Shaun Illingworth: This begins the second interview session with Dr. Martin Kling in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on October 16, 2012, with Shaun Illingworth. Dr. Kling, thank you very much for having me here today.
Martin Kling: Thank you.
SI: To pick up where we ended last time, you talked about how you met Dr. Fry at the Cobo Center in Detroit.
MK: Cobo, C-O-B-O.
SI: You were giving a talk on your dissertation subject and he was interested in recruiting you because they were starting a master's and PhD program in reading. Can you tell me a little bit about what the state of the department was when you arrived at Rutgers?
MK: It was a small department. It was the Department of Educational Psychology. I was an assistant professor and starting at that level. The usual way in academia is, after three years, you're reappointed for another three years. At that point, it's either up or out and you're given a year to find another job.
The main emphasis in the Department of Ed Psych was school psychology and, also, counseling. Reading was almost by itself in terms of Dr. Fry and myself. As it turned out, reading could be almost in any of four or five departments. There was a Department of Curriculum and Instruction. There was a Department of, as it turned out, also, Reading and, also, Department of Learning and Teaching.
These departments grew at different points, depending on the critical mass and how, nationally, things were getting organized around the country. So, at one point, it depended on what the zeitgeist was in terms of academia around the country, as well as Rutgers itself being very aware of where it was in the scheme of things.
The reason I chose Rutgers is because it was in that formative stage of development. Even though it was founded in 1766, it had a history of going through and evolving, from a Reformed school, not Reform... [laughter]
SI: Dutch Reformed.
MK: Reformed, yes, but religious-wise. It was founded by a grant from Rutgers, Henry Rutgers, for five thousand dollars to form the university. As McCormick's father noted, it fell on hard times at the turn of the eighteenth century. Princeton also fell on hard times.
At one point, the Board of Governors of Princeton said, "Why don't we merge with Rutgers and survive?" They passed it and it was sent to the Board of Governors at Rutgers. It lost by one vote. The rest is history, of course. So, it went through an evolution from that status to private-and-public and, finally, a state university.
[Editor's Note: Founded as Queen's College in 1766, the University was renamed in honor of Colonel Henry Rutgers in 1825. Richard P. McCormick, RC '38, GSNB '40, enjoyed a distinguished career at Rutgers as a Professor of History, University Historian, Dean of Rutgers College and a scholar of New Jersey history, Rutgers history and US political history.]
I could have gone to some other universities. In fact, I had an offer from the University of Santa Barbara. At that point, it was just coming out of being a junior college and joining the University of California system, which had consisted of six or seven universities like UCLA, and so forth, around the state.
My notion was, a professor is known by the students he or she has. I didn't see a future in that because it would not play into that kind of value system and mission that I thought, in terms of having students mentored, and, in a sense, making a difference, instead of one from community service. That whole evolution, it took a number of years for Santa Barbara to join the AAU, which is the Association of [American] Universities, which was founded in 1900, which had criteria for being accredited by that group, that professional group. It took a number of years.
I didn't regret it. Also, the location of Rutgers was between Philadelphia and New York. Of course, it was in good company, in the sense that most of the major universities at that time were located in that area. Also, in terms of travel and association, it could be utilized that way. Of course, my roots were in the Bronx, New York, and my family was in the area.
So, all these [factors] played into joining the Rutgers scene. I never looked back, although I had offers along the way. We went with the times, the zeitgeist--there's no beating the zeitgeist--joining it and doing one better, so-to-speak.
So, we eventually did join the AAU. I recall that, in order to join that group (and I don't know if I discussed that last time), you were checked out by a team of people for three days and had extensive preparations for that checkout. Did we cover that?
[Editor's Note: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, was invited to join the Association of American Universities, an organization for the nation's leading research universities, in 1989.]
SI: No, you did not.
MK: Yes. What happens is, they ask for documentation of what you've done as a group, as a university, what kind of students you have and where they went, whether they published in peer-reviewed journals and what the faculty had published, where they had published. The last thing that was on the table was whether they had any community service, but the big thing was research and basic research--and research that made a difference.
There are 212 PhD programs now in the country and sixty universities that belong to the AAU (sixty-three now) produce sixty percent of all the PhDs in the country. One of them is Rutgers. They command billions of dollars in [grants from the] National Science Foundation, NIH, NASA, and so forth, and have Nobel Prize winners, belonged to national academies.
I recall that we spent (the Grad School of Ed spent) a hundred thousand dollars preparing for that event in the early '80s. So, we went with the times and tried to keep ahead of it.
The thing that also was a factor in my development was the kind of students we attracted and the criteria we used to attract students from around the state and around the country. That was part of the idea of placement power and being aware of what was going on.
SI: Can you give me a sense of how that changed from the time you came to Rutgers to later in your career, what kind of students you attracted, how you went about doing that?
MK: Well, one of the things we did, because we were just starting out in '65, when I joined Rutgers, was the development of a reading and writing conference in '65. Doing that, we upgraded the whole field of reading and, also, worked with the State in making it a requirement that people have certain credentials to become a reading specialist in the State of New Jersey, following a curriculum that we charted and made very explicit in these kinds of conferences.
We made every effort to geographically appeal to a range of people from all over the state and all over the nation--all over the area, I should say, the Northeast. One of the places, geographically, we went--we went to three places throughout New Jersey, North Jersey, Central Jersey and South Jersey. We attracted, I recall, anywhere from six hundred people to over a thousand people, throughout the state.
We offered credit for it (or non-credit, depending on how they pursued it) and followed up, and [held] summer session programs, which were advertised in these booklets that we distributed and edited for their use. Here's one called "Perception and Reading," "A Table of Contents: Gaining Perspective on Perception, Perception Training Approaches: The Frostig Approach; The Delacato Approach; The Kephart Approach; The Winter Haven Approach; The Montessori Approach," which I happened to review, "and Reading Readiness Approaches."
We invited nationally-known people to present this all day long. So, they went home with a booklet and upgraded their skills in terms of what was going on at that point. The one that strikes my [mind], three one-day, in-service training institutes, Central Jersey, South Jersey, North Jersey, Cherry Hill in South Jersey, New Brunswick in Central Jersey, and North Jersey was West Orange, New Jersey, for example.
[Dr. Kling reads from the booklet], "We're happy to welcome you to our one-day Reading Institute. For those of you who are not familiar with the public offerings of the Reading Center, perhaps a word of explanation about our intent is in order. We consider the one-day institutes like a concentrated day-long course rather than a conference."
"We attempt to make the lectures similar to that you might experience of taking a university course and we used mainly Rutgers people. In fact, this booklet might be entitled 'Homework' or 'Outside Readings,' which supplement some of the concepts discussed in the lectures. The fall one-day institutes are much smaller in size than our spring reading [institute], which sometimes draws over a thousand educators and covers a large basketball floor."
"We also try to bring these supplementary education services to the customers by holding basically the same program three different areas of the state. This year, emphasizing new ideas, such as current progress in computer-assisted instruction."
Now, this was done in October, it's 1968, which was the beginning of computer instruction and the technological revolution, which was founded and developed by professors, mainly MIT people. If MIT were a country, it would be the eleventh wealthiest country, in terms of developing new and different ways of dealing with data and processing and the whole computer scene.
"We also try to bring these supplementary institutes to the customers, holding basically the same program, three different areas. This year, we're emphasizing new ideas, such as current progress in computer-assisted instruction, linguistics, TV, individual differences."
"In order to provide for a wider spread of interest, we are having afternoon portions devoted to school libraries in Cherry Hill, early childhood and disadvantaged in East Orange and supplementary reading instruction procedures in New Brunswick. These supplementary programs also provide some contact with a new Assistant Professor of Early Childhood, Ernest Washington, a well-known Professor of Library Science, (Marion Scott?), and a number of other graduate students in reading, plus, some representatives of the New Jersey School Librarians Association." So, there we go with the library; I had an association with the library also throughout the years.
SI: This would be targeted towards working professionals, teachers, librarians, reading specialists--I guess they didn't have reading specialists then.
MK: No.
SI: They came after you instituted these changes.
MK: Yes, right. So, they came from not only New York, but Pennsylvania and Connecticut, three major states. Of course, New Jersey was the biggest number of students, but, then, close to it was the Philadelphia scene, and then, next was Connecticut. So, now, we published these booklets each time (and you can have this as part of your repertoire) as we went along. So, now, I got this plaque as one of the co-founders, as the founder of the Rutgers Reading and Writing Conference, celebrating its fortieth anniversary. That was in 2008.
SI: This program is from the first year.
MK: Pretty much--well, forty, yes, pretty much. That's right.
SI: I see the term "Reading Center" attached to this. Was there already a reading center here or was that created as part of this process?
MK: Oh, of course, we offered the summer session courses and asked people to apply or they applied, recognizing that there was something going on here. Shortly after I came to Rutgers in 1965, we had a basement set of rooms and compartment sections devoted to little tutor rooms where we ran a reading clinic on Saturdays.
We had a secretary in front of the section who channeled inquiries and helped us publish things and stuff like that. We had, basically, a couple of offices in the same site. The compartments were for individual tutoring on Saturday mornings and diagnostic testing. The way it was set up was, it was a three-hour thing, a nine-to-twelve, and I was the director of that part of it. That was part of my load.
That was another thing--at a research university, the basic way in which the load that you carry is, two courses a semester and a couple of days a week, one day a week, you could do anything you wanted on your own. You didn't have to tell anybody anything about what you did; then, the others, preparation and stuff like that.
So, the Reading Clinic was set up so that the students who were more advanced and had a certain number of courses underneath their belts would work with the kids. Then, we would talk to the parents, but, before we did that, after we did that, we would reassemble in a seminar style around a rectangular, large table, a couple of tables put together, and discuss what each one did and what they might've done or could have done, and shared our concerns.
That went on right along. That was part of the program. If we look at the catalog of the day, which I think you'd better turn that off while I find it...
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SI: You want me to turn it back on?
MK: Yes. This happens to be the last catalog that I have--from '89 to '92 is the coverage of the years it was pertinent--which describes a Learning and Teaching program, "Degrees Offered: Masters of Education, Specialist in Education, Doctorate of Education." That's when I was chair.
Now, the Department of Learning and Teaching encompassed a whole set of things. First of all, we had professors and associate professors and assistant professors and, if you can see here, it's a pretty fair number, a critical mass of people, oh, about twenty-five, thirty faculty. "It offers degrees for students with career interests in teaching, curriculum, educational research, elementary, secondary and college level."
"The department favors a broad and interdisciplinary preparation that's built on a substantial foundation of at least one subject area. Programs that combine studies in general and professional education with work in a subject field are therefore encouraged. Students usually pursue coursework in the Grad School and other schools and colleges of the University. All programs in the Department of Learning and Teaching are designed to give students the opportunity to acquire breadth and depth in the subject field while pursuing professional work in education."
"Now, the master's, specialist and doctoral level program majors are offered in the following areas: creative arts, early childhood, elementary education, English/language arts, education, language education, bilingual, bicultural, English as a second language, and foreign language, mathematics education, science education and reading." So, this is the catalog, which was my domain as chairperson.
You had to satisfy all this critical mass (or maybe a mess) of people who are involved in this. So, degree programs are available that provide for students who desire graduate student [work], which is more interdisciplinary than the standard degree. So, in that sense, we were rather innovative, because, any way you slice it, the brain doesn't distinguish one or the other.
It's an arbitrary division, just like there are specialists in doctoring. Usually, the problem is, they don't talk to each other as a doctors' team, but we did. We made it our business to talk to each other in our meetings on a regular basis.
To invite and develop that, I had a ten o'clock breakfast every week discussing our issues around the table, openly and totally. Of course, we made decisions about evaluating each other and graduation and tenure and all that. Of course, when tenure was up, just the associate or the tenured people would discuss the issues.
SI: Was that the case when you first joined the department?
MK: No, I helped do that. My colleague was a bit more traditional and narrower in that respect. I remember a discussion we had once. He says, "I want you to teach this course this way, because this is the way I do it." I said, "Ed, if we both taught the same way and were identical, one of us would be redundant," and that was the end of that.
I have been known to be rather independent and secure in what I thought. That's been a kind of a thing that I've been known for all my life, actually, that I can remember. In fact, I developed a scheme for thinking about thinking. It's called "Levels of Thinking, Levels of Questioning," actually. There are four levels that I've developed. I used to have handouts.
One is cognitive memory--questions, define, name, yes or no, identify, observe, designate, recall. That category is to clarify, to assess, facts--who, what, where, when?--level one. Level two [is] convergent questions--explain, state relationships, compare and contrast, to build relationships, putting it all together--how? Level three [is] divergent questions--predict, hypothesize, infer, reconstruct. That level is called "To Stimulate Self-Analysis," question underlying causes for events, beliefs or actions--why?
The fourth level [is] evaluative questions--judge, value, defend, justify choice. The category there is to promote creative responses, coming up with your own ideas--what if? Then, these are defined alphabetically--what compare is, what contrast is, what does it actually mean? I used to hand this out. This is how I ran the program, and not that explicitly, but by action.
Then, so, the Master's of Education degree in Reading introduced most of these kinds of notions of interdisciplinary thinking, "Eighteen credits in reading, including: 'Reading for Secondary and College Students;' 'Foundations of Reading Instruction;' 'Remedial Reading;' 'Laboratory in Remedial Reading;' 'Seminar in Reading Research and Supervision;' 'Master's Thesis Research.'"
We were one of the few programs that held on to doing a master's thesis. Most universities dropped the thesis because of you know what. It was a trend to...
SI: Do you want to take a break?
MK: Yes.
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MK: Yes, universities tend to drop that, because it took too much time and students were not inclined that way. As you can see, then, to show how broad and deep we were, besides the eighteen credits in reading, we had nine credits in ed psych, which was my background, and Ed's background, too. He got his degree at USC in ed psych.
"'Introduction to Educational Tests and Measures,'" because you needed to use diagnostic tests and survey tests; these tests were evaluated by one of our faculty members who owned a publishing company which evaluated tests.
If you could take that green book out of that bookcase over there--you see that?
SI: Mental Measurements Yearbook.
MK: Yes, Mental Measurements Yearbook. His name was Oscar Buros, B-U-R-O-S. He lived in Highland Park and he was the editor of this book on reviewing tests, which was started in the 1930s and in which leading scholars evaluated tests and made their honest opinion about it.
There was no fee for it (given to you) to do that, but it was an honor to be invited. What you got for the review was a copy of the book. It was given to you free, which, at that time, was twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five dollars, substantial, because it was a big operation.
So, often, our faculty was invited, and I have several reviews, Martin Kling here. So, I had several reviews in this, among other things.
In order to give an individual a test, diagnostically, it has to meet certain criteria. First of all, validity--does it have some basis for existing? Also, psychometrically--is it reliable? Now, in order to pass the reliability measure, it should be in the 80s and 90s. If it's less than that, it's not useful for individual diagnostic placement.
Most tests don't pass that, very few, actually. If it's less than 90, it may be used for group analysis, but as a starting point, but not individually. So, the tests we used--there are hundreds of thousands of tests that are evaluated in this book by Boros--and many schools use tests that are not useful at all for individual analysis, let alone group analysis. So, I was honored to be invited to do that and help call the shots as I saw them.
Then, these nine credits in education, "Including 'Introduction to Educational Tests and Measures;' 'Introduction to Learning;' 'Information Processing;' 'Psychology of Learning;' and 'Introduction to Child Psychology;' and three credits in materials of reading from among the following: children's literature in elementary school, manuals, materials for children, materials for young adults, information services and sources for adults," and so forth.
Then, the other programs were in specialist in education degree programs, which was part of the department, "Creative arts, elementary education, English language, math, reading, science." Of course, the specialist meant sixty-four credits instead of thirty-six in that, and so forth.
Now, what I did with the master's and doctoral theses, I published them, co-published them, and gave students a head start in terms of rising above the usual candidates. They got the lead mention, in terms of the authorship, and I became secondary.
SI: You did talk about that in the first session.
MK: Yes. As a result--and we published in peer-reviewed things--I co-published or individually published fifty-some-odd articles in fifteen different journals. You would get things from all over the country, telling you, "Send me a copy," and that's how I made copies of these things. Some were not copied or in your archives, for example. Oh, here's one, yes, Growth and Change: Journal of Regional Development, "Why Johnny's Dad Can't Read."
It was not made at Rutgers Printing Press. So, it was a leading book at the time called Adult Illiteracy in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation. They generously supported good stuff, but it didn't pass my muster and I damned the book.
I saw why, of course. "Of the eleven recommendations Hunter and Harman make in the final, only Recommendation Four, which should really be Recommendation One, is substantive. The remaining ten rest on recommendations for," reads as follows, blah, blah, blah.
[Editor's Note: Adult Illiteracy in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation by Carman St. John Hunter and David Harman was published in 1979 by McGraw-Hill.]
"In sum, Hunter and Harman have alerted all segments of society to a major social problem in the United States. Adult illiteracy is associated with a myriad of other disadvantages, which isolate segments of unfulfilled people in a democratic, technologically-complex society."
"After having identified this major problem, the authors present a biased, humanistic view centered on community-based participation programs. These biases contribute to serious flaws in their assessment of the whys and wherefores of current thinking and severely limit the integrity of their report to the Ford Foundation."
"It appears that Hunter and Harmon started with a conviction of the superiority of community-based approaches and myopically pursued this view. Lapses in reasoning and documentation of their own view, as well as other, competing views, have resulted. The authors might have profitably examined the 242 annotated references, which constitute one-fourth of their book, to seek answers to the important questions concerning the problems of adult literacy," adult illiteracy, pardon me.
I think I spoke about the adult illiteracy problem--forty-four million American readers are functioning illiterate. That is, they don't read at the fourth-grade level and most of the stuff that we fill out is ninth or tenth grade at least. So, we have, still, a major, major issue program, and even people at high-powered places are not functioning as effectively as they might.
One of the things I did, as I think I mentioned in my last discussion, was teaching over five thousand adults to become more "reading efficient," I called it.
SI: You mentioned that you taught at PSE&G, Northeastern Power Grid...
MK: Colgate-Palmolive, and so forth. It turns out that (in my pre-check with them) more than half of their time is spent reading and keeping up with their fields. I've developed a stage of reading in upgrading these high-powered people in high-powered fields who want to become more efficient in their reading, and asked what their load is and what they are.
What we did was tailor-make each program for each set of skills that were needed to become more effective readers in their field, as well as more general reading. So, I developed what I call "Some Basic Assumptions: Developing a Reading Efficiency Program for Your Company." It's well spelled out in this document, which I handed out to these very motivated, very skilled, very educated people, many of them with higher degrees in their field and highly skilled in their area, but not in being efficient in doing their work.
So, you can have this as part of your documents if you wish, or I can summarize it quickly, "Reading is a complex thinking activity involving dozens of different skills used in various combinations depending on the various purposes and kinds of material read: teaching implications, to recognize the dynamic interrelationships between readers' purposes, skills, reading ability and materials."
"Number two, reading is a developmental activity. We recognize that it's not only important to improve the quality of reading at the elementary [level], but throughout lifespan. A reading efficiency program should be designed for average and good readers who are motivated to become superior readers."
Reading efficiency development for a specific group involves analysis of their reading habits, tasks and reading materials, not only in the context of their jobs, but, also, in their personal development. So, there's a dynamic relationship between personal and company thinking and reading.
"A reading efficiency course developed for a given group needs to take into account: reading theory, research and the best teaching practices the field has discovered, teaching implications, to balance reader needs, program development, what the field of reading can realistically deliver. Experienced and knowledgeable instructors ensure maximum transfer and satisfaction." I taught my own students how to do that, too. They sat in on these programs.
"Then, some fundamental scientific findings underlying a reading efficiency program: what proportion of reading time is spent on eye movements; answer: a major proportion of reading time is taken up by the duration of the pause in comparison with the eye movement time. The overall average is 92.7 percent for pauses and 7.3 percent for moves. These findings were developed by Tinker."
By the way, [Miles A.] Tinker, that was his whole life's work. He tinkered around with this eye movement thing. "The implication is that the eyes are primarily associated with conceptual processing rather than perceptual recognition. It needs to be recognized and properly bound--how fast can we read? The present psychological limit of reading most of the words on a printed page is between eight and nine hundred words."
"This fact derives from the first work done by a French ophthalmologist, [Louis Émile] Javal, in 1879, and reconfirmed by [Guy T.] Buswell," by the way, whom I took work with. He did that in 1922. He came to Berkeley. It was his last teaching position, "[Richard] Feinberg, [Luther C.] Gilbert," he was one of my mentors at Berkeley.
"[Stanford E.] Taylor, calculations, shortest fixation, approximately one-sixth to one-fifth of a second during which reading occurs; sweep to the next fixation, one-thirtieth to one-twenty-fifth of a second; return sweep to the next line, one-thirtieth to one-twenty-fifth of a second; average number of words that the eye can possibly see with a single fixation, 2.5 to three words."
Now, there were some phony things going on at the time about speed reading. They say you could read a page at a glance--baloney. It just doesn't hold up scientifically, and they made millions of dollars doing that. I debated some of that.
SI: At Berkeley, the people you studied under--and, also, I think your work with Dr. Holmes...
MK: Yes, he taught me, yes.
SI: They focused on the psychophysiological approach to reading. It sounds like you're looking at the same thing here, with the eye movements and that. Was that how the whole field was moving or was Rutgers unique or among a certain school in looking at that?
MK: No, actually, they were very broad in their thinking, and this is only one aspect. They're very eclectic. There were options you could take outside your program, and invited people with different views and challenged each other along those lines. They were very interdisciplinary in that sense, as opposed to other programs around the country.
That's what impressed me with the catalog that I sent for, [laughter] one of the over a hundred catalogs I sent for. Did I report that?
SI: Yes.
MK: I sent out a hundred postal cards at a penny a piece. Yes, I wasn't into reading at that time, when I came to Berkeley, actually. As I said last time, I was in pure psychology.
The master's level emerged because I took a course during the summer. As I mentioned, by chance, I met up with my future mentor by taking a summer course in reading, which I'd never taken a human course in anything, in psychology, pure psychology. I also mentioned there are about fifty different specialties in psychology. Most people think of it as clinical psychology, which that's only one segment.
So, we were very aware of, again, the zeitgeist changing and shifting and making our reading program interdisciplinary. We attracted those kinds of people who were looking for something that was challenging and were very bright and open to new ideas and different ideas. They shopped around, too. We also personalized programs to fit their needs or discuss these different options available to them, so that they felt comfortable in what they were doing.
SI: This is as you're adding new faculty members at Rutgers.
MK: Yes, yes.
SI: Just for some context, in the catalog you showed me, which is from the end of your career, there were about twenty-five to thirty faculty members in the department.
MK: Yes.
SI: When you first got there, how many were there?
MK: In reading? a half a dozen.
SI: Okay.
MK: Yes, so, we grew considerably. Of course, in order to grow, we had to argue that this was a viable thing, to get support from the administration. We made our case, and our case was these conferences, these three conferences, because we showed that there was a great need.
We got the State to approve and formalize the legitimacy of this program. So, minimally, if they or anybody else in the state were going to do a program, they had to have a minimum set of requirements, which we helped fashion, for the State to use as a certificate, a reading certificate, a reading specialist certificate. So, we led the way in that regard.
We also got into grantsmanship, and that's a whole other area, because that's what really put us on the map, nationally and internationally, because, again, the government was getting into it. What I'd like to talk about now is the fact that there was a program that was very competitive and was called the Right to Read Program.
SI: Okay.
MK: And that's where I did a proposal, "For Research and Related Activity, Submitted to the US Commissioner of Education, For Support Through Authorization of the National Center for Education Research and Development." The project was called "Targeted Research and Development Program Reading, Project II, Literature Search."
Now, this was submitted in May 1970. I'd been at Rutgers five years. I'd just made associate professor with tenure. So, I beat that by two years, in terms of the normal process of professorship. So, this was something that was big, big, big, in terms of a breakthrough for the national scene.
There was one simple idea behind it--it's called the "Invisible College." What I had done is, the "Invisible College" notion was developed in Germany in the end of the seventeenth century--excuse me while I collect myself.
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SI: Ready?
MK: Yes. This is from the Wiki"pedia, "The Invisible College has been described as a precursor group of the Royal Society of London, consisting of a number of natural philosophers around Robert Boyle (B-O-Y-L-E). It was suggested that other members include prominent figures later closely concerned with the Royal Society."
"The concept of Invisible College is mentioned in German Rosicrucian pamphlets in the early seventeenth century. Ben Johnson in England referenced the idea related in meaning to Francis Bacon's House of Salomon. In a masque, The Fortunate Isles and Their Union from 1624, the term gained currency for the exchange of correspondence within the Republic of Letters."
"Much has been made of the "Invisible College" in London of the later 1640s," and so forth, and so on. "So, in letters in 1646 and 1647, Boyle refers to, 'Our 'Invisible College' as our philosophical college.' The society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation." That's as far as we need to go on that.
My notion was to collect a group of people who we knew from all over the countryside to come together and solve a problem--that was my "Invisible College." I met them through various presentations throughout the country.
So, anecdotally, it reminds me of a situation where a family went to Johns Hopkins and says, "Our kid needs help." So, the people at Johns Hopkins says, "Why are you coming to me? Go to Marty Kling at Rutgers. He's right next to you." How did they know me?--well, through publications, presentations and stuff like that. I developed a camaraderie, professionally and personally, with people all over the country, just like how I came to Rutgers.
So, what I did was get these people together to solve this particular problem. This booklet is a proposal for this grant. Now, other people were very interested in it, too, because we're talking about 145,000 dollars--in today's money, it's probably a couple of million. I applied for this on May 11, 1970. As far as I know, there are a couple of dozen people, places, that were going for this.
In order to pull this all together, we were crazily working day and night to get this in. It was so bad--and it had to be in by twelve noon, signed, sealed and delivered by twelve noon--I made it by five minutes.
How did I do that? When the ink was dry, and so forth, and ready to go, there was no place else to go but by plane. So, I got money from the Dean and went to Princeton Airport, took a one-motor plane, single, just me and the pilot, flew right into Washington and just made it. My wife was pretty disturbed about that, [laughter] but we made it and we did it.
Now, what we did was--oh, wait a minute, the federal funds requested, I'm sorry, it was 249,000 dollars. I'm sorry, I was off by a little bit here, from July 1, 1970 to June 1971, June 30, 1971.
I got people from wherever I thought we'd get, and based on the simple notion of the "Invisible College," bringing all this brain power (and proven brain power) and productivity together, people whom I had met and worked with throughout my tenure, which is short, actually. I was only at Rutgers for six years at that point.
So, the idea was to find out what the field knew and didn't know at that point, from day one. So, the proposal started out with saying, "To prepare learning experiences in a systematic and scientific way, which are capable of aiding all students to learn to decode the printed symbols of language, to recognize their meanings, and to weave these together to recreate the original ideas of the writer is a complex process that remains a challenge to educators."
"Basic to this process, the teaching and learning of reading is a thorough understanding of the behavioral operations, A, development of language in the individual, B, the process by which reading is learned and, C, the complex events involved in the reading process itself."
"Without an adequate, integrated understanding of the behavioral operations on which language and reading are based, appropriate procedures for teaching beginning reading to all children and for the development and refinement of these complex skills cannot be constructed confidently and effectively."
"Yet, a great body of uncoordinated evidence of varying quality has been accumulated concerning language and reading in recent years. A number of basic disciplines increasingly have concerned themselves with questions related to these areas. To be useful to the educator, this diverse body of literature must be identified, evaluated, integrated."
Now, to show you what happened (and we didn't know that that was so), we accumulated over eight thousand references from day one to that time, and we had to work through them. I had the year off to do this, I had the staff to do this, I had the physical facilities and the computer facilities to do this. We were at the "War Room" at the Library School, the whole section called the "War Room," and we got several dissertations out of it and we did it.
SI: The grant was written between 1970 and 1971, and then, later on, you put all this together.
MK: Yes. What happened is, it was well-published. It was published in The Reading Teacher, for teachers to see, and it was published in these journals. These are the total issues, Reading Research Quarterly, Fall '71, Summer of '72, Winter '73, the total issues. This was part of the final report, distributed worldwide, almost as is.
As I introduced the beginning of it, "Three valued survey papers and one engraved paper in language development in this issue represent one of the three areas of Literature Search and Reading. The other two are Learning to Read and The Reading Process." Anyway, it's there. So, you can have this to store as part of the archives. They went all over the country, and so forth.
Now, to give you an idea, I was called the "Principal Investigator, Reading Theory and Academic Specializations." Mine was highlighted by, "Reading Theory, Psychology of School Subjects." The Director, who had a year off sabbatical, Frederick Davis, "Psychology, Reading Psychometrics." He was a very senior person, about ready to retire. It's just the right time to make use of his expertise.
Associate Director, one of my colleagues at Rutgers, who, by the way, was a student at Berkeley, too, "Reading Models and Sensory Processing; Project Liaison, Project I, Frederick Davis, Project II, III, James Kimple, Educational Administration, Reading Processes; Area Coordinator, John Geyer, Learning to Read."
"Area Coordinator, Joanna Williams," she was at University of Pennsylvania and went to Columbia. Her specialty was, "Learning and Child Development, Language Development; Area Coordinator, Irene Athey, Early Childhood Reading." She was then chair at the University of Rochester, and then, she joined us at Rutgers.
The language development, linguistics, cognitive development, and so forth, all these people came from all over the country, all over, Michigan, Minnesota, Columbia, University of Georgia, Stanford. Then, it indicated the stages there were, "Stage One: Preliminary Submission of Working Bibliographies," and then, the criteria and conferences. We had conferences at Rutgers. They came to Rutgers once or twice a year to exchange views and, in a sense, defend themselves or put up or shut up, that kind of stuff.
Then, that was, "Stage One: Preliminary; Stage Two: Conferences; Stage Three: Analysis of Literature; training reviewers and evaluation teams, location, photocopying; List of Resources: send lists of excluded items or code numbers, abstract, all included items, maintain list of tested, untested, untestable assumptions, check models for similar elements, merge common models; Stage Four: Conference." Of course, we'd be presenting papers at the various meetings.
"The following included in membership of this consortium are present and former editors of the following journals: American Educational Research Council, Educational Researcher, Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Communication, Journal of Educational Measurement, Journal of Ed Psych, Journal of Experimental Psych, Journal of Reading Behavior, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Language Learning, Psychometric Monographs, Psychological Bulletin, Research Quarterly, Review of Educational Research." All these people published in each of these, which are highly refereed. The rejection rate's fifty, sixty, seventy percent.
We had what was called the "Central Processing Personnel." We were the "War Room"--everything went through us. I was the principal investigator and the project director, Fred Davis, and then, the advisors to these people, "Dr. James Deese, Professor of Psychology, Johns Hopkins, currently Editor of Psych Bulletin," and another guy, "Robert Efron, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Boston University; David Elkind, Professor, Director of Graduate Training, Development of Psychology, Rochester;"
"Richard Hodges, University of Chicago; Albert Kingston, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Georgia, Director of Research and Reading Services; Carl Pribram, Recipient of US Public Health Service Career Research Awards since '62, Professor of Departments of Psychiatry, Psychology, Head of Neuropsychology at Stanford, a noted scholar in the field of neuropsychology; Robert Ruddell, Associate Professor at Berkeley; Barry Singer," one of my cohorts. He was at UC, Riverside, and then, the reviewer evaluators. So, it went.
Then, it said what computers we had to processes this, "The IBM 360/67, installed in April '69. It's the heart of the Computer Center of Information Services at Rutgers. This system is tied in with the IBM 360/91 at Princeton, producing joint capabilities of supporting 278 terminals; at present, twenty-three terminals are linked up with the computer at Rutgers. Plans call for tying in an additional seventy terminals in the near future. CCIS is a member of the IBM library share and the Association of Computing Machinery."
"Graduate School of Library Services has offered research space." That's the "War Project Room." [laughter] "It's located in its own new building adjacent to the University Library and CCIS. This building houses classrooms, faculty offices, laboratories for reference and bibliography, a remote video terminal, online visual access to IBM 360/67. The school exists to prepare professionals for libraries."
I don't know if you remember Thomas Mott. He was dean of the school at the time, "Has expressed a keen interest in an understanding of the proposed project, seeing it as a manifestation of increasing interest to coordinate interdisciplinary research, which is being generated by the new possibilities of the information retrieval services, is for this reason that he's made available to research project associates consoles and processing equipment."
[Editor's Note: Thomas Mott (1924-1989) served as the Chair of the Computer Science Department in the 1960s and directed the CCIS from 1966 until 1969. He then became Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.]
"Then, the Rutgers Reading Center was established within the Grad School to fulfill four interlocking purposes: professional training of graduate students with a doctorate; conduct research in reading; service the teaching profession; service the communities of New Jersey. The Center is directed by Professor Edward Fry. The principal investigator of this proposed project has been Associate Director of the Center since '65."
So, I was being groomed for taking over. He was getting on. "This long-term professional reading assures this project the cooperation of the Grad School as a source of high-quality doctoral students," and we got many dissertations out of it, many, many, "and support," because we had money to give them. So, it was a double incentive for them to join us and get published, also, as well, taking a piece of it. So, that chapter led to my full professorship the next year.
We'll finish that phase at this point
[RECORDING PAUSED]
MK: Yes, there's an interesting intersection and connection between Rutgers and Berkeley, unbeknownst to me. I was in the dentist's office the other day, and the dentist is a graduate of Rutgers. His father was also a professor at Rutgers.
He had a book on Rutgers--I don't know if you've seen that book--written by a cultural anthropologist about Rutgers from day one, from 1766 on, illustrations and stuff. It came out eight or nine years ago. It's sitting in his outer room there.
[Editor's Note: Professor Kling is possibly referring to The Rutgers Picture Book: An Illustrated History of Student Life in the Changing College and University by Dr. M. Michael Moffatt (a long-time Rutgers faculty member in the Department of Anthropology), published in 1985.]
I came across Selman Abraham Waksman. [Dr. Kling reads from the Nobel Prize website's biography of Waksman], "He was born in Kiev, Russia, in 1888, the son of Jacob Waksman and Fradia London. He received his early education primarily from private tutors and completed his school training in Odessa at an evening school with private tutors. He obtained his matriculation diploma in 1910 from the Fifth Gymnasium in Odessa as an extern and left for the United States immediately afterwards."
"In the Autumn of 1911, he entered Rutgers College, having won a State Scholarship the previous spring. He received his BS (Bachelor of Science) degree in agriculture from Rutgers in 1915. He was then appointed research assistant in soil bacteriology under Dr. Lipman in the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station and was allowed to continue graduate work at Rutgers, obtaining his Master of Science in 1916. In the same year, he became a naturalized US citizen and was appointed research fellow at the University of California, where he received his PhD in biochemistry in 1918."
[Editor's Note: Dr. Jacob G. Lipman served as Dean of the College of Agriculture at Rutgers University and Director of the New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment Station.]
"He was invited by Dr. Lipman to return to Rutgers, [laughter] where he received an appointment as microbiologist in the Experiment Station and as lecturer in soil microbiology at the University. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1925 and Professor in 1930. When the Department of Microbiology was organized in 1940, he became Professor of Microbiology and head of the department in 1949."
He was appointed the Director of the Institute of Microbiology, retired in 1958. However, he has a laboratory and office at the Institute to continue a limited amount of research and considerable writing and lecturing," so, come complete circle, and, of course, he found the penicillin.
SI: Streptomyicin.
MK: Yes, right. "Professor's fields of work include, [in] chronological [order], the microbiological population of the soil, sulfur oxidation by bacteria, microorganisms and soil fertility, decomposition of plant and animal residuals, nature and formation of humus, occurrence of bacteria in the sea and their role in marine processes, production and nature of antibiotic substances, taxonomy, physiology and biochemistry of the actinomycetes."
"He was published in over four hundred scientific papers, written alone or with others, eighteen books. He has isolated, together with his students, a number of new antibiotics including antimycin, clavacin, streptothricin, streptomycin, grisein, neomycin, candicidin, fradicin, candidin, and others. Two of those, streptomycin and neomycin, have found application in the treatment of various infectious diseases of men, animals and plants. They've been covered by patents," and so forth.
So, as the world turns, it's an amazing story, how a chance summer session course changed my thinking in terms of going, or a catalog changed my course and a course that I'd taken for fun in the Summer of 1949.
SI: I wanted to go back. You described how intensely you were working on this grant, and then, the project that came out of it, but, at the same time, you were working on founding the AAUP chapter at Rutgers.
MK: Oh, yes.
SI: How did that come about?
MK: It's called collegiality. I developed a lot of relationships with a lot of different people in a lot of different places. It wasn't just education--it was psychology, physiology, you name it. I mean, as you can see, I've always been open--and my own dissertation is called "general open systems," instead of closed--my mind is always open to new ideas and different ideas.
I recognize that there's a relationship between unionization and salary and competition in the marketplace. As I said, it's very Darwinian out there. You lose faculty based on making an attractive offer and negotiating for an offer. Rutgers was beginning to lose some good faculty and we recognized that we were slipping in that sense, pragmatically. I'm, as my wife calls me, an optimist and a pragmatist, I mean.
So, the problem was defined for me by the collegiality that I had. We often had lunches together and shared different ideas, because our people went to different places in terms of faculty. So, these kinds of relationships were fostered, and so, that's how it came about.
Then, I became editor of the journal and participated, and then, was singled out for the award because I was one of the instigators of this association. It was a natural, it seemed to me, because, again, it goes back to my father, who was active with David Dubinsky in the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, which tried to right the injustices that were carried on by people who were not interested in people. That's how deep my feelings were about it (and thoughts).
[Editor's Note: David Dubinsky served as President of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which had been established in 1900, from 1932 to 1966.]
SI: Are there other faculty members that stand out in your memory as being leaders in that movement at Rutgers?
MK: I have this letter somewhere, where I was invited and there's some names given, but I can't [find it]. There were so many in and out, so-to-speak, that I would have to [get the record].
Is it stopped?
SI: No.
[RECORDING PAUSED]
RK: Yes, yes.
MK: Jean Burton, who was in the Psychology Department, invited me to the annual Georgina Smith Award Reception to be held in 1992 at the Continuing Education Center from four-thirty to seven-thirty.
"This year, in addition to presenting the Georgina Smith Award on Distinguished Service, we will honor the founders of the Rutgers Council of the AAUP Chapters and the Executive Committee that, in 1970, established the AAUP as the bargaining agent for the faculty. On behalf of the Founders Award Committee, you have been selected to receive this recognition for your outstanding services to the AAUP."
"Please RSVP on the enclosed reservation form. We need to know whether or not you'll be able to attend and if you plan to bring a guest to this gala evening of collegiality and good cheer. We look forward to seeing you there," yes, but I documented what I had done there. I don't know.
SI: Even today, faculty unionization is not particularly widespread.
MK: Really? I haven't kept up with it. [laughter]
SI: I heard another interviewee say that, out of the AAU institutions, only the other SUNYs are unionized. Back then, was there a model at another university you were following or how did the idea come about, doing it through the AAUP?
MK: I think it was more of a pragmatic thing, in terms of losing faculty to better offers and keeping up with that kind of rating of good faculty and not keeping up with the marketplace. That's been an issue all the time. One way of rectifying it was to keep up with it. I haven't kept up with it, of course, since I retired, which is twenty-one years ago.
SI: Was there a lot of resistance from the administration?
MK: Not really. In fact, I had a very close relationship with the late Edward Bloustein and articulated some of these concerns, and it went through. It wasn't too much of a hassle, as I recall.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Edward J. Bloustein served as Rutgers University President from 1971 until his death in 1989.]
SI: Was Gross President then, when it started?
MK: Oh, Mason, I'm sorry, Gross was, yes, Gross, and then, Bloustein, yes. I don't recall exactly when that was. That was interesting, because he was a master at working with people. It was the time of Vietnam. I recall, at Berkeley, there was a big movement of "Get Out of Vietnam." It was so big and bad that when I filed my dissertation, I didn't know whether I'd get out of the building.
They surrounded the building, on the steps. It was a very belligerent situation. The police were there and a lot of physical activity going on and concerns about people's health and welfare. I mean, it was a very dangerous time.
Now, when this happened (or started to happen) here, he [Mason Gross] invited the students in and stopped it in the middle. He had a chat with them. He served them some tea and cookies and was rather fatherly and listened and responded accordingly. Nothing physical happened or emerged.
So, that was the end of his era, almost. It's almost like a punctuation mark saying, "This is about the last thing you're going to do that's important." Yes, shortly after, he retired, not too long. I don't recall exactly when.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Mason W. Gross served as Rutgers University President from 1959 to 1971.]
So, Rutgers is very competitive now, has been for years, and they've attracted some good people. When I retired, people used to call me and all that stuff, but I did some consulting for a while, as many of us do.
One case that I consulted on, which sticks in my memory quite strongly, because it's an example of what goes on in terms of the schools and the parents and the kids, I don't know if it's necessary to say the school's name, but there's a school in North Jersey, an upper middle class school, and these two twins, two guys, went special ed.
They graduated and were reading about the fourth-grade level. So, again, there are these private schools saying, "Oh, we could do this, that, and the other, in Massachusetts, landmark this, that, and the other. Just send that kid to us, send us the money, and we'll take care of the kid. They'll be like you never knew them before."
So, they decided, at their initiation, they'll sue the school for millions of dollars. This wasn't the only case. It was the tip of the iceberg. So, the school district hired a lawyer and they singled me out to be an expert witness.
They had--not a lawyer, but an advocate for dyslexics, for this, that, and the other. They weren't lawyers, but they were protagonists, helping out the disadvantage, the poor, whatever you call it.
So, I spent three days there and the thing dragged on for two years. The first question that was asked of me was, "When's the last time you took a course in your field?" I said, "Ma'am, I teach the courses that you're talking about." [laughter] That ended that.
I had two drawerfuls (I still have them) of all the things that the school district did, from day one, the team, special ed team, the parents. I tested the kids, diagnostic tests, IQs, what the parents did or didn't do. I even interviewed the parents.
In New Jersey, it goes through several layers. It goes to an administrative judge. It takes about two years to wind its way through--oh, and I also [wrote] reports. The bottom line was, you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Everything that the special ed team suggested, they did not do, in writing, in documentation, that this is what you should do--never. Of course, the parents were concerned there'd (inaudible?) two twins, nice kids.
Then, I went to school districts. I was a consultant in New York district and Rockville, New York, and so forth, wound down, so-to-speak.
SI: This is all after you retired from Rutgers.
MK: Yes, right.
SI: The other jobs, the consulting work with PSE&G, etc., that was during your time at Rutgers.
MK: Yes. That was all during the time, yes.
SI: Was that considered an outside consulting job or was that part of your work at Rutgers?
MK: No, that was outside consulting. I wrote a paper on--oh, by the way, here's an example of one of these yearbooks, The Seventh Measurements Yearbook, Volume II, on dyslexia.
SI: I had another clarification question, while you're looking at that.
RK: Yes.
SI: When you came to Rutgers in '65, you were in the Department of Educational Psychology.
MK: That's correct.
SI: Then, did the department change or were you moved to another department? Did you become a member of the Department of Learning and Teaching? How did that change over time?
MK: That's, again, part of the zeitgeist. In other words, the way the fields were being organized or reorganized at that time, nationally, was these different departments--also, with our own image of where we should go or where we could thrive, in terms of our say-so or against kind of a who's in charge or who's in control and what criteria is being used, and so forth. So, it was a national thing that was going on, too. That's how that went.
SI: At the end of your career, you were in the Department of Learning and Teaching.
MK: That's right. That was the latest development in terms of development of reading, where it might best thrive and be the latest in terms of what was going on.
SI: Those departments that you mentioned earlier--you mentioned, originally, it was Educational Psychology, there was also Curriculum and Instruction, Reading, and then, Learning and Teaching--are those all the same department just with different names or are they different departments?
MK: That's interesting--both.
SI: Okay.
MK: There's some overlap and some underlap. It's not all black and white. There's shades of gray there. [laughter] It also deals with personalities in terms of arguing your case as to whether you want to qualify and whether your colleagues want you there, too. So, there's a lot of juggling going on here in terms of--sometimes, it boils down to how feisty you are in terms of territorial rights (or lack of rights)--but we got what we wanted.
We were glad where we went and how we went. We found that being a reading department itself was not very productive. It was an interim thing, anyway. It only lasted a year or two, and we were glad to move on.
Learning and teaching was the way to go, because we became, as you can see, more and more interdisciplinary or holistic or whatever you want to call it. We talked to each other [at] many of our luncheons, and things in [the] faculty happened during lunch.
You'd bring your lunch or you'd go to lunch and you'd chat about these things. There's a lot of sub rosa things going on all the time, whether you realize it or not. So, I'm a social animal and very interdisciplinary, and have been that way all my life.
So, it was a natural evolution that characterized what was going on. I don't see any--not that I've kept up with everything--any change going on, any massive change going on, in regard to learning and teaching, because, as you can see from the diversity of groups, it does where the field is going and should be going, actually.
SI: When did you become chairman of the department?
MK: I was in five years before I retired. So, it was the end of my career, in a sense.
SI: You retired in 1991.
MK: 1991, right.
SI: Okay.
MK: So, it's usually a six-year appointment. I was short one year. So, of course, there are always challengers and people who wanted to become chair. Actually, I could have been a chair again, because that's the way it was going.
Then, I became active in the retiree--the thing that [Todd] Hunt is doing.
SI: Oh, the Silver Knights?
MK: No, not the Silver Knights. That's for the non-faculty. The retirees, the faculty retirees, I gave several presentations there. I was active there for a while, but I haven't been in some time now. They have regular meetings every month and there's a ten-dollar fee for joining, which I do whether I'm active or not.
SI: Were there other University-wide activities you were involved in, like committees, task forces, any search committees that you were called upon to serve on?
MK: Not formally that I know of, but, informally, when they were looking for a President, I had some input, but not formally.
SI: Okay. Was that President...
MK: Bloustein. Yes, he was an unknown. He came from a small college and untested. Then, there was this guy, the last one, from the South.
SI: Tulane.
MK: Yes, Tulane.
SI: Fran (Francis) Lawrence.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Francis L. Lawrence served as Rutgers University President from 1990 to 2002.]
MK: Yes, Fran Lawrence. Yes, I got a thing from him when I retired, emeritus status, yes. I was not too enthusiastic about his appointment, and nor did he prove himself, it seemed to me, subsequently, but this guy who just came aboard, he's a powerhouse.
[Editor's Note: Dr. Robert Barchi served as the twentieth President of Rutgers University from 2012 to 2020.]
He recognized--that was a big error made, when there was talk about a merger between the medical school and Rutgers. There's a big tumult going on when that was happening or not happening, and it should have happened, because that's part of being a major university, but I'm glad that that's coming aboard, and so forth.
Two of my kids got their degrees at Rutgers. That was part of the attraction, too, by the way. Faculty family could go to Rutgers. The other one went to Indiana, and then, Yale, third one, my daughter; the others were two boys.
I'm glad that I came to Rutgers, actually, because most of what I wanted to do, I did. It was a good fit. These other ten offers all had their pros and cons. I knew most of the people, part of the "Invisible College." I knew who was where or what. You have to have a critical mass of faculty and staff and support to do what you want to do. I don't look back in terms of the choice we made, [laughter] because I met my wife that way, too.
It's one of my mantras, "Luck and pluck seize the moment," because I did a readability analysis of the UN [United Nations] papers. It was a grant that you would get (if you were chosen) to come to New York and present your papers and work with the UN. It was a big competition, because they'd pay you for the summer. You could stay at International House, which, by the way, I stayed at at Berkeley. That's another story, by the way.
So, I said, "Most of this stuff is not pertinent, because the readability level of the UN documents is above what people can do." I was going to analyze it and suggest ways of making it more readable and understandable, what they were doing. It was a PR thing, too--the population doesn't know what the hell they're doing. Of course, then, they can't read it. They can't understand what they're doing.
So, I presented my paper, submitted it to the board. Some guy in political science, who had some connections, got it and I didn't, but I was determined to go to New York. I don't know why I hadn't been to my folks' for a while and I was going to [visit].
SI: What year was this?
MK: 1956.
SI: Okay.
MK: No, wait a minute, gosh, it's 1958. We've been married going on fifty-five years. Yes, 1958, that 2013, January 26th, will be fifty-five years we've been married, 1958.
SI: You got married in January of...
MK: Yes, January 26, 1958. So, I was determined to go to New York, come hell or high water. Oh, the attraction, of course, to go [to the UN was], they would pay everything, but that didn't happen. So, my brother invited me to come back and stay with them. This was in Riverdale, New York. So, I took him up on it and came to New York.
They were celebrating their fifth anniversary, and I didn't know any girl or anything. He says, "Why don't you get a date or something?" My future wife, so, they lived on the sixth floor and she lived on the fourth floor of this apartment building. So, probably, she could tell the story even better, [laughter] maybe she should, but anyway.
SI: Why don't we hear your version and, the next time, I can ask her?
MK: Okay, okay. [laughter] So, she was working. She was doing the laundry downstairs and she met my sister-in-law downstairs. She says, "Oh, we're celebrating our fifth anniversary. My brother-in-law is in town and he needs a date," and so forth. The rest is history. In other words, we hooked up and it all started up again, and so forth. It all happened rather quickly. In about six weeks, I proposed.
SI: Really? Wow.
MK: And so, that's where the "luck and pluck" comes in. It's always been the story of my life in that sense, because [of] being at the right place at the right time, unintended results or findings or consequences, as they say. So, she was working and had a life of her own, was very active, being involved at NBC.
So, I see it's almost five. So, we're right on target.
SI: Yes, let me just pause for a second.
[RECORDING PAUSED]
SI: This concludes today's session with Dr. Kling. We'll come back for another session.
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Reviewed by Shaun Illingworth 1/22/2025