It Wasn't Quiet at All

Kevin Krogh, professor of Spanish at USU, was one of the last people to have an office in the barn before its upper floors were condemned. He recalls the active social atmosphere of the barn in its last years as office space.

Dr. Krogh described the layout of the barn during his time there:

“Downstairs there were four or five offices and a conference room on the west side of the main floor. The four of us in our department were all over there. Harold Kinzer had an office on the second floor. There was a classroom on the second floor. On the third floor, who knows what was going on there; there were all kinds of people in a small space. I think it was a software producing business connected in some way with the university. Downstairs also was the rat lab, and the psychology department grad students were who they were, four or five students on the east side of the main floor.”

The layout of the building contributed to the noisy, social atmosphere of the barn:

“It wasn’t quiet at all. The psychology graduate students who ran the rat lab, their office wasn’t entirely enclosed; it was a half wall. You couldn’t see over the wall. There was probably a space of a foot and a half to two feet between the ceiling and the wall. It was a large space, and that was open to the main entrance area where students would come that were in the speech program to be interviewed by other graduate students. So there were people in and out all the time. It was really quite noisy. If you wanted quiet you had to shut your door because the graduate students were always chatting; students were always waiting in the hall for interviews in the conference room.”

Because his office window was directly across from the kiosk at the exit to the parking lot, where people stopped to pay for parking, he would often shut the window to keep out the sounds of the cars and the parking lot attendant talking to drivers. Unfortunately, the building was very hot in summer, so having both the door and the window shut to have some quiet would become stifling. Dr. Krogh recalled coming in very early in the morning in the summer to avoid the heat. In the winter the building was heated by steam, but it was often still cold in the barn during the winter, and the steam heat could also have some negative effects, as he discovered on one occasion:

"I came to the office, and when I opened the door to the main office I could hear this hissing sound. I thought, ‘What in the world is that?’ As I got closer to my office door I could hear the hissing sound was coming from my office . . . also I could feel that it was kind of humid in there. When I opened the office I discovered that the steam valve in the office had broken. Steam was going everywhere, and water was dripping off the ceiling, off my books, and onto my desk. You could see water everywhere.”

Apparently the barn had frequent maintenance problems, because Dr. Krogh recalls that "There were people from maintenance, USU physical facilities, there all the time, fixing things all the time, replacing valves, wires. They were doing something all the time it seemed.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the inconveniences of having an office in the barn, there was a real camaraderie among the professors who had offices there:

“The four or five of us that were there, we identified ourselves as those in the Barn. Everybody else in our department were over here in Old Main. We supported each other and we had the camaraderie of being in the Barn. You get to know somebody if you are walking across campus from your office in the Barn to Old Main where you are teaching or back. It was a great opportunity to get to know people. The people around me right now, I know them fairly well, but not as well, and I don’t feel the closeness as a colleague as I did with those who were in the Barn, even though they weren’t in my discipline. But I just knew them better because we had more opportunity to converse and to talk about things. Things kind of get boring over there in the Barn when you are there for a while, so you would go down the hall and visit with a person in the office down the hall.”

The camaraderie among the people in the Art Barn was what made it a special place to many of the people who had offices there.