 We're recording. Whenever you're ready. Hello, my name is Ashton. This is my partner, Sam, and we are here to interview Dr. Yulia Bingham. As part of the University of Cincinnati History 3097 Honor Seminar course titled Bear Cap Legacies, in collaboration with University of Cincinnati Emeriti Faculty History Project. The date is Wednesday, February 7th, 2018, and the time is 2.13pm. This interview is taking place at the UC Winkler Center, specifically in the Lucas Boardroom. First of all, I'd like to say thank you, Dr. Bingham, for taking your time to help us out here. Now starting off, you've already provided us with some information about your basic biographical information. We did have one quick question of basically what was your family like? What was your family life like when you were a child? They were wonderful. My mother and father, I'm an only child, and I think it was clear that I went to school in Covington where as my I lived with an aunt, my father's sister because they moved to a farm over in Boone County, which is the fastest growing county today. And to a farm, and I had to walk one mile out to catch the bus and hope the bus came. So they decided that for a kindergarten, well there was no kindergarten there. And I should go to kindergarten and I should go to first grade and second grade and third grade and fourth grade and they said, well you're ten years old now and you're old enough to walk that mile. It was a tough when I look back now, I didn't think about it then, but walking a mile in the cold to catch a bus that was usually a little you couldn't determine exactly when it would be there but there were some other kids in the neighborhood and we all stomped our feet and but it was a good experience at that county school in Burlington and I enjoyed, I always enjoyed school, I love school and so but I was an only child and I loved to have cousins come and visit and go visit them. So far as the we raised almost everything we ate, not quite but you know, we had bread that we would buy, but we raised a lot of practically everything we ate and we canned it during the war, the Second World War I remember well we supplied vegetables to our relatives because we had so many and we would can them and we had very good food I didn't feel deprived or anything even though we didn't have very much money my mother used to get a cream check she would from we didn't have a lot of cows but she would skin cream off and they'd sell that and on the bottom there was a little coupon and if you got so many of them you could get like an umbrella to have in the summertime so she'd say that for me I had lots of cousins and they were good to me so I think right now how little I had but I never felt deprived which is good and I worked on the farm gardening, helping raise tobacco So after like your primary education I went to county schools how did your parents feel about you attending college? Well my dad insisted upon it as a matter of fact and that's one of the most wonderful things that I think about my parents they didn't have a lot of money I came over to Cincinnati after I graduated and started interviewing because I always had a summer job I went to work at Woolworth when I was like when I just soon as I was 16 on Saturdays somebody told me about the jobs they had over in Covington but when I graduated I started looking for a job in Cincinnati and I had had summer jobs at one of the banks Fifth Third as a matter of fact but I was looking for a permanent job and I interviewed at Proctor and they said well we will give you a job doing so and so but we will train you and then you have to agree to work for us for five years or whatever it was and I can remember now walking getting out of the car that we had then and my dad was there and he said well how did you do today and I said well I got this offer he said I told you I wanted you to go to college and I you find out how much it is to go to eastern Kentucky University well it was a college, St. College then for for a year and let me know and I will get the money and so I called a cousin that had gone there and then I called eastern and they said well you can do it if you are not if you don't spend a lot of money for $500 there will be tuition and a meal ticket so I told him and he went to the bank and signed a note and got my $500 I mean can you imagine that it was it was he was a hero and so I didn't incur costs going to college which a lot of people can't say that and when I was started there I got a professor I wanted to be a math major and the math major was filled up with people and so the the biology professor took me in hand and he said oh you want to take some biology not all that math so I thought I want to be a math major so it turned out he said well you know if you would take a course in zoology and botany then you could be a lab instructor because I told him what my finances were and I had enough money for like one meal ticket and I thought well I wish I had two meal tickets for a week so I was always thinking about food so the next year I took the biology courses and then he started putting me into the lab helping students that was my first experience working in a laboratory and it was wonderful math so I didn't go on I started taking all these biology and chemistry courses and they became my life really and besides that I got paid for being a student assistant could have another meal ticket and when I graduated want to hear about that when I graduated I started looking for a job and that was in 1951 I think it was and I looked and looked and looked I finally saw one advertise for a chemical company out here in Pleasant Ridge Hilton Davis chemical company they made Bear Aspern, they made detergents, they made a lot of different things and I applied out there the summer after I graduated and they gave me a job and I held that job for two years and it was a eye opener I can remember a man standing emptying a tank of naphthalene and it was set up in there and you had to take a torch and heat the tank up to get it to come out and one day something happened to the hose and he was splashed with that he had a uniform on but that uniform stuck to his body, it was horrible and I will tell you that every day the fire department came at least once sometimes twice I had a pretty good job there really the building wasn't very hazardous anyway unless the building went up but I remember one day a woman who had graduated from UC was swirling something and she says you know somebody told me that this chemical that's in here that I'm cleaning this beaker with has been seen and it will cause leukemia and I said well I wouldn't use it anymore and I thought huh some of the people out there took interest in me one man had graduated from UC in the biology department in the zoology department and he was going on to he graduated with a PhD and he was going to another site and do research and he told me he said you know you really ought to apply there because you've been here two years right away at this so I talked to my parents and they said sounds like a good idea so I applied and they said well we don't have a place for you we have all our stipends used up and the week before school started one of the people dropped out and they called me and I said I'll take it and I left the chemical company and I worked on Saturday for a while and had a little more money but and then I was at UC and I told the story about they called me Max and got my masters and got my PhD and it was at UC it was great for the first three years I was there and then they finally took somebody else but it was an interesting place because I would have to teach a lot of anatomy and dissecting animals almost every I won't say everybody but I'd say 70% of the students there were Jewish they were all hoping to go to medical school here in Cincinnati because there were only two places in the U the S that really took any Jewish students very many and that was in New York and in Cincinnati so everything was great I enjoyed the teaching and everybody was good to me my major professor was wonderful but I couldn't live on $900 a month and I had a little apartment so I always had a job besides the teaching job and that's when I went I think I talked about that to the Jewish hospital and worked for Dr Schwartz because I needed a little more money and I don't recall whether I told you after he his grant was over he took me to the Department of Environmental Health which wasn't a department then it was called the Kettering Laboratory and and introduced me to somebody who gave me a job and which was Ray Suskin and Dr. Robert Kehoe ran the the laboratory and I learned more about what happens to people when they work did I tell you about the woman who came in I don't think I did one of the first things I did he knew I had been a chemist so he had me mixing up solutions and they were going to skin test this woman this woman came in and she was broken out from her hands or arms across here and Dr. Suskin said she was a seamstress and she would make uniforms and the fabric would go across her lap like that and we talked about it with her and so we decided we would take some of that fabric and see if we could get anything from water and alcohol solutions and see what came out of it well it was like a green excuse me a green color and so Dr. Suskin did some skin tests on her and they all flared up well what that said was that she was sensitized to the fabric and the color in that fabric and so he began to see different things like that I can remember taking products from Procter and Gamble that they wanted tested on animals and giddy pigs and swiping the giddy pigs with a brush with this material to see if it made them break out so that's sort of the way I moved in a little bit more to health and safety and it just seemed like after my first couple experiences that I just got more and more involved there was a horrible I was a technician during this period taking classes trying to finish my PhD still with that $900 but I also had a job that I would go to and particularly after work and on Saturday and one thing happened before I got my degree I think it was like 60 it was 57 or 58 one thing that happened was they called me and said we're going to go out to this plant and they make dyes and some of the men are having trouble urinating and one of them has bladder cancer we don't know about the other one so the other one had bladder cancers so we went out there and took samples and by the time it was all over I don't know there was an epidemic of bladder cancer because those people had worked in that plant where this dye stuff was used to dye material and there were two or three things like that that came up and I just became very interested in what could happen to people in the workplace and it really became my life I got my degree but I stayed working with them until I got my degree and then they offered me a job so you're doing all this work in occupational safety at what point does the government start to express interest in you and how did you transfer working in academia to going into the government well I was hired by the catering laboratory which became the department of environmental health with Dr. Keeho and started doing research and mostly my research was supported by at the beginning was supported by industry for example there was this lawsuit and this fellow had cancers on his arm and there was a lawsuit and the judge said well take this to the catering laboratory and have them test the material that leaks on him his arms well he does this cutting of the machinery of the machine and so I my boss came to me and he said test this on mice our system for testing materials to see if they cause cancer and he said it'll probably be a year before they ever get cancer they'll paint the material on the back of the mouse so I don't know about 30 weeks into the experiment if you want to call with that I said well we've got tumors and I said yep I showed him and he said well I'll call the judge because the judge had said to the company up here in Ohio we won't settle this case this lawsuit until we've tested this so when that happened the judge said okay case is settled we're going to give the man we should get compensation and so there were a lot of chemicals from industry particularly the petroleum industry that were sent to the laboratory and I did the testing of them and it's interesting that some of the people were physicians and head of health and safety for large petroleum companies and they were very honest with me they would say now when you dilute this material so you can paint it on the skin or your technician will don't use benzene don't use benzene and use toluene or xylene and make sure it's as pure as you can get don't have any benzene and I said well why is this he said well because it causes leukemia okay so that's what I always did so when I got to OSHA that was one of the first standards I put out was a benzene standard and I did a lot of work in that area and somebody who worked on cancer out in California, Paul Kotin and Hans Falk left California because they were working on cancer that you get from air pollution and they went to the National Cancer Institute and they heard about my work and they called me up and they said well will you come to the cancer institute and talk to us about your work and how you test animals and I said yes and I went there and they gave me a contract actually it wasn't a contract it was a cooperative agreement and that was probably in the 70s early 70s and I had that until I went to Washington it just kept going so it was I don't know 15 16 years and until I left the department but I did that there would be sometimes another terrible thing and I would help work on some of those episodes and I became very interested in chemical carcinogenesis and if there's anything I mean it wasn't just it wasn't just toxicology although that was part of it but it was chemical carcinogenesis one things in the environment particularly the workplaces cause cancer and when in 1970 I went to a meeting of the industrial hygiene folks up in Canada and Richard Nixon had just been elected and he had agreed to and the carers agreed to make this a little laboratory here on worker health and safety into the national institute for occupational safety and health and it's located here in Cincinnati and has been once it was made that institute and so I worked with those people and I started publishing after the act was passed I worked with some unions one of the things I used to test was materials they used in industry in the petroleum industry and there was a big episode where the unions that were in the petroleum industry in the asked the companies to give them a medical care and train them about what were the hazards there and do something about it and one company held out all the other companies assigned off on the contract and this one company just in Texas and I never worked with unions before and Tony called me and said you were in favor of workers being trained about the workplace and the hazards and this company won't do it and you know all the rest of them have signed up he asked me to come to Washington and be on a panel and I did it everybody was I think a Nobel Prize winner but me and I was the only woman and he just shows you how naive I was they said the last question all these people from the newspapers in Washington kept asking questions the last question was do you support a boycott of this company I'm just a country I didn't say it I thought I don't know I never supported a boycott I don't know and everybody went down the line and the Nobel Prize winners all said oh yeah and they got to me I said I don't know I've never boycotted anything before and that was the last question so Tony who was head of the union came down with these wives laughing like hell and I said oh my god I'm so sorry but I was just so taken back and he said it was wonderful we all looked so honest when you did that so you know I started working with unions after that and I guess some of the unions began to recognize me and what happened I think what led to Washington was the act was passed and they had committees committees by the department of labor on carcinogens and I got asked to be on that and was on it and spoke out and it was somewhat personal because here in Ohio there were rubber factor plants and it was so terrible in those plants lots of people would just fall over with cancer and so I knew a little bit about that and they started asking me to be on committees from the department of labor and they asked me to be the chair of the committee on coke oven emissions coke ovens and we used to be these big furnaces in the steel industry that they put a coal into and coke and fired them up so that they would use that to do the iron and steel so I just kept going from one thing to the next and worked with unions and worked on several big committees and so when Jimmy Carter well I had taken a trip with some people who were out of the UAW and auto workers and Sweden invited people to come from unions and in let's see that was about 1976 and somebody asked me to go and so I went with this group of people some workers, some union people and some political people and learned about what they were doing in Sweden and they were so far ahead of us in everything they did in terms of looking after the workplace and then and I just kept doing committee work and then as a result of that trip to Sweden there were people who worked on Jimmy Carter's campaign I didn't work on it but you know I wasn't that political but they knew what I had done in other workplace situations so the unions got together and decided they would put my name in the pot and one day I was in my laboratory and I got a call from the transition committee and I left Adam it was interesting then they called me back and said who would like for you to come in and talk to President Carter President what was President Carter because it was January and I said I'm not interested I can't read Cincinnati so it turned out that I had a large laboratory by that time a lot of NIH grants and industry grants and the most important person with working with me was this African American man and I knew his family and everything and he says you've got to go you've got to go and talk to him and I said oh Bill I can't well you've got to do it so they called me back and I went and talked to President Carter and that's on the YouTube what I talked to him what he said to me and what I said to him I was interviewed and I can tell you more about that but I came and talked to Secretary Marshall at the Labor Department and I told him I said you know I have all these grants I can consult he said you sound just like me and here I am so the people at the university said you've got to go you know because I was the one really let's face it and so I did and I can tell you about the conversation Carter and I had if you want to hear it but it was and as a matter of fact I was registered Republican and I told him I said I'm registered Republican and they said well you sound like a Democrat I said well here it is Billy Gradison had somebody who was against him and so I registered and voted of course for him but I felt no pressure to be a Democrat or Republican when I was there it was just going after things what else do you want to know I don't do too much kind of more towards the becoming director of OSHA how did you feel your responsibilities changed from being like an advisor or an consultant to the actual director of the organization well I felt like well let me tell you let me say when I went up to the Hill I talked to Congressman David Obey from Wisconsin who was head of the Appropriations Committee and I wasn't sworn in yet but they wanted me to talk to him and he said to me what's the most important thing that you think you can do and I said well we need some standards for certain chemicals but the most important thing for me that's lacking the department does some of those standards but what's lacking is there is $500,000 spent by the department of labor on training workers and I think they need to train workers they need to train the unions they need to because I think that workers need to know about what the hazards are and he said how would $2 million help I just was floored I said well be wonderful and I went back to the office and I told the holdovers that they weren't they were the next level down they said oh my god you should never have done that you should never say something like that that has to all go through the system and the secretary and the president has to agree to all that and I said well he asked me and he's on the committee and I told him what I thought and they said well you'll never get it this year well of course even though the budget was already passed he made sure I got it they went back and put it in our budget and I just did what I thought you should do and the secretary Marshall was very I never asked to do anything that he didn't back me up on and I have to say that except for one thing the same thing for me I went over there because some of the people didn't want us to regulate the cotton dust industry and there had been a lawsuit and well I should tell you there had been a lawsuit and the department of labor had dealt with cotton dust and probably the third week I was in office I got this call and they set up this meeting for me with the Brown Lung Association they worried about people who had bisonosis, the cotton dust disease and they came in and it was a room about like this and they said the chair sat there and I sat here and all these people and it was like this and they said I'll have to get up and leave and they told me that they had been waiting for three or four years whatever it was for a standard and they wanted me and I said I'll do whatever I can and when we got this this was really fought tooth and nail by the cotton dust industry and I one day I went into the office and we had the standard all ready to go out and Secretary Marshall was there and he said oh I just got a call Jimmy is going to call me Jimmy Carter and so I was there when he took the call and one of the people from was head of I forgot his name he was in charge of making sure that administration didn't cost industry too much and he has talked to the president and the president says we really need to come over and talk with him about it even though he had approved it well I thought what are we going to do and I called some people from Mount Sinai I called the man from a pathologist and I told them I said you know if the president doesn't agree to this standard I'm going to stay here and Irv Selikov was sort of the boo-roo in New York City on a disease pulmonary disease from asbestos and I told him and he said you're right and I thought what can I do and I got out the book on industrial hygiene and I went to the part where it says these are the control the hierarchy of controls and the one that's recommended is you engineer it out and you get as low as possible so that you don't cause the disease and it went down the very last thing was you put people in respirators because it doesn't work really so I went over there, Fritz Mondale was there about a half dozen people and Carter was so very nice he said well tell us why you're doing this so I went into it and Mr. President this is the book on industrial hygiene and these are the hierarchy of controls and I went down and he was an engineer and that was it and he said well how does this sound we'll put off requiring it for so many months and then they'll have to come into compliance and he named the steps they would have to do but they'll have to come into compliance and I couldn't believe it I just couldn't believe it nobody else could and I went back to the office and they met me in the hall and it was very emotional I was crying they said oh my god she's going home I said no I'm not because I said well no he agreed that everybody didn't have to wear a respirator they would try to phase it in in different places so that was a wonderful thing for Carter to do that it was the south come on and probably grew caught at some point in time but anyway that was a big thing for me because I knew he supported if I could make the case the only thing he didn't support was there was something a material that was used on submarines and he put that off for a period of time and then I my appointment was over but I came back to the university came back to my department and took me a while oh maybe a few weeks to get back into things and one day the president called me up Henry Winkler and I had met Henry when he was made president about halfway through my term he and his wife I met with UC graduates up in Washington area and they invited me to come and they were very nice and then when I got back I was back and for I don't know I don't know a few months and the man who was vice president for research and graduate studies B.P. left and it was he was the vice president for research and graduate studies and he was I had two jobs really Dean of the graduate school graduate school used to be in that and so he asked me to come and do that and I said oh no I want to do my research but he convinced me I should do it and it was possible for me to still be on committees in my profession and it was wonderful it was a great job you got an opportunity to make sure departments got you helped people coming in to get money to set up their laboratory and that's the story of my life and then I I did that for what from 1980 maybe until 1991 and I kept I didn't do a lot in the laboratory but I did do a lot of publications and so I went back and got a grant started working in health and safety again one of the things that I did that helped me out was I had issued a standard for labeling which was a big thing for workers to know what was in a bag of chemicals and when the new administration came in they withdrew that standard and so Henry let me take time and I went around all over the United States Alaska Seattle California a lot of state legislatures people upset about it and I had the unions here in Cincinnati were wonderful they passed and the city council passed a resolution that said the fire in the fire code they put a regulation in that said you had the bags of stuff chemicals labeled can you imagine that? Roxanne Pauls was big on that and I worked I would work with legislators make speeches and go California when I needed to get that straight now and one day I got on the plane to go to Washington for some committee when somebody from Proctor was on there well you won you won I said what do you mean I won he said well they're going to put back the standard and label everything and that'll be a federal rank so that's how I won one of the things that happened the fellow was appointed after me to head OSHA was the son of a contractor in Florida very well off and this young man got the job and I don't know he did what he was told to do by the other people around I'm sure and really didn't want to do a lot of stuff regulations that should have come out and I would say about five years after he left OSHA his son fell off of a scaffold in Florida that was on their site their company so it was horrible for him and I'm sure he thought a lot about his former job anyway one of the things they did was after I left we had this brochure of this man in the cotton dust industry and this brochure had a picture of a man who had terrible pulmonary disease and he was on oxygen because what they were doing brown lung disease people were going and trying to get the cotton dust in the cotton dust manufacturers to follow the OSHA rules and they had this brochure and it was it upset some people so they tried to withdraw but it turns out that you can't get rid of anything when the government makes a brochure like that they can't just destroy it so anyway but we finally got it straight now what else they came back and started doing things here again I started working I got a call from I got a call from a union guy and he said would you go down to Oak Ridge with me we got some people their construction workers who work down there at the Oak Ridge facility and they got all kinds of problems down there diseases and he said come let's talk to the union this one union and I said okay so I went down there and I listened to all these stories about what was going on at the Department of Energy and what had gone on for a long time back when they were building the bomb and you know once you get the radiation around it doesn't go away so I came back and thought about it and talked to him this union guy and I said if you'll be on the grant I'm going to put a grant into NIOSH to see if they will support us doing a study and I did put a grant in and lo and behold they funded it and so we went down there and did this study and it was really we did the study with construction workers now the construction workers at that site were hired out of the union hall to do a job that would last maybe for two years or maybe it would last for six months and they would go in on a truck to where they were supposed to work I interviewed a lot of them and this one fellow told me about going into this one building and they were supposed to remodel it and they ripped the boards up and all this silver stuff came rolling out but it was mercury it was mercury and well during the time they were trying to build the bomb I guess Oak Ridge had the world supply of mercury down there and I guess they didn't have ventilation anyway they so anyway we did the study from NIOSH and then it turned out that the unions were working with the congress and they got the a law that had in it medical exams and medical removal protection depending on what your disease was and this was what 10 years 20 years after I had been in OSHA and these workers construction workers not the plant workers full time had never had a chest x-ray no matter you know they had no medicals so we worked with the congress and got that and I worked on that far well I don't know I worked back at Oak Ridge and some other places particularly with construction workers because the other people had a different way of medical care and I did that up until recently and I still do a little work on it I still do a little damn it so that's where I've been I started cutting back on research and not got any more grants and I just last June stopped at all I was still on for 1% or 2% but I still I'm on the DOE committee for this and that for workers and still do things like that still wrong advisory committees for the government really and that's my life it's incredible so I'm kind of bringing it back to the university Cincinnati sorry were there notable differences at UC during the 80s as opposed to like when you were a student when I was what when you were doing like your graduate work here were there any notable differences from when you were a faculty member as opposed to being a student well the first of all that building that tower was built and you know there's so much space and equipment and we didn't have all that but you know they always got the specimens for you to dissect and field trips were very important there was I can remember in the spring we would go out to this one place where we would collect well we collected a lot and but what happened to me when I was doing my research was I was working at Kettering and there would be people there if I wanted to buy some things extra they had money from projects that would help do it if the department didn't have it so the budget was so much greater now for research and I will say this Wiker who was head of an apartment and then Jack Godcheng who was head they didn't have much money for almost no money for you to go out and buy things well from my perspective it wasn't difficult because I was working at Kettering and there was always material there that I could use they wanted me to get my degree so I could work full time so that was a big difference is to have enough money available to buy things and it's not that way now they have budgets for that and there are more grants in the department and but I'm not complaining because the department was good and I'm sure if I had asked Dr. Wiker for $50 to buy some chemical have it already in the locked up somewhere he would have come up with that I never felt that was a inhibition and probably because when I was really doing my research I was working at Kettering and the medical school they were pretty far ahead in terms of having money from somewhere to buy equipment with equipment or chemicals the most money if they had to be spent on equipment or chemicals was spent for the laboratories that undergraduates had to take and there were a lot more people who did work with they would study the animals in their environment or they would collect animals and try treatments and this or that the research then wasn't as chemically related as it is now I had my research was fairly chemical but I was able to get the chemicals from the department of environmental health the Kettering place and that's one big difference is one big difference but the the help that you got from the professors was really good actually was wonderful Weikert was head of the department and he was he was good one of the things for example there was a fellow who eventually became head of the department Jack Gottschalk and he gave us a test at the end and I didn't go on all the field trips because I worked but I did as many as I could and one of the final questions one of the questions on the final was what is D period O period R period stand far when you see it in a collection and what in the world is that well it stands for dead on road well I wasn't on that field trip and I put down Dan old rattler and he read the thing and started laughing and called some of the other professors it was wonderful so it was a good place it was good the graduate program was good graduate students helped other graduate students everybody helped the people who were trying to go to medical school you know and I think I perhaps told about the one guy that saw me he was a physician down there and he screamed so that's there wasn't as much money available for departments as there is now and that's good and the people now who are hired a lot more are into what I'll call instead of whole animal work actually are spinning out fractions and it's a lot more chemical related one of the things we used to do though that was wonderful in the spring there was there's a pond somewhere up here in Ohio where according to the ice of fames in the meridian as Dr. Dreyer used to say the fairy shrimp are due at was a wall in pond but I'll say wall in pond this week and these are little they're fresh water fairy shrimp they're about this big and we used to go out there and collect was a big thing for them and anyway they probably don't do that anymore you know so throughout your time here have you noticed any changes in attitude over the years just like how they view school their work at the center I don't I will have to say that the students I've known and I you know was I started teaching graduate students at Kettering in 1961 because I was pregnant I remember and my the first two or three five people that did got a master's in industrial hygiene were in my class and I can't say there's much difference from them than people now and I must say that people worked hard those people who were in the department of zoology back when I got my degree well you know people didn't get a lot of stipend they got free tuition if they taught classes and they wanted to get finished and get out and get a job because some of them had families and others were pre-med students and they wanted to go to medical school and people wouldn't work like dogs now I taught the labs I mean I taught them to dissect all kinds of animals including cats I'm sorry to say because I love cats but they would come in from a vendor ready for you to dissect and sharks and one thing and another but they worked like dogs people never and they never complained about being there on the weekends and I don't think they do today it's people in that they love what they do so kind of throughout your career I'm sure you've noticed and dealt with a multitude of changing technologies how do you feel that how do more advanced technology shape academia and how does that affect your role more advanced technology it came so slowly that I don't know I never think back the way it used to be if something new comes and you can afford to get it or put it on a grant you go after it one of the things that happened in zoology when I was there is most of those people almost all were students who were just out of college or if not a year or two out whereas over in environmental health the first students that I knew there had worked for industry for the government the Navy used to send students so they were different they they came in now if you were if you wanted to get to medical school sometimes you had people who were like this but in the Kettering students or environmental health medical center they were more like this is a job and you would come in sometimes on the weekends but they didn't hang around until 10 o'clock at night that was different I mean the people in the graduate now more recently the people in the medical school and the people on campus they were like pretty much the same looking trying to figure out how they're going to get money to support their research they're they're all very focused on once they decide what their thesis is going to be they're really focused on that it's you know it's just it's different is it better I guess but a lot of people when I first went and knew about the Kettering a lot of those people were married with kids and so they were a little more laid back I guess about things that had their ups and downs so as we've heard from other professors that are now retired there are a lot of social movements that greatly affected the main campus such as and the Vietnam War do you think the medical campus specifically was as strongly affected by these? I don't think it was affected as much as the other campus because the medical campus was dealing with people who were already out of college and I would say the students that were in my class the first year I taught at the Kettering in 1961 they'd all been in service there was one guy who came who was from Wisconsin and he had just graduated from college but everybody else had been in the service we had a lot of people who were in the Navy and it made a difference for me in my experience with him and you know and I will say this sometimes except for well I don't know I can say that Pyramid students are very focused they're very focused and they're even now but back then we had a large Jewish population and because there were two places in the U.S. that took a lot of Jewish kids in this was one of them and they were after acceptance to be physicians and maybe their family their grandfather their father was a physician and the people I had over in Kettering it's a little different they're younger now some of them are younger now but I would say that the class that we have at least half of them have been out working for at least a year before they came back and it makes a difference when you have students who have been in the workplace and then come back somehow they think they're spending money to go but I would say the Vietnam War it just made everybody who came they were likely to be in the service had people come from a lot of people from the Air Force and from the Navy had a place over here and I never I I'm trying to think about the whole business of the people in the the problems that were during the civil rights the main person I picked to work with ask him if he would work with me he was in another department and I got along with him I got along with his family and I asked him to come work with me and when Dr. Kehoe gave me this big lab and we had the fellow who was actually we have more we had more African Americans then that we have now in our department it's very sad very sad we have Chinese and but we don't have African Americans that's not good for the university the we had quite a few and we still have quite a few African Americans who are graduate students I can't say anymore I mean I told you I didn't notice that what you were talking about that much so I had to go back to think about it so usually professors have to strike a balance between teaching and doing their own research medical campus professors strike a different balance more research more research a lot more research you're expected to pay your way that's the way it is you get your salary you come up with your salary at least in our department now probably there were when I first started there were some basic science departments because there wasn't much research money and who taught Gross and Ann or whatever and but now it's different so kind of cycling back to student culture you mentioned how motivated and dedicated medical students were in their studies and how they wanted to ensure so one aspect of being a student in contemporary college is that there is this huge emphasis on job security so do you think that medical students once they get into med school are more competitive or do you think it was more competitive while they were still premed once you back then and I think it's still true now it's hard to get into medical school and so once you get in you know people help each other out that's my impression and it was that way when I was in graduate school and had a lot of you know one of my best woman friend was wanting to go to medical school and then and but you know there's so much stress on you to come up with because you had to have a great point of average and you know you had to I think particularly among Jewish kids it was difficult because if they didn't get in here they weren't going to get into New York because they didn't live in New York I mean we had medical students who were in zoology were from all over the US it's probably not that way now but I after that once they were in medical school people relaxed they did their work but they'd help each other out and I think that was a big thing and I guess well I knew how stressed people were because I taught the labs over there in the biology department the regular first year lab and the anatomy lab and I went through them all so that's and I don't think today I don't know what this I mean I can't really speak a lot about today because I don't see those pre-med students very much it's probably the same because it's already in medical school no matter where and but they relaxed once they got over got in school so moving forward are there any changes that you'd like to see happen at the university either on main campus or medical campus or both well I don't deal with the medical I mean with the university campus that much as I used to when I was Vice President and came back I think that there's not as much on this what I'll call collegiality on this campus as there could be and even and I'll I don't want to badmouth my department but in my department there was a lot of collegiality we had people would go to bowling teams there's no bowling team over there now I bring their kids on campus for the bowling and there was more collegiality and not much of that goes on in the medical center the and in our department it's entirely different because we have the chair of the department who has her laboratory on one floor one wing and she locks keeps the doors locked and she brings over students from China who don't speak any English and he have keys and they go in and the doors locked the whole quarter where I did 20 years worth of work nobody goes in there anymore except those students that she brings over on the card and that's now there's one unit in our department I'll call it the industrial hygiene they they're mostly engineers now they got getting some women in it but they're sort of like the old the old way it was everybody helps each other out but the toxicology is not that way anymore it used to be that way and I can remember myself and my African American guy that was in my laboratory worked with me we would help anybody intubate an animal or do this or do that up and down all the quarters he was a special person one day he and I were doing something at the bench together and he went like this and I said Bill was a man and he didn't answer me and I put my arms around him and got him in a chair and called for a nurse that was close and we got him a bed for him and the ambulance came and took him and his kidneys were gone he ended up being treated and eventually when it was four brothers the kidney and he lived 20 years after that as long as living recipient here and we were a family and I don't see any families like that the lab people with each other were family is what I'm trying to say and you never hesitated to stop and help somebody out and I don't see that there are little groups of people here and here that's different and it's different cultures I'm sure and I'm not blaming anybody but it's different cultures as to how and we had people we had people in the lab back then who came from oh Yugoslavia they escaped when Pito or whoever came in they blended in and we pat each other on the back but it just doesn't happen anymore there's little people who come here from other countries don't blend in as well and it may be Americans fault or it may be their fault I don't know but there are some conditions that happen on campuses that make it more difficult but locking people in this quarter or that quarter not having free access and that's a lot that's wonderful when you can go around actually this campus has more of that than it does over in in that building that I've been in and I don't know maybe it's that way in chemistry I don't know about that so it's you know it's one of I guess growing pains with immigrants from certain countries I wouldn't want to be getting a job in Ohio without a degree if I were from Mexico now you know and maybe I don't know I think my grandfather my grandmother came from Germany and maybe she felt it I don't know maybe it's just inevitable so but I don't know what you can do there are probably things you can do and not do to make it easier if you're going to have immigrants and our department has fewer African Americans now than they did when I came over there in 1960s isn't that interesting so who knows so I'm candid as we near the end of the interview would you mind telling us what your favorite memory of UC is my favorite memory well I have quite a few it was wonderful being vice president for research and graduate studies I loved when this guy brought the current president over to me and said we got to have this guy for an assistant professor and he's from a school in Pennsylvania and he needs this, this and this and to be able to help them out have enough budget to help them it was wonderful that made me feel so good and I was able to I loved being with arts and sciences faculty and the other faculty meetings they would come in they accepted me and that was wonderful I was so happy I must say that I was never treated like a woman I'll say it that way by the faculty when I was vice president it was that I was one of them and it was wonderful I can remember Bill Joyner who was a big concho in physics and was always tweaking the administration on things and my office was on the same building and when I first got that took that job he stuck his head in one day and said I'm Bill Joyner and I knew he was a big political guru and always fighting the administration and I said he brought up a subject it was a good subject and I said come on in and sit down and from then on he would come at the door and I said come on and sit down Bill and you know that was so important because he was a president of the faculty and I felt so accepted by the faculty and it was wonderful I always felt accepted by the faculty in my department but the rest the medical faculty really never knew who I was by and large because they were just doing medical students I was doing graduate students in my in environmental health we really didn't do much with medical students and that was great and it was great to be able to see people who had been hired help them get started setting up their laboratory helping them out one of the things that happened I didn't cause it to happen but Dick Celeste who ran the Peace Corps and he became governor twice and that was when I was VP for research and graduate studies and he got the state to come up with this bags of money and gave them to the universities and I was able to go to the faculty and talk about having this money if you've got a really good research project and you need some money to hire somebody for a couple of quarters or you need a piece of equipment which you put it in and that was just spectacular with this that resulted in an engine we had eminent scholars I guess they still do but that resulted in helping start that and you could get them going so that was really a wonderful thing that happened while I was over there and I don't know that's what I can think of and I'll be honest what helped me the most in my career was getting approval to be on committees at the federal and state level a committee on we're going to study um Pistoplasmosis we're going to study this and would you come help us decide how we should set that up I was on advisory committees for the Department of Labor before I ever went to Washington and what it does is at the state level when Dick Celest came back he had several committees and I was on two of them that is really maybe it's just because I'm a woman it really made me know that I was accepted and somebody was making a statement that seemed to me that she's okay it's hard it was hard when I was first starting out and I suppose my undergraduate they were so accepting of me and I worked in a chemical plant where they were all men men or young kids out of school so I was one of the boys and if you did your job then they accepted you there and that helped me I think at UC when Henry Winkler for example knew I was in Washington and he when he first came here he and his wife met me up there and they invited me to come the chairman of the board of trustees was very accepting of me which really helped out I was trying to think of something else that helped it's gone to be accepted helps and I'm sure it's difficult I mean maybe people who are from various cultures they have a hard time because they stick with their they don't know whether they're accepted so that may be something that ought to be worked on a little bit more at the university I don't know if you've heard anybody talk about that or not the other thing I can remember Henry Winkler when I came back was ready to retire and he called me in the office one day and they were looking for candidates and they had this one of the candidates was from Connecticut and the funny thing is he worked for a gun company Joe Steger, you've heard of Joe and Henry sent me up there to interview Joe at a club up in the airport clubs and I thought, oh my goodness what am I going to do but we got along fine and great appointment I'll tell you what was great about it Joe Steger would go out early in the morning or after five o'clock and go around to the buildings and see who was cleaning the women and the men who were doing all that work he knew every one of them he knew their name I knew that was a special thing to do that and that makes those people feel like they're needed so what may be our final question if you had to give one piece of advice to a college student now what would it be? to a college student now? oh my one piece of advice really to depend on the college student do they have enough money to go to school on? I mean in my life that was always a big issue where was I going to get the money so that's a big thing now if you're a college student and your parents are paying you away and you don't have to worry I would give those students is find somebody who needs help and help them out you know be a big brother or a big sister or be a colleague and that's what I would say if they don't have to worry about their tuition then that would be the thing you know do something nice for somebody that you don't have to do it for I mean it's only helping them with their homework sometimes I don't know what else to say Yulia is there anything that they haven't discussed or that you haven't discussed that you'd like to put on the interview for the record and closing? well I would say that I'm not sure I think it was easier when I went to that undergraduate school down there eastern Kentucky people were nicer to each other and I think people were nicer to each other when I came here to graduate school in many ways even if they didn't say that they had to call me Max they couldn't call me Yulia Lee but that they were still nice to me and I think where I am now in the department people are not nice to each other and it would be a very we have groups of people here from a country we have some from another country and they tend to stick together and I'm not saying that's wrong well because they want to be comfortable and I don't know I haven't really thought about this I don't know how you make them feel more comfortable one of the things I'll say that I did that I'm glad I did and I try to do it is we get new students in and we had a couple of students from Africa and they worked in menial jobs and they came over to do a degree in industrial hygiene and I looked them up after our first seminar where everybody came together and some of them were really on money they saved to come and they just needed somebody to come and talk with them and I sort of made it my business to do that and one of them wanted to be go on with his degree and he was working hard and I decided to have when I was vice president I decided I was going to have a fund that would be you have to put so much money in before they spend it all they'll take the interest off of it and when I moved back to my department they started spending the money and I said no no an endowment or something and I said that's to be an endowment and it's not it doesn't have $50,000 and I'm trying to give this $2,000 or $5,000 a year depending to a student you wanted to give it to a student you wanted to give that money to a student yeah and I decided that I was going to have an endowment because there were some students who really could use $1,000 and I decided to put it in industrial hygiene and I just got a big award from a group out in California in industrial hygiene not because of that but I finally got the money in there and the first award I gave was to this woman who was a her uncle was a graduate student with me and the other, the first I didn't have one award to be made but I made two dug in my pocket one was to her and one was to this fellow who told me about how he worked in saving the money to come here to do the industrial hygiene program and the way I gave them the award was that they could use that award to go to the national meeting and that's what they were to use it for and that way they could go and meet people from all over the United States in industrial hygiene and you know we I don't know we just need to help students sometimes I mean I'm not rich but but you know I don't live high and it's you need to help some of these people out a little bit with just a little something that I think one of them got a thousand and the other one got a thousand dollars but when it made it so that they could go to the industrial hygiene meeting and have a place to live so I don't know that you can ask all faculty members to do that it depends on you know whether they been as lucky as I've been so but people ought to be encouraged to give back and well you've done a great job at that and I know those students I'm sure those students appreciate it it's hard I think about the people that come here well I think that concludes it um thank you thank you for doing this where are you going to go next year graduate school I actually still have one year left as a student here after that I'm not sure I really wanted to go to graduate school it's just I'm not sure where I want to go in board since I'm a mechanical engineering major right now I'm kind of balancing between they trying to get an MBA so that I can take more management around an engineering