Episode 55: The Great Storrs Air Raid

This week, Prof. Lucy Gilson stops by to talk about why business and research are a natural fit; we learn about how the Guerrilla Girls changed the art world for the better; and we look back on a very patriotic series of fires on the Storrs campus.

Transcript

Tom Breen: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 55 of UConn 360. It’s the world’s only podcast that covers the University of Connecticut, in all its glory, from every conceivable angle. Uh, we hope you’re doing well as you listen to this.

Julie Bartucca: [00:00:24] The world is burning.

Tom Breen: [00:00:26] Yeah. As, as we record this, things are still okay, but who knows?

By the time it reaches you, it may be, yeah. We may be living in a dystopian post-apocalyptic nightmare, in which case our podcast will still come out, apparently.

Ken Best: [00:00:38] Podcast must go on.

Tom Breen: [00:00:39] That’s right. That’s exactly right. We’re like the monks of the middle ages preserving the classical learning. My name is Tom Breen. I’m your facilitator of sorts. Joining me as always are my colleagues. Maxine Philavong,

Maxine Philavong: [00:00:49] Hello!

Tom Breen: [00:00:50] Julie Bartucca,

Julie Bartucca: [00:00:51] What’s up?

Tom Breen: [00:00:51] And Ken Best,

Ken Best: [00:00:52] Behind the board.

Tom Breen: [00:00:53] We were actually going to be in Boston this week for a conference, but it got canceled because of, you know what. And so this is actually a good time to go back to episode 40, and listen to Tom’s history corner, which was about the Spanish flu at UConn in 1919. We’re not going to talk about that today. We’ve been ordered not to talk about it. So let’s,

Julie Bartucca: [00:01:08] By me!

Tom Breen: [00:01:09] By Julie,

Julie Bartucca: [00:01:10] Just incase you’re wondering.

Tom Breen: [00:01:11] What do you have for us? You’ve got, you’ve got some exciting fun stuff.

Julie Bartucca: [00:01:13] I do! I don’t have news, we’re gonna go right into my segment.

Tom Breen: [00:01:16] We’re gonna go right into your segment, that’s right. Absolutely.

Julie Bartucca: [00:01:17] Because Corona virus is the only news and I don’t want to talk about it. I want to talk about Lucy Gilson, who was one of my favorite professors in the part-time MBA program that I finished last year. I took a course with her about change management and it was very engaging and interesting, and she was recently appointed associate dean for faculty and outreach of the UConn School of Business.

She’s the academic director for the Geno Auriemma UConn leadership conference and the senior associate editor of group and organization management. In her new role, Lucy Gilson focuses on supporting faculty and bringing in new faculty who will help the school reach its goals and mission, and she’s providing them resources and development opportunities to get them to tenure and increase their research productivity. For the outreach part of her title, she’s heading up the school’s communications efforts and developing better relationships with business partners and alumni, engaging them to help bring the school to the next level.

But she says she’s still very much a professor, and teaching and conducting research will always be part of her identity. Named among the most highly cited researchers in the world by the web of science group in November, Gilson’s areas of expertise include leadership, team effectiveness and creativity.

She visited the studio to discuss what some of her findings mean in the business world, and I started out by asking her about research she recently conducted with professor Nora Madjar on different types of creativity.

Lucy Gilson: [00:02:40] We would argue that everybody can be creative, but people are going to be creative in different ways.

And one of the really cool things about creativity that people forget is that creativity is context specific. So what it means to be creative in one job, it can be very different than being creative in another job. If you think about creativity along a continuum, sometimes what is very creative is a little tweak.

It’s a change to what you do. Some research I have with Nora, looks at a large supermarket chain and people in the bakery decided that instead of keeping them in a bin, they would design a pegboard to put their cake toppers on. Now we’re sitting here going, well, that’s not that creative, but it actually meant that when they came to have to decorate a cake. They could see exactly what cake toppers were available, use those cake toppers and not have to express order them in. And it really helped the bottom line for the bakery.

The other work that I do looks at the interplay between creativity and standardization, and so all the research here shows that teams and individuals who are highly creative actually have better performance.

The tradeoff is, though teams that are very standardized and follow set procedures, often have better customer satisfaction. So think about that. You go to get your car serviced and they give you that nine point checklist. That’s a standardization. You like that. But if they said to you, Oh, while you were here, we took the tires off, you know, we looked in the trunk. You’d say, well, you’re changing my oil.

But they may know that something to do with tire alignment is actually going to help your car’s performance. So as customers, we don’t always like the creative bit. So here’s where it gets really interesting, in my opinion. When you have high creativity and high standardization, that’s when you get the best customer satisfaction. For performance, too much standardization and not enough creativity can be detrimental to performance. So again, think about that from a managerial tradeoff. How do we encourage people to try new things, like rearrange their cake toppers? Cause that’s going to help that performance. But if we also have some sort of standardization that when you put in your order, you, you know, fill out this form, and then when they give you about the cake, they give you back your form.

Now you’re satisfied and we’ve got creativity, we’re going to have the win-win.

Julie Bartucca: [00:04:52] That’s cool. They almost sound diametrically opposed, but they can work hand in hand.

Lucy Gilson: [00:04:56] So that’s the one end of the continuum, right? Whether we have this incremental, these tweaks. And at the same time, you need people who are coming up with brand new products, completely new ways of doing things.

Think entrepreneurs think R and D. Think communications, marketing teams, right? And so there has to be this blend. And then what we find in, in our work is different. Leave us if you like, will influence both. So rewards is always a classic thing. Rewards will get you the incremental. So if I offer a reward as the supermarket chain did, but people to come up with creative ideas in their work areas, they got lots of tweaks, lots of little things that help to their bottom line, very successful.

But we don’t come up with the big ideas for the reward. We come up with the big ideas because we’re intrinsically motivated. We’re excited about the project, and it works the same way with managers, right? So being hands on as a manager will help with the incremental. Hands off as a manager helps with the more radical.

Julie Bartucca: [00:05:51] Interesting. I remember this from class.

Lucy Gilson: [00:05:53] Yay! Then my job, my job is complete.

Julie Bartucca: [00:05:56] You also focus on teams and a lot of us have to work in teams, whether it’s all the time or for certain projects. What should people listening to this know about effective teamwork?

Lucy Gilson: [00:06:05] This is like a 10 minute little segment as opposed to a full semester’s course on this.

A lot of that depends on how your team is working together. So for virtual teams, we know that meeting at least once, face to face helps team performance. So people often work in virtual teams and you know, the new thing, we have this great technology and then they’re surprised when their team doesn’t do as well as expected.

And so again, there are a couple of things that the research says will help you. So one is meeting at least once face to face. The other thing is actually getting to know the people on your team. Spending some time building trust, building rapport with your teammates. So one of the reasons that virtual teams often don’t do as well is that it becomes transactional.

I go in, do my piece of work, upload it to the cloud, and I leave. Now when the work becomes more complex, you don’t know me. And so you don’t know if I just did a bad job; if that’s all I can do. The quality of their work goes down. So a couple of things. So one is getting to know people on the team helps.

But the other thing that we find is the role of professional familiarity. So knowing things about the person’s work background, work expertise really helps you on a bushel team. So again, managers thinking about leavers. Does everybody on the team know their backgrounds? What projects have you worked on before?

Maybe share your resume. In regular teams, we call this transactive memory. On a team, you don’t have to know everything, right? That’s the benefit of a team, that you can have experts who come in and know that piece. However, you have to know who knows what. So that piece transactive memory is critical here.

Even more so in virtual teams where I can’t ask you a water cooler chat. So from a management perspective, realizing that the more team members know about the expertise of other members, especially if they don’t see each other, they may never meet, is going to help team performance. And in particular, when tasks get complex.

So that’s, I think, a critical piece when it comes to business research. Because a lot of people say to us, you don’t do real research in the business school. You’re not curing cancer. Right? You’re not helping, you know, a plane stay in the air. And so I, I pushed back on that a lot.

Julie Bartucca: [00:08:15] As you’ve should.

Lucy Gilson: [00:08:16] Thank you, and argue that yes, but what we look at is, so, you know, we have a professor, John Matthew, who is looking at what combinations of people should go to Mars.

What does the team relationship look like in that type of scenario? John and I have also done work on virtual teams and leadership and how the army should communicate using technology when something bad happens. So right now, when something bad happens, they shut down or technological communications.

Well. Guess what? Now everybody knows something bad has happened and the scope, again, thinking almost like radical, to incremental. It could be something disastrous bad has happened or something very small, but everybody assumes the worst. So how can we train their leaders on how to use technology and the appropriate technologies for the right message?

Because that’s another piece in the vitural teams literature is varying the technology we use based on the task. So that just how some of my research ties into business. But you know, our finance professors are looking at corporate CFOs and their investment strategies, and again, how, you know, different types of investment portfolios will help firms success under different economic climates.

So…is that curing cancer? Maybe not. But is that helping the business world succeed? Absolutely. And so that is, again, in my new role, one of my goals is to help. How do we get that message out? How do we share the impact that our research makes to the business community?

Julie Bartucca: [00:09:42] Shifting gears a little bit, you champion women in business. In part, you’re a faculty advisor for the women’s MBA association here and in lots of other less formal ways.

And you’ve been in the business world for a long time. So I was curious about what you’ve learned being a woman and what was kind of traditionally a male dominated field and how you’ve made your voice heard and gotten to where you are.

Lucy Gilson: [00:10:03] So I would take objection to the word traditionally, cause I think it’s still is a male.

Julie Bartucca: [00:10:07] Yes.

Lucy Gilson: [00:10:08] Unfortunately, I think it still is a male dominated field. So I think there’s a lot we can do, and I think a lot of it is we’re doing some really good things at the university at the moment. A lot of it is mentoring. A lot of it is women’s support groups. So I’ve been very fortunate in my career that I’ve had some amazing women mentors who have helped me with some decisions and said, do this. Don’t do that. Speak up now. Don’t speak up now, but the flip side of mentoring is sponsors and advocates. So people who are maybe in the proverbial room where it happens, who will put your name forward and support you by coach? A lot of young women on come in and sit down. Don’t sit in the corner, don’t sit on the back side of the room.

Own your space, and if you have an opinion, speak up. If it’s not correct, somebody will correct you, but that’s okay. And then there’s a lot of research, which I think is super cool on what’s called amplification. And that’s the role that those of us who are more senior in our career can really play. Which is we know that the way women speak, they often inflect because women talk to build collaboration, whereas men often talk to compete and to win.

So when you hear a woman mentioned something in a meeting and she in flex at the end, it’s not so much that she doesn’t know the answer. She’s trying to get bind from the group. So then the research shows that, you know, three or four to suggestions later, a man makes the same suggestion without inflecting and the outcome gets attributed to him.

So what women can do is go back and say, I’d like to comment on what Julie said, or Julie’s point was, so how do we make sure that we are crediting the person who said it originally by using their name? The have piece sometimes with unconscious bias is the research here says that it’s unconscious. We don’t necessarily, we know we’re doing it, so women have to realize that rather than sort of going away and feeling, Oh, that didn’t go the way I wanted. Sometimes you’re talking to a man or a group of men say, listen, I know you may not like me for asking for this, but if I didn’t ask for this, I wouldn’t be doing my job supporting my team, asking for something that a male colleague would ask.

Now that you have referenced the unconscious bias up front, to some degree, you’ve sort of closed that door a little bit so. You know, helping women see, you can ask for it, you know? What are your strategies? I work a lot with the undergrads. I just spoke at the women in business club last week saying, you get a job offer, ask for more. This is where being in a business school is so cool cause you can do the financial implications. So the man gets a $5,000 salary offer that’s higher than yours. What does that end up translating to over a lifetime? So the first $5,000 is maybe, you know the down payment on your car. The second 5,000 plus the salary increase.

Is your vacation, you know? And it just compounds. So one of the things that, doesn’t matter how busy I am, I will probably always meet with women’s students and talk at women’s groups. It’s that building, the cohort, building, the group, helping one another. How can we all help each other? The generation before us, they were sort of the first women out there and they had to sort of play the men’s game.

I think our generation, we have women ahead of us and now we have to step up and support the next generation.

Julie Bartucca: [00:13:24] Professor Gilson mentioned alum and professor John Matthews’ studies on what types what teams of people are ideal for traveling to Mars. There is a fantastic article with beautiful illustrations about that research in the fall 2016 issue of UConn magazine, which you can find by going to magazine.uconn.edu/issue.

Tom Breen: [00:13:43] We’d make a good team to go to Mars, the four of us.

Julie Bartucca: [00:13:47] I think it would kill each other. No, we’ve traveled as far away as the Las Vegas together.

Tom Breen: [00:13:53] We have, that’s right.

Julie Bartucca: [00:13:54] Other than Maxine, I’m sorry you weren’t there for that, but it was pretty good.

Maxine Philavong: [00:13:57] Wasn’t invited, it’s fine.

Ken Best: [00:13:59] The Mars Lander just sent back a stunning new image. They got it to do a 360 look for the first time, and you could see everything around it, including debride from the Lander itself. Very interesting. You can find that at probably at the NASA website, I would think.

Julie Bartucca: [00:14:18] That’s awesome.

Tom Breen: [00:14:19] Ken, what have you got for us this week?

Ken Best: [00:14:21] Well, we’re going to take a step back and forward on this subject. In 1985 a group of women artists put on gorilla masks to protest gender and racial inequalities in the world of art. Women artists were not being represented well in museums and gallery exhibitions, or even in art history books. And according to 2019 in national endowment for the arts study, 87% of artists, exhibits and museums are works by white men.

The efforts of the guerrilla girls, and that’s spelled by the revolutionary war fighter guerrilla, not the animals continues today. Uh, the William Benton museum of art, where we used to record the podcast has a collection of posters created by the guerrilla girls who used the names of noted female artists when speaking to the public wearing their masks.

We had an exhibit of that work here at the Benton several years ago. More recently, the art and feminism project has expanded this recognition effort with its art and feminism wikipedia edit-a-thon. This is where groups of volunteers gathered together to create Wikipedia entries for women artists and not previously listed, and to update those that do exist. At UConn, an art history professor Kelly Dennis organizes UConn’s annual art and feminism wikipedia edit-a-thon, which includes students in their classes. This year’s event will take place on two campus locations on Tuesday, March 31st they’ll be one at Homer Babbage library in stores from 4 to 7:00 PM and then the computer lab at UConn’s Hartford campus in the computer room,223 from 4 to 6:30 PM Kelly stopped by and we’ve talked about what to except for this year.

Kelly Dennis: [00:16:03] We have a larger outreach going on this year. I am doing public trainings on March 26th. The edit-a-thon itself begins from four to seven. I’ll be there from about 2:30 on doing trainings. So the, the public, the community, is open because that’s the point of, you know, a large state institution hosting a node like this is, it’s not just for our students and our staff and all faculty, but also for the greater public.

Ken Best: [00:16:26] How has the reaction been to the project over the last several years? Cause you’ve been doing it a number of years now. Uh, we wrote about it and UConn Today and there, there was great activity and enthusiasm when I saw the students working on their projects.

Kelly Dennis: [00:16:41] The students are always very excited about it, and more so now than I think early on where I think there was a bit more skepticism and suspicion about it.

And I think students kind of are, have more of an awareness about it. I think the Me Too movement and the last couple of years politically have made students much more open to the undeniable facts of how history is written and who’s included and who gets left out as a regular basis. So I think explaining the gender gap to Wikipedia falls on fairly receptive ears. Whereas previously I think students might’ve been a bit more skeptical. I think the general public at the university anyway is, uh, has been very welcoming and receptive. We have a math professor who brings students each year as well, uh, some of his graduate students and adds to the sort of women mathematicians, which I think is really fantastic, but I think it’s been pretty receptive. I think the biggest issue with people participating, frankly, is just time. Finding the time to do it.

Ken Best: [00:17:36] Who have you selected this year to introduce to the Wikipedia world and who are you trying to enhance in Wikipedia land? Because the dynamic is to bring forth people who have been a missing from the listing and to expand those who are there but, there needs to be more information.

Kelly Dennis: [00:17:55] This year we have expanded or re-added Joni Sternbach. Joni Sternbach is a very prominent, world renowned photographer, mainly of surfers actually, and she works in analog technology, old technology, tintypes actually. And works with an eight by 10 camera, creating tintypes.

So her work is actually really very well known and she was deleted when we added her several years ago and we’ve re added her in triumph this year. Other photographers include Glenna Gordon, who is a fairly internationally renowned photojournalists. She’s covered kidnapping and rape of girls and a number of other globally important types of events like that as a photojournalist.

And her work is pretty widely published. Nancy Floyd is another photographer we are adding this year. I met Nancy at uh, Nevada museum of art a number of years ago where we were both on a panel together for the Western literature association. Nancy Floyd has a number of photographic projects that she has done.

The, I think the one that she is most well known for is called women with guns. In which she takes, uh, insights you, um, full body portraits of women with guns, not the kind of Sarah Palin in a bikini with a submachine gun, but not, yeah, the Annie Oakly portrait. But a women who actually hunt and use guns for sport to end entertainment.

Ken Best: [00:19:18] One of the things, I recall, the students telling me when, when we did the story for UConn today was the broadening of their skills as a result of this class because writing classes have certain demands. But they also require you to learn certain research skills and decision making on how, when you think you have enough information and then beginning to write about it. How are these students this year adapting to all of that? Because that’s really the key to what, why they’re doing this project.

Kelly Dennis: [00:19:50] Sure it is. It’s a multimodal approach to learning, writing, um, and doing it obviously for an audience that’s not just your instructor. Students get kind of lost in academic language when they’re writing for their professor and ah this, they’re writing for a broader audience and they’re learning how to contribute to public knowledge.

They usually divide themselves up into sort of, you know, who does the writing, who does some research and bibliography, who constructs the list of, you know, grants and exhibitions and the like. But, either way. I think one of the things that I’ve done is I do in class trainings because you have to be signed up as an editor to edit Wikipedia and to kind of get credit for it.

So that’s part of the function of the trainings, but it’s also learning how to do research both outside and, you know, through Google scholar. Um, so not just online in the Google world and the Google verse, but also by using academic journals, peer review journals. A database’s held by the UConn libraries as well.

So these are also skills that they brush up on because the more peer reviewed sort of sources there are, then the more stability the entry has, the less likely it is to be deleted, and the more that contributes to the notoriety of the artist.

Ken Best: [00:21:03] One of the benefits then is learning to check your source information to make sure it’s accurate because there is so much misinformation online that this is a good training exercise, if nothing else, to understand what is good information, what is not good information.

Kelly Dennis: [00:21:21] Yeah. It puts that really into practice and helps them learn it pretty much from the ground up. I have to say as a, as a somebody who’s a kind of hardcore writing instructor person that I used to be very anti Wikipedia, I guess I’m still skeptical of it, but I used to forbid students from using Wikipedia as a resource because I knew it was crowdsourced and I knew it was suspect sometimes.

Um, however. As you know, a Wikipedia is one among the top three search sites in the world globally. So why not join the crowd who sourcing it and provide a legitimate information? There are editors in Wikipedia who do follow up and try to make sure that things are legitimate, and that’s one of the reasons why they keep deleting women artists.

So frequently, because as you know, we don’t really necessarily accord to the notability standards, which have been set by historically by and for men. Um, and so our definitions of artistic genius tend to by default, exclude women, people of color and, um, gender non-binary artists.

Ken Best: [00:22:21] For those who might be interested in participating or whether they need to do?

Kelly Dennis: [00:22:25] They can come to the training, which is held at the Babbidge Library on March 26 they can look at our webpage. Of course, they can come to the event itself, and there’s a training before that as well. So I’m holding two trainings, but you can also go to artandfeminism.org and look up more about the organization and the other kinds of links that they can provide to training and information about getting more involved.

Ken Best: [00:22:54] If you want more information about this, there is a long website address, ArtFeminismWikiEdit.UConn.edu. And there’s a list of both locations, information and links for the outreach dashboard for more information on both of those locations.

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:15] That reminds me of the, what’s the New York Times project called? Where they write obits for?

Tom Breen: [00:23:19] Oh, yeah. I don’t know the name of it, but yeah.

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:21] On something. Yeah.

Tom Breen: [00:23:22] Yeah. Unwritten maybe or something like that.

Ken Best: [00:23:25] Well, they go back to, uh, folks who were not very well known, but made significant contributions in their field or in history and,

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:35] Or well known, but didn’t receive their,

Tom Breen: [00:23:37] Didn’t get an obit in the New York Times.

Ken Best: [00:23:38] So they’ve, they’ve gone back and re-researched and done that. And then for years, the The Times has always had policy of interviewing noted people for the obituaries while they were still alive, so that they could have those two solid pages of information ready when the time is near.

Julie Bartucca: [00:23:56] Well, it’s important to represent everybody, especially women.

Tom Breen: [00:24:00] There was a journalism class here who did that for UConn.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:02] Yes.

Tom Breen: [00:24:02] And I think I was interviewed by like half the students and, uh, one of them, it’s like, was, was kind of asking questions that implied like, I might have known Edwina, uh, Whitney. I was like, how old do you think I am? She was here in the 1890s.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:16] Like, what did they ask you?

Tom Breen: [00:24:18] That was like, what kind of woman was she? You know, like, you know, what did she like to do? I’m like, I don’t know. She died like 1930.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:27] What was her, uh. I know there’s. There’s a dorm named after her. What was her,

Tom Breen: [00:24:32] She was the first librarian.

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:33] Okay, thank you.

Tom Breen: [00:24:34] She was here forever too.

Ken Best: [00:24:35] So, so where are we going to have to Breen building?

Tom Breen: [00:24:39] Oof. Try to imagine the series of misfortunes that will lead to that. You know what? If we did have a Breen building,

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:44] It would be named after your dad.

Tom Breen: [00:24:45] What would happen is what I’m about to describe what happened to some buildings on campus in 1942 which is that it was bombed by the military. 1942, as you may know, I wasn’t there for this, but um,

Julie Bartucca: [00:24:56] Yeah you were.

Tom Breen: [00:24:56] There was a big, yeah. Me and Edwina were catching up on all the war news and the shortwave. There was a war happening all over the world. In fact, they called it the world war two, the sequal to the first war.

Ken Best: [00:25:08] And that first one was the war to end all Wars.

Tom Breen: [00:25:11] Right.

Ken Best: [00:25:12] Of course, that did not happen.

Tom Breen: [00:25:13] It was so successful. They decided to have another one.

And we got involved in the war, uh, after December 7th, 1941. And in 1942, the whole country was mobilizing for the war. It was a big draft, but it wasn’t just the people going into the military. It was, you know, there are all kinds of things. It was growing, victory gardens and buying war bonds and what have you, and.

UConn played its part too as being the site of a bombing. The war department, civilian protection school of Amherst college chose UConn as the site to demonstrate the effects of an air raid on civilian buildings. Now I want to point out that didn’t choose UMass. I like to think they snubbed UMass or maybe they thought that we were more bombable?

I don’t know. Anyway, they came here in the fall of 1942 and actually they were construction crews who built two houses, a three-story hotel and three demonstration addicts. The first of the addicts will typify the junk filled Garrett of the ordinary home. The second will be clean, but unprotected in the third will be cleaned and protected by whitewashed walls, a standard floor and chicken wire laid over the roof. So the idea was they were going to bomb all these different things and show people sort of like, this is how you protect your property from air raids.

Julie Bartucca: [00:26:18] With chicken wire…

Tom Breen: [00:26:19] With chicken wire. That’ll stop incendiary bombs.

Ken Best: [00:26:22] Stop chickens.

Tom Breen: [00:26:23] And it will certainly, it’ll stop chickens.

One of the houses will be demolished by an oil bomb. The other by a high explosive bomb, the hotel be blown up by a thermite bomb dropped through the roof. This was a technically a demonstration for like a civilian defense workers, but the public is invited and they all came to horse barn hill first week of November, 1942 to watch all these buildings right around horse barn hill being blown up by the military

Julie Bartucca: [00:26:44] Where around horse barn was this held?

Tom Breen: [00:26:46] It doesn’t say, but I’m guessing it’s probably the away from. Where the buildings are.

Julie Bartucca: [00:26:52] The real buildings.

Tom Breen: [00:26:54] And so it went off without a hitch, I guess. Except, you know, six buildings were blown up. And, uh, it involves a description of an air raid telling people what to look for in case there was an air raid and,

Ken Best: [00:27:02] Planes.

Tom Breen: [00:27:03] Yeah, you’re right. To look out for planes.

Uh, the, the spectacle was called brilliant by many who saw it with the flashes from the explosives lighting up the night sky.

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:10] This is a darks story.

Ken Best: [00:27:12] Were there are no pictures of this that we could see?

Tom Breen: [00:27:16] If there were, they’re not in the Daily Campus might have taken some, I don’t know. I’ll have to go and look.

But it was at nighttime. So again, 1942 is difficult to take pictures at night, although, I dunno. It’d be kind of cool to see pictures of the, I want to see what this three-story hotel looked like.

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:28] Right. Like, how, like how long did they take to build these things?

Tom Breen: [00:27:31] I’m guessing these were sort of like,

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:32] How structually sound were they?

Tom Breen: [00:27:33] The town village Potemkin village type things where they’re just sort of hastily thrown together.

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:37] Yeah.

Ken Best: [00:27:38] So movie sets.

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:39] Yes.

Tom Breen: [00:27:39] Well, there are all kinds of mobilization efforts on campus. There were air raid captains and blackout drills and all that kind of thing. And we had a department of military science at UConn at the time as well as ROTC, and they helped blow up the buildings.

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:51] Excellent.

Tom Breen: [00:27:52] So as far as I know, that’s the first and only time the military has bombed part of our campus, but I’ll look in and see if there was others. I don’t know.

Julie Bartucca: [00:27:58] I hope not.

Ken Best: [00:27:59] Oh, I know they were coast, coast watches during world war two.

Tom Breen: [00:28:02] Yep.

Ken Best: [00:28:03] Because the thought was that there would be submarines coming over and there were, in fact, in the Long Island sound.

Tom Breen: [00:28:10] Yup.

Ken Best: [00:28:10] Findings of submarines,

Tom Breen: [00:28:12] and there were some, there was one, at least one ship sunk in the harbor in New York city by German saboteurs.

So anyway,

Julie Bartucca: [00:28:17] This was making me even feel even better about the state of the world right now.

Tom Breen: [00:28:21] Well, you know, the war is over. The good news is there hasn’t been a world war three, despite, despite the success of world war two.

Julie Bartucca: [00:28:27] Don’t put it out there. Despite the success…

Tom Breen: [00:28:30] We did great box office.

Ken Best: [00:28:32] When the 50s who are a whole bunch of war films. And there’s, there’s a channel on one cables station that, that runs all the TV shows that were based on that. Like rat patrol, combat patrol.

Julie Bartucca: [00:28:44] Rat patrol? Sounds great.

Ken Best: [00:28:46] Bout guys running around in a desert trying to fight each other.

Julie Bartucca: [00:28:48] On that note,

Tom Breen: [00:28:49] That’s Tom’s history corner for this week.

Julie Bartucca: [00:28:51] I gotta go.

Tom Breen: [00:28:52] Thanks for listening. Hope you’re all doing well. If you want to follow us online for some reason,

Julie Bartucca: [00:28:58] Tom doesn’t tweet for us anymore.

Tom Breen: [00:29:01] I’m taking lint off.

Julie Bartucca: [00:29:02] But what about our Twitter, Tom?

Tom Breen: [00:29:04] It’s still Twitter. So you’ll get Julie’s tweets until Easter.

Julie Bartucca: [00:29:07] Great.

Tom Breen: [00:29:08] @UConnPodcast. Well, don’t follow me cause there’s, I’m not doing anything, but I’m @TJBreen.

What about @Main_Old? Are you Julie Bartucca: [00:29:16] tweeting there?

No, I haven’t.

You’re depriving the people of what they want.

Tom Breen: [00:29:21] Well, it’ll be even more exciting when I return to tweeting form. Maxine, is there anything you want people to know?

Maxine Philavong: [00:29:27] You can follow me on Twitter @MaxinePhilavong. I’m also producing a show next week, which I, which I guess would be the Friday this comes out on Where We Live on 90.5 WNPR.

Awesome.  Very cool.

Julie Bartucca: [00:29:39] Making moves. I’m @JulieBartucca. And I wanted to send our love to our friend at Yale, Colin Poitras. We’re so sorry about our Yale joke last time, Colin. We love you.

Tom Breen: I’m not sorry.

Ken Best: He wrote to us.

Julie Bartucca: We love you.

Tom Breen: [00:29:52] We do like Colin.

Julie Bartucca: [00:29:53] We’re just kidding about Yale. No problem with Yale.

Tom Breen: [00:29:56] Colin’s not only a bulldog, he’s also a Husky. He’s sort of a double dog for Connecticut.

Julie Bartucca: [00:30:00] Yes. No, he’s a long time husky.

Tom Breen: Ken?

Ken Best: [00:30:02] I think I’ll be back on the air, not being preempted on 91.7 WHUS, UConn’s sound alternative. And of course we will have a refreshed episode of the UConn 360 podcast in the talk block with the rest of the semester, and then we’ll take the summer off as we restock.

Tom Breen: [00:30:21] Thanks for listening everybody, and we’ll see you in a fortnight. .