File Name:		David Pugh.mp4
Transcriptionist:	Colin Morgan, 2022 January
Interviewee:		David Pugh, FAICP
Interviewer:		Dave Gattis
Location:		Bryan, Texas, United States
Date:			2015 January 6
Duration:		01:30:12

Speaker Identification:
Dave Gattis:		DG
David Pugh, FAICP: 	DP

TRANSCRIPT BEGIN

[00:00:04] DG: All right, well this is Dave Gattis and its January 6th, 2015, and today we're talking to Dr. David Pugh at his home here in Bryan, Texas. So, welcome David, glad to have you here.

[00:00:14] DP: Thank you very much.

[00:00:16] DG: So, let's start at the beginning, why don't you tell us when and where you were born?

[00:00:20] DP: I was born in Wayne, Michigan, which is about 20 miles west of Detroit.

[00:00:27] DG: Okay.

[00:00:29] DP: And had the most wonderful childhood you could possibly imagine. In fact, my whole life is just, if you're looking for somebody who's been blessed throughout their life simply with great dumb luck, you're looking at him because that's certainly true in my case. But anyway, I was born in Wayne, Michigan in 1942 and grew up there.
[00:00:59] DG: Okay, and what did your parents do? Why were you in Wayne?
[00:01:03] DP: My father was a clay modeler at the Ford Motor Company, and at that time, and I understand they still do, before they manufactured an automobile, they made clay models of it, and then the engineering department took those clay models and made the engineering specifications, literally, of the clay models.

[00:01:28] DP: And he was a very interesting case in his own right because he was a farm boy from Arkansas who had a minimal education. But he was fortunate enough to go to the Ford Trade School, which they had at that time. He was a janitor at the Ford Motor plant, and Edsel Ford came up to him one day and had struck up a friendship with him for some reason and asked him if he'd like to go to the trade school and he said, "Certainly." So, they trained him to be a clay modeler. And he did that for the next 35 or 40 years and he was very good, he
was a very skilled artisan. But he was also a diehard gardener and small farm operator, and so, we always live on at least five acres, and it befell David's responsibility to maintain the garden
in the summertime. So, I have more hoe experience than many of my compatriots who grew up in places where you think they would have farm experience.

[00:02:44] DG: Did you have siblings to help you in that, or?

[00:02:46] DP: No, I did not. I have a sister, but she was five years older than me, [coughs] and she quickly moved away from the farming activity, so it was David's responsibility. And we also had a little truck farm on the side of the road, and we maintained a table there where people could stop and buy sweet corn and tomatoes and strawberries and stuff like that.

[00:03:18] DG: So, you stayed in Wayne through high school?

[00:03:20] DP: Stayed in Wayne through high school and had a wonderful time in high school. I just had a splendid time. Mainly because this was, really, at the beginning of rock and roll and I was in high school from '57, '58, '59 and '60. So, I was there at the beginning of rock and roll with Elvis and Little Richard and all of that. And every weekend was a party, and I just had the best time imaginable. I mean, it's the old joke about them having to burn down the high school to get me to leave is literally true. I loved it.

[00:04:11] DP: Well, when I got to my senior year, I still hadn't decided what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and my assumption was, "Well, I'll just go over to the Ford Motor Company and get a job on the production line. It pays pretty good," and there you are. My father informed me that that will not work, you're going to college. And we started talking about it and I was pretty good at art, I was pretty good at drawing. I had taken four years of art in high school. Which was kind of unusual for that time. There probably weren't many, any high schools in this part of the country that had offered four years of art in high school. Anyway, I had four years of art and I was pretty good at it, and he said, "Well, what about architecture?" And I said, "Well, that sounds fine, maybe I'll pursue architecture." and I said, "But if I'm going to go to college, I'll go and give it a shot, but I want to go where they have a good football team." You know, my priorities were real high in those days and he said, "Okay."

[00:05:44] DP: And so, I said, "Well, maybe L.S.U.," because they had a very good football team at that time. And I knew nothing about L.S.U., absolutely nothing. So, I applied, and I was admitted and lo and behold, in, I guess it was about July of that same year, 1960, I get a letter from L.S.U. saying "We have terminated our architecture program, at least it's on hiatus and we're reconsidering offering it." So, I had to figure out something else. So, I thought about it a little bit and well, as it turns out, in '55 and '56 Oklahoma won the National Championship under Bud Wilkinson, and they had an architecture program.

[00:06:41] DP: So, I jumped in my dad's Chevrolet and drove to Oklahoma, drove to Norman, and looked it over, and went back home to Michigan and said, "Maybe I'll go to Oklahoma." So, I did that, I was admitted, and got there and spent two years in architecture, and I was doing just splendidly in my design classes, I was making As right across the board, but at that time, architecture was not the same as it is today. It was, for all practical purposes, it was architectural engineering, and it was a very, very heavy emphasis on math, on structures, on physics, and I was not very good at any of those.

[00:07:33] DP: And so, after two years, my grades looked like, it was just unbelievable. I mean, I had As and Ds and Fs across the board, and I realized I had to do something, that this wasn't working, it wasn't going to work. So, I transferred into art and went on and got my degree in art. In the spring, I guess it was the spring of '66, because I had lost hours when I transferred out of architecture and I was somewhat behind, and in the spring of '66 I was trying to decide what I was going to do after I got my bachelor's degree in art. And the prospects weren't looking very good, and things were really beginning to heat up in Vietnam, and that specter was facing me and I had two good friends in art school, Don Caspright, who later became the Director of Planning for Redevelopment for Oklahoma City, and Bob, I'm having a senior moment. I'll think of it in a minute. Anyway, Bob was a guy who went on and created, probably, the biggest airport planning consulting firm in the country, was extremely successful at that. Anyway, I was talking to them one day and they had graduated a year before me, and I was talking to
them and they said, "I wanna show you something." So, they took me to the Carnegie Building on the campus at O.U., and they said, "Look up here," and what they were showing me was a wall, a very long wall and it was just plastered with job offers. I mean, from one end to the other, it was just plastered with job offers from all over the country. "We need planners, we need city planners," and they said, "This is what you want to get into, city planning." And I said, "Fine."

[00:10:13] DP: So, I went and talked to the program director, Joseph Lee Rogers and told him, I said, "I'd like to enter your graduate program," and I said, "My undergraduate grades aren't all that great, but my last couple of years have been very good and I'd like to get in." and he said, "Well, here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna put you in the spring edition of the housing course, taught by Professor Lear, and if you do well in that course, if you pull a B or better in that course, I'll let you enter the planning program." So, I took the course, I absolutely adored it. Lear was a great professor, but I also found the subject just fascinating. And so, I completed the course, I did well in it and in the interim, Don Caspright again had talked to me, and he said, "Listen," he said, "I had an internship this past summer in, of all places, Alabama." and he said, "They're looking for an intern this summer and you can have it if you want it all, I'll give my former boss a call and you can have it." And I said, "I have no plans for the summer, great!"

[00:11:48] DP: So, I hopped in my car and went to Decatur, Alabama and worked for the state as a planner and that was my first job and my first project was doing a neighborhood analysis of Scottsboro, Alabama. Now, I don't know if you've ever heard of Scottsboro, Alabama or not, but it's very famous for a murder trial that unjustly convicted four or five African American boys for raping a white woman, which never occurred. Anyway, it was a very interesting experience. But it was a very good experience, the people that I was working with were pretty competent.

[00:12:43] DP: After that, I went back to O.U. and actually began the two-year graduate program at that, planning programs at that point were really almost in a fledgling state because prior to the 1950s, I don't think there was really a whole lot of urban planning going on in America, I mean it simply wasn't commonplace. It sort of grew out of engineering and architecture and landscape architecture and these other respective fields, but the field of urban planning as such really didn't exist until probably the early 50s on up into the early 60s, when it really became full bloom. At the time I was a graduate student at O.U., there were only 17 schools in the country that offered coursework in urban planning. And so anyway, I completed the program and while I was completing the program, I first accepted an internship and the program had been designed so that we went, as I remember, we went to class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and we had Tuesdays and Thursdays off. And we would work as interns on those Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I went to work for an architecture/planning firm called Hudgens, Thompson, Ball & Associates in Oklahoma City. And there were four or five of us from my class of 11 O.U. students who went to work for them and worked for them for the better part of a year.

[00:14:47] DP: And then, in my second year, and I was going to say, the planning programs were different and unique from the other graduate programs on campus because they were longer. In the case of O.U.'s graduate program, they required 54 hours plus a thesis and that was easily the longest graduate program on campus. At the beginning of my second year, we had a project with Del City, Oklahoma, and they, which was a suburb of Oklahoma City, and the mayor began talking to me and he said, "We're looking for somebody to direct our planning efforts." and I tell him, I said, "I'm a student, you know, I don't know that much." and he said, "We'd feel more comfortable with a person like yourself than we do with a firm." I now realize he was probably thinking in terms of finances, because they paid me a pittance of what they had been paying Hudgens, Thompson, Ball & Associates.

[00:16:10] DP: Anyway, they hired me, and I worked for them for about, I guess, about four months. And then I came in to work one day and the assistant city manager came in and very sheepishly told me, "Your services are no longer required." And I asked him why, and he said, "We just simply can't afford it, it's, you know, we've under-budgeted," and that was probably thoroughly untrue. What had happened is that about a week before that, I'd had a zoning application for a piece of property in Del City, where a guy was going to put in some kind of a business, I don't even remember what it was, but it was a freestanding site, it didn't have anything abutting it, really, any structures abutting it. And he wanted to build property line to property line and, of course, the zoning ordinance had setback requirements and I had told him "You can't do that, because it would violate the city's zoning ordinance." Well, he was livid, and I'm pretty sure he went and talked directly to the mayor and neither of them were very happy and they thought, "Well, the easiest way to resolve this is just to get this kid out of here." So, it was goodbye Del City. And so, I left Del City and,

[00:18:07] DG: So, had you finished your degree at this time yet, or?

[00:18:10] DP: No, I haven't finished my degree yet, I'm still working on my degree. So, I went over to Oklahoma City, and asked them if they needed anybody, any help. I didn't want to go back to Hudgens, Thompson, Ball & Associates. But Norman Standerfer was there at the time, he wasn't the planning director, a guy named Pat Painter was the planning director. Anyway, I interviewed with both of them, and they said, "Sure, you know, come to work for us." So I did, and that was a much more pleasant experience than Del City.

[00:18:49] DP: And while I was there, I met a guy who had a really, kind of a profound effect on me, his name was Adam Bereszy?ski and he was a refugee from Poland. But he had been working as a member of the Russian delegation of planners in Kabul, Afghanistan, and he had a wife and a child, a son, and he made arrangements while he was there to simply leave Afghanistan and get on a CIA plane and fly to the United States. And he did that, he successfully did that, and when he got here, they said, "Well, we're going to we're going to fly from the east to the west, so tell us where you want us to put you down." He knew nobody in America, absolutely nobody, and didn't speak very good English. But he got out a map of the United States and said, "Well, Oklahoma City, put me down in Oklahoma City." So, they put him down in Oklahoma City. And, but he was a fascinating guy and very knowledgeable and I learned a great deal from working with Adam. So, I guess you can say he was kind of one of my early mentors. Anyway, all of this is to say, I didn't graduate from the program. I left the program lacking my thesis.

[00:20:41] DP: So, I got married, Susan and I had been dating, we had a long courtship. We've been dating for about three years, and we got married, and I was looking around for a job and I had the selective service breathing down my neck because at that point, Vietnam was really in high gear. And I wrote to North Carolina, and North Carolina was sort of like Alabama and Tennessee and Georgia and these other southern states. They had a very, very highly organized section 701 program, much more so than the other parts of the country. To the extent that they each had a state planning office, they each ran programs out of that state planning office and offered planning services to cities and counties in their respective states, and North Carolina did exactly that.

[00:22:01] DP: So, I wrote the director of this program in North Carolina because he had one of those job listings on that wall that I'd mentioned before. And he said, "Yes, we have a position for you if you want it and what's more, it has the added benefit, if you want to consider it, of waiving your selective service liability. It will give you a military waiver." and I said, "This sounds like a spot for me." So, I took the job and Susan and I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina and I essentially became a circuit planner.

[00:22:57] DP: I was given the task of doing planning services for Southport, North Carolina, which was way down in the southeastern-most part of North Carolina. Just up the coast from, all right, I'm having another senior moment, big golfing community in South Carolina, big vacations or used to be a big vacation spot. Anyway, I was given Southport, North Carolina, and the county in which it was located, which was Buncombe County. And then I was also given another county, Edgecombe County, which was more inland. And those were my responsibilities. And so, every week I would make a circuit and in the interim, I would write plans and ordinances and things of that kind for these respective groups, and I enjoyed it very, very much. Learned a lot.

[00:24:23] DP: And this is one of those moments where I've been really blessed because I had the best boss imaginable. A guy named George Monahan, and he was very demanding, but very fair. And perhaps his best, attribute was that he was an excellent editor. And I vividly remember writing these plans and ordinances and I would take my initial drafts, which had to be approved by Monahan before they could be presented to the community, and I would submit them, and I would get back something that looked like he had opened his veins and bled all over them and I would just go orbital. I mean, Susan can tell you times when I came home and I had smoke coming out of my ears, I was just, I was so angry. It was such an assault on my ego that someone would criticize my work. And then after I had cooled down, I would sit down at the table and look at his comments, and every single one of them, without exception, was spot on. They were absolutely correct right across the board, and it taught me more than I could ever have gotten in graduate school or anyplace else. It was an education in and of itself, and I'm always grateful to Monahan for having done that.

[00:26:02] DP: Anyway, I was in Raleigh doing that for two years, and then I got, for some reason, I don't even remember why now, I got an itch to move on. So, I started looking around and I looked at Texas, and I was offered the job as Director of Planning for a community in Texas and I was offered a position in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I really wanted to take it, but it didn't pay any more than I was making in North Carolina, it was just a lateral move. And I was offered a position as director of the statewide planning program in Missouri and accepted the one in Missouri, in Jefferson City. And that was a much less pleasant experience than my position in North Carolina, because it was staffed by people who really didn't know what they were doing. and it was pretty badly disorganized. And I can't say that anything that I did during the two years I was with Missouri accomplished a great deal, mainly because nobody knew what they were doing.

[00:27:51] DP: But, during that two-year period, I met Robert Froehlich, and Robert Froehlich was a professor of law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. And we struck up a conversation one day and we got to talking and I was telling him how fascinated I was with the zoning and always had been and, I just found it fascinating. And he said, "I'm giving these talks around the country," he said, "would you like to participate?" And I said, "Well, you know, I don't know that much about it." and he said, "At least you have a planner's perspective." He said, "Most of these people are lawyers and they don't know what an urban planner does and all that." And so, he actually involved me in a couple of his lecture programs outside of Missouri. The one that I remember most vividly was in Colorado, in Denver. We had a conference there for attorneys and he involved me in that one, and then one day we were just sitting there, having a cup of coffee, and he said, "Have you ever thought about going to law school?" And I said, "Not really." I said that "Bob, I don't think my undergraduate grades would get me into law school and my graduate grades are good, but they look more at your undergraduate grades than they do at your graduate grades. And he said, well, he said, "Why don't you apply?" and so I did, and I'm sure because of Bob's effort, I was admitted to the University of Missouri - Kansas City and left Jefferson City and went to Kansas City, Missouri and started law school.

[00:30:17] DP: And while I was in law school, I was different than most of my compatriots. For one thing I was older, a little bit older than most of the other students there. And I never went to law school with the idea that I was going to practice law when I got out. That also made me rather unique as a law student, I went to law school because I wanted to go back to O.U. and teach and wanted to in the worst way. And so, anyway I decided that I wouldn't, while I was in law school, I wasn't going to clerk or intern for a law firm, I was going to work for a planning firm because I knew I could make a lot more money. I mean, they were paying law interns nothing, just literally nothing. And I knew I could make a, even part time, I could make a fairly decent wage working for consulting firms.

[00:31:29] DP: So, I started looking around for consulting firms to go to work for, and I've always considered this to be a really funny story, I, the first firm, well, the first firm I interviewed with was the city of Kansas City, Kansas, and it was a disastrous interview. I was really kind of shocked by the unfriendliness, let's put it that way, of the planning director, and told me that my background was worthless, that the institution I had come out of was terrible, that I knew nothing, that I wouldn't do well in Kansas City, Kansas. I later learned that he was, and I don't even remember his name, but he, apparently, he was a very cantankerous guy, and he was having a bad day and that was the end of that.

[00:32:36] DP: I next interviewed with Howard Needles Tammen Bergendoff and that interview went much, much better. In fact, they called me that same day and offered me the position. And I said, "I have one more interview and I need to honor it and I'll call you back tomorrow and let you know." And there was a pregnant pause on the end of the phone and the interviewer was more than mildly upset that I had not immediately said yes.

[00:33:22] DP: After that phone call, I interviewed with a man named Ralph Ochsner, who again was another mentor in my life. A wonderful man, still alive. And Ochsner and I just hit it off beautifully and he was working with mostly medium-sized and smaller communities around Kansas City, and I knew that I would like that. I would feel comfortable with it because it was essentially the same kind of stuff that I'd been doing in North Carolina. And he offered me a job and I said "Yes," so I went back and called Howard Needles Tammen Bergendoff and told him that I had accepted a job. And again, the interviewer, to say that he was hostile would be an understatement. He was livid that I had actually turned down a position with Howard Needles Tammen Bergendoff to go to work for Ralph Ochsner, this piddling little office. Ralph Ochsner later became the president and acquired Hare & Hare, which is a very large landscape architecture planning firm in Kansas City.

[00:34:55] DP: Anyway, I went to work for Ralph Ochsner, and it was a thoroughly pleasant experience, just wonderful. Ralph was, in many ways, a genius. We were working for; this is one of my pithy little anecdotes I was gonna tell you about. We were working for Parkville, Missouri, which is a suburb of Kansas City, and we were preparing a plan for them, and we had done the land use survey, but we had not compiled any of the data. We didn't have anything to show them other than the fact that we had a colored map and we had we had done the field work. And I got a phone call from the city secretary, and she said, "When you guys come to the meeting tonight the council would like to see the figures." I said, "What?" She said, "We'd like to see the figures on the land use." and so I hung up the phone and Ralph was not in the office, and I was petrified. I thought, there's no way that we can do this, because at that time, and actually for quite a while after that, the way you got those figures was you took your colored map, and you got out an instrument called a planimeter, for those of us who have ever had to use that instrument. Unlike the youth of today, we didn't have G.I.S., we didn't have any computer-based tools to use. So, we got out this mechanical device called a planimeter and you would put it down and run it around your acreages on your map, literally run it around, and you would do that a couple of times because it was notoriously inaccurate, and it took forever, and it was really a tedious task, and I knew we can't possibly do this by seven o'clock tonight or whenever the meeting is.

[00:37:27] DP: Ralph comes walking in the office and he was never, unlike myself, he was never on edge about anything, he was just Mr. Cool. You know, I mean, the walls could be falling down, and Ralph would just be, "Well, we probably need to address that, you know." He was just cool as a cucumber. I told him what was going on and he said, "I'll get it." and I'm, you know, "'Get it'? How are you gonna get it?" He said, "Give me the map." I gave him the map and he left, said, "I'll be back in a bit." About two hours later, he comes walking in same expression on his face, "Here are your figures." I said, "How did you do that?" He said, "Well, this is what I did." said, "I've got a friend who works in the University of Kansas Medical Center," and he has access to their laboratory there, which has extremely sensitive measuring instruments. And so, I went over there, I got access to those instruments, I took the map and I waited. And then I cut the map up and I put all of the yellow for residential and all the red for commercial and all the different colors into different piles, and I measured those piles. and then through simple mathematics, I figured out, very accurately, the acreages. And it was just so ingenious, but that was Ralph Ochsner, he was the guy who made lemonade out of lemons.

[00:39:33] DP: And so anyway, I graduated from law school, and I took a job in Springfield, Missouri as assistant city attorney while I was waiting to take the bar and I didn't enjoy that very much at all. And I had applied to the University of Oklahoma for a faculty position, and they were very concerned about civil rights issues. And so, they employed another person who, to be perfectly fair, was probably just as well qualified as I was. But anyway, they opted to go with somebody else, and so I was kind of crestfallen and I didn't know what I was going to do, because I didn't consider this position in Springfield to be anything that I wanted for a long time. But I did get to work some with some wonderful planners while I was there because I was assigned to be the legal counselor for the planning commission. And I got to work with the legendary Harold Haase, who was the planning director in Springfield, and I got to work with Subir Mukherjee, who is now, and I don't know if you ever met Subir or not, but he was a terrific planner and got to work with some others.

[00:41:30] DP: And while I was there about, I'd only been there like four or five months, and I got a phone call from ?Wolfgang Rössler? and I had met Rössler while I was working for Ralph Ochsner because Rössler was also a consultant in Kansas City. And Rössler called me, and he said, "I've been talking to Harold Haase and Haase says that you have an interest in teaching." And I said, "Yes, I do." And he said, "Have you ever heard of Texas A&M University?" And I said "Yes, but most of the things I've heard about Texas A&M University were rather unkind." And he said, "We have a planning program here and we need someone with some legal talent, would you be interested?" And I said, "Yes, how quickly can I say yes?" And he said, "Well, they'll hire you and, you know, come on."

[00:42:45] DP: So, we left in January of '76. We left Springfield and went to College Station. And again, it was a wonderful move and a very, very good decision and I got to work with some wonderful people, and I couldn't have been more kindly received in Texas. I don't think it was possible. Everybody I talked to was extremely generous and helpful and I just enjoyed the heck out of it. Oddly enough, when I first began to teach, I wasn't assigned any legal courses because Dr. Rössler considered himself to be an authority on the law. And while he was directing the program, he was going to teach all the law related courses. So, David's first course at A&M was a housing course. And then I taught comprehensive planning and plan implementation and things of that kind. I taught the undergraduate course, "An Introduction to Urban Planning," and these various a sundry planning courses, and it was great.

[00:44:30] DG: Do you recall how big the program was, how many students?

[00:44:32] DP: The program was fairly small. The program probably didn't have more than 20 graduate students when I entered it. But that wasn't a shock to me because I came out of a program that had 11, you know, there were 11 students in my class. So, that didn't shock me, I understood that.

[00:44:58] DG: And you happen to know when the planning program started?

[00:45:02] DP: It had started a few years before I got here. It was started by, really, for all [unintelligible] purposes, it was started by a guy named Joe McGraw, who was a planner out of California. And when he created the program, he brought in people that he had known, mostly from California. Bob Cornish was from California, was a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, and Jim Gardner had been the planning director in, oh I can't even remember the name of the town now. But a fairly good-sized, medium-sized community in California and I think [Chewy Annjose?], who was also on the faculty, but he had been working in Nicaragua with U.S.A.I.D. And I'm pretty sure that he was on leave when I got to A&M and then he came back about two years after I had been there, he came back from his service with the U.S.A.I.D.

[00:46:44] DP: Virgil Stover was on the faculty; he was very knowledgeable about transportation planning. He was our main transportation planning go-to guy because Virgil had a lot of experience and continued to work kind of part-time with Wilbur Smith & Associates, which was a big-time transportation planning firm, and Virgil also had a split appointment with the Texas Transportation Institute, and he was very active there and very well-respected. Just trying to think of who else, we had Norbert Oppenheim was our quantitative methods professor, but he wasn't there but for a couple of years and then he left.

[00:47:53] DP: It was a wonderful time and a wonderful experience, my first couple of years at A&M. Mainly because of not only the people who were there, but the size of the institution made it very comfortable to teach. A professor could take time to sit down and talk to students. You weren't encumbered with activities that precluded you from doing that, which later on it became almost impossible to do that. You also have to understand the really seismic shift that was taking place in both the profession and in education simultaneously. When I entered the field of planning, as I said before, it was really in its beginnings and almost all the people in education had come out of the workplace. I mean, F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. had no PhD, he wrote the book on land use planning. T.J. Kent, to the best of my knowledge, had no PhD in planning, again, he came out of the workplace. Almost all these people came out of the workplace, the entire faculty at A&M came out of the workplace. And the emphasis was on practicum, it was on teaching students how to leave the university and go to work as a city planner or a county planner or a planner in a state agency and, again, the emphasis was on practice.

[00:50:21] DP: With the introduction of, an emphasis on the PhD programs, all of the emphasis on practicum began to wane, began to go out the window and there was a much, much greater emphasis on research, to the extent that when I left Texas A&M, there was just about zero emphasis on practicum, and all of the students, all of the graduate planning students, were interested in going on and getting their PhDs. I don't know any of them in, in my last classes at A&M that were interested in going to work for cities or counties or the state, which I found truly lamentable.

[00:51:25] DG: So, you started at A&M in 70,

[00:51:29] DP: Six. Right,

[00:51:30] DG: And you went through, when did you retire?

[00:51:32] DP: I retired in 2004.

[00:51:35] DG: Okay, that's a long career there.

[00:51:37] DP: Long career.

[00:51:38] DG: And for part of that time, you were chair of the department?

[00:51:40] DP: Yes, I was a chair. I replaced Wolfgang Rössler and did that for about four years and then stepped down and continued to teach and continued to really run the master's program, because Wolf was still very, very interested in the PhD program.

[00:52:26] DG: And I introduced you as 'Dr. Pugh,' did I misspeak? Did you ever get your

[00:52:31] DP: I have a juris doctor.

[00:52:32] DG: Okay, so

[00:52:33] DP: And yes, that was that was always a funny story. When I came to A&M, Wolfgang Rössler was, he was a very strange guy. And he was a very strong believer in puffing yourself, you know, every day. I mean, he had the grandest, what I used to call 'the wall of respect' that you've ever seen, this is the wall with all your plaques on it. I mean, it was just amazing, if you ever walked into his office all these plaques and certificates hanging on his wall. And the irony is that I have on more than one occasion seen Wolfgang Rössler create his own certificate, applauding himself for something, which we all found to be extremely humorous, but there was nothing wrong with that, just "I'm the best." So, you know, it's okay. Anyway, all this is to say, he was a stickler on, or he placed an emphasis on, touting your titles and whatever. So, he began addressing me as Dr. Pugh and I told him, “You don't need to do that, I don't have a PhD, I have a juris doctor but in legal circles that's a bachelor's degree.” And he said, "No, no, no," he said, "you've got an earned doctorate and we're going to address you that way." And it wasn't a suggestion, it was an order. And he could be that way, he was a very forcible person. So anyway, all my students began addressing me as "Dr. Pugh" and it just
got completely out of control and I said, "You know, fine, if you want to call me Dr. Pugh, fine." So, that's how8 that all came about.

[00:55:12] DG: Let's go back and try to string in your A.P.A. activity.

[00:55:17] DP: Sure.

[00:55:18] DG: When did you first join A.S.P.O. or A.I.P.?

[00:55:23] DP: I joined, I was a member of A.S.P.O. and A.I.P. probably back around '68, and when I when I got to Texas in '76, I took the A.P.A. exam, but it was an oral exam at that time.

[00:55:47] DG: The A.I.P. exam?

[00:55:49] DP: Yeah. And passed it. And so, I became A.I.P. And then I got a fairly active, pretty early on with A.P.A. activities because I could see the benefits of strong ties with the A.P.A. and I felt that there wasn't a lot of, really, organized city planning going on in Texas when I arrived in '76. I mean, you only had, for all practical purposes, you only had one truly active consulting firm in the state, and that was Marvin Springer & Associates. The other active planning firms, quote unquote, were engineering firms and planning was their loss leader, and a lot of people don't understand this. But architecture firms and engineering firms love planning to the extent that it's their entrée into a community. If you're an engineering firm, you take a contract to provide planning services and once you've completed the plan, it makes very good sense to go back and ask that same community, "Well listen, we've now planned your streets, why don't you let us build them? We have now planned your sewer system. Why don't you let us build it? Who knows more about your sewer system than we do? You know, we're the people who planned it!" And so, firm after firm after firm has done that and they've been very successful at it, and there's nothing wrong with that, but that's just the way it is.

[00:58:04] DP: But in 1976 there wasn't a lot of really active planning going on except in the larger cities, the Metroplex. And that was just beginning to come into its own, I mean you had lots of towns, lots of suburbs in the Dallas area that didn't have planners, didn't have planning staff, that were just beginning to realize the benefits of planning and perhaps Houston, that area is the worst. I mean, it's never had a real strong reputation for planning activities down there. You still have lots of communities that really don't have very active planning services. San Antonio, that area out there, I can't speak much about because it's so largely dominated by the city of San Antonio, but I'm led to believe that, certainly in '76, surrounding communities like Seguin and others, they didn't have planning departments and didn't do much planning. All of this has evolved since that time and a lot of it's been aided and abetted by A.P.A. and the interconnectedness of the people who were associated with A.P.A.

[00:59:45] DG: I assume your first entrée into the Texas chapter was through the Education Foundation?

[00:59:51] DP: It may have been, you know, it's hard to remember. I do remember that, early on, I developed the Texas Planner magazine, and Bob Wegner helped me with that, who I think, in listening to these other interviews, you were asking people who were their mentors. Well, I don't know that Wegner was a mentor, but he was certainly one of the two or three people I think really deserve a lot more credit than they've been given for their work as planners in Texas because Bob was a relentless champion of urban planning in the state, and nobody worked harder than Bob Wegner.

[01:00:48] DP: And anyway, Bob sort of collaborated with me on the development of Texas Planner magazine and then somebody asked me to edit the section of the guide, Urban Planning in Texas Communities, that section on zoning, which I did for a number of years till Kim Mickelson took it over and I began going out, giving talks to communities because I realized that the Educational Foundation's once-a-year short course was kind of limited and still feel that way, unless I'm unaware of any major changes that have taken place, I mean, it's positively ludicrous that you only have, you have an organization that only provides one course a year and that course can't even really be described as a course! No, it's just a series of seminars, brief seminars on various sundry subjects. But so, I went out and eventually developed a presentation, about a 4-hour presentation on city planning, zoning subdivision regulations, and through some capital improvements, programming ideas in there as well. And then developed a series of slides or transparencies to use with overhead projectors. An0d I would go out to these communities, and I would give my dog and pony show on the benefits of urban planning.

[01:02:54] DP: And that turned out to be a splendid endeavor, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I got to travel all over the state of Texas. I've been to many, many communities. It was just a wonderful experience and I enjoyed it very much and I feel like it had some value because most of these people really didn't have a clue what city planning was or urban planning was. So, I did that.

[01:03:36] DG: Well, and at some point in time you became president of the Texas chapter.

[01:03:40] DP: Yes.

[01:03:41] DG: In the late 80s or so?

[01:03:42] DP: Yes.

[01:03:43] DG: And do you remember how you got it? I mean, was there an entrée before that besides the editor or?

[01:03:51] DP: Not really, I mean, I had served as, I think, I had served as a section director, and I had attended the meetings and almost all of the state conferences and I would be asked to be speaker at the state conferences and,

[01:04:21] DG: And as I recall you brought a fair number of students to the conferences.

[01:04:26] DP: Oh yes, yes, I always encouraged our students to get involved with A.P.A. Always did, and mainly because I thought it was to their benefit. I mean, I thought, you know, "These are the people who might employ them, you know, when they graduate. So, what better opportunity to meet them than going to a state conference or becoming involved in the student-level activities of the A.P.A.?" so you can rub shoulders with these people and get comfortable with them.

[01:05:00] DP: And then one day, I got a phone call from, as I remember it, Sarah Jane White. And, who at that time she was either the president or she was about to become the president and she said, "Your name has been placed in nomination for the presidency." And I was very, very surprised because I had never said [buddha?] to Sarah Jane about it, or anybody else for that matter. And she said, you know, "Can we place your nomination, is that okay?" and I said, "Sure." And I really didn't think I stood much of a chance of getting it. Well, lo and behold, to
everybody's shock, including Sarah Jane's, I won the election and got elected to the presidency and that was a wonderful experience. I probably wasn't nearly as good a president as I should have been. And I'm not sure why I wasn't better, but it was, in a way, it was kind of a humbling experience because through the chapter president's counsel, I got to meet all these other\ people from different states and realized that many of them were doing great things. But on the other hand, we weren't so bad in Texas either, I mean we were doing some good stuff and,

[01:06:59] DG: Do you happen to remember people that were on the board at the time you were president?

[01:07:02] DP: You know, I've been really struggling to try and remember some of the people who were on the board at the time and I don't,

[01:07:13] DG: Or any particular issue or

[01:07:18] DP: Well, the issue at the time, as I remember it, everybody was concerned with policies planning versus comprehensive planning and then there were those who thought we should be doing strategic planning. But. if you ask them what strategic planning was, you got any number of different responses and I'm not sure that they really knew what strategic planning was versus comprehensive planning versus policies planning.

[01:08:16] DG: And then since you were chapter president, you kind of stepped back or did you have aspirations of anything else?

[01:08:23] DP: Oh, no. No, no. I never had aspirations for anything higher than that. I've always considered my services as chapter president as sort of the pinnacle of my professional and academic career, for that matter.

[01:08:44] DG: On the other hand, you were elected to the College of Fellows.

[01:08:47] DP: Yes, I was, and I was, very, very surprised with that. I'm not sure that I even knew that there was going to be a College of Fellows. And so, I was flabbergasted when I got the letter from A.P.A telling me that I had been elected. But that was really, really a high honor. And no, I was going to say, I think, looking back on this whole thing, I think that Frank Turner and Gerry Hebert are owed a thank you from the chapter because prior to their term as president and, I think, Jerry was vice president or some high-ranking office. By the way, Jerry is now in North Dakota. But prior to their term, the Texas A.P.A. was a wonderful organization and did many good things, but it wasn't very highly organized, and I think Frank and Jerry kind of turned that around. At the same time, I have to say that if you go back and listen to Craig Farmer's interview, you realize that we had a real good time as Texas planners back in his day. I mean, everybody knew everybody, and everybody loved everybody, and our state conferences were one heck of a party, and it was great.

[01:11:13] DP: But I'm not sure we were as effective as we could have been because, again, we weren't terribly well-organized. Frank and Jerry turned that around, and they put a much greater emphasis on organization, going to the state legislature, trying to get things done there, which we had really not been very successful in doing before. And so, I give them a lot of credit for that. I think, as I've said, Bob Wegner was a terrific influence on planning the state, but I think, probably the single biggest personality to affect planning in Texas in my lifetime has been Mike McAnelly, I think he should really be applauded for all the work and effort he has put in over the years, in both the Educational Foundation and the Texas chapter. It's just, it's amazing. So, he should be applauded for that, but there are many others.

[01:12:34] DG: So, you were at A&M for 27, 28 years?

[01:12:39] DP: Yes.

[01:12:39] DG: A lot of students went through the programs under your tutelage, so, any of those that stand out that your particularly proud of?

[01:12:46] DP: Yes, yeah. I remember, let me get my glasses and look at my notes here. Well, of course Craig Farmer, but,

[01:13:08] DG: Which now, you said Craig was just a year

[01:13:10] DP: He was a year before me. Jeff Taebel, Gary Mitchell, Mark Guy, Kelly Templin, Joey Dunn. Many, many, many others I could name, but I'm very proud of the students that I had the privilege to instruct while I was at A&M because they've all, by and large, they've been great. Brendan McDonald was a student of mine. They've all been great. I was going to say other people, I think, made a real contribution are, and these weren't students of mine, but they were all great planners that I associated with: Doris Davis, Jim Bertram, Jonathan Cunningham from El Paso, Julianne, I want to say her last name was Radosavac?

[01:14:28] DG: Yeah, she's married, so it's Rankin now.

[01:14:30] DP: Rankin? Yeah. She was very instrumental in the valley. Joe Vining did really great work in Round Rock. Leroy, from, Leroy George, from, I think he was from, not San Marcos, San Angelo, I think. May have been someplace else, but Leroy was,

[01:15:16] DG: Abilene?

[01:15:17] DP: Abilene! Maybe Abilene, you're right.

[01:15:27] DG: Well, being in academia, you were also involved in the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, A.C.S.P.

[01:15:34] DP: Yes.

[01:15:34] DG: Were you active in that, or?

[01:15:35] DP: I was very active in that; I was on the board of directors for several years. But really had kind of a parting the ways with them. Mainly because, again, I saw this full-mounted rush to 'research is everything' and 'the PhD is everything' and 'the master's degree is pretty much unnecessary,' and I didn't like that at all. And that put me at odds with a great number of people on the group. And I got to the point where, and I'm kind of ambivalent about it now, but I got to the point where I really wasn't much in favor of accreditation anymore. Because, I guess, I feel about accreditation for planning schools, like I do about accreditation for planners. And we used to have, many states including Michigan, used to have a state registration requirement and I thought that was silly, especially for people who had earned a master's degree in planning and then have to turn around and take a state examination, because my question was, "Well, what are you going to, what is it that you're going to examine? What questions are you going to ask?" And my belief then, and probably still is, is that your reputation is your qualification. And it doesn't take you long to earn that one way or the other. If you're very good, people know about it. If you're not, they'll also know about that, so.

[01:18:01] DG: Well, that kind of feeds into one of the current controversies, particularly between academia and the practitioners, is that faculty members don't think that they should get the A.I.C.P. because they think the PhD basically covers that.

[01:18:18] DP: Yes.

[01:18:18] DG: You got thoughts on that or?

[01:18:21] DP: Yes, and most of them are probably pretty negative towards the faculty and their opinions. Again, you have to understand the transformation that has taken place and that the relationship between academia and the practicing planner is probably, I don't have any empirical evidence to show this, but it's probably at an all-time low. Because they're coming at this from an entirely different perspective, there are a different approach and that is, they've got to write articles every year to keep their jobs, and it doesn't matter how esoteric those articles are. It doesn't matter if they are about, if you're living in Austin, Texas and you're writing articles about housing choice in Botswana, Africa, it doesn't matter. The relevance doesn't matter, the fact that you've written the article is what matters. It's publishing that matters.
So, relevance is not in the equation, it's just been removed, and I always thoroughly disliked that. My approach from the get-go when I entered A&M was we're here to try and help the average Joe or Jane working for X city, X county in the state of Texas. That's it, that's the whole nine yards. If we're not doing that, we're not doing our job and that's not the approach today at all. It's anything but that.

[01:20:45] DG: You've been a long proponent and student of zoning and zoning has changed a lot over the last 40 or 50 years as well, what are your thoughts on that?

[01:20:55] DP: Well, I have, oddly enough, I have mixed emotions about zoning. I support zoning, I think it's necessary. But we've tried, we need to go back to Dick Babcock, we need to go back to our roots and, on many things. But Babcock wrote a wonderful book called The Zoning Game. And in that he said, "You have to remember that this instrument is only as effective as its implementation." If you conceive of something that's difficult to administer, it's not gonna work, it's just simply not going to work. And we have now twerked zoning into such a sophisticated tool that even with all of our wonderful new planning tools, like G.I.S. and databases and all of that, they're difficult to implement. And although we've been sold a bill of goods that, oh, this will make the process so much easier and this will, this will speed it up and all of that, you know, and that's not true at all. I think we need to simplify; I think we need to go back and make it much more black and white. I mean, I am absolutely convinced after all these years, that if you tell people the rules and stick by the rules, you'll be okay. But if you give them something that says, "Well, it might be this, might be that." You're just, you're begging for trouble. You're just, you're asking for it.

[01:23:29] DG: So, you retired in 2004. You continue to do training for cities for awhile after that?

[01:23:36] DP: No, no, no, no, I didn't. I've done one dog and pony show on urban planning for the fair city of Fort Stockton and that's been in it for about the last seven or eight years, so, nope, I'm out of it. These days I spend my time, as I said, playing with my computer and reading books and puttering around in my woodworking shop and that kind of thing.

[01:24:08] DG: Okay, and you mentioned a couple of grandkids too.

[01:24:11] DP: Yes, yes, yes.

[01:24:12] DG: So, you have any advice for young planners?

[01:24:18] DP: Yes. First of all, I think a person interested in urban planning should ask themselves if they are really well-suited to it. For this reason, as I so frequently told my students at Texas A&M, planning is really, kind of schizophrenic and it's very difficult for most people to have a career as an urban planner for this reason, you're not very well respected. The environmentalists in your community think you're in concert with the developers, the developers think you're a communist and you're in concert with the environmentalists. The city council is probably not going to give you a great deal of credence in your suggestions because your field, and I need to get on this as well, they're not very well-educated on what a planner is, what a planner does, the benefits of planning any of that kind of thing. So, it's a terrible environment to be in, in many ways.

[01:26:06] DP: Looking back on my own career, I'm not sure that I would ever have made it as a planner in the trenches, working for a city or a county. I'm really not certain of that because I don't know that I could withstand the daily pressures and the daily disrespect that is shown to urban planners. But, in many ways, we are responsible for that. The one glaring failure that I can cite A.P.A. for is its inability to educate America as to what urban planners are, what they do, and the value of urban planning. Back years and years ago, I literally helped create a videotape for children on urban planning. It was bought and paid for by the A.P.A., it was never used. But since that time, to the best of my knowledge, there have been very few efforts, very little energy poured into correcting this problem of the education of the youth of America as to the benefits and value of urban planning and I think it's perhaps our biggest failure.

[01:28:03] DG: Well, we've covered a lot of territory, is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn't talk about?

[01:28:09] DP: Well, you asked me a minute ago what my advice to a beginning planner is and it would be this: you have to remember at all times, your purpose and your purpose is to serve the interests of the public. And I, as I began to move towards retirement, I began to hear some things from planners that really disturbed me, and the thing that disturbed me the most was the idea that the city is always wrong, and the developer is always right.

[01:28:54] DP: And I think young people have to understand the difference between the goals of the developer and the goals of the city and they are not one and the same. The goals of the developer are to maximize his or her return on investment, and there's nothing wrong with that, that's as American as apple pie. That's great. But that's not the goal of the planner. The goal of the planner is to maximize the benefits to the citizens of the city. To protect their health and safety and all of that, and they need to understand that.

[01:29:41] DG: Okay, do you still do your artwork?

[01:29:45] DP: Not really, no. These days my artwork consists of taking the gazillions of family photos that I've gotten, putting them into some kind of order and digitizing them and getting them ready to present to my son and his family.

[01:30:03] DG: Okay, well, I think that's a good note to end on. So, thank you very much.

[01:30:06] DP: Thank you very much.

TRANSCRIPT END