extended the area on out toward the lakeshore under what you now see as a open plaza deck that almost reaches the lakeshore. This provides a whole new very large center for boat storage and canoe storage and sail drying and repair work and kayak building. Students built kayaks there right along. They get a kit for maybe $25 or $30 and we provide the space and the wherewithall for their own work in building a fiberglass kayak for themselves. At the beginning we rented bikes there. We had twenty bikes to rent. This would be unbelievable now but hardly any student had a bike, even in the early '60s. So we rented bikes to students who wanted to bike out to Picnic Point or around the lake, or wherever.
Well, now there are more than 10,000, 12,000 or 15,000 bikes on the campus privately owned but this was a very valuable resource in the beginning to be able to rent a bike and go somewhere along the University pathways for an outing. In Union color sound film done in the early '50s, '54 I guess it is, one of the scenes is this group, about a dozen or fifteen people, taking off on bikes over Observatory Hill. It was unheard of before then. So, this boat center got built and is now the focus of all of our activity and is due, we hope, for some expansion down the lakeshore towards the Limnology building because the Hoofers now have something more than 80 boats of all kinds of sizes, some of them gifts, some of then they purchase through their dues. But they've had all sorts of troubles over the years with their temporary wooden docking and where the boats have been stored on shore because the wind and the waves when a storm has come up have wrecked the wooden docks and torn loose some of the boats and destroyed them and left very considerable damage. So this whole area between the outing center at the theater, the lake frontage and down to the Limnology building is scheduled for a permanent waterside boat storage area and a park like area with planting and trees and benches and seating.
Will there be any kind of a building?
No. This is all shoreline development and partly to preserve the shore which has gone to pieces with wave action--it began to erode. And this is a current project which also involves taking the second story off the old Lake Lab that hasn't been used for years but which hides the view from the Park Street turnaround out over the lake towards Picnic Point and turning that into an open deck as a kind of overlook for the public. And this is in the works now and with the Hoofers putting upwards of $55,000 into it. Two classes have made it their fifty year class gift for this purpose and the Legislature has added $75,000 and the Brittingham Fund has come up with some money.
The Union sponsorship of the Hoofers Club represented a good and long symbiotic relationship for most of the years since the founding of the Hoofers. It has gone on now for almost fifty years but there was one period of time when one of our young instructors in the faculty who was an ardent sailor himself and active in the Hoofer Sailing Club, in fact, considered himself a self-appointed sailing coach, thought it was arduous and unfair that the Union should be taking a use fee for the use of all this vast facility that was devoted to the Hoofers, and therefore proposed that the Hoofers move out, that they cut their ties with the Union and set up shop somewhere else on the lakeshore to be free of what he thought of as Union imposition on the Hoofers, because of these charges.
Well, he got a certain following among sailors, particularly undergraduates who didn't want to spend any more money than they needed to. So, there was a long back and forth between the Union governing board--Council--and this chap and his supporters on "why a use fee?" Well, the rationale for a use fee, of course, was that the Union had invested $300,000 to $400,000 in this facility, that we had provided staffing for it, all of the support services in terms of back-up financing when needed, use of the workshop, poster making, duplicating room for duplicating work, and so on and so on. But the main, expenses, of course, were the maintenance of this very large area and the staffing of it, and since the Hoofers were charging for the use of boats--a modest fee to be sure. You know the old Bernard Boathouse people used to charge five dollars an hour when five dollars was five dollars, which would be equivalent to about fifteen dollars an hour now, and the Hoofers for fifteen dollars gave a whole summer of sailing privileges. So, it wasn't exactly an expensive sport. But since we had built this area through gift money and other student fees and were maintaining it all with student fees, we felt that the students who got the specific use of the area and benefits as over against students who were not sailors, that a portion of their fee, (I think it was ten percent or fifteen percent of their income) ought to come back to the Union as a partial offset, a very modest offset, to what the Union was putting into it. And this was the basis of their annoyance and their aggravation and their reason for a long series of negotiations on what to do about it.
Well, for one thing, the sailors thought they owned the boats because their fees had paid for them but, in fact, all the Hoofer monies by University requirements are also the Union monies, so the boats were all on the University inventory as owned by the University and it's department, the Union. Well, there was a big argument of who owned the boats. The University administration, of course, made it clear that the boats were part of the official University inventory and couldn't be moved to another location. What's more, there wasn't any other location anybody could provide and it was, of course, just out of the question for even the most eager sailors to find the wherewithall to build new docks and new boat storage area, new shelters, and acquire new boats.
So once this chap, this particular chap disappeared from the scene because he later got married and was preoccupied with that and his research projects, the whole thing eased off but there were still questions at budget-making time about the rationale of this use fee. There has been a kind of a steady relationship in recent years and ever since.
The use fee still continues?
Yes. I can't tell you exactly what it is now. They've renegotiated it and it's some new formula that I have not been aware of since I left the directorship.
There were, of course, the usual difficulties one encounters with student organizations in caretaking of the premises. There were certain established closing times required by the timing for the entire Union building, and we had some of the independent Hoofer members who didn't want to leave at that time and resisted the closing hour rule, or they wanted to come early before the quarters were open. And we had established that the quarters were only open when the Hoofer outing director or Union staff member or his substitute was there, for obvious reasons of avoiding theft of all this equipment which could easily be stolen if not watched over. And there were problems of vandalism, of fires being built without the flue open and the room smoked up, or fires left going without a screen, with sparks which could have ignited nearby rugs or furnishings. And so we were on the track, as we were with all the other departments of the Union, of having any facilities under a supervisor's eye for safety reasons, for conduct reasons, and so on.
This was resisted by some members of the Hoofers and we had to iron out these complaints. I think, as I recall, one of the solutions was to authorize certain members of the Hoofer Council or club heads to be supervisors and be responsible for safe keeping and orderliness of the quarters when the outing director himself could not be there. But there were, at times, tensions over this and complaints, and complaints both ways. We would get night reports from our night engineer who made the rounds of doors left open, lights left on, the fire still burning or conduct cases and so on which led to these conferences.
But on the whole, this has been over the years minimal, and the Hoofers, in contrast to most student organizations, have been thoughtful and reliable and willing workers. And it is notable that in the days of the big protests and demonstrations on the campus in the late '60s and early '70s, when all the public attention was drawn to the extremists who were out demonstrating on the streets and damaging University property and confronting administrators, and so on, and who were sure the world needed them to be saved and arousing antagonism among alumni and the public and turning off the faculty--it seemed to be the dominant student mood at the time and this thing was always referred to but right along all this the Hoofers were back here in the outing quarters putting in hours and hours of volunteer time preparing their equipment, teaching the students the job, numbers expanding, more outings developing, the complete opposite of the radical extremism. In other words, here is the other side of the coin, the normal, probably majority, student body in operation as evidence by their will and willingness to do for themselves and to be contributors rather than obstructors. They never joined in these demonstrations or protests. They just waved them aside and went on about their business which well might have been organizing a ski trip to Vail, Colorado, for a couple hundred students which were completely led, organized, and financed by students without accidents, without problems.
So, it has been overall a very rewarding development in the Union's history in terms of what we are trying to do and that is mainly expand student interests wherever they may lead us. That kind of informal recreation and learning that the Union has tried to foster, and which we believed can and should also take place outside a building as well as inside--not just a physical place with a wall around it where things only happen inside. Rather, we try for a comprehensive plan for the recreational and cultural life of the student body.