Transcript of interview by Ms. Heather Moore and Ms. Boni Carey of Mrs. Laura “Grams”
Tyron, Pennsylvania
March 14, 2004
Heather Moore: We’re doing research on women who lived in the twentieth century and putting the interviews up on the web to provide firsthand sources to researchers on women’s history, if we have permission from the women we interview. Like Boni told you I am particularly interested in the grenade testing part of your life.

Laura Grams: Well it was during World War II, and of course I was head one over there. We made had hand grenades now we didn’t do the whole thing.
(Background noise and thanking of Boni’s family for coming over for lunch that we all had before the interview as they leave)
To get back to what we were talking about, we didn’t complete the whole hand grenade. Now the gadget-stem. The stem that was put in there, I never had one that came back that I tested. I never had one. But we have to watch we tell for what we did, if you know what I mean, because it might be World War II and my daughter, Ellen, at that particular time I was carrying her. Ellen would be living she would be 58 years old right. I’m 89. So I have to watch what I say because when I took what I did, I had to sign my name. But what is most important that you would like to know?

HM: There’s a couple different areas I might take with my paper and one of them was talking about the differences in family life through the women and the opportunities they have had. I was wondering if you could tell me some about growing up as a woman and the opportunities you have had and seen open up.
(Some talk to Boni about papers)

LG: Actually, my life is different than the kids are today growing up. I came from a family of 12, a family of 12. I had three brothers in World War Two, two brothers. And if you want to know as far as life, my daddy runs coal mines, that’s what he did. At 15 years old I came over here to Tyron. And I went down to school Birmingham (an all-girl’s school about 10 miles away next to the river). That wouldn’t be any thing for you, I don’t think so. But then I did nursing, for older people. That was for my life. Even after I was married I did still done that type of work. I done forget about it, Boni (daughter of Ellen-thus Grams’ granddaughter) don’t know too much but if Laurie (Boni’s older sister by 14 years) was here she could tell you. And then I went to the war plant. I was over there from the time it almost opened until the day that Ellen was born October the 7th and the day before that things were settled with the war. See what I mean? Outside of that I have to watch what I say. If you were to say to me, ‘do you remember all you done for them hand grenades’ I don’t believe I could. Because it’s one thing after things are over that you almost dismiss it you know from your mind. But we had three floors over there. I imagine there might have been four or five hundred over there at the war plant. It’s not even over there anymore. They tore that down when I-99 went through.

HM: Four or five hundred women?

LG: Oh no, there were men too. Not too many men; not too many men.

HM: It was mostly women?

LG: I’d have to say more so the ones that done the firing, plumber, maybe making different chairs. They weren’t a chair, more like bench that a lot of people who run machines could put their feet up on it. In fact my husband when he got laid off he went over and he got a job almost right away because he could do almost anything. Of course, I don’t have my husband anymore now. But it was more women-from over the mountain: El Tuna (southwest), Bellwood (right before El Tuna, southwest), Osceola (over the mountain in the north), Warriors Mark (east between Tyron and State College). All those places was over there. There might have been even more than 500 because there was three floors.

HM: So it wasn’t like city women but country women?

LG: I would have to say country women. Yes, I’d have to say that.

HM: Did they live at the plant or did they live like…?

LG: Like I said….

HM: Did they commute in?

LG: Well a lot of people come from Lewistown (East). In fact, Mr. Rowhan, I don’t think Boni even remembers him. He was one of the bosses and he was from Huntingdon (Southeast). We had some fine people over there. I think we all loved one another.

Boni Carey (helper): Did they have to move over here or did they have to drive back and forth?

LG: I’d say they drove. I know they drove from over home, I came from Sandy Ridge, I wasn’t born and raised over here (Tyron). A lot came from Saltburg (doesn’t exist anymore), Osceola, Eton (near Bellfont area northeast), Delta (near Hunningdon), Sandy Ridge (north), and I’d have to say Huntingdon, Lewistown, El Tuna, Bellwood, Grazierville (between El Tuna and Tyron). They came from all around because at that time work was really bad but yet a lot that had went to the service still some of the people couldn’t do what they did. You know what I mean? I have to say that I have, oh yeah. And the stores down in Tyron at that time, golly you could go down there and buy just about anything. You go down there today and you wonder what you’re going to buy because so many of them have closed up. They can’t, these malls and stuff have taken over. They’ll say shop Tyron, and I’ll say what are you going to shop for? They have a shoe store and that lady I can’t think of her name, Maryanne, she has a shop there where the old bank building is right there at 10th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. And when they took Ames out, they took another good store out-Family Dollar. They took that out and put it up where my brother is at Colonial. Actually, there ain’t hardly anything really. At the time of WWII, heavens they had anything and everything down there-shoe shops, dress shops, suit shops, anything and everything you name it. But actually Tyron is just getting to be like El Tuna, and over home at Sandy Ridge and down through there. Malls (North) is taking over. Now you take, Penn State, now you know State College, people go over there that live over home. I always call Sandy Ridge, over home because that’s where I was born and raised at. I could write a book. I really could, of my life. I could write a book.

HM: Well I’m willing to listen. That’s what I’m here to do.

(Mumbling of lots of noise of everyone laughing at me)

LG: Well whatever you want me to tell you, I’d gladly tell you. But really and truly, if I had to choose from today and my life growing up, I’d still take my life growing up. Because, today there’s nothing to look forward to. And as you’re growing up you have something to look forward too-you think of meeting somebody, getting married, and having your family and what you’re going to do and so on. You don’t hear that too much anymore.

BC: Not really.

LG: A lot don’t even bother getting married. In fact just like Matthew (Boni’s cousin) here, him and his girlfriend lived how long Bon.

BC: Ummm, about a year.

LG: About a year or so.

HM: Now that’s something that’s very much Boni and mine’s generation though, that’s not something that you really saw before right?

LG: Oh NO. Matthew, what’s the name of the girl he went with before, what was her name?

BC: Abby?

LG: No not Abby, before that. I can’t think. Well, thank god they didn’t live together. They might as well have, they were always together. He graduated up here at the high school. There’s just so much of it and I just don’t know.

BM: Well, you got married pretty young didn’t you?

LG: Me, I was married in October and 19 in January.

HM: That’s very young. I mean, both my grandparents got married at 19 and my grandmother told me later once my grandfather passed away, she’s passed away and Boni and Dan (Boni’s ex-boyfriend) were the ones there when I actually got the news, that she was so happy that she got to try, and it was the first time she was on her own and she was so happy that she got to do things on her own finally. Do you ever have that feeling?

LG: Well I suppose down the line, yeah I supposed I did. I did.

HM: But you don’t regret the decision to get married young do you?

LG: Oh no. No no no no no. You know, my mother had a slogan, and I had one of the dearest mothers-in-law that anyone would ever want Mother Simple*-god bless her. She say to you ‘You know Laura, you don’t really know a person until you get married and live with them.’ Truer words were never spoken. You’ve heard of people, I could name a lot of people really, that say ‘You know Laura, if your mother said it and Mother Simple said it, then it’s true.’ You know you could go with a man for two years and never really know them but once the day you get married you really start to know them. I’ve had ones that when I was at Birmingham School, some of the girls at the schools that came from the South, all around, New York City, Mexico, and you know it. I forget how many nationalities is down there. And talk, talk, talk but you never heard one of them ever say something about going with someone. When they had their graduation parents were there, sisters and brothers but you didn’t see anybody else. No, I don’t know how many would be down there today. Four of us, my sisters and I, all worked and stayed down there. Lovely, lovely people but I don’t know. Just like my oldest boy, Merle, him and Faith got married early and their life was just like this (crosses her fingers) until they parted. They had two girls and three boys, is what they had. She went her way and the others went and stayed with my son out at Bald Eagle. That’s just the way things go. Why, you take Freddy and Gloria, look at how long they were married when you think of it. They had a trailer out here and the chemical.

HM: So when you were growing up there weren’t that many divorces?

LG: No, there weren’t any like that. But when they parted she wanted to go her life and didn’t want no family. She said I still love you but I want me own life. And she went over to state college and got into a mess and that was it.

BC: Why do you think people get divorced more now then they did back then?

LG: Oh yes, Boni.

BC: But why do you think so?

LG: I don’t know. I can’t answer it. You see a lot of young people don’t want to hear ‘you go to church’ (they respond) ‘oh I don’t go to church. I haven’t got time for that. I sleep in on Sunday morning.’ That’s some of the things I used to hear but one wants to go to church and the other don’t want to go to church. Well if you don’t wanna go then I ain’t going to church and that’s the way things start to go. Now, Gloria, Fred’s Gloria now, she never once went to church and Freddy he went to Grace Baptist. But young people today don’t give a. You take Matthew, he was brought up going to church. But when he started going with, she didn’t go so Matthew didn’t go. Well you aren’t going to tell a 17 year old that you have to go or you won’t be in my house. No, Fred’s not like that because Freddy is a person who believes that one of these days he’ll find out that dad’s right and his mother is right and he’ll start to go. I say to him ‘Matthew why don’t you go to church anymore?’ ‘Well Tanda doesn’t go.’ Yes but she’s responsible for herself and you’re responsible for yourself. I ain’t saying that you can’t go to heaven if you don’t go to church because that’s a building but I try to answer them the best I know how. But all of us has our own lives. If you don’t go to church I ain’t saying you don’t belong to the lord. You can’t answer that, you don’t know that. You read your bible and say your prayers and so what that’s all god almighty wants. But you’d be surprised at the answers I get from Matthew. I never once said anything to Tanda because it’s none of my business what they do. So, I do like her.

HM: So you’ve seen the decline in religion throughout the years. Well, people doing religious activities (Boni interrupts)

BC: Well back in your day, the social place to go would be church, like if you wanted to meet a nice man, and now that’s changed?

LG: Oh you said a mouthful. That’s right. Yes yes yes. I lost two brothers and two sisters in my family. I’m not bragging but we was a wonderful family. We always stuck together.

HM: Now, I’ve noticed up here you guys are all close like Boni’s cousins came over and you’re down the street from Boni’s house. Is that, do you think a lot of the social mobility and the women getting involved in the work force is maybe why a lot of things have changed on the family stuff?

LG: Oh yeah, so many of the people you talk to would say ‘I used to do that, I used to do that’ (nickname stuff left out). What would you do do do do do. I can’t say I’d do that same thing or I’d do what they want to do. You can’t answer that. They ask you something and you know deep down in your heart that you don’t want to hurt their feelings you you’ll say ‘well whatever the lord led you to do.’ Well there’s nothing you can do and sometimes that don’t answer the question. Oh, I don’t know.

BC: Do you think that back when you were growing up, the mom stayed at home and took care of the kids, like you were talking about earlier today (over a lunch discussion arguing about home work being work or not work because it wasn’t paid-McClurken I won thanks to help from your class last semester) do you think the reason there are more divorces and a decline in religion is because women work more then they used to?

LG: Yes I do believe that Boni. My bible tells me where a woman is in the home my bible tells me where the daddy, not the father we only have one father (lesson on the father son and Holy Ghost being one in the same), that’s your husband talked about in the bible. Today it seems, hey Boni this goes a way long way back (Boni was shaking her head no). Seldom did you ever see a woman go to work. Now she’s obligated to go help a neighbor when she had small child who came to the hospital but I mean go to the factories and work, go, go, go do these things. I don’t know Boni. But I do know one thing people were more happy and contended when they were in the home. When you get out and get around the people of the world, you get around all kinds of people. Some people are easily led and some aren’t. See what I mean? Then sometimes the husband and wife cast some confusion. I work and I’m going to do what I want to do with my money you can do what you want to do but we have to pay the bills. So she give in and down the road he needs money and he lets her pay all the bills. This is the stuff I hear and it’s all true. Merle, (her husband not her son who has the same name) now I had a wonderful husband Boni knows that, he never once ever asked me for my money. Never and I worked up there at the school for 14 and a half years. Never, never, (he said) I’m the head of the house I’ll pay the bills if you want to get this or that for in the home. And that’s what I did. I didn’t go splurging. I didn’t go out and buy a lot of clothes and stuff like that. I’m not like that. But that’s not the way it is today. I can name quite a few people you’d even know that they refuse to give any of their husbands any of their money. This is what is sad, if the woman is willing to go and work for maybe too for their home and work together. I don’t see one thing wrong with that, really I don’t. Because they both are wanting to get a home and get it fixed up not go get everything elaborate. I mean down to earth people. But some many times I hear ‘You know Laura, I work and all and I get the groceries and he thinks I ought to do this and that and he wants something like hunting, he wants to go fishing, he wants to buy this or that. Well I’m taking my money this time.’ The next thing they start going in the hole. And then their credit is no good. Well that spoils for her as well as for him. So many people and couples are like that. (Story about John a neighbor and his wife.) I hope I’m not talking too much.

HM: Oh, no not at all. I had a question, umm, on relationships with other females. The major way you met people and did social things was with churches when you were younger, if I understood right. Could you talk some about the social ties with the women maybe growing up and in the factory and such?

LG: Well, our family had to go to church. We loved to go to church. The more older we got the more we did. When I was fifteen I came over. I stayed with my Aunt Gerdie, that was my mother’s sister’s daughter. And they were good Christian people and I just have to thank god in my younger life that I could go to my Aunt Gerdie’s and I was there until I was 18 years old. Whenever I started to go with Merle, I was always involved in Church work-the youth for Christ and all that because it was the life I always prayed that I wanted. I didn’t want to do something to be sorry for. A lot of times in my life and growing up they really didn’t have the things then like they do today like football games, baseball games-they had baseball places over home but nothing elaborate. What we knew was to go to school; like I told Forrest (Boni’s nephew) no it was Matthew, ‘when did you have to go to school Grams’. We had to go to school for nine o’clock we can get out at twelve o’clock back at one o’clock and out at four o’clock. That was the way our school was, we had good teachers. They could be mean but they had room to do it sometimes because sometimes the older ones would try to be smart. That’s growing up I know that. As far as my life is concerned, I have to say I had a good life; I had a wonderful life (explains life as a roller coaster with her hands). I’ll never forget it, when I got married I said you know something in ‘38 I’ll go housekeeping, I was right here in this home. From the time I was married in ‘34 until I had my oldest boy, Bud-god love him, and we built this house over here, I don’t mean this one right here (right out the window) it’s the one ‘long side it, but Boni knows which one I mean.

HM: Ok.

LG: But my husband’s a carpenter, plumber, you know it he could do it and he worked the paper mill over here. So I went to housekeeping, well then Dad Simple, Merle’s dad, he heard about this farm, you know over where the Sportsmen (apparently some sort of bar as I would find out later on in the visit) are Boni, the one by Bald Eagle. Well I always liked farming. I liked to be where there’s a garden, have trees, and all that. Well me saying that and Merle liking that, Dad Simple he went and bought it. He was an engineer on the railroad. He drove trains of course when they got the other kind that didn’t need no firemen he got a big metal because he had been there 14 years. Dad Simple built this house, well he had men that built it. Well anyway Dad Simple come over and he say ‘honeygirl, you like farming and you like being out in the country’ oh he named all these things and I didn’t know what he was getting at and he said ‘it’s very nice out there and I bought it and you and Merle can do you what to do the place is yours. If you want to I know someone who would love to have your house here.’ My heart went clear down like this (points to stomach). You can talk about something but you don’t know if you’re going to experience it or not. But just as one didn’t I didn’t. I liked my little home here. So Mother Simple-god bless her I couldn’t say enough of that dear soul, she said ‘well dad and I’ll try to come out anytime we can when we can when he has a day off or even on the weekends.’ I wouldn’t have hurt that woman life for the world. If I had to go down to the valley of death I would that’s how much I thought of that soul. Well, we were out there not over two years and then Merle’s brother and we had Bud and we were out there and I tell you I got so homesick so lonely and I often say all I hear is “cow’s balling” or something like that. You just couldn’t see nothing. Dad Simple come out and say honeygirl I hope you like it out here, of course it was in the summertime it made a little bit of a difference. But when it came winter, things got down and Merle and Harry went over to Sandy Ridge brickyard, there’s two brickyards there-Sandy Ridge and Brictot. Well all night long Bud and I was there all by ourselves because they went to work. I hated it then worst yet. So I had next thing to a breakdown and I had to tell Merle then I said ‘well dad I can’t take this’ and he said ‘no, I could see it and my mom said so too.’ So Dr. Greenday said ‘it’s nice to have something like that but if you were there it’d make a big difference.’ So I said, “Oh lord” and I cried out to the lord many times. Dad Simple had an apple tree out here and Dad Simple-god bless him-said he’s going to hand pick them apples and then laid them up. Well Mom Simple said be careful. Well he got on the stepladder and he was a big man and he fell and he broke his hip.

HM: Oh no.

LG: He said he wanted to see me. He said Laura would you do me a favor, I never let on to him that I hated it out there but I think Merle might have told him, he said would you move back in with mom and help mom. And I was happy as a lark. So at a snap of her finger we sold that and gave dad Simple all the money that he had put it back in the bank. I was a different girl, but I came back in home and had to store all my furniture. So that was one thing I was let down of course but I went to housekeeping after Dad got on his feet. We moved out but things didn’t go right in the home. Dad Simple got sick and next thing you knew Merle said that his mom wanted to see me. And we moved back home. I just had Ellen. (Talks of the shadow and mountains in the path the lord makes.) That dear soul said to me, I hate to ask you I’ll get rid of my stuff I really will if you will come in with me. So I did. So then we bought the house, not out of my money it was Merle’s money. And we paid Mother Simple for the house but see that was most of my life. But you know it’s wonderful to sit back and think Lord I’m glad you used me. You used me sometimes I didn’t like you down through the valley and so on like that. But it makes you stronger.

HM: Now did you have a lot of female friends that came and visit you?

LG: Oh not out in the country.

HM: But here?

LG: Oh my yeah.

HM: Were they through the church group?

LG: Yeah.

HM: Did you guys do a lot of social functions?

BC: Grams use to hold church here. Didn’t you used to have church here?

LG: Yes I had church here for quite awhile, right here in my living room. I did, down at Grace Baptist when our preacher left. Why we couldn’t keep things going down there and actually we built that because we sold it to I couldn’t even tell you the guy’s name he’s from El Tuna. So we met right here and I looked forward to it. And then some of the people couldn’t come when it was winter (it’s at the top of a steep hill). So we moved down to Olive Johnson’s down there on Lincoln Avenue. Then I started going to church on Adam’s Avenue. It’s nice to have friends. If you don’t have friends, I think have an awful life.

HM: Now what kind of activities did you guys get together and do?

LG: I’d have to say we shared in things in the Bible. Just like we’d say let’s get into the book of Revelations. But before that mostly what we’d do is in the Old Testament. Because when you go through the Old Testament you life almost goes like this from what you came through yourself. So now we’re not living in the past now but yet we still have to go back to the Old Testament to know what will face us. To know what is coming now, know what I mean? (List off people that can relate) When we talk about things going wonderful the bible tells us when you think things just going wonderful, I’ll put it in words you’ll understand one of these days it’s just gonna back up. And one of these days it is. (rotated the tape during which time Grams moved on to explaining bad things…) kill all the cattle because they didn’t have the grain to feed them, so they are looking for work looking for work there’s so much shooting and killing, and so on rape you know it. So much of it. So what do you do? You cry out to the lord all the more because you can almost put your own self just like that train wreck. Look at the people that got killed. Out there last week, there were three trains in Spain and last night I heard 190 people had died and they don’t even know about the rest of them how they’re gonna live or not gonna live. See what I mean? These things have to happen because the bible says so. See what I mean?

BC: When you were little, what did you and your friends do when you got together? Like when you were growing up?

LG: What do you mean?

BC: Did you go shopping or?

LG: Shopping, no Boni when I was a kid the only time I went shopping was with my mom when she went down to Osaola to get her groceries.

BC: What did you guys do?

LG: We had no stores over home. Only grocery stores and the butcher shop, that’s it.

HM: Did you guys get together and do things like I guess they would be called home economics things now? Like….

BC: Cooking or sewing. What did you guys do for fun?

LG: What did we do for fun? All we knew Boni, wash up the supper dishes, go to the dinning room do our homework, and go to bed. We had jacks, we played a ball-not football just a ball, and during the summer time we had mud hole. And if the boys got there before the girls, the girls had to come back. The girls down there we’d chase the boys away so we could go swimming (laughing).

HM: So it really wasn’t boys and girls together doing activities?

LG: Oh no, never. I never even had a bathing suit when I was a kid back home. We put on a top, you know like a shirt over, and our underwear. I never had a bathing suit until I came down to Aunt Gerdie’s.

BC: What did you guys do for dates?

LG: Boni, really and truly we girls would get together and the boys if the boys had a birthday or if there was a baseball game. We’d all meet down where they played baseball, Tyron used to play over there. Bellwood use to play over there. Phislburg played there. Osceola use to play there. Eden and Osceola I believe came in together. But really we had no arc lights. What I mean, when our daddy whistled we knew to go home because nine o’clock you were in bed. That was our life. And it was a good life.

BC: What about when you and Pap, like when Pap was courting you, when you started seeing Pap what did you guys do when you and Pap got together-like would you go to the movies or…?

LG: Well I was never much of a movie person. More so we’d go to someone’s house with at about that time the TV was just starting to come in.

BC: That’s right you didn’t have the TV.

LG: So therefore we didn’t have a lot. All we had was radio. So sometimes we’d dance or we’d sing or we’d go for a ride. Sometimes, I’ll tell you one thing.

BC: But Pap used to hitchhike to come visit you on the weekends.

LG: Then he’d have a ford roadster and I’d have to take him home because he’d be plastered. He was tired. Then your grandpap had a sandbank down here towards Fort Matilda. And they didn’t go there to work because of the hot hot sun and they were down in a hole. And I used to go down there in the evening while he was working because I wasn’t the racing down there. And the other ones had their wives. Boni, we didn’t have nothing like you guys, nothing. We didn’t even have a radio at home until I would say I might have been 13 or 14 years old. I’ll never forget the name of it-Water Kent. You don’t even hear of it anymore.

HM: Now was there always someone else when you guys got together, like group dating? I mean, it’s not like when Boni and I go out, we go out with one guy and we might go out to dinner but it’s just me and the guy it’s not like a group. Was it more of a group setting?

LG: …we would get together on the porch and sing and play jacks; there was nothing else to do. Nothing else to do. Then once in a while go out. I never really cared too much for the movies, now they had movies two of them down there: El Patio and Mitcho. None of us would ever think about going to a movie. We’d sit there and swing and sing and something like that. There’s so many things the kids do today that we didn’t because we weren’t allowed to in plain words. Whenever come ten o’clock you were off the porch. It was suppertime because Uncle Herb had to go to work and Aunt Gerdie she done a lot of baking for people she wanted to help out and I’d help Aunt Gerdie.

HM: Now was that another thing that was really common up. I grew up in city and my mom grew the backwaters of Tennessee but moved a bunch and my grandmother talked about it before, is it something that was common if one woman got sick or was in childbearing or just had a child or pretty far along, did you all get together and do the baking and different activities?

LG: Oh yeah. Oh yes indeed.

BC: Grandma helped out.

HM: Even with the housecleaning and such?

LG: Wherever I felt I was needed. They would call and I’d hear about this or that and I was there. I just had Bud at the time and Mother Simple was here to take care of him. I was over at (list of neighbors) I worked for people. Not they didn’t pay me. You’d go there and oh we have to give you something, we appreciate that. But you know you’d felt better by not taking it because you were doing them a favor. But you don’t do that with a lot of people. You didn’t dare walk out of some houses without taking money. (Short story of a neighbor that paid her but she asked to not include the story). We grew up that way to help people. You don’t help people to get always paid. Sometimes they didn’t have but they’d take their last cent to pay you. I’d sooner have my life than what some of these are today. There are so many girls and so many fellows that I just don’t understand them.

HM: Now would you say a lot of it has come from, well you didn’t have a lot of the media because you said you didn’t like to go to the movie but would you say a lot of it has to do with as women got the right to vote, as women did the equal rights movement and as they become more public figures it took the toll?

LG: I don’t know how to answer that honey. It’s something people have to almost speak for themselves because I don’t think I could answer that. Because I would be putting myself ahead of them because if that’s the way they think that they want it I can’t speak for them. You can’t hardly, I could talk to you two here and say this or that but down the road you don’t know the other person would feel. You can’t hardly speak something like that for how they feel. I’ve often heard people say ‘since people doing this and people doing, women outdoing men, women want the vote, and the right to be that, and look to be that.’ I never ever expected a woman to ever want to be the president. You know what I mean? I hear people say so and so would be a better president then this man. I think the world and all of Bush because he belongs to the lord and he’s not afraid to pray and he’s not afraid to ask the lord in front of thousands and thousands of people because he knows who he goes to, to get his answers. Know what I mean? But they went on about Clinton, all I heard was what was on TV when he was in for president. Was it true what he did, can you prove it? No you can’t prove it. Maybe some people can. But you have to watch you say about the other person because you aren’t in that person’s shoes.

HM: That’s true. So would you say the women’s movement affected your life a lot?

LG: Say that again?

HM: The women’s movement: like getting the right to vote and moving outside the home and jobs and stuff. Would you say that affected your life a lot?

LG: No.

HM: No, like the factory and teaching and did a lot of work at home with growing up with the kids. And that’s something you would have done even if the women’s movement hadn’t happened?

LG: Oh sure that’s true. Yup. Sometimes you hear people talk about life being like a bouquet of flowers. Well at first it might have felt like dandelion but as you get older the good lord puts you through something to let you know that he carries you through that but you’s on better ground then you thought you were. See what I mean? That’s right. If we get down through the trials and tribulations we learn a lot. We think we don’t. But when He puts you down through those trials and tribulations and brings you up, you have to thank him because it draws you closer to the lord. I’ll tell you honeygirl, Mother Simple was a bleeder, a hemophiliac, so was Dad Simple. That dead soul that I speak so highly of laid five of her children that bleed to death, laid them out, they didn’t have funeral homes like they do today. Right here where this window is the whole five of them laid.

BC: I didn’t know that.

LG: Now I don’t know nothing about it but I know through Mother Simple.

BC: Were they able to go to the hospitals?

LG: They didn’t have hospitals then.

HM: She survived through the pregnancies and stuff even without. Is that something you saw a lot of as growing up at the rate of survival?

LG: My oldest boy Bud was a bleeder, so was her mother (Boni’s mom) a bleeder. I never saw so much blood in all my life as I did in my younger life. Merle bleed, Bud bleed, Ellen bleed, Mother Simple bleed, Dad Simple bleed, my sister bleed, Peg bleed. I never in my life saw so much. I have taken my boy, he was bleeding so bad and we had a doctor. The doctor said the only thing I can tell you to do is chill him, we had to put him in cold water. That dear little boy at that time was only two or three year old. You go to bed at night and you wonder if they are ok, are they not bleeding. That’s the life that I went through because we didn’t really realize and know what they know today about bleeding. Now this might sound silly to you but it’s the god’s truth some dear person at one time told Dad Simple done all them years down on the railroad as an engineer, he’d get nose bleeds, his blood was too thin. So this one dear man, he says did you ever hear of taking a chunk of bacon and you use the fatty part and make what you can put up your nose and it’ll stop. Dad Simple had his fat meat, when my husband went to work he had his fat meat. Well you do what you have to. You make a plug then Bud would cry so if we tried to do it to him…. He grew out of it. I know it was an answer to prayer. I can’t say I never doubted because that would be a lie. I’ve see so much blood in the Simple’s it was something else…But that dear soul laid five children out in a little casket right here. And Bud, the oldest boy, when Mother Simple passed away she was here and my oldest boy crawled up and got alongside her in the casket. Now that almost kills you. Now the road was pretty rough a long time ago but the good lord has been along.

HM: So you think the change of moving funerals to funeral homes has been a better change for family life or just a change?

LG: I don’t know the funeral was right here. Mother was right here. The Reverend took care. Dad Carey was right here. I could write a book. But it was a good life. (Lord valleys again) And that was my life and if I had to go through it again maybe I could go through it stronger than I am today because I remember. You expect more when you’re younger. Heck those things happened to us in the ‘20s. (Talk of Bud growing out of bleeding by 16).

HM: The biggest determining part of your life would say religion or being a mom?

LG: Trusting in the lord.

HM: I don’t think I have anymore questions. I just like to sit and listen.

BC: Same here that’s why I choose to stay around.

HM: But you choose to be a mom?

BC: You were really active in your kids’ lives.

HM: But stay at home moms now aren’t as active in the kids’ lives usually. Now did you experience any sort of like community not liking the fact that you stayed at home, or not like the women that went to work, or was there different views?

LG: The thing of it today is that you can’t hardly speak for anyone. We’re in a different generation. The girls of today, they talk, young ladies, they talk. We choose when we got married that we were going to be with our families. So when we heard of a girl in our church we’d go help them. We were always the person behind the kids growing up. Mom always sent one of us girls out to help. That’s how we were brought up to help. We had a big home in Sandy Ridge. My dad run coal mines and all. It was a good life. But today we didn’t have a lot of clothes or jewelry or anything like that, like today. I had to laugh one day out at Laurie’s I said towels, towels, towels. We had a washstand with a rod that went across it and we had a big bowl and a pitcher. Now you’re gonna say what are you talking about?

HM: I’ve actually seen them.

LG: When we took our bath my mom carried the water up and dumped the water in and we’d take a bath. Same way with the boys. The boys was on one side and the girls was on the other side of our home. When we were kids growing up we had one towel a week and that’s the truth! A wash rag and towel then we had a towel for our butt. I don’t know about out Kohl has to have one towel here and one towel and one around here.

HM and BC: (Laughing) I use two.

LG: How can a towel be dirty if you laid it up over the rod and dried, your body was clean? I do like to have two washrags I will say that. Another thing we had a laugh about is underwear. Well maybe three times out of the week not every day did we have to change our underwear, nope because we didn’t have that many. Same with socks we wore socks maybe two days then we’d get a new pair. That’s the way it was. We didn’t have clothes where every day we could change all our clothes. No. We wore aprons.

BC: You had to have had work clothes.

LG: At home we had aprons. We had cook stoves and a furnace.

HM: Cook stoves are the ones you brought the wood in right?

LG: Yeah.

HM: The biggest thing I remember about the cook stove is that women now had to make multiple parts to the meal no more just potatoes and meat for dinner every night. (Laughing)

LG: Yes. We had a furnace too.

HM: Now was it the women’s chore to do the fuel?

LG: Now my daddy brought up the coal. We had a big coal thing outside. People didn’t steal stuff like they do today. You could put anything out in the yard and it’d be there tomorrow. Now we had big aprons we’d put on when we went to the table, wash dishes or whatever we had to do. Well these days young girls don’t ever think about an apron. Therefore we saved our clothes. And I sure that I got clothes up there that aren’t even dirty, well wash it anyway. We wash things to death these days. Today we live in a different, different world. I would still choose mine. I wouldn’t want to live my life over because it was a good life. Growing up you’d see kids getting this and that and we couldn’t get this or that but it’d make us stronger and appreciate what we did get.

BC: Well Grams you have a lot of skills that I have no clue. You know how to cook, how to sew-she still has the old sewing machine, the pedal one.

HM: Cool, I don’t think I could coordinate that. All I think I could do is push the petal and the needle goes, the crank thing is too much.

LG: (Laughs at Boni and I)

HM: Well that’s all stuff that was taught at school or home or what?

LG: Oh I learned that from my mother.

BC: Wasn’t it essential to day to day?

LG: We had a bench, our table, we had a big kitchen.

BC: Well you had twelve kids and two parents.

LG: Now when my mother went to bake, which was every week. My mother on a Saturday morning is when she’d start her baking. But you’d bake bread twice a week, homemade bread. Greta and Laura and Dora would sit in the back there and the other kids would be standing. Now we didn’t dare reach over we would have been smacked. We would watch our mother make up the dough, do this do that and so on. Now this is what I’m going to do and as you grow up and get older it would get in your mind. All of us girls could bake cakes, bake bread, bake pies, you name it. When she made soup or anything, now this is what we would do. Now I had a wonderful mother, a beautiful mother. Boni never saw my mother. Laurie did. But my daddy played a juice harp.

BC: Like a harmonica?

LG: No Mother Simple played one we called in a mouth organ.

BC: What’s a juice harp?

LG: Something like the same thing. My mother would take the tablecloth off the dining table and we’d play jacks or we’d play old maid. That’s what we did. We had a good life. Some girls would go to the movies with their parents. My daddy didn’t even own a car, he had an old wheelbarrow. (Laughing). But that’s very true.

HM: What type of technology most changed your life?

LG: I could never answer that.

BC: All of them.

LG: I could never answer that. I had a great life. I had a life that you could appreciate later that you look back and say I got through all that. As you’re growing up you learn to know your mommy and daddy and your friends and enemies. When I was over at the war plant I had 68 girls on the third floor. If I was to say which one I like the best, I couldn’t answer that because I liked them all.

HM: Were they mostly married women?

LG: I’d have to say some but no. More married women then young girls. They were terrific, they were really nice. They’d really help you out, know what I mean. And I had a lady above me that was my boss and Rowhan was above us. (Story about furnace) The day the war was over, I didn’t have to buy one thing for that girl (Ellen). They had anything and everything for that girl. I didn’t have to buy one thing. Nothing to complain about. Oh yeah that was the good old days.

HM: They sound a lot simpler than today.

LG: They were.

**All cities are little cities mostly thrown together under Tyron on a map. They operate by school districts not counties because they don’t exist. Most of the little towns mentioned

~~Two years ago this April, April 2002, Grams was diagnosed with breast cancer and given two years to live. However her spirituality has pulled her through and she has yet to slow down compared to that time (according to Boni).

Transcript of interview by Jason Echols of Edith Violet (Meredith) Egbert
March 2, 2003

Jason Echols: But we came up with our own questions (inaudible) umm, anyway, well just to start: what’s your name? Your full name?

Edith Violet Egbert: Edith Violet Meredith Egbert.

JE: Okay. And when and where were you born?

VE: Where was I born?

JE: When and where?

VE: Where? Okay. June 7, 1918 in…I guess I was born in Anawalt, West Virginia.

JE: Anawalt?

VE: That’s the town, that’s not the mining area. That’s the town. A-N-A-W-A-L-T.

JE: And that’s where you grew up though?

VE: Well, I was there until I was ten years of age.

JE: And then you moved to…?

VE: To Smyth County [Virginia], Chilhowie.

JE: Chilhowie?

VE: Actually, it was Smyth County, out in the country. I take it you’re going to re-edit all this. This is not your actual interview. You’re going to re-edit it, write it?

JE: I think this is going to be the transcript. Most of what’s being said here. But I’ll take out parts for the paper and things like that. If you ever want anything taken out, just let me know. Well, we might skip around to parts of your life, but just the questions are going to focus on your experience of what was happening at the time. But the first questions I’m going to ask you about are about romances and marriage.

VE: Oh my goodness, we’re jumping right in there! I have all these things happen while I was growing up before I got married! Okay. Well I guess Vincent and I were in the same church together but there was about seven years difference in our age so really he seemed so much older than me. And we used to have what we called B.Y.P.U.-Baptist Young Peoples Union and we would have our church activities and then we would have parties or socials where we would get together and do fun things. And so one of my first remembrances of actually recognizing Vincent at all was at one of these socials and he came and we got into some conversations and that led to him finally asking me to go to the movie with him. And I had a very close girlfriend so of course you know as girls do, maybe boys too they get together and talk over all these things that happen and so she was real anxious to know how everything went. Well of course he had at that time he had a car, very few people even my age did not have cars yet but he was older so he had a car. And we went to a movie. And so then the girlfriend she was anxious to know all about it so I said, “Well he’s very nice and I enjoyed it” but I said “Of course he’s just too old for me. And that’s that” but I said, “He’s very nice and I enjoyed it, had a good time.” And that was the beginning then of our…I don’t remember how the romance continued particularly except that we just went to the movies and went to the church activities some together and eventually led up to our realizing that we were more than just casual acquaintances, that we liked each other. And of course he had a good family background and I did too, no conflict as far as religious convictions were concerned. One of the things that always fascinated me about him and he liked so much-on his steering wheel, he had a knob and you could take that knob and turn that steering wheel around. And he just loved that…that was his toy, and also I was fascinated about that too.

JE: It turned the steering wheel?

VE: Well, it was a knob that fastened on the steering wheel and it…the knob would turn and so you could get that knob, you could turn that steering wheel. It was real ornate as far as I was concerned. And that seemed to be one of our conversations-talking about that knob on that steering wheel! And of course by that time, see he was working; his father had passed away. And they had-he had the wholesale business and had a lot of merchandise and so the family decided that Vincent would be the one that would try to help get rid of that stock. And clean it out. And later on I always told people that I didn’t know whether he just was such a poor salesman and couldn’t get rid of it or if he decided he like the business and stayed with it. And so that’s the business he was in at the time I started dating him-that I married into.

JE: So he…oh, I’ll get to that…. Do you remember what the movie was you went to go see?

VE: Land’s no! No. I guess I wasn’t thinking about the movie!

JE: Do you remember what car it was?

VE: Car? I want to think it was probably a Plymouth. I’m not real sure about that. But he drove Plymouths for a long time, then he went to Dodges, then he went to Oldsmobiles. I think it was a Plymouth.

JE: It was Riverside though?

VE: Yes.

JE: Do you know what year it was?

VE: I graduated high school in ‘35. So it was in the late 1930’s, ‘37 - ‘38 somewhere like that I guess.

JE: So did you have any boyfriends before Pap-paw?

VE: Well, yes. We were just friends. We did not have the conveniences that young people have today at an early age where they have a car and go here and can go there. Mostly what ours was, was that we would get together as a group in the local community and walked a lot, where we wanted to go. In fact, where we came by yesterday by this little place called Campbell’s Chapel, which is on about a mile, maybe a little more than a mile beyond my home up in the country. And we would walk to these places, we walked up there and they had singings, they called it, they (inaudible). So we just enjoyed going and socializing and singing with them and of course you had to walk there and walk back and that’s when you sort of paired off and walked together so I had boys like that but never anything, any serious things.

JE: So what was your…. Well, you kind of talked about your courtship. What was your courtship, your wedding, what was that like?

VE: Okay. The courtship, now with Vincent, it mostly revolved around our activities with the church, the social activities with the church, and of course our coming together for our meetings and so forth. And going to an occasional movie that was basically the activities we had. And of course when we married, I had a little baby brother, that came later in mother and daddy’s life-that’s my brother Eldin that was killed in the service. And of course I did not have any money because I had never worked and daddy had a limited income. He had bought a farm and he had owned it and the depression hit and he was afraid he was going to lose it and he did get this job hauling milk then. So he had to invest in a truck and so forth. So money was very scarce on my part. But Vincent of course had this growing wholesale business and so when we decided to marry, we did not have, as you would have today, these big church weddings and all that. They didn’t have enough money for nobody to get me a sort of special dress to wear. And so we had it all worked out with our pastor from our church to marry us. And at that time the parsonage for Riverside was in Chilhowie up from where the old high school was in Chilhowie, where the library is now, right up the street there. And so we had the appointment to come over and everyone was real excited about our getting married because here were two local people from the church. So we had an appointment to be there at nine o’clock at the parsonage to be married and my mother could not go with us but Vincent’s mother was going with us as a witness I guess and just to be there. He was late coming and then my daddy kid me, he said, “Well, he’s back out on you” said “He just won’t show up.” But he had a flat tire so he had to fix his tire so we came on into Chilhowie and this simple, this ceremony as far as the vows were concerned is basically what you would even see today in churches. But the only people there was the minister’s wife and her sister who I had gone to school with and Vincent’s mother. And so it was pretty, sort of fair. And we took Vincent’s mother back home and took off and we stopped over at I think it was Troutdale or Independence for lunch and then we honeymooned-this was on a Friday-and we went down into Asheville, North Carolina and went to the Biltmore estate and toured all that and then came on back home on Sunday because he had to be back on work on Monday. And we did not have our own home we were staying-I was staying with him at Mother Egbert’ house and then shortly after that the little house down there, the little white house right next to the church, the one right there by the road went for sale and Vincent enough money to do it and just about pay for it. And that was our little, that was our little haven. I was so glad because I was uncomfortable being in someone else’s home and I was so glad to have my own home.

JE: So when did you move in there? When did you move into your own home? When did you move into that white house?

VE: Oh! Well let’s see, we were married in April and I believed we moved in to the maybe on along about August-September, that same year. Wa’n't long. I’m not sure about the time but it wa’n't too long after we heard that we moved into the house. And young people today would not think about starting out with as little as we had. We had just the basics. Of course we had to buy a stove and we bought a…and Sandy still has that table and chairs today it was painted white and had little red decorations on the backs of the chairs and so forth. I took all that paint off and had a nice lacquer finish. I mean she has it today and she’s just now redoing it in her home now. So it was a stove, and we did not have a refrigerator, we did not have running water, we did not have indoor plumbing. Now, I had it…Vincent had it at his home, but I had not had plumbing at my home at that time. And we got a bed from mother Egbert and it’s one of those old iron bedsteads and it’s like-I don’t even know if I can talk about it-but it had the-you put the head and the bottom together with a railing but it was metal and then the slats, wooden slats, lay across that and you laid the mattress on it. Well that was railing, slats, or whatever you want to call it, but want to spring and Vincent and I were dumped out in the floor several times when our bed cave way, it would spread wide and then the boards would go down. But anyway that was all right. And at first the clothing we had-a lot of your merchandise in those days came in boxes, wooden boxes, crates, and he’d pick them up at the station, railroad station, in Chilhowie, his merchandise came there. So we had one of those and we converted it into like a dresser, only it did not have drawers…and it had a little mirror up there. So you know, young people today wouldn’t think of starting out that way. If I were able to buy two living room chairs and what they called a studio couch, that opened and made into a bed [inaudible].

JE: A studio couch?

VE: Well, I think that’s what they called it. I believe. But it made into-it opened out and made into a bed.

JE: Well, why wouldn’t your family-your brothers and sisters, Pap-paw’s-at the wedding?

VE: Well, you see, I was the oldest one in my family. And Earl, of course, he was in school-this was on a Friday and so he had to go to school. And of course my other brother was the baby, wasn’t there because as I said earlier he came later into the world.

JE: So your parents were there? With Eldin? Your parents were there at the wedding?

VE: No. Vincent’s mother was the only one of any family member that was with us.

JE: Oh. Was that the way most weddings were?

VE: Well, that’s just the way it had to be. Mother would’ve loved to have gone, she was very supportive. But daddy had to-now he was hauling milk, and we had no refrigeration at that time and you had these cans, metal cans, five to ten gallon cans and they would put them like in the spring branch. But the milk had to go out every day because there was no way of keeping it fresh. And so Saturday, Sunday, any day of the week, he still had to make that route with that milk. And he’d bring it into Chilhowie, and they had a plant there. And he made the expense to get from there. And finally went on in and built one in Abingdon…later on.

JE: So it wasn’t unusual for a lot of people…?

VE: Now this, you have to remember, this was severe depression time. That before the-I mean banks foreclosed, and businesses lost everything. It was a very critical time. So there’s a lot of history written about that period, the Depression, that time-I don’t know why they call it “depression”….

JE: So then your….

VE: And of course now, going back, I was born in West Virginia and started school in West Virginia and we did not come to Virginia until I was about ten years of age.

JE: So that was almost when the Depression started. Isn’t it?

VE: Yes. Daddy had just bought the farm, it wan’t but thirty, thirty-some acres. And he had just bought the farm and the Depression hit, and he thought he was going to lose his farm. So you know today, children like to have pants with the holes in them and it’s fashionable. But it wan’t fashionable it our time because it was a necessity and so you wore patched clothes. You had to have money to buy clothes with. Some of my clothes were made out of-at one time they had grain and feed sacks-and so you’d take those seed sacks and you’d make your clothes out of that. You know they talk about up there people today and Loaves and Fishes and all that. They don’t know they don’t have any inkling of what it is to be in a situation like that. But he was able to-he of course got the milk route and of course he had to go and get, buy his truck. But he was able to save his farm with what he could do….

JE: He was doing the farm while doing the day route?

VE: And he’d make his routes and then it was from dawn to dusk that you’d work. And we would go. You know we children had to go and hoe the corn and help with the crops. I’ve done everything there is to do to tobacco, for example: pulling off the suckers, and taking rid of the worms on the-see they didn’t have the sprays and things, you had to manually work up there and get those…and I hated that job! But I’ve even-I even cut some tobacco. Put it on these sticks and stripped the stalks….

JE: Didn’t you say once that you’d always go in and start up the stove? To make the cornbread and stuff for lunch?

VE: Yes. It was during that time that they’d all be out in the fields working and I’d just come in. We had a wood stove and we had some coal and I’d start it. And of course, basically, a lot of times our meals would consist of just brown beans, dried beans cooked, with a little pork in them, and cornbread. And, or if you had garden time, we [inaudible] we had fresh corn from the garden, greens and beans and all that sort of thing. Everyone had a garden at that time. We’d canned and made your own preserves. Even took cabbage and made kraut out of it.

JE: But you were the only daughter, right?

VE: Um-hmm.

JE: That’s right. What was your mother…where was she? She had to go out in the fields too?

VE: Who?

JE: Your mother.

VE: Oh yes! Oh yes! You even took that baby out in the field and put it in a basket or a box or something. You had that baby out there with you.

JE: That would be Kenny?

VE: Well, now Kenny’s the…came…let’s see…I guess it was Kenny that was the baby. [Inaudible] I guess Eldin…. [Inaudible] Now my mother was the type person she probably-if she had lived in today’s world, she probably would have been a registered nurse because she had a lot of interest in that area. Whenever anyone was sick, mother had her home remedies that you use for this, that and the other. She would go-and I’ve known her to go-and sit through the night with people who were critically ill, like that had pneumonia, when a fever breaks, and help with childbirth. She did have enough education, and she did teach school. And she met daddy. Daddy, my daddy, had gone to Illinois somewhere, they had some big farming area, and he had a brother and a sister there. I don’t know how they ended up in Illinois, but anyway Daddy went out there and met-he came home one time to visit the family and fell in love with mother. And so then they went-after they married, they moved into West Virginia into the coal fields. He did not work in the mines, but he took care of the mules that they used to pull the coal, their carts of coal, out of the mines. They didn’t have the facilities they have today. The mules would get hurt, sometimes break a leg, you didn’t shoot him, you tried to mend him up, fix him, get him back in harness, and he sit up many nights with a mule nursing him through an accident he had. They had accidents with mules and with people.

JE: And you all had a farm in West Virginia too?

VE: Hmm?

JE: Did you have a farm in West Virginia too?

VE: No no. We lived in-the coal company owned most of the houses in the town. And so we lived in one of the company houses. I can see it right now; it was painted dark green, and I think it had three rooms. We sit high up on the bank, looking down on all the houses owned by the company.

JE: So why did you all move to Smyth County?

VE: Hmm?

JE: Why did you all move to Smyth County?

VE: Well, going to West Virginia and working in the coal mines was just a matter of seeking a way to exist. And that’s when daddy was able to save up enough to make a down payment on that farm. And he loved to farm, and he would like to have eventually gone back to Illinois because the farming was so extensive around there. But mother was reluctant to leave her family. She was the baby one in her family and had several older brothers and sisters. For long time she didn’t even have a name. And she was about…I think she was close to three years old if I remember. And they were in West Virginia now I don’t know how come they to be in West Virginia. But they were coming home, and the older brother-they were coming by train and the older brother said ‘Well, mommy don’t you think we ought to give the baby a name.’ He said, ‘You know when you go back they’ll want to know what the baby’s name is.’ And so, she got the name Minnie and that was the only name she had.

JE: Do you know why she got that or did they just choose it?

VE: They just chose it. I don’t know-I know of no connection. Now, she had nieces that were named after her. But up to that point I don’t know where they got the name. I said there must have been a black Mammy around somewhere that had that name. A lot of black people had that name: Minnie.

JE: Do you know how far she went in her education? You said she was a teacher.

VE: She…now, I don’t know. They did not have-as I remember it, they did not have the grades like first grade, second grade, and all that. You just sort of moved along, and I don’t know if they actually named the grades but you had like school up to what we considered the seventh grade if I remember correctly, and she-I don’t know how this came about but she ended up going to Abingdon and boarding down there and they had what they called “Normal”-now don’t ask me what that normal means-but you’d get a teaching certificate there and so she got her teaching certificate and came back and taught in the-I think it was a one or two room school over in what they called the Piedmont area out in Synclair’s Creek.

JE: In Chilhowie?

VE: Yeah, in Chilhowie. It’d be on the-well now let’s see, if you were going like to Konarock, you’d get pretty close to the Piedmont community. It’s just over on that trail.

JE: But she didn’t have any training as a nurse? She just knew some of the….

VE: She just, she just had a gift for it.

JE: Did she teach you any of that?

VE: No. I didn’t have any desire to learn it. She was dearly loved by her students, and they called her ‘Miss Minnie.’ In fact, when she was in the hospital shortly before she died, one of her former students came and her mind was not functioning good then. But he and I were talking, and something was said and we heard making a stir, and she was real excited and she recognized, recognized what he had said and could identify with him. And it pleased this man so that she responded to him, and she sort felt a little recognition for one of her former students.

JE: But was she teaching in West Virginia at all?

VE: No, she did not teach in West Virginia. Now, she was involved-we only had one church there and think they called it Methodist but if you were going to church, you’d go to church there. She had a pretty voice and she sang alto so she was in the choir in the church in the Methodist church. And they just…. It’d be hard for you to understand how you know you’re independent of your neighbors here you’re not dependent on your neighbors. But they were just…if one needed something, you’d go and borrow it. You started to make bread and you was out of baking powder, for example, you’d go and you’d borrow baking powder from your neighbor. Or maybe flour, or meat, or anything like and they were just very generous with you and they’d pay it back-they just can’t take it and not pay it back. So it’s hard for you to identify with that.

JE: Do know you if she stopped teaching when she got married? Was that why she stopped teaching?

VE: Yes. Because see she went from here into West Virginia. I don’t think that she…. She worked closely with the school. Of course I started school there and went through the fourth grade there. And when I came to Virginia, then I was able to skip a grade because in West Virginia, the schools were far ahead of Virginia at that time. So that was the reason I ended up being a year less than my classmates when I graduated.

JE: When did you graduate from high school?

VE: Oh. What year? Might be ‘33. I’m not sure about that.

JE: Well, didn’t the Depression keep you from going to school at all?

VE: I had…. Well, there was a man in Chilhowie that took a special interest in me-because I was salutatorian of my class and we had to make a little speech at graduation. And this man, he was a mail carrier. And he was with my daddy, and my dad was a Mason, belonged to the Masonic lodge. And this man was in the Masonic lodge and he also carried mail. But why he took special interest in me, I don’t know. But he made arrangements for me to go to Marion College seeking a business degree. As I said, then my brothers-Earl and I are fairly close together and then there’s quite a span between Earl and Eldin and then from Eldin to Kenny, there’s a wide span. And then mother got sick and they just decided I had to stay home to take care of her. And so I did not get to on to school.

JE: So after high school, you were going to go to…?

VE: A high school education is as far as I got in my education.

JE: So you were going to go to the business school in Marion?

VE: Everything was set up for me to go to Marion College, and I was going to get a business degree.

JE: Why a business degree?

VE: Because I like figures, I think. I said ended up, you know, literally running the business that we had, the private business. But I liked math and I liked English. Maybe secretarial work I could bring….

JE: Was that…were there mostly…? Was Marion College a woman’s college?

VE: It was just a two-year college at that time.

JE: Was it just for women or was it co-ed?

VE: I want to think it was just women, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure about that. I may be wrong of course it probably did change, as did all the schools. They weren’t integrated at the time.

JE: So you were…. But even during the Depression you were going to go to Marion College. It’s just that your mother got sick?

VE: See, she had a stomach ulcer and so she felt that I’d be better…. Of course, we for survival had to depend on each other you couldn’t just take off on your own and do what you wanted to do because the family had to be held together. To survive, you just had to buckle down and do what you had to do. I was very disappointed because I wanted so much to go. And then I had a close friend who lived just on up the road and across the hill from where I lived and she went to Virginia Intermont and took business courses. And so she let me have her books, her typing books and so forth and so then that’s where I picked up on that, on my own, and self-taught in other words. Different days from what you know.

JE: Would you have lived on campus? Do you know?

VE: He had made arrangements for me to live in a home. Of course, I think the idea was, if I remember correctly, that I would help with several things in the house. Instead of paying my board, I would work my way by doing things in the house like washing dishes and taking care of the children or whatever they needed.

JE: And do you remember hearing about what type of classes you would have had? Were they typing classes?

VE: Well, let’s see. I didn’t get that far. No.

JE: And was this man going to help you pay for it?

VE: Well, I don’t know how they worked out the arrangements. Well, he got basically what we would call today a scholarship for me. There was some money there that they furnished for education. And as I said I had no personal contact with the man. It was just some reason…of course, he and daddy were good friends. And he just took an interest in me and knew that I was interested in learning and that I had excelled in my classes at school. And it was just something he wanted to do. No strings attached. He just worked it all out.

JE: Wow. Do you remember what his name was?

VE: Hmm?

JE: Do you remember what his name was?

VE: Yes. It was Prater. Hiram Prater.

JE: Hiram?

VE: Hiram, H-I-R-A-M, Hiram Prater.

JE: But then you…. So from 1933 when you graduated from high school and then you were just working on the farm, making the lunches, and working out in the fields?

VE: Well, I finally…I got me some…. Ha, I felt like I wanted me to have some of my own and so…. Now, you don’t understand about this either I don’t think. To have little baby chicks, used to, you had the eggs and the hens would sit on their nests and hatch their chickens. And they had what you’d call an incubator. And as best as I can remember it was a round thing and there was heat in that someway. I don’t know how all that worked. Anyway, you had your little chicken in there. Anyway, daddy worked it out for me to raise a brood of chickens, or a flock of chickens. And so I got the chickens up to where they could on market day, they could sell them and get a little money that way and you’d get egg money.

JE: Was that just for you or did you have to share with the family?

VE: No, that was my project and that was for me. I was the only girl in the family and so I got a few favors. But they realized it was difficult times. It was hard on them. It was hard to see us struggling and so…I walked to school. We didn’t have buses; we didn’t have no snow days. You went to school it didn’t make any difference. We went down to Riverside, about a mile walk.

JE: It was about a mile?

VE: At one time it was so cold that I froze my…my heels froze. And my heels hurt all that winter long, and it took up to two or three years to where my heels weren’t sensitive because it was just so cold. And walking in the snow, ice. That’s the reason today, you know, when I think there’s a little bit of snow on the ground I think they’re going to have school. I think it’s terrible….

JE: You lived a mile from the Riverside school. What if you lived farther out?

VE: You walked.

JE: Would you still…even if you lived in the mountains?

VE: Now, they did have-they didn’t use them the years I was at Riverside-but when Vincent was at Riverside, they had barns out back. And you could ride your own horse or bring a horse and buggy and store them there. And they stayed there while you were in school. And you’d go…when you went home, instead of getting on a bus, you got on your horse or you got in your buggy. And if they had a buggy and there were several children, several children would ride that buggy.

JE: But not everybody went to school, right?

VE: Well, a lot of people did not get an education. That’s right. It was not mandatory….

JE: It wasn’t something you had to pay for though was it?

VE: No, no. Now, when I finished…now, at Riverside, we only had through grades, seventh-eighth grades. And as I said mother had taught school and she was interested in education. And so she went to the superintendent of schools and asked if there was some way that we could pick up some transportation where we could get into Chilhowie and get a high school education. And so they granted some money for it and there was a man that he drove a pick-up truck and he delivered mail and so he put a cover on the back of that truck and took two benches-one on either side-and he’d pick us up and take us to school and then delivered his mail and then took us back to Riverside. So that’s the way we got to go to school. Now, with Vincent, his father bought a house in Chilhowie so they could live there during the school year to be able to go to school beyond the academics of Riverside.

JE: How did your parents afford to let you-and did any of your brothers go too? How did they afford to do that without having you there to help with the farm?

VE: Well, you’d work when you came home in the afternoons. Summertime, you know, it didn’t get dark until seven or eight o’clock. Got home around three-thirty or four o’clock I don’t know, basically I’d say about the same time your schedules are now. But you didn’t go home and sit down to read a book or you didn’t watch television-because they didn’t have television! And so you worked, you know you had your chores to do before you went to school in the morning. We had a spring and we had to carry water from the spring to have water in the house. You had that. If it was Monday, it was Wash Day, you carried up enough water to fill up the kettle and they’d heat the water in it and you washed on a board…a tub and a board. Did you ever see a washboard? Of course, later on, mother and daddy were able to get a washing machine, and it was a gasoline motor that went-putt putt putt putt putt putt putt putt-you’d hear it all over the community that we was washing clothes!

JE: When did they get a washing machine? It wasn’t while you were…during the Depression, was it?

VE: Hmm?

JE: Was it during the Depression?

VE: Well, now all of this…. The Depression was a…it took a long time for them to come out of the Depression. Of course, I don’t know what caused it, and I don’t know what it is. My whole period of growing up from the time now… We got along fine in West Virginia, and that’s why people came there. And I went to school with every nationality you can think of. There were Hungarians-they called them “Hunks” and “Swedes” and that kind of thing. But they came there to work and of course a lot of people knew the danger of going into those mines at that time because it wasn’t unusual to have a slate fall or coal fall and kill someone, it wasn’t unusual. And they…when they had an accident at the mine, they had a big ol’-I don’t know how it worked-but a big ol’-not a whistle but a big ol’ sound that went off when something that there was an accident. And everyone who was able-bodied would go to help recover that person, to get them out and everybody tried to get help for them and so forth. We had what you called a company doctor; the company furnished the doctor for the minors. So you see, that was something you didn’t have here in the country. But then, you see they owned the property, they owned the houses, the doctor was employed by them, and they even had a company store. And you could go to the store and you didn’t have to take money, you had what they called script. And at payday then of course, that’s when you lost your bills to pay off of the script you used to buy your groceries. They never liked-my folks never liked the coalfields. They didn’t like the environment…and as I said I went to school with all nationalities.

JE: Do you know when…you said the Depression lasted a long time. Do you know when it ended…when did it end for you all?

VE: I guess it was close in there-now, I don’t know history-but I would say close in there around maybe nineteen and forty, somewhere right in there. Fairly lengthy. And as I said I don’t know anything about the government as to why it happened or how it happened. But it was a dark time in history. But you learned… in one sense of the word it taught you values and appreciation for what you do have. That’s the reason today I can’t understand…well, I can’t understand Loaves and Fishes even for example because these people are willing to just stand in line and have a handout. And during the time when I was growing up for the most part, people were too proud to have done that. They would have dug ditches, they would have done anything to earn their own way, but they would not live off of somebody else’s money. It just…that independence was there I guess, I don’t know. But everyone was poor for the most part a few people weren’t. We had the operators of the mines, you know, they had a pretty nice home. But still they worked and mingled in with the employees. Didn’t have the organizations that they have now. Didn’t have the rules and regulations and stipulations. You just thankful.

JE: How did you know when the Depression was over? Did anything change?

VE: Well, everyone began…jobs were generated for one thing, more employment was given that was available to people other than working in the mines or nothing. And as I said, Daddy came here and started to work, and the Pet Milk Company started the milk business they helped people to select cows that were good producers of milk and they checked the butterfat and all that sort of stuff.

JE: In the 1940’s?

VE: Um-hm. So gradually then, we came out of the Depression. It was a gradual process. But the store, you’d go to the store, you needed the things maybe you had butter, you could take your butter and sell your butter and get groceries. You know, what you could buy was so short; it was all whatever you needed-basics. And you heard me tell about carrying that chicken to the store and how hot…well, mother was canning something and she had to have something from the store. And she sent me and that was then about a mile walk, went down to [inaudible] that was where the store was. And I carried that chicken on this hot day and oh, I remember it was so hot, I remember I was barefoot and it was hot on my feet. I got down there and my chicken had died! ‘Course you carried it by the legs and of course this was… this was always now this was not my kind of thing, but it was something I had to do. So if you had to do it you did it.

[Tape Ends]

JE: You talked about a lot of things that I was about to get to, so thank you! You must have gotten this sheet ahead of time.

VE: No, I’m just ramblin’ along. I hope no one checks it out as to how factual it is as far as dates and years and whys and how-fors I don’t know about.

JE: No, we’re just doing generals, times…But when you said that you had married [Vincent] that he had already that his dad had died and left the warehouse business. Did his dad start the warehouse business?

VE: He had traveled for another company early on I think, and he met Vincent’s mother. She worked for a China business in Bristol. Course that time we weren’t married. I think she also did office work didn’t she, I don’t know. She was also going into Tennessee. I don’t know much about that time. But yes….

JE: So [Vincent’s] dad started the business?

VE: Now, I don’t know how he came, how he came into the business. I don’t know about that. But he died…now I just came across a tintype of him the other day-I think I told you, maybe I didn’t tell you-but I was just so surprised it had on the back of it “E.B. Egbert, Baby Picture” and that was “1864.” And he died at age 62, and I know when he died I thought of him as being an old man and you know 62 today is not considered an old person. But he had traveled horse and buggy and I think he had worked up until he had some kind of car and he worked the merchants throughout the countryside. And so Neil and Vincent were the two boys, and the family said well, they needed to get rid of the merchandise they had there. And so Vincent was elected-Neil would stay there and do farming-and Vincent was elected to go out and get rid of the stock. Now, he had a lot of things under his own label “Echo Sales Company.” He had like [tire] tube patch, in fact Billy, Amanda’s husband, showed us-if you want some he’s got a little-on the dresser in one of the living rooms-Billy loves old things-and he had what they called an “H&N tablets”-a headache and a neurgal[?]-they had a box packaged under the Echo Sales Company. Several things he had: had batteries, under his name. But anyway, Vincent was to get rid of merchandise and I was always told people I said: “I didn’t know if whether he was just such a slow salesman and couldn’t get rid of it or if he just decided he liked the business and stayed with it.”

JE: So when you married him, he already had the business going? Was he still trying to get rid of it?

VE: I believe he died in ‘33 or somewhere [inaudible]. What he did, he took the backseat out of the car and that made room to carry this stuff in. Later on he got up to where he could move into trucks. But at the time he passed away, he was just doing commercial work.

JE: So when you got married, were you helping out with the business? Or how did you become involved in it?

VE: Well, of course, Vincent was gone….

JE: On the road?

VE: Yeah. You see sometimes he was gone just spent the night out; he’d stay in someone’s house. You didn’t stay in a motel because motels started when you just slept in someone’s home. Of course, he’d just spend the night there and he’d be there in the evening and have breakfast there, dinner, supper. By the time we married, he had pretty much a regular routine [inaudible]. Now, what was it? I’m trying to think of so many things; I lose track.

JE: When you got married, how did you get involved?

VE: Oh! How I got involved. Then, then. Well, when we bought the little house there next to the church and that little building out there beside the road was where he put his merchandise. For a while he still worked out of the building at the farm but then. So it was up to me where if a customer came by, a merchant came by and needed something, well I would go out and get it for him out of the building. And of course, I was always like…like on Saturday, Saturday mornings, Vincent would have to go into Chilhowie and the depot pick up the shipments that had come in for him. And then I was just always a sort of a busybody I just sort of got into it you know and I helped with the stock and that sort of thing. And then of course, when we moved to Chilhowie and had the business just up over the townhouse and it was just a necessity that someone go out and take care of the…at that time we had freight trucks bringing in the merchandise and the freight truck people. And so I just sort of worked into it, and I just keep on working in to where I was really running the business. And he could…Vincent loved to sell and he loved to travel and so that was his point. And he didn’t care about being there, about being there long enough to find out what was in. Of course, I learned to mark the merchandise, and he’d see what you marked. And really when the business really started paying off was when inflation hit and everything…the prices started going, sky-rocketing up and we had just enough money to start out, the money to buy, before the merchandise went up I could buy. And then let’s say I pay $0.10 for an item and could only mark up to $0.12, but with inflation, I could go up to $0.15. Do you see hear I’m saying? So then I could double my profit on what I brought because I was able to buy it before it went up and then go to the new marked-up price.

JE: Was that something you and [Vincent] just sat down and talked about? Or was it something you did in the office?

VE: Well, it’s just something that I…. Well, I guess that was the era…. See, if I had…I probably would have ended up with a secretarial course or something but that…business is more my thing, teaching school I would have never cared about at all. I didn’t…I wa’n't that fond of my school teachers to start with. I think that’s one of the reasons. People thought I would be a teacher, but I never had the desire and my mind was always on more of a business level than it was on teaching.

JE: So this was something you did while he was on the road?

VE: Well of course at Riverside, we had the little business right there, and your dad was a baby and so forth, it just seemed…. Of course when we moved to Chilhowie, we lived in that garage, that three-car garage, and put our stock upstairs and had it up there for a long time. And that’s where the little dummy elevator-got it out of a restaurant in Marion-right there behind that side door you can see where it went up and we’d take the freight up on that little elevator behind the steps. Of course we lived there at first in part of that up there it wa’n't even finished while we did some work on the house. The house had belonged to Vincent’s father and he had rented it to one family, one couple, they didn’t have any children, for seventeen years. And they didn’t…they were both teachers, and they were not housekeepers and they did not keep things up and did not ask for things to be done. And so it was a lot of work. And they had a dog, and they kept the dog in the basement. At that time, the basement was dirt and you couldn’t get rid of the odor of that dog and that dog that scared Sandy so that she had such negative reactions to dogs. But anyway, that’s when we had it in our home and finally we were able to get it into the other end of town.

JE: Do you remember when that was?

VE: I’d say probably early forties, maybe mid-forties.

JE: And so you all built the building it was in?

VE: [Inaudible] and that was when we could sit down and eat a meal without interruption. When we had the business there at the house, you know, someone wanted a box of candy, it didn’t matter if you was right in the midst of your meal if they wanted a box, it was $0.85 for a box of candy; candy bars, a nickel. Well, you had to climb those steps and get it, get up from your meal to get it for them. We hardly ever got to eat a meal without interruption. But we went to the other end of town, I said that’s end of it.

JE: So what you did was just sold to the country stores around here some merchandise-making a little bit of profit on it?

VE: Well we…of course we enlarged the territory some. Still, it was necessary for Vincent like if he went to Tazewell County, to spend the night somewhere over there and work a second day because he couldn’t get it all at once. If he went into Carroll County, he would spend the night and as I said, he stayed in homes. Later on, he stayed in motels. So you see, I was left alone a lot of times, and it was either I did or else it didn’t get done type of situations. But it was so natural for me and I never minded it, it was the type of thing I love.

JE: Was Aunt Sandy-Aunt Sandy was born when you all moved to Chilhowie? When you moved into the house?

VE: Now, let’s wait a minute, let me think back. Norman was born on this sub-zero night in January and we had a rough time; he was born at home. Sandy was born in a hospital in Marion. [Inaudible] Norman was born at home in Riverside; the doctor stayed there all night, and he was born a little later the next morning. And on that Sunday, when we had church, everyone in that church came over to see the baby. We lived in that little white house. Sandy was born, and I was…I had the same doctor deliver both the children and he told me. He said “Now Violet, I was able to help you before, but it’s going to be necessary for you to go to the hospital.” And the hospital on this end of Marion was Lee Memorial out there next to where the bottling plant is as you go into Marion. And that was about it, I guess.

JE: How long was it…the doctor was able to come when Norman was born?

VE: He came and spent the night! At my house! Norman was a long time coming. He spent the night. Now, that wasn’t unusual. Now, mother had pneumonia while this same doctor was going…he came out to the home. And he wanted to stay with her, but he had other patients that were critical too because it was bad at that time. And a good friend of mother’s came and stayed with me that night and he told us what to do all night long. We put these mustard poultices on her chest and you took and warmed them and put them on and as they cooled, then you warmed them and put them back on. We worked with her all night and the next morning he came and broke into a big smile and he said, “Well, you all have done it yet; you’ve broken her fever. She’s going to be all right.”

JE: Was this when she was having Kenny?

VE: No, she just had pneumonia. But they went to the home, they delivered the babies in the home, doctors did. They didn’t have hospitals available.

JE: How did you get the doctor there?

VE: How did you get him? Get him to come?

JE: Yeah, for Norman?

VE: Well, we had a telephone, a party line. Ours, I think, was two longs and a short or something like that-that ringed “Mpeh-mpeh-ee.” And you could call. And of course, a lot of people eavesdropped so there was a lot of people knew when you called the doctor. Word got around. But they were an old wall phone. They had what they called a central office in Chilhowie; it was up over where the old bank building is. And she was known to listen in on conversations and know all about everything that was going on. And sometimes she’d get real interested and she’d interrupt and ask a question. Not much privacy to it.

JE: So you didn’t have…. It was just you, and [Vincent], and the doctor? There weren’t any midwives or anything?

VE: He brought a nurse. He brought a nurse with him. A doctor had a hard time in those times. I mean he went all kinds of weather. He had to some kind of conveyance that would get him out. You didn’t go into his office the way you do in a nice air-conditioned room when you went to see the doctor, he went out to see his patients.

JE: Did…and Norman was just born you had him in your bed?

VE: Um-hm.

JE: Well…with Echo Sales, you were staying at home with Sandy and Norman, but how did you get to the office, how did that work out?

VE: Well, with Riverside, it was right…well, most of the times when the children were small it was right there. Now, when we moved to the other end of town, they were both in school. So I’d get them off to the school then I’d go in there. And of course, if I needed to go pick them up I would and take them out to the warehouse and they’d stay with me until it was time to go home.

JE: So after school a lot of times they’d go, you’d pick them up and take them back there. How did you…how were you able to keep up the house? You had to do a lot of the cleaning.

VE: Well usually-we were closed on Saturday and Sunday, and so Saturday was the time you caught up on the housework-cleaning the house, doing the wash.

JE: But that must have been a long day though.

VE: Well, we didn’t have forty hours a week work. You started in the morning and you worked until it was dark or the job was done. Like with the…. Well, when you started taking orders and delivering them, you worked a lot of times at night….

JE: You took it home? Well, when it was in a separate building, you took it…? And then you all had to work it when it was at your home.

VE: Yeah. Well, of course, there was a time when you had to do all that work in the home. Well, when we built the building at the other end of town, I said “Okay, I’ve had enough of this.” I said, “We’re going to have office hours and we’ll spend them there. When we open the door, they’re free to come. When we close the doors, they have to leave. And we don’t go get them a box of candy at the other end of town just because they didn’t order. And so we stuck to it, and it worked out all right.

JE: Is that something you told [Vincent]?

VE: No, that’s just what I thought. Well, as I said, by that time, I was pretty much running the business. He liked to sell, but he didn’t care about the bookwork and that type of thing. And so we made a good pair.

JE: But he didn’t say anything, he just let you do it?

VE: Oh yeah.

JE: Was he still gone some nights?

VE: Oh yeah.

JE: Did you…I mean a lot of people weren’t working outside of the home at that time, a lot of women weren’t. Did you…were you conscious of that? Or how did you view yourself doing the work? Did it just seem natural?

VE: Well, for me it was just natural because I think I was just in a field that regardless of what the circumstances I would have still been in basically something of this sort. So it was just natural. And, you know, something comes natural to you, it’s just easier to do it. It’s when you got to do something that you put out to do it.

JE: So it didn’t seem unusual to you?

VE: Didn’t what?

JE: Did it seem unusual to you at all?

VE: No. I guess I’ve always been somewhat of an independent type person. And maybe just growing up and having to assume responsibility and being an oldest child, it was just a natural thing. It was never something I had to work at. It was just kind of natural. I was happy and content with it to get into it all. And I like…for quite awhile after we built the building at the other end of town…. [Vincent] did all the buying; the salesman would have to see him. I’d tell them what time he’d be in and when they could see him. And so he saw a lot of salesmen, even at night. And I remember one time, one salesman-he sold sunglasses-and he came and we working out mowing the lawn. And I think at that point we still had a push mower. And Vincent was trying to something and you know what not and I was trying to do something and that salesman kept trying to sell him those sunglasses and Vincent would say he’s not interested and he kept on. And Vincent-he finally got him talked down-and Vincent said “Well send me six cards.” And so then when he was away he said something about me doing the buying and I said “Well now, if I do the buying, I’m going to do it my way.” And that salesman came and I said “Now, I’m not like Vincent.” I said, “When I tell you ‘No’ that means no and we’re going to stop right there.” I said, “I’m not going to say ‘Yes’ later on and you’re not going to sell it to me because I’m not going to buy it.” I said, “Once I’ve said ‘No’ even if I change my mind and think I should have bought it,” I said, “I’m not going to do it.” That salesman and I got along beautifully. He never did hound me. He showed me that merchandise, and I’d say what I wanted. And we just ended up very good friends and good relationship and had no problems. But he respected what I told him. And one time he started, and I said, “You know what I told you.” I said, “When I say ‘No,’ I mean no and don’t go over that mark.” I said, “We’d get along fine as long as you….”

JE: Maybe it was good for [Vincent]….

VE: But they could talk…. Salesmen could talk Vincent into it, but they knew that I decided what I wanted, what I didn’t want and that was it. And that didn’t mean I was always right, but that set me a pattern that I went by and they knew.

JE: Maybe it was good for [Vincent] that he had you.

VE: One time he sold a…I was with him. When we first married, I went with him quite a bit on the road because I didn’t like staying up at the Egbert house. You know, it just wasn’t…. And I’d go with him. We were over in Carroll County and it was close to Christmastime, and I could hear these voices-it wasn’t a terrible cold day because I must’ve had the window down-but I could hear these voices. And I thought, it sounds like somebody’s out of union or something in there. So after awhile Vincent came back out and he was carrying this thirty-pound piece of chocolate box. And I said, “What’s the matter?” And he said, “Well,” he said, “he decided he didn’t want them.” He said, “Well, that’s alright I’ll just take them back.” And I said, “Well, it sounded like he was angry.” He said, “Well, he was.” He said, “You know, there’s something bothering that man, and he said, “It wasn’t just the chocolate bars.” He said, “He just sort of vented out his anger on me.” And I said, “Well, I guess this is the last time we stop at this store.” He said, “No.” He said, “I’m going to come back and see him” because he said, “there’s something wrong with him.” He went back to see him the next time, and he apologized to him for having been so rude and bought both chocolate boxes! But something had happened and he was very upset about that, I don’t remember what it was but he told Vincent that. And he was very upset, and he said, “I really just vented out my anger on you.” And he said, “I apologize for it because you have been very congenial, very nice to work with.” And that sort of thing. Made a good impression. But I said if that was me, I probably would’ve never gone back.

JE: It was good for both of you then.

VE: It was a balance there. Okay, does that about do it? That’s about all I know about us.

JE: Well no, you’ve got a lot more to say, I’m sure. Well, when you were going on the road, you were pregnant with Norman, weren’t you?

VE: Um-hmm. Well, it was a natural childbirth; it was a natural thing at that time. It was no big deal. You still had to do your chores, you did your own thing, you did your own washing, you hoed your own garden, and you gathered your crops. Other than children, you just kept on with it. It was a natural thing. Pattern yourself.

JE: Even at Christmastime, you’d be pretty…he was almost born by then.

VE: Yeah, yeah.

JE: Well, what did you think about-well, we talked about [Vincent] for a little bit-what about your romance, the marriage even throughout your life?

VE: I don’t understand what you mean.

JE: Well yeah, it’s sorta broad. What did-did anything change in it, in the way you viewed your romance? I’ll have to explain, but….

VE: Well, I guess…I guess, we were…. Well, we were just pretty compatible, and we respected each other. I guess we know how far one could take the other before we got out of union too much. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have our disagreements or anything like that but still it wasn’t…it was always that…I guess that with the years, the trying circumstances you had during that time of survival, growing up, that you learned to be more forgiving and the [recognition] of the other’s wants and needs or so forth. You just recognized that.

JE: When you were first married, you mean?

VE: No, I mean that just throughout our relationship together, it was just that way. We just…husband and wife work together. And of course, for a long time, couples were dependent on each other: the man was the breadwinner and the lady’s part was to take care of the home and the children, so it had to be a compatible type of thing. And you didn’t hear much about divorce. You just stayed through it. “In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, till death do us part” was a vow that you made and people adhered to that. Whereas now they say those words and it don’t mean a thing in the world. It’s just part of the routine and it doesn’t have the meaning that it had. At least, that was my interpretation.

JE: But you all weren’t exactly like the breadwinner and you staying in the home because didn’t [Vincent] take Norman and Sandy out a lot of times and stayed with them?

VE: Oh yeah! Well, sometimes he’d…well, Norman can tell you there was times he went with his daddy. And soon as he was out of school, he went with his dad, just enjoyed going and helped carry things in. Take a lot of stuff in short if you didn’t necessarily sell them, take it back in from the truck, he brought it…. He was daddy’s little helper.

JE: Well, we’re going to jump a little bit more for two things.

VE: Maybe we can get Norman in here and figure this out now that we’re getting down in here!

JE: But I want to jump a little bit. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was the women’s rights movement and the feminist movement. How did…. Well, part of it might have been how you reacted to it, and the other part of it: was there any impact on-that women’s rights movement-on your life?

VE: It never bothered me. Of course, I’ve always, I think I’ve just always been my own person. I am what I am and that’s it and it didn’t bother me. And I didn’t…it didn’t matter whatever I had to do I did it, whether it was a woman’s job or a man’s job, I did it. Like as I said, I’d go out and cut the tobacco in the field. Daddy’s late getting in, I’d go out and I did everything there is to do with tobacco. I don’t like tobacco, and I didn’t like working in the sticky stuff. But you just…I just our lives were more disciplined. I guess that’d be what I’d say. You just did what you needed to do-some of it you might enjoy, but some of it just had to be done, and you did it. It’s not…I don’t know, women’s rights I believe some aspects of it, I think, they’ve gotten out of control. The husband and wife-it’d be interesting, I guess, I don’t know whether they deal with it in this new movie they’re talking about, about Christ. But anyway, like this thing of gays and all that, you know, that’s ridiculous as far as I’m concerned. It’s just ridiculous, and it shouldn’t even be there. The Bible says “man and wife,” “man and woman” And so this gay rights movement, these gays marrying. That’s not right. From my standpoint, that’s not right. The scriptures-in my interpretation of the scriptures, it’s not right.

JE: But um…. Did um, do you remember anything about the…. They look at the, you know, 1960s and 1970s as the second wave of the feminist movement, and then there was the movement to get the right to vote. And if you were born in 1918, you were probably too young when they passed the Nineteenth Amendment, but do you remember anything from your childhood about women voting…?

VE: Not anything that really stands out in my mind.

JE: Your mother’s?

VE: I think as far as my mother is concerned, she…. Mother, my mother was an outstanding person in that she was sort of ahead of all these movements, you know what I mean, she just moved on through things, and so it was just never an issue that I recall at all. You know, if they were not eligible to vote because women, okay; but if yes, then I will because I have that right. But as far as her taking part in any of it or expressing herself about it, I don’t recall it.

JE: So do you remember her going to vote?

VE: No, I remember her voting, but I don’t remember the first time she voted.

JE: I mean when you were younger do you remember them going to vote?

VE: No, we never got into politics during most of that, daddy was a Republican but I guess he voted for about as many democrats as he did republicans because he believed in voting for the person and not the party. All of us are still like that today, I go in and I don’t pay much attention to republican or democrat, I just vote for the man that I think will best do the job. And I don’t really care for politics. I don’t like these people who if they’re gonna vote are gonna vote a straight democratic ticket regardless or a straight republican ticket regardless. I just don’t believe that. But I never particularly cared for politics. I know that, I think our method of government has been fine. I don’t like some of the things that are happening today. You know, with television and exposure these days, they talk out both sides of their mouth at the same time. They say what they think this group wants to hear and what that group wants to hear. I think it’s an important part of our society. I would like to see it more as it used to be. You just…as I often say, my daddy’s word was his bond. If he told you he’d do something you didn’t have to have a piece of paper signed that he was going to do it. If he said he was going to do it. Whoever he dealt with if they knew Mr. Meredith, they knew that his word was his bond; he didn’t need a signature to make it out. And I often said that daddy would have crawled on his hands and knees, he would have done it to keep his word on something. It was very important to him that if he told a man he’d do something, he’d do it whether it was easy to get it done or not he’d do it.

JE: But do you remember when you first voted? Do you know?

VE: Well, I guess I voted when I became eligible to vote. As I said, I never, I don’t like politics. I just don’t like them. People talking the way they think the most-what would get them the most votes rather than expressing their convictions. They just want the votes. And then they get in office and then some of them do a good job, and then some of them shouldn’t be there.

JE: But you still vote?

VE: I still vote. I don’t necessarily vote for everyone that’s on the ticket. If I don’t like either one of them, I don’t vote for either one of them. Some of them’s like this: up here, down here.

JE: You could always write in yourself! Did um…. Okay, we’re going to do another jump, I guess. What about the changing technologies like household appliances that came in, how did that affect your life?

VE: Well, yours was slow in coming because we didn’t…well now mother just had a Maytag washing machine, I guess it was a gas motor. You know, that was a big step forward. You know, a lot of people didn’t have that; they were still washing on a washboard. You got to have a water pipe from the spring to the house. Some people were still going to the springhouse and carrying the water in buckets. They were conservative and they didn’t waste money. But then they liked to move along and progress as society and civilization allowed them to. They didn’t want to stay back in the Dark Ages in other words. If it’s available today and you could afford it, you’d have it; if you couldn’t afford it, you did without it. Like if you didn’t have a bathroom-we didn’t have a bathroom for so long-my mother used to say well if you’re dirty and want to get clean, you get clean with a teacup of water. You don’t have to have all this water to get clean. If you want to be clean, you can get clean with as little as you can get by on. So we never…. It didn’t make any difference if someone else had a radio, for example, and we didn’t have one. Now when we were in West Virginia, we had electric lights, we had electric power. When we came here to Virginia, we did not have electric power; we had oil lamps. It took my parents a long time to realize that I had a deficiency in sight. I couldn’t see. One of the first times I remember-daddy, I could hear a cowbell, and at that time in West Virginia, cows were free just to roam and find grass where it was. I hear this cowbell, and I said something about the cowbell. And daddy said, “Listen, that cows just across the river cropping the grass.” And I couldn’t see it. And well he really got kinda aggravated with me, but he said, “It’s right there; I don’t see why you can’t see it.” And I said, “I just don’t see it.” And then when I started school, and I was in, I guess, probably second grade, maybe third grade. Of course, as I said, mother had taught school, and she had this teacher for a meeting. Anyway, she told her that I had a deficiency in sight and I needed glasses. She said, “I’m having to sit her up, right up to the board in order for her to read.” They had not been aware that I had a problem with vision up until that point. And at that time, I guess since Eldin was a baby-my brother was always… [inaudible]. The company doctor see he was going over to Bluefield and he told mother and daddy, he says, “Let me take her over there and get her eyes examined and see about getting her some glasses.” I will say-and this may sound like I’m bragging and if I’m bragging here, then that’s all right-but both my parents were of the caliber and character of people that they were admired and respected by other people, and they were looked up to. And so little old shy poor me went all the way over to Bluefield with that man. And I was so excited because I thought you know. And I remember they put the drop in your eyes and you had to put something over them and I couldn’t see. And one of them fell off and I didn’t know how to get it. A woman said, “Honey, that fell off your eye. I’ll put it back up.” And she did. But my first pair of glasses was just-it was just like a whole new world opened up to me because at last I could identify. Everything I was seeing evidently was in just blobs, blur blobs, because my eyes. And so that just opened up. And I always loved that doctor because he was…you know, many doctors don’t take a child. I guess at that point I was eight or nine years old.

JE: So you were the first person…?

VE: Then when I, when we moved to Virginia, and I had to have my glasses changed, we went to someone in Bristol. And they were a little-well glasses a lot like we wear today-a little round. Got my glasses back and I kept telling them I couldn’t see through those glasses. They said, “Well, you know, it takes a while to get adjusted to a change.” “I just cannot see through these glasses; I cannot see through them.” So finally, they decided well, maybe they ought to check on them. And I don’t remember how we went to Bristol I guess daddy had a car at that time. Anyway, they took it to Bristol, and the man said, “Well no wonder the child’s been having trouble with her glasses. Her lens has been put in upside-down.”

JE: Were you the first person out of your immediate family to have glasses?

VE: None of…. Well, now later on, mother and daddy with age, they started wearing glasses. Kenny wears glasses. I don’t recall that Earl had them. Earl did later on but that was more an age. Eldin never had glasses.

JE: So what about…you told me last night about learning to drive a car, did? Where you had to learn to drive a car?

VE: I don’t remember I decided or Vincent decided-I think Vincent decided I needed to learn to drive a car. Of course we lived in that little house in Riverside.

JE: So it was in the early ‘40s?

VE: Yeah. I have pictures of Vincent holding [Norman] as a baby. I’d drive the car in the parking lot of the church. He’d watch me, and he’d tell me to do this and that. Just gradually, gradually learned to drive a car.

JE: So why did he say you needed to? Did he give you a reason?

VE: Why? Why I needed to drive? Because we had children, and he was gone so much, and it was necessary for me to get the children to the doctor. And of course it became, well, just a practice that women drove. It wasn’t unusual that women drove at that time. Of course you had to use that clutch all the time, every time you had to shift gears in that thing, you had to use that clutch. And using that clutch and using that brake and learning to do it just right was difficult. But anyway, that’s how I learned to drive. Of course, at one time…. Our car was even the one he worked out of. I mean on Sunday if you went anywhere, you had all that stuff still in there. Sometimes well if we went on vacation or something, well then he would take it all out and then he’d put it back in.

JE: What about when you moved into Chilhowie? Do you remember any particular-your stove, your washing machine or something that helped you out or you were particularly happy to get that you didn’t have before?

VE: Well, I guess the thing that stands out in my mind more was that little house needed so much work done on it. And that again was just right up my alley. And I’d get magazines, and at that time, magazines weren’t full of all these pull-out cards and advertisement stuff-you had some meat on them, you had meat on them pages! But a lot of the ideas and suggestions on how to do things. And for example, [Vincent] and I, we built our picnic table and benches. We built those. We got a pattern. Daddy had the woods at that time, so we got the lumber from him. We had to go out and get it. We built that. And then that lounge chair-I’m talking about out there at the picnic shelter-went over to the junk yard and got an old bedspring and worked out and figured that out. And of course, it was oak lumber, you couldn’t drive a nail through it, and we had a terrible time with it. Had to get screws and put it together. And then we just took different projects. We remodeled the house. When we first moved into that house, there was a chimney standing right up through the floor-of course where a stove one time had been. So everything in that house has been pretty much changed. And so those were just projects we got into over a period of time. But we just enjoyed it. You tried to take vacations, tried to do things that were enjoyable for the children. Go to the circus. Now, when I was growing up, mother and daddy’d do us that way. The circus came into Marion. It used to come in on the train, and people would get out all along the way to see the circus come into town. Now if the corn needed to be hoed, then you’d get up extra early….

[End of tape]

JE: Okay, sorry about that.

VE: I’m going to quit talking so much so we can get through.

JE: No, that’s okay. You’re doing really well. Thank you. Do you remember what magazines they were that you got your patterns out of?

VE: Better Homes and Garden, for the most part. Better Homes and Garden used to have a lot of good ideas about building things, and about decorating your home. And then we had some awfully good carpenters that were skilled, and you could pretty much tell them what you wanted them to make you and they could pretty much fix it for you. Just like your daddy talked about my towel thing, you know, a carpenter or I guess that little place you have for that towel rack in here. Well, like my dough board in there slides out. See, but they were skilled carpenters. Like they put a new roof on the house and we had a rainy season like we had this year, and he said, “You know I believe we could put that new roof under that roof that’s up and then take that roof off.” And he did because it had a real high head on it, I don’t know what it was. Some of that skill, you don’t have today. You do it all by machine.

JE: Well, I know you’re really interested in your computers; I know you’ve gotten into them. How did you first or why did you first get interested in computers?

VE: Well again, I said that’s just a part of me. I’m self-taught as far as the typewriter is concerned. As I said my friend went to school, and she let me have her books, and I took her books, and I learned how to type. And computers again, it’s just part of my make up. I guess anything mechanical like that.

JE: Do you remember when you first got-when you first heard about them, when you first got interested in them? Do you remember when it was?

VE: Now what?

JE: Do you remember when you first got interested in them?

VE: Probably when they became available. Of course, typewriters have been around for a long time.

JE: Typewriters. So it was just kind of a new…I mean how did you first view them? Was it just a new type of typewriter? A better way to do those things?

VE: Well, you know, there was great improvement in typewriters as time went along. Of course, I didn’t have one of the first ones I guess, but I certainly didn’t have the most expensive when I bought it. Of course, usually you’d just go within the price range.

JE: Was that mainly why you were interested in it, just so you could type things on it?

VE: Well, as I said, it’s just a part of me.

JE: Do you remember when you bought your first one? Was it that a Commodore?

VE: Well now, they were manual. You didn’t have any power hooked up. Everything was manual. If you wanted to slide the keyboard, you did not by hand. You didn’t use a button. But I’m glad they made improvements on it. I’m glad they got rid of having to shift gears on a car. On different cars, the clutch and the brake would work differently.

JE: Do you remember when you first bought a computer? The first computer you bought, when that was?

VE: Well no, not really. Computers have been out for a while, I’m sure. Of course, as I said, the first one I had was just the barest of necessities for the business. But I don’t know.

JE: But you’re still learning on them too?

VE: Just like that today-that message on it. Some things I like about some of that, but some of it I don’t. I think one of things to me that’s frightening on them is that you could lose your identity. People are finding ways to get into the things that are private and that you do not care about everyone knowing about. Just like now, I heard about someone getting something because I hit the wrong button and giving out the wrong information or uncover something that I don’t want to uncover. I guess that’s the reason I go, I hit that delete key. Every time I turn that on, I got so much stuff there, and I just delete delete delete.

JE: The last one’s a little strange, but…were there any-and this person has suggested-were there any moments of truth in your life? I think what they’re wondering: were there any major crises, were there any moments of truth, were there any times when you stopped and rethought any of your roles?

VE: Oh, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. The moment of truth-I related it to you the other day-it goes back to early childhood that has stuck with me throughout my life and that’s when I got curious about the matches, and I told you about that.

JE: Curious about the…?

VE: Matches. About my striking the match. Okay, the moment of truth for me goes back to that point. This is when we were still in West Virginia, and I came here when I was ten years of age, but this was when I was much younger than that. My mother had stepped next door to a neighbor’s, and for some reason, I can’t remember why, but I was fascinated something about matches. And the matches were kept out of my reach because it’s dangerous. But we had a stool and I pulled that stool over to the cabinet, and I stepped up on the chair, and up on the stool, and then up on the cabinet. Do you know what I’m talking about-the old kitchen cabinets had shelves up here and then had a place down here. And I stepped up there and I got up there and got those matches. And it was like the boxes of matches, loose ones you got, not the ones you tear out. And I struck that match, and I guess it’s something maybe the light from it that fascinated me, I don’t remember. But it was something that I was curious about. Well, mother came in and she said, “Violet, what were you doing with the matches?” “What matches? What are you talking about?” She said, “You were in the matches.” And she gave me a little talk about why they were put up, about how they could burn my clothes, could catch fire and burn up. And I had lost a little friend with-well then they called it “colts” but it was colitis and diabetic. A lot of children died at that time because they didn’t have the treatment. And I had experienced what it was like to lose a friend. So she told me about these matches that could have caught the house on fire and burnt me up. And then I had seen a house burn, and that still stood out in my mind, I can see that house burning and that awful feeling I had. But the truth of it was…it came out that my mother was so smart that she even knew that I had struck a match and she wasn’t even in the house. And then to go and talk about it. How did she figure out how I was able to do that? And then of course later, she said, “Well, you had your little tracks where you-” Said, “You moved the stool first of all. Had the tracks to it.” Said, “Them matches had an odor.” And so that was my moment of truth. I thought then, “Don’t ever try to get by with telling anything but the truth to mother and daddy.” And so-as I said my daddy-I don’t know how he came to his moments of truth-but daddy was so honest. He would never-if he had a cow and he needed to sell that cow and he could get a better producer. He would tell you exactly what production you could expect from that cow. He wouldn’t stretch it one iota. He would tell if there was anything wrong with that cow. So I grew up with-that’s part of the rich heritage I have.

JE: Were there any times in your life when you were conscious of yourself as a woman and thought about your role in that?

VE: It’s never bothered me. I think I’ve always gone along with the idea that a woman had her place, and she should not put herself in the position of the man, especially husband and wife. He says something goes, you talk it over, and you honor him as head of the house. Of course, I’m pretty much opinionated and self-willed and so I’ve changed [Vincent’s] mind quite a few times. But the truth for me-for conscience sake now, truth is important to me-I can’t-I couldn’t sleep until I’ve confessed something I felt I’ve lied about. Truth is part of my heritage. Now it’s hard sometimes to have to face the truth.

JE: Looking back now, do you have any regrets or disappointments about anything that happened or anything that you wish you could have done? Any ambitions that were left unfulfilled?

VE: Well, I would have loved to have pursued the education. I would love to have that opportunity. As I said, [inaudible]. And of course, as I look back now, I realize before we were ever aware of it that mother’s mind was taking a turn. So that she became so dependent on me. Well, I just couldn’t go because she was sick. Of course, she just had a stomach ulcer-[o]k well, you know that wasn’t, it was uncomfortable but it wasn’t a life or death situation. I guess that’s one time I had a little resentment. I felt that I was so disappointed because I wanted to go on, and I couldn’t move ahead. I was made to feel being the oldest child, I think a lot of times I had to assume responsibility. If Earl had been older, he would have taken the role, but as I was the oldest child, a lot of the decisions of the rest of the children came from me down. I guess in that situation, I’d rather be a boy instead of a girl.

JE: Did you ever feel that you didn’t have a lot of choice or control? How do you feel about the degree of choice and control you had and what your life would be, the direction of your life?

VE: Well, early like with the schooling, that I did.

JE: You thought you didn’t much control over that?

VE: No, I had no control. They just said I couldn’t go and that was it. But as far as the rest of my life is concerned, I can only think of blessings. I’ve been so blessed with a mate, with children, with my family, with the church, I just feel like God has richly blessed me. So I don’t care. I never cared to be, I never aspired to be President of the United States, for example. I think women’s rights has let women move ahead into a lot of things that I still think that as God would have intended it, it would still be in the role of the male instead of the female.

JE: You don’t think a woman should be President? Is there any reason?

VE: No, I don’t really. I don’t say she should be, but for personal preference, I would prefer…I think that to me there’s more stability in a strong male and his convictions than there is in a woman. I see some of them and I think they’d be better to step down and let the men have it. Some of these women may be down on me hard to hear me say that. No, I’ve never aspired to ever think that I’d want to take over what I’d considered a male role. Like if God called them to preach and if God really called them to preach, a lady minister, but I prefer a male. And yet I’m sure these are very fine women, I feel like there’s other places they could serve And I see something on television, some of these women and I thought, it doesn’t seem natural the role that they’re playing. It doesn’t look natural. It’s unladylike and I just don’t care for it. That’s just for me; that’s just personal opinion. I think that we have a strong role as women, but I think there are places where they should say this is a man’s role. Now, I don’t mean that you should bow down and do everything a man says to do, but nevertheless let the man have. After all, they can lift a load women can’t physically, so why not men?

JE: Maybe women having a stronger role?

VE: Well, I just think God intended it that the man is the head of the house, and the man should hold that role. And they should be subservient to the man. I don’t mean be a slave, but I mean respect and be willing to take the job down here rather than wanting the one up here. I don’t know whether you-do you think that?

JE: Do what?

VE: How do you feel about it? How do you feel about women taking over? Would you want a lady for President of the United States?

JE: Well, this isn’t my history. This is your life.

VE: Well, I know it. But you don’t have to have that on tape. But what I’m saying is that’s just the way I feel about it.

JE: That’s fine. There are no wrong answers.

VE: Now, I had a lady who was principal of school, but I liked it much better when a man was principal. Of course, one man we had, he should have never been in elementary education. He had a brilliant mind, but he could not identify with the level of a young teenager; he was beyond that. In other words, you had your assignments, and if you didn’t get them, that was your fault. He wasn’t going to tell you what to do. He sit up there in front of the class, but he did not. And he had been a college professor.

JE: But other than going on to Marion College, there weren’t any other regrets? That was the only time you felt you didn’t have a choice in what you could do? Everything else has been a blessing?

VE: Nothing seems to…. As I said, I’ve just had a good life and a rich life, and looking back, I won’t say that I haven’t made mistakes, but I’ve learned from those mistakes. And I just feel like that I’ve really, truly been blessed. And my walk with the Lord has been with me through the years and my conversion experience and walking in the Christian faith and then the assurances I’ve had of God’s love and His miracles. I don’t know what people do without God. That to me is the top of the ladder for me, just Christ and his teachings and trying to follow his teachings. I don’t know whether I told you this, but with my surgery-of course we went through Vincent’s and had experiences there because his was touch and go a lot of times. It could have been cancer, and it was not. But you know I started-when they told me my heart was bad and I needed to have surgery, I decided that I didn’t know if we had any business messing with-if men or people had any business messing with the heart because the scripture talks so much about the heart and that’s almost like sacred ground if you think about the interpretation of the scriptures of the heart. Well, I decided I didn’t know maybe man’s gone too far and he’s interfering too much, and he doesn’t have any business messing with the heart of man. And so I decided not to have my surgery. And as I went-the men, two doctors, they talked to me, and they told me you know with this surgery you might live fifteen years; without it, you might last six months. And I said, “Well, I’m at peace with my life and my relationship with God and so forget it.” And they started out the room. And it just came out-didn’t think about it, it just came out-I said, “I guess I’ll always have one regret.” That top surgeon turned around and said, “What’s that?” I said, “Well, my children will never be able to understand why I decided not to take this surgery.” He said, “How many children do you have?” And I told him. He said, “Where do they live?” And I told him. He said, “Can you get them here?” I said, “Yes, I can get them here.” And he said, “Well, you get them in here. We’ll have this talk.” So, I made the arrangements, and they came in. I lay there, and I listened to the children as they asked their questions. Children and in-laws and heard the doctor’s answers. And then all at once, a peace came over me, and I thought, “Violet, what are you worrying about? Your life is in God’s hand. If He has something else he wants you to do, then you’re going to come through this all right. If not, then he’s ready to call you home and that’s it.” With that in mind, I said okay, I’ll have the surgery. And I wasn’t a bit worried about it; I wasn’t a bit concerned about it. And Ray mentioned to Sandy going home, “I don’t understand your mother. She seems to be completely relaxed and doesn’t seem to be worried about this at all.” She said, “Well, she’s turned it over to the Lord.” And that’s the way I’m living today. I told my children, I said, “Don’t worry. If you come in and find me gone, that’s fine. Say ‘That’s the way she’d like to have it.’” I said, “If I have to suffer, I have to suffer. My life’s in God’s hands.” Then just more recently, and then this is going to be the end of this interview. I had gotten…let’s see if I can remember where to start and not make this too long. I had on some earrings that were good earrings, not five or ten cent store, but good earrings. And I was down at the pool, taking my exercise, and all at once, I reached up and one of my earrings was gone. Well, I hadn’t been anywhere but there in that dressing room and then out at the pool and then back in the dressing room. I couldn’t find that earring, and I was just real upset about it, and I told Mildred, I said, “Mildred, I’ve looked everywhere but feel around in the back of my sweater and see if you can find that earring.” And she said, “Well no, I don’t see a thing.” And so I just lost it, I don’t understand what in the world happened to it. Went on home, worked on around the house there for a while, thinking about that earring and out on the porch. And I said, without thinking, I said, “Lord, please help me find that earring. I know it’s just an earring, but I’m so upset about it. Just please help me find that earring.” And no more had that gone through my mind, now I wasn’t thinking…I thought, “Violet, what are you doing? Leave this to the Lord, not to you, to dictate to Him what to do.” And so then I believe I said, “God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I bothered you, I know it’s such a little thing when you have so many things you have to take care of. Please forgive me. I should not have bothered you with this.” Well, that settled it for me that made me feel better. I apologized to God. I’m standing on the back porch. I went…stepped up into the kitchen, and as I passed the refrigerator, right there at the counter. Now, I’m just walking through and I haven’t touched my body, and I hear “Plink,” and I look down and right there lay that earring. And the lesson I got from that, what I think God intended me to have. He said to me then, “Violet there’s nothing too small for you to come to me about. I’m here, I’m ready to answer, so always feel free to come to me, but let it be my decision.” So that’s the way I live now with that truth that God has protected me. And I said, “When I get to heaven”-I know that Vincent was a Christian, I know that his conversion experience was real-”When I get to heaven, I’m going to have to apologize to him. Because I did not”-and I said I know I’m going-and I said that I’ll have to apologize to him because I did not realize that he did so much. I thought I took care of everything. And I miss him so, and so many things I think, “Well Vincent took care of this. Vincent did this. Vincent did that.” And yet I wasn’t doing it all. He was my-I was his helper. So I miss him. No regrets.

JE: No regrets.

VE: Anything else? Does that wind it up?

JE: That’s it.

Transcript of Interview by Erin Fish of Jean Dwyer Fox
March 3, 2004

Erin Fish: When and where were you born?

Jean Dwyer Fox: In Toledo, Ohio on December the 27th, 1924.

EF: Where did you grow up?

JF: In Toledo, Ohio.

EF: What was your life like as a child?

JF: I was very busy, my mother died of childbirth with the ninth child. They put him in the hospital until I graduated from eighth grade, and then they brought him home from the hospital, and I had him for the summer.

EF: What did you do to take care of him? What was your role?

JF: Everything, I’d get up at night with the baby, I…walked the floor with the baby, I fed him, I taught him how to crawl and to walk. Anything a mother would do, I did for the baby. I had been working for a neighbor as a nanny after school until my mother’s death, and then my sister took over my job and I came home and took care of the baby. We prepared meals, we did dishes, we cleaned the house, we did the washing…. [Hesitation]

EF: Were you still attending school at this point?

JF: Well, in the summer, see, we were off. They tried bringing in housekeepers but none stayed very long at one time. When we went to school, there was somebody with my… [Brother] Bob, but when he became four years old, we couldn’t find a housekeeper, so a teacher friend put him in her kindergarten class, and he was in kindergarten a couple years, and then he started first grade.

EF: So, what would you say your family’s economic status was if you were able to hire housekeepers? Were you well off or just making it?

JF: No, just making it, and not making it sometimes. Had trouble paying the electric bill, the coal for the furnace…the groceries, my father had grocery stores so we had groceries for free come into the house all the time, and it took a lot of groceries.

EF: So, you had plenty of food but as far as the upkeep of the house, that was more difficult?

JF: Much more difficult. With nine children, you know, we really did try to keep the living room presentable and the dining room we used for all of our meals, with the big table. There were seven bedrooms and they were divided up in different ways at different times of our lives.

EF: What was your relationship like with your father, since your mother had died?

JF: Well, he worked twelve hour days, and he was never home. He would come home unexpectedly to check on us, so we never know when he would pull in the driveway…he was stern, but he had to be, being responsible for nine children, and he did very little if any care of the little ones…because Jim was only two when my mother died, so it was all up to us to keep everything going.

EF: When you say “us,” which siblings are you talking about?

JF: Well…mostly Ellen I guess, Ellen and I. Marie worked at the grocery store…she was a brain and so she worked the cash register very easily. All the little ones stocked shelves in the evening, sometimes after school, depending on the time of year…everybody reported to the grocery store most of the time, but whoever was responsible for the babies, so I did not work at the grocery store nearly as many hours as the others did.

EF: Because you had more responsibility with the kids?

JF: Yeah, because I was kind of responsible for the food getting on the table, three meals a day, and taking care of the little ones.

EF: What age did they start working at the grocery store?

JF: Oh, stocking shelves, like four, five.

EF: What kind of relationship did you have with your siblings?

JF: Oh, very good. None of us had very much, so we all helped the other ones…at school, we had mission collections, especially during Advent and Lent, and every time somebody was supposed to take something to school, they sent fudge, and I would make the fudge. I would go home on my lunch our, make the fudge, and sent that child back to school with the fudge that could be sold for pennies…often they’d raffle off a cake, and often, one of us won the cake, so that’s about the only time ever had dessert…. We had basic foods, a lot of meat and potatoes, like all the Irish people had, the big meal was at noon.

EF: Was there a large Irish community where you lived, and is that what you connected with? Or, was it more like a large Catholic community?

JF: No, it wasn’t at all. Very few Catholics…my father’s partner was his boyhood friend in Plattsburgh, New York…and he became a lawyer and the two of them came out. My father married my mother and got on the train and went to Toledo to start his life in the grocery store. Before that, he was principal of a normal school…that was like a high school.

EF: Was it difficult being an Irish Catholic in Toledo if there weren’t many other people there that were?

JF: No, we never thought about it. We attended public schools in our early years because my mother taught school also. Upon her death…no, no, I started Catholic school when I was in fourth grade. That’s about when anybody started after me…as in fourth grade, and we had to walk about…four miles, and home for lunch and back again. When we were old enough to skate, we skated, and every Easter instead of getting candy, we all got new skates that would last until the snow started to come in the fall.

EF: In the school that you attended, what kind of schooling did you receive?

JF: I would say, very good schooling.

EF: Was it primarily academic schooling? And was there any distinction to the schooling that the boys would receive as opposed to the girls?

JF: Ah, no, no. We were all in one big classroom. I would guess we were about forty to a classroom. And…in public school it was the same way. I can remember…having to go to a trailer in the public school, for one of my early years, you know?

EF: Overall, looking back on your life as a child, what would you say your role in your family was?

JF: Well, I don’t know the terminology you’d use today. Kinda a pacifier. I kept everybody together, I think…I still do to this day. If there’s a problem in the family I’m one of the first ones to hear about it, and they always know I’ll find some way to settle it…I have eight sisters and brothers, and all but one still living today.

EF: When did you decide that you wanted to be a nurse?

JF: That’s the only thing I’d thought of all my life and I knew absolutely nothing about nursing at all. I don’t know why I wanted to be a nurse. I knew we had no money, and I imagine, they told me, they gave me a poor girl’s scholarship. But, I really think my very rich godmother probably paid for my tuition, which was fifty dollars for the year.

EF: Do you remember how old you were?

JF: Yeah, I was seventeen.

EF: So, was that after high school then?

JF: Immediately after, we had no summer vacation. It was during WWII, and I think I was off like ten days or something from the graduation date ‘till I started nursing.

EF: What type of nursing school did you go to?

JF: Well, at that time there was only one type, it was general nursing…you went in as a student, you had to work so many hours every day, plus all your class work. It was very tough for me, but I was never a good student, and I got through on a wing and a prayer, I tell you. I probably was the lowest…I held the lowest grade all the time, through all the two and a half years of schooling. We didn’t have much vacation, so instead of three years we got through in two and a half.

EF: What was so tough about nursing for you?

JF: For me, the studies. I loved the people. I thought I was very good at nursing…no money to ever go to a show or anything, unless I had a date for it, before I graduated. Once I graduated, I had a paycheck, which wasn’t much. I made five dollars a day, and I was responsible with my friend, who was my boss, who was about three years older than I am. We worked six days a week and we were responsible for about fifty men. If I was on duty she didn’t have to be if something came up, and also if she was on duty, then I could take the day off if I became ill or something. Otherwise you both worked six days a week. She always wanted off on Sundays, so I usually had to work Sundays.

EF: You said you were responsible for fifty men, what type of tasks were you responsible for?

JF: Well, I had student nurses under me and graduates. I was responsible for their entire care. You had to go…with every doctor to see a patient at that time. A doctor never went into a room without a nurse being with him. You had to know everything about that patient of his since the last time he visited (the day before usually)…and I didn’t find it a hardship. Walking the halls were as probably as hard as I found…I really felt very capable by the time I graduated, and I took the summer off because I was very tired of nursing at that time as a student, and my father promised me a trip to New York City to see his sister when I graduated. So, I worked at the grocery store all summer and towards the end of the summer he and I went to New York City and then up to Plattsburgh. My mother was from Lake Placid, and we also visited her family.

EF: Going back to nursing, what effect did the decision have on your family? What did they think about your decision to be a nurse?

JF: Well, I think they were very definitely all for it. It was the only thing I had talked about all my life. So no one ever expected anything differently from me.

EF: Was it hard on them for you to leave the family, since you took care of so many people?

JF: It probably was, but I didn’t realize at the time it was a hardship. But…I’m sure it was, because you had to go in and live in the nursing home, and you were only off half a day when you were a student, and sometimes you didn’t even get half a day off, week after week. It was a lot of hard work. You were always very, very tired.

EF: Were most of the nurses that you went to school with females? Were there any males?

JF: Yeah, there were no males.

EF: What was life like in the school when you were living there? Was it social? Was it like the dorms today?

JF: Probably a lot like the dorms today, only they had bought a large mansion, and that’s where they put us. I had two girls, the first year, from the same town. They knew each other, but they weren’t friends, and myself in the one very large room…and you were responsible…you didn’t have to do your uniforms, your uniforms were done for you by the big laundry, but any other parts of your clothing you had to be responsible for yourself, in between everything else…. Most rooms held at least two, and some four. There were forty-two of us started, and nineteen of us graduated. It was very hard, very hard.

EF: What was the name of the school you were at?

JF: Mercy School of Nursing, run by the Mercy Nuns.

EF: When did you quit nursing, and why?

JF: I…well, I’ll go back. I worked until middle of fall and…a boyfriend was discharged from the service and he came to visit me…and we didn’t get along at all. So, I sent him back to Pennsylvania, and I was also dating one or two other fellows. But, then he came back and pleaded his case after a few months, and we decided to be married in about two months, in the very late fall.

EF: What year was that?

JF: …I believe it was ‘42. I’ve been married 55 years, but then I didn’t get married, you see. My father had a heart attack when I told him. I told him in the afternoon when I picked up the groceries for supper that I was thinking about taking a ring from this boy that came from Pennsylvania. He didn’t discuss it with me, he said, “what do you want to cook for supper?” With that, he gave me the groceries. I went back home to cook food enough for ten of us for supper. After we had eaten, but I didn’t have to do dishes that night, he and I met a group of my friends for the evening. We went dancing and so forth, and then I stayed at my best friends over night, because she only lived about two blocks from the hospital, and I could get up early in the morning and walk to work. So, at 6 o’clock, the phone rang, and it was my sister Marie, who is the one older than I am, saying that dad had had a heart attack. I said, “Who’s on the ambulance?” because I knew all the ambulance drivers, and I said, “Tell him not to worry about calling a doctor, I’ll go immediately to the hospital and I’ll have a doctor waiting for him.” I think I had like six doctors in the emergency room waiting for my father because they knew this was a man raising nine children by himself, and what would happen to all of us, especially the younger ones, if he died. So, it was a very severe heart attack, and I ‘specialed’ him for days, and then I told Scott to go home, because I had no idea when I would have any time to even see him, let alone go out with him, and I told him to, “forget about us getting engaged because I have no idea when or if I’m ever gonna marry ya.” With that he decided to go back to Pennsylvania. Then he decided to go back to college, so he enrolled in Carnegie Tech and I continued nursing. It took me about six months to get my father on his feet again, that he was able to work at all at the grocery store. In the meantime everybody helped in every way. At that time, we were used to hard work, so there was no problem. I went back to my seven to three job at the hospital, on the men’s wing, and just continued working. It was two and half years later before I decided I would get married. I really wanted to wait another year and save some money, but he had been waiting two and a half years, he said for us to get married, he didn’t want to wait any longer, so we got married on a shoestring, had no money at all. I saved a little money and bought a couch and maybe a chair and a table, a kitchen set maybe, because I was only making five dollars a day, and that didn’t add up to very much, even in those days, so I went to Pennsylvania to live. He took a job with Corning Glass upon graduation, and we stayed with Corning Glass our entire life, moving fourteen times over the many years.

EF: So, when he took the job with Corning Glass, is that when you stopped nursing?

JF: That’s when I had to stop nursing, because I was nursing in Ohio and he took a job in Pennsylvania, and he really didn’t want…he was tired of coming in for a weekend and spending half the time with me either working or sleeping or putting up my hair and taking it down, and he just didn’t want me to work. I was extremely tired by the time the wedding came because I had put it all together…oh, my friends really did, I shouldn’t take any credit for it. But anyway, I just, I was very tired, and we hadn’t been dating that much, so we just wanted to go out and have a good time for awhile, which we did.

EF: When did you meet your husband?

JF: I met him my freshmen year of nurse’s training…I didn’t believe in blind dates. My girlfriend lived at the university, in the dorm, where the cadets were stationed, Air Force cadets, and she wanted to fix me up and I wasn’t interested. I was dating some other…and I wasn’t interested in dating someone I didn’t know. That week, the nun told me I had to take the half day for the following week…well, I didn’t have a date or anything, so I called my friend Phyllis and asked her if she had plans, and she said, “no,” and I said, ” well, how about getting together and we can go to the show?” and she said, “well you got a new suit for Easter,” (which I had), and she said, “why don’t we get all dressed up and go to the show?” And I said, “Fine” So, I got dressed up and took a bus out to the university and I knew her roommates and she said she wouldn’t be there, but her roommates would be there. We sat around and talked, and then she came in, and she said it would just take her twenty minutes and she’d be ready to go, and in the meantime, the loudspeaker, “Miss Fog, [that was her last name] your dates are waiting here.” That’s the first I had any inkling that I had a date for the evening, I could have killed her. She comes out, and says “don’t say a word, they’re waiting already, we have nothing to say to each other, I’ll explain it all later.” Well, she already had a date when I had called her she didn’t want to tell me that. I met him, but we didn’t let on I was a nurse ‘til the end of the evening, and he asked if he could call me, and I said, “You know, don’t bother because there’s only one phone for all of us, and I’m never there in the evening.” I said, “I had a wonderful time, but let’s forget about it.” So, with that, every night he would call and every night I wasn’t home. So, the girls said they’d stay off the phone at three minutes till ten (they shut them off at ten), I’d have to be in at that time, because I had to be in by ten, so that’s how he got through. They all told me, “you have to give him a date, you have to give him a date.” So, I think I gave him a date the following weekend or something, then I saw him till he left town, and then his group was in Columbus at one point, they flew to Toledo, and I fixed up the other fellows with dates and we all went out on a Saturday night and had a wonderful time, and then they had to fly the plane back to Columbus again. I really had a real good time during nurse’s training, I really did.

EF: What was dating like? What was the typical date like?

JF: Well, with me it wasn’t too typical, because I never had a lot of time. Eating, I think that was my…I was always hungry. I didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds, but I didn’t like the hospital food. So, anytime you wanted to feed me, you had a date, and one fellow said to me one time, “you know I don’t mind paying for all this food, but do you realize that you never eat it after we order it.” I said, “Well I eat as much as I want to.” So, I said, “okay, I won’t order anymore food when I go out with you.” “No,” he said, that’s not what I meant, I just wish you’d eat more. He kept feeding me. I dated him right up to the time I became engaged because I was thinking about marrying him. He was a real…oh, he’d give me the heaven and earth, real nice guy, he had a beautiful convertible and a nice boat. I doubled with my girlfriend all the time. She dated his best friend, and so we did a lot of things together the four of us.

EF: What made you decide to not marry him and to marry Scott instead?

JF: Oh, just because I think he [Scott] was a little harder to get. I think the other guy laid the gold at my feet and he [Scott] wasn’t so easy. I think that’s the only reason, probably…I just, it was one of those things, I think that if I would have married the other fellow, I think I would have had a great life, too. But, I didn’t pick him and chose Scott, and I think my father had the hardest time because he thought I was marrying someone I didn’t know anything about, and he was probably right.

EF: So, how long had you been dating when you told your father you were going to marry him?

JF: Only when he’d come in from Pennsylvania and not very much. Of course, I dated him after we finally got together I dated about every weekend before he left town. Then, he came in from Columbus at different times, and then I went up to Columbus for something… probably a dance or something, and had a great time. Then he wanted me to come and meet his parents before he was shipped overseas, and I said this was kinda ridiculous, all this was done by letter because you couldn’t afford a phone call. I said, “You know, I’m not interested in meeting your parents,” and he had told me, one night while we were waiting for another couple to meet us, he says, “my mother would absolutely kill me if she knew I had a date with you tonight.” I said, “Well back up, does your mother know me?” He said, “no” and I said, “how can she be upset you’re dating me if she doesn’t even know me,” [He said,] “I was never allowed to date a Catholic girl in my lifetime, in high school she wouldn’t let me date anybody.” But he had a real close friend, he probably would have gotten married after high school, if the war hadn’t been there, he probably would have married the girl…a beautiful redhead, I never met her. I just…getting back to dating, it was mostly dinner…I never learned to ice skate, and went ice skating a couple times because I could never stay up on skates. Dancing, a lot of dancing, and I never really cared a lot about dancing, I went along with the crowd, you know, you didn’t dance that much, you spent most of your time talking and drinking a little bit. I did like my liquor. My father used whiskey for everything around the house, when any of us had a cold, we had whiskey. But, so I really enjoyed my liquor until I found out I was a diabetic and really shouldn’t be drinking, and that’s what told me something was wrong with me. I used to be able to hold my liquor, no problem at all, all at once, I came to the second drink and I thought, you feel it, what’s wrong with you. And that’s one of the first things I said to the doctor, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I used to be able to hold my liquor, and now on the second drink I know I’ve had some liquor.” But, they had terrible time diagnosing me, I kept going through the different tests with flying colors and it took years to pinpoint it.

EF: When did they finally diagnose you?

JF: …it was not until I went to New York to live, it was when my daughter, Donna, started Bowling Green [State University]. They diagnosed it when my son, John was born, he was a ten and a half pound baby. I carried all of my boys ten months… my sister and I did, and the girls I only carried nine months. John was a ten and a half pounder and they sent a pediatrician to the house to examine him for me, and he took one look and he said, “They didn’t tell me you’re a diabetic.” I said, “Well I’m not,” and he said, “yes you are, they just haven’t diagnosed you yet. You’re definitely a diabetic.” That was the first time, but then I went back and passed the tests right after that again. I just didn’t feel good, and everybody said I was missing my daughter too much, that’s what was wrong with me. I said, “You know, I don’t really think so, I’m not much of a worrier or anything,” so the doctor said to me, he called me on the phone, he said, “Do you have plans for Monday?” I always had plans way ahead, and I said, “Doctor, why do you ask?” “Well, I wondered if you could come and stay in the office for about three hours and let me take some tests on you.” I said, “Well, I have a committee meeting, could I bring the other two girls and have a committee meeting in the office?” He said, “Yeah,” so that’s what I did, that’s how busy I was with everything, we held a committee meeting in his waiting room.

EF: What committee was that?

JF: Oh boy, it was usually a Catholic…it was probably Women’s Club for St. Mary’s and the church was in the next town. We didn’t have a church in our town, and they wanted to start a Catholic women’s group, and they asked if I could open my house to this and I said, “yes, but I don’t want any chairmanship or nothing,” [They said,] “no, no, you don’t have to.” Well, nobody else would be head of it. I had all these wonderful women that would help me and do anything, but they wouldn’t be in charge, so I took over as president and I stayed president for years because nobody would. But, they did all of the work. I didn’t do the work, they really did. But, it became kind of a social club, really, and our husbands were invited and we went out to dinner had one of these roving dinners where you started with appetizer one place, went to the next house for a big meal, dessert one place, after dinner drinks the other place. You’d use all these different homes, you know…and they were all fairly well-to-do, so you didn’t worry about the money that they spent. And I started…my mother helped the poor, I could remember that before she died, and I always thought you should help the poor, I suggested that when Christmas came upon us, we did [donated to] so many families. So, I think we started with ten or twelve families the first year. The year I had to move away, forty-two families we did out of my house. Isn’t that something? And we had seven gifts for every person, plus food for a week for that family.

EF: How did your life change once you were married?

JF: Well, the biggest thing was the pay check. I was paid every two weeks and that really sent me. But, my husband was paid every week, so that helped us. But, then he came home one time and said, “I got a raise but now I’ll get paid once a month.” I said, “go back and give him the raise, tell them we can’t live on money once a month” that’s how naive I was. But, of course, the rest of my life, I lived for the eighteenth, which was pay day…and I’ve been known to hit fifteen stops on pay day to get all the different shoes, dresses, any gifts that were needed for the next month, then made due with whatever money was left. That included the milk, everything.

EF: What was your role in your family once you were married, as a wife and a mother?

JF: Well, I had wanted to be a mother, and I was kinda a mother with my brothers. I just wanted to be the perfect mother, since my mother died the day after I was thirteen and I saw a lot in the hospital that shouldn’t have gone on. I wanted to be one of the most perfect mothers ever born, and that’s what I aimed to be most of my lifetime. I know I didn’t succeed, but I really tried hard. I never missed a ball game or sports event or anything any of my children were ever in, unless I was sick. That’s the only excuse. I never let any social obligations, unless it was the glassworks, interfere with any of my children’s things, and that very seldom ever did. We did a lot of entertaining in the years to come. My first party was…my husband wanted to entertain the people he worked with, so I came up with a chili supper. Well, we were born and raised when you go out to somebody else’s house, to take one helping, and no more. Well, I had this chili supper for everybody to have one helping. Well, we ran out of chili the first hour. I was so embarrassed that never happened the rest of my lifetime. We always had plenty of food waiting to be served, I was so embarrassed, I could have died. To this day, I don’t see why people go to a party and help themselves three times, they act like they haven’t eaten for days. I really think that…I think that I was brought up right, to just take one helping of someone else’s food…and that’s all I ever do, to this day.

EF: Would you say that you had a social role in regard to your husband’s job?

JF: I had to learn [the card game] bridge, that was the number one thing. I had never played cards in my life. His best man and his girlfriend came down every Saturday night, and we played bridge all evening and into the night. Every single Saturday night they came and we played bridge…and I still am not a good bridge player. I do not have any card sense. To this day, especially if I have a man for an opponent, I pray hard that I don’t get anything, so I don’t have to say anything, and nobody knows that I don’t know what I’m doing…and that’s the truth. I’ve been playing for fifty-five years, I know how to hold the cards, I know how to play bridge a little bit, but I’m far from a good bridge player.

EF: Do you think that hosting parties helped your husband in his job?

JF: Oh, very definitely. I don’t think we could ever have gone up the ladder if we didn’t do our part with playing bridge and entertaining. The one town we lived in, everything was bridge. You were invited to brunch and bridge, lunch and bridge, dinner and bridge. I mean everything in that town was bridge.

EF: Which town was this?

JF: Greenville, Ohio. We stayed in Greenville for a while. We had to build a house because he was made plant manager…and you had to entertain in your homes when you were plant manager. They didn’t want their people out in any of the bars or anything. You joined the country club and that’s where you took the people to eat. I didn’t have to serve dinners, sometimes I did, but not on a regular basis. Sometimes I would open my house to pool and cards three times a week. That’s how much entertaining. I would bake pies because it was the cheapest way to entertain people. I would get up and get the children off to school…and I would turn around and bake two or three pies…and so we always had fresh pie to serve that evening when the men got tired of playing pool and stuff and wanted to sit down. Scott could always offer them pie. I never stayed up. I had everything ready…the dishes. But, I never stayed up to serve the dessert because that would be very late at night or towards morning, and I had to get up at six with the children for school.

EF: What was your relationship with your children like?

JF: I don’t think I did too well…. Don’t know why. I think maybe I was too busy with everything all the time. But, that was my life. I felt I had to be as busy as I was to keep everything going, and I had to stay home and cook meals if I was going to be at a ball game into the night. So, I don’t know. I tried very hard, but I don’t think I succeeded at all.

EF: What were your daily interactions like with your children? What did you do with them in a typical day?

JF: I had to get up and pack lunches for everybody. We didn’t have the money to give them for school. So, packed lunches everyday for everybody. It depended on where we lived, if there were buses. Scott, at one point took Donna and her two brothers to the Catholic school and dropped them off. And then also took another family, the Builders. And then she [the mother] brought them home every day. We only had a car until after I had five children. The only transportation I had was after he came home from work late at night and I’d go and get groceries. Now, I must admit, I usually had a friend that went to get groceries with me, so I wasn’t by myself at night getting groceries. Now I always had to do everything once I got the car…and if I really needed the car, I would take him back after lunch. He came home for lunch every day of his life practically, and then I’d take him back and I’d have the car to do errands and so forth in the afternoon, and then had to go back at five thirty to pick him up.

EF: What was your relationship with your husband like?

JF: Very good. We’ve always had a great relationship. Maybe because we had to wait two and half years to get married…he’s quiet, unassuming, the brains of the family, and I was always the people person all my life. They say opposites attract and he and I are certainly opposites. We were attracted immediately to one another. I think he’s had a very great life, he feels, which is wonderful.

EF: What obstacles did you face as a wife and mother?

JF: I didn’t have a mother, as I keep saying, so I always tried to be home when they came home from school. That was very important for me to be home. I baked cookies when they got older. So, when the school bus came, my sons and their friends could all get off the school bus and come in knowing that there were fresh cookies waiting to be eaten, and sit around our kitchen table an hour or so, before they went home. Their mothers were working, and they were in no hurry to go home. And often I was ironing or sometimes I had groceries to be unloaded from the car, and I would say, “Boys, unload the groceries before you start eating today,” or something like that. I treated all the boys in the neighborhood like my other sons, and had no problem with that at all. I still correspond with Brian, the boys’ best friend across the street.

EF: As far as child rearing is concerned, do you think that you had more influence on raising the kids than your husband did?

JF: Oh, he had very little influence. I took full responsibility. You can’t work the hours he did, seven days a week…and be responsible for five children. I very seldom ever told him any problems I had with the children, unless they were over and done with, and then I just told him what happened. I think the biggest thing was that I got up one morning to get everybody ready for church, and one son had never come home that night at all…and it had never happened to me. He was probably in high school, probably a junior or senior, it was after prom I think…and so we went to church, and I sat down and started praying, and I said to myself, “you can’t stay in church.” So, I gathered us all up and walked back out of church again, and came home, and he was home by that time…and I said, “Hello,” he said, “hello.” I didn’t say anything more to him. Then, Scott came home, I said, “we need to talk to John,” and Scott’s laughing, he knew he hadn’t come home, but see he wouldn’t take any responsibility for disciplining. He said, “You discipline people and they still like you, the kids get upset if I discipline them.” So, he very seldom ever did any disciplining at all, with any of the five children. And we [the children] got along fine. Only I grounded that boy [John]. I went to a dance that night, a church dance, and the girl’s parents were there, and they came off the dance floor, and said, “You’re not grounding…” and I said, “Why am I not?” They told me to forget it there was a big something in two weeks, and their daughter wouldn’t have a date (they were going steady). I said, “I’m sorry, tell her right now to hurry and get a date, because I don’t change my mind.” That was something I very seldom ever did, was change my mind once I said…I thought about it a lot and I set down rules, and I had very few rules, but if you broke them, you really paid dearly for breaking any of my rules. Staying out all night had never happened to me before, and I was just livid.

EF: What were some of the rules that you had?

JF: Oh, probably no lying to me when I asked a question. I wanted to know where they were going to be in case something happened. Every time I moved, I was anxious to get a lawyer that would know me, so in case, one of the children, high school age, would get in trouble, I would know a lawyer to call, and meet at the jail, because I know of instances where people had been harmed in jail under the police protection…and I worried a lot about that, but all the time I got all the different lawyers every time we moved, I never had to call them. I didn’t have too many rules, their friends were always welcome…if they were going to spend the night, I wanted to know before hand, and we talked it over to see if they were going to spend the night. With five children, I didn’t want to be running into some stranger up in the hallway. I really can’t think of too many rules I had, for any of them…. I probably had two or three, but I didn’t have a list of rules, because I thought that if you both had a respect for each other, you would not break the rules, and you wouldn’t need many rules to be broken.

EF: To what extent did the experiences of your life, influence the decisions on how your sons and daughters were educated?

JF: Well, my father always wanted all of us to have an education, in case one of us were widowed or our husband walked out that we could still support a family. Now, what I thought I was going to do [if I was widowed], was become a housekeeper for a rich person, or a social butterfly for a rich man, who needed somebody to set up his different entertaining and so forth… and could take care of his children, getting them to their dentist appointments and doctor appointments and all that. I thought I could do that very well and still have a home for my family within his home. He wouldn’t have to pay me much in wages as long as he fed all of us. I really thought I could do that well. Only if I was widowed, that’s how I was going to make enough money for five kids and educate them. It takes a lot of money to educate five. We watched our pennies all the time. We did celebrate when your mother graduated from college. We went to Ireland and England and Scotland for three weeks. But, when it came time for Pat to graduate, we already had John in and Kathy thinking about it. We didn’t have any extra money. We had very little money. I was allowed to buy one thing for each child when we were over there, and I bought them each an Irish sweater. That’s what I brought home to everybody. But, we had no extra spending money. We watched every time we ordered anything at any restaurant. But then, afterwards, the company would send us on these trips and then we didn’t have to worry about paying for anything.

EF: What was your relationship with your siblings like once you were married and moved away from Toledo?

JF: Not very close…well, yeah, I guess very close in comparison to most families. My sister, Nancy, came to stay with us for a few weeks, and she didn’t have any clothes. So, Scott allowed me to go out and we shopped all day in Pittsburgh, the two of us…and we got her a jumper with a couple different tops and one dress I think. I only felt I could spend so much money and we did it, we interchanged everything that we bought. We checked the prices in all the stores, and then we went back after grabbing a peanut butter sandwich or something for lunch, and spent the money on clothes. To this day, I was shopping with my daughter Kathy, when she was in college, and I bought her good clothes so I wouldn’t have to buy them again, and here she shot up. She called and said, nothing fits me, and I couldn’t believe it. But, she came home and nothing fit her. So, she and I took off early in the morning to hit the sales, like I always did… and probably about one or one-thirty in the afternoon, she stopped dead on the sidewalk and said, “you haven’t changed a bit,” I said, “I thought we were getting along pretty well.” She said, “But, don’t you ever get hungry? You have never taken time to eat anytime I have ever shopped with you all your life, mom.” And I said, “Well, yeah, I’ll feed you, I had never thought about it.” If we were spending money for sales, I wasn’t looking at spending money on food. But I took her someplace and fed her and then we continued shopping. But, we watched every penny. I bought six bottles of pop, for each child, whatever they wanted, each payday…and that had to last them the whole month, unless a friend dropped in when they were drinking theirs, and then I always replaced whatever they gave a friend. But, we just…. I baked all the time. I never bought anything sweet at all. We lived on basics, like potatoes and meat and spaghetti, a lot of casseroles, and we ate a lot differently when Scott was in town, because I felt like he needed the nourishment. So, meals were much better when he was in town. When he wasn’t in town, I just threw everything together in a pot, probably put some soup with it, and baked it…and that’s what we had for supper.

EF: What was the impact of the changing household technology on your role in the house?

JF: I never had a dishwasher until I had five children. The only reason I did then was the contractor wouldn’t build this expensive home without a dishwasher. I was in the hospital from a stroke, and Scott came in and said that they will not build the house unless you allow them to put a dishwasher in. I had never heard of such a thing, and he said, “Well, that’s what he said.” Nobody would ever buy the house from us if it didn’t have a dishwasher. He couldn’t believe that we still washed and dried the dishes…and I said, “Well, then put a dishwasher in.” The house was all ready to be started. So, that’s when I got my first dishwasher. Before that, one child per night would help me with the dishes. I would wash them and they would dry them. I wouldn’t bring up any subject at all, if they didn’t want it to be quiet, they had to do the talking. The same way with the car. If you were in the car with me, I never turned on the radio. You’d get so tired of no noise at all that you talked, then you had something to say with me. I did that all my life, those two things.

EF: What was your relationship like with your father once you were married?

JF: With my father…I think I was more like my mother than anybody else, he kept telling me that anyway, and he and I got along very well. I kinda stood up to him when I thought he was wrong a few times. But, outside of that, you never crossed him at all. His word was gold, you know. Well, he was never home, only to eat and read the paper a little bit and go back to work again. He had a very hard life, but the good Lord let him live until I think he was eighty-four or eighty-five. He saw all his children do well, and that was a big thing in his life. John was an international speaker, and Jim had his own advertising firm, and Bob, of course, was just coming along. But, John had promised his brother Bob that he would have a place in his insurance agency if he kept his nose clean and studied during college…and that’s what made Bob the millionaire he is today.

EF: What did you think of the women’s movement and feminism? Were you a part of it or did you look down on it?

JF: No, I never even gave it a thought. Those days, I never thought about it at all.

EF: Even in the 1960s when it was on TV?

JF: No, I don’t think I gave it much thought. I never really watched much TV and I don’t watch much of it today. I would much rather have a good book to read…and now, everything takes more energy than I ever thought it would. I always thought I would walk miles my whole life…and of course I don’t anymore. I just learned last week I can only do one load of clothes a day, or it’s too much on my system. I just have to cut down. I always worked as hard as I could for as long as I could with every job I’ve ever had.

EF: Going back to historical events, how did the Great Depression affect your life?

JF: Very much, I remember when the banks closed, and we drove by the banks to see if they’d opened up and all these poor people were sitting around. It took all my father’s money, and we paid the dentist by…he got groceries from the store to pay his bills. We did that with the doctor, paid him with groceries. We didn’t have a lot of doctor bills, we had a lot of dentist bills because most of us have small mouths. Electric, now dad had a terrible time paying the electric before it was turned off. That’s why I think, to this day, I never want to owe one penny to anybody, and I always want to have a lot of cash around. I never want one of my children to need something, and I can’t produce cash at the moment for anything that’s within reason. I don’t trust the banks. I don’t have very much in the banks.

EF: What about World War Two? How did that affect your life?

JF: Well, that’s where I met Scott. I was going to join, at one point, I went into nursing thinking I was going to be an army nurse. But, decided not to do that, and the war was over when I got through.

EF: So, the war was over, and that’s what helped you make the decision?

JF: No, I think I had made the decision before. I had heard so many stories.

EF: What type of stories did you hear that made you not want to do it?

JF: Well, the nurses had trouble not being raped. Gang raped sometimes. That kind of story is what scared me off. They didn’t have much respect for the women in the service.

EF: How did you hear these stories?

JF: Word of mouth.

EF: Ok, going back, the money that was made from the grocery store, and that your siblings made from the grocery store, would you ever actually get money from your father, or was it just that the labor helped keep the business going?

JF: Yeah, we never got paid a cent for all the work we did at the grocery store. You could work eight hours a day, five or six days of the week, and you never got paid a cent.

EF: Looking back on your life overall, are there any moments of truth or crisis that made you rethink how you lived your life or your goals?

JF: Yeah, probably my three miscarriages. That takes a lot out of a woman…and then just eight years ago…nine years ago, I had the miracle of both of my eyes. That made me think why did the good Lord give me a miracle, and all of these saints that are praying all the time? I do a certain amount of praying, but, you know, I’m doing other things too. Many times I’m doing other things when I should be praying, but I think maybe, when I decided to lead the rosary every morning at church for fifteen years…I think he was thanking me for getting all of these people to pray for his mother. I think that’s the only reason I can think of, because I’m no better than most of the people on this Earth, and I’m not nearly as good as a lot of my friends.

EF: What exactly happened with your eyes?

JF: I was ready for surgery, but then there was nothing that needed to be done with my eyes. Everything was wrong with my eyes, but cataracts. Now, nothing’s wrong with my eyes at all. I’m a very severe diabetic, type A, have been a diabetic all of my life.

EF: Were there any major changes in your economic status during your life?

JF: Well, of course, there is. We aren’t putting any more children through college. We have enough, if we watch our money, to have a very pleasant life. We don’t, I don’t have a hobby, Scott’s always told me I needed a hobby. Well, he found out living with me that people are my hobby, I don’t have time for a hobby. I just go from day to day. I love people and I get along with most people. The good Lord puts your friends everyplace you live and every time I moved, the good Lord found me some real good friends to help me through the crisis. My husband was never home, or usually not even in town, when something would happen to one of us… and I just had to depend on my friends like I would a sister. My friends have been very, very good… the ones here, I don’t have as many here now that I am older. But, they’re just every bit as good as the ones I have met along the way.

EF: Are there any regrets or disappointments from your life?

JF: Regrets? Oh yes, I should have written Grandpa [my father] much more. With five kids I didn’t take time to write to him very often. He always felt he was welcome to come and visit… he never stayed long. He never had the time…why sure, I could have been much nicer to everyone along the way in my life.

EF: Any decisions that you made that you wish you would have handled differently?

JF: …Nothing that bounces out at me. One thing that has been a big help to me has been having Father Jim Bruce, the stigmatic priest, as such a good friend, and his mother an even better friend of mine. I always feel like if I have a question about anything, he can answer it. If it’s very important to bother him, otherwise I say something to his mother. Not in a question for him, but I discuss it with him. But, he is so shy and retiring. When he came to see me in the hospital, I couldn’t believe that he would take the time to come see me and stay so long… we have a great rapport, he and I. He has already said he would speak at my funeral, wherever it is… and our priest at St. William said he will assist him with my funeral mass…. Boy, I don’t think I have too many regrets. See I grew up a lot faster than you did, with my mother dying. So, I had to make big decisions when I was thirteen years old and I’ve been making them ever since. I wanted a bigger family. I wanted nine children, that’s what I really wanted.

EF: Why didn’t you have nine children?

JF: Well, because I lost three, then I was about too old to have any more.

EF: So you lost your children after…?

JF: In between the other ones. I lost one before Donna was born, and one after her, and then I lost one after Patrick I think it was.

EF: So, then you felt like you were getting too old?

JF: No, you can only have them so long, and I was going forty when Mike was born.

EF: For safety you decided not to…?

JF: No, it was…if I would have gotten pregnant again that would have been fine with me. No, no, I never decided not to have any more children. It just didn’t happen. See, they told me after your mother was born that I wouldn’t have anymore children. So, I didn’t for five years, well four years. Then a doctor friend of mine said he would go to Canada and get me a baby. So, we went to Toledo to sign the papers. I signed. When it came time for Scott to sign, he looked up and said, “I’m not going to sign these.” The doctor said, “I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t either.” My friend the doctor! Here I made the trip from Pittsburgh to Toledo to sign these papers to get a baby, and Scott decided he didn’t want to adopt a baby, and hadn’t told me. I don’t think he had made up his mind really. I don’t blame him. I don’t think he had made up his mind and didn’t want to ‘til we were there. So, then I went home and my father’s there and I said, “No baby, Scott wouldn’t sign the papers.” My father said, “I’m glad, I really don’t believe in adoption.” So, you know, I’d been used to disappointments other times, so it didn’t hit me as hard as you feel it would at that point. I just thought I’d have an only child, which wasn’t what I was thinking all of my life…and so I was happy I had five. But, wish there were more of them. I think my children are very happy they have each other, you know…and if they aren’t, I’m sorry. You see, I’m still very close to my seven [remaining] brothers and sisters and my sister-in-law. You have a different relationship with each person. Now, if you’d ask Marie, she’d say that I’m closest to her. If you’d ask my sister, Marg, she’d say I’m closest to her. If you’d ask my sister, Lib, she’d say I’m closest to her. She skipped grades and caught up to me. We went to high school together in the same grade. And then if you’d ask my sister, Ellen, well she knows she’s the closest to me because we stay at her house. So, you know, I’m jumping everybody all the time. But they all have a different place in my heart…and my brother Bob feels he can call me and say anything to me, and I feel the same way about him. I also feel if I ever really needed anything in my whole life time, he would have given it to me. But, so would my brother John. My brother John was very free, and Uncle Bob has given a car to somebody because I said they needed it, a new car. So, he watches his pennies, but if somebody needs something, he’s ready to hand out the money. But, if I had ever needed anything in my lifetime, my brothers would have come through…and that’s a great feeling to have.

EF: Was there anything in you life you wish you could have done? Any unfulfilled ambitions?

JF: I wanted to go to Rome. I guess that’s my number one thing. But, Scott, not being Catholic wasn’t interested in going to Rome, and now I’m not, I don’t have the health to climb all of the steps and do everything. I wouldn’t want to waste the money going to Rome. But, outside of that I’ve done everything that I wanted to do.

EF: Going back to what you were saying about Scott’s mother, and how he said something about not being able to tell his mother that you were Catholic…how difficult was that to marry someone who wasn’t Catholic?

JF: I think it was extremely difficult for her. They weren’t going to attend the wedding until the last minute…and of course, my family went all out for them and saw that they had a good time. I think it was a hardship for the rest of her life, for his mother. Because we weren’t even allowed to go into his church for service at that time. You stayed away from non-Catholic churches entirely and so I was never there. His father and I got along extremely well. I was the daughter, I think, he never had, and he really thoroughly enjoyed me…and he enjoyed Donna, they both did immensely, and Pat, those were the only two born before his father died. But I think it was a big hardship and a blow to her. I feel sorry for her now, looking back, that her only son had to marry a Catholic…and if I would have been thinking, I probably wouldn’t have married him. I hadn’t thought about it at the time.

EF: What do you think was so wrong in her eyes about marrying someone that was Catholic?

JF: Well, because they expected them to have big families and the man working all the time, never having a life for himself, just trying to keep food on the table for all his kids. Catholics had large families, they didn’t practice birth control at all. They lived in a small town with lots of Italians and they had big families. His mother was really going to be very satisfied with just one child, and she told me that. Scott was an only child, he didn’t want to have an only child if he could help it. He thought he had missed so much in life, and after being around my family all the time, he knows he missed an awful lot. My sister and brothers are always there. No matter what you need, there’s someone to help you out. We’ve helped each other out with money, clothes, with everything all of our lives…we’re still extremely close.

EF: What degree of choice or control do you think you had in the direction of your life?

JF: Oh, a lot of control. I think I’ve controlled my life pretty well.

EF: So, you don’t think anyone ever held you back or prevented you from doing anything that you wanted to do?

JF: No, I don’t think so. I just wanted to be a nurse and I worked for years… loved every minute of it. I would have worked another year or so longer if Scott would have waited to get married… and I wanted a family, and I’m happy to have had a family. I always wanted friends, never had time for friends…to this day, my oldest friend still says “you never called Sav [nickname from nurses training] unless you absolutely had to.” Then [I] got on the phone [they’d say], “Sav, we’ll pick you up at four o’clock,” and then [they’d] hang up. There were nine people, ten people that used that phone. For years we didn’t even have a phone, and everybody had to have their dates, and all of us were dating. So, you never stayed on the phone for more than about two seconds, unless you absolutely had to. We all did it that way, we never even thought anymore about it. We lived an entirely different life than you know about.

EF: Do you think your life was typical to other people during that time period?

JF: Oh no, it was a much harder life than anybody else I knew, because we had to work so many store hours, cook, do dishes all the time. You had dishes for ten or eleven people three times a day, that’s a lot of dishes. We never had paper plates, they cost money…. I think the biggest hardship was that every other one in the family was a true brain. Graduated from high school at fifteen or sixteen and went on to college right away…and I had no brains at all. I had to really work, and I couldn’t retain it. So, I think that was the hardship of my lifetime. I had to work so very hard and I still got F’s and D’s.

EF: Well, thank you for your time.

JF: It was not a problem. Feel free to call me if you need anything else.

[March 31, 2004]

EF: How was the grocery store able to stay open during the Depression?

JF: We had a very hard time. Often we couldn’t pay our bills. We’d have to ask the meat packer if he could wait another week to be paid for the meat he was delivering. We asked the electric company if they could wait a while to be paid. We asked the telephone company if they could bill us a few days after the date when we’d send the check. We’d call the people on the phone and ask them to hold a check. We did that a lot. We asked them to hold a check ‘till a certain date so that it wouldn’t bounce.

EF: Were there still as many customers at the grocery store?

JF: We took as much charge as we could from those people. When it got up too high, we had to tell them “no more.” But, that was very rare. They always tried to pay a few bucks a week and then eventually, the majority paid off in the years after that, but many people didn’t.

EF: Did anyone pay in services or in ways other than money?

JF: Not that I recall.

EF: Do you know anything about the aid programs during the Depression? Do you know anyone that took part in them?

JF: The only thing I know is that the WPA had a program for children for recreation after school. They taught dance at different levels. I had taken awhile and I caught onto the steps, so they asked me if I would teach some four or five year olds how to do the time step for tap, and then progress from that. I was more than happy to do it. I was in the seventh or eighth grade when that happened. Then, I didn’t go anymore after I was in the eighth grade. I don’t know what happened to that program, but the teacher was excellent. She had to be in charge of all the different ages. There weren’t that many students I don’t think. I guess probably thirty or forty students all together. They had to have transportation out to this playground that had a pavilion where the dance lessons were taught.

EF: Did you get paid for that?

JF: Oh, no. Just helping out. Volunteer work.

EF: Going on to World War Two, how did the shortages during the war affect you?

JF: Well, because my father owned grocery stores, it didn’t really affect us as much. We were very careful of the things that were low so that we didn’t take more than we should. But, there were ten of us to feed, and we watched…we didn’t throw anything out. On Sunday, we always had fresh fruit salad that we had prepared in the afternoon from the fruit going bad at the grocery store. Every Sunday evening, we had fresh fruit salad and bread for supper.

EF: What about nylons? Were there problems getting them?

JF: There was a big black market for nylons, and they were scarce…they seemed to always be available.

EF: So, you could still get nylons if you wanted to…did the price go up?

JF: I think most of mine were gifts from people. We were a poor family and people feeling sorry for us would give us nylons. You know, with six girls you used a few nylons.

EF: Did you support the war?

JF: Oh yes! After they invaded, we had to back it up. Oh, absolutely, positively. Everybody did, there were not war mongers at that time.

EF: Do you think that the war changed your life?

JF: I met my husband because of the war. I was a nurse in training at a nice-sized Catholic hospital. I met my husband on a blind date. We really didn’t hit it off. I dated him every once in a while until he left the area. He was probably there six months and he had a late night to be back in the dorm on Saturday night. My late night from nurses training was Sunday night. Often, I had to work at the grocery store. So, we would go out in the afternoon and I’d go to the grocery store to work and he’d go back early to the university campus. That’s how we met. But then, he’d be able to get a plane and fly into Toledo and bring a few extra fellows with him and I’d fix them up with the nurses. He wanted me to meet his parents, so I went to meet them before he went overseas. Then when he was overseas, about nine months, he flew the European tour with a bomber. He was a pilot. The other fellows kept saying he was the best pilot. Everybody wanted to fly with him. But, I got a note from his mother asking if I’d heard from him since a certain date because they hadn’t. You never think about using long distance telephone at that point. I wrote back and told her that I had. About five days after her last note, I’d received a note, but I hadn’t heard from him since then…and he’d been downed over there. But, I think one fellow was killed and he got the rest of his team to safe haven under the American troops somehow. But, they had a terrible time getting out of the mess they were in. I don’t really know. He doesn’t want to talk about it. I think that was the only airplane he ever lost, when they crashed over there.

EF: So, you said he was on the European tour…do you know where he was stationed exactly?

JF: Over Germany. He’d fly from England and then back again. His base was England.

EF: So, you met him at the beginning of the war?

JF: I think it had been going on for nine months to a year when I met him. He was already picked for the Air Force, that’s where he tried to be. He flunked out just so he could get in the service because his mother wouldn’t sign for him. He went back to Carnegie Tech later after the war. He was overseas for about six or nine months. They could only have so many tours and then they were sent back to rest up. Once he was sent back, the war was over. He was out in time. It took a few months to get rid of everybody. Then, he came to see me and we broke up at that point. I thought he had changed completely.

EF: How did he change?

JF: His ideas were foreign to what I was used to…and…I felt he was a little too full of himself. I wasn’t the least bit interested in continuing the relationship. I was dating someone else, that probably helped. Then my graduation from nurses training came along. He did not receive an invitation to graduation. I didn’t want him there and didn’t expect him there after we broke up. But, he sent a large package for my gradation gift. I was so upset with him, I just left it there, I didn’t take time to open it and all the other nurses on the floor wanted me to open this big package. I finally told them to open it up themselves. So, when I came home, they had opened it. It was two pieces of luggage, one stacked inside the other. Gorgeous, gorgeous luggage. I hope I sent a thank you, but I’m not sure. My Irish was probably up. I do have an Irish temper. I very seldom let it go, but when I do I know what I’m saying to the person. It’s not off the top of my head at all. Usually I don’t care if I ever see that person again. That’s how Irish I am.

EF: Did you keep up correspondence with him during the war?

JF: Not very well. I was dating all the time and working long hours and studying. No, I did not correspond very well with him.

EF: How often do you think you did correspond?

JF: Every couple of weeks I probably sent off a letter. I was also corresponding with a boy I dated who went into the Coast Guard. I worked under his aunt as a dietician. I had to go through that program. Once she had me, every time she needed an extra nurse, she’d call and ask for me. Wherever I was, I had to go down to see her. She’d ask me if I had received a letter from Fran [Francis]. So, I’d run over to the nurses home to see if I had received a letter. If I did, I would come back and tell her that he was fine…. I really didn’t think I was going to get married for many years. You know, I raised my brothers and sisters and then went to nurses training. I was in no hurry to get married.

EF: What made you decide to get back together with Scott then?

JF: Oh boy, he started calling once a week, or twice a week. He’d get one of my sisters and brothers because I was out. I told them to tell him not to call anymore. It was just costing him money. They got so they were talking to him on the phone, long distance. I told them not to tell him anything. Of course, I didn’t think about him ever coming. One night I was at a party with my boyfriend and I was called to the phone. My father was on the phone. He never made phone calls. Everyone hushed. He had taken a phone call from him [Scott]. He promised him I would be home at ten o’clock. He wanted me back home at ten o’clock so that I could shut off the phone calls. He [my father] didn’t care what I told him. Scott had told my father that he was going to be there in two days. I knew he couldn’t. I had to tell him myself. I told him off, but it didn’t do any good. Then he arrived with the ring, of course he didn’t tell me. He was sick as a dog. By the time he pulled into town, his reservation at the hotel was taken. Eventually he found someplace else after my father had said that he could hit a couch. I didn’t want him in my house. But, he called in saying that he had found a place. My father simmered down and I went to bed. So, I took the day off. I met him at the door, everyone else was gone to work and school and stuff. I invited him in, and we talked a while. He told me that he had a ring with him. He said it was going to be on my finger. He told me he didn’t care what he promised me. He said I could have anything in the world, just so I’d take the ring. I hadn’t even been speaking to him before he walked through the door. It took hours and hours. Then we took the ring down and left it at a jewelry store because it was much too large for my finger. We left it for an hour. Scott was afraid that they’d change the stones in it. After my father’s heart attack, Scott went back to school. I told him to forget that we were engaged. It was going to be years before we got married. It was two and a half years later that we got married.

EF: When you were raising your siblings and your father didn’t re-marry, what do you think other people thought about that?

JF: He was a very good-looking fellow, and always had women come to the store for the third time in one day chasing him. But, with nine kids, do you have time to date? He didn’t even have time to keep his old friends. The old friends kept him, but he really didn’t have time for anything but existing. It took him six months to recuperate from that heart attack.

EF: What about when your mother died, do you think that changed him a lot, too?

JF: Oh, very definitely. It was weeks before he went back to the grocery store, and that he could meet anybody without crying. He idolized my mother, and again, his folks were against the marrying. They were married at five thirty in the morning, and none of his side was invited. Then, they caught the train to Toledo where they were going to make their home.

EF: How do you think her death affected the kids?

JF: Probably drastically, but when there’s that many kids, you’re used to doing so much work anyway. She taught school until she had the sixth or seventh child. She’d bring a colored girl from the South through connections. She’d teach her how to cook, how to wash clothes, how to keep house and how to drive (that was the biggest thing). Then, she’d go back at the end of the year, like in May, and send a cousin back in September to be taught all those things, too. They had a room to themselves and everybody wanted to come and work for my mother. Everybody loved my mother. She was a very, very nice person. We had to work harder. We had to help each other. You’d depend on what your siblings said to you. You always knew who your sisters were dating. My father didn’t know anything. He just worked at the grocery store. It was all of us helping each other.

EF: Do you think you were a “stand-in” mother then?

JF: Oh, probably so. Dad gave me the job when he brought Bob home from the hospital that day. He said, “Here’s your job for the summer.” He meant Bob, and Jim, who was two. Now, Marg was in a crippled children’s home, so you did have some time there. But, nobody was big enough to do too much besides stock shelves at the grocery store.

EF: Going to when you got married, what did marriage mean to you?

JF: That you were married for life, no matter what happened, or what obstacles you were up against. You wouldn’t take any abuse at all because that’s why my father made sure we all had an education so we would never have to stay in an abusive marriage. I think the fellows that married us knew we wouldn’t take anything from anyone. I was married about a month when the phone rang one morning. [My brother-in-law] told me that when I wanted to leave my husband, I could call him and he’d send me money for a ticket. Everybody knew I wasn’t going to stay with him. They just knew we wouldn’t get along. Everybody thought it wasn’t going to work out.

EF: How do you think you proved them wrong?

JF: Probably stubbornness, Irish stubbornness, plus I really wanted my kids to have it better than I had it, as everybody does. In the world we lived in, I had to be the perfect wife, the perfect groomed mother. I had to be everything for everybody. I was just determined that I would make a go of it. Money was very, very tight. He gave me 250 dollars a month for everything. I paid the electric, gas, everything, plus bought the groceries and clothes, any spending money. Everything had to come out of 250 dollars.

EF: So, you were in charge of the finances?

JF: I did everything but the mortgage. He always paid the rent or the mortgage. I never wanted to ask for money. Once you have your own pay-check, you don’t want to ask anyone for money.

EF: When you were having your children, what did you think about mothers who worked and also had children?

JF: I don’t know. I thought it was a full time job, and maybe because I didn’t have a mother myself after I was thirteen. But, I think there’s so few years that you’re home with your kids, that I wanted to enjoy it, and I wanted them to enjoy me. I found that my kid’s friends would come and talk to me and tell me things they should be telling their own mother. When it came to the boys’ age, I always had the ironing board up. When it was time for the school bus, I always had home-made cookies. They could always come over and have water and home-made cookies. I would be there ironing. You couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversation. Sometimes they’d stay an hour. They’d gotten off the bus and wouldn’t have gone home at all. I’m not a perfect mother. I’ve done lots of things that everyone thinks I’m wrong about. But see, when you have your own rules and regulations for yourself. You don’t bend them very easily, and if you bend them, you don’t break them.

EF: Would you have continued working if you could?

JF: No, no I wouldn’t. My husband didn’t want me to. I have never nursed since. We waited two and a half years to get married. He wanted my full attention. He was tired of waiting for me to put up my hair while he waited to kiss me goodnight. I didn’t want to, I really didn’t. We wanted a family. I wanted nine, but lost three, probably because I’m a diabetic. I just thought I’d make the perfect mother.

EF: What did motherhood mean to you?

JF: To be always there for children, through thick and thin. I don’t think I ever missed anything any of my children were ever in, if I could possibly do it.

EF: What values did you teach your children, or try to instill in them?

JF: Oh boy, it wasn’t neatness. I always picked up after my kids. Honesty would be number one and love of God should be one plus. Love of God first. I really do think that religion makes a big difference in everybody’s life whether they realize it or not. If you know you can always fall back on the good Lord… maybe that’s why he gave me the miracle of my eyes. In my whole life I never dreamt a miracle for me. But, that probably had changed my life a lot…. Kindness towards people, and look out for the ones that don’t have as much as you do. Always look out for underlings.

EF: What about abortion? We learned in class about illegal abortions, what did you think about that?

JF: It really didn’t come up in the Catholic faith very much. We knew we were very definitely against it. We were brought up to be against it. In the hospital, I had people who had had them and then ran into trouble with hemorrhaging. They always felt so bad about it afterwards. It changes your life completely if you have had an abortion. They tell you that if you have had an abortion, you have trouble living with your soul.

EF: Did you ever hear about any acquaintances that had one?

JF: No, I really didn’t. But see, I went to a Catholic high school, and then a Catholic hospital. I really didn’t run into that at all.

EF: What about birth control?

JF: I just…. I think it’s everybody’s own choice. I myself have to live with me. I really think the good Lord doesn’t send you anymore children or anything else in your life that you can’t handle. I think he prepares you for any problems he sends to you.

EF: Well, I think that’s everything.

JF: Well, I’m glad I could help. Call me if you need anything else.

Transcript of interview by Meghan Sloan of Rita Hassett

Meghan Sloan: Please tell me a little bit about your childhood. What kind of family life did you have when you were younger? Talk to me a little about your parents and your relationship with them and the relationship you had with your sisters.

Rita Hassett: Okay, I was the third oldest of seven daughters, seven girls, six siblings and am grateful today that they are all still alive. I was born June 17, 1933 and was born, brought up in Middletown. Our home was located on High Street and so many years later, all with the exception of five years, at age seventy today, I spent these years here in Middletown, Connecticut. Born and brought up as I said on High Street, here in Middletown, Connecticut. I do recall at that time as a youngster, our home and house always did seem adequate in the light of a four-bedroom house. I do recall though probably the only, maybe you would say, major or difficult point was the one bathroom and it seemed as our family continued to grow, maybe at like age five or six the need was just to add a downstairs lavatory. So, that certainly helped in that area. Because anyone ever dealing with women and with girls, you can imagine with seven of us, seven girls, and my mom, one bathroom certainly was anything but adequate.
I started naturally school at a private parochial school, which was our parish of St. John in Middletown, and at that point in time, my two older sisters were you know in attendance there and I joined them at age five, a half-day session of kindergarten. At that time school buses were practically unheard of at the private, parochial schools, so I can say that we were you know fortunate enough that we you know daily, more or less walked to and from school. Something almost unheard of today, that I think through my entire grammar school years, with an hour for lunch, we walked there again to and from the home to a hot lunch. And naturally our particular neighborhood we were very fortunate. We had plenty of school chums, school mates, neighborhood friends, and it seemed like everyone at that point in time did go to St. John’s, which was considered the north end of Middletown. We always had friends that we walked with and many, many times we were fortunate if our parents weren’t available that one of the others might be and you just would load up in somebody’s vehicle. Maybe then motor vehicle rulings and laws weren’t quite as difficult because I recall many, many times flying down Grand Street Hill in Middletown. We were probably loaded to the hills and sitting on each other’s laps, but, nevertheless it helped a little bit you know with that last minute ride.

MS: Now when you were a little girl…World War Two? Do you recall any of the rationing your family did?

RH: I vaguely do…the lines with stamps. Various items, but I guess it was more your meats that the stamps you were given. I don’t know how it worked, maybe the number of persons in your family…determined the number you were entitled too. It must have been difficult to keep track. I do remember the gas, and of course the sugar. Weekends you know, you just….unless it was a complete necessity, you really didn’t get in the car for any joy ride or whatever to get out.

MS: Moving on to your education, what were your classes like at St. John’s?

RH: I must admit of course the parochial schools, yes, the only disadvantage the only one would say is there were classes as large as forty, and most of the classes were staffed by the religious, Sisters of Mercy. During my time, I don’t know if I ever recall a double class, and I do say, repeating forty in a class, I do say with my graduating eighth grade class in 1948 there were 34 of us that graduated that point in time.

MS: Do you remember what your academic curriculum entailed?

RH: The essentials, being at a parochial school, naturally we had 45 minutes of our first class, would be our religion class, if it wasn’t taught by a particular sister, but this was strictly upper grades where we switched around, naturally our religious class brought in one or two of our parish priests. Naturally, the essential of the English was particularly stressed, and I do have to say the English for some reason it seemed you would hear then continuing on to your next area of your high school days, often anyone coming out of the parochial schools, often excelled in the area of English. Naturally, emphasis was stressed on the math, which I always recall wasn’t one of my favorite subjects….

MS: Me either!

RH: History and of course the sciences, did we mention geography? Yup, yup. But the English was divided into the area of your…your…reading and the grammar. I do recall especially my 8th grade sister, she was very, very particular within the English with the grammar and defining you know the meaning within the area of sentences and the breakdown and all of the nouns.

MS: Now besides school, your friends, what kind of activities did you enjoy doing together?

RH: I do recall always going from as far as the girls were concerned, we had our Brownies. Then we went into Junior Scouting and even into eighth grade, we had a very, very active and wonderful scout leader, which took us through senior scouts. Then the other enjoyable bit, was, my sisters and I at young ages, we for many, many years we went to a dancing school, I bet that was for ten or twelve years. In those days, it was two sisters who taught us and they had an enormously large dance studio and in seventh and eighth grade of our parochial school, these two sisters came at one o’clock on maybe Monday and Wednesday to the school, they taught you know for ballroom lessons. And then every few months at their studio, they’d combine the classes and we would have socials, gatherings. And then the finale of that school year, it was like a formal…a formal gathering. And the parents, the women of the mothers would put nice tablecloths on the tables, and we would have a nice meal and the boys would be in a suit, not a tuxedo by any means, but a suit, a blazer, and the girls were in you know, a formal, full-length gown. And that was certainly a social period that you know we enjoyed at that age, and enjoyed and always looked forward to.
Another bit in the Catholic parochial school we had at different ages, we had different, well then they would call them societies. And I remember in the lower grades, there was one called the Holy Angels Society.

MS: Now, what were the Holy Angels?

RH: Oh, they were a group of girls reaching out to youngsters and you know spending time with them in a social atmosphere. You could classify it as a big-sister program. Then when we got to grade six, the elevated next area was called the Immaculate Conception and that was basically well I remember at holiday times, we went with the two sisters to the convalescent homes, maybe with a little cheer to greet and bring a gift. Perhaps especially at Christmas time, we joined in a little musical program where we would sing, and bring this Christmas cheer to the shut-ins. Very active I was within the group, I would say…the teenage years in the Mary’s Young Christophers. That was a very popular, well-known…the Christopher Movement. And their slogan was, “Better to light one candle, than to curse the darkness.” And that was established by Reverend Christopher…oh dear, dear, I don’t know if it was Dylan. Yup in New York.

MS: And what did you do with this group?

RH: That was regular, very active teenage group, and we did many, many things. Many things within our Middletown, CT community where we reached out…and I do recall, I guess, somewhat with fond memories and a little bit of pride, because it went on maybe twenty years I was the first president of the Mary’s Young Christophers. Originally, we started out with just girls. Maybe forty active young girls, but then we outreached to the parish, and you know within the community, the catholic girls, and maybe year three or four, the boys joined us. There were many fine social gatherings. I remember our first big project, which we thought was a little overwhelming, there were fundraisers, and were proud to think we raised ample funds to purchase this enormous crèche, which today still stands. The Middletown Parks & Recreation department has taken it over and puts it out every year, and it’s on the grounds of our parish up on the North End. You know many, many years ago, say in 1952 whenever that was, that was quite a bit of money, we were proud to have raised the funds. And parents, along with our priest, Monsignor McKenna that went to New York to purchase this, and the enormous, the beautiful statues that make up the crèche.

MS: Oh wow, I never knew where that came from.

RH: So there were some fun times within those years.

MS: Maybe we could move on and talk about your parents, what kind of people they were…. I know Grandpa Tynan was involved with politics. Could you expand on that a little?

RH: My parents, very proud to say, a very fine Christian couple. With the large family they had, my mother she never worked outside the house, somewhat proud to say she was a stay-home in-charge mom and of course, with seven girls, she was quite active and kept herself pretty busy. My dad, well naturally, frequently was being kidded by the fact he had seven daughters and always said he had to wait for his first grand-son. But a very, very fine upstanding man. Very well thought of and as I recall in our young ages, he worked to be exact 24 years for the City of Middletown, which he was very proud of. He worked as the Tax Assessor, city of Middletown. City Hall, which was a very large, very old city hall downtown, Main Street, Middletown. He was a very active within the community. I recall one thing you know in my younger, probably even pre-school years, my dad I know was the president of the Rotary, Men’s Club which is a very active…you know, throughout I guess the area, or maybe even the country. And one thing that always stood out in my mind, once a year after Christmas, the day after Christmas, we always…we then had a very, very fine, lower Washington Street. The Steuck’s, which were a very prominent family in Middletown who ran this very fine hotel and the day after Christmas, oh I bet for maybe ten years, we knew we were going with my dad. Just a magnificent I’d say a Christmas luncheon, but you could almost say dinner. And I don’t know how many at this point in time, this Rotary Club in Middletown was made up of I don’t know how many gentlemen bringing their family to this Christmas gathering. I remember Santa Claus always being there, and the thriller, the excitement was you were always assured of just that extra magnificent Christmas gift. So that was always fun.
And as far as my dad was concerned, I would say in the late Twenties, he became heavily involved in then what was then the Middletown city politics as a very faithful…. He was a Democrat, and for years and the early ages he headed the town committee as General Chairman of the Democratic Town Committee in the city of Middletown. And he was just so well you know thought of and respected and as the years passed…well, my dad’s name was just very much thought of and as I said again I’m repeating myself, respected. Then he moved on to the state. And he held the position of the State Motor Vehicle commissioner, and I think somewhere have the article at the time of my dad’s passing in 1982 that he was the longest acting commissioner at that time in the state. He served as State Motor vehicle commissioner for eighteen years. We recall at home, I guess it was every four years, he would go to the National Democratic Convention. He met many great politicians, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, of course John Kennedy. The Democratic Party within the state was very active, and I don’t know how many election years he went as the state delegate to the conventions.

MS: Knowing that your father was heavily involved in state politics, were there any experiences you had affected by your father’s job?

RH: Well, I had the pleasure of, I would say back in the late 1950’s, then a very fine, one of Connecticut’s senior state’s senators, Brian McMahon from Norwalk, Connecticut. I remember he and his wife, one Saturday night, they were with a group at my parents that they had entertained at home. Another one, we all know today as our senior senator, Christopher Dodd, his dad Thomas Dodd was a close friend to my parents, my mom and dad. And he too, with his wife Grace visited the house you know on different occasions and…oh dear, dear I’m trying to think. And our own, very respected governor, John Dempsey who I think believed served the state of Connecticut as governor and his wife Mary. Governor Wilbur Snow, who was a very, very fine…well you know born and brought up in Middletown, Connecticut and always a very close friend to my parents and sisters. He was an English…poet instructor at Wesleyan University for many years. It seems to me he acted as Governor of the state of Connecticut, but I believe it was only for the matter of two weeks, during the vacancy of one of the governor’s who had passed on. I do recall it was a very exciting day, his, one of his chauffeur’s drove down in the governor’s car and took my six sisters and myself to the then, it was the old Hilton Hotel, with his wife. Our parents weren’t with us. A wonderful, wonderful tour, and I recall dessert at the governor’s residence in Hartford. At our young age, naturally it was a you know, maybe something out of the ordinary, but very exciting. And down through the years with the many years my dad did spend with his political career with the state, and that job was given to my dad by a very fine respectable governor, then of Connecticut, Abraham Ribicoff, who then went on to the Senate in DC.

MS: What were your late teens like? Your high school experience?

RH: I spent four years of course at Middletown High, graduating in ‘52, then spending one year additional year, just at a very, very small business school, called Laurel Business School which was in Waterbury.

MS: Now when you went to the business school, did you drive there every day?

RH: No, I bused it. Frequently had a ride home on the return…but no. Then after the year there, I was very, I considered myself fortunate with this position at one of the utilities right here. There was an office in Middletown at Connecticut Light & Power, CL&P.

MS: What were your job duties?

RH: Well, secretarial work…there were only two girls in the office. Constantly waiting on, and meeting the public.

MS: People coming in for appointments?

RH: Exactly, yes.

MS: There was just one other women who worked there, it was all men?

RH: Yes, only one other woman.

MS: How many people would you say worked in the office?

RH: Well their main office was in Berlin, Connecticut but they had these little district offices, almost within every city in the state of Connecticut. Probably the only outside added feature was mine. They put out a fantastic a…publication, a book every month. And it was my chore and duty each month, you know you had to write in continuing updates about what was going on in the office in Middletown, Connecticut. And I got a lot of enjoyment out of that. Once a month, it would take me to a different office, to a you know a luncheon meeting, and frequently to CL&P to its headquarters, where there would be a speaker. So to me that was such an added feature which got me out of the office, and I was able to meet a lot of new people, so that was great. And believe it or not, I, three months shy of ten years I was at CL&P.

MS: So you started when…?

RH: I started in I think it was June of ‘52 and was there until April of ‘61 because all of the companies, they had pregnancy, you know rules, in the light of, you had to, you were terminated, or you left.

MS: You had to leave?

RH: Yes…imagine? And I had to leave three months in April before Katie, our oldest daughter was born, in July of ‘61.

MS: Interesting. So, there was no choice? I know now women have babies and go back to work…was that even an option for you?

RH: Oh yeah. I could have.

MS: So women back then, could do that?

RH: Oh, certainly. I do remember the night they had a party for me at the old Monte Green in Middletown. It was nicely attended by…I mean it was just the two of us women in the office, but I bet there were twelve men, and their wives. Over the years, close to accumulating ten years, I just met so many people. Our closest contact was our Meriden office, where frequently I grew to know so many people, because of that one contact which was over and above your daily duties in the office. And I met so many wonderful people, so it was amazing, how many I recall, at that farewell, well not a farewell, maybe a gathering. I was just amazed at so many people that came.

MS: How about we move on now and talk about when you met Grandpa and moving into your first apartment?

RH: Oh yeah, golly be. (Laughing) Was it 1957 or 1958 when we met?

MS: Okay, so you met Grandpa in?

RH: Okay, in 1958, in June, through I guess you would say a mutual friend. Until that time, Grampy hadn’t been in Middletown too long. His parents had, but he was in service, okay. And now he was doing part time, I mean full time duty at the Armory, before settling down to a regular position. And this friend, who I believe I knew lots longer than Grampy, I mean joining his parents who were in Middletown now, upon returning from his service, and chatting with his friend, I guess throughout he might know somebody he was interested in meeting. And I guess he specified credentials, that he was looking for an Irish Catholic Democratic gal. So his friend, you know made it a point, you know to see me, and asked me if I’d ever be interested, in meeting this friend of his. And that’s how really he more or less arranged this blind date.

MS: Oh wow.

RH: And that was in ‘58 and we were married in October of ‘59.

MS: So you got married and moved into an apartment?

RH: I would, we’d say a very lovely, very fine, five room apartment. That too was in Middletown on Liberty Street.

MS: Then my mom, Kate comes into the picture?

RH: Then our first child, our first very beautiful daughter was born. We named her Kathleen and using my maiden name, Kathleen Tynan Hassett was born on July 20, 1961. We were still here on Liberty Street.

MS: And you decided to stay home?

RH: It worked out that I was fortunate enough to be the stay-at-home mom. And eighteen months later, Kathleen, which we called Katie, her brother Kevin joined the family. In ‘64, Maureen, ‘66 Patty, ‘69 Michael, and in ‘72 Erin, the youngest of our family of six was born.

MS: It was obviously stressful with all of the children?

RH: Well, yes, at times very hectic, and sure there was stress but a very fine, lots of fun, and many exciting times. Where I came from a big family and was always fortunate to have very fine friends, it seemed like everyone was raising children, and frequently we would get together on special occasions. I felt fortunate I was really only a block away from my home that I knew and grew up with on High Street. It was always a lot of fun to wheel the children down to my parents on any given day.

MS: Did you have a lot of friends in the neighborhood?

RH: Believe it or not, one of my sisters wasn’t far, my sister Pat and her Brenda, first child was the same age as Maureen. But, yes, my very close girlfriend, Joan and her husband Pete LaMalfa, were not even a block away from us. We were on upper Liberty and they were on Park Place. Maybe the first two or three years of marriage, of course they moved and went on to Portland. But the neighbors, were very much at home.

MS: Now Middletown today is very much crowded, was it like that when you were raising the kids? Was Main Street different?

RH: No, I have to admit, rather regret, that Main Street…with the kids growing up in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s you were very comfortable walking downtown to some you’d say, very fine stores, and restaurants, and then the theatre. Today unfortunately, so many of our you know, the stores and shopping enterprises they’ve gone all to you know, these malls and have really moved away from town. So, we still have our drug stores, and there are maybe a couple of small stores, but it just isn’t the same as we remembered it to be.

MS: So you could do all your grocery shopping, clothes shopping on Main Street…there was never any need to travel long distances?

RH: I’m going to say that. Of course, today, you’re traveling, you are to either the West Farms Mall, Manchester, or the Meriden Square to find your needs. Nevertheless of course, supermarkets, your Stop & Shops, Wal-Mart and all are handy in that respect, in that area.

MS: When you moved to Highland Avenue, there was obviously a lot more space…you sent your children back to St. John’s…what were their routines like?

RH: Of course then, buses were provided, and yes…they too were active and kept busy within you know the usual programs of…the girls repeating you know…the interests within Brownies and Girl Scouts…was there for them right within the Church. And of course with Kevin, Boy Scouts, but then of course he had his Little League sports functions…leagues that his father always was interested in to have you know both Kevin and Michael to participate in. And, the girls too went to dancing school with their dance recitals.

MS: Family vacations?

RH: Family vacations…a few summers we visited you know on the Cape for a couple of weeks. And, it seems there were many summers we’d go to the beach, to the Connecticut shore. But as the kids grew, their interests varied and Katie our oldest, seems to me, maybe her junior or senior year, she held a summer job at one of the quick restaurants, McDonalds. Kevin, of course had a paper route, which kept him busy. I believe it was the Hartford Courant. Michael repeated, but I believe he had the Middletown Press route. Maureen worked with the Parks and Recreation Department, and at McDonalds for a little while. Patty was with you know recreation. Maureen was with our pool, a lifeguard.

MS: Obviously, during the 1960’s and 70’s there were a lot of critical issues facing our country, with Vietnam and women’s issues. Do you remember anything significant happening in Middletown during this time?

RH: I do…and it would have been in the early ‘70’s. You witnessed and this would just be what you read in the paper, or your commuting, your drive runs when you were exposed to the Wesleyan campus. They would be out picketing and you’d notice, I guess what you’d notice was a complete change in how they would present themselves in their attire. You just kind of wondered, where Wesleyan is considered one of your finer colleges. It was almost the kind of take-over…militant…the exposure. Forever picketing…I don’t know…the appearance was just so changed, with the real long hair, and their, you know…appearance. Their attire of clothing was just such a radical, drastic change.

MS: Now as the kids one by one moved out of the house, you obviously kept yourself busy with social and church activities? Could you tell me about your church activities?

RH: Well, I still enjoy on occasion going to our St. Vincent’s DePaul soup kitchen, which you know are known throughout whether they’re church wise…or maybe now sort of diocesan sponsored. Very popular food and shelters for the homeless and now most of them provide living quarters. Every other month, our parish provides a complete dinner on two Sundays a month. I guess the other one continually on a monthly basis is a visit to the convalescent homes, where parishioners are there…just bring them some cheer and a bit of friendship.
MS: And you still continue to have a good relationship with your family, children, sisters?

RH: Yes, we continue to have a great relationship with my family and friends….

Transcript of interview by Quinn Gardner of Patricia Higgins
Little York, New York
March 6, 2004

Quinn Gardner (QG): When were you born?

Patricia Higgins (PH): I was born December 1, 1947.

QG: So, that makes you 56?

PH: Yep.

QG: You are a baby boomer, then?

PH: Oh yes, I am.

QG: What were your parents like?

PH: Um…my parents were married right after the war. They met during World War Two. My father was from a farming family in Central New York, and my mother was a city girl. She was, uh, born and brought up in Philadelphia. So, they were very different in their backgrounds. But they, they met during World War Two and married in 1946. 1945, actually. 1945.

QG: How many siblings do you have?

PH: I have two brothers and two sisters.

QG: You grew up with four other kids running around the house?

PH: Yes, I did. Um, we were like many baby boomer families. Uh, fairly close in age, at least the first, three, four of us. Fairly like most of the other families in the neighborhood. And it was a small house. So, I look at it now and I can’t figure out how we did it. But yes, we did.

QG: Was your house crowded?

PH: It was very crowded. It had…When my parents were first moved in that house, they already had three children, and I believe my mother was pregnant for the fourth. There were only two bedrooms. Now, eventually they converted another room into a third bedroom, but it was small. All the rooms were very small, um, so yes. It was very, very crowded.

QG: Did most of your friends have large families too?

PH: Yes, absolutely. In fact, we weren’t considered a particularly large family. I mean there were families in the, uh, school, that we went to that had eight, eight kids. You know, five was not considered a particular large family at the time.

QG: Where did you go to school?

PH: Um, when I first started school in, in kindergarten, I went to the public school, which was Park Hill School. But by the time I was ready for first grade the Catholic school was built, Saint Matthews. So, at that point I went to Saint Matthews for grade school. Up through eighth grade, that’s how it went. And I went to St. John the Evangelist High School, which was actually not in my neighborhood. It was located in downtown Syracuse.

QG: How did you get there?

PH: Initially, it was the city bus. We lived, actually, almost right on the corner of where the city bus went. And…they were very interested in having people go to the Catholic High School, so I think we even got some kind of a subsidy for our tokens to take the city bus. By the time I was a senior we had school buses that would pick us up and take us to St. John’s.

QG: Was it expensive to go to Catholic school?

PH: Um, it was, it did, there was a tuition. It certainly wasn’t like it is now, but it wasn’t as inexpensive as public school. I think we paid some small tuition, not for grade school, but high school. Grade school there was not a tuition for grade school but there was for high school. It was also, um, competitive to get in the catholic high schools, because they didn’t have the large catholic high schools like they do now. These were basically neighborhood schools. And they were located…um, maybe nine or ten of them located in different places around the city. There were all very, very small and um you would actually take a test to get in school. So, some of the people from St. Matthews that were in my class that graduated in eighth grade wanted to go to one of these catholic high schools but couldn’t get in. It was just very competitive to get in.

QG: Where did you grow up?

PH: I grew up in East Syracuse, which was originally a railroad town, but when we grew up the main manufacturing, uh…place was Carrier Air Conditioning. They were then based in Syracuse. And many of the people that I knew had families that worked for Carrier. My father did not at that time. But, uh, it was a manufacturing, manufacturing town, basically.

QG: Would you say you were a middle or working class family?

PH: Oh, definitely working class. Definitely working class. And, and everybody knew it was working class. I don’t think I knew anybody whose, uh, whose family would have been considered middle class. There were some folks, but most of my friends were working class.

QG: Did all your brothers and sisters go the Catholic school?

PH: Um…except for my brother David, who is about twelve years younger than me. Um, the four of us, the first four of us all went to Catholic grade school. But in high school, my sister Carolyn and I went to Catholic High School, and we were the only ones that went to Catholic High School. The other, actually the other three went to East Syracuse Minoa, which was, uh, a public high school.

QG: How come?

PH: Um, when we first went, when Carolyn and I first went to Catholic high school, the, the public high school in the area was terribly overcrowded. It was so overcrowded that, in fact, you had to go, you had to take a morning or an afternoon session. There would be a session from seven in the morning until one, and then another one until five or six or something like that. And, and, the Catholic High School were considered much better educationally and academically. They put a lot of emphasis on preparation for college. So, they were considered better. Now, by the time my brother, who is younger than me, went to school, that was the first year that East Syracuse Minoa was built so it was bigger school and there was a lot more offered. And I think, also, that he just didn’t want to go to. Neither did my younger sister. They didn’t want to go to Catholic school. They wanted to go to public school.

QG: Which brother? They are both younger than you?

PH: Both of them wanted to. Butch and David both. And Marilyn. Definitely wanted to go to the public school.

QG: Is there anything you want to say about your family?

PH: I think my family was in, in, like a lot of families at the time. Still being influenced World War Two to a great degree. I can remember one time when I was young they had another couple, maybe two other couples sitting around the kitchen table. Of course they all had a lot of kids. And the kids were mainly playing with each other. But I can remember being downstairs sort of listening, like kids do, listen to their parents when they talk. And I can remember, uh, one of the other guys that was there saying something, they were talking about, uh, bombing, and that they were sure there would be another war, and I remember distinctly when one of them saying “well, Syracuse would be a target to be bombed because of Bristol,” which was actually right up the street from us. Bristol Laboratories. And I remember really being … sort of shocked at that. But I think, you know, that they were still, most of them had been, uh, in the service. The men had been in the service, the women had been influenced by the war. Uh, some of them, you know, going with them and totally different places than they had grown up, and, uh, you know, I think that was an influence on them. You know, my, it was definitely an influence on my father. He, he had a lot of problems in terms of drinking problems and things like that as he got older, and as I look back I think a lot of that was related to his experiences in, in World War Two. My mother, of course, was totally taken out of her context. I mean that she grew up a city girl in Philadelphia, and, uh, when she first moved to Central New York with my father, the first place they moved didn’t even have indoor plumbing. It was a huge, huge shock to her. She had never had, I mean she didn’t cook or anything like that. Her mother did it all, so she comes to live in a farm family where all the women are, you know started cooking, cleaning and all that, when they were probably five years old. So, she was definitely a fish out of water. And I think that impacted their relationship which of course impacted everything that happened.

QG: Did your mother work?

PH: When we were young she didn’t work outside the home, but, um, I think I was probably I don’t know, twelve, or thirteen, and this was again, during recession time, and my father lost his job and that’s the first time I remember my mother working. She got a job with an insurance company, and did start working then. She did that for a few years, and then she got pregnant for my young…. Well, I must have been younger than that, because she got pregnant with David and quit work then and I was twelve then and David was born. And she didn’t work then for a number of years, I think for maybe three or four years, and then went back to work and worked for New York State Compensation Board and continued working there until she retired.

QG: So, she was working when your dad wasn’t working?

PH: Yes, yes. He was not working and, uh, she got a job and you know, he eventually did get other jobs, but uh, there was a little while where she was working and he was not.

QG: Did your friends’ mothers work?

PH: Again, when we were little nobody did. Absolutely nobody. It was just not considered to be a good thing. At all. I mean, women were supposed to be home taking care of these kids and there were so many kids, and they were supposed to be involved in the PTA and, um, all of those things that, that kind of go on. But they all had stair step kids. One right after the next. But I can remember there being just a kind of attitude that they shouldn’t be working because if they were working they were taking jobs away from men.

QG: So, then your mom just started working at first because your dad wasn’t working?

PH: Right, absolutely and I can remember when she went to interview for the job at the insurance company she had to take a test. My mother was pretty intelligent. She didn’t go to college but she was, you know, is a very intelligent woman. And, uh, my father drove her down and she went in and took the test. When she came back out, you know, he of course, didn’t expect her to have gotten the job because he had been looking for other work and hadn’t found anything and she just got the job immediately. And he, you know, she walked out and said “oh, I got the job.” He was just shocked. Just shocked that she just went in and took that test and got the job. Now, it didn’t pay a heck of a lot of money or anything but it was a job and, you know, they needed the money so she did.

QG: Was he upset, or anything?

PH: I think he always struggled with that. I, I do, I really do. He uh, from when he lost his job, this was the job he had had from when he was young and he went in the service and came back to this job after the war. But, you know, it was sort of his, his self-hood, it was tied up in that. And even though he did work and have other jobs pretty much for the rest of his life. I don’t think he ever really recovered from that. The fact that she could, could just go and get a job very easily, although, again, she didn’t make any money, very little money compared to what he had made. But I think he struggled with it.

QG: What expectations were put on you growing up?

PH: Umm…. We were a big family, and uh, my mother always expected, in terms of school work, she always expected me to do my best, but she never put any pressure on me, ever put any pressure on me at all. And I do remember whatever my grades were she just thought that was wonderful. She never thought, I never remember her saying to me “you need to do better,” It was like, “yes, you are doing very well.” The same with Carolyn, um, so she was always very, very proud, umm, expected that we would do well in school but didn’t expect that we would, you know, be the best at everything. As far as …my father had no expectations whatsoever in terms of grades or anything like that. Never paid the slightest bit of attention to that, at all. He was very umm, sports minded. He was a great athlete in high school. When he was a freshman in high school he was captain of his baseball, basketball and football team. And, uh, probably, had he gone to college, he probably could have gotten a scholarship to go to college. One of his best friends at the time was Tommy Cahill who eventually became a coach of West Point Football. And they stayed friends really for their whole lives. He was a great athlete. He was also a professional boxer for awhile. Umm, and he was very, very good at that. He quit that because his mother didn’t like it, which was kinda interesting. Umm, she was an interesting person. But she didn’t like him boxing, and he quit even though he was very, very good. So he was very athletic minded. But he really, I think, in his mind, girls… there was no reason to educate girls beyond high school, he expected us to get through high school, because they were just going to get married anyway. He really had no interest in that.

QG: Was there any expectations on you because you were a girl?

PH: Yeah, yeah, there were. Um, we were supposed to do certain housework that was just, and it was definitely divided over the gender line. The girls were supposed to do the dishes, the cleaning, things like that. My brother was supposed to take out the trash and mow the lawn and you know, very divided along gender lines. Completely divided along gender lines. I don’t know that we ever really did very well though. And since my mother wasn’t a particularly great cook and she was an okay housekeeper, but it was never anything that she ever had any selfhood tied up in. She didn’t ever put any effort in teaching any of it to us either, so, I guess you’d say the expectations were there but not really, not really, big in terms of that kind of thing.

QG: What was high school like?

PH: Oh, high school. High school, you know, when I think about it and I don’t know if it was any different from high school at any time in terms of the emotional upheaval of high school which I found to be very difficult. There was, umm, umm, it was a small high school and there were kids from different parts of the city that had come to this high school. You had to take a test to get in. And, umm, I think we had 80, 80 kids in my graduating class. And it was very cliquey. It was, you were either the in crowd or you weren’t in the in crowd. It was such a small school there really wasn’t room for a lot of different groups. There was only 80 in the whole graduating class. It was a struggle, I think high school was a struggle, I wouldn’t go back to high school for anything. It was a very difficult time.

QG: Did you go to college?

PH: I, I went to college, umm, first to a two year college and graduated and then I worked for a number of years and then I returned to a different college later and completed my degree.

QG: Were your parents supportive of you going to college?

PH: Not really…. My mother was. My mother was. She thought it was great. Um, and she was, you know, she tried the best she could to be supportive. They had really no money. So my first semester of college, I don’t know where she got the money now that I think of it. She paid for my tuition and room and board for one semester. But then after that it was up to me. I had to figure out how to do it. I def, distinctly remember when my older sister, who is a year ahead of me, went to college, it was kind of like the one that was the ground breaker because my father just saw no reason to go to college. And she was bright, she was very bright and very ambitious. At that time much more ambitious than I was. And she had it in her head that she was going to college and she got everything arranged to go and he just didn’t see a reason for that at all. I even, I remember him saying to her “why are we putting her through college?” Not that he was. He really wasn’t putting her through college. She put herself through college. Umm, “She’s just going to get married anyway.” And then the only reason that you could sort of logically say to him that made any sense was, “well, she’ll have something to fall back on if her husband has a problem.” You know. So that was the only thing. But she was the ground breaker, I wasn’t. I think because she did, and because I was in this Catholic high school where the emphasis was on going to college, I decided I’d go, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. No clue, none whatsoever.

QG: What was your college experience like?

PH: I went to college in, I started college in 1965. College in 1965 and graduated in ‘67 from my two year college. That was the time, really, it just seemed like the world was changing. In so many ways. The music which of course was always a big part of uh, any, any teenager’s life, was changing radically. I remember distinctly when the Beatles came over and all of that. It was a real hard rock and umm, people’s looks changed radically. And then of course there was the Vietnamese war, and that was just a huge impact on, on college experience in those first two years. I can remember a friend of mine who went to high school with me, umm, she went to Lemoyne College, she was there six months I think, and immediately, the first time I saw her she just didn’t looked like the same person. Not even the same person. Everybody grew the really long, straight hair, and ironed it and wore, umm, eye-liner and really, really short skirts. Just, uhh, bellbottom pants and so it was just, it was one of those times when things changed really, really rapidly.

QG: When you were younger what did you see as your future?

PH: Umm…I really didn’t know. I really didn’t. I remember when I was probably … oh gosh, probably in like eighth grade or something having a conversation with my sister, Carolyn. And, you know, about what we were going to be when we grew up. And I think I said something like maybe I’ll be a hairdresser. And I remember her saying to me it was one of those things that I distinctly remember, “A hairdresser? That doesn’t take any brains to be a hairdresser.” I think that was the first time I even thought about that. You know, thought about something. It just didn’t click with me. I had no idea what I wanted to do. None.

QG: Did most of your friends feel like that?

PH: Umm…I think as we got older, and we were in high school most of my friends wanted to do the same things that every other, they wanted to go to college ‘cause we were in this school where everyone went to college, but they wanted to be teachers and nurses. That was basically what people wanted to do.

QG: Did you feel pressure to marry?

PH: I didn’t feel pressure to get married from my parents or anything like that. I certainly felt it from society. I mean, especially when I first started college, that was still the time where…uh, you know, what you really wanted to do when you went to college was by the end of it get pinned, get engaged, and get married. That’s just, that’s just how it was. And I just wanted to do that too because I just thought that was what I was supposed to do. I didn’t feel any pressure from my parents or anything like that, but myself, I think felt like I wasn’t going to be successful unless I was able to do that.

QG: Did you know anyone who served in Vietnam?

PH: Yes, I did. I knew…there was one young man who went to grade school with me. And he was…he was the first person I knew that got killed in Vietnam. I think up to that point, even though it was in the news and everything, I… I never paid any attention to it, I didn’t know what was going on. And when I heard that he had gotten killed I remember just being sort of shocked. And then afterwards I knew two, actually three, three other guys that I knew that I had dated on and off were in Vietnam at different times and it was…it was pretty scary. It was a very scary time.

QG: How did you feel about the Vietnam War?

PH: I think in the beginning, like a lot of people I really didn’t pay much attention to it. I didn’t think, I didn’t think about it. I remember when I was in high school, and again remember this was a small Catholic high school, they had a speaker come in, and I think I was maybe a junior when he came, and his name was Anthony Bouscaren, I still remember his name. And he was like some head honcho in government and he was talking about Vietnam then and it must have been at the very, very, very beginning and someone asked a question of well won’t they, meaning the world, say that we’re being aggressive if we go to Vietnam and, and, you know, have a war there. And I remember him saying well they’re saying that anyway, so why not just do that. And at the time, that made a lot of sense. I just thought, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, I think probably at the beginning, I was probably thinking, if I thought about it at all, which I really didn’t, but if I did I thought oh well, yeah, that’s, that’s, and besides our government knows more about this that I do. What do I know? That’s probably okay. But of course as the war progressed, umm, I thought differently of it and was, was one of those who, who felt it really should end.

QG: How did the feminist movement affect your life?

PH: The feminist movement affected my life a lot. Although not when I was young. Again when I was young, I just didn’t get it. I mean, for me, it was of course I just want to get married and have kids and, you know, I didn’t think much of it at all. But when I went back, actually, let me think about this. I went…I did two years of college and then I did some teaching and then I moved to Indianapolis. And, I think I was in my mid twenties, then. And that’s when, and I was by myself there. And that’s when I started doing a lot of reading. I can remember going to the library every Friday and just getting books, and books and books, and reading over the whole weekend. And, I picked up some, some book having to do with feminism or women’s rights or something. And I started reading that, which got me to read a whole bunch more on that. And…it was just all of the sudden it was one of those experiences where it just sort of all clicked. I read a lot. I remember reading The Feminist Mystique, I can remember reading, uh, umm, I can’t think of her name now. The other woman that, I mean there were two or three at the time that were best sellers, and I just absolutely remember thinking, my god this makes so much sense. And, um, really started considering myself a feminist. So, that was sort of myself doing that I guess. Umm, I wasn’t necessarily at that point involved in the movement, but I remember starting to identify with what I was reading and what I was seeing. And then when I went to back to college at the University of Missouri, and um, started taking courses, and, again, started getting more involved in issues and I think I was part of the Women’s Political Caucus, there, and really considered myself a feminist. First and foremost. It was probably how I would have identified myself at that time. If you asked me to identify myself I would have said I’m a feminist.

QG: When did you get married?

PH: I got married, um, in 1982. And I was thirty…four years old.

QG: Why so late?

PH: I was always sort of a little off-cycle. When all my friends were getting married and having kids, I was going back to school. And then, after I went back to school and moved back here to New York I started getting involved in a lot of things. I met somebody and, um, decided to get married and that was right when all my friends were getting divorced. So, I was always single when they were married and then I was married when they were all single. But I really didn’t think that I wanted to get married. You know, once I sort of said I really don’t need to get married, I kind of got past that I really don’t need to get married, I thought I really don’t think I want to get married. And, uh, it just so happened that I met somebody and we decided that we wanted to have a, a child and that is something that I didn’t want to do without being married so we got married.

QG: Did you feel like you had to get married?

PH: Before that? I wouldn’t have considered myself successful if I hadn’t gotten married. That was just, I mean, I mean, we’re talking way back now, the only women who didn’t get married were people who couldn’t get a man.

QG: Did you have children?

PH: I had one daughter.

QG: How did motherhood affect your life?

PH: Wow. Motherhood affected my life hugely, because I was thirty-five when I had my daughter. I knew I would go back to work. It was really never…a consideration that I would stay home. And, I, you know, wanted to go back to work. Plus, we needed it financially. But I would have anyway, because, I just, I had, you know, worked my whole life. I couldn’t imagine staying home. So, but that was extremely difficult. I don’t think, I think I totally underestimated how difficult that would be. In terms of, um, you know, having a child and caring for a child, but also working in a professional capacity. Um, my sister, my other sister and I were pregnant at the same time and had our children roughly at the same time, and we used to say how the biggest problem was that you never felt like you were doing anything right. You weren’t putting enough time into motherhood to do it right because you couldn’t and you weren’t putting enough time into work to do it right because you couldn’t. So, you know, you felt like you were just not doing anything how you wanted to do it. That was probably the most frustrating thing. It was very difficult. Very difficult.

QG: Do you think that your husband felt the same way?

PH: Umm, it was a little different for him. He, he owned a restaurant so…the interruptions to work cycles or whatever fell to me. Umm, my daughter had ear infections a lot and had to be taken to the doctors and things like that on a regular basis. But he owned a small restaurant and he had to be there. It was open 12 hours a day and if he wasn’t there it was closed, which meant there was no money. So, there really wasn’t any choice, so I had to be the one to do that all the time. Umm, I was, I was fortunate that I had a job that I could, most of the time, accommodate the time, but it was hard on me then. I had to figure out how to get all the work done some other time. I don’t think he felt the pressure the way I felt the pressure because it just felt like…I mean I had to do it. He couldn’t so I had to do it. And…even if…I don’t know how to explain this. It was just I always knew that I was the one that had to take care of her. I knew that, so it was just always there.

QG: Did he ever make you feel like you had to do certain things because you were the mother and the wife?

PH: Oh, no. Never, never, never at all. No, he wouldn’t. Remember, I was thirty-four when I got married and he was thirty. He knew exactly what he was getting. I kept my own name when we got married. There was no…He knew I didn’t cook, he knew that I didn’t do that kind of stuff. He knew I would work, so no, he never. He never said you do this because you are the woman, that would never be in his vocabulary, except in a joking kind of a way. He would never do that.

QG: What jobs have you held?

PH: Umm, when I, when I first graduated from my two year college I did some teaching and early child care. I worked in a day care center for a while and that was in Indianapolis. And it was at that point that I realized that I really needed to go back to school if I ever wanted to, you know, go any further. So, I did, I went back to school at the University of Missouri and when I got there, um, what happens a lot of times. You go back for one thing and then get interested in a lot of other things. And I got interested in women’s studies and human development, a lot of things like that. When I finished I really wasn’t interested in working in child care anymore. I was interested in working in, um, some kind of capacity working on women’s issues. So, I…after I finished I came back to Central New York and worked at the YWCA and did a lot of women’s programming there. After that I worked for Council on Women’s Issues at United Way in Syracuse. I kept my finger in child care. I worked on what’s called a CDA which was Child Development Associate. I was a, a faculty member at Onondaga Community College. And I taught courses in child development to head start teachers so they could get that credential. I work…um…what did I do after that? I got it. Then I started with the PACE program at OCC, Onondaga Community College. Umm, we worked with, umm, women on welfare who wanted to go back to school trying to get their degree and a better job and that got to be sort of a bigger thing with welfare reform. We started the JOBS Plus! Program which was for welfare recipients in the county to get back to work. And then, I was asked to be, umm, Acting Vice President for Student Services at Onondaga Community College. So, that’s what I’m doing now.

QG: How has being a woman impacted your career?

PH: Umm…I think that being a woman impacted my career probably in the very beginning because I didn’t see other things that I might have been interested in. You know, in fact, when I grew up, you just didn’t see women doing anything really other than being a teacher, secretary or a nurse. So, I probably limited myself … a lot in the beginning just because it didn’t occur to me I could do other things. And, um, you know, when I, one of the things that was kind of interesting to me was, when I went back to school in Missouri, one of the required courses was you had to take one course in economics. And I didn’t take it until I was just about done, I had almost everything almost everything done. And I took it one summer and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And it was one of those things where I guess you either liked it or you don’t like it. But the, the professor at the end of the class said that I could, I could have been an economist, because my mind thought that way. And, you know, it was that, I think that is kind of one of the examples of, that would never have occurred to me being an economist because I didn’t know what an economist was and certainly there weren’t any women doing that. I think probably in the beginning being a woman limited my, my thoughts and ideas. And then I think also didn’t think I needed a career because I thought I was going to get married and, you know, there you go. So, um, I think as I’ve gotten, as I’ve gotten older…I don’t, because of the field I’m in, I don’t know that being a woman has been, has stood in my way at all, if I fell in a lot of other fields then I definitely think there was a glass ceiling and women can’t get above it. Where I am I don’t think it is.

QG: You said that you lived in Indianapolis and Missouri, why did you move there?

PH: After I graduated from the two year school I was doing some teaching in Catholic school and I had some friends that were in Albany. So, I moved there and the three of us had an apartment together. I did that for three years. And toward the end of the third year I just knew I didn’t want to be a teacher for the rest of my life. That hit me, even though I liked it and was good at it I knew I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. And I had no clue what I wanted to do. I had a friend, a different friend at the time, and she was a teacher also. The two of us decided, and we were like in our early twenties, that you know what let’s just take a year off and take a car and drive around, across country. People did that a lot, then, in those days. We didn’t have to spend much money and it would just be something to do. So, I quit my job and she quit her job and that was what we were going to do. Because she had nothing to do in the summer she went to summer school and then got really involved in her graduate work. She kinda bailed out on me. So, come September, I’ve got no job, actually it wasn’t September yet it was August and I was really in a stew. I was at my parent’s house in East Syracuse and, because I had quit my job, left Albany and I was just kinda in a stew. I didn’t know what to do. And one night I said you know, I gotta get outta here. I had a little Volkswagen. I packed up my stuff and it was at night. And I just said I am just going to get in my car and drive and stop where I stop. And that’s what happened. I drove and drove and drove and for some reason stopped in Indianapolis and ended up living with a little old lady while I worked at a day care center. And that’s what got me interested early childhood was at the day care center. I got to be very good friends with a family there, they had two little kids. And, uh, I was there a number of years. That’s where I decided I really needed to go back to school. Decided, I looked at three places and one of them was the University of Missouri at Columbia, and that’s where I ended up. So, I was out in Columbia for about three years. And then just as I was finishing school a job opened up in Cortland, NY, which was about thirty minutes from my home as a, a director of a program with battered rape victims at the YWCA and my sister sent it to me and I thought well, this is what I have been studying, so I came back.

Transcript of interview by Amanda Neyenhouse of Nancy Kinn

Nancy Kinn: Nancy Kinn, that’s K-I-N-N.

Amanda Neyenhouse: When is your birthday?

NK: October the 24th and I will be 87 this year.

AN: Where were you born?

NK: I was born in Springdale, PA.

AN: What did your parents do?

NK: My mother was a homemaker, my father, when I was a baby, I believe he worked for the PA railroad then he bought a dairy and he delivered milk to people’s homes every day. Sundays and holidays.

AN: How long did he do that for?

NK: Oh garsh, I don’t know how many years daddy had that. Well your grandfather and I were married and he had just sold the business shortly before we were married in ‘44.

AN: So you grew up in PA, what was that like?

NK: It was a small town, there were maybe three thousand people. I went to grade school, we didn’t have kindergarten like you folks have. Went to grade school and then we went, grade school was first through ninth. Then we went to high school. And we had our own high school, beautiful building, it was built just before our class went into it. We had people coming, young folks, our classmates came from towns surrounding. Mining towns. And they were bussed in, it wasn’t a regional school or anything, it was just the high school. We had some pretty nice teachers, we had some good times. My best friend, her father was superintendent of school. And our classes weren’t all that big. So that’s where I went to grade school and high school.

AN: What year did you graduate high school?

NK: 1935.

AN: Where did you go to college?

NK: I went to Allegheny College in Meadville, PA.

AN: How was that?

NK: I entered there in 1935 and graduated in 1939. It was a liberal arts college. I majored in economics. The first two years we did just the general subjects, introductory. And then we majored our junior year. And I majored in economics with a side of secretarial work. I got my certificate in secretarial work plus my BA degree in 1939.

AN: Was it a co-ed school?

NK: Yes, It was co-ed.

AN: How many students were at Allegheny?

NK: At that time, I forget how many were there, I think it was about 700 students. It was up, we used to say, there was Slippery Rock College, and that was a teacher’s college. Then the next school up the road was Grove City which was, um, more or less like Allegheny. Only at Allegheny it was a little more prestigious, is that the word! And, many of my classmates came from Erie, PA schools, Pittsburgh schools and surrounding.

AN: What was your favorite part of college?

NK: Ha-ha, well, I had a lot of favorite parts. I belonged to a sorority. We had sororities and fraternities and at that time they were an integral part of our college. They took care of the activities that most colleges today take care of. They had inter-fraternity dances, we had Pan-Hellenic dances. We had frat parties and sorority parties. We had fraternity serenades and sings, so fraternities and sororities in those days were very important. And, as we found out after we graduated they were an introduction to people that could have helped us in getting a job or in society in general.

AN: What sorority were you in?

NK: I was in Alpha Chi Omega, we had six sororities, we didn’t have houses, we had sorority rooms and the men had frat houses. We had all the top ones, I think it was six or seven. And they had some very nice parties too at times! (Ha-ha) And intramurals, and so it was, we had a good social life. We made some very dear friends and we just had a very good college life. Of course, now fraternities and sororities aren’t quite as important as they were then because that was how the social life was done for the college. Instead of the college having to provide dances and different activities why the fraternities and sororities took care of that.

AN: Did a lot of people go to college when you were young?

NK: No. Very few of us from high school. In fact, there were times when we were considered snobs because we went to college. Many, many of my high school classmates came out of high school and got married and had children. Some of them went to secretarial school. I forget the percent in my class that went to college. But, it wasn’t very big.

AN: Was it much less common for a woman to attend college?

NK: Uh, it depended, I think so. I mean, I don’t recall now, I never kept track of how many percentage wise of men and women that went. But I know that when I went to college, I think the male population was considerably more than the female.

AN: What was it like growing up right after W.W.I?

NK: I was born in ‘17 so that had no effect on my life, that I knew of at the time ‘cause I was just a little kid. And, we lived well, I mean, supposedly we were in the, it wasn’t society as we know society-high society and all, but my parents and their friends were considered the top of the line in the town that we lived in. It was a small town, it was a working town, and there were foreign immigrants there, but not many. And they had their own church and their own area. But, we were considered higher up in the town. My father was active, he was on the school board for many, many years. My mother, as I said, was a home-person. She had been a school teacher in her day, before she was married. But she never did it after, that I know of. In fact, she just raised my sister and I.

AN: What did you do after college?

NK: After college I worked for Jones and Lockland Steel in the purchasing department. That’s the job I told you my family’s friend got me. I worked there for, I guess, a good year, year and a half. And a friend of mine called me from Meadville where I had gone to college. And she had stayed there and worked for Talon. She called one day and said there might be a job opening, “Would you be interested?” So I went up and interviewed and I was hired and I worked in the engineering department of Talon which was most interesting because the first year I worked there I was doing secretarial work. And I was picked to go to each engineer for two weeks while their immediate secretary was on vacation. So I got the whole bailiwick, even from the head of the department down. It was quite instructive and very interesting because it was not only the metal that’s used, it was the tape and the components for a zipper.

AN: What is Talon?

NK: Talon manufactures zippers, fasteners as they’re called. They used to be called zippers.

AN: So how long did you work there?

NK: I worked there until 1942 until a friend of mine said, “Nancy, lets go join the WAVES.” So we went and we were interviewed, and I was turned down because, as I found out later, I hadn’t met the weight requirement. I was quite a bit underweight. So I said okay, it was a good idea. We didn’t want to join the Army, we just didn’t. And furthermore, it was getting to the point where all the guys were leaving and there was nobody left to date! So we decided we’d join the WAVES. And we did, as I said, I was turned down and I went back to Meadville one Sunday after being home for the weekend. There was a telegram on the mantle saying I was to report the next day to the recruiting office in Pittsburgh. So I called my father and said, “Meet me in Pittsburgh, I’ll take the next bus back.” And I did and I was sworn in. I think that was in August. We were sworn in, and I think I reported to Smith College the following November. Hold on a minute, I have the dates….

AN: So you went in October of ‘42?

NK: Yeah, October of ‘42.

AN: You went to Smith, what was that like? What did you do while you were there?

NK: We marched everyplace, we had classes and I don’t even remember all of them now. I remember the one I couldn’t get into was Electricity. We had to learn about electricity, but they taught us Navy, Navy stuff. And of course, when we left there we were…I went in as a Seamen First Class and we came out as Ensigns. Then, in February we reported to Philadelphia Navy Yard. That’s where we were sent. We replaced, I think there were sixteen or eighteen of us sent to Philly and that number of men left to go to the Pacific. We were in communications, that’s what they were teaching us. And of course at Smith we learned which planes were good and which were bad and all the Navy stuff. And, as I said, we got there and when we graduated we were all sent basically back to our home districts. Now some of the girls that lived in Philadelphia or environs, they weren’t too happy, they wanted to see the world. Which we all did, but it worked out and eventually we were all promoted. They used to have mass promotions called All-Navs. And if you were, like we were Ensigns we were promoted to Lieutenant Jr. Grade and I came out as a Lieutenant Sr. Grade when I finished. And some of the girls stayed in and came out in higher ranks, but most of us…I was in charge of the code room. I was the officer in charge for, I think it was a year, year and a half. That was quite a responsibility. It was, of course we would get male officers in to teach them coding and decoding.

AN: So you taught male officers?

NK: Yes, and some of them weren’t too happy to be taught by WAVES. But anyhow, we replaced sixteen or eighteen men and all but one of them came back after their tour of the Pacific. I guess they were out there for two years, I don’t remember now. All but one man, he was killed. So it was quite thrilling and as a watch officer if a message came in, I think it was red, only the watch officer could open it or decode it. And with that, no matter what time of the night or day it came in it had to be done immediately. But, one of the other officers couldn’t do it, it had to be the watch officer. And then you had to seal it in an envelope and take it to the Captain or the Admiral. The Admiral was a lovely man, he never, if we had to take them over at night he was there in his bathrobe and pajamas and was very gracious and very nice. The Captain was a, he was kind of a, he was true Navy. Boy, he let you know who he was. He got really up on his horse if everything wasn’t…. One time I got called in because I had taken a message in an envelope and brought it back and the next day my Captain called me in and he said, “Nancy, you’re in trouble.” I said, “Why?” and he said from now on you have to take envelopes to put them back into after you’ve given them the message and seal it. And of course you had to have a Marine or top security to take you to the Captain or Admiral’s quarters. So it was quite interesting, I mean, of course, we stood watches. We worked from 8-4 for four days then had forty-eight hours off, then we worked from 4-12 for four days then had forty eight hours off. And we worked from 12-8 in the morning for fours days and had forty eight hours off. So it wasn’t, you know, then one time they decided that we had to work twelve hours a day, but that didn’t go over very big. And we had a very great bunch of people I worked with, some I kept as friends over the years, of course a few of them have passed away, but it was a great. Then I met your grandfather and fell in love. Then I had to get permission to get married, I had to get permission from the Captain to wear a wedding dress and next year my sister got married and I had to get permission to be a bridesmaid and I had to get permission to wear a bridesmaid dress. So, I mean, it was all strictly by the book. After V-E Day things quieted down on the East Coast. Very, very much. Everything was in the Pacific. Consequently we had nothing to do and I had been in three years, three months and thirteen days. And I was married. The only way you could get out at that time was to have enough points. Well you got points for your rank and you got points for the length of time you had been in and for, I forget some of the others. I had all but two points and I applied to get out and so I was discharged. I had to go to Washington to be discharged. And then after I had my first daughter, Janie, I applied for Permanent and I got my Honorable Discharge because you couldn’t be in and have a child under eighteen at that time. So then I just went on to be a mother and a housewife and I never really worked much after that. Until after your grandfather died and that’s when I worked.

AN: Was being a WAVES what you expected?

NK: At that time it was a thrill, I mean, we had to wear uniforms for everything, you didn’t go out without. A uniform was the dress of the day, no matter where you went. It was a thrill, it really was, you felt like you were doing something. We all went in voluntarily, and it wasn’t like when, which war was it when the guys kept running up to Canada and all over the place because they didn’t want to go?

AN: Vietnam?

NK: Yes, the Vietnam War. When we went President Roosevelt said we need you and we went. It was just something you did and there was no discrimination or anything, it was an honor to be able to do it. And we as WAVES did our part by releasing men to do the same thing overseas. Because the men that we replaced were doing communications in wherever.

AN: Where you hoping to see more of the world?

NK: I think all of us did, my roommate, of course after I was married they said we could go to Puerto Rico or Hawaii. Well of course I wasn’t about to because I was married, my roommate went, she went to Hawaii. But those were our only choices, I think it was Puerto Rico or Hawaii and being married, your grandfather didn’t particularly want me to leave. It was nothing, it was just a volunteer thing, and it was a lot of Officer/Messenger mail. We had to fly a lot of Officer/ Messenger mail out of Philadelphia to Lakehurst and Cape May and different places in the state, [New Jersey]. Your Grandfather wouldn’t let me go because he wasn’t too sure of the planes. And when I finally did fly it was on a commercial plane. But there were never any accidents or anything, it was safe. But you were young and that was the way it was. It was an honor and everybody, of course, we wore our uniforms and our hats and everything all the time and we were proud to wear them. There was no, I have to put this thing on again, in fact, it was easier just putting a uniform on then it was to figure out what to wear today.

AN: If you didn’t get involved with the WAVES what would you have done during the war?

NK: I probably would have stayed working at Talon because they were doing war work, I mean, so many things that we wore or used needed zippers on them, so I probably would have stayed there and worked. But it was just thrilling, it was something you wanted to do and this other girl said come on, do it so I did. My folks weren’t unhappy about it, I don’t know of anybody from my town that went, I have met WAVES since then.

AN: What was the country like during W.W.II?

NK: Ha-ha, it was rather hectic, as I’ve told some of the classes I’ve spoken to, you kids, in fact your parents had no idea, we had blackouts all along the shore. When I lived in Philadelphia, my apartment was on the third floor and we had to have black curtains on all of the windows. You didn’t go out much at night and we had a lot of home parties. Someone would say come over after work and now work, you may have gotten out at midnight so we would have a party from midnight on. If you were working days they would say well come and have dinner. We did things like that. In fact, when your Grandfather and I started dating we went to different clubs and all. I was able to go home to Pittsburgh, I found that the best time to go home was when I got off at four and I had from four to midnight the second day so I could have an overnight so I would occasionally go home. But we went by train, we didn’t drive very far because of gas rationing and we had rations, rations for cigarettes, rations for booze. You went to the store and we had a butcher up the street and I would, John would talk to him and he would say, “I’m going to have meat.” “Well, what kind of meat?” “I don’t know.” So he knew I was in the service so he would save a piece of meat and we had meat and we were able to get cigarettes and booze. We would buy quite frequently from the officer’s mess in the Navy yard. But of course we all smoked at that time and whenever anyone had cigarettes you saw the line from here to there. So it was rationing and of course blackouts, you always had to have your black curtains on the windows at night ever in Philadelphia. And when your grandfather and I came back from our honeymoon they were having a strike, what they called PETE, the Philadelphia Transit System. All of the busses and streetcars and everything were on strike. The streets were crowded with Army and Police because it was iffy. We only stayed overnight then we were on our way to our honeymoon and by the time we came back it was over. But I mean, I don’t Amanda, as I said, things were rationed, we had ration books and you used them. You would get new ones and they would tear out the stamps you needed, and this one store we went to, since he knew I was in the service quite often he wouldn’t even ask for the stamps. If you had extra you gave them to somebody.

AN: Do you think it was easier to deal with rationing because of the Depression?

NK: I don’t know, the Depression didn’t really affect us per se, my folks weren’t on, you know. We always had food and of course, we always had milk. The life we led wasn’t a high and mighty, but I don’t recall the depression ever hurting me. I was young and as I said, I went to college and that was in the thirties. I didn’t work and my father paid my way.

AN: So you didn’t really feel the affects of the Depression?

NK: No, not that I can recall of.

AN: How did you meet my Grandfather?

NK: He picked me up in a drug store. I said before we wore our uniforms everyplace, this one night I ran to the drugstore across the street, I don’t know what I went for, probably a magazine. And I just had on civilian clothes, but I had my raincoat on. I sat up at the counter and had a soda and this man sat down next to me and we got to talking and he found out I was in the service. I didn’t know who he was, he could have been someone checking why I wasn’t in uniform too, I realized later. And we got to talking and he asked if he could see me again and I said, well unfortunately this weekend I am going home to see my parents and he said that he would give me a call one day. And I got back and I didn’t hear from him and then he called and we went out. He would come home from work. Unfortunately he couldn’t get in the Army because he had a kidney condition. He worked for the US Rubber for awhile and he worked at the Signal Corps in Philly for a few years because he couldn’t get into anything. He tried the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, everything and because of his medical condition they wouldn’t take him. So he had a civilian job in the Signal Corps so he would get home from work and sleep until I got off and we would have a date. Queer dates, odd hours. So finally we said, this is good and we got married.

AN: Where did you get married?

NK: In Springdale, we went out and had a lovely church wedding and a reception. It was funny, I had to pick a time I could get leave, we were only allowed five days leave a year at that time. We were entitled to ten or more, but we could only take five. So I had to figure out the two weekends I had off anyhow and fit in days between so I would have at least ten or twelve days. We used one of them to get married then the rest for a honeymoon. Came back to Philly and went to work.

AN: Where was he from?

NK: John was from Roselle Park, NJ and he was working in Philly at the time. He lived just down the street in an apartment with another young man and it was really quite handy.

AN: Where did you go on your honeymoon?

NK: His guidance counselor from high school had a cabin up in Northern NJ, Delaware Water Gap. She had a cabin and she offered to lend it to us for a few days so we could go up. As I told you, we got into Philadelphia and they were on strike so we just dropped our stuff from the wedding in the house and drove on up there, got there in the middle of the night and just had a lovely week, doing nothing, just relaxing.

AN: I guess you couldn’t really go out of the country?

NK: No, we had no desire, this was fine. We just got away from everything and we came back and he went to work and I went to work.

AN: Did he have a problem with you working?

NK: No, he was very good about that because many a time and it was funny, I would come home at eight o’clock in the morning and go to bed and he would come home from work, he may already have gone to work and he’d come home and wake me up at four o’clock if I had to be at work at midnight and we’d eat. I mean, we worked it out and it went on for a couple of years that way. We had a lovely little apartment, and friends of ours lived down the hall, a girl who was in the service with me and her husband, Jim, who wasn’t in any service, he had a thumb abnormality. They lived down at the other end of the hall and we palled around with them. The four of us could play bridge, well in fact, your grandfather and Jim didn’t play bridge, but Jane and I said you have to learn and they turned out to be really good bridge players. We did that a lot, we hung out together and we went to movies. Philadelphia had what they called the Del. Concerts and we went to those, it was an outdoor concert place. We didn’t have a car, we came up to visit Grandma in Roselle Park and we’d take the train and then we’d go back to Philly on the train on Sunday.

Transcript of interview by Betsy Trimble of Darcy Lane
Poquoson, Virginia
March 6, 2004

The interview is being tape recorded for clarification of interview information. This release form is saying that you are giving your permission to use the information on a web site devoted to the history of twentieth century women. Would you please read and sign?

[Reading and signing the release form]

Betsy Trimble: Thank you very much. I think we should start with when and where you were born.

Darcy Lane: I was born in Athens, Georgia on November 29, 1944.

BT: Ok and when did you move? When did you decide that moving out of Georgia was the thing to do?

DL: When I married my husband and he was an Air Force First Lieutenant and we were stationed outside of Georgia. So to be with him I had to move from Georgia.

BT: Well that was very kind of you to move with him.

DL: Ha-ha

BT: Where did you move to the first time?

DL: Our first assignment we went to Biloxi, Mississippi.

BT: Where did you meet your husband?

DL: I met my husband in church where all nice young ladies meet their husbands. I was the church organist and he was attending the University of Georgia and he met our minister of music when he was singing in the chorus over at the University of Georgia and the minister of music found out that he was a Baptist and he invited him to come to church and to sing in our church choir. And he and his roommate did that. And that’s where I met him, when he came to choir rehearsal one night.

BT: Was it just love at first sight?

DL: Actually no. It was his roommate who hit on me first (clears throat) and his roommate asked me out but I was dating another boy at the time and so I was not interested in developing the relationship. So um I did not actually date him until a year…another year had passed and when I was no longer going with this other boy and I happened to see him one day in the music building and um he asked me “Did you marry that guy yet?” and I said “No, that just didn’t work out.” So he um called me that very night and asked me to go out. And uh but you see I thought he was one of those stuck-up Atlanta boys and so I was very happy to be able to tell him that no I couldn’t go out with him because I already had a date that night. He said “Well what about the next night?” And so I went out with him the next night.

BT: Aw that’s very sweet

DL: And it was probably not “love at first sight” but we um we became pretty serious pretty quickly. And so….

BT: Well what was it like growing up in Georgia? I’ve heard you know many [things about] the “Southern Belles” down there and, you know, maybe coming out parties or something. How was that where you were growing up?

DL: Um, I think there probably in and when I was growing up and when I was a young woman, and I graduated from high school in 1962. And so at that time I think that if you were a part of the society and especially I would say in the larger cities; Atlanta, Savannah, some of the places where they still had a very entrenched um…”Southern woman’s” kind of club, the women’s clubs. They still had debutante balls but I didn’t do that and none of my friends did that and in Athens I don’t think that was such a big thing. It was…there was still an element of that um society and if you were a certain type of…in certain strata of society. I saw it more in college with the sororities. Because some sororities were the ones that those society girls would be invited to join. And um so I kind of saw it follow through in that aspect. Um, I think the idea of the “Southern Belle”, if you mean the gracious southern girl who’s expected to be able to entertain and expected to be able to be gracious and be able to do all that sort of thing, yes, I think it was very much alive. In fact I think it’s still very much alive. At least in a college town, in a university town where there are a lot of things that…social events that are happening. And I don’t think it was a bad thing. I think that that kind of graciousness and being able to, um, make people happy and please people and you know do things for people um I think it’s kind of dying out in certain areas and people don’t care about people as much as they used to. And that’s kind of part of that. It’s not snobbery as much as I think it is a way of relating to each other and being gracious and being, you know, wanting people to come into your home and be comfortable.

BT: The “Southern Hospitality?”

DL: Yes, the “Southern Hospitality”.

BT: Which is still very much alive?

DL: Still very much alive, even in Virginia.

BT: Even in Virginia.

DL: Because your mother is one of the epitomes

BT: Even up in Fredericksburg where I am.

DL: That’s right and Fredericksburg would be a big place where it would be, yes. But and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. You know I think that in fact that’s something to be admired; a person who can invite people to be with them whether it be a person of your age, who is going to have your friends in, and you may not get out the silver. And um, you know, cook a seven course meal. But yet you want them to come and you want them to be feel welcome in wherever your home is. You want to entertain them and do things for them and say “Gee, I had a great time at Betsy’s house” well I mean, so it’s still that kind of…just how you do it may change.

BT: Ok well there are…I’m sure while your mother was growing up, and while you were growing up, there were some evolving roles of women in society. They were, you know, we were slowly making our way to a more liberal, more free, way of living. Did your mother try and keep you back from some of those?

DL: No, and in fact she…now my mother stayed at home. She raised her children and she kept the home and she did not work outside of the home although she did go to college and she did have her teaching certificate, and she was certified to teach school. And she taught school for a year but um…once her children were born she did not do that. Now, she told me that she never felt held back. She never felt like she had to do that. But my father worked as a professor at the University of Georgia, and then he also had a cattle farm. So he worked essentially two jobs. He would work until four o’clock at the University and then he would go out to the farm and sometimes not come home until nine o’clock at night if he had a problem with a cow or something. So, my mother felt like he was already out of the home enough and that she was the one that needed to be making the home, providing the stability for the children. You know, they were both raised, they were both Depression people and you’ve heard about that, where, you know, they were just lucky to have a job and felt like they…so she felt like that was her role. Now, when I came along, my father was adamant about education. And he um would never have uh…he made it understood to me from the time I was very young that I was not to consider marriage or anything else until I had completed my education. And he said, you know, he was going to pay for that education. I didn’t need to worry about that. It was just my responsibility to make sure that I did complete that education so that I could…I would never be dependent on someone else. And I think that was pretty um…that was probably a pretty um…liberal view for a man who, you know, who was um born in the early part of the century, in the early 1900s. Because I think sometimes I think a lot of those men thought that it was the man’s place to, you know, and the woman’s place was in the home and she didn’t need and education and she didn’t…but and because she’d always have a man to take care of her. But my husband said you don’t want to be dependent on anyone. You want to have a way of earning a living for yourself. So, you know that, and so I never ever really saw anything different. I always knew that I should be prepared to go out in the world and make my own way if I needed to.

BT: Then did you choose teaching for the first job? Was that why you went to school? Did you say “Hey, I want to be a teacher” and then go to school to be a teacher?

DL: No, in fact I said “I’ll never be a teacher!” And these words come back to haunt you, they do, but I um I always knew I wanted to do music. You asked me before about…to think about “life-defining” moments. The first “life-defining” moment that I can remember is the first time that I ever saw a piano. We did not have a piano in my home. But my mother took me with her when she went to visit a friend and they had a piano. And I sat down at that piano, and I stayed there that whole time my mother was there visiting. And every time I ever went anywhere there was a piano I sat and quote “played” it. And um I can remember, if they had a book there, I would turn the pages of the book, and then I’d play some more notes, and then I’d turn the page of the book and then I’d play some more notes. I didn’t just bang on it just to hear the sound. So, and that was amazing to my parents because they had no musical training or talent of their own and they couldn’t believe it so. But that was the first defining moment; was the fact that I found out I was interested in music. And so I majored in music. But I majored in Keyboard, because I wanted to play. I was not interested in teaching. So, my choice was to play the instrument and then I learned to play the organ. And that’s why I was the church organist because I had learned to play the organ and that’s where I felt like I was going to make my living was doing that. So, uh, but I didn’t think I would teach, and I didn’t teach, until after, you know, we’d been married twenty-some-odd years before I ever started to teach.

BT: So were you in one place for good before you started teaching music?

DL: Yes, because, um, what really happened, was that we had moved back to Virginia, and we bought this house, here in Poquoson. And Lit went to Turkey for a year unaccompanied. And I was here with Laura and Alystra. And I wasn’t teaching then. I wasn’t even teaching piano then. Um, because he was gone and I was just trying to get the house set up and do things with the children and everything. And then when he returned he had a three year tour at Langley. And at the end of that tour he decided he would retire and get out because we didn’t want to move, we didn’t want to leave the area. We chose to retire and stay here rather than moving again. And so I thought, “well, you know, I’ve gotten used to nice things, food, and maybe I ought to look around and see about a job because, he doesn’t seem real interested in looking around for a job.” And I thought “we can’t live on his retirement income.” So, um, at the time it, I don’t know, things do just seem to fall into your lap sometimes and, at the time, my neighbor across the street was the drama teacher at the high school, and I had played for her the year before when she did a musical, and she had called me to accompany and play the piano for the musical, which I had done. And so she told me, she said “you know, the um, the chorus teacher is leaving and I think you should, um, interview for that job” [dog barks in the background] and of course I thought “oh, I don’t know” and I thought about it. So, but finally she told me to go down and get an application, and I did, and I brought it home, and I read it, and it had three pages of teaching, classroom teaching, experience that they wanted you to list, and it had three lines of “other” correlating experiences. And I had three pages of “other” correlating experiences and NO classroom so I threw it in the trash because I said “this is ridiculous.” So, um, my other friend, Judy McCormick, who was the guidance counselor at the high school told me, she said “no, you need to fill it out and take it down there because you don’t know what they’re looking for, and you’d be perfect for this job, and I want you to do it, and I’ll write you a recommendation. So, I had my friend Judy write me a recommendation, I had my friend Sandy Catts, who was the drama coach write me a recommendation, I had my friend Gary Lewis, who was the church organist/choir director and director of the Virginia Choral Society, who knew some of my um talents and experiences, write a recommendation, and I turned in my form, and…I didn’t have a teaching certificate, and lo and behold, they hired me. So talk about a life-changing/life-defining moment. That was certainly one. So I thought “Oh, I’ll probably do this for a few years,” and then, um nineteen years later is, that’s how long I did it, nineteen years ‘till I retired in June of 2003. (Thinking) Two thousand and…three, yeah, right.

BT: And now you just baby-sit for the grandbabies?

DL: And now I’m just the emergency back-up sitter, that’s right.

BT: Ok, well, while your husband was away, in Turkey I believe it was, um, well all through your marriage actually and your life, did you have any like economic hardships, you know, like just like times when, you know, you just kind of…I don’t know how to put this….

DL: Well, I think no. I’m gonna tell you that no, we were fortunate. Because my husband and I both had a college education. He (clears throat) was a commissioned officer in the Air Force. So, we had a set salary. And um we had, you know, we had housing allowance and use of the Commissary and we made a sufficient income for us to purchase a car, and you know, live on a moderate lifestyle. Um, I’ve never really…we’ve never really had what I would call a “financial hardship.” We’ve been, we were fortunate in that um…when my father passed away he left money, which we were able to use for our children’s college education. So we didn’t have to scrimp and save like some people have to for that. Um, I wouldn’t say that we always had everything; we didn’t live a lavish lifestyle and wouldn’t have had the money to do so, even if we had wanted to. But, we own our own home, and we bought a nice home, in a nice community. We’ve always owned two cars and um, done…traveled when we wanted to. We…So I would say that we probably live a middle-class lifestyle and it’s, we’ve always lived that. And um, and I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had to worry about money.

BT: Have you ever had to travel outside of the U.S. with, if Lit was transferred?

DL: Yes, we had a tour of duty in the Philippines. That tour was only seven months and then we went from there up to Japan, and we were stationed near Tokyo. And um, I can’t say I really liked it because I’m really a person who likes my family, and you’re a long way from your family when you’re overseas, and especially when you’re in the Orient. It’s so much farther than even just being in Europe. Um, I enjoyed the cultural experience, I enjoyed being able to buy some things that were nice that were unusual that I would certainly had never of, you know, been able to have in the United States. But, I was happy to come back closer to my family when the tours were over.

BT: Was this before or after Alystra and Laura were born?

DL: Um, it was Laura was eighteen months old when we went, and I was pregnant with Alystra when I came back. In fact, that’s why I came…my father passed away and I had to return home, and they’d said I was already seven months pregnant. They’d let you come home but they wouldn’t let you go back. So I came home and then after he died I stayed with my mother to have Alystra. So she was born in Athens, Georgia in the same hospital I was born in because I was there with my mom. And Lit had had to go back to Japan. But after he got there he did some research and found out that he could apply for a “hardship” and have his tour there terminated early, which was only a few months early. And um, so he didn’t ever, I didn’t ever go back to Japan. He just, we stayed with my mom and he…Alystra was born in May and he came home in July. So, I would say that was a little bit of a hardship. I was there having a baby and my husband was two thousand miles away in Japan. And that was before the days of cell phones or satellite calls. If you wanted to make a phone call you had to do it by hand radio. And so you had to get transferred through somebody who was a hand radio, and they would call someone over there who was a hand radio, who would call landline…I mean it was a little bit difficult to communicate. So, I probably didn’t talk to him more than, you know, um, twice a month the whole time he was gone. Of course we wrote letters! How, my my, no email, but we actually wrote letters, and um, and kept up with one another. That was…if I had to say there was a time that was really hard in my life that I… it was that time when I was pregnant and not well. I had extremely high blood pressure, so I was not well. My father had passed away, I was with my mother, with my three year old, and pregnant, and my husband was a long ways away. And that was a little bit stressful.

BT: While he was away, did you find that your role in the house shifted a significant amount? Or was it still; did he still make money and send it back to you?

DL: Oh yeah, I mean, you know, we always had a joint account and um…so the only thing we did differently when he was away, I mean he was…I mean our um check…his pay had always been put into our checking account automatically, and um I actually was the person who paid the bills. Because even when he wasn’t away overseas his job required him to be on alert, where he was gone, you know, five to seven days at the time, then he would be home for like four days, and then he’d be in the office for three days. So, I mean, he couldn’t really pay the bills because his schedule didn’t make it where he was at home on a certain time every month. So, my role had always been the household maintenance, paying the bills, taking care of things in the house. And so the money was always available to me because we just had a joint checking account. When he was overseas, he just had a separate account and he had an allowance sent to him so that he got part of it to have for himself, and I had the rest for the household maintenance. I mean, that’s just the way we chose to do it, and that seemed to work for us the best.

BT: It’s a good system, seemed to work…

DL: Yes, it works, that’s right.

BT: How did you adapt to the changes in all technology over the years…

DL: Oh goodness…

BT: as they just keep coming quicker, more quickly, and more quickly.

DL: Well, like your mother, the cell phone’s a wonderful invention right…?

BT: Right…

DL: Um, yup, like that. Um, and I, of course, as a teacher, I had to learn to use the computer. You know, that was pretty much forced on you. So I uh had to learn some computer proficiencies, but I didn’t really use it in my classroom because in music, uh, you can use it, there are ways to use it, but it just wasn’t appropriate in my classroom…in chorus. Now if I had had a classroom where I could have had those keyboards you know, that you can put it with the midi and do a lot of that kind of stuff then I probably would have learned a lot more about, um, the music programs for computers. But, I can do email, you know, and I can go on the internet. And, I use that. I probably don’t use it as much as a lot of people, just because I didn’t have to. I think women who might have worked in offices where they might have had to learn, oh billing techniques and a lot of things, and like networking with other things where they really had to learn a lot of computer use are more proficient than I am. It doesn’t bother me, I mean I think I can use it well enough that I can do what I have to do with it. But, um, I wouldn’t call myself really “technologically advanced.” Um, I can’t program the VCR. I have to have my daughter come over and set up the VCR…you know, when you hook it up to the TV and all. I just don’t, don’t worry about it. But always figure, you know, when I left home…I lived at home while I went to college just simply because being a music major it was better for me to live at home. I could practice at home, I could do a lot of things at home because in the days when I went to college, those were the days when young ladies had to be in the dorm my nine o’clock at night, and you had a house mother, and you, you know, you had to be in the dorm. And so, I lived at home and I didn’t have quite those restrictions…and I could go down to the church and practice the organ and it would be ten o’clock coming home, and it wasn’t a problem. But, um, so, um…wait a minute where was my train of thought there? I was going to tell you something about that… (Thinking and humming)…Oh! And so I didn’t know anything about cooking when I left home because really I hadn’t done any cooking with my mother because I was always practicing. It was always such a good excuse, you know, I could never help cook, I could never clean up the dishes because I always had to practice, and I always had to do it then. So what my mother said, she figured that anybody that was a Phi Beta Kappa could read a cookbook. So, I figure that anyone with a college education a can at least read the manual and figure out the VCR. I just don’t choose to do it (said with a smile).

BT: That’s my mother’s excuse as well. She likes to use that one. So was it a bit of a shock taking your daughters to college and noticing that boys lived down the hall from them and they didn’t need to announce…. I remember my father telling me that when he would go visit my mother he would have to yell “Man on the hall” before he could even enter the hallway. And my college experience I lived across the hall from them. So, was that a bit of a shock to you?

DL: Um…

BT: Did you adjust well to that…?

DL: Oh I don’t think it bothered me. I knew that, um, you know, they had co-ed dorms. Laura, chose to live on a dorm where they were co-ed by floors, so she didn’t have the man right on the hall. But they, of course, had visitation, and they had certain hours that were open and the guys would come in and visit and all that. But after a certain time at night no guys were allowed on the hall. She preferred that, she just didn’t want to worry about whether she was in her nighty or whatever. In, you know, when she went down the hall to use the restroom or whatever. But, um, and I don’t remem…then by the time Alystra went I don’t remember about that building. I think that that building was also co-ed by floors. But, you know what? No, I just didn’t…it didn’t bother me, I didn’t think that they needed to have quite the restrictions we had while I was in college. It’s not that I think they should have those restrictions. I think that the problem comes in, you know I think it makes them very alone, very lonesome. I mean, really nobody cares a hoot about them. I mean, and nobody cares that they’re in or out. I used to say to Laura, “You need to make sure you have a friend who knows if you’re going to be coming in late. I mean, you could be, you know, lying hurt in a ditch, and nobody would wonder why you weren’t in your room.” And I said, “To me, it’s not the issue that you might be off somewhere doing something you shouldn’t be doing.” The issue was “does anybody care if you’re home in your bed when you’re supposed to be? Does anybody care if something’s might be wrong? And say “Gee, I wonder why my friend’s not home yet?’” You know, so, that’s the thing I think. I think it’s just, instead of giving people so much freedom, it has isolated them. Because nobody knows, or seems to care, about them.

BT: Well, backtracking a little bit here, when um…what kind of impact did it have on your life with the integration coming into play?

DL: I would say that was a big…yes, see because I was right there at that time. Because I was a student at the University of Georgia when the first two black students were, um, entered in the University of Georgia. And that was a big, um, big thing. I went to school at an all white, um, high school. It had not been integrated in Athens at the time. So, I did see that come about we did not have riots, etc. at Georgia. I mean I think it was handled, it was past the time when they tried…of course you’ve seen all of the news reels about Alabama with George Wallace and all that sort of thing. We did not have that sort of thing, and I think because they saw how bad that was and, um, so it was a peaceful integration. But I, I mean, I’ll be honest that we didn’t have anything to do with them. You know, when the black students came on campus, we didn’t socialize with them. I can even vividly remember when we went to a football game, uh, at Georgia one time, you know students didn’t have reserved seats, so there was just a student section and you showed your ID and you got in the student section. Well there was like a great, um, seat, bunch of seats, and there was nobody sitting in them. And this guy sitting in front of us started to go in a sit down, and he looked and he saw that he was about to sit next to the black student, and he jumped up like he’d been scalded, and got up, left that. Well, I was with Lit, we were going to the game. He said “Those are two good, those are good seats, I’m not wasting good seats.” He walked in and said “Anybody sitting in these seats? Mind if we sit here?” And we sat down. Now we did not converse with the man, you know, with the student. And I felt, at the time, he was sitting right by himself, no friends at all. You know, the NAACP had paid their tuition, had paid for them to come to the University of Georgia. I’m sure that they were glad of the opportunity for the education. I’m sure they were glad of the money because it was probably helping their families, but my how lonesome they must have been. Because, I mean, that boy was sitting there right by himself. And you know that he had that experience in every class, all around the campus, and I don’t know where he lived, because I don’t think he lived in the dormitory. So, um, it was a def…, you know, it was an interesting era. It didn’t really affect me personally because of course I went right from college, with my husband, into the military. I mean, I married Lit two weeks after I graduated, and we, um, and then we went into the military where there was no segregation. If there was any kind of segregation it was between officer and enlisted. And we had many officer friends who were black. So, you see, it never was an issue with me. Because it just, I went from the all white environment to just having a few black people integrated into the University which I really didn’t come into contact with much, into a totally integrated situation, where it was accepted, and it was expected, and nothing would ever have been done differently.

BT: So, what, um, when you were raised, was it more just kind of “stay away from black people?” Or was it a racist…

DL: Oh, they were totally, um, well, you know…

BT: I mean I can see it would be more dramatic in the South…

DL: Yes.

BT: …than in the North, but.

DL: Um, it was I think at the time more dramatic in the South. Of course, that’s where they had the separate bathrooms, and they did have separate bathrooms. I mean, I can remember having the “colored restroom.” I didn’t ride the bus much, but in the bus systems, they had to sit in the back, and white people sat in the front. And, um, you know, we just, we weren’t, I mean I never thought anything about it. It wasn’t an issue to us. And you look back, and it’s just like slavery. I mean, I don’t think people meant to be cruel. They just didn’t think of it as being wrong. We didn’t think about it being wrong because it just always had been. And I guess that’s a terrible thing to say. It’s probably terrible to say “couldn’t you tell how bad that was for people to be, you know, demoralized like that?” Um, I guess we just, you know, it’s just the way it was. And we didn’t think anything about it.

BT: So at your school was there any outright violence towards the black people…?

DL: Not at the University, not that I knew of. I was not aware of any violence, no.

BT: Integrated, but just separated by themselves?

DL: Yeah, I think that it was just, I mean, I think that there was probably a lot of emotional effect on the black people because the white students didn’t have anything to do with them. They just wouldn’t have anything to do with them. I mean, they’d sit in a classroom and there’d probably be three or four desks around them where people just wouldn’t sit. Or if they did sit there they didn’t speak to them, didn’t talk to them. I don’t know how the professors treated them, I never really had a class with a black student. Now, pretty soon after the integration, I don’t really know what year that was, but, um, more and more black students came and we did begin to have several in the music department. Um…seems to me that in the music department it was a little more accepting. I don’t know why, but we didn’t seem to, I mean, I never knew of any problem.

BT: Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

DL: Ok, I was in…a sophomore music theory. I remember it quite distinctly because it was one week to the day before my birthday. It was November 22. And, um, it was, you know, it was, we’d never experienced it, I never experienced anything like that. We hadn’t had a president assassinated. And, um…I do, I think personally, it didn’t affect me in a political way as much as, you know, the fact that by that time television was so prevalent. I mean, you could, that’s what we did, we sat and we watched it on TV, because, I mean, you could see everything that was going on. Everything about the, um, you know, the funeral, everything that they talked about, the swearing in of Johnson as the new president. It was all just right there in front of you, and I think that was probably one of the first instances of history in the making right in front of you on the TV. Now, we’re so used to it we watch complete wars being, you know, held in front of our eyes on TV. It’s almost desensitized us to it. But, I remember the fact that when Kennedy was shot, it was just so, um, it was so unusual. We hadn’t, we weren’t, we were, it was so unexpected, we weren’t used to any kinds of violence toward out national leaders. And, I think now in today’s “terrorist aware” society we’re a lot more worried about that, or a lot more conscious of it. But then it was, it was really shocking. And of course, he was a young and handsome president, you know, that kind of, added to it, but it was certainly, um, it was very, I mean I remember to this day how it was that, you know, somebody brought a radio into class and said “the president’s been shot” and I mean, we were there listening to it and then they made the announcement that he had died. It was just so, so shocking. Because it was just, you know it just can’t happen. I’m sure it’s like how people felt when the airplane hit the towers and they said “this is America, this, I mean, this can’t be happening.” So, um, and I think it, the thing that being able to watch it for the next few days on TV because they cancelled classes and everything else. It was just, um, it was weird.

BT: Well, when you were overseas with your husband, and when he was…was he fighting in the wars?

DL: No, well, Vietnam was still going on, it was still sort of winding down, but he was never in Vietnam because his duties were as a communications officer, so therefore he was behind the, he was not there, he was making sure the communications were in order and that they could talk to whoever they wanted to talk to and all that sort of stuff. So we were not on the front line. But the Vietnam War was still going on when we were over there. Um…I think that um, it showed me that Americans are not universally well-liked. And, um, especially in Japan, even though the World War had been over for, you know, twenty years, yeah, more, twenty-five years, that there were still some hatred of Americans. Because of just lingering from the World War. And I remember, you know, they used to have to sign up if they were going to have demonstrations outside the gates. But it used to tickle me, because one day, you’d go out of the gate and see that they were going to have a demonstration, um, and they would be yelling “Dirty Yanks go home! We don’t want you here!” and “Get out of Japan!” And then the next day they’d have a demonstration “Don’t close U.S. bases!” because, and the reason they didn’t want that to happen was because they were required by law to hire Japanese nationals, like in the PXs near the Commissaries and all that. They had to hire Japanese nationals. And so, “We need your money!” “You’ll ruin our economy if you leave.” So, you know it’s just kind of like they hated us, but yet they loved our money. So, I didn’t ever know that until I was actually stationed overseas.

BT: So were you ever in fear of just safety?

DL: No I was never in fear of my personal safety. And I traveled. I used the metro. We went out some, you know, I was I had friends and we would want to go shop in Tokyo, so we’d get on the metro, the rapid transit, and go down to Tokyo. You know it’s like everything else: The people themselves that you would see on the street that you would talk to were very helpful, very friendly. They would want to practice their English. Especially the young people would want you to talk to them, want to talk to you because they wanted to practice their English. But, it was more the, you know, kind of political stuff the political people that would arrange these rallies and everything like that that were trying to make a statement and all that kind of stuff. I felt like the Japanese people themselves were very, you know, they were just people.

BT: Well another important event that happened to a lot of Americans was the shooting of John Lennon. Did that affect you in any way?

DL: No, because, actually you see, I was way past that Beatles thing. I wasn’t even old enough to be, you know, into the Beatles when they were young and when they came on. Because I was already married, and you know, not, I hadn’t had children yet, but I was already settled into a lifestyle that just, um you know, I wasn’t a teenybopper anymore and that’s who really they, when they first came out. Now, now I like the Beatles music. There’s some of their stuff that was very creative. As a musician I can look at it and call it very innovative, and um, some of the stuff that they’ve done I really like a lot. But I was never into that Beatle-mania, so when he was killed I was sad, but it wasn’t a personal loss to me. Neither was Elvis. It wasn’t a personal loss to me because when Elvis came along, or when Elvis was, um…you know, I did listen to Elvis music but he was never a big…I was never a big Elvis fan.

BT: So kind of in conclusion of this whole interview, do you feel as though over your entire life you’ve had control over it? Because the understanding that I’ve been having is that women have been (phone rings in background) struggling with their differences in their roles in society? And also did you go against the quote “social norms” of Athens or anything like that? Were you a big rebel or anything? Because your father was so “you’re going to college, this is what you’re going to do….”

DL: Ok, um…I would say that in general I have had complete control over my life and what I wanted to do. You know, I think you are guided by influences, whether it be your parents, or your peers, or your husband, um, or even your children. I think that you make decisions that sometimes you make a decision that might be different because of what you know that these people want you to do. But I don’t believe that I’ve ever done anything, I don’t think my life has taken a way that I didn’t like, I mean, that I didn’t want to do. Um…and some things that I’ve done have been more or less rewarding than I thought maybe they would be, but I mean, at all the important junctures in my life I think it was the right decision to choose music as what I wanted to study in school. I think it was the right decision to marry the man I chose to marry. We’ve been married thirty-seven years and we still have a successful marriage. Um, I think that it was the, um, right decision to stay home and raise my children. Because I like being at home. I didn’t have a desire to have a career where I would be the person in charge or, I mean, I never wanted to be a career woman in the sense of being a lawyer or a doctor. I mean, you know, if I had wanted to I think I would have done that. But I didn’t ever really desire to do that. And I didn’t have to financially. We were fortunate in that I could stay at home and raise my children and we didn’t have to, you know, we didn’t have to have a second income. Um…when I did choose to go to work, it, as I said, it sort of fell into my lap but I…it was more rewarding than I ever thought it would be. Um…not just the teaching, but the teaching of music, and having students and being able to introduce them sometimes to music and hope that they would love it as much as I do. And I used to tell my students in class: “What I hope for you is that you will love music as much as I do. Not that you will major in music, not that you will be a professional musician, but that, but in some way you will want music to be a part of your life for the rest of your life.” Um…so that was what I wanted to do, and that they would have a remembrance of their musical experience in high school as being one of the, you know, best parts, of their young lives. And um…when you’re a music teacher in high school you generally teach kids for four years because if they really love it, they stay with you. So, um…it really was, I began to see that I did have an influence on some young lives, just simply because, um it was like raising your children; you saw them every day during school, for one hour, for four years. And a lot of times you developed a relationship with them that gave you some chance to maybe say something that might affect them to go in and do something, be something, grow up and be somebody worthwhile. So I mean, I don’t of course think that I ever was some magnificent in that way, but I did see that you have a chance to say some things to some kids that maybe would help them to just be productive members of society, to take control of their own lives and to do what was best for them.

BT: Well my final question has to do with the evolution of society, and things that, just things that have been brought to light over the years; such as the coming out of gays and lesbians, that kind of thing, and more and more sex on television. Things that were not talked about for so long that are coming out. How did you react to the changing and the openness of people?

DL: You’re flipped over there on your microphone….

BT: Ok

DL: Um…ok, let me think about that one for a minute. Well, I think personally that, um there’s too much sex and violence on TV. I mean, you know, as an adult it doesn’t affect me, you know, I can just turn it off or not pay any attention, but I think that it has desensitized young people. Because, sad to say, I don’t think parents are monitoring what the children watch. Um…and I think that um, or I think that they think that they can watch it too early. And I don’t think a twelve year old ought to see some of the things that are on some of the TV programs that I know they stay up and watch. Um…now I’m not a big fan of not letting people read certain things and not letting people see certain things. You know, I’m not a big fan of censorship, I just think that sometimes you need to show a little bit of commonsense. I mean, it’s common sense that a young person who’s not even a teenager yet, is not mature enough to evaluate and understand adult subjects. And I think what it does is it just makes them where they’re so used to it they just think that it’s just normal. And I don’t think that they way they show things on TV. I don’t think that’s normal people’s lives. I mean I don’t know anybody that acts like that, except on TV. I mean, you probably don’t even know anybody that acts like that.

BT: The occasional character, but that’s about it.

DL: The occasional character, right. I just think that yet it makes it seem normal because it’s on TV. Just because it’s on TV. So…I think we’re reaping and I think we’re reaping the affects of that in the schools, in society, I mean, I just, I don’t know the answer, except that I just don’t think it’s necessary. I just really don’t think it’s necessary. Um…So, you know, every generation is gonna do a little more than the previous generation. Every generation, things are gonna change a little bit. But every now and then you have a little throw back, you know, and, I know, I remember, now it’s not considered proper child-raising to spank children, you know. And I think that’s another thing that’s gonna come back to bite us in the butt too. But, you know, I can’t ever actually say I remember being spanked. I think my mother might have spanked me. I remember my daddy talking to me. I would rather he have spanked me, but you know, because he would sit me down and we’d have to talk about what I did, and talk about it. But, um, I think that that’s good to a certain extent, but sometimes I think a child just needs to know who’s in charge. And, I think sometimes that they’re so much wiser than sometimes their parents are. And they’re certainly can outlast you. So…um at any rate, I think…I’m just not sure it’s for anybody’s good for all the sex and this. And as far as homosexuals and their role in society…I don’t think it’s a sin. Like I know the Bible says that homosexuality is a sin, but remember that’s the Bible being written by people at that time who thought that mental illness was being because you were in control of, the devil was in control of you. That was the devil in your body, mental illness. I just don’t think that it’s…I just don’t think it’s the way men and women were meant to interact, and somehow these wires have gotten crossed, and I don’t…I’m not sure everybody who thinks they’re gay really are. Do you know what I mean? I think that it’s kind of a thing that they just, um, I think they’re confusing what could be a loving friendship. I mean, I love a lot of women. I love your mother…a lot. But I don’t love her in a sexual way, but I love her in a way that I want to kiss her and show affection to her. But I don’t confuse it with the physical love that I have for my husband or that I would have with a man. And I think that somehow, and I don’t know why, that some people have confused the kind of love that they have for someone. Um… I’m not going to judge it. I know a lot of people who are really rabid about it, pro and con. It reminds me of what happened during the integration, and how some people, you know, blacks were inferior people as far as they were concerned. I mean they would tell you, “Well everyone knows they’re inferior. Everybody knows that, you know, they’re not really, they don’t have a soul.” That’s what they’d say. I mean, you know, so I think it’s, I think that, I don’t want to say that they are sinful and immoral people. I don’t think that what they do it really…I don’t really think its right. I don’t condemn them so far as to say they’re going to hell because…I just think that they’re not, that they’re cheating themselves of a good relationship because somewhere, how, or another they’ve gotten themselves messed up. But, but you know what, in another fifty years someone might say, “Oh that is such a stupid…” you know, they might say what I just said was so wrong, you know. We know things like this in context with where we live. Which is what you’re doing this paper about. How things change, and how people think about things. So, I mean, I know that my mother, I’ll never forget this story she told. She was with her husband, with my daddy somewhere, and she saw these two men, and they, um…I don’t know, she said something to my daddy about it and he said “well, they”…something about that they were homosexuals and she says, “I don’t believe that’s such a thing. I don’t believe there is any such thing as that. Do you? I don’t believe such a thing.” Because you wouldn’t have even talked about it, and my mother didn’t even know that such a thing was possible. She was just dumbfounded, you know, so I think that, you know, as we go through life, and things change, you know, things, just like metal illness used to be considered being…having the devil in you, and now we know that it’s an illness. So, I mean, maybe homosexual sexuality will be considered a “normal” avenue for humans to follow in years to come it will just be the faithful people who thought that was wrong. They were just, you know, out of it, they just didn’t know any better. So, I don’t know. Maybe it will be that way…. To me, it doesn’t seem, just kind of behavior that I can’t buy into, that I can’t see.

BT: Well are you more of a just an accepting, liberal, kind of person….

DL: I wouldn’t say I was as accepting about it as I just, um, let me see, how do I put it, I’m probably one of those people who just ignores it.

BT: Ignorance is bliss?

DL: Probably. I mean it doesn’t affect me personally. And so, I haven’t had to take a stand on it. So I haven’t taken a stand on it. It’s just not something I want to make a decision about. So I don’t. And that’s probably the sign of a weak character (both laugh), I don’t know. But, so, it’s just like abortion. I haven’t had to take a stand on it. Is it morally right? or is it morally wrong? Or is it….you know, I hate the thought that women, you know, can’t have…that’s such a life-changing event, having a child, and I hate the fact that a woman couldn’t have control of a decision like that. You know, on the other hand, there’s all this unwed teenager mothers who really don’t need to be raising these children. We’ve got all these children. I mean, because, they’re not themselves old enough to…mature enough to parent, most of them, and yet they’re just babies having babies. And so, I don’t think that’s right either. So, you know, there’s a lot of things in life I haven’t made a decision about because I haven’t had to. It hasn’t been something that I’ve had to personally take a stand on. But I think, I guess a lot of people are like that.

BT: Probably, yeah. Until they’re actually confronted with it, it’s not really….

DL: Right, until they have to make a decision about it themselves, you know, they just kind of say, well I don’t know what I think about it, because they don’t want to…so I guess I don’t know what I think about it, because I haven’t had to.

BT: Well, thank you very much for taking the time out to speak with me today and talking about your life and how you think about things. Um…and I will definitely let you know how this paper turns out.

DL: Good, good.

BT: Thank you.

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In this interview, Annette Spillane talks about her work as a teacher(1) and as an addictions counselor(1)(2). She also discusses her mother’s work experiences(1). Ms. Spillane talks about her education opportunities when she was young and her opportunities for higher education(1). She discusses her experiences during World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam (1). She also discusses motherhood(1), the impact of changing technology on her life, gender discrimination (1), the women’s rights movement, and sexuality(1).

Transcript of interview by Victoria Stauffenberg of Annette Busse Spillane
Oak Park, Illinois
March 5, 2004

VS: Um…Annette, what…what’s your date of birth?

Annette Spillane: My date of birth is January 31, 1938.

VS: And where were you born?

VS: I was born right near where I am currently living but it was in the city of Chicago. I am in a suburb right now.

VS: And um…in your childhood, what was the structure of your immediate family?

AS: Immediate family was interesting in that it was not only my mom and dad and my older sister, it was also my great grandmother that lived with us. So that’s cool because when you said 1870, I knew a woman who lived back then. Actually, she lived with us and we lived with her. It was great.

VS: And where was she from?

AS: My grandma Murray was from um…Ireland. County Clair, Ireland. So it was something I always knew but that was taken for granted.

VS: Was she your maternal or paternal grandmother?

AS: This is my mother’s, that she was my mother’s grandmother, my great grandmother.

VS: And um…what was the cultural or ethnic background of your family?

AS: Well that it was certainly very Irish in that my great grandmother lived with us. Yet she didn’t have a brogue although she had grown up there, had lived there, and brought children from there. So and my father’s side was often called Alsace-Lorraine because he neither wanted to be French nor German, he wanted to be just that, that in between place.

VS: And where did you spend most of your childhood growing up?

AS: I grew up um…. All my years growing up, from birth to when I was married until I was 23 all living in Chicago, Illinois. I’m grateful, grateful that I grew up in Chicago.

VS: Okay. As a child, what were you expected to learn in terms of domestic work?

AS: That’s…that’s a good question, because my older sister was expected to do the domestic things. I was a tomboy and I was allowed great freedom because of that and I used to dust. That was my big thing. The other truth though was they saw this as I got older is that my grandmothers, because my mother’s mother lived nearby, I learned a great deal by watching them, how they did the laundry, how they hung it out on the line, how they did it on certain days of the week, how they kept the house clean and how they did certain morning chores. So there was a great order in our house, even though I was more of an observer than a doer.

VS: You didn’t have any brothers…?

AS: No, I didn’t.

VS: But in terms of what males did, um…how did they participate in domestic work?

AS: That…my father was…had a very interesting history growing up. His father had been killed in a railroad accident when my dad was only four, four years old. And in those days, with no insurance to back up his mother, his mother was a widow with four little children, my dad being the second oldest. And so my dad had a wonderful philosophy about work and that was whatever job needed to get done got done. And so I would see my father who worked regularly as a carpenter and a tradesman also do anything that a woman needed to do, such as sewing, taking care of the children, cooking, and so there wasn’t a great delineation of men did this and women did that. My mother worked outside of the home, which I realize now looking back was a forerunner of women working out of the home. And so I was used to my mother and my father leaving for work and they had a very strong and simple work ethic, you showed up for work on time or early and you did your job, whatever it was and you took pride in how you did it. And so I learned that, such as a carpenter, when he was finished with the day, his tools were always lined up, they were always clean, they were always ready for the next day and you left your work site clean and um…My mother I felt had a same preciseness. She worked with numbers, she was a book keeper and I had a feeling there was a lot of order where she was, which I didn’t see, but which I believed she had. And of course my grandma’s great order in their house. And so it was good…I was grateful for the order even though I didn’t appreciate it.

VS: Uh…. When you said you were a tomboy, um…can you define that a little bit? Like what made you a tomboy as opposed to just any other little girl?

AS: Sure, one of the easiest ways to describe me was that I loved my blue jeans. And my mother would say to me occasionally as I got older, meaning ten or so, she’d say, “Annette, no boy is ever going to like you that way.” And I used to say to her, “Then they don’t have to like me. That’s fine with me.” And yet almost all of my friends were boys. Loved playing with the boys. And any girls that I would play with and girls that I did play with cause some of them are still my friends today, we’d play tough games. We were out there playing Cowboys and Indians and our dolls were out there and so it was also in the kind of play we did. We played a lot of street games, um…Red Rover, Red Rover…a tough game. We banged your forehead a lot, came home bloody a bit and lot of roller skating on the street and a lot lassoes. We’d have our ropes and start tying our toys to the tree. We’d…we had a…. So it was defined by kind of our play and by our dress….

[Door bell chime]

AS: So….

VS: Alright…um…what kind of sports were available for girls at the time and did you participate in any?

AS: The sports that we had were more neighborhood things so there were no organized sports that I did in um…when I was in grammar school. I went to a nearby parochial school. Again, the same street games that we played, we played in the school playground too. Although, finally Red Rover was banned after enough blood and guts happened in our playground. The uh…first organized sports I was in happened in high school. I was in an all-girl’s school and we played half court basketball with big blue gym suits on which reminded me of big bloomers. And it was fun because I was big and strong physically, tall and also I…the basketball throwing was very important. The passes, we’d try to get half court passes going because we could only go to the half court positioning. So that was my first. I did a little bit of swimming, but that was never in an organized way and that wasn’t from school? So….

VS: What did the outfits that you wore for school look like?

AS: Well, like I say, they were kind of bloomers with a full um…like jumper on top of the bloomer and I remember lots of snaps and they had a shape to them though. They were comfortable. And our legs were free, bare or free and uh…they were pretty much that way for the four years. I wore a uniform to school too so I was very tuned into uniforms. They didn’t bother me at all. They were okay.

VS: Where did you go to school?

AS: I went to school at a Catholic high school for girls only in the city of Chicago called Providence High School, which is still there I am proud is still there in a neighborhood that has had many changes in it and is still a private school and still going strong in a neighborhood that definitely needs some private education.

VS: And um…was there any huge difference…what’s the difference between your sister’s age and yourself?

AS: The years are substantial. At least they were when we were young. She’s at least eight years older than I am. And so I was never much of a tag along sister. Her interests were different. They were much more domestic and um…not athletic and indoors, while mine were mostly outdoors and that made a big difference. I don’t think in the culture they were different in those eight years, it’s just that her choices were different than mine. So she didn’t take advantage of some of the things I did and I didn’t take advantage of things she did. Like sewing. She was a great embroiderer and all I could think was a long needle and thread that made my hand sweat and so I didn’t do anything like that. Although I did learn how to sew on a sewing machine when I was twelve. I taught myself and wound my old bobbins by hand. It was an old Singer my dad had and I was really grateful because I liked things that went fast and the sewing machine went fast. Hand work was slow and I liked it fast so that was a good instrument for me.

VS: And also, World War II happened when you were a child.

AS: Yeah. That…I was thinking about this and I didn’t know questions you were going to ask me, but I had to feel you would ask me things that had influenced me. And maybe somewhere in the course of this interview we will talk more about my grandmothers because of the strong influence they had on me. The war though had a profound influence on me as well. And I thought, why was that so true, I was so young. I was born in [19]38, the war began close to that time. We knew things because of the radio. I remember sitting in the bathroom of the house we rented and while my dad would shave, he would listen to the radio and he would listen. And I knew bad things were happening. I almost think I can remember when Pearl Harbor happened and that was because one of my uncles was already in the Navy soon to be killed after Pearl Harbor. And he was my godfather so I knew about him even though I hadn’t really known him.

AS: And when the war happened in 1941, I was three and I would early on in my neighborhood go to the movies. It wasn’t at three, but I was going to the movies probably as early as being five or six by myself. Movies were a dime. I went with my cousin. And we would get a full double feature. We would get cartoons and coming attractions and serials and the movie tones, that’s how I remember it. I’m not sure that’s the accurate name but it’s the name I remember. And you would sit in it in the front and you’d see the eyes and ears of world cranking in this black and white film and they would zero you in on some pictures of the war. And mostly what I saw and what my memory remember was liberating soldiers and not so much sailors, but soldiers being cheered by the people in Europe. They’d be riding in tanks and people would be saying hurray they are here. But closely following that were the pictures of the concentration camps. And they were horrifying to me. I would sit in my seat and I can remember almost not being able to breath. And to this day prisons, anything around a prison system holds great terror for me. I have to really deal with that because those images are just imprinted on my brain of seeing dead people. Dead corpses that were just so emaciated and you could see the horror that they must have lived with for a long period of time and our soldiers having to walk through that and um…I have a great, I think, deal of compassion for that which led to that, which led to that and which can, you know, which I believe is still happening today in many…many different places.

AS: So yeah…that was a profound influence was the war, what led me through the war. And then living through many wars thereafter. We never were really without war. We didn’t think there would be a war again and then we had Korea .and I remember freezing temperatures that they would report in the news, the black and white news I that I’d see in the movie theaters. Movie theaters were very important to me and they still are. And the um…and then from there Vietnam and the horror of that. And so the wars have been an influence on me and probably in some ways today has a great influence on wanting peace.

VS: Um…How many participants of your family were in the war?

AS: During the Second World War, because I had quite a few uncles, all of them, and I think that number’s six, no…yeah…six of my uncles were in the war and they were my mother’s brothers. And one, my godfather Joseph, died in…near…in the water, he was a sailor and he um…died I think right after the war started. Probably in [19]42, 1942. And I can remember the grief of my grandmother over the loss of Joseph and it was a grief she never got over totally and the reason I knew that was when I got to be much older, being in my 30’s, and she lived that long, her telling me about him and especially near Christmas time because his last that he wrote to her, she had received after he had died. And he said, “Mom I am thinking of a White Christmas. I am in this hot place and to this day when I hear I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.” I um…still feel some of her grief around that.

AS: My other uncles some in the Navy, some in the Army, had different experiences. They were on warships, they didn’t talk about it a lot when they came home. I still see my grandmother with the stars in her window. The gold star for…very much affecting me at this moment. And the blue stars for her other sons in the service. Um…her youngest son was in another island operation. He was very young. He joined the CVs and the CVs were out there with the Marines clearing land. And so he occasionally mentioned hand to hand combat in those islands, which, again, meant he was responsible for killing people, you know. And I think oh my god, even then, you know, it was very thinking how horrible that must be. I never felt he wasn’t supposed to do. I just felt it must have been horrible all the way around. And I remember the day my uncle-my youngest uncle came home. And he was in his uniform and I was eating lunch at my grandma’s house and he came upstairs unexpectedly and there was a great I mean like scream, like a Hallelujah. And I ran all the way back to my house to tell my great grandmother about it.

AS: So the war…and I remember the day the armistice was declared. I was outside and all the sirens were blowing. And I was frightened. I thought because of the air raids we had practiced over the years we were being attacked and I remember hiding by myself under my aunt’s back porch thinking we were going to be bombed. And it wasn’t, it was the bells ringing out the news that it was over. So, yeah…the war being a big influence on my life.

VS: What sort of responsibilities did you or mother or your grandmother or even your great grandmother have during the war?

AS: Well…I think the influence of my grandmothers during the war years were the regular use of what my grandmother would call the beads. And those are rosary beads and my grandmothers were not church-going people. They believed in a god. I knew that without any talk about it. They were very silent about many of these things, but their actions let me know that they believed in something. And I did go to a Catholic school so I had a different view of that faith. They had the beads and they would use them, especially at night. And if I was around, especially my grandmother, she would have the beads going around her fingers a lot. And I look back on that and I realized how much praying she did do for everyone’s safety.

AS: The um…type of things we did as a family was we had a victory garden. I could still draw you that garden today. We had a lot of leaf lettuce, we had carrots, onions. My grandmother lived with us, my great grandmother was a great conserver of the food. We ate very carefully, we had rationed food at times. We had different…I would go to the butcher shop and I would get x amount of food. And I liked doing that. I felt very responsible. We saved all of our tin cans, washed them out and flattened them because that was part of the war effort.

AS: My mother went to work every day so I never saw her work as part of the war effort, but her constancy of going to work, my father worked in a war plant, and so you asked me more about the women in my family, that was a strong influence, that there were prisoners in our country from anther country working in our war effort. My mother bought savings bonds and that was something she very much believed in and that bonds were a very big part of her savings for us and when I got older I benefited from that. I ended up getting a new car because of the savings bonds. A used car and a new car for me. So um…there was a lot of effort but it was very quite, consistent, ongoing effort. We saved the fats. We…my grandmother made soap even in those days you could buy soap. She believed in saving those kinds of things so that they could go to a greater good, which was one of their great principles of living anyway. Believed in helping others. So….

VS: And of your Korean War experience, um…was that as big of an impact on you?

AS: No. It wasn’t. Of course I was older. I remember um…you know, the threats. There was…there was threatening times. Because I stayed not only in high school, but I went on into college right away. That was expected. That was a big influence. The first woman in our family to go to college. And it was just something they expected of me. I was a good student and I never thought I wouldn’t go. I just kinda assumed I would go, which I did.

AS: And again, it was the radio, it wasn’t so much the theaters, the movie theaters during that war. Although there were war movies being made, I don’t remember the title of one, but again, the coldness of Korea, I always was impressed how cold and how the foot soldiers endured so much suffering and how they had to try to take care of their feet in just impossible situations. And then the terrible reports of the interrogations that they were going through and how something was starting to happen and shift how our soldiers were to be treated as prisoners of war and kindness of information. So there are bits and pieces that the Korean War influenced me on. My biggest fear during the Korean War were people I knew that have to go to war because we were getting into the teenage years now and it was kind of an ongoing dark thought in the back of my head that I would start knowing people that would have to be soldiers.

VS: This is kind of a big jump, but um…in terms of…like what was the dating scene like? Like what age did you start dating? [Laughter]

AS: I’d be glad to answer that.

VS: A happier topic. [Laughter]

AS: Being a tomboy, I had a lot of boyfriends. And I used to defend my right to have boyfriends that I was not romantically involved with me or I with them. And so the dating scene was not a very, you know, prolific time for me. I went to an all-girl’s school so I didn’t take a lot of opportunities to go out to sock-hops and things, which a lot of my friends did do. And so I went to the country every weekend with my dad. And I had boyfriends out there that I roller skated with, that I ice skated with, and that I even went to outdoor theaters with. Can you believe it? We didn’t hand hold and neck, we were just going to see a movie together. And uh…the only thing I can insert in there so you know I am not a dud is that I got…had my first kiss when I was twelve. From a boy that was my tomboy friend and I thought yuck and it was like I’m never going to play with him again and so…it was that. It wasn’t until I met the man I ended up marrying that I fell in love. First, last, and always. It was just a wonderful experience, and I was 19 and I was already in college. So the dating scene was very minimal for me until I was 19 and then it was pretty much immediately seriously um…a relationship. So….

VS: And you said you got married at 23?

AS: 23.

VS: So that’s like four years of dating.

AS: Four years of dating and yet military service for my husband and he was entered in to that and he was in ROTC [pronounced rot-see]. I still call it ROTC [pronounced R-O-T-C]. And he was sent on his assignment. And actually, although he did a lot of his training on the east coast, he came back and stationed at Fort Sheridan um…for most of his tour of duty and so I saw him in the military time and that was very special to me.

VS: And in terms of getting married, um…how was it dealt with?

AS: It was great. Again, my tom-boyishness saved me from a lot of the arrangements. My mother being very straightforward and, again, that orderly bookkeeper type of person, had taken…I lived at home, which was very common in those days. You lived at home until you married or you went on to a bigger career of some sort. And I had been a school teacher and that was my emphasis in school. I was a chemistry major, I knew that I wasn’t a chemist at heart and school teaching was something I enjoyed. And so I was teaching school and living at home. And so I would give my mother $50 a month out of my check of $200 dollars a month. And I never thought about where she would put it, I just thought she would use it I guess. And what she did is she saved it. Much like those savings bonds and I already had my car bought from those savings bonds. Five hundred dollars, I remember that first car.

AS: I…my mother said, “Annette, do not worry about the wedding. I have the money. I saved up the fifty dollars and that will pay for your wedding.” And so I like things simple, I still do. My dress cost fifty dollars. I had a wonderful white wool dress made that I still love today. I would get married in it all over again. It wouldn’t fit me though. And the uh…the wedding reception was at a very local banquet hall and we had roast beef, I remember, and live music and I was married in the church of the school I was teaching at. And it was wonderful. My sister was my matron of honor and my sister in law was the other bride’s maid and it was in the winter and it was simple. There was no hassle over invitation, which we had sent out simply. My mother made a list. My future mother-in-law made a list. We sent them out and the wedding proceeded and so religious sisters that I taught with were not able to come to the wedding because in those days, they were semi-cloistered. But I remember with great joy going over and visiting them in their convent and they oohed and ahhed over me and Richard and that was a wonderful part of the celebration and it was good.

VS: And this my kind of an awkward question, but in terms of a honeymoons, like what did people usually do or what did you do after the…? [Laughter]

AS: Oh no. You can talk about honeymoons any time honey ‘cause their great. I love them. I recommend them. Although because I was teaching at a Catholic school, I felt I couldn’t take time off and so we chose February 11, which happens to be a feast day in our church, but is was also the weekend, in those days, we celebrated Lincoln’s birthday. And it would have given me a day off on that weekend, on that Monday. And so my friends got together and they said aw-aw. You need a honeymoon. You deserve a honeymoon. They came in and taught my class, which again, Catholic school said it was okay and these were all college graduates. One of my good friends, who had actually helped me get introduced to my husband said she’d teach for me. And so I taught through that Friday, the children gave me a great big party with a great big cake, it was a very ethnic neighborhood, it was a great big Italian cake with gooey stuff in it and on it. And I was teaching third grade at the time. And the honeymoon part was…we could hardly wait.

AS: We were married on a Saturday um…we left our reception early ‘cause we couldn’t wait our hands on each other. It was great and uh…cause now we were going to live together. We had lived both with our parents until then. And we went out for a ride and we went for one drink. I remember one drink and we went up south on the outer drive of Chicago and we stopped at the Carriage Trade. I think that was its name. At least it had a big carriage on the big neon sign outside and we had one drink and we drove back. And the next morning we sat on the floor I remember. We were going to go to church, which we did as we were both Catholic and Sunday mass was part of our life. And before we did, we opened up all of the envelopes. And people had graciously given us cash. It was wonderful. And I remember we had twelve hundred dollars, which was like a fortune.

AS: And then we went to mass. And we got in the car and I didn’t ask my husband where we were going. I wanted to be surprised. I said just tell me what kind of clothes to bring. And he said bring a warm sweater and some, you know, slacks to wear. And I did that and he drove this gorgeous way out to the North Woods. A place which he dearly loved. He had done a lot of being there during the-his growing up years, his teenage years. And it was our first supper club we-it started to get dark and we…he knew about supper clubs. I didn’t. They were part of Wisconsin’s lore, not of mine. And it was the first time I had ever had lobster. And the people were so nice. We were the only two people in there. They opened up early for us. They didn’t know we were coming. They opened at five and we got there say at four, 4:30. I remember sconces on the wall and the honeymoon was on. It was wonderful. We ended up going to a place-it has now been demolished. It is called the Northern Air. And it was a lodge up in the hills of Wisconsin. A little mountain nearby called Sheltered Valley.

AS: And we learned to ski there. Oh…what a romantic, wonderful place. Good people. There was…were wonderful help there. We were the only ones out on the slopes in the morning. We had a Norwegian ski instructor. I would recommend a honeymoon to anyone and everyone. Don’t miss the opportunity. It’s great. And just as an aside, we went back there the next year with our first baby in tow, in fact, Victoria’s mother. Victoria’s interviewing me. And we brought her along. And the women who did a lot of seasonal work to survive up there took care of her. And we kept the bottle on the window ledge to keep it cold. And we had a wonderful second honeymoon the following year. So yes, yes, yes. Honeymoons are wonderful.

VS: Okay. I want to take a jump backwards. Um…into college life. You said you were expected to um…it was assumed at least that you were going to college. What kind of college did you go to?

AS: I took a very simple route. I was in an all-girl’s school taught by the sisters of Providence, who I greatly admired. I had had them all through grammar school as well. And there was what they called a working woman’s college up on the north side again of Chicago. By this time I knew a little more about Mundelein College, which is where I went. It was called the skyscraper college. Um…it’s know been assimilated by a much bigger university, Loyola University. The um…and that is were I went. It was the only place I applied to. I don’t remember anything like you’re going to be accepted or not. It was assumed again by me. Very…very uninformed route sometimes. I just was grateful when I look back on how simple it was. And I remember one question on the interview that we had to write about ourselves. And it was what kind of art do you like. And I remember the answer was Norman Rockwell. And I still like Norman Rockwell. You know, that was kind of where it was at. You know, definitely blue collar and grateful.

VS: What did a lot of your girlfriends end up doing?

AS: That’s very interesting because if I hadn’t had an aptitude in science, which is how I ended up being a chemistry major, I might never be here talking to Victoria because without the science connection and a good friend that I made in the science department, who introduced me to my husband to be, my life would have been very different. Of the women that I went to high-college with, I also had gone to high school with some of them. And even some of them I had gone to grammar school with. So we some of us have celebrated knowing each other now almost sixty years, which is just wonderful. They all, lots of them took different turns. They were very bright women and of course they still are.

AS: Our whole little club of ten women that we formed in early college years, we still meet with each other. And eight of the ten are still in the area on a regular basis. We did it monthly for years. Now we do it four times a year. And we even have taken long rides out to Nebraska where one woman is. So there were teachers in that group. There’s still a chemist in that group who works for a living at it with a big research um…department. In a big research department for a big cosmetic firm. So she’s very much using her education on an ongoing basis. Another friend, several of them went on to be high school teachers. One wanted to be a dentist and backed off of that, but still stayed in the science end of junior high working situation. She just retired this past year. Another woman, biologist, stayed very active in the field until she decided to stay home and raise her son. So I found the women very stimulating. The women that didn’t marry right away ended up loving opera, so they would come….

[End of side A]

AS: Yes, I had talked about my friends. I would say very active woman. Um…probably the primary was the teaching end of it. Yet they remained very active in their interests of the science field. They often judged science fairs. They’re often involved.

VS: Now in college, you were in chemistry classes. Um…was there a big difference in ratio between the sexes?

AS: You know, I wasn’t that aware of it because I was in an all-girl’s school. Even in college it was an all-girl’s school. The um…. So I wasn’t even thinking in that department. It was more, where I would have seen the differences between men and women? Again, because of my home life, I wasn’t that aware of it. I saw I guess one of the biggest things that comes to mind, my husband, because he was in ROTC, ‘cause he was right next door with the ROTC practice fields. And I didn’t think of women going into the service that much. You know, it wasn’t anything that ever attracted me. Maybe because my terror of some of it. So that would be one of my internal differences, which men did that kind of thing, which I know isn’t true and yet it was probably my perception.

AS: And when the Vietnam War came, my children were, I call it, falling between the cracks. They were too young to go into Vietnam. And…and the horror of that experience and the patriotism that I felt because I think of my background and my husband being in the army, loved the army, almost considered staying there in the Army as a career. He didn’t. I remember defending soldiers that were being ridiculed on the street, um…And I can’t say I took a real active interest other than that. But it was horrifying to me that our soldiers would be maligned because of a war. And then I came to know more about it and yet I never thought it was the soldiers’ fault if things went awry. And I feel I still keep a very strong thread of patriotism, although it’s taken another turn in my later years as to how I interpret that.

VS: Okay, going back to college. What were the other kind of subjects that were offered at your college?

AS: I was taught by a different congregation of religious sisters at the time. They were the BBMs and they were noted for their intellectual pursuits and they were amazing women. I thought the sisters of Providence were really educated too. They have their own college as the BBMs. And I never thought they tried to steer women into what we call “womanly” things of domesticity. They believed in working women, because that is what it was called. A working women’s college. Many of my friends worked their way through school. And I want to tell you tuition was a hundred and fifty dollars a semester when I left there [cough] and yet some of my friends worked hard to make that money happen for themselves. And so I credit, more again in hindsight, the women I grew up with. My mother more in my older years. My grandmother certainly right there on the spot. Of how strong they were coming from another country and making it happen and in many cases without husbands involved. Husbands dead. Husbands not present in the picture. That I very much believe that I was in a very strong women’s society and have only lately through my own children’s suffering, through the um…negative connotation’s given to women lawyers, I have one daughter who is a lawyer. So I see some of it more now than I did then, but I wasn’t hampered. Then of course I was a teacher, which many women were and I never thought I was mistreated because I was a women, a tomboy in a man’s society, you know, that wasn’t how I had experienced my growing up.

VS: How did you end up paying for college?

AS: That was easy. My mother and dad paid for it. They believed that the job that I had was to be a good student and I was. And so although I found college harder than high school um…because more of the demands and responsibilities, I was blessed being paid for. It was a freebie in the sense of my parents paying for my college education.

VS: And was there any expectation, either your parents or yourselves, about what you would do after college?

AS: That was another expectation that I would teach. They never looked, you know, askew of my chemistry, they just felt that was a necessary part of my schooling. They expected me to go on to teach. So that again was quite easy. It wasn’t a hard decision at all. I liked children. I did choose to teach in a Catholic school. I ended failing the um…city exam and I failed the music portion. I did fine on the creative part. I did fine on the scholastic part. And I tried to learn how to play the piano the weekend before the um…the exam. And I didn’t do very well at it. And I remember I got a 60 and I needed a 70 and um…I can still sing you the song that I failed on the music exam and I opted not to go back and redo the exam. In another way, I took that easier route. I taught at a Catholic school. That particular requirement wasn’t expected.

VS: Where and what did you teach?

AS: I taught grammar school kids. I had a very unique experience of working um…at a school that probably, unfortunately, the country of United States knows about it, Our Lady of Angels fire that occurred when I was a senior at college. And again, one of my friends was a social worker major and I asked what some of the women did. She was called, the seniors of our class were called, social majors-social work majors, to come and help at the hospitals. And again, I remember being influenced by the horror they experienced there. Not only seeing some of the burn victims, but seeing some of the distraught families trying to find their children because they were not easily found. They had been sent to so many area hospitals, they were making so many terrible journeys trying to find their children alive or otherwise. That happened and afterwards they very much needed teachers and so that was the school I applied to. So we taught in a substitute building that is still a Catholic school and that was my beginning of my teaching. I taught second grade, did some first grade teaching, and then I did third grade. And I only taught for two years. I was married while I was in school, teaching school. And I was pregnant. My husband and I talked and he said I could support us and so I became a stay at home mom at that point.

VS: And um…how many children did you have?

AS: We…I’ve…. This is very much a “we” process. This “we” had eleven children. And I am grateful to say that I still do have eleven children that are alive and well and wonderful. Victoria being part of the wonderfulness. And I do want to say though, just to use the use of my education, I ended up going to work full time when my youngest was five. And my college education allowed me to do that. I became an addictions counselor. And in those days, the requirements were pretty straightforward and one of them was college. And I had that even though I was a chemistry major and education minor. At Mundelein, your education hours were as many as your major. They always believed in giving you a full dose of education hours and so um…that degree helped me get a good job, a job that I was very fond of, that taught me a lot about myself as well as other people in the world. And I worked in an alcohol and rehab unit in a hospital setting. And I stayed there for ten and a half years. And I really credit my ability back to my schooling.

VS: Um…how old were you when you had your first child?

AS: When I was married, I was just twenty three. My birthday is in January. Married February 11th and my first child was born on December thirteenth of 1961. So I was twenty-three. A lot…a lot of things happened when I was twenty-three. A lot of good things.

VS: And with eleven children, did a lot of your friends have that many?

AS: That…big families were very much a part of our suburban living. I say suburban because at this point, we had moved to a suburb next to Chicago. And that was my husband’s direction. I would never have moved there on my own volition. I saw the suburb as the rich suburbs. It turned out the reality is it’s varied. There are many different incomes, many different backgrounds in the community I continue to live in, which is still Oak Park, Illinois. And they um…my friends…one of my friends has ten children…um…one of my friends has six children. So I would say yes. Big families are a part of it. And again, the community I lived in at one point, our block alone had sixty children on it. And that’s just one block. And so my dad used to say the air was pregnant and he would say to my mother, don’t breathe it. I don’t care if you are sixty-five, don’t breathe the pregnant air of Oak Park. So yes, there was lots of big families and it made it much easier.

VS: And um…you became a stay at home mom, what kind of things did you have to do for the upkeep of the house and the children?

AS: It was pretty basic. It gradually became bigger washing machines and bigger pots. No regrets. I think though one of the things I would like to say here is that um…the expectation on education that I had kinda grown up with for me, was the ongoing attitude in our household. More at this point of my husband who believed in education. Probably to a greater degree than I did. He, too, was the first in his family to go to college. And maybe because he was out in the working world. Absolutely because he was out in the working world, outside of the home, is that he saw the need for it growing more and more and more. And while mine was tempered such as my dad’s attitude who had quit school in the fifth grade to help support his family never went back to school, was a self-taught carpenter and went on from there. I felt that they only needed to do what they wanted to do and so I wasn’t as forceful of yes you’re going to school no matter what.

AS: And yet the end result, at least of today, is that all eleven of the children have gone to college. They’re all self-supporting. A couple of them don’t have a college degree of four years. They’ve all either had Associate’s Degree or beyond. Several have degrees, two lawyers. So it’s…education was definitely I would say an integral part and more importantly for me was the need and love of reading. I just value that. I grew up near a library um…and my husband was a great reader of newspapers. He always knew the current histories, you know, the past histories and the current events, um…I know Victoria’s mom has had many conversations with her father about those kinds of things. They really know the insides of why things are the way they are. I don’t have as much knowledge of that. Nor even probably an interest at times. But the love of reading and I see that as being essential. If you know how to read, you can do anything.

VS: Okay. And um…within daughters of your own, they’re kind of different in age, so they probably had different experiences growing up. One was the oldest of all eleven, two were right next to each other in the middle, and then one was second to last. Um…and so they probably had different experiences from what you taught them, but were there certain things that you taught your daughters um…to do as opposed to say…teaching your sons? Or did you just lump everything together?

AS: Well there was certainly a lot of lumping. There certainly was… I think, again, my husband had a great influence on many of the things that we did and he saw them as individuals while I taught them more as a group. Let’s all go to the store. Let’s all do this. I think one of the wonderful things that I see in my children today, both the men folk and the women folk are not afraid to work. They all approach hard work very open-mindedly. They are all willing to do hard work. They’re all willing to do dirty work. I don’t-a lot of them are willing to sew. A lot of my children use sewing machines. The men change diapers as well as the women-folk do. I see the women folk willing to demolish building, which they did in our family home when we decided to rehab it after my husband died. They were as dusty, as dirty as the men folk carrying things out. So I like that integrated idea of work.

AS: I do see though, as I said earlier, that women in some professions have been hurt mightily by what I see as a masculine or patriarchal system and that is even in the teaching profession. I have seen that continue to stay under that kind of hierarchy and I don’t agree with that. That’s kind of where I moved when I look at war and the peace movement of which I’m a very little part of is that the…we need this kind of breakdown of the matriarchal-patriarchal system and we need to realize that we may be different but we are equal. And there is a need for equal pay and some of those basic things that people have died over…and continuing to be hurt by.

VS: What kind of jobs did your husband do?

AS: Like I said, he loved the army, but he chose not to stay there, partly because of me. I found it a very difficult life. He went into a um…corporate setting that was very um…Ma-Bell. I’m going to call it what it is because the name of it, its nickname the Illinois Bell System, was a very recognized and very good place to work for because of its benefits and longevity, you know, the benefits you could have after retirement. That was true for him. My husband started selling steel. I was amazed at how bright he was and how much he learned in a field he didn’t know about. He did it almost instantaneously. He was a very bright man. And he did it willingly to help us. He wanted a job where he knew his family would be cared for. And the Illinois Bell System was that place and so after a few years in the steel industry, selling steel, he moved into the Bell System where he did wonderful things um…lots of creativity he brought to the job. And he saw that he moved around in the field. He didn’t stay in a comfortable place. He’d go out and become directors of things and he got a lot more education in the Illinois Bell System. Got his masters degree and he went on to his doctorate while working for the Bell System and then moved on to the field of recovery and addiction. Certainly had influence on me with that. And he was the um…part of a group of people that developed the state licensing division for addiction counselors and received an Illinois Bell Gram Award for that. So he was very creative while still taking ongoing consistent care of us.

VS: Do you feel like you participated in his work experience? Whether supporting him through the household or…?

AS: Well, you know, I guess that’s a yes and no answer. I was certainly not willing and maybe not even able to be a part of any social parts of his job, which were pretty minimal. I did support him in the extent that I was at home working every bit as hard as he. I don’t think I really appreciated all he really did for us until I went to work full time to support myself. And maybe he didn’t appreciate all that I did at home either. So…and yet I feel to the extent that we did the best we could and we certainly did that.

VS: What kind of stuff did you do within the household? Like cleaning wise or…?

AS: It was never clean…never clean enough. I guess the best I could say for myself right now is that looking back at the disorder that evolved is a forgiving attitude of self. When I have grandchildren over and I can see how quickly things can get turned around, I looked at what it must have been really like with eleven children all under, you know, eleven or twelve years. They were all kind of little together and different things happening is that I…I’d say the best I gave my children was a reassurance that it was okay to reach out and do certain things. I wasn’t perfect at it and yet I think it was ‘Yeah you can do that’. There was a lot of adventuring out into worlds that um…I knew I really had no control over. And so they had different experiences. Sea Cadet kinds of things and a lot of camping experiences that stemmed from going out on a lot of camping as a group. They were able to do a lot of building. They were willing to use full sized tools at the age of five and I was willing to let them. I wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t a lot of fear ideas around those kinds of adventures. And so it was more of an attitude than it was an actual physical setting up of things. It was more letting them have their freedoms.

VS: And in terms of your daughters, did you push them in any directions towards activities?

AS: You know, I have to go back to my previous answer in saying how imperfect I was. I was certainly imperfect in there too. Um…at times I wanted to control that group, even though at times I wanted to say go out and do your thing. So they had a kind of a yo-yoing existence with me. And…I was glad they were bright. I recognized that in all the young men and young women, boys and girls. And yet I think at times, maybe because of my tomboyish, my closer association to my father as opposed to my mother, I favored the boys and that wasn’t a surprise to the girls. You know, later as they became adults and took more risks with me, they’d say mom that was no secret to us that you favored the boys over the girls. And for that I can ask their forgiveness. I guess that’s one of the major old lady tools that I am grateful for now. That all of my children say hello to me and then many of them do more than that. And so there’s a lot in these questions that I’m not answering because the question is not being asked directly, but I know how grateful I am that they are all alive and I’m alive and that we have a chance to heal some of these early wounds from some of this early pushing and pulling that we did. Some of that yo-yoing I did.

VS: And in terms of things like, I know we talked about education already, but um…say your daughters dating, and they would have done that in, ‘cause of their age difference in different decades. The eldest would start in the ‘70s, the late ‘70s, and um…the youngest into the ‘80s. Did you see any…did you put different standards on them in their dating life or were you even involved in their dating life?

AS: I think that there would be the difference, again, some of these related questions, is that in some ways I worried more about the girls than the boys, which is not real sane to think that way. But I know there was more of a concern about that control where are you and what are you doing. I think what I know from what they talk to me now is that there were a lot of um…um…issues of being around and part of big family and having so many brothers and so the brothers knew the boys and so that certainly had an influence on the girls of all the ages, whether it was the oldest, the youngest, or the two in between. That their brothers were out there and they were big strong brothers. And so there was more of influence from that in my opinion then there was of me on them.

VS: In terms of what they would do, in terms of like uh…for higher education or in the work world, did you have any expectations for your daughters?

AS: Well, I think I had this for all of them and certainly my daughters is that if they wanted an education they were going to be able to get one. And while that was my statement, it was really through the efforts of my children, who are still teaching me today, they are really wonderful teachers to me, is that they did the footwork. They got out there and got the papers, got the forms, filled out endless hours of questionnaires. My husband was the one who was their standby guide who would tell them about these monies and information, these tax returns and reports and all the things they needed to fill these out. I really had no hand in that. I really credit them, the children and he, their father with getting most of that going.

VS: Okay. Um…and in terms of opportunities for them, do you feel they had more opportunities to expand?

AS: I do. I do. And as soon as you said that, what comes to mind is that because of their being in a big family, again my opinion obviously, is that they had to learn how to make their way very early. And there was a certain attitude about there was really nothing impossible, they had you know grandmothers around them and grandfathers. If there was a problem, you found the solution for it. And I see that in many of the ways they live today, is that something needs to get done, they do it or until they find out. They don’t sit back and say oh I don’t think that’s possible. I think they’re very much into yes this is very much possible. I think they are very much into solutions. And that’s in whatever kind of jobs they have. And so I think that’s an attitude that came from each other and being in the family they were in and being in the neighborhood they were in, they were going to credit that to, is that there is nothing they can’t do. And I see that today in the way they travel, in the way they say yes to life, and the way they take the ups and downs of life and continue to always look for a way to live it and not wallow in it or get stuck in it. I see them really as our current hope.

VS: And jumping back, the Vietnam War, we spoke about it briefly, but is there anything else that you participated in with it? Like your children were a little bit younger, but did you do any active work…?

AS: No….

VS: …to help them?

AS: No. No. I-I…. Looking back at my, you know, activism career, it was very non-present. I had certain things I believed in and um…would stand up for on occasion that it would arise. Like I said, a soldier being maligned on the street. I can remember that. Only recently have I become more active. And I’ve been to the Vietnam War Memorial and have felt some of the pain of that and yet I have no personal-personal meaning, that no one in my family was there in Vietnam. I did work though in the addiction field of many of our clients or patients were from Vietnam. I got a great appreciation for the post traumatic stress syndrome idea. I visited with the traveling wall. Very powerful experiences. Beyond that, no.

VS: Oh…when did you start going back to work and why did you make that decision to go back to work?

AS: I went back to work when the youngest child was five and it was out of sheer necessity. My husband and I had separated…that summer of 1980. And while he was again a constant and positive force of taking care of us, now there were two households to support. And so I needed to get to work. And so I had done some part time work prior to that in the addiction field working in a court system, a DUI system, driving under the influence and having to interview clients on a part time basis and come up with treatment plans for them. And so the next logical step was to work at a hospital.

VS: And…is that…when did you stop working?

AS: I stopped working in 1992. Um…my husband had retired. We had reunited in a positive sense. It was wonderful and he wanted to travel. So I had actually burned out of my job. I had loved my job. But I had always believed if you couldn’t give your patients the very best of yourself you didn’t belong there. Sick people deserve good help. And so the combination brought me to ask my husband, I said I would like to retire also. And he said, you come on home and so I did in 1992. And I’m so grateful because he died three years later. Is this kind of the close?

VS: Um…not really.

AS: Or do you have more questions? Because I want to say something….

VS: I have more questions. I have more.

AS: …before I…. Okay.

VS: I have some more kind of general questions. When did your last child leave the house?

AS: um…. Golly. The last children that actually left the house after my husband died, and Richard died in 1995, so we lived in a small family house. It had been small, four to a bedroom and he and I were there alone. And so, as I say, they were so independent, so able to take care of themselves, some of them still in school doing their kind of thing. They were all out of the household in 1994 possibly, the year before he died. The neat thing is after he died, a couple of them kind of came back home for a while, two of the unmarried children kind of came back home. And lived in and out, they lived in an independent way. And yet I am very grateful for the grieving process to have them a little closer.

VS: And since the time that your husband died, what have you been doing…to stay busy?

AS: I do stay busy. I have a great…I am a very grateful person. I am part of a um…that I will tell you is a twelve step group. I am very grateful to be a part of it. It has helped me integrate my life in very positive ways, because if you read the twelve steps of recovery in whatever twelve step recovery that you may be part of, you will see how positive they are, they are all positive statements of living. I um…feel I live a very rich life, being involved with the children, the grandchildren and the um…and a little bit of the, I say the peace movement. I don’t want to maximize that because I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be honest. I’ve come to appreciate the Declaration of Independence so much more. I feel we all need to read it and reread it. And I feel I’m more tuned in to the outside world. I need to maintain inner peace at the same time.

VS: Can I ask you to pause for a second while I change the tape? Thanks.

[Tape 2]

VS: This is Tape 2 of the interview with AS. And um…within jobs or just living, did you feel you were pretty mobile, like you could make decisions uh…Did you feel like there were a lot of opportunities for you to go?

AS: I did. And certainly just referring to the work experience in the hospital, and it was a local hospital, it was only fifteen minutes on the bus, and that was important to me. And that was one of the reasons they gave me later on and one of the reasons they hired me, they said you are close by and you obviously need to work and we feel you will stay here. They ran through a bunch of people in my position that had left after a few months. And I realize as I stayed at the hospital working is that they needed a consistent person. I valued consistency and so I was able to be there every day and glad to be there and the opportunities that were in my job were enough to see the patients day by day. I found that stimulating. I found it exciting. I found it probably fitting in with some of my tom-boyishness is that each and every day was different. And while certainly I had to do like to lecturing and things like that, the patients themselves were changing in front of our eyes each day. And so that was a very stimulating environment to work for.

AS: Could I have risen in the hospital field? I had no desire to do that. I saw being a boss sort of thing and moving away from the patients not something I would like. I probably would have had to have gone back to school because they were beginning in those late ‘80s, I started working there in 1982, is that I didn’t want to go back to school. I didn’t want to do some of those things. Leave those to somebody who wanted to do those things. And I found our hospital unit, as it grew, we became a very big unit for our area, while we started with eight patients and ended with about forty in our unit for a while, is that was not my desire at all. Where I stayed, I wanted to stay. And so I would say the opportunities were limited in the sense of rising, but I received you know regular work evaluations, I got good evaluations at work and I got raises accordingly. And so I felt I was well paid for what I did. And men and women were both doing my job and so I didn’t’ feel any adversarial women versus men situations. I had a good job situation.

VS: Uh…you lived, it sounds like, all your life in an urban setting. Did you ever feel like you could live in a rural setting or did you vacation…?

AS: I lived in what I would call a country situation on weekends. We lived out in the lake area. It truly wasn’t rural. And I early on could see that farmers worked seven days a week and I didn’t want to do that. And so a rural setting would not have been on my list of places or things to do. No. I’m just grateful I grew up in the city and not a suburb. I feel I had a more expansive view of the world. I grew up with street cars. I had those being able to transport myself anywhere in the city that my parents allowed me to go, a lot of freedom again. Um…I took subways. I went downtown and visited big libraries to do research for different school assignments and I am really grateful to live in the suburb I live in because it was attached to the city and I feel the children have taken advantage of that growing up, getting on those same els and subways and exploring the city well. So…I’m glad I live where I live and I’m more glad I grew up in the city.

AS: Did you take trips to kind of acquaint yourself with a rural setting? Like later in life with the children?

AS: I did because my husband interestingly, although he grew up in the city, he had one little farm experience he said of summer, he was ten years old and had lived on a farm, he loved the state fairs. I mean loved them. He loved Wisconsin, which is very rural, at least where we were driving to camp and etcetera and maybe the camping experience a bit of the rural setting. We lived more primitively. We lived all in a tent. All thirteen of us in one tent. And um…there were no faucets or running water and things and we had faithfully…my husband said they must know about cows. They must know about pigs. They must know how smart those animals are. We would eat dairy products in Wisconsin state fairs. It was just…I’m so glad he brought that experience to us. One of my sons currently lives in a farm setting. It’s wonderful to drive out there. My husband and I would take rides out to the…it’s truly the farming country. He loved it. He loved the peace that the fields and the birds flying over that field brought him. He never had any desire that I know of to live on a farm.

VS: And where does your son live now?

AS: He lives in a um…DeKalb County, which is very agricultural. Although it’s changing rapidly. Lots of land is being sold off and developed.

VS: Did you have any relatives that were true rural, like in your family?

AS: No. I think um…just looking back, and I know I’ll get a chance to talk about the grandmas, I don’t want to, you know, belabor that, but they were such an integral part of my life, is that growing up in Ireland I believe they were very much a part of farmland and valued the um…in Ireland, I guess, the meager living that it brought them. Yet the principle of hard work that they brought over from Ireland with them and you know, the Potato Famine and the horror of that. So much more than agricultural, but political. And they kept their wits about them. And I can remember one of the amazing little things my grandmother did and taught me, more by doing than by saying, but she used to say Annette if you have a pound of potatoes and your neighbor is hungry, you give them half a pound. And you feed your family with the other half a pound and then God will take care of you tomorrow.

VS: Um…did you participate in any feminist movements?

AS: No. I did not.

VS: Did you recognize certain movements throughout your entire life as being feminist?

AS: Yes. I remember, I think, again, it was a little more of bit being at Mundelein, it was an all girls college and it was right near the time, I graduated in 1959, close to that time in the early ‘60s, things just started coming unglued and certainly the church circle that I was familiar with, the constantly in that was starting to change drastically and of course, now the Vietnam War was happening and people were starting to protest, I was at home with a lot of little children. I am telling myself I was not involved in that movement. Women were struggling more and more for equal rights. I remember doing a lot of reading on that, but still not…I was busy. And I did not pay attention to a lot of what was going on inside of me in a lot of these particular movements.

VS: Do remember what kinds of equal rights they were struggling for? And the general time-frame?

AS: The big thing that I thought of then was equal pay for equal work. I certainly knew I believed in that. Again, coming to a place where the women worked as hard as the men and the men worked with the women and did all kinds of jobs, is that that certainly was common sense, that they get paid for what they were doing.

VS: And in terms of women’s fashions, how has that changed throughout your life?

AS: Well, so many images come to mind from what my grandmothers wore. They always wore dresses. They always wore work dresses when they did the physical work of cleaning the house and cooking and all of that. They always wore a dress and put a hat on when they went out. I grew up wearing hats. Easter bonnets and even in early marriage which would have been the early ‘60s I had a wonderful hat with feathers that I thought just made me beautiful. I don’t wear hats anymore. I like my head free. I don’t even when I ride a motorcycle, which I don’t drive, but I like to be on the back of one occasionally, I don’t like to wear a helmet. I like the freedom of not doing that. I’m not saying that’s best. I’m saying that’s what I like.

AS: Uh…the fashion that has influenced me the most as I look back is that I pretty much wear uniforms day by day, black kind of exclusively inside and out. And I laughingly knew why. I grew up with religious sisters that wore back all the time. And I remember thinking when I was very young in grammar school thinking they can go anywhere in their black clothes. They don’t have to worry about getting dressed up. They just put on their black clothes. They can go to the dance. They can go to the dinner. They can go to the social event. They’re dressed. And I know that has remained a strong influence on me. I think black is great and can go anywhere. So it’s what I wear. And the most changed in fashion was seeing my mother begin to wear slacks. My mother always wore dresses. And then one day, she retired, she never wore slacks to work. And when she retired, and my mother lived to 93, slacks became the order of the day. And so I value my blue jeans that I grew up with. And I value my slack and pants that women wore today and that I wore today.

VS: How do you feel that the styles changed for the general group of women?

AS: I like the fashions of today in that they are so eclectic, they are so individual. I see artistry in everyone’s life and in everyone’s person. And so they express it in different ways, in clothes. I think both men and women express their artistry. So whether they’re wearing black, cut-off jeans, things with holes, I like it. I think the more the merrier. Even my husband is much, even a business situation he was in, if they wanted long hair, they could have long hair. If they wanted tattoos, they could have tattoos. You know, God bless. I’m grateful that for not putting a lot of emphasis on hair styles and on kinds of dress.

VS: And the technology for the household, how did that change throughout your life?

AS: I think the biggest things for me was going from the electric washing machines with the ringers where you were committed to that basements and you know putting your clothes in and out of the ringer and the rinse waters and pulling back up to the regular machines that we have today, the automatic machines. That was huge. I can remember when I got my first set from Sears. They were Kenmores from Sears and they lasted, I remember eleven years, the same washer and drier, which I thought I doubled the amount of wash I did. Seven washes a day. And the ease at which the children could be doing the laundry. I felt that if they could take apart their bikes and build buildings that they were doing at the age of six, then by the age of six, it was time for them to wash their own clothes, and that was probably the biggest help. That and getting a second bathroom in our house after the twins were born. It was wonderful. I really very much appreciate bathrooms.

VS: And marketing to women, whether through clothing or certain products, how do you feel it has changed?

AS: Well, you know, growing up with working women, and even my grandmothers worked outside of the house because they came from Ireland, they worked on the Southside for other families that had more money than they is that um…I think my pictures of people from the ‘40s and ‘50s were people with cute little aprons on, you know, looking very feminine in a kitchen. And that was never my view. My view was very double boilers and pots of coffee and get the bacon fried and then you went on and did other things. And I think that the advertisement magazines and other places, TV of course, um…geared themselves toward many faceted women in the clothes and the backgrounds and things they put in their ads.

VS: Um…jobs outside of the home, for women specifically, do you feel that it has opened up and like in what fields?

AS: Oh…in my experiences, mainly now through my children and grandchildren is that I think a lot of things are said to be opening, but I’m not certain that they are because of the abuse that comes verbally and behind the scenes possibly in some of the specific situations that I know about. I think it’s still the greatest country in the world. I hope it remains that way. I think as, again, we need to read our Declaration of Independence out loud so we hear ourselves and hear others. I think there is still a great patriarchal bully system. It’s around in a lot different fields. I think there is a lot of David and Goliaths going on. And I often think the Davids are correct, but I don’t always think they have their weight slingshot for the giant. I think we’re in a crucial situation in our country where I think we need to take a strong look at what democracy is and being a republic and what that means. We’re losing some very basic freedoms that very concerning me. I’ve lived my life. I’m sixty-six. I have very real concerns for not only my children who are now moving into their forties. Um…the youngest being thirty, but for my grandchildren, who reap the benefits of the freedom I’ve enjoyed.

VS: Do you have any specific concerns you’d like to talk about?

AS: I’m concerned about what we have taken the term “terrorism” and to what level we have taken it as an excuse for losing some of our basic freedoms. I am very concerned about some of this home rule freedom security system. I keep my written materials from some the peace walks I’ve been on etcetera in a folder so if they come to my door, I can say you don’t have to tear my house apart, here it is. Here’s what I have. The um…things that we will do in terms of terror often promote rage is um…I’m concerned of us mimicking the history of Germany in which they got to the children, such as the Brownshirts, which is something I would hear about as I began to do a little more reading as I got older. Get the children.

AS: I saw the movie Killing Fields. Movies have had a big influence on me. Don’t go after the family. Go after the children and have them go after the family. I’ve seen the reports of some of the African atrocities and how the children are encouraged to destroy family. That concerns me here in our country is that we cannot give up these freedoms. Some of the old quotes we oh that was just quoted. No, that’s an old quote is be careful of our long term goals so we don’t lose it through our short term goals. So I fear that the right to speech, free speech, is being greatly hampered. I’m concerned about the gigantic company control by different names. I’m concerned about the consumerism that’s going on in our country, hard to find things that are made in the U.S. of A. that look for them. I have to pay more for them. That’s okay because often, I’m very willing to do that. But I don’t use a lot either so I’m not knocking the people that buy more cheaply. So I have concerns. Yeah, I do.

VS: Um…when did you start having these concerns or was there ever a change?

AS: I think really the death of my husband finished a section of my life at that point, in 1995 and beginning more and more my children’s exposure to the outside world and having them talk. They began to have an influence on me. I saw my children, some of them going through very difficult life situation changes and standing on their own two feet and speaking up for themselves more and more, being something that was teaching me I needed to do more of that also. And don’t always have the background that many of my children have, but I feel I do know a little bit about freedom and about what I’ve enjoyed because of that. I do know I benefit from my husband’s involvement in the work field because I benefit by getting his pension money. And I think our children are not going to be allowed that. I think they will do a lot of things differently.

AS: And so, you know, I’m grateful today to be a single woman. I moved out of the widowhood. I took me about three years, I still miss him, my husband, that is. I am grateful for this opportunity to learn more about me. And I’m learning that, as I say, through the family. I’m learning that through the generational family. I credit that a lot with the grandmas. The “swirling grandmother energy” I call it. I’ve a re-appreciation of my mother and my father now that they’re both dead. Um…I appreciate through my church because I believe I can stay within an established church while not agreeing with the hierarchy in many situations. I believe the twelve step program and its positive attitudes toward living have also become more integrated in my life. So I am grateful, although I get lonely at times, is that I am grateful for who I am at this very moment.

VS: Do you have any concerns for women in the future?

VS: You know, I don’t know exactly how to answer that as simply as I might like to, as I do believe in the keeping it simple philosophy. I know I’m proud of the women in my family. I’m proud that my granddaughter is sitting across from me and her willingness to step out and go after what she very much believes in, what she is very much interested in, what I believe she very much loves, history and all that ramification. I think learning about history is a wonderful way to appreciate the country we have today, the positions we’re able to be in. My concerns for them, you know, would be the outside forces that I’m concerned about that I feel are taking away from liberties, will cause them to have to step up even harder and faster at great risk to themselves or submit and go more subtly downward. I haven’t given a lot of thought to that except for this question coming up. I think though they’re up to the task of whatever it’s going to take as women. I think they have great history preceding them, not history they’ve always agreed with, not history or actual life situations that were always easy, but I think they’ve learned from the good and the difficult as well as the bad. So I think they’re in for the long haul in a good way.

VS: And you mentioned the death of your husband as having a great impact and kind of an ending of a whole life. Were there any other kinds of moments in your life where you kind of just stopped and looked how you changed as a person?

AS: Well I think the big ones for sure the leaving of home and moving in to another life home with my husband, the birth of the children and the amazing creation of that. And again, repeating myself, the involvement in the twelve step program has been one of the most positive outside influences on me. I’m hopefully busy digesting and living each day. But I would say what comes to mind and continues to come to mind is his death.

VS: And um…women in your life, we’ll start with your family…What kind of impact…you lived with your great grandmother? What kind of impact on your life as a woman did she leave?

AS: She was amazing. Um…and I’ll start with this story real quick. I was asked to draw God once by, I was an adult. I was in my thirties and this women across from me asked me to do that and I started drawing and who I drew is God…as God, was my great grandmother. And I didn’t realize I was doing it until afterwards when Oh my God! She has stout shoes on like my grandma does…did. And I appreciate that idea today because God as a concept as a higher power is very important to me because I believe that that kind of energy, Godlike energy, creative energy, higher energy, is that which feeds me moment by moment. I am very, at times, very aware of how important that is to embrace the moment. And I saw my grandmother and my great grandmother and my mother doing that.

AS: And so those women, my mother in a more negative sense, but I struggled with my mom a lot. She tried to control me I thought. And my grandmas did not. I was mightily influenced by that. I was influence by my grandmother’s healing ability. I didn’t realize it what she was, but she was a midwife in Ireland. I didn’t know that term. I just knew that she helped people have babies and she did in this country as well and they respected her, my mother would say. The doctors would respect her and I realized that healing energy is in my family. A lot of hands on. So that kind of influence very important. I saw my mother-in-law, she called herself a swinger, and she very much knew how to enjoy life in a different way. Traveled and encouraged children to do that. Try knew things, try knew foods. My mother-in-law was very important.

AS: My grandmother had an amazing ability to accept the death of children. Many of her children died before she did. And uh…she was able to get through that and still smile. She had a wonderful, wonderful smile. Certainly the women in my family. My mother was deaf and as I look back I see that incredible energy and when you talk about technology, she wore a hearing aid that had six batteries that weighed about a pound each and she carried that on her back on her special backpack that she hid under her dress and she would wire herself up. She almost looked like a walking time bomb to allow herself to hear a little. And she made her way in the world with that amazing handicap, I guess you’d call it. But she never called it that. She’d always say Annette you always learn more about people by watching them than by hearing what they do and what they say. And so those kinds of influences are big for me.

VS: Is there anything you would like to say in general about women’s experiences?

AS: You know, I’m grateful I’m a woman, even with all the tom-boyishness of my life, early life especially. I was always grateful I’m a woman. And whether that came from the creative energy of being able to look back and say wow, eleven children or it was more the influences of grandparents, grandmothers, my own mother-in-law, now to see my grandchildren. I think there is a, in my words, a hierarchy, a word I don’t like to use often and that is of being a human being. And there is just a wonderfulness to um…you know having lived these decades. I’m grateful for the decades I’ve had. I jokingly say to myself to learn my new phone number is its 9417. I hope to be 94 and I’m not sweet 17 anymore and I wouldn’t want to go back to any of those years. I’m grateful for the years I’m in. I’m grateful for the moment I’m in. I’m grateful for the day I’m in. I’m grateful to be smiling to Victoria across the table from me. Maybe she knows most of this. She has a great love of history and family history. She is, I call her my family historian ‘cause she does it a lot with not only her words, but her photographs. I hope she continues to do that. And I’m just grateful to be me today. So thanks.

VS: Okay. And uh…I have a consent form giving permission for other to listen to this interview and use it for scholarly research and if you are still willing to sign it…

AS: I will. I’ll be glad to sign it.

VS: Thank you.

AS: The scratching you hear will be of the pen.

AS: [Signing the consent form]

AS: Interviewee.

VS: And on behalf of Mary Washington College, I’d like to thank you for participating in this project.

AS: It was fun. Thank you.

VS: And best of wishes in the future.

AS: Thank you. Blessings right back.