Keith Pannell and Louie Saenz

[00:02] LOUIE SAENZ: I'm Louis Saenz I'm 66 years old. Today is January 15, 2023. We're in El Paso, Texas. I am interviewing doctor Keith Pannell Chemistry professor. He is a great friend of mine and also a colleague at the University of Texas at El Paso.

[00:18] KEITH PANNELL: My name is Keith Pannell. I am 83 years old. It is indeed January 15, 2023, in El Paso, Texas. And I'm having a conversation with Louis Saenz who I've known for 35, 40 years, mainly through the radio station KTEP. And I'm ready to go.

[00:40] LOUIE SAENZ: Keith, it's no secret that you are british. When you speak, your accent comes out. When we first met, as you mentioned, the radio station here at KTP, it was during fun drives, and people would comment, who is that british man talking? And so it was there that you got introduced to the radio station and then also became part of the radio station. But I want to go back a little bit. And you and I had talked before about World War two. You were born in England, and you were born during the Blitz.

[01:15] KEITH PANNELL: I was born on August 27, 1940. I'm told that was one of the days with the first serious bombing raid on London. And I was born in a hospital, not at home. And I spent the first five years of my life in a war zone, effectively. I don't remember too much about the first three or four. I do remember the fourth and fifth. I remember seeing dogfights up in the air between ours and theirs, aeroplanes. I remember seeing one crash behind my house in a place called Biggin Hill, just south. Well, south central London. And I remember Ve Day. My mother took me up. Ve day. That's Victory day. I don't remember the exact date, but half of the world in London went up to London to celebrate. And I remember that day, just people all over. I was on the shoulders of my mother and my uncle. It was just something I remember without having any specific facts to remember other than lots and lots of people.

[02:20] LOUIE SAENZ: You mentioned that you remember the last fourth and fifth year, and the fact that there was an airplane that even crashed near your house. What do you remember as far as, what did your mother or your father tell you when you would hear the bombs, when you would hear the air raids? What did you all do?

[02:39] KEITH PANNELL: We would duck. We would get into the shelters, because all the homes then had shelters. I had a shelter in the house which was a sort of steel cage underneath the dining room table. I think that was called an Anderson shelter. And then there was an outdoor shelter, which was really a hole in the ground, but reinforced with dirt on the top, on a metal frame. And we would listen for the air raid siren. And when you heard that we just were trained. Like pavlovian dogs run for the nearest shelter.

[03:13] LOUIE SAENZ: You said that you were trained to do that. So did it come kind of like this is something that's usual? As a five year old, did you think this happens all the time?

[03:24] KEITH PANNELL: I don't recall any particular feeling of that. I just know that's what we did. I remember the sirens. It's a very idiosyncratic sound, but it was just part of living. I mean, that was the. That's what you did.

[03:44] LOUIE SAENZ: Were you scared?

[03:46] KEITH PANNELL: I don't ever remember being scared, no. Which, of course, is one of those interesting things about the whole concept of that as a weapon. You know, bombing cities. It's one thing to bomb a factory or to bomb, for example, a naval shipyard of. But to bomb indiscriminately where the population live. Right. The idea is you're supposed to cower people into submission. It's not the way it worked. Not that I can say that as a four and five year old. But from all my family, it was just part of living. And you just got on with it.

[04:23] LOUIE SAENZ: Tell us about your family. Did you have any family members in the military?

[04:28] KEITH PANNELL: My father. Well, Mister Pannell was a. He worked for the timber industry. And for about the first three years, I'm told, he was exempt from military service. But as the world got a little more serious and we needed more manpower. He was placed into the police force, all right, in London. And had a very undistinguished career. He had his police car stolen from him. And so then they put him in the air force. And he became a liaison officer. Between the United States States Air Force Bomber Command. Up in the north of England, a place called Domcaster. And the Royal Air Force. I don't know what he did, though. He never really talked very much. But he did give vivid talks. Not talks, but recollections. About the american bombers coming back from their bombing raids, but so badly shot up that quite a few of them, when they landed, just collapsed. He was very impressed with that experience, I would say that, yes. And my mother, I don't think she did anything during the war. Except looked after myself and my older sister. And then we moved a lot. We were bombed out again, I am told, several times before we landed up in the house in Biggin Hill. So before that, we'd lived in four or five different places. And had to move because of the bombing. But I don't recall any of that at all, which is just as well.

[06:05] LOUIE SAENZ: Is there a big age difference between you and your sister?

[06:08] KEITH PANNELL: She's twelve years older than I am, right. So that's quite a large difference.

[06:13] LOUIE SAENZ: So when you saw her growing up, you saw her mostly like maybe an aunt?

[06:17] KEITH PANNELL: You know, it's interesting. I don't remember much about her, to tell you the truth, because by the time I got to five and six, well, at school earlier, she was evacuated. One of the things that they did to the children in London during the war, during the bombing, was to evacuate them to other locations. So my sister was evacuated to about 100 miles to the southwest of London. Didn't have a good time. In fact, she was abused in terms of making her work. I wasn't evacuated until the last year. And then we went to a farm up in Northamptonshire, which, by memories, if I have any, seemed to be quite pleasant. So we had different experiences. I was fortunate to be too young to suffer from what suffering was going on around me. She was older and then felt the brunt of it.

[07:16] LOUIE SAENZ: When you say that your sister was abused with work, were they taking these.

[07:22] KEITH PANNELL: Children and they were placing them in different homes, and the idea was that they would have a safe place a long way from major cities. In her particular case, she was made to do a lot of the housework. And, I mean, schooling was not particularly rigorous, so she had a tough time.

[07:47] LOUIE SAENZ: How did your parents react to this, or other parents?

[07:50] KEITH PANNELL: My father, mister Pannell he went down and rescued, quote unquote, my sister from this situation she was in. And my family history is very complex. I don't particularly wish to go into it, other than saying that my sister has that one bright recollection of her father, who then went down and rescued her. But after that, it degenerated. The war is a terrible time for families when they're all in different places with different responsibilities. There's a different social mores. And so after the war, my parents divorced, I was shuffled off to boarding school, which is good english tradition. And so I didn't see my sister for many years after the war. It wasn't until I was about 15 and 16 that I began to see her more regularly. And indeed, now I see her very regularly. We're very good friends because we never had to live together as young adults. We don't have any clashes of personality. Sort of interesting.

[09:07] LOUIE SAENZ: What is it that drew you to science? Because, as I mentioned in the introduction, you are a chemistry professor, well known chemistry professor.

[09:17] KEITH PANNELL: It was a bit of an accident, the british system, when I was old enough to start making decisions. So this will be about 1956. When I was 16, I had to make a decision as to whether you go out to work or whether you carry on an academic track. I wanted an academic track. I was quite bright, and so it seemed natural. But I wanted to study geography. I wanted to explore the world. Geology, geography in French. My parents said the people who I was living with at the time said, no, no, no. Your schoolteachers tell us that it should be math, pure math, applied math, physics and chemistry. I said, no, no, no. Just because I'm good at it doesn't mean to say I want to do it, which is something that comes back later on in life when you mentor students. Just because you're good at something doesn't mean to say that's what you've got to focus on for the rest of your life anyway, so the teachers won out. I was effectively told if I wanted to stay at school, chemistry, physics and mathematics. And then once you've done that at 16 to 18, when you go to college in Britain, you know, you don't have that great plethora of opportunities that you have in North America. It's got better. But it was very clear that when you get to 18 and you've done these three years of specialization, that's what you continue to do. And, you know, so that's what I did.

[10:48] LOUIE SAENZ: And at what point did you decide or what choices did you have to come to the United States and study?

[10:55] KEITH PANNELL: Well, I had children at a very early age, and so to be a graduate student in England at the time with children was considered to be, well, there was not enough money, and you're not supposed to have had children to go before you go to graduate school. So I went to Canada, where I had an aunt who was a war bride who went to Toronto, and I thought, I. I'll go there. They gave good scholarships so I could afford to have my family there. And so that got me out of England to begin with. Then I came to the United States to do what we call a postdoctoral experience. You work with one of the major experts in a field, and then you get on with your own life. You become a professor or you go out and get a job. And so that's what I did. I came from Canada, Toronto, got the PhD, went to Georgia, as a matter of fact, in the southeast, which I actually enjoyed. I was there for two years, very informative years, 67 and 68, and these were years in America, which were fantastic in the sense of showing the resilience of America. You know, they had all these demonstrations, you know, at the democratic convention in Chicago. I remember watching those assiduously. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and yet the system carried on. It took it in its stride, and that impressed me a lot. But I wanted to go back to England as a professor, so I did found out that you didn't get much more money as a professor in England than you did as a graduate student, and so therefore decided to come back. And the University of Texas at El Paso was the first place that offered me a position. I applied for about ten positions, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. And the gentleman who hired me at Ut El Paso, Bill Whalen, worked magic. In about two and a half weeks, my application had been looked at. I was deemed good enough to come to UTL Paso, and the offer was made. I didn't have a visit, I didn't have a telephone call. It was all done by letters. Couldn't happen now, but I'm very thankful that it is. And I thought I'd stay here for a few years, get this fabled tenure, and then go to somewhere bigger and better known. But by that time I'd got used to going to Mexico on a regular basis. I got used to sunshine, I got used to everything about El Paso that I found so enjoyable. My family liked it and so we never really bothered to go anywhere else. I was lucky in the sense that the sort of thing that I do in chemistry research, which is called organometallic chemistry, I could get a lot of funding for that from all national and international organizations. So I always had a lot of research money. And if you do that at a university, they tend to leave you alone. They don't try and tell you what to do. And so that's very comfortable and very successful.

[14:21] LOUIE SAENZ: You mentioned that you came to the United States and you were in Georgia doing postdoctoral work a couple of years there. So I want to kind of go back because you mentioned 1968, and indeed that was, as you mentioned, the Vietnam War, the Democratic Convention, Martin Luther King Junior, Robert Kennedy, and you were in Georgia when Martin Luther King Junior s funeral was taking place.

[14:45] KEITH PANNELL: I was. I remember the worst parts of being there. There were restaurants which would have effigies of black people hanging outside as sort of an advertisement for their restaurant. I mean, I couldn't believe that, but I did have a lot of friends in the african american black community. And you say, well, why? Well, it's a very simple and silly reason, but I like to go have a drink after work, you know, I like to go and have a beer or something. And it was a dry county. Clark county was dry.

[15:26] LOUIE SAENZ: I.

[15:27] KEITH PANNELL: There were no bars for me to go to unless I was a member of the veterans of foreign wars or the American Legion or an elk or whatever, lions and things. But there was 1 bar in town, illegal bar. But that was simply left alone. Benign neglect. And it was the black bar. So one day I just walked in and said, hey, can I get a beer here? They said, sure. And then. So that was my bar for about a year and a half. And so I got into that community and was accepted. Except they never called me Keith. They would always call me London. I mean, I got no clue as to what that meant, but it was just. I was London. So, you know, London's come for a drink today.

[16:15] LOUIE SAENZ: What do you remember from the funeral?

[16:18] KEITH PANNELL: I just remember a large number of people solemnly walking behind the carriage. That's what I remember. I don't remember talking to many people. It was not the sort of occasion, you know, it took me about an hour and a half to get to Atlanta from Athens. But just walking behind the carriage with all sorts of different people. And it wasn't just black people, it was all sorts of people. I just remember being solemn and respectful. That's about it. Which is enough. I mean, that was very impressive, if that's the right word. I'm not sure it is, but it made an impression on me. And I remember also during that period of time, going to watch Henry Aaron hit home runs with the Atlanta Braves. I mean, mixed emotions and mixed things. But the country survived. The country was resilient. And that's impressive, too.

[17:21] LOUIE SAENZ: You mentioned that you are very close friends now with your sister, and you go back to England frequently. How has England changed from what you remember as a young man?

[17:36] KEITH PANNELL: That's interesting. I'm not sure because of what I do when I go there that it's changed because it's obviously very, very multicultural. I remember I didn't ever meet a black person till I was 21. 1st time ever that I was in the same room with someone who was black. It was an exchange student from Sierra Leone up at the University of Durham, where I studied. Now, you know, London is just like New York, Chicago, more so. In fact, there's just people from all over the world there. So in that sense, the multiculturalism and the restaurants and the things that go with having different people from different cultures all living together where they didn't before, that has changed. My family live in the country. And so that has changed. Not quite so much. All right, it's a lovely place to live, but you need a lot more money than I had.

[18:41] LOUIE SAENZ: You are a jazz aficionado. You love jazz music. You love music in general. But I'm curious. I want to know a little bit about, were you already in Canada or United States when the british invasion happened? As far as music, Beatles, Rolling Stones, all that.

[18:59] KEITH PANNELL: I disgraced myself here as an englishman. The british invasion meant nothing to me. I was not a Beatles fan. I sort of, kind of liked the Rolling Stones because they had that sort of frisson of sort of danger. But none of that. No, I came to Canada for the PhD. I went to the symphony concerts there. I went down to Newport jazz festivals, three of them in a row. Saw all the big boys, John Coltrane, Pharaoh Saunders, Stan Gett, you name them, they were all there. Jerry Mulligan. That was very, very good. And I remember one three day period, no, one week actually driving to Detroit to hear the Moscow Symphony. And the cellist was, yo yo, no, yo yo, ma. Rostropovich was the cellist, and he played the Shostakovich. And then two days later, we drove back to Toronto, and I heard the same symphony orchestra with David Oysterach playing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto. And then two days later, we drove to Montreal, and the two of them played the Brahms double concerto. One of the finest weeks of my life. Didn't do any work that week, just drove and listened to music with friends.

[20:21] LOUIE SAENZ: I mentioned earlier that I met you through the radio station, public radio station KTEP. Have you always been a fan of public broadcasting, public radio, or was the one here in El Paso?

[20:35] KEITH PANNELL: I grew up listening to the BBC. All right. We didn't have television at home. All right. My parents, when I was that age, they refused to have tv, so I didn't have it listened to the radio. And then when I came here, 71, I remember the station manager there was Louis Vaers, and Louis did morning jazz at that time. And I, oh, this is good sort of music I like. And in the evenings, the classical music. And then along came, after a month or two, the news programs, you know, all things considered in the afternoon. That's what got me hooked, because finally there was a series of news that you could feel was the real news. You know, I didn't seem to me it was embellished in any way. And so I grew up in America. When I finally came back to live with NPR, you know, it was exactly the same. NPR was founded in 1971. That's when I landed and becoming part.

[21:42] LOUIE SAENZ: Of the radio station, wanting to do. Because you, you and Keith, I mean, you and Kiki Cooper, doctor Cooper did an award winning show, won an award, science studio. Tell us about that. Well, actually, let's talk a little bit about how you used to play with the callers, the audience, and you would throw out science questions and then you would ask them to call.

[22:04] KEITH PANNELL: Let me back off before that. I am a scientist. My career, what I get paid for, what I'm known for outside of UTL Pestle, is the chemistry and the research that I do, all right? And I think it's true for me to think this following way, that in general, Americans, Europeans, you know, whatever the lay public knows very little about science. Very little indeed. In fact, what they know is often wrong. But also, I'd say, if they know little about science, they know far less about scientists, right? They just don't necessarily. Scientists have got hair all over the place, you know, it's just the classic Einstein view and perhaps Nerdish. That's not the fact at all. And so I feel some responsibility to disabuse the general public about what on earth a scientist is like. But you were right. We were on the radio one morning, 630 in the morning seven, something like that. Ridiculously early for me, trying to drum up money. And it was tedious. Nobody was calling in, just a typical public radio, you know, you got to bare your soul just to get a dollar. And I remember saying to Kiki Cooper, a friend of mine, professor of physics, I said, keke, we're going to do something. I tell you what we're going to do. We're going to. I'm going to ask a science question, and the first person to call in the correct answer gets the opportunity to donate $200 to the radio station. A complete, you know, absurd concept, but very much Monty Python, who I'm a great fan of, right? So we asked this question and people started to call. Now, the first few people didn't get it right, and, you know, we could play games and say, oh, Doctor Smith, he didn't get the answer right. And then after about the third call, somebody calls in and says, look, my name is da da da da. I think this is the answer, but I don't want you to mention my name if it's wrong. But the point is, it became a game and people started to join in and we raised money. It was fun. So Kiki and I said, hey, look, let's do a radio show. Kiki is very garrulous. He's an absolute wonderful raconteur, and he plays the guitar and he sings. He's a physics professor, but he's a vineyard owner. He's a special man and was just perfect for radio. And the two of us made a good foil. He's funny and quick. I'm a little more pedantic and nerdish, even though I don't think I am a nerd. But nevertheless, we started to do radio shows, and it's gone on for 36, 37 years. Not with Kiki. He dropped out after about five. And then a good friend of mine, Russell Kinelli, joined, and he's finished. And right now it's just, well, never mind. It's been a lot of fun, and we'll continue doing it. But it led into this other program now that is called we are ut El Paso, where I simply said, look, if people don't know much about scientists, they really don't know much about any faculty person at all. Whether it's a historian person in dance and theatre, whether it's music, whether it's history, whatever the subject, most people don't know these people. They have a great respect for their learning and their audition and their teaching and mentoring. But so we like to go on the radio now and sort of find out, who are these people that the public's entrusting their education to? And slowly, one by one, the public says, God, these are really good, interesting people. Yes. No wonder, you know, the University of Texas at El Paso is getting such a good academic record.

[26:09] LOUIE SAENZ: And as you mentioned, that tell us how the university has changed since you started in 1971.

[26:17] KEITH PANNELL: That's a much bigger difference, I noticed, than the difference between London or England going back over the years. When I came, my first class was an inorganic chemistry class. So those of you that know where the periodic table is, periodic table has got one element called carbon, and another hundred and God knows what, which are not carbon. All the chemistry associated with carbon is what we like to call organic chemistry. The rest of it goes under the general title, inorganic chemistry. And that's what I like. I like chemistry outside of that of carbon. My first class was a senior inorganic chemistry class, 15 or 16 graduating seniors. It was the last class they took before graduation. One Hispanic. All right, just one single Alonzo Flores. He was the only Hispanic, and it made no impact on me at all. I didn't come here thinking, oh, I'm going to be surrounded by Hispanics. I said, I'm going to come here. It's Texas. They have money I can do the research that I want. And right across the border next is this wonderful place called Mexico. That's what I came to sort of get involved with. Plus the sunshine. Now, if I was to think about the latest class, last class I taught in that same level, I'd say that out of the 15 that I'm saying were in the first that had one Hispanic, now there'd be two who were non hispanic. That's what has happened. And the institution has become rightly famous and well recognized for being a major educator and mentor of the hispanic community in El Paso. I remember talking to Diana, Diana Nathalisio, our president. We would have a drink about once a semester and talk about things. And she said when she became the president, she had this vision that the student body at Ut El Paso should reflect and look like the general population of El Paso, meaning, you know, predominantly hispanic. And we are now about 80, 83% hispanic students. But not everybody thought that was possible back then, and this was 15 years after I arrived. People thought that there was not a good preparation of the students locally that would translate into successful college careers. Well, that's just been thrown out the window as a piece of poppycock. Total rubbish. And I look over the hundreds of students, hispanic students, and others that I've mentored, and they have positions ranging from professors in major universities. Okay. To important surgeons. One of my students is the head of neurosurgery at Harvard. Another one became the provost. Yeah, the provost at Rice University. And these were undergraduate students from this area. So it's pretty impressive. So that's the one thing I would say, that, in fact, on public television about two years ago, they had a fellow that went around the country, and I can't remember his name, trying to find out who are the happiest people in America. All right? And he finally came to a conclusion on the last day of the year that he was covering this question. He said, well, I've seen a lot of successful people over the year, a lot of happy people. But he said, a lot of the successful people aren't as happy. If you're a broker up in New York and you're making a million a year, you're really not very happy, because the guy next to you could be making 2 million a year. He said, but I do know that people who are in the education tend to be the ones who think they're doing a really good job, totally satisfying. And he said, so I will now tell you that the happiest people in America are the faculty at the University of Texas at El Paso. Right. Because not only are they doing the teaching, they are teaching to a new generation of people who previously had not accessed education. And what is it, 60% of the students at UT El Paso, maybe more, are first generation students. And he said, and the faculty get paid well, and so they live well in El Paso, so they're economically happy to, and they are emotionally happy and they are professionally happy. So we are the happiest people. So you and I, Louie, looking across the table, should be some of the happiest people in the world. So you want to stop there or what?

[31:29] LOUIE SAENZ: Ten minutes. I thought she had said 10 seconds. That's why I stopped.

[31:36] KEITH PANNELL: I know it was ten minutes.

[31:37] LOUIE SAENZ: So tell me, as far as the, you and I know that everybody, it seems like everybody on campus knows Keith Pannell doctor Pannell or the guy with the british accent, but we've seen you. You're able to go into an open door through a lot of the administrators and just walk in. And a lot of the times they.

[31:59] KEITH PANNELL: Listen to you at some stage. That was probably totally true. Probably. As I said earlier, I was very successful in getting money. I've had money from all the agencies you can imagine, plus some that you couldn't. I had a lot of money from NATO. That was a particularly good grant, actually, because the money came straight to Keith Pannell I didn't go through the university, and so I had to put it into a bank, I had to hold the accounts, etcetera. But when you are in fact successful at all the aspects of higher education, the research, the teaching, the mentoring, the placing of local students in academic positions, medical positions, industrial positions around the country, then people begin to recognize this and they will put up with a little bit of the more argumentative side of my personality. I do think it's important for faculty to question administrators because they were faculty once. Most themselves, they just forget.

[33:05] LOUIE SAENZ: And when you said that you're able to make, bring in a lot of money, generate a lot of money, you have, because I've seen you as a member of the radio station, how you brought in money to the station and able to buy equipment and stuff like that. I guess the people who are not in academia wonder, okay, how do you go about generating that money? What is involved in writing a grant? What is involved in going out there and knocking? Do you knock on doors? How does that work?

[33:34] KEITH PANNELL: It is work. All right. It is work. And you spend a lot of time in the sciences. I have to spend a lot of time reading the literature, knowing what it is that I know and what I enjoy doing, what is fun for me to do, and then finding out where that fits into the current knowledge and then putting in proposals. National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health. As I said, NATO. There's so many places. One was to the foreign office. No, you don't call it. You call it the State Department. Department, right. And they had some money that they were going to give to Pakistan to fight the russian insurgency so many years ago. When the Russians left, the US, State Department says, oh, we'll give this money for research, non military type research in the US collaborating with Russians. And so for four years, I had this big chunk of money that paid the salary of about five people in the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. But it was because, you know, I knew experts over there that were doing things that I was interested in and that they obviously would be very interested in collaboration, because a lot of science involves collaboration. The scientists that I'm trying to explain to people, what is a scientist? First and foremost, they're not prima donnas. Some are, but in general, they're not, because we know, I know I can't do anything without a team. I can't do anything without postdocs, without equipment, without collaborators around the world that have instrumentation that I don't have access to. And as you get more and more of that activity going, you know, people begin to say, hey, well, there this group down in El Paso, and there's lots of them now, I must say, we've come a long way in the last 40 years, but if we put money down there, it will be well used, not just for the research science, but also for the manpower we create. Right. Because every, every new result from in the way we work, you're producing a new practitioner, a new student that's going out there to use their expertise. And so it's a double win. You get new research, but you get new practitioners at a very high level that can go out to different parts of this country or this town and be creative scientists and entrepreneurs.

[36:16] LOUIE SAENZ: Are there any of your current or former students who remind you of yourself?

[36:25] KEITH PANNELL: Yeah, there's a couple that were sort of adventurous. I mean, they were all adventurous in one way, but I remember, well, one of the things that I've done here that really made a big impression and helped me recruit students and people into my group was every year we take a retreat into Mexico. We would get a Chihuahua, Juanzi's bus down to Chihuahua. We'd take the Chihuahua Pacifico railroad to Mochiz, then the ferry to La Paz, and then spend three or four days there talking science and then going wherever we went after that to get home. That's an adventure. That wasn't my idea. It came from one of my coworkers right at the beginning. And students like that, some don't. Some felt it was just a waste of time to go trekking or halfway across Mexico just for a three day when we could have done it in the classroom here. But I had a different attitude, and a lot of my students have carried on that tradition, and wherever they are now, of having research retreats, wherever university they're at. So, yeah, some of them do. And I could name about four that have been very successful but also have a certain level of independence from the system that they're in. I don't know how to put it any other way. I used to get grades when I was a kid, and from what you would call a high school, and it would always, quite often say, resents authority. It's not totally true, but I do question authority, and so I know several people have gone out there and have done really well by questioning the authority that they were subjected to and changing it.

[38:25] LOUIE SAENZ: Well, some people are afraid to rock the boat or buck the system. From what I've known, you. You are not.

[38:32] KEITH PANNELL: No, I see no virtue in that. It's. Let me finish off this thing with a thought, because I was thinking now about all the students that I have, about 200, maybe slightly less, have gone on and get PhDs, not at Ut El Paso, but from all over, and Ut El Paso, too. El Paso. Also one of them who works for a very major company in east Texas. I don't want to mention the name of the company, but highly successful, well placed, and he said, keith, and he's hispanic. He said, keith, what you did. And if I look back, you opened the door for me. You opened a door. And he said, and, you know, what happened after that was up to me. But the one good thing is you never close the door. And I like that. I just think of myself. That's pretty damn positive. You open a door, you exhibit the possibilities, and you don't close it until they close it themselves if they wish. That's not bad. It's not a bad career. It's a good one, actually.

[39:43] LOUIE SAENZ: Is there a. I want to hear about a good memory and a bad memory that you have from either England or Ut El Paso?

[39:53] KEITH PANNELL: I don't have bad memories. I have memories of people that are no longer alive. I mean, that's the one thing you're getting to 83. You know, people who are my students, who are 65 have passed away. That's totally, totally sad. And the rest of it has just been. I have just nothing but good memories.

[40:16] LOUIE SAENZ: It's.