J. B. Schooland

J.B. Schooland was an emeritus professor at CU, Boulder, as well as the author of several books on the history of Boulder. Among his civic accomplishments, he was instrumental in getting the train put in Central Park on Broadway and Canyon Blvd in Boulder.

In 1986 he sold his home and moved to California. He was quoted in the Boulder Daily Camera as saying that Boulder had grown and changed so much that he wouldn’t miss it much. He leaves as his legacy his excellent history books about Boulder. — S. Byron Gassaway

The Interview

I came here in 1929. That was almost 60 years ago, and 65 years before that there (weren’t any European-Americans) here. It isn’t the same town at all from when I came here. We had twelve thousand people and now we’ve got ninety thousand. The University was small. It had twenty seven hundred students and now (1986) we’ve got twenty thousand with a lid on enrollment. The types of people living here now are altogether different – those were mostly pioneers. When I came here, people were original settlers or descendents of settlers. The townspeople knew each other really well – now they don’t.

Do you remember what year IBM built their plant here? I’m wondering what year or what event really marked that change?

No, I don’t. I remember very well that they came here, but I don’t remember what year. The Diagonal Highway wasn’t there yet. It was put in there about the same time.

Was there a two lane road?

There wasn’t any.

I remember there was an old school building in Niwot that had a big diagonal pipe on the side that was used as a fire-escape from the third floor.

They took that out to make the Diagonal Highway. Niwot was originally a railroad station. The roads all ran north and south, east and west. We didn’t have the Boulder Turnpike then either.

Did Boulder change all of a sudden when IBM moved here, politically or socially?

It was starting to grow commercially then. It started to grow right after World War II. Before that, it was really slow. One of the reasons was that there were so many troops stationed at camps near Denver and here in Boulder. And we had the Defense Language Institute for the Navy here on campus. As soon as the war was over, they thought this was a nice place to live and they started coming in here.

The University had quite a time with the enrollment. It doubled in just a couple of years and the faculty had to take up the slack. We couldn’t get new teachers that fast.

What did you teach at the University?

Psychology. I retired in ’62 – too old to teach anymore. I started teaching in ’29.

Where were you from?

Michigan. They had just gotten the stadium built three years before I came here. Eight years before I came here, they took the railroad tracks out. Arapahoe was just a dirt road where the tracks used to be. They took out the electric inter-urban two years before I came, in ’27. I rode the streetcars every day. Those were taken out in ’32.

What was your reaction, as a professor emeritus, to seeing the changes in the students and the faculty in the ‘60s?

The long-hairs weren’t there when I was teaching. I retired in ’62, and they came just a couple of years after. There was violence all over the country. Boulder was always a liberal town and became that way more and more.

I remember SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. They were very active in the ‘60s and they were kind of reactionaries, anything against the government, period. When Hyakawa was here – he was a Senator later on from California – he was going to speak here at Macky Auditorium.

Anytime I knew that something like that was going to happen here, I’d go down to campus and take it in. I knew if he came here it would be a pretty lively place. So I went down almost an hour before he was due and got a seat in the front row of the balcony in the center – which is just about the best observation seat in the whole place.

The place was packed. Hyakawa got up speak. They all started yelling at him and they wouldn’t let him speak. I saw him pick up people out of their seats and literally push them out into the aisles. I saw him push some of them out the doors. He literally lifted them up and took the seats (with them) and that sort of thing.

They threw things at Hyakawa. I saw one of them throw a chair. It would have hit him, but a plainclothes cop reached out and caught it before it would have hit him in the head. I recognized the kid. Well, I didn’t recognize him, but I fixed him in my mind and the next day when I went to the UMC to eat my dinner, I just thought I’d coast around to pick up on what was going on and I saw two fellows getting in line right where I was, and one of them was the fellow who threw the chair. I recognized him.

They were talking in an animated fashion and I just listened for a little while, and finally I asked, “Are you fellows by yourselves?” One of them said, “Yeah.” I said, “Mind if I sit with you?” They looked at each other and one of them said, “OK.” So we sat at the same table. I just thought I’d like to talk to them.

Apparently, I was a little block to their conversation, because they weren’t speaking as easily as I thought they might. So I finally said, “Were you the fellows at the auditorium last night? Do you belong to SDS?” I didn’t tell them that I saw them throw the chair – but I did. I thought I recognized them. “Are you proud of the SDS? Are you proud of what they did last night?”

One of them said, “What do you mean?” You know what I mean. You students invited him to speak and you wouldn’t let him speak when he got there. Are you proud of it? One of them said, “No. We weren’t. In fact, when you were asking if you could sit down with us, we were just having a discussion, and I told my pal here that we invited him to speak and that if SDS was going to operate that way then I was going to pull out. I’ve been with them right from the start, but I won’t go along with that. That is going out of bounds.”

I said, “Well, I was there early and I knew that you students had invited him and they should have given him permission to speak because they invited him. And I heard him say that he would give the podium to anybody who was entitled to it after he got through. What more can you ask for?”

That was about as far as we got. The other fellow never spoke – the one who threw the chair. I would have liked to have gotten him into a conversation, but he wouldn’t open up. I was going to ask them, “If they had invited you to speak, wouldn’t you expect them to let you speak?” I just wanted to put them on the spot as much as I could. Being a professor of psychology, I probably felt a little more assured of myself than I probably would have otherwise.

A number of times I’d go down and talk to them. I nearly got thrown out of the Administration Building. They were standing outside chanting and they got more and more wild. Finally, they went inside the building and just filled up the whole place. I squeezed myself in with them and got up on the second floor. They were borrowing the president’s office and everybody else’s offices, and finally one of them came up to me, a great big husky fellow (who) wasn’t a student, and he said, “You’re not one of us.” And I said, “No. That isn’t hard to see.”

He asked, “What are you doing here?” I said, “That’s my business. It’s your business doing what you’re doing here. But since you wanted to know, I just thought I’d just come in here to see what was going on.”

“Well, we’ve taken over here and you haven’t got any business here.” He was being pretty belligerent, so I thought I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero. So I said, “I’ve seen what I wanted to see here. I’ll leave if you want me to, having gotten the picture.” He looked at me kind of dubiously, not knowing quite where to go from there. So I left and went downtown and there was a group blocking traffic on the corner of Broadway and Canyon and on down to Pearl street, so the traffic couldn’t get through.

A fellow with a loud-speaker was talking, moving the loud-speaker in different directions. So I stood against the building on the corner there trying to get what he said. All I could get was when he’d aim the loud-speaker toward me. I couldn’t get it the rest of the time.

I asked some of the fellows standing there, “What’s he saying there? What’s he talking about. Look at the way he’s talking. I can’t get it. Can you get it?”

“You can’t?” One of them said. “No. Look at the way he’s talking. Can you get it? Well, if so, tell me what he’s talking about.” Well, they weren’t sure.

I asked, “Do you know who he is?” They said, “Yes.” “Well, what’s his subject?” “Well, we’re part of that group that was at the Memorial Building last night.” So I went down to Crossroads (Mall) and got a cup of coffee and got a place to sit until they came in. There was a group of girls who were in with the main group in the hallway by the mall where Walgreens coffee shop used to be. They were in there, so I went out and talked to these girls and said, “What’s this march about?”

“Well, this is part of the group that just came down from campus.” I asked, “Who is leading it? Do you know? “ They said they didn’t know. “Well, what’s the object of coming down here?” They couldn’t tell me.

I said, “You kids seem pretty sharp. You seem too sharp to be involved in something you don’t know what it is led by somebody you don’t know and don’t know what it is he’s trying to say.” They looked at me kind of funny and kind of sheepishly. I told them they were acting too independently. They were opposed to anything that might be government or anything that might be a required course or anything like that. It didn’t make any impact, but it satisfied my curiosity.

Did you ever find out who the speaker was?

No. I never did. I think it was that group from Chicago – the Weathermen. But I can’t be sure. That was in the late ‘60s. It was all over the country. Berkeley was pretty bad. Hines was president (of the university) then. Hine’s dad and I were undergraduates together at the University of Michigan, but I never knew Roger. Roger Hines was president at Berkeley.

Where did the main impetus for ridding the university of in loco parentis come from? Was it a natural evolution? What was different about that era? Where did it come from?

It happened pretty much after the war, after World War II. War, I’ve always felt, is demoralizing. The Civil War was just thirty years before I was born, so I’ve heard a lot about the Civil War. I was in the Army and knew how the guys felt. In war, you just feel like you better get what you can. We may not get back from Europe, so let’s live it up every chance we get. When they came back they had to settle down quite a bit.

We had a Dean of Women here who was very liberal all of a sudden. The one right before her was very conservative. The Assistant Dean of Men was also very liberal in those sorts of things. So that’s what opened the doors right here. Those two pushed the doors wide open right here. I’d tell them, “I can see you want to open the door here, but for goodness sake, don’t pull the door right off the hinges.” They’d say that I was too conservative. But I’d say that I’m a parent too, and I felt that students needed a little restraint on them and I’d appreciate it if the teachers had the same attitudes. But you couldn’t stem the thing. It just went like that. They had to have their freedom.

I talked to some of the girls about it. I asked them, “How do you feel about it? No hours now. Do you like it?” And quite often they’d say, “No. We had problems enough with peer-pressure as it was.” If we could say no because our parents said ‘no,’ it made it easier to say no. All the students weren’t for in loco parentis – but a lot of them were.

Copyright 2026  S. Byron Gassaway