Oral History with Edward Spencer, November 7, 2014 (Ms2015-007)

David Atkins: My name is David Atkins. I'm here with Ellen Boggs and Dr. Edward

Spencer and I'm conducting an interview for the LGBTQ Oral History Project. Can

you tell us your name, date and place of birth?

Edward Spencer: I'm Edward Spencer and I was born on August 18th 1945 in Pittsfield Massachusetts.

ATKINS: Can you tell us a little bit about your family and how you were raised?

SPENCER:I grew up for my first eleven years in Pittsfield and my father wound up with a

forty-six year career in General Electric. My biological mother died when I was

not quite four years old and so I was raised by my father and then various

housekeepers, one of whom eventually became my stepmother. We moved to Decatur

Illinois in the summer of 1956, spent three and a half years there. 00:01:00Then we

moved to Stratford Connecticut for about a year and a half, and then to Auburn

New York in the Fair Lakes area for my junior and senior years of high school.

And then I did my undergraduate work at the University of Rochester nearby there

and then got a Master's from Syracuse; well I went to medical school first then

dropped out after half a year. But got a Master's from Syracuse, met my wife in

the graduate program at Syracuse and then we moved to the University of Delaware

in 1970 for our first professional jobs. And I got another Master's and Ph.D. in

Social Psychology while I was working full time at Delaware. My wife and I have

one son who we adopted when he was seven years old and 00:02:00he obviously finished his

schooling here in Blacksburg and then he did a career in the army, and moved

back home and started to raise his family here. Long story short, I lost my wife

to cancer after she went through about an eleven and a half year struggle with

that and then last January lost my son sadly to huffing, inhaling, aerosol

substances, about which none of us knew anything about.

ATKINS: I'm sorry to hear that.

SPENCER: In a nutshell, that's my life [laugh].

ATKINS: Can you tell me about how you arrived at Virginia Tech, a little bit

about your career before then and then getting to Virginia Tech?

SPENCER: Sure.

Well I went off to Delaware in 1970 with my Master's degree and my first

professional position, which was in the residence life area of housing and

residence life and 00:03:00then became an Assistant Director in that program and had

responsibilities for public relations and room assignments and then eventually

moved into the facilities area of that department. So by the end of my twelve

and a half years at Delaware I had experience in student life area, the

administration and public relations and facilities area of housing and residence

life. And then meanwhile, I had also finished my other Master's and my Ph.D. in

social psych. And Virginia Tech in 1982 was looking for a director of housing

and residence life and my credentials were prefect for them and they came after

me. To tell you the truth, I'd never heard of Virginia Tech at that point and

somebody said to me, 'well it's VPI.' And I thought 'oh okay its VPI now I

understand, I know what school it is.' 00:04:00My wife at that point had become- she had

started in student affairs and had moved to academic affairs- she had become an

Associate Dean at the College of Business at the University of Delaware and she

decided she would like to give up her position and get her Doctorate here, which

is what she did. We fell in love with the place when we moved here. And shortly

after we moved here the same position she had at Delaware opened up here and

they came after her. But she finished her doctorate part-time while working

full-time here like I had done at Delaware. So I became Director of Housing and

Residence Life, which is responsible for everything about residence halls, from

the facilities area to housekeeping, to the student life programming,

everything. Had that title until 1988, no it was '89 and I became Director of

Residential and 00:05:00Dining Programs when the dining program was moved from Business

Affairs to Student Affairs and Jim McComas was president at the time and asked

if I could turn it around into something I could be proud of, which I think we

did through a lot of good staff. Eventually became Assistant Vice President for

Student Affairs, as other departments began to report to me besides Housing and

Residence Life and Dining. Then eventually became Associate Vice President as

number two to the Deputy Vice President position. And then tragically the Vice

President who preceded me, Zenobia Hikes, died while in office from

complications from heart surgery. And the Provost asked if I would move into the

vice presidency position. He said for maybe three years and I said okay because

that would match when I want to retire so that's fine. I wound up agreeing to

stay for a fourth year until 00:06:00I retired. So I did a forty-two year career in

Student Affairs the last four of which were the Vice President position.

ATKINS: Did you find any one of those more rewarding than the others?

SPENCER:You know they're all rewarding in their own way, because you get into working

some details and special programs and creating things. I think certainly when

you become Vice President you realize the impact you can have because you have

responsibility for so much and can approve things and take things in new

directions. So that's probably the most exciting, to have finished as Vice

President.

ATKINS: I want to talk a little bit more about your role as Director

of Housing and Residence Life here at the school. You held that position from

'82 to '89?

SPENCER: From January 1st '83 until April of '89.

ATKINS: 00:07:00What were

your original responsibilities or just responsibilities in general with that

role?

SPENCER: Well the Director of Housing Residence Life is the chief housing

officer for the university so everything on the facilities side, you know,

furnishings, the buildings themselves, the equipment, to the public relations,

room assignment side to the Residence Student Life program, the RA program,

everything like that. So anything and everything to do with the residence halls

comes through the Director of Housing and Residence Life.

ATKINS: In your role

there did you deal with any issues directly related to the LGBTQ community at

Virginia Tech?

SPENCER: Oh sure. At the time I came into the position, 1983, the

AIDS crisis was really growing then it was a big, huge issue. Frankly there are 00:08:00so many parallels to the Ebola crisis right now that I see going on, it's deja

vu for me as I look back at it. There had been a student group that I think was

originally called the Gay Student Alliance I think formed back in the 70s that

was in the process of changing its name to the Lambda Horizon Group. As the AIDS

crisis came about and there was a lot of fear and anxiety and prejudice and bias

and discrimination going on, simply because someone was gay and therefore they

must have AIDS, that's the thinking that some people had. That a lot of us were

concerned about helping our LGBT students in the midst of all this. So we had a

really outstanding health 00:09:00educator in the Schiffert Health Center, Joanne

Underwood who I hope you're getting to interview.

ATKINS: Yes we are.

SPENCER:

Who really was ahead of her time in many ways as a health educator. She had

developed a close bond with students involved in what had become known as the

Lambda Horizon group. I think she sort of bridged the gap from student to

administration in bringing us all around the table together to talk about this.

So as the person in charge of the whole housing program, I decided I would get

personally involved in it. I knew Joanne through our church, so we had the kind

of relationship. So that's how I first got to know Mark Weber, who I guess was

president, if not secretary of the organization at that point. And we 00:10:00formed an

AIDS education committee, and this would have been I guess around '85, '86

something like that. And on that committee from the health center was certainly

Joanne. Walt von Lem [sp], who was one of the physicians in the health center

and Dictus Jardins [sp] who was one of the physicians. Interestingly, Walt had

lost his son to AIDS, so he was very personally committed to this. Dr. Schiffert

I think himself served as sort of a consultant to the committee. Obviously I was

on the committee, Mark Weber, and I think Keith Mckelhenny [sp] from the Lambda

Horizon group. Lucretia Cavin, who was a graduate student in our college student

affairs program that I teach in, she was on it. And I think Ken Israel from the

Counseling Center was on it at one point as well. I may have 00:11:00missed some, but

that was sort of the core group. So we began very much an educational mission to

try and educate people about AIDS, and that also moved towards understanding

LGBT students and realizing that just because someone has AIDS doesn't

necessarily mean that they're gay, or the other way around: that someone who is

gay doesn't happen to have AIDS. But as I was saying, this is so parallel to the

some of the discrimination and the assumptions and the panic that's going on

with this Ebola crisis, it really takes you back to that era of how people think sometimes.

ATKINS: Can you go into a little bit more detail about what you did through the

education program? How you tried to reach students, was it just students or was

it students and faculty?

SPENCER: Well I think 00:12:00it was aimed largely at students,

but we publicized it in such a way it was really open to everybody. So faculty,

staff, and community members, everybody I think took part. So we began

developing written materials to educate everyone about it. We put together as I

recall a forum, an all day forum, and we had Richard Keeling [sp] come in. Rich

Keeling used to be Director of the Student Health Service at the University of

Virginia and became President of the American College Health Association, which

is the national association of student health services. He was really, in the

80s he was very much the expert on AIDS in the American and campus communities.

So he came in to speak and we had, as I recall, we had breakout sessions with

various people from the 00:13:00committee and the community leading those sessions in an

effort to educate everybody. And we got, I think, really good publicity on

campus. In those days the Collegiate Times was the only way to advertise on

campus really [laughter]. And the Roanoke Times covered it as well. So I think

gradually we were able to build a lot of education, hopefully change a lot of

opinions of the people.

ATKINS: So it was mostly positively received?

SPENCER: It was, it was.

ATKINS: I want to talk a little bit now about the AIDS epidemic

and how it affected student housing. Was there a university policy about it

related to student housing, or not?

SPENCER: Well really from this committee,

which made recommendations to the Student Health Service, and really the

Director of Schiffert Health Center is the one who makes medical decisions for

the campus, and that was Dr. Schiffert at the time, who is 00:14:00still alive by the

way and living in Blacksburg. The basic policy we developed was very simple:

that each case would be considered individually, what was the best to do in any

situation. Was any action necessary? Was there education of roommates, hall

mates if we had such occasions in the residence halls? How you contract AIDS and

how you don't contract AIDS, that kind of thing. So there wasn't a blanket

policy it was more individual, where we'd look at each case individually and

determine what to do.

ATKINS: Is there any one case that specifically stands out

as being different or-

SPENCER: When I think back, I'm not sure we ever had a

case that became apparent in the residence halls. I know we had some students

living off campus 00:15:00who had contracted the disease, but I don't think we ever had

one in the residence halls. I might be wrong, but I can't remember it. I think

if we did I would have remembered.

ATKINS: What would you say the general

attitude towards AIDS on campus was with faculty and staff and with students at

the time? And I guess how it changed from your initial involvement in '83

through the 80s.

SPENCER: I think initially there was unknown exactly what this

was, what it meant. And then I think there was some panic that developed and

then I think people began to understand that AIDS is not an easy disease to

catch and I think that was a 00:16:00lot of what our focus was to get people to

understand that. So I think there came to be understanding about the disease and

what we were doing and what needed to be done. I think then, simultaneous to

that, you have attitudes about LGBT students. When you go back to the 80s there

was a lot of discrimination, homophobia that certainly we saw throughout the

country and throughout the campus for that matter. And I think it was a very

difficult situation for LGBT students to be students in that era because of

those attitudes and biases that were going on. I think it's a lot different

today, we've come a long ways, but those were difficult times.

ATKINS: Can you

speak to that change over time, how you've 00:17:00seen attitudes change in regards to

the LGBTQ community?

SPENCER: I think it's been a very long slow process that

you also see with attitudes towards gay marriage too. That's come about over a

long slow period of time. I think people began to understand and accept LGBT

students, to be less threatened by them. I think some role models started to

develop because we started to have some RAs who were openly gay, and I think

that that helped a lot. At the same time, folks who chose to do that and be open

about it sometimes faced real homophobic responses. I know we had some RAs who

had 00:18:00graffiti on their door from hall residents and that kind of thing. We tried

to be supportive and come to their assistance when that kind of thing was going

on. But I take it back, very parallel to the civil rights movement. I went to

school in the sixties when the civil rights movement was really going on and I

think the slow changes in society that we saw from the civil rights movement is

what we are now seeing in the gay rights movement. To me, it's a very parallel

situation.

ATKINS: What kind of support did you offer to those people that

experienced that discrimination?

SPENCER: We often when we had that kind of

thing, we would call floor meetings where this had happened, to discuss the 00:19:00situation with residents of the floor and that we wouldn't tolerate that kind of

thing. We wanted to be as supportive of that RA as we could, to increase our

level of educational programming and housing programming about that subject and

to show people that we wanted to be a welcoming community to everyone. That was

difficult to do sometimes when you're surrounded by a society that didn't have

the same maybe forward looking attitudes that you did in higher education. Some

of the same kinds of situations that Blacksburg faces in the midst of a very

conservative area of Southwest Virginia.

ATKINS: Was the Gay Student Alliance or

the Lambda Horizon group part of any of those conversations?

SPENCER: They were.

We began to partner with 00:20:00them more and more. We tried to help them with

advertising their events, their meetings. In those days, in the eighties

initially, my recollection is the Lambda Horizon group could not even advertise

where they were going to meet because there had been incidents of well I

remember a rock being thrown through the window of one of their meetings. So if

you wanted to attend one of their meetings you had to call a number and, I

believe this is what I recall, and find out where they were going to meet and

who you were and that kind of thing. Pretty sad. We've come a long ways, but it

gives you a feel of what it was like.

ATKINS: Do you know how they determined

from the phone call whether they would tell you where the meeting was? Do you

know how that worked?

SPENCER: 00:21:00I don't know. That's a good question to ask

somebody, probably Mark Weber I guess.

ATKINS: I was just curious. So have you

been involved in any other LGBTQ organizations here at Virginia Tech or

elsewhere?

SPENCER: I've been I think a very strong ally for the organization

over the years, is probably the best way to describe my relationship with them.

And certainly have been that way with the undergraduate group and then with the

graduate group as it formed, and certainly I have been a friend to the faculty

staff group as well. When people ask me 'what are the things you've really

achieved here?' certainly turning around the dining program, for example, is one

of the things I always say, but as when I was vice president I was the one who

finally approved a full-time position to work with the LGBT community as part of

multicultural programs and services. So Catherine 00:22:00Cotrupi, who was the person

who went into that position, we had her as a wage person for the first year that

she worked in the center and then we were able to establish it as a full-time

professional position the next year. And she easily was chosen as the best

person for that job. Sadly, she and her partner moved elsewhere and she's no

longer here, but she was a great person to start that position.

ATKINS: Can you

talk a little bit about how that came about, I guess within the university, was

there resistance to it?

SPENCER: Yeah I think that if I had been Vice President

back in the eighties and tried to establish such a position it would have never

gone anywhere, just the political background would have prevented that from

happening. I think as things gradually changed over the years the openness to

doing that was there and then I think it 00:23:00was a matter of how can we put funding

together from either the Multicultural Programs and Services Department or other

departments to have enough money and an allocation for a position to do it. So,

we were able to do it that way.

ATKINS: You talked a little bit about the

contrast between the Virginia Tech community and the surrounding community. Did

you ever deal with any I think you even mentioned some community members that

came and spoke at the education meetings and forums. Was their experience in the

greater community different from LGBTQ experiences at Virginia Tech, do you

think?

SPENCER: Oh yeah, cause I can remember hearing stories told over the

years by some of these folks of things they have experienced in the local

community. Of graffiti, name calling, 00:24:00sometimes attacks, personal attacks,

physical attacks, that kind of thing. I think some of those community members

would tell these factual stories to our students to remind our students that

this wasn't always the safest place to be, even though we wanted it to be. We

started Safe Watch on campus, we started the Safe Zone program, really trying to

send a strong message that we want this to be a welcoming and safe place for

all. And I think things like that, when you put all those efforts together, it

eventually turns around a culture. As you well know, a culture is not something

you turn around over night. It's a long slow process. But frankly, 00:25:00when I was a

college student, did I think I would ever live to see gay marriage approved, I

would have thought 'no way, that will never happen in the United States.' I mean

look what's happened- amazing.

ATKINS: So the Safe Watch program, that was

something for all students, right, and it just happened to cover

SPENCER: It

was for all students, faculty, staff, really everybody. It was an effort for

people to have a way to report incidents that had happened. You could report

something that happened to you personally or it could be a third party reporter,

reporting something that you heard about or witnessed happening. And then those

reports came into the Dean of Students' office. The Safe Watch line was looked

at two or three times a day by the Dean of Students office. So it was checked

each day, and then they would follow 00:26:00up on the various incidents to determine

exactly what happened, what we could do in response, if we identified a person

that we need to meet with, a floor of a residence hall. Is there some place in

the community where this is coming from? That kind of thing. So it was a good

way to get started being proactive and reactive about incidents.

ATKINS: Do you

know if the incidents occurred more on campus or off.

SPENCER: They were mainly

on campus. And it really was developed mainly in response to homophobic issues,

but it became appropriately used for other kinds of incidences, because

occasionally we'd have racial issues going on as well, or sexist issues. But it

really developed in response to concerns from within the gay community.

ATKINS:

For student safety?

SPENCER: 00:27:00Yes. And one of the people initially involved in

that with us, partnering with us, was Michael Sutphin, and I'm assuming you're

probably interviewing him. Michael is a graduate at Tech, he was very active in

the gay student group as an undergraduate, and I forget whether he became the

president of the group at one point or not. He now works as a public relations

officer in college, it's either the Vet school or the Ag school, I forget which,

but he's a member of the Town Council of Blacksburg. He got elected to Town

Council. He would be a very good person for you to talk with if he is not on

your list.

ATKINS: Okay. You spoke a little bit about LGBTQ meetings and meeting

places, do you know were those off campus, on campus? Did they have meeting

spaces available?

SPENCER: They were a registered student 00:28:00organization and

eventually a chartered student organization. And so sure, they could reserve

space on campus. Now did they always meet on campus? I don't really know for

sure. I suspect they might have met off campus as well, but certainly they could

reserve space. Now whether or not they publicized where the space was had to do

with how the atmosphere was at that point. I think eventually they became very

public about where they were meeting. Thank goodness that they were able to do

that.

ATKINS: Did that occur gradually as well?

SPENCER: I think so, that's my

recollection. I think probably in 2014 if you said to one of the people in the

current group, 'you know at one time we couldn't even publish where we'd meet'

they'd look at you and say, 'you're kidding' [laughter]. That's how much times

change.

ATKINS: Especially now with all the other means of publication.

SPENCER:

Oh absolutely. Yeah, cause you have to think back, this was at a time, as I was 00:29:00saying, the only way to publicize things was really in the Collegiate Times. We

didn't have cell phones, we didn't have email and instant messaging or anything

like that. So it was a different era.

ATKINS: Are there any issues you can think

of with the LGBTQ community here at Virginia Tech that you felt the university

dealt with very appropriately or perhaps even inappropriately? Or anything

specific you can remember?

SPENCER: I can't remember anything that we might have

handled inappropriately, I don't believe so. Of course I was a member of the

administration so you're not always your best critic [laughter]. I think the way

that we handled things by really trying to be proactive and reactive and jumping

in new things through Safe Watch , through responding to issues that might be

brewing in the residence halls, 00:30:00by moving the LGBT group from a registered to a

chartered student organization, by changing the discrimination code at the

university to include sexual orientation. I was on the Commission of Student

Affairs when we made that change, which I think was during the McComas

administration, if I remember right.

ATKINS: Do you remember the year?

SPENCER:

I wanna say it was probably about '91, '92, something like that. You would have

to dig, well you could go right into the university council minutes and find it,

but I think that's when it was. There were in incidents in Squires at the office

of the LGBT group. There was some door defacement that went on there a couple

times that we had to deal with.

ATKINS: In the Student Center?

SPENCER: One of

them 00:31:00occurred after we had security cameras in place and my recollection is we

were able to identify who did this from having those cameras.

ATKINS: Was it a

student?

SPENCER: It was.

ATKINS: What happened to that student?

SPENCER: Well

it would have been referred to the student conduct system, but I don't have a

specific recollection of exactly what happened. Sometimes it's just enough to

confront it and show the person the jig is up to get it to stop, but I'm sure

that person faced sanctions and the student conduct system.

ATKINS: Is there

anything else you'd like to tell us about? Or is there anything I didn't ask

that you wish I would have asked you about?

SPENCER: As I look back on all those 00:32:00years, I have a lot of empathy for what our LGBT students went through during

the years when it was much more difficult to be out than it is today. I hope we

did all that we could do to help them. In retrospect could we have done more? No

I can't think of anything off hand that we could have done more. I think we did

a good job, we were responsive, we had a great relationship with the group and

we simply worked very well together. But I think there are probably many LGBT

students who were in, maybe still are in the closet and didn't want to deal with

the atmosphere of those days. But I think they had some good leaders in the

group, like Mark Weber, who were good leaders 00:33:00and helped the group come out and

move to a position in the hierarchy of student organizations that they are

today.

ATKINS: Was your relationship with them, did you feel it was always

positive or reciprocal?

SPENCER: I think so. I never heard anything from LGBT

students that they didn't like me and wanted me out or anything like that. I

think we had a good relationship. And I still have contact with a number of

those folks, like Mark. I assume he is a person you're interviewing too?

ATKINS:

Yes. I know he's on the list. Is there anyone else that you can think of that we

might want to interview?

SPENCER: Well I mentioned Michael Sutphin because you

didn't seem to have him on the list.

ATKINS: Yeah I'm not sure we do.

SPENCER:

He would be very important because he was really with us as we started the Safe

Watch program and was really one of the driving forces to help us get that 00:34:00going. Mark may know where some of the other folks who were initially involved

are today, I don't know. Certainly there have been gay RAs. Jason Sesul [sp] who

works for the CDC in Atlanta, was one of our first openly gay RAs. He was an RA

up in I think maybe Thomas Hall, if I remember right. Trying to think if there

are other ones that come to mind off hand. Jim Devaty, D-E-V-A-T-Y, he was one

of our head RAs, and head RAs are like hall 00:35:00directors. When I first came here,

the halls were staffed entirely with undergraduate students, we had no live-in

professional staff at all. So head RA was a very prestigious position held by

some of our best and brightest, and Jim Devaty was one of those. Now, I'm not

sure he was at the time openly gay, he certainly is now. He and his husband have

adopted a boy and they live in the Pittsburg area. If you need an address, Mark

probably has an address for him because they were out of the same era. Is there

anybody else? Tonia Moxley, who is the Higher Ed reporter for the Roanoke Times,

is a graduate of Tech and former editor of the Collegiate Times and is openly 00:36:00lesbian. I don't think she was ever an RA for us. But you know, as a former

Collegiate Times editor and now the Higher Ed. reporter for Virginia Tech, she'd

be a good person to talk to also.

ATKINS: When was she here, do you know?

SPENCER: I think late eighties, early nineties. I think that's right. Her spouse

Maureen, I can't think of her last name, was the prime staff member for Planned

Parenthood in Blacksburg. And they have certainly a 00:37:00perspective from that agency

as well.

ATKINS: Do you have any questions about the project or anything else?

SPENCER: How's it going? What are you going to do with it all?

ATKINS: It's

going well. Ultimately they will all be housed in Special Collections, part of

the building of the LGBTQ collection there. Which, as you probably saw, it's

fairly small right now, but it is a brand new collection.

SPENCER: It was funny,

I went in to look at it and the person couldn't find it and they said 'oh wait a

minute, Mark Weber has it on hold for you' [laughter]. I said 'Oh ok great.' So

I just sat down, I looked at it quickly and I came back yesterday to look at it

more. He left some great things in the files there.

ATKINS: Anything in

particular that you thought was interesting that you found in there?

SPENCER:

Sort of the history of things that Greg Edwards wrote for the Collegiate 00:38:00 Times.

Greg was himself HIV positive and frankly I don't know whether Greg is still

alive. Mark can tell you, but I think Greg and those articles gave a good

historical perspective on things and that was very helpful. And then reading

Mark's handwritten notes from meetings is really interesting. But it was really

helpful for me to refresh my memory, because the minute you start to read, oh the

AIDS education committee, I remember who was on that now. So it was very helpful

to bring all of that back.

ATKINS: So the interviews will be housed there and

anything given by individuals will be there as well. Initially at this point

it's just to start a collection and preserve it and I think the goal is to see

how the 00:39:00LGBTQ community at Virginia Tech has changed over time.

SPENCER: Certainly the organization has been through cycles as sometimes viewing itself

as a political organization, sometimes viewing itself as an educational

organization. Some years when it seemed like all the leadership positions were

held by women and some years all the leadership positions were held by men. My

sense is now they have a pretty good balance between the two. Sometimes I would

hear a lot about political infighting within the organization, which is never

helpful for any organization. I think they've come a long ways to be very well

respected now. Really the graduate student organization sort of spun off from

the undergraduate organization. The faculty, 00:40:00staff group sort of developed

simultaneously in parallel to the undergraduate organization. I think my

impression too is sometimes each communicating with the other has not been as

smooth as one would hope it would be.

ATKINS: Between the three?

SPENCER: Yeah,

but my sense now is they're much more united and recognize and value each

other's purpose.

ATKINS: Do you know if it was anything in particular that

caused them to have moments where it was mostly male officers versus female

members and stuff, or just perhaps the way it happened.

SPENCER: Well I don't

know. Yeah you'd have to ask somebody like Michael or Mark and get their

perspectives on that. Tonia, I think, would be a good person to give you some

good perspective too. It would be good to interview Tonia. She's always

interviewing everybody else cause that's her 00:41:00job. It would be nice to turn the

tables and have someone interview her.

ATKINS: Is there anything not in the

collection that you would like to see in there?

SPENCER: I think these

interviews will be a great addition for people to the collection. I don't know

what else I would think of offhand. Whether there's someone who could sit now

and write sort of a more lengthy updated history of the whole organization. To

take some of the early stuff that Greg wrote and Mark wrote and to follow it

forward to the present.

ATKINS: I know they're working on a working timeline. To

add to that to kind of supplement the history of it.

SPENCER: That would be great.

ATKINS: So that is something that will eventually be available, but is

still a work in progress.

SPENCER: Sure.

ATKINS: 00:42:00Is there anything else you would like to add?

SPENCER: I think we've covered a lot of territory, anything

else you want to ask?

ATKINS: No, we've covered all of my questions.

SPENCER: Ok good. Well good luck with it.

ATKINS: Thank you for agreeing to sit down and

talk with us today.

SPENCER: I hope I've given you some help.

ATKINS: Absolutely.