Mark Rogers Interview, History 150 Spring 2016, Conducted by Faisal Abou-Karnib, General Social Change, March 8^th 2016.

 

Formal Transcription

A. My interview was conducted in person; in Mr. Rogers classroom at JEB Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia over spring break. I used an app on my phone called Voice Recorder Pro to record the interview. It all went well, I took about 30 minutes to record everything, and there weren’t any complications to my knowledge. At one point the door was open and there was a little background noise, but I closed it and there weren’t any problems after that.

B. My high school history teacher Mark Rogers taught my IB Topics of the World history class during my senior year. I spent a year learning about the World Wars, and the Cold War from him. He is a great teacher and knows the material very well. He has a very light-hearted personality, and loves to tell stories; especially about random things he’s learned or experienced throughout his life. He was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley of southern California in 1957. He grew up during the Civil Rights Movement and while nuclear proliferation was a major issue. In his 20’s he moved to Virginia to continue his teaching career. He grew up and studied during the Cold War era. Because of his extensive studies of the Cold War era; he has a lot of knowledge on the topic, and different perspectives that many people who also grew up in that period might not have. I also have the Cold War textbook and am going to look through that if I need any further assistance.

C. I’ve been studying the Cold War era since my junior year of high school. I’ve done many assignments on the Cold War era from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Bay of Pigs invasion to foreign policy like NSC-68. He’s also taught me plenty of material on the Cold War so most of the things he’d talk about I’ve been exposed to before. Mr. Rogers grew up during the Civil Rights Movement, and talked a lot about some issues during that time. He also talked about the Vietnam war and how the war split the nation among the people who favored the war and those who opposed it. He was born in 1957, this was a few years before the Cuban Missile Crises, which was in 1962 and the Civil Rights Movement which began in the 1950’s.

 

 

D. Interview

F: I’m here with my ex- high school history teacher Mark Rogers.

 

MR: I’m still a high school history teacher, your former high school history teacher [humor].

 

F: My former high school history teacher [laughter]. Today I’m going to do an oral history interview, my first question is; how has your job affected your view of the Cold War?

 

MR: Wow, what’s interesting about my job as a history teacher and also having written a couple text books on that is that I’ve had to go back and read and research a lot of things on the cold war which provides a lot more balanced understanding, but also kind of a switching back and forth on how I feel so the more research I’ve done and the more I’ve taught it year after year. The more different things stick out to me and how I’m not all that sure what my view is at a given point. There’s so much information that I’ve oscillate a bit.

 

F: So, looking back you see things differently.

 

MR: Well yes when I was in the Cold War, meaning when I was living in the US during the Cold War, I didn’t really try to understand the many different pieces of it. When you research it you tend to look at the different aspects of it. Yeah it’s definitely changed, I’ve looked at it, its more complex.  That motivations are also more important, and specific facts whether its NSC-68 which is something when I was growing up for instance I never heard of, but all my students do. We didn’t really study the Cold War when I was growing up, we studied World War 2 and the closest war we studied was Korea. So we understood Korea only in terms of the Cold War; communism versus democracy and the American way and such.

 

F: What were some significant conflicts, if any, that personally affected your life?

 

MR: I’m assuming you don’t mean personal[sarcastic].

 

F: [laughter] Conflicts of the era.

 

MR: Well the two big ones when I grew up, Vietnam was huge because when you’re a little kid if you can imagine; we start getting involved in a major way in 1964. Then what happens is in 1964 I’m 7, we’re there in 65 we see people from the neighborhood going to war. Most coming back, but a couple not. Then each year it goes on, and I go out of elementary school and junior high school and the war is still going on. I graduate from junior high in 1972, which was the, George McGovern and Nixon ran in ’72 and that was when water-gate occurred. People were vehemently arguing, families split on the fathers versus the mothers. There was a lot of debate on Vietnam, and so ’72 its going on ’73 its going on. I’m in high school about to be graduating and we’re starting to talk about if we’re gonna get drafted. So my whole memorable childhood was Vietnam, so that was one really important[event]. The other big conflict was the Civil Rights Movement, and bussing or state ordered bussing which was part of desegregation. Of course there was the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy real close together. So that as well sort of was the and were the major conflicts if anything. The Cold War was there but it wasn’t [inaudible] – if you’re talking about conflicts it was over everything.

 

F: How did you get into Cold War studies, were there any influences from there era?

 

MR: No, it was just part of the curriculum. Pretty straight forward; it wasn’t really my first passion I was more interested in Civil Rights than I was in the Cold War. But it was in the curriculum so any time you taught it was there. But when I first started teaching the Cold War we were still in the Cold War. So we would teach up to Cuban Missile Crisis, and nuclear proliferation and such. To give you an idea I’ve been teaching at [JEB] Stuart [high school] for a couple of years when the Berlin Wall came down. So we were all here at that moment.

 

F:  How was life different in California compared to Virginia?

 

MR: The east coast is a lot more conservative. Politically, dress-wise, school rules-wise. But it was much more liberal when it came to drinking in vehicles. This is really interesting, in California there was a very very strict open container rule for cars. If you were driving a car and there was an open container in the passenger compartment, it was assumed the driver was drinking and was the same penalty. So I never saw anybody in college or anywhere else ever have and open container in a car, ever. When I first moved to Virginia I was in my late 20’s and I hoped into the car with somebody and they had an open beer. I said “What are you doing?” they said “No it’s fine as long as the drivers not drinking” and I was like this is crazy. That attitude towards alcohol and also towards cigarettes, towards legal drug use was more accepted than in southern California where I grew up. But also schools were much more strict about dress codes and things like that, there were no dress codes, we marched out of my junior high; we had a walk out on whether girls could wear pants or not. Basically dress codes were completely abolished by the time I was 13. When I came here I couldn’t believe all the rules and things like the daily saying of the pledge of allegiance. It was strikingly more conservative in a lot of ways.

 

F: Do you think you’ve had a different experience being a male teacher compared to being a female teacher in the history department, and do you think this has changed from the Cold War era?

 

MR: Wow, I haven’t thought about that before too much. You know what’s interesting, since I’ve been here I’ve had 4 female principals and 2 male principals, and I haven’t had a male principal since 2006 or so. Most of my assistant principals have been female. My department chairs, the people who run my department, I’ve had males for a couple years then females for two decades and then males for a couple years. So I’ve mostly worked with my bosses being female. So I think the thing is for a male teacher is that, it was thought that you had more authority, but that’s not true I’ve seen some female teachers be great disciplinarians. I do think that language in past couple decades has definitely toned down as far as sexism. What was acceptable to talk about and use phrases and to discuss women’s appearance and stuff like that simply is not acceptable anymore. So I think that’s changed a lot. I think there’s much more sensitivity to gender issues too. Thirty years ago people would use totally obnoxious or offensive phrases about gay people, stuff like that. You know whisper behind their backs; now its not even a part of the discussion, and it would be repulsive to anyone and I think that’s changed a lot.

 

F: What was working life like during the Cold War, has it changed at all? If so, how?

 

MR: So what’s interesting is when I wasn’t teaching I was a supervisor for an assembly line and some other things in an aerospace factory called Semco Instruments for a little while. I had some Russian immigrants, there weren’t many who were able to get out but we had some. I had a worker who was from Russia and he was very enthusiastic and wanted to please a lot more than American workers did. What was interesting was the first day I gave him this assignment which was to cut these shielded cables, which would be used on aerospace equipment at an exact length. Normally because you had to be really careful it would take lets say to do a hundred cables like 4-5 hours because you have to measure each one carefully and cut it carefully so there were no threads hanging out, you didn’t crack insulation etcetera. So I came back a half an hour later and he had cut a hundred of them, and only one of them was usable. What he had done was cut one correctly then cut each of them using that one to measure so they got progressively shorter and shorter until the hundredth was about half the length it was supposed to be. Most of them were broken and I asked what had happened, and he said “I am finished what is the next task?” I said no you ruined thousands of dollars of caballing. He didn’t understand, he said this is how we do it in the Soviet Union. You got a task and you completed the task. He didn’t realize that it was more important to get it right than to get it finished. Working life in that way was different, another thing that was kind of different was[stuttering]. You know I was not involved in the defense industry, [but] my dad worked for Rockedine, which was producing [inaudible] the rockets in the San Fernando Valley which was where I lived, and there were test missiles that would go up from Vandenburg air force base. So there was stuff around but I don’t know that teaching in the Cold War was really that different. It’s hard for me to sort of think about that. I know people discuss politics and they talked about Reagan and some people loved him and some absolutely hated him. There was no neutrality on him, but that was not only for the Cold War which is what he’s most well known for. It was also about civil rights and environmentalism, things like that. Where he stood it wasn’t just about one thing. The thing I do remember [about] living LA, is at one point during the Reagan administration they discussed that every city needed a plan to escape if there was ever nuclear war. We would all leave, and we were all in LA and we just laughed because we could only imagine eight million people getting on the freeways all at once to get out. You’d just be in a parking lot on the freeway, and even if you did manage to get out to the North was Vandenburg air force base, to the south was Del Toro Marine base, and out in the desert to the east was Edwards air force base. So no matter where you went those were prime targets for nuclear bombs. We just all knew if there was a war we were gonna die. That was there but I don’t think it was anymore prevalent than for instance terrorism is today (…) to you guys on a daily basis. On a daily basis we were concerned with sports, girls in my case [laughter], college – sort of the usual things in everyday life, and the Cold War was sort of hanging there I think.

 

F: Did you ever live in fear of attacks from the USSR or Cuba?

 

MR: Not on a daily basis, but there was a buzz in the back of your head that you don’t notice till its gone sort of thing. So when I was a little kid I was really scared, cause we had drop drills once a week, and they didn’t call them duck and cover. In LA it served a dual purpose for earthquakes and the nuclear blast. I remember teachers were ordered to go to a window and look out and yell drop. Then we all had to drop or all had to drop against a wall, and protect our necks and we did those every week. So as a kid I was scared of what happens if you’re the only one left because they would tell you all these horrible things, and you would see videos. [Sneeze] When you got older there were times, especially when Reagan was president when the language was so bellicose, so back and forth angry that we were kind of scared, like what happens if they do something. So in certain ways (…) we were always wondering if anything was gonna happen. (…) There were times when it came up, and then there were times when you just put it in the background. But there were a lot of nuclear tests when I was a kid. You would hear the ground shake and you’d think its an earthquake but it was actually a test near Las Vegas which was hundreds and hundreds of miles away. So yeah so that came up too.

 

F: Looking back, do you think that there was a lot of propaganda in the entertainment industry towards the Cold War?

 

MR: Oh yeah, films that came out, TV shows. You know in movies they’d portray Russians as these aggressive people or these bumblers. A good Russian was someone who loved capitalism. By the time I was a teenager there was so much opposition to the Vietnam war that there was actually alternate groups that were putting out this pro-Communist propaganda and anti-Government propaganda.

 

 

 

[The remaining 10 minutes was not transcribed because it exceeded the 30-minute limit]

E. The interview went very well. We rarely diverged from the topic except for a few times. When we did stray from the topic it usually went in the right direction. If I did it over I would probably try to prevent him from going on tangents where it didn’t relate to the question. I’d also try to prevent any outside noises at all before I began the interview. Overall the interview flowed very well and I’m happy with the outcome.