>> This is James Newberry,
and we're here again for Part 2 of my interview with
Dean Joseph Meeks and
the founding Dean, College of The Arts.
This is Thursday August 24,
2017 at the Sturgis Library.
I'm glad to have you back.
>> Thank you so much, James.
>> So we're going to pick up where we left off.
And that really is
your introduction to what was then Kennesaw College.
Can you tell me a little bit about that?
>> Yes.
In 1974,
I would have to say that I had heard
about Kennesaw Junior College
prior to that time because I had a friend
who was teaching here, but I had not been here.
And so as I started my journey away from
Clark College to considering
where my career would go next,
I started to meet musicians in
the Atlanta area as I moved over
to Georgia State University and started another degree.
And one woman that I met,
a singer of soprano,
who was a graduate of Northwestern University.
Her name was Donna Angel.
And Donna had heard me accompany
a Georgia State student in
her recital and she wanted to work with me.
So we started rehearsing
and she was very talented
and we enjoyed the relationship.
And then she said, I have been invited
to sing a recital at Kennesaw Junior College.
Would you please come and accompany me?
So I readily accepted, said, of course,
because I was eager at
this point to start performing again,
to be involved in the music community.
I felt as if I had been in a isolation and
had not had the opportunity to perform as much.
So I said, oh, yes.
And of course, I had no idea
anything about Kennesaw Junior College.
So our time arrived to come and do the recital.
And so I arrived at this main campus,
which was three small buildings sitting in a pasture.
There was no sense of entry or
no sense of exit. You just arrived.
And these three small buildings had,
you could say three stories,
but one pretty much was underground.
So they were small and then,
of course, it was very rural,
and this whole area was.
What you see today is
absolutely way beyond what things looked like in 1974.
So with this rural county,
rural town, many friends would say to me,
I never go across the river.
Or I don't go outside the perimeter.
So I was definitely outside the perimeter and
I had definitely crossed the river.
But it was one of the best crossings I ever
made because I arrived.
We did the recital to
about 150 people from
the community who came to hear this recital.
There was a thirst for the arts here.
And in those days,
the only place we had to perform
was in the original Student Center.
That building is still here on campus,
and it served as a cafeteria,
a place for meetings,
lectures, and concerts in the evening.
So a lot had to take place
that Linoleum tile had to be scrubbed and
polished and piano had to be rented and brought
in and chairs had to be
assembled and you did the recital.
But what a wonderful first experience,
because Donna sang beautifully and I
enjoyed thoroughly accompanying her in that recital.
But it was the audience,
the community, the engagement
that took place that evening.
Shortly after that, I was
invited back to play a solo recital,
which I readily did again
and I came and had the same experience.
A large population of the community came to the recital.
And so from then on,
I was here a lot, playing, accompanying, performing.
And this really was the beginning of my
seeing a possibility of being here to teach.
Young people were coming up to me after the concert,
saying, I want to study piano with you.
Now, that would be wonderful.
So very shortly after that,
Dr. Wayne Gibson, who was the program coordinator.
You must know that
in those days we didn't have departments.
We didn't have schools, we didn't have colleges.
We had programs, and there was a music program.
Dr. Wayne Gibson, graduate from Northwestern University,
PhD in music history,
he was a musicologist,
kept inviting me to come and participate
in the music that they were making here in this campus,
small campus at the time.
Still sitting on 150 acres,
which allowed us to grow.
So he then invited me to come and teach a part time.
And so I agreed to do that.
And I was amazed at the number of
students he assigned to me.
There was a real excitement about the fact
that they were offering music courses.
Because when I arrived, there was
only one large room dedicated to music.
And in that large room,
we had a college chorus,
risers for them to stand down and to rehearse.
We had a piano that had possibly been in
a shipwreck because it was so poorly put together.
And the only thing
that was being taught was music appreciation,
chorus, and students wanting to study applied music.
So I came, I started teaching these students.
And then Dr. Gibson had the vision in 1974
and '75 and '76 in that time frame,
that he wanted to design a music curriculum,
and I was very excited about that.
This was a wonderful opportunity
to participate and be involved
in something that was beginning and would grow.
The opportunity that you have with that
is that nothing has been carved in stone.
It hasn't had 100 years or
50 years of just getting put in place.
So you had the opportunity to create and to develop and
to dream about what could be for a music program.
So I joined him in that effort
and we would teach and then in the evenings,
we'd have dinner, and then we would work on
designing music curriculum
till 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning.
Because we wanted to expand,
even though we were still a junior college
and we could offer an associate's degree in music,
we did not have a curriculum to go beyond that.
So we designed it and we got approval to start
offering music theory 1 and music theory 2,
along with the music appreciation classes
and the applied lessons.
We also started adding
part time faculty to teach
other instruments besides piano,
for flute and for guitar,
and so there was a real excitement about all of this,
for the community, for us.
And in the present day,
we talk about community engagement a lot.
But we were always about community engagement.
Had we not been engaged in the community,
we would not be here today.
We would not have flourished in the way that we did.
And I believe that with all of our programs,
but particularly for those of us who were in the arts.
Those programs got accepted,
and then because of the growth,
they assigned us three more classrooms.
We grew from 1-4.
And in those four classrooms,
we taught private lessons,
we taught classes, music theory,
and all of this was housed in
what was the original humanities building,
which is connected to what university college is today.
All of the humanities were taught in that building,
foreign languages, English literature,
art, one theater professor,
one art professor, maybe one part time person in art.
And so we were one big happy family.
It was a young college, a young faculty,
and a closeness that we all
enjoyed in the friendships that we
made and the support we were able to give each other,
which became the catalyst to move even further.
So that was going quite well.
And I was on the part time faculty,
and Dr. John Grider was
the chair of the Humanities Division.
We did have divisions,
as I mentioned earlier, not
colleges and schools and departments,
but we had the Humanities Division and
within that division, these different programs.
So Dr. Grider was
a wonderful leader and very
supportive of what we were doing in music.
And he just was so excited about what we were doing.
And of course,
we're dreaming bigger and bigger and the opportunity
came for us to
inherit the old and the original maintenance building,
which is still there.
Still houses some of the music faculty and classes.
It's a small building,
what was the original maintenance building.
We renovated it, gutted it,
created classrooms, music studios that were soundproof,
did an addition on the back that
would serve as a large classroom,
rehearsal room, which we
then were able to do concerts there.
Now, in that transition from moving from
the student center to having
our own space in this renovated maintenance building.
In the James Carmichael student center,
there was a conference room upstairs,
and it was a place for meetings for all gatherings.
But it was large enough for us to
start doing some of our concerts.
So once again, we'd put out the chairs,
pull the drapery across the wall,
put a piano in the room and we'd start doing concerts.
So the program continued to
grow in terms of having faculty recitals,
guest artists recitals, and we were gaining visibility,
which was critical to our growth.
So once we moved into
the renovated maintenance building and put
the sign out music and that we had our own place,
we had put down a stake that was significant for us
that we had studios that were soundproof,
practice rooms for the students,
classrooms and a place to rehearse and perform.
And so that was really the beginnings of our becoming,
our moving towards being a music department.
>> And when were you hired full time?
>> I was hired full time in January of 1975.
>> So what would you say
your goals were for the program at that time?
>> The goals for me at that program was
to have someone like Dr. Gibson
who was excited about building
something and the opportunity
that I could be a part of that.
I felt that I had been stagnating.
I felt that I had not been able to contribute in a way
that would fulfill my soul as a musician.
So at that moment,
when he and I would talk,
we both could just get so excited about what we could do.
And I will have to say that unless you have
upper administration supporting your goals and dreams,
you don't get very far.
And we have been really blessed at Kennesaw to have
had a president from
the first president, Dr. O'Hara Sturgis,
to our second president,
Dr. Betty Siegel, to our third president,
Dr. Daniel Pap and
now our current president President Sam Olens
who were supportive of the arts,
who applauded what we were
doing and wanted us to succeed,
not holding us back.
Dr. Sturgis and his wife attended every concert we did.
In the first year I was here,
I did 15 faculty concerts.
We had a community orchestra and it was
called the Cobb Symphony Orchestra.
Betty Bennett was the conductor.
She had started in her living room with that orchestra.
She was a flutist or floutist,
whichever you prefer, and she
started to teach private lessons for us.
She involved the orchestra.
We developed a partnership with the community orchestra.
I performed several concertos with the orchestra.
They would come on the campus,
and when we built the new student center,
James Carmichael Student Center.
We clear out the floors after
the cafeteria and in the evenings,
we'd put in the seats,
bring in the piano and we'd play concerts there.
But Dr. Sturgis was very supportive.
When he retired he and his wife went abroad for
the first time and
my faculty recital fell during that time.
The minute he was back,
he called me on the phone and he said, Joe,
I just want you to know that how sorry Sue and
I were that we were not able to attend your recital,
but we had never been abroad,
and we had this opportunity.
And so that support and
that advocacy made you want to be here.
So Dr. Sturgis had retired and
then we launched a search for the next president.
And so in that search,
Dr. Betty Siegel applied for the position.
She took the search committee,
the Board of Regents, all by storm.
She was vibrant, dynamic,
a change maker or change agent,
you might say, never met a stranger, a big smile.
Mary Tyler Moore smile she could light up a room.
And she came and wow.
She just blew everybody out of the water.
But it was a change because she would become
the first woman president
of a college or
university in the University system of Georgia.
And there was so much excitement around that.
Everyone was so impressed with her delivery of her dream,
her vision for this college.
She engaged with everyone
with whom she met during that time,
the community, and internally
with the faculty staff and the students.
So with great support,
she was hired as
the second president of
Kennesaw State University and she hit the ground running.
No grass grew under her feet
and no grass better grow under your feet,
she was going to keep us moving. She had a vision.
She was an art enthusiast,
an arts advocate and always a supporter.
Now with the second President,
the arts have a friend,
and Betty Siegel was that friend.
And for the next 25 years,
her leadership was sustained and
revolutionary for the 25 years that she was here.
And she wanted the arts
to be a part of the fabric at Kennesaw.
And so she was behind anything
that we did to advance our visions and
our dreams for creating
arts programs and so
that's why we made it to where we are today as well.
She became such a good friend,
a friend to the community, a friend to the campus,
a friend to me personally,
a friend to the arts.
She would oftentimes go to something in Atlanta,
she'd have dinner with someone
and she'd come back the next day.
She'd call me on the phone.
And she's owe a letter.
I have maybe three folders of
just treasures of letters that she sent to me.
And she say, Joe, last night,
I met a wonderful couple in Buckhead,
and they love the arts,
and I think we should have them to the campus.
And so what do you think? I think we should.
Let's have them up for
a concert and have them for dinner,
and let's get connected and I said absolutely.
We would invite these people
and bring them to the campus, to the concerts.
We'd sit down and have dinner with them,
and again, that engagement,
and she loved to sit at the table and
almost play that game of six degrees of separation.
She loved to put 12 people together
and watch all the connections take place.
This inspired us.
And she was really enthusiastic about this,
that we start a concert series
and one that would bring in renowned artist,
national, international artists to this campus.
And she felt that by doing that,
it would bring us high visibility with
the Atlanta community and the communities around
us that we could
engage them in what we wanted to do here.
She felt that if we could bring patrons
and friends, politicians, musicians,
anybody in the community,
and have them sit with us for
a concert and to have dinner with us,
break bread together,
that that was going to advance our dreams,
our vision for this university.
>> And did you see that happen?
>> Yes. It happened.
It was the catalyst that moved
us far into the future at that point.
In the meantime, we were developing a strong curriculum.
When Betty Siegel came,
we had become a four-year college
in 1976.
And our name change,
in 1977, from
Kennesaw Junior College to Kennesaw College.
Now that we were a four-year institution,
we were able to design a baccalaureate degree.
And the music program was one of
the first six baccalaureate degrees
that was approved for this college.
So having a baccalaureate degree,
having inherited a maintenance building
that was now a music building,
our own music building,
we were really on a roll.
We were moving forward.
We were adding more faculty,
more talented students were coming.
The community was becoming
more involved with what we were doing.
So we were off and running.
>> Well, tell me about your trajectory.
You were a full-time faculty, and how did you progress.
>> Well, I became full-time faculty.
And of course, with that,
when you think about how few members
of the faculty we had,
everything fell on the three of us,
and then the four of us,
and then the five of us; committee assignments,
teaching, performing,
engaging in the community, making presentations.
All of those things,
oh my goodness, how exciting.
I was suddenly in a whole new world that I
just loved every minute of it.
Many friends would say,
Joe is the only person I know who
really loves his job and loves what he's doing.
Because it was inspiring.
It was just very inspiring to be in
the midst of that energy that was taking place.
So we have the baccalaureate degree,
we have the music building,
and I came as an assistant professor.
And then within a short time, I guess, five years,
I was promoted to associate professor,
but those kinds of things and those kinds of titles
don't really mean that much to me.
I know it's a marker for people,
but the fact is, what are you doing?
Are you doing it? Are you enjoying it?
Are you making a difference?
So we were making a difference
and we were really interested
in being able to offer professional degrees.
We were in that time period,
a liberal arts college,
but having come from major music schools,
all of us, we knew
that professional degrees had to become
a part of that enterprise.
So we wanted to offer the bachelor
of music degree and performance.
Now, what we had done when we
created the bachelor of arts degree,
we disguised a bachelor of
music degree within that bachelor of arts degree.
So our students were working very hard to meet
all those assignments and all those requirements.
People on this campus,
people in charge of the curriculum committees would say,
no, we're not going
to have professional degrees on this campus.
We're a liberal arts college.
That will not happen.
Oh ye of little faith.
Don't say what we can't do.
Let's talk about what we can do.
To make a long story short,
we moved forward and got
a bachelor of music degree
eventually approved so that we,
not only offered the liberal arts degree for
those students who did not want to
pursue the heavily performance component of a degree,
but to remain with the traditional liberal arts degree.
We then in the early 80s decided that we needed to
have an accrediting agency
to approve and to guide us and to
advise us in how we move forward.
The historic National Association of Schools of Music
was established in 1925.
It became the organization
that gave you the stamp of approval,
the good housekeeping stamp of approval you might say,
that you were meeting all the standards
and you were delivering
what you said you were delivering.
So we became individual members
of the National Association of Schools of Music,
Dr. Gibson and I.
And we would go to the annual meetings,
and we started learning
and reading about what we would have to do to
advance the music program here to be a member.
So following the guidelines,
we created a degree.
To have NASM,
we had to do a self study
to address every facet
of a program and what would need to be there.
So we prepared,
finished our self study,
which ends up being
a very large document if you've ever been
involved with accreditation requirements.
Then of course, the final thing is that you have
an outside review team that
comes to see what you're doing.
At this point, we don't
have the bachelor of music and performance degree.
We have just the bachelor of arts degree.
So they come,
we meet every standard.
They're very pleased about what we're doing.
And of course,
we're evaluating it within a liberal arts focus.
So they made recommendations
as well for what we would have to do to
grow to keep the program vital and relevant and so forth.
So we received our first accreditation
and we're now official members
of the National Association of Schools of Music.
We have our bachelor of arts degree in music,
we have our building,
and we have national accreditation.
That was a joy because you want
to be able to advertise that you
are a member because all of
our sister colleges were members.
They had been around much longer,
University of Georgia, Georgia State, the other places.
And so we were joining that group
of distinguished schools and becoming a member.
And we could now advertise and
market ourselves saying that we're
a member of the National Association of Schools of Music.
But for me, that goes
back to reach the goal that goes back to
my teachers to Flori Dan and before I went to college,
Edwin Kashevski and Bruce Simons at Yale.
Flori Dan said to me,
you cannot go to a school that's not
accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music,
which is the reason I ended up at Converse,
which was a charter member of
the National Association of Schools of Music in
the first 17 schools approved in the United States.
And so that was always ringing in my ear.
If it was required of me,
I want this for our students as well.
And so that was another milestone that we
reached with developing and
growing the music program here at state.
>> And you were also seeking
department status, is that right?
>> Yes. And we had received department status.
And when Doctor Siegel came,
she decided that the academic architecture
ought to expand more and so
she wanted to create colleges
and departments within colleges.
So we ended up with
the College of Humanities and Social Sciences,
which later became when the arts kept growing,
it became the College of Arts
Humanities and Social Sciences.
And so within that we had departments,
and then we started to have schools
within the college like the School of Nursing.
So the whole academic architecture
started to change to what we have today.
I believe we have 13,
maybe we have more than 13 colleges now.
>> Well, let's transition a bit and talk
about the effort to build a performing arts center at KS.
Can you tell me when that first began?
>> Well, the desire was always there,
of course, but you have to take baby steps to get there.
And so we were making progress,
but we also knew that we did not have
a place that was
designed specifically for the performance of music.
Oftentimes, if I may just jump back,
I've often said in my storytelling
that we went from two music stands to
six music stands to a full orchestra.
That's literally the truth.
When I came, we had two music stands and that one room.
Then at the end of the year when we would get funding,
Doctor Grider started saying,
Joe, what would you like for us to buy?
I have a little money to spend.
Can we have six music stands?
He said, of course. We went to six music stands.
And so after we had
the department and I became department chair,
we still didn't have the performance facility
and we knew that it was going
to be critical that we have that.
Now, a mentor whom I respect very much said to me,
don't you dare create a strain program,
don't you dare create an orchestra.
It's expensive.
You'll have to have lots of scholarships,
and it just won't work.
I paid no attention.
I've moved right ahead with beginning a string program.
Starting at an orchestra.
And then today, if you want go to the stage of
the Bailey Performance Center at Morgan Hall,
to hear our orchestra, it is outstanding.
So, I've always been a builder.
I'm entrepreneur early in spirit.
I'm a risk taker,
and so I just kept moving forward
with the vision that I had for that.
So doctor Gibson was also very much on
board with the building of a concert hall of distinction.
So we had begun that effort in
the early 90s and we were dreaming big
then that we were going to build a 16.5
million dollar performance building.
Well, the college had no history of
ever raising more than $1 million.
So to raise 16.5 million was rather large.
But Doctor Siegel, being our advocate, our supporter,
and enthusiastic about everything
that had to do with the arts,
she wanted it to happen.
So we engaged architects.
We designed a beautiful brochure
with this $16.5 million building.
And off we went.
That's when I transitioned
into the Department chair position.
Doctor Siegel said to Doctor Gibson,
I want you just to work mainly
on getting the funding for this building.
I received a call that said, Joe,
and this is from Doctor Ed Rugg,
who was the Vice President of Academic Affairs.
Doctor Siegel and I would like for you to step
into the interim chair position for
the Department of Music while Doctor Gibson steps away
and focuses on building a concert hall.
And the same place where our current concert hall is now.
And so he left and I took over as interim chair.
Of course, I was resistant to this.
I did not want to go into administration.
I wanted to teach, I wanted to perform.
So I went into it reluctantly because
I thought my life will become just going to meetings,
writing letters, taking care of problems,
putting out fires, and I thought, Oh, my.
But anyway, I said,
okay, this is going to be a one-year appointment.
At the end of one year,
they said Doctor Gibson is going
to stay away another year,
and we are asking that you
continue in the interim position.
So in the summer of 1995,
we started putting some efforts into how
we were going to cultivate friends and funds.
So Doctor Siegel hosted 12 dinners in her home in
the summer of 19 what did I say 1995.
And we would go.
We would invite 25 people,
prominent people from the community,
people we thought we could count on to be
advocates and excited about
the community and having a concert hall.
Dr. Oral Moses, who.
Was on the voice faculty and I would show
up and we would perform for our guests.
Everybody would eat and go home.
We did 12 of those that summer.
Trying to cultivate to get the funds.
So we continued and
we weren't getting very far with this effort.
So Dr. Gibson,
when we got into the third year of his being away,
he decided to retire,
and then they did an internal search for chair,
and I was appointed as chair of the department.
So Dr. Gibson retired,
I was now the chair,
and I'm looking and thinking, my goodness,
we've got so much to do,
because in 1996, we had our accreditation visit.
And ASM came, we wrote our self-study.
The external reviewers came in
and you've got to know now that we
have a performance degree.
But to go with a performance degree,
you've got to have the facility for the students in
the faculty to perform in to support that degree.
So while we passed in 1996,
and we had a 10 year time period,
they made it very clear that when they returned
10 years later that if that was not in place,
we might get put on probation.
Who knows? We may have lost our accreditation.
So I knew that the clock was ticking
and we had to get things going.
So at that point in 1996,
97, I decided, we need to start having fundraisers.
We need to start raising funds.
We cannot depend on the state to
provide us with everything.
Particularly in the arts,
we're not going to be the favorite one on
the list to get the funding sent to you.
I had my first fundraiser.
I had a Tango event.
I invited Tango artists from Argentina.
I had been there to visit,
had heard these performers,
a singer and a guitarist.
I invited them up. I created
two fabulous evenings and invited the community.
We had a sit-down dinner at the Jolly Lodge for
50 people and I had the Tango people perform,
and then I had started to study Tango and so I
studied Argentine tango for three years.
I had my teachers come and dance.
It was a lovely evening.
We had a real draw from some of the Hispanic community.
The second night, I had
a college friend with whom I had stayed in touch,
who was a music major.
She and her husband had built
a magnificent home in Buckhead.
They became the host for the second night and entertained
150 people in their home and their veranda with dinner,
dancing, and the performance by
the Argentine tango singer.
And we made the appeal for
funds for endowments for
endowed scholarships and it was amazing.
It started to happen.
And so that was my first fundraiser.
It was very successful with
two nights where I hosted between the two nights,
200 people from the community to come and
listen to what we wanted to create here at Kennesaw.
But still we 1996,
we've got 10 years to build this concert hall.
But it's not happening fast.
We're not getting the approval from
the Board of Regents to get funding.
So as we got closer to time,
I knew that time was running out.
So I had begun to appeal to every pot of money that
I could and so
by 2006,
get the date straight here.
I felt that we were moving in the right direction,
and we were getting enough
interest in what we were trying to
do that with various pots of
money that Dr. Siegel and the upper administration and
deans started agreeing to
if we had one building that we were
building with state funding,
could we take a piece of
that money and put it towards a concert hall?
The deans had a meeting with
the vice presidents and each dean was asked to make
a presentation about our programs
and what we envision those programs to be?
I created a little brochure in house, just regular paper.
I called it points of pride.
And in that presentation I made,
I made a very passionate talk
about what we had accomplished,
but what we were going to need to accomplish in order to
advance not only the arts, but the university.
Again, the things that I've said all along,
we had achieved department status.
We had the professional degrees
and a liberal arts degree.
We had our own music building,
member of the National Association of Schools of Music.
So we had all the things in place.
But we were not going to be able to
keep going without it.
So that was a turning point.
The vice president of academic affairs, the deans,
they were all behind
the project and wanted to see it happen.
We finally had the money together.
And I don't know
if you've looked online recently but there's
a picture of me sitting there in
the woods with my foot on a stake.
And I was looking out the window of
my office when they came out
and put the stake in
the ground and a little pink ribbon on it.
And I said to someone,
grab the camera,
I want proof that they've done it and we can't stop now.
So I went out of the woods,
put my foot on the stake and it's
online right now if you look at the school music.
We took that picture with my foot propped up saying,
we're claiming this land.
Is this going to happen?
And all of those pictures,
you see these wonderful pictures as
we built that building and the mud and
the clay and the efforts that were made.
So we were able to put together about $9.5
million to build the Bailey Performance Center.
Now in the meantime,
I've been doing fundraisers now from
2001 until I retired in 2013.
In that community engagement
with raising funds and at this point,
having raised over all this time
$3 million just on our own
out of the College of the Arts.
We started to make friends who could make a difference.
One of those people was Dr. Bobbie Bailey.
I had tried to get to know her in the earlier days,
but she was a very busy,
very successful, very important entrepreneur herself,
very much involved in music.
She was the executive producer of
the Georgia Music Hall of Fame Awards Show.
She had done some recordings.
She had recorded very famous the platters.
She was on the board of the Grammys.
So she was very involved.
But when I first met her,
doctor Siegel invited me to lunch with her,
she didn't give me the time of day.
She didn't even look at me.
And so no matter what I said,
she didn't seem interested.
And I suppose she had so many things going on.
She was supporting so many things that
she wasn't really red take on something else,
and she had already become involved
here at Kennesaw State.
She had met Dr. Siegel and of course,
they both were highly
respectful of each other
because they were both successful women.
Then Dr. Siegel invited her to become
a trustee of the university.
She lived in Atlanta and in midtown,
in the Ansley Park area,
and she was a very busy, very much involved.
When I got this building and it came out of the ground,
we invited her to come.
She was so excited.
She just absolutely was
just blown away with the beauty of it.
We asked her if she'd like to name it,
and she said, "Absolutely."
And with that, she created the large endowment
that has made a difference for the school of music.
Naming it the Dr.
Bobbie Bailey and Family Performance Center,
showing again, her love for family,
including the family and the naming.
So all of a sudden,
my relationship with her changed.
She was calling me on the phone,
she was excited about what we were doing,
she wanted to know what we were doing.
So I have a story where I say,
"Hello, Elvis, hello, Bobby."
I had gone up to Memphis.
I'd never been to Memphis before,
the home of Elvis Presley.
I was there with a friend,
and I thought, "Well, while I'm here,
I need to go to Graceland."
So I went out to Graceland and
I bought my ticket to go over to the house to see it.
I was in the line ready to step on
the van and my cell phone rang,
and I looked down and it was Bobbie Bailey.
So I got out of the line and I said, "Hello."
And she said, Joe,
this is Bobbie Bailey, which
is what she always said. Joe, this is Bobby.
She said, "You're going to
need a new concert grand piano
for that hall, aren't you?"
I said, "Well, yes, I am."
"Well, I want to buy one," she said,
"I want to dedicate it to my mother, Mary Bailey.
She loved the piano.
She can only play by ear,
just hymns, and she never owned a piano.
So I want to buy it."
I said, "Well, that's great.
But it has to be a Steinway piano,
and we have to go to New York to select it
and you have to go with me and you have to help."
That'd be great. Let's do it.
When we going?
I said, we'll make the arrangements.
So she said great.
You should have heard the excitement in her voice.
She was excited that we were going to do the piano,
but she was just as excited that we were going to make
this trip to New York and
that she was going to be involved.
So we made all the arrangements, went up to New York.
The Steinway factory invited us.
We had a room. They have a selection room.
There were 12 concert grand pianos
for us to choose from,
so she had rented a limousine to pick us up.
Take us everywhere. She said,
"We have to stay over, we have to go to a show.
We have to do all that." So she wanted to do
New York as well as buy a piano.
So we went in and Steinway people welcomed us.
But of course, when you're about to
spend that kind of money,
I'm sure they're very excited to see you.
So we sat down in the selection room.
Bobby would sit next to me.
We would play in the meantime,
I had invited David Watkins who was on the music faculty
to fly up to New York to be there
with me because he taught piano here,
unless he could be a part of that selection.
We would play and the whole idea in the selecting is you
play one and if you decide that you don't want that
when you put the fall board
down and cover up the keyboard.
So she'd sit there and she'd
listen and she'd look at me and she'd say,
"I don't like that one, do you?
Sounds too tiny." I say,
"Yeah, you're absolutely right."
She had a good ear. She sound meant something to her.
So we'd go on to the next piano and after a while,
David and I had tried them and
we'd moved them around and moved them
next to each other and we'd play
all the repertory that you could think of.
We were down to two.
Finally, we made the decision.
She was just so excited about it.
So we spent the whole day there,
and so we were sitting in
a big conference room after
lunch and I was there all by myself.
Where's Bobby? Where did she go?
I waited, wait, wait she come back.
After a while, she came back into
the room with a big smile,
just so happy and full of energy.
So we then prepared
to head to the airport to return to Atlanta.
But what was so exciting about that?
You just had to sit there thinking
about where we were at this point.
We had a wonderful friend who liked what we were doing
and wanted to endorse that by making
a large gift to that dream that we had.
And we had a new Steinway piano coming,
and so we waited for the day
for the piano to be delivered to
the hall so that we could have
the opening in October 6, 2007.
So after we got back to Atlanta,
she invited me to come down and meet her for coffee at
Ansley Mall in the midtown area.
One Friday afternoon, we sat there all afternoon.
And we talked and we talked and she
talked about the pianos and she talked
about Steinway and all this,
and then the subject of all Steinway school came up.
She had picked up on it when we were sitting in
the conference room because the various schools,
universities were on the wall,
naming all Steinway school, Oberlin College,
and whatever, so she wanted to know what that was about.
She talked to me about it and she said,
"Let me call Georgia State."
So she picks up her phone.
So she calls Georgia State,
School of Music. She said, "Hi.
This is Bobbie Bailey.
Are you all in all Steinway school?
You aren't. Okay. Well, would you like to be?
Oh, you would.
Well, thank you very much."
She hung up the phone.
She made these calls to see how people would react like,
"Oh, yes, we'd love to be a Steinway school.
Then without my knowing it,
she called the schools where donors had
made that happen to ask the donor,
why did you do it?
She was good at doing her research.
She didn't just hand out her money
without doing the research because
she wanted to make sure
that it made a difference in people's lives.
In this case, for faculty,
the staff, and the students.
Making a difference in
people's lives was primary with her.
I thought why is she asking
all these questions and why is she doing all of this,
and so we had a lovely afternoon.
Then we came up and had a celebration with the arrival of
the big piano, this concert hall.
We were all there, Bobbie Bailey, everybody.
As it rolled in and they took it into the stage,
I guess the student
knew that it was going to be dedicated to
Mary Bailey. I think I need some water.
>> Need some water?
>> Yeah.
When you use your voice that much.
[NOISE]
>> Here we can take a breather.
>> Ready to go?
>> Yeah.
>> As the piano was being rolled backstage,
she overheard one of the students say,
they were all wanting to see this instrument.
"Can I see Miss Mary?"
And so that is when Dr. Bailey got inspired,
she was so excited about that moment.
And she said, "We're going to name it Miss Mary."
So with that,
she was so inspired by the naming of the instruments.
She wanted to name more instruments.
So at the opening, the night of the opening,
the faculty and the staff and the students
did a glorious concert.
Standing room only, you've never
seen such excitement and enthusiasm.
There's also a picture that you'll see
online where my arms are like this.
I was so excited that we had reached
this milestone that when I walked to the podium,
I said, "Hallelujah, we're here."
[LAUGHTER] And it was just an amazing evening.
So of course, protocol is that you thank everybody,
you thank the construction people
and the technology people,
and everybody, and the president is there,
and [NOISE] so it's an exciting time.
And then we invited Dr. Bailey to come to the stage.
I've got to stop again.
[NOISE] Excuse me.
We invited Dr. Bailey to the stage.
And of course, she took the microphone.
She wanted to say a few words.
She thanked everybody and how
excited she was, and she said,
"Dr. Pat, Joe, I have one more thing I want to do.
I want to make Kennesaw State an all-Steinway school."
[NOISE] This is going to be terrible.
The audience went crazy.
Standing ovation, the acoustics were absolutely,
it tested them to see
just what they could handle in terms of sound.
It was a brilliant moment
and she could not have been happy.
I have wonderful pictures of
that time when that moment happened.
The thing that you realize about donors
is while it means so much to you to
receive and to get that endorsement and
that gift but then you
realize that it's just as meaningful in the other way.
She was just as thrilled with
giving as we were in the receiving of the gift.
So with that, we had to make
another trip back to New York.
And of course, that thrilled
her that we were going traveling
again to select the other pianists.
What an exciting moment it was when Dr.
Bailey came from the audience and
stepped to the podium to greet the applause that
the audience was giving her for the gifts she had made.
And then she took
the podium to speak and she was not one,
she was not long-winded in that way.
She might be in a conversation with you,
but not when she got to a podium in a microphone.
But she took the microphone.
And she said, "Dr. Pat and Joe,
I have one more thing I want to do."
And we're all just staring at her.
And with a big smile,
she turned around and looked at us and she said,
"I want to make Kennesaw State an all-Steinway school."
And the audience just went crazy.
And the audience standing ovation.
The sound was just deafening and you've
never seen a more joyous time
than we were having that evening.
Not just the opening of a hall,
but now we're going to be an all-Steinway school.
>> Well, I want to talk a little bit
about the construction process,
[NOISE] the Bailey Center.
Talk to me about that process,
your involvement in it,
and how you tried to keep standards high.
>> As you all know, we talked earlier about
the first effort to build
a concert hall which did not materialize.
Once we put the various pots of money
together to build the current concert hall,
The Dr. Bobbie Bailey & Family Performance Center,
we had to pretty much start over with
the architects because we had been in and out,
the architects would design
something and we'd talk about it
and we'd think we'd be able to move and raise the money,
but then it wouldn't materialize.
Now, we hired an architect,
John Abbott, and he was wonderful to work with.
And he started working with us on a design.
And a lot of times you'll hear the expression,
a shoe box hollow,
a shoe box theater,
meaning just a rectangular-shaped box which you've seen
so many times when you've walked into an auditorium.
It's just one of these.
And that one is that as well.
But what we did inside,
we did an asymmetrical design
so that you don't sense the shoe box.
[NOISE] So he designed
this beautiful asymmetrical concert hall
with those beautiful wood finishes.
But the main thing from day 1 was not the building,
not how it was going to look on the outside or
the inside, but the acoustics.
The number 1 goal was to create a space
that was as acoustically perfect as we
could have for the performance of music.
And we were willing to sacrifice whatever,
almost the seats,
just come sit on the floor to
get the acoustics that we wanted.
So with that design,
then we invited David Kahn from Poughkeepsie, New York.
At that time, his company was
known as Acoustic Dimensions,
and then later on that name was
changed to Acoustic Distinctions.
So that company is still in existence,
but they changed from Dimensions to Distinctions.
[LAUGHTER] David Kahn was a stickler for perfection.
I was so blessed to have Peter Wilde as the chair of
the music department at that time because he and
I were in total agreement of what we wanted.
And with my serving as dean over all of the arts,
Peter was very much hands-on with me as we put
together the Performance Center
and working with David Kahn.
And you can imagine the number of
meetings you have to have as you're going
through meeting with the architects
and the acousticians and whatever.
David is a friendly and nice man,
but he's not warm and fuzzy if you're not doing
what he asked you to do or what he has designed.
Oftentimes people are satisfied with 80%,
85%. This is good.
This is great. But we were
never satisfied with just good.
We wanted to get as
close to perfection as we possibly could,
and we had David Kahn on our side.
So he would fly down,
he'd take a look.
He would look up and say,
you still haven't done this.
You still haven't done that. The sound's not right.
We have to do this. We have to do that.
And he wasn't nice about it.
He was very firm because his name as
the acoustician was going
to be attached to this building.
It was important that it reached that level.
And Peter was adamant and so was I.
[NOISE] So we worked
together with the administration
and with the people on campus,
the architects, the project manager, and whatever,
to make sure that we got
the best product we could possibly get.
And of course, when you build something like this,
you've got all of these subcontractors.
So you're constantly having to watch for
some inferior quality product that gets put in.
For example, the thresholds.
We have to have pretty strong thresholds because you're
rolling these grand pianos over these things.
Well, the first ones they put in, they were just 10,
and when you roll over them, they just collapse.
The other thing was the air conditioning
and the air return in the building.
In order to have the right acoustics,
you can't hear air blowing
the air conditioning of the heating system,
that completely destroys and takes
away the acoustics that you want to achieve.
We had to have the large return duct work
so that you didn't have
air blowing around and
there and you could hear in the hall.
We had to build it so that acoustically,
we didn't hear the planes going over.
So putting the air conditioning units
or whatever that finally decided
to putting them on the roof,
at first, we had a problem with the sound
coming through these vents.
We had to build sound chambers around the hall.
So that we had a rehearsal hall,
so that we had these sound chambers
between that and the concert hall.
So that a whole different concert could be
going on in the rehearsal hall or rehearsal,
and nobody could hear it in the concert hall.
These were all the things we had to consider.
We had to consider about where we're going to put
these concert grand pianos.
The next thing that was
one of the most critical things is,
it had to be climate controlled.
It had to be environmentally
appropriate at all times for the musical instruments.
You can't have high humidity and freezing cold weather.
It had to have something that was
consistent to provide the right amount of humidity,
in the right amount of dryness.
With all of those things,
it took a lot of conversations,
it took a lot of effort,
a lot of work, to make sure we achieved that.
And in terms of the acoustics,
if you bring in a performance group like a band,
that's a lot of sound.
So when there's all of that sound,
what are you going to do to take away some of the sound.
So along the walls in Morgan Hall,
you'll see these heavy draperies,
that we can pull or close.
Up around the stage, we have draperies.
There're black draperies that go around
the stage that can be opened or closed.
What you're doing is creating
hard surfaces and soft surfaces.
So that the acoustics can
adjust to whatever the ensemble.
If you've just got a singer in a piano on the stage,
then you don't want those curtains to absorb
the sounds so they get pulled back.
But if you go all the way up,
and while we don't have a balcony,
the space that we have there is equal to Carnegie Hall,
even though we don't have all the balconies going up.
And so if you go up there,
there are also draperies that you can't even
see that work with the sound.
So David Kahn and Peter and I,
we were a great team in
achieving a space that has now become known as one
of the best places acoustically in
the Atlanta area in the Southeast
and probably for most places across the country.
We were really lucky
because when you start out to do that,
I don't know, say we're lucky.
I think we planned it that way,
but at least the outcome was what we wanted to achieve.
Because people build beautiful halls
every day and spend a lot more money than we did,
and then to only realize
that the acoustics are not right.
And they spend the rest of their lives fixing
this and fixing that and trying to achieve it.
David still comes down.
If he goes all over the country
designing the acoustics for concert halls.
If his airplane lands in Atlanta,
and he looks to see if there's a concert,
it's not surprising to suddenly have him tap you on
the shoulder and he's sitting in the hall because he's so
pleased with the outcome here.
And so he'll stay over,
just to come to a concert in
Morgan Hall to see the work that
we did and the design that he
created that brought us
the fine acoustics that we have in that hall.
>> Wonderful. Well, I want to talk about two things.
The first one will require us to backtrack just a bit,
and that is talking about 2001.
A big year for you.
Can you tell me the position you
were in at the time and about
the national search for a dean of
the school of Arts at that time?
>> In 1998,
Dr. Siegel, actually, prior to that,
in 1996, she was a theme president.
She liked to have
initiatives and she liked to have themes.
I have to tell you this part to get to that.
And so each year she would declare what
that theme was going to be for
the entire campus for that whole year.
So in 1996, she chose the theme,
the year of the Arts.
Okay. And she said to me, Joe, what do you think?
Let's just celebrate the arts all year.
And I think she had
gone somewhere like Wake Forest and they
had had a year of the arts and she came home.
Because she'd get real excited if she
went somewhere and they were doing
something that was getting some really wonderful results.
But she wanted the whole campus
involved in the year of the arts.
So every department,
every college had to look at their creativity,
and what could they do to celebrate creativity.
The major focus of course,
was for those of us on the arts.
But she wanted everybody.
It was something that was campus wide.
And so it was a year of just celebrating the arts.
But it was the catalyst.
It was the catalyst that then moved
us to the point that she said,
Joe, I think we need a School of the Arts.
And I said, yes we do.
And she said, we need to move forward.
Well, she and I were maybe
the only two thinking that way.
Others were saying, we don't want to do that.
We don't want to leave humanities and
social sciences. What about our funding?
We can't exist on our own.
But she and I kept moving forward.
So in June of 1998,
I was out of town,
and Dr. Siegel appealed to the Board of Regents,
for a separate school,
a School of the Arts.
And in 1998, they approved it.
I got a call saying,
the Board of Regents has just approved
to creating a School of the Arts.
Now, we chose School of the Arts because we thought it
had the right sound.
We didn't realize what that was going to mean for us.
Because we're always trying to make ourselves relevant,
and that our degrees in music were just as
relevant as a degree in history or a degree in English.
They were always taken all the other degrees,
whether it was business or English or history as
being the way to success,
the way for financial security.
Anybody choosing the arts,
you were just setting yourself up for no career at all.
So they approved it,
and I had a call that said,
they wanted me to call in on Tuesday
because it was June and I was out of town,
wanted me to call Dr. Rugg,
the Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dr. Sue.
So I called, I didn't know what they wanted,
and they told me
that it had been approved and they said,
we would like for you to serve as
interim dean of this new School of the Arts.
And so then I started thinking about,
well I've had four years as department chair,
and I've survived and I've done all right.
And maybe I need something new.
A new project.
And I said well, I'll do it.
And then they said,
but we want you to remain as
chair of the Department of Music.
And we will launch a search for the Dean.
You've done such a good job as Department chair.
You've increased graduation rates.
The department's moving forward.
We'd like for you to do that,
but then create
this whole new school college, if you will.
I must have lost my mind,
I agreed. Oh my goodness.
So I thought, "Well,
I'll do what I can to advance the Arts and
to advance what we've been trying to do all these years."
So now I'm wearing
two hats which proved problematic later.
I'm department chair, and I'm
Dean and everything from having
stationary created to choosing and having
to have all the committees
that you have to have in a separate college or school,
a budget that's now got to work for a separate college.
It's a big undertaking.
I hadn't even thought along
the way when I had said, "Oh, yeah,
let's have a School of the Arts
that there would have to be a visionary dean,
that have to be somebody take on that job, and of course,
here it was put into my lab or offered to me."
So it was a 24/7 job, as you can imagine.
I would have to have my department meetings
with the faculty and then
I had to have the school meetings
with all the department chairs,
and I had to keep both of these things
going until such time we had hired
a half time position to teach band for us.
We were lucky that Peter Wilde,
who had graduated from the University of Michigan applied
for this half time position, $15,000.
That's all it paid. He came,
but wow, he was one of the best hires we ever made.
He came in and he was just working and he had a degree in
wind symphony conducting and
he started changing the whole quality
of our wind program.
And was there working
the hours that I was when I was part time and
helping me to advance our mission and our goals.
So finally, after I had done this in
'98 and '99 and I'm getting a little bit worn out,
we had gotten Peter to full time by this time
that I invited him to be the assistant chair.
So that helped some.
So then in 2000 we went one year,
two years, three years,
they finally said we're going to launch a search
for the Dean of the School of the Arts.
So Peter was now still assistant chair.
In September of 2000,
I was diagnosed with a health issue
and was not sure whether I should apply for the job,
not knowing what the outcome is going to be.
So I did not apply right away.
They opened the search in the fall of 2000.
I was away having surgery,
and I was gone for three weeks and I came back
and just mainly focused
on my health and the job I was still doing.
Dr. Larry Peterson from Math and Science,
who was the dean at that time was chairing the search.
So I went through
the whole fall and in Christmas time December,
I still had not decided whether I would apply.
And some of it had to do with not knowing how I was
going to be physically
and some of it had to do with my goodness,
I've been doing this for three years.
Everybody knows what I can do and it may not be enough,
and they oftentimes are more attracted to
someone from afar who
may have better credentials and
more experience or whatever to come in and do the job.
So I didn't know whether I wanted to
be put down by saying,
"You've done it for three years,
but you're not really qualified for this job."
So two days before the deadline,
I submitted my application.
And so Dr. Peterson called me on the phone and he said,
"Joe, I'm happy to tell you
that you've made the short list,
which was seven people."
Well, it made me feel a little bit better.
If I go down that at least I made the short list,
so I'm not quite as negative about this.
And just kept doing my thing because I had a lot to do.
A couple of weeks later,
I got another call and he said, "Joe,
you have been named one of the three finalists."
Well, then I found out that one of the finalist is from
Florida State and the other finalist
is in University of Illinois.
Well, you start comparing yourself, you think,
"I've been sitting here at Kansas doing this,
and just trying to make it go right."
But anyway, I'm still feeling good about
this that I'm down to three
which is not so bad and I'm almost there, but not quite.
So I said, "Okay."
Dr. Peterson said, "No, Joe,
you will be treated just like all the other finalist,
you're going to have to do everything,
there will be no special
anything.” So I went through all the references and all
of the interviews by the committee
and meeting with the vice president and the president.
And everybody had to make a presentation
publicly for anybody at the university who could attend.
So over in BURS in the business building,
that's where I did my presentation,
had about 150, 160 people attend.
And when I thought about what I would talk about,
the most appropriate talk for me
was knowing the history that I had lived already
had brought us to where we
were and what I wanted to do still in
the future so I
entitled it looking backward, looking forward.
And I was able to
talk about those accomplishments and where we were.
But what I felt that we needed to do in order to
advance the mission and the goals that we had.
So I did the presentation,
the question and answer thing.
Most people were smiling.
Some, I didn't know whether they were on board or not,
I'm sure some were not.
So I was the last candidate to interview.
I'd had no feedback of how the others had done, nothing.
They treated me just like everybody else.
I was sitting in my office,
my secretary Melissa Fryer said,
"Dr. Rugg's here, he'd like to see you."
And I said, "Okay, oh my goodness.
He's come in to tell me,
Joe, thank you so much."
And I knew I could go back to the Department of Music
because I was still the chair
that was just in an interim position.
He came in, he didn't waste any time.
He sat down, he looked at me with the biggest smile,
and he said, "Joe, you just
blew everybody out of the water.
And he said, I'm happy to
offer you the position of Dean of
the School of the Arts." What a moment.
It was an emotional time
because of all that we had done and
that I was now at this point [LAUGHTER] because
when I started to look back to see
all the milestones and all the parts,
all the pieces that it takes,
all the ingredients that need to be in there.
So I thought, well,
now my work begins.
I had said publicly when I
had talked about the initiatives that I
thought we had to address was that fundraising was
the major one that we
could not continue to depend on the state for funding.
If we wanted to advance
our mission and to achieve our goals,
we had to have money besides state money.
So that's when I was able to return to
my first fund raiser and now in 2001,
start those next 11 years of fundraisers,
which was a friend raiser and fundraiser.
And it was a community engagement piece.
The University was calling for
the various departments to create
the school of music board or
the department of whatever board.
And as you well know, people accept board invitations,
and they'll sit on the board,
and they'll come to meetings
and you hope that they're going to
donate or give to the department of the school,
and they don't always do it.
My board was my fundraising chairs,
my community engagement piece, because guess what?
Suddenly, when they accepted that invitation,
they had a fundraising and a goal of
advancing the college and
soliciting funds for the things that we needed to do.
So now, there is a board and that's wonderful.
But when you did what I did with those 11 years,
when they accept that they'll chair your fundraiser,
they're accepting a really big because our first year,
at first fundraiser, $150,000 we raised.
The next year it was $250,000.
Then it got up to 300,000 and $350,000 as we advanced.
A lot of times,
boards can't even if
they reach in their pocket or write you a check,
they might write you a $1,000 check,
but you might have $6,000-
$12,000 depending on the number
of people on your board at the end of the year.
We built friendships and we raised
money and we made some good things happen.
>> And one of the things we had talked
about is that you were dean of the whole college?
>> Right.
>> What was school but became college.
>> Well then, let me just say something about that.
The reason we changed from
School of the Arts to College of the Arts, once again,
we were not considered
an academic unit by people at the university or wherever.
They would get up in
a public meeting in the convocation center and say,
at that time, we have
six academic colleges and one School of the Arts.
The adjective academic colleges
and one School of the Arts,
six and one School of the Arts.
We're an academic college,
why would they not consider us an academic?
It goes all the way back to the liberal arts degrees and
you can get a better job and you can make
more money if you major in something else.
Once again, they were looking at us like we just
over there making music, and that's it.
With that, we decided that we
had to match everything else.
We then petitioned to
change the name from the School of the Arts
to the College of the Arts.
And that was a good move.
And that's where we are today.
>> And there was music and there were other [OVERLAPPING]
>> Yeah. And then at that moment,
[NOISE] then we had the Department of Music,
the Department of Theater and Performance Studies,
and the Department of Visual Arts.
Now over my tenure,
we were able to,
with the growth of visual arts,
it became the School of Art and Design.
Then when I hired Ivan Pulinkala as
the dance professor, he came in.
He was another excellent hire,
and he and I were totally in
sync on moving that program forward.
And so now it is the Department of Dance,
which happened while I was still
a dean and we've just opened
a new dance theater on the Marietta campus.
He hit the ground running as well.
You don't do this by yourself.
You've got to have people who join
you that have that same kind of excitement,
that same kind of energy,
a strong work ethic,
dreamers, entrepreneurs that
want to make something happen.
Then we became a college of four departments,
including the Department of Dance now,
[NOISE] and we accomplished a lot of things.
The visual arts building that we have on campus now was
our first funded building
and that was funded by the state.
That was the first one that we
accomplished after I became dean.
Of course, and our fundraisers,
our first scholarship that we wanted to
endow was a scholarship in theater.
We established the Betty and
Joel Segal Theater scholarship in our first fundraiser.
And then in our second fundraiser,
we wanted to do a scholarship,
an endow scholarship for visual arts.
We did a study abroad scholarship because they were
wanting to create that program in
Montepulciano which still exists.
Our Art College,
the College of the Arts had and
it may still be in that position,
the most endowed scholarships
of any college at Kennesaw State University.
That's how many we created over those years.
[NOISE] And then we
ended up with a study abroad program in Montepulciano,
Department of Dance came about over time.
We started with just offering a minor,
then majors in our department.
And then along came Bobbie Bailey.
And I've talked about that where she wanted
to create a large endowment for the naming
of Dr. Bobbie Bailey and Family Performance Center,
and then the naming of the concert hall and atrium.
And it just continued to grow
so that we're really pleased where we are today.
>> Well, let's move towards our conclusion.
And talk a little bit about your retirement
and how you came to that decision.
>> Well, I retired twice.
In 2006, at the Egyptian Ballroom at the Fox Theater,
Betty Siegel was leaving and Dan Pat was arriving.
With an audience of 400 people at that 2006 Gala,
I announced Bobbie Bailey was sitting,
she had bought one of the tables at the front,
and Audrey Morgan was sitting there.
All the friends and people that had suddenly joined us
in this arts initiative,
I announced that I would be retiring the next year.
The room just kind of went,
probably wasn't the best place where you're having
fun at a party to do this.
But I had always said I
did not want to stay too long at the fair.
I did not want to stay so that people said,
is he ever going to leave.
So I went ahead and said,
I just need to get out of here.
Now think about that date.
That's 2006. We haven't even opened the concert hall.
So Bobbie Bailey and
Audrey Morgan walked up to me afterwards and they said,
Joe, we did not come here tonight to hear this.
[LAUGHTER] Well, that can really make you feel bad.
And Audrey Morgan, my goodness,
what a great friend and
she has been to us because she had already years ago
created an endowed music scholarship
as well as a nursing scholarship.
And so she continued to build and
add to that scholarship.
It's one of the largest in
the School of Music and probably one of
the largest in the whole university.
I was amazed because they never really expressed anything
about when you're going to retire
and they were really a little bit concerned.
So I said, well,
yeah, it's time for me to go.
I just did not want to stay too long.
The very next week,
I was in my office and through the door came Dr. Pat.
And as he walked through the door,
he looked at me and he said, how much time do I have?
I said, well you have the rest of the year.
And [NOISE] he said, can we sit down?
I said, yes. And he said, well,
first of all, I need to
make sure I have your phone number.
And I said, well,
I'll make sure you have my phone number.
He said, but let's talk about the fact that
maybe you might want to postpone this.
He said, the next six years are just going to
be great and you should be a part of it.
I said, well, I'll think about it.
Well, that continued.
Every time I would see him,
he would say, Joe, whatever.
So finally, we were at event
and his wife was standing next to him,
and he said, Joe,
he was just going on about, you need to stay, whatever.
I said, well, let me just do this.
Let me do it on a year by year basis.
Let me just say I will stay
an extra year and then we'll reevaluate that.
And he just kept talking.
His wife pushed him and said, Dan, take it.
He said he'd stay an extra year.
So interestingly, I stayed six more years.
And I'm so glad I did.
That's when we built the concert hall.
Bobbie Bailey named the building.
We became an All-Steinway school.
And what I accomplished in
those next six years or I won't say I,
we, because I always want to emphasize,
you do not do it by yourself.
But what we accomplished with such a great team of
people was absolutely staggering
of what we did in those six years.
But then I thought,
six years, it's time for me to go now.
I satisfied Dr. Pat.
He said he's going to be the
sixth best years and he was right.
I stayed. So I announced my retirement for 2013.
So I left on February 1st, 2013.
Then about six months later,
he called me again and asked I'd come back and work half
time and continue to raise money and whatever.
So I did because I was in the throes
of the museum when I left and
I had gotten the lead gift
on the building of the Zuckerman Museum of Art.
And so I was friends with
Bernard Zuckerman and his wife, Suzanne.
So I came back and was
a part of the opening of the museum
and getting funding for
some of the galleries, the Morton galleries.
And so I continued to do that.
Of course, Bobbie Bailey,
before I announced that retirement,
I invited Audrey and Bobby to lunch.
I met for lunch and they came with
the most grim faces you've ever
seen and I told him what I was going to do,
and they said, well, we were talking.
We were wondering what you were going to inviting
us to lunch and what was going on.
Were you going to ask us for money
or what was going happen?
We didn't know that you were going to tell us that.
Well, once again,
I had gone another six years,
but they weren't really smiling about it.
And that's very flattering.
So I came on back to the university after we had
lunch and I saw that I had
a phone call on my cell phone from Bobbie Bailey.
And I said, I'm going to retire,
but then I started soft pedaling,
but I'll still be connected to you and
I'll still be around and whatever,
to make her feel better.
So she calls on the phone and she said, Joe,
don't you ever do something like that to me again.
And I just felt so bad about it.
She was so excited, so involved here,
wanting to be involved that I
really started to feel that I was
letting her down that I was going.
Because to then she met with Dr. Pat,
she just wasn't really happy that I was going to be here.
So Dr. Pat said, Joe's coming back.
He's going to be doing some work for us.
So I did.
And I think that was good because I was able to
continue to do good works,
and that's what we really want to do.
When we created those spaces
like the Bailey Performance Center or
the Visual Arts Building or any of these spaces,
we create it so that faculty and
students can do and showcase their good works.
And I'm so happy that we were able to do that.
And so with Dr. Bailey,
we were able to continue to strengthen our friendship,
to remain close friends.
We'd have dinner for 2-3 times a week.
We talked on the phone every day,
and as you all know, I had dinner with
her the last night before she died.
And it was all celebratory,
drinking champagne and eating sharing
a chocolate dessert as if we were going to go on forever,
but we all know that we don't.
And the next morning,
Audrey called me to tell me that she'd had a stroke.
So I feel so blessed that I was able
to be there for that last evening and to
have that last conversation and to
celebrate life and to celebrate her
and to celebrate the good work that
she did and her belief in us.
>> Well, we can conclude
here if you're comfortable
doing that, or is there something else?
>> Well, I don't know if there's anything
else that I didn't tell you.
>> Well, I have some concluding questions,
but we covered quite a bit of it.
You left only a few weeks ago, really?
>> Yeah. Two months now.
>> Last office. What about your personality,
do you think made you a good fit for this role?
I think that would be my final question.
>> Well, I'm an extrovert I have a strong work ethic.
I have high standards.
I'm all about community engagement.
I like people. I like communicating with people.
So I think my entrepreneurial spirit,
my wanting to build something,
I think those are the traits that you have
to have in order to be
a leader because it does take a lot of work.
And it takes a lot of vision,
and it takes that engagement.
Betty Siegel was all about
community engagement but community engagement
was talked to me by my first piano teacher.
It came with the Steinway with
the accreditation National Association goes to music,
being involved in the community.
Those things have just followed me all the way through.
And I think with having
that background that has
come all the way through my life,
it made it a good fit for me to be in that position.
>> Well, thank you so much, Dean Mix.
>> Thank you, James. I enjoy doing this. Thank you.