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BN: Wanted to go back a little bit. I'm sure we'll get back to other collaborations with Harry Kitano later. But before we broke, you started talking a little bit about you first faculty position in Platteville. So wonder if we could go back there and talk about how that came about, and whether... curious about your wife's reaction to leaving L.A. to go to someplace like that also.

RD: Well, she was prepared to go anywhere. But it was culture shock for her more than me. Judith was born in -- actually born in New York City, but her people lived in New Jersey. Her father was a lawyer there and they moved to L.A. after the war. So she was an L.A. girl and that's what she remembered. But she'd flown back and forth to Barnard a number of times on family trips. And as we traveled in a car from Santa Monica to Platteville -- I don't know if you know where Platteville is, but it's down in the corner where Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin come together, and close to the Mississippi River. Somewhere in Nebraska, she looked at me and she said, "You know, Roger, you're right. This is a big country." We weren't doing... and then when we got there, my goodness. When people found out we were Jewish, a number of people in town wanted to know if we knew the other Jew, who was a scrap dealer. And we never met him. His daughter was, his daughter became Miss Wisconsin. But they didn't like in Platteville, it wasn't Jews, but Catholics. Catholic faculty members there had felt it. There had apparently never been a Jew on the faculty there. It's now Platteville State University, but it was then the State College and Institute of Technology, it was largely a mining school. And it sent a lot of engineers to California because you had to have a degree to work and to do all these jobs, and that looked like big money to anybody who was in Platteville. But the economics there were so great that if you wanted gas -- we lived short of, out of town on Magazine Street, that's where there used to be a military magazine for the storage of arms. Much of the lead that got fired south during the Civil War was mined in the Galena Platteville area, more down in Galena, which is in Illinois, but just across the border. I don't think I mentioned Illinois, 'cause that's on this side of the river and I was thinking on that side of the river. But if you wanted to get your car gassed up and didn't want to go get gas yourself, you called up and they came out, two guys came out in a pickup truck. One of them got in your car, they drove back, filled the gas thing up, did what had to be done to the car, always came back spotless, with no extra charge because there were several gas stations and great competition between them. So that gives you some idea of what it was like. Can you imagine? But it was a very poor place. Academic standards were not very high, but in my first class was one of the best students I ever taught, still a friend. And about twenty years ago, I went out to Dartmouth to participate as a visitor in his installation as president of Dartmouth.

BN: It's your first class.

RD: Yeah, he was in my first class. In fact, he was seated in the front row. It was a small classroom, good sized class, but there wasn't a lot of room in that place, if you can imagine. Big fellow, sat with his feet stuck out, and I walk around when I talk. And he seemed never to take a note, and was not sleeping but sort of sitting sleepy-eyed. And I was a culture shock to the people there. Most of the faculty were giving mostly multiple-choice examinations with maybe one essay question. I'd seen some of that at the University of Houston, but there was none of that at UCLA and there had never been any of that in my classes. One class once complained, a small class at UCLA complained that they wanted a multiple choice test. One guy got up and said, "I didn't do very well. I don't know if I'd do this well, but my high school, we had multiple choice tests." And there's a lot of -- you know what would happen, the class said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." They knew they could approach me. I said, "Well, if you want to, I'll give you a multiple choice test. But remember, it's going to be conducted the way a multiple choice test should be. And to each question that you have, there are three possible grades, plus point for a right answer, minus point for a wrong answer, and no points at all for a blank answer." And there was a little nervousness in the class, and some people said, "No, no, no," and they took a vote. And it was like two-thirds said, "Yeah, we'll take a multiple choice," etcetera, and I gave one. And they never wanted to see another one again. I worked very hard in constructing it. For instance, a whole list of historical events, some of them rather obscure, "List them in precise chronological order." And it's hard to make just one mistake. If there were seven on the list, that was a seven percent question, because there were always a hundred questions to make the arithmetic simple. And some students as a result wound up not with zeroes, but with negative grades. And I'd had experience with the other kind of test grading at the University of Houston. And one student at the University of Houston achieved almost the impossible, a three hundred question final exam, all multiple choice, some true and false, some pick the right answer, etcetera. Two hundred and ninety-eight consecutive wrong answers, one right answer, and another wrong answer. Almost, I took it in to the professor and said, "Here's one that's almost perfect." He says, "Oh?" and looks for it, and then saw what kind of perfection it was. [Laughs] And by the way, in that class, eventually, I never counted that exam toward their grades. It was a special exam, but nobody ever asked me for a...

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