Interview with Jack Osman

This interview is being conducted in the Hearing and Balance Centers Conference Room in the Administration Building on the Towson University campus. It is part of a series of interviews comprising the TURFA

Oral History Project, conceived and supported by the Towson University Retired Faculty Association, with a generous support from the Dean of the College of Health Professions. This interview, as well as others in this series, is

available in the Towson University Archives. Our guest interviewee today is Jack Osman, who's professor emeritus from the Department of Health Science. Welcome, Jack.

Glad to have you here. Glad to be here. We're going to start with the question from the very beginning.

Where were you born? Philadelphia. Philadelphia. The one in Pennsylvania. I was born in a hospital, but we lived in a row house.

They're now called townhouses. Townhouses, right. Right. And then what colleges and universities did you go to?

Westchester for my undergraduate degree, University of Maryland for my master's degree, specialized in health education and nutrition. And then I taught for a couple years in Washington, DC. Doctor

King was assassinated at that time. And at Ballou High School, where I taught health education, we had a very interesting event when, well, let's just say the government came in and they had military all over.

Because there were riots in in the city at that time. From there I went to Ohio State University, the Ohio State, now officially, and I got my PhD there in '71 and came directly to Towson the summer of '71, while I was still finishing my

dissertation. So I was writing my dissertation here at Towson. So it sounded like you decided you were going into a career in higher education.

Why did you decide on a whole career in higher education? My first choice was higher education because I thought I would be spending or wasting a lot of time disciplining students in a high school level.

Much to my surprise, I did not. I was teaching at Ballou High School in Southeast Washington and it was an absolute delight to be there. And I was teaching African Americans predominantly, with

the exception of some military children whose parents were stationed at Bowling Air Force Base. But then you came to Towson and the rest is in higher education? Yes.

What were you, what was your impression when you first came to Towson, of the institution? I loved Towson. I first came here, was interviewed by my department

chair. And as I was walking on campus, I heard, Mr. Osman, what are you doing here? And I said, Sonny, I'm here for an interview.

Sonny Gadsden was one of my students at Ballou High School. Small world. And he became the president of the Black Student Union very early on.

And who was the department chair when you first came here? Clint Bruess. What was your impression of the overall institution when you first came here?

To me, it was more of a family, an extended family. I loved interacting with all the other departments and faculty members in different departments because there might be something I could learn from them.

Now, later on, I continued to interact because I was always looking for a more dysfunctional faculty than the one I was in. Now, you retired from the Department of Health Science.

Was it called that when you first came here? Yes, it was called the Department of Health Science And how many years were you here? 38. 38 years.

OK. You sent me some information that indicated that you taught far more than even 20 different courses while you were at Towson University. That's really amazing.

But how come you had to teach so many courses, different kinds of courses? Well, our faculty was somewhat limited at first. We had ten faculty members when I first got here.

And then from there, I just enjoyed the variety and diversity because one of my favorite courses was the beginning freshman course. Even though I was brought in to help with a graduate program, I

preferred to teach the 1st generation college students that Towson became known for. And tell me something about those students that made you feel that that was the favorite course to teach.

They were down to earth, genuine. I came from Ohio State University, where I was an instructor at the same time I was doing my graduate work, and they were third generation college students.

Their parents had gone there, their grandparents had gone there, and so they knew how to work the system. At Towson, the students were just genuine and I enjoyed my interactions with them because they were open to learn.

Did you ever have any famous students? Students who went on to become famous. Several, several.

One of them was famous because of his father. My first summer course in 1971, the student did not show up for two days. Two men came up to me, young men, after class and asked when

was I going to start teaching from the book, and I said that's probably not going to happen. I teach about what is in the book, but I don't teach directly from it.

And I wanted to establish rapport for the first few days. And the third day the student showed up, sat between the two men. His name, Randy Agnew. So after class I gave him the handouts and said to him, are

you? And he said, yes, he's my dad, and I'm going to meet him at Andrews Air Force Base today. He's coming back from China.

That was my introduction to Towson University. I would assume that the Secret Service men had protection on them. Did they get graded?

Yes. The Secret Service men? You gave them grades? They took courses. Oh, they did.

They took the entire course. Yeah. Any other famous or students that became famous? Sean Landeta was in my class.

Of course. He was the famous punter for New York and he was a young man at that time and playing football and enjoying himself. He was not what I would call one of the better students that I

had taught over the years, but he was definitely famous, very famous. Lynn Brick of Brick Bodies. Lynn was in my class in the early 70s before she met, you

know, Victor, her husband. Victor and Lynn Brick. And of course, he's made some nice donations here to the university too. And there have been some others over the years who probably have

become famous or millionaires or even better. Were you ever an administrator in any capacity at Towson? For a very short period of time.

When I finally discovered my level of incompetence, I knew I wanted to come to Towson to teach. Teaching was my love, my forte, and I wanted to explore the limits of what could be done in the classroom.

But I did design a master's program under a grant from the college for Doctor Clint Bruess, who asked me in '73 to begin writing a program when there was a moratorium on new master's programs.

And he and Neil Gallagher went to Annapolis with what I had written and the support material and were able to get it through because of the great need for Towson to have a master's in Health Science.

Tell us more about what was in that program. Well, there was tremendous flexibility. Of course, the normal, we had a master's program through the College of Education, but it wasn't completely for Health

Science. The program that I wrote included, you know, typical research and statistics courses, but also some other process courses.

And in the flexibility that I designed, there were options for directed readings. There were workshop formats, which I definitely utilized in my teaching because I love teaching the workshop format in

the summers for the graduate students, that was... And then for students who graduated from the program, what's the most likely course of action they would take next in terms of getting a job?

Some of them were in healthcare management later on in the program. Others were educators who came to their graduate classes at night after a full day of teaching.

And I do recall one student who said to me, well, this is a lot of work. I've been working all day and I come here at night. And I said, you know, I have been here all day too, and I come here at

night to teach this class. Did your responsibilities as a faculty member change in any way over all the years that you were here? During the early tenure?

Yeah. From the first day you walked in till the time you retired, did your responsibility as a faculty member at Towson, did it change in any way?

It had its changes, but I preferred to be a teacher, an educator, and teach students and not, you know, try and seek a reduced load for teaching, and my responsibilities, of course, as we move toward a Research 1 institution,

and that was a goal that came up about the middle of my career. It was like, who moved the cheese, you know, where, you know.

And so the responsibilities shifted from a teaching responsibility of 70, 75% to a little higher level of research, professional development and presentations at national conferences, which I did.

You know, I enjoyed doing that, but that was a change that some faculty members just didn't appreciate. What about students during that period of time? Did you see any changes in the student body at Towson from when

you came in till the time you retired? Yes. By the time I retired, most of the students that I was teaching became second generation college students.

In fact, several students came to me and said, this course is highly recommended. I said, well, who recommended it? My father.

He had you so many years ago. And that happened on three or four different occasions. But I thought, well, maybe I should retire before people come to me and say my grandfather recommended this course.

That did not happen. After you retired, did you teach any more after that? I have seven grandchildren, so I'm always a teacher, and once a teacher, always a teacher.

You're always trying to help people along their journey in life. And I taught at my worship community, but I did not go back to formal teaching.

I helped out at the local YMCA, but I really never went back to teaching now. But you did make a change in your career after you left Towson, didn't you start to develop a new career or develop

a new degree or something like that? Well, while I was at Towson, I saw a need because I was doing national presentations with some other professionals who were writing and speaking on the spiritual dimension of health.

And the three of us got together and thought, well, none of us have credentials in this area, but we're all three interested in promoting the spiritual dimension. So I decided, since I was always interested in theology, that I

would go back to an ecumenical institute here in Baltimore, Saint Mary's, and pursue a degree in theology. And so in 1985 I received a second master's degree in theology from there.

And tell us then something about how you made use of that degree after that. At Towson, I was able to offer courses in the spiritual dimension of wellness as a summer workshop. And that was delightful because I would bring in all the campus

ministers and we would have a round table discussion with the students. And so the campus rabbi, the Lutheran pastor, and you know, the Presbyterian pastor.

So they were all involved, and the priest here at Towson, and it was memorable because right when the rabbi was ready to speak, we had a power failure that summer. Someone during the construction had hit a main line and it

knocked the power out on campus. So we actually conducted the rest of the class with candles and flashlights, very appropriately. And of course, there were interesting comments throughout

that day. Yeah. Were there any changes you had to make in terms of your own pedagogical methods in class over the years that you were

teaching here? Well, when I arrived at Towson I was given the opportunity to explore the possibilities. They actually, not put up with me but tolerated some of my antics

that I used early on, and I would do things to grab students' attention and then once I had their attention then I would be able to sneak information in. Do you want to share some of those antics with us?

I dressed in what I refer to as an Albert Ellis outfit. Doctor Albert Ellis out of New York was a psychotherapist, and I walked in class with a plaid shirt and plaid pants and a handkerchief hanging out of my pocket.

My hair was disheveled and all the students started laughing and I didn't say anything. And I went on teaching because I was teaching about rational emotive behavior therapy.

And part of the process, part of what Doctor Ellis was about, was to challenge irrational belief systems, like, who said that you should dress impeccably when you're a professor or what have you.

And so I would have students do shame-evoking experiences intentionally, and they would, you know, maybe hang some toilet paper out of their, you know, back. And sometimes students would share things that happened in

their own lives because it's not embarrassing unless you have a belief system that suggests that you must be perfect, you shouldn't do this. You ought not to wear mismatched plaids.

And by the end of class, the students ignored how I was dressed for the most part and focused in on what was being said. So did you have to go to all those classes you taught with

different outfits or different antics? Oh, OK. No. I kept a number of things in my office and then made a quick

change before I went to class, and in my nutrition class to demonstrate how much grease is in a bag of potato chips, now, I'm talking about a small bag of potato chips, there is 1 1/2 ounces of grease.

And so I would come into class bag of potato chips and a shot glass and a bottle of oil. And I would pour the oil into the shot glass. And I said, this is how much grease is in this little bag of

potato chips. And I said so, Oh yeah, I have here a baked potato, and I would open up the tinfoil and I said, so in place of that bag of potato chips, I took a bite of the baked potato and down the

shot glass of grease. Now, what the students did not know was that defizzed ginger ale is the same color as oil.

And so I would put the oil in a different container and then defizzed ginger ale and pour it into the oil bottle. And that's what I consumed because I had to do that two or three times during the same week.

Your office must have been like a theatre department's costume and prop department. Not quite, not quite. Students who majored in Health Science when the, think back at the beginning when you first started

teaching here, what kind of careers would they go off and... Initially most of them went into teaching because it was health focused education program, even though it was a Health Science department.

And I remember talking to one student who worked uptown in one of the fancy restaurants and she was making more money as a waitress several nights a week than I was making. Near the end of your career, were most of your majors still

wanting to be teachers? No. What were they doing? They changed.

We went through a period of medical technology that Neil Gallagher coordinated for a while. And then healthcare management became really a large portion of of the program.

And so public health education was also part of it. And we had people coming back for a master's degree who were specialist in blood, I mean research in blood and details in all of the different types of, aspects of, you

know, hospital administration. So there were a variety of individuals. One of the students I taught became director of the Maryland Lung Association, Steve Purgoy, and he also came back part time

and taught here on the faculty. So there were a wide variety of students and careers. And of course, nowadays, four or five career changes is common. That's the norm. Yeah.

As we, after we all retire, we have certain memories that stick with us, that don't go away. And some of them are things that happened that were funny. Some of the things that happened were just

challenging. Do you have any stories you can tell us that you just have remembered from your years in teaching? How long do we have?

Keep going. My first meeting of Jim Fisher was in a locker room, a faculty locker room. And Jim Fisher was president at that time? Jim Fisher was president, 1971.

This was the summer of 1971. Clint and I went out for... Clint Bruess. We we went out for a jog, but I was not in anywhere near as good shape as he was.

So he came back in to play racquetball and we were sharing his, I was sharing his locker. I didn't have my own issue at that time. And so he went off to play racquetball or handball and

locked my clothes in his locker while I was in the shower and that included my towel. So when I got out of the shower, looking around and there's no one else in the locker room and in walks President Fisher.

I had not met him at the time. I extended my hand to him and said, very pleased to meet you, President Fisher, can I ask a favor of you? Well, I'm not sure, was his reply.

So I explained the situation, and he graciously went to the racquetball court and got Clint to come and unlock his locker so I could get dressed. And so therefore, every time I met President Fisher afterwards,

he said, oh, I didn't recognize you with clothes on. Yeah. So another pleasant experience was with Buzz Shaw. He was what we would call today the Provost, but he was Vice

President and Dean I guess then and I think he came at 29. President Fisher came at 37 years old. Buzz was just a down to earth person and very genuine, very gracious and engaging.

And I went on some faculty grant to San Diego to a conference, it was my first major national conference to, make a presentation. And back then the university was supporting you with about half

of the total cost. And so while I was there, I had this great idea, I thought. I would send a thank you note to Doctor Shaw on a postcard with postage due.

And the postcard said something to the effect that I really appreciate Towson State College supporting my first professional presentation at a national conference. I hope I can afford to come back.

And I'd gone to the post office, paid the postmaster for the card, but asked him to stamp postage due and addressed it directly to Buzz. After I returned, about one month later, Buzz sent me a

letter saying, Jack, we are searching around for additional unused funds and wondered if you have any money leftover from your San Diego trip. So he got me.

Yeah. Later, his niece challenged him to a mile run. And Buzz was not a runner, but his niece was a marathoner. And so I helped train Buzz to run that mile fast enough to

beat his niece. And he did. He did. I have a great admiration and respect for that man.

Yeah. So there have been lots of interesting things, memorable things that have happened in my career at Towson. I could tell you have a certain fondness for

Towson. What makes it so special to you? Well, it was, to me it was an extended family and I really did enjoy meeting other

people on campus. And it wasn't just other faculty members, but I'm talking about some of the staff members and people like Carolyn Westbrook, who worked in graphics just tirelessly and she was amazing.

And then people in photography and, you know, mass comm was part of that division. And I just enjoyed learning. My dad instilled in me, when you're through learning, you're

through. Did you come from a family in higher education? No, I was the first one in my family to ever go through college.

And that includes, you know, immediate family. My dad had a high school education and he also taught me learn everything you can whenever you can. And you obviously did that.

You never know when you can use it, right? Right. Yeah. And when you know... But things on campus, I took advantage of the

speaker series and came to hear so many speakers that were invited here from, you know, Doctor Ben Carson to Doctor William Masters, the human sexuality researcher with Masters and Johnson, you know, scholars and presenters of

theories, Thomas Oss and, you know, but it it was just delightful. In Burdick Hall, believe it or not, we had Helen Reddy do a concert, and opening for Helen Reddy, who had just

been traveling and traveling and was exhausted and her performance wasn't quite up to snuff. John Denver opened for her and he was an absolute gem, just a delight.

And he captured the hearts of all the people in the audience. And you say this was in Burdick Hall they did that? Yes, in Burdick Hall.

All three areas would open up and the bleachers would come out. And it was great. I mean, the basketball games that were held there were, you

know, it was just wonderful. And I came with my young children to sit in on practices when Hank Levy was conducting the jazz ensemble. And of course, he was famous and Buzz was responsible to get him

here. So your office was in Burdick Hall when you first came here? Yes. And then you moved to where?

I moved to the old administration building which we called the USS Fisher on Towsontown Boulevard. Looked like a concrete ship. And then after years there with the nursing department, I moved

back over to Burdick and ended my career in Burdick. But I enjoyed doing things and I took a water aerobics class. I took a course in religion and psychology, psychology and religion with Doctor Fink, he was a Lutheran

pastor, and an Orthodox Jew as the other professor, whose name unfortunately, I can't remember. I think it was Steven something, but he was wonderful, wonderful as an instructor.

I took a course in philosophy with a retiring faculty. I really wanted to take a course in astronomy from Elmer Kreisel, but he retired the year I wanted to because I was waiting for my

son to come here in physics. And we would take the course together. But that never happened. Yeah.

So there were just so many things. Concert speaker series. Leo Buscaglia came the author of the book called Love, as an educator, and he would stand in line and give people hugs.

Anyone who wanted to hug afterwards. That took place in the Towson Town Center. But there were just wonderful things going on and I did take advantage of them.

I enjoyed the environment. It was exciting, it was stimulating. And yes, it's different type of stimulation on a farm. But to answer the other part of your question, I went into sweet

potatoes as a natural extension of nutrition because sweet potatoes are probably one of the more nutritious vegetables. Currently, it's number six in the world as a source of calories and quantity, however, it is one of

the very few products that can be put on a table like your dining room table and left there without refrigeration, without any special protection, for nine months. And you can use it.

It is still an excellent source of nutrients. So are you growing sweet potatoes? I just ran a sweet potato festival up at the farm from 2001 to 2013. In 2013

the farm produced 19,000 lbs of sweet potatoes, 26 varieties, and the festival was something where people would come and dig their own sweet potatoes with their children. And then I would make sweet potato soup, sweet potato pies,

sweet potato ice cream, sweet potato pancakes, and later, near the end, sweet potato, well, a Doctor George Washington Carver sandwich. I invented it.

I had been invited to speak at Tuskegee University, where he taught all his life, and I was addressing the faculty there. And so I wanted to do something special. And, you know, Doctor Carver was very well known for

all the products, 216, that he did with peanuts, all kinds of products with peanuts. In fact, he served farmers, one day he served farmers a meal with everything made from

peanuts. And I was there, toured the museum in honor of Doctor Carver. And I went to the presentation with all of the equipment I

needed to make this sandwich, peanut butter on one side of whole grain bread and mashed sweet potatoes on the other side. And I would then put a little dab of marshmallow cream and

some cinnamon sugar and put it together. And the faculty absolutely loved the George Washington sweet potato, yeah, the George Washington Carver sweet potato sandwich.

You made me hungry, but I have a question, maybe you can answer it related to that. I don't know the difference between a sweet potato and a yam.

Can you help me? The short answer is yams are grown in a climate where it's very warm, hot, probably 180 day minimum, maybe 200 to 300 days. And a yam is larger.

Yeah, they're bigger. And it is not a sweet potato. It is, actually,

the sweet potato is from the morning glory family. The leaves and the blossoms on the sweet potato vines look like morning glories. The yam is from the lily family.

However, when the natives were unfortunately enslaved in the South and they were growing sweet potatoes, they named it nyami, which is the word NYAMI, the word for a yam. And so the word "yam" is much easier to put on a sign in the

grocery store, three letters, than it is to put "sweet potatoes," ten letters. Thank you. Yeah.

Did... I just brought a variety of shirts. I had all kinds of shirts I used to wear, but this is just a lovely shirt.

This was tie dyed by someone. And... But anyway, I'm not here to display shirts and I'm really not here to display the box. Unless you want, I mean, I got articles and things, all

kinds of articles done about growing sweet potatoes. And so in the year 1999, I believe it was, I had a sabbatical leave to work on technology in the Health Science field.

The things I really discovered on my sabbatical, which started in September, was that three sweet potato plants that I had growing somehow wandered from where I had taken the vines and stretched them out into the garden.

They wandered across the path, you know, a four foot path into a well rotted horse manure pile and buried themselves in the pile of manure and by late September had already produced little mini sweet potatoes.

I thought that was kind of unique. So I harvested a sweet potato and took it in, and my wife and I prepared it. And we were amazed at how good this Georgia Jet sweet potato

was. And so we started to think, well, maybe we should have grown more than just three plants. So I started to become more and more curious about sweet

potatoes. Of course, you go on the Internet and it was still in its infancy back then in 1999. It wasn't...

You couldn't find a search engine or anything. Primitive ones, yes, but not quality ones. And I found a man who had written a book on sweet potatoes for the northern grower and he was in Canada.

He mentioned in the book about a national organization in the United States for researchers in the area of sweet potatoes. So it had the current president or chairperson's name at LSU. So I found his phone number.

I called him up and said, I'd like to come to your conference. And he said, well, it's in Florida this year. And I said, oh, that's pretty good distance for me to travel on my own. If I make a presentation there,

since I have a good background in nutrition, perhaps you could put me on the program. And he said, yeah, I think I can arrange that. It was kind of a laid back organization, right?

So I arrived there and made a presentation on nutrition of the sweet potato. And I'm dealing with scientists who are entomologists,

they're geneticists, they're breeders, very special kind of a scientist who understands it all. There's no educators there. There's no nutrition specialists there.

They're just a wonderful group of scientists. And so within seven years of attending every year, I became the chairperson. I said, wait a minute, you're voting me?

I said, I'm an educator. I'm not a national sweet potato collaborator. I said I'm not a scientist per se, and I'm from the North and you're all from the South.

North Carolina has a very, very strong program, North Carolina State University, in sweet potato research. LSU has wonderful people there too. And people in California, Mississippi, Missouri.

Yeah, all over. So Alabama. So there's 125 men and women that are scientists and I'm asked to be in charge of them.

So every once in a while we had a pre-conference field trip and it was in Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia the time when I was chairperson, which meant I had to organize the whole conference and and do the promotion,

whatever. I contacted Tuskegee University, which isn't too far from Atlanta, and we had a pre- conference workshop at Tuskegee University day before and we carpooled and drove over there.

And, you know, the Dean and the department and all the sweet potato researchers there were were wonderful men and women. And they invited us to their special faculty dining hall for a very elaborate lunch and they picked up the tab for all of us.

And we were just absolutely thoroughly, you know, delighted, but also impressed by their work. They gave us tours of their lab. They introduced us to some of their graduate students and the

work they were doing. They allowed us time to tour the George Washington Carver Museum. And, you know, that it was just a delightful time. Sounds wonderful.

Yeah, so in those short years that, you know, it was like four years, five years, I was invited, asked to be chairperson for the following year. This is unbelievable.

Remember her, Meryl Comer, WJZ, Channel 2? She had a show called Two's Company in the 70s and I'm measuring her body fat with a skin fold caliper. And I was invited there because there was a woman with a book

called... A weight control book called The Rice Cake Diet. And I kind of agree with Bill Cosby that a rice cake tastes like the air in your mouth. But now they have a much different variety of them.

So I thought I would just go down and have some fun. And so I brought a a Lang skin fold caliper. That's right before I came out with my own inexpensive skin fold caliper that I designed in 77 and produced in

1980 and it was very well received and it's very accurate. But since that time, good ideas get copied and it's been copied and utilized by a lot of others. Mark Johnson was a sociology major here and Mark was, he was

in my human sexuality class in the 70s. He was an excellent runner. I mean, I'm talking a miler here at the university, or Towson State College back then.

And then he went on to run marathons and he could run a two hour, 32 minute marathon. And so we stayed good friends after the course. And so we collaborated on this book in 1979 and it was a diary

for runners. And I did a lot of the nutrition stuff in here and you were supposed to keep a log and a record of your jogging and training.

And so Mark and I published this, self published it the same year Jim Fix, who was a very famous writer and runner, the year he came out with his diary.

And we had a lot of these leftover. Somehow, the American Medical Joggers Association, physicians who are joggers but not runners, they had their own organization, and they thought it would be a good way to promote, you know, things.

And so they picked it up. And Mark and I were invited to run the Boston Marathon. Now, I'm not a runner. I'm a jogger.

Running is being airborne off both feet longer than any foot is in contact with the earth. So you're airborne more than you're... It's about a seven-minute mile and I'm running a seven and a half,

eight-minute mile. Mark's running a 6:15 mile, you know, and then doing it for another 25.2 miles. So we were invited up to the Boston Marathon.

They have a banquet, the medical people and we were invited to dinner to hear Jim Fix speak. And then we drove all night after the marathon to get back here so I could teach my Thursday morning classes.

It was on, you know, Monday, always on a Monday, Patriots day. So that was the real marathon, teaching a whole day after driving all night.

So there's, you know, a few publications. Thin from Within. I did a a book called Thin from Within using my values clarification background and dissertation that I did, which is about teaching strategies.

That's where I loved what I did when I was experimental here at the university. They allowed me to employ a lot of the strategies that I had developed when I was at Ohio State University.

And the values process is a very fascinating one because so many people believe as they have been programmed to believe. And by the way, you do know we're being programmed by all that out there and the internet.

Are you listening? Probably. Yes. And they have algorithms that are absolutely amazing. Back when Walden was written, there is someone, I guess it was

in Walden Two, sitting on top of the hill pulling your strings while you, with free will, thinking that you were pulling your own strings. No. So much of what we do is programmed.

We think it's an immediate reaction when someone cuts us out on a highway, takes our almost takes the bumper sticker off of our front and we beep our horn and then we pass them. Not me.

And then they wave one finger at you and that irritates you even more. No, between the stimulus and the response. It is not Pavlovian, it is not the salivation of a dog, but in

the human condition, between the stimulus and the response is a pause. That pause may be infinitesimal, but it's a pause and you have the ability to stretch that pause between the stimulus and

the response and do something called thinking. But you need to let 6 seconds go by. It's called the six second delay. Because how you've been programmed by parents or whatever is to respond

immediately. So you let that old tape play out for six seconds and then you think through, what are my options? Well, I could just back off.

I could do a number of different things. Just like when people say, well, they tell me, well, I'm engaged. And I often enjoy asking them questions like, what are you engaged in?

And then I say, Oh, well, why do you want to get married? And they look at you, well, because I'm in love. So? Love, and I pause, is a stupid reason for getting married. Now the pause is love in and of itself is a stupid reason for

getting married. And they look... And so in my love course, I would do this whole spiel and ask them to write a definition of love and what they thought would be the best definition of love.

And then we would critique them anonymously. And very fascinating. Love is a feeling. We would tweak what love was and during the course I would have

love and sex in separate columns. You know, love is an attitude and, you know, sex is a biological instinct, basic need and, you know, and all those issues under sexuality, and love is an

attitude between two people, and we share that in common so that we will be stronger together, than either one will be alone. It's just fun for me, and I consider this scholarly fun to challenge belief systems that haven't yet been challenged.

And some of the sacred cows of life are the very best belief systems to challenge. So to me, it was what I did, and sometimes what I did had shock value with it.

And I understand that. But shock value is not like the shock jock that was popular on talk radio, not with profanity or anything else. It was sometimes with statements. At the end of my career in the

wellness course, last ten years, maybe twelve, I started the course out, the very first words out of my mouth. No one will get out of this world alive. Now, prior to that, I just looked at everyone in the classroom, just

looked at them all. I made that statement with a pause. No one will get out of this world alive.

And they'd start giggling. You're going to die. I'm going to die. The students sitting next to you are going to die.

Your parents are going to die. Your grandparents. Yes. Your pets. No one will get out of this world alive. Life and death need each other.

Thanatos and eros, you know. Book title from years ago. But it's very important to wrestle with and deal with death.

Once we become acquainted with our own mortality, we might be able to befriend it. We might be able to become comfortable with it and then go on to celebrate life with zest.

Because someday you're going to die. That doesn't mean you stand in front of a truck, but you don't hold back because of fear. False evidence appearing real, FEAR, the definition by the

American Cancer Society. Jack, thank you very much for a wonderful interview and much happiness to you on your farm. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. I feel very blessed. Yes.