George Waring, Lifelong Professor

Oral History Transcript of George Waring

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: May 7th, 2021
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Archives
Transcribed: August 2022 by Adrian Kien

Aubrey Jaap: Alright.  It is May 7th, 2021. We're here with George Waring. George, I would like you to tell us a little bit about your family's background, kind of your parents, grandparents, and then we'll roll from there.

George Waring: Well, since I'm not from Butte . . .

Jaap: I still care though.

Waring: Yes. All right.  My mother was born on a little farm outside Dundee, Scotland back at the turn of the century, the last century. My father was born in west St. John, New Brunswick.  I think he was about three years older than her. She was born in 1905. He was born in 1902. And they went their separate ways because of the Great Depression. It hit Scotland very badly in the late 1920s. Big coal mining area and whatnot. So my mother was lucky enough. Elizabeth was lucky enough to have a bunch of older siblings who left Scotland and went to Canada, looking for work. And three of them made it across the continent to settle roots in Vancouver, BC. And so once they settled, they asked her and her younger sister Meg to make the transoceanic trip. And so they came up the St. Lawrence, I guess, to Montreal and they got on the transpacific railway. And my mother on the way over had a marriage proposal that if she would get off at Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with him, she would help him manage a bar there. And she passed that up and went on to Vancouver. And so the rest of the story is that my mother and father met each other, I guess in 1937, the Depression was really, really bad. And they worked fixing up houses together. And then in 1940 I was born in Vancouver. So that's just, that's as much of my story as I can make it.

Jaap: I love it. We love it when people make up the stories, it adds a little more color. So, yeah. So, okay. You're born in 1940 in Vancouver.  I'd love to know how you kind of ended up in Montana. And if you kind of want to tell us a little bit about your life rolling up to that as well.

Waring: My father worked for the American government up in Port Hardy, the Northern tip of Vancouver Island during the war, he was an accountant there. And so he was recognized as an American citizen. I think he had previously, when he lived in Boston, got an American citizenship. And so as a result of that American citizenship, for some reason, he fell in love with American football and wanted to come to Seattle, Washington to watch the Huskies play the University of Oregon. And so that would be 1945, I think I was five years old. And so my mother and I were smuggled across the border by my father who was an American citizen. And it is a funny story about that.  He knew this rather odd couple from Wales that lived in my grandmother's rooming house in Vancouver, very friendly.

And they helped me pack my little bag before we left. And so it wasn't until we got to Seattle. I mean, we were, I think, in a hotel on Cherry Street that my father discovered they had packed a Soviet flag in my luggage. Now this is 1945. Yeah. Yeah. All I can remember is my father exploding. And I had no idea what it was about, but I decided I'd study history then and find out what bothered him. So I'd been in Seattle from 1945 until I came here in 1967.

Jaap: Are you a football fan as well?

Waring: I did play playground football and I was actually a center on the team that went to play for the Seattle playground championship in west Seattle stadium. I was probably 13 years old at that time, 135 pound league. And that's where I lost my front tooth. I can remember how it popped out. A fellow hit me with a good knee in the jaw, but unfortunately for our team, our fullback got hurt in the first half and I had to sub for him. And so for me, it was two yards and down, two yards and down. So we lost the championship. You remember those failures all your life, I can tell you.

Jaap: The Seattle playground championship. Yeah. Oh, I love that.

Waring: So I decided I would not play football in high school, then I became a very good student. Yes.

Jaap: So you came to Montana in 1967. What brought you to Montana?

Waring: Well, it just happened. I did my graduate work at the University of Washington under a very famous professor, Giovanni Costigan, but what a lovely man, he once debated Buckley in Seattle and just made a fool out of Buckley about the Vietnam war.

So he was my idol, and we just got along together for two years of graduate school. And he was an instructor when the fellow who was running the humanities and social studies department up at Tech went to the University of Washington and knew him very well and got a couple of his former students to come out and teach in Butte for a while. So I got a nice call when I had done my 37th interview, looking for a job in 1967. I got a nice call from Professor Costigan saying a good friend of mine, Cliff Lahey, is in Seattle right now, would you come down and have lunch with him? And so I did. Cliff and I just hit it right off. Both of the same democratic principles you'd say. And he found out that I didn't want to do research. I wanted to teach. And that's when he said, I'll give you plenty to teach at Montana Tech. Yeah. Yeah.

Jaap: What did you think of Butte when you first came here, what was your first impression?

Waring: I thought it was very quiet after living in downtown Seattle and whatnot. It was very quiet and I could walk everywhere I wanted to. And I just fit in so well with the other characters in that department, all had a good sense of humor.  All except a couple. And Cliff made me just feel right at home. And the rest is history. I just stayed up there and taught history.

Jaap: So the first time I went to Seattle, I was flabbergasted about how green it was. I thought I've never seen a place this green, this is so strange. What are these plants? And so I can imagine coming here from there, you must've thought, oh, what's all this brown. I've never seen this much brown before.

Waring: Yeah. I think it meant quite a lot to me to get my first job teaching. And it really didn't matter where it was. I just wanted to teach. And then, you know, I just realized that Butte had a great history and I just met some great Democrats the very first year I was here. Well, I should say that I came during the Vietnam war, as you know, and I had been active on the University of Washington campus with Americans for Democratic Action. And so I met some students who were quite interested in opposing the Vietnam war and they asked me if I would host a kind of get to know session up at Tech of people in the community who would like to help them form an anti-Vietnam war group. And so I did that. And I remember that evening very well because that really introduced me to making me at home in Butte. Chaz Jeniker and his good friend (I can't remember the name right now), but Dan Harrington who was head of the Butte Silver Bow Democrats at that time, he came up and three others.

And then we had about 10 students who came up that night. We formed what was the Dissident Democrats of Butte, because, of course, we were taking on Johnson who was the Vietnam war hawk. And that led to an invitation to come down and be active in the Butte Democratic party in the central committee. And there was an elderly gentleman, I loved him very much. His name was Rudy who had been treasurer for years, but his eyesight was such that he couldn't really do that anymore, but Dan still wanted him to be there as part of the governing council. So I said, yeah, I'll do it. I'll collect the money and keep a record of the books. So I was a volunteer treasurer in the Democratic party from the first year I was in Butte for quite some time then. And I made some wonderful friends in it. Yeah. And that's how I got my start in Democratic politics in Butte. I just became part of the little governing committee doing some work for them. And by 1972, we had a chance to work for McGovern. I can remember my little Volkswagen driving it around with the sons of my friends in the party dropping in those days, you could drop your pamphlets right in the mailbox doing that, going down the streets, doing that. So, you know, I fit in that was five years after I came to Butte and I just felt so much a part of this community then.

Jaap: Yeah, that's really great to hear.

Waring: I was considered kind of an odd person out. Me and Jim Albertson, my fellow Democrat there because no professors up at Butte had got active, at least in democratic politics, the way Jim and I were active then. He had a son who was going to qualify for the Vietnam war. So he was quite active along with me and introducing me to people. So I was just brought into one kind of big family. Yeah.

Jaap: Was your anti-Vietnam group well received here?

Waring: We were the ones who formed the anti-Vietnam war. And as a matter of fact, one of my best friends was just coming back from Vietnam and we were having a demonstration on the courthouse steps. And that must have been 1971, I think something like that, when he came back from Vietnam. Steve McGrath. And I remember a group of us met him when he got off the train, along with another good friend and Steve would know his name, but we marched up Main Street together. He was an anti-Vietnam, one of the soldiers who could come back who could tell the stories about what was going on. And so he became a speaker at our meeting at the courthouse. Those things that stick in your mind. Yeah.

Jaap: Did you have any other issues that you worked on that were particularly meaningful to you or that stand out as something that you're proud of that you worked on?

Waring: Oh yes. You bet. Yeah. Later on in my life, this would be . . . what's a year now, 1994. We jump ahead. Chaz Jeniker, one of those original friends, told me that you've got to see this woman, Mary Kay Craig. She is really taking on the county over the Berkeley pit and she has become head of the Citizens Technical Environmental Committee created under the EPA. And she was savvy enough. She was an old Butte girl.

Mary Kay left here when she was 24, I think, went to California and actually became an executive in the Delmonte company in California. And so she had good business experience and she stayed in California working in Laguna beach. She would take me on trips, down to Laguna Beach to show me where she lived down there. But Mary Kay had lost that job and decided she'd come back to Butte. And she said, I want to stay in Butte now, even if I have to wash bedpans, I'm going to get a job in Butte. So she got a job and she got a job with the Clark Fork coalition. They were looking for an upper Clark Fork coordinator here in Butte.

And she was an old Butte gal who had all of these ties. And so of course she got Chaz Jeniker involved in that governing committee. She got a retired sheriff, Rob Cunningham in that governing committee.  I just can't remember the name Al Lubich. Yeah, well, Al was involved too, but there is one other good friend of Chaz's who was involved. And that was my first invitation to use my ability to teach state and local government, to go and protest a secret meeting that the county had not advertised, but that because Mary Kay was involved with so many people, she got a tip from a guy working in the EPA office up in Helena that this is a secret committee. There's no notice of it posted anywhere, but if you could get a few of your friends to go down there and protest that I'd really appreciate it. And so Mary Kay got me to go down there and read a little letter about when you don't give notice to the public and you cannot have a hearing.

[00:16:30]

Well, Sandy Stash of ARCO was there, Don Peoples was there, the chairman of the county commission was there.  And so Mary Kay had rounded up all of the members of the CTEC board to come down and protest this. So I think there must have been eight or nine of us who made little statements at that.

And then what came out of that is when we went to the county commissioner's meeting the next week on Wednesday, I found out from the head of the commission who had been there that no such meeting had taken place.  There's no record of it. So that was just a friendly meeting, a get together meeting with Arco. And Don Peoples, the mayor and the county commissioner. It's one of those things that lobbyists do all the time. But anyway, that was my first venture into using my state and local government information. So anyway, from that moment on Mary Kay and I hit it off. And again, Chaz Jeniker says, come on down to this meeting, Mary Kay is sponsoring it at a building downtown. And she was looking for some way to get out this big petition that she had, get people to sign that we did not want the water to be raised in the Berkeley pit. And I sat in the front row and was quite close to Mary Kay. And when she said any of you have an idea how we can get out of this meeting. And I held up my hand and said, I'd like to put an ad in the newspaper. And that's what we did. We put an ad in the newspaper. And then we went out for about two weeks gaining signatures. And Mary Kay was very good. She got students down at Butte High to do this. And as a result of that I got to know Mary Kay quite well.

And I actually took her to the 4B's for a special dinner. Yeah. Personal joke. I think I bought her a turkey sandwich. And so I had fallen in love. Yeah. That was wonderful. Yeah.

Jaap: Oh, that's wonderful.  When you were collecting those so early on, was the group well received? Did you guys have public support or was it hard?

Waring: We got good public support.  Mary Kay, I think, gathered over 3000 signatures. She was a personal friend of our US representative at that time, Pat Williams. And a picture of her presenting that petition to Pat Williams on behalf of the citizens of Butte, that we would not raise the water in the Berkeley pit, she had done. She had a lot of good insight from geologists at Montana Tech about what would be the danger of raising this level in the pit to a certain height. Well, you could contaminate all of the Upper Clark Fork. I mean, that was where she was working from.  But anyway within a week of that, Mary Kay learned she had been fired by the Clark Fork Coalition. And that was by influence here in the county government here. She was sticking her nose in things that caused people to be uneasy. And so that's when I proposed to Mary Kay. And I said, what kind of a marriage would you like, Mary Kay? I want you to have an academic marriage. I want you to go and get your degree at Tech. So it was all love. Wonderful.

Jaap: I can tell you care for her so much.

Waring: And so she did. That was four years later. And so at that graduation ceremony, I got the opportunity to present her diploma on stage. We made the front page of the paper. So anyway, Mary Kay had me sign on for life and she would get me to do a lot of things that as an introverted academic, I was not prepared to do. She had me march in the July 4th parade. About that time she had a good friend named Lana who had two small boys and so she got the idea of driving a truck in the July 4th parade that'd be well decorated with, let's see, Don Peoples was pushing what was called the Greenway. And so she made up a sign "First Clean Way, Then Greenway." And that was on the truck. And she was driving the truck and then Lana, the mother, walked beside her two boys in a little fishing boat, and they had a fish out the back.

They were dragging on a line that was on roller skates, you know, a little model of a fish and, and on their sign was "Wishing for fishing on Silver Bow Creek." So my job was to follow up and every time the fish fell over, I would run up and put it back. And I remember a fellow who was on the radio talk shows at that time. He knew me because I'd been on his talk show three or four times for various things. And he said, "George, George, what are you doing out there? Come on over and talk." I said, "I can't, I'm too busy right now." That was wonderful, that was my first time in the July 4th parade. Mary Kay was smart enough to recognize that was the kind of venue we could never be out after that time. We would have some truck or float in the parade.

And then, of course, I have to jump ahead now because this is more recent to me. I should mention that at the time I met Mary Kay, I was quite active in the Montana Human Rights Network. One of my former students had come to me and told me about this fellow who was on the radio, the major station in Butte. The announcer had taken a two weeks leave and he had a substitute and the substitute was Bob Fletcher. And he would later be the PR person for the militia of Montana. And so he was filling the airwaves with all sorts of whatever the thing was at that time. But a racist, white supremacist kind of things. My former student told me I should listen to him. And so I did and I taped him and then went up to Helena and gave them the tapes for their collection.

So I was signed on then to taking on what would turn out to be the Militia of Montana, but we really didn't have any activity in Butte. Once Bob Fletcher was gone, he went off to the place in Northern Idaho where the Aryan Nations had their compound over there. So he became a spokesman over there, but I stayed with the Montana Human Rights group up in Helena. At one time I became chair for a year of it, but that would revolve among the different places in Montana, Kalispell, Billings, Ronan and places like that.

But I was active throughout the time that Mary Kay was doing her work here. I was active in that. So I actually did research because I, you know, I was teaching German history up at Tech. I actually did research and submitted that would be my, they called it sabbatical and you take a year off teaching. And I arranged with the Human Rights Network that I would write them.

[00:26:00]

What I saw as a teacher. I actually taught even a course in fascism at Montana Tech, what I saw was related to what was going on with the militia of Montana and Aryan Nations and whatnot. So I had a sabbatical to write up my report for the Human Rights Network where I threw in a bunch of academic stuff about how the fascist rose in Europe and their strengths and whatnot.

Yeah. So, I was doing my volunteer effort there and Mary Kay was very supportive of that. And that brings us now to the war in Afghanistan where we bombed Al Qaeda. And, we got very active then in another group that Mary Kay had been involved in forming called Taking Action for Peaceful Solutions, TAPS.

And then during that period of time, and the years just go by so fast, but I can remember we had over four years time, we had an entry in the Butte, July 4th parade that was the Statue of Liberty. There was an artist in Bozeman who had put together this big Statue of Liberty, but she was holding a peace sign. And so we got that entered for four straight years, I think. Yeah. Oh yeah, because we changed it a little bit. When Obama came into power, we changed that. We had her lie down in a hospital bed with a broken leg in a cast and we were Medicare For All. That's what we were doing the last time she appeared in the July 4th parade.

She was laying in a cast with her feet up. We had that wonderful actress who played in the Superman movie, Lois Lane. She was with us. She was living in Montana at that time and she had done something to her legs. So she was whizzing around in an electric wheelchair from side to side, turning around, but we must have had, you know, 25 people from Missoula and Billings and whatnot come in and march, I think that was the last time we went into the parade was probably 2001. Yeah. Good memories are brought back. Thank you. That is fun. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah.

Jaap: I think it's really important that you guys took such an early stance in fighting for public meetings. And it's kind of curious to think about what the community might look like or be if you guys hadn't done that.

Waring: Exactly. And Mary Kay was smart enough to recognize that she really needed technical assistance. So she had got some wonderful volunteer profs up at Tech, you know, basically telling her what was going on, what needed to be done and whatnot. And, anyway, as a result of it, the Greenway was never approved. We had to get something better than that because you just can't just plant green plants along the side of the river and say, everything's fine now. So the fact that the upper Clark river was cleaned up, Mary Kay played an important role. And in that, and getting the technical help from the people up at Tech, in the various departments at Tech also because they knew what was going on as well. She knew who to schmooze. And she did a wonderful job of it, but she actually became the head of the CTEC. And then she was fired. They got complaints coming from the mining community. And so that's when Sandy Stash was in full gear. And so she managed to put on enough pressure on the EPA to get Mary Kay fired from that position and the whole board, we all resigned at once after her. And so it went back to being a board of, you know, geologists and technicians and chemists, and mining people up at Tech. But that's what happens sometimes when you get the community a little too involved in what the EPA is doing. Yeah, we got that one, but she was ready. She went back to school then, and got a degree, Magna cum laude. And that was great.

Jaap: What do you think about the cleanup efforts that have been done in Butte? Do you think they're successful? Are they enough?

Waring: Well, Mary Kay was working with the Silver Bow Creek cleanup group. That was her last group that she volunteered for. And that's a sister, Mary Jo McDonald, and Evan Barrett, people like that. She was with that. After she had a terrible operation in Houston, TX at the cancer center where they cut off all her lymph nodes and she began to suffer from lymphedema then. And so she was not quite as active, but I'd drive her down to the meetings and Mary Jo or Evan would drive her home again after the meeting was over. They were good, close friends. But they did a lot of work in raising questions about whether Silver Bow Creek could be cleaned up and what was the best. And no one had, had been pushing from that inside the cleanup office here in the county. And so I know that there was one person in charge who just didn't want Mary Kay's interference or any interference otherwise. Yeah. But those are the things that you learn over the breakfast table kind of thing.

But she went down fighting. The very day that she was life-flighted out of here, she had actually arranged to be on the zoom meeting that night with Evan and the whole group. And that's when the pain came. She just had to say, "Take me to the emergency, George, or get the ambulance." And so that was the last time I saw her.

Yeah, yeah. Last time. But it was a perforated bowel that she had and the surgeons couldn't do anything here in Butte because she needed an extra anesthesiologist. So they had to send her. Missoula was packed with pandemic at that time, they had to send her off to St. Vincent's in Billings and they were able to operate, you know, two or three in the morning on her.

But the fact that she had two cases of cancer beforehand and so much had been done in her internal organs that made the surgery so difficult. They couldn't deal with the perforated bowel. So that was what, she died of sepsis and perforated bowel, but it was because of the cancer. And that was one of the things I learned from Mary Kay. You know, she was raised down on Utah, below the tracks. And every day that you had trains coming along those tracks with just stuff swirling in the air. Her father died of cancer, her younger sister, Sue, died of cancer. Her mother and father, Sue, they died of cancer. The people who didn't die of cancer got out of Butte early on in their life, in their college years and stayed away.

But the people who remained down there, it's a high cancer neighborhood. And that was one of the things that Mary Kay would go and talk to the council of commissioners until, you know, the year of her death was don't pay attention to this state study, pay attention to the studies that are being done locally.

So she got in trouble for questioning what the state was doing in terms of keeping track of cancer. Because I learned this from Mary Kay because she had a very good friend working down in the lab at St. James that the doctors did not want to be on record talking about the cancers that were found in her neighborhood in Butte.

So we had a very good friend. I won't mention her name. She's no longer in Butte, but a very good friend who was fired down at St. James. Because she was keeping her own personal record of the addresses of people who are dying of cancer in St. James. And there's a very powerful doctor down at St. James who got her fired and ripped that off the wall and got her fired. So that's a good Butte story too. Going back to the Anaconda Company here that was so . . . big outfits tend to cover things up, I understand. Yeah.

Jaap: Yeah. That's horrible. We all have a right to our health, I think, and at least having clarity and transparency in regard to . . .

Waring: But the woman who was fired, she was a very good friend of Mary Kay. And so Mary Kay helped to get her a job doing reclamation work in the county down around those beaver ponds. That would be down to the southeastern part of town. Yeah, she's a good woman. But she moved to Missoula. Yeah. Yeah.

Clark Grant: George, how long did you teach at Tech?

Waring: So they gave me credit for, I started in 67 and it was 2009. So I guess they gave me credit for 40, 43 years. 42 or 43, something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Grant: So what compelled you to want to teach and to teach for so long?

Waring: Oh, I was inspired by that professor at University of Washington. I wasn't even a student of his when I first saw him on television. He was being threatened over the phone by a fellow who was just clicking a revolver on the phone. Rolling. He was a World War II vet, Giovanni Costigan. He was in the US Air Force in World War II. And I saw him on TV and I said, I want to go and study under that guy. So, you know, he could only take a year from him when I was a sophomore. I got to take his English history, but then I gradually worked up so that I was able to make English history my major when I went for my masters and he became a person who supervised my master's degree.

And the last time I saw him, I was visiting the University Washington library as I would do in the summer to get stuff for a research project I was working on to get my full professorship. And he said, "George," he said, "how are things going in Butte?" This was two years afterwards, I think. And I said, "They're going fine." He said, "When are you going to run for the US House of Representatives?" I never did. I imagined Giovanni knew people all over the Northwest who worked for him that were good liberal Democrats. So he would say the same question too.

Grant: Were you not eligible for Vietnam?

Waring: No. As a matter of fact, I lucked out, and out of no knowledge that I had. I went to the University of Washington for one quarter when I just got out in 1958. I got one quarter in and I'm a worrier and whatnot. I said, I can't keep up with this stuff and be worried about money and had no stipend or anything. I'm going to quit for a while. And I had a friend who was working at the post office who said, “Take their test, George, you'll pass it in no time. Become a clerk, work there a couple of years and you will be making money that you couldn't believe." And as it turned out, I stayed there four years. And then just in 1962 . . . it's hard to keep these things, when you're a historian and you get mixed up with these dates. But I think I came back to the University of Washington, in the fall of 62. I had four years and I was able to save up so much money. And then I began, once I had two years of college behind me, then I began to get some scholarships, qualify for scholarships. So I just stayed there. So it was 67 when I came here, I had graduated in the spring of 67 at the University of Washington.

And I can't remember the question again.

Grant: Why were you not eligible for the war?

Waring: Oh yeah. Okay. I was 1A, being classified, 1A. So I worked at the Post Office from 58 until 62. And so from the time I was 18, till the time I was 22, and then went back to college, I knew nothing about a college deferment. That was something I learned later, but that was what I went back at the right time to be deferred from going to Vietnam. It's a good question to ask someone my age, I'm 82. Because I had a brother of a very good friend who died in Vietnam, so yeah. So, but anyway, I was able to take on that war from a different perspective.

Grant: Can you tell us more about Americans For Democratic Action? I've heard of the SDS but I hadn't heard of that group. Yeah. Well I had a good friend, Ron Erickson, who is also one of Gioni Costigan's students and a young woman who saw that he was on the board of the Americans for Democratic Action nationally.

And so we simply, three of us went and asked, you know, what's the position of the ADA and the war - totally against it. And I said, well, is there a chapter we can join here at the University of Washington? No. He said, but you could form a chapter. So that's what we did.  I can't remember the name of the New York Congressman who created ADA, but it was created as being, you know, far to the left, not like SDS, but it was within the Democratic party, Americans for Democratic Action.  So it was a well-known group. And so we formed that and then took part in protests on the campus for ADA. Yeah.

Grant: Were there fights with people who were opposed to you?

Waring: No. Nothing more than shouting matches, you know, that kind of thing. No violence on the University of Washington campus, not even on the football team. It's amazing.

Grant: George, what contributed to your, other than this inspiring professor, I think, before that you had convictions of democratic principles, where did that come from?

Waring: Oh yes. I had an opportunity to go to Queen Anne high school. And that was a high school and the top of Queen Anne hill and that high school up there is a very ritzy kind of area. It's named because of Queen Anne style architecture. And then the other part of the student body would be brought in from Magnolia, which was a really upscale residential area too. I came from lower Queen Anne, which is one of those old neighborhoods that was getting industrialized. So I had to walk up the hill every day and meet people who came from a different income group than mine.

And I just had a sense of wanting to defend unions. And so I would get involved in little arguments in the classroom about the need for unions. And someone turned me onto Walter Ruther at the auto union. And so I read his book on the need for unions when I was a sophomore in high school. And I wrote papers and handed them in on the need for unions. And I remember when I got on the debating team, we were debating public power versus private power that year. And I said, I will never debate for private powers. I was excused from what everyone else was required to do, you have to know both sides. I didn't want to know the side for private power. And then when you, when you went to work at the post office, you had to take a long bus ride out to South Seattle to go to the major terminal annex and then when you're a sub, of course you work 12 hours a day or 11 and a half, actually, but 12 hours.

And then you have to run to catch the last bus to go into Seattle about two in the morning. And I would always get off at the stop where there was, I can't even remember the name of it now, but it was a left-wing, you know socialist, social Democrat, socialist, Democrat paper, and forgotten the name of it now, but I would get a copy every week or that read that on the bus going home. And so I was set up, I don't know. I think it was, you know, I'll just say this. I think it was being around very wealthy kids from my background at that high school made an impression on me. I said, I'm an articulate young fellow, well-read, better read than those kids because my father loved to read Mickey Spleen and Shel Scott and those books were always around. I was always able to read something. So I got A's, not straight A's, but I got a small scholarship to get me to the University of Washington for one quarter, but then I realized it wasn't enough. So I actually joined a union. Then when I was at the post office. It was called the US Post Office back in those days before Nixon semi-privatized it.

And I met a lot of wonderful people who were World War II vets. If you're a vet, you got kind of a special place. You didn't have to pass the very hard test. And I'll thank her till the day I die . . . It was at Wallingford section zone 818 . . .The woman I sat next to for two years is named Bernice, a black woman who flew aircraft across from South America to Africa during the war. You know, one of those people who actually flew the planes into where fighter pilots would take them over. And there wasn't a week go by after I'd been there two years, she would say, "George, are you going back to college today?" Bernice, God be with you.

Grant: George, what about the Tech administration? Was there ever tension there given your outspoken politics?

Waring: Well, I can honestly say from the time I was hired in 1967 to, I would say a good 12 years, I had nothing to do with the administration. It was my own fault that I got in trouble. It wasn't all that big, but I did get called into the president's office for something I said on the radio. There was a radio station called Party Line back in those days. And I can't remember the man who ran it, but I became a good friend of his and I got on and said too much one morning about what I'd read in the paper that Montana Tech had been given part of the model cities funds to replace their grass on their stadium with artificial turf. And that was model cities. That was the region that I lived in all my life was, you know, broken down sidewalks, nothing, but getting AstroTurf at Tech just pissed me off.

And I went on, I can't remember his name right now, but everybody knew him from that generation. And boy, did he get the phone calls after that. People were outraged about Model City's funds being used for that. So I basically used the term fraud when I was on the radio. So when I was called into the president's office and he is a very nice man and he and I parted on the best of terms, I won't use his name and he was just a very loving man. And, you know, he was really upset about this. He had his dictionary out, looking up fraud and fraudulent. So at that point I said, "Doctor, I will have my resignation on your desk within half an hour." "George! No, no, I just want you to, you know, just, I just didn't like the word fraud being used in here. But no I'm not threatening anything, you know, you're, you're doing a fine job, but, you know, just to let you know, there are certain boundaries you just, when you're on the radio, you know, don't use a kind of technical criminal term like that, whatnot." Anyway, he was very nice. I can't remember his name and don't need to use it. But he was just a wonderful man.

[00:50:42]

And that was the only time I was ever brought upon the carpet, as they say. And many of my colleagues were brought up on the carpet, but it was because of what they were doing environmentally. Yeah. Big mining interest.

Grant: What about model cities? Did you follow it very much other than the AstroTurf?

Waring: No, I didn't. But I had been interested in the program because I lived in the center of that. And though there were representatives on the board, I just heard stories from people who had lived in Butte all their life in the democratic party and whatnot about how Model Cities was being used to, you know, rip down these old houses and basically loot them of their interiors. And you ended up with . . . I know, here's the kind of stories you'll hear when you're drinking with people in the Democratic party, being in a bar in Seattle and recognizing it as a bar you used to be in Butte, you know, pieces of valuable history. You know, taken off and sold, sold abroad.

So I remember a very good friend who was a teacher down at Butte High. And when he told me this, it was out in the Holy Spirit church. So it has to be the truth. He was a good 10 years older than me. And he knew I was doing some kind of research on model cities. And he said, "George, I admire you, but you know, I just keep checking your porch for explosives each night." That's a good Butte story. Yeah. Yeah. But he was a good guy and I loved him as a teacher at Butte High. The old ones are gone. That's the trouble. I just can't remember their names. Now I'm being treated for Alzheimer's.

Not specifically diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but I'm required to drink charcoal a couple of times a day and do liver sauce, but I'm under a very good doctor down in Deer Lodge, the same doctor that took care of Mary Kay. She and a good friend, we drive over together. She's taking hers for mold because she cleaned out a lot of old houses here in Butte, you know, fixing them up and whatnot. She is being treated for mold and I'm being treated for mercury poisoning. But the doctor told me it was the fillings in my teeth were the cause of the mercury poisoning, but we're both under the same six months thing with drinking charcoal. Yeah. So your water tastes a lot better.

Jaap: I'm sure it does.

Grant: George, I wanted to ask you some more general questions. Why is the study of history important?

Waring: If we don't know what our ancestors had to go through to get things like social security, to get things like medical insurance paid by the state. If you don't know what other countries have done in those respects, you're a total ignoramus. What the government has been able to do . . . I had times off from what I was teaching and one of the summers, I went to England and got into a program at Oxford University. And that's when I learned about the creation of the welfare state, right after World War II, by the labor party, when they had absolute control of the government. And all of these men coming back from overseas, in really bad shape and whatnot. That's why they got socialized medicine. So many people needed it. I mean, civilians, bomb victims and whatnot. Britain suffered a great deal. And that was a wonderful summer I spent in Oxford because I actually got to sit at a dinner table with the Lord Mayor of Oxford. He and his wife had both served in World War II and they told me, you know, why we got the labor party, got socialized medicine and all the benefits and things. It was a hard fight, but the conservatives basically couldn't do a thing to stop it. So that's why you should at least know the history of our own family. Because I know my father died of diabetes in his early sixties, and it could have been diagnosed a lot earlier, had it not happened, so we can look back in our own families and see what has happened.

But to me, as you see, in my columns every week, we become the country of 650 billionaires with half of the population living far below a poverty line that you would find in any other Western country because of . . . you know, I heard testimony from people here in Butte being totally bankrupted in one year because of the medical emergency.

So, yeah. Yeah. So from my view, I had a cause that I was fighting for. And it was, you know, socialized medicine in the United States is what I wanted, seeing my father. So, we all joined for different reasons. Yeah. But history is an absolute necessity and don't get stuck just reading medieval history, read modern history.

Grant: Do you have favorite authors or researchers?

Waring: Oh yeah. You know, I think, I kept Noam Chomsky fed for all the time I was up at Tech.  This is probably my memory going on me right now, but a wonderful historian, I think he's still alive, but I haven't looked at his books for a while. But they're all on the left. I mean, reading about, you know, slavery in the south and the Jim Crow era and that sort of thing. What's happening in the United States today. Yeah. That's I think why I was diagnosed with pre-Alzheimer's is because my memory wouldn't allow me to teach history anymore because I can't cite the authors that I could before.

Grant: How does that feel, George?

Waring: You get used to it. I can recall my personal events in my life quite well with Democrats and Mary Kay and that, but when it comes to, you know, thinking of the author, I can tell you, you know, the author I'm reading now is a wonderful English author named H.E. Bates. I am just finishing up a second one of his novels. He was a World War II fighter pilot. And I saw a movie made by the BBC at Masterpiece Theater entitled, based on one of his short stories, entitled, "A Summer by the Lake". And that story just reached out and reached within me. It's about a semi-retired teacher who every summer, he goes to this lake in Switzerland and spends a month there. And this summer she meets this retired World War II officer.

And so it takes a long while for the romance to begin, but it does begin in the final two pages. Anyway, those are the people I'm reading now are, you know, I'm going to be reading Animal Farm for the little shop down on Main Street, that's opened up, a little bookstore. We meet on the last Tuesday of the month to discuss a book. So last month we were reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed, and talking about that.

And then we'll be reading Toni Morrison next week after Animal Farm this week. And so it gives me a chance to get together with no more than three or four people and talk about a book together. So I'm looking for opportunities like that. Yeah. But as far as remembering the historians, it just would take me a little bit of time to think about that and I could come up with them, but it's just part of the aging process.

It happens to us all. You don't have to be, you know, Alzheimer's to do it. You just have to recognize your strengths in other ways. Or you divert the conversation to a novel that you've just read.

Grant: George, one time you came up to the building that Daniel and I are working on in Walkerville and you know, it's an abandoned church. Yeah. You may recall. And you really struck me by quoting, I think it was, T.S. Elliot, "Kneel where prayer has been valid."

Waring: Now, T.S. Elliot, now that's . . . Every day you'll see me walking around town, talking to myself, people see me coming and get over to the other side and I'm reciting just the first two, at one time I had memorized the entire poem, "Little Gidding," the last of his four quartets. It was the last poetry that he ever wrote. The two first stanzas of "Little Gidding" that comes along in that. You go to this place, Little Gidding, which is a shrine. It was run by what you would call English Catholics during the 17th century, 17th century revolutionary war. And it was run by these high church Anglicans.  It's just a little farm, not far from Cambridge University, but he visited that. His four quartets, each quartet is named after a place he visited and had some mystical experience in.

And so at Little Gidding, he had this mystical experience of visiting this place. And he basically says you are here to kneel where prayer has been valid. And I had Mary Knoll Priest who recited that to me once over dinner, "You kneel where prayer has been valid." And prayer is more than the conscious occupation of the praying mind or the sound of the voice praying. Yeah. It's just a beautiful, beautiful poem. And I said that, you know, I'm not unable to memorize other poems, but I memorize so much of that poem. I can basically recite it when I'm in rhythm, walking around. You get into the rhythm, then you can. Yeah. Yeah. "Midwinter spring is its own season . . ." [Quotes Elliot] So that's just the first part of it, but it goes on and on. I can actually walk about 10 blocks before I shut up. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to be a showoff again.

Grant: Absolutely. What about your Catholicism, George, it's an important aspect of your life? Is it not?

Waring: Oh, it's an essential aspect. Throughout my life, I was an agnostic, but my love for Mary Kay brought me into the church. It meant so much to her being raised in an Irish Catholic family. And the irony of it was we were not going to get married in the church because we were each waiting for the results of our survey that you're required to take. If you've been divorced as a Catholic, you have to go through a long process before you get permission. So as it turned out a week before we were to leave on our honeymoon for Ireland, neither of us had permission from the authority up in Helena.

So we had our marriage vows given to us by a very good friend who was an Episcopalian minister. So she wasn't married in the church, but she was married to a Catholic because I became a Catholic at that time. I had gone through RCAA. Yeah. And that meant a great deal to her, but her family and she were raised very strict Catholic, but when she was with me, she was not a strict Catholic at all. She was just as liberal and left-wing as any good, but still Catholicism was something that bound us together. Yeah.

Grant: What do you derive from it?

Waring: I derive a sense of getting out of myself, you know, thinking of a wider universe, thinking of past generations who have suffered through the same things and where they drew their inner strength from to endure some terrible challenges that you have in life. And so I'm not good at basically sitting down and being able to recite a prayer to you, but I am good at praying, you know, and I guess for both Mary Kay and I, we would say the same thing, we were both social justice Catholics. That's what appealed to us. So the Pope we have now is just the kind of Pope we could never have wanted better in our life, seeing an environmental Pope, social justice Pope. Yeah.

And it just causes me to think, as long as I stay alive every day, I can be doing something to help someone. Little though it may be, I can help out. And at this period of time, especially. What a blessed life I've had, to retire from Montana Tech with a full professor's pension, social security and belong to the university professors union and getting the benefit of Medicare plus and prescriptions. You still have payments. There are always payments. The people in Butte, you know, I'm one in a thousand or something like that, to be placed in this place where I am able now to do just what Mary Kay was in life to do. Look out for the people. Yeah. That is a blessing. That's God's blessing. That's God's blessing.

Grant: I don't want to ask you to join that debate team you were excused from, but what is the rationale for privatization? Does it have any merit, whether it's natural resources, communications, infrastructure, all these things that are privatized in this country?

Waring: Well, as a socialist, we believe in goods belonging to society. That none of us are on our own. We are part of a society. And do we want to be part of a caring society, a society that looks out for everyone, or do we want to remove that portion of society's goods and say, well, this person, you know, can show that he can make good use of it. He should own that. No. We are all born into a society. Yeah. That's as strong as I can think of the idea. It is. No one can live alone. We all have to be part of society. And so as being part of a society, we have to play our part in society and we have to contribute our part to society to make it good.

I know the libertarians came up with this in the 1990s, that's when it became strong with them, about individual liberty. There is no such thing as individual liberty. There is the freedom that we are allowed to have as being a responsible part of a cooperative society. Yeah. That's the only way I can put it. Yeah. None of those 650 billionaires would be prospering were it not for the fact that so many people have to live in poverty today. And I know a libertarian can justify them by saying they knew how to invest their money, but boy, they certainly also knew how to avoid the draft as well.

Grant: George, studying governments for so long and looking at governments over centuries, you know, what lessons stand out to you most?

Waring: Well, the lesson I'm getting right now is how fragile society is. How it's easy to take our society for granted. But once you have people beginning to drop out of the society and taking no responsibility for anything other than what they call their own private goods, that will destroy this society. Yeah. We lost a sense that we are all in this together. Yeah. And that's what Catholicism helps to inspire in me as well. We're all in this together. Yeah. Yeah.

Grant: How is that notion of the community degraded?

[01:11:30]

Waring: The community degraded?

Grant: Yeah. That notion that I think it's pretty well understood and agreed that we are divided. But how does that occur?

Waring: Well, I think finance plays such an important role in this society.  Individuals learn that they have to all save a certain amount of money for their retirement and for bringing up their children, all these things. In my perfect society, we wouldn't have to worry about that. We just worry about people on a day-to-day level rather than saying, you know, because every day one can say, well, if you're in my position, you could say, well, I've got an extra thousand dollars to spend this month. Now, why don't I just, you know, invest it and make sure that I can afford medical care when I need it, rather than say, what can I do today for people who are hurting today with that money?

[01:12:41]

And that's where the Catholic comes from. You know, the idea of the mendicant friars and people like that. They joined together to create the community among themselves and look out for each other. And they're looking out for society to see everyone as part of God's grace. And whereas the last thing I saw on TV today was the big meeting at the villages in Florida going on. All these wealthy people who were retired to their villages in Florida. Yeah. Well, that's not what I learned when I talked to the Lord Mayor of Oxford and his wife who both fought in World War II and learned what keeps society together. And that is self-sacrifice. You sacrifice part of yourself towards society. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the opposite of radical libertarianism. Yeah.

Grant: Do you consider your viewpoints radical?

Waring: No. I consider them in the mainstream of Western thought in terms of what Europe is. I've only once, well, twice been in a socialized society and once in Germany and once in England. Yeah. And they had their public conveniences that you find in a socialized society. They're available to all. I remember the first time I was studying in college at that time. And I made a friend who was from England and he says, "You know what I miss here are public conveniences." I mean, I can always go to a public bathroom. There are no such things as public. You can walk down the street, you have to go in and buy a beer in a bar to go to the bathroom. That was his. I mean, he was just, he was as young as I was.

But we all depend on public conveniences, every moment of our life. Yeah. Yeah. And we've starved them. And why have we starved them? Because we're afraid too many black people are making use of them. Is that it? Too many poor people are making use of them? Loafers? No. And that's it. No, my belief in socialism is probably as strong as my belief in Catholicism, but I don't expect to see Karl Marx when I die.

Grant: That's a great quote. I know it's difficult to talk about, but I was just curious how you want Mary Kay to be remembered. She has a legacy in the newspaper and so many places. But how do you remember her?

Waring: Well, I remember her as loving the people in her own neighborhood. You know, the poorest people. That every one of them has a story. Every one of us has a story. And that was her concern. I mean, she was, no one could have been more of a Butte girl than Mary Kay, but she learned that from her mother and father. Her mother was a very strong Catholic, but her father, and I didn't know this at the time, of course, but I probably met him, you know, decades before I met Mary Kay. His name was Anthony. Anthony J. that was it. Today, he would be the person in charge of the Bureau of Labor Department, which would go around and check to see that workers were being paid a fair wage.

He was the Wage and Labor head for Montana. And so you would have to drive across the entire state through snowfalls and whatnot to check out complaints, hear about people who had been cheated out of their wages and check up on the hours that people are working. That's when you had a government that was very strong because, you know, Mary Kay was raised during the well, she was alive during the FDR and the Truman administrations. And excuse me, under Eisenhower, that kept on going and you didn't have an attack on that kind of thing until Ronald Reagan became president. The 1980s is when we began to say, you know, it was Reagan who made that famous statement. "I'm here from the government and I'm here to help you." I remember Reagan saying that. His way of dismissing the government as something we don't need. Yeah. So Anthony J. Craig was his name and boy, he was well-loved. A strong union backer, that kind of thing. I probably sold him a lot of tickets to our [inaudible]. And so knowing this was my future father-in-law.

Grant: And so you think he inspired that social justice streak in Mary Kay?

Waring: Yeah, no doubt about it. She respected her father very much. And since her mother had been a nurse and a lab technician, she learned a lot about that society concern as well.

Grant: When you and Mary Kay would spend your evenings at home, you know, and I'm just curious how it was in your household. I've been to your house and we've drank whiskey at the Silver Dollar together. And you know, I know you guys like to socialize, but what was your household like with her?

Waring: I'll tell you how it was like, this is my best, best effort at it. Within a week of us being married, Mary Kay and I got into a little argument in the kitchen. And so I did my introverted thing. I just stormed out the door, walked down the street and around and whatnot. When I came back she said to me, "George, you're never going to do that again." She grabbed hold of me and said, "We're going to sit down and we're just going to talk this through." And that was it. Perfect marriage from that point on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're equals here together. We are just going to sit down, we're going to work out what the thing is. You're not going to have any temper tantrums or anything. So, yeah, it's a wonderful lesson to learn early in a marriage. Yeah. But she taught me to respect strong women. That's what she taught me too.

And so that's what I like in H.E. Bates' novels. He's a World War II fighter pilot, but boy, the women in his stories are really strong. They're strong. Yeah. Yeah. I like that treatment. Yeah. So, and then meeting all of Mary Kay's friends as well, or Rose Brock, I mean these wonderful people, that sister Kathleen O'Sullivan. She was the intermediary between me and Mary Kay because when I was looking for some hints on how I could get the Montana Human Rights Network chapter in Butte started, someone told me, you know, I think it was a priest, told me go and see Sister Kathleen O'Sullivan, that's the kind of thing she does. So I went over there that night and Mary Kay was there and we all talked about getting this chapter started. Yeah. And there is a good, strong woman. She took on the Montana Power Company. Montana Power Company was withholding payments from people's monthly reports and a fund that was supposed to go to help out poor people who needed their bills paid. Yeah. It was written into law. She made the headlines in the paper by exposing that Montana Power was holding onto that money that was supposed to be used. [Laughs.] No, I won't say his name.

I will say the fellow I ran against. And what I consider my only successful run for the legislature was Montana Power Company stooge in Helena. And I got help from people up in Helena who helped get me, tell me what was going on. And that was when we still had the Montana Power Company and they decided that they were going to deregulate and do this and bring Enron in. You remember that? Then they went bankrupt. Yeah, I was in touch with Ken Toole up in Helena who knew all of that. And a friend of his came down, even talked to the Democratic Party to me about why I should be elected and this guy who served for 20 years from the same district. And so Mary Kay and I actually, actually ended up getting 37% of the vote, which was good door to door. Yeah.

We had a good friend of Chaz Jeniker, Don Cooney made us up a brochure and it said, "Don't let them disconnect your power!" or something like that. Going around. And people just couldn't understand anything about it because it was so obfuscated. Yeah. This was all being done by Enron. It was all being run by Enron to get hold of our cheap power in Montana to sell in California. But he was a stooge and that was it. It was wonderful going door to door and talking to people and being bitten by dogs twice. But I did my duty. Yeah, that was the year after I left the Montana Human Rights Network. Ken Toole and I can't remember the guy, but he went on to have a position in the next administration. He taught me in going up against him.

Grant: I wanted to hear a little bit more, George, about the Montana Human Rights Network and the Montana Militia. You know, that's always a fascinating topic.

Waring: Yeah. Well, let's see, where to start? It was a Jewish home in Billings where a young daughter was asleep in her bed and a fellow threw a brick through the window and almost, you know, could have killed that girl in her bed. That was how the Montana Human Rights Network began in response to that. They began with "Not in Our Town." That was the term, "Not in Our Town." And they had the Billings paper print up these things that you could put in the window, "Not in Our Town." And so this organization had been in existence for about a year when a good friend, Mick, said, "Listen to this guy on the radio, Bob Fletcher."

And then he put me in touch with Ken Toole who had gone down to Dillon to give a talk. He had heard of him in Dillon, and then I got a call from Ken Toole, asking whether I'd be interested in doing something like this in Butte, And I said, "Yeah, just need to send me some information and I'll take it around." He said to go see if there is a parish council meeting or a meeting of all the ministers in Butte, go and talk to them about it. And they did. And the Catholic priest out at Holy Spirit actually gave me $10 and then told me to go see Kathleen O'Sullivan. So they're the people that got me started and organizing it here, but it was just taking on racism is what it was because you have a total anti-native American racism is the most prominent form in Montana.

So I got to meet people in the Salish Kootenai. Then finally when I felt comfortable enough, getting that sabbatical to write up a whole history of how fascism rose in Germany and Italy and was able to put that into the Montana context. I still have that paper. I have to make another copy and get it to you. You'd be interested in that. It was just before I left. You're bringing back some good memories there.

But I was an only child, an introverted child, read a lot, but I was put in a position now, after having done that research, to go and talk. I talked at the university in Bozeman, the university in Billings. I talked to a Salish Kootenai group, went up to Kalispell and gave a talk, was over in Missoula and gave the talk there and had a nice write-up in the paper. The reporter who had read that I was coming to town and talk about fascism, he wanted to know, you know, we had a good, long talk and he said, "I'm going to run a good story on you, George. You sound like you know what you're doing." It was one of the major reporters over in Missoula at that time. But before I met Mary Kay, I don't know, I would have been just doing research in the library. That was how I would introduce myself. We had to present an award to a woman from California, from Oakland. She had got a sabbatical paid by the Montana Human Rights Network. I think she was living in Basin at the time to get away and do some research on what she'd been doing, black woman.

And so I had to go up to Helena with her and Mary Kay and present the award up in front of all the Helena people, whatnot. And I remember looking down and Mary Kay sitting in the front row next to her, and I said, "Well, I want you to know that down in the front row of the auditorium here is the woman who rescued me from the library." Yeah. And she did. So and I'm trying to think, I just can't think of, I can see the titles of the books, I just can't think, but you'd recognize his name. And he's written a lot about racism in the south. And I guess, you know, is a Jewish author and all those things going for him. Yeah. But he's just the best. There are a couple of them. They are two great American historians.

Grant: We heard a lot in the 2016 election and the four years after that, people comparing the rise of fascism in Germany to this movement in the United States, do you see those similarities?

Waring: Yes, I do.

Grant: Really?

Waring: Yeah. Yeah, because they're both racist at the core. And for the Germans, it was anti-Semitism and for the United States, it's a traditional racism. So they're both based on the belief in white supremacy. And because of something called Pentecostalism, because of our strange right wing, that's the term we use when we talk about the bottom, the basic Christian teachings. But they'd been on TV and on radio for so many years. These people doing this thing, Oral Roberts and all those people. Jerry Falwell, getting the names going here. They created within that fundamentalist Christian part of our population an avenue to get in white supremacy as being part of that belief.

Yeah, that's the best I can do right now to tell you. But I think that makes us . . .  In Germany, it was their Protestant faith in Germany that Hitler tapped into, I mean, you read these stories about people going to church, and then when church services are over, they all get in line. They march down to the Nazi meeting in the center of town. Yeah. So that was well-tested in German fundamentalist churches in the 1920s and 1930s. Yeah.

Grant: How does this ideology inter a secular institution like the government? How does it move from the church?

Waring: Oh, well it's the people that you appoint to power or people who decide to run for power that get in the government that way. I mean, they have to come out to do this. I remember having this debate long before our time now. This is back in the late 1990s and it was a minister from Billings who was telling me about this, that she saw the rise of this movement from the Vietnam war. She dated the Vietnam war and the feeling that Americans had been betrayed in Vietnam. And there is a political split over that. Whether those people who wanted to be out of Vietnam, we betrayed the troops and whatnot. So you got the kind of same stab in the back legend that Hitler had, that it was the Jews and communists that stabbed the Germans in the back. And that's how they lost the war. We had to withdraw from Vietnam because of a stab in the back. And that was first propagated by people who were working for Nixon. Yeah. Yeah. And remember it was under Nixon that he was the one who created the Southern strategy. That we will now displace the Democrats in the south. And boy, he was successful in doing it.

There's a wonderful book, entitled Winner Take All Politics. And I can't remember the two authors right now, but Winner Take All Politics is the most recent thing I've read about that. And I might still have a copy at home, but it was really a good way to view the change in the Republican party. And it was a change in the Republican party that they got rid of all the people who would go along with what is called socialism. I think because there were quite a few liberals in the Republican party.

Grant: I have this perception that the student population at Montana Tech is rather conservative.

Waring: It is and always has been that way.

Grant: So how did those students interface with you? Did they go home and tell their ranching father that this commie is . . .?

Waring: I can't recall the number of times I had people who had been quiet all semester long. Finally, when it was over, they had a chance to blow up in my face about me being a communist and things of that nature.  Yeah, but you know, maybe twice or so a year, you'd get someone who really had to sit there and put up with it. Yeah.

Grant: Did you perform any conversions?

Waring: Oh yeah, I think I had quite a few conversions. Yeah. Yeah. I actually got pretty good marks at the end of semester evaluation. Never the way of the most popular ones, but I would give myself a B plus. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grant: Well, I wanted to ask you to really reach back, George and your early childhood in Canada, I guess. I didn't realize. But, you know, you lived up there.

Waring: Yeah, but I came to the United States in 1945.

Grant: When you were five.

Waring: Yeah. Five years old.

Grant: Do you have any memories up there?

Waring: Oh yeah. I have memories of going to a cousin's birthday party. Seeing a pony in somebody's yard. I also remember in 1944, so I was four years old, and I had explained to me that a ship had blown up in the harbor. And so either an ammunition ship or some other ship had blown up. And that was what that huge explosion was during the night. Yeah. Yeah. But that's about all I remember of Canada. That and being with Mary Kay's sisters, aunts and whatnot. Yeah.

Grant: Well then what about Seattle as a child? You described it as a changing place, your neighborhood becoming industrial.

Waring: Well, we seem to have gone to lower Queen Anne within a couple of months of arriving in Seattle. We rented this apartment. It was basically one of those apartments that goes from the hallway out, long apartment, long apartment hallway, and then a kitchen on the side. That was what we had. So it was just, you know, one main room and mother and father slept on a bed here. And then I slept on a couch down here and then there was a table to eat dinner and then a little kitchenette. And that was it. I remember that. So I became, at an early age, a paper boy. A guy in the apartment house worked for the PI. We need to get you a job selling papers. So I remember that my first job in Seattle was selling papers in front of Safeway. Yeah. And then that guy took care of me. I think everywhere we moved, he was still with the PI. And so my last job before I went to the post office was selling papers through King County hospital every morning, before I'd get on the bus and go to school, get up at 5:30 in the morning and you'd start your rounds at 6:30 in the morning. And then you'd get your bus at 8:30. And that's what gave extra money to the family. Just selling those papers through the King County hospital. And I guess that selling papers when you're a young kid or as a teenager influences you. What you see in a county hospital. The people you meet and whatnot.

Grant: How's that?

Waring: Well, I think you'd develop more affinity. You recognize when one of your customers who has been buying a paper is gone. You know, that sort of thing, hard to talk about that, but there is a special feeling of empathy you get. You're going in a certain room. You know where this guy is going to be. He lost his legs. I mean, amputated and you got to know him. He was a Filipino guy and every morning for a year and a half. Bingo. And then all of a sudden he was gone. He died in the night. So yeah, maybe it's just, you're open. You're more open to that. You're not hidden away. I am the pre TV generation. My first entertainment was listening to the Green Hornet on the radio, something like that with my grandmother. Yeah. Yeah. So, I can remember learning good study habits.

When you get up that early in the morning and you go around selling newspapers, you basically learn, you've got to go to sleep early. So you've got to do your work right after dinner or you don't do it at all. Yeah. And by going to Queen Anne high school, since it was such a good high school, the teachers you got were good teachers. Yeah. I remember it was my eighth grade math teacher who said, "George, you need glasses." So he moved me from the back row up to the front row and said, "Get your parents to get your glasses." Yeah. Those are all World War II people too. People who had gone through World War II. There was a feeling of a sense of community. Yeah. Yeah.

Grant: It seems like war really is the defining catalyst for change.

Waring: It is. It really does. It teaches you how reliant you are on other people.

Grant: It's sad that it takes a war.

Waring: I agree. It's sad that it takes a war. But also the films that came out of that war were also the same way. You know, they taught a sense of camaraderie and being with a group and that kind of thing. They weren't loner films. Yeah. Everything was being done in a group. I don't know enough about Hollywood history, but it seems there came along a period of time when they were all loners. James Dean became kind of the first loner person. Everyone else was working in that sort of family structure and whatnot.

Grant: Well, I just wanted to ask about if you ever had an interface with the Anaconda Company and their mighty power. Did you ever oppose them?

Waring: No. Back in those days, I can remember I guess it was the second, third, fourth year I was here, two of my colleagues, Barbara Engle and Dave Cooper. We rented a house down on West Broadway street, within two blocks of Tech. And so we did a lot of things those years together. They taught me how to cross country ski. But they would also go around and look at things, you know, as part of a group I wanted to be there. So I remember one night we went down and looked at the pit. And I said, "This is Bosch! This is a view of hell!" The big lights and all these trucks moving around and whatnot. I remember being shown that. That was my interaction with the Anaconda Company. Other than that, there wasn't any. It was gone in 1970. Yeah. 1970 is when it was gone. So that was the fourth year that I was here. That's when the socialist government in Chile seized the Anaconda Company.

Grant: Were you thrilled?

Waring: Yes, certainly. But I didn't know that a depression was on its way for Butte. I was too young to know that. Yeah, those are bad times. I'll tell you. You can remember that because one of the first kickbacks at Tech for that was my two friends were gone. Not enough people were able to afford to go college then. So immediate. Within a year, my two friends, Barbara and David, went back to Portland and Billings. Yeah.

Grant: I feel like we can't help, but address the elephant down the street, the M and M on fire. You've seen this before, right?

Waring: Yeah. Well, I remember going down, I remember it was with Barbara and Dave. We went down in the middle. We saw Pennies burning down. And then a couple of days after that, maybe weeks. I don't know. But there was another fire, the Medical Arts building going down. Yeah. So we went down, looked at those things, as young people will. Yeah.

Grant: What do you recall, George?

[01:43:17]

Waring: I just don't recall anything. You know, everyone feeling so sad. This is the center of our town. It's going. Yeah. I can remember hearing stories later on that there were people who were investing, who were in the government who were investing in the Rocker area. You're going to move the center of Butte away from the pit and out to the west. Yeah. So I never heard anything more about that, but it was a rumor. Have you heard something like that?

Grant: Butte Forward failed.

Waring: Oh, Butte Forward, that was it.

Jaap: The vote was closer than you would think it would.

Waring: Was it?

Grant: Jim Edwards, the former head of Model Cities failed to convince the full city council, despite his assurances that he could do so.

Waring: Well, you know more about it than me.

Grant: I'm just curious, there are so many larger trends affecting Butte, you know, especially with it being tied into global commodities, like molybdenum and copper. Do you see hope for this town?

Waring: I'm the wrong person to ask about that? I think Butte has a history that will enable it to survive because it is so historic. I mean, I think sometimes, I don't remember this because I've never been that myself, but I think people who grew up in suburbs come into Butte and are all of a sudden struck with the kind of anti-beauty of this place. I've heard people walking past, just walking down Main Street, talking about how unusual it is to be in a really old American city. So I think that's worth preserving. Yeah, as a historian, I think it's worth preserving. But some of it is that it just takes so much money to redo the buildings. Yeah. And this is just a total tragedy.

I managed to sort of separate myself throughout my life and to just research projects, I took on one project that took me six years and I got grants for three of those years from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do it. But what I did when I went off to these places, I would participate with one master kind of professor who knows more about the Lutheran church than anyone in the United States. And there'll be 12 of us who are drawn from small colleges, who got grants to come and study under him, whatnot. And I did that for six years, I think, yeah, maybe it was seven years. I didn't get it for one year, but I would be willing to go off and be in that place, doing that kind of work throughout the summer. And then having the opportunity to be in the University of Wisconsin library to do the research project. And it was only by sacrificing your summer because I knew my friend, Bob Hollister would be out fishing the Big Hole. But I did that and I got the thing approved and then recommended by one of the professors I was with at Indiana University. He recommended that that be published. And so I got the publication and then within a year of my publication and became a full professor. Champion of the world!

Grant: Do you find your life is kind of divided into research projects?

Waring: Yeah. It has been. My last research project was for the Montana Human Rights. Yeah. I'm a good researcher. Yeah. Yeah.

Grant: Aubrey, do you have any other questions for George?

Jaap: No.

Waring: Butte Forward, I haven't heard that for years.

Jaap: So they wanted to move to the flat.

Waring: Did you ever hear that Don Peoples was behind that?

Jaap: Micone was chief executive at the time.

Waring: That's what Mary Kay told me.

Jaap: It's interesting to think that could have happened and maybe I'm just a little cranky today, but I don't know. I feel like we're doing it ourselves. I don't know. It's hard. I don't know.

Waring: What was your name again?

Jaap: I'm Aubrey.

Waring: Aubrey. Have I met you before?

Jaap: You have not met me before.

Waring: I thought your mask was familiar, but I guess it wasn't.

Jaap: Yeah, I know.

Waring: It's just difficult to imagine. Anyway, nice to meet you, Aubrey.

Grant: Aubrey is the assistant director here.

Jaap: I am, yeah.

Waring: Congratulations. Yeah. No, I think that's wonderful. You're directing this whole project to collect.

Jaap: Well, it's kind of Clark's project, but the Archives is pretty involved in this piece of it.

Waring: So you're the director of the Archives?

Jaap: Ellen is the director.

Warring: Ellen was one of my students. She gave me a bottle of wine one year. I think I must have given her a high grade. Yeah. Ellen was very nice. She gave me a bottle of wine.

Jaap: That's great. I'm thinking that my memory hasn't gone that far. You remember students that give you a bottle of wine.

[01:49:26]

Grant: Well, George, maybe I'll conclude with the question about this phase of your life and how you will persevere. I'm just curious how you do it.

Waring: Well, luckily Mary Kay left me a variety of very good friends. And so they are looking in on me all the time and inviting me to do new things, like join a book club or go out every first Saturday of the month for dinner. Or come over to my house for Saturday night at the movies. And I get to show them Ingmar Bergman. There was a New Yorker cartoon of this woman with her little cat. And she said, "Oh, my little cat!" And the cat is thinking, "Oh, it's another Saturday night watching Ingmar Bergman."

And there are great New Yorker cartoons, but I'll do that. I got quite a few movies from, we used to show movies up at Tech, all the time. And then we showed them at the library and they're basically a history of four years before I retired. We'd show them up at Tech and one evening a week. And then I just, you know, put them away after that one showing, but they're a real history of what was going on in terms of the environmental movement, the defense department, you know, they're all very critical, very critical left wing movies. And so I'm looking for a place. I wonder if the Archives would be glad to get those.

Jaap: Yes, we would. Yes. We're definitely the place. Yeah.

Waring: Good, good. Because these are just wonderful movies. You actually get to see Noam Chomsky talking in Managua and things of that nature. Some of them are lectures and others are just full fledged movies. The last one I got to show at the library was one of those evenings in November when the first snow and ice comes in. And I remember that movie because of having to walk home that night slipping and sliding, but it was about the islands in the Southeast that are being submerged into the sea. That just left an imprint on me, seeing that. Those are the kinds of movies we'd show.

Sir, No Sir, the best movie about the Vietnam war ever made. Did you ever see that?

Grant: I have not.

Waring: It was about the ones who did not obey. Yeah, really good. Get them up here in the Archives. You can show them.

Grant: Yeah, really.

Waring: Yeah. I'd love to do that.

Grant: Well, it sounds like you're staying busy then, George and have still a vibrant social life.

Waring: People are keeping me company. And I'm looking out for one very good friend, she lives alone, her own house up on Quartz Street. She's badly arthritic, but she's coming and advising me on . . . She's a great gardener. So she's advising me on what kind of garden you put in this year. And I have another young friend. I said, this is your lot. If you want to work in here, you can make some money by doing the stuff that I can't do. And so she says, you bet, George. Yeah. So yeah.

Grant: Well, thank you so much, George.

Waring: Invite and they shall come.

Grant: I appreciate your time today.

Waring: Well, thank you. All right. It's been a pleasure, Aubrey. Yeah. Well now I know where those films should be. I was thinking of the public library.

[END OF RECORDING]