Creator: George Axinn, Jeff Charnley

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Date: July 22, 2003

Format: Text/pdf

Original Format: Word Document

Resource Identifier: Axinn.pdf

Collection Number: UA 3

Language: English

Rights Management: Educational use only, no other permissions given. Copyright to this resource is held by Michigan State University and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the University Archives & Historical Collections, Michigan State University.

Contributing Institution: University Archives & Historical Collections, MATRIX, Office of the Provost

Relation: Sesquicentennial Oral History Project

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections

Text File: Download

Transcript: GEORGE AXINN

July 22, 2003

Jeff Charnley,
interviewer


Charnley: Today is Tuesday, July 22, the year 2003. We’re on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing. I’m Professor Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. George Axinn for the MSU Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial of Michigan State to be commemorated in the year 2005.
As you can see, Dr. Axinn, we have a tape recorder for this session today. Do you give us permission to record this interview?

Axinn: I certainly do.

Charnley: I’d like to start first with a little personal background, and then educational and professional before you came to Michigan State. Where were you born and raised, and where did you go to school prior to college?

Axinn: I was born and raised in the state of New York. My memorable youth was all on this small farm in Ulster County, New York, and I might point out that one day I was driving a tractor on the field, and we had a road that went right through our farm. It was in the hills, a small hill farm, and a car drove by, somebody I didn’t know, and my father was there, and he was talking to him. I was going back and forth in the field with one eye on them, and what the man asked my father, said, “Does your son really want to be a farmer when he grows up?”
And he said, “Yes, he talks like he does.”
And he says, “Well, then you ought to send him to Cornell [University], because that way he’ll learn how to be a farmer.”
And frankly, I hadn’t thought much about higher education then at all. But, yes, I went to Cornell University and studied agriculture.

Charnley: Who was the man?

Axinn: I never saw him again. I have no clue what his name was or why he—

Charnley: He was an Extension agent or something?

Axinn: We had a county Extension agent. We were far away from the city of Kingston where 4-H things were, and I did raise chickens to show in the show there. There were no 4-H clubs in our valley. It was a narrow valley, high up in the mountains. I got very much involved with 4-H, and some later things, if you wish to hear about.

Charnley: Sure. Was this western New York?

Axinn: Central New York. The Hudson River runs right on one edge of Ulster County, and then the county goes west from there. It was out of that experience that I went to study agriculture.

Charnley: How would you describe your farm?

Axinn: Two hundred and sixty acres, mostly hills, much of it untillable, which you would keep cattle on. A small mixed farm, and that tractor was the first one we had. For a while we had a homemade tractor, and before that, we had a horse. I had a brother who really had no interest in that. By then, he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. But together, we talked our father into buying a tractor, and he gave us all the reasons why it was better to have a horse than to have a tractor, and we tried to convince him.
Many years later, here at Michigan State, I was trying to convince the dean of the College of Agriculture that we should have electric typewriters for our courses, and he was absolutely against it. He thought our secretaries could just sit at the keys and whatnot, and I told him this little story, and he was furious. So now I’ve told it again. I said he was just like my father. He did not want to get rid of the horse.

Charnley: That’s interesting. What kind of tractor was that?

Axinn: It was a Ford Ferguson with a hydraulic lift on the back, very nice for me. I used to mow people’s orchards in addition to ours, and things of that sort with it.

Charnley: Was your father pleased after he saw what it could do?

Axinn: Yes, I think so, but he was worried that I was going to do some damage with it, you know, cut off my fingers or some other more serious damage. But, you know, it wasn’t just agricultural engineering; we milked only a few cows, sometimes down to four, sometimes up to six, and we ran the milk through a cream separator, and my mother made butter, and we sold milk to our neighbors in bottles. It wasn’t pasteurized. I picked the flies off the top before I closed the bottles. And later—I don’t know whether you want to skip to that, but my wife’s family had a much larger farm close to Cornell. There I was milking ninety cows twice a day with their machine, but not like the modern machines you have in a modern dairy with all highly automated machines. It was hand—put the machines on and take them off.

Charnley: A lot of labor.

Axinn: Yes. Well, you know, ninety cows. That means you have to bend down and wash the udder, and then you put the milking machine on, then you get down again and check it, and then you’re actually taking four deep-knee bends, plus cow, times ninety cows, times twice a day, times seven days a week.
When we finished, my wife and I—we got married when we were sophomores at Cornell. I’d already joined the United States Navy, and they were about to ship me out. Anyway, after the war, I worked there part-time while I was finishing my degree at Cornell, and her father wanted me to stay, because the poor man had no sons. And after all these deep-knee bends, Cornell University offered me a job at the Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station in a place called Geneva, New York, north of there, as their assistant editor. I had edited the Cornell Countrymen, a student magazine, and switched my major back and forth among many subjects, but agricultural journalism was one of them. So we had a choice of staying on the farm or going up there and writing, and I chose journalism.

Charnley: Interesting. When did you start Cornell?

Axinn: 1943.

Charnley: So you went in the service after the war already started.

Axinn: While I was there, they came through enlisting people for the United States Navy, and I signed up in the United States Navy Air Training Program, but at that time they had too many people. They had groups at every campus like they did at this one, so they sent me back to Cornell for a few more semesters till they were ready, and then I started their training program, and then the war ended. So that ended, too, and I went to Guam. Went to several Pacific islands and then went to Guam, where they were looking for somebody who was untrained, had no rank, no nothing, but knew how to type. So I became a yeoman in the navy and had a very unglorious career.
Then in those days they had a point system that you could get discharged. I mean, the war ended. When I got to Guam, the war was just ending, and our problem was getting rid of all the tremendous equipment and a lot of relieved persons, because we were prepared for the invasion of Japan, which we never had to do. Anyway, I don’t know if any of this is relevant.

Charnley: Of course. As I said, many of the people we’ve interviewed have had World War II experience and that sort of thing. So was that the farthest you’d been from home in terms of the travel that you did associated with that, with your military service to that point?

Axinn: Yes, really. My family had traveled to Florida once for a vacation, but getting to the Pacific islands was a very different world for me, and I really liked it there. I wrote about Guam and the things on the island. The navy had a hometown news service there, so I was writing articles for them that they would send to somebody’s hometown newspaper. It’s not like the open journalism we’ve had in more recent combat situations. So what I was doing for them was writing stories about people who were there, for their hometown newspapers to say how great it was to have one of your boys still in the United States Navy.

Charnley: What rank did you finish when you got out?

Axinn: I was a yeoman third class, bottom of the barrel.

Charnley: In reflecting, where were you when you heard the news of the end of the war, at least in the war against Japan? Do you remember when you heard the news?

Axinn: I was in the navy. I was at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, and my wife was there with me. We heard the news and went to Times Square to celebrate with a lot of other people. I had a brother. He was in the army in Europe, and he was in Sicily and then in Italy, and then he had already been [unclear], because that war had ended earlier and he had already been back to the States.

Charnley: And then after the war, you went back to Cornell?

Axinn: After the war, we went back to Cornell and finished. I had changed my major a couple of times, but I was working editing the Cornell Countrymen, which was the Ag College magazine, and taking classes in journalism, also. My journalism prof got me a job with an ad agency in Ithaca, so I was also working weekends, interviewing farmers and visiting farms and writing stories for their local Farm Bureau. We it called it Farm Bureau then, before it became Extension.
Anyway, my wife graduated a little bit ahead of me, because she hadn’t missed the years that I was in the Pacific, and went to work in Extension there in Tompkins County, which is the county that Cornell was in. And my prof in animal husbandry, it was called then, had arranged an assistantship for me out at Iowa, where there was a professor who was really good in my interest, which was animal breeding. But then Cornell offered me this job at the Agricultural Experiment Station, which was mostly horticulture. Never had a course in horticulture, but I learned a lot there. I learned that Michigan State was a great place because our director and many of the others had come from Michigan State.
Anyway, I can go on chronologically, if you wish.

Charnley: The cross-fertilization is interesting, where people from Cornell came here.

Axinn: Cornell and Michigan State have had an exchange of people since before I was born.

Charnley: Liberty Hyde Bailey.

Axinn: Liberty Hyde Bailey was the dean really before I got to Cornell. Although later, at one time, my wife and I sat in at an evening session with him, sat on the floor literally, while he sat in his chair, and a dozen or so of us just hung on every word. Liberty had a [unclear] that was really great. Later I visited his home here and other things. Ulysses P. Hedrick, who was head of our hort[iculture] department here, then went to Cornell; spent a long time there as director of that experiment station at Geneva.
But after a couple of years there, the University of Maryland offered me a job there, doing similar work in the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Extension Service, editing all of their publications. So I went there to do that, and a little radio besides, and I did that for a year or so.
Then the University of Delaware right next door, they had a one-man information kind of bureau, and I was asked to go there and replace him. So then I started writing a daily column for the Sunday paper and the news releases for the weekly papers of the state, a daily radio program when tape recorders were much newer than the beautiful one you’ve got. I used a wire recorder when I was in the navy. But than we switched from wire to tape, and it was all reel-to-reel tape, but I got a portable one and I used to—since the Delaware Farm and Home Hour was on five days a week at 12:30 noon on WDEL, which is the NBC station for there. Although in those days, we had more strict traditions than we have today in terms of avoiding—we were sponsored by a bank, who put an institutional announcement at the beginning, at the end, and everything else had nothing commercial in it.
But I traveled all over the state of Delaware. The state of Delaware has only three counties; it’s not a big thing. So for some years I traveled all over that state every day, made tape recordings interviewing farmers and covering the 4-H events of the state, and county fairs in each county. We would do our program as a remote. In those days, it was very untechnical compared to now, to do remote broadcasting with the cooperation of local telephone companies. But I think with some pressure from my good wife, Nancy Wixton [phonetic] Axinn, who had grown up on a dairy farm and was heavily involved, she’d been an Extension agent in two counties in New York—

Charnley: What was her field of study at Cornell?

Axinn: At Cornell it was home economics, and home management was her main thing. But she said, “If you’re going to stay working for universities, you’ve got to get a [unclear] degree.” University of Wisconsin had a master’s degree program in agricultural journalism, so at a certain point—and I was taking courses. Even at Maryland, I usually took one course each semester.
Then I went to Wisconsin. We went there for a year, a little less than a year. By that time we had one little daughter, and lived in grad student housing off of the campus and rode through the snow every day. It was a good experience, and a fine department, and I completed this degree, went back to the University of Delaware, changed the unit, its name, to the Department of Rural Communication, the first such department in the world, to say nothing of the U.S.A., which was one of my many creative failures in this. After I left there, they changed it to something else. In fact, they changed it back to where it was before, and no other university picked up on that great idea. So we had [unclear] College of Communication.
As another year or so went by, I was very busy, because I was in my office writing in the mornings. At noontime, did this broadcast. I would take a sandwich in the car and go someplace in the state, and it was such a small state, I could go to every county in that very day, making tapes and whatnot, writing. It was exciting.
Then our NBC station, WDEL, started television. It was black and white, like stick figures walking around.

Charnley: This was the early fifties?

Axinn: Yes, this was about ’49, ’50, maybe ’51. I could look it up, if you want. I have my CV here.
But I went to see the station manager and said, “You know, you ought to have a farm program on your television station.”
He said, “Well, how much would it cost?”
“It wouldn’t cost you anything, except [unclear] to get us some time.”
So one evening a week—they were only broadcast three evenings then, I think, like from five to nine or something like that, and so we started the Farm Television program. I’m the first man in the world to ever milk a cow live on television. We made a table about the size of this one that we’re sitting at, about four by eight, with wheels under it and a box on top with glass sides, and made a garden into that, so we could do seasonal gardening things. And we could grow the garden outside. We couldn’t go outside the studio.
Anyway, in about late 1952, Michigan State, right here in the EE Building, they were setting up a little studio. They couldn’t broadcast; they weren’t on the air, but they were making kinescope recordings, and the Colleges of Agriculture and Home Economics said that they needed to get somebody in Extension who would work on television, and get them on the air in television.
So, one thing led to another, and we came out here. Went to the Kellogg Center, was a brand-new hotel. Couldn’t believe, my wife and I, that there was a hotel right on the campus with such modern stuff in it. And had some interviews on the campus, and they asked me to come immediately, so we could start.
Well, I was also teaching. I taught two course there in my Department of Rural Communication, and the semesters were a little bit different. The semester didn’t end till January then. Christmas vacation was during it, and the first of February was the first of the next semester, so I agreed to come on the first of February. And on the first of February 1953, I came back for my—I’m going to say second visit. I had visited before, because in the intervening years I had visited most of the land-grant colleges that you could go to.
We had an association which lasts, I guess, till now, of agricultural college editors, and they would meet at one campus each summer. And so starting in 1947, I guess I went to all of those kind of things and was active in that. So I’d been to Michigan State a couple of times. I knew Lowell Priestor [phonetic], who was head of the information services department here then, and Earl Richardson, who was the agriculture-in-charge.
Anyway, so I came here and started producing recorded television programs, and we sent them here and there around the state. We started a new series after about six months called Country Crossroads, which we did once a week, in addition to producing, writing, and everything else. We did have a director, and I was the emcee of that thing, and we had people from both colleges, doing demonstrations of one thing or another. I can remember a lot more about that, but I think we’d be wasting your time.

Charnley: No, no, no, not at all, because that’s obviously—this was before WKAR, right?

Axinn: Yes, yes, before WKAR went on. We, the university, was working on WKAR. We had WKAR Radio and they were broadcasting from the auditorium in some little studios there. Occasionally they interviewed me there just to find out what television was and what its impact was going to be on agriculture and whatnot. I was very excited about it, too.
Back in Delaware when we started, nobody in the College of Agriculture at the University of Delaware had a television receiver. So my wife and I had to buy a little RCA black-and-white receiver, where all we had was black and white then. And on the Thursdays when our program was on the air, most of the college faculty and wives would come to our little apartment to watch, especially if their husband was on the air that day.

Charnley: On the big screen.

Axinn: Yes. Then when we came here, we still had small screens and we had just black and white. But the director, a guy named Les Fishhof [phonetic], who worked for the TV thing in the EE Building now, it’s the Computer Center, he used to come to our house every night because we still had that. We would watch other people on television, you see, and get ideas of what to do and how to make our show creative and such things.
But then in addition to that, in the College of Agriculture, they needed some training for county Extension people, and also the stations. They were just coming new on the air. We had one, and then two in Lansing. They got one in Grand Rapids and they got one in Traverse City, and so as part of our Extension responsibility, I found myself going to those places, helping them see how you set up a studio and how do you do those kinds of things, and working with the county Extension staff, trying to convince them that, you know, it does work. People will watch it when you get going. But then they were writing articles for their newspapers and doing radio broadcasts, a lot of them, so we set up a communication training center in Ag Hall, and that was really a one-man thing at that time that I did.
I went out to Iowa because I was doing things for the College of Home Economics as well as Agriculture, but we decided we need really a home economist. WOI, at Ames, was already on the air. We were still talking about WKAR, and they had a home economics show, and I went out and saw it one time, and Margaret McKeegan [phonetic] was doing it, and Michigan State employed Margaret, so she came, and we then had a two-person team here. Margaret McKeegan later married Ken Whitehair [phonetic], who was a veterinarian, and they stayed in East Lansing for a long, long time.
Anyway, we were producing television and doing the communication training, traveling all over the state in that Extension capacity. And then in the old cafeteria, which was used during World War II, a very large Quonset building with small Quonsets around it, MSU—MSC [Michigan State College], I guess—just we were becoming MSU. That was about 1956, ’57. I can’t remember exactly.
The studio and everything moved out of the EE Building to that place, not exactly soundproof, because we then went on the air, and our program then was five nights a week, like, I think it was 6:30 to 7:00. The news was at 6:00 to 6:30; and then we were 6:30 to 7:00. And I think the first night it rained. Well, when the rain hits the roof of the Quonset building, if you’re concerned at all about sound and sound quality, that was—and we were learning a lot. You know, we had microphones, not pinned to people then. We had them on booms, trying to get to the right place, keep them out of the picture, but allow them. And I learned a lot about television.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture was also interested, and so they came out and watched our productions, and we made a film for other colleges of agriculture and home economics—now human ecology—on how to do that kind of television. The U.S. Department of Agriculture then distributed it to all the other colleges, but it was produced here.

Charnley: Does the university have that film, a copy of it?

Axinn: I don’t know how good our archiving is, you know. This was 16-mm film, and all of our programs were produced on that. When we recorded it all, we recorded on that with the kinescope recorder. We didn’t have tape, which means everything on the air was live, and whatever you did wrong on the air was still on the air live. It was a great experience.
Anyway, I was getting into these other things. We then employed one of the assistant deans in the College of Agriculture. Dick Swenson [phonetic] became the on-the-air host, so I was usually producing, arranging different faculty members to do demonstrations of one thing or another, and Dick Swenson was the on-the-air emcee. I was in the control booth then all the time as the producer, with a couple different directors. We had an art person, too, with sets and props and things like that.

Charnley: Were there any particularly memorable ones that just stick out in your mind, that succeeded?

Axinn: Well, you know, success is hard to measure, although we were then doing—I had done my master’s thesis on audience research, or audience listenership to radio when I was still in Delaware, and we were kind of keeping some track of whatever success was.
But one show that I particularly remember was what we called the Picnic Show. It was in springtime and we were focusing on outdoor kind of things. The studio was on the third floor, I guess—third or fourth, I’m not sure—of the EE Building, and the Red Cedar River is running right by. So we had one scene in that, in which the ducks went by the river. We had one camera. We had to take the camera on the tripod down the elevator with the cord out the window to reconnect it. These were big clumsy cameras compared to what you have now. We had the former dean of the College of Agriculture read a poem, sitting on the bank, about fishing, “Don’t Let the Fishing Spoil a Good Fishing Day.” And as he did it, somebody said, “Cue the ducks,” which means they threw bread crumbs on the water, so they would run down, and the ducks followed it down, and the ducks went right through our scene. And that was one of the plusses of that, one minus to demonstrate our amateurism.
We had another scene where some people are sitting around a campfire, talking and cooking things and discussing whatever the subject was. I think it was safety in pit making, how to keep from getting burned, how to keep from ruining the food, etc. The fire was artificial. There was a red light under some red paper, and some logs over the top and whatnot. And off to one side we had a tree stump, which was really an old footstool with papier-mâché on it, made to look like a tree stump, and here our faculty member, who was giving this discussion to some other people who he couldn’t see that well, sitting on the tree stump, cooking his thing. But what they had done is made a little fire there, a safe, indoor kind of fire, and it got hot. At one time he took the tree stump and moved it back about a foot, and the director shouted, “There goes our verisimilitude,” whatever the word was. Because you can’t move the tree stump, that shoots the whole thing.
Anyway, we were amateurs. We were having a lot of fun. We learned a lot, and that was before we went on the air that I remember that one. Those Country Crossroads broadcasts we issued each week. We could only afford to make two copies of it, and we would send them by mail to two stations, who then sent them by mail to two other stations, and then sent them by mail to two other stations. Usually, after two or three weeks, we’d get them back, and then we kept them in Ag Hall in the basement, where my office was, copies of all of those. And WKAR, when it went on the air, was keeping copies of those things, too. What they have now in the archive, anywhere, I have no idea.

Charnley: Those first two stations, you remember where they were? Was one in Grand Rapids and one, was it WOD?

Axinn: Yes, WOD was in Grand Rapids. There was one in—K something. KZO, maybe.

Charnley: KZO, Kalamazoo.

Axinn: And then in Traverse City, there was another one.

Charnley: But nothing local?

Axinn: Well, there were stations locally.

Charnley: WJIM.

Axinn: WJIM was on the air before us, and maybe one other. And they used our kinescope recordings also. But then we went on the air, things changed a little bit, because we sort of became competition. We weren’t competing for their advertisers, but we were competing for their time, and also, recording was expensive, you know. We didn’t have lots of money in making these films, and when we went on the air, in a sense we didn’t have to do that. And some of those broadcasts were probably recorded. But by the time we had tape, I was no longer doing that, because I was already training Extension personnel all over the state and doing other things.
Durwood B. Varner, “Woody” Varner, was our director of Extension during those days. He hired an associate director called Paul A. Miller, who came from the sociology department. And then President [John A.] Hannah appointed and the board appointed Woody as the vice president for off-campus affairs, and Paul Miller became the director of Extension, and he wanted an assistant to the director, I guess, and so I joined his office to be the assistant to the director. Later during that period, thanks to the Kellogg Foundation, I went to the University of Wisconsin, finished my Ph.D., and when I came back, they made me associate director.

Charnley: What year did you finish your Ph.D.?

Axinn: I really finished everything in ’57, even a book on communication, but the university said, “You haven’t been here long enough to give you a degree, so we’ll give it to you next year.” We finished all the exams and everything, and they said, “Your dissertation has to be dated 1958,” and I was disappointed. I came back here and I was talking to a colleague in Ag Hall, complaining, and he said, “George, you’re a fool. If you wait ten years from now, and it’s dated ’58, yours will be a more recent Ph.D. and it will be better. So you’re ahead.”
I came back and forgot all about that, and worked with Paul Miller for several years as associate director. Then Woody Varner was sent by the university to Oakland to start Oakland University. He was its first—they called him the chancellor or vice chancellor or something like that, and then he went to [University of] Nebraska, I guess, to become the president. And then Paul Miller—we had a vice president for off-campus affairs and a vice president for on-campus affairs. You know, we had Floyd Reeves [phonetic] here, a great gentleman who had been at the University of Chicago for a long time, in education, and he had come here as President Hannah’s sort of personal advisor, and he also was in the education college. He taught—

[Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Charnley: This is side two. We were talking, when the tape ended, about Floyd ReevesError! Bookmark not defined..

Axinn: Yes. Floyd Reeves had been at the University of Chicago for a long time, knew a lot about administration, and had worked very closely with the federal government. When John Hannah worked out the potential of how to do the point system and the discharge of people at the end of World War II, because he was working on personnel with the government part-time then, Floyd Reeves was the one who actually laid out the details of it.
Floyd Reeves, when they decided to have a Tennessee Valley Authority, he was the one who did the administrative design and worked in the top administration of TVA for a long time. He knew a lot about higher education and its administration, and John Hannah brought him here when we got the idea of general education, decided that everybody needed a general education, before this building was built for that purpose some years later. We started the—Was it called the University College?

Charnley: Basic College.

Axinn: Basic College, yes, and it was Floyd Reeves who was the leader of that exercise of forming the Basic College.
John Hannah was a visionary—we can talk more about him, if you want—but he thought ahead. He wanted to have television here when most universities thought, you know, you teach face-to-face, and it’ll spoil it if you start doing it on television, and television will compete. If people watch television, they won’t be going to school. Their fears were very negative. But he could see the possibility, which was why I got into television, and he could see a lot of other things in the future. He thought very broadly, but he also brought in technical experience, people to help do the various things. He had brought Floyd Reeves for that purpose.
And now I’ve backed up a little bit. When I first came here in information services, my arrangement was at Extension that if I would be allowed to take some courses toward Ph.D., I’d come. Otherwise I could stay in Delaware. The big advantage of coming here was not the greatness within Michigan State College, which was still pretty great. But my Delaware friends kidded me. “You’d leave the university to go to a college?” and things like that.
But Michigan State College said, “Yes, we have a rule here, if you’re a full-time working faculty member, you can take one course each semester,” which is not a lot of courses, if they’re averaging three credits each. And I did that all the years that I was talking about doing these other things, and then I would take one in the summer, and sometimes do one ahead, back register and various things. But I took Floyd Reeves’s course, which was excellent, and some others.
Then the Kellogg Foundation was really concerned about the Cooperative Extension Service, as it has been for many years, and they said, “You’re hiring people to be the directors of your Extension Services who don’t know much about administration, and they don’t know much about higher education, and a lot of other things like that; and most of them did good work in the county someplace, and got well known, got a little political help, you made them Extension director. We ought to have some kind of program to really prepare people to be directors of Cooperative Extension Services in the various states.”
So they set up a program, which was headquartered at the University of Wisconsin, and gave fellowships, and that fell very nicely into my long-range thinking. Paul Miller, maybe with some reluctance, although he’s also a great leader—he’s down at Columbia, Missouri, at the University of Missouri now, where he’s retired—he agreed. “Okay, we can get along without you for a year.”
I’d collected a lot of credits, fortunately, in the CIC, or the Big Ten, as it’s more generally known. You could change credits back and forth anywhere, so I went to the University of Wisconsin for one more year, and finished that Ph.D. That’s why we had the timing thing I mentioned earlier, because they transferred all my Michigan State credits there, and I became a full-time student for the first time in my life, which was a great experience. And when I finished my dissertation, I had it bound in black. I cut out the K from [Kellogg’s] Special K, which was a new cereal then, and pasted it on the cover, and gave one to the Kellogg people.

Charnley: Did you know Russ Mobey [phonetic] then?

Axinn: Yes. Russ was doing some television as the on-the-air person in the kinescope recording days when he was in the ag econ department as a grad student before I came. And then when we started the live television, he did some emceeing for us. Then when I was the associate director of Extension, we decided we were going to have an assistant director for agriculture and one for home economics and one for youth and one for marketing, which was a thing which grew, and one for which is now resource development. Russ was the assistant director for youth and 4-H, which then was called the state 4-H leader. So we were close colleagues for several years.
In those days, Paul Miller was our outside man. He got the money, did the public relations, and George did personnel management and program development, and that lasted for several years, until Paul Miller became the first provost. Different from later provosts. He went to the library and he looked up provost. One question—how do you—some people said “provo” and some people said “provo” and some people had other things. And he spent a week there. He was a scholar type. I remember that week, because that was the week that all the calls that came to Extension, especially since people had heard the director was leaving and they wanted to know what was going on, I had to take them for him because he was in the library.
He went through the stacks—it was the old library, which is now a museum—and as a scholar, he studied the literature of the administration of higher education, much of it from England, some of it from the United States, and found out what should a provost do? As far as I know, he’s the only provost who did that. At least the next couple, they thought they were anointed as a provost. When they were chosen, it was like somebody had touched their head with magic wine, and they all knew how to do it. I’m not going to say any more about future provosts after that. But Paul was a very creative, vigorous provost, who really related to the faculty and saw that as his main job.
The main reason for having a provost, I think, was to look at the budget and see that the academic side has a role in it as well as the other parts of the university. Paul Miller used to have meetings in his office with faculty members on some topic, and there usually were so many, we were sitting on the floor on the carpet, discussing the evolution of the child education program, the changes in timing of things, the transition to the—you know, we were in quarters then. Semesters came later, but it was discussed.
One of his big projects was the changing of the name of home economics to human ecology, which was not an easy thing to do. But it wasn’t just a name change; they were concerned about ecology and the ecological movement long before some of the present popularity of the ecosystem came into effect. Managing families in an ecosystem was something that home economics was teaching already. Beatrice Palluchi [phonetic] was a great leader in that field, and she produced a book or two on the ecological approaches to family life and to home management.
Anyway, Paul Miller was the administrator, creative administrator, if you will, who convinced the other deans that it was all right to do that, and there were many other things that I really don’t remember well enough to know, and he became a very dynamic and creative leader of that.
In those days we had Continuing Education Service and Cooperative Extension Service, two different, separate administrative units, continuing education headquartered in the Kellogg Center. Woody Varner had started working toward some kind of a collaborative and merger thing. I think it was when he was the vice president. We set up that every college had one person who was sort of an assistant to the assistant to the dean for continuing education, and so there were weekly meetings of people from every college in the Kellogg Center, and I was the representative from College of Agriculture and Natural Science, which was then was just the College of Agriculture, although under natural resources. We had the resource development-type departments going.
But those were things where John Hannah could see ahead that you had to do more. And Paul Miller then became the one to really implement that, and so we changed responsibilities. We had a person in Grand Rapids who was in charge for that part of Michigan of continuing education and Cooperative Extension, another one for the Upper Peninsula, and I think two others in other parts of the state. But, you know, the Farm Bureau, [unclear] the Michigan Livestock Exchange, and the other groups, who politically were sort of defending the tradition that they and I grew up in. You know, 4-H was for farmer kids.
We had an office Extension in the city of Detroit for a long time, but having programs for urban people, for urban kids, and then by that time we had one member of our board of trustees who was a labor union representative. Well, I think the thing that was called Extension was changing to a university-wide, off-campus service thing to carry on educational—television in a way fit right into that, because, you know, we didn’t have any boundaries in our relationships, and helping the other stations was, from the very beginning, even before we went on the air, part of the MSU responsibility in television.
But when Paul Miller became the provost, I think the political pressure on President Hannah, who was very astute politically as well as creative educationally. I mean, in those days he would go to the nominating conventions of both the Democratic and Republican Party, and make sure that both of them nominated a friend or alum of MSU as their candidate, and one of them always got elected, or two of them got elected. They might be for either party, but they were our friends, and he did a lot of other things of that sort. It became clearer to him that we really have to get a straight-line aggie as our Extension director, so he chose Pat Ralston [phonetic], who was then head of the dairy department, a very fine gentleman. He became the director of it, and we did some shuffling around.
I became the director of a thing called the Institute for Extension Personnel Development. I guess I was associate director of Extension then, and personnel was my main concern as it had been before, but then training new people. In Ag Hall we had a one-person unit, and we gave master’s degrees to Extension agents, dozens of them. I’m now recycling the paper, unfortunately, with a few tears, of people who got their master’s degrees during those years. There were lots of them. Had Extension agents coming from the county to do a master’s degree, and the goal was to have them really broaden their vision, and see a lot of things that they hadn’t thought about.

Charnley: So they did on-campus study?

Axinn: They did on-campus study for one year. They would get their master’s degree, and they all had to do a thesis, so it took them a whole year usually, and sometimes a little more. County Extension personnel came from many other states as well, and that was a really exciting adventure for me. I learned a lot. Actually, you know, Michigan State has been teaching me and training me for fifty years, because it was about February 1st of 1953, and I got to be seventy years old before February 1st of 2003, and so about five years before—seven years ago now—I really retired, and I became professor emeritus. If you’re trying to do this chronologically, I’m skipping way ahead.

Charnley: That’s all right. You said the university has been educating you.

Axinn: Yes. I have been learning from, and I have a great debt to the individuals and to the philosophy of it. And that brings me back to Hannah, you know. The other day someone was asking me in international studies and programs, how did Michigan State get involved? What was the driving force? And I said, “Number one, John A. Hannah; number two, John A. Hannah; number three.” And there were some others. Floyd Reeves was one of them, and Paul Miller, when he became provost, was very much interested in international studies and programs.

Charnley: How about Glen Taggert [phonetic]?

Axinn: Well, he was employed then. Glen Taggert was working for the United States Department of Agriculture. They had a thing called OFAR, Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. In World War II, they were very busy working in places like Turrialba in Costa Rica, and some other agricultural research locations in Latin America, because, you know, we had a shortage of sugar, for instance here, during the war. We had to bring food, tropical food mostly, from these neighbors in Latin America, and USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] was doing collaborative research with them in those years, focused mainly on the plantation crops where people like Dole could ship fruit to the mainland, or to the U.S.A.
Glen Taggert had worked with them over the years. He was a graduate of Utah State [University]. He has a Ph.D. at Wisconsin, and he was very much interested in international things. When Ezra Taft Benson became the Secretary of Agriculture, by then Glen had got high enough in their system that he was on the edge between professional appointees and political appointees.
Well, John Hannah had seen him one day and said, “You know, we have this rigorous, dynamic rural sociology program at Michigan State in the sociology department.” It was still sociology and anthropology. “And you’d fit in nicely. If you’d ever want to come, let me know.” He said, well, he was too busy; he didn’t have time.
But when somebody from Benson’s office came to see Glen Taggert and told him that, “We’ve decided to keep you, Glen,” he realized he had gotten at that point where further appointments were going to be political. The gentleman left his office and, as he told it to me, as soon as the door was closed, he picked up the phone and called John Hannah. And he said, “Are you still interested in somebody with my kind of international experience?”
And John said, “Right away.”
So he came here, and he really taught and did research in Extension in the sociology department for some time—now my memory’s not that good—a year maybe, maybe a little more. When then really the dean of international programs was started, Office of International Programs. Later we got changed to international studies and programs, and I guess it’s still ISP. Yes, Glen Taggert had a lot of do with the organizing.
Both of them had connections with the Ford Foundation, and that’s one thing, you know, and that an administrator for a public university has to spend a lot of time, obviously not exactly fundraising with the politicians, but keeping the politicians informed that things are good and they should support the university, but also in the foundation world and at other places where it was legitimate to get financial support. After his long successful career here, people at the Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation—Kellogg especially had great relationships with them—Rockefeller Foundation, those three particularly, they all knew John Hannah, and maybe not as much as me, but in general, they worshiped him.
So when he and Glen Taggert came to see them about an international dimension at Michigan State—we’d just become Michigan State University then—they were enthusiastic and they provided funds, which were very significant to this institution from then on.
Now, you know, it was about 1959 when I was walking across the campus with Glen Taggert, who was a colleague in sociology, and I was then working in the Extension with the Extension personnel development, very excited about my students and the other things there. And Glen said, “President Hannah wants to see you. Do you mind if we take a shortcut and go by the—,” what’s now the old—

Charnley: Linton Hall?

Axinn: Linton Hall. He had an office up one long flight of stairs with a beautiful view of the circle. And I said, “Well, do we have to make an appointment or something like that?”
And he said, “No, I think he’s expecting us.”
I said, “What does he want to talk about?”
He said, “Let’s wait till we get there.”
I knew he’d been working in Nigeria, because at the last Extension conference in which I was involved in planning the program and managing it, he’d just been back from a very exciting visit to Nigeria to a site that he and Nnamdi Azikiwe, who had become the president of Nigeria—formerly, Nnamdi Azikiwe was the governor general of the eastern region, but Azikiwe had found a site as far as north and west as you could get in the eastern region of Nigeria, so as central as you could make it for that. And he wanted to start a university there and he invited President Hannah, and they talked—and this is two of them.
I’m reflecting one characteristic of John Hannah, different from some other academic and administrative leaders, was that he, himself, with his feet on the ground, went there. It’s not like they cooked up a project someplace and wanted to send faculty over there to do something, or they cooked up a new department someplace. He listened a lot to the faculty. He knew the faculty very well.
Every year we had a reception on this campus at the Student Union, same building, a little smaller then. He and Mrs. Hannah were the receiving line, and each person, faculty member, and spouse. And from my very first year, when I walked through there, he’d call me by name. He’d say, “George, how are you? How are things going with the television?” in the early years. He knew what I was doing. When I started this Extension Personnel Development Institute that year—and I didn’t say anything to him; I didn’t know—he said, “How’s the training of the Extension agents going? Is the Extension Personnel and Development Institute going to survive?” And everybody else in the line was the same way.
Anyway, so John Hannah was very instrumental in, you know, a lot of things, and he gave a on-hands leadership. But with his foundation connections, he was able to bring the ideas. While he was here, before the war ended, he had a faculty committee discussing international things, because what they were saying—and someplace in the International Center, if they haven’t thrown it out, there were records of that committee, because they said, “Look. We have done a charitable thing, you know. We’re educating students here at Michigan State College and Michigan Agricultural College and the University of Michigan, for that matter, to be citizens of Michigan, and good citizens. We’re trying. But they don’t know much about Indiana, or Illinois, even, and the rest of the world is just a blank.” There were stories in the newspapers then, “The Americans went to a certain island to land and take the island, but they didn’t know there were coral reefs. Their maps didn’t show that. They got up on the coral reef, and the Japanese shot them all.”
And they were saying in this faculty meeting, “Somehow, after the war, we have to do a better job of preparing our students to live in the world that they’re going to have, which is international.” They weren’t using the word globalization, but they said, international.
Hannah understood that. He tied it to his Washington work, which was part-time—he was driving back and forth, flying back and forth—with the Defense Department, because then the point system for getting people out of the military and the whole G.I. Bill. I think Floyd Reeves drafted the first draft of the G.I. Bill.

Charnley: Really?

Axinn: Yes. And Hannah was very much involved with those kind of things, and so, you know, it wasn’t just an accident that he tried to talk Glen Taggert into coming here. If you set up a new deanship, the first things all the other deans will tell you is, “It’s a big mistake. You shouldn’t do it.” It’s competition, you know.”

Charnley: Sounds like the tractor and the horse story.

Axinn: Exactly. The other deans were not in favor of having a new dean, and I can say that for every—I wouldn’t say that about the communications arts. I was much involved personally in that because of my communication background, and I was very interested, but, you know, everybody else said, “The English department can do that,” or, “The American Thought and Language can do that. You don’t need a College for Communication Arts.”
But back to my story of international things. Because the Ford Foundation had given us money, you see, there was some clout available. So first, President Hannah, and, of course, Paul Miller also was involved—all three of them, really, were very much involved in that. So the deans of department chairs knew that they had this thing up there, a new dean, a provost, and a president, all who wanted us to become more international.
But they had money, so they could say, “Okay. You’ve got a professor who’s teaching three courses. We’ll buy out his time for one-third of that to do international research,” or international travel or international something. And they could say to the professor, “You know, if you go to Okinawa,” one of our early projects, you know. First of all, we say to the dean, “We’ll, of course, absorb his whole salary while he’s gone, and that’ll save you all of that money, and we will pay him his salary plus an overseas incentive allowance or something like that, plus we’ll pay all the costs of his travel back and forth. If he wants to take his family, we’ll do that and so on.”
They usually had contracts for that, contracts with ICA and MSA before that. ICA later became AID [United States Agency for International Development], our present thing that happened in the John Kennedy years, and AID is still the name, and some contracts like our work in Colombia was funded by Kellogg Foundation, our good friends here. We started doing technical assistance projects here and there, not because the professors and, I think, the administration would rather have them go to do research in their field, wherever it was in that place, but nobody would pay for that.
So we said, “Okay, you can go to country x, if you’re an etymologist, and help them set up their Department of Etymology. That’s what you’re going to do there. While you’re there, expand your insect collection, because when you come back here, we want you to be able to teach not only about the insects of U.S.A., but maybe the insects of Africa, too, or the insects of South Asia, or wherever you’re going.”
And the same was true in soils. We have soils department here, people teaching that. “We want you to go to a place where there’s volcanic soils, not just to teach what you teach here. You’ve got to learn about volcanic soils while you’re there. Bring some soil samples back,” and so on.
Same with the social sciences. “You’re going to a Hindu culture. You’d better learn something about Hindu culture while you’re there. And if you’re going to come back—.” And again, John Useem [phonetic] was interested in cross-cultural things before that. He and his wife, Ruth Useem, who’s also a scholar, they studied Hindu culture. They learned a lot about it. We did have a project, a medical project, in Madras, and a small engineering project also. But we, the university, were able to facilitate people like John Useem doing his work there. He wrote a book called Western-Educated Man in India, which has become a classic in terms of what happens to people when they get a western education, and then go back to their own culture and try to survive.
Some of these names are popping up in my mind. You can see I’ve got no papers. It’s not—I’m leaving out some. I’m just giving you the ones that come to mind.
The deliberate effort of the university was to get as many of our faculty to have an experience abroad in a different kind of place than Michigan, or different than the U.S.A., and learn enough so when they came back and taught, they could build that into their curriculum, their [unclear] material.
Let me see if I can put some year numbers on these. Before 1959, maybe 1958, for the next two decades that was central and a major thing, because it was late in 1959 when I had this meeting I started telling you about before with President Hannah and Glen Taggert in Hannah’s office. And he said, “George, how would you like to go to Nigeria?”
And I said, “Why would I go to Nigeria?”
And he said, “Well, we’re having some administrative problems there. We’ve sent out a team of six people. None of them had—.” They didn’t realize how naive and innocent we were.
You know, President Hannah was very much involved in President Harry [S.] Truman’s Point-Four Speech. No reason for you to remember that, but in the second inaugural address, Point Four was foreign aid to implement the Marshall Planand to do these other things. The Marshall Plan had been going and a great success in Europe, and Point Four was saying, “Look. We have the technology to produce food. The world has a lot of starving places. We should send our experts, because we can solve the world’s hunger problem probably in a decade.” The promises sound a lot like our present administration. I mean, they’re impossible things. We—I’m including myself—were definitely naive and arrogant.
We thought we knew, and what I learned personally, and others since and in various ways, was that we were both naive and arrogant, because we not only didn’t know the answers, we didn’t know the questions, and plenty examples of that. I’ll give you just one. At a certain point we got started in Pakistan. It was East and West Pakistan then. Ford Foundation was going to pay the bill. They came to MSU to organize it. We already had our Office of International Programs going, and we assembled a small team, which had Harry Vogel [phonetic], who was head of the Department of Agricultural Economics, later became dean of the College of Agriculture, and Floyd Reeves, and one or two others.
They went to both East and West Pakistan and they studied the situation, and we learned an awful lot, because they were an instrumental with Ford and the governments of those two branches of then one Pakistan in the selection of who the leadership would be. And they selected a person for the West at Peshawar, where our joint venture was, the training program for what would be like for county Extension agents here. Village Aid, it was called, and it was training a village, so it was a Village Aid academy. And Roger Oxcell [phonetic] was a good public servant who followed the rules, and didn’t make anybody angry, and the government liked him, and he became the director of it.
Over in the East Pakistan in a place called Kamalia [phonetic] they had another one of these Village Aid schools, and our committee—and heavily influenced by Floyd Reeves, probably, ran against this guy called Dr. Hameed Khan [phonetic], and he’d been in the Indian civil service and he’d resigned because he didn’t like it. When I say that, resigning from the Indian civil service in those days was a catastrophe. Your own family would be really annoyed at you, because they paid money to get you an education, you passed a lot of exams, you had become an elite, whatever, and you were giving that up.
But Dr. Hameed had worked as a civil servant in one district in West Bengal, and he didn’t think the government was doing the right thing for the people. And he understood village life. He was a student of the Koran as well as his English was better than mine, which is not saying too much. And he thought, “We’re not paying enough attention to the really hungry and to the rural people,” and so on. And he was one of several candidates to be the director of that East Pakistan Center at Kamalia. The Americans really liked him, and I think the Pakistanis were not too happy, but since our team had gone along with Roger Oxcell in the West, they said, “Okay, we’ll go along with Dr. Hameed in the East.” And he became the director of that institute, and there’s plenty of documented history since then on rural development and international development that came from him.
In the first year, they hired staff, both groups did, that was going to work with them. They sent them both to Michigan State for a year. And since I was directing the Institute for Extension Personnel Development, I was involved in that training program here.
I’ll give you one little incident about that. I took a group with Dr. Hameed and others, up to Marquette, because I wanted them to see Michigan along the way. We had a speaker on the bus. We were having lecture and discussion all the way up and all the way back. The [Mackinac] bridge was new then. We got to Marquette, and I was chatting with Dr. Hameed in the lobby of the hotel when the manager came to see me. I saw he was furious. One of our participants was ruining his plumbing. Well, we raced up to his room on the second or third floor. I don’t know what it was at—

[Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Charnley: This is tape two of the George Axinn interview.
When the last tape ended, you were talking about your trip to Marquette with the group from Pakistan.

Axinn: Yes. Well, there was a plumbing problem, and Alger [phonetic] Hameed Khan, who was leader of that group, had gone with me up to the room, and there was a sink torn halfway out of the wall, and a very frustrated Pakistani trainee, you could say, who said, “I knew there was water in there somewhere, but I didn’t know how to get it out.”
Anyway, later at one point, Glen Taggert was very good because I did go to Nigeria—I should go back to that story and tell you more about it, but I’ll interrupt it for a moment. When I was really working on the Nigeria program mainly, but doing other things for international studies, Glen Taggert wanted me to see other projects. He was that kind of a leader. He thought, “This guy should know more than just what he’s doing in Nigeria.”
We went to visit several projects, including the one at Kamalia, and there I was following after Hameed, who I’d met earlier, to see some of the work. And my vision now is—we’re walking along a bund of a rice paddy. The rice paddy’s about two feet deep, full of water and rice plants. The bund is about one foot over that, about a foot or a foot and a half wide, and relatively dry, and you’re walking along it in single file, of course, because you’d fall in the water maybe even then. And he’s going first, and I’m trying to keep up with him and I can hardly do it, running on this thing, and all the while, he’s lecturing.
We went to several meetings of farmers, and he organized some very dramatic, important approaches to involvement of local people in their own—quote—“community development,” which people like us had been teaching for years, and he was way ahead of us. I mean, first, you’ve got to listen to them and learn what their world is like, and then you do other things.
The reason I got into the Pakistan story at all was that the picture that was in the Administration Building, and maybe even in the dean’s office now, shows one of these big rice paddies, and a whole single-file line of tractors with drivers in them. Well, you know, the Americans thought tractors was the way to farm. In fact, as a kid, I imagine I thought that, too. And so we did one of the obvious things—we sent tractors to Bangladesh. That was a problem. I don’t know how big this room is, but farmers’ fields were not much bigger than this. I mean, it was in terms of feet, maybe twenty by twenty, that would be pretty big. Some would be twice that size, but not too many. Well, you can’t turn a tractor around on that.
So they had to reorganize the social structure and get people to cooperate and also one family, because of their inheritance, would own several plots like that in different locations, they had to do a lot of social organization to get them to have ten of them in a row that they could argue to get a tractor out to make it go the length and come back. We had to train tractor drivers. We had to train tractor maintenance people. They set up a tractor maintenance shop at Kamalia, all kind of things like that, and I visited there several times over the years. It wasn’t too long before they all sat in that beautiful row, rusting, because in Bangladesh, they had a shortage of land and a surplus of people and a shortage of money.
Now, in the United States, when it was growing, we had a surplus of land. All our history, even till about then, we had a surplus of land, a shortage of labor, and plenty of money. [unclear], cheaper to borrow. So it was just the reverse thing. If you have a surplus of land and a shortage of labor, you need agricultural mechanization; and if you have a surplus of labor and a shortage of land, the last thing you want is to mechanize.
The real goal, as I learned later in India at their research station, instead of having a hoe with the blade about ten inches wide or eight inches wide to hoe in the garden, you need a hoe with the blade two inches wide, because that way you can grow another row of the thing next to it, or you could plants seeds in one row, and then wait two weeks and plant in the next row, and wait two weeks and plant in the next row, and by the time the first ones are getting big, the little ones are started, and then you harvest one and do it over again. You want to intensively produce as much food as you can from a small piece of land, and good agricultural engineering research would be making smaller and smaller blades on the hoe, but we had brought tractors.
I just offer you that as an example that we were not even arrogant. Well-meaning, well-educated, college professors went to places all over the world to try to really help them, and some of them were colossal failures, some of them were tragic failures, and some of them we gradually learned how to do it.
And another thing, I’ll give you one more example of that, because I think it characterizes what the well-meaning Americans in Point Four tried to do for the first twenty years or so. We sent a home economist from here, and she went to Okinawa to our project there at the University of the Ryukyus, and she was going to teach women about food and nutrition. So she got the 4-H bulletin, and one of the first ones you start with is how to bake a biscuit. Because twenty years before her time, every farm home had a wood stove, and the oven was always hot, so you had a hot oven. They all had cattle, so milk was easily available, and everybody had wheat, and they had shortening from lard or whatever else. So you had the ingredients already on the farm, and then you would turn on the stove, and you could bake biscuits. So we taught level measurement and things like that to girls in 4-H by making biscuits.
So this well-meaning, honest young woman—not all that young—went to Okinawa, and she organizes groups, and she wants to teach them how to make biscuits. Well, they don’t have ovens. Not to worry, we just had a war. We had all these five-gallon gas cans. You could make one on top of the other, use the bottom for the fire and the top for the oven. And, you know, with a little bit of work and some help from others, you could make ovens, and you could get fuel. Wood was scarce, and people cooked on usually three stones in an open fire; that’s what they cooked on, and this one was more efficient. And then they didn’t have the fat that goes in or the lard, so she was able to get from the U.S. military some of their big cans of Crisco or S_____.
We’d take the [unclear] sacks, so you brought your own artificial things, and they had dry milk they could make powder out of. There was a dairy. There were dairy cattle on those islands before, but not lots of them. It was a home dairy at best, if you had one, and goats are much better than cows, because th