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TI: Okay, so today is Wednesday, June 26, 2013. We're in Seattle in the Densho studios, and we're going to begin the third interview with Roger Daniels. On camera is Dana Hoshide, and interviewing is Tom Ikeda, that's me. So, Roger, at the end of interview two, we had just finished talking about the publication of Concentration Camps USA and your move from the University of Wyoming to SUNY Fredonia. So this is about the year of 1971. So let's first talk about why you went to SUNY Fredonia. What was your position at SUNY and what responsibilities did you have?

RD: Well, we knew, after we got to Wyoming -- which in many ways I loved. I immediately became very much involved in campus affairs, enjoyed my teaching, enjoyed my colleagues. But the pay was very poor. They had TIAA, but it only covered a portion of your salary, because they have to match it. And the public secondary schools in Laramie were not places I would want my children to go to. And Richard was in the first grade and Sarah was in kindergarten. It was wonderful; our house was in the middle of one block, half a block to the right was the school that Richard went to, half a block to the left was the school where Sarah went to, so that was very good. And the elementary teachers were mostly wives of faculty who were imported, who had come in and been trained elsewhere. I mean, one of her teachers had an M.A. in education from University of Chicago, Richard's teacher had an M.A. from Berkeley, or vice versa. They were good people. But the junior high and the high school were run by local people who represented much of what was awful about Wyoming. The vice principal of the junior high school, for instance, introduced himself to me at a public meeting in which I was the chair, so I was involved in many such things, and assured me that, "Although we've got a lot of" -- and he used a pejorative term for Mexican Americans -- "in the school this year, we'll run most of them out by Christmas. You don't need to worry about that, it'll be a white school." And there was no way I was going to do that. There wasn't a private school in the whole state of Wyoming, so our thought was that if we stayed there, we would have to send our kids to boarding school in Colorado, and we didn't like that particular idea. And we knew that we were approaching a decision, but we had five or six years, we weren't doing anything about it at all.

But hard on the publication of the Concentration Camps book, I began to get feelers from various people. And the university, the distinguished historian in the department at SUNY Fredonia, whom I did not know, contacted me at a history meeting and asked if I would be interested in coming there. I said I would be, and he said, "Well, I'll talk to people." And by the time I got back, there was an airmail special delivery letter -- there was no email in 1971 -- from the dean asking would I come. "We want you to come." I was already a full professor so it had to be that, and that they wanted me to be chair of the department. And I went out there and had a very successful interview. There was no PhD program there and that didn't bother me too much. And the pay was very, very good. I'll tell you a funny story about that. We got there, we'd moved in, and I bring the first paycheck home and I give it to Judith. I go to do something, and she comes to where I was reading or doing something and says, "Roger," she said, "I thought we were making a lot more money, that's what you said." I said, "Yes, we are." She said, "But this is only," she named a very small sum, "only more than the checks we used to get at Laramie." I said, "Judith, they pay every two weeks here." So that despite the high taxes in New York, it was a good deal of money. And Fredonia was, despite the terrible weather, not as bad as Buffalo, but an awful lot of snow. We weren't in the snow belt, which in that part of the country it depends on your altitude. If we got an inch of snow, three quarters of a mile up the road and maybe five hundred feet up, they'd get a foot. But it was that kind of thing, there were very much mini climates. But we liked it in many ways, very, very much.

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