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Transcript from "Henry King Stanford"

So then Dr. Stanford was brought in as an acting vice president for academic affairs and he was the one for the job, because he went from one side of this state up and down making speeches that everything is okay at the University, we are going to be fine, keep supporting, keep sending your students here, keep contributing to the funds and so on, and he did, he healed us that year in a real way. He did in one year just by his…he had been president of four or five universities. He was an articulate spokesman for higher education, and so he went around the state preaching the gospel of the university.

I have heard you call him a healer.

Yeah.

And I know he placed a call to you at one point. Tell us about that. Where were you and what happened?

I was with my cousin and another friend of hers. We were getting ready to go down the Colorado River on a raft, and I was down in the bottom…we had walked down the Bright Angel Trail to get down to the bottom of the canyon where we picked up the boat, and they said I had an emergency call, and so I got to it and it was Dr. Stanford wanting to know if I would accept that job, and so I did, and I thought about it the rest of the trip, I can tell you, but we went on down the river for a week and then I came back.

It was a very popular appointment here on campus in 1988. Faculty and students and staff knew, somebody they could trust I think with Dr. Stanford and you moving into that position, things stabilized.

Well they did. People wanted to get well, and so we had some meetings with Coach Dooley and pointed out that it had been a very bad time for the university and that the president had lost their job, and the vice president and the developmental studies, and it was in his shop, and we just had to get some things changed, and so we did.