Tom Glowacki:                 Okay. We are recording. So today is May 25, 2025. We're in Roxbury, Wisconsin to interview Professor Walter J. Dickey as part of the Dane County Bar Association Oral History Project. "This interview is being recorded and transcribed and will be made available for people interested in the evolution and development of the practice of law in Dane County." Professor Dickey, do I have your permission to record you and have a transcript prepared?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 And you've already signed the release regarding this?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 Thank you. Could you give us your full name?

Walter Dickey:                 Walter Joseph Dickey.

Tom Glowacki:                 And where do you live now?

Walter Dickey:                 [REDACTED], Sauk City, Wisconsin.

Tom Glowacki:                 Just generally, what is your current family background?

Walter Dickey:                 I have one brother who's 81 and my other brother was killed at the World Trade Center.

Tom Glowacki:                 And are you currently working?

Walter Dickey:                 No.

Tom Glowacki:                 You retired?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 And when and where were you born?

Walter Dickey:                 I was born on November 11th, 1946 in the Bronx.

Tom Glowacki:                 Did you grow up in the Bronx?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 Where'd you go to high school?

Walter Dickey:                 Fordham Prep.

Tom Glowacki:                 And where'd you go to college?

Walter Dickey:                 University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Tom Glowacki:                 What got you all the way to Madison from the Bronx?

Walter Dickey:                 Well, the school I was at Fordham Prep strongly encouraged Catholic colleges and I wasn't having it.

Tom Glowacki:                 That was a Jesuit school, isn't it?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 Yeah, that'll do it to you. Where did you go to law school?

Walter Dickey:                 I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.

Tom Glowacki:                 And what attracted you to the law as a profession?

Walter Dickey:                 Well, my father insisted that his sons get a profession and my brother Bill got one and he eventually worked at Cravath, Swaine & Moore after he graduated from Columbia Law School.

Tom Glowacki:                 And besides the law, did you have interest in any other professions?

Walter Dickey:                 Not really.

Tom Glowacki:                 And while you were in law school, were you employed at all?

Walter Dickey:                 No. I worked for Frank Remington and Jim Jones as research assistant.

Tom Glowacki:                 Okay. Did you have family while you were in law school?

Walter Dickey:                 No.

Tom Glowacki:                 And looking back on your law school experience, are there any memorable classes, professors or classmates that stick out in your memory besides obviously Frank Remington?

Walter Dickey:                 Frank Remington was an outstanding faculty member and he guided me throughout my law school time.

Tom Glowacki:                 And when did you graduate?

Walter Dickey:                 1971.

Tom Glowacki:                 And did you have a job at the time you were graduating?

Walter Dickey:                 No, Mary and I had just been married and we decided to save our money and go to Europe and travel as long as it lasted.

Tom Glowacki:                 Doesn't sound like such a bad plan. Did you look into the possibility of a judicial clerkship?

Walter Dickey:                 No.

Tom Glowacki:                 Why not?

Walter Dickey:                 Frank Remington discouraged me from doing that. I think he thought it was a waste of time.

Tom Glowacki:                 So what did you do in terms of employment after law school then?

Walter Dickey:                 So I happened to discover the International Legal Center from Larry Church who visited several countries in Africa, and I applied to the International Legal Center and I ended up receiving a fellowship in Ghana.

Tom Glowacki:                 Just hold there for a second. Make sure this is working. It is. Okay. So what were your experiences in Ghana then?

Walter Dickey:                 Well, I worked for a body called the Ghana Law Reform Commission, and I was drafting statutes to modernize the law of Ghana. And I also taught part-time at the law school.

Tom Glowacki:                 Were there any changes in the Ghana government while you were there?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes. There was a coup on January 13th, 1972. And the leader of the coup raised in my mind doubts about whether I would be allowed to stay in Ghana. But the members of the Law Reform Commission were all very broad-shouldered people and they assured me that no, nothing would be changing.

Tom Glowacki:                 So how long did you stay in Ghana?

Walter Dickey:                 We stayed there for two years.

Tom Glowacki:                 And then did you return to the United States then?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 And did you find a job when you returned?

Walter Dickey:                 Well, eventually, Mary and I traveled out to the West Coast interviewing in Denver and in Palo Alto. And eventually, I ended up taking a job at the Dorsey Law Firm in Minneapolis.

Tom Glowacki:                 Do you have an area of specialization at Dorsey?

Walter Dickey:                 I was involved in litigation.

Tom Glowacki:                 Okay. What was Mary doing while you were at Dorsey?

Walter Dickey:                 She was teaching at a school for special students in... I can't remember the suburb.

Tom Glowacki:                 And how long were you at Dorsey?

Walter Dickey:                 I was there for one year.

Tom Glowacki:                 And you're smiling. What happened?

Walter Dickey:                 So we used to go for a beer after work on Friday afternoons. And I unfortunately started to bad mouth the structure of the Dorsey Law Firm, particularly with regard to secretaries. And I said "If I were a secretary, I'd come in and I'd not touch my typewriter on a Monday morning until the secretaries were treated better." And that resulted in my being called into Henry Halladay's office. He was the senior partner and the name of the firm was Dorsey, Windhorst, West & Halladay. So he took me to task for what I had said because it was a very anti-union place. They had represented the Northwest Airlines in the stewardesses lawsuit and it had resulted in a hundred million dollars in damages to the stewardesses in back pay because they were not being treated equal to the men who were employed by Northwest.

Tom Glowacki:                 So that made you unpopular.

Walter Dickey:                 Yes, it did.

Tom Glowacki:                 So what happened after Dorsey then? I assume you left.

Walter Dickey:                 I left, yeah. I left in, I think it was probably early '74 or must've been because I was only there for one year. It might've been, yeah, '74. And I came down to Madison and interviewed with Frank Remington for a place in the Legal Assistance to Inmates program. And I got the job. So I ended up being the director of the program after about a year or so there.

Tom Glowacki:                 And how did your career at the law school evolve from there?

Walter Dickey:                 So Frank insisted that in order to become a regular faculty member, you had to have published an article. So he and I collaborated on a piece about the legal needs of confined people, and that was crucial as was his support to my getting a regular faculty job.

Tom Glowacki:                 Hold that thought for a minute here while I check on this. No, we're good. We're still recording. And did you become a regular faculty member at the law school?

Walter Dickey:                 I did. I did. And the salary was $19,500 a year.

Tom Glowacki:                 Wow.

Walter Dickey:                 And this was in 1976.

Tom Glowacki:                 Yeah. That wouldn't have been a bad starting salary right out of law school back then?

Walter Dickey:                 No.

Tom Glowacki:                 Did you hold any positions on the law school faculty during your time there?

Walter Dickey:                 Yeah, I was the chair of the Retentions Committee. And in a controversial matter, there was a Mexican kid who was flunking out, effectively flunking out, and he appealed to the Retentions Committee and we turned him down. And that was not popular amongst the student body. And there are members of the faculty who also disliked the decision, but there were others who felt that it was necessary to maintain standards. I also was, at least for a couple of years, a member of the Tenure Committee and later when Cliff Thompson was the Dean, became a member of the Academic Planning Council.

Tom Glowacki:                 Okay.

*Break*

Tom Glowacki:                 Recording again here. And what did you teach when you were at the law school?

Walter Dickey:                 I taught criminal law and criminal procedure, and I was at least nominally the Director of the Legal Assistance Program.

Tom Glowacki:                 And when did you retire from the law school?

Walter Dickey:                 I retired in 2011.

Tom Glowacki:                 And besides your law school career, did you have any non-academic positions during your career?

Walter Dickey:                 I was the chair of the judicial council when we revised the homicide code, which had been left undone in the 1952 or three revision. And that homicide statute was held up in the legislature by people who thought abortion should be excluded from it or included in it. And we hadn't included it because by then the law forbade abortion. The other thing I did was I became the chair of the Athletic Board in about 2001 after having been a member of it for two, three years. And that led me to what turned out to be the next step in my journey here.

Tom Glowacki:                 Let's hold it there for a second. Let's go back over the non-academic stuff. You were also Secretary of Corrections, were you not?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes, I was.

Tom Glowacki:                 And how did that go?

Walter Dickey:                 That went with some difficulty. One of my big fears was having somebody die on my watch because the death of an inmate by suicide had led to the investigation of the riot that ensued.

Tom Glowacki:                 This is at Waupun?

Walter Dickey:                 It was at Waupun, yes. The investigation led me to connect to Tony Earl, who was then the governor, and Linda Rivetz, who was the Secretary of Health and Social Services at the time, and John Torphy, who chaired the committee investigating the riot. And one thing led to another, and eventually I was invited to, "Interview," for the job of being the Head of Corrections. And I wasn't interested in interviewing for a job, I turned him down. That is for the job interview. And then Torphy gave me a call and he asked me, "What is it you thinking of?" And I told them that I wasn't interested in interviewing for a job. If they wanted me, they could just appoint me.

                                           And that led to my appointment as the Director of Corrections in about April of that year. And then I moved between the law school and Corrections then at One West Wilson for there were may remainder of that semester. I was teaching criminal law and criminal procedure at the time. I eventually ended up relinquishing the directorship of the Legal Assistance Program. Ken Lund succeeded me, and one of the things we tried to be careful about was making sure there was no corrupt appearance with respect to the funding of the program because Corrections was chipping in a lot of dough for that program, for the program, and we wanted to avoid the appearance of any impropriety about it. I took over Corrections mostly about the summer of 1983. And one of the interesting things that happened to me was I fired the warden of Waupun, Tom Israel, who I'm told has recently died.

                                           Anyway, what Israel was doing was he had turned over concessions that is the inmate practice of buying goods in the commissary. And the commissary was very well stocked and he was careless about overseeing the inmate funds that accrued to them as a result of their selling the food and trinkets and stuff like that, that are part of the commissary. One of the reasons I ended up firing him was his lack of oversight of money. And the other thing really was I went up to visit him a fair amount and in a sense I got on his good side because he shared a lot of things with me he would not have shared with others. He was a very close to the vest guy. And as I said, I ended up firing him. John Torphy delivered the message.

Tom Glowacki:                 Good plan.

Walter Dickey:                 He was the Deputy Secretary of Health and Social Services at the time. One of the other things that happened when I was the Head of Corrections was Judge Dan McDonald died and he died in prison after he had been convicted of the murder of a lawyer in the town, the murder of the lawyer who beat him in his county election. And McDonald had effectively mouthed medication, and he ended up taking his own life and I called in his brother and McDonald's wife to talk about this, and I ended up telling them that he'd killed himself. That was a fairly trying moment.

                                           The other thing about Waupun was first of all, it was the centerpiece of the correctional system at that time. We built Columbia and opened it while I was in charge, and we also built Oshkosh and opened it while I was in charge. But the correctional system then was very different than I'm told it is now. All I know is what I read in the newspapers because I don't really have any contacts down there, in Corrections that is. Waupun was obviously the center of all things correctional and in the public's mind.

Tom Glowacki:                 I am glad this tape recorder is working. My tablet needs me to bump on it. Here we go, we're back in business.

Walter Dickey:                 As I said, the Waupun was the center of the public's view of the prison system at that time. Green Bay was another maximum security prison. Oshkosh was medium and Columbia was max. One of the things I vividly remember about my time in Corrections was we made a suggestion that we would downsize Waupun in an imitation of something the Feds had done that I had... Because there was a meeting of correctional administrators all from all over the Midwest. And one of the things, as I said, I was vividly remembering was the fact that this suggestion for downsizing Waupun led to a meeting in which I was shouted down by the citizens of Waupun at a public meeting. They didn't want any part of it.

Tom Glowacki:                 They liked the jobs.

Walter Dickey:                 They liked the jobs, yes. That's a vivid memory of mine.

Tom Glowacki:                 How long did you serve as Director of Corrections?

Walter Dickey:                 Four years.

Tom Glowacki:                 After that, did you have any other further employment opportunities in the corrections field?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes. I decided to write a series of articles called, From the Bottom Up, and I went around following parole agents and Darrell Kolb, who was then the warden of Fox Lake, and I wrote a series of pieces and put on seminars for parole agents about what I was finding and best practices.

Tom Glowacki:                 Then at one point you actually got something of a job feeler from the federal government, is that right?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes, I did. The offer, their interest was in the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but I was at a time in our family life that that was impossible. The call came from the White House originally, when Clinton was president and I was not in a position to move the family and that was out of the question.

Tom Glowacki:                 And back to the Athletic Board, you joined it in 2003, I believe?

Walter Dickey:                 I think so, 2003 or two or one.

Tom Glowacki:                 And then ultimately became chair of the Athletic Board, is that right?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 What work did that entail?

Walter Dickey:                 There's the budget question and there's also the compliance question. And the guy who had been the chair before me, Bruce Jones, was just out of control on the board and he had a few allies, Judith Harackiewicz, a psychology professor among them. And the compliance was a big part of what we were doing, and we obviously were intent upon following the NCAA rules. And I ended up going to Indianapolis, driving for an interview about our worry that we were not in compliance with a couple of the rules. And the result of the Indianapolis trip was that we were cleared of... Because the NCAA was then in Indianapolis most of the time.

Tom Glowacki:                 Then you ultimately took a job with the athletic department, is that right?

Walter Dickey:                 I did, yes.

Tom Glowacki:                 What was your job title?

Walter Dickey:                 My job title eventually ended up being Deputy Athletic Director, but I started out unwilling to go that far because Barry wanted me to be deputy right away and I oversaw compliance. Now, Katie Smith was the actual director of compliance and she was not a person of great confidence, and she needed a backup and I provided the backup. Then Sean Frazier eventually was applying for all kinds of overseer of athletics jobs, and he eventually ended up taking one at Northern Illinois, and I think he's still there. And that freed me to become the deputy because he had been the former deputy and he had tried to elbow the competition aside. In fact, one of the interesting things about Frazier was he appointed himself the acting athletic director when Barry was coaching the football team in a couple of the Rose Bowls. And because Bret Bielema had resigned, and as I said, Sean appointed himself the acting athletic director, and Barry went ballistic about that.

Tom Glowacki:                 Besides the Athletic Board, you were also faculty representative for UW?

Walter Dickey:                 Yes, I was faculty representative for the NCAA and the Big 10.

Tom Glowacki:                 And I guess rather than asking a lot of questions about Frank Remington, why don't you just explain Frank Remington and your relationship with him?

Walter Dickey:                 Frank was something of a father figure to me. He was dead set against my retiring and working for athletics because he thought it would eventually, "Corrupt me." But he was, as I said, a fatherly figure. But he eventually ended up dying after retiring. Two years after he retired, he died. And I think it was in 1998 he died. But because he retired in 1996 at the age of 70, and he was teaching part-time at the law school for the period of his retirement, but then he ended up having a stroke and dying. One of the things that I treasure about my relationship with Frank is he was a steady form of guidance for me in all things, even though I didn't take his advice about working in athletics.

Tom Glowacki:                 And I guess at this point, do you have anything else you'd like to say that we haven't covered?

Walter Dickey:                 Not really.

Tom Glowacki:                 Thank you for taking the time and sharing your experiences with me and anybody who listens to this in the future, we'll have a transcript prepared this interview and send it to you for proofing. And that'll be before it becomes part of the oral history project. And unless you have something to add, I'll just note that the time is now 10:48 and I'll shut off the recording.

Walter Dickey:                 Great. Thank you.

Tom Glowacki:                 Thank you. Appreciate it, Walter. I know it's been a pain to come back.

Walter Dickey:                 When I was overseeing compliance, there was a strict desire to adhere to the rules. Now the rules are gone by the wayside, and now that players, the kids are being paid, apparently there's going to be about a $2 billion settlement in the case that's going to end up in dividing money up to pay past kids. That's not the way I was brought up.

Tom Glowacki:                 Thank you.