Chair
recalls Gordon antics
By Steve
Carr
William
C. Gordon the practical joker? Hard to believe maybe,
but true just the same. And at least in one instance, fit to
print.
Psychology
Chair Michael Dougher remembers the days of old when then Professor
Gordon was a bit of a funnyman. Some of the stories Dougher
relayed, while others, are better left in the closet.
Speaking
of closets, one tale Dougher shared involved transforming Psychology
Department faculty members offices into janitors
closets when they arrived at UNM or when they changed offices.
We
used to have this ongoing joke, Dougher recalled. When
I first got here in 1980, my office was down at the other end
of the hallway. The night before I came in, Gordon turned my
office into a broom closet. He had gotten two pieces of sheet
rock and sort of made this small area right in front of the
door. He filled it with buckets and brooms and all kinds of
cleaning stuff. So this kind of became a running joke back then.
Whenever anybody changed offices we would change their office
into a broom closet.
Turnabout
was fair play as far as Dougher was concerned.
When
he became chair, I did the same thing in the chairs office.
When he came in on his first day there were mops and buckets
and things like that. We did that all the way up as he continued
his climb in administration. Every time he moved, we would go
to his office and turn it into a broom closet before he would
come in. Unfortunately, we couldnt get into Scholes Hall
when he became president.
One twist
to the joke came while Gordon was psychology chair.
I
got some deans stationery and wrote him a bogus letter
from [then dean] Hobson Wildenthal saying that Bill had gotten
the Psychology Department into an intolerable financial crisis
and that Hobson had no alternative but to appoint a new chair.
Bill believed it for awhile. He really did. He couldnt
figure out what the dean was referring to because he was really
financially responsible and hadnt even been in the chairs
position long enough to do any real damage. I couldnt
keep from laughing as Bill was telling me the story, and he
figured out what was going on.
There
was a series of things that he would do to me and I would do
to him and it went on like that for a long time, said
Dougher.