It has been about a year and half since former Idaho State University President Carl W. McIntosh died of natural causes at age 94 in his Bozeman, Mont., home on Jan. 19, 2009.
Carl McIntosh
Our office helped put out a news release on his passing(
http://www2.isu.edu/headlines/?p=1623), but an acquaintance of President McIntosh, Pricilla Hearst, informed me at a meeting for a Pocatello community group that our story hadn’t captured the essence of ISU’s seventh president, who served from 1946 to 1959. At the time, in late January 2009, I told Pricilla I would contact her to get some additional information for the 2009 spring edition Idaho State University Magazine story on McIntosh, but I failed to do so.
To try to make some amends for my omission, I recently visited Hearst, 84, who is a retired social worker and forever activist for many different causes. She is the widow of Joseph Hearst, former dean of the then ISU College of Liberal Arts and political science professor and chair, for whom ISU’s annual Frank Church Symposium Joseph Hearst Memorial Lecture is named. Joseph Hearst founded this annual symposium that takes place on ISU’s campus.
Pricilla is a captivating speaker and tells a good story, so I visited her hoping I could film her using our office’s Flip video camera. She refused to be interviewed on camera, but I did take some notes. Thus, blog consumers, you’ll have to settle for my stilted re-telling of Hearst’s stories, instead of hearing it straight in video form from this lively and good-humored woman.
“CARL McINTOSH,” said Hearst, “was such a fun man and such a wit, who had a marvelous sense of humor. I just have to call him a real wit because he just had a way with words and could make you laugh.”
“I was a new faculty wife of my husband, Joe, and I was worried sick about meeting President McIntosh, but when I met him he made me feel so welcomed. It was nice. It was like we were old friends. I haven’t met another ISU president, yet, that I could say that about. He established a camaraderie on campus, whether you were in physics or humanities, you were a part of the college (at the time, ISU was the University of Idaho Southern Branch.)”
“He was very social and very down to earth, but he and his wife never thought of themselves above anybody, but he didn’t put up with a lot crap, either.”
Hearst relayed three stories she thought would illustrate McIntosh’s character. These stories may shed light on some other bastions of ISU history, as well.
Story No. 1: A trick played on Eli M. Oboler, for whom Idaho State University’s Library is named
“When they were just beginning to build the old library, Eli Oboler was librarian. He had worked and begged to have a new library and the state built it. When it was built, it was HIS library, not ISU’s or the state’s. This is when Carl played his trick.”
Eli Oboler
McIntosh gathered some co-conspirators, including Larry (Laurence E.) Gale (for whom the Gale Life Science Building is named) and Rufus Lyman (for whom College of Pharmacy has created in his name the annual Rufus A. Lyman Award).
Larry Gale
Rufus Lyman
“Mac brought in these two men and said ‘this is what we’re going to do: go over there with tape measures and start measuring the library.’ So the two went over there and starting measuring the front of the library and Eli comes storming out, ‘What are you doing to the library?’ Larry and Rufus said ‘the president told us to make these measurements because he got some money from some alumni to buy a neon sign to point to the museum and the library.’
“Eli blew,” in Pricilla’s words, and stormed over to McIntosh’s office where he saw the President sitting in his chair, his back to him, looking out the window. The person in the chair, however, wasn’t McIntosh, but instead the late Chick Bilyeu, “who looked like McIntosh from behind.”
Chick Bilyeu
“Eli slams open the doors, races in and started yelling at the president, and went into a whole flourish of words. What happened during this big diatribe was that Chick turns around and says, ‘why, is something wrong?’ McIntosh then came in and told him it was just a trick. It took poor Eli two or three days to settle down.”
Story No. 2: McIntosh’s Prologue to the Faculty Handbook:
“Dr. McIntosh wrote a Faculty Handbook the he got printed up,” Pricilla said. “In the prologue it said ‘This will be the faculty handbook and remain in force until such time as it is demolished by faculty culture.’ That is the kind of message he wrote in the handbook. Even that had a twist of fun in it.”
Story No. 3: Pricilla’s missing daughter.
“My daughter Alice, my blue-eyed little girl, was picked as the May Queen crown bearer to walk beside Dr. McIntosh, to carry the crown so it could be placed on the Queen’s head. I left Alice in the charge of one of the attendants because I had to go back to work. When I came back to pick her up, there was no Alice. I asked what happened to her and the attendant said last time I saw here she was with Dr. McIntosh, so I rushed over to Dr. McIntosh’s home and asked him if he’d seen my daughter. He said ‘she’s here having a bowl of ice cream.’ And there, Alice sat, eating ice cream appearing to be having the best time in the world.”
Epilogue:
“I just wanted to let you know what kind of man he was,” Pricilla said. “I wanted you to get the feeling of what kind of man he was like.”
