Transcript: Mr. Harmon Holiday Special (Part 2)

Welcome back. We just got the fire start with Mr. Harmon and we're ready to continue this great teaching conversation. So, Mr.

Harmon, we'd like to continue teaching us about the wintertime at U.S. and what's all going on in the outdoor projects. Okay. We've highlighted what I looked at as an educational platform to apply what you have been talking about as blind courses in the school to have projects that you can apply the principles, like the thermal properties of materials, including water. you may also have things like materials that you want to find the energy content and so you have what's called a bomb calorimeter we do calorimetry we have done stuff like that with our leaves and our wood so for example we can tell in the sugaring operation the different values of wood in terms of energy for example if I'm going to split a lot of wood for making sugar I want both a wood that will ignite well and sustain a lot of heat and extend that heat distribution over an even level so it makes a better boiling atmosphere. Stuff like that where we can take small samples of the wood into the calorimeter and find out that of all our woods, The elm tree is like anthracite coal.

It's really high in energy. Its drawback is it's hard to get ignited. But once it's ignited, it burns like hard coal and it extends the fire. So we've learned these principles and that has to go back to physics and the energy content and materials.

We've talked about the hatchery basically as a trout farm. But that's just one aspect of it. Because we have a control of water coming in 24-7, that water has properties that change both diurnally, that is during the day, and during the seasons. Right now, the water is totally emerging from under the ice at the edge of the pond at the spillway.

It then goes down a tunnel and comes into the building, and it maintained at a temperature about one to two degrees above freezing throughout the winter, even when it's below zero. And that was because it comes through a tunnel that is protected in a landmass of a dam that provides some heat to it in the winter and takes heat out of it in the summer. It's cooling. So that dam is another part of the ability of our water to culture the trout.

Meanwhile, during the growing season, the water coming out of the lake is charged with all kinds of fantastic micro animals in the plankton of the lake. Plankton is simply a name of the group of animals that are microcrustaceans, most of them. Little things like copepods and water fleas, things that are often purchased by the school from a lab supply place, and then brought in and looked at. Here we can get not only the plankton that are currently in the lake, but we can get them fresh so that they're alive and not.

So we can provide tremendous amount of stock in cellular biology, live stuff, on demand, real time, one day, today or tomorrow, we provide a lab for having that experience in the classroom. So it's easy to bring up samples that we can trap every day. And they're trapped simply in a sock net that's laid in the flume. The canal that leads to the building is strained by a plankton net.

That capture is then put in a bottle and brought up to a lab. You know, Mr. Harmon, you kind of talk about that teaching experience that we found at the track. What's been your experience kind of connecting the students at university school and kind of trout hatchery or maple syruping or any of the other things that you do on the daily?

What has it been like throughout all these years since you started all that time ago, kind of connecting students with the outdoors? Well, this was the beginning was actually two of us. The headmaster, when I was hired, I had come from the Museum of Natural History. I was a staff member there for a number of years, and some of the teachers from here had taken students on a field trip down there at the time that this campus was ready to open.

So one of the teachers said, oh, you know, I don't know if you're looking for another job, but there's an opening at University Schools' new upper campus, and you might be interested in that. So I thought about it and I did. I called and I had an interview with the then headmaster, Roland McKinley. And so he hired me and another man who was just fresh out of the Vietnam War. and he was a specialist in physical training and he brought that side of outdoor projects, which was really the outdoor experience, camping, proper camping, proper fire making, endurance in the woods.

The formula was based on a program that was very popular at the time called Outward Bound. It was a challenging program to build physical features, strengths, by doing things in the forest. A ropes course, where you would have to assemble really a kind of a relay race through a series of challenges, like getting people over a high bar, maybe 10 feet above the ground. You had to take a group, and they had to figure out how to get everybody over the beam, and it took a lot of work.

It also included things like walking across the lake on a zip wire, A rope that was brought into great tension with a superimposed rope for your arm for stability. And you were asked to walk across the lake on this 150-foot rope that immediately started to waver as you encountered the lake. and then invariably somebody would not be able to get this calmed down, and they'd fall into the lake. Well, of course, John Massey, who was the person that McKinley hired with me to do this kind of work, had the boat there. We'd pick him up and go, okay, go on in, get dried off, and you can do it again tomorrow.

And this was done in November when the water was about 40 degrees. So it also extended into camping at this time of year where temperatures were like now, near zero at night. And so John moved on to Alaska. He worked here for several years and then was captivated by working up in the far north.

He was drawn, like so many people in the past, about his curiosity in an extreme climate like Alaska and its beauty. So then it was left to me, the farmer. John was going to be the physical challenges, and my stuff was to be the farmy stuff, the fishery, the maple syrup, which we set up together. and it's been uh so these programs have survived because they do offer applications of your science experience in the classroom and um we welcome uh people you know inquiring about how this can be uh made kept kept at its status and also add activities i keep coming back to the to the applications in this building i will do it this way the sugaring business involves at the beginning the maintenance of forests our stock for making a product maple sugar is simply collecting sap from trees that flow in the spring. Those trees have to be healthy.

They are intruded by a drill every year and therefore if they start to show a problem during the growing season, we'll lay them up from future tapping, at least in the near future. There's all kinds of things about clearing a trail where we have the collecting lines running, always trees are coming down in the summer or branches. And so before the next year, there's all this work in forestry. That gets me into what we had alluded to, the study of a disease in the forest, which Dr.

Lau, the head of the science department, is in charge of it's a wonderful way to again to look at this the health of the forest you may know or even been part of you guys of the uh inventory of trees within i think seven or eight centers out in the forest if you go there's a there's a post and from that post radiating out over 30 feet every tree or every plant in that area is catalogued and measured the ones that are over three inches in diameter are measured and that will be the the the process that is done way into the future as that forest as those trees mature their their growth rate is monitored many of those trees are beech trees and the beech tree in our forest which is a very key tree in the forest ecology has a really bad problem right now with an invasive animal that is a nematode worm and the nematode worm got here by some means we don't know probably on unquarantined plants from Europe or Asia. It started and first noticed in Lake County about six years ago. So just about half hour from here, from the campus, this was first noticed in beech trees near the Holden Arboretum. Since then it has migrated westward into Illinois and north eastward into Maine and Nova Scotia.

So this thing is moving. It is a tiny worm. It spends the winter in the bud of the beech tree. If you look at a beech tree, they have these large pointed buds.

And inside some of them, wrapped in the embryonic leaf that's supposed to come out next spring, is this little tiny nematode worm. As the leaf opens next spring, he becomes active, goes down the vein, the main vein of the leaf, and gets nutrition along the way. And in effect, by the time June is finished, usually the leaf is finished. It gets all curled up and falls off.

Now, it's more noticeable in trees less than 30 feet high. So those huge beech trees that go up 80, 90 feet, it doesn't seem to have reached there in significant numbers. If it does, it is going to be a real problem in our forest because it is a key tree. It's a key species, the beech maple forest here.

And so we're concerned about it, but it is an issue that is forcing studies to extend outward. You'll see some posters already in the science wing highlighting what they found already about the beech leaf disease. So there again, like maple syrup is involved as a product activity in the forest. There is another activity that deals with health of the forest.

I'd like to see also studies on soil. The mechanics and the chemistry and the physics of soils is a big part of forestry as well. And I don't think we do that service. That would be a good application for chemistry classes.

Soils are not just, you know, minerals that sit there waiting for a plant. They're structured in layers. Those layers are maintained by percolation of water and by the decay of organic matter at the top. And unless we understand that, simply regarding soil as just a bunch of clay is very unproductive.

And you talked about that maple syruping process Can you go a little bit more into what that involves specifically this time of year Like why can we get sap from the trees right now Well you know we in a temperate zone all through the world, Europe, Asia, here where we have cold winters and indeed on other climates where it's just dry, they have dry seasons. Plants have evolved to defend themselves against water loss or tissue decline by dropping their leaves. Okay, so even when we don't have frost, this year our main leaf fell began before we had frost. Usually we coordinate the leaf.

The leaf will give up its hold on the branch by a layer of cells that are produced late the season called obsession layer and they they get very brittle and the least amount of wind break them so they the leaf breaks off in the least amount of wind and that's a function to soar water if we if there are other forests that take leaves drop them just because of drought So that's a mechanism plants use. So the tree will, especially all trees, maple trees more dramatically, still produce sugar during the growing season. So when the leaves have finally come out on all our maple trees by the end of May, bingo, that wonderful process using sunlight called photosynthesis will take carbon dioxide from the air, which is a good deal. And it will take water from the soil and minerals and produce what is called sap.

Sap is 90% water from the soil that is there now. In other words, if you go into a season, very dry soil, it has to impact the amount of sap you get. We want a soil that has been saturated by fall rains before the leaves fall. You want a nice fall where you have good ground soaking water that starts the winter season.

You want water in the ground. So in the spring, as soon as the computer in the tree, it says it's okay now to start flowing sap upward, the magic of that becomes apparent as on certain days, even following temperatures near zero the night before, by noon, if the sun is on the top of that tree and it's March, and the sun angle is what it is in March, we have seen sap start to run up the tree. And in that sap is about 2% to 4% sugar. The rest are minerals like iron.

What is ever in the soil makeup comes out of that water. The tree also absorbs. but it makes its tissue, its cellulose, leaves, wood, from the sugars that it produces. Cellulose is simply one form of the sugar where water is taken out by an enzyme and it makes wood. Think about that.

Sugar is produced to produce energy to make wood everywhere. This amazing stuff. Okay, so here comes March. The sun, it's a real sunny day.

It's been cold. All of a sudden, you'll start to see it dripping. And the physics of it is fascinating. We haven't really heralded that very much in understanding that can you over-tap a tree?

Yeah, you could. It's like somebody giving blood. You can do it right, or you could bleed them to death, right? But here, when the conditions are right, there is a sense in the tree, especially in the roots, that it's time to flow.

And what we get, if you know what starch is, starch is a storage form of sugar, right? If you take sugar and you have an enzyme that's available, that enzyme can interact with the sugar to take away a water molecule. it makes a smaller molecule, the starch, starch or cellulose. And so starch will not dissolve in water. We've done this in lab, if you want, with your chemistry.

Go get a beaker of water, two beakers of water. In one, put sucrose, put cane sugar. And then in the other one, put a teaspoon of starch, which comes from sugar. Go away. next morning come in look the starch hasn't even dissolved it's floating the sugar you don't even see it so this the sugar is the medium to carry the sap to the top it it would not be able to carry the starch but in the winter all the sap that we're going to get to make our sugar this year is already in the roots as starch and to convert starch back to water it's a reverse enzyme it adds water to the starch molecule and that makes the sugar and up it goes now as it goes up uh you guys have studied here's an application uh the different things like osmotic pressure uh you you know what uh um hyper osmotic uh hypoosmotic conditions okay when you have a membrane, say in a cell, and on one side there's a high gradient of, say, sugar, and over here it's just water, there's going to be a migration through the membrane to equalize the pressure on both sides.

So sap is run by the changing of the starch to sugar. That causes an anathematical pressure that draws it up, but it only explains it getting up about 12 feet in a big tree, 12 feet. But it's running the sap to feed the buds, right? The tree is just looking after its own nutrition.

So how does it get up to the top? I mean, it's going to go by the hole we make, but then it's going to go up. So we've investigated that and it turns out that Part of the drawing of the sugar up is by osmotic pressure. The other part is freezing.

So if we get a, we often note that the high flow of sap on the day is followed or preceded by a really cold night, which freezes tissue. and that freezing of the tissue causes a expansion or compression uh and pushes pushes the sap up further uh so it's pretty amazing yeah it's awesome you know mr harman one of the really cool things is how you've kind of worked with us to make things like the maple syruping program or to make things like the trout hot tree right so kind of going back in time going way earlier when that trout hot tree was first created when the maple sugaring was first created what was it like talking to some of the US teachers and administrators and students also trying to get something that has really just impacted so many through the years. Well, it involves, I mean, once we had a product and it was made available in containers, people started to see it. So we've got some more interest. And then once it was built, a large part of the interest comes from the lower school now Where it's often seen that little kids have a greater experience with doing this than the adult part is pretty much management and heavy work for the kids.

It's exploring. We give each kid here from the maple club of the lower school bucket and a lid and maybe you've helped in that operation where the tractor we have an old farm tractor. and it is used to pull a trailer with a tank. As the old days, it was horses pulling a sled or a wagon, and the kids love it. And a lot of those kids sustain this season and the next year by having it.

And the hope is that when they come here as upper school kids, they will take over a role of leadership and do it. So it's perfect to connect with leadership studies with the upper school taking care of the younger kids. That was always one of the interests of the headmasters of the school was, how do you have the upper school relate to the lower school? And this is one really good tangible way because it's perfect.

The leadership at the adult level with this high school, and then the kids learning the techniques, the tractor, it all pulls together to have a great experience. And that experience makes a good memory. Maybe they wanna pursue more things here in the future. We also offer, the activity by itself is worth doing, but then again, it's a platform for research for somebody who wants to go further with chemistry or as we get more and more equipment involved.

The maintenance guy, John Kaczynski, He's the main man now here with strength, and he does so much now for the program. He joined us, you know, 15 years ago, and ever since he's come, it's just made possible all kinds of things that as teachers get older, you're going to need more help, physical help to do this sort of thing. It is a very heavy physical activity, a lot of heavy lifting, heavy stuff. And so we welcome all age groups.

And we welcome a lot of guys from the weight room to come and see what it's like to lift these heavy objects. You know, one of the also just really cool things that I personally remember from when I was little at the lower school are your canoe making. And kind of some of the canoes that you've built and some of the stories about those canoes. and the third grade trips to Camp Whitewood where we would kind of go out and we would kind of canoe with you, right? Were you part of the – up at Camp Whitewood?

I was, yeah. In the canoe. Yeah, in the canoe. Did you go in the canoe?

I didn't. Oh, I saw the canoe you made up at the upper school, but I never – no, I never went on that trip. I know. You know, Kyle, what was that process in making canoes?

Obviously, you kind of explained how that love of canoes really started with you and your dad, but do you remember kind of building it with some of the kids or going on those Camp Flatwood trips? And how have you really just loved that experience? Well, it started actually as a lower school project, grade three. That's where you must have been when you went in the canoe.

Well, there was a teacher, maybe he was there when you were there, Eric Siegel. Yeah, he was. Siegel was very, if you might, you don't maybe know, but the third grade has a theme-based curriculum. I've heard about it, yeah.

So they study cultures. They study different cultures. You remember in third grade, it's the three R's, reading, writing, arithmetic. But they do it now with studying a culture.

So in the fall, it was Native Americans. In the spring, it's classical Egypt and Rome. But part of the experience, maybe you remember, he built dioramas. And you'd have a plywood sheet.

He made an Indian village. Somebody took a big, brought a house painting paintbrush, made a big blue swath across the plywood sheet. There's a river. And then they built long houses for the Algonquin people and stuff. and I knew this is when I was building the first of the canoes.

Stephen was interested and brought kids up to see that, you know, what we were doing in the choir loft above the dining room. Yeah, above the dining room. And that's all gone now. It's all filled in.

And he said, come on down and see the dioramas. I come down and there's these beautiful models of Longhouse. And they even had taken wax and made tiny wax figures. you know yeah uh they uh did some great sculpturing to make little figures that fit into the camp and he said what do you think and i said this is fantastic then i looked at this blue line i said where's the canoes oh you're right this these people would have had canoes so i he says you model i'm a model builder he said why don't you build a kit or something that we get the kids into building canoes. So we looked it up, and by taking the brown shopping bag paper and coffee stirrers made out of cedar and sewing thread and reading the research on how they built the canoe with real materials, they fashioned a model replica.

And they turned out great. Ribs were coffee stirrers. The skin of the boat, the barge bark, we couldn't get birch at that time was this brown paper then they had them all along the river and it was such a success with the kids he said stephen said why don't we build a big one so that's where it started and mr harman you've well first of all it's almost 5 30. are you okay we have like a couple more questions sure okay go ahead so you've talked about the canoe program the the maple syruping, the trout hatchery, and all of these programs that you helped cultivate which is amazing And obviously they all work together to create this kind of place of university school in the outdoors What signifies to you that the this outdoors at university school is healthy. When you look at the trout hatchery, the lake, the maple syruping, the canoes, what to you is indicators that this place is thriving and will continue to, I mean, the programs diving or the campus and the different, uh, the natural world is thriving.

Yeah. Um, It's challenged. We've had tree loss that could be explained by just natural attrition of forests. I mean, trees do die and fall down.

But we have no way to really know if it's a normal mortality of trees. We've already lost a tree, a key tree called the ash, which, by the way, is regenerating here from seedlings. The beech tree now is in trouble with this little nematode worm. And periodically other insects.

As long as we have globalization now, we're going to share pests with different places. And I'm sure Asia gets a lot of stuff from us. So the state of the forest is it provides a constant platform for studying the health of trees. Right.

Yeah. And, oh, as I said before, I would love to get some people going on soil chemistry and structure. It's a nice lab that you could tie into physics class and chemistry. So I see all of these outdoor projects as having really direct fingers into classroom experiences. and it's also a challenge to get teachers to find time and to see the things you see for research that would maybe enrich the class because his time or her time is valuable and it's short and they have to get a lot of stuff in and the more they have to get in from some other source, the more challenging it makes here. but to have a class come in here and hang around for half a day would be so great then it's time to ask questions they look around they want to see things but simply to walk in and then look at your watch and then run back has very limited impact so it has to be structured in by intention right it can't just happen automatically anymore it's not even as attractive it is for um you know who wouldn't like making maple syrup oh come on you know it's a lot of fun but this science aspect uh is something you got to work on to get teachers involved and what's one thing that you hope never changes about the way we treat this place because obviously the ecosystem will change the society will change with how we see things but what's one thing that you hope stays the same that will really keep this place thriving?

Well, one of the things working for us is the fact, again, the township we live in, Hunting Valley, they have a very extreme development code. You need at least seven acres. And most of the people that want or can have land here for dwelling appreciate this kind of environment, which is the forest and the rivers and the lakes. We know what happens when you urbanize the city.

The forests go, the features, the bulldozer fills the valleys and knocks off the hills. And so what I would see is that the clearing of this campus for organized sports and buildings would be held in trust as the limit that will allow the forest to maintain itself around the school. We also look for liaison with other people like neighbors that go along with our interests. Like we have tap trees on other people's property and we share the syrup with them.

That's a kind of neat thing. It kind of evolves. Somebody comes to our sugar house, oh I'm your neighbor, Oh, I got some trees. We have a thing called hitchhiking.

Hitchhiking is where a neighbor has several trees they want to get some sap from, but to boil away two buckets of sap is ridiculous. By the time you do it in a barbecue and by the time it's done, you have a little tiny bit of sap. So we call hitchhiking is the company, they bring in their sap and we have a chemical, it's called a sugar meter, we call it a refractometer. We can tell how much sugar is in the sap.

So we would say Joe comes from next door. He has a 3% sugar and he gave us 50 gallons. So we calculate from that how much syrup he would get. kind of cool you can do the math the kids can do the math with it and then at sugar time he comes he brings the sap you know maybe with a tank on his truck or whatever adds it to ours and then based on his um the reading so it's that kind of a business aspect he gets a share we get some of that from our for the school and he gets the rest for his house that's cool and like you talked about like those people that want to get involved in the outdoors with their trees and their maple syruping but just don't know there's I feel like there's a lot of kids at U.S. who are really in awe of this campus that we have but are just kind of it's too big to kind of go into and they feel like they don't know much what's your advice for someone who might think that they can't do it because they don't know something well you know the you know the act there's an activity all through the school year. You know, there's this, when the trees are out, just hiking through the extent of the property and wandering into neighbors' properties.

There's down the road here, the Ingalls property, which is huge. I never know when we're on our property or on theirs. There's kind of an unspoken, as long as you're just walking, you're not a threat to, you know, their properties or stewardship. And the more you know about the place, the more you appreciate it.

So I don't know any formal thing here, except please don't put more buildings on the existing forest, which means you cut more, which is the norm. Most people see land that like ours is waiting for development. That's a mindset that is hard to change. It goes into the economy.

Development means money for people, money for people developing, money for people who want to live on, you know, an apartment complex, something. So we're constantly trying to maintain a balance. And this goes for the whole country about why national parks? Why do we preserve large areas of natural beauty all across the country and treat them as inviolate, it's a trust.

Those were made because wilderness is important for mental health and emotional health of people. And here we would say that much of the property has the same quality as a national park. And it should be cherished as such. It's very valuable.

We should not cut trees for lumber because we don't have to. But we have to sustain a forest for students to grow and study. So the The most important thing is to keep the forest, study it, keep up with the challenges on the environment in it and the diseases that come. You know, Mr.

Herman, you've taught so many lessons to just a countless number of students. I mean, even me, I remember you teaching our kindergarten class about the kind of nature here at this campus. But, you know, many of the lessons that you teach about the outdoors and science, they've also a lot of the kids just like me have learned a lot of different life lessons. lessons just in general so if you could pass on just a lesson to everybody whether it's about the outdoors kind of just about students what would it be oh God Rob I there's so many things that this place uh uh has and that's the beauty of having a large tract of land and uh people who well trained and well conditioned to appreciate it can learn so many lessons here that help in their professions later after college and so forth. We do have people that have gone into professional environmental management based on some of the experiences they've had here.

Probably the most prominent one, his picture is hanging in the commons there, Doug Smith, who graduated here, I think in 1984. He became a biologist based on, he loved football and he also loved maple syrup and all the other stuff we did. We could do both then, we did both. He was both a football player and a sugar.

And he went to university and became, got his doctorate in biology, and he became the central biologist behind the restoration of timber wolves in Yellowstone Park. Now, I don't know if you know the story of Yellowstone, but the usual way since 1903 when the park was first, was to get rid of the predators, You know, shoot the wolves, shoot the puma. And then the park got overblossomed with bison and elk. They started over browsing the banks of the river.

So they saw by the 1980s that something needed to be done about the ecosystem, looking at the park as an ecosystem instead of just a great place to see geysers and keep the buffalo away. And so Doug and other biologists got together and started packs of wolves in Yellowstone by going up into northern Canada where they said, take all the wolves you want. They would follow a very expensive program. A helicopter would get onto a wolf pack and using a sedative gun, shoot, and the wolf would be down.

And then they would carefully bundle it up so we didn't have a problem with its metabolism. And then they'd bring it back to a staging area where it kept warm. So they built a pack that now is, I think the last was count was 13 packs in the park. And the result is the trees that were so minimized on the banks of the Yellowstone River were overcropped by over browsing elk.

Now the elk herd is under control. So the whole theory was when we got rid of the predators, like here as well, we had wolves, the deer become a problem. They over-browse. Browsing animals like bison on the prairie and the elk in the forest or the white-tailed deer here need a predator to keep it in control.

Here, they shoot them. I don't know if you know that. The park people, if the community feels they're over-browsing their bushes and everything, they'll have a hunt. You know, they'll announce that they're going to hunt and to control the herd.

So in Yellowstone, it's a natural system. The wolves serve that purpose. And right now, the census is that it's one of the biggest draws in the park is people come to see wolves. And they can.

You can see the wolves. Wolves now there are used to people. They are not a threat to people by any means. They have plenty of food. but you can go see them lounging on hillsides in the summer.

And that's kind of cool. So these are the things that a school like this can take. Doug Smith, Keith, let me see. Another man is in forestry.

He's a professor. Keith Canody graduated here in the 80s as well. He's, I don't know at what station, but he is at the University of New Hampshire, teaches in the forestry department. He loves trees.

He did a, his project here was trying to document record trees of their size. So he, every big tree he was doing, and sent this into Columbus or another receptor for that. He made that board over there that has the log in it behind the barrels. You see it?

Yeah, I do. There's an oak log inset in panels of wood. Each one of those panels is a piece of lumber that would have come from that kind of tree on the campus. And I'm sad it's in here.

It should be in the main part of the school to appreciate for us. And then on the log, the growth rings are quite evident. Another tree we have, which is down in the basement here, that was cut a few years ago. It's 48 inches in diameter.

It's over 200 years old. You may know a program they had up in the Redwood Forest where you document, And here's Genghis Khan, here's the birth of Christ, here da to the center way back So we that would uh you put a pin on growth rings you have maybe three colored pins red blue green red is for national history so what what was in the nation 250 years ago well you know it was just after the revolution so on each growth ring as you go back right and then the red then you have a legend on the wall you know bill of rights then you have state a green one for the state history then you have blue one for the u.s history that's what you know for the university school right yeah so those things are opportunities that's that was a project you know over 50 well 40 years ago and it's still not finished because it doesn't have the history marks on it and that could be up in the comments so we we have these things hidden away you know students have done a lot of things under this so there's two guys canody forestry uh doug smith uh wildlife that came out of this and you could say this must have had a big impression of. Connaughty was just on fire with maple syrup and then he got into general forestry in Maine. Now he's in New Hampshire, I think.

Anyway, this was great. You don't know who will come out of the population that is exposed to this stuff. And And in any level of primary or this school, it's so important for adults to signal appreciation of what the kids can see and experience. Certainly, you wouldn't want them to withhold experiences that influence their future.

So you guys should have a part in this by saying, what influenced you here to do these podcasts to influence people? Yeah, we all affect people one way or another. And this place is a great template for influencing people for good stuff. And so it's kind of a trust that the land that attracted location of the school in the first place, it was located because of the forest, that that forest isn't just looked at as a holding space for the next building.

So there will be people that promote more development, more fields for this. But we're at a juncture in history now. We're really getting a pushback against huge plans for more development of getting rid of national park security and all this stuff. We've got to maintain certain grounds.

And it's important for philosophy. It's important for emotional health. And it's important for just understanding people, too. You know, one of the things that obviously we think that you probably have thought about at this point is the future of just kind of your work with this, right?

You've worked with kind of the campus and outdoors and everything for just so long. So kind of the near future, what are you thinking about kind of how – My future? Yeah, is there any expansions for some of the programs here? Well, I'm at the end of my career. this is my you know this is my end up here I as everybody you know I'm on a timeline and I'm towards the end of mine and you're at the beginning so I was once where you are and then you will experience what I'm experiencing something so I would see that, you know, ideas, good ideas never die.

They'll, they'll fester somewhere. They'll be cherished somewhere and kept. Politically, we'll go again. We'll have some dark periods in history.

We always have. But this place has lived through, realized that university school has operated since the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, you name it. It's constantly been embroiled in a world that has leadership producers here that can influence the world for the better, and it has. It would be great to have somebody bring out the founders, and through each generation of students where they ended up to influence really favorable stuff in the world, not just the country.

For instance, this whole campus started with accompanying people from the Mathers. The name Mather, if you go downtown to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, You know that big ship that's sitting there? Do you ever see that? Yeah.

That's the William G. Mather. That's the name of the boat. It was a part of a fleet of ships belonging to Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company.

And Mathers, all the Mathers and a whole bunch of others, they were in Great Lakes shipping. Because when the school was founded, the ascendance of steel on the Great Lakes was very strong. And Cleveland housed at one time 13 steamship companies were offices here. One of the big ones was the Mather, the Pecans Mather, which is still around.

Pecans Mather owns iron mines in Minnesota and Michigan, and they have a fleet of ships to carry it to the mills. So it'd be interesting to do that kind of a podcast. These guys got together and formed this school in the first place down at Huff. and then each generation gets another. But none of them has had the forest like you guys.

And that's good. Well, Mr. Mark, we could go on forever, right? Yeah, we just have like two or three more questions.

Because when I think about like what my future may hold and I think about all the different things I'm interested in, right, It seems like you've kind of found your path as this is your thing that you've been able to make an impact on. What's your advice for me who's someone who has a lot of interest and doesn't quite know which interest to follow like you seem to follow? Oh, I can tell you by your own experience. When I was your age and I finished high school, I was not ready for college.

I could have gone to college right away, but I didn't. I got into a good university and I delayed admission. And then I went on the Great Lakes for two years on a steamer. I was a sailor.

And I learned, like you champion so many things about the outdoors here, I learned so much about the Great Lakes and about working with people in difficult situations. It was always changing. You're on open water. It's dangerous.

You have Edmund Fitzgerald's all the time on the Great Lakes. So it was a great education. So I would advise if you really don't have a good picture, go to at least to into a program like liberal arts. And the word by liberal, I mean, it considers everything.

It has a balance of courses. It isn't just getting a career in college. You're gonna be forced to look constantly at AI and all this stuff that is attractive now. It wasn't in the old days, but there are still classical classes that you need to become a person.

You need philosophy. You need religion. You need history. And these are not minimized by the fact that we've got so much electronic attractions.

So if you don't have a dedication to something that really attracts you to study broadly, don't just go after one one kind of course the whole idea of college is to experience as much as you can social sciences history not just and mathematics just basic math not applied to specific things not just all programming or all circuits in physics it's so and you can do that because once you get out of high school, you can pick your major courses, and you can work with somebody to get a blend of them that gives you more insight into what you want to do as a career. Maybe this stuff is great. A lot of stuff like this is in university where the podcast stuff. Okay, so that's my answer is, that's my advice to you, is don't commit to a career right away.

That's why it takes four years in college. Sometimes people don't get it until the third year. So the more you sample, the more basis you have for a good decision about your future. Well, Mr.

Harmon, we ask one question at the end of every podcast. I know you don't love talking about your legacy or your legend status at the campus. But one of the things that we talk about, no matter what guest it is, whether old or young, kind of do so many different generations. Our question that we always end with is, what is your why?

So as you kind of built the outdoor projects program, built the hatchery, built the maple shifting program, what is the thing that keeps you kind of going every single day? What is your why, Mr. Harmon? Well, you will see that yourself.

If you pick the right path in terms of your experience, your decisions about a career based on your personal experiences, which include readings and meeting people that impress you about living and your future. There's so much advice that old people are supposed to give young people. The times are changing so fast, you would say that the other side of it is old people can't really give you much insight into what you should do because it's so different than what they had. The main part is being human.

Being human and being open to new ideas is constantly charted out by old people to young people about being open to new ideas. So you can't help it in this age, especially with this computer age, not to be exposed to constant barrage of new ideas. But you have to filter them. The other one, the old ones were more, you'd meet people that had experiences that told you about them and that may have interested you.

Here you get an absolute bombardment of experiences from other people. So my God, I don't know. That's a bad question to ask old people. What would you do or what advice would you give?

Be a human being. Be charitable. Think about how many people don't have the advantages you and I do. And every day it's evident in the news how terrible parts of the world are to each other. and we've had that history here too.

And so don't duplicate it. Make decisions that help more than hurt. You know, make decisions that help more than hurt. And they always say, you know, these old adages, it's more satisfying to give than to receive.

Seek to help people rather than take from them. and that is given as the wisdom of ancients way back that when you do things for people it's much more fulfilling than simply just doing something for yourself so maybe looking for your career in college has something to do with some kind of service to people whether it's a fiduciary and finances you're smart in economics you know how to help people build wealth so they don't end up on the street when they retire. You know, these are real issues now. Imagine being homeless in this weather. You'd have to go to some shelter and you realize the extent of how many different kinds of people end up homeless.

It's not just people that made mistakes with drugs and booze. It can be circumstances that are just amazingly odd that people end up a bad financial situation that develop. So whatever profession you do, you're going to need to help somebody. And that should be, I guess, the main thing.

And then you'll be rewarded. I mean, And financially, with your backgrounds, you should be well rewarded, and it gives you actually the opportunity to serve others and get that satisfaction. Well, Mr. Harmon, it's been great having you on the show.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your stories and insights. Well, thank you for setting these things up. No, this is great. And then to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope you'll join us next Wednesday for the next episode of The Late Start Show.

Have a great winter break. Thank you, Mr. Harmon.