Moss, Robert

              
ORAL HISTORY OF ROBERT MOSS
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
June 13, 2012
 
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is Wednesday, June 13, 2012, and I am at the home of Robert Moss here in Oak Ridge.  Mr. Moss, or are you Dr. Moss?
MR. MOSS: No, it's Mr. Moss.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mr. Moss, thank you so much for taking time to let us talk to you.  Why don't you tell me a little bit about where you grew up and something about your family?  Oftentimes, that'll tell us a lot about a person, is their beginnings, so why don't you tell me about that?
MR. MOSS: Yes.  Well, I grew up fairly close to downtown Knoxville on 16th Street close to Laurel Avenue, and my mother came from Knoxville.  She grew up on Highland Avenue, the Rail family.  My father came from West Tennessee.  At any rate, I grew up there, went to Van Gilder Elementary School, and then to Tyson Junior High School, and just missed Knoxville High School.  It closed the year I was a senior in high school.  Well, no, that's not true.  Wrong.  I was a ninth grader when it closed, so I went to West High School, one of the four new schools that was established to take the students from Knoxville High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year were you born?
MR. MOSS: In '36 --
MR. MCDANIEL: In '36.
MR. MOSS: -- 1936.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you grew up in Knoxville during -- 
MR. MOSS: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- now what did you say your mom and dad did?
MR. MOSS: Well, my father worked at Fulton Sylvan Company.  He was an engineer back in the days when many engineers didn't have a degree in engineering, and he didn't, but he was responsible during the war for the shell factory that was down there, the shell production facility, and my mother was a homemaker.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have brothers or sisters?
MR. MOSS: Yes, I have an older brother who lives in Guatemala, and an older sister who died two years ago now, who lived in Florida.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what was it like growing up in Knoxville?  I mean, I guess, when the war came around, you're old enough to remember that.
MR. MOSS: Yes, I do.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were 8, 9, 10, I guess, at that time.
MR. MOSS: I do remember the war, vaguely, but I grew up in sort of a dream state, looking back on it.  I don't think I was very alert to what was. What was going on in the world and Oak Ridge, for example, I knew almost nothing about.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was it like in that neighborhood, that whole 16th Avenue neighborhood, that area, because I mean that was close to UT.
MR. MOSS: Yes.  Well, there was an influence of the university there.  We had rented out part of our house to people, and later it became students at the university, but it was really a very pleasant, quiet neighborhood, although we had, I think, three or four burglaries while I was there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. MOSS: But yeah, it was a very civilized, little neighborhood.
MR. MCDANIEL: This wasn't too long after the Depression, or because it was during the Depression, wasn't it, or right at the end?
MR. MOSS: My father and mother were very fortunate because Dad's job was never interrupted, so we fared quite well.  During the war, he had a gas card and other smaller perks, so it did not have the influence on us that it did on most of the people in the United States.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  So, you went to West High School and graduated from West High School in 1954. 
MR. MOSS: Then I went to the 13th grade at the University of Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, tell me about going to UT.  I assume you lived at home. 
MR. MOSS: I did.  In fact, by that time, we had moved from 16th Street to 17th Street, which is on the other side of Cumberland Avenue, right across from where the Carousel Theater is now, where the Humanities Building is built.  They built it right on top of our home site.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. MOSS: But anyhow, going to the University of Tennessee, despite the fact that it was really the 13th grade and that I didn't go looking for a college or think much about it at the time, but it was a big surprise for me, and I really worked hard the first year I was there, and did quite well, after everything went downhill in a hand basket.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?  Okay, so tell me about that.
MR. MOSS: Oh, it's just I didn't work hard enough, socialized too much, and I wound up taking a semester off at the insistence of my parents, and went to Louisville, Kentucky, to earn some money to keep myself afloat, and after that semester, came back and finished my degree, doing better.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was time to get your heart right, wasn't it?
MR. MOSS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was one of those times in a young man's life.
MR. MOSS: My parents were not paying any more of the foolishness that I was involved in.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what did you study at UT?
MR. MOSS: Well, I was an English major in my undergraduate years, with a minor in history, and that's what I graduated with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you know what you wanted to do?
MR. MOSS: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so why did you choose English?
MR. MOSS: I think probably because my older brother had taken English, and because of my high school English teacher, who made a pretty good impression on me, and I made a fairly good impression on him.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you graduated with a major in English and a minor in history, and it was time to find a job.
MR. MOSS: Yes, and the only jobs an English major was likely to find was teaching. So, I taught at Christenberry Junior High School for, oh, I don't know, half of the year.  Well, a little over half a year, and then the draft board came along, and I took the option available in those days of six months' training and went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and got basic training and advanced training, and came out of the Army and went back to Louisville to find another job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.  Why did you go to Louisville?  Did you have family there?
MR. MOSS: That's where my brother had gone.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. MOSS: He worked for Minneapolis Honeywell in their office in Louisville, and so I went and stayed with him the first time.  The second time, I was on my own, and I liked Louisville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Louisville is a nice town.  I like Louisville.  So, did you get a job up there?  Did you stay up there?
MR. MOSS: Yes, I did.  I got a job with Aetna Casualty Insurance Company.  I was a claim adjuster, and I worked there and drove down to Bowling Green, Kentucky, that was part of my territory, and I worked there for about nine months, I guess, and the Army called me up for the Berlin Crisis, and I was sent to Fort Eustis, which I wound up calling Fort Useless, Virginia, to fill a stevedore company from Baltimore, Maryland.  They were short of personnel, and I was set to work as a stevedore, loading and unloading dummy ships in the James River.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'd never heard that term before.  I didn't know what that was.
MR. MOSS: Well, they had a whole, great big yard full of boxes, wooden boxes with grenades, smoke, et cetera, et cetera, and they were all filled with woodchips, and our job was to put them on the ship in the proper order, and in about January, midway through my time there, we were working furiously three shifts a day, putting them on and taking them off.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was the point of that?
MR. MOSS: Oh, the point was to convince the Russians that we were serious about Berlin, that we were preparing troops, if that were needed, and heaven help us if we had been sent to do anything.
MR. MCDANIEL: You wouldn't have been able to do very much with those, would you?
MR. MOSS: I'm afraid that's the truth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?  Oh, gosh.  So, you were about to tell me a story about halfway through.
MR. MOSS: Oh yeah, halfway through, we were loading and unloading ships, and people were getting up at 4:00 in the morning to go down to unload the ship that we had just loaded the previous day.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.  Of course they were.  All right, so how did you end up in Oak Ridge?
MR. MOSS: I came back to Louisville and worked there for a while, and then came back to the University of Tennessee, and I was intent upon becoming an educational, or school administrator, and they pointed out to me if I wanted to be a school administrator, I had to first teach school, which is pretty obvious, but that's how naive I was.  But anyhow, so I went ahead and got a degree in history, and then in history social sciences for public schools.  My professors told me that there was a job available in Oak Ridge, and they had apparently talked to Tom Dunigan, and he had expressed an interest in seeing me, and they gave me my first inclination, my first indication of what Oak Ridge was, or was like, because they were very excited about the possibility that I might get a job in Oak Ridge, they took pains to tell me that this was a real opportunity and I needed to act on it promptly, which I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  So, what year was this?
MR. MOSS: This was in 1966, and I rode a bus out here, I walked down to the high school, interviewed, and I don't remember how much later, but I was offered a job there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what was Mr. Dunigan like?
MR. MOSS: He was completely different from the principal that I had worked for at Christenberry Junior High School in Knoxville.  He had a studious appearance and a studious demeanor, and was interested in books and history and academics, and I was quite impressed by him, and continued to be so during the two years that I worked at the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you got a job at Oak Ridge High School teaching history?
MR. MOSS: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.  Now, were you married at the time?
MR. MOSS: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right, so you got a job, and you were there for --
MR. MOSS: Two years.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- two years.  Tell me a little bit about your experience as a new teacher.  I mean, I guess, that was kind of -- well, you had taught at Christenberry, I suppose, but you're a fairly young teacher --
MR. MOSS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and didn't have a lot of experience in the classroom.
MR. MOSS: No, I certainly didn't.
MR. MCDANIEL: This was a school system that was notably -- you know, had some excellent, excellent teachers in the school system.
MR. MOSS: That's correct.  It was a very different experience, and one of the things that struck me very soon was the fact that the students had an interest I had not seen before in the school and their teachers.  On breaks, you would find that there were students coming back from the colleges they were attending to see their former teachers.  When I went to school in Knoxville, it's probably an exaggeration, but you wouldn't be caught dead on the campus of the school that you had attended.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure, sure.
MR. MOSS: But they came back to see their former teachers, and after school, when they were still there, they frequently went by their teachers' houses to see them, to talk with them.  I'm not talking about all the students, but some of them, and a very different environment, and I was impressed.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were you?  So, you were at the high school for two years, and then what?
MR. MOSS: Well, the first year, I taught in my own classroom, and the second year, I was asked to be on three different teams, Combined Studies, the American history team and a modern history team, and so I was part of the teaching team of a large group of students, and I didn't get to know them as well.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. MOSS: It was a good experience, but I preferred, I think, teaching my own classes, because you did know the students.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: Anyhow, a job opened, an internship as assistant principal, and I had been deciding early on that I wanted to be an administrator.  Oh, I remember why I wanted to be an administrator.  The principal at the junior high in Knoxville and I did not get along.  She gave me, what turned out to be, the remains of her scheduling process.  It was an English class and a history class, a math class, a reading class --
MR. MCDANIEL: Things that she couldn't get anybody else to do.
MR. MOSS: -- a study hall that were all left over when she finished with her scheduling and had given everybody what they wanted, and I was recruited to teach all of those.  I thought, "I could do better than this."
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, there you go.
MR. MOSS: So, anyhow, I applied for the job and got it.  Actually, I was called and asked if I wanted to apply for it, and I did, and so I went to Jefferson Junior High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, that was at Jefferson.
MR. MOSS: Yeah, when it was up at Blankenship Field, but that was the last summer it would be there.  It moved into the new building on Fairbanks that fall.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, that fall?  What year was that, '69, '70 --
MR. MOSS: That was 1968.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- '68?
MR. MOSS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you became an intern assistant principal?
MR. MOSS: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so tell me about from then, your career path.
MR. MOSS: Well, let's see.  I was there as assistant principal for five years.  I went back to UT at the invitation of the superintendent at the time, to finish up my -- no, that's not true.  He wanted me to get a doctorate degree.  I had a master's degree.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: So, that's why I took a year off, and he transferred a teacher from Robertsville to Jefferson to take my place, and the next year, the principal at Jefferson retired, that was Wallace Spray, and I applied for the job, along with the guy who had replaced me, and I don't know how many others, and was hired to be principal that year.
MR. MCDANIEL: At Jefferson?
MR. MOSS: Yeah, in 1974, and I was principal for 26 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you go to UT and get your doctorate?
MR. MOSS: No, I never finished my doctorate, and I don't regret that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.  Well, there you go.  So, once you became principal, you were there for 26 years as principal?
MR. MOSS: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you were really at Jefferson 30-plus years, I guess, weren't you, and in the Oak Ridge school system for, what, 35 --
MR. MOSS: Thirty-three, 34 years --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- 33 --
MR. MOSS: -- I think.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- something like that?  I bet you saw a lot of changes in Oak Ridge school system over that amount of time, and you probably saw a lot of changes in, one, the type of families that lived in Oak Ridge, and the type of students that attended your school.  Why don't you tell us a little bit about some of those changes?
MR. MOSS: Yeah, well you didn't have to be here very long to realize that this was, yes, a very different sort of city, that they had brought people from all over the United States and plopped them down in the middle of East Tennessee for the Manhattan Project, and it was, therefore, a very different city from Clinton or Knoxville, or any of the cities around it, and they had a different point of view and a different way of doing things, not always appreciated by their neighbors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course.
MR. MOSS: I guess I, early on, began to think about, "Now, what's gonna happen over time?  This community is going to become more like East Tennessee.  On the other hand, it will have some influence on the communities around it." I think we're reaching that point right now, where it's more evident that Oak Ridge is becoming like East Tennessee, and it has had an influence.  But, of course, East Tennessee will have a greater influence on it because it's going to be peopled by East Tennesseans, largely, it looks like, in the very near future, since so many people who work at the plants, who do come from out of state, from the North and West, live in Knoxville or West Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: So, I have seen the community change in that way, and, with the change, the job of the schools has become very different, and mostly that has been more difficult.  Kids who came from homes where the parents had graduate degrees had a different attitude toward education than those who come from homes where nobody has any college experience at all. Not to say that to succeed in school you need to come from a home with college graduates, that is not true, but you do need to have an attitude toward education. That's what you want and, "I'm gonna work to get it," and that's being lost.  So, I think the schools face a very much more difficult task than they did when I started here.
MR. MCDANIEL: What about the school system itself?  I mean what kind of changes did you see in the school system itself?
MR. MOSS: Well, it's shrunk.  Actually, it has maintained a lot of its characteristics that I was familiar with.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean, I know when I talk to people who are getting out of college with a teaching degree and are going to pursue education as a career, I mean, you know, Oak Ridge is always on the top of the list, even today, of the dream places they want to work.  I have a friend of mine who just retired from a position here in Oak Ridge this year, and he said they had 40 applicants for his job.
MR. MOSS: Yes, Oak Ridge still has a very good reputation in educational circles, and when I became a principal, what I told you about my professors seeming so eager to direct me toward Oak Ridge was very beneficial, because I had good applicants, and most of them were interested in teaching in Oak Ridge, if they could get the job, so they were eager applicants, often who had a huge advantage over people who worked in surrounding counties and cities.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  Now, at Jefferson, you were there a long time, and I'm sure, now, over the course of time, did your enrollment increase or decrease?
MR. MOSS: Decreased.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did it?
MR. MOSS: It was about 950 or 960 when I went there, and that was the largest it ever was.  It shrank to something in the neighborhood of 800, I guess, maybe it was less than that, when the sixth grade was brought up from the elementary schools because they had overpopulation, and then they brought the fifth grade up and sent the ninth grade to the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, when you went, it was seventh, eighth and ninth?
MR. MOSS: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. MOSS: And that made a huge difference, when the ninth grade left and the fifth came in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah.
MR. MOSS: I really would have liked for the ninth grade to have stayed there because my feeling is that American schools need to be more demanding than they are of their students, and when you become a middle school, you're inclined toward the elementary end of the profession and the structure of schools, and when you're a junior high school, you're inclined more toward the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. MOSS: I think, by the time you're in the seventh grade, you ought to be in classes that are taught by people who have taken courses in that field, or who are history majors, if possible.
MR. MCDANIEL: If possible.  Right, right.  We talked a little bit about the teachers, and I suppose that you saw, even as the school systems are going through today, the changes in requirements and testing, and all these kinds of things, I'm sure you saw some of that in your career.  Talk a little bit about that, requirements from the state, requirements from the federal government, those kinds of things that maybe you didn't have early on, and how did that affect Oak Ridge school systems?
MR. MOSS: Well, the state had a greater influence on us than the federal government, by far.  There was always some evidence, and particularly money.  When I went to Jefferson, it was in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and he had appropriated quite a bit of money for education, so we had a library that had really excellent magazines, probably more excellent than what was needed.  We subscribed to The New York Times and the Scientific American, and so forth.  But anyhow, the state had a greater influence, and still does, a much greater influence, although the Race to the Top that Arne Duncan has promulgated is having an influence through the state on the schools.  But, increasingly, the Oak Ridge schools seem to be jerked around, so to speak, by the requirements of the state, and sometimes it's pretty hard to avoid, and in my opinion, mostly it's misguided.  The opinion appears to be that no matter what society is like that the schools can make up the difference, and you just send the kids to school and the schools are supposed to educate them, and so forth, and when they don't, a good portion of our population feels that, "Well, it's the school's fault, and it's the teachers' fault." I think that's a mistaken belief.  The biggest variable in education is the effort of students, and we have never really believed that in this country.  In Japan, they believe that, and some part of our population believes that, but, in my opinion, too little of it understands that.  So, we're still trying to find ways to make the schools remedy the problems of our culture, and Oak Ridge is increasingly faced with that problem: students who really don't want to work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: That sounds extreme, but that is not extreme.  It was true that, well, for example, the black students, the African-American students at Jefferson, toward the end of the time that I was there, so many of them had taken the view that they didn't want to do homework because it was white, you know?  If you did homework, you just want to be like the white kids, and of course, the parents of those students were, many of them, quite alarmed by that point of view, and the white students also began to behave that way, you know, "What's the point of doing the homework?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MR. MOSS: "They're supposed to teach us."  Anyhow - 
MR. MCDANIEL: Speaking of that, I guess in the '60s, this was just right after integration, and there was a lot of civil unrest because of race that was going on in the nation.  What did you see of that in Oak Ridge, and what were maybe some of the examples of that that you saw in the school system.
MR. MOSS: When I was the assistant principal at Jefferson, we integrated the school.  That was the very first year that African-American students attended the school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. MOSS: Robertsville had been integrated, and I thought it was great.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: You know, here we're doing this, and we're doing it voluntarily.  Later, I found out that the schools were integrated under direction of the court.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. MOSS: But anyhow, we were integrated that year, and it went okay, but over the four or five years before I went back to UT to get a degree, things got really bad, and the last year I was there, was the worst year of my life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. MOSS: Fights and antagonism was just -- the education that we were providing the school was badly influenced by the turmoil that went on in the school, and it extended to the high school.  Robertsville got on better, as I guess they should have, because they had been integrated for longer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Didn't they integrate the elementary schools first?
MR. MOSS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: See, so --
MR. MOSS: Well, no, that's not true.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- oh, is it not?
MR. MOSS: All of them were integrated, the ones that remained, were integrated the year that Jefferson was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.  All right.
MR. MOSS: Anyhow, it was bad.  We had an all-out fight at the end of the year, before I went back to UT that made the front page of the paper for several days.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MR. MOSS: We had parents in patrolling the halls, and required students to go from class to class without pausing, but from that point on, when I came back, that was over, and I was never really fully sure why it was so bad.  Some parents told me that they thought it was because the kids went away to colleges and picked up the mood on the college campuses and brought it back, but I don't know that that accounts for it.  At any rate, it was not pleasant.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was just a pot that was simmering and bubbled over eventually.
MR. MOSS: Yeah.  The unfortunate part about it was -- well, it was hard on the kids.  It was very hard on the staff, as well, but it also damaged the education that we were trying to provide.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I guess any kind of distraction like that is going to interfere with what the core purpose of what you're trying to do.
MR. MOSS: Yeah, and that was, of course, my job, was supposed to be discipline, so I felt that I was not succeeding in my job, for sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.  I understand.  So, when you came back, though, you said things had kind of settled down a little bit.
MR. MOSS: Yes, they had.  They never went back to that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Never went back to that.  What were some of the highlights, if you can think of maybe some of the achievements that you all had had at Jefferson over the course of your time there?
MR. MOSS: Usually, what I considered my highlights were when I hired really good teachers, which is not always easy because you have to hire from the recruits that are out there, the people who apply for the job, and brilliant teachers don't apply routinely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. MOSS: There's not enough to go around.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. MOSS: But those years, and when the staff was doing well, I felt especially good, and when students earned accolades, which they do in junior high, but not near to the degree they do in high school, I was very pleased, and when the whole student body did well, which they did on occasion, by behaving themselves on the one hand, and working hard at it, it was a very pleasant experience.  Overall, I really enjoyed it.  There was never a time when there wasn't trouble of some sort there, but I really enjoyed it.  I look back on it with a good deal of pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: We talked about this a little bit, but let me just ask this directly, did you see a difference in the type of people that applied for jobs of teachers over the course of your career?  I mean, was there a difference in the mindset?  Were they being taught something differently than like when you were in school and being prepared to become an educator?
MR. MOSS: I thought there was a little deterioration in the quality of people who applied, not much though.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. MOSS: Like I said, you've got to deal with the fact that people make up their minds to go out and look for a job independently, and not when you particularly want them to, so you take what you get.  Every year is not going to be a year when you're going to find the kind of teacher you want for the jobs that you have available.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  I guess the thing to hope to do would be able to get them young and raise them up the way you want them.
MR. MOSS: Yes, although that was another benefit of Oak Ridge being an attractive place to work, and that very frequently, we got experienced teachers, and the reason that's important is because you're never absolutely sure that somebody is going to work out in the classroom until they've been there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. MOSS: So, if they've been in the classroom, you can find out, and you have to find out, I mean, you've got to call, and when you call, people are going to tell you stories, one, because they may like the person who's leaving, or one is because they want to get rid of them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly, "Oh yeah, they're wonderful."
MR. MOSS: So, it's not easy to get a good reference, but when you can get good references that you at least know they've been in the classroom and they were successful, so it was nice to be able to hire teachers with one or two, or three years' experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: What kind of relationship did you have with the school administration as a principal?
MR. MOSS: I got along fine with them, yes, and they're still around, so we see each other from time to time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.  Were they pretty hands-on, or did they kind of give you some autonomy?
MR. MOSS: They gave me a lot of autonomy.  They didn't give everybody a lot of autonomy, but I was fortunate to get a good deal of autonomy, and they were very supportive.  It was a very good system to work in, not only from the point of view that you got a good salary and good benefits, but teachers got a lot of independence and a lot of say-so in what went on in their schools.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you think it's the same now?
MR. MOSS: Less so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Less so?  And why is that?  Do you think it's just the nature of education?
MR. MOSS: Part of it is administration inside the system, but part of it is the effect of the state's influence, the state department's influence, which can be very intrusive.  It has been this past year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. MOSS: My acquaintances in the schools keep me abreast to what they're doing, and they are doing a lot of paperwork, a whole lot of paperwork.
MR. MCDANIEL: I've talked to a lot of teachers who are just so disheartened over it.
MR. MOSS: Yes, if it continues the way it is, then public schools, generally, are going to be hurting because there are going to be a lot of good teachers leaving.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, exactly, exactly.  Financially, budget-wise, over the course of your career in Oak Ridge, what did you see?  I mean, was there a trend as far as the amount of money that -- you talked a little bit about this, but the amount of money that you had to operate your school, has it maintained?  Has it kind of kept up with inflation?  Has it decreased?  And, if that's the case, is it because of the local influence?  Is it because of the state?
MR. MOSS: Well, my point of view is that money is not the major factor, except in making the school an attractive place for teachers to work so that you can get good teachers.  So, I was not too concerned about that, and yeah, I never felt that our attempt to teach was obstructed by a lack of funds, never.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you didn't have to say, "Okay, you can't buy any more paperclips for the next six weeks"?
MR. MOSS: No, no.
MR. MCDANIEL: It never got to that point?
MR. MOSS: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's good to know.  So, you retired in what year?
MR. MOSS: In 2000.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, in 2000.  Okay.
MR. MOSS: I've been retired 12 years now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. MOSS: It's unbelievable, but I am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, let's go back to when you first came to Oak Ridge.  We've talked about your job and what you did.  Tell me a little bit about Oak Ridge, about your social life, and your involvement in the city.
MR. MOSS: Well, my social life was mostly within the school system, with teachers, and other administrators sometimes, but mostly with teachers, but one of the problems of Oak Ridge was keeping people here in the city, and it was always a concern of the City Council and people who were interested in the community and its future to try to get people to settle here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: But people who were single, typically, did not stay in Oak Ridge, they went to West Knoxville because the nightlife, the opportunities to find other single young people were so much better.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, and Oak Ridge was typical, was similar as other small, East Tennessee towns, when the young people got old enough to leave, they generally left, right?
MR. MOSS: Yeah, and I guess it was the same for me.  I was older than most of the teachers that I hired.
MR. MCDANIEL: When did you move to Oak Ridge and live here?
MR. MOSS: When I became a principal.
MR. MCDANIEL: When you became principal?
MR. MOSS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.  Now, were you married at the time?
MR. MOSS: No. My wife was a high school teacher, and we had known each other when I was teaching at the high school, briefly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: So, anyhow, we were both former employees of the school system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. MOSS: She taught English at the High School for I don't know how many years, but a long time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.  So, you moved to Oak Ridge when you got the job as the principal.  Where did you move to?
MR. MOSS: Over on Jersey Lane.  That's on the other side of Illinois, just off of the Outer Drive, and I rented a flattop over there, and stayed there for, I guess, three years, until I married, and then we bought this B house.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, were you and your wife involved in any civic organizations or anything like that in the community arts organizations, anything like that?
MR. MOSS: Yeah, I'm presently on the curriculum committee of ORICL, which is the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning, and Kay works a lot with the church, the First United Methodist Church, and she -- I'm having trouble remembering what organizations that she works for.  There's quite a few of them.  I have not belonged to a civic organization, like the Lions, and so forth.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. MOSS: I've attended their meetings many times.  I've been president of the Oak Ridge Retired Teachers for five years, I think, four or five years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. MOSS: I've worked with various organizations, but I've not been a close member of them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.  Now, when you were principal, was there an active social interaction between the educators, teachers, things such as that at the school or in the school system?  Was there anything kind of maybe semi-organized that you had events or functions?
MR. MOSS: I know what you're talking about, or I think I do, but no, not particularly.  The school system made an effort to get the entire staff together and to have a sense of there being one group.  They had a beginning-of-the-year breakfast when everybody was invited, and the superintendent generally addressed the group, and so forth -- they had an end-of-the-year dinner -- but, no.  In fact, when I got the job at Jefferson and went to the school the first time, I had to ask directions, and that's pathetic when you consider that I was a high school teacher.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure.
MR. MOSS: But anyhow, no, there was not much.  We did have a lot of contact with teachers, but it was not an organized contact.  It was just friends.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, you just made friends, you know, you work with people, you make friends with them.
MR. MOSS: There was a lot of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure, sure.  But you didn't want to be forced to have to spend time with people you spent all day with.
MR. MOSS: I mean it wasn't anybody forcing you.  In fact, there weren't very many opportunities is what I was saying.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.  We've got this beautiful new High School now.  As a former principal and former educator, longtime educator in the Oak Ridge school system, why don't you talk a little bit about the state of the school system now?  We talked a little bit about it, but the state of the Oak Ridge school system at this point, what are your thoughts?
MR. MOSS: Well, my thoughts are that a lot depends upon the direction of the schools, the administration of the schools, that the schools physically are fine.  The new High School is a beautiful facility, and the rest of the schools are certainly adequate to their jobs.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, absolutely.
MR. MOSS: I don't know very much at this point about the quality of the staff of the schools.  There's probably been a 70 percent turnover at Jefferson in 12 years, so I can't say very much about that, but it appears to me that the school system is in good shape but morale is not doing too well right now.  This Race to the Top and the requirements that they have put on the schools are, for the first time, really getting into the classroom and affecting the teachers.
MR. MCDANIEL: What kind of role do you think the administration of the school system can play, or how much does it play into, well, not only the morale, but the general sense of being in the Oak Ridge school system?
MR. MOSS: Well, over time, it plays a pretty big part, and I think over enough time it can determine really the quality of the schools.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just like, I guess, with any big organization, a good leader is a good leader and that trickles down.
MR. MOSS: Yeah, something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, is there anything else you want to talk about?  I mean, I'm glad we had a chance for you to talk about your job and your history and the schools.  I don't get a chance to talk about the schools very often to people.  Occasionally, but not very often.  Who was the fellow that we -- oh, Jasmine wasn't with me -- interviewed an art teacher, a longtime art teacher.  Was his name Clyde?  No, it wasn't Clyde.  What was his name?  Anyway, just a few months ago.
MR. MOSS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: He was a longtime art teacher.
MR. MOSS: I'm trying to think of who that might have been, but I'm not coming up with --
MR. MCDANIEL: I can't remember.
MR. MOSS: -- a name.  Yeah.  Well, I'd like to say that I very much admired, and still admire, Oak Ridge.  I guess, because I live so close, I was struck by the differences and was impressed by the differences.  In Knoxville and Clinton, for example, politics tend to be intense and they get into the running of things, like the schools, and the police department, fire department, and so forth, and in Oak Ridge, that was generally not true.  The Oak Ridge Schools were about as un-political as I could imagine a school system being, and I was very impressed by the fact that the people in Oak Ridge were willing to pay enough in taxes to keep their schools as good as they were.  In Knoxville, when I was growing up, and as an adult living in Knoxville, the general attitude seemed to me to be that you paid as little taxes as you possibly could, and then you supported your PTA so that they would buy all the things that your students needed.  In Oak Ridge, the schools in the poorer part of town got the same treatment, as far as money was concerned, as the other schools, and I very much appreciated that and admired that attitude.  Once again, it's just you brought people from all over the United States into this place, and they brought with them their attitudes and their point of views, but it's also, I think, the fact that it was a new community and kind of a new experiment, and they wanted it to be the best they could make it, so I really appreciate that.  The people who worked at the plants are responsible for that, and thus, ultimately responsible for the quality of the Oak Ridge schools.
MR. MCDANIEL: When you say the quality of the Oak Ridge schools, really the result is the quality of the type of people that graduate from Oak Ridge High School.
MR. MOSS: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean, you can see that every day, the graduates, and what they have done with their life, you know?
MR. MOSS: Yep.  My son brought that home to me.  I sort of tended to forget it, but he came back from the University of Tennessee many years ago, and he said that in many of his courses that he felt like he got a better education at Oak Ridge High School than he was getting at the university, and that doesn't reflect, I don't think, on the university so much as it does on the student body that they had to teach.  But anyhow, he felt that he was very well prepared, and not only that, he had had good instruction.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  You know, it's interesting.  My sons are young.  I got started with my family late, so I have one that'll be in ninth grade next year, and in preparation for going into high school, we went to these meetings and they explained things, and they laid out his four years of curriculum, basically, and all this.  But one of the things that really struck me that they said is that they want that student that goes to college, that first year of college, to be so prepared when they graduate high school to where that first year of college is really sort of a review of what they've had, because they know that that can be a very challenging time for students, moving away from home for the first time, being on their own for the first time, being influenced for the first time by outside influences, and they don't want that freshman year to be an academic burden on these students.  I was very impressed by that.
MR. MOSS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: I really was.
MR. MOSS: Yes, that's sounds like a very promising introduction to the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, it was.  So, I'll have a high schooler next year, and we'll see how that goes.  I'll have a sixth grader next year. I have two boys.  So, anyway, one last question I have for you, and this is just your thoughts.  Since I just got an e-mail yesterday and filled out a questionnaire about this, I wanted to know what your thoughts are on year-round school versus traditional school calendar.
MR. MOSS: Well, I was sent to California one year to attend a year-round school conference, so I heard a lot about year-round schools from all over the country, and my feeling is there is nothing inherently better about year-round schools, nor is there anything that anybody has been able to point to, in my experience, that shows that they provide a better quality of education.  But teachers like it and many parents like it, but teachers like it because it gives them an opportunity to take vacations at times, like in the fall and the winter and the spring, rather than every time having to be in the summer.
MR. MCDANIEL: Also, it gives them an opportunity to recover after nine weeks of school, doesn't it, I would imagine.
MR. MOSS: Well, the arguments are that year-round schools are better because the intervals between sessions are shorter.  You don't have this long, two-and-a-half-month summer vacation to forget things, and it is true that teachers generally review when they come back in the fall, but it doesn't show up, at least in test scores, and it doesn't show up in the quality of the courses that they teach, and I just couldn't find it when I was in this conference and anything I've read about it, that it's better, but it is more attractive to teachers, and sometimes to parents.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: I think that still you can apply to go to Willow Brook from anywhere in the city if you want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: I believe you can.
MR. MOSS: The problem is the high school, and that is if you are a year-round high school in an area that is on a traditional schedule everywhere else, it is a real problem because you've got football going on, or probably you're on break when others, and everything else, all the competitions are geared to a traditional schedule and people are hired, or when they're available to be hired is not going to suit your schedule. So, there are a lot of problems for a high school in a year-round school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.  I said that was my last question but it's not; one more.  I would imagine being a teacher, being an educator is a pretty challenging vocation, and it probably takes a certain personality type, certain types of traits that people would have to be successful, and to endure a career in education.  What are your thoughts on that?
MR. MOSS: Well, I can't give you a list of characteristics.  I've interviewed hundreds of people for jobs, and I do think that almost anybody could interview a group of teachers and, if there was a really outstanding prospect in the group, that nine out of ten of them would identify that person.  It's not that hard to tell a superior teacher in an interview.  It's trying to sort out the people that are good but, you know, they're not that star quality, and personality does have a lot to do with it, in my opinion.  Training has something to do with it, but personality, in my opinion, and values, personal qualities, in other words, has more to do with it, I think, than where you graduated, or what courses you take, given the fact that there's got to be a minimum of what you got as far as training is concerned.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.  Oak Ridge being the city that it was, or the city that it is, the city that it has been over the last 60 years, I guess a lot of people think, when it came to finding teachers, we were lucky a lot of the times to get the cream of the crop.
MR. MOSS: We did, but getting the cream of the crop does not mean that every person we got was the cream of the crop.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, sure, of course.
MR. MOSS: That is certainly not true, but yes, if you look at the whole span of the teachers of the Oak Ridge schools, that's true, although as you pointed out, it's getting more competitive, much more competitive.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. MOSS: We no longer have the best salaries in the state, but it still has its reputation and a very good salary schedule, so we're doing fine.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.  Well, thank you so much.
MR. MOSS: Thank you, Keith. I appreciate it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Anything else you want to talk about, anything else you want to say?  Here's your chance.
MR. MOSS: I am proud to be an Oak Ridger, and I enjoy living here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.  Well, very good.  Thank you, Mr. Moss.  I appreciate it.

[END OF INTERVIEW]