William Becker Interview, 15 October 2014

Abstract

This interview was conducted as part of Cleveland State University's 50th Anniversary Commemoration effort. Becker is a native Clevelander and is currently CSU's archivist. Becker enrolled at CSU in the fall of 1969, majoring in history. Following graduation he received a scholarship and received his M.A. in History from CWRU in 1974. He later returned to CSU to become the university's archivist after finishing his degree and has served in that position ever since. Of particular interest is Becker's detailed account of the events that unfolded at CSU following the Kent State Shootings, his description of the faculty in the history department during the university's early years, and the changes that have taken place with both the library and the campus broadly over the years.

Interviewee

Becker, William (interviewee)

Interviewer

Wickens, Joe (interviewer)

Project

CSU at 50

Date

10-14-2014

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

76 minutes

Recommended Citation

"William Becker Interview, 15 October 2014" (2014). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 500047.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/702

Related Resources

CSU at 50 @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Joe Wickens [00:00:01] This is Joseph Wickens with the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. I am conducting this interview as part of Cleveland State’s 50th anniversary commemoration effort. You want to state your name and spell it?

William Becker [00:00:14] My name is William Becker. B-E-C-K-E-R. I’m the university archivist at CSU.

Joe Wickens [00:00:20] And then today’s date.

William Becker [00:00:21] Today is October 15, 2014.

Joe Wickens [00:00:25] All right, how about we start off with getting your background. Where were you born and raised?

William Becker [00:00:31] I’m a native Clevelander, was born and raised in Parma Heights, Ohio. I went to Valley Forge High school, graduated in 1969. And then in the fall that year, I came to Cleveland State.

Joe Wickens [00:00:45] Well, prior to that fall, that last year of high school is usually when people start to consider schools. Were there any other schools that you were considering at that time?

William Becker [00:00:54] No, not really. I did apply to other schools, but Cleveland State was my choice because lack of funds. I could afford to commute, but I couldn’t afford to live on campus.

Joe Wickens [00:01:07] Fair enough. So had you had prior interactions with the university before enrolling?

William Becker [00:01:13] No.

Joe Wickens [00:01:14] And so did you follow the early development then, too? Because it would have been in, I guess you would have started high school when CSU started, correct?

William Becker [00:01:21] Yeah. I would have never thought about going to college, really seriously considered, where I was going. It was not until my senior year, but my options were limited. So it was either here or nowhere.

Joe Wickens [00:01:38] So what were your first impressions then?

William Becker [00:01:40] It was a lot like high school, but in an industrial setting. Cleveland State, basically, the campus when I came down here was centered around East 24th Street, Fenn Tower. The science building had just opened. It’s in Stilwell Hall. They had the Modulux or the modular classroom buildings. A lot of this impressed me. [00:02:06] Like, looking back, it would be like 13th and 14th grade. I’m saying that because the university did things similar to what the high schools did. They had a student government, they had an evening student government. Then they had a yearbook, and it was that. And there were dances and smokers and rushes for the sororities and the fraternities. [00:02:38] And you came down here, and there are all these new people. The difference was you didn’t know the people you were in class with. That was a big change for me coming from a high school where you went through the school system with the same group of people practically, and then you’re down here and you’re basically out on your own. [00:03:00] You’re going to your classes. You may have somebody who has one class or two classes with you, but then again, you know, you don’t see the person. The attitude of the people at CSU back then was, give me my four classes and I want to go home because I got to go work or get out of here, get off campus. [00:03:21] There wasn’t much to really keep you here on campus.

Joe Wickens [00:03:24] Give me your four classes. Can you describe the process of obtaining those four classes? Registration?

William Becker [00:03:30] Well, I was fortunate. I did my class when it came in ’69, that was the first time they offered mail-in registration. Before that it was. And, well, if you didn’t get mail-in registration, you had to go through in-person. So the process was still the same. The classes were divided up alphabetically. [00:03:52] Seniors got to go first and then alphabetically. And you would go to the in-person registration site. Like it could have been in Fenn Tower, could have been in Stilwell Hall. And all the colleges were lined up, the three colleges, the four colleges, by that time. And you would stand in line for sociology class. [00:04:15] And you know, you’d go there. And as the line dwindled down, it was your turn and you asked for, you wanted to enroll in Sociology 201 or something, and they’d give you a little ticket. Then you go back to the line and you stand in there for psych. Or you’re going there for chemical engineering. [00:04:33] And you go through the whole line again. And you’re just hoping that the courses that you plotted out from the master schedule, that there’d still be openings. The one thing about mail-in registration is you put down your four courses that you wanted and then you put in options, second [options] with choices. And that was always a game. [00:05:00] You go there and you don’t want somebody picking your fourth course for you, you know, you want to pick it yourself. So some people were going along the lines of playing, you know, well, I won’t put anything down there and they’ll call me and at least be able to say something that I want, you know, otherwise, they would just assign you a class, like thanks a lot. [00:05:22] I don’t need another philosophy class, you know, I need a math class. I don’t want deductive logic.

Joe Wickens [00:05:33] Well, you mentioned a lot of these sort of like high school sort of things that were done in those early days. One thing that I’ve read about anyways, and I wanted to know what the actual prevalence of this was, was these beanies and the tradition of the quarter.

William Becker [00:05:48] The quarter. CSU started out on the quarter schedule.

Joe Wickens [00:05:51] Well, the 25 cents, apparently you could park with it?

William Becker [00:05:55] Oh, the token.

Joe Wickens [00:05:58] Yes.

William Becker [00:05:58] Okay. Yeah, the tokens were supposed to be five for a dollar originally. They were worth a quarter apiece. Parking on campus the first year was a quarter. And the beanies. Beanies died out quick. There’s pictures of the first couple years with people wearing the little green beanies with the little small rim. Fortunately, that had gone away. [00:06:25] The hazing of freshmen wasn’t prevalent any longer.

Joe Wickens [00:06:32] Well, you mentioned that you really, up until your senior year of high school, really had no intention of going to college.

William Becker [00:06:39] No, I never thought about it. I was figuring I’m going to have to go to college.

Joe Wickens [00:06:43] So what did you decide to study and why?

William Becker [00:06:48] Embarrassing. I took history because it was the only thing I was good in. I was a mediocre student in high school. I got above about a 2.6 average in high school. And so, you know, history was the one thing I liked. My father had always asked me, what are you going to do with a history degree? [00:07:09] Teach. Go into archives, you know, something. Okay, you need something to fall back on. Okay, well, we’ll talk about this some other time.

Joe Wickens [00:07:22] Well, you mentioned some of the buildings a little bit ago. Okay, where were the majority of your classes then? In the history department. Where was the department located?

William Becker [00:07:31] I guess, okay, the arts and sciences faculty. Most of them were in the Modulux buildings. They had office space in there. And I think history was like in the 300 building or the 500 building, one of the two. And the other buildings were used as classroom buildings. And so you had to track down your professor. [00:07:54] It doesn’t change now. Professors are never there when you want them. But you try to track down your. One thing they did was at least for the freshmen, they sort of emphasized freshman advising until you got to figure out what you’re doing. And then you know, like, I don’t need to go get advising. [00:08:18] Just give me my course. I know what I want now. I know what I need.

Joe Wickens [00:08:24] You said tracking down your professors.

William Becker [00:08:27] Yeah.

Joe Wickens [00:08:27] I think that the history department had some pretty dynamic professors to find, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t know for certain. It’s just some of the names were familiar in doing some background work.

William Becker [00:08:38] Okay, yeah, there was Joe Ink, who was long time carryover from Fenn. Alan Peskin, who came from the Ohio State extension, I believe. Joe I had for Western Civ 101, 102 and 103. Western Civilization. Instead of two semesters, it was three quarters. And Joe was kind of a stickler for maps. [00:09:14] We always had to do maps every week. And you got graded on your artwork, not only how accurate you were in there, but you had. And he get up there and show people examples of, you know, this isn’t a cartography class. Who cares? I know where the Dardanelles are. I know where the Hell Spawn is. [00:09:36] I know where the Bosphorus. I don’t, you know, I don’t want to do it in pretty colors. But you got graded on it. And he also. We met four times a week and twice a week we had a quiz, a 10 minute quiz at the beginning of the class where he. This was to ensure that we were reading, keeping our reading up. [00:09:56] So he was really treating us like high school kids a bit. But these are like 10 points apiece as you’re going along, you know, so, we haven’t had. We only had one quiz this week and it’s Friday. We’re going to have a quiz today, you know, whatever, and it was usually three questions and you wrote out your answers and you got them sent back and graded. [00:10:23] And so you’re sitting there, you can keep a running tab what your grades were in this class. The other interesting thing about, at the end of the quarter, Joe would tell everybody their grades. If you were in a position where you were above a C, you were in a B category above the C, but you had no chance of making an A, you didn’t have to take the final. [00:10:49] Okay, he gave you that option. But if you were like a B plus, you didn’t have to take the final. But if you wanted that A, you had to go take the final. And so, you know, he gave you the option of doing it. And his grades, his tests were pretty hard because basically there was some multiple guess, true-false, not very much. [00:11:13] But Vladivost was just writing out why something happened later on. I had a couple of teachers who were part timers for American History and then got into the upper level classes.

Joe Wickens [00:11:33] Did you ever have John Campbell or Thomas Campbell?

William Becker [00:11:35] I’m sorry, yes. Let’s not go there. No, Tom. Tom had a great reputation. We were going out there and I wanted to get into his class. And I had ended up working real hard to get into his class, Modern American History. And unfortunately for me, I felt that Tom took the quarter off. [00:11:58] I heard more about him being a baker in Philadelphia. You know, like, come on, that’s the third time this quarter you’ve told us these stories, you know, his graduate assistants did the grading on the tests. I was disappointed, but, you know, he had a great reputation among other people. But I think that spring semester he, you know, he was gone. [00:12:23] He wasn’t with it that quarter.

Joe Wickens [00:12:28] You attended college at a very interesting time, I guess even in American history, much less Cleveland State’s history. Fall of ’69.

William Becker [00:12:35] Yeah, that’s where I started.

Joe Wickens [00:12:37] Yes. That’s like the. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the peak of the Vietnam War, but it was pretty hot at that period of time. The moratoriums.

William Becker [00:12:44] Right.

Joe Wickens [00:12:45] Do you remember the events surrounding the moratorium?

William Becker [00:12:49] It was crowded. The speakers were on the front porch or the front entrance of the science building. Science building had just opened and the crowds spread out across the grass plaza in front of it and off spilled over onto the East 24th Street by Fenn Tower. There were people hanging out of Fenn Tower, the windows open. [00:13:19] Fenn Tower didn’t have air conditioning, but people were hanging out there listening and they had speakers. I was like, what’s going on here, little dorky kid from Parma.

Joe Wickens [00:13:37] Well, part of that was also the lottery. And that affected a lot of people that I’m sure you went to school with. What was your experiences with that? Was that something that pertained to you at all?

William Becker [00:13:47] What, the lottery?

Joe Wickens [00:13:49] The draft lottery?

William Becker [00:13:51] The lottery came later. Last couple years we were in there, I ended up with something like 343 in the lottery. I didn’t have to worry about it, but that was like one year we had. You know, every year you faced it and then you didn’t have to worry about it. After that, you either gonna go or you weren’t gonna go. [00:14:13] And that didn’t last. The lottery really didn’t last that long. But it was a way of trying to equalize it out that it wasn’t just the kids who didn’t go to high school, kids like me who were trying to avoid the draft or something. You know, felt like, you know, we can hang out for four years in college, get a degree and avoid the war.

Joe Wickens [00:14:35] Well, I guess continuing on, we spoke earlier, I’d like to hear this again.

William Becker [00:14:44] Okay.

Joe Wickens [00:14:46] Kent State happened.

William Becker [00:14:48] Yeah.

Joe Wickens [00:14:49] And it affected. It affected nationwide, everywhere. And what was the situation at Cleveland State?

William Becker [00:14:55] For me, it happened on Monday, I believe. And the first I heard about it was in the evening. And my situation at home was I had three brothers, lived in a ranch house in Parma Heights, and I couldn’t study at home. It was sort of like a three ring circus at home. I had two little brothers. [00:15:23] There was no quiet place in the house. And so I would stay down at school, do my homework and then come home later. So I’m coming, coming home, going out. And there used to be vending machines with the newspaper. And that’s where I first saw. It was the extra from the press talking about the shootings. [00:15:49] It was like Monday that day, not much happened. But then it came about like two days later. There was some rumblings like on Wednesday there was some agitation from outside. I understand I didn’t see it, but there was supposed to have been some agitation about closing down the university and the administration let the students vote whether they should close the university. [00:16:20] And the students overwhelmingly decided no, they wouldn’t. There were people saying don’t let the agitators at Case Western Reserve, the radicals from Case come out and tell us to shut down our university. I think the atmosphere and the attitudes of a lot of CSU people were no-nonsense. I’m here to get a degree. [00:16:43] I’m not here to change the world. I want to get a degree and get a good job. And so, you know, there was a lot of like, no, me going on strike isn’t going to help anybody and we’re not going to change the world here at Cleveland State. Besides, you know, I still have to leave early. [00:17:00] I got to go to my job.

Joe Wickens [00:17:03] So one or two days later then there was a little bit of unrest though.

William Becker [00:17:11] Yeah, there had been a spillover from some agitation from the black students, the Afro American students. There had been some dissatisfaction on campus. They had felt left out and probably they were. I was there but I wasn’t part of their world. And one in the afternoon sitting in Stilwell Hall cafeteria. And Stilwell Hall […] it’s now a science engineering laboratory, not lab, but a lounge. But I was at the south end. Oops, sorry. I was at the south end of it eating and the main entrance was at the north end. And all of a sudden there was this noise like things being dropped on the floor. And there were people lifting up tables and what I remembered most about was there was like a wave of guys who came through and told us to pick up our stuff and get out ahead of time, you know. So when they came through and they were tossing the tables over and the plates were breaking, glass was breaking. [00:18:38] Somebody threw a chair through a window. I went out the back entrance. That took you to science building There was a shared entrance to the science building. And I got out of there, you know, and then some of the students took over part of Mather Mansion. And that didn’t really. There’s a number of people, not a number, but a couple people who were arrested with that one. [00:19:07] But you know, like it was more like I’m sitting there, never saw this before in my life, you know, I didn’t realize what was going on until later on. Like, what’s going on?

Joe Wickens [00:19:18] Well, I guess sort of something that you touched on during that description about people taking it seriously. They were there to get their degree. Well, can’t take it seriously all the time. What else were you doing at that time?

William Becker [00:19:35] What social life? If you weren’t in a fraternity, you weren’t in a sorority, there really wasn’t much going on. You know, you had the film festivals, you know, free movies or cheap movies on Friday nights or something. One of the running jokes was about trying to get a girl, one of the girls to give you their phone numbers. [00:20:03] You know, like, forget it. They don’t want to be bothered with you. Most of the people just didn’t hang around. There was places like the Down Under, which was across the street from where Mather is, the Record Grotto, which, you know, you always wanted to get new records. You could go there. Down Under also had a place for. [00:20:28] Down Under basically was a 3.2 bar, I think. And they had another place where they sold the high content liquor, they called it My Bedroom. There was Plato’s Cave that opened up on 24th Street. The Agora was there. But during the day, you know, you’d come downtown and the environment at CSU wasn’t that enticing to stay down here. At the time when we first started, you would come down. If you’re coming from the west side, you’re coming down Euclid Avenue and from like 21st Street all the way down on the north side, all the way down was big construction fence all the way to where the Science and Research, that lot, covered the area that’s Main Classroom and where the Student Center now is and where Rhodes Tower is. [00:21:28] And then you had these hole places in the fence where you could look in, do your job as a sidewalk supervisor. And one of the big things, amusement was watching the crane, if you got bored, watching the crane bring up girders on top of Rhodes Tower as it was going up. [00:21:51] So you watch that happening. And so finally, you know, I think it was probably like in ’71 they finally got the last of the girders up.

Joe Wickens [00:22:05] So what was this building like when it was brand spanking new?

William Becker [00:22:09] This one?

Joe Wickens [00:22:10] Yes. Rhodes Tower. University Tower.

William Becker [00:22:17] Rhodes Tower was always. Until they got the administration out of here, out of Rhodes Tower on the 12th floor. And that Rhodes Tower was a pain in the backside to get around. Up on the 19th floor was Philosophy and History, which is not there anymore because they closed it down for asbestos. 18th floor was Arts and Sciences and English. [00:22:42] And 16th, I think was Econ, Sociology and Political Science, Math and Religious Studies. On 15, 14, 13 was the Education college. And they changed around, the computer center moved in there. And the tower had six elevators and they were guaranteed to be all up on the 20th floor when you came having to go to class or something, it would be like cattle being herded into elevators. [00:23:24] Everybody’s crowding in. Want to get in the elevator? I got to get upstairs. The faculty is trying to get down to their classes. So, yeah, Rhodes Tower was an office tower. There’s not much really interesting in it unless you wanted to go see your professor or go for advising. And then there was the library. [00:23:46] And originally the library ended right behind. You can’t see it in the tape, but there was a section, the western wing of the library wasn’t there. And that was built at the same time that they built University Center. Both of them went up at the same time. So, you know, the library is like, you know, a library down there. [00:24:12] And reading, it’s a lot different than it is today. Research is a lot harder back then. You know, go to Cumulative Index of Periodicals or something, trying to look up the topics for your research paper. And then, you know, they give you the listings, the titles and the volume and the journal. [00:24:37] And you’d go there and you’d be writing it all down, tiny print. And then you’d go there and you’d run up to the fourth floor and you’re going through the periodicals, trying to find everything is alphabetical. And you just, you know, like, oh, the Journal of, the Journal of, Journal for the Advancement, the Journal for the Advancement of this, The Journal for the Advancement [of that]. And you try to find it. When you found where you wanted to go, then it was a matter of, I hope the volume’s on the shelf. And then if the volume was on the shelf, it goes I hope somebody didn’t cut it out. [00:25:20] Yeah. So if not, if you couldn’t find it, it was off to interlibrary loan and hoping they would get it for you quick.

Joe Wickens [00:25:27] Well, you talked about some of the other buildings that went up at the same time as the tower.

William Becker [00:25:30] Yeah, well, just Main Classroom and this one went up together,

Joe Wickens [00:25:33] But they weren’t connected?

William Becker [00:25:37] Yeah, they weren’t connected. There was actually an entrance into the library off of. Well, you got to imagine this because first floor of Main Classroom was entirely different. It was wide open. Okay. You had a couple places for stairs. [00:25:54] And then the section down at the north end, which didn’t go anywhere, there was no steps. That’s where the auditorium was. But there was an entrance into the library right across from where the Main Classroom Auditorium was. And people could go in and out of the library. There were like three or four different entrances. [00:26:20] And the library suffered from that. The books grew legs. You know, the books would just walk away. And it didn’t help too, that they. When they opened up the west wing originally, that they took the second and third floor for classrooms. And so we had these temporary walls constructed. And if you wanted the elevator, you would come in around the walls and take the elevator in, or you could go out the west end. [00:26:55] You know, you didn’t have to check out a book. You didn’t have to check out a magazine. You could just go. That lasted for a while, but then the faculty were getting on the librarians because. What happened to all these books we ordered? We got them. We got them for you. You know, it happened. [00:27:16] Well, why don’t you have better security? Why did you set it up this way?

Joe Wickens [00:27:24] Well, what got you into the archives? Did you start hanging out in here?

William Becker [00:27:29] Nah, I went to Case as a graduate student. I went to Case Western Reserve as a graduate student. I was fortunate. I was chosen by the Fenn Educational Foundation, which is now the Fenn Educational Fund of the Cleveland Foundation. But I got a scholarship, paid most of my way to Case and the history department. [00:27:53] I wanted Case because they had, as part of their Library Science school, they had courses on archives. They had a couple courses on archives. And you had a choice of what you could do. You could go for a History degree and take the archival courses, or you could go to Library Science and take the archive courses. [00:28:14] So you had a choice of however you want to do it. I took the History degree and archives. Then, like a lot of things in the field of history, it’s a matter of good timing. Yeah, there’s a lot of good people coming out of history departments who can’t find jobs, especially in archives. [00:28:35] I just happened to be lucky. The archives here were started in 1954. And the man who ran it was named George Simon. George was known as Mr. Fenn, Mr. Congeniality. He’d be out there in the mornings, the stories go, you know, saying good morning to everybody. And he was a short guy. He had been in business and he didn’t have a degree, but he was teaching courses. [00:29:10] I mean, there was a man with the practical education. He retired and they gave him the archives job part time. And then when he retired, when Fenn became CSU and the fellow who replaced him was Dr. Professor Millard Jordan of the Sociology Department. Millard was, the best way to describe him was he was a 19th century gentleman. [00:29:40] He would never say anything bad about anyone. Okay. If the only thing he could come up with, if he was pressed, you know, he said he made a good cup of coffee or, you know, he’d find something. Well, the early years I was working with Millard, we did oral histories. And the closest I’ve ever seen. We touched on a couple people in the tapes. [00:30:10] And the closest I ever got him to saying anything negative was when I asked a question, a slight smile came on his face and he wouldn’t say anything. Okay, we’ll go on. He didn’t want to go there, but he was like born in 1890. So that’s why I was saying he was last, you know, he was raised in the 19th century, but he was great. He was a fountain of information about the school. He came here in 1930. Okay. You know, he’s 40 years old and he stayed until he was 75 or something. Amazing.

Joe Wickens [00:30:52] He was into prisons?

William Becker [00:30:54] No, he was in sociology.

Joe Wickens [00:30:57] Yes, but that was sort of like, I guess, was that his interest then?

William Becker [00:31:00] No. Juvenile delinquency.

Joe Wickens [00:31:01] Okay.

William Becker [00:31:01] It was juvenile delinquency. That was his main interest in sociology. Yes, as part of sociology.

Joe Wickens [00:31:09] So you worked together with him.

William Becker [00:31:11] And also we had. Well, what had happened was they had a full time secretary named Edith Hamilton. Edith Hamilton was British and she was short, old too, and kind of feisty. It took me a long time to get her to warm up to me, but Edith, I got half her hours. [00:31:39] She wanted to go down to two days a week. She had 20. I had three days a week. She had two days a week and working in the archives. And that lasted for a year and then she retired. One of the running jokes was we were up on the fifth floor at the time in 502 in the library. [00:32:00] And there were two storerooms off of the men’s room and the women’s room. And the archive store room was in the men’s room. Off the men’s room, not in the men’s room. But it was off to the side. You had to go through the door saying men’s room to get to the door. [00:32:17] And so people would be standing there watching. Something would happen. Edith would come get me out of the back room while I was working. And you see this little lady walk into the men’s room like, okay, yeah. After Edith retired, I got the job as assistant to the archivist full time. I was there. [00:32:38] And so there’s a cycle of boom and bust for the universities as far as state funding. And Millard retired just at the time of a bust where the state was slashing funding to the state universities. And so the library had to cut positions. And so what they did was Millard was retiring finally. [00:33:12] I think it was about ’79 or ’80. And when he retired, they just let his position go, you know, because I was doing all the work anyways. And then after a couple years, I said, you know, like, okay, I’m assistant archivist. Can we drop the assistant? [They said] oh yeah, but you’re not getting any more money, but we’ll drop it. [00:33:41] I was unclassified. I was unclassified staff. So, you know, it didn’t cost them anything. If I wanted. I had to go through the job audit, you know. They didn’t have any say over what I was getting.

Joe Wickens [00:33:53] The ’70s, though, for public history, I mean, was a boom time, though, right? I mean, it was an interesting time. There was a cultural turn. There was the emergence of the field. What was it like being a.

William Becker [00:34:05] You know what it was like going to college and being a history major? You heard all these horror stories about people going to get their PhDs and ending up driving cabs. There were so many, you know, the idea was stay in graduate school so you don’t have to get drafted. [00:34:25] So we had all these people with degrees in history and they can’t find jobs in the field. Sort of like what it is today. It’s been that, it’s been that way. There’s been a lot of good people who can’t find jobs.

Joe Wickens [00:34:47] Well, in academia, right? I mean, that’s.

William Becker [00:34:48] Oh, yeah, academia. Yeah.

Joe Wickens [00:34:50] But that’s part of the reason why public history kind of emerged during that time, right? Or.

William Becker [00:34:57] Well, we also had women’s studies, you had Black history, you know, Black history was the first one. And then, you know, it started fragmenting, you know, women’s history, and then public history. Public history, we know we were. That came about in the 80s. I got introduced to it by Jim Borchert. [00:35:28] In 1982, the Cleveland Press went out, stopped publishing in June. The following year, we got the Cleveland Press Collection. The publisher was Joseph Cole, and he was also on the board of trustees. And he donated the Cleveland Press Collection to the library. We call it the Cleveland Press Collection, but it was basically the reference library, which consisted of, besides books, reference books, they had a newspaper clipping file. And what the press did, they had a librarian, Tom Barensfeld, and his job was he cut out articles out of the newspapers and filed them either by name or subject or by individuals. The idea being here that reporters come and go, they change beats. [00:36:24] But there are some features of this history of the city that stay around. People who are like, back in my day, somebody like Sam Gerber, who was a county coroner, was around forever. You had people like Alex Burns or Shondor Burns, one of the mafia guys. He had a long history of encounters with the law. [00:36:52] Louis Finkelstein, who was a pickpocket. Or John Nardi, another one. And so the reporters come across names like this, or who was this? Or even the people in society they don’t know. They could go to the reference library, get out the clippings, look at them, and they get some idea who we’re talking about. [00:37:21] So we got that collection, plus we got the photograph collection. And Joseph Cole got a nice write off on his taxes. There was some, I don’t know if it was jealousy or how legit it was, but there were some people felt that Joe over-inflated the value of his contribution.

Joe Wickens [00:37:45] Well, it was. Maybe he over inflated it in terms of monetarily, yeah. But in terms of its actual size, it was quite large. What was that accession process like then? And where were you at?

William Becker [00:37:58] Oh, okay. No, they moved it. If you go over, again, you can’t see it. But across the hallway in Special Collections, if you go into there, they had built a room and you can see it when you walk in there. But what we got also were the lektrievers. [00:38:19] Let me explain what a lektrievers is. It’s an automated filing cabinet. And the newspaper clippings were in boxes about 6 inches wide or so. And they would fill up. They would fill up the whole row. And each there was like four lektrievers. And you would push a button, and it was all coded. [00:38:49] You know, you wanted the subjects for the C for Cleveland State, you would hit the C button and the thing would go [electrical motor whirling noise] around, and you’d wait for your turn to come. And, you know, you take out the box and use it, put it back in. Well, one of the bad things about this is if you forgot to put the box back. [00:39:17] Right. You had the box hanging over. Yeah. And then you would hit the button, and you hit the button, and sometimes the shelf would go up, sometimes the shelf would go down, depending which button you hit. And if you hit the wrong button and everything is going down, you end up crushing the box in the lektriever. [00:39:39] The only way to fix that was you had to get out this wrench, take off the front cover of the lektriever, and you would sit there, and you would be turning this ratchet, wrench, around and around and around and around, like, my arm’s killing me, around. Eventually, because of cost of maintenance, these things were expensive to take care of. [00:40:12] They got rid of the lektrievers and I guess put them up on shelving. The press clippings were [in front], the photographs were in the back. One of the things they did, the library never really wanted it, the Press Collection. And they basically were doing this as, you know, self service. [00:40:40] There were a number of librarians. There was like a librarian in charge, and they would give everybody like an hour a day or something. It was only open a couple hours, but there was a number of people they gave time to. And you sat down there and cooled your heels and doing nothing, waiting on people if anybody would come in. We eventually, like I said, had to get rid of the lektrievers. But the Press Collection wasn’t very heavily used until about ’94, ’95. And then that’s when it started getting used a lot.

Joe Wickens [00:41:23] The year before that, if I’m not mistaken. Gerald Adams.

William Becker [00:41:28] Oh, yeah, that’s different, that’s Special Collections. But the reason why it was ’94 and ’95, it started picking up because ’96 was the bicentennial for Cleveland. And then we started getting all these [authors] cranking out all these books, people started coming in, getting photographs for history books. We had Grabowski and Van Tassel out at Case Western Reserve were doing the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. And so, you know, the researchers coming down here, they had a number of people who were volunteering to write articles. We had a number of people who were on their staff. There’s a number of people who are freelance. And so they were coming in there, starting to use it because their plan was to get the encyclopedia out for the bicentennial. [00:42:17] And they did, it was like the second one in the world, to have an encyclopedia history of the city. They said London was the first one. So that happened. And by that time the librarians had basically washed their hands of the Press Collection. They didn’t want it. So guess what Bill, you got it. [00:42:45] You know, so I’m up on fifth floor and I have to come down every day and open up the library for the Press Collection for three hours every day. And like then eventually they said, you know, we’re just going to move you downstairs.

Joe Wickens [00:42:57] That came. Yeah, that came later. But you didn’t have really. It didn’t affect you at all. The ascension of the Union Terminal collection.

William Becker [00:43:04] Oh, that’s no. Yes it did. You know, it was like was given to me. Walter Leedy met this guy, came across this fellow named Gerald Adams, Jerry Adams. Jerry Adams was a collector. Now in my experience of dealing with people who are train aficionados, they are some of the most dedicated, single minded people about trains. [00:43:42] And Jerry was one of these types. I don’t know the real story, but there was the apocryphal one. Okay. Jerry had a pass key to get into places down in Union Terminal. Bolt cutter. That’s how the story goes. We had his bolt cutter, he’d be nosing around Cleveland. Union Terminal Company got sold and somehow Jerry got wind of it that they were dumping the records. [00:44:16] And Jerry rescued them and he put them in one of these remote storage facilities. I won’t say remote, but like U-Haul type storage, self storage, that’s what I’m thinking of. And there’s like 70-some filing cabinets of this stuff. And so Jerry wanted to donate them to Case Western Reserve, Western Reserve Historical Society. [00:44:52] And they were very gracious about it. And they said, you know, we’ll go through and take what we need. And Jerry said no, all of it. Walter Leedy, who was an art professor and also big in Cleveland architecture, it was his area, got wind of this and Walter got Jerry to donate it. [00:45:20] And so they ended up, I think on the fourth floor. One of the biggest [rooms] we use for classrooms now. On the fourth floor of the library. And these things were dirty. Oh, you know I’d just […] trying to go through this collection, and you’re blowing dirt out of your nose. [00:45:51] I went over, I finagled. I begged them to give me a lab coat from chemistry. They gave me one, but after the first couple weeks, it never was white again. So we ended up taking all the photographs out of the collection. I wasn’t surprised to find that that was the big thing for me. [00:46:13] All these photographs of the building of the Terminal Tower, the building of Higbee’s, the Medical Arts building, all these are going up. These were like seven by nines. These were nice shots. And so, you know, we got these out of there. And there were records for the chief engineer, principal engineer, signal engineer, all these different offices. [00:46:45] We got to meet people, get to know people. Like a guy named Jouett, who was the chief. He was the person who had the oversight of the thing, of the construction. So we cleaned that up and got that there. But that became part of my responsibility, too.

Joe Wickens [00:47:07] And I want to ask you about something like that a little later, but Walter Leedy, he was a person that I’d like to hear more about. How much interaction did you have with him? How well did you know him?

William Becker [00:47:21] Barrow knows him better. Bill Barrow. I didn’t have that much interaction with him. You know, it was sort of like Leedy got it here and you do it. So Leedy used the collection for some purposes, but it basically sat vacant for a long period of time. Nobody using it. I was wondering, why do we have this? But that changed eventually.

Joe Wickens [00:47:50] Well, you mentioned the sort of fervor to use the press collection in the mid-90s.

William Becker [00:47:57] Yeah, because what happened there was […] people got to know of it. And part of. Let’s use the euphemism, one of our big people who – be nice about it – people who promoted us. One of our big promoters was the Western Reserve Historical Society. Why? Okay. Why would Western Reserve promote us? [00:48:32] Because their policy was, oh, you want to use that photograph? It will cost you per photograph here. Well, what I did when I took over was I had a problem of how to preserve the collection but provide access. And this is before the digital age. All right. I wish I had the digital aid back then, but before scanning and all that. [00:49:05] So I came up with the idea was, we are not. We would give people. You could come in there and photograph the photograph yourself or you could take it up to our instructional media photographer and you pay for the cost of production. And that also covered ourselves as far as copyrights because we never claimed to have copyright. [00:49:34] We were going on using just the basis of fair use. Alright? We told people that you use it, you know, you’re responsible for finding out who has the rights to it. All we’re doing is providing you a copy. And so by making it cheap, it reduced the amount, you know, the urge to take. There was no temptation any longer to take it. I can get a photograph for five dollars, you know, it’s not like it’s going to cost you twenty-five, thirty dollars. And so when people found out about that, you know, we started getting a lot more people coming in and using things.

Joe Wickens [00:50:20] You mentioned that Bill Barrow would know Walter Leedy.

William Becker [00:50:23] He knows him better. Yeah.

Joe Wickens [00:50:25] When did you meet Bill Barrow? Do you remember?

William Becker [00:50:27] Yeah, I hired him. Jim Borchert, as part of the public history, wanted to get the kids experience as interns. And he had a couple of places he used and he came to the Press Collection. And Bill was the fourth one I hired. And I hired a young woman named Jody Morocco that year. [00:51:02] And part of the thing Borchert taught the public history class in summer, spring quarter, I keep wanting to say semesters now. And there was always a dog and pony show coming to the archives. Well, what do we do in Special Collections to give the kids, usually the grad student was in the public history, but you know, to make them look good in front of their peers and to Dr. Borchert, I would let them do part of the presentation. Well, Bill had come back. Bill was older, he had come back from Tucson and he was doing history and he heard Jody give the spiel and Bill came – like the same week he came back – he wanted to know how he could do it. Because Jody’s time was up. [00:52:02] Okay. Yeah, you want it? Fine. So Bill ended up being my graduate student the first year he was here. And then they got money to process the Press Collection. Not the Press Collection, the other one, the CUT [Cleveland Union Terminal] collection. And so Bill became part time archivist for the Press Collection. I keep going again, sorry, the CUT. [00:52:27] And so he was the one who went through, got everything in the Hollinger boxes and organized it so people could find things easily. And then so it came to the point of hiring a full time [employee]. Well, actually it was funny because when we hired the part time archivist, it was down to two people, the job. [00:53:00] Bill and this woman who was well qualified. And we had the search committee. And we were struggling because, you know, we’d have these little forms we were supposed to fill out, and, you know, we had the different questions, and everybody rated everybody one to five. One to five, you know, about four or five different qualifications, and it ended in a dead tie. [00:53:28] Everybody had different ratings, but the ratings for everybody worked out. Yeah. So we’re sitting there arguing with ourselves, you know, like, well, how do we justify one of these people getting the job? I mean, one as good as the other. Well, you know, we went back and started going through the resumes. And here Bill worked on construction for Hickley Co. after he got out of high school. And early years in college. Okay. We’re dealing with the construction of a building. We gave it to him. I mean, we had to justify ourselves to everybody. So that was.

Joe Wickens [00:54:11] So when did that happen? What year was that?

William Becker [00:54:13] Oh, I forget. In the mid-90s, early 90s. Wait, Bill’s been here 20-some years. Yeah, yeah, it was like early 90s.

Joe Wickens [00:54:27] Well, then early 2000s, launching Cleveland Memory.

William Becker [00:54:32] Yeah.

Joe Wickens [00:54:34] Can you tell me what was the genesis of that? What was sort of the.

William Becker [00:54:38] Well, Bill likes fussing around with the computers. And what he was doing was they had these big platt maps in our collection, and Bill got parts of them scanned, early scanning, and he would overlay photographs on it. You could go along the map, and he was doing this more or less [as a] demonstration. And if it indicated it was a hot button there, you click that. And then using HTML, it would come up with a photograph from the CUT collection. And, you know, like, I’m seeing this. I’m like, hey, this is pretty neat. This is cool. You know, we should do something. I had ended up doing the Lakewood collection. [00:55:47] We called it Yesterday’s Lakewood, and that was – couldn’t think of a different name. And George Condon was hanging around all the time. He’d go out to lunch with Bill. And George had done a picture book called Yesterday’s Cleveland. And there’s like, a number of these done. [00:56:12] Yesterday’s Detroit and Yesterday’s St. Louis and this. And George did one for Cleveland. And so we couldn’t think of anything better. So you know, I knew George, so we just called it Yesterday’s Lakewood. And now it’s like, we originally started out with, like, 600 photographs. Now there’s like 3600 photographs on it. And it goes through all. One of the things that helped was we actually got about a dozen people contributing photographs. We got from the Lakewood Historical Society. They liked it, they were giving me their photographs to put up there. I got things from the fire department, from the city, from the police department, individuals in Lakewood. [00:56:57] You know, it helped build relationships with the community. So we’ve been, I just kept that up. But that was the first one we did. And, you know, we went live with that. And then Bill is also doing bibliographies on the site. You could look it up and see, if you had a computer, you could look and get names, like, for cartography and maps of Cleveland, which was his specialty, because he had done work at Western Reserve Historical Society organizing their map collection.

Joe Wickens [00:57:40] It’s the Cleveland Memory Project.

William Becker [00:57:42] Yeah.

Joe Wickens [00:57:42] Is this a project that can ever be completed?

William Becker [00:57:44] Yeah if you closed Cleveland. No. Why? I don’t know. Yeah, someday mine will be. My contributions will be closed, but, you know, carry it on. We got all these photographs up there. I think there’s like 59,000 things up on there now. And we’ve had volunteers. Bill’s had volunteers come in and do sites, had interns from Kent State come in there. One of the things they would do is if they were interested in archives, Bill would come up with a project, or they could come up with a project. And the idea was that the student would do everything. It would go up in their name. And so they had something. When they went out to do a job, they would have something to put down to show people. [00:58:41] Cleveland Memory was also able to link with different historical societies and so it expanded, it was like reaching out to the community, not just staying home within the university.

Joe Wickens [00:59:00] Right. And I think what’s pretty amazing about that is that it expanded as technology expanded because when it started, there wasn’t a lot of people that were. I mean, definitely not in terms of where we’re at now. It’s grown. So do you have any, like, just off the top of your head, access numbers or how many people are visiting?

William Becker [00:59:23] Yeah, it’s on the web. I don’t know. I only pay attention to how many people show up at Lakewood because I send them the statistics every month. It’s around. I’d say between 450 and 600 a month. Visitors to the site. And the other ones, there’s so many stats they generate. It’s after a while going ah, my eyes are going bad, this doesn’t really mean anything to me. So there’s 50 people visited this one picture. Okay, that’s neat. That doesn’t mean anything. Somebody’s happy.

Joe Wickens [01:00:05] Well, the pickup in interest in the 90s or in the mid-90s over the Press Collection. Later, you’ve helped on some books even since then. A few of them that I noticed that you’ve gotten mentions for. One of them was In The Wake Of The Butcher: [Cleveland’s] Torso Murders. Do you remember helping out with that book?

William Becker [01:00:28] Yeah, that’s Bellamy, John Stark Bellamy [ed. Bellamy is author of the somewhat similar-sounding Maniac in the Bushes, among other works]. Yeah. John had a real neat cottage industry going while he was working as a librarian at Cleveland Public – not Cleveland Public, Cuyahoga County Public Library out in Fairview. He would give slideshows on bad things happening in Cleveland [laughs], talking about famous murders and hangings. We called it dysmelia, his dysmelia collection. And so, you know, he was involved in using the clippings and our photographs. Like, there’s one murder in Lakewood that we did. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I see his house on Lake Avenue, his mother-in-law poisoned him. He was a Cleveland industrialist.

Joe Wickens [01:01:24] I had to ask about that one because that one really kind of jumped out, the Torso Murders. I mean, if you’re from Cleveland.

William Becker [01:01:28] Oh, torso, yeah, the Torso Murders.

Joe Wickens [01:01:30] You know about it?

William Becker [01:01:31] Yeah, yeah, everybody’s done the Torso Murders.

Joe Wickens [01:01:35] Well, you did your own, you did a book.

William Becker [01:01:38] No, the one thing I got tired of with the Press Collection was Sam [Shepard]. I mean, if you know how many people. If you took the number of people who killed Marilyn Shepard that has been projected, they would have had to take numbers that night. They’d have to make appointments to kill her. I mean, it was like, Sam did it, you know, the mayor did it, this guy did it, the one armed man came in and did it. You know, like what? What? Everybody had a different solution to the Sam problem.

Joe Wickens [01:02:15] You should have a conversation with Gerald Fuerst, because when he was Clerk of Courts, he said that they would come in and people would ask for the transcript of that trial. And he said it was thousands of pages and people would plop it down and people would sit there and go through the entire thing.

William Becker [01:02:29] I know. Yeah, I know. But this was, I just hated people coming in and asking about Sam. I’m tired of you, go away.

Joe Wickens [01:02:38] Well, 2005, there was a lot going on that year, and I wanted to talk about a few of the things, I guess, well first.

William Becker [01:02:46] They split me off from Special Collections. Special collections got too big. Yeah. Because Bill and I shared the same space. And Bill kept bringing in all these railroad collections and performance art collections and postcard collections from Walter Leedy after he died. But, I mean, he got all these collections. And they were in this storeroom, and in that store room in the library. [01:03:17] And Dr. Thornton said, enough of this, basically, and built this area that we’re sitting in now, put the walls around it, and said, okay, we’re moving you out, and Barrow’s got the Special Collections area. Yeah, yeah. But that was 2005.

Joe Wickens [01:03:35] Also in 2005. You’ve helped a lot of people with their books. This book.

William Becker [01:03:39] Yeah, the Fenn College book. The Fenn College book, yeah. That was the year. That was the year. That was the 40th anniversary. The last graduating class of Fenn College. You know, I would have done it anyways, but saying it was for the 40th anniversary was a good excuse. There’s a publisher in local history called Arcadia Publishing, and they were doing all these local history books. They drum up authors from the local area, you know, do you know anybody who’d be interested in doing a book on some aspect of Cleveland history? Okay. And then I started coming in. They had two different types. [01:04:28] They had one that was more text oriented, and then they’d have all these picture books. And so, you know, like, okay, why don’t we do one of them just for the heck of it? And unfortunately, in the fall of 2004, I was in a minor car accident on my bicycle, and I broke a rib. [01:04:57] Okay so, like, I’m not lifting boxes for a while. I’m not throwing boxes around the archives or picking things up. So I basically went and did the book in my recovery period. So we published a book we published under the name of CSU Library. And, you know, it sold. [01:05:28] I think Dr. Thornton was good, kind to me in the sense that, you know, she supported it, because part of Arcadia was that we had to sell 400 copies of it. We had to take 400 copies, which was like $12 a piece. She’s putting down $5,000 on me. It came out in the spring. By the end of summer, we had made our money back.

Joe Wickens [01:06:04] You said they sold well.

William Becker [01:06:05] Yeah.

Joe Wickens [01:06:06] What was. I guess what was. What was the feedback.

William Becker [01:06:12] They liked it. It was popular.

Joe Wickens [01:06:15] Who was reading the book?

William Becker [01:06:16] I guess we marketed to the Fenn people entirely, you know, to alumni and Fenn. We were getting mail orders, people coming in, buying it. Yeah. So, you know, it was like nobody had done anything like that. There was one book written on the history of Fenn by Dr. Brooks Ernest, who was the last president of Fenn. [01:06:41] And Brooks is an engineer. And it read like an engineer. Writing was factual, but it was dry, mechanical. Yeah. And detailed. And I met only one person who admitted that they read it all the way through besides Brooks. I don’t know why Dr. Mongan did that, but Janet Mongan, you read the whole thing through?

Joe Wickens [01:07:15] Well, you did 40th for Fenn.

William Becker [01:07:17] Yep.

Joe Wickens [01:07:18] Just for the heck of it. What’s been going on now for this, for the 50th? What’s been in the works for you? What have you been up to of late?

William Becker [01:07:28] Me, I’ve been on the outside, basically. I started last year putting. Compiling things. It worked out well for the university because they seemed to get started late doing anything. But I compiled, went to the old school newspapers like the Cauldron and on campus news, bulletin board, trustee minutes, faculty senate minutes, graduate council minutes. [01:08:09] And I started compiling a list of events that happened in CSU’s history and did in a timetable, put it on a spreadsheet. And it’s all alphabetical. It tells you what happened on a certain day in order and then went through and. There were some mumblings back in the fall about doing a picture book. [01:08:34] So they were about the size of the Arcadia [book on Fenn], about 120 pictures. And so I put together a whole slide show of about 285 photographs, not counting athletics, because I didn’t have any. But, you know, they’re picking that whether they’re going to use them or not. But I also gave them the bylines to it, the cut lines for why was this picture in here? Why was that one? You know, why did I use this one? So, you know, showing things that happened throughout the history of CSU. So I provided information for people on this one. But a lot of this stuff has been done through – the 50th – has been handled through the 50th Anniversary Committee and Marketing.

Joe Wickens [01:09:29] So I’ll let you. Is there anything that you want to cover. I’ll give you a chance here. 50th anniversary? What do you look back to? Have we not touched upon anything you thought we might.

William Becker [01:09:40] On the 50th?

Joe Wickens [01:09:41] Well, no, just on your experiences in general. I mean, from ’69, pretty much almost continuously, right. Interactions with university.

William Becker [01:09:49] Yeah.

Joe Wickens [01:09:50] What stands out the most? If there’s anything that we didn’t touch upon that you thought we might mention or cover.

William Becker [01:10:12] [Long pause] I just wonder what’s going to happen with the library for one thing. There’s been some people in administration who have not been supporters of the library. They think that, and I don’t think they understand, you know, like, there’s the master plan for the campus that come out and they had idea of cutting the library down to two floors from four. You know, I was like, what? And opening up space for study areas or that. You know, it’s like, who’s coming up with these ideas? You know, [they say] like, everything’s online, that’s all you need, it’s online. Okay. I like the campus the way it is, though, now. You know, looking at the physical plant, it’s a lot different. We did a couple years ago came across a collection of photographs for the first master plan for campus. And when they were putting it together, they went and did a photo survey and property survey of a 43 block area surrounding Fenn. [01:11:43] This was before. This is during the summer before it became CSU. And it was like going from about 30th and Superior all the way to Carnegie. And for each property they would take a photograph of it. And we called it the Cleveland Neighborhood Survey. And you could go and you got to see what was surrounding Fenn College at the time it became CSU. [01:12:14] And you got to understand that what you see today is not what it was back then. Dilapidated housing, what we call the residential hotels or the flop houses, like where the communications building is now was like East 20th Street. When they opened up Rhodes Tower, you know, we could, before they started adding on the addition, you’d go to the end of Rhodes Tower and it just stopped. [01:12:58] And you know, there’s a fence across it, railing. And you could stand there and you could watch guys hanging out their laundry. You know, like, okay, how inviting this is? You know, the bars that were around here. But, you know, you can go right down Euclid Avenue, like Playhouse Square to 30th, and you could just go down and see all the things that were there. [01:13:38] Tasty Burger at East 18th Street, which was a Royal Castle knockoff or White Castle knockoff. And Luby Chevrolet was down here. These little bars on the north side gone. A bridal shop between 17th and 18th Street. The Builders Exchange building. So you see this stuff, you’re walking down there and you always walk by in a hurry in winter, as you’re running down the square to get your bus home at night, you know like, I’m not stopping. [01:14:21] And Playhouse Square hadn’t come back yet, the theaters were basically closed. So now you look at it and it’s like, oh, it’s a lot nicer down here. There’s places. Dorms were in Fenn Tower, that was it. If there was any overflow, they went to the Y. Yeah, nice. So my favorite place I think on campus though is still Fenn Tower. I like Panel Hall. I think Panel Hall, or they call it the ballroom now, but until they closed it in 2000, because they couldn’t pay for the upkeep, it was called Panel Hall. And I think more things have happened in Panel Hall than any other one place. [01:15:27] Because for years all the social events and everything took place in Panel Hall as far as Fenn College. They had concerts there, they had lectures there, they had assemblies there, they had plays there. And then when they weren’t using it, it was like a student lounge. And you get the stereotype of the college kids back in my day. [01:15:56] Sophisticated young man sitting there smoking a pipe. It doesn’t look like it really belongs in his mouth, like no kid. And playing pinochle like that was the big thing. Sort of like if you ever saw Animal House and Flounder was at the rush for the one fraternity and they’re playing cards and he goes, you guys playing cards? You know, that sort of thing. And I’m like, okay, that was funny about that, because that’s what it was like. Yeah. But I always liked Panel Hall. To me, that’s my favorite place. Yeah.

Joe Wickens [01:16:42] Well, all right. I think we’ve covered all the way up to. We got the whole span, I think. Right.

William Becker [01:16:48] Anything you were interested in, I didn’t cover.

Joe Wickens [01:16:51] No. You know what? I think so. So thank you, Bill. I’m gonna go ahead and.

William Becker [01:16:55] Okay.

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