Oral History Transcript - Empress Zedler - May 4, 1986

Interview with Dr. Empress Zedler

Interviewer: Kenneth D. Farrar

Transcriber: Kenneth D. Farrar

Date of Interview: May 4, 1986

Location: Dr. Zedler’s Home, Luling, TX

_____________________

Zedler: That’s a long time ago, October the, no, it was dated October 28, 1965. That’s great.

Farrer: That’s a copy. You can keep that if you like.

Zedler: I will. I’ll be delighted to—how long it has been. And it’s a pleasure to look this over—that’s fine. We were so delighted when it stood up under the U.S. Treasury Department scrutiny.

Farrer: What was the process then in getting it started? Did you and the other members of the board sit down and write it up? Did you have legal assistance to write it up?

Zedler: Uh, no, the Attorney General of the State of Texas met with the president of our university, and he [the attorney general] was the advisor to the president, and General Miller Ainesworth, who was the first chairman of our first board; those three people set up the charter.

Farrer: He was the attorney general?

Zedler: No, I don’t know who was the attorney general at the time, but whoever was the Attorney General of the State of Texas assisted the president of our university in setting this up, and it was done up in one week’s time. I was not present, and we had no board. We had to have the instrument before we could appoint a board. So, I have to talk to you—the thing that started this way was my need for, as chairman of the special education foundation, I mean, as chairman of the special education department, at Southwest Texas, I felt the need to—for monies that we could use that did not, were not, appropriated by the State of Texas because I wanted to go outside for assistance in improving the expertise of our students. Excellence in scholastics has always been in my aim, and here we were, located in San Marcos, Texas, I belonged to some national organizations, but I could not depend upon myself to go out to meetings and bring back the information our students needed. They needed contact, I felt, with the world’s best authorities on the subjects we were studying, namely the education of handicapped people, whether this was in hearing or in mentality or in emotional disturbance or speech or language, whatever it was. I would go to these national and international meetings of the organizations to which I belong, I think that tells you that I belong to many, and I would hear lectures and wish that my students could hear them and wish that they could have the advantage that I was having. And so I came back and requested—inquired as to how to get the money—all it would take was money. Lecturers and teachers have to be paid, and I found that famous people in my field, that they were willing to come to Texas if we could pay them. But we had no monies to pay them, we couldn’t, the State of Texas could not appropriate for Southwest Texas College, at that time, monies to pay anyone other than elected members of our staff and then people elected to be on our staff.

So, in my frustration, I began to ask friends how I could get $2,000 that would bring to our campus in the summer of 1965, I guess it was, yes, how could I bring to our campus famous people to teach us—to get the money. And I found it was very difficult. And the first question asked [of] me was, “Do you have a tax-free instrument? We’re willing to give you money if you have a tax-free instrument.” I didn’t even know what the term meant at that time. But I said, “I’ll find out,” so I called the president of our university; at that time we were not a university, we were a teacher’s college and so small, and I was on such, we were all on personal intimate terms with our president because he was the last and the first avenue of invention and intervention, so to speak. So I called Dr. Flowers, John Flowers, at 12:00 at night, which shocked him a little bit, I’m sure he’d been asleep a long time, and asked him if we had a tax-free instrument. And he said, as I’ve told you before, he called me “Mrs. Zedler” when he was displeased with me and “Dr. Zedler” when he was delighted because, you see, there were no women with PhD degrees on our campus, there was only one, I think, when I was in—when I finally got my PhD. And he was very proud of anybody on his staff with a PhD, much less a woman. But having been aroused at 12:00 at night, he said, “Mrs. Zedler, do you know what time it is?” and I said, “Yes, I do, I know it’s after midnight. But do we have a tax-free instrument?” and he said, “Why do you ask such a question?” and I said, “If we do have, I can get some money to use freely for our students, for the benefit of our students.” He said, “That we do not have, but we will have, we’ll start the ball rolling on Monday.” And I said, “What shall I do?” and he said, “You said to me whoever suggested such an idea to you that we needed a tax-free instrument.” And so General Miller Ainsworth, who was my friend, who had been present when I made the rash statement, “If I just had $2,000, I could bring to my campus one of the world-famous people to teach for us this summer.” And General Ainsworth went to Austin with the president of the university, and the next thing I knew we had a charter, and a board of directors was appointed at my suggestion, “Whom would you put on the board of directors?” Every person on this board of directors, with the exception of, let me see, two people, General Ainsworth and Mrs. D.C. Francis, both of whom were my neighbors and friends and bankers, were the only people on the board who did not have children in our clinic, children whom we’ve benefitted. And that was the beginning, but we didn’t have any money. The $2,000 was not readily forthcoming.

Farrer: So how did you go about getting that money?

Zedler: Well, I embarrassed Dr. Flowers by, week after week went by after we’d had the charter, and he would phone my office and say, “Where is the money? I’m embarrassed, we’ve having a meeting of the board of regents for the state senior colleges, and we have a charter, and we don’t have any monies.” I found that the people who were so willing to give advice were not too willing to part with their monies, and I didn’t know how to go about getting it, so I applied for a grant for myself for professional improvement through the Lupton-Brown Foundation in Fort Worth. The attorney for that foundation was a fraternity brother of my husband’s, and my husband suggested maybe that I would have to do it myself, so I got the money, I got the grant, a check for $2,500 made directly to me for my own professional improvement. I took the check for $2,500 up the hill to Dr. Flowers’s office and said, “Here are the first monies for the special ed foundation.” And I put my own check into the foundation. How could I defend that to the Lupton-Brown people who had given it to me because I intended not to leave San Marcos to improve my own professional expertise, but I intended to bring the people to San Marcos. And that was the beginning of a series of summer, not lectures but courses, taught by world famous authorities in various branches of special education. These people came not to give a lecture, but they came to teach our students, and I insisted each time that it be in connection with our clinic, and the clinic to function, had to have a parent, usually it was a mother who had accompanied the child, lived in San Marcos and attended a parent class.

 Now, these lectures by the famous authorities were not given to the parents, they were given to our students, but I then conducted a parent class. And our advanced student therapists worked with the children. And it was a three-way situation that lasted until I resigned or was requested to resign because of my advanced age. The first person, as soon as I realized we had the tax-free instrument, and we appointed parents with children who had been helped and were continuing to be helped in our clinic, and they had the experience of one summer. These are some of the people who came: for one, I spent the night making lists of them, they’re not in order, but I have all the people down. And I think you, it’s such an impressive list, I think you should know about it. But first, I brought first of all, Dr. Tarlton Morrow, MD. Now I think you should have a list of these names, they are very impressive. Dr. Tarlton Morrow, MD, to teach us about the emotional problems of children and the parent-child relationship. Now, Tarlton Morrow was at the University of Pittsburgh when he first came to us, the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, and after he had come to us for one summer, he went on the staff on Menninger Clinic in Kansas. And he came to us for two summers to lecture on that subject. We became extremely well-informed on the emotional problems of children. By the way, our students got semester-hour credits for having been to these workshops. We had hoped to put the distinguished names of the lecturers on the transcripts of the students, but that was not permitted. So, my name went on the transcripts, but I did not teach all these courses, it was these famous people who taught them. They would leave the exam questions before they departed, and I administered the exam, and the students got credit. Students were a little upset when they found out that the famous names of the professors weren’t going on the transcripts, but they weren’t, but they all, because of the list of these people, you will realized why our graduates, from the earliest times of the special education department, were sought after throughout the United States, and particularly in Texas, as being prepared, extremely well-prepared, because they had such distinguished people to teach them. The second person, now [after] Dr. Morrow came for two summers, the second person to come was Dr. Charles Van Riper. Now he’s a PhD, unless I indicate otherwise, these are PhD’s; now Dr. Morrow’s an MD. Dr. Charles Van Riper, PhD, the world’s authority on stuttering, and still is, he was at Western Michigan University. He was the author of a textbook my students were using in the fundamentals of speech correction, particularly stuttering. Charles Van Riper realized the aim of this thing—and we paid, by the way, not only their honorarium but their living expenses while they were on our campus. They stayed—Dr. Van Riper stayed two weeks each time he came and lectured each day. These classes met every day, of course, and all morning. They lived in San Marcos when we didn’t have as many fine living quarters in San Marcos, hotels and so forth, as we do now, so if appropriate facilities weren’t available, I brought them to my home. Dr. Van Riper came three times; he was so intrigued with the idea of having the people who stuttered there, he was interested in adult stutterers as well as children, and in having them on campus with their therapists and their future teachers, that he asked to come back again. The next person to come to us was Dr. Harold Westlake. He was chairman of the Department of Speech Pathology at Northwestern University. Dr. Westlake was with us for—

[Pages missing]

—its students. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when the state began to test teachers in the field—I never taught in elementary education, but I can talk about special education majors when I was chairman of the department, and they were first-level students—I would go to perhaps the Department of Psychology and visit with a few of those professors who knew our students—and ask them about the quality of our students. We always required psychology courses of our students—I am particularly glad to see that scholastic standards are being raised in the state of Texas and hopefully they will, the teacher of the young child will be as competent as those who were able to make A’s under these distinguished professors. No, I wouldn’t change anything, if I could change anything I would make it even more scholastically demanding—

If I were still young and a professor at the university, I would introduce and get involved in the education of the gifted, because our mentally gifted, they like to call them mentally gifted and talented—I don’t like that nomenclature, I think they are intellectually gifted, there are a small percent of people who are. They have been largely neglected in our public schools and still are—I would get ourselves involved with the gifted because they are special people. I hated to see the category of special education destroyed on a state basis, but not every university conducted its department of special education as we did, not many could afford it, and we could not have, if it hasn’t been for this little foundation.

Farrer: Would you like to wrap it up right there?

Zedler: Yes, let’s stop.

End of interview