Gene Bozniak and Chaplain Andersen

[00:02] GENE BOZNIAK: I'm Gene Bozniak age 79, one week short of 80. Today's date is Wednesday, October 5, 2022. Location is Ogden, Utah. I'm being interviewed by a former student and a friend by the name of Chaplain Anderson. I was his professor at Weber State University, where the students call me Bozniak

[00:30] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: My name is Chaplain Anderson. I am 54 years old. Today's date is Wednesday, October 5, 2022. We are in Ogden, Utah. I'm interviewing Boz, who's a good friend, my old university professor and mentor from Weber State University. Boz, I'm excited for the opportunity and how this came about is, as usual with me, there was a deadline issue, you may remember, from university years. What year did you retire from Weber State?

[01:04] GENE BOZNIAK: 2014.

[01:06] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: 2014. There was a student of yours at that time that put together a book of a lot of your former students. I believe his name was Jason. Tell me if that's right.

[01:17] GENE BOZNIAK: Jason Baker. Yes. For my retirement, he prepared a synopsis of student comments from as many students as he could get, and he put that together. It was a marvelous thing for retirement.

[01:36] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: I can't wait to see that book. I have never, ever seen it. He reached out to me at that time and I was happy to contribute. Things happen on the way to the deadline to get my piece in that book. So I'd like to consider this the errata to insert into it because I missed that there was an auto pedestrian incident and I was the pedestrian. So I was laid up for quite a while after that deadline passed, and I'm just happy to share the impact you've had in my life.

[02:14] GENE BOZNIAK: That's great. Actually, I included all of that in a memoir, which I put together during three months of COVID I was going to start crazy, and I decided I needed to leave a little bit of a legacy for my children and grandchildren. And I included that in that memoir. I'll have to give you a copy.

[02:36] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: I would love to see it. And that brings me to one of the questions I wasn't aware of. We briefly spoke outside before this interview, and I asked about how your daughters, Janice and Allison, were doing. One of my burning questions was, do you have grandkids? And now I know how many.

[02:52] GENE BOZNIAK: I have two grandkids, one boy and one girl. Allison's children, they live in Washington, DC.

[02:58] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: How old are they?

[03:01] GENE BOZNIAK: 16, almost 17 and 15.

[03:04] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: Oh, my goodness. It's been a long time. And boy, it sure goes quick. I want to just talk about some of the significant impacts as a mentor and professor and friend that you had on me and I had a pretty good stretch at Weber State. Ten years maybe, plus a year or two a couple of degrees down. Anthropology and botany. And I just had so much the experiences you and I shared from the tide pools. I believe our first field school was the tide pools in Newport, Oregon. You were this scampering gnomish person jumping around in the water, picking up all the creatures and teaching us this beautiful habitat. And from there to the southwest desert to Utah, the Uinta highlands for mycology training. Our trip to Mexico in what is.

[04:07] GENE BOZNIAK: The Punta Puerta Penasco.

[04:10] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: Puerta Penasco again, field school, tide pools, algology, which is of course your thing. And then Costa Rica, of course, which was a good capstone. And I'm sad you never got to go to the Guatemala trip. Doing the ethnobotany with Doctor Susan Young and I, that was a great. But we've had marvelous adventures. And the things you taught me I've used my whole life. There's not a day that goes by that I look at a flower and don't think of you. You taught me mechanical photography back when digital wasn't really a deal. And a lot of why I did this is. It's a time for me to reflect and express gratitude for people who have had a very, very significant impact in my life and outlook. I wanted to just thank you in a very personal way. And this is with the resources I had at hand, this seemed like the best opportunity. Can I ask you about growing up in Edmonton as a child? Tell me about that.

[05:10] GENE BOZNIAK: Certainly. I grew up on a farm in Alberta, northern Alberta, northeast of Edmonton. A small farm. We had 160 acres, which by today's standards is very small. A mixed farm. We grew everything we needed, basically. And because it was a mixed farm, we had all kinds of farm animals. Not too many, but enough to make sure that I had lots of chores both before and after school, which kept me busy, plus the homework, and I enjoyed school.

[05:55] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: So tell me about school at those initial phases and then maybe a little bit about your, some of the mentors in your life that led you to algology as your preferred professional field.

[06:08] GENE BOZNIAK: The school was very small. Six rooms, twelve grades, two grades per room. We had such a small population that in high school, I remember being in 11th grade, I took 12th grade chemistry because we combined the two classes. So I took 11th grade chemistry in grade twelve. So that was how small school we were. I had a professor that taught me in junior high, and then when I got into high school, he had been promoted to a high school teacher. So I had him for nearly seven years, and he was pretty instrumental initially in the making sure that we were doing our homework. He was a real taskmaster, but I admired that. And I think that helped me prepare for university, because everybody said university was so different. I remember going to my first class and I thought, what's so different about this? The professor is speaking English. I could understand him, but there are obviously large differences. And then when I got to university, the female professor that became my mentor, I'd love to interview her. Now she's passed, I'd like to ask her what it was that she saw in me that prompted her to encourage me to. To go on with my studies. That was very, very important to me. And she helped me write. I wasn't very good at writing. As a matter of fact, English was my weakest subject. But she helped me during my master's thesis writing. She helped me write, and she was very careful not to rewrite. My thesis was, oftentimes professors do. But she kept asking me, can you defend what you just said? I don't care what you say, but you have to defend it in front of your committee. And so I had to craft that thesis very carefully, and that helped me a tremendous amount.

[08:46] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: What was her name?

[08:48] GENE BOZNIAK: Lorraine Kennedy. She was actually a mycologist, not an algae person. It was interesting how I got into algology. I took a. In my second year, I took a mycology course from doctor Harold Brody, who was a world renowned mycologist studying cyathus structorius, which is the bird's nest fungus. And he saw that I was excited in his class. I remember since he was a bird's nest fungus expert, and we had to collect fungi. I thought, I'm going to collect some fungi from a bird's nest. These were imperfect fungi, like penicillium and so on. So I did, and we got some interesting results. And that was kind of a teasing project.

[09:50] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: Even then, puns, even then, puns were important. And that's something you and I share in common, is a ridiculous sense of humor.

[09:58] GENE BOZNIAK: That's right.

[09:58] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: And let me ask you, since I can, in 1990, when I started at Weber State, I was the first in my extended family to go to higher education. And to be honest, I was 21, I think at the time, thereabouts, 21 or 22. I was rough around the edges. What were your first impressions when I walked into, I believe my first class was, you're dreaded by the business school environment appreciation. People either hated you or loved you. And obviously I loved you because you were firm, fair, and a tough, tough professor. Tell me about your first impressions of me.

[10:35] GENE BOZNIAK: Well, I have to admit that I was a product of certain stereotypes. And you came in with long hair and I thought, a leather coat. Wow, what's this guy like? You have some guards go up. But then fairly quickly, I realized that you were perhaps provocative in the sense of classical, traditional norms. But you're evocative in the questions you asked, your demeanor. And what I was struck by was your commitment to your fellow students. And you helped create a learning environment which is very important from a professorial standpoint. When you have students that are active participants in this venture, that they're not there. Simply like when I went to Washington University from a state school in Canada, Washington University, private school, rich kids. I remember my first experience in the lab. These kids would sort of put up their feet and say, my dad paid lots of money for this education, so go ahead, motivate me. You know, whereas you seemed motivated and that helped motivate others. And that's what I really appreciate about.

[12:16] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: It's interesting. You talked about creating a learning environment and bringing the cadre together. My career path has meandered a lot, and it's strange that many, many of the things I've done were training educational in different things. From an AmeriCorps Vista station at Weber State, the second one there doing the academic office of Service learning from some high end corporate training stuff for tech firm. I'm not going to throw the names out. They don't deserve my time, our time. It's funny, though, I didn't recognize that in myself until fairly recently that, gosh, I am good at motivation and teaching people things. So it's really nice to hear that, that it was an inherent quality of me. I just thought I was extremely well read. And of course, that's one of my greatest passions that I've had my whole life, is books, books, books learning. And I wanted to ask something along scholastic. I was curious for literally decades because, you know, I did work briefly as a research assistant with northern Arizona University, doing cottonwood as a Keystone biodiversity organism in the riparian arid west. And I knew then it wasn't the academic life style at university. Teaching wasn't my path. And I always wondered if you were a little bit disappointed that I didn't follow in your footsteps and become that professor.

[13:53] GENE BOZNIAK: I suppose to some extent you'd like students that stand out to sort of reflect your career path to some extent. But on the other hand, I didn't think I was going to be a university professor, so almost anything goes.

[14:21] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: And it's possible I kind of followed the path of strange resistance, you might say. I just. I let things happen. By training, I'm a botanist, ethnobotanist, anthropology background, professionally trained. But by vocation, I'm a poet and an orator. And that came in the middle of my ten year stint at Weber, I think in 96. I believe it was through the honors course in the national undergraduate Literature conference, and some Michael Vutz, who I believe is still there, and a few others. I can't think of names right now. I'm a little on Spotify. My vocation is poetry and speaking, but I'm always deep down, like Dejardin or some of the early jesuit scientists, Mendel. And I've always been a scholar. And I just want you to know that you taught me critical thinking. I was a very rough around the edges biker kid, you know, leather motorcycle jacket, the long hair, which I still have both. I don't ride bikes much anymore. I'm a little frail for that. You know, I've had some health challenges throughout the years, and that just made me feel very fortunate to have had all the experiences that I had. You did teach me exuberance and flinging myself at the universe. And experiences are some of the key critical things that have shaped me and structured me and allowed me to teach others these types of things. And for that, I am eternally grateful for your patience with me. Words are my water, and I swim in math was not, I would have, at best, been, a mediocre scientist. But the method, the scientific method, rings so true. It's not a belief system, as you've said many, many times. It's a way of life. Not for everyone, but I've always carried that forward through the years. And I want to ask you, is there, I mean, I've asked you about your grandkids and your background. Tell me, what technologies in your life that have been most transformative for you and what you've witnessed, what kinds of things, because these things accelerate so much. What was the biggies?

[16:47] GENE BOZNIAK: It's interesting. When I was, I think, ten years old in 1952, television had just come out, and I started thinking about, wow, this technology is really amazing. Even though everybody said, this is black and white tv, I didn't think it was black and white when I first saw it. I thought it was like, instead of 40 shades of gray and black, it was 40 shades of blue. And one of the store owners in our little town that we had to walk to 2 miles, had a tv in his shop window, and we'd go there at night and just stare at this new technology. But when I think back to major technological events that helped shape what society is today, the first one that really struck me was the photo of this blue marble suspended in the blackness of space, taken from Apollo 17 in 1973. And I think it was transformative for society in general, but me personally, because up until then, I was trying to convey this as a model to students, that we're one unit, that there are no country boundaries. What we do on one part of this blue marble suspended in space affects the entirety of it. But this was now a visual representation of what I've been saying for so long, that it had a great impact on me then, and in retrospect, it had a great impact on society in general.

[19:01] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: Sagan's pale blue dot.

[19:03] GENE BOZNIAK: Exactly.

[19:04] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: This brings me to another thing that you and I have. I don't want to say argued, debated. I'm a huge NASA space exploration sci-fi nerd, and we. I don't want to, I'm not going to say argue, but we had some contentious conversations about, there's so much to explore on this planet, the depths of the ocean and the canopies and the treetops and the cloud forests. And I said, yes, yes. However, look, we have to look at this while we can before we. Speaking of technological innovation. Nuclear Holocaust has been a thing I grew up under as a child and all of that, and it's funny, but now, hearing that transformative moment, seeing that pale blue marble in the seventies, I would love to have more of those conversations now that we have rovers on Mars looking at potential organisms and water and the jovian system. Is that exciting to you now? More so than it was when we used to debate in college?

[20:10] GENE BOZNIAK: I think so. I think so. One of the people that I really admire in this area is Neil degrasse Tyson. I think he's a tremendous mind, and he is one of the transformative figures currently, to my way of thinking, that I wish more people would listen to him, study him and see what he has to say.

[20:43] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: I have to agree. He presents information that is inaccessible to much of humanity, whether through our lack of decent primary education and the budget cuts that we've seen at universities, and profit being everything over knowledge. He's one of the few people that can condense that and feel lay terms for any man, any woman, any person of any background can grasp the excitement and understand the vast implications of our unique time now in the universe in our solar system to be more neighborhoodly. It's just super exciting to me. And I'm a fan as well of Mister Doctor deGrasse Tyson. That is good. The cosmos is. It's a big place. That's why I always think, what's that? The Sagan book that they made in a movie. And the protagonist says, they should have sent a poet. And I've always carried that deep. I am a scientist, and yet also poet. And the stars. I look at the stars and the planets, and I follow the NASA Twitter feeds. I am amazed, and indeed I would use the term. I don't throw around a lot. Blessed to be at this time. All of the Sci-Fi I read about as a kid I have in my pocket in the form of a smartphone. We can video chat while on your travels in other countries. And it's just amazing that we have these tools at our fingertips, yet we still make the same mistakes. War, famine, over and over. It just boggles my mind. And I truly do feel blessed to. Science fiction has come true in my lifetime.

[22:34] GENE BOZNIAK: Yeah. And that was going to be my second technological revolution. That was transformative, and that's computers and the Internet. The Internet as a tool can be used for good and for evil, as we all know. But I remember using it as a tool that transformed my thinking and my knowledge about my own background. My parents were born in Canada, born to ukrainian immigrants. And I knew that at the turn of the 19th century, Canada was recruiting farmers to open up the west in agriculture. And a good place to recruit farmers was Ukraine farmers who were farming the best soils in the world. And western Canada had soils very similar to those in Ukraine, the chodnozims. And it was about 20 years ago that I discovered something very important that was heretofore unspoken in the ukrainian community in Alberta. And that was that the Ukrainians came to Canada on austrian passports, because Ukraine at that time was part of the austro hungarian empire. Now, keep in mind that these ukrainian immigrants spoke no German, spoke no English, and I even had trouble finding the manifest from a german ship that my grandparents came on because there was no Bozniaks on there. There were Pozniaks. And then you can imagine how that happened, you know, waiting in line, what's your name? And my grandpa didn't know what even the question was, and it came out Pozniak. So the genealogy is difficult, but nevertheless, they came to Canada on these austrian passports. One set of grandparents in 1898, the other in 1905. What happened in 1914? The first world war breaks out. Who is Austria on the side of? Well, Canada didn't know quite what to do about the ukrainian problem.

[25:41] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: With those.

[25:42] GENE BOZNIAK: Current with immigrate people that came in on austrian passports. So parliament met and labeled the ukrainian immigrants as enemy aliens officially, and they set up work camps. I didn't know that.

[26:04] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: I did not either. And that's so familiar to our experience in the states for World War two.

[26:09] GENE BOZNIAK: Exactly. So this is World War one now. And I asked myself, why didn't I know about this? Why did I have to wait until the Internet allowed me to find this? For one, it was a little embarrassing for Canada. So many Canadians didn't talk about this.

[26:31] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: But suppressed, but just not spoken of.

[26:34] GENE BOZNIAK: Not spoken of. And then I tell a story about how this might have happened in my family, why I didn't know about it. So I concocted this story about two northwest mounted police mounting their horses, riding out to my grandparents place from the little town called Smoky Lake. And it was a half day ride, and I can imagine them and a story that I made up. One of these northwest Monroe police was an english speaker. The other was a french speaker. They come to Grandma and Grandpa's place, knock on the door and say, they've got some papers to deliver. And the papers read that you're supposed to show up at the courthouse in Smoky Lake to be assigned to a work camp. That's the story I made up. But grandma and Grandpa didn't. Couldn't read English. Grandma looks at Grandpa and says, oh, these gentlemen came on horses. You take the horses into the barn, feed them, and water them. I'll make dinner for them. So she feeds them, and they leave these papers. As the door closes, Grandpa looks at grandma and says, what the hell was that about? And so they put these papers on the mantel and said, thinking one day, someone who can read English is going to come in and interpret these papers for us. We don't know what that's about. Years go by. Why didn't the police come and arrest grandpa? Well, why did Canada want these immigrants? To begin with, they needed farm products, and in a war, you need farm products even more. So they looked the other way. I honestly can say that my family did not know that these work camps existed elsewhere.

[28:46] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: That's amazing.

[28:48] GENE BOZNIAK: Some of the city, the immigrants in the cities that didn't have jobs looked upon this as an opportunity to work. They were paid and given a little bit of money. As a matter of fact, they had a camp in what now is Banff National park. So the ukrainian immigrants were the first to make trails and roads in Banff National park. But they'd come in, and again, speaking no English, they came into these compounds at night. They couldn't figure out why there was razor wire around this camp. And they probably asked about it, but they couldn't communicate. So even people to keep safe, to keep them safe from the bears and so on. Yeah. So anyway, and I thought to myself how that's transformative. I accidentally stumbled upon this information.

[29:46] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: That's amazing.

[29:46] GENE BOZNIAK: When I was an adult.

[29:48] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: That is amazing.

[29:49] GENE BOZNIAK: And so it's an interesting story in my background, and again, the Internet was the place I found this information. Since then, however, Canada has recognized that that was a mistake, and so they've apologized to the ukrainian community. The Ukrainians have a day where they celebrate the kind of freedom from this and recognition that.

[30:21] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: That I have. I'm a student and I know some history, but I had no idea as well. That is amazing. Oh, my gosh. We have a little bit of time left. I do want to say. I want to ask a couple other quick things. I know the family's all, well, we spoke of that, and I miss going to Canadian Thanksgiving at our mutual friends place. Hopefully we'll be able to do that soon. It's coming up, I believe, I think.

[30:51] GENE BOZNIAK: This Sunday, again, I just.

[30:54] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: I feel so fortunate. I've reached a point, you know, in my life with multiple, like, I've had three cardiothoracic, four cardiothoracic openings on three different occasions. I think that's a record. And I implore everyone, whoever hears this, don't try and beat it. It's unusual, but I've had a lot of time during the pandemic, immunocompromised, recovering from this most recent one, which was just in 2020, accidentally found ascending aortic aneurysm. I had to wait for a year to get the elective surgery, but I've had a lot of time to think about and reflect on the wonderful things that I've gotten to experience and a lot of it, and my outlook, my social justice activism, cannabis activism, political activism. It's been due to you and your early training and your environmental awareness, which was a stone around the neck of many, many students who had to take it. And it's the kind of class that it should be, as you say, mandatory education from k through twelve through adulthood. But it's that you were a transformative human being for me, and I think of how much you've impacted my life. And I'm only one of the many many, many students you've had over the decades. And I can, like a very, very big stone thrown in an ocean of ignorance, you have created better human beings through every interaction you've had with your students. And I know they teach their kids this and some of them have gone on to be educators in their own right and your influence will last a long time.

[32:45] GENE BOZNIAK: Well, thank you, Chaplain I'm just lucky. I appreciate that. And that's the epitome of the mark of success you can get in my profession. I've had a lot of students say, and it's important to me while I'm still alive that students say, you changed my life for the better. And it's gratifying to hear, even at this stage in my life, I get emails from students that say, hey, such and such a thing reminded me of an incident in the school where I've never forgotten what you taught us. I'll meet people in town that will say, do you remember me? I took a class from you 30 years ago and I said, well, you've changed. I haven't. And they'll say, you know one thing I remember you saying in that environment appreciation class that I'll, I keep teaching my kids and grandkids. And that is, there is no a.

[33:56] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: Way, no such thing as a way.

[33:58] GENE BOZNIAK: No such thing as a way. And note also that that class is called environment appreciation, not environmental. As oftentimes students will use the adjective. And when I initiated the class in 1971, a lot of people said, well, why don't you name it? Environmental science? And I said, I don't want it to be a science class. I want it to be broader than science. Every discipline has a stake in assessing environmental problems and coming up with solutions to them. Scientists aren't going to solve them.

[34:47] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: People will.

[34:48] GENE BOZNIAK: People have to. Politicians have to be informed and make decisions that are in the best interest of society at large.

[34:58] CHAPLAIN ANDERSON: You're a great man, Doctor Baz, and I want to end on a, we're almost out of time and we will do this more. Life's too short. But I want to let you know that I have a superpower and I think I got it from you. And it's mirth. You taught me. Mirth is the most important thing to get through these tumultuous times that we see and the problems that we can overcome. And we can only do it with empathy and laughter. And I thank you for that.

[35:31] GENE BOZNIAK: And thank you. Appreciate that. It's.