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TI: So Roger, we're going to start up again. And now we're going to jump to the latter part of your time when you were at UCLA as an assistant professor of history. And so we're sort of in the late 1960s, '67, '68.

RD: Well, let's see, when did I come there?

TI: The second time you were there from '63?

RD: Yes, '63. That was the fall of '63, I'd spent two years in Platteville. Our son Richard was born in Platteville. Are we on now?

TI: Yes, we're on now.

RD: Our son Richard was born in Platteville, we came back to Los Angeles, bought a home with the help of Judith's parents, not too far from UCLA, short bus ride. But we couldn't afford Westwood, no two ways about it. Actually, when we first got married, we lived in an apartment in Santa Monica for the year that I spent after the dissertation. Judith and I got married in October.

TI: Okay, so this was your first...

RD: The first year there.

TI: Before Platteville.

RD: Before Platteville. Then we spent two years in Platteville and came back, and Judith resumed her studies at UCLA, I began teaching at UCLA, and we bought this house in West Los Angeles. When I first got back -- and I think I said this before -- Irving Bernstein, who I'd worked for in that Institute of Industrial Relations, told me that I had to meet this Harry Kitano who had just come here, who was very interested in the things that I would be interested in. And he told Harry the same thing. So Harry and I got together and had dinner or lunch or something. Eventually there was a delicatessen that we went to on Pico Boulevard quite regularly, a place called Junior's, which was just recently closed, gone out of business. Really a good delicatessen, and we were almost charter members there. Harry and I, as I think I said,  never had a cross word about anything apart from baseball. We were both great fans of the UCLA basketball team, and those were the great years.

TI: John Wooden?

RD: I knew John Wooden, met him. We had... I forget what year Pauley Pavilion opened, but it opened when we were there, and I had two prime seats for as long as I was still at UCLA, just where I wanted them to be, upstairs in one corner.

TI: Oh, your seats were sort of in a corner in the upper tier? And why there and not lower on the court?

RD: You can't see anything.

TI: Oh, you can't see the plays.

RD: The pattern. No, I learned that... well, I didn't learn it there, but I later learned that the hockey coach in Buffalo, whose name I forget at the moment, very funny guy. He always said that that was the place where he sat, he liked to sit upstairs in the corner because you can see the whole pattern of play. If you're down on the floor, you miss a lot.

TI: So this is a little bit of a segue. But you were there -- and I'm a big fan of college basketball -- and during the heyday of UCLA, they were truly a dynasty in the true sense of the word in terms of college sports. What made UCLA so good?

RD: Well, they had a good coach.

TI: Well, some would say a great coach.

RD: Well, he became a great coach. He had a long period of good coaching in which he didn't win anything. I mean, he won games, but his first championship team was the team that won before Alcindor.

TI: Like Walt Hazzard? Was it that team?

RD: Yes, but that team had nobody bigger than 6'6". Fred Slaughter was the center at that time. But I was on campus -- did I talk about this?

TI: I don't think so.

RD: When Lew Alcindor came to campus. He was so gawky. And shortly after he came to campus, couldn't have been two weeks, I had this big course, five hundred people in it, in Haines Hall 39. And I come in from the back, it's an amphitheater, and god, there he is standing at the podium.

TI: All seven-feet-four of him.

RD: Whatever it was. I think he was still growing. And he says in a very high-pitched voice, "Professor?" So came in, I looked up, "Yes, sir?" He'd lost his pitch pipe, and he was in the class before, and it might have been there, would I ask? So I said, "All right." And I said, "Class, Mr. Alcindor here thinks he may have lost his pitch pipe. Did any of you find a pitch pipe in here this morning?" They said no. And then he looked at me and said, "Thank you, Professor. How did you know my name?" [Laughs] How did I know his name? Just a wonderful example of how naive a young giant can be. He became, of course, he was highly intelligent. He was a history major, by the way. He was never in any of my history courses, and he took mostly Middle Eastern and African American history. But one of my teaching assistants, in a year that he wasn't my teaching assistant, had him in a class, and it really bothered him because this was a big guy. He was 6'6", my teaching assistant, he'd never had to look up to anybody in his life. And to have to look up to his student and look way up, it just bugged him. He couldn't get over that anybody could be that big. But, yeah, those were great days.

TI: And you mentioned you knew John Wooden?

RD: Yes, I knew him.

TI: Because wasn't he also a student of history? Didn't he also enjoy history? For some reason I...

RD: Not to my knowledge. But he was a gentleman, which not all coaches are.

TI: I've read some of his work, and amazingly, because I coached a lot of youth sports, and it was never about winning. He never talked about winning, it was about these other fundamental things that eventually led to winning, but he never really talked about winning a game. It was about separation, those little steps which I so appreciate.

RD: He'd occasionally get thrown out because he really went after referees. But the strongest words he used were something like, "Oh my goodness, that was a terrible mistake."

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.