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UA was expanding, but Tucson was still a small town

By Ed Stiles, College of Engineering
December 20, 2007

Agnes Matsch – wife of Leander Matsch, former University of Arizona engineering dean – turned 100 recently, something she never expected back in 1950. Not that she thought 100 was out of reach, but she never dreamed she’d hit the century mark in Tucson, a place she hadn’t even heard of as the ’50s began.

In 1954, her husband, who was 52 at the time, wanted to leave his teaching post at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology to relocate in Tucson. The UA was expanding rapidly at that time under President Richard A. Harvill, who was striving to make it the outstanding research and technical university in the Western United States.

The proposed move “didn’t sit well with me,” Agnes remembered. She was a Chicago native, loved her home in Park Ridge, and was accustomed to big city amenities such as public transportation that was so good she never learned to drive.

Where is Tucson?

“We had never been out to Arizona,” she said. “I didn’t know where Tucson was. I had heard of Phoenix, but I wondered, ‘Where is Tucson?’”

She and her husband visited the campus in 1954, and Tom Martin, head of electrical engineering, offered Leander a job, which he accepted on the spot.

With the move a certainty, the first thing Agnes did back in Chicago was call the high school teacher who had taught German to all three of her children at Maine Township High School. “He also taught driver’s ed,” Agnes said. “I had three lessons, and then he said, ‘Go get your license.’”

Lots of packing and dealing with the movers followed. Then on a Friday night in 1955, with the family scheduled to leave the following day, Agnes, Leander and their two sons – Lee and Eugene (who both later graduated from UA) – were packing the two cars they would drive to Tucson. (Their daughter, Marjorie, had already married and left home.)

“The boys and my husband were getting the little odds and ends into the cars and then the boys came in and said, ‘Mom, Dad fell in the street and can’t get up.’” Agnes discovered that he had tripped on the steps and torn a tendon in his knee.

The doctors decided to operate, but “they weren’t going to operate until Monday, and the boys and I had to get out to Tucson to claim the furniture,” Agnes said.

Heading West

They had to leave Leander in the hospital and head west with Agnes’s new driver’s license, arriving in the midst of Tucson’s stifling August heat.

“I would have happily moved back to Chicago the following week,” Agnes said.

Leander followed 10 days later by plane. But as fall semester began, his knee prevented him from driving, and Agnes had to drive him to campus and get him on the elevator to his third-floor office. This was not as simple as it first appeared because the elevator couldn’t be summoned. If it was on the third floor, Agnes had to climb three flights of stairs, get in and ride it down to the ground floor.

Meanwhile, the family was living in temporary campus housing and searching for a home. It seemed everyone knew of just the house for them – even the mailman and milkman were in real estate part time.

Finally, Agnes found a realty company on Speedway that showed her a house in a new subdivision on the eastern edge of town — out around Craycroft Road, which is now in the center of the city. There she found the ideal house.

After moving in, “I found we were not in the city limits, which ended at Alvernon at the time,” she said. “We also couldn’t get a telephone at first. When we did, it was a four-party line.”

The closest grocery was at Swan and Broadway, and Swan was only two lanes. Now it’s a major, four-lane arterial.

“Everything else was downtown,” she said. “We had no shopping malls.” So she’d drive downtown to shop at Jacome’s, Steinfeld’s, and other stores that now exist only in the memories of longtime Tucsonans.

As Leander recovered, the doctors prescribed a walking program for his knee. Later on, he began running at the YMCA near campus. In those days, a jogging college professor was rare enough to rate a newspaper photo.

Many other wives of new faculty members found themselves similarly marooned in the Western desert in the 1950s, and they banded together for mutual support in a newcomers bridge group, which met on campus. There were six tables at that time. The group still meets more than 50 years later, but now there are only two tables.

Leander Named Acting Dean

Leander eventually was named acting dean of the College of Engineering in 1963, and served for one year, until the fall semester of 1964, when Howard Coleman was named dean.

During his years in the electrical engineering department, Leander wrote “Electromagnetic and Electromechanical Machines” (which is still in print) and several other EE texts, all of which Agnes typed in manuscript form on a manual typewriter. “I typed all the content for those books,” she said, laughing. “I’m not sure I’d do that today.”

Leander retired in 1972 and was asked to continue teaching halftime but decided to travel instead. He and Agnes took three trips to Europe and continued traveling until he began suffering strokes. He died in February 1984.

Despite leaving the city for small-town Tucson and resenting the move at the time, Agnes now says, “It turned out to be a good move. Now that I think of it, I don’t think I’d like to live in Chicago again.”