Charles Casey-Leininger

Spring 2018

Interviewee: Charles ‘Fritz’ Casey-Leininger

Interviewer(s): Gino Pasi

Date: 01-23-2018

Transcribed by: Katelyn Parvesse

Byline: This interview was recorded as part of The Covid 19 Oral History Project, a project of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute associated with The Journal of a Plague Year: A Covid 19 Archive. This interview was conducted through the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of credit for HIST3158 under the supervision of Dr. Rebecca S. Wingo.

00:00:00

Gino Pasi: Well, hello, my name is Gino Pasie. The date is Tuesday, January 23, 2018. Today I am interviewing uh Dr. Fritz Casey Leininger as part of the history 3097 honor seminar entitled Bearcat Legacies and also as a part of the Emeriti Association History Project. Fritz, thank you uh for being willing to do this interview with us.

Charles ‘Fritz’ Casey-Leininger: Glad to do it.

GP: Um, to begin, I I know Fritz, I’m assuming is a nickname.

CL: It is.

GP: So could you for the record, just state your your full name?

CL: Charles Frederick Casey Leininger.

GP: Okay. Now I know your father was a Leininger.

CL: Right.

GP: And your mother’s maiden name was Dean.

CL: Yeah.

GP: So where does the Casey—

CL: My wife.

GP: Your wife’s name? Okay,

CL: So we hyphenated.

GP: Good. And when and where were you born?

CL: I was born on February 22, 1949. Uh, My parents live in Woods Hole Massachusetts on Cape Cod. I was born in Toby Hospital in Wareham, Massachusetts, just off Cape.

GP: I’m sorry in in

CL: Wareham

GP: Wareham

CL: Massachusetts

GP: Massachusetts. Okay. We’re both of your parents East coasters?

CL: Um, yeah.

GP: Okay.

CL: Though they met in Chicago.

GP: [chuckle] Okay. And, again, just because I know a little bit about your history, how then did the family emigrate to Ohio?

CL: Um—so my dad worked for—um—worked in the retail cooperatives movement, which um, had um customer owned grocery stores, in a number of cities around the country. And he got his start doing education, about the cooperatives movement uh how to set up stores, what the philosophy of the cooperative movement was. He was doing that in Chicago. Um, he had, um. So he had, gone to Divinity School at Harvard and become a Unitarian minister. And after about six years of that he discovered, as he said, wasn’t that he was defrocked. He was unsuited to being a minister. Um, since about 1940, went back and his parents had moved to Ohio by that time, uh, his dad and his brother were in the Sheetmetal business. They brought him into the Sheetmetal business, uh wasn’t something he wanted to do, went to work uh in the co-op movement at Ohio and then moved to Chicago. Um, my mother was a a nurse um, uh, had uh, got her training at Boston Children’s Hospital, worked there and then New York City. Um. By 1940 ish, she had decided you know she was wanted to try some new stuff, and got some training as a physical therapist and then got a job in Chicago as a physical therapist. Um, and my parents met in a um cooperative co-ed rooming house um, in the Hyde Park area of uh, Chicago. Um, my mother almost voted against my dad moving in. But he did and they uh they fell in love and got married. Um, I think they both wanted to return to New England and um

dad decided that if he was going to do co-op education around cooperative stores, he ought to run one. So he moved, they moved to Needham, Massachusetts, where he ran a store and then to Woods Hole, where he uh ran that store um—

GP: And and eventually come back to Ohio at some point.

CL: Yes come—

GP: Or come to Ohio.

CL: He he came um, the cooperatives movement in the early 1950s was disappearing, as the economy—so the co-op movement had developed, in part in response to the collapsing economy in the 1930s. Uh, that that what looked like the death of capitalism. Um, by the early 1950s, capitalism was um, doing very well um, and the commitment to alternative economies um, was disappearing um, and his store did not was not doing well, so he was fired, uh moved back to Ohio to work with his uh father and brother in the Sheetmetal business again. Um, and eventually, um, after a couple of different jobs ended up working for a small folk songs book publishing company in Delaware, Ohio for co-op.

GP: Okay, so you grew up in Delaware, Ohio, pretty much.

CL: Yeah.

GP: I was gonna ask if you had a blue collar upbringing or white collar, but it sounds like it was a little bit of—

CL: The answer is yes.

GP: Yeah.

CL: To both. Dad had uh, working class jobs most of my life. Uh, mom was a nurse, which was distinctly poorly paid when she was a nurse, uh so we had working class incomes. Uh, dad grew up working class, my mom grew up, in a upper middle class uh family in Maine. Um, but always but her career was was a working class career.

GP: But now when you were, after you were born had your father, was he an academic at that point? Or was he in the store?

CL: Uh, he was in the store when I was born.

GP: Okay, but had a college education as did your mother.

CL: Yes yes a Master’s, um, my mother flunked out of college um and then not b—because she was, not committed to uh academics uh, but was a wonderful nurse and did very well.

GP: And had to get some schooling to become a nurse?

CL: Right. Right. She did. Um, I don’t think she ever had a bachelor’s degree but you didn’t need that right to be a nurse in her era.

GP: Um, so your dad had gone to college. Your mom not so much. was going to college as a young man, was that something you distinctly in your future or not so much?

CL: Oh yeah, it was I grew up it was my brother and I were going to go to college and that we would have um, professional jobs.

GP: Okay. And so uh, as your senior year approached, where did you find your interests, gravitating? Like what what was it you wanted to study?

CL: Everything, which was one of the interesting things about my family is that we sat around the dinner table talking about politics, theology, math, science, um, everything. Um, and I literally, when I got to college, I changed my major, literally every couple of quarters.

GP: And as far as your upbringing is concerned, and this is just, I hear co-op, I hear folk songs, I hear your um, Unitarian minister, I’m assuming it sounds like a a progressive upbringing, family.

CL: Yes. Yeah. Uh uh my dad grew up Methodist, and Republican, and when he when he went to college, he can, he apparently had some sort of conversion experience because by the middle of his freshman year, he was a pacifist and a socialist.

GP: Okay. So you then chose to go to what college as an undergraduate?

CL: I went to Antioch college, which was um, a very interesting, very progressive school um that had a co-op program for everybody, not just for science and engineering, um which was a wonderful experience.

GP: Was Antioch’s progressive nature, part and parcel of why you chose to go there?

CL: Yes, yeah.

GP: Had you applied anywhere else or you really had your sights set?

CL: Um, I applied to University of Chicago. Um, my dad thinks I also applied to Oberlin I don’t remember that, um, I actually graduated after my junior year in high school because I wanted to get the hell out of my small, very conservative, uh Central Ohio town. Um, Chicago had a program where they accepted um juniors out of high school, um but they wait listed me and Antioch accepted me and I would have chosen Antioch anyway, over Chicago.

GP: And what did you end up? You said you changed your major several times. What was it that you ended up settling on?

CL: Well, I didn’t really um,

GP: Okay.

CL: Antioch allowed you to build a um, interdisciplinary major, which meant that I could actually graduate. Um, so it was called environmental studies, but it included history, anthropology, hard science, uh at the end, I was actually um um thought I was going to become a geologist um because I was doing a lot of um hiking and camping and really liking being out in the woods. Uh, so I thought, you know, being a geologist, I could get paid to do a lot of hiking and camping and climbing mountains.

GP: And so you graduated with this environmental science degree,

CL: Environmental studies.

GP: Environmental studies. Im sorry.

CL: As a BA.

GP: Um, with the intention of possibly going into geology as a career.

CL: Right. And I went to I went to Boston College and got a master’s in geology.

GP: So let me step back, was it was it just nature in general that you were enthralled with that you just wanted to study? Um, you said you enjoyed hiking. Is that pretty much what led you to focus on geology? Or were you still kind of unclear and you just picked something?

CL: Um, I thought I was clear. Um, towards my senior year, I think, by the beginning of my senior year, it’s geology seemed like a way to be paid to be out in nature. And, you know, the geology courses I took, I found really interesting.

GP: And what year did you graduate?

CL: 1971.

GP: And so you said you go to Boston college?

CL: Yes.

GP: Then, directly after undergrad?

00:11:14

CL: Yes. So part of, early in my senior year I was like, hm, I’m going to graduate from college, what the hell am I gonna do next? I guess I better go to graduate school.

GP: And so you spent two years at Boston College?

CL: No it took me five years.

GP: Okay.

CL: Certainly, because um I didn’t have a strong undergraduate background in geology, um. So I had to be um retrained, I had to take extra undergraduate courses, um and then I was required to do a thesis which just took me a long time.

GP: What was your graduate, your master’s thesis on?

CL: Um, brittle fracture of granitic rocks.

GP: Okay. [chuckle] Which sounds fascinating. Don’t get me wrong.

CL: [chuckle] I I occasionally I look at my master’s thesis and go I have no idea what this means.

GP: So okay, so you go there for about five years. What are you doing to earn an income? Do you have a family at this point?

CL: No I um I had a free ride. My first few years um tuition and um, $200 a month, uh, which in 1971, was just barely enough. Um, by third year, I had tuition remission, and borrowed money. And fourth and fifth year, I was only registered for like, one course a semester and had a part time job and a um, uh, an outdoor store backpacking store.

GP: Which seemed to fit with your

CL: Oh, yeah

GP: Inclinations.

CL: Yeah.

GP: Okay.

CL: And I was also beginning to do some carpentry and Home Repair stuff as well.

GP: And so when you graduate with your MA, do you then go and continue to study uh granitic uh,

CL: Actually it was an MS, a Master’s of Science.

GP: Master’s of science, your right, sorry.

CL: These these kinds of distinctions. Talking to the students, the distinctions between BAs, and BSs, and MAs, and MSs are really important, in the academic world.

GP: They are.

CL: To some people.

GP: So do you go in then? I mean, do you become a geologist?

CL: I, no, I discovered that that almost all of the people I was in graduate school with were going to go to work for oil companies and mining companies. And as I thought about at the time, they were going to go help break the earth.

GP: Sure.

CL: And um, I had a checkered career as a graduate student um, was not well liked by my faculty by the time I left because I talked back to them. Um, so I moved to Ohio where my brother was living, um, and we went into the home handyman painting, self-employed home handyman business, um.

GP: Was that in the Cincinnati area?

CL: In Cincinnati, yeah.

GP: Um, how long did you do that? How long did you stay in that?

CL: Um, off and on from seventy-six through eighty-nine. Um,

GP: So that became a career?

CL: Yeah. Yeah. Um, um I was also involved in progressive politics, um started reading history on on my own, and thinking that history might be helpful and thinking about how to change the world. Um, and decided um that I would um, that maybe I should take some graduate courses, uh and called up the history department here talk to Gene Lewis, who’s department head at that time, um and he he said, sure, you can, you know, why don’t you sign up for um introduction to the literature of American history. I did that. And did that sequence my first year part time, and did well enough that I was offered an assistantship and tuition remission so I could go full time the next year.

GP: And that was what year?

CL: Started part time in eighty-two was full time in eighty-three eighty-four um. And I got f—in in eighty-three, I took a course on the history of Cincinnati, um where the professor required the graduate students to do a piece of original research, not just write a book review or do um library research, and I had was, had been living from seventy-seven to eighty-one, in a communal household, um in Avondale, and almost all of my neighbors were African American. Uh, many of the houses on the street were had been clearly middle class and upper middle class houses, there were we lived in a three story Victorian mansion. Um, and um, so I propose to him that I’d f—figure out who’s clear to me that at some point, this had been a wealthy white neighborhood, um and hadn’t been told by Cincinnatians, that that was true. Um, and so I decided to do a research project to see if I can figure out when it changed from white to black, and why. Um, and that laid the basis for almost all of my future research down to the present.

GP: And at this point, are you thinking, this is my next career, this is what I’m going to do?

CL: Uh, yeah, it became clearer and clearer to me that I love doing nitty gritty, getting my hands dirty in the archives history, uh putting together stories, uh getting an understanding of stuff that happened in the past that no one else really had never figured out. Uh, it was just it was it was fun. It was exciting. Um, and I thought that the story of, of racial change in Cincinnati’s neighborhoods uh, was an important story to understand um in the history of racism.

GP: Because you started to gravitate toward that, housing, social justice, the history of housing and neighborhoods. Did your background in home renovation have anything to do with that or are they completely separate?

CL: They’re completely separate. Um, but the interest in racial justice goes back to the fact that I grew up at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, um was aware of my, well, my dad was, my parents were not activists. Uh, they would pay lots of attention to um, progressive politics, the civil rights movement, Um, I remember, my dad brought home a comic book that um we had been put together, to put together uh to um to publicize the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King story, um and being really influenced by that. Um and in fact, um, some point I was left home alone with my older brother, and he told me to do something, and I said, no, I’m engaging in civil disobedience you can’t make me do that, from reading this comic book, um and I had a black cousin um, whose um godfather had was a prominent civil rights leader in the 1960s. So and he was almost exactly my age, and I really kind of grew up with him um and knew, knew his story his dad uh was an African American lawyer and in um in New York, his mom was my dad’s younger sister. Um, so race, racial justice, um, social justice was an essential part of who our family was. Um, and so it was no surprise that what I decided to do history, and that I would want to do um history of of race, social justice. Um, and, you know, I keep coming back to, you know, occasionally I’ll work on a project that’s not really that and I was like, this is interesting, but not what I want to do.

00:20:31

GP: And a lot of your research is focused around neighborhoods and uh white flight and housing and things like that for African Americans in the under representative. And that is that is kind of become your career

CL: My career

GP: Right. So you come back to graduate school in the early eighties, and then you get an MA, is that right?

CL: Right. This this one took me seven years.

GP: Okay.

CL: Um, in part or for two reasons. One is that my advisor kept asking me questions.

He wanted me to answer on my thesis, and then ri—and I had told him that once I got my MA, I was, I had a prenuptial agreement with my wife that we would move back to New England, which is where she’s she’s from Massachusetts. Um, and I

GP: Is this a real prenuptial, this was not a

CL: It wasn’t written down, but it was like, Okay, if you move to Ohio to marry me, while I got my master’s, once I get my master’s, we’ll move back to Massachusetts.

GP: So did you you met her while you were living uh, in Boston?

CL: In Boston, getting my first Master’s. Um, and we had an on again, and then long time off again uh, relationship, before we decided that we actually should be on again there’s a ten year gap in there um.

GP: And you sucker her into moving to a

CL: Well, we negotiated

GP: I see.

CL: For a move to Ohio in exchange for we’ll move back. Um, and I think my advisor was like, if I keep asking him questions and making keep working on this thesis, he’ll give up the idea of moving back to Massachusetts. Um, but, and then we had twins, which, you know, how much work twins are. Um, and then uh we finally moved back to Massachusetts, where I worked as a house carpenter for a couple of years. Um, and kind of continued to tinker with um the um thesis and um had a book chapter that I have been asked to do. Um, and so in so we moved to Massachusetts in fall of eighty-six, spring of eighty-eight um my wife’s former employer in Cincinnati, came out to Boston for a conference, and basically said, I will give you a lot of money if you’ll come back to Ohio. I’ll pay you really well, and I’ll give you a signing bonus so you can afford to make the move and buy a house. And I’d been working as a house Carpenter for wealthy people. She’d been working as a wealth, wedding planner for wealthy people. Uh, both of us were doing good work, but not making enough money. Um, I was tired of dealing with rich people, generally was tired of dealing with rich people. Uh, these these were not careers we wanted. Um, and I knew that uh from what my advisor had said that if I finished my master’s um and came back, that they would give me a teaching as—give me an assistantship and tuition remission that I would have a free ride to get my PhD.

GP: Okay. Wow.

CL: So Jenny’s offered lots of money to come back to Ohio. My advisor said if you come on back, finished, the Master’s we’ll give you a uh a free ride.

GP: And who was your advisor for this?

CL: Zane Miller who was uh UC’s, longtime um urban historian uh, for many years, he was the person you went to if you want to know something about the history of Cincinnati. We’ve got the guy quoted in the newspapers.

GP: So you you come back here then and you decide that the PhD is the route you’re going to take um, and continuing on, I assume, building on your master’s thesis and the research that you had done there.

CL: Yeah.

GP What do you end up doing your dissertation on?

CL: Um, race and housing and neighborhoods. Uh, I my master’s was specifically on the Avondale neighborhood, uh I expanded it to a a wider area um, looked at um city planning, how that impacted it, how uh racial discrimination and housing had had impacted um where blacks could live. Um, and um so th—that story from about 1945 to 1970 looked at the transition in the thinking um amongst planners, on housing reformers from believing that racial segregation was a good thing, to realizing that it was a bad thing. Um, and coming into coalition with civil rights activists who came to who wanted um there to be laws, making racial discrimination in housing illegal. Um, so my story is is neighborhood racial change why that happened, and then the growth of a fair housing movement, um and how that was related to very much intimately tied up with um, well, actually massive displacement of African Americans from the Old West and black community, when I-75 was driven right through the middle of that community. And the planners decided that the housing there was so horrible it had to be leveled. And the people needed to be rehoused. They did a great job of leveling that housing. And they did a terrible job of rehousing, the people who were displaced, so African Americans who were tens of 1000s of African Americans who were displaced from the West End, within a tightly segregated housing market, which meant that they were all funneled into the the margins of existing black neighborhoods. Um, at the same time, that whites were moving in large numbers to the suburbs, uh because federal housing policy made it possible to buy um for whites to buy a brand new, um suburban home on a grassy lawn, um and then take the interstate of the brand new interstates to work. So whites could escape the city easily, uh at the same time that blacks could only move into certain neighborhoods.

GP: Now, in the early 1990s, is this a topic that a lot of scholars are working on? Or at least in UC, do you find yourself kind of alone in that scholarship?

00:28:00

CL: Um, there wasn’t anybody else at in certainly in the history department was working on on that topic. But it was, it was a pretty hot topic nationally. Lots of other scholars working on it from a variety of points of view. Um, there are a whole series of books, starting in the late, maybe late fifties, early sixties examining how um what we then called ghettos, developed um almost exclusively African American neighborhoods, um and tight intense racial segregation discriminative enforced by discrimination.

GP: Sure.

CL: Um, so there were a series of books that examined that in a number of cities. Um, and, you know, I um an actually, there had been a previous doctoral student at UC who looked at those issues for Cincinnati, in the pre World War Two up through the end of World War Two. Uh, and I could, I was able to take what he, you know, build on the work he had done. If he hadn’t done his book, I would have had to go back to the early twentieth century. But fortunately, Bob laid this very nice uh foundation, that let me start at World War Two.

GP: So you get your dissertation, your you get your PhD, do you? What happens next? Are you immediately given a faculty position here? Do you adjunct? Do you do something else go back to renovating homes?

CL: Uh, did not go back to renovating homes except my own. Um, worked as an adjunct at UC for bout a year and a half, um was on the job market, had lots of interviews, uh including several finalist interviews and was never hired. Um.

GP: At this point, you were willing to move wherever the job was and

CL: Yeah. Um, for a variety of reasons. So in the, so I got the PhD in ninety-three. In the fall of ninety-four, I heard about a um position doing social policy analysis for the Cincinnati office of a national organization called the Children’s Defense Fund. Uh, the executive director of of that was my wife’s executive director’s sister. So I got that I got hired to do social policy got that job. Through the old gals network, as opposed to the old boys network. Um, and did that from ninety-five through 2002, while continuing to teach one or two courses a year at UC, um and keeping my hand you know, be uh I guess I, I think I did one other academic publication article with that period, um but was mostly doing social policy stuff. And doing some some writing uh for that.

GP: And maybe a little UC history here as an adjunct, because I think, you know, adjuncts notoriously talk about uh you know, overworked, underpaid, getting screwed. How was the adjunct culture at university? Was it similar to nationwide trends?

CL: Yes. Yes, so,

GP: Okay.

CL: So um. Let’s see um, ninety-three ninety-four I worked I had was basically three-quarter time um as an adjunct, so three quarters of a full teaching level.

GP: And what courses where you teaching?

CL: Uh basic American history.

GP: Okay, survey courses?

CL: Yeah, and I was making less than I did as a doctoral candidate. My income declined.

GP: Right.

CL: Because the pay was so lousy. I think um pro—I was making about um, $3600 a quarter, um three times, so I was making about 10,000 a year.

GP: At what point do you get hired as a full-time faculty member here?

CL: So that was a long and winding road. Um, I left Children’s Defense Fund in 2000, at the end of 2000, to set myself up doing um social policy consulting, um since I, my work was well known in in Cincinnati social service community. Um, a lot of what I was doing still had to do with race and poverty. Um, and continued um, to teach a couple of courses in a year at UC. Um, just about the time that I left Children’s Defense Fund, the evening college, which I was teaching in, uh was wiped out by the University of administration.

GP: So this was a teaching uh an evening college at UC

CL: Right, a separate evening college, um which had been really important to an—and, actually, I think, had remained really important to a lot of working class um Cincinnatians who work full time.

GP: Catered to nontraditional students.

CL: Um. Yeah, I had lots of adult students um who were, you know, had working class jobs, but and many of them were UC employees who got tuition free, um, but they were they they were wonderful to work with because they knew why they were in college. They wanted to be there. Um, not always well prepared, but willing to work hard. Um, really satisfying to work with. But the UC administration decided to wipe out even college for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it was retaliation against the Dean of evening college for fights between her and the senior administration. Uh, she retired and the senior administration said,now it’s time to get rid of evening college. And UC decided to move what were open access parts of the university away from the Clifton campus. Open access meant that if you had a high school diploma, you were automatically admitted. Uh, not to ANS or any of the professional schools, but evening college and a two years college on this campus called University College. Um, now, that work is done by Clermont, and Blue Ash.

GP: Would you still get a degree like an Associate’s degree if you attended those or would you just eventually matriculate into a professional school?

CL: Um, you would get a um yeah you get an associate’s degree from the evening college, I think you might have been able to get a BA in the evening college, I can’t remember, uh University College was just an Associate’s degree. And you could if you were successful with your associate’s, you could apply to arts and sciences or any of the professional schools. Uh your admission was not necessarily guaranteed however. Um, so I um the history courses in evening college, were brought back into the ANS history department, which brought me back in contact with um people who had been my teachers as an undergraduate. Um, um, Barbara Ramusack was department head at that time, and and she was uh was very pleased to have me uh teaching evening courses. Um, and then I picked up um 2006, I picked up a contract writing history of um, for local Legal Aid Society, actually, Gene Lewis’s wife Dobby worked there in um um fundraising, and she connected me with the executive director of the Legal Aid Society, and I got a fairly substantial contract to write um what turned out to be 100 page history of the Legal Aid Society that was very successful, uh brought me back to the attention of my colleagues in uh or teaching during the day, I was hired to teach full time for one year as well as called a visiting professor. Um and um friends of mine within the department started talking about how do we want friends full time on the faculty, how do we do that? Um and their budget, budgetary problems persuading, Deans that they should hire someone with my expertise, um but eventually, I was able to pitch myself as a public historian, um because I hadn’t worked outside of the academy outside of the university, doing both social policy and um you know, contract historical research. Um, and so eventually, the department was able to sell me to the then Dean, and I was hired full time in 2012.

GP: So there was no national search or anything

CL: Uh there was a search.

GP: Okay. All right.

CL: Uh, th—the rules require that they have to do a formal search, um but I was uh, I was asked to write the job description. And to be fair, they did they interviewed two other people um who uh they said were uh weren’t quite impressive, um but they I had a track record.

GP: Right. Now, is this something that sort of um, that trajectory, is that something that happens in other universities, somebody joins a department people like them, they want to keep them on?

CL: I I I think so. Um um I don’t know a whole lot about it. I do I did have I do have a friend who actually had a full-time tenure track job at Wilmington college, a small college about an hour from here. Her husband taught over in Northern Kentucky, they lived in Cincinnati, she was really close friends with um a senior faculty member who had been her PhD advisor at UC and um he wanted to bring her back into the UC psychology department um and eventually was able to um get UC to hire her as um what they called a um, um, an educator assistant professor, which is what how I was hired, it’s not a tenured line live job. Uh, three year contracts that are renewable indefinitely and with the possibility of promotion. Um, so it’s, I think it’s not uncommon uh if someone knows someone and wants them, to try to figure out how to how to hire them.

GP: Sure.

CL: But there have to be formal searches, and uh there have and the dean has to sign off on that. So there, uh it’s, you know, the way my advisor was hired at UC, was that the head of the department in the mid-sixties called his buddy who was the head of the department of University of Chicago and said, hey, have you got anybody who can teach urban history? And Zane had done his dissertation on late nineteenth century Cincinnati history, and um so they hired him.

GP: And that was enough.

CL: That was enough there. I’m sure there was no formal search.

GP: Sure.

CL: No competition. Um, very different.

GP: Certainly. So you kind of as an adjunct, and maybe visiting professor, were kind of on the outskirts of departmental culture history department.

00:41:34

CL: Yes.

GP: ANS college, arts and sciences college, when you became a full time professor, was it an eye opening experience for you now being completely submerged in this culture? Or was it no surprises?

CL: Well, there are um a lot of uh I knew a lot of what to expect going in. Um, what I hadn’t realized, even when I was a full time visiting professor was the incredible workload. Um, you know, I taught two courses a semester. Uh, I supervise the internship program, served on committees, uh met with students. Um, and it was, you know, that does not sound like a huge amount, but it was I was um it wasn’t quite it wasn’t twenty-four seven, but it was more like ten hours a week, ten hours a day, seven days a week.

GP: Sure. Um, when you did submerge yourself in that culture, um you begin I know, faculty members, you not only teach class, you serve on faculty committees, you have to involve yourself in professional service. Were there committees that you enjoyed serving on some that you did not enjoy serving on? And if so, could you could you talk about some of those?

CL: I served on the undergraduate studies committee for I think, for three years, uh and there were some satisfactions there um.

GP: It’s okay by the way, if you say no committee provided me satisfaction that’s perfectly acceptable.

CL: Okay, you notice I said some satisfaction there. The faculty member who was the head of the committee was disorganized. Just like, you know, let’s try to get us back on track. Maybe we can get this process done this year, instead of having to work on it again next year.

GP: Right.

CL: Um, you know, the history department while I was there, full time, those five years was generally a good place to be. Good people, liked each other, respected each other um. So mostly, that kind of administrative stuff that committee stuff work pretty well. Uh, there were varying amounts of lack of respect for me because I was an educator faculty instead of a tenure line faculty, and because I wasn’t doing research and publishing the way they were. Um, and I really had to kind of push remind the department that I was there that I was a competent, contributing member of the department um. You know an example of this is about three years ago, um I had taught a class where we wrote a history of us expanding neighborhood. Next fall, there was a party and another faculty members house to celebrate um other fac—faculty members who had published books in the previous year, and mine was ignored. Because it was not published by an Academic Press um. You know, it and I had mentioned it, I said to her, you know, hey, you know, which,

GP: By the way.

CL: We just finished this book that I think is a really nice history of this neighborhood. I’ll I’ll uh, you know, bring it to the party, and when she announced who the pub—published authors were, she didn’t remember to mention me. Um, so there was, there is a hierarchy within the academic world that um can be sometimes hard to deal with.

GP: Well, and for me, personally, as a public historian, I tend to think public historians traditionally over the well, since they’ve been increasingly more a part of traditional academic history departments kind of feel like the, you know, uh second class citizen,

CL: Yeah, yeah.

GP: Um,

CL: So, so the difference between a public historian and a academic historian is academic, academic historians, publish books, full length books that have been published by university presses, or if they’re really good, if there have become a star their books get published by commercial presses. But they’re always, you know, they’re, they’re reviewed by other people in the field. Um, you also have to write articles that get published in professional journals, you go to conferences and give papers. Uh, public historians tend to do smaller projects, um. Sometimes peer reviewed, but not as often. Um, they’re not necessarily as I don’t know I was gonna say, academically rigorous, but I don’t think that’s quite the word there, helped me out here.

GP: Not as academically rigorous, traditionally, I think, you know, it’s it’s changing, where public historians are being more in more and more accepted. Whereas uh an exhibit, for instance, is being accepted now as scholarly work um

CL: By some

GP: By younger

CL: By by by some academic historian.

GP: Right.

CL: But others were like, well, that’s nice.

GP: Exactly.

CL: Where the hell is your book?

GP: Right. You you kids did a nice exhibit there, um where’s the real scholarship?

CL: Right, where’s the real scholarship? And, you know, part of it is that the, uh you know, the academic historians are writing primarily for other academic historians. Um, um. Whereas public historians are writing putting together exhibits, webpages um for um um for the general public, so you’re writing stuff that is, can be understood by ordinary citizens. Um, you know, museum exhibits, the um, you know, um. The the the

GP: Text.

CL: The text is written for eighth grade, or tenth grade level. It’s simple. It’s 100 words. Um, and um, you know, Scott, you know, academic scholars are writing three 400 page books. Um, that take and that, quite frankly, take a huge amount of work. Um, our department head just last year published a book that he’d been working on for twenty years. Um, it’s won tons of awards. Um, and he deserves you know, he deserves every award he’s gotten, and he put a huge amount of work into it um. So yeah, so increasingly, public history, the creation of history for the general public is more and more accepted within academic departments, but there are still, you know, um still people who are like, why are we paying these people to write text for tenth graders? Um.

GP: Well, I think there is a tradition there among public historians too where, at at times, it has not been that academically rigorous. So,

CL: Right.

GP: And and I do see both sides of the point.

CL: Yeah. No, and that’s true that that um, you know, small museums are often um amateur or semi amateur operations um. Staff, they’re not always trained um, and in order to keep their doors open, they often do stuff that is incredibly ahistorical, um you know, stuff that people pay money to come see, that really is not well done. Uh, and so that, you know, I actually found myself sort of torn between, um, you know, traditional academic rigor, and the complexity of the stories I wanted to tell. And the fact that I also wanted to make sure that all that at the very least, that an intelligent, educated public, could read the stuff I was writing and understand it. Uh, and I I think I was pretty successful at that. Um, you’ll sometimes find historians not as much as some other fields, but um sometimes historians will write highly theoretical stuff with jargon, that you’re, you know, you go, what? Um.

GP: Yeah, there’s something to be said for the public intellectual that can uh,

CL: Right.

GP: Distill,

CL: Right, and

GP: Concepts.

CL: And ultimately, I see the historians job as, as being able to talk about the work they do in a way that is going to help enlighten the general public. Now, I know that, you know, this, both took twenty years to write will be read by lots of scholars, and they will use that material in the classes they teach. And some of the students will go off and teach high school social studies, and so some of Chris’s scholarship will get to college classes. Obviously, he’s teaching it, it’s informed, certainly informed his teaching, and some of it will get to high schools, and some of it will get to, uh maybe to elementary school, though I have a friend of mine, posted on Facebook, recently, a quiz that her first grader was given about Martin Luther King, and the three choices for answers, and the two of them were aps—were obviously wrong, and the third one was so simplistic, but basically, it said, what was the result of Martin Luther King’s work? And the answer, the correct answer was people are now treated fairly. It’s like, wait, I don’t know if this teacher made up that that quiz or whether she was canned or came from some, some other place, but it showed a a gross lack of understanding of the current state of race in this country.

00:53:20

GP: There’s there’s room there for

CL: There’s room for significant improvement.

GP: Well, Fritz, listen, I I just want to be respectful to the class, um because we’ve been talking for a while now, and I’ve got a few more questions to ask, not that many, but maybe some of the students here will pick up on some of those questions that I didn’t ask, so I want to open it up to the table.

CL: That’d be great.

GP: Any anything uh that you’d like to ask Fritz?

CL: Alyssa?

Alyssa: Um, so I know you’re talking a lot about your passion for social justice. So what was your involvement [two words unknown]?

GP: And I just want to repeat that for the camera. What was your involvement in activism? Um, regarding your, your dedication to social justice?

CL: So that that’s a that’s a very fair question. Um, it’s turned out that I’m a much better academic than I am an activist um, uh. Well, may not seem like it when I’m in the classroom, I’m really kind of shy um and careful um. And, and, and haven’t been trained as an academic, fortunately, or unfortunately makes me see things in complex ways, which makes it hard to be gung ho out in the streets, you know, tear down the walls um, so a better I’m better writing about this stuff and educating um people about it than I am about um organizing or being um you know, being a member of activists organization, though. In the late seventies, early eighties, I was part of a um a street theater group that did um social justice street theater, which was kind of fun. Um, and, you know, we were, you know, we did our place in a number of different venues and that um. So that’s my one claim to fame in activist um. But I’ve always been, you know, and my dad was, you know, very similar, you know, that in the ways that he read a lot, understood a lot of what was going on, but was not in the streets. Um, he did, however, when I was in high school, black kids, who rode the school bus to our high school were accused of slashing bus seats, and I had a good friend who was one of those African American students, and she said, we didn’t do this, you know, we’re being falsely accused, and I took the story home to my dad, and um he was outraged and got involved with a group of people who challenged uh the school administration on it and forced um them to apologize to the black kids. Um, but um yeah, um I think of myself more as being really good at it as critic, social critic and um being able to lay out, like the history of why African Americans have been displaced and discriminated against and the results of that, lay that out in a way that’s accessible to um the general public. And every now and then someone will post on Facebook, something related to my topic, I was like, okay, if you want to know more about this, here’s an article I wrote, and here’s a book that you could read and, you know, long form answers on Facebook, which, you know, only um my closest friends read all the way through, and my daughter’s like [air quotes]. Other questions?

GP: I’m I’m I’m just to interject here, let’s I’m reminded that we have a we have a case on our Lucy Oxley, the first African American Graduate of the College of Medicine here in 1936. Um, in an interview done in the eighties, somebody said, you know, did you involve yourself in the civil rights movement? And were you a civil rights activist? And she said, yes. And the interviewer said, well, how she said, I I showed up for work every day. I did my job. She had a private uh medical practice in Avondale uh primarily black neighborhood, black patients, and she did that for forty years into her nineties uh I think,

CL: And it’s and it’s significantly underserved medically underserved population.

GP: Yeah. So I think, you know, she made a statement, like, my activism is my life. It’s my job. Um, you know, I didn’t have to be on the the news uh throwing a Molotov cocktail. I I I show up for work every day, and I treat the community, you know, any other questions?

Unknown Student: Do you think your kind of extended education, you said, you got two Master’s degre—Master’s degrees, and they both took a long time with periods of work in between, you think that your life would have turned out, say very differently if you would have just went the normal, I say normal, but the standard route of going get your four years for Bachelors and two years from Masters?

CL: I don’t think I was capable of doing that. That’s just who who I am. Um, you know, when I went to get the Master’s in geology, it was in some ways it was kind of a whim as I’d only discovered geology as something that was interesting in the last year and a half of college. Um, you know, if it had been the last year and a half of college, I’ve been taking anthropology classes, I would have gone to anthropology graduate school. Um, I really I wasn’t ready, when I graduated from college to commit to a career I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Um, and and sort of the, you know, a part of the problem, or part of the, you know, the um um you know the um positive side of that was that um what I really wanted to do was explore and try different things out. And so that when I got to the history degree, it was clear to me that that’s what I wanted to do. Um, I gave up I’ve kind of gave up on the Master’s in history, because we had two infants um and I had to earn, we had to earn a living um, but my, but I knew I didn’t want to be a house Carpenter anymore. Um, and my advisor, and another senior historian, kept leaning on me. Um, and when I had the chance to come back, it was the right move. Um, it took me four years to get my Doctorate. So it takes me twelve years to get two Master’s degree and four years to get a Doctorate. And that was because I had um, I’d grown up. Um, you know, I’ve done a bunch of different things um. You know, I run into to people who have had professional jobs, who would, you know, graduated from college, went to law school, worked for a law firm, for twenty years, and then went f this, I am, you know, that I’m going to become, I’m going to go build furniture, or I’m going to become a house carpenter. Um, I did that first. Um, and I, and while I still I really enjoy building something with my hands, and I started this when I was in in working on the Masters that was taking forever, I would go work and build rebuild someone’s front porch was like, you know, at the end of the week, I did something. This was a mess a week ago. Now there’s something new there. Um, so there’s, I still have a real satisfaction with working with my hands um. But doing history is much more important to me. Um, and, and um so that’s a really kind of long and roundabout answer to your question, but I think, for me, I had to grow up, I had to experiment. Um, I’m really glad, I think that if I had followed the sort of normal career path, um I would have burned out on it in my late thirties and uh said screw this, I want to be a carpenter. And uh probably would have done that for a few years and went yeah, this is okay, I’m earning some money, but no, this is not what I want to do. So um the experimenting and growing up, um got me to a place that was the right place for me. And that’s something that I really am worried about for my daughter’s generation and you guys is that most of you are going to graduating from college with a lot of debt, and you are not going to have it’s going to be much more difficult for you to experiment um. You know, I was able to, uh I had very little debt at the end of the the geology Master’s, I was able to move to Cincinnati, live in a communal household, work maybe ten months out of the year, in the winter, work slow way down, I’d just take two months off, earn a um subsistence living, um do political work, um go backpacking, um and have lots of choices. My both my daughters are saddled with huge, but one of them who who one who to went to graduate school and her husband owe several $100,000 in college debt, they have to work. They can’t just say to hell with this, we’re going to go to Europe for for six months before we have babies. We both have to have jobs and you know taking six months or a year to go to Europe or South Asia is not possible.

US: And so, so I’m sorry build on that, but if somebody had the opportunity to say, pursue what they believe they’re passionate about, but may not end up finding that they’re the most passionate about that or taking more of a safe route and being able to build a foundation, maybe exploring those passions later in life. What what like advice would you give, I guess?

01:04:26

CL: Well, a—again, a kind of roundabout answer to that is I’ve learned stuff in doing the Master’s in geology that has stuck with me about certain kinds of rigor um about certain ways of approaching problem solving, um. You know, I look back on it and it’s and it’s like I’ve forgotten most of what I learned most of the technical stuff I learned but I did learn how to um do research. I learned a lot about problem solving. So it wasn’t a waste of time. What I would say is that you um as much as possible, given the realities of a uh responsibilities and financial situation, you should follow your passion. Um, do what you think is what is good for you, um taking into account everything, that that environment that the environment that you’re in um and be willing to experiment. I think lots of people in your generation are gonna change jobs multiple times, careers multiple times. Um, and that’s fine. Keep you know, it’s one way to keep your life interesting. I would say, try not to get trapped into um a career path that you’re not sure you want to do.

GP: Fritz, I’m going to stop you there. Any other questions? All right, well, then let me just bring the interview to a close Fritz by asking you um two more questions. That one thing you can encapsulate from your career here that UC of which you are most proud. If you had to pick just one thing.

CL: Through research and writing I’ve done about um race and housing in neighborhoods, uh I know that people use that.

GP: Right.

CL: Every now and then someone contacts me and said, I just read, or I’ve been reading your stuff for years, let’s talk, or a former student will email me ten years later and say, you know that stuff you’ve taught me about race changed my life.

GP: So that’s really been your life’s work. I mean, you’ve been carpenter, professor. You’ve done work with political organizations, but your life’s work has been really about exposing uh issues and race, housing uh and,

CL: Yeah, the research and writing and teaching of it um um I’ve done good work.

GP: Anything we haven’t talked about that you feel should be on the record before we close? That you’d like to say.

CL: I mean I could go into more detail about a bunch of pieces of this my parents stories, I think it’s really fascinating story. Don’t have time to to do that here um.

GP: A success of er of a later interview.

CL: Right. Um, no I think this has been been nicely comprehensive.

GP: Alright, well, with that, we’ll thank you again, and and we’ll bring this to a close. Thank you.

CL: Well, thank you for your your well put together questions.

GP: You’re welcome. And as you said, you were very compliant. I didn’t have to do a lot of lassoing. Thanks Fritz.

01:08:25