Sweeney: This is James Sweeney, the University Archivist at Old Dominion University. We are having another interview in our series of oral history interviews with emeritus members of the ODU faculty. This morning, May 25, 1977, I am speaking with Dr. Thomas Blossom of the history department.

First question, Tom, would you tell me about your family background. That is, about your father, your grandfather and their career interests.

Blossom: Well, first of all my father was a landscape architect in the Boston area who received the first Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard University. Then he went to work as a very junior draftsman, but eventually became a junior partner in the firm of Brothers who designed Central Park in New York and the park system in Boston and the San Diego Exposition. He had his own private business designing many gardens, one of which you may have seen in the Newport area the John Nicklaus Brown place.

On my mother's side, my grandfather, Jackson Dawson, was involved with plants all his life. He first was trained by Holly's which was a firm of florists in the Boston area. Then he fought in the Union Army and received his citizenship being an Englishman by origin. He married Mary McKenna, who was Irish, and started a large family. They grew up right there in the Arnold Arboretum.

My mother was a nurseryman when my father married her so I was trained originally by my father to hopefully follow his profession. But I couldn't draw very well, and after awhile he finally gave up and said, "Well, a person who can't draw very well won't do very well in landscape architecture. If you must be a historian, go be a historian. I don't know what you'll do with it but my blessings on you. Go ahead be a historian." Of course this is what I did.

Sweeney: In your early years back in Dedham, Massachusetts, what were your main interests?

Blossom: If you may remember, back in the old days they used to have terrific winters and I can remember such things as putting on snow shoes, wandering out through some of the less inhabited areas of Dedham then. Also learning to skate on lakes and ponds, and falling through the ice once there, and helping a friend of mine come out of it alive. I learned to ski and do things that you did in New England in those days.

Of course my dad from a very early period of time had jobs that he assigned me to do in the garden hoping that I would follow in his line of work of landscape architecture.

[2]

Sweeney: Could you discuss your years at Amherst College where you received a Bachelor of Arts in 1934 and your year at Columbia University in 1935, where you received a Master of Arts degree? Did any specific professors influence you especially?

Blossom: Yes, indeed, in answer to your last question, the history department and the English department and the French department, all three were very strong at Amherst and I was involved in all three. Actually I got involved in history by grading papers for Professor Salmon, whose specialty happened to be Latin American history, where I first got my contact with Latin America apart from my father's interest in Spanish gardens. I might add that the colored slides that my father made of Spanish gardens in 1922 which he hand-colored himself, a collection worth about ten thousand dollars according to the Art Department, is here in the Old Dominion University Art Department. I gave it to them about five years ago.

In addition to Professor Salmon and Professor Packard in history, I was officially a French major and took honors work in French. In the English department I had the unusual experience of having a course in writing with Robert Frost, so that I carried you might say, a triple major in English, French, and History. It didn't really matter, at Amherst majors were not as stressed as they are at some places. But officially my major was French; in actuality I carried an equal amount of courses in history and in English and American literature.

While I was at Amherst my freshman year I played football and made my letter but it took too much time and I soon shifted to track. I ran cross-country for three years. I was very much involved in the track program. I was never a first-winner, with one exception. In one cross-country race I think cross- country for three years occupied my athletic program along with track. Then of course, they had at Amherst in those days a fairly active group of people involved in what was called the Amherst Outing Club which I enjoyed. I like to get out and hike in the mountains nearby. As you know Amherst has a very beautiful setting there.

Sweeney: Did you want to continue your comments with the review of your year at Columbia University in 1935?

Blossom: At Columbia University I had as my sponsor Alan Nevins for my thesis which was written on Congressional Opposition to the War. In addition to that, Columbia in the mid-30's w in the mid-30's was a tremendous university. For instance people like and Nevins who taught my historiography class, and other outstanding people Parker, Carlton Hayes, whom I had in European history - these were all tremendous figures. I also got involved in something I had been interested in ever since which was a graduate students group called the Columbia University History Club. I was involved in that group while I was there for that year. In fact they gave me the job of lining up outstanding speakers from other universities to come and address the club. So I've always had an interest in clubs of this kind where university students and professors could meet on a non-classroom basis.

[3]

Sweeney: Could you provide, a little extra question here, you've mentioned Robert Frost at Amherst and you've mentioned Alan Nevins at Columbia, I wondered if you could provide any specific recollections about these two well-known professors and intellectuals?

Blossom: First of all, Robert Frost had a back-up man who was supposed to come in when Robert Frost would rather write than teach his class. I might add too, that I had a course with Robert Frost. He never missed. He sometimes came in from the Pelham Hills with manure on his shoes, dressed very formally, but he conducted this class in a rather unusual way.

First of all he selected his students, not on the basis of grades they might have had, but he required each of them to present a sample of their writing. On the basis of that he chose "twelve disciples" as they were called. We sat around a table in seminar fashion and criticized each other's work. He didn't tell us what to write, he expected us to try several different types of writing.

For instance I tried a one-act play which appropriately had to do with a hospital because that was the year that I ran a race and ended up a little later with an appendix operation. So I felt that the drama of a hospital would make the proper setting for a good short play which I wrote.

Also tried my hand at poetry. I wasn't very good at that, but nevertheless I also tried short story writing and of course, historical writing. We took turns criticizing each other's works. That's the way he ran the seminar. Then when students had finished talking about each other's works, then he would from time to time interrupt, interfere, or say a little about his own works; not very much though, and mainly act as a referee. And that's the way he conducted this writing course.

As regards Alan Nevins at Columbia, as you probably know, Alan never got a Ph.D., but he trained hundreds and hundreds of others who did, and thousands through the MA program. When I was there in '35 & '35 he conducted historiography classes and he graded all papers from hundreds of students in historiography. Until I watched him work, I didn't know how he did it. He was a very very fast worker, and right there in his office he had a tremendous library. I went to see him on one or two occasions since after all he was the sponsor of my MA essay, and he had a ladder, that he could run around the room. "Oh yes," he would say, "just a minute." And he would dash up the ladder and grab the book that he wanted to mention. Pull it down and open it to the place and show you.

Also he had a tremendous memory. I don't know how he did it, but he seemed to know the names of all of his students. At regular intervals he would leave Columbia and, I know this for a fact because I was later in Charleston, he had certain libraries where he knew there were rich collections and he would sometimes get his graduate students who were out in that area to line up things for him to look at. And he was a very very fast worker. His publication list was as long as my arm. He was continually writing and doing research and yet also teaching a tremendous course in historiography.

Sweeney: For five years in various secondary school teaching posts from 1935 to 1940 did you desire to teach secondary school at that time or did you teach at that level because of depressed economic conditions?

[4]

Blossom: The answer to that if you knew the '30's is fairly obvious. I had a masters degree in history which did not entitle me to teach at the college level. I didn't originally have a certificate for public school teaching and that left me only one way to get into teaching, and that was through private schools, which I did.

Sweeney: Now we're going to pick up some of the secondary school. Could you tell me any of the highlights of your service at Fresno Ranch School in Tucson in 1935, the American School for Boys in Florence, Italy, 1936-37, Munson Academy in Munson, Massachusetts, and Meteuchen New Jersey High School in 1940-41?

Blossom: Well, first of all, I should say that the first school, which was in Arizona was nearly sixty miles from Tucson over a dirt road, close to the Mexican border. Riding a horse, which was one of the activities we did every afternoon, sometimes all day Saturday and all day Sunday. I had never ridden a Western-style horse before, so that was a part of my education.

Also, I ended up, as you usually did in secondary school, doing some coaching as well as a wide variety of teaching. For instance, I discovered that I was automatically the assistant coach of soccer and I had never played soccer. One of the things the assistant coach of soccer had to do was to dig these tremendous stumps out of the playing field.

Also, I ended up assisting on the rifle range and I had never fired a gun before. But this was part of the activity at Fresno Ranch School. Of course, in private schools you usually had some duties regarding getting students up in the morning, putting them to bed at night and teaching them table manners at the meals that were served, and things that you don't usually associate with teaching but are all part of private school teaching. So I discovered that I was expected to do a wide variety of things like teach Latin, teach German, some French, some sociology and of course history.

This is quite often the way you started out in the private schools. You were expected to be at least semi-competent in a wide variety of subjects and almost inevitably involved in something like the newspaper. For instance, I discovered that one of my duties was to get the school newspaper going and my predecessor on that just had failed, so it was not an easy thing to do. But I was lucky. I had a young student named Dick Wesson, who was the grandson of the Smith and Wesson Arms family in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Dick Wesson, who went on to become a Hollywood writer of some sort, turned out to be a very good student editor and with his help, we got a newspaper going. We put out four issues for the Fresno Ranch.

Sweeney: Now, how about the American School for Boys in Florence, Italy in 1936-37?

Blossom: Well, that was a little different because first of all, going over we went on a Italian line steamer and stopped at all sorts of interesting ports. In addition it involved learning Italian which I didn't know, but I had a good background in French and Latin at Amherst, and German. So I wasn't unaware of the possibility of learning another language.

We had to learn Italian. Especially at meals to start with a sort of direct approach, because if you didn't learn the names of things, you didn't get anything to eat. The same thing going downtown. We had bicycles, and if you

[5]

wanted to do any business downtown, and we took trips. I might add I was officially enrolled in the Royal University for two courses. The lectures were in Italian so pretty soon I learned to use Italian.

Of course this again was a dormitory-type situation and in addition to that, we took two major trips. The two resident instructors, I and a young man with an MA from Princeton named Caseby, took nine boys, age thirteen to nineteen in a huge old Fiat over the mountains in winter to Austria and Germany. And I got a chance to see Austria just before it was taken over, and a little peek at Hitler Germany in the Munich area. Then at Easter time we went south to the churches. Some of the students actually met the pope. This was something that was a great highlight in their lives. We did the seven churches at Easter on a tour which you customarily do if you can. Also we got a little view at Naples where I hope to go back again and see this summer, some of the places I knew back then in '36 and '37.

As I said we rode bicycles everywhere. In those days people didn't have cars much in Italy, especially students and young teachers.

Sweeney: Were both of those one year appointments, as I noticed you went from one position to the next rather quickly?

Blossom: Well, the chance to go to Europe came to me in a rather unusual way. The man who ran the school was a neighbor of mine on Cape Cod, a man named Henson. He had rented a house from my father. This seemed like such an unusual opportunity that I took it. I could have stayed on there if I had wanted to, but the pay was almost zero above the trips that I mentioned and I had some debts from college, from Amherst and Columbia that needed to be paid. My stepmother felt it was about time I paid off some of these debts, and I could never do it that way, which is why I accepted a teaching position at Munson, which paid much better.

I stayed there two years, but found it rather dull compared to what I had had in Europe. Munson Academy was an old-line academy. I taught all history there which was not the case in the other two schools where I taught languages as well as history, but once again I found myself involved with coaching duties and dormitory duties and it was a rather restrictive kind of life. I realized looking at the situation that if I wanted a little freer life away from dormitory duties and this twenty-four hour business, the public schools would be the answer. So during those summers I took the required courses to get myself certified to teach in public schools which I did at Meteuchen High School in New Jersey, just before the war came on.

Sweeney: You served in the United States Indian Service at Cherokee, North Carolina from 1940-41 and again in 1943-44. How did you come to accept this position? What were your duties at the Indian School?

Blossom: Actually I came to go to Cherokee through my present brother-in-law, Tom Underwood. He was camp counselor in a camp in New Jersey and so was I. We became very close friends. At that time his sister, Mildred, my wife, was going to Columbia University and studying history. I kept saying, "Well, we have common interests. I would like to meet her."

[6]

He kept saying, "No, she's not your type." I had a chance to change from history to archeology and I was on my way to the University of New Mexico with the war coming on, and he said, "Well if you're interested in Indians and things of that sort, why don't you stop by my home at Cherokee, North Carolina, where my father is a school principal."

I had an old Ford, which was my first car. So, we packed all our gear, and in spite of a tremendous flood in the western North Carolina district where they said we couldn't get through, we did get through and I met Mildred and her mother and her father. The four of them seemed to me an unusual family. I liked them all very much. To make a long story short, Mildred and I found we had a lot of things in common. We went dancing, both to the local dances which were very much like square dancing and to round dancing. We had many things in common. We met in early August and were married on the 11th of October that same year. It was through her father that I got involved in at first a temporary and then a permanent position in the Indian Services at Cherokee.

Sweeney: What were your duties and what were your chief recollections of your experiences at the Indian School?

Blossom: Well, first of all, the Indian School was somewhat like the Mexican rural schools which I had read about. It isn't just classroom work that you're involved in. For instance, I had an orchard that I was responsible for pruning. I had some prize chickens that had been allowed to run down, and I was supposed to bring them back to full production. We had a garden, a cooperative garden which we worked with the Indians. I had a scout troop that I was responsible for. I had a dormitory that I was responsible for.

Also I found myself sponsoring a string band that went to Knoxville and put on a show. I knew very little, of course, about this, but I got along very well with the students there at the Cherokee Indian School. I had responsibility finally for the athletic program they used to put on in May at the end of the school year. I was responsible for all the gymnastics, so I found myself leading a very very busy life, but quite different from the kind of work you associate with the classroom.

Sweeney: Why did you leave the Indian Service in 1941 to teach at West Carolina College in Cullowhee?

Blossom: Well, first of all, that summer preceding my teaching at Cullowhee, I had been working with the National Youth Administration as what they called "Works Project Supervisor" for twelve counties in Western North Carolina. Through this very brief summer with the National Youth Administration program I got to know the people who ran the training school at Cullowhee and they were in need of persons with masters degrees. Particularly as it turned out I ended up teaching both an athletic program and mainly involved in supervising the seniors who were going to teach mathematics. As it turned out, due to the war, it drained off most of the mathematicians early for the services.

It turned out that I had more mathematics in my background than anyone else they could find at that moment. So for two years my job was to supervise the math teachers and it was partly for the college and partly for the training school. It was a model school which the college ran. I

[7]

was doing that for two years until I was commissioned in the Navy.

Sweeney: I would like you to tell me about your two years of active duty in the U.S. Navy. Where did you serve and what was the nature of your duties?

Blossom: I was commissioned in February of 1944, of course, which was toward the end of the war. They sent me first to Harvard University. Actually first I went to Princeton for indoctrination, which was a brief course of two months. Then I went for three months to communications school at Harvard. When it looked as though I was going to go out on an aircraft carrier as an air intelligence officer, all of a sudden they had a need for people to do convoy duty. This was what they called Navy Communication Liaison Officer duty, that is attached with a group of thirty or forty Navy men to merchant ships in convoy. In order to do this duty I had to be reassigned and learn the British system of communication at port director school in New York.

From there I went out on my first ship which was a converted tanker. They had a nice little name for these ships. They called them 30-60-90. I asked what they meant by 30-60-90, and they said, "30 days to build, 60 days to convert to Navy specifications, and 90 seconds to go down if you get hit." So that was my first ship crossing to Europe from a tanker carrying high octane gasoline, very explosive, usually in the middle of a large convoy. I made four Atlantic crossings on that tanker.

Then I made four crossings on an ammunition ship, which was a converted victory ship. It went a little faster, but would also sink a little faster, because of the cargo it carried. On my last trip, it was on a converted liberty ship, which was an old rust pot if ever there was one. It was converted for carrying troops back from the European theater.

Finally after eleven months of sea duty I was detached because the war in Europe was ending and it looked as though I was headed for the Pacific when they reassigned me to what was called Civilian Readjustment. Actually I went to Charleston, where they asked me to extend my tour of duty for six months while I was involved in taking enlisted men from the Navy, interviewing them, and making sure their papers were in order, particularly for the educational benefits and job training. It was through this very intensive interviewing I interviewed personally about forty thousand enlisted men leaving the Navy. I also found five or six different jobs that I could hold when I left the Navy. One of them happened to be suitable in Charleston.

Sweeney: Before we get into the Citadel years, I wanted to ask you why did you choose to remain in the Navy for twenty year's after your release from active duty? What were the chief benefits of your longtime association with the Navy?

Blossom: First of all, I had three cousins who I grew up with in Massachusetts and they were all Navy people, which is one reason I was very pleased to be in the Navy. Plus the fact that my grandfather and great-grandfather had been involved in ships and going to sea out of Fair Haven, Massachusetts, and later out of Brooklyn, New York, So the idea of the Navy is always very much a part of my family.

[8]

In addition to that, it was through the Navy that I met Granville Pryor who was chairman of the History Department at Citadel. I felt that in a way the Navy had brought me in line with this very good teaching job at Citadel. It seemed to me that the people I had met in the Navy had a kind of camaraderie, which is seldom seen in civilian life, so I would like to continue that.

I found it to be true again and again and again as a matter of fact. The people whom I've met, whom I've know over the years, including in colleges were Naval reservers like myself.

Sweeney: After your release from the Navy, as you mentioned, you joined the faculty at the Citadel. I was wondering, were you attracted to the institution in Charleston because it was a military academy or perhaps in spite of the fact that it was a military academy?

Blossom: Yes. More in spite of it, because as it turned out, the chairman of the history department I had known at Amherst College many years earlier. He was three years ahead of me at Amherst. His name was Granville Pryor, a very wonderful person. He had his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He allowed us within the military structure to do more or less what we intended to do in our history teaching. He didn't, for instance, select our textbooks. He tried to get each man in his depart meant to do his own special thing, which in my case was primarily Latin American history with a second strong field in modern European history.

He encouraged us to do things which we were interested in. In my case this included organizing a history club and a Phi Alpha Theta at the Citadel which they did not have before, So here was a very wonderful man whom I had known before who was like myself, I might add, a New Englander. I felt that this was a rare situation to be working and teaching for a man you had known a long, long time, and you trusted, who respects you and who encourages you to do the best you can. He didn't even urge me to go back to graduate school, which I eventually did. He said, "The main thing we want here at the Citadel is good teaching. I know you are a good teacher, but you may want to go back to graduate school for your own satisfaction, and if you do of course, we will try to help you in any way we can." But he didn't ever insist that I go back and get a Ph.D. at all.

Sweeney: I think this is a good place to insert some questions about your doctoral degree and after that we can go back to the Citadel and pursue your career there. You received your doctoral degree from Duke University in 1956. First of all, did you experience difficulty pursuing the doctoral degree while you were teaching?

Blossom: Yes. I used to go in summer, having taught a five week session at the Citadel with a final examination still in my hand in order to register on the Duke schedule on time. I would then have to be taking classes, simultaneously grading final examinations and mailing the results back to Charleston from Durham. In addition to that of course, I had originally two children when I started the graduate program and then when I was almost finished, or thought I was in 1951, we had twins, which made four children. And of course this going back and forth to a half of summer school or eventually trying to save enough money to go a full year, which I did and

[9]

then a second full year, but not consecutively. All of this took first of all, a great deal of patience on my wife's part because it meant moving back and forth or at least me moving back and forth. It meant of course a very stringent financial management which fortunately my wife could do and did do very well. I required more importantly that she was willing to stick it out for what originally was to have been a five year program and actually came closer to nine years from start to finish.

Sweeney: What professor at Duke University had the most influence on you?

Blossom: John Tate Lanning who taught Latin American history was a fabulous person. I met him my first summer at Duke which was the summer of '47 and he encouraged me to go on. First of all, he liked my writing. He said, "You know the first requirement of a good historian is that he have some natural talent to write which you do have."

Secondly he looked at my record and realized wit my record and realized with a background in Latin and Italian and French that I could probably pick up Spanish fairly fast, which I did. In fact he never doubted that I could learn enough Spanish to handle the material which I needed for his courses. They were mainly in Spanish.

Sweeney: I would like to know about the topic of your doctoral dissertation and whether you had any unusual experiences while researching this topic?

Blossom: My doctoral dissertation on Antonio Noreno did involve my traveling in 1962 to Colombia for three months. I traveled, studied and worked in the archives. Also, two years later, I went to Spain. While I was in Colombia in '62, for one thing I had to, on one occasion, go through what was then bandit country. I friend of mine who was the official librarian for Colombia, the first they ever had, didn't want me to go at first. Then when he realized that I insisted on going, on one occasion he went with me.

He said, "Well I know not only the captain in charge of the military unit there, but some of the people on the other side are related to me." So he went with me to a place called Villa Delava which is where Antonio Noreno died. It was an ancient capital of Colombia back in colonial days, and couldn't be reached by bus, or train or airplane. I went by taxi. He was afraid I would get with the wrong taxi driver and end up a casualty in this very bloody civil war that was still going on in the mountains of Colombia in 1962.

A second trip I took was even more unusual in that I went with a friend I had made in Napenzion where I stayed again through the bandit country for two and a half days. On one occasion we stopped in a place and I picked up a paper and I read that the road I was traveling the next day had been the scene of a holdup in which the bandits at a place called Berlineste, kilometer 75, had held up this truck, had machine gunned the occupants as they left the truck, and had then cut their heads off. Of course I was going that same route the next day. So we're traveling along in this very high mountain country. My friend who owned this truck said, "Oh incidentally, there is something I should have told you."

I said, "Oh you mean about the Paramoral Berlineste Kilometer 75?"

He said, "Oh you mean you know about that? How did you know about that?"

I said, " You know I read Spanish."

[10]

"Oh," he said, "well, if you want to turn around I wouldn't exactly blame you. I can arrange for you to go back to Bogota."

I said, "Oh, no I waited years to come down here to see the country where Antonio Moreno, my hero, marched, traveled, and fought the war against Spain. I wouldn't put this off for anything. This chance to see the country."

He said, "Well that's good because first of all, I have something for you." Then he pulled out a machine pistol from under the cab, and handed it to me and showed me how it worked. Then he said, "Furthermore I have one for the driver, and a bigger one for myself. If they do stop us we'll give them a hell of a fight."

They didn't stop us, and we did see where some trees had been cut down on this steep mountainside as a road block. He said, "Well you know, they seldom hold up people twice in the same place. Besides they don't like to involved foreigners in their local Colombian civil war."

So we passed safely through the area where the bandits had been the day before and went on to a place called Cucata, down in the hot dry country close to the Venezuelan border. Also when I was getting ready to leave Colombia, something rather interesting happened. It seems that somehow a Colombian official had neglected to stamp an entrance stamp, and here I was getting ready to leave, and the engine is ten o'clock at night and we had had our farewell party. My friends were down there to see me off after two months in Colombia, and the plane is out there waiting will all my gear aboard and I discovered I don't have this stamp. They said to the man, "Well look this man is a friend of ours. He has written about Noreno, this great Colombian precursor of independence, you wouldn't want to him to go back to the United States feeling badly about this situation would you?" He said, "No." "Well think of something," they said. "I have it, senór," he said. "Ustedes una fantasma." (You are a ghost.) He said, "You never entered Colombia, you never left Colombia."

Then everyone laughed and said, "Ustedes la fantasma mas grande que visto.." (You are the biggest ghost we've ever seen in Colombia.)

So in effect I arrived back in the United States officially stamped in and out of the U.S. but having never officially entered or left Colombia. Of course, I felt to myself that only a Colombian could have thought of a solution to this rather unique situation and done it with such good grace.

Sweeney: You've mentioned something about your life at the Citadel. I would like to talk more about the administration of the school, the student body, and curriculum.

Blossom: Well, first of all the Citadel, being a military school had a very specific course laid out for the first two years. There were some choices that came the third and fourth years. Freshman class was pretty cut and dried. The freshmen in their gray uniforms and their short haircuts would be marched into your class. Then the section leader would say, "Section seats!" Then at the end of the class the section would rise and march out.

[11]

These boys had such strenuous hours that the freshmen tended to get rather sleepy in class. This was a little discouraging. Now, that's the first year or two, but when they moved on to the junior and senior year. The students whom I knew better and whom I knew more personally and who were better students showed up in classes of their own choosing. That's where I taught, for instance, a 19th century European course, a 20th century European course, and where I developed a survey course for Latin America, which I brought with me in a sense here, when I came to Old Dominion. So the question of what you taught partly determined the kind of students you had.

I might add that almost every professor who came in when I did at the end of the war eventually got to teach his specialty as well as the survey courses. This was good for morale. There were some things of course, we didn't like such as being required every now and then to be totally responsible for a dormitory. This reminded me very much of the less pleasant aspects of private school. Plus the fact that every now and then some of the cadets liked to play pranks on some of the unpopular instructors, such as setting up a pail of water that might dump on you when you came in. I never experienced that, but I heard wild stories about some who did. Then, of course, every now and then they would do something like raise the Confederate flag or raise the Jolly Roger flag or get a huge cannonball and roll it up and down the corridor. This sort of thing made this particular duty called OC Officer in Charge duty the most disliked feature of whole military school from the point of view of the non-military civilian instructors.

Charleston, of course, is a fantastic place to live and we came to like it very much. We came to be accepted as people who were part of the community. Consequently with ten years there Charleston became a very dear and special place to us.

Sweeney: Did you live on the grounds of the Citadel or in the city?

Blossom: I lived in my nearly eleven years in Charleston always on Citadel property. The first place I lived was the old barracks which were built in 1821, at the time of the slave rebellion which was threatened at the time - the Denmark-Viesy incident. I lived in what was called B-2l; ninety feet long on the second floor with the ceiling about fifteen feet high. There were huge oak doors that were tremendously heavy.

General Summerall used to - he was general most of the time in charge - he would say "A bower of loveliness" was one of his favorite phrases. Of course it wasn't quite that, but still it was very reasonable. Then I moved to the main campus, two or three miles away which was much newer. Eventually I occupied first what were called "the gray apartments"; they were very comfortable quarters and again very reasonable. Finally I shared a brand new duplex house with Colonel Gardges who was the chief engineer in charge of the grounds, a career army officer, and one of their top graduates at West Point. We got along extremely well. The Gardges family and the Blossom family became close friends and he was one of the first people I visit when I go back to Charleston now.

[12]

Sweeney: You've discussed the courses you taught, so we can move on to the next question. Why did you leave the Citadel in 1956 and become chairman of the Social Sciences Division at Southern State College in Magnolia, Arkansas? What attracted you to this position?

Blossom: I guess just having just achieved a Ph.D. I thought it ought to be worth something special and sure enough, I got a chance to be a chairman of a division. I suppose it was sort of an ego trip. I don't know how you would... Plus the fact that I would, if I went out there, teach more or less whatever I wanted as chairman. I could plan my own courses and the whole thing appealed to me as a sort of step up from just being an associate professor as I was when I left the Citadel to being a chairman of a division which included the geographer, two political scientists, two historians and myself. It seemed like a challenge that was worthwhile. It was something brand new being an administrator and still a teacher with a tremendous possibility of growth. At that time that college, Southern State College was still being partly subsidized by the Ford Foundation grants and it looked as though it might have a great future.

Sweeney: Can you describe your duties as chairman of Social Sciences at Southern State?

Blossom: Well, first of all, as I said it included not just historians, but it included an economist, geographer, political scientists, and one of my duties was to go once a month to the Ford Foundation meetings in Little Rock. The Ford Foundation at that time was in the fifth year of their program to upgrade the training of teachers all over Arkansas. We had a little extra money which was supposed to provide a five year program for these teachers where they did nothing but learn their subjects the first four years and get into technical education courses in the fifth year.

But I found out after I had been there awhile that in effect the Ford Foundation felt the money was being misused by the education people there and were getting very annoyed at where the money was going and shut off the program my second year there. In effect the Ford Foundation program which had appealed to me when I went there was on its way out. So that was one of the reasons why the position was not as appealing as it had been from a distance. But more important there were personal reasons. My family, particularly my wife, didn't like the place at all, although she was born only two hundred miles from there. She found it in effect that this was the kind of community where men and women were supposed to meet and talk separately. Women were supposed to gather in one corner and talk about babies and diapers and the very rich, ones (there were twenty millionaires in that town) whether to be a Cadillac or a Lincoln the next time around or whether to paint their fingernails green or purple. Very inconsequential things. Since my wife is a teacher and reads a lot, she found very few people she could talk to. She felt it was an anti-intellectual situation.

[13]

In addition to that she had trouble with her teeth and the whole thing of being a thousand miles inland in an area that is not really south and is not really west, sort of in between, and where in effect, women are supposed to be seen and not heard in men's company. She said, "This is no place for a civilized woman. Get me out of here as fast as you can."

Sweeney: Your new position in 1958 was as assistant professor of humanities in the interdisciplinary program at the University of Florida. What was the nature and objectives of this program? What was your role in it?

Blossom: I should say that once again the Navy played a role in my change. I was on Navy duty and I met Fred Hartman who had a similar duty to mine in Washington and he said, "Now you've got a broad background in subjects other than history: English, American literature and French and languages in general. We have a program which we're very proud of at the University of Florida. I think you might fit into that program."

So Fred Hartman and another man on duty with me from the University of Florida who was in English were two of my original three sponsors. Then I had an interview with Lambert Patrick who was the chairman at Florida of the history department, specifically though for humanities and American studies in what were called the "C" courses at Florida. These were six required courses that all students had to take in their first two years.

So my original assignment was two courses in the American studies program, two courses in the humanities and when they could spare me from all of these programs, which was basically a twelve hour teaching load, I would be on loan to the history department, presumably in Latin American history. As it turned out I taught some European history on one occasion.

Sweeney: Did the humanities program at Florida measure up to your expectations? What were its strengths and its weaknesses?

Blossom: The program was an excellent program. I would say that the breadth demanded was probably... For me it meant reeducating myself to things that I had known such as art, the history of art was stressed very much there; going into philosophy somewhat, which I hadn't done before; being a part of a program where they had excellent specialized lectures on art history and music. Basically I thought the art history program was an excellent program.

The American studies program I didn't think was quite as good because it was a little on the shallow side with a very strong political science slant. It seemed to me it was a little more of a hodgepodge. In fact I think I've heard Ralph DeBedts say the same thing. He was teaching at the same time. He's here in our history department.

The two chief problems that I saw with the program was first of all the students very largely received their grade from machine-scored exams. The machine was known as "Flunkenstein". And even though the Florida students level of entering (the freshmen) was raised three or four times in the six years that I was there, quite a good many students were put out of the University of Florida through the machine-scored grades that they got in these required "C" courses. So they had a certain dislike for the courses because they knew that if they didn't pass them they wouldn't go on at the University of Florida.

[14]

From the instructors' point of view one of the drawbacks was that the grades that his students made - 25% or 30% was measured against the bell-shaped curve that Flunkenstein produced over two thousand students. So, subconsciously you might find yourself somewhat, shall I say, prepping them for the kind of questions you knew they would get on the Flunkenstein exam. I think this was the biggest weakness of the pro biggest weakness of the program, that the amount of freedom really allowed an instructor was not as much as it seemed, due to the fact that the instructor's grades were being compared with those given out by the machine.

Sweeney: Did you find it difficult to keep up with your own research while you were involved in learning this new material and reviewing material which you had learned before in the humanities program?

Blossom: Yes, because I started out teaching with a twelve or fifteen hour load and this meant in effect sometimes as many as five preparations simultaneously. I couldn't do anything in Latin American history then. On a few occasions though they called me to teach a course of my own at the graduate level on the independence movements in Latin America, and they relieved me of one course for this purpose. So, I got a chance to get up in my Latin American work now and then. The University of Florida had eight or ten Latin American historians and about enough work for two, so I didn't get to teach Latin American history as much as I wanted to, or get as much time off to do my work in that area.

Sweeney: You've already suggested some reasons why you had been thinking about leaving, but specifically why did you resign your position, a tenured one, at the University of Florida to come to the recently independent, and financially struggling Old Dominion College in the mid-'60's?

Blossom: I came here, once again, on Navy duty. My twentieth year as a Naval Reservist, and I ran into Bill Spencer who I had known at Duke University some dozen or so years before. Bill said to me, "What are you doing?"

I told him I was teaching at the University of Florida in the humanities and American studies program with an occasional course in Latin American history. He said, "Why don't you come to ODU and be a full time Latin American historian."

I asked, "Well, what have you got there?"

He said, "At the moment we have a course on the books which one man wrote up for us and never taught. We haven't really had anyone teaching Latin American history yet, so it's up to you. Whatever program you can build - it's entirely up to you."

I said, "Well, when do you want a Latin American historian?"

He said, "Right away."

I said, "Well, I can't move that fast. I want to go home and talk about it with my wife and I want to think about it."

So we negotiated for a year. That was '63. After a year I made my agreement to come here. I gave up my tenured position at the University of Florida.

[15]

Came here primarily to build a Latin American history program, but of course, in necessity, also teaching many survey courses.

Sweeney: Before discussing your career here at Old Dominion, I would like to ask you some questions about your research. In 1962, as you mentioned, you received a Pan American Union grant to go to Colombia to do research on Antonia Narino. Two years later you traveled to Spain on a Duke University Hispanic Foundation Fellowship to do research on the Spanish background of Narino at the National Archives in Madrid and the Archives of the Indies in Seville. Here are some questions on Narino:

1. Could you tell me why you first became interested in this man?

Blossom: Antonio Narino was a great admirer of Benjamin Franklin both as a learned man, as a reformer, and also as a revolutionary leader and a political figure. I ran across the fact in doctoral courses at Duke. There was practically nothing in English on this very outstanding Colombian precursor of independence. I also happened to have my own background of somewhat the same admiration for Benjamin Franklin because among my ancestors are the Folgers and one of Franklin's ancestors is a Folger, a Nantucket Folger.

My admiration for Franklin as a very good practical politician, and I came to realize that the things that he did, he did in a very calculating way. His way of getting things done for the City of Philadelphia and later done for the new country. This man seemed to be almost, here in South America, a leader who was almost trying consciously to follow Franklin even to the extent of having in his big personal library electrical experiments similar to that of Franklin. Also he was a printer who learned the printing trade feeling that the printed word is an important part of the reformer's machinery, and also, even more important as it turned out, if you are going to be a revolutionary leader, the press plays a major role in changing government and supporting new governments.

And Narino did all these things consciously with Franklin as his model.

Sweeney: What do you see as his chief significance in Colombian history?

Blossom: First of all, he was the sower of ideas, He was for total independence. Many of the other Colombian leaders sort of drifted into the idea of total independence, step by step. That is, at first they wanted some kind of reform of the Spanish government. When they saw this wouldn't come, then they wanted some kind of autonomy and very many of them came out for Ferdinand. When they still would not come right out in the open and say what they wanted was independence for Colombia, Narino never hedged on this. He was always for independence from the very beginning when he was arrested in 1794; he was already for total independence.

In this way he was rather unique among the Colombian leaders. Many of them, as I said, arrived at the idea of independence by stages, but not Narinô. He also,' very early, decided that the centralized Republic of France in. 1792-3 was the model that Colombia had to follow because in his opinion, Colombians weren't ready for a federal system such as the United States had put into effect. So he was quite clear about these two things.

[16]

First, that Colombia should opt for total independence from Spain as a republic. Second, that it would have to be a highly centralized republic because Colombians lack the experience necessary to operate a federal system.

Sweeney: You've already mentioned some interesting sidelights of your research in Colombia. I wondered if you have any other comments or if you had discovered any unusual documentation or vital research materials in your research in Colombia and also in Spain?

Blossom: One of the most difficult problems I ran into was to try to decide when Narino was born. Eventually I agreed with the official date given which is April 9, 1765. Before I finally got proof, both from Spain and Colombia that this was the probable date of his birth, I had no less than five other different possibilities.

So, here, the first fact you do with a man's life is when he is born and this proved to be one of the most difficult to determine to my own satisfaction.

In that same connection, a question of when he was married was an important element because as you know, a proper Spanish family, a man wouldn't marry at sixteen or seventeen, which he would have had to have done if one of the dates which was proposed for his birth was true. This is one of the factors that I used in trying to determine which of the several dates to accept for his birth date.

As it turns out, April 9 is interesting because April 9 also happens to be the day in 1948 when Colombia went through this terrible catastrophe following the assassination of Jorge el Gueferraguetanas, a very popular leader of the left liberal wing. His assassination led to civil war. So actually April 9 has a double significance in Colombia. It happens to be the birth date of Narino, the man I wrote about, and of course his two hundredth anniversary was celebrated in 1965. Also April 9 happens to be a memorable day in recent Colombian history - 1948. That's when this terrible civil war broke out.

Sweeney: How was the biography Narino: Hero of Colombian Independence received by the scholarly community?

Blossom: Choice, which as you know, is a magazine that often evaluates new books gave it a very good reception, and so have experts in and outside of the United States who are concerned with Latin American history. Unfortunately Latin American history is not too well known by other American historians and so Narino is still not well known. Recently I've noticed that Professor Lynch who is the top Latin American historian in Britain has included references to my work on Narino in his footnotes.

Sweeney: You co-authored a junior high school text in Latin American history with a man named Jack Allen. The volume was published in 1964. Could you tell me more about this project?

[17]

Blossom: I was teaching a double summer session in 1960 at Peabody Vanderbilt, a joint summer school of ten weeks. I came to know Jack Allen very well. He told me about this project to write a broad history of the Americas which is what Professor Bolt in California long ago had his idea of how American history should be taught - The Americas, with an "s" on it. This appealed to me very much and I said, "Well what do you conceive of as my role in this textbook you are writing?"

He said, "First of all it should be interdisciplinary, not just history, but history, geography, economics, customs of the country, and secondly you can go ahead and write it however you want to, but we have to rewrite it with the audience in mind. What they'll do is write a simplified vocabulary. You may not like the result, but if you are willing to get involved in this project you have a deadline to meet."

The deadline was probably a year off so in one year I wrote one hundred and twenty pages on each of the Latin American countries. Submitted it Prentiss Hall and then they took this simplified English and rewrote it to where I could hardly recognize anything but the facts, so it was quite different from what I had written.

Sweeney: You have just completed the manuscript for a biography of Francisco de Paula Santander. Could you tell me about your research and your assessment of Santander's place in Colombian history?

Blossom: Santander was a bitter rival of Narino. A much younger man, born in 1792, who had turned against Narino after working with him for a short time. He turned against Narino and Narino was general and president and dictator of the country, and joined the federalist group against the centralists that Narino sponsored. Actually he invaded Bogota, was captured and could have been shot as a traitor. Instead Narino pardoned him and Santander then went on to become a very successful guerilla fighter against the Spanish. He finally joined forces in 1819 with Bolivar and fought nearly ten years as Bolivar right hand man in fighting against Spain.

Then eventually because Santander was a federalist and Bolivar liked Narino as a centralist, they split over political issues. Eventually the bitterness between these two men led to an assassination attempt in 1828 against Bolivar. Santander was accused of being responsible, was tried and convicted and would have been shot, but instead of being shot, Bolivar as he often did (he was a very magnanimous sort of person) changed the sentence to exile for life from Colombia.

Now Santander was known as the organizer of victory because while Bolivar was fighting further south, first in Ecuador and then in Peru, and finally in what became Bolivia, the troops and the money that had to be provided were continuously provided by Santander's vice president of Colombia. So he earned this title of "organizer of victory". He also was known as the man of civil laws.

Santander, the rival of Narino and also after ten years of being the right hand of Bolivar, the rival of Bolivar, a very bitter rival, was accused of trying to assassinate Bolivar. It was an assassination plot which nearly worked, by the way. He was then exiled supposedly for life, but he went first to jail for nearly a year, and then he went to Europe.

[18]

France became his main headquarters, particularly Paris. He traveled around in all of western Europe except in Russia and Spain. He met all of the top scientists, politicians and so on. He enjoyed this very much; he went to the theater and to the opera. He finally got invited to all of the different soirees in Paris, and later in Rome, Berlin, London. He met famous people by the dozen literally. He met Lafayette no less than ten times. Finally he was reelected as people came more and more to realize after the death of Bolivar that they couldn't hold Colombia together.

They finally called on this man, the "organizer of victory" as he was called, to come back and see what he could do as newly elected president of Colombia after the parts of Colombia which became Venezuela and Ecuador had split off.

He came back to Colombia by way of the United States and spent nearly a year in the United States mainly in Philadelphia and Washington. There among other people he met people like Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and the various prominent senators and representatives. He took a trip to West Point which he liked very much because he was asked to review the troops there. He met the top people in New York City and shortly before he left he also met Josié Bonaparte who was living in Borten Town, New Jersey. So the people he met he thought of as kind of a resource for materials he would use if and when he came back to Colombia.

So the last five or six years in his life he was of course very prominent in Colombian politics. He was president and served his whole four years. The last two or three years of his life when he was dying he was still officially a senator and became sort of a leader of the opposition and died in 1840 in Colombia.

Now one of the problems I faced was that in writing about Narino the question was could I objectively approach Santander who had become such a bitter rival. At first I wasn't sure whether I could, but I decided that I would factually look at all the material available and come up with enough material to do fair justice to Santander who was such a bitter rival of both Narino and Bolivar.

Sweeney: Now let us return to your teaching career at Old Dominion College. I would like to know your initial reaction to ODC back in 1964. That is your reaction to the students, the physical surroundings, and to the Department of History.

Blossom: If you can remember, the building in which the history department was housed then was real shot. In fact my wife hadn't seen it when I accepted the job. When she later saw it, she said, "If I had seen this building I don't think I would have allowed you to make the move." It was a very old, dirty, dilapidated fire-trap. In fact it almost burned down one December. It burned out the geographer beneath me and fortunately didn't destroy any of my books, and didn't burn up fortunately when any students or professors were in there. But that building was a real horror and yet an awful lot of good teaching went on in that building, because it was not

[19]

only the history building, originally it was all of social sciences. When I came here there were eight people in the Department Of History, which is roughly one third of the present history faculty. I knew one or two of them somewhat before I came here. I knew Ralph DeBedts because he was teaching when he was still in graduate school at Florida and I was there as an assistant professor, so I knew Ralph somewhat.

I also knew Bill Schellings because he had been at the University of Florida. As I said awhile back, I knew the chairman because I had met him fifteen years earlier when he was on a summer grant at Duke University, and I knew Bill Spencer from fifteen years earlier.

The program of course was unjelled, unformulated as far as Latin American history was concerned. It was whatever I could make of it. As a matter of fact the bulk of my students as it turned out the first year were freshmen, and not as good freshmen as the ones we had at Florida because Florida, when I left there, had upgraded their freshmen selection process four times of Florida. Of course we were not at that point taking the same quality of students from Virginia.

We did have some very good juniors and seniors and we were moving into a masters program. Of course it was interesting to me because I could see a possibility of using my interest in Latin America with them. I think at first the change as far as the freshmen were concerned was a bit of a shock because many of our freshmen at ODC were really not ready for college work, it seemed to me.

Sweeney: During the late 1960's Latin American history flourished at Old Dominion College; however, in recent years enrollment in the 300/400 level Latin American history courses has dropped off sharply. How do you account for this?

Blossom: It is a world situation. As you can remember, when Kennedy became president in 1960 he put Latin America at the top of his list and since his number one enemy had been now maltreated twice in Latin America, one of the first things he did, was to put anything that Kennedy had at the top of his list, at the bottom of Nixon's list.

But I might add that this falling off happened even earlier because when President Johnson came into the scene, I think his notion of Latin America tended to be somewhat colored by the fact that he grew up in the part of Texas where many Mexican ladies were illegally in the United States. I think he tended to be rather short and impatient in his dealings with Latin Americans thinking of them mainly as these Mexican peasants he dealt with.

In any case, you may remember 1965 when trouble broke out in Santa Domingo I think we lost a great deal of ground in Latin America because without consulting the organization of American states we moved troops into Santa Domingo with great haste. So in a sense, I would say that the backpedaling, the decline in interest in Latin America really begins in '65 or thereabouts. Of course it became very intensive under Nixon. It was a policy, I think,

[20]

of studied neglect with Nixon; it was not an accident.

Sweeney: Who have been some of your most memorable students in Latin American history?

Blossom: One of the first students to go on and eventually become a professor was Robert Bunger who was very much interested in the elements of African cultures that were still here in the United States, particularly in the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina which I am somewhat familiar with from my eleven years at Charleston.

Bob Bunger soon found that Herscavitz, who is an anthropologist knew more about Africa, which he was interested in, than most historians. So we talked about it and he decided to shift over to anthropology. He went to Northwestern and got his pad there and is now an assistant or maybe an associate professor at East Carolina University at Greenville.

Then I had several persons in the military here. For instance Anthony Graham was a lt. commander. He was very interested in Central America and Panama and eventually was assigned to Panama. As far as I know he is still down there. After I had known him for about a year he got me involved in going back on, as it turned out, temporary duty in '67 and '68 to the Atlantic Intelligence Command. I think it was a result in our common interest in Latin America that I got this rather unusual assignment after being officially retired to go back on duty on a temporary status.

Among others I should mention the fact that Miss Lydia Taylor, who has now been accepted to law school at William and Mary got a Fullbright and went down to Chile. Didn't quite finish her archival studies, but did marry a Chilean and came back and worked for several years at the University of Texas, which is very strong in Latin American.

Herbert Sawyer, a retired Navy captain, got very interested in Latin American history. In fact he was one of a group of three people who signed up with me to go to Mexico one year. We didn't get the six we had counted on, but he went anyway on his own. He went to Monterray Tech, and he finished his masters degree with me and is teaching now at one of our community colleges here in this area.

More recently I might mention Dale Miller, I just had a letter from him the other day. He went to Colombia on his own. It improved his Spanish and he is now out at the University of New Mexico.

I had several dozen who were in the military pass through my classes and I have been either first or second reader on their masters theses. We have three or four masters theses dealing with Mexico. For instance, Colonel Morrison got very interested in Mexico that way. Others whose names I can't recall at the moment did get interested in Latin America ended up doing masters essays in what you'd call diplomatic history.

Sweeney: You mentioned the inter-institutional program which never got off the ground with Monterray Tech. I was wondering even though I didn't have a specific question listed here on that topic, if you could go into the background of that project and why it did not come about?

[21]

Blossom: First of all, the project which involved the Art Department which had courses in pre-Colombian art, the Political Science Department which had a geographer interested in Latin America, and of course the Spanish Department, would require five or six people in different departments to pull closely together and of course eventually would require some financial support. We weren't quite able to pull it off. We had on paper possibilities of not only a interdisciplinary program here, but chance for a close tie with a sister institution which is to say, Monterrey Tech, the only really outstanding technical university in all Latin America in Monterrey Mexico, It is privately financed and has very high standards. Their people come to Harvard and MIT with no problem transferring their grades.

One of their representatives came up here. We originally were trying to work out a system where we would exchange professors and students winter as well as summer. The only thing that came off was that three of my students went down there one summer and two of them liked it very much and came back with glowing accounts. The third one enjoyed himself very much; I don't think he did any studies. Since Monterrey Tech had rather strict standards on grades I don't think he was very happy with the way that his grades ended up. But two out of three were very strong for Monterrey Tech and wanted a more permanent relationship. I tried to work it out, but it just didn't come off.

Sweeney: Was there a lack of interest on the part of the administration here?

Blossom: I don't think it was a lack of interest, but at the moment I think it was a lack of finances. Also the fact that they wanted to determine how many students could I guarantee would be enrolled. That's a pretty hard thing to do.

Sweeney: You have served under three presidents at Old Dominion, Lewis W. Webb, James L. Bugg, Jr. and Alfred B, Rollins, Jr. What are your impressions of these three men as university administrators?

Blossom: Well, of course, first of all, I had rather close relationships, and for many years as I came here when Lewis Webb was president. I served on the commencement committee with him. I'll never forget the skill with which he handled a very very difficult and embarrassing situation. In fact I know of two, but I would like to mention this one in particular.

Commencement was coming on and the uniforms the students were to wear, the caps and gowns, weren't on hand. The question was where were they? It turned out that the uniform company had decided to earn a little extra money and had sent the uniforms somewhere into the western end of the state the very day before we were to get them. I remember working all these days until just a few hours before graduation and watching Lewis Webb never getting excited and never losing his cool. Finally, he worked it out and our graduation as far as the outside world knew, went very smoothly. But it was very tense at times.

I got to have a tremendous admiration for his ability, his tenacity, but also his diplomatic cool. Never getting, as I said, excited about it. Also a similar situation happened at another commencement that I remember.

[22]

I always felt that here was a man who was operating on a shoestring as far as I could tell in the early days and literally built Old Dominion College from something very small and very financially shaky into something very good, growing very rapidly with unlimited future in this area of a million people.

Sweeney: Do you have any comment on his successor President Bugg?

Blossom: I think President Bugg had an unpleasant job to do when he came here. I never will forget what he said in his first address that he had had a job similar to this before he came here which among other things, he had to get rid of the "dead wood". Of course this is an unpleasant expression because it meant among other things that faithful teachers who happened not to have doctor's degrees would be squeezed out or eliminated or forced back to graduate school. In effect it was a difficult job he had to change Old Dominion College into a university.

This sort of procedure of eliminating "dead wood", whatever that may mean, is no way to win friends as you can imagine. I think a certain ruthlessness was required, such as saying no more people without PhD's; those without Phd's must go. If you don't have enough publication out... So in effect, the job that he had to do was not a job for a person who wasn't able to be ruthless, and so of course in some ways he had to be. But he did what he was called on to do, to change the college basically into a university. In the process he made a good many enemies.

Sweeney: What is your impression of the start Alfred Rollins has made in his administration of the University's affairs?

Blossom: My only meeting with President Rollins has been under very pleasant situations. President Rollins had me and my wife and the rest of us who retired to dinner. Something that was absolutely unnecessary. He didn't have to do it, and he did it most graciously. So of course my feelings toward him on the only occasion I met him or had anything to do with him was of a very pleasant nature.

Sweeney: You've served thirteen years in the Department of History. Could you compare or contrast the state of the department today to that when you arrived in 1964?

Blossom: Well, we are now what? Twenty-five or twenty-six instead of eight. We cover almost every field of history which we didn't back then. The only thing that I'm concerned about at the moment, my successor has not been chosen (I understand it's a financial matter and is going to be delayed for a year) and I hate to see Latin American history which in effect here for thirteen years has dropped or at least allowed to drag for one year because a certain amount of momentum will be lost.

One of the two areas that we talked about over the years of filling, we haven't done yet. For instance, history of technology and its effect on history is one area we haven't covered yet. Melvin Krantzberg wrote an excellent two volume text on this very subject of technology and history. There have been times when I thought we would get the person in this area. Other than that I think we've covered most of the major fields pretty well. Of course if we're going into a PhD program as we hope to do, I think we need to do two or three things that we hoped to do.

[23]

One of them, of course, is to get better access to archival materials both here and elsewhere. Maybe even with some kind of permanent home in the Washington area where a lot of good materials are, and in the Duke, Chapel Hill area. Some kind of setup where graduate students can deal with archival materials on almost any field, which we don't have yet. It's a very hard thing to get when you come late into a graduate program. That's one thing.

Another thing we hoped would develop and hasn't yet, is a genuinely permanent relationship with Norfolk State College. I have done a little in the direction of trying to encourage that, but I understand, for instance, one thing that is very important would be a permanent bus shuttle back and forth. It's very hard without your own car to get from here to Norfolk State and yet it's just across town. It's one of the biggest hurdles we have to first meet if we are generally going to get a cooperative program with Norfolk State.

Sweeney: You have demonstrated considerable interest in your younger colleagues in the Department of History. Could you share with me your philosophy on the senior professor's relationship to his junior colleagues?

Blossom: As you know, I've enjoyed talking to and meeting the younger colleagues in a non-official capacity enjoyed their company and listening to their hopes. I often suggest something they might avoid if they move up in the profession, because I've sometimes made mistakes that I hope perhaps I can suggest they avoid.

But I've always felt that encouraging my own graduate students and following their careers and continuing on and helping the younger men coming in to develop is a part of my job as a senior professor. It isn't I felt I had to do. It's something I enjoyed doing.

a notable list of "firsts" to your credit. I would like to talk to you now about these. As you mentioned you initiated the professor exchange program with Norfolk State College some years ago. First of all, could you tell me how you came to teach a course at Norfolk State?

Blossom: At that time it seemed to me that both Norfolk State and Old Dominion hadn't really done much together and it was about time they did. It was suggested that if we could work out a professor exchange, that would be a good way to start. We didn't have anybody from the Middle East and they did. Their Latin American historian is a good friend of mine, Charles Simmons who was on leave, so they needed someone to teach a class in Latin American history. So we worked out an exchange whereby Old Dominion would continue to pay me and I would teach my course over there while Charles Simmons was gone, and Norfolk State would continue to pay their man in Middle East history and he would teach history here. It worked out quite well. We were hoping that it would continue but it didn't. It just seemed to die and never continued. I was very disappointed in that.

Sweeney: What were your reactions to the Norfolk State students? And how did they receive you?

Blossom: As you might suspect, at first they were a little cautious. They didn't know what to expect of me. I remember among other things, because they were

[24]

expanding, I would have three different classrooms in a matter of days, so I had trouble finding them and they had trouble finding me. Then as we got topics going, I usually try to get them in a survey course to get interested in a topic. I discovered that many of them hadn't really done much work in a library on a topic that required a lengthy paper. So I more or less guided them into the library and showed them to go about it. Eventually we got along quite well.

I got the feeling, though, that in the matter of experience, these were theoretically seniors, yet they hadn't done any lengthy papers as far as I could determine in which they had to use one or more libraries. They didn't know quite how to go about it to draw up a bibliography for a topic.

So I found that I was having to do more guiding than I did with my own ODC students.

Sweeney: How do you assess the state of inter-institutional cooperation between the colleges today?

Blossom: I think it's friendly, but cool. It doesn't seem to work as well as it ought to. Quite a few people here have good friends over there, and would like to see more done, but for reasons I don't understand not much seems to have been done yet. Yet it seems fairly obvious that two institutions in the same city, in some cases possibly duplicating each other more than they need to, and for what reasons I don't know except for the fact that it is very hard to get back and forth with public transportation. There's very little exchange which I see going on at the present. It's too bad.

Sweeney: Could you tell me about the team taught course on "Revolution in Modern Times" which you planned and taught with seven other professors? Was this course a successful venture?

Blossom: From the point of view of the students and the professors, it was very successful, but the administration pointed out that I was using up the time of eight different individuals, and this was too expensive. They couldn't do this again. It was a rare experience because here each man was a specialist in one particular area: China, Russia, Mexico, England, the United States, France, and so from the students' point of view, they were getting very very expensive and very specialized and very good program. But the administration said they couldn't afford anymore like this.

Sweeney: Could you relate your experience as the first ODU faculty member to teach a graduate seminar at Fort Monroe?

Blossom: It was in the casemate close to where Jefferson Davis had been held a prisoner, a rather unusual type of classroom. Most of the students were rather unusual students too, because they were men in their forties and fifties, majors, colonels, lieutenant commanders, commanders, that is they were mid-level military people.

Most of them eventually turned in very good papers. At first they didn't quite know what was expected of them or how to go about it. Most of them though, were pretty experienced in writing papers of some kind, so that part of it was no problem. I had a personal problem, though, in that these classes required eighty miles of travel for me everyday the class was held, after I had already been in to Old Dominion and back, which is a round trip of twenty-eight miles to my home. So the days when I taught at Fort Monroe, there were very long drives and tiring in that my day finished usually about midnight.

[25]

Sweeney: You have taught a course, the American Novel as History, which, I believe was the first interdisciplinary course in American history. Did you find this course a stimulating experience and did the English department raise any objection to the history department offering the course?

Blossom: Well, I don't know of any official objections that the English department raised. I can see where they might think I was poaching on their area. As far as the students went, I got unusually good students the two times that I taught it. About twenty both times. Any more than this would have been difficult to do what I do which is to divide the groups up into four groups treating four things: the South, the West, success or making it, then the future which included a study of utopias, distopias and some science fiction communities.

This seemed to be the kind of reading a lot of students are into on their own so I got students, for instance, who are English majors, art majors, some very unusually good students who were self-motivated and worked together as panels with four or five on each panel. The results were very satisfactory to me. They seemed to enjoy it. Many of them in fact told me, "I don't particularly like history, the survey courses, and I wouldn't have taken a course if it were run in the usual way from what I've experienced." Here we were reading somewhere between ten and twelve paperback novels in the course and these students got to know each other personally as they seldom do in a class because I divided them up into four groups and required that they work together.

We used a different approach. It wasn't the professor lecturing except to tie the things together and introduce the subject. It was mainly the students doing the work and these were self-selected very bright students who could write and who liked to read. This was the kind of group that came close to what I remember as I said that at Amherst I had the privilege of being in the writing class with Robert Frost. In effect it was students, good students interested in what they were doing, and doing it very well. This was of course the ideal teaching situation.

Sweeney: In the fall of 1975 you were the first faculty member to teach history with the PACE program. You taught aboard the USS John F. Kennedy when she went to the Mediterranean. Could you provide your recollections of this experience including the Kennedy's collision with the destroyer USS Belknap while you were aboard?

Blossom: This experience involved quite a bit of flying of the kind I've never done before. Personally this was rather exciting. The idea of going to sea at age 63, having not been to sea for some thirty years rather appealed to me as something different. A nice way to sort of wind up a career of teaching.

I wasn't at all sure what the teaching would be like. It was under somewhat difficult conditions at times. For instance one of my classrooms was in the library of the Kennedy and right next to the library was a screeching elevator that they carried ammunition up and down in. So I had to figure out ways to teach when I wouldn't compete with the elevator because I could not out shout the elevator.

My other classroom was much better situated. It was a lounge in back of the junior officers' mess. That worked pretty well. I found myself teaching double time knowing that when I got to port, for instance, the students wouldn't be there. Believe it or not, for a couple of weeks when I first got on the ship, which incidentally was just off the Turkish coast and I came in by helicopter, I found myself teaching a twenty-four

[26]

hour a week schedule. I was running with my tongue hanging out so to speak. Even though it is true these were only the basic survey courses in American and European history, students many of them had schedules where they were working twenty-four hours without any sleep, so of course they had a problem in coming regularly to class, but I had a good completion rate. I started out with something over one hundred students in four surveys and I finished up with eighty which they told me was a very good completion rate.

As far as the collision we had, this happened to be Kennedy's birthday, as you may know. Here we were aboard the Kennedy and this still unexplained collision took place with the destroyer cutting in front of the Kennedy in the middle of the Mediterranean at ten o'clock at night, stormy, rainy, dark. All of a sudden I was sitting at my desk at ten o'clock getting ready for my classes. The chaplain had just said prayers and put us officially to bed. Over a loud speaker comes, "Man your battle stations. Man your battle stations," No words, "This is a drill." So I knew this was it.

When you hear, "Man your battle stations, man your battle stations!", that's a war situation unless they say, "This is a drill." And nobody said it was a drill. So I started... I wasn't alone, I might add, in this little crowded quarters, there were three of us, three PACE instructors in there, and we started looking around, trying to figure out what did we do. We hadn't been instructed in what to do. We'd never been in an "abandon ship" drill. The lights went out for a little while and then under emergency power the lights came back on. Eventually one of our buddies who was down fighting the fire called up and told us how to use the emergency oxygen equipment if we had to use it. Believe it or not for eight of us in this compartment there was only one working flashlight and none of us had any knives in case we had to cut loose a life raft. So we realized that if the ship weren't able to put out the fire, as it burst out in our ship as well as the other ship, we would be in a very bad situation.

I might add there were a lot of heroes that night. As you may know, there were over fifty men who were swept into the water as the destroyer came under our angles, it's called, and sheared everything off the top. Rockets were going up into the air and ammunition was exploding all over the place. It just looked like,.. I couldn't even see how that destroyer could float, but they did and they managed to put out the fire. The other ships came by and then we saw these helicopters circling around and it turned out they were trying to pick up some fifty men who were in the water. They eventually got them all, but as you probably know, a dozen of them were dead, they were burned to death. One man on our ship suffocated and died. They had a service for him two days later.

So this was a kind of unusual teaching situation to say the least. It was about as close to a war situation as I'd ever been since I had convoy duty back in '44 and '45. But there were some very pleasant aspects to the whole situation.

For instance, the chaplain on board the ship invited me to join a group that went ashore in Tatania, Sicily. We worked one day in an orphanage there. Out of this I'm going to do something similar for two weeks in Naples this summer, again with this chaplain who has done this many times off the ship.

[27]

We hit Naples so many times, of course, many of the men had been there before and had gotten sick and tired of Naples. On the other hand, the ship took planned trips for the men, they took them to Munich Germany for three or four days. They took them to Florence for three or four days, to Rome so that actually liberty and leave off the ship were the biggest things in the minds of the men there. But it meant, among other things, that practically no classes could be conducted in port. You had to plan your courses so they were done at sea. Of course at sea you were competing with the jobs the men had to do on a very tight schedule.

Sweeney: You delivered a paper dealing with contemporary urban history on the program "On the Port of Norfolk" in 1975. Could you tell me more about that program and your paper?

Blossom: I was asked to deal with Latin Americans in the port of Norfolk and the amount we do with Latin Americans, particularly in coal. We do a tremendous business with Brazil, we do some business with Mexico. Spanish warships have come in here. Also there is a sizable Spanish-speaking community in Norfolk. My job was to try to determine how big that community was, where they came from and how many of them were involved in what professions.

I found, for instance, that there were something like fifteen surgeons in the area, mainly at De Paul hospital and at Norfolk General who spoke Spanish as their first language. I knew this in a general way before hand, but I didn't know exactly who they were. Also, I discovered that one Catholic church here once a month conducts services in Spanish, and there's one Protestant church that conducts services regularly in Spanish.

I found out that there were a lot of nurses in the hospitals who were Spanish-speaking. As far as consuls go, we have one retired Mexican consul, but at the present, no regular consul. We once had a very outstanding Brazilian consul here. He's now in the port of Baltimore. I was trying to get an overall picture of what our contacts in the port of Norfolk are with the Spanish speaking world including Spain and Portugal as well as Latin America.

I finally got access with the full cooperation of the Pilots Association to their records and I covered the ships entering and leaving Norfolk for one full year and got a complete rundown on which ones were Spanish or Spanish-speaking and I discovered a lot of these Greek and Liberian ships were mainly manned by Spanish speaking persons. Found also that the ships supply places here in Norfolk do a tremendous amount of business with Spanish speaking sailors here in Norfolk.

Sweeney: To what group did you deliver the paper?

Blossom: This was an urban studies group which is sponsored jointly now in its third or fourth year by Norfolk State and Old Dominion. They asked me if I would consider updating it for next year, I might.

[28]

Sweeney: Getting back to something we'd missed, in 1960-61 you served as co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies. Could you tell me about any significant experiences you had as the editor of a scholarly journal?

Blossom: Latin American journals have a short life so there were only four issues that we put out. We ran out of money eventually. Curtis Wilkes who had his own program of conferences at the University of Florida, wanted some of the younger professors at the University of Florida to take this load off his shoulders. He had run it himself in connection with his Caribbean conferences for some twenty years.

So he approached me and Charles who was a professor at the University of South Florida to see if we would do it, and we did. We managed to run it for one full year. As it turned out, Charles had some small children about the same age as my twins then and very often when we were mailing out the material to thousands of persons all over the world, my twins and his children of the same age ended up helping stuff the envelopes with the material and mail it out. We had about fifteen hundred subscribers.

Sweeney: Could you give me your assessment of the future of Latin American studies at Old Dominion University?

Blossom: I can't help but feel that with Nixon out of the picture, that as they used to say in Arkansas, we have nowhere to go but up. Arkansas used to be considered sort of the bottom of the heap in terms of education, I think they used to say they were running nip and tuck with Mississippi. Well, Old Dominion at the moment has people in the community who are interested in Latin America. I know this from having been involved in the free college here. I know this from people in the military who have written on Mexico, and other Latin American countries. So I know the interest is there. It's a question of some new person coming in who is willing to work hard to take it from where we are now and build it up. I think the present administration in Washington has a much better attitude than either Nixon or Johnson had. I noticed for instance where Rosalyn Carter is supposed to go on a tour of Latin America shortly, so I think while it doesn't have the number one position that Kennedy gave it, it certainly will not be bottom of the list or off the list as it was under Nixon.

So it seems to me that if we bring in an enthusiastic young person here who will work closely with the departments like the Spanish department and the art department, we can get it going again. I presume it will be done not later than next September.

Sweeney: After thirteen years at Old Dominion what have been your chief satisfactions and your chief disappointments?

Blossom: I would say my chief satisfactions have come from seeing some of my students go on to graduate school, go into teaching, keep me informed of what they are doing after they leave here. I've even had one of my former students whom I hadn't had in five years come up to me at a square dance last week and say, "Don't you remember me? I'm Suzy Butler. You probably don't, I don't look the same as I did then. I'm teaching now at.. ." I think she said Norfolk Catholic. So here was a student I had several years ago who felt that by having courses with me she had become interested in history and had gone on and is now teaching. This is just one sample.

[29]

Several of my students have gone into things like banking or business and still tell me though that history is a hobby with them and attribute it to interests that developed in my classes. I think this sense of the continuity beyond the classroom is the thing that is most satisfying. That in effect here is a lifelong interest which is developed and doesn't just die because the bell rang and class ended.

As for disappointments, I think that first of all, about two years ago, American history hit sort of a nadir. There weren't enough students to make the classes, and as you know upper division classes sometimes are small and if they get too small they get scratched. That was a disappointment.

Our failure to get something going with Motiterrey Tech was a bit of a disappointment. Of course I'm sorry that the young people, some very good people I interviewed in Washington in December, that none of them have been chosen yet to continue the work that I started.

Sweeney: Do you believe that professors should be compelled to retire at age 65?

Blossom: No. I would like to go on teaching, maybe not full-time, but certainly the idea of being told because you have a birthday you are finished is totally a non-arbitrary way to make this decision. I think it should be a joint decision on the part of the professor and the administration as to whether they will continue full-time or part-time or it just seems to me that here is a case where the professor has no choice at all. He's just told that's it.

Sweeney: What are your future plans?

Blossom: First of all, I've being trying to negotiate and I think I may have some success in either going to teach in Colombia next year or some further research on my biography of Santander. I've also had lines out looking for something in the way of part-time teaching in this area. This next summer coming up I'm going for two weeks to Casa Materna in Naples, a place where the Kennedy has sent me ashore to work in an orphanage. My wife and I are going with nineteen other people conducted in this case by the former chaplain of the Kennedy who has done this sort of thing many times. Possibly we'll go again next year to Spain because a British-sponsored orphanage there in Spain has asked us if we would do the same thing next year there. So I may be going to an orphanage in Spain next year for two weeks.

Of course these are sort of highlights of the immediate future. What I would like to do of course is continue my research and my teaching.

Sweeney: Thank you very much, Tom. It's been a most enlightening and refreshing interview.