Fred McGlynn, Longtime Professor

Oral History Transcript of Fred McGlynn

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: July 16th, 2021
Location: Home of Fred McGlynn in Missoula
Transcribed: May 2022 by Adrian Kien

Aubrey Jaap: Alrighty. It is July 16th, 2021. We're here with Fred McGlynn. Fred, I would like you just to start. And can you tell me about your parents and grandparents, some of your family history that you have?

Fred McGlynn: Oh, well, the family moved into Finntown about four or five months before I was born in 1939. And, my father said they were only going to stay there a little while, well they were there 18 years until he died of a heart attack. And my mother used the insurance to buy a mom and pop grocery on West Park. But the last three months before I was born, my mother had double pneumonia and wartime flu and was in the hospital. And three times they told my father to get anyone who wanted to see her alive to the hospital. She'd be dead by morning and they were going to C-section me, but they figured I'd be stillborn. They invented the sulfide drug right then, and that saved her life. And miraculously, I was supposed to be born on August 18th and my mother tough as nails, I was born on August 18th. I got. . . oh, what's the disease that . . . it wasn't measles, but there's another disease like that. This is relatively harmless, but it gives a big scar thing. Oh yeah. I got that when I was two days old.

So my mother didn't see me till I was like almost a month old. And I have scars in the back of my head from rolling my head from breaking pustules. But I survived and the doctors told my mother, I would either be blind, deaf, mentally retarded. Certainly, you know, the trauma of the last three months, there was no way I could be a normal child. My mother said she didn't relax until I was in the third grade. Yeah. My father said, "We were really worried about you when you were little, because you didn't talk. You didn't talk until you were a little over two years old. But," he says, "once you opened your mouth and started to talk, no one has figured out how to shut you up since." My mother said that I wouldn't walk. If she held a string, I would walk. But if she dropped the string, I'd fall and crawl. And one day I was in the kitchen and she said, "Damn it. Aren't you ever going to learn to walk?"

And she said, I jumped up and I didn't walk. I ran all the way through the house, back into the kitchen flopped down on the floor and didn't walk for two more days. But I survived and was actually, my mother discovered, I really was normal, you know, I could see alright. But I was tiny. I was the smallest kid in my class all the way through school. When I was little, my mother, so hated the neighborhood. She wouldn't let my younger brother or I, we had a family of five I'm the fourth child. The oldest was a boy. And then my sister was about 10 years older than me. And then a brother four years older than me and myself. And then my younger brother. My younger brother was born 14 months after I was. And I asked my mother later, I said, "Given what you went through with me, why in hell did you have another child?" And she said, "Oh, well, that's just what people did."

We were the smallest Catholic family in the neighborhood. Um, most of them were seven or eight children. We were just five, which was, you know, in those days was fairly small for a Catholic family, but we were the only Catholic family that did not go to the Catholic schools. We went to the public grade school and a lot of the Catholics went to the public high school, but almost all of them went to the Catholic grade schools. Although every teacher I had from first grade to senior in high school was an Irish Catholic born and bred in Butte. It was a public school system, but they were all Irish Catholics.

And my mother would not let my younger brother or I out of the backyard until we went to school. She didn't want us playing with the ragamuffins that were around there, but it was a real mistake because when we went to school, I was taught by my mother, well, if you're nice to people, they'll be nice to you. No, no, no, no. We got eaten up alive because those kids had been living in the streets since they were two years old. And we were living in our backyard and our playroom. We only knew one another. And what distinguished you at the Washington school, if you were a male, when I went there, if you were a male, you were thought of as really impressive if you could beat the crap out of everybody else. Or if you were a very good thief or if you were an excellent athlete. One of the kids showed up one day in the fifth grade and he rolled his sleeves up and he had wristwatches all the way up on both arms, which he'd stolen from, I don't know, the five and dime or something. Well, I was a mediocre athlete. I was too small to beat anybody up and I couldn't function as a thief. And so not only did I not distinguish myself in male criteria, but I did the worst thing any male could do. I cooperated with teachers. That was deadly. I was just thought of as "blah!" I defended myself.

Fortunately, my father, being a good Irishman, he had the gift of gab, as they say. And every night, once you started school, when we had dinner, my father worked as a meter repairman at the Montana Power Company. He'd started at the Montana Power when he was 14 years old, when his father died and he went to work as an elevator boy to support his three brothers and two sisters and mother. And then he became a meter reader and, eventually, a meter repairman. And where was I going?

Clark Grant: He had imparted something that helped you with the bullies.

McGlynn: Every night at dinner, once you started school, he would tell the story of his day. My mother would tell a story of her day. And then from the oldest to the youngest child, you would tell the story of your day. And I quickly figured out that it was not the case that you just said what had happened. You had to make it interesting. I remember when I was about 10, I met the men my father worked with and they weren't nearly as interesting as the men my father told us at dinner time that he worked with. So I learned to use my tongue shall we say. Well, it defended me in school because if I got into an argument with someone and eventually if I was winning the argument and they'd say, you know, "If you don't . . . I'm going to . . ." I'd say, "Well, you know, you could probably beat me up, but if you did you would admit you'd lost the argument and had to resort to violence."

If I got the slightest glimmer in their eye that they recognized what I'd said, I realized I'd get away with it. And they'd say, "Oh, 'F' you!" and walk away. If I got a dumb blank stare, the one virtue I did have was I was fast on my feet. And I'd get ready to run because when I got the dumb stare, I knew no, no, no, my argument, it had no impact on them whatsoever, but it was very difficult being a boy. And I told my mother, once I said, the only reason I am, what I am is I was more influenced by you than I was by my peers. Because my mother was very, very bright, but from a very poor family and never went beyond high school, she was a secretary, an accountant, et cetera, for all kinds of places when she went back to work. And she was an amazing woman. She developed a goiter when she was 15. She had it out when she was 54, when the tendrils were six feet long wrapped around her lungs.

And at dinner time, if she tipped her head to look at the base of her plate, she'd pass out and finally had to have surgery to have it removed. Her normal pulse was like 140 to 150 for, you know, from 15 to 54. The doctor said she was not likely to live beyond 30. She had what they called tachycardia. It was tremendous acceleration to the heart. She'd be ironing and all of a sudden. You could see the breasts just vibrating. And they taught my father how to press on the nerves under her ears and slow her heart down. She'd collapse on the floor. My father would push under the nerves under her ears to slow her heart down. She'd get on the couch. She'd have a coffee. And 10 minutes later, 20 minutes later, she'd be up and finish the ironing.

And she went on like that. You know, wasn't supposed to, the doctors told her you can't work. You can't live in a house that has stairs. You can't lift anything that weighs over 10 pounds. And you've got to take a two hour nap every afternoon. Well, that was after she had her first child. She had four more children. Once the youngest went to school, she went back to work, half days. We lived in a house with a staircase. She carried us up and down the stairs, et cetera, et cetera, and said, I'm going to live the way I want to.

[00:10:54]

And you know, if I die, fine, but I'm not going to become a hard invalid. Well, her heart slowed down when she had that surgery. And I told her later when I was in college, I said, you know, when you die, I'm going to have an autopsy. They're not going to find a heart. There's going to be a wizened old piece of shoe leather that'll still be bumping. Because she was absolutely amazing. When my father died of a heart attack, however, she had never spent one day of her life imagining that she would outlive my father. He was never sick. Very healthy. And he had one heart attack and spent a couple of months in bed and then he recovered and he'd gone back to work. And the doctors told him don't get excited. He got very excited watching boxing. He was watching the Friday night fights. I was out with a friend at a football game and I came home and apparently the fight finished. He stood up and boom, he was gone just dead instantly. 58 years old. My mother was insane for three years. She had never imagined living without my father, but she eventually recovered and she died at 79. So she was one tough person. But growing up in Finntown was really . . . My father and our local grocer and there might've been one other adult male over 40 in Finntown that was born in the United States.

[00:12:37]

Everybody in Finntown were all born in Europe. I don't know what the exact percentages were but I always estimated that Finntown was a third Finnish, a third Irish and a third Serbian. It was called Finntown, I think, primarily, because the Finns owned all the bars, but one. And boy were there bars. I mean, this was a residential area. I grew up about 150 feet from the Broadway bar, which is the only thing left of Finntown as far as I know, it's still there. And next to the Broadway Bar were four or five other bars, one after the other, there was something close to 20 bars within two to three blocks of my house. And it was a residential area. And you know, the church was right, the Catholic church was right immediately, one block, immediately, south of the flat I grew up in. The flat I grew up in, they moved in there when my mother was pregnant with me. It had been rented to miners as a rooming house. And Maggie and Timmy Tolan owned the three-plex. They lived in the downstairs of the eastern most one and rented the upstairs rooms. The middle one was an English family, the Goldsworthy's. The Western one had been all miners and we were the first family to occupy it. Apparently, it was in such wretched condition, my mother said, here she is pregnant. And she had morning sickness. Not just the first few months, she had morning sickness every day of all nine months of every pregnancy.

I said, "How could you have had more than one child?" So here she is with morning sickness. And she said, I would clean the toilet twice a day, every day for almost two months before she got a clean and they had to clean the wall where guys spit tobacco juice onto the wallpaper, et cetera. So it was apparently a pretty filthy place, my mother kept it very clean.

Well, we lived there. And the Tolan's were quite amazing. I don't know what they paid for the house for the flat, when they first moved in. But I remember Timmy came over when I was about 13 or 12, something like that. And he apologized to my father. He says, "Ah, Bill, I'm sorry, but I got to raise your rent $5."

And they paid, I think it was $20 or $25 a month for a 3-bedroom dining room, kitchen, living room, quarter basement flat, which, you know, wasn't too bad. But my father only made $50 a week as a meter repairman. My father was Catholic and raised us Catholic, but my mother was . . . Well, her mother was a Presbyterian. My mother never, her whole religion was summed up in, "You get your heaven and hell here on earth." She never went to church. She had no particular religion at all, but she let my father raise the kids as Catholic, and she would bake for the bake sale at the church had a couple of times a year to raise money for the poor. Everybody in Finntown was poor, but some were really, really wretchedly poor. And she was giving Mrs. Tolan some baked goods for the bake sale at the back fence. And Mrs. Tolan looked at her and she said, "Ah, Mrs. McGlynn, you're a fine woman for a heathen."

It was really interesting. I mean, the Pope was Catholic or was Italian, all the Popes up to that point had been Italian, but the Irish Catholics weren't too sure that the Italians out there in Meaderville were real Catholics or not. And anyone who wasn't a Catholic, they were deeply suspicious of. So the Orthodox Serbians and the Lutheran Finns, no, no, no, no. My favorite though, it was my brother, younger brother and I would always go to early mass on Sunday morning, 7:30 mass because it was a low mass half hour. And then you could come home and eat. And Mrs. Tolan and her sister. Her sister's child was a nun. The first woman I ever fell in love with. She wore the habit and et cetera, and she was absolutely gorgeous. I fell in love with her when I was nine years old. And I mean, I just couldn't get over it. The beauty of this woman.

But Mrs. Tolan and her sister would be going to the church. Well, the law said you close the bars at two in the morning, not in Butte. What you did at two in the morning was you turned out the lights and then sometimes . . . I didn't sleep very well there. And I'd be up looking out the window or something. And the upstairs bedroom and a police car would drive up and stop outside the bar. Policemen would go in the bar at like 2:30, 3 o'clock in the morning, and then they'd come out. And obviously they were taking a bribe and nobody bothered. Well, at 7:00, 7:30 in the morning, as we were walking down to the church, the Finns would be coming out of the bar, one with a fiddle, one with an accordion, and they'd be playing and dancing on the corner. And Mrs. Tolan and her sister would be walking back "tsk, tsk, tsk." All these awful people, you know, drunken. Sunday mornings and there they are still celebrating Saturday nights, et cetera. The sad thing about it was that most of the people in the neighborhood. The bars were basically family bars, something that seemed to be almost unique to Butte. Everybody went to the same bar every night and they were social institutions.

But too many of the people in that neighborhood went to the bar every night and their kids were left abandoned. And the kids I went to school with, it was really sad because there were no food programs or anything for schools at that time. And these kids would come to school with no breakfast. They would eat library paste. They'd eat chalk, you know, trying to get some food because they came to school without any breakfast. They'd go home at lunch and maybe they could fix themselves a lunch. Maybe not. They'd come to school in the winter sometimes with tennis shoes, with the toes out. No real winter coat. The PTA at the Washington school often, on the QT would buy a student a winter coat because they didn't have one. But these kids were so little taken care of because their parents were, if not alcoholics, at least they spent way too much time in the bars and way too little time with their children. And they were immigrants.

Most of them were, you know, they'd never really had much schooling or anything, and they didn't seem to have much regard for schooling. And unfortunately, there were about 30, 32 kids in my eighth-grade class. And when I graduated high school, I don't think more than four or five of us graduated from high school. And it was really sad because there were only a few families in the neighborhood and there were a few that really did take care of their children and their children did well and went on and developed. But so many of those kids were just abandoned. It was really sad seeing that.

The culture was very interesting, because, well, Mrs. Suvitch, a Serbian woman lived right next door to us, just west of us. And she came to the United States in 1917. She never became a citizen because she could not read or write English and she could barely speak it. How did she survive for decade after decade? Well, there were enough Serbians in Finntown. She didn't have to speak English. For some reason, she got enamored with my mother and wanted to talk to her over the fence. Well, every once in a while, she either would not understand what my mother had said, or my mother could not understand what she was trying to say in her broken English. She'd call her daughter out and her daughter would stand there and translate back and forth while she would have these conversations with my mother.

And they got along very well, but it was amazing that she came here in 1917 and only because of the ethnic mix of that neighborhood was she able to live that long and never really learned to speak English with any kind of fluency at all. I mean, hers was just real broken. You just thought she'd been in the country a month and she'd been here since 1917. It was very strange, but the Finns all spoke Finnish most of the time. And the Irish spoke heavily Baroque Irish and the Serbian spoke Serbian. And the only Serbian expression I remember is [speaks Serbian] which is what parents would say to their child when they were misbehaving. It literally translates to "dirty hose, bad boy." Dirty hose? Dirty socks, bad boy. Um, the finish though, I loved the Finnish. It's a lilting language and their names [says Finnish names]. He was about 6'2", 6'3", maybe 210 pounds. Nobody fucked with him. He was the toughest person in Finntown, but he got polio and was away for a while. And when he came back, he had a brace on his left leg and was walking with a cane. Some idiot decided, oh, he's vulnerable. Now friends from the south side in my high school had just brought me back. I never had a car. And I said, just drop me off.

This fight started outside the Broadway Bar between Tiesto and whoever was presuming stupidly that they could assault him. A young friend of mine who had never seen a real fight. "Oh, fight!" He went running down to watch the fight. Toyvo knocked the guy down. He braced himself on his cane and started kicking him in the stomach. And in the face, thump, thump. The friend came back to the car, threw up in the gutter. I said, "See, that's what a real fight is like. It's not like John Wayne in the movies. It's really vile and vulgar." And he was just totally, totally disturbed by seeing this kind of assault. But people learn, you know, okay, he had a cane and a brace on his leg, but he was still the toughest man in Finntown.

[00:24:38]

And there was big Helen Hakluda. She was this wonderful woman. But you know, the Finns were either tall and blonde. The Nordic Finns. Or real Finns, authentic Finns are medium to short and dark haired and dark eyed. And Finntown was a mixture of both, but Helen Hakluda was definitely a Nordic Finn and she was 6'2" 6'3". I saw her once. They were having a party in their yard, she was carrying a wash pan, one of those great, big wash pans, full of ice and beer on one hip, holding it with one arm and walking across the yard. I thought, holy God, I couldn't carry that with both hands and a wagon. Um, but she was, there was another Finnish woman who lived on Covert Street.

Every morning, her daughter was this wonderful woman and immaculately dressed all the time. She worked uptown and her mother was always criticizing her for being sloppy and dirty. And the girl was just immaculate, but the mother went out every single morning, except in the dead of winter with a scrub brush and a bucket and washed the sidewalk and the gutter in front of her house. Well, to say Butte was filthy would be an understatement. They put sand on the streets in the winter, but when spring came, they never bothered to clean it up. So the gutters were all full of sand and vomit and beer cans and cigarette butts. And just general filth. When I first got out of high school, I was working as a bellhop at the Finlen hotel. And one of the women who was a secretary upstairs, she was from Sweden and had married a GI and came back to Butte. She left him, even though she loved him and went back to Sweden because she could not stand the filth of Butte.

She said the village I grew up in, every morning, everyone washed the sidewalks and the streets in front of their houses. There was no trash ever anywhere. And the place was immaculate. And I think these Finnish villages and all were similar and some of these Finnish women, they literally, it was so dirty in Butte, but they scrubbed their sidewalks every morning. And but once in a while they'd finally decide, geez, it's really, really filthy. And a street truck would come out and vaguely clean the streets. But for the most part, the streets were just full of filth all the time. And it was an interesting place, but everything I knew except the Broadway bar, it's all gone.

My grandparents, my father's grandfather came to Butte with his father shortly after the mines opened in Butte. And that would have been, I don't know, late 1850s, early 1860, something like that. My father was born there in 1900. My great-grandfather came from Iron Mountain, Michigan, which was mining country. And a lot of the early Butte Irish, they were in Iron Mountain, Michigan working in the mines. And when Butte became a whoa biggest mining find ever, they wound up and they all moved out to Butte. And my grandmother also grew up in Iron Mountain, Michigan. She didn't come out here at the same time as the man she married, but they were both from Iron Mountain, Michigan. And my grandmother, if you looked up in an encyclopedia and found grandmother, and there were a picture of it, it would have been my father's mother.

She was a short, rosy cheeked, wonderful woman. And anyone in Centerville got sick or had a problem, she would go, she'd give them food. She took care of their children. She did this or that. I never saw her anywhere, except in her kitchen. We'd go up every weekend and visit. And three of the sons were still living with her and the two daughters had moved out. One of them got married, the older one did not. And she was always cooking and taking care of her boys. And, you know, my one uncle he'd have oatmeal. Oh Lord. He put ketchup on his oatmeal. I mean, who the hell puts ketchup on oatmeal? He put ketchup on everything. He was the brother, just, I think two to three years younger than my father and my younger brother was named for him. He was Michael Francis McGlynn. My middle name is from him. I'm Frederick Francis McGlynn. And my younger brother is Gary Michael McGlynn.

And when I'd have students at the university and sometimes find out they're from Butte, I'd say, "Where'd you grow up in Butte?" "Oh, Centerville." I said, "Oh, you must've known my Uncle Mick. Mick McGlynn." "No." I'd say, "The Greek." "Oh yeah! Everybody knew the Greek." He was called the Greek. What they call dark Irish. My uncle Mick was sort of dark Irish. I guess that's why they gave him the nickname, The Greek. There were Greeks in Butte, but my uncle was certainly not Greek. But for everybody in Centerville, he was one of the funniest people I've ever known. And one of the nicest people I've ever known, but he was the Greek for all these, all these kids knew him. Everybody knew him.

And he was the only one in the family who had ever been in war. My father was too young for World War One, too old for World War II. Uncle Mick went into the army and he was a radio dispatcher. He got sent to England, but when the invasion came in 1944, he never was sent to the mainland. So he stayed in England for the whole war, had no combat of any kind. My younger, the brother four years older than me went into the army, right as the Korean war had come to a kind of truce. He was stationed right near the 38th parallel for two years but didn't see any combat. And he spent 27 years in the army and was then in Vietnam three times. the first time enthusiastic, the second, third time he volunteered to go because he was a career guy and he didn't want, he thought he had to go instead of draftees, but he went on the condition that he'd be sent.

He was an economic adviser that be sent to the border with Cambodia and the Montagnards because everybody hated the Montagnards. They were the original occupants of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese were driven out of China into Vietnam and they drove the Montagnards up into the mountains, why they were called Montagnards. And he worked with them for couple of years. And my younger brother was also in Vietnam but never saw any combat at all. So nobody in my family ever, ever was involved in combat of any sort.

I tried to join the air force when I graduated from high school. And, I had played with the air force band from DC when they came through, they picked certain local kids and I was the best trumpet player around. And so I played with them and they were picking out people. Their third trumpet was going to retire and they picked out half a dozen people to say, you know, if you join, you can come and audition for that third trumpet seat. And if you don't get it, you'll get a major base band. So I wanted to join the air force and went up and I'm there doing the physical exam and we're walking around and the Sergeant finally said, "Who's leaving the full footprint impression on the floor in their bare feet?" They're looking around. "It's you, McGlynn." So the doctor came out and he examined me and he said, "Stand on your heels." And I did and fell over. And he took a piece of paper and tried to put it under my arch. Nope, wouldn't work. And he said, "No, no, you're 4-F." And I said, "Look, I work as a bellhop, eight to 10 hour shifts, six days a week on hard floors, in dress shoes. I have marched six mile parades at a tempo of 140 on the balls of my feet in my high school band. And I have never had any problem with my feet." He said, "You will."

Well, a year later I went to New York to study acting and walked around in moccasins. By the time I came back from New York, starving to death, couldn't get a job. It was the last Eisenhower recession. I couldn't walk a block. If they hadn't invented orthotics, by the time I graduated from grad school and came here to teach, I'd have been on a cane, but they invented orthotics the year I came out here and I can do everything but run, I can't run. But so I wanted to go in the military. Nope, 4-F. So I missed Vietnam because I was 4-F.

I don't know. The other thing was I grew up thinking I was a really mediocre athlete until I got into high school and I realized, no, I wasn't that bad. I just grew up with remarkable athletes. We won the state basketball championship when I was a junior. And three of the starting five players had grown up in my neighborhood with me. I played basketball on the Washington grade school team when I was in eighth grade. And my older brother went through school, mostly with Finns. I went through school, mostly with Serbians. And the basketball team, it was Markovich, Stanosich, Milanovich, Obilovich. And they made me an honorary Serb and called me McGlynn-o-vich.

Okay. And you know, Bobby Obilovich was the last 12 letter man at the university of Montana. He was the third best athlete in our neighborhood. Louie Markovich was absolutely amazing. He broke literally every high school record in every sport, but he didn't go to college. The story I heard is he got his girlfriend pregnant and he didn't go to college. But he was just an absolutely amazing athlete, but I realized suddenly, you know, I wasn't that bad of an athlete. I just grew up with some really amazingly fine athletes. And it was interesting. My younger brother, then, the kids he went to school with were kind of a mixture of Finns and Serbs. But my older brother went mostly with Finns and I went mostly with Serbs, but it was an interesting neighborhood. And I loved hearing all those different languages all the time.

Oh the other thing is, I don't know whether it's still the case, but in the Butte I grew up in everybody pretty much had a nickname. Politicians would put their nicknames on their posters and some of the nicknames, I couldn't believe it. I was walking uptown with my father one day and he met this guy and he introduced me to him and he said, "Fred, I'd like you to meet Got 5 cents." And then he gave me the last name and they talked for a while. And when he left, I said, "You know, this guy's 50 years old." I said, "Where's the Got 5 cents come from?" He said, "Well, when he was little, he slept with his brother in the same bed. And his brother wet the bed a lot. And they got up in the morning. And if his brother had wet the bed, he'd say Got 5 cents? I'll take the blame." I said, "So you're still calling him Got 5 cents when he's 50 years old?" Well, yeah, yeah. You know, everybody's known by their nickname. And so, you know, that to me was the ultimate of the nickname thing in Butte that as a mature middle-aged man, you'd still be called, Got 5 cents, I'll take the blame for what you were doing when you were, you know, four or five years old.

But that was Butte. I mean, the nicknames were everywhere. I don't ever remember seeing a political ad for anyone that didn't have the nickname on it, because everybody was pretty much known by their nicknames. Yeah. The other thing was one of the ironies, there was tremendous rivalry between . . . there were two Catholic high schools at that time, the Girls Central and Boys Central. Boys Central, oh my God, they're so lucky that building didn't explode in fire and kill everybody. It was so ancient and in such wretched condition. And finally, after I left Butte, they collapsed it and joined the girls and boys together in the girls high school.

Because Butte had lost so many people at that time. But the boys high school was just this terrible thing. And there was this great rivalry between the two high schools. But I suffered the ignominy of Butte and Butte Central had been playing football against one another since apparently the late 1870s. Central had never won. In 1955 or 56, Sweeney was their coach and he went on and coached Kalispell and then he coached Washington State and then he coached a pro team and they beat Butte. The Catholic high school just about tore the town down, celebrating that one.

[00:41:00]

And I had a cousin who was going to the Catholic girls high school at the time, and oh, I met her on the street, unfortunately. And she just, you know, the ignominy of finally being in the only class that had ever lost to them. And as far as I know, they haven't won since, but that was just, you know, unbelievable. It was like, you know, a professional team getting beaten by a high school team. They just couldn't bear the thought of it. But, yeah, there, the common story, the joke about Girls Central, do you know why graduates of Girls' Central are always sent to finishing school after they graduate? And the answer was, well, you don't know? Oh, well you have to teach them to say, "oh really?" Instead of "no shit."

Oh my mother's family. Oh yeah. There's a story. My maternal grandmother's grandmother grew up in, or was living in New York city when she married and she had a child, my grandmother's grandmother, her husband, drugged the mother, put the mother and the child on a train and sent him to the west coast and then sued the mother for abandonment and got a divorce. Needless to say the great, great grandmother was not fond of men. And she taught her daughter to not be fond of men who taught her daughter to not be fond of men. My grandmother married her husband primarily because she was jealous of her sister and her husband was the boyfriend of her sister. And she stole him away and married him. But Fred Stafford was his name. I was named for him my first name. Um, I think she hated him probably every day of their married life.

She was working at the hospital school, et cetera, in Helena, for unwed mothers. And she would, you know, her husband would send her letters and one of them, he signed Fred H Stafford and the women she worked with said, "Molly, what's the 'H' for? And she said, "Well, I don't know." So she wrote her husband and said, the women want to know what the 'H' is for. Well, in fact, my grandfather didn't have a middle name, but he wrote back and signed it, 'Fred hornswoggle Stafford.' He was an ex-cowboy, bull-legged, short, bald.

My father went out with him a lot and protected him because he said they were in a bar one night and he got in an argument with a guy and he said, the guy was twice his size. And he looked at him. He said, "You know, I don't mind you standing on my shoulders. I don't even mind you're shitting down my neck. But when you use my hair to wipe your ass, then I get angry." And my father had to take him out of the bar before he got killed. They were at a baseball game once. And during the seventh inning stretch, everybody was lined up outside the toilets at Clark Park and they weren't all that expansive. And he said, my grandfather started shouting, "Make way, make way for a man that has to urinate!" And of course that wasn't an expression they normally heard. So people parted their ways. And he went in and they realized what he'd said, when he came out, they were ready to kill him.

But he was something. He got prostate cancer. In those days, of course, you know, there was really no treatment for it and it spread and hit his brain. And apparently he went insane and he died in Warm Springs two years before I was born. But when I got prostate cancer, when I was in my early sixties, the doctor said, "Is there a family history?" I said, "No." I'd never heard this story. I was speaking to my sister and she said, "Oh yeah, your grandfather died of prostate cancer and madness." I said, I never heard that. My mother never, ever said that. But fortunately the hatred of men ended with my mother. She loved her father and she couldn't stand it when her mother dissed him, which she did all the time. She had an older brother too, Wally, who was just like the father, apparently wildly funny, you know, sort of irresponsible.

[00:46:35]

And Grandma Stafford hated her own son and her husband. Her first child who was named for her husband, Fred, he died in infancy. She always spoke lovingly of him. I suppose, the best compliment I could ever have given my father was to say this woman who hated men, never, ever had a negative word to say about my father and nobody ever had a negative thing to say. My father was really a wonderful human being. But Grandma Stafford had nothing negative to say about him when she hated her own son.

And you know, I mean, she loved her brother who was a pompous ass. I only met him once when I was about nine. I couldn't stand him. He lived somewhere else, but he was just a totally pompous human being. And pomposity did not go well in Butte. I suppose it doesn't go well anywhere, but you really had to be careful because at least the Butte Irish, if not the rest of them, they could take you down with a comment. And my father made damn sure nobody in my family, you could not possibly have an ego. When I started doing extremely well in school and all my father was constantly sort of saying, you know, don't overestimate yourself, et cetera, et cetera. It was sad in a way, because there was so much to worry about with my family. We were poor and on the edge all the time, sometimes we'd get to two days before my father's paycheck would come and we'd have almost nothing left to eat. And he worried a great deal. He knew his wife hated the neighborhood we lived in, but he couldn't afford to move us out of there.

And, I never told him any problem I had because I figured he had enough problems. When I was a freshman in high school, I was the third chair, first trumpet player. They were going to have a trumpet trio at our spring concert. I auditioned for it and I could play all the parts. And I was clearly better than this other kid who was the fourth chair, but he was a senior and the director told me after he said, "I'm going to put him in there because he's been waiting for this for two years and you'll have plenty of opportunities because you're going to be the first chair next year."

Well, it was true and reasonable, but it crushed me because I had heard the whole audition and I knew I was better. I came home and I told my mother what had happened and mother and father, and I broke into tears. My mother said later that my father said, "Well, at least he can feel something. I often wondered." And I said, oh my God. You know, because I never expressed, I figured he had enough problems without worrying. And my younger brother was half crazy at that time. And there were lots of worries. And so I never, never expressed any problems I had, not that I didn't have problems, but here my father thought I was this intellectually indifferent human being.

[00:50:30]

My brothers, you know, we all learned my father's gift for gab. I remember when I was a student here as an undergraduate, I was home for Christmas and both of my brothers were back from the military at that time on Christmas break. And one of them told a very funny story. It reminded me of something that had happened down here at the university.

And I said, oh, this reminds me and I, so I started to tell that story. I'm not a too bad a storyteller, but my two brothers, they looked at one another, they rolled their eyes, they sighed. And when I finished the story and got to the punchline, neither of them laughed. The one looked at the other and said, "Gee, Gary, don't, you wish you had gone to the university so you could have had such profound, funny experiences as this?" And the other brother said, "Oh yeah. It's so sad that we've never had . . ." They could just cut you off at the ankles. When I got married and my older brother was stationed up in Lake Michigan at a naval base up there, he was in the army, but there was a naval base and an army unit with it. And we invited him to dinner in our apartment in Evanston. And he came. One of the wedding gifts we'd gotten was a waffle iron. Well, I knew you had to cure a waffle iron before you used it. My wife didn't. So she tried to make waffles. Well, she ended up with waffle crumbs and she was embarrassed and serving us, but they were still edible. Well, my older brother just gave her hell, you know, et cetera.

And when he left, she broke into tears though. Oh, your brother hates me. I said, no, no, you don't understand. I said, he was kidding you all along. And it took months for my wife to understand because she came from a very serious family. And when I first met her father, he picked me up in Bellingham in a sports car and he was wearing a beret. I said, "Wow, sportscar!" He said, "No, it's my son's. I'm just taking care of it for him." Then I went into their kitchen and their mother was feeding a lamb, a bottle. But when she started to prepare dinner, she used an electric can opener. I said, "Wow, an electric can opener. I've never seen one of those." Well, I discovered that my in-laws had no sense of humor. They did not understand me kidding them at all. And they thought I was some kind of monster. They got over it eventually, but it took them and it took my wife months. The crowning moment when my wife finally understood was she'd gone to bed early and I was sitting up reading. I went into the kitchen in our apartment in Evanston to get a glass of water.

[00:53:53]

And I didn't turn on the light. I just took the glass. Well, we'd had turkey and a very small turkey, but with just two of us. So we had turkey again and again and again. And I'd finally told her, I said, "Look, if we have Turkey one more time, I'm going to go down and buy the most expensive steak there is. I can't stand one more night of turkey." Well, the last of the dressing, when she was digging it out of the carcass, part of it had flopped into the water glass. She left it there. She's in bed. I take the water glass in the dark, turn the water on and "whoops!" The dressing comes flipping out. I let out a yell and drop the glass. And then I heard this chuckle. She'd gotten me from the bedroom and I thought, ah ha, she's developing a sense of humor. Yeah. But when you marry an Irishman, you know, although actually I'm more.

Well, my, my grandfather on my mother's side was English. My grandmother was German. My mother's middle name is Corinda. She was named for her maternal grandmother, Corinda Elvira Klopp. Corinda Klopp. Yeah. I saw one picture of her. She was about five foot two, and about five foot two wide. Um, lived in North Dakota. She developed breast cancer when she was 52 and died. And it was utterly untreated. This was the late 1880s. Utterly untreated. And she died when she was 81. No woman in my mother's family, my mother died younger than any other woman in her family. And she died at 79. I was just, there's some really powerful genes on my mother's side. So I'm actually more German English Scotch than I am Irish, but my father's side of the family is completely Irish. And my kids, they're only one quarter Irish.

When I named my first child, Sean, I'd never known a Sean growing up, you know, Irish Butte. I'd never known a Sean. My God, by the time Sean was in the third grade, there were like 14 Sean's that we knew of in the town. When my youngest was born, he was born on May Day. And, I called my mother and said, you know, you've got another grandson. "Well, what did you name him?" I said, "Well, he was born on May Day, the international day of revolution. So I named him Carl Friedrich Vladimir Yidish Mao McGlynn." There was this big pause. She said, "You didn't." I said, "No, I named him Brendan for a drunken Irish, revolutionary poet, and dramatist, Brendan Behan." I don't know what else to say.

Grant: Well, what about when you came here to Missoula?

McGlynn: Oh, well, that's not a Butte story.

Jaap: It's about you. We'd like to hear it.

McGlynn: I studied acting in New York and I was starving to death because there was just no jobs of any kind available. So I came back and I went to work at the Trethaway music store as a clerk. And he was opening a store in Helena and offered to have me manage it, but I wanted to go back to New York and I'd save some money. And so I started back and I stopped to see my best friend Ray Gillis, who was in Minneapolis. And I stopped to see him. He took me to a philosophy class. It was run by a guy who had spent World War Two in prison has a conscientious objector. And when the war had ended, he had gone to Japan and lived in a Zen monastery for three years. And he had these mugs that the monks had made and he talked for an hour and then he had a tea.

We had the Japanese tea for all of us, and we had to sit there quietly and think about what we wanted to say and question. And this thing went on for about three hours. I was very, very impressed. And so I turned my bus ticket in, came back to Butte and went to Montana Tech for a semester. I'd won the most valuable student scholarship when I was a senior at Montana Tech, which was the Butte school of mines then, but I'd never used it. Well, I turned it in and they called me and they said, this was only intended for that next year, but they honored it.

And so I went there and I called down here at the end of the year and said, you know, "Do you have any scholarships?" And they said, "Well, we've got a couple in music and several in education, but that's basically it." But the guy said, "Well, we got this new thing, the national defense education act loans, and nobody's applied for them. So why don't you apply for one of those." Well, the NDA act was to educate people in the sciences and mathematics to help America build better bombs to defend us against those evil communists. It was not intended for someone who was a declared philosophy major, but I got it and it was $750 a year. So it paid my tuition and fees and books and gave me about a dollar a day to eat on.

And when I tell students what I paid, they'd go, oh, you're kidding. I said, no, I'd go over to the bookstore. And I'd take five classes. I was taking 25 credits a quarter. I graduated in three years and I was taking five classes and I buy all my books for five classes for around $50. They were all paperbacks and they were generally 75 cents to a dollar and a quarter. And only those that were sown bound. They were $2. They were the luxury paperbacks and I'll hold up a copy of, I'd hold up a copy of, Three Dialogues of Plato for my class in intro to philosophy and say, "What did you pay for this?" And they'd say $14. This is a copy I had as an undergraduate 75 cents, every three years, they changed the cover and raised the price, you know, but. The translations were in public domain and had been since the 1920s. So I came down here and I came here expecting it was going to be like every place, everything else in Montana, second rate, I was absolutely flabbergasted at the quality of education here.

And fortunately, I had older friends since, you know, I didn't come to college till I was 20. And I had older friends who had been here and who said, take this professor, this professor, this class, this class. So I got a wonderful education by these really superb professors. And the philosophy department was just absolutely outstanding. And basically, what they did is they took a pompous individual who thought he knew everything, blew his mind, destroyed his ego and, you know, let him develop. When I applied for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, when I was a senior, I asked Cynthia Schuster if she'd write a letter for me. She did. She said, "I never let a student see a letter that I write, but in your case, I want you to read this. And if you don't want me to send it, I won't." So I read her letter and it said, "In all my years of teaching, I had never met such a smug self-satisfied pompous young man as Mr. McGlynn.

However, he opened up and he learned, and there's real, you know, serious prospects, et cetera, for him, et cetera." I said, "Oh no, send that letter. Most of these letters, nobody pays attention to them. They just say, oh, so-and-so is the best blah, blah, blah. They'll pay attention to this letter." And when I won the Woodrow Wilson, the interview process was over in Portland. And I went over there. Leslie Fiedler was on the committee. There were only three of us in philosophy. So they'd hauled in a philosopher from Reed. They'd hauled in a philosopher from Reed. He was an analytic philosopher. I'd written my essay on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, existentialism, which the analytic philosophers think it's not philosophy at all.

And so it came time to interview me. The guy, he was about six foot four and he had his legs crossed and he was holding his knee and smirking. He had this little thin mustache and said, "Well, Mr. McGlynn, you're talking about phenomenology. So would you care to give me a phenomenological reduction of Aristotle's notion of being?" I thought, oh boy, am I in trouble? But I would not back off. And this guy, and I went back and forth, back and forth, and I knew that if I stopped and the feeder would jump in and ask me a question about Greek tragedy or something and I'd be okay, but I was not going to let this guy just run over me.

Finally, the chair of the committee said, "Well, I'm very sorry. You know, this is all very interesting, although I have no idea what you've been talking about for the last half hour, but he said, these interviews are supposed to be 15 minutes and you've been at it 45 minutes and we've got to move on. So, are there any final words you'd like to say, Mr. McGlynn?" I thought, well, I buried myself. I said, "Well, I guess the best thing I could say was for Socrates, you know, that the first step in wisdom is recognizing your own ignorance and I've certainly come to recognize that."

[01:06:01]

And I ran into Fiedler on Monday and I said, "I suppose I didn't get one of the fellowships." He said, "Oh no. You and a kid from Reed college who came in and told us exactly why we had to give it to him and was more brilliant than all of us put together." He said, "You were the only two that had a unanimous approval." I said, "I got a unanimous approval?" He said, "Oh yes, Fred, after that disgraceful appeal to Socrates, the first step was recognizing your own ignorance." He said, "How could we turn that down?"

But I came back here to teach. I had better offers, but I came back here because this university had saved my life. And everything I became, I owed to them. And so I had no hesitation in coming back here. They, you know, they've grossly underpaid faculty, et cetera. The last year I taught here, I was chair of that department, full professor. To bring me to the minimum salary or the average salary of a full professor in a state university, they'd have had to have given me a $25,000 raise in my salary.

But except for the two years after the Vietnam war ended. When I first came here to teach, the Vietnam, war was still going on and we had older students who were trying to stay out of the war and they were staying in the university, et cetera. When the war ended, suddenly, I was teaching both humanities and philosophy. And the humanities classes, suddenly we had classes, 30 students, all of them were 17 or 18 years old and had done nothing but go to school. And I had three, what I call hand grenade classes. They weren't interested in anything. And you didn't want to go and talk to them. You wanted to pull the pin on a live grenade, roll it in, close the door and walk away. And in the words of Thomas of Aquinas "rid the world of some invincible ignorance." But other than that, I never had a year when I didn't have a few just absolutely brilliant students. And I would say I enjoyed literally every day I spent here for 50 years. I remember Leslie Peter.

I took Fiedler's class originally because my friends were all saying, "Oh, what a great teacher he was." He was gone for two years on a fellowship, and then he'd come back. And I was a junior at that time. And I signed up for his humanities class to basically show what I thought that he was a charlatan and I was going to establish it. Well, he was just an absolutely fabulous teacher. But part of what made me think he was in charlatan, there was a Leigh Nye photograph. His books were being sold through the reader subscription club. And when you joined that, you got a couple of free books. And I was in the reading, his "Love and Death in the American Novel", which is his most famous book of criticism was in there, but they had the picture of him and he staring through the top of his head.

It was a Leigh Nye photograph. And I thought, what a pretentious thing. Then I read his novel. Oh God, he wrote that while he was in Italy. It was horrible. I mean, he was a great critic, but just a God-awful novelist. So I was going to show what a charlatan he was. No, no, he was this brilliant professor. Unfortunately, most of the students in his class were there to be entertained by the crazy professor. A couple of years before I came here, some guy from Billings, his son had humanities from Fiedler. And the parent was so appalled. He went after Fiedler and he took his criticism and excerpted this and his novel and various other things. And put together this package of yellow journalism to show that he was a vial, you know, just horrible Jewish scholar, you know, awful person who had no morality at all and should be fired. It didn't do any good.

He sent a copy of it to every editor of every newspaper in Montana. And it was quite a scandal, but nothing came of it. But there were all these kids that were in his class who seemed to be there to just see him. "Ooh, who's this weird professor." And I started out that way, but quickly saw no, no, no, no. One day he came in, went over and he looked out the window and it was that Leigh Nye expression. It was a common occurrence, looking through the top of his head.

He said, "You know, there are days, there are days and this is one of them, when you think that everything you do is rather pointless. That some of your students could be exposed to the greatest books and the finest minds. And they would remain in the words of Thomas of Aquino, "invincibly ignorant." And, and there are others whom you could cast aside on a desert island with the Montgomery Ward's catalog and they would become wise."

And then he turned from the window, scanned the class and he said, "You know what I mean?"

But I wrote a paper for him. We were doing Oedipus trilogy. And when I read Oedipus the King, it just absolutely blew my mind. We were supposed to write a three page, double spaced, or a five-page, double space essay on Greek tragedy. I wrote it and turned it in and I got a B+ on it. And he wrote your ideas seem to be stretching the limits of this paper, et cetera. And I went into his office and I said, "Well, professor Fiedler . . ." It was three pages. It's a three-page double-spaced essay. I had a lot more to say. And he looked up and he sighed and he said, "Oh, well far be it from me to limit the student mind, go ahead and say what you have to say."

Two days later, I brought him a 45-page paper. I have a lot to say about Oedipus the King. But that's the kind of thing he did. Um, he's the only professor I've ever known who could give the same lecture, inspire the janitor who was cleaning up the room, his brightest student, his brightest colleagues and a mediocre student. I mean, I never heard anyone who had that ability to say really profound things in a way that ordinary people could grasp them, understand them and develop them, et cetera. It's absolutely amazing. He was a and boy, I mean, he was just one of many, I mean, the quality of the faculty I had, I had a great faculty at Northwestern, but only two of them would have equaled any of them. Seven or eight faculty that I had here at the University of Montana. We had a way and still have a way better university than the state deserves, given their lack of support for it.

Jaap: How'd you get into music. I know you're quite musical, aren't you?

McGlynn: My older brother had Bright's disease, the one four years older than me. He had Bright's disease, when he was little. When he was about eight or nine, and he was confined to a bed for a year and a tutor came over to the house and gave him lessons, et cetera. And when he recovered, the doctors told my mother that he could not engage in organized sports because it would put a strain on his heart and he could end up with a bad heart. Well, apart from sports in Butte, the thing that was most renowned was the Butte high school band. We were one of the most famous bands, high school bands in the country and still the only high school band that marched in the Rose Parade and the parade in Oregon. And after marching in the Rose parade in 1948, people were so impressed with them, they were invited to come to the Rose Bowl. They weren't allowed to play at half, but they were given seats behind the end zone and they played before the game started. The only high school band ever.

And so music was a second choice. So they got him a trombone. He played the trombone. I was naive at that time, didn't have very good taste. I admired Harry James, awful trumpet player, blaring blasting, but I've thought Harry James was the cat's pajamas. So I wanted to play the trumpet. And I got trumpet lessons in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade. And then the assistant band director would go around to the various schools one day a week and give the musicians, lessons. Well, I was the only musician at school, so I got a private lesson from him every week. And so he knew what I was about. And then when I was in the eighth grade, eighth graders at the certain quality were allowed to come and rehearse with the band and play in the 4th of July parade before they were freshmen. And so I was able to do that. And then when the freshman year started, since he knew me and knew how I could play, he set me up right away.

When we went to concert band, he set me up as the fourth chair for his trumpet player, which caused the older players looking down. At the end of that Freshman year, we were picked for the first chair of America. It was an annual put out about high quality high school bands and Butte High was picked for it. So they sent a photographer and they did a picture of the band. I was so little that the photographer, he said, I can't see that person there in the band. So they put me on three books so that my head was this high. The trumpet is sitting on the bell on my leg. The mouthpiece of the trumpet is above my head. I was that small. I mean, I looked when I was a freshmen, I entered the high school, I was the smallest boy in the high school. There was one girl that was in our band, who was a flute player who was smaller than me. She was about four foot nine. I was four foot, 10 and weighed about 85, 88 pounds as a Freshman. I didn't grow until between my junior and senior years.

My first year after that trumpet trio disaster, the directors knowing how disturbed, I was by it. There had been a guy had come for an assembly several years earlier who played an alp horn, you know, those great big Swiss horns that they call them. Um, he bought one, he'd had it in his storage closet and never used it. And he decided, "Well, I'll compensate McGlynn with that. So we did a band concert and a twirling review with music, pop musical numbers, et cetera, and dancing and costumes and all of that.

And we started, I guess, with the orchestra concert then did the thing, but we also did the solos and trios that were out there and then did the twirler review and then did the band concert. So he decided they'd do a Swiss number. Um, the girls were all in Swiss outfits. He dressed me in lederhosen and the little cap, et cetera. And the girls come out carrying, with straps, the bell of this horn. I mean, these horns are huge. Put the bell out on a piano in the orchestra pit and this little tiny boy is coming behind it. That was me.

Well, I don't get stage fright. You know, as an actor I never had stage fright. As a musician sometimes, but this was the worst stage fright I ever had in my life.

[01:20:40]

I came out there, people started laughing right away, simply because here's this little tiny kid coming behind his huge horn. I was smaller than all of the twirlers that were dressed up for the thing. And the first trumpet player, he starts laughing. Well, I started to play and it's a wooden mouthpiece for the thing, but my left leg is going like this. My younger brother and his friends are sitting in the first row, along with a chef from the country club who I'd known when I was a caddy and they're all, they all start to laugh and I'm looking at them and my legs going like this. And I started to play. [horn sounds] But then I relaxed and I played and it was the William Tell, "baa di pa da." So I got it out fine.

And the next night I did, we did two nights of concerts. I did it just fine, but when I was back changing into this outfit. To show the kind of social problems of being small as a male, I'd be changing, the girls would come in from one number to another, they were changing their costumes right in front of me. They're standing there in panties and bra. I'm no threat to them. They would pat me on the head and call me Freddy. But that's how I got into it. It was just, you know, the accident of my brother having Bright's disease. And, you know, the two big outlets were sports or music. And the Butte High band was so famous that, and you know, when I was, a sophomore, we went to the Calgary Stampede Parade and led that. And of course we were going to lead the parade. We'd never marched without leading the parade except in the Rose Bowl. And they said, no, no, the, the Mounties lead the parade. You'd slow us down. And their director said, "Who runs this parade? Do you have a park here?" He said, "Yeah, there's a big park." It was Calgary, of course, there's a huge park. He said, "Have them there at six o'clock tonight." We marched at a cadence of 140 on the balls of our feet. So they said, "Okay, you can lead the parade, but if you slow us down, the Mounties will . . ." Well, there was no way we're going to slow the parade down. It's a huge parade. Six miles.

The morning of that parade, it was 93 in Calgary. We wore wool uniforms that clipped right up under your chin and Shaka hats. Oh my God. The heat was just, of course, coming from Butte, you don't get that. Now we're getting that kind of heat in Butte, but normally that was just unheard of, we are dying. We took off. His daughter is the head majorette. We had memorized nine sets of three pieces a piece, and we just went from one piece to another, to another, and then she'd call out number of another set and we'd go. We took off marching at 140, 146 something like that.

By the time we'd gone to half a mile, we were a quarter mile ahead of the rest of the parade. So we looked back and they were moving blocks back. So what do we do? We counter march. March all the way back to them and then counter marched again and took off again. When we got to the last mile of the parade, we'd lost three twirlers, three or four twirlers, and about seven members of the band from heat exhaustion. They couldn't go on. It was so bad that the kid who was playing second, first trumpet with me marching next to me, I said, look, I'll play one measure. You play one measure because we couldn't breathe. And so we went six mile parade at that kind of cadence, and we didn't slow anybody down, but we damn near killed the band.

And unfortunately that was the night that the American teacher and his students climbed a mountain there and near Calgary. And apparently the rope thing or something broke, they all fell and seven of them died. And so we did a Memorial service for them. Then the next day we went Banff, that's where we did the Memorial service was at Banff. But I'd heard of Banff. And I thought, well, geez, Calgary was way bigger. It wasn't anywhere near the size that it is now, but it was, Calgary was probably 175, 250,000 people at that time. I couldn't imagine that. So I thought that Banff was going to be huge.

Well, Banff is a little tiny village with moose and elk walking down the street, et cetera. And so I was just stunned. Then we went up to Lake Louise, very, very fancy resort looks out onto the lake with the glaciers and all of that. And we went up and gave a concert on the lawn and all the people came. Then the director said, could we go in and look at your lobby? Oh no, no, you can't do that. Well, when we were in Banff, the Banff Springs Hotel is fabulous. It's an old stone, but it's just gorgeous. It's way nicer than this other lake Louise, Chateau Lake Louise. It's much nicer than Chateau Lake Louise. Although less famous. When we played in Banff, the manager of Banff Spring said we could all come there and walk through. We walked all through the grounds, through the lobby, et cetera, and then no problem, but Chateau Lake Louise, oh no you can't be disturbing our guests, even though all the guests had come out to listen to us, give a concert.

[01:27:33]

Jaap: Did you do theater with Bill Froelich?

McGlynn: Bill Froelich?

Grant: What's his nickname?

Jaap: I don't know his nickname, not "Give Me 5 cents."

McGlynn: I did a variety of plays where they needed an older person than the students, when the students weren't quite up to the age thing. But the guy who was having the same thing on Friday, that's not Bill, is it? Me and names. Yes. We did "Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf" in the women's dorm that's right there. They have the beautiful lobby. We did it in that lobby and the woman who was the drama historian at the time, she had to leave because she got very ill and, but God, what an actress she was, and she played the female lead and I played George and we had a grad student from MIT with a master's degree in nuclear physics or something who decided to go into a drama who played the girl. And she was wonderful.

The guy who played the young man, and he was something of a problem, but that was a wonderful experience because that woman was so talented. She was the best actress I ever worked with. And, we had a great time. It was a wonderful experience. And then a year or two later I did, I'm a Becket freak. And, I did, "End Game." Played Ham in the university, in a small theater. And there was a young, black graduate student here at the time. He was very talented. He had a great voice and I got the director. It was, oh, it was a guy, he's from Florida State. He's probably the senior person over there now. But I persuaded him to cast this guy. He'd done some leads and he was drop dead, gorgeous, handsome, and had this wonderful baritone voice.

And I thought, well, let's stretch him, make him clove, where he's confined in the way he walks and et cetera, and is basically, you know, this oppressed individual. And so I did the whole thing, both rehearsals and production with my eyes closed, you know, and wore blind glasses because Ham is blinded by his own cruelties. But it was very interesting because the young man, we had free blocking and he was wearing slippers on a soft covered stage, but I knew where he was at every moment, I could feel him.

And there was a point in the play when we were rehearsing, where he's up on a ladder. And I ask Clov, to look out and tell me what you see. And he says, you know, "Gray horizon to horizon. Nothing's moving." You know, sun's not coming up, it's not going down. It's just stasis. And, there's a line there. I can't remember now exactly what the line is, but he's up on the ladder. He asked the director, he said, "What does that line mean?" I can't remember the exact line now. And I had written about this play and I read it multiple times. I taught it and I thought there was nothing about this play that I didn't know.

And it just instantly by working in the play, I suddenly realized that that's the moment that Clov closes off to Hamm. Boom. The kid recognized that. From that moment on, in rehearsal and in production after that moment, I lost him. I didn't know where he was, you know? So there, when there's a case where he's finally right on my shoulder, I'm startled, you know, but it was, it was an amazing experience.

I mean, I think it's the greatest play since Shakespeare, since Hamlet, you know, to me, it's Oedipus the King, Hamlet and Endgame, I think it's, you know, it's a kind of modern Oedipus the King.

[Insect]

Oh someone's thing on my Facebook yesterday, an ant stealing a diamond, an ant got into this jewelry store and was on the case and picked up a fairly good size diamond, and it was a dragging it. And there was a while before the clerk saw the ant crawling across the counter with the diamond. Ants can carry many times their own weight. And this ant was stealing a diamond.

Grant: This one's going after the laptop.

McGlynn: I love theater. I love music. What I discovered though, you know, I started out, I was going to be an actor and I realized, you know, God, you could spend half your life and have three good roles. Maybe only two, maybe only one. And with music, I never had the chops. I mean, my youngest son is the principal trumpet in the Missoula symphony orchestra. He has a doctorate in trumpet performance and he has chops. Um, I was limited. I was very good, but I remember when I, my first year down here, one of my high school friends, the music festival was always held here, the high school music festival. And they always had all state bands, all state orchestras, and all the solos and everything all done in Missoula. Now they split it up.

[01:34:41]

But this friend that I had, he said Fred, he said, "Saturday morning," he said, "you gotta go to the music. And go into the band room in the basement and listen to this kid. He's an eighth grader." I said, "An eighth grader?" He said, "Yeah, you want to hear this kid?" So I went there on Saturday morning. This gleaming little kid comes out. He's going to play Italian variations, which is a monstrously difficult piece that I had never been able to touch. It was Alan Mizzoutti. You ever heard of him? Oh God. His father taught him. And he's one of the greatest trumpet players in the world. He's retired now. But if you saw any movie over the last 25 years that had spectacular trumpet playing, he did it, he was a studio player in Hollywood.

And when he went to Eastman school of music, they had a brass quintet, faculty brass quintet. They'd never had a student in it. He played first trumpet in that brass quintet all three years that he was at Eastman. He was that good. And his father gave him all the lessons. His father must've been a marvelous teacher, but I had his younger brother as a student, his younger brother died of diabetes here a few years ago, but Alan has come back here a couple of times and given it. But if you ever get a chance to hear Alan Mizzoutti, don't pass it up. He's no kid anymore, but he's an absolutely amazing trumpet player.

Grant: Fred, how about those days in New York? I had never heard that before that you'd gone to New York to try to be an actor. Can we just hear a bit more about those? And when was that?

McGlynn: Oh, that would have been 1958, 59. And I was studying with Frank Corsorro, who was an original member of the actor's studio. I didn't have enough money when I went, so by the time I paid for classes . . . God, when I first went there, I went to this hotel on 43rd, right off Broadway. Someone once said New York City ought to have a flag, dirty gray with a cockroach in the middle of it. I get into this room and I turned off the lights and I heard, "scritch, scritch, scritch." I turned the lights on. They were cockroaches all over. They're crawling on my face. They're all over the walls.

So stupidly, I thought, well, okay. I know how to deal with this. I went to a hardware store the next day and got myself a bug bomb, close the window, tight the door, tight, put a Kleenex in the keyhole of the door, sprayed the whole room and went to a movie, came back. Oh, you wouldn't believe it. Dead cockroaches on the bed, that thick. The sink was full of dead cockroaches. I mean, it was like that deep. I spent about two hours throwing waste baskets, full of dead cockroaches into the waste thing in the hall. Go to bed that night. I thought, well, I've cleaned that problem up. Turned off the lights, "skritch, skritch, skritch." The whole hotel is one living cockroach. You can't get around them. I knew I'd arrived as a New Yorker when I was in . . . there was some real cheap hamburger place that served orange juice. I can't remember what it was called. The [inaudible] Automat.

That's where I knew I'd get a roll and a coffee there. But this place, you could get a small hamburger and coffee really cheap. And I was in there one day getting a lunch and I picked up my hamburger and a cockroach crawled out. I just flicked him off and went ahead and ate the hamburger. I thought, well, I've arrived as a New Yorker. I'll share my meal with a cockroach. But it was grim. When it got to the point where I couldn't take lessons anymore, because I couldn't pay for them. I couldn't get a job. And I was really, really starving. I remember one morning I woke up and I smelled cinnamon rolls. I went down the four flights of stairs, out on the street. My nose leading me, three and a half blocks later. I found the bakery. My nose led me there.

The stench in that hotel was just overwhelming. But when you're that hungry, when you're starving like that, you know, we're dominated by our eyes. Get hungry enough. All your other senses come alive. My sense of smell became acute. Because I could smell food that I couldn't eat. And you know, I got to that bakery and looked in the window and I wanted to cry. I wanted to desperately to have one of those and I couldn't afford it. The daughter of my band director was there studying as an actress. And of course her family provided her with income and all. Once every couple of weeks, she'd make a dinner and I'd get a decent meal. I was probably 150 pounds when I went there and I came back and about 110. And then when I was going back, because I said, you know, I ran into this philosophy professor and when I came down here, I actually thought, well, I'll spend one year studying philosophy and then I'll go back to acting because in one year, clearly I'll know everything there's worth knowing. And what I knew at the end of the year is that I was a flaming idiot.

Grant: Time to keep studying. The professor in Minneapolis. What was his name? Do you recall?

McGlynn: No, I don't. I wish I could, but I'm terrible with all kinds of names. I've always had a problem. My problem with names is so bad. When I was nine years old, I was having breakfast and I asked my younger brother to pass the sugar and I couldn't remember his name. My own brother, for God's sake. I dated my wife here at the university. I'd been dating her for three months, took her out one night and called her honey all night because I couldn't remember her name until I'd taken her back to her dormitory, was walking back to the place I was living. And just as I got back to the house I was living in, oh yeah, Kathy. I almost wanted to run back and shout, Kathy! But recently the thing with names is, you know, it used to be, it was only personal names. Historic names, I never forgot them.

Now I'm forgetting historic names and actors and et cetera, and things like that, that I never forgot before. Getting old. Well, you live long enough, you'll .. . At 40 I felt better than I did at 30. At 50, I felt better than I did at 40. At 60, I felt just as good as I did at 50. At 70, I'm pretty good. At 80, no. I began to feel what it's like. And I'll be 82 in the middle of the next month. [inaudible] It isn't just the COPD. It's achy joints and nervous attacks, you know, you'll be sitting there and all of a sudden you get nervous spasms in your fingers or in the back of your hand or in the palm of your hand or in your arm for no particular reason. Fortunately, they don't last long, but it's like an electrical shock to your system. I never imagined I'd live this long.

When I was a senior here and won that fellowship and was going to Northwestern, good friends of mine, well, really bright people said, "Well, you are going there? You'll be in Chicago. You'll be right at ground zero." None of us thought we were going to live to see 40. We thought that we were going to blow up the world before then. And I said, "Well, I'd rather be at ground zero than die slowly of radiation poisoning out here." And have you ever seen Dr. Strangelove? Oh God. One of the great political comedies ever done, but when my kids saw it, I said, you have no idea. My wife and I saw that on a big theater on State Street in Chicago and everybody's laughing. And then when it gets to the point where they have to invade the air base, where the general is kind of crazy and is going to start World War Three and they used handheld cameras. And it's American soldiers and an American airbase, Americans killing Americans to stop World War Three. Where did we see handheld camera footage? The Vietnam war, the news coverage of that.

Suddenly it got very real for people and it got quieter. And then at the end, when the whole world's blowing up, "I'll be seeing you . . ." And the bombs are going off. Everybody in that theater, when the film ended, they got up, they left and nobody said a word. It was dead quiet, and now people watch it and it's funny as hell, you know? But if nothing else, Peter Sellers is Colonel Muffly. Um, our president Muffly, he's also a British Colonel and he's also Dr. Strangelove. And he's Doctor Strangelove when . . . I can't name a name. I know as well as I know my own, but when I first saw him, I thought, my God, it's Dr. Strangelove because Peter Sellers, I wonder if he'd met this guy or seen him because it looks . . . You have got to watch Dr. Strangelove. It's as funny, a political film as there's ever been, but it just shows the difference. I mean, we really thought we were going to blow up the world and none of us are going to live to see 40.

Grant: What about that? I want to ask too about that fellowship. I've never heard of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

McGlynn: It has disappeared. The Ford Foundation put up the money. They had 200 of them for the entire country each year. And you had to write an application. You had to write an essay in your field and letters of recommendation, et cetera. Then they would pick a group of finalists and you would go, they had, I don't know, 15, 20 places around the country where you'd go to be interviewed. And after the interviews, they would make final decisions in each. They gave away 200 of these fellowships. There'd be so many, I guess, for each region. And the Ford Foundation dropped that after . . . the group still exists. I get things every year from them asking me to contribute or, you know, various things. They have newsletters and all of that.

But the Ford Foundation's money shifted from the Woodrow Wilson fellowships. Now what you have are those, I don't know what those . . . The arc that's in front of Main Hall. Those people there. There's another fellowship thing that it's the equivalent, Ford shifted their money to that one. And the Woodrow Wilson thing is. It's ironic. They honor the Rhodes scholars and these other people in that circle, but there's no honoring of the Woodrow Wilson people, which was before they built that circle. And before those presidents came here, but we had won about, I think I was the fifth over a period of 10 years or so. And, the year I went up, there was one other in the English department. And a friend of mine who was in the English department went to Harvard the year before and he'd won it. And so it was a nice thing. It paid your tuition and fees and gave you, I can't remember what it was. I think like six or $700 a semester to live on.

Grant: Enough to buy cinnamon rolls.

McGlynn: Yeah. Although my first year dating my future wife, I got to the point where I pretty well was out of money. And so she was working in the speech lab at Northwestern and was making a salary. So we rented an apartment or she rented it and I moved into the apartment before we got married.

Grant: What about your time at Northwestern? Can you tell us a bit about that?

McGlynn: Northwestern's a very fine university. It was in those days still . . . Well, the huge difference between the undergraduate and the graduate element. The undergraduate element is mostly children of very wealthy people. Particularly young women for whom a survey indicated, where do you want your child to go? And if it was young women, many of the parents wanted them to go to Northwestern because it was the place that they'd most likely ended up marrying a doctor or a lawyer.

The graduate student body was like any other graduate student body. A lot of poor people, et cetera. But the undergraduate, you would go around the campus, the edges of the campus, fabulous sports cars parked there. They didn't belong to the faculty. They belong to the undergraduate student body. I mean, it just, the wealth of the undergraduates was phenomenal and the wealth of the graduate students hardly existed.

I mean, it was a very different place and philosophy department was good. But as I said, I thought it was, I had a better department here when I was in undergraduate.

Grant: I wanted to ask about back at UM, the mood on campus during the Vietnam war. What memories do you have from that time?

McGlynn: Oh yeah. Well, the big thing was when I was an undergraduate here, little attention was paid to it because it hadn't really exploded. I left here in 63. That was just when it was really beginning to grow. Um, but when I came back, when Kent State happened. The staff went on strike and a lot of the faculty did. The oval had 3000 people on it for 90 hours. The president at that time was the guy they named the Southernmost dormitory for . . . He was something of a mediocrity, but he was wonderful at that point because the governor called and said, "Do you want the national guard down there?" He said, "No, no, we can take care of it." He set up a platform in front of main hall and put speakers up and a microphone. And he came out and he said, "Look, you can do this. You can have your rallies, et cetera. All I ask is that you let anyone speak and that, you know, pro or con and you'll let everybody speak." And they did.

The first day I was out there and one of the more radical students got up and went off about ROTC and all of that. He said, "Let's go occupy the ROTC building." And he started leaving the platform. And it's interesting the way group mentality works. The kids that were closest started to move with him. A professor jumped up onto the table and took the mic and said, "Stop!" And they all stopped. But some of them went on with them and some of my students went over there. So I went over and I went up into the ROTC offices and they're occupying, they're sitting on the desks and everything.

And I found the students that I knew. And I said, "I hope you understand that by doing this, you are very likely to be arrested and you may be expelled from school." "Yeah." Well, a couple of them left, but others stayed. And I left. Well, while I was there, someone took a picture of the room. The next morning, front page picture of the Missoulian, picture of the group and Professor McGlynn there as though I was participating in the, you know, assault. And I had to write a letter saying you should have inquired. I was there trying to talk some of my students out of it, but I realized what was going to happen. So I hung around and the ROTC students rallied out in the front and I knew it was going to happen. They were going to assault the protesters when they came out of the building. So I went up and engaged the head of the ROTC group in an argument at about the time that the students were going to come out of the building.

[01:54:51]

And then I started backing up as though he was pushing me backwards and I backed him way down the sidewalk away from the front of the ROTC building, arguing with him. All the kids are focused on me, the ROTC kids. And I see the other kids coming out of the building and going away. And when the last ones had left, I said, "Okay, that's enough." I walked away. Um, so I prevented there from being a riot. I went out there a lot to watch what was going on, because we lived quite close. There was a guy there from the John Birch Society, a funny guy from down in the valley. And he had this whole jacket full of recordings. And he'd come up and say, "Look, I want you to listen to this. I'm gonna show you how this is an evil, communist plot . . ." And people were very nice to him. No one really battered him in the head or anything. And my favorite was there was a young woman here who I had in class.

She was in a Seattle chapter of the Blackstone Rangers. And I don't know why she'd come here, but she was here for a year. And one of the kids stood up and took the mic and said, "I think it's unfair. One of my professors is giving an exam right now during this. And we're out here and we're going to flunk the exam because we're not over there in the Underground Lecture Hall, taking the exam. And I think they ought to, you know, make it so that doesn't happen." This black girl got up and took the mic and said, "Oh, you poor, poor people. Here you are doing the first protest of your life and you think, 'oh gee, if I'm going to morally protest, surely there should be no consequences falling to me for it.' Grow up! If you want to protest, take the consequences of it." I started cheering, quite a few other people did as well. She walked away. The kid was like, 'oh shit.' But it was amazing. There was the kind of thing that could just not happen anymore. I mean, we had 8, 9,000 students at that time. And there were 3000 students on that oval for 72 or more hours. It was quite impressive.

Grant: Did you ever speak?

McGlynn: No, there were enough. It was a student thing and that's what it was supposed to be. And the Kent State thing was very shocking because for some reason that single event marshaled people to protest like nothing else ever had. Although the greatest protest ever held anywhere in the world was right before Bush, Jr. invaded Iraq. I marched here. We organized it. The campus went down to the park by the Wilma. There must have been three or 4,000 people there. Worldwide, it was the largest protest. I mean, it was professors all over the world. Millions and millions of people came out to protest that invasion.

But it's you know, for the most part, it . . . throws back to Northwestern when Mario Savio did the free speech protests at the University of California, and it was all written up and student protests, blah, blah, blah, existing faculty and all of this and the administration, one of the leaders of the underground or the student body, undergraduate student body wrote a letter to the Northwestern paper and said, "Yeah, we had a protest. Let's have a panty raid." Oh God. But Ron Parent who was one of my colleagues out here and very radical guy, et cetera. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern at the time and he took some undergraduates and they went to the protests at Selma, et cetera. But you know, the majority of the student body at Northwestern they weren't going to protest anything.

Grant: Why would they? I mean, war can be such a defining element of life, but in your mind, is there a just war ever?

McGlynn: The only one that most people can think of, and that is, you know, fighting Hitler. We surely could have prevented that by stopping him much earlier. The greatest disaster, there was, well, there were two, the invasion of Poland, not Poland, but the division of Czechoslovakia, should have been action right then and there. And they waited until the Polish invasion. But when Hitler sent a division to take back the SAR, which had been taken from them at the end of World War one, it was their coal area. It was their steel area. It was so central to their industrial development. And the orders he gave that general, who led that division in there was if one Frenchman raises a gun and fires at you, turn around and retreat.

The French did nothing and his generals were all appalled. They didn't want to do it. They thought it would be their destruction. Had the French opposed Hitler at that point, his taking over the SAR, he probably would have been overthrown by his own generals, but because they didn't, suddenly see like Trump, 'I know more than my generals,' et cetera. Right. And it just, solidified his position in strength. But the only war I could think of as even remotely justified would be World War II. Someone did a thing, said that if you look at the United States, its entire history, there's only been like 18 years that we haven't been at war. We are the most dangerous nation in the world. The last three surveys of world opinion, the most feared nation in the world is the United States. We have bases everywhere. Since World War II, everywhere we've intervened, it's been a disaster.

[02:02:30]

Grant: I wanted to ask Fred kind of going back to when I was a student of yours, I'm sure that I'm one of a hoard of mediocre students that you've had. And I reside in complete obscurity in your mind, but your classes did make a big impact on me and showing up as a smug, pseudo intellectual myself to UM in 2008, my mind was blown by things like Nietzsche's Eternal Return of the Same, or teleological suspension of the ethical in Kierkegaard that blew my mind. I always, you know, I remember you would start lectures, you know, saying "I grew up in Finntown in East Butte." And I had no fucking clue what that meant at the time, you know, but I knew that it somehow commanded respect. And I understand more now why . . .

McGlynn: Well, I'll tell you a story about that. Jim Shea, there are innumerable Shea's in Butte. I mean, Shea's everywhere in Butte. And in fact, Jim and I discovered because of an accident of him making a comment about his uncle who was mayor of Walkerville.

Grant: Oh, that Jim Shea.

McGlynn: Oh that Jim Shea, who I think ran twice and then gave it up, but was written in and elected like nine times. I mean, he was a perpetual mayor of Walkerville.

[2:03:51]

My father said Jimmy Shea was a cousin of his. So Jim Shea and I figured out we are distantly related, you know, through cousinship.

Jim is on my Facebook. And he sent me a thing last year. He said, "Fred," he said, "my daughter is at the university and she was home at Christmas or something. And she was raving about this brilliant professor. She had professor McGlynn, you know, just so smart." And Jim said, ""Well, you know, I grew up with him." And his daughter looked at him and said, "Oh, you couldn't have. No one that bright could have come from Butte."

So I wrote him back and I said, "Jim, tell her, not only did I come from Butte, I came from Finntown, which was the least educated, lousiest part of Butte." But I love that. Nobody that bright could come from Butte. Butte has produced . . . my class was the brightest class that had ever came out of Butte high school. The year after us, that class, it was brighter than we were. My class had seven people that went on and graduated from Harvard. I had no idea at the time that I could've probably gotten a scholarship at any one of these. We didn't know, you know, if you didn't have money, you couldn't go to college. And we didn't have money.

But it's amazing the number of people . . . there's a major economist who came out of Anaconda. I can't think of his name now, but, he's well-known and, the guy who was the former ambassador to Russia, he's been on MSNBC a lot. He's from Butte. So, you know, there's been some remarkable people. When I was an undergraduate here, the women's honorary society here, senior honorary society, all but two people on that society had gone to high school with me in Butte.

Grant: Well, you definitely made an impression on me. And it really stuck with me in those big classes.

McGlynn: My favorite thing in teaching, as I said, was not, you know, as I said, the really bright student, hell, they can do without you. But my favorite was taking a student who was a mediocre and getting them better or taking a D student and turning them into a B student and students would come to my office, you know, all the help they ever wanted was available to them, but they had to actually make the effort. I would write on their paper. You need help please come see me. And those who did, I loved it when I could take a B student or a D student and turn them into a B student. But no, the greatest gratification I've had is - I've had innumerable students.

Some that I knew well, because I just knew them well, others that I barely knew at all, some of them I didn't.

As you say they're anonymous because they're in these intro classes, but I've had people come up to me on the streets, say, you know, "Hey, I took classes from you 15 years ago, you were the best professor I ever had. You blew my mind. You changed my life." And I thought, well, the professors I had here changed my life. And if I've changed other people's lives. When I won the second teacher of the year award, I was still an instructor at that time. And I beat three full professors for that. And I didn't even know I'd been nominated for it, but the students had gotten together. And I have a packet of letters of the nominating letters of those students. And then when I got the governor's humanities award, you know, I got a whole notebook of recommendations and all from faculty and people in this theater and various people I'd worked with and students and all of that. And those are the gratifying things. You know, the money has been lousy and the working conditions, not ideal.

I mean the liberal arts building, now there is air conditioning in it. Oh, have you seen what they're doing over there?

Grant: No. I remember there being no bathrooms on the second floor in my French classes. I had to go downstairs.

McGlynn: The EC. EC Hall. He gave them millions and millions of dollars and they've torn out all the windows. There's huge air conditioning units waiting to go in. They're going to air condition, that whole building, which I tell you when I'd have a spring or I taught some summer classes. If you were on the third floor with a summer class. Oh my God. You know, all the windows open. Students are playing out in the oval and your students and your class are all "ohhh, I wish I was somewhere else." My favorite was, I was teaching a class one spring up there. I can't remember what the class was. It wasn't a real big class, but I'm lecturing. And there was a bird came. We had the windows open and a bird came and sat on the edge of the window sill. And it flopped down onto the floor and it walked across and came right under the table where the lecture dias was. And I looked down, eventually the bird had dropped dead. I looked up at the class. I said, "God, I didn't know I was at boring." I just killed a bird with my lecture.

Grant: Oh my God. I wonder, how did you prepare for those, especially those large introductory classes? How did you prepare for those when you go into lecture?

McGlynn: What do you mean, prepare?

Grant: Well, I mean, I know you know your material, but did you do anything to prepare yourself to speak in front of that many people, many of whom are so young.

McGlynn: Well, one thing that helped was as I said, a lot of my students didn't like me, but the one thing that they could never have said about me is I was boring and the background in drama. And my father was Irish and has the gift of gab. It just made it where, you know, I, one of my great regrets as an undergraduate was seeing, and even as a professor here, there were certain professors who were brilliant, knew their stuff really, really well, had really good lectures that you could keep your attention on them, but were boring as hell.

The guy who did the huge biology classes that most students took for their science requirement when I was an undergraduate here, I forced myself to stay awake for a couple of his lectures. And they were really, really good, but he had, "ddddah, ddd." I mean, he was just . . . and there was a guy here, he was an historian. I can't remember what his specialty was. He never spoke above this level. And he had some large intro classes. I said, how the hell could you understand him? Well, the guy who is at the entrance of the liberal arts building, Walter King, when Walter was out of class, he lived down. When we first came here, we lived in an apartment down on Hastings, and I would often walk up to school with Walter and sometimes you'd have to almost lean on his shoulder to hear what he was saying, because he [was so quiet].

But I had multiple classes from Walter and when he was in a classroom, he spoke up and he was highly legible, et cetera. One of the greatest honors I ever had was when his two children came here, he called me and asked me if they could be in my humanities class. I said, "Oh God, yes, I'd be honored to have your children in my humanities class."

Grant: What about the university and its trajectory in recent years?

McGlynn: Well, I don't know. What's been going on here very recently with, you know, the pandemic and all. I haven't been in the liberal arts building in well over a year. And I haven't talked to anyone in the philosophy department to know what's exactly going on, but it looks like they're cutting back support for the humanities, which is not a good thing.

The humanities have been the heart of the place for technically that's our mission, the mission statement for the University of Montana says, all professional programs will be grounded in the humanities. That's a stipulation, unlike Bozeman, which is a technical, you know, it's the engineering school, et cetera. But here we're the liberal arts university. And if they're cutting back that support, I mean, yes, they say, well, let us students here. Yeah. But students have been taking business. And as you know, most students come here, not because they want an education, but because they want a job and it's accidental that you actually can provide an education to those students when I'd have those intros classes.

Um, you know, a lot of the students they'd show up, they'd miss maybe three classes in two weeks and they'd never come and get help. They never asked for notes and they'd flunk or get a D minus or something. Oh, what do you expect? You're not coming to class. You know, how do you expect anything like that's going to happen? Oh, I have another funny story to tell though. Our oldest child was adopted. He's a Salish kid. He was 20 months old when we adopted him. Before he developed type two diabetes, he would go to bars and drink a bit, et cetera. He doesn't drink at all. He doesn't drink at all now.

And he was in a bar one night and talking to this guy and the guy said, what's your name? And he said, Joel McGlynn. The guys said, "I know McGlynn out there at the university. I'd like to kill that son of a bitch." Joel is 6'3", 220 pounds. He was a Marine Corps sniper. He can, he's got hand-eye coordination like a God, and he can kill you in about 20 different ways.

He reached out, grabbed the guy by the back of the neck, lifted him off the barstool and said "That son of a bitch is my father. And if I ever hear you go near him, I'll tear both of your arms off by the socket." So the guy got up and left the bar. I said, "Oh God, I would've given anything to have been there and seen the look on his face when you, a Native American said, that's my father." And I'm this milk, skinned Irishman. But I can't imagine the shock, the guy who, oh my God, no, that couldn't be.

Grant: Can we hear about your family, Fred and Kathy and your family life, that side?

McGlynn: Well, as I said to my wife, some miraculous way, we raised three wonderful boys who are totally different. I mean, as far as I am concerned, I raised them all in exactly the same way. And they're three totally different people. Totally different sense of tastes, but they get along very well, which is really unusual. And so we did something, right. They're all nice, generous spirited people, et cetera. And we're very, very fortunate. All three of them live in Missoula. Only the youngest got married and I have two wonderful grandchildren boy and a girl. And, but they're, you know, they're wonderful kids. And Kathy was afraid of being a mother. She had worked around children when she was in high school. She was a playground supervisor and the kids ran all over.

And then when she was getting her master's in language pathology, she had a working situation where she was an assistant at a school for developmental disabled children in Philadelphia for one semester. And the teacher was called to the office one day and she was left in the classroom and the kids ran all over.

She was afraid of having children. She was afraid that she wouldn't be able to deal with them. Well, you know, we'd been married 10 years when we adopted Joel and he was such a wonderful kid. She said, "Well, I'm on some of my own." And the middle child was, we thought, dying when he was born and he was lactose-intolerant and he lost half his birth weight in the first few weeks. And, God, they gave him this compound that was goat's milk and God only knows what. He was so weak, his neck, his head, just flopped like this on his neck. And I would feed him and then be burping him. And then his head it'd be here.

But when he went to burp, he pulled his head up and burp right into my face. And it was like a dead goat, you know, 30 year old rotten cabbage. I mean, I've told him several times, I said, you owe me. I said, you can't imagine what you did to me when you were little. And he had really, really, really serious problems. You'd put him to bed and he was great. You tell him a story and he'd go right to sleep. An hour later you'd hear him [whimpering sounds]. When you woke him up, go back to sleep and start all over. The pediatrician here didn't know what was the problem, sent us to a neurologist. The neurologist didn't know what was the problem. He sent us to the University of Washington children's clinic, where he'd been trained. They tested him for two days, said, "Wow, the EGS don't show anything. So it must be a behavior problem." I said, "Professor, I'm a philosophy professor. Do you mean to tell me a 12 channel EEG machine, you think is a perfect diagnostic tool. That every single thing that goes on in the brain is registered by that machine?" Well, no. And then I did the, what Sean did. I said, look, he wakes up. He's perfectly good that when he wakes up, he's perfectly content to go back to sleep. It's only when he's asleep that this happens.

Well, my wife being a very analytic and stubborn person, she started going to the library every night research, research, research. Her father was one of the renowned child psychologists in America for a long, long time. She found a study by a retired neurologist at the University of California, Berkeley that was a perfect description of Sean. We contacted the guy and he said, "Well, send his records." We had the doctor send all of his records down to this guy in California. He said, "Yeah, he's gotten nocturnal epilepsy." And we'd never heard of it. The pediatrician here had never heard of it. The neurologist had never heard of it. Now they've heard of it. And the pediatrician told us that in the next three years, he diagnosed four other cases because of Sean.

And they said, well, the one thing that could happen is he could grow out of it as the brain develops. And it happened by the time he was 15, he'd grown out of it. But in the meantime, he had to take these pills a couple of times a day. So the teacher had to have these pills. Kids kidded him about it.

He had, you know, nasty behavior problems and all, but he outgrew it all. He's still, you know, a little more cynical than his father. But and my wife said, "I want to have one healthy, normal child." So we tried again and we got Brendan who miraculously was exactly what she wanted, healthy normal child who is so sweet and tolerant, et cetera. I was like, how is this my child? As I said, there are only two people I have known in my life about whom no one has ever expressed a negative word - my wife and my younger son.

Grant: You sound very fortunate.

McGlynn: Well, Kathy keeps saying, well, I have my faults. I said, well, yeah, you tried to burn down a barn when you were five. But she claims, you know, that she has all these faults. No one believes her. Absolutely, no one. When I married her and not only did every member of her family come up and threaten my life, if I ever made her unhappy. But most of the members of my family, once they'd met her, threatened my life if I ever made her unhappy.

Grant: Well, Fred, I just had one more question. It's hard to encapsulate a life in a couple hours, you know, but yeah. I feel like we've gotten a lot of really great stories out of you, but I was curious if, to bring it back to Butte, if you have any contemplations on Butte's decline.

McGlynn: Well, it all happened so suddenly, I mean the Anaconda Company, you know, once they opened that pit and as I said, when they first opened the pit, they were running those humongous trucks right up Broadway. And then gradually they started, you know, they'd opened the one mine that they built, where they tore out most of Dublin Gulch to build a mine because the old mines, the adit was so small, you could only get about a third of a railroad car of ore up through the adit. So they built the big mine so that you could get a whole railroad car up through the adit. And people thought that's going to make it go.

Well, a couple of things happen, one, they got all this low-grade ore out of the pit. Two, the high-grade ore at that point was so deep that you had to go down almost a mile deep to get the high-grade ore. And the company wasn't spending the money to ventilate and to timber that area safely. And at that point, the mining was done by professional teams. I don't know, it was four or five, six-member team. And you bargain with the company for, you got so much money for so many tons of ore you brought out. Well, they made very, very good livings because they knew what they were doing, but they refused to go into these deeper areas because they weren't safe.

The Anaconda Company started advertising in Mexico, come to Butte, earn $20 a day, you know, et cetera, and the mines, et cetera. And so all of a sudden we had all these Mexicans in Butte, illegal immigrants working in the mines. And of course the Anaconda Company owned all the major newspapers in the state.

And there was only three times a day when the mine whistles would go off eight o'clock in the morning, four in the afternoon, 12 at night, for shifts. If the mine whistles went off any other time, you knew there'd been an accident in one of the mines. And they'd go off. You never ever saw a report in the newspapers of what had happened, but almost everybody in Finntown was a miner.

So we always knew. And they were killing a lot of people. And you know, there'd been some . . . that one disastrous fire that was in that mine where they buried . . . that was before I was even born. But that fire as far as I know is still burning. Um, but all of a sudden you know, there was these double developments and then the miners went on strike and they went on strike at the worst imaginable period. The price of copper had dropped drastically. Why? Copper was used in all wiring until they started putting up these humongous power poles. Copper wiring, if they had used copper wiring for those, the wiring would have sagged down, you know, 10 feet from the ground. So all the power of the big power extensions across the country were aluminum. Copper carries power much more efficiently than aluminum does, but aluminum is way, way lighter. So suddenly the Anaconda Company had a surplus of copper.

The miners are going on strike while there is this surplus, the price is down, they had no chance. They ended the strike after, I don't know, four or five months, year later there, another strike. MY older brother at that time was working for the Montana Power Company and was taking turn-ons and turn-offs. In a period of about three years, Butte lost about 25,000 people. 200 businesses closed and, you know, Butte became what Butte is now. And when I graduated from high school, Butte was the largest city in the state. It was bigger than Billings. It probably had about 70 to 75,000 people.

It's around 40,000 people now, or less or even less. And it never recovered from that. And then of course, what happens? Washington, whose golden fingers. He opens that pit, you know, they take out Columbia Gardens, which was the one decent thing the Anaconda Company had ever done for Butte. They destroyed the Columbia Gardens. He builds a pit and suddenly the price of copper is up and he's doing well. They have never tested anywhere in that valley, anywhere that they haven't found low grade copper. But they own the Chuquicamata mine in Chile, which is all a mountain of high-grade copper that they just took out with shovels. That's why the American military has intervened over 50 times in central and south America to protect the Anaconda Company and United Fruit, et cetera. And why Pinochet came to power is because he nationalized the Anaconda Company miners and mines.

Grant: How about the development you see in nearby Montana communities like Bozeman and Missoula that you do not see in Butte? I mean, why is the decline seemingly perpetual? That's what I'm curious about.

McGlynn: Well, what's Bozeman got? It's got a university, which is a core need. It has a multi-million dollar mansion estate, 20 miles to the south, Big Sky, which just got massive, massive advertising with that golf exhibit because everyone was saying, oh my God, such a beautiful country. I mean, just all the pictures were gorgeous. You know, Bozeman's just grown like topsy, Bozeman, and Kalispell are the fastest growing areas. But what's happening with Kalispell, Whitefish, Bozeman, Missoula. A lot of it is the Californiacating of Montana. Wealthy people who . . . anyone in California can get out. Oh my God, the state is burning up now 10 months out of the year. So where do you want to go? Do you want to go to a beautiful place that is a little cleaner, less burned up country, although we're getting it now and where real estate values are 1/10th of what they are where you live. And so that's what's massively increased real estate values around here.

I mean, you hear these stories of people who have made offers and it just, people are offering 20, 30, 50, a hundred thousand dollars more than the list price of the thing. They get the thing and you, you can't get a house. And they had, they were talking to the one builder and he said, "I'd be glad to build houses, I can't find any land."

Grant: Don't get me wrong. I don't want that to happen to Butte. I just think it's curious that it has not. And is it because of the visible impact of mining, the open pits?

McGlynn: I don't think the open pit has helped because for a long time, the pit was just filling up and they were doing nothing about it. And it was making national news when a bunch of geese landed on the lake in the pit and died instantly. And the rate it was climbing at, at one point, it was going to go over the top. If it went over the top, it'd destroy the entire valley. It is still to this day, the most toxic site in the United States.

[02:30:30]

There's nothing anywhere near it. And it's been that way for 50 years and they have done almost nothing. They're now talking about filtering the water that's perpetual. They will be doing that as long as there is Butte. So there is no hope of ever restoring that site. None. It took out McQueen, it took out Meaderville and then took out Finntown. There was a government program to develop historically valuable buildings. The Anaconda Company talked Butte out of applying for the money because they were going to eventually move all of Butte down to the flat. Well, it didn't happen. Helena took the money and they restored all those historical buildings in Helena. And they've got a real tourist attraction there. Have you ever been in the water company building in Butte? That is one gorgeous, gorgeous building. And there are a lot of buildings in old uptown Butte, but they didn't get any of the money.

Grant: Do you have any desire to ever return?

McGlynn: Oh God, no. The cultural values in Butte were about, you know, it's one of those ironies. They say, well, you grow up with the values you are raised with, the culture you were raised with. I was so antithetical to all the culture of Butte. I mean, what did you do when you got into high school and we're an adult, well you drank, you drove around looking for fights, party girls, et cetera. None of that attracted me at all. I was in high school. I was Butte's only beatnik. Um, went to New York. I discovered, oh, my uniqueness is not so unique. Everybody down here in Greenwich village is just like me.

But I got my culture from stumbling across my oldest brother's bookcase. I read an Aldous Huxley novel "Point / Counterpoint" and I came across 250 words that I didn't know the meaning of. I started keeping a notebook. I looked up in the Webster's dictionary and there were still 30 of them that weren't in Webster's. And I had to go to the library and find an unabridged dictionary to find those words. And there were books mentioned in this thing. And so I read those books, which is a little weird. One of the characters there says, "Oh, the most beautiful novel ever written is Dianonzio's LaFiatta." The Italian culture minister for Mussolini. I find in the Butte public library, an English translation of Lafiatta. And I read it and I think God, Is this what culture is?" A bunch of rich people standing around in parties talking about sculpture? God, but I went to the school of Aldous Huxley, every writer he mentioned, I read their works. I read all of the Aldous Huxley. Aldous Huxley was one really bright son of a bitch. He wanted to be like his grandfather, a biologist, but he was blind as a bat. The only reason he could ended up being able to write was a series of exercises that he read about that worked. That gave him back enough vision that with Coke bottle glasses, he could see to write, but he couldn't see enough to do research and that kind of thing. He read knowing he was going blind. He read the entire encyclopedia Britannica three times.

One of the reasons Huxley's essays are often so weird is because he read all this weird shit and it gave him an idea. And he writes some odd essay about this. So my culture came out of basically literature and the things I was reading, no one else was reading. I mean, I was into beatnik literature and that kind of stuff but I was also into Huxley. And then I stumbled on Nietzsche when I was 15 and yeah, unfortunately, oh my God. Talk about naive stupidity. I hate to even confess this. This is embarrassing. I thought Ayn Rand was a perfect Nietzsche. I loved Ayn Rand until I read . . . it's the big one about the guy who's going to take over the world.

Grant: I've disregarded her so thoroughly.

McGlynn: It's a huge thick thing that's had all kinds of political influence. And when I read that . . .Atlas Shrugged, the lead character, has a a hundred page sermon to the world. And I finished that and I thought, holy shit, this is utterly idiotic. You know, Hitler would be justified in doing what he's doing because he could, you know, and but I actually saw her resume as a Nietzschean. You couldn't make a worst mistake than that. I know there were a couple of kids in the philosophy department who were Ayn Rand fans. I got them into my office. I convinced one of them that it was a delusion.

The other one, I never convinced. He runs for the state legislature every two years. He loses every single time. And he's still an absolute Ayn Rand fanatic and he's probably 45, 50 years old. Now he's never grown out of it. Oh. I saw her on a talk show in Chicago once. Oh, oh, oh, the guy who was interviewing had the best talk show I've ever seen [inaudible]. He was really good. And he's asking her some really hard level questions and she said, "Oh, you simply don't understand. You don't understand." That was her answer to any difficult question. "Oh, you don't understand." She gave a lecture at the big Convention Center in Chicago that burned down and then had to be rebuilt in the same place because of the insurance policy. She gave a lecture there at $6 a head. This was back in the mid-1960s and sold the place out, 6,000 people, $6 a head.

Grant: Petty opportunist.

McGlynn: Well, no, it fit her economic model.

Grant: I hate to end on Ayn Rand.

McGlynn: As I said that's really embarrassing to confess that I'd ever even read her. Worse to confess that I loved her at one point. I thought she was just wonderful. And even Fountainhead, you know, Gary Cooper and the movie, et cetera. That's what got me into it. And he is such a hero because this idiot friend of his, in this contest for design asked him for help. And he's so unpopular. He gives the guy, his designs, the guy wins the thing, but he's morally weak, which of course the architect should have known. And then they changed his designs. And so he destroys the thing when it gets built, because it didn't get built to his designs. And it's the freedom of the artist. And I was quite taken with that at the time.

And then, later I thought, Hey, and this kid said, what do you know that works? I said, no, it doesn't because I said he is weak and stupid. Why? Because he knows this friend is morally weak. He knows this friend would not stand up for the integrity of the design and he lets him have it anyway, just so it can get built. I said, that's his problem. And he has no right whatsoever to destroy the thing once it's built because he enabled it to get built.

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