AN INTERVIEW WITH TED FREDERICKSON Interviewer: Jewell Willhite Oral History Project Endacott Society University of Kansas TED FREDERICKSON B.A., Political Science, University of North Dakota, 1970 M.A., Journalism, American University, 1971 Juris Doctorate, University of North Dakota, 1975 Service at the University of Kansas First came to the University of Kansas in 1980 Professor of Journalism 2 3 AN INTERVIEW WITH TED FREDERICKSON Interviewer: Jewell Willhite Q: I am speaking with Ted Frederickson, who retired in 2011 as professor of journalism at the University of Kansas. We are in Lawrence, Kansas, on November 10, 2011. Where were you born and in what year? A: I was born in San Francisco, California, in 1944, so I’m not a boomer. The war was on and Franklin Roosevelt was president when I was born. Q: What were your parents’ names? A: My dad’s name is the same as mine, Ted Frederickson. I’m a junior. My mother’s maiden name was Stahl, Valerie Stahl, which means steel in German. Q: What was their educational background? A: My mother didn’t get any further than high school. She graduated from high school and then went to a business college briefly. My dad enrolled in Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and was editor of the student paper there. He was there when the Depression hit and that pretty much ended his college stay at that point. Q: What was your father’s occupation? A: When I was born my dad was an inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He worked in the brokerage of food crops. Q; Do you have brothers and sisters? A: I have two brothers and one sister, one brother older, one brother younger, and a younger sister. Q: Did you grow up in San Francisco? 4 A: No, we lived there for roughly two years. My parents, who were both from Minnesota, wanted to move back to that area. So they moved to Barnesville, Minnesota, and then to Grand Forks, North Dakota, which is on the Red River, on the border between North Dakota and Minnesota. Q: Where did you go to elementary school? A: I went to Catholic schools until I was a junior in high school. Then I went to the public high school in Grand Forks, Grand Forks Central. Q: Were you involved in extracurricular activities in high school? A: Not so much, other than the student newspaper. That was about it. Q: What sort of activities did you cover? A: School news, that sort of thing. Q: Did you have honors in high school? A: I was not a very good student in high school. I was at the point where I was discovering girls. I think there is something true about people that age having hormonal issues. I was one of them. Even though I did well on standardized tests, I didn’t do so well in classes. Q: Did you have influential teachers in high school? A: In the Catholic high school I had Sister Mary Leo, who was the teacher of the journalism classes, and she really encouraged me to go in that direction because she thought I was pretty good at it. Q: Did you have jobs after school or in the summer? A: I worked at the University of North Dakota, which is located in Grand Forks, in their student union. I washed dishes, I peeled potatoes. That was one of my jobs. Q: When did you graduate from high school? 5 A: 1962. Q: What did you do then? A: I briefly enrolled at the University of North Dakota. But I really wasn’t ready for it. I still wasn’t a good student. That was kind of the pivotal moment in my life because I dropped out of school without getting a single grade in anything. That was just as the Vietnam War was starting. I enlisted in the Army. The U.S. Army was the place where I developed my lifelong work habits, my work ethic, getting up in the morning, working all day, that sort of thing. It was very good for me. At that time when you enlisted you could choose where you went for basic training, so I chose Fort Ord, California, which is on Monterey Bay, a beautiful place. I picked the school I wanted to go to, which was the U.S. Army Information School, their school for journalists, which was in New York on David’s Island, which is in Long Island Sound. And then I got to pick my duty station and I chose Germany, where I was based for the final two and a half years of my Army career. In Germany I was the editor of a unit newspaper and I also worked for Stars and Stripes for a while. So that, I think, was kind of a pivotal moment and it continued because when I came back there was a very generous G.I. Bill at that time. So I was able to use that all the way through my undergraduate and my master’s degree. I had benefits from that that were very helpful to me. Q: Is being a journalist for the Army different from being a journalist for a newspaper? A: Oh, yes. The answer to every question from a superior in the Army is “Yes, sir.” Of course journalists are supposed to be very neutral people. I think that the First Amendment was not really applied that well in the Army, nor would I expect it to be. 6 Q: You had the G.I Bill, so where did you go to college? A: I came back to my home town of Grand Forks. I grew up in the shadow of the University of North Dakota, so I knew it well. I attended North Dakota. I got an undergraduate degree in political science. Even though I was a political science major, I was the editor of the student paper during that period as well. I graduated Magna Cum Laude. It was a completely different me when I got back from the Army because I went from being a high school student with not very good grades to being a four point student in college. Then I went on to get a master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C. Q: Did you have influential teachers when you were at North Dakota? A: I did. They were primarily political science professors. One in particular I remember was Steve Markovich, whose interest was international, Eastern Europe. He was actually a Yugoslavian. I think he was a Croatian. He loved journalism too. He was a very avid reader of the New York Times, where you get the best international news, of course. Q: Was there some reason why you didn’t major in journalism, since you had decided you were interested in that? A: Journalism has two kinds of training. One I would call almost vocational, or perhaps professional, where you are learning the skills of this trade—gathering, writing and how to put a story together, that sort of thing. But journalism is also at its base a liberal arts degree, an important segment of what we call the Humanities. Journalists are some of the most important gatherers of information, writing the first rough draft of history. I thought at that point I had worked enough on the skills in the army at the Information School that I wanted to concentrate on the substance of politics, which is, of course, the mother’s milk of journalism, covering politics. That sort of took me in the direction of 7 Washington, D.C., where American University is. They have a wonderful program, a master’s program, both in broadcasting and in print. Q: I guess we forgot to mention when you got your undergraduate degree. A: I got my undergraduate degree in 1970. Q: That was the time when they were having a lot of demonstrations. A: Oh, absolutely. Q: Maybe they don’t do that in North Dakota, or did they? A: Oh, they did. There were numerous large student demonstrations surrounding the Kent State and Jackson State shootings. There was a menacing crowd outside the university’s ROTC building, campaigning to get ROTC out of campus. Windows were broken. A lot of things happened. It was not different from any other college campus. At the time I remember being solicited by an anti-war group to sign my name to a one-page ad that was placed in the New York Times. The people who signed were student body presidents and editors of papers at major universities. So my name was on that particular page as opposing the war and arguing that we ought to get out of Vietnam. But anyway, I went off to Washington. That was a great program for me. By that time my good grades had rescued me and I applied for and got a full fellowship at the American University. All of my tuition was free, my books were paid for and they gave me a monthly stipend. I was told that not only did I not have to work, but that I could not work while I was a student there. At the same time I was still getting my G.I. Bill too. So I could concentrate on being a student. It was a very exciting place to be because we had all sorts of guest speakers who were prominent journalists or politicians in the D.C. area. 8 Q: What was your major? A: It was journalism.