Greaser.M.1706_04.11.2017_Transcript

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0:08
Marion Greaser: And then they had a meeting regard to the new building. There's a donor wall that they're trying to design something artsy for and have some sort of a muscle related thing to it. And wanted my input on it, so I met with Doug Dubaki, I guess his name is. And that, and then that's, oh, I've been in since little after 9:00, but I didn't get you called until ten after 11:00. So, yeah, what we don't have to do?

0:46
Joan Parrish: So we don't have to do everything today. Just keep working on it all. So we have that Oral History Program outline, the interview outline. And I think you familiarized yourself with some of the questions. So if we could just start, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your early childhood.

1:09
Marion Greaser: Okay, so I was born near Vinton, Iowa. I grew up on a farm. It's about five miles west of Vinton. My parents married late. In fact, my father was 47 and my mother 40 when I was born. So they'd had a had a long life. They only got married it a few years before, they married later in life, both of them had strong careers. My father, of course, was a farmer, but he also had been in the House of Representatives in the state of Iowa, and he was the chairman of the Farm Bureau Federation for the county for three years. And he was named a master farmer and master swine producer in the state of Iowa. So he was, he was prominent person on the bank board and so on. My mother was a school teacher, and she'd been a valedictorian of her high school class in Waterloo, Iowa, and then she taught school and in Des Moines for a long time. So they were both very educated and and active in in church activities and community activities and so on. So obviously they had a large influence on my life. And I was always expected to participate in things and, and I did and, and I had a good, good role models for for somebody that was wanted to get things done right.

3:02
Joan Parrish: So was education always important? I mean, it seems like your dad was a very educated person. 

3:10
Marion Greaser: Yes, he was the first one in his family to go to college, and he went to Iowa State College, which became Iowa State University. Got a degree in agricultural engineering, but came back to the farm, but he used that later on, because he drew the house plans for the house that they built on our farm when I was growing up. So yeah, he was always, always very supportive of education. My mother was on the school board at one point. And of course, she just finished two years for you know, many times back then, women didn't do a four year program to teach. She went to Iowa State Teachers College in Iowa, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, but she was always very supportive of education. So I had good role models. In terms of extended family members, not many. Since my parents were older, I only knew one grandmother and my father and his brother had adjacent farms, and but my uncle, wh farmed the other farm, was not, never part of my life, really, and he, he died when I was about 10. So I don't have a whole lot of memory about him. So not too much other family members, formative family experiences. Well, I was, And my mother was always very social, and she came from an extended family, and so we always, when I was growing up, we always had guests in for a Sunday meal. We would go up, we, when I was growing up, we went to a fourth of July celebration. It was just family, and there were about 75 of them. 

5:28
Joan Parrish: That's a bit overwhelming to meet that much family at once.

5:31
Marion Greaser: Yeah. Well, you don't meet them all at once. You meet them as you grow up. Growing up, and she lived up near Waterloo, and which is only about 30 miles away, so it wasn't difficult to drive back and forth. So that's probably the most thing I remember about family.

5:54
Joan Parrish: So were you involved with the animals?

5:56
Marion Greaser: Yes, I was. Our farm was 200 acres. We had one cow that we used to milk. We had about 150 chickens when I was growing up, was my responsibility to gather eggs, and when I got older, I'd milk the cow. We had pigs. We raised pigs. We always also had steers that we raised. So we were, you know, an old McDonald type of farm, diversified, diversified, yes.

6:32
Joan Parrish: So that's a lot of chicken eggs in one day.

6:35
Marion Greaser: Yes, it is. But together we then would sort them, clean them a little bit with a little sandpaper cover to get the stuff that's on the outside off, and then we'd bring them to town to sell. There was a place that bought eggs and the milk. We had a hired man when I was growing up, and he milked in the morning, and we milked at night, and that took care of our milk needs. And of course, the yield of milk from a cow was not so great back then, so we probably used up all the milk. You couldn't do that with a big Holstein now.

7:27
Joan Parrish: No, so then did you show?

7:29
Marion Greaser: I was in 4H. Yes, I did. I, just one other thing. I was just on the edge of the horse era. We had horses that were used for farm work until I was about five or so, and one of my favorite pictures is one that I'm sitting on my father's lap on a two row corn planter, and you can see him holding the reins, and it's one of my my favorite mementos from from my childhood.

8:12
Joan Parrish: Do you think the introduction of tractors made a difference in the in your farm life?

8:19
Marion Greaser: Yes, well, I mean, my my parents and my uncle were farming together, and they, they owned a tractor that they'd purchased back in the 1940s so they, they integrated the tractor with the horses, and then gradually, as they got a bigger tractor, they were able to take care of all the farm work with tractors. And so they got rid of the horses. But my father was always very progressive. He was the first one in his county to raise and sell hybrid seed corn. [JP: Really?] Yes. So he was always in close contact with Iowa State University, and so when they developed things. And my first name is Marion; that was named after a strain of oats. [both laugh]

9:30
Joan Parrish: Perfect. So when he, that's interesting, when he did the hybrid seed corn then, did you have to detassel and all those things little [MG: Yes.] And were you involved with that? 

9:43
Marion Greaser: A little bit. But I, it was, he stopped doing that about the time I would got old enough to be able to reach, you know. We didn't have the the drive through stand on stands and pull both tassels things. So when I got about old enough to do that, was about when he got out of the hybrid seed corn business.

10:06
Joan Parrish: Lucky you.

10:07
Marion Greaser: Right, right. Well, I can still remember he also sold seed oats, and we had a sort of a hand operated manual seed cleaner, where you dump the seeds in the top, and there are a series of screens where the little seed, weed seeds drop through, and you shake it and and the straw then gets shaked off in the end, and you find out finally, end up with a clean seed at the end. You see occasionally those things at antique stores and so on.

10:39
Joan Parrish: Right. So did they do yield tests on these crops?

10:45
Marion Greaser: Yeah, my dad came through the time when they manually picked seed corn. I threw it in wagons, and we still had wagons around. They would be about the size of this table top and size on them, about this tall. They had contests and so on. He actually also won a county wide contest for the best ears of corn, you know. And I still have to have his old trophy from that.

11:23
Joan Parrish: Oh, that's very interesting. 

11:29
Marion Greaser: Yeah. So you asked about 4H. Yes, I was involved in 4H. I always had a steer that I raised, and my dad always being very practical, he wasn't going to go out and buy the best show calf, you know. So my steers usually got red ribbons rather than blue, and didn't contend for a championship. But it actually is just a good preparation, you know. You don't pay extra money to buy a steer and then sell it for for about the same amount after you fed it for years, like some people do that are get involved in the show ring kind of stuff. So it was, it was practical training that I got.

12:15
Joan Parrish: Very practical. And you can learn just as easily on an average steer as you can on a really good steer, the things you needed to learn.

12:23
Marion Greaser: Right. And the responsibility of feeding them and taking care of them, cleaning the pens and so on. You know, the fancy ones don't do anything different. They eat and poop, just like the rest of them. So I also raised some pigs. And one year in 4H I was the county champion showmanship for pigs. And, you know, chase them around with a thing and switch and keep them so that they're the right profile for the judges and so on.

13:03
Joan Parrish: And that's no small, small task with pigs, 

13:06
Marion Greaser: Yeah, they have a mind of their own, yeah.

13:09
Joan Parrish: They'd be very stubborn, yeah. So, throughout your schooling, did you have hobbies?

13:15
Marion Greaser: So I was in FFA also, and was on the FFA parliamentary procedure team, where I don't know that you're familiar with that or not, but there's procedures that are standard for how you conduct a meeting. You know, when you make a motion, you need to have a second, and then there's discussion, and you can table things, and so on. And so the parliamentary procedure team would then demonstrate how this was all done. It'd be a group of four students that would do this, and we got to be reasonably good at that. So that was kind of fun.

14:02
Joan Parrish: And so that was training for public speaking.

14:04
Marion Greaser: It was public speaking and training for conducting meetings.

14:13
Joan Parrish: Right. And music, did you have interest in music?

14:17
Marion Greaser: I did. I was in vocal music. And, it's kind of interesting. We had, I think, three different vocal music teachers in my four years of high school music. My parents were big into vocal music. My father was a member of quartets. My mother sang solos at weddings, and they were all in the choir at church and so on. So I have an extensive music background. My sister actually played the organ for church and she has a daughter that has a PhD in clarinet or oboe. I think it is a PhD in oboe. And so she's still involved in music as well. And I've enjoyed singing all through the years. Never had enough time to do it as much, mostly in church choirs and things like that. Football. Yes, I played football. I was 135 pound end. Now back in the mid 1960s, why, or 1950s I guess, would be in the football years why, not all people were muscled up and weight lifting and so on. I think our the line for our football team averaged about 160, hundred pounds. But it was, it was a good experience. I always have enjoyed sports a lot, participating as well as watching and so on. But yeah, even got, scored one touchdown in high school. 

16:20
Joan Parrish: That's wonderful. So is that why you love playing soccer now?

16:24
Marion Greaser: Well, the reason I'm playing soccer is when I first came here, Bob Kaufman and I always played squash, and so, you know, I'd always been interested in exercise, and squash is a very intensive game. I don't know that you're familiar with it or not. High exercise. And so we played squash for many years, but then I started having trouble with my back. There's a lot of twisting and turning with it. And so I stopped playing squash, and I also played some basketball, you know, here on campus. And but then I got involved in this group that that I'm still involved with, that developed out of a study that was funded by NIH to get middle aged professors to exercise. This was radical back in the mid 1960s, and they had a study. They had a games group. There was a combination games and jogging and a jogging group. Well, the games group survived, and for many years it was there was a grad student from exercise physiology that directed the group, you know, and organized the activities. He met two or three times a week. Well, that that stopped, but the games group kept going. And so I've been involved in that since age 37. And so half my life I've been involved in that group. And of course, the oldest member, but Milt Sunday, was also a member of the original group. And Tip Tyler, you remember Tip from Dairy Science?

18:20
Joan Parrish: I remember seeing his name.

18:23
Marion Greaser: They were involved in the original group. And Milt played up until his mid 80s, I think, in the group. And it's, you know, it's, it's a very welcoming group, you know, people with different skill levels and so on. Play alongside people, like the former UW soccer coach plays with the group still, you know, so-

18:51
Joan Parrish: Proving that exercise is good for everyone.

18:54
Marion Greaser: Exercise is good. I attribute my good health to my exercise program. My father died at age 74 from emphysema related to mold, breathing mold from hay. And my mother died at age 67 from a heart attack. So I don't have good genetics in terms of, but I just turned 75 in February. So I outlived them both, you know, and going, still going strong. And I talk to people say, "Oh, you know, my health is so bad, you know, I can't do anything anymore." And they're 72 or 73. And that's not me. So I'm very, very fortunate. Never had any knee problems, for example.

19:53
Joan Parrish: That is good. So then you went off to college.

19:54
Marion Greaser I went off to college. Yes, I went to Iowa State University. I was always interested in agriculture and animal science, and it was animal husbandry at that time, of course. And the influence there, of course, my father had gone to Iowa State and always thought it was a good, good place, but he didn't put any pressure on me to go there. It was a decision that I made on my own. So in college, why, I was fortunate to get involved in a meat judging team and had an enjoyable time with that. There was a man on the staff named Darrel Goll. D, A, R, R, E, L, G, O, L, L. He was a young faculty member. He had been a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, jointly between animal science and biochemistry, he had an individual course on muscle that that I and a number of the people participated in, and a couple of us have ended up being professors in meat science. So he had a profound effect on me. He got me involved in working in the lab a little bit, and so on. And so it was kind of a natural for me to apply in here. And I came in and had the same kind of program, jointly between biochemistry and in animal science with the meat science program.

21:50
Joan Parrish: So I'm a little bit interested about what the level of understanding of muscle was at that time.

21:59
Marion Greaser: There was a lot of understanding about muscle the in the 1950s. The sliding filament theory of muscle contraction had come about. There was the electron microscopy showing muscle structure and thick and thin filaments and so on. So there was quite a bit known about muscle at that point. What wasn't known that there was also, at the time that I was an undergraduate, there wasn't an understanding about how calcium controlled muscle contraction. That sort of came and about in my graduate school era. And the protein called troponin was only discovered about in 1967, I think it was. So things are changing, but muscle structure was very well understood. There was good quality electron microscope pictures. I mean, I still, in my 305 teaching, I still showed one of the original pictures by Hugh Huxley, who described the content filaments with some detail back in the 1950s. I mean, his picture is, is better than a lot of other stuff that's been published in the literature since.

23:35
Joan Parrish: Right. It just seems like such a basic building block for life, muscle.

23:43
Marion Greaser: Right. But there was an understanding about the sarcoplasmic reticulum. There's an interesting story about that. When the electron microscopy came out, and why they discovered that there was these membrane systems in muscle that somebody by the name of Varati [?] had discovered back in the early, early 1900s. But they just sort of described this special staining procedure that showed some kind of a pattern, but didn't know what it meant. And then it was kind of ignored for, until the 1950s and 1960s. So it's interesting how maybe you're doing something that in science that nobody seems to pay any attention to, but somebody will come back later and find it, and you'll have a contribution later on. So don't give up just because nobody appreciates your work.

24:44
Joan Parrish: That's right, that maybe it's a historical perspective that's important. 

24:50
Marion Greaser: Yes, right. So in college, like I say, I was involved in the meat judging team. I involved a little bit of lab work. I got a good science background preparing for grad student. So met my wife at Iowa State, and then we were married a year after. She was a year behind me, and so she finished her degree, and then I came up here for the first year by myself, and then we were married after that. All right, let's see. I um, how did I finance my education? Well, I'd saved a bit of money from my 4H projects and so on. My parents helped me with some financing, but it didn't cost much money back then. I mean, tuition was, I don't know, you know, like, $100 for a quarter or something like that. I mean, it's, it's not, I mean, it's something where students could work for the summer and get enough money to pay for their school. And it's much different than it is now, much different.

26:24
Joan Parrish: Would you like to hazard a guess as to why it's different? Can you think, I'm just interested because I know-

26:39
Marion Greaser: A number of factors... There are many more regulations that have to be, you know, for grants and so on, that have to be covered. People have to take care of those things, the animal protocols and things like this. There's a whole cadre of people that are involved. Bureaucracy tends to expand unrelentingly, and. But it isn't because of faculty salaries being inflated a lot.

27:22
Joan Parrish: Maybe that there's just so much more support that's necessary to run a university.

27:26
Marion Greaser: Yeah, right. 

27:32
Joan Parrish: But so you just worked and your parents helped a little bit, yeah?

27:34
Marion Greaser: But I didn't end up with any debt after, after college. I mean, it wasn't a wasn't a major thing. What was college like? Well, it was an enjoyable time. I mean, I enjoyed all the activities, going to football games, participating in things. Giant 500 member chorus that put on a Christmas, I think the Messiah, for example. So singing with 500 people is, is a profound experience.

28:19
Joan Parrish: Where would you have found a facility to hold that in?

28:21
Marion Greaser: Well, it was like, it was like Ag Hall. We would actually meet an Ag Hall for practices. I mean, it's Curtis Hall down in Iowa State. I don't know whether you know anything about but, but you know there was, there was capacity for that. I mean, it was used for really big classes. Not too many of them were taught in there, but it was original, like, like the Ag Hall, auditorium.

28:54
Joan Parrish: That would have been just astonishing to hear.

28:56
Marion Greaser: Yeah, yeah. Well, even with that, in that smallest space, because you don't have a lot of extra space there, there'd be a stage and so on, but there's not when you put chairs and seats for that many, there's sort of two layers. There was a balcony area, and in the lower one, yeah. And then, of course, we performed in the Coliseum, I think the all campus facility. So I think I've covered about what I decided to study, and why. And something about significant faculty experiences on and off campus. One thing I'd like to mention there, between my junior my sophomore and junior year, I went on an ag travel course trip, and this lasted like a month and a half, and we went as far south as Texas and Alabama, up through the Carolinas and so on and back, back around. And I mean, like 20 different states seeing various things, farms, factories, agricultural things, seed, producing plants. And it gave me a really nice global perspective about agriculture in the United States. And I think that's valuable. Sometimes we get kind of narrow in our thinking, I mean, our own specific area of study and so on. But don't necessarily have a good big picture of what's going on, and seeing all those different locations and all the different terrains, areas where they have to irrigate or else they won't get anything, you know, different kinds of cropping systems and so on.

31:21
Joan Parrish: Had you traveled outside of the Midwest before this?

31:25
Marion Greaser: No, I had not. When our family, when I was growing up, we would take a trip every year to an adjoining state. So I'd been to South Canada and Nebraska and Missouri and Minnesota and Illinois, Wisconsin, but never beyond that point before. And of course, this was before air travel was anything regular, you know, at all.

31:56
Joan Parrish: And this would have been before the interstate system.

32:02
Marion Greaser: I think so. I'm sure that when I was growing up, I was never on an interstate highway. But of course, you know, there's one interstate that crosses Iowa east to west, and then there's another one that goes north to south. But, and I don't know when 90 and 94 were built, it must have been by that time. 

32:35
Joan Parrish: I'm just thinking, because this is a lot of travel. And I often find when we go across the country and you stay on the interstate, it's a very different experience than when you take the roads.

32:44
Marion Greaser: Oh, yeah, right. No, I'm sure that we were never on any interstates on this travel trip. So highways go through small towns, you know, there's not a bypass around the town. And so you slow down and you see what the town is like, and so on. You stop to eat it, not on a chain, you know. [JP: The local diners, right.] Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald's, this is before for those things were, were widespread. 

33:20
Joan Parrish: So that's interesting. I think about our students now, and how they have a very narrow view of the agriculture.

33:29
Marion Greaser: Yeah, right. And, you know, the, of course, the Internet was not in being. So you didn't, you know, you could find pictures of things like this at the library. If you went to the library and you found you know, something about farming and in Texas, why, there'd be pictures of farms and ranches and cotton fields and things on but, but to actually see them

33:54
Joan Parrish: And to smell them. Because I think sometimes you go somewhere like, I know I'm in Iowa because of that smell of the corn, [MG: Yeah, right.] So it's a very experiential thing to travel,that isn't captured on even on the internet. That's exciting.

34:17
Marion Greaser: Okay. And well, we went on trips with the meat judging team, and we went as far as Fort Worth had a judging contest, and Kansas City did. And in Chicago, of course. I was ,the Chicago stockyards  was in place. Do you remember anything about the Chicago stockyards or not? Have you ever been where that's at? 

34:55
Joan Parrish: I have seen pictures. [MG: Okay, all right.] That's all I know about it. So. Yeah, they actually brought in cattle, right?

35:03
Marion Greaser: Yeah, my father would sometimes sell cattle at the Chicago stockyards. Their semi trucks would come in, you know, we'd bought feeder steers. We'd fed them up until they were weight to sell, loaded them up, and went into Chicago. And lot of times, my dad or my cousin, who ended up farming the farm that's right adjacent to ours, would actually ride to Chicago with the semi driver and take care of the sale of the cattle.

35:42
Joan Parrish: Now, the pictures I've seen, there were like, walkways over the cattle pens.

35:46
Marion Greaser: Yeah, that was so that the buyers could come and look, look at the pen of cattle, and then they would bid on on that set of cattle. And they'd be able to see, you know, how well muscled they were, and whether they're fat or not. 

36:05
Joan Parrish: And so were these buyers local, then in the Chicago area, or were they then moving the cattle even further?

36:11
Marion Greaser: No, most of them were. I mean, there were many slaughter plants right in the Chicago area. So they were, they were processing them. Of course, Chicago is a big, big market as well, so you didn't have to move the meat very far from Chicago. I mean, it would be distributed out, you know, and trucked out and farther away. But, yeah.

36:34
Joan Parrish: So how many sale yards, like the size of Chicago, were there in the US, I mean? 

36:39
Marion Greaser: Oh, none were the size of Chicago. Chicago was much bigger than anything. There was a big one in Kansas City I know of, and there was probably one in Cincinnati, but I don't know. Not too many farther back East. So I think, you know, Fort Worth was probably, there was a one down there, but not very, very few. You know, there might have been one in Milwaukee, there was never one in Madison. I think there was probably one in Milwaukee, but, but now- [JP: Smaller.] I mean, it's sort of like, like comparing the Dean County Airport to O'Hare, you know. I mean, that sort of scale. It's trivial, you know.

37:34
Joan Parrish: Right. Okay. I'm just trying to get in my mind what these were like. So there were 1000s of heads going through Chicago.

37:41
Marion Greaser: Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe 15,000 a day, or something like that. I don't remember what the numbers were.

37:48
Joan Parrish: And they would sell every day. They would have sales? Or a couple of times a week, would it depend on the season?

37:55
Marion Greaser: No, it would be year round, and it would be at least five days a week, maybe six. I don't know. I don't remember.

38:02
Joan Parrish: And was it only cattle, or was it cattle and pigs.

38:05
Marion Greaser: No, Pigs, sheep, probably, veal probably was sold. Again, I never went to Chicago cattle yards other than then, there was a a meat judging contest in one of the plants down there in that area, but I was, I've never actually been in the Chicago cattle yards either.

38:37
Joan Parrish: Okay, well, this is interesting, though, to think about moving that mass of animals into one place. Do you need to go?

38:49
Marion Greaser: No, I'm okay. We can work on into the next section a little bit. So I've already mentioned the fact that I decided on graduate school, and started off with taking a master's, but had all intentions to go on to the PhD as well. And I had a joint program between biochemistry and in animal science, animal husbandry. I think at the time, when we started, I don't remember. The name was changed to meat and animal science, at a later point, I think you have a copy of Bob Kaufman's history thing. [JP: Yes] There's a lot of additional details exactly when some of these things occurred.

39:48
Joan Parrish: So what was campus like?

39:52
Marion Greaser: It wasn't a whole lot different down on this end, other than, you know, the dairy cattle center wasn't there. The animal facility that was not there. When I came the major animal science building wasn't there. All the professors were in the Stock Pavilion, and all their offices were there. So that was interesting. And of course, the meat lab didn't have this section, the new section. This is called, I call the new section. In fact, you can kind of see where the border is if you come up the stairs and make a right, turn to head down where the teaching lab and in the cutting room and so on, you can see the border between where the new building and the old building is, and the space potentially doubled. The oldest part of the building is equivalent to that wall that you face when you come right before you take a right turn to go to the classroom. That's the additional original wall of the original building. There's been two additions. There was one in 1952 and then another one in around 1970 while I was away. So I was here between '64 and '68. I left in September or October 1968. Also in that interim time, that was when the Dow Chemical thing reached its pinnacle in terms of protests, and when the building was blown up. Where that researcher was killed. [JP: Sterling Hall.] Sterling Hall, yeah, bombing. Okay, so there were some protests about the Vietnam War when I was in grad school, but most of them were on the other end of campus, down here. Most people didn't pay much attention to it, and there wasn't any police down here or confrontations with groups or angry protesters. Everything was, you know, business as usual. So it never affected me that much. And of course, after the bombing, why, that just killed the protest. And so when I came back, and in June of '71, everything was quiet. No protests going on. The war was still going on, but they weren't making a fuss about it here at least.

42:56
Joan Parrish: Okay. Want to talk a little bit about major professors?

43:00
Marion Greaser: Yeah. Bill Hoekstra had been a professor in biochemistry. He was probably middle aged at that point in time. He had wide interests. He wasn't in a single single field. He was, and he'd worked extensively with people in animal science, Ernie Briskey and Bob Cassens. Cassens had been a joint student with him and Bray, and so he has a long history with working with people in the agriculture area. And his predecessor was Paul Phillips in biochemistry, and he also had worked closely with number of animal science people including Bill Pope and Bob Grummer. So the marriage between biochemistry and animal science was very strong and remained that way for quite some time. So he was a very careful and analytical sort of person, and he was a good, good influence on me. Bob Cassens was a brand new professor. He'd gotten his degree under Bray. He'd gone away for a couple years or so a post doc, and then come back on staff, not a whole lot before I started grad school, and so I was his first graduate student. [JP: Oh, okay, all right.] And he was always very well organized. He had a large number of students, a large number of post docs. He had a sort of a hands off approach to working with grad students and he wanted them to figure out how to solve their own problems, and I think this is a good approach for students. Certainly, you don't want to let a student flounder, but you also don't want to have them be, you know, a technician. And that's a philosophy that I adopted with my students, it gave them a lot of lot of leeway to try to work out their own problems. You know, if they have something they couldn't figure out, why, now, if they're clearly going the wrong direction, why you kind of redirect them and get them going but, but, you know, when they're out on their own, they don't have somebody that's going to tell them what to do next. [JP: Right.] If you're going to be an assistant professor, why you gotta figure out what you're going to do, and how you're going to get it done, and who you're going to have to see, and how to figure out how the bureaucracy works, you know, all those sorts of things you need to do on your own.

45:57
Joan Parrish: Right. Sometimes failure is a good teacher. 

46:01
Marion Greaser: Yeah. Failure is a good teacher, right, right. So I was really blessed by having two very, very good influences in terms of major professors. Now teaching experience, almost none as a grad student. It wasn't a requirement at that time. What was a requirement, though, was you had to have two languages. You had to pass two languages. I had never taken any language high school or undergrad, so that was going to be a challenge. Well, one of them was French that I decided to take, and French, the way you did the test was you got a book in the subject area of your, that you knew something about, and then you could go in and translate that for the examiner, and, of course, French, if you knew some of the verbs and you knew the nouns you could pretty well figure out, and so I was able to pass that, you know, without knowing very much French. With German is a different kind of test. It was multiple choice. You were given three choices for an answer. If you got the answer right, you got two points. If you got the answer wrong, it was minus one, and if you didn't answer, it was zero. Well, I, kind of gamesmanship that I figured out, if any any exam question that I could eliminate one of the possibilities, I'm going to be ahead by guessing, because I get two points versus one point, and statistically, I'm going to come out ahead. And that's what I did. I took one, one, I think, sort of correspondence course semester, and learned just a little bit of German and was able, then, to sniff out the right answer. I've always been good at exams, whether or not I knew the material or not. 

48:39
Joan Parrish: So was that a graduate school-?

48:41
Marion Greaser: Yes. A graduate school requirement.

48:43
Joan Parrish: Oh, my. Our students would just die, now, if that was, if they had to do that. Interesting, interesting. So what about other graduate students that you were working with. You said that Dr. Cassens had a lot of students and post docs.

49:05
Marion Greaser: Yes, yes. Well, on the real who's who down there on our leaderboard, but Larry Borchert was a student, and he's somebody that you ought to consider also interviewing, because he's very history minded, and he can give a window on stuff, you know, maybe the five years before me, he just barely overlapped my time, and he's remained close to all the people that are in the the the meat science program through the years. 

49:52
Joan Parrish: So did you guys have fun together? Did you help each other with research projects.

49:56
Marion Greaser: Oh, yeah, right. Well, we'd always get together for lunch. There's an interesting story. One of the fellows, by the name of Bernie Link, was kind of a jokester, and he, we always use these yellow pads to write on. We didn't have computers, you wrote things on a yellow pad. And Larry Borchert, his yellow pad kept being missing, and Bernie is the one that was lifting this, you know, put it back in the storage room. So he came up with the idea that I'm going to put some fluorescent dye on his pad. And then when it disappears, you know, during the lunch hour, why, they turned off the lights. And guess who had the dye on their hands?

50:50
Joan Parrish: A little detective work. 

50:52
Marion Greaser: Detective work. So, yeah.

50:59
Joan Parrish: Did Bernie Link want to be part of Jack Links?

51:01
Marion Greaser: No. Different, different Link. Yeah. So yeah, there's, there's quite a number of students. I can't name all of them off the top of my head. 

51:18
Joan Parrish: I'm just trying to get a sense of how cohesive a group you were.

51:24
Marion Greaser: We were very cohesive, although there were a couple of students, because of the the Gene Allen, I don't know if you're familiar that name He went up to the University of Minnesota, was on the staff, became a dean up there, and so on. He was in the basement of the Stock Pavilion over on the south side. They had a couple or three grad students there, and they called it themselves the Fatty Acid Institute, because they were measuring fatty acids and things. But, but the whole group was very cohesive, and everybody knew everybody. And there were about, must have been 10 or 12 grad students. The room that that is now Bucky's Butchery was the lab for the whole group, other than those people who were in the basement of the Stock Pavilion. And so I tell the story about you had a rack of test tubes, and you picked it up on one side of the room to went over, over, somewhere else, and you couldn't find a place to set it down. But by the time you came back, somebody had taken the spot.

52:41
Joan Parrish: So you were all working, doing all the lab work in that little, that room is maybe what, maybe 15 by 30? Maybe?

52:50
Marion Greaser: Yeah, that's not very big.

52:53
Joan Parrish: So you were really crammed in there. And you had to learn to get along

53:11
Marion Greaser: Yeah, right. Okay... Length of graduate education. Actually, I came in June of '64 and left in October of '68, so I finished in four years and in three months, [JP: Did you do both masters and the PhD?.] Master's and PhD. Yeah. [JP: That's quite fast.] My degree is, my PhD is listed as '69 because that's the graduation date. But I actually finished, you know, in about October of '68. Yeah, things went well, and I've got like five, at least five refereed publications from that period of time.

54:06
Joan Parrish: What was the general area that you were working on?

54:08
Marion Greaser: I was studying the sarcoplasmic reticulum, and the major thrust was on what happened to that and whether it was responsible for the PSE condition.

54:27
Joan Parrish: Oh, do we have time to talk about PSE? Because I think that this is-

54:29
Marion Greaser: Yes. Maybe we don't have time today, but.

54:33
Joan Parrish: Okay, but we will put that on for the next time, talk about PSE. [MG: Right, yeah.]Because that was a huge focus here. [MG: Yes it was] Because it was a huge problem. [MG: Yeah, right.] So how did you, what was your committee? I mean, you had Hoekstra and Cassens, but then did you have other people on your committee?

54:59
Marion Greaser: Yes. Yes, there were other people on the committee. Certainly, Briskey was on the committee. I don't think Bray was. There would have been somebody else, probably from biochemistry. It could have been DeLuca, but I don't remember for sure who was.

55:26
Joan Parrish: So they didn't stand out as [MG: No.] giving you a hard time? [MG: No, uh uh.] and was part of your graduate work, did you go and give presentations at national meetings? 

55:41
Marion Greaser: Yes. I gave a, had a, I think it was before poster time. Gave a talk at the animal science meeting in Nevada. Reno, Nevada, I think '66 or '67. I found an abstract. Abe Averly [?] also gave an abstract at the same meeting.

56:14
Joan Parrish: Oh how interesting. So this was not particularly onerous task, to do your master's and your PhD?

56:18
Marion Greaser: No, no, I didn't, you know, as I mentioned, I think before that, this was before the time of photocopiers, and in order to get enough copies of your PhD thesis for everybody on the committee, you had to have carbon copies. They had to be typed with, you know, a carbon copy to make all the copies you needed. Well, if you make a mistake typing something that's on carbon copy, you have to start the page over again. So the only feasible way to do this, unless you're an outstanding typist, is to hire somebody to type your thesis for you. And of course, if you make corrections, or when you try to prepare a paper for publication, you can scribble between the lines about what the changes need to be, but then it has to be retyped all again. And so you had to have typists. Professors weren't doing their own typing back then.

57:30
Joan Parrish: So did everybody have a secretary? Or they would have a secretary for a group of professors?

57:35
Marion Greaser: Yeah, we typically would have two. We had two for many years, until maybe in the 80s or so, when-

57:46
Joan Parrish: Computers become more common.

57:50
Marion Greaser: Right, then a cut back in terms of staff and so on. Yeah. So... so identification of additional research interests. Well, I was always fascinated by the muscle proteins, although I'd worked primarily with the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which was membrane proteins. So the additional research interests kind of led me to where I did my post docs, but I think we'll wait on that. You may want to have more material about the meat science program, and let's cover the PSE thing you know the next time.