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Sweeney: Today
we are interviewing Professor Lee M. Klinefelter, who was the first director
of the Norfolk Division of William and Mary Technical Institute.
We'll
start here about Professor Klinefelter and a question in respect to his
own background - his boyhood in Iowa. Could you tell us something about
the education you had out at Colorado State College and later at Columbia
University?
Klinefelter: My
boyhood in Iowa was limited to about eight months, I think. The folks
moved to Minnesota before I can remember, and we lived in Elmore, Minnesota
for until I was about seven or eight years old. My dad ran a grain elevator.
And we moved to Colorado then, on account of the dust, I guess, and
the grain elevator. He had asthma, or something of the kind. And I had
a cousin who had a ranch near Ridgeway, Colorado, and he persuaded Dad
to buy a bunch of cattle and run them on the range. He built a log cabin
up on the mountains. He had an older brother, and we lived there one
summer and drove the cattle down to Delta, where he fattened them up
and sold them and supposedly - I don't know whether he made any money
out of it or not - he must have not done too well because the next year
he bought a little ranch up near Ridgeway and we... no, Cedar Ridge,
so we spent the summer there. We cleared that up - it was sagebrush
and wild land - and he didn't really like that much too, so we moved
to Rocky Ford. He bought a five-acre irrigated tract on the edge of
town and raised a family on that - raising tomatoes and cantaloupes,
cucumbers, and had some fruit trees, and so on.
I went through high
school in Rocky Ford and then, actually, I took a commercial course.
I don't know why I did. I learned typewriting and shorthand. I found
the typewriting useful. But as I approached graduation I began to -
the idea of working
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lost its appeal somehow,
and I talked to the principal, and he fixed me up with a college prep
diploma, so I went up to Colorado, Fort Collins, which is now Colorado
State University, and was entered in the class of 1914 there.
After I finished
there, at that time I took electrical engineering and engineers were
not in any too great demand, you see, and companies like G.E. and Westinghouse
were paying them about $75 a month, and they offered me a little more
to go down to Fort Lewis in the southwestern corner of the state and
teach shop and science and things like that. So I did. I was supposed
to be part-time at Fort Lewis.
Fort Lewis ran in
the winter when it was too cold for farmers to do anything, and so they
sent their kids to school. It was largely a Mormon community, and we
had probably 50 or 60 students who lived on the property - I think there
was about 10,000 acres that had been originally a fort, and became an
off-reservation Indian school, and then was made a state school of agriculture
which operated in the winter and not in the summer. It was the summer
that I was supposed to be part-time help at the college at Fort Collins.
I was divided up, apparently, between the physics and the engineering
department. They both wanted me full-time, so two full-times didn't
agree with me. So when I saw a notice in the paper that the government
I take a job at the Norfolk Naval Yard as aerial draftsman at $3.52
a day? So I wired right back that I would. I knew they meant electrical
because they knew I didn't know anything about aerial.
So I came here. I
was on my way to Norfolk when war was declared - World War I was declared.
I routed myself by way of Atlanta and met a girl there that I had met
at ... Institute, and we became engaged while I was there, on my way
to Norfolk. We were married the next year. And I was in the Norfolk
Naval Yard all through the war, and at the end of the war it became
- well, it was interesting during the war. We had a lot of things to
do. We worked 12 to 14 hours a day at times. But after the war it wasn't
very interesting, really, so I applied to the vocational director at
the Norfolk City Schools - that was Mr. Rightingsward, at that time,
a Swede - for a night school job. He came back with an offer for a night
school job if I would take a day school job. So I did, and I taught
industrial arts to Maury for, oh, two years, I guess, until they built
Ruffner, and then I went to Ruffner, supposedly as head of the industrial
arts department, which didn't amount to much. There were only about
three of us.
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I was there until
1942, I guess. Lewis Webb called up one time and wanted to know if I
would like to come out here and help with the war training program.
Well, I was in a situation there where there was apparently little opportunity
for promotion. So I told him sure, and I came on out and during the
war, this was World War II, they had two programs. One was the ESMF,
it was the college-level program, and then the vocational program. Eddie
White had the college-level program, and I had the vocational program,
and Lewis Webb sort of oversaw the whole thing. We divided up the night
work between us and got along real well. We had an office over in the
Old Administration Building, and I continued with that until war training
we built shops under the stadium, and we had classes in auto mechanics
and aircraft engines, carburation, welding, and subjects like that.
We had both day and night classes, but mostly night classes, and our
faculty was hired from the air station who came in and helped us out,
and it was quite an interesting program. The welding, I think, was probably
the most popular because welders were always in considerable demand.
So that was that.
Sweeney: Then after the war did you leave the college
and go back to the school system?
Klinefelter: No,
not immediately. I stayed with the ... moved over to the old Larchmont
School and was teaching physics and a little math and a little of this
and that for some time, and then someone called up from the school system
and wanted me to take over the maintenance department. The pay was pretty
good, and it sounded interesting, so I did. And I took that for about
two years, but it became so political, there were too many bosses. The
school board had several members, and two or three of them had businesses
that they thought should be favored, and so I called up Lewis Webb and
asked him if he had a job for me out here. It just happened that he
needed someone in the engineering department, so I came back out and
taught everything imaginable, mathematics, college algebra, calculus,
descriptive geography, electrical circuits, all kinds of things like
that. Before I left, we had been thinking about the Technical Institute
a little bit and had made some plans for it. While I was with the school
board, it was started. Mr. Parks, I believe, was in charge of it.
Then, after I had
been back awhile, Webb decided that I needed a change, so he put me
down in charge of the Technical Institute. At that time it consisted
of the shops under the stadium, that surplus building that had been
moved over from the Navy Yard, and we were overrun with veterans. We
had lots of them. We had all we could handle and more, too. We set up
what we thought
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were very practical
programs - two-year programs in most of the subjects, three years in
electronics, mainly because of B. C. Dickerson, who was in charge and
who thought it ought to be three years. And I'm sure he was right about
that because there was a lot to know.
We put on a pretty
stiff math course for all these people and really made it a technical
institute; those who weren't able to handle the math went into the auto
mechanics that was sort of the tail-end of the situation. We had some
boys in there who graduated from Maury High School and could write their
names fairly intelligently, but that was about all they could do. It
didn't take much to get a diploma from Maury High School at that time.
There may not be any difference now.
Anyhow, some of them
made excellent auto mechanics. I run into them once in a while now,
and they're doing well in the field. So I think that we did some good
work. So far as the other courses went, the drafting, refrigeration
and air-conditioning, electronics, courses were pretty well organized
and practical, and we had no trouble in placing our students. In fact,
many of our... well, electronics students went into jobs where they
were called engineers and paid like engineers, and still are, although
they did not actually have an engineering degree.
So I think the Technical
Institute did a good job. However, it was handicapped by the fact that...
well, I've always blamed the women counselors in the high schools for
a good deal of the trouble, I think. They have had a tendency always
to counsel any bright boys that they must go to college -they needed
a college education - and it never occurred to them that anything else
less than a bachelor's degree would be something they could get along
with. So we had quite a recruiting problem. We had difficulty in maintaining
our student membership.
Incidentally, we
took in the first black student in this institution. Mr. Webb called
me up one day, and it seems that there was a woman in his office who
was a teacher in the city schools - very active in the NAACP - and she
wanted to get her husband into school here. He was a mail carrier. He
wanted to take drafting as a night course, and I had turned him down
once, but she wasn't satisfied. So Lewis said, "Can't you take
him in? This woman is going to sue me
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if you don't!"
I said, "Sure. Send him on over." So we took him in and put
him in the drafting class, and he did all right. He did very well. He
caused nobody any trouble, and nobody minded. It was a very smooth operation
entirely. But he was the first black student, so far as I know, that
was a student in this institution.
Sweeney: Do you remember what year that was?
Klinefelter: No,
I don't.
Sweeney: The early fifties, probably.
Klinefelter: Well,
now, I'll tell you. It was after we were in the new building.
Sweeney: Oh, after the new building.
Klinefelter: Yes.
We were in the new building at the time. I was only there a couple of
years after we got in the new building. So that must have been about
- let's see, I retired in '59; it must have been about '57 or '58 or
something like that.
Sweeney: When the Technical School started, was it classified
as a trade school, because I remember reading a letter you wrote to the
editor about 1958 or so, and you were upset because somebody had referred
to it as late as 1958 as being a trade school. You said it was a technical
school and not a trade school.
Klinefelter: Yes.
That's true, and we made every effort to make it a technical school.
You know, it's an interesting thing. I spent some time studying the
history of technical institutes; they're old institutions. They started
way back in Colonial days. And a most peculiar thing is that Carnegie
Tech, for instance, was a technical institute. M.I.T. was a technical
institute originally. Those schools, they started out as technical institutes
with perhaps two or three year courses, and I think they got delusions
of grandeur. Their officers decided that it would be much nicer to be
president of a college than director of a technical institute.
So they all became
colleges. Technical institutes have traditionally graduated into colleges.
And, of course, ours did the same thing here, but in a little different
way. It was sort of absorbed by the engineering department.
Sweeney: Did you have any women students in the program
in the technical school in the late '40's and early '50's, or was it all
male?
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Klinefelter: We
had, only in the war training. I don't think after the war that we had
any women. Perhaps at night - in some of the night school - in some
of the drafting classes, maybe. But I don't think we had any appreciable
number.
During the war, we
had a lot of women in training as aircraft mechanics and that sort of
thing. But that played out after the war.
Sweeney: Which courses were the most popular during the
1950's? Was it refrigerating/air conditioning, or auto mechanics, or what
course?
Klinefelter: Oh,
I think the electronics courses were the most popular. There was a great
deal of demand, of course, in those days for television repairmen -
servicemen - that sort of thing. But we did not aim our courses generally
towards television servicing or radio servicing, but they did have such
courses that lead to that type of work, so that electronics were probably
the most popular. Refrigeration was popular, drafting was popular, and,
as I say, the auto mechanics caught the... those who couldn't make the
grade in -particularly in math - in the other fields. We had machine
shop work. We cooperated with the city to some extent in that we had
a program for a while which they sent out students to us in the afternoon
- they'd take their morning work in high school and in the afternoon
they would come out and take, well, I think we had them in all departments,
and some of them did very well. Some of them, after they graduated from
high school, went on to finish up here in the Technical Institute. But
that continued for several years.
Sweeney: Was the Technical Institute part of the William
and Mary scheme, or was it under VPI?
Klinefelter: I
really don't know. It was under the board of directors, you might say,
of the local college. In fact, we had no direct contact with either
William and Mary or VPI, as far as I know. We were under whoever was
in charge of this institution at that time.
Of course, we were,
during the war, and for some time after that we got a lot of war surplus.
Our shops down under the stadium were fitted up largely with government
surplus property. Some of it was not very suitable, I know. In the machine
shop we had one lathe that would have been all right in a railway locomotive
shop that was much too big for us, but that sort of material was very
handy.
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For instance, our
aircraft welding, which we taught, was almost all aluminum welding,
because aircraft are largely aluminum. And we would send a truck down
to the base, and they'd load us up with scrap aluminum, and the scrap
was too big to go on the truck, so they'd cut it in two and put it on
the truck. We did pretty well so far as material to work with at that
time.
Sweeney: Did you have a close relationship with the engineering
department in those years?
Klinefelter: Not
particularly so. No, I don't think so. That is, you mean, while during
the Technical Institute days -we were pretty much alone to ourselves
and didn't have -in fact, I don't know that we made any great effort
to cooperate with engineering or they with us, as far as I can remember.
Sweeney: Did you work with private industry in Tidewater
and find out sometimes, did they come to you and say, "We're going
to need so many people in one area or another" and then did you try
to induce students to come in and study for the course that would prepare
them for a job that, say, already existed?
Klinefelter: Yes,
we did some of that. Particularly auto mechanics and refrigeration/air
conditioning. We worked to some extent with the agencies of that type,
and they took over most of our graduates as they graduated. They supplied
us, too, with some equipment. We got, I remember, some automobile engines,
and cut-away type of demonstration equipment from the various automobile
agencies in town. They were quite cooperative, generally.
Sweeney: In 1957 the Soviet Union launched that Sputnik
satellite, and it seemed to really make people pay much more attention
to technical education. Many people felt the United States was far behind
the Soviet Union. Did this Russian space venture have any effect on the
people's interest in technical education in this area?
Klinefelter: I
don't really remember that it did. It may have, but so far as my memory
goes, I don't remember that it made any particular difference with us.
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Sweeney: Students set up a radio station, WMTI, William
and Mary Technical Institute. Could you recall how this came about and
where they got the equipment to put on a radio station?
Klinefelter: Well,
that was a project of Dickerson's - D.C. Dickerson, who was in charge
of our electronics department. And I was trying to see if I could think
where it was. We had a shack down there on the corner somewhere, and,
oh, the equipment was war surplus, I'm sure. You could get almost anything
from the Navy in the way of electrical equipment. They had everything,
and they were quite generous with us, if there was anything that they
could spare... and, I don't remember where... somebody gave us a tower.
Sweeney: WTAR, was it?
Klinefelter: It
could have been. It could have been. I don't remember.
Sweeney: Well, I think it was an FM station in North
Carolina that went out of business.
Klinefelter: I
just don't remember where I remember seeing that tower lying on the
ground and being put up, but where, it's the funniest thing... I have
a couple of stereo pictures of the campus taken from a tower. When they
got it put up, they sent one of the boys up to the top of the tower
to do something... Anyhow, I sent him up a camera on a string and had
him take a couple of pictures for me. I wouldn't have gone up there
for anything.
Sweeney: I notice that you used comic strips and cartoons
in your admissions tests. I was wondering what kind of admissions tests
these were and how the comic strips fit into assessing whether a young
man would be a good applicant for your program.
Klinefelter: I
don't seem to remember that. Was it a comic strip?
Sweeney: It was in the newspaper.The new building opened
in 1958 and, of course, in those days the school was just starved financially
and couldn't get funds for practically anything. Do you recall how it
was that funds were obtained to build a new Technical Institute building?
Klinefelter: No,
I don't really remember the machinery in back of it. It had been needed
for some time, and it was obvious that we needed a building. I think
there was some federal money that became available. You know. It was
probably built with
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federal money for
vocational education, and it was probably not generally known, but it
was the first air-conditioned building on the campus. And the reason
it was air-conditioned was that they had Kovner, who was in charge of
refrigeration/air conditioning, say, "We ought to get a big...'
- oh, I can't think of the name of the thing. It was quite a large rotary,
compressor air-conditioning machine. He said, "We really need it
as part of our equipment; if we're going to teach air-conditioning right,
we really should have it." So we put it down on our list. I think
it cost about $25,000 or something like that. And it went through. Of
course, when you had a machine like that, you couldn't run it efficiently
unless you had a load on it. It had to do something. So the most logical
thing we could think of to do was for it to work up an arrangement for
cooling, circulating cool brine through the radiators in the classrooms.
So we used it purely as a laboratory project to cool the Technical Institute.
But shortly after that the law was changed. You know, prior to that
time it was against the law to air-condition a school building, either
public schools or colleges and universities. It was only shortly after
that that. . . I think the library over here was the next building that
was built, and it was air-conditioned. We sort of snuck air-conditioning
into the Technical Institute by the back door. It was a laboratory project.
But the new building
was a great addition, a great help for us, because we had been. . .of
course, we still left the machine shop and the auto mechanics under
the stadium, and the machine shop was eventually moved over to the new
T.I. building, and the auto mechanics was abandoned.
Sweeney: You expanded some of the programs to three years,
drafting, refrigerating and air-conditioning. What effect did this have,
to expand to the three years? Obviously it made it a better program since
you went into it more deeply.
Klinefelter: I
don't think we did that very seriously. As I remember it, that was more
theoretical than practical. Aside from the electronics, which we kept
as a three-year program, I don't think the others became three-year
programs very seriously.
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Sweeney: I wanted to ask you about President Webb. Did
you always feel that he was a friendly voice in the administration as
far as the Technical Institute was concerned - I mean, was he sympathetic
to you?
Klinefelter: Yes.
He certainly was. He was very helpful in every way that he could be
and very sympathetic to us. An interesting thing that just occurred
to me is that when they were planning for the education department here
at college, the... I don't know how I got in on that, but I put forth
the idea that they should have an industrial arts program since there
was none this side of Blacksburg - they had one at Blacksburg -and so,
I guess, I'm to a certain extent responsible for the fact that we have
an industrial arts department, whether that's to my credit or not.
Sweeney: Did any of the students ever come up with new
inventions? I read something in an old newspaper that seemed to indicate
that in '58 they were experimenting with some type of microwave oven at
that time. Do you remember any inventions that were ever produced at the
Institute?
Klinefelter: No,
I don't believe so. Of course, a great many experimental projects were
underway, but I don't know of any that actually led to patents or inventions
of any kind.
Sweeney: You mentioned something just a minute ago that
caught my attention. You mentioned that the auto mechanics has been dropped.
It seems to me that in view of having so few good auto mechanics around,
then, there being such a great need of them, that was a mistake to drop
auto mechanics.
Klinefelter: Well,
of course, the institution of the city's trade school they have out
on Military Highway has taken over much of that; I'm sure they have
auto mechanics there. And that, of course, was one of our difficulties
after that was started, was the fact that education was offered free
there and tuition was charged here. So, naturally, if a boy could get
what he wanted there for free, he was more likely to go there. But I'm
sure they are continuing auto mechanics out there. And many of the other
subjects that we taught at the Technical Institute are taught out there.
Sweeney: Did you feel, when you retired, that you had
accomplished your goals in the position as the director of the Technical
Institute?
Klinefelter: Yes.
I felt that the school was on a sound footing and I was pretty well
satisfied with the way it was running, and
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I saw that I could
rather foresee what was going to happen with the engineering department
eyeing some of the activities that we were doing, so I thought it best
to get out. Let someone else take over those troubles.
Sweeney: In the years since you have retired, have you
retained close contact with the technical aspect. . . . Of course, actually,
now, hasn't technical education been completely taken over by engineering
as far as the school is concerned?
Klinefelter: Yes.
That's right. The engineering department has taken over the technical,
and they now offer, I believe, two types of engineering, one purely
theoretical and the other technical engineering, which would be the
operating type of work, such as we were offering in the Technical Institute.
So all they've done, I suppose, is... so far as the electronics, for
instance, is they've expanded it to a four-year program, and the same
will apply to the refrigeration/air-conditioning and many of those courses.
They've simply made them engineering technology courses.
Sweeney: Have you done any other teaching or become involved
with any other project since you left the school in 1959?
Klinefelter: No.
I've taught a few evening classes for a few years in the Technical Institute,
then during Dr. Webb's last year he lost his office assistant, and he
needed someone to help out in the office who.. . . It was a position,
apparently, that required a certain degree and an amount of administrative
experience, one way or another. He knew that when Dr. Bugg came he would
be bringing his own assistant, so he wanted somebody that wouldn't mind
the job for one year because there was no future in it. So he called
me up and asked me if I would like to come out and help out, and I was
very happy to and worked out an arrangement whereby I could, while working
four or five hours a day - a half a day - I would not lose my social
security or supplementary retirement. And it was very pleasant, and
I enjoyed a great deal working with Dr. Webb. I always had. And meeting
friends like Vernon Peele and various other people that 1 had known
while I was teaching there, so that it was a very pleasant interlude,
I would say. I enjoyed it a great deal.
Sweeney: Thank you very much, Professor Klinefelter. |
